The Guardian reports today that Australian mothers trapped with their young families inside one of Syria’s brutal detention camps say they are desperate to get their children out, fearful they will be taken from them, or they will die.

“The kids are shaken each time they see a soldier holding a gun,” one mother in the camp said. “And each night, when the boys hear a car, they can’t sleep, afraid they will be taken away from their mother.”

About 40 Australians – 10 women and 30 children – remain held within the Roj camp in north-east Syria, near the Iraqi border.

They are the wives, widows and children of slain or jailed Islamic State fighters.

I am sympathetic to anyone in difficulty. But I do not understand how people who left Australia, repudiated their Australian citizenship to join the caliphate, and supported murderers and torturers, have any claim on the goodwill or finances of Australian tax-payers.

You may have seen posts on social media, or even received emails from from anti-vaxxers, claiming evidence has shown they were right all along. The only place this is true is in their own dangerous delusions, and in the darker reaches of the internet.

In the real world, research by real doctors and scientists shows a vanishingly low number of ill effects which can genuinely be attributed to COVID or any other vaccines, and huge number of lives saved.

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald (paywalled but copied below in full) is just one piece of large-scale research from thousands of research programmes around the world…

The COVID-19 vaccine does not cause sudden cardiac arrest in young people, according to new research that dispels a persistent and unsubstantiated claim from anti-vaccination activists.

Researchers from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute examined more than 2000 instances of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in Victoria before and during the pandemic, and found no change in the median monthly rate of cardiac arrest among those aged under 50.

New research shows that there is no association between the COVID-19 vaccination and sudden cardiac arrest.

Dr Liz Paratz, a cardiologist at the institute, began the study, which has been published in the journal Circulation, after being besieged by abusive emails from anti-vaxxers following the publication of separate research into sudden cardiac arrest.

“They said I was a child-killer participating in state-sponsored genocide,” she said.

It didn’t stop there. A US Republican senator accused the cardiologist of a cover-up and the producer of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight asked Paratz to share her database so it could be examined more closely.

“We realised that there was this intense interest in whether vaccinations were causing sudden cardiac death,” Paratz said.

A cardiac arrest occurs when the heart suddenly stops beating.

The Heart Foundation says 20,000 sudden cardiac arrests occur out of hospital in Australia every year, and the survival rate is just 10 per cent.

It can be caused by genetic mutations, a blockage of the coronary arteries or a weakness in the heart muscle. In about 20 per cent of cases, the cause is unknown.

Using data from a registry set up to investigate cardiac arrests among Victorians aged under 50, Paratz looked at 2242 instances of cardiac arrest from April 2019 to the end of March 2022.

She divided the data into three periods: before the onset of COVID-19 in Australia, during the pandemic but before the rollout of a vaccination program, and following mandatory vaccination.

No variation was seen in the median monthly rates of cardiac arrest – it ranged from 61 to 63 deaths per month – or myocarditis, where there were just 13 cases over the three-year study period.

Previous research has linked the coronavirus vaccine to rare complications such as myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and pericarditis (swelling of the membrane around the heart). But it has also found that COVID-19 infections are much more likely than vaccines to cause these heart complications, and when they do occur, they are more severe.

Paratz said the majority of myocarditis or pericarditis episodes associated with the vaccine were mild, and her research showed they had not led to a rise in deaths.

“This is an incredibly reassuring amount of data for people who’ve been vaccinated,” she said.

“Extrapolation can be the enemy when you say, ‘vaccinations may cause a cardiac issue, therefore, cardiac deaths are going to go up’ … we’re not seeing that borne out. ”

Paratz also examined the deaths of 38 people who suffered cardiac arrest within 30 days of their COVID vaccination. No differences were observed in the underlying causes of their deaths when compared with age-matched data, and no one in this group had myocarditis.

Professor Jason Kovacic, the executive director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, said the research convincingly showed there was no increase in sudden cardiac death linked to the COVID vaccine.

Kovacic, who is also a senior cardiologist at St Vincent’s in Sydney, said he had also observed this clinically.

“I am aware that there’s been a couple of people around the world who have had a serious cardiac issue related to vaccination,” he said.

He has treated a handful of people with vaccine-related myocarditis and said they had all made a complete recovery following a short stay in hospital.

