PCGolden Girls Of The ADF

Even Agatha Christie couldn’t come up with this.  A plot which includes a man who demands to be called a woman; abusive conduct; hush money; Australian Of The Year nominations; anti-Australian Navy Captain; reward for misconduct; Army chief’s hypocrisy and a Defence Minister’s unhinged compliment.

In my humble opinion, of the two women hailed as the ADF’s ‘Golden Girls’, many might very well view one of them as a vindictive, abusive pretend-woman and the other an anti-Australian Muslim, both of whom appear epic failures when judged by past military standards.

Malcolm “Call Me Cate” McGregor was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Australian Army when he decided to be known as a woman. He didn’t undergo any surgery that would complete the transformation. Oh no, he simply started wearing dresses and demanded that he be recognised as a woman. The warm, fuzzy, tolerant and inclusive PC indoctrinated ADF chiefs fell all over themselves complying with his demands.

Let’s get to the truth about “Call Me Cate”. He admits that he has male chromosomes and says he is not a woman but he feels like a woman trapped in a man’s body so there—a woman is born. He was one who appeared to be cheering on the sacking of Major Bernard Gaynor by that other ADF PC-driven, David Hurley. McGregor couldn’t leave it at that and launched an extraordinary attack on Bernard Gaynor’s father who McGregor claimed had defective DNA.  Laughable really. Here is a bloke who thinks he is a woman criticising someone else’s DNA? Fair dinkum!

It may not have been because of this but after Lieutenant Colonel McGregor was “counselled”, McGregor was transferred to the RAAF and immediately rewarded with a substantial promotion to Group Captain and nominated to be Australian Of The Yea, while Gaynor Snr was further ridiculed by the ADF command because he refused to see McGregor as a woman. He was offered $25,000 to keep his mouth shut.

To understand part two of the ADF Golden Girls saga we take a look at the double standards and gross hypocrisy of retired Army Chief David Morrison as explained by Bernard Gaynor: “In other words, the former Chief of Army gained accolades for ‘respecting women’ by reading the words of a person who thinks that men can be just as female as the ladies. He then talked tough about ruthlessly ridding the Army of abusers, only to do nothing about the abuser who was standing right next to him – McGregor – who, shortly after writing that speech, decided to abuse my father.”

Captain Mona Shindy, RAN, Muslim. Mona Shindy for two years had control of an official Twitter account, @NavyIslamic, and during that time abused the privilege by using such account as her personal political pro-Islamic advertising agent.

Looking at the account it appears that Mona Shindy enjoyed complete independence in her role as RAN Islamic advisor and used the account as a personal billboard to broadcast the word of Islam either with the tacit approval of the brass or while they were drunk at the helm.

In March 2015 Captain Shindy gave a presentation to the Royal United Services Institute of New South Wales which, when avoiding PC speak translated to:

    The media was to blame for Islamic violence.

    Armed Jihad is justified.

    The Hijab is required by the Quran making it Sharia compliant.

    Islamic women aren’t oppressed despite FGM, stoning etc.

    Islamic extremism is our fault.

    The Western world is responsible for Sunni/Shia conflict.

    It is our fault that Muslim youth can’t get ahead in our society.

    If we thought like Muslims instead of Westerners then violence wouldn’t look like terrorism.

    Charlie Hedbo is our fault.

    Let’s just forget about 9/11 and the World Trade Centre.

    There is no problem with Jihad, the problem is us.

    If we were nicer to Muslims then terrorism would go away.

    We need to talk about terrorism but don’t mention Islamic State.

    The government needs to build more Mosques and employ more Imams to promote Islam

    Muslim’s victim mentality is justified.

Furthermore, Captain Shindy used the @NavyIslamic Twitter account to:

    Mock our former PM, Tony Abbott.

    Celebrate Tony Abbott’s knifing.

    Criticise our involvement in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

    Back the Grand Mufti’s flawed response to the Paris Terrorist attack.

   Attacked the ALA political party as being an ill-informed fringe group.

Despite her less than satisfactory conduct and her open anti-Australian political tweets she is to be rewarded by sending her to the Defence Strategic Studies Centre to do a Masters degree in, of all things, politics and policy. Ain’t that a doozy?

Just like the Malcolm “Call Me Cate” McGregor farce, there is an ‘Add Insult To Injury’ clause. Provisional Defence Minister Marise Payne (temporarily on training wheels) says that Captain Shindy is an “outstanding Australian” and that “She has served the country with distinction”. Payne, who is obviously not an big fan of reality, went on to say that the RAN is to continue developing an “effective and engaging” social media strategy and Defence was committed to increasing cultural diversity among serving members to better reflect Australian society.

Government/ADF policy, as confirmed by Marise Payne, is now geared to reward abusive and anti-Australian behaviour with praise for the blatant disregard of regulations while promoting offenders and resorting to bribing complainants to keep their mouth shut.

This means we are to see even more of this politically correct lunacy from the Minister, Defence bureaucrats and the ADF command according to Marise Payne who would be better suited to be Minister of Koolaide Distribution to Politicians.

And all with the full knowledge and consent of (and direction?) of PM Waffler himself.

SOURCE






Neo-puritans strive to find offence — anywhere

With January 2016 ticked off the calendar, it’s worth reflecting how the past month has provided a window into the mindset of a burgeoning class of sanctimonious neo-puritans.

A few weeks back, West Indies cricketer Chris Gayle was just about run out of the country after an interview with a female sports presenter where he said: “Hopefully, we can win this game and have a drink after. Don’t blush baby.” Social media went nuts. The media, talkback, feminists went equally manic that Gayle would dare to flirt on camera.

The cricketer apologised the very next day. But that made no difference to the remonstrating neo-puritans. The batting legend was ­labelled a sexist and a creep, his club fined him $10,000, Cricket Australia boss James Sutherland said Gayle’s on-camera flirting was “completely out of line and inappropriate”. “It’s very, very public,” Sutherland said.

A few weeks later, NRL player Mitchell Pearce was caught on a smartphone video behaving like a drunken buffoon at a private party. But privacy made no difference to the censorious neo-puritans. Public lapse in judgment? Private indiscretion? The boundaries keep moving. There but for the grace of God go I has become there but for the grace of an iPhone go all of us. Pearce clumsily tried to kiss a woman who quickly rebuffed him. So he stopped. The half-back then simulated a dopey, jokey sex act on a dog. He urinated on a couch. Dumb and dumber.

But in the minds of the neo-­puritans, there is no room for boofheads anymore. Pearce is a villain. End of story. And villains must be publicly shamed. So there’s endless talk of fines and penalties, contracts cancelled, ­careers over, rehab and counselling. Pearce has left the country. I am deeply uncomfortable to find myself on roughly the same side of the argument as Peter FitzSimons.

But here’s where the Red Bandanna and I part ways. The progressive set that FitzSimons surely calls home is to blame for the rise of the holier than thou neo-puritanism that has tried to destroy Pearce. Australia’s self-appointed moral guardians are having a ­heyday doing what they do so often: dividing the world into victims and villains. But can it really be that simple? There is something truly disturbing about the refusal by these self-appointed moralisers to make room for a few boofheads, be they drunk or flirtatious.

To be sure, no one should celebrate stupidity. Pearce behaved badly. He has to account for that. But the obsession to label every misdemeanour or error of judgment as a sure sign of bad character points to a deeper malaise infecting our society. This false ­dichotomy of victims and villains is creating a sterile, puritanical world where even minor mistakes of judgment are pathologised as serious moral misdeeds.

Witness the weird explosion of academic literature and campus chatter about so-called micro-assaults, micro-aggressions, micro-insults, micro-invalidations and so on and so forth. So you’ve picked up a copy of Hustler magazine and looked at a naked woman? That makes you a perpetrator of “micro-insults” — and a villain. Prefer to be colourblind to race so you don’t define people by their colour? That makes you a perpetrator of micro-invalidations — and a villain. You’d think that the very mention of “micro” points to how trifling this all is. Not in the eyes of the neo-naggers, who can find wrongdoing anywhere they look.

And it’s not hard to trace how we ended up in this realm of the utterly ridiculous. The misguided taxonomy between villains and victims was given a fillip once feelings entered the realm of human rights laws. Once an offending word here or an insulting word there attracted the heavy hand of the law, victimhood became a booming business. And given that victimhood works as a political philosophy only if there are villains, it’s not surprising then that Western modernity is stretching at the seams with newfangled classes of victims and villains.

You’re a Catholic archbishop from Tasmania who produces a pamphlet that defends the trad­itional definition of marriage that has not only existed for millennia but remains the law of the land? Most would think this is a complete non-story within a healthy democracy where freedom of speech and religion are basic rights. Wrong. Under the hectoring neo-puritanism, the law allows anyone offended by that pamphlet to claim victimhood status and, hey presto, the archbishop and his church are cast as villains by a human rights bureaucracy only too willing to play along.

We seem to have reached the point where every transgression from the norm now demands either a victim or villain label. There’s no room for plain difference or straight stupidity any more. And the victim/villain ­dichotomy has reached into ­absurd places when Gayle and Pearce were cast as villains even where there were no victims.

Neither Gayle nor Pearce broke any law. The police were not called. There was no harm done, as John Stuart Mill would have concluded.

The 19th century English philosopher best explained the no harm principle when he said “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

Mill was addressing the importance of individual liberty in the face of state control. These days, the preachy neo-puritans imagine they are the state, imposing their judgments, wrecking reputations and careers because they have identified a villain even where there is no victim. No harm no longer matters to the neo-puritans. The principles that helped drive liberty have been upended.

Last week, the honchos who hand out Australia Day awards tried to further cement the victims and villains narrative into our national psyche when they picked David Morrison as Australian of the Year.

Morrison, a military man, is not regarded as an extraordinary soldier. So why did he get the gong? He gave one famous speech about victims of discrimination (a speech written by his then speechwriter, Cate McGregor, who transitioned from a man to a woman a few years ago).

You might have thought that upon receiving the award, Morrison would defend this great nation, maybe explaining the importance of being committed to Western values such as individual liberty and so on. Wrong again. Morrison’s Australia Day speech was replete with dark talk of victims and villains.

Not surprisingly, those who have fallen for this false dichotomy have bequeathed hero status on Morrison.

Those of us who see through the victim and villain ­baloney see a man of mediocre achievement given an award he didn’t deserve. And his paean to progressive causes is a reminder of how far we have fallen as a proud nation.

The lionisation of Morrison and the concomitant destruction of Pearce suggest it’s high time we did more to keep in check the rapacious colonisation of our communities by the neo-puritans. After all, the freedom to be a boofhead is the other side of the liberty coin.

SOURCE






A battery for the home comes to Australia

And it ONLY costs $12,000.00 -- so is not for the average Joe.  It would appear to be a modified version of Tesla's car battery so is not new technology.  Lithium-ion batteries are common in consumer electronics.

The Powerwall, a lithium-ion battery system designed to store electricity generated from rooftop solar panels, is widely considered to be a game-changer for the electricity industry. 7.30 has asked consumer group Choice to crunch the numbers. Here's what they found.

While the concept of a home battery storage system is not new to Australians, the Tesla Powerwall unit has been highly anticipated.

The Powerwall is a 7 kilowatt hour (kWh) lithium-ion-battery system that stores electricity generated from rooftop solar panels (or PV panels) during the day so that electricity can be used at night during the peak-usage times.

The system has attracted a cult-like following in recent months after the announcement that Australia would be one of the first countries to have access to it.

The first installations of the Tesla Powerwall are now underway and have a 10-year warranty period.

How does it work?

The battery has a daily cycle, meaning it is designed to charge and discharge each day.

The efficiency of the battery is 92 per cent, so although it has a 7kWh capacity, the Powerwall's working capacity is more like 6.4kWh.

Tesla also has a 10kWh weekly cycle version intended for back-up applications, but it is the 7kWh version you will see in most home installations.

People who already have solar panels will be able to use their own power rather than exporting it to "the grid" — the energy distribution network that carries electricity from power stations to homes and businesses.

One of the Australian providers of the Powerwall, Natural Solar, says that there are only two inverters currently on the market which are compatible with the Powerwall, so most existing solar panel owners will need to obtain a new inverter.

If you do not already have solar panels, the Powerwall can be purchased as part of a complete system that includes solar panels and an inverter.

You will need a solar array large enough to power both your home and charge the Powerwall — for most homes that would mean at least a 4kWh array.

How much does it cost?

If you already have solar panels, the Powerwall and a compatible inverter will cost you between $12,000 and $12,500 depending on which inverter you choose.

Energy companies are selling Powerwall packages for between $13,990 and $16,500 (GST inclusive) and with consideration to rebates for small-scale technology certificates (STCs).

Is the Powerwall big enough to take my house off the grid?

It depends on your energy needs and the number of people in living in your household, but a 7kWh battery is not going to be enough to make most households independent of the electricity grid.

It is possible to install two or more battery units to increase your storage capacity.

SOURCE






Australia 'well equipped' to deal with Zika

As the devastating impacts of Zika virus hit Latin America, Australia is preparing for a potential outbreak.

Health authorities have linked the virus, which in itself is only a mild disease, to microcephaly - which prevents foetus' brains from developing properly.

There is no vaccine, and if a pregnant woman contracts the disease there is a chance their baby could be born with the rare and debilitating condition.

The same species of mosquito that spreads Zika, Aedes, is also found in Far North Queensland, but health authorities say there is little chance of the area suffering a similar outbreak.

Expert on mosquito-borne viruses Dr Cameron Webb spoke to Sky News about the likelihood of an outbreak in Far North Queensland, and said the state is well equipped to deal with the virus.

'We're very fortunate that the authorities in Far North Queensland have a lot of experience dealing with these small outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases.

'Exactly the same mosquito that spreads dengue fever in Far North Queensland is the species that's spreading Zika virus'.

He said the only threat is if a traveller comes into the area and infects local mosquitoes - but even then it is likely it would be contained.

'Authorities already have strategic framework in place so they can respond, so any outbreak is likely to be very minor.'

However, Dr Webb has warned any women who are pregnant, or who are planning to get pregnant, to avoid regions experiencing the outbreak.

He said if women can't delay their trips they need to take precautions.

'If you are travelling to these areas, if you are a man or a woman, pregnant or not, you should be using mosquito repellants to provide the best protection against these mosquitoes that may be transmitting Zika virus in South and Central America.'

SOURCE