Why am I left with the feeling that the parents of those demanding a “Free Palestine” were those chanting “One…
Open Thread – Tuesday 26 April 2022
- Open Thread – Thurs 14 Nov 2024
- Open Thread – Remembrance Day 2024
- The Sweetest Victory
- Open Thread – Weekend 9 November 2024
- Open Thread – Thurs 7 Nov 2024
John Fund, a US columnist, being interviewed by Sharri is sporting a black eye. I wonder who socked him.
Fap, fap, fap. Cap’n, I canna give her anymore! If I do, she’ll BLOW!
WTF is going on with power in Qld? https://www.ergon.com.au/network/outages/outage-finder/outage-finder-map/ It looks like half the state is out. There’s 3 houses…
Myer Christmas window tradition cancelled over protest threatBy Cassandra MorganNovember 14, 2024 — 8.03pm Myer’s annual Christmas window unveiling has…
Ben Garrison on Twitter
The 44 billion (like China City Shutdowns) does not make sense.
Tucker Carlson Gives His Perspective on Musk Successfully Purchasing Twitter Platform
There is an angle to this move which looms. If the doomsday predictions of Twitter’s Thursday anticipated first quarter financial earnings are correct, it is entirely possible that Musk is about to take a massive financial hit.
Some, including myself, who understand the financial black hole that Twitter’s business model represents, have suspicions that Twitter may be hung around Musk’s neck like a millstone as he’s thrown into the deep state sea of social media. It will be interesting to see how quickly Musk responds to those Q1 financials. [NOTE: I foresee be a small user fee in the future]
Sorry Tinta, didn’t mean to sound abrupt.
“Other projects” would be a more apt term.
BREAKING: Vice President Harris Tests Positive for COVID
In its tweet announcing the news, CNN notes that Harris is “fully vaccinated and boosted twice.”
Musk didn’t do due diligence on twitter earnings.
Seems likely.
From the Oz. Well said!
.. but of course she didn’t think to have a quiet chat with the RSL to clear it before the ceremony, did she?
Activist, what?
The Andrews Government – dealing with the relevant issues …
I’ll throw in a buck to pay him back if that’s what it takes.
Anyone else in?
A hateful transphobe might deduce those “trans men” preserving
the very core of being female know deep down they are engaging
in cosmetic mutilation because it’s the current thing.
a) register voter with issue of ID (driver’s license)
b) never ask for said ID when voting.
You know it makes sense.
BREAKING: Project Veritas Releases Leaked Audio of Twitter Meeting Following Elon Musk’s Purchase
The audio is only about a minute long, but Project Veritas Founder James O’Keefe has promised that there is more to come.
According to a report from Politico, Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde cried during the meeting “as she expressed concerns about how the company could change.”
“Gadde, who has worked at Twitter since 2011, is the key executive charged with overseeing Twitter’s trust and safety, legal and public policy functions. She is seen internally as Twitter’s ‘authority’ and the executive tasked with handling sensitive issues like harassment and dangerous speech,” the report explained.
It isn’t just “the Left”, I’m afraid. Happens with any divisive issue where people love their own ideas more than freedom for others.
I did wonder at that cartoon. Was it putting a “bad bird” in a cage? Other cartoonists appear to think Twitter is benign and should be “set free”.
Going to be an interesting few weeks as things find their level.
Has Leunig left the reservation or just have the usual absence of irony? (Yes that is not the correct use of irony but the commonly used use of the word). Echoes of Leak Snr if he has.
Hunter Biden humor, love it.
https://patriotpost.us/memes/87754-buzzing-2022-04-26
I read somewhere that Twitter brings about $5B in from advertising each year. If true that suggests it could be pretty profitable – fewer moderators being paid Silicon Valley rates plus a potentially larger audience if righties stop getting banned. Musk wouldn’t be the first guy to take a moribund lefty company and make it a profitable business.
CNN seems to be getting this treatment from newly merged Warner Bros/Discovery according to Surber yesterday.
Cleaning out the ideology and getting back to business can do wonders to the bottom line. CNN is probably past redemption though, and Warner/Discovery are establishment, unlike Elon. We’ll see.
Only 3% of its subscribers actually watched CNN+ (Surber, 25 Apr)
Meanwhile – Reports: Netflix Employee Morale Plummets as Stock Sinks and Subscribers Flee
Netflix is experiencing a crisis in employee morale following the steamer’s report last week that it lost 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter and expects to lose a stunning 2 million more in the months ahead.
The gloomy financial outlook has sent Netflix shares in a downward spiral, further alienating employees who receive compensation in the form of stock options.
Shares of Netflix have dropped 43 percent since the company reported first quarter earnings last week and are down more than 66 percent so far this year.
Netflix’s financial outlook is so grim that billionaire hedge fund investor Bill Ackman recently dumped his fund’s 3.1 million Netflix shares at a loss estimated at more than $400 million.
I presume the trans “men” will be renting someone’s uterus to incubate their fertilised egg?
Seems cancelled women are good for something after all.
This is exactly how they work.
a pattern of patterns
He got thwacked by a lefty censorship baseball bat, which seems to’ve opened his eyes a little bit.
Cartoonist Michael Leunig axed over controversial vaccine cartoon (21 Oct)
Mercedes face ‘hierarchy changes’ amid Lewis Hamilton struggles as Marko joke shot down
Ralf Schumacher has warned Mercedes that a shift in power within the team could soon be on the horizon if George Russell continues to outperform Lewis Hamilton over the course of this season. The latter has endured his worst ever start to a Formula One campaign and was recently told by Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko that he would have avoided the embarrassment that he currently faces if he had retired from the sport over the winter.
“We also have to talk about Lewis Hamilton, of course,” wrote Schumacher in his latest F1 column for Sky Germany. “He has to ask himself why George Russell is so much faster than him.
From the Comments
As I said, he very wisely ? did choose the 2nd driver yellow camera.
Alarming outbreak of hepatitis in children may have been brought on by Covid lockdowns weakening immunity to a ‘normal’ virus, health chiefs say as US cases hit 11
Filmmaker: Documentary Proves Rampant Illegal Vote Trafficking in 2020
Get woke go broke. Not at all surprised.
Believe it or not, this serving of utter tripe is from the Centre for Disease Control. Because, of course, climate change is the biggest health risk we all face.
Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Climate Adaptation Planning
Watching the Netflix mini-series, DOPESICK, about how “big pharma” , namely PERDUE PHARMA managed to control the US opioid market with the most addictive pain-killer ever known, OXYCONTIN .. coupla interesting points (among dozens) that stood out ..
After a meeting with the FDA and high level Perdue folk the DEA agents were stunned that with the amount of, damning, evidence they provided all the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) came thru with was a reprimand (wrist slap) and a lecture on using ambiguous wording on the drug label ..
One agent turned to the other and sez, “How can the FDA be so blind as to what is in plain sight?” ..
The other DEA bloke looks at him .. “this is what happens when your dealing with a company’s future employees” ..
“These FDA are making decisions whilst knowing about the salary(s) that Perdue are already paying to ex-colleagues and thinking about their own futures” ..
The second and something I wasn’t aware of, having always thought this bloke was the genuine article when it came to the “battler” ..
the involvement of RUDI GUILIANI with Perdue .. Post 9-11 when Guiliani was surfing on the wave of public popularity Perdue saw an opportunity and snared him (with appropriate recompense) as their, main, lobbyist expounding the non addictive joys of OXYCONTIN in the Washington corridors of gummint .. Yessssss folks! .. that “popular voice of the people” and a political “influencer”, ex mayor of New York and friend of the DON (all hail!) was the foremost vocal shill for OXYCONTIN the most addictive narcotic, freely & legally, available to the general public in history ..
not so much of a revered reputuation to remember but just another in the conga line of troughers with snouts in the trough ..!
Quite an eye-opener on the get-rich-at-any-cost schemes that “big pharma” get away with .. cos it ain’t about helping folk in need .. it’s about making money, lotza money regardless of the consequences ……..!
Filmmaker: Documentary Proves Rampant Illegal Vote Trafficking in 2020
“Through the movie ‘2000 Mules,’ we are taking on the ultimate taboo in American politics today—saying that the 2020 election was stolen by systematic, organized fraud committed by the Democrats and the left,” D’Souza told The Epoch Times.
Mindful of the power of cancel culture, D’Souza said great care has been taken to release the film on what he calls “un-cancellable platforms.”
“It’s hard to believe we have reached that point in America, but alas, we have,” he said.
“While I was a writer or a figure in a think-tank, I wasn’t bothered much. It was when I began to reach a wider audience that I became a political target.”
When asked why he’s willing to subject himself to possible cancellation, D’Souza said, “I am defending the system which made it possible for an immigrant from India, a boy at the bottom, to make my way up—a system that makes this kind of upward economic and social mobility possible.”