He has also treated patients with heart issues linked to COVID infections and said they had spent much longer in hospital, and some had never recovered.

“There is no question the vaccination has saved many, many lives, is very effective, and has been the thing that has helped us get out of this pandemic.”

This is slow. Find a quiet place to listen. It will reward you immensely.

Qohel has been in operation for fifteen years. The first post was in 2008. That makes it one of Australia’s most resilient blogs.

I get a lot of visitors. Perhaps because of the sheer volume of material – 1500 posts, just under a million words, on topics from sport to PC and console games, to philosophy, literature, art, mathematics, science, health, stock scams, and politics and current affairs.

The downside is that I also get a lot of unauthorised admin login attempts. That is, people who want to remove posts they find annoying, or because they want to take advantage of site traffic to boost their own schemes. We must be doing something right!

The current Australian Federal Government has proposed amendments to the Australian Constitution to create a first nations “Voice” to parliament. There are multiple concerns about this. Many Australians are not happy about enshrining division by race in the Constitution, or granting special privileges to any group on the basis of race. It is not clear exactly how the Voice would operate; on what matters it would have the right to comment, how much notice parliament and executive Government would be required to take of any recommendations, what avenues of appeal there might be, how members of the Voice would be appointed, etc …

There are already multiple bodies which offer advice and guidance to government on matters relating to aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, with various degrees of representation from sub-groups and communities remote and urban. These are supported by tax-payers with over $30 billion of funding. Some aboriginal leaders have expressed the view that they do not need another voice in government. Instead, they say, they need ears that listen.

Two weeks ago an delegation of aboriginal people came to Canberra to talk with those in government proposing the Voice. They wanted to express the view there were better ways forward that did not divide Australia by race, and would mean better listening to the real needs of indigenous people. None of the mostly white proponents of Voice were willing to meet with them.

Australian Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, got in trouble with some sections of the media a few days ago when he suggested that poverty, employment, and high levels of domestic violence and child abuse were more important to many aboriginal people than another body claiming to represent them.

Karl O’Callaghan, Police Commissioner of Western Australia believes Peter Dutton is right, and asked asked these questions:

“How would you react if your 11-year-old daughter had a sexually transmitted infection? How would you take the news that your daughter is up to 10 times more likely to be the victim of sexual abuse than others in her class? How would you feel if she was sexually abused and no one bothered to report it?

To most of us these situations are unthinkable and it would be difficult to fathom how we would react to them. This is the plight of hundreds of Aboriginal children in remote communities throughout Australia, and this is only half of the story.”

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an aboriginal woman from the Northern Territory, also agrees. She has repeatedly asked for a halt to the seemingly endless stream of feelgood consultations and new voices, and for better listening and real action and solutions to poverty and abuse.

The choices are: division by race enshrined in the Constitution, and another large layer of bureaucracy with unspecified representation and powers, or real listening and real action to resolve issues. If you care about Australia and about justice for indigenous people, the answer seems clear. Vote no to racism, and yes to real answers.

I keep seeing a meme that claims that smart cities, phones, etc stands for “Surveillance, Monitoring, Analysis, etc, etc …”

Smart does not stand for that. It is not an acronym.

Smart cities simply means making resources easier and cheaper to access, and travel, communication and workflow more efficient.

There will be real issues in how this is managed. There are risks to privacy and there may be barriers, as in additional costs, to the freedom of movement we now take for granted. These will be important to recognise and address. But simply making stuff up, as in “SMART stands for…” does not help, and reduces the credibility of those who raise genuine concerns.

This kind of baseless and inevitably incorrect prediction makes some Christian groups look like idiots.

This kind of baseless and inevitably incorrect prediction make another group look like idiots.

From the great Babylon Bee. Why should shoplifters have to bear the increased cost and risks of travelling outside their local areas to steal? Unfair! Break the system!

The primary risk indicators for suicide, accounting for sixty percent of all attempted and completed suicides, are a history of self harm including previous attempts, and intimate partner issues and family breakdown.

This is hardly news. But it is a reminder to be especially aware of increased risk of suicide for friends and family who are going through relationship difficulties or family break-up.

Another, and often under-stated or even forgotten risk, is simply being male. Men and boys make up seventy-five percent of all completed suicides in Australia.

