Daily Mail has article about NY fashion week and the Black Tape Project. One of those “tough jobs that somebody has to do”.

Well it appears I have a full wardrobe in my toolbox!

Seriously, what is the point of these people?

At least they picked some women with a few curves (even though some are bolted on), unlike most of the time when the models resemble an emaciated prepubescent boy, which I’m sure is just happenstance.

It’s everyone else’s fault

Graham Young, The Spectator (AU ed), 8 September 2024

Jim Chalmers has reacted to news that Australia’s growth has been an anaemic 1 per cent (which with population growth around 2.5 per cent means individually we’ve all gone backwards 1.5 per cent) by blaming ‘global economic uncertainty’. If ‘Gentleman Jim’ and his mates, hadn’t been holding the economy to ransom for their union Siamese twins, things could have been quite different.

In fact, if we rolled back the economy to 2007 before he and his predecessors started fiddling – and we’re not just talking Swan, the grand old man of the current gang, but Bowen, Morrison, and Frydenberg (incompetence is bipartisan at times) – things could be quite different now.

The major factors limiting our growth aren’t ‘global economic uncertainty’ but self-induced policy harms. We need to increase national productivity, but almost everything this government has done, and a lot of what previous governments have done, has been to reduce productivity.

The Treasurer points to a growth in government expenditure as being the only growth in the economy, but this is in fact part of the problem. Programs like the NDIS and health are out of control. These do not create growth, they redistribute it. So a growth in government is actually just cutting the pie differently so that business gets less and certain types of consumers get more.

For the most part it is business that provides us growth by investing to increase profits and in so doing employing a better paid workforce as well as providing a tax base that can support more redistribution.

Then there is the huge migration intake – the equivalent of a city the size of Canberra every year – that diverts resources to housing, away from more productive pursuits.

The government has been financing its expenditure by borrowing, and this has led to inflation, another drag on investment.

Then we have the industrial relations laws which are forcing businesses to deal with unions rather than employees. This is raising costs and lowering productivity for large businesses, and may even drive some small businesses out of business because they don’t have the resources to deal with the bureaucracy.

The botched energy transition is also raising energy costs and diverting resources from producing wealth to building renewable energy projects and the networks and storage to try to support them. Instead of giving us more power more cheaply they are actually giving us less power at a significantly higher cost.

Recent government decisions on mining projects, like the Blayney gold mine, also discourage investment in industries with high productivity, but long lead times and heavy capital requirements, like mining. (The Queensland government has also played its part with its super profits tax mining royalty, and other states have similar issues.)

All of this has led to the Reserve Bank deciding to leave rates higher for longer (although one shouldn’t assume rates are going back where they were two years ago).

The worst reaction to the situation would be for the government to decide it needs to get consumer spending going again. Figures show that the personal savings we were spending during the last few years are almost exhausted. We need a pause while the economy realigns. Trying to ramp up spending at the moment will just make things worse and run national savings down even further. If interest rates come down there will be some relief, but there is not a lot of room for them to come down as they are at historically fairly normal levels at the moment.

The sort of spending the country needs is investment. Economists tend to think that investment and spending are two different categories, but this is absurd. Investment isn’t an abstract dollar hanging around somewhere, it is dollars spent on productive assets which have to be built or bought and, in the process, involves quite a lot of spending.

Government spending would only help if it were directed into increasing investment in assets that have a positive return. Unfortunately, the current government’s record says that even when it spends money on assets it is most likely to direct increased expenditure into activities that destroy wealth rather than creating it, like the Capacity Investment Scheme where the government undertakes to subsidise renewable generation because it is unprofitable without a subsidy.

If they want to spend government money on infrastructure, one of their best options at the moment would be the second Bruce Highway which they are apparently refusing to fund.

Gentleman Jim won’t fix any of these things. The Greens see themselves as Robin Hoods, but the ALP has always been (with some honourable exceptions) a bushranging operation.

Having spent the last three or so years, and the eight between 2007 and 2015, redesigning the economy to more efficiently deliver other people’s money to unions and the social welfare rentier class, the only job left to Labor is deflecting blame to some straw man (or perhaps in the era of DEI, straw woman).

That can be ‘global economic uncertainty’, or Peter Dutton, ‘the most divisive leader of a major political party in Australia’s modern history’.

A bit of advice to Jim. Unless you want to be a bushranger all your life, owning your own mistakes would be a good habit to develop.

Australia, your luck has run out thanks to incompetent, interventionist management of the economy by the Uniparty. Quite an achievement when one considers how wealthy we should be as a nation.

