Exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, eh?
What will go off next?
Their Sony Walkmans?
The telex machine?

Long live the Honey Badger. Boss!

—–

Steve Inman:

Honey Badger vs. Leopard Gang

1968 is a year I remember very well.
I had begun a teaching career, turned twenty-one (which had greater significance back then) and had reported in Warwick for my national service medical.
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on my birthday, and I was passed A1 after my medical. Both these events effectively sealed my fate when it came to the following two years, as they combined to send me to Vietnam.
If I had failed my medical, or if Kennedy had the same luck as Trump, my experience would have been very different. When Kennedy announced that he was seeking the Democratic nomination, he made it clear that his campaign agenda prioritised opposition to the war in Vietnam over racial division and the problem of the cities.
From his announcement speech – I run to seek new policies – policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.
Whether or not his election as US President would have been timely enough to begin a withdrawal of US troops, and whether the Coalition would have followed quickly in this country will of course never be known, but it is feasible.
When Nixon was elected he talked about “peace with honour”, but nevertheless began an indiscriminate bombing programme in Cambodia which led, amongst other things, to the killing fields.
Those events in 1968 demonstrate a frightening symmetry with what has so far occured in 2024. Then as now, the incumbent Democratic president did not seek re-election (Lyndon Johnson’s decision); there were two assassinations back then, both successful, (Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy); and two this year, both unsuccessful; and the Democratic convention was be held in Chicago. The most significant difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the assassination attempts were unsuccessful.
The 1968 Convention was a landmark event which vividly demonstrated the deep divisions within the Democrats, but more significantly within the US community.
Those divisions are duplicated in 2024, even if the fault lines are different, but violence is always simmering just below the surface.
I’m reminded of two cliches that go hand in hand when it comes to that country across the Pacific. One is that violence is as American as apple pie, and the other is that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
However you look at it, the US is clearly at a crossroads now just as it was in 1968. By the time Saigon fell in 1975, fifty-seven thousand Americans, millions of Vietnamese, and five hundred Australians had died as a result of decisions made in the US. Many decisions had been made before those events in 1968, but many were made after that pivotal year. A reading of the Pentagon Papers is informative.
Let’s hope that the cadence of the rhyme fails, because if it doesn’t, and more deadly conflict ensues, there will be consequences for Australians, just as there were in 1968, and many will be negative.
Based on my personal experience, Australians who want to should be allowed to register and vote in the US. Our sovereignty has been lost, and forty percent of Yanks can’t be bothered to vote, or are discouraged by their crazy electoral system.

Hezbollah leader whining that Israel has broken the rules.

Reminded me of this.

Chortle.

Newsom Threatens Elon Musk with Legal Action For Sharing Kamala Harris AI Meme

It’s ridiculously easy to calculate a lower bound estimate on the number of Americans killed by the COVID vaccine: 500K

Ex-WA premier Mark McGowan heckled by students about Banksia Hill during Curtin University visit
Caitlyn RintoulThe West Australian
Fri, 20 September 2024 2:00AM

Popular former WA premier Mark McGowan has been left furious after being confronted by a mob of angry students while on a private visit to Curtin University.
Mr McGowan, who quit politics last year, was surrounded by the jeering students at the university’s Bentley campus on Wednesday.
They yelled abuse at him as he walked through in a troubling incident condemned by the university executive and student guild.
The former leader was subjected to a torrent of abuse that included being labelled a “murderer”, torturer” as well as an “a…hole”.
Footage shared online shows one student lambasting him and confronting him about a recent suicide in WA’s juvenile detention system.
“It’s a f…ing disgrace! What do you have to say about the 17-year-old that killed himself in the (system) that you set up,” the woman yells.
The woman appearing to hurl the most insults at Mr McGowan was pictured wearing a keffiyeh scarf and appeared to record the incident on a phone while following him.
A caption accompanying the footage crowed: “Mark McGowan getting rekt by Left Action.”
Left Action is an activist group based at the university.
Footage circulating on social media also showed other students joining in with the woman, chanting: “F..k the ALP. Four, five, six, f..k the rich!”

I see Toad posted an extraction this piece from Henry Ergas above, but it deserves posting in full.

It’s time for Labor to junk the crazed Greens

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 20 September 2024

Historically, Australia’s major parties have never condoned the use of violence as a means of achieving political objectives. The Greens’ decision to whitewash last week’s anti-Israel riots in Melbourne therefore marks a grim moment in Australian political history. It is, of course, true that the Greens have a long record of advocating lawlessness. Already in 2019, the party’s leader, Richard Di Natale, vaunted the Greens’ “strong and proud tradition” of breaking the law. Describing himself as the only Green parliamentarian who had “not yet” been arrested, Di Natale claimed it was entirely “appropriate” to breach “bad laws” – that is, laws with which the Greens, but not a democratically elected parliament, disagreed.

But even with that record behind them, excusing the violence that left 27 police officers injured has taken the Greens’ defence of illegality to new and dangerous heights.

At least originally, when their focus was on the environment, the Greens’ disdain for the law reflected a mindset dominated by premonitions of the end of days. Showing all the hallmarks of an apocalyptic eschatology – that is, a vision that combines a terrifying image of the last things with an announcement of their impending arrival – that mindset centred on the “climate catastrophe”.

The Greens were hardly alone in advancing climate-related prophecies of doom. Decades before Greta Thunberg burst on the scene, James Hansen had warned that there was a small, rapidly shrinking, window of time in which to prevent a “world-ending cataclysm”.

Echoing Hansen’s call, UK and Dutch prime ministers Tony Blair and Jan Peter Balkenende claimed in 2006 that without dramatic, globally co-ordinated action, a “catastrophic tipping point” would inevitably and irreversibly be crossed by 2023 at the very latest. And UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon further shortened the time that remained to “save the planet”, saying in 2006 that it was only if global emissions had stopped growing by 2019 that “catastrophic consequences” could be avoided.

Given those visions of humanity quaking in the antechamber of its own extinction, it is hardly surprising that Bill McKibben urged protesters to do whatever they could to disrupt “business as usual”, so “we’ll at least be able to say we fought”. Democratic niceties, James Lovelock asserted, had to be “put on hold”, as protesters forced governments to impose on voters the immense sacrifices needed to avert “Gaia’s revenge”.

Nor is it surprising that anyone who dared question those propositions was denounced as a “climate denier”, implying, through the deliberate rhetorical proximity to “Holocaust denier”, not just normal fallibility but wilful error at its most morally abhorrent.

That descent from righteousness to self-righteousness, and from self-righteousness to the apology of violence, would have been chillingly familiar to those who know the history of apocalyptic movements.

As Norman Cohn showed in his landmark The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), apocalyptic movements invariably involve the “phantasies found in paranoia”, including the “megalomaniac view of oneself as the elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted yet assured of ultimate triumph”, along with “the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations of human existence, such as fallibility, intellectual or moral”.

It was “phantasies” of that ilk that prompted the great Protestant reformer Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) to coin the modern term “fanatics” for the Anabaptists, who “think with their blood, not their brains”, elevating rage above reason.

But what made that collective paranoia especially dangerous, said Cohn, was its “attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary”. “The distraught saw God and the devil locked in battle for men’s souls”; if the children of light could not destroy the children of darkness, “the end of the world would surely follow”.

And more often than not, the children of darkness were “the supremely powerful, always stubborn, ever-deceitful Jews”.

Of course, the Greens jettisoned God long ago; but they could never do without Satan. The “climate catastrophe” had imbued them with a deeply Manichean view of the world, pitting absolute good against absolute evil. As they morphed from environmental activists into a coalition of wildly disparate groups – ranging from “Queers for Gaza” to virulently homophobic Islamists who would happily crucify any “queers” they could get their hands on – the Manicheanism, with its consuming need for a devil on whom to pin all sin, became even more intense.

That devil, wrote French psychoanalyst Ruben Rabinovitch in his study of mobs, “fulfils two crucial functions: it serves as the mob’s ‘negative’, on to whom its members project everything threatening, wicked and corrupt; and by shifting their focus from themselves on to a single “other”, it provides the cohesion without which the precarious coalition could not survive, much less become a movement”.

Or as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it, the centrifugal tendencies inherent in the extreme politicisation of identity, which fragments the public into warring tribes, propels a “common-enemy politics” whose unifying basis is not shared hopes but shared hatreds. And the greater the capacity to whip those hatreds into uncontrollable fury, the stronger is the common bond.

That “common-enemy politics” has been on display for months. Indeed, the victims of October 7 had not yet been laid to rest before the Islamists and their fellow-travellers were on Sydney’s streets, yelling “where are the Jews?”.

That was merely a prelude to incidents that include a violent demonstration at a synagogue (triggered by Burgertory boss Hash Tayeh, who was involved in last week’s protests), an assault and kidnapping at a Jewish premise, the “cancelling” of Jewish speakers, and torrents of intimidation and abuse.

It is doubtful the situation would have degenerated as seriously as it has if governments and the police had acted more promptly and more forcefully. Instead, by appeasing the mob, they fanned the violence’s flames – and encouraged the Greens’ escalation of their uncivil war on Australia’s social fabric.

There is no prospect whatsoever of the Greens changing course. On the contrary, they are broadening their offensive, taking on the defence of the CFMEU’s thugs, extortionists and racketeers. As a result, the fundamental question must be whether Labor will reward the Greens – and their extreme views – by giving them its preferences.

In the end, that is a question of morality. And it is sadly true that political parties more readily sacrifice 99 per cent of their principles than 1 per cent of their votes.

But it is every bit as true that the symbiotic relationship between Labor as the host and the Greens as the parasite, which was once mutually beneficial, has mutated into one in which the parasite, sensing the host is in terminal decline, turns on the host, extracting as much as it can, as quickly as it can. Confident it can prosper despite the host’s demise, its change in strategy makes that demise all the quicker and more certain.

That is the trap Labor is now in. Whether it has the will, the skill and most of all, the moral courage to pull out of it is another matter entirely.

Interestingly, the ALP’s post-mortem into the 2019 election result concluded, with Bill Shorten’s doublespeak on coal in view, that there was no overall electoral advantage in Labor courting the inner-city green vote.

It’s a lesson they seem incapable of internalising.

Do any of those here who declare this or that recent PM as ‘the worst in our history’ have any self-awareness? Their ignorance of history goes without saying.

Your Dutch literalism is showing.

It’s a rhetorical statement.

I thought m0nty’s comment at 9:00am was reasonable.

I suspect that was his wife. 😀

Hillary Clinton, queen of disinformation, issues two-faced call for censorship

With Albanese sitting comfortably in third place.

The slapper and rub and tug are equal third.

Little johnnie established alarmism and renewables in this shit hole. He did not close the abc or truncate wokeism. He prevented nuclear and did not support fossils. As I say his conservatism is based on there being rules and the left obeying them. That type of conservatism destroys itself and little jonnie did that to the lnp, his own party, which is now a shambles, populated by faggots, pissants and quislings, as well as the society he pledged to preserve. He has the self awareness of a dead fish. All this prevents him from understanding Trump. As I also said you can measure a person by their attitude towards Trump; and on that basis little johnnie is manure.