Sellout concerts and four hit singles have fans and critics alike saying Two Times Shy is Australia’s hottest new band. Tearing Up Inside, their third single, is on Youtube as audio only – no video.

I used AI to create this video for Two Times Shy’s Tearing Up Inside. It is not authorised by Two Times Shy or any way official!

Prompts for image creation were: grief, nightmare, dark, betrayal, torn + each line of the lyrics. I wanted something nighmarish and unsettling. It is that, and may be very different from the band’s vision.

For more of Two Times Shy’s music visit www.2xshy.com , or their Youtube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@twotimesshyband

I was very sorry to hear this evening of the death of Barry Humphries. He died in hospital this morning. He was a rare comic genius.

An interesting story here from a former Presbyterian theologian and historian, whose studies of history and the early Church led him to the Catholic faith. His journey mirrors mine. I attended AOG churches in my teens, was a regular member of ISCF (Inter School Christian Fellowship) and invited my friends. After school and a couple of break (well, manual work) years, I studied theology, history and and biblical studies for four years plus post-grad. Then I was in full-time ministry for twenty-five years.

Ultimately my reading of the early Church fathers, and comparison of the faith of the early Church with that taught by protestant Churches made it clear that the early Church was the Catholic Church, and that the reformation was far from a reformation.

A friend of mine went to court a few days ago to challenge a speeding fine.

He didn’t address the question of whether he had been speeding or not. Rather, he noted that the speed camera which snapped him passing was illegally parked, in an emergency stopping only zone. Police are required to comply with the laws they enforce. This means the speed camera was illegally parked. The evidence obtained by the camera was obtained illegally, and therefore cannot be used in court.

It is not a silly argument. Judgement was reserved. I will let you know the result.

Mainland China (The People’s Republic of China – PRC) insists it owns Taiwan. Taiwan says it is an independent nation. The PRC finds this embarrassing. The PRC does not like to be embarrassed.

Communist China has claimed Taiwan since 1949, when the Kuomintang began governing the island after the fall of Japan in 1945. Nearly ninety years have passed. Why should anything change now?

The answer is fourfold. First, there is considerable and under-reported unrest in China. The PRC’s ongoing mistreatment of the Uighurs and other ethnic and cultural minorities, its mishandling and continuing obfuscation of the COVID crisis, the severe financial fallout of that mishandling, jealousy amongst ordinary citizens of the greater individual wealth and comfort of people in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and ongoing restrictive rules on movement and social interaction, are leading to increasing dissatisfaction with the central government. The PRC needs a distraction, preferably one which will give it a victory and restore confidence in the party and the state.

Secondly, the USA, which is the only country which could help Taiwan withstand an attempted invasion by the PRC, is weaker, both materially and in resolve, than at any time since the Second World War. The US economy has been damaged almost as badly as that of China. It has weak and equivocating executive leadership. US armed forces have been seriously depleted by the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the transfer of billions of dollars worth of military hardware to Ukraine, and their own woke agenda-distracted and battle-inexperienced senior officers.

Thirdly, US leadership and the US public have deeply entangled trade ties with the PRC. Far more so than with Russia, for example. For a number of reasons, including its abandonment of energy independence and local manufacturing, the US is dependent on China for a large proportion of its consumer products.

Finally, the US, along with much of the Western world, is worried about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and the severe decline in the relationship between the US and Russia. There is a sense that “We can beat China. We can beat Russia. But we can’t beat both.” Entry into another major conflict in East Asia, even if coming to the aid of a friend, would be deeply unpopular and deeply alarming to large sections of US society.

The PRC leadership knows all this. It has also heard President Biden’s assurances that the US would (probably) come to the aid of Taiwan. And it knows that even if the US were willing to help, by the time US forces got there, the PRC would be in effective control, and that any attempt to remove them would be massively destructive of lives and infrastructure.

Communist China is not worried. We should be.

It may seem a small thing, but what does it say when a shooter or other violent criminal’s race is mentioned every time he or she is white, but never when the perpetrator is of another ethnicity? I am struggling to think of any reason for this, other than to stir up race based resentment, or to hide just how much violent crime is committed by members of some other group. Either mention race every time, or not at all.

This is just the latest example: