ezlxa1949
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Re the Australian federal government’s attempt to stop X broadcasting the stabbing attacks, I haven’t seen any of the videos of the ghastly events and don’t intend to. I don’t need to. The verbal reports have been quite enough. I don’t want to act like a disaster tourist, don’t wish to loiter around the scene of the crimes, don’t aim to learn how to murder or attempt to murder, analyse how I would have done it better or even defended myself better. There’s enough simulated murder and violence on free-to-air TV as it is. We don’t need training in it. Some people will wallow in what they see. I choose not to.
It is clear that X is mightier than the Australian federal government, just as Facebook proved to be some time ago.
It’s as though the Easter Islanders had waged war over who got to consume the last tree.
(By the way, it was disease introduced by the invading Europeans that put paid to the Easter Islanders.)
A few minutes later… pondering the various wars, rumours of wars, and preparations for wars around the globe,the wastage of resources of all kinds is huge, colossal, enormous – and seemingly endless.
For all the good that this expenditure and activity is doing, we may as well be throwing all of our treasure and resources into the bottom of the sea.
I declare that the entire human project is in an utter mess and disarray. For all our cleverness and resoucefulness and hard work and sleepless nights, for all our piety and wit, we have FAILED.
Sad in the extreme.
I agree with phoenixvoice: maybe the Dali really did run by accident into the bridge. That’s a possibility too.
Accident or not, what are we, the little people, going to do about it? What CAN we do about it? Nothing except to ride out whatever consequences ensue.
And when it comes to Easter, what on earth do eggs and rabbits have to do with Christ’s death and resurrection? Are they merely poignant symbols of resurrection and new life, or are they borrowings from pagan sources? If the latter, then should we have done that? Do restrictions on Easter (Ishtar) eggs really matter?
Boeing is just fine, according to The Conversation this morning. Here’s an excerpt from the email notification:
The bumpy ride was the latest in a string of unfortunate events surrounding the US aerospace titan, from an emergency door panel flying off a plane in January to a dramatic engine fire and the unscheduled jettison of a tyre during takeoff. And that’s before we get to the conspiracy theories around the apparent suicide of a former Boeing employee turned whistleblower, who alleged the manufacturer had cut corners to save money.
What’s a poor traveller to make of it all? According to aviation expert Doug Drury, not too much. While Boeing has faced some quality assurance concerns, it appears to be acting to address them – and most of the high-profile incidents are more likely due to poor maintenance and human error than to issues on the manufacturer’s part.
That’s about all the mention that this alleged suicide gets.
For good but depressing analyses of the British situation, by a writer based in Devon, I suggest visitng Tim Watkins’ Consciousness of Sheep website. According to him, Britain’s economic situation is DIRE. Among other things, they’ve run out of North Sea oil, squandered the gains on tax cuts for the rich, renewables aren’t making the grade, most of the country north of a line from the Severn to The Wash is among the poorest in Europe, and so on and on and on.
The UK is being bled white by its poor leadership, muddle-headed economic policies, ignorance, denial, hubris, stupidity and cupidity.
So is Australia.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
Yesterday: Gonzalo Lira dies at the hands of a government.
Tomorrow: Julian Assange dies at the hands of another government.So utterly sad.
Taking the video of the Stryker vehicle at face value, we can see clearly the design principles behind Russian mobile equipment. Their country becomes a vast quagmire in the warmer months. Their civilian and military vehicles are designed to cope with this. Ukraine has splendid, deep soils for agriculture but not for military vehicles to churn up.
Seems to me the Stryker would be very effective in Arizona. Maybe it should stay there.
@Dr. D: “Don’t yo uhave your own problems in Britain and Australia without bothering with Donald Trump?”
Too right we do, and I for one am utterly fed up and bored with talk and reports and analyses of the disorganised kindergarten of US politics. Trouble is, because Oz has hitched its wagon to the US oxen, we get dragged wherever the US goes.
No need to worry, nothing will turn out all right.
Gag.
A bit more on sulfur. In the ancient Near East the vapours from burning sulfur were commonly used in religious practice to purify and cleanse. The Greek word for sulfur is “theion”; the word for god is “theios”. You can see the similarity. So fire and brimstone (sulfur) refers to purification, not destruction.
Yes, I know, try telling that to the clobbered inhabitants of Sodom.
By the way, note that in the Bible we read that the great sins of Sodom were pride, fullness of food, and maltreating the poor. In other words, self-adulation, an adundance of resources, and self-centredness. Not quite the popular conception, is it.
