Open Thread – Weekend 18 Nov 2023
1,171 responses to “Open Thread – Weekend 18 Nov 2023”
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as a Marist Boy, going to watch Joeys Play Rugby, the comment was the Joey’s Boys arriving for the Game with their Wife & Kids
Sure.
Or – or, as a Christian Brothers boy at a school that valued rugby, the same or similar commentary was directed at some of the Geelong Grammar players.
Not because they were 28, but because their sheer size dwarfed the players on the other team.
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WOW! Breaking news @staceyabrams brother in law was just arrested in Florida for having sex with a minor and assaulting this minor! That means that Stacey Abram’s brother in law is a pedophile. Even worse he is the husband of Stacey’s sister Leslie Abrams Gardner, a federal judge in Georgia who was on @JoeBiden’s shortlist to be selected as a United States Supreme Court Justice. That means that Joe Biden was actually thinking of appointing the wife of a pedophile to serve on the United States Supreme Court!
Stracy Abrams’ own strength is election manipulation.
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Pfizer’s C-19 Vaccine Contract with Canada Reveals Govt. Knew The Shots Were NOT Safe when purchasing in 2020.
The Government pushed ‘Safe & Effective’ on the population knowing the long term damages were unknown.
F.O.I. Request reveals:
..”Purchaser (Canadian Government) further acknowledges that the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known”Manufacturing and Supply Agreement Between PFIZER CANADA ULC (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DGIxi2gS95nt5F1fZdCnKuaMSC_Xlc-h/view?pli=1)
-Amanda Forbes, CHD Canada. Vaxxed Canada, full time carer of her vax injured dad
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Stacy Abrams has been saying she is the true governor of Georgia for quite a while, and she was robbed. Robbed!
Which is kinda ironic since Trump is currently fighting a court case in Georgia after being robbed of the Presidency due to an actual stolen election.
That her BIL is an actual pedo is a cherry on top. Dems seem to be into everything.
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Canada’s federal court has found Ottawa’s single-use plastic (straws, bags, etc) ban to be “unreasonable & unconstitutional” but found nothing wrong whatsoever with tyrannical covid lockdowns, vax mandates, & billions of face masks made with micro-plastics.
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Armadillo – From what I can infer Biden has assembled a dirt file the size of Mt Everest, and Jill is the custodian of it. Amassed over 50 years in the gutters and septic tanks of the Democrat Party. I expect Epstein might get a mention, and his friends.
The cautious angling towards getting Biden out of the candidacy suggests he is sitting on a very large and smelly bomb. Add in also that quite a few Biden clan members have been mentioned in dispatches. I doubt Joe will be easy to remove.
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SpaceX@SpaceX·1h
All systems and weather are go for the second integrated flight test of Starship. Today’s webcast will go live ~35 minutes ahead of liftoff ? http://spacex.com/launches
Quote
Elon Musk@elonmusk·9h
? Ad Astra ?SpaceX@SpaceX·52m
Propellant load of the Super Heavy booster is underwaySpaceX@SpaceX·32m
Propellant load of Starship’s upper stage is now underwayWhatever happens it’s going to be interesting.
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The show has started!
SpaceX@SpaceX
Watch Starship’s second integrated flight test ? http://spacex.com/launches
SpaceX@SpaceX
Starship’s Second Flight Test
11:24 PM · Nov 18, 2023https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1725852544587727145
(Love how he’s cutting YT dead.)
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Indolent
Nov 18, 2023 10:51 PMSon of WEF co-founder calls for Klaus’ arrest
For what? You can’t prove they arrange for the pandemic to happen. It’s unclear which part of their *reaction* was illegal. Schwab is several levels above the hands-on jabbing. What can you arrest him for?
Pascal said:
I call on the Swiss authorities and security to arrest those people immediately. Why? The WEF, WHO, GAVI, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Bill Gates all advocated a global humanity injection by a bioweapon injecting nanolipids into 5.7 billion people.
They “advocated” mass vaccination. That’s not illegal. Risky, but not illegal.
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Politics takes a huge amount of egotism and narcissism to even consider it as a career. What people fail to recognise is that it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are always faceless people backing them, funding them and supporting them.
Ego feeders. As a society, these are the people we need to fear. No one elected them, they just know how to “sell a product”, and to remain in the shadows.
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Cop deals with a violent loony by un-holstering his… German shepherd:
https://twitter.com/TheFarEastFiles/status/1725528054460457042
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Retired generals call for coup to eject Spain’s Socialist PM
Pedro Sánchez came second in July’s elections, but has managed to cobble together support from hard-Left and regional parties
By James Badcock – UK Telegraph
A group of retired military officers in Spain have called for an army coup against the prime minister after Pedro Sánchez secured a new term through a controversial amnesty for Catalan separatists.
In a letter, 51 retired officers ask “those responsible for the defence of constitutional order for the dismissal of the prime minister and the calling of general elections”.
Mr Sánchez’s Socialist Party came second in July’s elections, but he managed to cobble together sufficient support from hard-Left and regional parties to win approval from the majority in Congress.
Taking the oath before King Felipe VI at the Zarzuela Palace near Madrid on Friday, Mr Sánchez was sworn in again as prime minister of Spain, a military dictatorship until 1975.
The call for Mr Sánchez’s removal from power came in an open letter published on Friday on the website of the AME association of Spanish armed forces members. It is supported by 51 retired officers, according to digital newspaper infoLibre, but their names were not published with the text.
The officers denounced Mr Sánchez for encroaching on judicial independence and flouting the constitutional principle of equality between Spaniards by favouring Catalans with a generalised pardon for criminal acts.
Rebel officers discussed ‘killing 26 million’
Reportedly, the 51 signatories include some who were investigated over the contents of a WhatsApp chat in 2020 that discussed ousting Mr Sánchez, even though this might mean having “to kill 26 million sons of bitches”. No charges were brought.
That same year more than 70 retired officers sent a letter to King Felipe, encouraging him to intervene in Spain’s political situation.
During the parliamentary debate for Thursday’s vote, Right-wing politicians accused Mr Sánchez of damaging democracy by presenting an amnesty for Catalans who committed crimes during the region’s failed effort to separate from Spain in 2017.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, conservative People’s Party leader, accused Mr Sánchez of “buying” the support of Catalans and perpetrating an “electoral fraud” as Spaniards had not voted for an amnesty.
Prior to the elections, Mr Sánchez had stated his belief that such an amnesty would be unconstitutional.
Santiago Abascal of the far-Right Vox party accused Mr Sánchez of staging a “coup d’état” that would one day see him face criminal proceedings of his own.
On Thursday protestors marked two weeks of nightly demonstrations outside the Socialist Party’s Madrid headquarters, in which dozens have been arrested and injured as demonstrators battle with police guarding the building.
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Señor m0nty sits in his jumpseat on the commieplane ready to parachute into action to defend la revolucion from any Spanish right wing junta.
Stop eating the paracord, m0nty, they’re not noodles!
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Armadillo
Nov 19, 2023 1:10 AMSomething weird about that clip, CL. It’s staged like a training exercise. That’s not a stationary camera. It moves. Background doesn’t look right with the bike, and the speed of the cars. Also the way they are dressed, the pathetic opening punch and the gloves and boots in particular.
Definitely staged for training.
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Week In Pictures — with lotsa LOLs.
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Watching endless BBC b/s, and many…many words about Gaza.
I suppose all the talking heads have to do it – endless jabber on this and that as their pulled strings wind down like Chatty Cathies. Sewage running in the streets, children with “dead bodies”, blah…blah…blah.
It all boils down to a single, simple principle…
RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!
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In other news, I’m crook as Rookwood. Last night, made to stand in a freezing, wind swirling at – 4C corridor to learn all about the history of Bergen.
Well, I’m now up to speed on the Hanseatic League, so that’s a plus. On the other hand my nose is running like a tap and people are looking at me like I’m Typhoid Mary. Thanks DeathPox.
The ship is loaded with corpulent Germans, a smattering of French and leavened with Aussies. I was chipped by a bint for “pushing in” this morning when I changed lanes after the bar code reader went tits up. I kindly invited her to “push in” in front of me. Silence and death stare. 🙂
Life’s rich tapestry.
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No mention of how she can afford a “high profile” brief .. looking like a smack on the wrist and the naughty corner by the time she, eventually, gets to court ….. and she’s not even a”refugee” .. Oz justice gotta luv it ..
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12750427/Afterpay-Zip-Pay-Latitude-Openpay-Carly-Davidson-fraudster.html -
Crazy stuff.
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Serpentza:
Crazy Chinese Workplace Accidents – Why is Workplace Safety so Bad in China?
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This is the level of integrity of our governments and institutions.
Ernest Ramirez’s 16-year-old son died five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.
FEMA then contacted him, offering to pay for his son’s burial if he claimed COVID killed his son.
Thank you, @RepThomasMassie @mtgreenee, and @RWMaloneMD for bringing to light stories like this.
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Tyranny alert for West Australians: End this before it begins
New mask ‘requirements’ – where this leads is up to you.
Precisely. If there’s one thing we should have learnt from the Covid experience is that the only way to nip this sort of thing in the bud is to stand up to it AT ONCE. As soon as they get their foot in the door through obedience they ramp it right up.
This article has two main messages:
If we catch them in the act and warn people, they will back off.
Americans did it and so can we.
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Climate hoax falling apart as Earth not warming as predicted by (junk) climate models.
Hoaxers now blaming plants for absorbing more CO2 than imagined.
Naughty plants. How dare they interfere with the narrative.
Global warming might not happen quite as fast as we thought – here’s why
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As a Baker and a Dog owner, below is a challenge I simply must achieve.
