Sharpe's Sortie

Anti-Semitic semantics

2011-04-03T19:11:00.003+10:00

Socialist Alliance candidate, Pip Hinman, has sparked a debate in the comments section of her piece in the Drum which is all too familiar to those who follow these sorts of online debates. The article defends the stance of Marrickville Mayor and state Greens candidate Fiona Byrne on a boycott of Israeli goods and firms. The comments thread has been derailed by the ubiquitous debate on the definition of anti-Semitism. Without having to go through subscription sites like Macquarie, the first definition available from the online dictionary is this:

–noun a person who discriminates against or is prejudiced or hostile toward Jews.

Common usage of the term would support its general meaning as being applicable only to Jews. The confusion comes in when the word is broken into its constituent parts, which gives actual racists a semantic escape clause. The same online dictionary provides this definition of Semite:

–noun 1. a member of any of various ancient and modern peoples originating in southwestern Asia, including the Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs. 2. a Jew. 3. a member of any of the peoples descended from Shem, the eldest son of Noah.

Therefore, by being pro-Palestinian precludes them from being anti-Semitic on the basis that the Arabs are Semites too. In the aforementioned comments thread, commenter GRAYAM made the following point:

Anti-Semitism is a word constructed in Germany in the late 19th century as a more acceptable substitute for Judenhass (Jew hatred).

Intrigued by that assertion, I looked up the etymology for anti-Semitism, and found this. It states:

anti-Semitism also antisemitism, 1881, from Ger. Antisemitismus, first used by Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904) German radical, nationalist and race-agitator, who founded the Antisemiten-Liga in 1879; see anti- + Semite. Not etymologically restricted to anti-Jewish theories, actions, or policies, but almost always used in this sense. Those who object to the inaccuracy of the term might try H. Adler's Judaeophobia (1882). Anti-Semitic (also antisemitic) and anti-Semite (also antisemite) also are from 1881, like anti-Semitism they appear first in English in an article in the "Athenaeum" of Sept. 31, in reference to German literature.

It made no mention of Judenhass, so I looked further. I found this at another site which provides some more enlightenment:

The political writer Wilhelm Marr is credited with coining the German word Antisemitismus in 1873, at a time when racial science was fashionable in Germany but religious prejudice was not. This term was offered as an alternative to the older German word Judenhass, meaning Jew-hatred. The aim of the effort to rename "Jew-hatred" into Anti-Semitism, was to give "Jew-hatred" a more scientific basis, however, it was never intended to eliminate the concept of hatred towards Jews based on the Christian conspiracies and legends so popular with the general population. In his book, "The Victory of Germanicism over Judaism" (1879), Marr took up secular racist ideas of Arthur de Gobineau's "An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races" (1853, though direct influence is debatable). Marr's book became very popular, and in the same year he founded the "League of Anti-Semites" ("Antisemiten-Liga"), the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany posed by the Jews, and advocating their forced removal from the country.

German has provided the English language with many useful words which succinctly distil concepts. In the true fashion of the English language to import words from other languages and make them our own, I propose that Judenhass join Blitzkreig, Schwerpunkt, and Schadenfreude in the greater English lexicon. It is appropriate to disarm a deceptive word coined by a German racist with the use of the German word it replaced.

Targeting Gaddafi

2011-03-20T01:07:00.008+10:00

Like most things in the military, planning is structured. The planning process is known the MAP – the Military Appreciation Process. It is a systematic and structured process that aims to ensure that all elements have been considered and that a plan meets the test of being feasible, acceptable, suitable and distinguishable enough from other plans to warrant consideration on its own. One of the first steps is to create a Centre of Gravity Construct. This allows the planner to shape a plan to target an opponent's weaknesses. General H. Norman "Stormin'" Norman wrote extensively about it in his autobiography. The Centre of Gravity has a long-winded doctrinal definition, but essentially it is the "thing" that, if you kick it out, will cause your opponent to topple. I have had a quick bash at creating a CoG construct for the first phase of any operation to topple Gaddafi. If the war in Iraq taught us anything, it is that subsequent planning must be focussed on winning the peace as comprehensively as winning the war. This idea, which I bashed out on a slow Saturday night over a couple of beers, is not aimed at a "Phase 2" plan, but at removing a dictator to facilitate a transition into something else. I am not a General, or a politician, or even a planner on a staff HQ. It is just the ousting of Gaddafi according to Sharpe.

Centre of Gravity Gaddafi's ability to crush dissent and control the population.

Critical Capabilities
Combat Power	Traditional Loyalties	Finance	Propaganda
Critical Requirements
Air Power Land Forces Weapons/ Consumable munitions Moral authority to employ force	Tribal supporters Chain of Command Reputation Ability to portray the opposition as a threat to traditional values	Oil revenue Offshore funds International funding	Control of domestic media Information operations/ dissemination of information Religious leaders
Critical Vulnerabilities
NATO/UN forces have considerable capability overmatch to his Air Force, which is vulnerable both to destruction on the ground and interdiction in the air. Land Forces can be functionally dislocated from the rebel elements by forcing engagement with a coalition land force – not necessarily of sufficient mass to conquer Libya, but sufficient to draw Gaddafi's land forces away from the popular revolt. Weapons/Consumable munitions can be targeted through embargoes as well as direct strikes against munitions storage facilities. Moral authority to employ force can be targeted through Information Operations – see column 4.	Military and political embarrassment of Gaddafi will erode the loyalty of his tribal supporters. Gaddafi's Chain of Command can be targeted by isolating his command structure through targeted destruction of his communications. His reputation as the tribal "strong man" is vulnerable to attack both physically through decisive military defeats, and politically by international refusal to acknowledge his legitimacy. His ability to portray the opposition as a threat to traditional values can be undermined by tying him to international terrorism – see column 4.	Isolation of Gaddafi's finances has already begun, through the quarantining of offshore funds etc. This will need to be expanded and targeted to deny him funds to prosecute his continued defiance.	Control of domestic media can be targeted both physically and through the EM spectrum. Destruction of broadcast facilities would constitute a short-term solution, but would deny friendly elements the ability to use those in the future. Denial through the disruption of bandwidth is a better long-term solution. His ability to influence the Information Operations battle can be targeted through a comprehensive counter-IO plan, using traditional media as well as social media to tie Gaddafi to the Lockerbie bombing and support for various terrorist agencies etc to undermine his recurrent theme of branding the protesters as terrorists. In addition, a positive campaign to tie the protesters to a democratic future for Libya will undermine his supporters and deny him legitimacy. Religious leaders can be targeted by isolating the political struggle from religious orthodoxy. IO campaigns need to differentiate between political and religious identity.

Murphy’s Law of Combat Operations

2011-02-08T22:31:00.002+10:00

I pilfered this list from Military Quotes.

In light of Tony Abbott's comments aired today on Channel 7, I think it is safe now to add "Shit Happens" to the list. For the record, nothing sums up "sometimes, no matter what resources you have at your disposal on the day, the Gods of War are just not smiling on you" than "Shit Happens".

Some of these are dated, some are American-centric, and some repeat themselves. It is also a much longer list than I remember taped to the wall of the B Coy Q Store at 8/9 RAR in the early 90s. Enjoy.

1. Friendly fire - isn't.

2. Recoilless rifles - aren't.

3. Suppressive fires - won't.

4. You are not Superman; Marines and fighter pilots take note.

5. A sucking chest wound is Nature's way of telling you to slow down.

6. If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid.

7. Try to look unimportant; the enemy may be low on ammo and not want to waste a bullet on you.

8. If at first you don't succeed, call in an air strike.

9. If you are forward of your position, your artillery will fall short.

10. Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than yourself.

11. Never go to bed with anyone crazier than yourself.

12. Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.

13. If your attack is going really well, it's an ambush.

14. The enemy diversion you're ignoring is their main attack.

15. The enemy invariably attacks on two occasions:

a. When they're ready.

b. When you're not.

16. No OPLAN ever survives initial contact.

17. There is no such thing as a perfect plan.

18. Five second fuses always burn three seconds.

19. There is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.

20. A retreating enemy is probably just falling back and regrouping.

21. The important things are always simple; the simple are always hard.

22. The easy way is always mined.

23. Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy other people to shoot at.

24. Don't look conspicuous; it draws fire. For this reason, it is not at all uncommon for aircraft carriers to be known as bomb magnets.

25. Never draw fire; it irritates everyone around you.

26. If you are short of everything but the enemy, you are in the combat zone.

27. When you have secured the area, make sure the enemy knows it too.

28. Incoming fire has the right of way.

29. No combat ready unit has ever passed inspection.

30. No inspection ready unit has ever passed combat.

31. If the enemy is within range, so are you.

32. The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.

33. Things which must be shipped together as a set, aren't.

34. Things that must work together, can't be carried to the field that way.

35. Radios will fail as soon as you need fire support.

36. Radar tends to fail at night and in bad weather, and especially during both).

37. Anything you do can get you killed, including nothing.

38. Make it too tough for the enemy to get in, and you won't be able to get out.

39. Tracers work both ways.

40. If you take more than your fair share of objectives, you will get more than your fair share of objectives to take.

41. When both sides are convinced they're about to lose, they're both right.

42. Professional soldiers are predictable; the world is full of dangerous amateurs.

43. Military Intelligence is a contradiction.

44. Fortify your front; you'll get your rear shot up.

45. Weather ain't neutral.

46. If you can't remember, the Claymore is pointed towards you.

47. Air defense motto: shoot 'em down; sort 'em out on the ground.

48. 'Flies high, it dies; low and slow, it'll go'.

49. The Cavalry doesn't always come to the rescue.

50. Napalm is an area support weapon.

51. Mines are equal opportunity weapons.

52. B-52s are the ultimate close support weapon.

53. Sniper's motto: reach out and touch someone.

54. Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity.

55. The one item you need is always in short supply.

56. Interchangeable parts aren't.

57. It's not the one with your name on it; it's the one addressed "to whom it may concern" you've got to think about.

58. When in doubt, empty your magazine.

59. The side with the simplest uniforms wins.

60. Combat will occur on the ground between two adjoining maps.

61. If the Platoon Sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.

62. Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, never stay awake when you can sleep.

63. The most dangerous thing in the world is a Second Lieutenant with a map and a compass.

64. Exceptions prove the rule, and destroy the battle plan.

65. Everything always works in your HQ, everything always fails in the Colonel's HQ.

66. The enemy never watches until you make a mistake.

67. One enemy soldier is never enough, but two is entirely too many.

68. A clean (and dry) set of BDU's is a magnet for mud and rain.

69. The worse the weather, the more you are required to be out in it.

70. Whenever you have plenty of ammo, you never miss. Whenever you are low on ammo, you can't hit the broad side of a barn.

71. The more a weapon costs, the farther you will have to send it away to be repaired.

72. The complexity of a weapon is inversely proportional to the IQ of the weapon's operator.

73. Field experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

74. No matter which way you have to march, its always uphill.

75. If enough data is collected, a board of inquiry can prove anything.

76. For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. (in boot camp)

77. Air strikes always overshoot the target, artillery always falls short.

78. When reviewing the radio frequencies that you just wrote down, the most important ones are always illegible.

79. Those who hesitate under fire usually do not end up KIA or WIA.

80. The tough part about being an officer is that the troops don't know what they want, but they know for certain what they don't want.

81. To steal information from a person is called plagiarism. To steal information from the enemy is called gathering intelligence.

82. The weapon that usually jams when you need it the most is the M60.

83. The perfect officer for the job will transfer in the day after that billet is filled by someone else.

84. When you have sufficient supplies & ammo, the enemy takes 2 weeks to attack. When you are low on supplies & ammo the enemy decides to attack that night.

85. The newest and least experienced soldier will usually win the Medal of Honor.

86. A Purple Heart just proves that were you smart enough to think of a plan, stupid enough to try it, and lucky enough to survive.

87. Murphy was a grunt.

88. Beer Math --> 2 beers times 37 men equals 49 cases.

89. Body count Math --> 3 guerrillas plus 1 probable plus 2 pigs equals 37 enemies killed in action.

90. The bursting radius of a hand grenade is always one foot greater than your jumping range.

91. All-weather close air support doesn't work in bad weather.

92. The combat worth of a unit is inversely proportional to the smartness of its outfit and appearance.

93. The crucial round is a dud.

94. Every command which can be misunderstood, will be.

95. There is no such place as a convenient foxhole.

96. Don't ever be the first, don't ever be the last and don't ever volunteer to do anything.

97. If your positions are firmly set and you are prepared to take the enemy assault on, he will bypass you.

98. If your ambush is properly set, the enemy won't walk into it.

99. If your flank march is going well, the enemy expects you to outflank him.

100. Density of fire increases proportionally to the curiousness of the target.

101. Odd objects attract fire - never lurk behind one.

102. The more stupid the leader is, the more important missions he is ordered to carry out.

103. The self-importance of a superior is inversely proportional to his position in the hierarchy (as is his deviousness and mischievousness).

104. There is always a way, and it usually doesn't work.

105. Success occurs when no one is looking, failure occurs when the General is watching.

106. The enemy never monitors your radio frequency until you broadcast on an unsecured channel.

107. Whenever you drop your equipment in a fire-fight, your ammo and grenades always fall the farthest away, and your canteen always lands at your feet.

108. As soon as you are served hot chow in the field, it rains.

109. Never tell the Platoon Sergeant you have nothing to do.

110. The seriousness of a wound (in a fire-fight) is inversely proportional to the distance to any form of cover.

111. Walking point = sniper bait.

112. Your bivouac for the night is the spot where you got tired of marching that day.

113. If only one solution can be found for a field problem, then it is usually a stupid solution.

114. Radios function perfectly until you need fire support.

115. What gets you promoted from one rank gets you killed in the next rank.

116. Odd objects attract fire. You are odd.

117. Your mortar barrage will put exactly one round on the intended target. That round will be a dud.

118. Mine fields are not neutral.

119. The weight of your equipment is proportional to the time you have been carrying it.

120. Things that must be together to work can never be shipped together.

121. If you need an officer in a hurry take a nap.

122. The effective killing radius is greater than the average soldier can throw it.

123. Professionals are predictable, its the amateurs that are dangerous.

124. No matter which way you have to march, its always uphill.

125. The worse the weather, the more you are required to be out in it.

126. The quartermaster has only two sizes, too large and too small. (or "on order")

127. The only time suppressive fire works is when it is used on abandoned positions.

128. When a front line soldier overhears two General Staff officers conferring,

he has fallen back too far.

