Pacific Islands patyingbthe price of Western power: www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

"I was always convinced that there is in everyday communicative life, also a kind of push to give reasons, to be more or less reasonable, to give answers to the questions, ‘Why did you say that? Why did you do that?,’” Jürgen Habermas Dies at 96 www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/b...

My very first serious academic work was a study of how U.S. military and civilian defense officials simply refused to treat their Vietnamese counterparts as strategic actors that made rational decisions in their own interests, attuned to their own geography and survival. 😡

Incisive work from Frank

Model Elizabeth Cowell, London — Lee Miller, 1941

Congratulations to Rachel, a fine scholar

Yet another example of parasitic AI makers of slopware enshittifying public resources for everyone, and creating wasteful "work", gumming up tech staff who're meant to be serving the public rather than managing massive bot scraping & extraction

“No stupid rules of engagement”

It’s the result of massive bot activity, downloading data at a scale which our infrastructure has found challenging. We have been finding this across all our metadata resources in recent months.

Yes, this is a start but an arbitrarily appointed chamber is still a democratic nonsense.

Researchers from the University of Barcelona took a submarine to Calypso Deep off the coast of Greece and found “26,715 items of litter per square kilometer at the deepest point in the Mediterranean Sea, with plastic making up nearly 90% of the debris.”

Online already - and with the Adrian Vickers approval! You've got to watch it this week www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXuO...

My review of Alison Carroll's latest with @routledgebooks.bsky.social, "Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific" 👇🏽 "As the fault lines of the Cold War reopen, this is a welcome call for recognition of regional connections, overlapping histories, and shared ideals" #ArtSky 🎨 #BookSky 📚

Reminder that if you can add “by zombies” at the end of a sentence, it’s in passive voice

So the 5 Iranian footballers they helped today (rightly given asylum) was to distract u from their plan to slam the door on the rest who could have safely got even temporary sanctuary from war here

The opposition to the destruction of Binybara Lee Point has grown to the point that even Territory Labor is calling for a halt to this disastrous project. nit.com.au/10-03-2026/2...

"NO CHARGES WILL BE LAID" against a man who terrorised & threatened children and violently attacked people? Told to 'move on'?! No search for drugs? What the hell, @victoriapoliceau.bsky.social? Doesn't look like identifying him will be a problem. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

“…privatized employment services impact the social determinants of health care, are detrimental for well-being, and contribute to inequities.” pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... #auspol

In 2014 Ross Gittins described the MRFF as an accounting trick (www.smh.com.au/business/med...) to hide deficits rather than fund more medical research. How right he was www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

This is what we are dealing with as reference archivists. A complete fabrication of the archive. www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/gemini-...

Alyssa Healy with her family on 'Healy Hill' after her fantastic international career came to an end 🙌

Yes Sam Kerr #Matildas #AUSvKOR

Alyssa Healy signs off for the final time in international cricket ✨

Let me briefly distract you from rising fuel prices. Electricity prices will rise too with the gas cartel now super-profiting from selling OUR gas in a disrupted Intl market. @albomp.bsky.social’s dud gas policy changes announced in December mean the cartel laughs as we suffer. #auspol

Yes housing approvals may be poor, but housing construction completions the real measure of any improvement. The rest just land speculation.. & what type of housing proposed? In Sydney it’s hi-end housing, costly towers & more sprawl - hardly helping make better cities or affordable housing

Indonesia suspends its participation in Board of Peace “Indonesian FM Sugiono said the decision to suspend participation was taken because of the latest military escalation in the region, which has directly affected the foreign policy priorities of countries involved in the initiative”

When will King Charles make a statement on the split in his role as head of the Anglican Church?

I still remember being carried from the car to the house by Dad (pretending to be asleep, as you did) around 1970 in Adelaide & looking up at the most amazing night sky. You have to go to the middle of nowhere to see that now. Most never will 😔

Israel abruptly announced it was temporarily closing the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City for wartime safety concerns, police said. The closure was the latest blow for Muslims from Israeli-imposed measures at the disputed and volatile site.

NIGERIA: Labour backs FG’s textile revival plan, says 650,000 jobs could return www.vanguardngr.com/2026/03/labo...

Note the pointed message to Iran:

Tapping into quantitative sociological studies is wild because it's 15 pages of 'data' and then half a page subtitled 'discussion'.

Insert country name here

Australia saw on-shore #windfarm health complaints shrink to homeopathic levels after 10y of effort to put sunlight on their rabid fruitcakery. Our free book deep dives into their antics & nonsense. V useful for those in Trumpian fake news era open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/files/978174...

And a reminded that the LNP built a fuel stockpile for Australia …in the US. Has everyone conveniently forgotten? www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04...

Time to remind everyone of Australia’s nuclear ambitions behind the Snowy Mountain scheme: www.news24.com/oz-tried-to-...

Semicolons can’t become outdated because a semicolon isn’t a technology the way a VHS tape is. A semicolon is just a convenient notation for a form of grammatical relationship that appears in language when articulating ideas. Eliminating or changing the notation doesn’t obviate the relation.

I actually don't have words as to how angry I am. Wonder what happened in these countries that people on student visas in the UK found themselves needing to apply for asylum instead of going home post 2021. UK Labour are heartless bastards & apparently have bo idea whats happening in the world.

Israel has been dumping herbicides throughout southern Lebanon as part of a concerted ecocide campaign to render the region uninhabitable. This has been going on for months with Lebanese journalists & environmentalists regularly reporting on it. The BBC: we don’t know why the Israelis are doing it

Far out. “The environment department advised the government in late 2024 that it should revoke a 2012 decision that allowed salmon farming to expand …”

Supported by the Sydney Anglicans

The February 26 Incident of 1936, which happened on this day ninety years ago, was modern Japan’s most serious coup attempt and led to four months and twenty days of martial law.

Our friends in Transnational Institute have set up a page with tributes from across the globe to Susan George who passed lately. Lots of good words there, recommended reading: www.tni.org/en/article/i...

Eagerness for the End Times and the Second Coming rarely makes for sound policy decisions

Not ideal.

Meanwhile. 😂

So-called journalists: Indonesia is not a “Muslim state”, and there is more than one Ayatollah in Iran (in fact there are lots). Sigh