Headlines Tuesday 14th July 2009

July 14: Bastille Day in France (1789)
===
Turnbull claws back some poll support
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has recovered some public support in a recent opinion poll following his disastrous attack on Kevin Rudd over the OzCar saga. - now that the truth is beginning to filter out over the ALP lie that Turnbull had done something wrong. - ed.

That's not a knife: Tables turn on thief
A Stanley knife wielding bandit had the tables turned on him when he attempted to rob a Brisbane convenience store attendant who was cutting vegetables.

Criminal infiltrated A-G's office
It has taken four years for the State Government's highest law office to discover a convicted criminal within its ranks, after she changed her name.

Killed Aussie's body 'tampered with'
The doctor who conducted the autopsy on killed Australian Drew Grant says the body may have been tampered with before he could examine it.

Man clocked at 231km/h in loan Ferrari
A rare Ferrari California has been impounded after a motoring writer was clocked at 231km/h in the......

Smoke from stolen car burnout prompts emergency calls
There was no fire to be seen when firefighters arrived to investigate a callout to a Melbourne street, but there was an abandoned car with very little left of its wheels - under the ALP, the authorities are not normally alarmed by theft - ed.

Petrol Commissioner investigation predatory pricing in petrol promotion
The Petrol Commissioner is looking at whether Coles and Woolworths are deliberately attempting to drive competitors out of business.

Irish Catholics riot at Protestan brotherhood parade
Masked and hooded Belfast Catholics hurled petrol bombs, fireworks and other makeshift weapons at police on Monday as the most bitterly divisive day on the Northern Ireland calendar reached an ugly end.

British teen drowns after being sucked into Thai pool pump
A British teenager died in Thailand after he was sucked into a swimming pool pump, police confirmed on Monday. Nathan Clark Griffiths, 14, was swimming with his older brother Rhys at a water park in Pattaya, east of Bangkok, when the incident occurred Friday.
=== Comments ===
Rudd stymied as the barbarians shut the gate
Piers Akerman
WHEN it comes to trade and diplomacy, China plays with a two-headed penny and has done so for centuries.

The chances of Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd or Foreign Minister Stephen Smith being capable of convincing Beijing to release Rio Tinto executive and Australian citizen Stern Hu soon are slim to non-existent.

The last Chinese-born Australian to run afoul of the Chinese legal system was James Peng. He languished in a Chinese prison for about six years before the Howard government applied the diplomatic equivalent of the blow-torch and secured his release.

Peng, who had been in a business arrangement which soured with the niece of the then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, was held in prison despite being cleared of wrongdoing by a Hong Kong court.

The old joke about “Hu you know being more important than Hu Yaobang” which circulated when the former Chinese Community Party general secretary was dumped in 1987, tells it all.

The Chinese take offence very easily. And while foreign governments complain about their commercial and judicial methods they are not going to change anything any time soon. Or at least until it suits their interests.

- I have had extensive dealings with this crew and can tell you they are hardcore racists but are really polite about it.

The thing Rudd does not get about the Chinese is they actually think it is an insult for a white guy to be speaking their lingo. When he sits there in a press conference with his opposite number the Chinese guy loses face because he cannot speak English at a proficient level. Rudd’s only value to them was as a conduit to Washington and to a lesser extent Europe .....They thought he would have the political pull of Howard ... With the change of administrations in both Washington and Canberra Australia’s importance has declined thus leaving Rudd with very little influence. Rudd also compounded matters by backing Clinton against Obama and blabbing the contents of a private presidential conversation with ‘W’ to a cocktail party. In short they see Rudd as a lightweight they cannot have off the record chats with. While many at the SMH are impressed with Rudd’s Chinese linguistic skills they forget that both nations have translators who can be ‘conveniently’ blamed when one side gets caught out.

When I am over there I tend to think of the Chinese as polite packrats. They love stealing ideas and mass producing them. Every interaction I have had with them always leads to one or more of them trying to pick my brain. They lack the innovative ability of the Japanese and the creativity of the West. Perhaps this will change as living standards rise????

While they have their downside I generally like the Chinese - They drink / smoke and gamble oh and loath violence..... all good things. -

Tim of DontFryMyDogVille
- I am constantly amazed at the people who will lie to misrepresent Rudd’s status in the international community. This morning on 2GB, Alan Jones was talking to journalist Greg Sheridan about the matter. Alan had correctly pointed out it was dismal that both Rudd and Smith (and Gillard and Tanner) be unavailable at this time of need for Hu. Sheriden agreed, and listed some of the gaffes that the Rudd government have committed. However, there apparently needs to be ‘balance’ whenever Rudd is discussed, and Sheriden made the remarkable statement that on the plus side for Rudd, he had spoken of Tibet to China. I feel I must dispute the balanced observation. What Rudd did was to say to Chinese students, in China, speaking Mandarin, that Tibet belonged to China. If that is the kind of advocacy Rudd is capable of then it may be better for Hu that Rudd never speaks on his behalf.
More personally, my ancestor, Mak Sai Ying, was apparently port liaison during 1831 to 1836. He returned to Sydney, on the death of his first wife. The first opium war began two years later. The trade of the East India company was in some substantial part, Opium. Point taken, however, trade was to win out. China respects strength above the rule of law. Notice that the Olympics were last year. China can now get back to what it does best, supporting piracy and promoting moral terpitude.
Let us hope that Hu doesn’t have to wait for the Liberals to be back in government again before the something is done on his behalf. Peng had to wait for both Hawke and Keating to be booted from office. - ed.
===
PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE TO KEEP THEM UP TO DATE
Tim Blair
Barbra Streisand – previously concerned about fishes dying in the world – talks about her intense interest in environmental politics:
During the ‘90s, in addition to making grants to support the work of leading environmental organizations, my foundation helped several U.S. scientists, experts and environmental leaders attend the Kyoto meeting on climate change. The meeting produced an international environmental treaty intended to achieve the reduction of greenhouse gases. (Of the 169 signatories, only the United States and Australia have yet to ratify the treaty.)
Australia ratified that stupid treaty ages ago. Looks like Kevin Rudd’s great leap forward didn’t register in Barbraland.
===
EVERYONE JUST GET MARRIED ALREADY
Tim Blair
Straight guy marches in gay parade. Media slap-fight ensues.
===
NEF OFF
Tim Blair
Late to the debacle that is the New Economic Foundation’s emissions-based global happiness index, Media Watch nevertheless turns up something interesting: tiny New Zealand, which produces fewer emissions than a single Google search for “tiny New Zealand”, is rated as the 103rd happiest nation on earth – even unhappier than Australia.

How can this be? New Zealand doesn’t even have the excuse of funding Media Watch, a sad program whose host these days seems to think he’s presenting a children’s pantomime. Look out – logo monster behind you!
===
SCIENCE SETTLED: WARM IS COLD
Tim Blair
Freed from BBC constraints, retiring newsreader Peter Sissons unloads on the PC British broadcaster:
At today’s BBC, a complaint I often heard from senior producers was that they dared not reprimand their subordinates for basic journalistic mistakes – such as getting ages, dates, titles and even football scores wrong – it being politically incorrect to risk offending them.
Considering they get everything else wrong, it’s no surprise that the BBC’s babies are also wrong about global warming:
The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that “the science is settled”, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t.

But it is effectively BBC policy ... that those views should not be heard.
So much for the importance of “diversity” that we keep hearing about. In a timely accompaniment to Sisson’s piece, here’s a recent BBC report:
Almost 250 children under the age of five have died in a wave of intensely cold weather in Peru …

This year freezing temperatures arrived almost three months earlier than usual.

Experts blame climate change …
But of course.

UPDATE. Pertayter famine! Global colding is killing spuds from Maine to Ohio.
===
THEY WELCOME ANYONE
Tim Blair
CNN anchor Don Lemon asks a question of correspondent Nkepile Mabuse, on location in Ghana:
Nkepile, I was watching you yesterday on the “Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer when President Obama was arriving, and they were doing the dancing, and all of the people who were running up to him. For a western leader, I know when presidents come over there, they are usually warmly received. But for a western leader, have you ever seen anything like this? Is this unprecedented?
Mabuse’s reply actually causes Lemon to jolt in his chair. But he’s a pro, so covers his surprise with dismissive condescension:
So, they welcome everyone. It doesn’t matter. That’s just part of how the people do it, right?

UPDATE. Meanwhile, no cause for celebration in Africa’s northeast:
Several Sudanese women have been flogged as a punishment for dressing “indecently”, according to a local journalist who was arrested with them.

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, who says she is facing 40 lashes, said she and 12 other women wearing trousers were arrested in a restaurant in the capital, Khartoum.

She told the BBC several of the women had pleaded guilty to the charges and had 10 lashes immediately.
Thank you, sharia law. Thank you for addressing Africa’s major problem – women in pants.
===
HE BRINGETH RAIN
Tim Blair
Cold and wet today in Melbourne. Guess who’s visiting …

UPDATE. Interesting headline in the Age.
===
Explain this, Mr Gore
Andrew Bolt

Will Al Gore be up to the challenge?

THIS is the chart climate change sceptic Senator Steve Fielding hopes will convince Al Gore that global warming is not real.

Senator Fielding is trying to score a one-on-one meeting with Mr Gore, who is in Australia promoting several environmental causes, to prove to him that climate change sceptics are right.

Senator Fielding has promised to clear his schedule for any chance to meet the former US vice-president and Nobel Prize-winning environmental campaigner.

I’m betting that Gore, who already avoids taking questions at his well-paid speeches, will find his schedule too full for Fielding.
===
One day someone will want their money back
Andrew Bolt
I don’t think Ruddernomics is going to end too well in America, the way Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress are spending:
Nine months into the fiscal year, the federal deficit has topped $1 trillion for the first time.

The imbalance is intensifying fears about higher interest rates and inflation, and already pressuring the value of the dollar. There’s also concern about trying to reverse the deficit—by reducing government spending or raising taxes—in the midst of a harsh recession.
===
Going cold on forecasts
Andrew Bolt
Now try telling these people that your climate models predict hotter weather in 2100:

FARMERS have lost faith in long-term weather forecasts because they’re unreliable, the South Australian Farmers Federation said…

“The scale of current models make them unreliable measures...”
===
Save the planet! Pedal to a hooker
Andrew Bolt

Boys, I think we’ve lost the fight:

A Berlin brothel is fighting climate change and the recession at the same time by offering a discount to clients who arrive by bicycle.

And there’s no shortage of men now prepared to help save the planet:

The Maison d’envie brothel in the German capital says it is getting three to five new patrons a day who have been tempted by the discount.

(Thanks to reader Neil.)

UPDATE

Is there no trick these alarmists won’t try?
===
Gore sees Nazis under the bed
Andrew Bolt
Professor Paul Kengor isn’t surprised that Al Gore last week likened fighting global warming to fighting Nazis:

How can anyone take this man seriously? Well, the fact is we’ve done just that for almost 20 years.

Believe it or not, Gore stated precisely these things in his 1992 international bestseller Earth in the Balance.... In one of the many deeply disturbing passages in a deeply disturbing book, Gore hailed ecological activists as “resistance fighters” and “people of conscience” engaging in a just war akin to the World War II resistance that fought the Nazis.

That thought alone is incredibly offensive, especially in what it implies of those who reject Gore’s environmental prescriptions…

Gore’s Nazi metaphors are ubiquitous in Earth in the Balance. Warning of an “environmental holocaust,” Gore exhorted: “Today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” Gore asserted that America’s consumption of resources is reminiscent of Germany’s descent into fascism.

As if his Nazi analogies weren’t aggressive enough, the Nobel Peace Prize winner envisioned “a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization’s relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction."…

Consequently, Gore urged, the rescue of the environment must become the “central organizing principle” of all societies and modern civilization....

In a just world, or at least, in an America where “journalists” provided objective news coverage, these Al Gore absurdities would have been exposed long ago, and this man would have never gotten close to the vice presidency let alone the presidency.
===
A good face for a judge
Andrew Bolt
The ABC’s AM presenter, Tony Eastley, says it’s great to pick judges for their race:

Barack Obama has chosen a New York judge, Sonia Sotomayor. While some Republicans are resisting her appointment, she’s likely to be installed as the first Hispanic on the US Supreme Court....

Traditionally Hispanics have lower average education and so many of them work in America’s service industry… So you can see why it makes good sense to have Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme court. Like Obama her face is a message to all Americans.

Totally missing from his analysis is any consideration of Sotomayor’s ability, rather than ethnicity. Race now trumps talent.
===
Even Gore thinks Rudd goes too far
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd on the clean coal technology into which he’s pouring $2.4 billion of your money and for which he’s winning applause at international meetings:

Its mission is clear: it’s to get large-scale carbon capture and storage projects done around the world, not just discussed… (It’s) to make one practical contribution to the great challenge we all face of dealing effectively with climate change.

But even the great green guru himself fears it’s just more snake oil:

AL GORE, CLIMATE CAMPAIGNER: I have some scepticism about how big a role that particular technology is going to play, but I hope I’m wrong.