129. Don't ever be the first, don't ever be the last, and don't ever volunteer to do anything.

130. If at first you don't succeed, then bomb disposal probably isn't for you.

131. Any ship can be a minesweeper . . . . once.

132. Whenever you lose contact with the enemy, look behind you.

133. If you find yourself in front of your platoon they know something you don't.

134. The seriousness of a wound (in a firefight) is inversely proportional to the distance to any form of cover.

135. The more stupid the leader is, the more important missions he is ordered to carry out.

136. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not your friend.

137 When the enemy is closing, the artillery will always be to long

138 Smart bombs have bad days too.

139 Uncrating and assembly instructions are always inside the crate.

140 If you have a personality conflict with your superior: he has the personality, you have the conflict.

141 If you enter the CO's Presence with an idea, you will leave his Presence with the CO's idea.

Why picking fights in the street is a bad idea

2010-11-17T11:34:00.004+10:00

Bwahahahaha! That is all.

TWO drunken yobs tried to start a fight with three strangers - who turned out to be the military's most decorated hard men.
The thugs, who had a Staffordshire bull terrier with them, got a surprise comeuppance after hurling abuse at the smartly-suited trio in a street.
They had no idea their intended "victims" were a hero Royal Marine, an Army captain and a VC-winning SAS hero.
The louts pushed and shoved the three men, attempting to provoke them into a punch-up.
After ignoring polite advice to "walk away" they suddenly found themselves on their backs while their vicious-looking dog fled yelping.
L/Cpl Matt Croucher, 26, and Captain Peter Norton, 47, both George Cross winners, were walking through central London with Aussie Cpl Mark Donaldson, 31, after a reception at Buckingham Palace. Though they were in civilian clothes they were wearing their medals on their chests.
A witness to the incident said: "It was a case of yobs picking on the wrong people.
"After they ended up on the ground the guys just calmly adjusted their suits and walked off."

Award winning Pallywood images

2010-07-01T20:14:00.007+10:00

This photo was posted on The Australian's website with the caption:

1st prize General News Singles
Picture: Kent Klich, Sweden
Light enters through a hole in the roof of a house hit by a tank shell, in Tuffah, northern Gaza. The family that lived in the house had fled during Operation Cast
Lead, the Israeli attack on Gaza that began at the end of December 2008.
Mohammed Shuhada Ali Ahmed, 39, had gone back to fetch clothes for his children,
and was killed when the shell struck.

Now, it seems quite obvious that something has gone through the roof, but that something did not explode. There are no shrapnel holes in the walls and the TV and the furniture are still intact. The other glaringly obvious detail is that whatever came through the roof came straight down. Tanks are not howitzers. At a pinch, tanks can be used in an indirect role; that is, that the main armament is used in a similar manner to an artillery piece. Unfortunately for the claim made by this photographer, they are not capable of firing their main armament at a high enough trajectory to drop a round straight through the roof of a building leaving an impact crater directly under the entry hole. Now, it may well be that the place has been cleaned up since the incident happened, in which case they have done a bang up job of cleaning the place up and filling the holes in the wall with spak-filla. Of course, why they put a new TV in a room with no roof remains a mystery, unless whatever it was that came through the roof didn't contain any High Explosive and didn't kill anybody at all.

Update: Below is a picture from the same photographer's website, the same album that contains the photo above. It shows what a wall looks like when it has been hit by shrapnel. Notice a difference?

Three genuine peace activists murdered

2010-06-22T20:40:00.005+10:00

No, I'm not referring to the recent tragic news of the three Australian SF soldiers recently killed in a helicopter accident. Accidents will happen when machines and men are pushed to their limits in an environment of threat, and while their deaths are a tragedy, it is hardly worthy of the fury of speculation as to the future of Australia's commitment to the war in Afghanistan. If anything, it is slightly unbecoming for the deaths of three men whose commitment to the objectives of this war can hardly be questioned to be used as a catalyst for discussion of the abandonment of those same objectives. Their sacrifice ought to be honoured and serve as a reminder of the deadly seriousness of the endeavour and to steel the resolve of our leaders to see that their sacrifice was not in vain.

The three genuine peace activists I refer to in the title are the three UN Peacekeepers killed in a random action in the western region of Darfur on Monday. The peacekeepers were providing protection to civilian engineers when they were attacked. This latest attack takes the toll of UN Peacekeepers killed in Darfur to 27 since the UN took over the operation from the African Union in 2007.

In contrast to the agent provocateurs who committed suicide by IDF Commando on the Mediterranean several weeks ago, these genuine peace activists will go unmourned by the world media because they were killed by Islamic bandits and not teh evil Juice.

Why just the officers?

2010-06-03T18:32:00.001+10:00

ADF to drug test officers

Half truths, ignorance and lies

2010-05-28T22:58:00.004+10:00

I was floating around the net the other day and popped in to Lav Paper, just to see how they could warp perception to suit a narrow worldview – again. There I read a post about a UN report into the practices of the RPNGC linked to the amount of Australian aid money going to PNG, a significant portion of which gets sucked up in consultant fees etc. Wondering how they might turn that extravegent waste into an ideaological issue, I had a look.

There I found, completely to my absolute lack of surprise, various commenters making sweeping statements purporting to be facts that bore only a passing resemblance, if any, to the truth. Of note was this gem from someone called billie:

From what little I know we have a long history of ham fisted actions in PNG probably due to lack of knowledge of PNG & its society. When Bouganville (sic) Copper mine was established the miners did not talk to the land owners. They talked to some men – but in New Britain society land is owned by the women.Get a map of the area. Bouganville (sic) is on New Britain. New Britain is really part of the Solomon Islands. New Guinea is the large island to the south The royalties were paid to Port Moresby. The people of New Britain are ethnically different to the people of New Guinea so money sent to Port Moresby stayed in New Guinea. The people effected (sic) by the mine site were not compensated for the disruption. When the mine closed after a landowner disturbances (sic) the PNG Army went through Bouganville (sic) house by house, street by street shooting
every body (sic). Most Australian ex-pats had left by then so most victims were locals. [A bit like the mining company in Avatar]

There was also this from a resident whacko called Lefty E:

Its (sic) worth reminding ourselves that Australia is the former colonial power here, and equally that we supported the PNG army to the hilt in Bougainville despite abundant evidence of human rights abuses – so let not our outrage blind us to our share of responsibility.
And of course, we also pulled our own police from line positions in PNG when their High Court determined we couldn't have full immunity from any prosecution (leading by example in terms of police accountability there!)
But all that duly noted – yep: any AU funding of the securty (sic) sector at least must be made conditional on transparent action on these human rights abuses.

I did get suckered into a response. My responses are as follows:

Billie is quite right. He/she really does know very little about PNG. It is true that many tribes from New Britain are matrilineal, but that is largely irrelevant because the point was being made about Bougainville, formerly North Solomons Province and quite separate from New Britain. It is true that Bougainvilleans are also a matrilineal society, which is different from a matriarchal society. It was quite culturally appropriate for BCL to speak to the men, they are the figurehead front. It is for the men to then speak to the women, the owners of the land, before they made any agreement with BCL. It would have been a gross imposition of our own cultural mores for BCL to directly approach the landowners.

I was living in PNG when the crisis started, and subsequently served in Bougainville with the Peace Monitoring Group, so you could say I was there at the start and at the finish. There had long been a secessionist bent in Bougainville, although the actual catalyst came from a negotiating failure on the part of the Panguna Landowners Association. The initial compensation figure demanded was, from memory, about twice what the mine had ever earned. It degenerated quickly because it was led by a lunatic, who eventually holed himself in at Panguna, declared himself the President of the Republic of Mekamui and eventually, King. Bougainville, with the financial support of BCL, was far better off than the rest of the South West Pacific prior to the crisis. All that came to a crashing halt when the BRA either blew up or burned down all of the benefits that came with the mine whilst also removing any capability they might have had to repair the damage the mine had done.

Atrocities were committed on both sides, in fact, make that all three sides. The BRA and the PNGDF were busy mauling each other when some of the locals decided that things were a whole lot better before it all started, and sided with the PNGDF. The BRA then retaliated and a nice little three-way fight ensued and civilian casualties were caused by all three groups. Yes Lefty E, Bob Hawke did send ADF elements to assist the PNGDF, although that was before it turned into a Civil War during the early phase of the Counter-insurgency. Our military aid consisted of unarmed helicopters piloted by Australians. They were quickly withdrawn when it became clear that human rights abuses, as well as terms of use violations, were occurring. The ALP Government then turned a blind eye to what was happening while the PNGDF blockaded the islands and let Bougainville sink into the horrific condition it was in when NZ decided to actually do something about it, with the support of the Howard Government.

It is also true that Bougainvilleans consider themselves more closely aligned to the Solomon Islands than PNG, although having served there as well, my own observation is that they have about as much in common with the Solomon Islands as they do with PNG. That didn't stop the crisis in Bougainville impacting on the Solomon Islands. The BRA were using the Solomon Islands as a staging area and safe haven from the PNGDF, running the gauntlet along the narrow strait to Choiseul Island. Although, as the crisis in the Solomons was later to show, they don't play well with their close neighbours, no matter how closely culturally aligned they may claim to be.

As to the issue of the AFP demanding immunity from prosecution, the "nuance" being missed here is that the immunity in question was not from any prosecution, but from prosecution in PNG. In order for the AFP to actually do the job asked of them, they would need to go after some of the big men in the inherently corrupt PNG legal system. They are the sort of people capable of avoiding prosecution by hauling AFP members in front of the PNG judicial system and seeing their problems disappear into the bowels of Bomana Prison. The AFP was still answerable to Australian law.

The rampant corruption in PNG derives predominantly from the Wantok System, whereby a man's principle obligation is not to his office, but to the extended clan – his wantoks. If Fran really wants to find the prima facie culprit for the mess in PNG, she need look no further than Gough Whitlam. In his rush to rid Australia of terribly unfashionable status of being a colonial power, he threw the people of PNG under the bus by abandoning our colonial obligations. Somehow, in the heady days of the "It's Time" campaign, the thought that thrusting Westminster Democracy on a stone age agrarian hunter/gatherer society was going to lead to anything other than what PNG is now, escaped the great thinkers in the ALP. PNG is rapidly on the way to becoming a failed state. The contribution from Australia to fix it is going to be significantly more costly than all the consultants in Canberra and will require a more robust legal framework than immunity from prosecution under PNG law.

Nobody has responded yet. I guess they all got distracted by Tony Abbott's recently announced refugee policy.

Media to blame for Defence secrecy

2010-05-09T21:57:00.004+10:00

The Daily Telegraph has run a story on the apparent secrecy around wounded ADF members returning from operations overseas. The thrust of the story is that Defence is trying to keep quiet the wounds that are being received over there. The story leads in with this line:

With opinion polls indicating Australians are divided over our involvement in Afghanistan, the Australian Defence Force's handling of casualties has come under scrutiny.

It has come under scrutiny from whom, the DT? The people getting upset at the lack of blood and gore horror stories coming from Afghanistan are the salivating media. The stories will come out, but rushing that through so that the Australian media scrum can onanate over the tragic circumstances of a wounded digger is not high on the list of priorities.

Wounded Australian soldiers, some having faced amputations and long-term suffering, are recuperating in facilities around the country, but the public seldom hears their stories.

Very true, the primary concern is the treatment and rehabilitation of the wounded. In order to achieve that, Defence go to significant lengths to make sure they are left alone by anyone not from their intimate circle of family and friends, or involved in their administration or their treatment. That includes nosy reporters having a slow news day.

The stories of the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan will come out. Some already have. The rest will happen when the wounded themselves are ready to tell their stories. Defence won't throw them in the deep end and feed them to the press, no matter how much that infuriates them.

Andrew Bolt is wrong

2010-05-07T19:18:00.002+10:00

The title of Andrew's piece today about Comedy Central's alarming double standards [South Park bravely savages the creed that won't say "boo"] is misleading and wrong. South Park has taken a satirical scalpel to Islam a number of times, as well as some of the other religious sacred cows that other comedy shows just won't touch. It is their parent network, Comedy Central, which censored their episode showing Mohamed and is planning a new series to poke fun at Christianity. The double standard is being displayed by Comedy Central, not South Park.

It is a hypocritical stance for Comedy Central to hold. How can they be willing to ridicule one religion, but not another? The short answer is fear. If we in the west accept that our culture can be dictated to by violent extremists, we have already lost. It is fine for Comedy Central to broadcast a series that mocks Christianity. It is not fine that they are willing to do that whilst they are censoring another show for ridiculing another religion. If it is OK to poke fun at one religion, it is OK to poke fun at all of them.

A new Kokoda VC winner?

2010-05-03T22:58:00.006+10:00

I was pointed in the direction of this article in the Mt Druitt Standard. From the text:

AN Aboriginal recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC) is unheard of but on Anzac Day, two young Aboriginal boys from Bidwill stood out as they marched from Rooty Hill to Pinegrove Memorial Park, Minchinbury.

True, there have been no Aboriginal VC winners, although I would be pleased to be corrected if I am mistaken. The article goes on though:

Their mother, Bernie, says the medals
belong to her grandfather, Frederick Charles Perry.
Ms Zammit told the Mt Druitt-St Marys
Standard that her grandfather served in the 39th (Hawthorn Kew Regiment) and
53rd battalions in Kokoda.
She said he died in 1974 without anyone
in his family knowing anything about his accomplishments.
She said she only discovered her own
indigenous background 10 years ago and had since fought to be given Mr Perry's
service medals.
She said she had no idea he had received a VC.
"Back then black fellas never got their medals and no one in my family had ever claimed his," she said.
"I had to push to get them and I only got them a week before Anzac Day.

Here's where it gets interesting. There is no Frederick Charles Perry, VC. The list of Australian VC winners is here. In fact, there are only two people of that name on the WWII Nominal Roll. Given the benefit of the doubt that her grandfather ever served in New Guinea, it must have been this Frederick Charles Perry. His service details have him as a driver with the 2/47 Australian Transport Platoon, with no honours or awards that fit the National Archive criteria for display (which would include a VC).

Why would someone make a claim to something so demonstrably refutable?

Legen.........wait for it.......dary!

2010-05-03T22:26:00.003+10:00

A BRITISH Army sniper has set a new sharpshooting distance record by killing two Taliban machinegunners in Afghanistan from more than 1 miles away.

Craig Harrison, a member of the Household Cavalry, killed the insurgents with consecutive shots — even though they were 3,000ft beyond the most effective range of his rifle.

"The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright," said Harrison, a Corporal of Horse. "He went straight down and didn't move.

"The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead."

