You’ve gone from “no, they were innocent of any of this” to “they won, they can do what they want whatever they said”.

I was moving along from your failure to provide a shred of evidence that there were “cables” showing the US was acting dishonestly from the outset. But yes, the US won the Cold War and if it decided to move away from initial undertakings then they’re were in the driver’s seat.

Sure, sure, in the late 90s Russia was a belligerent state just thirsting to dominate Europe.

Which is not even close to what I suggested. I said those states that were forced to endure the Soviet Union ran away as quickly as they could to seek protection from a future belligerent Russia. History has proven they were right to do do.

No, the principle reason these states sought membership of NATO is because it was the main show in town, the US was at the height of its power, and they wanted to have a seat at the table.

You’re denial.

Thanks Tom.

unidentifiable assailants

Kyoto, on my brief glimpse last night is a little more Japanese than central Tokyo, not as built up, with many old wooden buildings scattered around the station area where we are staying.
Google translate is indeed handy for handwritten menus, incidentally Kyoto taken off the nuke list because Truman honeymooned here? Seems very popular with Americans still.
Food here in Japan is consistently good and pretty cheap. I remember a former colleague who was married to a Japanese and lived here in the 80s complaining how expensive it was, the equivalent of $100 for a simple work lunch out. Now $10 to $15 to dine in.
Oh and those train lunch boxes are delightful. A work of art even.

My work colleague and her family who are a victim of a home invasion, car theft and stabbing are back to court today. Final dark chap found guilty facing his sentancing. At last call his lawyer claim he has ADHD which caused his behaviour. Judge requested this claim be supported by qualified psychologist determination.
Will the chap get off due to ADHD ? or will he get min 3 years jail ? or will the wheels of justice find something else shiny to look at for another month? Stay tuned cat fans for an update later today.

Interesting to see the method of operation has now progressed to machetes outside schools in Caulfield. Aint Vic law and order grand. FFS.

Sky After Dark is well worth the Foxtel sub – and free in the regions.
Best thing that ever happened to the bush.

Alas it is only the regions, not available in remote areas.

JJ Sefton had this line in his morning rant on Ace Of Spades. Possible liberty quote:

“If diversity makes us stronger, why does it require lower standards?”

Was a sub heading to a Daniel Greenfield article. Excellent.

KD – yes I saw a piece this morning on the Rolling Stones revival. I could hardly believe how sprightly Mick Jagger is at 80 years old – AND after all those drugs, hard living etc. Just wow!

Slightly gobsmacked reading that “the chap’ has been holding talks of some sort in Qatar .. why on earth would an out-there blokey impersonator be welcome in Qatar, regardless of her Oz gummint position, let alone chatting with Qatar gummint heavies given their laws and publicised attitudes on ‘queerdom”? ..

They are really pushing hard. Can you feel the reconciliation? Daily Telegraph:

An Aboriginal Land Council CEO leading a push to force Mosman Council to hand over a Crown land reserve adjacent to Balmoral Beach to Indigenous people says it should be given back, claiming the area’s wealth was partially built on “slavery” that went on through the 20th century.

“It is deeply ironic that Mosman Council does not speak to us and they had the greatest benefit from the use of Aboriginal people as slaves to provide the benefit that has created their lifestyle,” said Nathan Moran, CEO of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, which is pushing for the transfer.

The comments came after the council voted on Tuesday night to reject a Native Title claim by the Land Council, which is seeking transfer of the 2500 square metre Lawry Plunkett Reserve behind the iconic waterfront.

Mr Moran said that from the 1910s to the 1960s, young Aboriginal girls who were removed from their families were sent to Cootamundra Girls Home and subsequently sent to work as domestic servants in suburbs such as Mosman, Vaucluse, Neutral Bay and Strathfield.

One analysis found that from the early teens to the 1920s alone, 61 girls were sent to work in Mosman, among the highest number of any local government area.

“It turns out the suburb which had the highest concentration of Aboriginal slaves would be the suburb where people were opposing giving the land back.”

“I have to ask Mosman Council, are you really financially struggling? Are you so concerned about one piece of land?”

Mr Moran’s comments came after revelations of the land claim were made public, sparking controversy in the wealthy lower north shore suburb, where the average house price is $5.15 million.

The local mayor claims his council was blindsided by the push to have the land handed over to Aboriginal control.

“It’s taken us all by surprise,” Mosman mayor Roy Bendall said.

“This is an iconic part of Sydney and the size of the area that’s being claimed is about six or seven residential blocks right on the waterfront.”

Mark McLoughlin, who owns the Public Dining Room restaurant directly opposite the reserve, said “No one knows exactly what’s going on or what but in my view I think the reserve should remain as it is. People have picnics there, sit in the park and it’s very used by the community.”

Under NSW legislation, Crown land that is transferred to Aboriginal land councils comes with freehold title, theoretically enabling it to be sold or developed.

