I watched this tonight. Wow! What a great movie. The special effects are a bit cheesy in just a couple of places, but story and characters are compelling throughout. I loved it.
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It is pretty clear now that Donald Trump will not get the required number of delegates to win the Republican nomination. There will be a contested convention. At this stage, although he has a majority of delegates, less than 40% of votes have gone to Trump, and a disturbing (for the GOP) proportion of people in the street say they will not vote for him if he is nominated, regardless of who he chooses as running mate, or of who the Democrat candidate is.
I like Trump, but I also said months ago that the only way the Republicans could lose the election was to choose Trump as their candidate. If the GOP has any sense, and I am hoping they still have some, they will choose someone else. Who?
Cruz is a viable option, but not likely to get the numbers at a convention, though I wouldn’t mind if he did. The likelihood now is that something completely unprecedented will occur, and that someone who has not participated in the primaries will end up as the nominee.
Nikki Haley has shown herself a courageous and competent politician. She does not bow to popular opinion. She is consistently conservative on social issues, and sensible on economic policy. Foreign policy is important, and that is an area where she lacks experience. But it is also an area where good advice counts and is available. Character, intelligence, experience and energy all matter more. Nikki Haley is a woman and the child of immigrant parents. Those things should not count, only who will do the best job for the US and the world, but they do count with voters and it is silly to pretend otherwise.
So Nikki for president! But who should she choose as VP? Well, Cruz, of course. Stacked up against either Clinton or Sanders, both bottom of the barrel candidates, Haley/Cruz would be an winning combination electorally, and an outstanding mixture of character, skills and knowledge in office.
I think this guy needs a friend.
The answer, Miranda, is none.
I was a great admirer of Frank Devine. One of Australia’s greatest newspaper men, a person of imagination and integrity, and a superb writer.
His daughter Miranda is an insightful and intelligent woman, and also a talented writer. I rarely disagree with her. But Miranda Devine has lost the plot here:
“Newspoll revealed Abbott’s usurper Malcolm Turnbull had suffered his first defeat, with the Coalition trailing Labor by two points, 49 to 51 per cent.
The poll was manna from heaven to delusional conservatives. Abbott was circumspect when interviewed on 2GB yesterday morning. But the glee of the delcons knew no bounds.
The Newspoll is a “gamechanger”, they cried excitedly. It’s all over for Turnbull, the great “waffler”. He’s a “dud”! His challenge to state premiers to control their spending was a “humiliation”. He will lose the next election. Yay!
Yes, these are conservatives, willing a Liberal rout.”
No. Nope. There is no glee here. No will for a Liberal rout. There is just appalled despair.
I said at the time of the coup that this could not end well. People in the media and public life who supported Malcolm Turnbull were people who would never vote for him, because he is a Liberal. Ordinary Liberal Party supporters will not vote for him because he is not.
Already it is clear that those who supported Turnbull are being punished in their own electorates.
It is not that we “delcons” (and no we are not deluded, far from it!) want a Shorten victory. Shorten and the Labor Party have nothing to offer except more debt, more illegal immigrants in detention including children, more unemployment because of investment and industry moving overseas, and less credibility in international relations. No one in his or her right mind wants that.
But the social conservatives and economic libertarians who make up the Liberal Party membership do not see a party led by Turnbull as being significantly different in philosophy or outcome. What moves us is what we believe is best for Australia, for Australian society, for ordinary men, women and families, and what will help us to be the best citizens we can be on the world stage. That does not include Mr Turnbull. Nor does it include Mr Shorten and any renewed Green/Labor alliance.
And no, we are not stupid. We know putting Tony Abbott back in the leadership, much as many of us respected him and would like to see him back at some time, will not solve the problem. Nor will any change of leadership prior to the election.
Turnbull will take the party to the next election. It will be a close run thing. None of us will delight in a Labor victory, should that occur.
Our local member, Jamie Briggs, voted for Abbott in the spill, and has done a good job for his electorate. Although there are matters on which he and I disagree (the ridiculous white elephant Kingscote airport project, for example), he has worked hard, and is a person of integrity. I will be happy to vote for him again. The senate, however, gives me an opportunity to send a message to the Liberal Party mandarins, without doing anything to endanger a renewal of sensible, business and family friendly policies. And that is to vote for the ALA, with preferences to the Liberals.
Now that is a lesson I should have learned long ago; don’t run for long distances in wet bathers. Some bits of me are feeling sharply uncomfortable.
It was a nice run though. From Min Oil Beach, run, paddle, climb, jump, around to Redbanks.
This is a photo I took a few years ago. Kathy walking Hannibal along Min Oil Beach in the direction of Redbanks, the reddish sandstone cliffs in the distance.
Not waited? Called the police? Done something to help? Rescued the girls? Saved the planet?