The shooting — which took place while Harrison's colleagues came under attack — was at such extreme range that the 8.59mm bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target after leaving the barrel of the rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

The distance to Harrison's two targets was measured by a GPS system at 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles. The previous record for a sniper kill is 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an Al-Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

More here.

Hat tip: Black Five

Best photo ever

2010-02-15T18:52:00.004+10:00

This is so very apt. Every time my peers and I would discuss day to day events while working for the UN in Africa, words like UN-efficient, UN-workable, UN-realistic, and UN responsive would be common.

This photo just adds that motivational .ppt slant to a frequent meme.

Enjoy.

(Disclaimer: I am aware that the antonym of efficient is inefficient. Most of my peers were working in English as a second language, so I forgave them their minor lapses.)

Climate Justice Feast

2009-12-13T19:58:00.006+10:00

Firstly, apologies for the lack of posts; since coming home I’ve had more important things to do than blogging. Getting re-acquainted with Sharpe Jr and Mrs Sharpe has been high on the list, as well as a couple of other projects that germinated while I had lots of time to think about things. To really complicate matters, I’ve also just returned home from another extended period away from home, domestic this time thankfully.

Tim Blair, motivated into action by this genius, has declared the duration of the Copenhagen Greeny Love-in the Climate Justice Feast! I wasn’t able to pull something spectacular together for dinner last night, having eaten on the plane home, but I thought I’d share the coming home breakfast I prepared for the Sharpe clan.

You’ll note the secret ingredient for Sharpe’s patented scrambled eggs there on the left.

And this is what it looked like in all its heart attack inducing goodness.

Then followed a day of catching up on all the things that have been missed in my absence, before thoughts of dinner began to intrude. Having lived on mess food for the past five weeks, I thought a nice steak might be in order. It seems that steak is one of those dishes a mess will never get right. I trundled off to the butcher for some nice Australian Rib Eye, and some veggies to go with it.

The steak was then waved over the BBQ long enough to frighten it, before ending up as dinner.

The beer is Draught Home Brew (one of those little projects I mentioned earlier).

Now with a belly full of bleeding steak and homemade beer, I will adjourn to prepare for my last week at work before packing up and heading south for that obligatory instructional job for the next two years.

Peace Convergence Update

2009-07-20T22:47:00.002+10:00

Seven protesters from the “Peace Convergence” have knowingly trespassed into the Shoalwater Bay Training Area in an attempt to disrupt Exercise Talisman Sabre 09. While the bulk of the exercise will involve the use of blank ammunition, there are elements that will be live – that is that real bullets and bombs that go bang. I do hope that they don’t get themselves blown into tiny little hippie pieces, because the human being who launched the ordinance in the honest belief that he was firing into a safe area would have that on his conscience for the rest of his life, regardless of any actual culpability for the stupid actions of the morally retarded.

There is a familiar name on the list, and quite frankly I’m surprised he’s managed to haul his quite generous frame anywhere more demanding than the savoury snacks aisle at 7-11.

Guest post at OSK

2009-07-18T22:58:00.001+10:00

Kae asked me to write a guest post for Ocean, Sky and Khaki; a site set up to provide information to people interested in sending care packages to deployed soldiers. It is a great idea, and a great way of showing your support for those Australians a long way from home in harm’s way. The post can be found here if you’re interested.

Obama goes to Africa

2009-07-13T16:57:00.001+10:00

There has been some talk of Obama’s trip to Africa. I was in Africa when he was inaugurated, and the general feeling was that all their Christmases had come at once. It was about that time that we were having some difficulty with both power and running water.

Sometimes the water would cut out because the ablutions used by the African troops were routinely abused and the broken plumbing would leak all the water out of the tank that supplied our part of the compound. The other time we would lose running water was when we would lose power. When the power went out, so did the pump for the water, so that was a two-for. Now, I realise that not showering for a few days is hardly deserving of a VC out of petty cash, but it was a pain in the proverbial because we were entirely self-sufficient for rationing. Cooking our own food meant that we was some small measure of quality control for what went into our mouths, at least from the point that the ingredients came into our possession. It also meant the usual domestic by-product of meal production – dishes. After a while with no water, we would start to run out of clean dishes to cook and eat with.

After nearly a week of very intermittent water supply, one of the German police I lived with had had enough. He marched over to the camp manager’s office to give him a good old Teutonic performance counselling session. Having delivered his opinion of the situation and the competence of those who were responsible for its remedy, the local just smiled and said “Everything will be OK now, Obama is President and he will fix everything.”

Vale Ted Kenna VC

2009-07-09T20:32:00.001+10:00

Edward (Ted) Kenna, the last surviving Australian VC winner from the Second World War has died. I met Ted Kenna once at the Army Centenary Dinner in March 2001. He was a really genuinely nice bloke. I’m sure that night is one that he would have remembered with great fondness. There were 1901 serving and retired officers and soldiers at that dinner. Before the entree was served, the three surviving VC winners were announced. Sir Arthur (Roden) Cutler, Edward (Ted) Kenna, and Keith Payne entered the room to a standing ovation. As the import of the moment hit all those in attendance, the applause grew to a crescendo, and then some. It didn’t just die out either. It maintained its tempo and, if anything, grew as they walked past the assembled diners to take their seats.

In the Canberra Convention Centre that night, the current generation of the Australian Army showed their appreciation for the legacy they had been given. There were some moist eyes there that night, not only on the faces of the three heroes in our midst. I am grateful not only for having met him that night, but for having been present for such an outpouring of admiration, respect, and gratitude to men who had truly demonstrated the ANZAC Spirit. I know that when Ted Kenna left us, he knew that he held a special place in our history and in our hearts.

2009-07-06T21:32:00.003+10:00

I’ve mentioned local radio station 4ZZZ before. In preparing to write this piece I went back to that post, and found some lovely little comments that had escaped my attention when they were written. In light of the fact that ladies sometimes drop in here, I’ll remove some of the explicit vulgarity.

Anonymous said...
you are a stupid c**t. I hope you die in the trenches for your sh**ty cuntry you c**k
November 8, 2008 8:25 AM

Anonymous said...
blow sh*t up...
kill people...
nuclear waste everywhere...
yay what a happy world!!
what better things do you have to do? bash queers? do doughnuts in your clean efficient ute whilst yelling abuse at minoirty or fringe groups?
you're a real stand up guy!!
November 8, 2008 5:38 PM

Charming and erudite. Now that we have set the tone, I’ll broach the topic at hand, the upcoming protest against Exercise Talisman Sabre 09 (Ex TS09).
Ex TS09 is the biennial exercise conducted between the ADF and the US Armed Forces. It provides the opportunity to train in a reasonably benign environment in case it becomes necessary to do it for real somewhere else. Aside from the usual collective training benefits that come from exercises of this scale, the opportunity to train with our allies from across the Pacific provides many rewards. Not only does it give individuals the chance to foster personal and professional relationships with personnel from our major strategic ally and to exchange ideas on the profession of arms, it also provides the opportunity to synchronise systemic functions and ensure that when the ADF and the US military are doing it for real, they do so with the advantage of familiarity.

What has this to do with 4ZZZ and the charming fellow who left anonymous droppings on my blog? As I was driving back to work after lunch, I was flicking through radio stations. I paused when I hit 4ZZZ just as the announcer for their “Anarchy Hour” show was introducing their (wo)man on the ground in Shoalwater Bay. It seems that after their little “workshop” (I still hate that term) in Brisbane last year, they have managed to follow through and are planning a series of protests over the next few weeks. A number of things struck me as particularly ill informed throughout the interview, which was just about as hard hitting as Kerry O’Brien with Kevin Rudd.

Firstly, the talking head kept referring to Operation Talisman Sabre. Now, I’m only a lowly servant of the Australian people who goes where he’s told when he’s told, but if I was going to devote a month of my life to opposing a particular activity, I would at least find out what it was called. As I mentioned in the last piece on this topic, words have meanings. That may not seem important when you are just regurgitating Uni Co-op talking points, but it is. An operation, in the military sense, is real. In the least threatening scenario, it means providing aid to people who have just lived through a natural disaster (Op Sumatra Assist, Op Larry Assist etc) or just a lifetime of neglect (Op Outreach). In the conventional sense, it means real bullets, real wounds and real dead people. An operation therefore, should not be confused with an exercise. An exercise is just that – practice. At the end of it, everybody packs up and goes home. I guess operation just sounds cooler when you’re dealing with perennial adolescents.

The main pitch seemed to be against “warmongering”. The rationale seems to be that by hampering this exercise, they can promote peace. This is a fairly naive position. Look at it this way, what happens if they achieve their goal and the exercise is cancelled? Will that end the war in Afghanistan? Will it prevent another Iraq? No. All they will have achieved is to deny an opportunity for all involved to learn some valuable lessons that may one day save their lives. Because that is what an exercise is for, to learn. If they were to achieve their aims, all they would be doing is to ensure that Australian servicemen and women who do end up in Afghanistan or some other theatre of operations, are not as well trained and prepared as they should be, and any death or casualty should then upon their conscience be.

There was also a point made about how abhorrent it was that the Army had conducted an Open Day in Rockhampton and exposed children to the equipment of the ADF. No link is provided for a transcript at 4ZZZ so I can’t quote verbatim, but there was a statement that ran along the lines of “these things are killing machines, not toys”. In fact, they are neither. They are tools. A tank is an inert object. Without a human in it, it is a lump of very expensive metal. What it does depends entirely upon the crew. It can be used for great good, to shield civilians from sniper fire, or to blow the hell out of a protected fire position from which said sniper is engaging his targets. It can also be used to run down a lone protester defying leftist tyranny. It has no soul or conscience or self awareness. It is a tool. Exposure to hardware and the people who operate it is the first step in de-mystifying it and hopefully mitigating the visceral response like that which the interviewee demonstrated.

There was also concern expressed about the fact that the military would be using civilian infrastructure. Well knock me down with a feather, really? What else are they going to use? We don’t have large scale military ports, certainly not anywhere near where the exercise is taking place. Both the Port of Brisbane and Port of Gladstone are government owned. Why then would another government agency (admittedly in this case a Federal Department) be denied access to the infrastructure, particularly when the Qld Govt will be sending the bill to the Federal Govt? Somehow though, the military is imbued with such evil menace, that the very use of civilian infrastructure will somehow contaminate it. It is all very sad really.

The last part of the interview concerned the environment. Now, admittedly, an M1 will make short work of a Lesser Known Purple Spotted Bandicoot, should it be silly enough not to run away at the sound of gas turbine engines, but hey – isn’t that what Darwin was talking about? On a more serious note, Shoalwater Bay Training Area has been a military asset for over 40 years. In that time, the areas around it have been developed and altered. SWBTA has been recovering from mining and cattle farming since Army took possession. It is now a pristine wilderness area. It is pristine because the only people that use are the military. The ADF has very strict regulations about the use of the range and the minimisation of damage to the environment. It is quite a pain really, but that is what is required to maintain the range as a training area for years to come. The ADF is accountable for any environmental damage that occurs in SWBTA. The same cannot be said for Parks and Wildlife. How culpable are environmental vandals in National Parks once they have left? What recourse do Park Rangers have to prosecute offenders once they are safely back at home with no-one the wiser who set fire to the Lesser Known Purple Spotted Bandicoot’s log? Defence maintains permanent Range Control Officers who live in the training area. They are directly responsible for the maintenance of the environmental integrity of the range. They also know which unit was where and when. This means that should there be any damage to the range, they know who to go and find. This is quite a strong deterrent to anyone thinking they might get away with bending the rules and ignoring the regulations. The SWBTA Environment Report 2008 contains all of the details. Read it if you’d like.

Finally they got to the nuclear angle. Concern was expressed as to whether nuclear powered vessels would utilise the same civilian infrastructure mentioned earlier. Now, I don’t know how familiar these people are with nuclear powered naval vessels, but one of the great advantages of that particular type of propulsion is that they don’t have to refuel. The US, aware of the fact that berthing an aircraft carrier at Brisbane Wharf would likely incite these people to random acts of stupidity, is unlikely to drop the crew off for shore leave. If they do, it will likely be done by “Liberty Boat”, a tender that will ferry them to and from the ship anchored well away from the crowds of smelly hippies.

In the end, I wasted ten minutes of my life that I will never get back again, listening to the ill-informed ranting of a middle-aged petulant adolescent. I am therefore not surprised that a like-minded drone dropped such infantile droppings in my comments section.

No sh*t Sherlock!

2009-06-26T16:57:00.003+10:00

Hands up anyone who didn't see this coming. If course the media will be all over this as another example of Rudd's pointless, knee-jerk, symbolic, but ultimately useless gestures.........waiting......waiting.......

War is hell

2009-06-25T23:26:00.005+10:00

I was going through my photos from overseas, and found this gem. The thermometer was in our kitchen/dining area which was protected from the elements by a shade cloth. The two temperatures shown are inside in the shade and outside in the sun. I don't think it needs any more explanation than that.

To paraphrase Robyn Williams - It's so damn hot, I saw these little guys in the man-dress and the silly little hats burst into flames. It's that hot! Do you know what I'm talking about?

I'm home.

2009-06-06T00:29:00.001+10:00

I am home at last. I am currently taking some leave and reacquainting myself with Sharpe Jr, Mrs Sharpe, and the dishlickers. I am revelling in just the simple things, like constant power and running water. I have only asked Mrs Sharpe whether the water is running once when going to have a shower. I am also slowly adjusting to the idea that I’m home for good (well, for the foreseeable future anyway), and not going back when my leave finishes. I am also getting over that dislocated sensation of waking up in my own bed and not being sure where I am.

I won’t blog in any detail about the deployment. Not that any particular aspect was so harrowing that I don’t want to discuss it, but because I want to leave it alone for a while and just focus on being back at home. Suffice to say that if I have any sway in the matter, the next time I deploy will not be as part of a large international organisation mired in its own bureaucracy and ineptitude that allows civilians to run operations from in-theatre for purely political aims that ignore the military situation. Enough said.

Many thanks to all who send messages of support and especially to those who sent care packages, the constituents of which were put to very good use. In particular, the pre-dawn traditions on ANZAC Day would have been sorely lacking without them.

Civilisation at last!

2009-02-27T21:03:00.001+10:00

Having heard the sweet sound of the half-time whistle, I have returned home for a brief respite before I head back overseas. I have been keeping a fairly low profile, just enjoying the break. I have taken advantage of the myriad of luxuries that have been unavailable for the past few months, mostly beer and a great variety of products that were formerly a pig. Ham, bacon, pork, prosciutto and any other porcine products are being consumed with great gusto in preparation for the second half.

