Rupert Murdoch is no longer in bed with either Jerry Hall of Donald Trump.
In the space of a few weeks Rupert Murdoch has dumped Jerry Hall and Donald Trump. One dumped for threatening to cost him money and one because he can no longer deliver Rupert’s other love – power.
The first sign of this was The New York Post editorial comment published on 22 July 2022.
What do Americans think about politics and global warming? In the last blog we looked at the Damascene conversion of Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, and his advice on how global warming should be framed and what language should be used to persuade voters on climate change issues.
Now the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University has released its latest national survey on politics and global warming – undertaken in April-May just before Supreme Court rulings on abortion, guns and the EPA; the latest in the endemic US mass shootings; and the January 6 committee hearings.
The ongoing success of Republicans and US right wingers might be characterised as being due to the devil having the best tunes.
Yet recently, after a road to Damascus experience, the man actually responsible for many of those tunes turned his mind to how progressives can make their messaging about climate more effective.
It is no longer completely ridiculous to ponder whether the US might be heading towards a new low level civil war.
Indeed, it is arguable that it is already in an emerging state of insurgency. The number of weapons in private hands makes the prospect at least possible although, unlike the Civil War, the division may not be a clear division geographically but would be more like a patchwork.
The blog is taking a break. Back in a little while.
There is one area in which the Greens are out in a class of their own – hubris.
The Greens opposed the former Rudd Labor government’s Carbon Pollution Trading Scheme (CPRS) in 2009 and voted it down in parliament.
Later it supported the Gillard Labor government’s carbon price and claimed it only “happened because of the Greens”.
There are many secrets surrounding the Melbourne Grand Prix.
For instance: why they are the only big event in Victoria which can’t seem to manage to accurately count the number of people who attend and have to estimate attendance? How can they claim, on their estimates, that each year is a new record attendance? What real economic benefits, if any, accrue to Victoria? How the Kennett Government managed to ‘steal’ the event from Adelaide when in fact it was there for the taking because the SA Government thought it wasn’t worth the trouble and expense?
One of the great mysteries of the possible global impacts of climate change is the fate of the Gulf Stream more properly known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
A new Nature paper (2 March 2022) by Laura C. Jackson, Arne Biastoch, Martha W. Buckley, Damien F. Desbruyeres, Eleanor Frajka-Williams, Ben Moat and Jon Robson on the evolution of AMOC since 1980 throws more light on what might be happening with AMOC and why.
It would be easy to develop a history of recent Australian history around the theme of if only.
If only we had persevered with a carbon price and carbon trading system. If only we had cracked down on tax rorts such as negative gearing and dividend imputation schemes which benefitted the wealthy and/or pushed housing out of the reach of young people. If only we had embraced Indigenous reconciliation earlier and more meaningfully.
More than 30 years ago Umberto Eco wrote a book, Foucault’s Pendulum, about the creation of conspiracy theories by a group of Milanese book editors which embroils them in real conspiracies.
The editors, sick of looking at crackpot manuscripts, create more by randomly throwing hermetic manuscripts into a computer named Abulafia after the medieval Jewish cabbalist.