Open Thread – Tues 4 Oct 2022
2,499 responses to “Open Thread – Tues 4 Oct 2022”
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I am waiting to hear the evidence of how the victim ended up naked . Were her clothes damaged if they were removed , how long to take them off , how was clothing observed by security officer ?
Clothes removed and she was drunk from alcohol and perhaps , party drugs? All done in the time of 22 minutes ? from the time he signed in and out . Party drugs maybe why she didn’t report it .Just asking. -
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This page is a hoot.
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God saved Essendon from Andrew Thorburn
Joe AstonColumnistThe appointment of former National Australia Bank boss Andrew Thorburn as the CEO of Essendon Football Club landed like a turd in the punch bowl.
The fierce indignation centred on Thorburn’s extracurricular role as the chairman of a church that espouses Old Testament views of homosexuality as a “sexual immorality” and compares abortion to the Holocaust. “Absolutely appalling” is how Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews described these attitudes on Tuesday, and himself as a “disappointed Essendon supporter”.
That’s low-hanging fruit, to be sure, but Thorburn’s fire and brimstone side hustle has completely overshadowed two other preposterous ingredients of this story: first, the way in which Thorburn finagled the gig; and second, the Essendon board’s collective delusion in believing him “a man of great integrity and exceptional vision”.
Late on Tuesday, Thorburn resigned just 24 hours into his commission. Earlier in the day, he was defending how “my faith has helped me become a better leader”.
“That’s really what I want people to look at, look at my actions, look at my words as a leader and the organisations I’ve created…”
His last organisation charged customers – including dead ones – more than $650 million in fees for no service, then in the witness stand he tried to dismiss it as carelessness.
This man of great integrity was so soundly flayed by the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry that he was forced to resign immediately upon the release of its final report.
It caused commissioner Kenneth Hayne some umbrage that “Mr Thorburn sought to assert that no one knew this was happening. The money just kept ‘falling into NAB’s pocket’… He sought to portray the charging of fees for no service as a product of poor systems and carelessness. It was, in his words, ‘just professional negligence’… I cannot and do not accept this.”
‘Rotten culture’
Hayne found that “NAB also stands apart from the other three major banks. Having heard from both the CEO, Mr Thorburn, and the chair, Dr [Ken] Henry… I was not persuaded that NAB is willing to accept the necessary responsibility for deciding, for itself, what is the right thing to do, and then having its staff act accordingly … Overall, my fear – that there may be a wide gap between the public face NAB seeks to show and what it does in practice – remains.”This is unequivocally the description of an unethical organisation whose rotten culture flowed down from the very top.
On Monday, Essendon president David Barham boasted that, “to my knowledge, no other AFL club has ever secured the services of an ASX-listed top 10 company CEO to run its club”.
Barham omitted a key adjective here. Thorburn is a disgraced former ASX 10 company CEO. No other AFL club has ever secured the services of a disgraced former ASX 10 company CEO for the very good reason that no other AFL club has ever sought to.
How was it, precisely, that Essendon secured Thorburn’s services? Melbourne’s Herald Sun reported on August 27 that Thorburn had been engaged by Essendon to “conduct an independent review … which will focus on”, among other things, “the appointment of a new CEO”.
That’s right, Thorburn did at Essendon Football Club in 2022 precisely what David Gonski did at the Future Fund in 2012 and what Dick Cheney did in 2000 as chairman of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential search committee: he used his position as the headhunter to win the job for himself.
Thorburn even interviewed other (unsuspecting) candidates for the role – memorising the best parts of their pitches, no doubt! – before declaring himself a candidate. How is that ethical?!
Essendon is obviously sensitive about the dreadful optics here, given its torturous explanation of how Thorburn went from refereeing the race to raising the trophy.
You also couldn’t expect Thorburn to fix Essendon’s historically scandalous culture. This is the same guy whose chief of staff defrauded NAB of $5 million without him having a clue. The judge said he found it “absolutely staggering that those frauds were not detected by some appropriate system of internal auditing”.
It is a striking reality that in football today, being on the wrong side of diversity and inclusion issues is considered a far bigger black mark on a person than their questionable integrity or their record of ripping people off.
Barham is quite clearly out of his depth. His first press conference as president – defending the sacking of coach Ben Rutten – goes down as one of the worst in AFL history.
But Essendon is a weird club full of deeply weird people. Thorburn would’ve fit right in.
