SATIRE FIGHTBACK UNDERWAY
Tim Blair – Sunday, April 17, 11 (03:51 am)
Andrew Denton introduces Arrabella Twat, the latest Australian right-wing pundit. She has a fan.
UPDATE. Arrabella has actually been with us since March 26. All Comments (0)
443 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S DISADVANTAGE TAX
Tim Blair – Sunday, April 17, 11 (03:36 am)
Terry McCrann on trade minister Craig Emerson’s evident confusion:
Australia’s fundamental comparative advantage – my note, not his – is the production of CO2. Both domestically in our power stations, and by proxy with exports of coal and iron ore.
Yet he is part of a government determined to attack that advantage.
Typical conservative, only worried about the economy and employment. The important thing is getting back to Gaia.
PROFESSOR PANASONIC
Tim Blair – Saturday, April 16, 11 (06:16 pm)
Panasonic Australia Managing Director Steve Rust interviews Panasonic Chair in Environmental Sustainability Tim Flannery about Panasonic – and, despite it being the most awkwardly shot and edited conversation in media history, extracts a surprising admission:
Says Flannery:
I’ve also been carrying the flag for Panasonic in everything else I do, the books I publish, in the television series that I’m making at the moment, and of course in the new position as the chief of the Climate Commission.
So Flannery is “carrying the flag” for his multinational sponsor in a television series to be aired on the ABC and paid for with your taxes. Is this, to use Jonathan Holmes’s phrase, ”appropriate”?
More seriously, Flannery is also “carrying the flag for Panasonic” in his four-year, $720,000 government role as the head of Julia Gillard’s Climate Commission. Although Flannery declared his Panasonic interests prior to accepting the Climate Commission post, that presumably wouldn’t cover any ongoing Panasonic promotion – if that’s an accurate way to describe corporate “flag carrying” – during his tax-funded talks around Australia. Tim Flaggery might have some questions to answer.
Herding coconuts
Piers Akerman – Friday, April 15, 11 (02:03 pm)
With a music blasting from the cockpit speakers we headed slightly east of north out of Tonga (15 degrees magnetic) bound for Samoa on Monday just before noon.
Then the music died.
same article posted twice
Hackers cause trouble for Labor and The Age
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 17, 11 (08:00 am)
Be clear that The Age denies any hacking done by its staff, and that there is not the slighest evidence to doubt its word:
The advice was sought after an ALP audit of the party’s Eleczilla database, which contains the personal details of millions of Victorians, found it had been accessed from two computer terminals inside The Age.
The database holds the names, addresses, phone numbers and marital status of every Victorian on the electoral roll, and confidential details of correspondence from the public with the ALP. The source said the database had been accessed many times, with searches for the personal details of scores of individuals....
The Sunday Herald Sun has obtained a copy of legal advice from a major plaintiff law firm on the implications of accessing a database without permission.
“The maximum penalty is two years’ imprisonment and the offence attracts absolute liability ... there is no available defence such as public interest,” it said....
ALP state secretary Noah Carroll said the matter was under investigation, but Labor sources said a decision over whether to refer the matter to the police had yet to be made…
Paul Ramadge, editor-in-chief of The Age, denied hacking.
“No journalist at The Age at any stage hacked into an ALP database,” he said.
I would trust Ramadge to have said no less than the truth.
Those IPCC models seem hot
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 17, 11 (07:25 am)
Dr. Lucia Liljegren, an atmospheric researcher with the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, checks the real-world warming against what the global warming models predicted - and has excellent news.
