Quite often online when someone is amazed or annoyed by something (quite often an incidence of MAGA stupidity or bastardry), they will use the exclamation ‘JFC!’, short for ‘Jesus F*****g Christ’. I have been known to use a similar one; ‘JHC!’ or with increased exasperation requiring more emphasis, ‘Jesus H. Christ’, or with a tinge of disgust at my inability, for example, to pot a sitter at our weekly snooker game, ‘Jesus H. Christ on a bike’.
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption since May 24, 2020. The trial had been initially prolonged because it was paused due to COVID-19 and more recently, because of Israel’s attack on Gaza following the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas1.
Then Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced the indictment of Netanyahu on November 21, 2019.
I bumped into something very strange last night. I was mucking around on Youtube watching a couple of very recent episodes of ‘8 out of 10 cats does countdown’ which I believe is one of the funniest shows on television. While there a couple of videos popped up in the list at the side of the video being played.
In 1992, I went to Russia and Kazakhstan on what was supposed to be an Australia-USSR science agreement exchange program visit (the USSR had ceased to exist at this time, so the Australian government paid for the whole trip). A Russian researcher had come to Australia to work with one of my colleagues and me in 1990. We had moved into a new house a week before I hopped on the plane to Moscow, leaving behind my partner and our two little boys aged 6 and 3.
I know that not a huge proportion of Americans know what is going on beyond the borders of the US, and this was brought home to me recently, when I was reading something about the massive No Kings protests in myriad cities and town across the US. One source I read estimated that about 13 million people demonstrated.
As most people will have seen, in various places around the US, people in neighbourhoods have turned out to harass the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they attempted to pick up assorted people for detention or deportation1.
Annus horribilis is a Latin phrase that means “horrible year”. While it was initially used in the year 1891 in an Anglican publication to describe 1870, the year in which the dogma of papal infallibility was defined in the Catholic Church.
We bought an electric car; not a swasticar, but a Hyundai Kona. We have had it for three months and up until today had only driven it about 1500 km. On Friday we drove to Sydney to see family, and never having driven more than about 20 km in one hit, a drive of some 350 kms was taken on with some nervousness.
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an income support policy under which all individuals receive a regular unconditional cash payment from the government, regardless of employment status or income level. In other words, every adult citizen (and sometimes children, at a lesser amount) is granted a basic stipend periodically, with no means test or work requirement attached.