If you are reading this, thank a Teacher. If you are reading it in English, thank a Soldier
AUSTRALIANS are being urged to support members of the Australian Defence Force this Anzac Day by posting a message on a dedicated website or by SMS.
A joint initiative between the Australian Defence Force and Telstra has created this website to enable the messages to be posted.
Text and picture messages can be sent to 044 SUPPORT (0447 877 678).
Do something for the troops – go on, you know you owe it to them.
President Obama continues with his left wing plan to lend support to the Terrorists and every little Communist dictator he meets.
Forelock tugging in the Middle East, smiles and chats with Chavez and ” Hello Cuba, I want to be your friend” type activities must be making for many a wide eyed foreign diplomat. But that’s not all! Let’s tell the world, including the terrorists trying every day to kill us, just how we go about extracting information from them.
After releasing details on so called torture he assured a mainly wide eyed CIA audience that they shouldn’t worry and then the next day talks of Bush Officials being probed about their legal advice giving the green light for the so called torture.
The president last week overruled objections from Central Intelligence Agency officials and released documents that described such interrogation tactics as waterboarding, slamming prisoners against walls and confining them in cramped spaces — sometimes populated with insects — to induce fear.
Mark Corallo, a former Bush administration official in the Department of Justice lays it on the line.
“To even leave the door open to prosecuting lawyers who in good faith sought to provide legal advice to our military and intelligence community, who were protecting us from more terrorist attacks, is outrageous and shows a lack of leadership and an unfortunate act of obeisance towards the radical left of the president’s party,”
Even Mr. Obama’s director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, defended the harsh practices.
He wrote in a letter to colleagues last week that “high-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”
Slamming prisoners against the wall….oh my God, the horror of it all! But really, if just one American life was saved by these ‘abhorrant interrogation techniques’ then it is justified.
The fact that hundreds and possibly thousands of lives have been saved makes me ask ‘What on earth is he on about?
More at WSJ
A Canberra bomber with 2 Sqn RAAF in South Vietnam
THE remains of an RAAF Canberra bomber flown by Australia’s last two MIAs have been found in Vietnam.
The wreckage was found in a remote mountainous region near the Viet-Lao border but no human remains have been located so far, Defence Science and Personnel Minister Warren Snowdon said in a statement.
Flying Officer Michael Herbert (left) and Pilot Officer Robert Carver went missing in November, 1970.
More
Additional reading;
2 Sqn Association site and Airwarvietnam info on 2 Sqn.
Our US hosts have been upgrading their servers with the result that some posts and comments have been lost, presumable permanently. I realize that fact won’t impact negatively on the world’s literary inventory but it is annoying just the same, in that I can’t for the life of me remember what I said other than it was about asylum seekers.
Now I have to worry about another problem..maybe like the servers, I’m also losing large chunks of memory.
As proof that Rudd’s “We either spend 40 billion or we do nothing” line is working is this letter in The Australian this morning.
THIS week I went to my local supermarket and purchased goods worth less than $50 which I paid for with my EFTPOS card. I live less than 200 kilometres from the Sydney CBD in a major tourist town. As I stood there, my EFTPOS card failed to function due to a “modem error”. To my great surprise, I was told that the local store uses dial-up modem! This is horse-and-buggy technology. What a national disgrace that, in 2009, business is still relying on dial-up modem.
Australia needs the Government’s proposed broadband network and we need it now. If the critics can’t comprehend the need for high-speed broadband, then they just don’t understand technology and the massive benefits that the proposed new broadband network could deliver to the national economy. It is best that the Government ignores the Luddites and proceeds with all haste to bring our economy into the 21st century.
Adrian Bishop
If your local store in the area that you describe has dial-up it is because they have made a commercial decision to do so – it’s cheaper. These same people, small businesses, will make similar decisions after Rudd has thrown 40 Billion at the problem.
If you can’t comprehend that the debate is not about the need for high speed broadband but about the method of attaining same then you should keep quiet until you do some more reading on the matter.
My mate Google tellls me Adrian is a serial commenter and letter write extolling the talents of the ALP and the shortcomings of the Coalition. All well and good but his letter and comments elswhere in the media suggest he is an ALP stooge who accepts everything Rudd says as gospel and when interested parties question the method he fails to see the question and thus is a long way from providing any sort of answer.
I am getting jaded with Rudd’s “We intend to spend X billion on X problem, the alternative is to do nothing”
No it isn’t! The alternative could be do something less grandiose which in the case of Broadband doesn’t depend on punters paying for a Rolls Royce when a Commodore solution may well do the job.
Henry Ergas touches on the subject in The Australian
No business case has been developed, yet ministers promise both low prices and (as required by the Competition Principles Agreement) a fully commercial rate of return. However, even with high take-up rates, breaking even requires national retail prices of $160 a month; to break even with lower take-up rates would require retail prices higher than $200 a month. Given those prices, the network will struggle in metropolitan areas, where it will face strong competition, while bearing large losses in the country (where costs per line will be more than $300 a month).
