Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi

Twitter Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter:

bad cats and bluebirds

Well I’m off to get a Berocca and head to the horse races here. Two meetings per year which of course is Boxing Day and Easter Saturday. Going to be close to 40 degrees so continual fluid uptake is key. Have a great day Cats and Kittehs

Australian cardiologist Dr. Ross Walker calls for cessation of boosters after seeing 70 cases of heart damage.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/australian-cardiologist-calls-to-halt-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-citing-heart-damage_4924166.html

Mmmyes Malcolm, tell me more. Via Tim Blair

KD at 7:31.

Which is fortunate, because although in many respects Boxing Day is my Christmas I will be spared the 15 minutes of pre-Test palaver that will be yet another tribute – or series of tributes – to Shane Warne.

Puke inducing.
You can bet someone is making a motza selling cheap Chinese “commemorative floppy hats”.
On matters crickit, you mentioned the cheating, houso, ranga’s golden duck yesterday.
Any club cricketer would know that, when the opposition captain puts a bloke at short square leg 7-8 metres from the bat (not close in at bat-pad), you are going to get one straight at the noggin.
And yet he was taken by surprise.

Actually, this year Christmas Day one of the records. In addition to the plague of bugs, our satellite internet connection (Activ 8) went down overnight (it is still down & we are blue toothing to the mobiles), got a call from neighbour in Sydney to say our burglar alarm had been activated, and had massive family blue between grandchildren with 20 year old grandson wandering over the farm most of the night with a bottle of Bourbon or some such.

Thanks Indolent, for providing article of Dr. Ross Walker without the paywall!

Do Australia ever lose the toss?

Slightly late Christmas wishes to all here, including the mad, bad, deluded and sad. May they respectively get back on the medication, find redemption, find clarity and find something in the Christmas story to work through the sadness. Thanks to Doverbeach for running this excellent blog!

Yesterday here was a lovely not overly warm day. Menu was a few oysters (last minute additon, I don’t usually bother with them), crab lasagne, mango/prawn/avocado salad, with some turkey, ham and trimmings, followed by pav. Wouldn’t be dead for quids. Reading the posts earlier about the use of corn syrup puts into perspective how fortunate we are here in the variety and quality of available food. Were it entirely up to me, I would ditch the turkey for a cold baked snapper, but it isn’t and hot turkey and roast vegetables on the table at Christmas has been well imprinted in my family’s mind.

Yes, there will be a Berocca today, which I take every couple of days as being an older being, it gives me a kick along. It makes sense, I remember the 70’s learning experience of raising angora goats, if a kid was a bit lethargic after birth a tiny volume of Vitamin B injected subcutaneously would have it up and feeding in no time.

Today, back to the washing and ironing and the cricket. I think I will leave it a day or two before christening my Christmas present of a Bailey platform ladder – one in my family at least is of a practical nature and it will be very handy for me with pruning etc.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that that miserable Wally Dali’s abandoned dog found his way to Dr BeaGan’s to help with the leftovers and relieve his water and kibble diet? I think he was described once as part kelpie part whippet so he would be able to hold up his end of the conversation!

Psays:
December 26, 2022 at 10:45 am
“On the feast of Stephen”

On this first day after Christmas, Monday, December 26, 2022,
we celebrate the feast of the first Christian martyr.

Yes and I found out today that Boxing Day for the Northern Irish Protestants it is St Stephen’s Day. Apparently to jam it up those Roman Cafflicks……………………….

so I’m not allowed to say I like living and working here?

Yes you are and we still have freedom of speech here. But don’t say it out loud………………………….

I never drink water; that is the stuff that rusts pipes.

– W. C. Fields

I just don’t get these people. They have known for over a month or so that a shit load of water was coming down the River Murray. And now they are so surprised. FMD. SA must be in some kind of time warp. Don’t they follow the BOM? Is SA really in ‘Stralia?

I’ll say it again, Lachlan Murdoch is NO progressive.

If he’s anything like the old man he’ll back whoever is most likely to be in power to help him. Rupe was a big Blair and KRudd booster (for a time). The US may vary. The demonisation of Murdoch is largely another Leftist trope to rally the tribe.

Maybe one day you could admit you’re not right about everything.

Steady on. Will you see yourself out?

Anyone who “believes” in catastrophic climate change is a rolled gold moron.
Anyone who makes excuses for the morons because “tribe” is a dick.

