Current affairs

With the US unilaterally threatening to impose tariffs on friend and foe alike, do the affected nations have to impose matching tariffs?

Tariffs are an tax paid by those who import goods into the country imposing the tariffs, and are usually eventually passed onto the end consumers as an increase in prices for those goods. Tariffs are a direct punishment for a country's own people, but the intent is to eventually sabotage the ability of those countries supplying the goods to sell them to the imposing country, so allowing local suppliers to ramp up their own production to eventually supply the country's needs.

Allowing that country to continue to supply their own goods to those same countries without some reciprocal tariffs would seem to be allowing the imposing country to get away with the tariffs scot-free. While for simple consumer goods, that might be the case, but more complicated goods like cars and smartphones follow a much more complicated manufacturing path that crosses several countries, possibly involving several tariff impositions by the one country at multiple stages of manufacturing.

Even without other countries imposing any tariffs, the original country's consumers will be subject to substantial price hikes. However, the other countries involved in the distributed manufacturing processes will still be paying higher for their stage of import, but not through any tariffs by their own country. That means that any problems would be solely due to the original tariff-imposing country, while the other countries would be still proceeding in good faith. It would be a soft-bargaining position to point out to the consumers in the problem country, hoping for them to apply pressure.

Imposing bans on the tariff-imposing country would be acting in bad faith, but there is nothing to stop a country promoting some manufacturing self-reliance and imploring consumers to buy goods that are fully locally made, especially if they are emotionally more aligned with doing that due to the often false reasons for imposing the tariffs to begin with. Tariffs tend to be hard to remove, so each country unnecessarily applying tariffs just as part of trade bargaining would create long-term difficulties for their manufacturing and consumers.

Trade is complex, and applying simple so-called fixes can be detrimental in the long term, so avoiding retaliation can avoid many of those while providing the moral high ground in the public arena that puts all the pressure on the egregious country's government. These trade negotiations are temporary blips in the long timeline of manufacturing, so getting drastic can lead to bad outcomes. For example, tariff impositions rarely result in the intended boost to local manufacturing, but usually lead to a drop in overall competitiveness as the goods drop in quality while becoming more expensive.

Given the incompetence shown at negotiations for peace in Gaza and Ukraine, it is no wonder Trump had so many failed businesses.

It seems that Trump relies upon intimidation to get their way, rather than at actual skill at negotiation. Such tactics may work against those who are not used to dealing with bombastic narcissists, but anyone who is a serious negotiator can see that Trump is a dealer with no clothes, which is why they are so easily malleable in the hands of far more competent manipulators like Rupert Murdoch. Trump basically played misère and gave everything away, resulting in the aggressors getting all their own way and the aggressed being sold out. With negotiators like Trump, who needs enemies.

Of course, Ukraine and NATO are not buying any of it, especially since they have basically been left holding all the responsibility for what happens anyway, though they might hedge their comments because telling the truth would invoke who knows what retributive stupidity by Trump. The US has definitely entered the age of grift, with all now seeing how actually pitiful the country is led. NATO and other world organisations would be far better served without the US being involved, as then some sensible negotiations can be had because the remaining parties may obtain some useful outcomes.

Unfortunately, NATO is reliant upon the US for much of its command and control technology and skills, making it impossible to just do without any help from the US in the near-term. The best it could do at this stage is to buy the necessary technology from the US, thereby giving the US several $billion in sales, and thus something for Trump to brag about. It will still take some years to build up native skills to run it all, so the US will also get some ongoing income until then.

Europe has now lost trust in the US as any sort of guarantor of their security, so it must be independent, even if that means pivoting to other North American nations, or going for a Europe-only organisation. Until Russia stops being an enduring threat, they will need to have a common defensive strategy. Unfortunately, any nation could undergo dramatic changes in political agenda due to internal governmental or citizen dissent, making any organisation potentially unstable.

Certainly for those nations bordering Russia, the threat is very real, so they are much more united in their unity. Whether NATO continues to be ready to protect them is something they will continue to be evaluating over the coming years, especially with right-wing parties with a more positive attitude to Russia gaining more popularity in Europe. Why they view Russia in that way is very strange because it is obvious what Russia wants. For some reason there is still the glamour of Russia as some force of liberation that undeservedly persists.

The interactions of US users new to the Chinese social media app Rednote shows the extent of US propaganda.

Rednote, or its full translation of Little Red Book, is a Chinese social media app that has seen an influx of US users who were about to be orphaned by the ban on TikTok. This has allowed a lot more direct interaction between Chinese and US people, so each are finding out a lot more about the daily lives of each other. What US users are finding out is that they have been fed a lot of lies from the US government and media about life in China, but also the Chinese have found out that what they thought was their government's lies about life in the US were actually true.

While this interaction is good for dispelling cultural myths, and many YouTube videos from US Rednote users details these myths and lies, US media is avoiding any discussion about the US propaganda, and definitely nothing about how Chinese people are realising their government was telling the true about US life. It seems that the US media is still wanting to keep the US myth about the superiority of their lifestyle protected, so they will not allow their readers and viewers to know about the relative absence of lies about US life in China.

It is this fragility of exposure of the truth of US propaganda that seems to still drive US media spin. With such resistance to the truth, especially in the current US political climate, that a ban on Rednote will likely be forthcoming. It is interesting that for Chinese people, telling the truth about US life seems to them government propaganda because it sounds so crazy to them. Such revelations and reactions from the Chinese have has US users questioning the US narrative even more. All that they have been led to believe about life in China has been a lie.

When the truth about a country seems so bad to others that they take it as being lies indicates that that country really needs to get a reality on its perceptions of itself, and that its myths and propaganda is such a delusion that they are blind to how much they are missing out on that other countries take for granted. We can hope that a lot more US people see the deceptions perpetrated upon them by their own politicians and media, and coupled with the increasing evidence of oligarchs actually having too much power over them, that they do shift to rejecting the lies fed to them.

Many think tariffs protect a country from exploitation.

