Why should an ex-wife care

Here's an article in which the ex-wife of Karl Stefanovic has spoken about how she's not happy that her ex-husband is seeking to get his vasectomy reversed so he can have children with his new partner.

Why would she care?

Could it be that she wanted more children and he wanted to stop at three, so him going on to have more children with another woman is a slap in the face?  Possibly.

Or, could it be that the child support payments to her would go down with every child he has with a new partner?  Probably more likely.

Having seen women get angry that their ex-partner "only had children to pay less child support" (yes, that's what's going through every man's head when he has children), it doesn't surprise me that the level of entitlement of some women will never cease.

It doesn't matter if his new partner is pushing him to have more children, all that matters is that this is a scorned woman who thought she'd locked in her now ex-husband into only being a provider for her children.

Having seen adult children left out of the will of their parents estate by new partners, I'm surprised the media doesn't make a bigger deal about this, but of course they won't, primarily because it's usually women making off with the money since it's usually a younger woman than it is the man and women usually live longer.  Those two factors alone mean that, excluding divorce, when two people get married, it's usually the husband who dies first, leaving everything to his wife.

I previously wrote about how it was reported that supposedly Karl was paying through the nose to have access to his children, so it's not surprising that it's never enough.

Male rape victim, 4th paragraph again

So, here's a case of three men who put a bottle up another male's back side being reported in the news.

As per my usual statement of the 4th paragraph, the term 'rape' is thrown around a lot, the fact that all the perpetrators are male is introduced very early on (opening sentence even), however true to form for the media, the simple fact that the victim was also male doesn't appear in the article until the 3rd paragraph.

• 1st paragraph - "unconscious teenager"
• 2nd paragraph - "a 19-year-old"
• 3rd paragraph - "the man"

I know it's not technically four paragraphs, but come on, they could have mentioned that the victim was male very easily in every paragraph, but chose to withhold that because the media likes to only report when women or minorities are victims and when men and whites (or both) are the perpetrators.

Channel Seven lawsuit outcome

So the woman at who claimed a great many things after her two year affair ended with a Channel Seven heavy, is reportedly dropping the case and is expected to pay Channel Seven's legal fees.

Well, she did try to play the media (not a great idea when you're trying to play the media against the media), by all accounts took far more than any reasonable person could have expected to get in settlement and then, despite having been paid off with non-disclosure agreements in place, disclosed company information, presumably in the hopes of gaining support for her case.

Of course, whilst her initial case was given all the coverage of a visiting Royal, something tells me that now things haven't been found in her favour (possibly due to her actions) the whole thing will be swept under away quietly.

If reports of her having to pay Seven's legal fees are true, I'll bet she'll be wishing she'd quit whilst she was ahead.

Men robbing shops in groups - no mention of background

So, here's one of those stories about an Asian man who has taken to defending his store after being robbed by several men a number of times.

Of course, despite the clear as day pictures, there's no mention at all about the backgrounds of these men.

It must just be men in general.

If only there were another way to describe these men that might help us to identify some linking pattern from where all of this crime is coming.

Outrage when a man uses the system against a woman

So here's an interesting (and sad) story about a woman who isn't able to travel outside Australia because her ex put her on a family flight watch list.

The watch list is designed to prevent divorced partners leaving the country in custody disputes, yet there's outrage when a man uses it to prevent his ex taking their children overseas.

The reality is that women leaving the country with children and never coming back (otherwise known as 'International Child Abduction') make up the majority of cases, which is why I think this isn't considered a crime (it's usually a breach of court ordered visitation rights, but not a crime).  Many sites like to claim that every one of those women are doing so to flee domestic violence, but that isn't always the case, and they rarely have anything more than anecdotal evidence to back it up.  But if a man does the same thing, he's portrayed as an evil man.

I paid particular notice when they go into the details that she's spending thousands of dollars on legal fees to fight this, but "he's getting legal aid".  How many men have to pay thousands of dollars on legal fees in custody battles when their former partners get legal aid?  Apparently there's outrage when the genders are reversed.  Maybe she's got lots of money (maybe she got the lot in the divorce) and he's left broke.  Legal aid isn't available to people who have money, so stating that he's using it when she has to pay is indicative that she has money and he doesn't.

When the media starts reporting on all the divorced fathers who can't afford to mount a challenge to visitation rights because their ex is using legal aid but they have to find thousands just to appeal what they consider unfair access, then I'll feel sorry for this woman.

In closing, I'm not saying that this particular guy is or isn't guilty, but if there's one thing we've learned in the last year, it's that the media chooses which stories to report and which ones to hold back, which stories to beef up the details and which stories to leave out what they consider 'unimportant details' and which groups to hold up as the 'usual suspects and bad guys' and which groups should be given a free pass.

Given my recently acquired (in the last couple of years) skepticism of the media, I'm not inclined to take any case at face value until they start reporting crimes between men and women equally.  They can pretend all women are great and all men are evil all they like, but those of us who live in the real world know that both men and women exist at all ends of the good/evil spectrum.

Police searching for woman who abducted 6 year old girl

I guess it's hard to hide that a woman was involved in a serious crime like abducting a child when the only person (of three) who is known is a woman.

Notice how it's not until the 3rd paragraph that it's identified that they're looking for a woman primarily.

Not much is known about the situation, but given that someone knew the name of the woman, but not the men, suggests that the woman was known to the family, but the men might have been hired muscle.

Personally, I would have lead with "a X-year-old woman named Y and two men are wanted for the abduction of a 6 year old girl", not this pussy-footing around about "we're searching for a girl... she may be at significant risk... oh, and the main person we're looking for is...".

A little girls safety (and possibly life) is at stake here.  Can the media put down their PC agenda for ONE FREAKING MINUTE and get the message out there NOW.  As it stands, a person has to actually click on the link to the article to get the photo and name of the woman in question.

AFL Diversity Manager coward punch

Only time will tell if the AFL does anything to their Diversity Manager because of violence.

I guess like his brother, the former CEO of Australia Post, there aren't going to be as much scrutiny as there would be if a white person had done the exact same thing.

By the way, in my opinion what the CEO of Australia Post got away with in terms of being able to get a 'donation' paid to a foundation run by his family is far worse than hitting someone.  Although, hitting someone when you're supposed to be setting an example is always worse than if you're just some guy.

A bit like how the media holds up Right-wing politicians to higher standards to Left-wing politicians.  It's almost like having standards means you are going to be held to them.

Maybe that's the problem here: nobody has any standards and, therefore, they can't be held to anything.

North Korea's mineral reserves

Here's an interesting article detailing the vast amounts of valuable raw minerals that North Korea is sitting on although I disagree with the term stockpile.  A stockpile is usually used in the sense that they've mined the minerals and is holding them somewhere ready to offload.

North Korea isn't holding them anywhere, they just can't (or maybe isn't willing) afford the infrastructure needed to mine the various minerals.

Even if they could, they'd have trouble selling the minerals on the open market at their true value.

The biggest thing I take away from the article is not what the author is trying to relay, rather it's the arrogance that minerals in the ground somehow 'belong' on the open market and North Korea is somehow depriving the world of a valuable minerals.

Like it or not, North Korea (or at least it's leader) are choosing what to do with the country and are choosing not to pursue mining.  Perhaps if the country were desperate enough, they'd come to the world table and broker a deal, but right now it is their RIGHT to choose not to tap into those resources.

Let me put this another way.  Uluru (Ayers Rock) is predominately made up of iron ore.  As it currently stands, it brings in more money as a tourist destination than it would being mined for it's contents.  You can only mine it once for what would be a pretty small payday, but tourists could probably come for another 100 years just to see it.  More important than the tourist element, Uluru has a cultural significance to the Indigenous population of the country, so any business case to mine it would be very quickly shut down for both Cultural and Tourism reasons.

Let's imagine, for a minute, that those mountains in North Korea aren't just a resource parking lot, that they have been part of the country as long as time and there's possibly even ancient stories about them passed on from generation to generation.  We don't really know because we're only being told one angle.

The current leader may be thinking that in 50 years time his country will be the only untouched region of the world with such untouched beauty, which would make a much better tourist attraction than lining the vaults of the country with money for a finite time.  Maybe North Korea's Great Leader has a longer-term vision than most Westerners, who only think as far as next year (some only as far as next weekend).

The leaders of North Korea might really want to tap into them, but feel that they'd compromise on their personal beliefs, either culturally or simply because they don't trust big world governments not to take advantage of them.  In this regard, can we blame them after all the accusations against the Clinton Foundation for helping to set up the fleecing of Haiti's gold (and possible child trafficking) whilst on a supposed mercy mission after a major earthquake.

