Cate Q

@cateq.bsky.social

534 Followers 240 Following

Parent / Grandparent / Environmental Activist / Hotelier

“In December 2024, I was personally involved in an NSA‑authorized forensic audit of the 2024 election. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz won—by a wide margin. Trump lost dramatically. There are multiple layers of complexity to this cover‑up, including transnational organized crime syndicates that extend far beyond the United States and our elections. To that point, I work in the human trafficking sector, which intersects with the stolen election(s) and has ties to Trump and Epstein—not to President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Walz, but to the Democrats and other allied interests responsible for burying the audit.”— Adam Zarnowski, former CIA agent and author of Jörmungandr
As Felicity Hayes read her letter to a representative of the base, this remarkable woman living without electricity extended her solidarity to oppressed people on the other side of the world. In that moment, I wanted every politician pretending up is down, left is right, and that genocide is defence, and every hack in the press that has covered for them, to feel pain, shame, and the scorn of the liberated world. “We’ll hang this letter in the museum once we’ve closed the base,” says Shoebridge. After a moment of reflection, the Hayes family turn away, and return to the larger protest group and a hero’s welcome.
Worth noticing too, before we go further, that Australia has never run on one culture even setting migration aside. Queenslanders wear their distance from Canberra like a badge. Western Australia has spent a hundred years threatening to leave the federation. Melbourne and Sydney agree on little beyond disliking each other’s arrogance. None of that has ever been treated as a threat to the whole. Suburb, state, region, nation, Australians have always carried nested identities without collapsing one into another, worth remembering before anyone claims sharing a country requires everyone to become the same.
Economics can treat the natural environment as an infinite resource and infinite waste dump. Endless economic growth on a finite planet is feasible and desirable. Wealth trickles down from the rich to the poor – hence government subsidies to the rich are justified. Monetary sovereign governments must balance the national budget. GDP is a measure of wellbeing. The value to society of anything is given by its market price. All major social and political decisions should be left to the market. The only alternative to capitalism is a communist dictatorship.
People are starving for media. Not information. There has never been more information. We are drowning in it. Every phone contains more reporting, footage, commentary, statistics, rumours, outrage and unsolicited geopolitical expertise than any person could absorb in several lifetimes. What people appear hungry for is something more human. They want context. They want explanation. They want someone to tell them what they think without speaking like an airport announcement. They want a view that feels honest, even when they disagree with it. They want to ask a question, challenge a claim and know there is an actual person on the other side of the screen. Apparently, some of them are willing to seek that from yours truly, a cartoon pickle. This is either one of the healthiest signs in modern democracy or one of the worst. Probably both.
“How can it be a monoculture? We’re all migrants, except the Aboriginals, who as far as we know have been [in Australia] for 60,000 years.” - Paul Hogan He told the AFR his old crew on the roadworks and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, where he spent a decade as a rigger, was an Assyrian, a Thursday Islander, a Welshman, an Aboriginal bloke and a couple of Irish convict descendants, the same glorious mongrel mix on every job he ever worked. The characters that made him a star, Luigi the Unbelievable and the rest, were built straight out of those workmates. The dinky-di Aussie comedy Pauline Hanson is so nostalgic for was assembled, brick by brick, out of the very multiculturalism she’s just declared a national emergency. She wants to bring back the painting and ban the paint. Then he handed her the cleanest rule in the country, the one that fits on a beer coaster and levels her entire press club speech in one swing. “What makes a good Australian is wanting to be one.” - Paul Hogan
These people aren’t even from here. Peter Thiel isn’t even from here. Elon Musk isn’t from here. We’re supposed to have him come here and set up some kind of class structure and just follow along, like there’s nothing to it? They have money, but that’s all they have. And the only reason they have money is because this government gives them money and subsidizes all their shit, and protects them, and makes sure they don’t have to pay taxes. As far as I see it, they’re taking money from us. They’ve seized our wealth and our resources. And at some point, World War III is going to be, I think—again, this is my extrapolation based on history—it’s going to be the non-Peter Thiel classes of the world rising up, uniting under one common banner. And that’s going to be the end of these people.