Yes, I know there’s a typo, you will understand.
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This is an awful awful sharticle from their ABCcess.
She assaulted the chap, and he assaulted her back.
But shes the victim because magical vagina.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-19/tasmania-police-misidentifying-family-violence-victims-abusers/103102134
But when she stepped inside his house, she said, he grabbed her and shoved her into the door. She was so shocked and upset that she slapped him, but knew immediately she was in trouble when she saw the look in his eyes — at six-foot-two, he towered above her petite frame.
….Wow, its almost like having severe sanctions based on unproven allegations is an affront to justice??
And the costs are incalculable: Tasmanians who have been wrongly named on PFVOs have lost their jobs, their children, their homes, their faith in police and, for some migrant and refugee women, their visa — their ticket to remain in Australia.
Lucky this never happens to chaps.
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Because the people on the scene, observing the incident would have less idea of what is going on then a magistrate presented with a sanitised “he hit me” in a courtroom process designed to facilitate an outcome?Data obtained by ABC News earlier this year showed police issue PFVOs against female respondents at more than triple the rate of courts, raising questions about whether officers are always picking the right perpetrator.
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Biancas sob story..The officer also omitted what she felt were crucial details and context of the incident and selectively wrote down parts of her story that were “disadvantageous” to her. “I felt like I was having to actively fight to get my story heard,” she said. “It wasn’t an empowering process.”
In hindsight, she thinks the police concluded she was the aggressor for a couple of reasons. One, because they took an “incident-based” approach and seemed to focus on her admission that she’d followed her partner home and slapped him after he shoved her — without taking into account his alleged history of coercive control, the fact he was bigger and stronger, or her claim that he assaulted her, injuring her head and ripping the buttons off her coat.
As she sees it, the officers believed her partner’s account that she assaulted him whilst “trespassing” on his property and he “moved” her to defend himself.
The whole thing is an appeal to the Madonna woman, the immaculate creature who can do no wrong.
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John Cleese does an interview with Helen Pluckrose on the underpinnings of wokeness which is well worth the 8 minutes it lasts for.
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Just saw this..
Figures
Nov 18, 2023 4:04 PM(Actually, TB and lung cancer are two sides of the same disease).
Cachexia is because an animal would never stop to graze when it’s chased by a predator. A human suffering the equivalent trauma cannot eat and therefore waste away.
But for some bizarre reason if you try and actually make any biological sense of specific symptoms you’re a “conspiracy theorist”.
In short, TB is still common and lung cancer/TB has nothing to do with smoking.
WT actual F??
Different and distinct aetiology, pathology, genetic markers, microscopy, clinical manifestations, clinical course, demographies, treatment and prognosis.
But.. yeah.. apart from that they are exactly the same, just like laptops and Renaissance paintings.
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Also from Ace, something completely different for the D&D fans.
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Just in time for Bowen to go all in.
Offshore wind energy is sinking like a stone (17 Nov)
The media have reported that Orsted, Siemens and other wind power companies have been pulling out of projects in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and elsewhere. They blame financial hardship, high interest rates, tight material and equipment supply chains, consequent rising costs and insufficient taxpayer subsidies (which are already in the billions of dollars). But they hide the rest of the story.
Most people have become accustomed to the reliability and affordable prices that coal, natural gas nuclear and hydroelectric power provide. They’re not really hip to power interruptions, blackouts, 30-cent-per-kilowatt-hour electricity, or hidden costs that jack up their electric and natural gas bills. While they may give a wink and a nod to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Green New Deal, or solar and offshore wind, that support melts away if costs begin to rise.
A recent poll of 1,000 voters conducted by MWR Strategies found that the median answer to the question of “How much would you personally be willing to pay each year to address global warming?” was just $20, with 37% of respondents answering “zero” and 44% of respondents answering less than $10.
They never seem to mention that voters are already paying thousands per year for what has already been constructed. And it’s going to get worse.
Meanwhile wind energy still doesn’t stack up even with the vast tax payer funded subsidies it gets.
Ill Winds Blow Green Energy Off Course (16 Nov, via Tony Heller)
Green energy giant Siemens crashed to a €4.6bn loss yesterday amid a mounting crisis in the green energy wind turbine industry, writes Jessica Clark.
In just the latest setback for the clean energy revolution, the German firm launched a review into its wind power arm Siemens Gamesa, which it expects to post a €2.3bn loss in 2024.
It came just a day after it secured a €12bn bank bailout underwritten by the German government.
So the German government just threw them a lazy $20 billion Aussie to save them from going bankrupt. Amazing. It’s almost like wind energy is the most uneconomic form of electricity in the world.
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Boambee John Avatar
Boambee John
Nov 19, 2023 9:20 AMCalli
It all boils down to a single, simple principle…
RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!
Not quite, also:
Stop the rockets;
No more cross-border raids;
Surrender all participants in, and planners of, 7 October for trial; and
Abandon the slogan “From the river to the sea etc”.
That would be a useful start.That would do for starters, will never happen.
I don’t know what the solution is, something very drastic will happen eventually and all will regret it. -
The Sinking of HMAS Sydney -19 November 1941
How Sailors lived, fought and died in Australia’s greatest naval disaster
More Australian servicemen died in the battle between the German raider Kormoran and the light cruiser HMAS Sydney than perished in the Vietnam War.
It was not until 2008 that the wreck was discovered. The passage of time between the sinking and the discovery led to numerous mystery and conspiracy theories, all of which started replacing the truth. Now, with an explanation of how those on board lived, fought, and died, this book tells the full story.
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Knuckle Dragger reported on Premier Phuckface trying to get into Portsea Golf Club. An update via Hun:
Members of the prestigious National Golf Club on the Mornington Peninsula have joined the fairways revolt against former premier Daniel Andrews.
In a letter sent to the club’s committee in recent days seen by the Herald Sun, a National member claims more than 100 fellow golfers have “expressed a clear stance against … Daniel Andrews’ potential membership” at the Cape Schanck golfing mecca.
“I seek assurances for myself and fellow members that should Daniel Andrews express interest in joining the National Golf Club that his application would undergo the standard membership approval process,” the letter says.
“This includes the crucial step … which specifies that the candidate’s name be posted on the notice board for a 21-day period upon receipt of the membership application.
“It is imperative that any potential member, including Mr Andrews, aligns with the fundamental values of our golf club – demonstrating good character, sociability, and a genuine interest in meeting and befriending fellow members.
“Regrettably, it is noted that Mr Andrews lacks these qualities, and his inability to recall scores for each hole due to poor memory further underscores concerns about his compatibility with our club.”
The member has also inquired about whether the Andrews matter will be an agenda item at the club’s annual general meeting on Sunday.
The controversial former premier has been a guest at the National Golf Club in the company of property baron and confidante Max Beck since his resignation in September.
Members were up in arms when Mr Andrews was permitted to play a round on Grand Final morning with Mr Beck at a time National guests are not usually allowed to hit the greens.
Controversy is also raging at the nearby Portsea Golf Club where Mr Beck has floated the prospect of Mr Andrews joining the club.
One BMW-driving member of the National owns the number plate “FUDA” – an acronym for “F*** You Dan Andrews” – and has posted videos on social media smashing drivers into Bass Strait with an image of Mr Andrews’ face printed on the ball.
Mr Andrews is deeply unpopular among some locals, particularly due to his bans on Victoria’s golfing community during the pandemic and his decision as premier to include the Mornington Peninsula in metropolitan restrictions, which were often tougher than those in regional Victoria.
But he also has strong support from other members of the Portsea Golf Club who have threatened to quit the club if the former premier is “scared off” making a formal application by “the vocal minority”.
In an email to PGC members this week, president Phil Cramer said the club would consider an application for Mr Andrews to join on its merits.
“We appreciate your understanding and support as we navigate the current situation and continue to uphold the values that make Portsea Golf Club so enjoyable,” Mr Cramer said.
Richlister Mr Beck has hit out at the anti-Andrews camp, accusing fellow golfers of being “small-minded” and slamming their resistance as “ridiculous”.
Portsea GC member Steve Price this week threatened to “tear up” his membership if Mr Andrews was successful in joining the club.
“This is the premier who stopped us playing golf for two years during Covid,” Price said.
“This is the premier who locked down this community even though we’re 120km out of the city.
“The same premier who let people on the other side of the bay play golf. No way should that man come into the golf club.”
He would be lucky to get into a small country town sandscrape set up at this rate.
Daniel, no one likes you. Piss off. -
But he remembers with crystal clarity every slight against him in Caucus and the media since he entered politics.
Boambee John I think this is a hint at his cheating. I can’t recall who but a commenter here regaled a story of him at Wangaratta with his mates, um, not adhering to the rules of golf.
This would be passed around the clubs no doubt. -
SerpentZA (via Trickler)
Crazy Chinese Workplace Accidents – Why is Workplace Safety so Bad in China?
Value is subjective, we could value nearly anything, so there’s nothing inevitable about what Isaac Asimov said about dignity, but he does appear to be right.
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What’s wrong with Qlders? In NSW they keep relecting Anal. What wrong with NSWelshmen?
It’s a case of Victoriaitis. Dannorreha. The Melbin Disease. Acutely Idiotic Danisbad Sickness (AIDS). Hume Infrastructure Virus (HIV). Mass consumption. TB (Terminal Brunswickitis). Victoria’s Disease (VD). Completely Overblown Virus, Intentionally Deleterious (COVID).
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Red State has an excellent article on how the Ugly Face of Antisemitism is currently led by women.