I am also enjoying becoming reacquainted with Sharpe Jr, Mrs Sharpe, and the dishlickers. It is really quite surreal to be back in Australia in my home with the family. I still have a momentary double-take when I wake up. I guess I’ll just be used to being here when I have to turn around and go back. The dishlickers went into a happiness frenzy when I walked in the door, lots of running about in circles whining with tails going so fast they were in danger of achieving flight. Sharpe Jr took a little longer to warm up, although that was only to be expected. Mrs Sharpe is very happy, although at the same time knows that it will be short lived and I will have to go away again soon.

One of the great, although slightly disturbing pleasures, is to walk into a supermarket. The range of products just fills me with joy. I keep walking up the aisle finding things and thinking “Gee, if only I could get that overseas!” I am also enjoying driving on the correct side of the road from the right side of the car. It is also novel not having to pick the route of least discomfort through the sand and potholes whilst dodging donkeys, goats, and the locals (the latter often riding the former).

To those who have been sending messages of support, and especially to those who have sent care packages, I thank you. BOAB will be pleased to know that his parcel was a hit. The iced tea he sent was a particular favourite, and was shared out appropriately.

Things will be tense when I get back. There are political/strategic moves afoot that will have a big impact locally. It should keep me busy enough. The second half, by design, will be shorter that the first, so I am now over the “hump”. I also have a little more leave to take, which I will take locally, by which I mean that I will take advantage of being in that part of the world to visit some people and places that would otherwise be unaffordable and imminently impractical.
I still try and follow what goes on in the rest of the world, so keep up the good fight, and keep your powder dry.

Still Alive

2009-01-10T05:36:00.002+10:00

Just a quick note to let you all know that I am still alive and well. I am currently in an area that allows me to access the internet with more than the slowest and faintest of signal. This is not the case in my usual abode, which suffers from a distinct lack of modern conveniences - a usable internet connection being one of those. Added to that, all my Blogger settings default to Arabic, which makes it a bit of a guessing game to operate. My respite will be short lived, so I will revert to radio silence again shortly.

Conditions are very basic and some inventiveness is required to make the situation tolerable. I and some accomplices were able, through some nefarious means, to avoid some of the more onerous aspects of local law to at least enjoy Christmas and New Years in a suitable fashion. Unfortunately, a nice baked ham was not on the menu on Christmas day, and I would still kill for a greasy bacon and egg breakfast. It is always a challenge being away from home over the Christmas/New Year period, but we made the best of what we had and there was a lot of support from Australia. I commend the good people of the Wagga Wagga District National Servicemen’s Association for initiating the “Message to the Troops” program. I received a number of quite heartfelt messages from that area of NSW on Christmas Day.

I still have some time to go before I will be able to take leave, but it is something to which I am already looking forward. To those who posted messages of support when I left, I thank you. I won’t be blogging about this deployment in any detail, and I’m sure most of you understand why that is. Suffice to say it is quite challenging on a number of levels, and that it has been an eye-opening experience.

Keep up the good work in my absence. When time and internet connection permits, I do try and follow what’s going on around the intertubes. I just lack the ability to contribute myself.

Duty Calls

2008-11-18T22:34:00.002+10:00

They stand in the terminal as I wave them goodbye
Trying to hide the tear in my eye
Looking forlorn with my son in her arms
She certainly doesn’t seem quite so shy

For my part I know the risks I will face
For her part that certainly isn’t the case
All on her own with my son in her arms
It’s the challenge at home for which she must brace

It is domestic routine and daily grind
On her own the fortitude she must find
Facing the world with my son in her arms
The wife that soldier has left behind

There are dangers and hardships and perils ahead
Enough to fill ordinary people with dread
But at home on her own with my son in her arms
Is where all my thoughts and my fears will be led

Alone in the crowd as we said our goodbyes
The fear and the dread were clear in her eyes
An island of us with our son in our arms
With grief and great purpose I took to the skies

Completely unrelated to the previous post. Postings will be light, or in fact non-existent, for some time. It will depend on internet connection where I’ll be. Sharpe out.

Brisbane's storm

2008-11-17T23:22:00.002+10:00

After spending a long time living in the Top End, and dealing with big storms as a part of life, the storm last night in Brisbane was a bit of an eye opener. Not so much because of the ferocity of the storm, it was not any worse than scores we went through in Darwin, but because of the damage it caused. The North-West of Brisbane was flattened. Trees litter the roadways, and power lines are draped in tangled piles where they fell. Roads are closed. Power has been cut to tens of thousands. Roofs and whole houses are destroyed, and cars sit flattened under the shattered trunks of gum trees. I’ve seen cyclones in the Top End do less damage. I guess all the trees that were going to blow over in Darwin in a storm, already have.

To whom does a city in need turn when things are grim? Initially to the stalwart volunteers of the SES and other groups who battled through the night to clear major thoroughfares and provide aid the most urgent cases. They did a fantastic job. The extent of the damage and the amount they had achieved overnight was impressive. When the cold light of day revealed the trail of destruction wrought by the storm, it was to the “gunhedz” as described by Bryla at Blair’s, the Brisbane City Council turned to for help. The North-West is an area that Defence Housing Australia has heavily invested in, which means that the area hardest hit was an area that many of the soldiers who were tasked with responding to the request live. They have families at home dealing with the damage from the storm, but they were, and still are, out in the rain conducting clean-up and repair. Their families are still at home, without power and now without clean water. The argument could be made that because they live in the area, they are acting in their own self-interest. This would be a very shallow analysis. They are tasked according to priorities set by the SES and Brisbane City Council. Whilst other families were stocking up on the provisions required to carry on without electricity for an unknown period, and cleaning up and setting their own homes in order, the soldiers were out clearing trees and debris, and conducting repairs to the most badly damaged homes. I, like most people, would have put family as a higher priority than community in the initial post-disaster effort.

Power to the Sharpe residence has only now been restored, some 28 hours after it went out. Many still don’t have electricity. Energex, the successor to SEQEB, warns that some homes may be without power for up to three days. We were fully anticipating that would be the case. All preparations for a protracted period of Third-worldliness made, it was almost with a sense of anti-climax that the lights flickered on and the fans began to rotate again. The eskies were full (of food and er...other essentials). A stockpile of candles had been procured and some lit. We were enjoying a game of Trivial Pursuit in the dim silence, when we were suddenly thrust back into the 21st Century. Despite some wistfulness, the next time Mrs Sharpe can boil a kettle for young Sharpe Jr’s breakfast instead of boiling a pot of water on the BBQ, she’ll be grateful for the modern wonder of electricity.

I am an abused husband

2008-11-13T22:06:00.002+10:00

I must be. I’ve just this evening been diagnosed with “Burnt Chop Syndrome”.
Apparently, Burnt Chop Syndrome is a rallying cry for Feminazis that holds that should an oppressed wife manage to burn one or two of the chops whilst cooking, she will serve them to herself to avoid patriarchal criticism. This is a behaviour is passed from mother to daughter, reinforcing gender stereotypes of a woman’s subservient role to her husband.

Whilst fulfilling my role as oppressed husband this evening, I was relegated to preparing the evening meal. I was cooking some delicious lamb on the BBQ, when some of the fat dripped onto the little bricks under the grill that are quite deliberately designed to catch such dripping. The fat then caught fire, adding to the smoky BBQ goodness. Unfortunately, the two chops directly above my sizzling fat fire became what my father sometimes referred to as “carbon enhanced”. Rather than admit I’d ducked inside to tend to the vegies when I should have been maintaining my vigil at the BBQ, I served myself the offending chops. Mrs Sharpe noticed that some of my meat was a little darker than hers, and then filled me in on the whole “Burnt Chop Syndrome” thing.

I was just being polite. I cooked the meal. I left the meat untended. It was my fault it was a little black. Why would I then pass on my mistake onto her? Is “Burnt Chop Syndrome” really a symptom of an oppressive patriarchal society, or just good old fashioned manners?

Remembrance Day hijacked by narcissistic Vietnam Vet

2008-11-11T16:53:00.002+10:00

Being a proud former member of the Royal Australian Regiment, I went to the Remembrance Day ceremony today at the RAR Memorial Walk. The ceremony went along the normal sort of lines, there was a Catafalque Party from the 8th/9th Battalion, the 6th Battalion were all there, there were some speeches, some wreaths were laid, The Last Post was played, a minute of silence, and then Reveille. It was pretty standard, except for the speech from a member of the RAR Association who is a Vietnam Veteran. In the interest of brevity and coherence, both attributes the speaker sorely lacked, I’ll paraphrase in point form the speech that was made.

• Despite knowing about this speaking engagement for some weeks, I just penned a couple of ideas last night on the back of a beer coaster.

• War is bad m’kay. War will always happen while there are men with testosterone in charge of things (I shit you not, he actually said that)

• I was too poorly educated to know what I was getting myself in for when I went to Vietnam. I couldn’t even point it out on a map until it was pointed out for me on the ship on the way over. Even then I wasn’t really that interested.

• I am now a big fan of learning about history. I hate reading though, so I watch documentaries. I don’t have Pay TV, so I don’t get the History Channel, or National Geographic or Discovery, but I still watch whatever is on free-to-air, usually the ABC.

• I saw a good documentary the other night. It was about WWI (finally, are we approaching a point?). When Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith was in Germany (WTF?!) flying against the Germans, he didn’t know what he was fighting for.

• Then there was a British family and there were three boys and…….(A long story that had nothing to do with Australia at all followed. He rambled on for some time with no real discernable point, except that he tried to make out that “this is where we come from”.)

• I saw some of the current generation of soldiers once. They were from 2 RAR. They were smoking! One of them looked like my old Platoon Commander.

• I don’t agree with where you are serving or what you are doing, but you are doing a good job at it.

This bloke stood in front of a battalion of serving Australian infantrymen, with a collective operational resume that includes Somalia, Rwanda, Bougainville, East Timor, the Solomon Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan, and made a weak political point about their service, At the same time, he managed to make a Remembrance Day speech that rambled vaguely about WWI, but generally talked about himself and his own experiences.

This is what really annoys me about certain elements of the Vietnam Veteran Community. Somehow, it all comes back to them. Whatever the topic, the conversation will inevitably come back to Vietnam. Not all Vietnam Vets suffer from the same blinkered view, but those that do spoil the reputation of the rest.

I can understand that if a soldier has only ever served on one operation, or in only one theatre, that their whole military experience is shaped by that particular set of circumstances. Every operation and every theatre is different. You can’t template every war from now until the end of time on Vietnam. I spent the first half of my military career exposed to that mindset. Things changed very quickly when it became apparent that the world had changed since the early seventies, and we needed to evolve - very quickly. A narrow breadth of experience does not excuse a closed minded view. It certainly does not excuse the tendency to anchor a whole personality to a single experience forty years ago, as terrible as that may have been.

Just after the first rotation had returned from East Timor, I went to an RSL for ANZAC Day with a bloke from 5/7 RAR who had only just come home. He had only been in Australia for such a short time that he hadn’t even been issued his medals for East Timor. All he had was an Infantry Combat Badge (ICB) that he proudly wore to his first ANZAC Day as a returned serviceman. As the afternoon wore on, and he had been heartily congratulated by a number of WWII Vets who had certainly learned their lesson about how to treat younger generations of soldiers, he was approached by a Vietnam Veteran. “What do you think you’re doing wearing that?” he was asked by a bloke tapping his ICB. “It’s all I’ve got at the moment” he replied, “we haven’t been issued our medals yet”. Then followed a long tirade about how East Timor wasn’t a real war, and that he’d assaulted bunker systems with no tank support and my mate had only been giving rice to villagers (not the actual term used to describe Asian people, but I don’t need to go into that). How dare this little upstart turn up on ANZAC Day wearing an ICB when he didn’t know what a real war was?

I would have thought that after the fairly atrocious treatment that soldiers returning from Vietnam received not only from the usual suspects on the left, but also from the WWII Veterans in organisations like the RSL, that Vietnam Veterans would be more accepting of the fact that all wars are different. All have their own challenges, dangers, restrictions, and indeed rewards. Judging someone else’s service against their own is exactly what the WWII Vets did to them. Using someone else’s service to make a political point is also what the left did to them when they got home.

Wise words

2008-11-10T19:32:00.005+10:00

I had need today for a quote from that marvelous orator, Sir Winston Churchill. Whilst perusing a number of online resources, I was reminded of the great wealth of astute observations made by that man. I have included some below that may be pertinent to the world as it stands today in regard to our fight against Islamic terrorism, and to the decision of the American voters last week.

There is no such thing as a good tax.

We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.

A sheep in sheep’s clothing. (On Clement Atlee)

A modest man, who has much to be modest about. (Also on Clement Atlee)

The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

If you are going to go through hell, keep going.

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

I always think of that when I hear those who would have the crocodile eat them last complain that the War on Terror only makes us more of a target for attacks. To them I would say, read the next quote.

You ask, What is our policy? I will say; “It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.” You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

It has been noted that the words used in the last part of that speech, from “We shall fight on the beaches” to “we shall never surrender” are exclusively drawn from the Saxon (Old English) with the exception of surrender, which is from the Norman (Old French). Read into that what you will.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour!”

Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.”
Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”

Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.”
Churchill: “If I were your husband I would take it.”

The way forward

2008-11-05T20:56:00.006+10:00

So ends eight years of a Republican Presidency. Despite some threats to the contrary, democracy has prevailed, the people have spoken, and Barack Obama is to be the 44th President of the United States of America. He didn’t even need to commit voter fraud or have thugs standing outside polling booths to achieve it. Congratulations to Obama and to the Democrats.

Where does that leave conservatives? We now find ourselves looking to Canada as the last of the Anglosphere to retain a conservative government. That is a scary thought. There is much to look forward to though. If we were to ape the immature antics of our leftist opponents, it would be time to break out the papier-mâché and begin construction of Barack Obama’s head in effigy to march in the streets, block traffic and protest against an election stolen by ACORN and a biased media. That is not the way ahead though. The conservative movement in the west is in dire need of some self-reflection and a new approach. In Australia particularly, the ALP sold themselves as economically conservative. They are working very hard to disprove that platform, but the voters were presented with a choice between a stale incumbent and an alternative that promised not to spook the horses. There wasn’t a lot of difference between the two parties, so people went with the shiny new option. In the US it was a little different, but both campaigns sold an idea of change. Obama did it better, largely because he wasn’t in the same party as the incumbent. Conservative parties throughout the west need to reevaluate their tendency to avoid taking a responsible stand on the issues and pandering to a populist approach dictated to them by the media cycle. We are currently seeing the results of a decision making process driven by polls and sound bytes here in Australia. It is creating more problems than it solves. The opportunity now exists for the respective conservative parties to rethink the policy outcomes that they stand for, as well as the platforms they need to run on to achieve them. A little time on the bench for a breather and a chance for the incumbents to demonstrate the folly of their ideas might be a good thing in the longer term.

