I watch the news occasionally.  I couldn’t watch it every night.

I read a couple of news web sites occasionally being the ABC and The Guardian.  And I get three sets of news briefs emailed to me each day being SBS, The Guardian and the New York Times.  But now I’ve just unsubscribed from the NYT and I regularly delete the other two without looking at them.  Because everything I see leads me further and further to the belief that we are in a near endless death spiral where we all eventually disappear up our own arseholes.

What do I see that leads me to that?

Let me start here.  Topic 1 – BLM.

I see the senseless death of yet another black citizen in the USA lead to yet another round of Black Lives Matter protests.  This time is a little different.  Lots of worldwide protests happened last time and that’s happened again.  This time some changes to legislation regarding the police may be made.  That may help in some cases.  I see out here once again the spotlight is on indigenous deaths in custody, and rightly so.  And pardon my language here but I believe it is necessary, but abso-fucking-lutely nothing will change.  Just like last time where abso-fucking-lutely nothing changed.

Are black lives being respected more now than they were before the last set of protests?  Not that I can see.  Are the rates of Indigenous incarceration any different now to last time we had all of this happen?  Again, not that I can see.  And why is that you may ask?

Well, firstly, rioting doesn’t fucking help.  Destroying public property, police stations, police vehicles, etc does not help.  Who do you think pays for all of that shit to be repaired.  Let me answer that – you do.  The fucking taxpayer.  Oh, so not just you.  But me too.  All of that rioting take the attention away from the subject of the protests, and your average citizen says “oh look at all of that rioting, it’s no wonder the police and military need to control those idiots”, etc.  Yeah, those idiots derailing the issue away from peaceful and dignified protest allow people like Trump to call them anarchists.  And it fits.  It really does.  Send in the military he says.  At that point I’d tell the peaceful protestors to stay home for a day and then sure, send in the bloody military and get rid of the idiots who just love a good riot.  Chuck them in Guantanamo Bay.  Throw the keys away.  And then yesterday a BLM rally in the centre of Sydney tried to go ahead in the middle of a pandemic, on a Tuesday (??), AFTER losing a challenge in the Supreme Court on their right to hold a rally.  And somehow, against all the odds, the organisers seem to expect some sympathy for being arrested for doing what they were expressly forbidden from doing.  There are a lot of people who believe in the BLM movement.  Hell, I do too.  But holding yet another midweek rally mid-pandemic is really not going to help at all.

I just believe we should all be treated equally.  I don’t care about colour, race, religion, gender identification, orientation and the other factors that probably escape my mind as I type this while squinting at my monitor with sore eyes.  People are people.  And yes there are many complex issues around past transgressions, crimes, invasion, and all sorts of shit I am not going into now to be worked on.  But I at least have a starting point.  I know and have worked with people of many, many different backgrounds.  Mutual respect is all that is required.  Treat someone how you want to be treated yourself.  Is it that hard?  I clearly do not understand my own (alleged) species.  I understand dogs.  Maybe I am a dog.  Or should be a dog.  Whatever.

So do you want to change things so lives of all races are respected?  That is really, really easy.  VOTE IN SOMEONE THAT WILL DO THAT AND IF THERE IS NO ONE YOU CAN SEE WHO WILL DO THAT STAND FOR ELECTION YOURSELF.  We need the younger generation to be the ones who are going to say “right enough of this shit, you old farts cannot handle it, it’s time we took over”.  (I am one of those old farts that cannot handle it so bring on the younger generation I say.)  If you keep voting in conservative governments whose stated ambitions are smaller government, lower taxes and being big business friendly then you are going to get exactly that.  You are not going to achieve humanitarian gains because they cost money.  And conservative governments really, really like money.  So they can give it away endlessly to their mates as grants, tenders that you apply for after being awarded them and subsidies to businesses who are so toxic on environmental and/or humanitarian grounds that they would go out of business instantly without them.  Jobs, jobs, jobs for the boys at our expense while the super wealthy get even more super wealthy through additional tax concessions, grants and general bullshittery.  It winds me up so far I’m amazed I haven’t punched a hole through the keyboard typing this.  I have broken one of the legs on it though.  Currently a flattened and rolled up cereal box is holding it at the right angle for me to use.  I don’t quite qualify as super wealthy.

Topic 2 – COVID 19

Oh god I could write a book on this.  Here is a neat mathematical equation I came up with.

Obs(T + B + S + I) = aneurysm.

Where Observation of T (Trump) plus B (Bolsanaro) plus S (Stupidity) plus I (Infringement of my rights) equals a near certain chance of me having an aneurysm.

