You have the skill and ability to navigate through the moral issues here, Miranda. I thank you for doing so. There is a reason I haven't been able to when I have tried to explain my position. I want it to sound like yours. I agree with what you say. But my expression is darker and bitter. I think that you do a good job in removing that .. writing the salient points and making the issue by giving the correct weight to the gravity.
PURITY DRIVE
Tim Blair – Thursday, April 14, 11 (11:10 am)
Marriqville council’s great Jew shunning continues:
A council business paper to be tabled next week shows a hit list of a dozen international companies has been drawn up to either be banned from doing business with council or have their existing contracts cancelled …
The council will vote next Monday on whether the boycott, passed in December last year, will include ripping up all current contracts and services and disposing of equipment or be confined to future dealings.
A financial impact statement attached to the council business papers reveals it will have to spend $3 million alone to replace the council’s Hewlett Packard computer hardware and software systems …
The council is even considering banning the dumping of waste in the local tip because the waste services of the Southern Regional Organisation of Councils is run by Veolia and SITA, which the council presumably also believes profits from what it describes as Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Even the garbage must be untainted.
446 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S UNWANTED TAX
Tim Blair – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (11:52 pm)
Warmist Clive Hamilton is puzzled:
Most Australians say they don’t want a carbon tax. So what do they want?
Not a carbon tax. Just like they said.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Tim Blair – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (11:50 pm)
An educator declares:
“I’m a school teacher. Get a real job.”
CHANGE OF ADDRESS
Tim Blair – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (12:16 pm)
I now live inside Jonathan Green’s head. Please re-direct all mail accordingly. Speaking of Australia’s finest online editor, here’s another great moment at Green’s tax-funded hobby site:
According to the colourful former Reagan budget director David Stockton, Obama is weak and “folds like a lawn chair” …
Whoever this “Stockton” is, he’s right. But an alert editor – particularly one who “has been a journalist since before you were born” – might have remembered that Reagan’s budget guy was David Stockman. An alert editor probably wouldn’t have approved this intro, either:
The Statue of Liberty closed, or Lincoln Memorial off limits, these would have been the symbolic markers of Washington’s folly if the unthinkable had been allowed to happen and the Federal Government had shutdown.
Unthinkable? Think again.
NOW IT’S UP TO THE DOLPHINS
Tim Blair – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (12:07 pm)
Decommissioned navy frigate HMAS Adelaide was due to be sunk off the NSW coast at 10.30am. But sea meddlersare in the way:
Protesters are cheering a pod of dolphins interrupting plans to scuttle HMAS Adelaide for a dive wreck, attributing their presence to a local Aboriginal elder.
The elder, Lila Kirby, performed a whale calling ceremony on Sunday which she said brought the dolphins to Avoca Beach, on the NSW Central Coast.
“Now it’s up to the dolphins,” Ms Kirby told reporters.
“They’re making their statement, I’ve got nothing to do with it now.”
“I’ve let them go to do what they want to do. This is their turf and this is their land.”
Or water, as the case may be.
UPDATE. Sunk.
And Bartlett didn’t even add that maybe 200 boat people have died, too
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, April 14, 11 (06:02 am)
Former Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett says things are ‘’actually worse now’’ for asylum seekers under the Gillard government’s allegedly more compassionate policies:
The number of people in detention is higher, the number of children in detention is higher, and it is a shambles. At least with Howard and Ruddock, as much as I loathed the approach, you knew what the system was.
So did the boat people, which is why they stopped coming.
Like he said
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, April 14, 11 (05:35 am)
What do Australians want? The answer is clear. We want symbols of action but not action itself. We want to hear words that make us feel good about ourselves but none that ask us to make any sacrifice.
We certainly don’t want to make a sacrifice that doesn’t do a thing to stop the warming Hamilton claims to foresee.
But still Hamilton can’t quite take no for an answer:
Most Australians say they don’t want a carbon tax. So what do they want?
You just said it, Clive.
Depends who is being rude
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, April 14, 11 (05:31 am)
Not all are equal when it comes to being offensive, says Professor Gary Johns, former Special Minister of State under the Keating Government.
For ongoing legal reasons I cannot comment on this fascinating development - either on what Larissa Behrendt (left) wrote or on how Bess Price (right) refers to her.
(No comments by you for legal reasons, either. Apologies.)
