Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Tue Jan 28th Todays News

Australian of the Year was named for 2014, Sports star Adam Goodes. He has earned it on and off the sporting field. He represents excellent values and presents a face that is healthy to aspire to. "Nothing comes with this office except an inscribed chunk of green glass. There's no title; no stipend; no uniform; no official residence; nothing to pin in the lapel; and only the haziest of duties. What the winners are given is a voice." But it is telling to hear what the bigots who oppose him are saying. Some say he is merely Aboriginal and other Aboriginal peoples may have been more worthy. Some say he is merely an athlete and has nothing to offer the wider community. Some say that Goodes only got the award after being called an ape by a foul mouthed child. Others say they prefer others. It is ok to disagree. It is ok to not believe that Goodes is a perfect fit for the position. However, in a non legal sense, once an argument becomes Goodes is not Aboriginal enough to be representative of the wider community, or too Aboriginal, or not representative of Australians, then one becomes a bigot. The award is described as going to people where "Money and power aren't the point here. The rich have no place on the list. Raw success isn't enough. There has to be something more, some sense of distinction that lifts a candidate out of the ruck of the famous." When the foul mouthed child called him an ape, Goodes pointed her out, as he should. What the authorities did next was ridiculous, but that is not Goodes' fault. Words were placed in Goodes' mouth in subsequent days, which Goodes was taken to task for. The truth was that the child required discipline and their parent failed. It is also true many fine people could have been given the award. But none better than Goodes. We choose. in our democracy, who represents us. I am proud that Adam represents me. Others may disagree, but their reasons are often despicable. 

I'm against a separate constitution for Aboriginal peoples. Some good people are for it. I am against it for the same reason I oppose all forms of bureaucratic assignation of race. Partly because I am a mutt without a broad discernible back ground. Partly because of historical abuses of process. Partly because I don't trust government to do anything worthwhile very well. I recognise that Aboriginal peoples have powerful needs. In the past, authorities have tried to help, and there is a campaign at the moment to smear those good people who tried to help those in need. In some ways, the call for constitutional change is an extension of the sorry campaign. I believe that it is better to put such campaigns in the past and let healing begin. But, there is reason why some want change. I just don't feel it is a good reason. I support cultural assets. Race is rarely that. 
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Hatches
Happy birthday and many happy returns to those born on this day, along with
Matches
Despatches
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HELLO, SAILORS

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 28, 2014 (12:09pm)

After smearing Australian Navy personnel as torturers, the ABC now belatedly seeks the other side of the story:

image

I don’t buy that line about her boss not believing earlier allegations, and would advise any navy staff to avoid contact. This is a fishing exercise by an entity already revealed as hostile to Australian servicemen.
(Via casey)
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FROZEN BELLINI

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 28, 2014 (11:59am)

A beardo is berg bound
In the spring of 2015, Alex Bellini will fly to Greenland, jump on an iceberg, and live there until it melts. 
He’s going for gold in the eternal Stupid Olympics of green activism. 
As the chunk of ice floats southward to its thawing doom, he’ll witness his new home get smaller and smaller until it is no more and he finds himself adrift in the ocean. He hopes to raise awareness of climate change and global warming … 
But of course. 
He’ll be there for up to 12 months, the limit he’s set on the task. 
Good luck, son.
(Via Simple Simon)
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HULKSTRALIA

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 28, 2014 (11:28am)

Leftist crazybird Jeff Sparrow – lately blaming George W. Bush for violence in Sydney – now describes Australia as: 
… a steroid soaked neighbourhood bully drunk with power, casually coward punching the inhabitants of the Pacific. 
Sure, Jeff. We’re mostly punching them with millions in foreign aid. Take that, puny Pacific nations!
(Via PWAF)
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TUNDRA RACER

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 28, 2014 (11:02am)

This might be Antarctica’s only dragster, apparently built by US servicemen in the late 1960s:

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Seems they didn’t need to be rescued.
(Via Iowahawk)
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MARGOFEST AT MAULES CREEK

Tim Blair – Tuesday, January 28, 2014 (10:26am)

In tiny Maules Creek, a spectacular Blair’s Law movement is underway – documented by none other than MargoKingston herself. I might need to visit this historic event.
UPDATE. And the ABC joins in. This is now officially perfect.
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ABC now admits its navy smear “unlikely to be true”

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (6:07pm)

An senior army officer was so astonished by this email from the ABC that he wrote back to ask if it was genuine..

