J6 Prisoner Released After Landmark Supreme Court Overturns Obstruction Charge, His ONLY Charge — Watch This Emotional Family Reunion

by Jim H?ftNov. 21, 2024 7:30 am

Is this true?
How people in Thailand wait?

Kind joyful blue sky going off over Tim McBride’s bathroom capitulation.
https://x.com/babybeginner/status/1859497529060229474?t=EaOwTUSD6fxF4jmzrLKbTw&s=19

A stalwart of the “modern” left.

“You know when I wore that T-shirt a couple of times, the amount of people who came up to me and want their photograph taken with me…saying ‘good on you brother’…whatever, 10 to one.

And if you believe his claim about the level of public support he has, he has a bridge to sell you.

A good read from a former Treasury Official. One of the few ‘sound’ ones that I have known.

David Pearl
The Future Fund is now captive to Jim’s pet projects

As if any further confirmation was required, Jim Chalmers has now proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s a serious liability for the Albanese government.
Not content with presiding over an economy that has virtually ground to a halt, with living standards falling, productivity flatlining and an inflation rate among the highest in the developed world, the Treasurer is now deepening his assault on the integrity of our key economic institutions.
He has weakened the Reserve Bank’s traditional inflation-fighting focus and directed the Productivity Commission to focus more on green ideology. And he has now turned his attention to the $230bn Future Fund, which was set up by former treasurer Peter Costello to meet the federal government’s mammoth, unfunded public sector superannuation liabilities.
As we know, Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher have announced that the Future Fund’s mandate will be changed to require it to consider “national priorities” when making its investment decisions. If you think that sounds ominous, you are right.
This is a marked change to the Fund’s initial riding instructions, which focused on obtaining the best available commercial return and did not privilege particular sectors. Chalmers’ pet priorities are to increase the supply of residential housing, support the net-zero energy transition and fund local infrastructure projects to improve economic resilience and security. He insists this will not compromise the Future Fund’s focus on maximising commercial returns.
https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/78e45c8dcedbf129982bbf393ab78645
Katy Gallagher

Yet we have just witnessed the re-election of Donald Trump, who campaigned strongly against net-zero climate austerity and will pull that country – the world’s largest economy, let’s remember – out of the Paris Agreement. It’s dead.
Let’s not also forget the Albanese government has bet the house on wind and solar to get us to net zero: energy sources that apart from being inherently unreliable and expensive, require massive subsidies from the taxpayer to be commercially viable.
Residential housing, meanwhile, is a sector tied in state and local government red tape, with the threat of investment-killing capital gains and negative gearing tax hikes looming over it – from none other than Chalmers himself.
And in the area of infrastructure, the reference to “economic reliance and security” is well-known code for projects that do not stack up on commercial grounds.
As Judith Sloan pointed out on Thursday, if investments in these sectors were financially attractive propositions, the Fund would already be putting money into them.
If a David Murray or a Peter Costello-like figure were chairing the Fund, perhaps its commercial integrity could, despite Chalmers’ political directives, be salvaged. But Greg Combet, a career unionist, ultimate Labor insider and climate utopian, is at the helm.

If his appointment was a blow to the Fund’s credibility, Chalmers’ latest fiddling will do further damage. No longer will the Fund be seen by counterparties as a first-rate, commercially focused operation. Every investment decision it makes, even if perfectly justified, will be second-guessed by the market. It will have a political shadow hanging over it.

And now that it’s integrity has been breached, we can look forward to further Labor hobbyhorses to be added to the Fund’s investment wish list.
Why not the care economy or local manufacturing? Why not union-favoured construction projects? Every industry association in the country will be knocking on Chalmers’ door to get their sector a mention. His naivety is staggering.
The Fund decision, while deeply flawed, is not at all surprising for this Treasurer to make.
It reflects his basic misunderstanding of the nature of capitalism. When he invokes this term, he has in mind politicians directing private capital into favoured projects, not markets allocating resources to their highest-value uses, as directed by millions of consumers’ price signals.
Adam Smith first articulated the miracle and genius of the latter, which protected individual freedoms while achieving both social cohesion and growing prosperity – and all without a central directing political Leviathan.
A succession of leaders of failed, interventionist states has demonstrated the economic folly of the former. Crony capitalism is not progressive or enlightened or sophisticated, as Chalmers believes, but the oldest governance cancer there is.
At a deeper level, Chalmers’ Future Fund gambit is evidence of his inability to face the reality of trade-offs, which – when you think about it – is a basic requirement for competent economic leaders.
If you insist on equality of outcomes, you cannot have equality of opportunity. If you insist on running an economy with an overheated labour market, such as ours, you cannot have stable prices. And if you mandate expensive wind and solar power, you cannot lower power prices.

