Joe Hockey has been a hard man to spot while the media pack has been urged to "leave Malcolm alone" - by Malcolm Turnbull himself. Follow the latest developments live @ The Punch
Hockey holds talks with Turnbull
A DEFIANT Malcolm Turnbull is refusing to step aside, saying he will contest a leadership spill. - pity he didn't contest the ALP that way - ed.
Man wanted over police coffee ambush
A "SCRUFFY" gunman has shot dead four policeman who met in a cafe to go over paperwork.
Operator's bad first day as trains cut
MELBOURNE'S new train operator has cancelled more than a dozen services in its first morning in the job.
Woman 'thrown on tracks' in rail nightmare
A TEENAGER has been charged with throwing a 19-year-old woman on to tracks after an argument allegedly exploded on an inner-Sydney train platform.
Germany prepares to try suspected Nazi guard John Demjanjuk, in what is expected to be the last time the Holocaust will be played out so fully in a courtroom — and, the last time survivors will testify against a man accused of being one of their families' willing executioners.
Joe Hockey ready to step up
LIBERAL MP Joe Hockey is expected to today announce his leadership ambitions.
Iran to Build 10 Nuke Plants
Tehran reportedly approves plan for 10 uranium facilities in direct defiance of U.N. demands that it cut enrichment
Child murderers to avoid jail
CHILDREN who kill will have their final sentence postponed, sometimes until they are adults, under a radical plan being considered by the State Government.
9,000 Marines to Afghanistan?
Obama's Afghan war strategy to reportedly start with 9,000 Marines being deployed to southern Afghanistan
Obama to push Rudd for more troops
Rudd could be asked to send more Australian troops to Afghanistan tomorrow.
Will Tiger Break His Silence?
Authorities hope to speak to golf star, wife today as reports swirl over what happened before Florida car crash
'Shameful' Schoolies to continue
QUEENSLAND Premier Anna Bligh will not scrap the controversial Schoolies festival.
Australians have the biggest homes
AUSTRALIANS have the world's largest houses, beating traditional champion the US.
Tribute to the fire dead
A MINUTE'S silence will be held for the 173 Black Saturday victims on next year's anniversary.
Egypt's Princess Ferial dead
PRINCESS Ferial, the daughter of Egypt's last reigning monarch, has died after a long cancer fight.
=== Comments ===
TV OR NOT TV
Tim Blair
Following their success with light globes, environmeddlers launch a new assault:
Last week, after two years of debate and study, California became the first state to challenge America’s heretofore unquestioned love affair with its TV set. A state panel established the nation’s first energy-consumption limits for TVs up to 58 inches wide. Regulations for larger sets will be phased in later …Just as well that Australians are buying watchable TVs while they still can:
At least three other states (Washington, Oregon and Massachusetts) and two national governments (Canada and Australia) then said they, too, would consider energy limits.
Retailers and manufacturers are reporting unprecedented demand for flat-screen TVs. There are also forecasts that 2.4 million new TVs will have been sold this year.Sales will spike even further once consumers learn of government plans for CFL TV.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,’’ says Lionel Lee, the chief executive at electronics retailer Bing Lee. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything like this sort of action. Unit sales are up at least 20 per cent.”
===
DECLINE UNHIDDEN
Tim Blair
More data for climate shriekers to discard:
The percentage of Americans who believe global warming is happening has dipped from 80 to 72 percent in the past year …Among Republicans, belief has plunged from 76 to just 54 per cent. This is in line with global doubting trends, which may be driven by concern over stupid green taxes:
Electricity prices in NSW will soar by a staggering 60 per cent over the next three years, adding more than $400 to the average household power bill.A rational, non-suckish federal opposition might find something useful in this.
And Kevin Rudd’s plan to cut greenhouse gases would account for 50 per cent of the increase, according to a secret report with the State Government.
===
BETTERMENT OF NATURE
Tim Blair
Tim Flannery – already in Copenhagen; that jet-beating solar canoe of his is one rapid conveyance – offers his view on business:
Many business leaders seem to think it’s enough to look after your employees and make a profit. That describes perfectly well a criminal syndicate, but not a business.According to Flannery, business folk should ask themselves: “In my daily work do I contribute to the betterment of mankind and nature?” Ask yourself, mate. You’re the one with the local record for frequent flyer points. Readers who themselves run businesses are invited to answer Judge Flannery’s question in comments.
===
ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO TREACH
Tim Blair
Jim Treacher enjoys a friendly chat with the global warming evangelist who lives in his head. That chatty skull-dweller sounds much like the warmy who bailed me up at Saturday night’s party. Also from Treacher, tweets worth repeating:
• In the ‘80s, Tipper Gore wanted to tell us which music to listen to. 25 years later, her husband wants to tell us how to do everything else.===
• So Tiger Woods’ wife found out he was cheating on her & went after him with a golf club? Good thing he’s not a baseball player.
• Scientists really can work miracles. They turned a javelin into a hockey stick and Al Gore into a superstar.
• Climategate is a story about computer hacking in much the same way Watergate was a story about parking garages.
• Remember when reporters provided their audience with news, not the other way around?
SOLDIER DRONED
Tim Blair
Professional war protester Cindy Sheehan demonstrates her famous support for the troops. The fun kicks in at about 1.50. These days Sheehan is opposed to unmanned drones, which would describe most of her Code Pink associates.
===
Hockey prepares. I’d guess it’s on
Andrew Bolt
Samantha Maiden:
IN a strong sign he is about to throw his hat into the Liberal leadership ring Joe Hockey is holding talks at his Sydney home with Peter Dutton.===
Mr Dutton is viewed as a potential candidate for the deputy Liberal leader’s spot. The pair arrived in separate cars today and made no comment as they entered the Hockey family home.
SLOW TIMES
Tim Blair
“What should we make of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who apparently killed 13 innocent people at Fort Hood?” asks Thomas Friedman. He’s a New York Times columnist, so he takes a while longer than most of us to work things out:
Here’s my take: Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by “The Narrative.”By “The Narrative”, Friedman means the general anti-Western, anti-democratic sentiment clung to throughout the Arab-Muslim world:
This narrative suits Arab governments. It allows them to deflect onto America all of their people’s grievances over why their countries are falling behind. And it suits Al Qaeda, which doesn’t need much organization anymore — just push out The Narrative over the Web and satellite TV, let it heat up humiliated, frustrated or socially alienated Muslim males, and one or two will open fire on their own. See: Major Hasan.So much for the “pre-traumatic shock” theory and other Islam-dodging excuses offered in the wake of Hasan’s slaughter. At the NYT, it takes nearly an entire month for a fellow’s blindingly obvious motives to become clear. Fog lifted, Friedman ends with a request that Barack Obama deliver this speech to an Islamic audience:
Why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.The first of 688 reader responses to Friedman’s piece: “Pretty ironic that Tom Friedman would complain about The Narrative in a paper that is guilty as any other for promoting it.”
===
STARVED OF COVERAGE
Tim Blair
Fairfax environment writer Tom Arup reports:
On the lawns of Parliament house there has been a small tent where a man is fasting for climate change. I heard him on the radio early last week. He was described by the host as a 29-year old Melbourne University student. ‘‘29-year old student!’’ I proclaimed in my head at the time, following the thought up with something conservative about getting a job.Paul Connor is putting the “star” into “starvation”. Our favourite Gaia zombie is now 23 days into his chompless protest:
The faster’s marketing person has been hassling me about a story for two weeks. I am amazed that even fasters have media representation.
Viewers may be concerned at Connor’s health, given how rambling and disjointed he seems (also, he’s reading Peter Singer). But he sounded exactly the same before he put the cutlery away.
