There is actually a video of the night in question when Brittany was escorted into Parliament House which she has herself asked to see. It’s mentioned here, Brittany Higgins: Security guards ‘unlocked office’ for alleged Parliament rapist along with other things that seem to have been dropped from the way these questions are discussed at the moment.
CCTV that is continuously monitored 24 hours a day in Parliament House showed the male staffer leaving with no sign of the woman.
“Two went in, but only one came out,’’ a former security officer told news.com.au.
This is the second reason security officers returned to Senator Reynolds’ office to determine what had happened to the woman who had been brought in “falling down drunk” and barely able to sign her own name.
They found Ms Higgins disorientated and half-naked in the Defence Minister’s office, where she had been left by the male staffer who had brought her there.
Despite this, it appears there was no immediate sense from the DPS that a sexual crime may have been committed.
Release the footage and then let us judge for ourselves.
The rate at which our society is sinking into madness is truly bewildering:
1) It is now racist for a white person to translate the work of a black person
2) It is now homophobic for a straight actor to play a gay character
3) It is now racist for a white therapist to treat a black client
4) It is now racist to have advanced high school programs
5) It is now transphobic for biological females to reject having to compete against trans women (biological males)
6) It is now Islamophobic to criticize any tenets of Islam
7) It is now science denialism to question the ongoing COVID lockdowns
8) It is now science denialism to question any tenets stemming from climate change alarmists
9) It is now epistemological bigotry to support the scientific method as THE means by which you adjudicate scientific hypotheses
10) It is now racist to argue that mathematics yields right and wrong answers
11) It is now racist to promote the ethos of individual dignity over collectivist identity politics
12) It is now racist to criticize a Noble Person of Color be it a famous athlete or celebrity
13) It is now transphobic to posit that only women menstruate
14) It is now racist to publicly proclaim your support for “wrong think” black individuals such as Thomas Sowell or Larry Elder
15) It is now misogynistic to note that women greatly outnumber men in universities
16) It is now sexist to publish scientific research that yields sex differences that are contrary to accepted politically correct orthodoxy
17) It is now racist to point to FBI murder stats broken down by interracial markers of victim and perpetrator
18) It is now racist to openly support national borders
19) It is now racist to seek to curb immigration from countries that espouse values that are deeply hateful and anti-liberty
20) It is now racist to not decolonize philosophy and literature departments
21) It is now racist to request that job offers be based on the merits of an individual’s dossier rather than on the use immutable traits.
Let me also add this: Has Everyone Gone Insane? Not everyone of course, not me or thee, and I’m never all that sure about thee. By Noah Rothman who writes:
Does Amazon really think that their app design could honestly be mistaken for Hitler? Does Hyatt actually believe CPAC’s stage designers embedded an obscure Nazi symbol into its program to signal an affinity for fascism—a semaphore that seems to have backfired spectacularly, seeing as only the conference’s critics got the message? Does Syracuse University really suppose that their own student [a female lacrosse player who posted a supposedly racist picture of her making an “OK” sign] is in the wrong here, and not the overwrought agitators on the Internet whose only joy in life seems to be making others miserable?
The answer to these questions would be valuable, but they are also beside the point. Whether they believe it or not, they say they do. Or, at least, they think they have no choice but to say they do.
It’s all part of being “in” and not “out”. The madder whatever it is you must say you believe the easier it is to work out who is not playing along.
Labor will not back off, nor will friends of Porter’s accuser, which means neither will journalists. It means it will remain a serious problem for the government when parliament resumes, and it means Porter’s political career is destined to end. That is the reality Porter now faces and that Morrison has to deal with.
Barely a day has passed since Brittany Higgins’s rape allegations against a Liberal staff member were made public three weeks ago without her story, or other allegations of abuse, dominating the news cycles.
A government that prides itself on its control has been thrown off course. At some point the damage will be reflected in the polls. If Coalition MPs are not troubled by the principles involved, and many of them are, that will make more of them even more apprehensive.
One of the ongoing problems for Morrison with these scandals that have engulfed his government, that have the potential to bring them all down — scandals have been known to do that — is that his explanations for his ignorance about them stretch credulity, not just with the media but among those familiar with the way government works, including the people who sit behind him.
No doubt speaking for The Australian itself. Gutter journalism at its worst.
Conservatives struggle to grasp the latest inanity being foisted on (western) mankind. The mistake made is to treat each instance as being isolated. They all emerge from the same hellhole….
