The Brown Note

My position on the issue of abortion in the wake of the real world Handmaids Tale unfolding in Texas.

When I arrived in Sydney in 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald was everything a newspaper should be - especially in a country with the third highest concentration of print media in the world - next to China and Egypt, which are STATE OWNED. Well not anymore - the 2021 version, owned by Channel 9, with ex-Liberal party treasurer Peter Costello as its Chairman, is a bigger Liberal party propaganda machine than the Murdoch press itself. This morning alone I ran into three blue sky puff pieces, about the joys of swimming in Balmain, outdoor weddings and kayaking, designed to put a positive happy spin of the appalling mismanagement of COVID in NSW by Liberal state premier Gladys Berejiklian. For shame.

In the UK and Australia they have. I've earned more money than my low paid dad my whole life, he has always owned his own house - once the birth right of any working class person - I'm not even close to affording a small flat. He turned his $40,000 investment into property years ago into a million dollars today, in the last 15 years alone I've turned half a million dollars in rent into nothing.

COVID has overwhelmingly affected the first world worst, developing nations least, by almost every metric. Total cases, cases per capita and deaths per capita, why? Why is the same true for food allergies, sperm counts and obesity? I have my theory - we are killing ourselves with chemicals.

*I meant to make a distinction with South-East Asian countries that are still first world but fit the same paradigm of the developing nations.

America's new Saigon. A round up of current events, how we got here, who's to blame and what will happen. Why the Taliban will probably be a different proposition this time around, how the global politics are very different now and how the major background players - China and Russia - will likely great the Taliban.

Though it has always been a failure of biblical proportions, the war on drugs is actually over - it ended with a whimper and no one even noticed. With nearly 100 billion packages sent globally each year, encrypted messaging services and crypto currency, the game changed completely for the first time since prohibition.

In some of the years most heartening, warm and fuzzy news, the cess pit that is Murdoch's Sky News at night has been kicked off of YouTube, for a week, for repeatedly lying about COVID. This is a big deal, they get up to 50 times the views on YouTube than their pitiful TV channel gets. With YouTube's 3 strikes rule - two more strikes in the next 90 days and they are gone. Permanently. Lets make it happen.

Anthony Albanese your Labor party are a disgrace. You've been the weakest, stand for nothing opposition leader imaginable but have somehow reversed into a winning position through the mind-blowing incompetence, scandal and corruption of prime minister Scott Morrison. Along the way ditching all of the most important policies Labor should stand for - on franking credits, negative gearing and now tax breaks for the rich. Your Labor will not only do nothing to help the most unequal Australia in history, you will carry on hammering them with toxic Liberal policies. If you wont stand for anything at all just to get elected, what is the point of you? And what is the difference between you and Scott Morrison? Being a good guy is pretty useless when you act like a terrible one.

Prevailing wisdom is that COVID is a boon for the anti-vax movement like no other, I disagree - they've never faced a real time, global test on what they believe like it.

Most protests aren't sanctioned by the government, police force, media or even the majority of the public, so I'd be a hypocrite to deny the crowds in Sydney the right to protest the COVID lockdown this last weekend - even if this is a unique situation when it comes to large gatherings. There are some seriously bad faith actors amongst a very disparate group though.