“All types of electric devices owned by Hezbollah operatives are now blowing up in Lebanon and the region.

Apart from pagers and walkie-talkies, other devices such as fingerprint devices, solar power systems and radios are now exploding too”
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1836423700301685131?t=yoDNaYA12yRX5VpENCu7sg&s=19

Interviewers with pager victims, vowing to take the fight to Israel.
Unlike Hamas who would parade an endless array of innocent civilians.
https://x.com/hahussain/status/1836469406504780046?t=MHdtK0R8EfTzUeAihDOgMQ&s=19

Facebook.
HEZBOLLAH CYBERATTACK: Famed Syrian-Druze journalist, Faisal Al-Qassem, who has millions of followers on social media, including a program on Al-Jazeera, wrote the following about the blow Hezbollah suffered today:

* “What happened to Hezbollah today can be classified as the largest preemptive strike in modern history. It can be compared to Israel’s preemptive strike on the Egyptian Air Force before the Six-Day War. Today, Hezbollah has thousands of paralyzed members among its senior leaders and operatives.”

* “If Hezbollah enters a war now, its wounded will not find a single available bed in Lebanon’s hospitals, as they are currently full of casualties. Worse yet, Hezbollah has lost its most important security and military communication devices. Checkmate.”
https://x.com/hahussain/status/1836469406504780046?t=MHdtK0R8EfTzUeAihDOgMQ&s=19

James Allan on fire in The Speccie. Doubtful that the Lieborals are listening though.

This Bill is a disgraceLibs must fight now for free speech. Or lose the election.
James Allan

Look, I realise that this Albanese government is adopting policies that give every impression that it wants to destroy our agricultural sector. And its intentions as regards our mining sector may be even worse, despite Big Mining basically keeping this country afloat. Albo et al. are changing labour relations laws to make way worse what at least half-worked. (There was at least some flexibility, though not nearly as much as you’d find in virtually all other Anglophone countries’ labour relations laws. Canadians like me are staggered when they arrive here and learn that two-bit, pseudo-bureaucrat tribunals overseeing a 120-year-old outdated labour law system abandoned everywhere else – jettisoned even by New Zealand in the 1980s – have a hefty hand in deciding on, and imposing, wages and conditions that result in thousands of pages of rigid rules that even the ABC, the two big grocers, charities and the most left-wing employers you can imagine cannot help but breach on occasion. Good luck trying to design a more productivity-killing labour relations system than Australia’s.)

Meanwhile Team Albo thinks it’s a virtue that government spending is so high it’s the only thing keeping us out of a recession. (Why not then just jack government spending up to 80 per cent of GDP, Mr Chalmers, if this is some good in itself?) And this in the context of six quarters of GDP per person decline – a massive recession at the level that matters: how each individual is doing. The idiocy of the Keynesian outlook that focuses on the fictional unit of ‘the entire economy’ and hence can go up simply by importing per capita world’s highest numbers of immigrants, all while making individuals poorer and poorer, has never been clearer. Throw in lingering and impoverishing inflation. Add in what are virtually the democratic world’s highest electricity prices and highest minimum wage laws. Mix all this with an out-of-control NDIS welfare scheme gone mad. Then remember our woeful labour relations system, more dreadful productivity statistics, and an education system that aims to indoctrinate while delivering results that five years ago had us behind Kazakhstan only for us today to aspire to those outcomes. And finish it all off with the remnant effects of the thuggish, authoritarian lockdowns that have produced citizens who think they are entitled to work from home, who think government can just dole out money for nothing, who have been immunised against the huge costs of ever-increasing government spending, and who (for many) simply do not trust the elites because, as the great Stanford University epidemiologist Professor Jay Bhattacharya has said repeatedly, ‘governments were the biggest source of misinformation and disinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic’. (Remember that for what comes below.)
It’s not a pretty picture. So you can see why some people might be tempted to focus on those pocketbook issues and ignore what is happening on the free speech front. It is imperative, however, that we all must resist that temptation, especially Team Dutton.

