Maureen Daemon

Virgin, Mother - not quite yet Crone! Mother. Artist. Teacher. Writer. Designer. Heretic.

[stranger @strangerous10]

Sarah Hanson-Young left gobsmacked as ACMA admits they provide no policy advice on gambling ads, or how to tackle the harm of inducements, bcoz it’s a “matter of policy - for govt”

SHY “But policy is based on advice...”💥

Not just toothless, also muzzled.

[Sherele Moody (Femicide Researcher) 🌈 @ShereleMoody]

It’s Homelessness Week! So the Canberra Times decided to demean a woman who sleeps rough, has no money and experiences a range of health concerns.
On July 31, three Canberra Times reporters published a story titled: 'How to deal with the sweary rants of the homeless woman on the street'.
They changed the headline to 'Inside her mountain of rubbish, she tests our tolerance and compassion'.
The headlines were for a little expose on a female survivor of violence who sleeps rough.
They use words like rants, foul, screaming and sweary to describe her. They call her belongings a ‘mountain of rubbish’, they repeatedly reference her smoking and they talk about other people being ‘humane’ to her.
They also say she's testing the tolerance and compassion of locals.
This is a story about people sleeping rough being bad for business and property values - with comment from the Property Council and police, but no input from sector professionals.
They used anonymous comments from Facebook and took photographs to further reinforce their narrative.
They interviewed the woman, using quotes that upheld the article’s premise. I am betting they didn’t give her a chance to read the piece before it was published.
Frances Crimmins, YWCA Canberra Chief Executive Officer, describes the reporting as deplorable and failing to contribute anything to the discussion around why Australians are forced to live on the streets and why our governments do not provide adequate housing and other resources.
“This article has done an immense disservice to the woman in question, the community services which homeless people rely on, and the generosity of Canberrans,” Frances says.
The YWCA in Canberra assisted more than 400 clients in 2024-205 and 60% were women, most of whom are homeless due to domestic violence.

❤️SUPPORT MY WORK❤️
Please support The RED HEART Movement and Australian Femicide Watch by grabbing a RED HEART tee or providing a crowd-funded donation! 100% of money raised funds support for families of femicide, an apartment for domestic violence survivors and my work documenting the killing of Australian women and children. Links in bio or visit https://t.co/1TEEVN73X3

[Sherele Moody (Femicide Researcher) 🌈 @ShereleMoody]

Yvonne Whear went missing in February of 2026 from the Murwillumbah area and police say she did not do so voluntarily.
STORY: https://t.co/0certW0Amr

[Georgina Hollifield 💚 @sp4rkl3jumpr0p3]

Something that radicalised me was learning that the "carbon footprint" concept was popularised by the fossil fuel industry to shift public focus on climate change towards individual consumers n their lifestyle instead of at the corporations that are knowingly destroying the earth

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

They're trying to make us worse. These billionaire generative AI corporations reap profits by making us worse human beings.

They want us to become less human. Less connected. Less creative. Less capable. Less wise. Less intelligent. They want to atrophy our ability to speak, write, research, relate, draw, make music, and cultivate intimate connections with the most important people in our lives, and then sell those things back to us at the hands of some chatbot.

Their entire business model is built around turning us into a bunch of soup-brained narcissists who can't manage our own lives and our own relationships, and then being the crutch that we use to compensate for that self-inflicted debilitation.

The product they are selling us is not the chatbot itself. The actual product they're selling is freedom from cognitive and emotional discomfort. From the discomfort of learning new skills. From the discomfort of personal growth. From the discomfort of taking risks. From the discomfort of pushing past that intimidating blank page to get something written. From the discomfort of having to think about other people and consider their interests and feelings. From the discomfort of having to interact with other humans and maybe say the wrong thing sometimes. From the discomfort of leaping into the unknown.

But all the best things in life sit on the other side of discomfort. Love. Romance. Intimacy. Art. Creativity. Growth. Healing. Rising beyond our limitations. Liberating ourselves from the illusion of the ego. They all require us to push through discomfort to the treasure on the other side. An aversion to discomfort is an aversion to a fulfilling human life on this planet.

But that's exactly what these chatbot companies are nudging people into. They're encouraging us to spend our lives curled up in impotent little balls of emotional infancy and intellectual stagnation so that they can sell us machines which act as digital prostheses for the sacred parts of ourselves we have amputated.

We mustn't let them do this to us. We must remain human. We must hold fast to all those precious aspects of our humanity they're trying to extract and commodify.

So let's stay human.

Let's face our discomfort.

Let's face our fears.

Let's take that risk.

Let's tell our crush we fancy them.

Let's go in for that kiss.

Let's get our hearts broken.

Let's write that poem.

Let's learn to draw.

Let's learn to surf.

Let's learn the saxophone.

Let's learn all sorts of new things.

Let's learn about the people in our lives.

Let's nurture our relationships.

Let's heal our wounds.

Let's become better people.

Let's sink our toes deep into the earth and feel these wonderful terrestrial bodies of ours in each moment.

They're trying to pull us away from our humanity, so we must plunge deeper into it.

As things get more and more dystopian, simply holding fast to your humanity becomes an act of rebellion.

[David Joffe MBBS(Hons), PhD, FRACP @DavidJoffe64_2]

🚨 This is seriously BAD JuJu 🚨

The increasing devastation of bird life in Australia is rapidly escalating‼️

Yet.... Not a f**king peep from anyone within the conclave of Albo Pty Ltd

Would someone like to identify the reclusive and invisible CMO???

See if there's a pulse☠️

[Aaron Smith @aaronsmith]

Dave, spare me the faux concern.

You confidently broadcast economic bullshit, refuse to correct it when exposed, and then invoke ordinary Australians as moral cover for your own irresponsibility.

This is how Trumpist politics takes hold: confident falsehoods are repeated until they become tribal truths, corrections are dismissed as bullshit, and the person checking the facts becomes the enemy.

Once we accept that style of public discourse here, we should not be surprised when we end up with the same degraded political culture.

You do not improve Australians’ living standards by misleading them. You do not serve the public by feeding them political fiction on sycophantic platforms where nobody interrupts the performance with facts.

You asked what you got wrong. I answered in detail. Four replies later, you have not rebutted a single point.

Your concern for Australians would be more convincing if it extended to whether the things you tell them are true.

[Nick Volpe @nvolpewild]

Just found out the new species of Peacock Spider we found lost half of its habitat last month from land clearing 🥲
Other half is disappearing soon to housing developments…

[melissa @ArtistAffame]

Seeing South Australian politicians celebrating the opening of another foodbank actually sickens me. Foodbanks should only be used in emergency situations not week to week because people can’t afford food.

[Australian Femicide Watch @MapFemicide]

A man allegedly murdered a woman in Clyde North, Victoria yesterday. A 32-year-old man, known to the woman, is charged. She is the 42nd Australian woman killed this year and the third woman killed in the past three days.

❤️https://t.co/fTXj1OmuYW

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Sam Connor @criprights]

From an independent advocate in WA on those magical ‘foundational supports’;

"One of the cases I dealt with saw a non speaking disabled elderly woman left wallowing in her faeces and urine for many hours because the nurses were too busy and she was not allowed to have her support workers there.

This is the bed. She’d been left in it for nine to ten hours, we think.”

But now the NDIS want us to drop our support workers at the door, saying it’s a ‘duplication of services’.

This advocate is dealing with 43 cases like this at present.

[The Autistic Coach @AutisticCoach_]

Disability accommodations aren’t taking anything from anyone.

The quiet room doesn’t force anyone to be quiet elsewhere.

The ramp doesn’t break the stairs.

“If we accommodate you, we’d have to accommodate everyone”

Yes.

Correct.

That’s the idea.

Precisely.

[Jenny Difficult-Frecklington-Jones 🇵🇸🇱🇧🇮🇷 @JonesHowDareYou]

"There is nothing in the July announcement giving a person the right to know when an automated system made a decision about them, or a process to contest that decision, or any guarantee that a human remained meaningfully in the loop."
https://t.co/ARibyDQ5rB

[Maureen Daemon @VirginMother]

@ArtistAffame Yay!!! 🥳

[Sam Connor @criprights]

KILL THE CRIPPLE FROGGER GAME

Let’s play a game. It’s like Frogger, or Chicken, or Truth or Dare, and it involves significant personal risk.

I’m taking that risk because I want to make a point, and show people what the government are doing. If I die doing it, all the better #YOLO. Because this needs to be fixed.

So, here is the story.

The NDIS National Disability Insurance Scheme have RUSHED to replace my $1 plan (because adverse media) and I now have five hours of support a week.

But - they haven’t given me, a wheelchair user, a consumables budget.

They say I have to do a functional capacity assessment first.

I asked the planner what will happen if my tyre pops. To be clear, both my front Batec (power attachment) tyre and manual wheelchair tyres need replacing.

A consumables budget is the way that we pay for that. Because now we have stated supports, I can’t sacrifice one of my previous showers for a tyre.

If I was agency managed, like I was under my $1 plan, I would have to go to a registered provider like Life without Barriers or Aruma for my tyre.

But they gave me self management again. But no funding for a $35 bicycle tyre, or the more expensive Batec tyre.

The bike tyre is the more pressing issue. And it’s about to pop, I reckon.

So let’s see what happens. Will it pop while I’m in the middle of a road? Will it pop when I am near a kerb, spilling me and forty kilos of chair into traffic? Who knows? FROGGER!

For those not in the know, consumables are things like;

* Continence products (pads, catheters, drainage bags)
* Disposable gloves
* Wipes
* Low-cost wound dressings related to disability support
* Feeding consumables (such as enteral feeding syringes and giving sets)
* Protective bedding
* Modified eating utensils
* Low-cost assistive products under the relevant price limits
* Batteries for disability-related equipment (in some circumstances)

Before the NDIS, most paraplegics used to steal catheters from hospitals if they didn’t have the money for it. No other choice.

Apparently, I now have to do a massively expensive Functional capacity assessment just to get the consumables that I’ve been routinely funded for in the past for the equipment that has been funded THROUGH THE NDIS.

This would, I imagine (Melissa and Andrew) apply to things like stump liners and socks for amps. They are not things most people use, nor are they optional extras.

I’m using my chair as an example because most people understand the need for one, when they don’t understand more complicated things like feeding consumables or stim toys - but they are all just as important as each other.

And by the way, a basic bike‑style tyre fitted at a bike shop might cost around $35-70 per wheel all‑up, whereas a specialist wheelchair tyre fitted via mobility services can easily run AUD 150-200+ per wheel - roughly three to four times more expensive. Make it make sense.

21 days til the inquiry ends. Message your Labor Senator or leave a message on their FB page about why this Bill must be stopped.

When and if my tyre pops, then I’ll diarise what happens and how it feels - if I can.

Because it’s going to be far more illustrative of this absolute shitfuckery than just being $35 out of pocket.

LETS GO!

[Maureen Daemon @VirginMother]

@ArtistAffame I would love to see a glimpse after you are all settled in 😌

[Jenny Difficult-Frecklington-Jones 🇵🇸🇱🇧🇮🇷 @JonesHowDareYou]

Wilcox. #auspol #SitDown

[Maureen Daemon @VirginMother]

@ThatEricAlper Ahhhh ooooo!