Saturday, November 04, 2017

Sat Nov 4th Todays News

Don't give up on hope. LNP is trailing ALP in Queensland despite the ALP premier having an abysmal record, no plan for prosperity and opposing Adani because of the appearance of corruption. The reason why it is so hard to elect LNP is because Turnbull, Bishop and Pyne are oxygen thieves. NSW and Victoria will have similar problems so long as Turnbull is PM. 

 It is difficult to overstate ALP corruption, but I became aware of something recently which may help illustrate it. I'm being persecuted by people who believe it is in ALP interests to do so. I have asked an awkward question (25 years ago) regarding ALP and pedophilia, and the result was a child died from neglect. Part of the persecution of me involved denying me income, and taking my home and life savings. I had made application (10 years ago) to access Superannuation (on medical grounds) and needed reports filled in by two GP's. I'd only seen one because I've had very bad experiences with them. But I'd seen a sleep specialist too. So I asked the sleep specialist if they would be willing to put a diagnosis or an opinion on the form. It had been the fourth visit to the specialist. The first was to approve my need for sleep apnea CPAP device. The second and third were routine to note it was working as a cure. The last was the special request for an opinion as a second medical practitioner. My paperwork for the specialist has gone missing. All that is left is the first contact. The result means that the hard fought for Drivers License I recently got from Victoria will be voided, pending a time I see another sleep specialist. 

 Why am I being persecuted? Who benefits? 

I am a decent man and don't care for the abuse given me. I created a video raising awareness of anti police feeling among western communities. I chose the senseless killing of Nicola Cotton, a Louisiana policewoman who joined post Katrina, to highlight the issue. I did this in order to get an income after having been illegally blacklisted from work in NSW for being a whistleblower. I have not done anything wrong. Local council appointees refused to endorse my work, so I did it for free. Youtube's Adsence refused to allow me to profit from their marketing it. Meanwhile, I am hostage to abysmal political leadership and hopeless journalists. My shopfront has opened on Facebook.
























































Here is a video I made "Sometimes When I'm Dreaming"

"Sometimes When I'm Dreaming" is a song from Agnetha Fältskog's 2004 comeback album, My Colouring Book. The song was written by Mike Batt, once famous as the writer of songs for The Wombles and was originally recorded by Art Garfunkel. Katie Melua also covered this song on the Piece By Piece (Special Bonus Edition) album. === I have good friends and they tell me not to do things like this ..


=== from 2016 ===
IPA Review features a Michael Husek article “Volunteerism and Civil Society.” Husek discusses the United Firefighters Union (UFU) power grab over the Country Fire Authority (CFA). It is an attack on a cultural asset, CFA volunteers have a long and noble history. The take over means that volunteers will not be able to take basic action regarding a fire unless they are in the presence of a paid firefighter. However, paid firefighters are nowhere near flash-points but are in urban areas. People who are in volunteers have given up over this issue. The problem is that if they take positive action for the community they can be prosecuted. Worse, country folk cannot even defend their own property, with green oversight groups preventing firebreaks and land clearing. Dan Andrews, Premier of Victoria has broken volunteers. As Victoria approaches summer, she is defenceless. It is another impost on struggling farmers. It also affects South Australia and Western Australia with their own volunteer organisations being devalued and disrupted.

I posted in defence of Cardinal Pell the other day. I noted that accusers anonymously post online abuse that lacks substance. In reply I have seen the following
Philip Thompson No way anyone can tell me this bloke didn't know what was going on. He actually stood up for one of his paedophile mates in court. He reeks of at least protecting these jackalls.
David McArthur No matter whose to blame, pedophilia accusations and statements should never be ignored or shunned as 'ploys' by the lefts. Cardinal Pell has been accused of pedophilia and molestation and must atone for his act or prove himself innocent.
Adam Corp Looks like a rock spider to me
Glenice Lohde BIG ROCK SPIDER…
Daryl Robson The man is at best a defender of pedeophiles and at worst (allegedly) one himself. Old Cardinal nappy tearer as he's colloquially known.
Celie Wright He knew exactly what was going on , in the church, scumbag let it happen fir years, so much abuse, rot in hell..
Greg Worley David Daniel Ball that is bullshit,he like all catholic priests would have covered up heaps of abuse cases
They did not need to illustrate my point about baseless abuse. 

Australia is poorly positioned to capitalise on a Trump Presidency with both the foreign affairs Minister Julie Bishop and the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull talking out to personalise antipathy to Trump. One understands they prefer Hillary Clinton because they prefer working with corruption. They had insisted Abbott give over $10 million aid to the Clinton Foundation in 2014, and rolled Abbott after he stopped the payments. But neither Bishop nor Turnbull has explained how Australia will be better off with a corrupt Clinton as President, compared to a GOP backed Trump. Trump is not Reagan. Trump is very good at negotiations and knows how to run an executive team. Reagan was more reliant on insiders from GOP. Trump can deliver on promises better than Turnbull can. Turnbull has portrayed himself as being a good business executive. With Trump as President we will see a real one. Trump would never have put himself in the ridiculous position Turnbull has. All Turnbull can do now, constructively, is resign.

Meanwhile Trump’s progressive opponent is loved by the press and demonstrably corrupt. And the Libertarian candidate is trying to find Aleppo. Or a head of state.
Rumour now runs internationally that the apparent Saudi Spy who partners Hillary Clinton kept a life insurance policy of emails left in her ex husband’s computer. And the FBI found it. And so the insurance policy has been cashed in early. And the FBI investigating a witch on Halloween have found incriminating evidence on her familiar’s Weiner.

One person who knows how to profit from central planning is Hillary Clinton. The Chicago Tribune is withdrawing support from her, and suggesting that Democrats replace Hillary. But corrupt news, like the Tribune, knew everything now known about Hillary as they supported her days ago. Maybe they are only backing a tribe, but not a policy? And Maybe they want to find another crook. I note that press, who had accepted Hillary's corruption, are now denouncing her Saudi Spy Handler

Donald Trump's speech at Gettysburg is frightening media. They have supported and protected insider corruption for a long time. Trump will clean up the festering wound, and make America great again. 
=== from 2015 ===
Miranda Devine, journalist, has correctly called out the ICAC showing some of the damage it does to lives. Personally, I felt it had gone too far when it destroyed the premiership of Nick Greiner. But there was a reason for retaining it. As with the Human Rights Council, the ICAC is a parody of what she should be. But because of the leadership of Triggs and Latham, they fail in their basic duties. It should not be the case that a judge is as partisan and incompetent as Triggs and Latham are. It should be the case that judges had the acumen and opaqueness that independence and insight provides, so that cases are not prejudged. But Latham and Triggs are so transparent that any case's judgement is known before facts are presented. In the case of Triggs, she makes up stories. Security guards are said to have weapons when they are in fact not armed. In the case of Latham, a police minister with a perfect record has been accused of corruption on no evidence. Devine is wrong to demand the dismantling of the ICAC. The ICAC needs to function for NSW to be healthy. But it needs competent leadership. 

For some, at the moment, the Sex Party has more credibility.
From 2014 
Melbourne Cup Tragedy
Melbourne cup is over for another year. Many congratulations to German race horse Protectionist placing first. Red Cadeaux placed second for the third time. But questions need to be answered regarding the 7th placed Araldo and the last placed, favourite, Admire Rakti. Japanese Rakti died in its' stable soon after placing last. It seemed distressed before the race, but had won handsomely in other meets recently. Araldo was spooked by a young boy waving flag soon after the race and broke a leg and was put down. It is not good enough if horses die in the race. Another horse broke a leg in the same race last year. There are many horse races in Australia and internationally where the horses do not die. Accidents happen, but too often, and the race appears fixed. Tom Waterhouse promised up to $25 million to any better who could choose the top ten places. With the favourite not even appearing in the top ten, that bet is pretty safe. 

World Trade Centre and US Mid Terms
World Trade Centre and US Mid Term elections happening almost simultaneously. The expectation is that Obama whose reputation was made after he spoke against GOP policy following the war in Iraq after the World Trade centres collapsed in 911 is likely to lose all external authority to the Presidency as Democrats lose prestige. A sensible congress has been absent eight years, coinciding with Democrats controlling the houses. The new World Trade Centre is elegant and beautiful. A symbol of the promise of hope for the future. 

The future for ALP and US Democrats
ALP unreformed and without a policy or credible leader. In the US Democrat fortunes have collapsed, but they have a future if the two year lag between US and Australian politics remains as it has since '96 when Mr Howard won government for the conservatives and, two years later, Clinton was at his lowest. Thing is, the ALP have not reformed, does not have a credible leader or policy, but is polling well thanks to institutionalised lean from the mainstream media. Policies that are so bad they killed people are applauded by the media as compassionate. The death of Whitlam is a signal for a lie frenzy about his achievements and celebrations in which it is wrong to question what happened. So as the US Democrats sink, they can rest assured that they need not do anything worthwhile to get votes again. However, the Democrats have a possibility they might explore. They can reform, and distance themselves from dangerous divisive minority interests. They can work to unify the US by supporting cultural assets and promoting prosperity for all. If they did the basics right, a good leader would be revealed. At the moment, all the Democrats got for leaders are broken down horses. 

Four Corners on the ABC had an enlightening expose of jihadists and the CFMEU but failed to draw the line connecting the ALP. The ALP have fostered corruption in the union movement for decades. Not solely through the use of slush funds to skew elections but through protecting the unions from scrutiny, which is partly what the demarcation dispute over Work Choices was about. In Victoria, a few weeks out from election, the over popular ALP have continued to maintain strong links to the CFMEU, including having CFMEU leadership on ALP steering committees. On Four Corners it was shown that the Islamo Fascists ALP champion, some of whom are currently fighting for ISIL, were working for CFMEU leaders as independent contractors and bikie gangs as stand over men. The independent contractors were debt collectors and stand over men and seem to have had substantial influence over corrupt transactions in the building industry. Gillard had dismantled the oversight into the industry. The possibilities are chilling. 

The National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) was created by Rudd in '07. It was intended to help poor people with rent. Instead it has been abused, so that commonwealth auditors are joining police in probing how a NSW based company defrauded Victorian charities. Another Rudd scheme for the poor is exploited by filthy rich corrupt mates of the ALP. 

ALP are ahead in polls 54:46 according to Newspoll. The apparent popularity of the ALP seems to stem from their irresponsibility in denying the budget, in particular budget cuts. Mr Abbott has signalled that Public Service pay rates would be raised beneath inflation. Thank the popular ALP for failing to pass cuts. The result exposes a truth. Conservatives need to be conservative to win and hold office. The Liberal party has been too timid at the start of their administrations in recent years. 

