Head on a Pike The process of replacing Andrew Laming — whose reputation is once again spotless after he threatened to sue all those people being mean to him on Twitter — in his seat of Bowman has concluded. Laming announced his resignation at the next election after various allegations — that he denies — totalled up to an unmanageable extent.
Anyway, the Liberal National Party is looking to move on the only way it knows how, by preselecting… Laming run through a malfunctioning photocopier: Henry Pike, who presumably jumped to the front of the queue by being the only bloke option in a list that was otherwise all women. He got the nod, despite being engulfed in a mini-scandal already, with messages he sent more than a decade ago (“[It] states quite clearly in the Bible that fucking a fat chick is a sin beyond redemption” is a representative sample) coming to light on Friday.
Yep, it was already on the public record when the vote took place, raising the question: what optics would have been bad enough to shift the vote to a woman? Or perhaps history has taught the LNP that frequently commenting on people’s weight isn’t an impediment in Bowman?
The apocalypse will be televised In a development we might want to start getting used to, the past week has furnished us with not one, not two, but three visions of fossil-fuel apocalypses.
First, there was the “eye of fire” in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, a disturbingly beautiful fire on the surface of the sea.
Then there was Friday’s “life as bad Banksy sketch”, with beachgoers in Romania looking on at a night-black plume of smoke billowing from the centre of the horizon after an explosion that killed one and injured five at the Black Sea Petromidia refinery.
And while Azerbaijan denies anything’s amiss, there’s this footage that purports to be of the Umid gas field in the Caspian Sea.
Kinda puts the danger and ugliness of wind farms in perspective, huh?
Hickory dickory TikTok The Australian Labor Party TikTok page is largely as you would expect; political ads featuring leader Anthony Albanese wearing a hard hat and smiling reassuringly, lots of clips from Parliament with the caption “the Liberals are not on your side”, and the novel approach of illustrating the prime minister’s lies (guys if you care so much about honesty, how’s about a shout-out at least?), not to mention some nice getting to know you chitchat with various pollies.
But of course it wouldn’t be Labor if there wasn’t some truly baffling stuff in there. For example, a video asking “why is ScoMo hiding during a pandemic?”, a reference to Morrison’s disappearance during the last calamitous week. Fair point, and I know what you’re thinking — surely the best way to illustrate this is by photoshopping the PM’s head on to a character from a video game that may or may not have existed 20 or so years ago*.
The scene purports to be from an old Dora the Explorer PC game*, with Morrison a wily fox you’re supposed to find among the forest. Except .. what? And why? And who in the ever-loving Christ is any of this supposed to be for?
*Mainly I’m mad that I had to spend a silly amount of my morning watching footage of various Dora games on YouTube trying to establish if this was from a real game.
Unprecedented temperatures in British Columbia, way off the charts records, fires along the western US/Canada seaboard, torrential rains in Japan causing another significant mudslide. Early season cyclone in the Caribbean moving onto the gulf and side-swiping Florida. Oh yeah, climate change effects are ramping up.
I wonder at what stage of environmental calamity The People rise up and blockade coal mines and divest entirely from Woodside and similar companies and demand government action. At the moment we’re on a fast flowing river and the scientists are warning us there is a huge waterfall ahead, and all these companies are saying “just row faster towards the waterfall”. For posterity sake, yes, most of us realised what was happening but had no power to stop it. We now know how pre-war Germans felt watching the rise of Hitler. Complete dread at what are the obvious signs and a total inability to effect change. This is our lot. We might have stopped rowing, but can’t get anyone else to pull their oars in.
If all artificial combustion and carbon dioxide release ceased tomorrow,or last week/month/year…century, it would not alter the lunge into climate change.
That horse died a long time ago, before the tundra & permafrost began thawing releasing the far more atmosphere damaging gas methane.
Tip over point is in the rear view mirror.
The best we can now do is adapt.