Jason

The Shell Australia Country Chair just told the Senate committee that 6 or 7 gas companies have contributed $1 million each to fund a huge campaign against a gas export tax 🤯 and smaller companies have also contributed. Gas companies are spending millions to ensure Australians aren't paid a fair share for the export of our gas. Go to ourgas.com.au to help fight back against their propaganda.

The @tabcomau don’t even specify whether racing at Sandown is on Hillside or Lakeside on their app, totally differing racing tracks. The most basic of knowledge completely ignored. They just rely on the fact that punters will punt

Yulong breed 500 yearlings a year. Many are shipped off to China, never to be traced again, so much for Australian racings traceability hey💁🏽‍♀️ Others are sold off on online sales for others to deal with, like this 2 YEAR OLD filly being sold as a broodmare because she’s basically crippled & they feel zero responsibility for her so make her someone else’s problem. Where’s their retired racehorse program for these thousands of horses they bring in to the world? It doesn’t exist. Unbelievable.

News organisations need to be unflinching in their use of strong language to describe Trump. Too often we have normalised the abnormal. Mea culpa. I did it myself at the BBC and often came up against institutional timidity. My weekend read. open.substack.com/pub/historynev…

@tas_zaf @jimmytheflea @mivkaa They played weak squads in both Oceania games & lost both. I know at least 2 people that loaded up on them to lose by 2 goals or more v Oakleigh, odds were juicy. Integrity????

@tas_zaf @jimmytheflea @mivkaa Can you explain to me why they had a full strength team v Preston knowing there was a game v Auckland the next day? It seems as though they can pick & choose when to field a strong eleven. That’s my point re integrity. It also refers to both competitions they’re in.

Here at Lakeside Stadium today for South Melbourne v Oakleigh. South Melbourne with their “weakest” line up of the season today with the squad still in Fiji. 2 debutants and 9 changes to the starting 11 who beat Preston last week. Oakleigh with no changes to the starting 11 that beat Hume last week and have a massive opportunity to go back into 2nd place on the table and go within 1 point of South. Tune in from 3:30pm on the @nplvictoria YouTube page with myself and @stevencurtain on the call to see if the South Melbourne kids can cause the biggest upset in NPL history

Aitor Zabaleta tifo displayed by Real Sociedad supporters at the Atlético Madrid match. Zabaleta was an antifascist Sociedad supporter and was stabbed to death by Atlético Madrid’s neo nazi ultra. The murder was committed in 1998, but it still keeps its place in memories. Because Madrid far right supporters sang chants celebrating Zabaleta’s death throughout the day before today’s match and insulted him. That is why this was not just a visual show, but a message given from past to future: “We are always antifascist.”

I am surprised how my tweet below entered the political spheres of Australians. It means that many Australians actually care about their country. But if you want to do something about it, the first thing to understand is that the answer is not the other party. The two parties run the visible layer. The operators underneath is the same regardless of who is in office. Same mining multinationals. Same four banks. Same supermarket duopoly. Same media owners. Same property speculation engine. Same gas exporters paying almost no resource rent. The faces rotate. The arrangement does not. So voting harder for Labor when the Liberals disappoint you, or harder for the Liberals when Labor disappoints you, is not resistance. It is the trap. It is the pressure-release valve doing exactly what it was built to do. The way to move the operators in Australia, is how you move any operator in any country. Stop voting tribally. Strengthen the cross bench. Vote for community independents and minor parties willing to put structural questions on the table that the majors have agreed never to discuss. A senate full of crossbenchers extracting concessions is worth more than another majority for either side. Learn who owns what. Find out who owns your bank, your supermarket, your toll road, your energy retailer, your superannuation, your media. Most Australians have no idea how much of the country routes back to a small handful of foreign asset managers and resource multinationals. Once you see it, the arguments between the parties stop looking like a contest and start looking like theatre. Build parallel structures. Move your money to a credit union or mutual bank. Buy from local cooperatives where you can. Read independent media. Put solar and battery on your own roof so you stop buying back your own gas at a markup from the people who exported it. Demand specific reforms, not vague good intentions. Ask every candidate, federal and state, whether they will support a real Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. Whether they will support a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund built on actual resource royalties. Whether they will support ending negative gearing and the capital gains discount. Whether they will support breaking up the media monopolies. Whether they will support foreign investment screening with teeth. Whether they will support rebuilding domestic refining capacity and downstream processing of the minerals that's shipped out raw. Vote on the answers. Politicians respond to specificity. They absorb and neutralise vagueness. Tell the truth in your daily conversations. The deepest defense of the system is the conditioning that tells Australians their own sovereignty over their own resources, their own currency, their own land and their own future is the unrealistic option. Norway did it. South Korea did it. Singapore did it. Australia chose, repeatedly, through both parties, not to. That is a choice. Choices can be made differently. Saying so out loud, in private and in public, in conversations with family and friends and colleagues, slowly breaks the spell. Australia is managed. That is the bad news and that is also the good news. Anything that can be managed can be unmanaged. But not by waiting for the next election to deliver a saviour from inside the same recruiting pipeline that produced the current arrangement. The change starts when enough citizens stop voting for the marketing departments and start asking who actually owns the building.

#C4News last night reported on the wholesale targeting of ambulances & paramedics in Lebanon by Israel, including the recent 'triple hit', when Israel attacked an ambulance, then attacked paramedics who went to help, and then attacked further paramedics also trying to help.

There is no rise in anti-Semitism. There is a rise in the number of people who are very angry at what Israel is doing. Your inability to separate the two is equally problematic.

Haven't posted much of late because I've been working on the below article. In it, I attempt to explore the reasons why talented Australian players often don't reach their potential. It's a long read, but I think an interesting one. Read it here: open.substack.com/pub/aussiescou…

This whole Gout Gout thing has made me realise that so many people have no fucking idea what an Australian is - including some Australians sadly. Australia is a nationality, not an ethniticy. The only ethnic Australians are Aboriginal. A big part of our culture, is being multicultural. Our diversity is our strength, not something that should be hated or feared. Anyone who's born in our wonderful country is an Aussie, through and through. Anyone who goes through the immigration process, does their best to fit in and earns their citizenship, is welcome and is just as Aussie as the rest of us. I am. You are. We are Australian 🇦🇺. And don't you cunts forget it!

You are so lost. I pity you

@Nic_Ashman The protocols work, not one fatality since. The moment you make exceptions is the moment you lose all integrity. It’s pretty simple

He probably wins both races too - have they robbed the best WFA horse in the land of two of the biggest prizes in the land ?

South Korea tells Israel to stop playing the victim in a remarkable response to Israel’s demand for an apology. The reference below to the “repercussions” suffered by the Korean people as a result of Israel’s war, and Israel’s refusal to end the war, is the key point here. If Lebanese or Palestinian civilians were the only ones hurt, countries will condemn that but move along. Now *they* are getting hurt too and Israel does not seem to realize how isolated they are: “Our people, who have endured countless cries and the pain of losing national sovereignty through a 5,000-year history, fully empathize with and understand the horrific suffering experienced by the Israeli people in the last century. “However, no reason can justify inhumane acts that exceed all bounds. We cannot stand idly by while such acts continue and their repercussions reach even our own people. “We urge Israel to break free as soon as possible from the chain of hatred where the memory of victimhood leads to further perpetration.”

Gas companies are under pressure and are peddling absolute BS to Australians. But we're seeing through their spin. Tragically the major parties keep using the industry’s lines and putting multinational gas companies interests ahead of the interests of Australians. We deserve a fair return on our offshore gas exports. Simple as that. A 25% gas export tax won't stop investment overnight or destroy the gas industry (all these arguments were used in Norway when they decided to tax their gas exports) - we’ll just have more revenue to pay down debt, put some in a sovereign wealth fund and fund cost of living relief Australians desperately need right now. 7news.com.au/news/7news-the…

By all means racing needs opinions, not more fluff pieces but this is just idiotic. @RacingVictoria

Give her a gig at the @micomfestival 😂

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild. He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed. When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them. Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate. The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions. Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement. The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean. That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.