Large amounts of prescription drugs found in 32-year-old actress Brittany Murphy's bedroom when paramedics were called to her L.A. home Sunday. - because she was diabetic it may well have been the case that even the drugs did not do it. Diabetic peoples are subject to heart attacks. - ed
If It's Law, Will It Be Legal?
Health care bill could face storm of legal challenges as opponents prepare to challenge its constitutionality
Alabama Rep Defects to GOP
Freshman Congressman Parker Griffith leaving a lump of coal in Dems' stocking as he joins Republican party
White House Warns Defiant Iran
Obama Administration says international community is ready to take 'next steps' if Iran rejects U.N. nuclear deal
A man who received a life-saving heart transplant says he has developed a love of his teen donor's favourite snack food
Fire threat forces evacuations
RESIDENTS told to flee as cyclone triggers a "catastrophic" fire risk and leaves a trail of destruction.
First home buyers downsizing the dream
MCMANSIONS are being shunned as first home buyers think small, while renters feel stuck.
Rock legend loses cancer battle
THE founder of Australian band Rose Tattoo has died after a short battle with liver cancer.
Brittany Murphy's husband tells of terror
BRITTANY Murphy's husband has told of the chaos inside their home the morning she died.
Journo dies after being thrown from window
A JOURNALIST has died after being thrown from the sixth-floor of an apartment with his hands and feet bound with duct tape.
A cyclone's gift of needed rain
TROPICAL Cyclone Laurence caused destruction in northern Western Australia, but its ghost could bring life back to central and western NSW.
Desperate carers dumping relatives
CARERS are dumping relatives because they're so desperate for a break they have nowhere to turn but the public health system.
=== Comments ===
Atheist Group Unveils Anti-God Ad Campaign Ahead of Holidays
This is a RUSH transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," December 21, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Watch "The O'Reilly Factor" weeknights at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET!
LAURA INGRAHAM, GUEST HOST: In the "Culture War" segment tonight: The war on Christmas heads to Sin City. Atheists have taken their anti-God show to Las Vegas and other cities across America with signs featuring creative messages like this: "Heathen's Greetings," and "Yes, Virginia, there is no God." Merry Christmas to you, too.
Joining us now from Madison, Wisconsin, of course is Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which bought the ads. Annie Laurie, how are you doing? Merry Christmas, by the way.
ANNIE LAURIE GAYLOR, FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION: Well, merry winter solstice.
INGRAHAM: You almost said it. Annie Laurie, you almost said Merry Christmas. I caught you. It was coming up — off your tongue.
GAYLOR: No, it's the winter solstice today.
INGRAHAM: OK.
GAYLOR: It is the natural holiday. The reason for the season.
INGRAHAM: That's right, because a lot of people would care about the winter solstice were it not for this thing called Christianity. All right, but let's get back to your ads because I find it fascinating. I was thinking about this when I was getting my make-up on. You know, it's the Christmas season. I was thinking what if a Catholic group bought an ad, spent maybe $3,000 bucks on an ad that displayed the following: I gave your winter solstice true meaning, Jesus. Would that offend you?
===
DEAR PRIME MINISTER
Tim Blair
Little Gracie’s letter to Kevin Rudd.
===
SQUNDLE
Tim Blair
If there were such a thing as a speech-capable squirrel, and if you could imprint every known Marxist text upon that squirrel’s brain, and then if you set the squirrel on fire, it might sound something like Guy Rundle:
Invoking communism as the positive correlate of a brilliant and constantly challenging critical reading of the current world inevitably leads to questions as to what its positive contents might be – indeed one of the routines at the Idea of Communism conference became a sort of peek-a-boo, whereby a member of the audience would get up and ask whether Nepal/Chiapas/Bolivia constituted a new communism-in-embryo, only to have Badiou or Žižek shake their heads slowly, as if to say, ‘you still haven’t got this “idea” thing, have you?’. What positive content there is seems to rely heavily on the Negri/Hardt – and more Hardt than Negri – notions of the common, as neither public nor private. That’s useful in analysing the process of increasingly abstract enclosures – of given genetic material, language, etc – into intellectual property regimes, but it also simply and unreflectively replicates the US humanities post-doctoral world – a realm of open source, cultural flows and radical personal equality sustained by invisible old property: the massive endowments of the Ivy League.Guy Rundle is lately on a roll, having presented three columns within a month that nobody on earth, including their torched-rodent author, can understand.
Since the act of self-describing is rhetorical anyway, its only criteria of judgement is whether it gets some sort of effect – or whether it instead rushes to get a dividend from a process of getting people to think otherwise what, at this stage, needs to be more concrete and particular, albeit not fragmented and ungrounded in postmodern fashion.
===
DRIVE TO THE HIGHER LATITUDES
Tim Blair
Attention, fellow primitives! George Monbiot has important news about our living arrangements:
Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting 7 billion people.We call these conditions “houses”. They have “heating” and “cooling” that allow humans to “live”. Unless you live outside, which is where most of us dwell, according to George:
A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places that can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was 4 degrees Celsius. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.Let’s all drive there in a Renault Clio.
===
STARVE ON
Tim Blair
Paul Connor has quit, but Adam Blakester is keeping the climate-starvation dream alive:
I am continuing to fast 35 hours per week - one hour for every 10ppm of CO2e - until [a climate justice] agreement is made.That works out to just five hours of non-eating – ie, sleep – per day. (Blakester previously Gaia-dieted on weekends.) Hands up from anyone who is able to beat Blakester’s current level of starvation commitment.
===
HAPPINESS IS A WARM STATE
Tim Blair
An academic study reveals the happiest US states:
The Top 10 states on the happiness scale are, in descending order, Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, Alabama and Maine.And also Republican.
Louisiana? Uh, didn’t it have that huge hurricane, what’s her name, a few years back?
Yeah, Katrina is a complication, the professors said. Some of their data predated the storm. But the hurricane is not all that defines Louisiana. Like nearly all the other states in the Top 10, it is warm.
===
AUSTRALIAN RULES
Tim Blair
James Morrow enjoys a day of regulation.
===
PIVOTAL COPENHAGEN MOMENT
Tim Blair
Gordon Brown leads Al Gore into a closet:
===
PONYFAIL
Tim Blair
I know exactly one male with a ponytail who is an acceptable human being. It isn’t William Connelley.
===
Save the planet! Stop these summits
Andrew Bolt
Ministers gathering to discuss poverty and greenhouse gases create lots of both:
Sweden recently hosted the European Development Days, a five-day summit meeting of EU ministers discussing poverty and climate change. Attendees thumbed their noses at both the poor and the environment, Sweden stuck with a 3.5 million kronor ($480,000) bill for limousine services.===
Rule 1: No puppies on live TV
Andrew Bolt
===
Warmists kill Christmas
Andrew Bolt
How mad are these people? North America and Europe are freezing under record snows, but the warmists at the toys-chain Build-a-Bear are telling children Christmas may be cancelled this year because global warming has melted Santa’s home:
Girl Elf: Santa, it’s gone!Once again, it’s the bullying and me-me-me badgering that betrays the appeal of global warming to the inner totalitarian. Ask me all about it, having had a warmist MC at our local carols by candlelight hector me from the stage.
Papa Elf: It’s gone, It’s gone!
Santa: What’s gone?
Girl Elf: Tell ‘em, Dad!
Papa Elf: The North Peak.
Santa: A mountain? A mountain’s gone? How is that possible?
Ella the polar bear: Santa, sir, that’s why I’m here. That’s why we’re here. The ice is melting!
Santa: Yes, my dear, we know, the climate is changing. There’s bound to be a little melting.
Ella: It’s worse than that, Santa, a lot worse! At the rate it’s melting, the North Pole will be gone by Christmas!”
Santa: My, my…all of this gone by next Christmas? I don’t think so.
Ella: No sir, not next Christmas, this Christmas! The day after tomorrow!
For any children worried that Santa’s home really has melted, here’s the latest satellite picture of all the ice (in purple):
===
Avatar, the answer to a Copenhager’s dream
Andrew Bolt
MOST people will date the death of the great global warming scare not from the Copenhagen fiasco - boring! - but from Avatar.
It won’t be the world’s most expensive warmist conference but the world’s most expensive movie that will stick in most memories as the precise point at which the green faith started to shrivel from sheer stupidity.
