Monday, August 18, 2008

Headlines Monday 18th August

Looking tough, but ageing fast
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
Philip Stephens says Russia’s looking as buff as its prime minister, but is ageing like him, too:
Some time ago when the Kremlin distributed photographs of a shirtless Vladimir Putin brandishing a hunting rifle the temptation was to snigger. Another middle-aged man; another mid-life crisis. Alas, this week’s invasion of Georgia has confirmed that the Russian prime minister’s swagger was indeed a metaphor for his government’s foreign policy....
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Died in the dirt
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
I’m astonished by the verdict on the bare facts of this case, and suspect lower standards were demanded of these particular foster-parents for reasons the NT News is consistently too sensitive to mention, as a matter of policy:

A DISTRAUGHT mother tried to confront jurors yesterday after they found two foster carers not guilty of killing her 12-year-old daughter…
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Can’t brook Barry
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
Our friend Professor Barry Brook should be the best-informed man in Australia on global warming, given his impressive titles:

Professor Barry Brook holds the Foundation Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and is Director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide.
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A Russian soldier’s war snaps
Andrew Bolt
Not for the fainthearted. But to let you see what the Russians are up to in Georgia. As photographed by a proud Russian.
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A theatre producer’s abortion
Andrew Bolt
Margot Knight wants the Victorian Government to let women kill their unborn children just months from birth, as she did:

I AM a theatre producer who creates theatre about powerful social issues. I am fortunate. I was able to complete my education and work in my chosen field. I did not have to raise an unwanted child at 20. I had a late abortion, and wonder how my life would have been had I not been supported in that by a wonderful doctor, Bertram Wainer.
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CHILLER THRILLER
Tim Blair
Arctic ice seems to be growing somehow. Meanwhile, local coldening is out of control:
• The strongest cold outbreak in five years came through NSW and Victoria over the weekend.

• On the Gold Coast in the state’s south-east, the mercury dropped to just one degree Celsius at Coolangatta airport at 4am AEST, in the coldest August morning there in 25 years.
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CONCEIVE! BELIEVE! ACHIEVE!
Tim Blair
“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe,” according to Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice’s motto, “it can achieve”.

This has worked out brilliantly for Steph, who evidently conceived and believed that she could win a whole bunch of Olympic gold medals and then went out and achieved exactly that. Good for her.
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CARBON DATING
Tim Blair
Cruising for some carbon neutral love?
Green Speed Dating (or “carbon neutral love") brings together single people, living in the same area, who care about the environment, believe in sustainability, and would like to meet others who feel the same way.
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REJIGGER THE APPLIANCES
Tim Blair
Philadelphia’s Terry Box on sonic finesse:
Lots of people these days see cars as mere appliances that can be rejiggered with an electric motor or a fuel cell and sent puttering down the road like some jazzed-up can opener on wheels. Pardon my French, but that’s a bunch of donkey dust. No appliance sounds like a ‘67 427 Corvette or a new Ferrari F430 or a Hemi-powered ‘32 Ford hot rod.
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BALDWINS BATTLE
Tim Blair
2000: Alec Baldwin says he’ll leave America if Bush wins.
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CLOSE ASPEN, SAVE PLANET
Tim Blair
Ultra-green Aspen has no industrial source of alleged greenhouse gases. Nevertheless:
Aspen’s per capita emissions of greenhouse gases are nearly double that of the United States as a whole.
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COLUMNIST DOWN
Tim Blair
Unhappy news:
I heard Catherine Deveney speak in Daylesford last weekend, and it seems she really IS in the midst of a nervous breakdown or similar. She was talking about visiting a shrink and being diagnosed as possibly bipolar, and having Valium in her bag that she’s trying hard not to take.
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MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION
Tim Blair
The UK Telegraph‘s Christopher Booker considers an election with no warmening debate:
We may look back on the US presidential election of 2008 as a time when history really did reach a watershed; the moment when the nations of the West finally signed up to the most bizarre suicide note the world has ever seen.
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FLANNERY FRIGHTENED
Tim Blair
“As the world hots up,” reports the Guardian, “so does the market for books about climate change.” Nobody knows this better than alarmist profiteer Tim Flannery, to whom the paper turns for guidance:
It all seems to have happened so quickly. Just two years ago we received warning of an imminent disaster - a climatic shift that “could easily be described as hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive”. The Cassandra was no deep green fundamentalist, but James Lovelock ...
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OTTAWA LITTERED
Tim Blair
Top secret Canadian trash:
Canada is again facing an embarrassing security breach after a sensitive government document was found on a rainy Ottawa street.
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A Beijing prisoner sends the IOC a letter
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
David Burchell says jailed Chinese dissident He Depu politely disagrees with the International Olympic Committee’s claims that the Beijing Games has helped to open up China:

He Depu ... was a scientist from a humble background who was emboldened to speak his thoughts because of a temporary political thaw, as a result of which he was able to edit a reform-minded magazine, and to participate in the Democracy Wall. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was arrested for penning a handful of relatively innocuous thoughts, on the internet blog of a recently arrested friend. Like Solzhenitsyn he was held for months in isolation without charge, badly beaten (so that he is now almost deaf), and finally sentenced to eight years in a labour camp…
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Rudd feels the heat on 60 Minutes
Andrew Bolt
A turning point in the debate: 60 Minutes is suddenly not so sure man is heating the world to hell, after all. And it won’t have been reassured by Kevin Rudd’s shaky grasp of the evidence in spruiking his carbon tax:

PM KEVIN RUDD: But economic cost (sic) of not acting is massive, it’s through the roof. Think about food production, the Murray, think about the impact on tourism in QLD, no more Barrier Reef, Kakadu, no more Kakadu. Think about the impact on jobs, it’s huge.
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I predict no ugly fate for the mayor
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
Exactly the kind of dumb comment that should see this mayor ... um, reelected:

There have been calls for Mt Isa Mayor John Molony to apologise for comments in local press that, ”with five blokes to every girl, may I suggest beauty-disadvantaged women should proceed to Mt Isa”.
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More minions wanted
Andrew Bolt
The Bureaucrat in Chief wants more public servants? Why would you be surprised?

Despite Labor’s election promise to cut ministerial staff by 30 per cent, the Government is now preparing to expand staff numbers to meet a growing workload...

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