Vicki wrote:

My reading of some of the estimates of writers some 70 or so years ago – before the invective started – is probably around 300,000.

Over time I have come to conclude that fatality counts in many instances of conflict are extremely exaggerated.

Why so? Because it’s beneficial in most cases to exaggerate.

If you are the winner, magnifying the number of dead on their side makes you seem brave and mighty. Doing the same on your side shows how brave you were.

If you are the loser, it can paint the winner as homicidal and nasty. Also showing you resisted bravely.

In a lot of medieval and ancient battles, bodies are almost entirely missing from mass graves afterwards. This is in countries where burial rather than cremation is the norm.

Cases in point include Towton – supposedly seeing 26,000 killed on one day. More than the Battle of the Somme, yet with club and edge and missile weapons rather than firearms.

A second example is the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Burial pits containing many hundreds have not been located.

Another is Darwin 1942, where “many hundreds” more have been alleged to have died on the Allied side rather than the 236 provable.

There are many more such examples.

To prove Aboriginal dead in Australia beyond doubt you’d need photographic or burial evidence.

Top Ender
Jul 12, 2023 12:55 AM

Vicki wrote:

She is a fine contributor but I feel she has an undue fascination with everything aboriginal.
Not every stone is significant or meaningful. Patterns do happen in nature without human interference and even it was done by humans, so what?

Is every campsite where you boiled a billy sacred? Or just the ones where aboriginals roasted a roo?

Earlier this year, Justice Michael Lee found ten imputations put forward by the national broadcaster did hold defamatory meanings following a preliminary hearing in November 2022.

This Michael Lee is good.
PS the ABC redacted its documents?
In other words, that’s obstructing the discovery process.
The next time someone has a legal stoush with the ABC they should redact their documents & see how quickly the ABC howls about that.

Meanwhile in Hobart:

Do you think the William Crowther statue should be taken down?
Yes 23 %
No 77 %
495 votes

Mercury but paywalled

He played for Manly in the 70’s didn’t he?
Or Newtown?

Crowther is the noted haberdasher who also championed Tasmania’s first bicycle lane.

Obviously.

I just can’t get over the ABC providing redacted documents during the discovery process.
Who precisely do they think they are?

Great article from the Daily Sceptic, don’t know how applicable to the modern human world it is but makes me think it’s what’s happening to the west. The meek won’t inherit the earth, those who have something to fight for will.
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/07/11/the-mice-that-gave-up-reproducing-and-died-out/

Tate is a fraud.

The Guardian can hardly contain its glee as it reports today that academics from the University of Melbourne, University of QLD & Princeton have issued a report saying nuclear is too expensive

Bullshit.

It all goes down to scale. This is evident if the costs of shale oil is compared to gas, conventional oil or tar sands.

Nuclear is the most scalable of all because it is the most energy intensive.

The Australian Electoral Commission’s war on democracy continues unabated:

A Federal Court judge believes the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) behaved inappropriately when it warned former federal MP Craig Kelly about non-compliant political advertising in his electorate but did not tell him the exact location.

Mr Kelly is being pursued in a civil case by the AEC for what it says were 22 contraventions of electoral law over advertising in the lead-up to last year’s election.

and

During submissions from the AEC’s barrister Christopher Tran about the seriousness of the offending, Justice Steven Rares today questioned the AEC’s conduct.

Justice Rares said failing to disclose the location of the posters did not reflect well on the regulator.

“During an election campaign, one would have thought your client would have been assiduous to tell people ‘you’ve got contravention at this location, you’re misleading people here, get it down or get it fixed’,” the judge said.

“I just don’t think that is an appropriate way for a regulator to be behaving, particularly where it’s saying to the court this is such a serious thing there should be a pecuniary penalty and originally an injunction … on election eve.

“Yet, you’re not telling the person who’s committing what you say is a serious contravention where it is, so that they can fix it — when they’ve expressed a willingness to fix it, if you tell them.”

Mr Tran told the court the maximum penalty was $26,640, saying Mr Kelly’s advertising fell “well short” of requirements that authorisation information be “reasonably prominent”.