ABC and Global Warming
Roast axed by ABC after criticism from Bolt. The Roast has put up abysmal comic items which weren't funny, but were actionable for their crudity. Naturally it was biased to the left. Dr Karl boasts he is inflexible and wrong when he talks of Climate Change. He too has been criticised by Andrew Bolt. Sceptic bashing in the ACT as the Canberra International Film Festival will screen Merchants of Doubt and follow that with a public forum. The whole concept seems extraordinarily unbalanced. The 7:30 report with Leigh Sales and alarmist Professor Lesley Hughes are fact checked by Bolt. ABC poll fail on alarmism on AGW as the ABC post a simple poll, and get a number greater than 90% asserting that the world won't warm as much as the ABC hysterically claim. 

Mediawatch fail on Peris emails. Previously, Mediawatch applauded the outing of private emails which have destroyed the career of a poet. But the reflex to protect a possibly corrupt ALP senator asserts itself. 

Mixed issues
Jihadism is growing, fuelled by Islamic leadership and mainstream media encouragement of a dismal and wrong point of view of politics and religion and culture. Children are being raised in the West believing propaganda which is not challenged concerning Jews, custom and culture. Support of ISIL is alarming because terrorists do not offer a hope or a future for their adherents. 

Fairfax fails to apologise for a mistake in verballing Mr Howard. They had claimed Mr Howard was criticising Mr Abbott for his effective turn back the boats policy. In fact Mr Howard supports Mr Abbott's policy and his speech Fairfax quoted from was eighteen months earlier than the report, when Mr Abbott was not PM. 

Rinehart leaves Ten board .. Will Bolt Report remain?
From 2013
I have no interest in whomever Bieber sleeps with so long as he/she/it is legal. Nor Miley Cyrus. But a defence force girl humiliated through a scandal concerns me. It was politicised by then ALP defence minister so as to embarrass the defence forces who were getting toey. Losing soldiers to bad defence policy is upsetting to senior personnel too. We know it was bad policy because adults in the form of conservative government did not lose a soldier over about the same time the ALP did. 40 to nil is not a good soccer score. In this case, the score are soldier's lives. The young woman concerned in this particular scandal, and others involved in other scandals did not benefit from the spotlight. Like other victims of sexual abuse, they are entitled to a fair process sympathetic to their futures. Instead they were pawns in political battles that had little to do with them. Naturally, the press shy away from why this woman was treated differently to other such victims Australia wide. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Which is why the caretakers of the unknown soldier needs to be watched. 

Miranda Devine pays appropriate tribute to a highly decorated SAS soldier. Also UWS Vice Chancellor gets rewarded for her diligence doing what I would love to have done, but with equal opportunity never can. Opportunity knocks the Golden Eagle, which while not endangered, is protected by the US Government unless it flies into a bird killing wind mill. If Obama spoke on the issue, I'm sure he mis-spoke. Read a compelling story of a man who loves his work, by Tim Blair .. the man is an Egyptian executioner. He works with his hands, which is something the ABC should do, not broadcast news or current affairs, but community service for their crimes against culture and truth. Who doesn't love cooked, crispy Bacon? Certainly better than the journalist educator. Bruce Hawker describes for Bolt how he abused and used the willing press. A protestor gets legal aide for a trumped up charge .. I am threatened, my home is at risk, and no legal aide for me. 
Historical perspective on this day
1429 – Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War: Joan of Arc liberates Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier.
1501 – Catherine of Aragon (later Henry VIII's first wife) meets Arthur Tudor, Henry VIII's older brother – they would later marry.
1576 – Eighty Years' War: In Flanders, Spain captures Antwerp (after three days the city is nearly destroyed).
1677 – The future Mary II of England marries William, Prince of Orange; they later jointly reign as William and Mary.

1737 – The Teatro di San Carlo is inaugurated.
1780 – The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II against Spanish rule in the Viceroyalty of Peru begins.
1783 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Symphony No. 36 is performed for the first time in Linz, Austria.
1791 – The Western Confederacy of American Indians wins a major victory over the United States in the Battle of the Wabash.
1798 – Beginning of the Russo-Ottoman siege of Corfu.

1839 – Newport Rising: The last large-scale armed rebellion against authority in mainland Britain.
1847 – Sir James Young Simpson, a Scottish physician, discovers the anaesthetic properties of chloroform.
1852 – Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour becomes the prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, which soon expands to become Italy.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Johnsonville: Confederate troops bombard a Union supply base and destroy millions of dollars in material.
1868 – Camagüey, Cuba revolts against Spain during the Ten Years' War.
1890 – City and South London Railway: London's first deep-level tube railway opens between King William Street and Stockwell.

1912 – First Balkan War: The First Battle of Çatalca begins - an attempt by Bulgaria to break through the last defensive line before the Turkish capital Constantinople.
1918 – World War I: The Armistice of Villa Giusti between Italy and Austria-Hungary is implemented.
1921 – The Saalschutz Abteilung (hall defense detachment) of the Nazi Party is renamed the Sturmabteilung (storm detachment) after a large riot in Munich.
1921 – Japanese Prime Minister Hara Takashi is assassinated in Tokyo.
1922 – In Egypt, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men find the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
1924 – Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming is elected the first female governor in the United States.
1924 – Calvin Coolidge wins a full term as President of the United States.

1939 – World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the United States Customs Serviceto implement the Neutrality Act of 1939, allowing cash-and-carry purchases of weapons by belligerents.
1942 – World War II: Second Battle of El Alamein: Disobeying a direct order by Adolf Hitler, General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel leads his forces on a five-month retreat.
1944 – World War II: Bitola Liberation Day

1952 – The United States government establishes the National Security Agency, or NSA.
1952 – Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected the 34th President of the United States.
1956 – Soviet troops enter Hungary to end the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union, that started on October 23. Thousands are killed, more are wounded, and nearly a quarter million leave the country.

1960 – At the Kasakela Chimpanzee Community in Tanzania, Dr Jane Goodall observes chimpanzees creating tools, the first-ever observation in non-human animals.
1962 – The United States concludes Operation Fishbowl, its final above-ground nuclear weapons testing series, in anticipation of the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
1966 – The Arno River floods Florence, Italy, to a maximum depth of 6.7 m (22 ft), leaving thousands homeless and destroying millions of masterpieces of art and rare books. Also Venice was submergedon the same day at its record all-time acqua alta of 194 cm.

1970 – Vietnam War: Vietnamization: The United States turns control of the air base at Bình Thủy in the Mekong Delta over to South Vietnam.
1970 – Salvador Allende takes office as President of Chile, the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country through open elections.
1973 – The Netherlands experiences the first Car-Free Sunday caused by the 1973 oil crisis. Highways are used only by cyclists and roller skaters.
1979 – Iran hostage crisis: A mob of Iranians, mostly students, overruns the US embassy in Tehranand takes 90 hostages (53 of whom are American).
1980 – Ronald Reagan is elected the 40th President of The United States, defeating incumbent Jimmy Carter.

1993 – China Airlines Flight 605, a brand new 747-400, overruns the runway at Kai Tak Airport.
1995 – Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by an extremist Israeli.
2002 – Chinese authorities arrest cyber-dissident He Depu for signing a pro-democracy letter to the 16th Communist Party Congress.
2008 – Barack Obama becomes the first person of biracial or African-American descent to be elected President of the United States.

2010 – Aero Caribbean Flight 883 crashes into Guasimal, Sancti Spíritus. All 68 passengers and crew were killed.
2010 – Qantas Flight 32, an Airbus A380, suffers an uncontained engine failure over Indonesia shortly after taking off from Singapore, crippling the jet. The crew manage to safely return to Singapore, saving all 469 passengers and crew.
2015 – A cargo plane crashes shortly after takeoff from Juba International Airport in Juba, South Sudan, killing 37 people.
2015 – A building collapses in the Pakistani city of Lahore resulting in at least 45 deaths, at least 100 injured.
=== Publishing News ===
This column welcomes feedback and criticism. The column is not made up but based on the days events and articles which are then placed in the feed. So they may not have an apparent cohesion they would have had were they made up.
===
I am publishing a book called Bread of Life: January. 

Bread of Life is a daily bible quote with a layman's understanding of the meaning. I give one quote for each day, and also a series of personal stories illustrating key concepts eg Who is God? What is a miracle? Why is there tragedy?

January is the first of the anticipated year-long work of thirteen books. One for each month and the whole year. It costs to publish. It (Kindle version) should retail at about $2US online, but the paperback version would cost more, according to production cost.If you have a heart for giving, I fundraise at gofund.me/27tkwuc
===
Editorials will appear in the "History in a Year by the Conservative Voice" series, starting with August, September, October, or at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1482020262/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_dVHPub0MQKDZ4  The kindle version is cheaper, but the soft back version allows a free kindle version.

List of available items at Create Space
Happy birthday and many happy returns Tegan Perkins Ftk and Carla J. Patterson. Born on the same day, across the years, along with
November 4: Day of Ashura (Islam, 2014); Unity Day in Russia
Altare della Patria, Rome
Time to put Anaesthetic to bed. The union supplied the Forrest. The soldier is unknown. Socialism doesn't last. Pardon the rude. Let us party. 
Deaths
===
Tim Blair 2017


===
Andrew Bolt 2017


===
Andrew Bolt


===

The unaccountable destroyer of lives we call ICAC

Miranda Devine – Tuesday, November 03, 2015 (11:16pm)

ON the morning of May 2, 2014, Mike Gallacher, a cop who had risen to become police minister, was on stage addressing graduates of the Police academy at Goulburn.

