Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned! Trump has a Harp

 

The truth inflames MAGA

Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned! Trump has a Harp.

The incredible reaction to Jon Ossoff saying just one word about our emperor's new clothes -- "Natalie" -- shows what Democrats can do if they just speak the truth about what all of us can see with our own eyes

The Computer That Helped Win World War II

IEEE Spectrum – Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications: “One summer day in 1941, a British radio operator was monitoring German military frequencies and heard something unexpected in her headphones. A later report called it “strange new music.” 

Sounding unlike the familiar Morse dit-dit-dah of enciphered messages sent over the German Enigma network, the “new music” was a rhythmic warble of binary teletype code being transmitted at high speed. Germany’s wartime engineers had developed a radically new encryption and transmission system. It was way more advanced than Enigma, which was patented in 1920. 

To break the complex new cipher, engineer Tommy Flowers built Colossus, the world’s first large-scale programmable electronic digital computer. Flowers previously built Enigma-related codebreaking equipment for Alan Turing, the British mathematician. Colossus was installed in the British codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, about 80 kilometers from London. The room-size machine weighed around a tonne. The computer is being commemorated as an IEEE Milestone. The dedication ceremony is scheduled to be held 29 September at Bletchley Park.”

Google Buys All of Spirit Airlines’ Data to Feed Its AI Models

CNN: “Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worked there? Then your information will soon be feeding Google’s artificial intelligence model. The discount airline halted all operations in May, and it’s been selling off its remaining assets through the bankruptcy process ever since. While most of that is planes, equipment, and real estate, there’s other things that are valuable, too. It was disclosed late Monday that the company agreed to sell its data to Google for $10 million. 

That includes emails and internal communications, spreadsheets, transactions with the public including bookings and frequent flyer information as well as human resources information on its employees. The data has been stripped of anything that would allow individuals to be identified, according to the court filing. But it is still a massive amount of useful intelligence…”

See also Ars Technica: “Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data. Bankrupt Spirit accused of selling out workers in massive data sale to Google….

In a court filing Tuesday, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), a collective bargaining unit that represents Spirit workers, argued that Google relied on consumer protection laws to guarantee the data wouldn’t contain personally identifying information (PII). However, those laws do not cover worker confidentiality, and that allegedly leaves a huge privacy loophole in Google’s deal, especially when you consider that the tech giant is buying worker data, not consumer data…”

The Minns government has yet to respond to a recommendation by Adam Bell, SC, in his 2022 review of The Star

One patron, Patricia Zalavros, a 62-year-old pensioner who lives nearby in Department of Housing accommodation, has played the pokies until 4am six or seven nights a week in the Diamond Suite since its opening a decade ago.

The apparent disparity between Zalavros’ income and spending is known to Club Marconi. Her de facto partner, club director Angelo Ruisi, has had his membership recently suspended following an alleged altercation, but been allowed to continue to sit on the board.

Club Marconi reported $46 million in revenue last financial year – about 95 per cent from poker machines. The club has been the subject of several complaints over the conduct of executives and directors, some of whom have business relationships with the club.

Zalavros’ Diamond Suite spree is not unusual. Mounties, one of Australia’s largest club groups, last April admitted allowing 13 customers to launder up to $226 million through poker machines.

After decades of controversy over money laundering, NSW casinos had their own moment of truth when reforms resulted in board restructures, prosecutions and oversight by a new regulator, the NSW Independent Casino Commission. The casinos are also obliged to be mindful of ASX corporate governance principles that stress the importance of an effective board. Their directors are required to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest.

That said, they continue to display the lack of ethics common in gambling organisations: the state’s casino regulator on Wednesday fined Sydney’s Crown and The Star a combined $2.25 million for allowing a 16-year-old boy to gamble tens of thousands of dollars using a fake ID.

But registered clubs, whose business models are underpinned by gambling, are not held to the same scrutiny as casinos and have not been forced to undergo any cultural change.

The Minns government has yet to respond to a recommendation by Adam Bell, SC, in his 2022 review of The Star, to consider extending harm minimisation obligations imposed on the casino to all gambling venues, or the NSW Crime Commission’srecommendation to introduce mandatory cashless gambling to pubs and clubs to prevent money laundering.

