Hang on a minute, what just happened?

Billy/ / General, Incentives Matter, Whither Democracy, Whither Government?

One moment the UK had switched Prime Minister and Chancellor to candidates who’d clearly signalled their intent to implement many of the pledges from the 2019 manifesto plus a more Hayekian growth strategy, the next moment, the Chancellor has been fired and the Prime Minister now has the look of a hostage reading out the demands of their kidnappers to camera.

The “demands” are incredible too; the u-turns from the previously announced policies are bad enough, but they’re also reversing policies implemented by the same governing party only three years ago. It seems trivial to deny the request for a fully-fuelled jet plane and pilot.

The new Chancellor is an incredible sight to behold too; only 3 months ago he was the Prime Ministerial candidate promising the most tax cuts, yet finished lucky last in the competition. Today, he’s increasing taxes and is the de facto Prime Minister; Truss can’t sack him now, that’d be five Chancellors in a year, not even the Tories could stoneface bluff their way out of that.

How the hell did we get here?

So who is this new power behind the throne?

Jeremy Hunt.

The family are old money, landed gentry. He did the usual Charterhouse then Oxford, route to Westminster via a few failed businesses and one successful one.

He was a Remainer in 2016. During the Covid nonsense, he was THE most rabid Zero Covid/Lockdown Larry/Vaccine Mandate authoritarian voice in the UK. Go back and watch some interviews from the time, they’ve not aged well, particularly the one about his sister being locked up in Beijing.

As we’ve seen in the last 3 months, he’ll do and say anything to gain power. And has.

In summary, the very worst example of the tabala rasa model of power hungry politician; “….those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well I have others”.

So, that’s the power behind the throne.

Or is it?

Here’s Mrs. Lucia Hunt:

Lucia Hunt was born, raised and lived most of her life in China.

One doesn’t need to be a xenophobe to ponder whether the spouse of the most powerful politician in Britain being from, and still having many close relatives living in China raises an issue of national security.

There is likely zero chance the agents of the CCP haven’t already tried to influence Mrs. Hunt in some way, either directly or by inference.

How do we know this? Because ALL Chinese emigrants are in some way under the influence of the Chinese security agencies, as CNN has pointed out:

While it remains unclear just how many of these students are on the radar of law enforcement, current and former intelligence officials told CNN that they all remain tethered to the Chinese government in some way, even if the vast majority aren’t sent to the US to spy.

When you leave China, you do so with the full knowledge you’ve left behind people for whom you are still responsible.

Bill’s Opinion

There’s so much about this last month in British politics that’s utterly insane, perhaps everyone is shell-shocked and can’t think clearly.

You don’t have to be a Klaus Schwab WEF conspiracy theorist to start to have serious doubts about the integrity of the systems and institutions at the heart of the UK government.

There doesn’t even need to have ever been an explicit conspiratorial preference stated for us to have got to this place where an empty vessel with a citizen of an enemy state as his spouse is now running the country. Soft long term influence and utter incompetence would have got us here too.

Let’s face it, love or loathe Blair, he was the last competent human in the job. Since then, the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland has been a series of declining quality not seen since the Police Academy movies.

And here we are, like Don Logan sitting on the plane wondering why he allowed himself to be grinfucked into leaving.

(The embed video function isn’t working. Click this link to YouTube).

Welcome home

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, General, Legacy Press (c)

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” ― Charles MacKay

Slowly but surely people around us are coming back to their senses. Topics that only 6 months ago would have labelled as conspiracy theories are now being accepted as mainstream opinion.

Venal pond life such as Piers Morgan are channeling their inner Keynes (no, not the pederast bit) and claiming to change their minds when the facts change.

Public figures are suddenly wondering whether, in the face of awkward all cause mortality statistics, lockdowns and universal vaccinations were perhaps not worth the long term cost.

The trigger for each volte face is unpredictable. This excellent article listing all the things Australian politicians said about vaccines preventing transmission to justify their authoritarian and immoral new laws, for example.