Andrew Rule from July. It’s an excellent read from the Hun.

They say if you remember the seventies, you weren’t there.

But older football followers were there — and remember it vividly. The VFL, aggro stepfather of the modern AFL, bristled with violence that’s no longer tolerated in the game.

Even so, not all the rough stuff was caught by the primitive TV coverage of a game in which rank amateurism and brutal professionalism were exactly that: rank and brutal, especially behind play.

On-field assaults put players in hospital with broken jaws, broken noses, broken ribs and broken dreams — and would have put others in jail if they’d swung the same king hits in the street.

As the song went, the 6.30 news was a horror movie, and that included sports bulletins.

Try this. In round 14 of 1972, the sublimely talented ballplayer John Greening ran onto the Moorabbin ground for his 98th League game. At 21, he realistically thought he might play more than 300 games — something his coach Bob Rose thought fair enough.

Greening was a footballing freak. He’d been signed by the Magpies at 15 and played his first senior game at 17. Tim Watson meets James Hird with various Riolis and Abletts thrown in.

His meteoric rise ended viciously. He woke in hospital from a coma, doctors telling him he’d nearly died and would be lucky to recover from being paralysed down one side.

He’d been felled behind the play by St Kilda’s Jim O’Dea, who was lucky not to be charged with grievous bodily harm.

An eight-year-old watching that day prayed for Greening’s recovery all week. His name was Eddie McGuire.

Greening did play again — sort of. Two years later he made a comeback but could handle only a few games before retiring to try to forget the terrible wrong against him.

His devastated wife was dissuaded from taking legal action when St Kilda and Collingwood raised $50,000 in blood money, playing a fundraising game in which, bizarrely, O’Dea played.

That says more about 1970s football than any other single incident. But there were plenty of them.

Football was war. Nearly every team had “enforcers” to intimidate opposition talent — and to protect their own ball players from opposition thugs. An arms race.

Most of those old-school hard men have slipped from legend into semi-anonymity, like retired heavyweight champs. Carl Ditterich and Ron Andrews come to mind but there are others. They know who they are.

Every club had them, except maybe the “handbaggers”, as the tough city clubs called Geelong for recruiting ball players to play open, skilful football as if they were playing sport rather than spilling blood at the Colloseum.

As gladiators go, “Big Carl” Ditterich had everything but the sword and spear to go with God-given talent and Nordic warrior looks. Caligula would have loved Carl. He had the size and colouring of a polar bear but wasn’t nearly as kindly.

Once the bear has killed and eaten a walrus, it will ease up until it gets hungry again. But Carl wasn’t so easily satisfied, especially in the later stages of his 17-season career. He terrorised lesser beasts on principle.

Even in his last game, when the sinful Saint had joined the Demons, he wounded half a dozen Collingwood players from sheer habit.

“Rotten Ronnie” Andrews seemed more amiable off the field than Killer Carl but was just as dangerous to the young, old, talented or those brave enough not to dodge him. Andrews drives a school bus these days, a long way from Windy Hill, Victoria Park and the MCG, and it’s a fair bet the kids don’t give him much lip.

Another hard man of the era, Stewie Gull, could now afford to buy the old South Melbourne ground just to park his cars, boats and horse floats. But the tycoon is not as proud of his property empire as he is of the fact he once poleaxed Ronnie Andrews at Windy Hill.

Make that twice. When Andrews gamely challenged him to “try it again”, Gull hit him again.

It was Gull that Carlton’s sneak puncher Wes Lofts ran away from after blindsiding some smaller Swans player the same way he’d once belted the only League footballer who wore glasses on the ground, Essendon’s gentlemanly forward Geoff Blethyn.

Even Lofts’ teammates never forgot his self-preservation instinct. He cut a dash in business and at parties but never quite lived down running from Gull.

The old South Melbourne followers called their team “the Bloods” and the fighting forward from Ballarat never let them down. They came to watch him fight at Festival Hall. Running away wasn’t for him.

Tears flowed when “Mr Football”, Ted Whitten, succumbed to cancer in 1995. The sight of his wasted body in an open car at the MCG, punching the air and croaking his war cry one last time — “Stick it up ’em”— was one of sport’s most moving moments.