And other climate alarmists agree Rudd’s plan is a con:

CLIVE HAMILTON, CLIMATE ACTIVIST: Well, sooner or later we have to get over this grand delusion that clean coal will save the day… I think the Rudd Government refuses to recognise the reality, and they power on with this myth that clean coal will save us.

But spending billions is these days is proof that a leader is decisive and bold, Doing Something rather than just doing nothing. It barely matters that the something the leader is doing is no solution to a problem that may actually not exist.

UPDATE

Professor Ivan Kennedy analyses the dodgy components of this snake oil:

First, Boyle’s law and the associated formula for calculating pressure-volume work tell us that capturing, cooling and compressing carbon dioxide to the liquid form will need a significant proportion of the energy yielded by burning the coal in the first place.

Second, transporting the liquefied carbon dioxide at least three times heavier than the original coal used to generate it will add significantly to the energy cost—requiring even more fossil fuel…

Third, the ongoing cost of adequate monitoring and managing the containment of the geo-sequestered carbon dioxide, even for the next thousand years, could soon exceed the net value of the energy gained in the first place.
===
Saying nothing in either language
Andrew Bolt
When the going gets tough…

AUSTRALIAN Trade Minister Simon Crean has told China to behave like the “market economy” it says it wants to be, as the Rudd Government comes under renewed pressure over the detention of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu....

But Mr Rudd, who returned from overseas early yesterday, said nothing on the matter. He is on what is being called “informal leave”.

That said, I’m not sure public intervention by Rudd is yet worth the risk, given he cannot know what evidence the Chinese have against Hu.

UPDATE

How seriously would China think we take this affair:

A REVOLVING door of acting foreign ministers will oversee the Stern Hu arrest crisis because Foreign Minister Stephen Smith is in Cairo meeting Third World leaders and Kevin Rudd is on “informal leave”.

The Australian understands Defence Minister John Faulkner, who has been in the portfolio for a month, took over the role on Sunday. He will serve until Wednesday when Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson will take the job until Friday.

UPDATE 2

Jennifer Hewett:

What is increasingly evident is that rather than Rudd’s deep knowledge of China being a strength in Canberra’s dealings with China, the government’s approach has become ever more of an irritant in Beijing.

Australians doing business in China suggest that prime ministerial references to his prowess at Mandarin and his understanding of China are widely regarded as unbecoming boastfulness by the Chinese. At the same time, Canberra’s all too evident apprehension about the level of Chinese investment in Australian resources and about the potential Chinese military threat have resonated loudly. That’s even without silly snubs like trying to change seating arrangements to avoid Rudd sitting next to the Chinese ambassador in London.

None of this explains, let alone justifies, the provocative act of the Chinese in detaining four Rio Tinto employees, including a senior Australian executive. But it may help explain why Beijing has been so dismissive of the Australian reaction and sensitivities to the extent there was no prior warning or attempt to deal with the matter through back channels.

UPDATE 3

I’m not sure Labor is drawing the right lesson from this showing of China’s teeth, or is sending the right message. In a report on Hu’s strife, Lateline adds:

China’s Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Jieyi has been invited to observe Labor’s national conference in Sydney.
===
Denise might not agree
Andrew Bolt
Who would be so stupid as to demand women feel more agony?

(A British midwife) believes that women should endure the agony of labour, which is a rite of passage for building a special bond with the child.

Read on…

Dr Denis Walsh has sparked controversy over his claims ...
===
Teaching the world some scams
Andrew Bolt
The particulars are new, yet strangely unsurprising:

AUSTRALIA’S lust for high-dollar Indian students has led to a thriving black market in sham marriages, forged English language exams and bogus courses, and turned a once-respected international education sector into a recognised immigration racket.

While the federal government and industry work to repair the damage caused by a recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, education agents say the violence has shone a light on a $14 billion industry riven with corruption.

Laura Ingraham Schools Juan Williams On Obamacare

On FOX News Sunday Laura Ingraham schooled Juan Williams on President Obama's next massive spending plan- Obamacare.

Headlines Monday 13th July 2009

Bikie changes name to Tony Soprano to evade police
A simple name change is allowing many criminals to assume a new identity and escape their tainted past. - in NSW that works. -ed.

Sydney peak hours to be treated as 'special events' to deal with traffic
Every Sydney peak hour will now be treated as a ''special event'' in a desperate bid to ease congestion.

Your money's safe in the US, Timothy Geithner promies
On his first trip to the Middle East as Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner's message this week will be similar to the one he delivered to Chinese officials a month ago: your investments in the United States are safe.

Couple saved from truck by house design
An elderly couple says they've lucky to escape unharmed, after a truck slammed into their house at Smithfield.

Three-headed fish fuel chemical fears
Three-headed fish at a Noosa River fish hatchery have prompted calls for a ban on the use of farm chemicals in the area.

Snipers on patrol for penguin killers
Snipers have been hired to catch the killer of nine little penguins at an endangered colony on Sydney's northern beaches.

NT man pleads guilty over 'Fresh Meat'
A Darwin man bought a bundle of pornography containing child abuse material entitled Young Fresh......

'Petrol price war exposes exploitation'
Massive petrol discounts being offered by Coles and Woolworths show how exploitative their regular......

Mother admits killing ex with tomahawk over treatment of teen son
A woman has admitted she and her teenage son killed her ex partner after spiking his orange juice with sleeping tablets.
=== Comments ===
Rudd’s open door to illegals
Piers Akerman
The great cover-up of the illegal asylum-seeker traffic to Australia is beginning to unravel. - It is ALP rhetoric which has it that it is heartless and cold to impose community standards on migrants. I think it a travesty to confuse ALP failure on law and order with immigration. Or to confuse the immigration debate with ALP lead protest movements of the sixties. Or to confuse multiculturalism with migration.
Rudd described ALP policy with his phrase lacking ‘detailed programatic specificity.’ Thing is, Liberals like Fraser and Hewson have fallen for such claptrap in the past. The fact is Australia benefits from new migrants, but ALP policy is making it expensive to welcome them, and dangerous in security terms. The gripes of the writers who say things like “Sorry DD Ball, but I must disagree on this” actually agree with me that Law and order and security need to be dealt with properly and this is where the ALP fail. However, to say that it is migrant fault for ALP policy is to ignore the obvious reality.
As for the old multiculturalism saw, I put it to you that multiculturalism does not exist .. philosophically, there is no such thing as a multiculture. However, pluralism is the mainstay of any functioning society and I welcome the fact that Australia is a pluralist nation. - ed.
===
HE BRINGETH RAIN
Tim Blair
Cold and wet today in Melbourne. Guess who’s visiting …
===
Wasn’t it once red?
Andrew Bolt

Reader Brendan notes a change in the color of the book now being waved by precisely the same kind of people:

About 1500 Australians aged 16 to 26 are descending on the University of Western Sydney to learn about organising and to hear speeches from Tim Flannery, senators Nick Xenophon and Christine Milne, the NSW Premier, Nathan Rees, and via video link from Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations panel on climate change, and the former US vice-president Al Gore, who is training an older generation of climate change campaigners in Melbourne this weekend.

Over three days Power Shift attendees will learn “Camp Obama” style strategies from a manifesto called The Little Green Book, such as recruiting first-time voters and targeting awareness campaigns at marginal seats in the federal election next year.
===
The pain tells you it’s a real recession
Andrew Bolt
Former Treasury secretary John Stone says Kevin Rudd’s colossal wasting of your billions hasn’t saved us - and won’t:

THE Rudd government claims that Australia has dodged the bullet of an economic recession, and that its fiscal stimulus is responsible. Both claims are essentially untrue.

The first claim stems from the fact that, after declining by 0.6 per cent (seasonally adjusted) in the December quarter, our gross domestic product grew by 0.4 per cent in the March quarter, thus avoiding two successive quarters of negative GDP growth (the technical definition of a recession).

But while that definition refers to overall GDP changes, what surely matter are changes in GDP per head. Australia’s gross product per head actually fell in both the December and March quarters (by 1.1 and 0.1 per cent, respectively). In fact, it also fell in the preceding June and September quarters (by 0.1 and 0.3 per cent, respectively). So on this more meaningful basis, we have already been in recession for 12 months, with GDP per head down by 1.6 per cent.

More important still, what actually affects people’s wellbeing is not changes in production but changes in what they can buy with that production: what the economists call gross domestic income. When Australian export prices fall faster than import prices, our capacity to pay for imports diminishes, and hence our GDI falls faster than our GDP. During the December and March quarters, GDI per head fell by 1.8 and 1.9 per cent, respectively. Australians on average thus became poorer by 3.7 per cent over those six months. Some non-recession!
===
Obama’s new advisor on getting rid of humans
Andrew Bolt

Finally John Holdren can get some of his green ideas put into practice, now that Barack Obama has appointed him chief scientific advisor.

Which ideas? Well, how about these planet-saving suggestions, from a book John Holdren co-authored in 1977 with fellow eco-alarmists Paul and Anne Ehrlich (emphases mine):

In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?…

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society…

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock…

A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men… The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births…

If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection....

Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

You can sure understand why a man with such inclinations would be now strongly drawn to global warming theory.

But why is Obama drawn to him?

Zombietime, who uncovered Holdren’s witterings, has the context, the history, photographic evidence, and denunciation all here, along with answers to the most common objections - and asks that if Holdren has since repented his views, why has he never said so?
===
ABC likens Rio’s Hu to al Qaeda’s Hicks
Andrew Bolt
What is Lateline host Leigh Sales suggesting to Liberal MP Andrew Southcott with her absurd analogy - that Rio Tinto’s Stern Hu trained and fought with Uighur terrorists?

Andrew Southcott: This is the job of the Prime Minister, to be in touch with his counterpart on a very important issue involving an Australian citizen who’s been detained and not yet charged.

Leigh Sales: Well Dr Southcott, isn’t it a bit rich for the Coalition to be so exercised about this matter when the Coalition left David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay for two years without charge and for five years without a completed trial?
===
Dear MP: explain or abstain
Andrew Bolt

If our politicians can’t explain this graph, how can they vote for Kevin Rudd’s ruinous plan to slash emissions?

Family First Senator Steve Fielding has now sent all Senators the graph, which shows the world cooling over the past eight years despite a rise in the emissions we’re told are warming the world to hell. And he’s challenged them as he challenged hapless Climate Minister Penny Wong

This runs counter to the assumption underpinning the CPRS which says that increasing carbon dioxide emissions are the leading cause of global warming. Given the Rudd Government has failed to explain this obvious contradiction I can’t understand how any member of the Australian parliament can vote for an emissions trading scheme.
===
Don’t mention the warming war
Andrew Bolt
No more than you’d expect - or say of the ABC, too:
Peter Sissons, the veteran newsreader who announced his retirement last month, ... claims it is now ‘effectively BBC policy’ to stifle critics of the consensus view on global warming.

He says: ‘I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change. The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that “the science is settled”, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t.

‘But it is effectively BBC policy… that those views should not be heard.’

Sissons, of course, is famously prepared to say a truth that few would dare admit to:

UPDATE

Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian sceptic, is going global. The Spectator is the latest to warm to his cool anti-alarmism.
===
Rann’s bagging of bags is the real pollution
Andrew Bolt
South Australian Premier Mike Rann today demonstrates that the worst rubbish isn’t plastic bags, but what’s said about them by green alarmists:

Every year, four billion of these bags are dumped into Australia’s environment, clogging landfill or choking the nation’s waterways. By stopping this in South Australia, that’s 400 million bags a year that won’t be causing massive environmental damage.

Fact check on just this one paragraph of his wild piece:

1. No, 4 billion plastic bags aren’t just “dumped” on our environment each year. A Productivity Commission study estimates just 0.8 per cent of them become litter.

2. This, of course, means that South Australia is not removing 400 million bags that cause “massive environmental damage”. It’s in fact removing fewer than 4 milliion bags which end up as litter, and cause only an arguable amount of “damage”.

3. No, the nation’s waterways aren’t “choked” by plastic bags. Look for yourself.

4. In fact, the Productivity Commission reports that plastic bags, rather than “clogging” landfills, seem have “landfill management benefits including stabilising qualities, leachate minimisation and minimising greenhouse gas emissions”.

5. It seems that the “massive environmental damage” done by plastic bags has actually been massively overstated by green groups, many of which have wildly misrepresented and exaggerated the effect of bags on wildlife.

6. Removing plastic bags may in fact cause more inconvenience and even environmental harm than leaving shoppers be, again according to the Productivity Commission study.

Other than that, Rann’s paragraph is largely accurate.
===
The green religion has its first baptism
Andrew Bolt
Even a dunking in cold water couldn’t shake her new faith:

TEENAGER Anna Surridge is so passionate about climate change she organised her own eco-baptism....

The Bishop of Llandaff High School pupil worked out that the electricity needed to raise the temperature of a baptistery (for immersion baptisms) to a comfortable temperature could be equivalent to making a thousand cups of tea and that it easily holds more than 1,000 litres of water. So she decided to be baptised in a more green way… during a weekend camp near Brecon in the river Usk…

“The weather was fantastic, but the water was freezing. I was wearing a wetsuit, as was my dad who baptised me, but I most certainly could still feel the cold.”

