Sky news reporter last night complaining about Israel’s treatment of the Hamas prisoners.
Apparently circulating pick of all the man books is torture

Calli:

the repellent jelly of moral confusion

Mmmmm.
Jelly.

David Penberthy is generally to be avoided.

However, this little para in his piece this morning about the midget left-handed houso ranga cheat, and in which he backs Mitchell Johnson’s valid question as to why Warner’s being given a ‘farewell tour’ is a nugget for the ages:

With a guy like Warner in the team, supported by his small but effective coterie of defenders and excusers, completely innocent blokes such as Carey find themselves standing on the shoulders of midgets, the undeserving inheritors of a moral legacy crafted with a folded-up square of sandpaper in Cape Town in 2018.

Yes, Mr Penberthy. Yes.

Sprinkling glitter on turds;

Labor to scale back migration

Clare O’Neil will set out a mechanism to manage a more orderly migration inflow to help in the planning of infrastructure and social services.

H B Bear Avatar
H B Bear
Dec 9, 2023 10:41 AM
Country nightclubs do have an air of bacchanalian pleasures not readily available in an urban environment.

Its called meth Mr Bear, meth.

Seriously a rellie owned the only nightclub in Feraldton, he ended up shutting it down as a massive loss maker.
Everyone wired to the gills before they enter the door, council wankery and bugger all drink sales.
He tried to really go all out on the club, bringing in some interstate DJs of some repute and so on, didnt matter the meth and dunny water brigade were the mainstay of customers.

Im fairly firmly of the opinion the only nightclubs in existence serve to launder drug money.

The latest hot take is ” ScOTt MORRissON hid the tape of Briteknees RApe!!!” on twatter.

Clare O’Neil will set out a mechanism to manage a more orderly migration inflow to help in the planning of infrastructure and social services.

Productive immigrants don’t require “social services”. That’s what jobs are for.

Bespoke
Dec 9, 2023 8:16 AM
John H.
Dec 8, 2023 10:01 PM
Eating Your Way To Risk? The Major Impact of Diet on Alzheimer’s Disease

I take studies and papers with a heap of scepticism. You can easily find ones to support just about eny theoretical theory nodays and conformation bias is rampant.

Not that I disagree with it just saying thay are being use not to consult but to force change. Also way to many people fussing over how other people live.

That can be true Bespoke but there is a way to overcome that problem. Hard work, as I have repeatedly stated the goal is to keep reading and aim for consistency at multiple levels of analysis. I have long joked that there is so much biomedical literature one can provide references to run any argument to suit a personal bias. That isn’t an intractable problem but it is a very difficult problem.

They are not forcing anyone to eat in a particular way. They are arguing against the food lobby and the typical Western diet. A study can’t force anyone to do anything.

Unlike so much other dietary advice there are no extremes there, no need to eliminate fats or carbs or specific foods or a cabinet of supplements or fasting but rather to find an appropriate balance.

It is not possible to be truly skeptical unless we have done the prior hard work. Without that work we are being cynical. In relation to health though there is one metric: how our bodies respond to different lifestyles. By what metrics can we dismiss claims on any subject? Intuition? How do we know if someone knows what they are arguing about? What we saw on a youtube channel that seems to make sense? In these days it is fashionable to bash experts. Who then should we trust? Someone on a forum who keeps posting on a subject and abusing anyone who disagrees with them? We are often exercising faith in authority figures; one escape being consistency across differing domains of analysis.

The public health implications are enormous and there is already data supporting their argument. Such a huge increase in dementia, diabetes, obesity, and MetS will incur huge societal costs. Social media is replete with people fussing over how other people live and most of that is just personal bias. This study is about a society eating its way into very serious problems.

Johnjjj

yep. What I am getting at here is that in Arab Muslim culture this will keep on going forever. The family has 12 kids and they only need one to be a martyr. If they are killed/ executed they remain a model for the younger brothers, cousins and others. So celebrating their death is a mistake if we want to stop this process. Islam is not about individuals, it is about the family and society. It is the sorcerer’s apprentice. I don’t know the solution, but it certainly bears thinking about.

Understood, John. But a martyr is still a dead man. And if he’s been killed by a woman or chucked in a hole with a pig, they also believe all bets are off. So who would want to be the next useless son?

Pouges chap had a decent sendoff.

I hope Gerry Adams, Nick Cave and Johnny Depp remembered to pray for the repose of his soul.

