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In a land chock full of guns hatred has become a currency. A young American man, from a Mormon family in Utah, who grew up around guns, I mean the family embraced a love of guns, used that weapon of choice to kill another man. This is an American story. Guns and hatred. The culture worships guns. Every movie and video game is packed with automatic weaponry. Why did Tyler Robinson kill Charlie Kirk? It’s pretty bloody obvious. The why was Kirk’s expressed and implicit hatred of non-white and different folk in America.
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Charlie Kirk, it appears, was murdered, allegedly, by someone further to the Right, a Groyper. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, who longs to blame those on the Left – the nutjobs with the guns are predominantly on his side. A Groyper is a follower of Nick Fuentes, who is basically a Neo-Nazi in his professed views re-antisemitism and white supremacy. Charlie Kirk was murdered, allegedly, by someone further Right than himself. Trump has normalised racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, belittling women, and demonising Democrats in America.
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America voted Donald Trump back into the White House. This tells us Trump supporters are on-board with sex trafficking and abuse. You cannot have your cake and not eat it, in this instance. Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump were best friends for 20 years. Rich men buying and selling young girls and women to flaunt their wealth and power is the cream of American elitism writ large. Americans worship money and elect billionaires to run the country. Everything is about money in this culture. Justice is determined by wealth and status. Power is bought by these very wealthy men.
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Day 3 of having no power due to a storm. No service: Profitability is the new power. Yes, this post is written under the duress of being cut off from electricity in my home and work. We live in a time, where being connected to the grid is more essential than ever before. Everything now runs on electricity. My gripe is that despite this clear and present reality, we are still dependent upon outdated and fragile infrastructure. 50 years ago, as I was growing up, I heard about the plans to put the power lines underground. Indeed, this has been achieved in many new suburbs. I do wonder why in this wonderful new world of privatised utilities how so many more established suburbs and towns have not been transformed in this subterranean fashion. Storms wreak havoc to power lines on poles.
I am, by choice, petless in my life. That is, without a furry companion to share my domicile. For four weeks, however, this changed, when I was invited to house sit on holiday in WA. Thus, the title of this post – Doggie Dementia: My month of pet poop and piss in Perth. It was a family arrangement with a sibling, she and partner were off to Bali, whilst I would hold down the fort. Water a few sheltered pot plants, turn on the irrigation system, take out the trash, something about feeding worms, and look after Misty – the Shih tzu Maltese Terrier Cross.
Do the dulcet tones of the human voice do it for you? Are you a lover of aural pleasure? The spoken word read well, whilst you drive to work? Listening for both intellectual and sensual gratification? Learning stuff and getting where you are going at the same time? All of these things are possible via audiobooks. For the very first time, sounds of fanfare ladies and gentlemen, my books are available as audiobooks. And they sound pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. Now, you can take the banality out of traffic jams by listening to what I have to say on the really important topics.
Heaven help us and let it burn. If the sector is so moribund that it has come to this, I do not think that governments should prop it up. Australians do not want to be assailed morning and night with ads from largely overseas owned corporate bookmakers. What kind of country are we living in? Aussies lose $25 billion a year gambling! That is a lot of money, to state the obvious. Do we have too much money and are we too dumb to care? If free to air TV is dependent upon gambling ad revenue? Surely, something is wrong with the business and, perhaps, it has reached its use by date.
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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.
Culture Fresh Media News Politics Power 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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AFL footy is a different game in the current clime. It started with outlawing the bump to protect the head. Players were told if you choose to bump you are likely to be suspended if you make contact with the head. Now, if you tackle too ferociously and bring the player to ground and he hits his head you can get rubbed out for 3 weeks, in many instances. 26 players have been suspended in 2023 for these kinds of things. AFL footy is a different game these days. Looking ahead the evolution of the game is probably morphing into a non-contact sport like soccer. The contact will not survive the civilising of our recreational activities in the future, I bet. There are very real issues emerging in both the men’s and women’s’ games in regard to the wellbeing of the players going forward.
It is time to call in the exterminators, according to the Senate review into consultancy firms preying on governments in Australia. These bloodsucking accountants and management consultants have managed to extract some $20 billion over the last 10 years. This is a direct result of the neoliberal push to privatise governments and their services. The public service has been gutted by a decade of conservative LNP government providing wealth to their mates via outsourcing to these multinational consultancy firms. Government pests: An infestation of accountants sucking the life and wealth out of Australia.
Robodebt was an ideological attack on the welfare system by the Coalition for economic and political gain. When they were unable to find the billions of dollars of claimed to have been rorted, they confabulated them via illegal means. Scott Morrison bragged about being a Robodebt welfare cop in his public announcements as social services minister. If he is not ultimately responsible for a scheme that has cost the lives of the innocent and vulnerable Australians who is. If Scott Morrison is not responsible for the $1.8 billion lost in a settled class action against the government who is.
The Coalition in opposition has voted against legislation designed to halt the massive increases to energy costs for Australian households due to the gas company cartel and its control of that market. The Coalition has, also, voted against the creation of a future fund designed […]
The leaders of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) are calling for unemployment to rise. Yes, the RBA want more Aussies out of work so they can slay the dragon they call inflation. You may not have been aware that for the last 50 years the economists at the RBA have adjudged full employment as an unemployment rate of 4.5%. That equates to around 500, 000 ordinary Australians being out of work. These are the sacrificial bodies and souls, apparently, necessary for the economy to work without high inflation. I have an alternative suggestion. Australians: Is it time to eat the rich?
Watching the 4 Corners expose on the Soviet mole in ASIO I was struck by how unimpressive the people featured in this were. The Australian intelligence service betrayal by this senior espionage supervisor in the 1970s and 1980s was done for cash. These tawdry people playing cloak and dagger in the shadows reflected badly on this state funded service. These operations grew out of the Second World War and brought that mindset to peacetime. Selling secrets to the Soviets for large amounts of cash and getting away with it for decades tells us just how ineffective these services are.
We have had 40 years of people in power telling us that the market will take care of everything. That market forces are the most efficient means of regulating all aspects of our lives. This economic mantra has been repeated by those on both sides of the political divide. Admittedly with more fervour by those on the right with a conservative bent. Well, Australians cannot afford housing, with both renters and first home buyers struggling to put a roof over their heads. The market has not looked after the most basic needs of the many in this regard. Governments have failed Australians and seem powerless and hardly inclined to do anything about this state of affairs. The market has failed renters in Australia and is eating up the livelihoods of a third of Australians.
In Australia, we like to tell people that we are not a racist nation. We are the whizz bang wonders of a multicultural society, after all. We judge things like racism by our own experience of such things. Coming from privileged, white backgrounds, our view of the world is rosy and she’ll be apples mate! Too much is made of this kind of thing. Hell, it doesn’t bother me! Nobody talks much about the concept of walking in another man or woman’s shoes. If you haven’t had shopkeepers and bystanders staring at you suspiciously. If you haven’t had women crossing the street to avoid your presence. If you haven’t experienced closed minds judging you when you apply for a job, a loan, or an even break – how the f*** would you know anything about racism in Australia, really.
In Queensland, yet another Indigenous Australian man is shot dead by police. 6 police officers could not restrain an angry young man with a knife without shooting him dead. The training around guns is so bad that we should follow the British example and only have specialist units armed with deadly force. Australian police: Take their guns away to save lives. Police should not be called out to domestic violence situations, as they too often make things much worse. Police officers in states around Australia fail to talk offenders down and disarm them. Their presence actually escalates the problems and results in the unnecessary use of deadly force.
Melbourne, the Nazi capital of Australia, is, also, the booing capital of the AFL. I wonder if the same folk booing at the footy are the same racist scum booing Aboriginal footballers? Victorian footy fans seem to think it is their God given right to boo every moment of a match when things don’t go their way on the field. It is an ugly sound just listening to it on the TV. Umpires and opposition players and fans have to listen to this crap from ungrateful entitled members of the crowd. Either these folks don’t know the rules of the game or just don’t care and loudly complain anyway. The ugly sound of booing during AFL matches is something you don’t hear at other football codes.
