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I am thinking that a union of environmental, civic and other groups - along with individuals - could work more like the the trade union movement used to - that is it can come up with its own policies democratically and throw support behind one or the other political party. Thus the union might choose to back Sustainable Australia, and help support and promote it, without being involved directly in politics itself. This might be an appropriate pathway, as environmentalists, civic groups, etc are usually busy enough saving what they can of the environment, seeing people are getting meals, etc, and don't necessarily want to (or have time to) be involved as politicians. Matt

Thanks Observer - yes, that party seems ok. It advertises that Dick Smith just joined. The policies - at a quick glance - seem quite reasonable. So perhaps the best we can do is encourage people to support this party?. No point in re-inventing the wheel, or fracturing the sector into smaller, and perhaps less effective, parts.

Received April 30, 2018: Dear Mr Mitchell Thank you for your email of 26 February 2018 regarding traffic light sequencing at the Intersection of Seaford Road and Railway Parade, Seaford. I apologise for the delay in responding. As you may be aware, the Andrews Labor Government has embarked on the largest rail infrastructure project in the state's history to remove 50 dangerous and congested level crossings across metropolitan Melbourne. With_ large construction projects like these, VicRoads and the Level Crossing Removal Authority project team work closely together to minimise disruptions of any works on the road network. In this instance, on 20 February 2018, the project team were working to identify the location of underground pipes and cables associated with various utilities. A traffic management plan was Implemented that changed the sequence and timing of the traffic lights at the Seaford Road level crossing. Unfortunately, when the works were completed, the change that had been implemented wasn't removed and this resulted in the delays you experienced. The sequence to the lights was changed back to normal on 27 February 2018. To ensure this does not happen again, the project team and VicRoads have discussed the issue at regular coordination meetings, undertaken training with all workers and will ensure communication of any future disruptions will be provided to the local community. Over the course of the Level Crossing Removal Project, there will be traffic changes from time to time. To keep up to date with these changes and the project In general, I encourage you to register for regular email updates at . Thank you for raising this matter with me. I trust that this information has assisted In answering your concerns and I appreciate your patience while we undertake this vital infrastructure project In Seaford.

Thanks Sheila, that is encouraging. I was thinking this really should have been the domain of the Australian Greens - but they have been around for a long time now, and the problems seem to be growing. If anyone has any lessons to learn from the experience of the Greens, please post them up. It would interesting to learn why they have not engaged Australians. and are not engaging them now when there is so much frustration at the levels of traffic, of seeing our much beloved city and suburb changing before our eyes - the loss of trees on St Kilda Boulevard is just one little example, even at Seaford Road intersection there has been massive tree removal of quite old trees for Sky Rail, the loss of which now blights the whole neighbourhood. Not the mention the thousand other things that are happening that require urgent action (fracking, water mining, native forest logging etc).

Fine observation, Quark. I suspect though that, like any addict (addicted to the thrill of putting money on all kinds of things), Soros thinks that the open market open borders system will protect him from regulation. His talk of regulation reminds me of how serial killers sometimes say they want to be stopped, or alcoholics say they want to be stopped - but most do not put themselves into a position where they must stop.

From Sara Flounders: There is great enthusiasm that over 1,000 rallied on April 15 at Herald Square, NYC on a cold, damp day. Impressive list of speakers from almost 40 organizations represented countries and struggles targeted by US imperialism, along with social justice, union, community, youth and antiwar organizations. Several groups of drummers. including Indigenous drummers and Korean drummers helped keep the rally moving. A very spirited rally opposing ALL US wars and solidarity with peoples under attack. Then several hundred marched to Trump Tower. March was led by Syrian, Yemeni, Palestinian, Korean and Puerto Rican activists with their flags, drums and signs. For a view of a diverse multi national coverage and stream of March, front banner of March and rally all good visuals see links sent by Julie Varughese: Check out our Twitter moment containing photos and videos: https://twitter.com/i/moments/985663956088913923 ​Facebook livestream of the march from Herald Square to Trump Tower in New York City: https://www.facebook.com/WorkersWorldParty/videos/1290378814430093 ​

David Z Hughes has just expressed what many people think, but most do not express. I know David. He is a brilliant engineer and he thinks through social conundrums with an engineering approach. He is a very warm person, who once sent me a card from his factory cat, and with a left-field sense of humour based on pure logic that can take your breath away, but when he is analysing a people problem in the abstract, he comes out with stuff that ignores human social constraints and therefore shocks them. I grew up with an engineer and engineers run our terrible overpopulation and planning program in Australia on the same sort of logic. They sort of accept the way people are presented as economic units and behave as if we people also accept that. So they foist smart cities on us and think we will like it because they have some hypothesis that it will make us more valuable or less costly economic units, which they confuse with virtue. [Edit: Sorry, did not mean to imply that David is a growthist, more that he has an engineering way of ignoring social constraints.]] I made those comments above just to let you know a bit the way I think David thinks and to introduce my response to the statement he has made about increasing the global death rate. I wish I had all day to write this, but actually it is part of my third book on the subject. Humans, like all other animals and plants, once tended to live in viscous populations. (Biological term, look it up). Many still do. These populations or societies have a default of (a) marrying within themselves within the constraints of incest avoidance and marriage rules (b) observing incest avoidance rules and marriage rules (kinship rules) that vary according to the carrying capacity of their local traditional territory, (c) discouraging marriage and therefore children between members of the population who lack land and assets sufficient to raise children without impoverishing the community or themselves. The smaller the population, the smaller the marriage and fertility opportunities. It is quite normal for people to live and die without a partner, whilst enjoying roles as aunties and uncles. In other animals there is often a delay or non-event of sexual maturation where fertility opportunities are not present. Or sexual behaviour may simply not arise. WAR: When war happens, it knocks out established marriage rules, kinship rules and structures, killing off spouses and giving people from another population fertility opportunities they would not have had before. This occurs through widows remarrying, through rape, through young people who would have found no one unmarried of their age, or of suitable station, now exposed to an invading population or to a new host population as refugees and other kinds of immigrants. The melding of the invaders with the invaded, or migrants with the host population, becomes a permanent new population,which may become bigger than the original with a higher fertility structure. You can reexpress this by saying that the quality of endogamy in the viscosity of the people in the place was reduced by a wave of exogamy. (Depending on economic technology, the conquered may have their living spaces reduced as slaves or a lower caste, or work in factories - otherwise, in a subsistence society, the population for the area will come down to its original size.) This process has happened over a couple of centuries in the Middle East, where colonialisation and its accompanying industrialisation have pushed viscous endogamous tribes/peoples together, thus destroying their viscosity and greatly raising their fertility. The same process has both caused and used wars to change patterns of settlement and economic distribution in favour of new classes. Industry also encourages high marriage rates because it wants a lot of labour that is reliant on wages. We can see how this affects Australia. Even if you completely wipe out a viscous population, as long as its territory is still viable, a new population will fill it with the associated increase in fertility opportunities associated with new land. UNLESS they have an ethos of NOT filling up new land - but currently these kinds of ethos are overwhelmed by the commercial imperative of capitalism which will leave no living scrap of earth unconcreted if it can. This process is happening all over the world - but less in populations that live under Roman Law - notably those in continental Europe - because their inheritance and land-tenure system protects viscosity. Their identification as nations assists this. The European Union wants to destroy this viscosity and land-tenure. HOW GLOBALISATION RAISES FERTILITY OPPORTUNITIES Globalisation is a process of de-viscousing (or dissolving) our populations, and it causes many more fertility opportunities. To show this on a computer you would have to model a whole lot of discrete viscous populations (tribes) at some point, and start inserting events like global warming that reduced land availability and resulted in migrations, wars, takeovers, with the usual increased fertility opportunities. Eventually you would get to the 21st century, with the Australian property development industry overwhelming yet again the native born (now including many non-aboriginals) with new couples and fertility opportunities; US-NATO yet again pushing the peoples of the Middle East together by paying 'rebels' to chase them this way and that, rape them, kill their males and marry them; and Angela Merkel welcoming many new young unmarried males to Germany and the EU. This is how you get a world population with an average growth rate of maybe around 1.2, with growth lobbyists all trying to raise the rate, especially in Australia, US, NZ, UK, Africa, India, China and probably South & central America (haven't looked there lately). You did mention Yemen in the original post that I edited. If the Saudis, financed by the countries of US-NATO using British, French and US supplied weapons, get their way, they will almost annihilate the Yemen population. Then the Saudis and others will move in to resettle. Those Yemenis who survive will be in a situation where there are many more fertility opportunities than previously. US-NATO will probably open up some factories or other slave opportunities and the surviving Yemenis will continue to survive through very low wage labour. They may have large families because there will not be child labour laws so each child will raise the family income which otherwise would be stuck. We will be told that the Yemenis are finally 'developing' (uggh! hate that term) but that they have an overpopulation problem, which will require education of females and the eventual use of contraception. The only reason you hear more about Syria here than about Yemen is that we just don't have enough hands to type with! We are well aware of the immense tragedy, and in that tragedy, I include the political fallout of population structure destabilisation. I don't approve of what is happening in the Middle East or in Australia. I wish it would all stop, but war is going to make it worse. IMHO and my scientific opinion. What do you think, David?

Yes, there is so much evidence of a gross externally funded conspiracy, repeated again and again in the Middle East. The Russians have worked out what happened, as I report here: /node/5472. We are really being shown in the clearest of terms that our leaders - here in Australia, and throughout the western world - have similar values and mores to the worst medieval princes.

Ok, thanks Sonya. I really appreciate your reply.

Yes, it is good to help people by removing negative gearing for non-genuine investments, but this problem is already out of hand. So many young people are going to be extraordinarily stressed by their high mortgages, and when they have children, even more stressed - and I worry for the raising of these children - with absent (due to work) and stressed parents. If interest rates rise these people will lose their houses, probably never get another one, and yet will still be paying of the banks for the rest of their lives.

But perhaps a bigger problem is that the growth of housing, and ever more and wider roads is moving over prime farmland, land that not only Australians' depend on for food, but also much of the rest of world to whom we export to. Europe has not been able to feed its population for decades now and relies on food coming from former colonies to survive. The production methods used in these plantations and in the USA and Australia, are not sustainable. It is not helping us, or anyone globally, to be permanently destroying our own land. If the houses were on stumps, they could at least be removed in an emergency, but they are on concrete slabs - and production of concrete is also a major contributor to global warming. In fact, all our activities of road building, high density houses (which usually require air-conditioning as there is no tree cover) are contributing to global warming, not to mention the production of plastics which are now choking our oceans, and whose mass will soon exceed that of the fish in the oceans, as I am sure you are aware.

Look, really what our government should be doing is moving onto an emergency footing - equivalent to the efforts put into the two world wars - to restructure our society away from failing industrialism and global fossil-fuel economies as quickly as possible - much as Cuba did during its crisis at the end of USSR. We need to move to localised systems with much smaller land holdings for food production. Research by the UN shows such farms are more productive per-acre than large ones (but large ones require less man-power to run when you use fossil fuels, thus their predominance).
(see Small is Bountiful by George Monbiot)
I am sure you will find plenty of people young and old who are up to the challenge, if they are given opportunities, including access to resources.

It is clear that time is running out to address this fundamental fact: the system has already failed, both environmentally and financially - governments are just living in denial.

Best Wishes,

Matt

(PS: for readers who are interested in what happening in Cuba, and how they responded with a market system based around democratised ownership of land please see: The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.. The interesting thing about this was that communist Cuba had a mass of small privately run farms and local markets whilst 'Capitalist' America has 6 companies which - for example - control all its meat production. Cuba also had free health care and education, and people during this period were healthier than Americans.

Ok, given that in a worst-case collapse scenario mass population movements are likely, this may make the restriction of a limited number of citizens in each parliamentary area a distraction, at a time when other matters are pressing.

Also, we have seen the intractable problems water management has caused between our existing state structures, thus I am proposing a modification to the concept, whereby each parliament is determined by its water resources, a critical issue on the world's driest continent. In this regard there is already a mapping of regions to water sources provided by Steve Iron's FOWTOR model at his site: http://www.bloggerme.com.au/

Below is an extract -the full interactive map is at Steve's site, Steve's model has some hierarchical elements, so I am talking to Steve about how this might work.

Concept

If you are standing in a hamlet, a town or a city of Australia, you will be on the slopes or in the valley of a major river system. It is that river system that, over the last million years or so, has determined what the landscape you are looking at looks like, and what the land around you is capable of producing, and other matters such as how many people are living there, and what they can and cannot do with their lives, and so on. Even in the major desert that is at the centre of Australia, where rain rarely falls, this simple observation is valid. So it is possible to divide Australia on the basis of where water, when it drops from the sky, will flow in its (sometimes quite short, sometimes very long) journey towards the sea.

Construction

The FOWTOR Model goes to a major river system and draws a boundary around it based on the 'flow of water' (FOW). All boundaries therefore must be at the 'top of the ridge' (TOR). Water falling from the sky will be in one major river system if it falls on one side of the ridge, and in another if it falls on the other side of the ridge.