The lucky stroke crippled me and gave me a new life. Now I'm just unbelievably good looking and modest. Always turn a little to the left.
30 Mar 2016
Why are Australians so gloomy about the future?
Snap out of it Australia. Despite our wealth, health and good weather an international survey has revealed consumers here are among the gloomiest in Asia. And it's been that way for most of this decade.
When citizens across 15 Asia-Pacific nations were asked about the outlook for their economy, employment prospects, income prospects, and quality of life only three countries – Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia – were more pessimistic than Australia.
The poll, conducted twice a year by card payments company Mastercard, showed our confidence ranking was more than 30 per cent below the regional average.
Movements in consumer sentiment don't always correlate with what actually happens in the economy. But the regional comparison is telling.
Its really not to hard to find a good reason why Australians are much gloomier about their economic circumstances than most of their Asian neighbours, including New Zealand.
Australian political parties for the last decade have continuously told us how our economy is in terrible shape and we have this huge BLACK HOLE enveloping us. The answer to this problem? Well apparently the economy can only be saved by electing either one of the very parties that continue this lie.
So why are we Aussies so depressed, well our politicians and media have been taking about black holes for so long now they actually believe their own invention.
Remember if people are told a lie often enough
for long enough they come to believe it.
Ten or more years of this lie has convinced us that we are doomed!!
A mix-up by a Brussels taxi dispatcher may have prevented more carnage at the city's airport, Belgium's DH newspaper reported, saying the cab firm sent a smaller car to pick up the bombers than the one ordered.
Citing unidentified sources, DH said Ibrahim El Bakraoui and two other men suspected of carrying out the attack had called for a minivan to take them to Zaventem airport, laden with bags, early on Tuesday (local time) from an apartment in the north of the city.
When the driver turned up in a saloon, the three found they could not fit all four heavy holdalls into the trunk. They left one behind.
Two men blew themselves up in the airport's departure hall and the third ran off, leaving the heaviest explosive device which security services later detonated.
After the taxi driver called police to relate the tale, they found a large nail bomb in the apartment in the borough of Schaerbeek and defused it. Police had no comment on the report.
"What would have happened if all the explosive devices found in the Schaerbeek search had been taken to Zaventem?" DH asked.
Widow criticises Bunnings’ no-defibrillator position
Dunedin
By Vaughan Elder on Mon, 28 Mar 2016
A woman whose husband died of a heart attack in a Bunnings store has slammed the company's stance to not have defibrillators in its stores.
Wellington woman Sharron Gilmore, whose husband Peter died of a heart attack aged 62 in Bunnings Naenae in 2005, made the comments after the company's management "put its foot down'' and forced its Dunedin staff to give the store's defibrillator to a community group.
Social club members from Bunnings Dunedin raised $1300 to buy the defibrillator about three years ago, after one of their colleagues died from a heart condition, but the company's management has since called for it to be removed.
A Bunnings staff member, who did not want to be named due to fear of disciplinary action, said Bunnings New Zealand manager Jacqui Coombes visited the Dunedin store on Wednesday.
Its Crucial for the development of new jobs and new industries, yet the government seems to be going in the opposite direction. Fact:- Innovation and science are critical for Australia to
deliver new sources of growth, maintain high-wage
jobs and seize the next wave of economic prosperity. Innovation its about new and existing businesses
creating new products, processes and business models. Its also about creating a culture that backs good ideas
and learns from taking risks and making mistakes. Innovation is important to every sector of the
economy – from ICT to healthcare, education to
agriculture, and defence to transport. Education and science are at the heart of innovation and this government is bleeding our heart to death.
So Mr Turnbull has just been pretending to be pathetic for the past few months, he's silently endured weeks of dismissive commentary branding him a hopeless ditherer " - is this a big act.
All his chopping and changing on tax policy, letting Tony Abbott and his supporters have free rein sniping and undermining of him and letting the likes of George Christensen and Cory Bernardi run him over on the Safe Schools scheme. Then on top of that he gave no viable response to Labor's new policy on negative gearing.