Cold?

UPDATE

Which one is the fake green scare? Or is the answer “none”? Or, actually, “all”?

Example 1:

THE WORLD is now on course for a plague of “superdisasters” - natural catastrophes with unprecedented destruction and loss of human life, the Red Cross warns today....

“From tsunamis and earthquakes to floods and famines, mankind is ever more threatened by the forces of nature,” says the report. “With almost a billion people now living in unplanned shanty towns, with deforestation wrecking ecological defences against catastrophic natural events, and with global warming making the forces of wind, rain and sun ever harder to predict and counter, the world is at risk as never before.”

Example 2:

Today’s environmental threats can be compared in many ways to the Biblical ten plagues. When we consider the threats to our land, water, and air, pesticides and other chemical pollutants, resource scarcities, threats to our climate, etc., we can easily enumerate ten modern “plagues.” Unfortunately, like the ancient Pharaoh, our hearts have been hardened, by the greed, materialism, and wastefulness that are at the root of these threats. And, in contrast to the biblical plagues, modern plagues are all occurring simultaneously...

Example 3:

The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and the water are becoming even more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct in vast numbers – we kill off more then 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process.

Example 4:

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?

Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…

Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!

Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

The answer? See from 2:00:

===
Unscheduled Earth Hours likely
Andrew Bolt
But stopping our dirty power is the green dream, right? So there’s surely nothing to worry about here:

ELECTRICITY generators are cutting back major maintenance work, raising the risk of California-style power brown-outs, because of uncertainty caused by the federal government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme.

Victorian generator Truenergy’s managing director Richard McIndoe said yesterday that with $950 million of debt to be refinanced this year and banks wary of the impact of the CPRS on the industry, the company had decided it could not justify the cost of major maintenance…

Energy Supply Association of Australia chief executive Brad Page said there was always an increased risk of “less reliable supply” when generators cut back on routine maintenance…

The ESAA warns that the government is not giving the industry enough help to adapt to the CPRS and remain viable… The government had offered what amounted to $3.5 billion in support when the industry needed $20bn to survive the CPRS in its current form.

UPDATE

Al Gore works out on one of his computers fresh ways to cut even more power:

===
Rude relief
Andrew Bolt
Strange research that I actually believe, which which would have been more socially useful if kept secret:

SWEARING can lessen the feeling of physical pain, scientists have discovered....

“Increased aggression has been shown to reduce sensitivity to pain, so it could be that swearing helps this process.”

Huff and puff classes for expectant mums should now get a whole lot more interesting.
===
Mirror needed
Andrew Bolt
Ian Rintoul denies it, but there is at least the possibility that this refugee advocate helps to lure illegal boat people here, only to blame government when the predictable drownings occur:

REFUGEE advocate Ian Rintoul denies having any contact with people-smugglers, whom he describes as “poor people’s travel agents”.

And he blames Australia’s border protection policies for the probable loss of 20 or more lives from a boatload of refugees that went missing in Indonesian waters last Wednesday.

The Australian last week revealed that Mr Rintoul was in regular mobile phone contact with a passenger on the sinking vessel, who told him the engine had failed.
===
China really means it
Andrew Bolt
If true, it’s trouble not just for Stern Hu but for all our future dealings with this authoritarian regime:

PRESIDENT Hu Jintao personally endorsed the investigation into Rio Tinto that led to the criminal detention of iron ore executive Stern Hu and three staff, according to Chinese Government sources.

The investigation appears to be part of a seismic realignment of how China manages its economy, with spy and security agencies now promoted into top strategy-making bodies.

The fact of top-level support for the Rio Tinto investigation makes it even more unlikely that the Shanghai State Security Bureau will reverse its decision to detain Mr Hu and his Chinese citizen colleagues, Liu Caikui, Wang Yong and Ge Minqiang.

UPDATE
Yesterday federal ministers were sent out to attack Malcolm Turnbull over his call for Rudd to pick up the phone to his Chinese counterpart to demand the businessman’s immediate release.

But if there is a view in the community that such action is required, then Rudd has only himself to blame.... The fact is Rudd’s efforts to leave the impression that he would, as Prime Minister, have both special access and clout in Beijing have been concerted. Those efforts have ensnared him in a great foreign policy irony; Rudd came to his prime ministership replete with diplomatic background and Mandarin tongue, holding out the promise that handling the China relationship would be his major foreign policy strength.

It now threatens to become a manifest weakness.
===
Restage it, with Stern Hu as the hero
Andrew Bolt

China has arrested a Rio Tinto employee, Stern Hu, over a business dispute, revealing the fangs of what is still a totalitarian regime, despite all the softsoaping.

Meanwhile, Rio Tinto softsoaps the regime, sponsoring a new tour in Australia of the National Ballet of China in ”Raise the Red Lantern”, a story about a woman trapped without rights in China. Imperial China, that is, not this nice one that replaced it.
===
Ticking Turnbull, tickling Rudd
Andrew Bolt
The complete list of questions asked by reporters at Malcolm Turnbull’s press conference on Friday, after the Opposition Leader made some remarks on the arrest by China of Australian businessman Stern Hu:

QUESTION: There is a lot a stake for China as well in this, and China is accusing the Australian citizen of bribing officials from Chinese steel companies. These are serious claims, and as I say China has an enormous amount at stake here, why would they take such a course of action if they didn’t have a case?

QUESTION: The Prime Minister has accused you and Julie Bishop of trying to score domestic political points on this issue. Is that what you are doing?

QUESTION: Are you worried that you are inflaming the situation and putting at risk billions in exports to China?

QUESTION: And you are not grandstanding, you deny that? The Prime Minister says you are grandstanding.

QUESTION: As a former diplomat, surely the Prime Minister would know how to deal with such a delicate situation?

QUESTION: Stephen Smith this morning said the allegations are coming out of mainly commercial and economic issues, so what sort of implications will that have for other Australians doing business in China?

QUESTION: You say they’re political points that are being made in the Chinese media, but he’s been accused of bribery, of bribing Chinese employees of these steel companies.

QUESTION: Just on another matter, Mr Turnbull, the Prime Minister today has said that he thinks tourists should be able to climb Uluru. Do you agree with that?

QUESTION: The Prime Minister’s carbon capture and storage institute has won support form a number of international leaders, I think it’s twenty or twenty-three leaders, including President Obama. Do you congratulate him for his efforts on that front?

QUESTION: A bit of programmatic specificity, you could probably say?

Now see if you can detect a slightly different tone to the questions - especially those on global warming - asked by journalists at a press conference called by Kevin Rudd on the very same day. Again, here are all those questions, and see if journalists demand Rudd answer Turnbull’s as they demanded Turnbull answer Rudd’s. And see if a single question on global warming suggests anything but the journalist’s whole-hearted approval of Rudd’s position:

Radical Obama Refuses to Admit US Won Cold War

The radical in the White House could not admit that the US won the Cold War today in an interview with Major Garret from FOX News.

Headlines Sunday 12th July 2009

NSW: 200 years and $2 billion down
There is an estimated $2 billion budget blowout and combined delays of 200 years for planned infrastructure projects in NSW.

PM should pressure China: Bishop
The Federal Opposition says the Prime Minister should be putting pressure on Beijing to act quickly concerning the detention of Rio Tinto executive, Stern Hu. - China don't seem to respect Rudd, as they did Mr Howard. - ed.

Police reveal Aussie man shot five times
An Australian man has been shot five times in Indonesia, police reveal.

Blacktown dog attack capital
New figures show Blacktown is the dog attack capital of NSW.

Police raid Rebels North Shore HQ
Police on Sydney's North Shore have raied a Rebels clubhouse, seizing drugs and cash.

Greedy hangers-on killed Jackson - sister
MICHAEL Jackson's sister La Toya says a shadowy conspiracy murdered the icon, who was "worth more dead than alive". - as conspiracy theories go she is right about MJ's worth. - ed

'Slight bump' as bus backs over woman
A WOMAN was killed in her driveway by the reversing bus she had just hopped out of.

Young view Bible 'as old fashioned'
KNOWLEDGE of the Bible is in decline in Britain, with fewer than one in 20 people able to name all Ten Commandments and youngsters viewing the Christian holy book as "old fashioned", a survey said today. - fair enough. I view media as largely irrelevant. - ed.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Sotomayor Special
Nominated to the highest court, with the power to shape America's future! But, what do we really know about Sonia Sotomayor?
From incredible accomplishments to controversial rulings, we uncover crucial facts about the Supreme Court nominee!
===
Guest: NFL's Keyshawn Johnson
He's rewriting the playbook on interior design and scoring big. Super Bowl champ Keyshawn Johnson on his latest move!
===
D.C. in the Driver's Seat!
Will Uncle Sam really steer the new GM in the right direction, or will government control only lead to more financial roadblocks?
===
Rock Out with Huckabee!
Country music royalty Tanya Tucker performs! Plus, dancing with the Czars! We break down who's really running America!
=== Comments ===
Rudd’s open door to illegals
Piers Akerman
The great cover-up of the illegal asylum-seeker traffic to Australia is beginning to unravel. - All of my family migrated to Australia, it is said some did it eighty thousand years ago, others more recently. I think migration is wonderful and I welcome them. However, I am appalled at ALP behavior which limits migration and makes it more expensive and dangerous. I have friends who braved the waters to get here and they are a bonus to the community. I know one former unified Vietnam special forces soldier who came to Australia after having been captured by the Khmer Rouge and tortured and chained to a tree for three years. He spent a further five in a Thai refugee camp after spending time in a Thai POW camp. And in Australia he became a Christian Pastor who works among the dangerous community of Cabramatta (made dangerous by the ALP government incompetence over law and order). I’ve known people who fled the Khmer Rouge and those who survived them. I know Timorise, Philipinos, Koreans, Thai, New Zealanders and Canadians . and they are wonderful giving people. I’ll include Chinese, Afghans, Iraqis and Lebanese. I’ll include Brazilians and Sudanese, Kenyans and South Africans.
I do not accept the danger that Rudd and the UN seek to impose on the journey of those wishing to come here. I feel that we need to allow access to Australia in an orderly fashion, through normal migration and through refugee camps. The Conservative parties have facilitated an expanding and generous policy for migrants. The ALP are playing russian roulette with migrants. I think ALP policy is heartless and brainless. - ed.
===
WARMING CONFRONTED
Tim Blair
This week’s column arrives from sunny and friendly Townsville. Which, while otherwise delightful, could do with a few more taxis. Recommended: the Wagyu steak at Watermark. Not recommended: nightclubs.
===
PLANET DESTROYED
Tim Blair
Please save us, Copenhagen:
Sydney is set for an increase in colourful tropical fish as a changing climate warms our waters.
===
Rudd’s Siev X?
Andrew Bolt
Yet another:

A boat carrying more than 70 suspected asylum seekers has been intercepted by the Australian navy off Christmas Island.

That should cost us at least another $2 million. And isn’t this Kevin Rudd’s Siev X:

Meanwhile, there are growing fears for the safety of 59 asylum seekers whose boat foundered and sank of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumbawa last week.

Even before this, at least 25 asylum seekers have died trying to get here since Kevin Rudd made out laws against illegal immigrants “kinder”.

So where is the outrage over how we seem to have lured yet more asylum seekers to their deaths? Where, this time, the conspiracy theories, senate hearings, protests and even plays accusing the Government of murder?
===
Just some French youths
Andrew Bolt
The religion of the gang members who deliberately hunted for a Jewish victim isn’t mentioned:

THE leader of a group that called itself a “gang of barbarians” was sentenced to life imprisonment by a French court for kidnapping and torturing a young Jewish man for more than three weeks before leaving him to die… Amid tight courtroom security, Youssouf Fofana, the gang’s leader, who admitted killing Mr Halimi, was sentenced to life imprisonment, the maximum penalty under French law, with a minimum period in jail of 22 years.

Twenty-four other gang members were handed sentences ranging from six months suspended to 18 years in prison.

But there are these clues:

Many in the Jewish community say that anti-Semitic aggression among French youths of Arab and African origin has been on the rise in recent years, exacerbated by anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict… Fofana, a 28 year-old of Ivoirian origin, expressed no remorse… On various occasions, he smirked at Hamili’s relatives, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” ("God is greatest!) and at one point threw shoes at lawyers.
===
Suddenly Rudd’s hot line is snipped
Andrew Bolt
How we rank with China:

THE Rudd Government yesterday was forced to deliver its “strong concern” about the detention of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu to a junior official in the Shanghai Government, again illustrating Canberra’s lack of diplomatic traction in China.

Trade Minister Simon Crean’s meeting with Sha Hailin — ranked 16 in the Shanghai administration — failed to produce any concessions that might save Mr Hu from China’s secretive and capricious legal system…

Mr Crean said the fact that access was gained at short notice “demonstrates the recognition on the part of the Chinese Government of the seriousness with which we take the issue”.

It’s sure a fall since the days when Rudd used to boast - even injudiciously exaggerate - to journalists about all the calls he used to make to the very highest Chinese leaders, and others:

Rudd’s view on China was probably better informed than he let on to the US President. Just four days earlier, the fluent Mandarin speaker had discussed the global turmoil on the telephone with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
===
The same old dream
Andrew Bolt
Once world government was the obsession of Jew-haters, Illuminati-obessives, the Comintern and the odd dictator. But now it’s mainstreaming:
(Al) Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming.

“But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.”

UPDATE

The Green Pope faces a schism:

A split has developed between the country’s pre-eminent environmental organisation, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), and a bloc of other green lobbyists over the foundation’s public support for the Rudd Government’s carbon trading scheme.

Both sides will be looking to Mr Gore for any sign that he endorses their position.

ACF chief Don Henry, along with the Climate Institute and WWF, gave public endorsement to the Government’s scheme in May, applauding its 25 per cent conditional target for emission reduction. Their comments were promoted by Kevin Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong…

But Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society and state-based conservation councils were angered at what they saw as a cynical political compromise....

In the political context, though, Mr Gore’s every utterance will be closely watched. Mr Henry, who is close to Mr Gore, wrote in a May email to members that “Al Gore has let me know that he thinks it is ‘great news’ that Australia has moved to the 25 per cent target”.

But Mr Hamilton, author of Scorcher, the Dirty Politics of Climate Change, said he hoped to see Mr Gore “seriously criticise” the Government’s target...

Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft Kicks Off "Show Me the Bill" Rally in St. Louis

Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft kicked off th St. Louis "Show Me the Bill - Hands Off Our Healthcare" Rally in Clayton, MO on July 11, 2009.

Neglected Keystrokes

communitychannel
July 11, 2009
unless you're a codemonkey or gamer in which case I probably like you. * I don't actually use a pc keyboard and know it's a tilde so it's all good. Also, the costumes took long enough to favourite lol * You'd think some of you don't read the tags or something :p
Hope you're all well and enjoy a fantastic weekend.
x
n
===
Squiggly is named 'Tilde' And tell your mum my name is David. I'm not used often but I won't be taken for granted.

Headlines Saturday 11th July 2009

SLB's Birthday I still remember after 24 years and she never cared.
===
Murderer smuggles sperm out of jail
It's been revealed that a murderer has fathered a child from behind bars after smuggling his sperm out of jail in a serious breach of the NSW prison security system.

Australian shot dead at Indonesian mine
An Australian has been shot dead, possibly by a sniper, near a gold and copper mine in Indonesia's Papua region, police say.

Sex offender Dunn dies in NSW jail
Convicted pedophile Robert "Dolly" Dunn has died in jail aged 68. - he might still vote for the ALP next election. - ed.

Father sees 'foul play' in Jackson death
Michael Jackson's family prepared on Friday to attend a memorial service in his hometown of Gary, Indiana, as investigators said they could not definitely rule out homicide in his death. - MJ is probably glad to be dead. He never had to live as an old man, or be responsible. Plastic Surgery wouldn't have benefited him any more. - ed.

Hard slog ahead of climate change pact:
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says world leaders face a "hard slog" as they race to overcome huge hurdles he fears could stop them from signing a new climate change pact. - actually, Rudd was upbeat, saying the conference would lack only detailed programatic specificity. - ed.

Deep grief marks international student's funeral
A Chinese woman had to be sedated after being overcome by grief at the Hobart funeral of her slain student daughter.

=== Comments ---
Change out of your sharkskins instead
Andrew Bolt

Florida lawyer Bill Bone files a motion against the footwear of Michael Robb, the opposing counsel in his case:

3. It is well known in the legal community that Michael Robb, Esquire, wears shoes with holes in the soles when he is in trial.

4. Upon reasonable belief, Plaintiff believes that Mr. Robb wears these shoes as a ruse to impress the jury and make them believe that Mr. Robb is humble and simple without sophistication. . . .

* * *

6. Part of this strategy is to present Mr. Robb and his client as modest individuals who are so frugal that Mr. Robb has to wear shoes with holes in the soles. Mr. Robb is known to stand at sidebar with one foot crossed casually beside the other so that the holes in his shoes are readily apparent to the jury . . . .

7. Then, during argument and throughout the case Mr. Robb throws out statements like “I’m just a simple lawyer” with the obvious suggestion that Plaintiff’s counsel and the Plaintiff are not as sincere and down to earth as Mr. Robb.

8. Mr. Robb should be required to wear shoes without holes in the soles at trial to avoid the unfair prejudice suggested by this conduct.

Motion denied.

UPDATE

Hmm. If it worked for Adlai Stevenson (picture), then let’s see if it could work again:

===
Rudd privately admits: climate deal a dud
Andrew Bolt
An open mic, and a caught-out Kevin Rudd, have exposed the fantasy that the world is on the brink of a deal to slash the emissions we’re told are heating the world to hell.

Until yesterday, media reports tended - typically - to oversell the G8 claims of a breakthrough this week in agreeing to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees. Downplayed this time by many was that the G8 leaders made no firm promises, agreed to no sacrifices, excluded giant emittors China and India, and came up with a wording that Russia promptly seem to disown.

So you tended to see shiny-eyed reports like this:

President Obama and other leaders backed historic new targets for tackling global warming last night in an agreement designed to pave the way for a world deal in the autumn.

And this:

THE world’s biggest economies have called on developed countries to slash greenhouse gas emissions, putting pressure on Australia to beef up its target… Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, who is in Italy for the Group of Eight climate talks, welcomed the G8 statement that the world should restrain global warming to two degrees.

But if many in the media could not see just what a complete failure the G8 deal was, Kevin Rudd sure could - well, at least privately:

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has been overheard pouring cold water on world leaders’ chances of hammering out critical climate change limits in Copenhagen - just hours after US President Barack Obama called for global optimism.

In an embarrassing gaffe, Mr Rudd’s comments were picked up by Australian TV microphones that had been allowed in briefly to film bilateral talks with Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who is to host the Copenhagen summit in December. This is the vital meeting at which world leaders aimed to hammer out a united agreement with developing nations for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

“Right now I don’t think we are on track to get an agreement at Copenhagen,” Mr Rudd told Mr Rasmussen. “There are too many problems.”

So if there is no real agreement in Copenhagen, why Rudd’s rush to pass laws before then to set up our own colossal emissions trading scheme, to slash gases that are insignicant?
===
Top 10 travellers’ boasts
Andrew Bolt

Travel + Leisure rates the best cities for 2009. If Udaipur is first and Paris nowhere, we need hardly trouble ourselves further with this list.

That Cape Town, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Chiang Mai - Chiang Mai! - rate above Florence, while Luang Prabang outpolls New York and Rome
just adds to the joke. It’s all evidence of the great weakness of travellers, whether backpackers or five-star celebrities - to outdo each other by boasting of the most out-of-the-way places they’ve seen, each of which is a flyless Shangri-la you must, must, go visit before you die.

Far more constructive to compile a list of the world’s cities and great sites that don’t live up to their billing:

Borubadur
Kathmandu
Amsterdam
Fiji
New Delhi…
===
China’s new offer: a better deal or jail
Andrew Bolt
It’s becoming a confrontation over not just principle and national pride, but economic interest:

AUSTRALIA is directly challenging China’s claims of espionage against detained iron ore executive Stern Hu, setting the Rudd government on course for its most serious foreign policy crisis since taking office in November 2007.

As Australian consular officials gained access to Mr Hu for the first time since his arrest last Sunday by Chinese secret police, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith suggested Mr Hu had been conducting normal commercial negotiations…

It also emerged yesterday that Mr Hu’s detention coincided with a Chinese government crackdown against iron ore officials across the country… An official Chinese government website said yesterday Mr Hu had bribed staff of Chinese steel companies during fraught negotiations over this year’s iron ore prices… It is now clear that the issues surrounding the arrests of the four Rio employees are focused on the iron ore negotiations and nothing to do with Rio’s about-face on its deal with Chinalco. But the arrests come against a backdrop of increasing resentment in China of the fact that it does not have a stronger hand in world ore negotiations...

Welcome to our future in the new Chinese century, which Paul Keating last month thought was ”altogether positive” and nothing really to worry about. Now we see just how ready China is to use state power and flout the rule of law to intimidate foreign businesses, and even governments.

UPDATE

This incident shows that Kevin Rudd was fooling himself to think personal relationships could even count with China, no matter how much he touted his role as an intermediary between China and West, or how hard he pushed China’s chase for a bigger say in the IMF, acting almost as China’s foreign minister. In the end with China, as with all such paranoid, one-party regimes, it’s about power, and not friendship or principle.

In fact, Greg Sheridan shows just how far China has gone to deliberately offend Australia - and to warn:

There are several reasons for concluding that this is a deliberate political move by Beijing aimed at intimidating and disciplining the Australian government…

First, there is the fact that Hu was arrested on Sunday. But the Chinese chose to determine that his detention began on Monday, so that under the terms of a consular access agreement Beijing and Canberra signed in 2000, they did not need to allow him consular access until yesterday.

Australian officials had sought consular access from Sunday and asked the Chinese for full information, but they got nothing. Canberra officials, including the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers, had to wait until the Chinese made public statements yesterday before they got any indication of what Hu had allegedly done wrong. Nor were they initially told where he was being held…

The fact that the Chinese went out of their way to humiliate and rebuff Australian officials, and more broadly the Australian government, shows their clear intent to send a message to Canberra.

UPDATE 2

Stern Hu’s former boss at Rio, John Dougall, demands more action from Rudd to protect a “trade hero:

I just want to speak out strongly and say ‘here is a great Australian that we need to get behind’. Mr Rudd has to do more than sit back and let Stern be thrown to the wolves.

I’m actually sure Rudd is doing plenty behind the scenes. It’s just that China will do what China wishes to do, and the only criticism to so far make of Rudd is that he ever thought he could persuade it to act otherwise.

UPDATE 3

Rudd throws the book at China. Sadly, it seems to be a thesaurus:

AS I said before, we the government will take every representational opportunity to put an appropriate position to the Chinese at whatever level, based on the best advice of our consular officials on the ground.
===
Just pay the best more. Period
Andrew Bolt
A welcome step to introducing performance pay to teachers in state schools, but too small and a bit confused:

(NSW’s) best teachers will be paid almost $100,000 a year to help struggling children in disadvantaged schools under a landmark performance pay deal… Teachers applying for $98,000 positions will need to demonstrate superior skills and will be judged on their students’ results, by their peers and by external “examiners” who will observe them in the classroom.

The confusion comes in this: these are not just the “best” teachers, but the teachers who’ll be paid extra to go teach in tough schools.

Much as I think the tough, badly-performing schools need extra help and good teachers, it’s also true that great teachers are needed to get the best of the brightest and most motivated students, who are at least as likely to attend well-performing schools. Why aren’t their best teachers paid more, too?

I’m also dubious about the role of “peers” and external examiners in helping to decide which teacher deserves the extra pay. It would be a mistake if judging excellence becomes too influenced by the collective and by unions in particular. Their criteria for excellence may not be yours.

It would be far better to adopt the model of so many private schools - to leave such decisions largely to the principal, on whose head it is if the school thrives or withers. - To my mind this looks like an extra layer of examiners keen to ensure corrupt practice isn’t removed from the profession. Like the practice of selling socialist ideology and campaigning against conservative policy even as the rhetoric claims even handedness. Or the rort of ensuring golden haired teachers don’t miss out on the spotlight. Until the government can show clean hands over the case of Hamidur Rahman their ability to fairly govern must be questioned.The sliming of Barry O’Farrell over his correct stance regarding premiership details is a case in point. It misrepresents Barry’s position to say that he wanted to deny parents information. It also beggars belief that we might trust government assurance of fairness when it is not evident on earlier issues. - ed.
Hermit replied to DD Ball
One of the great strengths of the inspector system in the “old days” was that the inspectors generally could REALLY teach.

I can remember as a student teacher having a feral class that I dreaded and watching the inspector at work. He had them eating out of the palm of his hand.

The government system has deteriorated to the point where there are very few “inspector” class people in the system.
===
Down, not up
Andrew Bolt

Both the UAH and RSS statellite data show the globe cooled in June. Lucia now plots the temperature trend since 2001, and contrasts it with the trend you’d expect from the IPCC’s gloomy warning of a temperature rise of 2 degrees by the end of the century (brown line).

Meanwhile, a reporter goes to a far more authoritative source on global warming than a lousy satellite:

UPDATE

Yet Prince Charles says we’re just eight years to sayonara:

Delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture, Charles said that without “coherent financial incentives and disincentives” we have just 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”

If he flew less, we might have one year more.
===
God, Global Warming and President Obama
By Bill O'Reilly
On Friday, President Obama will meet with the pope in Rome, near where the president is attending the G8 economic conference. Wouldn't you like to be in on that meeting?

As you may know, the president is a secular guy, a strong pro-choice advocate who dodged the question on when life begins by saying it's above his pay grade.

Well, the creation of life is above everybody's pay grade, but if you don't know, it seems to me you have an obligation to protect as many lives as you can, right? I bet the pope sees it that way as well.

