Albo reckons the Voice wasn’t a loss for him? It was one of the greatest humiliations ever handed to a PM and their government in living memory. He’s as clueless as when The Great Man stuck him in a corridor as an 18yo Trot.

Albo reckons the Voice wasn’t a loss for him?

Albo has to put a brave face on the whole fiasco. Tanya Plibersek is standing behind him, deciding where she’ll plant the big knife.

greg craven greg craven
My Christmas gift to ‘Generation-Greed’: A dash of reality and a hint of perspective
2:46PM December 25, 2023
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Christmas is a time of love, joy and goodwill. Also, in its fuddle of hangovers, appalling family gatherings and insulting gifts, it’s the opportunity to nurse hatred, resentment and naked prejudice. I certainly do.

I’m 65. My body is disintegrating like a Qantas takeoff schedule. My relevance has fled like a serious reader from a Peter FitzSimons doorstopper.

The only consolation is my mind is deteriorating so fast I can’t take it all in.

So my deepest jealous loathing is for younger, fitter, bouncier generations. I contemplate them with a mixture of pure hate and eviscerating envy. Gen X, Y and Z, millennials and whatever an Alpha is, I wish you miserable lives punctuated with catastrophe.

A few plagues would be nice. The odd global conflagration directed by some bad-tempered AI robot would be amusing. An intense acceleration of climate change seems only just given your endless moaning on the subject.

Of course, it’s your fiscal whining on everything from house prices to the cost of living and the price of biodegradable, ethically sourced underpants that really purges the intestines. Don’t you understand? Nobody cares.

Or to put it another way, if we boomers – God, I hate that tired condescension – are rapidly dying out, it is only fair we leave your unrequited economic fantasies to haunt you like the ghost of Keating past. Your resentment is our joy.

It’s the low moaning over real estate that irks me most.

“We can’t buy a house.” “We’re excluded from the market.” “My mortgage is stifling my creativity.”

Listen, sonny. Yes, we bought our first house for a song, namely a tune from the darker recesses of Les Mis. And yes, it was in Brunswick. Or as it was called in those days, Obrunswick. As in: “Where do you live? Ohhhh, Brunswick?”

Our little slice of Hades was a predatory shack waiting to engulf us in its own collapse. It was indeed a funky terrace, but only in the sense that its wooden exoskeleton was held up only by the houses on either side.

And yes, the surrounding atmosphere was diverse and multicultural. Our first neighbours were regularly visited by family members escaping from Pentridge jail. Our second lot kept chickens in the kitchen and sacrificed sheep in their backyard. Really.

I do understand the personal violation inflicted on you by real estate tyranny.

You have a human right to live in Enmore. Those Uighurs should just stop complaining.

I know you have HECS debts from studying at university. You deserve them. We had to drudge through grim syllabuses in the law of contracts or structural engineering. You flitted your way through poverty law for the safely remote and postmodern physics.

No wonder your writing skills are like a self-help guide for narcissists from Newtown and your bridges fall down. You are the tinea of useful education.

Scott Morrison once said you should cut down on avocados to afford a house. How about eliminating aeroplanes from your diet? Most of you baby bludgers saw Paris before puberty and Rio during a primary school beach outing.

By bitter contrast, my wife and I first went overseas when we were 33. We packed two children under 10 and a six-month-old baby. Between shrill insubordination and projectile vomiting, the experience was a cross between a bad holiday vacation movie and The Exorcist.

One distressing reality is that Gen-Greed has developed its own entitled dialect to demand undeserved concessions and promote intergenerational guilt.

It is a doggerel patois mingling meaningless speech patterns drawn from every corporate human resources department, and the least profound pop psychology. As in “If you don’t buy me a car, Dad, I’ll feel really unsafe and gaslighted.”

When I told one of my professionally mendicant sons I was writing this, I received a sententious warning: “Don’t, Dad, my generation is really hurting, and lot of people will be triggered.” Dear God, I hope so.

You can plumb the intellectual depths of these generational malignants by visiting their favourite bookshops in Balmain or Carlton.

Those who are not permanently plugged into reality-cancelling headphones portentously read a melange of management porn for future jobs they will never get, fitness tomes they will never follow, and trite biographies of people who should never have been born. Think Katy Perry’s Guide to a Toned Midriff through Business Networking.

The politics of the generationally correct are as shallow as President Joe Biden’s memory. Forget a Labor Party moderately devoted to workers’ rights or a Coalition vaguely in favour of small business. Just so bourgeois and unimpactful.

Instead, alphabeticals and millennials gambol around the Australian Greens. They particularly enjoy the Greens’ messianic focus on climate change. It is the perfect issue for the generationally motivated because they cannot be held responsible for it and there really is nothing practical they can do about it. Nice lack of work if you can get it.

But the defining feature of the generationally enhanced is their loathing for their parents and their determination that the old folks should die quickly so the loot can be distributed.

These days, when some feckless 40-year-old gazes into their mother’s eyes, it is not love you see. It’s the steely gaze of an open cash register.

It’s not so much the fact they want you to die that gets you. It’s that they want it to happen so damn quickly. Many elderly Australians are being measured for their coffins before their wheelchairs.