And did I see Josh “I believe in small government” Frydenberg offering an apologia for the Morrison government’s covid response in The Australian on the weekend?

The nonchalance with which Australian politicians brush off their responsibility for the disasters they create and the harm they do to others is both astonishing and disturbing. Do they not have consciences?

In further reversal of the best laid plans on the road to net zero, Hun:

Victorians can continue cooking with gas in the kitchen for as long as they like after the Allan government excluded the popular stovetops from a net zero road map.

And laws will be introduced to state parliament to encourage new offshore gas storage projects in a bid to boost dwindling supplies and reduce risks of energy shortages later this decade.

The legislation will also send an investment signal that Victoria is open to new gas imports from interstate or even overseas, amid growing doubts there are enough local reserves to satisfy our near-term needs.

Ms Allen, darling. If your federal counterparts want to import millions of slackers, best you keep Yallourn going eh?
When ideology trumps reason, abandon all hope.

Update: Warning Call Placed to School on Morning of Georgia Shooting Was Made by Shooter’s MOTHER – ‘I Told Them it Was an Extreme Emergency’

Nolte: Trump Tops Kamala in New York Times/Siena National Poll

The FBI raided his home. The corporate media crusaded in lies for years to frame him as a Russian spy and insurrectionist. Fascist Democrats seek to imprison him for life, bankrupt him with lawfare, and take away his business empire. He’s constantly smeared as a “felon,” a “racist,” a “rapist,” a “threat to democracy,” and the “next Hitler.” When his 2024 campaign began to pull away from Joe Biden towards a triumphant November victory,” they shot him in the face and then threw the game board on the floor demanding a do-over with Kamala’s scrutiny-free “joy” campaign–a campaign backed by tens of billions of dollars in free corporate media cheerleading…

And yet…

The Bee

‘Maybe We Took A Wrong Turn Somewhere,’ Thinks Party Whose Candidate Just Got Endorsed By Dick Cheney And Vladimir Putin

Calvin Robinson’s Final Interview Before Leaving the UK. Are We Prepared to Fight for Britain?

So before everyone starts throwing bricks at me, provide a solution to the Australian malaise that works, because I can’t think of one.

Economies are self-correcting if governments will just get out of the way.

Again, just confirmation of what we already know. Deliberate and planned.
Caught Red Handed: Fauci, Gates & Moderna responsible for COVID Pandemic – U.S. D.O.D issued ‘COVID-19 Research’ contract 3 Months before COVID was known to exist – & Fauci & Moderna had a Vaccine ready in Dec. 2019

I managed to get to this through the paywall:

Has Keir Starmer’s Britain become the softest touch in the West for illegal migrants?

Daniel Johnson, The Telegraph (UK), 8 September 2024

In a week when another 12 people drowned in the Channel and ministers squirmed under scrutiny about their still leaderless Border Command, attention turned to the Continent. “Rwanda’s back – but it’s Germany planning to use it,” screamed a tabloid headline on Friday. Tory leadership candidates fell over one another to claim German endorsement for their now defunct scheme.

Joachim Stamp, Berlin’s migration commissioner, had indeed floated the idea of processing asylum seekers in Rwanda, using facilities now sitting idle since Labour abandoned the policy as their first act in office. The irony of this turn of events will not be lost on British taxpayers, who paid hundreds of millions of pounds for these facilities in Kigali. And if the Germans are so eager to go ahead, where does that leave all the legal objections and moral outrage of our own liberal establishment?

In a further twist, Germany’s London ambassador, Miguel Berger, denied the story. “Let’s be clear,” he tweeted, “there is no plan of the German Government to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.” But this official denial was a classic piece of diplomatic distraction. The ambassador added: “The discussion is about processing asylum applications in third countries under international humanitarian law and with the support of the United Nations.”

So Germany is considering sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. The only difference is that Stamp wants to put the scheme under UN supervision and target migrants entering the EU across its eastern borders — a tactic used by Putin’s Russia to destabilise Europe.

In Germany, the politics of migration is even more incendiary than in Britain. Last month a deadly terrorist attack in Solingen, allegedly by a Syrian asylum seeker, helped the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to become the first Right-wing nationalist party to win a state election since 1945. Olaf Scholz’s embattled centre-Left government responded by speeding up deportations. True, there has been no popular unrest in Germany to compare with this summer’s riots in Britain. Over recent years, however, there have been hundreds of arson attacks on refugee hostels in the former East Germany. In some of these incidents, crowds of onlookers have cheered on the arsonists. Many blame Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million migrants from Syria in 2015 for the rise of the AfD.

