Saturday 30th of March 2024

star truck...

 

beam me up...

If Australian UFO enthusiasts hope to retain government money, they may need more proof of terrestrial activity.

The nation's Social Services Minister, Christian Porter, has described having "a beam me up, Scotty" moment after learning his department had approved grants to the Tuggerah Lakes UFO Group.

The group has received A$6,000 (£3,400; $4,500) since 2013 under funding to support volunteers with disabilities.

Mr Porter has halted the payments to seek "more detail" about the group.

"I'm sure they are very nice people and there are lots of volunteers who are getting something out of it, but looking at it from my perspective, representing taxpayers, it did not seem to pass a common sense test," Mr Porter said on the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Funds on hold

The New South Wales group has more than 800 members on Facebook, where it says it shares "news, information, support friends and network in UFO matters as well as related topics".

When asked about apparent sightings in the region, Mr Porter said: "You tend to find a lot of sightings when you are funding UFO-sighting groups, I tend to think. But we will see what they are about."

The Tuggerah Lakes UFO Group has been contacted for comment.

A person identified as a spokeswoman told the Central Coast Gosford Express Advocate: "We have elderly people we pick up and take to meetings, where we need projectors and microphones so everyone can see and hear what is going on."

read more:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-39946130

 

turned off the interminable political interviews...

From Stan Grant

It is almost two weeks since the budget and I have a confession: I have paid it scant attention.

I have barely skimmed the headlines, turned off the interminable political interviews, faded out of TV news bulletins.

Still it seeps in. All that chatter about the Government being "Labor lite". The opinion polls and political point scoring. The self-interested squealing of bankers.

I have let it go in one ear and out the other, all of those political parlour games that the media obsesses about. I am better off for it. I have certainly banked some precious hours of my life that I would otherwise not get back.

But it isn't because I don't care. Far from it. I care too much and no one seems to be talking about what really matters.

Here's what we are facing right now. The world economy is stagnating. Recovery since the 2008 global financial crisis has been sluggish and unconvincing.

The gap between the wealthiest and poorest is widening and the poorest among us are growing in number. Entire industries are disappearing, jobs are gone and will not be coming back.

Of those jobs that still exist, those in the know say at least half will be replaced by robots. Not even neurosurgeons are safe.

Full-time work is vanishing, replaced with precarious part-time labour.

Retirement age is being pushed back and government pensions are shrinking.

Average wages have flatlined, yet corporate bosses pay themselves obscene amounts.

Our children will be poorer than us. They won't be able to live in our prohibitively expensive cities.

Social mobility is waning. A good education is no guarantee of a prosperous future.

If you're born rich you will stay rich and probably get richer, otherwise good luck.

Don't look to our politicians for answers. Politics globally is toxic. Democracy is in retreat and populism that exploits our worst instincts and feeds on fear is on the rise.

Should I go on?

Ok. The planet is getting hotter, the seas are rising and the president of the world's most powerful nation disavows climate science and has said in the past that climate change is a fake Chinese plot to steal American jobs.

The world is stockpiling nuclear weapons. North Korea is developing a missile system that could deliver a nuclear strike to Australia.

China is expanding its military and is locked in territorial disputes that has the region on a hair trigger. Generals in Washington and Beijing are war-gaming worst case scenarios.

I haven't even mentioned the Islamic State group and global terrorism.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-19/the-great-divide-is-getting-wider/...

searching for alien inc...

 

An independent team searching for habitable and inhabited planets outside of our solar system has launched a Kickstarter to help fund the advanced telescope they’re midway through building – one with some pretty sweet rewards.

The PLANETS Foundation is an independent team building an exoplanetary telescope on a Hawaiian volcano. They describe themselves as "an international team of professors, astrophysicists, engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists from 7 countries around the globe." Now, they're trying to raise money for their $4 million PLANETS (Polarized Light from Atmospheres of Nearby ExtraTerrestrial Systems) telescope, and they've gotten $3.5 million of it so far.

To raise some of the remainder, they've turned to crowdfunding on Kickstarter. Pledge $25 to the campaign and get a coffee mug, or $35 for a shirt – or you can donate $75 or more to receive an ExoCube, a mineral sphere modeled after a nearby, possibly habitable exoplanet.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/science/201705191053798912-crowdfunding-alien-ex...

 

See toon and story at top...

 

get stuffed, losers...

 

The social services minister Christian Porter has refused to apologise for Centrelink’s automated debt recovery system, after a Senate inquiry found it had caused trauma, stress, and shame to Australia’s most vulnerable.

The Senate inquiry into the robo debt system released its final report on Wednesday night, recommending the system be suspended until its flaws are resolved

The report described the debt recovery system as “so flawed that it was set up to fail” and said it had “a fundamental lack of procedural fairness” at every stage.

“This lack of procedural fairness disempowered people, causing emotional trauma, stress and shame,” the report found. 

 

But Porter said on Thursday the system was “not a matter for apology”.

He described the inquiry’s report as “political”, and noted there was a strong minority dissenting view in the report.

“This is not a matter for apology,” Porter told the ABC.

“What we have is a responsibility to the taxpayer to make sure that we are paying people exactly what it is that they dutifully required to receive and no more and no less,” he said.

“There are a massive amount of overpayments that occur in the system, now we are actually tackling that problem. That’s not a matter that we would apologise for, there have been a whole range of refinements to the debt recovery system.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jun/22/christian-porter-...

 

 

The anti-social services minister is a robot designed by Hitler with spare parts from "the Torture Manual" of the CIA.