Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the execution of Ronald Ryan. Just before 8 o’clock on the morning of February 3, 1967, Ryan declined a sedative but took a sip of whisky and walked calmly to the gallows trapdoor at Pentridge Prison.
Ryan addressed his executioner directly, “God bless you, please make it quick.”
Ryan’s supporters and opponents of the death penalty observed a three-minute silence. Protesters assembled outside Pentridge Prison in vigil.
The circumstances of his death at the hands of the state have led to great myth-making about Ryan. He has been variously painted as a bit of a larrikin, driven to crime by circumstance and little worse than a kite flyer (passer of bad cheques).
The truth is he was a career criminal and his crimes before his penultimate arrest, included what we would call today aggravated burglary and robbery in company.
His arresting officer on that occasion was Bryan Harding. I’ve known Harding for many years. He was an outstanding police officer and at various times headed up the Fraud and Homicide squads in Victoria. Harding is retired and now in his 80s; he remembers Ryan as a hardened criminal who showed little or no remorse for his crimes and gave nothing away under questioning.
Full column here.
Cory Bernardi’s new Party “The Australian Conservatives” website, Mr Insider. A chance for anyone to get in on the ground floor of a new party. Given the lack of up to date info on the website I might suggest it will be “basement” level you will be joining!
http://www.conservatives.org.au/
aka Bernardis Boxheads
Christopher Pyne Tweeting like a wild man this morning, Mr Insider, re the Bernardi affair. Looks like the Donald has made Twitter the new ay of getting the message across
http://tinyurl.com/zuzx6lq
Indeed HB, “twitterati” was until very recently a favourite term of abuse among the crusty old AWM commentariat. Suddenly the very same people regard Twitter as a legitimate alternative to the “MSM”, i.e. the distorted left-wing lügenpresse such as NewsCorp and Fox.
Nice dog he’s got there HB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7zdPSitLPY
Truer words have never been spoke
On that note, it also seems that “slacktivism”, long derided by the Right, is the Trump supporter’s new favourite thing to do on the weekend. Some ads aired during the Superbowl shamelessly portrayed immigrants, brown people and queers as if they were regular folk, in brazen defiance of the clearly-expressed will of real Americans and the orders of the new Übermensch. These insults prompted a flurry of Twitter-driven boycotts of Budweiser, Coke, Google, AirBnB, Lady Gaga and some other pinko companies selling timber and shampoo.
Never mind that most of the ads were made when President Trump was still a twinkle in Matt Groening’s eye and such images were not yet politically incorrect, these traitors should have gotten with the program and re-shot them using normal people and proper country-rock music we can all enjoy.
http://time.com/4660769/super-bowl-anti-trump-ads/
I suppose there’s no hope of you getting over this Trump thing?
what, are you saying the ads were made before last november?
seems unlikely to me, one of them, snickers i think, mentioned the live scores.
personally, i doubt that preachy type ads work for any company, whatever views they express, though sort of patriotic ones do perhaps, qantas and telstra may have done OK.
The Coke one has been aired since 2014.
Ah Jack, who can ever forget Telecom’s ads asking people to phone home. Remember the one when the Italian mama was called to the phone when daughter/son (?) phoned home, not a dry eye in the place.
Then the Qantas choir singing “I still call Australian home”
Penny, or as a friend used to sing it, I still call Australia by phone.
A very “revealing” story, Mr Insider, on POTUS Trump’s life in the White House, as we learn he wanders its corridors at night in a bathrobe. Lets hope it doesn’t spring open at some untimely moment revealing the “First Appendage”!
http://tinyurl.com/hgtcuye
When you’re a star, they let you do it.
Very darkly funny story HB. I liked the bit about Trump’s staffers working in the dark because “they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches”. As each half-cocked order fails and the internal finger-pointing starts, they are gradually re-instituting all the safeguards and protocols they so arrogantly discarded. Meanwhile, between mood swings, Trump tweets, watches TV, chooses new golden drapes, and then lies about where they came from. Amateurs.
Keep going JOH. The chattering classes will ensure the boofhead gets another 4yrs.
That story seems to have taken on a life of its own. It started as “Trump watches tv in his bathrobe and occassionally explores so far unexplored sections of the whitehouse” and has metamorphised into “trump explores whitehouse in his bathrobe”.
Personally, Im getting a little sick of all the trump angst. The man is a f…wit. We know that. But do we really have to have a blow by blow of every little thing he does? All this palaver means he has almost singlehandedly sucked the oxygen from pretty much every far more important issue in the world. Unfortunately the preferred option of letting him get on with things and criticise him when he screws up or tells fibs seems to be untenable due to the sheer scale and speed with which he racks up screw ups and fibs. Im not sure I can take another 4 years of this.
Shocking report from the Royal Commission on Institutional Child Abuse by the church Jack. Looks like the heat on Pell is not going away either
Disgraceful Yvonne and Pell should come back to Australia and face the music imho
Razor 6 Feb 2.42pm
Thank god for that Razor! Think ‘Let it go’.
We’re all of us allowed an opinion here unless JTI says otherwise.
BTW What is a ‘GET-UP operative’? Is that like BlackOps, Razor?
All political parties and activist groups do it Bella.
No doubt you will give the same advice to Dismayed Bella. Or not?
Good point Bella. We are all allowed a different opinion and as JTI runs this blog, it’s not for us to tell anyone to go away. If you don’t agree with someone, by all means disagree, but there is an undercurrent of nastiness that has started to emerge from quite a lot of people that post here.