In the meantime, we are now the opposition; an important role in any democracy. We are the voice of dissent. It is our responsibility to highlight the flaws in any new legislation or policy direction. I am going to enjoy the ride. I am already pointing out that I voted for the other guy in the domestic political farce that has developed over the last 12 months. Republicans should enjoy doing the same.

The video below is from the BBC series “Coupling”. It illustrates that point very well. I apologise for the watermark and the aspect ratio, but this clip is not on the net and I had to use some freeware to convert it to a usable file type. Watch it all the way through and enjoy a lefty head explosion.

Eco-Inflation

2008-10-30T19:08:00.005+10:00

During the election campaign last year, our esteemed PM, then Leader of the Opposition, appeared on the 7.30 Report and opined about the cost of his environmental plans.

KEVIN RUDD: In terms of the whole economy what the modelling from MMA demonstrates is that the total impact on the economy will be marginal over time. That is that they calculate that between now and about 2045 that you'd be looking at a total impact on the economy of somewhere between $600 and $800 million or something in the vicinity of $45 per person over that period of time or something like $1 per person per year.

That figure has since been revised. The cost now, according to new modelling done by the Treasury Department, is about a dollar a day.

HOUSEHOLDS are expected to pay on average $7 a week extra in electricity and gas bills once the Federal Government adopts an emissions trading scheme.

So, the cost has gone from a dollar a year to a dollar a day. There’s inflation for you.

Who will get hit the hardest?

Lower-income households are likely to be "slightly more affected'' by the
introduction of an emission price, according to the modelling, "as they generally spend a higher proportion of their disposable income on emission-intensive goods''.

The party of the working man indeed.
If the cost has risen by 354 times in 11 months, how much will the burden on the poor schmucks who elected him and his sniveling cronies be by the time the plan is introduced in 2010?

Rachel Lucas can get in line like the rest of us.

2008-10-29T20:24:00.004+10:00

Rachel Lucas wants to legalise gay marriage so she can marry Megyn Kelly. She needs to join at the back of the queue. Although to be honest, it would require a change in the law to allow polygamy. I'm cool with that. I'm not sure that Mrs Sharpe would be though. The video that has so swayed both her and my moral compass is below.

I have a confession to make.

2008-10-27T18:53:00.002+10:00

In light of all the media attention on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe, it is time for me to make a confession. I spend my working day comfortably attired in clothing provided to me for free by the Australian taxpayer. It gets worse though. When those clothes start to get a bit worn and tatty, I just hand them over and I get brand new ones for free. I don’t pay a red cent. The Australian taxpayer covers the cost of my fashionable wardrobe. I know they are fashionable. I see the cool kids at the shops wearing them while they skateboard around the mums with 80 bags of shopping, two kids and a pram. Those suckers had to fork over their hard earned allowances to dress as well as I do. I get them for free!

It has been absolutely astonishing how readily I have been furnished with these taxpayer funded clothes. There was a new line introduced recently. They just gave me the new design. I didn’t have to ask. I didn’t even have to give my old ones up. It’s a rort I tell you. I was also recently preparing for a little business trip overseas. The clothes I had been given were the wrong colour, so they just gave me new ones in another colour. They were exactly the same as the other ones, just a different hue!

Sarah Palin has got nothing on me. Her clothes were purchased by her party, not the taxpayer, and they’ll be sold for charity at the end of the campaign. The taxpayer gives me my free clothes, and when I’m finished with them they get cut up into cleaning rags. You poor suckers, all bent out of shape because money donated to a political party is used to dress their candidate for the second highest job in the country, and all the while I swan around in clothes you paid for with no political aspirations at all. BWAHAHAHA!

And this guy thought it appropriate to tell Americans how they should vote?

2008-10-26T20:16:00.001+10:00

Russell Brand, the non-entity that no-one had heard of until he managed to offend all but the most partisan lefties at the MTV awards, has made the news again. It seems that he’s been prank calling British actor Andrew Sachs (AKA Manuel of Fawlty Towers), and making absolutely hilarious suggestions about how he’s slept with Sachs’ granddaughter. Funny stuff, I’m sure. This is the same guy who called Sarah Palin a VILF, George W. Bush a retarded cowboy, and Trig Palin a PR stunt. All of which absolutely convinces me the he is the man that Americans should be looking to in order to make the informed choice about which of the candidates will receive their vote. It’s all about the nuance, don’t you know?

Proud to be Australian

2008-10-25T11:01:00.003+10:00

As a follow up from the post about the heroic actions of our SAS friend, here's a quick tune to remind us all of why we ought to be proud to be Australian. Enjoy.

h/t Blackfive

Suicide in the ADF

2008-10-24T20:12:00.005+10:00

The Australian media have picked up on the common myth that the ADF is rife with bullied, suicidal soldiers. This old chestnut gets hauled out every time a member of the ADF commits suicide. Additionally, it gets wheeled out after every inquiry into said suicide, and then again when family members drag it up again. It’s a fairly natural response from members of the family who have lost a loved one. It’s a traumatic experience for all involved.

Whilst my heart goes out to anyone who has lost a family member or loved one through suicide, blaming the system is just an easy way out. Statistically, the ADF has a suicide rate about half that of the broader community. Given that the ADF targets and consists primarily of the peak demographic for suicide; that is an impressive achievement.

Admittedly, psychological screening on entry to the ADF does rule out some of those predisposed towards suicide, which would fudge the figures. On the other hand, members of the ADF are exposed to far greater stress situations than their civilian counterparts. By that, I’m not referring exclusively to the operational environment, as stressful as that is. There are also a number of other factors that create significant levels of stress and could lead to mental health problems.

The ADF targets its recruiting specifically at school leavers and young adults. The reason for that should be fairly self-evident. The training required to make the transition from civilian to soldier/sailor/airman is necessarily quite intense. These young people are taken out of their familiar environment and comfort zone, and exposed to a strict and sometimes overwhelming training environment designed specifically to prepare them for combat. Once that is complete, they are sent to another training institution for further development into their specific trade. Only then are they sent to a unit and life regains any semblance of normality, although that normality is not the world they left behind at the recruiting centre.

They are immersed in a world where discipline is key, where the chain of command controls almost every aspect of their lives. They are different people to what they once were. That is not to say they become inhuman. They will have friends like they never had before, people with whom they have conquered adversity and come out laughing on the other side. They are instilled with values like courage, initiative, teamwork and mateship.

At no stage in a military career can they expect to have what anyone else would refer to as a “normal” lifestyle. They are expected to maintain a high degree of fitness. An injury can cause serious career problems from that perspective. They can expect to move every 3-4 years, sometimes more frequently than that. Not across suburbs, but interstate and occasionally overseas, and often to remote locations away from their family and friends. They can expect even in peacetime to be away from home for extended periods for exercises or courses. They can expect to work long hours for no additional remuneration. They can expect that as defence tries to save more money each year, that they will fill two or even three jobs at the same time. Then there is operational service.

Operational tours cause a whole raft of difficulties just in and of themselves. Six to eight months overseas in a dangerous environment with limited ability to communicate with loved ones and in almost always very basic living conditions is difficult enough. Throw in actual combat or situations that are beyond the realm of rational understanding, and it only gets worse. That is why significant effort is made to screen all returning servicemen for psychological trauma during and after a deployment, but no routine program will ever identify every problem that lies dormant in the subconscious.

That is why military training institutions are hard. They are designed to be so that they can prepare, as much as humanly possible, a person for the career they’ve chosen. It says a lot about the military in this country that even accounting for initial entry screening, the rate of suicide is still half that of the rest of the community. Remember that ADF members, whilst exposed to all of these additional stressors, are also still people, and will experience all of the usual emotional disasters that befall the rest of the community. Relationships will fail (more so than outside the military for all of the reasons stated above), there will be deaths in the family, and poor financial decisions will cause additional hardship.

There are a number of support mechanisms in the ADF to help people deal with all of these additional burdens. The Defence Community Organisation exists to help families cope with the demands of service life. There are equity advisers in every unit and formation and are outside of the chain of command to deal with complaints about harassment, bullying or unfair treatment. There are people trained specifically in suicide prevention. There is a medical system that is trained to deal with mental illness and a dedicated Australian Army Psychology Corps (with appropriate counterparts in the other two services). There are philanthropic organisations like the Salvation Army and the Everyman who deploy to the field and even overseas sometimes. There is the circle of mates that only ever grows throughout your time in the service, and of course there are the Padres.

The padres deserve their own special mention. Chaplains in the ADF are a very special breed. The churches of the world could take a leaf out of their book for the advancement of humankind. They live and breathe ecumenicalism. The unit padre might be a Catholic and you a Protestant, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, or devout Atheist; he couldn’t care less. When your world is turned upside down by absolutely anything from a fight with the missus to a close mate dying in your arms, the Padre will be the first by your side. He is often as filthy, wet and tired as you are, but he’ll make a hot brew and listen to you pour your heart out. He has powers that other officers couldn’t even comprehend. He’ll shirtfront Generals if need be, to see a problem resolved. Anyone who says that they had no one to turn to with a problem whilst serving in the ADF is either ignorant or lying, and from personal experience, it is very hard to be ignorant of the existence of the Chaplain.

Bullying does exist in the ADF, like it exists in any other workplace. Sometimes there is a fine line between discipline from a superior and bullying. Sometimes there is a fine line between training and bullying. It is worse in training institutions because they are necessarily hard. Some examples of workplace bullying have led to suicide. That is tragic. To tar the whole ADF for the few and isolated instances where that has taken place is ignorant, inaccurate, unfair and just plain lazy.

bingbing gets all musical 'n' stuff

2008-10-24T18:24:00.003+10:00

Over at Tizona's, bingbing is having a whimsical day posting some of his his favourite music clips. Yours truly gets a shout out as well.

Take a VC out of petty cash

2008-10-23T16:18:00.003+10:00

If this guy doesn't win a VC, there is no justice left in the system. Bravo Zulu brave son of ANZAC.

Hypocrisy or just blatant stupidity?

2008-10-22T16:40:00.004+10:00

Listening to 4ZZZ is a bit like intercepting enemy transmissions that happen to be broadcast in clear. The latest cause is the upcoming Land Warfare Conference in Brisbane 27-31 Oct 08. They plan to try and stop the event taking place, much like they managed to achieve in Adelaide. If they can’t achieve that, they’ll be protesting outside the Brisbane Convention Centre for the duration of the conference. You’ve really got to admire their ~~idealism naiveté~~ stupidity. Do they really think that by protesting at a conference, they will deny the ADF the opportunity to discuss the future of Land Warfare, and by default, stop war from happening? Do they really think that by protesting at a conference they will stop DSTO and DMO from trialling and procuring new weapon systems for the ADF? Do they think that by denying the ADF the best in modern weaponry that they will prevent the ADF from doing the job that the government (currently a flavour they are so very fond of) dictates to it?

The next activity on the calendar is a workshop (I detest that term; words have meanings, a workshop is not a place where hippies gather to talk shit) that will deal with plans to make Qld nuclear free, and to discuss plans for disrupting Exercise Talisman Sabre 09, the biennial exercise between the ADF and the US.

I must confess to being a little conflicted about that one. If they have their way and get the exercise cancelled, it will save me months of work and several weeks living in the dirt at Shoalwater Bay. On the other hand, the exercise will provide the ADF and our US allies to exercise in a relatively benign environment before teaming up to do the real thing in far less accommodating environs. I also just can’t bring myself to put my own comfort and laziness over the dual prospect of seeing the ADF denied the biggest training activity for the next two years, and seeing reality starved hippies get their way.

The twisted logic of these people has managed to determine that a conference held by the sworn servants of their elected officials to improve the capability of the taxpayer funded ADF is something that should be shut down, but a workshop (aaarrgh!) to plan subversive activities to disrupt an exercise endorsed by the elected officials of the people of Australia, held the very next weekend, is fine and attendance should be encouraged. Power to the people, man!

In the interest of fairness, I propose that people in Brisbane opposed to the plans of the appeasers at Peace Convergence form their own protest group. I’m thinking the People Against Convergence Organisation. We could stage our own rally at the convention centre demanding the right of our elected officials and their legitimate employees and business partners to discuss better options for the employment of the ADF. We could also demand that they cancel their ~~workshop~~ smoke-in because it plans to hinder the operational capability of the ADF, impact on the capability of the ADF to operate in conjunction with our major ally, and deny Queenslanders the option of a cheaper and cleaner source of energy.

On second thoughts, I have better things to be doing on my weekend than trying to thwart the plans of an irrelevant and impotent fringe group.

Tim Blair over-reacts

2008-10-21T19:24:00.002+10:00

Whilst I am normally a big fan of Tim Blair, he might have gone a little overboard in his recent post about Sarah Palin’s fictitious encounter with Terry Tate. That is not to excuse the other fairly vicious material he highlights in his post, but the Terry Tate thing is a long running gag. Whilst violence against women is always particularly nasty, a little perspective here may be in order. We’ve been poking the opposition recently about an inability to see the humorous side of things, so in the interest of balance, here’s the Terry Tate story.

Terry Tate – Office Linebacker

Terry Tate – Vacation

Terry Tate – Draft Day

Terry Tate – Sensitivity Training (a personal favourite)

Terry Tate - OSPN

A beacon of hope

2008-10-20T17:32:00.003+10:00

In a world where daring to ask a question of a politician is sufficient cause for a gross invasion of privacy, and it is OK for the media to solicit schoolgirls for inside dirt on the wife of a presidential candidate, but it is somehow racist to apply that same scrutiny to an actual candidate, there is some good left after all.

The concept of a “fair go” has been hijacked by all sorts of malcontents over recent years, but it is uplifting to know that real examples of giving someone a real fair go still exist. Even if this is an American example, it really typifies what a fair go is all about. It will warm the cockles of your heart.

I’m also moved to sit down and watch the LOTR extended edition following Rachel Lucas’ stirring post.

Hold your ground! Hold your ground!

Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers,I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

A day may come when the courage of men fails,when we forsake our friendsand break all bonds of fellowship,but it is not this day.

An hour of wolves and shattered shields,when the age of men comes crashing down,but it is not this day!

This day we fight!!

By all that you hold dear on this good Earth,I bid you stand, Men of the West!!!

I’m such a geek at times.

Open Thread

2008-10-17T12:07:00.002+10:00

The Debunking military myths thread got a little sidetracked, so here is an open thread to post bawdy Infantry drinking songs, or bawdy Rugby drinking songs, or if you feel the need to raise the bar; poems, stories or reflections.

I have the Monster-In-Law in this weekend. Pray for me!

Hands up who saw this coming

2008-10-16T17:24:00.000+10:00

Defence spending hit by financial crisis.

Debunking military myths

2008-10-15T20:01:00.004+10:00

Boy on a Bike has an updated post about the Soldiers podcast on Counterpoint. In his post he discusses the continuing fallacy that the military is almost exclusively recruited from the working class. I agree with him on that point. In my decade and a half of experience, most soldiers are from middle class families. Most are educated to at least Year 10, and a significant proportion to Year 12. There are also quite a number with tertiary qualifications, and not just in the commissioned ranks either. It is not unusual for an officer to have fewer academic qualifications than some of his subordinates. Whilst there is some acceptance in the wider community that this is true of the ADF, there persists the perception that the US Army is made up of the poorest of America’s citizens who view the military as a way out of squalor and poverty. This is true in some cases. Information is publicly available from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in the US, that refutes the belief that the US Army is primarily recruited from lower income brackets. This graph shows a breakdown of the neighbourhoods that US soldiers are recruited from. It clearly shows that the lowest income bracket neighbourhoods contribute 11%, whereas 25% come from the wealthiest. The graph also shows a progressive rise in the number of recruits as the income bracket goes up.

But what does that information mean? It fairly comprehensively refutes the myth that military service is a last resort for people unable to forge a career in other areas, as well as the myth that it is primarily made up of people who see it as their only avenue of escape from abject poverty. It means that there is something else that draws young people of all backgrounds to service. Are they just too stupid, despite their family’s wealth, to have any other career? This graph would suggest otherwise. It shows enlisted recruits outperforming their civilian counterparts in the qualifying testing than their civilian counterparts in all but the highest and lowest brackets. It should be noted that 20% of the civilians tested scored in the lowest bracket, but the military representation is exactly 0%, although it probably indicates a recruiting standard more than anything else. Is the US military exploiting minority groups to attain recruiting targets? Quite simply no, this graph breaks down the percentage of recruits by identified racial group as a proportion of the whole US population. Variances between the two figures are minor, with the exception of Native American/Alaskan, which is nearly three times the general population. That is an interesting statistic.

All this ties in with an argument I’ve been having with a former Australian National Serviceman, about motivations for soldiers in combat. The data indicates that a vast majority of military personnel have alternatives to military service. This means that they have chosen the military, not out of desperation, but out of a sense of duty, or pride, or morality, or honour, or all of the above. It means that soldiers are not the tools of exploitative governments, but willing volunteers who see service as a reward unto itself. They will serve their country, be separated from their families and loved ones, and even sustain wounds or die in combat because they see it as the right thing to do.

There are those whose ability to separate soldiers from the decisions of their political masters rests on the premise that they are somehow pawns, that they were too poor to do anything else, or they were coerced into service. This negates their moral responsibility for their participation in a controversial conflict. That is not the case. Soldiers are responsible for their own decision to enlist, in the full knowledge that they may be required to do violence on Her Majesty’s behalf. They are the servants of the Australian people. They fully understand their role. They will conduct operations, violent and deadly if necessary and mandated, against Australia’s enemies as dictated by her elected government. Whilst the government are the elected representative of the Australian people, soldiers will do what the government tells them to. This is not a surrender of their own conscience or intellect, but the acceptance of their role as servants of the people.

An ABC interview about soldiers

2008-10-14T18:53:00.001+10:00

Boy on a Bike has a link to this discussion on Counterpoint, an ABC Radio programme with Michael Duffy. John Farrell is the founder of Australia and New Zealand Defender, a magazine that follows Australian soldiers throughout the spectrum of military operations and exercises. It is an interesting conversation. Duffy displays some of the tired old cliché beliefs about the military and the US, but to his credit, does actually ask some engaging questions and tries to get his head around what Farrell is telling him. I’m not completely sold on Farrell’s point about soldiers enlisting to seek adventure, but otherwise he seems to have a good handle on what’s going on for a journalist and ex-reservist. He makes some very good points about Rules of Engagement (ROE), and their impact on operations, and about some of the environmental conditions that soldiers on operations deal with. Well worth a listen. h/t Boy on a Bike.

The importance of studying history

2008-10-13T19:56:00.003+10:00

Over at Bolta’s, Andrew discusses an Op-Ed by New York Times columnist Frank Rich that accuses the McCain Campaign of pumping up “Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies”. Now, Bolta does a fair job of refuting these claims and then slips the quick ball on the inside to Michelle Malkin who storms through the middle and deals with the real Germany circa 1930’s campaign. Kae in the other hand is discussing the new Australian history curriculum over at Bloodnut Blog. How are these two issues related? In using the Weimar Republic to evoke an image of rampant hate fuelled rallies, Rich is demonstrating a poor understanding of what the Weimar Republic actually was and therefore invalidates his own point.

The Weimar Republic was the democratically elected government of post-war Germany. One of the new Republic’s first acts was to sign the Versailles Treaty, which accepted responsibility for the First World War, which led to the disarmament of Germany, and the acceptance of responsibility for the massive war reparations demanded by the allies. This led to the hyper-inflation and massive unemployment that gave the Nazi Party a fertile ground for their own rise to power which, coincidentally, saw the end of the Weimar Republic.

Rich has just used a cool sounding German word to push his point about the McCain/Palin rallies. This historical inaccuracy by a columnist for the New York Times proves how important a real understanding of history really is. History is all about cause and effect. To understand that there needs to be a chronological and fact based approach to teaching history. For students in the free west, that means a detailed and sequential study of the significant events and personalities that led to the society we enjoy today. That also means a significant European and specifically British bias, for the simple reason that the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and a host of other nations all owe their political freedoms to the evolution of British democracy and then the rise and fall of the British Empire.

For Australian students, that means studying British history from the fall of the Roman Empire, through the rise of the monarchy, the Magna Carta, the Reformation, the English Civil War, and the rise of the Empire. This leads straight into the American Revolution which created a need for another penal colony, hence New South Wales. At that point Australian history should be focussed on the opening of the Blue Mountains, exploration of the continent, the establishment of the colonies, the Gold Rush, the Shearer’s Strike, and the colonial wars abroad. None of this can be viewed in isolation though. The Royal Navy’s campaign against slavers, the American Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution all impacted on Australia’s development. When looking at the 20th Century, Australian students should study our involvement in both world wars, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation, the Vietnam War, East Timor and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. Whilst students should know what Australians did in these major events, they cannot be studied in isolation. International factors drove Australia’s involvement, and so should be studied. That would include the inter-war period in Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the rise of National Socialism.

Hopefully then, no Australian student would confuse the Weimar with whatever it was that Rich was trying to say.

Motivation for war

2008-10-12T22:28:00.002+10:00

1735099, a former Nasho and general pain in the arse, has a review of Paul Ham’s “On War” from the Weekend Australian Magazine from 4 Oct at his site. The article includes one of the most pretentious and demeaning memes about military service.
"We were fighting for our lives and the lives of our mates" seems to be the most common thread that binds men in battle.

Whilst I acknowledge that in times gone by, young men would enlist because it was the thing to do, or because all their mates were and they didn’t want to be left behind. The days of the massive armies made up of rapidly mobilised civilian populations are now behind us. Modern professional armies are made up of volunteers. Not volunteers who enlist for the duration of hostilities, but career minded young men and women who are fully aware of the ramifications of their decision to join.

"We were fighting for our lives and the lives of our mates" is a very narrow approach to the motivation for soldiers to fight. By scorning the more altruistic ideals behind military service, it actually demeans ability of soldiers to rationalise their involvement in conflict. Whilst the example of conscripts like 1735099 provides a convenient escape clause for ownership of a decision process that led them to war, the same generalisation cannot be made for the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts. The soldiers fighting in those theatres are volunteers. They enlisted with the knowledge that going to war may be required of them. To focus on the immediate and visceral reaction to combat oversimplifies a broader understanding that the modern soldier has about his role in any operation. It is an attempt to paint soldiers as pawns rather than the masters of their own destiny and the bearers of responsibility for their own decisions. By so doing, it comes across as the condescending and paternal reassurances from our “intellectual betters” that assume that because we’d be involved in a conflict that they see as repugnant, the only answer that doesn’t lead to the same sort of horrendous treatment of soldiers that the veterans of the Vietnam War experienced, is that we are too stupid to know better. The motivation for going is that all our friends are. The only reason we fight is because we are in the immediate danger that the “evil government” put us in and we are defending our own life and those of our mates. It is demeaning, condescending and insulting.

We know why we deploy to these places. We know the geo-political manoeuvrings that put us there. We know the historical and cultural roots of the conflict. We know our mission and our role in it. I am yet to receive a deployment briefing that runs along the lines of “You are going to country X in order to protect your own life and the lives of your mates”. Those are what we call implied tasks. They are important, but never the primary mission for any deployment. They are also usually the first questions asked; our ROE hold a very important role in the maintenance of morale. Overly restrictive ROE in dangerous situations makes people tense. Rwanda, specifically Kibeho, is a textbook example of that. Even that example though, of soldiers in the heat of the moment concerned with protecting their own life and those of their mates, were able to clearly see the more important concern was for the civilian populace caught up in those terrible events. They are now horribly traumatised by that experience, not because of the danger that they were in, but because they were denied the opportunity to serve the greater good in accordance with the altruistic ideals that they believed they were there to implement. To reduce those experiences to "We were fighting for our lives and the lives of our mates" cheapens their suffering and ascribes to them a baser level of their understanding of their own involvement than is painfully evident to even the most naive observer.

That does not obviate the primal desire to protect your own life, nor does it the quintessentially Australian ideal of prizing mateship above all. These things are highest in mind when rounds are cracking nearby, although concern for one’s mates doesn’t end when the adrenalin fades either, it is often in the most mundane that the true regard for and from our mates is evident. To condense that into the rationale for involvement in conflict or to ascribe to it the thematic principle of operational service misses the point. Without a higher purpose, fighting for your life and your mates overseas is no better than thugs who will do the same in a pub or back alley on a Friday night. Servicemen and women who accept the risks of joining the military and who serve the ideals of the mission when deployed deserve better than "We were fighting for our lives and the lives of our mates".

Aussie Pride

2008-10-09T18:20:00.005+10:00

A furore has erupted over the Logan City Council’s insistence that an ex-soldier remove the Australian flag from his front yard following complaints by a neighbour that it was “offensive”. The council then back flipped, with the Mayor declaring that "I am offended that somebody should complain to the council about the Australian flag, and whoever they are should hang their head in shame." Never underestimate petty bureaucracy though, a “council spokeswoman said there was a concern the flagpole could fall down in high winds. She said Mr Wilson, who is a salesman, needed a building permit, because the pole was only 4.5m from the kerb and, under the Queensland Development Code, it should be at least 6m from the front.”

That the Logan City Council were even willing to entertain a complaint that an Australian flag is somehow “offensive” speaks volumes about the slippery slope we are on to becoming Britain.

What rapidly got out of hand was the comments thread following the article. Some people lacked any reading comprehension ability, not being able to differentiate between the neighbour’s complaint about the “offensive” Australian flag, and the bureaucratic pedantry about the siting of the flag pole. Comments are as posted on the website, I take no responsibility for any spelling, grammatical, factual or logical errors contained therein.

Good point Hebs and Stuart, The provocative headline creates a stir, with subtle racist tones. But then....we get a story about not conforming to planning guidelines. Can we just have the news without the manufactured hype, please.
Posted by: Lisa of Geelong 9:39am today Comment 110 of 289

If the media were more accurate in their reporting, we would all know the whole truth that the flag pole was offensive (rattling guide ropes etc) not the Flag!!
Posted by: BARRY WALKER of Gold Coast 9:38am today Comment 109 of 289

Its amazing how many people dont take the time to actually read the story but rather go on what the sensational headline reads . People, its all about the safety of the flagpole please read the full story.
Posted by: Karen 9:37am today Comment 108 of 289

Then we get the people who see the flag as a symbol of division rather than unity. These people completely miss the point that the Union Jack in the Australian flag is not a symbol of Anglo-Saxon superiority, but of a link to our national roots. By that I mean that we are a former British colony, and now a Constitutional Monarchy with HM QEII as Queen of Australia. We have a Westminster style Parliament and our legal system is based on the Common Law. The flag acknowledges that. These people (among many others I may add) don’t seem to get that.

Personally I find the Australian flag very offensive. It contains the Union Jack which is a symbol of slavery and I think it makes our immigrants / muslim friends feel uncomfortable.
Posted by: d of Sydney 9:24am today Comment 97 of 289

Slavery? Awesome! The Royal Navy sure did nothing about that! d of Sydney also obviously didn’t get the memo about not mentioning the “M” word.

There is an part of the Australian flag that too find offensive, the part with the Union Jack on it. We need to be an Direct Election Republic with a new accompanying flag.
Posted by: John Iurincich 10:29am today Comment 152 of 289

Flying the current Australian flag is hardly "patriotic" - I find it particularly disrespectful to our abORIGINAL owners who have suffered enormous social injustices UNDER that same flag people "proudly" wave. If anything, it should be a flag of shame and replaced with a modern 21st century flag which is inclusive of people from all lands and creeds.
Posted by: Steve 11:06am today Comment 179 of 289

The “abORIGINAL” people have a flag Steve, it is representative of a very small portion of our population and is exclusive and divisive. That still doesn’t take the moonbat award though, read on. The other meme that got a good airing was that to be a proud Australian is to be a racist. Given the current US Presidential race, I’m starting to think that racism is a term that morons use to fill the space between other words, a bit like a Tourette’s sufferer with no medical condition to excuse the behaviour

Is this just another media beat up to try and increase racism? I have been astonished at the number of storys like this lately that seem intent on causing rifts in communities. There has been numerous storys published and broadcast of the last couple of weeks that seem intent on causing resentment towards immigrants and other nations.
Posted by: aussie born and bred of melbourne 9:34am today Comment 106 of 289

It is offensive, because the message that it send is that some are more Australians than the others. I am hoping that is not also a racist gesture, given the abuse of flag in Cronulla riot.
Posted by: A. A. 9:35am today Comment 107 of 289

wonder if this man has been making racist remarks to others in his neighbourhood, and then put the flag up to make a point. In that case he was misusing the flag and what it stands for and therefore making it offensive. We don't seem to get both sides of the story here....
Posted by: Cee Cee of Sydney 9:50am today Comment 119 of 289

Nate of Woolongong takes both the Dale Carnegie and the Godwin’s prize for these two gems.

like being in the army is a real job COME ON! only if you have no skills and like killing poor people! fly that flag!!! be proud...
Posted by: Nate of Wollongong 10:44am today Comment 167 of 289

Richard,(Not me by the way, I didn’t wade into this quagmire) i pretty sure some jews found the Nazi flag offensive... and i'm pretty sure some PROUD germans said "love it or leave it"
Posted by: Nate of Wollongong 10:47am today Comment 169 of 289

Second place for utter moonbattery goes to Ginger for proposing that we surrender our own culture to accommodate those who have left other countries to embrace what Australia has to offer.