Indeed it did – from your link.
“Trans men’s eggs have been matured in the lab—and could help them have children”
John MacArthur said he used to wonder at what Roman’s 1:28 would look like.
Now he reckons he knows.
He may not have himself.
But Morgan Stanley is a significant shareholder in Twitter and likely will have had the calculator out for a quick rattle.
MS is also being paid the Russian GDP equivalent in advisory and arrangement fees.
So, if not, there will be a circular firing squad, involving MS, Goldman, Barclays, BNP, Nomura…
(Having said all that, there’s no guarantee that the smartest humans on Earth don’t turn out to be chimps.)
Ryan George on Netflix.
shatterzzz says:
April 27, 2022 at 9:12 am
Watching the Netflix mini-series, DOPESICK, about how “big pharma” , namely PERDUE PHARMA managed to control the US opioid market with the most addictive pain-killer ever known, OXYCONTIN .. coupla interesting points (among dozens) that stood out ..
Listen to the Dollop Report
The Dollop #280 – Opium in the US – Part 1
The Dollop #281 – Opium in the US – Part 2
Incredible history – The Dollop with Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds: Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds picks a subject from history and examine it.
They must have excellent researchers
JC,
This is where the figures on exports come from:
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/exports-by-country
They are quite different to DFAT’s figures, but whilst this link says it’s 2021 data the charts titles say 2020.
https://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/trade-and-investment/trade-and-investment-glance-2021
Gospel Reading today at Mass – John 3:16-21.
I have seen advertising on the sides of buses advertising some series about past Presidents’ wives. The ad features images of the actors playing Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Michelle Obama (doubtless why they need to advertise on the side of a bus).
My first take was that it was going to be panegyrics to Democrat Presidents’ wives, but having had a look at the reviews on IMDB it seems that the complaints are all about shonky performances, not political bias.
Perhaps Paramount+ is being more careful and inclined to being even handed. If so, good luck to them.
Could crisis-hit Netflix demand Prince Harry and Meghan Markle offer up MORE royal secrets? Experts warn producers will be looking for better value for money as bosses try to lure back more than 200,000 subscribers who left this year
Personally I care as much about the vacuous Sussex Circus as I do about Johnny Depp and his ex.
But there’s a huge pointer, right there, about the quality of the Netflix corporate brain processes.
A Sell Signal, if you will.
Twitter lawyer who censored Biden Laptop story cries during Musk takeover meeting
Gadde holds one of the most controversial positions at Twitter: Her teams decide how to moderate content. That’s made her a target of right-wing criticism, particularly when Twitter blocked the distribution of a New York Post article about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in 2020. She faced a renewed wave of criticism after multiple reports confirmed she was behind the decision to ban Trump from Twitter.
Monday was an emotional day at Twitter — even for its executives.
Shortly after billionaire Elon Musk bought the powerful social media platform, top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde called a virtual meeting with the policy and legal teams she oversees to discuss what the new ownership could mean for them.
Gadde cried during the meeting as she expressed concerns about how the company could change, according to three people familiar with the meeting. She acknowledged that there are significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk’s leadership.
That’s right. They were also supposed to be a brilliant investment on the part of Netflix.
Biden Family Values
suck it up princess
Miranda Devine: ‘The most compelling evidence’ of 2020 vote fraud
In line with Netflix’s investment in Cuties — brilliant — not wonder Netflix considered investing in two dumb-as-a-bag-of-rocks, ahistorical ignoramuses was a brilliant coup until it’s not.
Knuckle Dragger said at 6:05 am
“they might realise governments are nearly always , , , , incompetent and ill equipped to solve many problems we trust them to solve”
I will take it further:-
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn addressed the reason for the Russian Revolution that resulted in the slaughter of 60 million people. After spending fifty years studying this question,
Solzhenitsyn summarized his conclusion in the words of elders that he heard in his childhood:
“Men have forgotten God;
that’s why all this has happened.”
And in my opinion that includes most in Australian politics!
A lot of the people saying that they are going to leave Twitter because it will become less of an echo/star chamber with Musk at the helm I think will not.
They have nowhere else to go, and they desperately want to spray the world with their opinions. If they don’t projectile tweet regularly they will burst. And they will insert themselves into any and all conversation because one of the things they are always certain of is that they are right. They profoundly believe that ultimately they will win. In effect this means they swiftly shift to falsehood and abuse because like a person in a desperate struggle their field of vision contracts to a small circle and everything inside them is trained on that.
They will flounce a lot, but they can flounce off to any other part of Twitter they like. Twitter has no ‘centre’ so everywhere is as good as everywhere else.
There was no plan A or B. And the RUS losses reported by UKR are exaggerated.
I watched my quota of Netflix through various lockdowns but the last few months have rarely made it though an episode of any if the more recent offerings.
Switched to Prime for Bosch watched that til halfway through the final episode. Not convinced I’m going to watch the spin off series.
Then watched series 10 to 14 of original Law and Order on Prime, now watching seasons 1 to 10 on DVD again.
Not as if L&O didn’t have the occasional political message but not always shoved right down your throat.
Bizarre photo at the top of that page. It looks like Hunter has gashes in his back. (Hunter became the hunted?) I assume that is why he took the photo in the first place.
And there is also a band (5cm) of lighter skin across his back below the gashes. Doubtless it is just a result of the ambient light reflected off the edge of the mirror – which can happen when the edges are bevelled. But I swear it looks like he was wearing a sports bra or something outside and he got tan lines.
With Hunter you can never really rule stuff like that out.
Fraud is the Only Issue
From a straight political standpoint, things are not going well for the Democrats. It’s difficult to cite a time in post-World War II America when so many things on so many fronts went this badly this quickly, and the voting public knows it’s their fault:
These Democrat policies have tangibly and dramatically degraded the quality of daily life in America, to the point where many people are starting to doubt that things will ever return to normal.
The Democrats are giving it their best shot to divert attention from their failures and gin up feigned outrage over nonexistent Trump-caused national transgressions, but the public isn’t buying it. No January 6th investigation, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (“DEI”) efforts by schools and woke companies, Green initiatives, etc. are resonating with the voting public.
American voters are most concerned with traditional kitchen table issues — the job market, runaway inflation, crime/safety, energy availability and affordability, schools/education, and illegal immigration and the strain it puts on the affected communities. This is what voters care about.
The degree to which the current Democrat administration has botched all of this up is really stunning, especially since under President Trump all of these issues were essentially the best they’d ever been post-World War II.
With no actual accomplishments to point to, having ruined everything that was running so well for the American people, Democrats are turning to what has become their most effective electoral tool in recent years: Fraud.
Putin has told Guterres he is open to peace negotiations.
Perhaps Plan B isn’t going as well as expected either.
There is another Netflix documentary series, very good, about the pharmacist who went after Purdue pill mills after his son was murdered during a drug buy.
The Purdues are still fighting law suits over their ill gotten gains.
Trump went after them iirc.
Hint.
While at Dover’s cat, please don’t acknowledge truth Bombs.
Especially with such a steadfast and well argued response.
You are supposed to dig your ostrich hole even deeper and keep muttering about anything else, like the Ukraine war, ww2, Pell, ANYTHING ELSE than why the most jabbed nation on earth has had a massive spike in deaths……….and why out of sheer coincidence it just happens to be those hated so much by the socialists doing this to us……the Jooooooooooooos.
Plibersek and Shorten reportedly “frozen out” of Labor’s media appearance schedule.
Is their presence a negative or were they the ones backgrounding against Elbow in week 1?
FOOD SHORTAGES, By design?
“How many US Presidents in modern history have announced ‘food shortages’ before they occurred? The answer is only President Biden.”
At one point I would have dismissed this sort of thing as conspiracy theory. But the conspiracy theorists’ track record isn’t bad, these days . . .
Trans men are different iirc calli.
The operations, not surprisingly, rarely end with useful appendages (how could they?) so they seem to stick with flat chests, fake abs, Adam’s apples and testosterone beards with intact uterii.
freedom of speech, transparency in rules, obligations to comply with our own rules for hate speech,
Anyone see a potential discrepancy here?
Some people can’t recognise incoherent nonsense, ever.
Also.
Nuts.
Them’s fighting words around here sport!
Wolf Alice – Big Top Luna Park Sydney 26 April 2022
An amazing show from a band who knows how to please their audience. Given how many live shows they play, it wasn’t surprising they were in top form last night and it was a perfect opportunity to showcase their now extensive and broad ranging catalogue of classics.
As for Miss Ellie, she was absolutely luminous. Knee high leather boots, black micro mini, black jacket (which came off two songs into the set) white long sleeved shirt and black boob tube. Hair suitably long and sufficiently tousled. Best legs in the business, bar none. Both Freddie and Liza would be green with envy.
