Hi Cats,
As you can see I have created a copy of the Cat for you to continue to bicker, argue and occasionally make a reasonable point.
I do hope a solution is found with the original Cat but just in case Sinc doesn’t want to transfer the site to a new generation I have built a replica before the closure so we can migrate as many of the community across as possible.
Programming Note: I rushed out the site so there will be bugs. I can get them fixed but did not want perfection to get in the way for progress.
Community Note: Please let as many cats know of the new blog as soon as possible so we can capture the magic of the original. In particular would love for the original posters to continue their great work here.
Ideological Note: I am an infrequent poster but long time reader of the Cat. The discussions there have been a huge part of my own ideological growth on many issues. In particular free speech is key for me so will have a very similar light touch to the original Cat, potentially adopting my one policy on an earlier forum I built: “No D***heads” which is subjective but surprisingly easy to implement.
Website Note: I will run the Cat as close to possible as the original because I don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel. However if the community so wants I am happy to make changes to improve the experience so if you have any ideas let me know. For anything specific hit me up at the contact form, else go nuts in the comments.
Thanks again, Tom.
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Go to sleep Graeme
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Graeme trying to deflect and whine again.
Silly Graeme…
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Can relate to Varvel
Yah… I’m “grumpy daddy” after news. Or being on here tbh….
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Thanks Tom. Mark Knight seems to have drank the Koolade lately.
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Thanks, Tom!
I kid you not, Cats – I actually got the following text-the-editor into print today in my region’s Daily Mudroch newspaper…
“I’d like to see a very large-scale public debate on covid, the vaccines, the treatments, and the government responses and not just the government and media mass-debating themselves.”
🤣🤣🤣
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Are mussies a race, Bird?
Everyone is viewed by their race according to Bird.
How very collectivist
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Yes.
Bird is a thinly-disguised communist.
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Oooh Cardi you ARE awful…but I like you
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Cardimona you are a legend
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On This Day:
‘1265 – Second Barons’ War: Battle of Evesham: The army of Prince Edward (the future king Edward I of England) defeats the forces of rebellious barons led by Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, killing de Montfort and many of his allies.’
Unhappy with the leadership of Henry III, de Montfort had some early success before being slaughtered with most of his 5000 men at Evesham.
After having his neddy brought down from under him, de Montfort was promptly despatched. At the conclusion of the battle and after his body was located, de Montfort’s head, hands, feet and testicles were cut off – which was that time’s equivalent to being banned from Twitter.
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I hope Latham is wrong but of course he probably isn’t.
This should be a teaching moment for the cardboard cutout conservatives – including yuks like Ray Hadley – the idea that the constitution is just fine is lunacy.
State constitutions can allow for absurdly authoritarian law.
The only recourse is usually Federal human rights law under the aegis of the external affairs power and Ch. III courts.
Which then has its own conflict of laws problems because such treaties do specify sensible “negative” rights, they also outline some silly motherhood statement “positive” rights.
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Hello Rick,
Thank you for your patience and understanding in waiting for our response. With such a high demand for the Freedom Phone, our customer care team is working to assist customers as quickly and effectively as possible. You can use virtually any carrier with your Freedom Phone. By putting your SIM card into a Freedom Phone, you should immediately have access to your provider’s network. As long as your carrier provides coverage in Australia, you will have no problem using the Freedom Phone there. In terms of shipping, we ship through FedEx, so we can send phones anywhere that they ship to.
If there are any other questions I can help you with, please feel free to reach out.
Best Regards,
The Freedom Phone Customer Service Team
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Ahahaha. Also, On This Day:
‘2020 – At least 220 people are killed and over 5,000 are wounded when 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate explodes in Beirut, Lebanon.’
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Thanks Tom. Mark Knight seems to have drank the Koolade lately.
Mark Knight has always been a Marxist wanker, check out his cartoons from 1996.
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LOL
The Kangaroo Court Kook reckons the AFP Commish is part of a LNP conspiracy.
Ah yes Shame Drooling SC, belieb all wahmen!
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Zeducation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5RSpLva28&pp=sAQA
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“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I’m easy come, easy go, little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me, to me”
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“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy………..
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You’re being a bit Queen, Splatacrobat?