Tariffs are rather like sales taxes, in that they increase the prices of goods, but only those from another country. They are meant to protect the local industries from cheap foreign imports, but then the protected have no real incentive to improve their products, so quality goes down rapidly. Tariffs do nothing to change the global conditions that create the trade imbalances that lead to the death of a country's industries, which are mostly because of exploitation of the labour of other countries, usually being those that were exploited through colonialism and never recovered.

As an example of what happen when trying to protect home-grown industries from foreign competition, the banning of sales of US computer chips to China has had some unforeseen consequences. In January 2024, the release of Chinese DeepSeek reasoning AI wiped over a $trillion off many US tech companies because in not getting access to the chips that those US tech companies had used to run the training of their models, DeepSeek had to innovate and after a series of those, came up with a far more efficient learning model, showing just how much hubris was in play over supposed US AI superiority.

Tariffs are also like sales taxes in that they favour the rich because of their far greater discretionary financial reserve, and so lead to greater wealth inequality. However, in conjunction with lowering income taxes for the wealthy, tariffs become another huge transfer of wealth from consumers and businesses to the extremely wealthy, and just another grift that everyone else is being sucked into funding.

The real way to protect a country's industries is to bring all countries to the same level of prosperity, as in equal wages and costs of services. Then there is a true level playing field with real competitions, so those with something unique to offer will be able to sell to those who do not have them. Of course, local suppliers of local goods and services will have the lower costs, and so will tend to be favoured by local buyers.

This arrangement will maximise the amount of currency circulating within the same country, while allowing the exotic offerings of a country to be available everywhere. That is real free trade. Not only that, but it would allow all the people of all nations to have a decent life free of exploitation, but only if we take real measures to remove the exploiters from their power to manipulate the world's market forces for their own benefit.

The US social media corporations have thrown their weight behind Trump and capitulated to the misanthropists supporting them.

The banner of free speechabuse has finally conquered the social media companies, leaving no shelter for the many abused minorities in the US and most of the world. It appears that the only national group that could possibly take on those social media sites is the EU. But with the rise of right-wing parties in many EU countries, are they really ready to tackle the torrent of abuse that will now flood those sites? Given that most of those countries are supporting the psychopaths running the Israeli genocide, can we expect that political survival will not compromise them on this issue as well?

We are coming down to more than a red line in the sand as far as the safety of the world is concerned, but the dividing line between a world and its destruction. The social media companies have been playing their part in trying to decouple people from the reality of what it takes to have peace and stability in the world, while hedging their reputations by pretending to be doing something to protect their users from abuse. The veneer of fake concern is now lifted, so there is no excuse for those with the will to not curtail the reach of social media.

The drastic ban of under 16s from social media taken by Australia might just be the way that the game will have to be played to reduce their reach into the minds of citizens. How many countries are willing to do that when there will likely be a push by the US to counter such restrictions, given how those companies are now giving free reign to the propaganda the US is to release onto the world through them. The ultimate stopper is to ban social media in a country until they take responsibility. How many countries will take that step is probably few if they want to stay on-side with the US.

This is a test of nations now, and how willing they are to support their citizens. We will now see the politicians who are not only alright with genocide, but who will also be publicly willing to throw their citizens under the bus as well. They have been really doing that all along, but the public visibility of social media make their capitulation take centre stage. It will be up to citizens to decide what sort of country they want to live in. This is the outcome of the Judgement day decisions that individuals made over the last few years.

The decisions to be made will continue to affect wider groups in humanity until the need to decide permeates humanity at all levels. No human activity will be spared from the need to decide. It is us who has to make a stand, and that is at each level we operate in this world.

There seems to be a continuing attempt to find some internal combustion engine that will displace electric vehicles, but all ignore the real elephant in the room.

The car industry is still having issues dealing with the push to reduce dependence on fossil fuels with the need to incorporate the radical change of materials and processes required to adopt the new technologies that accommodating renewable power requires. The difficulties involved are a deterrent to wanting to fully change over, so car makers are still trying to find a better internal combustion engine (ICE), with Koenigsegg being one of the latest.

However, no new ICE, even one that could even approach 100% efficiency, is ever going to match the whole-of-life lower emissions that renewables offer. That is because of the very poor efficiency of the fossil fuel production process. Being only able to utilise a third of the energy produced to make fuel is the real problem, and only being able to use even 100% of a third makes any ICE a poor choice for dealing with climate change. I doubt whether car maker executives have forgotten this, even though many ICE enthusiasts probably have, if they were even aware of it.

So safely ignore any talk of a new ICE as being considered as anything other than a desperate attempt to justify not having to actually deal with climate change, nor avoiding the killing of millions each year from the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

There is a lot of finger-pointing between Democrats as to why they lost.

There is a plethora of Democrats who are claiming that it is their pandering to wokeness and other leftest ideas, but this seems strange when they gave prominence to such a lot of Republicans at the convention. The reality is that the Democrats proudly showed off all their celebrity and elite supporters, and thus played into Trump's hands. We know that Trump craves such support from elites but talks solidarity with society's underdogs, which is what they want to hear.

The Democrats clearly did not want to upset their rich backers, but with Harris and Walz so clearly starting their first answers in debates with what was basically a promo for their genocidal backer Israel, is it any wonder that they received such low turnouts among previous Biden-voters? How they expected that standing so prominently with psychopaths would appeal to anyone is perplexing, as it makes them totally untrustworthy to look after any citizen's interests. While Trump supports such people, they do not verbalise it in such clear terms as the Democrats did.

Other than the backing Israel thing, after some platitudes about hope, the campaign just centred upon the problems that voting for Trump would entail. While most of that would be true, that message carries no weight when uttered by genocide supporters. Other than that, there was very little that could be called woke, but the word has gained such a nonsensical meaning that expressing any sort of sympathy for anyone elicits shout-down choruses of it. The absurdity is that Republicans are spending so much time virtue-signaling about how woke about woke they are.