Since 2001, we’ve actually been cooling (red line), according to the HadCrut3 data of the UK Met Office, when the models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted strong warming (black line):
As many are aware, when testing the ability of people to predict or project, I prefer to limit comparison to data observed after the method of projecting was frozen. I judge this to be very near Jan 2001. With that in mind, this is the data I would chose to test whether the multi-model mean projection is matching data…
Currently, these results indicate a fairly strong rejection of the hypothesis that the multi-model mean and HadCrut agree. This does not reject the notion that some individual models might be correct, but it strongly suggest that the mean over all models is high. That means: At least some models are biased high relative to HadCrut for the current period. We are not currently getting as strong results with GISTemp or NOAA, so it’s possible the problem lies with HadCrut… or not…
Liljegren also compares the models against the data since 1980, which takes in that abrupt step in warming that helped fuel the warmist alarm that this was actually the start of an inexorable man-made rise in temperature:
Says Liljegren, even then, the rate of warming over three decades (as measured by HadCrut) is way less than the IPCC models predicted:
Notice that the trend associated with the multi-model mean is outside the range consistent with the ARIMA uncertainty intervals for HadCrut. This suggests that either a) the multi-model mean is biased high relative to what is happening on the real honest to goodness earth and that bias is statistically significant, b) HadCrut is mis-measuring what is happening on the honest-to-goodness earth or c) we need to figure out some reason why we believe the uncertainty (in the sense of non-repeatability) in the linear trends fit to data should be larger than we could get by fitting with any and all possible choices of ARIMA up to (4,0,4).
I’d guess you would get much the same result if you used the NOAA satellite data of the University of Alabama at Huntsville:
Smith demands better spin doctors to hide the kind of damage he’s caused
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 17, 11 (07:25 am)
So first Stephen Smith trashes the public image of the Australian Defence Forces
Just why Defence Minister Stephen Smith has called six separate inquiries into the allegedly sexist culture of the Australian Defence Forces is a mystery. You see, the excuse for this massive attack on the ADF - Chairman Smith’s Cultural Revolution - is actually trivial, despite the mad hype since.
Now we find he wants more spin doctors to fix the ADF’s reputation:
THE strife-torn Defence Department has assigned more spin doctors to politically sensitive areasafter Defence Minister Stephen Smith ordered a shake-up of its 100-member public relations machine.
I couldn’t possibly comment
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 17, 11 (06:34 am)
I’m afraid I cannot comment on legal advice, although Miranda Devine can. Sorry, but I’m also advised that I should not let you comment, either. And, please - this is not my fault.
What climate refugees? What map? What dud predictions?
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 17, 11 (12:07 am)
Gavin Atkins exposes another dud prediction by the United Nations’ warmists - who immediately start erasing all trace of their latest boo-boo:
The United Nations Environment Programme has tried to erase one of its glaring failed predictions about climate refugees by removing a a map from its website purporting to show where 50 million climate refugees will come from by 2010.
After Asian Correspondent reviewed its findings earlier this week,… the website which is maintained by GRID-Arendal, an official United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) collaborating centre, has now deleted the map.
What’s more, the error message dishonestly claims:
Dear visitor, it seems like the map you are navigating by is maybe not fully up-to-date, or that it might have an error in it, or is it that your GPS is not loaded with the correct data?
So first we’re missing those millions of climate refugees that UNEP predicted, and now we’re missing the map showing where they’d come from.
Another nice little earner for our Alarmist of the Year
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, April 17, 11 (12:02 am)
Tim Blair discovers Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery is actually being sponsored by Big Electricity. Well, by Panasonic at least.
So does he want us to switch on or switch off?
UPDATE
If you think that’s the most bizarre kind of sponsorship deal for a professional warmist, try this:
Australia’s most famous environmentalist, Tim Flannery, has lent his name to a scheme by the world’s most infamous self-publicist, Richard Branson, to burn untold tonnes of greenhouse gases so rich people can become space tourists….
Flannery will speak at a promotional event for Virgin Galactic at the Powerhouse Museum on Tuesday.
Then there’s his Toyota deal:
Swan’s excuse is that he’s not that good
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 16, 11 (04:14 pm)
Treasurer Wayne Swan clearly leaked this to excuse the cuts he’s going to make:
Wayne Swan will be forced to make savage cuts to his May budget after confidential Treasury figures showed a $13 billion fall in economic growth for this financial year.
The Treasurer will announce forecast growth of just 2.25 per cent, far lower than the 3.25 per cent forecast in the November budget update and well below the 2.5 per cent canvassed informally in budget meetings just weeks ago.
But hasn’t Swan also leaked evidence of Labor’s poor economic stewardship. Only half that drop is explained by our string of natural disasters.
What caused the rest? Labor?
