We really didn’t need to see what Mitchell Pearce did with a dog on a couch. But we did, on the evening news, and it wasn’t pretty.
Peter FitzSimons raises some pertinent questions. Continue reading Saturday salon 30/1
“Playing and protesting”, that was the headline on the TV news as to how Australia spent its national day.
My brother and his wife hosted a street party where people hailed recently from seven different overseas countries. Yesterday one of my wife’s clients said she knew Aborigines who would just close their doors and cry. Continue reading Australia, a work in progress
In Goodbye Holocene, hello Anthropocene? I outlined the process being undertaken to consider whether the Holocene should give way to the Anthropocene. Now a few articles have appeared making the case.
Sam Wong in New Scientist give seven reasons: Continue reading The case for the Anthropocene
The figures are now official, 2015 was the hottest year on record:
Scientists have discovered through gravitational effects on other bodies that a ninth planet almost certainly exists in our solar system. It is thought to be 10 times the mass of earth and takes 10,000 – 20,000 years to orbit the Sun.
Computer simulations suggest the ninth planet is located 20 times farther away from the Sun than Neptune. Continue reading Saturday salon 23/1
As far as I know Clive Palmer’s two main cash producing assets were Queensland Nickel and the Coolum Resort, known now mainly for the fibreglass dinosaurs he installed all over the place. Coolum is presently shut, and Queensland Nickel has gone into receivership. Terry Barnes thinks “Palmer and his political influence are going the way of the fibreglass dinosaurs inhabiting his defunct resort at Coolum.” Continue reading Will Clive Palmer and QNI go the way of the fibreglass dinosaurs?
While we wait for politics to crank up other matters are more interesting.
On politics, Essential Report has the LNP lead narrowing to 51-49, while Roy Morgan also has a narrowing but by 1.5 points to 56-44. They can’t both be right, but they can certainly both be wrong! Continue reading Poll stuff
A Deutsche Welle report I heard on NewsRadio began along these lines:
An extensive investigation by Der Spiegel tells us that groups of men humiliated, sexually assaulted and robbed women around the main railway station in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. What happened was not new and was not limited to Cologne. What was different was the scale, the presumed predominance of men from North Africa amongst the perpetrators, and the timing in relation to the dilemmas faced by the influx of refugees from Syria. Continue reading Cologne: what happened and where to from here?
The key thing in the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) system is that the individual athlete is finally responsible for what goes into his or her body. That runs counter to the ethos of how teams operate. Continue reading Saturday salon 16/1: late edition
Richard Di Natale has broken with The Greens’ policy on genetically modified crops, saying that he does not believe genetically modified crops pose a significant risk to human health. He says there is no concrete evidence on potential health harms to people. Continue reading Di Natale breaks with Greens’ policy on genetically modified crops
Yes, according to Fairfax, with the story reprinted in The Guardian, and then picked up by other media outlets. For the record, the ABC also got it wrong by saying it was all people over 60. It was all people over 65.
But the article was misleading in other ways as well. Continue reading One-third of Australian pensioners live in poverty?
It hasn’t happened yet, not officially. The final decision rests with an august scientific body called the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which has a 36-person Working Group on the Anthropocene. Now 24 scientists, including some from the Working Group, have produced a paper advocating for the Anthropocene to be recognised as having begun in the mid-20th century. Continue reading Goodbye Holocene, hello Anthropocene?
