Watched my honeyeater kick the kiddies out of the nest and they’re gone. I love nature.
Open Thread – Weekend 15 July 2023
- Open Thread – Mon 25 Nov 2024
- The more you gets the less you eats
- Open Thread – Weekend 23 Nov 2024
- Open Thread – Thurs 21 Nov 2024
- Open Thread – Mon 18 Nov 2024
In local bird news, just watched my resident rail pass the window with a tiny black puffball chick in its…
Looks like the phantom downticker found a new victim. How childish can you get? So be it, I can live…
Exactly. How different would it be if we had an enemy choose our system of power generation?
Why are we fixing something that isn’t broken? And then why are we choosing the least effective and the costliest…
All wedding, no marriage.
Yep.
I know chicks who deliberately planned their wedding to fall on Grand Final Day to see what level of resistance they encountered, and who deployed the ‘If you really loved me, or If this wedding is important to you – to US – you wouldn’t care about the stupid football‘ lines.
As a contrast, no woman ever has scheduled their wedding on their own mother’s birthday.
The best weddings I’ve been to were my daughter’s in the backyard, son’s in a park and SiL’s in a farmyard. All were a celebration of marriage not like mine which was FiL discharging social obligations with lobster and French champagne flowing freely.
She’s Canadian, now backpacking in South America.
And just like that, Elbow cancelled the apartheid referendum to avoid his doomed “leadership” being ritually humiliated. You watch.
As most of them live off men, when you’ve lost women, you have lost the war and are on your way to losing government.
The best weddings I have been to are nuptial masses, every outdoor wedding with a celebrant seem imitation to me.
That disgruntled bridge story first surfaced in 2018.
I suspect it might be not quite true.
Why is it getting a run again in 2023?
There’s your problem, right there.
I agree with the hey youing.
Michigan hair salon under investigation after owner refuses to serve transgender clients
I know chicks who deliberately planned their wedding to fall on Grand Final Day
I went to one that was on for Cox Plate day with the race itself being on during the ceremony.
She was an absolute see you next Tuesday.
The marriage wrapped quicker than mine.
From the Oz article on da Voice polling tanking for the Yessers:-
This is the equivalent of the footy coach, finding himself six goals down at three-quarter time after a ten goal blitz from the opposition in the third quarter, saying, “No problems. We’ve been ahead for most of the game.”
calli
Jul 17, 2023 6:09 AM
The BBC just shrieked at me that over 60,000 people in Europe DIED FROM HEAT last summer.
Despicable.
Katie Hopkins
I recognise them too, under the category
‘I don’t care’
Also cross referenced under
‘Why?’
Tasmania is the first state to officially recognise those who identify as asexual, adding the A to LGBTIQ+
I don’t see any wiggle room there. He either wasn’t listening to the question that was asked (too focused on getting to his rehearsed lines) or he just didn’t care what was asked. Either way, he just torpedoed his presidential campaign and likely won’t hit the donor threshold to even participate in the GOP debate.
Every time.
I remember the 2003 heat wave.
Someone I knew was living in Paris where the buildings are not designed for hot weather, no air-conditioning, windows that don’t open etc.
They said people were dumping the bodies of elderly relatives in the street to avoid paying funeral costs.
Heat-related mortality took the lives of over 70,000 Europeans in the summer of 2003 amid heat waves, researchers found in 2008.
probably just explaining away Vaxx deaths
I have a feeling I have heard the bride story before too, but I am willing to concede their might be more than one.
A relative of Mrs P’s did the same, although stopped short of hitting up guests for a contribution. She did replicate the blow-up with the maid-of-honour though. Childhood friends but they still don’t speak to each other years later. She actually wore the tag “Bridezilla” with pride.
The “Kardashian for a day” behaviour continued until the husband crawled under the fence and escaped five years in.
The story has a happy ending, though. She is now almost totally no speaks with us as well because we didn’t pander to her never ending demands.
Just one word change is necessary to make your comment unimprovable, Wally.
Air pollution: 38,000 deaths per yer worldwide, including 48,000 in France…
– The European Scientist
French overachievers?
2018. GUARDIAN GOES ALL IN.
Invisible killer’: fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds
who are now more worried about making their own family’s ends meet than Albo’s big segregation idea*.
*with reparations.
Oh and I didn’t know who Jane Birkin was.
Tim Blair in today’s Tele:
THIS ONE’S FOR THE GALS ONLY,
SORRY GENTLEMEN
TIM BLAIR
Nostalgia comes at you fast these days.
In a delightfully retro gesture, the Walkley Awards people recently
announced that their 2023 prize for excellence in journalism would be
given only to a female candidate.
“The directors will only consider women nominees,” the Walkley
Foundation declared, “as they seek to redress the gender balance in
recipients.”
How quaint! This adorably tokenistic move will remind old-timers of
when, a decade or so ago, male bosses at various leftist media outlets gave
themselves time off on International Women’s Days and allowed female
staffers to stand in as editors.
Golf courses in Sydney and Melbourne were unusually busy on those
occasions.
In 2017, the ABC celebrated global lady day by making women work harder
than usual. “Commencing at 6am with ABC News Breakfast,” the
broadcaster announced, “an all-female line-up will lead the major radio
and TV news bulletins and current affairs programs and present across the
day on NewsRadio and News 24.”
It’s International Women’s Day, so let’s have the blokes get a paid day of
leave. Makes sense.
But a lot has changed since a few XY chromosome desk jockeys and panel
monkeys stepped aside for their XX colleagues. Many previously maledominated areas – particularly media, despite the Walkley Foundation’s
touching gender imbalance concerns – have been impressively equalised.
The contest now is for space in previously female-dominated areas. Last
week, the Miss Netherlands beauty pageant title was awarded to trans
woman (or biological male, in other words) Rikkie Valerie Kolle.
Talk about redressing a gender balance in recipients. The Walkley’s
excellence in journalism prize – this year open only to female entrants –
has already been won by women candidates seven times since the category
was established in 1992.
The Miss Netherlands pageant, however, was founded way back 1929 – and
not even once before has any man stood tearfully triumphant on the big
night’s stage, a vision of jubilant femininity in his victory tiara and
sequined conquest sash.
By Walkley standards, then, Netherlands beauty contest judges have some
work ahead of them.
By normal standards, though, what the screaming hell is going on here?
How is a biological male who was surgically reconstructed by male doctors
and wouldn’t even rate among his country’s top ten prettiest soccer
players, somehow cleaning up in a nationwide glam event for gals? Why is
this happening?
“Because it’s trendy,” observes Fox News’ gifted gag writer Jim Treacher
in a recent Substack column. “Because it’s woke. Because words like
‘beauty’ and ‘woman’ have been rendered meaningless by insane,
vindictive activists.
“In other words, because it’s 2023.
“And here’s another fun fact: Kolle only had ‘gender-affirmation surgery’
— AKA the surgical removal of his penis and testicles — in January of this
year. He’s been a ‘woman’ for just six months, and he’s already a beauty
queen.
“That’s one hell of a rookie season!”
Hats off to Kolle. And other adornments besides. Understandably, oldschool feminists now marvel at how quickly historic advances for women
are being erased.
“I grew up in a sexist society which required women to lie constantly – to
themselves and others – if they were to be accepted and acceptable,” the
UK’s Julie Burchill wrote in the wake of Kolle’s success.
“Then came a brief moment of honesty – and now the required lies again,
even more misogynist than before.”
Australian columnist Julie Szego cited one of those required lies earlier
this year when describing the challenges of covering gender issues in a
time of woke.
After a column on the topic was knocked back by The Age, Szego
announced a new personal site where she would be able to write about
gender identity politics “without the copy being rendered unreadable by a
committee of woke journalists redacting words they deem incendiary,
such as ‘male’.”
This is presently the case. If someone says they’re female, despite all
available historical and biological evidence to the contrary, it is indeed
now an offence to mention any of their masculine elements in masculine
terms.
Which explains why the impossible phrase “her penis” is now often used
across media, notably last year in a UK Metro headline: “Ex-soldier
exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public.”
Julie Szego, a two-decade Age contributor, was subsequently canned at The
Age. By a male, as it happens.
She should enter that journalism contest they’re having over at the
Walkleys. Get in quick, before biological women are banned.
Daily Mail is running with the tree planting story.
Roger Cook is the best thing the WA Liberal Party has going for it.
Ransom isn’t compensation.
And you don’t have to be held hostage in Sweden to see Stockholm syndrome. In some cases it can overwhelm entire nations.
Thanks BBS- i might sound a tad unhinged on the fringe, I’ve had a funny kind of year so far. Been trying to devote myself to study again after a looong layoff, piano, Finnish and seeing if i’ve got any poetry inside me- but realizing I’ve got a constant musical accompaniment running in my head, which is kinda hobbling my progress. As a child I can remember it was like mental echolalia from whatever was happening in my day- lambs bleating, harvester rack squeaks, beeps from the draft reset on the plough- now it’s more complex and noisy, anything from the Neil Young songs we were thrashing in the cover band to the Decca recording of Danse Macabre. It’s not keeping me from sleep, but it’s there when I put my head on the pillow… very strange.
And, I’ve been so damn angry lately. With the wife and kids away for the week and no proper dog to snog and playfight with, I’ve had the TV on for company, and everything sh*ts me. ABC and SBS news are rubbish, SBS was applauding cluster bombs for Ukraine yesterday, now they’re gung ho for AI murder drones and broadcasting slick Mission Impossible graphics to explain to us moviegoers how it’s helping the brave Zelenskyyites win against a greater quantity of Russky blunt weapons. Some stoopid sunrise news program was trying to tell me that the Wimbeldon crowd were all willing Alcaraz to win- seriously? More than anything, the current run of ads which are based on a narrative of “hey you’re all white trash and massive dags, so are all of us at AAMI-demazin-Isuzu-KFC!!!”
…
The best thing would be to start my day with stretching and meditation…
…
Maybe I’m going through Womenopause.
…
My state and federal members are both women, both Libs. I’ll put a polite guide to opposing the current Sacred Site Reset and Voice Reset efforts respectively. I’ve worked with both the birds before around school P&C stuff, roadworks, spud board, sheep export, so I might get a hearing.
I have only watched the opening minutes so far and am amazed at the reception Tucker Carlson got from the audience, it was of Trump proportions. I think he is the only one who could give Trump a run for his money for the Republican nomination.
Setting aside the inevitable climate change spin that’s not incredible.
Lots of elderly people living in buildings that weren’t designed for hot summers.
Bwahaha!
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Yellen’s appalling statement yet.
Yellen Says Funding Ukraine’s War Effort Is the Best Boost for Global Economy (16 Jul)
What a horrible woman. She certainly fits right in at the Biden Administration.
Irish study finds children born in lockdown lag in the development of verbal skills.
Input for “yes” and “no” pamphlets is due by midnight to AEC. We’ve never heard of these pamphlets before, but suddenly they are very, very important to “their” ABC.
AEC will reject all from the “no” campaign on spurious basis that will be spun as “disinformation” as in “we can’t do the “no” pamphlet because all they did was send us disinformation and as a result of this “behaviour” be the “no” campaign, we will have to postpone the referendum, look at what you made us do.”
“Disinformation”, of course being anything they don’t agree with or like.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear…the ironies… 🙂
Today’s Tele again:
I’M A BIKIE GET ME OUTTA HERE
EXCLUSIVE
MARK MORRI – CRIME EDITOR
Bikies are calling up police and asking them to raid their homes so they
can have their club colours taken without recriminations from their gang.
The boss of the bikie busting Raptor Squad, Detective Superintendent
Andrew Koutsoufis, said many bikies want to quit because of increased
police attention which has seen numbers plummet by about 20 per cent in
recent years.
“The way we operate with Raptor is constant pressure,” Det Supt Andrew
Koutsoufis said.
“The feedback we get from ex bikies or guys quitting is that it is not the
threat of getting locked up, it was the constant pressure, lawful pressure I
might add, which got to them.
“When their wives are at them, their family are at them saying ‘I’ve had
enough of this crap’ because we are turning over the car, visiting your
home, sometimes every couple of days.
“We have bikies ring us up to say come and do a search warrant or a Fire
Arm Prohibition Order on our house, telling us they will have their vest out
so they can go to the club and say the cops took it.
“It means they can save face with the club and not face the prospect of
being beaten. In many cases they are orchestrating their own demise.”
Police say the work of Raptor in conjunction with other squads in the NSW
State Crime Command and different strategies from years ago has resulted
in murders and public place shootings plummeting, despite 18 gang
related murders in the past two and half years.
“If you could see every single thing that comes through the doors of
what’s happening out there you would think we were at war and yet the
work of Raptor, the suppressions over the past 17 years is spectacular. The
statistics support it,’’ said Criminal Group Squad boss, Detective
Superintendent Grant Taylor.
“Obviously prevention is our ultimate aim. If we can stop the murders by
taking someone off the street for any offence it can often prevent a
homicide, even if it may be to the detriment of a longer term
investigation. In the end it prevents someone being killed.
“Recently, a very senior member of an organised crime group was arrested
who was a red hot target of ours and had considerable covert strategies
deployed in the operation which if it was to go to its end game, say in six
months, that person may never see the light of day with the charges we
would have laid.
“But that target was involved in an incident, an assault and may have been
planning revenge, well we take him for that lesser offence to stop the
danger to the community.”
No one asking how that Aboriginal Corporation planned to spend that extra 2.5 million or what they do with the taxpayer funds they currently receive?
If someone in the No campaign decided to stop playing nice, they could mash up a decent advert, splicing Goodes in with the Canning River extortionists.
I shall post the article shortly but the gist:
Whistleblowers from inside the office set up to investigate the Lawyer X scandal have revealed bombshell information about former top cop Simon Overland.
Exactly Roger
A repeat of 2003, also need to factor in a reluctance to turn on air-conditioning and fans because of energy prices.
Said last year rising energy costs would kill more elderly than covid.
She contradicted herself, also saying ending the war was a moral imperative.
She’s 76.
The only good thing about that is we’re about to see the American the gerontocracy exit the stage.
“he recited the Uluru Statement from the Heart without notes.’ Should make all the difference then, shouldn’t it?
In my experience, every non-church wedding marriage ended in a divorce, some fairly quickly after the wedding and others later on. Marriages following church weddings mostly lasted the distance, dissolution numbers definitely not proportional to the type of wedding.
Jesse Kelly
@JesseKellyDC
The death of everything.
They will kill all. They will destroy all. Then they’ll kill each other. Then they’ll try to burn the ashes too.
Because they’re communists.
I don’t remember many air conditioners in houses; I suspect that’s still the case.
Brenden Dilley
@WarlordDilley
We’re entering an age of authenticity, and the good lord is not messing around. You don’t have to be perfect. You’re allowed to be flawed, make mistakes, and change your mind.
But… deception will no longer be tolerated. The collective will of man has grown tired of the lies and constant inundation of disingenuous double speak.
In order to navigate this new cultural landscape, you must accept yourself as you are and strive daily to allow the world to see the real you. Men and women in leadership positions such as politicians, celebrities, and local leaders will be scrutinized for this one attribute.
Honesty, integrity, and a forthright disposition are the new counterculture. God is bringing light as man continues to plead for it.
Electric Vehicles: Costly Virtue Signaling Forced on America by Left
Former Dem Turned Republican Georgia State Rep. Mesha Mainor Shares Emails From Democrats Proving Their True Hateful RACIST Colors
It’s a perfect circle, Goodes spruiks the activity and then the cultural committee, or whatever they call it, slaps on the price.
Jen Psaki and Dem Lawmaker Peddle New Conspiracy Theory: Biden Investigators are Captured by Foreign Agents
I think he is the only one who could give Trump a run for his money for the Republican nomination.
Did you see the Vivek Ramaswamy clip with Tucker (link posted last night)?
Conservatives would be well served were he to get the GOP nomination. A most impressive man.
Son of Canadian pastor gets standing ovation in EU Parliament as he slams PM Justin Trudeau for taking ‘freedom and democracy’ away from citizens – as his father faces jail time for sermon to truckers blocking US-Canada border last year
True. The problem would be finding someone willing to air it or run it online without it getting censored.
The geriatrics are not going anywhere, they are too useful to the manipulators behind them. It seems to be that the older the better is the new push and I don’t think it has anything to do with veneration of the wisdom of the elders. The old dementia crowd seems to fit in perfectly with their Marxist handlers, none of them know what they are doing.
Article by Shannon Deery:
Item came with a pic of both Fatty Ashton and Planet Cornelius, so I take one for the team.
What an absolute farce.
Areff, he would be a good VP pick for Trump.
They’re soon going to meet their Maker, you can be sure of that.
“he recited the Uluru Statement from the Heart, without notes”.
Sheesh that’s like marvelling at Taylor Swift knowing all the words to her songs.
‘They will fight to the death’: Farmers revolt at Victorian power plan
Australia hasn’t built transmission projects this large across farm country for decades. The projects are critical to the transition to net zero, but farmers say they’ve been ignored, taken for granted and patronised.
Ben Potter
Senior writer
It is three years since a land access agent for AusNet Services first visited the Myrniong family farm of Emma and Peter Muir, an hour’s drive north-west of Melbourne, with a plan to run a 500 kilovolt transmission line across their top paddock in front of their home.
Anger and dismay are etched across their faces as they describe their battle against the backers of the 190-kilometre Western Renewables Link (WRL): AusNet, the transmission company building the link; the Australian Energy Market Operator, which manages transmission in Victoria; and the Victorian government of Daniel Andrews.
The link is one of a slew of huge new transmission lines that energy experts say are vital for Australia to get its faltering clean energy transition back on track and bring clean energy from far-flung wind and solar farms to the grid that feeds big cities and industries.
Farmers such as the Muirs say they’ve been ignored, taken for granted, patronised and insulted by AusNet, AEMO and Victorian Energy Minister Lily d’Ambrosio, and this has made them only more determined to fight.
They have pounced on advice from energy expert Bruce Mountain and former power executive Simon Bartlett, who say that WRL and VNI West – a second new transmission line to connect the WRL to NSW – fail cost benefit tests.
They are drafting an alternative plan – based on their minority view, among experts at least – that mostly relies on enhancing existing power lines.
“I think I would have accepted that if the project was legitimate, and if the project had a benefit and we weren’t the ones paying. We’re bearing the brunt of this enormous project. And we’ve just been told to do it for the greater good. I think there’s got to be a better mix than that – especially when we did all the numbers we had credible people like Bruce Mountain look at and say this doesn’t stack up,” Emma Muir tells The Australian Financial Review at the kitchen table of their farmhouse.
“You’re thinking, ‘bugger it, I’m going to fight this’.”
The clash of interests politicians must resolve doesn’t come much starker: 23 million people on the eastern states’ grid who mostly just want the energy transition to succeed versus fewer than 1000 farmers who say their livelihoods – even their lives – may be at stake.
Still, these farmers have been doing it for generations and are far from the popular image of opponents of progress. “We’re not NIMBYs,” says Emma Muir emphatically.
The WRL would run from Sydenham on Melbourne’s north-west fringe north of Ballarat and on to Bulgana near Ararat, across some of Australia’s most fertile land, home to sheep, cattle and crop farms.
A precise path for VNI West, which has a $3.5 billion budget, has not been identified.
But it would broadly run from Bulgana via a strip of land that includes Charlton and Boort through the border to join the NSW grid at Dinawan. Opposition to VNI West from farmers who learnt they might be in the path of VNI West only in February – after a change of route – is simmering too.
In NSW, Humelink, a $3.3 billion link traversing rich farmland from the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project to the NSW grid, also faces hostility from landowners. Of five major transmission projects included by AEMO in its Integrated System Plan, only EnergyConnect, linking the South Australian and NSW grids over remote, arid country, is under construction.
Ministerial orders
These projects are critical to the transition to net zero and the achievement of the Albanese government’s target of 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030, but it is clear something has gone badly wrong with their execution.
AusNet and AEMO have conducted 550 community meetings, 350 field days and accepted 95 route changes to smooth the waters. Even so, amid signs of accelerating climate change – from shrinking polar ice sheets to record sea temperatures and brutal heatwaves in Southern Europe and the United States – more is clearly needed.
But d’Ambrosio’s change of tack hasn’t placated farmers, who know the state has last resort powers of compulsion.
She issued ministerial orders in February and May seizing control of WRL and VNI West from AEMO under extraordinary “Henry VIII” legislative powers – to use the language of the farmers’ legal documents seeking judicial reviews of the orders.
The orders swept away protections on which the farmers had relied: the February order was in response to the farmers’ first action to overturn AEMO’s approval of the WRL; the order in May was in response to a second farmers’ action to quash d’Ambrosio’s grab for control.
D’Ambrosio says in the orders that the moves are necessary to accelerate construction of the power lines and facilitate an orderly energy transition.
The government acknowledges via a spokeswoman that it is changing the way transmission is planned and developed in Victoria because it is “vital for securing affordable power for Victorians and enabling the development of our renewable energy industry as we work towards net zero emissions by 2045”.
In June 2020, Emma Muir got 400 affected farmers and their families to a public meeting within weeks of that first visit three years ago, complete with police looking for COVID-19 lockdown infractions. She says AusNet has engaged a crisis management expert, Kelly Parkinson, who “rings me all the time to butter me up”, and its representatives attend meetings accompanied by guards.
An AusNet spokeswoman said Parkinson was experienced in working with people to address concerns about complex energy projects. “The community have asked us to improve our engagement and this is one of the ways we are trying to do this,” she said. After “serious and credible threats to project staff … unarmed security are sometimes present at meetings and events”.
Australia hasn’t built transmission projects this large across farm country for decades. Farmers in the path of VNI West say they’re being asked to bear an unfair burden because of political expediency, and their corridor would yield less clean energy for the grid and cost more to build than another discarded route.
