If ever actually constructed, look for it to be the first DC monument gleefully destroyed in every future disaster movie

This important point (👇) was censored (by BlueSky!) for "intolerance".

I'm putting it up again; wish me luck! To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, "Intolerance of the intolerant is no vice" ...
#Trump

If you aren't watching the return of Artemis II, I completely understand. I'm watching, but I'm nervous about the heatshield.

On Artemis I, it had problems, so they made changes to the flight path, but it's the same heat shield. I won't feel secure until they are on the ground.

Okay so here’s my actual Bluesky-is-dying hypothesis:

The entire web is dying. Users aren’t going from BlueSky to another site (x/insta/threada/tiktok). Users are going to chatbots.

I know traffic to news sites has cratered (like 90%). My hunch is traffic to all the social platforms is down too.

We've subsidised oil companies for decades as we "need" their products to run society, but now we dont, we need to use those same subsidies for heat pumps, EV's, solar panels, turbines, bio mass what ever else we can use to generate electric, it's only fair, we'd get to "net 0" real fast that way.

A War on Witnesses: Remembering Gaza’s Fallen Journalists Since the outbreak of the most recent war, an unprecedented number of journalists, photographers, and media workers have been killed in Israeli airstrikes

How can Israel's Ambassador to Australia speak at the National Press Club while they target journalists in Gaza?

At what point does the murders cease to be seen as “collateral damage” & instead be recognised as a campaign to eliminate the witnesses?

#NPCS #Auspol
1earthmedia.com/a-war-on-wit...

This is so far over the line it is impossible not to see this as murder and minimally a war crime…. Israel must be held accountable

Solar and batteries for every school and childcare centre! Across Australia, children are learning in classrooms that are getting hotter every year. At the same time, schools and childcare centres are facing rising electricity bills that put pressure on alrea...

This cause is close to my heart - please sign: petitions.getup.org.au/petitions/so... @getup.org.au

Powerwall 2

Happy Valentine's Day.

Hoping you have someone as obsessed with you as the National party.

The only thing I’m obsessed with is fixing their energy mess.

On the non-obsessed hand, my Powerwall 2 is down to 45%, the SolarEdge is only producing 720 Watts this cloudy day. Maybe I shouldn’t have left the EV charging from solar yesterday when it was also cloudy?
Please keep upsetting the cookers.

I have total confidence that an NACC would do a much better job (of hiding any problem).

Angus Taylor’s One Nationfication of the Liberal Party is Australia’s MAGA moment Friday 13 February is a fitting date for Angus Taylor to roll Sussan Ley as Liberal Party leader because Taylor represents a Trumpist MAGA horror show result for Australia’s social cohesion and demo.....

We need to be honest about what is going on here people! Angus Taylor’s One Nationfication of the Liberal Party is Australia’s MAGA moment. My analysis 👇🏻
independentaustralia.net/politics/pol...

Trump wants more access to your personal data. Will our government hand it over? Speculation over a proposal to hand Australians' biometric data to the US is raising concerns among privacy experts.

No fucking way! #albo
Trump wants more access to your personal data. Will our government hand it over?
www.sbs.com.au/news/article...

Just a thought, but to avoid the bloody annoying arguments every year about Australia Day, perhaps it could be on 27 May. That was the day in 1967 that 90% of Australians voted to include Indigenous Australians in the official population count, thus recognising them as citizens.

ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials Superintendent says Liam Ramos and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway and sent to Texas

‘Terrible things are happening outside… Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return… to find their families gone.’
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Whistleblowers just shared a memo showing DHS instructing ICE to force their way into peoples' houses without a proper warrant. Why is this not on all the networks right now? This is a criminal conspiracy to violate rights under color of law.

OECD says its time to cut the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing The OECD’s annual survey of Australia’s economy this week bluntly noted what most Australians understands very clearly: housing is expensive and in short supply. The report highlighted issues with pla...

"OECD says its time to cut the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing" me for @thepointau.bsky.social
thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

But woe betide we spend similar annual amounts to act on climate change…

…much of which just redirects investments from BAU stuff burning expensive fossil fuels + related infrastructure to clean economy tech like renewables, batteries, EVs

(Nor cost of failing to act, which is far higher)

"In the race to build new energy
#wind fast
#solar faster
& #batteries will be faster again
#Coal has started a fast exit"

— Prof Ray Wills, 22 Oct 2017

Screenshot from the website of the NT News: "First gas from the Barossa field being loaded in Darwin ahead of export to Japan". Sub-head reads: "First gas has begun flowing for a long-awaited nation-building gas project. Read what it is."

In what galaxy is an offshore gas project that ships gas straight overseas "nation-building". I know the NT News is famous for its hilarious headlines, but this is just deadshit.

Words used to have meanings, y'know.

But when I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE's crimes.

What people are doing here is beautiful. It's a tragic beauty, but a real one

I don't want to paint a rosy picture, because it's a city under siege. People are being abducted all the time. One person told me about watching 1-2 abductions a day, just in her own work following ICE.

Another friend put it to me like this: "ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter."

Today I talked with a 76 year old who'd been standing in the cold for hours guarding her neighbors. I was getting kind of chilly, even in the new winter gear i bought for this trip (and I live in the goddam mountains myself).

She didn't even have a hat on.

Before I came, I asked a local friend if the cold (it's going to be -20 or so in the coming days) would stop people from coming out. "No, we'll be there. It's ICE who can't handle it."

It's genuinely a leaderless (or leaderful) movement, decentralized in a way that the state is absolutely unequipped to handle. There are a few basic skills involved, and so people teach each other those skills, and people are collectively refining them.

I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

Half the street corners around here have people--from every walk of life, including republicans--standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.

I got in late last night. First thing this morning, I saw cars following an ice vehicle down the street, honking at it.

Later, we didn't drive more than three blocks before we found people defending a childcare facility. (The idea that people have to defend a childcare facility... let that sink in)