However, Mr Moran said his organisation was not seeking to block access or make money off the parcel of land, which has an estimated worth of as much as $100 million.

The land claim comes after the Metropolitan Land Council won a land claim on the Waverton Bowling Club site in the neighbouring North Sydney Council area in November.

The club had previously been under the control of North Sydney Council which had called for the site to be maintained for public use, though it is currently unused and dilapidated.

The NSW Government confirmed there were 38,339 land claims currently active across NSW, but it is understood this includes multiple claims on the same properties, as well as overlapping claims from different councils.

A spokesman for Minister for Lands and Property Steve Kamper said Mosman Council and other organisations have been asked for evidence that the patch of land near Balmoral Beach was in use when the claim was submitted.

“The Mosman Council and other agencies have been invited to provide evidence that demonstrates the land at the date of the claim was needed and being used for public recreation or for another essential public purpose,” he said.

“Once all information is gathered it will be reviewed and a determination on the land claim will be made against the statutory criteria.”

The number of approved land claims has hit record highs in the last two years.

In the last financial year Crown Lands approved or part-approved 545 land claims, the highest number since the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 came into use.

If a claim is approved, it’s up to the Local Aboriginal Land Council what it does with the property, although the new owner is required to comply with local and state planning requirements and zoning.

Balmoral beachgoer Harriet Miles had mixed thoughts about the land claim, saying: “I genuinely think it should be given back to the land council but as long as it stays as a reserve. It shouldn’t be given back for the wrong reasons.”

I’m sure Mr Moran, who was snapped in a nice suit is also a beneficiary of this alleged slavery. Or the taxpayer wicket is playing with good consistent bounce.
So the land council don’t want it for development or whatever. Then what the hell is the claim for? To turn it into some healing centre? Another unkempt eyesore? Just leave shit alone.

Balmoral beachgoer Harriet Miles had mixed thoughts about the land claim, saying: “I genuinely think it should be given back to the land council but as long as it stays as a reserve.

Mmm…yes.

Harriet’s probably voting Yes too.

We need a Mandela, not a tribal chieftain
tony abbott tony abbott

12:00AM September 7, 2023
266 Comments

In a calculated pitch to The Australian’s readership and in a sharp change of tactics, the main Yes campaigner, Noel Pearson, now says it’s important to answer people’s questions about the voice.

If only he could. No one can say how the voice will be chosen, what powers it will have and exactly who can stand for it because all this would have to be decided after the referendum by the parliament; and then, most likely, further adjudicated by the High Court when a government’s decision-making displeases some or all of the voice’s members and arguably contravenes an expansively worded new chapter in our Constitution.

This referendum, should it pass, would be a blank cheque for change, and all that can be answered with certainty about a blank cheque is that it’s full of risk.
Read Next

Pearson also says the voice is about Aboriginal people taking responsibility for their own lives. Again, if only. As the Prime Minister has said from the beginning, the voice will have no program-delivery responsibilities whatsoever and it won’t replace any of the myriad existing entities representing Aboriginal people or providing advice on their behalf. Because it would be entrenched in the Constitution, and because it would be an attempt to restore a measure of the sovereignty that Aboriginal people lost after 1788, it would take – in the PM’s own words – a very brave government to ignore it.

What the voice would have, in fact, is the opposite of Pearson’s claim – power without responsibility, the power to make endless demands without ever having to take responsibility for anything. Indeed, every failure and disappointment would be someone else’s fault; in the first instance the government’s for failing to spend enough to meet the voice’s demands, but ultimately the Australian people’s for the original sin of British settlement.

It’s good that Pearson now admits that the way the Yes case has been prosecuted is wrong. He now wants to engage with the opponents and the sceptics, instead of abusing them as closet racists or worse. Unfortunately for him, he can’t take back his disgraceful bullying of senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price for supposedly “punching down on black fellas” and allegedly being “caught up in a redneck celebrity vortex”. And he can’t retrospectively rewrite the Uluru statement for which he was one of the moving spirits.

The Prime Minister may not have bothered to read it, but the full Uluru Statement is a lengthy tirade against Australia, as the activists’ mantra – Voice, Treaty, Truth – reveals. Its Our Story segment is a denunciation of Australia’s history as a story of shame, characterised by official violence, even genocide, and ongoing oppression.

Even though this generation of Aboriginal people are not victims and this generation of non-Aboriginal Australians are not oppressors, the voice would mean that all of us and our descendants would have to live forever with institutional arrange­ments enshrining compensation for the crimes of some Australians’ ancestors against other Australians’ ancestors.

