===
Not just a recession: Australia's economy 'buggered'
A leading economic forecaster has warned its clients to batten down the hatches for the sharpest deceleration Australia's economy has ever experienced....
===
Obama raring to go as inauguration looms
Barack Obama's team has vowed to hit the ground running on the recession-hit economy and Iraq as a concert kicked off a three-day inauguration party....-But where will they run too? - ed.
===
Gaza war 'great victory' for Palestinians: Hamas
Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniya said the Gaza war with Israel amounted to a "great victory" for the Palestinians, in a televised speech on Sunday.... - shows how much Hamas cares for Palestinian peoples - ed.
===
Brewers dodge alcopop tax, target teens
One of the world's biggest alcohol companies has created a new drink aimed at teenagers that avoids the Rudd government's alcopops tax....
===
Driver, 15, rams police car with Mercedes
A police car has been rammed by a stolen car during a high-speed pursuit in Sydney's west. The driver was just 15-years-old....
===
Call for bigger warnings on cigarette packets
A key anti-smoking group has called for bigger warnings on cigarette packets, after finding nearly half of smokers do not know their habit causes lung cancer....
===
Greenhouse gas or just a load of hot air
Piers Akerman
THE rift between members of the federal National Party and the federal Liberal Party over strategy to deal with the Rudd Labor Government’s global warming policy should not be allowed to destroy the Coalition’s electoral hopes.
===
NAZIS NEEDED
Tim Blair
Via Nilk, images of yesterday’s Hamas rally in Melbourne:
The Age‘s elevated shot doesn’t reveal such fascinating detail. AAP merely describes people “carrying placards calling for an end to what was described as a ‘massacre’”. Meanwhile, in Paris:
Vandals hurled Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in a Paris suburb yesterday in the latest outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France since the start of Israel’s Gaza offensive …
Home to Europe’s biggest Muslim and Jewish populations, France has recorded more than 55 anti-Semitic incidents since Israel launched its Gaza offensive last month, drawing appeals for calm from politicians and religious leaders. Three other synagogues have been firebombed in the past two weeks and vandals have sprayed anti-Israeli graffiti on at least two other Jewish places of worship.
Jews haven’t been so vilified since Islamists attacked the US on 9/11.
===
GREEN SOLUTIONS
Tim Blair
Compact fluorescent light bulbs that melt and burn, wind turbines that generate no power, energy recovery systems that zap mechanics, clean technology that creates toxins, hybrids that hate winter, canvas shopping bags that are made from polypropylene, biodiesel that clogs in cold weather … and now a solar-powered toilet that can’t handle snow:
The winter storm knocked out the prototype public toilet that was unveiled with great fanfare just a few weeks ago …
Snow covered the restroom’s roof-mounted solar panels, cutting off the flow of power to the storage batteries, which were completely drained and damaged.
Toliets aren’t a complicated or recent invention. It takes particular genius to build one that doesn’t work.
===
WE HAVE PAID FOR ISRAEL’S FAILURE
Tim Blair
Melbourne Age columnist and Asian business expert Michael Backman unloads on evil Israel:
If the residents of Bendigo started firing rockets into Melbourne you would expect Melbourne to retaliate. But what must Melbourne have done to Bendigo to make them do such a thing?
Could be any number of root causes, really. Maybe someone in Melbourne drew cartoons that were disrespectful of Bendigo prophet Colleen Hewitt. Or perhaps Bendigo’s charter simply demands Melbourne’s obliteration.
At his leisure, Mr Backman considers the Problem of the Jew
Backman – this ran in the business pages, by the way – blames Israel for everything:
Israel’s utter inability to transform the Palestinians from enemies into friends has imposed big costs on us all. We have paid for Israel’s failure with bombs on London public transport, bombs in bars in Bali, and even the loss of the World Trade Centre towers in New York.
Do read the entire piece, which also includes the claim that “young Israelis are rude, arrogant, and argue over trifling amounts of money even though they clearly have means.”
===
SURVIVORS
Tim Blair
Australia’s Aborigines have survived here for 40,000 years or more, yet according to Reuters they are now threatened by a teensy temperature increase:
Aborigines will feel the impact of climate warming more than other Australians, with their remote outback homes and generally poor health making them particularly vulnerable, a report said today.
A reasonable case could be made that Australian Aborigines are the toughest people on earth; you can’t live through four hundred centuries of “climate change”, plus more recent trauma (introduced European diseases and 19th century mass killings) without a certain resilience. As it happens, two-thirds of Aborigines now live in urban areas, yet the cited report is all nature-boy noble-savagey:
“If the community-owned country (land) becomes ‘sick’ through environmental degradation, climate impacts, or inability of the traditional owners to fulfil cultural obligations through ongoing management and habitation of their land, the people of that land will feel this ‘sickness’ themselves,” it said.
They are but simple creatures, who know not the ways of modernity. They commune with the rocks and the trees. In other indigenous news, Canadian Inuits have slapped down claims that polar bears are endangered:
On one side, researchers told federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice that the bears could be virtually extinct in a century. On the other, Inuit leaders spoke of bear populations doubling over the past 50 years, proliferating to the point of becoming a pest in many northern communities.
“Forty or 50 years ago, our camping areas were not invaded by these animals,” said Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of Wildlife for Nunavut Tunngavik “The current population is stable. It is not constructive to exaggerate that situation.”
Well, that depends on one’s aim:
“They are using the polar bear as a tool, a tool to fight climate change,” said Harry Flaherty, chair of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.
“They shouldn’t do that. The polar bear will survive. It has been surviving for thousands of years.”
===
BONUS GAMED
Tim Blair
A certain profession isn’t the only beneficiary of Kevin Rudd’s holiday handout:
Poker machines won out with the Federal Government’s stimulus package, which has been blamed for a $15 million boost in revenue in Queensland.
More than $167 million was spent playing poker machines in December – 10 per cent above the previous month’s $152 million.
It was also significantly higher than for the same period in 2007.
All we need now is a report that pensioners bought crack with their bonus cash and we’ll have all the major vices covered.
===
FAN FISKED
Tim Blair
Robert Fisk, of all people, warns against exaggeration:
Pro-Palestinian marchers should think twice before they start waffling about genocide when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem once shook Hitler’s hand and said – in Berlin on 2 November 1943, to be precise – “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews… They have definitely solved the Jewish problem.” The Grand Mufti, it need hardly be added, was a Palestinian.
Antony Loewenstein, who is prone to citing genocide claims, will be devastated. Fisk is his hero.
No comments:
Post a Comment