THE BBC has been plunged into a new controversy after Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson used the most offensive swear word in the English language to describe British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in front of a studio audience. Clarkson described Mr Brown as "a c--t" during the show's recording on Wednesday night. Although some in the audience reportedly burst out laughing at his comments, BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow later gave Clarkson a "dressing down" in front of crew, the Daily Mail reports.
PM takes a swipe at The Australian
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has singled out The Australian newspaper for the criticism it has published this year of his first essay.
No financial gain without pain: Tanner
Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner has warned we will feel the pinch of government budget cutbacks......
Lockerbie bomber seeks release
THE man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, which killed 270 people, has appealed to be freed on compassionate grounds.
Children tried to escape their killer
BLOOD trail marks discovered inside the bedroom of two young boys indicate that they may have tried to escape their killer.
Daily pill may cure blood cancer
BLOOD cancer patients could soon take a daily pill to treat the condition which has traditionally given sufferers a survival time of just a few years.
Unions set for jobs stoush with Labor
ACTU chief Jeff Lawrence insists unions won't go quiet at the Labor conference this week....
I'll do what I want with my money: Neale
British backpacker Jamie Neale has told his critics: "I'll do what I like with my money."
Australian skiier killed in NZ avalanche
The oldest son of a Melbourne real estate agent caught in a deadly avalanche that claimed the life of a fellow Australian in New Zealand has spoken of his family's relief.
Man swims to safety, two drown
A man swam for up to a kilometre to reach safety when his fishing boat capsized near a south Sydney beach in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Wife clung to death plunge lawyer
THE wife of a man who fell 17 floors to his death tried desperately to hold on to him as he clung to a balcony railing.
Another jumps fatality at Valley meeting
The death of top jumper Geeorb at Moonee Valley has once again placed Victorian jumps racing in the......
World War I soldier Harry Patch dies, aged 111
HARRY Patch, the last soldier to fight in the trenches of Europe during World War I, has died at the age of 111. Claude Choules, 108, who lives in Perth, Australia, and served with the Royal Navy, now becomes the last surviving veteran of the 1914-18 conflict from the British side.
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Fatwa by any other name is still murder
Piers Akerman
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd says Australian troops are in Afghanistan to defeat terrorism and prevent them prospering closer to home - in Indonesia. - As a teenager I read Rushdie’s Grimus and enjoyed the references to sex, but found nothing spiritual uplifting or otherwise. I’ve not read the Satanic Verses but am sure that that book is in the same vein. It is Science Fiction, much like that which is attributed to Islam these days, by Islamic leaders, terrorists and media apologists. Apparently the Koran offers no guidance on this issue.
Science fiction has not been understood by the general population recently .. probably never has been. Some are in awe of SF’s ability to predict, sometimes wildly wrong, the future. As when Space 1999 radically mistook man’s achievements in space by 1999. Or in War of the World’s failure to predict intelligent life on Mars and radically overstated intelligent life on Earth. On TV, Sci Fi suffers from not being sport in the eighties and not being reality tv in the 90’s to now. Programs like Babylon 5 have come and gone, traversed tv channels from 7 to 9 and sunk to oblivion under the weight of programming which consigned it to midnight broadcasts. Although in UK, at the 7pm Sunday slot, it ruled the ratings for some four or five seasons, gaining an army of young fans who still had the choice of Rugby or Big Brother. McLelland probably missed the Babylon 5 episode in which the Earth administration outlawed ‘unemployment’ as a word, or ‘crime.’ Writer Joe Michael Straczinski brilliantly tore apart the Orwellian ideal. Like all great sci fi, it paralleled the issues we face, when such censorship obscures realities so that actual corruption can not be reported. Like the time the cover up of the death of a school child was not reported because it was not in the public interest .. - ed.
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EVERYBODY ELSE MUST DO SOMETHING
Tim Blair
Global warming worrier Thomas Friedman – “climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago” – obviously isn’t too concerned about his personal contribution to the planet’s demise. Warmies do adore their enormous houses.
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Throw the Jew under the Muslim bus
Andrew Bolt
Jewish American “shock jock” Michael Savage (real name Michael Weiner) hadn’t even planned on going to Britain, so was stunned twice over to find British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announcing he’d been banned as an extremist who’d preached hatred.
But emails released under FOI laws show that the true racist was actually Smith, who’d singled out Savage just because he was white - and not Muslim, like the people whose true extremism was her real worry.
Emails written by Home Office officials privately acknowledged the ban on Mr Savage would provide ‘balance’ to a list dominated by Muslims - and linked the decision to Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband.I hope Savage follows through with his threat of defamation action. For Smith to ban him just to protect herself from bigoted criticism for banning Muslim hate-preachers is not just cowardly and deceitful, but grossly offensive to Savage, who in no way deserved to be listed along with, say, Samir Al Quntar:
The officials admitted their action could look ‘duplicitous’ and cited his ‘homophobia’ as a reason the move would receive public support.
Spent three decades in prison for killing four soldiers and a four-year-old girl. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs and to provoke others to terrorist acts.===
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Friedman’s home truths
Andrew Bolt
Thomas Friedman demands support for global warming laws to make houses more green:
Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs...
Then Friedman, feeling noble after demanding sacrifices from others, drives home to this energy hog:
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Artist says he’ll mock only the peaceful
Andrew Bolt
Several things strike me from this weaseling:
A FILM student is prepared to use an image of the prophet Muhammad to help find two Australians willing to sell their virginity online.
Filmmaker Justin Sisely has already featured the Virgin Mary in his recruitment drive, using posters of her with male genitalia drawn crudely on her forehead in Sydney and Melbourne. He has also used the image online…
Sisely said he was considering using an image of Muhammad in a new series of posters in Brisbane next month, but would not if the move incited violence.
1. Why use the mockery of any faith?
2. The artist is only “considering” using an image of Muhummad as he already used one of Mary. Yeah, right.
3. The artist won’t use an image of Muhammad if it incites violence, which supposes a predisposition for violence in one faith that he presumably dismissed among followers of another.
4. The artist won’t criticise the violent as he will the peaceful, suggesting both that he’s timid and that he’s most likely to attack those who are most peaceable. Strange priorities. An even stranger incitement to answer criticism with violence.
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How did slobby become a class act?
Andrew Bolt
It’s a pity something so obvious needs now to be said - even defended:
TEACHERS have been told to smarten up their sloppy dress standards if they want the respect of students. Chandler Primary School principal Peter Paul, who transformed his school into one of the best in the outer east, claimed teachers needed to look the part in front of their class.
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Teaching us
Andrew Bolt
China’s power will grow dramatically this century, so this is just a taste:
CHINESE hackers have attacked the Melbourne International Film Festival website in an intensifying campaign against the screening of a documentary about exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer. The sabotage comes as festival organisers confirmed federal and state police had been called in, private security guards were being hired to protect film-goers and festival staff, four Chinese-language films had been withdrawn and a long-term Hong Kong-based sponsor had pulled out of the event.
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Spendthrift Rudd rewrites our prudent past
Andrew Bolt
Professor Sinclair Davidson gets stuck on just this third paragraph of Kevin Rudd’s latest long, long essay on how he’s remaking economic theory:
The alternatives were to do nothing or, worse, effectively replicate the Premiers’ Plan of 1931 when governments cut expenditure, thereby compounding the problems created by a private sector already in retreat. The result, of course, was an economic rout, appalling unemployment and a decade of negligible growth through the 1930s.
Funny, thought Davidson. That doesn’t sound remotely like what actually happened:
Okay, so lets look at GDP per capita growth from 1919 to 1939.
You’ll notice the turning point for Australia in 1931 - the same year Rudd claims that ‘an economic rout’ occurred leading to ‘appalling unemployment and a decade of negligible growth through the 1930s’. Let’s now look at unemployment.
The overall unemployment rate peaked in 1931, while unemployment for unionists rose one more year before peaking and the declining. So it seems the Premiers’ plan did not lead to appalling unemployment. There is a substantial and steady improvement in Australian economic conditions after the Premiers’ plan is adopted.
Read on, as Davidson shows that what really failed in the Great Depression was Ruddernomics in the US, not the saner policies in Australia Rudd now trashes:
UPDATE
Whose judgment would you most trust? Self-justifying Rudd’s - or that of Henry Morgenthau, the US Treasury Secretary from 1934 to 1945, who had to deal with the effects of Ruddernomics:
We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get jobs. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.
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A detail to help us better understand
Andrew Bolt
This horrific crime and and despicable betrayal seems incomprehensible - and an indictment of a growing depravity of the US:
ONE of four boys charged with raping an eight-year-old girl in the US state of Arizona last week will be prosecuted as an adult. The details of the case have shocked local officials and provoked outrage across the United States after the parents of the young victim disowned her on grounds she had “shamed” her family.
Unless, perhaps, you look elsewhere for the cultural context left out of this story - context that might have been supplied if, say, Duke University lacrosse players had been involved.
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Different flag, same foe
Andrew Bolt
Antonia Senior says yesterday’s Reds would be today’s Greens, and just as hostile to your freedoms:
My desire to live a free, mundane life is a fundamental cog in our messy, glorious, capitalist democracy. It is built on millions of such small entrenched postitions. Red-filtered, my desires are despicable and bourgeois and must be beaten out of me with indoctrination or force. Green-filtered, my small desires are despicable acts of ecological vandalism. My house is a carbon factory. My desire to travel, to own stuff, to eat meat, to procreate, to heat my house, to shower for a really, really long time; all are evil.
The word evil is used advisedly. Both the green and red positions are infused with overpowering religiosity. Dissenters from the consensus are shunned apostates. Professor Ian Pilmer, the Australian geologist and climate change sceptic, could not find a publisher for his book Heaven and Earth, which questions the orthodoxy about global warming. He is the subject of hate mail and demonstrations. It is entirely immaterial whether he is right or wrong. An environment that stifles his right to a voice is worse than one that is overheating.
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Actually, Adelaide may now be worse
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, July 25, 09 (02:50 pm)
“I’d like to welcome Andrew Bolt to Adelaide,’’ says the MC at the charity-do I’m to about to address. He gloats that I’m a refugee from the “most Left-wing” state of Australia.
We’ll, I would have probably said that was true. But have I really found refuge in South Australia?
In my hotel room two hours earlier I watched a long TV news report on the tragic death of two gum trees near some school. In a state with millions of the things, several dozen of which no doubt had to be cleared in the saner days in which the school was actually built, this grieving strikes me as rather excessive.
Next comes a progress report on the state’s mad ban on plastic bags - one the Productivity Commission warned was a costly and inconvenient fix to a problem much more trivial than alarmists claim.
So how’s it working out? From the news report, it seems retailers are now losing twice as much stock to shoplifters who use the new planet-saving green bags to smuggle out their goodies. The planet may not be better off from the ban, but the crooks of South Australia sure are.
Add that to Premier Mike Rann’s ban on nuclear waste facilities, opposition to nuclear power, promotion of global warming faith, friendship with Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery and ban on GM crops - reimposed last year over the advice of a review committee - and I wonder how much longer I can complain that Victoria is the maddest state of all.
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