Positions that conform with reality are still positions, and they’re often the best.
Sancho Panzer
April 30, 2022 12:26 pm
miltonfsays:
April 30, 2022 at 10:33 am
Good morning- reading about voting in the Senate above, we only have to vote for 6 below the line? So the AEC is lying to us? WTF?
I think it is more than that below the line.
I think you can vote up to six above the line.
miltonf
April 30, 2022 12:27 pm
Morgan is a disaster and he’ll be gone very soon.
Big fat turd- how I detest that waste of space.
Roger
April 30, 2022 12:28 pm
At the start of this business (February 2022; although 2014 marks the real beginning) I maintained that Putin had some moral right to extend protection to the break away Russian-speaking republics and that the Ukrainians had acted irresponsibly and stubbornly in that matter (and in disregard of the Minsk Protocols brokered by France & Germany). It seems that many Ukrainians thought so as well, because Zelensky was elected over the pro-American Poroshenko with a mandate to work out a peace deal with the Russians.
When Putin then cynically used the conflict in the Donbas as a pretext to launch an invasion of Ukraine in the interest of his Greater Russia idea, however, we were entertaining a different moral question. He was not waging a just war and the Ukrainians, the majority of whom wanted no part of Russian occupation, had a right to defend themselves.
Now the American State department, which has had a hand in Ukrainian affairs since the early ’90s, has very wrecklessly decided to use the conflict to inflict as much damage on the Russian military as possible, escalating it to yet another, very dangerous phase in which Russia may determine that it is under existential threat. Russian media, which speaks for Putin’s regime ( ‘free’ outlets having been closed or censored), is now preparing the populace for nuclear war.
There’s a lot of blame to go around in this and we’d better hope someone finds the lever to de-escalate things and quickly.
Milts – just to clarify, I was referring to voting below the line on the senate ballot paper. Only six boxes need to be numbered (twelve in a double dissolution).
This is the complete quote from the AEC “Official” Guide to Vote I received yesterday .. Below the Line .. If you choose to vote below the line, you need to number at least 12 boxes, from 1 to 12, for individual candidates in the order of your choice. You can continue to place numbers in the order of your choice in as many boxes below the line as you like
Sancho Panzer
April 30, 2022 12:32 pm
Rex at 12:17.
I couldn’t read the brochure.
Why tail-dragger?
Particularly fond of ground loop accidents are you?
Or does it have aerobatic capability?
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 12:32 pm
Having gently and caringly struggle cuddled the franchise to death the BBC orders Dr Who exhumed and handed over to chicks with dicks for one more poop chute plundering…
PEG is an important part of the lipid nanoparticles based vaccines. Moderna COVID vaccine mRNA-1273 and Pfizer-BionTech COVID vaccine BNT162b2 contain PEG2000 in abundance. Let’s review why some people are getting allergic reactions with these vaccines, and the impact on the patient’s immune system for the future PEGylated therapies.
Zipster
April 30, 2022 12:42 pm
“Electric buses aren’t the issue here, Bollore buses of this model are the issue,” a spokesman for the transport operator added.
Bollore itself said in a statement that “the whole staff of Bluebus is mobilised… to find out the origin of the accident”.
so many mysteries
Bruce of Newcastle
April 30, 2022 12:48 pm
A romantically tranny Dr Who may cause a new baby boom. Nothing is impossible!
Might need some assistance from a sonic screwdriver for that to work.
GreyRanga
April 30, 2022 12:51 pm
Bons I liked you analysis of your senate vote, whether or not it is acceptable to others doesn’t matter. Imagine if everyone analysed their vote in the manner that was suitable for them instead of voting above the line how much different the composition of the senate would be. Personally I don’t like preferential voting as we get what we have now. First past the post for me and no voting above the line. Never happen of course.
John H.
April 30, 2022 12:51 pm
Zipstersays:
April 30, 2022 at 12:39 pm
Drbeen Medical Lectures
How Polyethylene Glycol (PEG) in Vaccines May Cause Allergic Reactions
PEG is an important part of the lipid nanoparticles based vaccines. Moderna COVID vaccine mRNA-1273 and Pfizer-BionTech COVID vaccine BNT162b2 contain PEG2000 in abundance. Let’s review why some people are getting allergic reactions with these vaccines, and the impact on the patient’s immune system for the future PEGylated therapies.
In the broader context though all of us have many plastic particles in our bodies of many differing compounds. The quantity of plastics in the vaccines is probably miniscule compared to our cumulative exposure.
President Biden’s disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz sang about dead child sex with fictional character Harry Potter, as she participated in the “wizard rock band” called “The Moaning Myrtles,” which released several songs detailing such fantasies
It is an ironic discovery — Jankowicz’s apparent obsession with Harry Potter — as many have deemed her the U.S. version of the Ministry of Magic’s overpowering Dolores Umbridge.
Rex Anger
April 30, 2022 12:52 pm
Rex at 12:17.
I couldn’t read the brochure.
Why tail-dragger?
Particularly fond of ground loop accidents are you?
Or does it have aerobatic capability?
The RV-4 thru -8 are the aerobatic ones. The -9 is a long-distance tourer that can squeeze in and out of the same sort of shorter strips the other types typically can use.
As far as taildragger vs trike goes, I think the design looks nicer and keeps the prop a bit more out of the grass and rocks when anywhere away from a paved surface.
Plus, it would be a convenient excuse to get the appropriate endorsement on the PPL should the opportunity for Rex With Wings arise… 🙂
Makka
April 30, 2022 12:53 pm
the Western alphabet agencies,
The CIA has been deeply and widely embedded in the media since the 60’s. (Operation Mockingbird) . More so now in the digital era , now that 5 Eyes is alive and thriving.
Makka
April 30, 2022 1:01 pm
Biden is dangerous because he is senile.
It’s much more dangerous than that. Biden is a brain dead puppet for what is now in power; a malicious, evil, marxist, authoritarian, cabal- who are OUR ALLIES.
We are allied with what has become an evil and despicable regime. If Albo is elected, there is no doubt in my mind we will become like them – very fast. Within Albo’s first term. An “accommodation” with the Greens will only hasten that process.
Two huge challenges to the conventional understanding of brain function. I hope I live long enough to see these ideas mature. The brain wave one in particular fascinates me and this one explains an anomaly long known. Synapses are not fixed structures. Microglia, the immune cells of the brain, regular consume synapses.
As noted in the article the problem with AI that attempts to emulate brain function is that we’ve been wrong about brain function! Neural nets my ass.
Roger, I don’t disagree much with what you’ve said above, except that the ‘Greater Russia’ and media preparation is exaggerated. I’m pragmatic insofar as the Russian occupation of south and east is concerned. My position here is that given the costs this has imposed on Russia in both blood and treasure, the creation of Republics in those areas if they were to become a part of the Russian Federation isn’t cynical, its just realistic. They have significant Russian populations and any resistance at least in Kherson and Zaporizhzhya seems low . And they learned some horrible lessons given their muted response to the uprisings in 2014, in Kharkov, Mariupol, Slavyansk, and the like.
Zipster
April 30, 2022 1:15 pm
disney has turned full evil Turning Red
Mei Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang) is a confident, dorky 13-year-old torn between staying her mother’s dutiful daughter and the chaos of adolescence. Her protective, if not slightly overbearing mother, Ming (voice of Sandra Oh), is never far from her daughter – an unfortunate reality for the teenager. And as if changes to her interests, relationships and body weren’t enough, whenever she gets too excited (which is practically ALWAYS), she “poofs” into a giant red panda
Zipster
April 30, 2022 1:17 pm
I’m pragmatic insofar as the Russian occupation of south and east is concerned.
ukraine is just the obama adm…biden administration playing dominoes
President Biden’s disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz sang about dead child sex with fictional character Harry Potter,
While disturbing, it is less interesting than this
During her testimony, Jankowicz referred to the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer saying “The social media platforms played a huge role in allowing that group to organize. It allowed, you know, that group to — it seeded the information that led them to organize.”[15]:?29
But lawyers for the accused countered that the scheme was mostly “smoke and mirrors”, profane talk by angry and disillusioned men.
Throughout the trial, they maintained that the men had been entrapped – or improperly induced into the crime – by an undercover FBI operation.
Diogenes
April 30, 2022 1:19 pm
Please show where America literally invaded a country (in order to annex parts of it) without some kind of legal process, no matter how daft.
Ask the Apache, Comanche, Sioux, Navajo etc etc that question.
Old bloke
April 30, 2022 1:20 pm
Roger says:
April 30, 2022 at 12:28 pm
Now the American State department, which has had a hand in Ukrainian affairs since the early ’90s, has very wrecklessly decided to use the conflict to inflict as much damage on the Russian military as possible, escalating it to yet another, very dangerous phase in which Russia may determine that it is under existential threat. Russian media, which speaks for Putin’s regime ( ‘free’ outlets having been closed or censored), is now preparing the populace for nuclear war.
If the Russians were to launch nuclear missiles against the USA, wouldn’t they fly over the North Pole?
Jeremiah 50:3
For out of the north there cometh up a nation against her, which shall make her land desolate, and none shall dwell therein: they shall remove, they shall depart, both man and beast.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 1:20 pm
POWs should not be used like this by either side.
From memory, the practice is illegal, under the Geneva Convention.
rickw
April 30, 2022 1:22 pm
The RV-4 thru -8 are the aerobatic ones. The -9 is a long-distance tourer that can squeeze in and out of the same sort of shorter strips the other types typically can use.
Apart from the issues raised here our brains would rot because neurons need to maintain a regular firing rate in order to be healthy and stay connected but because our brains consume 20% of O2 and energy resources it won’t be possible to keep human brains sufficiently active in hibernation.
Makka
April 30, 2022 1:24 pm
Many commented about Ukraine using POWs for propaganda purposes.
You mean like Ukes filming the shooting Russian POW’s in the legs?
Does this receive the same strong reaction?
Which part? When the Brit is assured he is safe, assured that he will be going to hospital to attend his arm? Maybe the propaganda is directed at the Azovs to surrender in Mariupol – who in fact have shown themselves to be a murderous nazi bunch.
So if China is going to sell national assets, will this transfer down to the private market?
And what will happen to the Australian housing sector?
Logically it should split two ways – the Chinese private citizens who are able to get to their housing assets, and will keep them – and those who cannot, and will sell.
I’d be getting out of the market if I were in it.
All it took was some election cheating (there is always election cheating) , an absurd and panicked over response globally to a pandemic, and all of a sudden some of the “right” are exactly where the hard left were fifty years ago:
Anti- American.
Derisive of Western values.
Supporting Russia.
Apologising for our foreign enemies.
Falling into an abyss of crank theories and shit history.
After decades of being too above it all to fight the culture war, too busy making money to get into the key areas of teaching and media, too arrogant and short sighted and sneering to do the hard work, the response now that it’s obvious that war is horribly lost? “Fuck it, the West was never worth saving anyway”.
Makka
April 30, 2022 1:39 pm
Anti- American.
Derisive of Western values.
You can spin you silly bs any way you like to fit your absurd nonsensical narrative.
The current Administration is clearly anti-American and completely abhors western values. Therefore those critical of the current disgusting US Administration are most likely pro-American and are heavily pro-Western in values.
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 1:40 pm
POWs should not be used like this by either side.
Absolutely.
As well as mocking/televising the dead and wounded (as opposed to recording and reporting).
Geneva Conventions I, II and IV
According to Article 50 of the 1949 Geneva Convention I, Article 51 of the 1949 Geneva Convention II and Article 147 of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV, “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” are grave breaches.
So its all fun and games to grab oligarchs yachts, but is it legal?
Which is, I realize quite small fry compared with actually starting a war in the first place.
was it you who mentioned lithium orotate here some weeks ago?
John H.
April 30, 2022 1:43 pm
Arkysays:
April 30, 2022 at 1:34 pm
All it took was some election cheating (there is always election cheating) , an absurd and panicked over response globally to a pandemic, and all of a sudden some of the “right” are exactly where the hard left were fifty years ago:
Anti- American.
Derisive of Western values.
Supporting Russia.
Apologising for our foreign enemies.
Falling into an abyss of crank theories and shit history.
Exactly Arky. Many of the complaints of the Right were articulated by Chomsky etc 50 years ago. I should explore the psychology\cultural dynamics of those shifts but in these days I’m too lazy and prefer computer games.
Timothy Neilson
April 30, 2022 1:43 pm
Arkysays:
April 30, 2022 at 1:34 pm
All it took was some election cheating (there is always election cheating) , an absurd and panicked over response globally to a pandemic, and all of a sudden some of the “right” are exactly where the hard left were fifty years ago:
Key words must be “some of” the right. As for most of the right, I’d say: Anti- American. No. Anti the “elites” who are destroying America from within (and causing mayhem elsewhere as well). Derisive of Western values. No. Just no. They aren’t. Supporting Russia. In a sense I suppose. Many are definitely asserting that reality isn’t a cartoon-like “Good Ukraine/Evil Russia” dichotomy, but I don’t think that even they are acting as Putin’s cheer squad. Apologising for our foreign enemies. I don’t know who or what you’re referring to. Falling into an abyss of crank theories and shit history. Well yes, there has been a fair bit of that.
“And what did you do Arky”?
If you remember, ten years ago I was at putting my job at risk by going on here and telling exactly what was going on in schools and how you could expect that to change the culture.
I told you “You should see what’s coming down the pipeline”.
I wrote piece after piece about the importance of the story we tell ourselves and each other about who we are, and how that story was getting corrupted and manipulated in schools.
John H.
April 30, 2022 1:48 pm
local oafsays:
April 30, 2022 at 1:40 pm
John H,
was it you who mentioned lithium orotate here some weeks ago?
Yes and I just picked up a fresh supply yesterday, delivered by iHerb from the USA. Not only helps the brain, a recent research report highlighted it can also protect the kidneys which was surprising because the therapeutic doses of lithium for bipolar have a big problem with possible kidney damage. However those dosages are much higher than taken as a supplement.
Additional Protocol I
Article 47(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I defines mercenaries as any person who:
a) is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict;
b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities;
c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party;
d) is neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict;
e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and
f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.
…
Lots of bits at that link. Ukraine
Ukraine’s IHL Manual (2004) states:
1.2.25. … [M]ercenaries are unlawful participants of the hostilities.
…
1.2.25.2. … [M]ercenaries shall not have the right to be prisoners of war and are subject to punishment for their actions. However, their punishment may only be imposed by a competent tribunal.
… Russian Federation
The Russian Federation’s Regulations on the Application of IHL (2001) states:
When fallen into the power of the adversary, neither spies, nor mercenaries shall have the right to the prisoner-of-war status and shall be subject to punishment for their activities. However, sentences with respect to the above persons shall only be passed with previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court and the accused shall be provided with the generally recognized guarantees of court defence.
Both sides make it a bad idea to be captured as a mercenary.
too arrogant and short sighted and sneering to do the hard work, the response now that it’s obvious that war is horribly lost? “Fuck it, the West was never worth saving anyway”.
Hey hey hey….Arky……..once there were enough people not wearing masks in the airport, our intrepid heroes marched through it without one on and declared victory after their big stand against face nappies.
Holding the line and all that.
FMD.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 1:52 pm
African gangs set Adelaide on edge
David Penberthy
SOUTH AUSTRALIA CORRESPONDENT
@penbo
7:01PM April 29, 2022
A shocking stabbing murder has highlighted the extent to which troubled and violent African gang members are travelling between Melbourne and Adelaide in the apparent pursuit of vendettas.
In less than 12 months, the relatively peaceful streets of Adelaide have been marred by more than half a dozen stabbings at city nightspots and suburban centres that are home to the city’s modest and historically well-behaved Sudanese population of about 2000.
That violence reached a new low on the Anzac Day long weekend with the stabbing and bashing murder of 25-year-old Melbourne man Ngor Bol, with 17 young men and youths facing many charges including heading into the CBD with knives and machetes, clearly ready for a fight.
Bol’s shattered sister Achel Bol denies her brother was a gang member and wrote an emotional Facebook post this week saying his killers would “rot in hell”.
Of the 17 men arrested in relation to the attack, six are from Melbourne, including the one youth who is facing murder charges whose name has been automatically suppressed as he is 17.
Rather than tiptoeing around the problem, SA Police and the newly elected Malinauskas government acknowledge there are specific issues within a subsection of the Sudanese and other African communities that must be addressed with force and possibly also tough anti-gang laws.
I used to think this way within schools:
Their theories will meet reality and reality will win. They will have to change.
No.
They are ideologues.
When their theories met reality and failed, they counterfeited reality and the theories stayed.
The RUS are also hitting bridges and main road links. Which means air transport may become a prime mode of weapons delivery for Ukr from outside her borders. Let’s hope NATO don’t get ballsy enough to risk providing air transport for their arms shipments – and lose a plane or two. Then it could get very hot indeed.
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 1:57 pm
Of course the waters get much, much more muddied when people have volunteered/enlisted to fight for a side (as I assume most of the Ukraine foreign fighters have) rather than for monetary reward.
Interesting that there is a lot of countries with laws around mercenaries being illegal, and not considered legal combatants, but at the same time affording them basic rights against mistreatment and legal process rather than rule .303.
