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 Four out of five Australians wouldn’t pay for ABC TV if it were a subscription service
That’s how much we value our public advertiser broadcaster. But as it stands, at $1 billion dollars a year, on average $70 is taken each year from every *taxpaying* man, woman and child in Australia, or $280 for a family of four.*
In a survey of 500 Australians this week, more than half (52%) didn’t want to pay a cent. The situation got worse when they were asked if they would subscribe “like Netflix”? At this point the number of naysayers grew from 52% to 79%.
Truth be told, we all deserve a refund, and backdated 30 years
The cost to the nation of their ABC is not just a billion dollars a year lost, but their culpable-pro-rata-part in the billions of dollars wasted on policies that were practically pagan witchdraft which the ABC covered up. As leading failures of the fourth estate, the ABC consistently hid the incompetence of universities, professors and institutions like the BoM.
But according to the ABC, 72% of Australians say they are ‘Australia’s most trusted source of news and current affairs’. (I guess it depends on how you ask the question, trusted compared to what — the KGB?) With more careful questioning it turns out about 70% of adults think the ABC can’t be trusted to tell the right wing side of the story.
Two out of three people say that it’s biased to the left. Even 60% of Labor voters thought it leaned left. Even, wow, by crikey, 78% of Greens voters felt it “leaned left”. Was that them speaking the unspoken out loud? Are they proud that the national broadcasters uses taxpayer funds to represent just 5% of Australia? This might be a little window to the truth. In future surveys the Greens will learn to say, “the ABC is biased right” and blame Murdoch.
All up, most people would pay nothing, and those who might pay were only willing to pay $3 a month — meaning the ABC budget could be cut 75%.
The study was funded by the Menzies Research Centre, a right wing think tank. In comments on The Australian about the only response defenders of the ABC have is to accuse the Menzies Research Centre of being aligned with the Liberals. But we all know why the ABC haven’t run surveys exactly like this one.
The time to protest The ABC Swamp is coming.
James Madden, The Australian
The majority of Australians believe that ABC television is not worth paying a single cent for.
According to an independent study conducted by True North Strategy, more than half (52.6 per cent) of those interviewed said if they had a choice, they wouldn’t be prepared to pay anything for access to the national broadcaster’s television content in its current form, while the other respondents said they would only be willing to pay (on average) $2.94 per month.
Did the ABC publish those “most trusted” survey questions, I’d like to see them if anyone can find them.
REFERENCES
The ABC Annual Report, Financial statement pages 116 onwards.
The ABC Annual Report, “Most Trusted” statistics p18
ABC: Chris Berg and Sinclair Davidson, Against Public Broadcasting: Why and how we should privatise the ABC.
h/t Skeptical Sam
*Corrected. To be more accurate, there are 13.5 million taxpayers in Australia so the cost is $74/taxpayer. h/t Lawrie
9.9 out of 10 based on 92 ratings
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9.1 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
There are lessons for conservatives from this eclectic election in the most isolated state on Earth. It was historic, epic, and “A complete and utter landslide“. And the message is “borders”. Remember “Build the Wall?” Conservatives all around the world seem to have forgotten the power and appeal of being able to control who and which viridae, come across the border. If the Democrats in the US fortified the wall, they might not have to fortify election results.
 … The election Saturday was a wipeout of legendary proportions among democracies anywhere. Only four years ago, the Liberals (conservatives, theoretically) were the ruling party in Western Australia. Today they hold but two, as in one plus one, seats in the lower house of the WA Parliament, out of 59. They may win 3. The Labor Party took 58% of the first preference votes (that’s almost unheard of). Labor will take the Upper House too. See: WA Election Results. Things are so extreme, the talk now is how the Parliament is not big enough to hold the Labor M.P.’s. The rooms are just not designed for one party having almost all the members.
The Labor leader, Mark McGowan, is no Rhodes scholar or Cary Grant. There are no stirring speeches, but he’s wildly popular, by mostly just for standing up for the state. The Labor Party WA is an old fashioned centrist type player. So un-progressively neutrally-woke that when the (ahem, right wing) Liberals recklessly talked about removing all coal power in… f.o.u.r… (4!) years, McGowan said it was too fast, renewables were too unreliable and electricity bills would rise. Did I say centrist?
Firstly, secondly and thirdly, it was about borders
Make no mistake, there was only one issue in this election which was a 90 percenter, and that was the two week mandatory quarantine — the hard borders. They worked brilliantly (at least for people on the inside of them). To be fair, Western Australia has a land border which is 1,800 kilometers long — but with a million square kilometers of desert, there are only two bitumen roads across the entire length. If WA couldn’t close the border, who could?
