Work is very busy lately, and it's interfering with posting. But these things have caught my attention:
* What a competition it is to pick out the worst, most awful, person in the Trump administration, but Hegseth's unrelenting politicisation of the military puts him right up near the top:
A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said.
The outbreak at the base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables....
In the weeks since Mr. Hegseth’s vaccine policy took effect on April 21, only about 40 percent of Air Force trainees have opted to take the vaccine, which had long been mandatory, an Air Force official said.
In the aftermath of the outbreak, the Air Force issued an exception to the voluntary vaccine policy, requiring that all recruits at Lackland get flu shots — part of a broader effort to stem the virus’s spread.
Mr. Hegseth cast his decision to make the flu vaccine optional as a matter of religious freedom and medical autonomy.
“Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” he said in a video announcing his decision in April.
He described the longstanding flu vaccine requirement as an “absurd, overreaching” mandate that had served to “weaken our warfighting capabilities.”
I'm very curious as to what has happened to the average of political viewpoints in the military under Trump. We would have to start on the assumption that the average member has long leaned Right/conservative, but I would also assume the average recruit under Trump is far more to the Right than historical averages.
BUT: I can't imagine that the Iran war has engendered much happiness amongst those who have been deployed around the region, doing nothing much to no obvious good end. Surely their Trump allegiance would be being tested...
* In another New York Times article, Hegseth's politicisation is further covered:
So far this year, Mr. Hegseth has blocked the promotions of at least 40 senior officers to general and admiral ranks. About half of those are women or members of minority groups.
Read the whole thing, if you want, here.
* I can't access all of the review of this book at Nature News, but it sounds interesting:
The Common Good Economy: A New Compass Mariana Mazzucato Allen Lane (2026)
The 500 richest individuals on the planet added a record US$2.2 trillion to their fortunes in 2025 alone, while more than two billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. The charity Oxfam International, based in Nairobi, estimates that the super-rich in high-income countries extract around $30 million per hour from low- and middle-income nations, where roughly 85% of people in the world live.
As ever more people struggle to keep a roof over their heads, public money is increasingly being absorbed by military spending, which reached a staggering $2.7 trillion in 2024. Government-sponsored investments into ‘high-tech solutions’ are concentrated in this industry of death, further fuelling ecological devastation through mineral extraction and fossil-fuel use.
These figures offer only a glimpse into the profound irrationality of a society in which the production of goods and services — even those most essential to life — is subordinated to an abstract and violent logic of capitalist profit.
Building on her earlier influential ideas on technological change and the role of the state in innovation, economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that today’s environmental and social crises stem from an economy that is organized around extraction and shielded from meaningful democratic accountability. The Common Good Economy presents a road map for the urgent transformation that our societies must undertake.
The book challenges the dominant narratives of power and value that many of us have internalized through the framework of neoclassical economics. Rather than treating capitalist markets as natural developments that allow for freedom and collective opportunity, Mazzucato draws on the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi to emphasize how markets are politically constructed and deeply embedded, often in ways that undermine the common good.
She shows, for instance, how the prioritization of short-term financial returns and shareholder value has driven corporations to spend trillions buying back their own shares instead of investing productively. She also highlights how the housing crisis, even in wealthy countries such as the United Kingdom, has been intensified by governments increasingly subsidizing private landlords rather than funding social housing.
Although neoclassical economics reduces climate change and social injustice to ‘externalities’ — indirect inconveniences unrelated to the broader system — Mazzucato argues that today’s challenges require centring our collective actions around the common good. In her words, it means “getting economic relationships and structures right from the start, instead of correcting and picking up the pieces afterwards”.
Would make Sinclair Davidson and old Judith Sloan grind their teeth, I'm sure.
Deaths of 3 rugby players in Malaysia expose brutal side of heatwave
The incidents have raised questions about whether more precautions need to be taken in countries like Malaysia where the weather is harsh
* Further to the "man, we need a better class of billionaire" category, Gina Rinehart made a splash by giving her new bestie Pauline Hanson a toy bulldozer and tried to get the audience to play along, and ended up very cringe (even to Hanson, I suspect.)
Of course she would want to gift land to Elon Musk. He can't afford to buy any:
The mining magnate, who made a “significant investment” in Musk’s SpaceX company earlier this week reportedly worth $1.4bn, said the trillionaire could be given free land at “sparsely or non-populated islands” near Townsville for SpaceX satellite construction and launches.
And of course she would want to invite Israeli arms manufacturing to Australia, because, you know, that government is so internationally popular with its use of arms at the moment:
Rinehart, who spoke after being introduced by Pauline Hanson, also said the land could be provided to skilled Israelis and their families to build “advanced war drones, and or other advances in defence, and or improve upon their Israeli style domes, and manufacture them here to sell to our country to help make our people and critical infrastructure safe”.
I wouldn't be completely surprised if she embraced again using nuclear bombs to help her mining efforts.
* I've said for years that combining solar farms with actually farming beneath the panels seemed a sensible approach, especially in hot countries like Australia. The Chinese are showing how it can be done with fish farming beneath. (Sure, it doesn't look all that attractive from above, but flat salt pans are exactly an appealing landscape either.)
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