We live in a multi-cultural society and must respect the wishes of our new friends from other places of the world in our neighborhood. It's just a flag - take it down for the sake of community harmony.
Posted by: Ginger 10:58am today Comment 176 of 289

First place has to go to Sarah from Brisbane for mind-boggling naiveté.

Patriotism is overrated. If there were no military organisations there would be more war. If there were no political boundaries there would be no war. There is more that is needed but that would be a start. We're all human beings why fight, why cause feelings of disparity by raising a flag?
Posted by: Sarah of BNE 10:14am today Comment 138 of 289

Proud Australians all.

Foxymorons

2008-10-08T21:24:00.013+10:00

Military Intelligence is often cited as the default example of an oxymoron. Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon has bettered this example when discussing Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith’s recent pessimistic statements that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. According to The Australian, “Mr Fitzgibbon agreed the door should be open for political negotiations with Taliban moderates”. What differentiates a Taliban moderate from an extremist? Are they prepared to allow girls to go to school, but not allow them to learn? Will they fill soccer stadiums with crowds of jubilant Jihadists, line up all of the homosexuals, apostates, adulterers and women who have allowed a man other than their father or brother to see their face, and cut their heads of just a little bit?

A Taliban Moderate

Why, after nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan, when the Taliban are hiding in caves in the mountains, fleeing into Pakistan to evade coalition arse-whoopin’, and are splintered and disorganised, would the Australian Defence Minister be talking about a negotiated peace? The reason we went into Afghanistan in the first place was to oust a regime that had harboured Bin Liner and his cronies and provided them with a safe haven to train for and plan the September 11 attacks on the US. Are these the same “moderates” that the Defence Minister now thinks should be invited to the negotiation table to discuss their future role in the governance of Afghanistan?

The military will not provide a comprehensive victory in Afghanistan. There will be no triumphant parade through Kabul announcing the cessation of hostilities. Any workable peace for that troubled country must involve a political element. The Afghan people deserve a functioning political system that will provide the stability they need to begin the rebuilding process. There is no room in that political process for medieval thugs. To do so would only give them access again to political power, and Afghanistan would suffer for it.

Mother of all conspiracy theories

2008-10-06T21:49:00.000+10:00

There really is the most amazing stuff on the internet. I thought that this Flat Earth Forum was a bit of a piss-take initially. It even makes reference to the four elephants and a turtle of Discworld fame. It does seem to go quite in depth though. If they are having a lend, they’ve gone to a lot of effort. The premise seems to be that the Earth hurtles upward through space creating an inertial force that we call gravity. The Sun and the Moon orbit the Earth, and a giant ice wall in Antarctica keeps the ocean from falling off. Enjoy.

Sexism in naming conventions

2008-10-04T23:53:00.002+10:00

I had a little disagreement with a former teacher and “person who used to be in charge of a school” about grammar and naming conventions over at Blair’s. He took umbrage with my use of the word headmaster, and claimed that it was sexist. Now, when I went to school, an appointment with the Headmaster usually meant bad things. For the sake of disclosure, I went to an all male school. We had a sister school across town .They had a Headmistress with an equally cantankerous reputation. The respect that these two people engendered in the student body had nothing to do with the name of the title they held, but from the power and responsibility that came with the position.

On those occasions when both schools came together for social interaction, the boys didn’t sit in a corner and snigger that the Headmistress was a woman and therefore deserving of ridicule. We ran a mile to avoid confrontation with a successful and powerful woman who would see us for the lustful little teenagers intent on pushing our luck with the delightful girls in her charge that we were. So why then is a term for a respected position incompatible with modern language? What is the point of androgenising all language to obfuscate gender? In the PC world imposed upon us, terms and names that are gender specific have become outdated or even offensive in the drive to promote women as the equals of men. This seems to me to be a contradiction. Women are every bit men’s equals. Why then are we ashamed to promote the fact that a woman, rather than a man, might be involved in an endeavour?

Take for example, the use of the term chairperson. If a man holds that position, he is a chairman. If a woman holds the position, she is a chairperson. Why can’t she be a chairwoman? What is wrong with acknowledging the gender of the person who holds the position? The other one that annoys me is the use of the term actor for both male and female practitioners of that art form. What is wrong with identifying a female performer as an actress? I realise that in the early days of Hollywood, actresses were exploited. I also acknowledge the rationale behind the move for actresses to become actors in order to put themselves on equal footing with men. The problem is that changing language does not change reality. You could demand that I refer to dog shit as luxurious carpeting, but that doesn’t change my innate desire not to step in it. Now, I don’t mean that to infer that women are dog shit, quite the contrary. Women didn’t achieve better remuneration, conditions and recognition by changing the name of their job title. They did it by demanding those things and having the talent and dedication to back it up. Most of that was achieved whilst they were still calling themselves actresses. Adopting the masculine title didn’t make them better at their jobs, it just confused language. We now have categories of awards for best male and best female actor. If the move to a single title was a move towards an equal recognition of talent, why the two categories? Why not just have an Oscar for the best actor, regardless of gender?

All that is not to say that English is not an evolving language. There are words that quite rightly have been done away with. They are words that cannot be used in any other way than to invoke evil. The “N” word is an example of that, despite its continued use in it’s former target. Gender specific terms do not in themselves cast judgement or incite ill will. They can be used just as positively as they can be negatively. To consign them to the dustbin of history, along with thee and thou, only robs our language of accuracy and denies women the same right men have to be successful in their own right.

Crushing dissent

2008-10-02T22:37:00.003+10:00

I raised the issue of Gwen Ifill at the post at LP about the VP debate. After the screaming howler monkeys had thrown their poo, I thought I might actually be making inroads into the discussion. Apparently not, it seems there is no room in a thread about the VP debate to discuss the conflict of interest of the moderator, and it is really a forum to throw poo at Sarah Palin. My mistake.

Modern-Day Trafalgar

2008-10-02T19:10:00.002+10:00

It seems that it is Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson’s 250th birthday (h/t Blair), or at least it would have been if he hadn’t died at Trafalgar and then somehow managed to stay alive for 250 years. I’d love to claim credit for this, but it was an email. Enjoy.

Modern-Day Trafalgar

Nelson: "Order the signal, Hardy."
Hardy: "Aye, aye sir."
Nelson: "Hold on, that's not what I dictated to the signal officer. What's the meaning of this?"
Hardy: "Sorry sir?"
Nelson (reading aloud): "England expects every person to do his duty, regardless of race, gender, sexual
orientation, religious persuasion or disability". "What gobbledygook is this?"
Hardy: "Admiralty policy, I'm afraid, sir. We're an equal opportunities employer now. We had the devil's
own job getting 'England' past the censors, lest it be considered racist."
Nelson: "Gadzooks, Hardy. Hand me my pipe and tobacco."
Hardy: "Sorry sir. All naval vessels have been designated smoke-free working environments."
Nelson: "In that case, break open the rum ration. Let us splice the main brace to steel the men before
battle."
Hardy: "The rum ration has been abolished, Admiral. Its part of the Government's policy on binge
drinking."
Nelson: "Good heavens, Hardy. I suppose we'd better get on with it ..full speed ahead."
Hardy: "I think you'll find that there's a 4 knot speed limit in this stretch of water."
Nelson: "Damn it man! We are on the eve of the greatest sea battle in history. We must advance with all
dispatch. Report from the crow's nest please."
Hardy: "That won't be possible, sir."
Nelson: "What?"
Hardy: "Health and safety have closed the crow's nest, sir. No harness. And they said that rope ladder
doesn't meet regulations. They won't let anyone up there until a proper scaffolding can be erected."
Nelson: "Then get me the ship's carpenter without delay, Hardy."
Hardy: "He's busy knocking up a wheelchair access to the fo'c'sle Admiral."
Nelson: "Wheelchair access? I've never heard anything so absurd."
Hardy: "Health and safety again, sir. We have to provide a barrier-free environment for the differently
abled."
Nelson: "Differently abled? I've only one arm and one eye and I refuse even to hear mention of the word.
I didn't rise to the rank of admiral by playing the disability card."
Hardy: "Actually, sir, you did. The Royal Navy is under-represented in the areas of visual impairment
and limb deficiency."
Nelson: "Whatever next? Give me full sail. The salt spray beckons."
Hardy: "A couple of problems there too, sir. Health and safety won't let the crew up the rigging without
hard hats. And they don't want anyone breathing in too much salt - haven't you seen the adverts?"
Nelson: "I've never heard such infamy. Break out the cannon and tell the men to stand by to engage the
enemy."
Hardy: "The men are a bit worried about shooting at anyone, Admiral."
Nelson: "What? This is mutiny."
Hardy: "It's not that, sir. It's just that they're afraid of being charged with murder if they actually kill
anyone. There's a couple of legal-aid lawyers on board, watching everyone like hawks."
Nelson: "Then how are we to sink the Frenchies and the Spanish?"
Hardy: "Actually, sir, we're not."
Nelson: "We're not?"
Hardy: "No, sir. The Frenchies and the Spanish are our European partners now. According to the
Common Fisheries Policy, we shouldn't even be in this stretch of water. We could get hit with a claim for
compensation."
Nelson: "But you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil."
Hardy: "I wouldn't let the ship's diversity co-ordinator hear you saying that sir. You'll be up on
disciplinary."
Nelson: "You must consider every man an enemy, who speaks ill of your King."
Hardy: "Not any more, sir. We must be inclusive in this multicultural age. Now put on your Kevlar vest;
it's the rules. It could save your life"
Nelson: "Don't tell me - health and safety. Whatever happened to rum, sodomy and the lash?"
Hardy: As I explained, sir, rum is off the menu! And there's a ban on corporal punishment."
Nelson: "What about sodomy?"
Hardy: "I believe that is now legal, sir."
Nelson: "In that case ...kiss me, Hardy".

What bias? What conflict of interest?

2008-10-01T19:22:00.000+10:00

The moderator for the Vice-Presidential Debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden has been named. Gwen Ifill will be the “impartial” moderator for the event. Michelle Malkin investigates her impartiality, particularly in light of the fact that she has a book due to be released on 20 Jan 09, coincidentally the date of the inauguration of the next POTUS, called The Breakthrough – Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Would the author of such a book have any vested interest in seeing Senator Obama reciting the oath of office? Is there any way that there could be the slightest perception of bias against Governor Palin?

Family Guy is Rude! :o

2008-09-29T19:09:00.001+10:00

Foxtel is in trouble with the Australian Communications and Media Authority over an episode of Family Guy where the character “Death” has a sex with a dead girl. Way to keep up with the times! I’ve seen that episode at least four times, the first being several years ago. The scene in question is:

A) Animated
B) Not explicit
C) fucking old news!

Get a grip people. Foxtel don’t set the classification. If there was a problem with the episode, it should have been picked up when the program was originally classified, before it was aired. Why was that episode singled out? What about the one where Brian (the talking family dog) doesn’t pay his gambling debts and Stewie (a 1 y/o) beats him to within an inch of his life, shoots him, and sets him on fire? Or maybe they could whinge about the running gag that there is a predatory homosexual paedophile hunting Chris Griffin? If you are letting your kids watch Family Guy thinking that it is in any way good wholesome family entertainment, you’re a moron. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t let their kids watch it if that is the decision they make, but complaining about it afterwards is just weak. Make the decision and accept the consequences. I love Family Guy. That and American Dad are two of my favourite shows. Letting my kids watch it might be a different story. Sharpe Jr likes it, but then, to him it’s just bright colours on the screen. When he gets a bit older I might have to sacrifice it, but if I still choose to watch it with him in the room, that’s a decision I’ll make and I’ll live with the consequences. It is part of being a parent and being responsible for the upbringing of my child. Blaming someone else because I let him watch something a little risqué is abrogating that responsibility.

The death of Blogocracy

2008-09-26T21:25:00.001+10:00

A News Ltd Blog set up a couple of years ago to address a perceived imbalance in the Murdoch blogosphere, Blogocracy, sees its final post today. Host Tim Dunlop moves onto quieter pursuits. I would often peruse Dunlop’s site in my internet meanderings, mostly just for a chuckle. Dunlop did try very hard to maintain a balanced approach to his blog, with varying degrees of success. There were some quite insightful comments there from time to time. Mostly it was the usual howling at the moon from the rabid left. There were a number of characters there, much like there are at any blog I suppose. On the good side, there were some commenters who did daily battle with stupidity, and I admire their determination above anything else. There were also the clinically unhinged who were given a haven to vent their idiocy. To his credit, Dunlop catered very well to both, and I wish him all the best in whatever he decides to do from here. Just for the entertainment of it, for the sheer mindless, banshee-like ululation of a majority of his contributors; this was my favourite thread.

Australians in Afghanistan

2008-09-25T19:01:00.002+10:00

There is an excellent feature at News.com.au today on the Australian soldiers serving in Afghanistan. It is well worth a look.

Two New Navy Ships

2008-09-25T18:30:00.007+10:00

I can't claim credit for this, I got it as an email. Enjoy.

