November 2015

Have wondered. This one will be a hard sell.

"Corporate greed and systematic political failure have brought healthcare to its knees. There are too many misinformed doctors and misinformed patients." Amazing that the third greatest cause of death is prescription drugs.

This will be a battle, hopefully. The GST was always a pretty bad idea, increasing it just makes that bad idea worse. As always, the poorest will pay more while the wealthy will continue to cost the country a fortune in tax breaks.

Happy birthday, my wish for you is that you got a good sleep :)

Happy birthday!!

Happy birthday Jen! Sorry, been travelling today.

I'd give Staunton a plug any day of the week. One of those rare geniuses who saw a simple answer to a complex problem - in this case, what to do about termites eating homes. There's a termite nest within 50 metres of just about every home in Australia, unless you're in Tassie. http://termitetrap.com.au

I sat next to a Muslim woman on a plane yesterday. She looked very uncomfortable, and was obviously aware of being stared at by many people, in fear. She hardly spoke a word of English and needed my help to figure out the seatbelt and also in finding her way around the terminal when we landed. She was extremely grateful. Made me think about how we got to be at this point. The wing nut was a big part of it, whipping us all into frenzies of hatred and fear at every opportunity, following his master 'relaxed and comfortable' John Howard. Reminds me of the joke I heard from an Asian comedian recently, talking about "Asian drivers". He said most paedophiles he's seen are white Anglo-Saxon men, so he now assumes all white men are paedos.

Real wisdom here, about the folly of hankering after the 'simple life', whether that's some love affair with 'nature' (whatever that is), or telling people to get off their phones and enjoy reality more etc. All silly. Also a glimpse into how America got to be like it is now.

One of the reasons I've come to be a fan of chlorinated tap water, even though Lithgow's gives off enough gas to choke you. They use chloramine now in most supplies because it's much longer lasting and they can be sure it'll still be bug-free when it comes out your tap, but it also means the usual methods of removing chlorine like letting the water sit before you drink it, won't work. What does work and is super easy is to pour the water you're going to use into some sort of dispenser (I have a 10-litre bench top one with a tap), and crush a single vitamin C tablet into it. Vitamin C will react quickly with both chlorine and chloramine, and you end up with beautiful-tasting and smelling water, chlorine-free. Best of both worlds, the chloramine kills the bugs, then you remove the chloramine.

Why anybody would want to copy the US tax or health systems is impossible to figure out. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/radical-reforms-to-health-insurance-flagged-by-turnbull-government-20151108-gktobi.html

Happy birthday Brett :)

Headline of the day: "Swedish man dead after being catapulted from shopping trolley in Sydney joy ride."

Sometimes people want good quality tea, they left that bit out.

Call me boring but I think point to point speed cameras might be the only thing that will make people pay attention to speed limits. Right now a huge number of people on the roads ignore them completely. That's why governments are hesitant, they know it'd be unpopular.

happy birthday buddy! Have an amazing day, hope you're well.

You don't need a gym.

So nice to have a non-baboon in charge, who doesn't decide to invade a couple of countries in difficult circumstances. Those invasions did a lot to create this current problem, which shows stupidity breeds more stupidity.

My wish from what's happened in Paris is that we start doing a bit more brain work and a bit less dumb emotion. Understanding is our only way out of this mess. Starting here, which helps explain why all this is happening, and why overwhelmingly still the greatest number of victims of ISIS is other Muslims. Paris isn't even close to being the largest recent attack, we just don't hear about the others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia–Sunni_relations

Happy birthday Sharlene! Hope you get spoiled :)

History is an interesting thing... One for your research @[100000218740944:2048:Sarah Nietz]? https://vimeo.com/145666660

Easily the smartest thing I've seen on this topic. Only thinking will fix this one. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

Putting the old school teacher hat on, a very different way to understand recent terrible events is to see that kids blow themselves up in some parts of the world for the same underlying reason kids binge drink here. Terrorism is overwhelmingly committed by young people, and it's because we don't understand young people well any more that we don't understand terrorism. https://www.facebook.com/prageru/videos/897194363656754/

“I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock." Gotta love her. There's a difference between supporting transgender people, and actually saying chopping off bits suddenly converts them to the opposite sex.

A river of sand, go figure.

Really well done.

The problem *is* extremism, worldwide. Extremists here, including people like Bolt and Jones and Hadlee in the media, don't even see how what they do generates so much of what happens overseas with extremists. These were the people cheering on shock and awe Iraq and Afghanistan wars, that in turn generated extremists there. Now they want more shock and awe in Syria, because they're stupid and never learn.

I'm a big believer that the human microbiome is the secret to a lot of human health. But you need to pay attention to both probiotics AND prebiotics. This is the Daily Mail, a journalistic sewer, but the science for this one is legit.

Terrorist attacks in Western Europe since the 1970s. We live in relatively peaceful times, despite what hysteria would have us believe.

Happy birthday Rosco!

Bit of a man crush on Varoufakis. Articulate, smart, super charming. Speaks English better than a lot of natives.

Righto, trying this.

Fantastic. There's the Daily Terrorgraph version of religion bashing, and then there's the more 'intellectual' version. The latter is harder to spot, but Sparrow outs it beautifully. And he's spot on. We need to understand religion a whole lot better. It's not feeble minded, nor are the people who find it powerful.