Retired infantry officer. Conservative by nature and politics; Happily married and father and grandfather of eight. Loves V8 powered Range Rovers, Golden Retrievers, good books and technology and think there should be open season on Greenies. Born in the mid forties and overdue for servicing but most parts still work.

Phone call to Jordan

Speaking to my son last night who is living in Jordan and has just come back from a trip to Egypt. Some quotes;
If they put all the Egyptian antiquities on a truck and moved them elsewhere, no one in their right mind would visit Egypt.
My daughter said something similar when she visited years ago. The men have no respect for woman and actually maul female tourists in public. It was a constant fight for her to maintain her dignity. Nothing surprising in this one either;
I visited the Cairo Military Museum and could not see the word Israel anywhere at all
Wonderful place, the Middle East.

2020 jury in

Discounting Left wing sources the general consensus seems to be it was a left-wing talk fest. Many, myself included, feel it smacks of Gorge Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Jeremy Sammut points out Big Brother (The original Big Brother, not that stupid TV show) is looming. Treaties before kids, A Bill of Rights before Industry, A Republic before water problems and a host of motherhood statements all culminating in larger government as outlined by Henry Ergas, CEO of Concept Economics.
The outcomes paper makes this clear, with recommendations for creating more than 20 new government agencies and instrumentalities, without a single agency, instrumentality, spending program or current government function being identified that ought to be cut back.
The weekend is ably summed up by John Capel in his letter to the editor of The Australian
THE summit showed how carefully contrived questions put to carefully selected participants will result in totally predictable outcomes. John Capel Black Rock, Vic
I will waste no more time on the Summit but wait expectantly for actual outcomes that benefit the nation as a whole. Waiting….waiting….

2020 Hindsight

I have long advocated giving young grads a cut in their HEC debt for service in remote Australia. Young Doctors, nurses and teachers would be welcome in a lot of communities and as we can’t seem to get our quota of older professionals then the young ones will do. This is one idea to come out of the Canberra gathering of the true believers that I haven’t heard before but the rest is mostly old stuff and/or motherhood statements. I note Mundine advocates that all Aborigine children should learn English but does anyone else feel there is something basically wrong when he has to say it. Of course kids in Australia should learn English and we don’t need a committee to tell us so. We just need the cultural warriors of the Left to lay of and let governments and agencies work on giving Indigenous kids the same chance at education as the rest of us get. I can’t get it out of my mind that the whole show has been set up to glorify Rudd and confirm his policies and to bring into public debate those policies of the insane Left that he said he wouldn’t implement when he was looking for votes. Run ’em up the flag pole, so to speak, and see who salutes. Well, we know who will salute and that’s the worry. The whole process was set up to provide a set-piece result. How many monarchists were invited I wonder. We know Small Business hardly got a look in, the AMA weren’t represented and was there anyone there to caution against committing to a greener world without at least some semblance of considering the economy as well in the mix – I doubt it. The Courier Mail’s deadwood edition has a huge headline VOICE OF THE PEOPLE but could I be so bold as to say it is not the voice of the people; it is the voice of a small select group of people who subscribe to a certain set of opinions that are welcomed by the ALP. If some of the Motherhood statements are turned into reality something may come of it but that’s a big ask and when the activists supporting some of the more zany ideas are confronted with the electorate then reality will bite. I am not enthused and still wait for the Rudd government to actually do something for the benefit of the country as a whole and not just for those who voted for the greener grass on the other side of the ideological divide….that bright and shiny thing over there – let’s try that out. Surely some must be looking at the shiny thing a bit closer now and noting it is really is a bit dull, not what they thought or were lead to believe, but a poor copy of the real thing.

2020 talkfest not getting down to business

BUSINESS leaders are fuming after only four small-business representatives were accepted for this weekend’s 2020 Summit, far fewer than the red carpet of celebrities attending. FOUR! Film stars abound for Rudd/Celebrity photo ops, Union leaders everywhere, Members of the Church of the Latter Day Alarmists (Global warming advocates), Greenies and Academics all queuing up for their fifteen minutes of fame but only .04% representation from a group that employs over four million Australians. Makes sense in a Lefty/ALP sort of way. Opposition small business spokesman Steve Ciobo joined in the attack, accusing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of “gagging” the industry.
“I want to know how Mr Rudd plans to have a decent discussion on the future of small business when the people who can bring a real perspective to the table won’t even be there.
Dr Emerson (Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) replies;
“only the Opposition” could continue to be negative about a major summit to discuss the ambitions of the nation. “From the outset the Government has been clear that people would be selected on merit and not on their ability to represent peak organisations,” he said.
Hence the brace of Union Reps and as a matter on interest, just how does Cate Blanchet fit into that formula?