Her voice is better suited to their slower songs where she’s able to superbly mine the intimacy of the subject matter, but their rockers were also delivered with great passion and energy. She’s also picked up a Strat recently (tobacco sunburst, played for only one song).
The light show was fantastic, Joff and Theo were in top form and the keyboardist has a more prominent role than I realised in some of their more recent songs. Three song encore, wrapped up with the legendary “Don’t delete the kisses”, which is my favourite song of theirs. Not a lot of banter with the audience between songs (mainly during them) and Theo’s observation that they’d “travelled half way round the world to be here, so we want to make sure you enjoy the show” was a nice touch.
9/10, the only gripe being that they played for just less than an hour and half. Strongly recommended for any Cats who may be interested in catching their other shows while they’re here.
“top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde”
Gadde is a far-left progressive liar and she should be the first person to be shown the door and I hope she hits her head on the way out. I remember about three years ago when she appeared on Rogan with Dorsey. Both she and Dorsey blatantly lied about Twitter’s moderation policies and they were both called out for it by Tim Pool, who was also on the show. Twitter’s censoring ramped up many notches under her counsel. I look forward to Gadde starting up her own social media company, after all that’s what we on the non-left been told to do over the last few years, speaking of which I have no doubt that Gadde was instrumental in the destruction of Parler back in January 2021 and I have no doubt she was also instrumental in the shutting down of the Post’s Twitter account in October and November 2020.
In the light of Musk’s purchase, I’ve been thinking about the big tech companies. I strongly suspect that the problem in these companies is scum like Gadde, it isn’t with the algorithm programmers, most of whom remain “geeks’. They just do what they’re told and they get paid very well for it. No, the problem has been sanctimonious far-left progressive management who’ve used the platforms to push, spruik, promulgate and lecture the non-left……even to the point of influencing elections.
I note Choo choo is miffed because he was FORCED to have three injections just to keep his union bludgefest of a job, now the borders are sort of open…but only for the rich with time on their hands getting back in unjabbed.
Forcing is being physically held down and penetrated three times.
He was forced in the same manner thousands of other Western Australians were forced, but didn’t get penetrated by their government, because they stood up, they didn’t submit,…. they didn’t drop to their knees like a whore to McGowan.
It seems pretty reasonable that if I choose to follow someone I should see their tweets without having to go hunting for them.
True. Although the Pommy defense minister announced to the Commons yesterday some figures. A very big number compared to Aussie experience in WW2 for example.
Ukraine’s losses will be even larger I suspect, but they have less of a problem getting warm bodies than Russia does, since they can call up previous national service personnel. Ukraine has had compulsory national service for the last 8 years, whereas Russia’s conscription program has been much more limited.
WL Baillieu, Hudson Fysh, Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca were unavailable for comment.
Shortly after billionaire Elon Musk bought the powerful social media platform, top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde called a virtual meeting with the policy and legal teams she oversees to discuss what the new ownership could mean for them.
Gadde cried during the meeting
Well, at least they only said she “oversees” the teams – they didn’t claim she “leads” the teams.
Terrible shit…especially when the duds here are looking for ways to denounce this to follow their Liberal party into net zero, billion in debt destruction of a once great nation.
Nazis In Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has given American elites some white supremacists they can embrace.
When Vladimir Putin declared that a primary objective of Russia’s invasion was to “de-nazify” Ukraine, the political elites and their media went ballistic. Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said flatly, “There are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine.” The truth? The CIA has been organizing, funding, and training Nazis and developing fascist assets inside Ukraine for 75 years. Nazis are a powerful and growing presence.
In 2014, the CIA and U.S. State Department engineered a coup that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian president. The United States replaced him with a pro-American, anti-Russian president—and the Nazification of Ukraine kicked into high gear. Well-funded, highly trained, and heavily armed neo-Nazi militias that had appeared almost overnight to stage the coup unleashed terror upon ethnic Russians and political opponents of the new regime.
Since then, Democrats and Republicans have empowered and enabled neo-Nazis to infest all levels of Ukrainian government and society. Nazi influence has only grown stronger during the presidency of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukrainian Nazism has deep historical roots. While 4.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army to defeat the Nazis, many Ukrainian fascists and anti-Semites collaborated with the Germans in World War II. One in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust—some 1.5 million people—was murdered in Ukraine.
The Roy Morgan poll shows pretty much the same trend as other polls taken during the election period.
L-NP closes gap on ALP for second straight week after the first Leaders’ Debate: ALP 54.5% cf. L-NP 45.5%
ALP and Coalition level pegging 35% of the primary vote. Thus making the election turn on minor preferences.
Unfortunately the Greens are still the major force (12%) amongst the ‘parties of no government’, with PHON the only significant show (4.5%) amongst the rats and mice parties – although evidence of a move towards independents, who now hold 8% of the poll.
Way too uncertain to predict a 55:45 win to Labor on national poll numbers. Even though taken off a small sample, the swing is clearly not uniform amongst the States – with Coalition gaining ground in WA and ahead in Queensland.
And that’s before trying to guess at the impact of the Teals.
Takeaway: Springtime for indies and Craig Kelly. Both major parties should be puckering…
As the newly macho intelligentsia of Australia lusts after war with China and cultivates an embarrassing man-crush with CIA step ‘n fetchit Volodymyr Zelensky, a commando is on trial for killing terrorists in a war.
Recapping the war in Ukraine to date
Comment: The following analysis is a compilation of tweets by independent reporter Gonzalo Lira
Which means:
The Russians intend to conquer and permanently annex all the south and east of Ukraine. This is why their strategy on the battlefield has dramatically shifted: Now they are carrying out a slow, methodical grinding down and destruction of the AFU.
The war in the first 30 days was speed, feints, nominally capturing vast swathes of Ukraine territory, with the aim of pressuring the Zelensky regime into a negotiated settlement. But the West’s total financial and political break with Russia means they have nothing to lose. And they have a lot to gain: The Donbas is mineral rich, the really productive farmlands of Ukraine are in the east and south, Kharkov is a major industrial city, the Sea of Azov has untold natural gas reserves.
And they *have* won – make no mistake. Ask any military man who is not a system pig, he’ll tell you:
There is no way for the AFU to retake their country. They have no armor, no air defense, no fuel, no comms – it’s over.
The great tragedy is that so many THOUSANDS of young men will die, and die NEEDLESSLY!!, in order to postpone the inevitable. These brave boys will have fought so valiantly – and died so young, so cruelly -because of the evil of the Zelensky regime.
That’s the hard truth.
And in the end, this will be the map that will remain — a bitter image of Ukraine’s future. Russia will pour billions into their newly acquired territory. It will prosper and flourish. But the rump-state of Ukraine will be left poor, destroyed, forgotten.
Unemployment.
Take note Lieborals. For next time.
Ukrainia off the shopping list for the immediate future.
No jab, no job! Dan Andrews is due to stand down THOUSANDS of teachers tomorrow for failing to get a Covid-19 booster shot
– Thousands of teachers due to be stood down for not getting third Covid-19 jab
– Victoria and Northern Territory the only states to mandate booster for teachers
– Loss of thousands of teachers due to vaccine mandate causing staff shortages
Bruce of Newcastlesays:
April 27, 2022 at 10:13 am
And the RUS losses reported by UKR are exaggerated.
True. Although the Pommy defense minister announced to the Commons yesterday some figures. A very big number compared to Aussie experience in WW2 for example.
Australia’s worst period of battle losses would have been Fromelles/Pozieres/Mouquet Farm, between 19 July 1916 and early September 1916.
In a period of around seven weeks casualties totaled almost 29,000, of whom around 6,000 to 7,000 died. This was from a force totaling 48 infantry battalions, four machine gun battalions and four pioneer battalions, about half of the number of BTGs committed to Ukraine by Russia in a similar period.
If the estimate of around 15,000 Russian dead is accurate, they are losing men at a rate comparable to one of the worst periods of World War I. However, British casualties in the Hundred Days of August to November 1918 were higher than for the Somme, but eased by the fact of final victory.
Sometimes the Bee doesn’t even bother being satirical.
Eccentric Billionaire Accomplishes More For Free Speech In One Afternoon Than Republicans Have In Decades
Enthusiasm is off the scale!
Most people ‘are not talking about election at all’ (27 Apr)
No Cory I don’t think so. I think the people are pretty much fed up with nagging pollies and are not at all attracted by the mouldy lot on offer. They’ll do their duty and vote, but don’t ask them to be interested in this chore.
At least I never went full Bird…
Evidently the DM doesn’t employ sub-editors anymore.
2018-2020 Mercedes-Benz line-up recalled in Australia with software fault
The fault could cause an emergency call system to fail, according to the manufacturer.