Matt McGurk, who farms near Charlton with his father Trevor, says he accepts the transition has to happen but “the whole reason that the project is actually coming through this corridor now is because AEMO couldn’t get social licence on a previous corridor closer to Bendigo and Daylesford”.
“Moving it west doesn’t reduce the offensiveness of the project, they just think it offends fewer people.”
Alistair Parker, CEO of Transmission Company Victoria (TCV), part of AEMO, says there was a small difference in the yield but “I don’t think it was material in terms of the decision”.
Farmers also worry the 90-metre mandatory easements and 70-metre to 80-metre towers required for 500 kV lines will interfere with modern technology such as GPS-guided machinery, spraying from manned or unmanned aerial vehicles, and the rapidly developing field of autonomous farm equipment.
“Those things are potentially going to be stricken from the easement [at] massive cost to productivity. So, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of the developing technology,” says McGurk. Last year’s wet season required extensive aerial spraying at their property. “Whether that’s fertiliser, herbicides, fungicides, we’ve baited mice by air, slug bait, all these things, you can actually put a physical and real cost on the inability to do that,” he says.
The losses, farmers say, would not be covered by the $200,000-per-kilometre traversed over 25 years – or $8000 a year – compensation offered in Victoria.
TCV’s Parker says power lines may interfere with localised, specialist GPS systems but “deep technical work” can fix this. “If it doesn’t, then the compensation process should make you whole to the extent that you lose productivity,” he says. TCV’s Landholder Guide sets out a range of separate compensation measures – beyond the $200,000 access payments – for the market value of easements, loss of farming profits and “special value”.
Other complaints range from the prosaic – devaluation of farms, impaired views across fields – to denial of insurance, potential loss of farm properties in families for generations, and matters of life and death.
In a country periodically scarred by deadly bushfires, farmers’ ability to fight fires is hardest to overlook. Firefighters aren’t permitted to fight fires on power line easements, says Tom Drife, a farmer at Glendaruel, north of Ballarat.
Five fires have raged towards Glendaruel via nearby Mount Beckworth and Mount Bolton in the 20 years he’s been a member of his local volunteer Country Fire Authority branch.
“They’ve all been pulled up on the [proposed WRL] easement,” Drife says. The worst conditions – hot northerlies turning westerly and eventually southerly – can quickly whip up massive fires “to such a scale that it gets really hard to put out”.
CFA procedures require crews to pull back from power lines when visibility is impaired by smoke. “We can’t fight under the power lines but when we can’t see them, we’ve got to drop back to our firm reference points, which is really only roads and can be kilometres back,” Drife says. “The fire issue’s actually life and death.”
Euan Ferguson, a former CFA chief officer and local farmer, says construction works, vehicles and increased access are all sources of ignition, and it isn’t clear how aircraft can operate around 80-metre towers. Ferguson and the McGurks were among a dozen farmers who gathered at the Woosang Fire Station near Wedderburn at the invitation of Graham Nesbitt, a local Victorian Farmers’ Federation branch president, last Wednesday to voice their opposition to VNI West.
“The lack of a coherent response around fire management is just startling,” Ferguson says. “At the very least they should be engaging with CFA and maybe [the state firefighting agency] and getting a plan for how to deal with this because at the end of the day, the land landowner is still going to bear that responsibility. So the question is who is going to take the responsibility for increased fire risk?”
All these questions have been asked, but no answers have been forthcoming, says Nesbitt. The AusNet spokeswoman acknowledged community concern about impacts on fire fighting. “There are 6500 kilometres of existing transmission lines that are highly regulated to ensure they are designed, maintained and operated safely to prevent fire ignition,” she said. (Most of these lines are 220kV or less, and require smaller towers and narrower easements than 500kV power lines.)
Ausgrid’s spokeswoman says: “We work with Emergency Management Victoria and the CFA to ensure aerial firefighting can operate in the vicinity of high-voltage transmission lines. We are engaging with the CFA in relation to this project and the potential impacts on fire risk.”
Beggar thy neighbour
The Muirs have at least had the power line traversing their property reduced from 4½ kilometres to about 1 kilometre and moved away from their farmhouse. Peter Muir says he might be able to live with that, although they want the line run underground as well. But the power line’s new path now intrudes more on a neighbour’s property, and those neighbours no longer talk to the Muirs.
“How are we going to be able to change that?” he asks.
Not so lucky are Barb and Glenn Ford, among the last broadacre farmers in the “green wedge” between Melton and Melbourne Airport. The WRL will cut their property diagonally in half, and the 80-metre towers will loom higher than nearby Mount Kororoit.
What stumps them is that their son wasn’t allowed to build a two-storey house in its shadow or use bright colours because of a “significant landscape” overlay.
“We’ve watched the urban growth come out towards us. We know we can’t stop it. But the transmission line is just like another nail in our coffin,” Barb Ford says. “I’ve been asked why haven’t we asked AusNet what would be the least impact for us? But if I suggest the least impact, it’s going to impact one of our neighbours.”
Ford would also like the line to run underground, but Transgrid says this would be significantly more costly to build and for energy producers to connect into. She’s also worried about the impact on farm productivity as more and more energy infrastructure crisscrosses the landscape. Farmers generally fret that the vast amount of infrastructure needed for the transition would impair “food bowl” production.
At Melton Air Services, the WRL misses the airfield, but owner Evan Reeves says it would still affect pilots’ ability to take off and land safely.
An aviation survey found some towers just off the airfield would exceed safe heights.
AusNet’s representative complimented Reeves on the view but thought the surveyor was mistaken, and asked if Reeves would prefer the towers or sagging lines between them aligned with his two main runways. Reeves wasn’t impressed with either option: a loss of power on takeoff would pose an invidious choice for pilots.
Reeves, who isn’t in line for compensation because there are no towers on his land, says he is hearing plenty of arguments why he should live with it, but “I am not really getting heard on why they shouldn’t do it”.
It will be nasty
Tom Drife’s bank gave his farm a $1.5 million haircut when he pledged it for a loan to buy a nearby property, and he hasn’t been able to get answers to questions about compensation. “We intend to follow every angle through as far as we possibly can. We’re not against it. We’re happy to have it come through underground,” Drife says.
Peter Muir says he’s been so stressed he’s had to take Diazepam to sleep. Members of other farmers’ families say the stress of dealing with the projects could exacerbate mental health problems, which are already worse among farmers than in the wider population.
Minister d’Ambrosio’s grab for control of the power line projects will accelerate their progress if it is upheld by Victoria’s Supreme Court, which will hear the farmers’ case in September.
Emma Muir says she’s heard “indirectly from the minister’s office that she doesn’t care – that the government is prepared to take a hit”. (The minister’s office did not respond to this.)
“These people aren’t going to sit down. It’s going to get really nasty. You are talking to people who have, like my husband, been here for generations. It’s not just a place to work. It’s in your blood. It’s so important. It’s part of who you are … your children’s future and their children’s future,” Emma Muir says.
“These families along here – I hate to say it, but they will fight to the death, won’t they? They will blockade them – it will be very, very nasty.”
Some of this implacable hostility sounds overdone, some is misguided – due to a lack of information – and some may be bluster aimed at maximising compensation. After all, city dwellers have to live with freeways, large apartment blocks and other noisy infrastructure. But much of the angst is genuine, and the battle has months if not years to run. The energy transition may depend on whether a workable solution can be found.
Clearly you didn’t go to Scotch.
Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.
– Will Rogers
Gee, thanks Rosie!
I didn’t realise that the “outdoor ceremony” lifelong commitment to my late husband meant so little as to be “imitation”. Even now, 4 1/2 years after his passing, there is no desire, let alone any intent, to abandon that bond. That’s not maudlin or soppy or “imitation”, I just can’t see another relationship ever replacing that which was lost, and I’m content with that. I call that pretty real.
Maybe it’s the two individuals involved in the ceremony, not the trappings of the ceremony itself, that matter.
Aha!
This is where tactics come into play.
Construct the advert so it is only excerpts from the Goodes ad and direct quotes from the extortionists, with a simple tag “No”.
Not even “Vote No”.
Just “No”.
When the ban-hammer falls, take it to court. It would be hard to argue that direct unedited excerpts juxtaposed in the advert with no commentary except for “No” could be “misinformation”.
And the outcome of the case doesn’t really matter. The controversy would have people searching online for it, or descriptions of the hypocrisy appearing everywhere.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
Jul 17, 2023 9:34 AM
The Chicken Littles
1 hour ago
The voice has been legislated and the National Indigenous Australians Agency is the result. It started operations on 1 July 2019. Billions of dollars in funding and huge staff. If we need a second advisory body it’s an admission the NIAA is a failure and our billions have been misdirected. If the NIAA is a failure why would the second voice be any more successful?
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha,
received email from BIL this morning on exactly that
Subject: Fwd: National Indigenous Australians Agency NIAA
THE VOICE IS ALREADY IN PLACE
Check the website: niaa.gov.au
Main office is located in Canberra at the following address: Charles Perkins House, 16 Bowes Place, Woden ACT 2606
This is the web site every Australian should be aware of. This is the web site of the National Indigenous Australians Agency. This is a government funded body tasked with improving the lives of Aboriginal Australians, to advise government on ways and means to do this. You can read their mission statement and you will discover a very simple truth, their role is exactly the same as the proposed VOICE to parliament. This body is not new. It has been using public funds for some time, to do exactly what the VOICE is now proposed to do.
This is not a little back office, government funded sideshow. This organisation has some 1,300 employees, it has offices all over Australia and more importantly the cost to the taxpayer of this organisation last year was over 4 BILLION dollars.
Before we vote for a new version of the NIAA we are entitled to ask a few questions of our government.
. What is the material difference between the VOICE and the NIAA?
. What are actual differences this body has made to all aboriginals ?
. Will the VOICE replace the NIAA or be in addition to?
. How can the VOICE do better than the NIAA and the 4 BILLION dollars they spend in a year.
If the NIAA was doing it’s job the VOICE would not even be a discussion.
Porking the help. An oldie but a goodie. Just make sure it doesn’t appear in Tattler.
Whoever thinks that has – mercifully – little first hand experience of indigenous politics.
Ok Cats – Own Up -Who is Watching ABC?
Less than 8pc of the ABC’s flagship news viewers are under 40
Mark Di Stefano
Reporter
More than 80 per cent of the broadcast viewers for the ABC’s marquee news program, the 7pm bulletin, are over 55 years old – with a staggering two-thirds of viewers older than 65, internal data circulated to managers shows.
Less than 8 per cent of viewers for the bulletin are under 40, the figures obtained by The Australian Financial Review show. It is this information that has caused concern among the broadcaster’s executive, with one senior manager describing the audience as “the grey-BC”.
Executives, led by the ABC’s head of news and current affairs, Justin Stevens, have used an increasingly urgent need to pursue younger audiences as justification for cutting some positions at the broadcaster, including the contentious departure of political editor Andrew Probyn.