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Clown world.
Jimmy Saville MBE vs “convicted pedophile” Rolf Harris.
Anyway. ABC NewsRadio has been orgasmic in telling a ridiculous story that the UK Tories made an embarrassing backflip on tax cuts to…avoid a 2008 style financial crisis started by the collapse of Lehman Bros.
Yep. The market was so concerned about future budgets.
At the same time their drunk idiot business reporter was feeding the chooks on the necessity of quantitative easing and that business cycles being created by governments were inevitable; we’re in the very best of hands.
You can’t make this shit up.
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ABC NewsRadio is also basically a campaign centre for the Greens and their war on cars.
I feel so dumb. I have been repeating the concept that nuclear power derived liquid fuels would be great.
Of course the Greens don’t care if EVs only by 2030/2035 is dumb and impractical.
They hate cars, ordinary people (like me) and the country folk (who need reliable cars capable of long distances and towing).
It’s like how they don’t care if solar energy has a fairly low upper limit. It is their religion that everyone is forced to live like druids.
They would love it if 90% of us went back to Sancho the Donkey or Shanks’ Pony.
No cars for commoners, Teslas for the elite.
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Clothes removed and she was drunk from alcohol and perhaps , party drugs? All done in the time of 22 minutes ? from the time he signed in and out . Party drugs maybe why she didn’t report it .Just asking.
She’d had lots to drink and staggering.
Needs to have a pee, can’t get the clothes back in place before she passes out on the couch.
There’s no need for any sexual conduct to explain her position. -
System black event in Bangladesh.
Power Grid Collapse In Bangladesh Leaves 140 Million People In Dark (5 Oct)
Bangladesh’s national power grid collapsed Tuesday afternoon, plunging 140 million people, or nearly everyone in the country, into darkness, AFP reported.
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Prices of energy as well as food as other staples have soared worldwide in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, including in Asia.This has wrought havoc on Bangladesh’s electricity grid in recent months, with utilities struggling to source enough diesel and gas to meet demand.
Better get your act together Bangla government peoples or you might have a revolution on your hands. The denizens of countries like yours can get quite excitable sometimes, especially when fuel prices rise.
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No cars for commoners, Teslas for the elite.
Electric Hummers, Dot. Teslas are old hat.
Man Plugs $80k+ Electric Truck Into His House, Finds Out It Will Take Over 4 Days to Charge (1 Oct)
You’ve gone green and you’ve done it in style with the GMC Hummer, starting at $86,645. That’s right — the Hummer’s now a green vehicle!
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The video begins with standard 120V charging — or Level 1 charging, to use official jargon. This is the standard current your home already offers.“Right now it’s about 6 p.m. on Tuesday,” the man says. “And it says it will be full by Saturday at 10:55 [p.m.], which is four-plus days of charging. Wow.”
To be fair, however, this won’t be how most Hummer owners will be charging their vehicle. Level 2 chargers are upgraded home stations which deliver a significantly higher amount of electricity than your regular home circuit would be able to deliver — but they require special equipment and installation.
That’s from Surber today. Even the level 2 charger took 24 hours. And with a few of those in your area you might plug in your Hummer only fry to the transformer at the end of your street.
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That inflated invoice scam at NAB is still playing out, the external party is currently before the court.
It went on for four years, and despite the millions involved no internal auditing in NAB picked it up, apparently.
The amount defrauded was $15 million, Rogers the NAB employee just got $5 million as her share.
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Does he ever do any work?
Elbow Grease -
Thorburn’s fire and brimstone side hustle has completely overshadowed two other preposterous ingredients of this story: first, the way in which Thorburn finagled the gig; and second, the Essendon board’s collective delusion in believing him “a man of great integrity and exceptional vision.
Called it. *moonwalks left* *moonwalks right*
Thorburn’s using his religion as a shield. ‘Oh it’s because I’m churchy, not because I have a decades-long proven history of scamming cash for myself and my mates that Essendon and its idiot president ignored during the entire selection process.’
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Funny old thing with Musk moving forward on the twitter acquisition.
He’s at the same point he was a couple of months ago with the only difference being he got to partially go through a discovery process.
The reality is he’s over paying for the business in it’s current form.
It’s a huge punt on making the platform bot proof. -
NASHVILLE, TN — With the success of Matt Walsh and the newly-bearded Ben Shapiro, pressure is mounting at The Daily Wire headquarters for popular conservative commentator Candace Owens to grow a beard of her own.
