thefrollickingmole

@AuronMacintyre @Oilfield_Rando I hope they have the decency not to pretend to be surprised when they are lined up against the wall.

Still think Franco is the worst outcome?

@RoseCaporale I’m beginning to think they just do this randomly to squeeze more dough they know isn’t owed. I was fortunate, the email I had was quite explicit all debt were paid.

I have had this 1995 group certificate for the last 31 years and so has the ATO, which i also pointed out to the ATO in 2013, when they in part bankrupted me for a debt that had already been paid on my behalf for at least 18 years, and the ATO still bankrupted me in part for a debt that had already been paid.

1995 Group certificate shows taxes paid for taxpayer, but debt is still on tax records in 2026. ATO abused similar tax laws to proposed ASIO laws, where even courts cant "go behind" ATO assessments, including the High Court of Australia to alter tax assessments due to laws

@Sargon_of_Akkad @ZackPolanski Be government Mong. Regulate until things are rooted. “ capitalism has failed11!!11” Many such cases.

@ZackPolanski The economy was not designed. It is an emergent phenomenon of the independent activities of millions of people making decisions according to rules and incentives, making judgements and taking risks of their own. You do not know what you're talking about.

The economy was designed, and it can be redesigned. Green councils will not hold back in demanding a change in direction from this Government.

@GrayProber @XFreeze AI is Malthus’ worst nightmare

These dumb policymakers now want to force Grok to their lunatic woke ideological views!! For Grok this affects the entire world and how AI is used!! This ain't just Colorado BS - it goes global and fcks with AI everywhere!!! Today xAI is suing these clowns. Keep their woke hands OFF Grok, keep the Truth-Seeking mission alive Crazy that these dummies trying to force an entire AI to reason in their twisted deranged reality

@DrewPavlou Check the judges closing remarks about how the 3 were completely credible with no motivation to lie, and he couldnt imagine how their testimonies matched up so well...

I spent three hours reading Ben Roberts-Smith court documents this morning and found something pretty incredible. TLDR: Previous court cases addressing Ben Roberts-Smith war crime allegations relied on the testimony of illiterate Afghan villagers who called him an infidel. Part of the war crimes claims made against Ben Roberts-Smith relied upon the testimony of Afghan villagers who openly told Australian courts that they viewed Roberts-Smith and Australian soldiers as infidels. Nine Media relied upon the testimony of three key Afghan witnesses in order to support the claim that Roberts-Smith executed a farmer named Ali Jan who he claimed was a Taliban spotter. These men were illiterate subsistence villagers who expressed hatred for ''infidels'' including Australian soldiers during the trial. Hanifa, pictured in court drawings wearing a green shawl, acknowledged directly that foreign soldiers were called ''infidels'' or ''kafir'' and that he did not like them. He also confirmed that persons killed by soldiers were called ''martyrs'' and that he hated Australian soldiers for going near ''our women.'' He said: "If they are coming to our houses, go inside to our women, of course that's what we call them infidels." Mangul, pictured in the court drawings wearing a blue shawl, expressed hatred of foreign soldiers and confirmed his view that they were infidels or kafir and that those they killed were martyrs. He said he did not like the Taliban but still referred to Australian soldiers as infidels. According to Daily Mail court reporting, when asked if he hated the soldiers who invaded his country and did not share his Islamic faith, Mangul said: ''Yes, it is like that.'' Hanifa also told the court that when the soldiers arrived by helicopter, he took a donkey from Ali Jan in an attempt to make them both appear to be nomads: ''I took one of the donkey from him thinking that we will look like nomads and the foreign forces will think that we are nomads.'' The actual mechanics of their testimony is incredible in and of itself. Hanifa told the Federal Court that a man named ''Dr Sharif'' paid for his accommodation, food and transport for up to a year in support of his ability to testify against Roberts-Smith. Dr Sharif worked for representatives of Nine newspapers as a fixer in Afghanistan. Each Afghan key witness said that a local representative for Nine Media paid their family's living expenses since moving to Kandahar, then Kabul, earlier in the year. According to Daily Mail court reporting, one key witness was accompanied by his wife and five children, another by his wife and six children and a third had 14 relatives with him. And the logistics regarding court translation were incredible. The only available court-certified Pashto interpreter lived in Ontario, Canada. When hearings commenced at 10:15am in Sydney, it was 8:15pm in Ontario and 4:45am in Kabul. The Afghan witnesses therefore gave evidence about murders in a Taliban stronghold through a three-way international audiovisual link at dawn, interpreted by someone in a different hemisphere. The court-certified Pashto interpreter conceded that he had difficulty translating from classical Pashto to the rural Pashto dialect the men spoke. All three ultimately testified that they did not see the alleged shooting execution of Ali Jan, but two said they directly observed Roberts-Smith kick him off the cliff. Roberts-Smith has always maintained that Ali Jan was a Taliban spotter in a village that was a Taliban stronghold. It is a matter of historical fact that there was confirmed armed Taliban presence in the village of Darwan the day of the raid and that Roberts-Smith killed a confirmed armed Taliban militant during the wider operation. Roberts-Smith was operating in the village of Darwan while searching for Hekmatullah - a Taliban sleeper agent in the Afghan National Army who massacred three Australian soldiers in cold blood as they prepared to sleep on their own base. This massacre of Australian soldiers was technically a Taliban war crime. By enlisting in the Afghan National Army and wearing its uniform, Hekmatullah had presented himself as a co-belligerent fighting alongside Australian forces - not against them. This made him guilty of the war crime of perfidy. Judge Besanko ultimately dismissed the infidel/kafir argument in a single paragraph for each witness, bracketed with the Dr Sharif financial support argument, writing: ''However, I do not consider (the infidel argument), or indeed the other general motive to lie advanced by the applicant of the sustenance (food and transportation) provided by the respondents through Dr Sharif, to be strong motives for Mohammed Hanifa to lie." In my opinion, this represents an instance of the Australian legal system failing to grapple with the cultural gulf between Australian morals and Pashtunwali morals - raised in a deeply conservative Pashtun culture in which foreign soldiers are categorically viewed as enemies of the faith, living day to day in a Taliban stronghold village, I believe the hatred that these men had towards Australian soldiers means that their testimony cannot be fully trusted. Roberts-Smith's barristers directly put it to Mangul that his religion permitted lying to infidels in some circumstances. Mangul rejected the suggestion — but the mere fact that Roberts-Smith's own counsel felt compelled to raise the question in open court speaks to the cultural gulf I am describing. It must be said that their testimony was not the only testimony against Roberts-Smith that day - their words were held up as corroborating the words of an Australian soldier, Person 4. Besanko J and the Full Court both wrote that even setting aside the Afghan witnesses' evidence, Person 4's account stood. That said, it feels deeply wrong to me that the Australian courts did ultimately choose to rely upon the evidence of men who openly admited they viewed Australian soldiers as infidels and subjects of contempt. It feels like a particularly troubling example of misplaced institutional deference - treating the admission of deep religious hostility as insufficient to question the reliability of evidence. These Afghan witnesses may now testify again in the criminal trial against Roberts-Smith where the standard of proof is ''beyond reasonable doubt'' rather than the civil ''balance of probabilities.'' The criminal standard of ''beyond reasonable doubt'' is substantially higher than the civil ''balance of probabilities'' standard at which the defamation findings were made. It is hard to see their evidence alone passing muster at a criminal standard.

