🎵Do you like via-ferrata?
Do you like steep terrain?
Can you clip cow tails?
Do we have to explain?🎵
(With apologies to the Pina Colada song.)
A great day guiding two Scout sessions on course 1 with RockWire Mt Buller and the Scouts Victoria Climbing Team
We were on the iron path today
Here be dragons
Contemplating the West Ridge, Mt Buller
Good morning
Greenland’s glaciers are losing ice at an unprecedented pace 🇬🇱
The bad news: vast quantities of freshwater entering the North Atlantic could disrupt major ocean currents - changing ocean ecosystems and European climate.
The good news: this GIANT collaboration is getting to the bottom of it, fast ⬇
Don Watson - The Bush Paula Constant - Slow Journey South Paul Carter - Smoking Monkeys, Drilling Rigs, Bio-Diesel Bikes Mark Twain - Roughing It Kate Legge - Kindred (A Cradle Mountain Love Story)
Today’s plunder.
(You’ve got to love a great second hand book store)
Screenshot of the article which reads: There is a certain duality to Kilgour’s failure of imagination; it only fails sometimes. The former deputy secretary of the Department of Social Services Serena Wilson was found, correctly, to have engaged in serious corrupt conduct for her role in misleading the Commonwealth Ombudsman about the legality of the robodebt program in 2017, two years after it began. In whacking Wilson, Kilgour appealed to matters of “common sense and ordinary human experience” as well as quite correct observations about the role of senior public servants. “But it is only to be expected that Ms Wilson, as a deputy secretary, would have had systems, procedures and assistance in place to isolate more important communications from the dross, and thus to devote to the former the time and attention they deserved,” she writes. Fair. Not so for Campbell, though. Campbell, Kilgour says, was far too busy to be across the detail even though it was Campbell who first briefed the concepts of robodebt to Scott Morrison — not the more senior DSS secretary — and who directed that the briefs be prepared, and who was so intimately involved in the development of the policy that later became the cabinet submission. Kilgour states as fact something that could only have come from Campbell’s testimony about the development in 2015: “Ms Campbell’s focus was elsewhere on the Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation program (WPIT)1397 which was a vast program involving the establishment of new arrangements and IT upgrades with multiple other agencies.” Her focus was elsewhere. Says who? Campbell.
Whole chunks of Campbell's evidence are taken at pure face value. Not even in the 'I've weighed this and considered it' sense but in the 'just state it as fact in passing' sense. www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/13/n...
The NACC report is astonishing for just how many non-sequiturs, excuses and naive assumptions can be packed into 455 pages. The deputy commissioner who authored it is not a judge, unlike Catherine Holmes. And it shows. www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/13/n...
Illustration of a young woman wearing a white shirt reading “From the River to the Sea,” standing calmly between two looming police officer silhouettes holding her arms. The officers appear large and shadowy behind her, while she is rendered in bright red and white tones, highlighting tension between protest speech and state authority.
Welcome to Queensland - the Censor State - where you can face up to two years’ imprisonment for a simple phrase.
As of early 2025, approximately 73% to 79% of U.S. adults use at least one social media site (Pew Research).
Approximately 20% of registered voters in the U.S. are considered "disengaged" or "low-information" voters. (YouGov)
Not sure that you’re looking at the real problem here.
Post interaction settings Who can reply Anyone Nobody Your followers People you follow X People who get the joke Select from your lists Allow quote posts
here, as a public service.
for general use:
Oof!
(Mansfield)
Good morning
THE MAKING OF A RENOWNED EXPLORER: Mr. Croc recalls his early years:
"I suppose some people are just born to be one of life's adventurers - and she was one of those..."
(Cheery sandwich wrapper of the day, to help you on your way.👍🏼😃)
Robodebt was the great test of Australia’s accountability mechanisms – and they failed
You've totally gotta wear @nordacious.bsky.social's shirt in the next episode, as it's genuinely brilliant subversion of fascism, using an Aussie icon's song no less.
Keep up your brilliant work, @ettemedia.bsky.social!
Trying to ban "from the river to the sea" is almost identical to trying to ban "Always was, always will be"
Imagine a political party trying to do the latter - they'd be rightfully driven like a tent peg.
Caving in to a foreign influence operation because it's easy is pathetic.
It’s the calm before the storm; 9am activity starts this morning
High Ropes V Walk
Good morning
Read Mean Streak. The detail is all in there.
The NACC continues to be a joke
"It looks as if, rather than make it his duty to get good environmental outcomes, this minister for the environment is leaving it to Chinese mining giant MMG to decide wherever it wants to go."
How citizen science and activism saved the Takayna/Tarkine rainforest. satpa.pe/taJX7iz
Hearings 62. Private hearings were held pursuant to section 62 of the NACC Act extending over 35 sitting days between 5 August and 3 October 2025. During those private hearings, each of the 6 referred persons and a further 33 witnesses were called to give evidence. See Witnesses. 63. The Deputy Commissioner considered the use of public hearings and applied the statutory test established under the NACC Act. The statutory threshold for public hearings in this investigation was not met. For more
NACC decided it wasn't in the public interest to make its corruption hearings with Morrison, Campbell, Mussolino etc public
I would conservatively estimate that 90% of Australians would disagree
Where NACC = No Actual Consequences Comrade
What a fucking crock.
Two mid-level officials found to be corrupt by the NACC, but the big guns get off scot-free forever.
Looking up an artificial climbing wall to the TruBlue auto belay at the top
Good morning
A study of social media content 18-24-year olds see in #Finland, #France and #Romania shows that algorithms overwhelmingly feed them right-wing political content - whether or not the users are interested.
Three country average for right wing content was 58% - in Finland, 67%!
yle.fi/a/74-20214134
We don't talk enough about the risks of geomagnetic storms.
Earlier this year, an Aussie power company said that some of their network might have been knocked out by the Jan solar storm.
So I chatted to our leading space weather scientists about the origin and risk mitigation of these events.
🔭🧪
