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| Cathy Wilcox |
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| McToons |
Saturday, 16 January 2021
Friday, 15 January 2021
Nationals MP announces $3,900 grant to help protect Clarence Valley koalas. WARNING: quotes are heavily laden with hypocrisy and political spin
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| IMAGE: The Chronicle |
This member of the NSW Legislative Assembly who never saw a timbered block of land he didn't want to clear fell and who was rightly labelled 'Koala Killer' during the Northern Rivers fightback against the threat to koala habitat he, his party and their political donors represent, now has the hide to wave a pitifully small amount of money in front of the electorate's eyes in an attempt to paint himself as very concerned for the fate of Clarence Valley koalas.
It's enough to make one nauseous.
Clarence Valley Independent, 13 January 2021:
Clarence Valley Council has secured a $3900 grant from the NSW Government to help protect local koalas from dog attacks, Clarence Nationals MP Chris Gulaptis has announced.
“This is part of a comprehensive Government strategy to boost the local population with the help and support of local landholders who are ultimately the koalas’ best friends,’ Mr Gulaptis said.
“Preventing these injuries to koalas and other native wildlife will help the recovery of koalas and other native wildlife following the devastating 2019-20 summer bushfires.
“The smallest mouthing or bite by a dog can cause serious injury or death, and the situation is always very distressing for koalas, carers and dog owners alike,” Mr Gulaptis said.
“This funding will ensure dog owners are aware of the risk of injury their dogs can cause to koalas and other native wildlife, and prevent these injuries from happening in the first place.”......
Thursday, 14 January 2021
Kevin Rudd: "Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives"
Crikey, 12 January 2021:
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| SCOTT MORRISON AND DONALD TRUMP (IMAGE: AAP/MICK TSIKAS) |
Donald Trump may have lit the match that caused his country’s turmoil, but it was Rupert Murdoch who crammed the joint full of explosives.
His systematic manipulation and radicalisation of the American right-wing polity at large, and the Republican Party in particular, should ring alarm bells throughout our nation, including in the office of the prime minister.
Over the past 25 years, Murdoch has used his Fox News network to unite American conservatives under his banner and shift them from the centre right to the far right with an intoxicating diet of grievance-driven, race-fuelled identity politics.
By the time Trump announced his presidential campaign, these voters had been indoctrinated into a universe of “fake news”, “alternative facts” and elaborate conspiracy theories. The operational definition of fake news, in the eyes of the Trump presidency, became anything other than Fox News.
After some initial disagreements, Murdoch backed Trump all the way to the White House. And they kept in lockstep throughout the Trump presidency.
Trump would often repeat publicly the talking points he’d picked up from Fox. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker, recommended booking interviews on Trump’s favourite shows as among the most effective ways of communicating directly with the Oval Office. And nothing delighted Murdoch’s swaggering ego, hard-right ideology and business tax interests more.
Fox covered up for Trump’s mistakes, trying desperately to keep track with his shifting claims about the mildness or severity of the coronavirus.
When Fox’s news reporters found nothing newsworthy in documents relating to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, Murdoch’s New York Post (under the watchful eye of his leading Australian henchman Col Allan) swooped in by pressuring junior reporters to put their names to its dubious front page story.
Like Trump, Murdoch’s news outlets also gave succour to the dangerous QAnon cult, with the devastating consequences witnessed in Washington last week.
It is now beyond time for Scott Morrison to stand up and denounce QAnon before it can fully take root here in Australia. Even if it strains the prime minister’s personal friendships with members of the far right, he should send the sort of crystal-clear signal that Trump proved himself unable to before it was too late.....
Read the full article here.
Personally, I believe it is too late to save Scott Morrison from himself. He lacks the ability for genuine self-examination.
Morrison was always attracted to Donald Trump, as one flimflam man often admires another more successful confidence trickster.
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| SNAPSHOT: Peter van Onselen |
Scotty from Marketing has clearly drunk the QAnon-Trump Kool Aid, wrapped himself in his personal closet racism, his foreign Legion of Merit medal and those evangelical & pentecostal contacts he appears to prize above the interests of the Australian nation, so that he is now willingly protecting those members of his own government who are just the sort of greedy, self-interested, ignorant crazies who have driven American society into the ground.
Wednesday, 13 January 2021
The Berejiklian Government appears willing to stand by and watch wild koalas rapidly go extinct in New South Wales within the next 30 years
Under cover of the public heath emergency created by the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Berejiklian Government is still not genuinely moving to save koala populations in New South Wales from extinction.
The Liberal Party leadership is still paralysed by the blackmail threats of National Party leader and MLA for Monaro John Barilaro - and so Liberal MLA for Hornsby Matt Kean in his conflicted role of Minister for Energy and Environment is doing little except mouthing soothing platitudes and making empty promises.