===
Turnbull out by tomorrow
Andrew Bolt
Hockey will be the Opposition Leader tomorrow:
MALCOLM Turnbull has declared he will contest the Liberal leadership after Joe Hockey told him today he would seek the top job.
===
Swiss cut minarets down to size
Andrew Bolt
Europe is pushing back:
Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets on Sunday, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise vote that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population....===
The referendum by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party labeled minarets as symbols of rising Muslim political power that could one day transform Switzerland into an Islamic nation. The initiative was approved 57.5 to 42.5 per cent by some 2.67 million voters. Only four of the 26 cantons or states opposed the initiative, granting the double approval that makes it part of the Swiss constitution.
Muslims comprise about six per cent of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people…
“The minaret is a sign of political power and demand, comparable with whole-body covering by the burqa, tolerance of forced marriage and genital mutilation of girls,” the sponsors said.
You’ll pay - and for what?
Andrew Bolt
Labor will pay for this great green tax on everything:
ELECTRICITY prices in NSW will soar by a staggering 60 per cent over the next three years, adding more than $400 to the average household power bill.Remember that this is just a downpayment on the true cost of this mad tax. You won’t just pay higher power prices. You will also pay more for everything that needed electricity, too - processed foods, clothes, cars, steel, concrete, train rides… You’ll need to pay more for the people who will lose their jobs because of this tax. You’ll pay more for the uneconomic “green” power we’ll be forced to use instead of cheap coal-fired power. You’ll pay for the gassy companies demanding compensation for going broke. You’ll pay for the billions Kevin Rudd is spending overseas to bribe pooer countries to cut gases, too.
And Kevin Rudd’s plan to cut greenhouse gases would account for 50 per cent of the increase, according to a secret report with the State Government.
In alarming news for struggling families, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal is recommending the hefty rise in power bills from next July… IPART is disputing Canberra’s forecast that an Emissions Trading Scheme will only add 7 per cent to electricity prices in 2011/12, rising to 12 per cent the following year. IPART expects the impact of the CPRS will be closer to 30 per cent by mid-2013.
You’ll pay. I suspect you’ll one day make Labor pay, too. And make the Liberals pay who said this great green tax on everything was a good idea - because they did not dare say no.
===
Climate Gate Corruption
Andrew Bolt
JR Dunn, in a brilliant anaylsis of Climategate and the corruption of the climate science, gives Hockey all the reasons he now desperately needs to change his mind on man-made global warming.
First Dunn lists just some of the incredible “mistakes” made the Climategate scientists and their allies that suggests not just atonishingly sloppy work, but an entire culture of exaggeration and evangelism that is utterly hostile to good science:
===
What’s burning is not the planet, but those eyes
Andrew Bolt
Green activist and actor Ed Begley Jr just can’t cope with the revelations in the Climategate emails. Facts meet faith and ... well, stand back, or be splattered by exploding brain matter.
Wait until these guys read the Climategate emails. They’ll sure have something to cry over then:
===
Making Sweden warmer
Andrew Bolt
We’ve already seen serious questions raised about the way a warming rise was calculated in New Zealand. Willis Eschenbach now describes how the Climategate scientists misled Sweden’s Professor Wibjorn Karlen about the temperatures over Nordic countries, too, when he asked how the IPCC had produced graphics like these for northern Europe:
What puzzled Karlen was that the data he was looking at for Nordic countries in fact showed no warming above what had been witnessed in the 1930s:
Wrote Karlen to the Climategate scientists:
It is hard to find evidence of a drastic warming of the Arctic. It is also difficult to find evidence of a drastic warming outside urban areas in a large part of the world outside Europe. However the increase in temperature in Central Europe may be because the whole area is urbanized (see e.g. Bidwell, T., 2004: Scotobiology – the biology of darkness. Global change News Letter No. 58 June, 2004).Eschenbach then describes the snow job.
So, I find it necessary to object to the talk about a scaring temperature increase because of increased human release of CO2. In fact, the warming seems to be limited to densely populated areas.
