DECOMPOSTA
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 24, 11 (04:43 am)
Alene Composta’s son Sandy brings tragic news:
We found her, well, the Emergency boys actually found her, about two hours ago. Alarm goes off, neighbours report it, neighbours report it again, door gets kicked in, and there she is, stretched out on the floor, quite dead, with her head in the oven. She must have been a bit glum when she did it. It’s an all electric house.
Alene leaves behind a magnificent literary contribution and some very relieved members of the Gullible Australian community.
THE BOY IS ONE YEAR YOUNGER THAN EARTH HOUR
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 24, 11 (04:03 am)
Melbourne’s Chris Pezzimenti encounters pre-school propaganda:
Apparently they were discussing Earth Hour at my son’s 3 yo kinder today. I wonder if they were taught to spell “indoctrination”...
And here’s a card “made” by Chris’s three-year-old at his kindergarten:
Writes Chris:
I will sit down and discuss his theories on AGW after bath time.
At least the kid is still washing. He’s not a total convert.
(Via Garth Godsman)
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 24, 11 (12:19 am)
Actress Elizabeth Taylor, eight times married and twice an Oscar winner, has died at 79.
UPDATE. Seven decades and 50 films.
467 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S GARNAUT TAX
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (11:24 pm)
Professor Ross Garnaut, an economist who believes the planet’s temperature is influenced by Australian taxes, continues his battle against ignorance:
“There’s no doubt that there is a battle, an awful battle between ignorance and knowledge going on,” he said.
“It’s a great contest between the academies of sciences of Australia ... the academies of science of all of the countries of scientific achievement on the one side, and the shock jocks of Australia on the other.
“We’ve had these battles before in the history of our civilisation. This battle will have quite a lot to do with the future prosperity of Australia, the future quality of our civilisation.”
Disagree with Ross and you’re ignorant. Way to sell that tax, brainiac. Also in the knowledge corner is a sensitiveGween wif hurty feewings:
Greens leader Bob Brown says he hopes the Opposition Leader apologises to the Prime Minister for speaking at an anti-carbon tax rally in front of “offensive banners”.
UPDATE. A must-read rally report from Gavin Atkins. NSFG warning: includes “offensive banners”.
UPDATE II. Attention, Queenslanders! The Greens want to stop your state.
FAITH OFFENDED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (02:09 pm)
These people are out of their minds:
Activist group GetUp is taking on Sydney shock jock Alan Jones, demanding the broadcaster withdraw comments disputing the science of human-induced climate change.
The organisation is launching proceedings with the broadcast watchdog, demanding Jones publicly and immediately revoke what it calls fabricated statements.
At least he doesn’t describe carbon dioxide as carbon.
BIRDS DICED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (12:46 pm)
Julia Gillard spent the morning at a wind farm, proclaiming such things to be “the future”.
It’s not much of a future for birds:
The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats …
By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.
If we could find some way of throwing cats into them – catapults, perhaps – problem solved.
SHE WAS RIGHT THE FIRST TIME
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (12:37 pm)
Troubled ABC online editor Jonathan Green receives some advice from ABC presenter Kathy Bedford:
Hold your head JG …
Followed quickly by:
That’s ‘up’ JG, hold your head UP!
GOVERNMENT BY SERVIETTE
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (12:34 pm)
Asked in 2007 how the incoming Labor government might behave, Lindsay Tanner claimed that Labor “certainly wouldn’t”, for example, announce anything like …
… a $10 billion water program written on the back of a serviette after a long lunch without being adequately costed or assessed by Treasury or finance and without even being taken to Cabinet. We won’t do that sort of thing, I can assure you.
Tanner has since quit and Kevin Rudd – Prime Minister during the first phase of Labor rule, before he was fired by his own party – is busted down to Chief International Bothersmith. Under Julia Gillard, Labor is now announcing multi-billion dollar programs that have no details at all.
BLOWN AWAY
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (12:20 pm)
Assange-defender Andrew Wilkie reflects on his own whistleblowing heroism:
“For my efforts you were told that I was mad,” said Wilkie, adding that whistleblowers commit suicide at a higher rate than the rest of the Australian population.
So do mad people. Anyway, we shouldn’t forget the exact nature of Wilkie’s whistleblowing, which wasn’t as many now recall.
TEST PASSED
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (11:47 am)
That Wall of Shame established last week to list journalistic errors in coverage of post-tsunami Japan is turning out to be quite a thing. One of the latest blunders comes from SBS:
Report title reads ‘Japan Orphans’ and then the reporter proceeds to interview two children ... and their mother!
Meanwhile, we have a nuclear convert:
A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation …
Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.
Our pro-nuke pal is none other than deep green George Monbiot, who is having one of his periodic moments of clarity.