The need to believe ourselves morally superior to others has impacts on our understanding of history, the way we respond to calls for social or environmental action, and the way we interpret current events. The story of the story of Kitty Genovese is instructive. Thirty-eight neighbours watched the assault and did nothing? No. Thirty-eight neighbours were interviewed by police. Most of them heard and saw nothing, because they were inside with their families.
The rape and murder of Kitty Genovese was sad, horrific. There are lessons to be learned. But the story of Kitty Genovese does not say anything about the willingness of “other people” to stand by idly or curiously and watch a neighbour being stabbed and raped. That is not what happened.
“At 3:15 on the morning of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese drove her red Fiat into the parking lot of the LIRR station by her Kew Gardens home.
As she walked home — she was only about “a hundred paces away” from the apartment she shared with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko — she heard a man’s footsteps close behind her. She ran, but the man, Winston Moseley, was too quick. He caught her, slammed her to the ground and stabbed her twice in the back. She screamed twice, once yelling, “Oh, God! I’ve been stabbed!”
Across the street, a man named Robert Mozer heard Genovese from his apartment. Looking out his seventh-floor window, he saw a man and a woman, sensed an altercation — he couldn’t see exactly what was happening — and yelled out his window, “Leave that girl alone!”
Moseley later testified that Mozer’s action “frightened” him, sending him back to his car. At this point, Genovese was still alive, her wounds nonfatal.
Fourteen-year-old Michael Hoffman, who lived in the same building as Mozer, also heard the commotion. He looked out his window and told his father, Samuel, what he saw. Samuel called the police, and after three or four minutes on hold, he reached a police dispatcher. He related that a woman “got beat up and was staggering around,” and gave them the location.
Other neighbors heard something as well, but it wasn’t always clear what. Some looked out the window to see Moseley scurrying away, or Genovese, having stood up, now walking slowly down the block, leaning against a building. From their vantage point, it wasn’t obvious that she was wounded. Others who looked didn’t see her at all, as Genovese walked around a corner, trying to make her way home at 82-70 Austin St.
But the police did not respond to Samuel Hoffman’s call …
Word of the attack spread though the building. A woman named Sophie Farrar, all of 4-foot-11, rushed to the vestibule, risking her life in the process. For all she knew, the attacker might have still been there. As luck would have it, he was not, and Farrar hugged and cradled the bloodied Genovese, who was struggling for breath.
Despite the attempts of various neighbors to help, Moseley’s final stab wounds proved fatal, and Farrar did her best to comfort Genovese in the nightmarish final minutes of her life.
.. Instead of a narrative of apathy, the media could have told instead of the people who tried to help, and of the complex circumstances — many boiling down to a lack not of compassion, but of information — that prevented some others from calling for aid.”
Yes, but telling the truth, the whole truth, is not what the lamestream media does.
“How different then is that gentle, tentative sexuality between parent and child from the love of a paedophile and his/her lover?”
“Love, warmth, support and nurture is an important part of the paedophilic relationship.”
The author of these tributes to the beauty of ‘intergenerational love’ is Gary Dowsett, a professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He wrote those words, and many more in the same vein, in an article on ‘gay men and kids’ in a 1982 edition of a publication called Gay Information. Dowsett is a former schoolteacher now employed in La Trobe’s department of Sex, Health and Society, the nest of thinkers who gave us the Safe Schools Coalition.
Lest anyone think that Safe Schools is just the latest whim of an LGBTI establishment wanting to push its entitlements to the limit in a society which has lost its hitherto defining moral principles, Dowsett’s Gay Information article shows that initiatives of this sort are part a carefully thought out strategy, planned over the decades. Long before many of today’s advocates of gay ‘marriage’ and such novelties were born, the future professor was stating that:
…a new political position is needed for there are significant political struggles at stake. First, we have three legal/social questions to win: custody rights for gay men and lesbians; the legal right of paedophiles and their young lovers; and finally the sexual rights of children as a whole…
As with manifestos such as Mein Kampf, what ‘we’ intended to do could not have been spelled out more clearly for anyone who could be bothered to read it. This, of course, was back in the days when the ABC in its hippie mode was endorsing paedophilia as a ‘lifestyle choice’ and the fashionable LGBTI demand, the gay marriage of the day, was for the age of consent to be lowered to eleven.
Excerpted and edited from an article by Christopher Akehurst in The Spectator.
For, women, it was nasty, brutish and short. An excerpt from an article by Tony Thomas on the Quadrant Magazine website.
Newly-arrived British and French were shocked at the local misogyny they encountered. First Fleeter Watkin Tench noticed a young woman’s head “covered by contusions, and mangled by scars”. She also had a spear wound above the left knee caused by a man who dragged her from her home to rape her. Tench wrote,
They (Aboriginal women) are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality.
He also wrote,
When an Indian [sic] is provoked by a woman, he either spears her, or knocks her down on the spot; on this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club, or any other weapon, which may chance to be in his hand.
