Andrews was the worst, streets ahead of the rest. And my loathing for Andrews and in particular Vikpol has only grown since then.

The race to the bottom is the only race Andrews has ever won.

I don’t know if their redevelopments entail a ‘Frontier Wars’ gallery, but if they do place such skirmishes on the same level as the major armed conflicts, they will lose me as a believer.

Forensic evidence of any such “Frontier Wars?” “Stories my Nanna told me” don’t count.

Never understood the popularity of this guy.

I don’t know the guy, but would observe that there is a significant population who crave anodyne bromides that can serve as principles that make a virtue of following the path of least resistance.

As opposed to the principles that they may have been brought up with that might occasionally demand that they stand for something.

depository or repository?

If they are going to use it to start infusing the nonsense of the non-existent ‘Frontier Wars’ into our history then it would be a suppository.

Before I go…

Dr Strangelove is on SBS World Movies at 4:55PM.

BRS has quit 7 but will Stokes continue to bankroll his appeal?

This happens, and has happened in every industry everywhere since forever – and don’t ever walk around under the misapprehension that the ladeeeees don’t do exactly the same thing.

Bwah ha ha ha.
Last weekend we had dinner with a bunch of chaps from school.
The ladies were rating various celebrity Hemsworths etc that they would ‘do’.
The barometric pressure in the room dropped considerably when a couple of blokes started playing the same game, with very specific ratings for different ladeee attributes.

I still don’t get the BRS loss and what he’s come up against. In order to earn his medal for valor, the people deciding would’ve have spoken to numerous people around him – up, down and sideways. How does it come to this? Numerous people found him valorous then subsequently he’s a murderer? Seriously, WTF?

He was NOT criminally tried for ‘war crimes’ and therefore cannot have been found to committed them.

So how do the howler monkeys at “The Age” get away with this?

The rich and influential cheer squad who backed a war criminal

Pancho, was Margo Robbie mentioned? She’s about the only Hollyweirdette I can think of that I’d give more than a second glance.

Err, no.
The chaps seemed focussed on ladies with yuuuuge bosoms.

There you go, it’s no longer up for any contentious debate. John Howard was our best PM ever.

John Howard is our worst ever prime minister

Phillip Adams in the oz

I still think the critical issue is the issue of rules of engagement (&, by implication the Geneva Convention) in respect to battleground conditions in places like Afghanistan. The related question of repeated deployments in such conditions should be an essential issue explored, as is the culpability of senior command.

Yep. Facts:

Taliban/ISIS wear no uniform
BRSs mission to kill or capture hekmatullah, the dog who did the Green on Blue murder of 3 of BRS’s fellow soldiers
Ali Jan was an associate of hek and admitted to be a taliban by nein’s barrister nicholas owens
Afghan witnesses paid by nein; not eye witnesses: probative value nil
SAS witnesses not eye witnesses: they are the key.

What happened to hek:

Hekmatullah, the rogue Afghan soldier who killed three unarmed Australian diggers in Afghanistan a decade ago, is living in a luxury home in the capital Kabul, treated as a “returning hero” by the Taliban who released him from prison.

“I will continue killing Australians and I will kill you as well because you are a puppet of foreigners,” he said.

Is brereton or campwell or shoebridge or masters or mckenzie investigating this? Bastards.

Dr Faustussays:

June 3, 2023 at 1:02 pm

The related question of repeated deployments in such conditions should be an essential issue explored, as is the culpability of senior command.

Absolutely.
Unfortunately, the military and political establishments are clearly forming up to find individual guilt that exculpates any political and command failings.

Little people just don’t understand the relentless pressure at the top, where the buck stops.

I seem to remember a former PM proudly announcing that he had been patted on the head in Washington and told our military “punches above it’s weight”.
Which is another way of saying “over-stretched”.

Our spy secrets revealed: How the Garage Girls helped shorten World War II
Garry Maddox
By Garry Maddox
June 3, 2023 — 5.30am

They were known as the Garage Girls: a group of women code breakers who worked – around the clock in eight-hour shifts – in a shed behind a Brisbane mansion during World War II.

Out the back of the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur, who was supreme commander of the allied forces in the southwest Pacific, they decoded Japanese radio signals and decrypted messages to allied troops using cypher machines.

Officially known as the Central Bureau, it was a smaller-scale and less-well-known Australian version of the British code breakers at Bletchley Park.

