old man emu

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where individuals with low ability in a specific area overestimate their competence. In pre-PC days, wasn't that called the Peter Principle?

Call me a MAGA maniac, but he gets my vote.

I think that we should give Elon our whole-hearted support. Provided that he is on the first rocket to Mars.

You can only be cursed if your culture teaches you that you CAN be cursed. If you are not of that culture, curses don't work. Look at Christianity. If you say that you are a Christian but don't follow it tenets then you will be cursed with Hell fire. Do you think that a Hindu would take any notice of that?

Many times hostages have been recovered by planned operations which directed the recovery operations to specific places. Bin Laden and Hussein were caught without the harm inflicted on the whole population. The Israeli government's idea seems to be that every single Palestinian is an active member of Hamas, so is a legitimate target to be destroyed by whatever means available. Isn't that an echo of the policy of the government of Germany from 1933 to 1945? Isn't that why the survivors of that German policy ask the rest of the world not to forget?

That is the US movie industry. We are starved for movies from other countries. The English, with their long theatrical history produce movies with stories that do not require violence. Even if violence is needed in the plot, actual depiction of it is muted, or simply implied. Australia's problem is that we allowed Hollywood to take control of the distribution of movies in the first half of the 20th Century. By gaining that control, Hollywood stifled both our own industry, and access to other English-language producers. It really wasn't until the 1970s when that political ogre, Whitlam, gave government support to the movie industry that it began it growth to what it is today. Now we have Fox Studios in Sydney and Warner Bros in Movie World in Queensland. The social pages of our newspapers often inform us of the presence of some international movie star who is here to make a movie. Once again it is clear the the Hollywood bean counters decided that the bottom line would be enhanced by moving production out of the USA. Now it is too expensive to produce any type of motion picture entertainment in the USA.

Or he could take the "stud bull" approach and use semen collection methods. One shot collected and diluted into a number of smaller doses. A bit like firing 12G birdshot as opposed to 12G slugs

I hope that the US movie industry collapses. Then we might get some movies that don't involve violence from the first to last scene.

I think that the "anti-Semite" label is applied too easily when reacting to the actions of the government of Israel. Isn't the situation in Israel more of a civil war, or war of independence, or preservation of an ancient homeland? Compare the colonisation of Australia with the establishment of the State of Israel. Europeans came to a land uninvited and set up a system using the advantage of better organisation. Something similar happened when the displaced European Jews moved into Palestine post-WWII. Note that the area at that time was known by one and all as Palestine, implying that it was the home of the Palestinians who were of the Islamic faith, plus a few Jews and Christians. The Palestinians, having been shafted by the French and British after WWI, and more so after WWII, naturally arced up. But the Palestinians, having been a subjected subjugation for centuries by the Ottomans and then being "invaded" by people backed by the big powers, were unable to halt the takeover. The takeover did not seem to provide any benefits to the Palestinians. In fact, the more of the newcomers there were, the greater the losses the Palestinians suffered. What the Israeli government is doing is unacceptable to the civilised world. They are cracking walnuts with a sledgehammer. To call the Israeli government out for its actions is not being anti-Semitic. It is exactly the same as what has been done many times before, and in fact, isn't the condemnation of Russia's actions in the Ukraine much the same thing?

Before the election, I was proposing that the young voters would have a big impact on the results. I thought that they would be supporting the Party which had the strongest policies regarding environmental matters, both locally and globally. That would have suggested that the Greens would increase their numbers in the Lower House. Now we know how the Greens did, I must admit that my thought was incorrect. It would appear that the Young People were either seeking the security of a Party that had many of their interests in common, or else, they were turning away from Parties that had little interest in the Young People. Perhaps, too, they saw the Greens as being incapable of mounting a strong voice against either of the other two main sides.

In Sydney there are a lot of vacant public houses which are deteriorating due to lack of maintenance. It is quite clear that this lack of maintenance is due to a lack of sufficient funding. There are also many areas where the houses in the early public housing estates were built on quarter acre blocks. The houses are small and look like a pimple on a bum. Each of these blocks could carry at least four town house types dwellings. The current tenants could possibly be placed in temporary accommodation while the new dwellings were constructed and then returned to the same community. However , the problem is not land and construction material. It is the taxpayer dollars to do it. And, I suppose the political will to seem like a government is favouring one part of the community over others.

I glanced at the window of a Gilgandra real estate agent today. There were several houses for sale priced in the $360,000 range. Cheap enough compared to Sydney, but a bit over the top for a small farming town 60 km from its nearest reginal city.

Because we forgot, or were in nappies in he early 1980s.

You can't blame Keating for that recession. A Treasurer he had to react to the global situation, and as I have posted elsewhere, the rot set in when the World Monetary Fund agreed to base exchange rates on the US dollar, then Nixon banned Americans from owning gold as investments.

It is not often that US commentators say anything about the smaller countries like Australia. However, publicity is now being given to the result of our recent election with a bit of an emphasis on comparing Albo and Dutton. Much is being made of Dutton's earlier MAGA mania, and his lauding of Trump and his policies and how that was a big factor in Dutton's defeat.

He looks great for a bloke who died in 1991

Have you ever considered the meaning of the opposites of some words? There are some words that we use that are constructed by adding a prefix to a word, but then we stop using the word that the prefix was added to. For example, look at the word "impeccable". This word, meaning "not capable of sin," was created from French impeccable (15c.) or directly from Late Latin impeccabilis "not liable to sin," from the assimilated form of in- "not" + peccare "to sin". So if you remove the "in-", you get "peccable", which must mean "capable of sin". Have you ever heard of that word?

If there is one good thing that came out of COVID it was work-from-home. As Litespeed says, it has changed the lives of very many from a "work to live" existence. I wonder, though, what percentage of the workforce can actually take advantage of working from home. I would say that the vast majority of the workforce cannot, due to the jobs they have, from Uber drivers to international airline pilots. Think of the teachers, childcare workers, retail workers. The list is extensive.

And there's research into the creation of the 51st State, if that matters.

There are four States of Matter. Plasma is a state of matter characterized by charged particles, often described as the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas.

Isn't amazing that four Liberal Prime Ministers or Party leaders lost their seats in general elections in the past 25 years? Turnbull resigned his seat, and in the by-election the Party lost it.

I was gob smacked too. A Labor landslide and Dutton ousted from his seat. Unfortunately the ABC is imply showing total Coalition seats. I'd like to know the spilt between Libs and Nationals. Perhpas we could have a little proud Leader of the Opposition.

Do you think that the Cost-of-Living crisis is something that just suddenly arose from nowhere? That sort of thinking is simply a reliance on short term memory. I watched the following video and it made me think that the current economic situation actually began to develop about fifty years ago. Once again it was the USA which caused the problem.

Well. That was an effort. I didn't have to wait in line for very long, but working out how to record my vote was very difficult due to the number of candidates to select from. I had to mark 10 boxes to complete a valid vote for the Lower House. Numbering the major Parties' candidates was easy, but trying to sort the wheat from the chaff amongst the rest was made difficult because I knew nothing of their alliances or policies. Then I had to attack the Senate ballot paper. Once again, the major Parties were easy to indicate, but then there were all sorts of other groups whose alliances or policies I had never learned of. I simply had to interpret the name of each group to see which ones would get a tick and which ones would miss out. If the Legalise Marijuana party gets in, I'll be stoned.

Aye! There's the rub! once you've tooled up. As it says in the quoted article, there are just about no tool and die makers in the USA, or for that matter in Australia, who could make the tools and dies needed to produce the modern products consumers have been convinced that they need.