The political parties in the US are so intertwined with the wealthy that there is little hope of their exploitative systems ever truly serving the interests of citizens. Of course, the nature of politics is that it will attract the wealthy so that they can rig the outcomes, but the US twists itself in knots celebrating the wealthy while trying to pretend that they are egalitarian. Half are fooled by this delusion, and half are not. Until that ratio changes, the exploitation will only get worse.

Australia is planning to ban under 16s from using social media, but will that really help them?

Unfortunately, politicians often see legislation as a sort of panacea for societies ills, but legal measures will often fail if other complementary measures are not done in parallel. However, this measure seems to be taken out of total ignorance of what under 16s will actually need. Banning until 16 just delays the onslaught when they really need to learn how to handle the onslaught, and from a very young age. Finland leads the world in media studies for children, starting at kindergarten, training children in critical thinking and all the methods used to manipulate public opinion.

Of course, Australia's education system is more geared towards producing good and obedient employees rather than critically thinking citizens, which is why such simplistic so-called solutions like banning are on the table. The government does not want to really revamp the education system to make citizens more resilient to manipulation, because that would be self-defeating for their own attempts at manipulation. Changing education systems requires a long-term approach, for which there is little political will.

What banning social media for under 16s would do is restrict their access to information and images that would expose what Australia et al are doing to continue the suppression of other peoples, or anything else that they do not want children to know about. Israel from its founding used propaganda in schools to justify their apartheid, even resorting to recounting Biblical passages to justify taking all the lands for Jews, despite the leadership not being religious. Israel is an educational template that many Western countries would like to emulate, and to a large extent the US already has.

Anti-propaganda studies would undermine all those efforts. We have already seen how the Australian government is trying to suppress whistle-blowers exposing the country's own war crimes and hijacking the NACC to coverup the illegal robodebt scheme. Letting such corrupt and psychopathic politicians prevent the next generation from avoiding making the same mistakes should be resisted. Banning rather than educating will fail. Such media studies is now a required core skill, just as essential as reading and writing, while also enhancing them with analytical skills.

However, sometimes what may seem short-sighted may just be the clear vision of some who have seen what the future may bring. We have seen social media platforms capitulate to be the propaganda and abuse arms of those who wish to subjugate us, and getting some legislation on the books that opens the door to halting that within a nation quickly may be what has happened here. Certainly, those nations that want to halt the propaganda and abuse will be looking to see how far Australia gets with this attempt to curtail the malign influence of social media on our societies.

With the Trump win, already many political commentators are positing that a similar right-wing populist surge can occur in Australia.

News outlets are always on the lookout for stories to beat up, and with Trump winning the presidency in 2024, of course they will want to beat it up about the possibility of a right-wing surge in Australia, as has happened in many recent elections in Europe. We can expect more of such talk, especially from the Murdoch media outlets, with conservative politicians happy to front up and spew their dubious lies and misinformation. But how likely is such a change, given that recent trends in Australia have shown the opposite?

The Australian federal election in 2022 showed a clear drop off in any right-wing sympathy vote. The Murdoch media, once considered the kingmakers in Australian politics, drove hard for the conservatives, but despite trying to smear every opposing politician they could, were ignored even more, failing to buck recent trends in falling right-wing sentiment amongst the voting population. Even Hanson's One Nation Party, despite getting a slightly larger overall vote, due to fielding candidates in more electorates, had even lower vote numbers in the electorates they had previously contested.

In Queensland's recent election, the Liberal National Party (LNP) ousted Labor with a clear majority. While this could be seen by conservatives as hopefully a national trend, the win really reflects country and outer suburban Queensland issues. Country Queensland is a stronghold of conservatism in Australia, resisting the wholesale takeover of mainland Australia by Labor. It was really in the outer suburban areas where Labor lost voters to the LNP, while the Greens increased their vote by 20%, though they did not gain any seats.

Regions in the other states are not the same as Queensland, with their cities more likely to vote Labor or Liberal, showing that they are more likely to be affected by urban-type economic issues than the mining or agriculture focus of regional Queensland. These cities have been trending more towards Labor and even the Greens over time. That, together with the last federal election indicates that Australians are generally less influenced by right-wing conservative misinformation than in the past, so a Trump type win in Australia is far less likely.

Australia does not have the half of its population believing in crackpot conspiracy theories to appeal to. However, with Labor showing that it is just as caught up in neoliberal ideals and supporting genocide as the Liberals, some appeal could be made by the latter with the false popular impression that they are superior economic managers. The thorn in the Liberal side is the Teals and other independents. They have made the most inroads into the Liberals because they basically support the same economic policies, but want action on climate change and some better support for people, like women.

While there might be some dissatisfaction with the current governments in Australia, there is too much skepticism of all the right-wing hype for a populist leader like Trump, or any such mass sentiment, to result in a similar takeover of government. Plus almost all of the bureaucracy is not voted for, but statutory, so there is less chances for the type of broad political inroads that have occurred in the US.

Trump has won, but they are not the one that is the real threat.

Many pundits still consider Trump should not be a threat because their last administration was not really competent enough to create too much damage, or that they will completely destroy the US. The problem with all this is that Trump is only a figurehead that with the right prompting will do what whomever is behind them's will. We have seen over US$400 million spent installing right-wing judges in the Supreme Court, and Project 2025 aims to immediately start replacing the bureaucracy with right-wing sympathisers as soon as Trump takes office.

The real danger is the fossil fuel companies and their Dark Triad owners that have paid for all this heightened right-wing influence and control of all levels of the US government. They want to destroy democracy permanently. It began with Reagan with their cutting back social support, increased tax cuts for the rich, and disparaging the benefits of government. The last few years of divisiveness has been about fostering a severe distrust of government in the population to the point of Trump claiming that there will be no need to vote again because they will do it right.

This all does not mean that the new administration will be a smooth-running operation, as putting half-competent people full of right-wing ideology in charge of government departments will lead to a lot of mistakes. Unfortunately, all those that depend upon the proper and timely running of services will suffer, and minorities will continue to be suppressed and vilified, and subject to increased pollution and law-enforcement crackdowns. Government processes that currently work well will probably continue to work for quite a while, while others will get more flaky.