Hartcher turns a mad Leftist killer into a Palin-type
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 16, 11 (10:50 am)
Peter Hartcher, political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, is in my opinion shamefully ill-researched or disgracefully biased. Either way, or both, his attempt to smear the Right for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords is contradicted by almost every single fact we know about that crime, making Hartcher’s account at best unprofessional, and at worst...:
It was only a little over two years later that a gunman shot a Democrat congresswoman in the back of the head. Gabrielle Giffords survived the attack, but six bystanders did not.Giffords had predicted such an attack.... Anger at Obama and his agenda had been seething. The movement to deny him legitimacy by claiming he was not born in the US grew and merged with the claim that he is a Muslim.
When his Democrat allies in Congress passed his health insurance bill, the anger surged, fomented by right-wing shock jocks. A number of right-wing figures, including political candidates, called for ‘’revolution’’. And the anger was focused by the Republicans’ Sarah Palin, former vice-presidential candidate. She famously urged supporters: ‘’Don’t retreat - RELOAD!’’
And she published her so-called target map with crosshairs pinpointing the districts of 20 Democratic Congress members, the priority list of seats for Republicans to retake.
The next day, Giffords, a Democrat who had voted for the health insurance bill, was interviewed on television. She said that Palin had put the ‘’crosshairs of a gunsight over our district’’. She warned that ‘’when people do that, they’ve got to realise there’s consequences to that action’’.
She didn’t know that it would be Jared Loughner, apparently insane, who would be the one to put bullets into his guns and decide to hunt an elected member of Congress. And she didn’t know that she would be the member he would come after.
But she heard the rhetoric, noted the escalation, saw the incitement, and predicted ‘’consequences’’. So did others. We don’t know whether Loughner saw Palin’s crosshairs or was affected by the level of anger in the political rhetoric.
Actually, there is a lot we know about Loughner - and Hartcher could have, should have and maybe even must have known that the picture he was painting was false. The most perfunctory check would have told Hartcher the followingfacts:
- Jared Loughner, the man who shot Giffords, was no Tea Party or Palin supporter or even a conservative. In fact, he was said by his school friends to be ”Left-wing, quite liberal”. He was not Christian, opposed the war in Iraq, thought the Constitution was full of “treasonous laws”, and cited as his favourite video one showing a US flag being burned.
- Loughner’s hatred of Giffords seems to date from 2007, many months before the rise of the Tea Party movement, the elevation of Palin into federal politics and the election of Obama.
- There is not the slightest evidence that Loughner listened to or admired Right-wing radio hosts, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement or any other scapegoats sought by the Left. A friend said he did not watch TV or listen to political radio.
- The causes that really had Loughner angry were not part of any Palin or conservative agenda.Loughner was in fact mad, and raged about bad grammar, thought control, “conscience dreaming” and a “third currency”.
In short, there is not the slightest evidence or excuse for Hatcher’s strong suggestion that Palin or “right-wing shock jocks” incited Loughner to anything at all, let alone to shoot Giffords.
So why was Hatcher so keen to vilify conservatives and the Right on this flimsiest of pretexes?
Simple, to demonise and denounce those now criticising the inept and deceitful Gillard Government he supports, and the independents propping it up:
Veteran observers of Australian politics detect a rising level of anger and vitriol in political debate. A University of Sydney professor emeritus of politics, Rod Tiffen, said: ‘’I think it has moved into a more aggressive phase. There seem to be more people out there with the US-style view that the government is run by traitors.
‘’There’s a lot in politics that’s symmetrical but there’s a lot that’s not, and the right-wing populist anger seems to me to be much stronger than it was before. You see that on issues like asylum seekers and carbon tax.’’
Indeed, Tony Abbott, while calling for civility in political debate, has sought to marshal popular anger at the government, calling for a ‘’people’s revolt’’ over the carbon tax....
As the record shows, Australia’s relatively low level of political violence historically has not precluded it altogether. We have no magical immunity. It can happen here.
There are only two necessary ingredients - nutters and weapons, and Australia has both. The rising level of angry political rhetoric reverberating in the media echo chamber can only raise the danger level.
I don’t support hate speech either. But where Hatcher and I may part company is over my contempt for false speech as well.
(Thanks to reader zbcustom.)
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