(Miscellaneous debris)

[tigerhutch]

he would have just punched his lights out .... end of story

[Jimmy_041]

I've never been a huge fan of Keating, but I found the interview with him on the ABC last night (I think part 1 was last week) very interesting.

Gave an insight into his career in Canberra, what drove him, and his relationship with/ opinion of, other key figures in Parliament during his time.

I thought it was particularly interesting when he said that his "dislike" of Howard was not personal, but purely based on JH's political philosophies/ideology.

Paul hangs proudly on my wall.
Wouldn't it be great to have him around debating with Abbott and his clowns

He was a disgrace to the position and inadvertently admitted it last night
His revision of history to try to promote a legacy is even worse

[mighty_tiger_79]

clive palmer and Katter having fun in question time

[Gozu]

Unfortunately last nights episode of Keating was the 4th and final episode, they were fantastic and he was from the days when politicans actually had ideological views and personal opinions, not the cardboard cut-outs we've been served up by both sides in recent times. Even Howard tried to be as bland and inoffensive as possible until the ideological mask came off in 2004 when he got control of the Senate and gave us WorkChoices.

There might be a few episodes of Keating on ABC iView if you missed it. I'll get the DVD when it comes out because I want to watch all four of them again and it will sit nicely alongside my Keating!-The Musical DVD

[Gozu]

Far-right former Walking Dead actress pleads guilty to trying to kill President Obama:

A former actor has pleaded guilty to sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, under a deal that her lawyer has said would cap prison time at 18 years.

Shannon Guess Richardson entered her plea in federal court in Texarkana, Texas, to a federal charge of possessing and producing a biological toxin.

Richardson was arrested in June after authorities said she tried to implicate her estranged husband, Nathan Richardson, after he had filed for divorce.

Prosecutors say Richardson mailed three letters from New Boston, outside Texarkana, then went to police and claimed that her husband had done it.

Richardson, 35, has had minor roles in the television series The Walking Dead and the film The Blind Side.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/worl ... 6780507910

[Psyber]

I remember being very concerned at the time this was proposed, but with everything going on in federal government since I had forgotten all about it until it was raised in a discussion on a medical web site.

Roxon, as the Attorney General, in a critical position, was part of a government, that tried to rail-road through the Senate in two weeks the most egregious and frighteningly anti-Western bill ever seen in this or any other Western country; that did three things:
1. Make it a criminal offence to offend someone
2. Reverse the onus of proof, i.e. guilty until proven innocent
3. Taxpayer funds the prosecution
Does anyone else remember this?

On that site this was cited to express concern about the socio-political orientation of some of our politicians, and our bureaucracies, and the significance of such orientation in the motivation for controlling health data on government owned servers as the "Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record" the development of which all the doctors on the steering committee have now walked away from in protest. The core issue of the debate was why the PCEHR on government servers was needed at all when it would be much cheaper to simply provide an encrypted email system whereby doctors could easily and simply send information to each other. Data-mining and potential non-medical use was a central issue of the debate.

According to the discussion every PCEHR on line has cost $200,000 to establish. I haven't had access to the raw figures to check this.

[The Sleeping Giant]

From "a medical website"?

What is your problem with PCEHR ? Is it because patients can see what is in their file?

[Psyber]

From "a medical website"?
What is your problem with PCEHR ? Is it because patients can see what is in their file?

As a patient I don't trust the bureaucracy with my data - there have been leaks from other government records in Oz - Centrelink and Police - and from UK health records. I had a stalker get a friend in the department concerned to extract my home address from a suppressed file, after I had had my electoral enrolment and address suppressed because of previous incidents. A few years ago there trial run of an improved Medic Alert bracelet which would enable the patient to carry their own medical record with them. That got no government support - I can only think because that protected the data from the bureaucrats too. (Yes OK the patients could lose them.)