Related:

My favourite YouTube homilist, Fr Brendan Kilcoyne:

Last “Rights”: The Decline of the Catholic Funeral.

The invasion of “…lots of pagan bullshit…”

in Arab Muslim culture this will keep on going forever.

It’s been “going on” for 1700 years in one form or another. Our forebears God bless them , knew how to deal with prior moslem invasions and incursions. Our modern traitorous scumbag leaders have waved them in, now we have them among us and multiplying like a plague of mice.

Let’s try a little transparency. I sent Dover exactly 300 bucks for upkeep back in October, which I done every year since it began.

Is that all? You mean bugger, JC.

John H.
Dec 9, 2023 12:26 PM

Cheers .

Never a C class. GLC 6.3 wagon, Volvo wagon and Audi wagon.

IMO, a good column by Greg Craven

Our refusal to damn sadistic, wicked Hamas shames our society
We have long assumed that evil was self-evident, spoke for itself, we literally could smell it. But for Australia, this now is an empty boast amid our apologies, our squirming, our twisting and our excuses.

By GREG CRAVEN
The defining characteristic of a society is its ability to tell wrong from right. Without this, it merely is a structured mob. Of all moral phenomena, the most important to identify is evil, the black heart of wrong. A society that does not know evil is a morally failed state.

We have long assumed that evil was self-evident, spoke for itself, we literally could smell it.

But for Australia, this now is an empty boast.

Our apologies, our squirming, our twisting and our excuses for the butchery by Hamas, both directly of Israelis and through the expedience of Palestinians, show us for what we really are. A nation that can stare naked evil in the eye and not recognise it. Or even smile, sheepishly. This is not merely shameful, it is a national indictment of moral inadequacy. In these days of click morality and reality television ethics we do not talk much about evil, which is why we urgently should start now.

No one is evil simply because they are stupid, ignorant, stubborn or even abusive. Evil is the quality that comes right at the sickening end of a wide scale of perceived turpitude. At the opposite end is mere disagreement, even irresponsible disagreement. We often regard those who disagree with us as morally deficient. Normally, this is incorrect. Even the stupid are entitled to their opinions.

Next is wrongness. Any person can do something that is unequivocally wrong. Typically, they will be acting immorally, illegally or both, but this does not actually compromise their being or, as we used to say, their soul.
Then there is badness, a much more intense concept. A person or action that is bad involves a fundamental moral failure. The very character of the individual or act is tainted.

There are easy practical examples. In the recent Indigenous voice referendum a lot of people passionately disagreed with each other. Overwhelmingly, they were not bad people, though some on each side were better informed than others.

Next up, it is indeed wrong to defame, evade tax, steal, punch someone or commit adultery. For some of these, but perhaps not the right ones, the law will punish you.

At the next, much worse level, badness is exemplified by all forms of sexual abuse and the vast majority of homicides. It involves the wicked actions of wicked people. These are detestable and typically attract harsh punishment.

But it takes an element of intense, sequenced, deliberate horror to raise even these types of acts to the innermost circle of intended hell. That is evil.

If you are religious, you spend a fair amount of time thinking about evil, sometimes too much. But when something happens like the Hamas atrocities, you do get an awful chance to check your perceptions.

Evil seems to have three elements. First, the action itself is deeply and clearly wrong. This is an objective test. For example, deadly assault is unequivocally wrong.

Second, the perpetrator must understand the utter wrongness of their actions in terms of consequences. A sequential sexual abuser knows exactly how much the victims and their families will suffer.
But it is the third crucial element that is truly chilling. Evil does not just happen, it revels. It delights in itself. It celebrates its horrors. It flaunts its pain. Evil, not power, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

It is no wonder that in the Catholic sacrament of baptism, the godparents denounce not only Satan but “the glamour of evil”. Real evil is alluring, glittery and to its dedicatees, enormous fun.

Think of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and their exterminations. That race massacre was not merely grim duty. It was something to be celebrated, the subject of boasting and even of jest. The Nazis danced around the fires of the Holocaust. Likewise, in his liquidations of real and imagined opponents, Joseph Stalin luxuriated in his power to kill, and its exercise. He would contemplate killings and their details with pleasured satisfaction, and sometimes elation.

On these criteria, the actions of Hamas since October 7 have been undiminished evil. Overall, they comprise a Goya masterpiece of horror. But their atrocities also excel against every standard of gross criminality.