Arky.
I could operate tours for years without giving my politics away, and nobody demanded that I show my hand.
No religion or politics as was the old rules.
Now the left have no qualms about calling you out and demanding you declare your hand.
eg.
Driving into the filth and human misery of Maningrida, the public servant lefties who were the majority of ones who could afford the tour…and the only ones willing to pay that much to see aboriginals, drove into a scene of rubbish, mangy camp dogs dead and dying, shit and filth everywhere, back yard burials, ….and when one passenger from Queensland who was not a lefty declared “Holy hell, look at the rubbish everywhere’…..they just mumbled to themselves “white man’s rubbish” and although the scene hits them like a brick, they saw nothing.
They saw nothing.
And what they admitted to themselves was white man’s fault.
Denialism………..we see it here as well.
Bruce
April 30, 2022 2:08 pm
@ Dot:
” because they were gay, apparently.”
There is a book out there called, “The Pink Swasika”, that covers the topic.
The SA was was more than a bit “Cabaret”. It was obviously getting out of hand and thus the “purges”.
Yes and I just picked up a fresh supply yesterday, delivered by iHerb from the USA. Not only helps the brain, a recent research report highlighted it can also protect the kidneys which was surprising because the therapeutic doses of lithium for bipolar have a big problem with possible kidney damage. However those dosages are much higher than taken as a supplement.
Thanks for the info.
I can hardly find anything about lithium orotate online, mainly whether there are any side effects or interactions with medicines. If you can point to any info about it, would be much appreciated.
I believe you mentioned improved sleep. That sounds very interesting and I’m thinking of trying it, but would like to be sure it’s not going to interact with any medications or other supplements.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 2:14 pm
Interesting that there is a lot of countries with laws around mercenaries being illegal, and not considered legal combatants, but at the same time affording them basic rights against mistreatment and legal process rather than rule .303.
Two episodes brought the whole matter to a head in the 1970’s. A group of Brits, fighting in Angola were captured, shoved in front of a “kangaroo court” as mercenaries, and shot. It was pointed out that it is not illegal, under international law, to be a mercenary. The other was, as the “Bush War” in Rhodesia, was winding up, Robert Mugabe announced that foreigners, serving in the Rhodesian Army , would be tried as “mercenaries” and “war criminals.” The unspoken threat was that they would also be shot. The result was the “Biet Bridge 500” as a number of foreign servicemen were told “The truck is outside. Get out, chuck your rifles into the river, and the South Africans will give you a passport to get home. “
the public servant lefties who were the majority of ones who could afford the tour
..
Once you figure it out and see the self interest driving their beliefs you can’t unsee it.
Hint: it has nothing to do with helping the unfortunate.
From the smallest interpersonal to the broadest public policy proposal, it all comes back to “what’s in it for me”.
When the chickens come home to roost. This one is a doozy.
Electric vehicle firm Lucid Group, Inc. (LCID on the Nasdaq). Fourteen-year-old Lucid, which had never sold a vehicle prior to late last year, rode the wave of special purpose acquisition companies following its merger with a blank check firm last summer, eventually commanding a $91 billion market capitalization at its November highs. Thanks to that eye-popping surge, Lucid bestowed a $556 million pay package on CEO Peter Rawlinson, Bloomberg reported yesterday, including $263 million in performance-based equity awards. That marks one of the largest payouts to any corporate executive in the country last year.
Such generosity comes as shares now sit 67% from their November peak and with cash needs growing more prominent. Bloomberg analysts now expect the company to burn through $9 billion by the end of next year, compared to a prior $7.5 billion estimate, while Lucid’s $2.1 billion in convertible notes have slumped to 70 cents on the dollar from 98 cents as recently as late January.
John H.
April 30, 2022 2:33 pm
local oafsays:
April 30, 2022 at 2:09 pm
Yes and I just picked up a fresh supply yesterday, delivered by iHerb from the USA. Not only helps the brain, a recent research report highlighted it can also protect the kidneys which was surprising because the therapeutic doses of lithium for bipolar have a big problem with possible kidney damage. However those dosages are much higher than taken as a supplement.
Thanks for the info.
I can hardly find anything about lithium orotate online, mainly whether there are any side effects or interactions with medicines. If you can point to any info about it, would be much appreciated.
I believe you mentioned improved sleep. That sounds very interesting and I’m thinking of trying it, but would like to be sure it’s not going to interact with any medications or other supplements.
You can’t buy it in Australia because the TGA is a pack of panic monkeys. You can’t even buy selenium supplements in Aus. I don’t buy supplements from Australian outlets because those are so expensive. iHerb offers free shipping for amounts of US60.00 and the products are much cheaper even with shipping.
If not on any meds start with 5 mg. You can go higher but even with that small amount it is a pronounced effect on me. If on meds speak to doc first.
It can take several weeks for lithium to start to take effect when using it to treat bipolar depression. A standard dose of oral lithium for an adult is 600–900 milligrams, taken two or three times per day.
A follow-up study in the same Texan counties looked at similar variables over a longer 9-year span. Researchers came up with almost identical results: the incidences of suicide, homicide, and rape were significantly higher in counties where drinking water contained little or no lithium, versus those with levels ranging from 70 to 170 mcg/L. Unsure if these striking findings were somehow unique to that geographical region, other researchers have sought to replicate the study template in other areas throughout the globe. Lithium water studies have now been repeated internationally at sites in Austria, England, Greece, and Japan. Overall the collection has revealed a strong inverse correlation between aggressive crime and suicide and supplemental levels of lithium in the water supply.
Lithium may reduce risk of dementia Clinical use of lithium is associated with a lower incidence of dementia in old age (Kessing et al, 2010; Nunes et al, 2013). Moreover, excellent lithium responders have preserved cognition (Rybakowski and Suwalska, 2010). Lithium-treated patients have better visual memory than nonlithium patients (Bersani et al, 2016; Quartini et al, 2016).
In addition, minute doses of lithium (150?mg/day) exceed placebo in slowing the rate of cognitive deterioration over 1 year in elderly women with mild cognitive impairment (Forlenza et al, 2011). Positive effects of micro doses of lithium have been reported in Alzheimer’s dementia (Nunes et al, 2013).
I have to admit, initially, I was skeptical that such a low dosage[5 mg] would have any effect on my clients. I’m happy to say I was wrong. Here’s a little background on Lithium Orotate and some examples of what it’s used for.
John H.
April 30, 2022 2:34 pm
Local Oaf
Just posted a lot of links and info on Li but in moderation due to all links. Be patient, hopefully DB will release it soon.
All it took was some election cheating (there is always election cheating) , an absurd and panicked over response globally to a pandemic, and all of a sudden some of the “right” are exactly where the hard left were fifty years ago:
Anti- American.
Derisive of Western values.
Supporting Russia.
Apologising for our foreign enemies.
Falling into an abyss of crank theories and shit history.
Much of what you’re seeing began far earlier than 2020, all that’s happened is that events have enlarged that part of the Right that has been long suspicious of American adventurism abroad, domestic American economic policy, and so on. 2020, the pandemic response, etc. have simply accelerated that shift. Characterizing this as ‘anti-American’ or ‘derisive of Western values’ is just absurd. The former is simply a version of rendering any criticism of this or that Leftist shibboleth as ‘phobic’. Re the latter, the major institutions use the term ‘Western values’ as a skinsuit for whatever operations they are currently conducting, or even conducting operations against genuine Western values in the name of Western values; and this is not to absolve that significant portion of the public that is itself either confused as to those values or militantly opposed to them.
DrBeauGan
April 30, 2022 2:49 pm
Dr Beaugs- good to see you lurking.
…straight to spacechooking- how the hell can I buy cigars economically in Oz?
Wally, I get mine from Cuba. I save a certain amount, but I have to pay duty when they arrive in Oz. This is a fair bit more than the cost of the cigars themselves.
If you are interested, I can put you in touch with the ppl in Cuba, or handle the purchase myself on your behalf.
Write to me by emailing my name as on this post followed by an (at) sign and then gmail.com
I don’t know how to get Australian tobacco cigars. They’d be illegal, of course. Our government intends to keep extorting from us. Bastards.
Isis ‘Beatle’ given eight life sentences for Syria murders
I miss my father so much, victim’s daughter tells pair
David Charter, Alexandria
Friday April 29 2022, 8.00pm BST, The Times
ANTHONY LOYD FOR THE TIMES
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The 11-year-old daughter of a British man beheaded by Islamic State told two members of the gang that imprisoned him how much she missed her father before a US court handed down eight life sentences to one of them.
“My mum is trying hard, but I can often see that she is sad,” Athea Haines, daughter of the aid worker David Haines, told the court in Alexandria, Virginia, as Alexanda Kotey, 38, and El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, sat yards away with their legal teams. With Mohammed Emwazi they formed a brutal Isis cell known as the Beatles by their hostages because of their British accents.
Kotey, who admitted five charges of hostage-taking and three terrorist conspiracy charges, was sentenced on Friday. He looked at his victim’s daughter as she spoke with remarkable composure. Elsheikh, who was found guilty by a jury two weeks ago, stared down or closed his eyes.
“I wasn’t even three years old last time I saw him. I miss him so much,” Athea said, speaking into a microphone during a series of pre-sentence statements for victims of the Isis terrorists who grew up in London but have been stripped of their British citizenship.
“Sometimes I get sad when I see my friends from school and club laughing and playing with their dads,” she said. “It is not easy to be that kid in school whose dad was killed by terrorists.”
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Kotey was told by Judge Thomas Ellis that he would spend his whole life behind bars for “egregious, violent and inhumane conduct” for his role in the kidnap, torture and death of four Americans, two Britons and others held in Syria. He will be eligible for transfer to a British prison in 15 years under the terms of his plea agreement, although the final decision remains with the British authorities.
Kotey was told by Judge Thomas Ellis that he would spend his whole life behind bars for “egregious, violent and inhumane conduct” for his role in the kidnap, torture and death of four Americans, two Britons and others held in Syria. He will be eligible for transfer to a British prison in 15 years under the terms of his plea agreement, although the final decision remains with the British authorities.
what a waste of taxpayers money, bring back the death penalty!
Mark Ames
@MarkAmesExiled
·
2h
Do we ever find out which private mercenary corporation Willy Cancel worked for, or is that a state secret too?
Fair question.
Zyconoclast
April 30, 2022 3:10 pm
A shocking stabbing murder has highlighted the extent to which troubled and violent African gang members are travelling between Melbourne and Adelaide in the apparent pursuit of vendettas.
They already have the means, infrastructure and recent practice to stop people at the Vic/SA borders.
I’m sure they can use this for the keeping people safe.
The AEC has that delicate blend of incompetence and political correctness that characterises every institution that should be marked down as an enemy of good government.
OK, mark them down for a jolly good purging.
Runnybum
April 30, 2022 3:23 pm
Where is BoN? I notice his hero of the war reporting in Ukraine is back in Australia reporting on the price of Bok Choi in Australian supermarkets.
What a hero.
Cassie:
Here in Maranoa, I’ll be punishing Littleproud.
Purge the bastards.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 3:32 pm
Jacob Zuma ‘let his cronies plunder state assets’
Jane Flanagan
Friday April 29 2022, 5.00pm BST, The Times
JEROME DELAY/REUTERS
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Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president, “readily opened” the state’s doors for cronies “to help themselves to the money and assets of the people”, according to a years-long inquiry into corruption under his rule.
The former leader was enrolled in a huge looting plot by a family of Indian businessmen because his “character was such that they could use him against the people”, Chief Justice Raymond Zondo found after hearing the testimony of hundreds of witnesses.
Eskom, the state-owned power utility which supplies 90 per cent of South Africa’s power, is the focus of the judge’s fourth tome into the biggest scandal of the post-apartheid era during Zuma’s nine-year presidency.
The plundering has saddled Eskom with R400bn (£20.2 billion) of debt and left it battling to keep the country’s lights on. Scheduled power cuts to prevent the collapse of the grid have returned to businesses and homes in recent weeks as winter draws in.
Eskom struck irregular deals worth 14.7 billion rand, the inquiry found, mainly with businesses linked to the brothers Atul, Ajay and Rajesh Gupta who were close to Zuma and his family.
Zuma, 80, stacked Eskom’s management with stooges, identified by the Guptas, to grease the wheels of the sleaze including making coal deliveries that violated its own regulations and unlawful payments to McKinsey, the management consulting firm.
Earlier reports by the commission into so-called state capture also placed the Guptas, who moved to South Africa at the end of white rule, at the heart of alleged systematic ransacking which is estimated to have cost South Africa 1.5 trillion rand (£69 billion) in stolen funds and lost GDP.
“It is clear that from quite early in his first term President Zuma would do anything that the Guptas wanted him to do for them,” Zondo said in his 1,000-page findings.
Eskom was only one of several state structures targeted for looting during the Zuma years. The national airline, the freight-rail operator, the revenue services and weapons company were all hollowed out, according to the inquiry’s previous reports. The treasury had a narrow escape, the chief justice wrote in the fourth and latest instalment, which was handed to President Ramaphosa today. Zuma was forced to reverse the appointment of an accomplice as finance minister after a cabinet backlash.
“It is almost a miracle that the national treasury was saved from the tentacles of the Guptas,” wrote Zondo, adding: “I shudder to think what would have happened.”
The findings, which recommend criminal charges be brought against Eskom’s corrupt board, piles fresh pressure on President Ramaphosa to act on a decade of impunity. There is no trial under way in a case relating to the state-capture scandal and little sign of urgency. Ramaphosa has asked for four months to respond to the thousands of damning pages once Zondo delivers his final report in June.
Zuma’s defiance of a court order to appear before the inquiry, which began hearing testimony in August 2018, resulted in a 15-month prison sentence. His jailing in July triggered the worst violence since the end of apartheid, with more than 300 people killed. Zuma was released on medical grounds in September.
The Guptas, who have denied any wrongdoing, left South Africa for Dubai shortly after the ruling African National Congress forced Zuma to resign in 2018. Eskom, which is under new management, welcomed the report. McKinsey has promised to return fees earned in the Eskom projects.
One of the lessons of the pandemic is we have to stand on our own two feet — we’re vulnerable if we’re at the end of supply chains.
This does nothing to alleviate the issue. We will assemble a couple hundred buses here from parts shipped in from all over the world at a cost of around $1 million a bus*, and $2.5 million per job created. And we’re still at the end of the supply chain. If any of the required components can’t be shipped to Oz for whatever reason, no buses will be rolling off the line until they arrive.
*that’s not the price of the unit, by the way, that’s the price of establishing the assembly facility. Then you have to pay for the bus.
In a new white paper published yesterday, the government announced a review that is expected to dump the current 100-year-old funding method in favour of an alternative, such as a subscription model.
Excellent news. The BBC and the ABC are ready for a damn good & hard, hot water purging.
the major institutions use the term ‘Western values’ as a skinsuit for whatever operations they are currently conducting, or even conducting operations against genuine Western values in the name of Western values; and this is not to absolve that significant portion of the public that is itself either confused as to those values or militantly opposed to them.
..
In this passage you put yourself in opposition to Western institutions and it’s public.
Other than the landmass itself, that doesn’t leave much.
If those are truly your feelings you might ask yourself if this isn’t a Sodom and Gomorrah moment. If it is, then it’s time to walk away and not look back.
I have had recent good reasons to look upon my fellow citizens with a great more respect and gratitude. There are a lot of fantastic people out there.
For every jerk there are ten or twenty good ‘uns.
Rex Anger
April 30, 2022 3:42 pm
Where is BoN? I notice his hero of the war reporting in Ukraine is back in Australia reporting on the price of Bok Choi in Australian supermarkets.
What a hero
I thought you wanted nothing to do with Ukraine, Struth-sock?
Because it was distracting everyone from ThE GrEaT ReSeT and the WEF’s DeAtH CaMpS…
DrBeauGan
April 30, 2022 3:48 pm
For every jerk there are ten or twenty good ‘uns.
Probably more. But they don’t run the institutions.
Apart from the above Germany has upped defense spending, recently announced it will send heavy weapons to Ukraine, and is now purchasing the F35, an aircraft that is far beyond any Russian aircraft capability.
Bruce of Newcastle
April 30, 2022 3:52 pm
Where is BoN? I notice his hero of the war reporting in Ukraine is back in Australia reporting on the price of Bok Choi in Australian supermarkets.
Runny – If you mean Seven reporters, they seem to’ve taken turns in Kiev. Their London guy was there at one stage. I couldn’t tell you what they’ve been up to lately as I don’t have a TV and I haven’t looked at a Seven site for several weeks.
Cats by and large understand by now that I regard the MSM with more distaste than a slug in a food factory, bok choi or otherwise.
rickw
April 30, 2022 3:53 pm
Rumour has it that the youngest of mum and dad’s farm dogs has taken to sneaking off and having a bounce on the kids trampoline by herself. 🙂
rickw
April 30, 2022 3:56 pm
The AEC has that delicate blend of incompetence and political correctness that characterises every institution that should be marked down as an enemy of good government.
Perfect.