As a former private practitioner my view is that the doctor's notes are the doctor's notes, to prompt his memory, not the government's or the patients. I used to write in my records notes to myself to watch for emerging symptoms that may occur if the precise diagnosis was not clear, and reminders of similar patterns in other family members I knew of that that could be relevant in future because of possible genetic predispositions. That was useful in case management, but can't be done if the patient can have a right of access to the doctor's notes and thus the cross-referencing. It has made keeping track harder and caused duplication of work.

In the public system notes are public - and they used to get left out in trolleys in the Nurses' office bay where anyone could pick them up.
Relatives were not uncommonly found reading a patient's file.
I hope they are handled better these days...

The medical website is a member only site requiring a log in and a medical provider number for access. So, a link was of no use.
Are you suggesting I invented the story if I didn't provide one?!

[bennymacca]

wonder what the response from the international community would be if it was the other way round...

http://www.theguardian.com/global-devel ... enocide-un

[Jimmy_041]

It was the other way around Benny.
The Muslims took power and began the slaughter
The current slaughter is retribution

[bennymacca]

It was the other way around Benny.
The Muslims took power and began the slaughter
The current slaughter is retribution

im sure you realise that most of these countries have some sort of conflict going on, but systematically killing everyone is a whole different ballgame

doesnt really excuse either side really. just the first i had heard of it in the australian media, so i thought was interesting

[Psyber]

It was the other way around Benny.
The Muslims took power and began the slaughter
The current slaughter is retribution

im sure you realise that most of these countries have some sort of conflict going on, but systematically killing everyone is a whole different ballgame

doesnt really excuse either side really. just the first i had heard of it in the australian media, so i thought was interesting

Much of this is driven by religious divisions like the Sunni/Shia division or Islam/Christian division in Islamic counties, or by long-term tribal rivalries.
It was much the same in central African when the Hutu seized power and began slaughtering the Tutsi. Later the Tutsi gained the ascendancy and started slaughtering the Hutu. Similarly the 1000 years or so of intermittent conflict between Croatia and the rest of what was once "Yugoslavia" was driven by Croatians being dominantly Catholic while the rest are mainly Orthodox.

[bennymacca]

yeah. and quite often its not the religion, its the ethnic differences - i.e the croats were one religion and the slavs were another. if they werent different religions they would have found something else to fight about, like what you have correctly pointed out about the rwandan conflict

[Squawk]

Just came across this clip on You Tube - a parody of the rail refurbishment nightmares for Adelaide commuters. It's pretty amusing!
[url]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SJ39Ylnjsw[/url]

[Grahaml]

Some interesting things coming out in the court proceedings against Craig Thompson. Always hard to formulate a great opinion based on media reports but there's a pretty clear picture being painted.

http://www.news.com.au/national/victori ... 6807770922

[Gozu]

US President Barack Obama on marijuana:

President Obama waded into the controversial politics of marijuana in an interview published Sunday, saying he’s not convinced pot is “more dangerous than alcohol” and arguing it’s “important” to allow recent legalization efforts in Colorado and Washington State to proceed.

“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” the president told the New Yorker’s David Remnick. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

The president even argued marijuana is less dangerous “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”

Still, “It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy,” he added.

The president also said he’s troubled by racial disparities in the application of marijuana laws.

“Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he explained. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.”


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-marij ... n-alcohol/

[fisho mcspaz]

Just putting it out there: How awesome is Scott Ludlam?

[Gozu]

Just putting it out there: How awesome is Scott Ludlam?

He's very good but is under a bit of pressure to retain his seat with this new WA Senate election coming up.

[fisho mcspaz]

Just putting it out there: How awesome is Scott Ludlam?

He's very good but is under a bit of pressure to retain his seat with this new WA Senate election coming up.

He's got the vote of the young people and the Greens are working bloody hard in WA to get him in. I think that the results will read very differently to the 2013 election.

[Roxy the Rat Girl]

I never thought id agree with Alan Jones but his quote on ABC's Lateline 'there is a definite nexus between mining and the State Governments and this is worthy of further investigation and probably a royal commission' really is on the money in my opinion. Mining has ridden rough shot over the Australian population for too long.