The first two factors do not need to be discussed, they are well known, history will have it’s say, and I will set out my platform now that T will win the November 2020 election somehow.  I don’t know how, and even less can I understand why, but it’ll happen.  I’m sure I saw it in a teacup somewhere.  Factor S though is appalling.  I understand that people are not taught to think in our current education system, and my crazy opinion is that is intentional.  That trait is thrashed out of you very, very quickly.  “You don’t need to know how to calculate your times tables, just remember them.  Remember 12 x 12 equals 144.  What?  13 x 12?  Don’t be so stupid – you’ll never need it.  Go and do detention for that you little smart arse.”  (Ok I made that up – but ask any kid what 13 x 12 is.  Seriously, ask them.  See what they tell you.  Not many know it is 12 x 12 + 12.  How screwed up is our school system.  Don’t get me started on writing essays on Shakespeare, doing calculus and forcing me to take lay ups for basketball in PE when I’m perfectly capable of sinking 3 pointers all day long.  School does not teach you to think, it is to prepare you for University.  Where it is handy if you can fucking think.  And breathe…)

I have done a Uni degree.  I paid my HECS debt, I did my 4.5 years of doing the work and busting my arse to get good grades.  Which were meaningless – no one cares that I have nothing lower than a Credit.  How old are you they want to know?  How much salary do you expect?  Nope, can’t afford you, it’ll cut into my profit margin.  Next!  But anyway at Uni it was kind of expected that I knew how to think.  And by that I mean think critically.  Fair enough I thought.  Everyone can do that can’t they?  Er no.  They can’t.  I saw that among many fellow students.  Some of them could, and a select few did a better job of it than me, but not many are in that cohort, which saddens me deeply.  I am going to provide a statistic here that is meaningless as I have no quantitative data to base it on, but given the post-truth world we currently live in it’ll be fine.  52% of the general population (no reference available but who cares right?) cannot analyse this statement properly.  “Wearing a filtration mask will lower the amount of oxygen you breathe in, the carbon dioxide you breathe out will stay in the mask and you will eventually get sick from wearing it.”

Now I’ve been to hospital a few times.  Had a few operations.  Had one that lasted a good couple of hours, that wasn’t fun to recover from.  But luckily the above statement regarding masks is utter bullshit because everyone in the operating theatre other than me was wearing one of those masks and the resulting surgery could have been really messy if they all fainted mid-stream.  How can anyone be that stupid to believe that crap?  How do they have the IQ to learn human speech? Honestly, I am baffled.  Even if they have never been to a hospital, haven’t they ever seen someone doing woodwork with lots of sawdust about? And this whole business of “infringing my human rights by making me wear a mask” bullshit?  That kind of relates to those people infringing my basic human rights to live amongst people that have a positive IQ.  “I woke up in a free country this morning” is the best line I’ve heard in the past month.  I nearly cried laughing at that one.  My response to that?  “Yes sir, we both did.  And you are free to walk around outside my store without a mask and not come in.  It’s private property and if you don’t wear a mask you do not set foot in my store.  It’s my property and I set the rules.  If you do not follow my rules you are trespassing and in the free country we both live in that is a crime,  Good morning to you sir.”  No way I could say that with a straight face though.

Ok, let’s leave masks aside for a minute.  Even though I could go on here all day.

On this very day Queensland is being reported to have 2 people who flew from Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane that were required to isolate for 14 days since Melbourne is currently a COVID shitstorm.  They didn’t.  They went shopping, they went to work, one of them at a fucking school, and SURPRISE! they are now sick.  Got tested.  Positive test.  Lucky they were isolating.  Umm, well about that.  Remember that saying “you had just one thing to do”?  All they had to was stay home.  Did they not see that awesome Samuel L Jackson book reading?  Apparently they are both 19.  Age, not IQ.  Or maybe it’s both.  I’m not sure.  But it’s the act of the “I don’t give a shit” or the “I am as dumb as shit” people that helps the virus spread so well.  A little bit of thought goes a long way.  And if you can add some common decency to it too then all the better.  And against my better judgement I watched the news while I had dinner and a close contact of those 2 has already tested positive.  Congratulations, you are now the proud parent of your very own COVID cluster.  Well done.  Bellends.

Topic 3 – Bushfire enquiry

Ok, if you have ever read any of my other dribble on this site you will by now be aware that I have a slight issue with my country of birth and it’s inability post-Kevin Rudd to fire a single neuron in the Parliament for doing anything useful about Climate Change.  Last summer, well spring and summer actually, was pretty much the worst fire season we have seen.  Today the numbers of natives animals lost or displaced is estimated to be 3 billion.  Yeah, billions.  Everyone can fathom a few koalas, some roos and wombats but few consider lizards, frogs, bats, birds and the other parts of our fauna that contribute to an actual operating ecosystem.  (You do realise that Sydney’s CBD contains no native fauna and is not an ecosystem right?  More like a sewerage system.)  We also sadly lost people, houses, lots of livestock including horses, cattle, sheep and who knows what else.  Thousands of miles of fencing, roads, power lines and all sorts of infrastructure.  And before all of this happened our retired Fire Chiefs were raising the alarm.  The Bureau of Meteorology had 300 separate briefings for all levels of government (local, state and federal).  They all said this is going to be really, really bad.  They all said Climate Change is an important component of this cocktail for disaster and we need to do something about it.  30 years ago would have been a better time to start but hey, let’s do something now.

Effectively the government response was “Yeah, nah.  We’ll piss our Paris commitments in by accounting wizardry.  We’ve got some Kyoto credits that fell down behind the fridge so she’ll be right mate.  Now where’s the pen so I can sign off on Adani mate?”

Why we are not THE world leader in renewables utterly bamboozles me.  Why an Australian of Chinese heritage had to go to China to get the backing to build one of the largest manufacturing plants for solar panels and attributed technology amazes me?  Why one of the sunniest countries on Earth has governments that do not fully back solar astounds me.  Why they fight wind power because they think they look bad?  Ever seen a cola fired power plant up close.  It’s just beautiful.  Er, not.  Most of our politicians don’t look so great either but we have to see those people strutting about on TV and embarrassing themselves during Question Time whenever they bother to show up.  But it’s all right, the non-existent Clean Coal Carbon Capture Technology will save us.  Probably at the same time the 5G conspiracists say we’ll be suffering under the mind control powers of the evil Huawei 5G waves or some such nonsense.  Stuff that works, provides little pollution during manufacture and none at all during use is bad.  Stuff that lives only in fantasy is good.  Plus coal of course.  Coal is always good.  Here hold it, it won’t hurt you.  Dumb arses.  So do I vote for a Unicorn at the next election then?  That’s a fantasy creature.  And that would be a miracle too wouldn’t it?  Right up Scotty’s street then eh?

And that’s only 3 topics but I had to stop somewhere.

So what are we becoming?  (And by that we I mean Western civilisation)  And do we really want to know?  I read 1984 last year for the first time, and while I am not saying that is what we are becoming I see some eerie parallels at times.  Fake news, alternative truths (I just died a little inside typing that), governments doing whatever the hell they want without recourse to their own population (think Russia, China, Syria, North Korea, Poland, Hungary as a few examples of late), surveillance, the great fear-power word of Terrorism – it’s not looking great.  I think what we are becoming, on average, is dumber, far more gullible, and far less able to analyse what we see around us.  We are easily led, we scare easily, we are becoming more xenophobic and there is a growing inability amongst people to work together.  The poison of Nationalism is growing exponentially and as someone who doesn’t believe in nationalism and patriotism at all that quite literally scares the shit out of me.  Why the hell should I support X sporting team because I live there?  I copped crap for years at my first job for supporting Sri Lanka in the cricket.  Was no surprise I was the only one in the office who could pronounce every Sri Lankan name.  I was called unpatriotic by a work colleague.  I laughed in his face and told him he needed to try a lot harder on the insults.  I followed the Lankans because of how they played the game – they had fun and loved it.  They were cavalier about their batting, ruthlessly and crazily aggressive with their bowling, and sure they got flogged a lot in the early days because of it.  But they were worth watching because they loved what they did and it showed.  Why the hell would I follow Australia who the press put on a pedestal after every win.  Even then you couldn’t trust the press!  Grooming us to follow along blindly behind our National heroes.  And you thought I’d lost the plot on another off topic whinge didn’t you?  HA!

Anyway, where are we headed?  I don’t know.  But the direction needs to change.  And I am just one grumpy old bastard who cannot change everything on my own.  I’ve been saying this stuff for years, in conversations to mates, work colleagues and anyone dumb enough to listen to my rants.  It is slowly getting more desperate, and we need an about face.  And we can’t leave it to just a few campaigners to plug away.  We need a lot of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Great Thunberg’s to be launching themselves with passion and courage into the limelight and dragging us along the path away from perdition.  We need to support young people prepared to go into the political arena for the right reasons.  I was fortunate to attend a Climate Change rally in Bathurst and see some passionate young people who wanted to make that difference, to have a go.  And if you have a go you get a go right?