Friday Fireworks!

Fiona Uncategorized

Earlier today I received an email from Joe6pack:

Hi, stuck In gladstone waiting for a crane big enough to unload me to turn up. Not happy. Sorry about leaving friday night to you again.

So, I had a flash of inspiration. In honour of Le Jour de Bastille this Sunday, we should illuminate The Pub a bit more than we usually do:

CK Watt will work his usual raffle magic:

C@tmomma and moi will serve drinks

and food

(when not kicking up our heels)

while Mr Bushfire Bill will exercise crowd control:

So, Pubkateers, kick back and enjoy the fun!

334 thoughts on “Friday Fireworks!”

  3. Off topic, great BBC article on a very interesting side note of history. Note, this group are still around, in Australia.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22276494

    12 July 2013 Last updated at 00:05 GMT
    The Templers: German settlers who left their mark on Palestine

    In the late 19th Century a group of German Christians called the Templers settled in the Holy Land on a religious mission. What began with success though ended three generations later, destroyed by the rise of Nazism and the war.

    Kurt Eppinger’s community of German Christians arrived in the Holy Land to carry out a messianic plan – but after less than a century its members were sent into exile, the vision of their founding fathers brought to an abrupt and unhappy end.

    http://www.templesociety.org.au/about-temple-society.html

    How We Became The Temple Society In Australia

    The Temple Society was founded in 1861 in Germany. In the late 1860s, Templer communities migrated to the Holy Land of Palestine1 – envisioned in the Bible to be the epicentre of God’s kingdom – to live according to the teachings of Jesus. Four Templer settlements were established in Haifa, Jaffa, Sarona and Jerusalem.

    During World War 2, the British occupied Palestine, and in 1941 deported the majority of Templers to Australia where they were interned at Tatura in Central Victoria. In 1948, the Australian Government offered them residency and new communities were formed in Melbourne and Sydney. These communities have continued to live by the founding principles of the Temple Society established over 150 years in Germany.

  5. leonetwo

    I’m wondering what major new policies Rudd will have. It seems Labor’s election campaign will be all about keeping what has already been accomplished. ‘If you want to keep the better schools funding vote Labor’. ‘If you want Disability Care to stay then vote Labor’. All the hard work has been done by Julia Gillard. All the things Rudd Mark I was too chicken to tackle have finally been accomplished. What’s left for Rudd Mark II to do after the election? A bit of tinkering with parenting payments to allow a few thousand bludgers to suck at the public teat a bit longer. An increase in Newstart. A bit of posturing on asylum seekers. Maybe something on electricity prices. A fiddle with the trasition to an ETS. All minor stuff, nothing visionary or inspiring there. And then….? Another round of useless overseas trips, I suppose. So far Rudd has not put forward anything that excites me or grabs my attention.

    And if Abbott is elected it will all be eradicated so you won,t have to worry about Julia’s legacy as there will be none.

  7. cuppa,
    You have summed it up perfectly. So the choice becomes elect Abbott and see all of her work and legacy destroyed or support Rudd in the hope that her policies and work will be protected..It is up to every member of the caucus to make sure it is the latter.

  10. Leone,

    I will vote Labor because the thought of Abbott’s mob of goats is terrifying. I will do my bit to help Labor for that reason only.

    Even if Labor wins, I have no hopeful feelings that this country will not suffer the consequences of three years of an abbott, a rudd plus his handful of supporters together with a handful of ‘trusted’ media twits who poisoned the government and its people. Besides, I will most probably be pushing up daisies before sense and decency again reigns supreme.

  12. Australia was just not ready for a female Prime Minister. India has had a female leader, even conservative Pakistan and a host of other countries.

    Regularly murdered, by the way.

    I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll welcome a Labor victory but my heart’s gone out of it.

    To do it this way, this terrible way, tarnishes any victory that may come, in my mind anyway.

    I guess I’ll just have to revert to my usual position since 1975: a useful idiot for winning elections but Rudd’s just another bloody politician.

