https://www.theaustralian.com.au/the-teachers-pet

The Teacher’s Pet: friends and family at start of long road

Hedley Thomas

The day before Chris Dawson’s arrest, I had a long conversation with Lyn’s sister, Pat Jenkins.

“They can’t be much longer, surely. They’ve had it for so long,” Pat said.

The NSW Office of Public Prosecutions had been given the police brief of evidence against her former brother-in-law in April. She was trying to stay positive but had been here before and seen her hopes dashed when the department declined to prosecute him.

“It’s our last chance. Here’s hoping, hey?’’ she said.

Yesterday morning, when my phone began ringing with news an arrest had been made, it was enormous relief rather than any sense of elation or celebration that washed over me. Lyn’s steadfast friends and family are finally at the start of a road they’ve been trying to reach for more than three decades.

The Teacher’s Pet podcast series

I spoke to Lyn’s brother, Greg Simms, and his wife, Merilyn, soon after the arrest. They were elated but it was still sinking in. As we talked, the news headlines came on their TV. “It’s on. It’s on. It’s true!’’ he said.

Lyn’s friend and neighbour Julie Andrew was trying to call me as Greg and Merilyn were talking. We connected soon afterwards.

“I can’t actually contain my emotions,” Julie said. “I feel like running through the streets and screaming at the top of my voice, it’s something I didn’t think we’d ever get to. She didn’t leave her kids, and her kids will know that.”

She spoke of “everything that everyone’s gone through for so many years, living day to day, year to year, decade to decade, and feeling no one was ever going to do the right thing and believe in Lyn”.

It has been a very long struggle for many people who knew Lyn Dawson. At last everyone who has spoken up for her can start to look forward, instead of continually reflecting on what they should have, would have, could have done. Mixed with the relief is a lingering frustration that they had to fight so hard for so long to get to this point.

There has been a broader purpose here; NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller touched on it yesterday. Many families have lost loved ones under suspicious circumstances and are looking for answers.

The world has embraced Lyn. All victims should be cared for like this.

ENDS

Congratulations Hedley and The Australian for backing him.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/the-teachers-pet

 

In 1942, Dole joined the United States Army's Enlisted Reserve Corps to fight in World War II, becoming a second lieutenant in the Army's 10th Mountain Division. In April 1945, while engaged in combat near Castel d'Aiano in the Apennine mountains southwest of Bologna, Italy, Dole was badly wounded by German machine gun fire, being hit in his upper back and right arm. As Lee Sandlin describes, when fellow soldiers saw the extent of his injuries, all they thought they could do was to "give him the largest dose of morphine they dared and write an 'M' for 'morphine' on his forehead in his own blood, so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose."^[10]

Dole was transported to the United States, where his recovery was slow, interrupted by blood clots and a life-threatening infection. After large doses of penicillin had not succeeded, he overcame the infection with the administration of streptomycin, which at the time was still an experimental drug.^[11] He remained despondent, "not ready to accept the fact that my life would be changed forever." He was encouraged to see Hampar Kelikian, an orthopedist in Chicago who had been working with veterans returning from war. Although during their first meeting Kelikian told Dole that he would never be able to recover fully, the encounter changed Dole's outlook on life, who years later wrote of Kelikian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, "Kelikian inspired me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it, rather than complaining what had been lost." Dr. K, as Dole later came to affectionately call him, operated on him seven times, free of charge, and had, in Dole's words, "an impact on my life second only to my family."^[12]

Dole recovered from his wounds at the Percy Jones Army Hospital. This complex of federal buildings, no longer a hospital, is now named Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center in honor of three patients who became United States Senators: Dole, Philip Hart and Daniel Inouye. Dole was decorated three times, receiving two Purple Hearts for his injuries, and the Bronze Star with "V" Device for valor for his attempt to assist a downed radioman. The injuries left him with limited mobility in his right arm and numbness in his left arm. He minimizes the effect in public by keeping a pen in his right hand.

• Alex Turnbull, former PM's son, names 'top 5 craziest Liberals'

  

  "A lot of [my dad's] legacy is fighting the good fight against the crazies."

• RN Drive - Alex Turnbull on Wentworth

  

  Duration: 14 minutes 59 seconds14m

  One of the more interesting factors in the race is the intervention of Malcolm Turnbull's son, Alex, who's openly backing Labor.

• RN Drive - Alex Turnbull, TPP and feral cats

  Duration: 1 hour 27 minutes 12 seconds1h 27m

   

• Alex Turnbull urges Wentworth voters to ditch Liberal

  

  Duration: 17 seconds17s

  Alex Turnbull took to Facebook to urge voters in Wentworth to send a message to the Liberal Party's "hard right" by not voting for them.

• Scott Morrison hits back after Alex Turnbull urges voters to abandon Liberals in Wentworth

  

  The son of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull issues a blunt assessment of the state of the Liberal Party, urging Wentworth-by election voters to steer clear, but PM Scott Morrison says his predecessor doesn't share the sentiment.

• Alex Turnbull: Coal miners exerting 'undue influence' on Liberal Party, says son of former PM Malcolm Turnbull

  

  Speaking out after his father lost the Liberal leadership, Alex Turnbull described Australia's energy policy as 10 years of "panic and mania", and said it made no economic sense to build new coal-fired power plants.

• PM - Energy policy chaos helps hedge funds like mine, but not consumers: Alex Turnbull

  

  Duration: 6 minutes 21 seconds6m

  Singapore-based investment banker Alex Turnbull speaks with PM on the end of his father's tenure as prime minister and the "cycles of mayhem and panic" created over years of federal energy policy.

• 

  The Government is correct when it judges voters are focused on power prices, but it underestimates people's concern about emission and commitment to renewables, and Alex Turnbullknows this, writes Michelle Grattan.

Monday PM

Duration: 30 minutes 30m

On Monday's PM: whither energy policy in the Morrison Government?; investment banker Alex Turnbull, the son of the former PM, shares his view on some Liberal MPs' obsession with coal; and the UN recommends Myanmar's military leaders be investigated and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

.@TurnbullMalcolm on clean energy: There is a significant percentage of Coalition members who do not believe climate change is real.

The people who hold those views are prepared to cross the floor in order to get their way.

MORE: https://t.co/HXcc5VZUQu #SkyLiveNow pic.twitter.com/f1VpfKsUfn

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) December 3, 2018

Update - this video courtesy of Janet Albrechtsen!

ENDS

Last night Alex Turnbull published this disgusting, degrading remark.

He followed up with this smart-arsed non-apology.

I think we can all learn from Professor Graham Harland - writing in USA Today.

I deactivated my Twitter account about a week ago. I was partly acting on impulse, because the social media site had just, for no obvious reason, “permanently banned” someone I follow, something that seems to be happening more and more. But I was also acting on my growing belief that Twitter is, well, horrible.

All social media have their issues. The “walled garden” character they create is the antithesis of the traditional Internet philosophy of openness. They are actually consciously designed to be addictive to their users — one company that consults on such issues is actually called Dopamine Labs — and they tend to soak up a huge amount of time in largely profitless strivings for likes and shares. They promote bad feelings and bad behavior: I saw a cartoon listing social media by deadly sins, with Facebook promoting envy, Instagram promoting pride, Twitter promoting wrath, Tinder promoting lust and so on. It seemed about right.

But as someone who spends a lot of time on the internet and whose social media experience goes all the way back to the original Orkut and Friendster, I think that Twitter is the worst.  

In fact, if you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter. Twitter has the flaws of the old Usenet newsgroups, but on a much bigger scale.

Precursors to Twitter required accountability

Even the “blogosphere” of the early 21st century, in which independently run blogsites posted items on news, and responded both to Big Media stories and to each other, was more like traditional media in some respects than like Usenet or social media. To read content on blogs, readers had to go there. To interact, bloggers had to read each other’s sites and decide to post a response, generally with a link back to the post they were replying to.

If you didn’t like a blog, you could just ignore it.  A story that spread like wildfire through the blogosphere still did so over the better part of a day, not over minutes, and it was typically pretty easy to find the original item and get context, something the culture of blogging encouraged.

As James Lileks wrote, “The link changes everything. When someone derides or exalts a piece, the link lets you examine the thing itself without interference.” 

