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The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
— Ayn Rand-
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Ahoy there
1
Scotch on scotch rocks with rain water. Sweet.
The only way to drink good Scotch. Indeed. I claim this thread, in the name of the distillers, of good single malt, and to Hell with all bourbon drinkers.
And in the week that was, staff member whose child is diagnosed dyslexic, has a teacher who won’t allow someone to write down his narratives. She wants to mark him on his comprehension, grammar and spelling. The cognitive dissonance between the education department’s website and mission statement and coal face farkery is schizoid.
Blokes night at the Cats is officially over.
Ladies, you are now officially welcome to comment. Enjoy.
ZK2A..the tanks are full. Unity Water can go and skulk for good few months.
Who the hell is “Unity Water”?
Air hellair!!
Turn it up loud, pour yourself a double Lagavulin, and never mind your neigbours….
,dillo. Unity Water sells water in SEQ. Now, shouldn’t you be dumping the clutch at 3000 rpm and shredding tyres?😎 I’ve done my bit today showing SUVs that round abouts are not their forte. God bless AWD and plus 250.
No no no. Music loving Cats need to go here……
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPKaZQAWre5YbAsmmIbvj03rQ8tv1c0s6
Fantastic covers of music. It’s a shame they don’t do covers of the “olden day music” of pre 2000 when most of you old dinosaurs were about.
Quiet night tonight!
That’s not a question Arky is ever going to be able to answer. As I type, he’s probably sitting in his nailed together orange crate in his garage yelling “broom broom”.
He’s probably wearing racing googles and a leather cap.
And possibly wearing a fake leather jacket, with “Thunderbird” written on the back.
Top twenty?
Might be worth a run on the record. There is always room for improvement.
The ABC is alleging Tony Abbott is a communist spy!
Ahahahahahahahahaha.
Tony Abbott attended functions hosted by Communist Party-linked moguls.
Just look at the resources thrown into this attempt to win Warringah for a leftist:
All of those investigators needed confirmation of their concerns:
Way, way down in the story …
The ABC is alleging Tony Abbott is a communist spy!
Ahahahahahahahahaha.
Tony Abbott attended functions hosted by Communist Party-linked moguls.
The ABC is alleging Tony Abbott is a communist spy!
Ahahahahahahahahaha.
Tony Abbott attended functions hosted by Communist Party-linked moguls.
Just look at the resources thrown into this attempt to win Warringah for a leftist:
All of those investigators needed confirmation of their concerns:
Way, way down in the story …
Tony Abbott
The ABC is alleging Tony Abbott is a communist spy!
Tony Abbott attended functions hosted by Communist Party-linked moguls.
Just trying to work out what could possibly be filtering my comment.
I give up.
The site has become unusable.
Watched The Godfather again tonight.
How much better was a world with tradition, honour and code?
And Apollonia! Mama Mia!
Yep. It’s crazy shit. Might as well surrender to the left.
Libertarian my arse. The defenders of Free Speech are officially dead.
My theory is that Sinc has been bought out by Soros.
You couldn’t blame Sinc for taking the cash. I just hope he drove a hard bargain.
And guns.
nUmbers gets to stay because he “doesn’t break the rules”.
Big Brother is keeping an eye on us all. Make no bones about it.
Top 25? Still awake and bored shitless.
Looks like no-one else is though…..
I am
mizaris
#2980793, posted on April 6, 2019 at 3:43 am
Looks like no-one else is though…..
Looks can be deceiving.
Paul Zanetti.
Watching big hot stuff being pounded
Peter Broelman.
Jon Kudelka.
Surprise, surprise. David Rowe’s inner totalitarian hates Brexit.
Al Goodwyn.
Steve Kelley.
Robert Ariail.
Michael Ramirez #1.
Michael Ramirez #2.
Bob Gorrell.
A.F. Branco #1.
A.F. Branco #2.
Lisa Benson.
Pete of Perth
#2980798, posted on April 6, 2019 at 4:00 am
Watching big hot stuff being pounded
Thanks Pete, great engineering stuff, love it.
Wish more of this kind of info were shown to students looking for a carrier.
Maybe, just maybe less of wimmenses studies or social engineering courses would be filled.
I know, I know, not a chance.
What happened Tom?
You are early. Invested in a new alarum clock?
not carrier but career fer God’s sake
Make an exception re. correcting typos, nothing to do with me this time, stupid computer software is to blame.
Nota, you are welcome to your voice rec.
Mark A
#2980819, posted on April 6, 2019 at 5:37 am
Nota, you are welcome to your voice rec.
That reminds me, where are you Nota?
RUOK?
Strange, do I pong? keeping everyone away?
Don’t answer that!
Thanks Tom!
(Mark, change deodorant brand!)
Cheer Tom
I like the flash mobs, prefer the musical kind but I’m open minded.
I could tell.
By the shoes.
Yawn…
Good Moaning.
Well, the dog spewed, so that woke me up, and after cleaning it up, having a coffee.
It’s now 5:25 here.
May as well stay up now.
The point to be made over MV’s obsession with the voting situation is that he constantly lives in the past regarding his view that you may as well give up because the majors are always going to get 50% of the vote.
My point is that they certainly will with that attitude, and his already defeated approach to it.
Times have changed from his entire political life’s experience with the great exodus from the libs to minor parties on the so called right.
For example, the numbers would be such that if ALA, AC, PHON, and various right wing independents were to merge, the libs getting 50% of the vote through preferences would not be a given.
Of course, they are highly unlikely to merge, but the point being is you do not fail to give your support to these parties because you think it’s hopeless, or it always will be.
As things get worse and worse for the liberals and their behaviour is more and more appalling and left wing, individual seats will change to the right wing minors and independents.
This election, I see a shambles.
This is due, in part, to the bipartisan ignorance of the media.
They actually believe that right wing voters are a Neanderthal, dying fringe group, not main stream at all.
Their analysis of the political situation confirms this.
The votes the Liberals are losing are not going to Labor.
Some Liberal seats will now fall, only some, to right wing minority parties or independents.
No thanks to the likes of MV.
This election?
You put the majors last and hope that (due to labor and the greens preference deals) that a defeated Liberal party is in opposition to Labor with right wing parties and independants stifling labor’s ability to govern by being a virtual minority government.
Whatever happens, you vote as right wing as you can, and realise the liberal party are a socialist party now and put them way down with labor.
It’s a shit situation, and yes, our voting system sucks the big one, but my point has always been that you don’t give up, you vote right wing and never forget, every rep in every seat, still has to win it.
They are obsessed about local opposition.
MV sees “party” politics, which in itself is anathema to our constitution, and can be as much of a noose around a candidate’s neck as support.
It’s about your little neck of the woods.
All those back benchers for the libs are staring into the abyss in many seats around the country, due to their party’s traitorous behaviour.
And there are now alternatives.
And again, that’s not due to people taking MV’s approach.
Motoring in Havana – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCEChlTNrnE
Metronome Tone describing the Chinese Communiast party –
And accepting their invitations – https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-06/abbott-attended-function-hosted-by-communist-party-linked-mogul/10962224
struth
#2980831, posted on April 6, 2019 at 6:55 am
Until you change the system, MV is right.
The system is rigged.
But I don’t care anymore.
Good luck to the USA …
Political polarization sparks confrontation at Starbucks, triggering online fury.
“It began when Palo Alto resident Rebecca Parker Mankey attempted to shame an elderly white man wearing a red Make America Great Again hat as he sat in the coffeehouse…”
She asked the public for help finding him — “I want him to have nowhere to hide,” she wrote — a practice called “doxing,” or posting personal contact information to encourage threats and harassment.
“Let me be clear.
The MAGA hat at its best represents a distorted and inaccurate view of America, its history, and its place in the world, and, at its worst, is a symbol of hate and everything that is wrong with America today.”
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/04/03/political-polarization-sparks-confrontation-at-starbucks-triggering-online-fury
I’m not a libertarian and would have no hesitation to ban, restrict, emasculate a couple of posters.
One for being an unbearable bore and general nuisance and having a vomit inducing personality.
An other for being a monumental hypocrite and for using a double.
Very clever that one, none of grirg’s crude attempts there.
Yep, Without constructive criticism and friendly jabs people become lazy. Better to come from within.
Not arguing about that.
It most certainly is.
Arguing about method to use now in comparison to before.
For example, if there were only two major parties right now, I wouldn’t vote at all.
I’d wear a fine, but if there is a right wing candidate in your area to vote for, not of those parties, there is now enough support that it may not be a given that the preferences will give it to the majors.
You’ve got to be in it to win it.
bespoke
#2980838, posted on April 6, 2019 at 7:19 am
Are you by any chance a psychic?
Mark A
You don’t want an eco chamber but some lines and they need to be clear would help.
No
Good god now numbers is actually shilling for Cuba.
struth
#2980839, posted on April 6, 2019 at 7:22 am
Until you change the system, MV is right.
The system is rigged.
Not arguing about that.
It most certainly is.
Arguing about method to use now in comparison to before.
For example, if there were only two major parties right now, I wouldn’t vote at all.
I’d wear a fine, but if there is a right wing candidate in your area to vote for, not of those parties, there is now enough support that it may not be a given that the preferences will give it to the majors.
You’ve got to be in it to win it.
Agree, that’s why I never win tattslotto.
But the reality of the preferential system is that your right wing or shooter or any other candidate has some sort of a deal stitched up with the other parties.
If all goes well for him/her, he/she gets in, if not, the majors get his/her preferences.
I happens from time to time, like that joker a couple of elections back.
Nice find.
THE FIRST BREXITEER! Rare Roman coin features Emperor who took Britain OUT of Roman Empire
At £100,000 it would be worth about a hundred times its gold content.
Dang! Looks like I picked the wrong week to accept a birthday party invitation at the local Chinese, lest they have links to the Chinese Communist Party.
Lucky for you, Mark A, none of this concerns you anymore.
Creepy Joe doubles down
https://twitter.com/charliespiering/status/1114195453271318529?s=20
Hey, they don’t expect tips.
Must be a workers’ paradise.
The voter decides the preferences. Many voters follow the how to vote cards they are given, but there’s no reason why anyone has to. Put the major parties last precisely to avoid the situation which you describe.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2010B00213
The rules changed to prevent above the line votes automatically transferring between parties.
Heh. I see a Cat re-discovered ELO last night. Kick start the pacemaker, pop on your platform heels and body shirt and ditch the walking frame. It’s party time!
*viewer warning – ultra tight trousers and peak hairy
And Bushkid. Condolences for your great and terrible loss. Be gentle with your broken heart.
struth
#2980849, posted on April 6, 2019 at 7:52 am
Lucky for you, Mark A, none of this concerns you anymore.
It doesn’t and it does, my family have lived here since 1852, originally from Folkestone.
We are a multitude, and whatever happens politically it will affect a lot of us.
Go to Kyneton (our farms are in the district) and look around, it was a town where I went to school, 40 years ago, everyone knew everyone, my relatives were involved in civic life, on the shire council and in other organisations.
Today it’s a mirror of Richmond or South Yarra. Full of refugees from high house prizes in Melbourne.
The council of Macedon Ranges is dominated by them.
Original inhabitants don’t have a look in.
Welcome comrades.
Yes Bushkid, condolences.
Many people think their role in the political process is simply voting, and being one in millions makes them feel impotent.
But every time you discuss politics in the years in between you are also contributing. As part of countless movements on countless topics. Think the Overton window. How did it get to such a point where not a single politician of the two main parties will call bullshit, or even mention nuclear?
The media has much to answer for here. They have been able to pass themselves off as vox populi for decades, and perhaps they once were not so far removed. But the circumstances that make their position so defensive and precipitous (the growth of social media) is our opportunity.
The left’s activists, true to their totalitarian instinct, have sought to pervert this with their astroturfing. Somnambulant Gnats is a classic example – a handful of people posing as thousands. And Cassie gave us an example of the correct response: expose them.
One difference between the right and left is that the right lets too much slide: It is not motivated to engineer opinion. Leftist activists live for nothing else.
Anyway, just spitballing here.
Well there ya go.
I would have pegged your age at scarcely more than a century.
Leftards are clueless #357,831:
Hispanic Socialist Ocasio-Cortez culturally appropriates a southern African-American accent while speaking to an African-American audience.
Their Andrew broad, the gormless halfwit that relentlessly took Victoria’s safest Tory seat as far left as it took to get armboob from university activist wymynsys has had his farewell speech reported in Fairfax rural press.
Dribbling that he was proud to have never offended the left, and proud to have made so many leftist friends through his refugee activism and work on the friends of the United Nations parliamentary committee, their Andrew broad boasts of his wymynsys credentials like nationwide intervention orders for female victims of male violence, and mass refugee visas.
A nobody married backbencher from the left that supported Trump and preferred right wing single girls half his age and joined right wing thinktanks would be crushed.
Their Andrew broad was tolerated for his little ways, ways that have made the seat of Mallee the property of the left.
Rogue halfwit Tory politicals need to be as concerned as lefties are about the price of treachery.
At the least, broads potential abuse of his party’s time and money, if not taxpayer time and money in the pursuit of left wing girl activists half his age, as well as deliberately compromising himself by pursuing his affairs in full view of the chicom secret police, should become a crushing humiliation he never recovers from.
To encourage the Others.
Comrades.
+1
I think we’ve discussed it before. We personally wouldn’t have crossed paths, but our families most certainly would have.
Mother Lode
#2980859, posted on April 6, 2019 at 8:26 am
It doesn’t and it does, my family have lived here since 1852
Fell asleep at 6Pm, been up since 11PM last night.
Sozzled.
Other than that, no excuse for sloppy grammar.
Exactly.
That’s why I’m here.
We do good here by arguing amongst ourselves to find the best path, using the wisdom of crowds.
That’s why the trolls are such good value.
You constantly find our political foe are vacant in so many ways, emotional children and virtue signallers.
The emotions of envy and a belief in entitlement, severe racism due to collectivism, the terrible lying, etc, we know well and understand, but it is good to know they have nothing up their sleeves unexpected.
We know our enemy well.
Thanks Tom.
I’ve been through Kyneton many times.
Beautiful area
Last night I travelled over the bridge and went south of Park street for the first time in years. Just checking out old haunts around Leichhardt.
So I drunk in one night what would normally cover weeks.
When you say sozzled, I am hearing ya!
struth
#2980867, posted on April 6, 2019 at 8:37 am
I’ve been through Kyneton many times.
Beautiful area
Zig Zag Rd Drummond.
God’s gift to mankind, in a good year the grass will be 3 feet high.
Baldrick
They lapped up the chronic patronizing as so many do.
I installed DuckDuckGo on my phone but it seems that when I use it my phone defaults to the external service (Telstra) rather than my WLAN which works for everything else.
Is there a setting I have missed? Or is DuckDuckGo protecting my privacy from myself?
The ongoing suffering of contemporary Western women:
‘Fat chicks shouldn’t wear lycra’: The trauma of being heckled while exercising.
Mark A,
Are you a Turpins Falls veteran?
Great childhood memories of trying to kill myself there.
I don’t get the one between Zanetti and Broelman.
Is it modern?
Trigger warning!
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/04/05/gillette-venus-ad-campaign-features-obese-trans-models/
Ok. I’m ready. Gonna watch it now, then will report back.
Wish me luck.
Shit, a night at the Cat with just banter and no vacuous attention seeking. Great!
Some good news for wool producers.
I love the export company’s spokesman’s name. 🙂
Also in the sidebar is an old story (2018) about one of my hobbyhorses – the true cost of textiles. Worth thinking about, especially when filling up the trolley with cheap sh*t.
More to shave , good for business.
Do you want vacuous attention seeking, Nick?
I can do that. What degree of vacuousity do you require? 😄
No, no. The follicles are just more widely spaced.
Or so I believe.
No watermelon?
Awful.
Mater
#2980873, posted on April 6, 2019 at 8:45 am
Mark A,
Are you a Turpins Falls veteran?
Great childhood memories of trying to kill myself there.
Who isn’t who lived around there?
Not quite as daring myself, we have a spring fed dam, it was enough for me.
Oh, the deceptive warm top layer of water to dive in only to get shocked breathless by the freezing lower layers.
Memories, memories, just on the right side of sixty by a whisker, but I would love to go back to those more innocent times.
It’s too early for that young lady
Kyneton. Kelly’s Pub still there? Used to be one of our stops when playing rugby away. Was a great friendly place as I remember.
Indeed.
And sadly enough they wear the least blame for the Libs and Nats debacle. Those who caused it are not running again, they are retiring with their ministerial pensions. If they retired when the Coalition were the Opposition the pensions would be much smaller.
Out of that lot Tony Abbott seems to be the only one who is willing to fight to the end.
Scum is as scum does.
“Frank Walker from National Tiles
#2980845, posted on April 6, 2019 at 7:34 am
Good god now numbers is actually shilling for Cuba.”
Scumbers has been a shill for Cuba for quite a while.
Would there actually be more to shave, or would the follicles just be more spread out?
Always mindful of the big issues, I am.
Oops! Calli beat me to it.
Thanks Tom,
A.F.Branco #1 today
Yes, Calli, the Chinese have figured out how to manufacture a high demand product from crossbred wool that was always a low value byproduct.
Merinos are still far more valuable in dollars of wool per head, but crossbred wool now worth paying attention to.
Bit of innovation changes things rapidly.
Comrade mates did well.
Rock Doctor,
As described by Mark A, Kyneton isn’t what it once was.
You could drop by for a virtue refreshing, gluten free, skinny soy latte at Duck, Duck, Goose & Larder…with a side of cold filtered Kale juice.
Ready or not, Bill Shorten will be changing Australia
The Australian Editorial
“Women and men of Australia,” Bill Shorten began on Thursday, echoing the focus groups echoing Gough echoing Curtin. The Opposition Leader has downshifted into very old-school Labor for the coming campaign, not a Hawke or Keating motif in sight. In his budget in reply address, as close to an election launch speech you will hear in parliament, Mr Shorten brought all the strands together of the policy manifesto Labor has been plotting after it lost office in 2013. Not since Fightback in 1993 has an opposition offered such a radical departure from the mind-numbing, slogan-rich faux campaigns of recent times, when two tribes did not go to war. Mr Shorten should be praised for offering up a broad-ranging scheme, something alternative prime ministers have not been brave enough to do. He intends to do nothing less than rattle the country’s values, redistributing income from old to young, rich to poor.
Labor’s fiscal plan would require more spending, more revenue and greater intervention in the labour market and economy — the antithesis of its successful record of economic management and reform under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating from 1983 to 1996. Over his final six budgets as treasurer, Mr Keating kept average real spending growth to zero. Taxation as a share of the economy fell to 22 per cent when he was prime minister; it is now 25 per cent. Shorten Labor is raising an extra $200 billion in revenue over 10 years by cracking down on negative gearing, doubling capital gains tax, ending cash refunds for excess franking credits, raising taxes on discretionary trusts, and slugging high earners with a 2 per cent budget repair levy.
Labor’s tax magic pudding — also fed by fiscal drag and high export prices — will be splurged on a vast array of shiny things, from education to health, electric vehicles to motorways. “We will put back every single dollar the Liberals have cut from public schools and public hospitals,” Mr Shorten said. Labor is reviving the age of entitlement, when everyone scored a handout from Canberra, paid for by those working towards the higher end of the income scale. “Australians deserve the best,” Mr Shorten declared, as long as someone else pays for it. Labor believes the Coalition’s plan for a flatter income tax structure — bringing the top marginal rate for 94 per cent of workers to 30c in the dollar in 2024 — is the work of right-wing extremists. Instead, it will direct tax cuts to those who pay the least, in raw dollars or as a percentage of their incomes, as part of its Fair Go Action Plan. Labor plans to change industrial laws to favour the lowest paid with a “living wage”. “We’ve tried it their way, the invisible hand, leave it to the market — we know how that ends,” Mr Shorten said of stagnant wages. Didn’t Labor create this system?
Much of the electorate is oblivious to the vast scale of change being proposed, as Labor has zeroed in on fleecing the aged asset-rich and high earners in a precision strike on enterprise and self-reliance clunky class warrior Wayne Swan could only dream about. Under the banner of intergenerational fairness, Mr Shorten is exploiting generation Y and millennials’ fear of missing out: the property game and tax system is stacked against you because boomer property investors are abusing negative gearing. Mr Shorten promises a better deal for gen Spotify, not lectures about “smashed avo” from Double J oldies. In this inter-gen equity vein, Labor promises “real action” — last used by Tony Abbott in 2010 — on climate change, “for the sake of the Australia we hand on to our children”.
Mr Shorten, who ran the father of all scare campaigns at the 2016 election on health, accuses his opponents of trading on fear. He claims the Coalition is fixated on telling people to be afraid of change, new ideas, the future and of each other. “We choose hope over fear,” Mr Shorten said. But the Labor leader pushed his own fear buttons in the community, perhaps leaving some people with false hopes that he can fix their problems. The attention-grabbing Medicare cancer plan swung the fiscal debate to health, rather than the surplus, which was the Morrison government’s budget selling point. Mr Shorten used the word “cure”, carefully, in relation to the C-word, the “emperor of all maladies”. In a nation where every second person will be diagnosed with cancer at some stage in life, it is the epitome of health fears. Labor has got your attention. Even in budget week, the Coalition’s set-piece economic extravaganza, Mr Shorten has steered the conversation to Medicare, a policy area where Labor can never lose.
