The former Australian prime minister, Morrison, bizarrely appointed himself minister of health, minister of finance, minister of industry, ministry of science, minister of energy, minister of home affairs (policing), and minister of the treasury — without informing the public, or even the officially appointed ministers of those issues.

Apparently this meant that the officially appointed ministers remained ministers, but Morrison could override them at will. When he actually did so, did the officially appointed ministers find out what he had done? Or was that concealed from them somehow?

I wonder if Morrison was inspired by the wrecker's practice of dismissing the heads of agencies and departments and leaving those to be run by acting heads. This might have had an equivalent effect.

In Australia, the governor general (representative of the British crown) is responsible for swearing in ministers. He quietly participated in this abuse of the Australian governmental system. There is a movement in Australia to cut its tie with Great Britain and become a republic. I have a feeling supporters will point to this as a reason to remove the British crown from the process.

Morrison, who apparently couldn't keep track of all the things he was personally the minister of, said there was "no sense of bad faith in it." That may be true — he may be so inured to practicing bad faith that he has no conscious awareness of it.

Assange's lawyers have sued the CIA for violating their attorney-client privilege — by spying on their discussions.

The broken aspects of US society are damaging the physical and mental health of young Americans to the point that military recruiters can't find enough soldiers.

It may also be the realization that a lot of the fighting the US does is not justified or not necessary.

Poor people in Britain whose pets die feel incomprehensibly attached to spending money they don't have, for funerals for those pets.

Overattachment to pets, and pets' corpses, leads to a perverse sense of values. If you are rich and you feel like burying or cremating a pet, it's harmless. But we must not stand for the idea that people have an obligation to spend so much on pets that they ruin themselves. That way of thinking leads to enormities such as abandoning refugees in Kabul to evacuate a planeload of dogs.

I would feel sorry for Freya when her dog died, but I would not cater to her mishigas.

60% of Americans that rent housing are worried about whether they can pay the rent in the coming year.

The governor of Mississippi (a Republican, or course) cancelled the state's federally-funded rent assistance program. He said, though in different words, that helping poor people pay rent made their lives too easy.