Open Thread – Tues 2 Aug 2022
1,483 responses to “Open Thread – Tues 2 Aug 2022”
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Nuclear is too expensive and scary (except in France and other countries that have nuclear already) and one day uranium will run out, or perhaps not, depending on technology advances.
Complete and utter bullshit. New generation nukes use much less fissionable material greatly increasing known stock life which even with old nuke tech was measured in millennia. Same with new gen coal.
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hzhousewife
I’m interested to know what the wait time is currently for family reunion status for immigrants – it was getting quite long pre-covid, my guess is that things have settled down with inability to travel for a couple of years, and elderly parents getting older by the day. Any one know?
Interesting question wifey. Family reunion has always been problematic to me. For every approved entrant, how many entrants do we actually get? We have approved refugees from places that they “were in danger” known to have gone back to their places of origin in apparent safety. They also have ‘rights’ to bring their extended families here. Hence the massive congestion of enclaves in areas such as where I live.
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This bloke does not get how implacable the radical left is.
He’s a silly wet. He liked the Jungian fluff and the sense of insight which is spurious and leads nowhere, while struggling for neutrality. Staying neutral when someone is hellbent on destroying your civilisation isn’t noble and brave. It’s blackest treachery.
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Interesting question wifey. Family reunion has always been problematic to me.
The Indian subcontinent diaspora would be interesting to watch in this regard. I suspect quite a few will end up going home when their aspirations are not fulfilled to the satisfaction of their dreams, and as the mortgage interest rates climb.
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene??
@RepMTG
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10h
I’m going to text my friend Alex Jones how much I, along with countless millions of people, are proud of him for that answer.Yes we all want to know what the relationship was with the Clintons, Jeffrey Epstein, and whoever else, and pedophilia.
The Epstein Select Committee..
Quote TweetDamon imani?
@damonimani
· 12h
Holly sh!tBrilliant.
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Wonder how long they’ll be calling Biloela home before the “big smoke” beckons?
And:
They’ll be in Brissy or Sydney within a month.
I doubt they’ll go back in Biloela. The ‘outpouring of community support’ – that I saw, at least – was from a couple of whiny tree-changers yapping about the family having settled into the bedrock of the town.
Depends on what you mean by ‘settled’. Small towns like that have long wait times before you’re considered part of it.
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OK Cats, I’m going to get all controversial.
Fatty Trump needs to stand down for the next election.
This bizarre US Gerontrocracy needs to be brought to a long overdue end.
If the DeSantis runs for the presidency, it will be all over bar the election shenanigans.
Politicians of the Farage and the DeSantis Style are needed here, desperately.
Everywhere I look, it’s imbeciles busily selling this mighty country down the nearest euphemism.
This needs to stop, Cats. 😕
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Holocaust twins turning 100 are living proof miracles happen
exclusive
Cameron Stewart
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
28 minutes ago August 5, 2022
No CommentsPhillip Maisel says he has enjoyed two miracles in his life. The first was during the war when both he and his twin sister Bella survived the Nazi extermination camps of the Holocaust. The second was in Melbourne this week, when they both turned 100.
Or did they? The letters of congratulation that these living treasures received from the Queen, the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and the Premier say their birthday is not until August 15. But that is an 80-year lie which Maisel told to the Nazis – a lie that was never corrected.
“When I was in the concentration camp I needed to hide my identity in case I escaped, so I changed my birthday from 31st July to 15th August. When we both came to Australia in 1949, I never bothered to change it back,” Maisel says with a grin.
So Phillip and Bella and their family celebrated their real 100th birthday last Sunday, July 31 – and now they will have to wait until Monday week, August 15, for it to become official.
There was also a third miracle in Phillip’s large life that could have been taken straight from the script of a Hollywood movie.
Having somehow survived a series of concentration camps, Phillip found himself stranded and alone in Germany in the months after the war with no knowledge of whether his family, including Bella, was still alive.
One day a man approached him and commented on his unusual Yiddish accent, saying he had just been at a displaced persons camp in another part of Germany where he had met a woman with a similar distinctive accent.
Phillip knew it was a “one in a million” chance that it was his twin sister Bella but he had to find out. So he took his 250cc motorcycle that he had bought from the Soviet Red Army in exchange for fuel and rode more than 150km across Germany to the camp in Landsberg to search for the girl with the strange accent.
Bella, who had assumed Phillip was dead, says she was dumbstruck when her twin brother suddenly appeared in front of her.