Of course, in the meantime, there is the so-called Bank of Mum and Dad. This sounds like some sweet exercise in intergenerational co-operation but actually is a black market where ageing brats exchange their unearned longings for their parents’ hard-earned cash.

It’s the greatest extravaganza of rapacity since Alaric the Goth sacked Rome. Just made worse because the slaughtering hordes are your own children.

In fairness, though, I don’t want to unfairly malign subsequent generations. It’s just that they are shallow, grasping, uncaring and homicidally entitled.

Beyond these slight drawbacks, they’re as cuddly as funnel-web spiders.

Power hit and miss now, a period of supply from midday cut half an hour ago. On and off but that doesn’t matter right now. Time for a few drinks.

JUST IN: The IDF has begun construction of a 1-kilometer buffer zone along the entire Israel-Gaza border (on the Gazan side). Only Israeli soldiers will be allowed in. The mistake of allowing Hamas terrorists to encroach on the border and attack Israeli forces will not be repeated.

Aah, the Sumerian mead…no, sorry, best I can do is some One Nation rum that I bought for spouse and son. I haven’t handed it over, yet.

On this special day some whacky islam:

‘Sydney Gay And Lesbian Mardi Gras’ calls for ceasefire, wants Hamas alive so its members can enjoy Sharia (great photo of hamas throwing a queer for palestine off a roof)

Duuuuude! Biden Regime Pardons Marijuana Use Nationwide (featuring a young obama lighting up)

What did Adam say on the day before Christmas? It’s Christmas, Eve!

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

– Charles Dickens

The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.

– George Carlin

Does that mean citizens from Gaza will no longer be allowed to work in Israel?

memory serves that was decided very early in the follow-up ……!
No work, no help re-building, no access to/from Israel at all ……. could change, of course, but that was the official line week 2 …….

How Rishi Sunak announced an amnesty for illegal immigrants and hoped nobody would notice

Albanese – the ideological grand nephew of Neville Chamberlain

Say what you will about Chamberlain, but he wasn’t a perfidious Trot.

The IDF has begun construction of a 1-kilometer buffer zone along the entire Israel-Gaza border (on the Gazan side).

The Egyptians did the same about a decade ago after attacks on their soldiers.

A bit of worrisome commentary about Gaza and possible trouble in Sydney which cast a momentary shadow.

From Gaza to Sydney; that’s a long shadow.

But still who the hell would have wanted another war just 20 years after the horror of WWI.

Chamberlain knew a war was coming, but he believed he had bought Britain and the empire crucial time to prepare.

Chamberlain knew a war was coming, but he believed he had bought Britain and the empire crucial time to prepare.

Chamberlain believed that he had averted the prospect of war, by “appeasing” Hitler, over Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain’s whole tragedy was that he genuinely believed that no – one, in their right mind, would ever plunge Europe, into the horrors of another war.

Looking through the trees to Siddy Harbour.
Champagne from the land of Britnah.
Oysters, prawns and crayfish with mango mayonnaise to start.
A massive lump of Victor Churchill slow roasted eye fillet with all the fixins for main, with a Coonawarra cab sav.
Home made plum pudding, vanilla icecream and custard.
Struggling through a final G &T before pulling the pin.
Chockers.

Champagne from the land of Britnah.

Any good jokes about knickers?

Christmas at home with wife and children including our daughter from Canberra. Traditional lunch with family and some young overseas students who had nowhere else to go. Some cultural challenges but mainly from an oldie like me.

My kind wife got out my old scalextric set, assembled it and now a few of us are having races between BMWs, Toranas, Falcons and Ford Sierras. I am a kid once more.

If they made a British champagne it would be full bodied and tart.

I think they do…I recall seeing it on Escape to the Country or similar.

Well, a sparkling white wine, anyway.

I’ve ordered Simon Heffer’s account of Chamberlains last letters.

We expect a review!

😀

We expect a review!

Happy to provide one. I spend my money on good single malt, books and travel, these days.

Iran Threatens to Close the Mediterranean Sea to Commerce

Europe on high alert as Christmas terror plots foiled in France, Germany, Austria

Mother Lode

Dec 25, 2023 7:38 PM

Champagne from the land of Britnah.

If they made a British champagne it would be full bodied and tart.

Oooh!
Harsh.
But fair.

Rool Dool at 7:40.

My kind wife got out my old scalextric set, assembled it and now a few of us are having races between BMWs, Toranas, Falcons and Ford Sierras. I am a kid once more.

Scalextric.
I used to dream about having one of those.
Maybe I still do.

😀

I’m sure it was delicious, Tinta.

By the way, how’s the memsahib? Did you spoil each other today?

She”se mending, rather slowly. We’re going for lunch, at one of our favourite watering holes, sooner, rather than later.

the origins of life from chemistry

..
Mathematically highly improbable.

Mathematically highly improbable.

Impossible even, as mathematicians advised biologists at an inter-disciplinary conference some years ago now. I’ll try to track down the reference but I’ll have to find the book first and it’s packed away. The biologists then accused the mathematicians of being creationists (in the philosophical, not the religious sense) but the latter protested that they could only report what their calculations showed.

