Rubrica

After two car accidents in this district within a couple of weeks, both of which resulted in people losing their lives, one local friend posted that despite a profusion of warning signs, camera surveillance and more and more road rules, these fatal accidents keep happening. Perhaps, she noted, authorities should be looking at the current rules and why they're not working, rather than imposing more laws. Fair call. And it got me wondering about signs.     Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (19 June 2026), journo Jo Stubbings took aim at the ludicrous number and nature of warning signs, including one at a lake warning of water (no, really!). She notes that warning signs, telling us what we can, can't and shouldn't do, are most prevalent anywhere that is owned or managed by a local council. There's a couple of things going on here.  The first is that local councils are shit scared of litigation - and with good reason. If a person is injured on council-owned property,...

 King George III was mad. At least, that was the diagnosis in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries when he was occupying the throne of Great Britain and its various colonies and territories around the world. Modern psychiatrists have suggested his "madness" was, in fact, more likely to have been related to bipolar disorder, but at the time he was just insane. Mad. Nuts. The king's erratic and unpredictable behaviour was causing concern to the parliament, his advisors and his family. But he was King, and there existed no mechanism for his removal due to insanity or an incapacity to undertake his duties as sovereign.  (To be fair, George and his wife, Queen Charlotte, had 15 children, which as far as I'm concerned would be enough to drive anyone bonkers. But still.) Eventually, the parliament bypassed the king and installed his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who ultimately became King George IV, as Regent. Which is to say, he effectively took control of the duties o...

 When the brainless orange dirigible and his psychopathic zionist sidekick started bombing Iran three weeks ago, petrol prices immediately spiked. And I mean immediately. It didn't take days for the changes to occur. Iranians were still shaking the dust out of their hair (not to mention burying 165 murdered schoolgirls) after the first missiles landed in Tehran and the oil companies were jacking up the price of petrol.  The petrol for which we had been paying around $1.78 per litre, overnight jumped to $1.98, then $2.19 and, well, you know the rest. But a related phenomenon also occurred. Hardware stores around the country reported that there had been a run on jerry cans. Locally here in Braidwood, the hardware store completely sold out of jerry cans by lunchtime on the first day of Trump and Netanyahu's illegal war. The big city hardware chains were reporting a similar trend.  The videoed footage of some greedy bastard at a servo in Sydney, filling up his 1000litre tank...

As I write, south-east Australia is experiencing an extraordinary heatwave. This is the second such heatwave for 2026. At the same time, a vicious polar vortex is monstering much of North America and Europe. While at this sweltering end of the world we’re enjoying photos of frozen rivers and huge snowdrifts, friends in Canada and the US are similarly enjoying pics of Australians trying to cool off under hoses. These conditions, while not unprecedented, are not normal. Yes, of course we’ve had heatwaves before, and the northern hemisphere has experienced big freezes before, but these conditions are coming more frequently and with greater intensity than ever before. This is not normal nor should it be. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Since the mid-1980s climate scientists have been warning us of climate change. The climate stats and data tell the story and we were warned in the 1990s that heatwaves would get hotter and more frequent, droughts will be longer and drier, floods ...

  The year is barely three weeks old but it seems like we’ve been here for months. If you’re feeling exhausted and in need of a holiday, you’re not alone. So far this year we have seen the USA invade Venezuela, devastating bushfires in Victoria, cyclone and floods in north Queensland, a rising tide of revolution in Iran, the announcement of a Royal Commission into the Bondi attack, parliament recalled to debate hate speech and gun laws, Australia retain the Ashes in just 11 days of cricket, and the Adelaide Writers’ Week implode. Suddenly the world seems to have moved into warp speed and we’re just hanging on and hoping it lands somewhere safe. It’s difficult to know where to start navigating this gridlock of events and, it being summer break and therefore our traditional season of beach, barbeques, beer and a breather from current affairs, we’re just not used to such a high octane start to a new year. Globally, the big question is will he, won’t he make a m...

 When the inventor, entrepreneur and businessman Alfred Nobel died, his will stated that his fortune was to be used to reward “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901, and is awarded to a nominated person who the Committee believes has done the most towards promoting peace. This year, the Committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan democracy advocate and opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy." Predictably, the malignant, bloviating orange blob currently occupying the White House, is throwing a full-scale hissy fit over the Committee's failure to award the prize to him, having been duly nominated by that other paragon of peace, the genocidal narcissist, Netanyahu. The White H...