Slattsnews

In this time of loss and sadness it’s a comfort to know that loved ones remain to give us joy and comfort. Judy loved this pair almost as much as her own.

With great sadness we farewell the lovely, funny, adventurous, kind and generous Judy O’Toole, who passed away early today after a courageous, uncomplaining battle with that dastardly disease.
We are all better people for having known and loved her.

Getting sucked in on a massive scale:

Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole with about 4 million times the mass of our sun, has trapped a giant cloud of gas and dust in its huge gravitational field and is pulling it inexorably inwards, at about 8 million km/h.

Tony Abbott doesn’t have to worry about putting his foot in his mouth. He’s got dishonest opponents only too willing to do it for him.
Abbott made this perfectly reasonable point in defending his paid parental leave scheme:

We do not educate women to higher degree level to deny them a career. If we want women of that calibre to have families, and we should, we have got to give them a fair dinkum chance to do so,” he said. “That is what this scheme of paid parental leave is all about. It is long overdue. I am proud that the Coalition has come swiftly into the 21st century where this is concerned.”

Whining, dishonest politicians from the Left interpreted this as a slight on women judged as not of high calibre. At least, I think that’s what they’re saying. It’s hard to understand the grievous Left as they seem to grizzle on so many fronts.

Blind Freddy, Arthur or Martha, Snowy on the trams or Blowie the dunnyman could have predicted this. For nothing.

A new British study of 18 to 30-year-olds finds thousands still expect their parents to do the most basic chores for them, from laundry to shopping to doing up their flats. Almost half regularly get their parents to give them a lift, a third have their washing done and more than a quarter have asked their parents to help them find a job.

What the hell do academics and educationists think the word “spoil” means?

Mixed fortunes at yesterday’s Warrnambool Cup meeting where I backed the Cup winner. My collect paid the admission fee and provided stake for a red-hot tip in the last. Alas, it finished down the track so I went home no poorer or richer than when I arrived. Bit like dancing with your sister. Regrettably, I let an omen quinella slip by. First and second in the fourth at Newcastle were Christian Brother and Ball Boy.

Henry Ergas employs a fine turn of phrase to describe the schmozzle overseen by Treasurer Wayne Swan:

Deconstructing Swan’s arguments is as challenging as picking a dead man’s wallet. Shop-worn tropes go round and round, like unclaimed bags on an airport carousel: Labor is the party of opportunity, a sentiment to which Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald and John Maitland are presumably living testimony; Tony Abbott, accused of every possible malfeasance short of starting a leprosy pandemic, would destroy what this country retains of good and true; and only Swan and his colleagues stand between Tony Abbott’s Visigoths and the “fair go”.

Swan has to spout bulldust, he’s got no other choice. Ergas points out that he was beaten at his own game before the first siren blew.

Expressed in prose as riveting as elevator music, Swan’s claims are unsullied by evidence. The inconvenient fact that the Howard government made greater inroads on inequality and did far more to spread prosperity is simply ignored; instead, taking the dream-to-reality ratio to new heights, Swan focuses on the glories ahead thanks to the National Broadband Network, the Gonski spending and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

By any stretch, this is astonishing news:

He told his audience: “So, let me make this perfectly clear. The Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, is under investigation by police. This is fact. I hadn’t planned to add to what I said yesterday out of respect for the detectives on the case. But if the Prime Minister’s office wants to deny she’s being investigated, as has been reported last night and today, then I will once again correct that record. Now it needs to be pointed out that the Prime Minister and her office mightn’t know she’s being investigated. But I know it. And others do too. The detectives are investigating three individuals and one of them is Julia Gillard. Prime Minister, you may not know this, but you are currently being investigated by the Fraud and Extortion Squad of the Victoria Police Force.”

Hedley Thomas would like to know why the ABC has virtually ignored this serious matter and the critical fact that for months the PM’s office denied the police investigation had anything to do with Gillard.

Reckon this will be the most discussed subject at Geelong district footy matches and in local bars today.

A former AFL footballer has been remanded in custody this afternoon, after being arrested outside the Corio Village shopping centre this morning.
Corio man William Lindsay Nicholls has been charged over a shooting at North Shore in January this year, which left a man with serious injuries.
The 32 year-old has also been charged in relation to a shooting at Corio in June last year.
He is better known as Bill Nicholls, who played 16 matches for the Hawks and Tigers between 2001 and 2004.

George Jones leaves a marvellous legacy, not the least the amazement of his fans that he survived this long.
Once, George was supposed to be drying out when he was pulled over for driving a ride-on mower erratically on a public road. When it was put to him that he was not supposed to drink alcohol, George countered that he wasn’t imbibing booze, just beer.

GEORGE Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic He Stopped Loving Her Today, has died. He was 81.

Take heart fans. One of George’s early hits was Ain’t No Grave Deep Enough.

Grandson has just turned one and has gone from a baby to a (mostly) happy little boy.

Is it any wonder kids are getting dumber? Consider some of the idiots running educational institutions:

Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have filed a civil rights lawsuit against a Chicago public school district on behalf of a second-grade teacher who was suspended after he displayed garden-variety tools such as wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers in his classroom as part of a “tool discussion” in his class.

Good thing ABC studios are sound-proofed. Else po-faced ABC commentators who clearly know little about recent AFL results would be drowned out by the laughter of a million footy fans.
Cellar-dwellers Melbourne on performance enhancing drugs? The hapless Demons?!!! If so, someone should be demanding their money back.

Texting should be like farting: Do it in private and only when necessary, certainly not when someone is speaking to you. But that would be showing good manners and respect which take a back seat in schools these days to self-esteem promotion. They may be ignorant little bastards but they sure feel good about themselves.

A judge in Oregon noticed an unexpected glow on a juror’s chest while the courtroom lights were dimmed during video evidence in an armed-robbery trial.
The juror, it seemed, was texting.

Hopefully, authorities are closing in on whoever’s responsible for today’s Boston atrocity:

Boston police and a cadre of federal officials descended on an Ocean Avenue apartment complex in Revere last night.
In addition to two Boston Police K-9 units and a bomb squad unit, a large contingent of federal agents from the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as Homeland Security investigations and state police had assembled at the two buildings.

UPDATE:
Major breakthrough.

When I first heard the story about Frank Packer adding “Hooray” to the Daily Telegraph’s front page banner announcing Stalin’s death, I recall feeling a little disconcerted. Perhaps my religious upbringing had the monster burning in hell, thus a crass display of grave-dancing seemed a little superfluous. Anyway, such sentiments say a lot more about the utterer than the attacked.
However, it could be argued that Stalin, who slaughtered tens of millions, deserved every condemnation in life and death for his barbarity.
Not so, Margaret Thatcher. The vehemence from the Left since her death has been disgraceful, compared with their silence following the passing of tyrants like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Chavez.
Did Thatcher force famine on millions? Drive generations of intellectuals into exile? Establish Killing Fields? Deny political opposition?
No, she merely realised and convinced plenty of rational followers that it was unsustainable to keep paying miners $1000 a week to produce $500 worth of coal. She was also an early adapter to the maxim that socialism is OK until you run out of other people’s money to spend.
Many Australians detested ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser for any number of reasons. And early in his leadership he expressed views similar to those of Thatcher at that time. Anyone remember “No such thing as a free lunch” or “life wasn’t meant to be easy”?
But when Fraser passes, I doubt we’ll hear of celebrations and street parties. I’d like to think Australians are too fair-minded to indulge in such ugly acts.
I guess Britain’s old Left-driven class-hatred still permeates some pockets of the nation.
All these haters – many of them not born when Thatcher ruled – bring shame on their rejuvenated nation.
UPDATE:
Gerard Henderson nails the Thatcher haters’ hypocrisy:

Thatcher’s death has ushered in a moment of fool-headedness among the left. Eco-catastrophists, who warn about global warming, have condemned Thatcher for presiding over the closing of dirty and inefficient coal mines in northern England and Wales in the 1980s. Yet it was these closures which made it possible for Britain to meet its emission targets under the Kyoto agreement.
Then there are the leftists who have depicted Thatcher as a war-monger because in 1982 she refused to accept the invasion of the Falkland Islands, which is British territory, by Argentina. This despite the fact that, at the time, Argentina was ruled by a corrupt right-wing junta.

Remember when the smartest of young people predominated at university. Now, thanks to the long march through academia, you must be a gold-plated moron to advance politically at our unis. This from Bolta’s blog:

Honi Soit has been given an exclusive and extraordinary list of grievances … detailing [the Sydney branch’s] reasons for splitting from NLS. They include…:
– The refusal of the National Caucus to speak out against forced female genital mutilation, due to cultural relativism.
– A prominent member of the caucus, now a National Office Bearer, who believes in ‘headmates’ – other identities that occupy your body, and can claim different ethnicities or sexualities, thus allowing you to join an autonomous caucus (for instance queer or women’s) you were not otherwise entitled to join.
– A prominent member denouncing “logic,” “rationality,” and economics as tools used by males to subjugate women.
– A debate in National Caucus about dating preferences: some members stated that racial dating preferences is entirely racist, another criticised those who dated based on attractiveness, and one person even stated that dating based on the sex of the other is discriminatory.
– The judgment that the term ‘cut’ – as in, ‘cut me from the speaking list’ – was a word likely to trigger traumatic flashbacks and could not be used at all.

This removes any doubt that minor bureaucrats make up the most interfering, petty, greedy, counter-productive, bullying sub-strata in Australian society:

NICHOLAS Zisti thought he’d get into the Australia Day spirit by decorating the family cafe in patriotic colours – so the City of Sydney hit him with $5000 in fines.

Well, it is the season of resurrection.

A PROSTITUTE in Zimbabwe ‘died’ during a hotel romp with a client – only to come back to life as her body was being put in a coffin.

Here’s to happiness and for those so inclined, blessings, for Easter among those who sail on this blogship.