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It’s a huge punt on making the platform bot proof.
Bots aren’t the problem.
Lefties are. Twitter is unreformable.
I think that’s why he didn’t want to go through with it: the entire workforce is feral, and they’ll just refuse to do anything he orders done. The management will back the feral workforce and even if he tries to fire them he’ll get tied up in endless lawsuits in lefty jurisdictions. It’s going to be an awful mess.I hope I’m wrong, but it’s the same problem righty bosses of the ABC get every time the Libs try to appoint one.
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Monty – 4/10 @ 7.40
Unfortunately people who don’t understands sports are involved in sports.
Just have a look at this a Hawthorn racist non sense. The hysteria of pointing a finger which is a lie which everyone flocks to.
Womens footy, seriously, ( let me let you into a secret, guys don’t like women crashing and bashing into eachother and trying to act like men), how far down the amuter divisions do you have to go before it comparable.
Carolyn Wilson, I scalped this guy, that guy , this guy, and we do need 3 umpires on the field, that way women umpires can keep up with the play – this is not sport.
Growing up in the 70s in a house hold with no much cash left over the entertainment was playing sport or listening to pop music and entertainment eg movies tv series.
Interesting on how the entertainment industry and the do reporters attitudes to life differs. The entertainment industry would insult athletes, haven’t a brain in their head, being coached by Ron hiltler Barassi and on and on and on.
The entertainment industry does not like the sports industry and continues its smearing of the sports industry, why because you have to try, you have to work at it – the entertainment game does not like this. -
Learning something, every day (the Tele):
Meghan Markle has taken aim at Mike Myers’ Austin Powers and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill for portraying “over sexualised or aggressive … caricatures” of Asian women in the decades-old films.
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The Duchess of Sussex was joined by American comedian Margaret Cho and journalist Lisa Ling to discuss how many women of Asian descent, like them, are stereotyped in everyday life and on the silver screen.Sparkles BoltOns is Asian now. Bleck Asian lady. She describes going to a Korean spa with her mum, seeing naked Asian women there, then eating noodles and then having Asian stigma. A profound analysis of noggies in film follows:
“The Dragon Lady, the East Asian temptress whose mysterious foreign allure is scripted as both tantalising and deadly,” she continued.
“This has seeped into a lot of our entertainment. Movies like Austin Powers and Kill Bill — they presented these caricatures of women of Asian descent as oversexualised or aggressive.”
Tip for Megs: Every character in both of those movies is a caricature.
“This toxic stereotyping of women of Asian descent … this doesn’t just end once the credits roll.”
Markle just outed herself as a Tiger Mom. Good work, Markle-san.
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Bern, thanks for posting the AFR piece on the Essendon footy club and its sacked CEO Andrew Thornburn.
Because it’s written by a line-and-length media lefty, it fails mention the story’s most important point: Thorburn was chairman of the committee tasked with finding a new club CEO.
In other words, Thorburn had himself appointed to the job.
Essendon has become famous for its hubris and that’s it right there in neon lights.
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If NZ can be turned around surely it can be done here.
Sorry to be so negative Roger, but what difference would it make if Matt Guy won in a landslide in November, What difference would it make if Dutton gets in? For that matter, what difference did the Morrison gov make? I often wonder if we had of gotten a Shorten gov if we would have been better off. But then again, the Dutton opposition is not visible at all now, they would probably have been invisible during COVID as well.
sigh…
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Traces Of mRNA Vaccine Found In Breast Milk!
The Jimmy Dore Show
The latest COVID-related conspiracy theory to be borne out as conspiracy truth involves… breast milk. At one point we were told unequivocally that the COVID vaccines could not find their way into nursing mothers’ milk. But now it turns out that traces of mRNA vaccines have been discovered in breast milk. Naturally, all the voices who dismissed this possibility as a “conspiracy theory” have profusely apologized for their error — no, wait, that hasn’t happened at all. -
she’s going to struggle to keep that up for the duration of proceedings.
She needs to learn to keep her powder dry.
Not really, if that front pages picture in the Oz is any guide. Cameras clicking outside the court, quick into the ladies for some work on the smudged mascara. Voile! Ready for the media pack.