Those who tell the public they can have their cake and eat it are either dishonest or blind ideologues, whether of the left or the right. They may succeed in this deception for a while, but the public soon find them out. If Chalmers was betting his own money on his pet sectors, he would at least pay the price if they failed.

If the Future Fund fails, it is not only taxpayers that will suffer, but every person in Australia who depends on the government safety net – whether the Age Pension, the NDIS, aged-care support, unemployment benefits or the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
The Future Fund is an insurance policy for these millions of Australians. A financial resource that, if managed wisely and prudently, could fund the coming tsunami of public sector superannuation liabilities with no need to made calls on our annual budget – with no need to cut into their entitlements.
Without the Fund or something like it in place, these liabilities will have to be funded by higher taxes, lower welfare payments or higher debt, pushing the cost on to future generations.
This is the position that Greece found itself in after the global financial crisis. We are not close to that country’s predicament, but Chalmers’ weakening of the Future Fund is a small step in that direction.
When Labor has taken the economic high ground and looked out for working Australians, it has always enjoyed political success. When it has surrendered to ideology and forgotten its traditional base, it has suffered.
A good Labor treasurer should be the economic conscience of the government they serve. A Chris Minns or Peter Malinauskas, if in Canberra, might fit the bill.
Jim Chalmers, for all his boasting and ambition, is not that man.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

Are there ICC arrest warrants for Putin and the Russian defence minister? Syrian “president ” Bahar Assad and all his government? Xi and the CCP for slavery?
I’m not up to date so just wondering.

Seasons are racist.

Joyless ‘Scientists’ Want to Police the Language on Your Invitations (20 Nov)

An op-ed in the journal Nature came out in October, but it just came to my attention this week. Two climate scientists (which should clue you in on their leanings) from Australia, Melissa Hart and Negin Nazarian, wrote that using the season in your event invitations isn’t “inclusive.” …

It gets even better because Hart and Nazarian offer suggestions on how to remedy this problem that nobody has. Of course, they do.

“Avoid naming seasons for events or communication,” they write. “This might not be an issue when inviting researchers from a single country, but it’s crucial if you’re trying to attract an international audience.” Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m assuming that this “international audience” is made up of grown-ups rather than preschoolers.

“Provide specific dates and months,” they continue. “Even saying ‘summer (Northern Hemisphere)’ implies the Euro-American-centric approach. The simple use of a month instead removes any confusion.”

They haven’t seemed to’ve worked it out that names of months mostly come from the extremely colonial-imperialist Roman Empire. But it’s fun that we here in Australia overachieve so much in producing this dribble.

Russian ICBM strike video

look at the speed of these things

Can someone explain what the big deal is about Russia using ICBMs tipped with conventional warheads in the ongoing war? 

It is a minor escalation from nuclear sabre rattling to actually throwing a sabre, albeit one without actual nukes. It is intended as a threat that Russia is able to deliver nukes fairly easily.

Which everyone knew anyway, so it will make no difference really. Just something for Putin to order and feel like he is accomplishing something other than destroying the current generation of young Russian men.

Question for computer types.

This age verification for social media, doesn’t affect me I’m not on anything.

However a mates mrs is Thai, currently very indignant about giving details to Facebook if she has to but like a lot of Thais she runs under a false name, false age, false city of residence & has no profile apart from name so would run afoul anyway. She has it for messenger so they can face time overseas.

If she were to move her profile residence from here to Thailand, would that be a work around? Or would there be some geolocation type firewall?

I’m curious as well, as I suspect a lot will just do that and I’d imagine the Government would have already thought of that course of action, mitigating it somehow.

So in Victoria the Allen Labor government is raiding the State’s Emergency relief and disaster Fund and in Canberra the Albanese Labor government is about to raid Australia’s Future Fund. What is it about the penchant for Labor stealing our future!

Available now for parts. Any parts? Stage sweeping? Tea boy? Sorry – tea person!

Jussie Smollett has conviction over ‘hoax hate attack’ overturned

An actor accused of hiring two men to stage a racially motivated attack on him has had his conviction for lying about the incident overturned.

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Jussie Smollett, who starred in the drama series Empire, was treated unfairly because prosecutors broke an agreement not to charge him.

