It’s not even cold and some inconsiderate neighbour has lit a wood fire.
From the amount of smoke it’s either tainted wood, or their flue needs cleaning
Wood burning stoves/ heaters really oughta be banned in built-up areas.
Air purifier in the lounge room here isn’t making much difference
Great excitement! Black cockies visiting.
Of course the sun is in the wrong spot, so you will have to take my word for it.
Even so… just the thought is cheering, innit?
“French shoppers spent $3.2 billion on textile products in 2025, an average of 43 items per person, according to French eco-organisation ReFashion.
In comparison, the Australia Institute estimates Australians purchased about 56 items per person over the same period.“
“ Australia is the highest consumer of textiles per person in the world, according to Clean Up Australia.
More than 200,000 tonnes of clothing ends up in Australian landfill each year. ”
(article does not mention just how much of this schmatte from Australia ends up in Africa where it is instantly found to be useless waste)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-03/shein-and-temu-law-crackdown/107106012
Fren is watching a John Wayne movie.
SPOILERS
Female character is rambling some nonsense.
Fren “she’s a terrible actress!”
Me: “what do you want from her, the script is absolute shit”
(1959 Hollywood, where men were men, and women and mexicans were a white man’s burden)
Role models: Dean Martin as (wait for it… a drunk)
Walter Brennan as the town whinger
Ricky Nelson as singing eye candy
The boys are all having a sing-a- long and fun in the jailhouse.
The “single white female” is sulking across the road in the hotel cos she’s in love with John Wayne
it’s true — anyone who is still buying chop chop, if given a choice between a legal product and an illegal product at the same price, will probably buy the legal product.
PHON is accumulating votes by promising the sun, moon and stars to disaffected people.
I’m reminded of an episode of Zig and Zag from the 1960s, where the two clowns decided to please everybody, and turn the weather to whatever people wanted. You want rain for your garden? Sure. You want a sunny day for a picnic? Sure. No wuckers, mate.
This PHON strategy will attract a lot of votes, because unlike those other two clowns, she won’t be expected to deliver.
Faced with a choice of voting for someone who pisses them off and won’t make their life better, or voting for someone who can’t make their life better but seems to be listening, a lot of people will vote PHON.
What’s missing from the ballot paper is the possibility of voting for someone who wants to make their life better, and can.
I’m spoiled, I know. No one can hold a candle to Gough. I didn’t like Hawke, but at least he promised to end child poverty. Failed, but seemed to be well-intentioned. We don’t even have an option like *that* anymore.
I’ve never felt more impotent in my life.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-18/hanson-one-nation-cut-tobacco-cigarette-tax/107048678
In the following description of One Nation’s electoral strategy, which is the appropriate spelling?
Which do you prefer?
woman sitting in a truck, possibly in NT or something cos at some point we cut to footage of a great earthmoving lorry hurtling along an unsealed road
Fauziah chatting to the woman driver about fuel costs, about how there has been no time to prepare for rising fuel prices 🙄
yep, I have *some* qualified sympathy for anyone trying to make a living, especially as sennalink is as useful as a chocolate teapot, but can’t help wondering if there is a hint of “Gina wants a tax free economic zone in northern australia” behind the whining
was the abc really this parochial 50 years ago? or have i just got old fart’s disease (become grumpier than i was back then)?
yes, it’s an “oil price shock”
they have been happening at intervals since oil became the centre of the capitalist universe
these things are cyclical
and they are inevitable when a country or two decide to bomb the crap out of other countries …and incidentally, certain countries bombing the crap out of others is, well, itself inevitable…
a supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link
not to mention utterly indefensible that in a country this size we are so dependent on trucks for long distance movement of goods (“I’m not gonna take this container off a truck and transfer it to a train that would be double handling and slow us down time is money who needs a planet yeah nah *** that etc)
sorry about the cost of oil, lovey, but if you are in a business that is reliant on female labour, you are living on the edge, anyway
(maybe this is a job for special visa people who LIKE to be underpaid and away from their families? 🤔)
at least you are not in a war zone
had my oatmeal,
made a cuppa,
scarpered…
———-
since february this year,:
US-Israel attacks on Iran: Death toll and injuries live tracker
Preliminary figures are 3,468 people dead in Iran, 3,371 dead in Lebanon, and 28 killed in Gulf states.
——-
went to three, today, and could not find one saucepan waiting for a chance to be sacrificed on the altar of fren’s cooking 🙁
is it possible she has broken the market?
