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The results of the West Australian state election last night are certainly quite dramatic with the incoming Labor government gaining over 10% of the vote in a two-party preferred basis and on-track to increase their parliamentary representation from 21 to 40 or more.

A few days ago we saw the leopard paint over its spots with water soluble paint. President Donald Groper, the most powerful man on earth after Vladimir Putin, made a coach’s speech to the American congress. An inclusive speech he claimed things were on the right track and before you know it, America would be great again. I assume he was talking about North America (excluding Canada), not central or South America. A man who knows all about fake news should get his facts right. He’s not President of America, he’s President of the United States of America.

It was an fascinating week watching the lurchings of the Shambling Mound, Lord Dampnut, with trajectories towards the ridiculous, the improbable, and the unfair dominating the headlines. Never one for shortage of content, Lord Dampnut continues to shake up the United States in a manner that leaves more level minds nonplussed (nota bene: this may mean the opposite to what you think it means - look it up).

When you hear John Howard lament about the Liberal Party losing its way, you know things aren’t right in Tallarook. If there’s one thing you can say about the Prime Minister who lost his seat, it’s he has the uncanny ability to read the Liberal Party’s political tea leaves. What he’s seen lately makes him apprehensive, if not ill.

I’m just about finished with William Gibson’s The Peripheral. I’m at the penultimate scene, the one just before the climactic blowout. Thematically, this is a perfect place to have stopped, because one of the things the book talks about is life before, and after, the “collapse.” Gibson’s work is all about the future, about how the future feels between your fingers.

On Wednesday I heard the news that Trevor Grant had died. The last time I saw Trevor was at the West Papuan Rent Collective Christmas gathering. He was pale, very weak and obviously dying but he had made the effort to be with friends. He was honoured on the day for his financial generosity to the West Papuan Independence Movement. That day he donated $5,000 to the West Papuan Independence Movement to educate West Papuans. Dr. Jacob Rumbiak announced the education bursary for educating young West Papuans outside their homeland would be called The Trevor Grant Scholarship Fund.

If you really want to start cleansing your brain of the bad media habits that are subtly making your life more miserable, the best thing to do is to recognize and behave as though online publishing - not just Natural News or the Blaze, but even the respectable stuff like 538 and Vox or the New York Times, are all scams. All of it. It isn’t that the things they peddle are or aren’t true, either.

Poor Alan Tudge, the Federal Minister for Human Services, appears to have put his foot in it. Concerned about the tone of an article in the Fairfax media by a social security recipient who claimed she had been harassed about a debt she never owed to social security, he took it on himself to pass on personal details about the woman who wrote the article to the Fairfax media group so they could address what he considered to be inaccuracies in her article.

We the people:

In case anyone got overly sidetracked by the Russian spy drama, the following bills HAVE been introduced:

Belonging to the lesser known genre of Australian films known as the Fish n Chip Western, A Fistful of Rubles is a B-grade farce currently screening in Australian cinemas. It tells the story of Red Hanson and the One Nation Gang, a group of small time hustlers and con-artists who make a living by harassing ethnic and religious minorities, pedaling climate change denial and rustling voters at election time, for which the Australian Electoral Commission pays them $2.62 per first preference vote.