For anyone who is interested I am posting a picture of my Clubman now that I have it back on the road.
There are still a few things to do but after taking longer than I expected it is very good indeed to have the car going again.
Long and lean and easy on the draw.... (click on the image to see more pictures)
Oh and a note to Damian this is post number two for this Monday 
Cheers Comrades
A good friend, who often comments here, recently told me that women are smarter than men and that I should just accept that and get on with life. Well if the opinion of Rory Gibson writing today’s Courier Mail is to be believed my pal was right on the money.Kate was feeling the strain of being a stay-at-home mum trying to juggle the demands of three boisterous boys and a limited budget.
I made what I thought was a caring suggestion: “Why don’t you find a job and I’ll quit and be a stay-at-home-dad?” I meant it.
She looked at me with the sort of hostility you would expect if I had just revealed I was having an affair.
“Are you insane?” she snorted. “Why would I want to do that?”
Welcome to the reality of the supposed glass ceiling, the alleged invisible conspiracy by the male-dominated economy to keep women out of senior roles in the workforce.
Every time I see one of the regular reports by the union movement or women’s groups about how women get a rough deal in the workplace, I think of that conversation with my wife.
I don’t believe in the glass ceiling. I do accept that women are represented poorly in senior management and at board level in many businesses, but it is my observation that this is mainly because women have a choice that men don’t, and they exercise it gladly.
In more than three decades in the workforce I have met countless women with huge talent and great ambition. There was nothing stopping them reaching whatever level they wanted to reach in whatever field they chose. But invariably they chose motherhood. Or travel. Or education. Something other than being a wage slave.
Many women have obviously worked out that there is more to life than obsessively fighting to climb the next rung up the career ladder and I can understand the way they think. I am in the fortunate position of being married to a woman who answered the question posed (in bold above) in the affirmative and it has worked out very well for us. Raising the kids is a most admirable vocation and one that has great satisfactions as well so I suggest that the next time you hear the feminists frothing at the mouth about female earnings, glass ceilings et al that you have a just a little think about why it is anyone draws breath. Is it that they live to work, or do they work to live?
If you chose the later I think that you may well end up with a happier life.
Cheers Comrades
Hat tip to Abu Chowdah 
Cheers Comrades
An artist's sketch of bikepath rapist Luke Colless. Pic: Channel 7
Colless will be sentenced in Brisbane District Court today. Queensland Director of Public Prosecutions Tony Moynihan SC is seeking life imprisonment for him.
Mr Moynihan said Colless was a violent “serial rapist”, a “menace to society” and a sexual sadist with an uncontrollable compulsion to attack women in public places.
“He showed a callous disregard for the dignity of the women involved, who all suffered devas- tating consequences,” Mr Moynihan said.
“He says he is sorry. Only in the future will we be able to assess if he is truly remorseful.”
The court was told how Colless would stake out a spot in a park or bikepath on his way to work and change into jogging apparel.
Once Colless identified his female target, he would stalk them, grab them around the mouth, push them down and sexually assault them with his finger.
Colless would then calmly leave, walk to his car, change into his work clothes and head off to his work.
Like most other people up here I wait anxiously to hear if the Judge is going to do the right thing by the people and send this guy away for a very long time but I can’t help thinking that repeat rapists have just the right sort of criminal CV to be considered for a bit of the old “air dancing”.
You know it makes sense Comrades
On occasion in the past I have called myself a “feminist” but then I thought about the issues and I changed my mind, thinking instead that what is important is to move beyond any claim that one gender has the moral high ground in behaviour to a position that recognises the reality of each gender that is programmed into each individual at the most fundamental level to be a particular way. Nothing made this clearer than having a daughter of may own. I had seen so many of my female friends demonstrate a total lack of any ability or understanding of machinery or mechanism and I was absolutely sure that this was an example of “learned uselessness” and I was determined that my daughter would grow up knowing how to use tools and to be as able as any male in the workshop.
Duh!
Daughter has other ideas and proves to be totally uninterested in my gender role fantasies. So it dawned on me that the real truth is not that we can blur the lines between the genders but that we have to embrace the differences and accept that males and females are complementary and there is no point in whining about the qualities of either. Which brings me to the piece I cite below about Fay Weldon which ticked my funny bone this morning. What really upsets the Fem-nazis is that we men steadfastly refuse to be moulded into the image that they have designed for us. They can’t accept that we see the world differently and have different visions of what is clean and tidy for instance.
Fay Weldon: 'If you have children late you have no energy left for sex, and men wander off with someone else'
Asked if she thinks feminism has destroyed women, the author of The Lives and Loves of a She Devil and Puffball claimed that there are fundamental differences between the sexes.