Here is an brilliant clip that portrays exactly what is happening in the West right now. -
BBC ‘hypocrisy’ row as reporter racks up air miles to criticise global emissions
By Ewan Somerville
The BBC has been accused of “rank hypocrisy” after a reporter racked up an estimated 20,000 air miles to ask why “despite all the green promises, we’re using more fossil fuels than ever before”.
London-based Richard Bilton travelled to Europe, the Middle East and the United States for an episode of BBC One’s Panorama in which he claimed “the world is saying one thing and doing another” on climate change.
Analysis by The Telegraph suggests that he could have racked up around 20,000 air miles, taking flights to Dubai, Alaska, California and Berlin for the programme, which was aired on Nov 13.
At the most conservative estimate, this would have produced around 5.4 tonnes of CO2, more than the average person produces in a year and the equivalent to driving an average car for 18 months.
The air miles estimates are based on one scenario, which involved Mr Bilton taking return flights from Berlin and Dubai back to London, and going from the UK to California and then onto Alaska before returning across the Atlantic.
The BBC would not say which routes Mr Bilton took.
The BBC, which has pledged to reduce its operational greenhouse gas emissions by 46 per cent by 2030, said all the flights were in economy class and were “required” for “on-the-ground reporting”.
But critics have pointed out that the corporation has local teams of reporters in each location, meaning the “one-man jolly” was “rank hypocrisy”.
In the Panorama episode entitled Why Are We Still Searching for Fossil Fuels?, Mr Bilton took aim at how the world’s energy companies are planning to drill for more oil and gas, and interviewed academics who demanded a faster path to net zero in order to keep global warming to 1.5C.
He told viewers ominously: “2023 is expected to be the hottest year on record – the devastation of climate change will be hard to stop if we remain reliant on fossil fuels.”
Mr Bilton added: “Figures seen by Panorama paint a pretty grim picture of the world – everywhere, Middle East, US, UK – we’re getting more and more carbon out of the ground instead of leaving it.”
At one point in the programme, Dr Barbara Haya from the University of California, Berkeley, told Mr Bilton: “We’re in a climate emergency – we all need to be reducing our emissions as quickly as we can.”
However, analysis by The Telegraph showed that if Mr Bilton took a return flight from London to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he asked if it was a “suitable host” for the upcoming COP28 climate conference given it is “wedded with oil and gas”, it would have been 6,840 miles, producing 1.8 tonnes of CO2.
His trip to Alaska and California, assuming he visited both states in one trip from London and flew domestically between the two, would have produced 3.2 tonnes of CO2, a total of 12,290 miles. His Berlin round-trip would consume 400kg of CO2 for 1,200 miles.
In total, this would mean his flights to make the episode spanned 20,328 miles, producing 5.4 tonnes of CO2. According to the International Energy Agency, the average person in the world has an energy-related carbon footprint of around 4.7 tonnes of CO2 a year, the equivalent to driving an average SUV for 18 months.
These calculations exclude any flights for Mr Bilton’s production crew and travel by car – including one Mr Bilton was seen filming from – at each location.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the Conservative MP for Morley and Outwood, said: “If the BBC feels it necessary to lecture the public about fossil fuels, they should practise what they preach first.
“BBC Panorama ought to do an episode on itself, namely how its reporter is globe-trotting on flights at the licence-fee-payers’ expense.
“To add to the rank hypocrisy, the BBC could easily have used its local teams of reporters in each country rather than sending one man on a jolly.”
‘I took several flights’
During the BBC Panorama episode, Mr Bilton said: “Energy companies are meeting our demand. To make this programme, I took several flights – it’s hard to fight climate change if we still use fossil fuels to drive, fly and heat our homes.”
The BBC refused to confirm the exact flight itinerary and could not answer why Panorama did not use the BBC’s local reporters in each location.
A BBC spokesman said: “As a flagship current affairs programme, on occasion, some international travel is required to further investigate important stories and provide audiences with additional insight and analysis which may not be possible without on-the-ground reporting.
“We take our sustainability commitments seriously and careful consideration is made when travel is necessary for a story.”
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It’s sad to see so many young women go down this route. Sadder even that they have no idea those for whom they advocate would like nothing better than to see all Western women treated like Shani Louk was treated.
Shame on them all.
The west isn’t perfect it never will, but if your ati liberalism mirror the woke and islamist. Don’t be shocked at this.
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It occurs to me, while watching Rowan Dean speak about Dutton leading the country while Albo is away, that we urgently need to arrange a few more overseas trips for Albo, perhaps he’d like to go to Gaza next week and stay for a year or so.
An excellent idea. I suggest Elbow be appointed Joe Biden’s Middle East Special Peace Rapporteur and, to save him from Trotskyist temptation, he’ll be headquarted at IDF central command, not Gaza.
As PM, he already represents people he hates, so two years watching Hamas jihad murder videos would be just the trick for him.
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Space News has a nice write up of the Starship/Superheavy test last night.
Starship/Super Heavy lifts off on second flight (18 Nov, via Instapundit)
It was well worth staying up ‘way after normal bedtime to watch the live coverage. I even forgave the magpie who arrived at my front door at 6am and sang hopefully for an hour. Grr.
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Funny how the BBC has so much to say about the weapons in the MRI room and a thousand idiots have chimed in about the machine which pretty obviously has been turned off for some time (and yes anyone with internet access can confirm that a MRI magnet can be quenched.)
As someone on extwitter pointed out no discussion about the discovery of the bodies of hostages in the vicinity of Shifa.
Though there has been some islamic outrage about the IDF digging up bodies near the Shifa burns unit.
Where do these morons think the bodies of the three dead hostages that have been recovered were?
And if the presence of dead hostages in the vicinity doesn’t confirm hamas have been using shifa, nothing will. -
Voice fallout: support for treaty plunges after referendum
Lisa Visentin
By Lisa Visentin
November 19, 2023 — 6.00amListen to this article
6 minOnly a third of voters believe the federal government should pursue a treaty-making process with Indigenous Australians or establish a “truth-telling” commission, with support for the remaining ambitions of the Uluru Statement languishing in the aftermath of the Voice referendum.
Exclusive findings from the Resolve Political Monitor, conducted for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, show that support for treaty processes has nosedived following the Voice defeat, plunging from 58 per cent in October to 33 per cent this month.
The third pillar of the Uluru Statement – the call for a truth-telling process run by a Makarrata Commission to record the history and treatment of Indigenous Australians since colonisation – is languishing at 35 per cent support, a one per cent increase since the vote that is within the margin of error. Thirty-one per cent are opposed, while 34 per cent of voters are undecided.
Together the three elements – Voice, treaty, truth – comprised the policy direction set out by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, endorsed by 250 Indigenous leaders in 2017, and which Labor committed to implementing in full in the lead-up to the 2022 federal election.
But following the emphatic defeat of the Voice referendum on October 14, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney have been unwilling to re-commit to treaty and truth. It remains unclear what Labor plans to do with the $5.8 million it allocated in its October 2022 budget to start work on establishing a Makarrata Commission as part of its $27.7 election commitment to fund the body.
In response to questions about its plans for a Makarrata Commission, Burney said the government was “taking the time to pause and to listen to Indigenous communities before we decide on the next steps forward.”
“I have met with my state and territory colleagues and received an update on where each jurisdiction is up to in terms of establishing representative bodies, truth-telling and agreement-making,” Burney said, adding she would have further discussions at the Joint Council on Closing the Gap on Friday.
Resolve director Jim Reed said there were signs the fallout from the referendum had diminished voters’ appetite for reform in Indigenous affairs more broadly, including on symbolic constitutional recognition, which is supported by just 48 per cent of voters, down from 58 per cent last month.
Thirty-four per cent were opposed and 19 per cent were undecided when asked whether they would support or oppose an alteration to the Constitution to include a recognition that Indigenous Australians were the first inhabitants of Australia.
“Support for simple recognition, without a Voice attached to it, has always enjoyed majority support even until the referendum vote. But it’s now collapsed, so in many ways the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater,” Reed said.
“Support for a national treaty is less popular still, with just a third in favour of one. Even truth-telling, a legislated Voice, or government listening to one that is completely independent are minority positions. This has become dangerous political ground because of the strong rejection of the Voice.
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The decadent West has come face to face with the future – and the end of its dominance
The summit between Xi and Biden underlined the severe cost of the trade wars destablising the world
DANIEL HANNAN
We in the West like to imagine that liberal democracy spread because others were attracted by its intrinsic merits.
It didn’t.
It spread through military victories – a fact that the rest of the world has not forgotten.
Only now, perhaps, are we learning how limited its appeal is.
Several countries which we thought were in our camp turned out to be pro-Western only contingently and transactionally.
The moment they saw our power waning, they began to look elsewhere.
We see the shift in the reluctance of states beyond Europe, the Anglosphere and a handful of East Asian democracies to join sanctions against Russia.
We see it in the UN votes positing an implicit equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.
When the world’s dominant power declines, violence and disorder rush to fill the vacuum.
It is against this background that Joe Biden and Xi Jinping held their meeting in San Francisco this week.
Biden came across, as usual, as a dotard, fluffing his lines and horrifying his officials by referring to his guest as a dictator.
Xi, by contrast, looked comfortable and confident, convinced that time is on his side.
Like Winnie-the-Pooh, to whom he has been compared so often that Chinese censors ban references to the portly bear, Xi radiated the Taoist virtues of patience and imperturbability.
The two sides had very different takes on the summit.
For the Americans, it was all about encouraging China to take up its responsibilities as a member of the international community.
