Today’s Oz: Virgin pilot relayed warning on Chinese live fire drill after it started Ben Packham 1 hours ago. Updated 32…
Open Thread – Weekend 15 July 2023
- Open Thread – Mon 24 Feb 2025
- Destroying Trust
- Open Thread – Weekend 22 Feb 2025
- Open Thread – Thurs 20 Feb 2025
- Open Thread – Mon 17 Feb 2025
Tonight, “Australia’s Submarine Gamble” at 7.30 on Sky. Not “gambit”? Looks a lot better to me than the 1980s Kockup…
Meg O’Neill of Woodside demonstrates understatement. “Russian gas virtually disappeared overnight.”
Wide open market for genetic characterisation of blood donors. Go into hospital as white and come out as abo.
This turd has absolutely no instinct on how to behave. I am beginning to believe he is in the early…
I’m sure the Chinese Muslims feel the same.
Really?
They involved the laughing gas guys in strategy?
🙂
If the current system, economic and social, fails to produce sufficient children on its own to grow, then there is something deeply wrong with that system. We ought to identify those causes and resolve them.
To do that, the property market needs to be overhauled.
I’ll leave that to Dot to explain as he’s been spot on regarding this for the last few years.
Wife has a Filipino carer smart hard-working but has bugger all money.She is studying to be a state registered nurse.She would like to become a proper nurse but the cost is $30k per year which she cannot afford.
She’s gone about this the wrong way.
She should have trained to become a nurse in the Philippines & then wait for the agencies that trawl that country to bring them to Australia on a decent wicket.
The myth is that it’s British & Irish nurses filling the shortages.
The agencies are loading up on Philippines, Thai & Colombian nurses much to the chagrin of those nations.
Can Airline Seating Get Any Worse? ‘A New Form of Torture Chamber’
Passengers have flooded the FAA with complaints about narrow seats and scant legroom; ‘It’s literally painful to fly today’
Like nearly everyone who boards a commercial airliner these days, Tina Dixon hates the tiny, uncomfortable seats. At 6-foot-6, she has a point.
“They are a new form of a torture chamber,” said Dixon, 62 years old, from Blackshear, Ga. “I don’t have a folding femur. Most people don’t.”
Passengers have been sounding off for years about airline seating—no legroom, thin cushions, too narrow. Now politicians are listening. A bill introduced in Congress last month to update aircraft evacuation standards would compel federal regulators to study seat sizes and spacing.
Tito Echeverria, who used to travel frequently as a plant manager for a manufacturing company, has had too many awkward interactions with other squished travelers. “You end up having to consistently rub legs with someone, even though you’re not really trying to,” said Echeverria, 32, from Ontario, Calif. “You’re just freaking there next to them.”
U.S. regulations cover aisle width and the number of seats allowed on planes, but not minimum seat sizes. The Federal Aviation Administration has said in court it isn’t required to set seat standards unless it finds they are necessary to protect passenger safety. In late 2019 and early 2020, it simulated emergency evacuations and found seat size and spacing didn’t adversely affect the process.
Last year, the FAA sought public feedback on whether seat sizes posed safety issues, and it got an earful. More than 26,000 public comments poured in over a three-month stretch.
“Airplane seat sizes are appalling,” one commenter wrote. “They are built for people from the ’40s and ‘50s. They cannot remotely accommodate a person over 6 feet or 200 pounds. It’s literally painful to fly today.”
“I’m 5 feet tall and even I feel too confined in these seats,” wrote another. “I feel badly for those people of normal size.”
The FAA said it is reviewing the thousands of comments it received.
Airlines for America, an association representing the U.S. airline industry, said its members are investing in technologies to maximize personal space, comfort and safety.
In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied a petition that would have required the FAA to stipulate minimum seat sizes and spacing. The court said FlyersRights.org, the advocacy group that filed the petition, didn’t prove that seat-size regulations are necessary for passenger safety.
The court did agree with one point. “To be sure, many airline seats are uncomfortably small,” it wrote. “That is why some passengers pay for wider seats and extra legroom.”
Victoria Carter, 37, said the price of regular coach seats is already too high—that airlines are asking her to pay Hilton Hotel prices for a Motel 6 quality seat. She said she tries to fly exclusively with Southwest Airlines because they offer plus-size travelers a second seat at no additional cost. A spokesperson for the airline said the policy is meant to accommodate all customers who purchased a ticket for a flight.
Dayana Duncheva, 39, said she doesn’t think she would be able to exit a plane safely in the event of an emergency, given the cramped space between the rows and bags sticking out from under seats.
“If you get caught on something, you are going to fall and you probably don’t even have space to fall,” said Duncheva, who lives in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. “And somebody is going to step on you.”
Michael Rodgers, 36, an engineer who flies about 80,000 miles a year, said he gets irritated when people seated in his row just try to squeeze by him. “It’s crazy how small that space is that they’re trying to get through, and it becomes really awkward,” he said. “Like, let me know and I’ll get up.”
Matt Conner, 34, from Medford, Mass., said “the most annoying thing is definitely when somebody leans their seat back. It immediately hits my knees every single time.”
Conner, who is 6-foot-3, said he nearly swore off flying coach two years ago after a flight from Boston to Dublin. A large, tall person in front of him reclined for the entire flight. “My knees were destroyed after that flight,” he said.
Barry Umbs, a 6-foot-9 retiree from Milwaukee, said he has gotten into heated exchanges with passengers in front of him who try to recline.
“I hate to say it, but when I get on a plane, I jam my knees into the back of the seat until they give up trying to recline,” said Umbs. “I’ve had people call the flight attendant and say that I’m not allowing them to recline. And the flight attendant will look around to the back of the seat and say, ‘You can’t recline because the person’s knees are jammed in already.’ ”
Jack Rogosin, 27, said he is always shocked when the person in front of him has the gall to recline. “I feel like, ‘Wow, are you serious?’ ” said Rogosin, who lives in Brooklyn. “I just roll my eyes.”
Matt Cronin, 53, said he tries to take a middle ground on the reclining question. “I only recline halfway,” said Cronin, who lives in Appleton, Wis., and flies about 200 times a year working for a medical-device company. “I’m very conscious about the back.”
Liddy Cotter, 25, said carriers should put more effort into making seating more pleasant, even if they have to sacrifice some profits.
“I understand they’ve got to make money,” said Cotter, who lives in Manhattan. “But at the same time, where is the humanity?”
From the Comments
– SOMNOLENT is a new airline startup that is instituting a new experience in flying.
Passengers will first change into a paper gown, be anesthetized, and inserted into sleeping chambers along with personal items that cannot be checked. The chambers are robotically stacked into the plane volume. Upon arrival the procedure will be reversed. This new way to fly will allow reduced costs since flight attendants, food service, toilets, and overhead storage will be eliminated. Brilliant!
– The article did not address whether the seats are indeed getting smaller or just Americans getting fatter.
– I see the answer as being BOTH
– It’s pretty scary that they’re trying to cram more people into each plane given that so many people are overweight nowadays. How do weight limits factor in?
– No politician has the courage to touch that third rail.
– Simple solution: Don’t fly!
To create more competition for jobs which suppresses wages. The RBA has confirmed this many times.
Our fkwit Govt’s and the RBA’s blundering approach was to first close down our economy then provide a deluge of “free” money (our Debt). While years of supply chain and skills development are wrecked. We now get to enjoy this inflationary loop for years.
The covid period taught us that citizens don’t even factor into their decisions. We are sheep to be herded. Mindless. So now that they have us living in this inflation shithole , importing a few more million from the sub-continent won’t even be a speed bump for them.
<blockquoteOh, Gawd, Lizzie’s on about ‘my Huguenot ancestors’ for the 177th time in recent memory. The Me! Me! Me! has risen from the murky depths again recently, including yet another reprise of Angela’s Ashes in the western Suburbs of Sydney.
Tell us, Lizzie, what fraction of your genes are Huguenot? 1/1024, perhaps? Less? Are you ‘a Proud Huguenot Woman?’ Do you feel an instinctive connection to the culture?
You are about as Huguenot as your namesake in the US is Native American. Why keep bringing it up? Perhaps it meant to impress somebody, as otherwise it is of no conceivable interest or relevance to anyone but yourself.
19
The only thing I have to say about this disgusting piece of either a hangover or a still-drunken rave is that I said my visit was in 2020, but it actually was in 2022. Early morning waking meant I got it wrong. I was busy saving a heritage church on that visit, part of Huguenot ancestry for a little unknown group, the Agricultural Huguenots, of the fifty thousand Huguenot refugees from continental Europe who fled in the seventeenth century.
Nineteen uptickers can go ferk themselves. And Johanna needs help.
oops. Must still be tired. I forgot the tail off the quote bracketing.
Only the last line is written by me. But you knew that. lol.
Hamtramck, Michigan: All Muslim Council Fires Two City Commissioners for Violating “Pride” Flag Ban
Shortly thereafter:
And since the council is majority Muslim there won’t be a peep from the marxists.
Wokesters should be careful about who and what they chose to declare to be beyond criticism. They tend to put good little woke marxists up against a wall and pull the trigger as soon as they gain power.
oops. Last para and last line.
I’m outta here for today. I have far better things to do than entertain nineteen idiots.
The SK rate is .78. They pay young people several hundred dollars to go out and socialise. Complete waste of money. JC the breeding decline is a longstanding trend, at least a decade, more like 30 years. Ask people why they aren’t breeding. There are many nations to sample and I don’t care about explanations that are based on psychobabble or political orientation. Nor is it just about breeding, the most recent generations are losing interest in relationships generally and even sex according to some accounts.
A related issue is the much longer trend in declining sperm counts and increasing testicular cancer. That’s fascinating and points to an environmental cause. It could be anti-androgens or jocks or too long sitting or … .