 Continue reading 'The unaccountable destroyer of lives we call ICAC'
===

Where Kiwi PM goes, Malcolm Turnbull follows

Miranda Devine – Tuesday, November 03, 2015 (11:15pm)

Malcolm Turnbull and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key have a lot in common.
 Continue reading 'Where Kiwi PM goes, Malcolm Turnbull follows'
===

A FEW MORE EARTH HOURS SHOULD SORT THIS OUT

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (3:20pm)

A carbon correction from the Chinese government: 
China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, is burning far more annually than previously thought, according to new government data. The finding could vastly complicate the already difficult efforts to limit global warming.
Even for a country of China’s size and opacity, the scale of the correction is immense. China has been consuming as much as 17 percent more coal each year than reported, according to the new government figures. By some initial estimates, that could translate to almost a billion more tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere annually in recent years, more than all of Germany emits from fossil fuels …
The new figures add about 600 million tons to China’s coal consumption in 2012 — an amount equivalent to more than 70 percent of the total coal used annually by the United States. 
If this report is accurate, China’s correction on coal alone represents almost double Australia’s entire annual human-generated carbon output. Chalk up another success for Tim Flannery, who three years ago predicted: “China is doing exceptionally well … they are on track to stabilise their emissions.”
China’s coal revision also demonstrates the pathetic futility of Australia’s short-lived carbon tax. That little correction is worth nearly 60 times more carbon dioxide than was cut by the carbon tax in 2013.
(Via A.R.M. Jones.)
===

WORLD’S WHITEST WOMAN

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (2:57pm)

Run for your lives! Tanya Plibersek has gone radioactive:

In other melatonin-deficient developments, Rachel Dolezal finally admits she was born white:

===

POLLS? WHAT ARE POLLS?

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (2:53pm)

Less than two months after backstabbing Tony Abbott because he was behind in the polls, Julie Bishop claims: 
“Not that I follow polls …” 
Honestly, Julie. 
===

WHEN STRING IS OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE STRING

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (2:38pm)

An email announcement from Gun Control Australia: 
In October this year the Coalition Government approved the immediate importation of the Alder A110 shotgun with a five round magazine capacity.
To show the publics dictate for this decision and support for string gun laws, GCA will have a large TV screen erected in Martin Place to demonstrate the working of the Adler A110 Shotgun and seeking public support for the banning of this weapon.
We need your support to fun this event. 
Go right ahead. Fun it up as much as you like.
(Via Michael Mann, who notes the sensitivity of presenting this little stunt in Martin Place.)
UPDATE. A follow-up email from GCA: “A large TV screen will be erected in Wynyard Park (please note updated location).”
===

SUBMERGE THESE ISLANDS IMMEDIATELY

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (12:15pm)

Bill Shorten dances up a storm during his crucially important Pacific island climate change tour: 
===

NO SHAME IN BEING A PARIAH

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (11:37am)

Today’s Daily Telegraph editorial: 
Former chief justice of the Family Court Alastair Nicholson last year declared himself ashamed to be Australian. One of the main reasons for that shame, Nicholson wrote, was Australia’s policies on border protection.
“Australia is rapidly becoming an international pariah," Nicholson claimed, “riding roughshod over solemn treaty obligations into which it has entered like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Refugee Convention and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
Nicholson is far from alone in denouncing our nation. “Australia has become an international pariah,” John-Paul Sanggaran wrote in the Guardian last September.
“Our policies and treatment of people fleeing persecution, war and torture are infamous for their cruelty and selfishness. The number of refugees that Australia takes is trifling and shameful when compared with the rest of the world.”
It seems, however, that nobody told Norway, Denmark or Sweden that Australia’s policies are so wicked. All three nations have now commenced Facebook and Twitter campaigns warning refugees that they are not welcome. 
Indeed they have. Here’s Joran Kallmyr, a state secretary in Norway’s foreign ministry: 
“The aim is to get the number down. Many are coming and many of them are not from Syria,” Kallmyr told state broadcaster NRK on Sunday. “The refugees choose where they travel, based on what they know about the country. Although Denmark is a safe country, there are relatively few who have sought asylum there.”
Kallmyr said the campaign would, among other things, inform potential asylum seekers of the Norwegian government’s proposals to cut the benefits they will receive on arrival. 
And in Sweden: 
“We want, through advertisements in foreign newspapers, to explain that the utopia they want to come to in Sweden no longer exists. Here, it’s tent camps, winter and cold,” party leader Jimmie Akesson said. 
Australia leads the world. Not bad for a pariah.
(Via J.F. Beck.)
UPDATE. While in Sweden recently, Mark Steyn noted the presence of beardy reffos. An Australian leftist challenged that view: 
How Steyn managed to determine that they were refugees and not hipsters, I’m not sure. 
Steyn’s reply: 
Erm, it was because they were speaking Arabic. 
===

YOU HAD ONE JOB

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (10:51am)

The ABC can’t even nail a simple two-word quote:

Add it to the list. And here’s Father Tilty O’Jesus in Gosford: 
The Melbourne Cup is somehow seen as something quintesentually Australian. Unfortunately so is racism. We can be better than this. 
That’s why Rod Bower only uses little words in his dumb church slogans. Big words are too difficult. 
(Via John P.)
===

IN SYDNEY, EVEN RADIO PEOPLE ARE HOT

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (10:36am)

Apologies to Justin Smith, but the only reason I appear on 2UE every week is so I can talk to his executive producer:
===

MORE OOPS THAN SCOOPS

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (10:08am)

“Out in the cold, Tony Abbott turns to Julia Gillard for comfort. Seriously. No joke. Not a word of a lie.” – A bold claim yesterday from Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston.
“Since being ousted, Tony Abbott has apparently rung up Julia Gillard on the phone several times.” – The Sydney Morning Herald’s Ben Cubby.
“Almost unbelievable: Tony Abbott has phoned Julia Gillard several times since being dumped.” – Buzzfeed’s Mark Di Stefano.
“The story that I have attempted to contact former PM Gillard is completely false.” – Ex-PM Tony Abbott.
“Our story today was wrong. Apologies to Tony Abbott, who has not contacted Julia Gillard.” – A correction from Aston.
“Sometimes when something sounds too strange to be true, it’s because it’s not. We apologise to former PM Tony Abbott for saying that he has reached out to his predecessor Julia Gillard since his removal from the Liberal leadership. He hasn’t. Don’t I feel like a total galah.” – Further from Aston.
“No joke. No word of a lie. Joe Aston is out of control.” – News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt.
===

PETAL TO THE METAL

Tim Blair – Wednesday, November 04, 2015 (9:37am)

The Clownshoe at peace in its flower-strewn Buddhist meditation space:
===

Flannery flops in China

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (5:57pm)

In 2013, Tim Flannery said China was the model:
China has capped the amount of coal that they’re going to be burning, pretty close to current levels and instead are expanding renewables very quickly ... so they really are taking a leadership position… The Chinese have set targets for themselves in terms of emission intensity, in terms of overall electricity demand and they are exceeding those targets, not just meeting them, they’re exceeding them.
Last year Flannery urged Australia to follow China’s revolutionary lead in tackling emissions:
China has committed for the first time to cap its carbon emissions by 2030, or earlier if possible. In what is being touted by some as an “energy revolution” China has also agreed to provide an additional 800-1000 gigawatts of zero emissions generation capacity by 2030… Meanwhile, as the latest report from the Climate Council has found, Australia is lagging further behind.
Flannery in April even claimed China was burning less coal, not more:
Places like China have already reduced coal burning by 2.5 per cent over the last year. So there are huge efforts going on overseas. We’d be in the middle of the pack if we took up the 30 per cent target.
But, uh oh, another Flannery flop:
China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, is burning far more annually than previously thought, according to new government data… 
Even for a country of China’s size and opacity, the scale of the correction is immense. China has been consuming as much as 17 percent more coal each year than reported, according to the new government figures. By some initial estimates, that could translate to almost a billion more tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere annually in recent years, more than all of Germany emits from fossil fuels … The new figures add about 600 million tons to China’s coal consumption in 2012 — an amount equivalent to more than 70 percent of the total coal used annually by the United States.
Mind you, even without this correction, China’s data shows that Flannery was talking out of his hat:
(Thanks to reader Alan RM Jones.) 
===

Quigley attacks Turnbull’s NBN

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (5:45pm)

Labor made such a dog’s breakfast of the NBN that we assumed Malcolm Turnbull must have been a genius by contrast.
Former NBN Co boss Mike Quigley ...  has broken his silence by adding to the discontent circulating around the Coalition government’s Multi-Technology Mix (MTM) National Broadband Network (NBN). On the ABC Radio National Background Briefing last Sunday, Quigley highlighted how the figures in NBN Co’s Corporate Plan 2016 show that the delays and cost blowout of up to $15 billion are the result of the Coalition government’s decision to change how the NBN would be rolled out. 
He supports his assertions with a detailed analysis contained in a report titled ”Exploding Malcolm Turnbull’s Myths”…
According to Quigley, the delays and extra expense introduced during the renegotiation with Telstra, the associated slow-down in revenues and the higher operating expenses for the MTM NBN are some of the major reasons for the latest cost blow-out.
His major criticism centres around the government’s decision to enter into a one-off settlement in 2014 of outstanding claims by NBN Co’s construction partners, and higher ongoing contract rates. Quigley states that he would not have agreed to the construction partner’s demands and the resulting extra cost of about $500 per premises is the “true like-for-like difference” between the FTTP rollout costs before the election and what NBN Co is faced with now.
Quigley state[s] that “far from being a difference of over $2,000 per premises (or 80%) as implied by Mr Turnbull, the true like-for-like difference is closer to $500 (or about 10-15%)."… Emeritus Professor Rod Tucker recently gave a presentation that provided details about why the MTM NBN would be slow, expensive and obsolete before it is completed ...
(Thanks to reader John.) 
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More union transactions probed

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (5:40pm)

These kinds of allegations are getting so awfully familiar that I wonder when the ACTU will drop its “few bad apples” defence. Of course, these are just allegations, and the presumption of innocence must apply:
In an echo of the revelations around former Health Services Union leader Kathy Jackson, the trade union royal commission today heard damaging claims of fraud, this time concerning National Union of Workers NSW state secretary Darack “Derrick” Belan. 
“Investigations by the commission have identified a large number of suspicious transactions on branch credit card statements,” counsel assisting the commission Sarah McNaughton SC said in her opening statement at the start of three days of hearings into the union.
Mr Belan’s American Express Corporate Card and Commonwealth Bank Corporate MasterCard, billed to the union branch, were used to buy clothing, bed linen, Lego toys, sunglasses, Easter eggs, makeup, jewellery from Tiffany & Co, perfume and other “obviously personal items” from shopping website catchoftheday.com.au worth almost $40,000, Ms McNaughton said. Mr Belan also used a union credit card to spend $12,000 on ITunes, $2271.70 in fees for dating websites and payments for entertainment, holidays, accommodation, and a tattoo…
Mr Belan, who abruptly stood down as NSW boss last week after 14 years in the post, asked to be excused from giving testimony to the Commission today on the grounds he had been admitted to a Sydney psychiatric facility.
However, Commissioner Dyson Heydon rejected Mr Belan’s application to and compelled him to appear.
The inquiry also heard $68,395 in payments from union branch funds to personal accounts owned by Mr Belan’s niece and branch bookkeeper Danielle O’Brien, were made “under the guise of wage payments to union officials and employees” in the past four years…
Ms O’Brien also resigned last week along with her father, NUW organiser Nick Belan.
In further allegations aired at the commission this morning, the inquiry heard NUW NSW branch paid former NSW Labor MP Paul Gibson $271,566 for “consultant services”.
The payments were made in the two years after Gibson left Parliament with the union unable to produce any evidence of the work performed, Ms McNaughton said… The late Mr Frank Belan was NSW secretary of the Storemen and Packers Union and, following amalgamation, the NUW’s NSW branch, from 1983 until his death in October 2001 when Derrick Belan took over.
(No comments.) 
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Showing us the Christian family, but not the Muslim ones

