text:
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
taxes and the inter-generational minefield
In the good old days – up to c.1979 – death and
taxes in Australia were not merely the twin certainties in life; they were
coupled together in a way which led to a clutch of secondary assumptions about
wealth accumulation, holding (or not), and dispersal/transfer within average
families. State death (and gift) duties
placed a kind of glass ceiling on capital gains, particularly over family homes
and other unproductive real estate (i.e. that was mostly or entirely vacant). Unproductive assets would hence tend not to
spiral up in value because, even if – and in those days it was a big "if" – the
acquirer "won" the game of speculation, there would be an eventual but (for
most) inevitable day of reckoning with both grim-reapers. For the middle-classes, at least, the taxman
would take a heavy cut (although the wealthy could more easily sidestep death
This situation led to a virtuous circle in and for middle-class
Australia. Productive investments were more
or less neutral for estate-planning (being taxed in both life and death), while
spending one's surplus wealth in retirement was gently encouraged – and here I
mean actually spending it, as opposed
to locking it up in unproductive real estate, such as renovations. On the other side of the ledger – from the
perspective of the adult children of the retirees – there was a distinct lack
of angst about all this, in a way that today seems almost inconceivable. But in days before real-estate price
inflation became rampant – and a present-day inter-generational minefield, of
which more about soon – it really was this elegantly simple. The younger folk bought their own houses
without reference to, or handouts from, their elders. That they could afford to do this was, in turn, largely due to a thriving real (as
opposed to real-estate) economy – when, once upon a time, retirees actually spent.
Since the 1980s, a countervailing vicious circle
has taken hold. Real-estate inflation
has fed off the peculiarities within capital gains taxes (CGT), first introduced
in 1985, and a national regime very different to the old death duties ones. CGT has always exempted the family home and has,
since 1999, generally been levied at a much lighter rate than income taxes. Speculating (as it was once called, or "investing"
as it is now more usually known) in unproductive or negative-income real estate
has thus become a no-brainer for many. Expensive
home renovations, meanwhile, have become a similarly vacuous quasi-"bank" for both
storing and flaunting wealth – a curious phenomenon that surely no 1950s
futurist could have conceived of. This was a decade when
cutting-edge renovations meant an indoor toilet (fancy!) and a fresh coat of
paint indoors every twenty years or so.
Plus, if you were really serious about keeping up with the Joneses in
the 1950s, there was also a must-have accessory – an Albert Namatjira print
hanging on the lounge-room wall.
"Spending the kids' inheritance" is usually said in
a tongue-and-cheek way that belies its modern complexities, if not de facto impossibility. This loose phrase would not seem to apply to
money that is or could be got from unlocking the capital in the family home –
if this is seen as "spending" money at all, it is of the serious,
non-discretionary type; viz for entering aged-care, etc. So the family home's value is largely sacrosanct
from discretionary spending – or properly hoarded, you might say – despite much
of this store of value usually being an intrinsic windfall. Retirees' surplus spending money will thus mostly
come from other sources – primarily investments. However, because these monies are, on the
whole, lightly taxed, particularly if inside superannuation, there is also a
disincentive to spending them, compared to the good old days of death duties. A
tendency to "bad" hoarding, or miserliness, is thus structurally
While the degree of this will vary with the personality
of each retiree – and so it is very hard to quantify on macro-scale – the
prevalence of this type of hoarding is undoubtedly masked by what I call
pseudo-spending: on renovations to the
family home, and perhaps also, more controversially, on staying on for one's
twilight years as a single or couple in a large family home (or a modest family
home on a large or otherwise windfall value-increased block of land). The latter scenario involves deep emotional
factors, as well as complex economic rationalities, mainly to do with age-pension
eligibility and aged-care bonds.
But for all this, the matter of retirees' discretionary
spending in the real economy should not be overlooked. If this spending is perversely
light – which seems to me to be the case – then "the kids' inheritance" indeed
comes to the fore, precisely because it is
not sufficiently spent. The adult "kids"
(apart from those who work in the tax-advantaged real-estate and renovation
industries) thus have fewer and less well-paid jobs (and pay more than their
fair share of taxes along the way).
Meanwhile, real-estate prices continue to inflate, largely driven by the
tax system.
Here, you may still think that this situation will
sooner or later resolve itself, and happily for all. The kids will eventually get their inheritance
– and the hoardier their parents were, the bigger the kids' windfall will be, naturally.
But these are largely uncharted inter-generational
As well as the present Xer-and-younger (born
on/after 1 July 1962, by my calculation) generations being, on average, poorer
than their parents, now and probably also at death, longer life-expectancy is
starting to see inheritances now commonly delivered when the "kids" are in
their seventies (if not, although still rarely, even older). For baby boomers – on average (much) richer
than their Depression-child parents, despite the latter's frugality – this may
mean that the beach-house upgrade comes, annoyingly, a few years later than
would have been ideal.
For retirement-age Xers-and-younger however, the
timing of the inheritance is of much greater fiscal significance, particularly if
they do not – ahem – yet have
significant real-estate equity. For such seventy-somethings, an inheritance
may well be a case of Too Much, Too Late:
a disruption to receipt of the age-pension (if that even still exists
for seventy-somethings from 2032) until the inheritance is spent on first-home
buying, which real-estate may in turn be occupied for a only brief time before
an aged-care bond comes knocking. That
said, here I may be privileging Xer hardship above baby boomer stresses. With thousands of baby boomers now turning
seventy every week, who am I to minimise the existential dread many must be
feeling at this milestone; still beach-house bridesmaids in Blairgowrie (and
Pittwater), and watching the biological clock ticking on their inheritance-dependent
close-ups in Portsea (and Palm Beach)?
In summary, my message to all those born before 1
July 1962 is: please spend (as baby boomer Colin Stephen puts it, with a visceral spit) your kids' inheritance. That is, spend it on anything but
real-estate. And especially, don't financially
"help" your kids to get into a late-stage bubble market in
real-estate – this diverts dollars
away from the real economy, and so the chances are it depresses your kids'
wages and job prospects, if not also their lives in total. No doubt many of you privately like the idea
of your kids as anxious supplicants, whether before or after your death. If nothing else, this is presumably a
psychological pay-off for the vague spectre that haunted your own outwardly-affluent
childhood; that of your (now very-old or deceased) parents' frugality demons
from their own inter-war childhoods. But
if you must, property-hoard away, boomers – you can renovate your way to property nirvana and tax-less fiscal immortality, but you can't
hide from the other grim reaper.
- NB: this post was edited and expanded at 1:45pm AEST 30 Nov 2016.
of reflection for home renovators
Once-white, mottled old
shade-cloth mirrored in pool gleams
like polished concrete
- Paul Watson
- Paul Watson
Thursday, September 29, 2016
South Australia was
asking for it, says PM Turnbull
The recent, and ongoing, severe storms in South Australia
have, of course, been accompanied by equally severe blasts of hot air from
Canberra, with PM Malcolm Turnbull, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, and –
curiously – independently-minded (or so I had thought) Adelaide-resident
politician Nick Xenophon being prominent wind-instruments here.
Not living in South Australia, and so not directly affected
by these twin barrages, I do not want to play the victim-in-the-eye-of-the-storm
card on their behalf. I am sympathetic,
but that's almost beside the point, from afar. At ground zero, there are lots of emotions
going round almost randomly in these situations, which perhaps explains the straw
of blame that Nick Xenophon has chosen to cling onto. (As it happens, I also lived through an 8-hour
blackout yesterday, but that's another, very local and minor story.)
What I'm actually angry about is thus not the (media) storm
heaped upon the (real) storm, as an ill-timed double whammy. Rather, it's the uncanny – and obscene –
similarity between South Australia and a rape victim in all this.
The PM Turnbull (et al) line is, quite simply "She was asking for it, flaunting her svelte, low-emissions
(40% renewable) figure like a Vegas stripper.
Or like uncovered meat, if you prefer the feline analogy. In either case, under this logic South
Australia got what she deserved. That
is, a shafting by moralising puritans with their pants around their ankles, who
in their own minds rationalise their thrustings as benignly teaching her a valuable
lesson. Viz that in future, by modestly
dressing herself in a carbon-saturated sackcloth of coal-fired electricity, she
will, oh so generously and Praise the Lords of Global Warming, be spared a
repeat rape.
But does the PM Turnbull (et al) line have a slight skerrick
of scientific basis? The AEMO has,
according to two out of three ABC TV (7pm News and 7:30 Report) reports this
evening denied that there was any link between the state-wide blackout and South
Australia's choice of electricity-generation mix (or "attire", to continue the
analogy). The third report said that AEMO
was still investigating the cause. This hedging
and dallying is revealing – of an ugly truth.
South Australia plainly does
have a problem with its electricity, and that's the Victorian
interconnector. The hyperbolic, if
mercifully short-lived price hike in South Australia of a few months ago, which
resulted from the Victorian interconnector being down for "maintenance" well
demonstrates the power relativities here, in both senses. I would have thought that such "maintenance"
would have been well-flagged in advance to those who would bear its brunt, so
allowing South Australia to put other contingencies in place. But perhaps I'm wrong here – and in
mid-winter, South Australia couldn't even think about covering herself briefly
with her own non-renewable electricity, as she was too busy sashaying around to
notice the letter in her box from grim Victoria, telling her what was in store
if she didn't get her act together.
It was, fittingly enough, protecting the Victorian interconnector (and so stopping the blackout
spreading to brown-coal lickin', and here
actually morally-virtuous Victoria) that
seems to have been the reason that the blackout went entirely state-wide. South Australia, in "aggressively" seeking renewable
electricity, has thus found itself a lightning rod for a whole set of nasties,
worse perhaps the worst meteorological storm. In trying to be a responsible adult on this
planet, and so to mitigate climate change, South Australia has found itself to
be at the whim of a sick-puppy Victoria, playing dog in its odiferous brown-coal
manger: "So now you want our dirty electricity do ya – so beg for it, whore".
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Song title: "A walk
on the monopoly board (using real money)"
salute to the GenX highly-educated precariat* (with apologies to John Schurmann
and Redgum)
Mum and Dad and Caro came
to the auction round the corner
It was a long way from the
My place was next to be
tarted up and sold
And baby-boomer neighbours
lined the footpaths as we* cringed against the fence
This photo from the
auction shows us shocked and scarred and lined
God help me – I was
already forty-nine
And can you tell me, tradie,
why I still can't get to sleep?
