Not much else to preface this with. Credit as best as we can tell goes to some industrious folks over at Reddit.com and Imgur.com.
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Della Watson is Sierra's main author. Small changes made to our daily habits can add up. This week, with help from the Eco-Dentistry Association, we'll provide tips to help you green your dental hygiene routine. Store-bought toothpaste can include some questionable ingredients and it's easy to concoct your own paste with a few simple ingredients. Baking soda is central to most DIY recipes. Adjust flavor and texture by adding peppermint oil, spearmint oil, cinnamon, or salt. Care2 offers a good basic toothpaste recipe to get you started. INGREDIENTS 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, finely ground 1 drop peppermint, spearmint, sweet orange, clove, or cinnamon bark essential oil A few drops tap water Combine ingredients in a small bowl and mix them thoroughly with a toothbrush, your finger, or a small spoon until a smooth, thick paste forms. The paste shouldn’t be too runny; it has to stay on your toothbrush. Dip your toothbrush into the paste and use as you would regular commercial toothpaste. If Sessions gets approved as Attorney General, we only have the supreme court standing up for our rights under the constitution. The republicans in the senate abrogated their constitutional duty when they refused to consider president obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the supreme court. With almost a year left in obama's term, they said that they wanted to wait until "the people had spoken." well, the people did speak: by almost 3 million votes they spoke for hillary clinton to choose our next supreme court justice. Careful academic analysis puts Gorsuch (Trump's SC nominee) to the RIGHT of scalia! we expect you to fillibuster any nominee not named merick garland (or of equivalent moderateness and competence to him). You must stand up for what is fair and right: Merrick Garland will not be replaced by someone who will not protect the rights of workers, the environment, women's health et al. Thank you. We are gentle people, but we are people in motion...with a new explanation. Wear those flowers in your hair! If you're going to San Francisco Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair If you're going to San Francisco You're gonna meet some gentle people there For those who come to San Francisco Summertime will be a love-in there In the streets of San Francisco Gentle people with flowers in their hair All across the nation Such a strange vibration People in motion There's a whole generation With a new explanation People in motion People in motion For those who come to San Francisco Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair If you come to San Francisco Summertime will be a love-in there If you come to San Francisco Summertime will be a love-in there -SCOTT MCKENZIE "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)" David RitvoDavid is my cousin and lives in San Francisco. Dr. Ritvo graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1974. He works in Walnut Creek, CA and specializes in Psychiatry and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. This is a talk presented by Lou Weis as part of the Parallels Conference, at the National Gallery of Victoria, 2015. Lou's work can be found at BroachedComissions.com Lou is a creative director & strategist with twenty years experience across the creative industries, working for festivals and companies to realise ideas that always stem from a passion for historical context. Broached Commissions, a gallery based research driven furniture and object design brand, is the purest expression of this context driven work. The company was founded in late 2011 to international acclaim. Immediately after launching Broached was engaged to create a narrative furniture collection for the now renowned Hotel Hotel Canberra. Broached created the first ever design show for UCCA, Beijing and is the only studio that presents work at the prestigious Design Miami, Basel shows. Since 2006 Lou has been engaged by companies and government agencies to realise strategic goals. This talk has two purposes; firstly to articulate the research methodology of my design studio Broached Commissions. The second is to consider this methodology within the changing nature of our interior domestic spaces. Let me first address this idea of a market for what we create. In Australia there is no coherently identifiable market for collectable design. That is because there are no galleries in Australia representing the kinds of work seen at Design Miami or Design Days Dubai. Indeed we are the only Australian studio showing at those international events. The market for what Broached does is located more within the media than it is with buyers. We tell historical stories through objects. The challenge of fusing contemporary design and craft with particular moments in history is a story the media has found