We did a consulting job on bricks in Perf for a colourful character from the 80s (more a bit player). Interesting and quite good fun but didn’t get paid a cent. Bricks by container out of Perf become economic periodically. Likewise clay roof tiles imports from Europe. Whole think went nowhere, although curiously Hanson now here.

Alas no given the state the Liberals are in.

This is the wildcard. I wouldn’t take that prediction to the bank. I expect post- Voice politics will be quite different to the status quo.

boambee john at 1051

Two choices:

The Cane Toad and her lawyer are lying – deep trouble for them,

or

DPP Drumgold is lying – deep trouble for him.

Popcorn all round!

there appears to be no outcomes which are entirely popcorn-free

If was going to build a house, I’d use imported Danish bricks. They look great.

Somebody’s due to be wormed.

WSJ

Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination’
The author of the Dobbs abortion ruling answers attacks on the court’s ‘legitimacy.’ He says he thinks he knows who leaked the draft and is certain about the motive.

Justice Samuel Alito was supposed to speak to law students at George Mason University in Arlington, Va., but when they showed up, he wasn’t there. “That Alito was speaking via closed circuit from a room at the Supreme Court seven miles away, rather than in person, was a sign these are not normal times,” the Washington Post reported. The Post didn’t explain what made the “times” abnormal.

It wasn’t a lingering fear of Covid-19. In a mid-April interview in his chambers, Justice Alito fills us in on the May 12, 2022, event: “Our police conferred with the George Mason Police and the Arlington Police and they said, ‘It’s not a good idea. He shouldn’t come here. . . . The security problems will be severe.’ So I ended up giving the speech by Zoom,” he says. “Still, there were so many protesters and they were so loud that you could hear them.”

Justice Alito says the marshal “did a good job with the resources that were available to her” and agrees that the evidence was insufficient for a public accusation. “I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” he says. He’s certain about the motive: “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft . . . from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Justice Alito says. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” On June 8, an armed man was arrested outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the suspect was later charged with attempted assassination and has pleaded not guilty.

But as the court has grown more conservative in recent years, the left has stepped up the attacks on the court’s “legitimacy,” including character assassination of individual justices, with little objection from mainstream Democrats and plenty of help from the media.

And look who not only isn’t defending the judges but supporting the threats.

Justice Alito says “this type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices” is “new during my lifetime. . . . We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.” Instead, “if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks.”

I remember a particular day at Cottesloe beach. Massive swells!

You’d roll yourself into a ball, get pummeled and go back for the next set. It was better than a carnival ride.

Below should put a smile on your face.

———–

Bondi Rescue:

Lifeguard’s Most Desperate Resuscitation | Bondi Rescue – Season 6 Episode 4 (OFFICIAL UPLOAD)

Welcome to my Country.
Now pay me.

Two blankets and a jar of rum?

Depends on what’s in the blankets.

Smallpox, if you believe Bill Shorten.

Scenario
If you were on a cruise ship and Telstra was a passenger hanging over the rails on the top deck after midnight.

Man overbooooooooooard. 🙂

This was meant to be the ‘official history’ of the Australian Signals Directorate … what happened?

By Mark Dapin
5:50PM April 28, 2023
No Comments

John Blaxland and Clare Birgin’s “unofficial history” of Australian signals intelligence, set to be published on Monday by UNSW Press, has an intriguing history. For one thing, it started life as an “official history” of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), and it was originally due to be published by ANU Press.

The signals directorate is the Federal agency that gathers intelligence through signals interception. Much of its work is done in secret. In 2019, Professor Blaxland was commissioned by the ASD’s then director-general, Mike Burgess, to produce a two-volume history that would chart the progress of the ASD through its predecessor organisations to the present day. While the writing team would exercise editorial control, the ASD would have veto over security issues (a similar arrangement to that which Blaxland worked under while writing The Official History of ASIO).

In 2020, the ASD’s new director-general, Rachel Noble, reduced the remit of the project by 25 years, so the narrative would conclude in the mid-1990s. Having excised the closing section, the ASD then claimed to be affronted by the opening chapters, which placed the department’s methods in their historical context via a survey of cryptography and communications interception from ancient times to Federation.
Read Next

Blaxland offered to reduce or remove the offending material, but it was already somehow too late. The ASD asked for its money back. The ANU agreed to refund only the unused portion. Blaxland and Birgin’s official history, commissioned at a cost of $2.2 million, was curtailed, at a cost to the Australian taxpayer of about $500,000.

Precisely nobody in the world believed that the ASD sought greater oversight of the project in order to conceal some top-secret success or hitherto unpublicised organisational virtue. Approximately the same number of people believed that former Signals troop commander Blaxland could not be trusted with matters of security.

So, what was the real problem?

Nobody who knows seems willing to tell.

Blaxland and Birgin eventually resolved to produce a historical survey of Australian signals intelligence generally, rather than the directorate specifically, with reference only to publicly available sources. The ANU backed away from publishing, presumably to avoid antagonising the ASD, with which the university is a partner in the Canberra Cyber Hub.

The full title of the book that has emerged from this intrigue is Revealing Secrets: An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence & the Advent of Cyber. It maintains the style, if not the imprimatur, of an official history, packed with facts and figures, charts and diagrams, and measured, unsensational judgements.

Blaxland’s work on ASIO was enlivened by the inclusion of interviews with former ASIO agents who had never had a public voice. Apparently, similar oral-history interviews were conducted with ASD operatives, but they had to be binned along with the rest of the data that had been gathered. So we do not discover if ASD officers of the recent past are worthy inheritors of the traditions of the field’s eccentric, sometimes brilliant local pioneers such as Florence McKenzie, a founder of the Australian Women’s Flying Corps at Sydney’s Feminist Club in 1938, who taught classes in Morse code for corpswomen and later established the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps. We do not know if the directorate is staffed with classists such as Athanasius Pryor Treweek and Professor Arthur Dale Trendall, who served with an Army cipher-breaking unit formed at Victoria Barracks, Sydney, in January 1940. Trendall was an expert in 4th-century BC Greek vases, with an apparently intuitive approach to code-breaking. Treweek is described as “a polymath; highly gifted in mathematics and linguistics and with a photographic memory”, who in the 1930s “foresaw the value of learning Japanese.” A lecturer at Sydney University in ancient Greek, he was also a militia officer in the artillery, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

They don’t make them like that anymore. Or, if they do, we’re not allowed to know about them.

What we do know is that scandal intermittently disturbed public perceptions of the ASD in the 25-year period that was taken out of the scope of the official history. We know there were allegations that the department broke the law by passing on intercepted telecommunications between the captain of the MV Tampa and the Maritime Union of Australia in 2001.

We know that in 2002 a dossier of complaints by a group of six senior officers was leaked to The Daily Telegraph, alleging a culture of extramarital affairs (between spies who’d have thought it?), incompetence, nepotism, corruption and law-breaking. We know that in 2018 The Daily Telegraph reported a plan for the ASD to monitor emails, text messages and bank records of Australian citizens without a warrant.

Blaxland and Birgin, denied the use of official records, have no further light to shed on these matters of considerable public interest.

There’s some engrossing material in the book, but its novelty lies in the extent of its detail rather than any particular revelation – although I personally did not realise that many of the successes attributed to Coastwatchers were actually due to signals intelligence and miscredited to protect the integrity of their true source.

By far the most interesting period in the history of Australian signals intelligence is World War II, and the directorate was not founded until 1947, so Blaxland and Birgin’s best sections have little to do with the ASD.

Meanwhile, the first volume of the really-honestly-totally-official-this-time history of the ASD, John Fahey’s The Factory, was released in February, complete with the author’s insistence that he had been “left to write free of oversight or interference” except in questions of accuracy and national security.

Between them, the two studies offer a sturdy historical framework for any enterprising researcher – perhaps with the help of a whistleblower or two – to build a truly unofficial warts-and-all history of the directorate.

And I suspect that might be the lasting legacy of the ASD’s decision to sideline Blaxland’s original idea.

May you live all the days of your life.

– Jonathan Swift

I’m not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

– William Hazlitt

callisays:
April 29, 2023 at 2:56 pm
Why would you do that, Johnny? Making sure everyone has a look?

Dotty Dot did it. And it was not the Butler.

Wodney, can you go and ask ladyboy what s/he thinks?

Attapuss’s white fat tum in full display cures many ills. And when he jumps up on what I’m reading, settles his two front paws on my shoulder and tries desperately to lick my hair, hoping that one day I will turn into something furry like him, he is beyond glorious. He then tries to make do with my face and hands

Gorgeous Lizzie. Just gorgeous.

The Voice will make all the fvcking difference here, too, won’t it!

‘She’d been scavenging out of bins, sleeping with the camp dogs’

Two-year-old Sammy had been fending for herself before coming into the care of a loving foster home, only to be ripped away after nine months. Top End foster carers speak candidly about the heartbreaking reality of Indigenous children caught in the system.
By Christine Middap
From Inquirer
April 29, 2023
13 minute read

When the little girl first came into her care, severely malnourished “like one of those World Vision famine babies”, Northern Territory foster mum *Clare knew only scant details of her life. “The case worker told me she’d been scavenging out of bins for food and sleeping with the camp dogs,” Clare says in a matter-of-fact way that doesn’t quite hide the horror of the situation she is describing as we sit at an ordinary kitchen table scattered with photo books.

