At this time of the year, news items get into the “slow news” mode. I was mentally whinging about this while walking to the community centre to get my daily dose of computer time, when I saw a madman walking, in a fashion, and whirling his hands in giant circles, although pure mathematicians would disagree I suppose. Then a voice said: you have two minutes to write a short story. I looked around, but there was nobody there, so it must have been my homunculi, the little man in my brain, whatever, “my” is. So, I, whatever that is, stopped in mid-stride, and took out some scraps of paper, and did this:

“Nigel like to twirl his hands, just like some people, well me, get silent joy out of tearing up paper and neurotically folding the pieces until they disintegrate. Nigel though had a raw disorder which was a psychological condition that caused him to hand-twirl, as if he was some kind of decaying circus performer, ageing politically correct marching person, or one of those strength athletes who spin round Indian clubs for shoulder exercise, or just to smash those who upset them. The problem was that Nigel was a menace to society most of the time. People drinking hot coffee could end up with the boiling liquid on their faces, in their eyes, instead of in their stomachs where it would in the normal train of events cause cancer.  Then there was also the problem of medical expenses, as Nigel went through rotor cuff muscles (it’s in the shoulder) as people go through clothes, the surgeons constantly having to repair failing tissues, all on Medicare.

     Kissinger has been around since, well when Adam was in short pants, and he was alpha enough to have as a girlfriend, the most delicious of the Bond girls, Jill St. John, the first American Bond girl. The guy must have something worth saying, apart from his extensive knowledge from his political career:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OU3zLcHcTE
  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/kissinger-coming-conflict-between-us-and-china-will-be-worse-world-wars

“Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger warns that a catastrophic conflict between America and China that will be “worse than world wars” is inevitable unless the two sides sort out their differences. We are in a difficult period now. I am confident the leaders on both sides will realise the future of the world depends on the two sides working out solutions and managing the inevitable difficulties,” said Kissinger. A permanent conflict between Washington And Beijing would be unwinnable and lead to “catastrophic outcome,” he added. “It’s no longer possible to think that one side can dominate the other…it will be worse than the world wars that ruined European civilisation,” said Kissinger. The U.S. and China have been embroiled in a trade war since President Trump began imposing tariffs on thousands of Chinese-made products in a bid to end unfair trading practices.”

     That title was almost a lesson in grammar, what with the “who” and “whom,” and when to use what. Anyway, this is an interesting one, about who is getting killed buy whom, stated by President Assad, who is a bit more in the know that me:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/assad-goes-red-pill-interview-epstein-bin-laden-baghdadi-liquidated-they-knew-vital

“In a wide-ranging new interview with Russia’s Rossiya-24 television on Thursday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad addressed the death of White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier, who had been found dead Nov. 11 after an apparent fall from a three-story high balcony outside his Istanbul office. Le Mesurier was a former British military intelligence officer and founder of the controversial White Helmets group which Assad has previously dubbed the 'rescue force for al-Qaeda' and his reported suicide under mysterious circumstances is still subject of an ongoing Turkish investigation. In an unusual and rare conversation for a head of state, Assad compared Le Mesurier's death to the murky circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jeffry Epstein, Osama bin Laden and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Assad said what connects these men are that they "knew major secrets" and were thus "liquidated" by "intelligence services" — most likely the CIA, in the now viral interview picked up by Newsweek and other mainstream outlets. “American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was killed several weeks ago, they said he had committed suicide in jail,” Assad said during the Russian broadcaster interview. However, he was killed because he knew a lot of vital secrets connected with very important people in the British and American regimes, and possibly in other countries as well.”

To The Australian         My, what an uncharacteristic tirade from the normally measured and responsible Janet Albrechtsen ("Tuning in to royals' prime-time meltdown", 20/11)! It is ridiculous to claim that the seriously poor behaviour of one prince means the end of the British royal house. The Windsors have survived other scandals and will survive this one. The Queen has very greatly enhanced the esteem in which the monarchy is held and there is a triple succession waiting in the wings (Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George). Is it a sign of hysteria that we find two notable errors in Albrechtsen's piece: "principals" for "principles" and "incredulous" for "incredible"?    The Crown, in Australia as well as in the United Kingdom, is widely loved by the public, who see that royalty, with its basis in religion, tradition and chivalry, is a great check on the predatory behaviour of so many politicians and the selfish interests behind them.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

     Who would have thought that the once-humble laser pointer, used in lecture theatres across the world, could be used by those getting up to such mischief by protesters in Chile. Hong Kong, well, yes, but Chile, well, that’s a surprise:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/watch-chile-protesters-kill-police-drone-using-hundreds-laser-pointers

“As the protests have raged, the repression unleashed on demonstrators has become increasingly brutal and high-tech. Chile’s protesters, however, have responded with a combination of ingenuity, persistence, and equally high-tech tricks to fend off police attacks. Such was the case earlier this week in footage that quickly went viral on social media Wednesday that appeared to show a police unmanned aerial system (UAS) being disabled as protesters aimed run-of-the-mill green laser pointers—the type available in any Office Depot or Staples—at the law enforcement-grade drone. The video, which NextGov reports first made its appearance Tuesday night on Reddit, shows the drone hovering above a sea of demonstrators as the lasers are trained on it. Soon, multiple other lasers are trained on it and when the drone attempts to escape, the lasers have an almost tractor beam-like effect, forcing the UAS to falter before it helplessly descends to the ground. Laser lights at demonstrations didn’t first appear in Chile. The pointers have had a ubiquitous presence at the raucous demonstrations in Hong Kong, where protesters have also used the lasers to disable surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition technology. And as Defense Maven reports, U.S. Army Stryker vehicles are also being equipped with laser weapons that would be used to disable and knock out incoming flying drones.

To The Age         The most important contemporary truth about school reporting practice is that there should not be too much of it ("End-of-year reports are 'old school'", 20/11).  A winding back of over-elaborate procedures is needed, in order to free up teachers for teaching not only the formal curriculum but also other insights, beauties and wisdom particular to each teacher in a relaxed and unpressurised classroom. The promotion of continuous assessment throughout the school year, rather than saving teachers from "avalanches of reports at the end of each term", may in fact only subject them to a continuous, year-long avalanche of assessment duties. And "old school" practice in "days gone by" may have been wiser and more humane than today's stressful reporting fashions.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave

     The U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 20 passed two Hong Kong bills supporting the ongoing pro-democracy protests, sending them to the White House for the president to sign or veto. The House voted 417 to 1 for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which unanimously passed the Senate a day earlier. The House unanimously passed another version of this bill earlier in October. The Act would require the State Department to review each year whether the city, which reverted to the Chinese rule in 1997, retains sufficient autonomy to justify its special economic privileges with the United States.

  Full Article:  https://www.theepochtimes.com/house-passes-2-hong-kong-bills-in-support-of-protests-to-be-sent-to-president-for-approval_3152754.html

     City people have their brains basically wired for city things, and lose connection, at a most basic level with nature. That is why some us have this feeling of world weariness living in the concrete jungle, and long for a green lusty luscious jungle complete with poisonous snakes if necessary, and the like, a new Eden:
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-11-16-city-living-causes-brain-stop-recognizing-objects-natural-world.html
  https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1492

“Ambiguous images are widely recognized as a valuable tool for probing human perception. Perceptual biases that arise when people make judgements about ambiguous images reveal their expectations about the environment. While perceptual biases in early visual processing have been well established, their existence in higher-level vision has been explored only for faces, which may be processed differently from other objects. Here we developed a new, highly versatile method of creating ambiguous hybrid images comprising two component objects belonging to distinct categories. We used these hybrids to measure perceptual biases in object classification and found that images of man-made (manufactured) objects dominated those of naturally occurring (non-man-made) ones in hybrids. This dominance generalized to a broad range of object categories, persisted when the horizontal and vertical elements that dominate man-made objects were removed and increased with the real-world size of the manufactured object. Our findings show for the first time that people have perceptual biases to see man-made objects and suggest that extended exposure to manufactured environments in our urban-living participants has changed the way that they see the world.”

     Listen carefully to a typical bush-fire warning: “A big fire in the XYZ National Park is now threatening adjacent homes and farms”. For decades now politicians have been recklessly locking up more land in National Parks, Reserves and Heritage Areas. There are now over 500 national parks covering over 11% of Australia.

     In addition to this huge area of nationalised parks, the Howard government, in cahoots with compliant States, created untouchable Kyoto forests on private land in order to meet silly carbon dioxide obligations imposed by the Kyoto Protocol. This conversion of private grazing land to protected “Kyoto Forest” was accelerated by state government tree-huggers who used aerial surveillance to identify “remnant vegetation” and “regrowth areas” on private land which were then subjected to preservation orders (without ground checking or discussions). Graziers were also prohibited from harvesting timber on their own land. Then some greedy landowners created private plantations of eucalypts to earn credits from carbon fairies in Canberra. This vast area of “protected” land soon became a tinder box of unburnt weeds and flammable scrub.

     Things must be getting pretty crazy, when the big O himself, Obama says, “Hey fellow Globo-commos, slow down a bit, you are moving too fast, and might scare the sheeple”:
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/16/obama-signals-concern-about-radical-2020-field/

“Former President Barack Obama warned a group of leftist donors that Democrats must be cognizant of public sentiment going into the 2020 election, taking a veiled shot at far-left candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by noting that Democrats “have to be rooted in reality.” The former president spoke to a group of liberal donors in Washington, DC, on Friday and suggested that the far-left ideas articulated and pursued by some of the candidates in the Democrat primary could turn away potential voters. “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality,” Obama said, according to the New York Times. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.” Obama refrained from naming a specific candidate, but he, according to the Times, “cautioned that the universe of voters that could support a Democratic candidate — Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans — are not driven by the same views reflected on ‘certain left-leaning Twitter feeds’ or ‘the activist wing of our party.’”

     We don’t hear a lot about Wales, but rest assured, it too is facing the twilight of the West, suffering from the same philosophical diseases as everywhere else:
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/16/welsh-separatist-leader-wales-turned-into-nation-of-sanctuary-refugees/

“Liz Saville Roberts, who leads the Welsh separatist party Plaid Cymru in Britain’s House of Commons, has called for her small country to become a “nation of sanctuary” for the world’s refugees. “We live on an island of Britain,” the London-born ex-teacher told a BBC Question Time audience. “In terms of managing immigration this is way easier than for many other nations,” she added — although despite the seeming logic of this statement the United Kingdom does in fact have the joint-highest illegal alien population in all of Europe. [Immigration] has become desperately political. Now, forgive me, now, to be referring to Wales again, but this is equally true for other areas in the United Kingdom… 96 per cent of people in Wales were born in the United Kingdom, and yet we hear this same argument there, but we’re dependent so much on people to come in for clinical staff, for food processing, for catering — we’re going to be in trouble if we don’t have these people still coming in,” she claimed, appearing to suggest in the same breath that immigration to Wales is both too limited to be of any concern, and also absolutely vital to the health service and for a steady supply of cheap waiters and factory workers. “Now, I am proud to see that my party would like to see Wales as a nation of sanctuary for refugees,” she added, passing over the fact that the economic migration to Wales which she initially mentioned has little bearing on the question of refugees, which in Continental European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden remain overwhelmingly jobless. “But I think there is a time now, rather than [immigration] being a political football — and this is a political par excellence of our time, and it is ugly — that we start talking about immigration in terms of these are other human beings, and how we manage with that in the world, rather than using it as an excuse for closing down our doors, becoming more inward-looking, and more turning in ourselves, because I fear for the future if we continue with this narrative,” she concluded. Despite the Plaid politician’s rhetoric, however, the reality is that Britain’s doors have not been closed or even closing for generations, with net immigration currently running at or near record annual highs and the country’s demographic make-up transforming rapidly. Quite how Wales, with a population of just over 3 million, could possibly retain any semblance of identity or even survive economically if turned into a “sanctuary” for tens of millions of global refugees, remains unclear.”

     So, Janet Albrechtsen thinks we should become a republic because a relatively minor Royal (8th in line to the throne) is in the spotlight (Australian 21/11/19). Of course, were she an American, I doubt that she would be calling for a return to the monarchy because of the various matters being revealed in the impeachment process against the president! She forgets that we have our own constitutional arrangements which are subject only to the Australian people and to no one else.  We have nothing whatsoever to do now with the British parliament and because we, not anybody else, have opted to remain under the Crown, the Governor-General, as representative of the Queen, is our executive head of state. We therefore have the best of both worlds.  We have a system that blocks politicians from absolute power, and we have the independence to decide for ourselves on whether we wish to retain our current system or move to another.  It is the people’s choice, not the Queen’s, not the politician’s and certainly not that of Janet Albrechtsen or her friends in the media. Only the people.

Philip Benwell
National Chair
Australian Monarchist League

To The Australian        Reactions to remarks by British eco-warrior Roger Hallam about the Holocaust seem excessive and unjustifiable ("Holocaust not unique: eco-warrior disowned", 22/11). His point that there have been a number of large-scale killings of peoples in history and that the Holocaust is another but not, in that context, unique, is surely correct. The scale and irrationality of subsequent attacks on him are extraordinary. My goodness, a rebuke from the German government and the withdrawal of the German version of his book, and all because of a sensible if controversial comment! German Greens co-leader Robert Habeck's claim that there must be no "downplaying of the Holocaust" is contemptible in a nation that routinely jails Holocaust revisionists and thus affronts disgracefully the vital principle of intellectual freedom. It's time this sacred cow was laid to rest.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

     The politically correct Marvel movies (e.g. Captain Marvel) get a well-deserved kick in their super-guts, with the incel Joker, now becoming the most profitable comic book movie of all time:
  https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2484350/holy-cash-cow-batman-joker-is-now-the-most-profitable-comic-book-movie-of-all-time

“For a while, it seemed like Avengers: Endgame and the MCU were poised to completely dominate the cinematic landscape this year -- at least as far as comic franchises were concerned. That changed this October, when Joaquin Phoenix’s Clown Prince of Crime danced down those now-iconic stairs, and demanded a place in box office history. Now, Joker isn’t just one of the most successful films of the year — it’s the most profitable comic book film of all time. It was previously reported that Joker was on track to match Avengers: Infinity War’s overall profit. And Forbes confirmed that as of Friday, November 8, Joker will have grossed more than a $304.2 million in North America, and a staggering $957 million worldwide. Against a $62.5 million budget, that gives the Batman villain’s origin story an edge over films like The Mask, Venom, Aquaman, and even the Joker’s nemesis Batman. And the film hasn’t even finished its theatrical run. Joker has been racking up records since its debut, posting the biggest opening weekend for a film in October, and quickly surpassing Deadpool to become the highest grossing R-rated film of all time. They’re staggering accomplishments for any film, but especially one with subject matter that doesn’t necessarily have family-friendly appeal. Before it hit theaters, Joker stirred controversy and debate due to its dark tone and unflinching violence. It’s divided critics and audiences, who either view it as an unnecessarily dark contribution to the DC canon, or an important film that elevates the entire comic book genre.”

     In the name of political correctness, if the past is allowed to exist, it must come with a health warning, naturally:
  https://summit.news/2019/11/14/disney-puts-outdated-cultural-depictions-trigger-warning-on-old-movies/

“Disney’s new streaming service includes trigger warnings on old movies that caution the viewer about “outdated cultural depictions.” The launch of the new Disney+ service in the United States made available many classic films, but they could not be presented without the need to genuflect to political correctness. Movies including Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, The Aristocats, Peter Pan and The Jungle Book all feature the trigger warning in their plot descriptions due to negative racial stereotypes like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp, the Native American characters in Peter Pan, and the crows in Dumbo. “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions,” reads the disclaimer. Movies deemed too controversial due to their stereotypical depictions of non-white people, such as the 1946 film Song of the South, are not included as part of the Disney+ service. There is a constantly increasing number of movies and songs that are being forgotten or done over in order to conform to the ever changing social mores of progressivism. John Legend and Kelly Clarkson recently released a re-recorded version of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, completely changing some of the supposedly “misogynistic” lyrics. The song was a total flop, receiving almost twice the number of thumbs down than thumbs up on YouTube. Get woke, go broke.”

     Socialism, if humans were rational and not subjected to unending manipulation, should have died in the 20th century, but it is making a comeback, especially with young people at universities… this is one of the reasons why we need to close down the universities and put in place new training institutions, without the Humanities and Social Sciences:
  https://mises.org/wire/4-reasons-why-socialism-becoming-more-popular

“The supporters of socialism are not simply the young, but rather, disproportionately those among the young who are college-educated. And the more college they have, the hotter for socialism they get. According to a 2015 poll , support for socialism grows from 48% among those with a high school diploma or less to 62% among college graduates to 78% among those with post-graduate degrees. Those on the left probably stop thinking hard about now and jump immediately to the conclusion that support for socialism is just a natural outgrowth of big brains and elite educations. But there is, in fact, a less obvious but ultimately far more compelling explanation that also manages to account for the general fact that more education correlates with more leftism: something — something bad — is happening at universities themselves to pull students toward the (far) left. We have already seen above that what’s not happening at universities, even elite universities, today is a whole lot of education in important subjects like history. What we are getting instead is a lot of groupthink and indoctrination. Universities have always skewed a bit left. But beginning in the early to mid 1990s (for reasons I’ve explained in some detail elsewhere ), ideological diversity began to vanish entirely, as the leftward deviation turned tidal. As documented in a 2005 paper from Stanley Rothman et al., as of 1984, 39% of university faculty were left/liberal, and 34% were right/conservative. By 1999, those numbers had undergone a seismic shift: faculty was now 72% left/liberal and 15% right/conservative. Since 1999, the imbalance has become starker still. A comprehensive National Association of Scholars report from April 2018 from Prof. Mitchell Langbert of Brooklyn College, tracking the political registrations of 8,688 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of U.S. News & World Report’s 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges for 2017, found that “78.2 percent of the academic departments in [his] sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.” Predictably, given the composition of the professoriate, survey data also indicates that students’ political views drift further leftward between freshman and senior year. In light of this data, it should not be a surprise to us that students who have gone to college in this age of ideological extremism have come out radicalized and … socialized.

     I love nuclear power, even the waste is exciting, at worst creating super-heroes, but it need not be like that. Now it looks like nuclear waste can be zapped by lasers, making it safe enough to kick around as one would a football:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/nobel-prize-winner-suggests-blasting-nuclear-waste-lasers

“But now, for the first time, there may be a solution to the previously unsolvable nuclear waste issue.
Nobel laureate Gérard Mourou has proposed a novel solution that smacks of science fiction and revolves around blasting nuclear waste with lasers. Morou and his research partner Donna Strickland won their Nobel Prize in 2018 for their work with Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA), a revolutionary invention that creates extremely rapid and ultra-powerful laser pulses with lots of different potential applications. “The original research focused on applications like laser machining and eye surgery,” reports ExtremeTech, “but scientists could also use it to observe atomic processes that happen at almost unfathomable speeds. If we could speed it up a bit more, Mourou says CPA could have a use in processing nuclear waste, too.” According to Mourou’s hypothesis, CPA could turn even the most nuclear waste we have sitting in secure storage facilities around the world, where it will otherwise remain radioactive for millions of years, into a substance so safe you could hold it in the palm of your hand. Of course, the CPA process will require a bit of tweaking to get to this point of capability. “Currently, CPA can produce laser pulses as brief as one attosecond — that’s a billionth of a billionth of a second. To transmute nuclear waste into something safe, Mourou says you’d need to increase the pulse rate by roughly 10,000 times,” says ExtremeTech.

To The Australian         Telling the truth about Aboriginal matters will not lead in the direction espoused by Chris Kenny ("Truth is at the heart of an indigenous voice", 23-24/11). It is not good enough to complain about "dishonest conservative opposition" without specifying what that is and why it is dishonest. Secondly, the people whom he describes as "constitutional conservatives" are not really such at all. The conservative position, well expressed recently by Greg Sheridan ("A constitution that distinguishes us by race: this way madness lies", 14/11), is that constitutionally all citizens are to be treated equally, regardless of their ethnicity or where and when their ancestors lived. The controversial Uluru statement (its claim to come "from the heart" is questionable and it could perhaps more accurately be characterised as political propaganda) very definitely does seek to unjustly extend especial privileges to a group that has its own ethnicity or racial mix as well as having (not always wholly by any means) "traceable inheritance rights to this land". As is typical of proponents of Aboriginal constitutional recognition, Kenny does not really address the powerful arguments against it which are now on the public record.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

     Here are some of the latest items on the Trump impeachment saga. People on our side are basically sitting it out until Trump strikes back, or just gives up and offers his neck for execution. There does not seem to be any reason for the impeachment other than, we are the Democrats and we will not permit anything we deem undesirable to exist. It is as simple as that. How then can America survive as a unit in any form? It cannot, and should not. It is time to start divorce proceedings.
  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/11/13/the-latest-false-news-on-the-trump-impeachment/
  https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2019/11/12/impeachment-frenzy-nets-aim-destroy-trump-96-negative-news

“As the media are all out to get Trump, there is no way to get any valid information about the so-called impeachment. But you don’t have to pay too much attention to notice that the Democrats and the presstitutes are constantly changing the focus. The alleged whistleblower, who only had hearsay information, if that, has dropped out of the picture, being too compromised by his affliations and prior meetings with Adam Schiff during which the “whistleblowing” was planned as an attack on Trump. The Democrats and presstitutes then shifted focus to state department types who also heard second hand from “staff” about the alleged conversation containing a quid pro quo, a claim unsupported by the transcript of the telephone call or by the President of Ukraine. So now a new alleged phone call has emerged, or been invented. The acting ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, a sleazy State Department type, today (Nov. 13) testified that a member of his staff heard Trump in another telephone call asking Sondland about the Ukraine investigation of the Bidens. This second-hand information is described by the presstitute media as a “bombshell.” God help us. It is nothing of the sort. But the presstitutes will repeat it until it is.

     This time round I am going to get on the winning side, and not have the next five decades of my life wrecked by being a loser. China has won, it is done and dusted, there is no fight left in Australians, if there ever was, and we should get down on our knees and beg China for our pitiful lives, like I do every night before sleeping! There, I have said it, I repent, forgive me! Can I now have a big wad of money please? My 30 + pieces of silver too, just like all of those academics, business folks and pollies got, and get?
  https://www.businessinsider.com.au/chinese-australian-billionaire-chau-chak-wing-un-fbi-case-2018-5
  https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/where-is-australia-china-makes-a-bold-play-for-the-south-pacific-s-treasure-islands-20191115-p53b4g.html
  https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2017/chinas-operation-australia/hard-power.html

     Then, we have those few remaining pests, the die hards from a Bruce Willis movie, wanting the last dregs of Australia to resist the inevitableness of China, China, China:
  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-17/andrew-hastie-james-paterson-refuse-to-repent-china-criticism/11712160