kgwilson

The US will only do what the US wants to do so no matter who is getting invaded or attacked if it is not in the interests of the US regardless of treaties and alliances it will always please itself. The US is at war with itself and has been for a very long time. There is till a lot of support for the confederates, slavery & republicans are obsessed with the second amendment.

The one area where Russia has always had superiority is Rocketry. This includes from before WW2. German development was rapid during WW2 but the Russian technology has always been at least one step ahead though they did gain a lot of German technology during their march Eastwards in 1944.

The Ukranians are struggling in the East but continuing to inflict a lot of damage to advancing Russians but in another report it seems that Ukraine has mounted a counter attack offensive in Kherson https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/2022/05/30/ukraine-launches-counter-attack-to-recapture-kherson-as-donbas-city-breached/

The Russian advance is continuing but the Ukrainians are making them pay for every inch of ground. The US heavy artillery continues to arrive & now they may be getting long range rocketry. Putin still seems hell bent on destroying every building there is in the towns he is taking so there seems little gain other than territory. Eventually due to the rate they are using equipment & ammunition they will have to slow down or stop and regroup while their supply lines can catch up. I reckon there will be another well timed counter offensive from Ukraine combined with co-ordinated Partisan distractions and attacks behind the lines that will cause major upsets. Putin reportedly spent 80 minutes on the phone to the Germans & French complaining about their supply of arms & ammo to Ukraine. They told him he'd better start talking to Zelenskyy about a cease fire. He won't of course so another nail starts to get driven in.

Griffs travel docos are all worth watching. Combines really interesting information about a place with some great offbeat humour.

I absolutely loathe commercial TV. Anything even remotely watchable is peppered with advertising. I used to have Foxtel mainly for sport, movies and drama but got rid of it (don't need to line Murdochs pockets) & now have a good LG OLED 4K Smart TV & subscribe as required. I watch ABC news & current affairs (4 corners & Foreign Correspondent) Mediawatch, Gardening Australia, Grand Designs (NZ & UK) & some of the dramas (mainly British). Otherwise it is Netflix or Stan mostly for good Movies & Dramas. Mostly British productions & some locally produced for the quality of production. There are a few American movies/dramas that are good but the bulk are awful with predictable plots (if there even is a plot) crappy acting and too much gun violence. Can't stand any of the super hero stuff. We are currently watching an 8 part BBC series on Netflix "Black Earth Rising".

Reminds me of Marl Knopflers song "Don't Crash the Ambulance" which was about George HW Bush's advice to George W Bush when he took the US presidency. From the last verse below & of course the last line is definitely American. "We don't forget who put us here, jack That's page one We talk soft but carry a big stick And pack the biggest gun"

Since the retail electricity market was opened up about 10 years ago there have been dozens of retailers and new ones popping up all the time. Originally I was with Country Energy when the house was built. They were absorbed by Origin & the prices began to increase. I have changed several times when better deals turned up. These included Momentum Energy, Red Energy and Energy Australia and now Elysian Energy and I am about to change again to Simply Energy. I have solar panels but it is only a 2kw system & I use just over half of what I produce. Each time I used a comparison website to find out the best deal. Initially there were contracts with timeframes and exit fees etc but these have largely disappeared. There is always a timeframe for the big enticement discounts. I've only been with Elysian since 25th of January & have had 4 monthly bills all of which they have stuffed up & now they have changed the plan with 15 days notice & reduced the amount of power I get for the money, hence my latest change. Mainly due to the price of coal, generation costs have doubled in the past year & at this stage there is insufficient wind & solar & zero pumped hydro to take over all of which is now infinitely cheaper than dirty polluting coal. My latest deal with Simply Energy is 23% off the NSW Government set rates including the supply charge which ends up close to half of the bill. The downside is the solar feed in tariff is only 5c a KWh. A few years ago I was getting 18c a kWh. I have a time of use meter with Peak, Shoulder, Off Peak and Feed in kWh numbers. Electricity is a product where quality is the same no matter who the retailer is & you don't get a choice how it is delivered so for me cheapest is always best. How retailers package their deal is the bit you have to navigate through to find out who has the cheapest deal.

They probably award the medals to themselves. Maybe 1 for every month they survive under Kim Jong-un

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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