But, of course, this same hero had smashed 17-year-old Peter Hogan’s jaw in the boy’s first game for Richmond, the way that young Whitten’s own debut had been ruined by “Mopsy” Fraser in 1951.

That year, Victoria hanged a woman, Jean Lee. It was a very different time.

Most of the big-name hard men are long lost to elite football. Only a handful stayed around.

“Lethal” Leigh Matthews reinvented himself as a thinker in the game that has outlawed the unthinking mayhem he routinely committed in the Barney Rubble era with its single field umpire and stone age cameras.

Kevin Sheedy was a heavy thinker, too, even when he was just a heavy back pocket player. He and “Lethal” became super coaches who made a permanent mark on their sport.

But, as the bruisers of the 1970s enter their own 70s, perhaps only one of them is still exerting influence on a game barely recognisable as the one he played in that dark and deadly decade.

His name is Neil Balme. And, as a new biography by Anson Cameron makes clear, he’s not so much a reformed character as one who found his true vocation after hanging up his boots with the Tigers.

Balme quit playing when he was just 27, his knees a mess. But he never quit thinking about how to play football a better way — a tendency he’d shown from teenage days, exasperating old-time coaches like Ray “Slug” Jordon and Tommy Hafey, who preached the virtues of fitness and fierceness rather than tactical finesse.

The perception is that Balme is a changed man. The man himself argues — gently and persuasively, with humour — he never really was the pitiless thug he seemed, the Tiger who spooked a generation of opposition players during his decade of living dangerously.

Balme was, or still is, hated by two generations of Carlton supporters because he concussed Geoff Southby, broke David McKay’s jaw and flattened Carlton’s own heavy, Vin Waite.

Mouthy Carlton players openly taunted Richmond’s gentle ruckman Michael Green, a law student. But when Balme took his turn in the ruck, an eerie silence fell over the centre square.

Not that Balme’s blues were limited to Carlton.

He was an equal opportunity enforcer, happy to dish the dirt without fear or favour, even to Ditterich and the crazy brave Don Scott.

As Carlton’s premiership ruckman Mike Fitzpatrick said years later, “Balmie was top of the food chain, don’t worry about that.”

But underneath the rugged exterior was the thoughtful student of the game who has turned into a football Buddha, dispensing wisdom, comfort and calmness to two generations of coaches, players and administrators.

It’s this apparent contradiction, between the havoc he once imposed on the field and the bottomless calm he instils off it, that gives the biography its title, Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.

The difference between the raging bull (the one the astonished Balme kids later saw in old TV footage of his most notorious “hits”) and the gentle husband and father they knew was always a thing of wonder in his own family. Likewise, in the football families he has fostered at five clubs, four in the AFL and at Norwood in South Australia.

Balme has spent longer than anyone else in the whiteboard jungle roamed by hundreds of coaching, medical, psychological and athletic staff across the AFL. He’s apparently top of that food chain as well, with little obvious effort.

He was a revered and successful playing coach at Norwood in the SANFL, and a loved though statistically unsuccessful coach of the Gutnick-era Melbourne side. But the man old enough to have rucked with and against the 1960s icon “Polly” Farmer came into his own in a role he made all his own.

He has had several titles at three powerhouse clubs but it’s hard to define exactly what he does, only what happens when he’s around. Balme’s stints at Collingwood, Geelong and, now, back with his first love, Richmond, have coincided with premierships at each.

In all, he has played a part in 11 premierships. Insiders call him a different four-letter word from the 1970s ones. It’s “guru.”

He certainly is original. It was Balme who asked the darkly humorous writer Cameron to get his story on paper before it’s too late. An oddball team selection, but it works.

Cameron is used to imagining characters and dialogue but has found Balme’s life a rich vein of the real thing.

Such as the day in 1969 when the teenage Balme, fresh from Perth, was standing outside his new school, University High.

A hot Torana pulls up. At the wheel is Robbie McGhie, unemployed apart from playing for Footscray. Told that the kid in front of him is Balme, just signed by Richmond, McGhie lights a smoke, bangs a tattooed arm on the car door and bellows: “We’ll meet one day, Balme. We’ll meet on the footy field. I’m gunna bash ya!”

Then he drops the clutch and fishtails up the street. Welcome to the big time, kid.

McGhie bashed half the competition, but he never did bash Balme.

An 8 pointer, 4 pointer and a button buck are standing by a field browsing on acorns.

