Ah no radar. Bastards took it out of this model and I hadn’t read ze bulletins. It’s surprising how quick you adapt to new tech and when it ain’t there you have to smarten up…quickly.

Next think you know we will have to look over our shoulders before changing lane. ? (imagine a smiley face here if the one I put in doesn’t show)

Yes.

I guess the obvious question would be – did the baker do custom wedding cakes for other customers?

If he did, then my Sketchers argument topples over and JC’s assertion remains.

We can’t have any level discussion about it till the state coercion is removed from one side.

Bespoke

Don’t get me wrong. I support the right to refuse service for whatever fucking reason. For instance, Driller said years ago he doesn’t want to serve wogs at his bar. That’s totally fine with my philosophical underpinnings. It’s your property and you should be able to serve whomever the fuck you want.

Before I take off .Just to remind the aviator and all round entrepreneur, Hallward Hughes that I posed a bet to him last night over his cancer prediction. he may have gone to bed and didn’t see it. We escrow. 🙂

JC did you write the hit piece on Karl Denninger yourself or just reproduce it without attribution?

What was that term Terry McCrann used the other day? ah, yes, “Wall Street vermin”.

How Fanatics Took Over the World

This is from the Brownstone Institute and has a certain level of optimism. It also identifies George Bush as insisting on a whole-of-society plan in 2005. Obviously, this relates to the U.S. and similar things must have been happening elsewhere. There is a strong stench of Lysenkoism.

The Three Numpties.

They are still the elected representatives of the Victorian people, as is the muppet elected in Western Australia, on a platform of “Daylight saving.” “Daylight saving has been trialed in Western Australia three times, and rejected at referendum four times, in forty years…

Hallward

Oh, did I leave out the attribution. I would have thought that a massive brainiac would have seen it was in quotes.

Denninger is a massive loser and has been since 2008. Trust you to find him informative.
Vermin now.. coming form Queensland whitewash? Wow!

Hughes, formulate the cancer bet and I want to see it this afternoon. Stop fucking around. The bet!

Before I take off .Just to remind the aviator and all round entrepreneur, Hallward Hughes that I posed a bet to him last night over his cancer prediction. he may have gone to bed and didn’t see it. We escrow.

This is simplistic. The issue is not just cancer. If the immune system is impaired, any and all opportunistic illness or underlying issue can take hold.

No one would touch a coal fired power station under the NEM.

That’s the whole idea.

Indolent

According to Hallward Hughes , the vaxes also cause penis shrivelling. It’s a new side effect he found at Karl Denninger’s site, market trixter. Ask him.

Hopefully named for the sound they made, right?

Carpe will know if the Nipponese do onomatopoeia.

All inbound travellers to be required to present a HPV/cervical cancer clearance certificate at the port of entry?

We can show the world!

[Can everyone just tone it a little down please?]
I didn’t say the clot shot CAUSES cancer. By inhibiting your immune system the cancers which naturally occur in the human body quite often, probably only a few cells at a time , may not be eliminated in time.
Now look at the Dr Ryan Cole video, or even, spend some time at http://www.market-ticker.org and find out what Denninger ACTUALLY says, which you don’t appear to have done.
You are arguing from a position of ignorance as usual and degrading the signal to noise ratio of the blog.

amputation of a leg is not really serious.

I’m sure the lovely Delta has a differing view on this. She’ll be head over heals at the news, so to speak.

He can cheerily look forward to months in a cast, then the marvelous shrinker, then a year of intense gym before being fitted and trained for use of a prosthetic. If he’s very lucky, he won’t suffer excruciating phantom that makes one cry out loud, and everyone who sees him will be polite and understanding of his trauma.

PS: I like the ‘head over heels’ bit. Apt, but funny.

PPS: I especially liked the ‘lovely Delta bit.

No idea what this Warren Brown cartoon is about.

The search for William Tyrell’s remains, Tom.

Thanks, P. (Blush.)

So much for a virtuous republic and the pursuit of happiness.

History suggests that empires have a 250 year life (John Bagot Glubb did the calculations) and the rot starts from the head & not the extremities.

Not an iron law, but a rule of thumb, as it were.

The US turns 250 in 2026.

The question then becomes the nature of the decline – a bang or a whimper?

Carpe will know if the Nipponese do onomatopoeia.

They do. In a big way. More than us.

Try here, but scroll down to ‘Japanese Onomatopoeia for Animal Sound Effects (Giseigo)’ to get to the lists.

When I was there I used sometimes to take a tram (Hankai-sen) commonly known as the ‘Chin Chin Densha’ or the ‘Chin Chin’ train. Apparently the first part is a rendering of the sound of the metal wheels rubbing against the metal rails as they turn.

I hope this is correct, because the other meaning for ‘Chin Chin’ would require more mental gymnastics than understanding onomatopoeia does.

Today is the Memorial of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary – Patron of Bakers.