Nor has there been a formal response to the 2024 NSW Independent Panel on Gaming Reform report recommending mandatory cashless gaming and stronger harm minimisation. However, last month’s state Labor conference unanimously called for its implementation.

Stopping the use of poker machines to launder money would be a start. Government recognised the nefarious practice in casinos but incredulously allow dirty money, coupled with poker machines, to wreak harm on the lives of many in NSW.

Reforms cannot come soon enough.

Books are good for your brain. But fiction has a surprising added benefit

Reading fiction may strengthen the social skills we use to understand and connect with others.

Curling up with a good book isn’t just enjoyable. It’s also good for your brain.

Reading in general — newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books — has been linked to slower rates of cognitive decline in older adults and even longer lives. 

But reading fiction may have unique benefits. For example, the amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place. 

Why? Fiction forces you to imagine a story’s world and characters. It makes you grapple with different perspectives, mentally inhabiting distinct points of view, according to Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This can help us find “better insight into our own experiences, insight into the experiences of others who are very different from us,” said Raymond Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, who recently wrote a review on the benefits of reading narrative fiction. “It just tends to evoke a form of reflection and contemplation, which can only be good for us.”

Why reading is actually social

Social health is important for overall health. And it turns out that reading, though often thought of as a solitary activity, can boost our social abilities. 

To understand why, it helps to look at how reading shapes us as we grow.

Between ages 4 and 6, children develop a theory of mind — the ability to understand that others have different beliefs, perspectives and feelings. Studies find that children exposed to more storybooks are further along this developmental milestone than those exposed to fewer ones, Mar said. 

A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 studies found that children who read more storybooks had more empathy. And there is evidence that empathy and reading go both ways. Better reading comprehension was a predictor of empathy later in life, while empathy also was a predictor of better reading ability, according to a 2024 study of more than 900 children. And adolescents who read more for fun became more social adults, a 2023 study found. 

Reading fiction “presents to us a complex cognitive and emotional simulation of the social world,” which is useful in the real world, Mar said. 

The power of storytelling

These benefits may be due, in part, to the power of storytelling. 

Neuroimaging studies find that brain networks involved in understanding stories overlap with brain networks needed for theory of mind. This suggests that “while engaging with stories, we’re also pulling online the same kinds of brain networks that we use to understand other people,” said Mar, who wrote a review about these studies.

Other forms of storytelling, such as television and movies, may provide similar benefits, but “one of the things that you do when you read is you have to construct the world” in your head, Buttrick said. “The world is not given to you. You have to do the work of imagining.” 

This extra work may amplify the benefits of engaging in a story. 

Spending time with our favorite story characters may also help us feel connected. “Even if our friends aren’t around and can’t get together, we can always open up a book,” Mar said. 

Reading can be a social activity, too, one that reinforces the joys and benefits of reading. Book clubs, shared reading organizations and social media communities like BookTokcan connect us with other readers and add yet another layer to building our social cognitive abilities. 

Talking to others about the books you read means you’re not only imagining the characters in a story, but also gaining an understanding of how other people respond to those characters, Buttrick said.

Exposure to difference

Beyond helping our social cognition, reading fiction can expand our world and our understanding of its complexities. Good authors are master observers of the human condition and can expose us to experiences outside our comfort zone. 

“Reading is an encounter with difference, with a different kind of mind, a different place, a different approach to the world,” Buttrick said. “And so a lot of the places where I think reading is most interesting are in places where it smashes this up with difference as strongly as it can.”

In a 2022 study of more than 5,000 people published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Buttrick and his colleagues found that those who grew up reading more literary fiction were more likely to become adults with more complex worldviews — with more nuance, more psychological richness and intellectual humility. 

“I think if we want to live in a world in which everyone’s treated as something like an individual, knowing that the world is complex, especially socially complex, is probably really good,” he said. 

But there are inherent difficulties with studying the effects of reading because “reading is a part of a person’s life,” Buttrick said. “And when people have more time, more space to read, more inclination to read, they’re not doing that at random.” 