It is the wholesale changes set out in the Project 2025 book that will likely have the most far-reaching effects, as some departments will be gutted as much as possible, and with the loss of their expertise, recovery under a later administration will be difficult to achieve, as was seen with trying to reverse what Reagan did, which is what the intent of the sabotage of government is about. Of course, the departments that give out money to corporates will work as efficiently as possible, though due diligence will likely be almost absent.

We can expect that the US will pull out of any international bodies that it cannot control, leading to a worsening climate crisis, more displacement as aid drops, and more support for right-wing dictators. How Ukraine will fare in all this is unknown, depending upon how much Trump gets their way. Expect to see more targeted attacks on foreign principals, depending upon who gets Trump's attention at the time.

Many parts of the US government will become dysfunctional, but the right-wing agenda to destroy democracy will continue unabated, both domestically and internationally.

Trump et al avoided being too specific about what they were actually going to do when in power, even off-the-cuff remarks by Trump that seemed specific. Conversely, the Democrats kept falling over themselves to voice their their support for Israel, which basically said that they supported genocide, so who was really going to trust that they wouldn't throw everyone else under the bus as well. We saw that with their lockout of any pro-Palestinian voices from the Democratic Convention.

The problem is that the Democrat politicians are beholden to the the same Dark Triad fuel bosses the Republicans are, as well as Israeli money. The Democrats are obviously taking great pains to avoid upsetting those backers, and it shows. In this, the Republicans have the perfect foil in Trump, because Trump gives the impression that they are their own person, giving the finger to the elites, which is something so many American want to believe. But that is the delusion they feed themselves of being freedom-loving, rugged individuals, rather than the self-absorbed people they really are.

US citizens voted for Trump and the Republicans because they still have something to learn about themselves, and Trump reflects that back at them. Hopefully they learn before too many die and too much more damage is done to the world order and the earth.

Iran sending drones and missiles to Israel is a direct response to Israel attacking the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria.

The Iranian attack is a direct response to a deliberate attack by Israel, yet all the Western leaders have called for restraint on Iran's part and pledged full support for Israel. This is insanity that the Western nations are directly responsible for by not forcing restraint by Israel all along. It is like supporting Israel, no matter what they do, is an obsession for them. Allowing Israel to genocide Palestinians and attack any other nations they want is what has brought about this very dangerous situation.

As for Israel, it is either total arrogance or some perverted desire to see what they can get away with, as if they are some adolescent child seeing how far their parents will tolerate their attempts at rebellion. Either way, Israel is out of control and needs to be curtailed, but the more the Western powers tolerate Israel's stupidity, those nations weaken themselves. Failing to curtail Israel is showing just how corrupt they are. As if all the Western hypocrisy hadn't already alienated many other nations, their irrational support of Israel's insanity will ensure many more will.

All this will play into Chinese and Russian hands as they will probably persuade a lot of nations in the global south to turn away from Europe and the US in their quest to find some security in an increasingly absurd world order. The latter have been failing to make a case for choosing democracy as their own governments have been clamping down on anybody criticising Israel for being the genocidal apartheid ethno-state they are.

This shows that Western governments seem like they are overly beholden to Israel and the only solution to this is to purge out Israeli infiltrators in their governments, and take military action to squash the genocidal regime in Israel to make way for a truly democratic and fair single nation. Without taking radical steps to reinstate democracy in themselves and their spheres of influence, that influence will wain through lack of trust. And if the US et al do not do something about Israel very soon, one of its neighbours will nuke it, and probably be justified in doing so, just to stop WWIII.

Let us be clear that Israel is the real problem here, as its unrestricted aggression steadily destabilises not only the Middle East, but also its supporting countries, as their citizens are increasingly siding with Palestinians and being repressed by their governments as a result. Supporting Israel is leading to this loss of democracy in its supporting countries, which may be the goal of right-wing elements in those countries. Those elements, even if anti-Semitic, have admired Israel as a model nationalistic ethno-state, which is what they want to emulate in their own countries.

Zionism is modern Fascism, and as long as its adherents run Israel and are allowed excessive influence in other governments, the world is not safe. They must be purged from positions of power, just like their other fellow psychopaths. Then we can go about making the world a safer and fairer planet, and actually solve our greatest problems without being sabotaged.

The Australian government does not like people knowing about war crimes, whether of Israel or their own soldiers.

Covering up war crimes seems to have become a popular pastime for the Australian government. Not only has there been backlashes against any publicity for Israel's war crimes and genocide against Palestinians, but the jailing of David McBride for revealing war crimes by Australia's SAS soldiers is an attempt to stifle others coming forward with their own accounts. This is bad for a nation, as it covers up what was done in their name, and that should not be hidden from a country's citizens.

A lot of bad stuff happens in the fog of war, but when military forces do despicable actions, they should be held to account. Given the veil of secrecy that those who took part, and their superiors, place over all who know about them, whistle-blowers are only means for such actions to be properly dealt with. But punishing the messenger is only allowing future miscreants to get away with similar actions because the messengers are getting punished worse than they would.

Governments like to be able to get away with what they can, and the same leeway is given for allies. That our soldiers and those of Israel are allowed to commit war crimes with impunity is despicable, as is punishing those who let us know that they are happening. Israel is showing us that those who support them cannot be trusted with our lives, and so we must remove them from representing us as soon as possible, otherwise, we will be at risk from their quest for power at any cost.

The ABC seems to be basing more of its news items around a person or two.

Showing how people are personally affected by what's happening in society does help to ground how such things affect people. However, without a wider context, and that means statistics showing the extent of the issue in numbers affected, the news item is just anecdotal and thus loses credibility as a possible source of fact for people to make value judgements on. Statistics have to be based upon a 1000+ people, with a rigorous testing methodology.

It is worrying that the ABC has been getting far less funding over recent years, especially given its high support among the general Australian population. This has been largely due to pressure from conservatives who heavily utilise the Murdoch media to hound the ABC and try to discredit them whatever they do. Accusing the ABC of bias for reporting widely seems very hypocritical given that Murdoch owns 70% of all newspaper mastheads in Australia, and 100% in Queensland, while being largely a propaganda outfit for conservatives with no attempt at being unbiased.

The ABC management should be pushing back at such hypocrisy, and pointing out that without the ABC Australians would be poorly served by Murdoch and other media that don't have a mandate and an obligation to be reasonably fair in their reporting. However, the ABC has been progressively moving towards centre-right positions, like with their almost non-existent coverage of the genocide in Gaza until almost every other outlet had to acknowledge some of what has been going on.

This, and their softly-softly, low-key and constricted coverage of systemic problems, is what will make Australians trust it less, but that is what the many who want to exploit us want. The ABC, along with SBS news, is respected among Australians, but unless it fights back against the extremely aggressive and malicious Murdoch campaign against it, it will be gutted by management decisions that weaken its focus and subvert its ability to keep us informed and cover the issues that affect us in sufficient depth.

The coalition is pushing for nuclear as the way to go for tackling climate change. It's a scam for extending fossil fuel usage.

All the evidence about nuclear energy is that power plants take much longer to build and substantially overrun costs, compared to what was planned, and that is for those countries that have been running nuclear for decades. This is obviously unworkable when wind, solar and batteries substantially undercut all other energy sources in cost and installation time, and are only getting better at both. So what is the coalition up to?

Given the coalition's opposition to anything to do with renewables that don't consume chargeable resources in operation, and that nuclear will most likely mean we will have to rely upon whatever energy sources are around for a while, it is obvious that the going-nuclear ploy is a cynical effort to keep fossil fuels around much longer so that those companies will continue to rob us of our wealth and health, and fill their party's coffers. It is the same cynical contempt for the wellbeing of their constituents that drives Labor's gas-led spruiking for the fossil fuel industry.

Renewables that don't require paying for ongoing energy sources, other than the upkeep of the equipment, are the obvious way to continue tackling climate change, especially given their continuing and substantive reductions in capital costs. However, rather than placing hopes of viable carbon sequestration that isn't anywhere near ready for larger-scale testing, let alone actually handling the enormous quantities of current and future CO2 production, we need to be reducing our overall energy consumption if we are to keep temperatures down.

When all these parties are willing to stand with Israeli psychopaths and our own war criminals for free, we can see why they are so blinded by such small donations from these psychopath-led fossil fuel corporations just to keep their pathetic careers going. They have lost perspective on what democracy is, and what their part in it should be, so it is time to throw them out of office whenever we can.

While Zelensky now states that Ukraine's incursion into Russia is to create a buffer zone on Russian territory, there may be other reasons.

After Ukraine took back the Kharkiv and Kherson regions earlier in the invasion, Russia has more recently been slowly expanding the borders of the territory it holds, though it has been expensive for them in terms of soldiers and equipment. If Ukraine can get Russia to divert more resources from those areas to deal with their incursion, some opportunities might be available for making some advances elsewhere.

Some dramatic things need to happen to break Russia's hold over the South-East of Ukraine. They have pushed back Russia's Black Sea fleet, and caused damage to the Kerch bridge, but it still stands. There is a path that may dramatically change the battle, and that is for Ukraine, if Russia lowers some troop levels in the Zaporizhzhia region, to drive a wedge down to the Black Sea and send several missiles to the Kerch bridge to completely disable it. That would cause severe supply line issues for Russia in Crimea and territory to the North of it.

From there Ukraine could then drive towards Kherson and Crimea with less risk of being challenged, and with closer territory to launch missile attacks from. If Ukraine's attacks against airfields in Russia are successful, Ukraine could take complete air superiority over that whole region with its new F16s. Once those regions are retaken, Ukraine can then drive eastward to push Russia forces back to their own country.

So what Ukraine is doing in Russia is going to make it easier to act more boldly against the Russians in it own South, possibly bringing the whole invasion to a dramatic close.

PM Albanese is now standing with psychopaths, and that is a betrayal of the values their mother taught them.

Albanese has mentioned several times in the past about how their single mother brought them up, and taught them their life values. We can see how they argued in support of the persecuted Palestinians in the past, but now stand with their persecutors. This is a complete abandonment of their claimed values, and is perhaps why they are so willing to throw those doing it tough, like their mother did, under the bus, in their thorough adoption of neoliberal exploitation of Australians by the wealthy and greedy corporations hijacking Australian politics and common wealth.

The Greens now seem to be the only Australian party standing for something resembling human-centred values, all the others having long since abandoned them for their lives of bourgeois comfort and supplementing their general taxpayer-paid remuneration with rental income from their properties. Principles hijacked by material success, leading to abandonment of their responsibilities to the Australian people.

Most politicians have thrown themselves in with Israel, but Peter Dutton, in comparing a pro-Palestinian protest to the Port Author massacre, has shown just how psychopathic he is.

While they claim that the comparison was supposed to be about how John Howard had shown leadership at that time, but Anthony Albanese hadn't stood up for liberal democratic values during the 9 Oct 2023 pro-Palestinian march. This shows just how much Dutton is actually working against the values he supposedly espouses. He is standing with the psychopaths of the Israeli genocidal regime and hoping to make Australia just as undemocratic and inhumane as Israel. They are a psychopath and should be excluded from ever being Prime Minister.

The legitimate comparison is of the Port Arthur massacre to that carried out by Israel in Gaza, both being examples of people being massacred by an overwhelming force bent on their destruction. That Dutton refuses to see such parallels shows their incompetence in being able to provide any leadership for Australians, other than also leading us to be like the Fascist regime in Israel. They don't understand democratic values at all, which is why they are so willing to deny climate change or do anything to alleviate the suffering of Australians, let alone anyone else in the world.

CrowdStrike has been aggressively canning Microsoft in order to get customers, but has now fallen flat on its face.

CrowdStrike had a popup on their website claiming that Microsoft was so bad at security that using CrowdStrike's Falcon software was the best remedy. Well, that campaign was obviously successful, but their 29,000 enterprise customers having to send their techs to manually reboot the millions of effected Windows PCs after a sloppy update doesn't make them look good. I bet a few of them are not so convinced now.

It will take a few days to weeks to get through all the PCs to get them operational. The logistics of that will keep IT departments too fully engaged to look at what they will do in future to mitigate having to rely upon single suppliers for the core security and OS software. All the Linux aficionados will come out of the woodwork to spruik their favourite Linux flavour, even though Linus Torvalds thinks that as desktops they all suck. Even if many desktops had been Linux, CrowdStrike would still have been on them for a unified enterprise security regime in those businesses.

The general and tech news coverage seems to be featuring Microsoft and Windows blue screens in their visuals, but only mentioning CrowdStrike within the bulletins themselves, and sometimes only once. Now Microsoft has had its share of problem updates, but none having this depth and breadth of effect, nor anywhere near as costly to customers. A lot of this may be news organisations desperate for visuals when there is none for CrowdStrike, but there is no excuse for tech channels to peddle the same bias. We shall see what the fallout from all this is in the next year.

It is very suspicious that despite knowing about a possible Hamas attack for a year, bases were at half-strength around Gaza when Hamas broke out in 2023.

According to research done by The New York Times, half of the guards were off for a Jewish holiday, and combined with the lack of any plan against a significant Hamas attack, the IDF was thoroughly unprepared. This produced several hours of delay while the units defending Gaza were overwhelmed, during which many Israeli citizens were killed. There is something wrong with this picture when considering that Israel has been perennially on alert. No one leaves such a deliberately-created hotbed of discontent without sufficient protection. The whole situation is totally suspicious.

How could Israel have left themselves so poorly guarded, especially since they knew that an attack was likely? A possible reason is that the breakout was needed for political purposes, much like their funding of Hamas to have an excuse to justify their excessive militarisation to Israel citizens. Netanyahu still needs a distraction from his corruption and right-wing takeover, so having a war serves that purpose. It just took letting out a few prisoners to rampage and they had all they needed. It is not the first time a sitting duck has been left out as a temptation for an enemy to start a war.

With so many bat-shit crazy conspiracies around, this situation seems more sane, especially given the excessive IDF preparedness to take every opportunity to just stand around and intimidate Palestinians. The IDF is not so short of soldiers that they would have to totally allow their Gazan posts to be so understaffed, nor be so overloaded in the West Bank or the Lebanon border that they could not send several helicopters down to Gaza within half an hour, especially since their Southern Command is only 40km away and experts in dealing with Hamas.

Given that successive Israeli governments have kept Hamas as pet terrorists to activate when they needed a distraction, this has been just another excuse to eradicate more Palestinians and keep their own citizens on edge. This is how psychopaths work, but this time more people around the world are not prepared to sit passively by and let them continue their killing spree, and are not prepared to believe the lies of their own politicians who have been willing to overlook the genocide to advance their own country's interests. It has been a turning point that Israel and its allies did not expect.

Real estate agents treat renters like shit and favour landlords.

In a normal retail market, a retailer buys goods from a seller and then sells them to customers. Neither set of transactions is directly dependent upon the other set, though not enough of the latter will affect the ability of the retailer to buy more goods.

When it comes to rentals, without a renter there is no payment for the landlord. When the renter pays the agent, it goes into a trust account from which the agreed majority value goes to the landlord and the agent keeps the rest. Both the agent and landlord are totally dependent upon the renter for their livelihoods, but the renter is treated like shit by the agent in favour of the landlord. Agents will ignore contact from the renter unless it is to sign a lease or get the property fixed where legally required. Otherwise, renters are ghosted.

This is a strange situation as in most other transaction arrangements, those who pay call the shots. The landlords don't pay the agents at all, so why are renters treated so poorly? This isn't rhetorical question as I just don't know. Perhaps renters need legislation to require agents to have an explicit duty of care towards renters and landlords equally. That is, they become an agent of the partnership between renter and landlord, not just an agent for the landlord. It is time renters received some respect as without them, no one gets paid. No one wants rent strikes.

However, it is not just rental agents. Recently, the apartment we are in was sold. The selling agent proclaimed that they would try to keep disruptions to us to a minimum, and it seemed that was so, except they failed to conform a possible appointment and just turned up for an inspection, but since we were both totally unprepared, we refused them entry. The agent kept claiming they were bending over backward for us, as if we should be grateful for being totally interrupted with absolutely no benefits for us at all. We weren't the ones getting the big commission.

For the next appointment, we requested that they respect our privacy and not randomly open cupboards just to peek in. One of the potential buyers seemed to have difficultly doing that, but also the lot of them decided to have a chat crowded into the bedroom. When asked to not do that again, they again claimed the big sacrifice they were making and threated us with with putting off the sale, and forcing us to vacate the premises after the end of the contract. What a bully! From then on we had to tread carefully to escape more threats. They abused their power imbalance in their favour.

They were dependent upon our cooperation, especially since no buyer could have better tenants looking after their property, but instead they chose to bully us to force our cooperation. In their eyes, they think that renters should not assert themselves and make demands as to how their home should be respected. The block next to ours is only half occupied, with the empty ones most likely being owned by foreign nationals hiding their fortunes from their governments. This is the true cause of the housing crisis, and real estate agents make their money out of pandering to such property predators.

The politically-motivated cruelty that was robodebt shows just how much psychopaths are being allowed to run free in our society.

Robodebt was a dubious scheme using ATO-derived average income to claim thousands of debtors had to immediately pay back monies owed. It was illegal and the PM, government ministers and senior public servants signed off on it anyway. It was a deliberately draconian measure used to bully welfare recipients into paying back money they didn't owe, and dissuade others from making claims. It led to suicides and a lot of unnecessary stress.

Of course, anybody of wealth does not get treated like that if they take government money that they are not entitled to, as evidenced by businesses such as Harvey Norman not being forced to return multi-million JobKeeper handouts despite record profits. Keeping the rich wealthy while unjustly tormenting those far less well off is the modus operandi of psychopaths, aided by politicians who seek their favour.