Marine Lt. William Collins wrote, “We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted.”
Governor Phillip’s confidant, Bennelong, in 1790 had taken a woman to Port Jackson to kill her because her relatives were his enemies. He gave her two severe wounds on the head and one on the shoulder, saying this was his rightful vengeance.
Phillip was appalled that an Eora mother within a few days of delivery had fresh wounds on her head, where her husband had beaten her with wood.
In 1802 an explorer in the Blue Mountains wrote how, for a trivial reason, an Aboriginal called Gogy “took his club and struck his wife’s head such a blow that she fell to the ground unconscious. After dinner…he got infuriated and again struck his wife on the head with his club, and left her on the ground nearly dying.”
In 1825, French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville wrote “young girls are brutally kidnapped from their families, violently dragged to isolated spots and are ravished after being subjected to a good deal of cruelty.”
George Robinson in Tasmania said in the 1830s that men courted their women by stabbing them with sharp sticks and cutting them with knives prior to rape. The men bartered their women to brutal sealers for dogs and food; in one case, such a woman voluntarily went back to the sealers rather than face further tribal violence.
Also in the 1830s, ex-convict Lingard wrote: “I scarcely ever saw a married woman, but she had got six or seven cuts in her head, given by her husband with a tomahawk, several inches in length and very deep.”
Explorer Edward John Eyre, who was very sympathetic towards Aborigines, nevertheless recorded:
Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands and friends…they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences…
…few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear wounds about the body. I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds.
Louis Nowra visited outback communities and found them astonishingly brutal: “Some of the women’s faces ended up looking as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in the women’s eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission.”
Bashing of women’s heads appears to have been the custom for millennia. Paleopathologist Stephen Webb in 1995 published his analysis of 4500 individuals’ bones from mainland Australia going back 50,000 years. (Priceless bone collections at the time were being officially handed over to Aboriginal communities for re-burial, which stopped follow-up studies). Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women’s skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles. In the tropics, for example, female head-injury frequency was about 20-33%, versus 6.5-26% for males. The most extreme results were on the south coast, from Swanport and Adelaide, with female cranial trauma rates as high as 40-44% — two to four times the rate of male cranial trauma. In desert and South Coast areas, 5-6% of female skulls had three separate head injuries, and 11-12% had two injuries.
… serious armed assaults were common in Australia over thousands of years prior to conquest. Settlers reported that sexual violence, including pack rapes and horrific genital wounding, was inflicted in many groups on girls barely out of the toddler stage.
Solicitor/historian Joan Kimm wrote: “The sexual use of young girls by older men, indeed often much older men, was an intrinsic part of Aboriginal culture, a heritage that cannot easily be denied.”
But it’s easier to whine than work…
I must say a big thanks to the guys at A2 Hosting.
I had been with 1and1 for the last eight years. As long as nothing went wrong, they were fine. as soon as I needed help, at all, with anything, forget it!
The support staff at A2 could not have been more helpful in transferring data over, and even fixing some of my mistakes. It is a huge difference in service level.
if you are looking for a web host, I am happy to recommend them.
Naturopaths, homeopaths, etc, – these charlatans make a fortune out of suffering, illness, cancer and depression. Don’t be fooled. Seek genuine, tested treatments from a real medical practitioner.
“About ten months ago, a naturopath by the name of Dorothea Cist commented on my article about ND education and training, claiming:
I have many other cases of, and letters of testimony from, patients who were treated successfully by naturopathic medicine, and often by homeopathy alone. These magnificent cures, by treatments completely unsupported by any double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials, were from pathologies as varied as rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, grand mal seizures, interstitial cystitis, and bi-polar [sic] disorder.
I asked Cist to clarify. Is she claiming she can cure bipolar disorder with homeopathy?
She didn’t respond, but she didn’t need to. Yes, Cist was asserting she can use magic to cure a mental illness, along with a slew of other complicated diseases.”
Evening light at my home, American River in South Australia. Not a river at all, but a large tidal lagoon. The American part of the name comes from a group of American sealers and whalers who in 1803 built here what was the first ship to be constructed in South Australia; the schooner Independence.
Even though our eyes are on the US presidential contest at the moment, this applies everywhere. Even in Australia.
8,000 refugee/asylum seeker children were placed in detention during the Labor/Green alliance governments of Gillard and Rudd. Some 1200 men, women and children lost at sea.
Now, for the first time in a decade, there is not a single child in detention on the Australian mainland. The last few, a baby, a toddler and a seventeen year old, left the Wickham Point detention centre in Darwin on Friday.
That is something worth celebrating!
I loved the book, and the 1959 movie with Charleton Heston. The new movie version, due in cinemas in August 2016, looks great!
Qohel Blog Author Peter Wales
