King Andrew for an Australian Republic

 The release this week of the so-called "Palace Letters", correspondence between Australian officials and the British Monarch leading up to the 1975 dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, has been an absolute bombshell of nothing we didn't already know.

Historian Jenny Hocking campaigned for years to have the contents of the letters released to the Australian public and she is to be commended for her efforts but really, the letters contain no startling revelations. We already knew the gist. John Kerr was a bit of a bastard, the Royal posterior was protected at all times, and there is no good reason why the Australian Governor General should need the input, assent or advice of the British Crown to change the government (whether the Governor General should have that right at all is a topic for another day). But the events of the dismissal have reignited once again talk of the need for an Australian republic, because there's nothing to fire up the punters and get the attention of the person in the street like the finer points of constitutional law. 

I've got a better reason we should become a republic.

This guy.

No, not the dead one. The bloke on the left.

Australia must become a republic, and Prince Andrew is why. The realisation that Australia is one accident of chromosomes away from having the BFF of a convicted sex offender who has himself been credibly accused of rape should be enough to make even Tony Abbott into a republican. 

Because that's the thing with a monarchy. We get what they give us. We have to put up with whatever quirk of DNA they give us, whether it's someone who gives 65 years of devoted ribbon cutting, or a loser drongo who lucked out on the primogeniture. We don't even get to have our own drongos. And it should sober up a champagne brunch at the ACM to realise that if Prince Charles hadn't been first born, if those two smitten globs of 23 strands of DNA hadn't united first, we'd be facing the very real prospect of Prince Andrew becoming King when the Queen dies in another 47 years. We'd have no say in the matter. That's how monarchy works. You take the good with the bad. Prince Andrew could well hope that with Epstein dead, everyone will move on and he can get back to royal life, which if he was next in line to the throne, might have meant taking the Crown.

What if Prince Andrew had been the oldest son? (Women didn't get to take equal place in line to the throne until recently; Princess Charlotte outranks her brother Louis). Some may argue that Andrew's sense of responsibility and duty would have tempered his behaviour, much as William has always been more restrained than Harry. Well, maybe. But I know lots of people who aren't in line to the British throne, and none of them have been credibly accused of sexually assaulting underage women on a private island owned by their billionaire mate. And all of them sweat a normal amount*. The point is, even if Andrew is the biggest shit in the world, and he seems pretty shitty, if the wheels of fortune had spun on his number in monarchy roulette**, we'd be stuck with him as King to be. 

Luckily, we don't need to worry about this. Our future is in the safe hands of a man who once wanted to be his then-lover's tampon***, and two people living on the public purse who keep having more kids. That's enough of a worry itself. Because as long as we're a monarchy, we have to accept whatever the Windsors give us, our constitution is actually an act of the British parliament, and even though he only came third in the royal race for the nappies, protocol dictates that Prince Andrew if he shows up here is still entitled to pomp, ceremony, curtsies and bows. And that's just gross.

* Except for Ursula but that's an unpleasant subject we don't need to discuss here.

** Is this how roulette works? I don't gamble. 

*** As if things weren't bad enough right now, I've made you remember this. 

Politics is not a team sport

 One of the primary dangers of patriotism is when it induces a sort of blindness to the failings of your own country.

This tendency can result in evil - such as when George H.W. Bush said he would never apologise for America, when American guided missile cruiser floating in Iranian waters shot down a scheduled Iran Air flight, killing 290 civilians - or just plain stupidity, as seen when the same people who question why refugees don't stay in their own countries and fight their oppressors insist that lefties who don't love their country should leave. Per Al Franken:

"[Conservatives] love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.”

Unfortunately this blind adoration of the child has spread to politics. Or perhaps the love could be better compared to the affection one has for one's sports team. It doesn't matter what your loved one says or does, you'll support them regardless and anyone who criticises them is bad. 

Daniel Andrews has done many good things during the recent flare of COVID-19 cases in Melbourne. He's worked seven days a week for months, first during the January bushfires and now in pandemic response. Meanwhile, Scott Morrison is at the footy this weekend without his during his family during his week off for family time. They were probably glad to be rid of him for a few hours.

But it's hard to deny that the lockdown of nine public housing towers in Melbourne, home to many people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and Melbourne's most vulnerable residents, has a distinct whiff of racism about it. And it's been poorly handled; residents unable to access necessary supplies such as nappies, tampons and Ventolin; residents being delivered expired food; a lack of cleaning supplies to reduce transmission in the buildings, and uniformed police stationed on every floor and around the building to enforce the lockdown. There seems to be little plan to prevent transmission within the buildings, only to keep the residents confined so their poverty skin colour illness can't infect others. You can read a statement from community groups representing tower residents here. 