And why the sound of
auction clapping chills me to my feet?
And what's this regret that
comes and stays, can you tell me why it grinds?
God help me – I was
already forty-nine
* Or is it only me?
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Newsflash: Gold Coast car
salesman is not a wanker
For the last six months, the Australian newspaper has been running an
intermittent-but-otherwise-red-hot, vindictive campaign to discredit David
Ridsdale (1). Their motivation for doing
so seems plain enough – to silence one of George Pell's chief critics; and the
timing of the first three successive headline explosions has been exquisite in this regard –
wheeling out David Ridsdale's past when the public heat would otherwise be on
George Pell's present, per his Royal Commission evidence.
As to why a loss-making newspaper would
allow itself to be used as a blatant PR mouthpiece for such a dubious – but deep-pocketed
– cause, you'll have to ask Rupert or the Vatican. In any event, my interest here is less in the
tawdry underlying economics, but in the even more tawdry extremes to which a
story must be stretched, so as to be able to flog the sponsor's message, disguised,
and so unnoticed, among all the lurid bathos.
When I say "unnoticed", I am not
referring only to the Australian's
mass audience (if that is not an oxymoron).
The Fairfax Press and the ABC (/Media Watch) have been strangely
reticent to call the Australian out
on the anti-David Ridsdale campaign. I
acknowledge one substantial reason for this reticence – to do justice to this
issue, post 7 May 2016 at least, there is no alternative but to tread on the
finer feelings (or worse) of a man who here I'll refer to as the Gold Coast car
salesman. I accept that this is a flimsy
pseudonym in the circumstances, and that what I write about him here is deeply
personal, unsolicited by him, and the words of a complete stranger. That said, I wish him no harm, and sincerely
hope that, by pointing out how he has been re-victimised by the Australian, this opinion piece takes
away one, rather than adds another, layer of his victimisation.
More in the "it goes without
saying" category, I express the same sentiments in respect of David
Ridsdale. Quite possibly, adding more
oxygen to this story, from whatever "side", is the last thing he wants at this
moment. In the interests of full
disclosure, I also note that, while this piece is also unsolicited by him, he
is not quite a complete stranger – either he or one of his brothers was my
Grade 1 classmate/playmate at St Alipius Primary School in Ballarat in 1971,
but in any event, I have not seen or been in any other form of communication
with David Ridsdale since 1971.
Where to start this story? The Australian's
biggest story in their (ongoing?) PR vendetta series so far – a 7 May 2016
weekend magazine article by Trent Dalton – was centred on the abuse of the Gold
Coast car salesman by David Ridsdale in 1984, when the former was 12 and the
latter 18. The article's title, "Chain
Reaction", evinced a broader concern, however:
what happens when (male) child abuse-victim becomes an adult abuser of
children? Hetty Johnston, a professional
spokesperson for child abuse-victims was quoted on some of the nuances
here. Otherwise, Trent Dalton's
interest in the theme was limited to a "chain reaction" of two – starting with
David Ridsdale's childhood abuse by his uncle, priest Gerald Ridsdale, up to
1981, and ending, firmly (if by implication only) with the future Gold Coast
car salesman's childhood abuse by David Ridsdale in 1984.
However, there was also a passing
mention that Gerald Ridsdale also claimed to have been sexually abused as a
child. Should this story, in fairness,
start there? (Trent Dalton obviously thought not.) Or if Gerald Ridsdale's
rapist (now presumably deceased) was himself abused – as would seem likely –
back further still, and so on?
Personally, apart from the
evidentiary diminishing returns, I don't think that much is to be gained from
tracing such "chain reactions" well back.
Even if Gerald Ridsdale's childhood rapist was still alive, and healthy
enough to be successfully prosecuted and appropriately sentenced, this would
seem to be a mere footnote in the scheme of Gerald Ridsdale's crimes.
Quite possibly, Gerald Ridsdale
himself would regard my dismissive approach here as an injustice and
double-standard, saying to himself (and/or to anyone who cares) that (a) he
would never have become an abuser but for his own abuse, and (b) he would not
have offended so prolifically and for so long, had his own abuser been charged
at the "usual" life-stage, per the most common age-of-reporting scenario is when
the victim is middle-aged and probably at a low-point, mental-health wise (i.e.
in Gerald Ridsdale's case, c. 1980). To
which I would reply curtly: "You had your chance then", and c.1980, you blew it
on David Ridsdale (among others). (There
are also obvious large differences of scale between the offending of the two Ridsdales,
but to go down this path would be to marginalise the victims of once-off
paedophiles, so I won't.)
We shall start in 1984, then, when,
as I've said, the future Gold Coast car salesman, then 12, was sexually abused
on two or three occasions by David Ridsdale, then 18. I emphatically think that it should be
unnecessary to go into the details of this, which Trent Dalton's article does,
with some apparent relish.
On this, I think that it is a
generally brave act for a victim of childhood sexual abuse to step-forward by
name, and so waive their otherwise cast-iron right of anonymity (and doubly so
for a male), but I query the collateral price they often pay, in terms of their
abuse being graphically described. While
this is presumably necessary in the text of court judgements convicting and
sentencing paedophiles (although I often detect a sense of gratuitous voyeurism
even in the penning of these), Trent Dalton's resort to lurid detail is
initially inexplicable.
Additionally, Dalton also lets us
into the Gold Coast car salesman's otherwise-private adult sexual peccadillo, which,
to be fair, does depend on our contextual knowledge of some detail about his
childhood abuse. By itself, I don't have
the same reservations about this adult-peccadillo disclosure – a fact that my
headline, of course, robustly attests to.
Here, I should mention my philosophy that, should mortifyingly personal
(and adult) material "go" public, the
lighter the touch, the better.
Plainly, Dalton's philosophy is
different; he thinks that adult sexual peccadillos should be milked for
tragedy, not comedy. But Dalton needs to set up the Gold Coast car
salesman in this (unhelpful to the victim, I would have thought) searing
light. The bare facts of the police-station and
courtroom sequel to the 1984 abuse, were they to speak for themselves, would
barely add up to a story, whether in 1994 or 2016, much less today's
excoriating, drip-fed public scandal (and private/lurid tragedy).
In short, David Ridsdale is indeed,
as Gerard Henderson loves to put it at every opportunity, a "convicted
paedophile" – meaning that as an adult (although at 18, barely) he was, on 5
October 1995, convicted of the indecent assault of the future Gold Coast car
salesman over events dating back to 1984.
In fact, David Ridsdale pleaded guilty to all this, and received a good
behaviour bond, in large part apparently because of the fact that he himself
was a victim of his uncle (although his age at the time and his prospect for
rehabilitation presumably also worked in favour of this sentence).
This sentence was the lightest possible
one in the circumstances. If you (a)
haven't read Trent Dalton's article, and (b) haven't paid much attention to mine
so far, you may think "Aha!" at this point:
David Ridsdale got a slap on the wrist, while the Gold Coast car
salesman got a life-sentence. And thus, no
wonder that the Australian is arcing
up here: Pell's denouncer has dirty-linen
of his own, in receiving a cushy sentence, for an ultra-relevant crime to his
present-day reputation.
Actually, the Australian has said no such thing.
While it repeatedly stresses the general shade of David Ridsdale's dirty-linen,
Trent Dalton's article is very careful to not even hint that his good behaviour
bond was an unjustly light sentence. Instead,
Trent Dalton manages to insinuate that David Ridsdale's guilty plea robbed the Gold Coast car salesman of
justice; apparently he only found out about this only recently, having
assumed for two decades (and Trent Dalton is careful to imply this only) that his case against David Ridsdale had been
quietly dropped, for some strange or sinister reason, by the Ballarat police
(an agency that the Gold Coast car salesman in the mid-1990s had already found
to be quite unhelpful personally).
So, to get Trent Dalton's story
straight here, David Ridsdale's guilty plea, far from sparing the Gold Coast
car salesman the need to travel and re-live his abuse in an interstate
courtroom, a kilometre or two from the scene of the crimes, instead exacerbated his childhood abuse, by
thwarting his chance for closure. While
David Ridsdale, of course, had something to potentially gain (2) from his guilty
plea, to turn this around, as Trent Dalton does, as a re-victimisation of the Gold
Coast car salesman by David Ridsdale –
who under Dalton's logic, somehow had the Ballarat police working under his
thumb – is perverse, in my opinion.
But you can be the judge here. Is David Ridsdale a criminal mastermind, a
man who only the Australian is brave
enough to call out? Do Fairfax and the
ABC actively still hide David Ridsdale's murky past, despite it being all over
Google (although without any hint of the victim's identity until very recently)
since at least 2002 (3), because acknowledging it would wholly rescind his
bona-fides as a George Pell critic, and possibly also rescind the bona-fides of
all George Pell critics, as
co-conspirators with David Ridsdale?
This is the Australian's
reverse Samson-and-Goliath bottom-line (editorially, if not also in
To be blunt, I have no doubt as to
whom I would rather have teaching or baby-sitting my (hypothetical) children
out of David Ridsdale or George Pell – the "convicted paedophile" wins over the
supposed moral paragon. No doubt the Gold
Coast car salesman sees this differently, but here I suggest that the New Testament
may have some interesting and relevant opinions on this dilemma. This hypothetical aside, I suggest that if anyone
honestly believes that George Pell has done more to arrest clerical paedophilia
in Australia than David Ridsdale, warts and all, then they are one sick puppy. Although such sick puppies are probably still
in a moral class above those who gang-up and demonise David Ridsdale simply for
the money. I'll leave it to you to
decide who is in which moral category here.
In a strange way, I'm actually with
the Gold Coast car salesman c. 2015 (when he had a breakdown) all the way on one
aspect – when Trent Dalton, Gerard Henderson, and John Ferguson have had an uninvited
and unwelcome wank right next to me (viz, reading the Australian at breakfast, if you must know), for taking such a
grotesque liberty with little-old me, every time I now see their names in
public now, for their gutless temerity, I shake with a near-bottomless rage. And if,
reading this now, you feel that I have also wanked right across little-old-your
own virtue, I'm terribly sorry – but to this I plead guilty also. The "chain reaction" goes on, I'm afraid.
Disclosure: Paul Watson is
(A) a wanker, who (B) would be an appalling salesman, who would not be able to
sleep at night unless he had informed every potential customer of each
potential defect in the merchandise. He
also (C) has a strong personal belief in Hell, otherwise known as the Gold
Coast, or in Paul Watson's parochial moral compass, "Vatican II" – both Vaticans
being places where anything and everything is for sale, and very little is real.
Update 23 May 2016
I've just become aware that the ABC
– perhaps stung by Gerard Henderson's hysterical cry of "censorship" on 12
February 2016 # decided to play "me too" with the Gold Coast car salesman's
story, on 10 May 2016.
# "Meanwhile The
Age — plus the rest of Fairfax Media plus the ABC — has chosen to censor the
news that Pell's chief accuser, David Ridsdale, is himself a convicted
paedophile. David Ridsdale pleaded guilty in 1984 [sic] to having sexually
assaulted a 12 year old boy when aged 18.
This was
revealed by John Ferguson in The Australian on 21 December 2015. But the
Pell-haters in Fairfax Media and at the taxpayer funded public broadcaster seem
to have determined that this news is not fit to print or broadcast".
Personally, I would have thought
Gerard Henderson's (and George Pell's) connections with the late, paedophile-protecting, and ultra-conservative Bishop James O'Collins (a story that no
mainstream media organisation wants to touch, despite being well-enough
documented) are a much bigger case of "censorship" than David Ridsdale's lone teenage crime.
But on the topic of (arguably) minor crimes, I
also note two errors of fact by Gerard Henderson. The first, in the above quote, should read
"1996", not "1984". The effect of this
error is to separate in time David Ridsdale's disclosures as perpetrator from those as victim.
In fact, of course, these were at much, if not exactly, the same time
(1994-95) – a point that deserves taking the time to stop and think "what if?". What if David Ridsdale had never made his dual disclosures to the police, re the Gold Coast car salesman and Gerald Ridsdale? I suggest that the outcome here in 2016 would
have been: (a) David Ridsdale would
today be a privately troubled middle-aged man, but not a "convicted
paedophile", (b) the Gold Coast car salesman would today also be a privately
troubled middle-aged man (still depressed that the Ballarat police had fobbed
him off about David Ridsdale in 1994, but at least having had two decades since
without even hearing mention of the name of David Ridsdale). Oh, and (c) Gerald Ridsdale would still be a free man – and quite probably, if not still
offending in his 80s, having racked up hundreds more victims in his 60s and 70s. In other words, there would have been one, and only one, big
winner – be careful what you wish for, people.
The second error of fact by Gerard
Henderson makes me wonder whether it, and the error above, were actually intentional. This one could not possibly be a typo. In his 21 May 2016 column, Henderson wrote:
"Also, the royal
commission declined to question David Ridsdale (one of Pell's chief critics) on
Ridsdale's pedophile conviction in 1995 — revealed in February by The
Here, the "February" reference can
only mean Henderson's 12 February 2016 column – as quoted above (first quote) – which prominently referred to John Ferguson on 21 December 2015 as actually breaking the news. But most Australian readers, of course, would not also read this blog, or otherwise take the trouble to look back for Henderson's February reference, so allowing his error, as to who "broke" (3) the story, to "stick". Has John Ferguson – who as "Victorian
Political Editor" was on a plainly extra-curricular assignment in the first
place – had some post 7 May 2016 reputation-saving second-thoughts about his
own complicity in the "chain reaction" that his December article started, and
so Gerard Henderson has kindly stepped in to muddy the first link in the chain?
"Pell accuser indecently assaulted boy at YMCA",
John Ferguson (Victorian Political Editor, Melbourne), Australian 21 December 2015.
"Media Watch Dog: Banging the (loaded) Drum on
the ABC", Gerard Henderson,
Australian website, uploaded 12 February
2016, 3:45pm.
"Ghosts of the
past bring horror back to life 30 years on" and "Chain Reaction", both by Trent
Dalton, Australian 7 May 2016.
"Sex abuse royal commission fails test of
fairness", Gerard Henderson, Australian
21 May 2016.
2. This was not a one-way bet. If he was more concerned about avoiding the "convicted paedophile" tag than the increased possibility of a custodial sentence, David Ridsdale would have been well-advised to plead not guilty, and take his chances with a jury. Had he a criminal-defence budget in the realms of the six or seven-figure sums that the Catholic Church has routinely spent in recent years defending its in-house paedophiles, I suggest that David Ridsdale would have been a fool to plead guilty.
2. This was not a one-way bet. If he was more concerned about avoiding the "convicted paedophile" tag than the increased possibility of a custodial sentence, David Ridsdale would have been well-advised to plead not guilty, and take his chances with a jury. Had he a criminal-defence budget in the realms of the six or seven-figure sums that the Catholic Church has routinely spent in recent years defending its in-house paedophiles, I suggest that David Ridsdale would have been a fool to plead guilty.
3. The Australian dredges up some old news and proclaims a "scoop".
Monday, April 18, 2016
On chastity vs hands down deep pockets
Celibacy is a "gift" to the
Catholic priesthood; a key part of a grand vow and voluntary choice for life
(usually). That for gay Catholics
celibacy is just baldly assumed should be an outrage. Such individuals are deemed to be in a kind
of second-rate priesthood; entered into involuntarily, and with zero trappings
or institutional support.
Of course, this has long been a
successful recruitment strategy for the priesthood and convents; for centuries,
it was almost a no-brainer. When puberty
made it clear the depth and type of one's sexual identity, and assuming one
wanted to remain a good Catholic, to enter the priesthood was a free
first-class ticket for life (and beyond) while the only non-sinful alternative
was a bleak, hard road.
This balance has now been torn
asunder, of course. For the last few decades, very few gay Catholic adolescents
in the West have succumbed to the Church's bluff. When one alternative in a binary "choice"
involves demonstrable psychological distress for life, discarding the very
binary framework, and instead entering into a life of "sin" is, I suggest, a profoundly
moral decision. To have taken the easy
road would be to encourage blackmail; and ditto for the hard road.
This is at the heart of the
Catholic Church's inability to deal with its deep sickness within. Without substantial fresh flows
into the priesthood, the whole system quickly becomes illiquid. The small numbers of new seminarians are much
more likely to be heterosexual – for whom the category of second-rate celibate
does not apply, and so in general are more fickle in their belonging. Incumbent gay priests are thereby doubly
deprived of young gay men to have uncomplicated intra-workplace dalliances with
(one of the tacit fringe benefits of the priesthood, it would seem).
This crisis actually has already
passed; with the paedophilia epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s being a grim
marker of the transition period. Akin
perhaps to a butterfly flapping its wings causing quite something else, the
modern gay rights era has a causal relationship to the paedophilia epidemic of
my childhood.
To attribute blame here would be ludicrous, I hope it goes without saying. The
thinking-in-centuries Catholic Church was caught wrong-footed and on the
hop. Equally, this rupture explains why
the Church must clamp down so heavily on even a small gesture of homophilia
within its ranks. Loosely speaking, the present-day
proliferation of out gay men and women is now a sort of rival priesthood to the
Church, albeit one without earthly trappings built-in to the job description.
Though middle-age gay ex-Catholics
are only a part of this diverse mob, their presence as secular traitors – who should have been priests – has been a
singular, and quite personal, tipping-point.
My age cohort bore the brunt of the paedophilia epidemic, as priests on
a sinking ship took out their fears and frustrations, indiscriminately. In the 1970s and 80s, it was probably a
desperate, double-or-nothing recruitment strategy, to keep some semblance of
business as usual. The hope at the time
must have been that, for gay Catholic adolescents with strong stomachs and love
of hypocrisy – which is to say, future leadership material – the old closet
bargain was still on.
However, few, if any, of my
generation bought this – leaving the Church in a lurch. Its human capital now in probably terminal
decline, it has had no choice but to focus its efforts on the other sort of
capital – money. As this focus alone would
seem crass, the Church also kept some moral irons in the fire. Chief among these is that old chestnut, the
virtue of the celibate closet for gay Catholics, and the relatively-new, corollary
evil of the "gay lobby". As a PR
strategy for a tarnished institution, this is beyond ridiculous. But for an organisation now bereft of a large
cohort of middle-aged leaders (or leaders in waiting), I can understand the
logic and attraction of this strategy for the ageing keepers of an objectively
rudderless real-estate empire and cash-box.
Like inbred third-world
oil-sheikhs, the Church both can afford the very best lawyers and PR lackeys (some
of whom purport to be journalists), and indeed nothing less would compensate for
the imbecility of the client. Accordingly,
the paedophilia epidemic grew a substantial industry of hangers-on in recent decades
– loyal retainers, if you like, with proven strong stomachs (through representing
guilty paedophiles, and discrediting and vilifying victims).
Having such loyal retainers, just
because the task one initially engaged them for dries up should not mean that
they are let go. This is the final,
delicious irony – that the Catholic Church has now effectively outsourced its
homophobia – a new and growing line of work – to expensive professionals. The emergence of this (secular and
self-perpetuating) "priesthood" was perhaps inevitable – a liking for first-class
trappings, and a lack of moral scruples allows a pleasing congruence between geriatric
cash-box keeper and up-and-coming cash-box donee.
Or put another way, the old game of
blackmail successfully continues in another guise. The sexuality of this new outsourced "priesthood"
scarcely matters, as long as they follow the homophobic script. It is easy money, I suppose. But for me, and I'm quite sure for a
disproportionate and growing number of my generation also, the hard road – staying
celibate from the financial tentacles of the Catholic Church – has never looked
so attractive.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Peter Ryan, last of the Alf Conlon-ites
It is a shame that Peter Ryan, who
died yesterday aged 92, will probably be remembered as a man of three parts: young soldier, middle-aged publisher and
grumpy old culture-warrior, per the 1993-94 Manning Clark/Soviet Spy controversy. Actually, his public life really only had one,
long act.
I have no doubt that Ryan's military
service in what became PNG during WWII, in some ways, forged the young
man. But it was a Melbourne office military
posting to Alf Conlon's DORCA #, in the later stages of WWII, which gave him a strikingly consistent
agenda for the rest of his public life. While
it is unclear who exactly Peter Ryan was a near-lifelong agent for, plainly he
was a toxic human being who used his cultural, commercial and official power to
destabilise Australian intellectual life over seven decades. For the most part, he did this smoothly and
expertly – but wantonly – leaving little trace of his interventions, but a large
penumbra of fallout.
# Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs
The "Was Manning Clark a Soviet Spy?"
controversy was hardly subtle or without obvious risk of personal blowback to
Ryan – after all, he was Clark's long-term publisher at MUP, albeit Ryan
started there after the "History of Australia" series was first
commissioned. Turning on one of one's
own children (even if s/he is technically a step-child, but brought up by the step-parent
from a very young age) is rarely a good look.
So what prompted Ryan to this extreme in September 1993, and why did he
wait for two years after Clark's death to plunge the knife in?
Part of the answer, I believe, is
that Ryan earlier had other balls in the air, and wanted to see first how these
others would fall, and thus align for posterity. Most importantly, Ryan's lifelong mission was
to sanitise from the record the corrupting influence, to the present-day (if nebulously
so), of Alf Conlon's WWII DORCA. While
this unit today is principally known for its connections to high-end political
intrigue in 1975 (per dismissal of Gough Whitlam by John Kerr, another DORCA
alumnus) and contemporaneous vaudeville (the Ern Malley hoax), it deserves to
be much-better known, through its successor ASOPA ##, as the principal
architect of Australian government Aboriginal policies in the 1950s. And probably ever since – that is, if the
machinations of Peter Ryan to suppress the DORCA/ ASOPA/Aboriginal policy
connection are interpreted as significant in themselves. It was only in early 1993, with the death of
Paul Hasluck, that Ryan felt the coast was clear, as it were, to change his
game from defensive subterfuge to open, peripheral attack.
## Australian School of Pacific
Paul Hasluck notably loathed Alf
Conlon; equally Ryan never said a word against him. As Hasluck saw it, this was principally
because of Conlon's loose-cannon role at DORCA during WWII, but later on, Hasluck
either never realised – or at least never admitted – that ASOPA, secretly but
very effectively, had hugely undermined him as Territories Minister (so notionally
also in charge of Commonwealth Aboriginal policy) between 1951 and 1963.
It is here, in influencing Paul
Hasluck to never say another public word about Alf Conlon after 1980 (when MUP
published Diplomatic Witness), that
Ryan's staggering modus operandi is revealed.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ryan, under the guise of an
improbable friendship, groomed the frail and elderly widower Hasluck, flying him
to Melbourne to visit Ryan at least four times in 1988-1991, so encouraging Hasluck
to take certain facts and opinions to his grave (on the face of it,
successfully so). While Hasluck was not
quite the last of that generation who could have, as a senior insider who was not
plainly a Conlon-ite, spilled the beans on DORCA/ ASOPA/Aboriginal policy, the
last such living domino – Harry Giese – dropped off in 2000, besieged by
controversy about his personal responsibility for removing Aboriginal children,
per the Stolen Generations. Whatever blame can legitimately be put on Giese
here, writing the child-removal policy was not one of them – that was the job
of the Canberra bureaucrats, who had a shadowy DORCA and US-military alumnus,
Nick Penglase, among them (Penglase also recruited Ryan to DORCA). Nor was Giese responsible for training the
welfare officers who (along with police) performed these removals in the Northern
Territory; these officers were, after 1956, ASOPA graduates.
For now, I won't go into the intricate
specifics of how Ryan groomed Hasluck, other than to say that Ryan was surprisingly
careless about what he blurted out in public sometimes. Perhaps this is the inbuilt flaw of a mostly
self-educated man, through circumstance elevated to work with Australia's very
best and brightest – in aiming for a breezy camaraderie to compensate for being
out of his intellectual death, he instead made some jaw-dropping moves.
While his grooming of Hasluck is
not one of these overt clangers, Ryan's clumsy attempt to absolve himself from
personal responsibility for accepting CIA funds for MUP to publish, in 1969
under John Kerr's Presidency of Law Asia, a book on – of all things – Asian contract
law is revealing. A furious letter to the
editor by that book's co-author David E Allan ["Clear funds for law book",
Australian 4 February 1999], calling for a retraction and apology from Peter
Ryan, was not answered in word or deed, as far as I am aware. Whoever Ryan (and possibly Conlon too) really worked for – and the CIA appears
to be the most likely possibility – plainly did not care about either loyalty
in human relationships or plain logical consistency. Following the party line was all; which ironically
made Ryan quite the undisclosed expert, of course, on Manning Clark's supposed
communist infiltration of the Australian academy.
I believe that Manning Clark's
supposed communist influence was also well-timed, in 1993-94, to distract from
the otherwise bigger, fresher, and more important Left-Right story of the day; Aboriginal
policy, immediately post-Mabo.
Twenty-two years on, I assume that Peter Ryan died yesterday with a
smile on his face – that in seventy years of manufactured disarray in
Australian Aboriginal policy, he was never once found out, despite often being quite
close to the action. In case it needs to
be spelled out, this disarray has been materially and psychically catastrophic
for generations of Indigenous Australians.
It has also been, I suggest, an intellectual vortex for some of our
smartest whitefellas; thinking they were boxing away their hardest in the ring
of public ideas, when the whole game was always secretly rigged.
It is now time to start reversing these
disastrous 70 years, by telling some home truths, and wiping the smile off the
face of the late Peter Ryan, idiot, glove-puppet and traitor.
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Mulkearns and
ecclesisatical responsibility; paedophilia and the National Civic Council
"Paedophilia is a continuation of
office and union politics by other means"
Apparent personal motto of Bishop James O'Collins, 1892-1983
Gerard Henderson likes to remind us (1), supporting George Pell's case that he knew nothing about
clerical sex abuse in his patch until the early 1990s, the two bishops who Pell
worked under during the decades in question (2) were "liberal" in contrast to the conservative Pell. Ergo, implies Henderson, Pell, despite having
senior roles in both dioceses, was plausibly locked out of the information loop
by his immediate superiors over two decades (1971-c.1991), regarding paedophile
is a strange and far-fetched argument when you think about it. Pell, whose career plainly prospered under
both these men, was according to Henderson nonetheless a victim of office
politics when it came to them not sharing certain information. If so, this was a tickle-with-a-feather, if
not downright lucky, type of victimhood for Pell.
Mulkearns and Little both retired under a cloud at about the same time, Pell
could go from nought to a hundred on the issue; from being (under his own
account) almost certainly the last senior
cleric in the Ballarat and Melbourne dioceses to know about widespread clerical
sex abuse, to being the first senior
cleric (in the Melbourne diocese) to do something to address its effects.
zero to hero overnight – I am surprised that Henderson doesn't also add to
Pell's list of victimhood slights by pointing out that Hollywood should have,
but hasn't, already made a movie about Pell's long decades of unknowing innocence, probably
because Hollywood is also infested with "liberals".
Such a movie would gloriously detail Pell's resolute fighting fibre when
he belatedly learns the truth, and conveniently gets the top job soon after, in
a third act that would be wall-to-wall triumph for the underdog Pell, who
fought so long and so hard against all odds. But I digress.
of the truth, I am surprised that Gerard Henderson's recent article didn't
bookend the (according to him) weaselly liberal reign of Mulkearns at Ballarat
by his conservative, and similarly long-serving predecessor, James
O'Collins. O'Collins was, as I presume
Henderson is aware, one of the three founding executives of The Movement in
September 1945 (3). This highly secret anti-communist organisation
later morphed into the National Civic Council, which in turn by 1971 had dwindled
into something of a shell of its former nuts-and-bolts heyday – keeping
communists out of positions of infleunce, particularly in trade unions. By the eve of Whitlam, the union communist bogeyman
was barely a threat; if you believed in these things, communism was by then
doing its dirty work more insidiously and nebulously still, via a
liberal/left-wing counter-culture, whose agenda included sexual permissiveness.
the mid-to-late 1960s, this new enemy was always going to be difficult to fight. Nonetheless, some of The Movement's younger warriors
have risen to present-day positions of power and influence, and in so doing,
have rarely if ever given an inch to the liberals; Gerard Henderson and George
Pell, for example. And let's not forget
Australian Prime Minister until recently, Tony Abbott, although he undoubtedly
had to make more compromises than his mentor Pell in his rise to the top.
it not for The Movement's efforts over the decades, I'm sure that we'd now have had communist-mandated
Sodom and Gomorrahs on every street corner. What a terrible thought – a world where the sexual
frontier would involve consenting adults with no sexual hang-ups, and not good
old-fashioned child abuse behind closed doors, with associated team-bonding and
career-enhancing blackmail, by looking through the keyhole. But again I digress.
back to May 1971, James O'Collins was then in seeming good health (4) when he handed over the reins to
Mulkearns as Bishop of Ballarat. O'Collins
choosing to throw in the towel at this point would, I think, make a very good
opening scene for a quite different Hollywood movie, although one I doubt that
Gerard Henderson and George Pell would have the stomach to watch.
movie's backstory starts like this: in
September 1945, the young and relatively junior O'Collins was not merely one of
three senior clergy co-founders of The Movement – he was also its points man within
the Church hierarchy (5) – effectively its founding CEO – although
officially he was just its chaplain. How
and why a provincial and relatively junior bishop got this role seems to speak
volumes about The Movement's ethos and modus operandi; it was out of sight, out
of mind, as far as the main Church hierarchy was concerned. Like the 2000s US practice of extraordinary
rendition, the Australian and Vatican big-wigs didn't want to know too much
about what O'Collins was getting up to, as long as he delivered the goods.
enough, torture was a common element in, say, 2000s Egypt (as one country that
enthusiastically cooperated with US in delivering/accepting extraordinary
rendition) and the 1960s Ballarat diocese under O'Collins. To be fair, torture was an integral part of
the Egyptian-American pact, while perhaps it was only a sideshow for the
O'Collins-Vatican pact.
see, in 1960s Ballarat, O'Collins was a battle-hardened general, who should
have been at the peak of his career. The
annoying itch for him, if not sexual, was that infiltrating the unions, and associated
malarkey, was fast becoming redundant – and what was an ageing, once
high-flying and ambitious man, now forever marooned in the provinces, to do
with a day-job that had once been so adrenal?
bored O'Collins'creative solution to his career ennui was to foster, over the 1960s,
a paedophile network within his diocese.
As you do, apparently. While
O'Collins may or may not have had a personal proclivity for raping chidren en masse,
its requirement for the strictest secrecy was plainly a pleasing use for O'Collins
of his highly-trained, pre-existing skill set, from The Movement's cloak-and-dagger
heyday. His skills that otherwise would
go rusty. (And wouldn't that be a
crime, he may well have thought.)
There is plenty of information available confirming
O'Collins as a knowing paedophile protector, one who was at least as culpable
as Mulkearns and Little are/were, on Gerard Henderson's loaded account. In leaving O'Collins out of the story, while
digging a grave, as it were, for Mulkearns, perhaps Henderson may care to
explain what it all means that John Day was promoted
by O'Collins after paedophile allegations were known, while conversely,
Mulkearns, in the same position, effectively demoted Day to the small parish of
Timboon; a surely unprecedented move, at the time if not also now, for a Monsignor. [NB: I am not defending Mulkearns' action in
this specific respect, only pointing out that it was significantly less culpable,
in my opinion, than O'Collins' craven act in promoting known horrific paedophile
John Day].
this point, the Hollywood movie really hits its straps. By early 1971, O'Collins had apparently had
enough of running a secret Salo Republic-style child-abuse sideshow (if not main arena) within his
diocese. The secrecy side of it was no
doubt fun for him, a stimulating game to oversee, if not also play, but perhaps
overall it was becoming all a bit tawdry, especially while outside, the
emergent permissive society daily reminded O'Collins that the war against
communism that he had signed on for in September 1945 was now essentially lost,
or at least hopelessly side-tracked
1971, O'Collins thus understandably wanted out – but he and the Vatican were in
a quandary: who could be trusted to take
over his job, and not to spill the beans on the sordid sexual empire that
O'Collins ran? A liberal, that's who.
appointment after O'Collins may seem counter-intuitive; they were ideological
opponents, after all, and what was to stop Mulkearns spilling the beans,
cleaning up the debauched mess he inherited from O'Collins, and so making
O'Collins retirement very uncomfortable, at best? (And conversely, Mulkearns'
job perhaps a lot easier, depending on how he played his cards with the Vatican,
and vice versa).
This is the big
mystery in the movie – and sorry folks, I'm not going to spoil the ending now. But I will give you some hints about the
strange O'Collins-Mulkearns handover.
Easter Thursday, 11 April 1971, just before Mulkearns took over from O'Collins,
the ambitious, and highly-educated young priest George Pell left Europe, and
his cosmopolitan student life forever, for workaday Ballarat. He therefore missed the opportunity to settle in nicely to his first diocesan appointment, at least, under his mentor,
O'Collins, and instead had his career left to Mulkearns' caprices, although in
this – and every – respect, the Vatican obviously was Mulkearns' boss. In any event, you might think: "silly George Pell and silly O'Collins for not
timing more career overlap between them here?
Or not? I'll leave the contents of
the rest of this narrative arc to you.
guessing your own narrative sweep and ending here, you may want to consider a
couple of other snippets. One is that
O'Collins got to live on in the imposing bluestone Bishop's Palace in Ballarat
until he died on 25 November 1983; while Mulkearns had to camp out (as Paul
Keating may have put it) elsewhere. What
this means as to the power relativities between the retiree and the nominal
boss, I'll up leave to you, as likewise also the fact that George Pell lived
with O'Collins in the same Bishop's Palace in for some years in the early 1980s.
to bring up the current Royal Commission, yesterday lawyer Sam Duggan, for
Cardinal Pell, said that some words George
Pell allegedly said in 1983 ("Haha I think Gerry's [Gerald Ridsdale has] been
rooting boys again"):
Sam Duggan seemed to have a point – that is, unless you know about the obscure concept
of ecclesiastical responsibility, a canon law doctrine in which a Bishop is
effectively still responsible for a diocesan priest's actions, even if that
priest is sent to another diocese, or even another state.
is quite undeservedly an obscure doctrine, in my opinion, as it seems to have
as many important legal ramifications as the notorious "Ellis defence". I only learnt about it this morning when I
read this:
Duggan's "it makes no sense whatsoever" thus in fact makes quite a lot of sense,
to me anyway – Ridsdale (among others) was the poisonous gift ("chalice", if you must) that Mulkearns
was handed in 1971, and then could never, try as he might, shake off. Wherever Ridsdale was sent to geographically,
he was still Mulkearns's jurisdictional problem (unless the Vatican laicised Ridsdale,
which was notoriously hard to do). I'll leave the implications of this doctrine,
especially in regard to the consequent motivations two other main players in the
Hollywood movie, to you.
to 2015, in fact – although I'm not positively sure about this sequence – Sam
Duggan had just yesterday heard the above lines about ecclesiastical
responsibility in the Royal Commission shortly before he uttered his lame "it makes no sense whatsoever" line.
need to start paying more attention, Sam – you will now necessarily have your
own role in the great Hollywood movie I have referred to, when you will face
your own proverbial cross-examination.
And coming days in the Royal Commission will determine whether that role is
career-making or breaking for you.
(1) "Cardinal must receive a fair go at royal commission and in media" Australian 5 December 2015
(2) The now terminally-ill Ronald Mulkearns b. 1930, bishop of Ballarat 1971 to 1997, Pell worked under him from May 1971 to late 1983 or early 1984; and the late Frank Little, Archbishop of Melbourne 1 July 1974 to 16 July 1996, Pell worked under him in a loose sense from 1984, when Pell became rector of Corpus Christi college in Melbourne, and then more firmly from 1986, when the then-Pope, without reference to Little, appointed Pell an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne, until he took over Little's job in mid-1996.
(3) All three were senior clergy; the other two were Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne and Cardinal Gilroy of Sydney; see Paul Ormonde, The Movement, p 134.
(4) Though O'Collins was then 79, he lived until late 1983.
(5) See FN 3.
Monday, October 05, 2015
Ye New Arts Minister
happened to be in Mildura the other night (Friday 2 October 2015), to capture an historic occasion –
albeit in a Zapruder kinda way. New Arts
(and Communications) Minister Senator Mitch Fifield was at his first arts event
as Minister (or more precisely, and as it usually coincides, his first Opening
day's Australian had run a story on Senator
Fifield's thinness on the arts ground during his first two weeks. Oddly perhaps, Senator Fifield's reply letter,
published in the next day's Australian,
did not mention his then-imminent Mildura appearance.
the main reason he was in town was apparently a CW-state meeting of arts ministers,
this coincided with the opening festivities of the Mildura Palimpsest Biennale.
While neither attendance seems to have
any reason for being a secret, I may be naively underestimating the throngs of
poets, at al, who may have one-to-one implored, or en masse heckled the new
minister, had they known where to find him.
can report that Senator Fifield presents nicer in person than his press photos
make him appear (which look I'd call Country Town Beadle), gave a reasonable
speech, and then adjourned to the lawn near where I was sitting. I turned around to take a photo, which fortuitously was at
the precise moment he was handed, post-speech, his first glass of champagne.
photo's resolution is appalling, but the trio's body language speaks
plenty, I believe. The senator, the
drink-fetcher (probably his spouse or a staff member), and Mildura Palimpsest
Biennale curator Jonathan Kimberley (in blue jacket) all appear to reverently
focus on the full glass of champagne.
There appears to be an unstated ceremonial aspect to the moment – the imminent first sip will make it all official, marking the point at which there is no turning back; a future of frequent re-enactments of the same crisp scene, just with different backgrounds and lookers/hangers-on, now awaits the senator.
There appears to be an unstated ceremonial aspect to the moment – the imminent first sip will make it all official, marking the point at which there is no turning back; a future of frequent re-enactments of the same crisp scene, just with different backgrounds and lookers/hangers-on, now awaits the senator.
this same, refilled cup contains a sweet elixir, heady-brew, or Lethean coping-juice
should be ascertainable, I'd guess, by about the one-hundredth performance by Senator
Fifield of his now de riguer little set-piece.
Saturday, September 05, 2015
NT spending
Aboriginal-disadvantage money "as they see fit"
The Australian
has recently run two front-page articles on the siphoning of CW money intended
to remedy Indigenous disadvantage:
Amos Aikman, "Aboriginal cash siphoned" Australian 8 August 2015, and
Amos Aikman, "'Close gap' funds spent on desk
jobs" Australian 5 Sep 2015.
In one sense, this is not an old story at all with
Nicolas Rothwell having made the same point several times over recent years (Rothwell
also has an editorial in the Australian
8 August 2015, "Scandal of underspending on Territory's remote communities", but it
is something of a weary understatement).
Where the funds
have gone to is, of course, the multi-billion dollar question. According to the page four graphs in Amos
Aikman's article today ("'Close gap' funds spent on desk jobs" Australian 5 Sep 2015, the Northern
Territory government has received about 25% of about $1.3bn in IAS grants. That's about $315m. However, Aikman's text has this as a paltry
$31.5m. Whether the decimal place was a
subbing error or not, it is a convenient whitewash for the Northern Territory
government. Hence, my drawing attention
to it ASAP.
While this has to be a brief post, here I also point out
the Northern Territory government's apparent mea culpa in the earlier article (Amos Aikman, "Aboriginal cash
siphoned" Australian 8 August 2015):
"A spokesperson for Territory Treasurer Dave Tollner . .
. argued state and Territory governments
were free to distribute revenue as they
saw fit".
Saturday, May 02, 2015
Day 50 years on, 50 years on
anniversaries are necessarily artificial re-imaginings – there will be no one
alive, with a cogent first-hand memory, to listen
to. And when there is no one to
listen to, talk is cheap and abundant – albeit within some strict limits. That is to say, it is ubiquitous and
meaningless propaganda.
browsing recently, I came across a fiftieth anniversary of Anzac Day
account #. With many WWI veterans still
alive in 1965, it was refreshingly unvarnished looking back to the long summer
of 1915 at Gallipoli. It could have, but
didn't, dwell on the more cringe-worthy aspects of Anzac Day commemorations c.
1960 (a la the play "The One Day of the Year"),
and/or how, back in 1915, Incompetent British Officer X wasted the lives of Y plucky
Australians at Z beach, when instead ZZZ beach was, in hindsight, the obvious
weakness in the Turks' defences.
My main recollection of George Johnston's article is that
nudity at Gallipoli was a big thing – lots of nude swimming off the beaches (including
by British officers, whose competence was not specified), and later on,
presumably as the summer heat peaked, general nudity in the trenches. As with any good homoerotic idyll, then, the
late-autumn evacuation (a non-botched operation, by all accounts) was a dream
ending – from above, it was a sobering prod from the real-world, and from
below, a sweet, seasonal passing.
What George Johnston doesn't indicate is how much of a
downright gay old time was had. While
accepting that what happened at Gallipoli sexually was always, quite properly, going
to mostly stay at Gallipoli, it could liberate the Australian national
consciousness in several ways to think that the silver lining at Gallipoli (an upside
of the sort that is found in many other awful and/or macabre situations, which
in no way minimises the downside) was not a vague, collective "us" Finding Somebody to Ceremoniously Blame, but rather was young Australian men
improvising and doing it for themselves – assertively in charge of their own bodies,
despite or because of the dire situation all around.
Why George Johnston's account, and its underlying implications,
have not gained traction over the last 50 years is not hard to explain. The Official Australian Anzac Account TM was
first penned by 30 y.o. Australian journalist (and later newspaper proprietor
and WWII Chief Censor) Keith Murdoch, who used it to advance his career greatly,
despite the content of the long letter he wrote clearly breaking wartime
censorship rules. In that letter,
Murdoch famously – and to date, everlastingly – stuck it to the British. More importantly perhaps, Murdoch's loftily-praised
Australian soldiers were virile but otherwise apparently sexless, and also
mostly voiceless. Overnight, an
idealised, politically-passive (and fully-clothed and heterosexual) volk was manufactured – delivering
packaged readers to Murdoch, and packaged voters to the politicians who
clamoured around him.
One hundred years on, it is breathtaking how little has
changed. In April 2010, the Murdoch
press freely incited the murder of a police informer, Carl Williams, publishing
top-secret information without legal sanction.
It and its government and other cronies get away with this, and much
more, because Australia's volk have
short memories – our democracy, like Anzac Day at 5pm, is a drunken
Murdoch's capture, and privatisation of history has perpetuated
a false history that masquerades as communally-owned authentic populism – dangerous
as it is to say this (albeit it is now well after 5pm on Anzac day). The real
story – one piece of which is what George Johnston told – is not suitable for
private manipulation and profit. It is
also, therefore, genuinely owned by
all of us. Sketchy though it is, it is
time that we took pride in this story, and junked, once and for all, Murdoch's wretched
Anzac crock.
# George Johnston, "Anzac – a myth
for all mankind", Walkabout April
1965, reproduced in Walkabout anthology
1968, pp 52-58.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
is now surely a self-parodying word. Its
main current usage seems to be by real-estate agents hyping the location
virtues of otherwise perhaps unliveably-small inner city apartments – they are invariably
on "lifestyle strips". Presumably
meaning an area with two or more copycat, hipster-rent-a-crowd cafés – so if
your apartment is not sufficiently claustrophobic, you can take the lift down,
to where you can soak up your new "lifestyle" in all its deafening, crowded and
bum-numbing glory. (If you're under 35, I do appreciate that these things are
actually positives, and indeed the Most Risky Thing in The World for a hipster
to do would be to patronise a new café in which there is not already a "hipster
quorum" – a dozen or so near identically-dressed other hipsters sitting on
milk-crates, or similar stools cunningly and expensively designed for maximum
discomfort. And if there's a queue to get in, I also appreciate that this is to hipsters what the "Sanitized" strip on motel toilet seats is to Middle America - a ring of confidence, worth its weight in gold).
secondary real-estate use of "lifestyle" is probably even more risible – it simply
means what until yesterday would have been called a retirement community, but
today, thanks to a few pieces of gym equipment thrown into a room, is now a "lifestyle
village". You no longer move to such a
place to quietly live out your twilight years – sweating them out instead is a
much better deal. Oh, but I'm sure there's
an in-house café too – thus meaning that the dwellings are unliveably-small (see
above), or if not, that your neighbours are not the inviting-you-home-for-a-cuppa
type, in which case you're not really living in a "community", in my opinion.
thus seems fair to say that people who choose "lifestyle" are gullible,
insecure herd creatures. And also, as of
this morning, Indigenous Australians living in remote communities – according to
Tony Abbott, anyway.
these Indigenous Australians have fallen for a real-estate spiel also; poor dears. It might have gone something like this:
"Move out of the town camp, and back to
your country. It will be a dry community,
so your less functional neighbours and relations won't be there much. You may find it a good place to create some
art – and the local art centre is a big employer in town. If art is not your thing, there's usually a
mining company sniffing around nearby – meaning there's a fair chance, if you
don't mind the lost land trade-off, of living sweet on royalty cheques. And if by some chance, your chosen remote community
doesn't have any real economy, you will still live the good life, spending your
days and nights sitting on whacky, ramshackle furniture communing with your
neighbours, happily ever after. Best of
all, you won't even need to move to 'lifestyle village' when you get older –
this community already has a few pieces of gym equipment no one ever uses. In fact, you're probably sitting on it right now."


text:
Since we don't seem to want to pay for the things we need and use together anymore, cities and other government entities have turned more and more to fees to make us pay. The next step is to outsource the collection of those fees to companies that collect tolls or the (virtual) quarters you put in parking meters. In return, the government gets some immediate money, but it in the long run it is the private sphere that makes the big bucks. In some ways it is a reversion of the days when the government gave tax collection out as concessions—maybe that is next.
Does this matter in terms of how we use our environment? We are about to find out in my native Cincinnati, where the city is selling its parking meters to the local Port Authority, which is in turn contracting the work out to a division of Xerox (no longer a mere document company).
The money, a little under $90 million, is already spent. The city has a budget deficit now, so it bargained future income against current needs (though it will still receive $3 million a year from the Port Authority). The money will help to pay for some major civic improvements, including the building of a new condo tower with a fancy supermarket in its base downtown and a new highway intersection servicing our major medical complex. In that sense, the deal will improve the city's accessibility and amenities.
On the other hand, the parking will be more expensive—how else is Xerox going to make money?—and, more important, there will be little tweaks such as extending downtown parking hours from 6 to 9 p.m. The latter is especially significant, as, like most downtowns, Cincinnati is turning from a retail into a restaurant and bar hub. It has become more and more of a lively place to spend an evening, but paying to park could curb residents' enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, the city has adopted a form-based code, which I think is a terrible idea, but they have also cut the amount of parking required of downtown construction. I agree with Slate's Matthew Yglesias that this is theoretically great news. But downtown is going to continue to reflect old-fashioned thinking about urban planning. More and more of the amenities we use are spread out all over downtown. To get from downtown to that aforementioned medical complex is still something you can do with a bus, though it is not very convenient—but getting to the Brooks Brothers that moved from downtown to a shopping mall ten miles away is another matter. An affordable grocery store, schools, and countless other things you might want to use if you live downtown are not accessible by foot or public transportation.
We have to find a way to invest in our cities, and not just our downtowns, in ways that make sense for how we live, that make the environment better, that make all of our existing amenities available, and that builds those things that bring people together. Making it more difficult and expensive to park—when those other pieces have yet to fall into place—is a half-measure.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose stories appear on this website each week. His views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
2002 Lexus ES300 Oil Pick-up Tube
Review Fitment Notes to Ensure Proper Fit› Change Part / Category
› Change Vehicle
Related Parts
Oil Pick-up Tube
Change Category
Change Brand
Genuine Oil Pick-up Tube
Click to Enlarge
(Read reviews)
Part Number: W0133-1738312
Detailed Notes: Includes strainer screen. The gasket to the oil pump is serviced separately.
Condition: New
Shipping Options:
Ground, Overnight, 2 Day OEM


text:
Early on in this set, Shinichi/Jimmy runs into a member of the crime organization that forced him to take an experimental poison that shrunk him down to a seven-year-old; this event forced him to take on the name of Conan Edogawa. Unfortunately, something happens to the man from the syndicate, so Shinichi/Jimmy ends up no closer to being returned to normal than he had been previously. The one thing that bothered me about this particular story, though, is that Conan refers to the two men in black by their names, although from what is shown in the series, he shouldn't know their names.
Murder mysteries are a big focus of the episodes of this set, just like the previous Case Closed sets. However, there is also a kidnapping story, an attempted murder, and a burglary story. The burglary storyline introduces a new character named the Kaito Kid, a "phantom thief" who confounds all police authorities. This character was definitely being set up to become another adversary for Conan, and I suspect he'll show up again in future Case Closed episodes.
One thing that frustrated me was the placement of the chapter marks in the episodes. In previous sets, the first chapter mark was placed right after the opening, so you would see the story's prologue if there was one, then get the title screen. However, on this set, the chapter mark is showing up after the title screen. If you skip over the opening, you have to use your remote to go back and make sure you didn't miss a prologue. For the final chapter mark, it was put between the denouement and the next episode preview on the first disc; again, you had to use your remote to go back and see the denouement. Fortunately, the problem with the final chapter mark was fixed on the remaining three discs in the set.
As for the bonus features, there are only three included. The first is a "Character Spotlight" for Richard Moore; this is one screen of text with a picture of the character to accompany it. The second is "Conan's Gadgets," which is one screen describing Conan's Wristwatch Stun Gun; this is accompanied by a picture of Conan using the gadget. The final extra is a page with a menu for trailers. The trailers included on this disc are for Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Yu Yu Hakusho, Ragnarok, Glass Fleet, One Piece, Ghost Hunt, and Case Closed. Since this is what I've come to expect from these box sets, I wasn't disappointed by the bonus features.
The Case Closed Season Three box set is a decent release, and is worth adding to your DVD library if you're a fan of the Case Closed anime series.
I wrote this review after watching a copy of this DVD box set that my older daughter gave me as a gift.
The Mist Goblin Murder Part 1 The Mist Goblin Murder Part 2 Weapon Of Choice Game Gone Bad Train Trick The Sunfish Murder Footsteps of the Hero Part 1 | Footsteps of the Hero Part 2 Shopping Can Be Murder Illustrated Murder Ghost Ship Murder Part 1 Ghost Ship Murder Part 2 Gomera! The Three Fingerprints |
The Crab and Whale Moonless Murder Mystery Death of a Diva Knight Baron Mystery Part 1 Knight Baron Mystery Part 2 Knight Baron Mystery Part 3 The Stalker | Triple Terror The Ship Wreck Murder Jinnai, King of Death Murder And Mahjong Phanton Thief 1412 Part 1 Phantom Thief 1412 Part 2 Bonus Features |


text: Radulomyces confluens (Fries) Christensen, teleomorph (ATCC® 96373™) Strain Designations: GB 2146/2 / Product Format: frozen General Information Characteristics Culture Method History Documentation Print Email Share Share this product Facebook Twitter Google+ Permits and Restrictions View Permits Strain Designations GB 2146/2 Biosafety Level 1 Biosafety classification is based on U.S. Public Health Service Guidelines, it is the responsibility of the customer to ensure that their facilities comply with biosafety regulations for their own country. Product Format frozen Type Strain no Preceptrol® no Comments Compatibility tests Medium ATCC® Medium 323: Malt agar medium Growth Conditions Temperature: 24.0°C Name of Depositor N Hallenberg Isolation Deciduous wood, Aqua Mts., Tenerife, Canary Islands; single-spore isolate. References Hallenberg N. Pairing tests with species of Aphyllophorales (Basidiomycetes) from two phytogeographically isolated areas. Mycotaxon 42: 355-386, 1991. Permits These permits may be required for shipping this product: Customers located in the state of Hawaii will need to contact the Hawaii Department of Agriculture to determine if an Import Permit is required. A copy of the permit or documentation that a permit is not required must be sent to ATCC in advance of shipment. Basic Documentation Product Sheet Certificate of Analysis SDS


text:
Men's Under Armour SpeedForm Apollo Running Shoes
Have a need for speed? Would you rather go all out than take a leisurely jog? If so, the Under Armour SpeedForm is for you. A lightweight running shoe that doesn't skimp on comfort, the SpeedForm is ready for some speedy action.
Lightning quick bursts of speed are a breeze in these running shoes, which feature a signature UA SpeedForm upper. This ultra-light mesh material has perforations and an Ultra Sonic seal, offering lasting durability in a breathable package. Soft, cushioned landings are a must when you're giving it your all, which is where plush Micro G foam and a 4D foam footbed come in. Both offer support and a cushy feel, without adding unnecessary weight. All of this sits atop a supportive UA TPU curve, which adds to the structure and durability of this versatile running shoe.
Give your run a speedy boost with the Under Armour SpeedForm Running Shoes.
- UPPER: Perforated mesh with synthetic Ultra Sonic seal
- MIDSOLE: 4D Foam footbed, Micro G foam
- OUTSOLE: Rubber with external heel counter
Fresh Off The Blog
"The SpeedForm Apollo delivers maximum running performance on a unique design that will have you standing out from the crowd."
Click here to read more about the Under Armour SpeedForm Apollo.


text: Not-At-All Creepy Background Check App Hits Android and iPhoneMat Honan6/30/11 4:40pmFiled to: appsbackground check appiPhone AppsAndroid appsPrivacyandoidiosBackground Check45EditPromoteShare to KinjaToggle Conversation toolsGo to permalink Hey everybody, now you can run free background checks on friends and co-workers and family members and random acquaintances right from your phone! That's great right? What? It's weird? Well, yes, sure. Welcome to modern life.AdvertisementBackground Check by Been Verified hit Android today for the first time, and returned to the iTunes Store. Apple had previously pulled it via privacy concerns. It lets you run a background check on anyone based on their name or email address, and checks for relatives, property records, criminal history and social media footprint. You get one free report a month. Extras cost $.99 each, or you can buy a 20 pack for $9.99When I ran the check on myself it found my previous address, but not my very new one, discovered an alarming number of my relatives, and failed to find my criminal history (a DUI that is now nearly 20 years old). It found my photos on Flickr, my Amazon wishlist, my public Foursquare records, Vimeo, Picassa, and Stumbleupon accounts. It even found hoary old accounts I don't really use much anymore, or at all, like iLike, Pandora, Bebo, and MySpace. It grabbed approximately twelve bajillion photos of me (with many, many false positives) and even more web links.AdvertisementIn short, it was amazingly comprehensive.This app has been called creepy. Repeatedly. It's not. It's weird, and new, and perhaps a little unnerving, but it's not creepy. It's just sadly modern.There is all this information floating around that is publicly available. It just happens to be information about people. Everything it found about me was also available with a Google sleuthing. It just did it faster and automatically. That's all.SponsoredWe live in the information age. Short of living off the grid in a Kaczynski shack, it's nearly impossible to not leave a data trail. This concept is going to take some getting used to. But it's a fact of life.The app is free.


text:
Search Weekly Wisdom
Emily Bennington: Becoming a Clear Channel for the Expression of Love in this Moment
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
View Summary
View ArchiveEmily Bennington is an author and teacher both of contemplative practice and leadership strategies. With Sounds True, Emily has released the book (and companion audiobook) Miracles at Work: Turning Inner Guidance into Outer Influence. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Emily about the perennial spiritual text that inspired Miracles […]
Jeff Foster: The Courage to Love
Thursday, March 2, 2017
View Summary
View ArchiveJeff Foster is a spiritual teacher who draws upon his own awakening experience after decades of struggle with illness and depression. With Sounds True, Jeff has published several books and audios, including The Way of Rest and Sacred as You Are. Producer Kriste Peoples chose this week's excerpt from Jeff's audio offering The Courage to […]
Master Stephen Co: Transforming the Planet
Friday, April 8, 2016
View Summary
View ArchiveOne unifying idea that appears time and again in the great world traditions is that there is an invisible life force or energy that animates the physical world. Whether you call it qi, ki, ruah, spirit, or prana, one thing is clear—harnessing this energy can have a powerful effect on our health, state of mind, […]
Various Authors: The Self-Acceptance Project
Friday, April 8, 2016
View Summary
View ArchiveIt's helpful to understand that when we're possessed by fearful reactivity, we can be hijacked by our primitive brain and disconnected from the neuro-circuitry that correlates with mindfulness and compassion. We become cut off from the very parts of ourselves that allow us to trust ourselves, to be more happy and free. The critical inquiry […]


text:
Longboat Key Fire Rescue Chief Rich Dickerson said firefighter paramedics were late in arriving to a 911 call at the Longboat Key Club and Resort Harbourside Dining Room Dec. 2 because a flurry of 911 calls received gave conflicting addresses.
Last Wednesday at 7 p.m., a man suddenly collapsed at a Longboat Key Club and Resort Islandside renovation and expansion project appreciation party. When the man fell to the floor in front of about 300 people, several people in the room began calling 911 to report the emergency.
Dickerson said the first call received by the south fire station, which sits less than a half-mile away from the Harbourside Dining Room, was from someone requesting an ambulance at 2110 Harbourside Drive in the Fairway Bay community.
People in attendance complained that Longboat Key Fire Rescue took at least 20 minutes to respond to the call. Dickerson, however, said the response time was delayed but took no more than 10 minutes.
"We could have been there sooner, but we responded to the location given to us by the first caller and had to backtrack," Dickerson said.
Longboat Key Police Captain Steve Mislyan, the first to arrive on the scene at 3000 Harbourside Drive, confirmed that police dispatch was given the wrong address, which led to the response delay.
The man was not hospitalized and ended up leaving the resort on his own, Mislyan said.
Dickerson urged Key residents to confirm the exact address of their emergency before calling for help, which will avoid paramedic response delays.
Contact Kurt Schultheis at [email protected]


text:
HOWDY PARDNERS!! "WE ARE COMMITTED To PRESERVING OUR WESTERN HERITAGE" |
3 cowboys were hurled into eternity, When Wyatt enforced the city code, so bring your hoss To Tombstone............and ride where Wyatt once rode. |
Send telegraph To: Cowboy Doug TOMBSTONE LIVERY STABLE 520-457-3559 email@example.com |
Chuck Wagon Dinners for Groups | ||
Trails for you and your horse To ride | ||
Cowboy Action Shooting Range | ||
Welcome To ......... The Town Too Tough To Die |


text:
The Alcohol and Drug Service (ADS) in Tasmania provides treatment and support services to individuals and families affected by alcohol, tobacco and other drug use. The Alcohol and Drug Service provide a variety of programs, interventions and treatment services which include:
- Inpatient Withdrawal Management Unit;
- Opioid Pharmacotherapy Program;
- Psychosocial Interventions Program;
- Smoking Cessation Program; and
- Youth Program.
Community Sector Service Provision
A range of Community Sector Organisations are funded by the Alcohol and Drug Service to deliver a range of services around the state. The Alcohol and Drug Service works closely with community sector organisations to provide the best service to clients. These services include:
- Advocacy Support Services;
- Care Coordination;
- Counselling and Support Services;
- Family Support Services;
- Health Promotion, Eduction, Training Services;
- Non-medical sobering up facilities/places of safety facilities;
- Residential Rehabilitation Programs;
- Smoking Cessation Services; and
- Youth specific services
Click here to view a full list of the ADS (funded) Community Sector Organisations.


text:
First of all, please forgive me for my bad English if it annoys you. Few months ago, I came to know about CPP Unit which is a unit testing framework for C++ application. I am a fresh guy out of college last year and was unaware about testing frameworks, so it was a very good experience for me to work with CPP Unit. As I was also programming on Windows CE, there was a need to write test cases for those applications also. But the problem with CPP Unit is that I was not able to compile for Windows CE as it used some features of C++ which are not supported by eVC++ compiler. I tried to search a similar test framework for Windows CE but I didn't find it. So after prolonged searching, I thought to write my own unit testing framework for Windows CE based applications. And this is what I came up with and I want to share with all.
This is a unit testing framework for applications written for Windows CE in particular. It provides GUI to select and run test cases, and to show results. It also stores the results of tests run to a file, if user wants.
Programming in C++ for WinCE is very restrictive. It does not support templates, RTTI and other stuff of C++. CPP Unit uses templates and RTTI, but in eVC++ it's not available. That's why I have used lots of member function pointers and call backs to implement it.
Compile the WCEUnit project to make WCEUnit.dll file for a particular platform. In order to use the testing framework, the test case project must be linked with the WCEUnit.dll. Write your test cases and link the project to WCEUnit.dll. Following topics discuss how to write test cases.
When you write a test class, it should be derived from CTestSuite class defined in the framework. The CTestSuite class holds all the information about the test cases written for that particular suite. The individual test cases should be added to the test suite as show in the following example. The macros which are used in the following example are defined in the WCEMacros.h header file. These macros wrap the test case addition mechanism. The below code shows a test suite class written for testing CComplex class. The CComplex class is very simple, and does primary implementation of complex numbers, and I will not go into the details of that one.
