No. 5 Nathan Buckley.

Present.

Zafiro

Feb 16, 2024 12:06 AM
Ketamine is a cool drug. I heard that shrinks are prescribing it for depression patients now Low dosage.. What Brad lined up was probably a tad much.
It makes you feel super positive in the scone. Without mania etc. also chilled. Gret drug..

Ketamine is a horrible drug.
You probably only see the fun times.
Go to your local A&E Friday night and see how much fun it is for the user and the staff.

Winston Smith
Feb 16, 2024 12:51 AM
Zafiro

Feb 16, 2024 12:06 AM
Ketamine is a cool drug. I heard that shrinks are prescribing it for depression patients now Low dosage.. What Brad lined up was probably a tad much.
It makes you feel super positive in the scone. Without mania etc. also chilled. Gret drug..

Ketamine is a horrible drug.
You probably only see the fun times.
Go to your local A&E Friday night and see how much fun it is for the user and the staff.

Another prescription induced drug addiction crisis? Will it become the case that once on ketamine always on ketamine? How long before prescription ketamine reaches the black market?

Ketamine inhibits a key receptor in the brain(NMDA). That receptor plays a important role in consolidating connections and memory formation. I have concerns that long term use of ketamine can potentially have damaging effects.

Leak & Branco win the internets today. Thanks Tom.

For the fans of Henry Ergas, enjoy.

What has happened to the West’s will to win?

The West has forgotten that the aim of war is victory. And if victory is to be achieved, in Gaza or anywhere else, the enemy cannot be allowed to shelter, regroup and strike again.

By Henry Ergas

February 16, 2024

There is, it seems, something else Joe Biden has forgotten: that the aim of war is victory. And if victory is to be achieved, in Gaza or anywhere else, the enemy cannot be allowed to shelter, regroup and strike again.

Of course, Biden is not the first US president to put victory aside. Nothing more surely presaged the coalition’s rout in Afghanistan than Barack Obama’s December 2009 speech at West Point, in which the word “victory” did not appear even once.

Speaking to the academy’s cadets, Obama announced a “surge” that would see a massive deployment of troops to Afghanistan; but having expressed some “anxiety about the notion of ‘victory’?”, he shied away from stating the goal the young Americans being placed in harm’s way were to achieve.

Winston Churchill, explaining Britain’s war aims in May 1940, had none of Obama’s reticence. “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory – victory, victory at all costs, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

Nor was Franklin Delano Roosevelt stricken by Obama’s tummy flutters: “The object of war,” said the US Army’s instructions for World War II, “is to bring about the complete submission of the enemy.” The task of the millions of men being thrown into deadly battle was to achieve the enemy’s “decisive defeat”, “breaking the enemy’s will and forcing him to sue for peace”.

The tragedy of Vietnam underscored that mission’s centrality. “When we commit our troops to combat,” said the Powell doctrine, which the administration of Ronald Reagan adopted in 1984, “we must do so with the sole object of winning: once it is clear that our troops are required, we must commit every ounce of strength necessary to win.” It was in that spirit that Reagan, when asked the outcome he was pursuing in the battle against communism, bluntly replied “We win, they lose”.

Those great leaders knew that in war victory is not just the most important thing; it is the only thing. Although it provides no guarantees, it offers a chance of ending ongoing conflicts, with their interminable cycle of action, reaction and counter-reaction. Destroying the old status quo, it creates the scope to install “the better state of peace” Saint Augustine said is the telos, or animating purpose, of just wars.

And more than any other outcome, it can reshape the moral, political and social landscape, imposing the victors’ values. If today’s keffiyeh-clad idiots can prattle on about human rights and war crimes, it is because – and only because – the Allies ruthlessly crushed the Axis powers, reducing their cities to rubble, forcing their population into homelessness and starvation, and then building, on totalitarianism’s ashes, a shared future of freedom.

There are, of course, wars that result in less than absolute victory. However, those “limited” outcomes are no recipe for peace: each of the parties, wrote Carl von Clausewitz, will regard that result “as just a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found at some later date”. Knowing that “so long as I have not overthrown my opponent, he may overthrow me”, the logic of mutual distrust inexorably reignites all-out conflict.