Daniel Andrews has come under sustained attack from sections of the media, but not for the public housing lockdown. The flying monkeys at the Herald Sun judged that it's Andrews' fault that the virus got out of control because he somehow allowed a security guard supervising returning passengers in hotel quarantine have sex with one of the guests, as if that was something he should have foreseen and specifically forbidden:

Yep it was the security guards that spread this virus, not lack of lockdown - conservatives hate the lockdowns; it was the initial lockdowns that prompted them to name Dan Andrews "dictator Dan" in the first place. But they just hate Dan Andrews in the first place. Victoria is the most left wing state in Australia and as the leader, Andrews is the target of the opprobrium of conservatives who want to maintain their Melbourne smugness but loathe semi-effective social services. 

At least the supposed sex scandal has given them a break from being racist for a few days, and allowed for such gems as this from Peta Credlin, now awarded a plum job writing and presenting for News Corp despite her only real qualification being her inability to get Tony Abbott to keep his shit together:

"I’m in Melbourne at the moment and it’s a plague-ridden city in a basket case state led by a man who is a lethal mix of political rat cunning, PR spin and unwarranted self-belief."

Plague ridden? Could we be overreacting? I do note that Ms Credlin is also disdainful of Mr Andrews for using call centre staff to carry out contact tracing instead of Australian Defence Force, "the best logistics experts I know". Well the ADF might be tickety boo at trucking water to bushfire hit communities, but what experience do they have in work like tracing people's contacts? Surely that's a job for police detectives or better yet, get the members of any true crime forum onto the job. I guarantee you'll have the kindergarten best friend of any COVID-19 patient identified, tracked down at their workplace and possibly doxxed before you've had time to practice reciting Murdoch's assigned talking points before tonight's appearance on Sky News. 

So I can see that the sustained attack on Andrews is spiteful, partisan and illogical whilst also despairing of the situation for residents of the locked down towers. But the defence of Andrews has swung too far in the opposite direction in some quarters. Just as there were a few years there where you couldn't criticise the Iraq war without being asked if you wanted Saddam Hussein back in power there, so too criticism of Andrews' handling of the towers' lockdown is seen as an attack on all that is good and true by some of Labor's most vociferous Victorian supporters. How can you criticise him at such a difficult time when he's under such attack from the right? People who criticise Andrews are dragging down the left, too ideologically pure and have no idea of the complexities of running a government.

But if I defend aspects of Andrews' actions from the worst of the attacks from the right, I don't want to be misunderstood that I'm not dismayed and disgusted by the implementation of the hard lockdowns at the social housing towers. Because politics isn't an all or nothing proposition. It's not a team support. You shouldn't be for or against Dan Andrews or any other politician. There hasn't been such a sustained attack on a political figure in Australia since the pile on on Julia Gillard, whom I also defended against misogyny even though I disagreed with her on gay marriage, welfare reforms, environmental action, asylum seekers and wearing blackface. It's the same with Dan Andrews. The attacks on him from the right are partisan, nonsensical and exhausting. But in saying that the public housing lockdown in Melbourne was rushed, poorly executed and has a whiff of racist opportunism (which obviously failed to placate the braying Murdoch mobs) I'm not attacking Dan Andrews, but evaluating one of his policy decisions in the face of the evidence - and acknowledging the real human suffering it has caused.

No one is all good or all bad (well, there are a few exceptions). Turning politicians into cartoonish figures of adoration and loathing does no one any good, least of all those affected by political decisions. Evaluate each decision on its own merits, not by cheering or booing the decision maker based on your allegiance. And that my friends, is how you think for yourself. 

Thoughtcrime? Conservatives lack thought quoting George Orwell

 Give conservatives a notion they like, and they stick with it in a big way. How many times have you seen one of their hilarious jokes about identifying as a pumpkin, colander or free thinker? Hilarious. They claim to hate socialism, but they're all perfectly happy to share one joke. 

Speaking of socialism, lately they've all been rushing to fill social media with quotes from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. Two in particular:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” 

and

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Their line of thinking is that Black Lives Matter protesters, wanting to have an open discussion of how historical narratives have been framed by white supremacy and maybe if it's not too much trouble get rid of statues of white men who raped, enslaved and murdered people of colour, are analogous to The Party in Nineteen Eighty Four. 