They know that Xi wants to escape from the economic restrictions imposed by Donald Trump in 2018. The Chinese economy is faltering, partly because of exceptionally long lockdowns, and partly due to the rise in expropriations leaving people reluctant to invest.
Sensing that they have leverage, the Americans want to draw China into collaborative structures on climate change, artificial intelligence and drugs. To have secured understandings with Xi on these issues, as well as establishing military backchannels, is no small achievement.
From the Chinese perspective, though, all that was fluff.
The real business of the summit, as they saw it, was to make plain that they intended to annex Taiwan. Sure, they would rather do so without a war. To win without fighting is, as Sun Tzu says, the ultimate achievement.
But Xi left Biden in no doubt that reunification is not some vague aspiration, but the policy on which he has staked his leadership.
The Chinese autocrat is aware of American concerns about the economic impact. Taiwan produces most of the world’s semiconductors, especially the advanced models on which the global economy depends.
How long, Xi asks, would it take the United States to build up a domestic manufacturing capacity? Five years?
Fine, then use it. But understand that, after that, Taiwan will be reabsorbed.
Talk of semiconductors brings us to why the world has suddenly become so chaotic. The relative peace and prosperity that followed the Second World War rested, to a greater degree than most people realised, on globalisation.
International commerce reduces both the incentive to wage war (without trade barriers, it doesn’t matter where resources are) and the capacity to sustain it (a bellicose country can be deprived of critical materials).
This consideration, more than any other, motivated the original campaigners for liberalisation. “Do you suppose that I advocated Free Trade merely because it would give us a little more occupation in this or that pursuit?” asked Richard Cobden in 1850. “No; I believed Free Trade would have the tendency to unite mankind in the bonds of peace, and it was that, more than any pecuniary consideration, which sustained and actuated me.”
Cobden was right. While no one has found a way to eliminate war altogether, globalisation has a pacifying effect, because countries like to remain on good terms with their customers.
In 1860, Cobden signed the modern world’s first trade agreement with his counterpart, Michel Chevalier, a rare French classical liberal. Since then our two nations, which had spent the previous six centuries in a state of semi-permanent war, have not fought.
Cobdenism began to run out of steam in the early twentieth century, as challenges to British power led to calls for retaliatory tariffs. The horrors that followed were to a degree products of the end of the Victorian economic order.
By 1945, there was a recognition that protectionism, autocracy and war were interconnected.
The victorious powers grasped that the dictators had been products, as well as supporters, of autarky, and set up the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to ensure that the world did not slide back into beggar-my-neighbour mercantilism.
“The whole world is concentrating much of its thought and energy on attaining the objectives of peace and freedom,” declared President Truman in 1947, the year that the GATT was established. “These objectives are bound up completely with a third objective: reestablishment of world trade. In fact, the three – peace, freedom, and world trade – are inseparable.”
Truman, like Cobden, was right.
As the barriers came down over the next 75 years, we saw not only a global enrichment beyond the dreams of previous generations, but an unprecedented decline in the number of wars.
The relative stability of the Victorian age had rested on the Pax Britannica; that of the post-war boom rested on the Pax Americana. When American power surged after 1989, so did peace and prosperity.
Then came the banking crisis, a fall in world trade and, before long, a return to protectionism – a process accelerated by the pandemic.
“Trade wars are good and easy to win,” declared Donald Trump as he ordered tariffs on Chinese imports. Joe Biden accelerated America’s retreat into autarky, notably through the disastrous (and comically misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act, a classic piece of protectionism disguised as greenery. The EU is now pursuing a similar scheme.
China’s leaders are determinedly building their own versions of the global companies that withdrew from Russia in 2020.
Xi has made clear that he does not want to depend on imports. “You should not rely on international markets,” he told his rubber-stamp parliament when Russia blockaded Ukrainian exports.
“China must depend on itself.” His solution? To reserve 296 million acres of agricultural land for food production – precisely the kind of policy that caused the breakdown of the 1930s.
Protectionism always does the most damage to the country pursuing it.
The US Tax Foundation calculates that tariffs on China are “equivalent to one of the largest tax increases in decades,” destroying 173,000 American jobs.
Similarly, had Xi not reversed his predecessors’ policy of liberalisation, China would not only be growing faster, but would be a trusted partner investing in our nuclear power stations and communications infrastructure.
Xi’s swerve to economic nationalism has also wrecked the prospect of peaceful reunification with Taiwan.
Many Taiwanese had been prepared to countenance some form of political union as long as China was becoming more pluralist, but the authoritarianism of the current regime, and its crackdown in Hong Kong, killed such talk.
As during the early twentieth century, a unipolar world order is being succeeded, not just by great power rivalries, but by a return to the disastrous illusion of self-sufficiency, what the North Koreans call “juche”. We can already see the consequences in the cascade of conflicts around us.
If the West, with all its collective strength, is unable to dislodge Russia from Ukraine, that cascade will become a torrent. The time of troubles is just beginning.
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the MRI … machine which pretty obviously has been turned off for some time
That was a fun thing. It was used as a prop for Mr FAFO, with blood stains and everything. But you don’t put steel objects near a functioning MRI unless you want a metallic pretzel. Recently a nurse was badly hurt when rolling a hospital carry bed too near a MRI in operation, as the bed decided to stuff itself, and her, into the orifice of the machine. The magnetic field is enormous.
MRI machine traps nurse in freak accident (30 Oct)
The photo of the bed squidged into the MRI machine is quite surreal.
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It was well worth staying up ‘way after normal bedtime to watch the live coverage.
Yes.
Now let’s talk about the fact that both stages blew up unintentionally.
I’ll even let them off on the 2nd stage, because that was new and maybe mechanics of the propulsion had not been sorted out, or a bug in controls, or something.
Am I supposed to believe they can’t do combustion analysis to figure out that the thrust of the 2nd stage is going to burn through or fracture the top of the 1st stage?
No.
Musk just likes blowing up rockets. He just knows he can’t do it too often.God bless the American taxpayer for funding Starship.
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In search of chief executives who never grow ‘old’
Competence and capability are the best ways to assess leaders whatever their age
Andrew Hill
By naming 53-year-old Janet Truncale as its next global chief executive, EY will hope it can put behind it a nasty bushfire ignited by one rival candidate over the final leadership taboo: old age.
During his campaign for the top job, Andy Baldwin, 57, warned executives discussing his candidacy that they risked breaching age discrimination laws if they made too much of the fact that a four-year term heading the professional services firm would push him beyond 60. That is when EY usually requires its partners to step down.
Sixty seems an absurdly and arbitrarily early age at which to ask executives to hand in their lanyards and badges.
Except in the case of a few physically demanding jobs, mandatory retirement also seems an anachronistic throwback. Most countries are obliging workers to toil for longer before they can claim a state pension. Companies are also falling over themselves to become more inclusive.
Tension is only likely to increase as companies and staff try to reimagine work for 50-year careers.
Speaking at the recent Anthropy conference on the UK’s future, Jeremy Hughes, who is helping to develop a new charity aimed at bridging the demographic divide, Intergenerational England, described the workplace as the “key forum where generations come together”.
But the workplace is also where generations could come to blows.
The career that Baldwin and his EY peers have had is already hard to imagine for 20-somethings. On the same panel, youth ambassador Ladajah Wilson made clear she did not want to follow the 9-to-5, four-weeks-annual-holiday path of her elders. She preferred a career that was varied and flexible (even if she lamented it would be hard to afford, given what she was set to inherit from the older generation, financially and environmentally).
Such “squiggly careers” are ill-served by traditional leadership selection processes.
Age is just a number, they say. But succession planning is dominated by another number: usually, there is only one job at the top. That tempts companies to force change to ease leadership bottlenecks.
Mandatory retirement ages are legal in the UK if they represent a proportionate means of achieving a business aim. That could include freeing up senior jobs or, in EY UK’s case, partnerships for younger colleagues. At a level where men still dominate, it might also serve to meet a corporate goal of greater ethnic and gender diversity.
In the US, mandatory retirement for CEOs is an exception under age discrimination legislation. But an increasing number of big companies have started to abandon or waive their mandates. This year, Chevron dropped its age cap of 65 for chief executive Mike Wirth, now 63, to ensure continuity at the oil and gas company.
Meanwhile, the average age of US chief executives continues to creep upwards. According to headhunter Crist Kolder, in 2013, the age of CEOs when hired averaged 51.3. It now stands at 55.6.
Listed companies do seem more reluctant to keep chief executives well into their seventies or eighties.
When I drew up a ranking of global leaders of listed businesses by age in 2011, Warren Buffett, then 80, was only the 16th oldest corporate chief. At 93, he now tops a global league table, prepared by BoardEx for the FT, that contains only two octogenarians.
Among US bosses, he is 11 years older than the next oldest in the Fortune 500, Robert Mehrabian of Teledyne Technologies.
Buffett might seem an exception. But he is living proof that some older chief executives amply justify extending their tenure beyond what used to be considered pensionable age.
Capable younger executives ought to be able to rise sooner, too. Only 31 of Fortune Global 500 companies are headed by chief executives aged under 50.
Research has shown that shareholder wealth drops for each year a chief executive ages.
Plenty of leaders overstay their welcome because of too tolerant boards or poor succession planning.
Another study suggests leaders become more risk averse as they age, with negative consequences for stock performance. Researchers found that was particularly true when the two most influential executives were older.
The best outcome might be to pair younger and older colleagues.
I prefer an age-blind approach that does away with age-related stereotypes. It could also help assess the capabilities and potential of younger people like Wilson, if she ever wants to run a multinational.