If Mr Shorten wins the election, and he has been the frontrunner for a very long time, fairness will get a makeover. It will be on for young and old. Greed will be out but envy will be OK. Aspiration will struggle for breath while every second person will drive an electric vehicle, restoring, Mr Shorten says, three very precious words: Made in Australia. Canberra will play a bigger part in your life. On his last legs in the 1996 campaign, Mr Keating sounded a dire warning: “When the government changes, the country changes.” The coming election is make or break for the nation, a fork in the road. If voters change the government, strap yourselves in for a wild ride.
No,way would I give them a red cent of my hard earned. I show up, have my name crossed off and then write rude words on the ballot paper. Very cathartic, no party gets funding on the basis of my first preference. This year AC will get my first preference if they run anyone in the safe Labor seat. If they don’t then it’s PHON.
I have a suspicion that once again it will be the major parties, Greens and animal justice fruit loops. Besides, the real action in this election is in the Senate.
Nation cursed by taxing obsession
Katrina Grace Kelly
The talk of the town is the Treasurer, who gave a solid performance on the floor of the house this week.
Launching the Coalition’s election manifesto via the latest budget, Josh Frydenberg repeated the phrase “without raising taxes” again and again.
From the television in our house, these words sang out and fell like sweet rain on parched ground. What a tease you are, Treasurer — if only this promised day would one day come. Imagine, a government that doesn’t raise taxes — what a beautiful idea. It is the same idea that was put long ago by this government before it was elected. And the same idea that disappeared as soon as this government gained power.
If we think of the past few years there have been tax cuts, true, and these have been appreciated. After all, we are all connected, whether rich or poor, business owner or employee, and when any government takes less tax off any one of us, it has to broadly ratchet down costs for everyone else.
This government has also had plans to cut taxes and those plans have been thwarted by the Senate to the detriment of the common good. But this government has raised taxes, against its promises, against the principles it is supposed to stand for, and against the wishes of its supporters, again and again.
Yes, Labor has plans to tax the living daylights out of us, but the Coalition has a poor record when it comes to raising taxes, and this detracts from its election messaging.
Take, for instance, the high income deficit levy, introduced by Tony Abbott, when he was prime minister. This was a shock, and to supporters a gut-wrenching betrayal that won’t be forgotten.
The deficit levy was a blunder because it has had adverse consequences for us all in the longer term. It opened the gate for Labor to justify bringing it in permanently and, accordingly, it has plans to do so.
Any fool could have foreseen this and it defies belief that those in charge didn’t. So if Labor wins, and puts the highest rate of income tax up by 2 per cent, that is Abbott’s legacy to carry.
Next, remember the way the government mugged our banks.
There was no justification for the bank levy, which is set at 0.015 per cent, paid each quarter on, essentially, a bank’s sources of funding. This tax was framed as forcing the sector to make a fair contribution to the economy, to improve competition and accountability and to complement prudential reforms.
In reality it was a money grab, an opportunistic mugging that came out of nowhere and took advantage of popular opinion running against big banks.
Then, think back to when the GST was applied to overseas purchases under $1000. This was a pointless tax and not fit for purpose. It hasn’t helped the retail sector, it has proved to have widespread noncompliance and it has just made the purchase of some items more expensive for no good reason.
Finally, who can forget the government’s attack on self-funded retirees?
All of a sudden it was discovered superannuation was being used as a wealth creation vehicle (was it ever supposed to be anything else?) and a decision was made to crack down on it.
The rules were changed on people who had already run their race and passed the finish line.
Government members now campaign indignantly against Labor’s “retiree tax” while conveniently overlooking their own shameful history.
The Coalition says efficient economic management is its main product differentiation with Labor. It says under the Coalition, taxes will always be lower. It points on its website http://www.laborstaxbill.com.au, where Labor’s taxes are all listed, to Bill Shorten as “the greatest risk to Australia’s economy in a generation”.
The problem is that as much as people want to punish the Coalition, and as much as it deserves that punishment in spades, Labor’s new taxes, if introduced, will make wealth creation in this country considerably more difficult.
Labor’s taxes will punish ordinary people. So, if Labor wins, we can presume mainstream Australia has turned a corner, made a definite decision individual wealth creation is not desirable, not required, and even frowned on.
Further, as readers of The Australian know, more than half the households in this country pay no net tax, once welfare and benefits are taken into account. The only people who can be frightened by the prospect of higher taxes under Labor are people who think they will pay those taxes, and that seems to be not very many people at all.
The Treasurer might look to the US. In 2012, American politician and presidential candidate Mitt Romney said there was a group of voters he could never win over — people who paid no tax: “There are 47 per cent of the people who will vote for the president (Barack Obama) no matter what. There are 47 per cent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it … so our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.”
For those who care about tax, it rankles that the government talks about not raising taxes with the zeal of the newly religious. The Coalition is damned by its record but it must think voters will forgive it if they think the other mob will tax us more. And here is where we find ourselves, staring down the barrel of a future where we will be taxed highly or exorbitantly. It’s the frying pan or the fire, I’m afraid.
Katrina Grace Kelly
Columnist
Katrina Grace Kelly is a regular columnist with the Australian. Her early years were spent in the Labour movement, before she started her own industrial relations consulting business.
Mater
#2980894, posted on April 6, 2019 at 9:11 am
Sad if it has gone that way. Had great fun as a 20 something in that part of Victoria and the hospitality even to a drunk mixed bunch of rugby players disgorging from a bus into pubs from The Black Duck Inn near Ballarat to many others especially further towards Geelong & Melton on lonely country roads was second to none.
Though I do remember Daylesford was already going that way then, saw a bakery empty of big burly guys when we couldn’t get a meat pie once. It was a vegetarian bakery.
Was fine right up to the age of 60. One of the girls at work remarked about my rapid respiratory rate. A year later and I had a defibrillator/pacemaker in and was exhausted after a morning shower.
Getting hit by the old age bus was no joke.
Cost me four peak earning years – lost about $450k in income.
From the Oz. Anyone imagine the scenario? “The school has rung, again. Little Mohammed has threatened to behead the teacher, again, and Fatima has called all the girls in the class “Western sluts” for not wearing a veil…”
Regarding the Sultan of Brunei and his sharia law.
Hotel workers around the world should be looking out for his relatives and ministers etc participating in activities that are considered non Islamic. For example when they order in, cough, “room service”.
When is Quantas going to cut all ties with Brunei airline etc.
Zyconoclast:
Any tax on energy is a direct tax on business efficiency and growth prospects.
Think about what would happen in Australia if all the taxes on fuel/electricity were abolished tomorrow.
Energy taxes kill economies.
She’s very good and doesn’t talk bullshit – just objectively reports reality.
That being the gliberals are a high taxing hypocritical opportunist pack of lying shitbags.
Unfortunately I am one of them. This situation will change after a braindead electorate with the collective memory of a goldfish re-elects those criminal inbred drooling squandermonkey cretins in about 6-8 weeks time.
No, you can no longer steal any of my heard earned, you useless grubby bludgers. Go and thieve it from someone else.
Thanks Tom – Ramirez nails it.
F.M.S.
No, you can no longer steal any of my heard earned, you useless grubby bludgers.
Damn you Percy! How did you manage that?
Are you retired and living off Centrelink?
Reminds me of ALP/Greens. Only names are changed.
err, no. Still a wage slave.
2GB DT says USA is full.
Daylesford, Kyneton, Castlemaine, Maldon, Trentham, Woodend…have all been infected with the parasite.
That is: Tree Changers selling up in Melbourne for big money, buying in the country for a dime, retiring on the leftovers (and a generous public service pension) and then spending their ample spare time defining their new lives by f*cking with everyone else’s.
Of course, the camp followers are always not far behind, to cater to their essentials (vegan cafe owners, trinket shops, yoga instructors, etc).
They are like a plague of locusts, but without the redeeming features.
Syphilis Spudpeeler opens his basement door and finds some unexpected guests.
You see that a bit up my way too. You can pick ‘em by the whingey letters they write to the local rag.
Mick Jagger not touring, while recuperating. How much is he losing?
Like the one’s who buy five acres in grape growing country, and spend all their time complaining about noisy machinery, and the use of chemicals?
NSW too.
Note well the media’s careful management of the Biden Situation.
Specifically, notice how they’re discussing it as a ‘woman issue’ – with Biden as a good-hearted, albeit overly tactile, duffer. Scrubbed from the ensemble of disturbing concerns are the repeated, multiple instances of his physical interference with small children and pubescent girls. Also missing in action: those established charges of Biden deliberately exposing himself to female Secret Service personnel. The media is trying to Move On.
—————–
Biden himself is so confident of his Democrat privilege that he is already laughing with the boys about groping and molestation:
Biden, in First Speech Following Allegations About Him, Jokes About Inappropriate Touching.
Pride comes before a fall.
Duterte: Philippine Troops Will ‘Prepare for Suicide Missions’ if China Seizes Disputed Island
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/04/05/duterte-philippine-troops-will-prepare-for-suicide-missions-if-china-seizes-disputed-island/
May 2016. Port Augusta power station closes.
Aug 2017. Spasms of ecstasy from Weatherdill, who magically conjures up the other 95% of SA’s energy.
Now. Reality hits, despite having $110M guaranteed
governmenttaxpayer funding( approx 17% of total cost)Biden is classic political class. Never had a real job in his life. They really the enemies of the people.
Oh.. and a handy hint as to why the libs in SA can never (and probably should not) win.
FMD
The interconnectors to Victoriastan, Taxmania and SA should all be cut.
Sod them. Let them all whinge incessantly in the dark.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-06/grazier-scott-harris-fined-illegal-land-clearing
She said an approval would undermine the half a billion dollars the Federal Government has spent on the reef, and could also potentially cause UNESCO to finally list the reef as an “in danger” World Heritage site.
“It could potentially put the Great Barrier Reef at risk of being on that ‘in danger’ list and being taken off the World Heritage list,” she said.
“If that happens the impact to industry will be absolutely catastrophic.”
Obey shortreich Tyranny, or transnational Tyrannical cartels will crush you, using conventions signed by the retured stabby mcstabbyface bishop and the turnbullites.
The Federal Court in November forced the Government to apply more rigorous assessment of the environmental impacts of the Kingvale clearing after a legal challenge by a conservation group.
Lawfare.
Scott Harris and his company were fined $450,000 in the Cairns Magistrates Court last month for illegally clearing 2,875 hectares of native vegetation at Strathmore Station in Queensland’s Gulf Country.
Rewilding of the North, or cropping of the North.
What will the chicoms be doing with it in thirty years?.
Comrade belt and road loansharks.
Meat is too good for the poor people say their left.
“When you’ve got the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Richard Branson investing millions or tens of millions of dollars in this alternative source of meat, it’s something to be very concerned about.”