Protests grow in Syria
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, April 14, 11 (05:21 am)
The fall of the Syrian regime would have far deeper consequences than the fall of the clown Gaddafi:
Thousands of Syrian women and children holding white flags and olive branches blocked a main coastal highway Wednesday to protest a crackdown by Syrian authorities on a protest movement against President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian regime, eyewitnesses said.
The crowd was demanding the release of hundreds of men who have been rounded up by authorities in the northeastern villages of Bayda and Beit Jnad during a security crackdown in the area in recent days. Some 200 people have been killed during more than three weeks of unrest, said Syria’s leading pro-democracy group, the Damascus Declaration.
Meanwhile, Europe faces a fresh wave of illegal and Islamic immigration:
More than half a million people have fled Libya over the past two months, the UN refugee agency reported on Tuesday as it warned that the exodus had picked up pace in recent days....
By April 10, the UN had kept track of more than 498,000 people leaving Libya by land since an uprising erupted in February, including more than 236,000 crossing to Tunisia, nearly 200,000 to Egypt, 36,500 to Niger and smaller numbers to Algeria, Chad and Sudan....
Aid agencies are concerned about growing numbers making their potentially treacherous exodus by sea, with refugees – mostly from sub-Sahara Africa – crammed on board unseaworthy fishing vessels. More than 200 are feared to have drowned last Wednesday when their boat sank in bad weather about 40 nautical miles south of the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Vote us: we’ll give you back half your money
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, April 14, 11 (05:14 am)
The Gillard Government’s winning strategy: think of a compensation figure - and halve it:
How much compensation? Greg Combet on ABC online, March 7:
Every dollar that is raised by the payment of a carbon price by the companies emitting large amounts of pollution will be used towards supporting households, with an emphasis on pensioners and low-income households.Think of a number. ABC Radio’s AM, March 10:
Minister for Regional Australia Simon Crean: We will ensure that the compensation is totally adequate.
Journalist Bronwyn Herbert: What defines totally adequate?
Crean: The fact that we will return all of the money raised to people through the tax mechanism.
Halve it. Combet on ABC AM yesterday:
What we’re making clear today is that more than 50 per cent of the carbon price revenue will be used to assist households and that we expect that millions of households will be better off under the carbon price arrangements and the assistance will be permanent. This is important and obviously as a Labor government we’re concerned to help lower-middle income households as much as we can.
I’d say this is becoming a farce - if it wasn’t one already.
UPDATE
Terry McCrann cannot believe this stupidity - or deceit:
Just how stupid does the prime minister and her climate minister think you are? ... There they both were yesterday, saying we want to hit you with a $10 billion tax, to pretty quickly grow to a $20 billion or $30 billion one. And we promise to give you back half of it.
They actually think this is the trump card! ...So this is what Ms Gillard means when she claims that people will be “better off”. Just focus on the $5 billion or $10 billion or more that you are “getting back”.
You don’t need to worry about the $10 billion or $20 billion or more flowing to Canberra, because as Gillard and Combet keep claiming, you won’t be paying it.
No, only the big so-called polluters will be paying the tax. Believe that and I have an opera house to throw in with the bridge I’ve got to sell you…
Combet seems well suited to this. I don’t think I’ve seen any previous minister who has managed to so seamlessly combine the most basic stupidity and the most shameless dishonesty. While at the same time demonstrating he actually doesn’t have a clue that’s what he is doing!
In his speech yesterday he used the word ‘pollution’ or a variant a total of 48 times, either directly or indirectly linked to the word carbon.
In every case he was of course talking about carbon dioxide - not simply harmless but utterly necessary plant food…
The stupidity and dishonesty is also captured and projected in the claim that on the one hand “only” the so-called big polluters will pay. But about half of you will be “compensated”, indeed over-compensated.
Compensated for what? If only the polluters are paying?…
That a government could be so inept in both political and policy terms is almost beyond belief.
No human rights lawyer will help a female soldier kill the Taliban
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, April 14, 11 (05:04 am)
Former Israeli infantry officer Ted Lapkin says Defence Minister Stephen Smith’s overreaction to the Skype Affair suggests we’re not ready for his ludicrous “fix” - putting women into front-line combat positions:
The government has seized on the ADFA scandal as the trigger for a full-fledged assault on what it sees as the army’s culture of machismo-laden aggression. Yet ... since time immemorial, groups of young men have been melded into effective fighting units through a chest thumping, testosterone-laden macho warrior culture....
The integration of women into combat units will disrupt the psychological small group dynamic that forges rifle companies into effective fighting machines....