So Western Australians have lived the last year like Covid didn’t exist and loved it. (Wishing our friends could too). Closing the borders was hugely successful, wildly popular, and the Liberal (conservative) party opposed it all the way, and they lost the election months ago, and everyone knew it.
For months on end, the voters universally sent the message, that they didn’t want Covid, or lockdowns, or any of that. McGowan reached stratospheric popularity — in the order of 90% approval. At one point in polls — as many as 95% of WA voters approved of the border closure. When, in any democracy, on any question do we get such a unanimous decision? Even Apple Pie would struggle.
It’s worth noting that this was popular among young voters: despite not being at much risk from the virus, the young wanted the borders closed even more than older voters in WA did — probably because their jobs in the service industries of restaurants and pubs were so at risk from lockdowns. And thus with no virus and no lockdowns, the open economy boomed, the stadiums had crowds of thousands, the nightclubs danced, and the weddings rolled on. We could visit our older folk in aged care homes without a second thought. The only exceptions to the happy list were some tourism operators and the poor sods caught outside the state trying to get back in. A problem that is still a blight. What does it mean to be a citizen if you can’t come home?
 Not a bad river to play on. Matilda Bay, WA. But even many of the hapless tourism operators ended up happy. Western Australians were prolific long distance travellers before Covid, but after Covid, many of them finally toured the distant corners of their own state for the first time, and the roads were packed with caravans. Local flights were busier than before.
The Liberal state opposition in WA, and the federal government Liberals in WA too, consistently took the side of other states, including backing Clive Palmer and his High Court case against WA. Go figure. It was like they wanted to lose. And it will hurt them federally too. Which WA Liberal Senator or member spoke for WA? As far as I can tell, they all represented the Liberal Party, not the people. They got what they deserved.
… the single biggest factor in the history-making victory was McGowan’s steadfast defence of WA’s right to close its border to keep coronavirus out of the State. He resisted pressure from Prime Minister Scott Morrison, defeated Clive Palmer in the Federal and High courts, waged a war of words with his NSW counterpart and watched the WA Liberals implode spectacularly when they misread public sentiment. — Peter Law, The West Australian
Once upon a time, conservative parties were the ones which spoke of sovereign borders, but when it came to the cheapest and most obvious way to stop a potential Sino bioweapon, to prevent debilitating lockdowns and loss of individual liberties, mortality, hospital surges, long term unknowable health problems — most conservative parties missed best chance they’ve ever had to argue for strong borders. And they are still missing it.
Western Australia is an extreme example, but this was an extreme result. Border control is a tougher pill when the economy is built on tourism instead of iron ore sales to China (which need to diversify). It’s awful when families are split. It’s tough when there are border towns — but there must be a better way to manage them than a state wall through the middle — why not draft a federal agreement that the twin towns are automatically temporarily moved to the care of the state without an outbreak?). But the next virus is coming. Giving up the trips to Bali was a small price to pay to avoid doing lockdowns and to avoid potential long debilitation.
Speaking of which: What’s a lockdown with no border control? At best, inefficient. At worst, sabotage.
Clearly the West needs a better Pandemic Plan
It’s a personality thing as well as a medical thing. Right wing entrepreneurs might be happy taking risks, but the democratic masses are clearly not, no matter how hard the risk takers try to convince them. And until widespread anti-viral cocktails make this treatable (which means getting past the gatekeepers), or SARS-2 evolves into something more like the flu, the cheapest easiest way to make both the risk takers and the masses happy (ie. democracy) is to keep unknown epidemics in their country of origin. i.e. All Chinese bioweapons should stay in China.
Though, of course, no matter which lab or cave generates the next one, the problem code could pop up anywhere, not necessarily just at a wet market next to a lab. The best time to close borders was January last year when the WHO was telling us to keep them open.
Second political black hole — the Green-left climate trap
Facing disaster, the WA State Liberals installed a new inexperienced leader in the last few months. He promptly announced a far left climate anti-coal policy and thus drove off any support from the base that still remained. His energy policies were so bad, they didn’t just make it hard for Liberal supporters to vote Liberal, they made it imperative to vote against them. In a complete flip of normal politics — the Liberals sounded like the Greens, and the Labor Party were speaking like climate skeptics.
The stupid Green Left Climate election trap is so obvious, it’s amazing any Western politicians still fall for it. The trap is when any centre right politician thinks they can appeal to young lefties in the hope of picking up Green votes. The climate religion has nothing to do with science or reason, or the centre of politics. It’s only a fashion quest for status — so young woke voters cheer the craven centre right for two microseconds (if that), but they don’t change their votes.
Appealing to the group that say they care about carbon dioxide emissions is doomed from the get-go. Reducing actual emissions is worthless to them — as has been shown again and again. In every choice between cutting CO2 and advertising their own virtue, they choose the advertising every time. They don’t support nuclear power, they don’t say “no” to flights for frivolous holidays, or advocate online conferences instead of carbon hungry global symposiums, and they keep supporting wind and solar power even though neither of those is a cost effective way to reduce CO2.