At times of crisis easy answers can seem like a solution. The reality is One Nation is not an anti-establishment party. Mining companies say jump, One Nation says how high. The corporations screwing over minimum-wage workers have nothing to fear, because One Nation backs the bosses every single time. They are more interested in protecting the grocery giants Coles and Woolies than making sure no child goes hungry. If you are angry at the major parties selling you out, One Nation will do it faster without a hint of regret. This isn’t an argument for the status quo, far from it. We’ve had enough of the establishment parties that don’t blink twice about supporting Trump’s wars, about criminalising our right to protest and selling our future to the highest bidder. This is a call to kick them to the curb. Labor has done nothing with their commanding majority in parliament except tinker at the edges while people struggle to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. They fumble around to respond to One Nation’s attacks on migrants because dog whistling has been their strategy for years. Labor can’t stop One Nation. You don’t debate a far-right movement into irrelevance. You call it out. You fight it. The Greens must lead this fight against the far-right. We cannot be spectators.
Farmers across the region have used more than 80 tractors to spell out ‘NO GAS’ in a powerful bid to demand attention from the Queensland government.
Thus begins the charade of the parties pretending to be enemies, both claiming they are the only ones who can keep us safe from the other. Two parties. One performance. Both go home at night and count their money. The Republicans pretend that they are the only ones preventing straight white Christians from being hunted for sport by hordes of Black and Brown trans drug dealers screaming pronouns and making up new genders as their children use litter boxes in classrooms. The Democrats pretend that they are the only ones who can save us from the fascists storming the Capitol. And they’ve gotten good at the dance. Watch their social media clips as they denounce the other side of the aisle while voting for the same tax cuts for the rich and bloated military budgets and genocides that line their own and their funders’ pockets.
But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name—they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality. The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide “a better future” for their children … the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for “his people” that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … and, for that matter, most women upon becoming pregnant for the first time … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community—for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on.
Property developer Harry Triguboff slams tax changes as ‘very bad’ for Australia Australia’s biggest property developer says looming tax changes will reduce apartment supply and push the economy further ­behind. “This is very bad what they are doing because we are falling further and further behind other countries,” said multibillionaire Harry Triguboff, Australia’s richest man. “There will be less buying, there will be more selling and we will have the apartment stock dropping.” Mr Triguboff. Mr Triguboff [said]“The amount of investors every year is dropping,” he said. “My investors accounted for 40 per cent of my apartment sales last year. This year it is 20 per cent. If [Jim Chalmers] keeps going it will be 10 per cent. -Australian, May 21 Meriton founder Harry Triguboff says investors will swarm new apartment builds after CGT changes Multi-billionaire property developer Harry Triguboff, who, at 93 years old, continues to helm his sprawling Meriton Apartments empire, says investor confidence is back and brand new units are in demand following the Albanese government’s about face on negative gearing and capital gains tax. -Australian, May 23, 2026
David Sheen @davidsheen · Follow After tireless struggle by victims and finally a 1-hour TV documentary this week, settlements south of Jerusalem admit their leaders have long created child pornography by filming when they gang-rape kids in the community: "No longer in denial: Gush Etzion admits to ritual abuse
And here’s the really cool part: the networks that funded the demolition of state capacity — the ability of communities, whether national or local, to support and help each other out — are the very same networks now funding the resulting fury. Who gives millions to the Institute of Public Affairs to argue that billions should be taken from the NDIS and state schools? The same interests that funded the case against the Voice to Parliament, the same companies campaigning against net zero, and against restrictions on data centres or online gambling, but for the freedom of money to make more money and do whatever the fuck it wants, and to never, ever pay for the damage it does.
Australia began as a penal colony. Not metaphorically. As a matter of founding fact. The British Empire, having misplaced one set of colonies in another fit of madness and needing somewhere to dispose of the poor and working class people it wished to be rid of, selected a continent already occupied by at least three-quarters of a million people — some estimates now put the figure considerably higher — it did not intend to consult, and began shipping its unwanted there. Convicts, radicals, the unruly, the poor who had become a pest, were all transported to the edge of the known world, from which return was, for most, unthinkable and silence was enforced. Two hundred and thirty-eight years later, we imprison military lawyers for informing the public about alleged war crimes. We prosecute tax office whistleblowers for exposing illegal debt recovery dodges. We are now pursuing through the courts the lawyers of those we have already pursued. Not the accused. The lawyers.
And here is the part that should make every working Australian’s blood reach a rolling boil. Pauline Hanson is, when you actually do the maths, one of the single biggest welfare recipients in the country. Her salary is taxpayer-funded. Her electorate allowance is taxpayer-funded. Her travel is taxpayer-funded. Her staff are taxpayer-funded. Her office is taxpayer-funded. The negative gearing tax break propping up her property portfolio is taxpayer-funded. The capital gains discount that turned her Maitland flip into an even fatter cheque after tax is taxpayer-funded. The solar rebate on her Beaudesert acreage is taxpayer-funded. The parliamentary pension she will collect every fortnight until she carks it is taxpayer-funded.
A serious country does not build its economic and political equilibrium around permanently rising house prices and then congratulate itself on its realism. Australia has spent years doing exactly that. Housing in this country has become far more than shelter. It is a speculative engine, a national status hierarchy, a household wealth strategy, a political third rail, and a collective emotional support animal. We like to call this aspiration. That is convenient, because it sounds noble and upward-looking. In practice, a great deal of what passes for aspiration in Australia is simply the defence of inflated land values by people who got in early enough to confuse timing with virtue.
TATEMENT OF PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP: Based on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so and, upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed our Military to continue the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other. President DONALD J. TRUMP
So why would this stupid Bluesky post set off an eruption of rage within me? I mean this is something good isnt it? It’s a promise of a future where we could all live. But no. We already know how this is gonna go. The greedy fucking fossil fuel monsters in this useless fucking country, and every other country in the so-called fucking free world, are just stirring up insane fucking culture wars to make sure they keep their fucking stranglehold on the political system and that we don’t get nice things like this. So we’ll spend the next ten or fifteen years driving around in our big ass stupid Ford Fucking Rangers, paying somewhere between $250 and $300 for a tank of petrol, because that’s what fucking freedom costs, bitch.
The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that.
“In December 2024, I was personally involved in an NSA‑authorized forensic audit of the 2024 election. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz won—by a wide margin. Trump lost dramatically. There are multiple layers of complexity to this cover‑up, including transnational organized crime syndicates that extend far beyond the United States and our elections. To that point, I work in the human trafficking sector, which intersects with the stolen election(s) and has ties to Trump and Epstein—not to President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Walz, but to the Democrats and other allied interests responsible for burying the audit.”— Adam Zarnowski, former-CIA agent and author of Jörmungandr
Governor Bullock is going to look at today’s +0.8% GDP print, the +0.4% per-capita growth, and the 6.9% saving ratio, and she is going to conclude that the Australian consumer has “excess demand” and needs to be punished. She is preparing to hike interest rates to crush a consumer whose “savings” are actually disaster recovery cheques, whose “consumption” is a government-subsidised power bill, and whose “investment” is a foreign-owned data centre. Hiking domestic mortgages to fight a Middle Eastern fuel shortage based on deeply distorted, backward-looking Q4 data will be the final, catastrophic act of Administrative Violence.
The net effect of this war will be to spread nuclear weapons around the world. Despite what CBS News is telling its viewers, Iran has no nuclear weapons. It agreed to give up its program under Obama, and then Trump tore up the agreement. It is the countries that are attacking Iran -- Israel and the United States -- that have a nuclear arsenal. This confirms a lesson that Russia taught in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: countries that have nuclear weapons are free to start wars of aggression. The only conclusion that can be drawn by others is that nuclear weapons are needed to deter such attacks. Trump has said that the purpose of the war is both to enable the Iranian people to rule themselves and to create a situation where the existing regime negotiates. This is not just contradictory. It was productive of real atrocity.
And so we see a series of enormous contradictions. We are at war with Iran, says Trump, because of Iranian electoral interference. But it was in favor of Trump. And it was prosecuted under the Biden administration. And Trump, again in office, deliberately made foreign electoral interference easier. And then the foreign electoral interference which was in Trump’s favor and which he permitted is, Trump now claims, against him to such an extent that that he has to fight a foreign war to stop it and then extend that foreign war all the way to the American ballot box. This is utterly ludicrous.
Dr Karl: I feel like I'm talking to a school child who says seven times two is not 14, but instead seven times two is a bicycle divided by the square root of a banana. Roberts: That's one way of making out that I'm a fool. Dr Karl: But all the scientists disagree with you. 99.999 per cent of the scientists disagree with you. Roberts: So now you're into consensus, which is a political tool. Dr Karl: Hang on, consensus is a political tool? … So if all the scientists agree that seven times two is 14, that's a political tool? Roberts: That's obviously a stupid comment, in my opinion.
“You’re a hypocrite” (Moral Justification) “You’re no different from me” (Advantageous Comparison) “This isn’t my jurisdiction” (Displacement of Responsibility) “This is too big for any one person” (Diffusion of Responsibility) “You’re making unreasonable accusations” (Distortion of Consequences) “You brought this on yourself” (Attribution of Blame)
The Quote "Fossil fuels now represent a systemic security liability, driving instability abroad while accelerating climate breakdown at home." - Admiral Chris Barrie, former chief of the Australian Defence Force (Retd)
After a year that most Australians couldn’t tell you what policy has had a real world impact on them, it wasn’t the announcement of a national housing commission that would build homes across the country, putting an entire generation to work. It wasn’t the announcement of a sovereign wealth fund that sought to ensure the country benefits from its resource wealth. It wasn’t the announcement of a world-leading approach to climate change, or a welfare program to eradicate child poverty in his country—it wasn’t even a tax on over $3 million super accounts, or a measly gambling ban. It was a blanket draconian ban on under-16s from accessing social media, among a lurch towards militarism.
Party that refused to properly negotiate on laws now bitching about laws they refused to negotiate properly on The refuse and bitch method is getting an incredible work out here from Sussan Ley. She is so sad for the miners. So sad for the farmers. Just sad for Australia really. Because mining and farmers just pay for all of Australia to live (it doesn’t but she is milking the hyperbole cow extra hard this morning) and now they have to *sob* have the same approval processes for fossil fuel projects that are destroying the planet and *sobs harder* not clear as much land as they want *collapse on the floor sobbing*. And my Dolly – will someone think of the loggers? All that native forestry that might end up *gasp* NOT LOGGED, because there will be a review into the industry’s exemptions in 18 months time? OH THE HUMANITY! IF ONLY THERE HAD BEEN A WAY FOR THE COALITION TO HAVE INPUT INTO THESE LAWS WHICH IT REFUSED TO PROPERLY ENGAGE WITH BECAUSE ITS LEADER HAS THE AUTHORITY OF A WET SOCK FORGOTTEN IN THE SODDEN GRASS.
Look, you look at the I mean, Albanese to get the EPBC legislation through has had to do it through a deal with the Greens. And, I mean, there’s no, absolutely no criticism in that. I mean, you know, that’s this parliament. Parliaments are designed for compromise and deal doing, right? That’s why that’s the whole purpose, people used to criticise me and say, ‘you’re doing deals in the Senate’. I’d say, ‘well, that’s, that’s what the Senate’s for’. The Coalition could have, they could have played an active role, but they chose not to. I can tell you what few supporters they have left in the business community will just be horrified.
Young generations are locked out of housing, but let’s talk about an attention-seeking extremist dressed in a burqa. The planet is burning, but let’s keep allowing fossil fuel lobbyists to dictate our policies. Israel commits a genocide, but instead of holding the perpetrators to account, the UN signs off on Trump’s real estate plan for Gaza. Our greatest ‘ally’ is in the grips of authoritarian fever, but Labor somehow thinks tying our nation’s future to this sinking ship is smart strategy. We’re investing billions in the US military industrial complex while telling our public hospitals to ‘reign’ in spending. Children are apparently too young for social media, but old enough to be treated as adults in the incarceration system. But hey - did you hear some Liberal right-wingers are burning down their own party?
In recent weeks, we shared new evidence showing how major new coal and gas projects will expose millions more people to extreme, near-unlivable heat. Today, we want to draw your attention to the broader security consequences now unfolding across our region – consequences that Australia cannot insulate itself from. Around the world, climate disruption is already contributing to unrest and instability. In Syria and Sudan, prolonged drought and climate-driven crop collapse played a role in civil conflict and mass displacement. These are not isolated cases. As climate stress deepens, the pressures on governments and communities will increase. In our region, the risks are profound. By 2050, Vietnam’s great river deltas could be devastated by storm surges and saltwater intrusion, undermining one of the world’s largest rice producing systems. In Bangladesh, even a one-metre sea level rise could displace 30 million people. Across South and Central Asia, worsening heat and declining meltwater from the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau will profoundly affect water supply, agriculture, and human survival. These cascading impacts mean mass displacement, food insecurity, regional instability, and increased risks of conflict – all of which directly affect Australia’s strategic environment. Yet while these threats accelerate, Australia continues to approve new coal and gas projects. Adaptation without serious mitigation is a dangerous illusion. We cannot build resilience while expanding the very threat that is destabilising our region. This is now a matter of national duty. To protect people, stability, and future security, fossil fuel expansion must end.
So, if you were planning to take over the government, invade major cities, preside over a deep recession, nurture new pandemics, start wars with other countries for their resources, and potentially invade Canada, all while the planet's climate breaks down into a chaotic mix of droughts, dust storms, heat waves, and hurricanes that ultimately collapse the GDP by 50 percent and kill billions of people.... Wouldn't you want a cool new bunker? I would.
Politicians that recognize the State of Palestine looking at New York street scene showing aspects of Trumps rule. Comment is that they don't recognize the USA