Peter Barnes II (#auspol account)

Auntie has been in steady decline for a long time, now... Under overt attack during right-wing governments, and apathy and deliberate neglect under "Labor" governments. Installing Murdoch retirees just guaranteed this result.

Headline sub-head starts "The gentile (sic) and sequined (sic) world of figure skating..."

Our ABC wanted Ads:

Wanted: Subeditor with basic literacy, at least five years' experience with clickbait headlines

Wanted: Proofreeder, must not suffer from homophonia or unconscious Islamophobia

Welcome to the 21st Century
STILL no flying cars, but your doorbell in the UK stops working because of a DNS misconfiguration in Virginia, USA.
Now THAT'S progress, right there.
Still working on hunger, disease, poverty, you know, that boring stuff.

Grand Theft Accounting I am shocked—shocked, I tell you—to discover in this year’s corporate tax report that Optus paid no tax on $8.2 billion of income.

Grand Theft Accounting
open.substack.com/pub/aliensid...

ABC headline "Israel's 'trust us' mentality loses power as it targets journalists"

Whose sudden awakening to the horror of Gaza needed not one, but

TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY
journalists and media workers to be
KILLED BY ISRAEL
in
GAZA

before this pitifully unself-conscious headline appeared?

MFing Journalists.
#ThisIsNotJournalism
#ABCNews
#auspol #Gaza #Palestine #Genocide

ABC headline "Israel's 'trust us' mentality loses power as it targets journalists"

Who gave us no-actor or passive-voice headlines "Palestinian children die" instead of "Israel kills Palestinian children"? Journalists.
Who have been excluded from Gaza for years, but make no complaint? Journalists.

ABC headline "Israel's 'trust us' mentality loses power as it targets journalists"

Narcissism and wilful blindness in one headline...
#auspol #gaza #palestine
Who are the only people who have trusted Israel since the genocide started? Journalists.
Who trusted Israel when they started bombing innocent women and children? Journalists.

A sovereign power *bombs* the local headquarters of an international relief organisation & it's described as "hits" as the last part of a tiny thumbnail.
It's a moral outrage, & it rates half a dozen mealy-mouthed synonyms at the end of a minor headline.
This is disgusting.
#ThisIsNotJournalism

even there the lede isn't 100,000 odd people marching, it's the police ending the march.
And hidden in the corner, oh yes, by the way, deaths from deliberate starvation, and, last part of the headline, Israel "hit" THE RED CRESCENT HEADQUARTERS.🧵

Several headline boxes on the ABC news front page. The double-width major headline lede is not that probably 100,000 people marched, or that they're protesting genocide (now spun as a "humanitarian situation"), but that police stopped the march after some time. The, hidden in a much smaller box further down is a tiny box reporting deaths from starvation, and, oh yes, last part of the headline, Israel "hit" THE RED CRESCENT HEADQUARTERS. A sovereign power bombs the local headquarters of an international relief organisation and it's called "hits" as the last part of a tiny thumbnail.

I know this is news ("news") to nobody but I am moved to register my continuing disgust at State Media (sorry, the ABC) "reporting" on the atrocity that is Gaza.
After nearly two years of blatant genocide, they finally spin it as a "humanitarian situation", but...🧵

Those billion trees would have the same huge impact on the amount of CO2e in the atmosphere as reducing emissions by? Anybody guess?
Current emissions are of the order of 35 million megatons per annum.
To reduce that by one megaton (or 1 billion trees) is equivalent to 0.000003% reduction. Or SFA.

The numbers:
The tree used for estimates sequesters one tonne of CaCO3 in its lifetime. Which is around 500 years.
That's 120kg of Carbon, or 440kg of CO2e. In 500 years.
Or 0.88kg of CO2e per annum.
To sequester ONE megaton of CO2e per annum would need 1.1 BILLION trees.
🧵

Fig trees convert atmospheric CO₂ to stone, research reveals Some species of fig trees store calcium carbonate in their trunks—essentially turning themselves (partially) into stone, new research has found. The team of Kenyan, U.S., Austrian, and Swiss scientist...