This is another area where technology could level the playing field. At an FT conference on artificial intelligence last week, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?, said AI could help humans “focus on the qualities that make people better leaders, while ignoring the noisy signals that make them more toxic and inept”.
The solution to “bed-blocking” by bosses, in other words, is not automatic ousting, based on age, but more rigorous appraisal, based on competence.
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Don McLean appeared in town to perform at the Dakota last night. His show constituted a late leg of his 50th anniversary celebration of American Pie — “I’ve been flogging it for two years,” he said. He celebrates both the song and the album. “It’s one album everything went right on,” he said.
Backed by a hot five-piece band, he put on a phenomenal show. He was engaging, funny, and incredibly entertaining. Featuring cuts from American Pie, the show was just about all highlights. At age 78, his voice has deepened, but it remains classic and resonant with an elongated vibrato. I can only say he left me wanting more.
Dear readers, among the string of highlights that he performed last night was “Vincent.” It’s one of his recordings that has been played more than 3,000,000 times on the radio.
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by Majid Rafizadeh
. From the Iranian regime’s perspective, annihilating Israel and the Jews would presumably be a major breakthrough, giving them a dominance over the Muslim world, even greater than Saudi Arabia’s.
. The dedicated funds that this new $10 billion will release can now be used to put the finishing touches on the mullahs’ nuclear bomb – to threaten their Sunni neighbors in the Gulf, Europe, and above all, “The Great Satan, the United States. Iran’s plans for cutting “The Great Satan” (and others) down to size are already underway in Cuba and throughout South America. Earlier this month, Israel helped Brazil thwart an attack by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hizballah on Brazil’s Jews.
. Sadly, the $10 billion looks suspiciously like a “pretty please” bribe not to try to drive the US out of the region this year [before the 2024 US election]; instead, wait for next year.
Who needs the Nobel Peace Prize when you can have the Biden War Prize?
That’s right, the Biden administration announced this week that it plans to give the Iranian regime another $10 billion in unfrozen assets from Oman, apparently as a small token of appreciation for helped orchestrate a war in the Middle East and targeting US troops in the region at least 56 times, wounding at least 56 US servicemen, many with traumatic brain injury — in just one month!
Where does everyone sign up?
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Just heard discussion on radio about NDIS.
Female on it said normal rate she could get physio if a walk in was $99 for half an hour. However if on NDIS physio can claim up to $199 so they all do.
Another mentioned a dog walker for an NDIS client was getting paid $199 for half hour.
Surprise surprise more autism cases being found as it is covered by NDIS
No wonder NDIS costs blowing out.
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It would be nice if every member of Portsea G.C. who opposes Andrews’ membership could from now on refer to him as “that person”.
I’ve never forgotten how he used that expression to refer to the world’s most successful female tennis player, Margaret Court.
He is now a nonentity and should be treated as such.
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Female on it said normal rate she could get physio if a walk in was $99 for half an hour. However if on NDIS physio can claim up to $199 so they all do.
Why not get patients pay upfront and they put it in for reimbursement from NDIS? We already do this for Medicare.
Alternatively, give NDIS patients an “allowance” upfront (say $2000) from which they pay for these services. In these cases, they will be incentivized to make their dollars go further. -
Knuckle Dragger
Nov 19, 2023 10:34 AM
Hard to believe that in this wide brown land, there is somebody with a worse reputation for cheating on a golf course than Jason Akermanis.
Cheating at goff is a strange phenomenon.
There are some who will cheat at the highest level of the game if they can get away with it. Thankfully, saturation TV coverage and thousands of rule nerds at home means it is almost impossible in big pro tournaments.
It is telling that golf authorities have had to make handicapping calculations incredibly rigorous to stop a genuine ten handicapper run his handicap out by a few strokes and clean up.
Something I’ve never understood. I’d rather say I play off 10 than win a meat tray off 15.
One of the reasons I dislike “social golf” with any money attached.
I can’t stand watching some arse scraping up $150 – $200 from a “social” round, knowing full well he is proficient with the sand-shoe wedge, or the best wood in his bag is the HB pencil. -
We often play the CD of his classics on the long drive to the farm. Just love “Vincent” , also “Castles in the Air”.
I sometimes belt out Castles in the air on long solo car trips. I couldn’t do that with anyone else in the car. Maclean also does a good version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”. I can’t sing that well either.
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10 Clues The Hospital You’re At Is Actually A Hamas Base
These days, it can be hard to tell if the hospital you’re at is also a staging ground for Islamist terrorists to commit mass murder! We at the Babylon Bee have assembled a list of ten subtle clues to help you discern if the hospital you’re at is actually a Hamas base:
1. The doctors break out in cheers when someone dies: Not a good start.
2. The ambulance has a .50-cal machine gun mounted on top: It does clear traffic, but in a very Hamas-y manner.
3. The hospital offers to waive your bill if you strap on this cool vest: To be fair, we’re told they do keep their word.
4. The gift shop sells “I’m sorry you’ve been taken hostage” balloons: Uh-oh.
5. The sound of small arms fire keeps coming from the Cancer Ward: Very unorthodox, those Hamas cancer treatments.
6. You got lost on the way to the cafeteria and ended up in an underground tunnel filled with rocket launchers: Not good!
7. The pediatric unit is labeled the “Human Shield Ward”: Strong terrorist vibes.
8. The intake nurse checks your temperature, pulse, and circumcision status: Yikes.
9. The surgical assistant is a goat: And oh no, he’s wearing Hamas’ little green headband!
10. None of the doctors are Jewish: Pretty much a dead giveaway.
Spotting Hamas bases inside hospitals can be tough, but keep your eyes peeled for these hints!
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US military using Russian fuel. From Revolver news.
After Western nations announced bans on Russian oil last year in response to the invasion of Ukraine, a Greek refinery that serves the U.S. military moved quickly to adapt. Within months, it told investors it had stopped accepting the forbidden oil and had found other sources instead.
But there was a reason Russian petroleum, on paper at least, could so easily be removed from the supply chain.
Petroleum products that originated in Russia kept flowing to the Motor Oil Hellas refinery on the Aegean Sea in Greece, a Washington Post examination of shipping and trade data found. They just took a new route, hundreds of miles out of the way through an oil storage facility in Turkey, a journey that obscured Russia’s imprint as ownership of the products changed hands multiple times before they reached Greece.
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As consumer and producer inflation cools, is a recession on the horizon in 2024?
Which is why the Federal Reserve has, for now, kept the Federal Funds Rate — the rate at which commercial banks lend to one another — at its currently elevated level of 5.25 percent to 5.5 percent.
But it is worth noting that the Fed’s interest rates are very much a look in the rear-view mirror, accounting for the inflation that has already occurred.
Whereas, market-based interest rates are a look forward, telling us about future growth and inflation. On that count, 2-year treasuries are showing some signs of having potentially peaked, down from 5.19 percent on Oct. 17 down to about 4.8 percent now.
The 10-year, 2-year spread on treasuries has been inverted for over a year now — usually a reliable recession predictor — but it could be on the brink of normalizing at just 0.38 percent as of this writing.
In the meantime, UBS is projecting the Fed will cut the Federal Funds Rate in 2024 roughly in half to about 2.75 percent, projecting slower growth, higher unemployment and disinflation.
Which is what usually happens historically after peak inflation — consumer inflation peaked in June 2022 at 9.1 percent — as the economy overheats and consumers must curtail purchases. High prices cool demand and, like clockwork, if it gets particularly bad, results in periodic recessions.
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I regularly go past an employment agency that caters to people with disabilities.
The rort must be good. Several people “working” sometimes but not so many clients going in. One day I noted several identical new white Kia SUV’s. Each staff member had one.
Somebody is paying somewhere.
NDIS is Labor’s gift to rorters. Seems one particular type of involved. Need some serious jail time to deter others.
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10 Clues The Hospital You’re At Is Actually A Hamas Base
This?
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‘Joe Biden’ declares that after the war, Gaza and West Bank should be ‘reunited’ and controlled by P. A.
That’s the kind of high-quality thinking that has served the US so well this century.
It would be better for everyone if these fake loiterers were billeted throughout the Middle East – paid to leave, if necessary – and Israel takes over all of it.
Short of that, this deliberately curated cycle of violence will never end.
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How much do you get on NDIS for…services?
A Democratic Congressional Candidate is ‘reclaiming her sexuality’ after a clip of her working at a Manhattan BDSM dungeon was leaked. Courtney Casgraux, 41, is a self-described ‘international businesswoman’ who is running for a seat in the United States House of Representatives for Oregon’s first district.
I hope she gets elected, since she’d be one of the very few Democrat congresscritters that has ever worked in a real job.
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Knuckle Dragger
Nov 19, 2023 10:57 AMLollipoppers are lollipopping hard at present.
The remaining handful are only a small step away from Lizard People country.
Admitting my guilt of going there occasionally, even made a comment about a post by Eyrie, the aviator, because I couldn’t work out what his post was all about.
Not a lot wiser after his explanation and redirection to some creepy sites.Then I caught the soliloquy posted by the guy who runs the site, Jesus help us.
What caught my eye is his reference to “dickhead” rules.
What are they exactly in everyman’s language, common parlance?
Anything you or the mistress of the site don’t like?
Lot of good people were banned under this rule, basically only two people bother to post and as you said, they are going borderline Bird and catching up with him fast. -
Battery electric vehicles are like Concorde
Sensible America never built a supersonic airliner. We should learn from that
MICHAEL KELLY
Today I want to compare the life story of Concorde – the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner – with the story to date of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), and to suggest a possible future for the latter.
Concorde turned out to be a technology too far, and I suggest that BEVs are heading the same way.
In the 1960s and 1970s the French and British Governments invested heavily in the development of Concorde to provide supersonic flight for everyman. The Soviet Union did the same, building the Tupolev-144.
It is salutary to recall, however, that American developers cancelled their own supersonic airliner, the SST, early on, as they could not see a commercial return.
Once British Airways and Air France started using Concorde to provide supersonic flight on routes to the US and Far East, environmental problems quickly emerged.
The aircraft’s very loud take-off noise was disturbing, and the sonic boom it generated in supersonic flight was so invasive that it was forced to slow down over land or stick to routes that were mostly over the oceans, a severe setback to its economics.
Concorde remained in service until 2003, a service lifetime of just 27 years.
The Tu-144 was even less successful: crashes meant that it only ever made 55 passenger-carrying flights.
During Concorde’s operation the costs were so high that only the rich could afford the tickets, and it was soon recognised as a beautiful piece of engineering that could never be a commercial success.
But what about BEVs?
Over the last decade and more, billions of dollars have been invested in the area by commercial car makers around the world, often with Government subsidies as sweeteners.
The situation now is akin to that of Concorde in its first years of service.
Most of the early BEV sales were to the wealthy: people who were rich enough to purchase a BEV as a second vehicle, keeping another car with an internal combustion engine (ICE) for longer journeys.
More recently, company car fleets have been the backbone of sales, with buyers enticed by the generous tax treatment.
There is a push to end the sale of new ICE cars in the near future. The deadline was set, not by those who are developing the vehicles, but by political fiat:
Boris Johnson moved it forward from 2035 to 2030 at the COP27 meeting in Glasgow, and it has been returned to 2035 again just recently.
However, over the last few months, BEV sales appear to have stalled in many parts of the world, and unsold stock has started piling up at ports and on sales forecourts.
Since improvements in performance continue year on year, these unsold vehicles will probably have to be dumped or scrapped.
The man in the street has failed to embrace BEVs for the same reason he failed to embrace Concorde nearly 50 years ago: the extra cost – of order £10,000 per vehicle – represents an insurmountable barrier.
People might pay the extra if they were getting something better in performance terms, but range anxiety and the lack of convenient recharging infrastructure remain formidable hurdles.
Insurance costs are high too, with figures as high as £6000 quoted in the media. This appears to result from concerns that even minor damage to batteries might cause them to spontaneously combust.
Even if, as seems to be the case, BEVs catch fire less often than ICE vehicles, the consequences are far worse, because lithium-ion battery fires are intense, very hard to extinguish, and may happen spontaneously when the vehicle is parked, particularly if it is charging.
A BEV that catches fire in a carpark, especially among other closely packed vehicles, could lead to disaster. As a result, insurers are replacing scratched batteries, at a cost running into thousands of pounds, rather than risking the costs of a catastrophe.
There are other cost pressures on EVs. While oil and gas are widespread commodities, with numerous suppliers around the world, the materials for BEV batteries are mostly controlled by China.
Expansion of the EV market will reap rich rewards for Beijing (while simultaneously causing immense environmental damage): and limited supplies combined with rising demand will push up prices still further.
Another source of cost inflation is human resources.
We will need 40,000 professional engineers for the next 30 years just to expand the electricity supply industry – generation, transmission and distribution – to cope with the 170 per cent increase in demand required by the planned transition to all-electric transport and heating, both industrial and domestic.
Staff to repair BEVs already appear to be in short supply.
Better technology will help, of course, but not enough. In 1974, when I bought my first electronic calculator, the AA battery had a carbon rod core and an outer casing of zinc.
Intensive research and development since then has provided us with the lithium-ion battery, which can store six times as much electrical energy in the same volume.
However, the energy density is still 40 times worse than petrol.
Experts suggest that the best we can hope for is an improvement by a factor of two over the next 50 years.
None of these problems will be solved in the next few years, and there is now evidence that many car manufacturers are having second thoughts about involvement in the sector.
The most likely outcome is that BEVs will be a rerun of the Concorde story, ending up as a short-lived plaything for the wealthy few, and for a similar complex set of reasons.
There is a difference this time.
Once developed, Concorde was forced to stand or fall in the commercial marketplace, but the Government has decided that the public are going to take up BEVs whether they like it or not.
But compulsion may not work: the example of Cuba, where existing ICE vehicles were carefully maintained for decades after the US cut off supplies of new ones, suggests that public resistance might be determined.
And even if people are compelled to accept BEVs, the engineering problems of generation and charging infrastructure may be insurmountable.
In a decade’s time, if we have many more electric cars but not enough new electricity (green or not) to run them, the public will surely make their feelings known.
I suspect the results will look much like the aftermath of Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax, with deep public dissatisfaction leading to widespread public protest.
Michael Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Royal Society of New Zealand, of the Institute of Physics and of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, as well as Senior Member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in the USA
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Admitting my guilt of going there occasionally, even made a comment about a post by Eyrie, the aviator, because I couldn’t work out what his post was all about.
Not a lot wiser after his explanation and redirection to some creepy sites.Well, that has been known to happen with that chap.
I am just relieved to hear he is still with us. I feared his towelling hat may have fallen over his eyes on short final in the glider.Then I caught the soliloquy posted by the guy who runs the site, Jesus help us.
FMD. I just went and read it. The comments are a cesspit of rabbit-hole antisemitism but he posts his “year in review” as if he is running the Oxford Debating Society circa 1965. His free speech mantra is a very unconvincing fig-leaf.
And the “no dickheads” net has some serious holes in it. -
Save the Planet, Cull the Herd!
One Reason the Left Pushes Abortion and Euthanasia
By Thaddeus G. McCotter November 18, 2023
With but a few keystrokes, (post-)modern technology’s search engines will spew out the reasons for the impending climate apocalypse, such as fossil fuels, agricultural practices, ad nauseum.
This is somewhat misleading, for it refrains from identifying the seminal cause of the carbon emissions despoiling and imperiling our planet –
You.
While breathing, you drive the fossil fueled vehicles to the party where the host uses his charcoal grill to smoke the meat of methane-spewing cattle raised by big agriculture and shipped by the fossil fueled vehicles to stores where it is refrigerated by coal burning electric plants, which you revile by posting on the internet using a computer running on that same electricity. Oops.
Little wonder that within the gaggle of radical green extremists we find both socialists, who believe only government can control the masses to the extent necessary to save the planet and equitably redistribute wealth; and we find Malthusians, who believe we must eliminate the root cause of the carbon emissions propelling the climate apocalypse – again, that’s you.
Well, okay, maybe not you, specifically, but certainly enough people to make the world less burdened by the blight upon Mother Nature that is humanity.
Fewer people means fewer carbon emissions; and fewer people also means less money has to be redistributed for the sake of “equity,” which pleases rich climate cultists (looking at you, World Economic Forum), who can give more money to the cause.
But that pesky “rule of law” (for now, anyway) and humanity’s survival instinct restrict the prospective pool of people to toss into the volcano as a human sacrifice to Goddess Gaia.
Ah, but the educated elitists of the Left are nothing if not persistently insidious.
Recognizing the limits placed upon coerced democide for the common good, the Left has chosen a sharp elbow rather than a shove to send human sacrifices hurtling into the lava laden crater.
Their goal is to make these human sacrifices seem the victim’s voluntary idea – well, at least at first.
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Why is dog-walking covered by NDIS? ..
Simples. If you are disabled you cannot walk your dog safely.
I know of an NDIS client (MentalElf) who kicked up a stink about her local hydrotherapy centre being unsuitable and was approved to move her sessions to Peninsula Hot Springs. To which she turns up consistently late. Has gone through a string of care assistants which creates a permanent employment pathway (and $$$$) for her agency. The fact they burnout faster than Musk’s rockets is a feature, not a bug.
There would be far more $$$ being sucked up by rorting than genuine assistance being doled out to those who genuinely need help.
I suspect we will need the political equivalent of a giant euthanasia needle to get rid of it – it’s neither sustainable nor salvageable.
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Vicki
Nov 19, 2023 10:57 AM
Re: Don McLean:We often play the CD of his classics on the long drive to the farm. Just love “Vincent” , also “Castles in the Air”.
He also wrote some great satire and laments:
Crossroads
The Pride Parade is an interesting song.When it looked like vinyl was doomed every week I would go to a second hand record store searching for everything I could find of McLean.
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The Rise of Ethical Cannibalism
Edward J. Erler
We should have seen this coming!
The flagship publication of Hillsdale College, Imprimis, which the College claims has a readership of more than six million, has recently published an article by the current enfant terrible of conservatism, Christopher F. Rufo, entitled “Inside the Transgender Empire.”
The article explores the question of how transgenderism became so successful, and especially how the transgendered and Drag Queens became so celebrated among the ruling elites. Rufo rehearses all the horrors that have been visited upon American society and politics by the transgender movement and, I believe, he thinks his analysis of that danger goes to the radical source of that danger.
It does not! His analysis is not radical enough;
it ignores the fact that the triumph of the transgender movement will inevitably lead to cannibalism.
If you think that statement is too harsh for polite readers, read on.
The Los Angeles Times has published not one but two rave reviews of a movie celebrating cannibalism.
Glenn Whipp, reporting from the Telluride Film Festival in September of 2022, describes Bones and All as “a tender story of young love” starring two “fine young cannibals trying to negotiate their natures and doing their best to ethically source their next meal.”
What makes the cannibalism ethical, one supposes, is that the movie’s two cannibal stars are “people on society’s margins” who are stigmatized and shunned.
