Rate things are going Albo is going to move over and give Andrews the big chair.

I’ll stay away from the banlieues and make sure I’m tucked up in my apartment before nightfall.

Anyhow calli as all the smart people know I’m only pretending to be in Europe. 😉

Omicron isn’t letting go in France

Now 13.5 million cases.

“My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive,” Hines tweeted on Tuesday. “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own.”

Scratch any of Joe Kennedy’s clan and under the surface you will find a thick layer of anti-Semitism.

Famine leaves Afghanistan ‘hanging by a thread’

By Christina Lamb
The Sunday Times
48 minutes ago January 30, 2022
No Comments

At the age of eight, Fatima’s future is decided. Her eyes limpid and far away, her clothes tattered emerald green, she would, she says, “like to go to school and study”. Instead, she has been sold in marriage to a man she has not met, to buy bread and time for her starving family.

In their mud-walled dwelling in western Kabul, Fatima sits on the floor around an unlit stove with her parents, siblings, widowed aunt and grandparents, all shivering, hungry and coughing. Family members proffer dirty plastic bags to me, each bearing stories of despair.

Her aunt holds a chest x-ray and a diagnosis for tuberculosis, which they have no money to treat, and a photograph of her bloody-faced eldest son killed by a suicide bomb last year. The grandfather tips out a few twigs, scraps of papers and rubbish collected from the street — their only fuel. The last bag is that of Fatima’s father, Lala Jan, from which he pulls out a charred shirt.

This is what he was wearing the night in 2010 when their house in Sangin was bombed during fighting between Taliban and British forces, leaving him so severely burnt that he spent eight months in hospital and displaced the whole family to the Afghan capital.

For a long while, he thought that was the worst day of his life.

But a few months ago, his family were so hungry that he sold Fatima for 150,000 Pakistani rupees ($1209) to buy food. Then last Wednesday things became so desperate, he tried to sell his three-month-old daughter Naghma, still wrapped in swaddling.

Now he looks round the shack where he lives with his wife, four children, parents, widowed aunt and other family members, and despairs. “I am having to choose between selling my daughters or all starving,” he said.

Eight pieces of bread a day to feed 30 people is the only aid the family receive. “It’s 20 days since we cooked even a potato,” his wife said.

That day they will eat leftover rice from the night before given by a neighbour: nothing else. The stove is off despite temperatures that fall to -16C at night. None of the children goes to school. “How can they?” Lala Jan asks, pointing at their ragged clothes and bare feet. The only toy is a plastic comb one of the boys is playing with.

Lala Jan used to get work as a labourer, bringing in 300 Afghanis ($4.11) a day but he has had none since the Taliban took over in August and foreigners pulled out, prompting the collapse of the economy, which was largely dependent on foreign aid. The currency has lost almost half its value and prices have rocketed.

Occasionally his father earns 100 Afghanis cobbling or one of the women a few notes from begging.

Not only does Lala Jan have no income but he still owes 200,000 Afghanis for treatment to his burns. That morning the lenders had come to collect and he had offered them baby Naghma.

“I told them take my daughter, I have nothing else,” he said.

They said they would think about it.

Fatima looks on silently. She will be collected when she reaches puberty. After that her fate will be in the hands of the family that bought her.

This is the reality of life in a country where according to the UN, 23 million people, more than half the population, face starvation and a million children may die. Already 97 per cent do not have enough to eat. “Afghanistan is hanging by a thread,” warned the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, last week.

Not only is the country suffering the worst drought in 30 years, but also a bitterly cold winter, an overnight end to foreign aid and all the work it brought, and the freezing of $US9bn ($12.8bn) of government assets, meaning it cannot pay salaries. All this in a war-torn land that was already one of the poorest on earth and where millions have been widowed or disabled. Now it is feared more may die from hunger than the war.

Thanks to whoever pointed out the important distinction between a Golden Goose and a goose which lays a Golden Egg.

Pay and volunteers: How Vladimir Putin revitalised the army

By Michael Evans
The Times
2 hours ago January 30, 2022
1 Comment

Tank for tank, missile for missile, Russia is so far ahead of Ukraine that on paper an invasion might end up being a mad dash to Kiev similar to the lightning advance by US forces across Iraq in 2003.

The Russian army today is better organised and equipped than it has been for decades, with a motivated and disciplined officer class.

Despite recent improvements in Ukraine’s forces – including NATO training and combat experience from the eight-year separatist war in the Donbas region – its army is still no match in the field.

However, just as the US was unable to defeat the insurgency in Iraq, Russia’s ability to quell a broad, post-invasion resistance in Ukraine is an altogether different proposition.

Andrew Krepinevich, a former senior Pentagon official with 20 years’ experience in the US Army, said Russia’s capabilities had soared since the “embarrassing” 1990s operations in Chechnya, which failed to suppress an insurgency. After the Cold War, the superpower’s debasement was best summed up by images of rusty submarines abandoned in polluted bays along the Kola Peninsula.

When Vladimir Putin came to power as President on May 7, 2000, his first ambition was to revive the military. He made it clear that he wanted Russia once again to be a force to be reckoned with.

