I like the Dixie Chicks, even though their politics are entirely unrelated to reality.
This song, though, could be a message from the free world to terrorists everywhere.
I love this clip.
Day: April 30, 2009
Just a couple of interesting gadgets.
The Sharkstopper is an accoustic shark repellent. It produces sound at a pitch sharks find uncomfortable, so they just swim away. That’s the idea, anyway.
If testing shows this is effective I can see the Sharkstopper being a big hit in Australia. There are about 12 shark attacks every year in Australia, and one fatal attack every five years, so it’s really not something to panic about. But that never stopped anyone.
Of course, even with one fatality every five years, Australians are still more likely to die from a shark attack than Swine Flu. But not if you are wearing the Sharkstopper. Presumably.
The Jupiter Jack is a little device you plug into your mobile (cell) phone. It produces a short range FM radio signal which plays your caller’s voice through your car stereo. It is easier and cheaper than a bluetooth connection or traditional hands free kit. Another one of those simple (and cheap) ideas you see and wonder why no one thought of before.
The Jupiter Jack claims to work with any phone in any car. Not yet available in Australia. Bother.
And I love Susan Boyle.
What to do?
Just watch it.
Crowds love ugly people – Britains Got Talent Parody.
It’s a parody of the judges, not Susan Boyle, by the way. ‘There’s something so surprising about someone really ugly being able to do anything..’ Wonderful.
World Wide Words defines a snollygoster as ‘a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.’
Snollygoster has not been heard much for the last sixty years.
President Truman used it in 1952, and defined it, either in ignorance or impishness, as “a man born out of wedlock”.
Many people put him right, some quoting this definition from the Columbus Dispatch of October 1895, with its splendid last phrase in the spirit of the original: “A Georgia editor kindly explains that ‘a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy’.
Remind you of anyone? It’s been used of Arlen Specter (well, by me, anyway), but I was thinking of someone else.
It’s no surprise that snollygoster is making a come-back.
A few people, including Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, have picked up these comments from Sir Michael Caine, originally published in the UK Telegraph:
“The Government has taken tax up to 50 per cent, and if it goes to 51 I will be back in America,” he said at the weekend. “We’ve got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I’m 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them. Let’s get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up.”
Sir Michael is a perfect example of someone who came from nowhere and got somewhere, by thinking, planning and working.
Lots of people don’t like to think or work, and would rather imagine that the poverty and dullness of their lives is caused by people with money keeping them down, or by bad luck, or indeed by anything except the likely real causes, stupidity and laziness.
The best hope for people who are in that situation is not to have some bleating social worker pat them on the hand and say ‘There, there, it’s not your fault, the system is keeping you down, you never had a chance.’
Sir Michael and thousands of migrants to Australia prove that no matter what your background, you can succeed if you are willing to think and work hard.
People who are unhappy, poor, lonely, need to hear that in many cases their unpleasant situation is a result of choices they have made. And (and this is something that really is empowering) that they can change their situation by changing those choices. That is, if they want things to be different, they have to act differently.
Gordon Brown’s (UK) and Kevin Rudd’s (Australia) government do not see things in that way. Both seem to be driven by resentment of people who have worked hard and done well.
Both Brown and Rudd are determined to introduce tax regimes which will undermine future economic development. Those regimes will undermine development by taking so much of the income of those who risk money they have saved for years, mortgage their homes, etc, to develop new ideas and new businesses, that no sensible person would bother.
Or if you were going to bother, you would go to some other country to do it.
Such policies are economic suicide. Taxes come from successful, profitable businesses, and the people they employ. Without profitable businesses, there is no tax income. If there is no tax income there is no legislature, no infrastructure, no social services.
It takes two to make a loan.
Borrowers are losing beds, TVs and washing machines after taking out short-term, high-interest “payday loans” they cannot afford to repay, say consumer advocates.
So, don’t take out the loan. Stop drinking. Give up smoking. Eat something other than takeaways. Stop buying Lotto tickets. Get a job. Take some responsibility for your life. Everything that happens to you isn’t someone else’s fault. It is not someone else’s job to keep paying for your mistakes, or laziness, or both.
John Brady, national compliance manager of City Finance, which lends money to people who need to fix cars or buy a new fridge… says his typical customer borrows $1500 and pays it off over a year, paying a 43 per cent interest rate and application fee of up to $380.
Yes, they are scoundrels. They take advantage of the poor.
But the answer is pretty simple. If you can’t afford to repay a loan, don’t get it.
Britain’s new ‘Equality Bill’ replaces nine other diversity laws, so that employers will find it easier to put into place a range of inefficient and unneccesary measures thought up by people wo have never run a business in their lives.
Great idea comrade! Let’s make it even harder for small businesses to employ people capable of doing the work they are employed to do. That should help the economy along.
TV shows fall under the bill. Including, gasp of horror, Top Gear.
Dr Louise Livesey, tutor in sociology and women’s studies at Oxford, accused Top Gear of “entrenched, institutional sexism”. There’s a big surpise.
But Top Gear executive producer Andy Wilman claimed it was “utter drivel” to suggest that the show excluded women, saying: “If the show is allegedly female-unfriendly, why is almost half the audience female?
“Secondly, if we are to have a female presenter just to represent the sexes, then by that logic Loose Women needs a bloke in the line-up pretty sharpish.
“I actually believe these sorts of mandates are patronising to women viewers, because they assume that women can’t enjoy a show’s presenters on merit, but can only appreciate a program if spoken to by one of their own sex.”
Preach it, brother.
Melbourne today recorded its coldest April morning for 60 years.
In Coldstream, in Melbourne’s outer east, the mercury dropped to -2.7C, while Mt Hotham had the morning’s lowest temperature of 4.4C – a day after the mountain recorded the lowest ever April minimum temperature of -8.2C. Melbourne set another record yesterday when it recorded four days in a row below 15C for the first time since 1949.
Meanwhile, some Australian ski fields will open on the first weekend in May, for the first time ever.
Of course, a couple of cold Winters, or a couple of warm Summers, don’t make a long term change in global climate.
But even for the most determined warming alarmist, it is getting harder not to notice that despite the computer games, sorry, climate models, the world is not actually getting any warmer.
The media will lose interest in global warming over the coming year. No one is scared by global warming any more, so it won’t sell papers, and won’t increase advertising revenues.
When the media loses interest, the politicians will lose interest. They have short little attention spans anyway. When the politicians lose interest, the scientists will lose interest, because there won’t be bucket loads of grant money any more.
Fortunately for the media, another scary potential disaster is looming on the horizon. Swine Flu. Or some other Nasty Scary Disease that is probably just around the corner.
To keep advertising revenues up, the sky must always be falling. The reason may change, but the sky must always be falling.
So we (well, not you, intelligent reader, obviously) are led around by the nose, hypnotised by the latest scare. When the public gets scared, the politicians have to look as if they are doing something. So vast piles of money are wasted on each new potential disaster.
Real, present disasters, large numbers of people dying now, take a back seat to something scary that might happen soon, maybe.
To give just one example, the new strain of Swine Flu was identified on April 17th – about two weeks ago. The first cases may have been as early as a month ago. During this time Swine Flu has killed maybe ten people – not 150 – according to the World Health Organisation.
So it might be worrying if you are in poor health already and have been in contact with someone who is already infected.
By contrast, over the same 30 day period, some 180, 000 people, about one every 20 seconds, have died from Malaria, most of them children.
Qohel Blog Author Peter Wales