Rex Anger
April 30, 2022 4:05 pm
Rumour has it that the youngest of mum and dad’s farm dogs has taken to sneaking off and having a bounce on the kids trampoline by herself
Cheeky bugger… 🙂
bons
April 30, 2022 4:06 pm
I am searching to find and post a great doco on the Bund Deutscher Madel.
The women, in their 60’s were mostly very realistic. One woman said that German girls who traditionally learned nothing about sex until their 20’s were suddenly confronted by hords of pregnant 15 year olds.
She said that the famous skimpy gym slips worn by the senior girls were for the titillation of the senior aparatchicks and Hitler Youth bosses, who made their choices of the 15 year olds.
One woman, confronted by the draft choices of civil defence, hospitals, air defence, transport, refugee support, and worst of all, factories (all of which involved huge hours, danger and constant sexual assault) prevailed upon the mistress of the local gaulieter to bring her on board as a deputy mistress.
Her post war denazification was severe but she considered her choice to have been worthwhile compared to the alternatives.
I’ll find and post.
Rex Anger
April 30, 2022 4:07 pm
Probably more. But they don’t run the institutions.
Yet…
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 4:08 pm
Arkysays:
April 30, 2022 at 3:42 pm
…
dover0beachsays:
April 30, 2022 at 2:38 pm
…
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.
… He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.
In effect we have a monoculture formed and housed in Canberra (with minor state versions).
The people are captured by the obsessions of the professional management class, media and uniparties.
People should be rejecting the Canberra obsessives en-masse, but due to the lockstep of the gatekeepers many people wont know to any great degree just how much of a sham our democracy is.
By Steve Miller, RealClearInvestigations
April 28, 2022
The pathway to a green future involves taking millions of acres of pristine wilderness and turning them into fields of windmills and hot expanses of glistening panels.
The Biden administration’s goal of supplying 40% of the nation’s energy from the sun by 2035 means covering millions of acres of forest and desert habitat with vast solar panel installations fenced off like prisons. It would require 8,800 square miles of land, or 5.6 million acres, to generate that power (leaving out small installations on buildings and the like) — about the size of Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined.
But the push to convert that land from pastoral to energy-productive is galvanizing a new environmental movement, one led by citizen groups and small non-profits rather than the monied green interests arrayed against them — ones ironically accustomed to casting the fossil fuel industry in the role of the ecological heavy.
The potential impacts of solar-power installations have flown under the radar while much public resistance has centered on wind farms – which kill an estimated 1.2 million birds per year in the U.S. and are considered loud and unsightly by many who live near their towering turbines. Even as the Biden administration has made limiting the environmental impact of oil and gas a key goal, it has opened large tracts of federal lands to solar development by major corporations including Duke Energy, Exelon and BrightSource Energy.
Solar advocates say mitigating climate change requires a switch to carbon-free energy, and utility-scale solar installations are vital to the effort. They contend a looming climate crisis requires the switch to be made quickly, although the effects of widespread solar development are not fully understood.
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 4:15 pm
For example 90% of voters will look at the big shiny numbers and think this is a good thing.
Anthony Albanese has pledged $125 million to manufacture 130 electric buses in Perth if Labor wins the federal election.
The McGowan government will match the $125 million commitment, with the aim of creating 100 new local jobs and transitioning 300 existing jobs to clean energy.
What this should be is a tombstone on any political parties campaign.
“creating 100 new jobs” Effectively saying this will be less efficent than what is being done now as it will require 100 more people to man it.
“and transitioning 300 existing jobs to clean energy”. Will effectively mean drivers and mechanics.
Yet the media is in lockstep allowing the squandermonkies to label all the Billions being spent as “investment”, not taxpayers money being sprayed up the wall like a trapeze artist with a dose of the squirts after a 12 Guinness and and curry lunch.
Politicans are proud of their ability to spend other peoples moneys.
They are verminous shits.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 4:15 pm
Bund Deutscher Madel.
Known, unkindly, as “League of German Mattresses.”
bons
April 30, 2022 4:16 pm
Winston. I wish I had a chance to take a poke at Littleproud. Disgusting creature.
Sneered at farmers during the drought, rejected fuel load reduction, jumped on board net zero despite knowing that it would destroy his electorate.
Attempted to publicly destroy Canavan.
Maybe I can lease a voting right for just this election.
Use-of-force expert says DC Metro Police officer committed felony in attack on Rosanne Boyland
By Joseph M. Hanneman April 29, 2022 Updated: April 29, 2022
A District of Columbia police officer used a large wooden stick to strike the body and head of protester Rosanne Boyland three times as she lay motionless on the ground on Jan. 6, 2021, according to bodycam footage from several officers obtained by The Epoch Times.
Use-of-force expert Stanley Kephart, upon reviewing the previously unreleased footage, concluded that the three full-force blows by D.C. police officer Lila Morris constituted a felony assault with intent to cause great bodily harm.
Kephart called Morris’s use of force “indefensible” and the internal-affairs investigation of Boyland’s death a “clear and convincing coverup.”
Police at the mouth of the Lower West Terrace tunnel at the U.S. Capitol ignored dozens of pleas to help Boyland after she collapsed, the videos show.
An independent forensic pathologist hired by the Boyland family contends that her cause of death wasn’t an overdose of the prescription drug Adderall—as reported by the D.C. medical examiner—but manual asphyxia. Boyland was crushed under a pile of people when police gassed protesters and pushed them out of the tunnel at about 4:20 p.m. on Jan. 6.
Kephart concluded that Morris’s use of force was a felonious “assault under the color of authority,” with intent to cause great bodily harm. He said that Morris should be prosecuted in criminal court and fired from the D.C. Metro police force.
“There’s people under here!” shouted Justin Winchell, Boyland’s friend who accompanied her to Washington that day. “There’s people trapped under here!”
A protester right at the police line who was bleeding from a baton strike to the head pointed to Boyland and pleaded for help. “Get her up. Get her up! Get her up, please,” the man urged. “Save her life! Save her life, please!”
One officer used his baton and boots to push five protesters on top of Boyland, bodycam video shows. “Please get her up! She’s gonna die!” Winchell shouted.
OSINT Aggregator
@AggregateOsint
· 27m
#Izyum Axis – Reliable sources reporting that #Russians are very close to encircling the town of #Oskil and a large number of #Ukrainian troops still inside the town. ?? troops may still have a window to escape S but most nearby adjacent ?? troops evacuated S a few days ago.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has refused to say whether households will be better off overall from Labor’s cost of living packages amid the risk of rising interest rates and inflation wiping out the gains.
Giving his first full press conference after his COVID-induced absence from the campaign trail, Mr Albanese continued to be peppered by questions over Labor’s policies to tackling the soaring cost of living.
But responding to the Morrison government’s announcement of a $10 reduction to medicines co-payments for patients, Labor flagged it would announce its own policy to address drug prices at its campaign launch on Sunday.
Campaigning in Perth on Saturday morning, where Labor hopes to gain up to three seats, Mr Albanese said it was “good to be anywhere frankly at the moment” after leaving isolation the day before.
Saying Australians had “conflict fatigue”, Mr Albanese hailed his announcement of investing $125 million – matched by the state government – to build electric buses in Perth as an example of cooperation with the states.
“This is a government always looking for an argument, never a solution,” Mr Albanese said.
“One of the lessons of the pandemic is we have to stand on our own two feet, we are vulnerable if we are at the end of supply chains.”
‘Cost of living crisis’
But with Labor’s accusations of government inaction over the rising cost of living central to its election pitch, Mr Albanese ducked questions over how the party would reduce supermarket bills.
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 19 Issue: 61
By: Roger McDermott
April 27, 2022 04:35 PM Age: 2 days
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western governments and analysts have periodically expressed fears that the Kremlin might try to escalate by using nuclear weapons. This anxiety stems directly from Moscow’s own nuclear threat rhetoric: indeed, Putin’s original announcement of the officially designated spetsial’naya voyennaya operatsiya (special military operation) against Ukraine included a warning against direct intervention by the United States and its allies, threatening them with unparalleled destruction (Interfax, February 24). The nuclear warnings continued with the successful testing of the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on April 20—routine and duly notified but characterized by Putin as providing “food for thought” to potential adversaries (Krasnaya Zvezda, April 22). These warnings are key in the Kremlin’s strategy to manage conflict escalation by deterring the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from considering directly intervening in the war. While the risk of nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US is possible, it is worth assessing the actual danger of a direct Moscow-Washington clash escalating to a nuclear exchange.
The three experts also draw upon Herman Kahn’s 1965 work that presents 44 rungs on the “ladder of escalation,” applied contemporaneously to great power competition in the information era but with the number of “rungs” reduced to 12—the point at which the nuclear threshold is crossed. The dozen points of escalation, from crisis to ending with a strategic nuclear exchange, are as follows
(Voprosy Eskalatsii i Deeskalatsii Krizisnykh Situatsii, Vooruzhennykh Konfliktov i Voin, 2021):
calli
April 30, 2022 4:25 pm
The Rock is red…repeat…the Rock is red.
And the land all about it, as far as the eye can see, is green. I managed to take some beautiful photos with a cloud streaked sky as a backdrop. Unlike last time, when it was a uniform grey and running fast with sheets of water and mini waterfalls, this time it changed colour with every minute.
Standing there in the silence, a little breeze kicked up. The spinifex rattled and creaked and there was the unmistakeable sound of the waves on the shore. The desert oaks were remembering the long lost ocean as their branches sighed in the wind.
bons
April 30, 2022 4:28 pm
Vlad’s most potent anti-NATO strategy would be to insinuate Sweden into the organisation.
The ‘human rights super power’ will have the organisation prostrate within weeks.
Any Cats who have experienced the joys of working with the UN would be well aware of how Swedes cripple an organisation with their arrogant politics.
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 19 Issue: 61
By: Roger McDermott
April 27, 2022 04:37 PM Age: 2 days
Moscow’s official statements since February 24, 2022, concerning possible nuclear escalation should the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) directly intervene in the Russo-Ukrainian war represent a deliberate policy of strategic deterrence. Possible escalation to a world war between the US and Russia is acknowledged by both sides, which are seeking to navigate its avoidance, and featuring in White House deliberations on the level of weapons and hardware support that Washington and its allies can provide to Ukraine. The risk of nuclear conflict caused by the war in Ukraine and the wider US-Russia crisis raises critically important questions about how to judge the level of escalation and discern the red lines on the part of both Moscow and Washington.
Thus, the Russo-Ukrainian war is occurring in the context of a potential confrontation between two nuclear powers, with each trying to establish where lies the point of no return on the path toward strategic nuclear exchange (Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, October 14, 21, 2021).
For now, wider war appears some way off, as Moscow has numerous conventional military escalatory options at its disposal, ranging from assigning a massive airpower role to the Aerospace Forces (Vozdushno Kosmicheskikh Sil—VKS), destroying critically important targets or even simply boosting its conventional firepower on the battlefield. For example, the Tu-22M3 long-range bomber can deliver the FAB-5000M-54 free-falling high-explosive bomb. The mass of the warhead reaches 4,200 kilograms, and the mass of the explosive is 2,210.6 kilograms. As a non-nuclear option, the VKS has at its disposal a high-power aviation vacuum bomb, informally named the “Father of All Bombs” (drawing by analogy on the US Air Force’s GBU-43/B, nicknamed the “Mother of All Bombs”). Some military specialists consider this to be the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the world (Gazeta.ru, April 19).
In reality, Russia’s Armed Forces possess enough conventional firepower to render the tactical nuclear option unnecessary in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the risk of nuclear use primarily relates to an escalatory response to the United States/NATO entering the war. For the time, the West has ruled out physical intervention. As Kokoshin and his co-authors warn, “Many domestic and foreign experts rightly point out that it is unacceptable to unleash any war between nuclear powers, any direct military clash, since neither side will be ready to admit defeat in a war using conventional means. An armed clash between the allies of the nuclear powers should also be considered very dangerous” (Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, October 21, 2021).
There’s more to it than that. Had the US/ NATO wanted to, they could have helped sideline Azov, Right Sector, and the like, and helped Zelensky implement his platform, however, either they were too important to the political coalition to isolate, or they were fulfilling a trajectory that the US/ NATO did not oppose.
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 4:40 pm
Doing a rough calculation on the impacts of interest rates doubling for housing.
$500,000 loaned over the 30 years etc at 3.5% is about $2300 per month.
$500,000 loaned over the 30 years at 7% is about $3400 a month.
If we were to get back to 10% (which was ‘normal” for a long time)
$500,000 loaned over the 30 years at 10% is about $4500 a month.
I have full faith in the Elbow/ Pissant coalition to blast past that in their first term. https://greens.org.au/platform/jobs Millions of people are struggling to keep their head above water, while big corporations are making big profits, and have too much power.
Working people need better rights, higher pay and more secure work. Working people need to be safe at work.
Your Vote Is Powerful. If just a few hundred people change their vote, we can kick the Liberals out, and put the Greens in balance of power.
The Greens will rewrite the labour laws to give working people more power, outlaw insecure work and increase wages. *
The Greens’ plan will create hundreds of thousands of well paid jobs to make us more self-reliant and sustainable, and help rebuild our arts, entertainment and creative sector. **
We will improve rights for women, and end the gender pay gap, so workplaces are fairer and safer.***
With better rights for working people, we can have a stronger economy and a healthy environment.
* I legislate everyone is paid $1,000,000 a year, Job done…
** Awesome, more ABCcess drama and artsy mongs who hate whitey…
*** They will legislate women will be conscripted into the dirty/dangerous/ demanding roles men do and work the same hours?
Right?
Afternoon all. Spent the day doing oil changes including diffs/transmissions in the car and routine maintenance. Trip into the town to find oils & parts I spotted a greens corflute hanging off railway infrastructure, sorta thinking about reporting it to the AEC LOL.
Still don’t think there will be wholesale changes of seats bar possibly Leichardt up this way. One thing is Palmer is off the boil and I doubt he’ll get many votes up this way. As for the election I note after the disastrous start the media is in full fluff mode for the ALP apart from some quarters of News Ltd. Some of the vomit I have seen this week like Jason Clare swoon headlines and more on Wiemar/Sutton (albeit Vic state) has had me literally gagging. Who writes this trash, better off at Mills & Boon then an apparently serious newspaper. Suddenly no-one is questioning Albo about costs of living or illegal immigration, just Dorothy Dixers about Trannies. LOL Chalmers the economic doofus gets “covid” as well. LOL who will it be next week to keep them out of the headlights?
In this passage you put yourself in opposition to Western institutions and it’s public.
Other than the landmass itself, that doesn’t leave much.
I said significant portion, not the public, and criticism, not opposition.
calli
April 30, 2022 4:49 pm
Still at Curtin Springs. Tomorrow is Kings Canyon, and probably well out of phone range.
This is a vast cattle property, around 1 million acres. They run Murray Greys, cute short and stocky and very biddable. Even the bulls are well behaved. Apart from a bit of tourism, they supply artists with handmade paper. It’s made from the local grasses – I had a demmo yesterday and made a sheet. It brought back happy memories of making it at school. It’s very easy to do and just about any fibre will work. Their product is dotted with seed heads, flowers, red soil and even cow poo.
They are minding a baby water buffalo in one of the yards – last night he was calling to the MG calves and their mums – poor little fellow. They also have some camels ready for processing. “Bush chops” for the young ones, mince for the oldies – not much of a yield they tell me. The Beloved, who is very naive about such things, asked where the cattle went after they travelled through the knock box. “Heaven”, I answered, much to the guide’s amusement. The refrigerator was a cooler alternative.
Timothy Neilson
April 30, 2022 4:52 pm
Rather than tiptoeing around the problem, SA Police and the newly elected Malinauskas government acknowledge there are specific issues within a subsection of the Sudanese and other African communities that must be addressed with force and possibly also tough anti-gang laws.
Is it possible that the South Australians actually made a sensible choice by punting the Coalition? [Sorry, of course that’s sensible per se but I mean also installing the ALP.]
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 4:54 pm
The Greens plan includes:
Boosting paid parental leave
Increasing women’s workforce participation through free childcare and flexible work arrangements
Closing the gender pay gap by increasing wages, valuing care work, improving pay transparency, and penalising employers who don’t act to reduce the pay gap
Implementing all recommendations in the Respect@Work and Set the Standard reports, including a positive duty on employers to make their workplace safe
Implementing public sector workforce strategies to boost employment of women, First Nations and CALD people, and people with a disability
Supporting women-led businesses through low interest loans and procurement targets
Oh come on
April 30, 2022 4:55 pm
Had the US/ NATO wanted to, they could have helped sideline Azov, Right Sector, and the like, and helped Zelensky implement his platform, however, either they were to important to the political coalition to isolate, or they were fulfilling a trajectory that the US/ NATO did not oppose.
Indeed. This doesn’t seem too complicated to figure out, though. Remind me again of Zelensky’s overwhelmingly popular election platform? National reconciliation and anti-corruption, IIRC. But is this what Ukraine’s Western friends wanted? NATO (ie. the US) doesn’t want any kind of meaningful national reconciliation, as it could not be achieved without rapprochement with Russia. NATO wants that wedge kept firmly in place. And the friends and family of the current occupant of the WH certainly don’t want an anti-corruption crackdown in Ukraine! Not to mention all of the DC Think Tank Commanders who are finally getting their chance to take on the Russians after the anti-climax of 1991.
