The Pont de Arts and the Institut de France, August Renoir, 1867
1,485 thoughts on “Open Thread – Weekend 10 Dec 2022”
Dr Chalmers
From wiki:
He went on to complete a PhD in political science at the Australian National University, writing his doctoral thesis on the prime ministership of Paul Keating,[2][3] titled “Brawler statesman: Paul Keating and prime ministerial leadership in Australia”.[6]
2
Roger:
I’ll just pull one sentence out of your post:
Seems “ethics” for our cricketers is telling other people what they should be doing.
Alter it a bit:
Seems “ethics” for some is telling other people what they should be doing.
Yes. Pretty damn correct.
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Rescued by a fellow Cat again , Carpe Jugulum visited my place yesterday to offer my friends and me his expertise on building matters .
Well done, Carpe.
That’s the way it’s done.
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Like Keating the Musical, I’m sure this Gough Musical that comes out next year will, yet again, immortalise and deify failure:
Regardless of what you think of Whitlam, Kerr, conspiracy theories about the Queen or the CIA, the Australian public made their choice on him pretty clearly… The Libs won an additional 30 seats in 1975 (or 91/127 HoR seats in total).
Quite a few years back but dad had to go through a similar process when his house started to crack up not long after building.
Turned out all the houses in the area(new released) were the same, some to the point water pipes were bursting as well as gas lines.
One place cacked up so you could see into the loungeroom from the street.
Council originally claimed no interest.
Banks uninterested.
Government uninterested.
Builders uninterested.
Then dad happened upon an engineers report from the council which showed they had approved normal footings for houses despite classifying the area as needing heavy footings.
They still stonewalled so dad gathered the affected people together and all refinanced with a major bank.
Then all stopped/ threatened to stop paying and walk away from the loans.
Once the bank was involved the council got absolutely steamrolled (as did the developers) and in most cases brought back/demolished the worst of the places or paid the loans out as way of settling.
If possible find the old council stuff, might be a hidden gem there if its similar.
(the council even went so far as stating burst water and gas pipes werent a hazard)
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Rabz I imagine you will have this ditty on your south coast travels. Just beautiful
Re: the 18 year old daughter missing out on a job because unvaccinated –
What is truly staggering is that people are still so ignorant of what is happening re vaccines and mandates. And it isn’t just that there is increasing evidence of adverse reactions that should have seen the discontinuation of jabs long ago, it is the fact that government itself is actually slowly retreating on the vaccines and the accompanying protocol.
No doubt many of you are seeing friends and acquaintances suffering thrombosis in varying forms, and other complaints that are either weird or out of left field. I caught up with a friend by phone recently, and when asked how things were, she replied, “Everyone is dying”. While I thought that was a bit extreme, since only two people she knew had recently died (although one was a 30 year old with no previous symptoms) her own husband had suffered a minor stroke recently and I guess she is a bit apprehensive.
And here’s the irony: I get suspended on twatter if I call a leftie scumbag an idiot.
I wasn’t suspended because I only resorted to mocking. I must have been shadow banned though – not that I give a rats -but I only mention this because highlight the old ways vs the new. I have received relatively numerous number of requests to follow. I can’t recall receiving even 1 over the past 7 years. It’s like a lid has been opened.
3
Absolutely ridiculous that WA could have power shortages…
When we consulting in there in the 90s they we’re running off take-or-pay gas contracts entered into alongside Alcoa to get the North West Shelf and DNNGP off the ground. The idea that diesel would be used across the SWIS was unthinkable. It was relegated to the outback as a last resort.
5
whoops.
but I only mention this to highlight
Robert Sewell says:
December 12, 2022 at 2:08 pm
Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity says:
December 12, 2022 at 2:11 pm
Many years ago I owned a vending machine business. Had lots of machines and in those days it was all cash via coins (before note/card readers). At the end of each day I would have a few of those bank issued cloth bags full of coins that I would lug home and had to count out the coins into those small bank issued plastic bags.
In those days the bank used to weigh my bags of coins and compare that weight with bags of their own. But I was always bemused because the scales weren’t electronic – it looked like somebody had brought their mother’s kitchen scales to work.
7
Re Jim Chalmers and his PhD on Keating:
I listened to a lecture by Andrew Leigh (another Labor PhD) last week at The Sydney Institute. A bit of a boring lecture on the evils of “marking up” by corporations that have dominant market share. My husband innocently asked why, if you have a “widget” better than others, you can’t charge more for it!
However, Leigh is a a more introverted policy wonk than Chalmers and is not surprised that Chalmers became Treasurer and Leigh has, I believe, been sidelined.
I asked him why, if Labor claims to be the defender of the vulnerable, they are not taking steps to stere the banks from closing regional and suburban branches are leaving the elderly and digital averse without viable options. He agreed that he had been shocked by the increasing closures, but could offer no solution.
5
He went on to complete a PhD in political science at the Australian National University, writing his doctoral thesis on the prime ministership of Paul Keating,
Eeeeeeew. Mavis’s sloppy seconds.
6
MatrixTransform says:
December 12, 2022 at 9:50 am
endless nudging into normalise it
bespoke nails it.
youse wonder what mUnty does in this forum … it is this
watch him push to the scandalous brink
then nek minnit, get busy with the old Hegel Maneuver
under the Almond Tree … mUnty, Hegel … and JC
because mUnter will need somebody to negotiate with the Devil
Magic Marvin seems very happy today (as always). The good old Southlander must be doing some great group therapy.
Cohenite, if you’re around…
(With apologies to William Hughes Mearns)
“Yesterday*down near the lake,
No restaurant confirmed my date,
Today, again, I did not dine,
No tasty morsel, can I find.
m0ntysays:
December 12, 2022 at 2:16 pm
That is completely wrong about porn by the way Monty, I don’t normally see it with the people I follow but I looked at a #Trump tag and the thread was riddled with very explicit porn.
That would be spam, which is an overlapping problem. They have solved it for normal timelines but not quite for reply threads, it seems.
Suuuuure it was. Suuuure they have.
You idiot.
6
Andrew Leigh
Wasn’t he the egg head who did not know about custody services and non-beneficial ownership and started railing about the banks controlling the ASX200 like an 18yo Albo?
2
In those days the bank used to weigh my bags of coins and compare that weight with bags of their own. But I was always bemused because the scales weren’t electronic – it looked like somebody had brought their mother’s kitchen scales to work.
Speedbox, I can see the possible reason. In those those days, fitting out every branch with a new gizmo would have cost a few bickies. Then imagine the maintenance cost because it’s always a good idea to provision when humans and fairly delicate machines interact. Sometimes near enough is just good enough, if you know what I mean.
1
John H:
Why did people of various persuausions regard Pell as guilty when the evidence presented was so weak?
Because they desperately wanted him to be guilty.
And yet to me, it was obvious the whole charade was bullshit. There was no ‘evidence’ – it was all hearsay, fantasising, and innuendo.
13
JC says:
December 12, 2022 at 3:52 pm
Oh yes, sure you’re correct. As we all know, banks don’t throw their money about and, as there weren’t many like me, they aren’t going to buy some fancy gizmo on the ‘off chance’ that somebody comes into a branch with lots of pre-counted coins in coin bags.
6
(With apologies to William Hughes Mearns)
“Yesterday*down near the lake,
No restaurant confirmed my date,
Today, again, I did not dine,
No tasty morsel, can I find.
(Not actually, yesterday)
Yeah, Trinity only open from Wednesday to Sunday. They can’t get staff.
2
Balance scales were fine. In must cases the bags would have gone out to pubs or something for change anyway. Nobody really cared either. The only time anyone really got excited was when we lost a bundle of $20s behind a filing cabinet returning a bag of notes to the Perth RBA. They got the cops in after a couple of days.
By a lovely irony, it was at the hands of the DLP. All is forgiven, Adem Somyurek.
Never fear, though. Chairman Dan will have her back on the Victorian taxpayers’ teat before you know it.
11
I’m sure someone mentioned it, Fauci is in deep trouble and Musk is going after him.
Someone sent me this related to the Fauci discussion.
‘A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.’ ? Edward R. Murrow
Applies here too, in spades.
8
Like most graduates I was a hopeless teller. I don’t think I balanced once at the of the day.
2
West Australian Cats and Kittehs, I received a notification that pubs, clubs and restaurants will require digital id as a condition of entry. From the end of January onwards. Is this correct?
By a lovely irony, it was at the hands of the DLP. All is forgiven, Adem Somyurek.
Wasn’t m0nty=fa gloating about Patten supposedly beating Somyurek at the time of the election? Sad, m0nty=fa, maybe next time.
6
Speedbox says:
December 12, 2022 at 3:59 pm
Oh yes, sure you’re correct. As we all know, banks don’t throw their money about and, as there weren’t many like me, they aren’t going to buy some fancy gizmo on the ‘off chance’ that somebody comes into a branch with lots of pre-counted coins in coin bags.
In my local branch at Carnegie they won’t take coins, you have to put them through the coin counting machine and present the printout.
5
H B Bear says:
December 12, 2022 at 4:04 pm
Like most graduates I was a hopeless teller. I don’t think I balanced once at the of the day.
Lawyers are absolutely terrible with money, so no surprise at all, Bear.
1
I wasn’t even legally trained at that point. No excuses. Just sloppy.
2
Zipstersays:
December 12, 2022 at 4:01 pm
Welcome to the End of Democracy
Joel Kotkin
Didn’t know it had started.
3
By a lovely irony, it was at the hands of the DLP. All is forgiven, Adem Somyurek.
Lovely news.
8
One trait can explain why the people who hate Pell are so often the same people who hate capitalism, Believe All Women, think it Always Was Always Will Be, and welcome climageddon-
misanthropy.
7
Black Ballsays:
December 12, 2022 at 4:07 pm
Jan 13, 2022, 12:53 pm EST
7
My 18 year old daughter has just missed out on another job because she is unvaccinated…
Victoriastan?
3
H B Bear says:
December 12, 2022 at 4:12 pm
I wasn’t even legally trained at that point. No excuses. Just sloppy.
excellent article, its quite long, I can post it for people that don’t want to register
3
Bar Beach Swimmer:
Yes, the increasing cost of power is affecting everyone to a greater or lesser degree, depending on your bank balance. But the push to remove natural gas appliances – which will affect everyone in the same way (and 4x drive ICEs) – is not something that those luvvies on the Climate Change bandwagon will like.
Reduced allowance to fly, to purchase what you want, when you want, that will affect the higher spenders. Yer no longer special, mate. Maybe the Great Reset is in the beginning of itself being reset by us all being equally screwed.
Something I’ve been at pains to try and get through to some – today Cock O’The Walk, tomorrow a feather duster.
The Upper Middle Class have some surprises coming their way if the planetary survival policies they want imposed on the wukkas and peasants come to fruition, because those policies will apply to them as well.
Have a look at the worth of a million dollars in buying power over the last century.
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Black Ball – something wrong. The date on the article says Jan 13, 2022. So, if true, the ID thing has been operating for almost a year.
4
One trait can explain why the people who hate Pell are so often the same people who hate capitalism, Believe All Women, think it Always Was Always Will Be, and welcome climageddon-
misanthropy.
wokeism doesn’t tolerate any form of religious competition
6
We could have a count-off, Bear. Much, much harder to count the plastic notes. The old paper ones could be flicked with a crack and a flourish.
And a weaponised coin roll. You have to be able to roll the coins and then drop the roll from 6” without it breaking.
😀
3
Ah yes thank you Trickler and Speedbox. So has this requirement been implemented?
5
Rescued by a fellow Cat again , Carpe Jugulum visited my place yesterday to offer my friends and me his expertise on building matters .
The Upper Middle Class have some surprises coming their way if the planetary survival policies they want imposed on the wukkas and peasants come to fruition, because those policies will apply to them as well.
Have a look at the worth of a million dollars in buying power over the last century.
FMD The turtlhead is a fucking moron.
“Upper Middle Class” the folks he envies, because he was a male nurse, don’t posses cash as their main asset. They own stuff like stocks and real estate. Have a look what both have done over the period. And why does this nursing intellectual assume that the upper income earners are all subscribing to the leftwing?
How does it go again to paraphrase what was posted under Winstron Sith?
Hey, let’s shoot a thousand folks in the back of the head as a lesson to others.
1
Martha, where’s that damned Iodine?
1
TrevorG says:
December 12, 2022 at 4:09 pm
In my local branch at Carnegie they won’t take coins, you have to put them through the coin counting machine and present the printout.
Those large commercial coin counters weren’t available for customer use back then. I’m talking from around the early 1990s to early 2000s (in Adelaide). I have a vague recollection they were a few becoming available in selected locations in the 2000s but none were convenient to me.
As an aside, I never bought a coin counter for my own use (small versions were available) because they were expensive. My opinion was that because it didn’t produce any income, it was a waste of money. So, I counted by hand each night even though it took up to a couple of hours – but I did become very fast at counting coins. 🙂
3
Black Ball says:
December 12, 2022 at 4:23 pm
No idea. I now live in Brisbane. WA Cats?
1
It would have been a good idea for Adam to comment on Cassie’s thread at Cassie’s thread. I’m sure she would have welcomed his thoughts on the subject. I certainly would.
My own position is that office Christmas parties are no place to argue politics, no matter how much you are baited by the perverse smart alecks.
Which probably means I am a “loser” too, but at least one who avoids indigestion.
9
Black Ballsays:
December 12, 2022 at 4:23 pm
Ah yes thank you Trickler and Speedbox. So has this requirement been implemented?
No.
5
Well, that’s Adam Piggott scrubbed from my ‘go to’ list.
And up yours too, Adam.
He makes some good points.
3
Roberto
Adam said he wants a Christian caliphate. That was enough for me to right him off as a nutter.
We’ve got roaring gales and heavy rain intermixed with sunny breaks in NE Vic.
sfw, some of that wind hit my place at 4 this morning. Still going, but not so strong now. Brought down a large branch from a one of my rotten conifers right across the driveway. Break out the chainsaw tomorrow.
mole, your dad is legend material.
Robert Sewell,
good move re, pigface.
Carpe, great work. And min, good luck.
6
Zipster
Welcome to the End of Democracy
Joel Kotkin
excellent article, its quite long, I can post it for people that don’t want to register
I tried the link but it didn’t work. Can you post? I am currently reading his book, “The Coming of Neo Feudalism -A Warning to the Global Middleclass” published 2020 so would find his summary article particularly interesting.
3
You are a one-man censorship board, spending your days investigating the darker parts of Twitter and looking at kiddie pron so you can report it. Lucky for us that you are here to discover all that questionable content! You are a hero, really.
I see mOron has received his daily propaganda from his lot at Freakshow and Deviant Inc. Today, like many days, it’s running interference and releasing squirrels diverting attention from his lot on the left and their obsession with getting at our kids.
Clearly, the leftards are most distressed with Elon’s truth bombs. mOron has been frantically waving his arms about here since the Enlightenment began. Nowhere to hide now mOron?
7
I’m sure someone mentioned it, Fauci is in deep trouble and Musk is going after him.
Musk going after Fauci? Oh please! What a Christmas present that would be!
Stupid dreamer that I am, I want to believe that the One will come who will challenge those, like the WEF & their ilk, who are so contemptuous of us mere mortals that they are determined to reduce us to serfs subject to their plans for this planet.
7
Did someone mention Iodine?
? “Oh, your red scarf matches your eyes …”
1
should be 𝄞
1
alwaysright says:
December 12, 2022 at 4:56 pm
Did someone mention Iodine?
Why yes. Winstron Sith spazzed out recently, scaring himself shitless worried that rural Queersland was a hot target in a nuclear attack and apparently he claimed he was after an Iodine prescription from a medico to combat radiation poisoning. All perfectly normal.
1
After my 18 month FOI war with Nilligan and their ABC* I try not to comment or think about the Pell case anymore. It made me drink too much.
*the “right to know” coalition
5
I like Adam’s blog. He’s a young-ish (well, much younger than me, anyway) grappling with a lot of tough issues. He isn’t the first Christian who might think Christians should be in charge politically. Plenty of them.
Problem is that Christians are just as sinful as everyone else, and just as liable to fall into temptation. In fact, the avalanche of temptation directed at us is unrelenting, particularly leaders and their families, hence that line in the Lord’s Prayer.
Our laws and many customs are based on the Judeo-Christian teaching. It should be preserved and protected because it is the best. It has proven value.
You might not like it, but it’s the pick of the bunch.
However, they were all better looking with the masks on……………….lol
5
Just back on my pins after a long convalescence, so have plenty of time to read and lurk.
3 things I learned during this episode:
1: have a GP who knows his limitations but has a good idea about the problem and has a very detailed Rolodex with the appropriate specialists.
2: The specialist IS a good one and has a list of the best surgeons.
3: Don’t skimp on selecting the surgeon on price, having money in the bank when you are six feet under is no good to you.
Having the bestest top private cover can still leave you out of pocket by many thousands, all worth it!
All the best to you in the same situation.
13
I like Adam’s blog. He’s a young-ish (well, much younger than me, anyway) grappling with a lot of tough issues. He isn’t the first Christian who might think Christians should be in charge politically. Plenty of them.