———
should they be “for-profit”?
personally, I don’t care.
the good thing about op shops is that a lot of stuff that would otherwise become landfill is re-purposed by second hand trading (without the hassle of second hand trading regulations)
when making donations of really good stuff, I go out of my way to give it to an op shop I know does good and generous works
— and that’s only if I cannot simply give stuff to people I know who will use it
if there is a choice between landfill and letting someone profit from stuff i don’t want, I will avoid the landfill option.
I recycle all my colesworth home delivery paper bags with op shops.
Not clothing though — see my pinned article about the mountains of discarded western clothes in African landfill. I rarely buy clothes from op shops, but don’t really “need” much.
I have more dislike of Salvos than savers — at the giving end, they are not nice to anyone. At the trading end, they exploit the compulsory labour of people who rely on sennalink payments. I have known some people trapped in salvo-land to pick through donations, taking good stuff and selling it on-line anyway. And what is left is often overpriced (tho the salvos in Hastings seems fair)
Epilepsy op shops I think — don’t quote me — are private for-profit but pay commission for using the charity label
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-18/us-thrift-chain-savers-arrival-unsettles-geelong-op-shops/106926136
#Auspol
This article contains the best metaphor ever for Hansonism
https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/hanson-is-just-the-tip-of-the-oligarchs-far-right-iceberg/
2/x
However, much of what passes for hard-headed realism is privileged doomerism. It flourishes comfortably among people living in stable democracies, who can generally assume clean water, reliable electricity, functioning hospitals and broadly accepted passports. It takes genuine suffering elsewhere and turns it into an aesthetic: a black profile picture tile, a quote about late-stage capitalism and the warm satisfaction of having correctly predicted the apocalypse from a cafe with excellent wi-fi.
I grew up under military rule, religious extremism, terrorism and power cuts as ordinary parts of ordinary life. People did not live by declaring the future as over. They sent children to school, organised, fell in love, made jokes, planned weddings and demanded change. They’re doing that still. People living through catastrophes rarely have the luxury of making hopelessness their personality. For them, hope is not indulgence; it’s survival.
That does not mean suffering is character-building or that people in danger should cheer up. It means those of us living in considerably safer circumstances have no right to mistake our emotional exhaustion for historical insight.
Yes, things have always been bad. But we shouldn’t believe our particular badness is uniquely unbeatable. Every generation has mistaken the crisis visible from its window for the final chapter of humanity. Sometimes the crisis was even worse than ours. Humanity’s record is full of war, famine, empire, slavery, disease, Karl Stefanovics and Dave Hugheses. It is also full of people ending, reducing or surviving those things.
Since 1990, the global mortality rate for children under five has fallen by 60%. That achievement does not erase the roughly 13,300 children under five who still died each day in 2024, most from preventable causes. Both of these facts matter — one tells us the suffering is intolerable; the other tells us it is not inevitable.
The same is true of poverty. World Bank estimates indicate the number of people living in extreme poverty fell from around 2.3 billion in 1990 to fewer than 850 million by 2024. Progress has now slowed badly and the world remains grotesquely unequal. This doesn’t mean that this progress was an illusion, but rather that it requires sustained policy, money and political will rather than motivational quotes printed over sunsets.
/3
#Auspol
1/x
“ Doom is not merely emotionally exhausting. It can be politically useful to the people causing the problem. The climate denier says nothing needs to be done because the crisis is fake. The climate doomer says nothing can be done because it is too late. ”
Sami Shah
This is a great article from Crikey — reads a little like Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark
———
The lucrative business of doom thrives on despair. Our duty is to hope
Radical optimism is a decision about how to behave under uncertainty. It involves acting as though a better world is possible before we even have proof.
[or as Gramsci would have said. Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will – Carmel}
Sami Shah
Jun 26, 2026 6 min read
——-
Australia is depressed. The national mood appears to be: everything is fucked, everyone else is dangerous, and the robot is coming for my job before the government gives it to an immigrant. According to the 2026 Lowy Institute poll, 59% of us are pessimistic about the economy over the next five years, a gloomier result than during either the global financial crisis or the pandemic; 47% feel safe when thinking about world events; 64% think the risks of AI outweigh the benefits; and support for cultural diversity has fallen from 90% to 73% in two years.