That today’s Indigenous disadvantage is the result of intergenerational trauma arising from British colonialism is a neo-Marxist fiction, yet it permeates the full Uluru statement. Even the one-page cover version refers to the goal of a Makarrata com­mission. Far from being a peaceful coming together, makarrata is a Yolngu word for a retribution ritual, a disabling spearing in the thigh to atone for a wrong. In this sense, what the statement’s authors want is payback for the past 240 years of nation-building as if there have been no compensating benefits for the original inhabitants.

In times past, Pearson’s public advocacy has been of great service to our country. In denouncing welfare dependency as the “poison that’s killing our people”, he was telling a profound truth transcending race. In demanding back-to-basics education, including rote learning of facts, he hit on the roots of so many modern Australian problems. In calling for a kind of “cultural interoperability” where Aboriginal people were immersed in their own high culture, as well as the best that has been thought and said, Pearson was expressing an ideal to which we all should aspire.

In articulating the concept of orbits that might begin in remote Australia but then lead anywhere in the world, he was trying to liberate Aboriginal people from being tied to a particular patch of land without losing a spiritual affinity for it. He was also right to point to the three pillars on which modern Australia has been based: an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character. If only he’d been ready to enshrine this in the Constitution as a gracious acknowledgment of everyone and everything that has made us, rather than try to retrofit an ancestry-based fourth arm of government into our nation’s foundational document.

If only the Mandela side to his character hadn’t been subsumed these past few years by that of a tribal chief waging a guerrilla campaign against an oppression that is long since past and that has been replaced by the “tyranny of low expectations” that a grievance and entitlement-obsessed voice would just reinforce.

From 1788, the land mass that became known as Australia has been on a decisively different and better path. It’s no disrespect to the First Australians, or their achievements in surviving so long in what was then a very challenging environment, to say that they too have been the beneficiaries of British settlement. “The world’s oldest continuing culture” now has the advantage of equality before the law, respect for women and other minorities, and previously unimaginable technical advance. For all the mistakes of the past, this should no longer be a matter of grievance or guilt to anyone.

Instead, whatever our ancestry (which is invariably mixed anyway) we should feel immense pride in Australia’s achievement in becoming the least racist and most colourblind country in earth. The last thing we should do is jeopardise this by intruding into our Constitution this latest manifestation of identity politics. Pearson still hasn’t apologised to Price, perhaps because her warm embrace of the Indigenous, the Australian and the more broadly Western elements in her character shows a magnanimity that Pearson has lost and is only now belatedly trying to regain.

Voting No to this divisive voice should mean a reset to the Indigenous separatism that has bedevilled us these past five decades and allow all Australians to go forward again as one united people.

Told this before.
My daughter experienced an aggravated burglary in Queensland, they crept through the house via the laundry door, fortunately nine month old was in with mum at the front , not in the cot in a bedroom opposite the laundry, both sets of car keys, wallets and one car stolen and written off after being used in another burglary.
Juvenile aboriginal offender only one caught because he leftprints on his Maccas wrappers, wouldn’t name his mates.
Victims were invited to a restorative justice session but as nothing was returned (they’d cleaned out baby Christmas gifts, the baby seat even family missals), they passed on the pretend sorry session.
It’s a merry-go-round of no justice.

Voting No to this divisive voice should mean a reset to the Indigenous separatism that has bedevilled us these past five decades and allow all Australians to go forward again as one united people.

Does Tony Abbott read the Cat?

Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson

Ep. 22 Larry Sinclair says he had a night of crack cocaine-fueled sex with Barack Obama, and that Obama came back for more the next day. Assess for yourself. Here’s our interview.

Dan Bongino
@dbongino

Liberalism is a rotting, metastasizing, global cancer that destroys everything it touches.
It’s not wrong. It’s evil.
It’s not a coincidence that even liberals don’t want to live in liberal hellholes.
They escape to conservative states where they spread the liberal virus.
FACT.

Abbott writes so very well.

What else is new. When has he done anything else. He’s now admitting that masks are useless on a “population” basis but are still of benefit on an “individual” basis and please, please do wear one. Oh, and of course, no one was ever forced to do anything.

Fauci Caught In A Massive Lie

Jack Smith, Letitia James Want Trump to Stop Defending Himself.

Yes Rabz that sound you heard was this claim going straight over the heads of the assembled press. You would think someone would pipe up and ask for documented evidence, but here we are.

Obama, Clinton and Biden ALL used secret, fake-name email accounts to hide their actions

As a scientist, I’m not allowed to tell the full truth about climate change

Little unfair Roger, I have seen him delivery very good speeches but the msm, the ABC in particular, just loved to just give the um ah highlights.

Kyoto Hotel girl just arrived with breakfast.
Mrs Panzer had Neil Mitchell playing over the innernets.
Hotel girl points at speaker and asks “Who this dickhead?”

I’m sure Aboriginal girls would have been delighted to work in homes in Mosman etc over being returned to tribal life.
Robinson tried to rescue Aboriginal women kidnapped by sealers like Mansell etc, most didn’t want to be rescued, despite them being less that perfect gentlemen.
Why would that have been?