Mercedes-Benz Australia has recalled 8378 vehicles across nearly 100 model variants, citing a software fault.
The affected vehicles are stamped Model Years 2018 to 2020, with the full spate of cars listed below.
The recall notice, lodged with the Department of Infrastructure, says: “Due to a manufacturing issue, the side airbags inflatable curtain inflators may rupture without warning.
“In the event of an airbag inflator rupture, compressed gas and metal fragments may be propelled through the airbag cushion towards the vehicle occupants causing serious injury or death.”
The Russians are always open to negotiations as they continue fighting. If war is the pursuit of politics by other means then the former doesn’t forestall negotiations.
LOL.
Mother Lode at 9:48 – arguably these platforms are not without risk. MySpace anyone? Not sure how Snapchat is travelling. You might think Facebook and Twitter have a sufficiently sticky user base to prevent this. I’m not so sure. It might be there is a threshold that once crossed prevents failure. In essence they all rely on human behaviour and habit.
Perhaps not.
But unless the Poot’s 4D strategy includes selling Russia’s arse to China, he was hardly going to tell Guterres that peace negotiations were off the table.
The problem I’m highlighting is that negotiations are based on territory gained.
Sign a deal now and they won’t get their southern corridor or deprive Ukraine of a Black Sea port.
The UK defense apparatus is almost as fantastical as the Kyiv Independent.
RUS has over three times the population. The idea that UKR can defeat RUS in a war of attrition is simply beyond words.
That may turn out to be a strategy of necessity.
But it would be a sad denoument to the centuries old debate in Russia about their relatioship with W. Europe.
You can be open to negotiations without restricting yourselves to present gains if you have the upper hand.
BJ – Long says in WW2 we had 8,904 killed in action and another 1,790 who died of wounds. That’s out of 396,661 who served overseas. Those are the Army figures. Casualties are roughly double when you add in the RAN and RAF. So we had about as many guys serving as both sides current are fielding, and in six years lost a comparable number to what Russia alone has suffered in two months. Says a lot about the incredible lethality of weapons today. You can see why there’s such a push for drones and robotic systems.
Twitter’s biggest assets, as far as I’m concerned is the speed at which you get breaking news and, when it works as it should, getting easy access to pundits who’s opinions you value.
Not in this instance.
Elon Musk slams Twitter’s top lawyer who sobbed after he bought social media network and blasts her for ‘incredibly inappropriate’ censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story
– Vijaya Gadde, the 48-year-old chief legal officer and general counsel of Twitter, called a virtual meeting with the policy and legal teams she oversees on Monday
– Gadde wanted to update her team on the implications of Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company, and ended up breaking down in tears, Politico said
– Gadde ‘expressed concerns about how the company could change,’ Politico reported, under Musk’s leadership, in which free speech is championed
– Having joined Twitter in 2011, she has been central in crafting the company’s positions on banning hate speech versus allowing free debate
– Gadde was instrumental in the decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform in January 2020 on charges of inciting violence
You can’t reduce discussion of this subject to raw numbers in any theatre of war.
The quality and morale of troops and their ability to be supplied has to be taken into account, as well as morale at home. Plus the defender’s advantage in modern warfare needs to be reckoned with.
Bruce of Newcastlesays:
April 27, 2022 at 10:49 am
BJ – Long says in WW2 we had 8,904 killed in action and another 1,790 who died of wounds. That’s out of 396,661 who served overseas. Those are the Army figures. Casualties are roughly double when you add in the RAN and RAF. So we had about as many guys serving as both sides current are fielding, and in six years lost a comparable number to what Russia alone has suffered in two months.
You need to add in those who died as PoW, and in accidents (training can be a lethal business, particularly for flyers), and of disease. There are a lot more names on the WW II side of the Reflecting Pool in the AWM than 15,000.
Have too go out now, I will look up the numbers later.
they will never get the south back. they may keep oddessa if they negotiate now, but blinken won’t let them off while teenage uke can still carry a rifle.
Oh, this is an interesting development re the operation at Gostomel airport:
You know, when I had a gander at the Wiki account of this operation, and it was reported that the UKR was mauling the RUS so convincingly, that when they run out of ammo, a Georgian commander jumped in a vehicle and proceeded to run down fleeing enemy soldiers, I surmised that something was really amiss. Sort of like this scene.
Dover – That too is true, but the Defense Minister has to have some basis for figures officially tabled in the Commons or he’d be in contempt. A subsequent inquiry would reveal if the the UK general staff were lying to the Minister, and that would have very bad consequences for the UK defense and intel communities.
The UK number is also in line with the apparent accidental release of RGS internal numbers through Komsomolskaya Pravda about a month ago, which I mentioned here.
“– Having joined Twitter in 2011, she has been central in crafting the company’s positions on banning hate speech versus allowing free debate”
Yes and Gadde’s definition of hate speech means anything non-progressive. The noose of censorship really started strangling people when she was promoted. And you know there’s something sinister and Orwellian going on when someone like Gadde is described as Twitter’s “moral authority”.
Another shot in the foot:
Russia will cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria this week because they won’t pay in rubles.
Both countries maintain that they have abided by their contractual terms.
Of course, which is why the UKR position is worse than that of RUS.
For years the MSM has been using Twitter as a news source for years.
Now they will go to Twitter and be faced with discrepancies of information which will demand research.
Nah, just kidding. They will just print the stuff that fits their prejudices.
BJ – I was comparing apples with apples. Most of the PoW deaths were due to the Japanese, and the deaths due to illness were primarily due to tropical jungle diseases in an age where antibiotics were only just becoming available. I had those numbers in front of me on the same summary page (appendix 7 of volume 7 of Long et al) and elected not to include them because they aren’t comparable for this stage of the current conflict.
We’ll see more when in future years we start to get reports of how either side has been treating prisoners. So far I’m not getting the impression that either of them put much emphasis on the Geneva Conventions.
What have been the serious consequences following the erroneous WMD claims in Iraq? General Staff will just say they gave too much weight to UKR or US report and move on.
mRNA Vaccines Show No Mortality Benefit – Danish Study
The mRNA vaccines have been endlessly billed as “Safe & Effective.” But are they?
A lot depends on what one means by “safe” (which is always a relative term, as nothing is ever perfectly safe) and what the definition of “effective” is.
By effective, I think we can all agree that a vaccine designed to be mass adopted in the midst of a pandemic ought to reduce deaths from the pandemic disease. That means it ought to reduce overall mortality.
Hopefully, we can agree that’s the right metric, because if a vaccine reduces some deaths in this part of the equation, but induces a similar amount of deaths over in some other part of the health equation, then it’s not actually being “effective” in terms of reducing mortality.
A new Danish study (pre-printed in The Lancet) shows that mRNA vaccines offer no all-cause mortality benefits. Zero. Nada. So, let’s list what the vaccines don’t do: they don’t stop infection or transmission and they don’t reduce deaths. Using only RCT trial data from the pharma companies themselves, the pooled results from the mRNA vaccines show no discernible mortality benefit.
Alternatively, and quite happily, the adenovirus vector vaccines – that’s J&J and Astra-Zeneca – do show a VERY positive mortality benefit from Covid and, intriguingly, even from non-Covid deaths. How can this be? I don’t know, but it’s the sort of data that begs for more inquiry and understanding.
One does not need a PhD in public health policy to understand that the only appropriate response to this data would be to promote the adenovirus vaccines over the mRNA vaccines.
But the exact opposite happened and that’s quite a scientific, medical and public health mystery. Certainly, we could make allowances for that to happen in the first early months of the pandemic. But now? A full 16 months after the launch of the vaccines? It’s very difficult to explain what the CDC, NIH and FDA were up to with their collective tens of billions of dollars of budgetary funding.
These are legitimate questions and concerns to address and the only question I have is “will the Big Tech censors allow us to ask them, or will this be taken down too?”
We shall see.
Twitter Insider Leaks Audio Recording of Internal All-Hands Meeting Following Elon Musk Takeover
Project Veritas
According to SMH. Coalition Spending…. $275 million for hydrogen energy and carbon capture in Queensland.
That will build a nice big tank for the water.
Matt Canavan told to ‘pull his head in’ by government colleagues over net zero by 2050 comments
National Press Club Address Bridget McKenzie –
Emergency Management Minister and Nationals Senate Leader
12:30PM – 1:41PM today.
Canavan told to stop saving the LNP’s election chances:
Let’s hope the sentiment of the Ukrainian people will eventually count for more than what Blinken wants.
Twitter Employees the Day After Elon Takes Over!
AwakenWithJP
I saw David Littleproud on Sky with Laura Jayes this morning. He was asked about the ructions in the Nats starting with Matt Canavan over the Government’s nett zero emissions policy by 2050 Morrison took to Glasgow.
