Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sunday Morning Open Thread: Global News

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Global News

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Congratulations, Australians of the centre-left!

Victory belongs to Anthony Albanese, only the fourth Labor leader since World War Two to oust a Liberal prime minister, but the 2022 Australian election was primarily a rejection of Scott Morrison and the brand of politics he has come to personify.

A politics that denied, and sometimes even mocked, the seriousness of the climate crisis – as Treasurer, Morrison laughingly brandished a lump of coal in parliament.

A politics that many female voters especially found bloke-ish and boorish…

At a time when conservative politics down under has displayed some small-t Trumpian traits, historians may conclude that Australian voters evicted from office the country’s first post-truth prime minister…

Albanese is the son of a single mother who grew up in public housing in Sydney. His biography doubles as an Australian dream. But the 59-year-old has become better at sharing his backstory than outlining a compelling vision for Australia.

That said, his promise to make the country a renewable energy powerhouse, along with his pledge to adopt the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which is so important to First Nations people, has the potential to give his government a narrative that weaves together the unaddressed challenges of the future and the unfinished business of the past…

The federal election has made politics here greener, more feminine and, at a time of creeping Americanisation, more emphatically Australian.

Perhaps the overwhelming message from voters is that they want a different kind of politics. Certainly, 2022 will be remembered for its shock to the system result.

 

Read the room, Etna!…

 

 

Reader Interactions

47Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Aussies were suffering for 10 years under a conservative government. Genuinely good news. Hope they can make the most of it.

  2. 2.

    Layer8Problem

    Murdoch’s newspapers are gonna be lit. “Every One of You So-Called ‘Voters’ Should Be ASHAMED of Yourselves!!”

  3. 3.

    debbie

    The Conservatives are best embodied by the image of Morrison tackling that little boy.

  5. 5.

    jeffreyw

    I assume that ‘Liberal Prime Minister’ being the opposite of what we in the USA would normally understand it to be is a result of the below the equator location where everything is upside down.

  6. 6.

    RaflW

    So a medium size Anglophone nation can reject trumpian bullshit and climate-mocking. That’s quite refreshing news!

  7. 7.

    Baud

    _________
    >>as Treasurer, Morrison laughingly >>brandished a lump of coal in parliament
    _________

    What an idiot. You’re supposed to use a snowball.

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    Yay (with one caveat*)!

    Perennial two thumbs way, way up movie “The Stunt Man” currently available of the free-with-ads streaming service Tubi. Commercial interruptions, thankfully, are infrequent and brief.

    IMHO, holds up as well today as when it came out 40 years ago, with but a scant sprinkling of era-specific inclusions which in no way detract and are amusing in retrospect (phone call requires a dime, no picture on a driver’s license, etc.). Peter O’Toole once again validated his black belt in scenery mastication.

    *Entirety of the closing credits does not roll, resulting in cutting out a final soupçon of dialogue at the very end of them.

  11. 11.

    p.a.

    Next time in power, who will Aussie conservaturds try to disenfranchise?

    O/T: shouldn’t you have called this site Jackalations?

  12. 12.

    kalakal

    A very encouraging part is Murdoch’s media is very powerful in Oz. The right got stomped despite having Rupe’s minions doing their very worst for them

  13. 13.

    Tony Jay

    Elected as a firm rejection of modern Conservatism (but that’s not ‘Conservatism’ wail the pro-Conservative media, its ‘Trumpism’ or ‘Right Populism’) with the Greens surging forward to keep Australian Labor honest.

    Are you watching , Nu New Labour? Or are you too busy replaying the 90’s in your empty heads and dreaming of centre-right domination?

  14. 14.

    NotMax

    ‘@p.a.

    In keeping with the digital milieu, wouldn’t that be E-jackalations?

    ;)

  15. 15.

    TS

    It really was a strange election result. The biggest winners were the smaller groups – with the colored names
    Greens – who are reasonably popular as an alternate to Labor (LW environmental party – now the government) – voted for by those who think Labor is not left enough and/or not concerned enough about climate change
    and a group of independents who became known as the
    Teals (mainly affluent, well educated women) – midway between blue Liberal party – RW) and the greens. They were voted for by the people who thought Liberal had moved too far to the right and were not concerned about climate change, women’s rights and political integrity.

    Labor’s campaign was not particularly good & they made a bad selection of a few candidates, but fortunately the country had had enough of trump’s bff & supporter of the right of religious schools to discriminate – Scott Morrison.

    I lived through many of our conservative governments – this has been the worst of them. Australia has a number of structural issues which they have ignored for the past 9 years. The number of socially aware independents and the election of Labor will hopefully see these issues addressed.

  18. 18.

    WaterGirl

    From the article at the link:

    “Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska has given a rare interview with her husband.

    This is only the second time the couple have been seen together since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

    She said that even though she hadn’t seen her husband for two and a half months, not even the war could take him away from her.”

    :: tears ::

  22. 22.

    Amir Khalid

    I swear, as a guitar player there’s nothing I dread more than restringing a Telecaster with a toploading bridge. You wouldn’t believe how finicky a job it is. Fortunately, the guitar and I just got through it safely. Two more clean-and-restring jobs to go.

    The good news from Oz is good. Does it mean that Uncle Rupert Media is finally starting to lose its hold on the populace?

  24. 24.

    kmax

    First comment on this temporary home.
    I am just an old mainframer but my Google skills are still decent.
    If thousands of websites are offline due to this outage I would expect it to be big news.
    Yet my searches find no hint of it.

  25. 25.

    kalakal

    ‘@Amir Khalid Never had the pleasure of restringing a Tele. My particular hate is restringing my Traveler Speedster ( It’s a heavily mutated Strat type that’s hyper portable for when travelling). It’s great for when I’m on trips but horrible to restring

  26. 26.

    Mike in NC

    Rupert Murdoch is one of the worst people who ever lived. His rancid FOX News gave us O’Reilly, Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, and Donald Fucking Trump. We are all waiting for them to stage Neo-Nazi Coup 2.0.

  27. 27.

    Chris Johnson

    Amir, one rival for that might be restringing a Les Paul where you’re running the strings through the tailpiece backward so they can go over the top of the tailpiece and then the bridge (for a flatter angle over the bridge) meaning you’ve got to string spare ball-ends on each string so the end part doesn’t stick out the end of the tailpiece.

    Just as annoying to do as it is to understand when told about in a balloon-juice-in-exile post :)

    Australia news is good. I’m in Canada looking after my mate (of this last year) who’s been to the hospital last week. Returning home by the end of this week. I hope to see Balloon Juice return home soon, too :)

  28. 28.

    WaterGirl

    ‘@kmax said:

    “If thousands of websites are offline due to this outage I would expect it to be big news. Yet my searches find no hint of it.”

    I think we all agree that the lack of publicity about this is very unusual. I suspect that either it’s a big enough hack that the government is involved and is keeping a lid on it – OR – That the PR side of 365 Data Centers is working very hard to keep this under wraps.

    I *can* guarantee that this is not a Balloon Juice site-specific issue.

    I *can* guarantee that this is not an issue with our site hosting.

    I *can* guarantee that there are some big web sites down, one of which is 365 Data Centers itself, or 356 Data Centers, as i like to call them today, after 9 days out of service.

    There’s plenty to speculate about, but there is indeed a big outage, and Balloon Juice got swept up in it.

  29. 29.

    WaterGirl

    ‘@Chris Johnson

    “I hope to see Balloon Juice return home soon, too.”

    So say we all!

  30. 30.

    MagdaInBlack

    ‘@WaterGirl : Thank you. I’m sure I’m not the only one google searching and thinking “wtf?”
    I keep my thoughts to myself because I’m sure you folks trying to fix this have had them all x 10,000 ❤️

  31. 31.

    kmax

    ‘@WaterGirl said

    “either it’s a big enough hack that the government is involved and is keeping a lid on it – OR – That the PR side of 365 Data Centers is working very hard to keep this under wraps.”

    I think this has been mentioned here before and also that this is an existential crisis for 365 Data Centers, but I am still amazed they have kept a lid on it for so long.

    Thanks WG for helping us move to this temporary home. I like the others was really feeling lost without the juice.

  32. 32.

    dnfree

    ‘@kmax
    Same here, can’t understand why this isn’t bigger news, especially after more than a week. Have all their customers signed NDAs?

    I first worked on mainframes in the 1960s (IBM 360, wave of the future! EBCDIC! Bytes! Hexadecimal!) and then, several job changes later, there I was again on a mainframe in the 2000s. I used to tell my much younger co-workers that anyone who did JCL in the 1960s should not have to still be doing it in the new millennium.

  35. 35.

    kmax

    ‘@ dnfree

    I have been MF but for a brief period in the mid-90’s.
    I am retirement-age but there literally is nobody to replace my specialized skillset. My peers are dying off on the job.
    Good thing I want to work till nearer 70, cuz it looks like my employer will need me till then.

  37. 37.

    dnfree

    ‘@kmax

    It’s interesting to contemplate the many different systems I worked on. I retired when the company still running on a mainframe home-grown system decided to get with the times. I never actually voluntarily left a job. Either I got laid off or the company was shut down or sold. It was great that the last company paid me extra to stay time during the transition and then I could retire.

  38. 38.

    Amir Khalid

    How do you like that? My mouse just died on me. I can’t really work my laptop without one, so it’s off to the shops for a new USB mouse first thing tomorrow. I hate getting up early. Grumble.

  39. 39.

    WaterGirl

    ‘@dnfree said:

    “Same here, can’t understand why this isn’t bigger news, especially after more than a week. Have all their customers signed NDAs?”

    Here’s the thing. The “customers” of 356 Data Centers are site hosts. And 356 appears to be telling THEM jack shit. So all the site hosts who relied on them KNOW JACK SHIT, so there’s no NDA requiring silence, it’s just that they know very little.

    On the day it went down, after it had been down for 3-4 hours, they said “we expect this to be resolved within the hour.” THEN SILENCE.

    The next day it was “in a day or so”.

    Then for days it was “blah blah blah we’re investigating”.

    Late in the evening on Thursday they said: “We have identified the root cause of the May 14 cyber incident.”

    On Friday they started using words like “recovery” and “plan for recovery.”

    Then more pablum about making plans, but nothing concrete.

    On Saturday, our site hosts said this: “365 has initiated a security process to reset user, endpoint, and server passwords and cryptographic keys. They have also introduced additional firewall and network isolation tools to provide an additional degree of protection.”365’s goal is to relaunch our data center exactly as it was prior to the cyber event.”

    But there are no firm dates yet.

    356 Data Centers is saying that they have “started a plan for restoration of services”.

    Progress, but no timeline.

    356 Data Centers says we should have a timeline “very soon”. I am guessing that “we have started a plan for restoration of services” is is something we will hear for several days BEFORE we actually see a plan and have a timeline for being back up..

  40. 40.

    Layer8Problem

    ‘@dnfree: Part of my free-time filler lately has been installing and running MVS 3.8J on an emulator on my laptop, because reasons and it’s less oily than car work. “Look hon, a FORTRAN IV sysout! A 3270 green screen!” Response: “IT’S THE TWENTY-FIRST GODDAMN CENTURY!”

  41. 41.

    Kmax

    ‘@Watergirl

    Back for a moment.
    Thanks WG for your insight.
    Please know i was in no way criticizing the team.
    This is obviously above our pay grades.
    Thanks again.

  42. 42.

    trollhattan

    This is huge, as Australia has been horridly retrograde on climate, both with moving away from coal generation and more importantly, being the solar system’s largest coal exporter, feeding India and China’s awful coal addictions. There’s no instant fix but they can now steer in the other direction.

    If only there were somewhere they might develop solar generation. If only….

  44. 44.

    dnfree

    ‘@Layer8Problem

    I started on Fortran II, but by the time I was actually employed we were up to FORTRAN IV. I remember when a character string was called Hollerith and you had to count the characters, like 11HHELLO WORLD. Wow, I would love to see your setup!

  46. 46.

    Ruckus

    WaterGirl
    I wonder a couple of possibilities.
    It’s something in 365’s efforts/setup that is so simple and wrong that no one ever noticed it till it failed and never looked for it when it did and/or it is a now ex employee who was/is pissed off and left them a present after they left. Either way it could have been something rather unusual in their business that no one would notice until after the fact and even then may not have seen it. Either way it could be very embarrassing for them so they are keeping their mouths very tightly shut. I’m leaning towards employee, as not all their centers are down and the CloudFlare reports are as slim or slimmer than what you folks know.

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