Whipp seems to think that this brings ethical issues into the equation. In this clash, the ethical conundrum seems to be a choice between the right to life of the victims of cannibals, and the cannibals’ desire to pursue the food of their choice;
who is the real victim?—those who are eaten by the cannibals or the cannibals whose way of life is considered unacceptable and stigmatized by society?
The second review, by Mark Olsen describes the film as “part horror film, part coming-of age tale, part romance.” He explains part of the movie’s plot as “two young ‘eaters’” “attempting “to stake out a semblance of normalcy and stability.”
But, of course, it is difficult to imagine normalcy and stability developing among cannibals, and the reviewer observes that “the film is driven by a sadness, a mournful, haunted quality that covers even moments of freedom and joy.”
The “freedom and joy” presumably breaks forth from the mournful gloom when then cannibals have stalked and succeeded in consuming their next meal.
We should have been prepared for the praise of the morality of cannibalism.
I, for one, have been prepared for it for years.
Friends, casual acquaintances, and bystanders have endured my discussions, sometimes polemics and even screeds, on how the result of progressive thought would ultimately be cannibalism.
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Megan
Nov 19, 2023 11:50 AM
Why is dog-walking covered by NDIS? ..Simples. If you are disabled you cannot walk your dog safely.
I would be the last one to deny a disabled person to have pets, but surely there has to be a better way to walk a dog for half an hour than to pay $200 bucks to a dog walker?
What about neighbors who have a pooch and would take his/her dog along?
Relatives? -
It would be better for everyone if these fake loiterers were billeted throughout the Middle East – paid to leave, if necessary – and Israel takes over all of it.
Short of that, this deliberately curated cycle of violence will never end.
That didn’t work pre-’67 when they were billeted in Lebanon, Egypt, etc. But I agree the two-state solution was probably never viable.
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Americans were horrified at the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli villagers on October 7 this year. The brutality and futility of the attack rocked the imagination. Yet within days, we witnessed huge protest marches in U.S. and world capitals and universities in favor of Hamas. Their favored chant, “from the river to the sea,” means only one thing, and that is the annihilation of Israel and all its Jewish inhabitants.
Such support for terrorism exploded in the 1970s as well in European cities and universities, and people wondered then about this same gleeful valorization of revolution by comfortable, privileged youth.
The Germans had a word for it: Leidensneid, or an envy of suffering, first described by authors such as Jillian Becker, the chronicler of the Baader Meinhof group.
The youth of this formerly Nazi nation thought of their old country as irredeemably evil, and they were not entirely wrong.
They came to envy the romanticized and righteous suffering of oppressed peoples, whose plight seemed authentic and meaningful.
As they lived a soft life under the new democracies, their hatred of the old order grew.
Eventually, they demanded nothing short of a utopian standard of justice for the new.
They developed an ideology of hypersensitivity to wrongdoing, including any they saw in their new nations.
And so, bereft of a nation to identify with, they identified with the victims of the post-war world, vowed destruction of “the system,” and embarked on urban guerrilla terrorism.
Similarly, today, protesters believe that Gazans live in an “open air prison” and thus suffer nobly.
Therefore, they deserve our pity and support.
Their struggle is heroic; their lives are significant and noble, unlike the Western student’s comfortable middle-class, or even upper-class, existence, purchased with the wrongdoing of their country.
The Leidensneid of the ’70s repeats in today’s popular oppressor/oppressed theory, the simplistic reduction that any successful nation or people must have achieved its success by oppressing less successful peoples.
They valorize this suffering and therefore believe that Hamas, in the present instance, has no choice but to resort to terrorism for “liberation” against giants like Israel and the U.S.
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Lying liars lying.
Fire is consuming more of the world’s forests than ever before, threatening supplies of wood, paper (Phys.org, 18 Nov)
Between 2001 and 2021, up to 25 million hectares of timber-producing forest was severely burned. The extent of fire has jumped markedly in the past decade, from an average of less than one million hectares a year up to 2015 to triple that since then.
…
Climate change is a major driver of fire weather and fire behavior. The increased risk of high-severity wildfire is an entirely expected outcome of warmer temperatures and, in some places, reduced rainfall.Why am I saying these lying liars are lying? Because of this graph.
Starting their dataset in 2001 is a total blatant tell. Here’s who they are:
David Lindenmayer
Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National UniversityChris Bousfield
Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of CambridgeDavid Edwards
Professor, University of CambridgeANU should be burned to the ground and all the academics sent to Alice Springs to experience some actual climate warmth.
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Gabor @ 11.58.
Oh, I agree. It was tongue in cheek…I’ve gotta have a support animal but someone else is required to support it, which is much too hard for me to organise so NDIS can do it. Exactly the stupid decision making devolved from thinking that refuses to accept any personal responsibility.
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Saw a clip of Jeremy Boring of Daily Wire commenting on the stoush between Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. Said she was welcome to stay but he was elsewhere.
However the interesting part was that he is away in Europe producing a TV series based on The Pendragon Cycle books about King Arthur. Looks like a serious production by the clips seen.
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Top three underrated places Aussies need to visit in Italy
Anthony Bolzonello
– Scilla
– La Spezia
– SalernoNext on Italian List for me after Milan, Turin, Venice, Padua, Verona, Porsche Experience Centre Brescia, Piedmont (priettier than Tuscany) this year,
is to bludge on Eldest Grandson’s Accommodation in Ascona & Son’s in Milan and see more of the Adriatic Coast -
Frank
Nov 19, 2023 12:00 PMWhat about neighbors who have a pooch and would take his/her dog along?
Relatives?
They are the ones getting registered for the $200.Then shame on them.
We don’t have a dog anymore, too painful to part with them, but if we did, I’d be happy to walk their dogs. They are usually friends on the off leash commons anyway. -
The war is over – latest:
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Why is dog-walking covered by NDIS? ..
Simples. If you are disabled you cannot walk your dog safely.So before NDIS either the dog stayed home or you didn’t have a dog .. NDIS is, I’ve alwayz thought, to help with the level of incapacity .. not pet ownership ….
And don’t give me that ‘companionship” BS .. dogs, like cats are personal choices ….
Anyone want the 2 moggies my daughters thrust on me for “companionship” and the necessary expense of $15 a week out of the OAP to feed the bludgers ………FFS!remember the “good old dayz” when you’d get the “OAPS eating catfood cos costs ect” plea .. fast forward to 2023 .. ColesWorths cat food $1.85 a 425g tin .. Colesworths spaghetti 0.65cents and baked beans $1.10 425g tin .. LOL!
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Bruce of Newcastle
Nov 19, 2023 12:10 PMLying liars lying.
Fire is consuming more of the world’s forests than ever before, threatening supplies of wood, paper (Phys.org, 18 Nov)
Between 2001 and 2021, up to 25 million hectares of timber-producing forest was
ANU should be burned to the ground and all the academics sent to Alice Springs to experience some actual climate warmth.
BON,
what do you mean Alice Springs & Climate Warmth?
It is B’Freezing around Alice Springs in Winter, many a time I have woken in Swag to fine frost on outside and pools of water frozen over nearby – Australian Desert goes below Zero in Winter
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Netanyahu to Biden re the post-war return of the P. A:
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Meanwhile, the Israeli defence minister says rich Hamas leaders living ‘safely’ abroad will be killed.
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FMD. I just went and read it. The comments are a cesspit of rabbit-hole antisemitism but he posts his “year in review” as if he is running the Oxford Debating Society circa 1965. His free speech mantra is a very unconvincing fig-leaf.
I haven’t even looked at the site for about a year. There are basically two core commenters and the blog owner. It’s really antisemitic.
Yeah, great year in review.
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20,000 Military Age Ukrainian Men Fled Abroad to Avoid Conscription, Another 20,000 Caught at Border.
LOL, as opposed to well over a million military age Russians who have gotten out of Dodge. (Including some friends of mine.)
Actually the real story is this one:
Protest against corruption held in Ukraine capital calling for more money for armed forces (17 Nov)
A rare protest took place in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv today demonstrating against corruption and calling for more public money to be diverted towards the armed forces.
Activists held banners reading ‘Money to the AFU’, or Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Corruption is a very plausible reason why Ukraine might collapse, but draft evasion certainly isn’t.
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Note however that *both* muzzies and jews inflict this atrocity in their boys.
Do you see no practical need, duk?
The only ‘practical need’ of any note is to allow the devotees of the cult to get it done to minors – depriving them of the ability to make up their minds about it as adults. (spoiler alert, *very few* adult owners of healthy foreskins elect to have them lopped as adults).
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Damn it. She is now beyond reach.
That’s a downer all right, a real bummer.
Rogue Traders – Voodoo Child (2005)
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I don’t know what’s going on with the place. Maybe it’s incidental, but everything I’ve bought or had bought for me that’s packaged, like medications, etc., is packed so tightly that you can’t open them up. You need scissors to get to the meds and lids are impossible. It’s like trying to open battery packs in oz needing scissors.
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11 year old grandson is learning Greek with duolingo – said great choice as knowing the Greek Alphabet from Physics, Maths & Chemistry help his Nonna & I around Greece in 1972 and he is going to take option of Latin as well in 1st year high school
As I said to him Latin forms the basis of the Romance Languages & English with relevance in Sciences
Although English is a Germanic language, it has Latin influences. Its grammar and core vocabulary are inherited from Proto-Germanic, but a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources. A portion of these borrowings come directly from Latin, or through one of the Romance languages, particularly Anglo-Norman and French, but some also from Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; or from other languages (such as Gothic, Frankish or Greek) into Latin and then into English. The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin and Greek roots.
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LOL. Hi, SBU.
So CL you don’t think Ukraine could collapse because of corruption?