Impossible even, as mathematicians advised biologists

..
Just the information part is highly improbable.
Embodying it within a cell structure is even worse.
But underneath that is the further improbability of a universe made up of the chemistry required to build the information and the cells. All the little bits required just happen to be lying around waiting to be randomly assembled into the complex machinery required for functioning, living cells.
That’s ridiculous.

Senor P

Scalextric.
I used to dream about having one of those.
Maybe I still do.

At my age it’s the equivalent of getting out the ELO or Alan Parsons Project LPs. A guilty pleasure. But there’s something about the tactile nature of the cars, track and trigger grip thingies. Much better than a playstation.

Ian Stewart is a mathematician. So am I. You aren’t.

..
Admittedly I spent most of the years I was studying at the University of Melbourne Mathematics Department drunk, and I did get there circuitously when the Education faculty stopped teaching maths and unloaded a dozen or so of us, but I did complete a major in mathematics there. One of the few Education students to survive the transition.
Not sure I would go around calling myself “a mathematician”.

Louis Litt
Dec 25, 2023 9:49 PM
Arky
What is the maths the origin of life.

..
You take all the molecules in the ocean.
You estimate how often they recombine.
You take the most simplest possible single cell and the information required for its genome.
You take the amount of time that the oceans existed.
Then you calculate the probability of getting the required information. You can further extend it by estimating the number of Earth like worlds in our galaxy.
People have done this, including myself (very roughly because I don’t have the chemistry background to do a good estimate of how often molecules combine and recombine).
When you do the calculations, even with the most generous approximations, the result is that there is not enough time, not in trillions of galaxies, for the information required to arise randomly.

Whether slow or fast, as long as mending, that’s all that counts.

Thank you. We have been advised that recovering from the effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment can take years.

Something (possibly) intriguing to think about emerged from the trash Tucker Carlson was spewing during those UFO discussions.

The visitor mentioned that “biologics” had been discovered in these downed UFOs. From what I understood of these talks, “biologics” meant life forms rather than dead aliens, and the crashed UFOs were unmanned probes dropping life forms rather than being manned. According to what we know, probes are designed to crash land.

This relates to inexplicable occurrences like the Holocene period, which are periods of unprecedented life surges on Earth that defy scientific explanation.

Though I don’t think so, it’s something to think about.

My power came back on a little while ago. Five hours without it this evening.

Money well spent, “when we had the farm”, was a backup gen set, big enough to supply electricity to all the houses “on the place.”

If life came from other worlds, it doesn’t invalidate the existence of a God. It basically means we may have to update our belief system away from the scriptures, which I guess is very problematic.

Will humans eventually try to seed the known part of the universe with life forms emanating from earth. I think it would be very possible in say a thousand years from now or in the long future.

From the Oz. Emphasis added.

Alan
52 minutes ago
As an Australian born Jewish woman, lawyer and taxpayer I am utterly disgusted by what this country has become. I am unsafe in my homeland and feel I need to hide my identity and justify my right to exist. The obvious anti-semitism cloaked in concern for those other than the Israeli people who were slaughtered in the most horrific way, sickens me. The vile hatred permeating our streets completely and utterly unchecked is telling and terrifying. How dare our elected officials do absolutely nothing to protect my community whilst happily accepting the huge and continuing achievements and contributions we make to Australian society every single day. Where are the hoards of Jewish Australians marching in Muslim areas or other public places calling for their death or questioning their humanity/right to be alive?? No-where. And it will always be so, because despite those of you who hate us and try to make the world believe we are ‘descended from monkeys and pigs’ we are highly civilised, ethical, industrious and the world would be a lesser place if not for what we, the Jewish people, have created and given to the world. The wife

I would like for others to chime in on the abiogenesis thing, from either side.
I don’t have the required chemistry or biology.

If they made a British Brittnah champagne it would be full bodied and tart.

Just looked back and saw the havoc auto-corrupt had wrought on a casual throw away joke.

Sheesh!

And you can’t see how to get to cells, so it can’t be done.

..
I don’t care if it can or can’t be done.
I’m agnostic on it.
But no one has shown how it can be done, no one has done it, but all the bits are there, apparently thrown together by accident somehow.
Isn’t that curious? That we can’t replicate an accidental occurrence even knowing the outcome?
And that some are so sure it must be?
I doubt either of us have the biology and chemistry backgrounds to argue the details so that’s as far as I go: something some insist happened accidentally, randomly, can’t be reproduced by the application of the best minds with the best equipment. Why not?

DrBeauGan
Dec 25, 2023 11:41 PM
I don’t have the required chemistry or biology.

I have pointed out how to acquire some.

..
I have one year of organic chemistry at uni. I know enough to know I don’t know enough to see the required details, nor the time to get it. I don’t have the best part of a decade to get a doctorate before trying to parse the subject, despite my interest. And reading a children’s author’s chapter on it isn’t going to advance my understanding.
If you have a doctorate in organic chemistry, or nuclear physics, or both then I get your attitude.
Otherwise…