Documents obtained by the Financial Review detail viewership information for the 7pm news bulletin across one week in late June, and for the broadcaster’s two prominent news panel programs, Q&A and Insiders.
The ABC is not alone among broadcasters to see audiences age. Young people have been turning away from television for more than a decade as viewership shifts to streaming platforms like Netflix and to YouTube.
To counteract this, broadcasters have been investing heavily in their own streaming platforms and building channels on YouTube and TikTok.
However, even including viewership on the ABC’s iView video-on-demand service, the organisation’s audience numbers for Q&A and Insiders tell a familiar story – more than 70 per cent of the viewers are over 55.
In a statement, an ABC spokesman conceded that broadcast news audiences were greater among older demographics and declining for younger ages, but said it was part of an industry-wide issue.
“This is not unique to the ABC, but is a trend for all news channels,” he said. “The audience for news on digital platforms is younger and has grown strongly in recent years. The ABC is the second-highest digital news service in Australia and reaches significant numbers of young Australians.”
Documents leaked during the redundancy round last month – which also included scrapping state-based Sunday night news bulletins in favour of a national version and reintroducing Stateline as a weekly “digital first” product – show that the ABC is attempting to position itself as a broadcaster where “most of its audience engagement” comes through digital products.
But that rationale for making the broadcaster’s political editor redundant caused uproar among staff. Mr Stevens said the ABC’s Parliament House bureau had “an outdated, top-heavy structure still largely focused on linear television broadcast”.
“This proposal would realign resources within CPH to strengthen its digital and social story production and distribution, enabling ABC News to reach audiences we currently underserve – young people, women and people in the outer suburbs,” he wrote in documents circulated among staff at the time of the redundancies in June.
The data seen by this masthead shows how few young people tune in. On June 26, more than 902,000 viewers cumulatively watched the ABC’s state-by-state bulletin.
Of them, those aged 18 to 24 and 25 to 39 made up 1 per cent and 5 per cent of the broadcast audience respectively.
It also shows the core audience for blue-ribbon shows broadly reflecting the demographics of the news bulletins. The David Speers-hosted Insiders pulls an average audience – across both linear TV and iView – split 70 per cent over 55 and 30 per cent under 55.
For Q&A, currently without a permanent host, 75 per cent of the average audience was over 55.
“Huge resources are still poured into pulling together a 7pm bulletin and, until recently, it was considered the most important platform,” said one senior ABC manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak publicly.
“Thankfully that’s changed.” They noted that reporters often turn television news into digital stories to run online, assist with Instagram and TikTok videos.
Therefore, a story can reach well beyond the TV audience. Mr Stevens claimed recently that “this year the ABC’s digital audience reach is expected to surpass each of our broadcast TV reach and our radio reach for the first time”. However, reach, which can be tallied with online clicks, impressions or brief views on Instagram and TikTok, can be a nebulous metric.
It certainly would not be the first time the ABC needed to grapple with its mandate to serve all Australians.
In 1975, the public broadcaster, with a mandate from the Whitlam government, set up youth radio station 2JJ (later Triple J). Former 2JJ presenter Gayle Austin later wrote that staff had been told “the ABC was worried about its audience dying off and wanted a station for young people who would grow up to be ABC listeners”.
An old boss I once worked for had a cruder (but more apt) warning on such matters …
“Don’t shit where you eat.”
Undoubtedly. He’s no old pair of comfortable sneakers. Long way back for the Lieborals but things can change quickly.
If and when Da Voice is voted down it will pass into progressive lore as a beautiful dream denied.
They will not remember it as something flawed, they will not admit that anything might have gone wrong with it – dreams have their own logic.
But they will commiserate and mollify each other over the loss – the same ways ants bumble into each other and exchange pheromones that bind them as a group.
It will also become a sacred reliquary of progressive virtue by which they will be forever reminding themselves why they have to keep the benighted herd-people away from any decision making – ‘cos they will screw it up and get the wrong answer.
Things like this are the genesis of the belief that ordinary people are a threat to democracy.
Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
– W. C. Fields
I don’t think the setting for the wedding is particularly important (although I get that some people like the tradition of a church wedding).
The problem seems to be when the focus is on the wedding as an end in itself, rather that the beginning of the marriage.
And, by extension, it is all about the bride, not the couple. Describing it as “her big day” is a telling sign.
I truly believe many of these Bridezillas fall into “Post Nuptial Depression” when the wedding is over for that very reason. The spotlight quickly moves on and they are left holding nothing but a pile of credit card bills and a West Coast Cooler stained dress.
And the Post Nuptial Depression is the beginning of the end of the marriage because the Bridezilla sees the next glitzier, cash immolation of a wedding of one of her friends (i.e. rivals) and starts blaming all those around her because her Kardashian Day In The Sun wasn’t quite as good.
Maybe it depends how far north Roger.
When I wandered in to the gypsy quarter of Perpigan new air-conditioning units were conspicuous on the front of 18th and 19th century buildings.
Australia’s most politicised police force, VicPlod, is in trouble if the Rule of Law ever returns to Victoriastan.
Is it open season on politicians yet? How many of these grifters if they were paid the average wage and conditions that the people are stuck with.
Europe’s pyrrhic gas victory
War has taken a $1 trillion toll on European gas consumers
Europe survived last winter with unexpected ease. Mild temperatures helped, as did lacklustre Asian appetite for liquefied natural gas (LNG) and unprecedented conservation measures. There was much relief when wholesale prices fell below ‘pre-invasion’ levels in January, and this sentiment has intensified as Europe’s underground gas storage tanks swell. Mission accomplished?
EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson seems to think so. She made some bold remarks about turning the tables on Putin and ending reliance on Russian gas in an interview with Politico. Europe’s immediate energy situation is certainly much better than many feared just a few months ago. But this does not hide the fact that Europe is still paying significantly more for gas than it did prior to 2021, when Russia began meddling in European energy markets ahead of the full invasion of Ukraine.
Gas prices on the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF, the European benchmark) averaged $5.31/MMBtu over the 2017-2020 period, whereas today the front-month contract is trading at $9.44/MMBtu, rising above $17 for delivery in January and February 2024.
Trillion-dollar albatross
These elevated prices are hard to absorb because European consumers are still burdened with an eye-watering cost overhang.
Believe it or not, Europe has burned through more than a trillion dollars’ worth of natural gas since Russia began weaponising pipeline exports in preparation to invade Ukraine.
Yes, you read that right: the value of gas consumed across the European continent since 2021 currently stands at $1.12 trillion, and structurally higher prices could see that amount rise by a further $600 billion by mid-decade.
Calculations by Energy Flux based on the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy and exchange data offer fresh perspectives on the toll of wartime gas pricing on Europe’s financial health.
Europe spent a decade’s worth on gas in just two and a half years, even though consumption fell to a 28-year low in response to scarcity prices.
A gargantuan debt is attached to gas held in storage, which means more pain for consumers and an enduring drag on European industrial productivity.
Restocking with LNG at the height of the market stifled Europe’s energy-intensive industries and rebased the continent around a high-cost, low-demand energy economy paradigm.
– Quantifying the burn
– Epic hangover
– Costing Europe’s LNG binge
– Higher for longer, lower forever?
– Exporting misery (at consumers’ expense)
I think there is evidence that the marriages of practising Christians are more likely to last the distance.
Not just the setting.
From 2011
The Yes campaign believes it can still win WA. That is why Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney has just spent six days there,
And we cough up $400K a year for this? …… maybe things would improve for 251s if she spent some time doing her “day” job … FFS!
My ex certainly did! It was “HER special day!”
They seem indestructible to me, just take Biden for example. My mother had a similar fall to the one he had after the speech at a military facility when he tripped over a sandbag. She broke her hip while he didn’t seem to suffer even a bruise. Then there is Mitch McConnell who fell down a set of stairs some time ago and is still alive and kicking and ruining the Republican Party.
No, Lake is the pick for VP. Vivek should be a Secretary in the Trump Cabinet.
“…underserve”. Chuckle.
I reckon Mr. Stevens will be made redundant before “young people, women” and (one can easily imagine the condescension as he typed the words) “people in the outer suburbs” turn to an ABC digital platform as their news service of choice.
It’s not that you “underserve” them, Justin; they’re not buying your product even when it’s free!
Sancho Panzer
Jul 17, 2023 9:55 AM
H B Bear
Jul 17, 2023 9:50 AM
… revelations his mining company Fortescue Metals Group investigated whether he was in an inappropriate relationship with an employee.
Porking the help.
An old boss I once worked for had a cruder (but more apt) warning on such matters …
“Don’t shit where you eat.”
An American version is “Don’t dip your pen in the company inkwell”.
It will be Howard and the Republic on steroids. You will hear the squealing all the way from Ultimo to Geneva.
As soon as an ALPBC management drone names becomes public, from the MD down, you know they are a problem.
Son tells me that since taking over management of a small group business he stopped Sunday trading as the costs are too high. Government now misses out on considerable tax and casuals a job.
Good for you Bushkid.
My friends’ outdoor marriages lasted the distance too, in one the husband died of a heart attack agee only 46 many years ago.
As a Catholic though, I was comparing a sacramental marriage to a Secular one.
The marriage covenant is a relationship between husband and wife, a permanent union of persons, capable of knowing and loving each other and God.
The function of the wedding is to give the bride an excuse to ride in triumph around the social circle of her friends, relatives and work colleagues.
The groom serves, admirably, as the horse.
Linda Burney couldn’t sell air to a drowning man.
I can’t see anyone getting their news elsewhere tuning in to the ABC.
Where are they going to advertise?
Lang got away with porking his help or was it the other way round? At least Rose was entertaining in a slow train wreck sort of way compared with the virtual signalling tripe forced down our throats 24/7 today.
I’m totally amazed that I’m not hearing earsplitting screeching, complaints, news articles and lawsuits from “Lock The Gate”.
After all these wretched things are much bigger, more damaging and worse for farming and the environment than the gas extraction the gate lockers got all activist about.
Why, it’s almost like they’re hypocrites or something.
The backlash will make Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral look like a church picnic by comparison.
The weeping, gnashing of meth-ravaged teeth and rending of possum skin garments will be something to behold.
There will be daily stories of emerging elders suiciding* because they had their hopes and dreams dashed, and venerated aunties and uncles simply dying of a broken heart** caused by the heartless Gariwerd*** Nazis.
But, despite all the noise, every politician who values his/her pension (i.e. all of them) will know this is a poisoned chalice and simply revert to the traditional practices of throwing money at the problem, and putting the political thumb on the criminal justice scales.
That is why I now want this to be not only defeated, but smashed into a million pieces, to the point where political self-preservation kicks in, and politicians start seeing spending on grandiose but futile Aboriginal gap-closing programmes as career-limiting.
That within a few years, “waste on Aboriginal programmes” is mentioned in the same breath as “Robodebt”.
Yeah, I know.
But dare to dream.
….
* Overdose.
** Cirrhosis of the liver.
*** Grampians.
GreyRanga – walk through any major shopping centre and plenty of them are closed on a Sunday unless the lease prohibits it. In which case you will typical find the owner making sure nothing is stolen. Extended trading (at least in the West) is primarily for Colesworths and their EBA slaves. As soon as they convert enough people to online shopping expect to see supermarkets go the way of bank branches.
This is very likely a distinction without a difference. The setting is often a marker of attitudes to marriage. The fact that non-religious weddings now overwhelm religious weddings is indicative of prevailing attitudes to marriage, prefigured by earlier changes in marriage law.
The war is a useful scapegoat for what the Europeans have done prior to it to their energy supplies in an effort to appease their weather gods.
I’ve noticed quite a few chain businesses in the “mall” that I occasionally frequent which used to employ two staff are now down to one even on weekdays. This means they pull down the shutters when they have to take a lunch or toilet break. It used to be the case that the staff person from the next door shop would watch out for them but I gather the shoplifters soon took advantage of that.
Bringing back Sunday as the day of rest.
Haven’t you seen the footage?
“Aboriginal souls will be crushed, if the Voice is defeated.”
When we got married in mid-70s the wedding was a get together for family and friends before we could get to the fun part, the honeymoon.
The church still does alright in the dying business. Which is kind of ironic when you think about it.
Cracks in NATO’s Ukraine Project
GORDONHAHN
July 13, 2023
Cracks are emerging in NATO’s anti-Russian alliance centered on Ukraine. NATO’s Vilnius summit exposed growing tensions between NATO members and between them and their Ukrainian client state as a result of growing risks of defeat in their proxy war. These tensions are destined to grow as Kiev’s position on the front continues to deteriorate. In Kiev, signs of panic and the likelihood of rising civil-military tensions pose the grave threat to the West’s plans to deal Russia a strategic defeat and to prompt Putin’s removal. Western and Ukrainian hopes and expectations have been unrealistic all the way around from the start.
The Failing Ukrainian Counteroffensive
With Ukrainian forces failing in the long-planned and much-touted counteroffensive, the stakes already are much higher half a year later, even putting aside for the moment the issue of the crucial NATO summit in Vilnius.[1] Western and Ukrainian expectations and claims regarding the potential of the counteroffensive are exposing the hideously phantasmagorical expectations of most in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev. After six weeks of Ukraine’s highly costly counteroffensive, instead of territorial gains Kiev’s forces are being routed, experiencing enormous casualties, losses of territory on the Oskol river, an operational encirclement of Avdiivka, and successful Russian advances on the Kupyansk-Liman front lines. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed on July 11th that the Ukrainians have suffered 26,000 casualties and lost 3,000 units of equipment, including 1,244 tanks and fighting vehicles as well as APCs, artillery pieces, and mortars, since June 4th when the counteroffensive began.[2] To put this into the perspective of Ukrainian weapons requests and NATO capacity and willingness (or unwillingness) to meet them, in December 2022 last year Zalyuzhniy told The Economist that he needed “300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs, 500 Howitzers.” In such case, he thought it “completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd.” But the Ukrainians never received anything like this, and the West nevertheless pressed Zelenskiy to underataken the ill-considered idea of a broad counter-offensive against the revived Russian army.
The Ukrainians have lost more equipment in just six weeks of the counteroffensive than Zalyuzhniy had requested; this without even reaching the first line of the Russian forces’ three well dug-in defense lines in the south and making even less progress in the east. Ukrainian forces have not been able to take and hold even one small settlement along the entire line of contact extending from Kherson to Kharkov. They take territory at great loss of life and equipment only to relinquish the same territory a few days layer with more losses. Not surprisingly, cracks are appearing in the Ukrainian ranks.[3]
On this background it is hardly surprising that tensions between Kiev and its Western patrons are running high, with each side blaming the other for the military farce. Both Zalyuzhniy and Zelenskiy are at odds with the West for its failure to provide sufficient military equipment for a counteroffensive the West itself has demanded as a kind of test as to whether Kiev deserves continuing military aid. In turn, Zelenskiy made his disenchantment with NATO and the West known both before and during the summit. In a June 30th Washington Post interview, Zalyuzhniy seemed to be airing both his opposition to the conduct of the counteroffensive without sufficient fire power (recall the pre-offensive pressure from Kiev for the provision of F-16s) as well as Kiev’s grievances regarding insufficient arms, thus setting up the West as scapegoat for the counteroffensive’s failure.
He condemned that Western expectations that the Ukrainian military do what no Western or Russian military would ever attempt to do – carry out a major offensive without air and artillery superiority – ‘pissed him off.’ “This is not a show,” Zalyuzhniy said; a comment that might be construed as a subconscious slight against the showman president who seems hell bent on winning an unwinnable war by a very bloody path, while he and his wife bask in the global limelight, outshining such spirits of our disinformation age ‘superstars’ as Greta Thunberg, and Zalyuzhniy’s coerced soldiers and even commanders die in pools of blood and mud for precisely what? “It’s not a show the whole world is watching and betting on or anything. Every day, every meter is given by blood,” Zalyuzhniy complained. “Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all.”[4] Of course, these unfeasible plans were not wholly or even mostly hatched in Kiev.
If one did not know already, Victoria Nuland told congress in late May that the US government and likely military has been working on them “for months.” Thus, the Biden administration is responsible for this unfeasible plan, along with so many others.
These are the wages of servicing present-day America. The wages were made clearer at NATO’s Vilnius summit.
Summit of the Deluded, Dismayed and Defeated
Zelenskiy entertained and publicly promoted the most unfeasible, inflated expectations. He regards too highly his ability to charm, cajole, and convince people to do and succeed in doing what he wants, whether it is accepting Ukraine into NATO here and now, receiving ever increasing arms supplies from NATO members’ whose stocks are depleted and defense industries have been wound down, or pushing through three reinforced lines of defense 35 miles deep with a few tanks and a hodgepodge of trained soldiers and a larger coteries of poorly trained soldiers recently scraped off the streets of Kiev, Lvov, and Sumy. Of course, many politicians suffer from this delusion of charisma and mastery over history. Putin, for example, at times has overestimated his ability to convince his ‘Western partners’, as he liked to call them, of the correctness of the Kremlin’s thinking on this or that issue. Western leaders are deluded by their belief that they are fulfilling democracy’s global destiny at the ‘end of history’.
At any rate, the effect of the counteroffensive in failure is to ensure that NATO would do what it was going to do and has been doing anyway: hanging Ukraine out to die on the altar of NATO expansion ‘as long as it takes’ in the hope of provoking a color revolution in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, destroyed cities and towns, millions of refugees, and tens of millions of ruined lives have and will not cause NATO to throw out the playbook. They just will edit it a little: a security guarantee with loopholes, a NATO-Ukrainian Committee, dispensing with a ‘membership action plan’ for a Ukraine that may not exist ‘after victory.’
Years of successfully pulling the wool over people’s eyes and Western fawning over him since February 2022 led Zelenskiy to overestimate the power of his personality and his communication skills. There was never any chance that the NATO summit in Vilnius would offer Ukraine membership, a membership action plan (MAP), or a shortcut to membership no matter how charismatic Zelenskiy imagines himself to be. These hopes were as delusional as were the repeated Ukrainian decisions not to forego NATO membership before and after Maidan, before and after Minsk, before and after Putin’s proposals on a new European security architecture and his massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders, before and after his February 2022 invasion, and before and after the March 2022 agreement to end the war by Kiev renouncing the goal of NATO membership and returning to the Minsk format. What kind of policy is it that demands Ukraine’s movement towards NATO membership, backs a coup to achieve it, and then arms the intensely anti-Russian Maidan regime while not offering Kiev NATO membership in the face of decades of protestations from the military and nuclear power next door that it views such actions as a grave threat to its national security? But it is worse than that. The Washington/Brussels consensus tells us that Putin is a hungry, imperial dictator determined at all costs to conquer ‘all of Ukraine’ and reestablish the former USSR, meaning taking all the Baltic and Transcaucasus countries as well. If we are to be guided by the concensus’s analysis, then we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that Washington and Brussels pushed Ukraine into the claws of the aggressive, angry bear they themselves riled and aggravated. No matter. United together, ‘we will not waver’: Ukraine will fight ‘as long as it takes’ to defeat the bear on behalf of the United States and its subservient allies.
Before the summit Zelenskiy pulled out all the stops: his usual simulacra, then trading at the Turkish bazaar, even blackmail. He faked an impending nuclear incident allegedly being planned by Russia, only to have the IAEA refute his claim that Moscow had positioned explosives on the roof of the Zaporozhiya nuclear power plant. He convinced Tukish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to break the agreement that the neofascist Azov commanders captured in Mariupol and transferred by the Russians to his custody would remain in said custody for the duration of the war. The PR of both these moves was to cover for the losses rather than the promised gains produced by the counteroffensive. So entranced by enthusiastic welcomes the West (not the world) over, he thought his threat not to attend the summit should NATO not present him the PR gift he needed and thought his due – NATO membership and the resulting adulation as national hero of most Ukrainians (though not necessarily from the neofascists that helped force him into this war) that would have come with it.
But Zelenskiy attended the Vilnius summit. Reports from the show Vilnius revealed a desparate Zelenskiy resorting to frantic backroom cajoling in order to beg for concessions on NATO membership. This would bring the alliance closer to entering the war and more of its arms at a sufficient level to defeat an increasingly powerful Russian force, or it might provoke the Kremlin into actions that would inspire NATO to finally take Kiev’s neck out of the noose into which NATO itself put it.[5] But the NATO summit declaration repeated what is now a bromide, having been stated 15 years ago—that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” and would be admitted once more “democratic reforms and security reforms” are implemented. Of course, no country has ever implemented democratic liberalization during war time. History, including America’s own history shows that countries authoritarianize in wartime—take the internment of the Japanese during World War II or the suspension of habeus corpus during the U.S. civil war, for example. Such reforms may be drawn out in any hypothetical reconstruction period after a ‘Ukrainian victory’ or other form of an end to the war.
The lack of compromise was reported to be a consequence of resistance to Ukraine’s accession to NATO now and in the future coming from Germany in addition to Hungary and perhaps Bulgaria, which recently refused Zelenskiy further arms transfers during his recent visit to Sofia. Germany apparently refused to sign on to a draft that included some vague language about Ukraine’s accession that has not been disclosed. Germany appears to be adamant about avoiding any potential direct military conflict between NATO and Russia, and depending on how the war plays out it may mount resistance to Ukraine’s accession even after the war. Germany is already in a recession, and there is no sign that the economic dislocation created by the war, mutual sanctions, pipeline explosions, etc is likely to abate any time soon. The social explosion in neighboring France probably has been instructive as well for some in the German leadership.