Bloggers often encouraged their readers to follow the link and “read the whole thing.” In addition, a story’s spread required at least a modicum of actual thought and consideration on the part of bloggers, who were also constrained, to a greater or lesser degree, by considerations of reputation. Some blogs served as trusted nodes on the blogosphere, and many other bloggers would be reluctant to run with a story that the trusted nodes didn’t believe.

In engineering parlance, the early blogosphere was a “loosely coupled” system, one where changes in one part were not immediately or directly transmitted to others. Loosely coupled systems tend to be resilient, and not very subject to systemic failures, because what happens in one part of the system affects other parts only weakly and slowly.

Tightly coupled systems, on the other hand, where changes affecting one node swiftly affect others, are prone to cascading failures. Usenet was one such system, where an entire newsgroup could be ruined by a spreading flamewar. If a blogger flamed, people could just ignore the blog; when a Usenet user flamed, others got sucked in until the channel was filled with people yelling at each other. (As Nick Denton wrote, the blogosphere “routes around idiots” in a way that Usenet didn’t, because if didn’t depend on the common channel that a Usenet group did.)

Twitter is more like Usenet than blogs, but in many ways it’s worse. Like Usenet it’s tightly coupled. The “retweet," “comment” and “like” buttons are immediate. A retweet sends a posting, no matter how angry or misinformed, to all the retweeter’s followers, who can then do the same to their followers, and so on, in a runaway chain reaction.  

Unlike blogs, little to no thought is required (the character limit discourages it), and in practice very few people even follow the link (if there is one) to “read the whole thing.”  The “block” and “mute” functions on Twitter are intended to protect against Usenet-style flamewars, but to the extent that they work, they also put people in bubbles of similar thinkers, which tends to encourage the spread of misinformation so long as it matches the thinkers’ prejudices.  

Journalists and pundits abuse Twitter

Worse yet, the heaviest users of Twitter are journalists and political operatives. They tend to have lots of short episodes of downtime — waiting on hold or in line for a congressional hearing, say — and fill them with Twitter. There’s a big psychic reward to issuing a bon mot — usually a put-down — and being cheered for it by your friends and political allies. But the end result is a lot of off-the-cuff meanness. Few tweeters even follow the links they retweet to read beyond the headline. And spending hours a day in this environment can’t help but affect their other work.

Some say the sharp partisanship we see on Twitter from allegedly objective journalists is a useful revelation: Finally, we’re seeing their true selves. While there’s some truth to that, I also think that Twitter actually makes people meaner and less thoughtful. People I’ve followed both on Facebook and Twitter are generally much meaner on Twitter, where they’re in the political arena, than on Facebook, where their friends and family are a big part of the audience.  

I don’t mean to give Twitter all the blame, as our political discourse has been getting worse for some time. But it does seem that its decline steepened sharply around the time Twitter appeared.

This isn’t a call for banning Twitter. But it is a suggestion that maybe our time is better spent elsewhere. Since I got off Twitter, I’ve filled the downtime I used to fill with tweeting by going what I did pre-Twitter, reading novels on the Kindle app on my phone. It’s better, and I’m happier.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself".

Jim Molan has just released this note confirming intelligent life in the Liberals is extinct.

I first met Jim in the 1990s when I was CEO of a Telstra business based in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Jim was the Military Attache at the Australian Embassy and we'd see each other at the endless stream of official functions at the Ambassador John McCarthy's residence and elsewhere around town.

I dropped Jim a note a few days ago

Senator, 

Every few seconds during the waking hours one of Australia's most loyal and committed conservative voters visits my website.

That's 18,000 per day, every day from a pool of 100,000 individual people who come by at least once a month.

There are hundreds of comments about you and they're overwhelmingly supportive of you.  I am too - I was one of the first commentators to write - with disgust - of your treatment at the hands of the Liberal Party's morons at the wheel.

We haven't heard from you directly in quite a while.   I know our readers would love to hear from you.  Perhaps you might care to thank them directly for their support.

Thanks for your service General,

Michael

ENDS

I know Jim's particularly busy at present, but he's taken the time to write to us - note the time!