There is no question President Obama is a secular leader, and that message has been well received in Washington. For example, for more than 40 years the Air Force has flown over the "God and Country Festival" in Idaho, but not this year. Nope, the Pentagon says it cannot provide planes because the festival endorses religion. Again, the Air Force cooperated with the patriotic festival 42 years in a row, but will not this year.

On May 7, the annual National Day of Prayer was held, but the president attended no events for it. When Mr. Obama spoke at Georgetown University, a Catholic institution, a religious symbol behind him was covered by some plywood.

Are you getting the picture here?

Also, after worshiping for 20 years in Rev. Wright's Protestant church, the president is now no longer affiliated with a specific church.

To be fair, Ronald Reagan was not an outwardly religious man. Neither was Thomas Jefferson and other great American presidents. We should be electing problem-solvers, not Bible-thumpers.

But to diminish spirituality by denying the good folks in Idaho a flyover is simply stupid. There is no specific religion in play at that festival. This is another example of secularists being disrespectful to people of faith.

The secular culture which President Obama embraces is mainly concerned with things of this world like global warming. They reject public spirituality and embrace political activism, most of it of the liberal kind. But where exactly is that getting us?

On Thursday we found out that China and India are not going to help on global warming. They are not going to cut back emissions or do anything else to clean up the planet. These countries want to make money, and heavy industry does that.

So right now, the only global warming strategy that might work worldwide may be prayer. That's how difficult it will be to convince emerging nations to clean up their acts.

The USA has become the strongest, most prosperous country on earth largely because of its Judeo-Christian traditions. I hope Pope Benedict reminds President Obama about that.

Sean Hannity Spoofs Al Gore-- Compares the Junk Scientist to Winton Churchill

This was beautiful. Sean Hannity disses Al Gore. Hannity compares clips of the noted junk scientist to Winston Churchill. It's great comedy.

Headlines Friday 10th July 2009

===
Rudd not calling China over Aussie 'spy'
Kevin Rudd says he has no immediate plans to discuss with the Chinese president the controversial arrest of an Australian Rio Tinto executive accused of spying.

Julia Gillard announces new 'super teacher' plan
Radical new plans to boost exam results by enticing a new breed of super teachers to work in the worst performing schools have been unveiled by Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard. - Barry O'Farrell was right to question what will be implemented, and he was horribly maligned for his stance. Gillard is being mealy mouthed with this half baked plan. She can defend it, but until she provides detail, it is only a gimicky pipe dream that she isn't capable of implementing as she describes it . Gillard has failed in all of her other plans, why should we suspend disbelief for this? - ed.

Asylum seeker boat still missing: Smith
The search is continuing for 74 asylum seekers whose boat is feared to have sunk in treacherous Indonesian waters en route to Australia. - how many more deaths will Rudd be responsible for? - ed.

Man under siege sexually assaulted 80yo
A man who stabbed a policeman and stole his patrol car has sexually assaulted an elderly hostage at a remote South Australian property.

Aussie small fish secures Jerry Seinfeld
Comedy megastar Jerry Seinfeld had only done two ad campaigns in his career - for Microsoft and American Express - but somehow Newcastle's Greater Building Society has signed him up.

France passes tough anti-piracy laws
France's Senate has approved a bill allowing judges to cut off Internet connections of users who...

Michael Jackson's doctor dodges paternity questions
Michael Jackson’s former doctor has denied he is the father of the late singer’s two oldest children – as far as he knows.

Kevin Rudd talks up would-be saint Mary MacKillop to Pope
POPE Benedict XVI has expressed great interest in the achievements of Mother Mary MacKillop amid hopes she might one day become Australia's first saint. The Pope discussed MacKillop's achievements with Kevin Rudd during a 20-minute private audience with the prime minister in his private library at the Vatican overnight. Mr Rudd said after the meeting that the Pope had shown great interest in MacKillop, who was beatified in 1995, and fondly recalled his visit to her tomb in Sydney in mid-2008, which the prime minister said had clearly "left a deep impression on the holy father".
=== Comments ===
We're not getting what we were promised
Alan Jones thinks he can't be the only person in Australia scratching his head at the lost election promises.
===
Chicago chills
Andrew Bolt
No, weather is not climate. But could someone please eplain that to warming hysteric Professor Barry Brook?

Brook, director of climate science at Adelaide University’s Environment Institute, freaked over Melbourne’s hottest day since 1851, claiming it was caused by global warming:

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has released a detailed analysis of the 2009 southern Australian heatwave. Some of the figures presented are staggering, with numerous temperature records smashed. Indeed, a colleague at BOM pointed out just how exceptional this event was:

“Given that this was the hottest day on record on top of the driest start to a year on record on top of the longest driest drought on record on top of the hottest drought on record the implications are clear…
It is clear to me that climate change is now becoming such a strong contributor to these hitherto unimaginable events that the language starts to change from one of “climate change increased the chances of an event” to ”without climate change this event could not have occured”.

I couldn’t have said it better.

Brook was of course as wrong on the evidence as he was on the conclusion. Melbourne had not its hottest day on record, but its hottest day since 1851.

And if the hottest day in Melbourne for 158 years is proof of global warming, what, then, does he conclude about the coldest July 8 in Chicago in 118 years?
Only one other year in the past half century has hosted so many sub-70-degree days up to this point in a summer season — 1969, when 14 such days occurred. Wednesday’s paltry 65-degree high at O’Hare International Airport (an early-May-level temperature and a reading 18 degrees below normal) was also the city’s coolest July 8 high in 118 years — since a 61-degree high on the date in 1891.

But, of course, this is rather more significant evidence than either:

Note, incidentally, that the sole period of warming which the IPCC concludes shows a human influence - that rising carbon dixoide concentration - amounts to just 25 years. Bear that in mind when alarmists tell you that eight years of cooling since is, of course, far too short a period to make any conclusions about climate trends.
===
Garrett’s hearing suddenly improves
Andrew Bolt
Peter Garrett yesterday couldn’t hear many people opposing the idea of banning climbing on Ayers Rock:
Yesterday Environment Minister Peter Garrett - who would give final approval to the plan - said he was not hearing “many voices” in favour of keeping it open.

Actually, Garrett today hears one voice, which alone should be more than enough:
KEVIN Rudd has called the idea of closing Uluru to climbers “sad”, and said he hopes it doesn’t happen.

Poor Garrett, foiled again. So far he hasn’t banned Gunn’s proposed paper mill, has dropped the promise to prosecute Japan for whaling, has delayed attempts to ban plastic bags, has been stripped of responsibility for global warming policies, has had to defend the delay in the emissions reducation scheme and all in all must be wondering what’s happened to his agenda.

UPDATE

Paul Toohey:

PETER Garrett has been left looking like a shag on a lonely rock after Kevin Rudd undermined him by saying tourists should continue to be allowed to climb Uluru.
===
Like a sinking stone
Andrew Bolt

I don’t think Barack Obama is travelling as well as you’d guess from the headlines here.

UPDATE

As I’ve said, Obama speaks so sweetly that you tend not to notice how little there is in what he says. For instance, note how Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson now explains to the Senate Armed Services Committee the truth behind Obama’s grand promise to close the wicked Guantanamo facility by the end of the year and put on trial its 229 prisoners, who actually include many very dangerous terrorists:

Martinez: If we are doing Article III [civilian] trials...we then also are talking about closing Guantanamo by the end of the year. There’s no way for 220-some-odd people to be prosecuted through some proceeding, whether Article III or military commissions, in that time frame. So where will they then be? I guess they’ll be here. And what about those who are acquitted? Where do they go? What happens to them?

Johnson: You’re correct. You can’t prosecute some significant subset of 229 people before January. So those that we think are prosecutable and should be detained, we will continue to detain, whether it’s at Guantanamo or someplace else. The question of what happens if there’s an acquittal...I think that as a matter of legal authority, if you have the authority under the laws of war to detain someone...it is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side.

Martinez: So therefore the prosecution becomes a moot point?

Johnson: Oh no, I’m not saying that at all. You raised the issue of what happens if there’s an acquittal, and in my judgment, as a matter of legal authority...if a review panel has determined this person is a security threat...and should not be released, if for some reason he is not convicted for a lengthy prison sentence, then as a matter of legal authority I think it’s our view that we would have the ability to detain him.

Jacob Sullum notes the trickery and spin:
So the Obama administration is all for due process, as long as it produces the correct result. Obama already has said that Guantanamo detainees who cannot be successfully tried by military commissions or civilian courts can still be imprisoned indefinitely if they are considered too dangerous to release. Now Johnson is saying that even those who are prosecuted can be kept imprisoned regardless of the verdict. The only point of prosecuting them, it seems, is to create an impression of due process while continuing the Bush detention policies that Obama condemned during the campaign.
===
Ho hot line to Beijing, after all
Andrew Bolt
There’s at least two reasons here why Stern Hu might wish he’d stolen a bar mat instead:

BEIJING last night claimed that detained Australian mining executive Stern Hu had caused “huge loss” to China’s economic interests by stealing state secrets.

As Kevin Rudd resisted demands to personally intervene in the case, Canberra’s diplomatic representatives will today gain access to Mr Hu, Rio Tinto’s general manager of iron ore operations, for the first time since the Chinese-born Australian was arrested by secret police on Sunday.

Despite China’s claims:

“My sense is it’s part of the very complicated context of the Chinalco deal,” said John Frankenstein, a China business watcher at the City University of New York.

Mr Frankenstein said he often recited the advice of a leading lawyer: “What foreign businesses just can’t understand is that the Chinese system can legitimately interfere in any business deal at any time under any context.”

Michelle Grattan defends Rudd’s softly-softly approach, but even she can’t help wondering:
The fact is, we just don’t know enough to judge whether the Government is going about things the right way. Obviously, it doesn’t want to offend the Chinese. But would being stronger in language be more appropriate and get better results, or simply make things worse?

It certainly sounds strange to hear this called a “consular” matter.

John Garnaut:

Some official sources involved in the predicament of Mr Hu and Liu Caikui, Wang Yong and Ge Minqiang say the fact that the investigation has got this far shows the Rudd Government has lost political traction with Beijing.

The truth may actually be that no one has traction with Beijing, no matter how much they flatter themselves. The leaders of this deeply authoritarian regime simply do what they must to keep their grip on power - and privileges.
===
Take your pick
Andrew Bolt
Daily Telegraph:

WOMEN in NSW are bearing the brunt of the recession, with the number of females in full-time jobs plunging 15,000 in just one month.

The Age:
WOMEN are the surprise winners from the changes that have flowed from the global financial crisis, with the latest jobs figures showing that female employment has been climbing at a time when male employment has been sliding.
===
Three bad reasons to close the rock
Andrew Bolt
PETER Garrett said yesterday he hadn’t yet heard good arguments against a plan to ban us from climbing Ayers Rock.

Well, right back at you, Pete. I haven’t yet heard a single good argument for you to do what you now threaten.

In fact, my dear Environment Minister, the people who have got your ear on this ban should fix up their homes before shooing us off the rock. Until then, excuse me if I doubt the sincerity of their concern about tourists who have paid $25 a pop to come marvel at - and walk on - the rock next door.

It’s actually a breach of faith that we must even argue now for our right to climb Ayers Rock, or Uluru.

After all, when the Hawke government in 1985 handed it to the traditional Anangu owners, the deal was that for the next 99 years Ayers Rock would still be open to tourists, who would still be free to climb it. Some 100,000 tourists a year, or a third of all visitors, do just that.

Yet now the national park staff and Anangu people who today oversee the site say that must stop. The deal is off.

And here’s the argument they put in their new draft management plan, now awaiting Garrett’s approval: “For visitor, safety, cultural and environment reasons, the director and the board will work towards closure of the climb.”

Which means, of course, banning Australians from completing a climb that to many is a pilgrimage to the heart of this country. A sacred rite, even.

But how serious are these arguments that traditional owners give and which Garrett now unthinkingly repeats?
===
Commissions propose, politicians dispose
Andrew Bolt
THE Bushfires Royal Commission seems to have got a bit big for its fireman’s boots.

Its senior counsel, Jack Rush QC, this week savaged the Brumby Government for having the cheek to act now to save lives, with the next bushfire season just 15 weeks away.

And in doing so Rush has seemingly forgotten that while commissions may advise, politicians must decide. Or so it must be in a democracy.

The fuss started last Friday, when Premier John Brumby announced changes to the Government’s bushfire policy which he felt couldn’t wait for the commission’s interim report on August 17 into the Black Saturday disaster.

They included improvements to warning systems and fire prediction services, and the identifying of “neighborhood safer places” where bush people could flee to in a fire.

In revealing them, Brumby was keen to smooth the royal commission’s fur, saying of course he knew it might recommend things very different to what he planned. Of course, it might recommend things the Government would be then glad to take up as well.

But he clearly didn’t stroke hard enough, given that Rush furiously attacked him for announcing changes without first running them by the commission, whose work apparently was now undermined.
===
And Al Gore is Moses
Andrew Bolt

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly sees good in making a faith out of global warming:

Titling his talk The Theology of Climate Change, (Ian Plimer) dismissed the global climate movement as “an urban fundamentalist atheistic religion” shaped to plug the hole left by “failed Western socialism and failed Western Christianity”. It’s true that climate change has taken on a deistic tinge. Phillip Adams praised John O’Brien’s recent book, Opportunities Beyond Carbon, thus: “Verily I say unto you: this is a new New Testament, containing hope of a planetary resurrection ... should be set to music and sung aloud by all policy-makers.” Adams was mildly tongue-in-cheek, of course. But only mildly. Tony Blair spoke for the masses when he positioned climate change as the moral issue of our time. And what’s wrong with that? Religion has always swayed behaviour by giving moral heft to certain rules of practical living, from not eating shellfish to not coveting your neighbour’s wife.
===
Tried before
Andrew Bolt

Leaders of the world’s most powerful countries, the G8, have agreed to limit the rise in global temperatures to no more than 2C.

Moreover, it’s non-binding, doesn’t include mega-emitters China or India, and Russia’s already backing away.
===
Feds May Crack Down on Oil Speculators
By Bill O'Reilly
The federal government may crack down on oil speculators, the people who hurt us all very badly by manipulating gas prices and giving the oil companies an excuse to artificially raise prices. That, of course, has greatly contributed to the brutal recession we are experiencing right now.

For more than three years, more than three years, I have been telling you that the oil companies are rigged, the markets are rigged, with supply and demand having little to do with what we pay at the gas pump or what the power companies charge us to heat or cool our homes. Now you'll remember, I was hammered for my analysis:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAC JOHNSON: But they're not speculators. They're future traders. What they are doing is sharing risk.

JOHN STOSSEL, CO-HOST, "20/20": You're allowed to speculate, and mommy government is not going to watch every move you make.

TOBIN SMITH: You're right about one thing. There is speculation in the markets. That's what makes the markets, Bill. It's this speculator who keeps the money flowing.

O'REILLY: Am I making any mistakes here on the oil? I think it's rigged. What do you think?

KARL ROVE: Well, this is one of the few moments where I may disagree with you.

O'REILLY: So you just answered my question that I'm right in my analysis that it doesn't have anything to do with supply and demand. It has to do with speculation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It has everything to do with the fundamental…

NEIL CAVUTO: That is a strong economy.

O'REILLY: Right.

CAVUTO: That is…

O'REILLY: We also have people manipulating the oil futures markets.

CAVUTO: We have no one manipulating.

JONATHAN HOENIG: I can't believe you didn't learn anything about economics, with all due respect, Bill, at Harvard.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Well Wednesday, the front page headline in The Wall Street Journal is: Oil Speculators Under Fire. U.S. weighs more trading regulations as U.K., France seek international action.

Well, it's about time. The Bush administration did nothing to control the speculators, and that was a major reason why our economy crashed. Americans had to divert millions of dollars to pay the four bucks a gallon gas price, while ExxonMobil and the other oil companies made record-breaking profits. Yeah, the mortgage mess contributed to the recession, but the oil con was just as big a factor.

Now, many of you watch "The Factor" because you know we'll tell you the truth even when it's unpopular. I received thousands of e-mails calling me an idiot, a madman, even a communist for telling the truth about the rigged oil industry. But now the truth is coming out, and you heard it here first.
===
To Tell the Truth
Has the CIA been lying since 2001 or are Democrats covering for Speaker Pelosi?

RANDOM

communitychannel
July 08, 2009
So Random. This is just a quick video to say hi and keep up! Sorry, it's almost four so couldn't do a longer one.
Hope you guys are well and enjoying the week.
love you all. Good hunting
x
n
===
I know what random is. The room was darkened, and your mum suggested we go to bed. I explained to her my brother's name is John, not me. She said "That's so random!"

Headlines Thursday 9th July 2009

Rio spy row threatens trade ties
RELATIONS between Australia and Asia have been thrown into a spin over the arrest of a mining exec on suspicion of espionage. - between Aus and .. Asia?? - ed.

Jobs to get worse before they get better
Australia's unemployment was up by slightly less than expected today, but the acting PM and economists are warning things will get worse before they get better. -Gillard's policy will make things worse, as promised, but nothing she says looks like making anything better. Gillard's helping hand is a dole queue. Gillard's attempt to not forget is commensurate with attempts to breed elephants in Australia. - ed.

'Rudd-speak' confuses Germans, Aussies
THE Prime Minister's calls for "detailed programmatic specificity" confuses more than German translators, Malcolm Turnbull says

Hostage held during cop-stabber siege
A man who stabbed a policeman and stole his patrol car held a woman hostage at a remote South Australian property before she escaped, police say.

'I want this gun to shoot a minister'
A man has allegedly tried to buy a firearm to shoot New Zealand Cabinet Minister Nick Smith.

SBY sweeps back into power in Indonesia
In good news for Australia, moderate Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has swept back into office, with exit polls showing him with up to 60% of the vote.

Police announce fine-free week
Police will stop issuing on-the-spot fines for traffic, parking and boating offences for a week, after their pay negotiations fell through.

Sydney man charged over 'mercy killing'
A Sydney man has been charged with the "mercy killing" murder of his wife inside their Ashfield home.

'Raped on a footpath in broad daylight'
A man who allegedly raped a teenager on a city footpath in broad daylight had absconded from a mental health facility just days earlier, police say.

Bird did hit her with a bottle: witness
A friend of a woman who was allegedly assaulted by Greg Bird at a nightclub - has told a Sydney......

NSW Government bans bottled water
Government departments are about to be banned from buying bottled water, in a bid to encourage more......

Mum egged on daughter to bash girl
A MOTHER claims she suffered a brain snap when she egged her child on to break a girl's nose.

Give all elderly the right to die - Nitschke
PHILIP Nitschke tells a packed forum that voluntary euthanasia should be available to people who are afraid of getting old.

Pol Pot prisoner 'woke under dead bodies'
A FORMER fighter for the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s told a Cambodian court today how he was suspected of turning against the Pol Pot regime, arrested and beaten unconscious, waking up beneath bodies in a burial pit. - ALP supported Pol Pot under Whitlam - ed.
=== Comments ===
Aboriginal milestones and hateful millstones
Piers Akerman
THE nation’s conflicting approaches to Aboriginal Australians will be on display today.

In Redfern, the Mudgin-Gal Aboriginal Corporation will launch a report of its progress over nearly two decades and outline its goals.

The corporation is one of a handful around the country run by Aboriginal women, addressing family issues and teaching all manner of essential skills.

By contrast, the ABC will tonight screen a so-called documentary called Spirit Stones that mumbles its way from mysterious claims of gravel falling from the sky to a generalised statement against white civilisation.

In Redfern, the message is clear. There have been more deaths of Aboriginal women through assault than there have been deaths of Aboriginal people in custody.

The women of Redfern know full well that they, as Aboriginal women, will experience violence at far higher rates than other Australian women. They are 10 times more likely to be the victims of homicide. - The ABC and other ultra left organizations have destroyed the aboriginal people with their ‘idealism.’ In the end the ABC has the ‘gamblers problem’ - They count the hits and not the misses. Left wing solutions have consistently failed to reduce aboriginal poverty and its attending crime levels. They need to rethink their approach ...it is killing people. - Party on - Tim of LooterVille - It is family lore that I have some Aboriginal ancestry. I am also aware of the abuse that has been part of my parent’s household and was also on my grandparent’s household. Family abuse and neglect is part and parcel with drunkeness and social ambivalence. The fact is that healthy families do things together (picnic, worship and show tough love) which the dysfunctional don’t understand for the apparent irrationality. Thing is, my family never benefited from the ABC and would never have accepted the apparently arbitrary rules of the Mudgin-Gal. But I think the Mudgin-Gal have got things that would work for the dysfunctional .. the ABC provide nothing but bile for conservatives.
I don’t even think the ABC can function as a media unit. Their journalism is hopelessly compromised and they seem ill equipped to report on even the most mundane matters fairly. - ed.
===
Message from Barry
On Wednesday 8th July, I was interviewed about the school 'league tables' issue by Alan Jones on Radio 2GB. Here, you can read the transcript of the interview or listen to it.
I strongly support more meaningful information to parents about their child's education, their own school's performance and how their own school compares to similar schools.

I am opposed to crude and simplistic 'league tables' that rank schools from top to bottom regardless of their differences.

You can't fairly compare and rank schools in communities as different as Brewarrina, Bankstown and Balgowlah.

Crude and simplistic 'league tables' stigmatise great kids and great teachers whose school some bureaucrat decides to give a low rank to.

Our kids' future is too important to tolerate them being tagged for life by a crude and simplistic 'league table'.
ALAN JONES: Barry O'Farrell is on the line. Now, I have to say, I have stayed out of this league tables debate and there's been a lot of it and basically Barry O'Farrell has been described everything from being incompetent and useless and hopeless and betraying Liberal principles and not worthy of succeeding as Premier of New South Wales.

I actually think that - and the reason I've asked Barry O'Farrell to come on the line now is that I think on balance Barry O'Farrell is making a very valid point and I just thought I'd ask him one or two questions because the argument is what Barry O'Farrell has done has denied parents - and Ross is a parent and Paul's a parent and so on - denied them access to information about their school and information about other schools. Therefore, when Ross decides to take his children out of his school, he's got no idea where there might be a better school.

I believe that that is certainly not the case in any of this. Barry O'Farrell, good morning.

Good morning, Alan.

Julia Gillard has said she'll publish the results of national tests online because she wants parents to be able to compare school results. Would you agree with that?

Alan, no problem with comparing school results but where the problem arises is where you have crude or simplistic league tables.

So a premiership. A premiership.

A premiership, Alan, that compares - that puts on the same league table soccer, league and Aussie Rules, not recognising, in the school sense, that there are different schools.

So Brewarrina, Balgowlah and Bankstown, Alan, vastly different schools, vastly different settings, different cultural backgrounds and in some schools, Alan, getting a child to attend five days in a row because of pressures within the community because of disadvantage, is a real achievement and that ought to be recognised but can't be recognised in a crude league table.

So, Alan, we support parents getting information about their child's performance, about their school's performance and about their school's performance against like schools but crude, simplistic league tables, Alan, serve no purpose and will ultimately stigmatise great students and great teachers in schools that on a bureaucratic ranking some public servant will put at the bottom of the list.

Okay. One report yesterday said, quote, the State Opposition and several minor party members last week voted to ban publishing results with schools breaking the ban facing fines of up to $55,000.

Well, it's not schools breaking the ban, Alan, it's the media. Ultimately when this bill was debated…

But you don't mind the media publishing results? You don't want the premiership table.

The crude league table, Alan - and the point is that when this bill went through everyone from Verity Firth through to Clover Moore, Liberal, Labor, National, independent, said we oppose league tables and Verity Firth went further. She said this legislation wouldn't allow league tables and yet the whistle was blown on that when Julia Gillard came out last week and said this will stop us publishing league tables.

Alan, this is - this is playing politics with children's educational futures. You know that not every child who goes to a school wants to end up in university. You know that there are many great teachers, great students out there across a range of schools that on a simplistic and crude league table won't be at the top of the list and you know that the consequence of them being down the bottom of the list is they'll be stigmatised and tagged for life.

My concern is the public may not be getting the correct message. Now, this report yesterday, a newspaper report, said, quote: every other state will provide their parents with the information leaving New South Wales as the only state to keep parents in the dark.

Well, that's not true either, Alan, because look, I think I'm the only person in this debate who actually has a student at a public school. I actually looked at my son's report last night. I looked at the report he got last year. I look at the report the school gave me which not only told me how my son's school was going but how my son's school was going against like schools. Information is provided to parents now. It'll continue to be provided. Information…

Okay, Julia Gillard said - just let me interrupt you on that basis then because Julia Gillard said, is quoted in this newspaper story: the New South Wales law did not apply to her. She would put the data on New South Wales schools on a website that would let parents compare how their school performed in national tests rated against the performance of other schools.

And no one has any problem with that, Alan. What we have a problem with…

So you want to do that anyway.

Absolutely and what we have a problem with is the simplistic and crude league tables…

The premiership list.

Okay, she said: we stand for openness. Do you stand for openness?

Absolutely and can I say…

She said we stand for finding out when schools are doing well and when they are doing badly.

And parents - parents can determine that now and parents come and knock on my door and I'm sure they knock on every other member of the parliament's door when they've got concerns about the way their school's performing.

So Adrian Piccoli - Picc-oli - has said - is that the way to pronounce his name?

Piccoli.

Piccoli. Said that Julia Gillard would not be breaching the New South Wales ban when she published school test information on her website.

Absolutely and that's the nonsense of this debate, Alan, is that what everyone opposed, including Verity Firth, is crude league tables. What no one opposes is parents getting meaningful information that enables them to determine how their child's school is going or how the public can determine where they want to send their child.

There's too much politics in this debate, Alan. As you say, it's got in the way of the basic reporting as to what's actually happened and the politics has got in the way of letting parents and the public know that their right to get information on their child's school, on a school they may want to send their child, is not at issue. What's at issue are crude, simplistic league tables…

Okay, well, you've got to get out there and sell your story, haven't you?

…students.

You've got to get out there and sell your story.

Absolutely.

Okay, good to talk to you. Thank you for that clarification.

BARRY O'FARRELL: Thank you, Alan.

ALAN JONES: I think that on this issue Barry O'Farrell has been much maligned.
===
TARGET IDENTIFIED
Tim Blair
CNN reports:
Researchers in the U.S. have proposed a new way of allocating responsibility for carbon emissions they say could solve the impasse between developed and developing countries.
Here’s a shock – it’s all about shaking down the rich
===
WEATHER GIRLS
Tim Blair
Zola Hay and Jairrah Roberts, the two young ladies who lunged at TV weatherman Tim Bailey, may face charges:
What started out as a spontaneous decision for a “bit of harmless fun” in Darling Harbour on Monday could end up in serious jail time, with Hay already on a good behaviour bond for assaulting police last year.

It has been alleged that punches were thrown in the ensuing melee. If Bailey or Channel 10 make a formal complaint and the 19-year-old is found guilty of assault she could be jailed for the remainder of her suspended sentence until September next year.
Not a good idea for them to have attempted this stunt in front of the Australian Girls’ Choir. Police have about 100 witnesses, and all of them are prepared to sing.
===
METAPHOR, ANIMALS MANGLED
Tim Blair
“It’s a game of cat and mouse,” said SBS Test cricket commentator Greg Matthews a few minutes ago. “We’re the mouse at the moment, running around like chooks with their heads cut off.”
===
GLOBAL WHEELING
Tim Blair
Early reports on the failure of Melbourne’s giant ferris wheel blamed extreme summer heat:
Melbourne’s big wheel has stopped turning after heat caused the Southern Star to buckle and crack last week.
This was seized upon by the LA Times as evidence of global warming consuming Australia. Apparently big giant wheel breakage is an international standard for determining the extent of climate change.

It’ll be news to the LA Times that the Sunday Age – usually as eager as the Times to credit global warming with magical superpowers – recently published an investigation into the wheel’s failure.

Verdict: design and construction faults. Heat isn’t mentioned once.
===
MADE FOR EACH OTHER
Tim Blair
The American Civil Liberties Union and Westboro Baptist Church are joined together in holy idiocy by Blair’s Law.
===
Australia’s rock
Andrew Bolt

Whose rock is it anyway? And is this really about religion ... or power?

THE Northern Territory Labor government and the federal opposition are furious with a federal plan to close the climb to the top of Uluru, saying Peter Garrett is slamming the gate on a world famous tourism experience.

A 10-year draft management plan for Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, released yesterday, indicates the days of climbing the rock are coming to an end: “For visitor safety, cultural, and environmental reasons, the director and the board will work towards closure of the climb,” it says.

One reason to instinctively distrust this try-on is the claim that a ban is also for “visitor safety” and “environmental reasons”. Every visitor who climbs it knows full well from all the signs that it’s a challenge, and it’s clearly their own judgment that the climb is worth the risk, just as countless people judge that flying is worth the risk of deep vein thrombosis. By what right does Garrett insist it’s not? As for the “environmental reasons”, I rather suspect that a million more people may walk on this giant rock without grinding the thing into a pile of sand.
===
Incas warmed up nicely
Andrew Bolt

A new paper shows that the Incas, at least, were very glad of a warming climate:

The rapid expansion of the Inca from the Cuzco area of highland Peru produced the largest empire in the New World between ca. AD 1400–1532. Although this meteoric rise may in part be due to the adoption of innovative societal strategies, supported by a large labour force and standing army, we argue that this would not have been possible without increased crop productivity, which was linked to more favourable climatic conditions. A multi-proxy, high-resolution 1200-year lake sediment record was analysed at Marcacocha, 12 km north of Ollantaytambo, in the heartland of the Inca Empire. This record reveals a period of sustained aridity that began from AD 880, followed by increased warming from AD 1100 that lasted beyond the arrival of the Spanish in AD 1532. These increasingly warmer conditions allowed the Inca and their predecessors the opportunity to exploit higher altitudes from AD 1150, by constructing agricultural terraces that employed glacial-fed irrigation, in combination with deliberate agroforestry techniques.
===
A secret love not secret any more
Andrew Bolt
Annabel Crabb writes like a lady spurned of my, er, love for Julia Gillard. I think I’m pleased, but a better explanation for my wary liking of Gillard is here.
===
More of Rudd’s free cash, I’m afraid
Andrew Bolt
We’ve had “stimulus” cheques sent to foreigners and the dead, and flushed down pokie machines and frittered to build what no one needs. Now more of the Rudd Government’s free money comes to light:

THOUSANDS of Victorians spared the worst of the bushfire disaster have claimed compo. About 7000 people have received Centrelink disaster recovery payments despite suffering no material loss or injury. They include about 3500 Belgrave residents, 2092 in Upwey, 440 Ferntree Gully locals and 640 in Selby.

A family of four could get $2800 - $1000 for each adult and $400 per child - by claiming for “psychological trauma” or for being forced to leave home for 24 hours.

But the Rudd Government will no doubt use again the excuse it’s trotted out to defend all that previous waste. Had to hurry, right? Meanwhile, consider how free all that “free money” really is as you prepare your tax returns.
===
China has ways to make you pay
Andrew Bolt
The spying charges suggest how paranoid Chinese authorities are - or how prepared they are to abuse state power:
AUSTRALIA and China are on a diplomatic collision course after a senior Australian mining executive was arrested in Shanghai by secret police on charges of espionage and theft of state secrets.

The arrest of Stern Hu, the general manager for China operations at Rio Tinto’s iron ore division, prompted speculation that it was linked to fraught negotiations over Australian iron ore exports to China. ..

Despite Mr Hu’s arrest on Sunday, along with three Chinese colleagues, and diplomatic approaches to Chinese authorities in Beijing, Canberra and Shanghai, by last night Australian consular officials had yet to gain access to the executive.

Analysts have no doubt:

EL&C Baillieu senior research analyst Ivor Ries told BusinessDaily there was “no doubt” that Chinese authorities were trying to punish Australian iron ore producers.

But our Foreign Minister seems to be making excuses:

Mr Smith said that despite speculation, there was no evidence or basis to link Mr Hu’s role in commercial matters between Rio Tinto and China to his detention.

This will only add to Rowan Callick’s surprise:

Mr Hu is not a hapless, indiscreet entrepreneur who might have strayed over a nebulous line by mistake. He is a corporate figure, Rio Tinto’s second-most senior executive in China and the head of its Shanghai office, responsible for negotiating iron ore prices and marketing iron ore into Rio’s biggest market. His best hope for fair treatment is for his case to be widely publicised. It thus appears odd that his employer and the Australian government appear to have downplayed his predicament for two or more days.

Meanwhile, the killing of nearly 200 people at Urumqi is another depressing measure of the nature of the Communist Party’s rule. Greg Sheridan:

THE violence and rioting in Urumqi, and other cities in the vast, desolate Western Chinese province of Xinjiang, constitute the greatest political loss of life in China since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. They are also the most serious challenge to Chinese state authority. They demonstrate the failure of the Chinese development model for both Xinjiang and Tibet, and the crudity of Chinese rule in those two provinces.
===
Chu a study in denial
Andrew Bolt
We already know that nothing that insignificant Australia does to cut emissions will of itself have the slightest effect on the climate, no matter how many billions the Rudd Government spends of your money and how many thousands of factory workers it gets sacked.

But now the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency admits that American efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions won’t really slash carbon dioxide levels either.

Trouble is that perhaps the most hysterical believer in man-made warming in Barack Obama’s cabinet, Energy Secretary Steven ”White Roofs” Chu, refuses to believe what a study by the administration’s best experts tell him. Watch:

===
How Palin was forced out
Andrew Bolt
Sarah Palin explains how she was driven out of office by her critics:

It’s that our administration is so stymied and paralyzed because of a political game that has been chosen to be played by critics who have discovered loopholes in the ethics reform that I championed that allows them to continually, continually bombard the state with frivolous ethics-violation charges, with lawsuits, with these fishing expeditions. We win the lawsuits, we win the ethics charges, we win all that — but it comes at such great cost. The distraction, the waste of time and money, the public’s time and money — it’s insane to continue down this road. And Alaskans who have paid attention to what’s going on, they understand that.

Now, there’s been some frustration with some in the media not fully reporting what’s been going on, so this may come as a shock to some Alaskans. We have sat down with reporters, showed them proof of the frivolity, the wastefulness — you know, millions of dollars this is costing our state to fight frivolous charges. And countless, countless hours from my staff, our department of law, from me every single day just trying to set the record straight. And it doesn’t cost the adversaries a dime in this game.

Note that Palin has so far won 14 of the lawsuits, yet been left with a personal legal bill of more than US$600,000, while her pursuers pay nothing. Her salary as governor is just $125,000, after she knocked back a $25,000 pay rise last December.

Resigning as governor gives her the chance of earning big money to pay back the bills she incurred in proving herself innocent of corruption. In this way her critics have forced out of office a popularly elected governor by using nothing more than false accusations, smears and legal tricks. How profoundly undemocratic this is. How foul.
===
Forgiving the Left the violence of the Right
Andrew Bolt
Why is Left-wing violence so easily forgiven by the Left-wing media? Silly question, I know:

Sweden’s Minister of Integration and Equality Nyamko Sabuni said it was time to recognize the detrimental effects of left-wing political violence.

“We have long distanced ourselves from the white power movement’s activities and violence, not least due to historical experiences. But for just as long we’ve romanticized and downplayed the violence that left-wing groups have inflicted on society’s representatives, calling it a youthful misunderstanding or freedom fighters who have gone too far,” she told SR.

Or, as a Tim Flannery might argue, these violent Leftists are just trying to save us, so it would be a crime to call their crimes a, you know, crime.

Oziur - Catch Me

Artist: Oziur
Title: Catch Me
Album: Black Promisses
Lyrics and vocals by D.Swaen
Music by A. Riuz
Videoproductions o0orecords©2008
Photography by Hegel

Headlines Wednesday 8th July 2009

Liz's Birthday.
===

A symbol of hope.
===
Minimum wagers receive double blow
Low paid workers with a mortgage have received a double whammy of nothing. - Thank you Rudd and Gillard .. for nothing. - ed.

'He sexually assaulted 23 drunk men'
A Perth man posed as a taxi driver, lured drunk young men into his car and sexually assaulted them, prosecutors say.

Stomach bug 'made Nate defecate in hall'
NRL star Nate Myles says he didn't mean to defecate in the corridor of a hotel, blaming the incident on a stomach bug and being locked out of his room.

Bird's accuser breaks down in court
The woman who accused Greg Bird of assaulting her at a night club has sobbed in a Sydney court after being told of discrepancies in her evidence. Gil Taylor was there.

Police seek owner of human skull
A human skull that washed up on a Sydney beach has police looking for its owner, who should be alive and kicking.

Malcolm Turnbull unveils 'debt truck'
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull is relying on a ute to help turn around his political fortunes following the disaster of the Utegate affair.

Rudd hoses down climate expectations
Rudd and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have hosed down expectations of a major breakthrough on climate change when world leaders meet in Italy on Friday.

Dungeon dad made daughter a sex slave
AN 18-year-old German girl was held prisoner and repeatedly raped by her father after tracing him to South Africa.
=== Journalists Corner ===
A Memorial for Michael!
The preparations, thousands of fans and star-studded performances...
As the world gathers to honor the King of Pop, FOX is on the scene!
===
Putting Politics Before Product?
We reveal how the government is driving GM's business decisions!
===
Palin's Political Shocker
Will Sarah's body language reveal why she resigned? "The Factor" finds out!
===
Guest: Gov. Haley Barbour
Sanford's Scandal and Sarah's Surprise Split -- What does it all mean for the GOP? He reacts!
=== Comments ===
Will President Obama Become the New Arnold Schwarzenegger?
By Bill O'Reilly
The parallels are spooky. Both men are charismatic and used their personalities to get elected.

But for Governor Schwarzenegger in California, it has been a disaster. His approval rating now stands at 33 percent. The state is bankrupt. It cannot pay its bills, and it is issuing IOUs.

When Arnold took office in 2003, California was spending $71 billion. It is now spending $92 billion, while running a $26 billion deficit. That is hard to believe, and it happened on the governor's watch.

If President Obama does not learn from this, the USA could go bankrupt as well, no question. But the Obama administration does not seem to be learning. In fact, there is now talk of yet another massive federal stimulus package:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The truth is there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited. Now that — I'm not laying this on anybody. It's now our responsibility.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

But Mr. Biden and the president must know the stats are grim. Right now, the feds are spending almost $2 trillion more than the government is taking in. If that continues, the American dollar will collapse. The national debt is now almost $11.5 trillion, and if the feds get into managing health care, that number will explode.

Even Nancy Pelosi could figure this out. If President Obama continues the massive spending, every American will suffer — and soon.

But it looks to me like many Democrats in Congress don't care, just as the California legislature did not care. The liberal philosophy is one of big spending. They believe government should provide for everybody.

