Serving Two Masters...

Odd feelings at work today… its very busy at work at the moment and but I had an interview yesterday with the company taking over “half” of my company.  It’s a bit hectic, but to paraphrase I am trying to protect my current company’s interests as they’re being taken over partially by a rival company and at the same time being courted by that rival company… all a bit odd and one we’re all going through at the moment.  Depending on what people’s roles are here, you can clearly see yourself being in the taken over bit or the retained bit or somewhere in the middle.  I am in the latter category and will really have to make a choice I at some stage… and that may be coming sooner than expected with the new company saying that they will have a job description and an offer (on equal or better dollars than I am now) sometime next week.  Given its Friday, it feels a bit rushed!

 

Very odd dynamic at the moment… you feel kind of displaced and yet busy all at the same time.  Probably why this post doesn’t make a lot sense too!

More On Sorry

My posting yesterday caused some heated comments and I have also read this mornings press in which the right wing (and lets be blunt) racists have manned the bastions that is talk-back radio to denounce the apology.

I just cannot believe some of the bigotry that is going on in this country.  There are essentially four factions spinning around at the moment; those for & against apologising and those for and against compensation. The compensation element is out there and there will always be those who will want to see it and then the counter argument is that there is plenty (albeit misused) money being directed to Aboriginal interests.  Lets put all this to one side and look at the bigger picture.

The Australian government has wronged a section of our community on the basis of race and Kevin Rudd has simply acknowledged and apologised.

The big picture of this though is that this is what we wanted when we elected Rudd.  We voted in a landslide to dump the hardline economic management driven Liberal party who have done so many divisive things in regards to our standing in the world’s view for a party that was prepared to put the people first and deal with the humanitarian issues.  Don’t let Nelson & Turnbull fool you, this inflation driven interest rate rises were coming no matter who was in power.  Labor knows this.  They know that they have inherited power at a bad economic time, but they will be dipping into the budget surplus to address issues like health, education and other humanitarian issues.  These are what would have been called “soft” issues by the Liberals, but the reality is that a big surplus is rubbish when the average Australian cannot access appropriate health care or gain access to a university.

The apology was one of the soft issue promises that Labor campaigned on and he has a mandate to deliver which he has done and I think that’s a small but positive step for this country.

PS – the absence of John Howard amongst the gallery of ex-Prime Ministers has been noted.  Bigoted little turd that he is!

Sorry!

It's about time! But credit to Kevin Rudd who has done what John Howard has refused to do for many many years and he today apologised to the Stolen Generation.

For those who are not aware, in the 1950's the Australian government of the day removed many Aboriginal children from their families and raised them in white Australian orphanages and foster homes for their "benefit". Essentially the Anglo-Saxon government deemed Aboriginals to be inferior and not deserving of raising their own children in their own culture.

Many years later, the Aboriginal people still feel hurt and pain at that program and families were ripped apart and never recovered.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today apologised for the events unreservedly and I applaud that.

Having said that though, I received an email today that was perhaps the most vindictive and callous thing I have ever read before and I paste it below. Bear in mind I dont agree with any of these sentiments:

SORRY...
AUSTRALIAN APOLOGY TO THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION

We apologise for giving you doctors and free medical care,
which allows you to survive and multiply so that you can demand
apologies.

We apologise for helping you to read and teaching you the English language and thus we opened up to you the entire European civilisation, thought and enterprise.


We feel that we must apologise for building hundreds of homes for you, which you have vandalised and destroyed.


We apologise for giving you law and order which has helped prevent you from slaughtering one another and using the unfortunate for food purposes.


We apologise for developing large farms and properties, which today feed your people, where before, you had the benefits of living off the land and starving during droughts.


We apologise for providing you with warm clothing made of fabric to replace that animal skins/dogs you used before.


We apologise for building roads and railway tracks between cities and building cars so that you no longer have to walk over harsh terrain.


We apologise for paying off your vehicle when you fail to pay the instalments.


We apologise for giving you free travel anywhere, whenever.


We apologise for giving each and every member of your family $100.00 and free travel to attend an aboriginal funeral.


We apologise for not charging you rent on any lands when white people have to pay.


We apologise for giving you interest free loans.


We apologise for developing oil wells and minerals, including gold and diamonds which you never used and had no idea of their value.