“I couldn’t believe it. We looked at each other and we couldn’t talk. I was just so incredibly happy,” she says. “Then after a while we started to tell our story.”
Their family in Vilna, which was then a part of Poland, had been ripped apart by the Germans who placed Phillip and his father in a Jewish ghetto.
Two years later, Bella watched as soldiers arrested Phillip and dragged him away. They never saw each other for the rest of the war. Bella was arrested and charged with being a member of the Polish underground and was thrown into a concentration camp. Phillip was moved to a series of concentration camps for years, narrowly escaping death numerous times.
They learned after the war that their father was put to death by the Nazis just one day before his camp was liberated.
After the war, Phillip and Bella moved together to Melbourne, where they had an uncle, and started a new life. They both married, raised families and were happy, but in 1992 Phillip felt an itch that he knew he had to scratch.
“In my concentration camp there were three of us who made a vow,” he says. “We promised one another if we survive even for five minutes we will tell the world what the Germans have done to Jews. And because I survived I could help fulfil the promise.”
So, at the age of 70, Phillip devoted four days a week for the next 29 years to recording the testimonies of Holocaust survivors at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre.
He has recorded 1400 of them, adding richly to Australia’s understanding of what these immigrants went through before starting a new life here.
Phillip says he loved recording the testimonies so that future generations would understand the stories of Holocaust survivors, but he admits that sometimes the horror and the heartbreak of their tales got to him.
“When I would come home (from recording) I would often think about it and feel the pain of the person,” he says. “But there was one very important thing that made me feel better – they survived. That was a very positive thing.”
Despite the horrors of the Holocaust, both Bella and Phillip still believe that humans are fundamentally decent.
“I believe that human beings are good,” says Bella.
“Unfortunately, during the war, the propaganda and the politics forced them and they lost sight of what was right.”
Phillip says: “In general I try to be positive but very often I am disappointed. Take Ukraine, for example. People are not bad but they can be misled so that even good people commit terrible atrocities. People have to be educated so that they are not willing to believe in false gods.”
Both Phillip and Bella admit that in the dark days of 1941 they could never have imagined in their wildest dreams that they would both survive the war, emigrate to Australia together and then live to see 100. “These are miracles,” says Phillip.
So is there a secret to their longevity and luck?
“Just be positive,” he says.
“Always be positive.”
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The Bill Gates funded ProPublica says that the spike in still births was caused by peopled not getting jabbed.
Top shelf gas lighting. -
The blogue has been misbehaving ever since it went to large font in the blockquotes
Pancho, the large font blockquotes haven’t been in evidence since last weekend or possibly earlier.
If it’s any consolation, Doves, everything appears to be working as expected (for a change).
You deserve better than trying to satisfy a bunch of very loud “commentaters*” …
*Deliberate, you pedants. 🙂
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Matt Canavan very good in that clip above. He may be a Senator but he could be drafted in for a run as Liberal leader if the going got tough. Hawke was drafted in, late, and won hugely. After two and a half more years of Labor and the Greens, who knows what might be in the minds of the voters and who will become heir to the political throne, the person they seek to change directions? I think it will need to be someone like Canavan, who has fire and says what everyone is thinking. Pauline does that, but she’s a muddling communicator. Matt speaks well, easily, and cuts through strongly.
I feel as do Calli and Cassie; a sense of rejection and hopelessness and a desire to retreat into my own world and my own concerns. I think I will do so for a while; feel less involved and be less involved. Each of us must find our own accommodation to these mad times. This small holiday is doing me good.
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Small holiday fun tonite. We decided to use the little kitchen in this one-bedroom apartment and have a good home-cooked meal of steak and salad with sweet potato chips, and relax ‘at home’. The pub meal last nite had been disappointing. There is a fully equipped kitchen but the induction stove is one of those ones with obscure modes of operation, sliding your finger and tapping lightly and hopefully in the right place, for nothing was apparent. The stove got greasy, the tapping stopped working, the steak was on high and we couldn’t turn the damn hotplates down, the extractor fan was feeble and the fire alarm went off just after I had raced to open the doors to the balcony and started waving a tea-towel around to dispell the fug. This is a very large resort complex and I was feared we would call the place out, with everyone having to troop downstairs.
