Good moaning, back to work for some of us but croissants don’t grow on trees you know.

Have nice day-week as the cousins keep saying.

We retreated to a small village called Glifa for an overnight rethink. All of central Greece was flooded with very bad headlines So we spent several hours working out our options, and decided on bring our flight forward…back to Oz on Monday night.

Travelling back to Athens was weird, like something out of an “end of the world SF movie”. Very few cars on the main A1 super-highway, and police roadblocks for anything going the other direction – eg: outwards from Athens and northwards. Freeways empty. Cars going the other way were lined up, with police advising them and generally turning them around. But there was one constant – Mrs TE guessed we would have six tolls, we were up to 5 with 100kms to go. They varied from 90p through to seven euros.

We gave car #4 of our travels back to Mr Hertz, and found an Air BnB in a seaside area of Athens. Flying the excellent Qatar Air again home.

Spare a thought today for those who perished in 9/11.

I see Ramirez’ TDS remains unabated.

Twenty two years ago, everyday people were still sound asleep, some with bags packed for their early morning flights, others with work clothes ready on hangers, perhaps lunches packed. Street sweepers wended their way along the kerbs in their night time cleanup, fire fighters were starting their graveyard shifts.

Meanwhile, others were wakeful. They had a plan to commit an unspeakable crime on innocent civilians. They too laid out their equipment for the task – harmless to anyone but ideological perverts.

Here in Australia, as dawn broke on the 12th, received the horrifying pictures. The night owls like my husband had watched, transfixed, from the early hours. Something is happening in America was all he said, a shocked face half a world away.

We are still experiencing the fall out from this today.

Last there in summer, 2019. The site is sombre, but busy. Nothing stands still, and neither should it. It’s a living city, not a museum.

The pools, marking the buildings’ footprint, have a waist-high coping. It’s sloped and carved with the names of those who perished. Not in alphabetical order…the placement is far more poignant and thoughtful. They are grouped with their workmates, remembered in death as they last stood in life, with the people they spent their days with.

The coping is punctuated with the occasional flower. A birthday, an anniversary, something significant. It’s powerful and emotive, and that’s not a bad thing.

The History Channel had a doco on this morning which consisted of home videos of New Yorkers on that terrible day 22 years ago. It was raw and gut wrenching. Never forget.

Six years ago I was in New York and had a flight that day to Toronto. The TV had the service where the name of every person who died was read out one by one. Driving across Manhattan to Newark Airport the solemn atmosphere was evident. I just hope that time does not diminish the memories too much.

Sophie again — updated from yesterday’s article

ABC presenter Leigh Sales said she has concerns about activism journalism in the media industry
By SOPHIE ELSWORTH
MEDIA WRITER
@sophieelsworth
UPDATED 3:25PM SEPTEMBER 10, 2023, FIRST PUBLISHED AT 2:11PM SEPTEMBER 9, 2023
ABC presenter Leigh Sales has serious concerns about activist journalism and the increasing “blurring of lines” in the media ­industry.

Speaking at the Women in Media conference in Sydney on Saturday, Sales said while the surge in artificial intelligence and its effects on the media was of serious concern, activism by journalists was a bigger worry after becoming more prevalent in recent years.

“The AI (artificial intelligence) stuff is worrying but what worries me more is the blurring of activism and journalism and the loss of what I would call ‘independent journalism’,” she said at the ­conference.

“I’ve been worried about that for a long time. I wrote a book about this called On Doubt in about 2007 and now I look back and go, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I was writing about this in 2007, that was the Golden Age of independent journalism’.”

The comments come just two weeks after Sales instructed staff at the public broadcaster that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was a “one-page document” and that those arguing it was longer were wrong.

She gave staff exact instructions on how to beats arguments that the statement was many pages long, including scripts for employees to read during interviews if someone argued it was not a single-page document.

Sales, who hosts ABC’s Australian Story program, told the audience there had been worrying signs since 2007 that “organisations have picked out their ideological bent and they’re reporting from that”.