In that blog piece, he mentions nothing about Christianity. I find it ironic that he’s ragging on about immigrants when he himself is an emigrant, holed up somewhere in Europe.
6
No, JC, not in that piece. To understand, you have to look at his blog in its entirety.
I don’t see Vietnamese or even Afghanis as invaders. How can they be, if they have been allowed in lawfully? Another case can be made about ones who arrive by boat or overstayers. Their politics are another thing altogether.
5
For those who watch Club Grubbery today they did a previous of interviews they are having this week :
This evening will be a Qantas staff member.
Tuesday lawyer Jason Gillespie on their High Court case about Vax for kids. Thanks to his last appearance on Grubbery two donors have come through to help them with the find raising which had a target of $600,000.
Wednesday will be Senators Antic and Rennick.
Thursday will be a Qld cop.
Courier Mail has an article about PM’s Covid plan which mentions :.
Other key measures within the national plan include the vaccine program being extended through to December 2023.
Anybody seen the full national plan ?
8
You might not like it, but it’s the pick of the bunch.
I do but I have zero tolerance for race supremacy, Calli.
2
Anyone hear about this?
The Grid Is Under Attack From Snipers, Hackers and Hurricanes
We don’t yet know who attacked an electricity substation in North Carolina, blacking out 45,000 customers, or why they did it. Whatever their motivation, they shot a few holes in the very idea of the grid.
Our electricity grids are founded on two basic principles. First, networks provide resiliency because if one part hits trouble, other parts can pick up the slack — up to a point. Second, grids reduce and socialize costs: The remote village gets reliable light at a reasonable price because it is supplied by the same grid serving many thousands of customers grouped densely in cities and suburbs.
This weekend’s attack didn’t lead to blackouts on that scale but demonstrated the vulnerability all too well. Based on reports so far, suspected intentional rifle fire against several substations caused damage to equipment that is “beyond repair in some areas,” according to Duke Energy Corp., the regional utility operator.
In any case, more than 35,000 customers were still without power on Tuesday morning. Some face days of outages in the middle of winter — and seemingly all because of some well-aimed shots at the kind of (often unmanned) facility that dots the US. The attack recalled one in 2013, when a sniper attacked a California substation. There will now be renewed calls for making such facilities secure: better cameras and sensors to detect saboteurs and a hardening of equipment, or replacing chain fences with solid walls, for example. Maybe we will see renewed calls for keeping spare, emergency transformers stockpiled in order to shorten replacement schedules.
3
LONG full article
Welcome to the end of democracy – Joel Kotkin
We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships.
The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one percent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 percent two decades ago. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.
An OECD report issued before the Covid pandemic finds that almost everywhere, the non-rich share of national wealth has declined. These trends can be seen even in social democracies like Sweden and Germany. In the United States, as the conservative economist John Michaelson put it succinctly in 2018, the economic legacy of the last decade is “excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.”
This process has developed both in the tangible and digital economies. In Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the European continent overall, farmland has fallen increasingly into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy. In America, the largest farmland holder is Bill Gates, with over 200,000 acres, while Ted Turner and John Malone preside over lordly estates of over two million acres each — larger than several American states.
As property has concentrated, small-holders have come under increased pressure. Australia historically has enjoyed high rates of homeownership, but the rate among twenty-five to thirty-four year-olds dropped from more than 60 percent in 1981 to only 45 percent in 2016. The proportion of owner-occupied housing in once-egalitarian Australia has dropped by 10 percent in the last twenty-five years. Morgan Stanley predicts that the US will soon become primarily a “rentership society” where Wall Street firms seek to turn homes, furniture and other necessities into rental products.
The digital economy is similarly dominated by a small group of giant firms. These overlords together exercise control of up to 90 percent of critical markets such as basic computer operating systems, social media, online search advertising and book sales. No longer satisfied with controlling the pipelines, the tech oligarchy increasing buys up old news outlets and “curates” the news to its tastes. It increasingly dominates mainstream entertainment too: the pending sale of MGM to Amazon is just the most recent example of its conquest and consolidation of the means of communication.
Like the barbarian princes who shaped the Middle Ages, the new oligarchs have been able to seize their fiefdoms with little resistance from weak central governments. The pandemic accelerated this process; its lockdowns and restraints on mobility proved a bonanza for tech companies like Google, whose profits doubled during the period. In this highly regulated environment, the tech-rich have simply gotten richer: seven of the ten richest Americans come from the tech sector. Apple, by some calculations, is now worth more than the entire oil and gas industry. The already obscenely rich have become richer still. Jeff Bezos alone saw his net worth jump by an estimated $34.6 billion in the first two months of the pandemic, while his company has enjoyed continued revenue and profit growth.
As executive compensation reached the stratosphere in Big Tech and finance, small businesses face what the Harvard Business Review calls “an existential threat.” Experts now warn that one third of small businesses, which comprise the majority of US companies and employ nearly half of all workers, could ultimately shut down for good. Hundreds of thousands have already disappeared, including nearly half of all black-owned businesses. Particularly damaged have been the small merchants along Main Street and those working for them, such as restaurant and hospitality workers.
The old middle class struggles to compete with online platforms. Amazon is able to coerce small businesses to give up their data. As big-box stores have done for decades, Amazon uses its bargaining power to minimize supply-chain issues by leasing its own ships and using its considerable leverage to secure items that smaller companies cannot get. Property is seeing a similar consolidation. As middle-class prosperity falters in Britain, cash-rich Lloyd’s Bank seeks to gobble up the emerging market in distressed properties, apartments and even single-family homes. Meanwhile, the grand houses of central London are restored to Victorian opulence by absentee Russian, Chinese and Arab investors.
Climate-change policies could nurture the new autocracy for a generation. As tech oligarchs and the financial establishment implement the Davos notion of a Great Reset, they will force a quick end to fossil fuels. There are huge opportunities for massive investment by super-rich companies and speculators in the “green economy,” all made possible with tax breaks, loans and guaranteed sales to governmental units.
This promises to create a new crop of mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, today the world’s richest man. In the era of super-subsidies, a wannabe electric-vehicle maker like Rivian, which has negligible sales and consistent losses, can be valued higher than General Motors, which sells almost seven million cars and has $122 billion in revenues each year. In Green Capitalism, the British Marxist James Heartfield labels this “austerity socialism”: reaping governmental edicts as opposed to actually producing real goods. Nice work if you can get it.
For the middle and working classes, however, the Great Reset may prove somewhat less promising — if not disastrous. For most people, notes Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, the rapid “green” transition will mean “a noticeable loss of welfare and jobs.” The conscious policy of degrowth as a means of forcibly reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require getting most people out of their cars, and forcing them to travel far less and to live in tiny apartments. Enforcement will be necessarily intrusive as well. Planners in the UK and elsewhere are pushing for family “carbon budgets.” Add surveillance technology and we end up with something akin to China’s “social credit” system, in which your right to free movement is subject to government approval.
The young are particularly threatened by these changes — younger people already face much harder prospects than any postwar generation. Few expect things to improve: across the higher-income countries, roughly two-thirds of people surveyed by Pew Research see a poorer future for the next generation. According to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project, about 90 percent of those born in 1940 grew up to earn higher incomes than their parents. The same is true for only 50 percent of those born in the 1980s. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis warns that millennials are in danger of becoming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. To make matters worse, over half of all young people, in a survey of ten countries, think the world is doomed by climate change.
As housing and other costs skyrocket, class lines are hardening. Inheritance as a share of GDP in France has grown roughly threefold since 1950, with some upper-income French millennials inheriting more money than many workers make in a lifetime. The growing importance of inherited assets is even more pronounced in Germany, Britain and the United States. In the US, a country with a national mythology that looks askance at inherited wealth, the children of property-owning parents are far better situated to own a house eventually (often with parental help) and enter what is now known as “the funnel of privilege.” In America, millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. Among the youngest cohort, aged eighteen to twenty-two, over 60 percent expect that inheritance will be their primary source of income as they age.
How will the downwardly mobile react to the prospect of permanent rental serfdom and, ultimately, total dependence on the state? A recent Edelman survey reveals that increasing numbers no longer trust institutions or believe hard work pays off. In a world dominated by a few institutions, today’s precariat of gig and short-contract workers, and those who have dropped out of the workforce entirely, could become an economically less useful version of Marx’s proletariat: a permanent underclass requiring aggressive, quasi-military policing.
Meanwhile, large tech firms and financial giants — even those skeptical about climate change zealotry — see the prospect of record profits and valuations in “disruption.” The pandemic accelerated the white-collar shift to remote work, and the broader demand for automated solutions skyrocketed. A future less reliant on human labor elevates the tech oligarchs to the highest perch on what Lenin called “the commanding heights” of the economy.
In a digitalized economy, it’s good to control the critical niches. The oligarchs do this brilliantly. They have seized dominant shares of key markets from search (Google) to social media (Facebook) to book sales (Amazon). Google and Apple together provide over 95 percent of operating software for mobile devices, while Microsoft still accounts for over 80 percent of the software that runs personal computers around the world.
I have covered Silicon Valley for forty-five years. Today, it is less the hypercompetitive, free-spirited place I knew, and more like the early twentieth-century trusts. Mike Malone, who has chronicled Silicon Valley as deeply as anyone, sees it losing much of its ethos. The new masters of tech, he suggests, have shifted from “blue-collar kids to the children of privilege,” and moved away from the production ethos that once made the Valley so inspiring and egalitarian. An intensely competitive industry has become enamored with the allure of “the sure thing” backed by massive capital and sometimes by government. Competition is no longer a spur to creativity: competitors are simply bought out.
Wealth cannot rule on its own. Autocracy needs a proselytizing class who can justify the rulers and salve the distressed souls of the lower orders. In medieval times, the Catholic Church served this role, essentially justifying the feudal order as the expression of divine will. Today’s version, a sort of clerisy or intelligentsia, is mostly not religious and consists of people from the upper bureaucracy, academia, and the culture and media industries.
The pandemic has been a boon to this class too. The emergency allowed governments to grant them unprecedented executive and administrative powers not just in centralized France but even in usually semi-sensible Great Britain and Australia. For some, the lockdowns served as a “test run” for necessary measures to realize their preferred climate-change policies. In the new schema, the real class enemy is not the excesses of the ultra-rich, or even wasteful spending by government: it’s the consumption patterns of the masses. We see this in the response of progressive media and even politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes to complaints about the rising costs of food, rent and energy. The clerisy sees even the essentials as ephemeral, and supply-chain problems as the consequence of too much consumption by the masses.
As in the Middle Ages, when church and crown competed for moral and political authority, the bureaucratic and unelected sources of power are not always in agreement. But to a large extent, they embrace very similar ideologies, particularly when it comes to imposing control over information about the pandemic or climate change. The early-twentieth-century Italian sociologist Robert Michels noted that complex issues — climate, for instance — reinforce what he called the “iron law of oligarchy”: the more dependent on expertise a society becomes, the greater the need for elite-driven solutions that bypass popular input — and the greater the force the elite will apply to attain its goals.
H.G. Wells dreamed of a “new republic” run by a virtuous few. Our digital elites are anointing themselves, and being anointed by their fellow elites in business and media. Well-educated managers of major companies and the credentialed clerisy are naturally drawn to the idea of a society ruled by professional experts with “enlightened” values — that is, by people much like themselves.
To confront what they see as an existential crisis, much of the media supports the creation of a global technocracy. “Democracy is the planet’s biggest enemy,” asserted an article in Foreign Policy, an establishmentarian journal, in 2019. This hostility to democracy as an obstacle to top-down “progress” is dovetailing with another source of anti-democratic distrust. People around the world, particularly the young, no longer embrace the basic notion of self-government. A majority of young Americans now favor large-scale government intervention in the economy; about a third call themselves socialists.
The leaders of woke capitalism have signed onto a pledge to defund fossil fuels in the great quest for Net Zero. This is not, as the wacko right and the wacko left might think, a conscious conspiracy. Instead, it is propelled by tech firms’ natural desire for profits derived from replacing the carbon-spewing analog world wherever possible, and the irresistible lure for investors and corporations of a huge, subsidized and government-financed market.
Most tech and finance executives are not ideologues. Nor are they, despite appearances, sociopaths. Yet they feel justified in censoring and even demonetizing not just Donald Trump or the New York Post or Bari Weiss, but also the credentialed experts whose views diverge from the accepted line for staffers at Google, Facebook and Twitter, organizations where woke instruction is increasingly imposed. (These companies’ location in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Puget Sound region, two of the most lopsidedly progressive areas in the country, is also a factor.) Many firms espouse woke ideas, says Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, because they are “afraid of their own employees.”
In practice this often means eliminating conservative opinions — and not just views from the crazy fringe, according to former employees. Academic experts such as Judith Curry and Roger Pielke, with somewhat contrarian takes on climate, are routinely ignored, attacked and marginalized. Skeptics like the long-time environmentalist Mike Shellenberger, the Obama advisor Steven Koonin and the “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg are largely consigned to the social-media memory hole for detailing the environmentalists’ record of exaggeration, hyperbolic projections and immiserating policies.
We are increasingly ruled by a perfect marriage of class convenience, with more power for the clerisy and ever-greater economic opportunities for the oligarchy — all with the added benefit of encouraging them to feel good about themselves. Even as they push austerity on the masses, they live like medieval lords, indulging in lavish weddings and building estates reminiscent of the Habsburgs’. Jeff Bezos just spent $100 million on a Hawaiian retreat. Bill Gates’s daughter just enjoyed a $2 million wedding. John Kerry, President Biden’s chief climate scold and beneficiary of an heiress’s fortune, travels on a private jet that use thirty times the energy of the average American vehicle.
That’s fine. The anointed purchase “environmental offsets”: a green version of indulgences. This may make them feel better about their vast wealth and excesses, just as it did for the murderous and corrupt aristocrats of old. Still, many are also making preparations against a potential peasant’s revolt — just in case. This includes using private security, building bunkers and looking for remote boltholes in the US or abroad, notably in out of the way and strictly controlled New Zealand.
What is the end game for the oligarchs and their clerical allies? Upward mobility for the masses is out of the question. The technology journalist Gregory Ferenstein has interviewed 147 digital company founders. His conclusion: “An increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will come to subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.” In Silicon Valley’s estimation, the mass of people can look forward to life as subsidized consumers of Facebook’s metaverse or Google’s dream of “immersive computing.”
What will the rest of us do? There is clearly some disenchantment with the emerging order. Global trust in institutions, most notably the media and Big Tech, has fallen to a low ebb, and economic and geopolitical insecurity are on the rise. We are trying to impose a green economy that we don’t have the technology or even the electricity to power. This will force some countries to return to coal — China has stepped up its use of coal-powered stations — and others to leave part of their populations to shiver.
As blue-collar and many white-collar jobs are eliminated by automation, the oligarchs and their allies in the clerisy want to impose a Universal Basic Income, to keep the peasants from suffering too much and possibly rebelling. We have already seen pushback from the right and left in both Europe and America. Many people do not want to accept a life of subsidized dependency, made bearable by the digital equivalent of Rome’s bread and circuses.
The time could be shorter than we think. The tech oligarchs are creating something similar to what Aldous Huxley called in Brave New World Revisited a “scientific caste system.” There is “no good reason,” Huxley wrote in 1958, that “a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.” It will condition its subjects from the womb so that they “grow up to love their servitude” and “never dream of revolution.” It will maintain a strict social order and provide enough diversion through drugs, sex and videos to keep their artificially narrowed minds occupied and sated.
The fusion of government with large oligopolistic companies, and the technologically-enhanced collection of private information, allow the new autocracies to monitor our lives in ways that Mao, Stalin or Hitler would have envied. A rising tide of money and administrative power defines the rising autocracy. If we as citizens, whatever our political orientation, are not vigilant, our democracy will become an increasingly hollow vessel.
13
I don’t see Vietnamese or even Afghanis as invaders. How can they be, if they have been allowed in lawfully? Another case can be made about ones who arrive by boat or overstayers. Their politics are another thing altogether.
I find effortless hypocrisy very entertaining. He likely wrote that somewhere in Europe. last time he mentioned he was on the Alps in Northern Italy I think.
1
The ‘festive season’ getting a good run in the media. Christmas hanging in there though.
5
Anyone hear about this?
Yes, and they will be powerless to stop someone intent on doing this.
7
China & the Cycles
From Armstrong Economics –
“The Tiananmen Square protests culminated on June 4th, 1989 (1989.424). While the COVID Protests have been rising in China and the lockdowns have been deployed more so for the control of civil unrest which may start to come to a head by October 2023, the Pi Target was October 27th, 2020 and the day before, the 26th, was when US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken reneged on all previous agreements with China since Nixon. He issued a statement regarding Taiwan and launched a new Cold War with China. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on the precise target of the 27th made it clear that the Biden Administration violated all previous agreements including the one-China principle. The whole Biden statements and Pelosi’s trip suddenly supporting Taiwan appears to have been to actually instigate a war. It now appears with rising civil unrest, governments typically need an external diversion and that may now become Taiwan.”
Yes, and they will be powerless to stop someone intent on doing this.
It’s either of these three.