UPDATE
Remember this graph produced by Climategate scientist Michael Mann - reproduced in the IPCC report that he and other Climategate scientists also co-authored - which claimed to prove it had never been hotter?
That, too, was a fake, first exposed not by peer review but by a retired mining executive, whose findings were confirned by an inquiry commissioned by a committee of the US Congress, as Bishop Hill describes in his brilliant history of the scandal.
But here is a fascinating interactive graph that summarises the overwhelming evidence that the world was hotter just 800 years ago. Click here for the mouseover interaction feature that calls up each graph:
UPDATE 2
London Imperial College researcher Michael Schrage in the Financial Times sums up the meaning of the scandal:
Dubbed “climate-gate” by global warming sceptics, the most outrageous East Anglia email excerpts appear to suggest respected scientists misleadingly manipulated data and suppressed legitimate argument in peer-reviewed journals.
These claims are forcefully denied, but the correspondents do little to enhance confidence in either the integrity or the professionalism of the university’s climatologists. What is more, there are no denials around the researchers’ repeated efforts to avoid meaningful compliance with several requests under the UK Freedom of Information Act to gain access to their working methods. Indeed, researchers were asked to delete and destroy emails. Secrecy, not privacy, is at the rotten heart of this bad behavior by ostensibly good scientists.
Why should research funding institutions and taxpayers fund scientists who deliberately delay, obfuscate and deny open access to their research? Why should scientific journals publish peer-reviewed research where the submitting scientists have not made every reasonable effort to make their work – from raw data to sophisticated computer simulations – as transparent and accessible as possible? Why should responsible policymakers in America, Europe, Asia and Latin America make decisions affecting people’s health, wealth and future based on opaque and inaccessible science?
===
Flannery drowns in contradictions
Andrew Bolt
Professional warming alarmist Tim Flannery is now in Copenhagen, having yet again taken a jet that belches the gases he wants the rest of us to slash. And he’s furious about Climategate:
Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, said the timing of the theft was suspicious. ‘’It reveals the depth to which climate sceptics will go to influence the course of events.’’Speaking of the depths to which some people sink to influence others, how about Flannery’s record of trying to scare people with the most apocalyptic claims about global warming:
The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.So how has that scare panned out?
Hmm. About as accurate as his predictions that Sydney and Brisbane could be out of water, too, and the Arctic out of ice. Why do people believe a single word this shameless scare-merchant says?
If he had any honor he might heed the implications of his admission on the ABC last week:
In the last few years, were there hasn’t been a continuation of that warming trend, we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate, so there are some things we don’t understand… These people (climate scientists) work with models, computer modelling, when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem, that’s when science gets engaged. What Kevin Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, is saying is, “We have to get on our horses and find out what we don’t know about the system, we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it”.UPDATE
Christopher Booker explains the three greatest scandals so far in Climategate, and concludes:
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
Tim Flannery, start backpedalling fast, because you will be one who will be held to account.
UPDATE 2
Dr David Evans matches the timing of the temperature rise - and then fall - against the timing of the rise in carbon dioxide emissions. The results immediately cast doubt, he says, on the theory that’s man’s gases cause global warming.
UPDATE 3
Remembering John Daly, the gifted and prescient Tasmanian sceptic whose death was such cheering news to Climategate ringleader Phil Jones.
===
Is all of her indigenous?
Andrew Bolt
Exactly what makes Cattermole “indigenous” and me not?
PERTH model Emily Cattermole is on the way to becoming Australia’s first indigenous supermodel after signing with elite American modelling agency Ford.
What makes all the difference is a grandparent:
A model since the age of 14, Cattermole is the granddaughter of former WA politician Ernie Bridge, who was the first Aboriginal political minister in Australia.Here’s Ernie:
Could we stop obsessing about racial differences almost invisible to the naked eye, and almost washed out by generations of mixed ancestry? It makes us look a little bit, well, racist.
No comments:
Post a Comment