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (1:30pm)

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton singles out an Iraqi Christian family - the husband a professional - to assure us that the 12,000 extra refugees we’ll take in from Iraq and Syria are people we should feel safe helping:
One of the phone calls new Australian resident Osama Butti will make after being presented with his official Australian status by immigration minister Peter Dutton this morning, will be to old friends from the Zyouna neighbourhood in the eastern suburbs of Baghdad. 
“I will tell them I have won the lottery,’’ says Mr Butti, who along with his 36-year-old wife Hanan Proty, 14-year-old son Saif and 12-year-old daughter Mina, was one of the first four families to be granted a humanitarian visa under the expanded 12,000 places for Iraqi and Syrian refugees…
Mr Butti, a 50-year-old who used to travel the world helping project manage for international corporations, and Ms Proty, a biologist, ... appear affluent and well connected… It is obvious they will assimilate easily into Australian society and prosper, and their refugee claim was enhanced by very close family connections to Australia.  
So far, so good. But while the Abbott Government privately assured us almost all the refugees would be Christians, thus more likely to integrate, the Turnbull Government seems to have a different aim:
Of the four families in the first wave of approvals, two were Sunni Muslim and two were Christian: Assyrian Christians from Mosul in Iraq, and Chaldean Catholics from Baghdad.
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Shorten dances up a storm

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (12:42pm)

Labor leader Bill Shorten went to Kiribati to talk about climate threats: 
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None of us need accept more taxes. We’re not mushrooms, are we?

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (6:26am)

No, they don’t have to accept that at all:
Australians will have to accept higher taxes under a GST reform plan, according to the federal government’s top advisers on budget repair, bluntly contradicting calls from Coalition MPs for the proceeds to fund income tax cuts.
I have more faith in these Coalition backbenchers:
As more Coalition backbenchers warn against the “lazy reform” of raising taxes to fund more public spending, Malcolm Turnbull and his top cabinet ministers are canvassing options that include an increase in the GST from 10 per cent to 15 per cent with a wider base that could be ­extended to health, education and financial services.
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Don’t tell the truth: media fails Bill Shorten’s warming test

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (6:15am)

On Monday I said Labor leader Bill Shorten had set the media a test:
LABOR leader Bill Shorten will test the honesty of journalists this week when he tours Pacific Islands he claims are drowning. 
Will they dare report that most of the islands are in fact growing or stable? Or will they again prove they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the global warming scare?…
Professor Paul Kench, an Auckland University coastal geomorphologist, along with colleagues in Australia and Fiji, has now studied more than 600 coral reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
His findings: about 40 per cent have grown in size. Another 40 per cent have stayed stable. Just 20 per cent have shrunk… And, if anything, [the IPCC says cyclones] are getting fewer: “Over periods of a century or more, evidence suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific.”
The results so far confirm that for the overwhelming majority of media outlets - and especially the ABC - the truth does not count.  The global warming fear campaign must be fed and to hell with the science.
ABC AM: Fail.
Sydney Morning Herald: Fail.
ABC News: Fail.
ABC Radio National Breakfast: Fail.

The Guardian: Fail.
New Matilda: Fail.
But The Australian’s Rowan Callick: Pass:
When in Marshall Islands, the Labor group should talk with the veteran editor of the Marshall ­Islands Journal, Giff Johnson. 
He wrote recently in an article for the Vanuatu-based Pacific Institute of Public Policy that “an increasing number of atoll studies are not supporting claims of ­Pacific island leaders that islands are sinking”. A credible study on the ground showed, he said, that “23 of 27 atoll islands across Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia either ­increased in area or remained stable over recent decades”.
Sydney Morning Herald: Pass. (Only just. And still bought the “extreme weather” hoax.)
ABC Radio National Breakfast today: Fail again.
AAP/Ninemsn: Fail.
AAP/7News: Fail.
AAP/Daily Telegraph: Fail.
Professor Stephen Howes in The Age: Fail.
International Business Times: Fail.
Labor Herald: Fail.
SBS: Fail.
This is scandalous. Sorry to tell you this, but you cannot trust the media to tell you the truth about global warming.
UPDATE
Related: Janet Albrechtsen::
With the UN climate summit in Paris due to start later this month, the global warming silly season is well under way. This week France’s popular weatherman Philippe Verdier was sacked by a French TV station for writing a book that challenges some scientists for inflating the effects of global warming… 
Addressing a September conference in London on climate change and international law, Philippe Sands QC called for a ruling from the International Court of Justice to “scotch” claims by “scientifically qualified, know­ledgeable and influential individuals” who challenge the “consensus” on man-made global warming. Are we re-entering the Middle Ages where you were treated as a traitor if you mentioned that the king might be dying — even if he was?
(Thanks to reader WaG311.) 
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The fall of the “social justice” warrior

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (5:55am)

David French, lawyer and National Review writer, predicts the decline of the “social justice” nagger:
If you’re Social Justice Warrior, you’re a liar. You actively spread absurd falsehoods about the nature of men, women, sex, and culture that can’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny. You change history and conceal facts to fit preferred narratives, even when it costs human lives. You claim the best of intentions yet achieve the worst of outcomes. And through it all, you hate the very nation and political system that have granted you the liberties you so grotesquely abuse. 
If you’re a Social Justice Warrior, you’re intolerant. Because your lies can’t withstand scrutiny, you wall yourself off in comfortable enclaves and then ruthlessly suppress dissent within your chosen communities. From that secure ground, you then strike out, seeking to expand your territory by walling off the arts, the academy, pop culture, and even athletics, silencing because you can’t persuade and punishing those you can’t silence.
If you’re a Social Justice Warrior, however, you’re also ultimately impotent. While you’ve intimidated many institutions, you actually control few. Only in the most cloistered of communities, including in your academic strongholds, do you represent a majority. You gain power by causing trouble, by making it easier to comply with your demands than to defy your tantrums. And that works until it doesn’t — until your demands become so absurd that you become the joke, until you’ve been proven so toothless that defiance becomes a path to power and popularity.
If history is any guide, then mendacious and intolerant ideological movements tend to have relatively short cultural half-lives, especially when they don’t actually attain total control over law enforcement or the means of mass communication. The modern wave of political correctness is doomed. In fact, it has already peaked — it has nowhere to go but down.
(Thanks to reader fulchrum.) 
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CSIRO: Most Australians are now global warming sceptics

Andrew Bolt November 04 2015 (5:32am)

The Sydney Morning Herald misses the most astonishing finding of the CSIRO study to complain that Malcolm Turnbull leads a party of sceptics:
Barely one in four Coalition voters accepts climate change is mostly caused by humans, with more than half of Liberal voters believing changes to global temperatures are natural, according to a CSIRO survey.
And it holds out false hope:
Andy Pitman, Director of ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of NSW, predicted that many Coalition voters will take their cue from the new PM and shift their views.
They didn’t last time, Mr Pitman. No, this is a reminder to Malcolm Turnbull not to push his luck too hard as leader of a party far more sceptical than he is:
But this Herald  report misses the most startling finding: only a minority of Australians now think man is mostly to blame for global warming. More think global warming is largely natural or not happening:
Incredibly, even 19 per cent of Greens voters are now sceptics, too:
Despite the media’s best efforts, there has been a huge shift in opinion. The global warming scare is dying.
Mind you, another drought - inevitable in this continent - could keep the scare going for a while yet.
(Thanks to reader Mark M.) 
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Labor sells sizzle, but no sausage

Piers Akerman – Sunday, November 02, 2014 (9:56am)

Proving he learnt nothing from the Whitlam fiasco, the Latham folly, or the Rudd catastrophe and the Gillard farce, Opposition leader Bill Shorten has saddled Labor with yet another empty slogan instead of delivering concrete policy.
“Fairness between generations” is the new banner Shorten waved Friday to rally his divided and disheartened troops.
It could have come from the litany of banalities chanted by followers of Mao’s appalling Cultural Revolution or a headline from the noxious Little Red Schoolbook.
Labor’s problems go well beyond a need for new slogans as was highlighted by the abject stupidity of the party’s response to a suggestion from immigration spokesman Richard Marles that Labor might accept the idea of turning back asylum-seeker boats.
After Marles recognised the obvious last Sunday and acknowledged that the Abbott government’s policy of boat turn-backs had stopped asylum deaths at sea and was having an impact on stopping boats entirely in tandem with the offshore processing which was resumed by Labor under Kevin Rudd in 2013, Shorten donned the blinkers.
“No, we don’t see that the argument has been made or the evidence has been made out about boat turn-backs. Labor’s policy hasn’t changed,” Shorten said.
Shorten argues Labor’s decision in July last year after Rudd returned to the leadership to strike a regional resettlement arrangement with Papua New Guinea was the “origin of the success” in stopping the floods of asylum-seeker boats to Australia.
That doesn’t accord with the facts, as Immigration Minister Scott Morrison reminded Parliament last week.
In the five months after the former Labor government returned to offshore processing, 75 asylum-seeker boats had turned up in Australian waters.
“For five months after the introduction of turn-backs, do you know how many boats there were? None. Absolutely none,” Mr Morrison said. “Do you know how many boats turned up in the five months after that? One.”
Contrary to the mythology of Labor and the Greens, the boat turn-back policy at the heart of the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders has been an outstanding success.
More than 1200 asylum-seekers were presumed dead or missing at sea during the Rudd and Gillard government years, including about 50 asylum-seekers who died after their rickety boat crashed into rocks at Christmas Island’s Flying Fish Cove in late 2010.
A year later almost to the day, an asylum-seeker boat carrying 250 capsized off Java. Fewer than 50 survivors were found. In August 2012 a vessel carrying 150 vanished after sending a distress signal from the Sunda Strait.
The voters are in no doubt about the success of the policy, Shorten is because he has no control over the Left of his party and is worried that Labor will lose even more votes to the mindless Greens unless he condemns the government’s achievement.
How can Abbott’s call for sensible debate on policy possibly survive when Labor’s can only provide such a moronic response?
There’s little doubt that Labor hopes its call for fairness between generations will be cheered by adolescent students protesting about the proposed increases in university fees.
They will seize on the overblown reputation of the dysfunctional Whitlam government and its introduction of fees, forgetting conveniently that there was a subsequent abandonment of the Commonwealth Scholarship scheme which meant the brightest were accommodated, and ignoring the other inconvenient truth that Labor introduced the HECS fee system when it discovered that the nation could not afford yet another impractical Whitlam dream.
They should be reminded that each and every one of them – just like every other Australian – has been left with a $25,000 debt burden courtesy of six years of disastrous Labor policies.
Shorten hopes to distract potential supporters with a redefinition of Labor’s moral purpose.
He would do better to outline Labor’s practical solutions for the problems that he and other members of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Cabinets created.
Whitlam had a vision for the nation which sustained a political elite, a coterie of luvvies, and a clique of fabulists but left the nation with what was then an historic deficit.
Rudd sought out the bien pensants for a weekend of visionary thinking in Canberra, where, surrounded by sheets of butchers’ paper, the themes of the future were solemnly debated. They were a complete nonsense and none survived.
Shorten says Labor needs to seek a “higher ground” when it all needs do is acknowledge reality.
Ominously for Labor, the public is showing a greater regard for the Coalition in the polls.
With the taxpayer-funded media giant, the ABC, in vehement irrational opposition to all its policies, and Fairfax not far behind, this is heartening for conservatives.
It demonstrates, again, that the electorate may not agree with all the details of every policy but it respects the fact that the government does have plans and moreover, they are working.
The carbon tax is gone, the boats have, by most measures, been stopped.
The simple message for Labor is that electorate doesn’t want sizzle, it wants sausage.
(ends ...) 
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ROAST IS TOAST