Friedrich Merz, her successor as leader of the Christian Democrats, has moved his party to the Right to head off the populist challenge. He wants to exclude all asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan. Expect more of this if he replaces Scholz as Chancellor after next year’s federal elections.

The migration debate is, of course, highly charged not only in Britain and Germany but also in France. There Michel Barnier, President Macron’s choice as Prime Minister, has a reputation as a hardliner on immigration. The direction of travel in France and Germany is therefore clear: on migration, both countries have had enough of the liberal policies that are still championed here by the Labour Government.

Across the EU, the idea of outsourcing asylum processing to third countries is gaining ground. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has done a deal with Albania, while Denmark also plans to send migrants to Rwanda. Sweden, meanwhile, has reversed decades of porous borders: this year, more migrants will leave than arrive there.

Suddenly Starmer’s Britain — with mass immigration, both legal and illegal, still roaring ahead — looks like the odd man out among European countries. Nor is this likely to change any time soon. A Labour Government led by a human rights lawyer is not only out of step with Europe, but increasingly out of touch with British public opinion. Crushing the riots was the easy part. Finding a solution for migration will be much harder – especially if using third countries such as Rwanda is ruled out.

Many in the comments are pointing out how pro-Europe Britons are conspicuously silent on these developments.

DATA: Trump Pulls Back into National Lead, With Swing States Still Neck-and-Neck. (thenationalpulse.com)

The cartoonist must have been on LSD when he drew cackles.

Can’t verify yet but Turkish News reporting that Iran fired 16 missiles at Israel.

Pilfered from another site:

Accent Research and RedBridge Group have published their second multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP) poll, in what looks like being a regular quarterly series. This aims for a detailed projected election result by surveying a large national sample, in this case of 5976 surveyed from July 10 to August 27, and using demographic modelling to produce results for each electorate.

The full report isn’t in the public domain as far as I can tell but it’s been covered on the ABC’s Insiders and in the Financial Review.

The results are not encouraging for Labor: where the previous exercise rated Labor a strong chance of retaining majority government, with a floor of 73 seats and a further nine too close to call, they are now down to 64 with 14 too close to call, with the Coalition up from 53 to 59. The median prediction from a range of potential outcomes is that Labor will hold 69 seats, the Coalition 68, the Greens three and others ten.

This is based on primary vote projections in line with the recent trend of national polling, with Labor on 32%, the Coalition on 38% and the Greens on 12%.

Five seats are rated as Coalition gains that weren’t last time, Gilmore, Lingiari, Lyons and Aston having moved from too-close-to-call and Paterson going from Labor retain to Coalition gain without passing go. Bruce, Dobell, Hunter, Casey, Tangney, McEwen and Bennelong go from Labor retain to too-close-to-call, while Coalition-held Deakin and Moore are no longer on their endangered list. However, the traffic is not all one way, with Casey in Victoria and Forde in Queensland going from Coalition retain to too-close-to-call. So far as the underlying model is concerned, it is presumably not a coincidence that both seats are on the metropolitan fringes.

A million miles from flopping around in a talentless pisstake.

Pisstake? Not sure Raygun sees it that way.

She’s adamant she’s the best B-Girl* in Oz.

*I’m hip.

Even some of the pro-Palestinian commenters on the social media post seemed uneasy about harassing Jewish schoolchildren, warning it might damage the integrity of their movement.

These would be your moderate Nazis.

Cough.

But I blame the cowardly government of this country. The blame lies at the feet of the grub from Grayndler.

There’s a lot of blame to go around, Cassie.

We could start with Malcolm Fraser and his cabinet who granted the so-called Lebanese concession c. 1975, allowing the first generation of Lebanese Muslims to emigrate en masse despite being advised against it by senior public servants and local Lebanese Christian leaders who originally requested exceptions for Christians escaping the civil war.

Then there’s John Howard & Co, who in 2001 opened the way for mass immigration from Muslim majority 3rd world countries like Pakistan on the pretext of addressing our ageing population.

Labor has exploited foolish decisions made by the Coalition.

Afaik, no government, Liberal or Labor (with possibly the one exception of a one-off statement by Peter Costello) has openly addressed the issue of Muslim assimilation or the failure thereof.

Which brings us to the craven and despicable Albanese.

Comment awaiting approval.

The Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide has proposed a new agency to help transition veterans into civilian life, a major crackdown on sexual violence and bullying within the Australian Defence Force, an overhaul of veterans’ entitlements and reforms to the military justice system.