Now a new ABC documentary, Breaking The Code: Cyber Secrets Revealed, reveals how the Garage Girls helped the Allies kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the head of the Japanese Navy who oversaw the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941.

In a blow to Japanese morale, Yamamoto died when his plane was shot down over Bougainville in 1943.

“The Japanese didn’t realise that the Allies had cracked their code,” the ABC’s political editor, Andrew Probyn, who reported and presents the documentary, says.

While others have claimed a share of the credit, Probyn says the Garage Girls deciphered a message that showed “where the Admiral would be flying, the plane he would be flying in and when he’d be getting to Bougainville”.

Probyn came up with the idea for the documentary about the evolution of Australia’s cybersecurity agencies after visiting the museum at the Australian Signals Directorate in Canberra.

He interviewed two of the last surviving Garage Girls, who were both recruited as 19-year-olds.

Joyce Grace, who finally received the Australian Intelligence Medal at the age of 100 in April, worked in a haberdashery before the war. Coral Hinds, who died in February aged 98, went from a cake shop to a cypher machine.

At the end of the war, the Garage Girls were required to stay silent about their work for 30 years.

“Their contribution was forgotten,” Probyn says. “If you can’t talk about something for decades, it’s almost history lost.”

The documentary includes a cable, deciphered by the Garage Girls and declassified for the ABC, that an obviously horrified Japanese officer sent to Tokyo headquarters after the atomic bomb devastated Hiroshima in 1945.

“The concussion was beyond imagination and demolished practically every house in the city,” it read. “Please investigate and report any information concerning this new type of bomb.”

Grace says in the documentary that MacArthur credited their work with shortening the war by two years.

“We must have done something special,” she says. “I feel very proud about it.”

The documentary reveals a more recent Australian cybersecurity success: how cyber operators in Canberra jammed the encrypting apps on the mobile phones of Islamic State fighters so Iraqi security forces and their international partners could travel safely on the way to recapturing Mosul in 2017.

They were able to activate Trojan software placed remotely on IS phones, shutting down their internet connection, when Iraqi military commanders needed support.

“Australian cyber warriors are clearly much better than many of us ever thought,” Probyn says. “From 13,000 kilometres away, they were able to rummage around the Syrian and Iraqi desert, identify Islamic State fighters then place what they call payloads on to [their] phones without them even knowing it.”

able to activate Trojan software

Capital-T for Trojan?

Pretty sure Troy was destroyed before the fall of the Mycaenean palaces.

Perhaps they peppered ISIS’ monitors with images of goats and camels in various provocative poses – chewing grass, drinking water, staring blankly into space.

Perhaps ISIS should have learned the Trojan lesson: Beware of geeks bearing gifs.

Ireland Plans to Slaughter 200,000 Farting Cows to Save Planet from ‘Global Warming’

In the past spent own time and their own money without any guarantees, deployed their knowledge, intuition, ingenuity, and often guesswork, to wring the last drop from their science to produce a world of easy abundance.

So comprehensive were their achievements that to their heirs it seemed the natural order of things.

And now we find ourselves in a time where our leaders and an effete elite think they can banish all those hard won gifts that underwrite our prosperity and bathe in accolades while plenty continues to rain down upon us like summer rain and sunshine.

Not normally a vindictive person (unless you live in apartment 19 of my building) but we may need to make some special arrangements to deal with our lacklustre politicians who face no consequences for their idiotic schemes beyond being prematurely ejected into subsidised retirement in their Game Of Swivel-chairs.

Obviously we should attach penalties to each scheme that does not work. Start with their pensions, but they are sometimes able to get around that by flogging access to politics. We must start to think body parts. Scientists estimate that there is a 10% chance that politicians love their spawn. (Not in the way that people do but in their own strange, alien way). Easy way to replenish available organs for transplants. If doing so directly is legally problematic then a small bureaucracy called The Department for Safe Roads could be established (with typical Orwellian purpose) to arrange car accidents to free their various tissues up re-allocation.

I don’t think this goes too far.

Cronkite

but is brain-dead about the screech.

What’s “screech”? Try and not pretend to be so with it and cool by using terms no one’s heard of. You’re a regional and will not allowed to get away with that.

And here’s the next big cab of the rank.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for most minors in the state, making Texas the largest state in the US to place restrictions on transgender youth’s access to critical care

There you go, it’s no longer up for any contentious debate. John Howard was our best PM ever.
John Howard is our worst ever prime minister
Phillip Adams in the oz

This is going to take a while to process. Give me a minute.