The Liberals in WA didn’t do their research, didn’t understand the science of virology or climate, nor did they understand the voters they represent.
The future
Perhaps it won’t be as awful as it could be. Given that some states are run by The disguised Uniparty anyhow, being run by The Labor Party is at least a known risk, and there is the hope that the Opposition will rise like a phoenix reborn, without so much baggage. There’s also the possibility that with so much power, the Labor Union powerbrokers will lose their control. Maybe no faction will rule the roost, and a bunch of Labor members sitting on seats that are really not Labor seats, will respond to pressure from electorates that could flip back any minute. (To those West Australians, start writing letters now).
And maybe a few political leaders will notice that simple policies are winners. Listen to the voters, aim for the centre, toss out all the climate vanity, and control your own borders.
Keep reading →
9.4 out of 10 based on 88 ratings
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8.5 out of 10 based on 33 ratings
After a thousand headlines told us Climate Change would make deserts grow, a new study suggests it won’t. It’s a finding that shocks no one who knew that climate models have no predictive skill with rainfall, and that a warmer world means higher global precipitation. Plus there’s the awkward clue that for the last forty years the arid regions of the world have been getting greener instead of more deserty.
Looks a bit different?
The top map (below) shows the deserts expanding — but that’s the old predictions which are based only on “atmospheric data” like temperature and rainfall. The bottom map is the new work which uses soil and vegetation data too. Red means growing deserts. Blue means shrinking.
Remember, all contradictory conclusions are based on expert opinions using worlds best practice and done by Nobel-Prize-winning people. Shame about all the farmers and investors making decisions based on junk models.
 Deserts were expanding until experts got a better model.
The new study is based on modeling too so it is still wrong, but less useless than previous studies.
The hugely different forecasts show how vaporously thin the past doom and gloom was, and how so many headlines were generated out of a banal omission from an inadequate model.
Cancel the cover shots of cracked Earth
Now they tell us?
Now we find that all the past expert predictions were made with models that only used “atmospheric information” like rain and temperature — to predict the condition of plants and soil. You’d think they might have mentioned that. Now that they have some actual soil moisture data and flora involved — things look very different. As all good skeptics know (but apparently not science journalists) increasing CO2 means plants need less water. Thus more carbon dioxide makes plants “drought resistant”.
Note the attention getting headline:
Previous studies used atmospheric information, including rainfall and temperature, to make projections about future land conditions. The real picture is more complicated than that, said Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper.
“Historically, we have relatively good records of rainfall and temperature but really poor records of the land surface, things like soil moisture and vegetation,” said McColl. “As a result, previous definitions of drylands are based only on how the atmosphere is behaving, as an approximation of the land surface. But models can now simulate both atmospheric and land conditions. By just looking directly at the land surface in climate models, we find that the models aren’t showing a clear increase of drylands over time and that there is huge uncertainty about the global average state of drylands in the future.”
Plants need less water when there is more CO2:
Keep reading →
9.5 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
The EU has given up trying to persuade Australian voters that wind and solar power is “cheap”. Instead, it’s using Upperclass centralized bully-power in an attempt to force Australia to sacrifice cheaper electricity and hobble its generation network to satisfy the EU totalitarians.
Written by someone at Their ABC
Australian exporters to Europe are likely to face millions of dollars in new tariffs after the European Parliament voted overnight to move forward with a carbon levy on products from countries lacking serious pollution reduction programs.
The vote came after a top parliamentary committee noted concerns about “the lack of cooperation by some of the EU’s trade partners … to reach the objectives of the Paris Agreement”.
Australians installed more renewables per capita than any place on Earth in 2018-19, but that isn’t enough. The EU say we need a “target” of net-zero, (which we can point at and ignore, like most of what the EU does):
Kathleen van Brempt, a key parliamentary trade coordinator, said an FTA was contingent on “a clear vision [from] Australia by when and how they will become climate neutral and by when and how they will phase out of coal”.
Until Australia establishes a new scheme to lower emissions, its exporters to Europe face the prospect of paying additional tariffs under the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is expected to come into force in 2023.
The mechanism is designed to apply tariffs on imports equivalent to the fees paid under the EU’s Emissions Trading System by local businesses producing the same product.
Three solutions: Nukes, fake targets, or a trade war?
Being practical, given that the EU is our second largest trading partner, we can either build a few nuclear power plants, fake up a symbolic “carbon target”, or fight back in a trade war. While Australia has more uranium than any place on Earth, we also have 300 years of coal and it’s a lot cheaper. Nothing beats wholesale brown coal at 3c KWh. As for symbolic carbon targets and fake declarations of emergencies, the price is still too high. These careless declarations become potent legal tools to protect extreme protesters, excuse trade wars (like this one), and punish certain politicians and companies.