Two New Navy Ships
USS REAGAN

Seeing it next to the Arizona Memorial really puts its size into perspective... ENORMOUS!
When the Bridge pipes 'Man the Rail' there is a lot of rail to man on this monster: shoulder to shoulder, around 4.5 acres. Her displacement is about 100,000 tons with full complement.
Top speed exceeds 30 knots, powered by two nuclear reactors that can operate for more than 20 years without refuelling
1. Expected to operate in the fleet for about 50 years
2. Carries over 80 combat aircraft
3. Three arresting cables can stop a 28-ton aircraft going 150 miles per hour in less than 400 feet
Size
1. Towers 20 stories above the waterline
2. 1092 feet long; nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall
3. Flight deck covers 4.5 acres
4. 4 bronze propellers, each 21 feet across, weighing 66,200 pounds
5. 2 rudders, each 29 by 22 feet and weighing 50 tons
6. 4 high speed aircraft elevators, each over 4,000 square feet
Capability
1. Home to about 6,000 Navy personnel
2. Carries enough food and supplies to operate for 90 days
3. 18,150 meals served daily
4. Distillation plants provide 400,000 gallons of fresh water from sea water daily, enough for 2,000 homes
5. Nearly 30,000 light fixtures and 1,325 miles of cable and wiring 1,400 telephones
6. 14,000 pillowcases and 28,000 sheets
7. Costs the Navy approximately $250,000 per day for pier side operation
8. Costs the Navy approximately $25 million per day for underway operations (Sailor's salaries included).

HMAS KEVIN RUDD

The HMAS KEVIN RUDD (KRUD51) set sail today from its home port of Werribee Sewage Farm.

The ship is the first of its kind in the Navy and is a standing legacy to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd 'for his foresight in military budget cuts' and his conduct while holding the (formerly dignified) office of PM.
The ship is constructed nearly entirely from recycled aluminium and is completely solar powered with a top speed of 5 knots.
It boasts an arsenal comprised of one (unarmed) F18 Hornet aircraft which, although they cannot be launched on the 100 foot flight deck, form a very menacing presence.
As a standing order there are no firearms allowed on board.
This crew is specially trained to avoid conflicts and appease any and all enemies of Australian States and Territories at all costs.
An onboard Type One Universal Translator can send out messages of apology in any language to anyone who may find Australian’s offensive. The number of apologies is limitless and though some may seem hollow and disingenuous, the Navy advises all apologies will sound very sincere.
In times of conflict, the HMAS KEVIN RUDD has orders to seek refuge in China.

Child abuse or just plain old discipline?

2008-09-24T17:14:00.003+10:00

FOUR children were removed from their grandparents' care and put into separate foster homes, allegedly because the grandmother smacked one of them on the bottom after the child tried to climb into a drain.
The children had lived on and off with their grandparents for six years while their mother battled drug addiction. The children were removed in December by the NSW Department of Community Services (DOCS) and have been living in foster homes, separated from each other.
How much more trauma did these kids need to go through? Their mum is a battling drug addict, and then they are removed from the care of quite obviously loving family members because some people in our democracy disagreed with their opinions on child rearing and discipline.

Maybe I’m a little ignorant, but I don’t seem to recall the referendum on smacking. I also don’t have any clear memory of a significant High Court ruling declaring any corporal punishment as child abuse. My understanding of the issue was that it was still a parent/guardian's perogative to discipline a child in the manner they chose, so long as the discipline was not abusive.

The subjective word here, I guess, is abuse. What defines abuse? Is a smack on the bum for climbing into a drain abusive, or just good old fashioned parenting? DOCS have a very difficult job to do. For mine, that job could be a whole lot easier if they stopped focusing on moral crusades, and started addressing some real cases of child abuse.

Castro Fan Club

2008-09-22T23:01:00.001+10:00

Mrs Sharpe sometimes thinks I’m exaggerating when I talk about the blatant stupidity of papers like The Age and The Guardian. When I showed her this link however, she was as astounded as I was when I first read it. Have a read of Alice Walker’s reflections on Castro, the Kennedy’s, the current US Administration and the “chill of Global Warning”. Try not to laugh; the woman has a Pulitzer Prize.

H/T eeniemeenie at Blair’s

Culture Wars hit ADFA

2008-09-22T20:14:00.002+10:00

There has been quite a bit made of the views of a Prof Anthony Burke, a humanities lecturer at the Australian Defence Force Academy, and his spat with James Cook Uni’s Dr Merv Bendle. At the centre of this dispute is an article in Quadrant Magazine in which Dr Bendle claims that “On the question of terrorism, Burke declares that “our critical task is not to help power [that is, the USA] seek out and destroy the ‘enemies of freedom’ [that is, terrorists] but to question how they were constructed as enemies of ‘freedom’ [and how] we … might already be enemies of freedom in the very process of imagining and defending it”. As Burke’s use of scare-quotes indicates, he doubts that terrorists are enemies of freedom or that freedom has any particular value, while claiming that it is “we” who are its real enemies anyway. One wonders how students at the ADFA will feel if they are asked to place their lives on the line for Australia in Afghanistan, Iraq or in other battlegrounds in the war on terror.”

LP have picked up on this and are spinning it the way you would expect them to. It has also been discussed, vigorously, at Tim Blair’s, where yours truly may have gotten a little heated with one particular commenter.

At the crux of the issue is the juxtaposition between academic freedom in a tertiary institution and course material suitable for a military training establishment. ADFA is both. The easy solution is that Burke is a numpty and has no place attempting to fill the heads of young Officer Cadets with ludicrous ideas that will run in opposition to tasks and missions they will likely be required to achieve in real time, in an environment of significant threat, with the lives of subordinates dependant on their decisions.

That might be too easy an answer though. Is it better to expose these potential commanders to all of Burke’s batty theories in the safety and comfort of the academy in Canberra, so that they can be calmly and rationally discounted before they ever step foot in front of real soldiers/airmen/sailors. I do think that Officer Cadets are certainly clever enough to see through such naiveté, and form their own opinion. Failing that, six months in a battalion will certainly shake the cobwebs from their heads before they face the problem for real.

All that said; is the idea of academic freedom appropriate for a military training institution? Servicemen sacrifice many of the freedoms and privileges they are sworn to protect. It comes with the job. They are also certainly not insulated from such opinions. A night out in Civic will expose a young cadet to the full gamut of Canberra’s fruitloop fringe. Do they also need to be exposed to it in the academic environment where the expectation will be that they will have to parrot these idiocies to pass the course?

In the end, the Culture Wars will not be won or lost on the campus at ADFA. Those young officers who may be taken in by Burkes proselytising, will be quickly disabused of those notions in the real world. Perhaps the question that needs to be asked is not whether this subject matter is appropriate for Officer Cadets, but whether a proponent of ideas so naive is a suitable lecturer for educated and intelligent young Australians.

Kevin Rudd: Let's work as a team and do it my way

2008-09-19T19:51:00.010+10:00

An offer of bipartisan economic management from the opposition:

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I am offering Kevin Rudd today, with my deputy Julie Bishop with me here today, we are offering to Kevin Rudd to sit down with him and speak and co-operate in a bipartisan way on the measures that can be undertaken in the very near term to provide greater stability and security in our economy and our financial markets

A rebuttal that proves that to Kevin Rudd, bipartisanship means my way or the highway:

KEVIN RUDD: If there is to be an act of bipartisanship, it can start very close to here. About 100 metres or so that way and slightly over there - it is called the Senate. $6-billion worth of bipartisanship. I noticed that someone said this morning that $6-billion actually wasn't much money.Can I say, it is. If you want, for example, to fund long term reform of pensions and of retirement incomes policy in Australia, $6-billion is not a piece of loose change - it is a lot of money. So a good test of bipartisanship is unblock the budget measures in the Senate.

Essentially, let us do what we want. Don’t provide meaningful opposition, and we’ll be happy to treat you as collaborators.

Try and figure this one out

2008-09-19T19:51:00.008+10:00

An anti-globalisation group in Sweden is blaming the decline in women’s rights in Europe on religious extremism and neo-liberalism.

Ms Bekkouche said that across Europe, both "immigrant women and local women face the same problems amid the rise of religious extremism and neo-liberalism".

"The Swedish authorities and politicians have a lot of respect for religions and traditions and they think it's not possible to criticise Islam,"

They claim that the trend began with the ascension of the centre-right right government in Sweden.

He linked the decline in women's rights in Sweden in part to the centre-right government's arrival in power in 2006.

"The conservatives have more power now. There are more religious schools than five or 10 years ago (and) they get (state) subsidies. I am worried because I see a backlash on the ground," said Mr Ghasemiani, who has lived in Sweden for 24 years.

So, in a nutshell; women’s rights in Europe are eroding because of neo-liberalism and the fact that criticism of Islam is not tolerated. This is the fault of a centre-right conservative government in Sweden.

When is bagging a terrorist not as good a thing as it seems?

2008-09-19T19:51:00.004+10:00

It seems the crew at LP are tying themselves in knots over the fact that Howard’s evil anti-terrorism laws have actually bagged a bad guy. The quote of the day goes to a poster called Francis Xavier Holden for this little gem:

From what I saw somewhere about rescources (sic) devoted to the case I worked out that it consumed at least 10 person years of work (10 x F/T persons) just for surveliience (sic) etc.

Person years? Priceless.

F-111 Senate Inquiry closes

2008-09-19T19:51:00.001+10:00

A good mate of mine still suffers from symptoms linked to his time in the RAAF working on F-111s. Hopefully something comes of the findings of the Senate Inquiry.

Snappy Headline

2008-09-18T18:49:00.003+10:00

“Chair-sniffer becomes state treasurer” bellows the headline in News Ltd’s online service News.com.au. Now, there’s nothing factually wrong with that statement, it just seems that to distill Troy Buswell’s entire life and/or political experience into a stupid scandal panders to the lowest and most trivial readers. Let’s face it, it really was pretty dumb to go and sniff a chair. That said, imagine having to stand in front of news cameras and apologise to the whole nation (there was no way that little gem was going to be contained to the Western Australian audience), with your wife by your side for behaviour like that. There would certainly have been a temptation to run out of the press conference with a jumper over your head and spend the rest of your living days working as an insurance salesman in Uzbekistan.

I think Troy Buswell got the raw end of the deal though when it comes to perpetual character tarnish for scandalous or just plain dumb behaviour. I seem to recall a day in November last year when every paper in the country ran banner headlines the proclaimed “Ear-wax eater wins election!” No? Let’s check what News Ltd said, “Kevin Rudd to be Australia's next PM”. OK, how about Fairfax? They’re usually good for a nasty little barb. “Rudd romps to historic win”. Nope. Not there either.

The journalistic profession in this country is sliding. The ABC fought a vicious rear-guard action during the Howard years to maintain their ideological bias, and now that they are free from the evil hand of their former conservative masters, they can indulge in their indoctrination of Australian audiences. The commercial media are little better. At the time of posting, the headline on News.com.au was a story about the weight problems of American actresses. Fairfax are much the same, only they are openly transparent when it comes to their political allegiances.

The chair-sniffer headline is symptomatic of the decline of Australian journalism to the standards better known in the Fleet St gutter press.

It is really little wonder that more people are turning to the internet and blogs for their news.

The Age is at it again

2008-09-17T21:57:00.005+10:00

According to Bolta, Catherine Deveny is not a well woman. If it was only speculation before, I think this nails it. A key phrase that describes not only Deveny’s view of politics, but by extension and reputation, that of The Age, is this line “I believe in democracy. As long as everybody else votes the same way I do.” The truly sad part is that whether or not the reports of Ms Deveny’s health are true, The Age still saw fit to print that. My mother-in-law reads that paper. I think there's something in that for all of us, don't you?.........

The regional balance of power

2008-09-17T19:08:00.004+10:00

This caught my eye about a week ago. Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, believes that an increase in Australia’s defence spending will initiate an arms race regionally.

We're going to make them divert even more money from their own societies into an arms race," Senator Brown said

He said Mr Rudd he should be spending more on alleviating poverty in the region."It is Cold War rhetoric and we ought to be instead improving the neighbourhood relations and helping our region tackle climate change disasters and poverty."

That is what passes for rational thought in the Greens? I’m sure that India, China and North Korea are madly trying to curb their defence budgets, but those pesky Australians keep getting new toys!

“If only the Australians would halt their relentless rush into regional military hegemony so that we can slow our own spending” an inside source in the Chinese Politburo told me over steamed pork buns in The Valley yesterday. “We would have given up this communist game years ago if it wasn’t the only way of working the people to death to pay for a standing army of 2.5 million men just to protect the country’s sovereignty from an overtly militarist Australia. They have Abrahms now.” he added sagely and apprehensively.

North Korea have also embarked on a plan of massive military build up following the threat of an increase in Australian capability. Their recent attempts to build an atomic weapon were, in fact, an attempt to gain the upper hand in this increasingly bitter regional arms race. This was reinforced by a spokesman for North Korea’s “Dear Leader” recently, when answering criticism of his government’s failure to halt a massive nationwide famine. “We would have provided food for the people, but we were so dammed worried about a 3% p/a increase in Australia’s defence budget, that we just couldn’t risk it.”

Not only are the Chinese and North Koreans quietly shitting themselves, the Indonesians have recently ordered SU-27 and SU-30s to deal with the threat of a “shock and awe” style air battle with an expansionist Australia as soon as they take delivery of the 24 Super Hornets planned for next year (or 2010 or maybe later, who knows really?). They are well aware of the mood in Australia in regard to Schappelle Corby, and are adamant that they will deny any military incursion into Indonesian territory to affect a rescue.

Other regional powers seem less concerned. New Zealand is actively encouraging an increase in Australian defence spending. They hope to be able to do away with the NZDF entirely by 2015 at currently projected rates.

PNG is keeping a watchful eye over developments in the Solomon Islands and Tonga, both of which have been subdued by single Australian infantry battalions in recent years. Whilst a recent move to establish an eighth regular battalion in the ADF was met with concern, they have realised that it really only takes one, so why fret about eight?

Whilst India is accelerating military spending, they have acknowledged that it is slightly ludicrous to be forking out such a massive percentage of GDP to protect themselves from a ravenous Australia, only to hand over an even bigger proportion to have Australian cricketers play in their domestic competition.

First Target - Malcolm Turnbull

2008-09-16T22:45:00.004+10:00

It worries me that the former head of the Australian Republican Movement is now the leader of the opposition. He is now charged with the responsibility of providing an alternate viewpoint to our social engineer government. Given that his cause de jour prior to entering representative politics was the formation of an Australian Republic, and our current government’s enthusiasm to discard the inherently separated nature of our head of state and legislature, who now is the voice of the majority of Australians who rejected this very issue in referendum in 1999?

Update I

Turnbull claims that he will not support a new referendum until the reign of the current monarch is ended. Her Majesty is now the oldest reigning British monarch ever. How long do we have before an Australian public, gullible enough to elect Comrade Kev, will again have this issue forced upon them with all of the requisite emotive symbolism they seem so keen to embrace?

Sharpe's Sortie

2008-09-16T21:56:00.002+10:00

Man the battlements and raise the portcullis, Sharpe sorties forth! With bayonets fixed and swords drawn, let’s see where this adventure takes us.