This is all very difficult to penetrate. It is fascinating that the primary evolutionary imperative, to reproduce, is being trumped by environmental causes. Many species will go to extraordinary lengths to reproduce. This is another example of how human behavior transcends biology(perhaps they also do that cognitively-a discussion for another day). Edelman was right when he wrote:
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, 1992
Of course any ancestry going back in one line is not genetic, even with a lot of local area endogamy (look it up if you don’t know). And it’s not something that can or should be used to claim any privileges. It’s just a personal link to the past, and there are many of those. It’s heritage. It’s called the grand sweep of Western Civilization, for those who don’t recognise that.
Mouth-breathers here take note.
Especially those of Dutch ancestry. Which if I recall seems to feature and matter here for Johanna, n’est-ce pas?
My reasoning is that they’ll bet on her femaleness drawing in enough votes to counter the Albanese effect in QLD.
Nope .. they’ll never get Tanya into the job even if she dumped .. hubby ..
the druggie’s moll needle is deep into the vote-herd vein(s) ……
I’m scarred for life. 165 kg walked past smiling, off to the toilet. Turned the corner, hospital gown open at back. Life is cruel. She snored all night. Other people complained not being able to sleep.
‘The land of the free’ has political prisoners in the ‘capital of the free world’- not for me anymore.
Crossie, I never said that Indian ‘Students’ weren’t polite nor hard working. I will say that many aren’t haven’t any particular academic attainment or financial means. I have attended at units where 10 or 12 Indian ‘Students’ were living in two bedrooms, all of them working hard and swapping beds to sleep when the others were out. Most of them were from poor villages where the family would put money in to get them here, in the hope that they would send money back and eventually get permanent residency or better. The end goal being to get as many family members here as possible.
The ‘studies’ that most were engaged in were little more than rorts for the ‘colleges’ who offered them. The mass migration program that both Lib and Labor love has the same goal, lots of people willing to work for less and so drive down wages and at the same time keep housing expensive and have an endless supply of cleaners, car washers and uber drivers etc.
Grey Ranga, not in a hospital gown I hope. They don’t leave much to the imagination.
Mme Zulu condemned hers as “disgusting”, and demanded a proper set of pyjamas.
US House Passes Defense Bill That Restricts ‘Woke’ Policies
Unfortunately it probably won’t make it through the Senate and Biden would never sign it, but it’s a start.
World Population – Political Statistics
Comment by Kip Hansen — 14 July 2023
Many of you probably follow Statistica – I know I get emails almost daily with some visual presentation of some data set from somewhere. Over the last year, I have begun to suspect that some of the illustrations and presentations have political motivations (meaning: seemingly produced for propaganda purposes for some group – or maybe just representing the group bias of the employees, owners, or managers at Statistica). This commentary is not about that issue, however. [If readers have specific examples of that aspect of the “Statistica issue”, I would appreciate a note in comments or an email to my first name at i4.net].
Here I just want to look at what has become a run-away bad habit in the field of science and data. Here’s the illustration whose purpose is, according to Statistica, to “Empower… people with data”:
This illustration comes with a caption by Felix Richter:
“According to United Nations’ latest projections of global population, India surpassed China as the world’s most populous country in April 2023. Having gradually closed the gap to China from more than 200 million people in 2000 to little more than 10 million in 2022, the UN Population Division predicts India’s population to reach 1,429 million in July 2023, surpassing long-time leader China by 3 million people.
In recent years, China’s population growth has slowed down notably due to its one-child policy before reaching an inflection point in 2022, when China’s population declined for the first time since 1961, when three years of famine had decimated the country’s population.
For India, which is currently expected to continue growing until the 2060s, its new position as the world’s most populous country will come with a new set of challenges, both domestically and internationally. These challenges include providing access to healthcare, education, and employment opportunities to an ever-growing number of people, all while finding its role in the global political and economic landscape.
Looking beyond India and China, the UN predicts a continental shift in population growth over the next few decades. With Europe’s population already declining and Asia’s and Latin America’s growth expected to turn negative in the 2050s, Africa is set to be the largest driver of global population growth for decades to come. By 2100, five African nations are expected to join India, China, and the United States among the world’s 10 most populous countries, with Nigeria projected to reach a population of half a billion before 2080. This demographic shift at the global level will require new approaches to managing resources, promoting sustainable development, and addressing issues such as poverty, inequality and access to healthcare and education.”
In my view, there are obvious outright errors in the data presented – if anyone wishes to chase those up, give us the scoop in comments.
One quick example – readers are encouraged to ferret out others – is the projection (allegedly by the UN) of China’s population in 2100. The chart shows that “The UN Projects” that China’s population will be reduced to ½ its current level in the next 75 years. Yes, dropping from 1,426 million to 767 million.
Even Chairman Mao couldn’t get rid of that many people that fast: “In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward that aimed to rapidly transform China’s economy from agrarian to industrial, which led to the deadliest famine in history and the deaths of 15–55 million people between 1958 and 1962.” [ wiki ]
How is China going to get rid of over half a billion people in just 75 years?
Nigeria is shown with a projected population in 2100 of over 500 million (half a billion) – a doubling of current population. That would be 1400 persons per square mile – or 541 persons per square kilometer. The current population density in the United States is 94 persons per square mile. I guess it is possible but I believe that national resources would be stretched exceedingly thin at that population level.
Those who wish can dig into the U.N.’s report (here’s the link to the Summary again). Interesting but not my issue today.
My complaint is this:
We do not and cannot have data about the future.
Hear one side and you will be in the dark. Hear both and all will be clear.
– Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Where’s Groogs? It’s Saturday. Surely he has some “thoughts” on steam cleaning.
Shush, Humphrey. We’re enjoying a troll-free Saturday morning sleep-in.
Coal power lifeline for NSW power grid
Angela Macdonald-Smith – Senior resources writer
The owner of one of NSW’s biggest coal power stations has delayed its potential closure date by four years to 2033 just as expectations are rising that Origin Energy’s huge Eraring plant will also have to run for longer as the snail’s pace of the transition to low-carbon energy takes its toll.
The new Czech owner of the 1320-megawatt Vales Point generator on the NSW Central Coast has advised the energy market operator that a full assessment of the equipment at the plant has shown the generator’s technical life will last beyond the original expectation of 2029.
“The plant continues to provide high levels of availability to the system and is expected to continue to do so through to 2033,” Delta Electricity acting chief executive David Morris said.
The decision comes amid escalating concern about the ability of Australia’s power system to maintain reliable and affordable electricity supplies as renewable power increases and as coal plants switch off.
Vales Point and Eraring are two big coal plants in NSW that were originally due to close this decade, but they could now both keep running for longer, putting at risk the country’s climate targets for 2030, including 82 per cent renewable energy use and a 43 per cent cut in carbon emissions. A third coal plant, AGL Energy’s Liddell in the Hunter Valley, closed in April this year.
A decision on whether Origin needs to keep running Eraring beyond its currently targeted closure date of August 2025 is expected between August and the year-end, after an independent technical report is delivered to the NSW government on the robustness of the state power system over the next few years.
The Australian Energy Market Operator will also provide data that feeds into that decision, including its updated assessment of the outlook for the supply-demand balance.
The independent report to the NSW government is due to be delivered in early August, while AEMO’s next outlook report is due at the end of August.
Shadow climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said Australia “can’t afford for Eraring to close in 2025”, and accused Labor of having its “head in the sand” about the risks to power prices and grid reliability through the energy transition.
“You don’t close one system down before a like-for-like replacement is ready to go,” he said.
AEMO declined to comment.
Supply gap
NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe has been briefed that as of February 2023, the shutdown of the 2880 MW Eraring plant could leave a gap of between 262 MW and 450 MW in firming capacity – generating plants that produce on demand to back up weather-dependent wind and solar power – in the summer of 2025-26.
The extension of the life of Vales Point follows the acquisition of the generator last year by private Czech group Sev.en Global Investments, which declared at the time it would “continue investing in these traditional assets as long as they are needed” before phasing them out as the energy transition progresses.
Sev.en chief executive Alan Svoboda said in an interview last year that the firm believed the conversion to low-carbon energy would take longer than some had anticipated. The incoming CEO for Delta, Richard Wrightson, who will take up the role next month, said last month that the current timing for the closure of Australia’s coal power plants was looking “very, very hard” given the slow pace of installing replacement capacity.
The debate over the shutdown dates for coal-fired generators has intensified recently as the difficulty and slow pace of the energy transition have become more evident, raising worries about the impact on power prices if coal plants close as targeted without replacement supply in place.
Delays in the construction of the $5.9 billion Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, and in building new transmission have contributed to the worries, while renewable energy capacity is also being added at about half the rate that is needed to reach the 2030 targets, according to one estimate.
Delta said that Vales Point, which provides about 10 per cent of NSW’s electricity needs, continues to be a key asset in the transitioning energy market, providing essential firming capacity to support the growing integration of renewable energy and helping maintain reliable power supplies.
‘Urgent need’ for secure power
It pointed to the delays in building new generation and transmission, as well as the earlier closure dates that have been announced by owners of other coal power stations, which include publicly listed Origin and AGL Energy.
“Given the uncertainties surrounding the capacity of electricity resources over the next 10 years and the urgent need to maintain system security throughout this period, Delta considers it a responsible step to advise AEMO of the availability of Vales Point power station’s capacity,” the company said in a statement.
No major additional expenditure would be needed to run Vales Point for an extra four years, but major investment would be required to run it beyond 2033, a spokesman said. He said Delta would continue to monitor the market before coming to a commercial decision whether to keep it open beyond 2029.
Regulatory requirements that coal power plant owners give 42 months notice of closure mean a decision could come in about mid-2025 if the plant is to be shut in 2029.
Delta employs about 550 people at the Vales Point power station and the Chain Valley coal mine that supplies it.