Or perhaps they would make that argument if any of them had actually read the fucking book.

The Party in Nineteen Eighty Four control everything. The government, the media, every aspect of everyone's lives. Guess what? Black Lives Matter protesters don't run the country. There's another guy running things in America, and you can find quotes in 1984 which could apply to him:

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power."

Getting back to the matter of tearing down statues, it's worth remembering who put those statues and monuments up. The people who erected them were the ones who falsified history, creating such narratives as Black people only being equal to 3/5 of White people, and terra nullius. They destroyed existing monuments - the Black Hills are sacred to the Native Sioux (Lakota) people,  but some numpty decided to blast away at it, turning it into a monument to Presidents the world now knows as Mount Rushmore. White colonisers destroyed history, culture, religious tradition and lives, and taking down a few statues is nothing in comparison.

While we're taking book quotes out of context to support our ideological beliefs, how about this one:

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

Are "the masses", and alas most people aren't out protesting in the streets for a better system, aware that they're being oppressed by a merciless capitalist system that will work them until they drop dead with no care whatsoever? Of course not, because they're not allowed to know it doesn't have to be this way; any discussion of alternatives to the decaying free market capitalist system is crushed by the mass media keen to preserve power for themselves and their billionaire friends, criticism of the system denigrated as socialism (Venezuela, again - another of those lines conservatives like to unthinkingly parrot) and class warfare. 

Here's the thing with conservatives quoting Nineteen Eighty Four. George Orwell was a socialist. And he was serious about it. He went to Spain and joined the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification to fight against Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He hated the Soviet Union, recognising that it was a totalitarian regime, far from the socialist workers' paradise it was supposed to be (and was dismayed by Britons' praise of Stalin when the UK allied with the Soviet Union during World War Two. And when you read quotes from Orwell, speaking for himself and not through his fiction, like "when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on", it's not hard to see what side he'd be on in the current protests.

It was his hatred for Stalin, and in the wake of Nazism, that drove him to write Nineteen Eighty Four. Orwell was issuing a bleak and terrifying warning on totalitarian regimes, which had nothing to do with socialism as he knew it.

I'm not arguing that Orwell was a perfect, or even good, person - he was a flaming homophobe, for one thing - but he was indisputably a socialist, and conservatives should understand that he didn't write Nineteen Eighty Four or Animal Farm to warn of the dangers of political correctness. 

If they can understand anything at all, per this recent exchange on Twitter:

Well, Bill and Kenny, as the saying goes, I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you. So I'm not even going to try. 

Godwin's Law - Venezuela edition

aThere are immutable laws of nature. Drop a pen, it hits the ground. Get sausages out of the fridge, your cat comes running. And mention socialism on Twitter, some bright spark will chime in with "duh, socialism bad. Look at Venezuela!".

Sometimes that bright spark happens to be the Australian Federal Finance Minister:

“The worthlessness of Venezuela’s currency is the result of inflation, 46,000% a year, which in turn is largely caused by the printing of money to finance the government’s deficit of 30% of GDP.“ #wrongdirection #budgetrepairmatters @TimWilsonMP https://t.co/15kMNkd8uW https://t.co/AXPy800uW0

— Mathias Cormann (@MathiasCormann) June 22, 2020

The thinking amongst conservatives goes that Venezuela is nominally a socialist country. Venezuela is in a bad way. Therefore, socialism is proven to be a terrible thing that ruins nations and the lives of the people who live there.

Sometimes, they make memes

Socialism must be avoided at all costs, and we must defend the robust free market capitalist democracies of Australia, the US and so on by stamping out all tools of Marxism, even if it's just "cultural Marxism", like safe schools and public broadcasting. (I am re-reading my way through Marx now, and he hasn't mentioned drag queen story time once; nor do I remember it from my last read through of Marx about 8 years ago - but I'm sure it's in there somewhere). 

But the capitalist powers that run the so-called "free world" won't allow socialism to succeed anywhere. They can't, because a thriving socialist nation would prove that free market, winner takes all capitalism is not the only system that guarantees freedom and happiness. And so the nations of the free world - oh the heck with it, I'll just say the U.S. - will do whatever it takes, including war, coups and threats, to cripple any socialist nation. And they've done so with impunity many times, a fact that the "duh, Venezuela" crowd is loathe to admit (and they're the ones saying we can't tear down statues of colonisers and slave holders because we need them there so we can learn from history). 

The U.S. has form here. Take Chile. In 1970, Chile democratically elected a socialist government under President Salvador Allende. America was terrified of the prospect of a well functioning socialist experiment in their own hemisphere, so Nixon and Kissenger launched economic warfare, determined to destabilise the Allende government by having the C.I.A. gather intelligence, ferment strikes and anger among Chile's business class, supporting black propaganda against Allende, and providing support for the 1973 coup d'état when the Chilean army and police overthrew Allende's government, installing a right wing authoritarian military regime under General Augusto Pinochet that would last 17 years. During the Pinochet years, press freedom was curtailed, books burned, public institutions purged of anyone suspected of leftist sympathies, and at least 30,000 people, from university professors to striking miners to rural farmers, murdered or "disappeared" by the government - but hey, at least they weren't socialists!  

But the U.S. didn't overtly get involved with Chile. They were still smarting from some rather unpleasant business in Vietnam. Panicked that communism in Vietnam may create a domino effect of the ideology spreading across the globe, America decided to lend military support to the South Vietnamese soldiers fighting the communist Viet Cong. 58,000 dead American soldiers later, the U.S. had to give the war up as a bad job. Jitters over Vietnam meant the U.S. decided to usurp the socialist government of Chile using the C.I.A. instead of the military. Not that many Americans wouldn't have liked military intervention in Chile. Henry Kissenger, annoyed at merely having America's thumb on the scale when he wanted his whole fist on the table, complained about the lack of recognition of the American role in the overthrow of a "communist" government, upon which Nixon remarked, "Well, we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one."

So what does any of this have to do with the current crisis in Venezuela? Things are genuinely terrible in Venezuela and I don't want to make light of the very real suffering of the Venezuelan people. 94% of Venezuelans are living in poverty; more than half don't earn enough income to buy enough food to eat; Venezuela has the highest murder rate in the world; more than five million people have left the country. 

But it's overly simplistic to ascribe these woes purely to socialism, let alone extrapolate that Venezuela's suffering is proof that socialism is the path to human misery. 

The economic fortunes of Venezuela have fluctuated since the mid Twentieth Century, because those fortunes are tied to oil. Oil is the backbone of the Venezuelan economy, accounting for over a quarter of GDP, and long before the advent of socialist government in Venezuela, their GDP fell and debt and inflation increased according to the whims of world oil prices. Following a punishing period in the 1990s when poverty in Venezuela tripled, Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999 on a socialist platform of redistributing wealth to the poor. There were successes in the early Chavez years. Land was distributed to the poor, infant mortality decreased, school enrollments soared, a government funded healthcare system implemented and education made free to the tertiary level. 

Chavez still has his fans

But Chavez made one colossal error above all others: failing to diversify the economy. So they were still tied to oil production, and world oil prices. The Venezuelan economy shrank as oil prices fell, and he saw off a coup attempt in 2002, despite the military appointing an interim president given immediate U.S. diplomatic recognition. Chavez was also responsible for corruption, human rights abuses and authoritarianism and a cult of personality; he died in 2013, succeeded by current President Nicolás Maduro. 

Well, current sort of President Maduro. The results of the 2018 presidential election were disputed; Maduro declared himself the winner, but on the day he was sworn in, 10 January 2019, the National Assembly declared Maduro's presidency illegitimate and announced that President of the Assembly Juan Guaidó was the true President instead. Guaidó swore himself into office even as the Supreme Court declared the National Assembly itself unconstitutional. 

Over a year later, the situation still isn't resolved. The U.S. and Western nations recognise Guaidó as president; Russia, China, Cuba, Iran and others recognise Maduro. To add to the chaos, National Assembly elections in January 2020 are in dispute as well, sanctions have been imposed, and since then there's been a little pandemic and collapse in world oil prices you may have heard about, hardly conducive to a country reliant on oil getting back on its feet - and hardly stuff that can be laid squarely at the door of socialism. 

Venezuela isn't even truly socialist at all. Outside of the government controlled oil sector, most of the economy lies in private hands. And those hands are in many pies. Even given the failure to diversify the economy from its reliance on oil, Venezuela's biggest problem lies outside ideology. Venezuela is a kleptocracy of mismanagement and corruption, a world hub for traffickers and money laundering, where prison based criminal gangs function as de facto civil authorities, profiting off illegal mines and extortion of farmers and land holders, whilst in Caracas, officials are estimated to have skimmed off $300 billion in oil revenues from 2003-2014. The whole thing adds up to what the Journal of Foreign Affairs describes as "a sprawling racketeering network clumsily hidden behind the façade of a government."