1. Lunatic green leftists
2. Dickheads with guns looking to cause mischief.
3. State actor sending a signal.
If you had to bet, which one would it be?
2
FESTIVUS
😀
3
Adam is a snowboarder, that says it all, no need to take him seriously.
2
How do you know when covid is officially dead? When the government stops doing free PCR tests is a good indicator. From The Australian.
Health Minister Mark Butler has handed down the federal government’s Covid health management plan for 2023, flagging that Australians will soon require a referral to obtain a Medicare-funded PCR test.
Watch the rate of infection plummet.
11
Calli
I think a bit fault in society has been the thinking that the (Christian) Church is full of Saints who are spotless.
I’ve always thought of going to Church as like going to a Doctor. If you were to meet a real saint in person (I have) they’d tell you immediately that they “were no good.”
A friend told me (not sure if true but it reflects a saintly attitude) that someone said to St Francis: “Do you know that you are very arrogant?” And he responded “Yes, and much worse things than that.”
8
FESTIVUS
Seems like there should be an ointment to take care of that.
4
How does it go again to paraphrase what was posted under Winstron Sith?
Hey, let’s shoot a thousand folks in the back of the head as a lesson to others.
Dont forget Admiral Lord Byng:
Mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de tems en tems un Amiral pour encourager les autres.
5
How many days since Labor said the Libs would privatise Medicare?
Whoops…
Staying on health, we reported earlier that the federal government had decided to wind back Medicare funding for mental health treatment as part of its national management plan for COVID-19 in 2023.
Suicide Prevention Australia chief executive Nieves Murray has described this decision, which will halve the number of sessions that can be subsidised by Medicare, as “baffling and very concerning”.
5
The whole Biden statements and Pelosi’s trip suddenly supporting Taiwan appears to have been to actually instigate a war. It now appears with rising civil unrest, governments typically need an external diversion and that may now become Taiwan
Armstrong must be reading the cat
3
Yeah, but Byng was hyng for losing a few ships by making poor decisions, a worthy outcome.
Sergius Witte, Russian Railways Exec., was jailed for a train disaster simply because, he was, y’know, the Boss.
Winstron Sith, he’s a straight up Troll.
1. Lunatic green leftists
Probably not. They like their modern appliances too much, and their ‘renewables’ use the same infrastructure.
2. Dickheads with guns looking to cause mischief.
Most likely, but don’t interpret this as ‘right-wing gun nuts causing mischief’. It’s a personal beef, or one of those dicks who just wants to see the world burn, but not necessarily politically orientated.
3. State actor sending a signal.
Only as a prelude to invasion, to cause confusion and disruption. Otherwise, the risk of your bunny being nabbed, spilling his guts, and causing an international incident. Doubt this one, at this particular juncture.
That’s my best guess, but it could be any number of things. The infrastructure is very vulnerable to such action.
2
A switched on VIC opposition would refer Dan gifting a government job to Patten to IBAC and FOI any relevant communication with her. Was it a quid pro quo for supporting his pandemic legislation, she would have known it was a risk to her ongoing political career. What about Meddick and Barton, will they be gifted jobs also?
7
If you had to bet, which one would it be?
3. State actor sending a signal, 99% 0f the time, the other 1%, 99% of the time a State Actor too, the other 1% unexplainable.
Suicide Prevention Australia chief executive Nieves Murray has described this decision, which will halve the number of sessions that can be subsidised by Medicare, as “baffling and very concerning”.
huh? nothing baffling about it, there’s just too many people and eugenics is back big time baby!
3
Shorter Groogs – spooks. Or flamers.
4
KSA not happy with the US it seems. Maybe the departure of the 5th Fleet’s carrier is causing some angst , as well as Iran’s progress towards nukes.
“”If Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said in an on-stage interview at the World Policy Conference in Abu Dhabi when asked about such a scenario.”
Was it a quid pro quo for supporting his pandemic legislation, she would have known it was a risk to her ongoing political career.
Straight out bribe.
With the Preference Whisperer calling the shots in Australia’s Upper Houses, Patten was only ever getting 1 Term.
Labor probably paid her election expenses both times too.
There were three guys named Jackson who were all in the clothing business. Due to lack of real estate options in their city, they all set up shop next door to each other. In order to convince customers to come to their store rather than one of the other Jacksons, they all put up signs to attract customers. The one on the left puts up a sign that says “JACKSON’S CLOTHING STORE. BEST PRICES!” Not to be outdone, the one on the right puts up a sign that says “Jackson’s clothing store. Best quality!” The one in the middle thinks about it for a while and eventually puts up a sign of his own. “JACKSON’S CLOTHING STORE. MAIN ENTRANCE!”
—
Two brothers enlisting in the Army were getting their physicals. During the inspection, the doctor was surprised to discover that both of them possessed incredibly long, oversized penises. “How do you account for this?” he asked the brothers. “It’s hereditary, sir” the older one replied. “I see” said the doctor, writing in his file. “Your father’s the reason for your elongated penises?” “No sir, our mother”. “Your mother? You idiot, women do not have penises!” “I know, sir” replied the recruit “but she only had one arm, and when it came to getting us out of the bathtub, she had to manage as best she could!”
—
An Italian, a Frenchman and an Aussie were talking about screams of passion. The Italian said “Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with the finest extra virgin olive oil, then we made passionate love and I made her scream, nonstop for five minutes”. The Frenchman said: “Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with special aphrodisiac oil from Provence and then we made passionate love. I made her scream for fifteen minutes straight”. The Aussie said “That’s nothing! Last night I massaged my wife, ya know, all over her body with a special butter. I caressed her entire body with the butter, and then made love and I made her scream for two long hours”. The Italian and Frenchman, are astonished, and asked “Two full hours? Wow! that’s unbelievable. How did you do it to make her scream for two hours?” The Aussie replied “I wiped my hands on the curtains”.
—
A man went to the police station wishing to speak with the burglar who had broken into his house the night before. “You’ll get your chance in court” said the Desk Sergeant. “No, no no!” said the man. “I want to know how he got into the house without waking my wife. I’ve been trying to do that for years!”
9
– spooks. Or flamers.
Usually both.
Remember that Ivanov guy who caused a ruckus in Bob Hawke’s first few months?
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
– Jimi Hendrix
3
Liz there is an interesting hypothesis floating around that prior to language there was music. “The Singing Neandertals” by Steve Mithen is a prominent example of that and the idea goes back many centuries.
Interesting theory. Certainly human children prior to learning speech do often ‘babble’ a lot, and it can be quite musical. My eldest son, who has mild autism, did this a lot, up and down a scale, and then suddenly his speech arrived more or less on time developmentally. Current our little grandson aged three who has speech difficulties has never done any babbling at all. Something’s wrong, I kept thinking and so it was.
Speech and language are evolutionary wonders, but so is everything really. Birdsong, for instance.
2
Suicide Prevention Australia
Here’s a suggestion. Don’t lock people up for no good reason for months on end and destroy their businesses.
20
Weaponised Trust
It’s a ‘must watch to the end.
Bill Whittle is a good bloke and puts up a lot of good stuff.
5
Bill Whittle is probably one of the best conservative commentators.
“Feminism Exists Because Men Allow It”: What TikTok ‘Karen’ Meltdowns Show about Society
Women rant on TikTok, or collapse in mental meltdown, or get captured on bystander video going full-Karen, or brag about sexual exploits. And then they bemoan the fact they can’t find a good man. Bill Whittle says the frequency of these former aberrations highlights the toll of feminism. He says the crisis is getting worse.
9
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot who was instrumental in getting Trump banned from Twitter and who ran cover for Biden in the mid-terms. What a creep;
I don’t see Bill Whittle as particularly conservative. He’s just sane and rational and fairly intelligent, and he thinks about things. Anybody who is sane and looks at the world and thinks about it is going to come to the same conclusions, pretty much.
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot
Went to the link, that is very disturbing stuff
4
Tell me again why we are destroying Australia…………………….
China and India clearly didn’t get the memo that reckons coal-fired power is dead. Both are determined to drag their people out of agrarian poverty and both know precisely how to do it: cheap and reliable coal-fired power.
Building new plants at a rate that incenses the climate cult intelligentsia, both countries have no interest in the sackcloth and ashes approach to energy currently in vogue across the West.
Energy security is first and foremost, as it should be. Robert Bryce explains why China and India so infuriate those who would keep them poor, forever.
I see now that it’s being deleted , probably because it’s so offensive it doesn’t get past Elon’s sniff test. Kid grooming and other deviant chatter.
mOron’s lot are just vile disgusting P’s OS.
9
Makkasays:
December 12, 2022 at 6:42 pm
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot who was instrumental in getting Trump banned from Twitter and who ran cover for Biden in the mid-terms. What a creep;
Lithium, a mineral used in batteries to power electric vehicles, smartphones, laptops, and all sorts of gadgets, has surged to a record high this year as the world pushes forward with a ‘green’ future. But in the process of decarbonizing the global economy, battery prices, for the first time since BloombergNEF began tracking the market in 2010, have risen on an annual basis.
After a decade of deflation, the volume-weighted average price of lithium-ion battery packs across all industries increased to $151 per kilowatt-hour in 2022, a 7% increase from last year. BloombergNEF forecasts prices could continue rising next year.
Haha, who’d a thunk that making batteries out of a metal half the price of silver might cause prices to increase? And that mines might be needed, which the greens dislike, so slow down the development of. Btw don’t miss Tim Blair’s take on electric utes that was posted upthread.
6
Big_Nambas
Building new plants at a rate that incenses the climate cult intelligentsia,
Far from being incensed, some have stated that it’s China and India’s turn to “catch up” with the west. They probably think that criticising them would be racist, neo-colonialist and a multitude of other sins against “progressivism”.
8
Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupiditysays:
December 12, 2022 at 7:42 pm
Didn’t m0nty=fa dismiss anything about Roth as exaggerated? I wonder will he look at this thread?
Monty will declare you’re a double-bigot for picking on a gay jewish guy.
Of course, how could I forget. He’s a hypocritical prick. Sorry, not a prick, they are useful. So are arseholes. Hmmm.
2
Ed Case says:
December 12, 2022 at 6:26 pm
______________________
With the Preference Whisperer calling the shots in Australia’s Upper Houses, Patten was only ever getting 1 Term.
You do know she had been in the Vic-ghanistan parliament (LC) since 2014.
O_o
3
Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity says:
December 12, 2022 at 7:42 pm
Didn’t m0nty=fa dismiss anything about Roth as exaggerated? I wonder will he look at this thread?
Monty will declare you’re a double-bigot for picking on a gay jewish guy.
Look at Labor Royalty joining in a pile on.
Dover, seriously just get rid of the redneck. He’s negative equity.
3
The Canbra Hooker gone, Meddick gone- greta news.
This is the website of Suicide Prevention Australia who are celebrating 30 years of bureaucracy. Adjusted for whole of population the rate sits at 2500 a year +/- 10% and hasn’t moved except for the last 2 years when numbers have gone up (over 3000pa they sat) which is outside the normal variation.
Success? Failure? They haven’t reduced the numbers and I’m not going to knock the diligent and well-meaning organisations who actually provide the follow up services but they haven’t reduced the numbers. In true bureaucratic fashion this year they get $4,000,000 for more research (because 30 years isn’t enough). Naturally they support you know what.
They want a National Suicide Prevention Act. I like the sentence on social determinants –
They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, their age, and the factors that influence daily life. Examples include childhood abuse, addiction, bereavement, financial crisis, insecure housing, education, social isolation and more.
The last, cough, 3, cough, years, cough. About which they’ve said nothing.
11
No surprise really given months of poor polling, but Ardern’s Labour Party has lost the bellwether seat of Hamilton West in a by-election by a significant 16 points.
With a recession looming she’s promised to focus on the economy and jettison unpopular policies.
Too little too late, I suspect. Is the LNP paying attention? Don’t be silly!
6
This is the website of Suicide Prevention Australia who are celebrating 30 years of bureaucracy. Adjusted for whole of population the rate sits at 2500 a year +/- 10% and hasn’t moved except for the last 2 years when numbers have gone up (over 3000pa they sat) which is outside the normal variation.
Hello.
2
The poor weather hasn’t hurt our harvesting as the rotor gear box shat itself on Sunday morning just before the showers came.
Today was a no harvest day with showers and with another cold front tomorrow it’s looking the same.
A new $10,000 box was located and will be fitted tomorrow hopefully. They’re big and heavy so we drove the header to the dealership. The workshops have gantry systems to make a far easier task out of the change over.
Three headers bogged in the area over the weekend. Excavators were needed to dig tracks so they could be backed out.
19
Can I make a suggestion? I know Cronkite has given it 5 / 5 stars but he’s always a late comer.
Buy Stan and watch Yellowstone. Not only is the storyline great, it’s just the most unapologetically redpilled show on TV. It’s also the most watched streaming series in the US. Great storyline and unreal scenery.
The US is truly beautiful.
3
Adjusted for whole of population the rate sits at 2500 a year +/- 10% and hasn’t moved except for the last 2 years when numbers have gone up (over 3000pa they sat) which is outside the normal variation.
Where is the immediate increase? See below from the website.
There is a much bigger issue lurking here. Suicide rates have been increasing for the last decade. Anxiety and depression rates have been increasing and\or are stable.
Antidepressant prescribing has gone through the roof.
Access to psychological services has been hugely improved and subsidised.
Why are these interventions failing?
From that website:
3144 Australians died by suicide in 2021, which represents an age-standardised suicide death rate of 12.0 per 100,000 people.
The number of suicides has increased slightly, with 5 more deaths in 2021 (compared with 3139 deaths in 2020). However, taking into account Australia’s changing population the rate of suicide has decreased slightly from the 12.1 age-standardised suicide death rate reported for 2020.
2
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot who was instrumental in getting Trump banned from Twitter and who ran cover for Biden in the mid-terms. What a creep;
He seemed like a perfectly normal young man with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour, who happened to be gay.
You lot turn into screeching harridans at a moment’s notice, don’t you. Your frightbat routine isn’t fooling anyone. You are trying to pretend that just because he is gay means he is a closet rock spider. Homophobic rubbish.
Shy Ted-
The “naturally they support you-know-what” had me thinking first abortion, then euthanasia, then puberty blockers for minors… got to admit Voice wasn’t on my radar at all!
1
Indigenous activists warn contractors to avoid Perdaman urea project
exclusive
By Paul Garvey
Senior Reporter
6:41PM December 12, 2022
No Comments
A group of traditional custodians opposed to a $US4.2bn ($6.2b) urea project on Western Australia’s northwest coast will warn potential replacements for collapsed contractor Clough that they face legal risks if they step in.
Save Our Songlines, a group of Aboriginal activists who have been campaigning against Perdaman Chemicals’ plans for a new plant on WA’s rock art-rich Burrup Peninsula, has written an open letter of warning to potential construction contractors and investors about the project.
Clough was set to partner with Italian firm Saipem in the design and construction of the Perdaman plant, but the company collapsed into administration last week.
The Save Our Songlines letter, signed by Indigenous women Raelene Cooper and Josie Alec, warns that the group continues to object to the plant’s construction.
“Undertaking the construction of the project at its planned location presents significant cultural, financial and reputational risks of which potential contracting parties and investors should be aware,” the letter reads.
The current construction plans for the urea plant will impact on several pieces of rock art at the site, with Save Our Songlines arguing that it should instead be shifted to the nearby Maitland Industrial Estate. They also say the project should be built to use renewable energy, rather than gas.
“The construction of the project on Murujuga will have a significant and permanent impact on our cultural heritage, and the World Heritage values of the area,” the letter says.
Save Our Songlines is a breakaway group from Murujuga Aboriginal Corp, the body that was formed to represent the traditional owner groups from the area. Ms Cooper and Ms Alec argue that MAC is too close to the major companies working in the area and has not been able to have a sufficient say over the level of industrial activity in the area.
In the letter, the pair compared the project to Rio Tinto’s destruction of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters, noting that the Perdaman project had been granted approvals under state and federal laws that proved inadequate at protecting that site.
They say the Perdaman project does not have the free, prior and informed consent of traditional owners and custodians.
“We believe the project is proceeding in breach of our human rights under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights and Interests of Indigenous Peoples, and have written to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in relation to the project,” they wrote.
The group has engaged the Environmental Defenders Office to provide legal advice.
Save Our Songlines has already convinced federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to launch a review of Perdaman’s plans and the broader wave of industrial developments in the area under section 10 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act. That review received more than 750 submissions, with the government-appointed investigator now preparing a report on the plans.
Perdaman founder Vikas Rambal on Monday said his company had all relevant approvals for the project and had engaged with traditional owners for the past four years. Last week, Mr Rambal said the collapse of Clough would delay the go-ahead for the project by two or three months, but said it was not a crippling blow.
“We are not giving up, but we are very realistic that we need a couple of months to resolve alternative solutions for the contractor,” Mr Rambal said.
The Perdaman project is expected to produce more than two million tonnes a year of urea, a fertiliser widely used for food production. In 2018, Perdaman secured a deal that would supply it with gas from Woodside Energy for 20 years.
The massive project is expected to create up to 2000 jobs.