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WeAreChange
(Disclaimer, I haven’t had time to watch all their stuff but looks ok so far)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9C1xOUiyC0&pp=sAQA
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rocinante says at 10:58 pm:
“… Adam has performed near miracles in the short time so far elapsed. Give him a while and I’m sure he will soon have the new place running like clockwork.”
Yeah, of course. “I’m sure” means “based on nothing other than I wish it were so”.
This reminds me of Their ABC Jonathan Green’s “… our audacious confidence in the fundamental goodness of others …” will win through … aaarrrggghhh!
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KD – In the last year Lebanon has gone from bad to worse. Really near to becoming a failed-state. Which is amazing seeing how it was such a business centre for so long.
Lebanon Sinking (30 Jul)
The elites seem to be blaming each other and anyone who can is stealing anything not nailed down. Of course the primary problem is Hezbies, who are impossible to get rid of. But no one dares say anything about that.
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Spooner, Ramirez (great one, there, Tom!) & Stiglich.
Thanks, Tom
Also, thanks, MarkA – but some of those were a bit strange 🤪
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Five years on, Bill Leak’s cartoon remains spot-on
ANTHONY DILLON
Five years ago today, The Australian published a cartoon by Bill Leak at which some sectors of the public expressed outrage at what they ostensibly believed was a racist depiction of Aboriginal people. But even casual followers of current events at the time would have known Bill’s cartoon was not racist but only reflected reality then, as it still does – Aboriginal children are more likely to suffer neglect and abuse than non-Aboriginal children.
As recently as Tuesday, a front-page story in this newspaper reported that in Western Australia, while some good work was being done to support Aboriginal families, more than half the children placed in care were Aboriginal.
For Bill’s persecutors, whom he referred to as the “offendarati”, it was another opportunity for them to do what they loved most – take offence, shout racism and be the centre of attention. Actually, it was an opportunity to do anything other than acknowledge that just maybe there was a problem with child abuse and neglect in Aboriginal communities.
Any accusation of Bill being racist was and still is ridiculous. I know this because Bill and I spent much time talking about the problems facing Aboriginal people, and he was deeply concerned for their plight. In the past, he had done some excellent cartoons defending them, so it beggars belief that he be called racist.
At the time of the cartoon, the neglect of Aboriginal children was nothing new; it was a topic this paper had reported on many times before and continues to do so responsibly today.
Consider a story by Nicolas Rothwell in which he wrote about the crisis in the Kimberley in 2011: “Pack rape is the most frequent mode of initiation into sex for pretty girls. These episodes are so distressing they rarely come out, but they show, of course, for years afterwards in the troubled behaviour of teenagers.” I can’t recall the outrage for this.
Three weeks after Bill’s cartoon appeared, Paige Taylor and Victoria Laurie wrote about Fitzroy Valley, “where children suffer among the world’s highest rates of brain damage caused by maternal drinking”. Where was the outrage?
Or consider an article by Taylor published nine days after Bill’s cartoon appeared, about WA’s Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre, where the children, mostly Indigenous, looked forward to Family Day each July – an event that was bigger than Christmas. However, that year, 2016, only 45 of the 80 families who had said they would come actually turned up. Where was the outrage?
Taylor went on to say, “Such is life at the Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre … where children learn they can depend on order in the system that incarcerates them, if not much elsewhere in their lives.” Where was the outrage? A welfare officer at the centre was reported to have said: “The kids openly tell us, ‘When I went home, you know, I went home to nothing, mum was drinking, so-and-so was taking drugs’.” Where was the outrage?
So why did Bill’s cartoon attract so much opprobrium yet the stories mentioned did not? I believe it was because his cartoon grabbed the reader’s attention immediately, and what gets your attention gets you.
News articles, no matter how well written, need to be read by interested people for their content to be noticed. But a good cartoon can be seen from across the room and hit you in your eyes, and this is what Bill did best: hit you in the eyes. He was just doing his job, which he did so brilliantly.
Early on the morning of Bill’s cartoon I emailed a copy of it to my father, Col Dillon, stating: “Dad, half of me was crying and the other half was laughing. Bill has an incredible talent that enables him to blend humour and tragedy without losing the seriousness of the situation.” My father, Australia’s first Aboriginal police officer, who admired Bill, said he agreed with my sentiments and offered Bill his full support in a conversation later that day, after Twitter went into meltdown with claims Bill was racist.