What's the atomic weight of Hopium, again?

This research on plant metabolic pathways is fascinating, until talk turns to using it to sequester Carbon.

Let's do some *arithmetic* shall we?
Headline:
Planting 1.1 BILLION trees ≡ 0.000003% reduction in current emissions🙄
🧵

phys.org/news/2025-07...

The Night Piano - music and images for dreaming and drifting through time and space. YouTube video by Natasha Moszenin Music

Folks, I commend to you "The Night Piano", three jazz piano compositions by Natasha Moszenin, good friend of mine for many years.

I don't usually do recommendations, but if you like lyrical jazz piano, you'll like these.

(Also, full disclosure, some photos by me ☺️)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCj...

So: how the hell is @bsky.app choosing to dish out verification ticks?

There are several thousand climate scientists, major scientific institutions, climate journalists etc who haven't been verified, but Bsky actively chose to verify a performance-fatalism casino tricks vlogger........

I'm guessing this is rhetorical, but two obvious answers spring to mind (with the obvious underlying answer that we don't):
1. To add draconian powers and remedies that would be seen for what they are attached to existing legislation
2. So politicians can "do something" and appease lobbyists
3. BAU

Golding.

Compelling article on what should be our defence priorities by ever-excellent #HughWhite in @thesaturdaypaper.com.au
Such clarity & strategy so absent from ‘political debate’…

I'm picking this post at random, so the comment isn't aimed at it specifically, or the poster, specifically.
It's just this: when bad-faith chaos agents start to destroy your social fabric from the inside, facts & logic mean as little to them, or to people who STILL support them, as your existence

The Governor-General and the Council of the Order of Australia have sullied the Australian honours system today. #auspol

Unfortunately the only juxtapositions influencing the new government are its arse and ministerial leather, and lobbyists and their credit cards.
#auspol

Loretta Swit, who played ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on M*A*S*H, dies aged 87 The actor, who won two Emmy awards, was best known for being one of longest-serving cast members on the hit series

Vale Loretta

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Good question. I don't have an answer... Sadly I don't think Australians will march in the streets for Palestinians, at least not in the numbers necessary, and the ALP have 3 years. It's not our conflict (they think) unlike Iraq.
Raising public awareness so the pressure gets too great, perhaps.🤷

Israeli air strike kills nine of Gaza doctor’s ten children. Dr Alaa al-Najjar was on duty at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis when she received her children’s bodies.

Our government, with an unassailable majority, continues to ship arms and voice “concerns”.
Day after day, week after week, month after expletive month this genocide has continued to their abject moral cowardice.
They’re not fit to lead a family, much less a country. #auspol

The Decline and Fall of the House of Walmarticus (A little programming note.

The Decline and Fall of the House of Walmarticus
open.substack.com/pub/aliensid...

Dutts is auditioning to be Brian Pegmatite, in a spin-off “Life imitates Art”

Demonstration of the mechanics of facial expression. Duchenne and an assistant faradize the mimetic muscles of "The Old Man."

G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, Synoptic plate 4 from Le Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine. 1862, albumen print. In the upper row and the lower two rows, patients with different expressions on either side of their faces

I think that's #31. They've hidden the electrodes well.

It’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it… When parents fear for their children’s health, education, even shelter they’re not going to have time let alone the audacity to fight their employers over $7.50/hour for 15 hours a week.

The majority of emissions — and the majority of carbon offsets purchased by corporations — come from the coal, oil and gas mining industries. Fossil extraction is responsible for the most emissions, and those companies are also responsible for buying the most offsets. Flourish logoA Flourish chart The offsets industry lobby group welcomed this new data as a sign of a “good start” for the scheme’s “training wheels” year. But how long can the industry tiptoe around the fact that it will cease to exist if big emitters actually start cutting real emissions? A steep drop would be the industry’s worst nightmare.

The first of what I hope will be many deep (and deepening) dives into Australia's single most significant climate policy - also somehow the most widely ignored and memory-holed.

For @crikey.com.au - new data shows Safeguard is worse than we expected -->>

www.crikey.com.au/2025/04/29/e...