Mr Puharich said despite his clarion call for action, he was confident Australia’s meat industry could meet any future challenges.
His own company will open a butcher shop in New York later this year, modelled on its Victor Churchill concept in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, which is possibly the most expensive, extravagant outlet of its kind in the world.
Nine years ago, the company converted the oldest continuously-run butcher shop in Australia into a retail outlet — and won an international interior design award for it.
The late American food writer Anthony Bourdain called it the most beautiful butcher shop in the world.
“A temple of meat, a dream, a gift,” he said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-06/cofounder-sydney-butcher-says-australians-should-eat-less-meat/10967936
I didn’t even last until my 40th birthday. Woke up New Years Day 12 years ago with shingles caused by what was thought to be lymphoma but was sarcoidosis. Doc reckons it’s inactive but I’ve never been the same since.
2GB listener: A socialist is someone who wants all you have, except your job.
How could you ever vote LNP again after what has transpired over the last five years.
err, no. Still a wage slave
OK, then either working in the cash economy or a properly-taxed entity overseas.
Not at all for a true-blue, you-beaut, fair-dinkum, ridgie-didge, Ozzie Oi Oi employer with courageous, good-looking, bronzed management whose excrement doesn’t smell… which includes all of the fucked-up, gorm-less, scum-sucking, morals-free, leftard-full, cowardly private and public “enterprises” in this [email protected] third-world-status aspiring country.
Lucky you.
Simonetta Stefanelli. She was 16 at the time. Couldn’t get away with that nowadays.
Her daughter Violante Placido is also a major hottie.
mh, I think there is an election coming up, thus the bamboo rattling. The Chicoms will continue to pay money to the right people and it will go back to the normal level of paid subservience.
While regarding their own private property as sacrosanct.
err, no. Still a wage slave
OK, then either working in the cash economy or a properly-taxed entity overseas.
Not at all for a true-blue, you-beaut, fair-dinkum, ridgie-didge, Ozzie Oi Oi employer with courageous, good-looking, bronzed management whose excrement doesn’t smell… which includes all of the f’ecked-up, gorm-less, scum-sucking, morals-free, leftard-full, cowardly private and public “enterprises” in this [email protected] third-world-status aspiring country.
Lucky you.
Kelly’s has been shut for about 5 yrs. another victim of RBT and mandatory loss of licence over.05. Pub drinking is dead and so go the pubs and so goes another facet of country life. 41 places to get a latte but. Am told that some traditions die hard, blokes standing in front of the red brick grandstand smashing tins on Saturday arvo in the winter. And wishing the worst on the scum from up the road. There’s still a hard core of dissidents behind the goats cheese curtain. I
How could you ever vote ALP again after what has transpired over the last 78 years.
From the Oz
Just sent this email to Mitch Fifield…
Jamie Dimon: US ‘absolutely’ right to enter trade war, despite short-term economic toll
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/jamie-dimon-it-was-absolutely-right-for-the-us-to-enter-trade-war.html?__twitter_impression=true&recirc=taboolainternal
Oi! Some of us are “outriders”.
Fredo ?
Seems the Labor Party will be wheeling out Paul Keating and Bill Kelty as “elder statesmen” during the election campaign. Will anyone be unkind enough to ask about “the recession we had to have?”
Why if we put that billion dollars per year into paying back the national debt … it would take a mere 700 years to finish paying it back, not including state and territory governments, and presuming interest didn’t stack up.
too stupid to survive
let’s be honest they did drag it down to near zero then realised that capitalism was what works.
Nation cursed by taxing obsession – Katrina Grace Kelly
Yeah, she’s Ok, but it’s like praising the best of a bad bunch.
Her brain doesn’t connect power prices and subsidies and the corporatism and other massive expenses smacked upon the average Aussie.
When your electrickery bill is closing your business down, and your domestic bill has gone from $150 a month to $900 under Liberals, you would have to suggest that our combined state and federal governments are purely , and criminally extorting us of all our wealth, and ruining the country.
So, yeah, she’s good but a little too soft on the situation.
Winning the most improved award.
Even for that they required import of massive amounts of Western technology.
Excuse me but I thought royal commissions got whatever they asked for or the refuseniks could be jailed. By what legal right does Victoria Police redact documents and refuse to answer questions?
Imagine if Bernardi had the smarts to declare that he’d be looking into it, to just declare if elected, he’d look at cutting funding, not even closing it down, just cutting funding.
he’d have all the free press he could ever wish for.
Pepper pig and B1 and B2 would be slashing their wrists.
What was the reply, by the way?
What piss weak diversion was used?
Commiserations on your loss Bushkid.
Labor politicians led by example during the Red Shirt scandal.
Been watching this with interest. There’s a fun dynamic of outrageous outrage from the feministas moderated by he’s one-of-us puff pieces. Extremely schizzo. Smolett is getting similar treatment.
On such topics I’m amused by the coverage of Rachel Orangegal. She’s also getting the buff and spray from the media having been caught diddling the welfare system.
Rachel Dolezal resolves welfare fraud case with agreement to fine, community service (today)
I love the “agreement” bit. If I get pulled over by plod for speeding can I negotiate an agreement like Orangegal and Smurfette?
Oi! Some of us are “outriders”.
If you run a company within the Standard-Model Oz corporate-ATO framework you cannot be an outrider, just a willing victim on a journey to final acceptance of your fate.
The only “outriders” are the ones with the courage to transgress the strangulating, stifling bureaucracies which employ over 30% of us mugs.
If so, good luck to you. Don’t ever divulge your secret(s)!
What you learn from Watching the Best Grand Tour Special –
Just watched the Grand Tour Special on Mongolia (only reason I subscribe to Amazon Prime)
An excellent History Lesson on Genghis Khan
10 Brutal Moments In The Conquests Of Genghis Khan
5. He Exterminated 1.7 Million People To Avenge One Person
When Toquchar was killed by an archer from Nishapur, his wife demanded vengeance. Genghis Khan’s troops attacked Nishapur and slaughtered every person there. By some estimates, 1,748,000 people were killed. Other historians dispute that number, but there’s no doubt that his armies killed everyone they found.
Women, children, babies, and cats were tracked down and murdered. Then they were beheaded, and their skulls were piled into pyramids—a request by Genghis Khan’s daughter to ensure that no one got away with a simple wounding.
As Richard Hammond said, horrible about the Women, children and babies but good use of cats.
The Grand Tour trio travel to Mongolia for a special episode of the show
but Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t exactly have fond memories of the journey. The new episode sees Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May forced to survive on basic rations, most crucially without alcohol, as they venture across Mongolia. While it proves one of the best episodes of the season so far, Clarkson would seemingly rather disregard it from memory entirely.
Posting on Twitter, Clarkson wrote: ‘I really hope you enjoy the Grand Tour Mongolia Special as much as I hated making it.’
Despite the pain though, Clarkson believes it’s the best episode they’ve ever done of the show.
‘Actually, I’ll say it,’ Clarkson wrote. ‘The Grand Tour Mongolia Special is the best we’ve ever done. It really really is worth watching.’
And I totally agree with Jeremy Clakrson – ‘The Grand Tour Mongolia Special is the best we’ve ever done. It really really is worth watching.’
Chincoms are shit…………hopeless and arrogant.
But they are criminals.
They would not be competing on the world stage at all if their socialist mates at the UN hadn’t tied both hands of western countries behind their backs with environmentalism, making it impossible to compete.
One country, the USA, breaks away from Paris and all other bullshit and the chinks are shitting themselves.
Imagine a resource rich country like Australia unshackled and with a decent I policy, and a few other western capitalist counties freed…………
together China wouldn’t stand a chance, and would have to drop socialism completely.
It’s winning by corruption of world trade.
Sloane Stephens is a colorful character. All forgiven?
The warning has been there for decades that antismokers (misocapnists/capnophobes) are seriously deluded. They are neurotic, bigoted, pathological liars, and have a superiority if not a “god” complex. We’ve had to endure an avalanche of baseless/exaggerated, highly inflammatory claims of the “dangers” of tobacco smoke, from firsthand smoke to secondhand smoke and, now, “thirdhand smoke”. With support/funding by governments and the mega-wealthy, the antismoking derangement just keeps expanding. It goes on, and on, and on, and on…..
The latest from a [five-star] gathering of these pontificating, authoritarian plonkers:
Smoking is slavery and against human rights, activists say
Smoking is a form of slavery and is completely incompatible with widely recognised human rights, activists against smoking have said.
“I am absolutely convinced that smoking is slavery and it goes against the human right for life and health. We should engage our work with activists in the human health field,” Francisco Rodriguez Lozano, president of the European Network for Smoking and Tobacco Prevention (ENSP) told EURACTIV.
https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2019/04/freedom-is-slavery.html
Ever heard of Crapcisco Lozano or the European Network for Smoking and Tobacco Prevention (ENSP)? Take a look at the tweet from Snowden’s article as these pretentious plops, snout burn from the funds-topped trough, gathered for the “Global Forum on Human Rights and a Tobacco Free World”.
“There has to be a red line about #tobacco just as there is one about not having sex with a 2 years old!” Clear& strong message from @dinamired
There we have it. Smoking is “like” having sex with a two year old. This is what comes from the mire that is the antismoking mentality. If there’s one thing that these egomaniacs are good at, it’s incoherent analogy and contortions of definitions. They backslap each other into a neurotic frenzy. Take a good look at these wankers for they are your “superiors”. These nitwits actually believe that they have their fingers on the pulse of the universe – superior to most, and that the world should be thankful that they are here to “fix” the world. The Dunning-Kruger Effect comes to mind.
With “diversity” and “inclusion” as the buzz words of the time, it could well be asked how antismoking (i.e., fear and hate-mongering) has been allowed to flourish: Those who smoke must be denormalised, stigmatised, and robbed through extortionate taxes as a matter of government policy, typically on the basis of inflammatory propaganda.
This is their time… the shallow and superficial. It’s the time of the dangerously stupid as they go about “fixing” the world.
Remember that this all began in the late-1980s with smoking banned on short-haul flights in the USA. At the time the prohibitionists squealed, “what’s so unreasonable about that?”
The sun is out, the sky is blue and some good racing at Randwick today.
Regarding Zulus post last night of the Angels Am I ever going to see your face again . No way get F&$#$. F&$#@ Off
Can I suggest Scomo play this over the phone whenever he receives a request from ISIS fighters or their supporters who are wanting to return to Australia.
Good and loud because that’s what I yell at the TV every time I hear this BS.
Over the last few years there has been a push to ban smoking in apartment complexes, part of the denormalisation program – one less place for smokers to smoke. That there is no good reason for such bans is no obstacle to the antismoking cult. Just spin some inflammatory crap.