(If I’m repeating him correctly), he said that if the government hadn’t signed up to it interest rates would have increased by up to 3% because the rest of the world wouldn’t have accepted our position, and this would make our exports dearer and be ignored by our customers. wtf?
I don’t think you have a handle on the life and expectations of eastern europeans
Democrats & Leftists Begin REVENGE On Elon Musk For Buying Twitter, Call For Social Media Regulation
Tim Pool
Unlikely in this case Dover. Corbyn appears to favour Russia, and that suggests the left faction of the Labour Party does also. They’re likely to push for such inquiries, to hound the Tories. Recall that the Left is who gets away with stuff (like a certain Mr Tony Blair perhaps), the Right has to resign if they drink a single bottle of wine given as a gift.
‘Why would he take Putin’s side?’ Corbyn’s constituents furious at ‘mad’ NATO comments (26 Apr)
774 beating up ‘long COVID’, line being that it is all the doing of the unvaccinated.
Apparently the ABCers don’t subscribe to Science.
https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-cases-coronavirus-vaccines-may-cause-long-covid-symptoms
SecDef Austin redefines Ukraine conflict goal
I am horrified at the statement of Defense secretary Lloyd Austin at his press conference in Poland following a secret visit to Kyiv. Via The New York Times:
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a news conference in Poland, following his secretive trip to Kyiv with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
The way Russia is weakened, of course, is by being ground up in a prolonged war that is destroying Ukraine. That beleaguered nation is being used as an abrasive to dull Russia’s war-making capacity. That’s a job that destroys Ukraine in the process of harming Russia.
There is no room for negotiations that could halt the destruction of Ukraine in this goal. The longer the brutal war drains Russia’s resources, the better in terms of Austin’s goal.
A shot across the bows for Germany, Italy, and France – and the EC generally.
Germany Rejects Putin’s Demand for Gas Payments in Rubles
In terms of proportional damage: Poland is a comparatively small offtaker of Russian gas by volume – but heavily dependent on it in its energy mix. So maximum demonstration effect, minimum Russian short-term $cost.
It’s a very big strategic lever for the Poot to pull, with many, many poorly understood consequences.
Watch this space.
In the next few days everyone in the MSM commentariat is going to suddenly become an expert petroleum engineer and gas trader.
Tucker: This will happen unless conservatives get their act together
Fox News host gives his take on government officials opposing transparency following Elon Musk buying Twitter on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’ #FoxNews #Tucker
DeSantis Signs Bill into Law Creating Election Police Force
As reported by Politico, the bill implements an idea that was first suggested by DeSantis himself, in the aftermath of widespread voter fraud in numerous key swing states during the 2020 election, which may have been enough to swing the results away from President Donald Trump and in favor of Joe Biden.
“I don’t think there’s any other place in the country that you should have more confidence that your vote counts than in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said at the signing of the bill, which took place at a sports bar outside Tampa Bay.
The law will see the creation of a new “Office of Election Crimes and Security” within the Florida Department of State, which is authorized to use additional investigators in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The bill allocates $2.6 million for the creation of the task force, and sets aside 25 new positions within the two agencies for this purpose. In addition, the bill makes ballot-harvesting – the process of third parties collecting and returning someone else’s ballot – a felony. It also mandates that election supervisors screen voter rolls on an annual basis in order to continuously remove voters who are ineligible or who have moved to another location.
The bill was proposed even despite the fact that Florida was a rare example of a major swing state where little to no fraud took place in 2020, thus leading to Trump winning the state by a sizable margin of nearly 4 percent. Democrats cited this as an excuse to oppose the bill, with State Representative Yvonne Hinson (D-Fla.) claiming that “this new election crime task force has been developed to solve a problem that does not exist.”
Voter fraud in 2020 remains one of the dominant concerns for Republican voters across the country, with numerous states implementing laws to crack down on fraudulent practices such as mail-in ballots, ballot drop boxes, ballot-harvesting, and private funding of election procedures, among others. States that have passed such laws include Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Iowa.
While everyone is rushing to blame evilbad Western Men Bad for being evilbad and Western and Men and Bad, remember that Vlad Bae didn’t have to invade. He never had any obligation to any [insert name of ethnic Russian group his forces have been fomenting insurgency amongst here] in any territory that once was claimed by previous iterations of Russian empire. He never had to set about regaining old territories by force, nor was he compelled to engage in economic or diplomatic jostling with any of his neighbours.
He chose this course of action. As much as the US Dems and Deep State chose to inveigle their way into Ukranian politics and commerce. And Vlad Bae chose to stay his hand between 2016 and 2020.
Thousands of lives lost, or ruined, a couple of trillion US$ – plus further destabilisation of shitistan politics.
It’s insane the amount of people here in WA who think that they’re out of the harness because- and I quote- “The winter panto can now sell tickets for 100% capacity!” and “Come on down the pub for Chase The Ace Friday Wal, buy a drink and let bygones be bygone!” and “yay only one more week of masks for kids!”
No you effing turkeys, unless and until the Sate of Emergency is let go, we’re still all MaoGowan’s bitches. Even if there’s a miraculous breakthrough, even a la NZ where a lone high judge has found that jab commands are a gross breach of fundamental human rights, we should not breathe easy until there are some heads on pikes… (*figuratively speaking).
And the powers that be are still wielding “modelling” as their oracle. I’m stunned that there are no journalists, anywhere here, that can win thirty seconds on the mic in front of the premier, or his box-fresh ministerette, and ask
“You’ve based two years of population directives on “pandemic modelling” and “projected vaccine efficacy” and “COVID overwhelming the health system” and “new emerging variants”, and for two years those models, projections and variations have been proven wildly innaccurate.
“Even if you posit that it’s only your population directives which have led to those apocalyptic predictions fizzing out flat, you’d have to admit that the disruption and destruction to the economy and society has been horrific, and there’s inevitably a lot more pain to come in the recovery, if you ever allow us to go back to Old Normal.
“My question is: when will you drop the “pandemic modelling” as your Holy Writ, and start looking towards the horrific decay that your government has wreaked upon the state, which is now painfully apparent in economic modelling, childhood development modelling, and mental health projections- and indeed in economic destruction, childhood development decay, and a mental health epidemic?”
Dissecting the stage-managed French elections
Macron’s second presidency was as calculatingly managed by France’s liberal elite as his first. As the country’s economic and geographic schisms widen further, yesterday’s Yellow Vest protests will seem like a tea party by comparison.
The numbers tell the story: There are 48,803,175 French citizens registered to vote. Macron got 18,779,809 votes. Marine Le Pen got 13,297,728 votes. Yet the most eyebrow-raising performance was by the Abstention/Nullified/Blank candidate: 16,674,963 votes.
So the president of France was re-elected by 38.5 percent of voters while the real second place, Absention/Nullified/Blank got 34.2 percent.
That implies that roughly 42 percent of registered French voters bothered to hit the polls basically to bar Le Pen: a brand that remains toxic in vast swathes of urban France – yet hardly as much as before – and even with the whole weight of oligarchic mainstream media engaged in Two Minute Hate campaign mode. The five oligarchies who run the so-called ‘audiovisual landscape’ (PAF, according to the French acronym) of campaign messaging are all Macronists.
Madam Guillotine meets the working classes
“Not necessarily the whole of France” in fact means the majority of France, if one bothers to leave a few tony Paris arrondissements to talk to people in Pas-de-Calais, Bourgogne or the Var. This ‘real’ France identifies the “social market economy” extolled by Attali and promoted by Macron as a gigantic fake.
It would be too easy to paint the current national divide between, on one side, the elderly and the very young carrying a diploma, living in comfort; and on the other side, the 25 to 60 year olds, without higher education and barely making ends meet. That is, the working class masses.
It is more nuanced than that. Still, the two most important factors in this election are that close to one third of voters didn’t even bother to show up – or nullified their vote (even here in Paris). And that the gullible Melenchon horde handed it over to Le Petit Roi, assuming their leader will become a de facto ‘prime minister.’
The working classes will be literally exterminated throughout another five years of hardcore neoliberalism. France’s until recently stellar social welfare system will be decimated. Retirement age will be extended to 65 years old. Smaller pensions will be barely enough to live on. The super-wealthy will pay much lower taxes while the common worker will pay much higher ones. Education and healthcare will be privatized.
France will merrily catch up with the fast decaying casino capitalism of the US and UK. And don’t forget further travel restrictions and food and fuel shortages.
Have you got a fedora?
My Sharpie skills are pretty okay (I can draw a passable ABC logo to stick in the hatband), a selection of reasonably-sized hammers and a soy latte.
All we have to do is ambush the ABC spokesmong at the door of the press conference, knock them out and steal their microphone. Then you skull the soy latte just before you go in, so you adopt the right kind of revulsive sneer to make you look like you fit in.