Hey, 9/11 (or 11/9 in most of the rest of the world) just came and went and I never noticed. Neither did the media in Oz. None that I saw, at least.
It really has become modern history, the world lurches on, and the processes launched on that day continue to work themselves through.
A couple of quick thoughts prompted by the [a]theism thread.
If this life is all there is, then when it’s over I won’t care or be bothered by anything or anybody because I will have ceased to exist. I will know nothing. I’ll be safely dead, as I like to say. Comforting in a way. Do your worst!, I snarl at my oppressors! Soon I’ll be beyond your reach!
If no god[s] of any description exist[s], if this universe is all that ever was, is, or ever will be, then everything we think and do and care about is in the long run utterly pointless and meaningless. All our hopes and dreams, cares and worries, triumphs and defeats, joy and pain, dissipate into useless energy floating around in an ever-expanding void of black nothingness. The heat death of the universe in other words.
And maybe we completely misunderstand who and what this “god” is. Why not? We completely misunderstand so much about everything else.
Prognosis for Australia in the event of a northern hemisphere nuclear war? Look at On the Beach (if you haven’t already). The 1959 version with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire is the better.
Talking of mental maths, try being a shopkeeper in pre-decimal currency and pre-calculator days, having to calculate change in one’s head or hastily scribbled on a spare paper bag. Twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound. It was of course commonly and regularly and accurately done. Cash registers could add up sums of money but couldn’t calculate change.
Another aspect of deskilling, methinks.
So, Blackrock has invested hugely in Ukraine. What happens to that if Russia wins? What shockwaves would that send through the western and perhaps global economies?
OK, so TPTB are planning to reduce global population by 90%. How long can civilisation last with such a reduced workforce, including scientists, technicians, mechanics, machinists, metaluurgists, mining engineers, computer designers and programmers, medical researchers, and so on and on? If this really is their agenda, then TPTB are committing slow suicide. Sure, they can coast along for a while, perhaps decades, relying on stores and stockpiles and a level of automation, but do they have any idea what the threshhold is for maintaining a comfortable civilisation?
I don’t mind dropping dead suddenly and without warning. At least then I will be beyond the reach of The System. That bit of bravado said, I do not want to leave my poor wife alone in this world. She needs my support and I need hers.
British Russophobia in 2023 is a replay of British Germanophobia in the early 1900s. Then everything and anything German was the target of hatred and vilification, and before WW1 was declared. Germania delenda est. During the war a peace conference was organised by and for women in the neutral Netherlands. Attendees came from all over. Churchill wouldn’t have it. To keep British women away from it, he stopped the cross-Channel ferries, and forbad travel anyway. Nothing new under the sun.
In Canberra Russia had a lease on land for a new embassy near Parliament House. A day or two ago Parliament passed legislation cancelling the lease. Rossiya delenda est.
Smoke from fires: now you know what many in south-east Australia went through in 2019-20. Dreadful. I used the time to find air leaking into the house, literally sniffing them out, and sealing them off.
Now it seems quite likely that El Niño will return in a few months’ time. There’s been plenty of regrowth because of good rains aver the past few years. Everyone is worried.
But The System does not care. Profits and growth are all that matter. Labour and capital are the only factors that exist. The environment has no exonomic function, hence it does not exist and can be ignored.
Rule by Decree
Some excerpts from Why tyranny could be the inevitable outcome of democracy
Plato, one of the earliest thinkers and writers about democracy, predicted that letting people govern themselves would eventually lead the masses to support the rule of tyrants.
What went wrong in Athens?
In classical Athens, the birthplace of democracy, the democratic assembly was an arena filled with rhetoric unconstrained by any commitment to facts or truth. So far, so familiar.
Aristotle and his students had not yet formalized the basic concepts and principles of logic, so those who sought influence learned from sophists, teachers of rhetoric who focused on controlling the audience’s emotions rather than influencing their logical thinking.
There lay the trap: Power belonged to anyone who could harness the collective will of the citizens directly by appealing to their emotions rather than using evidence and facts to change their minds.
Misleading speech is the essential element of despots, because despots need the support of the people. Demagogues’ manipulation of the Athenian people left a legacy of instability, bloodshed and genocidal warfare, described in Thucydides’ history.
Another factor in the equation is the debt ceiling. I just heard from the US that if the Feds don’t get that sorted out then their pension payments will stop as will their social security. Depending on how many people are affected this way, could lead to who knows how much social unrest.