compelling. Whilst we sell pieces from time to time it is not anywhere nearly as coherent a process as our relationship with the media in communicating the value of our work. Narrative led design is intended to provoke a conversation. The narrative is implicit in the form of the object and explicit in the media communications. For us the conversations are as important as the piece itself. The latter part of this talk will explain why. Broached is a young company created by mid-career practitioners: Vincent Aiello, Adam Goodrum, Charles Wilson, Trent Jansen and myself. Prior to launching I created a comprehensive business model; identified our key buyer demographics. Then I had lunch with a senior sales person from Space Furniture (a retailer of many European luxury furniture brands) and he said; your brand will succeed based on the interest shown by no more than 2 or 3 people in Australia. Broached has stayed alive due to the engagement of literally 10 people in Australia, most found directly through existing networks, a few others more tangentially. Internationally we have found a few friends, such as Cyril Zammit from Design Days Dubai, the Chinese designer Naihan Li and the UCCA in Beijing. But this is how fringe ventures always start: through the persistent engagement of a few early adopters. We realize that our market for product will continue to grow slowly, which suits our process. Indeed our process is an enquiry into the history of the market for design. Our research driven design aspires to sit at the intersection of historicism, design and globalization. These are weighty topics, each one a field of study unto itself. So I will break down how we engage with each. We see historicism as an analytical and storytelling tool that enables the commencement of a project. Our desire is to understand design not within its own traditions but within the grand narratives of history. So our projects start by commissioning a research essay, written by an expert in the period we decide to make our focus. The role of the curator is not to determine what we design, but to assist in understanding how design was part of the broader industrial paradigm of the period we are investigating. Then it is up to the creative team to discuss, with the curator and amongst ourselves, how the past does or does not persist into the present. For all involved in Broached we see the historical research as being the professional extension of that lifelong personal journey to ‘know yourself.’ Our first collection focused on the Colonial Period, our second collection Broached East looked at the Australian Gold Rush — which coincided with the second Opium War and the Meiji Restoration. Privately commissioned collections for Hotel Hotel, Canberra and Molonglo Group Headquarters also had a design response guided by historical enquiry. If we look at historicism as a genre of literature then its function often is to highlight the meaning of the past in the present. The proof of that is the continuing publication of books on the French Revolution or the American Civil War. Heritage must constantly be updated to continue to have a voice. Broached locates design within the larger, popular narrative of Australian history. When we talk of design it means for us ‘a service offered to industry.’ And because design is a service it is usually part of the rhetoric of optimistic progress that dominates industry. Design tends to be enabling rather than skeptical of entrepreneurial plans. The deeply conflicted experience of Shepard Fairey in creating the Hope poster for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign is an excellent example of design intending to be progressive but ultimately enabling status quo politics. Marc Newson’s design of a shotgun for Italian rifle manufacturer Beretta should help dispel belief that design has a particular claim to a progressive ideology. Design, more often than not, gives form to power. Designers are the Pollyanna’s of the rhetoric that comes to define each generation and the design media almost never calls them on it. The third area of enquiry Broached focuses on is globalization, specifically the Australian experience of it. Colonial Australia was born as the industrial revolution was beginning to flourish. Our culture is the product of unceasing involvement in global trade. Consequently, we exhibit a Pavlov’s dog like willingness to embrace everything new — whether it be consumer technologies or the latest recreational drugs, business people everywhere find willing participants here. Globalisation is an ongoing geo-political project. Although we are seeing record numbers of refugees right now and there are 1.4 million people in planes at any one time, the largest period of human migration was between 1850–1930, when 130million people moved country — mainly from China and India, but also from Ireland and other places. Each migration is coupled with a movement of that culture’s ideas. Broached is particularly fascinated by what happens to design when it migrates. I