Objectively and regardless of any argued justification, Hamas’s actions are irredeemably wrong. Murder, kidnapping, rape, genital mutilation, brutal beheading, the slaughter of innocents, ritual violent humiliation, mind-breaking mental torment – let alone the sacrifice of your own people to protect yourselves – all are outrages against humanity.

This is true in any war, even a supposedly just war.
Hamas knows exactly the appalling consequences of its actions. When you behead someone with a shovel, you understand what you are doing. When you slaughter an infant, your eyes are open not only to its death but to the anguish of its parents.

When you positively foment war with Israel to further your own status and power, you intend the deaths of your countrymen. You comprehend the cynical exploitation of lives, homes and families, proxy murder through use as human shields, mass dislocation and homelessness, and utter destruction of hope.

This intended expenditure of Palestinian lives to serve as propaganda bargaining chips, while posturing piously as their saviours, is an intrinsic part of the evil of Hamas. Cynical, duplicitous, utterly uncaring, it reminds you of Don McLean’s line from American Pie: “I saw Satan laughing with delight”.

As to that delight, who could miss the sheer elation of the actual perpetrators of all this death and despair: the dancing over bodies, the exultant cries of victory around shattered families, the humiliating parade of shuffling captives.

But worst is the chilling tones of self-satisfaction from the Hamas leadership and its spokesmen as they delineate demands and sentences. We have slaughtered you. You deserved it. We will keep doing it. We will annihilate you, from the river to the sea, you Jews.

And what are a few more dead Palestinian donkey herders along the way? Such pride. Such self-glory. Such grim joy. Such evil.

It is not easy to identify entire courses of events, as opposed to particular episodes or individuals, that rival this slaughterous absence of humanity. Certainly the Holocaust, and probably the Armenian genocide, but what else?

In my own family history is the Potato Famine. There is no doubt there were English politicians and landlords who genuinely saw the opportunity to “thin” the croppy population, and those individuals were evil. But even in the fullness of my anger, I cannot believe the British polity as such intended mass killings of Irish people. Criminal negligence, yes. Conscious mass murder like Hamas, a reluctant no.

Yet in the face of the systemic atrocity that is Hamas, some Australians – especially on the left – cannot pronounce the word evil.

Instead they peddle excuses, justifications and countercharges. Israel asked for it. The Israelis took Palestinian land. The state of Israel is historically illegitimate. Israel is bombing Gaza and killing civilians. It is not observing international law.

This is where avoidance of the E-word is so important. You can justify a lot by counteraccusation and quibbles. But you cannot excuse outright evil.

Part of this leftist indifference is founded in a chilling reality. These murders and rapes by professional extremists are not merely an attack on Israel but on the West and its whole compromised, ragged but glorious embrace of tolerance, civility and urbanity.

Tel Aviv is a proxy for London, Paris and Sydney.

So, because our own radical disrupters as a matter of principle detest the Western culture of capitalists, conservatives and cronies, they parlay with monsters who wage war against the society that protects their right to dissent. Monsters who would eliminate them at the first opportunity.

This is why we should not simply talk of Israel under attack, Israel fighting a war, Israel making hard decisions. In this sort of cultural dirty-bomb assault against Western values, there is no Israel, only a greater us. As far as Hamas and its allies are concerned, we all wear kippahs now.

Exactly why we in the West have cancelled the concept of evil is complex.

Probably the decline of religion is involved. For all their nuance, Christianity and Judaism – to name but two faiths – have the moral confidence to stigmatise the appallingly wrong. Perhaps modernist ethical codes are good with playground behaviour and accountancy but not terrorism.
Maybe it has been the declining acceptance of the personification of evil. If you believe in Satan, you will detest his instruments. Identify them, and you have evil.

Certainly, the universality of psychological explanation is in play. We rationalise bad people by their upbringing and mental illnesses. We can even categorise every act of evil as yet another symptom of unfortunate psychopathy. But anyone who believes Hitler and Hamas are just failures of psychiatric sanitation need therapy themselves.

Moral relativism and postmodernism clearly play a part. If there is no such thing as truth, then there is no such thing as evil, its ultimate enemy. Then again, even French philosopher Michel Foucault believed in right and wrong, provided he was sole arbiter.

There certainly has been a change in the way Australians visualise right and wrong. Historically, we were focused on relatively specific vices with easily identifiable outcomes. We were most opposed to obvious ills such as violence and dishonesty, and their consequences such as fraud, robbery and murder. Even something such as World War II had an immediate focus: the defeat of fascism, the overthrow of its regimes and the destruction of its very nasty ideology. Now we deal with much vaguer concepts of wrong, with less clear markers and remoter effects.