It would be nice to take, Ms Higgins grief on face value – maybe it is genuine. However there would have to be a scrum of advisors telling her how to look and what is the right moment to emote for maximum media impact.
“Weeping softly” is a very emotive phrase. Denoting genuine womanly grief from a hurt and wronged person. No doubt if the accused wept, his tears could be described in less sympathetic ways.
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The fierce indignation centred on Thorburn’s extracurricular role as the chairman of a church that espouses Old Testament views of homosexuality as a “sexual immorality” and compares abortion to the Holocaust.
I don’t know much about Thorburn, and nothing about Essendon – yes, people like me exist.
But with regards the first charge, the one about homosexuality: Does Thornburn’s church really expound the view that they should be killed?
With regards the second: I take it the author disapproves of this characterisation. Which is a little dishonest, in my opinion. You might think it overwrought, you might think it tasteless, but can he not consider that some people consider the systemic slaughter of innocents merely because their are inconvenient to recommend itself to the comparison? If you are arguing style rather than ‘systemic’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘innocent’ (or however people that make the comparison justify it) then you are sort of conceding it may well be valid and have had to resort to a side issue – the triviality of which highlights what it does not address.
Besides, is it The Holocaust (i.e. the Shoah), or merely a holocaust as in sacrifice by complete burning as practiced by the Romans, Greeks, and I believe it is in the Talmud as well.
If education wasn’t so shitty they could make a reference to Moloch, but most people would assume it was a video game.
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UK, The new USSR
She tweeted: ‘I know it’s procedure, but one minute I am cooking some roast chicken for dinner, the next I am having my socks searched for drugs, because of “insulting posts on the internet.”
‘It’s scary that the police can take someone’s word for something and just come and arrest you. All they could say is “we’ve had an allegation which needs to be investigated”‘.
Sentences for those found guilty under the Malicious Communications Act can be as long as two years.
Mrs Farrow, who once complained of her life being ‘invaded and dominated by insane trans rights activists’, has previously been publicly supported by Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
Mrs Farrow was investigated by the same police force in 2019 over allegations she had used the wrong pronoun to describe a transgender woman.
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A new guy in town walks into a bar and notices a large jar filled to the brim with $10 bills.
The man approaches the bartender and asks “What’s up with the jar?” “Well, you pay $10, and if you pass three tests, then you get all the money”.
“What are the three tests?” asks the man. “Gotta pay first”.
So the guy gives him the $10 bucks, and the bartender adds it to the jar.
“OK, here’s what you have to do. First, you have to drink that whole bottle of pepper tequila -the WHOLE thing at once- and you can’t make a face while doing it. Second, there’s a pit bull chained up out back with a sore tooth. You have to remove the tooth with your bare hands. Third, there is a 90-year-old woman upstairs who’s never had an orgasm in her life. You gotta make things right for her”.
“Well, I know I’ve paid my $10 bucks” says the man “but I’m not an idiot. No wonder you’ve collected so much money – that’s impossible!”
The new guy proceeds to drink several whiskeys, and eventually, he gets up his nerve.
“Wherez zat teeqeelah?” he slurs. He grabs the bottle of pepper tequila with both hands and downs it, gulp by gulp! Tears are streaming down his cheeks, but he doesn’t make a face.
Next, he staggers out back. Everyone in the bar hears a huge scuffle outside – barking, yelping and growling, then silence.
Just when they think the man must be dead, he staggers back into the bar with his shirt ripped and gashes across his body.
“NOW” he says “wherez at ol’ lady with the sore tooth?”
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Get your R plate for your car in Victoria – of course!
Australian drivers who have experienced road trauma can order an ‘R’ plate to signal to other drivers that they need more empathy and space.
The plates are designed for motorists who have had a traumatic experience on the road but are ready to ease back into driving.
The light blue plate signals to others drivers that the person inside the car will need a little more patience and space on the road.
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Big for electronic election systems
Boom!
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Whilst things aren’t going swimmingly for the Kremlin at the moment,
Moscow Centre’s* long long game against Chermany continues to bear fruit.
Building North Sea wind parks to produce “green hydrogen” to burn in
modified gas plants is nearly too perfect.
*Who’da thunk financing die Gruenen would do way more damage
than just fucking up REFORGER exercises. -
I am waiting to hear the evidence of how the victim ended up naked .