None of which proves that socialism is inevitably doomed to failure, because it's just not socialism. Venezuela isn't socialist. The means of production are not owned by the people in Venezuela. Workers don't self organise. Basic rights such as healthcare and education aren't guaranteed. And they don't even have the Gender Fairy. 

But the people who throw around "socialism" as a boogey man don't know that because they have no idea what socialism is in the first place. The "what about Venezuela" argument is a furphy. It proves nothing, except the ignorance of the arguer. 

So it's time for a Venezuelan version of Godwin's Law. Whenever Venezuela is mentioned in a discussion about socialism, it's a sure sign the person doing the mentioning has no idea what they're talking about. Especially when they're Matthias Cormann.

---

Never forget: the police exist to protect property - but not yours.

Why should we defund the police? I count 14 reasons right here, defending thee statue of Captain Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park: 

 That's (at least) fourteen police officers being paid to defend a statue of a man who claimed to have discovered Australia when there'd already been people living here for 60,000 years who knew very well where the land they owned was. A man whose "discovery" led to the invasion of the Australian mainland 18 years later, with all the subsequent centuries of suffering for those original inhabitants. A man who murdered Maori people, if not Aboriginal Australians. 

 And he wasn't even an actual Captain. So much for not rewriting history. 

 Inspired by the worldwide push to topple statues of invaders, colonisers, slave traders and other assorted arseholes, protesters in Sydney intimated online that the statue of Cook has to go. Of course our Prime Minister Scott Morrison says we should keep the statue and his equally useless offsider, Anthony Albanese, agrees with him. 

 Morrison only had to say the word and it was done. Police swarmed to defend the statue from the braying hordes. Crimes of family violence go unchecked because of lack of police resources, but there is plenty of funding to protect statues of dead white men and strip search kids for drugs at music festivals (though never race attendees - or parliamentarians).

 When Rio Tinto blew 46,000 year old Aboriginal heritage sites to smithereens, when BHP announced they planned to do the same, there were no posses of police there to protect the sites. In fact there's a legal mechanism in place to allow such destruction for the sake of mining. But heaven forbid a statue gets pulled down. 

 At the Black Lives Matter protest in Sydney last weekend, the police refused to join the crowds in taking a knee. I'm glad they didn't. Why should they get to pretend they're the good guys for PR purposes when they were attacking protesters with pepper spray hours later, and they're upholding the systems of oppression at all times? Because that's what the police are for. No one joins the police because they want to challenge the systems of oppression. They join the police to uphold them. It's legal to destroy sacred sites if you've a mining permit but not threaten a statue, and anyone who joins the police is saying "that sounds fair and reasonable, sign me up". 

 Of course if you yourself call the police to report your house has been broken into, your property destroyed, chances are they'll never find the culprit. Lack of resources, you see. And anyone who's ever tried to report a sexual assault to the police knows they aren't there to protect your body. The police are there to uphold the system. White statues, not black lives.

QAnon - the truth is out there

Proponents of QAnon - the theory that says that a cabal of Deep State, Satanist Elite Paedophiles are secretly running the world - urge scoffers to "do their own research" into Q. Seems that the evidence of all this devil worshipping sex trafficking is either unavailable to the mainstream media, with all their contacts, research and insiders, or ignored by them - thousands and thousands of people in a struggling industry ignoring a story that would both greatly benefit their business and protect children, all because they want to protect the paedophiles involved. Without the fourth estate willing to expose the secretive, child abusing, Lucifer adoring types who run the world, the only thing stopping them is the tireless efforts of Donald Trump, working quietly to bring the whole thing down, supported by his rag tag band of patriots and believers, adamant that the proof of all this is out there for the ordinary citizen to find, if only they take the time to look.  

I went to scoff but came away convinced. I'm convinced Donald Trump is quietly letting the whole Prince of Darkness sex slavery thing get away with it, for whatever reasons of his own.

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Imprisoned First Australians prove the rest of us are racist

Last weekend 100,000 of us turned up to join in the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, focusing in Australia on Indigenous deaths in custody. 

Since the 1991 Royal Commission into deaths in custody, there have been a further 437 deaths without a single conviction for criminal responsibility. None of the recommendations were adopted. 

The protests in Australia had nothing to do with wanting to be like the Americans, or thinking it looked like fun, or wanting to score social justice points. The protests were lead and organised by Aboriginal people who had lost loved ones in the racist prison system and were calling out for justice, and we went to say enough is enough.