The best choice is to point out how Australia is already a super-achiever with carbon reduction per capita, and the installation of unreliable renewables. When the EU achieves similar per capita “gains” then they can lecture us — especially when we have an energy-dependent economy, live on the lowest population density country on Earth, have bigger distances to cover, and are more remote than any continent bar Antarctica. Until then Australians will just have to drink Australian wine and cheese and drive South Korean and Japanese cars.
We’ll sell our gold, shiraz and beef to the UK, Canada, India, and US. Long live The Commonwealth!
 Map of the Commonwealth Time to talk about that lop-sided AU-EU trade imbalance
In a trade war with the EU, Australia surely holds the upper hand. We export $30 billion dollars worth of goods and services to the EU, but import $80 billion dollars worth of EU goods, none of which we really have to have, and that’s despite the EU already having higher tariffs on Australian goods than we do on EU goods. Could we not just add tariffs to incoming EU goods to recover their charges and distribute them back to subsidize our exporters to the EU? Seems only fair.
Yes, yes, obviously we’d prefer no tariffs, but if the EU wants a tariff on our electricity, so be it.
If the EU wants to set our electricity prices, Australians could easily choose not to buy EU goods. It’s not that we have anything against the suffering small businesses of the EU (to whom we are rather sympathetic), but if they won’t protest at this bullying behaviour and their own stupidly high electricity prices then we can’t help them. We don’t need German windmills, French wine, Italian cheese or Spanish olives. We can supply our own.
We should also cancel our French submarine purchase “in protest” (any excuse will do — the Japanese subs are better in any case).
9.8 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
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8.1 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?
The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.
This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the mainstream media, as ruin – as dead. But they are not, not at all. (And I do worry for all the children who now believe this precious environment/the Great Barrier Reef is dead from ‘carbon dioxide pollution’.)
In the photo Jen Marohasy floats on the surface and holds a one meter long bright orange tube.
 Jen floating, with aerial photograph taken at 20 metres above the front of Pixie Reef on 22nd February, just before the thunderstorm hit. But try spotting the orange tube “coral” from 120m above?
 Jen floating above the reef front, holding a safety sausage showing exactly one metre. This aerial was taken by Stuart Ireland at exactly 120 metres altitude.
All colorful corals die in space and other great insights from Big-Government “Science”.
Jen writes via email and on her blog:
It may have been more than 65% bleached back then. But it is difficult to know from this single data point recorded as the professor looked out the window of an airplane from an altitude of 150 metres.
It is my hypothesis that these coral health assessments of the Great Barrier Reef, comprising 1,156 reefs including Pixie Reef as published in the peer-reviewed technical literature by Terry Hughes and others, are yet another example of the mismatch between official government-sponsored (taxpayer funded) propaganda masquerading as science, versus reality.
Sure, Terry Hughes could have used a very high resolution camera from a plane, but he still diagnosed 65% of this reef as dead. Was it really that bad then? Has it recovered, or was it just “plane dead” then?
The more government funding we throw at the Reef the sicker it gets.
The undead Great Barrier Reef looks fine underwater.
 Close up of Pixie Reef Coral.
 More undead corals at Pixie Reef. Jen Marohasy’s other photos from the Great Undead Barrier Reef include Part 1, Part 2 and the garden of old Porites at Myrmidon Part 3.
Other posts on the Great Barrier Reef
9.9 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
 It’s not the hard and fast rules on censorship that are the worst — it’s the vague ambiguous ones. That way no one really knows what is permitted, and what isn’t. With random punishment and vague rules the underclass have to guess what is OK, and usually err on the side of silence.
Self censorship of a whole nation is so much more efficient. Otherwise the rulers need a lot of police. And if people are only punished randomly, there are no rules to work around — and the fear and guessing sets the boundaries way further out.
by Petr Svab, The Epoch Times
The principle of self-censorship is that people, just to be on the safe side, refrain from saying even things that aren’t outright banned by some applicable rules.
Vague Rules
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the world’s most notorious censor of free speech, has for decades used the method of making its policies intentionally vague. During its past political campaigns, for instance, the central leadership would issue a decree that “rightists” and “counterrevolutionaries” were to be punished. The next lower rung of party officials wouldn’t be told what exactly makes one a “rightist” or a “counterrevolutionary” and perhaps not even what the punishment should be. No official, however, would want to be seen as too lenient—that would carry the risk of being labelled oneself. As such, each successive level of bureaucracy would intensify its interpretation of the policy, leading to ever more extreme results. In some periods, the hysteria went far beyond self-censorship as even refraining from political speech wasn’t enough.