Zelenskiy’s desperate, ultimately failed attempt to get Ukraine moving more rapidly to NATO membership ended up alienating his ‘allies. In a social media post Zelenskiy essentially accused US President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders of showing disrespect for Ukraine by not admitting her for membership now—a measure that would require NATO to enter the war.[6] He called the lack of a timeline for membership “unprecedented and absurd,” even though NATO apparently agreed to waive the time-consuming standard membership action plan (MAP) process and President Biden had said in a pre-summit interview that Ukraine could enter NATO after the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war has ended. Thus, Washington and Brussels were “enraged” by Zelenskiy’s understandable desperation. His statements “seriously angered” the US delegation in Vilnius and surprised and frustrated NATO member-country advocates for rapid accession of Ukraine to the alliance, who saw dropping the MAP as progress. In the Americans’ opinion, this “adventure” was used by the Ukrainian president as a negotiating tactic. NATO member-country diplomats found the situation “very tense.” Later, Zelensky pulled backed his tone, saying he was “grateful” to NATO members “for their willingness to take new steps” to help Ukraine. [7] But membership was never to be at Vilnius or any time before Kiev defeats Moscow, and in that case Western arms will not be in sufficient supply for years to save Ukraine, given Western virtual economies. Nor will any ‘security guarantee’ from NATO amount to any change, since NATO will still not enter the war under such a paper guarantee and cannot increase weapons flows from NATO countries to Kiev. Entering a war NATO itself fomented is not in NATO’s plans. Washington and Brussels prefer that Kiev fight a far superior military power ‘for as long as it takes’ to do what is in the West’s interests—that is, weaken Russia. Despite the weapons, training, intelligence, and pats on Zelenskiy’s back, it can be said not just of Moscow but of Washington and Brussels as well: “They wept for Ukraine, but they destroyed it.”[8]
Rising Tensions in Ukrainian Civil-Military Relations
CONCLUSION
The tensions between Zelenskiy and his Western backers, on the one hand, and Zelenskiy and Ukraine’s military high command will untenable for continued stability in the NATO-Ukraine war effort should failure on the front persist, let alone should a Russian counteroffensive produce more territorial gains for Moscow in Odessa, Kharkov and/or left bank Kiev. Zelenskiy must either cease the offensive to please the latter and thereby displease the former, or he can push forward with the offensive to satisfy his backers and to keep the military equipment flowing and thereby alienate the Ukrainian military. One way out of this conundrum is victory on the battlefield, and that seems most improbable. The other exit path is NATO’s abandonment of expansion to Ukraine and the opening of peace talks with the Kremlin, and that seems equally as implausible. In months, crunch time may be coming in Kiev. In this context, it comes as little surprise that, according to some reports, Zelenskiy was lobbying NATO for support (only moral support apparently) for implementation of the proposed Polish-Ukrainian Union and the deployment to western Ukraine of a Polish-Lithuanian brigade or army corps this year perhaps to be supplemented later with Latvian and Estonian troops. Supposedly, NATO refused to discuss it, and therefore Zelenskiy now has passed on the idea.[15] I sense that in a pinch the project may go forward anyway. If it does, crunch time comes closer for all Europe. If it does not, the war ends early next year, and NATO expansion dies on the steppes of eastern Ukraine.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Ukraine perhaps is winning in a different sense, however. Its brand of thinking and even governance seems to be conquering the West. US congressional representatives and other government officials have allied with Ukraine’s neofascist since the Maidan. Most recently, NATO held its Vilnius summit one day after the the 80th anniversary commemorating the July-August 1943 height of the 1943-45 Volhynia and Eastern Galicia massacres of hundreds of thousands of Jews and 50-60,000 Poles carried out by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Its leader, Stepan Bandera is the hero of Zelenskiy’s Maidan regime and has central streets and squares named after him all over ‘democratic Ukraine’. Zelenskiy laid a wreath at a monument to the Polish victims even as he honors their murderers’ successors with medals and state awards. It is the West and Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists and neofascist who undermined the Minsk peace accords and prevented Zelenskiy from developing normal relations with Moscow. In terms of ‘governance’, we were recently informed that Zelenskiy’s secret police, the SBU, has been recommending to the FBI which US citizens’ social media pages should be shut down as part of the FBI’s censorship of Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts, as revealed in the U.S. House of representatives report.
See https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/fbi-sbu-staff-report-7.10.23-sm.pdf and https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-ukraine-sbu-told-social-102100906.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall.
[2] to [14] Follow
A couple of decades ago I worked with a woman whose husband was very involved in local Liberal Party politics, he was even a mayor for a term, yet she was a fervent member of “Friends of the ABC”. She was also a practicing Catholic yet did not like Cardinal Pell. I don’t know how those two things could be compatible but she never saw the dissonance.
My Paywallian comment rejection rate is rising. I might be the problem?
“Why is he tinted?” (Mother and Son remake)
“The wagyl don’t want your trees Whitey.”
To be honest, I didn’t hold out much hope for them.
Based on a Nature piece that at least has the good grace to admit to dreadful statistical analysis. (Sealed Section for Wonks: The implied conclusion that Europe is plunging into a fireball is brought all undone at Fig 4.)
The Lancet gives a more balanced and complex analysis of temperature-related excess deaths outside of an extreme temperature event. Simple Summary:
Takeaway: in Europe, over the period 2001 to 2029, on average, you were 10 times more likely to die of cold than of heat.
So let’s make Europe colder, if we can.
In good hands.
Holier-than-thou social justice Catholics.
More common than you might think.
The “I Hate George” badge was a virtue-signal showing how much you cared about “the real issues facing society”.
NATO’s threat of violence was its best feature which performed well until used by a feckless American administration and even more feckless Europeans. Zelensky’s problem was and is that he is reliant on them and is therefore at their mercy. From what I understand he tried peace initiatives several times and was knocked back by Biden’s people. Things will not get better until a change of admin in Washington.
Particularly now that the church has moved into the NFP government contract space.
I don’t think Albanese has it within him to manage the dashed expectations that the loss of the referendum would cause among supporters given that he has (foolishly) invested so much of his prime ministership in it. He’ll be tempted to fan the flames of division in a Whitlameseque manner rather than exhibit statesmanlike sagacity and tact.
That could contribute to his downfall as much or more than the loss itself.
Any time you are describing The Lancet as more balanced you really are down the Rabbit Hole.
Haha
I got permabanned from the same subreddit twice in a day – six days ago.
Dot – you are permabanned from r/WhitePeopleTwitter
My comments:
Zuckerberg is a Operation Mockingbird CIA payroll shill, as most bot accounts are here too.
Downvote me, cucks.
Your subreddit is racist, on the extreme end of racism; please look up the Church Committee and educate yourself.
Also, FaceBook never has and never will pay dividends, it will never be profitable without black budget sales.
Do yourself a favour and look up – even google – the Church Committee and In Q Tel.
?
FaceBook started the day after LifeLog ended.
“Ban him! He doesn’t like the current thing!”
Social justice is the one dogma* can they believe in.
* Not actually a dogma.
(To be fair, that’s not just among Catholics.)
Always a danger when fanning the flames of revolution.
The churches did us all a service when they banned the Collingwood theme song and AC/DC tunes at funerals.
And, according to some dweeb on 3AW last week, we have moved on from “celebration of life” to “joyous funerals”.
Look, there are a couple of people in my broader circle that I could happily live without, but I would keep my joyousness to myself during the funeral service.
I can’t remember who it was, but I did see the funeral of some minor celebrity where other minor celebrities turned it into a Broadway musical.
There was a shot of the family and I thought how cruel it was that they were in the depths of grief, but had to sit through a reprise of “Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday” at what should have been a solemn occasion.
Save to footy trip jokes for the wake, idiots.
If the NIAA was doing it’s job the VOICE would not even be a discussion.
And if the media were doing their job the VOICE would not even be a discussion. Very few people – even those who are fairly au fait with indigenous issues – are aware of the NIAA. It is an absolute disgrace that the media do not raise the question.
The BBC just shrieked at me that over 60,000 people in Europe DIED FROM HEAT last summer.
Some bloke on Ch9 Breakfast TV shrieked (literally!) that Death Valley in the US had just recorded over 50 degrees. Well – Death Valley does this fairly regularly – hence its name!
This climate paranoia is becoming really sick.
We forget that Zelensky was elected as a peace candidate and negotiated a cease fire in the Donbas in the year prior to the Russian invasion. No doubt there were powerful forces working against him on all sides, including in the eastern Ukraine.
Oh yes.
Repeat this several hundred times, add in the inter-clan/family squabbling, top up with urban ‘never-heard-of-him/her’ blow-ins – feed generously with gubba-funded lawyers – the Voice will deliver.
Big men.
Perfection.
Yes, true.
It was the Pell reference which focussed me on the Catholic arm of SJW Inc.
Voice to Parliament pamphlets for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ cases set to be unveiled
17 July 2023
Pamphlets containing information about the “yes” and “no” cases for the Voice to Parliament are set to be unveiled as Australia nears the landmark referendum. Source: Canberra Times.
Don’t just crit their siticising.
– Ronnie Barker
A spoonerism no less.
Being buried to “Pluck A Duck” is the perfect memetic magic mix of Kafka, Anthony Burgess, Orwell and Larry David.
Fitting for our times.
Then you get gonged by a rich white communist who calls you a racist, capitalist bastard and privileged as you get laid under topsoil and clay, after suffering from stage IV bowel cancer for 7 months working your job as a janitor and SES volunteer.
1 out of 10!
And the Communists/Marxists/Trotskyites are never far from the scene.
That may sound like “reds under the beds” to the average punter, but it has been the case for almost a hundred years.
Some of the most prominent indigenous names in the land rights movement have been CPA members.
He’s likely caught between the Atlanticists overseas and the Banderites at home, but he’s nevertheless responsible for the road taken.
Bjorn Lomberg pointed out over the weekend that, in India, 60,000 people die per year from extreme heat. Think about that.
Then think about his additional point that 600,000 people in India die each year from extreme cold.
LOL
Downvoted.
Someone really likes Dazza Somers.
The BBC just shrieked at me that over 60,000 people in Europe DIED FROM HEAT last summer.
And how many of those 60,000 people had underlying medical issues? And how many people died from the cold last Winter? And how many people died from heart related diseases last year? How many from Cancers? How many from Old Age? 60,000 people out of a European population of just over 742,000,000 is not that many BTW. Unless of course you are one of them.
Being a Proddie I just thought I’d throw that in lest I be accused of importing anti-papist sectarianism to the Cat.
😀
Being responsible for defending your country to the utmost against invasion isn’t the worst thing.
Yeah but did you catch the follow up line?….. “a shade less hotter than its hottest ever record” (which was over 56 in 1913).
About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.
At what point does the majority of the population begin to understand that their leaders want them starving and destitute?
Axe. Meet grind. Although he may be correct.
Trainite.
“Holier-than-thou social justice Catholics.”
Not just social justice Catholic, social justice Jews are also a problem, and a pain in the arse, particularly in the US. Progressive Judaism in the USA is now just a social justice cult. Social justice in Hebrew is called “Tikkun Olam” which means “repairing the world’. In the UK and here in Oz, most Jews affiliate with Orthodox synagogues so it isn’t quite as bad here.
Tikkun Olam had led to the near collapse of American Jewry. There’s more to Judaism than feel good social justice, you have to keep kosher, keep a Jewish home, and live a Jewish life, and most importantly of all….believe in God.
Trump Wins Turning Point Action Conference Straw Poll
Turning Point Action announced the results of its 2023 Turning Point Action Conference straw poll, commissioned by the Trafalgar Group, on Sunday.
The poll results show former President Donald Trump with an overwhelming lead for the 2024 GOP primary, at 86%. He leads the second-place finisher, businessman Perry Johnson, who finished at 8%, by 78 points.
In third comes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at 4%, followed by entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who polls at 2% in the survey.
Candidates Trump, Johnson, and Ramaswamy all spoke at the event in West Palm Beach, Florida, as did former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. DeSantis; Vice President Mike Pence; Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; and former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley were invited but declined, according to Turning Point Action.
According to the Washington Examiner, Turning Point USA founder and President Charlie Kirk said, “The straw poll demonstrates that President Trump remains the single most dominant force among the conservative grassroots. All the attacks against him have seemingly made him even stronger and more popular among the conservative faithful.
“What’s also clear is that Gov. DeSantis’ decision not to come to this event probably hurt his showing in this poll. There are a lot of people here who have a lot of respect for the governor and what he’s done in Florida, but I was approached multiple times by attendees telling me they were disappointed he didn’t come, and that’s evident in the poll results,” he said.
Meanwhile
Trump: Some 2024 Rivals ‘Good Potential Cabinet Members’
Meanwhile, Trump acknowledged that he believes some of the people running against him for the nomination are “good potential Cabinet members” and that he “possibly” sees a potential running mate among the hopefuls.
“You have some very talented people. I’ve been impressed with some of them. A number of them called me up, not for permission, but sort of, to say they’d like to do it,” Trump told Bartiromo. “I think you have good people, good potential Cabinet members.”
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., one of Trump’s competitors, is a “good guy,” the former president said. “I could see Tim doing something with the administration. But he’s right now campaigning, and I’m sure Tim and everybody else would say [they’re] only interested in one thing.”
Meanwhile, Trump said he expects that President Joe Biden has the Democrat nomination locked up and that there are “a lot of votes” that Democrats get “automatically” that they shouldn’t.
“I think I have a lot of union votes, too,” said Trump. “The car industry, I’m far better than the Democrats … I think the workers vote for me much more than the union leaders who are indoctrinated into the Democrat Party.”
He also said he understands why Biden doesn’t want to debate, even though Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. want to face off against him.
“I actually think he can’t do it,” said Trump. “I don’t think he’s capable of doing it. But why would he do it If he’s got a 30 or 40-point lead, which is what he’s got, I mean, I don’t think RFK expects that he’s going to debate … I don’t see RFK Jr., I don’t see him getting the nomination under any circumstances.”
Trump also on Sunday discussed things he would do differently if elected to a second term in office and said one of his mistakes the first time around included some of the people he hired.
“I mean, I wouldn’t have put a guy like [former Attorney General] Bill Barr,” said Trump. “He was weak and pathetic. I wouldn’t have put [former Attorney General] Jeff Sessions. And there are some people that I wouldn’t have put in. You know, most people were good … we had [former Secretary of Defense] Mark Esper. I didn’t like him. He was incompetent. I thought we had other people I didn’t like.”
Trump said the issue was that he “didn’t know the people” when he hired them. “I know the people now better than anybody has ever known.
The people I know, the good ones, the bad ones, the dumb ones, the smart ones.”
I am not sure the voice will get to 40% here in Qld, come voting day. Now that “no” people are realising they might be in the majority they are becoming less shy. “no” is gathering momentum.
A commitment to ‘social justice’ is often the last refuge of the agnostic Catholic/Protestant/Jew who would have no identity otherwise.
Gee, that sounds a bit hard going for me.
If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just stick with being a lapsed Huguenot, only showing up for end of Ramadan and Passover feasts.
Thank you – I was aware of the C.P.A. links to the post war stockmen’s strikes, but I didn’t realize those links went back so far.
It’s beginning to remind me of the situation in South Africa, where anyone who attempted to point out the links between the African National Congress, and the South African Communist Party, was similarly condemned…
I very rarely watch videos, the signal to noise ratio is low. I haven’t watched this one either. But the reviews of Tucker’s latest effort are in!
‘Not My Concern” Narrows the GOP Field (16 Jul)
American Greatness, by Roger Kimball
Tucker Carlson Wins Iowa with Sharp Humor and Sharper Questions (16 Jul)
Mr Kimball thinks Nikki Haley and Tim Scott did well, but the other guy points out that Tucker skewered both, respectively on Nordstream and country shoppers. Scott probably did the better and it wasn’t approaching the crash and burn level that Pence managed.
All in all it sounds refreshing that a guy can ask real questions of a bunch of pollies without the baggage that Fox imposed on him. And that they obviously hated it, but dared not not participate!
See also: Robespierre and Marat.
I’m always bit of a pessimist.
NO ON 24!
NO ON 24!
NO ON 24!…
…
…
…
It’s a landslide! YES on Prop 24!
Certain churches around here are replacing the climate change banners for Yes ones.
Some churches are still bitter clingers for ‘Asylum seekers are welcome’.
Mine remains a banner free zone.
I’m glad you made your good points to some Yessers Cassie.
Seems Aboriginal society, the educated section anyhow, like broader Australian society, had enthusiastic communists competing with enthusiastic Christians for hearts and minds since Communism was a baby.
So much for that water serpent thingy.
Has anyone else read the proposed section 129?
It is a blank cheque for the Commonwealth. If I was an Aboriginal activist who wanted the Voice in principle, I’d be against this because it serves no one else but the government of the day.
https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/4587747/Referendum-on-The-Voice-30-May-2023.pdf
The wording in the Constitution Alteration Bill introduced into the Parliament on 30 March 2023 is as follows:
—
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia
1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.
—
The section would appear at the end of the Constitution, as section 129, in a new Chapter IX, entitled Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. The heading of section 129 would be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
When Affirmative Action Kills
A recurring theme we’ve covered here is the consequences of placing unqualified individuals in fields such as medicine or aviation, where mistakes can cost lives (see, for example, The Next Affirmative Action Disaster).
We’ve had six aviation near misses so far this year.
on what comes next. – If this years near misses are any guide, it may be a plane crash
In the remarkable thread below, Richard Hanania detailed the affirmative action disaster that was Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, a hospital so bad locals called it “Killer King”.
The hospital was founded in 1972, in response to black riots of the late 1960s. Elites in LA, like elsewhere in the country, determined that racism was the cause of pathologies in the black community.
Therefore they decided to open up a hospital to serve locals.
Officially, as a public institution, it couldn’t be a “black hospital.” But most employees and administrators were black, and it was said to belong to the community.
California schools practiced massive affirmative action at the time, and graduates would go work at King/Drew.
Problems appeared right away.
In 1975, the LA Times reported on “horror stories implying neglect and incompetence.”
Employees were said to be drunk on the job or on drugs stolen from the hospital pharmacy.
A letter from a nurse in 1977 gave it the moniker of Killer King.
It took an LA Times report in 2004 to reveal how things had gotten.
According to one accreditor, the hospital had “problems of orders of magnitude that are substantially greater than almost all other hospitals in this country.”
Patients would come in with minor medical issues and end up dead.
Locals would run away from ambulances in order not to be brought to Killer King.
Police officers had an understanding that if their colleagues were shot, they would not allow them to be taken there.
Where did that money go? Overpaid employees, many of which became famous for their creative disability claims.
“Between April 1994 and April 2004, employees filed 122 chair-fall claims at King/Drew.”
The hospital spent $3.2 on claims of employees falling out of chairs alone.
Once, a cashier was getting married. Her supervisor found out that she hadn’t been asked to a bridesmaid.
The supervisor got mad, and the cashier said this gave her stress.
Killer King paid the cashier $216,000 on that claim.
In the hallways of Killer King, employees would sell peanuts and bootleg DVD.
Patients would sit in their hospital beds, being ignored as hospital staff sat out in the hallways talking about parties they’d been to and the movies they’d seen.
Having learned nothing, since 2020 California schools have been announcing new DEI initiatives. We’ll see what happens after the SCOTUS decision.
King/Drew shows what happens when you bring DEI staff together in one place. The problem is less noticeable when you spread them out
The diversity ideology poisons everything it touches in a vicious cycle.
Incompetent doctors, race baiting politicians intimidating those who know better and protecting failed institutions.
Now, a press that has become more openly committed to covering up inconvenient facts.
The sun has been going nuts these last few days and seems solar peak has come early:
https://www.reuters.com/science/russian-scientists-warn-powerful-solar-flare-activity-monday-2023-07-17/
Ukrainian Intelligence tried to kill the Head of RT News, offering a bunch of underage skinhead kids $25,000USD online to do it!….
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/15/russia-says-foiled-assassination-attempts-on-top-media-figures
It’s hard to decide whether it’s malice or idiocy with malice winning as nobody who reaches their heights in government could be that stupid.
Has anyone else heard of the asthenosphere theory of warming? Very interesting, apparently it can explain rapid warming over weeks or months; as the allotrope of iron changes (less pressure) the crystal structure releases heat, kinetic energy and electrical current.
What could cause that though? Gravity could change as we transit through the solar system, spiral arm, galaxy and so on as we pull away from and towards certain masses, hit gravity waves or as the sun’s output varies – changes in the fusion activity of the sun causes very strong EM fields to vary significantly, to form small wormholes (X points).
Interesting to note about the Voice poll.
I thought we had a “shy No vote” phenomenon at work.
Maybe we still do, but what is happening is that the Yes vote is declining, the No vote is gaining by a similar amount, and the undecideds are hovering around 10-11%
Newspoll results
June 4 … Yes 46%; No 43%; Undecided 11%
June 25 … Yes 43%; No 47%; Undecided 10%
July 16 … Yes 41%; No 48%; Undecided 11%.
Quite apart from the fact that the Yes vote is tanking to the tune of 1% every two weeks, the numbers suggest two obvious possibilities:
1. People have been Burney-triggered and have jumped from Yes to No without passing “Go!”; or
2. There is a steady drift of Yes into Undecided, and similar numbers from Undecided into No.
I think it is the latter, and I still think the Undecideds will break heavily to No.
Once people have abandoned “Yes” they are really set to follow the conservative voting patterns of previous referenda and vote down something which is vague.
They just haven’t rationalised their No vote yet. I reckon No will pick up 2/3 of the Undecideds.
Even if the Undecideds fall 50:50, the current numbers reflect a 53.5 : 46.5 win to No.
Trump’s biggest mistake was trusting that the Republicans around loved their country as much as he did. In fact they loved their party over the country and worked hard to eject him from the body politic.