Exhibit A is the revamped Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill that Team Albo delayed at the end of last year. Be clear. In terms of free speech this revamped Bill is even worse than the truly awful earlier version. In the guise of ‘keeping Australians safe’ (and tell me the Liberal MPs who showed basically zero concern for free speech all through the Morrison years will not succumb to this Orwellian propaganda) it will bring about a truly chilling effect on free speech. I have never seen anything like it in an advanced Anglosphere country. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) gets huge power over social media platforms. The pretence is that Acma won’t be able to take down content but it will be able to impose huge fines on them – so the Bill basically forces social media platforms to act as government censors or close down in Oz. The definition of ‘serious harm’ is now so wide it envelopes ‘harms’ to the Commonwealth, plausibly covers opinions the boffins just don’t agree with, and certainly includes opinions about public health and the economy. I’d say this Bill would cover basically all of the disagreements about government policy that swirled around during the pandemic – all those many claims that were sceptical of government’s thuggish rules; sceptical of the ‘there are no age differential effects of the virus’; inclined to believe there were far higher Covid vaccine adverse events than exist with established vaccines. You know, all the sceptical claims that were later proved correct – hence Professor Bhattacharya’s ‘governments were the biggest source of mis and disinformation’ assertion. Individuals can be fined too in certain circumstances. Oh, and the information request powers can (and will) be misused. Heck, imagine what Team Albo would have done in the Voice debate with these powers.

Put bluntly, this Bill would deliver a tool to be used against opinions that differ from the government line. Elon Musk has lambasted it as the sort of law a fascist government would enact. That’s not much of an exaggeration when the Bill covers information that is factually true but that some fact-checker (directly or indirectly) for Acma happens to label as misleading or deceptive because it lacks context. (Any bets how often that needed context demands alignment with the sceptical, libertarian or conservative outlooks rather than the usual establishment political left? The answer will rhyme with a fiddling Roman emperor.) And, no surprise here, the legacy media, academics and (implicitly) government itself will be exempted from the censoring strictures of this Bill.

Be clear. This Bill has to be stopped or repealed. This shows you what happens when the Libs cave in on earlier inroads on free speech as they did with the Section 18C hate speech laws. The inroads just keep on coming. I want Dutton to win. I think he can. But if he and the Libs don’t come out and unequivocally state: 1) that they will oppose this Bill and 2) that if it gets up anyway they will pledge to repeal it, then I won’t vote for them and neither should you. The ghastly and diabolical state of our economy is no warrant or justification for standing silently by as our free society is attacked in the platitudinous name of ‘keeping us safe’. We don’t need government to keep us safe. It’s far more likely to keep politicians safe but us unsafe. Just ask John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill and anyone with a functioning brain.
By the way, there are other exhibits showing Team Albanese is the most anti-free speech government in memory. There’s a supposedly ‘watered down’ Hate Speech Bill that will make it easier to prosecute people while adding way more ‘protected’ categories. Think of being charged for misgendering someone, say. This seems to mimic UK-style ‘prison time for expressing your views online’. And remember, even if you’re acquitted, the process is the punishment. Also, there’s a mighty speech-enervating Privacy Bill. And all of the above will come with a hefty helping of selective prosecutions – look out conservatives!

So Messrs Dutton, Taylor, Ley, Paterson, Littleproud, Hastie, et al, we need a spirited attack on this Misinformation Bill and the other speech-gagging Bills. Try to revive those dormant Liberal party first principles. Or if principles mean nothing to you, how about this: fight for free speech or watch your excellent chance to win the next election go down the toilet. And rightfully so.

Stiglich and Varvel made me laugh.

Ahaha! We’re doin’ a whole lot of triggerin’ this morning!

Clearly have a towelhead lurker in the wings.

I think the vocal pitch you’re looking for is counter tenor.

Martin McKenzie-Murray writes about teaching.
He nails it.

There are more than 300,000 full-time school teachers in Australia, although that’s far from enough. It’s a sufficiently large number, however, that reporting on their grievances and satisfactions can invite generalisation – that is, the promotion of an individual frustration to something dubiously representative. Naturally, there is great variability between schools. They occupy multiple socioeconomic pockets, enjoy different budgets, possess their own cultures, philosophies and challenges.