Quote Tweet
CBS News
@CBSNews
· Apr 29
Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly women, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.? https://cbsn.ws/38uUItk
Worth remembering.
Boambee John
April 30, 2022 4:56 pm
mole
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.
See Cassie’s thread on A Farewell to Sharma. Look to the poorer areas for hope, and rejoice in the possible pleasure of seeing the proles rise against their so-called “socialist” overlords.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 4:58 pm
Treaty And First Nations Justice
The Greens Plan For
The Greens plan to develop a Treaty and begin the process of truth-telling and healing.
This country was invaded. Sovereignty from First Nations people was never ceded. First Nations people were violently dispossessed, had their children stolen, their families separated and their lands, waters and skies stolen and destroyed.
Successive governments have perpetrated grave injustices, dispossession and imprisonment since colonisation, which continues to this day. This systemic racism, that is racism that is embedded into the fabric of our laws and social policies in this country, impacts every aspect of First Nations people’s lives.
Hundreds of First Nations Aboriginal people have died in police custody and no one has been held to account. Racist policies continue to result in health inequities and educational inequality. Aggressive policing of First Nations children, adults and Elders results in child removal, disproportionate incarceration and ultimately deaths in custody.
Your vote is powerful. With just a small change in the vote, we can kick the Liberals out, put the Greens in shared power and push the next Government to go further and faster to a national process of truth telling and healing which is how we begin our journey towards a Treaty or Treaties with First Nations people.
A Treaty will create a unified national identity that celebrates what unites us, protects the rights of First Nations people and their cultures while also acknowledging the ongoing and historical injustices of colonisation.
“This country was invaded.” Too bad the High Court disagrees with you.
Boambee John
April 30, 2022 5:00 pm
mole
Yet the media is in lockstep allowing the squandermonkies to label all the Billions being spent as “investment”, not taxpayers money being sprayed up the wall like a trapeze artist with a dose of the squirts after a 12 Guinness and and curry lunch.
Has there been a single ruinable (lack of) energy project that has not required a taxpayer funded “co-investment” that will never have a positive return on capital, much less repay the “co-investment”?
JC
April 30, 2022 5:00 pm
Tim
Is it possible to have an offshore corporation with it’s banks accounts, directors and accounting functions etc all domiciled in Australia treated as a domestic corp fopr taxes purposes?
“Is it possible that the South Australians actually made a sensible choice by punting the Coalition? [Sorry, of course that’s sensible per se but I mean also installing the ALP.]””
Whilst it’s early days, I think that, yes, South Australians made the sensible choice. If I lived in SA I too would have voted for Malinauskas over the uber progressive Marshmallow, who loved to spend his time hobnobbing with progressive elites at arts festivals .
JC, have you read Janet Albrechtsen’s piece in today’s Oz about “Unregulated private cash is taking over our public assets“? She writes about the Sydney Airport takeover by a consortium of large pension funds and infrastructure investors as well as the proposed bid by private equity funds and industry super funds for Ramsay Health Care.
Oh come on
April 30, 2022 5:06 pm
Apart from the above Germany has upped defense spending, recently announced it will send heavy weapons to Ukraine, and is now purchasing the F35
Big frickin deal. The Euros are so far behind in their defence capabilities that it will take them at least a decade of enormous investment to rebuild these. I don’t think they’re prepared to make this kind of sustained investment. What Germany is proposing to spend will barely touch the sides. What proportion of its armoured units are combat-ready? Can’t remember if it was 40% or 60% – either way, an embarrassingly low number. That’s what you get when you spend 1.2% of GDP on defence.
Farmer Gez
April 30, 2022 5:07 pm
skies stolen and destroyed.
The boomerangs no longer fly.
JC
April 30, 2022 5:08 pm
Thanks Cassie. Will take a look.
Farmer Gez
April 30, 2022 5:09 pm
Test driving cars today.
Hybrids are shit.
Nothing beats litres and a turbo diesel.
I’ll say one thing. It doesn’t matter whose side you’re on in the Uke war, but it looks like the Russians will win and it will be a defeat for the West whichever way you look at it. This isn’t good.
Among which various aryan males experienced “strength through joy”. One of them wrote a poem about it. Only slightly more tolerable than the works of the Vogons.
John H.
April 30, 2022 5:25 pm
Oh come onsays:
April 30, 2022 at 5:06 pm
Apart from the above Germany has upped defense spending, recently announced it will send heavy weapons to Ukraine, and is now purchasing the F35
Big frickin deal. The Euros are so far behind in their defence capabilities that it will take them at least a decade of enormous investment to rebuild these. I don’t think they’re prepared to make this kind of sustained investment. What Germany is proposing to spend will barely touch the sides. What proportion of its armoured units are combat-ready? Can’t remember if it was 40% or 60% – either way, an embarrassingly low number. That’s what you get when you spend 1.2% of GDP on defence.
It will take Russia longer. They can’t even afford their latest aircraft(wooden mock up of a stealth fighter was laughable), the tanks are old, the training is parlous. But that misses the key point. Putin has not helped Russia with this war he has damaged it. The weak democratic nations have rallied against him. His strategy has backfired. He has failed.
Top Ender
April 30, 2022 5:26 pm
Down in Tassie for a week, and see this tosh in the paper:
‘No, we’re not a young nation’: Peter FitzSimons to reveal new republican model in Hobart
A high-profile Australian republican will soon visit Hobart to spruik republicanism, saying we must ditch the “sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us”.
A new advertising campaign argues an Australian head of state would unify the country in times of crisis and celebration.
STAUNCH republican Peter FitzSimons reckons he’s got a solution that will convince Australians to ditch the “sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us”.
It posits an egalitarian way of electing a head of state without veering into populism – and could also involve a high profile Indigenous Australian – like tennis legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley.
“What could be more unifying than saying, ‘yeah we’re Australians, we’ve been here for 65,000 years, I reckon we can run our own show’,” FitzSimons said ahead of an upcoming visit to Hobart.
“It will be a signal to the world that no, we’re not a young nation. We’re part of the oldest living nation on Earth.”
The well-known author and chair of the Australian Republic Movement will speak on the “Australian Choice Model” at an upcoming luncheon on May 12.
He said the model, unlike the one that failed in the 1999 referendum, would involve a system where each state and territory would nominate an eminent person, with a national election to decide which of the candidates would become head of state.
“For our first elected president, a lot of people say they would like it to be an Indigenous person, an Indigenous woman,” FitzSimons said, adding an eminent Australian like Goolagong Cawley would fit the bill.
He said he thought Australia was ready to vote to become a republic.
“We spent a fair bit of money in a lot of focus groups working out what Australians wanted. From memory, on our projected figures, at least two thirds of the Australian population say if that model was presented to them and was explained, they’d vote for it,” he said.
“A lot of people don’t understand we have an English head of state … what becomes increasingly clear is the sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us.”
FitzSimons said Australia’s movement towards becoming a republic was getting stronger with the upcoming federal election.
He said come May 21, “we’ll have three major monarchists gone” from parliament, including potentially Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz, outgoing Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and retiring MP Nicolle Flint.
“They’re the three most powerful voices left here for monarchism,” FitzSimons said.
“Sixty-two of our elected representatives, in the House of Representatives, are with us as well.”
Ahead of his return to Tasmania, FitzSimons said he believed Tasmania was a “republican state”.
“Tasmania, for me, is one of the more progressive states in the nation,” he said.
It will take Russia longer. They can’t even afford their latest aircraft(wooden mock up of a stealth fighter was laughable), the tanks are old, the training is parlous. But that misses the key point. Putin has not helped Russia with this war he has damaged it. The weak democratic nations have rallied against him. His strategy has backfired. He has failed.
Cats – it appears the paragraph in the new senate voting regs from 2016 stating that six votes below the line were OK has been memory holed, or amended since the 2019 election. I sent it around to various of my work colleagues at the time (some of whom were handing out ballot papers or scrutineering) and they were aghast.
I will only be numbering six boxes below the line, regardless. The rest get a heavy line through them.
F*ck them.
DrBeauGan
April 30, 2022 5:31 pm
it will be a defeat for the West whichever way you look at it. This isn’t good.
Yes, it is. I don’t identify with the modern West. Au Cointreau.
JC
April 30, 2022 5:34 pm
Yes, it is. I don’t identify with the modern West. Au Cointreau.
Who do you identify with then?
1. A gangsta operation run out of the Kremlin
2. A Marxist -Leninist regime run out of Beijing?
Bruce
April 30, 2022 5:34 pm
@ Winston:
“OK, mark them down for a jolly good purging.”
Per Gilbert and Sullivan:
“I’ve got a little list; they never would be missed”
A high-profile Australian republican will soon visit Hobart to spruik republicanism, saying we must ditch the “sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us”
Be careful what you wish for, FitzSimians – you’ve already been warned that if Chilla “the tampon” Big Ears is crowned king, you’re going to be hurled ignominiously into the nearest dumpster and then it’s “New Ozzie Republican Chieftain Spurgeon Monkfish III sets out his far reaching vision for a 21st Century System of Government devoid of hereditary inbred chinless wonders and their equally useless Hollyweird hangers on”. 🙂
Knuckle Dragger
April 30, 2022 5:36 pm
calli,
Well done. You should be a tour guide of some kind.
Rex Anger
April 30, 2022 5:36 pm
Some interesting and complication-provoking translated links and sources from the Daily Kos.
Make of it what you will.
Boambee John
April 30, 2022 5:39 pm
Dover
Events will decide the matter.
As Harold MacMillan said after Suez, “Events, dear boy, events”.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 5:42 pm
From the Oz – I’ve posted the whole article.
Hotel fisticuffs, bags of cash and a witness own-goal in Ben Roberts-Smith’s court battle
Stephen Rice
SYDNEY EDITOR
@riceyontheroad
12:00AM April 30, 2022
It was meant to have been the week Ben Roberts-Smith launched his all-guns-blazing demolition job on the claims of former SAS comrades that he committed multiple murders in Afghanistan.
Instead it ended with his closest mate in handcuffs after a night on the town celebrating the end of three days on the stand; his most important witness forced to explain why he went to a party dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan (answer: because someone else was coming in blackface); and yet more questions about who was paying the bills, this time in bags of cash.
Then there was the matter of Person 35, the witness with a penchant for “liking” Instagram posts that celebrated the upcoming death of the barrister about to interrogate him. That this was not the wisest move became apparent to the witness when the barrister concerned, Nicholas Owens SC, began his cross-examination on Thursday.
Owens: Person 35, you’re an active user of social media, correct?
Witness: I am.
Owens: Do you remember that one of the posts that you liked yesterday morning before court started off with this? “When some f..kwit in a suit starts questioning your integrity and using his f..ktard’s snake logic he learnt … at their nonbinarylaw school, remember one thing: that this c..t will be one of the first to be held down and drowned in a muddy puddle for his fancy jacket when society crumbles.” Do you remember liking a post that said that?
Witness: I seem to remember liking that.
Owens: Who did you understand the comment in that post to be referring to?
Witness: I have no idea.
Owens: It was me, wasn’t it?
Witness: No, sorry, I don’t follow you, why would it be you?
Owens: Who else would it be?
Witness: I don’t know.
All this before the VC recipient even begins to deal with the claims by his ex-wife that he cheated on her, and the far more damaging allegation by his former lover that he bashed her.
But don’t write off Roberts-Smith just yet.
The first week in which he was able to call his own witness to rebut the claims of war crimes made by Nine newspapers certainly did not go to plan, though it started well enough. The war hero’s former patrol commander, a gruff ex-Royal Marine codenamed Person 5, stepped into the witness box and gave a detailed account of the assault on the Taliban compound known as Whiskey 108.
Critically, he rejected the evidence of several of Nine’s witnesses that two unarmed Afghans – including the now notorious “man with the prosthetic leg” – were hauled from a tunnel inside the compound and later executed. Roberts-Smith has always said the two men were armed and that they were killed outside the compound. His friend Person 5, also not a man to back away from a fight, engaged in several heated exchanges with Owens.
“You and Mr Roberts-Smith have discussed over many years, how to tell the story … to explain away war crimes, correct?” asked Owens.
“There’s been collusion – just not from our side,” the combative soldier shot back. “Your witnesses have been colluding for the last 12 years.”
Person 5’s contempt for the soldiers who have broken ranks and given evidence for the newspapers was barely contained. The 20-year SAS veteran recounted how he had asked Roberts-Smith at the compound what had happened to the prosthetic leg because it was no longer beside the man’s body.
“That dickhead’s got it,” Roberts-Smith replied, according to Person 5. That was a reference to Person 6, a still-serving SAS soldier who commandeered the prosthetic leg and took it back to the base, where it became a novelty drinking vessel at the soldiers’ unofficial bar, the Fat Lady’s Arms.
Person 6 has not been called by either side but his ghostly presence has permeated the trial. He was Roberts-Smith’s arch enemy within the regiment and the person he claims rounded up disgruntled soldiers, jealous of his VC, to speak to the Nine journalists.
The Kiwi-born “tunnel rat” – Person 35 – was next in the witness box, telling how he stripped off his body armour and put on a pair of night vision goggles before crawling alone into the tunnel in the Whiskey 108 compound, armed only with a pistol. He found a large weapons cache, but there was no one hiding the tunnel, he testified.
If Nine is to defeat that evidence it will have to prove him a liar, and Owens went for the jugular, questioning his credibility over the Ku Klux Klan outfit worn to the Fat Lady’s Arms party.
“Were you reprimanded by anyone in the chain of command for dressing up in that fashion at the party?” Owens asked. “No, I actually won the fancy dress competition that night,” Person 35 replied. The punchline obscured a truth that has haunted these proceedings from day one: that no one in the chain of command ever seemed to do – or see – much of anything.
Owens asked Person 5 if he thought it was “destructive” for the newspapers to question the conduct of individual members of the military about what they did overseas.
Person 35: “I think it is, yes.”
Owens: “Why?”
Person 35: If you’re going to question a soldier on what happens overseas, then you need to question the military about what happens overseas first.”
Person 5 got a parting shot in too, just minutes before his evidence finished, when Roberts-Smith’s barrister Arthur Moses SC asked why he left the Australian Defence Force.
The soldier replied that it was because of a disparaging comment made by the head of Australian special forces in Afghanistan in 2016 while the SAS was engaged in an attempted rescue mission of a dual Australian-British national kidnapped at gunpoint from her office in the country’s east. The soldier claimed Australian Special Operations Commander Jeff Sengelman had said the woman, presumed to be charity worker Kerry Jane Wilson, was “not a real Australian anyway” when the rescue team had pleaded for more support. Sengelman has been lauded in some quarters for having initiated the first inquiries into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan after hearing rumours from soldiers.
But Person 5’s barbed response goes to the heart of a defamation case that has become a de facto war crimes trial: that the senior military officers on whose watch the alleged crimes occurred are nowhere to be seen. They do not appear on the witness lists of this case. Many of them have already been formally exonerated of any wrongdoing, though not by a court.
By week’s end, much of the ground gained by Team Roberts-Smith had been lost, as Person 35 was forced to acknowledge he too was being investigated for alleged war crimes – a murder claim he forcefully and angrily denied.
But Roberts-Smith has at least a dozen more witnesses – and likely some surprises – still to come. The biggest battle of his life isn’t over yet.
ZK2A – sacré bleu – that would be “Bruce Pascoe”, Squire.
Knuckle Dragger
April 30, 2022 5:52 pm
This is a tweet on Dad’s Deadpool Blog from a lady named Melissa McKenzie.
It reminds me of someone:
After COVID, I no longer wonder how Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot happened.
Inside too many of our neighbours is a little tyrant who desires to tell you how to live your life, use violence to achieve their ends and clothe themselves in righteousness doing it.
For clarity, this is St. Ruth at 1.54:
Traitorous capitulation to tyrants is not “having another opinion”.
It’s hurting your fellow man and should be considered a crime.
JC
April 30, 2022 5:53 pm
Is there a more preposterous figure in Australian public life than Pedro FitzSimians, Cats?
Yes.
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Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 5:54 pm
ZK2A – sacré bleu – that would be “Bruce Pascoe”, Squire.
Quite so, Squire.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 5:56 pm
Is there a more preposterous figure in Australian public life than Pedro FitzSimians, Cats?
KD – the events of the last two years have resulted in poor ol’ St Ruth losing his mind, his sense of humour, his recognition of his place in the world (completely irrelevant) and his boat.
Do I give a rodent’s? If he wasn’t so self righteously abusive and painting himself as the “only true Ozzie freedom fighter left on this continent”, then perhaps.
There are Cats who’ve had to make far more difficult choices than him after the last two years.
The incessant self aggrandising is ridiculous and renders him a joke.
I’m not following the Ben Roberts-Smith trial particularly closely. The SAS seems like a tuckshop roster with automatic weapons that kill the odd person. That might just be the way it is reported.
Ed Case
April 30, 2022 6:04 pm
… is the sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us.”
Not seeing how discarding the Hanover/Guelph/Saxe Coburg/Battenberg/Windsors would change that?
They’re not British Aristocracy to begin with.
