Doctor and activist
26/04/2020
A Recession Alert! A Law is Coming to Get Ready for Negative Interest Rates, but it being sold as just another move against the ‘black economy. The bill is the ‘Currency (Restriction Use of Cash) Bill 2019’. Cash is used in the black economy to avoid tax. But when the GST came in, the obvious […]
26/04/2020
Capitalism is so entrenched as the major aspect of social organisation that when anyone in the Greens questions it, this is assumed to be electoral doom. But there are intelligently argued essays about its limits and its problems. I recently discovered Wolfgang Streek asking, ‘How Will Capitalism End’ in a heavy but still readable essay […]
26/04/2020
Tonight’s 4 Corners is about the Royal Australian Air Force contaminating the groundwater around its bases with a fire fighting foam containing PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoro Alkyl Substances, aka Perfluorinated chemicals, PFCs). It made me think of my experience with pollution. I started off in treatment medicine, and saw all the harm tobacco did, so […]
26/04/2020
As I have posted before South American politics is about grass roots Leftist groups getting the people a better deal alternating with neo-liberal ones where mainly US interests extract the money, usually by supporting a right-wing dictator. The CIA supported coups in Argentina and Chile in the 1990s with huge loss of life and gross […]
26/04/2020
Sometimes we have little experiences that are wake up calls. We need to note them, and act on them. I have little to do with Centrelink. Like most North Shore doctors I assume it does its job, and also tacitly assume it has nothing to do with me. It wrote to me about 6 months […]
26/04/2020
We hear of ‘victimless crimes’ like urinating in a park when all the toilets are shut, or jaywalking. Every now and then a politician wants kudos for actually stating that they are not going to prosecute (and they are going to save on legal system time). But more important are ‘crimeless victims’ where the neglect […]
26/04/2020
We see Trump not impeached on Party lines with only Mitt Romney crossing the floor. Sure he may have bent US foreign policy to attack a political rival, but hey, he is on our side and we want to win the election[1]. Meanwhile over in Oz, the Auditor-General finds that the Deputy Leader of the […]
25/04/2020
This perceptive article by Mike Seccombe in The Saturday Paper (11-17/4/20) details what disaster capitalists are doing to get mining under dams, fracking and revamps for coal-fired power up while Parliaments are closed and the world is distracted by the COVID epidemic. At the head of it all is the inimitable rorter, Angus Taylor, busy […]
25/04/2020
There has been a general acceptance that the COVID19 coronavirus came from the Wuhan Seafood market from some of the wild animals there, with a pangolin, a type of scaly anteater. It was a wet market which means that species are sold there raw. This seemed more plausible than the various conspiracy theories that it […]
25/04/2020
I am continually appalled by Centrelink’s callous incompetence. It usually does not affect me personally, but this week it did. One of my patients, who has not been able to work for over 4 years since a bad car accident and urgent neck neurosurgery came in for a SU415 certificate so that he could get […]