Whether it is confounding science by dressing up hypotheses as facts, or sowing confusion among children by teaching them that they might be in the wrong bodies; or ruining women’s sports by forcing them to compete against biological males; or preaching divisive ‘critical race theory’; cancelling people whose views are out of sync with goodthink; mindlessly tearing down statues; risibly ‘taking the knee’; or, idiotically, renaming mothers as gestational parents and breastfeeding as ‘chest feeding’. No rational sense can be made of any it in isolation. Try to and risk your mental health.
And on the topic of messing with rational minds? How about locking people away for months on end, double-masking them, and destroying livelihoods in order to ward off a virus which has no serious effects on well over ninety-nine percent of those who catch it. Consult Worldometer. As at February 27: 21,915,328 active cases; serious or critical cases 91,057, or just 0.4%. Confected Covid alarmism trumps even its climate counterpart.
We have made the mad agenda of the left mainstream and as a result Western Civilisation will sink into oblivion as a result. The only civilisation that has ever fought against racism along with having created as astonishing level of personal prosperity across the world, will disappear.
In my view, the problem is that there is nothing more for the left to achieve. It’s all there. Destruction for the pure pleasure of barbarism is all that remains which for the left seems quite enough.
News media, and The Australian in particular, continue its war against the Government with this latest screed: Normal people would be insane to enter politics. This should be an absolutely 100% anti-Labor article but somehow is not. This is why it should be anti-Labor.
“The announcement by Nicolle Flint last Friday that she will depart federal parliament at the next election is not just an indictment of the foul culture that women face in politics. Her decision is a reminder that politics is no longer a sane career choice for many clever, normal people.
“That reality is not just a problem for political parties; it points to a deeper predicament that threatens the good governance of this country.
“Consider what 42-year-old Flint faced.”
And what did she face?
“Vicious intimidation from haters within left-wing groups such as GetUp and Extinction Rebellion.”
But that’s not quite how it’s put. This is how it’s put.
“Consider what 42-year-old Flint faced. Not just vicious intimidation from haters within left-wing groups such as GetUp and Extinction Rebellion but outright hostility from moderates within her own party in South Australia.”
And the sub-head: “Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has called for an inquest into the death of a woman who alleged she was raped by a current federal minister in 1988.”
I find all of this almost totally sinister, an obvious attempt to make voting for The Coalition toxic to women. Politics is a hard business for which there are no rules. That every party is filled with people who believe in Green New Deal idiocies and are terrified by the Chinese flu just makes it harder to find a coherent policy that satisfies everyone.
If Nicolle Flint really represents conservative views, why is she leaving Parliament? Surely it’s not just because a bunch of far-left wackos said mean things about her in public.
Some useful background to the film, The Last Vermeer. Fascinating film and lots of spoilers for the film below so if you are going to see it, read the rest of it later.
“During World War II, Göring traded 137 paintings for one of Van Meegeren’s false Vermeers, and it became one of his most prized possessions. Following the war, Van Meegeren was arrested, as officials believed that he had sold Dutch cultural property to the Nazis. Facing a possible death penalty, Van Meegeren confessed to the less serious charge of forgery. He was convicted on falsification and fraud charges on 12 November 1947, after a brief but highly publicised trial, and was sentenced to one year in prison] He did not serve out his sentence, however; he died 30 December 1947 in the Valerius Clinic in Amsterdam, after two heart attacks. It is estimated that Van Meegeren duped buyers out of the equivalent of more than US$30 million in 1967’s money, including the government of the Netherlands.”
And to the point.
“The trial of Han van Meegeren began on 29 October 1947 in Room 4 of the Regional Court in Amsterdam.[43] The collaboration charges had been dropped, since the expert panel had found that the supposed Vermeer sold to Hermann Göring had been a forgery and was, therefore, not the cultural property of the Netherlands. Public prosecutor H. A. Wassenbergh brought charges of forgery and fraud and demanded a sentence of two years in prison.[5]Evidence against Han van Meegeren: a collection of pigments.
“The court commissioned an international group of experts to address the authenticity of Van Meegeren’s paintings. The commission included curators, professors, and doctors from the Netherlands, Belgium, and England, and was led by the director of the chemical laboratory at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Paul B. Coremans. The commission examined the eight Vermeer and Frans Hals paintings which Van Meegeren had identified as forgeries. With the help of the commission, Dr Coremans was able to determine the chemical composition of van Meegeren’s paints.