Reports a California lab has achieved a fusion “breakthrough”.
Early days, but I’m hoping against hope it’s true, if only because it could make windmills and solar panels economically redundant and see some bad people lose a lot of money.
Activist: “They keep on with their ‘Jesus Lord’! Do you even know the national anthem? Go back to Russia!”
Quote Tweet
Russians With Attitude
@RWApodcast
·
14m
Ukrainian activists interrupting a Ukrainian Orthodox service, trying to force them to stop praying & start singing the Ukrainian national anthem instead
Unbelievable. Keep in mind, this is the Ukraine-aligned Orthodox Church.
6
Here We Go! Bill Gates, Johns Hopkins, & the WHO Just Simulated Another Pandemic
Pandemics are like white supremacists, the supply isn’t keeping up with demand.
Public health officials are revisiting the topic of indoor masking, as three highly contagious respiratory viruses take hold during the holiday season.
That sounds terrible! A raging tripledemic! I wonder what the viruses are?
Over the past few weeks, a surge in cases of COVID, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus — known as RSV — has been sickening millions of Americans, overwhelming emergency rooms and even causing a cold medicine shortage. The triple threat has been called a “tripledemic” by some health experts.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted this past week that the simultaneous combination of viruses has been straining healthcare systems across the country.
Omicron, flu and a cold virus. Okaaay. Obviously Armageddon. We should panic and put masks on immediately!
And this is the human scum who judged and censored others ie normies.
7
m0ntysays:
December 12, 2022 at 8:13 pm
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot who was instrumental in getting Trump banned from Twitter and who ran cover for Biden in the mid-terms. What a creep;
He seemed like a perfectly normal young man with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour, who happened to be gay.
You lot turn into screeching harridans at a moment’s notice, don’t you. Your frightbat routine isn’t fooling anyone. You are trying to pretend that just because he is gay means he is a closet rock spider. Homophobic rubbish.
If you wanted to know how far m0nty=fa would go to defend one of his ilk, this gives an indication, but does not necessarily set the outer limits.
The fascist left, defending the indefensible when it is their side.
6
Can I make a suggestion? I know Cronkite has given it 5 / 5 stars but he’s always a late comer.
Not at all. I was advocating Deadwood while you were busy shorting.
Yellowstone is magnificent. It’s about basic US values which include what I would call pragmatic conservatism: John Dutton and his family exalt the land but recognise it must be used and that nature is not benevolent. The concept of family is the other pillar of this show. It’s about as unwoke as you can get and its sentimentality comes with a smack in the mouth every time.
2
Under the government’s just announced new covid regime for 2023 you’ll need a GP referral just to access a PCR test.
The virus will be treated “like any other respiratory disease outbreak.”
In other words, they’re going to do what they should have done in the beginning according to then existing pandemic protocols.
I suppose we should be grateful, but without a measure of justice for the damage done by the politicians and the epidemiologsts and health bureaucrats who advised them it feels like a hollow victory.
5
Pathetic that we’ve reached a point where this is a serious threat.
It’s about basic US values which include what I would call pragmatic conservatism: John Dutton and his family exalt the land but recognise it must be used and that nature is not benevolent.
Dutton and Rip also do some pretty down home problem solving , like the night train fr’instance.
2
He seemed like a perfectly normal young man with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour, who happened to be gay
Whereas you are a dickless slimebag looking after the milkman’s kiddies.
6
Requiring a GP referral for a PCR test will do wonders for the numbers. A calm hand on the tiller bringing about something something… make it go away.
If you wanted to know how far m0nty=fa would go to defend one of his ilk
he’s pretty fucking stupid
generally mUnty likes to play Mr Guilt By Association
and is forever on this forum saying stupid shit like “if you defend x, then you’re a bad person”
you’ll never be able back outta this mUnty … ever
does your wife know that you defend pederasts ?
sorry … does your wife know that you champion the rights of queer fuckers to negotiate sex with kiddies online?
6
Not sure it is sensible to argue that perfectly normal young men want to set up a kids section on Grindr.
3
You people don’t have much contact with the real world, do you? You haven’t graduated from the schoolyard. “lol no ur gay” is not an argument.
He seemed like a perfectly normal young man with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour, who happened to be gay.
smutley’s simping again
2
what you see here from mUnty … is only the pointy end of these people’s insanity
3
Cronkite
Imagine being married to Beth. You’d go to bed but wouldn’t know if you’re going wake up as she may have implanted a knife in your chest.
Parachutist who leapt from edge of space dies aged 94
By Will Pavia
The Times
5:35PM December 12, 2022
2 Comments
Joseph Kittinger Jr was a decorated fighter pilot, a prisoner of war who survived 11 months in the “Hanoi Hilton” and a balloonist who set a world record by flying 3200km across America while ditching all his ballast, landing in his underwear.
These were not nearly his most talked-about adventures. Colonel Kittinger, whose death at the age of 94 was announced at the weekend, was best known as the longtime record holder for the highest parachute jump: a leap into the unknown at the start of the space age to test whether anyone could survive outside an aircraft 30km above the earth.
In 1960, after rising in a gondola beneath a helium balloon to 31,333m above New Mexico, he stepped out and almost reached the speed of sound before the lower atmosphere slowed his descent and he could open his chute.
It was the last of three experimental jumps to test whether military pilots might survive an ejection in the stratosphere. “Some people say never volunteer,” Colonel Kittinger told Forbes magazine years later. “I say always volunteer. Every great thing I ever did was because I volunteered. I’d be in a room and the boss would say we need a volunteer for this and I’d be the only one to stick my hand up. I’d think: ‘Gosh, what’s wrong with me?’ But I ended up with some very interesting projects.”
John Mica, 79, a former congressman, said his friend Colonel Kittinger died from lung cancer. The US Parachute Association hailed the colonel’s “long, lonely leap”, which set a record that stood for 52 years until 2012 when Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver, jumped from 38,969m with Colonel Kittinger serving as an adviser.
Colonel Kittinger had cheated death, however, on one of his three jumps in 1960. A stabiliser chute became tangled round his neck as he fell and he passed out. He woke again when a reserve chute opened a mile above the ground. He said he thought he was dead but when he saw the parachute’s canopy above him he realised that he was “impossibly, wonderfully, alive”.
7
Imagine being married to Beth. You’d go to bed but wouldn’t know if you’re going wake up as she may have implanted a knife in your chest.
Don’t be a wimp.
1
Rita P really hammered Chris Smith on her show.
He should never come back to Sky, she says.
Her furious demeanor suggests that whatever happened was pretty bad.
5
Quaint how he does the only gay in the village thing by proxy. Almost as if he actually thinks nobody else ever had any experience.
1
Yellowstone is fab, as is it’s first prequel ‘1883’. That said, I’ve never warmed to Costner, who is apparently a big Liz Cheney supporter, but his character acting is first rate notwithstanding. For relative unknowns, the supporting cast is also exceptional.
1
You people don’t have much contact with the real world, do you?
Not with yourreal world, pal. That world of kiddy grooming and sicko deviants you claim to engage with.
You are really showing your true colours here, mOron.
Zipster,
Many thanks for posting the full Kotkin article and to Dover for allowing the space. Champion stuff.
2
Ed Case says:
December 12, 2022 at 8:33 pm
____________
O_o
Good_oh, G0_ogles
This is why peo0ple see you as a low grade douchenozzle.
You were patently wrong re 1 term Patten and this is the best you have.
This is why people spit on you in the street
2
I had a lunch today at the pub
the food was shiite but the company was good.
there are some forums where your’e like a god and people hang on yr every word.
parts of my little world are like that
I’m the old man
the oracle
the bloke that makes people shit themselves when I enter the room
the two younger guys, business partners, both have young kids
they’re like proto-me
one of those guys … I remember when he was a toddler
and I know his old man
and my business partner is still close friends with him too.
the young guns bought the political subjects up
they held forth on topics controversial.
you know the ones that mUnty defends
and speaking of the ‘real-world’
let’s just say that these young entrepreneurs are not exactly on-board with munty’s version of reality
in any way what-so-ever
I just added a few measured stoic truths … and they lapped that shit up.
mUnty your ilk needn’t worry about me
… we all know who’s gonna cut off yr balls and bury you
7
Roger:
Reports a California lab has achieved a fusion “breakthrough”.
Early days, but I’m hoping against hope it’s true, if only because it could make windmills and solar panels economically redundant and see some bad people lose a lot of money.
I’ll wait for them to start hooking up the lines first.
Even if Aliens were to turn up tomorrow and offer to sell us Zero Point Energy generators powerful enough to run a household, government would not allow us to have them unless they could control the off/on switch.
Just in case.
m0ntysays:
December 12, 2022 at 9:17 pm
You people don’t have much contact with the real world, do you? You haven’t graduated from the schoolyard. “lol no ur gay” is not an argument.
Ahm, you’re the only one here who has been using it. Another “dog whistle” that only you can hear?
2
C.L.says:
December 12, 2022 at 9:25 pm
Rita P really hammered Chris Smith on her show.
He should never come back to Sky, she says.
Her furious demeanor suggests that whatever happened was pretty bad.”
Yes, watched it too. Rita is usually quite circumspect, I suspect Smith’s behaviour wasn’t wasn’t pleasant.
2
there are some forums where your’e like a god and people hang on yr every word.
parts of my little world are like that
I’m the old man
the oracle
the bloke that makes people shit themselves when I enter the room
Wonstron /Turtlehead wants to see 1000 people shot on the back of the head.
Mental health isn’t a problem at all.
1
What is the difference between Bill Whittle and struth ?
Both want to point the finger at men for failing women.
That bus left long ago and we’re never going back to men as providers and women as homemakers.
I really enjoyed Bill Whittle’s video.
if you’ve ever been part of a magic show, you’ll know exactly what he meant when he promised to tell … here’s the trick he said
and then simply stated the truth … that the magician lied.
happens a lot
… just saying
2
I think Zippy posted on this upstream a bit earlier:
Sky News host Paul Murray says multiple police officers have been shot in an altercation with potentially two gunmen in the Western Downs in Queensland.
This was supposed to be the year Ireland got serious about protecting its bogs but some of those hopes are wafting up in smoke as households burn peat to save on energy bills.
The soaring cost of oil and gas has reinvigorated the ancient practice of cutting and burning turf, a fuel that hurts the environment but can save a family thousands of euros, especially as temperatures drop to freezing.
Earlier this year the government introduced curbs to peat cutting to protect Ireland’s bogs – which are important carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity – but Europe’s energy crisis has boosted what is supposed to be an anachronism. It costs approximately €500 to heat a household with peat for a year versus several thousand euros for more climate-friendly sources of energy.
…
In other news, water wet/fire burn… Niall Ó Brolcháin, a researcher at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the National University of Ireland, said consumers faced a pinch point. “The financial factor is a much stronger motivation than saving the planet. People are facing an immediate crisis.”
…
Schadenboner, its not just for breakfast anymore Meanwhile people across Europe are turning to solid fuels, with Germany experiencing a wave of thefts of trees and woodpiles in forests.
…
I have very serious doubts this chap is correct in his final assumption. Marc Ó Cathasaigh, a member of parliament with the Green party, which is part of the ruling coalition, also cited anecdotal evidence of increased turf cutting. Though hard to quantify it represented a “step backwards”, he said. “Our bogs are important for carbon sequestration, water management and biodiversity. They are much more valuable to us as bogs rather than as fuel.”
…
At last, some green jobs!!! For some there is an upside: Germany’s 21,000 chimney sweeps have reported a boom in business – a quadrupling in some areas – as householders install and rehabilitate fireplaces.
9
Given that Trump is massively retruthing everything
There’s a certain cognitive dissonance at play for Shantaram to sling off about mental health.
13
There’s a certain cognitive dissonance at play for Shantaram to sling off about mental health.
Psychopathic Labor royalty is seriously serious.
custard says:
December 12, 2022 at 10:13 pm
Given that Trump is massively retruthing everything
Don’t be delusional. Musk is.
1
Farmer Gez says:
December 12, 2022 at 7:57 pm
It’s a red one isn’t it, Gez?
Was down in your general area today, taking my Countrywide down to Horsham.
Couldn’t find a decent coffee in Donald at 2:30, an appalling state of affairs.
Speedbox says: December 12, 2022 at 3:45 pm
Many years ago I owned a vending machine business. Had lots of machines and in those days it was all cash via coins (before note/card readers). At the end of each day I would have a few of those bank issued cloth bags full of coins that I would lug home and had to count out the coins into those small bank issued plastic bags.
The operator of the vending machine run who handled my pool tables & jukebox did the run in an F350, fully kitted out with lockboxes under the tray.
(This would be quite some years ago)
His harvest was gold coins only & he was carrying a helluva lot of $2 and $1 coins. The lockboxes kept them secure & helped distribute the weight for better travelling (the run was a couple of thousand km)
He had the machinery to sort, count, & bag the coins. I used to swap him for $50 notes for most of his load, this helped us both. He’d have enough coins by the end of the run & his bank (NAB) was at the time penalising customers for depositing coins – (at the peak assholery point they charged 10% of coins deposited as a fee.)
He operation of the tables & jukeboxes down to a smooth art. Timers on them would reveal the date/time of any event (eg vandalism to a jukebox). On occasion this timestamp was sufficient info for a mine to know who was in the frame for the vandalism & sack them.
5
Imagine being lectured to by a guy that begins his arguments with ‘You lot…’.
11
JC
Should you debunk the Q post I referenced or shut the f up?
6
Major farming nation forcing closure of 3,000 farms to combat ‘climate change’
Brilliant. These morons are that shit scared of dying from ‘climate change’ they now want to starve everyone to death into saving the planet.
FMD. How soon can that next dinosaur metor get here and sort it out?
6
Douglas Macgregor – Break Through The Defenses
Great stuff. You can find the whole conversation on the main page.
Speedbox says: December 12, 2022 at 3:45 pm
In those days the bank used to weigh my bags of coins and compare that weight with bags of their own. But I was always bemused because the scales weren’t electronic – it looked like somebody had brought their mother’s kitchen scales to work.
Never saw balance scales used in a bank. I’d have been around in those days, but too poor to be a commercial customer, especially with coins.
Can image they were razor sharp accurate – I’ve used similar scales to measure powder for hand-loading ammo. Weights that are nothing more than a shaving of aluminium (or so they seem)
One day years ago I was in the queue at a bank & in front of me was someone with a vending machine business making a wheelbarrow-sized deposit in coin of every denomination.
It was painfully slow as the teller was opening every bag andhandcounting it.
Eventually the manager came out & said, way too loud coz we all heard it, “Farq this! Just count a couple of bags & if they balance correctly, just accept the rest at face value, if there’s any shortages it’ll be the loss of whichever customer gets them in a change order, farq this, this is bullsheet, farq”
He was right & I agree with him, though he shouldn’t have said it so loud, as there was bound to be some snowflake listening who found his attitude a bit too confrontational.
In those days the bank used to weigh my bags of coins and compare that weight with bags of their own. But I was always bemused because the scales weren’t electronic – it looked like somebody had brought their mother’s kitchen scales to work.
Speedbox, I can see the possible reason. In those those days, fitting out every branch with a new gizmo would have cost a few bickies. Then imagine the maintenance cost because it’s always a good idea to provision when humans and fairly delicate machines interact. Sometimes near enough is just good enough, if you know what I mean.
Cost of fitting out every branch: circa $2,000
(or a fraction of what they waste of furniture when they toss out perfectly good desks & chairs coz head office orders an unneeded replacement)
Maintenance cost: circa zero.
Any suggestion “near enough is good enough” can come only from one who has neither used nor has any idea of the accuracy of balance scales or electronic coin & note scales. Both methods are extremely accurate. The electronic scales are however much faster & have the ability to print reports.
Banks were very late adopters of coin/note weighing technology. I’d have been using electronic scales for nearly ten years before banks dragged their tired elephantine carcase into the 21st century & got some.
It was frustrating to watch tellers count by hand, taking up to 3/4 of an hour (okay in extreme) to count & recount with at times endless errors (tellers ain’t what they used to be) what I’d counted correctly in a couple of minutes.
Can image they were razor sharp accurate – I’ve used similar scales to measure powder for hand-loading ammo. Weights that are nothing more than a shaving of aluminium (or so they seem)
Supposed to have been a set of scales in a bank in Kalgoorlie that could weigh a cigarette paper.
1
Brilliant. These morons are that shit scared of dying from ‘climate change’ they now want to starve everyone to death into saving the planet.
The people actually running things are well aware that climate change is a fake. This is what you could call engineered famine.
7
Key details curated by me from the Courier Mail (Brisbane)
Article posted 20 mins ago:
Two police officers and a member of the public have been killed after they were ambushed on the western Darling Downs, understood to be by two gunmen wearing camouflage.
The police officers killed in the execution-style shooting are a 29-year-old male and 26-year-old female.
After they were shot, it’s understood the gunmen stood over the officers and fired further rounds into them again.
Four police officers attended an incident on Wains Rd, Wieambilla, south of Chinchilla about 4.40pm.
Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll, addressing the media tonight, said the offenders were yet to be taken into custody.
