Charming folks at Snuff Puppets:
A TAXPAYER-funded theatre group has turned the September 11 attacks into a black comedy.
The Melbourne-based Snuff Puppets company – which receives up to $50,000 in public funding – will put on a charity performance of The Twin Towers Show on Friday.
Snuff Puppet artistic director Andy Freer said the show included black humour and violence.
And so amusingly original in the approved Leftist way:
US President George W. Bush is represented by a shrub wearing a Texan hat.
Of course, Snuff Puppets did protest against September 11 - against the September 11, 2000, Melbourne meeting of the World Economic Forum, that is.
[url=http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/your_arts_grants_at_work/]Andrew Bolt's reference[/url]
Guess who Four Corners picked as the real villain in its story ths week of how paper maker Amcor defended itself against militant greens? Some excerpts from the transcript to give you a clue:
ReplyDeleteSALLY NEIGHBOUR: Tonight on Four Corners, a decade of relentless political lobbying and corporate dirty tricks
LINDA PARLANE, DIRECTOR, ENVIRONMENT VICTORIA 1990-1997: I think it’s a disgrace. Honestly, you know, we’d been, I’ve been involved in forests for long enough to know that there would be dirty tricks, or that there had been dirty tricks, but that doesn’t mean to say it’s acceptable.
Are they talking about Amcor’s “A-team” which attended the greens’ meeting to report on what stunt they would do next? Or are they shocked by what the A-team actually discovered?
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: They also revealed some of the greenies’ own tricks - like planning a graphic photo display about the effects of logging, using dead possums from a collection the forest campaigner kept in his freezer.
Do you remember that discussion?
GERALDINE RYAN, FORMER VOLUNTEER, ENVIRONMENT VICTORIA: I remember that was more than once. That he...he used to collect, if a possum was a road kill or an animal was a road kill, would collect them and keep them in the fridge. It was just again...to make it, sort of, real to the public.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: What, animals out of the forest campaigner’s freezer?
GERALDINE RYAN: Yes.
Other A-team reports revealed what kind of irresponsible protesters Amcor was having to cope with:
200, 250 drifters. Good time, mainly on grass… General appearance was unkempt. Many had matted hair and dishevelled clothing, similar to early ‘70s styling. The more the radical, the worse they were. But most of these didn’t attend workshops. The people who attended workshops were the sheep wanting direction…
About 100 would take part of various activities when they felt like it. The other, about 200, would just sit around till midnight doing various intoxications and sleep till about midday, then get up and wander about...
And then Four Corners heard this from Amcor’s A-team:
OLIVER RAYMOND, A TEAM VICE PRESIDENT: Did any of the environmental groups think that chaining themselves to logging equipment in the forest was a dirty trick? Stopping people’s livelihood by stopping their contract operations in the forest is a dirty trick. The groups that various A-team people were able to get into were open to anyone. There was nothing actually specified that said, “If you don’t believe in us you are not allowed to join us.” Do you call that a dirty trick?
So who did Four Corners pick as the true villain in this battle between law-breaking protesters with their dead-possum stunts and a law-abiding employer of hundreds of working men and women?
Yes, you got it.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/pick_the_abcs_pet_villain/
You might have believed the scare about global warming melting the ice caps, but the problem now is the very opposite:
ReplyDeleteThe “ozone hole” over Antarctica this year has matched the record size of 29.5 million square kilometers (11.4 million square miles), the U.N. weather agency said Friday…
This year’s Antarctic winter has been very cold, the weather agency said earlier this month, which has led to greater ozone depletion.
But wasn’t the ozone hole supposed to get smaller since we banned ozone-depeleting CFCs from fridges, sprays and air-conditioners?
Well, yes, says the UN, but:
According to the agency, it will take until 2065 for the ozone layer to recover and the hole over the Antarctic to close. That estimate is 15 years longer than previous predictions by the agency.