“He found that Van Meegeren had prepared the paints by using the phenolformaldehyde resinsBakelite and Albertol as paint hardeners. A bottle with exactly that ingredient had been found in Van Meegeren’s studio. This chemical component was introduced and manufactured in the 20th century, proving that the alleged works by Vermeer and Frans Hals examined by the commission were in fact fabricated by Van Meegeren.
“The commission’s other findings suggested that the dust in the craquelure was too homogeneous to be of natural origin. The matter found in the craquelure appeared to come from India ink, which had accumulated even in areas that natural dirt or dust would never have reached. The paint had become so hard that alcohol, strong acids, and bases did not attack the surface, a clear indication that the surface had not been formed in a natural manner. The craquelure on the surface did not always match that in the ground layer, which would certainly have been the case with a natural craquelure. Thus, the test results obtained by the commission appeared to confirm that the works were forgeries created by Van Meegeren, but their authenticity continued to be debated by some of the experts until 1967 and 1977, when new investigative techniques were used to analyze the paintings (see below).
“On 12 November 1947, the Fourth Chamber of the Amsterdam Regional Court found Han van Meegeren guilty of forgery and fraud, and sentenced him to a minimal one year in prison.”
As for the book and its inscription:
“Van Meegeren played different roles, some of which were shrouded in fraudulent intentions, as he sought to fulfill his goal of besting his critics. His father was said to have once told him, “You are a cheat and always will be.”[65] He sent a signed copy of his own art book to Adolf Hitler, which turned up in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin complete with an inscription (in German): “To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute, from H. van Meegeren, Laren, North Holland, 1942”. He only admitted the signature was his own, although the entire inscription was by the same hand.[4][20] (The book by Jonathan Lopez confirmed the accuracy of Jan Spierdijk’s article in De Waarheid in which Spierdijk reported details about Van Meegeren’s book Tekeningen being found in Hitler’s library.“
The film unfortunately follows Kates’s Rule of Movies: the final five or six minutes of a film reverses the sentiment of where the film had been heading, normally to bring on a happy ending where none seemed likely, but in this case, to turn a rogue into a Nazi for no reason whatsoever. Van Meegeren may have been a forger and a criminal as the film portrays him, but there is no evidence that he was a Nazi even if he did try to stay onside with people who would kill him in a second if they knew what he was up to. The film blighted itself unnecessarily. Why turn him into a suspected Nazi sympathiser if an inscription in a book is the only evidence they can find? It sours what should be a fun movie for no point I can think of.
Living in Danandrewstan as I do, daily doses of insanity are just part of the picture. My specialty is economics, with the form of madness I find myself most astonished by being the ability of political leaders to commit to expenditures beyond any possible hope of finding the funding to finance what they decide to do. If you want to see political insanity, try this on for size: ‘We are failing’: Premier vows to put mental health at centre of biggest social reform in generation.
Royal commission chair Penny Armytage said the mental health system had “catastrophically failed to live up to expectations”.
The commission’s 3195-page final report, which was tabled in parliament on Tuesday, found the mental health system was overwhelmed and could not keep up with the number of people who sought treatment….
Premier Daniel Andrews has committed to implementing all 65 recommendations made in the report, which he said would “serve as our blueprint for the biggest social reform in a generation”.
“Biggest” as in the most expensive. There are more than 3000 pages in the Report and there are 65 recommendations (with each of the “recommendations” merely a heading beyond which there are many other more detailed recommendations listed). But Dan has immediately committed himself (that phrase again) to the lot, which with absolute certainty he has only the foggiest notion of what is being said, what the nature of the problems are, or how much it might cost to implement any of it.
Andrews has been a catastrophe for the state and for Australia. When he became Premier, Melbourne had been for many years the World’s Most Liveable City. It’s now the dregs and he is pulling it lower and lower with each passing day.
I wish I knew what the right word is for someone who has lost their grip on reality, but whatever the word is, it applies absolutely to Daniel Andrews.
What I tell them back home is that the biggest mistake Canada made – other than electing Trudeau father and son – was not becoming a test playing nation in cricket. It’s not a lie, but I have yet to say it to anyone who sees the point or comes even remotely close to believing it. This is the one I liked and there are others at the link.
Uluru is an optical illusion
“I convinced my ex-girlfriend from Scotland that Uluru was just a tiny rock that we took pictures of up close.”
Of course, you more or less have to be an Australian even to know that Uluru exists. The post is taken in its entirety from Instapundit.
Law of Markets 