Two officers managed to escape.
A male officer suffered a gunshot wound to the leg and was rushed to Chinchilla Hospital.
A female officer who managed to escape was forced to hide on the property before she was rescued by back-up officers.
It was also understood a fire was also lit at the property.
The Special Emergency Response Team has been sent into the property.
The bodies of the two officers have been retrieved by a large contingent of police.
The officers were sent to the property relating to a missing persons report.
It’s understood the request to attend the property was made by New South Wales Police for a missing person’s case.
2
Two police officers and a member of the public have been killed after they were ambushed on the western Darling Downs, understood to be by two gunmen wearing camouflage.
It’s all good, Elbow has offered soothing words of comfort.
1
Here it is in clear, for those who find italics painful to read:
(from the Courier Mail)
Two police officers and a member of the public have been killed after they were ambushed on the western Darling Downs, understood to be by two gunmen wearing camouflage.
The police officers killed are a 29-year-old male and 26-year-old female.
After they were shot, it’s understood the gunmen stood over the officers and fired further rounds into them.
Four police officers attended an incident on Wains Rd, Wieambilla, south of Chinchilla about 4.40pm.
Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said the offenders were yet to be taken into custody.
Two officers managed to escape.
A male officer suffered a gunshot wound to the leg and was rushed to Chinchilla Hospital.
A female officer who managed to escape was forced to hide on the property before she was rescued by back-up officers.
It’s understood police-issued Glocks were taken from the officers after they were shot.
It was also understood a fire was also lit at the property.
The Special Emergency Response Team has been sent into the property.
The bodies of the two officers have been retrieved by a large contingent of police.
The officers were sent to the property relating to a missing persons report.
It’s understood the request to attend the property was made by New South Wales Police for a missing person’s case.
understood to be by two gunmen wearing camouflage.
God help any ex – digger wearing his field jacket to the pub…
2
Whoever these bastards are, they’ve not got long left.
4
Two years ago I would have had great sympathy for the Police killed. After covid and the actions of Australian police not so much. I won’t forget the police’s total disdain for citizens over the last 2 years.
10
Crikey, these bastards really meant it:
4 x police officers approach the house. (2 x male, 2 x female)
When the police draw near, 2 x baddies from the house open fire.
3 x police are wounded by the gunfire & fall to the ground.
1 x police (girl) bolts into the surrounding timber.
2 x baddies walk up to the wounded cops laying on the ground.
2 x baddies stand over the wounded cops & shoot them dead.
1 x wounded cop manages to wriggle away to the car & drives away, raises alarm.
1 x girl cop is somewhere in the surrounding timber.
2 x baddies set the bush afire, so the girl cop either comes out to be shot, or burns.
Shitloads of other cops turn up (some time may have passed) rescue girl copper & recover the dead police.
1 x neighbour has managed to somehow get shot dead in all this gunfire.
2 x baddies still on the run.
These bastards really mean business alright.
5
Two years ago I would have had great sympathy for the Police killed. After covid and the actions of Australian police not so much. I won’t forget the police’s total disdain for citizens over the last 2 years.
Qld police weren’t quite as bad as the NSW & Vic mongrels.
However, everything is relative, I’ve at least one (possibly more) videos of QPlod body slamming a middle class suburban housewife to the ground – for walking her dog around the block, just like she’d always done.
She didn’t understand what she was doing wrong & had assumed Police would be reasonable, or at least civil.
They were neither.
9
Plenty of cops need a bullet to the head. Plenty of cops would agree with this statement.
4
How dare you say that!
1
MatrixTransform says:
December 12, 2022 at 9:18 pm
what you see here from mUnty … is only the pointy end of these people’s insanity
I’m not sure about that Magic Marv. He at least doesn’t appear to have a god complex. Lol.
Tell us, are the meds the cause of the insane ego?
You were the problem.
gawd … what a tosser you are JC
9
Indolentsays:
December 12, 2022 at 11:12 pm
Brilliant. These morons are that shit scared of dying from ‘climate change’ they now want to starve everyone to death into saving the planet.
The people actually running things are well aware that climate change is a fake. This is what you could call engineered famine.
Don’t leftards still babble on occasionally about ther eeeeevvviillll Poms “engineering” the 1943 Bengal famine? Yet here they are, engineering a bigger famine of their own.
2
Six dead now in Queensland.
Very brutal stuff. Obviously the police had no idea they were walking into an ambush with cold blooded killers.
A woman in the company of the two men who executed the police was also killed in the siege.
2
Where there is smoke, there is fire! The big question nobody is asking is who appointed one of these deranged psychopaths as a principal of a kids school? Has that person/those people still have a job? If so, why? How many other unstable lunatics are in charge of kids at school? Why no concentrated demand for a public inquiry (think Royal Commission into child abuse?) inflicted by education bureaucrats promoting sociopaths into kids schools?
1
The oracle. The god.
FMD.
MatrixTransform says:
December 12, 2022 at 9:37 pm
I had a lunch today at the pub
the food was shiite but the company was good.
there are some forums where your’e like a god and people hang on yr every word.
parts of my little world are like that
I’m the old man
the oracle
the bloke that makes people shit themselves when I enter the room
Where there is smoke, there is fire! The big question nobody is asking is who appointed one of these deranged psychopaths as a principal of a kids school?
if you read the comments from ppl at his school, he was well respected and liked. clearly these ppl were pushed beyond their ability to cope and struck out at what they considered the representative of their condition.
maybe they weren’t smart enough to question some of the wilder conspiracies, but every day we see the media call ppl conspiracy theorists over what we know are gov nudging, psy ops and just plain lies.
many ppl on social media are quite happy to say never forget, never forgive, but its just meaningless words because the ppl in power don’t give a shit, are not scared of you and have enough sheep to get re-elected. and even if one side does get kicked out the other side is just as pathetic.
the ppl in power are not interested in having any fingers pointed at them, will never take any responsibility and will just abuse the incident to keep pushing their unstated political agendas, just like they do with everything.
Dr Chalmers
From wiki:
Roger:
I’ll just pull one sentence out of your post:
Alter it a bit:
Yes. Pretty damn correct.
Well done, Carpe.
That’s the way it’s done.
Like Keating the Musical, I’m sure this Gough Musical that comes out next year will, yet again, immortalise and deify failure:
https://www.watoday.com.au/culture/musicals/what-s-the-song-and-dance-about-the-dismissal-20221212-p5c5l9.html
Regardless of what you think of Whitlam, Kerr, conspiracy theories about the Queen or the CIA, the Australian public made their choice on him pretty clearly… The Libs won an additional 30 seats in 1975 (or 91/127 HoR seats in total).
Viktor Bout is more appreciative of America than Britney Griner
minsays:
December 12, 2022 at 3:04 pm
Quite a few years back but dad had to go through a similar process when his house started to crack up not long after building.
Turned out all the houses in the area(new released) were the same, some to the point water pipes were bursting as well as gas lines.
One place cacked up so you could see into the loungeroom from the street.
Council originally claimed no interest.
Banks uninterested.
Government uninterested.
Builders uninterested.
Then dad happened upon an engineers report from the council which showed they had approved normal footings for houses despite classifying the area as needing heavy footings.
They still stonewalled so dad gathered the affected people together and all refinanced with a major bank.
Then all stopped/ threatened to stop paying and walk away from the loans.
Once the bank was involved the council got absolutely steamrolled (as did the developers) and in most cases brought back/demolished the worst of the places or paid the loans out as way of settling.
If possible find the old council stuff, might be a hidden gem there if its similar.
(the council even went so far as stating burst water and gas pipes werent a hazard)
Rabz I imagine you will have this ditty on your south coast travels. Just beautiful
Rushed Industrial Relations Reforms risk wrecking workplaces
Malcolm Roberts
Bravo! Carpe san is one of the Good Guys.
Re: the 18 year old daughter missing out on a job because unvaccinated –
What is truly staggering is that people are still so ignorant of what is happening re vaccines and mandates. And it isn’t just that there is increasing evidence of adverse reactions that should have seen the discontinuation of jabs long ago, it is the fact that government itself is actually slowly retreating on the vaccines and the accompanying protocol.
No doubt many of you are seeing friends and acquaintances suffering thrombosis in varying forms, and other complaints that are either weird or out of left field. I caught up with a friend by phone recently, and when asked how things were, she replied, “Everyone is dying”. While I thought that was a bit extreme, since only two people she knew had recently died (although one was a 30 year old with no previous symptoms) her own husband had suffered a minor stroke recently and I guess she is a bit apprehensive.
Neo-feudalism | Joel Kotkin
John Anderson
I wasn’t suspended because I only resorted to mocking. I must have been shadow banned though – not that I give a rats -but I only mention this because highlight the old ways vs the new. I have received relatively numerous number of requests to follow. I can’t recall receiving even 1 over the past 7 years. It’s like a lid has been opened.
When we consulting in there in the 90s they we’re running off take-or-pay gas contracts entered into alongside Alcoa to get the North West Shelf and DNNGP off the ground. The idea that diesel would be used across the SWIS was unthinkable. It was relegated to the outback as a last resort.
whoops.
but I only mention this to highlight
Robert Sewell says:
December 12, 2022 at 2:08 pm
Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity says:
December 12, 2022 at 2:11 pm
Many years ago I owned a vending machine business. Had lots of machines and in those days it was all cash via coins (before note/card readers). At the end of each day I would have a few of those bank issued cloth bags full of coins that I would lug home and had to count out the coins into those small bank issued plastic bags.
In those days the bank used to weigh my bags of coins and compare that weight with bags of their own. But I was always bemused because the scales weren’t electronic – it looked like somebody had brought their mother’s kitchen scales to work.
Re Jim Chalmers and his PhD on Keating:
I listened to a lecture by Andrew Leigh (another Labor PhD) last week at The Sydney Institute. A bit of a boring lecture on the evils of “marking up” by corporations that have dominant market share. My husband innocently asked why, if you have a “widget” better than others, you can’t charge more for it!
However, Leigh is a a more introverted policy wonk than Chalmers and is not surprised that Chalmers became Treasurer and Leigh has, I believe, been sidelined.
I asked him why, if Labor claims to be the defender of the vulnerable, they are not taking steps to stere the banks from closing regional and suburban branches are leaving the elderly and digital averse without viable options. He agreed that he had been shocked by the increasing closures, but could offer no solution.
Eeeeeeew. Mavis’s sloppy seconds.
Magic Marvin seems very happy today (as always). The good old Southlander must be doing some great group therapy.
Cohenite, if you’re around…
(With apologies to William Hughes Mearns)
“Yesterday*down near the lake,
No restaurant confirmed my date,
Today, again, I did not dine,
No tasty morsel, can I find.
(Not actually, yesterday)
full vid
Neo-feudalism and the Middle Class Crises | Joel Kotkin
John Anderson
m0ntysays:
December 12, 2022 at 2:16 pm
That is completely wrong about porn by the way Monty, I don’t normally see it with the people I follow but I looked at a #Trump tag and the thread was riddled with very explicit porn.
That would be spam, which is an overlapping problem. They have solved it for normal timelines but not quite for reply threads, it seems.
Suuuuure it was. Suuuure they have.
You idiot.
Wasn’t he the egg head who did not know about custody services and non-beneficial ownership and started railing about the banks controlling the ASX200 like an 18yo Albo?
Speedbox, I can see the possible reason. In those those days, fitting out every branch with a new gizmo would have cost a few bickies. Then imagine the maintenance cost because it’s always a good idea to provision when humans and fairly delicate machines interact. Sometimes near enough is just good enough, if you know what I mean.
John H:
And yet to me, it was obvious the whole charade was bullshit. There was no ‘evidence’ – it was all hearsay, fantasising, and innuendo.
JC says:
December 12, 2022 at 3:52 pm
Oh yes, sure you’re correct. As we all know, banks don’t throw their money about and, as there weren’t many like me, they aren’t going to buy some fancy gizmo on the ‘off chance’ that somebody comes into a branch with lots of pre-counted coins in coin bags.
(With apologies to William Hughes Mearns)
“Yesterday*down near the lake,
No restaurant confirmed my date,
Today, again, I did not dine,
No tasty morsel, can I find.
(Not actually, yesterday)
Yeah, Trinity only open from Wednesday to Sunday. They can’t get staff.
Balance scales were fine. In must cases the bags would have gone out to pubs or something for change anyway. Nobody really cared either. The only time anyone really got excited was when we lost a bundle of $20s behind a filing cabinet returning a bag of notes to the Perth RBA. They got the cops in after a couple of days.
m0ntysays:
December 12, 2022 at 2:38 pm
Well obviously Monty but my point that people are unwillingly exposed to porn on twitter stands, does it not?
I remain unconvinced that
Of course you “remain unconvinced”.
The ABC mourns the political demise of Queen Skank Patten
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-12/fiona-patten-concedes-defeat-in-vic-election/101760620
By a lovely irony, it was at the hands of the DLP. All is forgiven, Adem Somyurek.
Never fear, though. Chairman Dan will have her back on the Victorian taxpayers’ teat before you know it.
I’m sure someone mentioned it, Fauci is in deep trouble and Musk is going after him.
Someone sent me this related to the Fauci discussion.
Applies here too, in spades.
Like most graduates I was a hopeless teller. I don’t think I balanced once at the of the day.
West Australian Cats and Kittehs, I received a notification that pubs, clubs and restaurants will require digital id as a condition of entry. From the end of January onwards. Is this correct?
From what I read here, it looks that way
Today’s words are paedo and adjacent. Monty, take a bow, you went there.
Old Leftysays:
December 12, 2022 at 4:03 pm
The ABC mourns the political demise of Queen Skank Patten
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-12/fiona-patten-concedes-defeat-in-vic-election/101760620
By a lovely irony, it was at the hands of the DLP. All is forgiven, Adem Somyurek.
Wasn’t m0nty=fa gloating about Patten supposedly beating Somyurek at the time of the election? Sad, m0nty=fa, maybe next time.
Speedbox says:
December 12, 2022 at 3:59 pm
In my local branch at Carnegie they won’t take coins, you have to put them through the coin counting machine and present the printout.
Lawyers are absolutely terrible with money, so no surprise at all, Bear.
I wasn’t even legally trained at that point. No excuses. Just sloppy.
Didn’t know it had started.
Lovely news.
One trait can explain why the people who hate Pell are so often the same people who hate capitalism, Believe All Women, think it Always Was Always Will Be, and welcome climageddon-
misanthropy.
Black Ballsays:
December 12, 2022 at 4:07 pm
Jan 13, 2022, 12:53 pm EST
My 18 year old daughter has just missed out on another job because she is unvaccinated…
Victoriastan?
Yea, but you were heading that way. 🙂
excellent article, its quite long, I can post it for people that don’t want to register
Bar Beach Swimmer:
Something I’ve been at pains to try and get through to some – today Cock O’The Walk, tomorrow a feather duster.
The Upper Middle Class have some surprises coming their way if the planetary survival policies they want imposed on the wukkas and peasants come to fruition, because those policies will apply to them as well.
Have a look at the worth of a million dollars in buying power over the last century.
Black Ball – something wrong. The date on the article says Jan 13, 2022. So, if true, the ID thing has been operating for almost a year.
wokeism doesn’t tolerate any form of religious competition
We could have a count-off, Bear. Much, much harder to count the plastic notes. The old paper ones could be flicked with a crack and a flourish.
And a weaponised coin roll. You have to be able to roll the coins and then drop the roll from 6” without it breaking.
😀
Ah yes thank you Trickler and Speedbox. So has this requirement been implemented?
Not all heroes wear capes.
Or wear their underpants on the outside.
(or does he?)
Oh god, I agree with Leunig…
https://www.leunig.com.au/images/recent-cartoons/no-worries-w.jpg
Fully Goth. With manicure issues.
https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2022/12/11/women-in-pants/
Well, that’s Adam Piggott scrubbed from my ‘go to’ list.
And up yours too, Adam.
FMD The turtlhead is a fucking moron.
“Upper Middle Class” the folks he envies, because he was a male nurse, don’t posses cash as their main asset. They own stuff like stocks and real estate. Have a look what both have done over the period. And why does this nursing intellectual assume that the upper income earners are all subscribing to the leftwing?
How does it go again to paraphrase what was posted under Winstron Sith?
TrevorG says:
December 12, 2022 at 4:09 pm
In my local branch at Carnegie they won’t take coins, you have to put them through the coin counting machine and present the printout.
Those large commercial coin counters weren’t available for customer use back then. I’m talking from around the early 1990s to early 2000s (in Adelaide). I have a vague recollection they were a few becoming available in selected locations in the 2000s but none were convenient to me.
As an aside, I never bought a coin counter for my own use (small versions were available) because they were expensive. My opinion was that because it didn’t produce any income, it was a waste of money. So, I counted by hand each night even though it took up to a couple of hours – but I did become very fast at counting coins. 🙂
Black Ball says:
December 12, 2022 at 4:23 pm
No idea. I now live in Brisbane. WA Cats?
It would have been a good idea for Adam to comment on Cassie’s thread at Cassie’s thread. I’m sure she would have welcomed his thoughts on the subject. I certainly would.
