Camped at Eagle Nest near Sharks Bay WA
You can just see the glow of my laptop where I was working on a clients web sIte in Tassie hosted through Rumcorps.net servers in Dallas Texas. As good an office as any!
Whales off the NW Coast
A pod of about 20 whales come fast from astern and passed either side of the yacht, frightening hell out of us.
Fire on the road
No flames apparent so I hardly slowed down until I had travelled a hundred odd meters with no visibility. About the time I started to panic I came out the other side.
Have a good one
Qld Election
It appears all and sundry expect the LNP to get a flogging in tomorrows election. The ABC are banking on it and supporting the ALP while The Courier Mail says Labor presents a clear alternative for voters – job creation and no asset sales.
Amazing, in three short years everyone has supposedly forgotten the ALP’s last period of power where they left the state with tens of billions of dollars in debt and the biggest public service in the country whence they were obliged to borrow money to pay their wages.
Cambell gets the arrogant tag because he has to make the hard decisions and cut spending. True, he could’ve explained it more but really, what part of $80b debt don’t people understand.
Now Labor tell us they will pay down debt in a measured and achievable way, all while retaining ownership of our essential assets – power stations, distribution networks and ports.
From the ABC
An elected Labor government in Queensland would merge some power networks and retain all assets earmarked for sale under the Liberal National Party (LNP) to help pay down $12 billion worth of debt in a decade.
From The Australian
QUEENSLAND debt is forecast to be $76.97 billion this financial year, $1.16 billion less than outlined in the June budget. Despite the improvement, the level of debt is on average twice that of other states and equates to about $15,000 for each person.
So the ALP plan is to pay back the debt of the Bligh government in 63 years.
It’s a plan but not a good one and keep in mind the author is Annastacia Palaszczuk who doesn’t even know the current GST rate
The previous ALP government sold;
- Retail arms of Ergon and Energex,
- Suncorp,
- Qld TAB,
- Dalrymple Bay,
- Golden Casket,
- Cairns, Mackay and Brisbane Airport,
- Port of Brisbane, and Qld Rail.
but that’s OK because…
They sold all those assets and still left a IOU note in the empty treasury for $80b.
Left with this huge debt Newman plans to sell of assets to help pay it back and suddenly it’s not OK because….
I don’t know why it’s not OK now, it just is…apparently.
Another Commo dead
One of the intellectual giants of the Australian Labor Party, the former Whitlam and Hawke minister Tom Uren, has died aged 93.
With Tom Uren we see a leviathan of the labour movement passing
Known as the “conscience of the Labor party” because of his principled stands on issues, Mr Uren was a leading figure in the Left faction, and one of the most respected Labor politicians of his generation.
Such accolades! It’s true he gave honest service during WW2 and did a lot for ex PWs during his lifetime. Unfortunately his principled stands on issues led to an association with Jim Cairns, whom he “loved”, thus spending years supporting the Viet Cong both financially and morally.
He was also a staunch supporter of the anti-nuclear movement that demanded unilateral disarmament of the US that was supported and funded by the Soviets.
I wont miss him.
Well done Sir Phil
Before you dump on Tony Abbot for awarding Prince Phillip a Knighthood look up Duke of Edinburgh Awards for young people.
The Duke has done more for young Australians, and youth all over the world, than have most of the Abbott haters currently mocking the man and the Knighthood.
Ignorant peasants, the lot of them.
Besides being a well earned Knighthood it annoys the hell out of the Left and the Media. His politically incorrect comments are legend and never fail to amuse me and wind up the haters.
Good call all round, I think.
UPDATE: A comment from Sabena at Catalaxy Files;
The Duke of Edinburgh was given an AC when it was Australia’s highest honour-now he has been upgraded given that AK is now the highest honour.
Where was the criticism of him being given the AC?
Oh wait-it was in 1988 and given to him by the Hawke government.
Fair comment.
Clancy@the overflow
Picked this up on FaceBook – Clancy in modern times
I had written him a text
Which I’d sent, hoping the next
Time he came in mobile coverage
He’d have time to say hello.
But I’d heard he’d lost his iPhone,
So I emailed him from my phone,
Just addressed, on spec, as follows:
clancy@theoverflow
And the answer redirected
Wasn’t quite what I’d expected
And it wasn’t from the shearing mate
Who’d answered once before.