The method appears to now be in play in contemporary America.
Amazon recently updated its policies to ban books that contain “hate speech” without explaining what it considers as such. Since Amazon controls over 80 percent of the book retail market, publishers are left to guess whether a book may get the “hate speech” label and thus be much less profitable to publish.
Perception of Random Targeting
 Another method to induce self-censorship is selective enforcement. During CCP’s past political campaigns, it would pick targets for persecution seemingly at random. Even the targets wouldn’t necessarily know what exactly had brought the party’s wrath on them. In response, people would scramble to make sense of the situation, drawing red lines of self-censorship based on guesswork.
Elements of this method can be seen in various settings in the West.
When Amazon recently banned a book that criticizes transgender ideology published by Encounter Books in 2018, it didn’t explain why. Instead, Amazon quietly updated its book policies on hate speech. It then left it to the public to connect the dots and label the book as hate speech themselves.
Guilt by Denial
Keep reading →
9.2 out of 10 based on 74 ratings
Fame, Fortune and Victimhood status is possible for anyone*
Babylon Bee reports unrecognised benefits of Meghan and Harry interview, inspiring millions of young girls:
“Oppression is inescapable,” said Markle, who is married to a prince and worth approximately $50 million. “If you are a woman– especially a woman of color, oppression will follow you all the days of your life and you will never really be happy.”
You can have it all:
“Thanks to Meghan Markle, I feel like I too can grow up to be a famous, rich, beautiful oppressed person,” said Mikayla White, a 5th-grade girl from Southern California. “It’s so encouraging to be reminded that I can grow up to be in the top 1% while never losing my resentment and high sensitivity to microaggressions.”
Markle has promised to continue taking her message of hope to girls everywhere until no one is happy or thankful anymore.
–Babylon Bee.
Out with all that old restraint, diplomacy, and gratitude for fame and fortune.
The Australian ABC described the interview as the worst imaginable for the Royal Family. Though some of us can still imagine what it would be like if, say, the first in line to the throne had been actually caught having an affair.
Hyperbole knows no bounds.
*Except for old white Catholic Cardinals and climate skeptics.
9.4 out of 10 based on 63 ratings
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8.6 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
The Upper Class Swamp has been labeling any conjecture they don’t like as Qanon (even if it isn’t connected to it) which buries it all as dangerous conspiracy theorizing. This weekend the countercry “BlueAnon” took off on Twitter and in the Urban Dictionary — mocking the conspiracy theories of the left.
You might suffer from BlueAnon if you think the CPAC stage was really a NAZI insignia signal, put there as a secret code; or you think the Capitol Hill rioters were really trying to overturn the most powerful government in the world without any guns at all, and of course, if you think all climate skeptics are secretly paid by Big Oil.
BlueAnon was registered on the UrbanDictionary:
 … The Upper Class Swamp keep telling us what they are afraid of: Being laughed at
Ed Driscoll on Instapundit noticed the BlueAnon trend yesterday and enthusiastically wrote: “OMG-LOL! Receipt-filled thread mocking #BlueAnon for each and every crazy conspiracy theory on the Left is an epic must-read.” But the Deplorables must absolutely not be able to laugh at crazy Upper Class ideas, so the Thought Police went to work. Within an hour the twitchy.com link and the “epic” jokefest became a 404 error, and the entire Google search was cleansed. The Urban Dictionary banned the definition.
 .. Since the Tech-Giants want BlueAnon banned, obviously it’s in the free world’s interest to use it and some are resubmitting it to UrbanDictionary again and again…
Spread the word.
Candace Owens says:
If you believe:
-DC is under military occupation because there are non-stop threats from Trump supporters.
-Joe Biden is the most popular American President of all time.
-Russia, Russia, Russia
You might be #BlueAnon
@MoreBooks4All is a critic:
There’s no such thing as blueanon. There is however, the ridiculous QAnon conspiracy theory that has taken over your political side. Deal with it and stop making up ridiculous nonsense.
To which, James Lindsay, super-antiracist replies, in fluent Qanon:
Denial of BlueAnon is the heartbeat of BlueAnon.
The joke thread and all that creative talent, is still missing. If anyone finds the “epic” thread copy, please post a link here. I searched google cache within an hour or two and the cache had already been cleansed.
For the record: The word has been around for a while. There was BlueAnon discussion on Twitter on Feb 3.
UrbanDictionary are not offering any explanation for losing the term. It’s not like it’s obscene or unused. They still allow Republic**ts.
There is a Twitter hastag #BlueAnon. As long as that annoys Twitter, keep using it.
9.4 out of 10 based on 76 ratings
Moves continue in the US to remove “extremists” from the Military. Though no one seems to know the definition of extremeist, nor what will happen to anyone identified as one.