@maimai0049 I was born dead. Revived outside the birthing room. Poor mum was left in the room by herself while they did it. And I can genuinely blame an evil nun for the problems.

｢ご主人、覚悟してください！｣ 産科の医師が 廊下で待っていた 夫のところに言いに来た。 ｢そんなに悪いんですか？｣ 初めての出産に挑んでいる妻を思い、夫は聞き返す。 ｢お子さんは体に ヘソの緒がからまっていて なかなか生まれて来れない。 これは危険な状態です。 息をしてないかも…｣ 医師は、楽観できない事態を 静かに伝えた。 ｢うちのやつは、 妻は無事ですか？｣ 医師は、口元を結び 笑わずに言った。 ｢お子さんを諦める覚悟なら 助かるかもしれません｣ 楽しみにしていた初めての子、 夫は何を言われたのかも 理解できない。 でも、絞り出すように ｢妻を、助けてください｣ と言った。 そして、助産師と医師は 必死に協力した。 妻も、我が子に会いたくて フラフラになりながらも 手術を選ばず いきみ続けた。 ｢お母さん、赤ちゃんの頭が 見えてるわ｣ 助産師は必死に励まして とうとう 赤ん坊を取り上げた。 でも、その子は 生まれても声をあげなかった。 紫色の肌の 赤ん坊を見た医師は

@MemoryMedieval Go Roman style. Huge earthworks to try and get some siege equipment to overlook the walls? Disguise your best men as a wandering mob of morris dancers to get inside? Wait for gunpowder?

Its a tough one, with the river guarding half of it and steep inclines. Best guess is from that slope (top middle of the picture) you may be able to get some siege equipment up there? Maybe you could pound down some of the walls from afar, and have a relatively even approach afterwards. If you were in somewhat of a hurry, that's likely the best straightforward approach. Realistically, with time, you'd be looking for other ways in. Either starving them out or subterfuge, assuming you have the manpower to cut them off from the outside. It's an extremely tricky location and it's not clear exactly what access you may have from surrounding hills, though it appears to be very little. From what I can tell, nearly half of the approach looks entirely insurmountable without ridiculous levels of casualties. I would probably look to the siege of Chateau Galliard as a template or example of something similar and that was a gruelling siege that only ended when it did because of luck (or foolishness on John's part). Extremely stout defense.

@elonmusk Just imagine- a literal one in a billion genius is born in the village. Because we fetishise primitivism his biggest contribution to humanity might be leading the tribe. Humanity just lost 10 years progress on a cure for arse cancer because we’d rather keep them Stone Age.