Tim Blair – Tuesday, November 04, 2014 (2:15pm)

Our scoldy ABC friends have been cut: 
Rising Australian satirical comedy series The Roast has been axed by the ABC.
In a pointed farewell on social media, the team behind the ABC2 show thanked viewers for the support they’d given during the show’s three-year run and “We’d also like to wish young, promising comedians like Shaun Micallef and The Chaser the best of luck as we pass the torch down to them.”
One member of the team told The Australian the decision was not their own. 
On the plus side, The Roast has finally made people laugh.
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FOG PROTECTION

Tim Blair – Tuesday, November 04, 2014 (1:55pm)

A big night of sceptic bashing in Canberra: 
The Canberra International Film Festival will turn the spotlight on professional climate sceptics on Monday night with the screening of the controversial documentary Merchants of Doubt followed by a public discussion forum …
Dr Matthew Rimmer, an associate professor with the ANU College of Law, said Canberra was the perfect location to screen the documentary given the political termoil caused by climate change policy in recent years. 
Forget the “termoil”. The real reason Canberra is the perfect location is that it’s full of alarmist rent-seekers who are terrified about getting real jobs. This gig would’ve drawn a full house. 
“A larger discussion will also be about the implications of climate scientists’ work abnd how we can better to protect them in terms against the fog machine of fossil fuel propaganda,” Dr Rimmer said. 
Is the “fog machine of fossil fuel propaganda” anything to do with the celebrated enormous conservative fuselage? 
The screening begins at 6.45pm and discussion will moderated by ABC Radio presenter Adam Shirley. 
But of course.
(Via Noel G)
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A HAPPY TEAM

Tim Blair – Tuesday, November 04, 2014 (1:31pm)

“In order to fulfill a bet with the Premier of Victoria, Mike Baird was required to wear a Hawthorn tie in Parliament last month,” emails Imre Salusinszky. “I am now the proud owner of this historic garment.”
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The jihadist danger grows, and so does the denialism of too many Muslim “spokesmen”

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (4:26pm)

The numbers grow:
ATTORNEY-GENERAL George Brandis has revealed 71 young Australians have fought in northern Iraq and Syria while 73 people have had their passports cancelled to prevent them from joining the conflict. 
Add their supporters, friends and enablers and we have a serious number of supporters of one of the most violent terrorist movements in generations.
UPDATE
How impressive was George Brandis on Q&A last night?
And how frightening the astonishing sense of victimhood of so many in the audience? You’d have thought Australia actually had no jihadists, no ISIS supporters and no Muslims jailed for terrorism plots.  You’d have thought Australian Jews serving with the Israeli army were as dangerous to us as Australian Muslims serving with the Islamic State. You’ve have thought the recent police raids were a failure or even a hoax, and that police truly took away a plastic sword and not a steel one.  You’d have thought that “team” was a word the Government used to exclude Muslims. And you’d have heard veiled threats that operations to arrest extremists and disrupt terrorist attacks should stop or we’d be made to pay. You’d have also heard Muslim leaders suggesting jihadism was the result of the Government not listening to the legitimate grievances of Muslims. You’d have heard Muslim leaders suggest the definition of consulting with them was simply doing what they said.
Incidentally, I was also struck by how many converts, especially women, purport to speak for most Muslims here, and how many could not ask Brandis a question without sneering. I was also struck by the effort Q&A had gone to to assemble a room dominated by Muslims and assorted critics of the Government and the country, and the smirking attempts of host Tony Jones to goad Brandis.
As reader L suggests, if this is what we get when Muslims make up just 2 per cent of our community, what would 20 per cent look like?
PS: Brandis did so well not just because he had the facts and made good arguments - not least against the claims that metadata collection was useless and that journalists should be exempted from laws banning the release of information about protected security operations. He seemed reasonable, calm, informed and very open to engagement and consultation with moderate Muslims. I suspect many moderate Muslims would have been impressed, and that would be an important gain for Brandis.
But his reasonableness came, inevitably, at a cost. Brandis could not and did not make the link between Islam itself and violence. Sure, it may well be that he sees no such link at all. But even if he did, it is now too inflammatory and dangerous for mainstream politicians to discuss, let alone assert.
UPDATE
Here are the audience questions, edited for length, but every one included. Only two - one from a non-Muslim - express any real concern about jihadists and the threat thy pose to Australians, Muslims included. The victimology, paranoia and blame-shifting is suffocating:

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'The jihadist danger grows, and so does the denialism of too many Muslim “spokesmen”'
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Victorian Labor should not be this close to the CFMEU. UPDATE: Packer denies backing Labor

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (2:47pm)

Jennifer Hewett on Victorian Labor’s dangerous links to a shady union:
(T)here’s no doubt the conclusions of the counsel assisting the trade union royal commission are humiliating for a former prime minister and further tarnish the federal Labor brand and era… 
But ... (t)he real public interest is in what the evidence to the royal commission suggests about the current state of union behaviour and its continuing impact on a wide range of businesses and the broader economy. Try the long list of corruption, thuggery, criminal offences, blackmail, bribery, fraud, extortion and conflicts of interest.
The 1000 pages of final submissions by Jeremy Stoljar cite many different examples of egregious behaviour of officials from familiar favourites like the Maritime Union of Australia, the Transport Workers Union and, naturally, the Health Services Union.
But nowhere is the extent of the corruption more breathtaking and widespread than in the actions of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union in the building industry…

[The] commission’s findings may make [Victorian voters] more alert to the influence of the CMFEU on any Labor government and increase the pressure on state Opposition Leader Dan Andrews to distance himself from some of the most powerful of his union backers…
Stoljar says, for example, that various CMFEU officials engaged in “criminal, unlawful and unprofessional conduct”.
Nor is this confined to the fringes of the union with Stoljar pointing to the existence of “a pervasive and unhealthy culture” that sees the law as something to be deliberately avoided, while those that speak out about union wrongdoing are to be vilified. According to the commission’s examination of case studies involving the CMFEU, this culture includes “blackmail and extortion” along with boycotts, cartels and other anti-competition behaviour in Victoria and Queensland; death threats against a fellow union organiser in NSW; misuse of private details of Cbus industry super fund members and deliberate defiance of orders by the Fair Work Commission and judgments by the courts.
UPDATE
Voters seriously want a party with these links, outlined in Parliament by Christopher Pyne?:
It’s important to know who the CFMEU is because I think many members of the public don’t quite realise the kind of rogue union that we are talking about. This is a union that received a $1.5m record fine for criminal contempt of court just last year in 2014. So just this year in 2014 for its blockade of the Myer Emporium site. This is a union that’s been found guilty of contempt of court 28 times since the year 2000, with links to gangland bosses like Mick Gatto through its secretary, with links to the Comancheros and the Rebels bikie gangs. And Labor’s response to this, Labor’s response to this information about the CFMEU which is quite public has been to welcome it back in to the Victorian Labor Party...
UPDATE
Voters seriously want a party with these links? 
LABOR MP Cesar Melhem used tens of thousands of dollars from a union-backed slush fund to smooth his path into parliament, according to counsel assisting the royal commission into union corruption. 
He also spent $27,286.26 from his Industry 2020 fund on overseas trips and a high-flying lifestyle, without reimbursement, Jeremy Stoljar, SC, says in his submissions to commissioner Dyson Heydon.
The former Australian Workers’ Union secretary also incorrectly told hearings he repaid $1001 of cigars bought in Singapore with the fund’s money, Mr Stoljar says. “Donations assisted Mr Melhem to become a person of notoriety and influence within the Labor Unity faction and the ALP in Victoria,” he says. “(His) entry into Parliament was truly charmed. It could not sensibly be contended his history of financial support … did not have some role to play.”
No wonder union bosses are so desperate for Labor to be back in charge.
UPDATE
As I said yesterday, I find it hard to believe James Packer would back Labor, given its record and its ties:
JAMES Packer today strongly distanced himself from racing identity Lloyd Williams’s assertion that Victorian Labor would have the billionaire casino mogul’s overt backing during the November 29 election campaign.

Mr Packer ... said his company wanted to work with both sides of politics. 
This was after Mr Williams was recorded claiming to Labor leader Daniel Andrews that Mr Packer would “kick every goal he can for you"…
“...Lloyd is a very close friend of mine, but he did not speak to me before making his comments to Daniel Andrews and they don’t represent my views,’’ James Packer said.