Unbelievable. And far from being a model litigant. The judge should throw the case out, and award Kelly full costs.

Someone mentioned Rosanne Barr’s most excellent definition of a woman the other day.

Here’s the whole interview with Piers Morgan, but the ‘definition of woman’ onwards is a good snippet. Watch to the end.

https://youtu.be/1zzXZOICjWA?t=721

“The Guardian can hardly contain its glee as it reports today that academics from the University of Melbourne, University of QLD & Princeton have issued a report saying nuclear is too expensive”.

No “experts” needed to say that renewables are both too expensive and too unreliable.

You wonder why that elderly student activist who ” Fights Tories” wants to censor internet dissent.

What a goofball.

?w=683

What happened to him in the Romanian courts was complete bullshit and ironically is the best thing he ever did – he called out the naked Emperor.

His life story too, is nonsense.

He was never a great fighter (his record of fighting wins and losses changes like his self reported wealth). He is not intimidating (he’s an awkward goof). He’s not a trillionare as he has claimed. He’s possibly not even a millionaire. He didn’t grow up poor.

Roger
Jul 12, 2023 8:09 AM
The reason the left and the communist media have the hots for Net Zero is the bit they won’t say out loud: Net Zero means net zero capitalism and therefore net zero economy.

I think what they’re aiming for is a government controlled economy with the big corporates in the box seat.

Use the correct title” Fascism.

Here is an interesting article about applying the principles of financial risk management to public policy. A couple of tasters:

First, a clear chain of accountability should have been established. In financial markets, the actors might be an individual investor, responsible only to himself, or a trader reporting to his boss at a bank, both ultimately accountable to their clients, whose money they manage—but an accountability chain exists. For a pandemic, public-health authorities make recommendations to politicians, whose job it is to weigh the trade-offs—lowering infection rates versus social isolation and economic disruption from the restrictions potentially imposed. These politicians are accountable to voters. This is not an easy decision-making process, needless to say, given that everyone has different preferences and risk tolerance. The principles from finance can help politicians weigh these complex trade-offs. For example: evidence soon emerged from previous pandemics and wars that prolonged school closures reduce the future earnings of children from low-income families. This reality could have been weighed against the evidence that schools were not a high-risk pandemic environment. A simple cost-benefit analysis that makes projections about the future would have demonstrated, even to risk-averse policymakers, that many schools could have been reopened earlier. Instead, politicians tried to offload decisions onto the health authorities, “following the science,” as the saying goes. The accountability chain wasn’t so clear.

and

But pandemics and financial crises occur so infrequently that it’s always hard to predict them. They’re what finance calls “tail risks”: events considered so unlikely that they’re out in the tail of the probability distribution.

The tail risks that loom large in our minds tend to be existential—events that will kill many people, like a lethal pandemic, climate catastrophe, nuclear war, or an asteroid smashing the planet. An existential risk need not be a tail risk: famines and infectious-disease outbreaks once occurred with some regularity. They were not tail risks, in other words, even if they were catastrophic, because the odds of them happening were relatively high each year. We had to live with such risks, lacking the power to control them. But in modern times, technology and know-how have made them much rarer, moving them to the tail of a probability distribution.

Because tail risks are so unexpected, when they do happen, we often panic at first, and even turn to superstition, so that we feel as though we’re doing something. But such events can also be instructive. The financial crisis forced a reckoning in how we use models when dealing with tail risks. We can apply the lessons learned to tail risks in public health and other areas, too.

Of course, some people (e.g. Bjorn Lomborg on climate) are already using this approach. But if the nitwits in the Commonwealth and State treasuries had used these tools before standing at the top floor windows and hurling billions of dollars out during Covid, we would be in a very much better position than we are at present. As the author points out, blowing all that money for small returns leaves us in a much weaker position if we hit another speed bump in the next few years, which is quite likely to happen.

What we all here know but Prof Jim says it eloquently and decisively.

What’s unfair about the Voice referendum?
Not funding the ‘No’ case

James Allan

12 July 2023 5:30 AM

Last week in the Australian, Professor George Williams wrote a column lamenting the plight of the ‘Yes’ campaign in the looming constitutional referendum. One claim Williams made was that the framers of our constitution ‘set the bar for success deliberately high’ because change here requires winning both a majority of votes nationwide in a referendum as well as a majority in a majority of states.

I’ll be blunt. Not for the first time, I completely disagree with Professor Williams. I am probably the law professor in Australia who is most sympathetic to the unwritten constitutional models of Britain and New Zealand, where nothing is any harder to do than to pass a statute, but if you want a written constitution, then you are buying into the idea of locking certain things in.

But just how locked in are things in Australia? Well, compare the procedures for constitutional change here to what is needed in my native Canada or the US. There is simply no comparison. Change is orders of magnitude harder in North America.

In the US, you need a) to win a vote with a two-thirds majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and then b) you need to get three-quarters of the State legislatures to agree. Readers, tell me which lays out the harder procedural path, here or in the US.

Then there’s my native Canada. To change the constitution in the Great White North for most matters requires proponents to get it approved by a) the elected House of Commons in Ottawa, b) by the unelected upper house Senate, and c) to get it approved by 7 out of the 10 provinces (and only then if those seven account for over half the national population). Harder than here, I’d say. But for some special topics, such as jettisoning the constitutional monarchy, change in Canada requires proponents to get the approval of all ten provinces. All of them! The tiniest province of Prince Edward Island, which has a population of 157,000 all up, has a complete veto on this constitutional change in a country of 38 million. (Yes, a province with 0.4 percent of the country’s population has a veto.) Want to know why no progressives in Canada waste their time trying to become a republic? It’s because Canada has very tough procedures to change the constitution.

So, in contrast to our two nearest cousins in the Anglosphere, Australia has a very easy constitution to change if we are talking about procedural hurdles. Professor Williams’ lament about how procedurally hard things are for the ‘Yes’ campaign is, frankly, comparatively illiterate. Written constitutions are meant to be hard to change. Otherwise (and again, I like unwritten constitutions, remember), move to New Zealand or Britain. But amongst countries with written constitutions, ours is the easiest one to change. Convince half your fellow citizens plus one, and you meet the first hurdle. Then, also convince over half your fellow citizens in over half the states. You can call that many things but not ‘setting the bar for success deliberately high’. I suspect that what many on the left side of politics (so nearly all the university class) dislike is that constitutional change in this country was taken out of the hands of the political caste and given to regular voters like you and me. As a big-time supporter of democratic decision-making, I think that’s one of the best features of our constitution.

Professor Williams also claims that ‘the state vote often has proven decisive’. This claim is very hard to cash out in any plausible way. There have been 44 constitutional referenda in this country. Eight succeeded, and 36 failed. Of the 36 failures, 31 failed on the first leg – proponents could not get half of Australians to agree to the proposal. Pointing to how close some referenda came to getting to that 50 percent threshold is neither here nor there. They lost because over half of Australians said ‘no’. So that leaves only five referenda where the majority of Australians said ‘yes’, but the proponents failed to get over 50 percent in four of the six states. In my understanding of basic arithmetic, losing five referenda out of 36 does not warrant the use of the adverb ‘often’ to describe the frequency of such second-leg defeats.

I went on the record at the very start of the Voice proposal, back when the polls showed voters leaning to ‘Yes’ by two-thirds and more, to predict it would fail as its details became understood. I thought it would fail then, and I still think it will fail now because it proposes to undermine the core notion of equal citizenship on which liberal democracy is founded. I also think it will fail because it makes very likely the possibility of judicial activists rewriting the constitution at the point of application and because it will further clog up our already sclerotic law-making processes (only two other democracies have anything like our powerful upper house Senate), and because, at core, I have huge confidence in the good sense of the average Australian.

But as we’re on the topic of unfairness, when it comes to the Voice, how many voters realise that for virtually all 44 other referenda, the government fully funded the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ campaigns? Mr. Albanese says he’s not funding either side, but he knows that huge corporate monies have poured into the ‘Yes’ side. Heck, even many charities have poured in money to the ‘Yes’ side. Imagine if Mr. Howard had only funded the side he agreed with in the republic referendum. Right now, the inequality in financial resources between the two sides is massive. And this is deliberate, not unintended.