It’ll be foolproof! 😀
(Okay- Fits of whimsy aside, plus eleventy to your comment… 🙂 )
The Nats commit suicide again.
‘The world has moved past Matt Canavan’, says Nationals MP (27 Apr)
The last base voter to leave doesn’t have to turn out the lights because there won’t be any electricity.
Believe it or not, Stalinism is everywhere is America – home of free market capitalism and land of the free. The entire American ruling class, including the Republican party, is a hive of Stalinism that, miraculously, is being thwarted following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
Almost all of Silicon Valley’s billionaires are HTML coders who can barely conceal their hatred of freedom and the human race. They made their billions talking to computers.
That’s why the Stalinist establishment is now trying to destroy Elon Musk. He dared to buy one of Silicon Valley’s social media monopolies and remove its secret algorithms for censoring content.
Tucker Carlson Tonight.
PS: The Silicon Valley tech revolution would not have been possible without free thought and lack of censorship. Lefties are the dumbest people ever born.
The Brit Labour Party is as gung-ho as the Conservatives re Ukraine.
This same crowd then thought regime change in Libya, Egypt and Syria was a smashing idea.
So Putin is just like any other statesmen.
Totally O/T.
Apparently, thousands of teachers in Vic are going to be stood down this week because they have chosen not to take the booster.
Not sure what manner of claim you are making there.
I am not subscribed to the idea that Vlad Bae is Evil Incarnate. Just as I do not subscribe to the seemingly popular ideal amongst some right-leaning folk that Vlad Bae is the One True Saviour of Western Civilisation and his invading the Ukraine is a Holy War against the Globalists that will free us all.
How you know you’re being lied to:
The ABC doubts official Russian claims of its losses but reports the official Ukrainian claims of its losses without question. Why?
Vladimir Putin agrees ‘in principle’ to evacuation of civilians from besieged steelworks in Mariupol, denies war crimes
The Russians have sought to evacuate civilians from wherever they’ve commenced operations. You can be cynical about this and perhaps you’re right, but the main question in this instance is why the hell are there thousands of civilians holed up in this “besieged steelworks”?
WE still have brilliant disability support workers unable to work because of the vaccine mandates, some have worked in the sector for more than two decades, to say nothing of the effect on people with disability who lose trusted support workers who’ve been part of their lives for years — great work bureaucratic scum
Volod Bae more to your liking?
Or Olod Bae, as ‘v’ has been banned.
never!
$$\ $$\
$$ | $$ |
$$ | $$ |
\$$\ $$ |
. \$$\$$ /
…\$$$ /
….\$ /
…..\_/
Putin has told Guterres he is open to peace negotiations.
Perhaps Plan B isn’t going as well as expected either.
I’m not really following this, but why wouldn’t peace negotiations have always been part of the plan?
If you negotiate and sign a peace agreement, then you draw a line under the conflict as best you can. If you don’t then the conflict might sputter on for years in one form or another.
Most conflicts are ended with an agreement, if not negotiations and an agreement.
It’s a normal part of the process/closure.
For many of those here bleating over the plight of Ukraine – you do realise you’re on the exact same page with virtually all of the people you condemn for lying shamelessly about Russiagate?
Something to think about. I mean, if my views vis a vis Russia were suddenly in lock-step with Alexander Vindman’s, that would give me pause.
But that’s just me.
Bruce of N
Total Australian fatalities in operational theatres, 1939-45: 27,073.
Army non-battle fatalities in operational theatres: 1165.
Army fatalities in non-operational area: 2051.
To those must also be added the Navy and Air Force non-battle casualties in operational and non-operational areas. There would have been many Air Force (training) deaths in non-operational areas.
I was waiting for that.
There are far too many people championing Vlad Bae because they think it’s a big old FUCK YOU to the US Establishment. And Globalists.
Vlad Bae does not and has never cared for US internal politics, beyond what it allows him to achieve in his own realpolitik.
Oddly enough, said Establishmentarians and Globalists tend to think the same way, too.
I can deplore a the bastardry of a left-captured Military-Industrial-Political Complex in America, AND deplore an unrelated foreign power taking the sovereignty of a smaller nation by force because it felt like doing so.
I am not an ideologue.
TLDR version-
You lot swallow Russian propaganda uncritically because you are throughly (and I absolutely agree with you on this) heartsick of the propaganda you are fed daily by our own Establishments here.
How about less Cope and more Clarity by everyone?
We are Cats, after all.
Bruce of N
Says a lot about the incredible lethality of weapons today. You can see why there’s such a push for drones and robotic systems.
Compare with the Australian casualties at Fromelles/Pozieres/Mouquet Farm in just seven weeks (from probably around 80,000 to 90,000 total committed). Old weapons could also cause a lot of casualties in a short period.
I really don’t understand the Russia last bastion of Christianity meme.
Ukrainian are also majority Orthodox with significant minorities of Latin and Eastern rite Catholics and at estimated 30% practising against Russia’s 8% not exactly in need of a Christian ‘crusade’.
dover0beachsays:
April 27, 2022 at 12:10 pm
Thousands of lives lost, or ruined, a couple of trillion US$ – plus further destabilisation of shitistan politics.
This same crowd then thought regime change in Libya, Egypt and Syria was a smashing idea.
Certainly was. Everywhere regime change was tried ended up completely smashed.
Coalition holds ground in Queensland amid coal fight, poll shows
The Coalition’s belief it will hold all or most of its seats in Queensland has been buttressed by the latest poll which shows it is the best-performing state for the Morrison government at this stage.
The Australian Financial Review/Ipsos poll conducted from Wednesday night to Saturday last week shows the two major parties tied at 50 per cent of the two-party preferred vote in the crunch state.
If the 9 per cent of undecided voters are included, Labor just leads by 46 per cent to 45 per cent.
The result, which carries a margin of error of 4.9 per cent due to the relatively small sample size, represents a tightening towards the Coalition since the last poll three weeks ago and is consistent with the views within the major parties, based on their own research, that Queensland could remain static when voters go to the polls on May 21.
However, the Coalition won 58 per cent of the two-party vote in 2019.
Victoria, however appears troublesome for the Coalition with Labor leading by 58 per cent to 42 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis, a result which carries a 4.3 per cent margin of error.
NSW, which has a 3.7 per cent margin of error, is more encouraging for the government with Labor having a slight lead of 52 per cent to 48 per cent.
While Labor is at a high watermark in Victoria, the Coalition has a similar stronghold on Queensland, currently holding 23 of the state’s 30 seats. Labor has six seats and independent Bob Katter the other.
At the last election in 2019, Queensland saved the Morrison government, due largely to concerns about the future of the coal industry under a Labor government that was ambivalent towards the then-proposed Adani coal mine.
Campaigning in Townsville on Tuesday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison focused on the safeguard mechanism in Labor’s climate change policy which would require the nation’s 215 heaviest emitters – coal mines included – to reduce aggregate emissions by 5 million tonnes a year to collectively achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
They would have to do so by either reducing emissions or buying carbon credits. After several days of confusion, including a claim all Australian coal mines would be exempt, Labor clarified that coal mines would not be exempt.
Party was broke and he ‘gave’ the million bucks when he was il capo but don’t know what stringsv were attached . They certainly can’t afford to give it back.
I thought a million bucks would be pocket money to people like Photios and Greiner- surely they could pitch in?
The UN reckons Ukraine has had 14,000 guys KIA. I would think it would be more than that, but on the other hand territorials are probably harder to spot and get than guys in tracks in this new age of effective AT missiles. Russia doesn’t seem to have widely available IR headsets for night infantry patrolling.
Speaking of Victorian teachers, what happened to that Catholic Education Office class action?
Just drove down Irving St Foostcray where there is a pop up booster clinic at the station for the keen rail traveller.
And you can still see the signage for Pat Cash’s father’s legal office on the other side of the road.
Well, he did it. He bought me my first ever opal. A lovely asymmetric blue with golden flashes. Will have it set when we get back home.
Off on a tour out to the derg fence and the Breakaways and the underground Serbian church.
The people here are friendly and interesting and they love the place. It’s the antithesis of suburbia.
From The Newcastle Herald 27/4:
The Nationals are working to head off a preference deal with minor parties which could eliminate the junior Coalition partner from the race to steal the Hunter electorate off Labor.
Independent candidate Stuart Bonds, who garnered a hefty 21.6 per cent of the primary vote in 2019 under the One Nation flag, said on Tuesday that the Nationals had been “begging me to put One Nation behind the Nats” on his how-to-vote cards.
A deal between Mr Bonds, One Nation, United Australia Party and the Informed Medical Options Party has an outside chance of delivering one of them enough votes to eliminate the Nationals’ James Thomson during the allocation of preferences…
Each of the four parties has been promoting themes challenging vaccine mandates, lockdowns, climate action and government overreach.
