. Russell is probably as skint as a peeled prawn right now,
Who’s funding his legal action then?
… he deserves some ABC court-ordered monetary lurve.

No he doesn’t.
He needs to get a job, like everyone else.
And get a real name.
Heston sucks dead dogs.

Can we get Ed Case’s comments put up in a different colour or font or something? I often find myself reading them by accident before whatever banal point he’s making makes me skip back to the top and confirm it’s him. Different colours or font would mean I could just keep strolling. All for free speech etc, and he can keep posting whatever he wants. It would just be a time saver.

Ed isn’t happy. This is not good. We should flee.

She’s got as many shades as Tan Grant

I’ve been watching a bit of telly, my wife and kids are away up the coast, and I’m putting it on for background noise company, and then watching a bit of odd stuff in between the tennis. After not watching much at all for ten years or more, a few observations-
-a large slice of TV ads have become shallow Bud-Lite like “we’re all just a bunch of goofballs”.
-the weird phenomenon of ad men wearing unbuttoned shirts over white t-shirts continues. You never, ever see that in real life.
-Ad men have lost weight significantly, and started shaving again. Ad youth have become fatter, obnoxiously dressed and pierced.
-SBS is full of lisping queens, talking too quick
SBS showed Israeli protesets against Netanyahu’s government doing something shocking, shocking I tells ya. Although tens of thousands were cited, the protesting crowds were shown in curiously tight shots, and a huge percentage of them had Israeli flags which were all the same size and colour. This might not be that stunning, but they were all the same size, condition, colour, flagpoles all the same height… a very well resourced and co-ordinated spontaneous grassroots protest. There were also a lot of 2021 edition LGB rainbow flags, just so we know they’re the good guys. Mic given to some old bat who, on cue, called the government far right extremists. The departing shot was a streetscape by night, with a few thousand marchers I suppose, but no rainbow rags.
Final video montage was of PM Albanese hamming it up in Vilnius for NATO- laughing, leaning in to Trudeau to fire off a bon mot, crowing over his shoulder when LaGarde said hi, shaking hands with Napoleon Zelenskyy with a massive, massive grin. You wouldn’t reckon there’s a war on over there, or a cost of living crisis at home.

Another sign-o-the-times observation- “The Rookie” has morphed from a buddy-cop, May to December police procedural, to a full-on gun-fu vigilante takedown show.

The Perfect D-Day That History Forgot

My wife and I often joke that our youngest daughter is “on the spectrum”. She probably is, but we’re resolved to never let a diagnosis get anywhere near her. What we have to do- that is, what I have to do- is get over my dissappointment and resentment, and find a way to love her as she is, because she’ll only have one dad, and in a few short years she could be out the door.

I do appreciate what you are doing, Wally. At least you have plenty of info (John H’s links are good) on ‘spectrum’ issues and can get an idea of what may be amiss with your daughter, if anything, and take it from there. I had no diagnosis for my son, 45 years ago autism had to be severe before it was recognised at all and that in itself was only since the 1930’s. I just knew something was wrong. Anne Deveson wrote movingly of her schizophrenic son as her little bird with a broken wing, trying to fly and failing to do so. I knew my son wasn’t schizophrenic, but he was something odd and unknowable at the time, trying desperately to fly, and unable to do so. It’s hard to see an intelligent child fail so often and so completely and no-one able at that to to tell us why.

Have you thought about how your daughter will cope when she leaves your loving care? Or in high school if she has school failures and peer rejections? You may wish to consider whether some testing might assist to define her ability to receive help in the future and to accommodate to peers who are like her and avoid the otherwise inevitable loneliness (you will find out how terrible it is to see a lonely teenager). Will she ever be able to sustain full time employment? If not, what then? And housing?

On the other hand, I too have striven to keep my son within the ‘normal’ range of things because I so much wanted him to be normal, and this has helped him to try to fly, but it may also have held him back from some self-knowledge about his deficits, which were obvious to others who knew him for any reasonable length of time. No-one wants to ‘label’ their child, nor do children need to live by a label. I’ve had wonderful times with my son when he was little, and we still have sympatico together. I admire him, even though he drives me to distraction. The intelligent man underneath with the life experience of his fifty years is delightful. But living on the edge of normality, trying to be normal while over-sensitive to stimulus and with confusion about the meanings of others is such a strain for unprotected autistic adults, particularly as they can’t handle bureaucracies and the ensuing demands for form-filling and compliance that come with adulthood.

There are no easy answers in all of this and much depends on your sense of how your child is managing. And your child when adult too. Just know that if she is truly substantially on the spectrum the row you hoe is going to be long and stressful for you and take care of your marriage when hoeing it and also of your other children who can feel the strain badly. Sorry if that sounds down, but know too that you aren’t alone, far less so now than in the past. Best of luck to you and your family, Wally.

Thanks Lizzie- our daughter, younger of two, is quite alright. The autist-ish side of her comes out badly in vicious anger, striking for the eyes while play-fighting, tormenting animals, blanking friends, breaking down in minor stress. The spectrum comes goodly with a punishing memory, maths proficiency, all feeding into a prodigious musical ability and a great gift for mimicry, fed by the memory of course. It’s frustrating that she has got so far without having to face any hurdles of committment or difficulty, and I’m wary that the gifted and talent school stream is taking “bright” kids and turning them into TikTok midwits. (minor victory, the PEAC co-ordinator whose feet I was holding to the fire with my requests to disclose exactly what she was doing with our kids for a day a week, has resigned mid-year… it might not be the end of the soft-fucus scandal, but at least I have a fresh nemesis to lay out my terms to).
Daughter’s troubles came to a head through the Reset years, really bombing out with what is called “school refusal” with a side serving of hypochondria and then spreading to a whole social panic where she didn’t want to go anywhere, see anybody, do any sport or activity. In my mind I think a lot of this has been happening in our society linked to working mothers, early childhood abandonment, cortisol derangement- the peak battlefield of these times was trying to get the kid on the schoolbus while my wife went in the other direction for work. Work for her was stressful, with so many in her profession being women of childbearing age refusing the jab and/or dropping out of the workforce entirely, plus the hangover of animal breeding which was fomented by WA’s draconian lockdowns. If we had our time again, I’d go all-out to have the ability for her mum to be able to drop everything when it came to the crunch.

LIzzie, funnily enough before your later comment touching on schizophrenia, I was reading your earlier and wondering about a dissociative disorder. A uni kid I’m working with was telling me about the ideation of an internal dialogue, the percentage of people who apparently don’t have one, and whether or not one can be cultivated.
“Panic attack” has been mentioned with our kiddo, and although we can see the glassy-eyed pale sort of slow shock that comes over her, CBT seems a good path to cutting through the animal panicked brain, and either bringing back a calm narrative, or winnowing through the wild notions that must go through her mind sometimes.

Documents released under freedom of information laws by the National Indigenous Australians Agency reveal a long manifesto sitting behind the Uluru Statement from the Heart also reveal this “Makaratta” commission would take on the role of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”.

Convincing yourself that this is anything but a trojan horse takes the gullibility of a small baby.

Listening to Mark Steyn recently who claims Canadia is lost reminds me that if Australia isn’t already lost, it will be if the VTP gets up.

Discuss it with everyone. Blow their gullibility out of the water. For their sake.