But the alarm stopped, I continued waving my teatowel getting a through draft via the entrance door to the open balcony door, and soon there appeared a security man and a housekeeper woman. They were very nice. Cooking? they enquired. Those stoves are so difficult to work, consoled the woman. No worries, said the security, you’ve got the extractor fan on and the doors open, the alarms off on the main console downstairs, and we’ve investigated, but next time, don’t open the door to the corridor as this can bring out the whole building.
He thought there would be a next time! I’m never coming back to this stove again.
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Barking mad ideologues, peoples – before the Albansleazey#, there just weren’t enough of them obnoxiously blundering into our existences, you know it to be factual*
#A poverty stricken houso (BIRM) from Shamperdown who’s been dining out on his own mediocrity ever since he was able to blame his alleged problems on anyone except himself …
*For the time being, until reviewed by MiniTru
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Matt Canavan is not a Liberal.
Matt Canavan is a National.Yes, I know. I momentarily forgot but he could still be drafted. Nats might be the main game by then, or the Libs may have to give way and invite him in. I don’t have a crystal ball. He just seems a likely bright spark in a very dim picture right now.
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Rosie, at 8.45 last nite, German warmie lady realising that coal is best.
Gives one hope, as does the set of Jewish twins turning one hundred.
Thanks Cats. Very upcheering. And thanks for the site, Dover.
Appreciate a man who stands up for the C19th social theorists (apart from Marx).
They did useful work in providing a focus on social stability and the changes of modernity.ps The Cat is working well from Mooloolabah on my laptop.
Haven’t ever had any problems on it in Sydney either. -
Glad you enjoyed the link, Rosie.
Sad she is a warmie, but there you are.
Economics and resource extraction are a little out of her wheelhouse but she still makes a robust case for nuclear on environmental grounds and the human cost, and she is alive to the fact that whatever the economics now she is still open minded, seeing that things evolve with time – a concept greenies and most warmies are determined to remain blind to.
Typically greenies will insist that nuclear is not economic and then sit smugly back as if they have delivered the last word (this is when talking to someone open to nuclear despite all the ooga-booga that greenies, hippies, and other luddites have been prattling on with since the 60s). But she acknowledges that nuclear would get cheaper, and then went on to discuss new forms of nuclear already heading that way.
One of the commenters is a lecturer at UNSW on a mining discipline who points out to her that the estimate of uranium available to us would be severely limited by the reluctance to search for and identify new reserves in these benighted ‘green’ times. But if, for example, the reserves of copper as known in 1980 happened to be all their was, we would have run out in the 2010’s (or thereabouts).
Clearly we haven’t.
And I love the way she pronounces Einstein – in German!
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The blog is so rooted with tech problems.
The blog needs updating and its own site?
So how about we take up a collection?
I’ll donate the $2 that JC owes me for the bet he lost about inflation and growth that he is trying to weasel out of by moving the goal posts with reference to year on year rolling averages.
squeak squeak …sounds of flagposts moving… -
Timothy Neilson:
A Voice to parliament would be an advisory body only and would not involve reparations to Indigenous Australians, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says.
We don’t trust these bastards.
Then why does the referendum wording give parliament the ability to determine the “powers” of the “voice”?
And this is one reason why.
…and which states of Australia are still in a State of Emergency?
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Eyrie:
They built 21 B-2’s. One was crashed on takeoff leaving 20. Knew a lady who worked on the wind tunnel when they were building it. Have a genuine Northrop model shop display model of one on the shelf above me .
I loved building these kits when I was a kid, but eyesight and coordination are preventing me from taking up the hobby again.
Any machinists know how difficult it would be to carve one out of aluminium on, say, a 5 axis machine?
I appreciate the difficulty would be in the programming but. -
Patrick Kelly:
The Treasury’s answer to economic problems seems to be to increase
GDP (ie tax base) via increased immigration. This has been an ongoing policy under all governments. What does it do for Australians?The increased cost of the immigrants lurks and perks mean our people are taxed harder and cannot afford as many kids.
It’s about replacement, essentially. -
“I have a vague memory of someone being able to create an EMP without nuclear weapons …”
IIRC, a linear array of single-loop coils and some conventional explosive at one end.
Coil spacing, current interruption and explosive shock wave velocity arranged such that all the “edges” of the magnetic field collapse in each coil align, creating the desired sharp-edged pulse in one direction (opposite end to explosive).
Obviously less intense than nuclear, but also can be a “focused” attack too – you can take out radar, comms etc at the military sites without wiping out all the civilian infrastructure too. And of course, no radioactivity issues either. And presumably can be assembled with minimal training and little “restricted” materials.
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