The royal commission into robodebt recommended that the language used to portray welfare recipients at the height of the scheme needed to change, but that is unlikely to happen in a politico-economic system like neoliberalism that rewards and applauds psychopathy. They are to society as paedophiles are to children, and the only way to undo their nefarious influence is to disconnect them from power in public life. They are not the people we should be allowing to pull society's levers, just like we do not want paedophiles near our children.

Society needs to work for all people and not just the few to get exceedingly wealthy from. We owe that to ourselves, our children and the planet.

The impeachment enquiries into Trump were about the constitution, which some have held up as somehow perfect, but it is failing to deal with the demagoguery that it was supposed to prevent.

The constitution was written in a time when the founding fathers had just fought a war with their former colonial owner, Britain, and were concerned about preventing the taking away of the ability of people to determine their own future. Consequently, they embedded a set of so-called checks and balances that were meant to prevent any one arm or level of government gaining too much power, perhaps through the influence of foreign powers.

What they didn't know was that an ideology that could span the world could simultaneously subvert the multiple arms and levels in a way that could prevent its influence being undone. That ideology is conservatism, supported by a self-serving Christian theology that promotes massive financial self-indulgence by the few as a blessing from God.

Currently, many state governors and legislatures under the control of conservatives have used their positions to favour the election of their federal colleagues by substantive gerrymanders. The original intention was that the arrangement would prevent the federal members doing gerrymandering of their own electorates. That doesn't work if they are part of the same conspiracy. The obvious course would have been to have given the drawing up of electoral boundaries to a statutory body charged with doing so fairly, as in countries like Australia. Several states have done this.

The constitution was designed to be adaptable by allowing amendments, as was done with the first 10 that form the Bill of Rights. The problem now is that the corruption of the electoral system has made it difficult to get the votes to make it fair, as amendments require fairly elected houses to get the numbers to get an amendment passed.

Of course, there is also the rampant manipulation of social media by domestic and foreign influencers that were totally unknown at the framing of the constitution. These two elephants in the room are just so outside of what was predictable back then that it is folly to think that the constitution is strong enough to properly handle them, let alone the worse challenges to come.

It is clear that rather than bogging down democracies by making so many public officials elected, many could be replaced by properly constituted statutory bodies with officials selected by means independent of political interference. However, the decades-long right-wing demonisation of government has made making such changes difficult, as public trust has been eroded. It is clear that efforts must be made to promote that a well-funded, properly directed government bureaucracy can be the best alternative for providing equity and efficient governance.

Some feel that a successful invasion of Ukraine by Russia may give impetus for China to invade Taiwan. This largely ignores a critical difference between how the world sees the two target countries.

Ukraine is a separate nation and recognised as such by almost all other countries, so there has rightly been condemnation of Russia for invading it on the pretext that it is really a part of Russia. To a certain extent that is true, but only in that the Russian peoples came out of the Ukraine area. However, that cultural historical link should have nothing politically to do with what the current people of Ukraine choose to do with their own nation.

In order to trade with [the People's Republic of] China, many nations have appeased them by adopting a one-China policy, which tacitly agrees that there is only one real China. It has been a pragmatic ruse in order to achieve the economic benefits of trading with the bigger China. However, it does bestow a legitimacy to their claims over Taiwan, and so China does not need any justification from Russia's action for an invasion of Taiwan.

However, the swift economic reactions to Russia's invasion does provide China with some idea of what it could face if they did their own invasion. The key is that Ukraine does not get direct military support from other nations because they are not a member of NATO, but the sanctions were implemented against Russia on the basis of being an recognised independent nation by those who have imposed the sanctions.

So where does this leave Taiwan that is not even recognised diplomatically by many of the same sanction-implementing nations that have compromised themselves to deal with China? Given how nations that have significant economic dependencies on Russia, like India and Israel, have abstained from condemning them, China could reasonably expect, with its critical economic stranglehold on the world, to have far less to fear from sanctions if they invaded Taiwan.

With its promise of cheap reliable labour, China enticed a lot of foreign companies to end up relying on the country for continued financial viability. With such dependencies, those companies have compromised their governments ability to act against China in any significant way. Words of token disapproval don't translate into any support for Taiwan if China invades. Another case of greed and selfishness compromising principles.

People, and consequently countries, are not perfect, but we cannot let past actions stop us from acting better now and in the future. However, to change we have to undo some of our current arrangements, which will create short-term problems now, but enable us to act with the freedom to follow principles. That may slow down economic activity, but given that climate change would also be abated by it, we should probably take the opportunity to make a better world politically and environmentally.

The Australian government wants to overhaul Medicare by focusing upon getting more GPs into the system.

Australia's Medicare has been used by US media as an example of a pseudo-universal government-run health system, though the UK's NHS is much closer to a universal healthcare system. However, like the NHS, Medicare has been suffering from such significant funding cuts that it is becoming dysfunctional to the point of dissuading citizens from seeking medical care.

The part of Medicare that is promoted as one of its benefits is bulk-billing, where a GP only charges a patient the rebate for the service it receives from Medicare. This suited patients because it meant there were no out-of-pocket expenses. However, the last few years have seen the rebate covering so much less of a GP practice's costs of providing services that they are suspending bulk-billing for most patients, meaning that patients must pay the full gap between the rebate and what the GP charges, being now AU$25 on average.

This is a significant increase in costs for most families, prompting them to forego medical treatment and especially so for preventative visits. This is reducing the profitability of medical practices to the point that it dissuades medical graduates from becoming GPs, not helped when practices overwork their GPs and decrease appointment durations to increase patient throughput. Thus, it all comes down to money, and no amount of tinkering with enticements to increase GP numbers will make up for that.

This all comes from Medicare being used as a political football by those who oppose government spending on healthcare on principal, as they have failed to keep funding apace with practice costs when in government. Medicare did not cover a lot of medical services like dentistry and some specialist services, so it was far short of the NHS, but the lack of adequate funding has come to thoroughly undermine the effectiveness of Australia's healthcare system.

This will undermine the effectiveness of the nation, as when many cannot afford to get early preventative health care, we all pay for the vastly increased health costs when severe conditions result. It is time to properly fund Medicare to be a true national health scheme by dispensing with propping up a fake private health care system that only provides profits for insurers, and including all medical services under its purview. Then the nation will pay the lowest costs for medical care which come from a fully-integrated health system.

Such healthcare should be seen as part of a nation's critical infrastructure, as it underwrites the capacity of the nation to adapt to changing world conditions, be they political or climatic. Treating health as just another means of making money is sabotaging the nation.

Amid all the fallout from Australian politicians having dual citizenship, making them ineligible to hold office, the real issue is that that dual citizenship can be triggered by foreign governments.

For many of the affected politicians, their dual citizenship was automatically conferred upon them by their, or their ancestor's, birth in the other country. While the foreign laws by which they have a residual citizenship are quite old, it highlights the possibility that a foreign government could change their laws at any time to make Australian politicians that have ancestry from that country automatically become citizens without their consent.

This exposes the stability of the Australian government to too much risk. That means Section 44 of the Constitution needs to be amended to close that risk off. The most obvious mitigation is that dual citizenship must not be allowable, at least where it is conferred solely by the laws of the foreign government, without applications from the affected politicians. Currently, a person must rescind the other nationality, but that is according to the laws or regulations of the other country, and so might not be possible, especially if the other country is trying to manipulate the government.

While the novelty of the situation seems to be entertaining the politicians, as they indulge in crazy conspiracy theories, the possibility of real nefarious conspiracies to undermine our government needs to be thwarted. This all means we will need to vote on changes to the Constitution, so our politicians will need to stop focussing on themselves and their parties, and join to protect the country, by having a bi-partisan approach to specifying the changes, and presenting it to the population.

The moral of the story is that a country must not frame its constitution or laws to have dependencies upon those of another country.

The Australian Labor Party just claimed that they would close the tax splitting advantages of family trusts. Conversely, maybe trusts could be extended to all of us.

Splitting income among members of the same family is probably more equitable per person across Australia than the current tax arrangements. It seems silly that two people that are in a family relationship, but only one works while the other is doing home and childcare duties, is taxed more than two flatmates with the same total income, so getting the lower costs of shared living while not being in a relationship. Of course, there would be some debate about whether children would be allowed to be included. I would say no, but there may be situations where that may be legitimate.

Administratively, the Australian Taxation Office already uses both partners' income in calculating the individual tax assessments, so it only involves a change in how the tax is calculated, because the rest of the assessment infrastructure to support shared tax is already there.

The idea could be taken further, and be applied to any group of people that want to support some others who would be performing unpaid work otherwise. One example is for supporting one or more people who need to work on an innovative idea, but long before they are ready to get funding, either from venture capitalists or government grants.

This is the way for governments to support innovation, rather than just giving large enterprises more money to incrementally expand their current business model. Innovation happens in garages, not well equipped development teams.

Many seem to think that zero tax is the baseline, but without tax there is no government and services, and no monetary system. Let us get back to reality and work out what is the right balance point.

Modern societies need government to maintain all the systems that keep the monetary system up and running, as well as all the services that enable businesses to employ people. Without governments ensuring that there is some competition in the marketplace, a few powerful people could manipulate the system to their own ends.

That manipulation is inherent when people have so much power and resources that they can pressure governments to do their bidding. This has been the standard modis operandi of large businesses since the British East India Company, and anyone who expects such power will not be abused is delusional. Democracies have enacted many laws curtailing business excess, but these have usually been in response to substantial abuse over long periods. We have to be more pre-emptive about this, and not make them so piece-meal.

The whole issue is then about how much tax is required to balance supporting business and providing services to a government's citizens. This is subject to a whole lot of ideological debate, filled with gross over-simplifications and unsubstantiated claims about causal relationships between low tax and general prosperity.

Unfortunately those claims are only backed up by theory, and have been shown to spectacularly fail whenever they have been attempted to be put fully into practice. Also, they seem to rely on appealing to selfishness in the middle class and demonisation of the disadvantaged to really only provide advantages for the very rich.

The problem is that tax rates are only a factor in influencing prosperity. How the tax money is spent plays a great part in the how much the prosperity is spread across society.

How much is spent upon infrastructure also plays into setting up conditions for future prosperity, especially if there are significant impediments to quick economic benefits arising from the investment, such as significant distances between urban population centres, as in Australia, where significant railway infrastructure, well beyond the level possible by private investment at the time, was required to support cheaper freight across the nation, supporting greater prosperity for country towns and regions. Governments had to foot that bill well ahead of any recoupment of costs.

Poorer people tend to spend most of their income on necessities, allowing them to keep more of it means the money soon re-enters the economy. Very rich people tend to put most of their money into property and other fairly static investments, which lock that money out of circulation. Middle classes, while prolific spenders in good times, tend to pay off debt in leaner times, leading to further contraction of the economy.

Judicious stimulation of the economy, coupled with tax rates that ensure that the most money keeps circulating, while maintaining adequate savings as a buffer against more difficult times, will go a long way to maintaining a widely-shared prosperity. Of course, changing internal and external circumstances require periodic adjustments to the rates and the targets of infrastructure spending and incentives.

However, all that is a long way from the simplistic low taxation = prosperity line, because that only guarantees prosperity for the rich, and reduced capacity for governments to keep their economies in healthy shape.

Much is made of the salary and parting package for the former CEO of Australia Post, Ahmed Fahour.

While it was certainly at the seemingly excessive level many CEOs get, yet, given that, Mr Fahour certainly earned it more than many CEOs for transforming a loss-making and tradition-bound government corporation into a profitable and modern business. The problem with the whole remuneration scale for senior executives is that it increases rapidly with each level up, while low and middle management typically don't get much extra for taking on a whole lot more stress compared to those they manage.

For those whose political spin depends upon the belief that government cannot do management, Mr Fahour's success will probably be a thorn in their side. That's because it shows that it can be done, but also indicates that the problems that do occur may not necessarily be with the public service, but with their de-facto CEOs, the Minister responsible for them, which implies that the politicians themselves cannot be trusted.