Friday, December 12, 2008

Headlines Friday 12th December

Go spend what you never earned
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd this week gave Australia’s poor $8.7 billion in free cash, earned mostly by other Australians, and told them to splurge it in the way that explains exactly why some of them are poor in the first place. And they did:

Pokie operators reported a surge in turnover - some by up by 50 per cent - as the bonus payments were delivered across the nation.
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Damning Dodson
Andrew Bolt
A dinosaur roars as his world crumbles:

ABORIGINAL leader Patrick Dodson has used his role as a paid consultant to the Northern Territory Government to launch an extraordinary attack on Cape York leader Noel Pearson, Aboriginal professor Marcia Langton and Labor powerbroker Warren Mundine, telling indigenous people during a government meeting that the trio “don’t recognise you and don’t recognise your culture”.

What Dodson is saying in code is that the trio are Uncle Toms - fake Aborigines - because they don’t live or prop up a stereotype of Aboriginal culture.

But don’t tell Dodson that his stereotype is dysfunctional - which barely begins to describe the living hell to which children at Wadeye, for example, are condemned.
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What you guessed about the Belgium arrests
Andrew Bolt
The hard fact is that you knew the faith and cause of the alleged terrorists arrested in Brussels even before you had to be told:

FOURTEEN suspected al-Qaeda terrorists were detained in Brussels today before Gordon Brown was due to meet EU leaders. The sweep came just hours before a summit brought together the heads of the 27 EU countries in Brussels.

This, in a city with such a large Muslim minority that 13 of the 47 city councilors have Muslim names.

I must point out that most Muslims are undoubtedly peaceful. If that were not so, we’d hear of many, many more incidents. But it’s also clear there are fault lines dividing Belgium’s 500,00 Muslims from the rest of the population:

There are clear differences between the level of education of native Belgians and of Muslims in Belgium..Similarly, the test results for students in Belgian French-speaking classes reveal the low attainment of both children of the first generation of immigrants and of those born outside Belgium, in comparison with that of the native Belgian children… In employment, Muslims are overrepresented in precarious jobs, working in poor conditions for low wages… The employment rate for Moroccans and Turks is three times lower than that of the majority of Belgian population… Muslims are more likely than native Belgians to live in segregated and disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
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Giving the homeless a kick
Andrew Bolt
NOT since Make Poverty History’s free concerts have I seen an event so pointless as the one Melbourne hosted last week.

In fact, the only time the Homeless World Cup of soccer made sense was when 15 of its 500 foreign players refused to go back and lodged claims here for asylum.

It’s the closest this bizarre event ever got to actually giving the homeless a home. And it’s one thing the organisers swore they never saw coming.

Until last week, I thought Make Poverty History was the full measure of these feckless, vain days, in which feeling good is admired more than actually doing it. In which moral heroes are people who demand others do what they do not do themselves.

We saw with those 2005 concerts how our rich young proved their goodness by dancing to their favourite bands and screaming at someone else - the Govm’nt, actually - to go fix Africa’s poverty with a click of its fingers and a sack full of Other People’s Money.

These cyberworld moralists didn’t even pay an entrance fee, they were so cheap.
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Heated claims melt away
Andrew Bolt
Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology, wonders how much more the global warming prophets can get wrong before their credibility melts:

Proponents of human induced warming and climate change told us that an increase in CO2 precedes and causes temperature increases. They were wrong. They told us the late 20th century was the warmest on record. They were wrong. They told us, using the infamous “hockey stick” graph, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) did not exist. They were wrong. They told us global temperatures would increase through 2008 as CO2 increased. They were wrong. They told us Arctic ice would continue to decrease in area through 2008. They were wrong. They told us October 2008 was the second warmest on record. They were wrong. They told us 1998 was the warmest year on record in the US. They were wrong it was 1934. They told us current atmospheric levels of CO2 are the highest on record. They are wrong. They told us pre-industrial atmospheric levels of CO2 were approximately 100 parts per million (ppm) lower than the present 385 ppm. They are wrong. This last is critical because the claim is basic to the argument that humans are causing warming and climate change by increasing the levels of atmospheric CO2 and have throughout the Industrial era. In fact, pre-industrial CO2 levels were about the same as today, but how did they conclude they were lower?
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Blowing gas, not cutting it
Andrew Bolt
Heaven knows what the GAO would conclude about Kevin Rudd’s proposed scheme:
The United States Government Accountability Office has released its report about the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme and international carbon offset scheme, the Clean Development Mechanism. GAO found that the available information on the Emissions Trading Scheme could not substantiate either emissions reductions or clear economic benefits, and that negative economic effects could occur if the European Union further reduced emissions allowances.

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