Nothing much is happening,

https://twitter.com/Suriyakmaps/status/1747299168979173602

Suriyak keeps an eye on maps and it seems there is quite a bit happening lately, all one way. Russia appears to be keeping up a robust rotation of troops so of course they will need to keep recruitment up. No surprises there. While Ukraine drafts in 60 year olds kidnapped off the streets. The idea that Russia can be dislodged from it’s Ukraine territory without NATO intervening directly on the battlefield there is fantasy stuff.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.

– Robert Howard (creator of Conan the barbarian)

Suriyak keeps an eye on maps and it seems there is quite a bit happening lately, all one way.

Makka – Veewy veewy slowly, if you read the words. As I said myself there’ve been some kilometer length advances in isolated areas like Avdiivka and Bakhmut. No signs of anything general. The Ukies for example are still on the E bank of the Dnipro near Kherson. About the only strategic change is the Ukies have given up any pretense of silly offensives – which were stupid and bloody but were needed to play up to their sugar daddies. The political vibes have changed on that score, so they’ve gone completely onto the defensive. Manpower is certainly a problem for them, but standing on the defensive is a powerful force multiplier. On the other hand their A/P and A/T drone warfare capabilities are getting very effective, and are relatively cheap. That makes the battlefield even more deadly for the attacker, who has to come out into the open to be able to advance.

My Mum’s Singer must be a hybrid. It’s got an electric motor bolted to the back of the body but the treadle still is there at the bottom of the fold-out timber cabinet. Straight stitch only.

What’s stopping the industry super pie being eaten by others?

Veewy veewy slowly, if you read the words.

It’s winter there Bruce. Losing and making ground in a Russian/Ukraine winter is a vewwy vewwy important marker which is showing up quite unfavorable for Ukraine. Despite their vaunted force multiplier.

Congratulations on your successful repair of TV. The ingenuity and application for which Australia is proudly renowned at work there. Well done you. Never beaten.

News report on the Nexobrid treatment,
Here.
It does indeed look like a game changer.

Now that the republic issue is decisively off the table he’s face to face with reality.

And so are we. A Liars/Greens/Teals Govt incoming.

Albo looking at cost of living.
Let’s see.
Put tens of billions into building a grossly inefficient renewable power system that require four wind turbines to match the claimed output of one and then solar panels to the horizon because they work effectively for six hours a day – weather permitting.
Top that off with tens of thousands of kms of transmission lines and hundreds of 100 million dollar terminal stations hoping it scrapes enough energy from a continent wide network without building anything like the needed storage component.
Sign this all off with foreign multinationals who rely on the unreliable China for the components and charge it all to the power consumer.
Winning!

They could cut green, red and black tape and take a razor to government spending.

Roger – they’re going in the opposite direction with an IR wishlist the unions will be wetting themselves in excitement about.

Labor’s workplace reforms will have a ‘terrible impact’ on the small and medium-sized businesses that make Australia tick (Sky News, 20 Jan)

Add also the catastrophic IR “reforms” on contractors and work conditions in the mining industry. Shaping up to easily be the most left wing government we’ve had since Federation.

Re Commonwealth Scholarships (apologies for any reptition here, this is for newer Cats). They had a living allowance attached, a very rare thing in those days, which was income tested against parents’ income for anyone under 25. You had to prove you had been independent and employed for three years if you wanted an Independent living allowance. I could easily do that and to me it was just like winning the lottery. I’d been living on six pounds a week from my savings all through tech and walking from The Rocks where I had a cheap room to Ultimo daily to save the twopence bus fare. I did shifts as a waitress in the Harbour Bridge Pylon lookout for one day most weekends when funds got scarce, especially towards the exams. Mum had been in and out of Broughton Hall Psych Hospital (mostly in) during that year and my father had disappeared as a hermit in a caravan somewhere out near Mudgee, and Big Sis living in a wrecking yard with her baby by then. I didn’t see much of them over that year, but she and mum and the bub arrived on my bassement room doorstep once my exam results came out. She’d left her husband and wanted to do the Day Matric and camp with me, mum minding the bub, till she’d got a job. She wanted to do better than me, and so she did. Not much wiggle room there, but she managed it. Sibling rivalry dies hard. 🙂

She got a Comm Schol too.
Are there any more of you? asked the Head of Tech. lol
There was my younger brother, but that’s another story.

Single = Singer

Grrrrrr….

Labor’s workplace reforms will have a ‘terrible impact’ on the small and medium-sized businesses that make Australia tick (Sky News, 20 Jan)

I suspect a lot of small businesses will be forced into cash in hand hiring, no questions asked and we deny it if we fire you and you squeak. Big boost to the cash economy.

the net radiative effect of clouds…is to cool the ocean atmosphere system during its tropospheric warm phase and warm it during its cool phase.”

That is, clouds moderate or dampen temperature movement in either direction.

I just saw a SMH article blaming climate change for Sydney getting muggier.

No, dickheads, it’s muggier because of all the rain. And of course, relative humidity goes down when temperatures rise, and vice versa.

They are literally gaslighting young people because they weren’t taught basic science.

They want to be high priests, and to be that they need everyone else ignorant.

They hate churches not because of their authority, but because they want it for themselves instead. Every socialists imagines themselves among the elites.

Sad how far my old uni has fallen.

Yes. I have an undergrad and postgrad degree from SU. They aren’t worthless, but anything gained today in these areas would likely be so. Such a shame.

Expect the supermarkets to get a kicking, possibly deserved, but a distraction in the larger scheme of things.

Inevitable.

With a Retail Commission, staples pricing orders, fines, and inspectorates adding to market efficiency.

‘Seen to be doing something’ always comes hand in hand with additional cost and unintended consequences.

And we wonder why Australia is Going Broke under Federal & State Labor Governments?

Nicolle Flint: Labor’s workplace reforms will have a ‘terrible impact’ on the small and medium-sized businesses that make Australia tick

The unchecked power being wielded by unions under Labor is becoming increasingly clear as the federal government’s industrial relations reforms come into force, writes Nicolle Flint.

SkyNews.com.au Contributor and Political Commentator

At the height of the Hawke-Keating era in 1988, 43.1 per cent of Australians were a member of a trade union.

The Albanese government has also been busy expanding the size of the federal bureaucracy as their budget papers show, from 173,142 staff (excluding military and reserves who numbered 80,635) in 2021-22, to 191,861 in 2023-24 (again, excluding military and reserves who numbered 81,063).

These extra 18,719 staff may well be new union members given the ABS tells us that government workers have the highest rates of unionism.

Labor has abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the Registered Organisation Commissioner, which were established to regulate the commercial building and construction industry and to keep union thuggery in check.

These new laws may well see the re-unionisation of the Australian workforce.

Businesses that have either never had union members, or have not have union members in their workforce for decades will suddenly be forced to deal with their tactics.

It is well worth reading Robert Gottliebsen’s columns for The Australian on 15 and 16 January to properly understand the terrible impact Labor’s laws will have on the small to medium sized business sector.

These are the businesses and the employers who keep our economy going.

Increasing union power on top of the raft of Labor’s other disasters – inaction on cost-of-living, the housing crisis, inflation, record migration levels, extraordinary spending on renewables and the associated destructive impact on farming land and the environment, the failed Voice campaign and related cost, and failed response to Hamas terrorist atrocities on Israel – is yet another reason voters may well ensure this is a one-term government.

Big businesses are not immune to Labor’s pro-union stance.

As recently revealed, global company DP World has been in a dispute with the Maritime Union of Australia at an extraordinary cost of $84 million a day since October.

As such the dispute may drag on for a total of nine months before the Fair Work Commission can force mandatory arbitration.

The question is whether Labor will inflict worse on voters before the next election?

Re old machines of times past. I learned to type during 3 months at the Metropolitan Business College in Parramatta, when I was 14 (paid for by a half schol and Big Sis who had been there on a full schol.) Glory be, I even got a certificate in Book-keeping (to Trial Balance and Balance Sheet, even though I was such a kid my columns were wonky).

But back to the typewriters. They had a roomful of them. Some of them were from the Edwardian era (shaped like some weird bird, with the rattling carriage return a tiny twist of metal at the top), some from the twenties and thirties, the majority were from the forties, though still with the steel-ringed keys, and the ones you tried to bag by arriving early were from the 50’s, modern as, we all thought.

With a Retail Commission, staples pricing orders, fines, and inspectorates adding to market efficiency.

Endless job opportunities for maaaates in our burgeoning bureaucracy. Employment numbers have never looked so good.

Indolent

Jan 20, 2024 8:43 AM
FARMERS REVOLT: Protests sweep across Germany against ‘unfair’ tax changes

Like everywhere in the Western World, government and its attendant parasitic bureaucracy has become too big to bear. It must be reduced to it’s appropriate levels or the host – us – will die.