Is is just possible that the ozone hole is - like global warming - caused largely by natural fluctuations, after all? Or at least influenced less by humans than first thought?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_new_problem_antarctica_cooling/
John Howard names some of quislings in the fight against communism, the enslaver of millions:
ReplyDeleteWith the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, it became all too easy to pretend that the outcome of the Cold War was an inevitable result of large-scale, impersonal forces that ultimately left totalitarianism exhausted and democratic capitalism triumphant.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This was a struggle fought by individuals on behalf of the individual spirit. It’s worth recalling just some of the philo-communism that was once quite common in Australia in the 1950s and ‘60s:
* Manning Clark’s book Meeting Soviet Man, where he likened the ideals of Vladimir Lenin to those of Jesus Christ;
* John Burton, the former head of the external affairs department, arguing that Mao’s China provided a model for the transformation of Australia;
* All those who did not simply oppose Australia’s commitment in Vietnam but who actively supported the other side and fed the delusion that Ho Chi Minh was some sort of Jeffersonian Democrat intent on spreading liberty in Asia.
There is a view that the pro-communist Left in Australia in decades past was no more than a bunch of naive idealists, rather than what they were: ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests.
And, of course:
We should not underestimate the degree to which the soft left still holds sway, especially in Australia’s universities, by virtue of its long march through the institutions.
Howard, Peter Costello and Alexander Downer seem to be more willing lately to lead the fight for conservative and humanist ideals against those who have most threatened them.
Good.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/howard_the_culture_warrior/
THIS weird love our cultural elite has for the Noble Savage can, of course, be as innocent as Rebecca Hossack’s dream of being buried like an Aboriginal.
ReplyDeleteHossack, who runs a swish art gallery in London and was the first cultural attache at our High Commission, has two Aboriginal burial poles in her basement: one for herself and one for her husband.
As the glossy Melbourne Magazine ooh-ahhed this month: “When she dies, Hossack says, her bones will be bleached on the roof of her London house, placed in her burial pole and sent back to Australia.”
Like I say, it’s innocent. No one is inconvenienced, unless Hossack’s heirs get the creeps waiting for the skeleton on the roof to turn white. Or the neighbours take fright at the vultures suddenly settling on the gutters of Notting Hill, clutching looser bits of Hossack’s rotting remains.
You might think other signs of this new craze for the myth of deeply spiritual savages living in some Garden of eco-Eden—with white capitalists cast as the snake—are just as harmless.
(Click on title for full article.)
Who cares if the ladies of Armadale decree that dot paintings by artists certified as genuinely Aboriginal and genuinely poor are a must for the well-dressed wall? At least some artists out bush will get a few honorably earned dollars out of it.
And the dry-cleaners of Melbourne could only have profited from the salvation seekers who queued at a phony Aboriginal “sacred fire” at Kings Domain during the Commonwealth Games to get themselves ritually smoked.
But not all of this romanticising about the good old Stone Age is quite so cute.
I’m thinking, for instance, of Tom Calma’s attack on the Howard Government’s Bill to stop Aboriginal wife-bashers and child-abusers from using the excuse that their barbarity was permitted by “tribal law”.
(The Government had in mind the 55-year-old man who was initially jailed for just one month for anally raping a 14-year-old girl, the judge accepting that under tribal law the victim was his promised bride.)
Wrote Calma, paid big to be our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner: “The problem is that this Bill does not address family violence in the indigenous communities in any meaningful way.
“Rather, it will undermine attempts to solve the problem and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Aboriginal customary law.”
Hmm. Does Calma seems more worried by the damage done to the image of tribal law than by the damage such laws do to a 14-year-old girl?
But he is not alone in re-imagining tribal ways to be gentler—and greener—than they really were and are. Many others want to forget the truth—that even an anthropologist as sympathetic to Aboriginal causes as Professor Peter Sutton says in his essay The Politics of Suffering that “a man’s right to beat his wife without interference” can be described by Aborigines as the “Blackfella way” and “high levels of interpersonal violence” have long been “sanctioned” by Aboriginal laws.