And, yes, indeed. A week after claiming it had “footage [which] appears to back asylum seekers’ claims of mistreatment by the Australian Navy” the ABC is now checking whether that improbable claim is actually true. What’s more, it now claims that it never really believed the claims it trumpeted so loudly, damaging the Abbott Government and the navy and prompting Indonesia to accuse Australia of a “crime”.
Amazing stuff:
Hi ,

I am a researcher at ABC news. I was wondering if you can help me.

I have been tasked with finding some navy personnel who might be willing to speak to us in a background capacity – not on the record. It follows the story our Jakarta guy ran on the asylum seekers burns claims. My boss feels the allegations are likely to be untrue and we want to get people on board some of the ships up there to background us – HMAS Maitland, Stuart etc.  We need people to talk to us.

Do you know of any people with navy or defence force affiliations who might be able to put us in touch with someone. There’s plenty of Facebook pages but they are often closed groups and I wouldn’t want to approach anyone who didn’t feel comfortable talking.


Many thanks,
Alison Branley
National Reporting Team
700 Harris Street, Ultimo NSW 2007
“My boss feels the allegations are likely to be untrue,” Then why the frantic pushing of these damaging claims?
Contrast this admission to last week’s reports, like this

ABC News has obtained video footage of asylum seekers receiving medical assessments of burns that Indonesian police say were inflicted by the Australian Navy…
Indonesian police say the asylum seekers suffered burns when Navy personnel forced them to hold onto hot pipes coming out of the boat’s engine.

The video and the version of events given by the police seems to back up the claims of mistreatment made by the asylum seekers when they first spoke to the ABC a fortnight ago.
And this:

New footage appears to back asylum seekers’ claims of mistreatment by the Australian Navy.
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No concession will be enough until apartheid is forced on us. So stop now

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (12:07pm)

The politics of race

First, all we needed to be reconciled was to simply say sorry. Here’s Aboriginal activist Professor Mick Dodson:

I think that the parliamentary apology made to members of the Stolen Generations will forever change the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the rest of the population of Australia. The apology has the potential to transform Australia and, once and for all, to put black and white relationships in this country on a proper footing
But it turned out another step was needed, after all - to change the constitution.  Here’s Ballarat elder “Uncle” Murray Harrison:
Mr Harrison said the recognition of indigenous people in the constitution would show that there was “no division between us"…
“As far as I’m concerned this is what it’s all about, just being recognised would put the icing on the cake, mate.”
But with both Labor and Liberal agreeing to constitutional recognition, it turns out yet another once-and-for-all step is needed:
However, Secretary of the Aboriginal Provisional Government Michael Mansell says the campaign for constitutional recognition is just a distraction and a treaty is more important.
“A treaty would impose on governments around Australia obligations that they would have to comply with the new treaty laws and it also creates rights for Aboriginal people that have been denied to us in the past and those rights would include recognition of customary law, the right to land, the right to make decisions over Aboriginal people and the right to raise our own economy.”
After that there will be demands for self-government, then nation status for tribes, then perhaps even evacuation of non-Aborigines. Meanwhile more recently arrived ethnic groups will demand their own collective rights and even customary law.
At what stage will even the Left baulk, with all its fine talk of “universal values” and its decrying of racism and apartheid? When will mute Australians who believe in the individual above the tribe and in the equality of all before our law cry “too much”?
It is not enough to simply “mean well” by making what seem harmless concessions to principle. A principle conceded, each step then leads inevitably to the next until racism becomes the official creed of a territory once called Australia.
Stop now.
UPDATE
And then the next demand, via Aboriginal leader Sol Bellear on the ABC’s The Drum:
The High Court ruling I’ll embrace is the one which finds that no Australian court has the right to sit in judgment of my people. And that’s fundamentally what this should be all about - sovereignty. The right of Aboriginal people to control Aboriginal lives.
So at what point exactly will we be “reconciled”? When the country is torn apart on ethnic lines?
UPDATE
A sign of hope.The following motion was moved and adopted by the Young Liberal Movement at its Federal Convention in Fremantle at the weekend:
“That the Young Liberal Movement of Australia express its desire for a strong and unified Australia and therefore reject any proposal to recognise any ethnic or social groups in the Australian Constitution to the exclusion of other Australians.”
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Mass immigration is a threat to what the Left should value, too

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (10:04am)

Former Labor Minister Gary Johns makes an important point:
SAVING one refugee is humane: saving one million refugees is almost certainly not. Large numbers of refugees, or migrants not carefully chosen, can change the nature of the host country, to its detriment. If Australia were to consist of a mix of Iraqs, Irans, Afghanistans, Syrias, Somalias, it would no longer be Australia.
Refugee advocates can never summon the courage to answer the question of how many is too many. Instead, they hide behind the particular instance, always ignoring the big picture…
An overly legalistic and generous refugee regime, detached from its consequences, makes Australia vulnerable to large numbers of refugees. The effect, if indeed not the object of refugee advocacy, is to disarm Australia.
And Johns adds an argument too readily howled down as “racist”, although British social democrats now realise its dangerous truth - that too many immigrants from cultures too different can erode not just the concept of citizenship, but the sense of mutual obligation that underpins the welfare state:
Australians do not tear themselves limb from limb, but graciously accede to an election loss and know that, in losing, rights to treatment under the law will be preserved. The same is not true in those nations, or bits of them, from which refugees flee.
Paul Collier’s fine study, Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century, proves that the immigration from poor countries to rich is on the rise. The numbers of those who want to take the protections of the liberal nation state, but potentially forsake its disciplines, are also on the rise.
Collier’s thesis is that, left ungoverned, as has occurred in Europe, migration will accelerate and become excessive…
He asks “suppose that international migration would become sufficiently common as to dissolve the meaning of national identity”.
He makes plain what is obvious to almost all Australians, that a national identity and a clear set of rules that all citizens obey are the price of liberty. More powerfully, he argues, “nations are important and legitimate moral units” ... [and] are the only way to provide public goods such as pensions and security…
Permanently rising cultural diversity runs the risk of undermining mutual regard. 

David Goodhart, former editor of the Leftist Prospect, has made the same point:
The global citizen worldview [of the Left] tends to be suspicious of communities. Or rather the idea of community is praised in the abstract but rejected in the particular in favour of a “cruise liner” theory of society in which people come together for a voyage but have no ongoing relationship. This individualistic view of society makes it hard for modern liberals to understand why people object to their communities being changed too rapidly by mass immigration – and what is not understood is easily painted as irrational or racist.
It also explains why this brand of liberalism is unmoved by worries about integration. If society is just a random collection of individuals, what is there to integrate into? In liberal societies, of course, immigrants do not have to completely abandon their own traditions, but there is such a thing as society, and if newcomers do not make some effort to join in it is harder for existing citizens to see them as part of the “imagined community”. When that happens it weakens the bonds of solidarity and in the long run erodes the “emotional citizenship” required to sustain welfare states…
Indeed, the modern nation state is the only institution that can currently offer what liberals, of both right and left, want: government accountability, cross-class and generational solidarity, and a sense of collective identification. As societies become more diverse, we need this glue of a national story more not less. This is ultimately a pragmatic argument. The nation state is not a good in itself, it is just the institutional arrangement that can deliver the democratic, welfare, and psychological outcomes that most people seem to want.  
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CFMEU scandal is the third strike for the union movement. Time for an inquiry

