Open Thread – Mon 18 Sept 2023
1,013 responses to “Open Thread – Mon 18 Sept 2023”
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Peta Credlin interviewing Dennis Shanahan, from the Oz.
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DrBeauGan
Sep 18, 2023 8:02 PM
Russell Brand is being accused not so much by the women whom he damaged or disrespected. He is being accused by disappointed women, those who expected more and got little or even nothing for having sex with him.They got bragging rights. ‘I shagged a celebrity!’
That seems to have worked until he went off the reservation and challenged the status quo. At that point he became a liability and fair game for #MeToo.
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Swimmer
So the economy must really be toast given that we’re adding thousands to the population from immigration.
Not really, Swim, or at least it depends if these immigrants are earning their keep holding down jobs and earning their keep.
Why you need to be cautious about capita GDP.
There was an interesting story about the poorest localities in the US that I read about five years ago. The poorest neighborhood in the US is a burb just outside of NYC, close to a place called Yonkers. When the analysis dug deeper, we found out that the neighborhood is made up primarily of Hasidic Jews. Hasidic Jewish couples are human breeding factories with 600 kids per couple. 🙂 Is that neighborhood blindly poor, or are the statistics really telling the real story? Obviously, it’s the latter because the GDP per capita was spread out over a large number of family units.
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The stunningly beautiful UK commentator Esther Krakue nails the allegations about Brand….
We often miss a good teaching moment, that is if you are a man in the public eye, or just a man in general, sexual discipline is very important because if you make a habit of being intimate with many women, at some point there is a high likelihood that something negative will happen, or something will come back to bite you on the bum.
I think Esther has said it best.
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Just after the 2010 US census. It still makes me LOL.
The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.
And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.
About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.
About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.
Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.
I bet it was growing geometrically. 🙂
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ABCcess the drum devoting an episode to hating on the new folk devil…
Russel Brand.All females and one lactating male like object keeping quiet on the commenter screen.
A popup appears just says ” wobblygong country” in the corner and disappears.
Apparently ” right wing people” come out and say it’s wimmin/ blacks/ the Media’s fault and are evil, or something.
Apparently Brand loves victimhood, and is nasty.
What’s the odds of their ABCcess finding such complete unanimity of views from a completely random selection of x- spurts.
Oh, and they are having a whinge about ” why don’t people trust the media”
RABZ the place now
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He is being accused by disappointed women, those who expected more and got little or even nothing for having sex with him.
A lads by the name of Debbie Schipp weighs in:
I don’t know if Russell Brand is guilty of the specific rape and sexual assault and harassment claims being levelled against him.
I do know I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for him to be called out as an allegedly predatory and controlling creep.
I do know that when I walked out of a one-on-one interview (actually, there was one of me, and then him and the tittering entourage he played to in the room) with Brand more than a decade ago, I’d just met a very unprofessional and decidedly ordinary human being.
I’d been witness to — and the subject of — a Russell Brand performance he’d spent countless press tours perfecting which featured a specialist misogynist using a facile, lowbrow stunts dressed up as humour to disarm and humiliate women trying to go about their jobs and remind them he was in charge.
Russell, his supporters would say, was just being Russell: the notorious womaniser was flirty, cheeky, bold. It was banter. It was harmless. Lighten up. Who was he hurting?
These were the days before #MeToo.
Nobody was calling him out on the way he acted in interviews, made comments on questions he didn’t feel like answering or hearing, and felt it utterly acceptable to comment on your appearance or physical attributes.
Nobody took on a major celeb. If you called it out, you were the problem. You were humourless. You were being ridiculous.
And you certainly weren’t getting any more interviews.
I’d been told by other female journalists who’d had the dubious pleasure of interviewing Brand how it would go.
Russell would pick a feature … your boobs, your legs, your butt, the length of your dress, early in the meeting. It would be masked as a compliment, and then it would get creepy, unprofessional and uncomfortable as he’d inevitably riff on it again and again.
For one of my colleagues — an entertainment writer of years of experience — her boobs were, apparently, totally fair game.
Brand’s running commentary at their first meeting saw her eventually, half-jokingly, appeal: “Russell, can you look at my eyes?” as his assistants tittered, and his co-stars sat mute.
She, like so many of us before and since, sucked it up and rolled with it.
For her next encounter, she was ready. “No Russell, we’re not doing this,” she said firmly, as she saw the words about to leave his mouth.
He meekly “behaved”. Like a naughty little child.
I had written sport for ten years before I switched to entertainment, and in that round had met a thousand Russell Brands: blokes who didn’t like that a female would have the audacity and temerity to write about serious subjects like racing and rugby league.
You learned to push back, or make the fact you were female invisible. Sometimes both.
So on that day in 2009 at Sydney’s Park Hyatt as I waited for my time with Brand I was on my guard, but only vaguely.
I’d seen Brand’s work — the stuff he got paid for — before, and actually admired his eccentric schtick, humour and razor-sharp wit.
The interviews were running later, as these things often are.
I had plenty of time to watch other journos emerge from their time with him. The majority of them were women. Stony-faced.
I can’t recall what he was selling on that trip to Australia. But within seconds it was clear it wasn’t professionalism.
As I walked in and offered my hand to shake his, he looked me up and down, carefully assessing me, then slowly met my eyes.
“Hello, Debbie Schipp,” he said, a faint mocking tone as he used my full name and his gaze returned to my legs.
I’d been warned Brand could be quite hard to pin down, so I thanked him for his time, and said ‘since we’re a bit late can we get right into it?’.
He laughed, looked at my legs again, and then said “Ooh, you’re very serious, Debbie Schipp, aren’t you? Why are you so serious?”
I shrugged and said, “I’m really not. I love a laugh, I just know we don’t have much time.”
Too late.
Brand had stood, glanced at his giggling entourage and darted out the door, insisting on saying hello to somebody he’d apparently met earlier in the lift.
He returned a few minutes later, sat — no apology — looked at my legs again, and said “right, where were we?”.
As I posed a second question, he was off again, this time chasing down a Park Hyatt employee he’d seen wandering past our interview room, for something that clearly couldn’t wait.
But the time he’d mocked two of my questions, inviting his entourage to ridicule them again, remarked several more times how serious I was (a shame, he said, because I could be quite pretty when I smiled) and had left the interview for a third time to hail yet another new hotel ‘friend’, I’d had enough.
I closed my notebook. Switched off the tape recorder. Stood. Shouldered my bag.
“Where are you going, Debbie Schipp, we’ve got another ten minutes,” Brand said, looking me in the eye for the first time.
“Yeah, I’m done,” I said.
It was the only time he had no smart-arse reply and no control.
As I exited, a publicist looked at me bleakly and said: “So I’m guessing this won’t be a cover?”
It should have been a cover story. But nobody would have read it.
These were the days when few called out the likes of Brand on his bullshit.
I shook my head and kept walking.
I was more sad and disappointed than angry.
I’d admired the irreverent and offbeat Brand as an entertainer with a formidable intellect who went where few dared, and skewered with smart humour.
Resorting to lame commentary on a woman’s physical attributes and palming it off as a joke was lazy humour. Easy pickings. Not the slightest bit clever. I thought he was edgier than that.
It wasn’t funny then. It’s not funny now.
Russell, the position you find yourself in now isn’t some mysterious plot engineered by faceless powerful people and angry women to bring you down.
You did that all by yourself.
It’s way past time you and creeps like you were called out.
It’s not a conservative revenge plot. It’s not a grand conspiracy.
It’s just people finding their Voice. And the karma bus catching up.
And you didn’t write about this at the time Debbie? It’s a #metoo moment, but not in the way you envisage.
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Anna Bligh, formerly of the Liars, tells us:
Anna Bligh, CEO of the Australian Banking Association, said Australia was seeing an “explosion of scams” hitting Australian citizens.
She defended the banks’ efforts to detect and prevent scams.
“Every bank is doing their best every day to try to make sure everyone is safe,” she said.
Couldn’t lie straight in bed.
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Bar Beach Swimmer
Sep 18, 2023 8:33 PMHaving a job.
So, it doesn’t matter what the job entails – working at Maccas or in a servo. No cost-benefit analysis re the effect on housing supply/traffic etc?
Swim, the comment was having a job is meant to show that if someone is working, it adds to GDP and doesn’t detract.
Outside of the public sector, a cost benefit analysis of a job we can leave to employers.
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thefrollickingmole
Sep 18, 2023 8:34 PM
Debbie thinks accusations of rape are ok because Brand was an asshole.Seems like a nice well balanced lass you’d love to have on your jury.