“I’m so big on things like setting aside your own opinion and trying to go into things with an open minded mindset.

“Fake news, misinformation … the bullying that occurs on social media, reporters are doing reporting that doesn’t fit with the zeitgeist or world view, that all really concerns me.”

ABC presenter Leigh Sales speaks of her concerns about activism journalism at the 2023 Women in Media…
The email instructing stuff about the length of the Uluru Statement was sent by the ABC’s editorial policy chief Mark Maley on August 24. In it Sales, the former 7.30 host, said an example of misinformation was “the claim that the Uluru Statement is a 26-page document”.

“That is inaccurate,” she wrote.

“The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a one-page ­document.”

The document’s length provoked much debate between the Yes and No camps and some pro-voice advocates, including Uluru Statement co-architect Professor Megan Davis, who in her newly-released book said it was “18 pages long”.

Earlier this month Sales did a sit-down interview with Ten’s The Project’s co-host Waleed Aly, and said she didn’t take positions on anything. If you “want to be a journalist, you have to leave your opinions at the door”, she told Aly.

She also told the Women in Media conference that diversity of perspectives in journalism remained vital to ensure stories were covered by people with lived experience.

“In any newsroom you want as much diversity as possible and I don’t just mean cultural diversity, I mean economic diversity … you want people who have come from working class backgrounds, you want people who have grown up in the country and not just inner-city Sydney,” she said.

“You want people that didn’t go to university as well those who went to university and you want people from all sorts of different cultural backgrounds. If you don’t have, for example, someone in your newsroom who grew up and their mother was on a single-mother pension … they’re not going understand really what stories about cost of living are like.”

SOPHIE ELSWORTH MEDIA WRITER

ABC presenter Leigh Sales speaks of her concerns about activism journalism

Can’t be any mirrors in Ms Sales’ house.

Dependence on a utopian ‘balance’ in the mesozoic media will lull conservatives into a false sense of security. What is required is to understand our audience as well as/better than, our opponents. It’s inarguable that our message delivery & associated tactics are woeful.

The renewables industry is cracking apart. Local suppliers are floundering. And here we go, the only answer is more taxpayers money to prop up uncompetitive businesses?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-11/wind-tower-companies-and-unions-want-local-procurement-guarantee/102837748

It would be helpful to know the timeline between sales and cancellations. If it’s only a matter of days, that’s conceivable. If it’s weeks or even months, then the issue becomes one of incompetence and perhaps malfeasance.

Ticketing systems are pretty sophisticated. It’s not is if physical vouchers are still widely used – it’s all automated. And those programs would have already been in place well before Covid. A flight cancellation would result in a “hold” on sales, a simple computer function.

Qantas isn’t the only airline to be grounded for so long. I know BA had endless problems with cancellations, and still do. Did they also sell many…many tickets for flights cancelled well prior to the sale?

Rosie, the only problem I have is a simple processing one.

Cancel a flight, hold ticket sales – the moment the decision is made, the system is activated. A keystroke or two. This is not difficult, because someone decided to cancel the flight. That someone in operations has access to the scheduling and sales via their keyboard.

It sounds as though this simple but vital element was left for later on and someone else – which is basic incompetence.

There is no point in comparing internationals who were all flying around long before Australia opened its borders.

Why? Their operations systems are all similar.

That’s what we were told about Pell.

Yea, one for the “a farty breakfast with acrid tears” & ‘da woodchippa’ crowds to consider re: malicious and fraudulent investigations undertaken by “hero cops” like Gazza Jubelin, etc.

Djokovic is now GOAT in slams.
Stick that up your arse NY Bidenites.

“I’m gonna tell you something New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I didn’t see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this,” Adams raved at a town hall meeting on Wednesday night.

“This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.”

How long before Adams starts shining a spotlight on the New York skyline with a bat shaped symbol?

Another server error.

from the RedBridge poll last week…

[as a reason for supporting the proposal] 16 per cent of voters said that the Voice “was initiated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.

Imagine, if you will, a referendum to change the constitution to enshrine the right to taxpayer-funded federal subsidisation of golf course membership fees.
Can you imagine 16 percent of voters saying that their main reason for supporting the subsidy of golf courses was that the proposal “was initiated by Anglo-Saxon people”?
It would not happen. Nobody would think for 5 seconds that golf course subsidies should be supported simply because the people asking for it were white.
The most generous interpretation here is it’s just more evidence that 16% of the country are as thick as two short planks. They might even be a bit racist.

What do you cats hear in your social circles?
Are people talking about the racist aspect of the Indigenous Voice To Parliament?

Anyways…off to Stitch n’ Bitch for the first time since July. Might do a straw poll on the Voice, although I suspect everyone except the politicians are Voiced-out.

😀

Real Deal on Saturday morning posted an article on NT jackery and its recent antics:

The Northern Territory’s new top cop is pleading with almost 250 former police officers to rejoin the force in a bid to heal rifts in the organisation following a ­“tumultuous” few years sparked by a fatal police shooting and the Covid-19 pandemic.

To recap, a constable shot a career criminal wanted for a raft of violent badness in Yuendumu. At the time of the shooting, the cop was being stabbed by the crook with a pair of surgical scissors.

The NT government was tanking, and tanking badly. Three years earlier, Chief Minister Michael Gunner gave NT Assistant Commissioner Jamie Chalker a lucrative job in his Department of Housing, heading up delivery of houses in remote locations – on yuuuge cash, it is said.

Gunner then parachuted Chalker into the Commissioner’s chair after the departure of Reece Kershaw (now the AFP honcho). Chalker got the nod ahead of Michael Murphy, and there was – and remains – substantial discussion that in exchange for the big jack chair Chalker owed Gunner, and owed him big time.

Chalker had to pay out early. Very early indeed. That constable was then directed to travel to Darwin from Alice Springs, where he was arrested, and parked up in the cells before being charged with murder.

All of this happened without a single statement having been taken.

We are thinking of trying out Qatar Airlines sometime next year for another European trip in summer 24. Hope they get more flights from Oz by then. Hairy’s booked us already for travel next March to the US, (using Delta I think to Puerto Rico), to pick up a Caribbean and South America cruise, coming home flatbed via Santiago on Air Chile. We’ve flown Business with them before and they are good.

We generally take Business Class for long haul trips. Shorter hops we do in daytime, sometimes in Premium Economy, sometimes just Economy and go straight to an airport hotel to recover.

III.

“We saw a lot of resignations, through and post-Covid,” Mr Murphy said.

Yep. This is the reason every police force in the country is both running short of applicants, and taking everyone that applies, regardless of dunderheadedness.

I contend that cops join the cops to lock up crooks. They do not join the cops to enforce health policy dreamed up by unelected mediocre bureaucrats.

One of the very first things Murphy did was reinstate, with back pay, five of the abovementioned cops who challenged Chalkers directive to jab or get sacked. Evidently, and although it’s early days for Murphy, this has earned him substantial goodwill.

The 51-year-old said he planned to reshape the force’s leadership now that positions in the executive are opening up with ­Assistant Commissioner Bruce Porter and Deputy Commissioner Murray Smallage retiring.

Porter and Smalpage were part of the inner circle. Yes men to the core apparently, so mu so in Smalpage’s case that Chalker brought him over from the WA jacks as his deputy. There is very good mail that two more of Chalker’s Top Men will be gonski in the next month or so.

From people that know him – Murphy is not the messiah, and he is starting with a very low bar by replacing the most unpopular Commissioner in 150 years. However, it’s a decent start and time will tell.

*so much so*

Oh and a little perspective, it was 8000 bookings out of a total of over 21.25 million passenger journeys in 2022.

ACCC tells us it was 8,000 flights, not bookings. So, unless QANTAS was cancelling an extraordinary series of one pax flights, we appear to be talking 100’s of thousands of paid bookings.