Get those votes in, Cats. The most preposterous figure in Australian public life:
Pedro FitzSimians – 2
Waffles Turnbuckle – 1
Mike “Gin Time” Carlton – 1
Any others?
Kevni Ruff
Julius Sideburn QC AO BBS
Bruce of Newcastle
April 30, 2022 6:06 pm
“For our first elected president, a lot of people say they would like it to be an Indigenous person
Already happened. Apparently there were 250 very civilized First Nations. Must’ve been democracies if they were so civilized. No kings or queens since that would be imperialist and we know that aboriginal people would never be imperialist would they? So in 40,000 years with 4 year terms that would come to 2,500,000 previous Presidents. Ok some would’ve had multiple terms but easily a million aboriginal Presidents must’ve been elected in Australia hitherto. I’m sure Bruce Pascoe will have a section on them in his next book.
Timothy Neilson
April 30, 2022 6:07 pm
JCsays:
April 30, 2022 at 5:00 pm
Tim
Is it possible to have an offshore corporation with it’s banks accounts, directors and accounting functions etc all domiciled in Australia treated as a domestic corp fopr taxes purposes?
Yes, a company doesn’t have to be incorporated here to be a “resident” for tax.
The current definition is “a company which is incorporated in Australia, or which, not being incorporated in Australia, carries on business in Australia, and has either its central management and control in Australia, or its voting power controlled by shareholders who are residents of Australia.”
“Central management and control” is usually the Board unless, broadly speaking, the Board is a rubber stamp for someone else.
There’s a proposal to amend the law to avoid offshore subs of Australians inadvertently becoming “residents”. The general idea is that a non-Australian incorporated company won’t be a resident unless it has a “significant economic presence in Australia” i.e. a good deal of its real business is carried out in Australia. Given that the definition already refers to “carrying on business in Australia” it might seem useless, but it’s addressing an arcane legal technicality. Exactly what impact the change will have is yet to be seen.
Ed Case
April 30, 2022 6:07 pm
Alan Jones.
Knuckle Dragger
April 30, 2022 6:07 pm
There are Cats who’ve had to make far more difficult choices than him after the last two years.
Goddamn right, Rabz.
The incessant self aggrandising is ridiculous and renders him a joke.
Preach it.
calli
April 30, 2022 6:08 pm
Geoffrey Robertson
JC
April 30, 2022 6:09 pm
Thanks Tim. Greatly appreciate the reply.
Timothy Neilson
April 30, 2022 6:10 pm
Rabzsays:
April 30, 2022 at 6:05 pm
Get those votes in, Cats. The most preposterous figure in Australian public life:
It’s a large and high quality field.
But I can’t think of any public figure more preposterous than Bruce Pascoe.
Indolent
April 30, 2022 6:10 pm
The WEF is a much easier pretend enemy to mouth off about. You don’t need to stick to timelines, or point to any concrete event. You just need to infer that there is an insidious beast ‘coming soon’ to do dastardly things.
If you’re going to ditch the monarchy, it can’t be to embrace the current republican models of an appointed or elected president. It’s all downside: same responsibilities of the G-G, minus the power to sack governments, and all likelihood that we’ll end up with G-G Grace Tame, G-G Ita Buttrose, G-G Bruce Pascoe or G-G Any Number of Other Look-At-Me Nongs.
If there is to be change, it has to be a popularly elected president with veto powers, as per the US model
That means, every so often, you can get an outsider pledged to drain the billabong.
Won’t happen though, not in a million years, so King Jug Ears, ne Prince Tampon, it is.
Pedro FitzSimians – 2
Waffles Turnbuckle – 1
Mike “Gin Time” Carlton – 1
Kevni Ruff – 0
Julius Sideburn QC AO BBS – 0
Alan Jones – 1 Robert Jefferson – 1
Alan Jones – 1
Bruce Pascoe – 1
And why would you bother to have an election for a figure head head of state?
Something only someone with serious money behind them could run for.
Or a maverick outsider like boaty mcboatface.
As pressing concerns facing the average Australian family it ranks around one millionth.
No wonder bandanaman wants to keep wasting money on referendi til we get it ‘right’.
“If there is to be change, it has to be a popularly elected president with veto powers, as per the US model
That means, every so often, you can get an outsider pledged to drain the billabong.”
Agree areff, which means we’d have to change our political system. This is what Ted Mack advocated at the 1998 convention.
Boambee John
April 30, 2022 6:22 pm
H B Bearsays:
April 30, 2022 at 6:02 pm
I’m not following the Ben Roberts-Smith trial particularly closely. The SAS seems like a tuckshop roster with automatic weapons that kill the odd person. That might just be the way it is reported.
Somewhere along the line, the SAS selection process has collapsed.
I’ve been watching a few of those ‘reaction’ videos where some random young person hears a piece of music from ye olde daze for the first time. In this case, it is an alleged US rapper, black guy, listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s superb rendition of Jimi Hendrix’ Voodoo Child. 7 million views.
It is not till I scanned the comments that I realised that this guy (age late 20s), who claims to be a musician, is black, didn’t recognise it. At all. He didn’t know that it was a Jimi Hendrix song. I started to wonder if he even knew who Hendrix was.
This is the frightening ahistoricism of our era writ large. It is like a Jew who doesn’t know about the Holocaust, or a writer who has never heard of Shakespeare or Jane Austen. Sorry, couldn’t resist the latter. 🙂
All that Black Pride stuff is a bloody joke, if a black American in the music industry is ignorant about Hendrix.
These people are not just low information voters, they are low information about everything.
Old bloke
April 30, 2022 6:25 pm
Timothy Neilson says:
April 30, 2022 at 4:52 pm
Is it possible that the South Australians actually made a sensible choice by punting the Coalition? [Sorry, of course that’s sensible per se but I mean also installing the ALP.]
The new Labor government there has invited all teachers and school admin types back to work, vaxxed or unvaxxed. The previous Liberal government there removed all mandates for the S.A. Police, so all the coppers can go back to work, vaxxed or not.
I’m not too sure what to make of it, with both parties holding some sensible ideas it’s not an ideological issue, must be something in the water.
Question: How many Victorian teachers will return to teaching in Victoria when they can cross the border and find work in S.A. which doesn’t hold to vaxx mandates.
Pedro FitzSimians – 2
Waffles Turnbuckle – 1
Mike “Gin Time” Carlton – 1
Kevni Ruff – 1
Alan Jones – 1
Robert Jefferson – 1
Alan Jones – 1
Bruce Pascoe – 1
The Bum Bandit – 1
Blandwhale Hyphen-Dung – 1
Timothy Neilson
April 30, 2022 6:25 pm
As pressing concerns facing the average Australian family it ranks around one millionth.
Absolutely.
It’s a “performing teals” type issue.
Boambee John
April 30, 2022 6:26 pm
Cassie
Agree areff, which means we’d have to change our political system. This is what Ted Mack advocated at the 1998 convention.
Ted Mack is one of the few Australian politicians who deserves any respect.
Carpes has gifted the winner a fresh pair of Chaps.
Updates less frequently from now on.
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 6:29 pm
and it will be a defeat for the West whichever way you look at it. This isn’t good.
On the upside, if Winnie the Xi had been contemplating a swing at Taiwan (and assuming the “3 days to win” was a real Russian ambition) hed be reconsidering his chances now.
“As pressing concerns facing the average Australian family it ranks around one millionth.”
Of course.
DrBeauGan
April 30, 2022 6:30 pm
Put me down as voting for Bruce Pascoe, rabz. There are altogether too many choices.
Dr Faustus
April 30, 2022 6:31 pm
If there is to be change, it has to be a popularly elected president with veto powers, as per the US model
That means, every so often, you can get an outsider pledged to drain the billabong.
Will nobody think of the greasy pole dancers? The process of selecting a candidate list would be a panic.
There is no way that a model that allowed for an popularly elected President, potentially selected independently of the major parties, would ever get to a referendum.
This is the frightening ahistoricism of our era writ large
Yep. Ignorant illiterate innumerate anti-scientific ahistorical imbeciles. “The West” is now awash with them, thanks to the five decades long march through the institutions.
If you were a conspiracy hypothesist (unlike my good self, of course) you’d think it was all by design.
Which meant it was then full of wind swept rubbish.
Another utopian narcissist.
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 6:39 pm
Ita Buttrose.
From pumping shit into teenage girls/womens brains as editorex of Cleo, Women’s Weekly and other paplications* Early adopter of causes involving men who are vagina decliners. Staple of daytime television Mongstrosities like Das Project and the Moaning show.
Topping it off with becoming an ABCcess director/catamite.
* Like publications, but devoted to lying endlessly about what Royal is divorcing/remarrying pregnant/ pregnant with twins/ just given birth to a litter of cocker spaniels etc.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 30, 2022 6:40 pm
Somewhere along the line, the SAS selection process has collapsed.
That’s the only conclusion one could draw.
Rockdoctor
April 30, 2022 6:46 pm
On the upside, if Winnie the Xi had been contemplating a swing at Taiwan (and assuming the “3 days to win” was a real Russian ambition) hed be reconsidering his chances now.
Agreed, invading Taiwan isn’t rolling across the border. 130-180km of sea separation warning then that’s after after the build up that satellite overpasses that would have detected. Then there’s the limited beach heads, I have flown in/out of Taipei and the first thing that struck me was the cliffs along most of the Island. After that then there’s the locals who will be about as welcoming as the Ukrainians are to the Russians outside Donbas and mountains. However the CCP is distracted at the moment with COVID and it looks like a bit of internal party argy bargy. Can’t see them pulling the trigger atm.
Ed Case
April 30, 2022 6:46 pm
This sounds pretty sensible, eh?
The State, …, is a spiritual and ethical entity for securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation, an organization which in its origin and growth is a manifestation of the spirit. The State guarantees the internal and external safety of the country, but it also safeguards and transmits the spirit of the people, elaborated down the ages in its language, its customs, its faith. The State is not only the present; it is also the past and above all the future. Transcending the individual’s brief spell of life, the State stands for the immanent conscience of the nation. The forms in which it finds expression change, but the need for it remains. The State educates the citizens to civism, makes them aware of their mission, urges them to unity; its justice harmonizes their divergent interests; it transmits to future generations the conquests of the mind in the fields of science, art, law, human solidarity; it leads men up from primitive tribal life to that highest manifestation of human power, imperial rule.
thefrollickingmole
April 30, 2022 6:47 pm
Somewhere along the line, the SAS selection process has collapsed.
That’s the only conclusion one could draw.
Id be inclined its because senior officers decided they should actively seek not to keep close tabs on the group as it would have led to
.A: A rapid decline in operational effectiveness
.B: A necessity to take action and generate bad publicity ‘in the field”
.C: A lack of promotional chances for the people in charge because of both A&B,
Albo has discovered a new winningly winning campaign idea!
Labor to make $125 million electric bus pledge (Sky News, 30 Apr)
Sure to bring in squillions of votes. There’s just one tiny problem…
Paris suspends electric bus fleet after fires (Phys.org, 29 Apr)
Hopefully Albo’s electric buses will have lots and lots of emergency exits in them.
Tucker: Our leaders don’t understand this
Fox News host explains how the U.S. is seeing the end of neoliberalism on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’
Positions that conform with reality are still positions, and they’re often the best.
I think it is more than that below the line.
I think you can vote up to six above the line.
Morgan is a disaster and he’ll be gone very soon.
Big fat turd- how I detest that waste of space.
At the start of this business (February 2022; although 2014 marks the real beginning) I maintained that Putin had some moral right to extend protection to the break away Russian-speaking republics and that the Ukrainians had acted irresponsibly and stubbornly in that matter (and in disregard of the Minsk Protocols brokered by France & Germany). It seems that many Ukrainians thought so as well, because Zelensky was elected over the pro-American Poroshenko with a mandate to work out a peace deal with the Russians.
When Putin then cynically used the conflict in the Donbas as a pretext to launch an invasion of Ukraine in the interest of his Greater Russia idea, however, we were entertaining a different moral question. He was not waging a just war and the Ukrainians, the majority of whom wanted no part of Russian occupation, had a right to defend themselves.
Now the American State department, which has had a hand in Ukrainian affairs since the early ’90s, has very wrecklessly decided to use the conflict to inflict as much damage on the Russian military as possible, escalating it to yet another, very dangerous phase in which Russia may determine that it is under existential threat. Russian media, which speaks for Putin’s regime ( ‘free’ outlets having been closed or censored), is now preparing the populace for nuclear war.
There’s a lot of blame to go around in this and we’d better hope someone finds the lever to de-escalate things and quickly.
Milts – just to clarify, I was referring to voting below the line on the senate ballot paper. Only six boxes need to be numbered (twelve in a double dissolution).
This is the complete quote from the AEC “Official” Guide to Vote I received yesterday ..
Below the Line ..
If you choose to vote below the line, you need to number at least 12 boxes, from 1 to 12, for individual candidates in the order of your choice. You can continue to place numbers in the order of your choice in as many boxes below the line as you like
Rex at 12:17.
I couldn’t read the brochure.
Why tail-dragger?
Particularly fond of ground loop accidents are you?
Or does it have aerobatic capability?
Having gently and caringly struggle cuddled the franchise to death the BBC orders Dr Who exhumed and handed over to chicks with dicks for one more poop chute plundering…
Written by Juno Dawson, Doctor Who: Redacted was launched alongside the Easter TV special, Legend of the Sea Devils, and has been described by the producer/director Ella Watts as “very gay, very trans”, and sitting “to the left” of the main show.
…
Whittaker has enthused about working with Dawson and Craggs, saying “their energy is ace”. Redacted is, indeed, irresistibly sparky. Characters are powered by protein shakes and oat milk lattes. Episodes run to a pacy 20 minutes. The dark conspiracy plot is leavened by a script that zings with Drag Race lingo and gags about alien penises in jars. Harry Styles is hailed as “an honorary lesbian”. “Live, laugh, love” culture and boomers who leave voicemails are roundly ridiculed. It’s like a sci-fi remix of Mae Martin’s Feel Good. Or It’s A Sin with aliens also saying “La!”.
…
“Doctor Who has always appealed to LGBTQ+ people,” says Dawson. “There’s something so enduring about the idea that, if you’re living a slightly humdrum life, this person in a blue box can whisk you away for an adventure in time and space. Many of the Doctor’s sidekicks have been downtrodden or marginalised, even if they weren’t outwardly queer. So to take that subtext and make it text, that means a lot. We don’t need to make it a metaphor any more. We can have three queer women front and centre.”
I suddenly have an awful vision of a darlek yelling “Diallate, Diallate the Doctor”!!!!
Drbeen Medical Lectures
How Polyethylene Glycol (PEG) in Vaccines May Cause Allergic Reactions
PEG is an important part of the lipid nanoparticles based vaccines. Moderna COVID vaccine mRNA-1273 and Pfizer-BionTech COVID vaccine BNT162b2 contain PEG2000 in abundance. Let’s review why some people are getting allergic reactions with these vaccines, and the impact on the patient’s immune system for the future PEGylated therapies.
so many mysteries
A romantically tranny Dr Who may cause a new baby boom. Nothing is impossible!
‘Birthing Person’: Midwife Students Taught How to Deliver Babies Through ‘Male Genitalia’ (29 Apr)
Might need some assistance from a sonic screwdriver for that to work.
Bons I liked you analysis of your senate vote, whether or not it is acceptable to others doesn’t matter. Imagine if everyone analysed their vote in the manner that was suitable for them instead of voting above the line how much different the composition of the senate would be. Personally I don’t like preferential voting as we get what we have now. First past the post for me and no voting above the line. Never happen of course.
In the broader context though all of us have many plastic particles in our bodies of many differing compounds. The quantity of plastics in the vaccines is probably miniscule compared to our cumulative exposure.
Biden Disinformation Chief Nina Jankowicz Sang About Sex Fantasy with Dead Harry Potter
President Biden’s disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz sang about dead child sex with fictional character Harry Potter, as she participated in the “wizard rock band” called “The Moaning Myrtles,” which released several songs detailing such fantasies
It is an ironic discovery — Jankowicz’s apparent obsession with Harry Potter — as many have deemed her the U.S. version of the Ministry of Magic’s overpowering Dolores Umbridge.
The RV-4 thru -8 are the aerobatic ones. The -9 is a long-distance tourer that can squeeze in and out of the same sort of shorter strips the other types typically can use.
As far as taildragger vs trike goes, I think the design looks nicer and keeps the prop a bit more out of the grass and rocks when anywhere away from a paved surface.
Plus, it would be a convenient excuse to get the appropriate endorsement on the PPL should the opportunity for Rex With Wings arise… 🙂
The CIA has been deeply and widely embedded in the media since the 60’s. (Operation Mockingbird) . More so now in the digital era , now that 5 Eyes is alive and thriving.
It’s much more dangerous than that. Biden is a brain dead puppet for what is now in power; a malicious, evil, marxist, authoritarian, cabal- who are OUR ALLIES.
We are allied with what has become an evil and despicable regime. If Albo is elected, there is no doubt in my mind we will become like them – very fast. Within Albo’s first term. An “accommodation” with the Greens will only hasten that process.
Rex.
Can you fit one of these babies in it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_205
There might be a kit version of this in the US for sale as well.
