Category: Politics

More Aussie Humour

While taking my obligatory daily walk, I usually listen to music that I’ve downloaded to my phone, but for the last few days I’ve varied things by listening to “Triple M”, an Aussie commercial FM station.   Of course, they carry adverts, which are frequently highly localised and delivered in a strong local accent, wherever one happens to be.   I’m inclined to ignore the content, but I learn a lot of dialect.

Yesterday, however, I was much amused by one for a new Ute – a Mazda I believe, though I could be wrong – which had a delightful political throwaway buried in the exaggerated Queensland Strine.   Describing the virtues of the new vehicle, at breakneck speed, the guy said –

… and as for grunt, well, this baby delivers 412 Newton-metres, which is more torque than you get at a Climate Change Convention …

Quite made my day. 🙂

Out of the House

Politics isn’t my usual fare. Still.
Delving into the world of American politics and its constitution one fact caught my eye. It concerned the term that a House of Representative member serves: two years. Two years? Even a non-political follower like me knows that this is quite a small amount of time to be in power. There’s not much you can do in two years. Four years seems to be the average length globally for general elections and stuff like that. Four years is plenty of time for policies and plans to bear fruit. And if not- Goodbye, you’re out.

A two-year term means that if you want to be re-elected you spend most of your time on the campaign trail. Continue reading “Out of the House”

I Am Fed Up!

I have had just about enough of theses endless cries of ‘racism’ that are being bandied around at every opportunity, not just in Britain, but around the world. While some are legitimate and provide cause for concern, others are trivial in the extreme. What they all share in common, however, is that they are white on black attacks, whether verbal or physical and that they are being pursued with unmitigated vigour by the law and the press. The reason I am so angry is that many cases are as I said, trivial in the extreme while at the same time similar as well as much, much worse examples of black on white attacks are ignored. Continue reading “I Am Fed Up!”

Back to their bad old ways?

Before South Africa became the Rainbow Nation, we in the rest of the world were resigned to reading regular reports of how police suspects had unaccountably jumped out of tenth storey windows while being questioned.    Steve Biko, for one.  One shrugged.   What else could one do, it was what the police did in the state of apartheid.

What were they called?   BOSS, or something, wasn’t it?   Buro vir Staatsveiligheid, that’s the chap.   They bullied their way around the world, infiltrating other police forces, including the UK, where they did some very questionable things.

But that’s all behind us, isn’t it?

South Africa is a model state these days, surely.

Well, actually – no.

After several misleading – and in some cases downright false – statements, the world’s press appears to have established that Peter Roebuck (an English-Australian-South African cricket journalist of great renown) “jumped” from his sixth floor hotel room whilst being questioned by a solitary South African police person, allegedly about a matter of sexual abuse.   Some accounts report two police persons.

Hah!   If you believe that you’ll believe anything.

I would dearly like to hear Soutie’s take on this.

Hang on a cotton pickin’ minute May.

When I ask, did it become acceptable to arrest anyone for something you think they might do?

Linky thing.

Somewhere along the line the gubmint has managed to engender such fear, that it seems perfectly natural to arrest people in the street who are totally innocent of any crime what-so-ever.

I am not an EDL supporter folks, I find their tactics distasteful. However, they do have the right to peaceful protest in exactly the same way as anyone else in this country. According to this story, they were standing in the street and paying their respects in exactly the same manner as every other member of the public. Continue reading “Hang on a cotton pickin’ minute May.”

A Framework of Thought

There are several vital differences between totalitarianism and all the orthodoxies of the past, either in Europe or in the East. The most important is that the orthodoxies of the past did not change, or at least did not change rapidly. In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It did not tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. And the same is more or less true of any orthodox Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim today. In a sense his thoughts are circumscribed, but he passed his whole life within the same framework of thought. His emotions are not tampered with.

Now, with totalitarianism, exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but cannot avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declared itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.
 George Orwell

Continue reading “A Framework of Thought”

This man has trashed Australia


This greedy, self-centred Irish gobshite (a word I hate, but nothing else is appropriate) has singlehandedly trashed the image of Australia around the world, playing havoc with our economy and ensuring that the airline that we were once proud to describe as an Australian icon will inexorably lose money and morph into another low service, poor safety Asian also-ran.

He ignored his customers, stranding some 80,000 of them around the globe.

Last year he took home $11 million as his salary plus bonus, but his declared objective is to get round Australia’s strong employment laws so that he can pay his employees Asian sweatshop wages.

He is a scrote.

Thank goodness that even Juliar had sufficient balls to (indirectly) order Qantas back into the air.