Tim Blair
9.57pm: All is in readiness. An air of anticipation fills Beijing’s National Stadium, replacing the need for any actual air.
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Horin won’t get off the plane
Andrew Bolt
Impressionable Adele Horin is now convinced that all her flying is an eco-crime:
Australians are born with a passport in their pouch, a New York friend once commented as I arrived for the second visit in as many years… Now the awful news can be ignored no longer. Travel is bad, very bad, for the fate of the planet… A jet is not the brilliant means of transporting us quickly to pleasurable destinations. It is a toxic flying machine.
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Rudd promised to drive down perceptions, not prices
Andrew Bolt
Phillip Hudson describes how Kevin Rudd tricked voters into thinking he’d cut grocery prices:
He told voters he felt their pain and, unlike the other mob, he would do something about it. He made grocery prices a central plank of his attack on the high cost of living. “We have seen a typical family paying 35 per cent more for their fruit and vegetables than they did five years ago,” he said on July 11 last year as he promised an inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to sort it all out. “When families fill up their baskets and trolleys at the local supermarket, they should not have to worry if they are getting a raw deal by inflated grocery prices.”
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To be truthful, Adams is the problem
Andrew Bolt
Phibulous Phil Adams offers the hand of reconciliation:
If McGuinness’s colleagues such as Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman can finally tell the truth, I’m willing to be reconciled.
Small problem, Phil. It’s actually the phibs of someone else that’s the real problem here. I mean, I’d be happy to call it quits, if it wasn’t for some ABC guru’s constant battles to speak the truth about, say, Republicans, a plastic turkey, his popularity, history, his guests, past interviews, the ”stolen generations”, what people actually said, and George Bush.
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Report shows global warming madness now critical
Andrew Bolt
Add this to the list of things caused by global warming:
RISING temperatures are likely to bring increased levels of violence to Melbourne by 2010, and are highly likely to by 2030, a report being considered by the city council finds.
Do these people realise quite how mad they seem? Just think for a second: the world hasn’t warmed for a decade, and at most might warm by, say, 0.1 degrees by 2010. Would anyone actually notice such a minute change on their skin? Would the difference really then make them punch someone?
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A rabble
Andrew Bolt
A sign of a sickness, and yet another we’ll ignore:
A massive brawl at a Sydney junior rugby league game has led to the arrest of a group of teenagers, some of whom have also been charged with robbery offences. Police say up to 80 players and spectators were involved in the incident on Saturday afternoon at an under-15s match in Guildford.
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Art is not artless
Andrew Bolt
ABC art critic Andrew Frost says it’s wrong to judge art by its content as well as form, and attacks another critic as “biased” for doing so:
It’s quite a natural state for any critic whose credibility is staked on the dubious notion that art must be judged on quality and virtue alone...Recent art controversies have been largely fuelled by people without much of a clue about what contemporary art is about. The spectacle of Bill Henson’s good name being dragged through the mud, Mike Parr’s dead chickens “shock” at the Biennale, the naked kid on the front of Art Monthly, all of these events of the recent past are reflective of a view that believes that art’s only role is to be beautiful while reinforcing archly conservative notions of good taste and decorum.
What’s curious is that this criticism (which does not even state fairly the position it seeks to counter) is made of a judge for a prize for religious art. What’s sad is that this oh-so fashionable morals-free stand leaves critics like Frost unable to criticise the sexualisation and exploitation of even pre-pubescent children, or to differentiate between babble and profundity, between dead chickens and deep insight. They are like people judging conversation only by the grammar or raised voices.
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PETA: Killing a man no worse than killing chickens
Andrew Bolt
PETA, the animal rights extremists, sees a cute marketing opportunity in the beheading of a passenger in a bus:
An animal rights group has tried – and failed – to run a newspaper ad comparing the beheading of a passenger on a Greyhound bus last week to the treatment of animals by the meat industry.
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Leftist blog users are ruder
Andrew Bolt
Matthew Sheffield’s findings come as absolutely no surprise, especially given the language of the Left on this blog and on others:
Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes…
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The danger of giving in is greater
Andrew Bolt
Gutless:
Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha’s life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of “The Jewel of Medina”—a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet’s harem.
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Jeering what they should applaud
Andrew Bolt
Bush attacks:
President Bush has issued a blunt condemnation of Beijing’s repression of its people on the eve of the Olympics, just as three American Christians were arrested for protesting for religious freedom in Tiananmen Square.