Easy enough to glue together.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/11/13/the-nazi-aircraft-fueled-by-coal/?chrome=1
The plane was going to be made of wood, plywood and steel tubing.
Choppering into Wentworth in this would be nice as well.
https://www.duffelblog.com/p/armys-new-coal-powered-tiltrotor-gaining-traction-in-congress?s=r
From Toms US ‘Toons, it seems very easy for them to switch from neo-con war shills to Musks fake free speech fan boys.
New Brain Learning Mechanism Calls for Revision of Long-Held Neuroscience Hypothesis
Two huge challenges to the conventional understanding of brain function. I hope I live long enough to see these ideas mature. The brain wave one in particular fascinates me and this one explains an anomaly long known. Synapses are not fixed structures. Microglia, the immune cells of the brain, regular consume synapses.
As noted in the article the problem with AI that attempts to emulate brain function is that we’ve been wrong about brain function! Neural nets my ass.
Roger, I don’t disagree much with what you’ve said above, except that the ‘Greater Russia’ and media preparation is exaggerated. I’m pragmatic insofar as the Russian occupation of south and east is concerned. My position here is that given the costs this has imposed on Russia in both blood and treasure, the creation of Republics in those areas if they were to become a part of the Russian Federation isn’t cynical, its just realistic. They have significant Russian populations and any resistance at least in Kherson and Zaporizhzhya seems low . And they learned some horrible lessons given their muted response to the uprisings in 2014, in Kharkov, Mariupol, Slavyansk, and the like.
disney has turned full evil
Turning Red
Mei Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang) is a confident, dorky 13-year-old torn between staying her mother’s dutiful daughter and the chaos of adolescence. Her protective, if not slightly overbearing mother, Ming (voice of Sandra Oh), is never far from her daughter – an unfortunate reality for the teenager. And as if changes to her interests, relationships and body weren’t enough, whenever she gets too excited (which is practically ALWAYS), she “poofs” into a giant red panda
ukraine is just the obama adm…biden administration playing dominoes
Many commented about Ukraine using POWs for propaganda purposes.
Does this receive the same strong reaction?
https://funker530.com/video/captured-british-veteran-interrogated-by-russian-forces/
..
POWs should not be used like this by either side.
President Biden’s disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz sang about dead child sex with fictional character Harry Potter,
While disturbing, it is less interesting than this
During her testimony, Jankowicz referred to the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer saying “The social media platforms played a huge role in allowing that group to organize. It allowed, you know, that group to — it seeded the information that led them to organize.”[15]:?29
When we now know
Gretchen Whitmer: Michigan governor kidnap plot case collapses
But lawyers for the accused countered that the scheme was mostly “smoke and mirrors”, profane talk by angry and disillusioned men.
Throughout the trial, they maintained that the men had been entrapped – or improperly induced into the crime – by an undercover FBI operation.
Ask the Apache, Comanche, Sioux, Navajo etc etc that question.
If the Russians were to launch nuclear missiles against the USA, wouldn’t they fly over the North Pole?
Jeremiah 50:3
For out of the north there cometh up a nation against her, which shall make her land desolate, and none shall dwell therein: they shall remove, they shall depart, both man and beast.
From memory, the practice is illegal, under the Geneva Convention.
The RV-4 thru -8 are the aerobatic ones. The -9 is a long-distance tourer that can squeeze in and out of the same sort of shorter strips the other types typically can use.
What’s the bomb load?!
Here’s Why Hibernation in Space May Not Be Possible For Humans After All
Apart from the issues raised here our brains would rot because neurons need to maintain a regular firing rate in order to be healthy and stay connected but because our brains consume 20% of O2 and energy resources it won’t be possible to keep human brains sufficiently active in hibernation.
You mean like Ukes filming the shooting Russian POW’s in the legs?
Which part? When the Brit is assured he is safe, assured that he will be going to hospital to attend his arm? Maybe the propaganda is directed at the Azovs to surrender in Mariupol – who in fact have shown themselves to be a murderous nazi bunch.
smart
POWs should not be used like this by either side.
From memory, the practice is illegal, under the Geneva Convention.
Are mercenaries/contractors covered by the GC?
human will need to be genetically engineered for interstellar flights
Yes, yes. If you actually read the legislation, it says you have to cast a ballot. Whether or not it is valid….
does a loose conglomeration of tribes constitute a “country?”
From memory, only if they are wounded, or sick.
Zipster:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-sells-western-currency-and-oil-assets-to-avoid-sanctions_4406675.html
Logically it should split two ways – the Chinese private citizens who are able to get to their housing assets, and will keep them – and those who cannot, and will sell.
I’d be getting out of the market if I were in it.
All it took was some election cheating (there is always election cheating) , an absurd and panicked over response globally to a pandemic, and all of a sudden some of the “right” are exactly where the hard left were fifty years ago:
Anti- American.
Derisive of Western values.
Supporting Russia.
Apologising for our foreign enemies.
Falling into an abyss of crank theories and shit history.
After decades of being too above it all to fight the culture war, too busy making money to get into the key areas of teaching and media, too arrogant and short sighted and sneering to do the hard work, the response now that it’s obvious that war is horribly lost? “Fuck it, the West was never worth saving anyway”.
You can spin you silly bs any way you like to fit your absurd nonsensical narrative.
The current Administration is clearly anti-American and completely abhors western values. Therefore those critical of the current disgusting US Administration are most likely pro-American and are heavily pro-Western in values.
POWs should not be used like this by either side.
Absolutely.
As well as mocking/televising the dead and wounded (as opposed to recording and reporting).
This bit of the convention seems to be flouted by the “good guys” with regards to seizure of property of civilians..
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule50
Practice Relating to Rule 50. Destruction and Seizure of Property of an Adversary…
Geneva Conventions I, II and IV
According to Article 50 of the 1949 Geneva Convention I, Article 51 of the 1949 Geneva Convention II and Article 147 of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV, “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” are grave breaches.
So its all fun and games to grab oligarchs yachts, but is it legal?
Which is, I realize quite small fry compared with actually starting a war in the first place.
John H,
was it you who mentioned lithium orotate here some weeks ago?
Exactly Arky. Many of the complaints of the Right were articulated by Chomsky etc 50 years ago. I should explore the psychology\cultural dynamics of those shifts but in these days I’m too lazy and prefer computer games.
Arkysays:
April 30, 2022 at 1:34 pm
All it took was some election cheating (there is always election cheating) , an absurd and panicked over response globally to a pandemic, and all of a sudden some of the “right” are exactly where the hard left were fifty years ago:
Key words must be “some of” the right. As for most of the right, I’d say:
Anti- American. No. Anti the “elites” who are destroying America from within (and causing mayhem elsewhere as well).
Derisive of Western values. No. Just no. They aren’t.
Supporting Russia. In a sense I suppose. Many are definitely asserting that reality isn’t a cartoon-like “Good Ukraine/Evil Russia” dichotomy, but I don’t think that even they are acting as Putin’s cheer squad.
Apologising for our foreign enemies. I don’t know who or what you’re referring to.
Falling into an abyss of crank theories and shit history. Well yes, there has been a fair bit of that.
“And what did you do Arky”?
If you remember, ten years ago I was at putting my job at risk by going on here and telling exactly what was going on in schools and how you could expect that to change the culture.
I told you “You should see what’s coming down the pipeline”.
I wrote piece after piece about the importance of the story we tell ourselves and each other about who we are, and how that story was getting corrupted and manipulated in schools.
Yes and I just picked up a fresh supply yesterday, delivered by iHerb from the USA. Not only helps the brain, a recent research report highlighted it can also protect the kidneys which was surprising because the therapeutic doses of lithium for bipolar have a big problem with possible kidney damage. However those dosages are much higher than taken as a supplement.
Mercenary laws here.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_cha_chapter33_rule108
Additional Protocol I
Article 47(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I defines mercenaries as any person who:
a) is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict;
b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities;
c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party;
d) is neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict;
e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and
f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.
…
Lots of bits at that link.
Ukraine
Ukraine’s IHL Manual (2004) states:
1.2.25. … [M]ercenaries are unlawful participants of the hostilities.
…
1.2.25.2. … [M]ercenaries shall not have the right to be prisoners of war and are subject to punishment for their actions. However, their punishment may only be imposed by a competent tribunal.
…
Russian Federation
The Russian Federation’s Regulations on the Application of IHL (2001) states:
When fallen into the power of the adversary, neither spies, nor mercenaries shall have the right to the prisoner-of-war status and shall be subject to punishment for their activities. However, sentences with respect to the above persons shall only be passed with previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court and the accused shall be provided with the generally recognized guarantees of court defence.
Both sides make it a bad idea to be captured as a mercenary.
Hey hey hey….Arky……..once there were enough people not wearing masks in the airport, our intrepid heroes marched through it without one on and declared victory after their big stand against face nappies.
Holding the line and all that.
FMD.
I used to think this way within schools:
Their theories will meet reality and reality will win. They will have to change.
No.
They are ideologues.
When their theories met reality and failed, they counterfeited reality and the theories stayed.
Traitorous capitulation to tyrants is not “having another opinion”.
It’s hurting your fellow man and should be considered a crime.
Map showing Ukr railways infrastructure strikes.
Orange= 25 April.
Red= 29 April.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRi7_W9VkAEKSbh?format=jpg&name=large
The RUS are also hitting bridges and main road links. Which means air transport may become a prime mode of weapons delivery for Ukr from outside her borders. Let’s hope NATO don’t get ballsy enough to risk providing air transport for their arms shipments – and lose a plane or two. Then it could get very hot indeed.
Of course the waters get much, much more muddied when people have volunteered/enlisted to fight for a side (as I assume most of the Ukraine foreign fighters have) rather than for monetary reward.
Interesting that there is a lot of countries with laws around mercenaries being illegal, and not considered legal combatants, but at the same time affording them basic rights against mistreatment and legal process rather than rule .303.
Yes, GC grant protection to POWs until trial and any matters of ambiguity are settled.
Arky.
I could operate tours for years without giving my politics away, and nobody demanded that I show my hand.
No religion or politics as was the old rules.
Now the left have no qualms about calling you out and demanding you declare your hand.
eg.
Driving into the filth and human misery of Maningrida, the public servant lefties who were the majority of ones who could afford the tour…and the only ones willing to pay that much to see aboriginals, drove into a scene of rubbish, mangy camp dogs dead and dying, shit and filth everywhere, back yard burials, ….and when one passenger from Queensland who was not a lefty declared “Holy hell, look at the rubbish everywhere’…..they just mumbled to themselves “white man’s rubbish” and although the scene hits them like a brick, they saw nothing.
They saw nothing.
And what they admitted to themselves was white man’s fault.
Denialism………..we see it here as well.
@ Dot:
” because they were gay, apparently.”
There is a book out there called, “The Pink Swasika”, that covers the topic.
The SA was was more than a bit “Cabaret”. It was obviously getting out of hand and thus the “purges”.
Thanks for the info.
I can hardly find anything about lithium orotate online, mainly whether there are any side effects or interactions with medicines. If you can point to any info about it, would be much appreciated.
I believe you mentioned improved sleep. That sounds very interesting and I’m thinking of trying it, but would like to be sure it’s not going to interact with any medications or other supplements.
Two episodes brought the whole matter to a head in the 1970’s. A group of Brits, fighting in Angola were captured, shoved in front of a “kangaroo court” as mercenaries, and shot. It was pointed out that it is not illegal, under international law, to be a mercenary. The other was, as the “Bush War” in Rhodesia, was winding up, Robert Mugabe announced that foreigners, serving in the Rhodesian Army , would be tried as “mercenaries” and “war criminals.” The unspoken threat was that they would also be shot. The result was the “Biet Bridge 500” as a number of foreign servicemen were told “The truck is outside. Get out, chuck your rifles into the river, and the South Africans will give you a passport to get home. “
..
Once you figure it out and see the self interest driving their beliefs you can’t unsee it.
Hint: it has nothing to do with helping the unfortunate.
From the smallest interpersonal to the broadest public policy proposal, it all comes back to “what’s in it for me”.
Bill Maher discovers fiscal conservatism.
When the chickens come home to roost. This one is a doozy.
You can’t buy it in Australia because the TGA is a pack of panic monkeys. You can’t even buy selenium supplements in Aus. I don’t buy supplements from Australian outlets because those are so expensive. iHerb offers free shipping for amounts of US60.00 and the products are much cheaper even with shipping.
If not on any meds start with 5 mg. You can go higher but even with that small amount it is a pronounced effect on me. If on meds speak to doc first.
https://www.chandramd.com/blog/lithium-mental-health
—
https://www.healthline.com/health/can-lithium-help-treat-depression#research
That is a treatment dose for bipolar. The orotate I take is only 5 mg at bedtime. If you are on any meds, especially psych meds, speak to your doctor first.
—
https://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/articles-1/2017/1/23/lithium-the-untold-story-of-the-magic-mineral-that-charges-cell-phones-and-preserves-memory
The New News about Lithium: An Underutilized Treatment in the United States
https://brainmd.com/blog/benefits-of-lithium-orotate-according-to-triple-board-certified-psychiatrist/
I have to admit, initially, I was skeptical that such a low dosage[5 mg] would have any effect on my clients. I’m happy to say I was wrong. Here’s a little background on Lithium Orotate and some examples of what it’s used for.
Local Oaf
Just posted a lot of links and info on Li but in moderation due to all links. Be patient, hopefully DB will release it soon.
Much of what you’re seeing began far earlier than 2020, all that’s happened is that events have enlarged that part of the Right that has been long suspicious of American adventurism abroad, domestic American economic policy, and so on. 2020, the pandemic response, etc. have simply accelerated that shift. Characterizing this as ‘anti-American’ or ‘derisive of Western values’ is just absurd. The former is simply a version of rendering any criticism of this or that Leftist shibboleth as ‘phobic’. Re the latter, the major institutions use the term ‘Western values’ as a skinsuit for whatever operations they are currently conducting, or even conducting operations against genuine Western values in the name of Western values; and this is not to absolve that significant portion of the public that is itself either confused as to those values or militantly opposed to them.
Wally, I get mine from Cuba. I save a certain amount, but I have to pay duty when they arrive in Oz. This is a fair bit more than the cost of the cigars themselves.
If you are interested, I can put you in touch with the ppl in Cuba, or handle the purchase myself on your behalf.
Write to me by emailing my name as on this post followed by an (at) sign and then gmail.com
I don’t know how to get Australian tobacco cigars. They’d be illegal, of course. Our government intends to keep extorting from us. Bastards.
Well worth 2 minutes of your time, good laugh.
https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2022/04/genius-comment-on-mail-in-voting.html
Feelthebern:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10768665/FBI-conducted-3-4M-searches-Americans-data-without-warrant-year.html
It appears to be about time the FBI was purged to a Level 5.
i.e. Each department and its subsequent junior departments heads and deputy heads are arrested and detained in solitary until they have proven their innocence.
This is no longer a Justice matter – this is about National survival.
And the Justice Department can be purged at the same time.
what a waste of taxpayers money, bring back the death penalty!
Fair question.
A shocking stabbing murder has highlighted the extent to which troubled and violent African gang members are travelling between Melbourne and Adelaide in the apparent pursuit of vendettas.
They already have the means, infrastructure and recent practice to stop people at the Vic/SA borders.
I’m sure they can use this for the keeping people safe.
Johanna:
OK, mark them down for a jolly good purging.
Where is BoN? I notice his hero of the war reporting in Ukraine is back in Australia reporting on the price of Bok Choi in Australian supermarkets.
What a hero.
Cassie:
Here in Maranoa, I’ll be punishing Littleproud.
Purge the bastards.
Here’s another dumb idea:
Labor promises to make electric buses in Perth, if it wins the federal election
This does nothing to alleviate the issue. We will assemble a couple hundred buses here from parts shipped in from all over the world at a cost of around $1 million a bus*, and $2.5 million per job created. And we’re still at the end of the supply chain. If any of the required components can’t be shipped to Oz for whatever reason, no buses will be rolling off the line until they arrive.
*that’s not the price of the unit, by the way, that’s the price of establishing the assembly facility. Then you have to pay for the bus.
Old Ozzie:
Excellent news. The BBC and the ABC are ready for a damn good & hard, hot water purging.
Jacob Zuma is great at reading the numbers.
George Christensen – “Why I joined Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party”
..
In this passage you put yourself in opposition to Western institutions and it’s public.
Other than the landmass itself, that doesn’t leave much.
If those are truly your feelings you might ask yourself if this isn’t a Sodom and Gomorrah moment. If it is, then it’s time to walk away and not look back.
I have had recent good reasons to look upon my fellow citizens with a great more respect and gratitude. There are a lot of fantastic people out there.
For every jerk there are ten or twenty good ‘uns.
I thought you wanted nothing to do with Ukraine, Struth-sock?
Because it was distracting everyone from ThE GrEaT ReSeT and the WEF’s DeAtH CaMpS…
Probably more. But they don’t run the institutions.
Tucker: Our leaders don’t understand this
Sweden and Finland consider joining NATO as Putin blows up
Apart from the above Germany has upped defense spending, recently announced it will send heavy weapons to Ukraine, and is now purchasing the F35, an aircraft that is far beyond any Russian aircraft capability.