I'm not a Greenie, but if a mining site on a potentially culturally significant site were being pushed on a region for profit anywhere else in the world, there'd be outrage, but since it's from a country people deem as despotic, it's apparently ok?

I say if the leaders of North Korea choose not to tap into those minerals FOR ANY REASON, then that's their decision and it should be respected.

Media claims we should be grateful for foreign buyers

So here we have the media actually acknowledging the existence of wealthy foreign buyers in the Australian Real Estate market, however one author writes that we should be grateful for them.

Now, the author might be correct, had the glut of apartments not been built specifically to cater to the demand of foreign buyers and only if foreign buyers were ONLY buying apartments.

In any economy there are multiple cycles going up and down at any given time.  In engineering, the perfect storm with salaries occurred just before the GFC when many industries were all peaking at the same time, putting a premium on engineers which, when the various industry cycles bottomed out at about the same time, ended with heaps of engineers all looking for work at the same time.

The same is true of property.  Of residential property, there are many sectors and sub-sectors.  Just because you've got a great 1-bedroom apartment in Newport isn't going to mean a thing if what's booming are 3-bedroom houses.

So the housing prices are in a completely different cycle to apartments, which are usually home to singles or couples without children.  Apartments don't come with a lot of land, making them less attractive to speculators due to the need for high returns and the risk that another 300 apartment block opening up next door that will compete for the relatively few tenants.

Claims that we should be grateful that foreign buyers are keeping the prices of apartments from collapsing (something that only the developers would really worry about and would normally stop creating more supply if they're unable to unload the last lot of apartments they built) are pretty stupid when it's the price of housing the average Australia cares about, NOT the price and vacancy rates of apartments.

The people already living in houses want them to only go up, the people trying to buy them would like to see them come down (at least long enough to get into the market).

Ultimately I think what the Media and the Politicians all ignore or avoid is that young people don't want any sort of unfair advantage, they simply want a level playing field, but the media is so bent on trying to remain positive about immigration that it's ignoring the fact that it's selling out locals for the security that higher house prices brings people who own their own home.

When a young couple from China in the 20's is able to buy a house in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne for over $1 million IN CASH, when they haven't got the sort of income needed to service a loan of that size, then we're not playing on a level playing field.  Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying to themselves or just to you.

Lindt siege psychiatrist stood down

So the disgraced psychiatrist who was advising police during the Lindt siege in Sydney is now claiming that it's the escapees fault that Monis killed people.

Like a true little liar, he's putting responsibility anywhere but himself.

He's quoted as saying (in other articles) that he wasn't aware that IS had put a callout for Lone Wolf attacks at the time the siege took place.

So, I guess he's blaming:

• The people who escaped, to save themselves;
• The lack of knowledge of the overall situation; and
• Anyone but himself.

Now, most normal people would feel guilty for how this whole thing played out and would have to live with it for the rest of their lives.

Not this guy.  No, he's absolved himself of any responsibility because the events weren't allowed to play out how he thought they should and that he wasn't aware of the bigger picture.

In my line of work, if I'm making calls without considering ALL the information, including LOOKING UP information that may be applicable, I'm still liable if things go wrong.  Legally if someone dies, professionally if it costs my organisation money (no pay rise for the guy who blew our profit margins when he forgot to allow for a $1 million piece of equipment in the tender!).

I guess psychiatry is a bit like being weather forecasting: there's no accountability if you're wrong because you missed an important variable in the equation.

Except this time the psychiatrist made calls that got people killed, which is why I applaud him being stood down.

I also note that nowhere do they mention the radicalisation of Islam as a cause.  I guess this "non-terror attack" has found its scapegoat and the gods of public opinion have been appeased.

Another car jacking, no description of perpetrators

So here we have yet another case of a violent crime in which the description of the suspects is deliberately withheld.

Is that because they're trying to be sensitive?  Or is it simply assumed that from here on out all violent crimes are to be assumed to be by people "of African appearance" unless otherwise advised?

Selling ones virtue has a price

So the founder of Roxy has come out and told all about being a 'pleasure wife' of a Saudi arms dealer.

What's interesting to note is that she's on her 3rd (and hopefully last) marriage, so clearly living that lifestyle had taken a toll on her in more ways than just taking up her time.

I do give her full marks for telling her story.  Hopefully it will dissuade women in a similar situation to her from doing the same thing.  That is unless women today are more likely to treat relationships like this as transactions and attach less emotion to it.

A bit like prostitution.

The moral code wasn't dreamed up by a bunch of old men just looking to ruin the fun of everyone, it was developed over a long period of time by people who worked out that it works out better, in general, for people who follow it.

Yes, there will always be people who follow the code who don't do well and vice versa, but the moral code increasing the probability of success.  If wearing a seat belt increases the probability of you surviving a car accident, aren't you more likely to want to wear one?

Autistic boy attacked again by gang

So, here's a couple of articles that have appeared over the weeks that follow the usual 4th paragraph shenanigans:

So an autistic boy has been attacked by a gang again.

A bakery has be broken into, with the baker attacked.

No mention of the background of the gang members, despite the photos clearly showing a group who are anything other than white.

Par for the course, really.

I'm just waiting for a vigilante culture to spring up to take these thugs on.  It only takes a few hard men from Eastern European countries to band together to decide enough is enough.

Remember, Eastern Europeans don't care about being called racist.  They care about themselves more than that.

A penny saved is a penny earned - Benjamin Franklin

I thought I'd take some time off from writing about the onslaught of Marxism in our current society to focus on a few financial matters that I think everyone should know about to help them in the current world.

A lot of the things I write about may not apply in countries other than Australia, but a lot of the concepts are the same, regardless of where you live.

I'd like to start with the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin: "A penny saved is a penny earned".

I believe that statement is actually no longer true in this modern day.  His statement was true in his day and age when income tax rates were zero (and the money supply was governed by the government, not a private organisation, but that's a whole other kettle of fish) but a penny saved is actually less than a penny earned.

With income tax being what it is, the average salary for a male is $83,902 p.a. which falls in the 32.5% tax bracket in Australia.  So that means that for every dollar I spend (over the $37k income), I have to earn $1.48.  It may not seem like much but consider if I'm able to save myself $40 a week on something, say transport expenses.

Assuming I'm only working 48 weeks of the year (we have four weeks annual leave a year) and ignoring public holidays (because when you're buying monthly tickets, it doesn't always work out to have monthly tickets start & finish around those dates) that's $1,920 per year AFTER tax.

The BEFORE tax amount on this is $2,844 (rounded off to the nearest dollar).

For a person living on the median salary, that $2,844 is the equivalent to a 3.4% pay rise.  Given this current economic climate, I know heaps of people who don't even get that.

Think about that for a minute: small things we can do every day, that might save $5 here and $10 there add up very quickly and, when you start to think about money you're spending in terms of how much you had to earn rather than what you're paying, it becomes very different.

$4 per drink for morning tea and afternoon tea (which is more like about $4.50 for a bottle of soft drink in the cafeteria in my building)?  That's $8 a day or $40 per week right there!

The same also applies for big purchases too.  People who are upgrading their phones every couple of years (many of them unnecessarily so) may spend about $1,200 on the new iPhone or Samsung phone (not including the case or cover that a person should buy to protect their expensive new piece of equipment).  That's about $1,800 in pre-tax money.  Or the equivalent of 2.1% of the median salary.  So, putting off replacing an otherwise working mobile phone until the old one actually stops working (or becomes obsolete) is like giving yourself a pay rise.

People who kid themselves into thinking they've avoided that cost by opting to buy the phone on a 24 month plan, are just paying the same price (or higher!), with the spend just spread out over 2 years.

I'm not suggesting we should all live like monks and not enjoy living in our country, but the lifestyle we lead may be more expensive than we think it is and, with intelligent decisions on where to cut, where to substitute and where to find cheaper alternatives, we'll be far better off than arguing or begging for that pay rise to be 4% rather than 2%.

The money we save will go a whole lot further than incremental pay rises.  We may not have a latte with every morning tea or the latest mobile phone, but we'll be financially better off in the years ahead.

Remember how many people you know who say "I wish I'd drank more coffees over the years" vs the number of people who say "I should have started saving more money years ago".

Anti-vaccination people forced underground

One really does have to wonder why, if we actually have freedom of speech, that people who want to see a documentary on the 'dangers of vaccinations' have to do so in secret.

Now, I'm all for vaccinations (my daughter has had all of them, but I'm so sick of people trying to make out that people who CHOOSE not to vaccinate their children are evil.

Much like how Medical companies have big funds set aside for compensation claims for people whose children have negative effects (why would they do that if the vaccinations were 100% safe?), the people who don't vaccinate are choosing to play the lottery the other way.

Are they putting other people's children at risk?  Maybe.  Are they putting their own children at risk?  Maybe.

Does the medical industry pretend like there's no risk?  Surprisingly, especially given how parents are expected to sign a waiver prior to being given the vaccination for every set of them.

I guess that's where the compensation fund comes in.  You're only signing away for mild side-effects like fever and illness.  If side-effects like death, disability or Autism were on the list, then you can bet your bottom dollar that:

• People wouldn't choose to vaccinate
• People who did vaccinate wouldn't have a right to compensation ("you signed it!")

Remember, you can only sign away your right to compensation for side effects they tell you about.  Anything else is fair game.  The difficulty is proving that your otherwise healthy and active child changed after the vaccination.

I was particularly annoyed when medical staff tried to claim my daughter's reaction "must have been something she ate", even though the rota-virus vaccine was THE ONLY common factor in her short term (as far as we know) symptoms.

Famous person pays through the nose to see his children, media doesn't care

So Karl Stefanovic is no saint and I'm certainly not a fan, but when he walks away from his marriage with less than 10% of the assets, on the condition that he can see his children whenever he wants, you know the Family Courts system isn't fair.

But notice how the media chooses to focus on how Karl liked getting drunk, rather than asking WHY he liked getting drunk.

That being said, the man makes $3 million a year, so it'll only take him a few years to recover from the hit (assuming his career doesn't drop off), but he'd never get that time back with his kids if his ex-wife had chosen to withhold access.

I'm hoping that someone in the media talks a bit about this, but I seriously doubt it.

Woman who killed eight children probably not going to be punished

So Raina Thaiday, the woman who killed seven of her own children and one child of another family, probably won't be punished because she thought she was saving them.

But don't worry, she's being treated now and is allowed out into the hospital grounds despite having two relapses since being taking into custody.

Her schizophrenia, brought on by excessive cannabis use, was to blame, she's just an innocent victim in all of this.

Don't worry though, she's being treated.

Just forget about any kind of punishment of any kind because it's not like cannabis is illegal or that it's not her fault that she used to smoke more of it in a day than most people see in a lifetime.

It's also not like we force schizophrenic people from being treated, so I guess that's 'punishment' enough.

So I guess our benevolent lawmakers are happy to chalk all of these deaths up to mental illness and not Domestic Violence.  Because it's not socially acceptable to show a woman committing Domestic Violence.

I wonder how many cases of man on woman Domestic Violence could be discounted if they were allowed to do the same.  But we all know that the anti-male establishment wouldn't allow that.

I'll put money on her ending up with a lucrative government position as a spokesperson for mental illness and wind up as Australian of the Year, a bit like Rosie Batty.  Ironically, if they don't count Thaiday's victims deaths as Domestic Violence, then we can't count Luke Batty's death either, since his father had a history of mental illness.  There surely can't be one rule for men and another for women, can there?

I don't know what makes me more sick, the media excusing some of the most inexcusable actions of women (not one word of the article does anything other than try to explain how it wasn't her fault) or the legal system being 'compassionate' to women, deciding that she shouldn't receive any kind of punishment, not even for endangering children when she was smoking the excessive amount of cannabis that resulted in the condition that contributed to eight deaths!

The simple fact is that the media has an agenda, that gender is to paint men as violent and women as victims.  But if we're comparing Greg Anderson to Raina Thaiday, the score is 1-8, but I don't see a SINGLE MAN being promoted to the level Rosie Batty is for what Raina did.  But I guess Greg is an easier target for allegations for what transpired in the lead up to that fateful date, since dead men tell no tales.

New proposed hiring quotas for men and women

So someone is now pushing for hiring quotas to achieve 40% women AND men in companies - this should be fun!.

So this means that companies will need to show that they are at least taking steps to try to achieve quotas.  I say they should start with government organisations first, you know, just to set the example.

Given that there are far more women than men in most government jobs (except at the top, as we're always told), this should mean that men would be given preferential treatment for the following government jobs including, but not limited to:

• Teaching
• Nursing
• Admin
• Department of Justice
• Department of Health and Human Services

Remember, there can't be one rule for men and a different rule for women!

United Airlines vs Emirates

So Emirates have decided to take a swing at United Airlines whilst United is under siege for dragging a man off an overbooked flight.  I somehow doubt that they'd have dragged a woman off a plane in the same manner.

Personally, I don't like either airline.

United Airlines treated my friends and I like suspected terrorists on every single internal flight we took whilst travelling around the USA.  This meant that they took everything out of our bag, felt us up and then ordered us on our way.  This system only worked to our benefit in Las Vegas, where we didn't have to wait the whole line to then wait in a second line, we just got felt up straight away.

Once I got on the flights, they were actually ok.

Also, on my flight back to Melbourne they announced that the flight had been overbooked and offered to put up anyone who was prepared to stay in a hotel overnight and fly them business class the next day.  There were people LINING UP to volunteer!  I would have taken them up on the offer, had I not been due back in Melbourne for work two days later.

Emirates, however, treated me like crap on connecting flights from London to Melbourne via Dubai.

The reason?  Because I was a single male travelling on his own, which meant that I was a 3rd class citizen, that I should move when told to, that I could be yelled at by passengers and staff who weren't aware that my moving was because I'd been told to and even that they refused to take away my food tray (and the trays of my fellow single men) well after meal time was over and the lights had gone out.

Given that my crappy flight with Emirates was around the time airlines were flexing their muscle on flying bans, I wasn't about to kick up a big stick about how I was treated, since I still wanted to travel and didn't want to find myself stuck somewhere unable to fly.

If you ask me, I wouldn't want to fly with either, but United Airlines treatment of me was due to over-the-top security.  Emirates were just being horrible people.

Waleed makes fun of Pauline Hansen, misses the point

So Waleed Aly is making fun of Pauline Hansen for asking Australians to buy non-Halal certified chocolate to not support the Islamisation of Australia.

However, anyone who knows what she's complaining about isn't whether it's Halal by virtue of what it is, it's whether the company that manufactured it has paid extortion money to Islamic groups and passed that cost onto consumers who don't care.

The concern is that it's a covert Jizya (a Muslim tax on non-Muslims).  We shouldn't pay any price for companies to be extorted for the religious beliefs of others.  Do we pay for foods to be Kosher certified too?

That is THEIR belief and, as Waleed has quite rightly pointed out, if the chocolate is vegan anyway, paying someone to certify something that is already Halal is like paying PETA to certify that peas and carrots are vegan: it's obvious to the people who know, it's irrelevant to people who don't care and people who don't care shouldn't be forced to pay ANY money to a religion to which they don't belong.

But don't worry, the media has Waleed's back: they'll continue to mock Hansen on his behalf.

Women's rights, getting the analogy wrong again

So a woman in Texas is trying to bring in a $100 fine for any man who masturbates outside of a medical clinic.

Her argument is that it's equivalent to the laws that ban abortions on the grounds that it's "an act against an unborn child".

What they fail to realise is that an abortion is the removal of a fetus that has already combined sperm with an egg.  Bringing in this fine is more like fining a woman every time she has her period, since the two 'emissions' relate to un-used procreation components, not the combined one.

But why let facts get in the way of a poorly thought out analogy.

Travelodge UK: It's ok to accuse guests of pedophilia

So a widower has found himself waiting for the police after the manager at a Travelodge in England called the police when he and his daughter checked into a hotel.

So they 'apologized', but maintain that it's company policy.

I guess we should just accept people randomly calling the police on fathers under the banner of 'it's better to be safe than sorry'.

Where will it stop?

Alec Baldwin lying about girl's age

So, Alec Baldwin is in hot water over a move he did with a 16 year old girl.

How do we know he was lying?  He's what's written:

"I was 47, and it never occurred to me to ask how old Nikki Reed was," Baldwin wrote in his new memoir Nevertheless.  "When I found out, just as we finished, that she was 17, I flipped out on the producers, who had told me something different."

So, just to make it clear, "it never occurred to me to ask" and the producers had "told me something different".  Two completely contradictory statements.

Apparently she was actually only 16, so he even got that wrong.