My own position is that office Christmas parties are no place to argue politics, no matter how much you are baited by the perverse smart alecks.
Which probably means I am a “loser” too, but at least one who avoids indigestion.
Black Ballsays:
December 12, 2022 at 4:23 pm
Ah yes thank you Trickler and Speedbox. So has this requirement been implemented?
No.
Well, that’s Adam Piggott scrubbed from my ‘go to’ list.
And up yours too, Adam.
He makes some good points.
Roberto
Adam said he wants a Christian caliphate. That was enough for me to right him off as a nutter.
We’ve got roaring gales and heavy rain intermixed with sunny breaks in NE Vic.
sfw, some of that wind hit my place at 4 this morning. Still going, but not so strong now. Brought down a large branch from a one of my rotten conifers right across the driveway. Break out the chainsaw tomorrow.
mole, your dad is legend material.
Robert Sewell,
good move re, pigface.
Carpe, great work. And min, good luck.
Zipster
I tried the link but it didn’t work. Can you post? I am currently reading his book, “The Coming of Neo Feudalism -A Warning to the Global Middleclass” published 2020 so would find his summary article particularly interesting.
I see mOron has received his daily propaganda from his lot at Freakshow and Deviant Inc. Today, like many days, it’s running interference and releasing squirrels diverting attention from his lot on the left and their obsession with getting at our kids.
Clearly, the leftards are most distressed with Elon’s truth bombs. mOron has been frantically waving his arms about here since the Enlightenment began. Nowhere to hide now mOron?
I’m sure someone mentioned it, Fauci is in deep trouble and Musk is going after him.
Musk going after Fauci? Oh please! What a Christmas present that would be!
Stupid dreamer that I am, I want to believe that the One will come who will challenge those, like the WEF & their ilk, who are so contemptuous of us mere mortals that they are determined to reduce us to serfs subject to their plans for this planet.
Did someone mention Iodine?
? “Oh, your red scarf matches your eyes …”
should be 𝄞
Why yes. Winstron Sith spazzed out recently, scaring himself shitless worried that rural Queersland was a hot target in a nuclear attack and apparently he claimed he was after an Iodine prescription from a medico to combat radiation poisoning. All perfectly normal.
After my 18 month FOI war with Nilligan and their ABC* I try not to comment or think about the Pell case anymore. It made me drink too much.
*the “right to know” coalition
I like Adam’s blog. He’s a young-ish (well, much younger than me, anyway) grappling with a lot of tough issues. He isn’t the first Christian who might think Christians should be in charge politically. Plenty of them.
Problem is that Christians are just as sinful as everyone else, and just as liable to fall into temptation. In fact, the avalanche of temptation directed at us is unrelenting, particularly leaders and their families, hence that line in the Lord’s Prayer.
Our laws and many customs are based on the Judeo-Christian teaching. It should be preserved and protected because it is the best. It has proven value.
You might not like it, but it’s the pick of the bunch.
This 7 Second Video reveals EVERYTHING —
https://twitter.com/i/status/1598245104762126336
However, they were all better looking with the masks on……………….lol
Just back on my pins after a long convalescence, so have plenty of time to read and lurk.
3 things I learned during this episode:
1: have a GP who knows his limitations but has a good idea about the problem and has a very detailed Rolodex with the appropriate specialists.
2: The specialist IS a good one and has a list of the best surgeons.
3: Don’t skimp on selecting the surgeon on price, having money in the bank when you are six feet under is no good to you.
Having the bestest top private cover can still leave you out of pocket by many thousands, all worth it!
All the best to you in the same situation.
In that blog piece, he mentions nothing about Christianity. I find it ironic that he’s ragging on about immigrants when he himself is an emigrant, holed up somewhere in Europe.
No, JC, not in that piece. To understand, you have to look at his blog in its entirety.
I don’t see Vietnamese or even Afghanis as invaders. How can they be, if they have been allowed in lawfully? Another case can be made about ones who arrive by boat or overstayers. Their politics are another thing altogether.
For those who watch Club Grubbery today they did a previous of interviews they are having this week :
This evening will be a Qantas staff member.
Tuesday lawyer Jason Gillespie on their High Court case about Vax for kids. Thanks to his last appearance on Grubbery two donors have come through to help them with the find raising which had a target of $600,000.
Wednesday will be Senators Antic and Rennick.
Thursday will be a Qld cop.
Courier Mail has an article about PM’s Covid plan which mentions :.
Other key measures within the national plan include the vaccine program being extended through to December 2023.
Anybody seen the full national plan ?
I do but I have zero tolerance for race supremacy, Calli.
Anyone hear about this?
LONG full article
Welcome to the end of democracy – Joel Kotkin
We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships.
The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one percent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 percent two decades ago. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.
An OECD report issued before the Covid pandemic finds that almost everywhere, the non-rich share of national wealth has declined. These trends can be seen even in social democracies like Sweden and Germany. In the United States, as the conservative economist John Michaelson put it succinctly in 2018, the economic legacy of the last decade is “excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.”
This process has developed both in the tangible and digital economies. In Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the European continent overall, farmland has fallen increasingly into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy. In America, the largest farmland holder is Bill Gates, with over 200,000 acres, while Ted Turner and John Malone preside over lordly estates of over two million acres each — larger than several American states.
As property has concentrated, small-holders have come under increased pressure. Australia historically has enjoyed high rates of homeownership, but the rate among twenty-five to thirty-four year-olds dropped from more than 60 percent in 1981 to only 45 percent in 2016. The proportion of owner-occupied housing in once-egalitarian Australia has dropped by 10 percent in the last twenty-five years. Morgan Stanley predicts that the US will soon become primarily a “rentership society” where Wall Street firms seek to turn homes, furniture and other necessities into rental products.
The digital economy is similarly dominated by a small group of giant firms. These overlords together exercise control of up to 90 percent of critical markets such as basic computer operating systems, social media, online search advertising and book sales. No longer satisfied with controlling the pipelines, the tech oligarchy increasing buys up old news outlets and “curates” the news to its tastes. It increasingly dominates mainstream entertainment too: the pending sale of MGM to Amazon is just the most recent example of its conquest and consolidation of the means of communication.
Like the barbarian princes who shaped the Middle Ages, the new oligarchs have been able to seize their fiefdoms with little resistance from weak central governments. The pandemic accelerated this process; its lockdowns and restraints on mobility proved a bonanza for tech companies like Google, whose profits doubled during the period. In this highly regulated environment, the tech-rich have simply gotten richer: seven of the ten richest Americans come from the tech sector. Apple, by some calculations, is now worth more than the entire oil and gas industry. The already obscenely rich have become richer still. Jeff Bezos alone saw his net worth jump by an estimated $34.6 billion in the first two months of the pandemic, while his company has enjoyed continued revenue and profit growth.
As executive compensation reached the stratosphere in Big Tech and finance, small businesses face what the Harvard Business Review calls “an existential threat.” Experts now warn that one third of small businesses, which comprise the majority of US companies and employ nearly half of all workers, could ultimately shut down for good. Hundreds of thousands have already disappeared, including nearly half of all black-owned businesses. Particularly damaged have been the small merchants along Main Street and those working for them, such as restaurant and hospitality workers.
The old middle class struggles to compete with online platforms. Amazon is able to coerce small businesses to give up their data. As big-box stores have done for decades, Amazon uses its bargaining power to minimize supply-chain issues by leasing its own ships and using its considerable leverage to secure items that smaller companies cannot get. Property is seeing a similar consolidation. As middle-class prosperity falters in Britain, cash-rich Lloyd’s Bank seeks to gobble up the emerging market in distressed properties, apartments and even single-family homes. Meanwhile, the grand houses of central London are restored to Victorian opulence by absentee Russian, Chinese and Arab investors.
Climate-change policies could nurture the new autocracy for a generation. As tech oligarchs and the financial establishment implement the Davos notion of a Great Reset, they will force a quick end to fossil fuels. There are huge opportunities for massive investment by super-rich companies and speculators in the “green economy,” all made possible with tax breaks, loans and guaranteed sales to governmental units.
This promises to create a new crop of mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, today the world’s richest man. In the era of super-subsidies, a wannabe electric-vehicle maker like Rivian, which has negligible sales and consistent losses, can be valued higher than General Motors, which sells almost seven million cars and has $122 billion in revenues each year. In Green Capitalism, the British Marxist James Heartfield labels this “austerity socialism”: reaping governmental edicts as opposed to actually producing real goods. Nice work if you can get it.
For the middle and working classes, however, the Great Reset may prove somewhat less promising — if not disastrous. For most people, notes Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, the rapid “green” transition will mean “a noticeable loss of welfare and jobs.” The conscious policy of degrowth as a means of forcibly reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require getting most people out of their cars, and forcing them to travel far less and to live in tiny apartments. Enforcement will be necessarily intrusive as well. Planners in the UK and elsewhere are pushing for family “carbon budgets.” Add surveillance technology and we end up with something akin to China’s “social credit” system, in which your right to free movement is subject to government approval.
The young are particularly threatened by these changes — younger people already face much harder prospects than any postwar generation. Few expect things to improve: across the higher-income countries, roughly two-thirds of people surveyed by Pew Research see a poorer future for the next generation. According to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project, about 90 percent of those born in 1940 grew up to earn higher incomes than their parents. The same is true for only 50 percent of those born in the 1980s. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis warns that millennials are in danger of becoming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. To make matters worse, over half of all young people, in a survey of ten countries, think the world is doomed by climate change.
As housing and other costs skyrocket, class lines are hardening. Inheritance as a share of GDP in France has grown roughly threefold since 1950, with some upper-income French millennials inheriting more money than many workers make in a lifetime. The growing importance of inherited assets is even more pronounced in Germany, Britain and the United States. In the US, a country with a national mythology that looks askance at inherited wealth, the children of property-owning parents are far better situated to own a house eventually (often with parental help) and enter what is now known as “the funnel of privilege.” In America, millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. Among the youngest cohort, aged eighteen to twenty-two, over 60 percent expect that inheritance will be their primary source of income as they age.
How will the downwardly mobile react to the prospect of permanent rental serfdom and, ultimately, total dependence on the state? A recent Edelman survey reveals that increasing numbers no longer trust institutions or believe hard work pays off. In a world dominated by a few institutions, today’s precariat of gig and short-contract workers, and those who have dropped out of the workforce entirely, could become an economically less useful version of Marx’s proletariat: a permanent underclass requiring aggressive, quasi-military policing.
Meanwhile, large tech firms and financial giants — even those skeptical about climate change zealotry — see the prospect of record profits and valuations in “disruption.” The pandemic accelerated the white-collar shift to remote work, and the broader demand for automated solutions skyrocketed. A future less reliant on human labor elevates the tech oligarchs to the highest perch on what Lenin called “the commanding heights” of the economy.
In a digitalized economy, it’s good to control the critical niches. The oligarchs do this brilliantly. They have seized dominant shares of key markets from search (Google) to social media (Facebook) to book sales (Amazon). Google and Apple together provide over 95 percent of operating software for mobile devices, while Microsoft still accounts for over 80 percent of the software that runs personal computers around the world.
I have covered Silicon Valley for forty-five years. Today, it is less the hypercompetitive, free-spirited place I knew, and more like the early twentieth-century trusts. Mike Malone, who has chronicled Silicon Valley as deeply as anyone, sees it losing much of its ethos. The new masters of tech, he suggests, have shifted from “blue-collar kids to the children of privilege,” and moved away from the production ethos that once made the Valley so inspiring and egalitarian. An intensely competitive industry has become enamored with the allure of “the sure thing” backed by massive capital and sometimes by government. Competition is no longer a spur to creativity: competitors are simply bought out.
Wealth cannot rule on its own. Autocracy needs a proselytizing class who can justify the rulers and salve the distressed souls of the lower orders. In medieval times, the Catholic Church served this role, essentially justifying the feudal order as the expression of divine will. Today’s version, a sort of clerisy or intelligentsia, is mostly not religious and consists of people from the upper bureaucracy, academia, and the culture and media industries.
The pandemic has been a boon to this class too. The emergency allowed governments to grant them unprecedented executive and administrative powers not just in centralized France but even in usually semi-sensible Great Britain and Australia. For some, the lockdowns served as a “test run” for necessary measures to realize their preferred climate-change policies. In the new schema, the real class enemy is not the excesses of the ultra-rich, or even wasteful spending by government: it’s the consumption patterns of the masses. We see this in the response of progressive media and even politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes to complaints about the rising costs of food, rent and energy. The clerisy sees even the essentials as ephemeral, and supply-chain problems as the consequence of too much consumption by the masses.
As in the Middle Ages, when church and crown competed for moral and political authority, the bureaucratic and unelected sources of power are not always in agreement. But to a large extent, they embrace very similar ideologies, particularly when it comes to imposing control over information about the pandemic or climate change. The early-twentieth-century Italian sociologist Robert Michels noted that complex issues — climate, for instance — reinforce what he called the “iron law of oligarchy”: the more dependent on expertise a society becomes, the greater the need for elite-driven solutions that bypass popular input — and the greater the force the elite will apply to attain its goals.
H.G. Wells dreamed of a “new republic” run by a virtuous few. Our digital elites are anointing themselves, and being anointed by their fellow elites in business and media. Well-educated managers of major companies and the credentialed clerisy are naturally drawn to the idea of a society ruled by professional experts with “enlightened” values — that is, by people much like themselves.
To confront what they see as an existential crisis, much of the media supports the creation of a global technocracy. “Democracy is the planet’s biggest enemy,” asserted an article in Foreign Policy, an establishmentarian journal, in 2019. This hostility to democracy as an obstacle to top-down “progress” is dovetailing with another source of anti-democratic distrust. People around the world, particularly the young, no longer embrace the basic notion of self-government. A majority of young Americans now favor large-scale government intervention in the economy; about a third call themselves socialists.
The leaders of woke capitalism have signed onto a pledge to defund fossil fuels in the great quest for Net Zero. This is not, as the wacko right and the wacko left might think, a conscious conspiracy. Instead, it is propelled by tech firms’ natural desire for profits derived from replacing the carbon-spewing analog world wherever possible, and the irresistible lure for investors and corporations of a huge, subsidized and government-financed market.
Most tech and finance executives are not ideologues. Nor are they, despite appearances, sociopaths. Yet they feel justified in censoring and even demonetizing not just Donald Trump or the New York Post or Bari Weiss, but also the credentialed experts whose views diverge from the accepted line for staffers at Google, Facebook and Twitter, organizations where woke instruction is increasingly imposed. (These companies’ location in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Puget Sound region, two of the most lopsidedly progressive areas in the country, is also a factor.) Many firms espouse woke ideas, says Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, because they are “afraid of their own employees.”
In practice this often means eliminating conservative opinions — and not just views from the crazy fringe, according to former employees. Academic experts such as Judith Curry and Roger Pielke, with somewhat contrarian takes on climate, are routinely ignored, attacked and marginalized. Skeptics like the long-time environmentalist Mike Shellenberger, the Obama advisor Steven Koonin and the “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg are largely consigned to the social-media memory hole for detailing the environmentalists’ record of exaggeration, hyperbolic projections and immiserating policies.
We are increasingly ruled by a perfect marriage of class convenience, with more power for the clerisy and ever-greater economic opportunities for the oligarchy — all with the added benefit of encouraging them to feel good about themselves. Even as they push austerity on the masses, they live like medieval lords, indulging in lavish weddings and building estates reminiscent of the Habsburgs’. Jeff Bezos just spent $100 million on a Hawaiian retreat. Bill Gates’s daughter just enjoyed a $2 million wedding. John Kerry, President Biden’s chief climate scold and beneficiary of an heiress’s fortune, travels on a private jet that use thirty times the energy of the average American vehicle.
That’s fine. The anointed purchase “environmental offsets”: a green version of indulgences. This may make them feel better about their vast wealth and excesses, just as it did for the murderous and corrupt aristocrats of old. Still, many are also making preparations against a potential peasant’s revolt — just in case. This includes using private security, building bunkers and looking for remote boltholes in the US or abroad, notably in out of the way and strictly controlled New Zealand.
What is the end game for the oligarchs and their clerical allies? Upward mobility for the masses is out of the question. The technology journalist Gregory Ferenstein has interviewed 147 digital company founders. His conclusion: “An increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will come to subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.” In Silicon Valley’s estimation, the mass of people can look forward to life as subsidized consumers of Facebook’s metaverse or Google’s dream of “immersive computing.”
What will the rest of us do? There is clearly some disenchantment with the emerging order. Global trust in institutions, most notably the media and Big Tech, has fallen to a low ebb, and economic and geopolitical insecurity are on the rise. We are trying to impose a green economy that we don’t have the technology or even the electricity to power. This will force some countries to return to coal — China has stepped up its use of coal-powered stations — and others to leave part of their populations to shiver.
As blue-collar and many white-collar jobs are eliminated by automation, the oligarchs and their allies in the clerisy want to impose a Universal Basic Income, to keep the peasants from suffering too much and possibly rebelling. We have already seen pushback from the right and left in both Europe and America. Many people do not want to accept a life of subsidized dependency, made bearable by the digital equivalent of Rome’s bread and circuses.