The Indigenous toddler’s family situation was uncertain but it was believed her mother had died from alcohol poisoning, so this child, not yet three, had been fending for herself as best she could. But she was in a bad way.

“She had a big belly, like you see on starving children in Africa, and dry hair like straw,” Clare recalls. “She was quiet and withdrawn and didn’t say anything for three days. She wanted to see where I was all the time, she had to be near me.”

When she woke from her daytime naps she’d fly into a panic if she couldn’t see Clare. “If I wasn’t right there she’d scream, throw herself at the window or throw things at the glass like she was trying to smash through it. I don’t know what had happened to make her do that.”

At night she would sleep only on the floor, not a bed, so Clare slept on the floor with her for the first couple of months until she could move into a room with Clare’s own daughter.

And gradually this little girl we’ll call *Sammy grew strong and healthy and happy, surrounded by Clare’s own children and, in the absence of any close kin who could be located, local Indigenous people who took her under their wing. “We found the appropriate people to connect with her and I had their support,” Clare says.

More than six months later Territory Families sent through an 18-year placement order. Sammy, already an entrenched and loved part of this family, had a level of permanency. She could stay with Clare, the non-Indigenous woman she called Mum, and the children she called her brothers and sisters.

“She was my baby and I was her mum. That’s what happens when you have these children who need your love. You love them. Her needs were being met, she was happy, she was calming down. She was quite violent when she first came but that was settling down.” Then, when Sammy had been with Clare for about nine months, Clare was told a sibling had been found and that under kinship requirements the two children would have to live together. Clare already had her hands full with her own children and couldn’t take another child. So case workers said Sammy would go to live with another foster family and her sibling.

“She had huge attachment issues but she’d come so far – and then to take her from a loving home … It was very upsetting,” Clare says. Along with the local Indigenous people who had been supporting her, and the local doctor, she made representations to Territory Families to keep Sammy and facilitate close contact with the sibling.

“You can maintain close relationships between children without them being in the same house,” Clare says.

Their arguments fell on deaf ears. Sammy went to another foster family and she has since moved to a third family. When she sees Clare in the street she still calls her mum but “I swear she thinks I left her at daycare and just didn’t pick her up because I didn’t want her”.

Clare is one of several Top End foster carers speaking out about the child protection system and the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle that states Indigenous children should live with Aboriginal families and communities. It’s a policy that they all broadly support but they wonder how its strict implementation can always meet the individual needs of the small number of children caught in particularly complex circumstances.

Googleory, I think it would be an excellent idea if the public service sent you to Bourke to explain to the Aboriginal locals how voting for the Voice will change their lives.

Second that. They could then send him to Northam, to explain to the two clans, who have been feuding since the late 1960’s, how voting for the Voice will change their lives.

British talk show host- Female of course.

She’d make a damnfine Kitteh.

Tom says:
April 29, 2023 at 2:50 pm

[Elbow] stressed the government would set aside room in the precinct’s plan to ensure “someone in social and affordable housing have access to this unbelievable view” at Macquarie Point.
…
Homeless derro drug addicts are now going to be housed in government-built apartments on prime waterfront land with million-dollar views (as long as they vote for Abo apatheid and the end of one-vote one-value democracy).

Here in Melbourne the govt is building about 1000 public housing apartments in a prime part of Hawthorn (at the park end of Robinson Road near Scotch Hill for those who know the area). This is in Monique Ryan and Pesutto’s electorates which once were respectively prime federal and state liberal territories. What do you think the effect will be on local demographics and voting outcomes once those apartments are populated with Dan’s clients enrolled to vote? Similar shifts are taking place in other formerly blue ribbon liberal electorates. I’ve written here before about the likelihood of permanent liars/greens rule in the democratic people’s republic of Victoriastan and that will apply federally as well. I don’t think blackouts, recession, unemployment or any reduction in SFL incompetence and stupidity will make much difference.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve given them too much mystique.

Muddy, Of course, people have. It’s laughable to think that only those who have read that idiot’s rules would know how to act and behave in certain situations, especially politics. For instance, those old pros in the Roman senate would have used them all in their scheming and skullduggery.

Cass

There’s lots of pushback—at least in the US, which appears to be where we obtain all our bad habits from seeing the Australian left mimic American leftism.

Parent associations are pushing back hard in the US. Also, I recall one university (Stamford), but there were two recently that pushed back hard against free speech restrictionists. Don’t forget, that one of the most important agents in the transmission of opinions, ideas, etc. is Twitter, which has been largely cleansed of cancer. The US House of Representatives is doing an excellent job of exposing the left-wing rot. 

And how about Musk allowing some journalists to pour over the innards of Twitter and show the disgusting way the state has tried to take over social media in favour of the left?