Last year, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released its report on the “disciplinary climate” of classrooms across the developed world. Australia was among the most unfavourable, ranking 33rd among the 37 countries surveyed.
The report informed a Senate inquiry into classroom behaviour, which reported late last year. PISA’s unflattering findings have been complemented by other reports and surveys, including Monash University’s frequent survey of Australian teachers. In its 2022 survey of 5000 teachers, it found the volume of teachers who felt unsafe at work had increased from 19 per cent in 2019 to almost 25 per cent in just three years. Last week, the New South Wales Department of Education released data on school suspensions within the public system. It reported that last year almost 34,000 students were suspended – that’s 800 a week, and almost one in 12 high-school students.

“We’ve got a number of data points coming together, all showing a similar picture,” says Dr Greg Ashman, deputy principal of Ballarat Clarendon College in Victoria and a frequent commentator on education. “So to ignore that, I think, would be complacent. But I think the politicians, to be fair to them, they understand that there’s an issue, because they were talking about managing behaviour, and they’ve asked AERO (Australian Education Research Organisation) to develop these behaviour resources. It’s more the department bureaucracies and the academics and the people that train teachers who just don’t want to go near the issue.”

A primary school teacher from Brisbane I spoke to this week, who has been practising for 40 years, tells me she had to drive a teacher aide home recently after the aide was attacked by a young student. “She was injured, and she’d been injured many times before, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the teacher says. “In the last few years, going to the staffroom and seeing someone in tears – that’s much more common now. Fear is definitely something that I’ve noticed more in the last few years.”

Contained within the reports and statistics about student behaviour and teacher satisfaction are philosophical debates and cultural changes that are reported on much less than the numbers. It’s not just media indifference here: the use and appropriateness of suspensions or expulsions is a significant debate within the profession, but it’s inhibited by several things.
One is the effective gagging of public-school teachers by their state’s typically risk-averse education departments; another is the delicacy that’s introduced by the fact Indigenous and disabled students are disproportionately reflected in suspension numbers. To argue for a school to reserve the right to suspend or expel students can invite accusations of discrimination.

A major part of this has been the trend of closing down specialist-needs schools, which some have argued is discriminatory and ghettoising. It’s a contested idea, but generally speaking the argument for equity has triumphed over tailored, specialist education. Last year, in its final report, the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability recommended that segregated schooling be phased out by 2051. Notably, however, the six commissioners were themselves split on this: half of them wanted no deadline imposed on the transition.

For Greg Ashman, there’s friction between ideology and practicality. He believes more disabled students can be included in mainstream education, but the subsequent challenges and demands placed on teachers must be commensurately acknowledged and resourced. “I wonder whether we’ve kind of crossed the Rubicon a little bit, particularly the inclusion agenda,” he says. “I think we could include more kids in mainstream education, rather than specialist schools, and I think the way you would do that is by having lots of structure and lots of routines and lots of support in place to do that. But I still think there’s a role for specialist schools. But what we’re having at the moment is activists saying we need to close all the specialist schools down and that we need to get every kid into mainstream education – we just need to support them, and we just need more resources. But more resources aren’t coming, and that is also affecting people’s morale and their perceptions of the feasibility of actually doing the job.”

Here’s the rub, as described almost uniformly by teachers I’ve spoken to: the burden of the job has increased, without commensurate support. The administrative load, as a function of increased accountability, has often become overwhelming. Adding to this has been a shift in parental attitudes: parents are much more anxiously inquiring about their children’s education these days, and there’s a related sense of entitlement to a teacher’s time. Equally, parental trust in schools has decreased. I’ve lost count of the number of teachers who in my conversations have nominated parent–teacher nights as exhaustingly combative. “I spoke to a teacher last week who said she felt suicidal after parent–teacher interviews and that she needs to see her GP,” one teacher told me, “and she said, ‘I just can’t do this any longer.’?”

“Anecdotally, I think morale is not great,” Greg Ashman says. “Certainly, we have a teacher shortage at the moment, and that gives you some indication of what might be going on. And I don’t think that, although all teachers would agree that they need to be paid more, I don’t think that’s the core issue. I think making the job more manageable is the core issue.”
It can be spurious to offer one individual’s quote as being representative of 300,000 people, but this one, I think, probably is: “Ultimately, it does feel like both the best job in the world and one of the hardest.”

“but the subsequent challenges and demands placed on teachers must be commensurately acknowledged and resourced”
And what about the challenges and demands on non disabled students who just want to get on with it?
It seems to be an objective in itself for some parents to mainstream their disabled children rather that send them to a school that has a program especially designed for them.
Blow everyone else.

“This sounds like a repeat of the de-institutionalisation of the mentally ill, but with broader consequences.”
These people are nuts.
As though money can fix everything.

“Like many others, I’ve become convinced that there’s no way this could have happened without substantial aid from the Maronite Christians in Lebanon, who are sick to death of being treated like dhimmis by their Muslim conquerors, who are armed and funded by Iran”.

https://x.com/NiohBerg/status/1836443015289704594?t=5ZShC-rY2XGHDi-Arv-5Sw&s=19

Hezbies looking for replacement comms devices.

One interesting facet to the entire Israel/Muslim war is the US election.
Israel will have worked out that if the Democrats win, they are stuffed.
So, what I’m waiting for is the Mossad operation that will expose multiple Democrat illegalities and moral failings, as well as the voting scams.
Israel knows it it is an existential brawl here – and I mean existential, not the usual existential crisis that comes from gerbil worming or coal power – I mean existential in terms of Israels existence being on the table.
I hope Mossad can pull another rabbit out of the hat.
I’m hoping for a nasty little October Surprise for the Democrats.

Good stuff…

The rise of the Keffiyeh Karen (18 Sep)

In her ready and confident fury, her rudeness, her iron-fisted appetite for confrontation over infractions of what she deems political and moral gospel, the Keffiyeh Karen is related to a broader epidemic of the Gen Z Mean Girl. These Mean Girls have graduated from running the schoolyard to terrorizing the workplace. If there is one type to be afraid of in modern offices, it isn’t the lech or the shouty, hungover male middle manager. It’s the twenty-three-year-old gluten-free vegan graduate, wet behind the ears. We know what these misanthropic misses are capable of — we’ve seen the Phoebes and Annas of Just Stop Oil chuck soup on Van Gogh. …

But there is something particularly humorless and stern about the self-styled progressive Lefty Lass — nothing is ever proper enough for her, or miserable enough, or righteous enough. Even when racism and transphobia have been stamped out in her sight, and microaggressions and misgendering slips of the tongue properly punished, she’ll mock you for forgetting for even a moment that the world is ending because of your climate profligacy. The revolution must come. Net zero needs to be achieved yesterday.

Pretty much nails Greens, Labor harridans and Teals I have to say.

It was jolly watching the Yids revert to some old Testicklement punishment on the mad mullahs minions.

How about a blanket in-principle condemnation of this ghastly piece of legislation that is not worthy of any kind of consideration, but only immediate relegation to the garbage bin of bad left-wing authoritarian ideas?

The conclusions more right-leaning classical liberal and libertarian Australians can draw from all of this are stark: either this opposition is full of politically strategic fools or they actually like and want this bill to proceed. Either is a troubling concern.

Or, perhaps even more of a troubling concern, nothing as deliberate:

Mr Speaker, Those Opposite want, Mr Speaker, want, our children to be exposed to pornography and predators…

We are way too frequently governed by the lowest and most debased forms of parliamentary retail politics. The zinger and 30 second grab.

Exhibit A: the Noalition – an absolute cracker, still on high rotation by the toxic little PM Impersonator…

Rabz on Penny Ping Pong @10:43am….

 you vile incompetent arrogant lesbian slag

Absolutely beautiful

Lebanon has very unreliable electricity, in fact it ‘no longer has a functioning public grid’ so losing solar is a big deal.
Hopefully this only occurred in Hezbollah strongholds.
Funny how these scumbags have billions to spend on killing Jews while their own country is falling more and more into abject poverty.
(Enclaves in the Bekaa Valley excepted)

So United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says civilian objects should not be weaponised . So does that mean Australia was doing the wrong thing in WW1 using jam tins to make trench bombs. This guy is a far left anti semite.