The first essay I wrote on this blog, back in January 2017, was about gun violence in the US. It was entitled appropriately ‘Gun nuts’1. At that time, the essay…
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Everybody who reads newspapers or their websites knowns that the relevance deficit disorder sufferer, and NSW One Notion upper house member, Mark Latham, tweeted something disgustingly homophobic (and deleted it…
I'm the father of a 21 year old daughter. There are lots of things I worry about. I worry about her being sexually assaulted, because that happens a lot. I worry about her being the victim of a drunk driver, because that happens a lot. I worry about her being the victim of gun violence, because lots of people die from gun-related injuries. Here's what I do not worry about: I don't worry about her being attacked in a restroom by a trans woman because (a) it has never happened; and (b) trans women are the most victimized group of people I've ever met, and the least likely to commit a crime of indecency in a restroom, because they are afraid of getting beat up when all they want to do is pee. And here is something else I don't worry about: I don't worry about my daughter being cruel and inhumane to trans men, women or kids, because my wife and I have raised her to have values and because she is a kind person. There are things to worry about, and then there are things people want you to worry about to conceal their agenda of discrimination and hate. Wake up.
The Coalition needs to be broken up. Not unhitching the Libs and the Nats – but untethering both parties from the political agenda of the Murdoch media. It has dragged the parties further and further to the right, even to the extent of directly campaigning against those Liberal leaders, such as Matt Kean, who understood the priorities of modern, younger Australians.
Deep in the basement recesses of the library at Geoscience Australia is a journal entitled Original Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory1. Decades ago, these were sent, unsolicited, to the…
Throughout American culture and politics, billionaire cash often works in a crudely transactional way, but it much more commonly operates more subtly. This, more than anything else, is what undergirds the machinery of American conservatism: a relatively small number of rich donors fund right-wing organizations and think tanks; those organizations and think tanks cultivate voices and personalities who serve as spokespeople, Republican-aligned operatives and public intellectuals; they, in turn, get to enjoy the favor and flattery of the wealthy people whose interests they protect and whose money fuels it all. The end result is a vast and powerful network of organizations and individuals whose ideological bonds are constantly lubricated by injections of cash from a tiny pool of plutocratic patrons.
Back at the end of October 2017, within the first year of starting this blog, I wrote a piece on how climate change deniers were trying to tell people that…
After mucking about with ChatGPT some days ago for a piece I wrote about the origin of the myth of opals being unlucky1, I decided to have a crack at…
I missed a paper from a couple of years ago; but it is a bit disturbing nonetheless. It deals with the relationship between extinctions and the past heating of the…