Personally, I think he just needs to shut the hell up because people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.  Then again, it's not unheard of for Hollywood to disregard the age of young girls.  Just ask Roman Polanski.

Media again hiding race of muggings

So here we have the media hiding the racial identity of men mugging people.

So 'the media' claims the police are looking for the attacker, but the media also neglects to mention that the man (and his friends) are all 'of African appearance'.

It's all in the video.

Yay for hiding the race of violent offenders!

The media, not reporting fake news, just hiding real news.  Because remember, it's not fake, just selectively reported.

Female driver hits male, media doesn't feature gender

So a woman who was declared a "drug driver" hit a cyclist and left him for dead.

I notice how the headline and sub-heading have no mention of the fact the the driver who did this was in fact a woman.  It's not until the end of the (rather long) first paragraph that the man was hit by a woman.

Knowing how soft the courts are on women, she'll likely be out in 18 months, despite the person she severely injured not being able to ever run again or return to work as a podiatrist, which is really saying something since it's hardly a career that requires a lot of physical activity.

Call the Midwife goes full PC

Now, a series like Call the Midwife, which is about a group of midwives living in East London in the 1960s, is always going to be PC.

But it's not as overt as when it features an episode that features Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

Now, given that it's a BBC drama, it's got more than its fair share of anti-male, anti-white bias including:

• Except for the Doctor, all the main male characters a dopes (Chummy's husband the police officer, Fred the groundskeeper).  Only in the last few series has a second regular male character who isn't stupid or hopeless: the priest.;
• If there's violence in an episode, it's the husband more than 95% of the time;
• If a woman's in a bad situation (poor, forced into prostitution), it's because of the husband or man;
• None of the nurses there are in the slightest bit racist, not even the old ones.  It's mostly white males (and only occasionally white women) on the show who are racist, never any other race.  I think the series feels that they'd 'dealt' with racist women in an earlier series, forgetting that the stories focus on lots of new expectant mothers, so each year would bring a fresh batch of potentially 'racist' people who hadn't got 'the message'.  That being said, it'd get pretty boring if every week it was featured.

But this recent episode featuring FGM takes the cake.  The story centers around a Somali woman who is expecting, who is further along than she thought (she was going to give birth in her native Somalia).  The midwives realise that her nether regions have been mutilated and she won't be able to birth naturally.

Where the show goes full PC (you NEVER go full PC!) is that, once the otherwise all knowing doctor finds out from head office what it's all about, he declares that "it's a practice that predates Islam".

Think about that for a minute.  You've got a patient who has been mutilated.  You then find out that every girl from that country has been mutilated.  But your immediate reaction it to confirm that it's not Islam that's to blame, it "pre-dates Islam".

We can't have Islam being shown in a negative light, can we?

But, in a show that loves to portrait white men as abusive idiots, how is this any different from most of the other episodes?

I personally feel that the quality of the show has gone downhill since it finished up the original source material.  They've introduced topics on lesbianism, homosexuality, vaccinations and more.  What started out as touching real life stories has morphed into a show that tries to pack in as much historical content as possible.

That being said, given that it's supposedly set in London following on from WW2, there's surprisingly few characters, even in the background, with any war injuries (missing legs, arms, etc).  I guess in Call the Midwife world, those people just kindly disappeared into the background.  But that's probably just because they're men.

Female student attacked, media does usual thing

So a poor female student was violently attacked whilst waiting at a bus stop, but the report holds back that the person doing the attack is also a woman.

As usual, the media features in the headline that the victim is female, but holds back that the perpetrator is female.

Same as this story about a FEMALE driver who was drunk and talking on her mobile phone when she pinned a 5 year old girl during a crash.

The drunk woman then left the scene of the accident because she felt intimidated.  Way to go media, you're defending a woman who broke two laws and hurt a little girl.

Would a male who had done the same thing be defended by the media in the same way?  Probably not.  Especially if he'd had a history of the same thing as this particular woman is supposed to have.

Group of Australian Muslims call for death, the Left silent

So an angry group of Muslims in Australia has been found to be agreeing that people who leave Islam should be killed.

I wonder where all those Lefties who defend Islam are when things like this come out.

Don't tell me:

• Religion of peace
• These are just radicals
• Not indicative of the whole religion

They don't even need to respond, we already know the stupid things they're going to say.

And the more cases like this come out, the more these stupid defenses of a violent belief will fall on deaf ears.

Public lambasted for lack of intervention during attack

So the media has decided to call out people who "did nothing" while one young lady was being attacked.

Things that were noticed about the article:

• The headline features that a young woman was viciously bashed, but only mentioned that the attacker was also a women later in the report.  Had the attacker been male, that detail would have been in the headline;
• The attack was noted to have possibly been racially motivated and, even though we can see that the attacker is clearly not Caucasian in the video, race is otherwise left out of the article;
• The victim is either Asian or dark haired Caucasian, so it won't be declared a hate crime.

Here's what we know about the media: had people around the area intervened and taken the attacker down, the video would have been edited to show a bunch of men (because women don't usually intervene physically) taking down a woman of a racial minority.

You want to know why people don't want to intervene these days?  Because we all know that the media can't be trusted to show the whole truth and are more than happy to edit videos to progress their agenda.

Better to just stay out of the videos altogether.

Fake media - helping to dissuade people from helping others for years!

London attack, media hides motivation

Disgusting media is at it again, hiding the true motivations behind the attack by a Muslim man, attacking innocent Westerners just because he believed that they deserve it.

Notice they're quick to identify the man as "British born" and that it was a "lone wolf" attack?

Not ONCE do any of the following words appear in the article:

• Jihad;
• Muslim; and
• Islam

They mention that the man was known to police and MI5 for his extremism.  What extremism might that be?  Was he an extremist My Little Pony follower?  Was he an extremist Star Wars fan?

One can't recognise a person for being an extremist without also identifying the concept to which they are extreme.  I might be called an extremist Capitalist, but if I were simply called and extremist, people these days are likely to assume that all extremism is religiously based.

I'm getting so sick of the media trying to hide all of these details and then wondering why things like Trump getting elected or Brexit happens.

Here's a little secret: because you're so far removed from the common person who is able to rationally identify the group who are overwhelmingly behind these attacks that they're also getting sick of the media pretending that there's nothing there.

That's the real danger here: the more the media tries to hide it, the more the public will seek out the truth from alternative sources, which carries the risk of being made up.  So if the media wants to get their credibility back, they'd better start reporting ALL of the facts, not just when the perpetrators is white and male.

Car & knife attack in London, media hiding major detail

So an attack has occurred in London by a Muslim-looking man who ran people over with a car, then followed up with a knife.

I linked to the above article directly because that's the ONLY article I've found that includes a photo that clearly shows the suspect of the attack.

Consider the following articles from:

• ABC 'news' (so far Left it'd have to replace half its staff to have a hope of going back to center);
• Sydney Morning Herald;
• The Australian (supposedly Right-wing news);
• Huffington Post; and
• News.com.au

What do all of those articles have in common?  They all hide any mention of the identity of the suspect.  Just in case the first link decides to take down the photo of the suspect, here it is:

Is there any doubt as to the background of the suspect?  I don't think so.

As usual, the media is going out of their way to hide that information until such time that it's "old news".

Former female PM to head anti-suicide organisation

So the news has just come out that former Prime Minister Julia Gillard will be heading BeyondBlue, an organisation trying to help people with depression.

Why am I concerned about this?  Well, suicide is overwhelmingly a male issue.  In a country where one third (about 32%) of domestic violence victims are male, yet the focus is solely on the female victims, it would stand to reason that in an issue where about 80% of all suicides are by males, then the focus should be predominantly on helping men.

I'm not saying that she can't do the job, I just think that with her track record for:

• Removing any penalties on women who make false accusations in family court to get an advantage in custody disputes;
• Bringing into law the Violence Against Women and Children Act - assumes in any violent relationship that the man is the perpetrator;
• Felt the need to give buckets of public AUSTRALIAN money to island nations to help the women there with their careers, but only committed a paltry sum (by comparison) to help with male suicide; and
• Changed IVF laws to allow single women and lesbians access to government subsidized IVF (I've really only got an issue with allowing single women to use it, but that's a story for another day).

Given that the first two items above have probably done more to cause more male suicides than any Prime Minister in quite a long time, I just don't see her doing anything other than try to shine a light on those poor forgotten women who committed suicide.

Time will tell how she commits her time, but I honestly think that this narcissistic person will hijack the organisation and make it, yet again, about the poor women.