Here’s an example from Canada:
ONLINE PETITION CALLS TO BAN SMOKING IN CONDOS ACROSS BC
https://604now.com/petition-ban-smoking-in-condos-bc-2019/
Here’s the online petition:
https://www.change.org/p/honourable-selina-robinson-multi-dwelling-unit-smoking-ban-in-bc
It’s fear and hate-mongering, standard fare for the antismoking disciples.
The creators of the petition think they are oh so “progressive”, so “informed”. Rather, they are gullible, brainwashed nitwits that have lapped up the inflammatory propaganda. They are now disciples of the antismoking cult. Great work!
..
Until you change the system.
Labour and Liberal are similar, paid for, globalist butt chums.
Long term, the party system must realign to reflect the major issue of the day: globalism vs sovereign nationhood.
At the moment the system still reflects an old class divide which no longer is the way most people define themselves.
The way to change the system is to break the existing party system.
That is to make it unattractive to the careerists that currently inhabit it, and through it, office.
The answer is simple, and one which Australians have a natural tendency to do: throw the bums out of office on a regular basis.
The minor parties must band together in mutual interest to preference the existing member of any seat last.
That is all.
Voters will back a campaign to “Throw the bums out”.
Simple message, effective in that it will ensure that joining the uni- party will no longer be a ticket to a lucrative career.
Good sitting members who work hard and have a good reputation will resist the campaign. Good.
It will take a few election cycles for this campaign to really bite, but bite it will.
The best thing about the “Throw the bums out” campaign is that it will appeal equally to people on both the left and right of the traditional divide.
Alternative parties across the spectrum will resonate to a campaign to rid ourselves of these careerist pigs.
Speech To Global Forum On Human Rights And A Tobacco-Free World In Bucharest
http://www.vitalstrategies.org/ceo-perspective/speech-to-the-global-forum-on-human-rights-and-a-tobacco-free-world-in-bucharest-romania/
Seriously? Are they invoking the word ‘Statesman’?
Remember how Gough was supposed to have been Australia’s most senior statesman? Guy was dumped from office because he mismanaged the GG, this dismissal achieved by Fraser blocking supply – a tactic Gough had repeatedly tried without success from opposition – his governments self-purported legitimacy wiped away by a landslide election, and then him not entrusted with any role of statecraft for the rest of his life-stretched-out-like-Gollum existence.
Yet Labour insisted on calling him “Australia’s most senior statesman”.
I think the silly old duffer twigged that the best thing he could do was keep his mouth shut and let others praise him according to their own dim and febrile lights: let the myth of the limping, scurrilously betrayed stoic giant linger as his legacy rather than opening his trap and confirming his unparalleled mediocrity.
But they say “Statesman”.
Now Keating – a shrunken husk sitting in a dusty gloomy room while his French Clocks taunt him, marking every new second lost to him – a tragic Greek figure suffering exemplary punishment like Tantalus, or Sisyphus, or Prometheus.
And Bill Kelty is not even a man. He gets ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’ as a courtesy to inanimate objects which have a natural protective interest in the word ‘it’. And state? Apart from not being a gas there is nothing ‘state’ about him.
Re Gillette’s bold approach to capturing a wider group of consumers.
Until Gillette incorporates a telescopic handle for the fatties who often are so layered with blubber that they can’t reach far enough to wipe their arses and throw in a sack of flour to roll then in, the current campaign is nothing more than virtue signaling.
The “outrider” was an unsubtle dig, not at you Gilas.
I am not going to prison for tax fraud. If that makes me a willing victim, so be it.
And I am not going to break any other laws to “stick it to da man”, including those governing building standards.
is what I “Oi’d” at. I know the ones you mean. Trying to make a profit honestly in today’s market is hard enough. Business is running against the trend (30% down this last month generally) so I must be doing something right.
A thousand words of bubblewaffle, Struth, punctuated by “the ABC Amendment (Fair and Balanced) Bill 2017″ – which still hasn’t passed.
Truly embarrassing.
Global Forum on Human Rights and a Tobacco-Free World
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/andriukaitis/announcements/global-forum-human-rights-and-tobacco-free-world_en
Yep. Of course. It’s for The Children™.
You can do that already … you don’t need Cori Bernardi to write your preferences for you.
Sure, it might be helpful if the minor parties campaigned along those lines, but that’s nothing to do with the voting system. Anyone can put the incumbent last … fine idea I’m all for it … we have the power to do that.
In any sensible society, the mere concept of wheeling out a shitbag confrontationist such as kelty would be the kiss of death for labor’s electoral prospects.
He is an odious prick who has done very well out of the workers.
White fright: the future of the West’s white majorities
By Eric Kaufmann
We need to talk about white identity. Not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached: an ethnic identity like any other.
In the West, even without immigration, we’re becoming mixed race. This is not speculation but is virtually guaranteed by the rates of intermarriage occurring in many Western countries.
Projections reveal that faster immigration may slow the process by bringing in racially unmixed individuals, but in a century those of mixed race will be the largest group in countries such as Britain, America and Australia. In two centuries, few people living in urban areas of the West will have an unmixed racial background. Most who do will be immigrants or members of anti-modern religious groups like the ultra-Orthodox Jews. The reflex is to think of this futuristically, as bringing forth increased diversity, or the advent of a “new man”, but if history is our guide, things are likely to turn out quite differently.
Many people desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory. This means we’re more likely to experience what I term whiteshift, a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions. Naturally there will be contestation, with cosmopolitans lauding exotic origins, but most people will probably airbrush their polyglot lineage out of the story to focus on their European provenance.
Whiteshift has a second, more immediate, connotation: the declining white share of the population in Western countries. International migration has a long history: the share of the world’s people living in a different country from the one they were born in has risen only modestly since 1960. But there has been a big rise in the number of people leaving “global south” regions such as Africa, Latin America and developing Asia, including the Middle East.
This figure more than doubled between 1990 and 2015 as 54 million people immigrated to Western countries. While nearly 40 per cent of those moving to European countries came from within Europe, 60 per cent arrived from beyond it. Moreover, the vast majority of immigrants to North America came from the global south — a big change from the period before 1980.
Whites are already a minority in most major cities of North America. Together with New Zealand, North America is projected to be “majority minority” by 2050, with Western Europe and Australia following suit later in the century. This shift is replacing the self-confidence of white majorities with an existential insecurity channelled by the lightning rod of immigration. No one who has honestly analysed survey data on individuals — the gold standard for public opinion research — can deny that white majority concern over immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist Right in the West. This is primarily explained by concern over identity, not economic threat. Not everyone seeks to maintain connections to ancestors, homeland and tradition, but many voters do.
Those with a conservative psychological make-up wish to maintain continuity with the past. For them, ethnic change is the irritant, not levels of diversity. Voters with an authoritarian profile, by contrast, seek order and security. Diversity, whether ethnic or ideological, however long its provenance, is problematic because it disrupts a sense of harmony and cohesion. Thus for authoritarians, high levels of ethnic diversity are as much the problem as ethnic change. Even if the rate of change stays constant, high diversity levels increase discontent among those who value existential security and stability.
As Western cities have been overwhelmingly white within living memory, today’s ethnic shifts are triggering both conservative and authoritarian responses. Many people have fond memories of youth, viewing this time as their halcyon days. Older conservatives look back on the way things were with profound nostalgia. Since Western populations are ageing, with the share over 60 projected to reach 30-45 per cent of various countries’ populations by 2050, the average voter is getting older.
The difference between nations’ current ethnic composition and their makeup at the time today’s median voter was 20 years old is widening. Given that old people vote at much higher rates than young adults, their nostalgia is an important ingredient in the rise of right-wing populism. On the other hand, today’s young people are growing up with greater diversity, so begin with more polyglot memories.
With some exceptions, they are less likely to support anti-immigration politics. If the rate of ethnic change slackens, the difference between the ethnic composition of “golden age” memories and current reality will narrow, which could weaken support for right-wing populism.
The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural Left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalisations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks.
At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural Left, with its dream of radical social transformation. This anti-majority adversary culture operates on a large scale, permeates major institutions and is transmitted to conservatives through social and right-wing media. This produces a growing “culture wars” polarisation between increasingly insecure white conservatives and energised, white, small-l liberals.
In the 1960s, the countercultural movement that I term left-modernism developed a theory of white ethno-racial oppression. Its outlook superseded the logical, empirically grounded, left-liberal civil rights movement after 1965 to become a millenarian project sustained by the image of a retrograde white “other”.
Today, left-modernism’s most zealous exponents are those seeking to consecrate the university campus as a sacred space devoted to the mission of replacing “whiteness” with diversity.
In softer form, this ideology penetrated widely within the high culture and political institutions of Western society after the 60s. It produced norms that prevented democratic discussion of questions of national identity and immigration.
Declaring these debates deviant in the name of anti-racism introduced a blockage in the democratic process, preventing the normal adjustment of political supply to political demand. Instead of reasonable trade-offs between those who, for example, wanted higher or lower levels of immigration, the subject was forced underground, building up pressure from those whose grievances were ignored by the main parties. This created an opportunity that populist right-wing entrepreneurs rushed in to fill.
Ethno-cultural change is occurring at a rapid rate at precisely the time the dominant ideology celebrates a multicultural vision of ever-increasing diversity. To hanker after homogeneity and stability is perceived as narrow-minded and racist by liberals. Yet diversity falls flat for many because we’re not all wired the same way. Right-wing populism, which champions the cultural interests of group-oriented whites, has halted and reversed the multicultural consensus that held sway between the 60s and late 90s. This is leading to a polarisation between those who accept and those who reject the ideology of diversity.
What’s needed is a new vision that gives conservative members of white majorities hope for their group’s future while permitting cosmopolitans the freedom to celebrate diversity. Cosmopolitanism and what I term ethno-traditional nationalism are both valid world views, but each suits a different psychological type. Imposing either on an entire population is a recipe for discontent because value orientations stem from heredity and early life experiences. Attempts to re-educate conservative and order-seeking people into cosmopolitanism will only generate resistance.
Differences need to be respected. My book White Shift is not just a prediction of how white identity will adapt to demographic change but a positive vision that can draw the sting of right-wing populism and begin to bridge the “nationalist-globalist” divide that is upending Western politics.
We are entering a period of cultural instability in the West attendant on our passage between two relatively stable equilibria. The first is based on white ethnic homogeneity, the second on what the prescient centrist writer Michael Lind calls “beige” ethnicity, a racially mixed majority group. We in the West are becoming less like homogeneous Iceland and more like homogeneous mixed-race Turkmenistan. But to get there we’ll be passing through a phase where we’ll move closer to multicultural Guyana or Mauritius. The challenge is to enable conservative whites to see a future for themselves in whiteshift — the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.
This is a process that is in its early stages and will take a century to complete. Until the mixed group emerges as a viable majority that identifies, and comes to be identified, as white, Western societies will experience considerable cultural turbulence.