Alarm grows at China’s influence in East Timor

And it should! On the day that Rudd pledged to deepen relations between China and Australia, China and East Timor signed a $28 million deal for East Timor to buy two advanced patrol boats. They can’t afford to maintain and crew the old ones they have now so who benefits most from the deal? While Rudd castigates the Chinese over Tibet to allow his media circus to report back to Australia just how important Rudd is, the Chinese are busy white anting us in the Pacific. I wonder if this matter came up in discussions between the Chinese Leader and Australia’s Chief Clerk…I doubt it yet I would have thought it should have been foremost in Rudd’s list of things to discuss. I feel uneasy about China’s increasing influence in our backyard particularly while we have a Sino- centric government.

Spam

Last night I deleted 41,000 spam emails from our server. All I have to do now is change the tags of every post and remove the allow pings option. If anyone knows how bulk edit posts please leave a comment as I have about 2,000 posts to edit. If you have emailed me over the last week, please try again. In the interests of doing the bulk delete as quickly as possible I chose not to check every email…30 seconds x 41,000….obvious choice wasn’t it? Wouldn’t be Monday without some problem, would it?

Dry your eyes, Princess

Guess who didn’t enjoy his National Service. A letter to The Australian
DEFENCE Minister Joel Fitzgibbon is talking through his backside when he states Gen Y recruits find “even a month-long commitment is an eternity to an Australian teenager’’, as I can well assure him my two years’ national service in the 1960s felt like 20. I think it might have had something to do with the brain-dead company of regular soldiers whose idea of great literature was a comic; they were generally hopeless people who would need to have been taught how to breathe in civvy life, and were, in the main, hopeless losers and drunkards. The same goes for the commissioned ranks. David William Hall Southport, Qld
Comic reader, loser and drunkard….hmm, at least I’ve been noticed. David, if you’re in Brisbane on Apr 25 why not drop in to the Pig and Whistle at Eagle Street and I’ll arrange for you to have the floor as you explain to the 7RAR and SASR Associations your theories on dumb regular soldiers.

Global Warming

I have included a quote and link to an article in todays Australian in the left column. If you are already a member of the new Church of the Latter Day Alarmists or are considering applying for membership, you might like to read it and ponder. It’s not simply a case that I agree with the good Professor, but more that he articulates my feelings and opinions on the matter better than I do. I have problems with the ongoing debate about temperature changes. Opinions are abound over what a decimal point change in average temperatures mean and what, or who is causing it; with enormous efforts by commentators portraying light and sound presentations complete with graphs and pics of Polar Bears on melting ice flows. They present this as proof that the worlds climate is changing but no one needs proof – it has been changing forever. We once had an ice age and now we don’t, and before that ice age we had warmer periods. Climate is always changing, it is cyclic as are the orbits of all the agents; the sun, other planets and matters or agents unknown to us. That much is clear but the core of the religious movement is that we humans are causing it. Nothing else matters which is a poor premise because we don’t know enough about everything else. Those of the faith, the Church elders, use alarming statements to convert us. Your waterfront property will be worthless, crops will fail, continued mining of coal will turn the skies, and your lungs, black and the people flock to the pulpit. The media, sensing a new and varied way to sell their products, join the faith and we are flooded with images of Pittwater, Sydney flooded…look at your house, it’s meters under…and graphic depictions of the Great Barrier Reef without coral…all those beautiful colours lost. Shades of Armageddon thousands of years ago ago…..convert, do what I say or you will spend your days in purgatory. That’s not to say we don’t look to better manage the Earth but I would like to see it done in a secular fashion using the old, ever reliable science, engineering and common sense. Plant trees where we have clear felled, plant and manage plantation timbers, help third world countries maintain their rain forests with some financial help, pursue cleaner power, but most of all, let’s not panic about what the preacher said at the pulpit last Sunday. UPDATE: They are even trying to panic the beer drinkers.
BEER will be short supply, more expensive and may taste different as climate change affects barley production, a scientist says.

What’s going on?

A SOUTH Australian woman has given birth to her father’s son after the couple had sex.
John and Jenny Deaves reunited 30 years after Mr Deaves separated from Jenny’s mother. Jenny was 31 and, just two weeks after meeting, father and daughter had sex.
I looked for the word ‘incest’ in the article but couldn’t find it and then I noted:
A South Australian police media spokesman said: “The couple is being monitored.”
Somewhere along the line I obviously had a bad day and failed to notice incest was made legal. What’s going on?
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