The temptation from our side of the argument is to welcome these victories for common sense and move on. But there’s a reckoning to be had first.

A slip of the tongue by a Pfizer exec in a Brussels parliamentary hearing doesn’t seem a credible reason for people to suddenly notice the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission.

When 90+ percent of Australians are vaccinated and yet everyone you know has caught the disease, simple observed reality should have been enough for any conscious human to notice.

Bill’s Opinion

As each individual returns to sanity, they need to justify to themselves their past decisions. They therefore need an inflection point they can state was the moment the facts changed, demanding the change of thought.

Those of us who didn’t spend the last couple of years in denial of reality and with a healthy distrust of official narrative know that this justification is pure bollocks, of course.

Nevertheless, welcome home. It’s a shame it took you so long though.

Perhaps we could start with one of us offering some sort of an apology?

Is it cos I is black?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Cultural Marxism, General, Hashtag Diversity, Identity Politics, Legacy Press (c)

The Sydney Morning Herald gave a laptop to another intern with nothing much to say, again. The result is a classic “everything is racist and you’re all racists” OpEd and yet another demonstration of Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism.

My phone pings. A friend request from the guy I went on a date with. I feel a sense of dread as I flick through his photos. My shoulders tense and rise to my ears before I let out a sigh of relief – he has friends of colour.

Friends of colour.

Stop. Before we go any further, let’s get some context on the author. Exactly where on the Dulux scale of Reykjavik to Kinshasa skin tone is Emma Sullivan sitting?

I admit to having a mild case of deuteranopia, but I’m seeing a very light olive colour there, a skin tone I can usually achieve by the third day of a beach holiday. So, in certain conditions, could I be your friend of colour?

The older I get, the more I find myself scanning the crowd to find faces like mine.

Really? What a strange thing to do, let alone write down and publish.

Being half white and growing up in a very Anglo-Saxon suburb, this hasn’t always been the case. In high school, I clung to my white privilege as it allowed me to laugh off comments like “you’re not really Asian” or “you don’t count”.

Search no more; we have found the Rosa Parkes and Nelson Mandela Australia has been looking for. “Let my people go”.

In an attempt to show us what other cultures looked like, our school even took a busload of teenage girls to Footscray “to see how refugees and migrants live”. I remember the squeals and grimaces at the markets as we walked past skinned ducks and ox tongue. Tiny noses being turned up at the sight of lunch.

Just girls on the bus? Well, this gives away a little more detail; not just white privilege, but single sex (therefore most likely privately) educated privilege. Do we have some underlying guilt feelings going on here?

But, when almost half of Victorians are either born overseas or have a parent who was born in another country, why do I run into large groups of people out socially where every member is white?

I’m going say the quiet part out loud here; is it because you’re the daughter of upper middle class rich parents, so you don’t hang around with the working class, most of whom have at least one mixed race relationship in their families?

I’ve noticed this most when out in affluent suburbs. From my experience, these people often to end up in workplaces full of their (white) high school peers – creating a vicious cycle that can shelter people from other cultures, and make them close-minded.

Told ya.

I’ve felt it when those around me refuse to use chopsticks. When my culture becomes “too hard” for them, it stings. No one is an expert at their first try – it’s the effort that counts. It’s about the willingness to learn and the eagerness to understand.

What a thing to be upset about in a world where the Uyghurs are in concentration camps.

I’ve felt it when people say they’ve “done a country” after visiting the tourist traps over a week or two. The word “done” is framed as if a country can be ticked off. We’re taught to not judge a book by its cover – so why do it after a fleeting glimpse at other cultures and countries?

Ok, you’re going to hate the context my friend Jako and I used say “done a country” back in our youthful days then. Probably wise I keep the details to myself if I ever meet you.

I don’t think it’s about implementing other cultural practices or rituals into our daily routines. It’s about allowing space for more than what you know.

“Please can more of you swipe left on my picture now?“

Bill’s Opinion

Pure projection. “I don’t see many non whites while I’m out in my chi chi bistros with my old school friends. Therefore you’re all racist”.