    For a few years it was nice to have a champion, Julia Gillard,someone I could admire and respect.

    I’ll never respect what Rudd did, or does.

  13. That photo of Abbott in the surf – it’s Tony givng a surfing lesson to a former asylum seeker. GetUp members kicked in to buy it at the 2010 Midwinter Ball. It took Abbott 11 months to get around to delivering the lesson and the breakfast that followed it, and even then he handed it over to someone else after a few minutes, saying he wasn’t a good instructor.

    http://www.swellnet.com.au/news/2285-a-surf-lesson-with-tony-abbott

  14. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/immigration-crime-benefits-everything-you-know-about-the-state-of-the-nation-is-wrong-8697574.html

    Tuesday 9 July 2013
    Immigration, crime, benefits: Everything you know about the state of the nation is wrong
    The world we think we live in simply does not exist, and the media and politicians share the blame

    A survey by the Royal Statistical Society has today revealed the vast disparity between what the British public believes to be the state of the nation, and the actual reality reflected by sober official statistics.

    It may not be surprising that people are sometimes rather skewiff in their assessments of some issues, but the gulf between perceptions and reality are quite staggeringly wide. The implications for politics and governance are profound.

  15. So you don’t like Rudd? Tell us something we don’t know already!

    I don’t think I can stand another 3 years of this tendentious sniping at Rudd.
    It’s just asinine.

    If only the people who support Julia Gillard so fervently could be as dignified in defeat as she is herself.

    It’s just too easy to do the ‘So Rudd will be the same old useless waste of space he always was’ thing.

    But what’s the point of it at the end of the day? It makes you feel superior to him? It gives you the feeling of smugness and self-satisfaction that seems to motivate the terminally-embittered?

    It’s certainly not an enlightening contribution.

  16. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929254.600-the-wonder-year-why-1978-was-the-best-year-ever.html

    The wonder year: Why 1978 was the best year ever
    11 July 2013 by Bob Holmes

    PECULIAR fashion choices, an oil crisis and embarrassing hairstyles notwithstanding, the 1970s were the good old days. A new study of global wealth says prosperity peaked at the end of that decade. Economic policy-makers, take note: we have been heading downhill since 1978 (see “1978: in this year…”).

    Governments have tended to build economic policies around gross domestic product (GDP), the sum of all monetary transactions in an economy. GDP has risen fairly steadily – and often dramatically – since the second world war, implying the world has become more prosperous.

    http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/embracing-the-economics-of-happy-62491/

    Embracing the Economics of Happiness
    Vermont tries out an alternative to GDP for gauging society’s progress.
    July 12, 2013 • By Michael Fitzgerald • No Comments

    In the first decade of this century, the poverty rate rose, and no net jobs were created—yet America’s GDP grew by nearly two percent. So why do we rely on GDP more than any other data point to gauge society’s progress? Vermont thinks it’s found an alternative. In a few weeks, a team of University of Vermont researchers will unveil a “Genuine Progress Indicator” to supplement more traditional economic metrics as a tool to help shape public policy.

  17. C@t,

    Sorry that I am so despondent. It wasn’t so much the ‘defeat’ of JG as the re-installation of a blackmailing, destructive, rotten-to-the-core psychopath. I have no feelings of being superior to him, nor smugness, nor self-satisfaction, nor am I embittered. I just feel nothing and quite honestly, I wish I could feel something, even anger or hate. It is the nothingness that is eating at me because it leaves me uninterested and apathetic about the little bit of future I have left.

    This time I find I just cannot pick myself up, brush myself off and move on as I was able to do when Gough was cut down. but then I was a lot younger then and had a lot of life left to live.

  18. Diplomat Lisa Clutterham has withdrawn her candidacy for ALP preselection in former prime minister Julia Gillard’s seat of Lalor.