The power plant was famously sold by the NSW government in 2015 for $1 million to coal investors Trevor St Baker and Brian Flannery, who also took on significant contract liabilities as part of the deal.
Two years later the generator was revalued at $722 million, but its book value has since been cut again.
It worked for the Bosnian Muslims in Serbia.
I don’t doubt that has something to do with it.
Bear that’s what I said.
Morning all.
Things that cannot go on forever, won’t.
For instance, gutters uncleaned.
The prospect of the childless city
As housing costs soar, the exodus of families from urban centres is a threat to social mobility and cultural vibrancy
Jo Riley is charging ahead — the brisk pace of a busy headteacher. The small heels of her ankle boots clip the echoing corridors of her school. Once in her office, with its higgledy-piggledy piles of papers, decorated with postcards of book covers, photos of pupils and family, Riley’s demeanour softens as she admits to the stress and heartbreak of overseeing the primary school in Hackney, east London, that is expected to close next summer.
“I’ve said it was like a bereavement, but actually?.?.?.?it’s more like a terminal illness. Every time a child leaves, it’s another symptom?.?.?.?Actually, there is no cure and it’s just waiting. There’s been waves of anger, waves of real sadness?.?.?.?We are such a community?.?.?.?One of our core values is love.”
Randal Cremer is one of several planned primary school closures and mergers in inner London triggered by low birth rates, families moving away because of expensive childcare, Brexit, and parents re-evaluating their lives during the pandemic. The biggest factor, says Riley, is that “housing is just becoming unaffordable”. Philip Glanville, mayor of Hackney, calls it “the acute affordability crisis”. Retaining children in the area, he says, requires an intervention from central government, to provide “meaningful investment in social housing, match welfare support with the real cost of housing, and put controls on rocketing rents”.
Hackney is not the only area in the capital that is losing children. London Councils, which represents the 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation, predicts a 7.6 per cent decrease in reception pupil numbers across the city between 2022-23 and 2026-27, the equivalent of about 243 classes.
A future with dwindling numbers of children is one many cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, are grappling with. In Hong Kong, for every adult over 65 there are, to put it crudely, 0.7 children, and in Tokyo it is even fewer (0.5).
Even before the pandemic, Joel Kotkin, author of The Human City wrote a decade ago about the prospect of a childless city, saying that US cities “have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children?.?.?.?The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating ‘creative class’ — a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students — occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich.”
Jon Tabbush, senior researcher for the Centre for London, a think-tank, worries about the capital becoming a “more segregated city, less culturally vibrant and, in the long run, a less productive city. High house and rent prices causing poor and middle-income residents to move outwards and leave the city would likely increase racial segregation, and damage the city’s shared culture that has made some of the most popular music, art and film of anywhere in the world.”
Childlessness, wrote the urbanist Richard Florida in 2019, “reflects how certain neighbourhoods come to specialise in certain kinds of residents by income and stage of life”. In London, children are spread unevenly, with families moving to the outer edges. Data from the Centre for London shows that in the 20 years to 2021, there was a decline in households with at least one dependent child in the inner London boroughs of Hackney (9 per cent), Islington (7 per cent), Lambeth (10 per cent) and Southwark (11 per cent). Further east, in Barking and Dagenham, there was a 34 per cent increase over the period, spurred by low land prices and an enormous programme of housebuilding.
This segregation, where poorer families are forced out to the furthest reaches of the city or, in many cases, out of the city entirely, says Tabbush, “is one with less social mobility and more calcified hierarchies of wealth and class”.
Whether a neighbourhood can be all things to every age group is a huge challenge, says Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the Centre for Cities, another think-tank. “Some things are direct trade-offs: the size of property or noise,” he says. “It’s difficult to provide world-famous amenities and [publicly funded] schools.”
The presence of children in a neighbourhood shapes the public and private provision of local facilities. Enrico Moretti, professor of economics specialising in urban economics at the University of California, Berkeley, notes the “demand for improvement in school quality is positively correlated with the number of families with children in an area, while the demand for entertainment — restaurants, pubs, and museums — is negatively correlated with the local number of families with children”.
Yet children’s presence in the city may benefit all adults, not just parents. Gil Penalosa, an urbanist, describes children as an “indicator species” — designing cities to work for children means they work for everyone else too. Alexandra Lange, author of The Design of Childhood, expands on this point, arguing that if you design cities to be safe for adults, they would be “typically designed for abled young men — who can cross the street quickly?.?.?.?who don’t need to rest after 10 blocks.
“But that’s not most people. Changing your lens?.?.?.?to that of a three-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 16-year-old — not to mention an 80-year-old — radically expands what designing a good city means and allows a more diverse population to live, work and play there.”
Jerome Frost, UK, India, Middle East and Africa chair at engineering company Arup, agrees. Children encourage the design of an urban environment that is “safe, supporting walkers”, he says. “If you move to the suburbs, you’re travelling by car to the park, or driving from one enclosed environment to another.” Children can also spur innovation. “Kids have an irrationality about them,” Frost says, adding that they “are more accepting of change”.
In the King’s Cross district of central London, children clambering in playgrounds and running through fountains have benefited businesses, says Anthea Harries, asset management director at Argent, the developer of the large estate in the area that is home to Sony Music and Google, as well as shops and restaurants. “Corporates enjoy the vibrancy that children bring to a place,” she says.
Pockets of London that are full of offices, or mainly for theatre and restaurants, “can feel corporate, very staid, very regimented”, says Harries. They can also feel very empty when workers go home. The City of London, historically home to banks and law firms rather than children, has in recent years been keen to draw visitors outside office hours.
Chaotic energy is humanising, argues Tim Gill, an author and advocate of children’s play. Children “exemplify a degree of tolerance and conviviality, the idea that life is about more than work and money and restless grown-up intensity”, he says. “Children are a bit annoying. They don’t know the rules, but that’s part of what makes a city vibrant and life interesting.” If you exclude children, says Gill, you end up with a situation where generations are segregated and never taken out of their daily experience, unless it is paid for and curated.
More than 20 years ago, US sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark described cities as “entertainment machines” for the affluent childless. Today, Lloyd is worried cities are in danger of becoming “rarefied” — if families can no longer afford the city, neither can artists that create some of their cultural appeal. “Kids are a source of connectivity — as you get older and pubs are no longer interesting, that communal attachment breaks down,” he says.
Children are also a sign of a neighbourhood’s longer-term health. In Hackney, Glanville sees them as the only way to build “sustainable, future-proof neighbourhoods”. Areas that are full of “transients — [there for] five years and out — don’t get as much back from their citizens”, says Lange, who is based in the US. “Designing cities for families also allows cities to retain those 30-year-old men after they get married and have kids. That means they upgrade to larger apartments, have shorter commutes, pay taxes in town, use the public library, build community through schooling.”
Having children means people start paying attention and start contributing to their neighbourhood, says Lange. “These are people who fight for protected bike lanes, run for the school board, plan block parties.” It also has an impact on local services. “An increasing number of young Londoners being forced to leave the city by the inaccessibility of home ownership will also impact hiring conditions and the state of public services,” says Tabbush at the Centre for London. The capital has the highest vacancy rate for NHS workers anywhere in the UK, he adds, which is largely driven by a lack of nurses.
In inner London, a staff nurse’s starting salary is £32,466, which means they would have to spend more than 66 per cent of their gross pay to cover local median rents, Tabbush calculates. Problems such as this will only intensify as London’s population ages.
What about the children themselves? I recently met up with a friend and her teenager, who had moved out of London, swapping a two-bedroom flat for a three-bedroom house with a garden. The city’s buzz and mix of activities were magical, he declared, a description he had never applied to the fields and woodland a bike ride from his home out of town.
The late American urbanist Jane Jacobs saw pavements as safer for children than playgrounds, because the presence of adults will monitor or cajole them into good behaviour. Gill says children have an “appetite for experience and life, and want to understand how places work?.?.?.?and learn the art of urban life”.
Lange agrees. “They observe so much more in a stroller and on foot than they do from a car,” she says. “Socially, there are tremendous benefits from making your own friends on the playground and then, later, being able to walk to friends’ houses on their own, get a bubble tea, take the subway.
“So many of the ills of contemporary childhood can be compensated for by greater independence and access to more diverse people and activities — things that are more possible in urban life.”
At Randal Cremer, Riley is saddened by the prospect that her pupils could miss the proximity to central London. “You can walk out of your front door?.?.?.?and see the galleries and see the little tech firms pop up, and there’s lots of things that can give you sort of some inspiration that you can tell you there will be some kind of future,” she says. Riley is worried about social mobility if children have to move out of the area. “If they’re not living here, they can’t see what the possibilities of London are.”
She pauses and, for a moment, the sound of shrieks and laughter from children skipping and playing football outside fill the room. Riley rallies her spirits: “We’re going to make sure that the kids have the best year?.?.?.?keep it as joyful as possible.”
Oops Link – The prospect of the childless city
Haha, they’re now naming warmer weather after creatures from Hell.
Cerberus heatwave hits southern Europe (Sky News, 15 Jul)
Gaslighting to eleventy and beyond. The only people who’d believe this rubbish are the clueless and lefties, but I repeat myself.
Clear confirmation that Epps always was a Fed Glowie.
Sorry Bruce, my uptick didn’t respond so I tried again. You should have 2.
Sancho Panzer
Jul 15, 2023 9:46 AM
Mother Lode
Jul 15, 2023 9:01 AM
Just saw the story about the ‘steam cleaning’ lie in the Brittany Higgins cycle of myths.
I think someone needs to check in on Googlery.
Fvck him.
An Australian Comparison would be interesting!
Home ownership in Britain has become a hereditary privilege
Without realising it, we have chosen to tackle unaffordable housing by widening wealth inequality
The rules of the game for making the transition from youth to adulthood in the UK are — by and large — that if you work hard and get a good job with a solid salary, you’ll be able to pay your way to a decent standard of living. Socialising, holidays, somewhere to rent: if you earn more, you can afford more.
Then you hit thirty, and the rules change. People you’ve grown up with, people you might consider your income peers, start achieving milestones that require upfront payments larger than anything you’ve seen in your bank account, perhaps even on your P60. Lavish weddings. London houses. It can happen quietly, but all of a sudden you’ve unmistakably fallen into the yawning gap between those with and without parental wealth.
This phenomenon is hardly new, but the housing affordability crunch has made it much worse. Forty years ago it took the average couple three years to save for a deposit to buy a home in the UK. Today it takes nine, rising to 15 in London. And with mortgage rates rocketing, the incentive to put down a larger deposit is greater than ever.
Try as they might, young adults have not miraculously been able to save three to five times as much as previous generations had to — cue parents stepping in. Two decades ago, about a quarter of first-time buyers in Britain said their parents had given them a financial leg up on to the housing ladder, but by 2019 that figure was 54 per cent. Most of these cases involved gifting offspring a property outright, or paying some or all of the deposit.
It’s bad enough that millennial home ownership continues to lag behind previous generations, but the comparisons often miss this crucial fact: the slow and delayed progress younger generations are making towards buying somewhere to live has been made possible by increasing dependence on wealthy parents.
This pattern is self-replicating. Home ownership and housing wealth are the biggest drivers of the wealth divide within each generation, according to a new working paper by University of Bath economists Paul Gregg and Ricky Kanabar. By making affluence among one generation increasingly conditional on parental wealth, the mechanism we appear to have quietly chosen to solve our housing affordability crisis is to entrench inequality.
The results are already stark. Home ownership among Britain’s 35-year-olds stands at 47 per cent today, but this masks huge gaps between those with and without family wealth. The figure is 58 per cent among the offspring of parents who accumulated housing wealth from early adulthood, but just 27 per cent among those whose parents were unable to buy, according to my analysis of the Wealth and Assets survey.
The value of properties owned by people from poor backgrounds is also substantially lower than those with a better-capitalised bank of mum and dad, compounding the issue.
And this is not merely a function of higher incomes. Even if we compare people with the same earnings, those with wealthier parents are consistently more likely to own a home — and those homes are more valuable. By my calculations, a 35-year-old with parents who rent needs to earn around £25,000 more per year than their contemporaries with homeowning parents in order to have the same shot at buying a house.
The gap is widening. As affordability has worsened over the past decade, those with more parental wealth have been drawing upon progressively more of those resources to maintain the same rates of home ownership, while people with little family wealth find themselves increasingly priced out altogether.
Gregg and Kanabar calculate that on current trends, the strength of the relationship between the housing wealth of parents and their offspring — already positive and significant — is set to double in the next 50 years.
Over more than two decades, successive governments have looked on as housing affordability has cratered. Those that can, look after their own, but the problem with relying on wealthy parents to solve a societal problem should be obvious: not everybody has them.
Was sent trailer for the re-make of Mother and Son – I hope all the gags aren’t used up in the trailer
For “Grey Ranga” to help with recovery .. LOL!
https://ibb.co/RBRnVW9
It’s part of it but it doesn’t explain the decades long trend, that in Japan and Italy they are giving away houses, and that the recent generations are losing interest in romance and relationships. From what I read years ago economic considerations, and watching their parents work, work, work(especially true in Japan and probably China with their 996 working life), are making them think that having a family isn’t worth it. Today there are so many more options to live but the long term result could be disastrous with huge numbers living alone and socially isolated; a trend that is already occurring in some countries.
It’s actually 23 now.
For the CAT Gardner/Farmer
https://www.amazon.com.au/ECOWITT-Wittboy-Weather-Supports-WeatherCloud/dp/B0BM3BQ425?ref_=v_sp_product_dpx&th=1
Looks like another ALPBC woke production. Arthur looks like Felise Kapusi’s bro. Although I hope Arthur’s dentist brother is as greedy and conniving as the original. Could be worth a looksee.
Ha. They went there . They’ve race swapped Arthur in Morher & Son.
Lie, or go to gaol.
More stick, less carrot: Australia’s new approach to tackling fake news on digital platforms (via Phys.org, 14 Jul)
I think I can see where this is going. If you don’t fall into line behind lefty lies and fake science you will get the stick not the carrot.
Here’s who this critter is:
Yep, a Spacechook factchecker. Totally legit.
Sancho Panzer
Jul 15, 2023 12:18 PM
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
Jul 15, 2023 10:59 AM
oops. Last para and last line.
I’m outta here for today. I have far better things to do than entertain nineteen idiots.
It’s actually 23 now.
There seems to be a large number here who lack the ability to scroll.
A question of weather…
Never underestimate the quantity of delicious data that can be harvested from an aubergine-sized device on a pole in your garden. The solar-powered WittBoy (with AA battery back-up) sends weather information to a small, WiFi-connected hub in your home, which also keeps tabs on conditions indoors. The resulting graphs, visible on an app or the web, were like catnip to my inner geek: temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind, air pressure and UVI, all plotted live and stored for viewing. That data feeds into a map of local weather stations, allowing you to wonder why it’s half a degree warmer a mile down the road. Add-on sensors will measure soil moisture and air quality. Ecowitt WittBoy GW2001 Weather Station
It’s part of it but it doesn’t explain the decades long trend,
Dot, get in here!!
For CAT’s with money to spend on the best
Sondek LP12 Turntables
and they are just the cheap ones
Linn Unveiled a New $60,000 Turntable That Builds on Its Iconic Original. Here’s Everything You Need to Know.
The Sondek LP12-50, developed in collaboration with Apple’s former chief design officer and his new team, will be limited to 250 examples.
Linn calls the limited-edition Sondek LP12-50 “A full reference-level flagship LP12,” and with a price of $60,000, it should be. In that rarified strata, it hobnobs with some of the most impressive turntables around, like the new SME Model 60, the “entry-level” TechDAS machines, and other able contenders in the sub-$100,000 field.
There seems to be a large number here who lack the ability to scroll.
Red rag, meet bull.
Lizzie I represent one of those idjits. shatterzz, GreyRanga is one word. Please don’t have me remind you again. I may take exception and you rightly so completely ignore me.
Paying a couple of hundo is a tactic, finding out why you need to allows you to develop a strategy: it doesnt matter how good you are at tactics if your strategy is wrong.
As an example, your pilots might be the best in the world, but you lose the war if they are ordered to drop leaflets over Auckland when they need to be shooting missiles at Chicoms in the Arafura sea.
Mark Carroll, who I believe is the editor of the Daily Telegraph:
1) Several of my OS deployments were in a non clinical role in an Ops room
2) I aint used ‘nitrous oxide’ to give an anaesthetic in decades…. much better stuff out there now.
Notwithstanding medicines present pendulum overswing to the side of uniform groupthink, it did always concern me a bit that Teo performed procedures that no other surgeon thought were a good idea.
I don’t know if this is true but a couple of Europeans have told me that doctors in some European countries have more freedom in treatment options. In the Australian medical framework groupthink is inevitable. That needs to change but won’t in my lifetime.
Teo may have succumbed to celebrity hubris. A friend of mine told me that when a person becomes a celebrity they can become arrogant and if they don’t recover in a few years they never will.
I too am descended from Huguenots who fled France for the Channel Islands.
Who married privateer captains, descendants of the Dukes of Normady and even working class Irish Catholics.
Two people died how many more survived Dr Teos surgery?
Who killed moreDr Teo or the doctors who spruiked the Covid virus.?
Who married privateer captains
The men or the women?
Was sent trailer for the re-make of Mother and Son – I hope all the gags aren’t used up in the trailer
Lotza suntan in there .. seems to meet “our” ABC’s diversity quota .. LOL!
Two people died how many more survived Dr Teos surgery?
I know one.
The wife of a former colleague.
Their two kids are pretty happy they have a mother.
Teo operated on her brain when no one else would.
Over a decade ago.
The ABC diversity quota on opinions is one.
There is no diminishing the suffering of the families of the two patients.
What are the families complaining about?
That the cancer industry didn’t give them a Hollywood ending?
Or that Teo was the one at the end that they can focus on?
It’s sad to hear that the whole population of southern Europe is dead from heatstroke.
I watched the news and noticed the complete lack of hat wearing amongst the potential victims.
No doubt the bald succumbed first.
I forgot to post this earlier.
This week I drove through the roundabout where that bus crash was in the Hunter Valley.
The difference was it was the middle of the day.
The bus driver is so cooked.
Pretty forgiving set-up even though they’ve got a temporary barrier up making it even tighter post the accident.
I have 800 tattoos and can’t get a job — not even cleaning toilets
I can’t imagine why employers wouldn’t want this representing their business.
#metoo.
Isn’t everyone?
Dover – check you email squire.
If you don’t have a Teo type in Australia, your option is to fly to the US where there’s a dozen surgeons who do the surgery.
Might cost a bit more though.
Meh. Stick a high-end cartridge on a Technics SL-1200 and I doubt many of the audiophile snobs could tell the difference in a blind comparison.
Having rendered herself almost unemployable…
Well that’s put paid to a pleasantly mild & sunny, Saturday .. fairly hefty winds now buffeting Fairfield, NSW ……
I may have mentioned this before. A mate came out in the 90’s from UK. Anaesthetist on a ship in the Falklands War. He was rejected by the Medical rego board because they didn’t understand the methods he used learnt during the war. Next time he passed when he dumbed down the answers. Between that and being mucked about by the local hospital he returned to UK to head the ED at a major hospital.
True that. By the time people can afford such expensive audiophile equipment as mentioned their hearing is too age impaired to appreciate it. What is the point of it unless you also have a specifically designed room with only one chair perfectly positioned? In my early 20’s I knew some audiophiles and the sound, especially for instrumental music, was a wonder to hear. Nothing like today’s prices. What is happening today is more about showing off than musical appreciation. That is especially true of turntables because the vibration isolation required to maximise turntable performance is very demanding.
Nup.
My ancestors were quality, not peasant trash.
Two people died how many more survived Dr Teos surgery?
The cancers ewere inoperable, and even had the patients survived, they woulda been zombies.
Plus Teo heavied the families into the surgeries.
Most people avoid the Courts even when they’ve got a legit grievance, so these 2 are likey to be the tip of the iceberg.
Who killed more Dr Teo or the doctors who spruiked the Covid virus.?
Huh?
Possibly, Sancho.
Mine went to all that trouble to escape dratted Catholics and then ended up with Catholic descendants.
We had a NAIDOC assembly at school and they invited a local elder who pointed out that the acknowledgement referenced a mob who never crossed X River (school is 500m from north bank of said river) and another who never came this far east. This is purely XYZ country. The look on our indig coordinator (a blow in from central Qld) was priceless.
https://twitter.com/barstoolsports/status/1679584320346882050
There were National elections in late 1973 for a Whitlam created Aboriginal Body, Senator Bonner said at the time it couldn’t work because of the nature of Aboriginal people.
It appears that the Cook Government knows this, so they try to do things on the sly
to avoid embarassing outcomes like that seen at the Freeway Opening.
Arthur is rather ‘dusky’, shall we say. Does the ABC really expect its audience not to notice?
Other than that he really does have the Arthur thing down pat.
Possibly already posted, the WH Sniffer in Chief at it again. Even the toddler can see the Old Pervert is a creep and wants him away from her. From the reaction of her idiot parents, I feel very sorry for her.
https://twitter.com/WatchChad/status/1679696622672916480
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
And that’s how Tennis Elbow and Blackout Bowen will be humbled.
Anyone who still thinks the US has a chance and Trump can get back in and eradicate the swamp should just watch 13 minutes of body analysis of Gaetz masterfully cross examining Wray; and Wray not giving a rats arse because he knows what Gaetz is revealing won’t mean a damn thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytVGjtKg0yo
Dr. Campbell’s latest video on the WA report looking at COVID adverse reactions is well worth your time. Six months late but they at least didn’t whitewash the findings. Adverse reactions per 10,000 vaccinations were 24 times above those for non-COVID vaccinations.
Just sitting outside enjoying the sun and wind and a thought came to me unbidden but incontrovertible.
Malcolm Turnbull really was a massive PoS.
He is still a PoS ,of course. Just now he is PoS on a much diminished scale, which no doubt adds fuel to the PoS fire in his heart.
But if IF Trump does get in, every one of these corrupt devious traitors should be summarily arrested, sent to GITMO and placed on treason charges. That may take 10-20 years to come before a judge. I will be very disappointed if POTUS Trump does anything less.
Mother Lode
Jul 15, 2023 2:20 PM
Just sitting outside enjoying the sun and wind and a thought came to me unbidden but incontrovertible.
Malcolm Turnbull really was a massive PoS.
He is still a PoS ,of course. Just now he is PoS on a much diminished scale, which no doubt adds fuel to the PoS fire in his heart.
He wasn’t called Malcolm TurnBullShit for nothing. The best Laybore MP that Laybore never had and he should be ejected from what remains of the so called Liberal Partee asap.
Cronkite, They can’t cheat away 10% of the vote in the battleground states as it’s too big a nut to crack. It looks like it wouldn’t even be close in these states.
Probably not the ‘zero percent’-ers.
Probably the ‘bald spot’-ers succumbed first.
False sense of security.
Those who are not subscribed to Matt Taibbi ought to be…
The perverted Filth, diligently pursuing their agenda to get at the kids;
https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-quietly-removes-child-sex-trafficking-information-from-its-website_5396469.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge&src_src=partner&src_cmp=ZeroHedge
“A Climate Council spokeswoman suggests Australian households should be limited to one electric vehicle and public transport. “
Another moron.
ICE is superior in every respect – cost, environmental impact (including CO2, even when using fossil sources of fuel), service lifetime and waste disposal.
Run personal transportation on propane, and create the infrastructure to turn organic waste (including sewerage) into propane – the tech exists, we stop pumping pollution into the ocean and burying organic waste, get a fully sustainable, carbon neutral transportation fuel that has mature sales and distribution, transport, handling and safety systems in place, can be retro-fitted to existing ICE vehicles old and new for relatively low cost, has energy density and refill times comparable to existing carbon fuels, and burns cleaner and more completely than petrol or diesel.
Furthermore, existing sources of propane already exist, so these can supply the needed fuel until the sustainable systems can be ramped up to the required volumes, and the opportunities for export of carbon neutral propane are huge – like Australia, both Europe and the USA use this fuel for cooking and heating, and they too already have a massive investment in distribution infrastructure. “Carbon neutral” propane would be very persuasive in such markets, and green groups would have no complaints – we would be reducing both nutrient-rich waste water and waste dump methane production, and even get good quality organic fertiliser as a by-product!
If we must have subsidies, can we please invest in something like the above – something that keeps our options open and even allows us to “back out” with little cost, while still providing a way for us to be energy independent, reduce pollution and transition to sustainability.
JC, am I dreaming or is this saying that the Dems can’t cheat 10%?
Makka
Jul 15, 2023 2:07 PM
Possibly already posted, the WH Sniffer in Chief at it again. Even the toddler can see the Old Pervert is a creep and wants him away from her. From the reaction of her idiot parents, I feel very sorry for her.
https://twitter.com/WatchChad/status/1679696622672916480
Please, somebody, ANYBODY, just knee him in the nuts, just once. They’ll have ample excuse, It won’t kill him, it’ll keep him off the 2024 ticket for sure… it should have been done so many times before and so long ago, but get it done and no-one will have to go on pretending anymore.
Who married private captains.
Coxswains?
https://www.booktopia.com.au/sodomy-and-the-pirate-tradition-b-r-burg/book/9780814712351.html
“A Climate Council spokeswoman suggests Australian households should be limited to one electric vehicle and public transport. “
Another moron.
Moron – of course. But hell – it really illustrates what fascist creeps these people are!
Makka @ 2:22
If Trump wins in 2024, he will lay waste the ground. I see it being operatically epic.
The geriatric dementia patient and the cackler will be gone, and in contrast Trump will be like a Herculean champion.
Perhaps I’m dreaming, I think they can do say 2 to 3%, but not much more.
They can’t cheat away 10% of the vote in the battleground states as it’s too big a nut to crack. It looks like it wouldn’t even be close in these states.
They did it last time. Wray is not stupid. He’s not even worried.
They didn’t stuff the ballots with 10% of the vote. It was much smaller. I’m not counting the vote harvest. I taking about the add they did after they closed up shop late in the evening. That was never close to 10%.
Hopefully.
The Democrats and the Swamp have sowed the wind and should reap the whirlwind.
I’m with JC on the limits to voter fraud. You have a limited pool of possible voters. If you get more of them to vote, you limit the number of voters still in the pool of available voters that can be dragooned into voting by fair means or foul. That is why you want a candidate that maximizes turnout on your side. Biden’s election in 2020 stinks because he allegedly turned out millions more than Obama in 2008 and 2012, in a campaign which was uninspiring even to Democrats, which just doesn’t make sense. While Trump increased his turnout in 2020 compared with 2016 by 10M. Those figures alone should be setting off sirens to any person with half a brain, and only more so when you also factor in that they reduced safeguards re voter fraud in 2020 on the grounds of COVID. If you’re in Trump’s camp, maximize your mail-in and early voting, as well as your election day vote. Don’t let the Dems bottleneck any of that vote, or create the impression of vast leads heading in to election day. And so on.
JC
They can’t cheat away 10% of the vote in the battleground states as it’s too big a nut to crack. It looks like it wouldn’t even be close in these states.
My recollection is that in 2020, Trump came up with around 74 million votes, the largest number until then recorded for an incumbent. Creepy Joe allegedly got 81 million. The gap of 7 million is around 10 percent of what Trump got, even if you (dubiously) assume that Creepy Joe got 74 million valid votes also.
It seems likely that the Demonrats cheated by at least 15 to 20 percent.
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs research on Friday revealed a disparaging truth about democracy in America.
Only about one in 10 American adults can give democracy in the US a high rating, and believe it is representing the interests of most citizens, according to a new poll.
A majority of respondents say US law and policies are doing a poor job of representing what most Americans want, especially on topics regarding the economy, gun policies, immigration issues and abortion.
The poll reveals that 53% of Americans believe Congress is doing a bad job of upholding democratic values, compared to the slim 16% who say it is doing a good job.
Overall, 49% of Americans say democracy is not working well in the US, compared with 10% who say it is working “very” or “extremely well,” and 40% who say it is working “somewhat well.”
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – Former US Vice President and 2024 presidential hopeful Mike Pence and journalist Tucker Carlson quarreled on Friday over Pence’s stances with regard to Ukraine, including on the issues of religious persecution of Christians and prioritizing Ukraine aid over domestic spending.
“I did raise the issue when we were there,” Pence said during an interview with Carlson, when asked whether he raised the religious persecution of Christians while on a recent trip to Ukraine. “I raised it with the leader of the Orthodox church [of Ukraine] when I was visiting Kiev.”
The church leader assured Pence that the Ukrainian government respects religious liberty, while admitting that certain elements of the Russian Orthodox Church were being targeted, Pence said.
However, Carlson pressed Pence on the issue, asking how the self-avowed Christian leader could support the arrest of Christian for having different viewpoints. “You spoke to one person who’s clearly on one side of it,” Carlson said, pointing to reports of clergy facing persecution by the Kiev regime.
Pence affirmed that he would not support religious persecution, but highlighted what he was told by the Ukrainian church official.
The English contribution to world cuisine – the chip.
– John Cleese
It’s pretty much the same thing. They thought the vote harvesting prior to election day would get them safely over the line given Trump’s vote in 2016. As Trump increased his vote by 10M over and above 2016, they had to make last minute additions to totals in GA, PA, MI, and WI on the fly.
Remember that black athlete that was living in another state and yet magically voted in his home state unbeknowst to himself until he checked his voter record? Many such cases. Flooding the field with mail-in votes never requested that are then sent to addresses you’ve previously had will tend to do this given the appalling state of state voter records.
The Arthur casting aside, I wonder how their ABC ultimately chose between Denise Scott, Wendy Harmer or Judith Lucy?
There’a comment somewhere about Huguenot Ancestry that’s only got 19 upticks.
Would someone be so kind as to direct me to the comment?
Nobel Scientist says Climate Change is a Hoax
“Dr. John Clauser, the co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Physics prize has come out and said the whole nonsense of Climate Change caused exclusively by CO2 is an absolute HOAX. Anyone who has ever studied physics cannot possibly conclude otherwise. There is absolutely NOTHING that can ever be reduced to a single cause and effect in anything. It is always a complex dynamic.
Here is Bill Gates who I would not trust to walk my dog admitting that blaming CO2 is not without dispute. There is just nothing, even in market movements, that can be reduced to a single cause and effect – PERIOD! Perhaps he should have paid attention in physics class, assuming he took it.
One of our clients was one of the top 5 Australian mining companies. Their CFO lost more than $50 million in the currency. They ordered him to meet with me. He knew my track record and said perhaps it was just a coincidence. Finally, I asked him what his background was. He hesitated and said physics. I said GREAT! Now look at the market through the Second Law of Thermodynamics. His jaw dropped and said – OMG, there has to be a cycle. I said you got it.
Heat always moves from hotter objects to colder objects (or “downhill”), unless energy in some form is supplied to reverse the direction of heat flow.
The second law of thermodynamics establishes the concept of entropy as a physical property of a thermodynamic system.
Human activity cannot possibly create a one-way street that is the typical linear analysis that if the temperature rises by 1 degree per year, then in 50 years we will be all dead. That is like saying since the stock market rose 1,000 points this year, it continue to do so for the next 50 years. It is just an absurdity and thereby it is a HOAX for nobody in their right mind would ever make such an honest forecast of this nature. According to all this nonsense, we should have been dead by now.
Greta Thunberg deleted a 2018 tweet about the urgency of addressing climate change. Her tweet included a quote from an article that said an influential scientist warned climate change “will wipe out all humanity” unless fossil fuel use was ended “over the next five years.” Some have said that Great misquoted him since he claimed he never made such comments. Anyway, we are still alive – thank you linear analysis.”
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/climate/noble-scientist-says-climate-change-is-a-hoax/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=RSS
Biden’s election in 2020 stinks because he allegedly turned out millions more than Obama in 2008 and 2012, in a campaign which was uninspiring even to Democrats,
Joe has a handle on the Catholic Vote and the White Working Class vote.
Obama got lucky twice againstst uninspiring candidates.
I think Joe woulda beaten Bush in 1988.
A fun day 🚀 🚀 🚀
James Howard Kunstler
Clusterf@ck Nation
Fri, 14 Jul 2023
“NATO has lost this war. Biden has lost this war. The lunatic Democrats have lost this war. The uni-party warmongers have lost this war. The EU has lost this war. Ukraine and Zelensky have lost this war.” — Kim Dotcom
Somebody in the “Joe Biden” White House apparently thinks that the operations already underway are not enough to destroy our country fast enough, so a little extra push, such as nuclear annihilation, might get’er done.
By operations underway I mean things like mRNA vaccines stealthily deleting kin, friends, and public figures from the scene… decriminalizing crime… undermining the oil industry by a thousand cuts… liquidating small business… making little children insane over sex… flooding the land with illegal immigrants… devaluing the currency… queering elections — all of these things done on purpose, by the way. And if you complain about any of it, here comes the FBI or the IRS knocking on your door.
So, to make sure that a collapse of the USA comes on-schedule, there is the useful fracas created by our government geniuses over in Ukraine that creeps day-by-day toward a quick American assisted suicide.
Just to remind you, here’s how that started:
In 2014, the US fomented a coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
In short order, the Russian language was banned (despite the fact that Most Ukrainians speak Russian). A piqued Russia re-po’d the Crimean Peninsula. When ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (the Donbas provinces) tried to go their own way, Ukraine shelled and rocketed them for eight years.
That was the setup.
All of the above was absolutely unnecessary, you understand. Ukraine had been going about its business the best it could since 1991 as a shlub nation with an aged-out Soviet infrastructure, some US-sponsored bioweapons labs, and no energy resources. It had been collecting royalties for allowing Russia to run oil pipelines across its fruited plain — of which, a lot of gas was siphoned off in transit by bandits. Ukraine attempted to compensate for its disadvantages by being an international money laundromat, though that only benefited its oligarch class (and the extended “Joe Biden” family).
After “Joe Biden” got “elected” in 2020, and news of his family’s sketchy business activities in Ukraine and elsewhere finally dribbled out, Ukraine was turned into a giant grenade and “JB” (or persons acting on his behalf) pulled the pin.
NATO was dragooned into the quarrel as backup against its better judgment.
If the objective was to weaken Russia, as stated by one of our strategic geniuses, SecDef Loyd Austin, it didn’t work out.
Rather, it exposed the USA as a reckless global psychopath bent on wrecking every country it pretends to help — including the major countries in NATO.
Two-thirds of the world’s other nations then started backpedaling away from the US and its protective services to form an economic and security coalition around the BRICs group, as led by Russia and China.
The Ukraine campaign itself was a loser from the get-go, relying utterly, as it did, on US and NATO support.
This week’s NATO meet-up in Vilnius, Lithuania, showed how that’s going now: Not too well. The Ukraine army is shredded. It’s out of munitions. The US is also out of those very artillery shells most in demand. What to do?
The answer to that, as “Joe Biden” returns from Europe to a White House haunted by a cocaine-snorting ghost, is to send three-thousand fresh reserve troops to Europe and promise a bunch of F-16 fighter planes.
Said planes, which were introduced in the early 1970s, will come out of our country’s “high-mileage” inventory. These F-16s will require a suite of highly technical ground support infrastructure. They will not come with the latest avionics upgrades and will be no match for Russian air defenses.
Good luck with that, President Z!
It’s all fakery, of course. What do we aim to do with those three-thousand US reservists? Send them into battle in Priyutnoye? I’m sure…. At this point, we can only pretend to prolong this stupid and unnecessary conflict with such lame gestures. Germany and France know this is a lost cause.
The United Kingdom (so called) is such a mess that it literally doesn’t know what it’s doing in far off and irrelevant (to it) Ukraine.
Without those countries, there is no NATO, really. So, the whole vaudeville this week was a sham — led by a US President who was too puny to attend the opening night banquet with fellow NATO leaders, and too incoherent to make a point on departure.
Anyway, “Joe Biden’s” entire act is unspooling.
He is a prank that the Democratic Party played on the American people.
Sometime before Halloween he will have to exit the scene in disgrace, gruesome as the prospect might seem, with Kamala Harris anxiously draining vodka bottles as she awaits history’s call at the old Naval Observatory.
That will be a fun day in the USA, all righty.
Turd Case
Anything to say on the collapse of the “steam cleaned Reynolds’ office” myth? Dies this affect your absolute belief in every word that Mizzz Knickerless had to say?
Johnny Rotten Avatar
Johnny Rotten
Jul 15, 2023 3:33 PM
The English contribution to world cuisine – the chip.
– John Cleese
French fries (North American English), chips (British English and other national varieties),[1] finger chips (Indian English),[2] french-fried potatoes, or simply fries, are batonnet or allumette-cut[3] deep-fried potatoes of disputed origin from Belgium or France.
In the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand, the term chips is generally used instead, though thinly cut fried potatoes are sometimes called french fries or skinny fries, to distinguish them from chips, which are cut thicker. In the US or Canada these more thickly-cut chips might be called steak fries, depending on the shape. The word chips is more often used in North America to refer to potato chips, known in the UK and Ireland as crisps.
Thomas Jefferson had “potatoes served in the French manner” at a White House dinner in 1802.
The expression “french fried potatoes” first occurred in print in English in the 1856 work Cookery for Maids of All Work by E. Warren: “French Fried Potatoes. – Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain.” This account referred to thin, shallow-fried slices of potato. It is not clear where or when the now familiar deep-fried batons or fingers of potato were first prepared. In the early 20th century, the term “french fried” was being used in the sense of “deep-fried” for foods like onion rings or chicken
Trump stole the 2016 Election in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
Those 3 hadn’t returned a Republican since the 1980s, so Clinton just took it for granted that she’d win.
They didn’t make the same mistake in 2020.
Ed Case
Jul 15, 2023 3:40 PM
There’a comment somewhere about Huguenot Ancestry that’s only got 19 upticks.
Would someone be so kind as to direct me to the comment?
NO.
The test for the ABC is whether they can keep politics out of it.
If they can keep to plays on human quirks, comedies of errors, and so on without meanness, and avoid the political digs out, then best of luck to them.
Ed Case
Jul 15, 2023 3:52 PM
Trump stole the 2016 Election in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
Those 3 hadn’t returned a Republican since the 1980s, so Clinton just took it for granted that she’d win.
They didn’t make the same mistake in 2020.
More Crapolla from the resident Political Pygmy. FFS.
Skidmark splutters:
Anything to say on the collapse of the “steam cleaned Reynolds’ office” myth?
Sure.
The guy said the office appeared to have already been cleaned and rang thru to ask if he was in the right office.
If he says the office had already been cleaned, then I’d say it had.
The question is:
When?
Because we know that Higgins vomited in the bathroom.
Yet cleaner said it was spotless.
And there’s still the question:
Who sent him to clean up and why, if the office was clean?
Hungarian PM Orban: US could stop Ukraine conflict instantly
Fri, 14 Jul 2023
The US wants the conflict in Ukraine to continue and has failed to explain its reasons to NATO allies, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.
Orban told national broadcaster Kossuth Radio that if Washington wished, it could stop the fighting at a moment’s notice, as Kiev is fully dependent on the West in the fight against Russia.
The Hungarian leader was speaking on Friday morning, after returning from the NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. During the event, the US-led military bloc declined to extend to Kiev a roadmap for membership. Hungary has stood out among members of the alliance by consistently criticizing Western policies on the Ukraine crisis.
“If the Americans wanted it, peace would come the next morning. Why Americans don’t want that is a question that puzzles the entire world,” Orban said. “We didn’t get an answer at the NATO summit.”
At this point, “Ukraine has lost any real sovereignty,” Orban claimed, citing Kiev’s devastated economy, and heavy dependence on Western allies for funding and weaponry.
Justifying its support for Ukraine, Washington has accused Russia of launching an “unprovoked war of aggression” against Kiev. US officials have said that inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Moscow is a primary goal.
Moscow, in turn, has accused the US of triggering the crisis by ignoring Russia’s long-running concerns over NATO expansion in Europe, while fostering a regime in Kiev that is hostile to Moscow. The Kremlin perceives the conflict as part of a US-led proxy war against Russia.
Orban went on to warn that if NATO were to admit Ukraine now, it would trigger a world war. He also highlighted the risks incurred by Western states sending increasingly sophisticated military hardware to Kiev.
The Hungarian leader also accused Kiev of using moral blackmail to receive Western support, but added that he does not blame Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky for acting the way he does, as he is “fighting for the survival of his people.”
The prime minister predicted that the conflict will drag on, and EU nations – including Hungary – will bear the economic cost, including high inflation.
Ed…just take a day off for once, eh?
Because we know that Higgins vomited in the bathroom.
Who is we and where is the evidence? Head Case on the case? Head Case in the Bog? Head Case dreaming again? So many questions………………….
Meanwhile – House votes down amendment to block cluster bomb shipments to Ukraine
As US cluster munitions arrived in Ukraine, a bi-partisan vote struck down an effort to stop the internationally banned weapons’ transfer.
Meanwhile, every House Democrat and a majority of Republicans voted down a measure to strip $300 million of Ukraine aid from the NDAA.
The House on Thursday night voted down an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine.
The amendment was led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and failed in a vote of 147-276. The amendment received support from 98 Republicans and 49 Democrats.
The night before the vote, Republicans on the House Rules Committee voted down the original amendment relating to cluster bombs that would have banned the export of the controversial munition to all nations, not just Ukraine, which had bipartisan co-sponsors. The Republicans then added the narrowed-down Greene amendment, which was less likely to get Democratic support.
Narrowing the amendment to Ukraine made it more of a vote against military aid for Ukraine rather than a vote against cluster bombs, and there’s been virtually no dissent from Democrats on President Biden’s Ukraine policy.
Even if the amendment passed, it wouldn’t have blocked current shipments of cluster bombs as they have already started arriving in Ukraine, and the NDAA still has a long way to go before it becomes law. Both the House and the Senate need to pass their versions, and then the two chambers have to negotiate the finalized version.
The House also voted down amendments put forward by Greene and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to reduce funding for Ukraine. One amendment from Greene would have cut $300 million in military aid for Ukraine that’s packed into the $886 billion NDAA, but it failed in a vote of 89-341.
Gaetz put forward an amendment to cut off all military assistance for Ukraine. The measure failed in a vote of 70-358, with only Republicans voting in favor.
Kneel
Jul 15, 2023 3:00 PM
ICE is superior in every respect – cost, environmental impact (including CO2, even when using fossil sources of fuel), service lifetime and waste disposal.
Yes, but I would be tempted by the new Hyundai Ioniq 5N.
Due for release in Oz in early 2024, this thing boasts output from the dual electric motors of 448kW and 740Nm in standard mode, rising to 478kW and 770Nm in N Grin Boost mode – 48kW and 30Nm more than peak outputs of the Kia EV6 GT.
Hyundai claims a 0-100km/h acceleration time of 3.4 seconds in boost mode, a top speed of 258km/h…..
No pricing but about $110k is the best guess at the moment (Kia EV6 GT is $100k). Yep, a lot of money but those are awesome performance figures and only the very best ICE sports cars will do better – at a considerably higher price.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/2024-hyundai-ioniq-5-n-revealed/
OldOzzie
Jul 15, 2023 3:59 PM
Orban told national broadcaster Kossuth Radio that if Washington wished, it could stop the fighting at a moment’s notice, as Kiev is fully dependent on the West in the fight against Russia.
The Hungarian leader was speaking on Friday morning, after returning from the NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. During the event, the US-led military bloc declined to extend to Kiev a roadmap for membership. Hungary has stood out among members of the alliance by consistently criticizing Western policies on the Ukraine crisis.
“If the Americans wanted it, peace would come the next morning. Why Americans don’t want that is a question that puzzles the entire world,” Orban said.
Huh? No, it isn’t a puzzle.
The prime minister predicted that the conflict will drag on, and EU nations – including Hungary – will bear the economic cost, including high inflation.
By coincidence, I’ve sent a guest post to Dover on the subject of immutable truths in geopolitics.
There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love.
– Stirling Moss
The World According to the Greens.
Soon off the coast of New South Wales,
Among the dolphins and the whales.
Huge metal trunks with blades annoy,
the burghers and the hoi polloi.
No dint of anger stirs the Greens,
Their ire directs a wider scene.
Beyond the waves of aqua hue,
Tis to the air that draws these shrews.
What sorcery can be this dire?
That charge such educated cries.
A spirit on a battlement?
No, not such maliced malcontent.
Tis breathe that’s all that marks their sobs,
The millionth part – the least of all.
The food of plants – no more no less,
To green a greening planet’s tress.
Yet metal trunks will here protrude,
that will cacaphonise our views.
and mar all nature’s beauteous best,
And yet they’ll claim it’s been redressed.
(Mine, Wally).
It seems likely that the Demonrats cheated by at least 15 to 20 percent.
That’s crap.
Joe was the most appealing candidate [for Democrat Voters] since FDR in 1932.
Yeah they cheated just enough in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania to make sure of the win, but the reality is that Trump had discredited himself with White Blue Collar workers.
Johnny Rotten
Jul 15, 2023 4:16 PM
There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love.
haha. Indeed. I can’t attest to the latter but have proof of the former.
No.
Turd Case
Clinton threw the 2016 election away in those states with her own ignorance and arrogance. Remember the “basket of deplorables” comment?
He he. Comment at Teh Paywallian with 6 likes and 2 replies before being rejected. Gotta keep the weekend work experience kiddies on their toes.
I can do both and have references.
Not at the same time.
Turd Case
Perhaps Mizzz Knickerless makes a habit of cleaning up after herself after she has drunk herself silly?
Oh, no, the “entry CCTV” shewed that she was not nearly as drunk as she initially claimed. Maybe she is a creative writer?
Joe was the most appealing candidate [for Democrat Voters] since FDR in 1932.
Yeah they cheated just enough in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania to make sure of the win, but the reality is that Trump had discredited himself with White Blue Collar workers.
What on earth have you been smoking/drinking lately? Really. Your Crapolla seems to be going higher and higher these daze. The NDIS has a special programme for people like you. Sign up now. You know it makes sense.
Oh, no, the “entry CCTV” shewed that she was not nearly as drunk as she initially claimed. Maybe she is a creative writer?
Wrong!!
Security on duty that night stated that Higgins was “extrememy Drunk” and Lehrmann was relatively unaffected.
Higgins herself has no memory of going thru reception.
So, if you’ve got an argument, cockhead, take it up wirg PH Security.
Turd Case
LOL. That doesn’t make him a good candidate.
You rate him ahead of Kennedy, Clinton and O’Bummer? Let me state if first, Turd Caser did not kill himself.
Turd Case
LOL, the Mandy Rice-Davies defence?
Unfortunately there is there no evidence that Ms Higgins vomited.
Other than her word.
I was thinking the same thing!
Cripes, crotchless defending biden’s win and britternay. It’s like watching a poor guy with no arms masturbating with his toes.
Speaking of the old pervert, biden not crotchless who is probably a bot, here are some outstanding photos of the old bastard going the sniff on some poor kid recently.
SHOCK VIDEO: Finnish Child Terrified As Joe Biden Nibbles Her Arm and Sniffs Her Hair!
Unfortunately there is there no evidence that Ms Higgins vomited.
Having 2 sets of cleaners go thru the place made sure of that.
Jeez it’s hard not to absolutely hate the msm that fully deserves.
The name of the pressure group organisation that’s supposed respresent American blacks is the NAACP. It’s stands for
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Then, dear Comrade, it should not be surprising when many of those same 1932 FDR voters also vote for Joe!
On Higgins apart from her contortions with the facts or outright omissions. Wow, what an incestuous little world Canberra is.
Funny how she lands a job with a Gillard affiliated mob in Geneva. Noice, well away from the prying eyes of any NACC investigation and also a nice little brown paper bag if said NACC says the compo money has to be returned. Job done.
2 things, the ALP involvement in this is just festering like a carcass in the tropical sun and I have no confidence the investigation will be anything more than superficial. Apart from Reynolds finally having enough, the opposition are again proving impotent in a target rich environment.
“It seems likely that the Demonrats cheated by at least 15 to 20 percent.”
Several – including Bill Barr – have said “no evidence of wide-spread fraud” and I believe it. It was heavily targeted where it was needed, the swing states.
Why win 90% of California’s vote, when 51% is enough and they don’t even need to cheat in CA to get that!
Remember that in 2016, Trump won by less than 100k votes in several important swing states like PA. In 2020, he lost the same states, and you will notice that all the suspicious looking stuff that happened, like “pauses” in the count and so on, happened in those states too.
Then too, there is the “weird” stuff that appeared in the time-series of the count, and even in the chirons of cable TV news shows – updates showing less votes than prior to the update, and very few even blinked, let alone demanded an explanation of how that happened. And such things not only happened a large number of times with no explanation, but the “correction” always benefited Biden.
Oh, and remember that guy who said he drove a truck with hundreds of thousands of filled out ballots from NY to PA, and they all said he was lying, that there was no proof? In little reported news, USPS confirmed a week or more ago that the guy was telling the truth. But aww shucks, that’s old news now, innit? Move along, nothing to see here – trust us, we’re germ-alismses!
IMO, if Dems do cheat enough to win 2024, it’ll cause protests that will make J6 look like a picnic, and maybe even start a civil war. I hope they aren’t dumb enough or scared enough to try it, but they probably are.
Colonel Crispin Berka
Jul 15, 2023 4:55 PM
Joe was the most appealing candidate [for Democrat Voters] since FDR in 1932.
Then, dear Comrade, it should not be surprising when many of those same 1932 FDR voters also vote for Joe!
Yes. Dead people vote Democrat only. LOL.
And according to the village idiot, she was totally drunk when she walked through the PH security checkpoint, and also managed to balance on one foot while removing her high heels, but remembers nothing of that.
Uncle Ed really lurrrrves his favourite niece, he believes everything she tells him.
On Britnee.
So far:
1) claims of inebriation that caused her almost to roll through security, not true.
2) The state of the Minister’s office and bathroom now refuted by the cleaner’s testimony, yet were “lost” when Britnee was given time off from giving her evidence because of her mental state. (Which possibly comes when your case is falling apart)
3) The story of the dress’s supposed destruction, yet worn to another function.
4) Claims of seeing a doctor and being examined contemporaneously with the alleged assault – not true.
5) Deletion of text messages before handing over phone to cops.
6) Claims of crying for 3? hours in the toilet when she was at Steve Ciobo’s farewell lunch.
7) Alliance between her, her squeeze and Ms Katy, leading to a massive payout.
8) Second trial cancelled because of her mental state and yet in the middle of the first trial she was completing papers for her tertiary quals.
How many more…
RD, the bloke who accused Cardinal Pell also landed a pretty good gig with interesting connections.
We know about one cleaner, who found the office clean. Can you identify the other cleaner? Or did you make that one up, because otherwise, the whole of Mizzz Knickerless’ story collapses?
Occams’ Razor suggests that you made it all up.
BBS, that’s seriously good to my ear. I esp like the Blake-esque rhetorical questions in the midst of the flow.
Submit it to Quadrant, you’ll get some feedback at least.
Wasn’t that claim contradicted by the actual security footage?
J
When lifelong Republicans die, they immediately become DemonRat voters.
Ta.
But do they accept pseudonyms? ?
(if it doesn’t show up, there’s a grin there).
Any gut-feelings as as to how the bi-election today in Fadden (Stuart Robert’s seat) will pan out? A loss for Dutton will not be good for the Lieberals and a win the the Sleaze may indicate some approval for the Scream.
Thoughts?
8) Second trial cancelled because of her mental state and yet in the middle of the first trial she was completing papers for her tertiary quals.
How many more…
And now, completely recovered (after receiving 3 million smackeroos) and able to commence a UN internship on “How to scam a Guv’ment of Taxpayer money”. A UN Climate Change appointment is next on the Gravy Train to nirvana………………FFS.
Thoughts?
All over by 6:10 Pm.
Huge win for the Liberal Party.
It was a beautiful day here. The air temp was about 24. A slight westerly was blowing, so waves were tiny and the water was clear. Water temp at 17.5. It all nearly encouraged me to have a swim. Sad, now, that I didn’t.
The Danny Hobby defence.
Any gut-feelings as as to how the bi-election
Maybe a By Election with mainly normal people who are not bi…………………
Could swing either way.
The Quadrant prints submissions from the pseudonymous “Elizabeth Beare” and I do believe Joe Dolce is a stage name… so maybe… up to a point?
“Plongeuer della Barbeache” ?
“extrememy”?
“wirg”?
Have you been into mummy’s McWilliams again.
Wally Dalí
Jul 15, 2023 5:38 PM
I’ve found Joe Dolce to be worth the read. He has been a fine entertainer with a good serve of brain material thrown in for the ride.
You should see the affidavits he’s filed over the years.
Here’s a link to Fadden coverage
Speersy and some woggy sheila [not PK].
The ‘world’s largest ship’ sure is ugly.
But criticising it for that reason is a bit hypocritical, in a modern world full of ugly buildings and other manifestations of same.
As for the lifeboat issue, perhaps those with better knowledge of safety at sea could chime in.
Dolce’s longer essays, and his Memento-style time-bending takes on films and TV, are reliably fascinating. To be honest, some of his poems seem like he’s simply sifting information in dot form… but he’s obviously got a massive brain. Also just read he was schooled in the U.S.
I miss the hilarious Michael Connor reviews of theatre- it was like being there.
Anyhow, thus ends my afternoon on computer. I’ve steadfastly failed to write the budget for the season… but I have submitted an adoption form for a dog, maybe coming to me from Cairns. Although I felt a bit daft asking the foster carer to send a dog to the opposite corner of the continent, she reckoned 95% of the dogs her organisation re-homes go interstate.
Daily Mail. Clementine Ford complains she is picked on by misogynistic men, who say nasty things about her…
You can’t acquire a voice. Either you have it, or you don’t.
– Lauren Bacall
Someone should tell Tennis Elbow that.
Hoggins will get far more unwanted attention from men at the UN than she ever got at Canbra.
Excellent article here abut the trajectory of print media from rivers of gold to candlestick status in about 25 years:
The same thing happened all over the world. The destruction of the print media in about 25 years is one of the most dramatic and extraordinary stories in economic history. It reminds us that nothing is forever, and even the bulwarks of the economy and society can vanish in less than half a lifetime.
The article also discusses the how and why of the degeneration of old style journalism (although it minimises its many failings) and in particular, the massive impact that the Trump campaign and Presidency had on the digital world.
Fascinating stuff.
Turd Case
It’s 6:30, has the election been declared in the last 20 minutes?
I’m not sure anybody will be shedding a tear for either the print media or FTA TV. I, for one, will happily dance on most j’ismist graves.
13 candidates and the LNP Candidate has 49.7%.
Labor and One Nation on 13%.
How about Anthony Chisholm’s head?
How low set are those ears?
In other news, Kevin Spacey says his accusers “are motivated by money”.
Where have we heard that before?
LOL
P.S. Spacey denies Crotch grabbing is his ‘signature move’.
P.P.S. Civil War in Sudan.
C’mon Groogs. Forget Fadden. Think steam cleaning.
They did a pretty good job.
That second cleaner that went thru reckoned it was spotless.
Greens vote cut in half, Legalise Cannabis beating the Greens.
Ya gotta laugh.
Look out, Tony Barry’s on the ABC!
Tony says that there’s a lotta Millenials, so the Liberals only hope is to stand LGBTI Asians.
It’s well worth not coming in here.
Sorry, Dover.. I’m cancelling my sub.
Cannabis Party 12% in Pimpama, Greens 7.2%, Dopers offering a split ticket!
26 upvotes?
What page is this comment on?
Flounce alert!
Denise Scott, Wendy Harmer or Judith Lucy
With those names – of course it will be political. woke and smug.
Please stay Lizzie, we like you!
Oh grate – a feral by election. Just what we need on a Saturday night. Except when we don’t, which would be 91.3% of the time.
On a lighter note, a Sylvester Jnr turned up in the backyard this morning, looking the same as he did about four years ago. Funny – the way Cats can move makes me jealous.
Bear, the history of print media started with flysheets sold on street corners and became more and more concentrated and ‘respectable’ over centuries. I am old enough to remember when papers like the SMH and The Age were regarded a ‘newspapers of record.’ That means that they had considerable status as purveyors of truth, which was usually (but certainly not always) the case.
Growing up in Sydney, I remember the SMH and the Australian Women’s Weekly as apparently indestructible. They were the source of rivers of gold to their shareholders, year after year.
Remember also that while they were not necessarily rivers of gold in earlier times, newspapers and magazines, properly managed, were good businesses for a very long time. Centuries.
Then suddenly, the whole industry went from a massive machine to a smoking ruin in a couple of decades.
Cataclysmic.
“The test for the ABC is whether they can keep politics out of it.”
A test the ABC has already failed. The revamp is woke because the actor playing Arthur is mixed-race. I strongly suspect the plots will be laden with how waaacist Australians are, transgender crap and all the other current woke garbage.
Some movies and television programmes are best left as they were, and should never be remade/revamped. The original ABC’s Mother and Son was beautifully written and superbly acted, with the truly marvellous Ruth Cracknell and Gary McDonald. It can never be surpassed.
Here’s my prediction, the revamp will last one series.
Why is it Dover’s fault 26 people (or two or three who know how to manipulate ticks) agreed with a nasty comment?
I’ve had hundreds but I’m not bothered.
Britternay and her equally fat arsed fiancée enjoying the punter’s dime as they ponder their next con.
At this rate of weight gain he’ll need a 12″ dong to plug the skank in about 2 more years.
Sky has Clennel running the Fadden by-election.
Zap.
Think I’ll keep an eye on the AEC website instead.
Over 1M Americans are likely severely vaccine injured by the COVID vaccines
If Higgins applied for this UN internship pre settlement (or applied for any job at all) there are some questions that should be asked and answered.
I don’t think they are long term positions but they are very nice and possibly tax free into the boot.