Precisely mole.
These people are deadset psychopaths.
“There’s nothing wrong with falsifying rape accusations because I don’t like you”
An idea which is gaining traction in the zeitgeist is false accusers ought to get the maximum penalty for what they accuse someone of.
A corespondent notes:
Two newspapers and one tv show investigated Brand for four years, talking to 300 different people.
And alls they got was a couple sluts out of it.
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thefrollickingmole
Sep 18, 2023 8:34 PMDebbie thinks accusations of rape are ok because Brand was an asshole.
Mole, here’s the problem with this nutball. He claims to have had sex with hundreds and hundreds of women. Possibly thousands, by his reckoning. Claiming to bag 80 gals a month means he was having sex with two/three gals a day. He also claimed to have sort professional help because he was a sex addict. In other words, he had an incredibly strong urge to get a leg over Put all that together, and it’s not a zero proposition that he may have forced himself on a few women who had second thoughts at the wrong time.
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On Russell Brand.
The Sun, my go to on UK sleaze, provides the sordid details – plus the background on what has management at the Beabysea, the Big Brother production house, and Channel 4 in desperate panic mode. And it’s not Brand challenging woke Leftist orthodoxy.
Beyond the direct allegations from the four women, two former crew members who worked with Brand on Big Brother’s EFourum claimed that their felt as if they were working as a “pimp” for the star as he got them to approach young female audience members for him to meet after the show.
Brand received treatment for sex addiction in the US in 2005, but The Times report claimed that “more sinister behaviour” was an “open secret” among TV bosses.
Given the wholesale career destruction that followed Saville’s official outing as a pervert in full view, stable doors are being slammed shut.
Naturally MP’s have now joined in the moral panic – and Inspector Knacker of the Yard is on standby…
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[email protected], “That could make a bloke very nervous”. Especially if it wasn’t your wife!
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Marriage is fu**ed.
The new consent laws Speakman implemented as NSW AG means that a young wife on the first morning of her honeymoon with her husband, could warm him up so to speak, no talking, just smiles and head pats, then after a brief period of being a generous lover to him, she is then dominant partner as her husband submissively receives coitus on his back. Not a word is spoken except for moaning and shouting each others names. They both are satisfied and she says I love you as they kiss and cuddle.
Well what it means is she is now a rapist.
If there is no enthusiastic consent, )YES means YES), then it is now sexual assault despite consensuality.
Our legal system is the enemy of family formation along with our tax system.
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Debbie Schipp, who I have never heard of, in 2009:
So on that day in 2009 at Sydney’s Park Hyatt as I waited for my time with Brand I was on my guard, but only vaguely.
In 2009. Fourteen years later, she decides to put pen to paper.
So – it was apparently important that Debbie Schipp stayed on-side rather than ‘calling out’ this apparent, and I mean apparent, terribly terrible behaviour by a bloke who was at the time not even on the cusp of the fame he later enjoyed.
In fact, at that time he may have only been ‘famous’ for a very, very poor reprise of Dudley Moore in Arthur, a story about a rich kid who falls in love.
Weak as piss. I will almost guarantee Schipp had just another giggly interview with Brand and then, because it then became fashionable, turned it into a #metoo where she’s the hero.
All for a couple of hundred freelancer bucks.
As Santa says, ‘Ho. Ho ho, and ho’.
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Recently, someone posted about side effects of covid antiviral infusions, including the feeling of smashed glass in one’s mouth. I can not remember who it was because, at the time, I was not affected in any way by the post, but today that changed quite significantly.
If possible, could that person please repost the relevant information?
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There are a lot of fuking idiots in this shithole.
You rang?
LGBT groups call for advisory board amid NSW government faith council establishment
Exclusive
By alexi demetriadi
NSW Political Reporter
@ADemetriadi
6:56PM September 18, 2023
No CommentsSydney’s LGBT community is demanding Premier Chris Minns keeps his promise to set up a voice-like advisory council for gay and trans people, after he set up a similar body for religious leaders who have promised to use it to push Labor on policy priorities.
The state government last week announced the establishment of a “milestone” NSW Faith Affairs Council to advise ministers on policy that could affect religious communities, such as – one faith leader suggested – changes to voluntarily-assisted dying or conversion practices.