The time could be shorter than we think. The tech oligarchs are creating something similar to what Aldous Huxley called in Brave New World Revisited a “scientific caste system.” There is “no good reason,” Huxley wrote in 1958, that “a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.” It will condition its subjects from the womb so that they “grow up to love their servitude” and “never dream of revolution.” It will maintain a strict social order and provide enough diversion through drugs, sex and videos to keep their artificially narrowed minds occupied and sated.
The fusion of government with large oligopolistic companies, and the technologically-enhanced collection of private information, allow the new autocracies to monitor our lives in ways that Mao, Stalin or Hitler would have envied. A rising tide of money and administrative power defines the rising autocracy. If we as citizens, whatever our political orientation, are not vigilant, our democracy will become an increasingly hollow vessel.
I find effortless hypocrisy very entertaining. He likely wrote that somewhere in Europe. last time he mentioned he was on the Alps in Northern Italy I think.
The ‘festive season’ getting a good run in the media. Christmas hanging in there though.
Yes, and they will be powerless to stop someone intent on doing this.
China & the Cycles
From Armstrong Economics –
“The Tiananmen Square protests culminated on June 4th, 1989 (1989.424). While the COVID Protests have been rising in China and the lockdowns have been deployed more so for the control of civil unrest which may start to come to a head by October 2023, the Pi Target was October 27th, 2020 and the day before, the 26th, was when US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken reneged on all previous agreements with China since Nixon. He issued a statement regarding Taiwan and launched a new Cold War with China. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on the precise target of the 27th made it clear that the Biden Administration violated all previous agreements including the one-China principle. The whole Biden statements and Pelosi’s trip suddenly supporting Taiwan appears to have been to actually instigate a war. It now appears with rising civil unrest, governments typically need an external diversion and that may now become Taiwan.”
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/china/china-the-cycles/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=RSS
It’s either of these three.
1. Lunatic green leftists
2. Dickheads with guns looking to cause mischief.
3. State actor sending a signal.
If you had to bet, which one would it be?
FESTIVUS
😀
Adam is a snowboarder, that says it all, no need to take him seriously.
How do you know when covid is officially dead? When the government stops doing free PCR tests is a good indicator. From The Australian.
Watch the rate of infection plummet.
Calli
I think a bit fault in society has been the thinking that the (Christian) Church is full of Saints who are spotless.
I’ve always thought of going to Church as like going to a Doctor. If you were to meet a real saint in person (I have) they’d tell you immediately that they “were no good.”
A friend told me (not sure if true but it reflects a saintly attitude) that someone said to St Francis: “Do you know that you are very arrogant?” And he responded “Yes, and much worse things than that.”
Seems like there should be an ointment to take care of that.
Dont forget Admiral Lord Byng:
Mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de tems en tems un Amiral pour encourager les autres.
How many days since Labor said the Libs would privatise Medicare?
Whoops…
Armstrong must be reading the cat
Yeah, but Byng was hyng for losing a few ships by making poor decisions, a worthy outcome.
Sergius Witte, Russian Railways Exec., was jailed for a train disaster simply because, he was, y’know, the Boss.
Winstron Sith, he’s a straight up Troll.
Probably not. They like their modern appliances too much, and their ‘renewables’ use the same infrastructure.
Most likely, but don’t interpret this as ‘right-wing gun nuts causing mischief’. It’s a personal beef, or one of those dicks who just wants to see the world burn, but not necessarily politically orientated.
Only as a prelude to invasion, to cause confusion and disruption. Otherwise, the risk of your bunny being nabbed, spilling his guts, and causing an international incident. Doubt this one, at this particular juncture.
That’s my best guess, but it could be any number of things. The infrastructure is very vulnerable to such action.
A switched on VIC opposition would refer Dan gifting a government job to Patten to IBAC and FOI any relevant communication with her. Was it a quid pro quo for supporting his pandemic legislation, she would have known it was a risk to her ongoing political career. What about Meddick and Barton, will they be gifted jobs also?
If you had to bet, which one would it be?
3. State actor sending a signal, 99% 0f the time, the other 1%, 99% of the time a State Actor too, the other 1% unexplainable.
huh? nothing baffling about it, there’s just too many people and eugenics is back big time baby!
Shorter Groogs – spooks. Or flamers.
KSA not happy with the US it seems. Maybe the departure of the 5th Fleet’s carrier is causing some angst , as well as Iran’s progress towards nukes.
So, up pops Xi..
https://thecradle.co/Article/Analysis/19283
Nuclear co-operation?
FESTIVUS
Mmmyes, the aluminium pole will be hoisted soon, because tinsel is distracting.
Then Feats of Strength after the Festivus meatloaf
Ed Casesays:
December 12, 2022 at 5:48 pm
Yeah, but Byng was hyng for losing a few ships by making poor decisions, a worthy outcome.
Byng was shot, not hanged, on the quarter deck of his own flagship.
Your Google-fu is failing you more and more often.
Joe Rogan reacts to Jeff Bezos $500 Million Super Yacht
Was it a quid pro quo for supporting his pandemic legislation, she would have known it was a risk to her ongoing political career.
Straight out bribe.
With the Preference Whisperer calling the shots in Australia’s Upper Houses, Patten was only ever getting 1 Term.
Labor probably paid her election expenses both times too.
There were three guys named Jackson who were all in the clothing business. Due to lack of real estate options in their city, they all set up shop next door to each other. In order to convince customers to come to their store rather than one of the other Jacksons, they all put up signs to attract customers. The one on the left puts up a sign that says “JACKSON’S CLOTHING STORE. BEST PRICES!” Not to be outdone, the one on the right puts up a sign that says “Jackson’s clothing store. Best quality!” The one in the middle thinks about it for a while and eventually puts up a sign of his own. “JACKSON’S CLOTHING STORE. MAIN ENTRANCE!”
—
Two brothers enlisting in the Army were getting their physicals. During the inspection, the doctor was surprised to discover that both of them possessed incredibly long, oversized penises. “How do you account for this?” he asked the brothers. “It’s hereditary, sir” the older one replied. “I see” said the doctor, writing in his file. “Your father’s the reason for your elongated penises?” “No sir, our mother”. “Your mother? You idiot, women do not have penises!” “I know, sir” replied the recruit “but she only had one arm, and when it came to getting us out of the bathtub, she had to manage as best she could!”
—
An Italian, a Frenchman and an Aussie were talking about screams of passion. The Italian said “Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with the finest extra virgin olive oil, then we made passionate love and I made her scream, nonstop for five minutes”. The Frenchman said: “Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with special aphrodisiac oil from Provence and then we made passionate love. I made her scream for fifteen minutes straight”. The Aussie said “That’s nothing! Last night I massaged my wife, ya know, all over her body with a special butter. I caressed her entire body with the butter, and then made love and I made her scream for two long hours”. The Italian and Frenchman, are astonished, and asked “Two full hours? Wow! that’s unbelievable. How did you do it to make her scream for two hours?” The Aussie replied “I wiped my hands on the curtains”.
—
A man went to the police station wishing to speak with the burglar who had broken into his house the night before. “You’ll get your chance in court” said the Desk Sergeant. “No, no no!” said the man. “I want to know how he got into the house without waking my wife. I’ve been trying to do that for years!”
– spooks. Or flamers.
Usually both.
Remember that Ivanov guy who caused a ruckus in Bob Hawke’s first few months?
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
– Jimi Hendrix
Interesting theory. Certainly human children prior to learning speech do often ‘babble’ a lot, and it can be quite musical. My eldest son, who has mild autism, did this a lot, up and down a scale, and then suddenly his speech arrived more or less on time developmentally. Current our little grandson aged three who has speech difficulties has never done any babbling at all. Something’s wrong, I kept thinking and so it was.
Speech and language are evolutionary wonders, but so is everything really. Birdsong, for instance.
Here’s a suggestion. Don’t lock people up for no good reason for months on end and destroy their businesses.
Bill Whittle is a good bloke and puts up a lot of good stuff.
Bill Whittle is probably one of the best conservative commentators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkYLiEUMeyA
“Feminism Exists Because Men Allow It”: What TikTok ‘Karen’ Meltdowns Show about Society
Women rant on TikTok, or collapse in mental meltdown, or get captured on bystander video going full-Karen, or brag about sexual exploits. And then they bemoan the fact they can’t find a good man. Bill Whittle says the frequency of these former aberrations highlights the toll of feminism. He says the crisis is getting worse.
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot who was instrumental in getting Trump banned from Twitter and who ran cover for Biden in the mid-terms. What a creep;
https://twitter.com/LeftismForU/status/1601718301625024512
Bill Whittle is superb.
Yoel Roth defends Grace Tame’s abuser
Very, very good, Dot.
Labor is subsidising electric vehicles, but there’s no plan for charging stations – Senate 25.11.22
Senator Gerard Rennick
Violent clashes in Mongolia between protesters and police near government complex
I don’t see Bill Whittle as particularly conservative. He’s just sane and rational and fairly intelligent, and he thinks about things. Anybody who is sane and looks at the world and thinks about it is going to come to the same conclusions, pretty much.
Jim Rickards + Keith McCullough | The Collapse of Our Global Economy
laissez-les manger du charbon
Went to the link, that is very disturbing stuff
Tell me again why we are destroying Australia…………………….
China and India clearly didn’t get the memo that reckons coal-fired power is dead. Both are determined to drag their people out of agrarian poverty and both know precisely how to do it: cheap and reliable coal-fired power.
Building new plants at a rate that incenses the climate cult intelligentsia, both countries have no interest in the sackcloth and ashes approach to energy currently in vogue across the West.
Energy security is first and foremost, as it should be. Robert Bryce explains why China and India so infuriate those who would keep them poor, forever.
https://stopthesethings.com/2022/12/12/mission-critical-coal-fired-power-central-to-china-indias-growing-economic-fortunes/
I see now that it’s being deleted , probably because it’s so offensive it doesn’t get past Elon’s sniff test. Kid grooming and other deviant chatter.
mOron’s lot are just vile disgusting P’s OS.
Makkasays:
December 12, 2022 at 6:42 pm
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot who was instrumental in getting Trump banned from Twitter and who ran cover for Biden in the mid-terms. What a creep;
https://twitter.com/LeftismForU/status/1601718301625024512
Didn’t m0nty=fa dismiss anything about Roth as exaggerated? I wonder will he look at this thread?
Monty will declare you’re a double-bigot for picking on a gay jewish guy.
Ok, it’s back.
But, mUttley’s lot are still vile P’s OS.
Hilariously Bowen’s subsidy has just evaporated, like magic:
Lithium-Ion Battery Prices Rise For First Time (12 Dec)
Haha, who’d a thunk that making batteries out of a metal half the price of silver might cause prices to increase? And that mines might be needed, which the greens dislike, so slow down the development of. Btw don’t miss Tim Blair’s take on electric utes that was posted upthread.
Big_Nambas
Building new plants at a rate that incenses the climate cult intelligentsia,
Far from being incensed, some have stated that it’s China and India’s turn to “catch up” with the west. They probably think that criticising them would be racist, neo-colonialist and a multitude of other sins against “progressivism”.
Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupiditysays:
December 12, 2022 at 7:42 pm
Didn’t m0nty=fa dismiss anything about Roth as exaggerated? I wonder will he look at this thread?
Monty will declare you’re a double-bigot for picking on a gay jewish guy.
Of course, how could I forget. He’s a hypocritical prick. Sorry, not a prick, they are useful. So are arseholes. Hmmm.
You do know she had been in the Vic-ghanistan parliament (LC) since 2014.
O_o
Look at Labor Royalty joining in a pile on.
Dover, seriously just get rid of the redneck. He’s negative equity.
The Canbra Hooker gone, Meddick gone- greta news.
This is the website of Suicide Prevention Australia who are celebrating 30 years of bureaucracy. Adjusted for whole of population the rate sits at 2500 a year +/- 10% and hasn’t moved except for the last 2 years when numbers have gone up (over 3000pa they sat) which is outside the normal variation.
Success? Failure? They haven’t reduced the numbers and I’m not going to knock the diligent and well-meaning organisations who actually provide the follow up services but they haven’t reduced the numbers. In true bureaucratic fashion this year they get $4,000,000 for more research (because 30 years isn’t enough). Naturally they support you know what.
They want a National Suicide Prevention Act. I like the sentence on social determinants –
The last, cough, 3, cough, years, cough. About which they’ve said nothing.
No surprise really given months of poor polling, but Ardern’s Labour Party has lost the bellwether seat of Hamilton West in a by-election by a significant 16 points.
With a recession looming she’s promised to focus on the economy and jettison unpopular policies.
Too little too late, I suspect. Is the LNP paying attention? Don’t be silly!
Hello.
The poor weather hasn’t hurt our harvesting as the rotor gear box shat itself on Sunday morning just before the showers came.
Today was a no harvest day with showers and with another cold front tomorrow it’s looking the same.
A new $10,000 box was located and will be fitted tomorrow hopefully. They’re big and heavy so we drove the header to the dealership. The workshops have gantry systems to make a far easier task out of the change over.
Three headers bogged in the area over the weekend. Excavators were needed to dig tracks so they could be backed out.
Can I make a suggestion? I know Cronkite has given it 5 / 5 stars but he’s always a late comer.
Buy Stan and watch Yellowstone. Not only is the storyline great, it’s just the most unapologetically redpilled show on TV. It’s also the most watched streaming series in the US. Great storyline and unreal scenery.
The US is truly beautiful.
Where is the immediate increase? See below from the website.
There is a much bigger issue lurking here. Suicide rates have been increasing for the last decade. Anxiety and depression rates have been increasing and\or are stable.
Antidepressant prescribing has gone through the roof.
Access to psychological services has been hugely improved and subsidised.
Why are these interventions failing?
From that website:
3144 Australians died by suicide in 2021, which represents an age-standardised suicide death rate of 12.0 per 100,000 people.
The number of suicides has increased slightly, with 5 more deaths in 2021 (compared with 3139 deaths in 2020). However, taking into account Australia’s changing population the rate of suicide has decreased slightly from the 12.1 age-standardised suicide death rate reported for 2020.
He seemed like a perfectly normal young man with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour, who happened to be gay.
You lot turn into screeching harridans at a moment’s notice, don’t you. Your frightbat routine isn’t fooling anyone. You are trying to pretend that just because he is gay means he is a closet rock spider. Homophobic rubbish.
Shy Ted-
The “naturally they support you-know-what” had me thinking first abortion, then euthanasia, then puberty blockers for minors… got to admit Voice wasn’t on my radar at all!
He says it all about Gates
New World Odor™
@hugh_mankind
·
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Explains How Gates And Fauci Turned NIH And WHO Into Big Pharma Billions
You are trying to pretend that just because he is gay means he is a closet rock spider. Homophobic rubbish.
Monty being gay pedo curious again?
1st frothing over Bidens hog, now its frothing for a chap who informs himself extremely well on kids and grinder.
Is there something you want to share?
Catastrophic Contagion
Here We Go! Bill Gates, Johns Hopkins, & the WHO Just Simulated Another Pandemic
Major farming nation forcing closure of 3,000 farms to combat ‘climate change’
Reports a California lab has achieved a fusion “breakthrough”.
Early days, but I’m hoping against hope it’s true, if only because it could make windmills and solar panels economically redundant and see some bad people lose a lot of money.
MORE FROM KARI LAKE’S LAWSUIT: 25,000 Ballots Added To Maricopa County’s Vote Totals AFTER Election Day
You do know she had been in the Vic-ghanistan parliament (LC) since 2014.
O_o
Good_oh, G0_ogles
Second journalist suddenly dies covering FIFA World Cup
The good guys are definitely winning.
That’s it, that’s the post.
EVs Were More Popular Than Gas Cars a Century Ago, But They Couldn’t Avoid This Big Problem
Scandal Rocks the European Union as Members of Parliament Are Arrested for Corruption Charges
You mean Trump, right? Tell us, how’s he winning?
He’s not wrong
Viktor Bout says suicide of civilization taking place in West
Don’t have a reference, but IIRC, that’s about what Australia imports, each year.
Biden Convenes Anti-Semitism Summit While Funding Murder of Jews
China’s Top Medical Advisor Says Omicron No More Dangerous Than The Flu
Alexander Vindman Is in the Middle of a Mental Breakdown, Screaming About Goebbels and Elon Musk
Unbelievable. Keep in mind, this is the Ukraine-aligned Orthodox Church.
Pandemics are like white supremacists, the supply isn’t keeping up with demand.
Authorities are urging indoor masking in major cities as the ‘tripledemic’ rages (12 Dec)
That sounds terrible! A raging tripledemic! I wonder what the viruses are?
Omicron, flu and a cold virus. Okaaay. Obviously Armageddon. We should panic and put masks on immediately!
These people are total fascist fruitloops.
JC
I’m occupied just now, I’ll respond later
The Elitist, Snide Worldview of Yoel Roth—Twitter’s Former Censor-in-Chief, with Michael Tracey
Glenn Greenwald
You’re under arrest, whatever for?
Dot:
That’s a radical idea, Dot. But I don’t think it’s going to sell.
