Yes, the four year fixed terms did slide through without a murmer in QLD.

The very limited campaigning focused on the four year proposition which was promoted as an efficiency measure.

The true meaning of fixed terms received hardly any coverage. People had no understanding that a deadbeat government was there for the duration and could not be challenged.

Before quitting my local branch, a number of us attempted to organise a campaign to oppose fixed terms. QLD LNP had just been captured by the Turnbull Moderates so there was no chance organising an effective opposition to the scam.

The ultimate outcome of the Moderates insurgency was the clown Crisafulli.

https://youtu.be/a1k_RlKGq0Q

Keir Starmer SLAMMED by Eamonn Holmes over ‘Far-Right’ grooming gang accusations: ‘All ME ME ME’

“Far-Right’ has joined a long list of words/slurs like ‘racist’, ‘transphobic’, ‘Islamophobic’ etc, that are designed to shut down discussion.

A week is a very long time in politics.

Bern, I like Caroline Marcus. She has mongrel.
I agree with the Lady she has on at the moment.
I am full of red wine. so haven’t caught her name, but, she reckons ANAL should go to Israel and suck dick. Yes, Yes, Yes!!!

I finished a novel on my Kindle last night, and this morning got an email asking me if I would like to purchase the next novel in the series.
This is creepy.

UK: Labour mulls reviving ‘Islamophobia’ definition that would criminalize telling the truth about Muslim rape gangs
?https://jihadwatch.org/2025/01/uk-labour-mulls-reviving-islamophobia-definition-that-would-criminalize-telling-the-truth-about-muslim-rape-gangs

Journalist Chris Tomlinson notes that “among the things defined as Islamaphobic? ‘… to characterize Muslims as being ‘sex groomers’” Yet while there are rapists of all creeds and races, the industrial-level rape gang activity we have seen in Britain is a uniquely Islamic problem

Well, that will solve the Muslim Rape Gangs issue, won’t it Mister Starmer?

When, rulers honored and rewarded their veterans instead of prosecuting them for doing their job.

———————–
The Emperor Augustus set aside some land in western Spain to house the victorious veterans of his legions, particularly Legio V and Legio X.

The new town was given the name of Emerita Augusta (today’s Mérida, Spain). The city grew and prospered, eventually becoming the capital of the Roman province of Lusitania.

Roman roads connected Emerita Augusta to all parts of Hispania. During the imperatorship of Trajan, the Romans built a sturdy bridge across the Río Guadiana which still carries pedestrian traffic.

The Puente Romano is 792 meters (2598 feet) long, making it the longest Roman bridge still in existence. http://www.chi-rhogroup.com

Where is a need, humans respond, well the clever ones anyway.
Before the chuck wagon there must have been hard for the men on the trail.

————————
In the late 1800s, as cowboys embarked on long cattle drives across the American West, the chuck wagon became a lifeline.

Serving as a mobile kitchen, it was essential for ensuring the crew was well-fed after grueling days of herding cattle.
Invented in 1866 by Charles Goodnight, a Texas rancher, the chuck wagon revolutionized life on the trail.

With its clever design, it provided not only meals but also a sense of stability and routine in the harsh and often unpredictable conditions of the frontier..
Meals prepared at the chuck wagon were simple yet hearty, featuring staples like beans, salted meat, biscuits, and coffee—foods chosen for their ability to endure long journeys and sustain the cowboys’ energy.

The “cookie,” the chuck wagon cook, was far more than just a chef; they were a central figure in camp life, maintaining supplies, setting the mood with their leadership, and often serving as a trusted confidant.

The latest Lamb ad has been released. Interesting. Sam has a new set of false teeth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75BAUXZyWw0&t=195s

Henry Payne.

From this story:

We’re Saved! Michigan clearing over 400 acres of a forest to create rows of Chinese-made solar panels – Despite study finding ‘loss of CO2 gobbling forests for solar installations results in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions’ (3 Jan)

Funny how the Greens went all rip-rip-woodchip when it was logging, but say nothing about clear felling for solar panels and windfarms.

Love the new lamb ad…definitely struck a chord after last night’s little contretemps in the “comments section”.

To make me feel even more humble, had a look at last year’s compilation of images from the Webb telescope.

That should keep me from getting too big for my boots (and Akubra).

No more Swiss letterboxes.

Swiss Burqa Ban Begins (7 Jan)

Switzerland enacted a law at the start of the year that prohibits anyone from wearing burqa coverings in public.

The Swiss people voted in favor of the ban four years ago but were met with backlash from the current government who called the ruling racist.

Yet, Swiss law requires the government to adhere to referendums and the government was overpowered by the people.

The Swiss direct referenda sometimes can throw up bad stuff, but it’s a tell when the government drags its heels for four years to implement a particular referendum. It means the people were right over the target: the WEF elites.

Bob Brown, now irrelevant, frantically tries to hog the spotlight from his shack in north Tassie:

Don’t label me more moderate, I back Adam Bandt’s Greens
BOB BROWN

Adam Bandt has solidified the Greens as Australia’s third political party.