We really like combating climate change because it is an amorphously uplifting cause, we feel good when we do it, and we can safely revile its supposed authors without ever actually having to sacrifice much ourselves.

Possibly the last cause is societal triviality. Does a society obsessed with social media, consumption and the infinite definition of microscopic identities real­ly have any use for archaic concepts such as evil? Does it have an X presence?
Of course, the other great unanswered question is why, when evil roams, it always stalks the Jews? Their own blackly humorous answer is because, like turkey at Christmas, it simply is a matter of tradition.

There are other theories. Serious historians point to medieval realities that promoted hatred of Jews, such as their monopoly on lending money, usury being forbidden to Christians. Others argue the wider population is simply jealous, given the staggering intellectual and other achievements of so many Jews.

Some maintain that Jews have always been the “other”, perennial outsiders in an intolerant world. This gets closer.

The real charge against the Jews is their unforgivable authenticity and agelessness.

Before Karl Marx (himself a Jew), Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander, even before the millennia-old Catholic Church and Christianity itself, there were the Jews. They are still here, a race, a religion and a culture.

The ancient Greeks and the Romans have gone, with their religions and their daily languages. Christianity fights for survival. But somehow the Jews survive, a standing reproach to our own vulnerability.

To the monsters of the right, the Jews offend by their persistent difference. They are indefatigable and indigestible. They will never conform to some mere creed of nationalism.

To the louche left, they offend because of their unswerving commitment to truth as they have inherited it. As a people, they will never be dispersed by assurances they do not really exist or that He Who Is represents a mere phantasm.

In reality, as its oldest continuous intellectual culture, the Jews are indispensable to the West. They are in the truest sense its cultural aborigines.

The cruel irony is that just as the mainstream West struggles to abandon its historic anti-Semitism, the Jews now are detested by emanations of evil such as Hamas. They are hated not merely because they occupy territory or fight wars but because they represent that Greatest Satan, the West.

We of the West should recognise fellow souls when we see them.

Greg Craven was vice-chancellor and president of the Australian Catholic University from 2008 to 2021.

The public health implications are enormous and there is already data supporting their argument. Such a huge increase in dementia, diabetes, obesity, and MetS will incur huge societal costs. Social media is replete with people fussing over how other people live and most of that is just personal bias. This study is about a society eating its way into very serious problems.

Dietary ‘science’ makes astrology look good.

Among the numerous problems, of which individual differences is a huge one, is the assumption that there is anything useful to say about diet apart from obvious things like that living on chips and coca-cola is not going to be good for anyone.

For example, the War on Salt clearly does not apply to the long-lived Japanese, who consume far more than the Puritans in the West say is a way of avoiding premature death from heart disease. Then there are the also long-lived Scandinavians and ditto many northern Europeans, who have traditionally eaten a lot of fat (and plenty of salt as well.)

The seekers of Truth about diet are always looking for magic bullets and killer poisons.

As our lifespans keep increasing, the food control freaks in the health Establishment keep insisting that five servings of vegetables a day are absolutely necessary, and the fact that only vegetarians actually do this does not deter them.

On and on it goes. Food faddism has a long and totally unscientific history.

That said, obesity is indeed a serious problem, but the causes are multifactorial, IMHO. Some people just eat too much, some really do have a genetic predisposition to put on weight easily, some bodies are predisposed to a certain diet via centuries of natural selection and react badly to a different diet.

But, looking at the landwhales around town, mostly youngish women, I do wonder if there is something like a virus at work as well. There is something wrong with their metabolisms.

At their age, I couldn’t have got that big no matter how hard I tried. And I didn’t exercise, ate and drank whatever I wanted, and never put on an ounce on my slim frame. The same went for almost all of my contemporaries.

Oh, and as others have reported, the Killer Heatwave is a fizzer here. While TheirABC ran a story not long ago about how it was going to be 37C, at 1 pm it’s just under 30C, and we had a big thunderstorm (described as a ‘freak’ storm, natch) overnight which cooled everything down.

Maybe there’s a weather nerd out there who will start compiling forecasts vs actual temps – it would be useful information.

Thefrolickingmoll:

Sixth immigration detainee arrested after High Court ruling freed more than 140 people including hardened criminals

Obviously they think the Australian Law is a joke and unenforceable. Or is that what they’ve been told by the Social Workers? I think the notes and interviews by the SW need to be aired to the courts that will now hear their cases.