Runny – If you mean Seven reporters, they seem to’ve taken turns in Kiev. Their London guy was there at one stage. I couldn’t tell you what they’ve been up to lately as I don’t have a TV and I haven’t looked at a Seven site for several weeks.
Cats by and large understand by now that I regard the MSM with more distaste than a slug in a food factory, bok choi or otherwise.
Rumour has it that the youngest of mum and dad’s farm dogs has taken to sneaking off and having a bounce on the kids trampoline by herself. 🙂
The AEC has that delicate blend of incompetence and political correctness that characterises every institution that should be marked down as an enemy of good government.
Perfect.
Cheeky bugger… 🙂
I am searching to find and post a great doco on the Bund Deutscher Madel.
The women, in their 60’s were mostly very realistic. One woman said that German girls who traditionally learned nothing about sex until their 20’s were suddenly confronted by hords of pregnant 15 year olds.
She said that the famous skimpy gym slips worn by the senior girls were for the titillation of the senior aparatchicks and Hitler Youth bosses, who made their choices of the 15 year olds.
One woman, confronted by the draft choices of civil defence, hospitals, air defence, transport, refugee support, and worst of all, factories (all of which involved huge hours, danger and constant sexual assault) prevailed upon the mistress of the local gaulieter to bring her on board as a deputy mistress.
Her post war denazification was severe but she considered her choice to have been worthwhile compared to the alternatives.
I’ll find and post.
Yet…
Arkysays:
April 30, 2022 at 3:42 pm
…
dover0beachsays:
April 30, 2022 at 2:38 pm
…
reading these and I get shades of 1984 and Winston Smith and his forlorn hopes.
https://www.abhaf.org/assets/books/html/1984/47.html#:~:text=If%20there%20is%20hope%2C%20wrote,not%20be%20overthrown%20from%20within.
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.
…
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.
In effect we have a monoculture formed and housed in Canberra (with minor state versions).
The people are captured by the obsessions of the professional management class, media and uniparties.
People should be rejecting the Canberra obsessives en-masse, but due to the lockstep of the gatekeepers many people wont know to any great degree just how much of a sham our democracy is.
They’re Paneling Paradise to Put Up Solar — a Lot
By Steve Miller, RealClearInvestigations
April 28, 2022
The pathway to a green future involves taking millions of acres of pristine wilderness and turning them into fields of windmills and hot expanses of glistening panels.
The Biden administration’s goal of supplying 40% of the nation’s energy from the sun by 2035 means covering millions of acres of forest and desert habitat with vast solar panel installations fenced off like prisons. It would require 8,800 square miles of land, or 5.6 million acres, to generate that power (leaving out small installations on buildings and the like) — about the size of Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined.
But the push to convert that land from pastoral to energy-productive is galvanizing a new environmental movement, one led by citizen groups and small non-profits rather than the monied green interests arrayed against them — ones ironically accustomed to casting the fossil fuel industry in the role of the ecological heavy.
The potential impacts of solar-power installations have flown under the radar while much public resistance has centered on wind farms – which kill an estimated 1.2 million birds per year in the U.S. and are considered loud and unsightly by many who live near their towering turbines. Even as the Biden administration has made limiting the environmental impact of oil and gas a key goal, it has opened large tracts of federal lands to solar development by major corporations including Duke Energy, Exelon and BrightSource Energy.
Solar advocates say mitigating climate change requires a switch to carbon-free energy, and utility-scale solar installations are vital to the effort. They contend a looming climate crisis requires the switch to be made quickly, although the effects of widespread solar development are not fully understood.
For example 90% of voters will look at the big shiny numbers and think this is a good thing.
Anthony Albanese has pledged $125 million to manufacture 130 electric buses in Perth if Labor wins the federal election.
The McGowan government will match the $125 million commitment, with the aim of creating 100 new local jobs and transitioning 300 existing jobs to clean energy.
What this should be is a tombstone on any political parties campaign.
“creating 100 new jobs” Effectively saying this will be less efficent than what is being done now as it will require 100 more people to man it.
“and transitioning 300 existing jobs to clean energy”. Will effectively mean drivers and mechanics.
Yet the media is in lockstep allowing the squandermonkies to label all the Billions being spent as “investment”, not taxpayers money being sprayed up the wall like a trapeze artist with a dose of the squirts after a 12 Guinness and and curry lunch.
Politicans are proud of their ability to spend other peoples moneys.
They are verminous shits.
Known, unkindly, as “League of German Mattresses.”
Winston. I wish I had a chance to take a poke at Littleproud. Disgusting creature.
Sneered at farmers during the drought, rejected fuel load reduction, jumped on board net zero despite knowing that it would destroy his electorate.
Attempted to publicly destroy Canavan.
Maybe I can lease a voting right for just this election.
EXCLUSIVE: New Jan. 6 Bodycam Videos Show DC Police Officer Assaulting Unconscious Protester
Use-of-force expert says DC Metro Police officer committed felony in attack on Rosanne Boyland
By Joseph M. Hanneman April 29, 2022 Updated: April 29, 2022
A District of Columbia police officer used a large wooden stick to strike the body and head of protester Rosanne Boyland three times as she lay motionless on the ground on Jan. 6, 2021, according to bodycam footage from several officers obtained by The Epoch Times.
Use-of-force expert Stanley Kephart, upon reviewing the previously unreleased footage, concluded that the three full-force blows by D.C. police officer Lila Morris constituted a felony assault with intent to cause great bodily harm.
Kephart called Morris’s use of force “indefensible” and the internal-affairs investigation of Boyland’s death a “clear and convincing coverup.”
Police at the mouth of the Lower West Terrace tunnel at the U.S. Capitol ignored dozens of pleas to help Boyland after she collapsed, the videos show.
An independent forensic pathologist hired by the Boyland family contends that her cause of death wasn’t an overdose of the prescription drug Adderall—as reported by the D.C. medical examiner—but manual asphyxia. Boyland was crushed under a pile of people when police gassed protesters and pushed them out of the tunnel at about 4:20 p.m. on Jan. 6.
Kephart concluded that Morris’s use of force was a felonious “assault under the color of authority,” with intent to cause great bodily harm. He said that Morris should be prosecuted in criminal court and fired from the D.C. Metro police force.
“There’s people under here!” shouted Justin Winchell, Boyland’s friend who accompanied her to Washington that day. “There’s people trapped under here!”
A protester right at the police line who was bleeding from a baton strike to the head pointed to Boyland and pleaded for help. “Get her up. Get her up! Get her up, please,” the man urged. “Save her life! Save her life, please!”
One officer used his baton and boots to push five protesters on top of Boyland, bodycam video shows. “Please get her up! She’s gonna die!” Winchell shouted.
Reality can be a brutal mistress.
Albanese dogged by questions over Labor’s cost of living relief
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has refused to say whether households will be better off overall from Labor’s cost of living packages amid the risk of rising interest rates and inflation wiping out the gains.
Giving his first full press conference after his COVID-induced absence from the campaign trail, Mr Albanese continued to be peppered by questions over Labor’s policies to tackling the soaring cost of living.
But responding to the Morrison government’s announcement of a $10 reduction to medicines co-payments for patients, Labor flagged it would announce its own policy to address drug prices at its campaign launch on Sunday.
Campaigning in Perth on Saturday morning, where Labor hopes to gain up to three seats, Mr Albanese said it was “good to be anywhere frankly at the moment” after leaving isolation the day before.
Saying Australians had “conflict fatigue”, Mr Albanese hailed his announcement of investing $125 million – matched by the state government – to build electric buses in Perth as an example of cooperation with the states.
“This is a government always looking for an argument, never a solution,” Mr Albanese said.
“One of the lessons of the pandemic is we have to stand on our own two feet, we are vulnerable if we are at the end of supply chains.”
‘Cost of living crisis’
But with Labor’s accusations of government inaction over the rising cost of living central to its election pitch, Mr Albanese ducked questions over how the party would reduce supermarket bills.
Assessing the Risks of Nuclear Confrontation Over Ukraine (Part One)
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 19 Issue: 61
By: Roger McDermott
April 27, 2022 04:35 PM Age: 2 days
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western governments and analysts have periodically expressed fears that the Kremlin might try to escalate by using nuclear weapons. This anxiety stems directly from Moscow’s own nuclear threat rhetoric: indeed, Putin’s original announcement of the officially designated spetsial’naya voyennaya operatsiya (special military operation) against Ukraine included a warning against direct intervention by the United States and its allies, threatening them with unparalleled destruction (Interfax, February 24). The nuclear warnings continued with the successful testing of the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on April 20—routine and duly notified but characterized by Putin as providing “food for thought” to potential adversaries (Krasnaya Zvezda, April 22). These warnings are key in the Kremlin’s strategy to manage conflict escalation by deterring the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from considering directly intervening in the war. While the risk of nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US is possible, it is worth assessing the actual danger of a direct Moscow-Washington clash escalating to a nuclear exchange.
The three experts also draw upon Herman Kahn’s 1965 work that presents 44 rungs on the “ladder of escalation,” applied contemporaneously to great power competition in the information era but with the number of “rungs” reduced to 12—the point at which the nuclear threshold is crossed. The dozen points of escalation, from crisis to ending with a strategic nuclear exchange, are as follows
(Voprosy Eskalatsii i Deeskalatsii Krizisnykh Situatsii, Vooruzhennykh Konfliktov i Voin, 2021):
The Rock is red…repeat…the Rock is red.
And the land all about it, as far as the eye can see, is green. I managed to take some beautiful photos with a cloud streaked sky as a backdrop. Unlike last time, when it was a uniform grey and running fast with sheets of water and mini waterfalls, this time it changed colour with every minute.
Standing there in the silence, a little breeze kicked up. The spinifex rattled and creaked and there was the unmistakeable sound of the waves on the shore. The desert oaks were remembering the long lost ocean as their branches sighed in the wind.
Vlad’s most potent anti-NATO strategy would be to insinuate Sweden into the organisation.
The ‘human rights super power’ will have the organisation prostrate within weeks.
Any Cats who have experienced the joys of working with the UN would be well aware of how Swedes cripple an organisation with their arrogant politics.
Assessing the Risks of Nuclear Confrontation Over Ukraine (Part Two)
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 19 Issue: 61
By: Roger McDermott
April 27, 2022 04:37 PM Age: 2 days
Moscow’s official statements since February 24, 2022, concerning possible nuclear escalation should the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) directly intervene in the Russo-Ukrainian war represent a deliberate policy of strategic deterrence. Possible escalation to a world war between the US and Russia is acknowledged by both sides, which are seeking to navigate its avoidance, and featuring in White House deliberations on the level of weapons and hardware support that Washington and its allies can provide to Ukraine. The risk of nuclear conflict caused by the war in Ukraine and the wider US-Russia crisis raises critically important questions about how to judge the level of escalation and discern the red lines on the part of both Moscow and Washington.
Thus, the Russo-Ukrainian war is occurring in the context of a potential confrontation between two nuclear powers, with each trying to establish where lies the point of no return on the path toward strategic nuclear exchange (Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, October 14, 21, 2021).
For now, wider war appears some way off, as Moscow has numerous conventional military escalatory options at its disposal, ranging from assigning a massive airpower role to the Aerospace Forces (Vozdushno Kosmicheskikh Sil—VKS), destroying critically important targets or even simply boosting its conventional firepower on the battlefield. For example, the Tu-22M3 long-range bomber can deliver the FAB-5000M-54 free-falling high-explosive bomb. The mass of the warhead reaches 4,200 kilograms, and the mass of the explosive is 2,210.6 kilograms. As a non-nuclear option, the VKS has at its disposal a high-power aviation vacuum bomb, informally named the “Father of All Bombs” (drawing by analogy on the US Air Force’s GBU-43/B, nicknamed the “Mother of All Bombs”). Some military specialists consider this to be the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the world (Gazeta.ru, April 19).
In reality, Russia’s Armed Forces possess enough conventional firepower to render the tactical nuclear option unnecessary in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the risk of nuclear use primarily relates to an escalatory response to the United States/NATO entering the war. For the time, the West has ruled out physical intervention. As Kokoshin and his co-authors warn, “Many domestic and foreign experts rightly point out that it is unacceptable to unleash any war between nuclear powers, any direct military clash, since neither side will be ready to admit defeat in a war using conventional means. An armed clash between the allies of the nuclear powers should also be considered very dangerous” (Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, October 21, 2021).
There’s more to it than that. Had the US/ NATO wanted to, they could have helped sideline Azov, Right Sector, and the like, and helped Zelensky implement his platform, however, either they were too important to the political coalition to isolate, or they were fulfilling a trajectory that the US/ NATO did not oppose.
Doing a rough calculation on the impacts of interest rates doubling for housing.
$500,000 loaned over the 30 years etc at 3.5% is about $2300 per month.
$500,000 loaned over the 30 years at 7% is about $3400 a month.
If we were to get back to 10% (which was ‘normal” for a long time)
$500,000 loaned over the 30 years at 10% is about $4500 a month.
I have full faith in the Elbow/ Pissant coalition to blast past that in their first term.
https://greens.org.au/platform/jobs
Millions of people are struggling to keep their head above water, while big corporations are making big profits, and have too much power.
Working people need better rights, higher pay and more secure work. Working people need to be safe at work.
Your Vote Is Powerful. If just a few hundred people change their vote, we can kick the Liberals out, and put the Greens in balance of power.
The Greens will rewrite the labour laws to give working people more power, outlaw insecure work and increase wages. *
The Greens’ plan will create hundreds of thousands of well paid jobs to make us more self-reliant and sustainable, and help rebuild our arts, entertainment and creative sector. **
We will improve rights for women, and end the gender pay gap, so workplaces are fairer and safer.***
With better rights for working people, we can have a stronger economy and a healthy environment.
* I legislate everyone is paid $1,000,000 a year, Job done…
** Awesome, more ABCcess drama and artsy mongs who hate whitey…
*** They will legislate women will be conscripted into the dirty/dangerous/ demanding roles men do and work the same hours?
Right?
Full interview with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
Al Arabiya English
Afternoon all. Spent the day doing oil changes including diffs/transmissions in the car and routine maintenance. Trip into the town to find oils & parts I spotted a greens corflute hanging off railway infrastructure, sorta thinking about reporting it to the AEC LOL.
Still don’t think there will be wholesale changes of seats bar possibly Leichardt up this way. One thing is Palmer is off the boil and I doubt he’ll get many votes up this way. As for the election I note after the disastrous start the media is in full fluff mode for the ALP apart from some quarters of News Ltd. Some of the vomit I have seen this week like Jason Clare swoon headlines and more on Wiemar/Sutton (albeit Vic state) has had me literally gagging. Who writes this trash, better off at Mills & Boon then an apparently serious newspaper. Suddenly no-one is questioning Albo about costs of living or illegal immigration, just Dorothy Dixers about Trannies. LOL Chalmers the economic doofus gets “covid” as well. LOL who will it be next week to keep them out of the headlights?
I said significant portion, not the public, and criticism, not opposition.
Still at Curtin Springs. Tomorrow is Kings Canyon, and probably well out of phone range.
This is a vast cattle property, around 1 million acres. They run Murray Greys, cute short and stocky and very biddable. Even the bulls are well behaved. Apart from a bit of tourism, they supply artists with handmade paper. It’s made from the local grasses – I had a demmo yesterday and made a sheet. It brought back happy memories of making it at school. It’s very easy to do and just about any fibre will work. Their product is dotted with seed heads, flowers, red soil and even cow poo.
They are minding a baby water buffalo in one of the yards – last night he was calling to the MG calves and their mums – poor little fellow. They also have some camels ready for processing. “Bush chops” for the young ones, mince for the oldies – not much of a yield they tell me. The Beloved, who is very naive about such things, asked where the cattle went after they travelled through the knock box. “Heaven”, I answered, much to the guide’s amusement. The refrigerator was a cooler alternative.
Rather than tiptoeing around the problem, SA Police and the newly elected Malinauskas government acknowledge there are specific issues within a subsection of the Sudanese and other African communities that must be addressed with force and possibly also tough anti-gang laws.
Is it possible that the South Australians actually made a sensible choice by punting the Coalition? [Sorry, of course that’s sensible per se but I mean also installing the ALP.]
Indeed. This doesn’t seem too complicated to figure out, though. Remind me again of Zelensky’s overwhelmingly popular election platform? National reconciliation and anti-corruption, IIRC. But is this what Ukraine’s Western friends wanted? NATO (ie. the US) doesn’t want any kind of meaningful national reconciliation, as it could not be achieved without rapprochement with Russia. NATO wants that wedge kept firmly in place. And the friends and family of the current occupant of the WH certainly don’t want an anti-corruption crackdown in Ukraine! Not to mention all of the DC Think Tank Commanders who are finally getting their chance to take on the Russians after the anti-climax of 1991.
Worth remembering.
mole
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.
See Cassie’s thread on A Farewell to Sharma. Look to the poorer areas for hope, and rejoice in the possible pleasure of seeing the proles rise against their so-called “socialist” overlords.
“This country was invaded.” Too bad the High Court disagrees with you.
mole
Yet the media is in lockstep allowing the squandermonkies to label all the Billions being spent as “investment”, not taxpayers money being sprayed up the wall like a trapeze artist with a dose of the squirts after a 12 Guinness and and curry lunch.
