bridgette

let me get back to you on that

[the Juice Media @thejuicemedia]

The Government™ made an ad about Ai Data Centres, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative. #auspol

(Tag @AlboMP and tell him you want a data centre moratorium until strong legislation is in place)

[Zeke Hausfather @hausfath]

I've previously done 2026 and 2027 global temperature estimates for the Earth's surface, but a lot of people also seem interested in what will happen in the lower troposphere (TLT). Historically TLT has had a much bigger response to El Niño and La Niña than we see on the surface:

[NowThis Impact @nowthisimpact]

This speech has been circulating in MAGA circles, and they’re absolutely horrified by it.

[The Conversation - Australia + New Zealand @ConversationEDU]

Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, yet leadership positions remain overwhelmingly held by white men. @ProfCarlRhodes @ProfPullen @Macquarie_Uni @UTSEngage https://t.co/IJiB2w3Dmj

[bridgette @bridgette_]

@grok So you're only British if you're white?

[bridgette @bridgette_]

Hey @grok fact check this

[Avery Daye @AveryDaye]

Europe is being conquered.

-Only 10% of children in Brussels are of Belgian origin.
-British residents are a minority in London, and 10 boroughs have a majority non-white population.
-Mohammad is the number 1 baby name in England.
-Sweden has 65 no-go zones.
-There are 900 uncontrolled areas across Europe.

[Nicole Chvastek @NChvastek]

Watching the chilling rise of the TrumpMurdoch hard right?
It’s happening under our noses.
Billionaire Gina Rinehart owns One Nation and the LNP, writes their policies, provides their transport https://t.co/l0i3mSDCYD

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

https://t.co/aPDa6Rqgkn

[Jane Caro @JaneCaro]

The powers that be really, really, REALLY want to make sure women shut the fuck up about rape. https://t.co/knBX0ciorx

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

While millions of families struggle to put food on the table Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos & Mark Zuckerberg own more wealth than the bottom HALF of Americans.

That’s what oligarchy is about. That’s what a rigged economy is about.

Is it any wonder that people in this country are angry?

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

For every significant war in our lifetimes involving the US, the bipartisan DC war class becomes enraged when it ends.

War is the lifeblood of DC. It provides them their profit, their power, and their self-esteem: to prance as courageous without doing anything actually brave.

[Paul Bongiorno @PaulBongiorno]

Can we handle the truth on climate? https://t.co/dgrnIIHLOZ via @SatPaper
Please educate yourself and read this scientific primer.

[Urban Wronski @UrbanWronski]

Here’s the sober reality, and it dwarfs any fantasy about “asbestos in wind turbines” by several orders of magnitude.

Australia isn’t dealing with a few grams of asbestos in imported brake pads.
We are dealing with millions of tonnes of asbestos left across the continent from a century of mining, construction, and industrial use.

Here are the key facts, drawn from the Australian Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency (ASEA), state health authorities, and historical mining records.

⸻

THE REAL ASBESTOS RISK IN AUSTRALIA: MILLIONS OF TONNES FROM MINING, NOT RENEWABLE ENERGY

1. WA’s Wittenoom (blue asbestos): 3 million tonnes of tailings

Wittenoom Gorge was once the largest crocidolite (blue asbestos) mine in the world.
•3 million tonnes of asbestos-laden tailings dumped across the landscape
•Tailings used as road base, building fill, and even playground surfaces
•Townsite now contaminated across hundreds of hectares
•WA government still removing families and demolishing structures into the 2020s
•Thousands of workers and residents dead or sick

This is the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.

Nothing in renewable energy comes remotely close.

⸻

2. NSW’s Baryulgil (white asbestos): contaminated soils + community health crisis

James Hardie operated the Baryulgil chrysotile mine for decades.
•Tailings used for roads, yards, community areas
•Chronic mesothelioma cluster among Bundjalung families
•Asbestos present in soil, drainage, and building materials

Again: actual, widespread environmental contamination.

⸻

3. Queensland asbestos mines: widespread diffuse contamination

QLD had several dozen chrysotile mining and milling sites.
•Contaminated pits
•Abandoned mine waste
•Residual fibres in soils
•Remediation still ongoing at multiple sites

These are real contamination sites, not hypothetical.

⸻

4. South Australia: Woodsreef (near Barraba)

One of Australia’s largest asbestos dumps.
•25 million tonnes of asbestos-containing waste rock
•Piles up to 70 metres high
•Fibres still blowing in dry conditions
•Ongoing state monitoring since the 1990s

This alone makes the “asbestos in a lift brake pad” story laughable.

⸻

5. Building legacy: 6,000+ products, millions of homes

Between 1940 and 1990 Australia imported and manufactured over 1 million tonnes of asbestos-containing materials.

This includes:
•fibro sheeting
•lagging
•insulation
•adhesives
•concrete pipes
•roofing
•brake pads
•cladding
•gaskets
•vinyl tiles
•electrical boards

ASEA estimates:
•1 in 3 Australian homes contains asbestos
•Many schools, hospitals, sheds, garages, and outbuildings still contain it

This is the real asbestos burden.

⸻

TOTAL ESTIMATE: Tens of millions of tonnes of asbestos-containing waste remain across Australia

Between abandoned mines, contaminated soils, industrial tailings, and asbestos-containing building materials, Australia is dealing with:

➡️ 20–40 million tonnes of legacy asbestos-containing material
➡️ Millions of contaminated sites
➡️ Hundreds of thousands of affected structures

Compare that to:
•a few grams of bonded asbestos inside lift brake pads in sealed machinery at a handful of wind farms.

It’s not even in the same universe.

⸻

THE LINE THAT CUTS THROUGH THE HYSTERIA

Australia has millions of tonnes of asbestos scattered across old mine sites, tailings dumps, roads, yards, and 1 in 3 homes — yet anti-renewables activists want you to panic about a few enclosed brake pads inside sealed tower lifts. It’s theatre, not public health.

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

Word of the day is ‘quockerwodger’ (19th century): a puppet politician whose strings are pulled entirely by someone else.

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

Very happy to read that 'hurkle-durkle', meaning to stay in bed *long* after it's time to get up, is being revived in current US slang, having lain dormant for 150 years! It's about time.

https://t.co/R0TSNMepth

[Hugh Riminton @hughriminton]

Oddly, for all of everything, Australians rank in the top 10 happiest nations on earth (the highest in Asia/Pacific), and our multiculturalism is a strong factor in that happiness, with 84% supporting it (Scanlon Institute).
https://t.co/jD1Weiy026

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: Doug Krugman served for 24 years in the United States Marine Corps. He resigned because of Trump and then wrote this:

On Sept. 30, at an unprecedented gathering of senior military leadership, President Donald Trump said, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room — of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.” I wasn’t invited to be in the room that day, and I had decided months earlier that I had to leave. By coincidence, Sept. 30 was my last day as a colonel in the United States Marine Corps. I gave up my career out of concern for our country’s future.

United States military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution without mental reservation or purpose of evasion. I swore or repeated that oath under five presidents, starting with former president Bill Clinton. I risked my life for it, serving as an infantry officer in two wars. I watched Marines die for it.

No commander in chief is perfect. President Clinton’s moral failures are well known. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq might be one of the worst errors in U.S. history. All recent presidents share responsibility for our failure in Afghanistan. I continued to serve despite all that because I believed the Constitution brought the country more success than failure, and I believed our presidents took their oaths to it seriously.
With President Trump, I no longer believe that. During his first term, his actions became increasingly difficult for me to justify, culminating with the Jan. 6 attack on Congress as it tried to execute its duties. I hoped he had learned from those errors, but it only took a few days of his second term for me to realize he had not. I could not swear without reservation to follow a commander in chief who seemed so willing to disregard the Constitution.

My departure was not about policy disagreements, which exist in every administration. President Trump won in 2024 and has the right to implement his policies within the law.

My first reservations were about promises and actions that I thought were morally wrong even if they were possibly legal. The Constitution gives the president the power to pardon, but pardoning roughly 1,600 of those who tried to violently overthrow the results of an election didn’t help defend the Constitution. Likewise, I didn’t see it as moral to deny refuge to Afghans who risked their lives to support us, which he did on Jan. 22. Ignoring reality to take advantage of vague laws to assume emergency powers is also immoral. For those who believe in honoring their word, breaking promises our country has made — including some trade agreements President Trump made himself — is not moral. These are not the kinds of actions that I’m willing to risk my life to defend.

Worse than immorality, however, has been President Trump’s willingness to disregard the law and Constitution to achieve his goals. When asked in May about the Fifth Amendment requirements for due process and if he needed to uphold the Constitution as president, the first words out of his mouth were “I don’t know.”

This month, National Guard officers received orders from the defense secretary that their governors opposed. A federal judge intervened, citing the lack of apparent emergency and the 10th Amendment. Those commanders and units were stuck between competing orders with no clear answer. When the president’s orders push or cross legal limits and put commanders in these situations, cohesion within our military is at risk.
President Trump’s description of Portland as a “war zone” is as fantastical as his belief that the June protests in a few blocks of Los Angeles would somehow “obliterate” the massive city of nearly 4 million. In both cases, his words had little connection to reality. Every dubious basis he gives for an order creates more room for doubt, more room for reservations and more threats to our unity.

The president said to military leadership on Sept. 30 of fighting domestic enemies: “And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” It wasn’t clear if he was referring to actual crime or to political criticism of him. In either case, military force is not the answer.

Some of his voters likely dismiss President Trump’s seeming disregard for the Constitution — such as him saying that criticizing the president should be illegal, despite the First Amendment — as him exaggerating. Others apparently don’t care, believing that achieving their ends justifies any means. This president acts as though one election makes 236 years of constitutional order irrelevant. Instead of trying to work within the Constitution, or to amend it, President Trump is testing how far he can ignore it. If voters and legislators cannot close the gaps in our laws to clarify the limits to presidential power, those who serve our government will continue to struggle. The next president — of either party — may continue us down this path toward collapse.

I do not claim to speak for any other person or institution. I respect those who still serve, many of whom have service contracts and can’t simply retire like I did. But if they have doubts about their orders, they are not alone. They should be confident in questioning possibly immoral or illegal orders, remembering they are responsible for their own actions, and knowing others are asking the same questions.

I voluntarily gave up my rank as the president suggested, but the future of our country is more important than any individual’s career, wealth or power. I have no regrets about my decision. I have given up the service I loved for the freedom to do the right thing, the freedom to speak my mind and the freedom to speak in defense of our country.

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

Word of the day, from Scots, is ‘hingum-tringum’, defined as ‘barely presentable; just about holding together’.

[Cheryl Kernot @cheryl_kernot]

Enjoy the comments.

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

Donald Trump was the President in 2020.