Hell writ large and small. Suffering and stupidity. More warnings. Acts of compassion and of great kindness too. Business as usual (see: plutocracy, plutonomy).
As we write this, on the radio Robyn Williams, not Robin Williams the comedic mind-mouth genius who took his life this week, but Robyn Williams the longtime presenter of the Science Show is inter-viewing Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, about her novel co-written with Erik M Conway.
The Collapse of Western Civilization :
A View from the Future
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Yet another wake-up call!
Their previous book was Merchants of Doubt :
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
Hence, the front page of this morning's 'Saturday Paper' (here) has the striking headline :
Abbott's piss and wind power on renewable energy
Image of the Week : "That's my boy!"
A photo posted on social media by the convicted Sydney terrorist Khaled Sharrouf, now abroad with his family and fighting as part of ISIS, shows his seven year old son holding up the severed head of a Syrian soldier. (SMH article here)
Lost for words : Responding to this, President Obama adds the word barbarian to terrorist : "these barbarian terrorists".
What's in a word? Bomber, for instance. One thing (a great reminder of 'The Two Truths') about being a supporter of the Bombers, about publicly wearing a scarf emblazoned BOMBERS, especially on the streets of Melbourne, is that most people hereabouts see such a BOMBERS scarf and think only of sport, of Australian Rules Football, of the Essendon Football Club, The Bombers. Usually, when your correspondent points out this semantic curiosity to others, that The Bombers have nothing (sic) to do with the War On Terror, they say: "Oh yeah. I never thought of that".
Team Australia : After our Bombers Seek Justice post of 11 August, the stats showed a series of visits to this post from Canberra :
and
If we have nothing to fear but fear itself we have nothing to hide, right? Who is metadata, what is she, that all her swains defend her?
Another warning : At the start, we mentioned plutocracy (think Clive Palmer, Rupert Murdoch...)
From Ancient Greek πλουτοκρατία (ploutokratía, “rule of the wealthy”),
from πλουτοκρατέω (ploutokratéō, “I rule through wealth”),
from πλοῦτος (ploûtos, “wealth”) + κρατέω (kratéō, “I rule”)
(from κράτος (krátos, “power”, “might”)
...and plutonomy :
Blend of plutocracy and economy,
from Ancient Greek roots πλοῦτος (ploûtos, “wealth”)
+ νόμος (nómos, “law”) (English -nomy).
During this week, in which the Australian banks announced their latest billion dollar record profits, SBS.TV re-screened Michael Moore's 'Capitalism, a love story' and ABC Lateline showed an interview with 'venture capitalist' Nick Hanauer in which he, too, warns (video and transcript here) of a revolution against the US plutonomy.
Still on this, the nation was shown a further glimpse of the mind-set of the Australian Federal Treasurer, cigar smokin' millionaire Joe Hockey. Even Abbott & Co backed away from this one, such was the odour. Hockey's view of the poor delivered him his own professional-political death sentence:
Quote of the Week : already paraphrased as 'Poor people don't drive cars'.
"I don’t think that a cursory look at the Budget is enough for people to understand what we’re really getting at. You have to look at the detail of what people actually receive now, and people are receiving tens of thousands of dollars in payments from other Australians. What we’re asking is for everyone to contribute, including higher income people. Now, I’ll give you one example: the change to fuel excise, the people that actually pay the most are higher income people, with an increase in fuel excise and yet, the Labor Party and the Greens are opposing it. They say you’ve got to have wealthier people or middle-income people pay more. Well, change to the fuel excise does exactly that; the poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases. But, they are opposing what is meant to be, according to the Treasury, a progressive tax."
- Full transcript here
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Out of the blue, early-1980s memories of the founder-editor of Art & Text, Paul Taylor delivering copies of that journal to Melbourne bookshops in his red MG.
Below, as observed by TAR
leaving Melb Art Fair
a Hockey-ite with fat cigar
en route to Oz Saloon car
click image to enlarge
courtesy : The Debt Collection
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