“There’s an enormous push to put the major parties last so that by the time it gets to the Nats they are below us,” Mr Bonds said…
A Nationals campaign spokesperson said the party was examining “all these scenarios” and holding discussions with “everyone.”
For one of their candidates to eliminate the Nationals, the minor parties would need to gather enough volunteers to main Hunter’s 57 polling booths on election day…”Preferences only matter if you man the booths,” the Nationals spokesperson said.
In 2019, 30 per cent of One Nation and UAP voters preferenced Labor above the Nationals in Hunter. One in four Greens voters put the Nationals above Labor. The National primary vote was 23.5 per cent in 2019, compared with Mr Bonds’ 21.6 per cent and Labor’s 37.6 per cent…
There would have been many Air Force (training) deaths in non-operational areas.
To add further to what BJ said here, and to others above…I think I have posted before about the figure the USAAF kept very quiet in WWII. They had six deaths in training and due to non-combat factors – eg: getting lost and ditching – for every death in combat throughout the war.
One bloke whose autobiography I read – names escapes me at the moment – catalogued his time in carrier fighter training. It was a very depressing read as his mates ones by one succumbed to some problem or the other. From memory it was much more pilot error than aircraft failure that took them out.
WWI on the Western Front was even worse. One “ferry” flight, IIRR, from Britain to the UK of four fighter aircraft saw four new pilots fail to make it in one way or the other. Three disappeared, crashing en route due to separation; poor nav etc, and the fourth crash landed on arrival.
Like the Malcolm of old, Turnbull tirade fails to stir the pot
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Voters these days already factor in former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his views, to the point he has minimal impact, Liberals say.
To the surprise of nobody, Malcolm Turnbull made his first foray into the election campaign on Tuesday with the goal of torpedoing the slender prospects of the Coalition securing a fourth term.
In a fireside chat on ABC Radio National, the former Liberal prime minister criticised his old foe Peter Dutton as a belligerent and bombastic blowhard who was more interested in a tabloid headline, than doing the hard yakka needed to keep China at bay.
Speaking from his New York bolthole, Turnbull accused Scott Morrison of cocking up the whole China business with his “bully boy language”, even rekindling Labor’s “I don’t hold a hose mate” theme to reinforce Anthony Albanese’s claim the government dropped the ball in the region.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne, a former factional ally who went to the wall for Turnbull during the leadership coup, was not spared. She was taken to task for not visiting Honiara since before the pandemic.
And perhaps the cruellest blow. Turnbull damned with faint praise the man he once pushed to succeed him in the seat of Wentworth, saying while Dave Sharma is “a very talented guy”, his independent rival Allegra Spender “is an outstanding candidate”.
Both would be “very fine” representatives of Wentworth and Turnbull would not say who he would vote for.
It was not what he said, but that he chose to say it.
As usual, there was a complete lack of self-awareness.
What really stood out on the back of his spray was that no one really cared.
Otherwise, no one batted an eyelid. Senior Labor members didn’t mention it and Morrison was not asked about it during his press conference.
A Liberal source said voters nowadays already factored in Turnbull who, in terms of minuscule impact, he likened to another former Liberal prime minister called Malcolm.
Malcolm Fraser so turned on the Howard government that he ended up spruiking for the Greens.
The key difference is Fraser took 20 years to turn bitter.
wow.
Twitter CMO / moderator. Presumably questions from the employees:
– Musk is a person of “questionable ethics”.
– with no board, who will keep Elon accountable, and how?
– Is there an updated understanding on what free speech means?
Fire them, with prejudice!
I’m looking forward to the upcoming Musk/Employee Q&A
China’s Secret Playbook For War – General Robert Spalding | Modern Wisdom Podcast 463
Global Supply Chain Crisis Flares Up Again Where It All Began
Ports are already snarled, with the $22 trillion trade in global goods facing months of severe disruption.
IIRC, appointing Turnbull leader coincided with donations reducing to a trickle. This totally inexplicable & mysterious coincidence, if publicised, may have marred the narrative of “coz magnificence” surrounding The Great Unifier, so to avoid getting red cheeks in public he kicked in the difference.
Straw man. Deciding to not to adopt a position because certain people hold the same position is tribalism. Sure it might give you pause for thought but so do many other factors.
Zip, though a good skit, the problem with AJ’s take on the twitter brain explosion from Musk taking over is that it’s too close to the truth. Comedy only works when behaviours/attitudes/relationships are exaggerated way beyond the real. But those characters are clearly based on real twitter people -people who, despite or because of their mental health problems, are actually the “higher-ups” in these companies. It is enough to make everyone shudder.
I saw Sophie Elsworth – The Australian’s media writer – on PML last night. She said Musk’s take-over of Twitter could almost make her go out and buy a Tesla. Fingers crossed he can really clean up this sewer.
Bruce of N
Re PoW and disease deaths.
The 15,000 seems to be a broad estimate of total deaths, and probably includes PoW and disease deaths.
Until we have good information that either or both sides are treating Ps oW with something other that a random mixture of callous indifference and random brutality, the prospect of significant numbers of PoW deaths cannot be ignored.
On disease, while scrub typhus might not be a big killer there, gastro diseases (depending on the strength of Russian and Ukrainian filed latrine discipline) are likely. Also, fighting in mud brings the prospect of charming problems like tetanus and gangrene.
Keep an open mind, and remember when discussing the effectiveness of modern weapons, around 140,000 British soldiers who went “over the bags”” on 1 July 1916 were reduced by around 19,000 deaths and around 38,000 woundings (and some prisoners) in 24 hours.
Calli, the Breakaways are interesting , but if you could get to The Painted Desert (which used to be on private property) – it is truly amazing.
What you think you are, or whatever values you believe you’re bringing to some metaphorical table, is of no importance. What’s going down in Ukraine ought not be our business. The fact you think it is is exactly the problem. We made it our business – we should not have done so. We’ve made this same mistake before in the Middle East.
It is time to stop.
No. If you’ve determined that certain people are bad actors in certain circumstances, that should hold in other circumstances. In fact, Vindman’s position is consistent. Yours is not. You should take a look at that and stop crapping on about strawmen.
Why is it that Liberal leaders such as Fraser , Hewson and Turnbull turn on the party when I cannot think of a Labor leader who has done a similar pivot.
I am sure that the Labor leaders are just as egotistical and venal but they hold fast.
Vlad is a bad actor. He’s no better than our lot.
Hi Graeme!
BoN @ 11;59am.
Thanks, Bruce. He refers to Treasury doing the modelling – there’s the beginning of his problem – they always get it wrong. It also makes me wonder about Barnaby: he said back in Nov? that he had no power to stop the government from signing up to Glasgow. Now, Littleproud is saying that it was because of the modelling from Treasury. So they were scared sh1tless by the big boys in the government. Says a lot.
Really? This sounds like the beginning of the same type of “‘SHUT UP!’ He explained,” act we’ve been dropping into here on everything from the Coof’s origins to lockdowns and mandates to jabs to what the WEF allegedly really wants to do with us and exactly what happened to the 2020 Elections.
It was. That’s unfortunate. 🙁
The universe is a chemist.
That is a significant concession. Thank you. I agree with you on that. Our leaders are as bad as – and possibly worse than – what you consider Putin to be.
Please comment on the wisdom of our leaders’s policies with regard to Russia in light of your concession.
Feelthebern:
Is there anyone speaking for these potential humans whose genetic code is being abused by these freaks?
Pathetic.
repost with menu, very good interview
China’s Secret Playbook For War – General Robert Spalding | Modern Wisdom Podcast 463
00:25 What’s Happening in Shanghai?
12:54 The West’s Double Standards
22:13 Unrestricted Warfare
33:14 Why Dictatorships are so Efficient
37:43 China’s Disinformation Process
47:57 Chinese Military Strategy
56:56 The Fentanyl Crisis
1:04:06 Weakening Enemies by Deception
Blinken and Austin meet Zelensky. Conflict in Moldova gets green light
The Duran: Episode 1267
Seriously. You need to do better than Instapundit circa 2012.
Mark Latham.
Rex-
Have you been following Avi Yemeni and his battle for press access to Dan Andrews in Vic? I’ve got absolutely no doubt that MaoGowan is using the same strictures to winnow out critics from his pressers, and would use his staff and our money to drag it through the courts if that’s what it came to.
Oh if I had the time. The bloke who recently hoiked over the fence and into the MaoGowan-AnAl lawn service was bang on the cutting edge- though like I would probably end up, too wordy and not firm enough asking for an immediate response- and that episode sunk without a trace.
I’m not sure that is the case. His allies have found him dependable.
Why?
You did just accuse me of being a sympathiser of the Deep Staters upthread because I think Russia invading Ukraine is not a good thing. And got a lot of upticks over it.