Media asks if being anti-vaccinations should be illegal

So the media is asking if being an 'anti-vaxxer' should be illegal.

I think the bigger question is why are we supposed to listen to an organisation (the Media) that is owned by 'big pharma'?

Notice that the Media (big pharma) isn't directly calling for being anti-vaxxers to be declared criminals, they simply ask the question and lay out some fairly basic information (not all of it, mind you) and hopes that people jump to attention.

I mean, it's not like vaccinations have ever been withdrawn from use due to bad side effects like it was in Japan in 1989-91 or Britain in 2009.

I mean, it's not like the manufacturers of these vaccinations and the doctors who administer them are completely immune from Civil lawsuits if the vaccinations kill or permanently disable someone. Oh wait, thay are.

For the record, I am pro-vaccination, but I very much like the media programming whereby they attempt to label people who may have legitimate concerns over the industry as kooks.  We should all have a right to be able to question something without being labeled undesirable.

It would be a different story if, like most other professions, the company that provides the vaccination were legally liable for the outcome.  Perhaps then they'd have a bit better incentive to have a zero harm vaccine.  Either that, or they'd just jack up the prices of their already expensive vaccines (which the government is happily making mandatory for all children) to cover the cost.

Do vaccinations have a place?  Yes.  Should it be that a child by the age of 18 has 69 does of 16 different vaccinations?  Sounds like a lot when I put it that way, doesn't it.

Another car jacking by the usual suspects

So a couple of dark skinned men have cut a man with their machete before stealing his car.

The man has now moved his family out of the suburb and into hiding in a different suburb.

As usual, the media keeps back the racial identity of the perpetrators until the 7th paragraph, despite the photos clearly showing dark skinned men.

Australia is fast turning into South Africa, where carjackings are very frequent.  If only there were a group of people we could simply deport the first time they commit these kind of offenses...

I know, what about violent immigrants who don't follow the law and assault people!  We wouldn't have to separate out a group based on their skin colour, we'd judge them on their actions alone and we'd also be keeping our own citizens safe and making our country a safer place for it.

Nah, some leftist morons might consider a equal opportunity policy (commit a violent crime if you're an immigrant and get deported) to be racist, despite the same policy potentially be used against white immigrants.

Someone poisoned David Lawrence, media hides who

So there are two different reports about the death of David Lawrence here and here.

One of them only mentions that his "partner" or someone close to him might have killed him.

The second one mentions that the home of his FEMALE partner at the time has since been raided.

As usual, the media plays down or covers up when WOMEN kill or assault men, preferring only to report on cases when men kill or assault women.

This is one of the reasons why I WILL NOT PAY FOR any subscriptions claiming to be 'news', when clearly they filter out details or rearrange facts to suit their agenda.

It's disgusting and it doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon.

Gay marriage - forcing companies to back it

So business leaders back gay marriage, despite the gay mafia threatening private companies who don't publicly share their view.

So it turns out the politicians were right, allowing both sides to put forward their arguments did result in attacks and hatred... only from the side that is supposedly all about love and equality.

Anyone who is not familiar with history knows that the Left has a very dark history of forcing people to do things they don't want to do, to ruin people who don't agree with them and to even kill people who aren't 'with' them.

Fortunately we're not at the third stage yet, but remember it's a slippery slop.  One minute you're being calmly told that marriage is all about equality, nothing else.  The next minute you're being accused of homophobia, yelled at and threatened.  Finally, you're being tracked down to your place of work and being outed as being racist, homophobic and misogynist for not saying what they want you to say.

It's funny because the people who have always lived in Australia just assume the best of people, whereas people who grew up in the former Soviet Union see the tactics for what they are: fascism.

It doesn't help that children today think that Hitler was Right-Wing, that Communists haven't been behind the overwhelming majority of state-sponsored murder in the history of the world and that the death toll of native populations of countries colonised by colonial British is upwards of 25 million.

As with anything, the numbers of deaths under communism gets rounded down every couple of years and the number of deaths due to white colonialism gets rounded up.  Before you know it, Stalin will only have been responsible for less than 1 million deaths, but most of those will be declared to have been criminals anyway, and the total number of Native Americans who died because of British settlements will be over 100 million.

Another aspect to all this that everyone is missing is that the slippery slope only gets worse.  First it's gay marriage, then it's polygamy and finally it's child marriages.

The arguments for all three will play out like this:

Gay marriage - why isn't it ok for two loving adults to get married, regardless of their gender since they're not hurting anyone and it's ok for heterosexual people to get married and divorced?
Polygamy - why isn't it ok for three loving adults to get married, since they're not hurting anyone and it's ok for gays and heterosexuals to get married?
Child marriages - why isn't it ok for a 30 year old man to marry a 12 year old girl, since they're not hurting anyone and it's ok for a homosexuals to get married and for people to have more than one husband/wife?

Before you know it, you'll have a 60 year old man with three wives who are all under 18 years of age or a 60 year old man with three husbands who are all under 18 years of age.

That's not to say there aren't some gay people who aren't going to be together forever, but the statistics show that gay men have a much higher partner count than heterosexual men, polygamy results in a gross gender imbalance whereby women are 'collected' by wealthy men, leaving more single men unable to find a wife and child marriages are often the result of arranged marriages, why can be abusive.

Of course everyone can point to instances where that's "not true", but not allowing children to marry until they reach a certain age is a general rule put in place to protect children and vulnerable people.

The strongest argument one can make against child marriage is this: if the love is so strong and marriage is meant to be forever (60 year marriage), then what does it matter if the loving couple get married when the younger person is 15 years old or waiting 3 years?  If a relationship is so sensitive that waiting a few years to be formally recognized, then it's probably not that strong to begin with.

Personally speaking, I don't care either way what individuals do.  Hell, when I was young and single I loved the idea of gay men in as much as the gay men were usually well dressed, well spoken and would otherwise have outclassed me (I'm generalizing here) in the pursuit of the women I pursued.

What I most strongly disagree with is this strong-arm tactic where you threaten the livelihoods of people who don't openly share your point of view and the politicians arguing that the laws of the land should just be changed since no one is game to openly come out against it.  If the plebiscite is held, I think you'll find far more people against the idea than the numbers the polls claim.  A bit like the polls that predicted that Trump didn't have  chance in hell of winning.

As a great man once said: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".

Female author stabs man, media defends

So a woman has been sentenced to 13 years jail for stabbing her housemate 22 times, killing him.

Notice how the report leaves out that the 'author' is actually a woman in the title?  I guess it's kind of assumed given that the author was pregnant.

Then the report goes on to list out all of the reasons why she did what she did, thereby arguing that she's not really a bad person, she was just:

• Hungry due to suffering morning sickness;
• Pregnant;
• Suffering withdrawal from alcohol and cannabis;
• Angry that he hadn't been "providing for her like he promised"; and
• Craving cigarettes.

It's interesting that she got such a long sentence, although I guess it'd be hard to defend killing someone.  I mean it's not like she permanently disfigured a man, put him in a wheelchair for 4 months and injured him with a knife so badly he needed 243 stitches.  She would have only been given 3 and a half years for that.

Woman murder-suicides son, media defends her

So here's a story about a woman who killed her son, then sent her ex (the father of the now dead son) a message to come and get him, before killing herself for her ex to find.

Notice how the actual headline starts out defending the child killer: "She was a great mum".

No, great mum's don't kill their children.

Great mum's don't kill their children just to hurt the father of said children.

No, this was not a great mum, or even a good mum.  This was an evil woman who the media spends most of the article defending her actions or dismissing them as "she was just in an emotional place".

Notice that the 'report' doesn't even get to the detail that his ex-partner killed their son until about the 4th paragraph?  A person who stopped reading at the third paragraph could just about walk away thinking that the guy had found his son and ex dead from a home invasion!  Notice that it says they were "found dead".  The boy was found dead, so technically it's true, but what's held back is that the mother did it.

Consider the difference in reporting from that story to this story about Greg Anderson and Rosie Batty, with Greg being painted as violent, abusive and mentally imbalanced and is described in the headline as "killer dad" with the opening paragraph reading "he killed son Luke".  The other article takes until the end of the article to even use the word "kill" and does it in a throwaway manner that "she may have killed".

Maybe Greg was violent, abusive and all of that, although he's not here to defend any of the accusations thanks to a police officer who shot a man armed only with a cricket bat (hardly a weapon of mass murder).