Bill, I wish I could say that since your cartoon we’ve made huge strides in eradicating the problem you were so deeply concerned about – the wellbeing of Aboriginal people, especially the children. But I can’t, because little has changed.
Consider an article from this newspaper in May that quotes from a report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report on child protection: “Nearly one in six Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children accessed child protection services last year – eight times the rate of non-Indigenous children – and an increasing number of them are in out-of-home care … The number of Indigenous children removed from home – now 11 times the rate of non-Aboriginal children – has been described as a ‘national scandal’ by Labor and ‘horrifying’ by senior Indigenous figures.”
I can’t help but notice the failure to stem the continuing high rates of child abuse and neglect in the Aboriginal population is matched by a rise in what I call the deadly three: political correctness, identity politics and cancel culture. Fear of speaking out keeps us silent. This paper gave Bill a platform to speak out using his cartoons. We still miss you, Bill.
Anthony Dillon is a part-Aboriginal Australian, a researcher at Australian Catholic University and an Indigenous affairs commentator.
Print edition of the Oz
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Aviation fans, enjoy! It is is wild.
F-16 Twilight Mini-Demo and P-40 Heritage Flight – EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2021
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‘Which is amazing seeing how it was such a business centre for so long.’
Yep.
Just goes to show you can feed a dachshund all the meth you want, but it won’t turn into a Malamute.
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Compared with Spanish flu, we’re doing OK
GEOFFREY BLAINEY
The lockdown of Sydney is now a source of alarm, resentment and medical and political dispute. It is also a shock, partly because Australia so far has been one of the international success stories in the fight against the pandemic.
Indeed, Australia – despite the excess of deaths in retirement homes in Melbourne and Sydney
– has broadly outperformed most nations, including those with which we like to be compared. In proportion to population, the pandemic death rate in nearly all European nations is far higher than it is in Australia.
Oddly, we still cannot be sure why Australia has averted disaster. Observers say we have been saved partly by distance and by the sea separating Australia from the outside world. I share the view that it is too early to identify the causes of why we have more or less succeeded so far. After all, at the end of World War I, when the Spanish flu arrived with the returning soldiers, we had the same advantage of physical isolation but deaths soared despite the quick quarantine. That virus killed a far higher proportion of Australia’s population than have been killed by this pandemic.
Some observers believe Australia’s success so far in fighting this pandemic is the more praiseworthy because of our federal system. It apportions health responsibilities between Canberra and the state parliaments in ways many voters appear not to understand. They wonder why the six premiers often appear to be the nation’s dominant leaders.
They ask why, in this national crisis, Scott Morrison is not allpowerful even though he carries financial responsibility. They also wonder why his federal government incurs the enormous debts needed to ease the economic crisis, but the premiers sometimes individually make decisions that magnify Morrison’s payments.
This unusual split in responsibility was seen at the national cabinet, the mini-parliament born last year. It also was seen recently when the ACT decided in effect whether members of the federal parliament could even be assembled to debate the crisis. The federal fathers would tap loudly on their coffin lids if they could learn of that unimaginable intervention by Canberra, a town designed to be the servant of the nation.
Vaccination is now the hot topic for decision-making. The argument for widespread vaccination is powerful, but a few million Australians quietly disagree. They carry concerns, often unspoken. Having suffered financially from the lockdowns, they see no sign of comparable financial sacrifices being offered by leading politicians and highranking officials, who mainly decide which citizens, industries and occupations should suffer.
Hosts of civil servants are receiving higher salaries and working safely at home while the losers in the private sector are suffering financially and even dipping into their superannuation.
Women, especially those in hospitality and tourism, are losers. The young more than the middle-aged suffer from unemployment, a burden that is more widespread than is measured by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The government’s job subsidies tend to support full-time employees, whereas so many young workers, especially students, are casuals.
Outer regions tend to suffer more than the big cities, while in the heart of those cities the hairdressers, coffee shops, laneway bars and other small businesses suffer more than banks and big mining companies. Some businesses, of course, have gained more than they merited because the Morrison-Frydenberg formula of subsidies needed to be devised with speed and generosity.