Because logging remaining native forests on Crown and private land - for woodchip, logs, sawn & dressed timber and biomass for power station/s - is what Liberal and Nationals shadowy political donors, greedy logging companies and developers hungry for cheap land are insisting needs to happen.
People in the Northern Rivers region are noticing.
I see #koalakiller is trending again. @GladysB if you don't want to see this keep trending, solutions are simple - 1st you need local koala coordinators & local koala community action plans for each population, then you need to fund them. Each population has its own needs🙏🐨💖 pic.twitter.com/Yy8RERhdEY
— Maria Matthes (@talkingkoala) January 12, 2021
The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 2021:
Koala advocates say the NSW government is not doing enough to save the animal from extinction after it backed without qualification a quarter of the recommendations of an upper house inquiry into the marsupial's populations and habitat.
In its formal response into the koala inquiry, the government supported 11 of the 42 recommendations, while offering "support in principle" to 17 others.
It "noted" the remaining 14. Among the recommendations supported was the suggestion the government rule out opening old-growth forests within the state reserve for logging, and that it create Georges River National Park to secure habitat on Sydney's southern fringe.
However, it only "noted" the call to investigate setting up a Great Koala National Park in northern NSW.
“Recommendations such as the government urgently investigates the ‘utilisation of core koala habitat on private land and in state forests to replenish koala habitat lost in the bushfires’ appear to be rejected out of hand," Cate Faehrmann, the Greens MP and chair of the upper house committee, said.
“Many of the key recommendations, the vast majority of which were supported by all committee members because they are what needs to be done to save koalas from extinction, seem to have been rejected outright."
The inquiry's report, released last June, found koalas were on track for extinction in the wild in NSW before 2050 with habitat loss the main driver of their demise. Environment Minister Matt Kean said in the following month that he would set a goal to double the numbers of the animals - believed to be as few as 15,000 to 20,000 - by 2050.....
Tuesday, 12 January 2021
Yes, it's been a bit wet recently...
On Thursday 7 January 2021 the Yamba Pilot Station recorded a total of 34.4mm of rain and this was followed the next day by rainfall of 22.8mm.
Up to 11 January 2021 the pilot station recorded a total of 81.9mm of rain.
The Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2021:
Last year was a hot and wet one for the Clarence Valley, with some rainfall records broken and above average temperatures recorded.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Wooli Beach set a new record in total rainfall, with 2201.6mm recorded in 2020, eclipsing the previous record of 2004.8mm in 2011.
Grafton Research Station also had its wettest year since 1959, with 1600.2mm recorded.
Yamba’s Pilot Station had 1746.6mm of rainfall in 2020, which was about 20 per cent higher than the average annual rainfall total for the station.
Grafton Airport AWS had a total of 1527.8mm last year, a 33 per cent increase on the station’s rainfall average.
Meanwhile, Grafton experienced its third driest November since 1917 with just 7mm of rain recorded, immediately followed by its wettest December in 164 years of data, recording 513mm.
BOM senior climatologist Dr Lynette Bettio said for NSW, rainfall was above average for most of the state.
“That was a real contrast to what we saw in 2019 with those extreme drought conditions across the state,” she said.
“Starting to relieve some of those drought conditions we saw good rainfall at the start of the year which helped out with those winter crops but we do still need to see more rainfall in the coming months to really relieve that long-term drought that we did see in 2019 but it was a good start…..
Monday, 11 January 2021
All the social media platforms that have banned or restricted U.S. President J. Trump so far may have limited the reach of his venom, but this does not mean the violence he unleashed last week is over
"I think I wouldn't be here [as U.S. President] if I didn't have social media. The media is fake. And frankly if I didn't have social media I would have no way of getting out my voice." [Donald Trump during U.S. "60 Minutes" interview, October 2020]
Donald J. Trump appears to have had a presence on social media since at least 2008-09.
At the time he was reasonably well-known to US mainstream media, but outside of America his name was not as recognisable to the average person.
However it was only once Senator Barack Obama stood in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and then became the Democratic candidate in the 56th American presidential election that the rest of the world began to really notice Trump.
However, much of the coverage of his views came second-hand in the mainstream media until May 2009.
By then Donald Trump had become a parody of his younger self, but did not at first glance appear to be highly dysfunctional. He came across as an eccentric and egotistical individual fond of conspiracy theories – especially if those theories supported his aversion to the idea of an African-American being President of the United States of America.
His open dislike of Barack Obama raised his own social media profile and he became adept at using Twitter and Facebook to express his personal world view.
Sometime between 2008 and 2012 Donald Trump began to flirt with the idea of running for US president himself, but it wasn’t until 2015 that he fully committed to the idea of standing in the Republican presidential primaries.
First as a political candidate and then in 2016 as president-elect Donald Trump was allowed a lot of latitude by social media platforms and he began to use social media as a weapon against all those he perceived as enemies.
There was so little pushback by management of the social media platforms that he frequented that by the time he became president I’m sure he saw himself as unassailable and, in many respects as the highest office holder in the United States he was.
In May 2020 his personal Twitter account reportedly had over 80 million followers, even though by then it was filled almost entirely with self-praise, blatant lies, insults, threats and political conspiracy allegations.
Then came his political defeat in the 2020 presidential election and a growing realisation that no matter how hard he tried he could not reverse the will of the people or the Electoral College votes.
It was then, when he thought he had nothing left to lose, that he became even more vengeful and recklessly destructive, setting in motion the events of 6 January 2021 when pro-Trump domestic terrorists violently forced their way into the US Congress in an effort to stop a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and Senate formally recording the Electoral College vote count that confirmed Joe Biden as the new president-elect who would be inaugurated on 20 January 2021.
Before that Wednesday ended the giants of the Internet began to show Donald J. Trump that even he could go too far and began to starve him of what political oxygen he had left.
First Twitter pulled the plug on his incitement of violence and sedition with a 12-hour suspension which quickly turned into the permanent expulsion of his account @realDonaldTrump. Then the list began to grow until 16 social media platforms/Internet services have slammed the door in his face, or the faces of his supporters, to date.
Axios, 7 January 2020:
Platforms are rapidly removing Donald Trump’s account or accounts affiliated with pro-Trump violence and conspiracies, like QAnon and #StoptheSteal.
Here is a running list:
REDDIT:
WHAT: Reddit has banned the subreddit group "r/DonaldTrump," a spokesperson confirmed to Axios on Friday.
COMMENT: "Reddit's site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals. In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies and to offer support or resources as needed," a spokesperson tells Axios.
CONTEXT: While not an official group or page hosted by the president, it's one of the company's largest political communities dedicated to support for President Trump.
TWITCH:
WHAT: Twitch disabled Trump's channel, citing the move as a "necessary step" to protect its community and "prevent Twitch from being used to incite further violence."
COMMENT: “In light of yesterday’s shocking attack on the Capitol, we have disabled President Trump’s Twitch channel. Given the current extraordinary circumstances and the President's incendiary rhetoric, we believe this is a necessary step to protect our community and prevent Twitch from being used to incite further violence," a spokesperson told Axios.
CONTEXT: Twitch was one of the first platforms in June to temporarily ban Trump's channel for hateful content around the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer.
SHOPIFY:
WHAT: Shopify took down two online stores affiliated with Trump — his organization and his campaign's merchandise sites — for violating its policies on supporting violence.
COMMENT: "Shopify does not tolerate actions that invite violence. Based on recent events, we have determined that the actions by President Donald J. Trump violate our acceptable Use Policy, which prohibits promotion or support of organizations, platforms or people that threaten or condone violence to further a cause. As a result, we have terminated stores affiliated with President Trump." - a spokesperson told The Financial Times.
CONTEXT: Shopify had until Friday gone the farthest in actually de-platforming Trump, as his stores were permanently removed, not temporarily disabled.
TWITTER:
WHAT: Twitter announced Friday the platform will permanently ban President Trump's account effective immediately.
COMMENT: "After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence," Twitter said in a statement.
CONTEXT: It's Twitter's strongest-ever action against the president's account and comes in response to the "risk of further incitement of violence," per the social media company.
GOOGLE:
WHAT: Google has pulled Parler, a social media app for conservatives and far-right extremists.
COMMENT: "In order to protect user safety on Google Play, our longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence," a Google spokesperson said.
CONTEXT: Google’s move immediately suspends Parler, going further than Apple's earlier decision to remove the app unless it submits a content moderation plan.
YOUTUBE:
WHAT: YouTube is accelerating its enforcement of election misinformation and voter fraud claims against Trump and other channels.
COMMENT: "Due to the extraordinary events that transpired yesterday, and given that the election results have been certified, any channel posting new videos with these false claims in violation of our policies will now receive a strike, a penalty which temporarily restricts uploading or live-streaming. Channels that receive three strikes in the same 90-day period will be permanently removed from YouTube," Alex Joseph, a YouTube spokesperson, told Axios.
CONTEXT: YouTube is typically slow to take action on bad content and accounts. Its response, while swift, was somewhat benign compared to competitors removing or disabling Trump's account. YouTube did remove the video Trump posted Wednesday that addressed the Capitol violence without fully condemning it.
FACEBOOK:
WHAT: Facebook banned Donald Trump from posting on his Facebook accounts for at least the next two weeks until the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden is complete.
COMMENT: "We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Thursday.
CONTEXT: On Wednesday, Facebook did remove the video Trump posted Wednesday addressing the violence without fully condemning it before taking greater action against Trump on Thursday.
INSTAGRAM:
WHAT: Instagram banned Donald Trump from posting on his Facebook accounts for at least the next two weeks until the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden is complete.
COMMENT: "We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Thursday.
CONTEXT: On Wednesday, Instagram's parent Facebook did remove the video Trump posted addressing the violence without fully condemning it before taking greater action against Trump on Thursday.
SNAPCHAT:
WHAT: Snapchat disabled Trump's Snapchat account Wednesday because it believes the account promotes and spreads hate and incites violence, a spokesperson said.
COMMENT: "We can confirm that earlier today we locked President Trump's Snapchat account," Snap spokesperson Rachel Racusen told Axios.
CONTEXT: Snapchat was one of the first major social platforms to take serious action on Trump's account for threats to democracy in June when the company said it stopped promoting his account in its "Discover" section, which features professional content and other prominent people.
TIKTOK:
WHAT: TikTok is removing content violations and redirecting hashtags like #stormthecapitol and #patriotparty to its community guidelines.
COMMENT: "Hateful behavior and violence have no place on TikTok. Content or accounts that seek to incite, glorify, or promote violence violate our Community Guidelines and will be removed," a TikTok spokesperson said.
CONTEXT: Other hashtags like #stopthesteal and #QAnon have been redirected since last year.
APPLE:
WHAT: Apple on Friday threatened to remove right-wing-friendly social media app Parler from its App Store if Parler doesn’t lay out a plan to moderate its content.
COMMENT: "We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property,” Apple wrote to Parler in an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. “The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”
CONTEXT: Apple is flexing its power to try to get Parler to moderate its content. [on 10 January 2021 Apple suspended the Parler App from its online store. This means the app can no longer be downloaded to an iPhone]
DISCORD:
WHAT: Discord says it has banned server The Donald, per journalist Casey Newton.
COMMENT: "While there is no evidence of the server being used to organize the Jan 6 riots, Discord decided to ban the entire server today due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence and plan an armed insurrection in the United States," per Mother Jones' Ali Breland.
CONTEXT: The Discord account was connected to the pro-Trump social network TheDonald.Win and the r/theDonald subreddit that was banned Friday.
PINTEREST:
WHAT: Pinterest has been limiting hashtags related to pro-Trump topics such as #StopTheSteal since around the November election, a spokesperson said.
COMMENT: "Pinterest isn’t a place for threats, promotion of violence or hateful content," a Pinterest spokesperson said. "Our team is continuing to monitor and removing harmful content, including misinformation and conspiracy theories that may incite violence.”
CONTEXT: Trump doesn't have a Pinterest account, and the platform has tried to stay away from political content, but Pinterest hasn't been able to squelch it completely.
The bottom line: Trump is quickly losing access to all the platforms where he once was able to spread his message freely, but groups of his supporters will still be able to gather online. [my red annotations]
Donald Trump joined Triller (an American video making & social networking platform) in mid-2020 but this site is yet to announce its position.
However, Twitch affiliate PornHub Update recently announced it too was banning Trump.
When Twitter removed Donald Trump’s personal account it appears to have cut off an est. 88,770,584 social media users from receiving his views directly into their timelines each day.
Gary Corby, the Trump campaign’s digital director tried to give Trump his account. Twitter promptly suspended him.
Twitter has also removed the Team Trump account and is selectively removing attempts by Donald Trump to place tweets on @POTUS which violate Twitter’s terms and conditions.
Individual Trump supporter accounts such as @linwoods, @FightBackLaw and @TheRISEofROD have been suspended for either spreading untruths about the 2020 presidential election or advocating lethal violence members of the US Congress.
According to Techcrunch, PayPal has been deactivating the accounts of some groups of Trump supporters since last week, who were using the money-transfer fintech to coordinate payments to underwrite the rioters’ actions on Capitol Hill. PayPal has been increasingly banning some political accounts, banning a far-right activist in 2019 and also banning a spate of far-right organizations in the wake of violent protests in Charlottesville in 2017. These bans so far do not appear to extend directly to the president himself.
Parler which apparently refuses to moderate its platform is also full of such threats - including incitement to assassinate the current US Vice-President for his perceived failure to support Donald Trump - according to Input. On Sunday 9 January 2021 alarmed at the proliferation of violent images and posts on this platform Amazon Web Services announced it would cut Parler from it cloud hosting as of 11:59pm, US Pacific Time (6pm Sydney Time, Monday 11 January 2021). Parler is then potentially offline for up to a week until it rebuild its website.
The naked violence that Donald Trump unleashed on 6 January which left five people dead is still a very real threat…….
"Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021." [Twitter Inc, 8 January 2021]
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| Parler, 6 January 2021 BACKGROUND |
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