American history offers a preview of what we’re in for. We should expect a civilisation-wide replay of the ethnic divisions that gripped the US between the late 1880s and 1960s, during which time the Anglo-Protestant majority declined to less than half the total but gradually absorbed Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their children into a reconstituted white majority oriented around a WASP archetype. This was achieved as immigration slowed and intermarriage overcame ethnic boundaries, a process that still has some way to run.
Notice that identifying with the white majority is not the same as being attached to a white Christian tradition of nationhood. Only those with at least some European ancestry can identify as members of the white majority. However, minorities may cherish the white majority as an important piece of their national identity: a tradition of nationhood. In the US, some 30 per cent of Latinos and Asians voted for Donald Trump and many lament the decline of white America.
In surveys taken soon after the August 2017 Charlottesville riots, 70 per cent of nearly 300 Latino and Asian Trump voters agreed that “whites are under attack in this country” and 53 per cent endorsed the idea that the country needed to “protect and preserve its white European heritage” — similar to white Trump voters.
Is a common national “we” not the solution to all this? I’m afraid not. Political scientists often differentiate “civic nations”, defined by loyalty to the state and its ideology, from “ethnic nations”, united by shared ancestry. All Western countries have been trying to promote civic conceptions of nationhood to include immigrants, but the populist Right shows that limiting nationhood to the American Creed, the French Republican tradition or “Australian values” doesn’t address the anxieties of conservative voters. These universalist, creedal conceptions of nationhood are necessary for unity but cannot provide deep identity in everyday life.
Ethnic nationhood, which restricts citizenship to members of the majority, is clearly a non-starter. But things aren’t so black and white. There is a third possibility — ethno-traditional nationhood, which values the ethnic majority as an important component of the nation alongside other groups. Ethno-traditional nationalists favour slower immigration to permit enough immigrants to voluntarily assimilate into the ethnic majority, maintaining the white ethno-tradition. The point is not to assimilate all diversity but to strike a balance between vibrant minorities and an enduring white Christian tradition.
This is the first of two exclusive extracts from the book White Shift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, published by Allen Lane and out now. Copyright © 2019 Eric Kaufmann. Look out for the second extract next week.
If they are in UNIparty or left of minor right wing parties, then absolutely great idea.
Up in here in Qld we had a TV add before last state election calling for putting the majors last………………………
Scottie Harris made the bad political mistake of going outside the approved area of land clearing. He has approval for about 60,000 ha or so all up I hear on Strathmore. The greenies of course would have a team watching his every move via satellite, and would have been onto the government the moment his D11s moved across the approved boundary. Think about how easy that would be to do in dead flat Savannah woodland along a boundary tens of km long.
That said, 2500 ha certainly looks like an attempt to get away with more than approved. So they have thrown the book at him.
As for Kingvale, I didn’t realise it was in a reef catchment. I always thought it was west of the great divide on the King and Palmer Rivers, and those flow into the Gulf. Maybe the far eastern part of the property is.
Sheer gutlessness………………..
Doesn’t the charter also require impartiality and reflecting the breadth of views of Australians?
Instead the use the word ‘independent’ when justifying themselves instead of ‘impartial’ like the Ague or the Haemorrhoid, which means inpendently biased.
And the Minions of the ABC like to pretend that the role of the ABC is to ‘balance out’ the imagined right wing biases of commercial media – and yet I cannot think of a single topic where the ABC and the vast preponderance of commercial media disagree: AGW, SSM, Trump, indigenous issues, drowned Bedouin candidates etc.
The only difference is that the ABC is more intellectually pretentious.
Hardly a balance.
Amen to that, overburdened.
Odious with extra repulsiveness.
White fright: the future of the West’s white majorities
By Eric Kaufmann
We need to talk about white identity. Not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached: an ethnic identity like any other.
In the West, even without immigration, we’re becoming mixed race. This is not speculation but is virtually guaranteed by the rates of intermarriage occurring in many Western countries.
Projections reveal that faster immigration may slow the process by bringing in racially unmixed individuals, but in a century those of mixed race will be the largest group in countries such as Britain, America and Australia. In two centuries, few people living in urban areas of the West will have an unmixed racial background. Most who do will be immigrants or members of anti-modern religious groups like the ultra-Orthodox J#ws. The reflex is to think of this futuristically, as bringing forth increased diversity, or the advent of a “new man”, but if history is our guide, things are likely to turn out quite differently.
Many people desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory. This means we’re more likely to experience what I term whiteshift, a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions. Naturally there will be contestation, with cosmopolitans lauding exotic origins, but most people will probably airbrush their polyglot lineage out of the story to focus on their European provenance.
Whiteshift has a second, more immediate, connotation: the declining white share of the population in Western countries. International migration has a long history: the share of the world’s people living in a different country from the one they were born in has risen only modestly since 1960. But there has been a big rise in the number of people leaving “global south” regions such as Africa, Latin America and developing Asia, including the Middle East.
This figure more than doubled between 1990 and 2015 as 54 million people immigrated to Western countries. While nearly 40 per cent of those moving to European countries came from within Europe, 60 per cent arrived from beyond it. Moreover, the vast majority of immigrants to North America came from the global south — a big change from the period before 1980.
Whites are already a minority in most major cities of North America. Together with New Zealand, North America is projected to be “majority minority” by 2050, with Western Europe and Australia following suit later in the century. This shift is replacing the self-confidence of white majorities with an existential insecurity channelled by the lightning rod of immigration. No one who has honestly analysed survey data on individuals — the gold standard for public opinion research — can deny that white majority concern over immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist Right in the West. This is primarily explained by concern over identity, not economic threat. Not everyone seeks to maintain connections to ancestors, homeland and tradition, but many voters do.
Those with a conservative psychological make-up wish to maintain continuity with the past. For them, ethnic change is the irritant, not levels of diversity. Voters with an authoritarian profile, by contrast, seek order and security. Diversity, whether ethnic or ideological, however long its provenance, is problematic because it disrupts a sense of harmony and cohesion. Thus for authoritarians, high levels of ethnic diversity are as much the problem as ethnic change. Even if the rate of change stays constant, high diversity levels increase discontent among those who value existential security and stability.
As Western cities have been overwhelmingly white within living memory, today’s ethnic shifts are triggering both conservative and authoritarian responses. Many people have fond memories of youth, viewing this time as their halcyon days. Older conservatives look back on the way things were with profound nostalgia. Since Western populations are ageing, with the share over 60 projected to reach 30-45 per cent of various countries’ populations by 2050, the average voter is getting older.
The difference between nations’ current ethnic composition and their makeup at the time today’s median voter was 20 years old is widening. Given that old people vote at much higher rates than young adults, their nostalgia is an important ingredient in the rise of right-wing populism. On the other hand, today’s young people are growing up with greater diversity, so begin with more polyglot memories.
With some exceptions, they are less likely to support anti-immigration politics. If the rate of ethnic change slackens, the difference between the ethnic composition of “golden age” memories and current reality will narrow, which could weaken support for right-wing populism.
The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural Left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalisations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks.
At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural Left, with its dream of radical social transformation. This anti-majority adversary culture operates on a large scale, permeates major institutions and is transmitted to conservatives through social and right-wing media. This produces a growing “culture wars” polarisation between increasingly insecure white conservatives and energised, white, small-l liberals.
In the 1960s, the countercultural movement that I term left-modernism developed a theory of white ethno-racial oppression. Its outlook superseded the logical, empirically grounded, left-liberal civil rights movement after 1965 to become a millenarian project sustained by the image of a retrograde white “other”.
Today, left-modernism’s most zealous exponents are those seeking to consecrate the university campus as a sacred space devoted to the mission of replacing “whiteness” with diversity.
In softer form, this ideology penetrated widely within the high culture and political institutions of Western society after the 60s. It produced norms that prevented democratic discussion of questions of national identity and immigration.
Declaring these debates deviant in the name of anti-racism introduced a blockage in the democratic process, preventing the normal adjustment of political supply to political demand. Instead of reasonable trade-offs between those who, for example, wanted higher or lower levels of immigration, the subject was forced underground, building up pressure from those whose grievances were ignored by the main parties. This created an opportunity that populist right-wing entrepreneurs rushed in to fill.
Ethno-cultural change is occurring at a rapid rate at precisely the time the dominant ideology celebrates a multicultural vision of ever-increasing diversity. To hanker after homogeneity and stability is perceived as narrow-minded and racist by liberals. Yet diversity falls flat for many because we’re not all wired the same way. Right-wing populism, which champions the cultural interests of group-oriented whites, has halted and reversed the multicultural consensus that held sway between the 60s and late 90s. This is leading to a polarisation between those who accept and those who reject the ideology of diversity.
What’s needed is a new vision that gives conservative members of white majorities hope for their group’s future while permitting cosmopolitans the freedom to celebrate diversity. Cosmopolitanism and what I term ethno-traditional nationalism are both valid world views, but each suits a different psychological type. Imposing either on an entire population is a recipe for discontent because value orientations stem from heredity and early life experiences. Attempts to re-educate conservative and order-seeking people into cosmopolitanism will only generate resistance.
Differences need to be respected. My book White Shift is not just a prediction of how white identity will adapt to demographic change but a positive vision that can draw the sting of right-wing populism and begin to bridge the “nationalist-globalist” divide that is upending Western politics.
We are entering a period of cultural instability in the West attendant on our passage between two relatively stable equilibria. The first is based on white ethnic homogeneity, the second on what the prescient centrist writer Michael Lind calls “beige” ethnicity, a racially mixed majority group. We in the West are becoming less like homogeneous Iceland and more like homogeneous mixed-race Turkmenistan. But to get there we’ll be passing through a phase where we’ll move closer to multicultural Guyana or Mauritius. The challenge is to enable conservative whites to see a future for themselves in whiteshift — the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.
This is a process that is in its early stages and will take a century to complete. Until the mixed group emerges as a viable majority that identifies, and comes to be identified, as white, Western societies will experience considerable cultural turbulence.
American history offers a preview of what we’re in for. We should expect a civilisation-wide replay of the ethnic divisions that gripped the US between the late 1880s and 1960s, during which time the Anglo-Protestant majority declined to less than half the total but gradually absorbed Catholic and J#wish immigrants and their children into a reconstituted white majority oriented around a WASP archetype. This was achieved as immigration slowed and intermarriage overcame ethnic boundaries, a process that still has some way to run.
Notice that identifying with the white majority is not the same as being attached to a white Christian tradition of nationhood. Only those with at least some European ancestry can identify as members of the white majority. However, minorities may cherish the white majority as an important piece of their national identity: a tradition of nationhood. In the US, some 30 per cent of Latinos and Asians voted for Donald Trump and many lament the decline of white America.
In surveys taken soon after the August 2017 Charlottesville riots, 70 per cent of nearly 300 Latino and Asian Trump voters agreed that “whites are under attack in this country” and 53 per cent endorsed the idea that the country needed to “protect and preserve its white European heritage” — similar to white Trump voters.