If that wasn’t supposed to be an attempt beat me over the head with the zeitgeist, I don’t know what you were saying…
Anchor What:
I’d suggest a rumour being circulated that the drop boxes are going to be the receptacles of incendiary devices in the rogue states, but I won’t. Because deliberately burning Democrat votes is illegal. Or something.
Just don’t use the drop boxes.
The obama…. er I mean biden administration is trying to destabilise the entire eastern euro region
Christians top charts
How An “Ocean” in Your Brain Helps Transmit Information
I hope this is true because it opens up an entirely new way of thinking about how brains work and we desperately need something new under the skull to advance our understanding.
The Biden Administration Is Openly Pursuing A Policy Of Escalation In Ukraine
As the war in Ukraine drags on, the United States is making a clash with Russia more likely with each passing week.
What are we to make of a comment Monday from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that the Biden administration’s goal in Ukraine is “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”?
Austin made the remark in a press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken after the pair met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, in what was the highest level visit by U.S. officials since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.
One obvious conclusion we can draw from Austin’s comment is that the Biden administration has now committed openly to a policy of escalation in Ukraine. The White House intends to keep the war in Ukraine alive, with the stated goal of weakening Moscow by continuing to pour new and more advanced weaponry into the war-ravaged country.
Indeed, Austin and Blinken announced a new round of military aid to Ukraine, bringing the total amount of U.S. assistance to about $3.7 billion since the invasion began. After resisting pressure early in the conflict to supply Ukraine with advanced weapons systems, the Biden administration has changed course. It is now preparing to send heavy artillery, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, antiaircraft radar systems, advanced attack drones and other weapons.
These weapons and munitions are getting into Ukraine for the most part via railway, which is probably why Russia carried out missile strikes on least five railway stations across central and western Ukraine early Monday, just hours after Austin and Blinken met with Zelensky.
How did Austin and Blinken get to that meeting? By railway. Politico reported that “Austin and Blinken traveled to and from Kyiv by train and crossed into Poland shortly before Russian missiles struck several railway lines — including one in the city of Lviv in western Ukraine, near the Polish border.”
If you’re wondering what is the significance of this deepening U.S. involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian war, or how it might lead to a direct military confrontation between the United States and Russia, consider that the U.S. secretaries of defense and state might have just narrowly missed being struck by a Russian missile as they traveled to and from Kyiv by rail on Monday.
But history, especially the unique history of Russo-Ukrainian relations, suggests otherwise. Indeed it suggests that Moscow will never allow for the kind of Ukrainian victory that Blinken and the White House are working towards. To the extent U.S. policymakers are relying on, say, historical comparisons to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan as a guide for the creation of U.S. policy in Ukraine, then we’re in trouble.
Put another way, this is not a peripheral conflict for Russia. As far as the Kremlin is concerned, the fate of Ukraine is inextricably tied to Russia’s core strategic national interests. The chances that Putin will accept total defeat in Ukraine without escalation that involves the use of nuclear weapons, or that involves widening the war, are probably lower than most Americans are comfortable with.
To bring it back to Defense Secretary Austin’s remark about the U.S. wanting to see Russia “weakened” to the point it cannot field a military capable of invading a much smaller country, one has to ask: how does Russia, a country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, get weakened to that point? Do Austin and his generals really think that a U.S.-backed Ukraine is going to be able to do that? Or do they have something else in mind? The evidence suggests they have something else in mind, and that something else is direct U.S. and NATO involvement.
See above. I was there at that time. Don’t trot those tropes out. I’m at least as familiar with them as you are. They had purchase in that context. Here…not so much. Not so clever.
You notice such things? Noted.
-s
Just looking up The Critical Drinker on Goolag – I notice that his Twitter results show up ahead of his YouTube result.
I wonder why?
Quite threw me off because YouTube has always previously come up first and Twitter below that.
I despise the US now with its critical race theory, gender fluidity, ‘sex changes’ for minors, detention of dissenters without trial and banana republic ‘elections’. Not to mention the treatment of Trump and his supporters. And now they’re trying to amp up a major war.
most russians like putin, he pulled them out of the post soviet anarchy. the corruption they just learn to live with and navigate through. it’s the price of relative stability and moderate prosperity compared to the hard times russians have suffered through. the hardship and struggle of russian life and history is deeply ingrained in the russian psyche.
the le pen infomercial is perfect zeitgeist of the russian mood, however self contradictory it might be. perfect distillation of russian pathos, toil and sacrifice and rejection of western “liberalism”.
A filthy x dresser an admiral- fuck me dead.
Russia failed several tactical objectives and has suffered many losses.
Who believes it was the plan to feign losing control of a major airfield and the capital was just part of a diversion for a sweep through the east and south?
Surely if they can plan that well, they could have just planned a rapid and low casualty sweep from Donbass to the last inch of Crimea.
In the Oz just now. Executing a search warrant?
A few here.
Rest easy, Australia:
Elbow has declared there’ll be no carbon tax under a government he leads.
“A Liberal source said voters nowadays already factored in Turnbull who, in terms of minuscule impact, he likened to another former Liberal prime minister called Malcolm.
Malcolm Fraser so turned on the Howard government that he ended up spruiking for the Greens.”
There’s a big difference between Malcolm Fraser and the miserable shit who resides in a mansion in Point Piper. Fraser at least started his political life as a conservative and I’m also pretty sure he never crossed the floor when in politics. Sure, as PM he was pretty useless but his animosity towards the Liberals took a few years go cultivate after his defeat back in 1983.
Malcolm Turdbull was never ever a Liberal in any shape or form. Turdbull was always a leftist and was only in politics for himself, he used the Liberal Party as a conduit to achieve his goals. He is a man completely lacking in any principle. The Liberal Party knew this from the beginning and yet, despite all of Turdbull’s backstabbing, leaking, maligning and sulking, the Liberals foolishly and recklessly rewarded him in September 2015 by handing him the keys to the Lodge, in the process knifing a PM who’d won a landslide two years earlier. Turdbull was always a disgrace, a complete and utter scum bag.
I watched Sky News last night and Senator Holly Hughes, a lightweight if there ever was one, put Campbell Newman in the same boat as Turdbull. Boy I laughed out loud. No, no, no Senator Hughes. There are big differences. Newman doesn’t defecate on the Liberal Party the way Turdbull does. Newman doesn’t side with far-left progressive Greens. Newman isn’t spruiking net zero emissions. Newman isn’t driven by spite or malice towards members of the LNP and if he is, he has the decency to keep a lid on it. There’s zero comparison between Newman and Turdbull. Newman was and remains a Liberal, it’s just that he’s now joined a party that actually adheres to real Liberal values unlike the Liberal Party that you, Senator Hughes belongs to, a party that’s trashed the Liberal brand.
Musk is definitely a force of evil in the world.
I mean, look at this (stranded travellers in William Creek).
Honestly, if the government told you to watch re-runs of Gilligan’s Island you’d now do it and have arguments over who is prettier, Marie -Anne or Ginger.
We actually had troops in Afghanistan and other wars barely discussed here when they were happening.
I’m sorry….but they own you.
You want Ukraine war.
You need Ukraine war.
God help you if you had to look at your own nation and predicament.
The insanity of the jabbed.
And you want attention.
Hi Struth.
How’s the boat?
Morsiesays:
April 27, 2022 at 1:51 pm
Why is it that Liberal leaders such as Fraser , Hewson and Turnbull turn on the party when I cannot think of a Labor leader who has done a similar pivot.
I am sure that the Labor leaders are just as egotistical and venal but they hold fast.
Labor is ruthless in its treatment of “rats”. See Billy Hughes and Mark Latham, both now hated by their former colleagues.
I need attention Choo choo?!
Check out this word wall letting everyone know you have no opinion on anything.
Why not just not comment?
And what is it about your fascination with upticks?
Would you change your position to gain more upticks?
But first you have to have one.
Just coming on here to troll is not having an opinion is it now, Comrade McGowan’s bitch?
No one would ever accuse you of being an ideologue that’s for sure.
No problems there.
“I am not an animal”
Cracks in EU appearing.
Bar Beach Swimmersays:
April 27, 2022 at 1:55 pm
BoN @ 11;59am.
Thanks, Bruce. He refers to Treasury doing the modelling – there’s the beginning of his problem – they always get it wrong. It also makes me wonder about Barnaby: he said back in Nov? that he had no power to stop the government from signing up to Glasgow. Now, Littleproud is saying that it was because of the modelling from Treasury. So they were scared sh1tless by the big boys in the government. Says a lot.
BBS
Two ponts.
The bureaucracy is not the government. They are there to support the government.
Second, that any reasonably informed person still shows respect for “modeling” demonstrates the ignorance and cowardice of that person.