will give my grandparent’s migration experience and the first home they owned as an example. My paternal grandparents are Polish Jewish holocaust survivors. They met shortly after the war ended, both working in an orphanage for Jewish children. Its purpose was to repatriate Jewish kids from Polish homes, care for them and send them off to what was then Palestine. This transportation required a journey from Eastern to Central Europe. After it concluded my grandparents moved to Munich where my father was born Michael Weisfenler in 1947. By 1950 the little family was on a boat to Australia. By 1951 Michael Weisfelner had become Bob Weis and the little Weis family were living in refugee housing in St Kilda, Melbourne. My paternal line was allowed into Australia under the ‘populate or perish’ foreign policy that widened the White Australia Policy to include people from Southern Europe and Jews — a horde of post war poor who filled our under-populated lands as a buffer to the perceived threat from what was termed at the time The Yellow Peril. By the mid-1960s the Weis family had established themselves in Australia. They bought a block of land in Caulfield, which not long before their arrival was filled with orange groves. They engaged architect Harry Earnest and a fellow European Jewish émigré, Zuref, to design a suite of furniture for the house. Both architect and furniture designer worked in the modernist style. My grandparents committed one wall of their new house to being made from Jerusalem stone, a trend at the time amongst their community that affirmed a commitment to the state of Israel. That wall, visible from the front door, continued onto a tiny outdoor Japanese courtyard, replete with a pond where small carp swam. The surfaces of my grandparent’s home articulated a range of political and cultural alignments that tied them to European modernism, to the Zionist project and to the English garden city. If I were to commission a house and it were to have a wall that articulated, simply through its material surfaces my political beliefs, a contemporary equivalent to my grandparent’s Jerusalem stone wall, what would that surface be? If I were to commission a suite of furnishings by a local maker what style would describe my attachment to a particular period and place? What is the decorative, the pattern, language of global capitalism? My physical being is literally made possible because of genocide, major shifts in Australian migration policies, the 1960s libertarian feminist movement etc etc. Migration to Australia is based around the opportunity to join the marketplace. Coming here means necessarily splintering from the tribalism of your origins and joining the churn of the market democracy. What’s the market for a design that articulates how one generation’s convulsions give rise to the life of the next? That is the market that Broached looks to occupy, and let me tell you it is small. But why put all of this political emphasis on design objects? The sustainability movement, and even just the logic of numbers, shows us that we do not need to design new couches, chairs or taps. We have more than enough. What I feel people do still need is stories that help them find the line between their historical and contemporary circumstance. This articulation becomes a story to share with family and guests. It may indeed be the catalyst for a conversation that changes how they trace that line. I do not think we live in a shockingly historically illiterate time. The market for historically contextual, locally made, applied arts pieces has not gotten smaller or larger since it was first promoted as a panacea to rampant industrialism by the Arts and Crafts Movement in the mid-19th C. The self-proclaimed failure of the Arts and Crafts Movement, their inability to widen their sphere of influence beyond a relatively small class of wealthy clients, is the Broached failure today. Our pieces are research driven — which is expensive — the making of them is laborious and craft based — which is also expensive. Consequently, our work can only be afforded by the wealthy. However, the dialogue with the media about Broached pieces pushes the narrative wide and far. It is this virtual dissemination of the products we make that have the potential to influence how people think about their own business practice or the construction of their own homes. The message Broached celebrates is close to that of craft; the importance of slowness and of haptic learning. Abandoning oneself to products of convenience happens incrementally, at the request of the marketplace and to the detriment of the integrity of our private lives. Let’s take music as an example. It used to be that the stereo had pride of place in the home. It was a piece of furniture unto itself and the act of storing, cleaning and playing music was a delicate one done with care and precision. People could hear if dust was causing a small disturbance in how the needle glided along the grooves of a record. We have seen, since Sony released the Walkman in the late 1970s, a demand by the music industry that we buy a succession of lower quality products that increases the mobility of music. Now music is played out of a phone hooked up to a cheap plastic box by Bluetooth. Music has never been more available and so devoid of fidelity. Most of the children I know have never had the opportunity to sit and listen to beautifully recorded music. The market drives speed and discards quality across every sphere of life, including the built environment. We are connected, but to archives rather than coherent narratives. Any brand, which wishes to create pieces that forces people to slow down, will have a limited and probably affluent or ‘mad enthusiast’ niche market. One of our private clients approached Broached to transform her childhood upright piano into a credenza. The piano represented the moment at which, through her brilliant piano teacher, a girl became a curious and cultured young woman who went on to be a leader in her field. Adam Goodrum reused an enormous amount of the late 19th C piano in the resulting work. This is the kind of transformational quality that the great objects of our daily life can have. Their significance can run so deep that people would rather reincarnate the object than let them go. These are the intimate projects that Broached looks to engage with. Intimacy is lumpy, lurching and often times awkward. The market on the other hand promotes efficiency and transparency. But really the market feeds off crises. It is the struggle for security and intimacy in the churn of globalization that Broached looks to capture in the objects we create. We know that it is impossible for broached to stay within this tiny niche and survive. We will hit the middle price point with a retail range at some point. However, I am yet to find a compelling way to achieve this without discarding what I love about Broached in its current form. What is slow retail? In mid-2016 Broached will release it’s third edition collection, Broached MONSTERS by Trent Jansen. Our first solo designer collection. Many thanks… to Ewan and Simone, to my fellow speakers and the NGV for this opportunity to speak today. Andrew Pike is a film distributor, historian and documentary film-maker. With Ross Cooper, he co-authored Australian Film 1900-1977 (published by OUP). His company, Ronin Films, has distributed many Asian and Australian films including STRICTLY BALLROOM (1992) and SHINE (1996), and today specialises in documentaries. In 2007, he was awarded an OAM for his services to the film industry, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Canberra. His documentaries as director include THE CHIFLEYS OF BUSBY STREET, EMILY IN JAPAN and MESSAGE FROM MUNGO (co-directed with Ann McGrath), and he has produced many others. I have known Andrew professionally and personally for fifteen years or more and the bio he wrote above doesn't even begin to cover his achievements or his place in cinema history. Ask our mates at Google. January 2017: My New Year's resolution has already been put into effect - to get all of my books, and my father's books, out of boxes and onto shelves. So after several trips to Ikea and a bruised thumb, have achieved my goal. All available wall space now has book-shelves, and there are very few boxes left. A little bit of judicious culling will get rid of the remainder in due course. Treasures are emerging frequently: books I’d forgotten (and in some cases had bought again), and also books that I was totally unaware of. The first treasure to emerge from my father’s collection is a well-worn paperback edition of Have Patience Delaney!, an Australian crime novel from the 1950s, by one Bant Singer. I read with great pleasure what my father had obviously enjoyed too, given the crumpled state of the book. It's a very readable and cleverly plotted Aussie version of Chandler, written in the first person in tough guy Aussie slang. Checking on-line, Bant Singer was one of many pseudonyms used by a prolific writer of fiction, non-fiction and verse, Charles Shaw, who apparently contributed much to the Bulletin (a badge of honour!). The name Bant Singer came from his car, a Singer Bantam, of which he was apparently very proud. Singer’s text is often repetitious which speaks of haste and a lack of editing, but his dialogues are convincingly uncouth, and the setting is a most credible countr town battling poverty, with people being driven to crime to survive, while the big end of town is corrupt and nastily arrogant. The novel deserves to be re-printed and I for one would be pleased to read the other novels in the Delaney series (apparently four in total). The author’s one big international best-seller was Heaven Knows Mr Allison (written under his real name), which I now must find and read: I have a feeling it will have more muscle than the cuteness that pervades the John Huston movie made in 1957 with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as wartime castaways on a Pacific island. The