kgwilson

The North Koreans win hands down on the medals front. They often have so many they have run out of space to pin them on their tunic so continue them down their trouser legs.

Scomo was cynically called "Scotty from Marketing" from the beginning after his knifing of Turnbull. He had risen to his level of incompetence, first as the head of the NZ Tourist Board, falsely claiming he was responsible for one of the best marketing slogans ever, "100% Pure NZ" when he had absolutely nothing to do with it. He made the claim after he was fired. Then his disastrous & very short lived "Where the bloody hell are you" slogan as head of the Australian Tourist Board, from which he was quietly let go & concentrated on politics from that point. He didn't fool any one who was informed or who wasn't a complete one eyed Liberal but managed to con the public for a while until it all began to unravel in full floodlight mode with the Hawaii holiday. A lot of the libs knew it but were caught like deer in the headlights & backed up his lies and deceit till they lost. Now they are all wide eyed & knowledgeable about what happened. The problem is can they find a cure for the cancer that has set in or will it slowly kill them off until some 2 headed phoenix arises from the ashes, one head to embrace the Teals & the other the ultra right. At the moment they seem to be heading down the path of the latter.

I read recently that Putin is considering scrapping the 40 year old age limit for call up duty so he will end up with Dads Army defending his positions.

I reckon the reason that a lot of aged care and health care services were farmed out and privatised is that government agencies were not managing them well and the cost was skyrocketing. Private enterprise is invariably better at managing business at reduced cost than government could ever be. But they are not in it just to provide a service, they are in it to maximise their investment with the highest possible return for shareholders. This is where State Owned Enterprises come in but they tend to work on the same principles and want to therefore provide a return to their single shareholder, the government. If they were more competitive than private enterprises then that may have an effect of keeping the costs of aged care down across the board. This doesn't happen though as the government doesn't channel the profits back in to the industry, they use it somewhere else, usually to reduce the effects of their failures elsewhere. If they don't make a profit by keeping their costs below private enterprise then you get private enterprise calling "Not fair" and so the saga continues without benefit to anyone.

The Pork Barrelling related to government grants not government facilities and infrastructure. The process of application has a range of criteria and points are given where the application meets these. Once the department has provided the list of recommendations to the minister they should be ticked off in order of priority. BUT this didn't happen. Remember the Sports Rorts saga (colour coded applications) when Bridget Mckenzie chose to ignore the recommendations and give the money to sports clubs in marginal LNP seats almost exclusively. She resigned & then got her job back when Barnaby got the Nationals leadership back. Here is a list of the Morrison Government "Snouts in the Trough" back in 2019. https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/06/30/golden-age-pork-barrelling-list-snouts-trough/ It also extended to the NSW LNP government and eventually led to Gladys Berejiklians downfall. She even boasted that she thought it was OK saying every government does it. Wrong, it is not OK & her successor has distanced himself from such comments.

Something that I was not aware of is that Albanese, as leader of the house in the last Labor minority government more than anyone else made the government work according to Laura Tingle the ABCs Political commentator. "He is a superb negotiator and coalition builder: Skills that will be crucial whatever the final numbers. And that sets the culture for his government. His Leader of the House, Tony Burke, is an equally wily negotiator. There are multiple options for Labor if it wishes to negotiate on particular issues, and significantly a path through roadblocks that have held Australia back for a decade on climate change. A proper integrity commission looms which could help re-establish some sense of probity in government and trust from voters. And an indigenous Voice to Parliament may also finally make progress. It's the most transformative election you can imagine: Both in the country and in the way we govern ourselves."

I think now that with an integrity commission (hopefully with teeth) a certainty, climate change a major issue, and better wage and conditions for those on lower incomes as well as health, aged care and education back on the agenda we will see a government with far more compassion and accountability. I also hope that pork barrelling can be put to death as well and the integrity laws should make sure of this. I think now the majority have finally worked out that the LNP is corrupt & fiscally irresponsible. How many hospitals and health care services could we have got for the 5.5 billion they wasted on a cancelled submarine scheme for example? The Greens and Teal independents will support most of this IMO and after the honeymoon will do their best to "keep the bastards honest". The other thing is I really hope they can clean up the toxic culture in Canberra with what looks like quite a few more females in the mix.

It looks like Frydenburg is gone. LNP 51, ALP 71 & 10 others at the moment. It's a mess.

Scomo won't resign if he loses because he doesn't know how to. He was fired from his last 2 jobs as head of NZ & then Australian tourist boards & has been in politics ever since.

The latest Russian propaganda is that they have deployed a new Laser weapon called Zadira that can incinerate targets up to 4.8km away. Of course this is again another attempt to cover up failures with unsubstantiated claims of which no evidence exists. Zelensky mocked the announcement, comparing it to "Wunderwaffe" or wonder weapons, coined by the Nazis to bolster their egos & support when they were losing WWII.

There was some pretty serious firing going on but the 2 in the trench only fired a few shots. What were they lobbing with the assault rifle that had what looked like a silencer on the end. It was fired at about a 35 deg angle twice . Something happened to shut the noise up after he threw that grenade. Seemed like a prudent use of munitions when there were hundreds of rounds coming their way.

One modern comedian I like is Al Murray. His profanity is prolific & he throws political correctness out the window, picks audience members to sometimes belittle & then praise, acts like a dill but is very intelligent and well versed in history. He does shows called the Pub Landlord & picks offbeat subjects and provides his own hilarious logic to what he asserts. He likes to rip in to Germans & the French. Here is one short clip.

That's a big gun. But then I remember the old battleships had 15 inch guns which is about 380mm & there were sometimes 3 of them in one gigantic turret. The noise and recoil must have been something else.

In Stalingrad I believe the Soviets lost about a million people but that was a resource they had a lot of. I think it was in the movie "Enemy at the Gates" where it was displayed when Soviet troops crossed the Volga without weapons they were told to run forward & pick up the rifle from the person who fell in front of them. They apparently killed more of their own people than the US lost in the entire war.

Scomo will definitely change after the election. Win or lose he will get worse. He won't give up his happy clapper religious nutjob role though. Everything will be OK because it will be a miracle that he lost and he has always believed in miracles.

That is a classic & still hilarious after all these years.

I think that was the 7 minute clip called Slaughterbots and was made 3 years ago. It was a futuristic look at what is possible with existing technology. It is scary stuff. Now all they need is a delivery of these to the Kremlin targeting Putin and the red button pushers.

I don't think Putins aim has changed. He believes that the Ukraine is part of Russia & should never have been allowed its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. The East has a lot of Russian speaking people and there are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians living in Russia or vice versa. It has been this way for centuries and the Ukranians have always fought for their independence and although they were briefly recognised as a sovereign nation in 1917, factional fighting and eventual conquest by the Bolsheviks sealed their fate till the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Stalins collectives in Russia failed and he just took the grain from Ukraine and starved the population in 1931/32. Somewhere between 5 & 8 million people perished due to starvation. Putin doesn't care about that and it is irrelevant as far as he is concerned. Ukraine belongs to Russia in his eyes. I don't think he is doing this for any commercial benefit. Getting all the agricultural lands and industrial infrastructure would just be financial collateral. Ukrainian nationalism really came to the fore with the overthow of the Kremlin friendly Yanukovich government in 2014. This was the start of it all for Putin & of course he then seized the Crimea & tried to take the Donbas. He has just failed to recognise fierce Ukrainian nationalism. It has been bubbling under the surface for centuries but after 30 years of independence and a taste of Western style freedom they will not let it go now. Putin will likely never recognise this even after he is deposed, or disposed of.

That was the moment that I was finally fully convinced that Frydenburg was a corrupt Liberal hack. I am looking forward to him losing his seat in 2 weeks time.

No.

Latest reports say that Russian troops have been forced into defence mode and some have had to retreat back across the border in to Russia after Ukraine launched counter attacks around Kharkiv and Izium to the South East. https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300586548/russian-troops-forced-to-retreat-back-across-the-border-in-fierce-ukrainian-counterattack Buoyed by recent successes Kyiv has now seemingly upgraded its ambitions to push Russia completely out of Ukraine, including the Crimea. The flow of western weapons needs to continue to grow with ever larger and more deadly capacity and this could be achievable but I imagine it would have to go hand in hand with the fall of Putins regime.

My wifes mother was born in Donetsk. She spoke Ukrainian & Russian, learned German, Romanian & Czech in a forced labour camp in WW2 & then English when she got to Australia in 1949 with her Romanian husband she met in the camp. Her accent was very thick and her English simple and poor. I could barely understand her but she could easily understand everything that was said in English around her and was an avid reader of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. She watched a lot of TV too, mostly crappy soap operas like days of our Lives etc. I always found it odd that her ability to speak English after living here for so long had not improved but she certainly understood what was going on around her. So is being fluent the ability to understand a language well or to speak it eloquently? She could only do the former.

Here is an analysis of the state of the Russian Military first published by the Ecomomist. Basically it is a complete basket case & recovery will be slow and painful. https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/economist/300584653/russias-army-is-in-a-woeful-state

They explain it well but then that is the problem, it has to be explained to people. It is not that difficult but far too complex for a lot of people who are FORCED to vote so they go in to the booth with a how to vote card & copy everything on to their ballot paper. This system was rejected when put forward at the rerefendum in NZ in the 90s where the old first past the post system was reviewed. The MMP system selected is simple as you have 1 vote for a candidate in the electorate & 1 vote for the party you like. The parliament is made up of 50% elected members & 50% of party votes based on the %age of what they got. Simple and truly proportional so you can vote for 2 different parties or an independent in your electorate and a party you think is best able to run a government. There is no upper house in NZ so when legislation is discussed & passed it can be implemented quickly. That would not work here though. The senate is the only way to try & keep the bastards honest though it doesn't always work & slows everything down. Both systems can end up with a hung parliament even with coalitions between parties. That is where independents and parties like the Greens (if LNP get back in) can have influence on decisions that otherwise might be damaging for the environment and full of false claims to benefit the wealthy or self interest above the good of all and the future beyond the next 3 years. So as they say Hung parliaments can be better for the country than what LNP & labour tell you.

You just have to look across the ditch. Voting is not compulsory but the voter turn out is usually very high, a little under 80% at the last election, and they have a labour government. Admittedly a charismatic woman PM who is well known & admired at home and around the world helps. In the US many of the Republican states go out of their way to make voting difficult for blacks and hispanics who make up the bulk of the lower paid working population so they actively discourage voting. Voter turnout in 2016 was just over 50% but in 2020 it was 62% mostly to make sure they got rid of Trump.