No, no, no. Our assorted earth-worshippers, snowfield socialists and freedom-fearers don’t want to hear that.
They prefer to hear High Priests of the primitive like . . . why, David Suzuki!
Suzuki, the famed green guru and broadcaster from Canada, is in Australia yet again, this time for a month-long “farewell” tour from Byron Bay to Broome.
I heard him recently at a government-sponsored conference in Ballarat as I waited my own turn to speak, and was astonished to find how crazed his hectoring had become—yet how rapturously an audience of public servants cheered him.
The capitalist world was eating up the world and was “on a suicidal path”, I heard him cry. “We live in a world that is absolutely shattered.”
How grimly pleased the audience was to hear it.
The ways of the West were rotten, he stormed. “Conventional economics is a form of brain damage” and science was just “bulls--- to baffle”.
We needed no more scientific discoveries, or even research. “The last thing in the world people need is more information.” (Except, of course, for the information in Suzuki’s book, which he duly plugged, sold and signed.)
And it was “disgusting” we lived in bigger houses than did our grandparents: “What kind of a world is this that regards this as progress?”
Oh, how the audience loved it all. For the culturally privileged, this is the anti-rational, back to womb-cave, message of our times.
So what was Suzuki offering in place of the reason that has made us so rich and free?
Indian ways. Aboriginal ways. Like those wise tribal folk, he said, we had to treat nature as “sacred” and live “in balance” with it.
And then Suzuki, who boasts of being an honorary chief of the Cree Indians and an honorary “Mountain Man” of South Australia’s Kaurna Aborigines, did a riff that borrowed from his book Wisdom of the Elders.
As he says there, “The Native Mind is imbued with a deep sense of reverence for nature” and “Native wisdom . . . regards the human obligation to maintain the balance of the health of the natural world as a solemn spiritual duty”.
On he went, urging us to worship the earth as Noble Savages allegedly did back when humans led “more stable” lives “in a state of nature”. Think Eden.
It’s all as Harvard anthropologist Steven A. LeBlanc says in his fine new book, Constant Battles—not only is the myth of the Noble Savage back in fashion, “it seems that the native people of North America, along with a few other social groups like the Australian Aborigines, have become the poster children for the ‘noble savage’ concept today”.
But the Noble Savage is a fraud. “To think that we have lost our ‘roots’ or are somehow out of touch with our ancient ancestors—and have lost the ability to live in peace and in ecological balance—is a myth and a dangerous one”, LeBlanc says.
In fact, from the very first days humans emerged, they have constantly and bloodily fought for more to eat after first plundering the land they already have.
Forget any of that tribal looking-after-nature stuff. LeBlanc tells of Indians hunting buffalo by driving whole herds over cliffs. He shows how other tribal hunter-gathers tore down branches from fruit trees to make huts, hunted animals to extinction and didn’t care if their animal prey were males or females pregnant with next year’s dinner.
The story was no different here. LeBlanc could have quoted Edward Curr, a squatter from the Murray who saw how the Bangerang hunted in the 1840s:
“(T)hey never spared a young animal with a view to its growing bigger. I have often seen them, at an instance, land large quantities of fish with their nets and leave all small ones to die within a yard of the water.”
Indeed, LeBlanc went through 30 years of issues of Human Ecology, a top journal of anthropology, looking for evidence of tribes living in harmony with nature in the way Suzuki claims, but concluded: “There are no clear examples of conservationist behaviour in any traditional societies reported during the last three decades.”
Why is he so keen to finish off the Noble Savage? Because we won’t otherwise see what a great chance we’ve been given by our Western ways—our science, our technology and our reason.
“For the first time in history, technology and science enable us to understand Earth’s ecology and our impact on it, to control population growth, and to increase the carrying capacity in ways never before imagined. The opportunity for humans to live in long-term balance with nature is within our grasp if we do it right.”