Avatar, in fact, is the warmist dream filmed in 3D. Staring through your glasses at James Cameron’s spectacular $400 million creation, you can finally see where this global warming cult was going.
And you can see, too, everything that will now slowly pull it back to earth.
December 2009. Note it down. The beginning of the end, even as Avatar becomes possibly the biggest-grossing film in history.
Cameron, whose last colossal hit was Titanic, has created a virtual new planet called Pandora, on which humans 150 years from now have formed a small settlement.
They are there to mine a mineral so rare that it’s called Unobtainium (groan), of which the greatest deposit sits right under the great sacred tree of the planet’s dominant species, humanoid blue aliens called Na’vi.
If Tim Flannery, Al Gore and all the other Copenhagen delegates could at least agree to design a new kind of people, they’d wind up with something much like these 3m-tall gracelings.
The Na’vi live in trees, at one with nature. They worship Mother Earth and, like Gaians today, talk meaningfully of “a network of energy that flows through all living things”. They drink water that’s pooled in giant leaves, and chant around a tree that whispers of their ancestors.
They are also unusually non-sexist for a forest tribe, with the women just as free as men to hunt and choose their spouse. Naturally, like the most fashionable of Hollywood stars, they are also neo-Buddhist reincarnationists, who believe “all energy is borrowed and some day you have to give it back”.
And, of course, the Na’vi reject all technology that’s more advanced than a bow and arrow, for “the wealth of the world is all around us”.
Sent to talk dollars and sense into these blue New Agers and move them out of the way of the bulldozers is a former Marine, Jake Sully (played by Australian Sam Worthington), who drives the body of a Na’vi avatar to better gain their trust.
(WARNING: Spoiler alert! Don’t read on if you plan to see the movie.)
===
Susan Boyle’s gift
Andrew Bolt
THERE is something to marvel at in the rise, fall and rise again of Susan Boyle - and something to learn from it, too.
What’s to marvel at is just what’s made this 48-year-old Scottish spinster the heroine of the most-watched YouTube clip of the year.
More than 120 million times have people clicked to watch Boyle stomp on to the stage of Britain’s Got Talent in her housewife’s frock, to guffaws and sneers from an audience amazed that such an unkempt frump would even presume to be a singer.
And 120 million times have people been awed, often to tears, to see Boyle put the microphone to her mouth and sing so miraculously sweetly that the mockers were stilled to stunned silence.
What was transformed in that instant was not just a vision of plainness into a sound of beauty. Boyle’s very life was instantly transformed, too.
The unemployed church volunteer and self-announced virgin was overnight an international celebrity, in demand by every newspaper, and music entrepreneurs fought for her signature.
But when she lost the final of Britain’s Got Talent to some dance group we’ve never heard of since, Boyle collapsed, and was rushed to a London clinic to slowly recover in seclusion from what was described as exhaustion.
Many were only too keen then to put Boyle and all such dreamers back in their station. Author Nicci French, for instance, tut-tutted the mob that had told this ugly duckling she was a swan.
But Boyle just needed time and space. Now she’s back with a debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, topping the charts in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.
For many the moral will be as simple as the titles of the tracks of her album suggest: I Dreamed a Dream, Daydream Believer, Who I Was Born to Be and Proud. It’s of dreams coming true, plus some battler’s I’ll-show-’em, which is why it will sell better at Kmart than Readings.
===
Greens don’t do sweat
Andrew Bolt
John Humphreys is in disconnect mode. He first correctly notes the defining characteristic of the new green moralists in this Age of Seeming:
It is an indication of the sorry state of community groups that when faced with a problem, they spend millions of dollars whinging and asking other people to do something. This is especially true when it comes to climate campaigners. While this group of young ideologues revel in their self-appointed moral superiority, they have so far achieved very little.But, not realising that such no-sweat, pass-the-buck, bully-others posturing is precisely the appeal of the authoritarian green faith, Humphreys then recommends the disciples actually do something - that they actually change from seeming to being:
Instead of whinging and waiting for politicians to become benevolent, people who are worried about anthropogenic global warming can take immediate action…Easy to imagine, John? Then why hasn’t it happened already?
Effective action requires money… One option for funds would be workplace giving, where workers could allow 0.5 per cent (or more) to be deducted from their income and go directly to the community fund as a voluntary donation. Even if only one-third of Australians agreed to give the minimum, they would easily raise more than $1 billion. It is easy to imagine entire workplaces getting together and jointly agreeing to join the scheme.
In fact, as the debate over the emissions trading scheme shows, the closer the pain, the more the doubt that this green faith is worth it.
Incidentally, I’m sorry to see the Centre for Independent Studies giving the global warming scare such credence.
===
China says no to the greens
Andrew Bolt
Green groups will have to get used to the idea that the capitalist US isn’t their greatest enemy at all. In fact, the real spoiler in Copenhagen was the world’s biggest emitter:
Copenhagen, however, has demonstrated - to Western eyes - a less agreeable side to Chinese assertiveness.Welcome to the Chinese century.
Across the developed world, China’s brazen stonewalling of attempts to reach a legally binding treaty on climate change was greeted by a stunned, angry and almost visceral response. Australian officials, led by Kevin Rudd, were understood to be irate; US President Barack Obama - who claims his greatest strength is his cool temper - was reportedly stood up by Wen Jiabao and barged in on a meeting the Chinese Premier was holding with other leaders.
The British Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, showed even less restraint, accusing China of ‘’hijacking’’ the summit.
Mind you, it was always perfectly clear and understandable that China would insist on giving people and progress the benefit of the doubt, knowing that cutting growth to “save” the planet was not just unfair to the poor but political suicide for the Communist regime. The only astonishing thing is that what China did came as such a shock to Rudd, when it was so obvious even to me that in February last year I wrote this:
Folks, get over this white man’s burden thing. China is now in charge... It’s done the maths and figured it will be better off warmer and richer than cooler and poorer.But I suspect the green groups will keep giving China a pass. Not that they care about China’s poor, of course, but that they hate capitalism more.
===
Carpetbaggers demand even more
Andrew Bolt
Just another demonstration of how green power is built on huge government handouts, all funded by you:
AGL threatened not to invest in alternative energy forms until the Government addressed a collapse in the price of certificates designed to encourage investment.These green carpetbaggers plan to be on the government teat for the rest of your life, and will always be wanting yet more of your cash.
The threat highlights the risks hanging over $30 billion of expected investment needed to reach a target of obtaining 20 per cent of power from renewable sources by 2020.
The managing director of AGL, Michael Fraser, said the Government’s approach was a fraud that threatened the industry’s ability to meet the target.
To encourage investment, energy companies receive renewable energy certificates in return for building green power stations. But the value of these certificates has almost halved, from near $60 to about $30 since the Government began issuing them to consumers who install solar hot water systems and other products that do not generate power.
===
Rudd’s overflow
Andrew Bolt
Here we go again:
THIRTY young Afghan asylum-seekers have been transported to Melbourne for processing because of chronic overcrowding in the detention centre on Christmas Island.===
If you read this out, my teacher will give back my play-lunch
Andrew Bolt
Imre Salusinszky discovers the unexpurgated version of the letter from six-year-old Gracie from which Kevin Rudd quoted in Copenhagen.
===
50 years of cooling predicted
Andrew Bolt
Who said the science was settled?
Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth’s ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.Australian angle: Lu received his PhD in Physics from the University of Newcastle.
In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.
”My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,” Lu said. “Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming....”
In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.
UPDATE
If Lu is right, the US can expect more winters like this one, with more than half the country now covered in snow:
UPDATE 2
Another reminder that warming would be good, since it’s cold that is the bigger killer
===
Losing even Doonesbury
Andrew Bolt
The Rasmussen poll is echoed by the Quinnipiac poll:
American voters also disapprove 51 - 44 percent of President Obama’s handling of the economy and disapprove 56 - 37 percent of the way he is creating jobs.In fact, Obama is losing even the Doonesbury demographic.
Roger Kimball says one picture tells the story:
===
Being green gives you a licence to be a hypocrite
Andrew Bolt
The newest columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald complains of censorship and the arrest of political protesters.
His name is Fidel Castro. He’s talking of Copenhagen, not Cuba
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