Post from Twitter comparing the Kuwaiti pilot to Tom Cruise's character from Top Gun

From the cursed site:

Merchant marine captain (UK), Rear Admiral (USA).

PVO is the right-wing example of the "spoils system" that plagues Australian academia (Nareen Young and Bill Shorten are Labor versions on what we might call "the left wing"). Political hacks granted prestigious academic positions (professor/dean/vice-chancellor) without any relevant experience.

Optimistic statement that they "want to change the country".

This is probably on their top 10 priority list, but the top 2 priorities are #1 Stay in Power and #2 Reward Labor mates and people/groups who are useful to us.

Good policy isn't outright forbidden, it's just well down the list.

I've benched 155kg, but I've never blasted out a casual lift like that at >120kg. Some sort of sleeper physique guy with a huge strength reserve could treat 315 like a plaything, but nothing else about Hegseth suggests that he's secretly a 350-400 bencher.

A bunch of guys after posted legit 315 bench videos and *every* one of them:

1) Had a more impressive physique than he does, particularly around shoulders/triceps.

2) Locked in with solid arch/foot placement.

3) Moved the weight at 0.5x the speed he did.

4) Rattled the cage putting back the bar.

A side issue is that this is our tax dollars at work. Maybe we shouldn't be heavily subsidizing sports clubs that support and encourage rapists? These convicted rapists are still playing for the club.

God in heaven, I hope Rousey has at least fired Edmond Tarverdyan in the lead-up to this. Amazing talent, ruined by the delusion that she was meant to stand and bang with zero head movement.

Whenever someone comes out with the bizarre take that the Epstein/Trumpstein files are "boring" or "a moral panic" I can only think either (a) they are in the files, (b) their close allies are in the files or (c) they're being paid or blackmailed to say that.

headline chasing nonsense (Kevin Rudd's quantum computing splurge, all the AI chasing, etc).

We need significant research institutes that are *centralized* (not just "an extra building across the road from UNSW and a bunch of joint appointments"), independent and sane.

What would be nice is if the government really committed to building some research institutes that aren't (a) bullying factories with bad culture (CSIRO), (b) prizes attached to each winning university group and funding them to do the same thing as they were before (NICTA) or (c) absolutely stupid..

To do what? Drive cabs? Work as quants?

Speaking as a US PhD student who came back to Australia, this isn't a bad idea, but it needs to be backed by jobs. Otherwise we're just recruiting more people into a hypercompetitive and depressing early-PhD job market.

Sounds like the familar economic theory of "relative advantage", where a country bad at making thing X is better exporting it, if it's what they're least bad at.

Given that this is Angus we're talking about, he is in fact better off the larger the share of voters who don't know anything about him..

On Nov. 16, a mental health counselor recorded in Kamilla’s medical records that her mother reported the girl had lost her appetite after being “served food that contained worms.” A week later, the couple said, children were told to gather in the gym for what they believed would be a Thanksgiving celebration. Excitement spread as families saw tables set with turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, they said. The children waited expectantly. But when a parent asked when the celebration would begin, Oksana said, staff told them the holiday meal was for employees, not detainees. The children, she said, watched despondently as the feast was packed away.

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast.

The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me.

But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.

Just stick 7 of them in a 64b word and Learn To Love Bit Operations.

The ugly fact is that *Labor* is the new center-right party.

Howard buried landmines in all our back-yards. Howard's "let's pull every lever that makes house prices go up" policies remain almost entirely unchanged decades later (regardless of whether the Coalition is in power or not).

what we want is ICE to be abolished, you pathetic fucknut

Heavily Airedale-coded message here.

I remember, watching the doco in 2023, being struck by the fact that the police seemed to have arbitrary (and as far as I can tell, unreviewable) powers to prevent ONEFOUR from performing.

or permanent, and think we should be doing way better by refugees, but a huge and barely controlled/understood increase in "temporary" "student" numbers (mostly focused in the capital cities) is just bad policy. If we want gastarbeiters, let's just call it that.

under the guise of it being "students". It's unprecedently huge except if you narrow the scope of comparison to 2015 onward (a standard rhetorical tactic to pretend that recent ups-and-downs aren't way, way bigger than what we had in, say, 2002).

I'm not against immigration temporary ...

The core problem is that the only party willing to say anything frank (even if it's disgustingly racist and wrapped up in bad economics and bullshit) about Australia's wild surge of temporary immigration is ON. We've build a guest-worker program of cheap, exploited labour for the big end of town ...

Labor loves a chancy tech. It's why we've spaffed away millions on quantum computing, which is still really a unproven research project.

In general, I am opposed to compulsory patriotism, but specifically making them sing the horrible dirge that is the Australian anthem goes beyond that, all the way to cruelty against children.

"I'm not f**king around, do it now or so help me God I will f**king end you."

Yes. And the craven failure of the Dems to do anything about high crimes and misdemeanors of the previous admin (in 1993, 2009, and 2017) means that we get the same scumbags recurring for multiple iterations. The Watergate plumbers and Iran-Contra people should have vanished from public life.

Yeah, apparently it was OK to export this kind of chaos all around the world, it's only bad when it happens in the US. Obama drone-striking weddings and overseeing mass deportations is an almost comical illustration of your point.

Very very quietly, I'm guessing. What a bunch of cowards.

Arguably we should increase the GST by un-exempting luxuries that rich people spend money on: private education and private health care, for a start (not counting dentistry since everyone is kind of stuck with that).

The magic of the unit extends (ho, ho) to many places, including medicine. See also "Throckmorton Sign":

radiopaedia.org/articles/thr...