That means using our brains—not some fake native “wisdom” that never was—to feed and house everyone without exhausting the land, so eliminating the greatest cause of wars.
Already we are less likely to die in battle than our tribal ancestors ever were. Kill off the Noble Savage for good, and we may yet live in that peace and “balance” of which Suzuki dreams—but with, and thanks to, the wealth he claims he spurns.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_savaging_a_myth/
What is Kevin Rudd’s real argument?
ReplyDeleteIs it that:
My concern is that in recent years we’ve only been hearing one set of Christian views on politics - and that has been an overwhelmingly conservative one.
Well, that clearly is self-pitying nonsense. Just check, for instance, the website of even the supposedly conservative Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference and you see press releases announcing “Bishop calls for justice for David Hicks”, “The Catholic Bishops of Australia have called for a renewed effort from all Australians in achieving dignity and justice for indigenous peoples”, “Catholic Bishop welcomes government’s withdrawal of offshore processing bill” and much more of the Left-pleasing (and indeed often worthy) same.
And as for the Anglicans…
No, the church elites are as noisily of the Left as ever. And Rudd implicitly acknowledges this very thing when he gets to what I think is his real complaint:
(W)henever an Australian Christian leader speaks out on industrial relations, Iraq or Guantanamo Bay, they are publicly attacked by Howard, Peter Costello, Alexander Downer, Kevin Andrews and the rest of the crew.
Good heavens, when a bishop now preaches Left politics, the wicked Howard Government dares answer back.
Even worse, moans Rudd, we now hear from some Christians who aren’t as far to the Left as their leaders.
(M)uch of this social justice tradition of Christianity has been drowned out by a new brand of political Christianity which is being systematically exploited in Republican America and John Howard’s Australia.
All Rudd’s complaint really comes down to is that conservative Christians should just shut up and leave the politics to their Leftist leaders. The cultural elite must not be challenged.
Get used to it, Kevin.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/rudds_god_votes_labor/
Let’s not speak frankly about why exactly parents at Halls Creek, even with intense coddling by social workers, fail to get their children to go to school:
ReplyDelete(The report) blamed two factors — the autonomy of children in indigenous cultures to make decisions for themselves about their activities, coupled with uninspiring teaching and bullying at the local public school.
Still, blaming the children is at least novel. I guess it’s their own fault if they sniff petrol, too?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/black_children_not_helped_by_white_lies/
Here’s a very good sign:
ReplyDeleteA LEADING adviser on Islam, Ameer Ali, has attacked Muslims who “blindly” follow their faith and fail to question the veracity of the Koran, saying that even Mohammed had “flaws”.
The chairman of John Howard’s Muslim advisory board yesterday warned that Islamists would continue to breed jihadis unless the Koran was “reinterpreted” for today’s society.
It’s obvious, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that saying this would have you (or me, rather) branded as a Muslim-hating racist. Let us hope this is an indication of the start of the Muslim reformation so badly needed.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/koran_needs_reinterpretation_says_muslim_leader/
The latest poll on popular website ninemsn.com.au (Channel Nine’s) asks:
ReplyDeletePoll: Is Joanne Lees innocent regarding Peter Falconio’s death? vote now
I hope Lees sues them for plenty.
UPDATE. That poll question has been pulled. Ninemsn now asks:
Poll: Should the boy who burnt an Australian flag be ‘humiliated’? vote now
An improvement, if not a very big one.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/is_eddie_mcguire_innocent_regarding_peter_falconios_death1/
Adam LeBor charges Kofi Annan:
ReplyDeleteAnnan’s term has also been marked by scandal: from the sexual abuse of women and children in the Congo by UN peacekeepers to the greatest financial scam in history, the UN-administered oil-for-food programme. Arguably, a trial of the UN would be more apt than a leaving party.
The charge sheet would include guarding its own interests over those it supposedly protects; endemic opacity and lack of accountability; obstructing investigations, promoting the inept and marginalising the dedicated…
A more specific charge would be that, under the doctrine of command responsibility, the UN is guilty of war crimes. Broadly speaking, it has three principles: that a commander ordered atrocities to be carried out, that he failed to stop them, despite being able to, or failed to punish those responsible. The case rests on the second, that in Rwanda in 1994, in Srebrenica in 1995 and in Darfur since 2003, the UN knew war crimes were occurring or about to occur, but failed to stop them, despite having the means to do so.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/annan_on_trial/
The Australian Library and Information Association demands the Howard Government drop its ban on pro-terrorism books being stocked in libraries because free inquiry is crucial:
ReplyDeleteThe Council of Australian University Librarians, the Australian Library and Information Association, the Australian Society of Authors and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions say the moves “threaten our freedoms and our capacity to respond to terrorism”.
“If we can’t read what extremists are saying, we can’t understand their thinking or present alternative views, nor can we guard against their threats,” the organisations say in a joint statement.
But the Australian Library and Information Association has also circulated protocols to libraries defending the right of Aboriginal “leaders” to remove from library shelves certain books to protect “the interests of those whose culture is described”:
The primary rights of the owners of a culture must be recognised.
(For more, see the epilogue of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/libraries_for_terrorists/
The Ferrari sports car seized by Purana taskforce detectives during raids on two Melbourne properties allegedly linked Tony Mokbel today adds to a growing list of luxury cars, properties, cash, jewellery and motorcycles that have been frozen or confiscated from the fugitive drug lord’s crime network.
ReplyDeletePolice had already taken one Ferrari – said to be Tony Mokbel’s pride and joy – when the drug boss was first arrested in August 2001. Mokbel also lost a $350,000 Mercedes seized on the same day, along with a luxury apartment.
The rolling up of assets has been a prime target of the Purana taskforce since Mokbel fled overseas in March in the closing stages of his trial on cocaine importing charges. The task has been made difficult by the network of companies, family members and associates used to hold assets.
Today’s Ferrari was taken at the same time as a 30-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of money laundering, asset concealment and dishonesty offences.
Here’s the bag of Mokbel assets so far:
• $1 million in cash and jewellery dug up from a suburban back garden on September 5 at a house belonging to an associate of the Mokbel family.
• A black Mercedes seized on September 5.
• $116,000 in cash seized from Tony Mokbel’s brother and sister-in-law.
• Two Mercedes belonging to Tony Mokbel’s brother and sister-in-law worth a total of $100,000.
• A 2005 Ducati 999s motorcycle worth about $30,000 seized from Tony Mokbel’s brother in May.
• Two 18 carat gold watches seized in May worth about $25,000.
• Three 110cm televisions seized in May worth about $3000 each.
• A 1975 Harley Davidson motorcycle seized in May worth about $8000.
• 1998 Ferrari Roadster seized from Tony Mokbel when he was arrested in August 2001.
• A $350,000 Mercedes-Benz seized in August 2001.
• Eight units in Templestowe worth $2.4 million belonging to Tony Mokbel.
• Shops in Sydney Road, Coburg valued at $3 million
• An apartment in Noosa.
• Properties in Kilmore and Bulleen.
• A $450,000 Boronia restaurant.
But Tony Mokbel will hardly noticed the loss. According to Australian Federal Police, he is believed to have moved $20 million off shore to fund his life on the run before disappearing.
Graphic: Where is the world is Tony?
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/mokbel_asset_haul_grows/
So Tony got remand for a similar reason as what some suggest Hicks should be freed. I understand the issue prejudicial, but is there no protection for the community in circumstances where those arrested are likely to have a custodial sentence?
