Author: Kev

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.

AWB Fiasco IV

Posted on by
Let’s sumarise the debate. Beasely, ‘Tricky’ Rudd and their co-travellers have raised the Cole enquiry to international prominence by politicising the process in their mindless pursuit of a government. Eager for a Ministerial scalp they have pre-empted the enquiry results and given succour to our enemies. The US wheat board, also hoping for a scalp for commercial reasons, are ecstatic. It gave them ammo to go to Iraq and put pressure on tthe Iraqis to buy US wheat and not Australian. With a good percentage of the ALP hating the US, I wonder whether the irony of their aiding and abetting the US Wheat Baord will come to their notice. Probably not. The big losers in this debate are the Australian Wheat farmers and by extension, the Australian economy. Winners include the US but not the ALP. Yes…I know, Newspoll gleefully records a loss of support for the government in their latest guestimate but don’t think for a moment that it’s a long term thing. The ALP are making mileage as they defend the high moral ground but that ground is historically indefensible as Corporations and businesses of all scales realize that to trade in certain parts of the world one needs to factor in ‘fees’. Do you think it only started with the advent of the Howard’s government? Of course not, it’s been the norm for commercial enterprises to pay ‘fees’ for decades. Certainly throughout the Hawke-Keating years but I can’t, for the life of me, recall anyone demanding those two erudite ALP leaders micro-manage private enterprise contacts. The ‘crime’ was victimless. Iraqis got fed….Aussie wheat farmers got paid. On the other hand, the ALP’s hysterical pursuit of Ministerial scalps is full of victims and they are all Australians. Farmers and AWB staff to name two groups. No winners here…not good.
Politics

Jews don’t like him and neither do I

Posted on by
ILLUSTRATOR Michael Leunig has been accused of playing the martyr in expressing outrage over his work being included in a distasteful Iranian cartoon competition because the images were anti-Semitic.
Leunig, whose cartoons appear in the Fairfax newspapers, was the subject of a bizarre hoax when someone fraudulently entered one of his works in an Iranian newspaper competition for the world’s most offensive Holocaust cartoons.
For more details see Tim Blairs expose
The entry was initially taken seriously and was picked up around the world by media including Australian Associated Press, The Sydney Morning Herald, Le Monde and Islamonline. But the cartoon was withdrawn from Hamshahri’s website after Leunig demanded it be removed.
The entry was taken seriously because it is believable. Leunig is anti-Semetic and anti-everything else I stand for and there is a fair chance his cartoon could’ve picked up a prize in the Iranian news competition for the most offensive cartoon that redicules the West or the Jews In the Age Leunig seeks sympathy from the Australia public, long used to his offensive cartoons with the header;
Amid the pain, God puts his hand on my shoulder.
But not on everybodies shoulder apparently;
Elsewhere in the world, families stricken with anger and sadness grieve for loved ones killed in the madness of war. Homes lie in rubble.
Wars started, I might add, by those who Leunig supports with his cartoons What an offensive tosser
War on Terror

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water again…it is.

Posted on by
PETER Benchley, author of the bestseller Jaws that was the basis for the blockbuster movie that terrified beachgoers and kept many out of the water for years, died at his home at age 65, his family said overnight.but I empathise with the Benchly family but one of my daughters is still traumatised by the movie Jaws and still views the sea as a source of terror so I’m glad the chance of another Jaws movie has deminished by his demise.
General Musings

Military kit

Posted on by
In todays Australian Michael McKinnon and Cameron Stewart co edit a piece lambasting the government on the equipment issued to soldiers and kicks off with this startling statement.
BLOOD-filled boots and sodden jackets infested with maggots force thousands of Australian soldiers a year to buy their own military equipment.
What can they mean…..blood…..maggots? The article actually turns into a unpaid advertisement for Crossfire Australia P/L who, in their catalogue have a boot grandly named the Peace Keeper ECW Boot marketed with the following a boast

CROSSFIRE® has been involved with duty boots of one kind or another for decades. We’ve provided tens of thousands of pairs to military, fire fighters, police, ambos etc.

