from civil liberties australia …..

Aussies hate government surveillance 

Before our eyes, day by day, Scott Morrison becomes the hollow man. His face tightens and twists, his eyes are dead, and his words strangled with jargon.

After some rummaging inside my pigeon loft that I cleaned thoroughly with a large serve of red ned and some cheap shoe polish, I have arrived at the startling conclusion that it could have been Martin Ferguson who fed the bullshit about the "coward" incident to the member of Batman, David Feeney.

An eyewitness account from last week's 15th Frances Folk Gathering:

Witching Hour at Frances, all was going well

till a bunch of new arrivals started raising hell

banging a tent together in the middle of the night

then yelling at each other until the dawn's first light

from Crikey

When governments drape a flag over their secrets, we need whistleblowers

Qantas this morning reported a $252 million half-year loss and announced it would cut 5000 jobs as part of an overall plan to reduce costs by $2 billion over 3 years.

The results come as the government weighs up assistance measures for the struggling airline.

According to a February 25 article in the business section of The Washington Post (WP), a senate report has found that the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse knowingly enabled and assisted wealthy Americans in avoiding paying US taxes on billions of dollars in income for many years.

Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

Qantas has posted a $235 million half-year loss and announced that 5,000 jobs will go.

We are witnessing history being made. Unfortunately, it's a history-making decline in standards of political behaviour. At least it proves we're not merely imagining that things were better in the old days.

The latest Census Bureau figures on poverty in America, combined with the data on inequality released a week earlier, confirm a shocking new reality. While a sliver of top earners are doing better than they ever have before, for tens of millions of Americans, insecurity - and, for a distressing number, destitution - is the new norm.