What makes someone walk into a school and callously shoot dead young girls? Or climb a tower and use a rifle with a telescopic sight to calmly pick off victims at random? Or dress in army fatigues and go out hunting for victims? What drives mass killers as they go out massacring strangers, a phenomenon virtually unknown in western society until 40 years ago but now a regular occurrence, as yesterday’s latest US school shooting shows? One prominent Australian forensic psychiatrist, who has glimpsed inside the minds of five mass murderers, has tried to explain.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Paul Mullen, the director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health, published his findings on five Australian mass killers in 2004. But his study takes on new significance in the light of what’s emerging about Charles Carl Roberts, the man responsible for the Amish school massacre.
Roberts, 37, and a father of three, bears many of the traits Prof Mullen outlined in his study in the international journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law. According to him, mass killers are normally:
• Male.
• Under 40 years of age.
• Socially isolated without intimate or close relationships.
• Unemployed, or in casual or marginal work.
• Bullied and/or isolated as a child.
• Fascinated with weapons and usually a collector of guns.
• Have no history antisocial, criminal, and specifically interpersonal violence.
• Have no prior contact with the mental health services or a diagnosis of serious mental disorder.
• Make no threats, or overt or covert statements that they intend to commit a massacre.
• Have no significant history of substance abuse.
• Show rigidity and/or marked obsessional traits.
• Are suspicious and may have think they have been persecuted.
• Have a tendency to resentment with intrusive ruminations about previous experiences of humiliation and injury.
• Prone to daydreaming, particularly about acts of individual, and usually murderous, heroism and of revenge against a rejecting and uncaring world.
• Have narcissistic and grandiose traits, which emerge in a profound sense of entitlement and over-weaning self-righteousness.
• Intend to kill as many people as possible then to die among their victims.
• Adopt an existing script for murder suicide that they have acquired from reading about or seeing it in news and dramas.
Roberts was male truck driver aged under 40; had no prior criminal record; left a suicide note saying he was seeking revenge for some persecution he suffered as a child; was described as a normal loving husband and father but had been recently introverted and intense; showed no indications of what he was planning; had a weapon collection that included a handgun, shotgun, rifle, stun gun and two knives; and had carefully planned his attack and his own suicide.
“It is clear to us that he did a great deal of planning…,” Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said. “He came here prepared. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. It appears he did a lot of time in planning and intended to harm these kids and intended to harm himself.”
Mass killings, such as yesterday’s school shootings and the Port Arthur and Hoddle St massacres in Australia, were virtually unknown in western society prior to the Texas University shootings in 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed a tower and shot dead 13 people and wounded 34 more. Since then, according to Prof Mullen, what he terms “autogenic” or self-generated massacres have become increasingly frequent and tend to occur in clusters.
“Distressing though it may be to contemplate, there are angry despairing young men who would welcome a death that brings them fame together with an aura of power and evil, and in which they pay back the uncaring world for rejection and humiliation,” he says.
.“Vengeance usually directed against society at large is part of the motivation. Above all, however, this form of mass killing is a script for suicide; but a suicide accompanied by highly public infamy, and by a vengeance that proclaims their power.”
Such killers want to “go down in a blaze of glory” and often borrow their script from previous massacres and from films glorifying violent revenge, such as Rambo and Taxi Driver.
According to Prof Mullen, one of the Australian mass killers he dealt with admitted that, when the day arrived that he had designated for his death and the deaths of as many others as he could manage, he no longer felt his situation justified such a drastic response. “Nevertheless, he proceeded because he had marked the calendar, the day had come, and he felt obliged to complete the task.”
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/inside_the_mind_of_a_mass_killer
Other than age, narcisism and weapons, I might qualify.
So what would be my script?
I love Brazil, or The Fisher King. I’m too old to be Jesus or a disciple .. I suspect the most subversive thing I can do is to implement government policy through public service .. and watch people suffer.
===
Truth be told, one particular element not explicitly stated as being one of those killers is a total abrogation of personal responsibility or complete lack of empathy. These killers do not achieve anything significant, as media interest suggests, but I suppose infamy is fame, of a type.
I wont say the worst thing I might do to another human being is too vote them out of office and make them work. I’m not convinced my state government are human beings.