We apologise for developing Ayers rock and Kakadu, and handing them over to you so that you get all the money.


We apologise for allowing taxpayers money paid towards daughters' wedding ($8,000.00 each daughter) We apologise for giving you $1.7 billion per year for your 250,000 people,
which is $48,000.00 per aboriginal man, woman and child.


We apologise for working hard to pay taxes that finance your welfare, medical care, education, etc to the tune of $1.2 billion each year.


We apologise for you having to approach the aboriginal affairs department to verify the above figures For the trouble you will have identifying the "uncle toms" in your own community who are getting richer and leaving some of you living in squalor and poverty.


We do apologise. We really do. We humbly beg your forgiveness for all the above sins.
We are only too happy to take back all the above and return you to the paradise of the "outback", whenever you are ready.


Disgusting.

Until we Australian's can stop having this sort of attitude things will never get better. Until people can learn to appreciate another persons view, we as a "species" will never improve ourselves and wars and conflicts will never end.

I hope that Kevin Rudd's speech will be the first step of stamping out racism in this country. I hope its the first step to stopping political parties such as One Nation (warning: Redneck alert) playing the race card in our Federal Parliament.

I also hope it is a step in bring more tolerance not only to race but also religion and a sign that this new government is not going to war anymore for American foreign policy (read Oil).

To the person who wrote that email, I hope you have a good hard look at yourself.

I was sent a link to MyPersonality.info in which you can undertake some traditional Personality Profiling.

Turns out I am an "ENTP" (if you want to read what ENTP means, click here) which is what I was expecting as I have taken this Myers-Briggs test in the past and the results are always the same... which I guess shows the test is fairly consistent...

So to satisfy my ENTP desires, dear readers of Lime Kettles, I want you to take the Personality Profiling and then join your results to this group I have set up and I'd be keen to know if there is a trend in my reading demographic!

SimCity Online?

Bumped into MyMiniCity.com today... I used to play SimCity alot as a kid... perhaps this may be an online version? I am yet to register and actually play, but it looks pretty neat.

Quick Post - Good News

My mate Joe and his wife Rosa had a baby boy last night.  Adrian Nicholas Puglisi was born at 11pm last night.  6lb 6oz or 3.0kg and 51cm in length.  Well done Joey and Rosa!  All the best and we’ll see you soon (don’t know why I am saying that, I very much doubt perusing Lime Kettles is high on your agenda today lol!)

Wet Weekend Wrap

Wet Weekends! According to the weather men, we had better get used to them.

Cricket was washed out despite the sunshine peeking out on Saturday afternoon, the ground was awash with water…

So instead, we played board games most of the weekend. I had bought Settlers of Catan when I went to Canberra a few weeks ago and I thought it would be good game to play with the girls. If you haven’t played it, it’s a board game in which you collect cards to trade in to build roads and settlements on the island of Catan. First to 10 points wins… game play is supposed to be 60mins. But 2 and a half hours later after 3 sittings, Kate eventually won and was very happy. Having said that though, everyone enjoyed it – even Niki who tends to shy away from my Tolkien-esque genre of games. So that gets added to the “play when the sky is pissing on us” list.

Sunday was Niki’s mums 75^th birthday and we had nice weather to go to the Norman Lindsay Gallery café for lunch. It was very wet on the ground though so we had to dodge the puddles to get to the restaurant but it was a good lunch with a couple of bottles of wine. It was good for Beryl to be out and about after her layoff recently (for the record, Beryl left our place on Friday after about 2 weeks).

Then it was to be home to watch the cricket, but my mate Tommy rang who had a comedy gig at Springwood for both a lunch and a dinner session and had 3 hours to kill. So he came over and we played “Return of the Heroes” with the girls as well. That too went for about 2 hours but the girls did really well and were very much into it with Kate playing the lady spell slinger and Brookie taking the role of a lady Dwarf (no beard!). Tommy and I did comparatively shit house and the girls managed each to battle through their quests and then take on the “big baddie” at the end – a Demon. Unfortunately both the girls were killed with Kate going down first and then Brooke but they had good fun. With time running out and with both Tommy and I a million miles away from getting to the bad dude, we called it quits… the girls were very happy that they did so well so it was a good fun afternoon of rolling dice.