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If it were on sale, there would be no buyers
Andrew Bolt
Veteran shopper and political commentator Dennis Shanahan reviews Kevin Rudd’s expensive GroceryChoice:
it’s as useless as a three-wheeled shopping trolley
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Productivity Commission warns Rudd
Andrew Bolt
A warning against the new Whitlamism:
A KEY government economic adviser has launched a scathing attack on Labor’s industry policy, railing against a “new protectionist” push for extra assistance and slower tariff cuts for car, textile and other manufacturing industries.
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Better the honest drunk
Andrew Bolt
BEING so smashed behind the wheel you ram two parked cars: a $10,000 fine from your club.
Lying to Eddie about it: the end of your season, and maybe even your future with the team.
And Collingwood is actually right: lying is indeed worse for your club than driving, boozed to the back teeth, down some suburban street.
That’s not saving Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, though. The man now has a permanent gig as a duck in a shooting gallery and is once more taking buckshot, this time over Heath Shaw’s mad drive.
I’m not quite sure what today’s gleeful excuse for pinging Eddie is, having heard him attacked both for being a prima donna and for not fronting the cameras.
But some of the kapowing has been over the alleged mismatch between the fine McGuire imposed on Shaw for drink-driving and the axe he then brought out when he learned Shaw had also lied to him, claiming his passenger as he weaved from the pub may have looked exactly like teammate Last Chance Alan Didak, but was some completely different drunken donkey.
Cue the press conference, before Shaw’s lie was exposed and became a bigger car crash than the one he was apologising for:
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Preparing the Green Archipelago
Andrew Bolt
ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning writer who died this week, spotted the danger back when it was called communism.
Mind you, it took no great brains to see evil in an ideology that was trying to destroy him.
After all, this Russian war hero had been arrested on wild charges of slandering Stalin and sent to the Gulag, where millions had died.
But we should be warned. When Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago in English from 1974, warning of the horrors of the Soviet system he’d somehow survived, his revelations struck many intellectuals in the West like a clap of thunder.
What? Nice communism, meant to help people, actually slaughtered them in their millions? Who’d have thought?
Well, not them. And which of our intellectuals can see now the newest form of the same totalitarian instinct?
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There is no real Obama
Andrew Bolt
Conservative Tim Montgomerie is challenged to list five good things about Barack Obama. He does his honest best, and puts a case that would be endorsed by many. But, interestingly, the five best arguments for Obama are about symbolism or are based on the assumption that Obama has no core values.
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WHOLE RACE ROPED
Tim Blair
Balinese jewelry exporter Ketut Sudra has his say on global warming:
“Global warming is undoubtedly one of the most important problems of the contemporary world. Global warming defies all of the world’s traditional boundaries, including geographical, racial, gender and religious boundaries. Global warming has bound the whole human race with a universal rope of fear and anxiety,” Sudra said.
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DO YOUR WORST, ENGLANDERS
Tim Blair
A furious rivalry threatens to undermine Olympic ideals of friendliness and hugs. Good.
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ROUND UP ALL DISSIDENTS
Tim Blair
Here tonight at 8.08pm Beijing time, or 10.08pm Sydney time (and whatever time it will be in your particular province): live blogging the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Some folks won’t be turning up:
A Muslim separatist group in China has made a new video threat against the Beijing Olympics, warning Muslims to keep their children away from the Games, a US group that monitors extremists says.
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Mao wiped out in Beijing
Andrew Bolt
Missing from the Beijing Games’ opening ceremony? Any mention of Mao or Marx.
In fact, the ceremony only confirmed the utter defeat of the monster and his muse, whatever lipservice the Chinese regime may still pay to both in internal propaganda to the men who bequeathed to them their authoritarian state.
While there was not a single tribute paid to Mao or the communist revolution, there was a lavish glorifying of China’s venerable past, and especially of Confucius, who in fact took the role in the ceremony that Mao would have taken just 25 years ago.
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Like they report global warming
Andrew Bolt
You aren’t biased at the ABC if you simply didn’t try hard enough to find what you hoped not to see:
THE ABC has cleared itself of any hint of bias in its treatment of the apology to the Stolen Generations, despite giving commentators who supported the apology more than four times the weight of those who opposed it… Mr Chadwick says the disparities are acceptable, because online editors tried, but failed, to commission more opinion pieces supportive of John Howard’s position on the apology and the intervention, and because the “tide of public opinion” was running strongly against the former prime minister.
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What good are drugs? Case #1: Amy Winehouse
Andrew Bolt
That’s the body. As for the mind...
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Blogs blamed
Andrew Bolt
You readers are starting to rock the Church of the Global Warming Apocalypse.
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Edwards unzips
Andrew Bolt
Democrat presidential contender and serial preener John Edwards confirms at last that he’s suffered from ”self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism”. The only quarrel he’d pick with us now is that he’d say he’s changed.
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