This is developing into a disturbing situation. Donald Trump has said he will accept foreign interference in the 2020 election. He is taking steps to suppress Americans ability to vote and has already started delegitimizing the outcome. Unless Trump loses by a resounding margin, he is likely to dispute the validity of the result and attempt to retain power. This we already know. So there is plenty to ponder for those who fear an existential American crisis this November. However, […]

According to surveys, many people find it hard to differentiate between the period humans have been around and the age when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Despite homo sapiens being extant for just 300,000 years, we sometimes find it hard to compute just how vast the gap is that separates us from the Cretaceous extinction. Dinosaurs died out a yawning 65.7 million years before the earliest human, but we’re just not intuitively equipped when numbers get so large. This cognitive disability […]

As the Morrison government continues to avoid scrutiny relating to its curious allocation of sports grants, Peter Dutton has ramped up his years-long effort to increase the ability of the federal government to eavesdrop on Australians. Dutton’s ‘International Production Orders Bill’ has made headlines as the proposed law would allow overseas police to monitor Australians phones, but further from view another rubicon has been crossed in the fraught digital relationship between citizen and state. Despite initial denials, a recent Buzzfeed […]

In May of 2016 Donald Trump tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl at his office at Trump tower, in a naked attempt to improve his poor standing with Hispanic Americans. The photo showed Trump grinning and giving his trademark thumbs-up as he dug into the tasty dish. ‘I Love Hispanics!’ he wrote, unconvincingly. In the background of the shot was the standard stuff you might expect from Donald Trump – photos of himself, golfing trophies, two (apparently) […]

The worst of it is that we’re just half way through Australia’s normal fire season. Who is to say what devastation a scorching late summer might wreak on our already scarred landscape. But some day the mercury will fall and the rains will come, and when the fires finally go out Australia is going to have to face the reality that this has at last ended the debate as to whether climate change threatens human life on this dry continent. […]

Champagne corks were conspicuous by their absence as Amazon recently announced plans to expand their operation in Australia by opening a new warehouse in Perth. Australia’s ‘boom to bust’ capital is experiencing its weakest economy in over two decades, and retailers have borne the brunt as the commodity miracle has come spectacularly to an end. At the mineral boom’s zenith, more than a 747-full of people were arriving to live in WA each week, but the one dimensional nature of […]