Heh, got you there!
Zelenskyy aide on corruption in Ukraine: ‘People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow’ (30 Oct)
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Saw this at Brilliant Maps yesterday:
World map of circumcision:
https://twitter.com/BrilliantMaps/status/1725442404835017179
When I was at school (all boys, Catholic primary and secondary), the uncircumcised lads were so exceedingly rare they were all pretty much known. I don’t think I even knew what a foreskin was until I was, like, 10.
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I know its bad taste but…
In light of Spain re-enacting the leadup to the Spanish Civil War.
Rally held in Madrid against Catalan amnesty after Sánchez sworn in as Spanish PM
About 170,000 people demonstrate in capital over socialist party leader’s deal enabling second term in officeI memed.
https://imgflip.com/i/86j312 -
Does the prostitute get the same rate as the dog walker?
As the art therapist or the guitar tutor or the macrame expert or… 200 per half hour to hang out with someone and talk turkey. It’s all about improving quality of life for the most disadvantaged and only a hateful bigot could possible disagree. That’s why they gave the job of fixing it to Shorten.
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I don’t know where I read it. Maybe it was posted or linked here, so I could be repeating it. Memory has been hazy over the past few days. There was an interesting story about how the Demons could try to get Newsom into the Oval Office surreptitiously. The theory is that they dump the laughing hyena as the VP pick and put Newsom in the VP spot. The crook then quickly resigns. Not a bad idea, but only if the Crook is still alive by the time of the election, and that’s 60/40 against.
Apparently, some of his close admin aides reckon he’s here in all of 24.
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PM slammed for Hiding Navy Divers Injuries
The federal government has confirmed the naval personnel were hurt on Tuesday while performing a mission in support of United Nations sanctions enforcement.
Defence Minister Richard Marles said HMAS Toowoomba was operating in international waters when a People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) destroyer approached, despite communications with Toowoomba.
The Chinese ship activated its sonar, forcing the navy divers to exit the water.
“Medical assessments conducted after the divers exited the water identified they had sustained minor injuries likely due to being subjected to the sonar pulses from the Chinese destroyer,” said Mr Marles in a statement.
Mr Marles has slammed the PLA-N ship’s manoeuvre as “unsafe and unprofessional.”
“Australia expects all countries, including China, to operate their militaries in a professional and safe manner,” he said.
The opposition’s defence spokesman Andrew Hastie has slammed the government for keeping the incident from the public.
“The Coalition condemns the actions of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) in which Royal Australian Navy divers on HMAS Toowoomba were injured in international waters last Tuesday,” Mr Hastie said in a statement.
“While the responsibility is solely on the Chinese PLA Navy, the Albanese Government also has some serious questions to answer.
“Reports that the Prime Minister knew about this incident and deliberately withheld information until after leaving for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit are, if true, outrageous and unacceptable.”
Mr Hastie said the Prime Minister “must explain” why he chose to wait after he left the country to disclose the information and whether it was raised directly with President Xi Jinping at APEC.
“What we continue to see from the Prime Minister and his Labor government is a lack of leadership and a lack of action,” Mr Hastie said.
“In a week in which the government has failed its most basic task – to keeping Australians safe – the Albanese government has again proved that it can’t be trusted on national security.
“We have always said that we will judge the Chinese Communist Party on their actions rather than their words, and this provocative behaviour contradicts the Government’s belief they are witnessing a stabilisation of the relationship with China.
This incident is evidence to the contrary.
“The Prime Minister must immediately disclose whether he raised this matter with President Xi, or whether it was withheld for expedient political purposes. Any failure to do so would rightly raise questions around Anthony Albanese’s ability to lead our nation.”
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The 80-Year Cyclical Theory v. the Economic Confidence Model
The concept of cycles is becoming accepted in Western culture. Recently, people have been honing in on what they deem the 80-year cyclical theory that marks a major shift in humanity. While this may be true as it takes a few generations to change society, they are not incorporating the additional nuisances associated with the true Economic Confidence Model.
The 80-year theory, also called the Strauss–Howe generational theory, believes that there are four 20-year cycles or turnings that build up to a cataclysmic event. For example, some are using 2024 as the starting point, which brings us back to 1944 when America was at the cusp of World War II. Going back an additional 80 years would bring us to 1864 – the US Civil War. Taking it back even further we arrive at 1784 when the Revolutionary War ended.
Now, absolutely everything is connected, and to garner the most accurate forecasts requires peering out at society and the global economy. The problem with the 80-year theory is that it was developed from a solely American viewpoint as it was designed to explain the history and future of the United States.
The Economic Confidence Model, at a basic level, sees waves of 8.6 years building in intensity amounting to six waves to construct a major long wave of 51.6 years. What you get at the end of these 51.6-year waves is very profound. After the 1774.95 peak, we end up with a revolution against the monarchy. The next wave peak in 1826.55 produced the Russo-Persian War, 1826-1828, Greek War of Independence, Battle of Monte Santiago between Brazil and Argentina, Mexican Constitution is formed, the Maryland Democratic Party begins creating the confrontation between the Democrats and Republicans (South v North) which sets the stage for the American Civil War in 1861, and even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the 4th of July 1826 (1826.50) marking the end of the generation of Enlightenment whereas the peak of the wave was July 19th. The next wave 1878 saw the Long Depression which was called the “Great Depression” until 1929-1932. The next wave peak of 1929.75 produced the takeover of the West by socialists. Then the next wave was 1981.35 which marked the peak in interest rates even to the day.
Each of these events shifted society as a whole. Capital concentration shifted in a profound way and changed nations. Nothing exists in isolation. The major wave will be 2032 and this will be followed by the shift from the West to the East in economic power.
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Bruce of Newcastle
Nov 19, 2023 12:10 PM
Lying liars lying.Fire is consuming more of the world’s forests than ever before, threatening supplies of wood, paper (Phys.org, 18 Nov)
Between 2001 and 2021, up to 25 million hectares of timber-producing forest was severely burned. The extent of fire has jumped markedly in the past decade, from an average of less than one million hectares a year up to 2015 to triple that since then.
…
Climate change is a major driver of fire weather and fire behavior. The increased risk of high-severity wildfire is an entirely expected outcome of warmer temperatures and, in some places, reduced rainfall.Why am I saying these lying liars are lying? Because of this graph.
Everything, and I mean everything about global boiling is a lie. Roy Spencer with interesting graphs about bushfires in Australia:
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Oh Lord, smell the Marty Gas. Jeez!
Crooks love crooks.
Disclaimer.
https://armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com/p/where-and-how-to-complain.html
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Inaugural AFR university ranking will contain many surprises
Julie Hare Education editor
When students make the complex decision about what they are going to study and where, a whirlwind of factors come into play: reputation, location, rankings, word of mouth feedback, relevance of the course on offer, the ambitions and hopes of family and friends and, of course, interests and ambitions.
To be published on Wednesday, November 22, the inaugural Best Australian Universities ranking from The Australian Financial Review could become an indispensable part of the decision-making process.
Using only publicly available data across five key categories, the ranking recognises the diversity of Australia’s 40 universities.
Unlike traditional international rankings which prioritise research performance over the student experience, this unique league table gives equal measure to both. It also takes into account equity and access, as well as reputation and career outcomes.
What is certain, is that there will be a raft of surprises in the final list, with a number of universities not usually appearing at the top of league tables being given their time in the sun.
Created by Professor Stephen Parker, former University of Canberra vice-chancellor and KPMG national education lead partner, and statistician Professor Tim Brown, a former director of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, the ranking gives a more balanced view of what a university is.
“It counteracts some of the advantages that older, metropolitan universities may have. No ranking can adjust for all the different situations that universities are in, but our broader approach gives all types of universities an opportunity to shine,” Professor Parker said.
“All rankings are contestable and an expression of values: a view of what good looks like.
“We say that the measurable quality of a university lies in its teaching; its research; the confidence it engenders in the value of its degrees through its wider reputation; the way it helps people in their careers; and how it counteracts disadvantage in the community.”
First, international rankings are an insufficient basis for judgment about domestic universities. They can use only a few measures where equivalent data exists or can be created around the world.
Professor Parker says that the Financial Review Best Universities Ranking will force us to confront our preconceptions; including some that might never have been evidence-based or which are out of date.
“In the lingo, there are many challenger brands out there now,” Professor Parker said.
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After two adventures in Boston, Equalizer 3 wisely changes the scenery. Without giving anything away, the results of a brutal job (the opening scene) and advancing age finally give McCall pause. Mortality and God are much on his mind. Maybe it’s time to settle down. This coastal town of Altamonte, Italy, which has adopted him without judgment or questions, seems like the perfect place.
But first, he’ll have to deal with the local mafia, the Camorra. Your imagination can take it from here.
The locations are gorgeous, and the action sequences are cathartic. Equally impressive is the subtle evolution of McCall’s character. He’s still a man burdened with grief over the loss of his wife, only now he’s willing to make friends with a local woman. This relationship is touching in its subtlety. Without saying so, we can sense McCall might be ready to move on. Might. And the movie leaves it up to us to decide what might happen next.
On a higher thematic level, Equalizer 3 is a rousing defense of Western Civilization. The storybook Altamonte is everything a sane world could be: a world of small towns and small businesses, of decent people who look out for one another and are held together by generations of tradition and religious faith. This is where McCall believes he belongs; this is something worth preserving, so he will rid it of the Italian barbarians doing business with (unseen) Islamic terrorists.
In this diseased era of DEI and shallow identity politics, watching as McCall is embraced by a town mostly populated by white Italians without the issue of race ever being raised feels like an act of subversion.
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