//TestComplex.h #ifndef __TEST_COMPLEX_INCLUDED__ #define __TEST_COMPLEX_INCLUDED__ #include "..\WCEUnit\TestSuite.h" #include "..\WCEUnit\WCEUnitMacros.h" #include "Complex.h" class CTestComplex : public CTestSuite { public: //Pass the name of the test class as parameter. WCEUNIT_TESTSUITE_INIT(CTestComplex); //Pass the name of the test case function as parameter. WCEUNIT_ADD_TESTCASE(testAdd); WCEUNIT_ADD_TESTCASE(testEqual); WCEUNIT_ADD_TESTCASE_EXCEPTION(testExcp, CUserException); WCEUNIT_TESTSUITE_END(); public: /*********************************************************** The signature of test case function should be void (func)(); ***********************************************************/ void testAdd(); void testEqual(); void testException(); void CleanUpTest(); void InitializeTest(); private: CComplex* m_p1; Ccomples* m_p2; CComplex* m_p3; }; #endif //__TEST_COMPLEX_INCLUDED__
Pass test suite class name to it. This function defines the starting of a CreateTestSuite() function. This function is defined as pure virtual in the CTestSuite class and is used to create the test case lists.
This macro adds the code to the CreateTestSuite() function to add a test case function.
WCEUNIT_ADD_TESTCASE_EXCEPTION(testCase, testException)
This macro is used to add a special type of test case function which should be tested for a particular type of exception. If the test case does not throw the exception then it is considered to fail.
This macro ends the CreteTestSuite() function.
You can see functions InitializeTest() and CleanUpTest() in the definition of the class. These functions are called before and after every test case execution. From the UI, you can select the behavior about these functions, i.e., whether you want those functions to be called for every test case or only once for all the test cases for a particular test suite class. You can specify your choice by checking or un-checking the Init Once check box on the main dialog.
While writing test cases, use macros defined in the WCEUnitMacros.h for writing the test conditions. Following are the macros used to write test conditions:
If the condition is evaluated to false then it asserts and marks the test as failed.
This is reverse of above macro. If you want that the condition must return false then use this macro to test the condition.
WCEUNIT_ASSERT_EQUALS(testValue, compValue)
This macro asserts if the testValue and compValue are not equal. If the two values are not equal then it marks the test case as failed. If you are using some user defined class objects to compare then the class must have '==' operator overloaded.
WCEUNIT_DOUBLE_EQUALS(testValue, compValue)
This macro is similar to the above one but it assumes that the testValue and compValue are convertible to a double value. It type casts the results into a double value and then compares.
WCEUNIT_DOUBLE_BETWEEN(testValue, minValue, maxValue)
This macro tests weather the testValue is less than maxValue and greater than minValue. It is assumed that the three values of expressions are evaluated to double. The following code shows the usage of the above macros.
Following code shows the use of above macros in test cases for CComplex class.
void CTestComplex::testAdd() { CComplex temp; temp = *m_p1 + *m_p2; WCEUNIT_ASSERT(CComplex(30, 70) == temp); } void CTestComplex::testEqual() { CComplex temp2; //Below test should fail. WCEUNIT_ASSERT_FAIL(temp2 == *m_p3); CComplex temp1; //Below test should pass. temp1 = *m_p1 + *m_p2; WCEUNIT_ASSERT_EQUALS(temp1, *m_p3); //To check the equality of the real and imaginary members. WCEUNIT_DOUBLE_EQUALS(temp1.GetReal(), m_p3->GetReal()); WCEUNIT_DOUBLE_EQUALS(temp1.GetImaginary(), m_p3->GetImaginary()); } void CTestComplex::testException() { //This fuction is only to demonstrate the exception test. //It throws CUserException. This test will fail as the expected exception //is CFileException. CUserException e; THROW(&e); } void CTestComplex::InitializeTest() { m_p1 = new CComplex(10, 20); m_p2 = new CComplex(20, 50); m_p3 = new CComplex(30, 70); } void CTestComplex::CleanUpTest() { delete m_p1; delete m_p2; delete m_p3; }
The CTestRunner class is responsible for running the test cases and getting the test results. To run the test cases you have written, create an instance of CTestRunner class. Also create the instance of all the test suite classes, and pass the address of each in the AddTestSuite() function of CTestRunner class. Then call Start() function of CTestRunner. The following code shows how to run test cases:
BOOL CTestComplexApp::InitInstance() { //Create the instance of CTestRunner class. CTestRunner obj; //Create the instance of CTestComplex test suite class. CTestComplex test1; //Pass the address of CTestComplex instance to the AddTestSuite() function. obj.AddTestSuite(&test1); //Sart the WCEUnit dialog to run the test cases. obj.Start(); return FALSE; }
The above image shows the main dialog. To select a test case to run, click the Select button, a new dialog will appear with the tree view of the test cases written by you. You can either select single test case or a test suite or All Tests. If you want to run all the test cases for a particular test suite then select that test suite, or if you want to run all the test cases of all the test suites then select the root node All Tests. The check box Init once is given for the option when the InitializeTest() and CleanUpTest() will be called. If it is checked then for each test suite, the IntializeTest() and CleanUpTest() is called only once respectively, before and after all the test cases are executed. If it is unchecked then for each and every test case, these two functions are called. Click the Run button to run the selected test cases. The results are displayed in the list box. If you want to see more information then just click the result item, you will be shown the detailed result. If you want to store the test results in a text file then check the Make log check box, a file \\WCEUnitLog.txt is created with the detailed test result information.
During the development of this project, I learned a lot about the pointer to member functions in C++. They are amazing things and do a lot more than what you can imagine. May be next time, I will try to post some thing about pointer to member functions.
This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)
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text: If you want to do San Marcos like a local, tube your way down the San Marcos River. With the river a near-constant 72 degrees, it's no wonder that so many families spend their time floating past tree-lined riverbanks with their toes dangling in the water. Looking for more adventure? Try claiming one of Texas' biggest bragging rights by taking on the Texas Water Safari and canoeing 100 hours down the 260-mile-long river to its end at the San Antonio Bay.


text:
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (Kyodo) Russia conducted a military drill last weekend on Etorofu, one of four Russian-held islands off Hokkaido claimed by Japan, despite a request by Tokyo not to do so.
A press officer in the military's Far East district said Saturday-Sunday drill was "the largest-scale exercise held on the disputed islands since the collapse of the Soviet Union" in 1991.
It immediately drew criticism from Japan, with Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada expressing "deep regret" over the military exercise.
Okada told reporters in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, that Japan cannot accept the use of a training camp on Etorofu Island by the Russian military and has lodged a protest with Moscow through diplomatic channels.
"We have a different political standpoint (over the island) but such an incident has never occurred before as far as we know. In that sense, it is regrettable," Okada said. "I wonder why they conducted the drill at this time."
According to an announcement dated Sunday by the Russian Defense Ministry, the drill on Etorofu Island was part of the Vostok 2010 strategic exercises in the Russian Far East and Siberia, which began June 29 and will continue through Thursday.
The drill on Etorofu involved about 1,500 soldiers and 200 military and special-purpose vehicles, it said.
Okada warned Russia against holding a drill on the disputed island last Friday, but a source at the Russian Foreign Ministry brushed aside the warning, telling ITAR-Tass news agency the same day that Russia "has the right to choose the place of exercises."
About 10,000 service members are taking part in the drill, which also involves all the Russian fleets — Pacific, North, Black Sea and Baltic — as well as air force units, according to the news agency.
ITAR-Tass quoted Russian Armed Forces Gen. Nikolai Makarov, who is supervising the exercises, as saying the drill is not targeted at any real country but aimed at ensuring "defense of national interests from a presumed enemy on the Far Eastern borders."
The row over the islands of Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan and the Habomai islets has prevented the signing of a postwar peace treaty.


text:
Location |
4473 Chiles Road |
At the Chevron station on Chiles Road |
Hours |
24 Hours |
Phone |
(530) 756-4250 |
Website |
http://www.chevronwithtechron.com/stations/extramile/ |
Owner(s) |
Names of owners/proprietors here |
Established |
Date, i.e. YYYY-MM-DD |
Payment Methods |
Credit, Debit, Cash |
Extra Mile is Chevron's premier brand of 24 hour convenience store. The only Extra Mile store in Davis is located at the Chevron on Chiles Road in East Davis. The store features all of the standard convenience store items along with prepared sandwiches, ICEEs, sodas, and many different flavors of Seattle's Best Coffee. They previously used Van Houtte coffee. There is also an Allpoint Network ATM located inside of the store. There is a car wash at this location along with gas pumps.
This page is in need of a Photo.To add an image to this page, click "Edit" then click the images button. |
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text:
We have a Good Samaritan among us. His name is Eddie Mefford. When he sees someone in trouble, he stops to help them. He is truly a Good Samaritan. Thanks, Eddie. Thank you so much.
Nancy Hughes
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text:
Tottenham's Lamela out for the season, to undergo hip surgery
Tottenham Hotspur's attacking midfielder Erik Lamela will miss the rest of the season with a hip injury and is set to have surgery on Saturday to rectify the persistent problem.
MADRID Barcelona need to avoid over-exuberance if they are to overturn a 2-0 deficit in Tuesday's Champions League clash at home to AC Milan, midfielder Cesc Fabregas said on Thursday.
Barca host the Serie A side after suffering a surprise reverse in last month's last 16, first leg at the San Siro and are reeling after being dumped out of the King's Cup and beaten in La Liga by arch rivals Real Madrid last week.
They are still 11 points clear at the top of Spain's domestic league but their hopes of a third European crown in five years are hanging by a thread.
"The desire this club has to win the Champions League is enormous and we will all perform at 100 percent," Fabregas told a pre-training news conference.
"But it's not necessary to start the match at full throttle," added the former Arsenal captain.
"Over-excitement is not good. We have to be intelligent as it's not just about playing with the heart. The head will be important too."
Fabregas, one of 11 Spain internationals in the Barca squad, noted that the club have a host of players who have proved they can perform on the biggest occasions.
"We are very capable of playing at this level, we have played finals in the Champions League, the European Championship and the World Cup," he said.
"This team has always performed at key moments. It's the motivation, the desire, the confidence to say if we play well and win it will be an incredible boost in morale."
Before Milan's visit, Barca host La Liga strugglers Deportivo La Coruna at the Nou Camp on Saturday (07:00 p.m. British time).
(Reporting by Iain Rogers, editing by Pritha Sarkar)