Should he somehow win the next election it will be very interesting to see whom he picks to run his administration. He will also need a Senate and House to approve his appointments.
Sorry.
The Yes vote is tanking at about 1% per week.
Despite Elbow banging on about “generoush and modesht proposhal to change the Conshishushen” the Liars pollsters will be sweating bullets.
And the response will be the tried and true sticking “waaaacist” labels on anything that moves.
If covid taught us anything it’s that malice and idiocy are not in short supply in the halls of western governments. Some might aver they’ve become essential attributes thereof.
Agree with that Sancho, however, “funny” how their ABC is quoting The Australia Institute’s poll showing 53% “yes.” Methinks Elbow and Co are living in the echo chamber which, ironically, is what the Invoice is all about.
In a packed programme tonight, we will be talking to an out-of-work contortionist who says he can no longer make ends meet.
– Ronnie Barker
I reckon come referendum day a fair portion who’ve told pollsters they’re voting Yes because some bully dragon offspring/ partner/ employer is within ear shot will vote Nein in the privacy of the polling booth too.
Beats expensive advertising (1 min 3 secs)
If you were ready to vote Yes, but have recently changed to a No, what would entice you to change back to a Yes vote by next October? Guilt?
He sided with the Banderites who would happily pile ethnic Russians in pits and murder them, like they did Jews and Poles in WW2, rather than tell them to stand down or else, as he should have in that infamous video in 2019. And he sided with Atlanticists that wanted to use Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia, who were also quite prepared to support Banderites if this helped achieve their aims, so long as, Nuland stated, they operated in the background. I wouldn’t count this as defending your country to the utmost but as seeking its destruction.
For one thing, it means the public will be dependent on the govt for their very sustenance.
Another good question would be who will be be supplying the food to the govt?
Looks like another attack on the Crimean Bridge has occurred in last hour or so. No details yet apart from explosions and civilian casualties. Emergency meeting in the Kremlin.
I see it ending like this…
with a full force punch of the demos, the memory of it will fade into nothing.
https://youtu.be/m_mPE9gcQJo
The WEF/Soylent Green Corporation?
Is this on??? Last comment nearly 1.5 hours ago.
Woops. The last 1.5 hours of comments magically appear …
Certainly looking that way (not bad for a servant of Big Paper and Big Crayon).
Dilemma time for Uncle Luigi: go sooner to avoid the rot; or trust Team Yes, and let the Referendum date drift into hopeful recovery.
At this stage in the game, trusting Team Yes must be like trusting a roomful of red-cordial-fuelled 8-year olds with matches and firecrackers, supervised by a mad Aunty on the cooking sherry.
Some reports a child was killed as she was thrown out of her car travelling across the bridge…
That is what I am looking forward to most is the outrage that will be triggered by a ‘No’ vote.
The anger, the vituperation, the abuse of ordinary Australians, and I possibly even some rioting and rampage from people who have had entitlement and resentment stoked to explosive levels being told that inchoate but lavish promises of munni will not eventuate after all, may well be an eye opener for we the peeps.
‘We’ might even begin to wonder how much of what is given is not truly deserved – well, not by the main (urban) beneficiaries anyway.
The left want race riots in Australia and a “no” outcome will “justify” it.
As Tucker said of the 2020 riots, “when George Floyd was killed, all the rioters were so outraged that they looted Footlocker…”
….any excuse… BLM riots are coming to Australia, be ready for it.
Sancho, lapsed Huguenot (lol), re axing the upticks.
I don’t want to get rid of the upticks.
As I’ve said, I think they enhance the flow of conversation. They feel interactive.
Though not getting on a regular basis any does seem to indicate your comment has fallen through to the floor. In that, they can be a way of freezing people out. Luckily a wide pool here means that doesn’t happen too often.
They can also be a means of piling on, whether manipulated or not.
I guess that’s something that just has to be lived with here, for a lot of the sense of ‘having your say’ would be lost if they disappeared.
From 4 years ago.
Potholer is full of sh*t. Being ex-BBC, who is surprised?
—
Tony Heller:
In this video, I take on Potholer’s unsupportable claims about methane, and explain why the United Nations is trying to demonize this harmless trace gas.
The Methane Big Lie
That would be the polling from The People Just Like Us Institute.
If the Libs had a nanotesticle between then, now would be the time state “ the parliament and constitution will no longer make any reference to race and seeking special treatment or punishments for groups will be illegal.”
Every person of Aboriginal ancestry will be gifted a one off $1,000,000 dollars scaled to the % of Aboriginal blood in your family
After that the rent is paid, all claims are settled and all Aboriginal agencies and departments will be closed down.
Special land areas held by the crown will be available for sale as freehold at a nominal price.
There will be a one year period in which significant sites can be nominated And assessed for protection, with the protection and upkeep provided by the title holder.
Now go forth and multiply.
Nothing.
The move from a yes to a no would be a conscious decision; and would be made after already weighing up any and all personal concerns.
Once that dial has been moved from yes to no, there’s no going back.
I worry that this will be something that will influence some to vote Yes, to avoid such confrontations. We have to grow a spine about this, and be ready to use the rule of law to far better effect than happened in the US riots.
Trump’s appointments of Wray,Sessions and Barr are in my opinion sufficient to disqualify him from the nomination.
Surely cursory enquiries would have revealed what types he was getting.
He is supposed to be the master reader of people but when it came to the most important appointments it looks like he waived through people who would undermine him and the Republic.
Kudos for the judges but McConnell ought to have been punted as well as he seems happy being minority leader.
We have to say we’re voting No regardless of any hurt feelings or violent reprisals.
It would only eventually get worse if we voted Yes.
Keep that in mind, we should tell all the waverers.
Voting No is your last opportunity to have your private say on this country’s future.
How dare you.
I am about to get the crayons out and backdrive some of the poll numbers to see what state-by-state figures would be needed for a Yes win.
Spoiler alert! It won’t please Elbow I suspect.
I think he is stuck with the last quarter of this year unless he takes the referendum legislation back to Parliament, which risks more Autocue Burney cock-ups and Lay-down Lydia histrionics.
As for timing, if anything, I think he is more likely to punt it to coincide with the next election.
His other horns of a dilemma thingy is about emphasis. Does he try to sell it by watering it down to a very explicitly limited advisory body restricted to Aboriginal Health, Aboriginal Education and very restricted tribal land use issues, explicitly ruling out Straya Day changes, interference in private land use matters, and no Treaty Yeah?
Might boost the Yes vote temporarily, but the almost certain Blaklash will then kill it.
Tough one.
I really feel sorry for him.
No, really.
I was never, ever going to vote Yes. The majority of people I know* made the same decision early.
Better to be called a racist than actually be one by voting to divide our country by race.
* The ones that are unbelievably stupid on this matter are almost all of my university cohort and/or colleagues. Colour me surprised.
On the Liz Storer vs Daisy Cousins issue.
I’ve always liked Liz Storer very much, from her earliest days with Advance Australia through to her increasing presence now as a commenter on Sky After Dark programs.
She reminds me of Cassie, not in appearance at all (sorry Cass, we are no longer in that league if we ever were) but in the tenacity and firmness of her opinions. She doesn’t hold back, and it is very refreshing to see her in action. She is also ‘vibrant’, which I think Cass and I have both been called in our salad days, as no doubt have been some other feisty kittehs here in their beautiful prime.
Daisy is a creature of artifice, a you-tube girl. I admire her for having the guts to carry off that persona initially and also to have seen the need to moderate it recently for Sky’s audience (she’s getting older too). I do wish she could also moderate the arch drama-trained voice, which is harder to do but which would improve her presentation. I have to say in her favour that when she launches into a long tirade, it is often good listening, well thought out.
Um, probably not.
They’ve pretty much played every card in the Waaacism/Guilt Suit, from deuce to Ace, and it has sunk their polling by 10% – 15%.
Having said that, the Torry-fighting Trotskyist will go there, because that is all he’s got.
That, and blaming the Mudrock presh for mishinformation.
Which, of course, will have precisely the opposite effect than that they are aiming to achieve.
Alexandra, from the Speccie’s Flat White, is another young woman who makes you feel that maybe the future is not completely lost in the young. There are a few others as well on Sky After Dark, often from the PR world, who can still fly the flag for liberal individualism. To say nothing of Peta Credlin, who has her strengths, and the redoubtable Rita Panahi, about whom not a bad word should be said.
Not, of course, pace Dover, that we all fly that ‘liberal individualist’ flag together.
The centre-right is a broad church. 🙂
Oh – and there are some young men worth noticing too. 🙂
Caleb’s not my favorite though he’s OK. Some of the IPA male yoof are good too.
The ALP tactic is to campaign as the opposition.
We saw that in Fadden over the last month, the LNP campaigned on what a shithouse Government the Albanese cabal is, Labor campaigned on Robodebt, Energy Rebates and cheaper childcare.
It may have worked for them, since they held on to their share from 2022.
Whenever govts do things that raise questions, the general belief is that it’s almost ineptitude rather than design, and in normal times that makes sense.
The other day I watched a Russell Brand clip in which he made mention of the Five Eyes and then referred to the coordinated govts’ response to covid, particularly within the Anglosphere.
That got me thinking about what mechanism would enable the usual concerns that covert communication within the Anglosphere encompass, to be turned into some form of practical, perhaps coordinated, action in the these countries.
After Sept 11, depts of Home Security arose that have turned surveillance more extensively and more openly onto each country’s domestic populations. It’s not a difficult jump to see the coordination occurring there.
As I understand it, the Referendum has to be held between October and December this year.
A short time in the electoral cycle, but at the current rate of Yes-decay you’d have to think that some of Australia’s finest minds are double guessing themselves over the exact when. Which I assume has to be announced quite soon to allow the AEC to do its stuff.
It’s a good job none of these arseclowns are trying to do anything serious with the rest of their time.
In this video, I take on Potholer’s unsupportable claims about methane, and explain why the United Nations is trying to demonize this harmless trace gas.
The Methane Big Lie
There are just over 8 billion humans on Planet Earth who breathe out CO2 and fart (Methane). Oh dear. What is to become of us?
The elites will most probably have most of us vapourised and then they can live the life of Riley with Robots and machines to do all the work. However, a Robot cannot currently do this on a Rolls Royce motor car –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ37QC2xFkQ
BTW. The elites are living the life of Riley now, so why change things?
We have to say we’re voting No regardless of any hurt feelings or violent reprisals.
Violent reprisals?
Get a grip, grandma.
We’re talkin bout a piece of paper, not the St. Bartholomews Day Massacre.
When Luigi goes to Europe does he visit the waiter? People with time on their hands would like to know.
At what % NO vote does Albanese give up on a core election promise?
Viagra won’t make you James Bond but it will make you Roger Moore.
– Anonymous
Matt Thistlewaite is on Sky with Andrew Clennell at the moment. In answer to Clennell’s question on the softening yes vote for the InVoice that the Yes Camp will have to get out and door knock/do stalls etc to get the message out there. He doesn’t look or sound confident.