Gillard’s policies lured these boat people
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (07:53 am)
Greg Sheridan nails the lies used to excuse the Gillard Government’s boat people policies, which he agrees are responsible for the explosion in arrivals:
It was the Rudd government that changed policy decisively in August 2008. It closed the offshore processing centre in Nauru and abolished temporary protection visas.
As a result, people-smuggling to Australia got back into business big time. In the 2 1/2 years since the government changed policy, nearly 11,000 boatpeople have arrived. Last year, asylum applications to Australia increased by 76 per cent. Among industrialised countries overall there was a decline. In 2009, while the global number of applications was static, they increased in Australia by 30 per cent. With the end of the monsoon season, there have been some six boats this month alone, carrying more than 330 people in total.
The government deals with this matter in a consistently dishonest fashion, giving up morsels of information only under pressure. Here are some facts. In the year to August 2010, some 45 per cent of illegal immigrant boatpeople had spent more than three months outside their country of origin. Of this 45 per cent, some 88 per cent had spent more than a year outside their country of origin.
In other words, they were not fleeing directly from persecution. Many Afghans who have come to Australia have never lived in Afghanistan, or at least not for a very long time. Life in Australia is infinitely preferable to Pakistan, but deciding to migrate to Australia is not the same as being a refugee.
$12 billion spent for next to no cut in emissions
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (07:46 am)
All that waste, just to be seen to be Doing Something about something that may be nothing:
The independent Melbourne think tank the Grattan Institute, analysed the more than $12bn of state and federal funding for more than 300 carbon reduction schemes and renewable energy programs over the past 15 years and found the result was mostly negligible....
The Labor government’s $3.5bn clean coal and solar flagship program is already showing signs of failure, with missed deadlines and companies withdrawing.
Last year, commonwealth grants programs resulted in carbon cuts of four million tonnes, well short of the 160 million tonnes Australia needs to cut by 2020 to meet global commitments.
The report’s author is hot for an emissions trading scheme, but guess what? Nowhere does he tell us what good this will do, either, as measured by a cut in world temperature.
Abbott needs staff with sharper eyes for media traps
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (07:00 am)
First Tony Abbott walked into a Mark Riley set-up without proper warning:
Riley’s provocative questioning of Abbott succeeded only in eliciting the response that it did - an enraged silence that made for compelling viewing - because the Opposition Leader’s office didn’t do its job properly.Abbott wasn’t prepped for what he was walking into. His staff didn’t adequately warn him of what was coming.
Then his staff failed to check for and remove from sight the abusive and damaging sign held by some obnoxiously rude protester at yesterday’s rally:
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and several Liberal and National MPs fronted the protest before placards decrying Ms Gillard as ”Juliar, Bob Brown’s Bitch” and another reading “Ditch the Witch”.
Very sloppy work.
And the pity for Abbott is that most of the signs at the rally were nothing like the one that’s being used now to smear him and the protesters. Check for yourself at this gallery of pictures.
Here’s the view that Abbott would have had of the signs as he spoke:
An early election in Queensland, then
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (06:34 am)
It’s an ill cyclone that blows nobody good:
Queensland Labor’s two-party-preferred vote surged 11 points to 52 per cent in the January-March quarter, kicking it four points clear of the LNP.
This wipes out the commanding lead the LNP had opened in the October-December Newspoll, where it headed Labor by 18 points, 59 to 41 per cent on two-party-preferred terms.
Finally, Julia Gillard says something absolutely true
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (06:29 am)
Spot on:
...the Prime Minister used a fiery question time, in which eight MPs were ejected, to declare that the carbon tax had become a national debate between “fear and fact”.
Here’s the proof.
Lost opportunity
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (06:14 am)
How close we came to having a merciful end put to this new paradigm:
HARRY Jenkins went within a whisker yesterday of being the second Labor Speaker to lose his job after naming an MP to be suspended and then not getting the support of the House of Representatives....
For a few precious minutes the Speaker’s fate hung by a thread because five independent MPs had not heard him “name” the manager of opposition business, Christopher Pyne, and were considering voting against the motion moved by government leader Anthony Albanese…
As the division was called, Mr Albanese raced to the independents to warn them a vote against throwing out Mr Pyne would be a vote of no confidence in the Speaker and lead to his resignation. If that had occurred a Liberal MP would have taken the Speaker’s chair and an election would have had to have been held.
It sounds a bit unlikely to me, but the law moves in mysterious ways.
(Thanks to reader Watty.)
The demonisation of the anti-Gillard protesters
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (12:09 am)
Bob Brown apologises for nothing he has done and for people for whom he does not speak, hoping only to shame someone who wasn’t responsible for what he’s apologising, either.