The ACCC today launched action in the Federal Court of Australia alleging Qantas Airways (QAN) engaged in false, misleading or deceptive conduct, by advertising tickets for more than 8,000 flights that it had already cancelled but not removed from sale.

The ACCC alleges that for more than 8,000 flights scheduled to depart between May and July 2022, Qantas kept selling tickets on its website for an average of more than two weeks, and in some cases for up to 47 days, after the cancellation of the flights.

Roughly 25% of the total flights scheduled in that 3-month period.

I’m neither an aviationist nor a booking system IT specialist – and certainly not a shill for the ACCC. But if this kind of system outcome wasn’t deliberate, or was tolerated because of convenience (and a neat way to boost working capital), then QANTAS’s defence is probably going to have to centre on ocean-going management incompetence.

Or possibly a distraction squirrel.

Here’s why Ukraine’s defeat could mean the end of NATO in its current form

The bloc has too much riding on Kiev’s highly-unlikely success, and that’s why it’s doing all it can to prolong the conflict

As the West’s proxy war in Ukraine slips inexorably towards utter failure, the neocons behind the debacle are faced with dwindling avenues of retreat.

And how do senior EU bureaucrats like Ursula Von der Leyen climb down from their quasi-religious devotion to the ’cause’ of utterly defeating Russia, which she has shamelessly evangelized for over a year and a half? Lastly, how does the American administration, which has gone politically, morally, and economically ‘all in’ against Russia in Ukraine, contemplate what amounts to an increasingly inevitable European version of Afghanistan 2.0?

They will need to do two things: Firstly, find someone to blame for their defeat and secondly, find a new enemy to deflect public opinion onto.

The ‘someone to blame’ will be quite easy to identify – the narrative will be flush with attacks on states like Hungary, China, and to some extent India, who will be accused of “undermining the unified effort needed to isolate and defeat Russia.”

The ‘China is the real threat’ narrative is bubbling steadily to the surface in Western media.

And, most worryingly, should Western powers fail to make their case for ‘plausible deniability’ around the culpability for this war, there is always the option of further escalating it.

Such an escalation could rapidly lead to direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, an outcome no lucid observer on either side of the debate could or should be contemplating.

In the event that NATO does indeed sanction a direct intervention into Ukraine, it will, of course, be justified as a ‘peacekeeping’ or humanitarian intervention by Polish or Romanian troops, but the categorization of the ‘mission’ will become gloriously irrelevant when the first clashes with Russian forces occur, followed by a potentially rapid spiral into all-out war between Russia and NATO.

Try flying with Emirates as I have heard that their Business Class is good.

Yes. We’ve flown Business with Emirates and it was something of that standard that I regard as par for the course with this type of fare. Qantas didn’t match up at all, and as we’ve flown Qantas Business in the past it was obvious that the service had precipitously declined.

Legal question. Is it fraud if they took your money for a particular flight but offered you alternatives?

It’s really: Did they intentionally or recklessly use deception to financially advantage themselves or to financially disadvantage another party?

In support of Qantas though, it wasn’t entirely their fault that they had to bump a Business passenger down in order to fly an employee on that flight. We had the same thing happen on Hawaiian Airlines, when we flew Business back from Honolulu. I blogged about it here. We weren’t bumped as they had spare Business seats but we had booked to sit in carrels next to each other, and one of those carrels was now taken by the reserve pilot, who watched videos next to me most of the flight. We complained then, to no avail, as that seat was apparently ‘dedicated’ to an employee if needed. Why they couldn’t leave Hairy next to me and put the spare pilot in Hairy’s Business seat was not explained as anything other than ‘regulations’.

Obviously airlines gamble on having one spare Business seat somewhere should the employee condition come into play. Qantas didn’t. They’d overbooked, leaving no spare. And it was only when the media piled on about it that they offered a proper recompense to the passenger. We had to just accept our lot. Not too hard. I don’t get to sleep next to a handsome pilot very often. 🙂