Or, maybe like Matt Davis and Stacey Docherty, there's more to the story, the difference being that the media is happy to speculate on what drove Stacey to do what she did, whilst defending her as an otherwise "great mum", whilst no attempt at understanding or putting forward of any positive attributes of Greg are put forward.

This is because the old rule of "never speak ill of the dead" apparently only applies to women and left-wing people.  Left wing people and women should be treated as flawless saints when they die, with their memory being bullet proof.  Men and right-wing people are open for attack after death.

The problem with the media and people doing this so blatantly is that more and more people are waking up to the inequality and are starting to question the narrative.  It's only going to get worse from here as they'll double down.

Also, I highly doubt Matt Davis will become a paid for speaker on domestic violence of mental health issues of women any time soon, because despite the fact that more children are killed by their mothers than their fathers, women are still the overall victims.

First step in many - granting fathers less than half

So here we have a case of a threesome gone wrong, with the ex-wife (now in a lesbian relationship with the mother of the child) now awarded one-third custody of a boy.

One wonders why the woman, not the biological mother, even needed to be legally considered one since she's actually living with the biological mother anyway.

This obviously is a ploy to argue that the man's access to his son should be reduced since he's not half of the parenting equation, he's only a third.

Men, be careful with whom you have children and ALWAYS question the motives of any woman who accepts that you have a child with another woman whilst you're in a relationship with them.

Far too many men have been hurt by women who 'discover' that they're actually lesbians after they've had a couple of children with a man.

UPDATE: Muslims taking over public schools in Sydney

So here's a story about how 19 schools in Sydney have been identified as at risk for radicalization of Muslim students.

Think about that for a minute.  You send your child to a public school expecting there to be no religion, only to find that the place is run like a mosque.

This will only lead to non-Muslims taking their children out of the school and moving them to other schools, resulting in a rise in the percentage of Muslim students in the school.

Notice how the story doesn't get around to reporting that 19 schools are affected until the NINETEENTH PARAGRAPH!?!  The bulk of the story is about Punchbowl High School, leading the average reader to assume the problem only exists in one high school, when there are 18 other high schools with the same problem.

Now let's hear from Muslim apologists as they try to explain how "a little radical Islam never hurt any innocent people", because we all know that they don't define non-believers as 'innocent'.

UPDATE:

So it looks like it's worse than previously thought: children as young as 11 years old are threatening to behead female teachers, threatening them for not letting them do what they want and walking out of lessons to go and pray.

Where are those Muslim apologists when you need them?  Simple plan: when the children turn 18 years old, ask them which country has their allegiance, Syria or Australia.  If they answer anything other than Australia, send them there with a one way ticket and cancel their passport.

We don't need people who hate us living here with, or even off, us.  If they love their 'home' country so much, why are they even here???

ADDITIONAL UPDATE:

We're now asked to believe that the anti-radicalization programs the government is trying to implement are actually "playing into the hands" of radical recruiters.  I'm always surprised when the proposed solution to a growing problem is to stop trying to solve the problem.

The easiest solution is to identify the people doing the radicalizing and give them a one way ticket out of the country to a country that already lives by the set of religious rules that they're so keen to follow here.

I don't go to a hip hop club and try to get them to play country music, so why do Muslims get to come to Australia (or other western countries) and then demand their own bigoted beliefs be respected?

I guess the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't want men to know donor children

So I posted a comment to the SMH article about "All children deserve to know who their parents are" which basically stated that the argument about are right to heritage extends downwards as well as upwards.

Put simply, a donor father should also have a right to contact any donor children once they reach a certain age.

Apparently my comment was a bit too sensitive, since it didn't make it past moderation.

I guess the headline should rather be "All children deserve to know who their parents are but not the other way around".

P.S.  I've submitted the following comment and will see if it makes it past the gatekeepers:

"They should have the right as the donors should also have the right to have contact with the children.
A right to know ones heritage also extends down the family tree, as well as up."

I'm not holding my breath.

Media making the case to stop circulation of $50 and $100 notes

So the media is now adding fuel to the fire for the removal of the Australian $50 and $100 notes: they're being counterfeited.

So they caught $365k in $100 notes in circulation and $1.1 million in $50 notes that were actually counterfeited.  So of all of the money in circulation, they caught about $1.5 million in 2016.

That sounds like cause enough to cancel all $50 and $100 notes.

There's no way that this is all just a smoke screen to justify forcing everyone to digitize their money and keep it in banks.

Rosie Batty twisting more words and family court reformation

So, Rosie Batty is at it yet again now making accusations against her now-dead ex partner of viewing child pornography.

She goes onto state that she "found out" that he had charges pending against him for view child abuse videos in a public library.  Because women in custody battles NEVER make false accusations against their exes.

I'm only skeptical of this new report because in every interview she's ever given her big point that she made that her ex was an otherwise good father and most certainly never mentioned something as serious as allegations of child pornography.

Isn't it just fantastic that these allegations have surfaced just in time for her to be a (presumably paid) speaker at world conference on families of sex offenders.  I guess just being a (paid) spokesperson for Domestic Violence doesn't get enough (paid) speaking engagements.

Isn't it also great that her ex isn't alive to defend himself against every accusation she's throwing at him and that the police aren't likely to come out and say her claims are false.  The guy either doesn't have any remaining family of his own or they're too afraid to call out the PR juggernaut that is Rosie Batty on what is either something that has never been mentioned in the past, or is a complete fabrication.

This woman has been through a tragedy, but seriously, the next thing she'll be accusing him of is child sex trafficking and scalping AFL Grand Final tickets!

Her previous position on domestic violence was that her ex murdered her son despite not prior history of any violence, which was used as the war cry for women's groups to argue that "lack of history of violence should not be considered a reason not to keep men away from their children".  But if what Batty is now claiming is true, then her ex DID have some black marks against his name and can no longer be held up as an example of men killing their children out of nowhere.

Please note, that at the time of writing this it is completely legal for women to make false accusations against men in family court.  By legal I mean that there are NO repercussions and no penalties.  Obviously they SAY women aren't allowed to do it, but if they're found to be lying, there are no penalties, so effectively it's legal.

There's even a petition on Change.org fort he reformation of Family Law Court that already has almost 1,200 signatures about it.  Interestingly enough, it's been started by a woman.

A problem with diversifying assets

I was thinking about how financial people are always telling us to make sure we don't have all of our eggs in one basket and that we should diversify our investments.

Example: if I have $100k in the stock market, I should aim to put a similar amount of money into property.

The problem I have relates to a specific scenario which is that if I purchased a small property about 10 years ago and the value of it has gone up about $50k in that time with me originally putting in $50k of my own money in to purchase, so I'd have a combined equity of $100k tied up in 'property'.

Now, the conventional wisdom of financial investing is that I should aim to invest an equivalent amount of money in the stock market to ensure that, if the price of the property were to collapse, I would be hopefully protected.

The problem I have with that is that the average person would take quite a while to find $100k to invest in order to provide the necessary diversity.

Another point is that I could find that, in the time it takes for me to invest said $100k, the value of the property would have kept rising, which isn't a bad problem to have.

The alternative way to look at it is that I'd be better off aiming to buy a 2nd property (in a different area, for a small bit of diversity) for many reasons, the main one being that I'd be chasing my tail for many years to catch up with the returns that my first property delivered.

To compound that, once I'd 'balanced my diversity' and decided to buy my next property, I'd either have to start saving a separate amount of money to buy a 2nd property, taking many years to enable, or I'd just liquidate a large chunk of shares to buy the 2nd property, thereby reintroducing the imbalance again.

There is always the possibility of borrowing against the 1st property to either buy the 2nd property or even invest in shares, but unless the shares are returning an above interest rate dividend, I'd be going into debt to maintain a false investment portfolio that I'd still have to pay back, even if the share prices collapse.

Overall, I think a balance of the two is good, however at the current growth rates of property prices in Australia, I think I'd be hard pressed to find an equivalent return in stock market without as much risk.  The one advantage the stock market has is the low entry and exit costs and the far quick time to liquidate the assets.

The main difference is that there are only a finite number of companies on the stock exchange and, whilst some are overrated and others are underrated, all are under regular scrutiny by many different groups of investors.

Property sees millions of houses being assessed by far fewer potential investors as a percentage of the whole, which means there's a far greater chance of finding a bargain.

Woman defrauds men for $2 million, gets 18 months minimum

So a woman has defrauded multiple men out of more than $2 million, yet only gets 18 months jail minimum:

http://www.9news.com.au/national/2017/02/23/13/53/sydney-lonely-hearts-fraudster-gets-6-yrs

Contrary to what I normally do, I've posted the full link to the article because, as people will notice, the link itself reads "Sydney lonely hearts fraudster gets 6 years", which isn't even half true as the full sentence is only three and a half years, with a minimum sentence of 18 months.

