Thoughts from a Bulldozer Driver

I’m sure we’ve all had events and happenings that change you. Big or small, for whatever reason, they force you to consider your position on things, and can sometimes change your mind. Hopefully these changes are for the better, for you and the people surrounding you. Thirty years ago, a significant event, and a subsequent conversation, changed the way I thought about some important things. I was working in a retail store in Wagga Wagga. I was only there for a short time, however during that eight or nine months I became good friends with one particular workmate, Mark. When I look back, it seems that we shared very little in common. I think it was our slightly different humour that we both appreciated. One of the things that my workmate and I had in common was an admiration for the music of Queen. One day, my workmate walked over to me and said “Did you hear? Freddie Mercury is dead”. The world had learned only one day earlier that Freddie was suffering from AIDS. To be told that he wa...

I see that Ms Berejiklian has said today that vaccinated people will be enjoying greater freedoms soon, and that she doesn't apologise for life being less free for those who aren't' vaccinated. Good idea. That'll teach the selfish buggers for not conforming to the will of the government! It's a little uncomfortable, sure. But it is after all for the greater good. Unvaccinated people, of course, won't be able to work for a living. The "No jab, no job" policy is already in place for several employment avenues. Who wants the unvaxed in their office? Gross. Risky. Dangerous. It seems to me that the government is stopping well short of what needs to be done. The unvaccinated will be on public transport, at sporting arenas, concerts, festivals... and we certainly don't want the risk of sitting next to one! But the cost of deploying a new branch of the police would be high. It would be a massive undertaking to check everyone's vax status on entry. So ...

 "THE WORLD IS GETTING WORSE" Guess what? You're wrong. When you have a good look, beyond the media narrative, the world is not getting worse.  In a 2016 survey, 58 percent of people in 17 countries surveyed thought the world is getting worse (rather than getting better or staying the same). I’m hoping that this little article will persuade you that this downward spiral in humanity and the natural world is very good news. News that, for some reason unknown to me, is being hidden from the masses. Because negative news often impacts us more than positive stories, the legacy media often push the thought that ‘progress’ is not news. Because many of us follow the news, and the news tends to concentrate on events that shock and outrage the audience, we often think that the world is far worse than what it actually is. It seems that as the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn’t actually gotten better at all....

So this month’s contribution hasn’t turned out the way I planned.  I have been working on a commentary on the Morrison Government’s more stupid policies. That is, the government’s collective thought bubbles that have turned into bad policy and bad legislation. Maybe another time.  Then the war broke out between Palestine and Israel. The fault of which I lay squarely at the feet of Joe Biden. I’d love to explain my thoughts, but that too will have to wait. I’m sure that you’ve had times where you have so many thoughts running around in your head that it’s hard to make sense of it all. If you’re like me you sometimes struggle to make sense of other people’s actions and wonder what the thought process behind it was.  Well this is me. I hear news on the radio, see headlines pop up on my socials feed, and hear of things in conversation with others that have me scratching my head. Not only do we struggle to work out where other people are coming from and what they stand for, of...

A few days after Joe Biden took office in the US’s White House, a (what I found quite funny) meme quickly circulated on the Socials. It showed a photo of Biden at his oval office desk, signing a stack of Executive Orders. The covers of said orders were labeled, (in a more crude language) “Fix This”, “Fix This” etc in a referral to his reversal of Trump’s policies. From what I have read, Biden signed 30 executive orders in his first 3 days, with 17 of them being direct recindation of Trump policies. This is despite Mr Biden once saying that only a dictator would rely on Executive Orders. The first three months of the Biden Administration has been a chaotic disaster. Here’s what just a few of those signatures has meant for the people of the US, and the world.  - Rejoin the WHO (World Health Organisation). Trump withdrew US support for the WHO protesting, among many things, the corruption and deceit trumpeted by the WHO when it came to investigating the origins and subsequent spread o...

It’s common thought that politicians have worked exceptionally hard in the year of Covid, and if it wasn’t for them we would all be dead.  Untrue. They have also pushed the fallacy that were it not for them doing those long tedious press conferences, we’d all be suffering from the WuFlu. People seem to think that Dan Andrews did his 200 press conferences in a row as some kind of higher personal sacrifice. I don’t think so. The idea that any politician didn't want to spend one to two hours a day, completely hogging the limelight, while completely drowning out the opposition, is ridiculous. This was a brilliant way to starve their opposition of oxygen, and you saw that manifest itself in WA where Mark McGown was re-elected absolutely overwhelmingly. Same thing happened in Queensland. Incumbency during a crisis means you get the cameras. And this crisis is a boon for incumbents no matter how ordinary or incompetent they happen to be.  Another myth that's taken hold is that they’v...

"YOU'LL DIE OF OLD AGE. WE'LL DIE OF CLIMATE CHANGE" We have all seen the picture of a girl, holding this sign at a school-hours “climate emergency” march. She, her peers, and people of all nations and ages, are living in absolute fear of climate change. And why not? This is the message being pushed on a seemingly hourly basis by the media industry. In recent times the message has been bumped up a notch or two by now referring to the climate change phenomena as a “Climate Emergency”, or “Climate Crisis”. Many news outlets have embraced the climate change ideology, with at least one, The Guardian, (not to be confused with the Ganmain Guardian) publicly announcing that they will (disgracefully) not publish counter-arguments to any climate stories that they publish. Organised groups of people are taking their fears of starvation/drowning/frying to death to the streets, causing havoc in major cities around the globe. And can you blame them? With the constant flow of bad/w...

 I won’t be signing Kevin Rudd’s Petition. Several weeks ago, a friend tagged me into a Facebook post where former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was “..officially launching an official petition to the Australian Parliament, calling on the Parliament to establish a royal commission into the abuse of media monopoly in Australia, in particular by the Murdoch media, and to make recommendations to maximise media diversity ownership”... Sounds very official, doesn’t it. This friend that tagged me in the post is not only a Facebook friend, but also someone I consider to be an actual friend. But I won’t be signing the petition.  Forget my contempt for Mr Rudd. His pathetic search for relevance, ten years after his own party sacked him, and several years after the Australian voting public resoundly sacked him a second time, is the least of my worries.  In Mr Rudd’s video, Mr Rudd declares that the Murdoch Media has a “Monopoly” in the print media, and Mr Rudd wants to “maximise divers...