The Wall Street Journal

The Them-vs.-Us Election

Opinion by Kimberley A. Strassel

Most Americans wouldn’t consider a banking titan a spokesman for the common man. But give JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon credit for putting his pinkie finger on the phenomenon—the divide—that best explains today’s unsettled political environment.

In an interview Wednesday with CNBC, Mr. Dimon took issue with a disconnected liberal elite that scorns “MAGA” voters. “The Democrats have done a pretty good job with the ‘deplorables’ hugging on to their bibles, and their beer and their guns. I mean, really? Could we just stop that stuff, and actually grow up, and treat other people with respect and listen to them a little bit?”

The powerful, the intellectual and the lazy have long said that the “divide” in this country is between rich and poor.

They divvy up Americans along traditional lines related to wealth—college, no college, white-collar, blue-collar, income—then layer on other demographics. This framing has given us the “diploma divide” and the “new suburban voter” and “Hillbilly Elegy.” It’s sent the political class scrambling to understand Donald Trump’s “forgotten man”—again, defined economically.

That framing fails to account for the country’s unsettled electorate. There’s a better description of the shifts both between and within the parties, a split that better explains changing voter demographics and growing populist sentiments. It’s the chasm between a disconnected elite and average Americans.

This is becoming a them-vs.-us electorate and election. Political candidates, take heed.

This gulf is described by unique new polling from Scott Rasmussen’s RMG Research, conducted for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Mr. Rasmussen says that for more than a year he’d been intrigued by consistent outlier data from a subset of Americans, which he later defined as those with a postgraduate degree, earning more than $150,000 a year, and living in a high-density area.

Mr. Rasmussen in the fall conducted two surveys of these “elites” and compared their views to everyone else.

Talk about out of touch.

Among the elite, 74% say their finances are getting better, compared with 20% of the rest of voters. (The share is 88% among elites who are Ivy League graduates.)

Two-thirds say they’d prefer a candidate who said teachers and educational professionals, not parents, should decide what children are taught.

More striking is the elite view on bedrock American principles, central to the biggest political fights of today.

Nearly 50% of elites believe the U.S. provides “too much individual freedom”—compared with nearly 60% of voters who believe there is too much “government control.”

More than 70% of average voters say they’d be unwilling to pay more than $100 a year in taxes or costs for climate—compared with 70% of elites who said they’d pay from $250 up to “whatever it takes.”

This framing explains today’s politics better.

While this elite is small, its members are prominent in every major institution of American power, from media to universities to government to Wall Street, and have become more intent on imposing their agenda from above.

They feel the system is rigged by elites that care more about the globe than them.

And why the continued appeal of Mr. Trump?

The man is a walking promise to stick it to the “establishment” (never mind that most of his party’s establishment has endorsed him).

This doesn’t support the idea that he is an elderly chap of Lizzie’s vintage (or even older).

Why not, Sancho? I am a huge fan of moisturiser, with a touch of Retinol, hence not a wrinkle on my visage or anywhere else. Oestrogen as HRT helps there too. Very protective of female skin and hair as well as bones … and temperament. I’m very good natured. As you are all aware. 🙂

I suppose you mean that Arty must be a skin-caring metrosexual.
All men should use moisturiser. Hairys physio has just told him that, re his legs where he had cellulitis and DVT’s, so I have returned from the Chemists with lashing of the recommended pump moisturiser stuff for them. Don’t stint on it, rub it all over you, I suggest. It’s cheap as chips and, apart from the Retinol, is pretty much the same as my expensive face cream.

Oh, and all reading the SMH and listening to and watching the ABC.

Subject to ‘influencers’ whom they try to emulate.
All singing that songbook.

Good to see how hopeless the LNP is in QLD. Kaiser is another outright crook that keeps popping up relatively unscathed.

On my arithmetic that’ll take Russia a very very long to capture the rest of Ukraine at the rate they’re going.

Lots of speculation about Putin’s objectives. Capturing ALL of Ukraine is just one. Served up for western propaganda. Here are the stated objectives reiterated a few weeks ago;

Mr Putin said that “there will be peace [in Ukraine] when we achieve our objectives”. Those “objectives do not change”, he said, listing “denazification, demilitarisation and its neutral status”. These are themes he has highlighted from the start of the war.

– BBC

I don’t see the conquest of ALL Ukraine territory in there. The coming Russian invasion of Europe is another propaganda version.

Someone has somehow arranged for her to do a speech at a school called Hunter High with a giant banner of the name behind her? That’s fun! Give whichever staffer it was a medal, probably posthumously.