His ISP provider wrote it
And verbatim I will quote it:
‘This account has been suspended:
You will hear from him no more.’
In my wild erratic fancy
Visions come to me of Clancy:
Out of reach of mobile coverage
Where the Western rivers flow.
Instead of tapping on the small screen,
He’d be camping by the tall green
River gums a pleasure
That the town folk never know.
Well, the bush has friends to meet him
But the rest of us can’t greet him:
Out there, even Telstra’s network
Doesn’t give you any bars.
He can’t blog the vision splendid
Of the sunlit plains extended
Or tweet the wondrous glory
Of the everlasting stars.
I am sitting at the keyboard
And I’m too stressed out to be bored
As I answer all the emails
By the deadlines they contain
While my screen fills with promotions
For ‘V1aggra’ and strange potions
And announcements of the million-dollar
Prizes I can claim.
But the looming deadlines haunt me
And their harrying senders taunt me
That they need response this evening
For tomorrow is too late!
But their texts, too quickly ended,
Often can’t be comprehended
For their writers have no time to think
They have no time to wait.
And I sometimes rather fancy
That I’d like to trade with Clancy:
Just set up an email bouncer
Saying ‘Sorry, had to go.’
While he faced an inbox jamming
Up with deadlines and with spamming
As he signed off every message:
clancy@theoverflow
Hicks still guilty
DAVID Hicks is set to have his terrorism conviction overturned after the US conceded that the former Guantánamo Bay inmate is innocent, his lawyer says.
What they mean is that at that time there wasn’t a law that said it was illegal to fight for the other side and try and kill westerners.
He is guilty as sin by his own word and will never be accepted by decent Australians as anything else.
Adelaide-born Mr Hicks was 26 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which believed he was fighting for al-Qaeda.
He was held in the US-run jail in Cuba until 2007, when he pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism and was sent to Adelaide’s Yatala Prison to serve the rest of his seven-year sentence.
He was released under a control order later that year.
Hicks said he only pleaded guilty in an Alford plea agreement to escape the “indefinite solitary confinement I was suffering in Guantanamo Bay”.
“I am just sorry it has taken so long to clear my name.”
Believe me Hicks, your name is not cleared.
Anna good Premier!
ANNASTACIA Palaszczuk has declared her predecessor Anna Bligh was a “very good Queensland premier” and said she wants her at the launch of Labor’s campaign today.
Despite being left to rebuild Labor after the wreckage of the Bligh and Peter Beattie governments, Ms Palaszczuk said she was very happy to have both former premiers attend the event in Ipswich.
“Everyone remembers what Anna did during the floods,” Ms Palaszczuk said.
“She was a very good Queensland premier. So if she can come and attend I’d be more than happy to have her there.”
I remember what she did during the floods. She fronted the media and behaved like a Premier, the only time during her reign when she did. Otherwise she spent like a drunken sailor and took the state to unprecedented deficits. Campbell Newman is still trying to pay off the debt.
But, she performed well on a couple of occasions and for that, Palaszczuk claims she was a good Premier.
To add to that insanity people are seriously considering voting for them again mainly because Newman has had to do they hard yards to try and fix the financial hole left to him by Anna Bligh et al and they refuse to recognize that we can’t spend more that we earn.
The entitlement mentality.
Let’s get real
In an interview with Bill O’Reilly Lt. Col. Ralph Peters said the plan for fighting war is “
one, you accept that you are in a war.
Two, you name the enemy: Islamist terrorists.
Three, you get the lawyers off the battlefield and out of the targeting cell.
You accept there will be collateral damage, and do you not apologize for it, you do not nation build. You don’t hold — try to hold ground. You go wherever in the world the terrorists are and you kill them. You do your best to exterminate them, and then you leave, and you leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows. If in five or ten years they reconstitute and you have got to go back, you go back and you do the same thing and you never never never send American troops into a war you don’t mean to win.
And “be as merciless as the enemy, if you’re not willing to do that, they will win.”
A family member told me on the weekend the problem is we marginalize the Muslims. Not that the extremists among them murder innocents; not that they rape and decapitate woman or sell them into slavery; not that they decapitate POWs by the thousands; not that they turn up and slaughter 2000 people in Nigeria; not that they turn up at schools and kill girls simply because they are at school; but that we marginalize them.
With thinking like that no wonder we are losing the war.
The war is against Islamic extremists, not against Muslims and the rational civilized Muslims need to get on the bandwagon and join the fight They are getting slaughtered as well.
Je suis Charlie gives everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling but achieves absolutely nothing. The extremists look at these displays of western “No action but plenty of words and graphics” and smile. They have us reacting as pacifists when, as LTCOL Peters says, we need to hunt them down and kill them.
The “marginalized’ Muslims come to our country, one presumes to be free of the uncivilized places where they come from, and then the young men go to the mosques and listen to preachers advocating that they work to create exactly the same uncivilized conditions in their new country.
The mosques are creating the extremists and we let them.
The “marginalized’ go off the rape, decapitate and kill other Muslims or westerners, show decapitation movies on YouTube and when they tire of it and feel a need for more of our decadent, Kafir social security money they fly back home.
And we let them in.
The media are printing reams of opinions on the problems of Islamophobia; worrying about violence that isn’t happening at the exact same time that the extremist Muslims are slaughtering innocents.
The problem isn’t Islamophobia, it’s Islam in it’s extreme interpretations.
Enderby eulogy says it all
FORMER Whitlam government attorney-general Kep Enderby named his son Keir after the Scottish Labour Party founder James Keir Hardie.
“I’m surprised I wasn’t named Che or Fidel or Lenin or Karl or even Marx, but that may give you a picture of my dad’s passion for equality and fairness to all,” Keir Enderby said yesterday at his father’s funeral in Sydney.
Equality and fairness to all in the same sentence as Che or Fidel or Lenin or Karl or even Marx tells you all you want to know about the man and the Whitlam government.
Commo bastards.
Enderby, who died last week aged 88, is credited with passing no-fault divorce legislation, setting up the Family Court and legalising homosexuality in the ACT. Those remembering him yesterday included Whitlam minister Les Johnson, Age Discrimination Commissioner Susan Ryan, Labor elder John Faulkner and federal deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek.
Keir Enderby said his father was “a thinker, a believer and a dreamer”. He quoted Che Guevara: “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.” Keir wondered if that was why his father planted so many trees.
He was a fighter for causes: befriending conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War and defending the Aboriginal tent embassy in front of Old Government House. He backed David Hicks and Julian Assange.
About all I have in common with Enderby is that we are both fathers.
Keir Enderby said he hoped his father had now joined other revolutionaries: “Hopefully they are comparing notes, having a drink, and shaking their heads at the state of Australian affairs.”
When they compared notes would they ask each other “How many people did you murder and then argue over the countless millions that died because of their communist insanity?
…and laugh insanely over their the answers.
DVA under siege
Grant Martin, a sailor during the war to evict Iraq from Kuwait wants PTSD recognized and a pension to compensate.
“I have to sleep in a separate bed from my wife because of violent fits and throwing punches all the time,” he said. “You’re on a knife edge all the time. You can’t sleep, you can’t relax, you can’t concentrate, it feels like your head’s going to fall off.”
All this angst because when serving on HMAS Canberra on Operation DAMASK VI following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (November 1992 to March 1993), someone did, or didn’t issue a missile alert indicating that the Iraq military might launch a scud missile aimed at someone, somewhere.
The initial report found there was “no evidence” to support Mr Martin’s claim the Canberra took evasive action after the missile threat was announced. In contrast, the tribunal’s final decision found “there was a missile alert … (Mr Martin) perceived a very real threat from the announced missile attack”.
His subsequent illness was “war-caused”, the tribunal found, and he was “entitled to receive a pension in respect of incapacity associated with those conditions”.
Hmmm
Bikies back ALP
OPPOSITION Leader Annastacia Palaszczuk will have the backing of exiled bikies across Queensland when she goes to the polls this year.
Labor’s pledge to repeal and replace the controversial anti-bikie laws is likely to score her thousands of votes from not only disgruntled motorcycle gang members but also their families, associates and even charities that benefited from their fundraising, bikie chiefs say.
“We just want to be treated like a sporting club. We are a sporting club. We’ll go along with anyone – Labor, Katter, whoever will listen rather than treat us like criminals.”
So prostitution, drug running and extortion are the new sports.
Who’d have thought that?
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