The loss of daily freedom has perhaps surpassed financial losses from the pandemic, though the two forms of damage cannot be compared easily. School-age children, deprived of their friends by the onset of online learning, have suffered emotionally. Mental health is impaired in all age groups. The assault on freedom of religion – inflicted promptly during lockdowns – has probably no parallel in the past 185 years.
This assault is more punitive than that organised by governments during the mask-wearing months of the Spanish flu, when Christians were often allowed to worship in the open air near their chosen church.
In the past 70 years the emphasis on civic duty has faded somewhat. There is a general decline in the personal responsibility felt for the wellbeing of the nation. Voluntary organisations, even big political parties, have difficulty enlisting members.
It is no coincidence, in an era of a waning emphasis on civic responsibility, that Twitter, Facebook and their rivals should become so powerful yet seem reluctant to accept responsibility. They have won enormous influence by allowing their customers to write what they like, with little fear of being held to account.
A lot of false or fickle information about the latest virus variant and the latest vaccine stem from hidden followers of the new media. So those Australians, apathetic or hostile to vaccination, quietly multiply; but surely they are not a majority.
We have seen astonishing changes. Science, so revered two years ago, has lost a touch of its magic. Medical opinion has lost prestige, with its changing advice on masks, distancing and even droplets. Admittedly, the world’s scientific knowledge today is superior to the advice offered when the word Wuhan first entered the West’s everyday vocabulary.
But widely read citizens now realise pandemics are not easily analysed and their journey is erratic. Today’s midmorning advice from a premier, minister and chief health officer is not so persuasive, and they cannot know whether a novel Delta variant might be on its way. In football terms we do not yet know whether this pandemic has even reached half time.
Last Friday in London the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned the British government that a variant more deadly than Delta was “a realistic possibility”. Such a quick-leaping virus could overcome the present vaccines and maybe kill one in every three people who become infected. Astonishingly, it might not prey so much on the old. Who would have predicted, two years ago, that the young and able-bodied, as in the Spanish flu, would be in the line of fire?
But let us not forget the cheerful news. Australia has performed so well, so far.
Geoffrey Blainey, a prolific historian, is twice vaccinated, and gladly so.
Print edition of the Oz
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which was that time’s equivalent to being banned from Twitter
And, in the scheme of things, probably not as severe.
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Today’s first LTE – sent to ten newspapers, designed to trigger cognitive dissonance in letters desk journo-listers.
…
The Editor
I don’t do social media, but I read several newspapers each day plus a dozen or so alt-media sites and lots of peer-reviewed and published research papers.
It’s become very obvious that Covid proponents are the same individuals and groups who have been promoting “dangerous man-made global warming.”
In both narratives there is lots of computer modelling, assumptions, suppressed data and generally substandard research.
In both narratives the ordinary person pays more taxes and has fewer rights and freedoms while the groups pushing the narratives accumulate wealth and power.
The narrative-pushers do have goals – they discuss them openly on their websites. “Climate change” was the vehicle to get them there by 2030.
But then in 2016 ordinary people started pushing back, as evidenced by the Brexit and Trump phenomena. The narrative-pushers needed to accelerate.
So now we have 24-7 wall-to-wall “Covid pandemic” – but no country has an overall death rate outside the normal variation. And flu has largely disappeared from the statistics.
I take vaccines as I see fit and I know the climate changes, but as a sceptical science enthusiast I can only conclude that Covid is mostly political theatre and is very dangerous to our democracy.
(198 words)
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HH, spot on. Banning is a disasterous idea that leads to a sclerotic blog with ever decreasing participants and the diversity of a Greens’ wheatgrass debauch.
God invented the scrolling finger to allow us to ignore crap that we disagree with.
Reacting to trolls is even more destructive. Constantly climbing over the fence to poke the Toowoomba idiot wrecked the old Cat. It was boring and boorish.
Bans should only apply where the Cat is put at legal, public opinion or moral risk, or, when continuous rapid, idiot intrusions are meant to make the blog unworkable. Recall the ‘Youallwanttobeme’ clown of a few years back.
There are exception of course, we are not here to tolerate the intolerable. K Rudd, M Turd, or J Caro would all be pre-approved candidates for the pineapple.