At the QLD airport about to board to Perth… plane broken. Nav system kapput. Need a new plane. Perhaps 2hrs delay.

I am down at Bulli for a cricket tournament involving my grand niece.

We were promised instant death and dessication due to the ‘furnace like’ temperatures. The organisers even considered cancelling.

It is a beautiful hot summer day with a cooling sea breeze. Shade and the beach are popular as usual in December, but the young kids are quite happy out in the field.

It is the weak indoctrinated parents who are panicking. Not one of them has said that it is just a hot summer day, they are babbling the stupid that they were told by the media.

Less so the country folks.

The constant attacks against Australians’ “give it a go, just get on with it ” culture are criminal. Panick on order is the new culture.

We are all living in a f*ken woke classroom with betas, snowflakes and scammers as teachers.

Travel advice sought from cats familiar with Italy. Spending a week in Feb and splitting it between Milan (3 nights) and Rome (4 nights). It’s my first time in Italy.

A few questions;
1. Is that too many days in those locations?
2. What does one do in Milan apart from visiting the Duomo?
3. Re. Rome, apart from the Vatican, Pantheon, Trevi fountain, what else does one do?

Any recommendations on hotels is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Queensland Coal. BHP & Rio Tinto all divested recently. Ditto Mitsui Corporation for the Japs, heard rumblings from Mitsubishi (who is in cahoots with the remaining BHP holdings) lately as well. Vale got out about 10 years ago in Oz.

Stanmore & Pembroke been buying up a lot of tenements coming on to the market.

Hairy Festerpenis gets a smackdown on twitter.

Nyunggai Warren Mundine AO
@nyunggai
·
5h
No genocide nor apartheid in Israel. Gaza has ruled itself since the withdrawal of Israel in 2005. Hamas has fired thousands of missiles of against Israel. The 7th Oct Hamas broke the truce by invading Israel, killing, gang raping, torturing, mutilating, kidnapping civilians.

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?Mary Kostakidis
@MaryKostakidis
Australia has abandoned international law in
@johnmenadue

@AlboMP

@SenatorWong
have placed Australia on the wrong side of history on what will forever be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes of western civilisation, all documented in real time

Why after your comment mine wasn’t enough?

I give to the IPA annually about twice what you send Dover. I rate this site as more valuable to me than the IPA.

I don’t see the Çat as just a subscription service to me. I think it has substantial general benefit to the nation. Partly because it sets a splendid example of tolerance of all sorts of people.

Vr, your four nights in Rome will flash by. There is so much to do and see there you will have to cull. Make sure you leave a day for the Vatican, and another for the antiquities. And have another day just mooching around and seeing what happens – perhaps a trip across the Tiber to Trastevere. There is also a day trip to Hadrian’s Villa if you like that sort of thing.

Milan 3 nights – yes, you will want to visit the majestic cathedral, and don’t forget to pre-book Santa Maria delle Grazie for a viewing of The Last Supper. You must book, don’t just show up. There’s also shopping in the Galleria. Take your credit cards! You can also do a day trip up to Como, hop on the ferry for a lake tour and hop off at lovely Bellaggio. In fine weather, it’s superb.

Have fun!

Sal, they might be ok with maneuvering their own body, but once they have to maneuver via a steering wheel they have no clue. Watch a Chinese parallel park. It’s beyond painful.

Watching anyone parallel park these days is painful. Sometimes I just grit my teeth and wait for the bang.

I wonder if the plethora of cameras and sensors has resulted in a dearth of natural skill. Unless you use it, you lose it.

I’m here Bush
A fire on the Borung at the Swan Hill intersection.
The nephew went as crew on the local tanker. He said it started right on the edge of the road and the flames were higher than the side of the truck as they ran the edge with the truck’s water cannon blasting the fire front. Crop and stubble involved.
Not far from where the grifters plan to build a 500,000 volt transmission line. The CFA commander wrote an article for local newspapers saying grass/crop fires don’t get above two meters high and the smoke is not heavy enough to arc a line. The nephew said the flames were over three metres high and the smoke was very dense.
We’re seriously thinking of writing a letter to the state government stating we will now longer recognise our command structure since it is politicised and therefore compromised, which means they are not representing our genuine concerns that building thousands of Kms of new lines actions the state represents a vastly increased fire risk and an impediment to firefighting.
The pricks need removing and we’re in the mood.

And someone FFS must instruct Chinese drivers when they get their licence here that their blinker does NOT automatically grant right of way. Nor does it activate a protective force field.