Oh do fuck off.

Also, a reminder of the ever accurate law:

Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism is that the most heartfelt journalistic extrusions will be demands for how society must be re-engineered so that, come the Revolution, the writer herself will be considered hotter-looking.

There were three in the bed, and the little cuck said….

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Cultural Marxism, Evolution in reverse hypothesis, Gender Politics, Incentives Matter

Paging Desert Sun, could Desert Sun please come back to the interweb? This really is his subject area, not mine:

Sexologist Tamica Wilder opens up about living with boyfriend, husband and kids (h/t the Ryan Long Boyscast podcast).

A leading Australian sexologist has opened up about living, until recently, under the same roof as her husband, their two sons, and her boyfriend.

Which makes one wonder who the leading Australian sexologist is?

On this week’s episode of the Parentkind podcast, Tamica Wilder – who is based in the Byron Shire…. Of course she is, where the fuck else in Australia would she be living?

When I met the father of my two kids, one of the first sentences that came out of my mouth was, ‘Yes, I want to be with you, and it won’t be just you’,” the 37-year-old recalled.

The father of her kids must smile wryly at that shared memory.

“I was very clear from the beginning of our relationship that I had polyamorous or open-relating values, and that was something that was a non-negotiable in terms of my relating style.”

“Relating style”…. That’s a new synonym for a much older adjective we’d all recognise.

“And so that kind of flung us into a whole world of not fully understanding what that meant at the time, and it really seemed like the more freedom and agility we gave each other, the closer and closer we became.”

(Bold mine) Let’s come back to this in a while, shall we?

….Tamica met Rob* at a 2018 festival in northern NSW, Australia. “I met this person who’s my partner now, and I came back home to the father of my kids, and I told him all about this person that I’d met. And I’d said, ‘I’m not willing to not see this person again. There’s something there with us, and it’s a thread that I want to follow,’” she said.

“Hi honey, I’m back from the festival and I got you a present!”

“And so [Rob and I] kept relating, long distance, for a while, and then he eventually moved down to Melbourne and into our family home.”

Which sounds rather like, “let him move in or see your children half as much as you currently do”.

It was also important, she explained, that she, Rob and Harry have “lots of conversations”.

As the Boyscast points out, those must have been almost as bad, if not worse, than letting Rob bang your missus.

You can skim through the next ten paragraphs of bullshit justifications for shagging around until you get to the money shot:

Ultimately, she moved with her two sons up to the Byron Shire, where they now live together with Rob.

How’s that the closer and closer we became thing goin’ for ya?

Bill’s Opinion

The common theme one finds with articles trying to normalise polyamory is that they always finish with one or more parties getting no sex and/or evicted.

It’s analogous to articles bemoaning the lack of true socialism.

But, apparently, you’re the closed minded bigot for thinking monogamy and the family unit are the best societal solution for humans.

You can’t hide your lying eyes

Billy/ / General, Transgender Regret Industry (c)

Well, this is awkward. It seems artificial intelligence software can correctly identify a human’s gender by analysing a retina scan.

But, but, but, “transwomen are women”?

It’s almost as if there is a fundamental biological binary reality within every cell in our bodies.

Bill’s Opinion

The autogynaphilliacs are going to have to get another medical procedure in their journey now; not just the “top” and “bottom” surgery, but they’re going to have to find a new pair of eyes, too.

And if not, why not? Surely if retina transplants are possible, someone who is truly born “in the wrong body” would wish to go that extra step to correct Mother Nature’s fuck up?

Lutruwita, a rose by any other name?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, Incentives Matter

The Australian Aboriginal tradition is an oral one, handing stories down over generations. Current scientific opinion suggests this has been unbroken for perhaps 50 to 60 thousand years.

That’s an amazing and globally unique situation; literally everywhere else has been invaded and the local population replaced at least once in that time period, or the geography was discovered much later in in the human timeline. The Maoris only arrived in New Zealand around the lifetime of Scotland’s Robert the Bruce, for example. That’s potentially a 58,703 year difference for two landmasses only a fortnight’s sail away.

The problem with oral tradition is the same as one we all recognise from the school yard game we used to call, in the olden days before the Thought Police, Chinese Whispers; the message changes radically over the generations of telling.

Over a landmass the size of Australia and a timeline measured in thousands of years, that means anyone who claims there’s a name for this or a cultural reason for that, are likely cherry-picking or unintentionally selecting the very last one. That’s probably fair enough; perhaps few people currently living in Scunthorpe, England pause to wonder or have any utility in knowing what the town was called prior to the Viking invasion of 865AD either.

In Australia in 2022 however, such nuance doesn’t conform to The Narrative, so we end up with articles such as this, challenging us to hit up Wikipedia every fifth word (I joke; Wikipedia has drunk the KoolAid too).

TL:DR, a 200 year old doll, discovered in Matlock, Derbyshire, has links to an Aboriginal girl for whom there are some written records. The article concludes she had a tragic life. More on this later.

Perhaps the first thing that might leap out at you in the article is the traditional name for the island of Tasmania which, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t have answered correctly if it came up in last night’s pub trivia quiz. The SBS article, however, uses Lutruwita first and puts Tasmania in parenthesis last as if it were the minority vernacular. You know, I know, they know, nobody outside of a government-funded department ever uses this name for Tasmania.

Do you know something else? It’s highly unlikely anyone ever described the island of Tasmania by this name before the perfidious English arrived either. I propose this hypothesis for two reasons:

  1. The chances any human ever reaslised Tasmania was an island prior to Captain Cook arriving trends very close to zero; any tribal member straying past their ancestral grounds risked death or worse. Maybe knowledge could be stitched together to form a view of all points of the compass, but really there’d be no practical use in passing that knowledge down, so I bet it didn’t.
  2. The official bodies tasked with agreeing the correct new/old/dual names for places in Tasmania are verrrry silent on how they came up with Lutruwita. They’ve got reasons and history for specific place names, creeks and hills. The entire island, not so much. Example one, two, three

Once one realises the article is being a little loose with the truth, there are narrative clues everywhere. The heavy use of parentheses is a big flag telling you that you’re uneducated and need to get onboard with The Narrative.

For example, an historic job title, Protector of Aborigines has the parenthesis explainer; (using the offensive misnomer). Did you get the memo that Aboriginal is acceptable but Aborigine is offensive? The woke dictionary, Merriam-Webster hasn’t yet either, but they’ll probably get round to it once they’ve finished redefining “woman”.

There’s more pushing of The Narrative in the article too. I’m reticent to pick on the individuals named in the article but there’s unasked questions we might have been offered answers to, to suage our suspicions of narrative cherry-picking.

Artist Janice Ross, for example, claims affinity with Mithina because their lives were similar. How were their lives similar? Well, Mithina was taken from her family for reasons unstated, “adopted” and used as slave labour, then sent to an orphanage and died at 18 in mysterious circumstances. Whereas Janice was adopted, again, for reasons unstated and, frankly, sounds like she’s alive and well in her 50s.

The inference we’re being asked to make for Janice is that she was part of The Stolen Generations, a government policy to remove mixed race children from Aboriginal mothers and integrate them into the white community.

It’s a bit before my time, but I’m going to take a guess that the reasons children were taken in to care over those Stolen Generations years were not all the same.

They probably ranged radically between a bizarre version of white supremacy that can somehow reconcile bringing mixed race kids into the “white” gene pool, through to obvious safety cases where the child needed to be moved out of harm’s way to prevent a tragedy. We’re not told Janice’s specific circumstances.

It seems most likely that either scenario was motivated by altruistic feelings, albeit neither passing the 2022 morality test. It seems unlikely anyone in history ever thought, “We hate this race of people so much for who they are racially, we’re going to adopt some of their kids and let them marry ours”, regardless of the morality of the “adoption” process followed. Historically, racist invaders tended to, I dunno, murder every last one of the enemy instead.

The SBS article doesn’t tell us why Janice was adopted nor how loving or abusive her adoptive family were. This seems like important and relevant information to the claim of affinity with the child, but also to simply square the obvious inference being made towards a known modern cultural issue.

Both claimant and journalist knew the context when they spoke/wrote. Why not resolve the hanging questions? Probably for the same reason the keyboard keys ( and ) were given such a heavy workout in writing the article.

Bill’s Opinion

Surprisingly, Bill Maher has a quote to perfectly explain this absence of journalistic professionalism by Sarah Maunder:

Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066: And you always win.

Bob’s yer uncle

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, Incentives Matter, Legacy Press (c)

Waleed Ally smuggled a thought bubble past the subbies:

Forget a president – here’s another idea.

It’s not all bad news though; the opening sentence probably resulted in an almond chai decaf latte being spat out in a chi chi Mosman café this morning; So, republicanism is now a minority position in Australia.

Put Peter Fitzsimons’ therapist on danger money, baby.

He then proceeds to state the bleedin’ obvious for several hundred repetitive and tautologous words, which he helpfully summarised early on in the piece, to save bored readers time:

…..a huge number found something appealing in it, even when the public relations were terrible. That’s true even with the absurdity of Australia having a foreign head of state, determined by hereditary rules.

Yes Waleed, people are irrational about the Monarchy. Also, the prospect of “President Rudd” or “First Lady Lisa Wilkinson” probably scares the living daylights out of them.

His answer though? You’re going to love it, it’s a doozy:

What if, instead of a monarch or a president, we had an Australian Elder? That is, a recognised Indigenous elder, appointed as our head of state for life.

Genius.

Can anyone see any potential problems with this? Beuller? Bruce Pascoe? Anyone?

Also, appointed by whom?

God?

Surely not The King?

Also, slightly controversial question; if we could poll the 24 million Australians, how many would be able to name even one recognised Indigenous elder?

Not a famous sports star or TV presenter, but “elder”, with all the inferred gravitas that noun contains.

We could even call our Elder “Uncle” or “Aunty”. And when our Aunty dies, deep rituals of mourning would already exist, ready for us to embrace as a nation.

He’s “thinking past the sale” here, we haven’t been able to think of an example anyone’s heard of yet.

Also, a teensy-weensy task of a communication exercise is required to let the rest of the world know that Australia will now be using “Uncle” in a different context to the two globally accepted norms of (1) parental sibling, or (2) “friend of Mum’s who often comes over when Dad is out”.

This though, is the ultimate in race-baiting projection:

Obviously, this office is racially closed. But so is the monarchy, which is always going to be white…

Which is another way of saying Prince George will be prevented from marrying anyone outside his race if he should wish to do so.

Scenario-play that through for a moment; let’s say in 2035, he’s been publicly dating an intelligent, beautiful, famous Nigerian heiress for a couple of years. Does anyone actually think he’s not going to be able to marry her? Or, that when it’s his turn to take the throne, there will be a law passed preventing the couple becoming King and Queen?

Waleed has the superpower of being able to see future racism from over decade away. That’s impressive.

Ultimately, as Waleed concludes:

It’s rough, and not fully thought through, I admit.

No shit, Sherlock?

(Uncle) Bill’s Opinon

Let replace an illogical tradition that’s evolved over a thousand years in to one the majority of people agree works well enough for them, with a newly invented illogical tradition and hope everything will go ok.

Alternatively, let’s focus our time and resources to crack on with doing something useful like inventing practical fusion energy generation or high speed mass transit or somethin’.

Cor baby that’s really free

Billy/ / 2nd Amendment, General, Too much government, Whither Democracy

Man assaulted in the street and subsequently arrested after shouting, “Andrew, you’re a sick old man” at Prince Andrew.

The report is silent on what happened to his attackers.

That’s probably ok though, shouting at someone at their mother’s funeral is beyond the pale and should have the full force of the law applied as a consequence.

Similarly, it’s right that this woman, arrested for holding a sign saying, “Abolish the Monarchy”, should face the legal consequences.

What about this one, then?

Man required to give details to police after holding a blank piece of paper at the Queen’s coffin procession.

Are we happy with these police interventions?

Which one was the overreach of the state, in your view, and why?

Bill’s Opinion

The slippery slope fallacy may be a logical mistake, but one can slide a long way before the descent is halted.

All three of these examples are unacceptable restrictions of freedom of speech and expression.

In the UK, the legal standard restricting free speech used to be “grossly offensive” – repeatedly posting pornographic images to somebody, for example.

Now, the standard has not only been reduced to merely offensive, but there doesn’t need to be an identified victim of the offensiveness either.

From nearly 21 years ago:

……why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this
chamber – a democratically elected government. Their leaders are
self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of
speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

I’m not convinced.

It’s all relative

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, General

….as they say in Tasmania.

Some data points for your amusement:

NSW is going to switch to weekly reporting for the Covid numbers. Because we’re living with Covid now, pandemic over, etc.

Mary Ward is “health reporter”, apparently.

Not a particularly curious health reporter, though.

If she was just a little interested, she might look back at some ancient history. Remember, something something, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Today’s statistics that we are so sanguine about that we can switch to weekly summaries for;

21 dead with/of Covid yesterday. Tragic, but not many really, in the scheme of things. I’m sure you, like all of us, are glad we’re over the dark days of the pandemic when people were just dropping all around us.

Oh, here’s something interesting I found in a history book, from nearly a year ago:

We were shitting the bed because five people died in a day with/of Covid. Screenshot below in case it gets memoryholed:

Bill’s Opinion

Shall we just play “let’s pretend” that the last couple of years didn’t happen or that it was all justified?

Yes, let’s do that.

O Lord, help me to be pure

Billy/ / China Flu, General, Incentives Matter, The end is nigh

…but not yet.

Saint Augustine

Many years ago, I was on a plane about to depart the airport in Lagos (the one in Nigeria, not Portugal).

Sharing the row of seats with me was my colleague, Ricky (not his real name) and an elderly Nigerian woman to whom I’d yet to be introduced.

Some background to Ricky; he was also Nigerian, living and working in London. In his spare time he was a lay preacher at a (very) large Christian church in a converted warehouse in North London.

He didn’t miss an opportunity to remind you of this fact. Think about the most annoying vegan you’ve ever met, then stick a copy of The New Testament in their hand.

Prior to take off, I introduced myself to the old lady and politely asked where she was headed.

“Geneva”

“Oh lovely, do you have family there?”

“No, I have a serious medical condition and my family have saved up to pay for me to be treated by the worlds best surgeon for that condition”

At which point, spying an opportunity to talk about his favourite subject, Ricky usurped the conversation:

“I’m a pastor, I am qualified in prayer and the laying of hands. Would you like to pray with me for a cure?”

“Oh yes, I’d like that very much”.

There then followed five tediously long minutes of Performative Christianity with several references to scripture and a grand finale with the claim, through faith, Ricky had cured the old lady of the, presumably, terminal cancer or whatever it was she was going to have removed.

“Oh, thank you so much”, responded the old dear.

“No walhala”, Ricky modestly replied in the vernacular.

Curious, I enquired whether she believed she was now cured.

“Oh yes”

“What, fully cured?”

“Yes, I believe in the power of prayer”

“Well, the plane doors haven’t closed, there’s still time to leave the plane and save your family a lot of money in medical bills”

“No, I think I’ll still go and see the surgeon”

Bill’s Opinion

I’m constantly reminded of this memory whenever I see people, presumably already with the benefit of four shots of a vaccine that prevents them catching and being made sick from Covid, walking around in public wearing non-surgical grade masks.

Now Jesus he came in a vision
And offered you redemption from sin
I’m not sayin’ that I don’t believe you
But are you sure that it really was him
I’ve been told that it could’ve been blue cheese
Or the meal that we ate down the road

I’m a young man at odds with the Bible
But I don’t pretend faith never works
When we’re down on our knees
Prayin’ at the bus stop

Hallelujah