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (9:35am)

The AWU scandal. The Health Service Union scandal. Now - to prove an inquiry into union power is needed - comes the CFMEU scandal:
A Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union ... organiser Danny Berardi decided to resign after Fairfax told the union it would report he helped at least two building companies, which did renovation work on his properties for free, win contracts on Melbourne construction sites.
An investigation by Fairfax Media and the ABC’s 7.30 program has found that several influential CFMEU officials, organisers and shop stewards in NSW and Victoria received bribes and other inducements from corrupt companies that needed their support to win multi-million-dollar contracts…

The CFMEU’s national executive has launched an internal investigation into allegations surrounding labour hire companies run by Sydney businessman George Alex…

One of Mr Alex’s companies won a lucrative contract related to the Sydney’s Barangaroo site after being promoted by an influential NSW CFMEU figure. Another senior NSW union figure requested Mr Alex to employ his son after he was released from jail having served a long sentence for murder.
In Victoria, Mr Alex’s agreement with the CFMEU involved him paying Melbourne underworld figure Mick Gatto tens of thousands of dollars to help broker the deal and run Alex’s operations…
A condition of Mr Alex’s Victorian CFMEU deal involved his company, United, hiring union firebrand Craig Johnston, who in 2004 served a nine-month prison sentence after being convicted for affray, assault and damaging property for an infamous ‘‘run-through’’ at two Melbourne companies.
Mr Alex, whose Victorian operation was overseen by Comanchero bikie Amin Fakhri, paid Johnston an inflated wage of at least $2000 a week…
The Fairfax/7.30 Report investigation uncovered a 2010 intelligence report prepared by Victoria Police and Australian Crime Commission that alleged Gatto and his crane company business partner, Matt Tomas, were involved in “criminal activity in the building industry and narcotics” and had connections to “the Hells Angels, the CFMEU and drug importers”. Around the time of the report, Mr Gatto’s company Elite Cranes and a Hells Angels East County chapter crane company won contracts on Victoria’s desalination plant through corrupt dealings.
Victoria’s biggest labour hire firm, MC Labour, ...  gave kickbacks to [a] CFMEU organiser, including free labour to help renovate his house in Melbourne’s north-east. MC Labour employed [his] wife…
Another labour hire and traffic management firm, KPI, which is run by a convicted criminal and former union shop steward, has regularly hired the relatives and associates of union -officials as a means of winning work and paid kickbacks to several union officials…
The Victorian CFMEU directed MC Labour to hire the girlfriend of ¬notorious crime figure Christopher Binse, despite the fact she was a hairdresser with no construction industry experience.
UPDATE
How can Labor keep blocking the restoration of a strong anti-crime force in the building industry?
THE Coalition has seized on fresh claims of corruption in the multi-billion dollar construction industry, saying Labor must now endorse the restoration of the Australian Building and Construction Commission.
Employment Minister Eric Abetz said Australians wanted corruption stamped out in the jobs-rich industry, in which union officials have allegedly received kickbacks from organised crime figures…
“Any argument against the re-establishment of the ABCC has just disappeared out the window,’’ Mr Abetz told ABC radio.
“Bill Shorten and Labor need to acknowledge that there is corruption and there is the need of the ABCC.’’
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Bob Brown’s audience doesn’t match his words

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (9:28am)

The crowd at Hobart’s “invasion day” rally gives me no confidence that its agenda really is reconciliation and unity. If I am to be reconciled with the Rebels bikie gang and race preachers I’ve probably given up more principles than is wise:
image
(Thanks to reader TassieRooster.)  
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Australia living on borrowed money, the Government on borrowed time

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (9:13am)

Time for real action:

THE budget is destined to remain in deficit for at least the next five years, with spending cuts of $25 billion a year required to return it to surplus.
Instead of cuts, both federal and state governments are expected to continue spending an ever-rising share of GDP as states tire of austerity and the commonwealth meets big spending commitments made during the election.
Consulting firm Deloitte Access Economics’ quarterly review of the economic outlook foreshadows two difficult years ahead with the end of the resource project construction boom leaving another 50,000 people unemployed, while real living standards have already started to decline...
And, as Judith Sloan suggests, time to sell that action, too:
There are...some important lessons from the Hawke-Keating years in terms of achieving beneficial, workable and acceptable economic policy reforms. The Hawke-Keating government used at least two useful ploys: create a sense of crisis - describing Australia as a potential “banana republic” was no accident - and introduce a raft of new policies so most people were both winners and losers at the same time.
Unless politicians from both the government and opposition are prepared to engage the electorate on a rational, reasoned and extended basis, the end result is bad policy pitched to accord with most people’s fast thinking. The Abbott government should take note; the Rudd-Gillard government certainly did not.
I have a sinking feeling with the Abbott Government. It is neither smiting its foes nor exciting its friends. In fact, its sudden lurch into the divisive racial politics of the Left could make an enemy of its own base.
I accept the Government has had some successes already (border policies) and is tackling needed reforms (work for dole). But much depends on the May Budget and the selling in the months before.
(Thanks to reader reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
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Unsettled science: new paper concedes “extent of global warming” is “highly uncertain”

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (9:00am)

Global warming - general

A new paper by warmists in Science blame aerosols for the failure of the world to warm as predicted, but admit it’s now hard to calculate what effect man’s gases actually have on the climate. From the abstract:
Aerosols counteract part of the warming effects of greenhouse gases, mostly by increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back to space. However, the ways in which aerosols affect climate through their interaction with clouds are complex and incompletely captured by climate models. As a result, the radiative forcing (that is, the perturbation to Earth’s energy budget) caused by human activities is highly uncertain, making it difficult to predict the extent of global warming
Remember when the “science was settled”?
PS: one of the authors, Steve Sherwood, is from the Climate Change Research Centre that includes the head of the Ship of Fools, Professor Chris Turney.
UPDATE
More unsettled science:
A paper published January 21st in Quaternary Science Reviews reconstructs storm activity in Iceland over the past 1,200 years and finds storminess and extreme weather variability was far more common during the Little Ice Age in comparison to the Medieval Warm Period and the 20th century. The paper adds to many other peer-reviewed publications finding global warming decreases storm activity, the opposite of claims by climate alarmists.
(Thanks to readers fulchrum and Ombudsman.) 
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The unsustainable sustainability fad

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (8:08am)

Nick Cater on the cult of “sustainability”:
Sustainability is one of the three priority themes in the new Australian curriculum, polluting everything from algebra to zoology.
“The sustainability priority is futures-oriented, focusing on protecting environments and creating a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action,” the curriculum says.
Students are encouraged to consider “that unlimited growth is unsustainable; sustainability - that biological systems need to remain diverse and productive over time; and rights of nature - recognition that humans and their natural environment are closely interrelated”.
Sustainability is Malthusianism for the 21st century: the fallacy that population is growing faster than the available resources and that ruination is just around the corner.
The world viewed through the prism of sustainability is a deeply depressing place in which dreams are discouraged, imagination is restricted and the spirit of progress frowned upon.
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Strangled by health and safety

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (7:56am)

The tyranny of red tape - and the consequence of courts granting too many wild compensation claims:
A REFRIGERATOR lightbulb retailing for about $3 at a hardware store ended up costing a far north Queensland state school almost $500 after Queensland’s Public Works Department sent an electrician to install it in a teacher’s government-owned home.
Doomadgee State School, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, was billed $200 for labour alone after the teacher was told workplace health and safety regulations prevented any staff member from buying and replacing the bulb themselves, The Australian understands.
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Letting in the seeds of strife

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (7:38am)

Our immigration programs are predicated in part on the lazy assumption that the second generation will integrate, not radicalise. That needs rethinking before more people get hurt.
And yes, I know, the first example below is actually the son of an Australian woman, as well as of an Indonesian immigrant, later deported after his application for refugee status was refused:
WITH an arm rested on a ute-mounted heavy machine-gun while the flag of al-Qa’ida offshoot the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham waves next to him, Australian man Mohammed Ayub smiles wildly and poses for a battlefront photo in Syria.
The son of “jihad sheila” Rabiah Hutchinson and alleged former Jemaah Islamiah cell leader Abdul Rahim Ayub, the 26-year-old, whose real name is Illias Ayub and who was once a student at Belmore Boys High School in Sydney’s west, is believed to have travelled to Syria about a year ago....
With an estimated 100 Australians fighting in Syria, the federal government fears the experience, connections and ideologies formed on the battlefront will see them pose a threat to national security if or when they return

A former Bond University student describes fighting with another declared al-Qa’ida-linked group, Jabhat al-Nusra, in Aleppo and near the port city of Latakia, using the nom de guerre Ahmed Shaheed to tell the story of how local jihadists put an end to proposed plans to kidnap Japanese journalists for ransom…

Another man describing himself as an Jabhat al-Nusra fighter and who claims to have studied IT at the University of Wollongong, “Abu Al Hassan”, ...  warned the jihad would not end with Syria. “By Allah we will not stop fighting kufr (disbelievers),” he said on January 4.... “Who ever harmed Islam and muslims is next, who ever is ruling according to man-made laws and not Allah’s is next, so o (sic) you who disbelieve sleep with two eyes open!!"…
A person using the Facebook account of the Al Risalah Islamic centre in Sydney’s west began posting on Shaheed’s page just days after he created it last September.
Small point, but what are Bond University’s standards? From the rantings of “Ahmed Shaheed:”
Couldn’t help but wonder how much the Japanese government would have paid for there (sic) release… I wish my AK-47 had bullets with witch (sic) I shoot and only the Kaffir (disbelievers) would be killed.
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Does the Left really want a race war?

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (7:10am)

Gerard Henderson on another taxpayer-funded attempt to excite racial tensions by grotesquely caricaturing Australia’s past:
[John] Pilger’s latest documentary, Utopia, is produced by Dartmouth Films in association with the taxpayer-subsidised SBS TV Australia… It has just had showings at the taxpayer-subsidised Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.... So stand by for a dose of alienation coming to an art-house theatre near you, followed by a release on SBS…
Utopia contains close to two hours of unremitting propaganda… Early in the film, Australian journalist Jeff McMullen (who presented Difference of Opinion on ABC TV, the predecessor of Q&A) makes a statement which frames Pilger’s documentary.
According to McMullen, the interaction between the European settlers and the first peoples over two centuries can be explained as follows: “We rounded people up into concentration camps; in fact what we have done from the original invasion until now is constantly reduce Aboriginal people to subhuman status.”
So, according to the Pilger-McMullen view, indigenous Australians are still regarded as subhuman. Such hyperbole runs through the entire documentary. No other view gets an uninterrupted hearing…
White and black Australians who support the Utopia line are allowed to state their case. Whites who proclaim a different view, such as Snowdon and Brough, are interrupted and disparaged. Pilger told Fairfax Media’s Nick Galvin he chose not to interview Aboriginal leaders who are “part of the political elite”....
Utopia glosses over the problems of drug and alcohol dependency among indigenous Australians along with the alarming rate of violence by Aborigines against other Aborigines, including women. Also Utopia fails to recognise that many indigenous Australians have a part-European or other background. Which means that, in Pilger’s testimony, their predecessors were both the invaders and the invaded. 
It strikes me that many on the Left will not be satisfied until we have a race war. Australia Day two years ago - when a Julia Gillard staffer incited a violent protest by allegedly passing false information about Tony Abbott to the Aboriginal tent embassy - is not just a metaphor but a foretaste.
The Left is playing with fire.
UPDATE
The hatred being preached against Australia is astonishing. John Stone on the country some are now trying to tear apart:
We should look back upon our history with pride, and rejoice in the good fortune of our inheritance, chiefly from Britain. The separation of Church and State, our parliamentary system, a respect for the rule of law (albeit not the rule of lawyers), the common law, and not least our language – that of Shakespeare, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, John Milton, and the list goes on – were all bequeathed to us, in some cases as a result of long and at times bitter struggles elsewhere. What a fortunate nation we have indeed been.
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Once upon a time the Palestinians were allowed a vote

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (6:59am)

It was another one of those Middle Eastern elections - one man, one vote, one time:
Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas deserves congratulations (mabrouk in Arabic). He has just entered his tenth year of his four-year term in office.
Israel is expected to make a deal with a president who broke a promise of elections to his own people. 
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The Left vs free speech

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (6:53am)

Free speech

John Hinderaker notes the same totalitarian instinct - the same intolerance of debate - in America’s Left: 
We have already seen some of that–liberals descending on private citizens’ homes, trying to frighten their families. In one notorious case, a teenage boy was home alone when a union-led mob, bused to the scene, attacked the front porch of his family’s house. Terrified, he locked himself in a bathroom. Most recently, attacks on Google buses in San Francisco have reportedly forced the company to hire armed security to protect its employees. And what of the Koch brothers themselves? They have received countless death threats, and their residences have been besieged by left-wing activists. Small wonder that most people who donate to conservative organizations would rather remain private.
But again: Why does the Times think that the effectiveness of conservative 501(c)(4)s “would be much reduced” if the government forced them to make donor lists public? I can think of only one reason: the Times and its allies on the far left would harass and vilify them; liberals would organize boycotts of their companies’ products; thugs from unions and Occupy Wall Street would threaten their families; the Obama administration would see that their taxes are audited and other administrative measures brought to bear. This is what the Times and other liberals want. Liberals like those on the Times editorial board have no wish to argue with conservatives; they almost always lose. What they want, instead, is to squash dissent by shutting conservatives up.
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Dear Katharine. Try argument, not abuse. This issue is too, too important for name-calling

Andrew Bolt January 28 2014 (12:16am)

The Left has become so intellectually lazy that it resorts to name calling as the first response to unfashionable arguments. That is particularly so when the Left is confronted by principled arguments against rewriting our constitution to distinguish between Australians on the grounds of Aboriginal ancestry.
Take even Guardian writer Katharine Murphy, who (disappointingly for an apparently intelligent woman) simply asserts what she does not trouble to prove - because, I suspect, she cannot:

Conservative opponents are starting to rumble. Columnist Andrew Bolt over the weekend produced an argument along the following lines: if the constitution contains racial framing then racism and division will ensue. Bolt’s “New Racism” argument is pernicious, and not even logical, but it is simple – simpler say, than explaining the complexities and deficiencies of a document that most Australians don’t care about, and haven’t read.
Once the Left thought racism was “pernicious”. Now they claim that opposition to racism is the real evil.
But why didn’t Murphy spend just a paragraph to prove my case not just pernicious but illogical? Wouldn’t that have been satisfying work, proving me illogical? She might even have talked me out of my position, since I would be very glad of correction if I am in error. But this abuse is simply lazy, and suggests intellectual bankruptcy.
(I note Murphy did not link to the blog item she criticised (or to this one).  Had she done so, some readers might have realised she did my argument little justice in her summary.) 
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Holly Sarah Nguyen
Honor the best in you. Respect what you can and can't do. When it's enough for you, it often has a way to show someone it must be enough for them.
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 Dry Bones cartoon, kirschen, middle east, syria, sunni, shia, shiíte, war, terror, islam, muslim, peace,
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Michelle Malkin 13
Hi everyone! Here's the MichelleMalkin.com newsletter for January 27th. Enjoy!

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Here’s John McCain questioning George Tsunis, who is President Obama’s nominee to be the next ambassador to Norway. Tsunis could have at last taken the time to look up Norway info on Wikipedia before trying to answer questions...

Chuck Schumer must not have heard last year’s news; Says IRS needs to curtail Tea Party groups

Count Chuck Schumer among those who aren’t even pretending that we have a Constitution anymore, though it doesn’t seem he’s been paying very close attention to the news...

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Portrait of Horace Walpole by John Giles Eccardt
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“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” - Ephesians 6:12-13
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon
January 27: Morning
"And of his fulness have all we received." - John 1:16
These words tell us that there is a fulness in Christ. There is a fulness of essential Deity, for "in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead." There is a fulness of perfect manhood, for in him, bodily, that Godhead was revealed. There is a fulness of atoning efficacy in his blood, for "the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin." There is a fulness of justifying righteousness in his life, for "there is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." There is a fulness of divine prevalence in his plea, for "He is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by him; seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them." There is a fulness of victory in his death, for through death he destroyed him that had the power of death, that is the devil. There is a fulness of efficacy in his resurrection from the dead, for by it "we are begotten again unto a lively hope." There is a fulness of triumph in his ascension, for "when he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and received gifts for men." There is a fulness of blessings of every sort and shape; a fulness of grace to pardon, of grace to regenerate, of grace to sanctify, of grace to preserve, and of grace to perfect. There is a fulness at all times; a fulness of comfort in affliction; a fulness of guidance in prosperity. A fulness of every divine attribute, of wisdom, of power, of love; a fulness which it were impossible to survey, much less to explore. "It pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell." Oh, what a fulness must this be of which all receive! Fulness, indeed, must there be when the stream is always flowing, and yet the well springs up as free, as rich, as full as ever. Come, believer, and get all thy need supplied; ask largely, and thou shalt receive largely, for this "fulness" is inexhaustible, and is treasured up where all the needy may reach it, even in Jesus, Immanuel--God with us.
Evening
"But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." - Luke 2:19
There was an exercise, on the part of this blessed woman, of three powers of her being: her memory--she kept all these things; her affections--she kept them in her heart; her intellect--she pondered them; so that memory, affection, and understanding, were all exercised about the things which she had heard. Beloved, remember what you have heard of your Lord Jesus, and what he has done for you; make your heart the golden pot of manna to preserve the memorial of the heavenly bread whereon you have fed in days gone by. Let your memory treasure up everything about Christ which you have either felt, or known, or believed, and then let your fond affections hold him fast for evermore. Love the person of your Lord! Bring forth the alabaster box of your heart, even though it be broken, and let all the precious ointment of your affection come streaming on his pierced feet. Let your intellect be exercised concerning the Lord Jesus. Meditate upon what you read: stop not at the surface; dive into the depths. Be not as the swallow which toucheth the brook with her wing, but as the fish which penetrates the lowest wave. Abide with your Lord: let him not be to you as a wayfaring man, that tarrieth for a night, but constrain him, saying, "Abide with us, for the day is far spent." Hold him, and do not let him go. The word "ponder," means to weigh. Make ready the balances of judgment. Oh, but where are the scales that can weigh the Lord Christ? "He taketh up the isles as a very little thing:"--who shall take him up? "He weigheth the mountains in scales"--in what scales shall we weigh him? Be it so, if your understanding cannot comprehend, let your affections apprehend; and if your spirit cannot compass the Lord Jesus in the grasp of understanding, let it embrace him in the arms of affection.
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Jeconiah 
[Jĕco nī'ah] - jehovah doth establish or preparation of the lord.
The next to last of the kings of Judah (1 Chron. 3:16, 17Esther 2:6Jer. 24:1; 27:20; 28:4; 29:2). Altered form of Jehoiachin, and called Jechonias in Matthew 1:11, 12.
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Today's reading: Exodus 16-18, Matthew 18:1-20 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Exodus 16-18

Manna and Quail
1 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the LORD's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death...."

Today's New Testament reading: Matthew 18:1-20

The Greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven
1 At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, "Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"
2 He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me....


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