movie won an Oscar for Best Screenplay adapted from another source, which must have made Charles Shaw proud. I hope he got paid well for the rights. It’s a pity that he didn’t have other winners to consolidate his position as a best-selling author. But Have Patience Delaney! alone makes my new year's resolution worthwhile! Next treasure to be revealed soon on these pages! - Andrew Pike Phillip launched Australia’s first rock n roll paper, GoSet in the 1960s, then the counter-culture magazines Revolution and The Digger, and the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. After moving to New York he published The Washington Spectator, the environmental newsletter News on Earth and the progressive populist newsletter The Hightower Lowdown. He returned to Australia in 2011 after 35 years in the USA. He can be read at coorabellridge.com where the article below first appeared. The inauguration of President Donald Trump, a man whose previous claim to fame was making a small fortune by inheriting a large one, reveals a lot of truths that are shocking to the world at large, and embarrassing, diminishing, and direful to the American nation. Forget for a moment whether Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice than Trump, or how Barack Obama rates in retrospect as a President. And let’s not try to locate Trump on any map of political ideologies, because he’s too scatterbrained for ideology. What follows is an attempt to organize his excrescences into something like a definition of Trumpism, since he’s incapable and unwilling of doing that for himself – and we need a better grip on what we’re up against. Here follow 10 key commandments of Trumpism, inferred from deeds and words of the man himself, and of the people he’s selected to run the country under his brand: 1. Men shall, at their own discretion, hold and exert power over women, including but not limited to assaulting wives or partners, dates, employees, and other uppity broads as necessary -- and deciding the fate of fetuses in women’s wombs. 2. People who appear to have European ancestry, primarily with pinkish pale skin color, shall, wherever possible, assert power over people who appear to have other ancestries. This will apply particularly to immigrants, Muslims, and African-Americans making trouble in ghettos, but also to foreign leaders from anywhere other than Britain, Russia, and a few others who look like them and talk our talk. 3. Men’s accomplishments and merits are measured by how much money they can plausibly claim to have, it being unnecessary for those numbers to be publicly verified or taxed if the claimant has sufficient cajones or weapons. 4. No public good, be it a thing such as a park, a service such as education, or an amenity such as clean air, should be mandated, regulated, or financed by government, if there’s a profit-driven business willing to do the job. 5. War and other transnational interactions such as access to land, sea, air and space, and trade, plus all consequences of such interactions, intended or not, will be managed on behalf of the USA by men whose businesses top-prioritize short-term profitability. In this spirit, we will encourage broadening the global market for nuclear weapons. 6. Activities that are not self-evidently beneficial to practitioners or the public at large, such as all forms of art, or whose benefits are attested to by experts but don’t make sense to me, such as controlling greenhouse gases, workplace conditions (including wages), or vaccinations, will henceforth be left to the invisible hand of the marketplace. 7. The United States shall not promulgate notions of inherent rights, or moral or ethical priorities, in either the global sphere (see 5th Commandment above), or -- the US Constitution as amended notwithstanding – domestically, except by Presidential tweet. 8. America belongs in the Material Men’s Sect of Christianity in which Jesus is not Semitic and his teachings are irrelevant but OK except those concerning rich men and needles, and loving the dispossessed, both of which were fake news written by Marxist priests. Other core beliefs, such as requiring that fetal remnants from abortions be buried at funeral homes, as Vice President Pence proposed for Indiana, will be made the law of the land if Christian voters in strategic electorates say so. 9. Given that certain core beliefs of Judaism overlap with our Christian values, eg that Mary gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem and was given gifts by Gulf Kings, the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu will be more than ever defended by US military as if it were American soil. The fact that my fellow casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is a fundamentalist Zionist who contributed $35 million to my election campaign is also irrelevant. And — the US will finally take back our oil from under the sands of Iran, Iraq and the other ones. 10. Acts designed to shame or criticize the POTUS, such as suing Him for rape or writing detailed