After a stupid statement by the silly old fart Bob Katter stating that every school should have an armoury in which each child could store their rifles, I wrote a piece about him and the reason he was so keen to sell more guns to Australians. That reason was that his son-in-law owns a large supplier of arms, ammunition and accessories1. Ever the spiv.
I saw a short video where a UK policeman was arresting someone for supporting Palestine Action, an organisation which is all about trying to prevent the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The person being arrested asked if it was because she supported Palestinians, and the copper said that it was. She also asked if she would be arrested if she supported Israel and the copper replied that she wouldn’t.
The appalling Josh Frydenberg has come out blaming Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for the atrocity in Bondi. Always a Liberal. In this he is just echoing the bullshit spouted by the monster of Gaza, Netanyahu1.
After the horrendous events of December 14th, it didn’t take long before self-serving lies of people like Netanyahu surfaced.
We have just been to a movie matinee put on by some friends of ours. The movie was Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’1, which I haven’t seen for a few decades. While the movie was made in 1946, it has many resonances with the modern world.
It is set in small-town America (of course), and the brief blurb on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) encapsulates it as follows: “An angel is sent from Heaven to help a desperately frustrated businessman see the value of his own life”1.
The current US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr) was involved in litigation against Merck over its Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, alleging marketing fraud and undisclosed side effects, and stood to earn significant referral fees from the lawsuit, which raised ethics concerns as he was considered for his current government role.
While most people are guilty of some level of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy afoot in today’s world takes some beating. Unfortunately, the worst hypocrites are in power in numerous countries and many, like me, seem relatively impotent in trying to at least highlight this hypocrisy, let alone remedy it.
The first rant I ever posted on this blog all the way back in early 2017 was entitled Gun Nuts and it referred to data from 2013 on general gun deaths in the US. At that time 33,534 people were killed by guns, at a rate of 10.35 per 100,000 people. In Australia in the same year 225 people were killed by guns, at a rate of 0.94 per 100,000 people1.
So, what is Australia doing for the future? Cutting funding to science, that’s what. Since the beginning of 2024, 800 staff have been cut from Australia’s leading scientific research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and another 350 are to be cut in 2026, which brings the total cuts to over 16% of the organisation’s staff. The Labor government has dealt the CSIRO some of the largest job cuts in the organisation’s history.
I read an article a day or so ago, mostly about the development of a new type of battery in China, which it was said could give your average electric vehicle (EV) a range of about 1,000 kilometres1.