Vast technology differences simultaneously

Tell people who are fixated on their genitals are promised they can be fixed with surgery. The people have surgery. The people fixated on their genitalia now have effectively non functional problematic mockeries of the organs they were expecting. At what stage in the process was it supposed to improve thier lives?

None of this is remotely surprising. The sex change experiments conducted by Dr John Money decades ago resulted in his subjects committing suicide. It was entirely forseeable that vivisecting people's genitalia in order to turn them into hideous, sterile parodies of the opposite sex would destroy their minds and souls. Hacking off a boy's dick and feeding him estrogen does not turn him into a pretty girl; hacking off a girl's tits and feeding her testosterone does not turn her into a handsome boy; in both cases they wake up one day to realize that they have irreversibly become abominations, and worse, that they were partners in their own destruction, that they asked to be destroyed. That's a hard thing to live with, and so, many decide not to. All of this was easily predictable, and indeed was predicted. From the very beginning. And yet an entire generation of white kids was subjected to this butchery for a decade. Celebration of this butchery of white youth was made mandatory. It was subsidized by the state. It was taught in the schools. The entire system was turned into a factory for mutilating white kids. There's no going back for those kids. There shouldn't be any going back for the people who enabled and encouraged it, either.

@lowlandsapien “ generic unsubstantiated fantastic claim from a story” Hmm that seems unlikely and physically infeasible. “ Why so racist” Every time.

Complete bullshit. How would it even work? Spend half the day burying live babies and hoping they sit still? Imagine how hard you've have to kick.

@magataotao Rivers of government advertising and grants flowing as well as the uni model of journalism.

Does anyone know why mainstream media in the West is becoming more and more like the propaganda machines in Communist China and North Korea? When I arrived in Australia in 2000, I turned on the TV and saw the opposition openly tearing into the government, with journalists actually reporting both sides. It felt like real democracy in action. But little by little, everything changed. Now every major TV channel and almost every reporter only says nice things about the government and the Prime Minister — no matter how badly they’re performing. The criticism has almost disappeared. As someone who grew up in a communist country, this feels all too familiar… and deeply worrying.

@MrEdgarHammond @_johnbye I actually made that little meme up in response to that story. It would be a travesty if they remade it with any sort of hopeful ending.

@frollickingmole @_johnbye empireonline.com/movies/news/th…

If you're British and of a certain age, you probably remember watching / being traumatised by Threads, the BBC film about the impact of a nuclear war on the people of Sheffield. But do you remember how that war started?

@Mupper41 During the trial expect to see a lot of questioning along the lines of "were you promised immunity" or "was any threat or inducement used before you would testify". Ive seen the Feds at work.

About the Ben Roberts Smith war crime charges..how shitty have you got to be(And I heard stories about him from guys who were in the Regt with him) that 21 other badged lads, a whole troop worth of lads, want to give evidence against you..

Little zippers seem to be a no brainer for city commutes. Here my pitch to Elon: an electric “ normal “ sized vehicle that has a forward section which can drive off by itself for short commutes. So you still have a family sized vehicle when you need it, but a tiny thing for commutes. He’ll sell the minis separately and have the other sections as optional buys later on.

Been driving the missus new Jaecoo EV once a week to work as we have free chargers, very hard to argue with how good it is not having to pay anything. 8 year warranty. If they come out with a tiny 2 door fast one under $20k ill probably buy it just for the commute.

@MUKIDEZA2 One you might like “ off to shake hands with the unemployed” - a man going for a piss.

ちなみに日本語で『キジを撃ちに行く』というのは『うんこしてくる』という意味の隠語になります。 女性は『お花を摘みに行く』というのが『うんこしてくる』という意味の隠語なので 自分は『うんこしてくる』って言いますけど

@WallStreetMav They chose not to pay the shithead tax. And mysteriously the “ commonwealth” of society increased.

You can just throw criminals in jail, require clean streets, and live like this.

I’ve had this argument before. We were going to lose a chap who had been at the site for 50 years- knew everything and where all the bodies were buried. He’d saved millions before when a workplan was revealed to be directly over the site of the old rubbish tip ( unmarked). He could have saved millions more if some other plans had been run past him. Ignored- instead of sitting down and extracting his corporate knowledge they kept him driving a truck for the last month before he retired.

@JesseKellyDC @abnheel Was talking to an old timer at a Big Oil refinery who had begged management for years to just let him bring a younger guy in and mentor him into his spot, directly and personally. Denied. He finally gave up trying. “So what are they doing when you retire soon?” *throws hand up*

America is for Americans. If we don’t have the people for the job, don’t go bring in foreigners. The vacuum will eventually be filled by trained Americans. Bringing in foreigners means you’ll never solve the problem here at home.

@Dystopian_Dawn @DungeonNoir I enjoyed the mummy as her homage to that genre.

@DungeonNoir The first three vampire books were really good. The 4th - meh - the 5th...I stopped reading. Servant of the Bones, IMO, is her best work.

I have never read this, any good?

@DungeonNoir I loved it.