“Any issues I had with the Victorian government in relation to a proposed gaming levy were fully resolved through negotiation and goodwill. “I do not intend to get involved in this or any election. Crown will continue to work with whichever Government the public elects in the best interests of our Melbourne resort and our thousands of employees.” 
(Thanks to readers Peter of Bellevue Hill and bill b.) 
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Why does the ABC employ warmist Dr Karl when he boasts about his failure to correct errors?

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (2:27pm)

Global warming - dud predictions

Dr Karl wears my criticisms with pride - and confirms them:
The howlers that the ABC science presenter proudly refuses to correct are here.
Why does the ABC continue to employ a science presenter who is not only so wrong but so determined not to correct obvious mistakes?
UPDATE
Still, the angry children at the Roast seems to think I am responsible for the ABC canning its show. All I did though, was advertise its content. But Dr Karl should take heed and at least issue a few corrections, as a professional science communicator should. 
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Newspoll: Labor ahead 54 to 46

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (11:31am)

I would bet this Newspoll result is an outlier:
Based on preference flows from last year’s election, where 80 per cent of Greens votes and 60 per cent of other votes flowed to Labor, the ALP holds a crushing lead of 54 to 46 per cent — the reverse of the election result.
Yesterday’s Ipsos poll put the margin at 51 to 49, and I suspect the truth is inbetween.
That said, I’ll say it again: the Government is doing very well for now on foreign issues but the election will be won and lost on domestic ones.
UPDATE
Readers remind me of a good reason to be less sure that this result is an anomaly. Hiking the petrol excise, even by no more than would cost the average motorist 40 cents a week, is not a winning strategy.
UPDATE
More pain to come, including to the Government:
TONY Abbott has signalled an across-the-board reduction in public service wages, warning nobody should expect a better deal than the real-terms pay cut imposed on Defence personnel.

The Defence Remuneration Tribunal yesterday approved a below-inflation 1.5 per cent pay rise for military personnel each year for three years, in a move branded “insulting” by defence advocates.... 
Australia’s inflation rate is about 2.3 per cent…
The Prime Minister, asked today to defend the wage offer, said ...  repairing the federal budget meant that all employees of the federal government needed to exercise restraint… “We would all like to pay our serving defence personnel more, but there is going to have to be very tight pay restraint across the public sector, including the defence personnel. I regret that,’’ he said in Sydney.
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Fact-checking the ABC and it warmist guest, Professor Lesley Hughes. No wonder I distrust both

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (10:13am)

Global warming - propaganda

Another ABC report on global warming in desperate need of an injection of cool facts:
Claim:
LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: ... The United Nations’ climate change body’s new report says the scientific evidence is unambiguous about the warming of the planet .. The Earth is on a trajectory for warming of at least four degrees Celsius by 2100. That’ll mean more and longer heatwaves and storms and more species extinctions.
Alarmist. 
In fact, the 4 degrees prediction is based on the report‘s highest estimate of the most extreme model of emissions and temperature sensitivity:
That extreme scenario does not predict “at least” 4 degrees of warming by 2100 but 2.6.
(Note, by the way, that even the worst IPCC prediction of sea level rises comes more than 99 metres short of the 100 metres that ABC science presenter Robyn Williams once suggested was possible and has never corrected.)
Claim:
LEIGH SALES:… I was joined earlier tonight by Lesley Hughes, one of the lead authors on this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report… 
LESLEY HUGHES, LEAD AUTHOR, IPCC REPORT: Well under a - what we call a business as usual trajectory - and we’ve already had about a degree of warming since pre-industrial times; we will almost certainly get another half a degree or a degree by 2030. Under a business as usual trajectory, the IPCC is saying 3.7 to 4.8 degrees by the end of this century.
False, exaggeration:
Check the box. Under the most extreme scenario the IPCC predicts a rise of between 2.6 and 4.8 degrees.
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES: Well, we’re also seeing the ice caps melting, sea levels going up, coastal flooding increasing, we’re seeing increases in hotter, drier drought, hotter, drier heatwaves. 
False or incomplete:
Only one ice cap is clearly melting. Antarctica, however, has had record sea ice, which has grown steadily since records started in 1979. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center says of the land-based ice that “in East Antarctica, no clear trend has emerged, although some stations appear to be cooling slightly”, and “overall, scientists believe that Antarctica is starting to lose ice, but so far the process has not become as quick or as widespread as in Greenland.”
As for “hotter, drier droughts”, The IPCC last year conceded “there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century” and past “conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated”. 
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES: ... Here in Australia we’re suffering the effects of earlier bushfire seasons.  
Misleading:
Last year’s early bushfire was an anomaly that cannot be attributed to global warming, especially given 16 years of no world-wide warming. Moreover, there have been many past examples of early bushfires in Australia, and last year’s fires had more to do with three years of good fuel-feeding rains that warmists claimed we wouldn’t get. 
Claim:
LEIGH SALES: The report also acknowledges the pause in warming over the past decade, which is something that climate sceptics often point to. 
False:
The report in fact admits to not 10 but at least 15 years of a warming pause: “the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to 0.15] °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade”.
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES:  ... But when we look at the global climate, the global climate has not stopped warming. About 90 per cent of the extra heat is going into the oceans and there’s been absolutely no pause in the warming of the ocean.  
False: 
NASA last month announced: ”The cold waters of Earth’s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years… The temperature of the top half of the world’s ocean — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.” Hughes’ excuse for the missing heat won’t wash. 
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES: Well I’d say to them firstly that about - the latest survey is that 98 per cent of practising climate scientists are actually at one on this, so there is extremely broad scientific consensus. 
False or misleading:
The various surveys making this claim have have been comprehensively debunked. One is based on just 79 responses. Last years included as members of the 97 per cent climate scientists such as Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, who all question the alleged consensus and say the survey authors ignored or misrepresented their work. In such surveys, the most that can usually be said is that scientists agree man has some influence on the climate, which is hardly controversial. 
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES:… If you want to know about the climate, go to climate scientists.
Arrogance, refusal to admit mistakes:
In fact, climate scientists did not predict this warming pause. They did not predict record crop yields. They did not predict record sea ice around Antarctica. They did not predict fewer hurricane and cyclones. They did not predict colder European winters. They did not predict a return here of dam-filling rains. They did not predict more snow in the northern Hemisphere. They did not predict a failure of the Great Barrier Reef to bleach for years now. Some did not predict ice cover of the Arctic would be this extensive.
And even the IPCC now admits that the climate models build by climate scientists are just not predicting the temperatures we are actually getting: “For the period from 1998 to 2012, 111 of the 114 available climate-model simulations show a surface warming trend larger than the observations.”
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES: ... Australia is somewhat at odds with the rest of the international community. 
False:
Australia was at odds with the rest of the world only when we had the world’s most punitive carbon tax, measured by tax raised per head of population. Most of the world does not have any national carbon tax or emissions trading scheme.
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES: ...There will be boundless opportunities from renewable energy. 
False:
Renewable energy from wind, solar, tidal or geothermal is in fact a cost, not an opportunity. That is why each sector is demanding big subsidies or taxes on cheaper forms of power.
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES: ... So, in my view, it’s our moral duty as people in a developed country to help the developing countries leap forward into development without making the same dirty mistakes that we did.
Hyperbole, misleading:
Cheap, coal-fired power actually is the foundation of so much Western wealth and development, from which poor countries have also benefited - not just from the power but from the transfer of aid and technology, as well as from trade. China and India have in fact determined to increase their own emissions, because ending poverty depends heavily on coal-fired generation - and ending poverty is no “mistake”.
Claim:
LESLEY HUGHES: Absolutely. I mean, President Modi in India has said he wants to see a solar panel on every roof in India. Countries like Australia should be helping with that, not shipping coal off there.
False, hyperbole, ideological extremism:
Modi wants India to have both solar and coal, and is in fact opening India’s coal reserves to foreign investors. Solar alone cannot come close to giving electricity to all Indians, especially not to all Indian businesses. Ending coal exports to India would hurt us and India both. If we don’t give India our coal, it will be forced to go somewhere else - and pay more.
When so many false claims, exaggerations and partial truths are made in an interview with an IPCC lead author, why would you trust another word any IPCC spokesman said?
And when is the ABC finally going to put global warmists under the same basic scrutiny it puts politicians?   
===

Any sorry from Fairfax for framing Howard?

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (9:55am)

I thought The Age and Sydney Morning Herald had verballed John Howard:
The Age is either better than me at cracking codes or it’s just making stuff up. 
The claim: 
Former Liberal prime minister John Howard has delivered a coded rebuke to his successor Tony Abbott for his diplomatic handling of boat turn backs in his first year in office… 
Howard agrees: 
“I have made no rebuke, implied or otherwise, of Mr Abbott’s handling of the policy,” Mr Howard told The Australian. 
The Sydney Morning Herald published a story yesterday stating that Mr Howard had “delivered a coded rebuke to Tony Abbott for his diplomatic handling of boat turn-backs in his first year in office”.
But Mr Howard’s remarks were made in an interview conducted at least 18 months ago while Mr Abbott was still opposition leader and publicly promising to turn back asylum-seeker boats to Indonesian waters “where safe to do so"… Yesterday Mr Howard said his remarks were not about Mr ­Abbott’s first year as prime minister but were a statement about how to deal with Indonesia.
But damage done, yet again. Any apology likely? 
===

Too much alarmism even for ABC listeners

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (9:18am)

I don’t think ABC Radio National got the result it expected:
(Thanks to too many readers to name.) 
===

Why did Fran pick Bonge? Yes, silly question

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (9:13am)

Paul Bongiorno is a nice man but to the Left of probably almost every other prominent member of the Canberra press gallery, which is itself overwhelmingly of the Left.  Pick a topic - boat people, global warming, immigration, “reconciliation”, the “stolen generations”, the NBN, Whitlam, the national disability insurance scheme, multiculturalism, the ABC, Iraq, George W Bush - and you know exactly what side of the argument Bongiorno will be on.
So of all the commentators Fran Kelly picks for her ABC Radio National Breakfast show other than Michelle Grattan (of the more mainstream Left), who does she favour?
And so there Bongiorno was again this morning, in full global warming alarmism mode. And, of course, not challenged at any point by Kelly.
The ABC bias is simply astonishing, shameless and in breach of its legal duty. In a private media outlet such as The Age it would be forgivable. But in a state-funded broadcast - and the biggest media operation in the country by far - it is dangerous.
The ABC is out of control.
UPDATE
On it goes, every day and in every way. Reader Peter of Bellevue Hill:
Disappointing effort from Media Watch on the Peris emails last night, especially when stacked against its handling of the Spurr emails last week. 
Publication of both sets of emails was in the public interest, yet there’s a gulf between the positions adopted by Paul Barry on the respective cases.
Remarkably, Barry noted the ‘blackmail’ claim Peris offered in the Senate, without acknowledging New Matilda’s swift demolition of the claim.
Curious to note also that while Barry was quite comfortable in broadcasting slab after slab of the Spurr emails, he suffered an apparent bout of the vapours at thought of broadcasting more than one of the Peris emails.
Peris is Labor and black, Spurr apparently a conservative and white. And the ABC is pink. Or do I mean green? 
===