Molan, Jim (Private)	Dec 3, 2018, 3:37 AM
to Zac, me

The most worrying aspect of yesterday's revelations about Victoria Police informer 3838 comes from the current Chief Commissioner.

The Australian reported on Ashton's comments today.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton yesterday stood by police involved in the scandal, urging people to understand the context in which detectives were operating. 

“Melbourne was in the grip of what now is known as the gangland wars ... The risk to the community at this time was significant … a genuine sense of urgency was enveloping the criminal justice system, including police,’’ he said.

He defended the roles of those involved in the decision to use the legal supergrass.

Ashton's response comes straight from the "Whatever it takes" playbook.

And it's frightening.

It's shocking enough that these events took place.

But how much worse that Victoria Police hasn't learned from it.

Christine Nixon and Simon Overland were under political pressure from the Bracks and Brumby governments to stop the gangland killings.

And Ashton is now justifying their actions.

Ashton's justification comes in the cold hard light of day.

It comes after the High Court's judgement.

He's defending the indefensible.

It's an insight into what he'd be prepared to do when he felt "a genuine sense of urgency".

That worries me - personally.

The Victoria Police motto is "Uphold the Right".

Not "Whatever it Takes".

Someone should remind Graham Ashton.

https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2016/08/interview-with-victorias-chief-commissioner-of-police-about-progress-in-the-awu-scandal.html

This is Ryan.

Age - 7.

Taxable income - $30M AUD.

I no longer understand how the world works!!!!!

And now.............from Forbes magazine.............the Top-Ten YouTube earners!

The 10 Top-Earning YouTube Stars

In January 2018, the 23-year-old elder Paul brother was kicked off YouTube’s Google Preferred program, which gives favorable ad rates to popular channels, after he filmed a video in Japan that showed an apparent suicide hanging from a tree. He apologized. His income from videos (pratfalls, pranks) and brand deals took a hit, but loyal fans kept his hefty merchandise business afloat.

Scandal hasn’t stopped Felix Kjellberg, the Swedish gamer who is the most followed YouTuber (72.5 million followers). Despite a backlash last year after a rash of anti-Semitic videos, advertisers have returned, shelling out up to $450,000 for a sponsored video.

Foulmouthed, energetic Seán McLoughlin is the most popular YouTuber in Ireland thanks to his colorful video-game commentary. A few bad words haven’t kept him from going mainstream: He did a series for Disney and is developing exclusive content for live-streaming platform Twitch.

Witty Canadian gamer Evan Fong plays mainstream titles like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. On the side he’s launching a hip-hop career, but music (so far) isn’t proving nearly as lucrative as the subtle art of being a couch potato in demand.

Hawaii-native Markiplier is on his PS4 nearly all day everyday—but he’s not bumming around. The gamer toured North America, signed seven-figures worth of brand deals and, with No. 8 Jacksepticeye, recently launched Cloak, a high-end athleisure line for gamers.

The makeup artist, famous since the Myspace era, has reinvented himself as a beauty mogul, cofounding Jeffree Star Cosmetics, which sells an estimated $100 million–plus of eye shadow, lipstick and highlighters annually.

Last year’s top earner at $16.5 million—Daniel Middleton, a British gamer who specializes in Minecraft—has been playing on-camera for six years, amassing a following of 20.7 million, who shell out for his tour and merchandise, which includes backpacks, baseball caps and hoodies.

This five-man sports crew (Coby and Cory Cotton, Garrett Hilbert, Cody Jones and Tyler Toney) specializes in feats of dexterity and intricate trick shots— say, hurling Ping-Pong balls that trigger domino-falls of Oreos, which garnered 175 million views).

The boisterous younger brother of disgraced Logan (No. 10) earned a career-best income from his thriving merchandise business. He attracted more than 3.5 billion views of his rap songs and goofy pranks over our scoring period.

Ryan’s just like every other 7-year-old: He loves Legos, trains, cars—and his 17 million followers. His latest mini-mogul move: a line of collectibles and more, now selling at Walmart.

METHODOLOGY: All earnings estimates are from June 1, 2017, through June 1, 2018. Figures are pretax; fees for agents, managers and lawyers are not deducted. Earnings estimates are based on data from Captiv8, SocialBlade and Pollstar, as well as interviews with industry insiders.