LGBT groups, although welcoming the move to give religious figures a forum, want the government to ensure a similar olive branch will be extended to them.
Read Next“Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, including LGBT people, people of faith, and those of us who belong to both groups,” Equality Australia legal director Ghassan Kassisieh said.
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Bar Beach Swimmer
Sep 18, 2023 9:13 PMAbsolutely.
So is anyone doing it?
I recall reading a column by Henry Ergas in the Australian some years ago about the cost benefit of heavy duty immigration and the policy of large immigration showed up poorly. Henry had a consulting business focused on spitting out cost/benefit analysis.
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Yessers, keep telling us that Senator Price doesn’t know what she is talking about:
Two men accused of fatally stabbing an Alice Springs man as part of what prosecutors describe as an “armed mob” attack have pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Key points:Ronald Martin and Jeremy Scrutton have pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing Kumanjayi Presley with a “butcher-style knife”
The two men in their 40s were armed with an arsenal of weapons when they confronted Mr Presley in Gillen in June 2020
They remain remanded in custody and are due to be sentenced in OctoberWARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the name of an Indigenous person who has died.
Ronald Martin, 47, and Jeremy Scrutton, 43, appeared in the NT Supreme Court in Alice Springs on Monday morning, each charged with manslaughter over the death of Kumanjayi Presley in June 2020.
Mr Presley, who was 36 when he died, was the nephew of Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Benjamin Martin, 42, a co-accused who is also charged with manslaughter, had his matter adjourned to Tuesday due to a lack of available interpreters.
Hello Marcia? Hello, hello? Any comment?
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More Debbie Schipp:
He returned a few minutes later, sat — no apology — looked at my legs again, and said “right, where were we?”
Let me get in character:
Oh noooo. Someone looked at my shoulders once 14 years ago. And my legs, and gave me an up-and-down look while walking past me in a pub.
Where’s my compo? I’m the real hero here!
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Found the piece. Google is your friend. It’s a column, but not accompanied by stats. Good piece though.
We love a big Australia — but not so fast
henry ergas Follow @HenryErgas henry ergas12:00AM April 20, 2018
It is true that Melbourne, with just half London’s population, covers six times London’s area, as Shaping a Nation, the research paper on migration released earlier this week by the Treasury and the Department of Home Affairs, claims. But it hardly follows that Melbourne should, or sensibly could, aim to achieve London’s population density.
After all, the goal of migration policy is not to increase population density for its own sake. Nor is its purpose to increase gross domestic product, or even GDP per capita, as the paper implies.
Rather, the aim is to improve the wellbeing of existing Australians, taking into account their interest in the prosperity of future generations, and humanitarian concern for the rest of the world.
The choice of objective matters a great deal. The building industry wants to boost the number of homes that need to be built, while our major retailers salivate at the prospect of a larger market, but those goals may conflict with maximising the welfare of present Australians.
At its heart, that conflict centres on the resources that are difficult to expand, such as roads in densely populated areas. By increasing the demands placed on those resources, immigration makes them more congested, harming existing users in ways that conventional measures of GDP do not capture.
It may be that proper pricing of those congestible assets (say, through road charges on intensely used routes) would limit the damage to living standards, as the paper suggests. But with even the most efficient pricing in the world, existing users will still be worse off than they would have been if fewer additional vehicles were on the road.
And the costlier it is to increase those assets’ capacity, the more dramatic the harm to existing users must be as population rises, and demand with it.
That is important because the costs of adapting our major cities to absorb fast population growth are now extremely high, compared with similar cities overseas and with historical experience.
In part, those high costs are due to our industrial relations system, which adds 10 to 15 per cent to the cost of infrastructure projects, with myriad other productivity-reducing regulations aggravating the penalty. The persistently poor selection and management of major infrastructure projects makes costs greater again.
But the high costs mainly arise from the fact, over more than a century, abundant land availability, high per capita incomes and a short working day have shaped an urban fabric that combines relatively compact CBDs, sprawling suburbs and heavily trafficked radial links between them.
When that settlement pattern was in its formative stages, providing infrastructure largely involved its extension to new greenfields sites, where construction encountered few obstacles. Although costs were high — because the spacing between homes was nearly twice that in comparable cities in the US and more than three times that in Europe — they were relatively bearable.
Moreover, in that phase of our development, population growth tended to significantly reduce unit costs over time, as fixed costs were spread over a larger number of users.
Now, however, capacity expansion almost always involves brownfields work in heavily developed areas, disrupting existing uses of land and requiring reliance on costly underpasses, elevated ramps and tunnelling over long distances. And instead of economies of scale, costs often rise more than proportionately as the scale and pace of projects rises, with “mega-projects” being especially prone to massive cost blowouts.
Those facts of life aren’t about to change. The urban fabric is extraordinarily durable, as is the housing stock: that is why there is so much truth in Winston Churchill’s dictum that “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”.
In democracies — which cannot adopt China’s approach of simply bulldozing millions of homes to build high rises and superhighways — modifying the structure of urban areas is the work of many decades.
As a result, the constraints those costs impose should figure prominently in setting population policy. Put in the jargon of economics, they limit the optimal population of our major cities, relative to many cities overseas, and the rate at which their population ought to increase.
But rather than facing that reality, the report simply excludes the costs of adapting our urban fabric from its calculations of the net benefits of the migrant intake.
Given that those costs are scarcely negligible — as a proportion of GDP, our infrastructure spending is already almost twice the average for the major advanced economies and may need to rise further — that exclusion casts serious doubt on Scott Morrison’s claim that the report provides “a clear evidence base for the government’s migration policy settings supporting our national interest”.
That the report’s quantification also ignores many other costs — including the impact of high rates of population growth on non-market resources, such as the untrammelled enjoyment of open spaces — only makes the Treasurer’s claim yet more suspect.
None of that is to deny that migration brings a broad range of benefits, many of which are also hard to measure. By far the most important is that migrants are driven by the desire to make a better life for themselves and their families. Settler economies, such as Australia, have benefited enormously from that ambition, as migrants have striven to give their children the future they dreamt of. Retreating from “Big Australia” to a country bunkered against inflows from the rest of the world would therefore be an unwarranted diminution of national possibility and an unjustifiable loss of social hope.
But there is no surer way of provoking that retreat than to keep migration at levels that exceed our absorptive capability. If that is what the government wants to achieve, it risks succeeding wonderfully.
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https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2023/09/voice-unity-albanese-style.html
SWMBO and I wondered why both SBS and ABC were covering a No rally in Adelaide that hadn’t yet started in their evening news. Non-event doesn’t begin to describe it.
As the above shows, it was because there was scheduled to be a bunch of protesters yelling “racist” etc and they were there to catch the vision.
Pretty poor turnout on the basis of the vid… I wonder if there will be better footage later on?
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Ronald Martin, 47, and Jeremy Scrutton, 43, appeared in the NT Supreme Court in Alice Springs on Monday morning, each charged with manslaughter over the death of Kumanjayi Presley in June 2020.
Mr Presley, who was 36 when he died, was the nephew of Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
WTF!!
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There are a lot of fuking idiots in this shithole.
You rang?
Governments should consider if Indigenous defendants should be heard by ‘mixed jury’, new report finds
A new report has made strong recommendations that an inquiry be launched immediately to remedy chronic underrepresentation of Indigenous jurors.Exclusive
By ellie dudley
Legal Affairs Correspondent
@EllieDudley_
8:28PM September 18, 2023
No CommentsGovernments should consider granting First Nations defendants special rights to be heard by a mixed jury of half Indigenous Australians, according to a report commissioned by a peak judicial body and backed by a Northern Territory Supreme Court judge as “ground breaking”. The report made strong recommendations that a national inquiry be launched immediately to remedy chronic under-representation of Indigenous jurors.
The inquiry, held by the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General, would also consider whether express rights should be given to Indigenous defendants to allow them to be heard by Indigenous jurors, after the researchers criticised the Territory Law Reform Committee for failing to assess the benefits of a structured mixed jury before ruling it out.
The report, written by University of NSW researchers Jill Hunter and Sharleigh Crittenden and published by the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration, was championed by sitting NT Supreme Court judge and AIJA president Jenny Blokland, who congratulated Professor Hunter and Ms Crittenden on producing a report that makes recommendations for “positive change”
Read Next“The long-standing barriers to Indigenous representation on juries must be urgently addressed if the administration of justice is to have any credibility in the parts of the community most affected by its decisions,” she wrote.