I imagine it was deliberate; sold to Dr President Dada Jill as a way to indicate support of Hunter and ‘flip the bird to the rednecks’.

I have to say that, for many years I applauded the introduction of easier entry of the children of poor families too university.

Yes, so did I, but removing all merit testing and making it free and available to all simply reduced the standards, as I always thought it would. An extension of the old Comm Schol system would have been a much better way to get more bright working class kids to universities. The competition actually encourages bright working class kids to ‘go for’ a scholarship, and the sense of achievement, and actual rewards for that education via employment, would have maintained standards and encouraged others.

Labor with its progressive universalism just can’t see that. As you say, Vicki, it requires a genuinely analytic mind set.

Future cyclone Kiraly has my attention now. Model runs starting to line up send it at the coast.

At moment Bowen crossing from GFS. Still has a strong area of uncertainty to the east but I’d say that will disapate on next model runs.

Already looking at flights back north as a precaution.

One other funny that could throw a spanner in the works though, seems the monsoon may be running out of puff. Could keep the intensity down.

Re Bruces comment on the water cycle. Perfect example of the heat/energy transfer mechanism at play will be the change in sea surface temps in the cyclones wake. Temps can drop dramatically. One of nature’s checks and balances.

I don’t see the conquest of ALL Ukraine territory in there.

Makka – Maybe so, although that’s not completely consistent with what Putin’s people have been saying. Recently too. Medvedev has been saying similar stuff. Whatever. But I have to think if they are allowed or encouraged to say things like this in public it is being done for carefully gamed-out reasons.

Currently the two sides are wide apart on peace terms. Russia wants everything they have, at a minimum, and Ukraine wants Russia back over the original 1991 border.

No compromises evident in that particular dynamic. As I said I will not be surprised if they’re still bleeding each other in five years time, which is basically what happened in Ethiopia/Eritrea and Iran/Iraq. Might change if Putin dies, but Zelensky is just a salesman and figurehead so if he offs the perch it won’t change anything.

I don’t see the conquest of ALL Ukraine territory in there. The coming Russian invasion of Europe is another propaganda version.

Sure, JuniorBurger (TM).

Multiple fronts of advance.
Attempts to: seize the capital, largest airbase/airport, unalive Z-Man and March 50 miles per day ala USSR military doctrine, and this was “just a feint”?

LOL

Those pictures of Jack-In-The-Boxed tanks were probably Ukrainian tanks anyway, right?

Russia should have about 20,000 new T-14 Armata tanks from their fabulous factory cities now anyway.

You’ve gone full Armchair Warlord.

You never go full Armchair Warlord.

Mr Farraway raised the bid to discredit Ms Hicks in his address to parliament, saying he had been told “certain staffers of government ministers” had referred to her as being unstable

This is the fashionable excuse, used as a catch-all to escape consequences.

‘Oh but she’s Radio Rental so it doesn’t matter.’

The same safety net is in use in NSW and Quenthland courts (at least). Anyone facing relatively minor jail time is entitled to apply for matters to be dismissed on mental health grounds. Former cricketer and commentator, and chick-basher Michael Slater and idiot TV bloke (and chick-basher) David O’Keefe are only two examples.

When Mitchell Johnson recently (and rightly) smacked up the unjustified adoration of that cheating left-handed dwarf prior to his final Test match and gave the selectors a belt as well for being too close to the players, George Bailey (a selector) publicly replied by questioning Johnson’s mental health.

It’s a horseshit red herring and should be seen as such.

Also, it is not lost on me that a Nationals MP kicked this off.

The Commonwealth scholarships were a bit of a rort

The private school I went to preppedI us for them with lots of practice exams.
Result 22 out of 30 in my class got the scholarship all from well off families.

I recall that kids from families with rich farms and good accountants got full support from TEAS, because earned income from family trusts was enough to show independence.
The rest of us got little – unless too poor for parents to have income.

By granting scholarships, poorer families could afford for a child to go to university. Making university free but not having a scholarship system in place made it more difficult for those genuinely poor families to allow a child to attend uni. They simply had to go and get a job to help support the household. It favours the upper middle class who could afford to support their child whilst they attended university.

1969 separate exam for scholarship.We trained on past exam papers

The Beer whisperer

Jan 20, 2024 11:23 AM
The best way to prevent youth crime is to make the punishments so onerous they act as deterrent.

The Beer whisperer
Jan 20, 2024 11:23 AM

The best way to prevent youth crime is to make the punishments so onerous they act as deterrent.

Sure, give em short sentences, but give them hard labour. No weights as they shouldn’t have enough energy to do so. Hard, hard labour. Dog holes and fill em again. Over and over.

Guaranteed to cure ingratitude.

Rattan cane. 20 strokes for first offence. 50 for repeat. Then Gaol.

Morsie
Jan 20, 2024 2:47 PM
1969 separate exam for scholarship.We trained on past exam papers

So the quality of education in Australia has been poor for a long time.

ONE YEAR WITHOUT GEORGE PELL
by Gerhard Cardinal Müller
1 . 19 . 24

This essay was originally delivered as a homily at an anniversary Mass for Cardinal Pell in Rome.

Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller is former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Bruce of Newcastle
Jan 20, 2024 12:38 PM
It’s winter there Bruce.

Makka – That’s the normal season when Russia does offensives.

Operation Bagration occurred in summer.

???

How am I coping?

I don’t expect Russia to lose this war and I never did.

If you’re going to seriously refute that Putin had designs on a total conquest of Russia or the T-14 production has been a total failure, go right ahead, provide some evidence and string together an argument.

I know you have a real job that is high falutin and above the Ken of a lot of people so it’s forgivable to not care on a blog but you’re bit of a lazy bugger re Russia now.

~ Carl Sagan, 1995, apparently having invented a time machine

It was obvious how things were headed long before 1995. Although they’ve got a lot worse since then.

Mr Farraway raised the bid to discredit Ms Hicks in his address to parliament, saying he had been told “certain staffers of government ministers” had referred to her as being unstable

Two words: Philip Arantz – the bastards on all sides of the political divide — Nick Greiner promised him justice — but left his just as he was — destroyed by corrupt, venal political scum.

During Concord Rally President Trump Says No to Nikki Haley as VP Possibility
January 19, 2024 | Sundance

I doubt anyone is happier than me to hear President Trump confirm, never Nikki!

‘Mentally unstable’: Labor’s bid to smear female death-threat victim Rochelle Hicks

Where, oh where, is “Powerball” Dreyfus?

He can fix this straight away with money.

Ours.

JC,
OK yeah that does make sense. Not upsetting any profitable siege engines.

Mr Brown isn’t brown. Or black either.

In biology we also had to purchase a dissecton kit and pull apart a dogfish soaked in formaldehyde. It came in handy for when I did a year of Zoology at uni. Apparently no-one does dissection at all these days. But it is essential to see that things don’t look as they do in the neat diagrams in text books, and explore why.

Great speech by Vivek. Trump is impressed. The demorats will have to kill Trump to beat hm by himself; with Vivek as VP I think the demorats are fuked.

Very impressive speech. Trump may see him as too young and untried to be VP (perhaps even a spot of caution re losing some position himself due to Vivek’s sway) but if Trump can feel secure about Vivek as VP, and act as both a moderator and a guide, then a shot to disable Trump wouldn’t end the Trump program, for Vivek would be in the way still. Have to remind ourselves of the absolute youth of commanders of the past. Alexander was twenty-two!

National Undergraduate Scholarship

If so, I never heard of it. Maybe it was for children of ex-Military.

I did get a ‘Bursary’ from SU after my first year results, which gave me fifty pounds and a book voucher to the bookshop for my texts, which was a great help.

The Comm Schols just creamed the top off the Leaving Cert results. You had to have at least one first class honours to get one (so Syd Tech told us) and a ‘maximum’ pass of two honours and at least three other subjects in which you received A’s was advised. Six weeks before the exams I added Ancient History to my load, as insurance. It wasn’t taught at Tech but I bought a crib book for dates and issues and read Bury’s tome on Greece, and was sweet for my ‘insurance’ A there.

Hence, my deep knowledge of Alexander’s age! QED.

I’d never heard of any scholarships or other means of getting to university from my three years in the A class at Penrith High, btw. I just thought you had to be from another world to go to university and that wasn’t my world. Only when I moved to Sydney did any other horizens open up, with my really easy climb into copywriting, where a certain talent was recognised and I lied about my age and education.

I still felt uneducated though, and somewhat fraudulent. Wanted to fix that too.

Top Ender

Jan 20, 2024 4:57 PM
Mr Brown isn’t brown. Or black either.

He looks like an ugly old Green to me.

Mr Brown was allowed to stay in his contracted role despite the threat “because he is ­Aboriginal and a cultural knowledge holder”.

I’m a cultural knowledge holder for Western civilisation. We all are, except m0nty.
But it doesn’t make us unsackable. Why is that?