Headlines Friday 22nd August

And to drink, an Aboriginal Beaujolais
Andrew Bolt
The reinvention of Aboriginal “traditions” - and not just history - grows steadily more bizarre. Here the chief executive officer of Melbourne’s Bayside Council responds to an inquiry from a resident puzzled by the “much promoted indigenous afternoon tea” the council promised for Reconciliation Week:

Indigenous food was provided and included chicken and mushroom pies, Kangaroo and burgundy pies, emu and vegetable pies.
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Katter is worried that someone has said something stupid and it wasn't him, for awhile.

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WARMING KILLS CONTENT
Tim Blair
The excitement builds and builds and builds over the impending broadcast of global warming drama Scorched:
www.scorched.tv invites audiences to contribute their own content—but instead of providing the ability to automatically upload it, asks them to create, and then send, a blog link, text, You Tube or Blip.tv embed code.
So, how many fans have contributed?
Sadly, it appears no one (apart from the main production crew) has yet done so.
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WATCH THE EYES
Tim Blair
Crucial information:
Liars blink less frequently than normal during the lie, and then speed up to around eight times faster than usual afterwards.
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PREZ PRAISED
Tim Blair
Not everybody hates him:
The American beach volleyball team of Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor defeated the Chinese team of Jie Wang and Jia Tian 2-0 to complete a perfect Olympic tournament and win their second consecutive gold medal.
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INDEPENDENT THINKERS TOLD
Tim Blair
Rosemary Cameron, director of the Melbourne Writers Festival, emails an instruction to senior festerers:
Dear MWF08 Festival Chairs …

Could you please consider working the following sentence into your opening remarks in your MWF events:

This year’s Melbourne Writers Festival celebrates Melbourne’s new status as a UNESCO City of Literature, second in the world to Edinburgh. This designation recognises Melbourne rich literary heritage and strong contemporary literary culture.
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THIS NEVER HAPPENED IN GERMANY
Tim Blair
Can we fall asleep during a Barack Obama speech? Yes we can!
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MORRIS ON THE BOARD
Tim Blair
Premier Morris Iemma, the memma for Lakemma, was delighted yesterday at Sydney’s inclusion in a world Monopoly game.

Securing a tiny coloured square on a piece of cardboard represents a stunning strategic coup for the Premier, and he was determined to make the most of it.

“Now the world game of Monopoly—no longer for one country or one city but the World Edition of Monopoly—and there is Sydney up there with New York and London, and how appropriate because that’s the company that we’re in,” the Premier said.
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NON-RETURN RETURN
Tim Blair
Phil Coorey reports:
The Education Minister, Julia Gillard, has in recent days reinforced Labor’s election pledge that “there would not be a return to compulsory student unionism”.
But:
The Rudd Government is set to reintroduce compulsory fees for university students …
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IF ONLY HE COULD GET HIS MESSAGE OUT
Tim Blair
McCain rises, Obama sinks:
In a sharp turnaround, Republican John McCain has opened a 5-point lead on Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential race and is seen as a stronger manager of the economy, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.
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NO ELECTRICITY FOR YOU
Tim Blair
“There will indeed be costs to society as we try to ward off further environmental damage,” writes SMH anticarbonite Annette Sampson. “But there will also be opportunities, especially for those who recognise the changes and plan ahead.”
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A LITTLE RESEARCH
Tim Blair
A Daily Kos gabbler accuses John McCain of stealing a prison story from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
It just sounded so fake and so contrived, so I did a little research about it … and here is what I found. A story about Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his times in the Soviet Gulags …
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DOWN WITH MYSTICS
Tim Blair
“Mysticism and superstition are making a comeback,” writes Labor minister Craig Emerson:
Twenty-first century mysticism and superstition is finding expression in the big environmental debates. Deep green extremists yearn for a return to a pre-industrial society, before the Enlightenment when faith and dogma prevailed over rational thinking and evidence-based science. In this gentle agrarian society (absent environmentally destructive hard-hoofed farm animals), human beings are tolerated, as long as they leave no carbon footprint.
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You must be mad to think it’s legit
Andrew Bolt
Jail seems harsh, but I agree it takes two shady people to complete the usual Nigerian scam:

THE Nigerian high commissioner says people who are ripped off by so-called Nigerian scams are just as guilty as the fraudsters and should be jailed.
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If true, China is in trouble
Andrew Bolt
All very murky, at best. If there’s some truth to it, though, all hell will soon break loose in the media coverage from Beijing:

Chinese troops fired on Tibetan protesters this week, as Beijing hosted the Olympics, and 400 people have been killed since unrest erupted in March, the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying in an interview published Thursday.
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First, they must be taught to want to work
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s decision to import 25,000 fruitpickers from the Pacific rather than get the job done by unemployed Aborigines is at least starting a debate we need to have about the desperate need to instill a work ethic among our Aboriginal young:

INDIGENOUS leader Noel Pearson has urged the Rudd Government to scrap the dole to Aborigines under the age of 21, saying the generous payments trapped people in a cycle of welfare.
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The only moral man is one who backs Leslie
Andrew Bolt
It’s hard to believe at times that Leslie Cannold really is a professional ethicist. Here’s one such time, where she says men have no right to speak on abortion, unless, of course, they support Cannold’s view:

Men lack moral standing in the abortion debate — indeed are guilty of moral arrogance — when they push for control over a procedure they’ll never have to have because they can’t get pregnant. But when men implicitly acknowledge their lesser standing by raising their voices in support of laws that take away power from their own sex to give it to women, they can feel confident they are doing the right thing.
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A terrorist? Pray tell
Andrew Bolt
MI5 sees no pattern at all to British terrorists:

MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation… They are mostly British nationals, not illegal immigrants and, far from being Islamist fundamentalists, most are religious novices.

Triumph of the candid
Andrew Bolt
Janet Albrechtsen says Mt Isa Mayor John Malony is making the news just because he’s being - shock - candid:

Candour makes news these days because we are drowning in a blancmange of PC-mumbo jumbo. Molony made two simple observations. First, there are “beauty-disadvantaged women” in the world. Surely we need not quibble over that. Some women are beautiful. Some fall short in the beauty stakes.
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A reasonable bigotry
Andrew Bolt
Australian Arabic Council chairman Roland Jabbour does his little bit for cross-cultural harmony in defending the right of Australian Muslims to watch a Jew-hating TV station run by Hezbollah, an Islamist terrorist group:

Mr Jabbour responded yesterday by saying that anti-Semitism was wrong and that Judaism should be respected, but that Hezbollah was not anti-Semitic.

“We need to make a clear distinction between anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, and between a terrorist organisation and a resistance group,” he said.

He said he would not call Jews the offspring of apes and pigs, but that in the context of “the crimes of the state of Israel” it was reasonable for al-Manar to do so and to portray Israeli rabbis as killing Christian children to use their blood in Passover meals.