Police Brutality.

We have a problem in this country: The elite is untouchable, sacred. Everything and everybody else is fair game.

Yesterday Victorian Police limited itself to brutalising climate change protesters (other State police have manhandled old men and strip-searched teenage girls, presumably because they could carry WMDs in their vaginas). Today they decided that journalists, including a Chanel Seven reporter, were also a legitimate target. After all, they capture in images scenes Victorian Police don't want the public to see:

Incredible. I was obeying their direction to move to another area. I’m stunned. https://t.co/YsZDIjc9jO

— Paul Dowsley (@pauldowsley7) October 30, 2019

Vic police pushing journo ⁦@pauldowsley7⁩ at #IMARCBlockade ⁦@australian⁩ pic.twitter.com/fJRPBo5YDi

— Tessa Akerman (@TessaAkerman) October 30, 2019

Today I was reporting on #IMARC for @FarragoMagazine. I was not involved in the blockade, just a student journalist peacefully observing. Yet I was still pepper sprayed by police. This police brutality MUST end. @VictoriaPolice pic.twitter.com/CAwufSQGyJ

— Ailish Hallinan (@AilishHallinan) October 29, 2019

Pleas for Help.

Entomology, the branch of zoology focusing on insects, is not a sexy area of research. As a consequence it has been relatively neglected. Yet, insects are vitally important for life.

Alarmingly, they are disappearing worldwide.

So neglected has been entomology that the credit for the first scientific confirmation of that disappearance can be attributed largely to Krefeld-based German amateur entomologists in a 2017 paper.

Australian scientists are attempting desperately to fill that gap. And it needs to be filled.

Climate Change as Threat to National Security.

A whiff of madness surrounds the Morrison freak show, their minions in the Commonwealth bureaucracy and sycophants in the Murdoch press-titute. The term "climate emergency" was banned, declared taboo, anathema. Caca.

And yet, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Climate change poses a 'direct threat' to Australia's national security. It must be a political priority

Climate change is expected to increase the severity of natural disasters in the Asia-Pacific region, straining Australia’s ability to respond through humanitarian missions and fuelling more climate migration. Vlad Sokhin/UNICEF handout

Chris Barrie, Australian National University
This is part of a new series looking at the national security challenges facing Australia, how our leaders are responding to them through legislation and how these measures are impacting society. Read the rest of the series here.

The End of the World as We Know It?

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an article like Liam Mannix’s “The End of the World as We Know It: Are we on the Brink of a Mass Extinction?” (October 17) sees the light of the day in Australia. (If readers know of similar articles in overseas newspapers considered serious, please, let me know).

That it appears in The Sydney Morning Herald (although it has recently suffered financially, it remains our Antipodean equivalent of the The New York Times), suggests readers should read it.

Workers’ Mail: Morrison’s Kill the Unions Bill (Updated).

The working class has been reduced to this. Email from Michele O’Neil, ACTU President:

Two years ago Federal Police raided union offices in full view of the national media, who had been tipped off about the raids.

On Friday, the Federal Court ruled that the Registered Organisations Commission did not have reasonable grounds to organise the AFP raid of the AWU offices.

These raids should never have happened. The raids were not justified and were used as a political weapon against unions.

If the Ensuring Integrity Bill becomes law, the same Registered Organisations Commission who organised these discredited raids, will be given the power over a union’s very existence.

Spring Rebellion.

(source)

Last week Peter Dutton, the federal Minister for Home Affairs (for overseas readers: a sort of Australian version of the US Department of Homeland Security), possibly on account of his experience as a Queensland Police Service officer, asked for climate change activists to be subject to mandatory criminal penalties, named and shamed, because they were a threat to the public.

The Devil From Down Under (Updated).

We’ve all witnessed the Donald Trump/Scott Morrison bromance blooming. The mutual flattering (“Man of Titanium”  remark included), the hands held, the giggles; Morrison’s Trumpesque snubbing of the UN Climate Change Summit and his adopting of the equally Trumpian “fake news” and anti-globalist rhetoric.

(source)

It turns out that there was a string attached to that love affair: The Donald expects ScoMo to “investigate” Alexander Downer’s role in the beginning of the Mueller inquiry.­