I think I’ll be sticking with the Commodore plan for a while yet. By the time Rudd’s plan undergoes full scrutiny the “spend $40 billion or do nothing” quote will have morphed into another throw away line.
You just wait and see
AFTER days of tense negotiations, the US Navy rescue of an American sea captain came in a matter of seconds on Easter Sunday when a few sniper bullets killed three Somali pirates who authorities feared were about to kill him.
There is a simple and economic answer to pirates. Just have an Infantry section (10 men) on each ship. They don’t have to be special forces – just trained infantrymen.
A damn site cheaper than deploying destroyers.
Some 200 mosques in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way for prayers, reports from Saudi Arabia say.
All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like building in Mecca’s Grand Mosque.
But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.
That’s the way guys, you keep working on the real problems of the world and us western folk will worry about the small stuff. You know science, maths, art, research and development, health, disease, transport……
In the last century, when I was a soldier, many a night I went to sleep listening to Taps on the Battalion PA system – on other nights I ignored it and order another round.
However it was never played as sweetly as this and never by one so young – do yourself a favour, stop, watch and listen for 5 minutes.
Her name is Melissa Venema
Talking to a teacher recently, an ex barrister/solicitor type, who looked stunned when I mentioned Chinese espionage agents operating in Australia.
“Says who?” he asked, intimating I had totally lost the plot or worse, was into anti ALP conspiracies..
“Why on earth would they want to spy on us?” He asked as if I couldn’t see the Chinese were an amiable lot and only wanted the best for everybody.
Mmm…well let me count the ways. We are a favoured client of the US and thus have state of the art military hardware and software…we are good at software ourselves…..we trade with China and they look for any advantage…they are a communist state thus paranoid and the list goes on. Here’s a couple more articles on the Chinese spying in Australia
I didn’t feel up to having a long conversation with someone that naive so didn’t pursue the matter but it is an indication of a lack of worldliness amongst our academia.
In Britain intelligence chiefs have warned that China might have gained the capability to shut down the country by crippling its telecommunications and utilities.
Intelligence officials have told ministers of their fear that equipment in a new communications network installed by Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, for BT, the main British telco, could be used to halt critical services such as power, food and water supplies.
Huawei was allegedly founded with significant funding from the Chinese state. Its head is Ren Zhengfei, a former director of an arm of the three-million-strong People’s Liberation Army responsible for telecommunications research.
It could be something-nothing…it could be a real threat. The point is – don’t trust them. We should deal with them by all means, sell and buy, have deep and meaningful conversations with them but keep in the back of our minds where they come from and what they have done.
David Burchell opines on Rudd’s recent meeting with Australia’s new-found friend, the CPC’s chief censor, Li Changchun.
Who is this unknown Chinese bureaucrat to whom we have accorded so many of the trappings of a royal visit, and who our political and business leaders seem so eager to propitiate? Li, who formally speaking is nothing more than an ordinary politburo member, is routinely referred to as the propaganda head of the CPC. And yet this sells him short. For his helium-like ascent through the ranks of the CPC has had less to do with disseminating favourable stories than suppressing unwelcome ones. He is, in effect, the party’s chief censor. In particular his brief is to suppress what remains of the liberal-minded opposition within the CPC.
Li has talks with a number of influential Australians;
… with acting Governor-General Marie Bashir at Government House in Sydney, with Environment and Arts Minister Peter Garrett, with Seven Network owner Kerry Stokes, and with ABC chairman Maurice Newman and general manager Mark Scott, the last of whom was photographed, looking a little uneasy, conducting Li around the set of The Gruen Transfer.
According to the Xinhua report, Scott agreed to “provide a full range of views” about China for the ABC’s audience, a statement Chinese citizens were doubtless expected to interpret as a reference to Tibet.
and the Australian people are told nothing about the propaganda visit
Whitlam started this ALP love affair with the Chinese and went there in indecent haste as Chinese equipped North Vietnam divisions invaded the South. While the bodies of our battle dead lay in recent graves, most probably killed by bullets supplied by China, Whitlam dines with their leaders.
Matched, of course by his one time deputy Cairns visiting the USSR, the other supplier of weapons designed to kill Aussie diggers, while he was President of the Australia-USSR Society. Busy boy Jim – he was also involved in organizing the Moratoriums to show his moral support for North Vietnam as well arranging collections at Australian Universities to help fund them.
Is it any wonder I don’t like the Left.
Viv Forbes, chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition, today came out in support of Earth Hour – but said it should be renamed “Blackout Night” and held outdoors, for the whole night, in mid-winter, on the shortest and coldest day of the year – 22 June in the Southern Hemisphere.
“Spending just one night in the cold and the dark, with no hot coffee or beef on the barbecue, using no light, heat or vehicle energy from coal, gas, petrol or diesel, and without protection from metal or concrete structures, would be good practice for the blackouts and shortages to come if world rationing of carbon products and carbon energy is achieved,” he said.
I thought I might go for a long drive in my vehicle nicknamed “Global Warmer with Middle Finger V8 package” and run over a Prius or two.