He converted the army from an organisation that was reliant on underpaid, badly equipped and often bullied conscripts into a largely professional volunteer force of 400,000 soldiers on much-improved wages. Absenteeism, the bane of the old conscript army, was eliminated.

The average Russian army lieutenant now gets the equivalent of $US1000 a month, which is considered a good wage in civilian life.

Pentagon chiefs and US combat commanders who have seen the way the Russian military has made its presence felt in different parts of the world, especially in Syria supporting dictator Bashar al-Assad, openly acknowledge the improvement.

“The compliment that we have to pay to Russia is that they are a learning and adaptive force,” General Philip Breedlove, a former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, told The New York Times.

“Every time we see them in conflict, they get a little better.”

In 2017, a Russian frigate in the Caspian Sea fired three Kalibr cruise missiles at Islamic State targets in eastern Syria 1300km away.

American commanders were taken by surprise. They did not even know that the Russian navy had such weapons operating in the region.

The Times

Sudden withdrawal from alcohol can be deadly for an habitual drinker without treatment

I stopped imbibing alcohol the day I was diagnosed with Cirrhosis of the Liver & told I’d be dead within 3 months if I didn’t .. I’d spent the previous 10 years on “skid row” living rough and drinking whatever including meths .. I was neither offered or sort any form of “treatment” other than medical for the Cirrhosis .. the ongoing withdrawal symptoms (3 years) weren’t pleasant but none came close to being deadly..

That’s Costa Rica off the bucket list.

Why the fuck? You were diagnosed with it a few weeks ago.

What’s the point of a bucket list if you become totally risk averse?

He’s a numbers man. 40 people get it a year in those sub-tropical regions which therefore means he’s odds on to get it if he visits.

My compatriot, Señor Nadal, is turning into a sweat puddle at the tennis.

After seeing boatloads of fit young Afghan men lobbing into Australia and many other Western countries with nary a woman or child to be seen among the passengers

I’ve nothing but the most withering of contempt for those douche nozzles, but it’s a bit hard on the women and kids they left behind.

In 2008, what was the implied volatility for the AUD?

I can’t recall, but I guess it was very high, but what’s the point?

BTC is legal tender in Japan and it is being adopted in places with joke central banks.

No biggie, but prices is not based on BTC on it’s own. Transactions are either hedged or they done immediately and the new owner likely converts directly to Yen.

Also Panama uses the Dollar to settle internal transactions, Dot.

It’s time for them to move onto something that doesn’t lose so much value.

Okay. BTC basically halved since Nov, Dot.

And they’re taking their sweet time declassifying them.

I’m quoting Seymour Hersh’s book “The Dark Side of Camelot” but, IIRC, those tapes were declassified over twenty years, beginning in the mid 1970’s.

Bwah ha ha ha ha.
I think BTC holders have been flushed out.

Dot , we have sticky wages. How would that work in a BTC regime?

CL

Crypto is worth zero. 🙂

‘Tweren’t me.
I’m far hairier than he. (Flowing beard for starters)

Thursday is when I get paid a pittance pension from DVA.

Wot ‘e said!

ANZMI had some classics. If you can find it on the net these days.

I clashed with two of those arzeholes in my time in the A.D.F. – I pizzed myself laughing, loud and long, when they turned up on ANZMI….

I live in a part of the world where there are a lot of ex – servicemen, from various countries live. “Clearance Divers” “Special Air Service Regiment ” scoundrels don’t last very long at all…

I thought they did good work,

Friend of mine was wounded in an ambush in Vietnam. He became a fairly reclusive soul, lived alone in the Wheatbelt – I valued his friendship. He rang one night in some distress – someone in the Eastern States was claiming to have been wounded in the same ambush, was making a claim on DVA, and citing said friend as witness. (He must have thought they would never track down said friend…)

I had the sheer, sadistic joy of ringing back said friend and telling him “Your mate “M***** Q****, has got his name all over ANZMI as a ” scoundrel.” You don’t worry about him.”

The fascist canute who inherited a safe Labour seat from Daddy and has never worked a day in her whole fucking useless parasitic life.

Don’t you hold back now – you tell us exactly what you think!

I linked a iirc fairly conservative new york post article made a comment about indolent.
As usual fat faulty can’t help himself not missant

How you got gloating from that is beyond me.
I was making a point about all the rubbish that gets a pass here
I don’t revel in the deaths of others.

And didn’t the ANZMI website just disappear overnight?

Indeed.

Looks like my cafe ban comes into force tomorrow. A dark day for democracy in Australia.

First impressions of Marseilles

Went to mass at St Laurent, Gothic Church with incredibly bare interior
Turns out it was dynamited by the Germans in 1943, along with its PP who refused to leave and was only restored in 1996.
The entire quarter was dymanited and many inhabitants interned. Mostly descendants of Neapolitan immigrants, who make up many of the names of the world war one dead whose names adorn the shattered and put back together honour role in the church.
I had lunch on the former Greek agora with a view of that famous church on the hill.
A few rough heads drinking in the square but plenty of normies too.
Oh and I got asked to do a reading at mass, I politely declined.