A series of US presidents, from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Eisen­hower, warned about corporations taking power from the people by buying political influence. Corporate power now rules the world, and the Greens, who are not beholden to the organised rich, have become the new focus of rage for the extreme right of politics. News that the right’s shadowy offset, Advance Australia, will spend millions attacking the Greens in the run to this year’s election highlights that anger.

Adam Bandt has solidified the Greens as Australia’s third political party. He has the intention to help shape future government ­direction, but the Greens’ policy of taxing the rich to help the poor (via such things as public education, hospitals and housing) is as attractive to the Gina Rineharts of the world as coalmining is to Vanuatu.

Bandt has my full backing. One angle being peddled is that I was a more moderate leader than Bandt (“Bob Brown’s Greens wouldn’t recognise their own party”, The Australian, 6/1/2025). That’s rubbish. We are different people sharing the same Greens credo of social justice and environmental protection.

No contemporary Greens MP has stood up on a visiting US president as senator Kerry Nettle and I did when George W. Bush addressed parliament during the illegal ­invasion of Iraq.

Nor have I seen a current mouthpiece of the right, like its iconic Alan Jones, rail against a current Greens MP as he did against me and prime minister Julia Gillard when we were working to tackle climate change in 2012: “Quite frankly they should shove her and Bob Brown in a chaff bag and take them as far out to sea as they can.”

Perhaps remembering that nastiness influences Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to shirk environmental responsibility now. Though some 80 per cent of Labor voters want an end to native forest logging in NSW and Tasmania, not least to protect what’s left of the koala and swift parrot populations, Albanese is so terrified of being seen to appease the Greens that he has given the loggers rousing support.

That will cost Labor votes.

Likewise, he has mollycoddled the foreign companies who have taken over the industrial Atlantic salmon industry that is polluting Tasmania’s once-pristine seas. In this, Albanese is being shepherded by Coalition leader Peter Dutton, who wants to expand the polluting industry as well as abolish “green tape” – that is, federal environment laws.

Adam Bandt’s trips to Tasmania’s threatened forests and seas have drawn much less media attention. As destruction of Earth’s biosphere by the resource-extracting corporations accelerates and the economic and social impacts of global heating grow, environmental coverage has taken a back seat. The ongoing death of the Great Barrier Reef gets far less front-page coverage than the fortunes of corporations or the stock exchange.

No wonder the electorate of Australia is restless. In 2022 the vote went roughly a third each to the two old parties and “others”, with the Greens the largest and most influential party of those others. Expect that vote to grow in 2025 despite a historic effort by the big end of town, already under way, to stop it. More and more voters, especially young Australians, want to see governments tackle the growing gap between rich and poor as well as the threats to life on Earth, which this generation is handing to the next.

The current powerbrokers seem oblivious to predictions that real incomes may be halved within a lifetime by the impacts of runaway heating of the planet. And the rich have rocks in their heads if they think that informed swinging voters are not blaming climate change for the 14 per cent per annum increase in Australian insurance premiums in the last year alone. No effort to attack Bandt and his Greens team, who have policies to address these looming problems early – and so more cheaply and effectively – will drive informed Greens voters back to either Dutton or Albanese.

Expect more teals or conservative lifestyle-defenders to be elected in 2025 too, in the wake of the old parties’ expansion of coalmining, gas fracking and native forest incineration – though the teals split ranks on the Greens’ plan for a “climate trigger” to rein in the most polluting corporations. It will worry some breakaway voters that the more conservative teals may give Dutton the leg-up he may need to form a minority government after the imminent election. The rise of Dutton is fostered by Albanese’s feebleness, but Dutton has handicapped himself by advocating nuclear power stations in the mainland states (Tasmania will forgive him for leaving it off that map). How many voters want to risk their power bills going nuclear?

The Bob Brown Foundation is pulling out all stops to bring an end to native forest logging, as New Zealand’s Labour government did in 2002, and plans rallies for the forests across Australia in March. Like New Zealand, Australia has millions of hectares of plantation forests to supply wood needs, and could redirect some of the massive amount of our timbers currently being exported to China, Malaysia and Taiwan.

The year will begin with new logging in the takayna rainforest in Tasmania and in the forests proposed for the Great Koala National Park in NSW, backed by both Labor and the Coalition in Canberra.

Schoolchildren could tell those holding Labor or Coalition portfolios that ending native forest logging is the cheapest and easiest way to help offset both global warming and the biodiversity crisis (almost three-quarters of Earth’s wildlife has been destroyed in the past 60 years). But Albanese and Dutton aren’t listening.

If the success of the Greens is to be measured by either the billionaires’ resources being deployed to attack them or the number of schoolchildren wanting to vote Green for their future, then Adam Bandt’s team is doing very well.

Bob Brown is the former Australian Greens leader who has set up the Bob Brown Foundation.

Oz

Hilarious Bob! The Greens agenda of radical leftism is being rejected around the world, and now that’s beginning in Australia – did you notice the NT and Qld state elections recently?

Your article is the equivalent of the old putting fingers in ears trick while yelling “Nah nah nah!” Then again that’s what living in Tasmania – supported by mainlanders’ taxes – is all about.

Prepare to offer Bandit an office at your place as he’s going to need space to write job applications once the federal election removes him from the political scene. 

PS: no mention of Lidia Thorpe? How’s that Green success working out?

People are funny Courtesy One bad Dude: https://x.com/onebaddude_/status/1876680198470639985?t=OIkcJ9uhTsqb7y-IHo7QSw

We’re finding out just how much the @FBI and locals officials blew it in the terrorist attack in New Orleans. New video shows Jabbar planting IEDs inside giant coolers around Bourbon Street, which police never noticed.

Very interesting twist:

New Years rammer made bombs with rare chemical, nails (7 Jan)

Shamsud-Din Jabbar packed 2 bombs with nails to kill even more people after his deadly ramming attack in New Orleans, used a compound that had never been used in a terrorist attack in the West before.

Earlier this week, NBC News reported that senior law enforcement officials said that the compound used in the IEDs was R-Salt, a compound that is similar in many ways to RDX.

I don’t even know what R-Salt is, and I’m certainly NOT going to look it up. But RDX is a well known nitrate high explosive. That suggests a level of sophistication well beyond the usual TATP cooking on a kitchen stove.

It sounds to me like he had serious help from somewhere.

A good start.

“Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh
TRUMP’S PRESS CONFERENCE: Highlights
– $20B tech investment into the USA
– Will work to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”
– Does not rule out military/economic coercion to take over Greenland/Panama Canal
– Reiterates ‘all h*ll will break loose’ on Day One if hostages not released by Hamas
– Sticking to pardons of Jan 6ers
– Working with Congressional Republicans on a package that includes key elements of his agenda, such as tax cuts
– Wants states to finish election counting by 10PM on election night
– Supports gas heaters over Biden’s effort to force electric heaters on American homes
– Will “immediately” undo Biden’s new offshore drilling ban”

Bruce O’Nuke:

Funny how the Greens went all rip-rip-woodchip when it was logging, but say nothing about clear felling for solar panels and windfarms.

That’s because the Greens get a lot of funding from the Chinese.
The poisonous dwarf in charge will do anything his paymasters want.

What’s the “cabana drama”? And why does Albo say it’s “not on”?

Are they having cabana wars at the beaches?

Lesser spotted newt news.

Fully recovering Australia’s threatened species would cost 25% of GDP. We can’t do it all at once—so let’s start here (Phys.org, 7 Jan)

To undo all the human-induced damage and bring nature roaring back across their viable continental range would come with a staggering cost—A$583 billion per year, every year, for at least 30 years.

Um, yeah, half a trillion per year, no biggie. Here’re who these people are:

April Reside – Lecturer in Conservation, The University of Queensland

James Watson – Professor in Conservation Science, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland

Josie Carwardine – Senior Research Scientist, Environmental Research, CSIRO

Perhaps if we abolished UQ and CSIRO, and sacked these drones, we’d have enough money to make a start on rescuing the poor lesser spotted newts.

Peter Yarrow had a penchant for 14-year olds and was convicted of child sexual abuse and pardoned by Jimmy Carter in his last day in office. Lovely man Jimmy Carter — maybe they might catch up in the 9th circle.

I had a look at Meta on the NASDAQ. Stock price $US 619, years dividend paid $US 2. A measly 2 bucks. That is hardly a business.

Rafiki January 8, 2025 12:31 pm

Invoking their right to self-determination (per UN treaties) the Greenlanders could declare their independence and then ask the USA to exercise suzerainity over Greenland. This is how Fiji became, in the first place, a UK protectorate.

All neat and tidy under “international law”.

Or they could sell the place to China. Or perhaps a couple of nice sheltered bays that could be turned into naval bases.
Don’t look surprised. Recent history has shown that the West is full of politicians who would sell their countries and their citizens out for a couple of million in small untraceable notes.

Big piece of President Trump’s National Security Plan

https://www.petersonschriever.spaceforce.mil/Pituffik-SB-Greenland/

It Begins: China Cuts Undersea Internet Cables to Taiwan

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/01/it-begins-china-cuts-undersea-internet-cables-taiwan/

In a replay of Baltic Sea undersea infrastructure attacks by Chinese ships in October of 2023 and November 2024, a Chinese-associated ship has now destroyed a major undersea cable off Taiwan.

On Friday, January 3, at about 1240 hours local time, Chungwha Telecom noticed an outage from its Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) Cable, which it owns and operates with AT&T, China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, KT, NTT, and Verizon.

The location was just outside the 12-mile limit of territorial waters of Taiwan, north of the major Taiwan Port of Keelung at the northern end of the island nation of Taiwan.

The water depth in this area is likely less than 500 feet.

Chungwha Telecom notified Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration (CGA), which sent a patrol boat to intercept the Hong Kong-owned, Cameroon-registered freighter “Shunxing39” (IMO 8358427).

Taiwan needs to open all the floodgates on the Three Gorgeous Dams.

SIR Keir Starmer will today order his Labour MPs to vote against calls for a new national inquiry into the Asian rape grooming gangs scandal — insisting the time has passed to ask any more questions.

Keir Starmer will order Labour MPs to vote against new national inquiry into Asian rape grooming gangs | The Sun