That looks a lot more unfair to me than lamenting the fact that you can’t change Australia’s constitution – one of the world’s oldest and one of the most successful – unless you can convince half your fellow citizens nationally, as well as over half of them in over half the states.

If we on the ‘No’ side didn’t know better, we’d say those on the ‘Yes’ side were already making excuses for what many of them now think will be a loss. Don’t be fooled. This proposal deserves to lose because it’s a bad idea. Changing our written constitution is procedurally easier than anywhere else in the developed Anglosphere, and maybe anywhere else, period.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.

Tintarella di Luna
Jul 11, 2023 6:58 PM

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
Jul 11, 2023 7:18 PM

You are both welcome.

Will try and get the goss on the semi-finalist selection.
At least two vanilla-flavoured duds inexplicably managed to make the grade.
This is usual in these Comps, so better not get too excited.

PS. Didn’t realise I made a word wall with the last post, it looked different in the text editor…

politicians, whose job it is to weigh the trade-offs
I’m not into this anaemic neutering of what the U.S. calls “lawmakers”.
Each representative politician is elected on the explicit understanding that they have personal convictions on law, life, liberty, economy, environment, and that they will act in accordance with those principles for their term, or term as minister. The idea that anyone- press, constituents, industry bodies, advisors, their own appointees, international Climate Clubs, made up things like Chief Medical Officers or National Cabinets- saying to them “OMG but this is an unprecedented once in 100 years pandemic/fire season/invasion” and then they fall into lockstep with the Lizard People’s dictums, is pathetic.
We should not tolerate it in theory, or retrospect.
Never forget.
Never forgive.

*Islam

Are “red pilled manospherians” advocating for male – tranny relationships just part of ‘Da Matrix’? Inquirin’ minds wanna know.

As soon as a man tells you to have sex with trannies, they’ve lost all credibility to preach to you about Da Masculinity.

The tail risks that loom large in our minds tend to be existential—events that will kill many people, like a lethal pandemic, climate catastrophe, nuclear war, or an asteroid smashing the planet.

The real problem is that almost all of these supposed tail risks are fake.

The Left has an incentive to declare existential emergencies at the drop of a hat, since they can use them to subvert democratic controls to get their cherished aims through where they couldn’t otherwise.

About the only one that might be real is nuclear war. Which no one can do much about anyway, so we should stop worrying and love the Bomb. I must watch the movie again, it’s such a fine black comedy.

Let me explain rosie.

Tate is a goofy, awkward fraud who is a likely CIA asset (as his father was), advocates for “masculinity” and sex with trannies, who went off script and got railroaded thereafter.

Thankyou Dot, Rollo Tomassi reminded me to watch the movie again. It’s been a while. For a moment I thought The Usual Suspects, but that was Keyser Soze. Same character though. Another excellent movie.

Steve trickler Avatar
Steve trickler
Jul 12, 2023 9:03 AM
Hey Dot!

[ middle finger ]

Dot is a fraud.

I don’t advise young straight men wanting to reclaim their lives and to be successful to bang transsexuals – gender dysphoric men in drag.

Hate me, but I’ll never be as bad as Andrew Tate, fake kickboxer, fake millionaire, fake red piller, fake Christian, fake Muslim and fake dating coach (he’s a cockroach, so this might check out).

Entebbe, Bibi Netanyahu’s brother gave his life.

Heard on the news ukeland is going to be rushed through the joining of NATO. Therefore guaranteeing it will cease to exist. The neocons sure do want a war with Russia. On the good side a name change will be easy for what is left. Nukeland. Time for the Russkies to target some neocons I think.

The Guardian can hardly contain its glee as it reports today that academics from the University of Melbourne, University of QLD & Princeton have issued a report saying nuclear is too expensive

I can’t bring myself to read the Guardian. Were these “academics” power engineers or economics/political paper shufflers?

Economic modellers.
The worst.

The Grauniad-moistening Net Zero Australia report actually came out in April. Written for wonks with the patience of Job, it is a masterpiece of green fantasy that probably takes stenographers a few months to digest.

Brim full of astonishing assumptions: by 2050:

• EV’s everywhere;
• A fully formed hydrogen economy – either thanks to the Sun, or by reforming natural gas and burying the naughty CO2;
• Agricultural practices transformed – forget fertiliser, meat, and high emission cropping;
• Australia no longer exports coal and gas;
• Australia no longer exports iron ore etc – but becomes a World Hub for green metals, because plentiful hydrogen (see above) and more efficient transport density;
• Apparently solar panels, batteries, and windmills never break down, or reach the end of their effective lives;
• The oil and gas industry voluntarily goes into care and maintenance mode in order to produce Satan’s Energy a few days per year (literally) when the renewable system is under stress;
• Luddites like Farmer Gez can get stuffed, there will be infrastructure everywhere – except for where “the Indigenous Estate” says otherwise.

In an unexpected flash of candour the Authors note: “The physical and social changes of the transition to net zero emissions are immense and are not necessarily benign.”

But Transitioned Australia will be a Nirvana – a beacon to the World.

Oh, and the report doesn’t completely rule out noocular: “We also only see a potential role for nuclear electricity generation if its cost falls sharply and the growth of renewables is constrained.”

The potatoes are out in force.

A good role model:

Your. Dad.

I would say I must have misheard Dover but probably not as the local newsreaders get it wrong all the time. English is almost a second language to them even if it’s the only one they know. One of the best things about the Cat is commenters delving deep into newsworthy articles, finding the original statement. I tell my wife about something only for her to hear about it a couple of days later and the story is reported with context removed or changed to suit the lefts view. Lying by omission is their favorite. I have been sucked in myself not checking.

give the benefit of doubt to the local farmer, housewife or schoolkid and get shot in the back/blown up a

The politicians and generals send soldiers to a place where the choice is to commit what is probably a war crime or almost certainly get killed eventually by a disguised enemy. And they talk about consulting ethicists.

Putting women into politics was the dumbest thing the West ever did.

In an unexpected flash of candour the Authors note: “The physical and social changes of the transition to net zero emissions are immense and are not necessarily benign.”

Funny…I think the Guardian left that bit out.

Odd, that.
But no doubt Team Albanese has a cunning plan to avoid the horrors and deliver sparkly unicorns instead.

Chatting to an Indian guy who is a vegetarian.He and his mate were wandering around Melbourne and saw a sign offering cheeseburgers at McDonalds.
Thought they would be ok .It wasnt until they had scoffed them that it dawned on them
what theyy had eaten

Wind farms vs whales.

Wind farms to be built in NSW Hunter and Central Coast regions despite community backlash (Sky News, 12 Jul)

The Minister for Climate Change will declare a zone in the New South Wales Hunter and Central Coast regions suitable for an offshore wind farm despite backlash from the community. Residents in Norah Head are furious over the lack of consultation and hold fears the project will destroy their environment.

The whale killing study the Feds are afraid to do (11 Jul)

The Feds have admitted that offshore wind development can cause the death of whales and other marine mammals, but they refuse actually to assess that threat for any wind facilities. So I here outline what such a study should look like. This sort of study is what they are afraid to do because it would give numbers to the deaths that are likely to occur, species by species.

First off, here is the Feds’ own description of some of the known deadly threats. In this case, the offshore wind activity is driving the monster piles that support the turbine towers, but there are others. The Feds say this in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Empire Wind project off of New York and New Jersey
…
The research question is simple: What is the mortality rate of harassment for a given offshore wind project? The Feds must answer that mortality rate question before a project’s environmental impact assessment is complete. They should also assess multiple projects, as discussed in the DEIS quote above.

I’m sure Mr Bowen is very concerned for the environment, so will immediately commission an urgent study for the NSW offshore wind farm effects on the southern right whale migration.

Ah, who am I kidding?

Good luck in recruiting for Special Air Service Regiment and Commandos after this one!

I love the liberal use of the word allegation, without any hint of irony.

How about some evidence?!