The PR Blog

Some time ago I watched a series on Netflix called " Babylon Berlin." It awoke an interest in the Weimar Republic and the change that occurred in Germany between the First World War and the Second World War when Germany flirted with democracy under the leadership of Hindenburg, the President of Germany from 1925 until 1934.

It was raw, gritty, dark and often troubling. Explicit in its portrayal of the excesses that humanity can so often, like today, embrace or at the very least, tolerate or ignore.

I was struck by the divide between those who had so much and those who had so little. Much like our world today. 

From the center of the continental United States to the middle of Australia is 9,241 miles. It’s a little further from London to Sydney—about 10,572 miles. But in economic matters—the laws of economics being both immutable and universal—the distances between the world’s cities and countries are far smaller.

I was recently reminded of this fact while researching the economic history of the Land Down Under. Curious to find out if Australia’s move away from a gold standard bore any similarities to events in the US and the UK, I discovered that the parallels are striking.

Our Governments need to admit that they were wrong. Cut their losses and get us out of the boathouse and set sail once more. We have been at anchor too long. 

Set sail on already charted waters and dare to venture out of the so called safe harbour that is politically correct, poll driven mumbo jumbo " I am a rabid wanker and you should all be proud of it. " country. 

Can we just start sailing again because I am sick and tired of being stuck in limbo and my sails, quite frankly, are running out of puff. 

By 7.30 am the morning sun had pushed far above a shimmering cloud line. Ignoring that it was final days of a bloody-hot Australian summer it still bit into the weathered necks of some thirty habitual punters who were already milling outside a locked security gate on the Eastern periphery of Sydney’s vast domestic airport.

Meanwhile, some 650 Kms. to the North West, in the NSW city of Armidale, officials were preparing for the 148th running of the Armidale Cup; a horse race that draws punters and good-time blokes from around the nation.

Through the chain-link fence and beyond the ragged grass awaited our chartered DC3.   

A long time ago the universe was made of ice. Then one day the ice began to melt, and a mist rose into the sky.. Out of the mist came a giant made of frost and the earth and heavens were made from his body. That is how the world began, and that is how the world will end. Not by fire but by Ice. An Ancient Scandinavian Legend, quoted by Robert W Felix in his great book:“NOT BY FIRE BUT BY ICE”.

Earth is living in the latter days of the Holocene Warm Era. This is the latest short, fertile, warm interlude within the long, barren, Pleistocene Ice Age.

At 9.41am on Monday 15 December 2014, Man Monis directed Tori Johnson (the manager of the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney) to call 000 and say that all those in the cafe had been taken hostage by an Islamic State operative armed with a gun and explosives.

Eighteen hostages were held in the cafe for 16.5 hours. Over that period, 12 of the 18 hostages were able to escape in four separate episodes.

At around 2.13am on Tuesday 16th December, the cafe manager Tori Johnson was executed by Man Moris. Following the execution, police stormed the cafe and another hostage, Katrina Dawson, was struck by fragments of one or more deflected police bullets and died at the scene. The hostage-taker, Man Monis, was also killed in the firefight that followed the police storming the cafe.