What say you, Mr Insider, to the “possibility” of a new Federal Election sometime this year, brought on by either stagnation or total chaos with the Turnbull government?
Mr Blowfly
Have an inside scoop the The Turnip is going to quit the Libs and form his own splinter party. Will be called the Waffling Trots. Bill Shorton is going to join it too
Me too Robin love it the “Waffling Trots” has a nice ring to it unlike Cory’s staid old/new Party.
I would have thought that the last thing you’d do with the trots is waffle.
I have to say I’m shocked by this: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444610/chicago-crime-police-gun-control-laws-growing-crime
Chicago has a homicide clearance rate of only 20%!
Interesting article Dwight and if correct the implemented so called reforms are ridiculous. I couldn’t think of a better way to a decreased clear up rates for major and organised crime.
Also be assured the threat of consent decrees by the Justice department, but sponsored by the ACLU, has a radical effect on policing in the states. Police misconduct probably reduces but crime clear up always does the same. These orders are generally race related but the problem police have is that they are taught to profile criminal offenders and then told to stop when these decrees are in place. It may not be pretty but when intelligence, eye witnesses and arrests show a specific demographic is committing crime, particularly gang related crime, then police need to target members of that demographic who fit the profile. If the don’t then anarchy ensues. Some may say, for some of the more radical elements of the ACLU, that’s the whole aim.
I am pro gun control here in Australia but truly believe it is too late in the US. The best they can do is tinker at the edges re mental health etc.
Almost as shocking is the author’s conclusion that the problem is caused by Democrats and would be solved by more guns!
Dwight, one matter that caught my eye as i read the article was that the stats on murders cleared were based on the crime being resolved within the same calendar year.
crimes used to be resolved in aus pretty quickly but almost never are these days, and i suspect the same may happen in chicago as a lot of it is to do withe the way cops, lawyers and courts operate.
if we had a graph of serious crimes in aus resolved in a calendar year i suspect that would show a similar dropping.
John, i believe the last republican mayor of chicago was some time in the 1930s, and as the democrat machine controls every public institution in the city i think a little blame can be safely sent their way.
as to the guns, most of the gun violence is gang related and a government offical signing a piece of paper banning gun possession is going to do what to get guns from the gangs?
Jack,
Most Homicides in Australia are solved very quickly. Within 48hrs in fact. That has pretty much been the case for decades.
Razor says:February 6, 2017 at 2:42 pm. Oh my. Pathetic. I have shown you to be wrong continually so you again have to resort to lies and personal attacks. I do not “deride” Oil and Gas I know it will be replaced for the sake of the planet. I do not “deride” Private schooling. I do not like “Private” schools being Subsidised ahead of the Public System. Likewise Health. You talk of rentseekers but support Coal subsidies at huge expense to the Nation and further damage to the planet.The big difference is that I want more opportunities for more people you want to continue the old ways of the few having more. I have provided data and research and all you have is dishonesty and personal attacks.
Not a bad comment from over the wall:
”What have we got folks ?- a Prime Minister with no policies, an Opposition leader with no brains, a Greens party with no hope, a Senate that thinks it is in government, a debt we can’t repay and a country seemingly with no future.
Bloody hell”
The Senate is correct.
The Senate IS correct. The legislation that is being held back is grossly unfair and targets the poor, the unemployed, families and those trying to get an education. The 600 companies who pay no tax…left alone.
I think the senate is in govt. Yvonne. Not happy about it, but that’s life.
Too late for scrolling so I will jump on you carriage, so to speak!
I find this both sad and strange. A man who has arrived at the pinnacle of his chosen sport, obviously a healthy man in most books, dies at 45yrs. Vale this man. Cherish the time, the views, simple meals, yourself and your loved ones; be it family. pets or interests. And if you have all 3 consider yourself thrice blessed.
http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-union/union-news/former-south-african-rugby-captain-joost-van-der-westhuizen-dies-aged-45-20170206-gu6usx.html
Motor Neuron disease is a bastard, it took my mother at age 42. I was 12 at the time…
Probably one of the best I had thecpkeasure to watch. Very sad.
This sums up The Looters succinctly
“Bernardi first sensed a problem in 2009, when during a heated and divisive partyroom debate on whether the Coalition should support Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme, one of his colleagues, West Australian MP Don Randall, rose to his feet and said: “I don’t give a stuff about the national interest, I want to get re-elected and this needs to go away.”
This metastasis continues to rot the Looters to the core.
Its a BaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaD government BASSMAN, as your loyal disciple, Henry, joins you in the now familiar chant!
No no no….this was Mr Abbott’s famous line virtually day in and day out.
Honestly Bassman put your hand on your heart and say none of Shorten, Gillard or Rudd have expressed exactly the same attitude through their actions.
Yes I totally agree with you. Of course you are correct. It reminds me of a Looter standing up in the party room and saying “The more boats that come the better for us”…to the point that Morrison used to cheer them in and keep a giant sized scoreboard.
But didn’t you say Australians want boat people landed here? If that was the case why would Morrison have kept a scoreboard.
I never said that.
Yes you did. Remember your link to the Australian Institute survey…….
I don’t think its just the Coalition, Bassy.
They all say and do whatever is necessary to hang on to votes. It’s all quite depressing
Ultimately Don Randall went away…..
It’s a broad church Bassy, they all get a say. Unlike your mob, if you look sidways, you’re a rat.
Is Cory a rat?
Yes
He’s a dirty rat. And I want my maltese falcon back.