 … Every illegal regime that comes to power by means of a coup lives in constant fear of the same thing happening to them. It’s their abiding characteristic and the reason they regularly have mass purges.
— The Pointman, How the Purge of the Military is Being Done
In 1899 the hard left gained power in France, and purged “the two main” conservative institutions — the church and the military. James S. Corum describes what happened and how 15 years later, it was a bloodbath in the first month of the war against the Germans, the French lost a quarter of a million men — fully one fifth of their field army.
James S. Corum, American Thinker
Even without Facebook the French government still had ways to filter out their political opponents.
In their desire to remold France according to Jacobin principles, the Left Bloc decided that conservative officers had to go. The government announced in 1901 that promotions in the army would no longer be an internal matter of the military promotion boards but would be under the purview of the War Department, run by the political ministers.
Under General André, the War Ministry initiated a secret system of surveillance and informants to collect information on the political, social, and religious background of officers. A network of Freemasons, leftist government officials, and leftist officers send information on French officers directly to the War Ministry. A vast system of secret files was amassed, eventually amounting to files on 19,000 of the 25,000 regular officers. The War Ministry used the files to push the careers of officers known to favor the left, while adherence to Catholic practices or familial and social contacts with the old aristocracy, were enough to dead-end even the most competent officer’s career.
The effect on the troops was so predictable:
Morale plummeted when it was obvious the promotion system was rigged….
The politicization of the army in the decade prior to World War I had an enormous effect. Many good officers left the French army as politically correct mediocrities were promoted. The officer education standards fell dramatically as applications to the elite military academies of France, which mostly consisted mainly of officer cadets from conservative and religious families, fell dramatically. In 1897 there had been 1,920 applications to École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, France’s West Point. By 1907, however, the number of applicants was halved. In 1900, 42% of the artillery officers were graduates of the elite École Polytechnique. In 1913, only 13% of artillery officers were graduates. The average scores on the academy entrance exams also fell in proportion to the decline in applications. And not only the officer corps was demoralized, but the professional NCO Corps also abandoned the military. In 1900 72,000 NCOs had re-enlisted. In 1911 only 41,000.
And the cost was a quarter of a million men, and almost the entire nation of France.
More than a decade of politicization of the military resulted in a French army that went to war in August 1914 with appallingly poor leadership and training. The great social experiment of the Left Bloc was a bloodbath. In the first month of the war, the French army lost 250,000 casualties—20% of the field army. Faced with an existential crisis, the French government announced a truce between the left and the conservatives. For the duration of the war, with France’s survival at stake, meritocracy would be the only standard in the French army.
Meritocracy was always going to win in the end. But it might have been German meritocracy that won.
h/t David E. Another Ian.
9.8 out of 10 based on 80 ratings
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8.9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone, found some studies showing Fires are less common today than in the past — including a ripper of an Australian study.
Emma Rehn et al went to a small lake in far North Australia and dug up about 6m of sediment core from the bottom. They looked at charcoal deposits and a bunch of different minerals. They discovered that the top most recent layers had the worst fires for a thousand years. It had all the makings of a Great Climate Change advert. But to their absolute credit, they kept going down and further back and uncovered a story of four thousand long years of wild blazes.
Despite millennia of prehistoric infernos, no media outlets in Australia have shown any interest in this study which came out a month ago — showing Sensationalism is not all its cracked up to be, and not as much fun as Confirmation Bias.
Look at the current blip (left hand side) since European settlement, compared to the fires of 4,000 years ago (right hand side). As Mr Dundee would say, “That’s not a fire…. ”
 Carbon Flux showing the intensity of fires in Arnhem land for the last 5000 years. The authors took mineral samples, looked at the different sizes of the charcoal particles. They decided that there were cycles of intense fires every 450 years in the era around 3 – 5,000 years ago largely driven by the climate. (Which climate models explain those cycles?)
There was also more rain around 4,000 years ago, which — rather than reducing fires — may have fueled the biomass growth that led to intense wildfires.
In the last 2,500 years ago, things got drier and more variable, and people who liked to eat a lot of mudflat shellfish moved into the area. Apparently they did more local fire management too. They appear to have been lighting more smaller fires. That, and the drier conditions meant there wasn’t the bulk biomass lying around to fuel the infernos we’ve come to expect from the modern Department of Planning, Industry and Environment.
The z-scores graph brings out the highest intensity fire periods.
The present is on the left (again).
Arnhem Land Fires were far worse 3,000 to 5,000 years ago and once had cycles of high intensity every 450 years.
 Marura, NT Then a strange thing happened around 900 years ago when there was hardly any charcoal in the mud sediments. The people at the time ate less shellfish and appeared to wander around more. The fires seem to be small regular patchwork fires.