Writer Sebastian Junger accompanied a unit of American paratroopers three years ago through their 15-month deployment to Afghanistan. In his bestselling book War, Junger described his platoon’s outpost as “a hilltop without hot food, running water, communication with the outside world or any kind of entertainment”.
Anyone who believes that there’ll be no hanky-panky if young men and women are posted in such conditions is naive to the ways of the human heart. And romantic affection, with its instinctive passions, jealousies and favouritisms, will wreak havoc when injected into the tightly knit fraternity that is a rifle platoon.
It’s also time to dispel the mythology about the status of women in the Israeli military that has been bandied about in this debate.
In its 1948 War of Independence, the Israeli army quickly scuttled its egalitarian experiment with female fighters. It turned out that male soldiers were so focused on protecting their female colleagues that they neglected their unit’s mission objectives.
And today women still do not serve in the front line units of the Israeli army that engage in close combat with the enemy…
The ADF must never be used as a laboratory for trendy social experimentation because the stakes are so high. Getting it wrong means dead Australians and battlefield defeat.
Chaplain: seven reasons why Defence Minister Smith must resign
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, April 14, 11 (04:43 am)
The Rev Fr Paul Stuart, a military chaplain, writes in to say Defence Minister Stephen Smith should resign over his massive overreaction to the Skype Affair:
I am a Chaplain in the ADF and here are reasons why Stephen Smith should resign as Minister of Defence
1. Whilst he correctly condemned the seven male cadets’ inappropriate behaviour and correctly called for them to be punished (which they would be even without Ministerial intervention), he failed to condemn the female cadet’s inappropriate behaviour. It is against the rules of the ADFA and ADF to have sex with colleagues on Defence property. Thus the Minister is allowing himself to be seen to condone promiscuous behaviour – at least if you are a female cadet and not a male cadet.
2. The Minister called for the “quashing” of the female’s conviction of two previous charges unrelated to the sex scandal incident, to which she pleaded guilty. That is like the Minister demanding a person guilty of drink driving having their drink driving conviction quashed because a month later they are the victim of humiliation in a totally separate incident. Whatever their humiliation, they are still guilty and answerable for previous crimes or breaches of rules. The Minister is in fact perverting the course of (military) justice. In other jurisdictions, a person who does this commits a crime and goes to jail. That is how serious Stephen Smith’s outlandish instructions were to the CDF.
3. The decision to reject police advice that a crime had not been committed by the male cadets and to request police to investigate further whether a crime had been committed was initiated by the ADF. The Minister had the public believe that he initiated this over ADF inaction thus painting the ADF as ineffective and he the hero and champion of victims of a bad and sexist ADF culture.
4. The Minister wanted the dismissal of ADFA’s Commandant, CDRE Kafer, who commands an impressive reputation for integrity and fairness throughout the ADF and not just the Navy, and who even by the female cadet’s public admission, has her respect too.
5. Like many organisations the ADF has its fair share of bad apples that are a tiny percentage. The great majority of ADF members, male and female, are not sexist and prejudiced. Of those in the ADF who are sexually promiscuous they include females. Of those who abuse power includes some females and not just males. Manufacturing a kind of gender war by the Minister is perverted and this alone makes him unfit to lead the Defence Department.
6. The Minister has married the sex scandal issue to non-related issues such as admitting females into front-line combat roles which while it deserves discussion and consideration should not be linked in knee-jerk fashion to sex scandals or perceived sexism in the ADF elsewhere.
7. Members of the ADF, whatever their Service or rank, are required to receive during their training phase an education in ADF Values such as Professionalism, Loyalty, Integrity, Courage, Innovation and Teamwork. The Minister has violated four of these and is a counter-example of these values. We cannot have such a person at the head of the Defence Department.
And the other half?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (05:45 pm)
Which genius in the Gillard Government thought it would be a masterstroke to tell voters they’d get half their money back?
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, speaking in Queensland moments earlier, almost stole Mr Combet’s thunder by announcing details of the compensation package.
“I can confirm that more than 50 per cent of money raised [from the carbon pricing scheme] will go to assisting households,” she said.
.
My goodness, but this crowd is absolutely useless even at what was once its sole glory - the art of spin.
