Busy busy…

Apologies for the lack of posts lately, moving house/internet stuffups/work/and the general business of running (at last) my own business have all conspired against me.

Just how willing am I to prostitute myself/loved ones for sales?? Watch the youtube of our promotion last week  and recoil in horror as the bizarre man/kangaroo/rat hybrid dances for your amusement…

Thats my other half in the costume, I got to do most of the next day. Our score was disappointing, only one small child terrified to run into 4 lanes of traffic, 1 near smash of cars, and about 10 children terrified into tears by the costume…

Still I hope to get a bit more posting in soon, so hang loose till then,

Cheers, Mole!

This kid is two

And her parents think she’s a 40kg good luck charm.

Understandably, the doctor in the last pic is worried.

The link is to a Korean site. Info on the kid thanks to Lady bingbing. JFTR, the kid is Chinese, not Korean.

This post isn’t here to mock the kid. An extreme example perhaps, but it’s here to raise the question of parental responsibility.

BER inquiry a farce

How much more convenient could now-PM Gillard’s inquiry into the BER get?

The latest is that many schools didn’t even know how to make a complaint and 112 schools that did know how aren’t having their complaints accepted.

[Public Schools Principals Forum chairwoman] Ms McBride said the most common complaint from public schools was the poor value for money delivered under the BER, followed by schools claiming they had not been adequately consulted, which had meant many were given types of buildings they didn’t need.

[P]ublic schools are paying roughly double what Catholic and independent schools are for buildings.

But as usual with the idiot Left, the Gillard love-in continues. Never mind the facts.

H/T Merilyn Williams and Bolta.

*cross-posted

North Korea set to make succession official

Going, going…

It really looks like North Korean “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, is on the way out.

North Korea has summoned a Chosun Workers’ Party delegates conference in early September, the first such event in 44 years.

This is most likely to make it official that his third son, Kim Jong-eun will take the reigns.

Complying with precedent, the apparatus of the Workers’ Party and its leading officials are likely to be reshuffled in September, most likely in order to set in place the Kim Jong Eun ruling core. There is also the possibility that Jang Sung Taek, who just became a vice chairman of the National Defense Commission during the last Supreme People’s Assembly session, will be elected to the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

Cheong Seong Chang, a North-South relations researcher at the Sejong Institute explained, “It may be that through this conference Kim Jong Eun’s succession is publicized across the country. This may be done by selecting Kim Jong Eun as a core official on the Central Committee or the Military Committee of the Party.”

The kid is only in his late 20s, so it’s unlikely this succession is being announced just for the heck of it. Most of the Nork leadership is a very old bunch of men and that would indicate that any announcement of Kim Jong-eun’s succession would occur when he’s older… unless, of course, time is not on his father, Kim Jong-il’s, side.

*cross-posted

I’d Like to Jump Her Bones!

Gillard

How sweet the sound.

So Bolt thinks Gillard’s speech was brilliant. Spare me.

Facts are facts. We have a fabian socialist, ironically being puppeteered by the Labor Right, whose biggest claim to fame was the BER, the Building the Education Revolution. Out of $16 billion, bar some spare change, all spent on buildings and not education, about a third of that has been wasted, it has disappeared.

And now that same person, Gillard, is in charge of (shut up, Yanks) our trillion dollar economy.

Bolt is on the money so often, but is way off with his Gillard love-in.

Why, Bolta? Because Abbott is so quiet? That “quiet” has worked.

As usual the MSM is way off the pulse, and should give Bishop, yeah, you know, her, a fair go.

And also just pre-emptively touting nonsense that Abbott won’t be able to attack Jules is just that… nonsense.

But we saw this with the MSM in 2007.

Ho hum, it’s all moot. The number of times Julia mentioned “stability” was most telling.

I’ve been told Kerry was pretty hard on Julia tonight.

LOL!

UPDATE

Finally, Tony Abbott is taking the gloves off with regards to Julia’s “handling” of the BER.

However, the Opposition greeted the new Prime Minster with derision. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said: “It’s clear that if you want to change the policies you’re going to have to change the Government. They’ve changed the salesman but they haven’t changed the product.”

With an election just months away – and hoping to blunt any political honeymoon for the new Prime Minister – Mr Abbott is hoping to target Ms Gillard’s central role in the Building the Education Revolution scheme.

He accused her of being principal author, along with Mr Rudd, of the “school hall rip-offs”.

And it looks like she’d better watch her back.

It really looks like the Labor MO is to get whoever’s popular to an election, then knife them at the first sign of trouble, especially if they aren’t doing the unions’ bidding.

Whatever happened to honour amongst theives?

H/T Merilyn Williams

*cross-posted

BER: 50% of budget disappears

More waste from Rudd and Gillard’s $16.2 billion so-called Building the Education Revolution…

My BER mole states that stuff is being built for about $1.4 million, dropped down from $1.7 million + GST but the NSW government website has the same stuff budgeted at around $3 million to $3.2 million. That’s a heck of a difference even if one allows for the 6% “managing contractor’s” fee and the builder’s 11% profit margin. But $1.5 million??? Thus, the question on everyone’s lips is, “Where is all the money going?” The builders can’t say. Not even the managing contractors can say. Does Julia know? One thing is for sure, but. Julia’s $14 million so-called inquiry? Add that money to the amount that has been wasted on this BER scandal.

BER Mole:

Seriously, I have no idea where 50% of the project cost has gone. Granted this makes my employer look bad as the builder, but what does that say about the Project Manager for the government when the cost of managing the project equals the project value?

And then we have employees of the Reed Group receiving massive cash bonuses of up to $1 million. The Reed Group is a major advertiser on 2GB, the radio station that hosts Alan Jones’ breakfast show and also Ray Hadley. Someone please tell me this isn’t why Jones changed his tune on all of this.

Jones:

He [Reed Group's Bob Leese] said the seven managing contractors he had appointed via a tender process had worked very well.

BER Mole:

The BER is a farce not from the point of the guys building it, it is from the people who are supposed to be managing it.

With the ratio of project managers 10 times the standard industry ratio, and with over-worked project managers signing cheques left right and centre, this was always going to end, er, not so nicely.

This fetid BER mess stinks more by the minute. Heads must roll. Rudd’s and Gillard’s first.

(With thanks to my mole and Merylin Williams.)

PS

Anne Connolly has some interesting articles on this, too.

An inquiry? Nothing short of a Royal Commission will get to the bottom of this, but there’s so much money involved – this is arguably Australia’s biggest scam ever – that I wouldn’t even trust that until another government is in power.

BER Mole:

It is fairly typical of any government contract, amateurs trying to contract the inept to oversee the professionals.

Perhaps so. But this time we’re talking over $16 billion of taxpayer money being wasted on a program with massive systemic failures being executed on a national level. That’s about an $800 rip-off for every man woman and child in Australia.

And on one hand we have private schools receiving a huge wad of cash, but they are able to choose their architect, choose what they want built, and choose who builds it. And they are getting value for money. On the other hand, we have the public schools being dictated to as to what will be built, who’ll design it, and who’ll build it, and we are seeing massive cost blowouts.

This is a “plan” that was rushed out by complete incompetents, that has been managed like kids managing a candy store, and how dare Gillard and Rudd get away with it.

UPDATE

For sure, this is not directly and solely related to this BER, but Labor has taken a massive hit in the NSW by-elections. Unprecedented, in fact. More than 25% swings. Any other time that would be astonishing, but not now.

And there’s every chance (unfortunately) the stuff on this blog will never go mainstream. But it’s quite something that it may not even need to.

*cross-posted with minor editing

Resources super profits tax, Major project risk.

The ABC’s Inside business show yesterday had an interview with the head of the Geraldton iron ore alliance, a group of miners starting up 5 iron ore mines inland from Geraldton in Western Australia. 15 Billion dollars of investment is on the line.

To give you an idea of the impact heres the companies own blurb on the impacts on the economy. Even allowing for the usual overstating of benefits its pretty considerable.

According to the report, key economic benefits from expanding iron ore mining in the region over a 25-year period has the potential to deliver:

• 1,360 jobs a year during construction;
• 4,254 direct jobs a year for a conservatively estimated 25-year operational period;
• A total of 12,000-plus direct and indirect jobs a year in WA from the increased economic activity;
• An addition of $1.5 billion a year to Gross State Product (the overall measure of WA’s economy); and
• About $7 billion in taxes and duties to the Federal Government and around $3.5 billion in royalties and other payments to the State Government.

Rudd wants more? If I do a rough calculation on the wages alone, based at a rate of $70,000 per year the mines would generate over $297 million dollars and at least a quarter of that flows to the government as increased tax/lessened dole payments.

The whole interview is well worth a watch, particularly for the body language of Mr Casello, the director of the alliance.

In a nutshell 5 seperate companies are developing mines in the same region, a Chinese consortium is building the rail links and I believe its a Japanese financed port project. All this has been in planning/development for over a decade now.

Watch this interview and tell me how likely it is to progress a lot further than it has.

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/insidebusiness/video/podcast/r583385_3684018.wmv

They still dont even know where the tax will be applied, as the ore is dug up, processed, or shipped.

The uncertainty will kill the whole project, KRudd has applied buckets of it, and the promise of no certainty for months to come. As mentioned in the interview, there are vast parts of what the tax will affect which couldnt be talked about by the governments own consultative group.

The killer line is right at the end. “Theres very little value in  getting tax out of something that doesnt go ahead”…..

Israel’s shame

Go here to register your complaint against the Jewish state.

H/T Bolta

Meanwhile, gay Spaniards prefer terrorists over homosexuals.

UPDATE

And it looks like hardly any aid was on that flotilla to Gaza to begin with, and none was on the Mavi Mamara. Conspicuously absent was medical aid – what Gaza really needs.

H/T Aussie Dave

*cross-posted

Antipodean Marsupial Comparison

A quick hemispherical battle of the marsupials

The Southern Hemisphere :

the kangaroo – awww, how cute… It’s like Bambi learned to stand upright and hop. With a pouch!

The wallaby – awww… like a kangaroo, but fun-sized.

The koala – awww… it looks like Pat Morita and a Teddy Bear had a love child – but in a good, mostly cuddly way.

The sugar glider – awww… tiny with big round eyes, a prehensile tail, pocket sized, it can fly. It is like a cartoon character with real fur. If it could talk it’d be one of the Rescue Rangers. (if only the wallaby looked like a moose instead of a deer. This is the reason to support genetic engineering. Upright moose + flying squirrel = real life Rocky & Bullwinkle)

The Northern Hemisphere :
North America has marsupials : Opossums (aka possums).

black shiny beady eyes, vampire teeth, a raspy hiss and naked, furless fingers

baby possums are almost as ugly as the parents but have more of a rat like appearance. Several ugly child possums will clutch on to the back of the parent making it appear to be a multiheaded monster.

Unlike other skittish animals like rabbits, mice or squirrels, a possum doesn't run away. It either keels over to play dead or it takes its time and will slowly walk away as if daring you to follow it back to hell.

Until the science of genetic engineering improves, I think the Southern hemisphere is winning the cuteness category but the Northern wins the ability to reflexively play dead category..

UPDATE [@s_dog]:  Antipodean Marsupial Comparison, Round II

A Brief Message

I apologize for not being around for a while, but there are no manuals on how to deal with an elderly parent who is suffering from age-related dementia. I much prefer problems that have manuals to guide me through the process, as figuring things out for myself is time consuming… because I’m not as smart or wise as I’d like to be.

Nice to see things are hopping here, and as soon as I’m able – and feel like it – I’ll be back with all of my friends. I’m posting this now because I have made some progress, but the past couple of months have been a thankless grind.

One step at a time. That is my mantra.

God bless.

Around the web

There are mother/son arguments in Florida – over “stolen” beer – drunk birds in the NT, and sheep thievery in NZ… 14 sheep in a Mazda.

Meanwhile, Ban Ki Moon does his best to make the UN irrelevant.

PS Don’t forget to give the troops some pizza.