So  in the USA ... land of the free, black women apparently aren't allowed to drive BMWs in New York, and 14 year old Muslim kids aren't allowed to build clocks.

How many billions have been spent on stupid shit like this vs how many actual real terrrrist attacks have been prevented?

I'm sick of saying this shit.  I've been calling it out since before George W. Bush even got voted in.  His election was probably pretty much the moment my faith in humanity started to fade.  Then his predictable, but still equally terrifying response to the WTC attacks. I could live with Afghanistan given there was apparently an actual link, but come 2002/3 and the bullshit of Iraq/Saddam, it was obvious the whole thing was a load of shit and loads of people were about to die to prop up the US military industrial complex, and thus their economy when the were spending millions every day on a stupid, pointless, unnecessary war.... not a whole lot different to Vietnam.

Then Tony Bliar was the next big nail in the coffin of my hope.

Rudd did a good job of taking some kind of faint hope and pounding it into a mound of self composting turds, but the end result of his shit was the unrelenting pile of shit that was Tony Abbott.

So you Australians will excuse me for my brief moment of jubilation that we managed to get our version of GWB gone in just under 2 years after he only managed to send 6 RAAF jets to bomb Syria.  That feels like an improvement to me.  God knows what else that demented twit would have done to save his job if Turnbull hadn't have finally stepped up and put an end to it.

Turnbull is no Messiah, but "the dude who stopped Tony Abbott" is more than enough for me.

The Turnbull leadership challenge

Well I think the Guardian starting a live feed on the leadership this morning was a clue, but it's now clear why I've been feeling particularly restless today.

[from a FaceBook post]:

I have strange, mixed feelings about the LNP leadership situation. I have been increasingly embarrassed and appalled at the complete and utter bollocks the Abbottses comes out with on a daily basis, but it's also become my daily entertainment. I actually look forward to logging on at the start of the day to see what the latest insanity the lunatic has said or done today. From a purely comedic perspective he was the gift that never stopped giving.

But at the same time it was obviously absolutely humiliating having his as our leader, and I shuddered every time I heard his name. I've become almost obsessed with him, morbidly fascinated by the fact that we somehow let this Gollum like creature, the Abbottses, run our country at all.

So despite the entertainment value, and the risk that Turnbull could actually give the LNP another term (or more) I still instinctively feel a desperate relief, even kidding myself that I might actually be glad to have Turnbull as PM.

I have no love for Bill Shorten at all, I kind of see him as Abbott lite. He only seems to know how to react to things, with nothing to offer.

But I'm a Green voter who won't vote LNP or ALP anyway, my hope is there could be another Labor Green coalition with loads of independents, because that is always more democratic, but I still get to have an opinion on who leads the country while the rest of you keep supporting these old timey parties.

To Blog or not to Blog... that's not any kind of question, just a half-arsed attempt at a title.

There is a niggling voice in the back of my head that's usually effectively inaudible above the noise, and it's telling me to write, frequently, or ideally daily as a routine.  So far I've failed.  But now that I'm doing a PhD, and the advice is essentially the same for that, maybe it will be the catalyst that finally spurs me to action.

I'm tempted to start a fresh, new Blog that can be associated with my professional identity, so that I can share posts freely without any concern that the content of previous posts might damage any kind of academic reputation I might develop, or the frank, sometimes brutal and ugly posts on mental health issues, but I think for now I will just carry on here.  I can always un-publish certain posts if it comes to it.

Usually a good indicator that it's time to think about Blogging again is when I start to get carried away on Facebook.  And at the moment I'm kind of obsessed with Tony Abbott and his parcel of fools.  A lot of it is Schadenfreude, and a sense of "Told you" to all the people who subjected us to the endless humiliation he subjects us to collectively on the world stage.  But I wake up each day and eagerly check the news just to see what the latest bout of lunacy might be, and whether the LNP are sufficiently embarrassed enough to have their next leadership spill yet.  The chatter seems to be increasing, and as I type the Guardian has started a Live updates page on the leadership question.  That's a good sign I think.

But as twisted as it sounds, I think I will actually be a little disappointed if he goes now and isn't booted out by the people at the next election.  Even more concerning though is the worry that by some terrible combined lapse of reason and massive Murdoch funded bombardment he might actually get voted back in.  I mean, he got in once, and I thought at one point the idea was too ludicrous to even contemplate.  George W. Bush got voted in a second time.  And Shorten is almost a kind of Abbott lite, with the same ethos of reacting to what everyone else does without offering any kind of direction of his own.

Ultimately, I am now a Green voter, and likely to stay that way.  I watch Australian politics with a kind of morbid fascination and find it kind strangely entertaining, but I suppose what I'm most interested in is witnessing the decay of a system that is becoming less functional by the day.  It makes me think of Michio Kaku's civilisation types — he says we are a Type  Zero Civilisation, but we now have a Type One Communication system, which will hopefully help other aspects of our society progress to Type One, eventually even energy, which is by his definition when we become a Type One Civilisation.