    Probably a good thing

  20. C@Tmomma, I was expressing my opinion, as you yourself have.

    For example:

    As we all know, who follow these things closely, that if Kevin Rudd was put back as Prime Minister, it might satisfy the Cardinals, who are living on a prayer that he will be their saviour. It might satisfy a few tabloid-reading, Reality TV addicts in the community.
    …
    The future of the Labor Party, if it is to have one, lies in not going back to the halcyon days of yore of faceless plotters like them, feeding their egos and feeding stories to the complicit media, in order to perpetuate the the way of doing business manifest in the personage of Eddie Obeid and Ian MacDonald in NSW. The old, tired and discredited NSW Right way of doing things, which these Cardinals are the absolute and continuing embodiment of.

    If we give in to them now, and let them put their front man back in to do a job that he was so obviously unsuited for, then the Australian Labor Party should just shut up shop, and hang a ‘For Rent’ sign on the front door.

    As it will be the old days and ways of the Hawke era back with a vengeance. When the old, male Union dinosaurs, or ‘Trogs’, as they styled themselves, ran the show as a sinecure for the Labor peers and greasy pole climbers, who did their work in the shadows and made sure so many lumps of useless wood got to sit on the Senate benches and occupy safe seats.

    C@tmomma, July 16th, 2013

    You’re such an absolutist.

    * Someone gets pissed off… they’ll be pissed off forever.

    * Someone expresses an opinion… they’re “terminally embittered”.

    * Someone considers and maintains a moral stance… they’re “smug and self-satisfied.”

    … unless you don’t think Rudd, his “faceless plotters” and “greasy pole climbers” lied, misled, grassed to a “complicit media”, broke Cabinet solidarity, white-anted and employed a grab-bag of other tricks to weaken Gillard and install someone who was “so obviously unsuited for” the job of PM. That it was all some kind of mirage, circumstantial evidence.

    “Long live the King. The Queen is dead,” is alright for some, not so alright for others.

    So maybe my contribution wasn’t enlightening. So what? It’s my contribution: legal and allowed here last time I checked, without being pounced upon and told I’m some sort of “terminally embittered” tragic.

    You may see your job as to follow whoever’s leader. That’s fine. You’re a party member. I’m not.

    There IS no party line here. There is no obligation to love or support whoever’s the leader, and to hold back any criticism for the good of the cause.

    You don’t own this blog and you aren’t its political commissar, responsible for stiffening spines and correcting shirkers, deviators or agnostics.

    One month ago you wrote that Rudd was a traitor, leading a bunch of traitors and corrupt dinosaurs. Anyone who disagreed would have received the C@tmomma special whammy for deviation from the true path.

    Now you’re jumping on people who agree with what you wrote thenm and suggesting to them they’re emotionally damaged.

    It’s very hard keeping track of what I’m supposed to think lately.

  22. Probably. We all have to unite with the Ruddite Labor don’t you know? The sheer hypocrisy!

    None of the idiots have thought ahead a bit to when Rudd will have to be replaced, not a one. I won’t toss psychobabble like narcissist etc around but he is a micromanager who cannot make up his mind.

  24. BB
    It’s very hard keeping track of what I’m supposed to think lately.

    You think what you think, and no one is allowed to think they know what you think otherwise, I will think that they think that you know what you think, and I don’t think that they know what you think, so I think that that you should just think what you think.

  28. FYI J6P, I have ‘walked’ a few times. The blokes I played with all ‘walked’, My son, who played grade, ‘walked’. It’s called the spirit of cricket. Simple prediction, that chap last night will be gone shortly

  30. I think that we should all think what we think and not what we are supposed to think. Thank you Joe for thinking what you think.about what everyone else thinks.

  31. Kinda like the notice on the notice board’ Until further notice, take no notice of this notice board’

  33. Bloody Hell! A Tweet of mine with the Abbott Phantom attached has just been picked up by an international news-dissemination service. If it’s genuine, and it appears to be, the Ghost Who Stunts might have a world-wide audience.
    Couldn’t happen to a nicer fake.

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