A whiff of ANZACKERY!!

General Electric will ensure all fridges have a workable defrost to store Austra-Zeneca!


Dear reader, it’s not often we receive an article so gripping, its pulse leaping from the page with the absolute and profound truth that we commit it instantly to the public. But this one nails it. Michael Pascoe, (Blood- brother to BRUCE) in this tellingly insightful piece suggests why wearing an ausssie flag mask is a ‘PROVEN WAR WINNING FORMULA’ for our times. 

We reprint the entire article and the only change is to augment his singular face mask image with many more from our P.M who’s doing it tough on the ‘FRONTLINE’ against a ‘SWORN ENEMY’, in this our ‘HOUR OF NEED’. As we repel the evil agressor from ‘OUTSIDE’, from ‘WITHIN’, and ‘BEYOND’ to fight the fight whether it be ‘ON THE BEACHES’, On a ‘FAR FLUNG ASIATIC SHORE’, or ‘AGAINST JOHNNY TURK’,  to the ‘LAST SHILLING’!!!

READ THIS NOW…….. for, from the Outposts we hear ‘THE DRUMS OF WAR’!!!!!!!

GREAT LEADERSHIP!! P.M gets to wear the flag mask. Deputy P.M knows his place.

Scott Morrison’s military defence doesn’t stand a chance against Delta

The most extraordinary newspaper story over the weekend disappeared with little trace, swamped by broader, more immediate COVID issues, the Olympics and journalism’s frequent failure to follow up another paper’s exclusive – the “not invented here” syndrome.

For mine, a general launching “a savage broadside” in national cabinet against a state premier is important news.

General Motors making his case for Two-Up school to be installed at all Crown Casino’s

For the Prime Minister to be unconcerned and immediately back up his military man makes it serious business, a marker in the militarisation of government, what the Australia Institute’s Allan Behm calls “Operation Khaki Creep”.

“Lieutenant-General John Frewen, an unelected public servant, had just listened to a desperate plea from the premier about redirecting Commonwealth-controlled vaccines from GP clinics into the most affected Sydney local government areas,” Rick Morton reported in The Saturday Paper.

“Frewen was apoplectic. According to those present in the virtual meeting, he spoke with such derision that it left other premiers and chief ministers stunned. At least one state leader told colleagues: ‘I would have stopped the meeting if he had spoken to me like that’.”

General maintenance addresses Crown Casino enquiry on the importance of ‘Two Up schools’ as a NATION BUILDNG INITIATIVE!

Morton also reported Scott Morrison handballed much of the negotiating in the virtual meeting to General Frewen and periodically stood up from his desk “turned his back to the camera and bent down to literally stoke a fire with a poker”.

OK, maybe poking the fire is not important, whatever it says about the Prime Ministerial attitude to national cabinet, but leaking of such detail from the meeting also says something about the low ebb of federal relations.

The reported performance of the military at that level is important, used by the Prime Minister to conduct national cabinet affairs, tackling a premier, rather than the supposed role of being a public servant of the federation in running the vaccination program.

Alas, The Saturday Paper has a relatively small circulation. It was someone else’s exclusive. It wasn’t mentioned on Insiders or anywhere else that I’ve noticed.

And knocking the military, questioning Operation Khaki Creep, has been turned into something a Committee for Un-Australian Activities might investigate.

That’s been both the aim and result of politicians increasingly wrapping themselves in the flag and surrounding themselves with people in military uniform, none more so than Scott Morrison.

GAS-LED RECOVERY P.M, Will fight on the beaches, to thwart a sensible National Carbon Policy!

The use of the military for props is a natural extension of the flag lapel pin – “it reminds me every single day whose side I’m on” – and the flag face mask and whenever possible, multi-flag backgrounds for announcements and photo ops.

A flag as a mask can help one remember which country one has been stuck in for 18 months.