Then in the last 200 years, European people arrived, mucked up the neat patterns and big fires came back again for the first time in a thousand years. Though the top layers of mud were stirred up in the little lake, so actual dates are blurry. But historical records describe what happened.
We knew the fires were big, we just didn’t realize how unusual they were.
Of course even bigger and stupider fires occurred in the last twenty years far away on the East coast of Australia. Experts decided they would protect koalas and spotted quolls by stopping all the small fires and grazing cows. Thus letting an incendiary tonnage of fuel build up so they could generate proper pyroclastic infernos that sterilize the Earth.
The new genius plan is to use solar panels and windmills to ward off Dem’ Big Climate Apocalypsy.
Stone Age science is so much more advanced than Politically Correct Science.
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When is an Armed Insurrection an Unarmed Protest?
 Armed with arms and legs? Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Red-pill the West. No guns were found on any of the protesters who went into the US Capitol on January 6th. The most important part of this message is not about guns, or the lack of. It’s about The Media. People need to know they are being sold elite propaganda every night on TV — fake news that serves the Upper Class Swamp.
What are the odds that a group without a single gun would be able to overturn the US Government? And on one of the most important sitting days in the history of Capital Hill, with possibly the largest rally in history happening at the same time, all known weeks in advance. Clearly Capitol Hill would be well protected. Clearly we would expect they had tighter security than normal. Oh wait…?
What does this say about the people in charge of Capitol Hill security — which was Nancy Pelosi.
What does it say about the intent of the protesters. Were they there to overthrow the government, or were they just citizens who want free and fair elections?
If they’d had bows and arrows they would have been a bigger threat.
Jack Phillips, Epoch Times
An FBI official on Wednesday testified at a Senate hearing that she has no knowledge of any guns being recovered from suspects who were arrested during the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
When asked by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) about whether firearms were recovered or if any suspect was charged with firearms offenses, FBI counterterrorism official Jill Sanborn responded: “To my knowledge, none.”
But in the hearing, Sanborn also said that before the Jan. 6 incident, “We knew they would be armed, we had intelligence that they would be coming to DC, but we did not have intelligence that they would be breaching the Capitol.”
“I believe that the only shots that were fired were the ones that resulted in the death of the lady,” Sanborn also testified, referring to the officer-involved shooting of Ashli Babbit.
So the FBI “knew” they would be armed, but no one thought to add extra security or to tell Capitol Police not to let them walk into the building? Five people died and all of them were Trump supporters. The policeman, Officer Sicknick was fine on the night of the protest, but died, possibly of a stroke (his family think) the next day.
Other stories about the Capitol Hill storming and corruption in US politics:
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FYI for Perth readers: There’s a protest at the WA Parliament on Saturday for those who think Western Australia needs coal power and free choice about medical procedures. Shouldn’t citizens be able to decide what gets injected?
10am – 11:30am, Saturday 6th March, Parliament House Perth, Western Australia. Click for more information.
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A group of teenagers want to stop the expansion of a coal mine in Australia. They have taken a class action out against the Government because we all know Governments are supposed to manage the weather better.
Well you’d be cross too, if you thought careless old folk were going to bring you slightly warmer weather!
The Guardian
Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun head to an Australian court on Tuesday to launch what they hope will prove to be a landmark case – one that establishes the federal government’s duty of care in protecting future generations from a worsening climate crisis.
If successful, the people behind the class action believe it may set a precedent that stops the government approving new fossil fuel projects.
Because the last thing you’d want is democratically elected Ministers to chose how we use national resources.
As with any novel legal argument, its chances of success are unclear, but the case is not happening in isolation.
So it is an ambit claim, backed by someone with money. Who? This could be a form of lawfare, and we all know who the beneficiaries would be if this case “gets lucky”.
The case is a response to a proposal by Whitehaven Coal to extend its Vickery coalmine in northern New South Wales. The expansion of the mine could lead to an extra 100m tonnes of CO2 – about 20% of Australia’s annual climate footprint – being released into the atmosphere as the extracted coal is shipped overseas and burned to make steel and generate electricity.
“The decisions that they make right now will impact us in the future. We’re the ones who are going to have to live with the decisions, we’re going to have to raise the next generation under those decisions, and we just want a future that is guaranteed to be safe for us,”…
So teenagers want a future that is “guaranteed safe”, but think they should be able to make heating and air conditioning unaffordable for senior citizens, right now? There’s another Duty of Care here.
The case hinges on the idea that if we stop digging up our coal, other nations will copy us. Otherwise if we keep our coal underground, all we are doing is creating great reasons for other people to dig up their coal and sell it to our customers.