My observations over the years are that the absolute ceiling is pushed higher every time. This time also?
It occurred to me yesterday that the way the elites are behaving greatly resembles a tontine. Simply put, this is an investment scheme where the last survivor gets everything.
So, if the elites are indeed conniving to eliminate the bulk of the population, then the time will come when the elites have run out of non-elite targets and must start eliminating each other.
In the final analysis it’s all totally futile. When I’m safely dead then I’m beyond their reach. And death really is their only weapon.
I truly don’t know what they propose to do with all their assets and their glorious isolation. C.S. Lewis imagined the gates of Hell as being locked from the inside. The elites seem to be slamming the gates shut even now.
Cold snap in SE Australia, yes, but climate change includes climate instability. El Niño is back and we expect a return to the heat and dryness of past years. Groan.
Australia’s ABC this morning had an article telling us about Putin flailing about, despatching one failed military cheif after another. Interesting how this different this MSM viewpoint is from others. Who is correct? Probably all of them to some extent.
All empires reach a use-by date and come to an end.
Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, Toltec, Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, American. And so on and on.
What’s next? The BRICS+ empire? Will it be any better than any of the preceding failures?
When this war is over, how long will it take for the Russians and Ukrainians to forgive each other? And how will they do so?
So the Monticello plant leaked radioactive water and kept quite about it. I have in-laws living not too far from Monty. They have instructions in their house for what to do if some big emergency erupts. Nothing about a little emergency.
According to the Health Physics Society fact sheet, tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. The decay product is low-energy beta particles which can travel about 6mm in air but are stopped by skin. Its summary reads,
Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that is produced by both natural and man-made processes. It mostly exists in the form of tritiated water and generally behaves as such in both the environment and the body. For this reason, tritium is widely dispersed in the environment, a very small addition to other radiation background levels. Due to its chemical properties and weak radioactive emissions, tritium is considered one of the least harmful radionuclides. Despite this fact, it is important to be aware that tritium is used in some common devices, such as tritium exit signs, that can release tritium if they are improperly disposed of or damaged.
I learnt yesterday that Australia has an equivalent of the USA’s FDIC, the Financial Claims Agency, It wasn’t set up until the crisis of 2008.
Numerically it has the same deposit upper limit of $250,000 (AUD of course). So I’m well covered! The ABC had a soothing article yesterday about how safe our banks are with little exposure to overseas risks. OK then, no worries.
The AUKUS sub deal is controversial in the Great Southern Land. To repeat: a better acronym is USUKA, pron. you sucker. I can’t help feeling that we have been commanded to join the program. Why we’re taking up arms against China is a mystery: they already as good as own us anyway.
I was going to write that Australia has gone into captivity, but on reflection we’ve been in captivity since the beginning, first to Great Britain (I remember then tail end of that period quite clearly), and now to the USA. We are basically very insecure and need a big brother to protect us.
It’s common in my parts for businesses to have a sign near the till that cash is not accepted. The Englishman’s strategy would fail here.
On the other hand, it is still a legal requirement for businesses to accept cash in payment for goods and services. The public are happy to use cards, and so do I although not for all transactions. It is convenient and does save me carrying around wads of cash for large purchases, and almost no-one uses cheques any more.
But the trend will not stop until the payments system falters or even stops.
Lyrebirds are totally amazing. How and where the photographer got that video I don’t know; the birds keep to themselves. In that clip I heard an old-fashioned motor-driven camera, a kookaburra and a whipbird. There were more but I can’t identify them.
And magnificant creatures like this are of no interest to the growth machine. If their destruction brings economic growth, then so be it.
Here’s a few bits and pieces from Charles Hugh Smith,with a few small ideas of my own. I was reacting to news about Amazon’s new wonder store in London which has no staff and no check-outs. Anything you carry out with you is detected and charged to your credit card. You can’t even get into the store unless you have Amazon’s app on your tracking device (mobile phone).
The System is intrinsically hostile to human life, fundamentally evil. People who work in the system are not necessarily evil but they get swept along with it. Just about the entire planet is swept along with it.
The System is hostile to non-human life also. Witness how environmental and ecological considerations figure so little in corporate plans.
The modern myth has some unique characteristics that make it particularly powerful and particularly dangerous at the same time. The modern myth tells us the following about the world and our place in it:
1. Humans are in one category and nature is in another.
2. Scale doesn’t matter.
3. History can be safely ignored because modern society has seen through the delusions of the past.
4. Science is a unified, coherent field that provides all the rational principles by which we can manage the physical world.None of these is true.
We may think The System is huge and unstoppable, but it’s not. It is in fact highly fragile. Some characteristics of a fragile system include:
1. centralised
2. tightly networked
3. optimised for “efficiency”
4. lacking redundancy.Amazon’s retail model possesses all four characteristics in abundance.
The Soviet Union in 1988 was mighty and strong and here forever. By 1991 it was gone. Amazon may think it’s here forever but I’m not so sure. Problem is, Amazon and its ilk can cause untold suffering on the way to their collapse.
@afktt
Good history lesson. Assuming Airstrip 4 is Oz (sorry, I’ve lost track), then AS4’s assigned role in the world is that of taxpayer-subsidised resource dispensary. Anything the world wants, if we have it then thay can come here and get it at great prices.Like AS5, our manufacturing and other transformative industries have largely been left to languish. China will supply us with everything we need and can afford. Nothing left for us to do except cut each other’s hair, and I reckon They are working on a robot to do even that.
And we wonder why youth suicide rates are high and going higher.
Somewhat altered lyric al excerpt:
Ninety-nine Chinese balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it’s red alert
There’s something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
Where ninety-nine Chinese balloons go byNinety-nine decision street
Ninety-nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we’ve waited for
This is it, boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As ninety-nine Chinese balloons go by.Chinese Balloons
I wonder what it cost for China to make and release that unguided balloon. It cost the US one fighter jet plus fuel plus $400,000 missile to pop it. (Was the balloon that tough?) What if China released hordes more? 99 of them? Or more? Hmmm.
Remember this?
The rhyming seems reasonably clear: Ukraine 2023 = Spain 1936-1939.
A great testing ground for weaponry. And every bit as nasty.The Aboriginal population of Australia has been a thorn in the side of the conquerors ever since the invasion started in 1788. At first we (“we” because I am of European ancestry) regarded them as doomed to extinction, and we did what we could to help them on their way out.
But the first nations people did not simply die out. Stubborn.
Public pressure in recent decades has forced TPTB to acknowledge their existence and accept their humanity, but they keep getting in the way of invariably destructive “development” proposals. It would be so useful to TPTB to get rid of them once and for all.
May God have mercy on us all. TPTB certainly won’t.
Woke up to this article in The Conversation:
“Yes, masks reduce the risk of spreading COVID, despite a review saying they don’t”Claims and counter-claims. I note that it argues against one meta-analysis (Cochrane Review). Otherwise I don’t have time to go into it in any depth.
So tired of all of this.
Visitng friends yesterday who during conversation casually mentioned how Russia is destroying “all the hospitals and schools” and so on. I said nothing.
Their only source of info is the MSM, so naturally they repeat what they’re told. I don’t blame them. Russia is the fons et origo of all kinds of evil, while Ukraine is the beleagured victim valiantly defending itself and assured of victory. We shall see.
I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for the Empire to collapse. I am old enough to remember the British Empire minus India, lots of red on the map, still large and important in the world, telling itself and everyone else that it was and had been and would continue to be beneficial and constructive and just and fair and etc etc etc. It took decades of decline for it to ariive at its present sad, withered, etiolated state.
All depends on one’s point of view, doesn’t it: centuries to build, yes, decades to decay, yes; but to me it felt like AGES.
Just heard that they shot down this terrifying balloon. Clever chaps, these Chinese: they send off an unguided balloon subject to the vagaries of the winds and bear witness to international consternation. Maybe it had a cargo of Caesium-137 ?
Interesting painting. Diogenes seems appropriately grimy, the women clean and neat.
However, according to the cultural norms of that era, for a woman (not a girl) to let her hair down in public was a sign of very loose morals. The other women have their hair decently covered. Was this depiction deliberate on Waterhouse’s part, or did he simply like his model’s hair?
Agree that DUMBs are putative graves. I fail completely to understand why anyone would want to live in a society, on a planet, which has destroyed its ability to support much if any human life of any quality, and yet it seems that this is where so much geopolitical activity is heading. It’s all fundamentally insane. Don’t look for any Noah’s Arks in this era. There’s no hiding place.
@John Day
“I’ll die on the surface, like most people.”
Me too, please. If the crazies in the various basements around the world throw even ONE nuke in any direction, given the evident groupthink among the elites, that is likely to trigger a cascade of more nukes. We’re all vividly aware of that possibility — but what about the crazies in the DUMBs?