The data confirms the great strategist’s prediction: one-third of all “limited” outcomes prove to be no more than fleeting pauses in “forever” wars. Sure, those wars are punctuated with high-minded promises of peace. But “promises”, said Lenin, “are, like pie crusts, leaven to be broken” – and it is only when an adversary’s war-fighting capacity is largely eliminated that durable peace typically prevails.

That is why Clausewitz argued that “the second act”, in which a retreating enemy’s remaining capabilities are hunted down and systematically degraded, is “even more important than the first”. Allowing a wounded adversary to regroup, in circumstances where it “is able to reap the benefit of the terrain”, gives it “the very means of starting a recovery in the morale of its troops”. Instead, “strategy at this point (must) demand that the victory should really be complete”, “shattering the enemy’s self-confidence and shocking the whole nervous system” of its fighting force.

Those are the reasons for pursuing Hamas wherever it hides, including into Rafah. Inevitably, that pursuit entails civilian casualties: that is the tragedy of war. Israel’s extraordinary precautions have reduced the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties to less than one-third the levels typically observed in contemporary urban warfare and even further below those experienced in Hue or, more recently, Fallujah. There are, however, simply no painless ways of eliminating scourges such as Hamas, which callously and deliberately put civilians at risk.

What is undeniable is that it is far more harmful to allow those groups to recover, and set off another round of appalling bloodshed, than to deal with them once they have been seriously weakened.

Yet the Biden administration seems intent on throwing Hamas a lifeline. In Afghanistan, the US troops used to say “the Americans have all the wristwatches but the Taliban has all the time”; Hamas believes that too. The pressure Biden places on Israel to back off will, it thinks, become ever more intense as the doubts about his competence mount, inducing increasingly frantic efforts to shore up his “progressive” base.

Moreover, as the US distances itself from Israel, the rest of the West, which was half-hearted from the start, will follow suit, allowing Hamas to claim the blood-soaked triumph it always thought its genocidal attack on October 7 would ultimately secure.

But Biden’s current woes are not solely to blame for the potential disaster. Rather, if spinelessness has such political resonance it is because the West has lost the will, and the courage, to win.

Refusing to face harsh realities, we hold ourselves responsible for civilian casualties, not the terrorists who use their own populations as human shields. Drowning in self-loathing, we shy away from asserting the right to crush – and hence effectively deter – aggressors, as if Western victories were a scandal, while Western defeats are a mere misfortune. As for ensuring Western values triumph over barbarism, it is no longer seen as the road to a better world: instead, it is denigrated as the epitome of arrogance, bigotry and racism.

Clausewitz, a Prussian general who knew what it means to “look into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield”, described war as “a horrifying experience”. But its horrors cannot “excuse blunting our swords in the name of humanity”. For once those swords are blunted, he warned, “someone will, soon enough, come along with a sword that is razor-sharp and hack us to shreds”.

Today, it is Israel’s limbs that risk being dismembered. But with Russia, Iran and China gloating as America prevaricates, this much is certain: it is ours that will be severed tomorrow.

tummy flutters:

That’s a keeper.

And it’s not just the Jews or the family they are coming after, it’s Christianity – or what’s left of it – as well.

MSM and NSW Gubbmint frothing at the mouth about ‘asbestos contamination’ in garden mulch used at various public sites in Sydney. They make it sound like Wittenoon all over again

But, what they coyly describe as ‘non-friable or bonded asbestos, which NSW Health advises is low risk to people’s health’ is in fact fibro.

Yup. It’s the stuff that hundreds of thousands (at least) of houses in Sydney and elsewhere were built from. Your correspondent grew up in these houses, and no doubt other Cats and Kittehs have lived in them.

Sydney’s perennial housing shortage was acute after WWII. Fibro was (compared to brick and timber) cheap, light and easily manufactured.

Fibro is bonded asbestos cement. It’s very compressed. The only way you are going to get harmful effects from it is if it is being shredded or pulverised and you are inhaling the dust.

The asbestos panic industry has been a nice little earner in places like Sydney, where demolishing a fibro house is treated like dismantling Chernobyl.

If, as TheirABC‘s report suggests, there is also dangerous asbestos floating around, fair enough.

But, I wouldn’t be buying gas mask futures just yet.

The painting – brilliant.

shatterzzz. Hmmm. Same deal with matches….and in earlier days, freworks. What kid didn’t start fires, or throw bungers at mates, or chase them with Roman Candles firing bits of flaming magnesium etc?

As with the button batteries….there may have been the occasional casualty but so f”ing what? The other multiple-million kids had FUN!

BTW: When will fish-bones be banned?

Remember when journos breathlessly told us for years the Australian transmission network was gold plated ?And that was the reason for higher energy prices?
It never was gold plated.

Tucker looks like an idiot doing grocery shopping in Moscow.

I’ve found a less doomer macro channel than Gammon or Schiff.

Blockworks Macro.

The interviewees are Austrian school aware/adjacent. Their discussion of China’s banking crisis and ever worsening property bubble the other day was very good.

It’s way beyond time that the coalition grew a spine and said what Bridget McKenzie was saying on Sky this morning, only it needs to be said plainly and without hedging.
1. Stop closing coal fired power until we have suitable replacements.
2. Nuclear is a suitable replacement.
3. The nuclear plants can be located where existing coal fired plants are, so they can use exisiting routes for transmission.
Sky selected airhead Steggall to speak for the entire leftoid power & climate class, which includes Labor, Greens and Teals.

In Doing It Tough, Canbra Style news:
(Unlinkable Oz)

Federal Education Department secretary Tony Cook yesterday apologised for a $12,637 bill racked up by public servants who booked high-end restaurants to host work meetings.

He revealed the bills – including $1209 charged by 10 staffers meeting at the one-hat Courgette Restaurant in Canberra – to a Senate estimates hearing yesterday.

Federal Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson said the “restaurant rorts’’ were a disgrace.

“Meetings should be held in a meeting room with a cup of tea and a biscuit, not in fine dining restaurants.

Chastened and visibly shaken, Mr Cook revealed the Education Department’s austere new ‘cup of tea and biscuit’ guidelines (as apparently approved by Senator Henderson):

“I think we have let the taxpayers down in terms of what they would expect of public servants,’’ Mr Cook said.

“We now have limits on the expenditure that is allowed to be made … the maximum rate is $77 (per person for meals).’’

Taking it like a Champ.
Exactly what I would expect from public servants.

KevinM
Feb 16, 2024 8:46 AM
Struth is going full bore at CL’s.

Noticed that. Apparently you’re a traitor if you criticise Trump. The bloke is delusional.

Bruce of Newcastle
Feb 16, 2024 8:10 AM

Hehe, Tim Blair fisks Richard Denniss…

Protect Us Please from Tonnes of Truckasaurus Terror (15 Feb, not paywalled)

Thanks for putting that up.

What a fantasy world these people live in!

I wrote recently about spending a couple of hours watching a minor highway while enjoying one or two (OK, two) glasses of fine shiraz. There was an endless stream of trucks carrying sand, gravel, timber, machinery, pipes, prefab steel – you get the idea. In between them were countless tradie vehicles, mostly dual cab diesel.

While whining about housing shortages, this putrid government imagines that wiping out all those vehicles and the businesses and jobs that go with them is going to make things better.

Who cares if Dutton is not charismatic. At this rate, he’ll romp it in.

Apparently you’re a traitor if you criticise Trump. The bloke is delusional.

Hey. I’m actually North Korean!

A subsidy is legitimate only at the start of a technology to make it possible to establish a system for mass production. If something needs subsidies for decades and projected into the future then it doesn’t make any sense at all, even if supposedly to alleviate a problem.

Both are equally weak, whilst not fallacious, they are specious, qualified arguments.

So why aren’t VIC farmers blockading Spring St with tractors?

Vikpol assault weapons and artillery. All of which they would love to try out.

Once you hand Power to any Organization, they will never return it willingly and will do anything to retain it

FACTCHECK#2: TRUE

AKA, ‘you cant vote your way into communism but you have to shoot your way out of it…’

DEVELOPING: France has passed a new law which will send you to jail for 3 years if you criticize mRNA ‘vaccines’ or ‘gene therapy’

Better warm up my old solitary cell in the Alexander Maconochie Centre then….

Is that $77 per person? For a restuarant meal?

This is supposed to be a windback of public sector waste?

‘Training’ is a long standing rort all over the public sector.

Let’s all go to an expensive resort and do some ‘team building.’

Real team building happens when you are on the job and under the pump, not when you are drinking cocktails with umbrellas in them and trying to work out which married/shacked up member of the team you are aiming to shag.

At taxpaayers’ expense.

DEVELOPING: France has passed a new law which will send you to jail for 3 years if you criticize mRNA ‘vaccines’ or ‘gene therapy’

Really? So much for academic freedom, let alone liberty, equality, fraternity.

Alexander Maconochie Centre

The Stanhope Hilton.

Re Gizzards nicknames;

Juliar
The Lying Slapper
The Droner from Altona
Vuvuzela

If you can remember anymore, please add to the list. 😀

Indolent
Feb 16, 2024 9:06 AM

Estonia Says Russia to Fight West Within a Decade Unless Deterred by a Counter Build-Up of Armed Forces

Why would Russia want to attack the West? What purpose could it serve?

That is the question many clear thinking people ask.
What’s in it for them?

The very same question about Chinese intention of military conquest of countries of interest, excepting Taiwan.

Why would they invade Australia?
Imagine the cost of manpower to oversee production, fight sabotage etc.
It’s a lot cheaper and safer to pay for the materials they are importing and it there is no hostile intentions then there is reason for us to cut supplies.

I may be wrong but I credit them with more intelligence.

Juliar
The Lying Slapper
The Droner from Altona
Vuvuzela

The union bicycle

What a genius:

“Complete unicorn and just absolute make-believe that Bridget and the Coalition are in,” Ms Stegall told Sky News Australia.

“They simply are trying to delay the transition to renewable, which must occur between now and 2035.”

World is not ready for Disease X that will be ‘worse than Covid’, warns WHO

X-2024 here we come!

Mask up, everyone!

Stay safe!
Smile as your business and personal life is destroyed!
Say bye to any sick relatives NOW!
We’re all in this together!

On the ALP’s intractable opposition to nuclear energy, apply the cui bono test.

Renewables

– Huge expense, potentially approaching the A$trill by 2050;
– Done at panic pace – loads of individual contractors, no regard for cost = multiple pineapple insertion points and paper bag opportunities;
– Low tech, lots of unionised jobs; transport, low-end construction, cutting grass, polishing glass, connecting up a spaghetti system;
– Lots of infrastructure requires maintaining; 10,000km of new power lines, thousands of windmills and solar panels, dozens/hundreds of switch yards, battery farms, etc.
– Constant replacements because the kit doesn’t last long.

Nuclear

– hugely expensive A$600bn+;
– eight sites;
– limited new distribution infrastructure;
– limited number of international contractors – all of who will be hard-arsed;
– significant opportunities for bastardry in costruction – but obvious and exposed;
– Limited and highly specialised operational staffing (most with PhD’s);
– Once up and running, requires minimal unionised input.

Then guess which approach is more likely to be favoured by Mz McManus and chums.

Re Disease X:

Had reason to consult medicos in the last few weeks – after almost no consultations over the last few years. Every time I raise the word Covid they go silent. Never asked if I am vaccinated. Zilch. Oh except for one who replied to my observation that the body definitively does NOT like that pathogen – she said quietly “ well, it isn’t natural” & then changed the subject.

Roger
Feb 16, 2024 8:33 AM

“We now have limits on the expenditure that is allowed to be made … the maximum rate is $77 (per person for meals).’’

Putting that in context, if a TPI vet travels 200km+ away from home for a day for medical treatment he may claim up to $34,90 for meals. Less than 200km it’s $17.20.

There was a time in the 1980s that official funds could be expended for hospitality only if there were more non-Departmental attendees than Departmental ones. And the discussion had to be on matters official.

Roger
Feb 16, 2024 8:50 AM

Struth is going full bore at CL’s.

One of the reasons I don’t go there often.

Blog owners seem to be under the misapprehension that free speech means they must give every dingbat commentator unrestricted liberty.

Struth has occasional moments of rationality, Dick Ed Case, who also goes “full bore” over there, doesn’t.