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agreed – this is a puzzling one.There is a type of person, who when sufficiently shitfaced, will disrobe – even at the darkest edges of drunkenness. Usually it’s very shortly before all activity ceases for the evening. They won’t realise they are doing it, and don’t remember doing it afterwards.
I had a couple of mates notorious for it. If you had to drag them onto their bed after an evening of refreshment, fully clothed, you’d check on them an hour later to make sure they hadn’t Bon Scotted and they’d be curled up nekkid with their gear thrown everywhere – regardless of background noise or ambient temperature.
It’s almost an automatism. It happens. It’s a real thing.
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Thanks for the piece bern.
I still maintain the media focussing on his church teachings as the means of his dismissal. There were no questions about his previous NAB er, work from said media upon his installment to a panel searching for a CEO.
Wonder what that profound idiot Mark Robinson has to say. -
Of course.
Masks saw more than 90% of deaf people struggle to communicate during pandemic
And just take a look at this if you want to see straight out malice and spite. They do it because they can, to humiliate people. Don’t think for a second they don’t know that it serves no other purpose.
New York Post
@nypost
Multiple Massachusetts colleges extend mask mandates indefinitely -
The arrest of Konnech’s CEO is significant for a couple of reasons:
The DA didn’t go after a low-level data geek within the company. Doing so would allow the media and the company to claim this was the work of a lone wolf and not a company sponsored policy. Taking down the CEO suggests that the practice of illegally mining data on poll workers came from the top.
LA County is not the only place where Konnech is an election software provider. They have contracts with about two dozen other cities, counties and states. The arrest in LA County puts pressure on other law enforcement agencies to take action. If Konnech has a contract in a jurisdiction and the local police don’t investigate, they’ll appear to be complicit.
If other jurisdictions bring charges against Konnech or its CEO, the timing of the November election becomes problematic.
HT Dave Hayes
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It is a striking reality that in football today, being on the wrong side of diversity and inclusion issues is considered a far bigger black mark on a person than their questionable integrity or their record of ripping people off.
My question is: what were the City On The Hill people thinking when they appointed him? He brings them into disrepute, given his history at NAB.
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Faeces-pouring protestor pleads guilty – so gets a month in the slammer until sentencing hearing.
Was that part of the plan?
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Bangladesh’s national power grid collapsed Tuesday afternoon, plunging 140 million people, or nearly everyone in the country, into darkness, AFP reported.
Let me guess… the solution will be more renewables?
On a personal note, my response to SAs first ‘state black’ was to put in a whole house, autostart, 7000w Honda. It’s run for over 200 hours since then.
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Bangladesh’s national power grid collapsed Tuesday afternoon, plunging 140 million people, or nearly everyone in the country, into darkness, AFP reported.
Let me guess… the solution will be more renewables?
On a personal note, my response to SAs first ‘state black’ was to put in a whole house, autostart, 7000w Honda. It’s run for over 200 hours since then.
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No wonder the Pfizer CEO declined to appear before an EU parliamentary hearing on the shots. There’s an endless litany of crimes against humanity he must answer for. But what is our excuse for not holding all the people in government and medicine accountable in the U.S.? One could have feigned ignorance in early 2021, but now we are light-years past the threshold for willful misconduct. How much longer will we allow the government to “roll the dice” with the lives of all humanity and even their future offspring?
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Neil Mitchell championing Thorburn’s right to religious freedom this morning and rightly calling TaliDan an A grade hypocrite.
ABC is desperately finding left wing totalitarians who think that hurt feelz is reason to disbar anyone from employment.
Young blokes with an Irish Catholic background should stay well clear of the Bombers.
No doubt Kevin Sheedy isn’t taking calls. -
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) filed its motion and amicus brief Thursday evening with the federal district court in Galveston urging it to allow the lawsuit to proceed against the FDA for its misleading statements against ivermectin. In Apter v. HHS, a group of physicians sued to hold the Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency within the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), accountable for its interference with physicians’ ability to treat Covid-19.
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But what is our excuse for not holding all the people in government and medicine accountable in the U.S.?
It’s turtles all the way down.
Three of the nation’s leading medical associations asked President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute journalists and parents who are concerned with hospitals and physicians who provide transgender surgeries to minors.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Children’s Hospital Association sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging him to “take swift action to investigate and prosecute” those who allegedly threaten or target hospitals and physicians who provide transgender surgery to minors.
The AMA and PGA here are obviously likewise captured.
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