She added that men should not be given such a hard time by career-minded women.
‘Life is much better, because you are not dependent on the goodwill of men,’ she continued, referring to the growth of women in the workplace.
But the trouble is, the battle became too fierce, and the whole culture encouraged women to believe that men are stupid, useless creatures who are the enemy.
‘But men nowadays aren’t s***. They’re actually much nicer.
‘They just don’t want to commit to you, and why would they when you are a busy working woman who can look after yourself and probably goes to bed easily with them?’
Weldon, a mother of four boys who has been married three times, also said women should not expect men to be their best friend – and should appreciate their need for sex.
‘The thing is, you need to find a man who is cleverer than you, or at least not let him know that you are cleverer than him,’ she said.
‘Women want their boyfriends to be like their girlfriends, fun to go to the pictures with, but men are not like that. They want sex and they grunt.
‘If you really want a man to be nice to you, never give him a hard time, never talk about emotions and never ask him how he is feeling.’
The outspoken author added that women should have children before they embark on a career and not be so picky about finding the perfect man.
‘I think we should have more teenage pregnancies, and work afterwards.
‘If you have children late you have no energy left for sex, and then men wander off to find someone else.
‘The definition of a good man has become ridiculous. I just think that as long as you have a sort of semi-good looking, able-bodied, intelligent man, you should have his baby.’
Weldon married Ronald Bateman, a headteacher 25 years her senior, when she was just 22.
I do very much agree with Weldon that women can’t deny the reality that our biology makes earlier child bearing the most sensible choice and that it is often easier to do things yourself than to harangue your partner into doing thing like clean the toilet. Likewise the idea that men should be more like their girl friends just does not work unless a man wants to totally suppress their inner bloke and who wants to commit such character suicide?
Its nice to see some of the icons of feminism beginning to realise that you just can’t fight biology and make either gender more like the other.
Cheers Comrades
8)
The crypt spot was offered to bidders on eBay, and by yesterday, a winning offer of $US4,602,100 had been made by an unidentified bidder.
But hours after an invoice was sent to the auction winner, the bidder emailed Mrs Poncher’s representative, withdrawing the offer.
“I am awfully sorry, but I need to cancel this because of the paying problem,” the email said.
There are a further 11 bidders who offered at least $US4.5 million for the burial space, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Bidding began on August 14 at $US500,000; 21 bids in total were received, with the winning offer posted at 9.15am Monday local time under the pseudonym “O***S.”
“Here is a once in a lifetime and into eternity opportunity to spend your eternal days directly above Marilyn Monroe,” according to the description of the property.
Elsie Poncher, whose husband died 23 years ago aged 81, said he bought the space in 1954 from Monroe’s second husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, and that she complied with Poncher’s cheeky demand about how he was to be buried.
“He said, ‘If I croak, if you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of my life,’” she told the Los Angeles Times.
Yep it is unusually hot and the dry relentless wind has kept me half a wake all night so I expect to be a grumpy blogger today…
Piper Bartram, 5, from Christchurch NZ , cools of at Kurrawa beac. Pics Adam Head
RECORDS set 117 years ago have tumbled as Queensland’s bizarre winter heatwave continued for the third day in a row.
Brisbane set a new winter record of 35.4C, breaking the previous mark set in 1946, while Charleville in the southwest hit 35.7C, breaking its 1892 seasonal record.
Winter records also fell on the Gold Coast, where Coolangatta hit 31C, while in the state’s far west Windorah, at 37.8C, was the hottest place in Queensland.
The blistering conditions occurred when a pool of hot air over the interior was blown south by northwest winds.
On a brighter note the “Dreaded Lurgi” that has been plaguing me for the last few days seems to be abating a little…
Cheers Comrades
8)
Street life ... Homeless man Ken Johnson in the city. Pic. Angelo Soulas Source: The Sunday Telegraph
On a good day, he said, he takes in $400 from generous passers-by.
On slower days, he still picks up amounts between $75 and $150.
“I’d be really disappointed if I did a long Friday and I only had $250,” said Mr Johnson, who has been living on the streets “since the late ’90s”.
“I knock off when I feel like it, or if I’ve done brilliantly. But on those good days, you might be on such a high that you go for a few more hours and get a bit more money.”
By definition, the Latte sippers have to believe anyone who spins a bleeding heart story, even when the facts are clearly against the narrative of that story.
Its in the club rules…
Cheers Comrades
Brother Number One in Grovel mode
Official figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show there are now more than 9000 indigenous children in state care — a figure that far outstrips the number that were taken in the 1920s and 30s.
Both NSW, with 4316, and Queensland, with 2085, have this year set records for the number of indigenous children taken from their parents.