Now, this is not a column arguing that everything is secretly wonderful. There are, obviously, reasons to be worried. Climate change is accelerating. Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine and too many other places offer daily proof that human beings can turn other human beings into statistics with horrific efficiency. AI companies are threatening to automate entire professions while conceding that the technology might also become sentient and murder us all. Inequality is obscene. Pauline Hanson’s popularity is spreading like a racist herpes outbreak. Donald Trump turned water green.
In the face of all that, optimism feels almost like standing in a burning house and saying the flames look lovely against the curtains. But I’m still not enticed by the pessimism. Sure, it’s trendy right now: it’s acquired the status of intelligence. The person who says humanity is doomed sounds serious, informed and pleasingly immune to disappointment. The person who says we can still fix things sounds like they are about to sell you essential oils. Online, hope is treated as a failure to understand the evidence, while despair is proof you have read all the news and heard all the podcasts.
/2
#auspol
“We have undergone multicultural awareness training,” responds one of the judges.
And with that an entire courtroom of Indigenous people and their allies pisses itself with laughter.”
https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/uncle-robbie-thorpe-and-the-truth-vs-king-charles-and-the-law/
a casual conversation with fren tonight has prompted
a casual #SerenityInOz quiz
answers will be in a subtoot Wed 17 June
please CW your guesses
:questionbox: — “Mortein” is a portmanteau of which two words?
Hint: the inventor was German and his wife was French.
Mortein was an insecticide which began its life in the 1870s, as a powder
Mortein’s inventor, J. Hagemann introduced a liquid version in 1928,
it was purchased as a liquid in a glass bottle, then
dispersed with a “Flit Gun”
(who sez immigrants never contribute anything to this country?)
The Mortein flit gun pictured here has a cartoon image of a dog running to escape an insect attacking its tail.
This complemented the slogan
printed on the flit gun barrel (blocked out by me in this photo)
:questionbox: what was the slogan?
(it has since been replaced)
(FLIT insecticide was made by a subsidiary of Standard Oil, in USA, so Flit Gun became a proprietary eponym. I don’t recall ever hearing the Mortein spray gun called that by anyone i knew, but that doesn’t mean no one else used the name in australia 🤔
Before security doors, there were not always fly wire doors on houses (not the ones i lived in, anyway)
The number of blowies inside varied with season, proximity of house to cow paddocks /dunnies, number of people going in and out through doors…
We were under strict instructions to brush flies from our backs with a leafy piece of a small tree branch before coming inside, but sometimes flies were tenacious
Fresh Mint was supposed to be a deterrent, but I never thought it worked
and didn’t we love sitting down to eat at a table protected by fly papers dangling over head?
Mortein introduced Louie the Fly in 1957.
:questionbox: which australian novelist came up with the concept?
The Louie jingle appeared from 1962
the music and lyrics for the jingle were written by James Joseph White, and copyright still belongs to his family
just got back from driving over the hills and far away to find an ANZ branch with hoomans innit
there is a push to “verify” account details — on an account i’ve had for 44 years 😬 i assume the government is behind it…
slightly wet weather, so was able to park within walking distance of the branch
waited with half a dozen others (all clutching our drivers licences) while 3 anz staff tried to work out how to use the photocopier
i had tried to do it online by following instructions, but page kept going nowhere.
(full marks to services australia for doing a better job with the rego rebate)
that’s twice today I have engaged with the real world and experienced success.
killing it 🤓
#SerenityInOz
not a quiz question, but perhaps an interesting article about something Australian
If you’ve ever wondered “what is drop slab construction?”, here’s a handy explanation.
other topics: itinerant priests; Port Albert; Tarraville; Gipps Land; early settlements in Victoria
“In Orwell's 1946 essay on politics and language he showed how a captured mind stops generating sentences and starts assembling them from prefab parts. The phrases come pre-stacked - you reach for the slogan before you reach for the thought. He'd seen it on his own side, among people fighting for things he himself actually believed in. People fall for a "good" cause at the same rate they fall for a "bad" one. The test: can you state your own position in plain words you built yourself, right now, without any of the movement's stock phrases? If you can't, you may not actually hold the position. It may be holding you.”
the weather here today is colder than a billionaire’s heart
not lovin it 🤬
The analysis conservatively estimates that family trusts alone cost the Commonwealth budget $4.9 billion a year in foregone revenue.
TIL crows, starlings and similar birds only *look* black to us — they’re actually very colorful in ways human eyes are unable to perceive. 🤯
Remember that next time people can’t see your “colors”.
Some colors just require different eyes.