“The AIJA Council resolved to directly commission this work, as although the issue is not new, the lack of reform in the past has led to sharp and justifiable criticism of the existence of being tried by ‘ones peers’.
“The failure to address the barriers to first peoples’ representation on juries, as the Report makes plain, has long been acknowledged in legal, judicial and policy circles. This failure must not continue.”
The researchers said there was a “strong argument” to restructuring Australian jury representation to “affirmatively include First Nations jurors”.
One suggestion raised to enable this was the concept of “juries de meditate linguae” – a method granting a minority defendant the right to be tried by a jury comprised half of that minority.
The researchers backed this method as having a long “historical heritage” that could “increase the inclusion of racial minorities on juries”. “The jury de meditate originally entitled Jews in medieval England to special mixed juries, made up half of Jews and half of Englishmen,” they wrote, noting the method is used in Argentina to boost the representation of Indigenous jurors.
“While this form of mixed jury was abolished in England in 1870, it continued to operate beyond that time in Australia and elsewhere. The de meditate linguae was recognised and applied in both South Australia and Queensland.”
These juries were employed in at least two separate Australian trials concerning Chinese defendants in the 1800s: the Melbourne trial of Ah Toon and the Northern Territory trial of Ah Kim.
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Some interesting defenders of Russel Brand coming right out hitting.
https://twitter.com/SammiePressdee/status/1703133573035733003In 2006 I refused to have sex with Russell Brand. I was in his London flat. There was a lot of heavy petting and we were both down to our pants. He didn’t pressure me when I said no. He wasn’t angry or abusive. Everything that happened was consensual. I stayed the night in his flat and felt safe.
…You’d hardly expect that sort of defense from women if he was a genuine predator.
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johanna
Sep 18, 2023 9:28 PMBenjamin Martin, 42, a co-accused who is also charged with manslaughter, had his matter adjourned to Tuesday due to a lack of available interpreters.
Is that even possible, that he cannot speak enough English in Alice Springs to understand the charges and proceedings?
I am curious what the interpreter would translate some of the legalize as? -
Steve trickler
Sep 18, 2023 7:23 PMI remember this clip at 12k views. Now it is up to 124 million.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – The Danish National Symphony Orchestra (Live)
Thanks for reminding me – it is a magic performance. I saw a clip of an interview with the whistler (perfect tone and note) and she is a married mother of three kids, surprised and delighted by the success of that performance.
Unlike Sydney’s SSO and Ballet, The DSO actually are interested in what punters want.
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Another outstanding performance of a Morricone classic.
You can see the contestants (finalists?) in the background just looking on in astonishment.. ‘we’re totally outclassed here, gals’.
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miltonf
Sep 18, 2023 7:55 PMI suspect you’ve never met a Ukrainian.
Actually yes- I can think of two
There are plenty of them in Queanbeyan, thanks to the Snowy scheme. The originals are very old, but still passionate in their views. They congregate for coffee in the mall, reminding me of Lygon St in the 70s.
Their offspring are a mixed bunch, ranging from the obese teenagers covered with ugly tatts and their druggie ‘boyfriends’ to hard-working and affluent tradies and professionals.
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Bar Beach Swimmer:
So, it doesn’t matter what the job entails – working at Maccas or in a servo. No cost-benefit analysis re the effect on housing supply/traffic etc?
Doesn’t that particular demographic, like the Mormons, barely enter the statistics because they are self sufficient?
So what would happen if they constituted half the population? -
I suspect you’ve never met a Ukrainian
my neighbours are Ukrainian and there’s a Camry with a Ukie flag on it parked in front of my joint right now.
I remember 5 years ago when we moved here and a day after there’s a knock at the door and Boris and Natasha are standing there with an an A4 photo-copy of a cat.
yep …a rag-dollB&N: hello I am Boris and this is my wife Natasha. We live at #9
MT: nice to meet you
B&N: have you seen our cat?
MT: nup
B&N: can we look in your shed?
MT: er … nup
B&N: oktheir grown kids are fair dinkum Adidas wearing gangsters
Grandma Olga, occasionally walks the the court with her zimmer frame and scowling
i swear the bird-life goes quiet when she comes out
dont even try to say hellothey’re warming to us … Natasha actually waved back at me the other day
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H B Bear
Sep 18, 2023 5:55 PM
News flash, Geoff – Australians are over the cultural cringe.