He’s like so many journalists now tut-tutting at nasty signs and some fruitloops among the 3000 people protesting against Julia Gillard’s lie and her ludicrous carbon dioxide tax, horrified less by their behaviour than their blasphemy.
Examples?
Malcolm Farr concedes that most of the protesters were indeed reasonable, ordinary Australians, yet cannot help but focus on the few who weren’t:
The personal bitterness was summed up neatly by the chap with the large sign reading: “JuLIAR…Bob Browns BITCH.” For some reason the word “bitch” was encased in a drawing of flames....
.
Other reporters, notably the West Australian’s correspondent, Andrew Probyn, sneered and lectured such rude locals. Former ACTU boss Greg Combet was shocked, I tell you, shocked:
“The decision by the leader of the opposition to associate himself with the placards we saw today, the messages that have been provided and the groups that have participated, is unbefitting of the leader of a major political party in this country,” he said.
It was as if Combet had never seen the 1996 ACTU demonstration in Canberra against the Howard Government’s workplace laws, in which unionist fought police and smashed their way into Parliament House.
It was as if no one had ever seen rude signs and anger at a rally before, or nasty things said about a Prime Minister. It was as if Brown and Combet and that great army of Left-leaning reporters had never seen, say, these anti-Howard protests:
And then there was the Howard stripper booked for a birthday party for Bob Hawke,
And never - not once - did Bob Brown feel moved to write a letter of apology to anyone. Rarely did Canberra journalists let the extremists of all those protests I’ve picture dominate their coverage or characterisation of a protest.
Hypocrites.
No target, no leader
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 24, 11 (12:02 am)
This war is a farce - but with blood:
FRANCE, Britain and the US have agreed NATO should play a “key role” in the command of military operations in Libya, but uncertainty remains about who will lead coalition forces
Labor goes the giant sneer
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (04:21 pm)
There is a very shrill tone to Labor’s vilification of the citizens objecting to its broken promise and its carbon dioxide tax.
And Labor MP Steve Gibbons‘ low blow also suggests sneering that’s so telling of the New Class that Labor unfortunately now represents.
Labor MP Nick Champion also prefers to abuse voters rather than persuade them:
A rally that has all the credibility of a Dungeons and Dragons convention - full of fantasists…
Labor MP Michelle Rowland also has that aristocratic contempt:
Some of these people, you objectively analyse their positions and they are extreme. They are extreme.
They should tone down the hate-speech. Someone could get hurt ... and the conservatives get framed.
UPDATE
West Australian political reporter Andrew Probyn tells Sky News how he lectured the protesters against Gillard’s tax about adopting the “precautionary principle” on global warming. Strangely, they weren’t swayed.
The Canberra press gallery at work.
(Thanks to reader David.)
Are you now - or have you ever been - a sceptic?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (11:27 am)
Using one of the cheapest debating tricks in the book, the Prime Minister claimed that she is with the majority in agreeing with every “reputable” scientist in the world on the issue of climate change, and that anyone who dares question whether a carbon tax in Australia will achieve any reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions, is dismissed instantly as a “denier”....
The Prime Minister and her ministers have repeatedly declared that the “science is settled"…
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist told me recently that “science is never settled” and that scientific assumptions and conclusions must always be challenged....
What does the Prime Minister say about the views of the more than 1000 scientists quoted in a report to the US Senate, also tabled at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun?
It includes comments from Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin: “Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself - climate is beyond our power to control . . . Earth doesn’t care about governments or their legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.”
And comments from legendary atmospheric scientist the late Dr Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA, who authored more than 190 studies and described as one of the most pre-eminent scientists of the last 100 years who said: “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organisation nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly . . . As a scientist I remain skeptical . . . The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system.”
What does Julia Gillard say of UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist who is of the view that: “Warming fears are the worst scientific scandal in the history . . . When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”
Or US Government atmospheric scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration who has challenged the notion of scientific consensus on climate change and claims that: “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.”
Prime Minister Gillard is not a scientist, yet she feels free to attack and denigrate anyone, and that must include Nobel Prize winning scientists, who holds a view that differs from her own narrow political prism.
Ten problems with those warming predictions
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (10:57 am)
Where’s the money coming from?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (10:40 am)
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Phillip Coorey, a warmist, promotes the Gillard Government’s carbon dioxide tax:
In the case of a carbon price, by keeping the compensation separate from the bill, people will not make a direct link. Therefore, they will still receive a price shock when the power bill comes in and be motivated to become more energy efficient, even though their pay packet or pension cheque is swollen. The government can assure them they are being compensated. Should they save energy and reduce their power costs, they can keep the difference, make a profit even.
Free money! You beauty!
But a question: which poor sucker ends up paying for someone else’s “profit”?
(Thanks to reader David.)
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