It’s pretty sick when mOron is so desperate to defend his deviant lot who post this kind of filth;
https://twitter.com/LeftismForU/status/1602204261194022912/photo/1
And this is the human scum who judged and censored others ie normies.
m0ntysays:
December 12, 2022 at 8:13 pm
This is a selection of historical tweets from one mOron’s lot who was instrumental in getting Trump banned from Twitter and who ran cover for Biden in the mid-terms. What a creep;
https://twitter.com/LeftismForU/status/1601718301625024512
He seemed like a perfectly normal young man with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour, who happened to be gay.
You lot turn into screeching harridans at a moment’s notice, don’t you. Your frightbat routine isn’t fooling anyone. You are trying to pretend that just because he is gay means he is a closet rock spider. Homophobic rubbish.
If you wanted to know how far m0nty=fa would go to defend one of his ilk, this gives an indication, but does not necessarily set the outer limits.
The fascist left, defending the indefensible when it is their side.
Can I make a suggestion? I know Cronkite has given it 5 / 5 stars but he’s always a late comer.
Not at all. I was advocating Deadwood while you were busy shorting.
Yellowstone is magnificent. It’s about basic US values which include what I would call pragmatic conservatism: John Dutton and his family exalt the land but recognise it must be used and that nature is not benevolent. The concept of family is the other pillar of this show. It’s about as unwoke as you can get and its sentimentality comes with a smack in the mouth every time.
Under the government’s just announced new covid regime for 2023 you’ll need a GP referral just to access a PCR test.
The virus will be treated “like any other respiratory disease outbreak.”
In other words, they’re going to do what they should have done in the beginning according to then existing pandemic protocols.
I suppose we should be grateful, but without a measure of justice for the damage done by the politicians and the epidemiologsts and health bureaucrats who advised them it feels like a hollow victory.
Pathetic that we’ve reached a point where this is a serious threat.
Petition against Central Bank Digital Currencies (The eAUD)
Dutton and Rip also do some pretty down home problem solving , like the night train fr’instance.
He seemed like a perfectly normal young man with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour, who happened to be gay
Whereas you are a dickless slimebag looking after the milkman’s kiddies.
Requiring a GP referral for a PCR test will do wonders for the numbers. A calm hand on the tiller bringing about something something… make it go away.
he’s pretty fucking stupid
generally mUnty likes to play Mr Guilt By Association
and is forever on this forum saying stupid shit like “if you defend x, then you’re a bad person”
you’ll never be able back outta this mUnty … ever
does your wife know that you defend pederasts ?
sorry … does your wife know that you champion the rights of queer fuckers to negotiate sex with kiddies online?
Not sure it is sensible to argue that perfectly normal young men want to set up a kids section on Grindr.
You people don’t have much contact with the real world, do you? You haven’t graduated from the schoolyard. “lol no ur gay” is not an argument.
smutley’s simping again
what you see here from mUnty … is only the pointy end of these people’s insanity
Cronkite
Imagine being married to Beth. You’d go to bed but wouldn’t know if you’re going wake up as she may have implanted a knife in your chest.
Two police officers allegedly shot dead at Queensland property
Two police officers are dead after they came under attack, reportedly by gunmen wearing camouflage, on the western Darling Downs.
Imagine being married to Beth. You’d go to bed but wouldn’t know if you’re going wake up as she may have implanted a knife in your chest.
Don’t be a wimp.
Rita P really hammered Chris Smith on her show.
He should never come back to Sky, she says.
Her furious demeanor suggests that whatever happened was pretty bad.
Quaint how he does the only gay in the village thing by proxy. Almost as if he actually thinks nobody else ever had any experience.
Yellowstone is fab, as is it’s first prequel ‘1883’. That said, I’ve never warmed to Costner, who is apparently a big Liz Cheney supporter, but his character acting is first rate notwithstanding. For relative unknowns, the supporting cast is also exceptional.
Not with your real world, pal. That world of kiddy grooming and sicko deviants you claim to engage with.
You are really showing your true colours here, mOron.
Global energy supermajor Shell has suspended its role in a landmark gas supply deal designed to prevent shortfalls on the east coast next year in response to the Albanese government’s plan to cap fossil fuel prices.
and so it begins
Zipster,
Many thanks for posting the full Kotkin article and to Dover for allowing the space. Champion stuff.
This is why peo0ple see you as a low grade douchenozzle.
You were patently wrong re 1 term Patten and this is the best you have.
This is why people spit on you in the street
I had a lunch today at the pub
the food was shiite but the company was good.
there are some forums where your’e like a god and people hang on yr every word.
parts of my little world are like that
I’m the old man
the oracle
the bloke that makes people shit themselves when I enter the room
the two younger guys, business partners, both have young kids
they’re like proto-me
one of those guys … I remember when he was a toddler
and I know his old man
and my business partner is still close friends with him too.
the young guns bought the political subjects up
they held forth on topics controversial.
you know the ones that mUnty defends
and speaking of the ‘real-world’
let’s just say that these young entrepreneurs are not exactly on-board with munty’s version of reality
in any way what-so-ever
I just added a few measured stoic truths … and they lapped that shit up.
mUnty your ilk needn’t worry about me
… we all know who’s gonna cut off yr balls and bury you
Roger:
I’ll wait for them to start hooking up the lines first.
Even if Aliens were to turn up tomorrow and offer to sell us Zero Point Energy generators powerful enough to run a household, government would not allow us to have them unless they could control the off/on switch.
Just in case.
Second journalist suddenly dies covering FIFA World Cup
m0ntysays:
December 12, 2022 at 9:17 pm
You people don’t have much contact with the real world, do you? You haven’t graduated from the schoolyard. “lol no ur gay” is not an argument.
Ahm, you’re the only one here who has been using it. Another “dog whistle” that only you can hear?
C.L.says:
December 12, 2022 at 9:25 pm
Rita P really hammered Chris Smith on her show.
He should never come back to Sky, she says.
Her furious demeanor suggests that whatever happened was pretty bad.”
Yes, watched it too. Rita is usually quite circumspect, I suspect Smith’s behaviour wasn’t wasn’t pleasant.
Magic Marvin is a God. Yea, I can see that.
Douglas Macgregor – Break Through The Defenses
Everything is normal.
Marv considers himself godly.
Driller told us he’s labor royalty
Wonstron /Turtlehead wants to see 1000 people shot on the back of the head.
Mental health isn’t a problem at all.
What is the difference between Bill Whittle and struth ?
Both want to point the finger at men for failing women.
That bus left long ago and we’re never going back to men as providers and women as homemakers.
I really enjoyed Bill Whittle’s video.
if you’ve ever been part of a magic show, you’ll know exactly what he meant when he promised to tell … here’s the trick he said
and then simply stated the truth … that the magician lied.
happens a lot
… just saying
I think Zippy posted on this upstream a bit earlier:
Sky News host Paul Murray says multiple police officers have been shot in an altercation with potentially two gunmen in the Western Downs in Queensland.
Two officers have been killed in the incident, according to the Courier Mail.
Multiple police officers shot during incident in Wieambilla, Queensland
hahahah…
Why wont the serfs shiver in the dark and cold to save the planet Janet???
The rising cost of powering and heating homes is spawning the least efficient forms of energy back into the game.
‘Like an oilwell in your back yard’: Irish people turn to cutting peat to save on energy bills
Curbs to protect Ireland’s bogs have gone up in smoke amid soaring costs – theft of trees and woodpiles in Germany also rising
This was supposed to be the year Ireland got serious about protecting its bogs but some of those hopes are wafting up in smoke as households burn peat to save on energy bills.
The soaring cost of oil and gas has reinvigorated the ancient practice of cutting and burning turf, a fuel that hurts the environment but can save a family thousands of euros, especially as temperatures drop to freezing.
Earlier this year the government introduced curbs to peat cutting to protect Ireland’s bogs – which are important carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity – but Europe’s energy crisis has boosted what is supposed to be an anachronism. It costs approximately €500 to heat a household with peat for a year versus several thousand euros for more climate-friendly sources of energy.
…
In other news, water wet/fire burn…
Niall Ó Brolcháin, a researcher at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the National University of Ireland, said consumers faced a pinch point. “The financial factor is a much stronger motivation than saving the planet. People are facing an immediate crisis.”
…
Schadenboner, its not just for breakfast anymore
Meanwhile people across Europe are turning to solid fuels, with Germany experiencing a wave of thefts of trees and woodpiles in forests.
…
I have very serious doubts this chap is correct in his final assumption.
Marc Ó Cathasaigh, a member of parliament with the Green party, which is part of the ruling coalition, also cited anecdotal evidence of increased turf cutting. Though hard to quantify it represented a “step backwards”, he said. “Our bogs are important for carbon sequestration, water management and biodiversity. They are much more valuable to us as bogs rather than as fuel.”
…
At last, some green jobs!!!
For some there is an upside: Germany’s 21,000 chimney sweeps have reported a boom in business – a quadrupling in some areas – as householders install and rehabilitate fireplaces.
Given that Trump is massively retruthing everything
Here’s a nugget
https://qalerts.app/?q=%23140
China retires Covid tracking app as part of easing virus rules | World News | English News | WION
There’s a certain cognitive dissonance at play for Shantaram to sling off about mental health.
Psychopathic Labor royalty is seriously serious.
Don’t be delusional. Musk is.
It’s a red one isn’t it, Gez?
Was down in your general area today, taking my Countrywide down to Horsham.
Couldn’t find a decent coffee in Donald at 2:30, an appalling state of affairs.
The operator of the vending machine run who handled my pool tables & jukebox did the run in an F350, fully kitted out with lockboxes under the tray.
(This would be quite some years ago)
His harvest was gold coins only & he was carrying a helluva lot of $2 and $1 coins. The lockboxes kept them secure & helped distribute the weight for better travelling (the run was a couple of thousand km)
He had the machinery to sort, count, & bag the coins. I used to swap him for $50 notes for most of his load, this helped us both. He’d have enough coins by the end of the run & his bank (NAB) was at the time penalising customers for depositing coins – (at the peak assholery point they charged 10% of coins deposited as a fee.)
He operation of the tables & jukeboxes down to a smooth art. Timers on them would reveal the date/time of any event (eg vandalism to a jukebox). On occasion this timestamp was sufficient info for a mine to know who was in the frame for the vandalism & sack them.
Imagine being lectured to by a guy that begins his arguments with ‘You lot…’.
JC
Should you debunk the Q post I referenced or shut the f up?
Major farming nation forcing closure of 3,000 farms to combat ‘climate change’
Brilliant. These morons are that shit scared of dying from ‘climate change’ they now want to starve everyone to death into saving the planet.
FMD. How soon can that next dinosaur metor get here and sort it out?
Great stuff. You can find the whole conversation on the main page.
Never saw balance scales used in a bank. I’d have been around in those days, but too poor to be a commercial customer, especially with coins.
Can image they were razor sharp accurate – I’ve used similar scales to measure powder for hand-loading ammo. Weights that are nothing more than a shaving of aluminium (or so they seem)
One day years ago I was in the queue at a bank & in front of me was someone with a vending machine business making a wheelbarrow-sized deposit in coin of every denomination.
It was painfully slow as the teller was opening every bag andhandcounting it.
Eventually the manager came out & said, way too loud coz we all heard it, “Farq this! Just count a couple of bags & if they balance correctly, just accept the rest at face value, if there’s any shortages it’ll be the loss of whichever customer gets them in a change order, farq this, this is bullsheet, farq”
He was right & I agree with him, though he shouldn’t have said it so loud, as there was bound to be some snowflake listening who found his attitude a bit too confrontational.
Interesting little clip.
Chap who survived the sinking of the Titanic.
https://youtu.be/52eXh4q-fhc
Cost of fitting out every branch: circa $2,000
(or a fraction of what they waste of furniture when they toss out perfectly good desks & chairs coz head office orders an unneeded replacement)
Maintenance cost: circa zero.
Any suggestion “near enough is good enough” can come only from one who has neither used nor has any idea of the accuracy of balance scales or electronic coin & note scales.
Both methods are extremely accurate. The electronic scales are however much faster & have the ability to print reports.
Banks were very late adopters of coin/note weighing technology. I’d have been using electronic scales for nearly ten years before banks dragged their tired elephantine carcase into the 21st century & got some.
It was frustrating to watch tellers count by hand, taking up to 3/4 of an hour (okay in extreme) to count & recount with at times endless errors (tellers ain’t what they used to be) what I’d counted correctly in a couple of minutes.
Rules for staying sane
Supposed to have been a set of scales in a bank in Kalgoorlie that could weigh a cigarette paper.
The people actually running things are well aware that climate change is a fake. This is what you could call engineered famine.
Key details curated by me from the Courier Mail (Brisbane)
Article posted 20 mins ago:
It’s all good, Elbow has offered soothing words of comfort.
Here it is in clear, for those who find italics painful to read:
(from the Courier Mail)
Two police officers and a member of the public have been killed after they were ambushed on the western Darling Downs, understood to be by two gunmen wearing camouflage.
The police officers killed are a 29-year-old male and 26-year-old female.
After they were shot, it’s understood the gunmen stood over the officers and fired further rounds into them.
Four police officers attended an incident on Wains Rd, Wieambilla, south of Chinchilla about 4.40pm.
Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said the offenders were yet to be taken into custody.
Two officers managed to escape.
A male officer suffered a gunshot wound to the leg and was rushed to Chinchilla Hospital.
A female officer who managed to escape was forced to hide on the property before she was rescued by back-up officers.
It’s understood police-issued Glocks were taken from the officers after they were shot.
It was also understood a fire was also lit at the property.
The Special Emergency Response Team has been sent into the property.
The bodies of the two officers have been retrieved by a large contingent of police.
The officers were sent to the property relating to a missing persons report.
It’s understood the request to attend the property was made by New South Wales Police for a missing person’s case.
God help any ex – digger wearing his field jacket to the pub…
Whoever these bastards are, they’ve not got long left.
Two years ago I would have had great sympathy for the Police killed. After covid and the actions of Australian police not so much. I won’t forget the police’s total disdain for citizens over the last 2 years.
Crikey, these bastards really meant it:
4 x police officers approach the house. (2 x male, 2 x female)
When the police draw near, 2 x baddies from the house open fire.
3 x police are wounded by the gunfire & fall to the ground.
1 x police (girl) bolts into the surrounding timber.
2 x baddies walk up to the wounded cops laying on the ground.
2 x baddies stand over the wounded cops & shoot them dead.
1 x wounded cop manages to wriggle away to the car & drives away, raises alarm.
1 x girl cop is somewhere in the surrounding timber.
2 x baddies set the bush afire, so the girl cop either comes out to be shot, or burns.
Shitloads of other cops turn up (some time may have passed) rescue girl copper & recover the dead police.
1 x neighbour has managed to somehow get shot dead in all this gunfire.
2 x baddies still on the run.
These bastards really mean business alright.
Qld police weren’t quite as bad as the NSW & Vic mongrels.
However, everything is relative, I’ve at least one (possibly more) videos of QPlod body slamming a middle class suburban housewife to the ground – for walking her dog around the block, just like she’d always done.
She didn’t understand what she was doing wrong & had assumed Police would be reasonable, or at least civil.
They were neither.
Plenty of cops need a bullet to the head. Plenty of cops would agree with this statement.
How dare you say that!
I’m not sure about that Magic Marv. He at least doesn’t appear to have a god complex. Lol.
Tell us, are the meds the cause of the insane ego?
You were the problem.
gawd … what a tosser you are JC
Indolentsays:
December 12, 2022 at 11:12 pm
Brilliant. These morons are that shit scared of dying from ‘climate change’ they now want to starve everyone to death into saving the planet.
The people actually running things are well aware that climate change is a fake. This is what you could call engineered famine.
Don’t leftards still babble on occasionally about ther eeeeevvviillll Poms “engineering” the 1943 Bengal famine? Yet here they are, engineering a bigger famine of their own.
Six dead now in Queensland.
Very brutal stuff. Obviously the police had no idea they were walking into an ambush with cold blooded killers.
A woman in the company of the two men who executed the police was also killed in the siege.
Where there is smoke, there is fire! The big question nobody is asking is who appointed one of these deranged psychopaths as a principal of a kids school? Has that person/those people still have a job? If so, why? How many other unstable lunatics are in charge of kids at school? Why no concentrated demand for a public inquiry (think Royal Commission into child abuse?) inflicted by education bureaucrats promoting sociopaths into kids schools?
The oracle. The god.
FMD.
if you read the comments from ppl at his school, he was well respected and liked. clearly these ppl were pushed beyond their ability to cope and struck out at what they considered the representative of their condition.
maybe they weren’t smart enough to question some of the wilder conspiracies, but every day we see the media call ppl conspiracy theorists over what we know are gov nudging, psy ops and just plain lies.
many ppl on social media are quite happy to say never forget, never forgive, but its just meaningless words because the ppl in power don’t give a shit, are not scared of you and have enough sheep to get re-elected. and even if one side does get kicked out the other side is just as pathetic.
the ppl in power are not interested in having any fingers pointed at them, will never take any responsibility and will just abuse the incident to keep pushing their unstated political agendas, just like they do with everything.