Measured response
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (03:31 pm)
Aboriginal activist Bess Price on the ABC’s Q&A defends the federal intervention opposed by Leftist activists:
Tony Jones: We’ve got a web question. In 2009, the UN Human Rights rapporteur said the Northern Territory intervention, however well intentioned, is “incompatible with Australia’s treaty obligations”. That’s diplomat speak for we are racist. Why has he been ignored?Central Australian Aboriginal activist Bess Price: What I found when the rapporteur came out to talk to people, he was just led around to speak to people who were against the intervention. He did not have a chance to talk to the other people who were for the intervention.
Jones: Are you still for the intervention?
Price: I am for the intervention because I’ve seen progress. I’ve seen women who now have voices. They can speak for themselves and they are standing up for their rights. Children are being fed and young people more or less know how to manage their lives. That’s what’s happened since the intervention.
Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes: It seems to me counter-intuitive to empower people to improve their communities by taking away their rights and that’s what was done when the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended and rights to complain were taken away from Aboriginal people. So in that sense I agree with the rapporteur.
Jones: Bess, can I ask you what your thoughts are about the suspension of the Race Discrimination Act, which was essential to allow the intervention to go ahead?
Price: At the time it needed to take place. It was an emergency because our people were suffering and it was so bad out there and I don’t think our government is racist.
Ths attracts this comment:
UPDATE
And this smear, from Paddy Gibson, co-editor of Solidarity magazine, Aboriginal rights campaigner, socialist activist and researcher with the Jumbunna centre at the University of Technology Sydney:
@LarissaBehrendt @rhiannapatrick ha! Being offensive pays. BessP and her white husband make a $packet$ doing ‘cultural awareness’ for NTER
9:12 AM Apr 12th via Twitter for iPhone in reply to LarissaBehrendt
(Original tweet protected. No link. No comments for legal reasons. Thanks to reader Mark.)
Mother Earth speaks to the UN through some Bolivian
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (11:22 am)
Er, right:
Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.
The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “wellbeing and existence of many beings” is now threatened.
The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.
That document speaks of the country’s natural resources as “blessings,” and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities, and the right to be free from pollution.
It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.
How does that ombudsman know what Mother Earth wants? Does she communicate her wishes through, say, the entrails of a chiecken? How does he know that what Mother Earth really, really wants is not to sacrifice herself for the comfort of humans?
You may laugh now, but you know that this is warning of the neo-paganism towards which we are fast sliding. After all, remember how this year’s UN conference on global warming opened:
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change,invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you—because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”
(Thanks to readers Alan RM Jones, John, Steve and others.)
What point is Wakim making with “permanently tattooed”?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, April 13, 11 (10:42 am)
I don’t think Jeremy Sher is overreacting at all:
I’m unsure if you have seen this article by Joseph Wakim (founder of the Australian Arabic Council) defending the Greens’ ‘“Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” campaign. However, what I dislike about this article is that the taxpayer-funded ABC blog is promoting an article which has all the hallmarks of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. It has all the juicy innuendo that one expects in modish, leftish writing about Israel and the so-called ‘Israel lobby’:
“It is ironic that the Greens candidates who dared to take a moral and non-violent stand against the Israeli occupation have copped the wrath of those who carry the political whips…
“With swastikas and loaded labels smeared onto the Greens candidates, the individuals are placed in a defensive position where they are permanently tattooed as guilty – defeated Greens candidate for Marrickville Fiona Byrne, successful candidate for Balmain Jamie Parker, and Senator elect Lee Rhiannon…“On cue, the major parties promptly paid their dues to Israel…
“If any of these whip crackers bothered to research the facts about the BDS, they would struggle to find any extremism…
“In our democracy, our politicians should shape our foreign policy based on our population and our national interests, not based on lubricated lobbying and ‘behind the scenes’ engineering”
The reason why this material is should be labeled anti-Semitic is two fold.
First, Wakim is obviously drawing a parallel between the Holocaust and the proponents of the Palestinian cause. In particular, the use of the phrase ‘permanently tattooed’.
Second, it harks back to one of the more virulent strains of anti-Semitism, best typified by that awful tome, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This ‘book’ alleged an international Jewish conspiracy, where Jews were seeking to control the world. Whether deliberately or not, Wakim is suggesting that some shadowy figures are behind the bipartisan opposition to the racist BDS campaign. Rather, Australia’s major political leaders have rightly and independently concluded that there are better ways to forge a path to peace than by punishing the Middle East’s sole democracy.
The activities of ABC Unleashed deserves more scrutiny - given its public funding and well-documented left wing bias… Wakim ought to be condemned.
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