Sunday, January 13, 2013

Sun 13th Jan Todays News

Happy birthday and many happy returns Maggie Made-In His-Image NelsonAloese Seumanutafa and Nathan Nguyen. Born on the same day,across the years. Remember, birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.

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January 13St. Knut's Day in Finland and Sweden
Émile Zola

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Events

[edit]Births

[edit]Deaths


[edit]Holidays and observances


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A bad government was succeeded by an abysmal government

Piers Akerman – Sunday, January 13, 2013 (12:21am)

TODAY marks a dismal anniversary in Australian history, it is the day on which the Gillard minority Labor-Independent-Green government equals the Rudd Labor government’s total time in office - 935 days.
Given the propensity for this miserable government to attempt to redefine failures as successes, it is possible that some foolhardy Rudd-hating, Gillard-supporting staffer may even pop a bottle of champagne in the office tomorrow when the current prime minister exceeds Rudd’s abruptly curtailed term.
While the moment may be morbidly depressing for many, many Australians who would like the opportunity to vote for a party which can demonstrate a clear mandate to govern, it does mark an important milestone at which comparisons between the Rudd and Gillard government can conveniently be made.
Looking at the ledger, it is abundantly clear that a bad government was succeeded by an abysmal government. If anyone is in doubt the Rudd government was bad, just recall that Gillard told the public his government had lost its way.
When Rudd attempted a comeback at the beginning of last year, his party colleagues queued to describe Kevvie from Brizzie as chaotic, unfit to be prime minister, a psychopath and responsible for sabotaging the 2010 election campaign.
The Opposition let Rudd off lightly by comparison. Economic management provides a black-and-red yardstick to measure the two government’s performances. In its first year in government (2008-09) the Rudd government produced a $27 billion deficit; a $54.5 billion deficit in 2009-10 and a $47.5 billion deficit in 2010-11.
The Gillard government produced a $43.4 billion deficit in 2011-12 before collapsing in a heap and crab-walking away from the future surplus it has repeatedly promised. It was the third major promise to be broken by the Gillard government after it had reversed its pledge on no carbon tax and no Pacific Solution for offshore processing of illegal people-smuggler clients.
Remember, too, that the Rudd government inherited a Treasury with a healthy surplus before it started its reckless spending spree which left Australia with $42.3 billion of net debt for 2009-10 and $84.6 billion of net debt for 2010-11.
The Gillard government (for factional reasons operating under the same hopeless Treasurer, Wayne Swan) then drove the nation further into the red by pushing our net debt up to $147 billion in 2011-12.
In the latest Budget update, net debt is estimated to fall to $144 billion by the end of the 2012-13 year, but the government’s own monthly financial statements show that net debt continues to grow month by month because it is addicted to spending.
Five years ago, the Rudd government lifted the nation’s credit card limit to $75 billion, increasing it again the following year to $200 billion. The Gillard government increased the country’s credit limit to $250 billion in 2011 and again to $300 billion in 2012.
Swan, in the Rudd government, demonstrated poor economic management, but with the loss of some of the notional restraints applied by former Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, showed himself to be a totally lousy manager under Gillard. To appear at all competent, Swan now resorts to pointing at failed Euro-economies, hoping the electorate will overlook the manner in which he has squandered national savings on worthless policies.
Another excellent and easily understood measure is provided by the flow of illegal people- smuggler clients. Again, Rudd started with near-empty processing centres as the Howard government had stopped the flow of boats. Under the Rudd government 140 boats arrived with 6,552 asylum seekers.
Under the Gillard government (which announced the “Malaysia solution” people swap which relied on a country that had not signed the UN Refugee Convention) 405 boats have arrived carrying 25,266 asylum seekers - more people than live in many sizeable towns - and there have been 1000 or more lives lost by those lured to try and breach the stretched border security net.
That number far exceeds the four lives lost during the bungled implementation of the Rudd government’s ill-conceived $2.4 billion Home Insulation Plan which also saw the destruction of at least 224 houses, possibly the Rudd government’s greatest policy failure.
Then there was the Rudd government’s Building the Education Revolution, which inflicted school halls, many unwanted and unneeded, around the country at a cost of $1.7 billion and of course, the uncosted, unfunded not-bloody-needed National Broadband Network, created on the back of an envelope by the then prime minister, which now pays its CEO more than it gets from its customers (more on the NBN later).
As far as policy failures go, the Gillard government’s carbon tax, which has helped deliver the largest quarterly rise in electricity prices since 1980, is hard to beat on so many fronts but then again there is its mining tax which last year collected no revenue.
Cost-of-living pressures under the Rudd government, from the December quarter of 2007 to the June quarter of 2010 saw electricity prices increased by an average of 34 per cent across Australia. Gas prices rose by an average of 26 per cent and water and sewerage rates increased by an average of 29 per cent.
Health costs jumped by an average 18 per cent, education costs increased by an average 17 per cent and the amount of rent people paid increased by 17 per cent as insurance costs leapt by 20 per cent.
Under the Gillard government, from the June quarter of 2010 to the September quarter of 2012, electricity prices soared by an average 41 per cent, gas prices increased by an average of 29 per cent and water and sewerage rates rose by an average 27 per cent. Health costs increased by an average 10 per cent, education costs rose by an average 12 per cent and the amount of rent people paid jumped by 10 per cent as insurance costs rose by 16 per cent.
An insight into the duplicity of both the Rudd and Gillard governments was provided on Friday. NBN announced it had exceeded its rollout target for 2012. This like so much of this government’s utterances was sheer nonsense as the NBN’s definition of rollout doesn’t meet any international standard. All it means is planning has commenced in an office somewhere but does not reflect actual cable laid in any actual city, town or suburb. Ouch!
The truly disheartening fact on this bleak anniversary is that Gillard was a key member of the failed Rudd government and that she has not matched even its dismal record.