Haven’t heard a lot of complaints yet, except sometimes the age old question: “Why doesn’t the ……… give us boots this good?”
One reason, they cost $355.00 a pair. With about 70,000 reserve and regular troops that translates at near $250m just to shod the troops.
Speaking from a military show in Las Vegas, Crossfire manager Peter Marshall said his company was a big contractor to the Defence Department, with “substantial sales directly to units and to individual soldiers”. “I have spoken to thousands of soldiers who all say they cannot operate at full efficiency because of poor equipment. This failure places their lives at risk,” he said.
The quote “substantial sales directly to units and to individual soldiers” clearly outlines Crossfire’s agenda….sell more gear…force the government to upgrade indidual equipment. Don’t listen to them anymore but do listen to the soldiers. Blood and maggots appears a bit extreme to me but the fact that not all soldiers are happy with their equipment is as old as soldiering. It’s a basic fact that a percentage of professional soldiers will always call to queston government issued kit and will look elsewhere for satisfaction. The quantification of this dissatisfaction is the telling point. The Crossfire manager quotes “thousands of soldiers” complaining about poor equipment but I can smell a bit of sales talk in the air. I complained about the equipment I was issued. My issue pack for Vietnam came in one size fits all and was designed to carry three days rations. I would talk fondly of getting hold of the bastard who thought three days capacity was sufficient for an Infantry pack and arrange for him to carry, for the rest of his life, the other seven days I had to carry in the bloody thing. I never did a three day patrol between resupply but did lots of seven and once, 14 days, living (sparingly) off the contents of the pack. The first Australian troops in Vietnam (1RAR) were shod with Boots, AB with ‘D^D 1945’ often stamped on the leather. After 20 years in storage and three months in monsoonal weather the stitching gave way and black insulating tape and signal cabling held them together until Defence designed, made and issued the Boots, GP. Soldiers called our “Smocks, Tropical”, “Smocks, Physcological” because they didn’t keep the rain out and when the government issued us with new tropical jungle green uniforms they forgot to tell us not to iron them as the nylon thread using in sewing them together melted and the sleeve fell off on day one…the pockets fell off on day two…the collar day three…..We were issued flack jackets but only used them to sit on and protect our masculinity when forced to travel by soft skinned vehicles and the helmet affected our hearing when jungle vegetation scraped along the surface so we used them for washing back at base. I could go on but you must have got my drift by now. It happens. Yeah, I know, different generation, different expectations, but by and large the game doesn’t change and so long as it is a minority of soldiers complaining then the more things change the more they stay the same. In moments of frustration we reminded ourselves that our equipment, incuding our rifle, was made by the lowest bidder. Besides which, if you’re soldiering in close proximity to US forces arrange for them to teach you how to play poker and buy their gear with your winnings. We did…worked a treat. And remember…cynicism helps put it all in perspecive.
Defence

‘Stinging’ Nettle

Posted on by
THE rosaries-ovaries T-shirt worn by an Australian Greens senator was deeply offensive to Catholics, Prime Minister John Howard said today. An understatement, Mr Howard. The Greens Senator is deeply offensive herself. So crass and yet claims the high moral ground in the debate.
Australian Greens Senator Kerry Nettle wore the “keep your rosaries off my ovaries” T-shirt earlier this week as the Senate started its emotion charged debate over who should control the abortion drug RU486. The T-shirt was sponsored by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).
I’m a self confessed coward in relation to the abortion debate. I say nothing…with a catholic wife, a Mother, three sisters, three daughters, what appears at times to be a hundred switched on modern nieces (all Catholic) and no religion myself to speak of I figure it’s a woman’s issue. All that of course doesn’t stop me picking on my favourite sub-species – the Greens. The woman is offensive, not just her shirt. The PM continues;
“The Greens Party can practically sneer at Catholic devotional practice and think it’s funny and to see some journalists standing around grinning as if the whole thing’s a joke,” he said. “And it’s the kind of silly undergraduate contribution to this debate which is regrettable but that’s democracy.”
Whereas I’m not heavy into religion, I’m very much into people having the right to practice their beliefs and pay homage to their Gods without redicule. Nettle and her kind; the downside to democracy. UPDATE: ‘Stinging’ Nettle says she’s sorry;
AUSTRALIAN Greens senator Kerry Nettle says she is sorry if her rosaries-ovaries T-shirt offended anyone, but pledged to wear it again.
Which really means she isn’t sorry; she just mouthed some words to get more media coverage and will wear it again when it suits her.
Politics

Butane could be the villian

Posted on by
Butane gas and aircraft do not mix. I can recall doing a Unit Emplaning Officers’ course whilst in-service and being told the story of a bic lighter sitting on the dash of a Hercules long enough to heat up, explode and cause sufficient damage to bring down the aircraft. I also remember being in a Herc one day when the Loadie discovered a butane bottle in someone’s kit. With drama worthy of a career in Hollwood he raised the rear gate and threw the offending item out at 30,000 feet. Thinking about that now, I wonder where it landed? Hope we were over desert or somewhere similar……still. Whatever, this article from the SMH raises the issue again. Butane could be the villian with the Sea King choper crash in Nias, Indonesia last year.
TEN canisters of highly flammable liquid butane gas found in the wreckage of a Sea King helicopter that crashed on the Indonesian island of Nias last year could have been taken on board by an aid worker, an inquiry into the accident has heard.
Counsel assisting the inquiry, Lieutenant Stephen Harper and Lieutenant Matthew Vesper, yesterday began investigating the role of an Australian aid worker, Frank Tyler, who was picked up on Nias with his interpreter on the morning of the accident. Mr Tyler wanted the Sea King’s assistance to get to Teluk Dalam, where more than 100 casualties had been reported. A number of boxes which Mr Tyler wanted transported were also loaded onto the Sea King. But instead of flying direct to Teluk Dalam, the helicopter flew back to the Kanimbla.
There the boxes were unloaded and stored in a hangar on the ship for 2½ hours before being placed back on the Sea King later that day for the flight to Teluk Dalam. It was on that flight that the crash occurred. In between, there had been a crew change on the Sea King, known as Shark 02.
Who signed off on the load list for the second flight, I wonder? Not good. UPDATE: Just to clarify my position; I’m not suggesting the butane had anything to do with the crash but could well have caused loss of life subsequent to the impact and resultant fuel ignition.
Defence

