Sunday, February 16, 2014

Sun Feb 16th Todays News

Published in 1969, French Connection was about drug trafficking. Made into a popular movie for adults (rated R) in 1971, Calvin Klein began a business for fashion in 1972, and called it French Connection. The drug scheme involved transport of heroin through France to USA from Turkey. The money came from Nazi France. Violence. Nudity. The brand was hip and cool and international. A fax from French Connection Hong Kong to French Connection United Kingdom was sent in anagram form in '97, FCHK to FCUK. A brand was born. T-shirts soon sported "fcuk fashion", "hot as fcuk", "too busy to fcuk", "fcuk safely", in Australia, "no fcukin worries". 

In 1987, I was busy and desperate, working several jobs to get through university, living in the Liverpool Motel and failing much. I visited a friend in Chatswood. We were hanging at the top of the station steps waiting for my train home. It was getting close to 11pm. A few police come by and order everyone onto the platform. I say my friend lived in Chatswood. They said "Go home." I say my friend lived in Chatswood, but I was catching a train home." One police officer smirked and said "Why, just so you can hold hands?" and I told the two police men to fuck off. I was about twenty years old and did not know what to expect. I was arrogant. My friend was scared, and bolted, as the senior constable unbuttoned his sidearm and rested his hand on the undrawn weapon, and approached me, eyeballing me. He ordered me to produce ID. I had my university library card and a train ticket. They escorted me onto the platform and wanted to know where I was living. I lived in the Liverpool Motel, but felt a friend's place in Lindfield was closer. The two policemen explained they could take me to the station and charge me with obstruction, or take me to a back alley and beat me up if I continued to act smart. It was a humbling introduction to ALP Premier Unsworth's Sydney. I'd never interacted with police before. It illustrates how quickly standards get corroded by pop culture, where a mere twelve years later an arrest able offence became hip and cool and edgy. 

Another brand began on this day in 1937. Nylon. Made up of two cities NY and LONdon, according to pop culture. Although it wasn't named that way. It was named after cotton and Rayon, so it ended with ON. NYL was accidental, it was going to be called NURON as in 'no run' but sounded too much like a nerve tonic. But I was born in NYC and my Nanna was born in London. I don't think I will be able to patent that name for any children I might have. But I'm really good on the right pair of legs.
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Hatches
Happy birthday and many happy returns Andrew Taco NguyenKevin LuctoretEmergo Tran and Favour Erumse. Born on the same day, across the years, along with
Matches
Despatches
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Apology foundation perpetuate fable

Piers Akerman – Saturday, February 15, 2014 (11:48pm)

FORMER Prime Minister Kevin Rudd could never be described as self-effacing.

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'Apology foundation perpetuate fable'
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Looking for the truth in beauty

Miranda Devine – Saturday, February 15, 2014 (11:48pm)

IN this selfie era, the tyranny of beauty is inescapable, especially for young women. On social media, girls are defining their self-worth by how many likes or followers their images attract. They pose like pop stars, seeking affirmation of their “hotness”.

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'Looking for the truth in beauty'
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THE LATEST SCIENCE

Tim Blair – Saturday, February 15, 2014 (10:11pm)

I am currently in Los Angeles investigating important climate science. This evening my research led me here, in the company of leading climate authority Iowahawk:

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Previously, we inspected the recent scientific work undertaken by Coop at his LA laboratory:

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This is the scene at Musso and Frank’s heat investigation unit:

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Among that night’s climate study group was none other than turbo genius Gale Banks, creator of several eco-awaremicro-vehicles. Investigations continue.
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The Left’s myths are destroying Aboriginal children

Andrew Bolt February 16 2014 (7:54am)

The "stolen generations", The politics of race

The media Left’s addiction to the stereotypes of white racists and black victims puts Aboriginal children in grave danger.

Example one, from the Sydney Morning Morning Herald:
Imagine if more than half the young people detained in Australia today were from Sydney. Imagine if they were white. Newspaper letter writers would whip themselves into a frenzy, GetUp! would run a national campaign and tens of thousands would take to the streets to march for the freedom of Australia’s children.
Instead, 53 per cent of young people in detention are indigenous. And instead of a national outcry, Australia is gripped by a national silence.
According to the latest national figures, indigenous young people - who comprise just 5 per cent of the population - were detained at a staggering 31 times the rate of non-indigenous young people on an average night in June 2012… So how, we should be asking, can we pretend the national shame of mass Aboriginal incarceration isn’t symptomatic of other problems?
Reporter Bianca Hall’s demand for “freedom” for such children and her suggestion that they are victims of racist double-standards is irresponsible and deceptive.
The children are detained generally because they broke the law or posed a danger to themselves or others. They are not detained because they are Aboriginal. 
But to bolster her argument of racial double-standards, Hall decouples this link between crime and punishment. Indeed, not once in her article does Hall use the word “crime”, talking only of the high rate of “incarceration”. It is as if we arrest Aboriginal children on a whim.
Hall is right, of course, to suggest this high rate of incarceration (or, actually, crime) is related to the terrible dysfunction and family breakdown in so many Aboriginal communities, but she is profoundly wrong to suggest we do not talk about that or try with social policies to fix it. (In fact, Hall herself won’t talk of the role of Aboriginal culture in producing the terrible outcomes she deplores, which is the real silence we must end.)
But Hall again tries to decouple actions from consequences when she insists:
.... cutting the incarceration rate of indigenous people should be at the forefront of attempts to close the gap.
That is exactly the wrong way around. In fact, closing the gap - in education and employment - should be at the forefront of attempts to cut the incarceration rates. Reverse the order, as Hall suggests, and we’d have to refuse to jail Aborigines for crimes for which non-Aborigines would be jailed. We would be entrenching racism in our judicial system, and also entrenching the terrible victim mentality which incarcerates so many Aboriginal children.
Example two, from the ABC’s PM program and the irresponsible Greens:
BRENDAN TREMBATH: For nearly a century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families by state and federal governments and church missions.
Aunty Hazel from the Gunnedah area in north-eastern New South Wales argues little has changed.
AUNTY HAZEL: There’s never been a gap, there’s never been a stop in stolen generation and that’s evident today…
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Grandmothers and their families have attended a rally outside the New South Wales Parliament to condemn the forced removal of Indigenous children by the State’s Department of Community Services… Greens MP David Shoebridge says there’re no doubt cases where the organisation is doing the right thing, but its first reflex is to remove children.
DAVID SHOEBRIDGE: Between 1997 and 2012 we saw a five-fold increase in the number of Aboriginal children being removed across Australia. And New South Wales tragically is a real hot spot, it’s the highest rate of Aboriginal child removal and more than one in 10 Aboriginal children across New South Wales are in care. It’s the new stolen generation. 
Here is the link I’ve often warned of - between preaching the “stolen generations” myth and attacking attempts today to save Aboriginal children from dangers from which we’d rescue them if they were white. How many Aboriginal children have died already, thanks to the poison of this myth?
Yes, PM did also quote NSW Minister Pru Goward rightly insisting that child welfare officials had no choice but to remove Aboriginal children at high rates, given the high levels of danger they faced:
PRU GOWARD: But we also need to see rates of domestic violence, alcohol abuse and child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities come down too, so we can be sure that Aboriginal children are safe, it’s very much a two way street.
But PM - and the ABC generally - has never made the obvious link. If we are removing many Aboriginal children for their own safety, how can we say previous generations of welfare officials were racist and wrong to do the same? What exactly are we apologising for when we talk of the “stolen generations”?
Fact: AM misleads in blandly describing the “stolen generations” as comprising “tens of thousands of Indigenous children ... forcibly removed from their families”. The definition is actually more precise and more damning:
Tonight we debate the stolen generations - the claim that between 1910 and 1970 as many as 100,000 aboriginal children were stolen from caring parents for racist reasons.
Robert [Manne] says the figure is actually lower. He suggests one in 10 Aboriginal children were stolen from 1910, and estimates the total number at up to 25,000.
But what do we mean by “stolen”. Let me tell how Robert has defined it.
Says he: “It was not from harm that the mixed-descent children were rescued but from their Aboriginality.” (1)
And, he said in one essay, this was overseen by authorities who “wished, in part through the child removal policy, to help keep White Australia pure”.
So, he adds: The “stolen generations is for Aboriginal Australians what the term Holocaust was for the Jews’’. (2)
Fact: not one “stolen generations” activist has ever been able to produce even 10 examples of these children stolen from their parents by officials just because they were Aboriginal, and not because they needed care.
Fact: not one of the many court cases since involving “stolen generations” claimants has found there was a policy to remove children just for being Aboriginal. Those findings apply particularly to Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. An Aboriginal-led Stolen Generations Taskforce concluded that in Victoria, too: ”there was no formal policy for removing children”.
Think of the Aboriginal children who have since paid with their lives for this “stolen generations” myth of the Left:
Just ask the New South Wales Child Death Review Team, which investigated why Aboriginal children of drug addicts were 10 times more likely to die under the noses of welfare officers than were children of white addicts.
It blamed a fear of the “stolen generations”, pleading: “A history of inappropriate intervention with Aboriginal families should not lead now to an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk.’’
Or this one:
I quote from yesterday’s Australian:
A senior departmental official (said) the child involved was sexually abused at age seven and, as a safety measure, was put with various foster families, eventually ending up in 2005 with a non-indigenous family . . .
“These non-indigenous people were fantastic—ensuring she went to school, and the father actually took a year off his work to personally supervise this girl,” he said.
“But two new social workers were appointed to the north and they expressed the view, which was repeated many times to the investigating committee, that putting an indigenous child with white foster parents was another stolen generation . . .”
And so this girl was sent back to Aurukun, to be pack-raped again.
Or more.
(Via Piers Akerman.) 
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Stuff George Bush didn’t do

Andrew Bolt February 16 2014 (7:13am)

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A school for five-year-old Marxists

Andrew Bolt February 16 2014 (12:22am)

Australia’s Marxists will gather at their yearly conference at Melbourne University at Easter. Some will drop their children off at the ”School for Rebellion”, run by the conference organisers to indoctrinate even five-year-olds:
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But the way the Green Left Weekly described it, last year’s school actually taught the children one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Marxist way:

The first School of Rebellion, held in association with Marxism 2013 over the Easter weekend in Melbourne, drew about 30 kids…
The school started with philosophy sessions for the younger group aged four to seven…
Next up was a graffiti workshop for the older group… This involved the kids making their demands and ideas known with spray paint… Their demands included, “Free internet”, “Free Food”, “Free everything!"…
The older kids rebelled in a slam poetry session, electing a 10-year-old girl as their spokesperson and demanding to go outside and play soccer. Which they did.
Hmm. Marxist children demand everything be given to them free, and then they go out to play. Only force by their masters will make some work to provide what the others take.
That’s Marxism, kids. It’s amazing that after so many disastrous failures exactly like this in so many countries that your parents still believe this stuff. And, worse, that so many of their preachers work in universities, teaching the next generation how to destroy what works best.
(Thanks to reader Terje.) 
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Hmm, AGW believers? - ed
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USS Philadelphia
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“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” - 1 John 4:10
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

February 15: Morning
"To him be glory both now and forever." - 2 Peter 3:18
Heaven will be full of the ceaseless praises of Jesus. Eternity! thine unnumbered years shall speed their everlasting course, but forever and forever, "to him be glory." Is he not a "Priest forever after the order of Melchizedek?" "To him be glory." Is he not king forever?--King of kings and Lord of lords, the everlasting Father? "To him be glory forever." Never shall his praises cease. That which was bought with blood deserves to last while immortality endures. The glory of the cross must never be eclipsed; the lustre of the grave and of the resurrection must never be dimmed. O Jesus! thou shalt be praised forever. Long as immortal spirits live--long as the Father's throne endures--forever, forever, unto thee shall be glory. Believer, you are anticipating the time when you shall join the saints above in ascribing all glory to Jesus; but are you glorifying him now? The apostle's words are, "To him be glory both now and forever." Will you not this day make it your prayer? "Lord, help me to glorify thee; I am poor; help me to glorify thee by contentment; I am sick; help me to give thee honour by patience; I have talents; help me to extol thee by spending them for thee; I have time; Lord, help me to redeem it, that I may serve thee; I have a heart to feel; Lord, let that heart feel no love but thine, and glow with no flame but affection for thee; I have a head to think; Lord, help me to think of thee and for thee; thou hast put me in this world for something; Lord, show me what that is, and help me to work out my life-purpose: I cannot do much; but as the widow put in her two mites, which were all her living, so, Lord, I cast my time and eternity too into thy treasury; I am all thine; take me, and enable me to glorify thee now, in all that I say, in all that I do, and with all that I have."
Evening
"Whereby they have made thee glad." - Psalm 45:8
And who are thus privileged to make the Saviour glad? His church--his people. But is it possible? He makes us glad, but how can we make him glad? By our love. Ah! we think it so cold, so faint; and so, indeed, we must sorrowfully confess it to be, but it is very sweet to Christ. Hear his own eulogy of that love in the golden Canticle: "How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine!" See, loving heart, how he delights in you. When you lean your head on his bosom, you not only receive, but you give him joy; when you gaze with love upon his all-glorious face, you not only obtain comfort, but impart delight. Our praise, too, gives him joy--not the song of the lips alone, but the melody of the heart's deep gratitude. Our gifts, too, are very pleasant to him; he loves to see us lay our time, our talents, our substance upon the altar, not for the value of what we give, but for the sake of the motive from which the gift springs. To him the lowly offerings of his saints are more acceptable than the thousands of gold and silver. Holiness is like frankincense and myrrh to him. Forgive your enemy, and you make Christ glad; distribute of your substance to the poor, and he rejoices; be the means of saving souls, and you give him to see of the travail of his soul; proclaim his gospel, and you are a sweet savour unto him; go among the ignorant and lift up the cross, and you have given him honour. It is in your power even now to break the alabaster box, and pour the precious oil of joy upon his head, as did the woman of old, whose memorial is to this day set forth wherever the gospel is preached. Will you be backward then? Will you not perfume your beloved Lord with the myrrh and aloes, and cassia, of your heart's praise? Yes, ye ivory palaces, ye shall hear the songs of the saints!
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Quartus 
[Quär'tus] - the fourth.
This name is associated with a quarternion of soldiers, that is, a file of four, the usual number for a night watch. Peter was placed under the guard of four quarternions of soldiers, or sixteen soldiers, in order that each might guard him three hours at a time (Acts 12:4).
It may be fitting at this point to discover the significance of the many friends Paul speaks of. Romans and Colossians are unique for their number of personal salutations. Paul himself was such a friendly person that friends gathered around him as moths do around a lighted lamp. In the majority of cases all we have is the mention of a name. Now and again Paul adds a brief, endearing term. But the fact that he mentions many by name, as in the case of Quartus, proves that he must have had some contact with them. Either he had met them on his journeys and they were blessed by his ministry, or they had ministered unto the apostle of their substance. By including their names in his letters, he gave them an imperishable memory.
There were multitudes of others who had labored with Paul in the Gospel, too numerous perhaps to be called by name. The apostle rejoiced, however, that their names, although not mentioned in his lists, were written in the Book of Life, and fully known of the Lord (Phil. 4:3). John also besought Demetrius to greet all his friends by name (3 John 14).
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Today's reading: Leviticus 17-18, Matthew 27:27-50 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Leviticus 17-18

Eating Blood Forbidden
The LORD said to Moses, 2 "Speak to Aaron and his sons and to all the Israelites and say to them: 'This is what the LORD has commanded: 3 Any Israelite who sacrifices an ox, a lamb or a goat in the camp or outside of it 4 instead of bringing it to the entrance to the tent of meeting to present it as an offering to the LORD in front of the tabernacle of the LORD--that person shall be considered guilty of bloodshed; they have shed blood and must be cut off from their people....

Today's New Testament reading: Matthew 27:27-50

The Soldiers Mock Jesus
27 Then the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. 28 They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, 29 and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. "Hail, king of the Jews!" they said. 30They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. 31 After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him....

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