“Today we resolve a question about the state’s responsibility to honour the agreements it makes with defendants,” wrote Justice Elizabeth Rochford.

“We address whether a dismissal of a case … allows the state to bring a second prosecution when the dismissal was entered as part of an agreement with the defendant and the defendant has performed his part of the bargain. We hold that a second prosecution under these circumstances is a due process violation, and we therefore reverse defendant’s conviction.”

Smollett, who is gay, claimed in 2019 that he was attacked in Chicago by two men who shouted racist and homophobic abuse at him, and left him with a noose around his neck. The men, Smollett said, shouted pro-Trump slogans and told him he was in “Maga country”.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the model Naomi Campbell and the actor Kerry Washington were among those who leapt to Smollett’s defence and condemned the “attack”.

Yet a court was told that he had paid two brothers, whom he met on the set of the TV show, a total of dollars 3,500 to carry out the attack.

Prosecutors alleged that he staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio’s response to hate mail he received.

Smollett, 42, insists he is innocent and did not stage the hoax, despite the brothers giving detailed interviews describing the arrangement.

Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in jail, 30 months of probation, and ordered to pay more than dollars 130,000 in restitution. He served six days of that sentence in 2021, but was released pending appeal.

In 2019, Kim Foxx, the state lawyer for Cook County, agreed to drop the charges if Smollett paid dollars 10,000 and did community service. But that agreement was rescinded and a special prosecutor later charged him again, leading to his trial and conviction.

The latest ruling cited the overturning of Bill Cosby’s conviction on sexual assault charges after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court concluded that his prosecution had broken a previous agreement not to charge him.

“It cannot be gainsaid that society holds a strong interest in the prosecution of crimes,” the Illinois justices wrote.

“It is also true that no such interest, however important, ever can eclipse society’s interest in ensuring that the constitutional rights of the people are vindicated. Society’s interest in prosecution does not displace the remedy due to constitutionally aggrieved persons.”

The Times

Bill Shorten’s valedictory speech reveals what he was really on about. Along with negative gearing, we all need to get onto:

….climate change, defence and foreign policy reform, constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, treaties and the equal treatment of women.

Strange…the comments in the Oz don’t seem to like him:

Brian

Committed to principles; just the wrong ones.

BrianK

Thanks for the total mess that you have made of NDIS . And the billions of costs that could have built very many hospitals and schools

John

Well done I say, made many people in business of care Millions. Thank fully you got back $1 billion sadly though as usual with Labor you blew the original budget by over 100%. I guess you and the rest of the Labor crew mean the best but sadly in my opinion you keep getting wrong. And hopefully you’ll be moved on.

Midnight spoiler

“There should be no dividing line any longer in this parliament between those who are pro or anti-­employer, those who are pro or anti-union. We no longer have to make that false choice. We can work together. The nation needs this,” he said.
This from the man who pitted Australian against Australian in his class warfare rhetoric in a vain attempt to win power.

Goldfinger

There was a referendum and the people said no. Yet we have people in government who refuse to accept the peoples word and are still pushing their own agenda. What ever happened to democracy and looking after the interests of the Australian people?

Jimmy

Bill the people read it alright and could see the beginning of the end for Australia and look what you have delivered us. Labor with their Leaders have proved over a long period of time they are economic vandals, no political nous and do not work in the best interests for the majority of Australians. You were a failure, even Albanese worse and now they heading to anoint their next leader Chalmers who has proven in every way that he is incapable of leading a prosperous and developing country and in fact is anti Australian.

Ross

The treaty boondoggle to divide Australia has been decided. We said NO. Our unrepresentative political class now plans to legislate what we overwhelmingly rejected.

David

Typical. Shorten comes up with a hairbrained scheme the NDIS which is crippling our finances & then leaves when he realises he cant fix what is broken. 

Sam

Bill will be remembered as the man who lost the unlosable election because of 1 issue, Franking Credits. And still Labor hasn’t learnt the lesson that Super is our money, not the Governments plaything.

jeff

Shorten has let the cat out of the bag as to the agenda of a re-elected labor party. Albo will not be happy.

Go there and join in if you can. Bill deserves it.

Shorten will be a good fit at the ‘university” of canbra. In what way do taxpayers benefit from the ‘university” of canbra?

Here we go.

How will Wong and Albanese react to the ICC warrant.

Having just stolen the Nation’s savings, spitting in out faces by pursuing Bibi wouldn’t trouble them in the slightest.

IT IS NEVER SAFE TO VOTE LABOR.