Nice thought, only it's impossible. And by trying to create a nanny state, the economic system in America could implode. It has happened in California under a Republican governor. Pray it doesn't happen to the entire country under President Obama.
===
BAD GUYS CUT
Tim Blair
The London Times, five hours ago:
Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.
And subsequently rewritten:
Al Gore invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill today by encouraging political leaders to follow the example of Britain’s wartime leader and unite their nations to fight climate change.
As Simon Scowl notes: “The Times of London has now removed all mention of the Nazis from the story and changed the headline to ‘Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill in battle against climate change.’ (So he must have meant some other enemy Churchill fought.)”
===
HISTORY FILED
Tim Blair
Veteran journalist David Jones joins his siblings in sorting through their late mother’s belongings – and discovers a newspaper goldmine.
===
CAR FOR COMMENT
Tim Blair
According to Green Left Weekly:
[Tim] Flannery’s injunction to “follow the money” turns up industry funding of many so-called “climate change sceptics”.
It also turns up $US50,000 speeches delivered by Tim Flannery. And now a new car:
Flannery bought a Toyota Prius three years ago but has since become an ambassador for the vehicle. He is due to take delivery of his third generation model in the coming weeks, in return for some public speaking engagements.
The latest Prius retails in Australia for up to $53,500. Tell your local Toyota dealership you’ll pay for one by speaking in public.

UPDATE. Further from Flannery:
A paleontologist by trade, he said the white ring-tailed possum has been around for at least five million years but exposure to temperatures above 34C for more than four hours results in its untimely death.
What happens if you put them under water for two minutes?

UPDATE II. Then there’s Al Gore, of course:
He’s getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
===
BRING ON THE BOOTLEGGERS
Tim Blair
H2Oibition in Australia:
The Southern Highlands village of Bundanoon is poised to become the first town in Australia, and quite possibly the world, to ban commercially bottled water …

All Bundy’s shops have supported a ban, agreeing to lose over-the-counter income in order to combat the hefty carbon footprint associated with bottling water and trucking it around the state.
Wait until they find out about all the other stuff that gets trucked around the state. Meanwhile, in England:
The boys in green are coming as the Environment Agency sets up a squad to police companies generating excessive CO2 emissions …

Decked out in green jackets, the enforcers will be able to demand access to company property, view power meters, call up electricity and gas bills and examine carbon-trading records for an estimated 6,000 British businesses.
Sharia law is looking better by the day.
===
IT IS ALWAYS COOLER IN STRATHBOGIE THAN IN EUROA
Tim Blair
A climate mystery is finally solved.
===
TREATY DEFEATY
Tim Blair
“There will be no Copenhagen treaty,” promises Times world business editor Carl Mortished. “There will, no doubt, be an agreement, full of pomp and promising words, but no pact that would stem, let alone reverse, the continuing increase in carbon emissions. Nothing that will stop the relentless mining and burning of coal: the fuel that powers Asia, the fuel that made the clothes you wear and the screen you watch.”

Good.
===
The Sceptics Handbook
Andrew Bolt

Perth-based science communicator Joanne Nova has published a sensational Sceptics Handbook, already translated into German, French and Norwegian.

It crisply summarises the biggest weaknesses in the arguments that man is heating the world to hell, and suggests the best ways to argue against alarmists. Please circulate widely.
===
China bares its fangs
Andrew Bolt
In case you doubted the true nature of China, now the real industrial-military complex:

Australia pressed China on Wednesday to explain why four staff of Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto ... had been detained amid tense negotiations over iron ore exports to China.

This simply confirms how inapporpriate it would have been to approve this investment in Rio by the Chinese giant Chinalco:

Tensions had been simmering below the surface for months between Canberra and Beijing over the Chinalco deal, which would have given the state-owned company an 18% stake in Rio, the world’s third-largest miner, and two board seats… Australian government officials have made clear through the inquiry that they don’t favor Chinese state-owned enterprises making large-scale takeovers of Australian miners but market participants say that China won’t likely be deterred.

The collapse of that deal may help explain the tensions now:

THE biggest investment deal in both Australian and Chinese corporate histories has collapsed, with Rio Tinto expected overnight to withdraw its board support for a $US19.5 billion investment from Chinalco… But it will spark a major spat between the Anglo-Australian miner and the Chinese aluminium giant, with Chinalco demanding that Rio pay a $US195 million break fee.

Consider that spat unresolved. And note that China’s state-owned companies are never really at arms length from their undemocratic, nationalist government.
===
This reckless spending must stop - again
Andrew Bolt
Could Kevin Rudd please take his own advice?

WORLD leaders needed an exit strategy from the unprecedented spending and government intervention they resorted to during the global economic crisis and should use the G20 to co-ordinate it, Kevin Rudd said last night.

Is this another example of chameleon Rudd taking on the coloration of his surrounds? After all, he was speaking in Germany, whose Chancellor had just days earlier said this:

Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has flagged she will be pressing for nations to commit to lowering their deficits and reversing their stimulus measures...

Still, it’s good that Rudd no longer is the great “social democrat” who just months ago wrote:

...the role of the state has once more been recognised as fundamental
===
More sexless sailors wanted
Andrew Bolt
Time for another round of shocked - shocked! - stories about fit, young men being hungry for sex after being locked in a floating can for weeks:

PERTH brothels are increasing staff to contend with the arrival of two US warships carrying more than 5400 sailors.
===
Banning not burkas but little red dresses
Andrew Bolt
Rod Liddle on the madness of fairness tribunals:

A Bosnian Muslim woman, Fata Lemes, has just won £3,000 from an employment tribunal because the Mayfair cocktail bar in which she worked required her to wear a red dress (above) in the summer months. She said this was humiliating and made her feel ‘like a prostitute’ and ‘violated her dignity’ and therefore she refused to wear the dress. She complained and won her appeal. ..

The red dress Ms Lemes was required to wear was not in the least bit revealing, incidentally — less revealing than the slinky t-shirt worn by the woman (below) on her Facebook site, apparently. I assume Fata is now busy applying for jobs in a pork pie factory, or a dog pound, or a synagogue, and keeping in touch with her lawyers. There’s another thing about working in a cocktail bar which might make Mohammed, pbuh, a bit twitchy. Can you work out what that might be? Hmm, let me think....

The final irony of the Fata Lemes case is that the money was awarded to her not because her Muslim faith had been transgressed with that red dress, but because she had been transgressed as a woman. Those were not the grounds upon which she had based her appeal, but the tribunal seems to have decided unilaterally that those are the grounds upon which she should have based her appeal. Their point being that while waitresses were expected to wear nice red dresses in the summer months, no such demand was made of the waiters. Somehow this unsurprising fact grated with the panel, the notion that women had to wear dresses and men did not. The discrepancy seems to have grated with the panel rather more than it grated with Fata Lemes. That is because — I would contend, M’lud — that the panel was comprised of mad men and mad women, as these panels usually are.
===
Taking the heat off Gore
Andrew Bolt
The Times gets it right the first time, properly underlining the absurdity of Al Gore’s alarmism:

Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

Alas, Tim Blair notes that the Times abruptly rewrote the hyperbole to make Gore seem saner.

Brendan O’Neill gives Gore the full bore:

He’s getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests…

Gore is also chairman of a greeninvestment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies, and which invests in firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organisations, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle that will furnish one of his other multimillion-dollar organisations, General Investment Management, with booming business.

As for Tim Flannery....
===
Doomsday not yet
Andrew Bolt
More doomsday merchants should be held to account - and not just the climate ones:

CONTROVERSIAL economist Steve Keen has refused to back down from his doomsday prediction that house prices in Australia will almost halve over a decade despite growing evidence to the contrary.

Nine months after his dire prediction that property prices will fall by 40per cent over 10 years, fellow economists have pronounced Professor Keen—who was held up as one of the few commentators to see the global economic downturn coming—“spectacularly wrong” on his outlook for the housing market....

According to property data agency Residex, the apartment market in Surry Hills experienced an average capital growth rate of 7.08 per cent in the year to May… Property data agency RP Data described Surry Hills as one of Sydney’s most resilient unit markets, with prices rising last year compared with a decrease in most other markets.

And, from last December:

The Australian dollar may fall below $0.50 in the first half of 2009 as falling commodity prices and a shortage of funds for private firms tip Australia into a recession, according to Morgan Stanley.

Swine flu, global warming, SARS…
===
Paying to play at saving the world
Andrew Bolt
How much of our money is Kevin Rudd splashing out to bribe foreigners into signing a useless deal to stop a warming that actually halted eight years ago?

BRITISH Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he has won Kevin Rudd’s backing for a bold proposal to create a $122 billion-a-year climate change fund for poorer countries, in the hope of breaking the deadlock threatening a new global agreement to fight climate change.

And that’s not including the billions he’ll waste on our own emissions trading scheme, or the billions we’ll then lose in productivity and sales.
===
Searching for some sexless sailors
Andrew Bolt

THE navy is shocked - shocked! - that healthy young men cooped up on its ships look at the healthy young women by their side and want to, er, rock their boats.

In fact, so shocked is the navy, apparently run by old and devoutly Christian aesthetes who still undress in the dark, that four sailors from HMAS Success have been removed from their ship at Singapore.

Their crime? To have run a contest to sleep with the most women on board.

Yes, stifle your gasps. You’ve never seen anything so horrific since the last time you went to a disco or office party. Or last watched Channel Nine’s sex-on-the-sea show, Sea Patrol.

Anyway, this contest had a few rules that’s been deliciously eye-popping for the kind of people who love to drool and damn at the same time.

Sleeping with an officer or a lesbian won extra points, and the sailors kept score in a book known as the ledger, with dollar amounts written next to the name of each woman.

Which is where I start wondering where the navy got so old-fashioned, albeit in an almost refreshing way.

How many of these women actually slept with the bounty hunters?

None, I’d bet. In which case, why all this fuss?

Or is the answer “plenty”? And then we must ask: why haven’t those women been sent home, too?
===
Cool to be a sceptic
Andrew Bolt
NOW that it’s so chilly, I can understand why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong wants us to stare at the sea, instead.

Better that than have us stare at the latest satellite data showing the world has now cooled down to the average temperature of the past 30 years.

Last month Family First senator Steve Fielding asked Wong a question she could no longer ignore: what proof did she really have that man’s gases were heating the world to hell?

And what got her attention was Fielding’s threat: if she didn’t give a good answer, the Rudd Government would not get his crucial vote in the Senate for its plan to slash our emissions with huge new taxes.

Specifically, asked Fielding: “Is it the case that carbon dioxide increased by 5 per cent since 1998 while global temperature cooled over the same period? If so, why did the temperature not increase; and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?”

An excellent question, even if it’s more accurate to say the world has cooled since 2001, despite a big increase in the gases we’re told will make us fry.

So I thought the media might be interested in Wong’s remarkable response a week later, given that she now said we’d all been wrong to fret about the air temperature.

You see, “at time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend caused by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases”.

Translated, that means, sure, it might be cooling now, which we still refuse to actually confirm, but one day it will warm again, just like we said. Just wait.
===
Jackson’s licence
Andrew Bolt
Psychiatrist Robert M. Kaplan diagnoses Michael Jackson:

Jackson, we are told, was deprived of a childhood because of his early involvement in the music world and this, in some mysterious way, provided him with a lifelong excuse to perpetrate just about any self-indulgent, destructive, futile or mindless behaviour that an inordinately self-obsessed adult male who kept sleeping with young boys could wish to do for as long as he had the fame, money or credit to do it....

Jackson has eight siblings who were exposed to the same environment; why did none of them turn out the same way?… Jackson constantly branded his parents, especially his father, as “abusive”, the psychobabble word that conveys instant freedom from responsibility for the victim.... Considering the competition and pressures they faced, they would have had to be as hard on their charges as any parents of talented child stars. The results were little short of spectacular, and their children were given opportunities denied to many others…

Does any of this explain the star’s infantilism? Jackson did not have a sweet childlike nature, living in a perpetual Wendy world. Far from it. The evidence at his trial showed that he was a caricature of the cynical, calculated and predatory adult, soaked in booze and drugs, constantly conniving to manipulate children into a coercive environment where he could exploit them as he wished without bearing the consequences…

There is only one epitaph for Jackson. He was a disgrace: to his family, his people, his fans, his talent, his industry, his country and to every child who dreams of creating a better life for themselves as an adult without abdicating responsibility for their actions.

On the other hand, there’s this weasely tribute from President Barack Obama, with a spectacular misuse of the word “tragedy” to flatter both Jackson and his fans:
(Jackson) will go down in history as one of our greatest entertainers… I think that his brilliance as a performer also was paired with a tragic and, in many ways, sad personal life...I’m glad to see that he is being remembered primarily for the great joy that he brought to a lot of people through his extraordinary gifts as an entertainer.
===
He speaks so well that you forget it’s empty
Andrew Bolt
4:15am, Tuesday (Miami time): What President Barack Obama says in Moscow:

The future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground.

7:45am, Tuesday (Miami time): What President Barack Obama does in Pakistan:

Suspected U.S. missiles ... attacked followers of a notorious militant leader close to the Afghan border,