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Stop telling bushfire victims to shut up

Miranda Devine – Sunday, January 13, 2013 (8:38am)

WHENEVER a major bushfire catastrophe occurs in Australia, the victims are essentially told to shut up.
It happened after Victoria’s Black Saturday fires in 2009. It happened after the Canberra bushfires, 10 years ago on Friday. And it’s happening now in Tasmania.
“Now is not the time for that conversation,” says the Tasmanian Minister for Emergency Management, David O’Byrne, avoiding questions about why adequate hazard reduction burns were not done in cooler months to remove fuel from the path of inevitable summer fires.
It’s just too early, claims Premier Lara Giddings, presiding over Tasmania’s ALP-Greens coalition.
But the residents of Dunalley, whose town was overrun, and the farmers whose properties and livestock have been wiped out, want that conversation right now.
Now is the time for farmers to complain that they could never get a permit to burn off excessive ground fuel on their properties.
Now, while public attention is focused, and before the truth can be buried for years.
Now is the time to point out, perhaps, that a fire which begins in a national park carrying negligently heavy loads of ground fuel can become an unstoppable inferno which will eventually burst out into the Canberra suburbs and kill four people and consume 500 homes.
Now is the time for people who understand the bush to tell the rest of Australia what fools we are.
“Fuel reduction burns make it possible to fight and control a fire; what happened here was uncontrollable,” Dunalley farmer Leigh Arnold told The Australian.
Greenies who oppose such burnoffs, “care more about birds and wildlife than they do about people and farms,” he said.
“But what’s the point of that now when the hills and trees they told me I couldn’t burn off, because there were protected eagles and swift parrots there, are now all burned and the fire it created was so hot we had dead swans dropping out of the sky?”
No, the only permissible comment on a bushfire catastrophe is to say it was caused by “climate change” - that convenient get-out-of-jail free card for greenies, governments and the obstructive bureaucracies they jointly create.
But we’ve heard it all before, and we’re not buying it.
“It’s really simple,” says Brian Williams, captain of the Kurrajong Heights bushfire brigade, a veteran of 44 years of firefighting, in one of the most extreme fire risk areas of Australia, on a ridge surrounded by 0.75 million hectares of overgrown national park between the Blue Mountains and Wollemi.
“Fires run on fuel. Limited fuel means limited fire.”
Green tape and heavy-handed bureaucracy has made his job harder today than in 28 years as captain. Rather than needing six people to perform a controlled burn in the cooler months, now 40 are involved, to oversee biodiversity and so on.
Williams managed to conduct just two of the five hazard reduction burns he planned before this fire season.
But don’t blame greenies. All week they have been claiming they support hazard reduction. Really?
No matter what legalistic and linguistic ploys are now used to rewrite history, green hostility to proper bushfire management is on the record, from the light-green NIMBYs who object to smoke, to green lobbyists who infiltrate government decision-making, taxpayer-funded green activists who embed themselves in government agencies, the bureaucratic green tape which makes the job of volunteer firefighters so difficult, the green NGOs who strongarm politicians, right up to the political arm of green ideology, The Greens.
It is true The Greens have developed a new set of “aims” including a caveat-studded “effective and sustainable strategy for fuel-reduction management”.
In practice, on the ground, it amounts to covert opposition. Williams scoffs at the Orwellian sophistry: “They publicly say they support it. The reality of how it pans out is nothing like that. Greens have two faces and underneath they are undermining everything.”
While there have been improvements under a new state government, Williams says hazard reduction is still inadequate across NSW, reaching just 1 per cent rather than the 5 per cent minimum recommended by the Victorian bushfire inquiry.
At least in the hard-won patch of Volunteer Fire Fighter Association president Peter Cannon, around Dubbo, Parkes and Forbes, hazard reduction is complete this year and he is confident any fires will be controllable.
He says it is a credit to hard-working firefighters that Tasmania-scale destruction has not occurred in NSW despite extreme fire conditions.
Another bright spot is the latest Rural Fire Service annual report which says more than 80 per cent of planned hazard reduction was achieved, and the area treated should increase by 45 per cent over three years.
It’s not enough but it’s a welcome change from the dark days of 2003, eight months before the Canberra inferno, when former RFS Commissioner Phil Koperberg told a NSW parliamentary inquiry that widespread hazard reduction was “an exercise in futility”.
Fast forward to last month and blame for that fire has finally been laid where it belongs, at the feet of Koperberg’s RFS and the green-influenced National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Brinadabella farmer Wayne West, whose property was wiped out in the fires, sued the two agencies. Last month in the ACT Supreme Court, Chief Justice Terrence Higgins found them negligent.
The episode demonstrated how green pressure on decision-makers filters down into a cascade of subtle bureaucratic obstructions which disempower firefighters on the ground and disregard their expertise.
The result in 2003 was that a small fire at McIntyre’s Hut in the Brindabella ranges was allowed to rage out of control through the national park to emerge 10 days later, and burn lethally through Canberra’s suburbs.
Unfortunately for West and his insurance company, the government agencies are protected by statute and don’t have to pay compensation.
But West won a moral victory. We all are in his debt because he fought for the truth and refused to shut up.

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Bob can’t handle the truth

Miranda Devine – Sunday, January 13, 2013 (7:42am)

I can’t say I was surprised when Bob Brown had a shot at me in the Sydney Morning Herald last week. Still, even though he is a Green, you’d think he’d have more integrity than to lie about me.
In a paean to tepee-dwelling eco-terrorist Jonathan Moylan, who admitted creating a false ANZ press release which briefly carved $340 million off the value of Whitehaven coal, Bob likened the young man to himself. And Ghandi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ. Jonathan, like Bob, is Saving the Planet. “Business as usual in coalmining is a high crime against humanity”.
Actually, the only real crime alleged here, which The Greens are irresponsibly championing, is Moylan’s.
Which brings us to me. Australian eco-activists are “committed to non violence”, wrote Bob. But no such commitment exists on “the other side”.
“Just read Miranda Devine’s advocacy of violence against environmentalists in the Daily Telegraph.”
It’s not true, Bob. I have never advocated violence.
But Bob did try to get me sacked for a column I wrote in the Herald four years ago, a week after Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people.
It wasn’t climate change or arsonists which killed those people, I wrote.
“It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves.
“So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.”
At the time, a lynch mob against arsonists was being egged on by politicians and the media, a tradition begun by Bob Carr in 2001. When a “fragile loner was charged with arson, vigilantes called for him to be burned at the stake.
No reasonable person would have read my column as advocating violence, or literally hanging greenies from lamp-posts.
Of 330 responses, not one reader mentioned lamp-posts.
It took ten days for Bob’s perverse misrepresentation to get traction. Four months later the Press Council dismissed the complaint brought by his supporters.
But Bob persists because shooting the messenger is his only answer.
UPDATE: A reader provides an example of green “non-violence”.
“I grew up in an area that had logging as one of its major employers. There are still many trees that can be harvested in that area but most sawmills have closed because of protest groups.
“It got so bad that protesters were hammering spikes into trees at a height where a person using a chainsaw could easily be killed or seriously wounded if the saw contacted the metal spike.
“Some of the sawmills had been in families for generations and this was only possible because trees were carefully chosen to minimise the environmental impact.
“The Greenies would have us believe that contractors moved in, stripped the forest, took all the profits and moved on to do the same in other areas.
“Nothing could be further from the truth.
“Should we want to live in houses and not in caves, most houses are built using products provided by Mother Nature.
“The timber is from trees, the bricks are from clays dug up and fired using heat generating carbon monoxide.
“The mortar is from cement mined in various areas and so on.
“Of these, trees are perhaps the only renewable source if managed correctly.”

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OUR FEATHERED FRIENDS

Tim Blair – Sunday, January 13, 2013 (12:55pm)

Greens senator Lee Rhiannon is concerned about a new coal terminal disrupting nesting areas occupied by the red-necked stint. But Australia’s avian crisis doesn’t end there …

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Miss California asked about euthanasia: ‘That’s a vaccine, right?’ ==> http://twitchy.com/2013/01/13/miss-california-asked-about-euthanasia-thats-a-vaccine-right/
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No Longer Imaginary
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awsome latex work! 
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This is an Arab home under "Israeli occupation" in Chevron; this is not unique, there are thousands of them in Judea and Samaria...please share the truth!

http://www.jmgads.com/israel/elections/index.php?sourcepage=jewishnewws+%3D
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Stop to visit magnificent Dray Nur waterfall, swim at natural Fairy Lake and enjoy the wild scenery with epic weather.. 

The picture was taken on our 2nd day of the Central Highlands Adventures going on at the moment.
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Photo: Primitive cellular pumps may have enabled rocky proto-life forms to eventually leave the hydrothermal vents where life likely originated. http://oak.ctx.ly/r/1un5
Primitive cellular pumps may have enabled rocky proto-life forms to eventually leave the hydrothermal vents where life likely originated.http://oak.ctx.ly/r/1un5
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