And the supposed inspiration for this great chorus

https://youtu.be/REPvgHbQd7g

WA set to have an all-Labor Upper House forever as Bill to make upper House MPs Statewide MPs (instead of regionally based) passes WA Parliament:

https://www.mediastatements.wa.gov.au/Pages/McGowan/2021/11/Western-Australia-enters-era-of-electoral-equality.aspx

“McClown says regions shouldn’t have more value in vote because of less population.” So, Marky, are we proposing to give back, say, 6 Senate seats?

Thank you, GreyRanga.

Strip maps are not what you may think.
The introduction to C17 and C18 travel within Britain is jolly interesting.

The fare per passenger was 1/- per five miles (approximately £12 today). It is worth noting that 1/- was a typical day’s wage for a labourer, and could, equally, buy you 6 gallons of beer or 4lbs of meat.

“McClown says regions shouldn’t have more value in vote because of less population.”

It is deliberately set up that way to make sure that the largest population centre cannot ride roughshod over the less urbanised areas without any restraint.

I wonder what class they inserted into the WA school curriculum that pushed out little things like civics and government.

I would wager most people would not understand why it might be a bad thing.

Perhaps someone could ask them how they think they would enjoy living in an Australia which is just a playground for NSW and Vic.

COVID Panic Will Only End Through Civil Disobedience and Mockery

We have already heard leftists sounding the alarm that the right is fighting dirty – with laughter.

They hear in the laughter of “Let’s Go Brandon” something like a threat of violence.

It is not surprising really. I have noticed long since that leftists have trouble with comedy. If they can keep themselves away from political topics they can get by, but when politics comes in hate dominates and their audiences are not laughing but swept up in a frenzy of hatred and malicious joy at hearing their enemies mocked.

WA set to have an all-Labor Upper House forever as Bill to make upper House MPs Statewide MPs (instead of regionally based) passes WA Parliament

Might as well abolish the Upper House altogether.

Create some hospital beds instead, which WA appears to be in dire need of despite a $5bn + surplus.

Former Labor MP Craig Thomson arrested over alleged migration fraud
Michael McKenna
Reporter
@McKennaattheOz
15 minutes ago November 17, 2021

Former federal MP Craig Thomson has been arrested by Australian Federal Police in relation to alleged migration fraud.

The one-time Labor parliamentarian was picked up in the central NSW coast town of Gosford after a long-running investigation.

In July, Australian Federal Police officers searched Mr Thomson’s home at Wamberal, near Gosford in a multi-agency investigation that also involved a search warrant in Queensland.

Thomson became a federal Labor MP in 2007 and held the seat of Dobell on the NSW Central Coast until 2013.

In 2014 he was sentenced by a Victorian court to three months in jail, with a further nine months suspended, for stealing from the Health Services Union in his previous role as the union’s national secretary.

On appeal, he avoided imprisonment and was fined $25,000. He had misused the union’s money on prostitutes and fine dining.

This article on the spineless surrender of independence in Australia during COVID is in today’s Australian Spectator under paywall, but I hope they won’t mind me relaying it here. It is by a writer called Kasumi Borczyk, & it superb, in my humble opinion. Beautifully and passionately written.

Of all the known unknowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, of who to blame and of how to act, one certainty remains: that the impact of the virus has spawned an entire vocabulary inscribed into the symbolic order. LGA’s, Contact tracing, Red Zones, Self-isolation, Tier one, two and three Exposure Sites, Close Contacts, COVIDSafe, Stop the Spread, Flatten the Curve, Do The Three To Stay Covid Free.

Thousands of Australians have been tuning-in to the official Covid-19 press conferences held by the secular priests of our time whereby the High Priestess of Epidemiology and the Archbishop of Public Health pantomime control through the invention of jingoistic neologisms like “Donut Days”. Governance has been reduced to a bureaucratic exercise in dispute resolution and its representatives likewise have begun addressing the public as though they were social media interns for Krispy Kreme.

In the same vein that the phrase “unattended baggage” has taken root in the post-911 collective psyche — such that an “unexpected item in the bagging area” turns your garden-variety avocado theft into an act of micro-terrorism — how will the official language of Covid-19 manifest itself in the months and years to come?

Political philosophers and public intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich and Giorgio Agamben have theorised the ways in which credentialed experts are exercising ever greater control over everyday life.

Foucault warned that the rising tide of history is continually shifting away from antiquated modes of control, such as the public spectacle of punishment, towards more nebulous forms of power that involve data modelling and surveillance that micromanage the education, health, and sex lives of individuals under the auspices of scientific neutrality.

Accordingly, rally cries to ‘defund the police’ or ‘abolish prisons’ will likely cosmetically reconfigure what today’s control society looks like by outsourcing the authority to whatever new iterations of social workers, mental health experts and criminologists will be required to meet the demands of newer surveillance technologies.

Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic has proven to be no exception. During the daily state press conferences, authorities have appealed specifically to the fact that they are following the free-floating signifier of “The Science” as a means of legitimating control.

As with the architecture of most institutions, the state response to the pandemic has had a tripartite trajectory: firstly it has reinforced our collective belief in progress as the animating force of our times. Secondly, it has made manifest the impossibility of this myth and thirdly it has explained that our inability to achieve it is the fault of individual actions of the unmasked, the unvaccinated or the non-compliant rather than considering the role that several decades of neoliberal policy has played in stripping the copper wiring for scrap metal from the walls of our housing, education and healthcare systems.