Nobody has picked up on the obvious flaw of the BRS judgement, that came in two (2) parts.
Part 1 was that BRS was obviously defamed. There is no dispute here.

The massive flaw is that the Judge ruled that the defamers had truth on their side. They didn’t!

=> BRS, as a soldier, was sent to fight terrorism by the Australian government.
=> The brutal fact is, soldiers go to a war zone to kill people. The terrorists were not distinguishable from non-terrorists.
=> The Taliban even had a reputation for using children to carry out suicide and other dangerous attacks, often recruiting them through deception.
=> Previously the Taliban themselves admitted to suicide killings by bombs hidden in an artificial leg.
=> In such a treacherous environment it would have been impossible to carry out precise rules of engagement without almost certain risk to the life of the frontline soldiers.
=> Thus effective rules of engagement should have ceded much decisionmaking to the professional judgement and much discretion, the special forces fighting in the frontline.
=> Furthermore, to be an effective soldier, it was the duty of BRS to instil fear into the enemy. That was his specialty.
=> Common sense tells you that experiencing death and mutilation from his deployment to the Afghanistan’s battlefront on six (6) occasions over a short period of time would’ve desensitised even the best trained soldier and made him more determined to inflict maximum damage where the treacherous enemy is very much all Afghans.
=> BRS was a corporal, subject to a long chain of command. It was the duty of those above him and ultimately the Special Forces Commander-in-Chief at that time, to manage deployment effectively.
=> A reasonable person should expect a competent Commander-in-Chief to be aware of the impact of battle on his frontline troops.
=> That BRS was permitted to serve six (6) concentrated tours of duty in what was generally known as a dangerous and treacherous environment and the knowledge they should have know about BRS’ effectiveness in such treacherous environment, should be substantial evidence of his commanders’ tacit approval of BRS’ actions.
=> As a result of the above, and especially the fact that BRS was merely a small cog in a longer chain of command, directed by all those above him; all responsibility exponentially moves from him to those higher up the command chain.
=> Much of this may seem distasteful to those not affected by being surrounded by Taliban terrorism, but these are the truths of fighting Taliban terror in their own backyard. BRS was sent there on his fearsome reputation as a fighter, by the politicians and the Generals. He is the product of Special Forces training!

I should expect that these critically significant facts self-evident to me, a non-lawyer would’ve been hammered home by BRS’ extravagantly paid legal team.

But in a profession notorious for imaginatively contriving antiphrasal meanings of words opposite to their literal intention, I’m more appalled that a learned Judge did not take into account that the truth of prolonged involvement in the frontline of Taliban terror, is completely different to the so called truth of making unjust judgements from the comfort and safety of his high bench. And BRS’ defamers know that.

It was BRS that should’ve been protected by truth, and not his opportunist defamers. This brazen injustice to BRS cries to the High Court to be corrected.

People should be outraged that BRS, sent to fight terror by politicians Australians elected, is now allowed to be cowardly smeared by grubs making money from sensationalism. Know this about the commie tyranny people have elected throughout Australia: they are playing with BRS today, but they will come after you tomorrow! That is always the pedigree of tyranny.

Johnsays:
June 3, 2023 at 4:20 pm
Nobody has picked up on the obvious flaw of the BRS judgement, that came in two (2) parts.
Part 1 was that BRS was obviously defamed. There is no dispute here.

The massive flaw is that the Judge ruled that the defamers had truth on their side. They didn’t!

Good analysis.

BRS was a corporal, subject to a long chain of command. It was the duty of those above him and ultimately the Special Forces Commander-in-Chief at that time, to manage deployment effectively.
=> A reasonable person should expect a competent Commander-in-Chief to be aware of the impact of battle on his frontline troops.

“Known…or should have known…” It was not as though BRS was a “newbie” or that the state of play was not famously known in the Australian corps.

And as a follow up: what were BRS’s instructions. This judgment was on the basis of conventional warfare and Geneva conventions. Did the instructions circumvent that. Every second Hollywood movie is about black ops, FFS.

P, lol. They’re just both round. The only two choices are squarish or roundish and he chose the latter. I wouldn’t put to much emphasis on that.
Square or round, he’s a first class moron and neither shape is going to hide that fact.

Cronkite wears round ones too, he once said.

Doc Evatt glasses. Chech out A.A. and H.V.E.

Evatt ended his days as Chief Justice of New South Wales. Critics described him as “incontinent” and “barking mad.”