By implication, if you’re not on Mr Morrison’s side, if you’re not waving the flag and saluting the military, adopting the cheesy American “thanks for your service” to begin every speech, you’re not on the side of the Australian people – you exclude yourself from consideration.

Judging by Morton’s report, that goes for state premiers as well.

Mr Behm, the head of the Australia Institute’s international and security affairs program, suggests Mr Morrison is picking up when John Howard left off in militarisation of civilian roles.

Compassionate PM smoothing the pillow of a (soon to be deceased) intern at an aged care facility

The Howard government deployed the SAS to swoop on the Tampa to prevent refugees being disembarked, appointed two generals to senior public service roles in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and appointed a major general to command the Northern Territory Emergency Response to Aboriginal child sexual abuse.

Scott Morrison kept uniforms close during Operation Sovereign Borders and when his polling dived during the bushfire crisis.

Now there’s Operation COVID Shield with a Royal Australian Navy commodore appointed in April to manage the logistics of the vaccine rollout.

And now we have the military not just providing service backup to civilian roles, but on the street creeping closer to policing.

It’s the military, the flag – we must be in good hands.

But the evidence suggests we’re not. Whatever happened in national cabinet on Friday, there was nothing of substance to show for it at the end.

As Alan Kohler has explained, there was nothing really new in the Prime Minister’s post-Cabinet media conference.

The vaunted “four-phase exit plan” is pretty standard and waffly enough for politicians to wave it about in hope of no more lockdowns in our time.

It’s more of a “back-of-the-napkin” thought bubble, according to the Grattan Institute.

FRONTLINE PM, negotiates skilful menipulation of short sightedness and Aussie Flag face- mask!

At the grittier end of reality, ICU specialist Dr Greg Kelly spelt out in a Twitter thread how it’s the case load of ICU teams that is likely to end up deciding when lockdowns end, not a vaccination yardstick that fudges its numbers by excluding children.

I think much of the incoherence & backflips in #COVID19 response, esp in rich countries, came about b/c ppl don’t understand who ICU teams are & what they do

I’m an intensive care specialist who did an MBA to try & understand this better myself, here goes at an explanation: 🧵⬇️

— Dr Greg Kelly (@drgregkelly) August 1, 2021

ICU teams care for the sickest patients from all areas of medicine, ICU is “the centre of gravity” of high-intensity hospital health care, Dr Kelly wrote.

Most ICU patients are in and out relatively quickly – 85 per cent in less than three days – but the remaining 15 per cent represent two-thirds of ICU bed capacity.

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, THE FLAG and the FACE-MASK!

It doesn’t take many extra long-stay patients to use up ICU capacity.

And COVID ICU patients tend to be long stay.

One severe COVID patient is the equivalent of 20 heart or major cancer surgery ICU patients.

Dr Kelly said ICU capacity is finely tuned – the 50-plus COVID patients in NSW ICU didn’t come with a reduction in other types of admissions.

Can we just expand the ICU teams? My mate has a 3D printer & said he can make a ventilator

It took me 15 years to train & I can’t really work any harder so that’s not easy thing to do. ALL OF OUR STAFF are specialists – nurses, physios, pharmacists, social work, child life, etc

PM and Premier looking upbeat at Sacrifice made in migrant communities NSW for the GREATER GOOD!

— Dr Greg Kelly (@drgregkelly) August 1, 2021

It’s the threatened case load that will decide lockdowns and there’s no sign the threat disappears around 50 per cent of the total population being vaccinated once the Delta variant has taken hold.

All the flags and uniforms and four-phase plans and buck-passing and political sniping won’t change the ICU reality.

Another…..musical despatch for the front

 

Another pearler from Frank.

 

Arguably, the fire that destroyed the Alexandria Library had a bigger cultural knock-on than the Sydney Luna Park Ghost train disaster.

Seriously, (and lockdown aside) though air fares to Alice Springs are more expensive than a seat on a Russian Oligarchs Lear-jet, (anyone heard of Navalny lately?) Franks Book launch seems poised to be bigger than the fire that consumed the Alexandria Library way back 48 B.C.  And  the last DC 3 for the book- launch with VIP seats is almost booked out. We’ve been told the  Alexandrian’s have been pursuing a Federal Government grant to restore the library, but been told than none other than SCOMO himself that they are ineligible by not being in a Coalition Seat. And besides, like the National Archive, Libraries, (unlike Sportsbet 365 or Crown Casino or the Gas-Led recovery), do not produce wealth. Good point. In the end literature always falls short of short term gain.  There’s a paradox there.

“The library itself cost possibly more than the Yuendumu police complex in todays dollars, but probably held less value to society at large’, (Herodotus)

Anyway, before we release the full transcript of his epoch making treatise for the ‘Daryl Maguire oration on political opportunism’, this insight from Frank is telling…..

In a William Tell kinda way.

He writes…..

 

G’day friends and others,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2yqcE3gZF0

Según tu punto de vista
Yo soy el malo
El villano en tu novela
El gran tirano
Cada cual en este mundo
Cuenta el cuento a su manera
Y lo han de ver de otro modo
En las mentes de cualquiera
Desencadenan en mi
Tenebrosos/venenosos comentarios
Después de hacerme sufrir
El peor de los calvarios

The ruins of the Alexandria Library. All that remains of the Gaming Lounge and the High-Roller Suites. .

According to your point of view
I am the bad one
The villain in your novel
The great tyrant
Everyone in this world
Tells their story in their own way
And make them see a different way
In other’s minds
Unleashing to me
Gloomy/poisonous comments
After making me suffer
The worst of cavalries

An olden-days picture of what the library probably looked like before it was torched as a budgetary requirement.

Two years after the Intervention, in 2009, Peter Sutton’s ‘The Politics of Suffering’ was published. I found it highly disturbing in that Sutton’s point of view differed so radically from mine. Thus, I can understand how those whose point of view is challenged by Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’ feel about that.

Published in 2014, I found Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu to be a great, interesting and well written read. After all of the negative propaganda and ‘facts’ stereotyping Aboriginal communities as dysfunctional, depraved, disadvantaged places, I also found Dark Emu refreshingly positive about the people I was now living amongst.
I wasn’t and still amn’t interested in the vicious ad hominem attacks Bruce suffered at the hands of the shock-jock/dogmatic press infantry. I contend that Bruce Pascoe’s essay ‘Andrew Bolt’s Disappointment’ in the Griffith Review put paid to that nasty episode.

The Juukan Gorge undergoing a similar treatment, (Image courtesy Rio Tinto).

So now seven years after ‘Dark Emu’s publication and its subsequent run-away success, that part of Australian society which have a different point of view to Bruce’s have, after their infantry rout, rolled out the academic artillery.
Keryn Walshe and Peter Sutton’s ‘Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? – The Dark Emu Debate’ has just been published.

The Lighthouse at Alexandria was also given the chop. Due to unprecedented demand for CCM’s (Cost Cutting measures)

I’ve read a review of Walshe and Sutton’s effort and countless comments. I won’t be reading it; I don’t get the impression it is a rollicking great read.

Last week I went on a one-day trip to an outstation northwest of Nyirrpi. A Warlpiri lady told us there was a patch of wanakiji(Solanum Chippendalei) on the way and also pointed out several places where she and her friends had dug up yarla (Ipomoea costata) yams, which are prolific this time of year.
We drove on a side track to reach the bush tomatoes patch and as we harvested a significant quantity of wanakiji one of the young ladies in our party sang out with glee:
Welcome to my garden!

A GREAT AUSTRALIAN, writer, bon vivant, aesthete, raconteur will be attending Franks Book launch at Alice Springs via Lake Alexandria.

A week from now is my book launch- wish me luck.

Frank