Some people make it their life’s work.
“The Eyes of the World Are Upon Us”.
Firstly, they are not. Australians are broadly travelled enough to know that the rest of the world couldn’t give a fat rat’s clacker what happens here.
Secondly, it’s now reciprocated. We don’t care what they think even if there is a remote chance one or two are paying attention. -
Thanks, JC:
Ergas:
After all, the goal of migration policy is not to increase population density for its own sake. Nor is its purpose to increase gross domestic product, or even GDP per capita, as the paper implies.
Rather, the aim is to improve the wellbeing of existing Australians, taking into account their interest in the prosperity of future generations, and humanitarian concern for the rest of the world.
…the report simply excludes the costs of adapting our urban fabric from its calculations of the net benefits of the migrant intake.
And still not happening because decisions for the benefit of the people are of little value to politicians.
So, the benefit of filling a servo job from migration maybe outweighed by the cost of more traffic on the road, or to repeat Ergas’ better prose, ‘the costs of adapting our urban fabric’.
Under this analysis high migration is not a win-win and not every job, when filled by a migrant, brings a standard benefit.
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Governments should consider granting First Nations defendants special rights to be heard by a mixed jury of half Indigenous Australians, according to a report commissioned by a peak judicial body and backed by a Northern Territory Supreme Court judge as “ground breaking”. The report made strong recommendations that a national inquiry be launched immediately to remedy chronic under-representation of Indigenous jurors.
Hang on, if your lineage is only 1/16th or less, you can claim all benefits available? Just really stupid and should be laughed right out of any self respecting institution.
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You know it makes sense!
Juries must contain a percentage of gay people if the defendant is gay.
What about if the defendant is from overseas? Insist there should be people from the defendant’s country of origin!
If the defendant is male insist there should be 48% of the jury male!
Trannies form a queue – we’ll get to your case when we can find enough…
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Yoohoo, Rabz!
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The Vanguard Group, Inc. 8.22% 12,272,048
BlackRock Fund Advisors 4.63% 6,912,497
SSgA Funds Management, Inc. 4.12% 6,152,336Firstly, they’re interconnected, certainly BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet and I’m sure some others too. Secondly, for a large public company, 7% and 8% investment is a huge amount, with board seats and plenty of influence to ensure they retain the holding.
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Firstly, they’re interconnected, certainly BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet and I’m sure some others too
How are they “interconnected’?
Secondly, for a large public company, 7% and 8% investment is a huge amount, with board seats and plenty of influence to ensure they retain the holding.
You described it as a controlling interest. It’s not. A controlling interest is by definition, 50%.
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Cassie of Sydney
Sep 18, 2023 8:00 PM
Re the women making the allegations against Brand, I’m sorry but when I hear stories of women who choose to go to the media rather than the police to “tell their story”, surely I can’t be the only one who is somewhat suspicious.
I saw a t-shirt on the street today.
“You can’t force people to respect you.
But you can choose not to be disrespected.”
Bit long for a bumper sticker, but there you have it. -
I have become more adventurous in playing with the buttons on Japanese toilets (albeit with the lid shut and standing a safe distance away to start with).
They have a sound effects button which plays birdsong and babbling stream sounds to mask any actual splashing, tinkling and groaning noises.
But nothing to mask the smell unfortunately. -
they’re interconnected, certainly BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet and I’m sure some others too
Strange how the capitalist system draws in these entities, all seeking to maximize their wealth and prepared to buy any share or pay any (reasonable) cost to do that.
Could it be that they do this because they are managing money for ordinary people?
The capitalist conspiracy never ends …
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I’d admired the irreverent and offbeat Brand as an entertainer with a formidable intellect who went where few dared, and skewered with smart humour.
Resorting to lame commentary on a woman’s physical attributes and palming it off as a joke was lazy humour. Easy pickings. Not the slightest bit clever. I thought he was edgier than that.
Sheesh some people are dumb. Or easily mesmerized by glamour. All i’ve ever seen on the screen is a heavily made-up doyenne who can speed-read a set scwipt fwom memowy, but fails to meaningfully engage with interviewers or guests… or subjects, as discussions progress.
Does it not dawn on anyone that Brand is no great wit, no deep thinker, no edgy contrarian… but rather, just a convincing performer? -
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