We are asked to believe it was just a ploy.Only a ploy,really?
What of his abandonment of the Republic and marriage equality, he allowed the opponents of equal marriage to announce that they wouldn't abide by the results of a plebiscite anyway. He didn't utter a word of condemnation, not a word.
So calling a 'Double D' and bashing the Senate over the head has suddenly made him a real leader(or has become a very ordinary politician who is clinging to power).
All these things are a positive for Mr Turnbull according to press commentators who now love him because he has finally made a decision. Where does that come from?
All we have been seeing was massive relief that Abbott was gone. The sort of psychic relief that comes from waking up alive in intensive care after a particularly horrific car crash.
Scarred and bruised we were and in need of ongoing care after having a bout of 'Abbottism'. However all our limbs are intact and our organs are functioning. We are still in recovery, though we are sipping through a straw."
Now we're in recovery and the doctor we first see in recovery is 'Malcolm' and he seems like god, he'll make us better.
Now fully recovered and the Malcolm we first saw has disappeared.
Now he may have been rotated just like other staff, however we looked forward to seeing that particular Malcolm again because he promised so much.
Where has that 'Malcolm' gone?????????????????? WILL HE RETURN?
Continuing crazy saga of great CSIRO sell-off that hurts the public good
PETER BOYERMercury Edited by S.W.T.Read
The CSIRO building on the Hobart waterfront.
COMPETITION is not everything. Communities also need people to be neighbourly, tolerant and well-mannered — the civilised attitudes and behaviours that bind us.
Based on this need, we created public services and amenities and thought up ideas like democracy and the rule of law, universal education, human rights.
We call these benefits the public good.
Centuries of effort by numberless people have created our public good, each contribution adding to previous ones like the stones that make a cathedral. It belongs to everybody. It can yield financial returns, but its most valuable benefits are not financial.
But when the public good is turned into a commodity to be bought or sold, it ceases to be a public good and our civil society is diminished.
CSIRO’s global reputation rests heavily on its non-commercial investigations of space and the atmosphere, ocean and landforms, ecosystems and other attributes of our region. To Australians this work is part of the public good, serving us all.
But a series of politically expedient decisions have put that notion under threat.
Clinging to the neoliberal nonsense that market economics has the answer to everything, governments have behaved as if public good research is a burden to be got rid of. For 25 years CSIRO funding has been cut back.
It has been told to get its money from corporate sources but, in the bizarre world of government finance, any success that it has in doing this is seen as reason for yet more funding cuts.
Once, scientists were put in charge of CSIRO, but no more.
In 2013, the Abbott government plucked Larry Marshall out of a crowded field of applicants for CSIRO chief executive. He has a physics degree but since the late 1980s has been a venture capitalist in California.
It shows. After being appointed he told scientists they had a “duty” to be entrepreneurs and start companies, as he had done.
Around the same time he won the Australian Skeptics’ Bent Spoon award for pseudoscience, for speculating that water-divining might have scientific merit.
Then last month he astonished the science world by boldly stating that we no longer need to measure or model climate and climate data gathering, modelling and other positions would be cut to make way for new teams to work on adaptation solutions.
I accept CSIRO should help secure funding for its work but disagree with Marshall that scientists must also be fundraisers and entrepreneurs. Science and entrepreneurship require radically different skill sets, in my experience rarely if ever found in one person.
And Marshall is wrong to think he is serving business by targeting atmospheric and marine research. Like the rest of us, business needs all the climate knowledge it can get its hands on.
After thousands of climate scientists from 63 countries signed a letter to Malcolm Turnbull about the threat to critical data gathering and modelling posed by the Marshall Plan, this month a New York Times editorial deplored its impact on “arguably the greatest challenge facing the planet”.
The PM has not replied to the letter and is silent about the international furore, while science minister Christopher Pyne and environment minister Greg Hunt both say that it is a matter for CSIRO.
In other words,we took the wheels of your car, now you've got to make it work without them.Its not our fault. The is innovation and cleverness?
Consider these facts. The first quarter of 2016 is set to break all heat records globally.
Unprecedented warming of coastal waters is bringing tropical fish to Tasmania and bleaching the Great Barrier Reef.
About 500km of the Murray River has been poisoned by an algal bloom.
What is the government doing to address this?
Having put a venture capitalist in charge of our premier science body and told him to let the market determine its future, it stands aside, its leader remaining silent, while he announces plans to cast aside those people best able to provide guidance, to make way for “digital solutions?”.
Meanwhile it continues to oppose carbon pricing and approves new coal mines. It misrepresents Australia’s rising emissions as a good news story. It pledges to abolish clean energy agencies.
Groucho Marx could not have written a crazier plot. Do they have any idea what they are doing?
In a world heading for a major water crisis, CSIRO cuts to water science will guarantee Australia cannot manage its most valuable resource into the future, says Bruce Haigh.
WATER IS VITAL for a sustainable future, particularly in Australia. To survive – and therefore for all of us to survive – water needs all the care and compassion it can get. Not so in Australia.
The new and brash head of CSIRO, Larry Marshall, recently announced plans to get rid of scientists from the Land and Water division. Apparently, there has been a judgement that they do not have the capacity to make money for the organisation.
March 14 may mark the six-month anniversary of Malcolm Turnbull’s ascension to The Lodge, but a far more important political anniversary appears set to pass without notice.
Today is also one year to the day since Tony Abbott ate a raw onion.
At a factory somewhere in wherever, the Prime Minister of Australia made a speech about something or other… and then bit into a raw onion. With the skin on. In front of television cameras. For now apparent reason other than he “likes onions”.
The incident quickly became known as one of the most important vegetable moments in Australian political history. It also helped hasten the downfall of a Prime Minister struggling in the polls.
But more than any other issue, Onion-gate helped a confused nation better understand Tony Abbott, the man leading their country.
Malcolm Turnbull's disunited Government is bumbling along in chaos, as the PM himself descends into undignified Abbott-style fear campaigns.
A Newspoll result suggests that Super-Mal is tanking. It's panic stations in the LNP camp. Ministers duck for cover. Back-benchers bolt. Like a rat up a drain pipe, our survivalist PM drops policy and shifts his tack to fearmongering.
Gone is the "better economic manager" his treasurer wrecked that role for him by failing to produce any kind of economic plan last week. No new idea after two-and-a-half years makes the innovator claim wear thin, too. Fading badly also is the allure of Mal the closet progressive. What is left? Mal the reactionary who will do and say whatever it takes keep power.
March 27 will mark 10 years since Work Choices was introduced. While that policy won't ever return under that name, the impetus which drove it remains deeply embedded in the liberal philosophy.
It's all about less power to employees and more power to those employers who will exploit their workers for profit.The strange thing is that firms that value their workers tend to pay them more than stipulated in awards, and guess what, they're very profitable.
That impetus is one which always views IR reform as requiring less employee power. And it's a desire that is never stated.
This impetus is seen again and again in data which shows that now more than ever, workers lack power, and yet the demand for that power to be lessened never slackens.
The LNP and certain sections of the media have a blinkered view, they will never admit that just like some union representatives who flout the system there are firms that also flout the system. There are bad apples in every barrel and both sides need to be policed.
The current bill before parliament to police unions and not employers is an example of blind justice.
11 Mar 2016
Who benefits from media reform?
Not the public!
I know someone who's laughing all the way to the bank.
Many narratives flow from the current set of proposed changes, but the most alarming consequence is the collapse in diversity of news reporting – which is already compromised by regional TV networks closing newsrooms.
If mergers of regional licensees with city affiliates go ahead, the number of Australian commercial TV networks may become as few as three (plus Imparja in Alice Springs).
The proposed changes to the points system, which deals with the number of news stories relating to “local” areas, seeks to support diversity.
Like so much government regulation, conscientiously planned by those with little experience of the industry it will affect, it will be easy to meet the target without honouring the purpose.
Story selection, buying in copy, sourcing amateur footage from mobile phones and using uncorroborated eyewitness accounts are among the many ways of covering the surface of events without providing the depth that serious news journalism demands.
The history of television regulation in Australia reveals two key lessons. First, licensee interests outweigh the public interest in the government’s eye, no matter what party is in power.
And if it is Sydney or the bush, bet on Sydney.
Windsor will shine a harsh light on Turnbull’s NBN
Based on an article by ROB BURGESS Economics commentator Former independent MP Tony Windsor plans to use use national issues to unseat deputy PM Barnaby Joyce. At the top of the list will be the Coalition’s ‘fast-enough’ NBN.
When Tony Windsor announced on Thursday that he would be running against Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce at the next election, he cited the National Broadband Network among his key motivations for getting back into politics.
Mr Windsor has long seen the NBN as essential nation-building infrastructure.
In 2010, Mr Windsor and fellow independent Rob Oakeshott included NBN choices on their shortlist of reasons for backing Julia Gillard to form government over Tony Abbott.
They supported an all-fibre network, with a ‘roll-in’ from the regions towards the city, which was an economic argument with several elements.
Getting regional centres connected to high-speed broadband helps alleviate some economic disadvantage.
Farmers, for instance, are increasingly employing internet-enabled technologies to improve crop or livestock production – so called ‘smart-farming‘. Click to compare internet speeds:
First published by The Conversation.
And regional Australians stand to gain the most in e-health applications, including in-home aged care, and online education – again, because of reducing the number of times they have to travel.
Sydney and Melbourne, both of which have large infrastructure deficits in road, rail and other services, are growing increasingly expensive and difficult to live in.That might not interest city folk too much, until you look at the flip-side of the regional coin.
That’s why an increasing number of regional cities are putting money into marketing campaigns to coax resident away from the Big Smoke.
See, for instance, the TV ad for living in regional Victoria – featuring, of course, a bloke using a laptop in his garden. Sooner, cheaper, slower
‘So what’s the problem’, you might ask? The Coalition won government in 2013, with then-Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull releasing a plan to complete the NBN “sooner and at lower cost” than Labor’s scheme.
The Coalition’s NBN is cheaper because it only provides full-fibre connections to 20 per cent of premises. The rest is a combination of fibre-to-the-node (points in the street), HFC cables (used for cable TV) and some wireless and satellite services.
Mr Windsor said at Thursday’s news conference, that the NBN is “a national issue of very high importance within the country areas – absolutely critical”.
“Go to Armidale and see what they’ve done there and what they are planning to do, and you will see that it is actually a cost benefit to be in the country … It has to be fibre to the home, and I will fight to see that restored as well,” he said.
Mr Windsor is going to put economic arguments around the NBN back onto the national stage.
Mr Windsor will be shining a light on the ‘fast-enough’ NBN – a network that will be significantly eclipsed by broadband speeds in our trading partners in the years ahead.
The graphic below, also created by Rod Tucker, shows how far behind we are falling.
Tony Abbott has made it very clear in the past week that he's not going anywhere, which means Malcolm Turnbull can't expect any clear air - now, or even after an election, writes Mungo MacCallum.
When US president Lyndon Baines Johnson was reviewing the reappointment of his adversary, the FBI chief J Edgar Hoover, LBJ opined: "It is probably better to have the son of a bitch inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."
Malcolm Turnbull would undoubtedly prefer Tony Abbott not to urinate anywhere; indeed, the Prime Minister would prefer his predecessor not to do anything much at all. But the reality is that Abbott remains defiantly inside the tent, pissing out, in, and in every direction.
His self control does not seem to be a strong point.(as in point percy at anything beginning with 'M')
A mob doesn't think; it feels. Its members have fully engaged the emotional parts of their brains, and everything else is temporarily switched off. A mob can do things which its constituents would never individually contemplate and of which they are later ashamed; the testimonies of people who participated in such horrors as the Rwandan genocide and, yes, what the Nazis did, provide plentiful evidence of this. Much of history is a record of lynchings, witch hunts, pogroms and genocides, all perpetrated by ordinary people who one day lost their moral bearings and became a mob.