One Guardian commenter, Sandra says “ the climate crisis cannot be entrusted to political players. Ideology, vested interests, political donations and fear of losing seats means that the Australian Government is compromised and decisions made are invalid.” Climate must be depoliticised she demands! Too true. But she wants totalitarian rule by PhD: “It [control of the weather] must be given completely over to the climate scientists.”
Depoliticize climate science says Jo? Yes please. But who gets to pick the people who call themselves “a climate scientist”? We can’t leave that to Vice Chancellors who will sack any professor that threatens the money flow and sends a satirical email. But hey, these are big decisions with many stakeholders. So let’s ask the voters. They can pick representatives…. we could call that “Parliament”?
The Duty of Care Method for ruling a country could get right out of hand. Old folk could sue Governments for risking their health, then young workers could sue the government for destroying their jobs.
Croakey — for those who want a little more information on the legal side:
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7.5 out of 10 based on 22 ratings
Hmmm. What one thing might unite the polarized sides of the USA?
Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck is a former US Marine who has worked in Thailand and Taiwan in academia and military intelligence. He writes that the West thought they defeated communism in 1990. They assumed China would play nice, but they were very wrong. Instead China studied the West and Russia, and is waging a Political War. There is a whole PDF book linked under that book image.
The SundayGuardianLive
Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck
 Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting” by Kerry K. Gershaneck China is an expansionist, hyper-nationalistic, militarily powerful, brutally repressive, fascist, and totalitarian state. It is essential to understand each word in that indisputable description. The CCP poses an existential threat to the freedom and democracy that India and the US represent. Failure to understand the nature of the CCP regime undermines our countries’ ability to fully understand the danger the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) PW poses and to build our capacity to combat it.
Officials in democracies such as India and the US have been too easily deceived about PRC’s political warfare for several key reasons. When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990, many in our countries naively believed there would be no more expansionist, totalitarian threats. They were wrong, of course. Chinese communists still quietly harboured plans for regional (and ultimately global) hegemony. As PRC rulers proclaimed China’s “peaceful rise”, they built massive economic and military strength and engaged in global political warfare operations to subvert the democracies.
Meanwhile, the US and other democracies dismantled their Cold War political warfare capabilities and foolishly assumed the PRC would join the community of nations as a “responsible stakeholder”…
All’s fair in love and political warfare:
From the CCP perspective, PW is total war—it is unrestricted warfare using every means just short of large-scale military combat. The PRC’s form of political warfare is generally standard worldwide: it uses the same playbook to achieve its political, economic, and military objectives globally without having to fight conventional wars. Tailored strategies and tactics, however, are adapted for each region and country.
It’s important to understand that PRC’s PW—this unrestricted warfare—is designed to get others to do what the CCP wants them to do. The PRC says unrestricted warfare means “the battlefield is everywhere” and there are no boundaries between “war and non-war, and between military and non-military affairs”. In essence, the PRC says that everything, legal or illegal, is permissible in order to achieve its ends. Specific examples the PRC gives of how to conduct its unrestricted warfare include biological and chemical warfare and terrorism, means particularly pertinent to note and consider in the Covid-19 era.
The list of weapons the PRC employs is long. It includes propaganda, psychological warfare, media warfare, disinformation, corruption, economic and sexual enticement, and coercion. It also includes active measures such as hybrid warfare, proxy armies, assassination, kidnapping, and brutal physical attacks. The PRC’s PW doctrine also includes concepts such as lawfare (using international and national laws, bodies and courts to shape decision making in the CCP’s favour), cyberattacks, terrorism, espionage, bribery, censorship, deception, subversion, blackmail, enforced disappearances (kidnapping, abduction), attacks by criminal gangs, and hybrid warfare.
The CCP’s Troll Factory and 300,000 workers:
A noteworthy recent addition to this list of PW weapons is social media warfare. The PRC uses social media to amplify its psychological warfare, intimidation, coercion, and propaganda. With social media, the CCP floods societies with propaganda and disinformation to weaken people’s faith in democracy and create political instability. In pursuit of social media dominance, the PRC has established a PLA cyber force of perhaps 300,000 soldiers as well as a netizen “50 Cent Army” of perhaps 2 million individuals who are paid a nominal fee to make comments on social media sites supporting CCP propaganda and coercion. In conjunction with the PLA Strategic Support Force, many of these so-called “netizens” use social media to intimidate and coerce multinational corporations, celebrities, foreign governments and organizations, and critics of PRC genocide and expansionism.
This is all part of the CCP’s totalitarian thought control.
In general, the PRC’s rulers wage political warfare for three key reasons: (1) to achieve regional and global hegemony; (2) to maintain absolute control over China’s subjects internally; and (3) to co-opt or coerce other nations into becoming vassal or tributary states and to destroy states perceived as adversaries.
Download a free copy of Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting” by Kerry K. Gershaneck
Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck was a Visiting Scholar (Ta
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9.6 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
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