Why Victorian Liberals deserve all they look like getting

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (8:08am)

Former Treasurer Peter Costello compares and contrasts:
In Victoria Labor is ahead according to opinion polls. The Liberal Party only narrowly won the last election, perhaps surprising themselves more than anyone else. 
They got off to a slow start. Not much happened. The public service inherited from the previous Labor administration was largely left in place and largely left to govern the state. Only a change of Leader and a realisation that the electoral term was more than halfway over got the Government to show some energy. It developed a proposal for a $6 billion East-West road tunnel to be built by the private sector.
Construction is due to commence soon. The question the voters will decide is whether it has done enough.
In NSW, the Liberal Party was elected with the biggest victory in that State’s history. After 16 years of Labor Government it was given a huge mandate to turn things around. Strangely, it took a timid approach. Although it had nothing like the corruption of its predecessor, it ensnared itself in funding and disclosure irregularities. After losing a Premier over a petty disclosure failure, it has now stabilised. It has a program of infrastructure funded from long overdue asset sales. It is well ahead in the polls. In Queensland the Liberal-National Party was elected after Labor was smashed. Labor had governed for 14 years and was well on the way to destroying the financial position of the state. A comprehensive Audit (which I chaired) recommended a far-reaching program to cut waste and restore financial discipline. The Government had a mandate and it exercised it. For a while, it went behind in the polls. Now that the state is turning around, it is back in front. 
A state government that does nothing will be slaughtered. A state Liberal government too scared to explain what it stands for, or which takes its politics from the Age and Fairfax, deserves all it gets.
Victorian Liberals must stop running away from the battle of ideas. It shows weakness or confusion or simply lack of intellectual nous. Besides, why be in power if on the social agenda you simply do what Labor would have done anyway?
I overstate the matter in Victoria, but not by much.
No Liberal minister in Victoria would have dared send the message Campbell Newman sent two years ago (albeit with finances in a far more desperate shape):
PREMIER Campbell Newman has scrapped the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards in a move that has shocked and outraged arts and publishing identities.

[A] spokesperson issued a statement this afternoon which said cancelling the awards was part of the LNP Government’s plan to control government spending and lower the cost of living for Queenslanders.
The results was a terrific conservative message - that when governments step back in such areas, individuals step in.  Moreover, what was government controlled is now grass roots:
‘Boy, Lost’ has been shortlisted for two literary awards in Queensland: The Courier-Mail Book of the Year/People’s Choice Award, and the non-fiction category of the Queensland Literary Awards. 
These awards were established after the then incoming premier, Campbell Newman, abolished the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards by wiping funding for them. With Queensland the only mainland state with a suite of premier’s literary awards, a band of writers and community members formed a committee to establish our own awards, all privately funded. Last year was the first the new prizes were offered, an extraordinary achievement by those volunteers who insisted that people in this State really did care about literature and about writing, and proved it.
They proved it. So much healthier and so much more inspiring than a government using other people’s money to reward writers and themes. And there’s the public money saved, of course.
But in Victoria, mainland Australia’s most Left-wing state, the Liberals keep funding a tightly policed arts collective at militant odds with all that conservatives represent.
The winner of this year’s Premier’s Literary Award is Liquid Nitrogen, by Jennifer Maiden: 
Jennifer Maiden’s poems are both political and intimate… Julia Gillard is considered by her mentor Nye Bevan, Kevin Rudd shares a flight with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt plays Woody Guthrie for Hillary Clinton…

Judge’s Report
As she has over her last couple of books, Maiden again ventures into the minds of public figures: a lyrical portrait of an imagined Julian Assange, and private conversations between Australian Prime Ministers and their inspiring mentors or inner consciences....
Book Review
...My daughters, like the rest of us genetically inclined to the Left, struggle to understand the unravelling narrative of politics of the last few years. For the first time, I showed them Gillard’s misogyny speech on YouTube. Then we watched Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generation.
The immediacy and intimacy that technology has brought to politics reverberates in Jennifer Maiden’s astonishing collection, Liquid Nitrogen.... I, for one, relished the project.... Gillard – in poetry – is a way of exploring the vulnerable body that exists in politics. Her femaleness – like Obama’s blackness – brings the body into play. With the body comes the vulnerabilities of the body, the limitations, sex, death, ambivalent power. 
Winner of the Victorian Premier’s award for non-fiction is Forgotten War, by Henry Reynolds:
Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. Why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists?… It is particularly timely as we approach the centenary of World War I. This powerful book makes it clear that there can be no reconciliation without acknowledging the wars fought on our own soil… 
Henry Reynolds ... accepted a lectureship at James Cook University in Townsville… In 2000 he took up a professorial fellowship at the University of Tasmania. Since then he has written Drawing the Global Colour Line with Marilyn Lake and co-authored What’s Wrong With Anzac?…
Judge’s Report
Henry Reynolds’ Forgotten War calls for the principle of ‘lest we forget’ to include all Australians who died in defending their country, including Indigenous people....
The non-fiction judging panel also wished to commend Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari, by Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Aboriginal Corporation.

Book Review ...  The Indigenous population fought against colonisation and fought hard, and central to the thesis of Forgotten War is the argument that recognition of their crusade is just as crucial to the national story, and they ought to command as much respect as any veteran or victim of Vietnam or Gallipoli. 
Naturally, to ensure the taxpayers’ funds are spent by the Left without interference, the Victorian Government has given the job of administering the Premier’s Literary Awards to the far-Left:
The Awards are administered by the Wheeler Centre on behalf of the Premier of Victoria.
The director of the Wheeler Centre:
Michael Williams ... grew up in a family of avid readers, teachers and campaigners for social justice – which ‘absolutely informed’ the way he sees the world.... When he returned to Melbourne, he freelanced for pretty much every publishing house in Australia – before taking a seeming career diversion into broadcasting, as one of Triple R’s Breakfasters.
The big private donors to the Wheeler Centre, after whom the centre is named:
Lonely Planet founders Maureen and Tony Wheeler ... have also emerged as figureheads at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre… In the address to staff, Tony Wheeler, who has just returned from Nauru, noted sagely said that if he and Maureen had “come to Australia in a boat under the Howard Government, we might have ended up in Nauru and the whole operation might have been run out of Nauru instead of Melbourne.”
Chairman of the Wheeler Centre:
Eric Beecher: co-founder and largest shareholder of Text Media, ...  went on to purchase Crikey of which he is now the proprietor and publisher. 
Typical Victorian Liberals, funding anti-Liberals to reward other anti-Liberals with money largely extorted from Liberal voters.
And they wonder why they are losing the cultural war in Victoria. 
===

Rinehart quits Ten board

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (7:15am)

How ironic. Gina Rinehart, long vilified and mocked by some many Fairfax journalists, now offers Fairfax the best chance in years of some kind of strategy to arrest its decline:
MINING magnate Gina Rinehart has resigned from the board of the Ten Network, igniting fresh speculation about the future of the media company. 
The move comes after The Australian revealed Ten had held high-level merger talks with Fairfax Media about a billion-dollar merger early last month, uniting Mrs Rinehart’s two media investments.
While it is understood the discussions are no guarantee that a deal will happen, Mrs Rinehart believes a combination of the free-to-air network and newspaper publisher will create the scale needed to compete in a disrupted media sector challenged by overseas entrants and audience fragmentation. Mrs Rinehart is Fairfax’s largest shareholder, owning 14.99 per cent of the newspaper publisher. She also owns 10 per cent of Ten.
I have no idea whether this merger is planned, or whether, say, Sky News is a better fit for Ten.
But Rinehart’s role should remind the cultural socialists on the Fairfax staff that nothing is achieved unless you first generate the wealth to pay for it. That basic insight might well have tempered not just their scorn of Rinehart but their faith in Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
Mind you, there is another possibility that should scare Fairfax. What if Rinehart got bored with banging her head against the brick wall that is its board?
UPDATE
Reader Frank of Malvern:
Ten becomes part of Fairfax. You could soon be very lonely in the staff room, Andrew 
And as a News Corp man even lonelier. Might have to bail, Frank. 
===

Just another Labor scheme

Andrew Bolt November 04 2014 (6:40am)

Just another Labor free-money scheme run the Labor way:
COMMONWEALTH auditors are expected to join police in probing allegations of fraud ­involving the National Rental Affordability Scheme, over a case that has allegedly left ­charities and a developer hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket. 
Victoria Police has confirmed it is looking into claims that a NSW-based property company defrauded organisations in Victoria by selling them NRAS incentives that proved worthless.
The Australian understands investigators are focused on ­between 80 and 120 incentives originally allocated to the University of Ballarat for a student housing development that did not proceed, but were later ­obtained by a Sydney-based firm. The firm is alleged to have sold the $10,000-a-year ­incentives to charities UnitingCare, St Laurence and Catholic Housing, as well as a Victorian builder called the Macneil Group, for an upfront payment.
The scandal is the latest blow to the Rudd government’s flagship social housing scheme, which has already been exploited — legally — by universities to build units for wealthy foreign students.
The $4.5 billion NRAS was launched by Kevin Rudd in 2007 as part of his public campaign to tackle homelessness and rising housing costs for struggling Australians, and has helped community organisations build thousands of affordable units for the needy. But it has also proven prone to exploitation by sophisticated investors, as well as ­administrative problems, and its expansion has now been frozen by the Abbott ­government… The latest allegations could be traced to flaws in the original design and implementation of the scheme. .
Judith Sloan called out this Labor scheme early this year:
Can I also point out what a laughable outcome this scheme has produced – 14,000 units built in six years. Given that we probably need somewhere in the order of 120,000 to 150,000 new dwellings PER YEAR to accommodate our growing population, 2,300 per year of NRAS accommodation just doesn’t hit the sides, let alone affect rents. And all for billions of taxpayer money.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

UN can't tell difference between peace activists and Arabs who want Israel destroyed

The UN is holding a "Media Seminar on Peace in the Middle East." As you can imagine, the seminar has nothing to do with peace in Egypt, Syria, Iraq or Lebanon.

The panel speaking today at the seminar "Youth activism, digital journalism and social media in the Middle East" reveals quite a bit about what the UN considers to be "peace."

Youth activism continues to be a driving force behind movements for peace, justice and democracy in Israel and Palestine, and across the Middle East. This panel will discuss how the acceleration in digital technologies and social media is affecting youth activism, and how the use of social media by youth activists has helped and/or hindered their causes.
Moderator: Mr. Ahmed Shihab Eldin, Producer and host, Huffington Post Live
Mr. Ahmad Alhendawi, United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth
Ms. Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Youth activist, Palestine
Ms. Sahar Vardi, Peace activist, Israel
Mr. Gökhan Yücel, Digital diplomacy expert and Lecturer at the Leadership, Politics and Diplomacy School of Bahçeşehir University

The Israeli representative, Sahar Vardi, is a far-left activist who refused to serve in the IDF and who participates in weekly anti-Israel protests. It seems clear that she really wants peace between Jews and Arabs, however misguided her viewpoint.

Contrast this with the Palestinian Arab representative, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh. She has this quote on herTwitter profile:

From you steel & fire, from us flesh, from you another tank, from us stones. So leave our country, our land, our sea, our wheat, our salt, our wounds- M Darwish

Does a demand that all Jews be ethnically cleansed from the area sound peaceful to you?

Can you imagine a Jew who says anything close to that ("leave our country, our land...") being invited to speak at any UN-sponsored conference, ever?

The fact is that any Jew who would speak like this would be considered an intolerant far-right bigot and would not be accepted in polite society. A Palestinian Arab who says this is honored as a leader on peace and justice.

There is a serious problem here.

The people who should properly protest this are the liberals. Hamadeh's attitude is the exact opposite of liberalism. But the acceptance and tacit encouragement of Arab violence is so ingrained in the "enlightened" Western world that nobody bats an eyelash.

(I tweeted Vardi asking if she agreed with Hamadeh's quote, but didn't receive a response yet.)
===
What A Week Of Groceries Looks Like Around The World
http://www.nutritionnews.com/food/diet-food/what-a-week-of-groceries-looks-like-around-the-world/
Here's a novel way to plan your next trip. Taking a look at what groceries the locals buy is a good way to know a new place to visit, although I'd have second thoughts about the good old USA. […]
===
Andy Trieu
Chillin at my old Uni for a interview for the Uni alumni publication. First question... How has your degrees helped u become a ninja....haha — atAustralian National University - Manning Clarke Leacture Theatres
===
David Bowles
My poems "Crockpot" and "Valley Haiku" were accepted for an upcoming edition of Illya's Honey. Super cool!
===
          
New Zealand police are being criticised for not taking action against a group of teenage boys who have been getting girls drunk, having sex with them and naming them on the internet.
"This is gang rape, full stop,'' said NZ Labour's women's affairs spokeswoman, Carol Beaumont.
"The fact that police have known for two years that these revolting individuals have been posting their 'exploits' on Facebook, and have identified victims as young as 13, but took no action, is astonishing.''
The group of Auckland teenagers, who call themselves the Roast Busters, have been using Facebook since 2011 to recruit others to join them in having sex with girls - some of them drunk - and then naming them publicly, TV3 reports.
"We take what we do seriously - some of you think this is a joke, it's not," says one of the teens in a video uploaded to Facebook.

"You try and get with the amount of girls we do. This is hard, it's a job, we don't do this shit for pleasure."
===

QUEENSLAND'S police minister says activists targeting Premier Campbell Newman over tough new bikie gang laws are "gutless cowards".
A Youtube video released at the weekend - purportedly by the activist group Anonymous - says Mr Newman's new laws are extreme.
The clip, featuring a masked figure, says the laws are an assault on fundamental human rights and warns: "We do not forgive, we do not forget, Campbell Newman expect us."
Police Minister Jack Dempsey said police are investigating the clip.
"We'll ensure the safety of everyone involved," he said on Monday.
"They are just gutless cowards. They have to hide behind a mask."
Meanwhile, police say they can't comment on how they are responding to reports Mr Newman and his wife received a number of menacing phone calls on the weekend.
===

JUSTIN Bieber tried to sneak out of a strip club in Brazil while covered in a sheet Friday — but photographers caught him red-handed.
The 19-year-old pop star and a friend spent more than three hours in the popular strip club Centauros in Rio de Janeiro — before leaving with two women, sources said.
He jumped into the back seat of a car while the women, who covered their faces, were put in SUVs and escorted back to his hotel.
Bieber’s security team covered him with a bedsheet bearing the club’s logo as he walked out of the establishment — and one of his handlers sprayed photographers with water, demanding they stop snapping, sources said. 
The photographers, who had been tipped off about Bieber’s visit, confirmed it was the singer through his security team. 
===
===
“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” Romans 13:1 NIV
===
Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

Morning


"Behold, he prayeth."
Acts 9:11
Prayers are instantly noticed in heaven. The moment Saul began to pray the Lord heard him. Here is comfort for the distressed but praying soul. Oftentimes a poor broken-hearted one bends his knee, but can only utter his wailing in the language of sighs and tears; yet that groan has made all the harps of heaven thrill with music; that tear has been caught by God and treasured in the lachrymatory of heaven. "Thou puttest my tears into thy bottle," implies that they are caught as they flow. The suppliant, whose fears prevent his words, will be well understood by the Most High. He may only look up with misty eye; but "prayer is the falling of a tear." Tears are the diamonds of heaven; sighs are a part of the music of Jehovah's court, and are numbered with "the sublimest strains that reach the majesty on high." Think not that your prayer, however weak or trembling, will be unregarded. Jacob's ladder is lofty, but our prayers shall lean upon the Angel of the covenant and so climb its starry rounds. Our God not only hears prayer but also loves to hear it. "He forgetteth not the cry of the humble." True, He regards not high looks and lofty words; He cares not for the pomp and pageantry of kings; He listens not to the swell of martial music; He regards not the triumph and pride of man; but wherever there is a heart big with sorrow, or a lip quivering with agony, or a deep groan, or a penitential sigh, the heart of Jehovah is open; He marks it down in the registry of His memory; He puts our prayers, like rose leaves, between the pages of His book of remembrance, and when the volume is opened at last, there shall be a precious fragrance springing up therefrom.
"Faith asks no signal from the skies,
To show that prayers accepted rise,
Our Priest is in His holy place,
And answers from the throne of grace."

Evening


"Their prayer came up to His holy dwelling place, even unto heaven."
2 Chronicles 30:27
Prayer is the never-failing resort of the Christian in any case, in every plight. When you cannot use your sword you may take to the weapon of all-prayer. Your powder may be damp, your bow-string may be relaxed, but the weapon of all-prayer need never be out of order. Leviathan laughs at the javelin, but he trembles at prayer. Sword and spear need furbishing, but prayer never rusts, and when we think it most blunt it cuts the best. Prayer is an open door which none can shut. Devils may surround you on all sides, but the way upward is always open, and as long as that road is unobstructed, you will not fall into the enemy's hand. We can never be taken by blockade, escalade, mine, or storm, so long as heavenly succours can come down to us by Jacob's ladder to relieve us in the time of our necessities. Prayer is never out of season: in summer and in winter its merchandize is precious. Prayer gains audience with heaven in the dead of night, in the midst of business, in the heat of noonday, in the shades of evening. In every condition, whether of poverty, or sickness, or obscurity, or slander, or doubt, your covenant God will welcome your prayer and answer it from His holy place. Nor is prayer ever futile. True prayer is evermore true power. You may not always get what you ask, but you shall always have your real wants supplied. When God does not answer His children according to the letter, He does so according to the spirit. If thou askest for coarse meal, wilt thou be angered because He gives thee the finest flour? If thou seekest bodily health, shouldst thou complain if instead thereof He makes thy sickness turn to the healing of spiritual maladies? Is it not better to have the cross sanctified than removed? This evening, my soul, forget not to offer thy petition and request, for the Lord is ready to grant thee thy desires.
===

Today's reading: Jeremiah 30-31, Philemon 1 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Jeremiah 30-31

Restoration of Israel
1 This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: 2“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you. 3 The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will bring my people Israel and Judah back from captivity and restore them to the land I gave their ancestors to possess,’ says the LORD.”
4 These are the words the LORD spoke concerning Israel and Judah: 5 “This is what the LORD says:
“‘Cries of fear are heard—
terror, not peace.
6 Ask and see:
Can a man bear children?
Then why do I see every strong man
with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labor,
every face turned deathly pale?
7 How awful that day will be!
No other will be like it.
It will be a time of trouble for Jacob,
but he will be saved out of it.
8 “‘In that day,’ declares the LORD Almighty,
‘I will break the yoke off their necks
and will tear off their bonds;
no longer will foreigners enslave them.
9 Instead, they will serve the LORD their God
and David their king,
whom I will raise up for them....

Today's New Testament reading: Philemon 1

1 Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother,
To Philemon our dear friend and fellow worker— 2 also to Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier—and to the church that meets in your home:
3 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanksgiving and Prayer
4 I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers,5 because I hear about your love for all his holy people and your faith in the Lord Jesus. 6 I pray that your partnership with us in the faith may be effective in deepening your understanding of every good thing we share for the sake of Christ. 7 Your love has given me great joy and encouragement, because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the Lord’s people.
Paul’s Plea for Onesimus
8 Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, 9 yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. It is as none other than Paul—an old man and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus— 10 that I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. 11 Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me....
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Sheba

[Shē'bă] - seventh, an oath orcaptivity.
  1. Son of Raamah, son of Cush, son of Ham (Gen. 10:7; 1 Chron. 1:9).
  2. Son of Joktan of the family of Shem (Gen. 10:28; 1 Chron. 1:22).
  3. Son of Jokshan, son of Abraham by Keturah (Gen. 25:3; 1 Chron. 1:32).
  4. A son of Bichri who rebelled against David after Absalom's death. This worthless adventurer, who snatched at what he thought was a chance of winning the sovereignty of northern Israel, had his head cut off by the people of Abel (2 Sam. 20:1-22).
  5. A chief Gadite, dwelling in Gibeah in Bashan (1 Chron. 5:13, 16). Also the name of the Arabian home of the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10:1) and a city in Simeon (Josh. 19:2).
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