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But let us not forget the cheerful news. Australia has performed so well, so far
Does he mean “cheerful” as in “cheerful squalor?”
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Deep in the Australian Idiocracy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rz8ZptV3mE&pp=sAQA
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I know a vet…
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Top Ender says:
August 4, 2021 at 7:28 am
Thanks for that TE.
I can’t really make head or tail of what he is trying to say.
Maybe it’s too late in the day for me? (near midnight)
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Why wont this save my name and email?
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Bons,
The Bird Bloke does not just seem deluded, his comments don’t make much sense at all. Now I accept a lot of us may make comments that another thinks is deluded – either side of the climate change debate, for example – and some may “speak in tongues” especially after a hard day at work or more likely because of a few too many beers.
But then there’s delusion on a whole different plane, with is this Bird character. Constant scrolling can make the place unreadable, too.
Not to mention, that Adam presumably can’t be here constantly to check if that legal line thingy has been crossed. And on that, if we’re all scrolling, well, who would notice?
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BBS chairfool
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Cardi,
Great letter!
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Planning a cruise .. take care! LOL!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9855457/Three-visitors-hospitalized-iceberg-wall-collapses-Tennessee-Titanic-museum.html
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Last Friday in London the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned the British government that a variant more deadly than Delta was “a realistic possibility”. Such a quick-leaping virus could overcome the present vaccines and maybe kill one in every three people who become infected. Astonishingly, it might not prey so much on the old. Who would have predicted, two years ago, that the young and able-bodied, as in the Spanish flu, would be in the line of fire
This relentless fantasy and fear porn that boomers indulge in about young people being at risk(tm) from dying from this virus Any Day Now is getting sick.
Look boomers. You’re the old now. Make peace with that fact, colds and flu can and will kill you, you’ve supported imprisoning the young for your own benefit. Stop trying the justify it to yourselves by pretending it’s for our good.
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RickW did you pick-up on the Olympic cyclist handle bar breakage as a 3d printed part. No doubt polycarbonate, head temp not hot enough? Would love to get into 3d but too many other things to do.
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LOL. We are being duped seriously:
From the latest ABS mortality report (their words, not mine):
Influenza
– There has not been a death certified due to influenza since late July 2020.
Pneumonia
– The number of deaths due to pneumonia has been largely below average since late April 2020.
– Between January and April 2021, deaths due to pneumonia were 130 (19.0%) below the 2015-19 average and 235 deaths (29.7%) below the same point in 2020.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release#australian-deaths-by-week-30-december-2019-to-25-april-2021
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I kid you not, Cats – I actually got the following text-the-editor into print today in my region’s Daily Mudroch newspaper…
“I’d like to see a very large-scale public debate on covid, the vaccines, the treatments, and the government responses and not just the government and media mass-debating themselves.”
To dream the impossible dream .. the moderator decided to share ……!
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Cable knitted mung beans, the ABC, soy, almond milk, the ABC, tofu, unbleached hemp linen knickers, the ABC, synchronised swimming, council CEO’s, the ABC, Sarah Travel-Wroughter, contemporary aboriginal dance, the ABC, Confucius Centers, soccer, the ABC, women’s soccer, K Rudd, that crazy fucker from Melbourne, the ABC, any non-STEM studies, teachers’ unions, the ABC, anyone named Morrisson, land whales in the media/acting, brussel sprouts, the ABC, white wine made in NZ.
Ahhh, with age comes tolerance. The ABC.
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“Bar Beach Swimmer says:
August 4, 2021 at 7:45 am”
Well said BBS.
Firstly, I would add that Holocaust denial is illegal. Secondly, a progressive with a gripe against a right of centre libertarian blog, if he or she were to have come here over the last few days and read Bird’s puke (and puke it is)…..they would have a Section 18C case….easily.
Bird has to go. There was a reason why Sinclair banned Bird and a few others….Sinc was very pretty tolerant but there are some things that cannot be tolerated.
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Ahahaha. Also, On This Day:
‘2020 – At least 220 people are killed and over 5,000 are wounded when 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate explodes in Beirut, Lebanon.’
And on This Day .. 2021 ….
https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2021/08/03/no-progress-in-probe-of-beirut-blast-on-one-year-anniversary/
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What are your chances of getting the Kungflu?
Here are the US numbers: