Blogs

On the night of the 2018 US mid-term elections there were many saying that the expected Democrat 'blue wave' over the Republicans did not eventuate. Nicholas Kristof at New York Times offered the advice "Don’t listen to Democrats who portray these midterms as an important triumph".

Since 2002 the Reclaim the Radical Spirit of the Eureka Rebellion Celebrations Committee have organised these celebrations on Eureka Day - 3rd December, in Ballarat.

Since 2005 the Committee has awarded six Eureka Australia Medals at Bakery Hill, Ballarat (the site where the Eureka Oath was taken in 1854) at 10:00am on Eureka Day, 3rd December.

The EAM is awarded to people whose political or community activities reflect the principles embodied in the Eureka Oath which was sworn by miners and their supporters at Bakery Hill, Ballarat on the 29th November 1854 –

Trump has laid the foundation for conservative politicians to start talking about scrapping Social Security and Medicare. Billionaires were bailed out during the Bush and Obama eras, when government borrowed from Social Security to subsidize and bail out rich folks. Trump has permanently cut taxes on the wealthy so that his rich friends don't have to pay back the money they took from Social Security.

I'm very irritated with basically everyone who had anything to do with the current mess at the border.

The Trump administration spent millions of dollars preparing for the arrival of the caravan. The fact that it's only been able to process 60-100 applicants per day is embarrassing. For a small fraction of the amount we spent deploying the military, we could have hired a bunch of temp workers, given them some basic training, and had the infrastructure in place to process the large number of asylum applications we knew were on their way.

Ayn Rand sucked at life. Her books were garbage and no one loved her, not even Rothbard. Also, "If there's one thing that will not be tolerated here, it's imprecision of language."

Harvey Beardman (Atlas in the metaphor) is the businessman with the world on his shoulders, so he decides to shrug off moral obligations and pursue "the virtue of selfishness." Atlas shrugs, ignoring the ecological impact of his actions and engages in selfish profit-seeking at the expense of the environment and the community.

A reminder that unemployment numbers are meaningless when it comes to the state of the economy.

A partially objective guide to minor parties running in the 2018 Victorian election

Animal Justice Party

The Animal Justice Party “gives a political voice to those who have none”. Kind of like the Human Justice Party, only for animals, and they’re a thing.

Aussie Battler Party

Vaccines don't cause autism and chiropractic is pseudo-science.

Even if vaccines cause autism (which they don't), a person can live a happy and fulfilling life with autism. You can't live a happy and fulfilling life if you're dead because you got a completely preventable illness. Also, the guy that did the "research" showing a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism faked the research because he happened to own the patent on an alternative vaccine—he was just a piece of shit trying to scare people away from the usual vaccine in order to sell them his own vaccine instead.

"The Republic" is also a mistranslation of the title of Plato's work. An accurate translation would be "The State." Plato was not a republican and neither was the form of government he advocated. He advocated a totalitarian quasi-communist monarchy. His politics was thoroughly fascist. Also, "scientific racism" played a central role in his political thought.

Tomorrow, Remembrance Day, formerly Armistice Day, will be observed for the hundredth time. At the eleventh hour, many people will pause for a minute’s silence in respect for those who have died in wars.

Eleven am (Paris time) is when the guns fell silent in the First World War, a war which had effectively ended six hours earlier.