In both states, Aboriginal children are being taken at 10 times the rate of white children.
Nationwide, Aboriginal children comprise just 4.4 per cent of all children, and yet make up 24 per cent of all children in care.
Vanessa Kirk, of Queensland’s newly formed Aboriginal Women For Change, said: “The Stolen Generation hasn’t stopped.”
She argued that children are being taken today for exactly the reason they were last century: poverty.
When Brother Number One created the piece of theatre which was his “apology for the stolen generation” the latte sippers cheered heartily because it meant that their years of self loathing and their over heated guilt chips were OK and a sign that they were right and that they could now forget the whole thing safe in the belief that their version of the story was true.
Of course those of us who said that it was poverty and parental ineptitude (either from ignorance or inebriation) that inspired welfare authorities to take children from their parents were very loudly condemned So I find the current very sad situation, where even more children than before the apology are in state care, is a sad vindication of my position.
I have always thought that using the term “Stolen Generation ” was a very clever piece of marketing and by golly it worked a treat for the activists that so often invoked it. Even Brother Number One got with the program. But in the offices of the welfare agencies around the country the reality of neglected children continues to require action, as it should. Children are our future and when any child is neglected or abused inaction is just as criminal as the abuse itself so lets not allow the same emotional appeal used pre apology to blind us to the primary importance of protecting the children.
Cheers Comrades
Barry Cohen
So why, I hear you ask, do I bridle at the word multiculturalism? We are a multiracial society and a harmonious one. What I object to is the idea promoted by the multicultural lobby that not only should we be a society of a hundred cultures but it is the government’s duty, nay obligation, to see that we remain permanently culturally divided. If some groups wish to remain separate from mainstream Australia, then that is their choice, but they should not expect governments to aid and abet those divisions.
Governments have a responsibility to assist new arrivals to settle in by helping them to find work, learn English, obtain housing and, if necessary, provide welfare. They should not help create the society from whence they escaped.
In return, migrants have a responsibility to learn about Australia’s history and culture, including indigenous Australia and those of Anglo-Celtic origin, which was the dominant culture for 150 years.
My children are growing up being proud Aussies but, like all parents I want them to know and understand their heritage, not with blind jingoism but with a subtle understanding of both its virtues but also its flaws. I just hope that I do not have to much work to do to counteract the “values free” nonsense preached by the latte sippers . While I can readily agree that diversity is very good to pretend that we should not ever judge cultural ideology or practice is the sort of nonsense that would see FGM (for example ) accepted out of “respect” for other cultures.
Cohen is right that we have to find the right balance here between the mindless preservation of heritage and using that heritage as an aspect of a newer Australia that is full of the hybrid vigour but also has a unity and a district Aussie flavour.
Cheers gausūs
Liskula Cohen.
A former Vogue Australia cover girl has won a landmark court battle to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” and an “old hag”.
Model Liskula Cohen sued Google in January in the hope of forcing the company to reveal the person responsible for allegedly defamatory comments on a blog called Skanks in NYC, which was hosted by Google’s Blogger service.
“I would have to say the first-place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen,” the anonymous blogger wrote.
“How old is this skank? 40 something? She’s a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank.”
Cohen, who is actually 37, believed the posts were defamatory but was forced to take action against Google in order to unmask the blogger’s identity before she could take further action.
I would really like to see Google being held responsible for the actions of individuals who users of their blogging platform to defame others because it may very well encourage Google, live Journal or even WordPress to do more to ensure that they know just who is using their services and that users have to provide more than just an untraceable email address to start a blog or create an online identity. Because as much as I admire Ms Cohen’s tenacity here I have my doubts that Google will be able to actaully tell her who the person was who created the blog in question. They just don’t ever ask and until they are obliged to do so as I and other writers think they should, the world of cyberspace will be infested with parasites and obsessive vigilantes.
So let me conclude by saying that I still believe that posting on the net under a pseudonym is fine, until it is used as a licence to abuse and defame people in the real world, then internet anonymity loses all virtue. To anyone out there who is propagating their views on the net under an alias you had better be writing as if your name is know because you never know just when all that you have written from behind an electronic mask will come back to haunt you like and unwelcome spectre walking through you life.
Наздраве другарите
8)
Ice Capades: Greenpeace recants polar ice claim
4 mins ago by wattsupwiththat.
Well it is that time of year again, the Arctic ice begins to melt, as it does every year, and all sorts of crazy talk starts coming out. This time from Greenpeace. I am encouraged though, as they have come around to the idea that maybe they are doing more harm than good by overselling the alarmism.
NSIDC also has taken a more moderate tone, announcing that there will “likely be no record low ice extent in 2009“. This is a sharp contrast to last year’s ridiculous press statement from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze about an “ice free north pole”. Now that Greenpeace has come clean on their statement, maybe Dr. Serreze will finally admit his statement was “a mistake”. – Anthony
From Not Evil Just Wrong:
The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.”
Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.
Anthony Watts
Cheers Comrades
John Pasquarelli
Coober Pedy sits astride one of Australia’s busiest north-south tourist routes and local and foreign tourists pass through in great numbers seven days a week. Many will be appalled by what they see and will assume that the evil white man is responsible.
The question of how to deal with grog and drugs appears to be insoluble given our present laws and the influence of the civil libertarian movement. New draconian laws relating to the sale of alcohol could be passed. Years ago in PNG, problem white drunks had their photos distributed by police around the bottle shops and were refused service. This name and shame process proved effective, but imagine the response if such a remedy were mooted today to deal with Aboriginal drunks.
Far too many of the people that work in the Aboriginal industry, whether black or white, are totally unsuitable to be employed. They drink too much, smoke cigarettes and use drugs such as marijuana. Yet these people should be role models and mentors, setting an example and as such they must be drug-tested in the workplace. Unfortunately, many of these people are only too willing to promote the cult of victimhood, subconsciously or deliberately, and weeding them out must be a priority. Otherwise Aboriginal women and children will continue to suffer like that girl who had her eye burned out 50 years ago.
food gardens New Guinea (click to enlarge)
William Ruddiman, the paper’s lead author and emeritus professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, said the early farmers were likely to have cleared land by burning forests, planted crop seeds among the dead stumps and moved on to a new area once the yields declined.
‘They used more land for farming because they had little incentive to maximise yield from less land, and because there was plenty of forest to burn. They may have inadvertently altered the climate,’ he said.
Prof Ruddiman first published a hypothesis five years ago suggesting people began altering the global climate thousands of years ago, with human activity accounting for rises in carbon dioxide that began about 7,000 years ago.
His theory was criticised by scientists who believe the human impact on the climate began with the industrial revolution because earlier populations were too small to influence the level of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
But Prof Ruddiman today said that early farming methods, with around 10 times the amount of land per person than is used today, could have created an impact on the climate despite the small number of people in early civilisations.
He suggests it was only as populations grew larger that farming technologies improved to increase yields using less land.
His co-author Erle Ellis, of UMBC, said: ‘Many climate models assume that land use in the past was similar to land use today and that the great population explosion of the past 150 years has increased land use proportionally.
‘We are proposing that much smaller earlier populations used much more land per person and may have more greatly affected climate than current models reflect.’
The article was illustrated with an image of Forrest burning in Panama which is not at all appropriate to the thesis of this hypothesis, the picture I have included above is what they should have considered as the gardening practice in New Guinea gives us a far better window into ancient agriculture than any kind of contemporary extractive forestry practice in central America ever would. Likewise if you want to see just how people could have used fire as a food gathering tool you need look no further that the Mosaic burning practices of our own indigenous people. The final nail in the coffin of this ridiculous theory is simply the way that cool temperate forests are actually rather hard to burn and the notion that ancient peoples would be able to do so at will is just bonkers.
No, this whole cavort is an exercise in shaping history to fit the tropes of the Warminista faith, a sort of rearward projection of the theory that ‘evil’ humanity is responsible for its own impending doom so that it can be that is “proved” by the fact that humanity has “form” for altering the climate in ancient times. There is not a single shred of evidence to support this theory not even the basic assumption about ancient farming practices is supported by any credible evidence. The whole thing is misanthropic imaginings of the foetid minds of the Warminista congregation and it should be treated with the disdain that it deserves.
Cheers Comrades
8)
Marilyn Monroe when she was real
“Here is a once in a lifetime and into eternity opportunity to spend your eternal days directly above Marilyn Monroe,” the sale advertisement on the site says.
Elsie Poncher, who prefers not to give her age but admits she is over 70, told the Times that her husband, a successful businessman, bought the crypt from baseball player Joe DiMaggio, Monroe’s ex-husband, in 1954. Richard Poncher also bought the spot one space over, which is where Elsie plans to relocate him to open up the crypt above Monroe. For her part, she wants to be cremated when she dies.
Being buried close to Monroe has already proved a draw for some, with Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner purchasing a spot to the side of the sex-symbol’s for $A89,000 in 1992.
It will be interesting though to see if it actually gets a real bid because I can think no good reason for anyone unrelated to the long dead woman to pay such a large stipend to be interred above her.
Maybe a “straight male ” Aussie Gay marriage advocate will bid…
Perhaps Reggie Dwight will cough up….
We live in a world of miracles and wonders
Cheers Comrades
Virginia-Murdoch,Flickr.jpg)