As usual, the media focused solely on the poor woman, what drove her to doing it (she's a mother of four and takes care of her mother and brother) yet doesn't mention the impact on a single one of the victims, who may never get their money back since this poor woman is supposed to have spent the "money on cocaine, gambling and building a house".

This other 'news' website reports that she also spent the money on plastic surgery and cars.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but only one of those three things even remotely relates to taking care of anyone.  Gambling and using cocaine never helped raise children or look after relatives.

She really isn't a victim at all.  As usual, the stories of the real victims here, the men, will never be told by the media, who never want to paint men as victims or women as perpetrators, so will avoid it as much as possible.

Compare the 18 month sentence to the four year jail sentence issued to a man who 'only' stole $80,000 from 87 victims on Gumtree.  The difference was that this man had no contact with his victims, didn't continually lie to them, only the main lie that he was selling something that he didn't have.  So woman steals $2 million and gets 18 months jail, man steals $80,000 and gets 4 years jail.

I guess that's equality.  Feminists must be outraged!

The Conversation censors even suggestions

So, the (extreme far left) Conversation website has taken down my comment about Tax and dividend: How conservatives can grow to love carbon pricing.

I didn't bother taking a cut and paste of my original comment, but it was pretty tame (for me).  It went something like this:

Trying to tell conservatives what they should think (based on what you think they should think) isn't the way to go.  If you want conservatives (and indeed skeptics and denialists) on board then the pro-Climate Change scientific community needs to call out their more radical peers for making outrageous claims (like that half the cities of the world are going to be under water within 80 years) rather than simply attacking anyone who questions it.

Scientists who may actually agree with climate change are afraid to challenge some of the more extreme claims out of fear for being labelled a denier or skeptic.

If the scientific community doesn't call them out, then it gives the skeptics ammunition to point at failed predictions as proof the whole thing is wrong.


That was pretty much the gist of it.  All I was asking for was for the scientific community to call out its zealots who are making outlandish statements on the grounds that, much like the story of the boy who cried wolf, if we continue to hear outlandish predictions (and spend real money to try to prevent or mitigate against their outcomes) which then prove to be false, then we're going to stop listening to the predictions.

A bit like the priest who says to an atheist that the atheist needs to give half his money to the church lest he go to hell.  A better approach would be to tell the atheist that if he gives him 1% of his money that won't go to hell in addition to going to church.  The atheist is likely to say "I'm being promised salvation for only 1% of my money and a bit of time, what's the harm?"
Once in church, the priest can then increase the amount of money requested, whereby the (former?) atheist might decide that slow incremental increases aren't too much to bear, especially for eternal salvation, up to a point.

No, the way these climate alarmists work is that you're all in or you're all out, the only difference between the priest and a climate alarmist is that the priest is only saying that if the atheist doesn't go to church (and give some money) that his soul will be lost and the climate alarmist is saying that if a skeptic doesn't join the cause (and give lots of money) that everyone is lost.

It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy on all counts:

1. If climate change is man made and we manage to stop it, they'll (rightly) take the credit;
2. If climate change isn't man made and it stops (or it didn't exist) regardless of how much money we throw at it, they'll (incorrectly) take the credit;
3. If climate change is man made and we don't manage to stop it, they'll blame the people who didn't believe them; and
4. If climate change isn't man made and it doesn't stop, they'll blame the people who didn't believe them.

Notice that there's no scenario in the above where climate change believers will ever admit that they were wrong.

Remember, science is repeatable and must have results and be transparent.  When pro-climate change people collating data 'lose' inconvenient data before it has a chance to be backed up or verified by an external source isn't science, it's just crap.

If people who question those actions are then attacked for even questioning the 'word', then it's not science, it's a religion.
Notice the similarities between Islam and Climate Change:

• Both believe that it's ok to attack non-believers;
• Both demand more than their fair share of space and representation;
• Both groups are defended unconditionally by the media, despite questionable actions;
• Both groups have radicals who say/do extreme things that connected to their core beliefs, yet are somehow 'disconnected' when they go to far; and
• Both groups have wealthy backers financially supporting their spread (the UN for CC and wealthy sheiks paying to build mosques in Western countries).

Overall, both groups have honest people who mean well, but both groups have radical groups out to push their cause.  Both groups have underlying organisations behind them that stand to profit from their success and people should always be suspicious of a group offering to 'save' you for money, but only if you sell your soul.

How divorce provides disincentives for investment

In Australia, there's a very real imbalance with regards to how finances are dealt with when it comes to divorce and, specifically, child support.

Put simply, the rules are set to cover 95% of the applicable population, with the other 5% expected just to suck it up.

Consider Case A - Unfair to men:

A couple get divorced and they have one child together.  The husband, let's call him Harry, has to pay $300 a week in child support, which is based on the fact that his ex-wife, who we'll call Debbie, earns a decent wage.

Harry's ex-wife Debbie then re-marries and has another child to her new husband and decides to cut back on work or quit altogether.

Child Support Australia then re-calculates Harry's child support payments and INCREASES them to account for the fact that Debbie is no longer earning.

The outcome: Harry must pay MORE money to support his child because of the lifestyle decision his ex-wife made in a new relationship.  What's worse for Harry is that there currently exist no safeguards in place to ensure that the money that he's paying to his ex-wife for child support is even spent on his own child.


Now consider Case B - Unfair to women:

The same couple get divorced, only this time Harry remarries and has a child with his new wife.

Since Child Support Australia calculates amount payable as a portion of your income, the amount Harry is required to pay in child support to his ex-wife is REDUCED because he's now got two children and the total amount he can reasonably be expected to pay is now divided by two.

The outcome: the ex-wife, who may have been relying on that weekly payment to put food on the table and the lights on, is now going to come up short.


Now consider Case C - Disincentive to invest:

Same couple gets divorced, man decides that he's going to buy an investment property, which is negatively geared to the tune of $10k a year.  Since Child Support Australia doesn't allow deductions for negative gearing, the net loss of roughly $200 per week must come out of what money Harry has left after paying child support.

Fast forward 10 years, Harry is still paying child support, only the property is now positively geared and making $200 per week.  Since this income is now considered in calculating child support payments, his payments to his ex-wife go up proportionally, despite him taking the hit for the first 10 years.

Fast forward another 2 years, Harry decides to sell the house and walks away with $200k in capital gains, which is first taxed by the ATO for capital gains tax, then taken apart by Child Support Australia as being profit.

The outcome: any man paying child support is going to pay for an investment property out of what he has left after paying taxes and child support, but once that investment turns a profit in either selling for Capital Gains or in increase in rent, he has his child support adjusted.

The alternative would be to allow deductions of child support due to negative gearing, however this would negatively affect women as some men would load themselves up with multiple properties in the interests of avoiding paying child support.


Conclusion:

As stated above, the laws are in place to cover 95% of the population, however as I've shown above in Case C, the current system is a massive disincentive for people paying child support (usually men) to invest in property since they get no concessions in payments early in the investment in the loss-making portion, and get stung at either the profit making, be it positive cash flow or capital gains.

Give that child support can last 18 - 21 years, that's a big chunk of what would otherwise be prime capital building years.

I guess the only suggestions I can make are:

1. If planning to purchase property, opt for long-term holdings rather than flipping houses profit method.  Making $100k in two years may look good on paper as a side project, but won't look as good when your ex-wife gets a hefty chunk of money from the investment without lifting a finger.
2. If you already hold properties and would like to sell, hold off on selling until child support payments have stopped.  Simply waiting a couple of years could save you thousands.
3. Consider investing in lower cost, lower time investments like shares, bonds and ETFs.  You're going to have to pay money to support your child one way or another, but property investment carries a lot more unpaid time cost and capital improvement cost that can only be deducted from your post-child support money.  Simply paying that money as a percentage of dividend yield is a far simpler in the short term.

Please don't take the above post to mean that I'm advocating to minimise support of your children.  I am only pointing out that the whole system is designed for the 95% and that the 5% ends up in circumstances that cost tens of thousands of dollars and are a massive disincentive to bother in the first place.