Has there been a single ruinable (lack of) energy project that has not required a taxpayer funded “co-investment” that will never have a positive return on capital, much less repay the “co-investment”?
Tim
Is it possible to have an offshore corporation with it’s banks accounts, directors and accounting functions etc all domiciled in Australia treated as a domestic corp fopr taxes purposes?
“Is it possible that the South Australians actually made a sensible choice by punting the Coalition? [Sorry, of course that’s sensible per se but I mean also installing the ALP.]””
Whilst it’s early days, I think that, yes, South Australians made the sensible choice. If I lived in SA I too would have voted for Malinauskas over the uber progressive Marshmallow, who loved to spend his time hobnobbing with progressive elites at arts festivals .
JC, have you read Janet Albrechtsen’s piece in today’s Oz about “Unregulated private cash is taking over our public assets“? She writes about the Sydney Airport takeover by a consortium of large pension funds and infrastructure investors as well as the proposed bid by private equity funds and industry super funds for Ramsay Health Care.
Big frickin deal. The Euros are so far behind in their defence capabilities that it will take them at least a decade of enormous investment to rebuild these. I don’t think they’re prepared to make this kind of sustained investment. What Germany is proposing to spend will barely touch the sides. What proportion of its armoured units are combat-ready? Can’t remember if it was 40% or 60% – either way, an embarrassingly low number. That’s what you get when you spend 1.2% of GDP on defence.
skies stolen and destroyed.
The boomerangs no longer fly.
Thanks Cassie. Will take a look.
Test driving cars today.
Hybrids are shit.
Nothing beats litres and a turbo diesel.
01:13 Report: China is the largest source of fake goods
02:48 Chinese firms avoid #Tariffs with loophole
04:42 Shanghai COVID-19 death toll raises questions
08:34 Hollywood flick echoes CCP territorial claim
11:21 WTA not returning to China in 2023 over Peng case
13:11 More details on Chinese firms getting U.S. subsidies
China in Focus – NTD
is combat-ready…
I’ll say one thing. It doesn’t matter whose side you’re on in the Uke war, but it looks like the Russians will win and it will be a defeat for the West whichever way you look at it. This isn’t good.
Karachi blast: Separatist group warns of more attacks on Chinese | DW News
Among which various aryan males experienced “strength through joy”. One of them wrote a poem about it. Only slightly more tolerable than the works of the Vogons.
It will take Russia longer. They can’t even afford their latest aircraft(wooden mock up of a stealth fighter was laughable), the tanks are old, the training is parlous. But that misses the key point. Putin has not helped Russia with this war he has damaged it. The weak democratic nations have rallied against him. His strategy has backfired. He has failed.
Down in Tassie for a week, and see this tosh in the paper:
‘No, we’re not a young nation’: Peter FitzSimons to reveal new republican model in Hobart
A high-profile Australian republican will soon visit Hobart to spruik republicanism, saying we must ditch the “sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us”.
A new advertising campaign argues an Australian head of state would unify the country in times of crisis and celebration.
STAUNCH republican Peter FitzSimons reckons he’s got a solution that will convince Australians to ditch the “sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us”.
It posits an egalitarian way of electing a head of state without veering into populism – and could also involve a high profile Indigenous Australian – like tennis legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley.
“What could be more unifying than saying, ‘yeah we’re Australians, we’ve been here for 65,000 years, I reckon we can run our own show’,” FitzSimons said ahead of an upcoming visit to Hobart.
“It will be a signal to the world that no, we’re not a young nation. We’re part of the oldest living nation on Earth.”
The well-known author and chair of the Australian Republic Movement will speak on the “Australian Choice Model” at an upcoming luncheon on May 12.
He said the model, unlike the one that failed in the 1999 referendum, would involve a system where each state and territory would nominate an eminent person, with a national election to decide which of the candidates would become head of state.
“For our first elected president, a lot of people say they would like it to be an Indigenous person, an Indigenous woman,” FitzSimons said, adding an eminent Australian like Goolagong Cawley would fit the bill.
He said he thought Australia was ready to vote to become a republic.
“We spent a fair bit of money in a lot of focus groups working out what Australians wanted. From memory, on our projected figures, at least two thirds of the Australian population say if that model was presented to them and was explained, they’d vote for it,” he said.
“A lot of people don’t understand we have an English head of state … what becomes increasingly clear is the sheer absurdity of having an English family of aristocrats reigning over us.”
FitzSimons said Australia’s movement towards becoming a republic was getting stronger with the upcoming federal election.
He said come May 21, “we’ll have three major monarchists gone” from parliament, including potentially Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz, outgoing Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and retiring MP Nicolle Flint.
“They’re the three most powerful voices left here for monarchism,” FitzSimons said.
“Sixty-two of our elected representatives, in the House of Representatives, are with us as well.”
Ahead of his return to Tasmania, FitzSimons said he believed Tasmania was a “republican state”.
“Tasmania, for me, is one of the more progressive states in the nation,” he said.
Article has two photos of bandana-man, but strangely isn’t open for comments.
Events will decide the matter.
Cats – it appears the paragraph in the new senate voting regs from 2016 stating that six votes below the line were OK has been memory holed, or amended since the 2019 election. I sent it around to various of my work colleagues at the time (some of whom were handing out ballot papers or scrutineering) and they were aghast.
I will only be numbering six boxes below the line, regardless. The rest get a heavy line through them.
F*ck them.
Yes, it is. I don’t identify with the modern West. Au Cointreau.
Who do you identify with then?
1. A gangsta operation run out of the Kremlin
2. A Marxist -Leninist regime run out of Beijing?
@ Winston:
“OK, mark them down for a jolly good purging.”
Per Gilbert and Sullivan:
“I’ve got a little list; they never would be missed”
And so on….
Be careful what you wish for, FitzSimians – you’ve already been warned that if Chilla “the tampon” Big Ears is crowned king, you’re going to be hurled ignominiously into the nearest dumpster and then it’s “New Ozzie Republican Chieftain Spurgeon Monkfish III sets out his far reaching vision for a 21st Century System of Government devoid of hereditary inbred chinless wonders and their equally useless Hollyweird hangers on”. 🙂
calli,
Well done. You should be a tour guide of some kind.
Some interesting and complication-provoking translated links and sources from the Daily Kos.
Make of it what you will.
Dover
Events will decide the matter.
As Harold MacMillan said after Suez, “Events, dear boy, events”.
From the Oz – I’ve posted the whole article.
Bullshit! 😀
Oh, wait… 🙁
(I got to see Suzy-Q at Temora twice when I was at Uni. The ground actually shakes when big radial-engined birds throttle up and get airborne).
I nominate Bruce Paxton.
Is there a more preposterous figure in Australian public life than Pedro FitzSimians, Cats?
ZK2A – sacré bleu – that would be “Bruce Pascoe”, Squire.
This is a tweet on Dad’s Deadpool Blog from a lady named Melissa McKenzie.
It reminds me of someone:
For clarity, this is St. Ruth at 1.54:
Yes.
?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1563950185866
Quite so, Squire.
Malcolm Turnbull?
KD – the events of the last two years have resulted in poor ol’ St Ruth losing his mind, his sense of humour, his recognition of his place in the world (completely irrelevant) and his boat.
Do I give a rodent’s? If he wasn’t so self righteously abusive and painting himself as the “only true Ozzie freedom fighter left on this continent”, then perhaps.
There are Cats who’ve had to make far more difficult choices than him after the last two years.
The incessant self aggrandising is ridiculous and renders him a joke.
over the last two years …
I’m not following the Ben Roberts-Smith trial particularly closely. The SAS seems like a tuckshop roster with automatic weapons that kill the odd person. That might just be the way it is reported.
Not seeing how discarding the Hanover/Guelph/Saxe Coburg/Battenberg/Windsors would change that?
They’re not British Aristocracy to begin with.
Get those votes in, Cats. The most preposterous figure in Australian public life:
Pedro FitzSimians – 2
Waffles Turnbuckle – 1
Mike “Gin Time” Carlton – 1
Any others?
Kevni Ruff
Julius Sideburn QC AO BBS
Already happened. Apparently there were 250 very civilized First Nations. Must’ve been democracies if they were so civilized. No kings or queens since that would be imperialist and we know that aboriginal people would never be imperialist would they? So in 40,000 years with 4 year terms that would come to 2,500,000 previous Presidents. Ok some would’ve had multiple terms but easily a million aboriginal Presidents must’ve been elected in Australia hitherto. I’m sure Bruce Pascoe will have a section on them in his next book.
JCsays:
April 30, 2022 at 5:00 pm
Tim
Is it possible to have an offshore corporation with it’s banks accounts, directors and accounting functions etc all domiciled in Australia treated as a domestic corp fopr taxes purposes?
Yes, a company doesn’t have to be incorporated here to be a “resident” for tax.
The current definition is “a company which is incorporated in Australia, or which, not being incorporated in Australia, carries on business in Australia, and has either its central management and control in Australia, or its voting power controlled by shareholders who are residents of Australia.”
“Central management and control” is usually the Board unless, broadly speaking, the Board is a rubber stamp for someone else.
There’s a proposal to amend the law to avoid offshore subs of Australians inadvertently becoming “residents”. The general idea is that a non-Australian incorporated company won’t be a resident unless it has a “significant economic presence in Australia” i.e. a good deal of its real business is carried out in Australia. Given that the definition already refers to “carrying on business in Australia” it might seem useless, but it’s addressing an arcane legal technicality. Exactly what impact the change will have is yet to be seen.
Alan Jones.
Goddamn right, Rabz.
Preach it.
Geoffrey Robertson
Thanks Tim. Greatly appreciate the reply.
Rabzsays:
April 30, 2022 at 6:05 pm
Get those votes in, Cats. The most preposterous figure in Australian public life:
It’s a large and high quality field.
But I can’t think of any public figure more preposterous than Bruce Pascoe.
You really are an idiot.
If you’re going to ditch the monarchy, it can’t be to embrace the current republican models of an appointed or elected president. It’s all downside: same responsibilities of the G-G, minus the power to sack governments, and all likelihood that we’ll end up with G-G Grace Tame, G-G Ita Buttrose, G-G Bruce Pascoe or G-G Any Number of Other Look-At-Me Nongs.
If there is to be change, it has to be a popularly elected president with veto powers, as per the US model
That means, every so often, you can get an outsider pledged to drain the billabong.
Won’t happen though, not in a million years, so King Jug Ears, ne Prince Tampon, it is.
Charlton for me.
None of the above.
Zali Steggal?
Royal commission kevni for me.
Pedro FitzSimians – 2
Waffles Turnbuckle – 1
Mike “Gin Time” Carlton – 1
Kevni Ruff – 0
Julius Sideburn QC AO BBS – 0
Alan Jones – 1
Robert Jefferson – 1
Alan Jones – 1
Bruce Pascoe – 1
Doves – who is this Charlton personage?
Adam Bandt?
And why would you bother to have an election for a figure head head of state?
Something only someone with serious money behind them could run for.
Or a maverick outsider like boaty mcboatface.
As pressing concerns facing the average Australian family it ranks around one millionth.
No wonder bandanaman wants to keep wasting money on referendi til we get it ‘right’.
“If there is to be change, it has to be a popularly elected president with veto powers, as per the US model
That means, every so often, you can get an outsider pledged to drain the billabong.”
Agree areff, which means we’d have to change our political system. This is what Ted Mack advocated at the 1998 convention.
H B Bearsays:
April 30, 2022 at 6:02 pm
I’m not following the Ben Roberts-Smith trial particularly closely. The SAS seems like a tuckshop roster with automatic weapons that kill the odd person. That might just be the way it is reported.
Somewhere along the line, the SAS selection process has collapsed.
Banks, joined by Mickie, Minnie and the Chipmunks. 🙂
Hanson-Dung.
Dr Kerryn “Do Not Listen To This Person” * Phelps?
* h/t Nick Coatesworth
Mrs Pedro FitzSimians
Squalid Aly.
Bit of trivia for old fart rock fans.
I’ve been watching a few of those ‘reaction’ videos where some random young person hears a piece of music from ye olde daze for the first time. In this case, it is an alleged US rapper, black guy, listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s superb rendition of Jimi Hendrix’ Voodoo Child. 7 million views.
It is not till I scanned the comments that I realised that this guy (age late 20s), who claims to be a musician, is black, didn’t recognise it. At all. He didn’t know that it was a Jimi Hendrix song. I started to wonder if he even knew who Hendrix was.
This is the frightening ahistoricism of our era writ large. It is like a Jew who doesn’t know about the Holocaust, or a writer who has never heard of Shakespeare or Jane Austen. Sorry, couldn’t resist the latter. 🙂
All that Black Pride stuff is a bloody joke, if a black American in the music industry is ignorant about Hendrix.
These people are not just low information voters, they are low information about everything.
The new Labor government there has invited all teachers and school admin types back to work, vaxxed or unvaxxed. The previous Liberal government there removed all mandates for the S.A. Police, so all the coppers can go back to work, vaxxed or not.
I’m not too sure what to make of it, with both parties holding some sensible ideas it’s not an ideological issue, must be something in the water.
Question: How many Victorian teachers will return to teaching in Victoria when they can cross the border and find work in S.A. which doesn’t hold to vaxx mandates.
Pedro FitzSimians – 2
Waffles Turnbuckle – 1
Mike “Gin Time” Carlton – 1
Kevni Ruff – 1
Alan Jones – 1
Robert Jefferson – 1
Alan Jones – 1
Bruce Pascoe – 1
The Bum Bandit – 1
Blandwhale Hyphen-Dung – 1
As pressing concerns facing the average Australian family it ranks around one millionth.
Absolutely.
It’s a “performing teals” type issue.
Cassie
Agree areff, which means we’d have to change our political system. This is what Ted Mack advocated at the 1998 convention.
Ted Mack is one of the few Australian politicians who deserves any respect.
Carpes has gifted the winner a fresh pair of Chaps.
Updates less frequently from now on.
and it will be a defeat for the West whichever way you look at it. This isn’t good.
On the upside, if Winnie the Xi had been contemplating a swing at Taiwan (and assuming the “3 days to win” was a real Russian ambition) hed be reconsidering his chances now.
“As pressing concerns facing the average Australian family it ranks around one millionth.”
Of course.
Put me down as voting for Bruce Pascoe, rabz. There are altogether too many choices.
Will nobody think of the greasy pole dancers? The process of selecting a candidate list would be a panic.
There is no way that a model that allowed for an popularly elected President, potentially selected independently of the major parties, would ever get to a referendum.
As you say, not happening in a million years.
“Ted Mack is one of the few Australian politicians who deserves any respect.”
Yes, and Mack was a true independent. The amusing thing is that we won his North Sydney seat in 1990 from John Spender, Princess Allegra’s daddy.
Yep. Ignorant illiterate innumerate anti-scientific ahistorical imbeciles. “The West” is now awash with them, thanks to the five decades long march through the institutions.
If you were a conspiracy hypothesist (unlike my good self, of course) you’d think it was all by design.
Ted Mack banned rubbish bins in North Sydney.
Which meant it was then full of wind swept rubbish.
Another utopian narcissist.
Ita Buttrose.
From pumping shit into teenage girls/womens brains as editorex of Cleo, Women’s Weekly and other paplications* Early adopter of causes involving men who are vagina decliners. Staple of daytime television Mongstrosities like Das Project and the Moaning show.
Topping it off with becoming an ABCcess director/catamite.
* Like publications, but devoted to lying endlessly about what Royal is divorcing/remarrying pregnant/ pregnant with twins/ just given birth to a litter of cocker spaniels etc.
That’s the only conclusion one could draw.
On the upside, if Winnie the Xi had been contemplating a swing at Taiwan (and assuming the “3 days to win” was a real Russian ambition) hed be reconsidering his chances now.
Agreed, invading Taiwan isn’t rolling across the border. 130-180km of sea separation warning then that’s after after the build up that satellite overpasses that would have detected. Then there’s the limited beach heads, I have flown in/out of Taipei and the first thing that struck me was the cliffs along most of the Island. After that then there’s the locals who will be about as welcoming as the Ukrainians are to the Russians outside Donbas and mountains. However the CCP is distracted at the moment with COVID and it looks like a bit of internal party argy bargy. Can’t see them pulling the trigger atm.
This sounds pretty sensible, eh?
Somewhere along the line, the SAS selection process has collapsed.
That’s the only conclusion one could draw.
Id be inclined its because senior officers decided they should actively seek not to keep close tabs on the group as it would have led to
.A: A rapid decline in operational effectiveness
.B: A necessity to take action and generate bad publicity ‘in the field”
.C: A lack of promotional chances for the people in charge because of both A&B,
Self interest, its the only horse thats trying.
Thirteen candidates, only two of which have more than one vote.
C’mon, Cats, let’s get the contempt flowing …
Ed Casesays:
April 30, 2022 at 6:46 pm
Fascist, N@zi or communist?
tatoo! tatoo! the science!
A new peer review study published in Journal Nature has said that rapidly warming earth has emerged as an opportunity for viruses and increased the probability of future pandemics.
Bob Brown