One of the most banal aspects of the pandemic has been the ways in which the professional managerial class have been able to substantiate the mythology of their own self-importance in antagonism to the “uneducated” and the “misinformed.”

The market has swiftly reconfigured itself to meet the needs of the present moment. The result, of course, has been a kabuki theatre of one-upmanship in which mask wearing, social distancing and elaborate displays of vaccine status can be used as a means with which to signal your adherence to or rebellion from the dominant narrative.

Entire cottage industries have been created and embraced by consumers with a cargo-cult enthusiasm and marketing consultants have brainstormed endlessly about how to make masks, hand sanitiser and QR codes appear less sinister. The table with wet-wipes at the front of my local supermarket is called a “sanitation station,” my local pharmacy sells hand-sanitiser disguised as a “purifying hand treatment” and my favourite clothing brands have pivoted towards loungewear for “these uncertain times.” The accoutrements of the covid-19 pandemic are clearly here to stay given how easily they can weaponised towards crypto-puritan displays of tolerance and conscientiousness.

As Byung-Chul Hang notes, the “neoliberal labor camp has acquired a new name: the home office.” Zoom meetings have proven to be the ideal communicative medium for the narcissistic age in which every workplace interaction is mediated by the image of oneself. Work-from-home scenarios, Hang explains, are often more taxing than traditional office spaces because the final vestiges of a disciplinary society have been replaced by the deregulated rhythms of cognitive capitalism. The distinction between our public and private lives, with their own social and geographical configurations, no longer exists when we are able to seamlessly work, socialise and consume through the one technological apparatus.

Over the past few years, certain foot soldiers in the culture war have displayed a libidinally-invested obsession in dissecting the minutiae of online media discourse. Every week a new puff piece would be published about why “silence is violence,” why “X film has a gender/race problem” or why “Y’s tweet was problematic because it constituted Z-erasure.” What has become clear throughout the pandemic is that the professional managerial class is interested only in critiquing language when it aligns with liberal orthodoxy.

The ability for white-collar workers to “stay home and save lives” while ordering soy burgers for delivery, “anti-vaxxer tears” coffee mugs and “Pfizer Alumni 2021” t-shirts online is contingent on an entire underclass of workers both at home and overseas who enable the conditions of possibility for their inflated sense of self to unfold.

When tradesmen began protesting the lockdown measures in Melbourne, Australia, the liberal media machine was quick to defuse their political potential by labelling them as “anti-science” and “conspiracy theorists” rather than taking their demands seriously.

The left, who have historically condemned the sensationalism of mass media coverage on rioting and protests, immediately distanced themselves lest they be accused of co-conspiracy (even though it is the working class who will most likely be subjected to the rigmarole of future restrictions on movement and employment.) As Alex Gutentag reported, in the last two years which saw the greatest wealth transfer in human history, “Experts, technocrats, and corporations became the heroes of the pandemic, while the masses became the villains.”

During the early days of the pandemic, Georgio Agamben became one of the heretical bad-boys of academia for denouncing Italy’s pandemic response. He railed against the popularisation of the term “social distancing.”

The conception of the masses has been inverted through social distancing measures so as to refer now to a symbolic collection of atomised, individual existences who are unable to mobilise, socialise, celebrate or mourn for their dead.

The government and its media henchmen have inculcated an atmosphere of fear and hostility centred around the lives you could either lose or save simply by choosing to participate or abstain from everyday, civic activity.

The modus operandi of our times, as evidenced by the language of everyday, is geared toward the preservation of bare biological existence. Agamben concludes that “a norm which affirms that we must renounce the good to save the good is as false and contradictory as that which, in order to protect freedom, imposes the renunciation of freedom.”

If the pandemic has shown us anything it is that the more nebulous the threat, whether real or imagined, the more easily it can be appropriated towards stoking fear and engendering obedience.

The climate of paranoia fomented by death tallies, outbreak maps and press conferences are then instantiated in everyday interactions in which every person is treated with suspicion as a possible vector for death and disease. The animosity towards intellectual inquiry is such that to critique the government’s response in any way (apart from suggesting that the restrictions should have been harder, longer and more extreme) is tantamount to doing “a science denial.”

Alain Badiou speaks of Art, Love, Politics and Science as seperate “truth procedures,” independent from one another. In his Manifesto for Philosophy, he claims that philosophy is unique in its ability to think through truth procedures qua truth procedures and to be able to exist at their intersections. The danger, according to Badiou is when philosophy defers its intellectual energy entirely to another truth procedure resulting in a myopic description of the events at hand.

The process by which so-called liberal democracy has been slowly ceding ground to the techno-medical despotism of unelected experts at the expense of love, politics and art began long before the pandemic and will continue long after it but it took an event as global in scale as Covid-19 to realise its true expression.

Dissident voices have never been more urgent but they will require the courage of their own convictions to confront the low-grade hostility that dominates today’s cultural landscape.