One of the common complaints I read from ex-husbands is that their respective ex-wives have no accountability for the money: "I pay $500 a week and my wife doesn't work, wears Prada, smokes and drinks".  Perhaps things would be better if there was a mechanism whereby the wives were required to account for the money a bit, but knowing how the media loves to just shoot down any suggestion that women be held accountable for anything is "sexist" and could be open to abuse by former spouses (men) whilst simultaneously defending the decision to allow the current laws brought in under the Gillard government making false accusations against men in divorce cases legal, the chances of any changes in this space are minimal.

It really is one law for men and one law for women.

Strange 'extortion' attempt

So here's the story of a poor woman who sent some photos of herself to a guy she was chatting with on the internet whose girlfriend found out and tried to get her fired.

Firstly, I note how the whole article mentions extortion, yet by all accounts the jilted girlfriend only tried to threaten her off her man and sent photos to her boss to try to get the woman fired.  I saw no mention of "give me $20k or else".

Secondly, it's not until the sixth paragraph that we find out the online abuse (or 'extortion') came from the guy's fiancee, NOT the guy himself.  In the article's defense, it was written in chronological order, so taking six paragraphs to get to that little detail is somewhat forgivable.

Thirdly, the woman worked in retail, so getting fired from a job in retail because some random stranger wasn't likely to happen, but even if it did it would hardly 'ruin her life'.

True to form, there's only a handful of paragraphs where the gender of the abusive person is mentioned, whereas had the offender been male every other paragraph would have started with "The man then..."

Remember, the media lies by omission and will play down or leave out details they don't want featured.  Had it been a man doing those nasty things the headline would have been "Man sends images of woman to her boss".

Media reports on poor Middle Easterners arrested, leaves police's side last

So the media has reported about a couple of Middle Eastern men who have been arrested and charged following a scuffle with police.

As usual, the media tells the whole side of the 'poor misunderstood' Middle Eastern guy's story first, even interviewing him, before then showing the other side of the story.

Most police don't just start dragging people to the ground for no reason.

That area is known for its high Lebanese population and, interestingly enough, a person I was speaking to the other day who is also from Lebanon was telling me, when I asked had they gotten to know the Lebanese community, that the people they saw from Lebanon who now live in Melbourne were not typical of Lebanese and were, for lack of proper translation, the 'bogans' of Lebanon and not middle class or upper class.

I've met a few Lebanese people who were very nice, but the males in the area mentioned above tend to have a big chip on their shoulder, do whatever they want when they want and don't respect other people in their neighbourhood.

I'm aware that we get people like that from all backgrounds and it's the noisy ones who get the most attention, but this is more than that.  The Lebanese gentleman who lived next door to me was quiet, however he'd invite his extended family over on occasion (any night of the week!) and there'd be arguments, swearing and yelling until all hours of the morning.  It's possible that the quiet ones were trying to calm down the rest of their friends and family by association, but all we saw and heard was large groups hanging out the front of their house until all hours of the morning and even throwing stuff (like eggs) at my house.

Coming back to the original article, it's not hard a hard concept to understand: don't abuse people who have the authority to arrest you for that abuse!

Potential Islamic terrorists charged, Yahoo and Nine quiet

So a couple of aspiring Bonnie and Clyde youngsters looking to go on a rampage against "the kaffir" have been charged and face possible life in prison.

Funny how this doesn't make the headlines of Yahoo or Nine.  I guess this doesn't fit with the "all Muslims are peaceful" narrative.

How to potentially reduce your tax while paying your family

Want to know how to potentially reduce your tax whilst giving money to your family and get more money than you started with?  Just follow what the CEO of Australia Post did.

Notice that he negotiated a $2 million taxable payment into a $2.8 million, a 40% increase, 'donation' to the Islamic Museum of Australia that his brother runs, which presumably pays his brother a salary, though it's not really a donation if it's technically a payment.

I think I'll look at setting up an organisation that will be run by my wife and will negotiate $50k of my salary into a $70k donation to the organisation, which will ultimately pay her a salary.

It must be legal, because Ahmed Fahour was allowed to do it!

Oh wait, the donation came from a Muslim and was paid to a Islamic organisation, so I won't be holding my breath that it'll be audited or investigated in any way, since our media and law enforcement doesn't want to appear to be 'racist'.

On second thoughts, I'm not prepared to convert to Islam just to save a bit on tax.

UPDATE:

Apparently Ahmed has resigned from his position.  Interesting things to note that are written in the article is that it was supposedly his decision, he'll still get his multi-million dollar salary and he's just waiting to find out what his bonus (presumably in the millions) will be.

I just hope that Australia Post won't let the guy negotiate any of his salary into a 40% increased amount 'donated' to an organisation run by his family.

Musings on the public vs private school debate

This is a copy and paste of a comment I left on an article about public vs private schools at the Monthly:

Living in a large country town that is crowded out by private (mostly Catholic) schools that apparently poach top performing students from public schools, leaving the public schools with 'the leftovers', I'm caught between a rock and a hard place.

I myself went to what was (and still is) a very good public school (I think we got lucky with where we were living at the right time) whereas both of my parents went to private schools and opted for a lifestyle decision not to send me to a private school, mostly based on the good reputation of the local public school.

I'm in the opposite situation as where I'm living with my family is in an area that has pretty terrible public schools (primary and secondary) for the simple reason that the private schools poach the good students and then parents (like me) decide not to send our beloved children to what is a 'failing school', statistically speaking, in favour of one of the more expensive private schools, which in my area consist of moderately priced Catholic schools (a bit hard to get in if your children aren't baptised) or the exorbitantly over-priced non-Catholic schools.

It almost becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because nothing succeeds like success, so parents climb over and sometimes go into debt to send their children to one of the nearby private schools instead of risking their children's education.
My brother and his family are living in the catchment area of a much better performing public school, but oddly enough, should they decide to send their children to the nearby private school, the fees are very reasonable at about $2k per student per year, as opposed to the 'moderately' priced $5k per student per year I'm looking at.

So, I've got the choices of:
1. Move into the catchment area of a good school - $$$
2. Get my children Baptized so they can attend - deceptive, but I have seen MANY couples do this
3. Put them into the public system and hope they get poached - not helping the public school
4. Put them into the public system and put full support behind it, even going so far as to resist any possible effort for my children to be poached.

It's a hard decision to make and I'll never really know if I've done the right thing (unless all of my children become CEO's or Prime Minister) as I'll always wonder if whatever decision I made could have held them back.

Sorry for the long post, but I'll finish with this one piece of information that the original poster may not have been aware: one of the reasons behind my parents, who were both privately schooled, not sending me to private school was that a study had been completed by Melbourne University on the outcomes of students who went public vs private. The outcome was that if a family could easily afford the money, then the slightly improved outcomes were worth the money. If, however, the parents had to scrimp, work two jobs or struggle to put them through, then it wasn't.
Whether this was because of any pressure or resentment from the parents (ie "I'm paying a fortune for you to attend that school, you should be top of the class") or whether it is because the children from wealthy families bully the 'poorer' students (apparently the children work out very quickly whose family isn't wealthy), the conclusion from the study was that the overall outcomes of children has more to do with the home life of the children than what school they went to.
If parents are always out working (to pay for school fees) then of course the children are at a greater risk of falling into bad crowds.
As a guy once pointed out to me when talking about discussing sending his two girls to private school: "for the amount of money my ex-wife is asking me to pay for our daughters' education, I'd rather buy each of them a rental property that I have to put the same amount towards every year and be able to give them each a rental property when they graduate".
I'm not sure which way that guy went, but often times we like to console ourselves that we 'did our best' when raising our children, and all too often the yard stick we measure how much we put into raising our children is measured by how much we spent on their education instead of by how much time we spent with them.
I know many doctors and lawyers who went to public schools and I know quite a few people who went to private schools only to drop out of university or who never went to university.

END OF COMMENT:

Further to the above comment, when I look across the people my age who I know went to private schools, not that many of them completed university (some had trouble going from a system that held their hand right through to a self-driven model), so I imagine a few people would be a little annoyed if you'd spent $50k on your child's education for them to end up as a waiter/waitress.

Conversely, I know quite a few people who went public school, who work as real estate agents, supermarkets and as mechanics and who are very happy with their lives, not that the private school people aren't happy, and perhaps they could have done more, but their parents are at least not disappointed in the lost opportunity cost.

I think giving any children I have a (partially paid off) house each in a market that will arguably be very much harder to buy into in 20 years time will provide a much bigger advantage than a $50k education that they may choose to take or leave.  The house will probably be worth more than the education would have cost and it would be theirs to do as they wish, removing the need for them to spend the first 5 to 10 years of their working lives scraping together a deposit on a small starter home.