The real Xmas miracle is thinking Katherine Murphy is one of the nation’s best political writers, and that The Guardian is left-wing.
She’s not.
It’s not.
Confusing #ScottyFromHillsong with the PM shows how effectively the PMO spins stuff to the Gallery.

Like her colleagues on #Insiders, Murphy laps up the spin and regurgitates it as her special sauce insight.

It’s not insightful, it’s just stenographic repetition of a failing ideology.
It starts from the false premise that our game of mates system is a democracy.
It’s not.
Journalists love to separate base and superstructure as if the political sphere operates independently from the economy.
It doesn’t.
Capitalism requires a veneer of political democracy built on commodity fetishism to mask the economic inequality that is endemic.
Gallery is blind
to this glaring contradiction because they buy into the systemic lie that a formal equality of opportunity exists and that through application of the Protestant work ethic anybody can become a member of the wealthy elite.
They can’t.
Class inequalities are an essential feature
of capitalism and papering them over with idealist gibberish about democracy just perpetuates class divisions.
Journalists don’t see it because they are incapable of critical, independent, materialist analysis.
They cling to the Fourth Estate delusion of objectivity and balance
believing that they hold a blowtorch to the belly of the system.
They don’t.
Instead, they give the system a stress-relieving blowjob and are well paid.
They wrap the turd of capitalism in the tinsel of two-party electoral politics and call it a democracy sausage.
Fuck that shit.
Just have a look at the list of *winners* of the National Press Club awards.
It is a Who's Who of shills and stenographic regurgitators.
All insiders and all compromised, but full of their own Fourth Estate importance

Murphy won it this year,2020, too.
https://t.co/oazStKQp00
Anyone who claims their job is to "hold the powerful to account" and to be the saviour of democracy should reject this kind of insider self-promotion.
But they don't.
Instead, they self-indulgently bask in what they see as glorious limelight and accept accolades from their quarry
They are not the poachers of the Fourth Estate, they are the gillies, gamekeepers and gatekeepers for their Lords and Masters (and Mistresses).
Embedded in the Canberra Bubble, they help to keep it inflated and they whitewash the many sins they see.
It took an outsider to lift the lid on the rooting and tooting, but not one Canberra journalist has done a serious follow up.
They just rinse and repeat #ScottyFomMarketing spin and run away from digging the dirt.
Why?
Two reasons:
1. Their snouts are in the same deep trough
And 2.
They depend on information scraps from the staffers, minders and spinmeisters, many of whom share beds, joints, bongs, lines and beers with Gallery folk.
They are cut from the same cloth and are easily interchangeable via the two-way career hatch in the Bubble.

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Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).
This is a piece I've been thinking about for a long time. One of the most dominant policy ideas in Washington is that policy should, always and everywhere, move parents into paid labor. But what if that's wrong?

My reporting here convinced me that there's no large effect in either direction on labor force participation from child allowances. Canada has a bigger one than either Romney or Biden are considering, and more labor force participation among women.

But what if that wasn't true?

Forcing parents into low-wage, often exploitative, jobs by threatening them and their children with poverty may be counted as a success by some policymakers, but it’s a sign of a society that doesn’t value the most essential forms of labor.

The problem is in the very language we use. If I left my job as a New York Times columnist to care for my 2-year-old son, I’d be described as leaving the labor force. But as much as I adore him, there is no doubt I’d be working harder. I wouldn't have stopped working!

I tried to render conservative objections here fairly. I appreciate that @swinshi talked with me, and I'm sorry I couldn't include everything he said. I'll say I believe I used his strongest arguments, not more speculative ones, in the piece.

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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991."
https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.