Benefits probably take time to accrue, and socioeconomic status is a strong predictor of reading behavior and ability, though a 2025 study of more than 14,000 students found that leisure reading had the largest benefits for children whose parents had less education. 

“Successful art resonates with a great number of people because it captures something about being human that appeals to us and maybe that we don’t fully understand,” Mar said.

How to read more

Start slow. Mar recommends getting off your phonebefore going to bed and spending that time reading instead. “Maybe you have to build up to an hour,” he said. “But you can start with 15 minutes and then work to 30 minutes, then 45 in an hour before you go to sleep. It’s probably a good thing.” 

Cultivate a habit. Consistency is key. “I don’t think that any one book will change a person’s life,” Buttrick said. “I think it’s the accretion of lots of books, you know, reading again and again and again, that really has an effect on how people think about the world more broadly.”

Dive into the vast diversity of reading. Different forms of reading — short stories, graphic novels and fan fiction, for example — also count. Given his busy work schedule and reading of academic journals, Mar prefers to read short stories. “It’s hard for me to commit to a book,” said Mar, who has most recently read the works of Irish writer Claire Keegan. 

(Buttrick is currently reading Spencer Ackerman’s “Reign of Terror” and gearing up to read William Vollmann’s 3,000-plus-page novel, “A Table for Fortune.” And I’ve been reading through my collection of Terry Pratchett, who is a hilarious satirical writer, including “Small Gods,” which tackles religion, and “The Truth,” which is about journalism.)

Audiobooks can be beneficial, too. Buttrick said audiobooks still count as reading. In fact, the format may make certain books easier to grasp. Listening to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” not only makes it easier to understand and funnier, but also makes “you realize how much of it is just a song,” Buttrick said. 

Remember that reading should be enjoyable. “I don’t think of reading as a monastic experience that you have to do alone at night in order to grow as a person,” Buttrick said. Lean into what you enjoy. 

Make it social. Book clubs are excellent and flourishing. It’s nice to have an accountability partner and others with whom to share perspectives, Buttrick said. 

Read unselfconsciously. Reading is for enjoyment. “A lot of times people seem embarrassed about the things that they’ve been reading,” Mar said. But “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about whatever you’re reading.”

Do you have a question about human behavior or neuroscience? Email BrainMatters@washpost.com and we may answer it in a future column.

I’m a garden designer. Here’s why I hired a gardener

 “At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to use the words "f*** off“ much more frequently.”

~ Helen Mirren

The worst part about getting old, is that you stay young on the inside but nobody can see it …

“Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.” 

I’m a garden designer. Here’s why I hired a gardener It may be how I earn a living but when it comes to managing my own green space, I need help

As a garden designer, I know a fair bit about gardens. And after living through the pandemic in a gardenless north London flat, I was determined that nothing would come between me and my third-of-an-acre kingdom when we moved to our Wiltshire cottage three years ago. I was ready to manifest my long-held visions of pruning, mulching and weeding, small children playing at my feet. 

But after two years spending every free weekend running in and out of the house with arms full of bare-root whips and bulbs, I was burnt out. Everywhere I looked, my ambitions exceeded my resources. A baby’s weekend sleep schedule does not equal enough hours to make a garden. 

What I needed, I came to realise, was help.

I put a call out for a part-time gardener on Instagram and received 10 respectable applications. After reluctantly turning down the charming, qualified gardener who was familiar with much grander homes than mine across rural England — there is a limit to how much I can justify spending on my own garden — I began working with the lovely Nathan King four months ago.

Now I look around and see climbers carefully trained up walls, beds free of weeds and meadow borders with neat, mulched clearings around juvenile trees and shrubs. Garden waste is neatly rotting in brand-new compost bays, waiting to be recirculated. 

‘Now I look around and see climbers carefully trained up walls, beds free of weeds and meadow borders with neat, mulched clearings around juvenile shrubs’ 

Looking back, I don’t know what took me so long. I source a great gardener at the beginning of every design project if the client doesn’t have one or two already. I just felt that I should have been able to manage on my own.

Clare Foster, an author and garden writer with a space similar in size to mine, admits to having mixed feelings about hiring help. She visits incredible gardens every week and sees the armies that keep them in tip-top shape, yet she too feels she should be able to manage her rambling beds of self-seeders and informal gravel garden by herself. Are we all under the illusion that beautiful gardens should make themselves?

Landscape designer Sarah Price, who works with three gardeners intermittently on her garden in Wales (and on other projects), is pragmatic on the subject. “I think it’s important to admit that you can’t do everything. I love the act of gardening but I also love drawing and dreaming up and creating real gardens,” she says. Working with others has also fostered an “ongoing creative dialogue” that has made her garden richer, she adds.

You don’t need to be in the profession to see the value of skilled help. If you regularly go to the garden centre, and regularly kill your plants, you need a gardener. If you spend hours asking AI for gardening advice, you need a gardener. If you are an expert hobbyist gardener who needs an excuse to indulge even more, you need a gardener (you’re welcome). And if you’ve spent a fortune on your interiors, but have scrimped on your outdoor space, then yes, you need a gardener.

It doesn’t have to be a full-time commitment and some will offer consultancy services, helping you find your feet in a new space. At home I employ King for four hours every other Friday. We start with a walk around the garden discussing plans and making new ones. So far he’s clocked up more than 30 hours. It’s sobering seeing his monthly hours on paper — not for the cost, but the realisation of how much work a garden really takes. 

‘King and I share an aesthetic; he loves our mossy, uneven cobbles as much as I do and knows not to over-weed’

Most of his work involves weeding, mulching and composting — jobs I still do but that no longer overwhelm me. He’s also fixed steps and rebuilt walls. In the autumn we’ll lift and divide perennials, tackle the bed of ground elder and start work on the gravel garden.

One client observed that me having a gardener is like a therapist having a therapist. King challenges my ideas and has gently mediated where my boyfriend’s ideas have differed from mine. Who needs therapy? 

Decisions now have to be made faster. Will we paint the house, or should we just climb roses up it? Replace the paving, or rebuild the dilapidated stable? We are forced to plan for now, rather than getting caught up in potential future scenarios.

It helps that King and I share an aesthetic; he loves our mossy, uneven cobbles as much as I do and knows not to over-weed. He found an old gate in our shed and suggested it could support climbers up against a crumbling wall that had been bothering me. A fresh pair of eyes goes a long way. 

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My optimism is contagious. Our next-door neighbour has hired King too. Plans to build a hedgehog highway are now under way.

There is always more to do. Weekends are still happily spent working outdoors. The vegetable patch is thriving under the stewardship of my boyfriend and our toddler. I have grown ageratum, sweet peas and nicotiana from seed. But I also have time to sit under the fig trees on Sunday afternoons — and finally enjoy having a garden of my own.

 

Segal’s speech code meets the law: Justice Fagan wrecks Canberra’s Israel exception

by Andrew Brown | Aug 22, 2026 | Comment & Analysis, Latest Posts

Justice Desmond Fagan. Image: NSW Supreme Court

The Israel lobby wrote itself a dictionary. Governments adopted it, regulators enforced it and police made arrests under it. Then it met a judge who required evidence, and it collapsed in an afternoon. Andrew Brown on the Fagan judgement.

Justice Desmond Fagan’s decision in State of New South Wales v Farhat wrecks the architecture designed by Jillian Segal, adopted by Anthony Albanese and enforced across Australia.

Australians have been instructed that hostility towards Israel is hostility towards Jews. The lobby never won that argument. It changed the dictionary instead.

Albanese supplied the imprimatur. Chris Minns supplied the muscle. David Crisafulli criminalised protest slogans. Peter Malinauskas carried the doctrine into the South Australian parliament.

Different parties. Different states. The same obedient genuflection.

The vandal who wasn’t an antisemite

Mohommed Farhat was a vandal for hire. He caused more than $110,000 in damage, torched a vehicle and painted “Fuk Israel” across Woollahra. Fagan found he was recruited and did not know what some slogans meant. Yet the State wanted him branded an antisemite and shackled with 55 terrorism supervision restrictions.

Fagan refused. His judgment is an autopsy of how propaganda becomes administrative fact. Police, prosecutors, the Crown Solicitor and the Director of Public Prosecutions repeated an unexamined claim until repetition replaced proof. The label was false and “injustice to the defendant” followed.

Then he turned to the definition. The IHRA formulation promoted by Segal and embraced by Canberra was, he found, “verbose and imprecise” and “detached from the reality of common usage”. Promoting it sought to change the settled meaning of “a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years” and to “graft” onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism”a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel”.

Fagan cited Pew polling showing 74 per cent of Australians unfavourable towards Israel, rising to 79 per cent this year, and inferred a “humanitarian reaction to Israel’s genocide of the Gazans”. A definition that tars four in five Australians is not detecting hatred.

It is outlawing majority opinion.

Antisemitism, Fagan said, is simply “hostility to Jews for their Jewishness”. It is real, repugnant and must be confronted. Israel is a foreign state. Zionism is a political ideology. Neither is entitled to immunity from condemnation.

Protecting Jewish Australians is essential. Protecting a foreign government from criticism is not.

The lobbyist who wrote the law

Segal became special envoy after leading the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, whose published mission includes defending Israel, encouraging Zionism and lobbying governments for positions favourable to Israel.

The referee was recruited from one team’s front office.

She may hold those views. She may not launder them through the Commonwealth and receive them back as law. Albanese outsourced the dictionary to a protagonist, then adopted her every recommendation despite warnings from Jewish and civil liberties groups that it would punish lawful advocacy for Palestine.

Not consultation. Capitulation, formalised in a press release.

The government’s response commits the Commonwealth, states and territories to implementing Segal’s program. National machinery of compliance, and the premiers queued up to install it.

Minns, Crisafulli, Malinauskas

Minns expanded police powers and created new speech offences. Crisafulli criminalised two protest slogans, with two years in prison where words might reasonably cause somebody to feel menaced, harassed or offended.

Offended. The decay of liberal democracy, compressed into one word.

Malinauskas backed IHRA through the South Australian parliament, then pressed Adelaide Writers’ Week to dump Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. David Gonski, whose name once meant needs based schooling, now fronts an Antisemitism Education Taskforce with Segal at his side.

The Australian Public Service Commission says IHRA applies in federal workplaces. AHPRA adopted it across sixteen professions and more than 960,000 practitioners. A reference tool held over a doctor’s registration is not a dictionary but a threat to a livelihood. Fear is the cheapest police force ever deployed.

Executive policy cannot rewrite ordinary language. A circular cannot create law. Parliament never enacted IHRA, so the court gave it no force. Not a High Court ruling, but a preview.

Eighteen police, one shirt

I have been the test case.

On 3 November 2024, NSW Police arrested me at Bondi for wearing “Fuck Israel, Fuck Zionism”. I threatened nobody and damaged nothing. I was handcuffed, held six hours, fingerprinted and DNA tested by force over my objection.

Three charges followed, with bail conditions that ran more than a year. At one point I was banned from the eastern suburbs. My home in Surry Hills sat 400 metres from the boundary. One wrong walk meant arrest and up to twelve months in a cell awaiting a hearing. For a shirt.

All three charges collapsed in December 2025 once my lawyers raised the implied freedom of political communication.

On 6 April this year, as many as eighteen officers surrounded me at Bondi over the same shirt, among them Odin squad taskforce officers and two senior officers from area command. Overhead, a drone and a helicopter. On standby, an ambulance and two caged wagons.

Odin is a tactical unit for crowd management, high visibility policing and high risk operations. The high risk operation that morning was a shirt. I took it off. They arrested the shirt. A penalty notice arrived a week later.

Fagan has not decided my remaining matter, but he has demolished its pretence. He found the sprayed “Fuk Israel” was “crude political expression of contempt” for a foreign state, not hatred of Jews. If those words stayed political when painted during a crime spree, they cannot become Jew hatred worn peacefully on cotton.

The obscenity was never the shirt. It was the state power assembled around it.

Segal supplied the language. Albanese supplied the authority. Gonski took the classroom, AHPRA the professions, Minns the handcuffs, Crisafulli the statute book, Malinauskas the parliament and the festival stage.

Justice Fagan supplied something none of them could survive: the law.

Editor’s Note: the NSW Government is considering appealing Justice Fagan’s decision.

Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist