gap

While millions of Australians struggle to make ends meet during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation’s billionaires have pocketed $205 million a day.

Anti-poverty charity Oxfam has run the numbers and found Australia’s 47 billionaires doubled their collective net worth to $255 billion over the first two years of the crisis.

Those men and women, who count business magnates Gina Rinehart, James Packer and Frank Lowy among them, now hold more wealth than the poorest 30 per cent of Australians, which equates to about 7.7 million people.

The findings from the Oxfam report, released on Monday, were mirrored on a global scale, with the world’s ten richest men also more than doubling their fortunes to $1.9 trillion.

scam

NSW residents have been warned to brace themselves for high numbers of COVID-19 deaths in the coming days as the state’s healthcare workers battle exhaustion in the face of rising hospitalisations.

Health Minister Brad Hazzard hit out at people who have chosen not to get vaccinated, saying they needed “to give a damn about someone other than” themselves.

“Give a damn about your community, your family and most particularly, the health staff across NSW who you expect to be looking after you if and when you end up in our hospital system,” he said.

The state recorded 29,504 new COVID-19 cases and 17 deaths in the latest reporting period.

immigration

In her latest book, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, world-renowned scholar and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The United States has never been ‘a nation of immigrants.’ It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization, not as rigid and organized as the ‘seasoning’ of Africans, which rendered them into human commodities, but effective nonetheless.”

rats

At its heart, economics is fundamentally the social science of distribution — who gets what.

And, right now, the pandemic has thrown a spanner into the works: no-one, or at least, very few people, are able to get everything they want or, in many cases, even need.

agreed

Russia previously slammed the alliance's creeping expansion, saying that NATO should return to the positions that existed at the moment of signing the 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act. The Russian Foreign Ministry has underscored that strengthening NATO’s military potential near Russia’s borders poses a national security threat.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Sunday the bloc would never pull allied troops from member states that had joined it since 1997, but is ready to discuss arms reduction with Russia.

albo

Despite the Murdoch media hate of the Labor Party, history has not been in favour of Albo in another aspect. Let's say that one would expect a bit of funny "vengeance" from Uncle Rupe may not be out of the question, because at the time of the Rabbitohs being expelled from Rugby League (1998-99) by what we suspect were Murdoch's shenanigan. Imagine at the time, TWO protests in the streets of Sydney walking to the Town Hall — one protest with more than 40,000 angry people against Murdoch and the second having more than 60,000 people in the streets... And Albo was a supporter of the Rabbitohs then... And the appeal to the court case reinstated the "Rabbits"...

blinkering

“One lesson of recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave.”

The level of hubris-laced ignorance it would take an ostensibly intelligent, well-informed individual to make such a statement, in public, in an official capacity, goes beyond political parody.

paris

Parisian Dream

To Constantin Guys

By Baudelaire

I

Of this fantastic landscape,

That no mortal ever dreams

This morning again the image,

Distant and vague, delights me.

Sleep is full of miracles!

… By a simple decision

I banned from the spectacles

All the wild vegetation,

And, proud of my creative genius,

my painting tasted like thus

An intoxicating uniform ether

Of steel, and marble and water.

Towers of stairs and arcades,

Were an infinite palace

walking on sewage... 

The political life and times of Scott Morrison will hopefully end at the next elections. On this line of articles and comments we will try to explain why Scotty should be booted out.

Scotty is a beast of great manipulation like a magician in a second-rate show-alley called parliament. And this is dangerous. He plays a deceitful game like a glib painted clown plays an important personage in a Shakespeare tragedy that demands the appearance of self-sacrifice. Yet, at no stage, is Scott able to take the blame for the crap, mishaps and fucups he has made you endure. Meanwhile, he will give good marks to himself for having survived these major SNAFUs. But should someone expose him as a fake, he will roll onto himself and play the martyr.

planet

Ada Palmer is a professor of European history at the University of Chicago. Her four-volume science fiction series, Terra Ignota, was inspired by 18th-century philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot.

“I wanted to write a story that Voltaire might have written if Voltaire had been able to read the last 70 years’ worth of science fiction and have all of those tools at his disposal,” Palmer says in Episode 495 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

balls-up

Novak Djokovic is back on court in Melbourne, training ahead of the Australian Open despite ongoing uncertainty over whether he can remain in the country.

Follow today's events as they happen. 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-14/novak-djokovic-updates-blog-visa-decision-alex-hawke/100755958

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

idiot

Australia's journey through Omicron is like the bus tour from hell. Steering awry, seat belts forgotten or not working, and the driver's patter wearing thin with stressed passengers.

Eventually we'll see the back of the boggy ground on this outback track. But in worse shape and at higher cost than the Morrison government was suggesting only weeks ago.

"Omicron is a gear change and we have to push through," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday. "You have two choices here: you can push through or you can lock down. We're for pushing through."

brennan

"Nowhere are the stakes higher for our national security than in the field of biotechnology," Brennan stated. "Recent advances in genome editing that offer great potential for breakthroughs in public health are also a cause for concern because the same methods can be used to create genetically engineered biological warfare agents."

In April [2016], the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Health Affairs Acting Director Aaron Firoved testified in Congress that synthetic biology and gene editing offer terrorist organizations potential to modify organisms for malicious purposes such as manmade pathogens that can rapidly cause disease outbreaks.

diplomacy

The Western empire-builders are weakened and exposed in the eyes of their own populations and thus are disarmed politically to pursue confrontation. 

Author and commentator Alex Krainer explains in the following interview why Russia is now strong enough to take a definitive stand against the United States and its Western empire-builders. This is the wider historical context for high-level negotiations being conducted this week between Russia and the U.S. and NATO in which Moscow has asserted red lines for its national security.

fart

The warning to Scott Morrison about a crisis in virus testing was made very clear last year after the Prime Minister told Australians to prepare for a world where they would emerge from lockdowns and live with the coronavirus.

The warning was so loud it was almost impossible to ignore. Almost. Now, only a few months later, voters can see the way Morrison has lost the race to bring in huge supplies of rapid antigen tests when people needed them most.

The government’s twin talents, arrogance and complacency, have been at work again in an astonishing repeat of the slow supply of vaccines last year.