Mind you, some of this is hard to distinguish from normal far right nonsense.
]]>Unreadable Pretentious @ 1365 Just for once ... that "terrorist propaganda" thing is scary ... simply because one could, quite literally do such a thing without knowing about it. Lots of lying "reassurances" from guvmint about it, but you can bet your boots some innocent butterfly will get caught by it ... followed by massive prees campaign & backtracking. Would have been simpler to get it right first time, but that's not how we do things, is it? [ See also recent case of man who went to support Kurds & Yazhidis, with US support, charged with terrorism on return - case dropped .... eventually. Other people in same leaky boat, up shit creek without paddle, bacause of bad legislative wording. ]
AND @ 1369 Oh goody, goody even more so ... along with all the extremely dirty laundry that will be dragged into public view, one hopes.
Matt S @ 1372 Oh, but it doesn't matter, because the Han are not EVIL HORRIBLE WHITE IMPERIALISTS ( Much ) - incidentally, for other reasons, I'm currently reading a large synoptic history of China - I've got to the "Warring States" period, so far.
Matt S @ 1373 And, if I hear correctly, the current AUS guvmint now want to re-open an, ahem "detention facilty" on Christmas Island, yes?
]]>Funeral homes commonly subscribe to an out-of-hours answering service. Distraught people will call them up at any hour, wanting to do something after a relative has died and knowing there's a funeral to plan phoning the funeral home at two in the morning seems the obvious thing to do. The funeral home owners know those sorts of folks don't want to listen to a recorded message or an answering machine so they get a human being to talk to, someone who will listen sympathetically, take their details and tell them to call back at a more regular time.
]]>The thing to remember is that those camps are actually better than the ones in Nauru and PNG. Poor countries find it hard to run concentration camps effectively, and also to some extent the fences are there to protect the captives from disgruntled locals.
My understanding is that in the Australian camps there's less physical and sexual abuse by the guards, and more attempt to stop trouble between refugees. We still torture them, obviously, but it's less "random effects of being in a third world shithole" and more "systematic denial of basic human needs". Refugee support organisations also find it easier to get access to refugees (this is also why the Australian people hate having the camps here). Although it's possibly somewhat to Australia's credit that it's hard to get and keep staff for the camps except via the neoliberal "work or starve" system making unemployment benefits conditional on accepting whatever work is offered, no matter how odious.
I didn't know the policy had been changed. Thanks for the update.
The demographic time bomb is mainly a function of urbanization, I think. Back in 2005 Shanghai lots of young people who could have a child were opting not to, because raising a child in the city was so expensive. Given my friends' concerns about money, I infer that the same dynamic is present in other cities. No stats to back this up, but it matches my experience.
]]>Those subs were never intended to actually go in the water. They have already completed their primary mission, as gigantic black phallic pork barrels.
One seat in South Australia hung on a few hundred votes. Getting the government re-elected cost 50 billion and actually worked. That one seat was pretty vital. It would have been cheaper to campaign on a promise to give everyone in that electorate a gift of 100 000 dollars (orders of magnitude cheaper), but there you go.
]]>Even Australian voters don't like to think of themselves as corrupt money-grubbers who can be bought. It's important to at least pretend that it's about "jobs and growth" or "we decide who comes to this country" rather than just "borrowing money to bribe voters in selected marginal seats".
Admittedly, 50 billion is $25,000 for every single person in Australia... but again, put that bluntly even the average voter would be able to work out that the government isn't getting that money out of thin air, it's going to come out of taxpayers somehow. And no party would ever be that even-handed, there would always be "only some people get the bribe" (I missed out on the Rudd stimulus, for example, because I happened not to be employed at the critical moment... you'd think that would make me the ideal recipient, but it was very important not to give money to dole-bludging scum and fucking abos (I paraphrase)).
The major difference between the two coalitions is that one will take money from the poor to give to the rich, and the other from the poor to give to the middle class.
]]>Which is a bit snarky if you know your [redacted] I do not (plenty of tidbits but nothing integrated), but simply knowing that it is snarky is helpful. USA chose Racism / Fascism today btw. We shall see. America's not-so-secret weapon is lawyers and like-minded activists. Have to deep-soak some more in news feeds though.
Links, well this early effort is ... crude and ... direct and to my mind unethical in a few ways (I have high standards :-), but apparently reliable. Something to track for sure. Human Mind Control of Rat Cyborg’s Continuous Locomotion with Wireless Brain-to-Brain Interface (04 February 2019 - open - Shaomin Zhang, Sheng Yuan, Lipeng Huang, Xiaoxiang Zheng, Zhaohui Wu, Kedi Xu & Gang Pan.) The results showed that rat cyborgs could be smoothly and successfully navigated by the human mind to complete a navigation task in a complex maze. Our experiments indicated that the cooperation through transmitting multidimensional information between two brains by computer-assisted BBI[brain-brain interface] is promising. via Researchers Create 'Rat Cyborgs' That People Control With Their Minds (Bill Andrews, February 14, 2019)
]]>2b) We work on the principle that basically only two people (you n bill) actually read our stuff
I read it but I feel in no way qualified to comment
]]>If anyone cares, on the 4th day of hearings on the vote for NC's 9th Congressional district the unofficial winner said there needs to be a new election as the one under review could not be trusted.
TL;DR It appears the apparent winner, Mark Harris, got caught lying under oath at the hearing and his lawyer stopped it, things went behind closed doors, then Harris made a statement saying let's have a do over and quickly left. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-nc-a-surprise-in-the-end-everyone-agreed-it-was-election-fraud/2019/02/22/52e9f226-36c5-11e9-854a-7a14d7fec96a_story.html?
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