AWB Fiasco III

Posted on by
Greg Sheridan in the Australian.
I THINK it’s time we all took a cold shower on AWB (formerly the Australian Wheat Board) and its participation in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. According to the Volcker inquiry, about 2253 companies from 66 countries were involved in paying kickbacks to the Saddam Hussein regime as part of their trade under oil-for-food.
My thoughts exactly. If you do business in this part of the world you pay bakshees. If you don’t pay you don’t sell. Would ‘Tricky’ Rudd or Beasley have compensated the thousands of Australian wheat growers for loss of sales if the crop stayed in the bins? No way. Australians see that it’s all about the ALP trying to score a strike against the government; that the government most probably didn’t know about the details of the case and that after all, the AWB did what it was chartered to do – sell the wheat crop in extremely difficult circumstances. As well as getting money to the wheat growers for their efforts they most probably saved lives in Iraq. Kids had food for a change. I guess that in the total absence of any coherent policies the ALP can not hope to win power; they can only hope to bring the government down by a technicality.
The broader question of corruption is very slippery. When people are accused of corruption, this normally means acting dishonestly, stealing money for themselves. Many people connected to the UN, such as Kofi Annan’s son Koji, made a lot of money personally through oil-for-food. No one is alleging that folks at AWB were improperly pocketing money themselves.
It’s not about the AWB, they are just the catalyst for the ALP to attack. There will be any amount of Australian companys who will have paid ‘fees’ to get goods over the wharves in Indonesia, through customs in some South African excuse for a country or even into a European market. It just happens and the only difference is the actual word used to describe the ‘fees’. In fact, if any company tells you they don’t pay ‘fees’ to get goods into Indonesia I would say they are telling porkies. The ABC, SBS and ALP should get over it and start acting as a constructive opposition. There are plenty of bills to debate and the AWB will not cost Howard any votes.
General Musings, US Politics

Abu Hamza guilty…looking at life

Posted on by
Good news from London. Abu Hamza, the Muslim cleric whose fiery rhetoric has become synonymous with Islamist extremism in Britain, today faced life imprisonment after being found guilty of inciting his followers to murder.Egyptian-born Hamza, 47, was convicted of 11 of 15 charges of using his position as spiritual leader of the Muslim community in North London to become, in the words of the prosecution, a recruiting sergeant for terrorism. His counsel argued that Hamza’s speeches may appear deeply offensive at times but offensiveness did not make them a crime. Yeah…right. And when he’s finished in Britain, the Yanks want a piece of him for trying to set up a “terrorist training camp” in the state of Oregan. UPDATE: Abu gets seven years
The judge said that in handing down a seven-year sentence he was aware that upon release Abu Hamza was likely to be rearrested and extradited to the United States where he faces serious terrorist charges, including conspiracy to take hostages. 
That should see him out of the picture for a while.
War on Terror

Beazley and Downer on cartoons

Posted on by
OPPOSITION Leader Kim Beazley has condemned the publication in Australia of controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Mr Beazley said he believed publishing the caricatures was “extremely unwise”.
“It’s an offensive cartoon and it shouldn’t be printed,” he said.
I’m sure he meant to say they are offensive cartoons. Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper has published one of the 12 cartoons, while political commentator Tim Blair has posted all 12 on his website.The cartoons, which were first published in Denmark, have sparked violent protests around the Muslim world. Downer says;
“I see the cartoons they produce of me and John Howard and so on and they’re usually incredibly offensive but that is just the nature of our society.” “I think around the world people have got to learn that not everybody needs to agree with them or have the same interpretations that they have of events or people, and they need to demonstrate a higher degree of tolerance.”
Mr Beazley also has condemned the global violence over the cartoons, as “absurd and disproportionate”. It might be procative to publish the cartoons but the alternative is to be seen as buckling under fatwas and only printing in our media what these 7th century zealots authorise. Not this little black duck. Meanwhile, Al JAzeera reports that Iran is planning a series of Holocaust cartoons in retaliation
Iran’s largest selling newspaper has announced it is holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
When no Mosques are destroyed, no riots eventuate, no Iranian flags burnt and no threats made they are going to appear stupid. So stupid in fact that they won’t even realize it.
General Musings
1 … 142 143 144 145 146 … 228