Elizabeth Webber 💉💉💉🇺🇦💉💉🦜🕷🐧

A gardening, bird lover and science fan with an addiction to geology and the natural world. And food. And beer.

[Andrew Leigh @ALeighMP]

At the National Press Club today, I spoke about rebuilding trust in Australian civic life.

Our government is backing charities to bring people together and speak up for their communities.

The goal: to make Australia a country of joiners again.
https://t.co/UaugJ9Na4k #auspol

[John Collins @Logically_JC]

This one hits hard.

[Just Your Average Punter @Your_Avg_Punter]

Agree with Julia - where are the people who funded this & the billboard company who let it pass their ethics test - pathetic…
It’s not free speech - it’s vile behaviour for particularly the youthful women of Australia

[Elizabeth Webber 💉💉💉🇺🇦💉💉🦜🕷🐧 @e_webberish]

@SandyHorne61 Why are we always twitchers in such articles? I consider myself a bird watcher.

[MFWitches @MFWitches]

A lot of people are saying on social media today that a public campaign against Premier Jacinta Allen using the phrase “Ditch the Witch” isn’t sexist because they’ve heard of MFW and know we proudly use the word witches.

Please.

They must not have heard about how we started, which was as the result of an extraordinarily sexist text message sent by Peter Dutton to a mate, and which he accidentally sent to a woman journo instead.

They must not understand history, in which all women who were in the slightest way outspoken or different or not perfectly aligned with patriarchal requirements were called witches and often viciously murdered for their so-called sins.

And they must not understand parody, in which we witches have re-claimed the word “witch” to mean all women who protest the outrageous misogyny so many men practice with barely any constraint.

Because we’re here to clearly say that yes: the campaign against Allen is deeply sexist, just as it was sexist when it was used to denigrate then-PM Julia Gillard (pic in comments), and when it’s been used to stir up hatred towards any women with power or influence or anything other than simply being perfectly pretty and perfectly unheard.

What’s more, the campaign couldn’t be anything BUT deeply problematic, funded as it has been by a consortium of what appears to be a deeply right-wing group of men who want nothing more than to oust Allen from her job, and promoted widely in #NewsCorpse publications in ways which further harm Allen and her government:
“‘[Allan] doesn’t answer questions. She’s not accountable to everything … It’s just how people are feeling. That’s what they’re resorting to’ Puleo said. ‘That’s not a political ad. It’s basically what the Victorian public feel’.”
https://t.co/GQ2N1VsQiN?

The campaign is despicable, and the billboards should be banned. Today. Anything else is unacceptable, and does nothing but show the endemic hatred for women among large sections of conservative men and politics in this country (and among many progressive men and groups too, but that’s another story).

For fuck sake, ban these billboards. They’re hate speech. And us calling ourselves witches as a way to parody that hate will never make the use of the word okay in other settings and formats.

That’s all.

_______

We won’t stop till advertisers stop funding filth. Go to https://t.co/gefVqPNei2 to learn how to contact advertisers. Or go directly to FOE lists for ongoing campaigns here: https://t.co/Es49qK4lMQ . Send all responses you get. From companies to [email protected].

Please also support our work to get rid of Vile Kyle: it’s a subscription to the future for the price of a coffee (or two) each month:
https://t.co/LES4fbVPKU

#ToYourBrooms

[stranger @strangerous10]

@KowalskiKit @SenKatyG @JacintaAllanMP Hi Kit, not sure calling out misogyny has anything to do with your transphobia. Let’s not make this about you and your issues, please stand up for women for a change, even if you don’t agree with them.

[Elizabeth Webber 💉💉💉🇺🇦💉💉🦜🕷🐧 @e_webberish]

@strategywoman So sad.

[Misinformation Fact Checker. @MisinfoFact]

Pauline Hanson says young people don't want to work, but If you only showed up to work 12% of the time, you'd probably be looking for a new job.

Yet Pauline Hanson wants working Australians to take her seriously after an 88% absence rate at Senate Estimates.
#auspol #OneNation

[Elizabeth Webber 💉💉💉🇺🇦💉💉🦜🕷🐧 @e_webberish]

@wtb_Michael 😁

[Elizabeth Webber 💉💉💉🇺🇦💉💉🦜🕷🐧 @e_webberish]

@CallissClan I had to look up that word and am none the wiser. 😁

[MFWitches @MFWitches]

How the fuck do we live in a country where if 30 dogs had been murdered and thousands more violently harmed by owners this year there’d be a national outcry and money galore to fix the problem but as it’s only women and kids being killed and maimed it’s … crickets?

#NewsCorpse

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

Is Albo using his sinister communist tax changes to destroy the housing market?
— First Dog on the Moon
https://t.co/VgvjMhjWib

[Elizabeth Webber 💉💉💉🇺🇦💉💉🦜🕷🐧 @e_webberish]

@visitnorthyork No.

[Prof. Carl Sagan @ProfCarlSagan]

If we don’t explain science to the public, others will fill the gap with nonsense.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SIR ALAN BATES - THANKS GOD FOR THIS MAN. EH.

In 1998 Alan Bates and his partner Suzanne packed up their lives in West Yorkshire and moved to a small town in North Wales.

They put everything they had into a post office. Every penny. Every hope. A future they had planned together.

Two years later the software started lying. Money appeared to be missing. He called the helpline 507 times. He kept going. He kept records. He kept asking.

The Post Office's response was simple. It wasn't the software. It was him.

In 2003 they sent him a letter terminating his contract. No reason given. He lost £65,000. Everything he and Suzanne had invested, gone. Their private notes about him, revealed at the public inquiry decades later, described the situation with devastating corporate elegance. He had become unmanageable.

That is what they called a man asking why the numbers were wrong.

So he did what any reasonable person would do after losing everything to an institution that called them a liar.

He spent the next 25 years fighting back with nothing. No legal fund. No media empire. No government support. Just a burning refusal to let them win.

He wrote letters promising his continued and increased resolve to bring this to people who would have no choice but to act, regardless of how many years it took.

It took 25.

While he was fighting, at least 13 people who had been through the same thing took their own lives. People who couldn't hold on long enough. People who needed someone to believe them and found nobody there.

While he was fighting, the Post Office and its lawyers billed £265 million in legal fees between 2014 and 2024. Making sure the truth stayed buried. Making sure men like Alan Bates ran out of road before they ran out of fight.

He didn't run out of fight.

He rejected three compensation offers he considered insults. He watched an @ITV drama turn his life into a television event. He watched politicians suddenly discover outrage they had been too busy to feel for two decades. He watched the country cry at a story it had been ignoring since 1999.

In June 2024 they gave him a knighthood. Twenty-five years after calling him unmanageable.

In November 2025 he settled his compensation claim. He received 49.2% of what he was owed.

No executive has been charged. Fujitsu (@Fujitsu_Global) still holds government contracts. The Post Office (@PostOffice) is still standing.

This country failed Alan Bates for 25 years. It failed every person who could not hold on long enough to see what he saw. It handed him a title instead of justice and called itself generous.

He deserved better. They all did.

Teach this man in every school in Britain. Not as a feel-good story. As a warning about what happens when ordinary people trust institutions that were never built to protect them.

And as proof that one person, with nothing but the truth and the stubbornness to keep saying it, can make an entire country look at itself in the mirror.

Even if it takes 25 years to get them to look.

Sources: @ComputerWeekly | @BBCNews AND many others

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

The year was 1957. Inside a modest Sony research laboratory in Tokyo, a 32-year-old physicist named Leo Esaki was doing something that looked almost embarrassingly simple. He was pressing a tiny sliver of germanium semiconductor between two electrodes and watching what happened. No massive particle accelerators. No sprawling university budgets. Just a quiet man, a small crystal, and an idea that the textbooks said shouldn't work.

What Esaki noticed was extraordinary. Electrons weren't behaving the way classical physics demanded. Instead of climbing over an energy barrier the way any sensible particle was supposed to, they were slipping straight through it. Vanishing on one side and reappearing on the other, as if the wall simply didn't exist. This was quantum tunneling, a phenomenon that had been theorized for decades but never cleanly demonstrated in a semiconductor until that moment.

The implications were staggering. Esaki hadn't just confirmed a ghostly quirk of quantum mechanics. He had shown that it could be harvested, controlled, and put to work. The device born from his discovery, the tunnel diode, could switch between states faster than any conventional transistor of its era. It was a signal that the future of electronics wouldn't just be about building smaller components, but about bending the rules of nature itself.

Physics laboratories across the world took notice almost immediately. The tunnel diode ignited a wave of research into quantum devices that rippled from Bell Labs in New Jersey to research centers in the Soviet Union. Scientists who had spent careers working within the comfortable boundaries of classical electronics suddenly found themselves peering into the strange, probabilistic world of quantum mechanics.

In 1973, the Nobel Committee in Stockholm made it official. Esaki was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Ivar Giaever, the two of them recognized for independently illuminating the tunneling phenomenon from different angles, Esaki in semiconductors and Giaever in superconductors. It was a recognition not just of two brilliant careers, but of an entire new chapter in the story of physics.

Today, Leo Esaki turns 101 years old. Born in Osaka on March 12, 1925, he has lived long enough to watch the quantum principles he uncovered in that Tokyo lab become foundational to the technology billions of people carry in their pockets every single day. The man who once watched electrons walk through walls is still here. And the world he helped build is still catching up to him.

[Elizabeth Webber 💉💉💉🇺🇦💉💉🦜🕷🐧 @e_webberish]

@CallissClan Look at those feet!

[Ben Pennings @BenPennings]

Pauline and Gina’s soldier 😕 He drew swastikas on trees across the road from their food truck and then attacked her physically while saying she “didn’t belong here” and that “she needed to go back to her own country”. Sound familiar?

https://t.co/S7fmTrhWxN

[stranger @strangerous10]

Barbara Pocock fries KPMG CEO Andrew Yates calling his reasons for not misleading the Senate on Power Mapping “quite pathetic” & “really quite offensive”
“You’ve lied to us more than once”
“Perhaps 4 times & probably more that I don’t know about”
Yates on the ropes💥#Estimates

[David Pocock @DavidPocock]

We are one of the first generations to have grown up not being able to gaze up at the full majesty of the night sky.

There are simple steps we can take to ensure Australians don't lose sight of the stars.
https://t.co/3yIAnwW1ox