Yet the usual flying monkeys had their simple answers ready. "If Aboriginal people stopped committing so much crime, they wouldn't go to jail and they wouldn't die in jail. Nothing to do with racism."

It has everything to do with racism. 

Aboriginal people are incarcerated at roughly ten times - that's 1000% - of non-Aboriginal Australians.

Indigenous incarceration rates prove Australia is a racist country.

You think that the reason Aboriginal people are imprisoned at ten times the rate of non Aboriginal people because they commit ten times the amount of crime? Then you're a racist. And the fact that a lot of people think this proves Australia is a racist country. 

You realise that there's other factors contributing to high rates of Indigenous incarceration, such as the legacy of dispossession, targeted policing, and disparities in sentencing? These are all the systemic factors in play because Australia is a racist country. 

There's no way around this. We have a massive problem, and we have to get it out of the trenches of the cultural wars and face it and deal with it. 

Unfollow Trump

Poor Donald Trump. Being President was supposed to be all about power, money and perks, and getting his name in history for something other than being a reality TV host and saying a bunch of gross things to a radio shock jock whose other career stand out is the 1992 release of his film Butt Bongo Fiesta. And for a while it went okay. He cut taxes, the economy was doing well, and he got to bask in the adoration of fans who will backflip, twist and spin reality at a pace that would make Simone Biles dizzy in order to convince themselves of their hero’s infallibility.

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Birth and Death

My mother worried about me as a teenager. She worried a lot. And one of the things she worried about was my choice in reading materials. With few entertainment options in our little town in regional NSW, the library was my life. I spent a lot of time there avoiding home, reading 3 month old copies of The Face and wishing I lived in Manchester (Cool Britannia! Britpop! Manbreak Ocean Colour Scene Manic Street Preachers Pulp The Bluetones heck Tony Blair before he turned evil who would want to live in an Australia falling under the grip of John Howard?).

But I also discovered the 340 subdivision of the Dewey Decimal System.

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Free dark words collage sheet

Like me, love journaling but are absolutely sick of the relentless "live your best life" toxic positivity of all the journaling ephemera out there? My journals are where I vent my real self, not curate a fake life of friendship! coffee! happiness! for Instagram. Here's a quick collage sheet I threw together of some more realistic ephemera for the journals of a lot of us. Print, share, whatever I'm not your mom who probably doesn't care what you do that much anyway except that everything you do is wrong.

Pauline Hanson Weaponises Her Wilful Ignorance. Why Can’t We Call It Out?

This post was originally published on New Matilda. Reproduced with permission.

Pauline Hanson has learnt nothing. With the recent bushfire crisis and the outpouring of evidence, from the Rural Fire Service to bushfire experts from around Australia, stating that the fires were largely not caused by arsonists or lack of fuel reduction burns, but were exacerbated by climate change, Hanson has used her media platform to repeat the false information spreading on social media via another of her regular spots on Seven Sunrise.

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If the government doesn’t provide leadership, then what’s the point of having a government?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has already shown a tin ear when it comes to the devastating fires affecting Australia this bushfire season. As we moved from spring to the height of the summer bushfire season – and with bushfires already having devastated large parts of northern New South Wales, destroying hundreds of homes, and smoke choking cities along the east coast – he went on holidays to Hawaii, compounding his ignorance of the requirements of high office by having his staff spend several days lying about his being on holiday and seeming to blame his kids for his absence at a time of national crisis; that the trip was in order to keep a promise he made to his children.

But just as it was becoming painfully apparent that Morrison just doesn’t get it when it came to the need for strong leadership in the face of the unprecedented bushfire disaster, he started to get it less.

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MEGA LINKS POST - the truth about the Greens, bushfires and backburnings

As the horror summer of bushfires continues in Australia, we keep seeing the zombie rumours that the scale of the fires are the fault of the Greens preventing back burning operations, allowing for the build up of fuel in fire prone areas. This post is a collection of reliable and verifiable sources with the as much info as I can find, showing the truth about the Greens fire policies, back burning, climate change, arson, the role of the Morrison government, and a whole lot of other misinformation about the fires.

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Ladies, let men tell you how to Make Women Great Again

Ah, new year, new you. It's time to make New Year's Resolutions to become a fitter, happier, more productive self. No really, this year you're going to walk 10,000 steps a day, hit the gym three times a week, cut out simple carbohydrates and limit yourself to clear spirits on religious holidays. It's going to be great. You're going to be great.

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