and irrefutable exposes of His corrupt business practices, or suggesting that his election by one in four voting-age Americans does not constitute a mandate, or that hundreds of thousands of voters were systematically prevented or dissuaded from voting, will not go unpunished. Throughout these Commandments it is assumed that “men” might occasionally include women, at the discretion of the man or men in charge. Challenges to any or all of these Commandments on Constitutional grounds will be adjudicated by the Supreme Court, now divided equally between “liberals” and “conservatives” but, given that three of eight justices are either over-80 or dead, will soon be the Trump-Supreme Court. And if you or anyone you know (and might even love) is still saying “give the man a chance” or “anything’s better than the status quo”, show them the bios of the hundreds of people he’s choosing to populate the pyramid of powerful people immediately below him in Washington and around the world. Pretty much to a man, they are proven purveyors of the inhumane agenda embodied in the above Commandments. They are the real deplorables. I asked a small number of people to either write for the site or to let me republish their work from other places they had written. Sian is multi-talented. She sings opera, she does radio and television, her book Shy was a great read and was very well received and reviewed, she teaches creative writing at RMIT - is there anything this woman can't do? I have known her for a while and nothing comes to mind. Oh yes she often works as an MC. Her first repost is from her sianprior.com web site. Inside the tram it smelt like wet sheep. The floor was smeared with a cocktail of Coke, coffee and winter rain. We’d all had enough and were heading home. No one looked more exhausted by the working day than the man sitting opposite me. His face was a picture of weariness.
I looked away then looked back again. The shape of the face, the colour of the eyes. Something familiar from a time when all faces were new and therefore unlike any others. Those faces can stick in your memory for decades. Memories are often inflected by vivid colour. There’s an orange memory: sunset, 1970, daylight savings, Black Rock beach, late summer heat, no wind. Coarse sand between my toes. Kentucky Fried Chicken grease between my fingers. A laughing boy in the water who, back then, embodied joy. Andy was my first love. We were six, he had two brothers, and our families had barbecues and beach trips together. Andy made me laugh. He was a fast runner and a good reader and we competed with each other in both those things. (Maybe that first love does set the pattern. I still fall for funny fast-moving avid-reading competitive boys.) Andy smiled a lot and when he smiled joy spread through me like the taste of a Wizz Fizz. In grade four Andy moved to another school and we lost touch. His circles were not my circles. He became an orange-infused memory, until that night on the tram about a decade ago. I could have said hello to him. We could have reminisced about Black Rock Beach and primary school spelling bees. I could have asked about his two brothers and whether he still loved reading. But I was too shy and he seemed too tired. So I looked away again. Last week I went to a funeral. There were speeches about a funny clever guy who was good at sports, delivered by middle-aged men who looked a lot like my memories of Andy’s dad. Except that they were his brothers. The day after the funeral I went to Black Rock beach. The sea was frothy and brown, the sky slate-coloured, and it was drizzling. The horizon seemed closer. Everything was so much smaller than I remembered. Nothing was the same. Not even me. Now, I thought – now I would say hello on that tram. But now it’s too late. This column was published in The Sunday Age on January 15th 2017 * Andy’s name has been changed to protect his family's privacy. A MASSIVE ICEBERG IS POISED TO FRACTURE IN ANTARCTICA
A widening rift leaves the fourth-largest ice shelf on the continent at risk BY ALEXANDRA MALLOY | JAN 12 2017 NASA photograph by John Sonntag Within the past two decades, the Larsen ice shelf along the Antarctic Peninsula has undergone drastic geographical changes to the coastline. In 1995 and 2002, the Larsen A and B shelves splintered off. Now, a rift gradually splitting the section of Larsen C has expanded rapidly and once again poses a dramatic change to the landscape. When pictured by NASA’s IceBridge mission on November 10, 2016, the fissure measured roughly 70 miles. Within the last month, it has expanded by 11 miles, with only a 12-mile sliver holding Larsen C to the main ice shelf. Once it calves, it will take on new life as an iceberg the size of the state of Delaware. The rapid expansion of the cavernous fracture, which is more than 300 feet wide and a third of a mile deep, has been closely studied by Project MIDAS, a United Kingdom–based Antarctic research group with Swansea and Aberystwyth Universities in Wales, and the British