To dismiss Trump's supporters as a dumb racist swill is to entirely miss the point. Almost everyone in the world is latently racist to at least some extent; when a big enough section of society feels lost and alienated from the power structures which govern them, and a putative leader comes along who speaks the language of their rage and promises to speak brutal, impolitic truth to that power; then if that leader understands the emotional levers of his audience, he can turn it into a mob and wield its force for his own ends.
That's Trump in a nutshell. He gets all this. He plays the cards of racism, misogyny, inclusion/exclusion, demonisation of The Other in whatever form is momentarily convenient, to manipulate the elevated emotions of the mob he has attracted and keep his face plastered all over the news. He wants to be president. It's possible, if the mob keeps growing and maintains its present rage.
Federal Cabinet Minister Peter Dutton has forecast an economic disaster if Labor introduces its tax policies. This is an "outlandish scare campaign".
The Opposition's plan would restrict negative gearing to new properties and halve the capital gains tax discount from mid-2017, while protecting existing landlords.
Labor said the measures — costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office — would save $32.1 billion over a decade.
"I think the economy will come to a shuddering halt and I think the stock market will crash," the Immigration Minister told Sydney radio station 2SM.
"I think once people realise how dangerous Labor's economic proposal is I think they'll be happy to see an election and deal with it.
"Labor's essentially said they want to lower house prices and they want to increase rents and I think that would be a disaster."
The Government has yet to release a negative gearing or capital gains policy of its own.
Based on an article in Independent Australia Like a seasoned rabble-rouser Malcolm is was hell-bent on instilling fear and loathing amongst the aspirant and middle classes. What is there to be afraid of?
Well if you vote Labor?
"Vote Labor and see your house price go down. That's what Labor is offering. Lower house prices, poorer Australians."
Forget the national interest, social policy, or the fate of the economy, what we should really be scared of is the Labor party’s tax policies.
"70 per cent of Australians who own houses will see the value of their single most important asset smashed."(This is actually a figure plucked from the sky)
The words might be about tax, but the real agenda is about creating fear to get votes. Until recently, we had "stop the boats". Now, Turnbull trumps up with a new one "better stop the evil lefties from sending you to the poor house".
Turnbull doesn’t really know where he or his party stands on the issue of Capital Gains Tax with all of his back-flipping and front-flipping over the issue. He is out to rescue the polls by trying to discredit the opposition, he is downright decisive about the dangers of voting for anyone but him, after all he was born to rule. It's sad to see someone who showed such promise lobotomize himself. He's likable and articulate, why doesn't he just wheel out some good policies the electorate is waiting. He not in opposition he's the PM he has the whole public service to work on policies. God forbid that we could have a repeat of Abbottism rearing its ugly head, I thought that they had found a vaccine for that disease.
At first, we all treated Donald Trump's popularity as a joke. Like many fellow Australians I laughed at his hair, his behavior, and his outlandish speeches.
I took solace in the fact that, the GOP would need to go through a few polarizing candidates before settling on a more stable nominee.
As the caucuses and primaries got under way, I started shifting uncomfortably in my seat I was feeling the urge to race to the toilet. He was still a joke, but now with in a more eerily tone: "He said what? And he's still in the race? and He's leading?"
I think I speak for many fellow Australians when I say that I have now moved into full-blown panic mode: America, what the hell are you doing?
Trump has commanding leads in close to all the states that will vote in the SEC Primary on Tuesday. He is no longer a potential front-runner; he is someone who may possibly sweep Super Tuesday, yes that's what I said, this guy is becoming very dangerous.
What an incredibly terrifying thought, because it puts him within target range of the White House, the red button and close to the nuclear codes.
Let me quote a British friend who recently summed up quite succinctly what many people are thinking down under.
"I can't take it anymore. I have children! I want to be able to rationalize and deride Trump in a constructive way but all I do is panic inside every time I see his face". Fellow Australian, don't worry I have a plan We will tow Australia south, closer to the Antarctic, as far away from the USA as possible. Then again the moon looks inviting!
