The Brown Note

Please spare some space in your heart to pray for the saintly Gladys Berejiklian, queen of our hearts, cut down so brutally from her rightful throne as leader of New South Wales by those pesky corruption scandals. Vale oh golden saviour.

No we're not! COVID is giving our media, politicians and public some false sense that we are one country united - far from it. We are two countries that hate each other and where one side lives to stick it to the other, every way they can.

With the streets of the UK now resembling an episode of The Waking Dead, as the zombiefied masses literally fight over petrol, shelves are bare, fast food joints have no food and a million workers are missing, if only there was some kind of warning that this would happen...

What should China do with a problem like Evergrande, their very own personal Global Financial Crisis collapsing property giant? They should do the opposite of what the West did and send a message to the World.

Now surpassing One Nation as Australia's most awful band of political charlatans, the UAP, despite ironically sending me an unsolicited text message in 2019, to tell me they would ban the practice, are in 2021 - sending the country unsolicited text messages. And from one of the country's most esteemed purveyors of self promotion and conspiracy theories - Craig Kelly. A look at how stupid someone w...

It's been near 20 years since the most watched event in global history kick-started the century but could America's forever war finally be over? Since World War 2 the USA has either been in a cold war with Russia or troops on the ground in South East Asia or the Middle East, now all of that's gone and the stars are aligned. Biden seems strong enough to wear the abuse of pulling out of the last two...

The New South Wales state premier has taken several leaves out of the king of empty PR and spin - Prime Minister Scott Morrison's book and is dealing with her COVID failures by relentless gaslighting of the public. Daily announcements about new freedoms that have already been announced, constantly telling us things we've know for months as though they are brand new, making out it's public hesitanc...

My position on the issue of abortion in the wake of the real world Handmaids Tale unfolding in Texas.

When I arrived in Sydney in 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald was everything a newspaper should be - especially in a country with the third highest concentration of print media in the world - next to China and Egypt, which are STATE OWNED. Well not anymore - the 2021 version, owned by Channel 9, with ex-Liberal party treasurer Peter Costello as its Chairman, is a bigger Liberal party propaganda mach...

In the UK and Australia they have. I've earned more money than my low paid dad my whole life, he has always owned his own house - once the birth right of any working class person - I'm not even close to affording a small flat. He turned his $40,000 investment into property years ago into a million dollars today, in the last 15 years alone I've turned half a million dollars in rent into nothing.

COVID has overwhelmingly affected the first world worst, developing nations least, by almost every metric. Total cases, cases per capita and deaths per capita, why? Why is the same true for food allergies, sperm counts and obesity? I have my theory - we are killing ourselves with chemicals.   *I meant to make a distinction with South-East Asian countries that are still first world but fit the same...

America's new Saigon. A round up of current events, how we got here, who's to blame and what will happen. Why the Taliban will probably be a different proposition this time around, how the global politics are very different now and how the major background players - China and Russia - will likely great the Taliban.

Though it has always been a failure of biblical proportions, the war on drugs is actually over - it ended with a whimper and no one even noticed. With nearly 100 billion packages sent globally each year, encrypted messaging services and crypto currency, the game changed completely for the first time since prohibition.

In some of the years most heartening, warm and fuzzy news, the cess pit that is Murdoch's Sky News at night has been kicked off of YouTube, for a week, for repeatedly lying about COVID. This is a big deal, they get up to 50 times the views on YouTube than their pitiful TV channel gets. With YouTube's 3 strikes rule - two more strikes in the next 90 days and they are gone. Permanently. Lets make it...

Anthony Albanese your Labor party are a disgrace. You've been the weakest, stand for nothing opposition leader imaginable but have somehow reversed into a winning position through the mind-blowing incompetence, scandal and corruption of prime minister Scott Morrison. Along the way ditching all of the most important policies Labor should stand for - on franking credits, negative gearing and now tax...

Prevailing wisdom is that COVID is a boon for the anti-vax movement like no other, I disagree - they've never faced a real time, global test on what they believe like it.

Most protests aren't sanctioned by the government, police force, media or even the majority of the public, so I'd be a hypocrite to deny the crowds in Sydney the right to protest the COVID lockdown this last weekend - even if this is a unique situation when it comes to large gatherings. There are some seriously bad faith actors amongst a very disparate group though.

The latest vanguard in the civil rights movement seems to be pronouns and new sexualities - it shouldn't be, it's not the same thing and it's taking up space.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese has fallen down the stairs backwards into an election winning position and is now in a race with Prime Minister Scott Morrison to see who can reverse the slowest to victory.

The obnoxious right wing firebrand has been booted out of Australia for breaching COVID rules and that was the plan all along. She never intended appearing on Celebrity Big Brother at all. She wanted exactly what she got - to manufacture her own exit then cry about her freedom of speech being silenced. Heads must roll at Channel 7 for ever thinking this was a good idea and being duped by this low...

If the modern age has been defined by Islamic extremism, no country is more culpable than the USA, who have been the driving force in fomenting radical Islam for more than seventy years, usually to attack Russia. Nowhere is that more bitterly on display than in Afghanistan - where America began funding violent Islamic groups in the early seventies, and doing so wholesale under Operation Cyclone th...

Being allowed to get away with murder by both the Australian media and half the public - the coalition government has increasingly resembled the last days of the Roman empire, with corruption that would make Caligula blush. The latest 'sports rorts' dwarfing scheme being the $660 million car park rorts, more evidence the Scott Morrison government spent billions in tax payers money to get re-electe...

Through the sheer luck of being a remote country, with a small popualtion, well spread out - Australia rode the first year of COVID at the top of the world. Now the terrible leadership of the Morrison government is coming home to roost. With terrible vaccination rates, access to vaccines, vaccine roll outs and quarantine facilities - Australia is heading to the bottom, with crippling lock downs an...

Proof once again Australian politics is about as far from being a meritocracy as feudal England, the bonking beetroot Barnaby Joyce is once again the deputy prime minister of Australia. This after previously being sacked for being caught cheating on his wife and the mother of his four daughters with a young female staffer he got pregnant and being accused of sexual harassment. Kind of ironic for a...

Making the case that the band that came from the UK's dreariest town yet turned into the most glamorous act on earth were not only the best singles act of the 80s, who released the most dramatic singles but also the best 'boy-band' since The Beatles and the last great boy-band before it all went to hell.