Antarctic Survey. The team began monitoring the fissure two years ago, but noticed in August 2016 that the rift was starting to expand faster. Erin Pettit, associate professor of geophysics with a specialty in glaciology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says that warmer temperatures in the past decades have led to the collapse of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves and to this new rift. “It's not necessarily that unexpected in the overall trend over the last few decades due to climate change,” Pettit said, speaking by phone from the McMurdo Station on the continent. “We’ve seen a very strong trend in the destabilization of all these ice shelves in the last couple of decades, and this spring and summer has been much warmer than average.” Antarctica itself is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world, with temperatures rising by 36.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 50 years. “The atmosphere really has the power to destabilize these ice shelves,” Pettit said. Larsen C is already floating in icy waters, so the calving will not affect sea level rise in the short term. However, the loss of the ice shelf leaves open space for the glacier to push ice into the sea. “Ice shelves act like a dam, and if you take out the dam, the river flushes everything,” Pettit said. With the loss of the shelf, there is no barrier to hold back glacial ice from moving into the sea and melting. In a statement to the Washington Post, Paul Holland, a member of the British Antarctic Survey, estimates that the ice that will fill the gap left by Larsen C and melt into the Weddell Sea could cause sea level to rise by roughly 10 centimeters (3.9 inches). The collapse of Larsen C could also affect the nearby marine ecosystem and ocean circulation as well as destabilize the remainder of the Larsen ice shelf. As to when the ice shelf will break off is up for debate, with some scientist predicting months and others years. “As long as there is a balance between the chunks that calve off and the ice that comes in off the mountains, it’s a normal part of the process,” Pettit said. “This one is very large and will put the whole system into the negative. And that’s why it’s particularly interesting to us.” Well well. After trying his best to destroy the credibility of the ABC when he was the Chair, insisting they buy ang screen a film that denied global warming this dangerous fool, a senior advisor to the Prime Court Jester, is now informing the Government and the Australia people that the IPCC is corrupt and the climate change "lobby" is a money making venture by a criminal gang.
If this wasn't all happening it would be a laugh but the continuing move to make Australia backward is actually gathering pace. Newman was appointed a Special Advisor by the generally clueless Abbott based on his solid Conservative credentials. I'd love to hear what he is good at. He has advice to give on working arrangements too. He looks back fondly to Work Choice and he will no doubt have advice on how to reimplement it with a different name this avoiding, in his tiny mind, the problem of the smell associated with it last time. Let's get this lot as far away as possible from the governments of this country before more damage is done. Here we go into the silly season of bubbles and cheer. It might also be a time for reflection.
For Australians, hopefully, it will be a time to think - what have we done. Here is a short list: The planet's most vulnerable people the global refugees are now untouchables and unmentionables. Climate change policy has been reversed while China, Brazil, the US and all of Europe have measures in place. The Shanghai carbon exchange opened with a huge day of trading. Our lowest paid workers got their super removed while Clive Palmer got mega dollars to open the biggest greenhouse gas emitting coal mining and distribution centre in the world. Greg 'Minister for telling lies' Hunt closed the marine parks by press release on a weekend. He continues to do damage even though he knows what he is doing; that is more evil than his puppet-master who has no idea what he is doing. The ABC and SBS are in danger of being sold off to please Rupert, the ultimate puppet-master. Joe Hockey confects all sorts of outrage while going further into the debt he once derided. But it's not his fault. He doesn't have a clue how it works. Like Abbott he knew how to snarl, bark and bite but don't get him into the area of policy. Confused about the NBN? You should be as the lies they told prior to the election are catching up here too. It's all a sorry state of affairs but as Matt has argued below one that we needed to realise how well we were doing. As usual it is the most vulnerable that will pay while the top 2% of wealth owners will get richer and fatter and eat up more of our atmosphere. Their wealth belongs to us but they paid Abbott and co to convince us that taxes for mining, in place in most mining territories in the world, would be VERY BAD for us. |