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I congratulate Samantha Mostyn on her appointment as Governor-General. Such an appointment is a great honour. Ms Mostyn has given much service to public life as she has to both community and business life. This service marked her out as a distinguished communitarian with a complex range of interests. And with those interests, experience. Accordingly, Continue reading »

India has ordered YouTube to take down two ABC reports on Sikh separatism and not allow them to be viewed within the country, a demand with which Google, the owner of YouTube, has complied. One of the stories, titled Sikhs, Spies and Murder: Investigating India’s alleged hit on foreign soil, was aired on the ABC’s Continue reading »

An amended claim by Prince Harry in the High Court puts both the interviewer and newspaper mogul in the spotlight

This loon is taking votes from Biden? Seriously??? He might as well be QAnon.

Once there was a girl named Jenny. She was like all the other girls, especially for this one thing: she always wore a black hair tie around her wrist.

There was a boy named Alfred in her class. This made sense, as names from the 1900s had cycled back into fashion. Alfred liked Jenny, and Jenny liked Alfred, despite his name.

One day he asked her, “Why do you always wear that black hair tie around your wrist?”

“I cannot tell you,” said Jenny, in an attempt to practice boundary setting as encouraged by her therapist.

But Alfred, who was not partial to respecting boundaries and often felt entitled to women’s personal information, kept asking, “Why do you wear it?” And then he would reach over and snap it on her wrist.

Jenny would say, “Ow, fuck, stop. It’s not important.” Then she’d slide the hair tie up and down her arm to change the spot where an indentation was forming due to lack of circulation.

It’s an abusive relationship Donald Trump, the alleged “master brander”, has liberally stolen all of his most famous slogans from other politicians, starting with “Make American Great Again” which he took from Ronald Reagan. During the 2016 campaign he made a big announcement that he was going to be the “Law and Order” candidate, which made many people chuckle since it evoked the famous TV show. But it was also one of Richard Nixon’s winning slogans in 1968, used to appeal to the white conservatives who were freaking out over civil rights and anti-war protests. I’ve never been sure if Trump is consciously aware of the political echoes of these thefts or if he really believes he came up with them himself. Either way, they resonated with Republicans who either nostalgically recalled their former leaders using those terms or think Trump is a very stable genius for creating such instantly memorable campaign slogans. From the moment he came down the escalator in ’16 he’s been demonizing immigrants as murderers and rapists and promising to eliminate the problem with draconian crackdowns.

More “stranger danger” After terrorist and mass-casualty attacks like the El Paso Walmart mass shooting (target: Latino immigrants), the Tree of Life shootings in Pittsburgh (target: Jews), the Charleston and Buffalo shootings (target: Blacks), and others, police investigate how the killers got radicalized. What made them snap? Except lately authorities simply document common features instead. ABC News from January: A toxic brew of ideological extremism, blended with rage, anger and violent tendencies is making it increasingly difficult for authorities to identify motivations behind mass casualty attacks in America, according to a new assessment by the Department of Homeland Security. The confidential analysis, distributed to law enforcement on Jan.

With the Labour Party officially abandoning its pledge to invest £28 billion a year in its Green Prosperity Plan, two elements of their green platform remain. One is their proposed publicly owned clean energy company, Great British Energy, with initial funding of £8.3 billion, paid for through government bonds. The other is their ambitious target […]

So, in violation of red letter international law and norms, the Israelis bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus. This is a literal causus belli as a consulate is the land of the nation occupying it.

What will the consequences be?

Well, the best take I’ve seen is this, from Elijah J. Manjier (part behind a subscriber wall):

Cannon headed for recusal? With special prosecutor Jack Smith’s Florida filing on Tuesday, says former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman, “DOJ calls out Judge Cannon and her improper rulings, and signals it is ready and willing to take her up to the 11th Circuit.” That is, to have the Donald Trump-coddling Judge Aileen Cannon removed from the classified documents case. The Department of Justice accuses Trump of illegally removing classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence and obstructing the government’s attempts to reclaim them.

When COVID struck Rebecca Saltzman’s family, the virus unmasked a life-changing discovery: her husband and two of their kids had genetic heart disease. The kind where people drop dead. As their healthy wife and mother, Saltzman had a new role too—guiding her family through what Susan Sontag called the Kingdom of the Sick. In this column, she’ll explore the anthropological strangeness of this new place, the mysteries of the body, and how facing death distills life into its purest form: funny, terrifying, and sublime.

Read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

YOU’RE OVERDUE FOR A CLEANING! Jennifer at reception started having an affair with one of the dentists, and her husband will be storming into the office to confront them about it during your appointment.

YOU’RE OVERDUE FOR A CLEANING! Our new latex gloves are churro-flavored.

YOU’RE OVERDUE FOR A CLEANING! We are going to start publicly posting on our website when all of our patients’ last appointments were, so you can’t lie when your mom asks. HIPAA be damned.

YOU’RE OVERDUE FOR A CLEANING! The TV in our waiting room is playing Erin Brockovich.

YOU’RE OVERDUE FOR A CLEANING! I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but did you know that Jonathan Groff is one of our patients, too? Who knows, maybe you might bump into him here.