Thanks Cassie for the reminder about Toulouse, I can vividly recall certain details of that atrocity.

Activist plea: help me pay my $2m legal bill

Exclusive
John Ferguson
Associate Editor
@fergusonjw
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
An hour ago January 30, 2022

The climate change activist who failed to eject Josh Frydenberg from parliament over his citizenship says he faces a legal bill of between $1m and $2m and has openly resorted to a publicity campaign to stave off financial ruin.

Melbourne man Michael Staindl, 68, was ordered to pay the Treasurer’s costs after the Federal Court found there was no ­evidence to back his claim under section 44 of the Constitution that Mr Frydenberg was ineligible to stay in parliament because of his mother’s Hungarian citizenship.

Mr Staindl has written to fellow climate change activists in inner-eastern Melbourne pleading for help, saying he has no chance of finding the money needed to pay for the legal action.

An email to the Lighter Footprints lobby group details Mr Staindl’s concerns but also his insistence that the case he brought against Mr Frydenberg, who declined to comment, had substance. “I have no further legal options or financial options,’’ he laments.

“Frydenberg through his lawyers Arnold Block (sic) Liebler (sic) has said he plans to take and sell my wife’s house, and accordingly he issued bankruptcy proceedings on Christmas Eve (two days after burying my 93-year-old father and with my wife just out of hospital and very ill).

“Publicity is my last-ditch hope.”

Mr Staindl, a prominent climate change activist, said he had acted on what he had “perceived” to be Mr Frydenberg’s falsehoods over climate. He said when questions had arisen over Mr Frydenberg’s citizenship, he received a report from a Hungarian professor who said Mr Frydenberg had a Hungarian bloodline and therefore citizenship.

“Please forgive this personal appeal but I need all the help I can get in spreading this message,” he writes in the email to Lighter Footprints.

Mr Staindl also asks members to spread the word on an article in The Age last week, where he said he did not have the cash to pay court-ordered legal fees of $410,000, plus interest.

The email suggests the total bill is now between $1m and $2m when all costs are considered.

“I was probably a bit naive, I thought Frydenberg’s side would be covered by the government,’’ he told The Age.

“I didn’t realise that I would potentially be liable for Frydenberg’s case,” Mr Staindl said. “I also didn’t realise my star witness would vanish two weeks before the case.’’

The case was based on Mr Staindl’s false claim Mr Frydenberg should be disqualified under the Constitution because he was entitled to Hungarian citiz­enship through his mother, Erica.

Dear Mr Staindll – climate change activist. Please accept my personal cheque for one million dollars, to help with your legal costs – Zimbabwean dollars…

Tony it is morally acceptable to take welfare now, you have been coerced out of a job for a joke medical therapy.

Welfare is just the return of your taxes. My pension and NDIS would be a few years of taxes. I probably owe them a bit for the surgery and 9 months of hospitalisation. 🙂

The climate change activist who failed to eject Josh Frydenberg from parliament over his citizenship says he faces a legal bill of between $1m and $2m and has openly resorted to a publicity campaign to stave off financial ruin.

Unforced error.
Self-inflicted wound.

He broke the golden rule of litigation.

First Newspoll out for 2022 in Teh Paywallian. SloMo probably wishes he had gone to Hawaii instead.

I see someone still earnestly and truthfully scrolls all my posts.

Superb weather here.
Got a bit sunburnt yesterday 🙂
I’m at a loss why this is the low season.

So low my accommodation was half price.

Miss A.
That is exactly what happened.
It was a link, the like of which Indolent links to twenty times a day and simply making that point.
Someone found “gloating” in there and it suddenly became fact.
Classic verballing.
Possibly not Faulty, but out of the Faulty playbook.

Sancho
Couldn’t do his homework.
Hungarian Jews were stripped of their citizenship and rendered stateless.
Many years after the war and long after Mrs Frydenberg senior had emigrated to Australia Hungary ‘restored’ citizenship rights to Jews.
Mrs Frydenburg didn’t know iirc and did not stoop to pick up that pathetic offer in any case.

With swampies increasing using lawfare in pursuit of their aims bankrupting a few for costs will be important, unlike the CFMEU which can just continue to laugh it off.

Miss A.
Are you saying that protocol dictates that you must wear all medals awarded, or none at all?

Exactly Bear.
That is why I hope Frydenberg takes this fuckwit to the cleaners.

ANZMI were giving the impression of lax corroboration, as mentioned upthread.
This is risky enough.
However, some of the write-ups they were publishing seemed quite scathing, unnecessarily so.

Some of it seemed to be of the nature of:
“Mr. Brown is reported to have attended a picnic race meeting in Central NSW where he claimed to have been a Corporal who served Nine years in the army, from 1963 to 1972.”

“ANZMI has investigated and found Mr Brown served from Sept 1963 until Jan 1972, or Eight years & 4 months. He was not a Corporal but a Lance-Corporal. He is therefore a scumbag who has misrepresented his time in the army and misrepresented his terminal rank.
He is scum and has been attending meetings of an RSL club, he should be pelted with manure as scum like this have no place in society”