Contents

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  Equal Access to Healthcare

  
  Healthcare can no longer be an expensive privilege in the private tier and a catch-as-catch-can system of firefighting in the public tier, where patients present at ever later stages of their illness costing both lives and resources that could have been saved with timely access. 5 minute read.
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  THE ESSENCE OF HUMANITY

  
  Drunken, brawling, criminal, lazy, as thick as two short planks nailed together, and not wanted over here—that’s what ‘everybody knew’ about the average Mick when I was growing up in England. Creating a racist stereotype doesn’t need any basis in fact, just an ugly image repeated often enough. (10 minute read.)
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  Misinformation, disinformation, and plain ole lies

  
  Social media algorithms created separate information tunnels leading to echo-chambers fed not with information but with affirmation of what their readers had already liked. Each tunnel built up ‘truths’ that appeared incontrovertible: anything that offered a different perspective had been sent down a different tunnel.
• 

  Eddie Comes Home (Fiction)

  
  The first words she’d ever said to him were that her father had warned her not to be in this dance hall because it attracted a very low crowd. She’d had a blonde bubble-cut then, just like Kim Novak’s, and she was the best-dressed girl in the hall.
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  Equal Access to a Home

  
  The only possible conclusion is that current housing policy is designed to make landlords, developers, and investors rich on our tax money. Keep shovelling the money upwards and, to paraphrase Trump, ‘one day the homeless will just disappear, like a miracle.’
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  “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” by Eric Bogle – a new interpretation

  
  Written by Scottish-born folk singer Eric Bogle, the song describes the futility and horror of war through the personal experiences of the song's character. In stripping away melody the words alone are left to convey the bleak vistas and raw emotion of the story.
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  Angry Commoners

  
  The pandemic has drawn a sharp divide between those who could lose their houses, jobs, or lives, and those who are calculating how to foreclose on newly ‘distressed’ mortgages, or who will use job losses to depress wages, or who talk about the death rate among older citizens reducing the cost of pensions.
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  A Very Irish Coup

  
  Albert Einstein said that we can’t solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them. Swinging endlessly between two parties from a socially conservative, right centrist, and redundant tradition of party politics got us to the mess we’re in. But take Einstein’s word for it, it’s not going to get us out of it. (10 minute read)