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)

I came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.

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www.tunemymusic.com

5.1tn annual music streams... but 120.5m tracks had 10 or fewer Music-biz number-cruncher Luminate has published its year-end report for 2025, with plenty of stats for the industry to chew over.

Read the article here: musically.com/2026/01/15/5...

In April 2024, Spotify implemented a new scheme: songs with less than 1k streams per year would no longer receive royalties.

The data for 2025 was just released via Luminate, and 88% of songs have been demonetized.

Read it again: 88% of songs on Spotify have been demonetized.

Heard a lad earlier talking about ‘Belgian whistles’

“A basic website costs 10k or 25k upwards if you want all the Belgian whistles”

BELGIAN WHISTLES

I get the top bunk, Rupe. I think it was Stephen King who first introduced me to the line, “Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it”, a tidy little omen he credited to some old Chinese philosopher.

“The only thing everyone seems to agree on about Albo’s new Hate Bill is that everyone hates it… Personally, I’m looking forward to the inevitable Chernobyl at Holt Street, when Rupert’s top editorial warlocks realise they’re legally adjacent to the neo-Nazis of the National Socialist Network.”

Remember:
26Jan has been recognised as a Day of Mourning since 1938, in recognition of the invasion, dispossession & numerous massacres by British invaders against Indigenous Australians since 1788.
It has only been a public holiday as Australia Day since 1994.
Facts matter. History matters. #auspol

Want a safe car? Crash tests say you should go electric Electric cars are proving to be the safest vehicles in Australia, with battery-powered models making up six of the seven strongest crash test performers.

ANCAP’s crash tests are proving electric cars to be the safest vehicles in Australia

Battery-powered models make up 6 / 7 strongest crash test performers

Surprise: highly flammable liquids (petrol and diesel) in ICE are much more likely to catch fire than electric cars
thedriven.io/2026/01/16/w...

Hi there, I would like to talk about paywalls

Today I had a rather large article drop in Slate and there was a soft paywall. A lot of people commented upset about that paywall

Let's talk about:

a) how to get around paywalls
b) why you shouldn't be mad about them