The 8 pointer says “I’m happy with my 10 does, we’re really getting along”.

The 4 pointer says “I’m happy as heck with my 5, they really take care of me!”

The Button buck says “My two are all right, better than nothing I guess”.

Then all of a sudden a GIANT 14 pointer walks out into the field. The three bucks had never seen anything like him before, they were in awe.

The big buck made a huge scrape and pissed in it, rubbed a tree the size of a telephone pole and snapped it off at the ground!

The three bucks looked on in amazement.

The 8 pointer says “I could probably get by with 4 does… who really needs 10 anyway?”

The 4 pointer says “You know… come to think of it, I only really use one or two of mine!”

The button buck was silent, as the other two bucks look over to him in confusion.

Suddenly the Button buck runs out into the middle of the field! He rips and tears up some grass, pisses all over the place, snorts and wheezes, rubs his head raw on a tree, and chews a licking branch clean off!

Then he runs back over to his buddies. His friends immediately ask him “What the hell are you doing!?”

I’m just making sure that big sonofabitch knows I’m a buck!”

Dominick nati obviously needs to have a heated garage so he can charge his Tesla

BON

The rich have gone collectively bonkers, except for a very few escapees like Trump and Musk and Gina

This has puzzled me for some time. Why have today’s rich gone loony fascist?
Is it because they are a younger, less or even non educated generation?

The rich in the 70s didn’t swallow global cooling when the loonies tried it. What happened since then?

Could the end of the USSR have something to do with it perhaps. Going totally nutso in the 70s with global cooling and collapsing Western societies could have been a danger to their fortunes.

These days they don’t fear a revolution from us.

Tom

From vague memory, the Sunday Times was virtually a different newspaper from the regular one, I think. It even had different editors. Is that correct?

These days they don’t fear a revolution from us.

Yes but when it happens, they will be somewhat surprised………………And it won’t be too long now.

Never try to impress a woman, because if you do she’ll expect you to keep up the standard for the rest of your life.

– W. C. Fields

Seen it in person with friends.

You don’t seem the type to have feeble minded snobs as friends, Arky.

Matersays:
December 26, 2022 at 7:55 am
Predictable
Diversity + Proximity = Conflict

Correct.

‘It’s hot out there today Mr Walker’
38 in the paddock.

Remembering back to my first real harvest 86/87.

International C1600 with single axle trailer, vacuum brakes and bottom dump bins.
Roaring into St Arnaud AWB (or whatever it was back then), drop grain and roar back out to the paddock with all the flow through air conditioning that two windows could offer. Adequately dispersing the combined heat from the sun and the 345 V8 engine was never achieved for the driver.

Last truck for the day always stopped at the bottle shop for “the cans”.

I’m so glad I got to do it then and so grateful we don’t do it with that sort of gear now.

I’m so glad I got to do it then and so grateful we don’t do it with that sort of gear now.

I don’t miss a 1975 Acco 1830, where you sat directly over the engine………

don’t miss a 1975 Acco 1830

..
We had one of those on the farm I worked as a kid.
I asked Brian “Is it diesel”? He said “No, it would be even more gutless if it was”.

Wot’ is all this Bollocks to do wiv’ doxxing? I mean, wot’ is it all abbat’. Sounds like a load of bollocks to me. COYS and that means fuck off Arsenal………………………………

2m ago
Wong condemns Taliban for banning women from NGOs
Georgina Noack

Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong has condemned Afghanistan’s Taliban-run administration after it ordered non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to stop female employees from coming to work.

The ban comes days after the administration ordered universities in Afghanistan to close to women indefinitely – a shock decision landing less than three months after thousands of girls and women sat university entrance exams across Afghanistan.

In a statement on Monday afternoon, Senator Wong condemned the Taliban’s most recent decision to ban women from local and foreign NGOs, describing it as “appalling”.

“This decision seriously impacts the country’s ability to deal with a major humanitarian crisis,” Senator Wong tweeted.

“We support the UN which is leading discussions with the Taliban to annul this decision.”

Just had a look at the BOM app.

“Heatwave warning” is up, which is something I haven’t seen before.

Three maps showing the regions affected with a colour legend of yellow/orange/red. Then a brief description of temps expected.
Check of current and three day forecast temps and there’s nothing over 38 back down to 32 Thursday.

A condensed version would read, “It’s summer in Australia”.

Laughable