If anyone has any idea on obtaining documentation, feel free to share or ask Dover for my email.
All I am finding on Google is SBS reports and human rights articles.

This is a long post on X. I remember some of this. People did die and it was mooted that it was to protect Obama from scandal. I’m surprised that Larry Sinclair himself wasn’t killed. Perhaps he was too high profile.

Barack Obama’s Ex-Boyfriend Admits He Was ‘Prime Suspect’ in Gay Serial Killer Case

Doc Faustus, I was assured by one of the Voice lapdogs that any dissenting opinion was misinformed Trumpian lies.
Will any dissenting Coalition members be allowed to have a say? I will see myself out.

That “Women in Law” thing is something you have a laugh with a chap over lunch at the club. And then completely deny ever doing so.

Sorry Tony, but we don’t need a Mandela either.

Considering that Nelson Mandela had sat on the Central Committee of the old South African Communist Party, no we don’t need another Mandela, not really.

I’m sure Aboriginal girls would have been delighted to work in homes in Mosman etc over being returned to tribal life.

For shame, are you suggesting that tribal life was less then Utopia?

Balmoral beachgoer Harriet Miles …”
Probability of Audi driving Teal voter? I’ll ask at the next Friends of the ALPBC meeting.

you can be sure that any ‘invisible disease diagnosed by tests and treated by chronic meds’ (think hypertension and hypercholesterolemia) will, over time, see its diagnostic criteria widened to include more and more customers.

But surely, where public health systems prevail and medicines are subsidised, governments would resist this due to budgetary concerns?

1) governments no longer care a whit about ‘budgetary concerns’ …

I dare say we’re not in that world anymore.

My GP complains about being constrained by prescribing parameters presumably set by whichever government agencies are responsible to keep costs down.

I tell her not to worry as I really don’t want to be taking any more drugs anyway.

And the next stadium funding deal.

It appears we have the reason as to why Qatar Airways were given a middle finger after asking for extra flights into Australia:

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has hinted that the real reason why Australia blocked more flights from Qatar is linked to the invasive strip-searches of women at Qatar airport.

Three years ago, multiple Australian women were stripsearched by authorities at a Qatari airport after a premature baby was found in a bathroom.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne described the searches at the time as a “grossly disturbing, offensive, concerning set of events”.

Female passengers said they were ordered off the plane and told to take off their underwear before they were examined and the reason for the invasive medical examination was never explained.

“She told me to pull my pants down and that I needed to examine my vagina,’’ a female passenger said.

“I said ‘I’m not doing that’ and she did not explain anything to me. She just kept saying, ‘we need to see it, we need to see it’.

The matter is now the subject of legal action.

It emerged on Tuesday that Senator Wong has spoken to the Prime Minister of Qatar on Monday and raised the 2020 strip searches.

But her office confirmed she did not mention the political storm over Australia’s decision to block more international flights.

“I initiated the call to discuss a range of bilateral matters. One of those, obviously, is in relation to the Hamad Airport incident,’’ Senator Wong said at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“That’s something I spoke about in Opposition. Obviously it was a very distressing event for the women concerned. I also wanted to raise some multilateral issues.”

The not so subtle reminder of the issue came as it also emerged Transport Minister Catherine King rejected a bid by Qatar Airways to introduce an additional weekly flights on the same day she signed a letter to five Australian women who were invasively stripsearched at a Qatari airport.

The letter reassured the women the Australia was not considering “additional bilateral air rights with Qatar”

“As most Australians were, I was shocked by what happened to you at Hamad International Airport,” Ms King wrote.

“The treatment that you received was disgraceful. All travellers deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Speaking this morning at a press conference to release a new aviation green paper, Ms King said the women being taken off the plane by gunpoint, was a context for her decision.

“As I’ve said repeatedly, I made this decision in the national interest, and there is no one factor that I will point to that swayed my decision one way or the other,” she said.

“Normally, these decisions are not in the public domain. They are routinely made by government. I informed the prime minister prior to the decision being made public … on July 18.

“If you remember, we had multiple media requests on behalf of the women who had been escorted at gunpoint after a Qatar airlines flight and had then been subject on the tarmac in ambulances to invasive body searches. We’d had multiple media inquiries about that. And so, by July 18, the prime minister was aware of my decision.

“For context, this is the only airline that has something like that has happened. And so, I can’t say that I wasn’t aware of it. But certainly, it wasn’t the only factor. It was a factor.”

Ok I am sure many women have been to this airport and not been asked to strip to nudity. Something isn’t quite gelling.

JC you alluded to this yesterday I apologise.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has hinted that the real reason why Australia blocked more flights from Qatar is linked to the invasive strip-searches of women at Qatar airport.

Funny how this only comes up now.