Is a common national “we” not the solution to all this? I’m afraid not. Political scientists often differentiate “civic nations”, defined by loyalty to the state and its ideology, from “ethnic nations”, united by shared ancestry. All Western countries have been trying to promote civic conceptions of nationhood to include immigrants, but the populist Right shows that limiting nationhood to the American Creed, the French Republican tradition or “Australian values” doesn’t address the anxieties of conservative voters. These universalist, creedal conceptions of nationhood are necessary for unity but cannot provide deep identity in everyday life.
Ethnic nationhood, which restricts citizenship to members of the majority, is clearly a non-starter. But things aren’t so black and white. There is a third possibility — ethno-traditional nationhood, which values the ethnic majority as an important component of the nation alongside other groups. Ethno-traditional nationalists favour slower immigration to permit enough immigrants to voluntarily assimilate into the ethnic majority, maintaining the white ethno-tradition. The point is not to assimilate all diversity but to strike a balance between vibrant minorities and an enduring white Christian tradition.
This is the first of two exclusive extracts from the book White Shift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, published by Allen Lane and out now. Copyright © 2019 Eric Kaufmann. Look out for the second extract next week.
Translation:
“Listen to me being passionate about a bunch of angsty causey buzzwords I strung together! This must surely be worth some NGO redirection of public funds … because no way do I want to go back to my old shitty job pumping gas at 3AM.”
..
That is the point Tel.
You have to find a solution within the bounds of the existing system.
Which is compulsory and preferential.
The only workable strategy is the one I just outlined:
A campaign by all minor parties to preference the sitting member of any seat last.
You must regularly unseat most sitting uni- party members to break the uni- party.
It does not matter that in almost all cases you replace them with one from the other half of the uni-party, as long as you continue to do it over a number of cycles.
It requires a campaign to get a threshold percentage of people to do it.
But only a small percent need to.
A 2% or 3% penetration of the voting population by this campaign will make it a success.
Politicians have a very low trust rating. People will back a campaign to vote them out.
Link – White fright: the future of the West’s white majorities
ABC/Nine Media pretentious
..
No.
The campaign does not need to appeal exclusively to the right.
That is part of the benefit of targeting any sitting member regardless of if they are Liberal or Labour.
You can get support from traditional lefties.
It is simple: “Vote the existing member out”.
Labour or Liberal, who care? Vote. Them. Out.
I have gone and had a look. The application for clearing is in the east part of kingvale, which is on the Normanby catchment and flows into princess Charlotte Bay on the east coast. The vast bulk of Kingvale is west of the divide.
Scott Morrison’s mates join Liberal fighting force
Rosie Lewis
Reporter
Scott Morrison will rely on an inner circle of confidants and also friends from outside of politics as he crisscrosses Australia during the election campaign, attempting to convince voters to keep him in The Lodge.
Key Coalition election strategists started arriving at campaign headquarters in Brisbane’s inner-city suburb of Milton yesterday and say they are ready for whenever the Prime Minister calls the May election, which could be as early as this weekend.
The Weekend Australian understands WA Liberal MP Ben Morton, a former state director and a numbers man for Mr Morrison in the August leadership spill, will play an important role and hop on and off the Prime Minister’s plane.
There will be no ScoMo Express bus for the federal campaign after Mr Morrison was criticised for using a VIP jet for most of a 1500km, four-day tour of Queensland seats late last year when the bus was on hand.
Labor and Liberal Campaign Teams
Mr Morton is considered to be able to take the pulse of the party, but Mr Morrison will also rely on mates from outside federal parliament, such as Liberal-aligned lobbyist and former Peter Costello staffer David Gazzard, who once stood for the marginal seat of Eden-Monaro.
Liberal Party heavyweight Scott Briggs will be another sounding board, as will former prime minister John Howard — who Mr Morrison considers a pivotal figure — and parliamentary colleagues and ministers.
Kelly Boxall, who served as chief press secretary to former New Zealand prime minister John Key, has also been brought aboard to drive the Prime Minister’s social media campaign.
Mr Morrison has joined Snapchat, which is losing popularity with young people, and recently launched an official account on WeChat to communicate with Australia’s Chinese community.
About 130 staff, most of them Liberals and at least 20 of them Nationals, will descend on Milton for the campaign in the key battleground state of Queensland. This follows the Coalition’s controversial decision to locate headquarters in Canberra during the 2016 double-dissolution election.
Senior moderate Liberal Simon Birmingham will work as the party’s official spokesman while leading WA conservative Mathias Cormann will base himself at campaign headquarters as “minister-in-residence”. Andrew Hirst is the Liberal Party’s campaign director and will be in charge of an election for the first time after working for four Liberal leaders.
Former Liberal federal director Brian Loughnane will be a key source of counsel for Mr Hirst in an unofficial capacity, after pulling together a comprehensive review of the party’s complaints-handling processes.
It is unclear how involved former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull will be in campaigning in his old seat of Wentworth as Liberal candidate Dave Sharma tries to take it from independent Kerryn Phelps. Government sources said they would be surprised if Mr Turnbull did not campaign with Mr Sharma.
The Liberal Party’s polling firm of choice, Crosby Textor, will conduct nightly research without co-founder Mark Textor, who said he was “out” of this campaign.
The Nationals have hired Sexton Marketing Group to do research and track key seats. Sources conceded it would be tough to hold on to all Nationals seats, but the junior Coalition partner was eyeing off Indi and believed it was also in with a chance in Lingiari, Gilmore and Eden-Monaro.
MV was half way there with his “Themm” idea.
But spoiling your ballot is a dumb idea, no one would care, it would not be sufficient to change anything.
No.
You have to go further.
You have to hurt the existing system by disrupting it.
The way to disrupt it is to turn over the politicians and deny them a career in selling us out.
Not if it is a bitch that kills its owner in the bath because he was away too long.
I like to be precise.
Arky won’t that just bind the uniparty closer? After all it is not the individual but rather the collective. The leaders of course will place themselves in safe seats so they will carry on as usual.
But the plan is better than nothing which all we have at the moment.
Smoking is great.
Any young people reading: give it a go.
Don’t be judgmental.
Lmao
..
Good.
They can merge, and leave a space for another party to form on the conservative side, even a third major on the left.
Win, win, win.
Who is running the Sharrouf family’s PR, I wonder? A scrubbed up Elomar was in the Oz today following Fairax’s ‘bring them home’ pieces.
I don’t think they will merge.
I think the Liberals have broad- churched themselves to irrelevancy.
They will be gone eventually anyway.
“cheerful squalor” man aka 1735099.
I advocate in the coming rigged election putting all sitting member last on the ballot paper,stone motherless last ,now there IS a protest vote ,just imagine the consternation that would cause ,the elites would be wetting their knickers in fear of losing their cushy jobs and I’ll gotten gains.
The people who replaced them would not be a lot better ,but couldn’t be any worse ,the sir humphrys would not let them in fear of losing their own lucrative careers . Pressure the new ones into conforming with the wishes of the voters,stopp lobbyimg it’s bribery under another name curtail political donations to $10 per person or organisation ,with draconian jail and asset stripping for breaches .
Destroy the left ,defund them ,a lefty without OPM socialism dies .
We need to talk about white identity. Not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached: an ethnic identity like any other.
The great stupidity of the so-called “progressives” was to establish identity politics as a means to control groups of voters, without ever considering that the biggest identity group in western nations would hop onto the bandwagon. And while doing so, take political positions contrary to those of the “progressives”.
Tgey really do not display the “holistic thinking”that they claim as theirs.
Beyond parody.
Old Ozzie scomos mates? Do they hold meetings in a phone box? Suburban conveyancing lawyers don’t have mates ,mate .
Something else a new party might experiment with is increasing the direction from peeps, rather than just offering another prepared menu item.
As it is we have personalities in parties who prepare a suite of policies and then try (comically) to find people to vote for it. The voters have minimal interest or…stakeholdership.
If you persuaded people that it was really their party, not the vanity project of someone who believes their career has been ordained by God, they will have more interest in success.
The left will try to pollute it, of course. Individuals are as nought compared to the grand narrative, and democracy is the elevation of fallible limited self-interest over the majestic grand denouement of historical realisation. But it doesn’t have to be a new democracy within a democracy. Like the Cat: Numbers, Monty and (Fuck off) Septimus come here and bolster the opinions of the people they think they defeat. That is just how stupid they are. But The Cat houses a draws on a wide range of experience, buzzes with discussion, discovers considerable agreement, and so direction.
There would be no one here who completely agrees with whatever might be calculated to be the Cat’s opinions, but people are interested, motivated, respect difference and feel kinship.
Not a bad basis for any party.
Smoking is a truly great habit. Keep the numbers down and it’s perfectly fine.
There’s nothing better than slunking outa bed, heading to the cafe down the road to have a cig and a coffee.
Lezzos are very dangerous people.
https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/cliff-plunge-that-killed-family-of-eight-is-ruled-a-murder-suicide-ng-81fe793c82a435e49d7e50c3ad1fbd63
Calling one of her pups Iphigenia would be pretentious though.
Hmmmm…there was a nice Christie Murder Most Horrid written as a hat tip to that tale.
..
Brexit is instructional, and relevant to us.
They only allowed the referendum because they were sure it would be defeated.
Then when it wasn’t, they spent two years engineering a complex, undemocratic means to undo the vote.
You might fear populism: I think the existing crony tendencies needs a dose of populism to right the balance.
..
Not you, you.
Just people in general.
Have you seen the ad with the obese landwhale trying to do a Toyota jump in air? That’s so possible.
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/04/05/gillette-venus-ad-campaign-features-obese-trans-models/amp/
Any young people, stay away from cigarettes
Cigars and a pipe are your aromatic best friend.
Numbers is an out-and-out rider.
Muddled too. Went to a hotel in the US. I would be pretty certain part of his choice would have been price.
Then was to niggardly to tip, saying the hotel should pay higher wages – which would have bumped up the price he based his choice on.
Interesting article on Ethiopian Airlines Crash. Did the pilots know how you use manual trim?
Army. Great idea ,been advocating sitting member last for a while,just checked over 26 seats held by a margin of 5 per cent or less wokd not be hard to to turf them out of politics . Just imagine the abject fear the elites woukd experience .wonder how the elites woukd over react ? It would certainly throw them into confusion . What about a campaign to outlaw lobbying deprive the pollies of money ,donations are bribes aren’t they altruism doesn’t exist in politics today.
Fred.
I think it would be effective.
I think your average voter would like the idea of turfing sitting members and reclaiming politics from the careerists.
I don’t think the system was originally designed to be a career for anyone.
Well, whenever I go on a trip…
Being morbidly obese is not natural. It’s a result of lack of self control and often is accompanied by mental problems.
Aiding and abetting someone who will ultimately suicide by tucker is neither kind nor edgy. It’s wicked.
Shame on Gillette.
What could possibly go wrong?
Sitting on the boat after a good days fishing with a frothy beveridge and a cigar makes life worth living.
We’ve had razors and chainsaws. Anyone got a machete story to complete the trifecta?
A little tale, absolutely true, of Carnarvon, for MV and others who have lost loved ones. In 1988 I drove round Oz and the day or 2 I was in Carnarvon were so gorgeous that I resolved to live there one day. Lovely and warm, blue skies and bluer seas, picture perfect. Took 15 years to make it happen and only managed 6 months before the Ningaloo Reef beckoned. Anyway, the working week was over and Mrs Ted and I headed out over the shallows to the trenches (shallows just a few feet deep, trenches deep and black where the fish were and only a few metres wide). Anchored up and waited and pulled in several dinners worth. Very little tide that day so when the fish stopped biting I thought I’d g for a quick snorkel over the shallows. Usually not much to see but there might be colourful little fish, squid and octopi to occupy me for a while. I’d developed a method of masking and finning up and then sliding down the anchor rope so as not to make a splash and scare of what I wanted to watch. Hanging a few inches above the water I heard Mrs Ted shout “shark!” We’d often done this in other places for a quick heartstarter and the other would respond with a suitably profane response. But her face was panic and just a few metres away was one of the hugest fins I’d ever seen attached to a monster tiger shark which swam round the boat several times with one eye out of the water. People don’t react rationally at moments like this and I took off my mask and threw it back in the boat. “Don’t just stand there, throw it a fish or something,” I screamed (as you would throw a dog a bone or a stick). Esky opened, fish thrown into water, big splash near the shark but even closer to me and a quick change of direction by the tiger and it was swallowed whole. Nothing for I don’t know how long but I couldn’t climb back up the anchor rope so told Mrs Ted to put the cheap plastic foldable ladder over the side and I would swim around to it. In her panic she didn’t click the ladder locks in properly. Fins off and in the boat and I gingerly drifted to the side and the ladder, grabbed it and put first foot on bottom rung. Ladder folded crushing several finger which began to bleed profusely accompanied by much screaming and thrashing in the water. Ladder was broken and wasn’t going to get me back onboard. Panicked plan B needed, round to the back of the boat and stand on the outboard fins, push the red button and be lifted into the boat but with only one hand, the sea turning redder and redder and tiger Jaws somewhere in the vicinity I couldn’t quite muster the strength to do it so flailed around with one foot trying to get a bit of leverage. Foot landed on fish finder, a little piece of plastic screwed to the hull. A mighty effort and the plastic broke and cut my shin open as it slid past. Sea now crimson and about to meet my maker but I’d also fallen across the outboard and quick as a flash Mrs Ted had pressed that beautiful red button and lifted me up. No easy feat to get back aboard but I did somehow and first aid applied to fingers and shins. Both of us in tears at the near miss but it was only the latest in a long line of idiotic decisions I’d made out bush and we’d always ended up laughing about them which we did. We didn’t see the tiger again and decided to head on home but first to put the caught fish in fresh seawater so empty the esky and bucket over the side to replenish. Open the esky lid – “where’s the effing mackerel? You threw the effing mackerel to the shark when there’s blooming trevally!?” Mrs Ted and I rarely argued but this was different. As an eating fish there’s no comparison, mackerel every time. Got one finger that won’t quite straighten and a lovely scar on the shin from that escapade. Story told and retold 1000 times with no need to exaggerate. A couple of years later I was fishing off Broome and landed a baby tiger, magnificent piece of nature’ engineering and set the camera to movie for a quick pic, lifted baby tiger for a side by side selfie when it objected and almost took a chunk out of me. Lesson learned. Lots of other Carnarvon adventures too, everyone should go there and explore a bit. Hang in there MV and others, remember your adventures.
Thanks Woolfe an interesting article
Woolfe
#2981022, posted on April 6, 2019 at 12:49 pm
Interesting article on Ethiopian Airlines Crash. Did the pilots know how you use manual trim?
add WSJ – An Aircraft Bubble Epilogue
How cheap money and strategic gamesmanship helped give birth to Boeing’s 737 MAX.
To make sense of Thursday’s press conference in Addis Ababa defending the actions of the crew aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, it may be wise to consider the views of a group of pilots and consultants interviewed by the Seattle Times.
They argue that a pilot could have disabled an errant software system in Boeing ’s 737 MAX and still not have been able to recover if the aircraft’s speed and configuration were imposing more force on the tail surfaces than could be overcome by hand-cranking the trim wheel.
A solution reportedly had been spelled out to pilots of the 707 and early 737 models but not pilots of later 737 models: Relax pressure on the control column briefly to free up the trim wheel. Repeat until the plane was back in trim.
If this account is accurate, it explains why an experienced Ethiopian Airlines pilot, who had been briefed on how to handle a failure of Boeing’s MCAS software after last year’s Lion Air crash, could not save his plane. In fact, he may have been reduced to turning the defective MCAS back on in hopes of freeing up the trim wheel.
Other failures have yet to be explained. Why do angle-of-attack sensors on the plane seem to keep failing? Why did Boeing reportedly eliminate a feature that in previous 737s had allowed the pilot to retain power-assisted control over the trim wheel even when all autopilot-like functions had been disconnected?
Longtime readers won’t wonder why this subject is of special interest for me. I devoted several columns here years ago to an “aircraft bubble” that I specifically cited as playing a role in Boeing’s decision to launch what would become the ill-fated 737 MAX.
I won’t rehash the many factors behind Airbus’s and Boeing’s curious decisions to launch upgraded jets after 2010 that would instantly undercut the value of thousands of their own planes still on backorder. Obviously one factor was a profusion of cheap, often government-subsidized capital for plane buyers.
Recent accounts of the 737 MAX’s genesis have tended to focus on the scare American Airlines put into Boeing in 2011 when it threatened to place a big order for a new Airbus jet. In fact, American would end up splitting its giant order between Airbus and Boeing, and then—demonstrating a major contributing factor in the bubble—promptly seeking a U.S. bankruptcy court’s help to afford the new planes by shucking its existing debts.
The key moment for the 737 MAX had actually come about six months before, when Airbus unveiled its A320neo. This upgraded version of its existing 737 competitor was designed to fit a new engine from Pratt & Whitney that promised 15% fuel savings.
Airbus’s top salesman at the time, John Leahy, all but proclaimed that the Neo had been launched to spoil the business case for a new jet using the same engine from Canada’s Bombardier, which threatened to break open the Airbus-Boeing duopoly.
Antitrust economists who specialize in game theory will understand exactly what’s going on here. Supposedly “cozy” duopolists actually have much to be paranoid about. If not for fear of new entrants, they might well have jacked up prices to deal with the overflowing demand for their products.
Boeing’s reluctant OK of the 737 MAX was clearly a response to Airbus’s strategic game-playing. Whether this should be considered a complicating factor in the 737 MAX mishaps is a matter to argue about. Even planes that are not rushed out can have catastrophic flaws. Recall the de Havilland Comet and the DC-10.
Still, the fact remains: Boeing reluctantly contributed to the aircraft bubble only after frantically signalling to all involved that it preferred to move in stately fashion toward an all-new aircraft rather than continuing to fit new engines on an aging 737 frame.
Investigators will spend months now combing through the factors that contributed to the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines tragedies. All too pat is an argument already heard in some quarters, holding that capitalist greed is responsible when a plane crashes but not when a million planes land safely. An explanatory principle that can’t distinguish cases explains nothing.
One place investigators will surely land a finger is the complexity of Boeing’s design and integration process. Whether an FAA with a bigger budget and more manpower might have caught the flaws that Boeing missed is suppositional. It’s bracing to consider a more realistic possibility and one that probably applies to many complex systems: Any inferior choices Boeing made in putting together the 737 MAX likely never would have been noticed if the usually highly reliable angle-of-attack vanes had performed up to par.
Appeared in the April 6, 2019, print edition.
Ted! 🤣
There is a big, old tiger shark out there in The Deep, telling tales about “the one that got away”.
True story.
The morbidly obese girl in the ocean would not be able to get up again if she fell over in the water. Quite dangerous for her to be in water or anywhere unsupported if she fell on a road or something. She could not get up again.
Ted goes fishing:
In English.
Scott Morrison will rely on an inner circle of confidants and also friends from outside of politics as he crisscrosses Australia during the election campaign, attempting to convince voters to keep him in The Lodge.
Naturally ScoMo’s own vision and intellect don’t feature in this cunning plan.
In surveys taken soon after the August 2017 Charlottesville riots, 70 per cent of nearly 300 Latino and Asian Trump voters agreed that “whites are under attack in this country” and 53 per cent endorsed the idea that the country needed to “protect and preserve its white European heritage” — similar to white Trump voters.
You don’t escape to the USA with a view to getting more of the shit you just left behind.
The Elomars are multi millionaires they can afford to bring home their cousins daughter in law granddaughter etc
iirc they didn’t just know Sharouffs from Sydney, they go back to Tripoli as well
There are so many pleasures people will not even entertain because they would be embarrassed to be discovered enjoying them.
The feel of a fitted suit (doesn’t have to bespoke, just something that really fits), the rich aroma of a cigar, a trip to a rightfully expensive restaurant, dancing cheek to cheek rather than grinding pelvises…all manner of things.
As you get older you feel you can get away with it, but it is a shame to wait.
In another life my company used to have shinnenkai functions. The Japanese staff (after 150mL of beer) would afterward go to work, but the foreigners would start at one end of Ebisubashisuji with cigars (my preference ran to Davidoff) and walk toward Honmachi, stopping in at bars and restaurants along the way.
Yeah there was a bit of histrionic play about it, but it was also very satisfying.
People have spent centuries getting these things ‘just so’, but people put off enjoying them because of fashion.
This is one of his best: Tucker Carlson’s opening segment today on the Big Brother 1984 world constructed for us by the fascist Western left “where you are required to repeat things you know aren’t true” and where “humour and dissent are criminal offences”. Includes an interview with the Pommy comedian who invented Titania McGrath, the satirical woke Twitter zombie. Runs 20m minutes. Stay on for an interview with lefty investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald at around the 30-minute mark on the latest disgraceful disinformation campaign by the New York Times on what they want you to believe is in the Mueller nothingburger.
Yesterday I predicted the tragic case of those two drowned Aboriginal boys in Townsville would almost certainly end up having a DOCS back-story, raising the question as to whether an unwillingness to ‘steal’ the boys ultimately led to their demise. Well, as it happens the mother’s criminal ineptitude was indeed known to DOCS. An indigenous “elder” says it’s all their fault:
Here is another hint of how dysfunctional a ‘home’ this was: