Thursday, October 08, 2015

Thu Oct 8th Todays News

Channel 9 aired "The Verdict" in which several left wing panelists agree with each other about current affairs. Disappointingly Anne Henderson, the lone voice of reason, failed to stand up for an anti abortionist who had been banned from coming to Australia. Several on the panel, including the host, Karl Stefanovic, claimed that the banned guy was calling for the murder of abortionists. Not true, and Latham pointed out the banned guy had denied it. In fact, the banned guy had called for the law to be enforced and noted there was a death penalty for murder. All the panellists agreed he should be banned. 

 For some, at the moment, the Sex Party has more credibility.
=== from 2014 ===
Issues on unwanted outcomes
Bob Carr seems to have intervened in a surrogacy case, encouraging a couple to traffic one of their children in 2012. Twins, one boy, one girl were born in India to an Australian couple via surrogacy. Allegedly, the Australian couple only wanted one gender, and so it is alleged they sold the one they didn't want. It is alleged the Australian embassy tried to encourage the couple to keep both, but the then government intervened with a highly placed ALP politician. Bob Carr was foreign minister at the time. Bad parents are a menace. There are good parents that worry that any reference to bad parenting is reference to them. It isn't. Good parents guide their children through adolescence, providing them with rules so that when they are older, resistant to their parents and have hormones preventing clear thought, they still have rules they can rely on to keep them alive. And in the thick of it, parents will struggle to know if they have done right. But parents relying on courts through AVO's on their adolescent children have created a menace which will get harder as the child ages. Comcast had an unhappy customer fired after Comcast allegedly tracked the customer, who had a legitimate complaint and a right to complain, to the customer's work. The work was apparently a client of Comcast. The message being, no one should work for such an employer as Comcast. Australia has budget problems. The budget was appropriate in making needed cuts, but it has been opposed by the Greens, ALP and PUP. Obstructionism will not end before another election, and maybe not then, either. Australia also has problems when the same organisations prevent the PM banning those who speak for terrorism.

Issues on pedophilia
Seventh Heaven, a highly rated Christian tv show, has had a pedophile shock with an actor, the show's lead, the dad, taped confessing to abusing multiple children. Hillsong, the large evangelical Christian church is reeling that the father of a senior pastor, Brian Houston, may have been a serial pedophile. There is no evidence at the moment claiming the church has condoned it.

Issues on terrorism
Hatred is blinding twitter fools to the fact that terrorism is not the same as government. Terrorism is not the same as religion. Terrorism is not the same as war. Terrorism is not the same as culture. Terrorism is not the same as leadership. Just because terrorists oppose some people the hater hates, does not make the terrorist a sympathiser for their cause. AndrewBolt has written "The Islamic State is to Islam what Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin were to socialism." Obama's indecisiveness and incompetence threaten to entangle the US in a thirty year fight against Terror. Women supporting oppression by wearing a niqab or Burka, includes Jessica Rowe. So, do what she asks, and stop following or watching her. Four people claiming to be Islamic are arrested on terrorism related charges in the UK. Australians will and do stand for oppressed peoples, including Islam. There is video proof from a Macquarie University study.

Random issues
ABC hashtag is #ourABC and that is undeniable. But it is supposed to be balanced and for all. And the ABC is not balanced and does not represent all. Greens cheer over making a carbon capture coal plant in Canada with a billion dollar subsidy. No plant food. Expensive. Small. Sarah Hanson-Young is choosy about which whistle blowers she endorses. She is happy for liars to denounce Australia. She is unhappy when those liars are exposed to scrutiny. A union is investigated for accessing personal information from a Superannuation fund they manage and emailing it. 
From 2013
Politicians' pay is big at the moment in the press. Obama is collecting his pay check while he has shut the government down and impeded the public. There is debate about Liberal Party people collecting expenses from parties like weddings. Peter Slipper, the disgraced former MP, has said that he feels the wedding fees are like his driving rorts. To put them in context, Slipper is accused of using driver dockets as cash for items he didn't legally get. While the weddings and expenses things people are getting excited about is related to the kinds of things that politicians do when they network. In fact, the expenses claims may be technically legitimate, but are being repaid because they look bad. But what Slipper is accused of is theft. But somehow every single ALP equivalent is somehow excused .. they are supposed to look bad. But the truth as I see it is wider. Politicians that are paid too much are paid too much if they are paid at all. But politicians that are good can not be paid enough. Imagine the $billions of back pay owed to Peter Costello. Things are looking better in the economy with Abbott in charge. We could not pay a single ALP member enough to get them to vote responsibly a few months ago. Maybe we can't pay them (the ALP to be responsible) enough now, either.

I don't know how I will be able to produce these columns in the short term. I have sewage/flood issues. I'm also weeks away from defaulting on my home loan. All I can say is, I'm clean .. even the tax office admits that .. and I want justice for Hamidur Rahman and for the Campbelltown PAHS bungled pedophile investigation to be .. investigated.
=== 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.
===
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 the purchase of a kindle version for just $3.99 more. 

List of available items at Create Space
The Amazon Author Page for David Ball
===
For twenty two years I have been responsibly addressing an issue, and I cannot carry on. I am petitioning the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to remedy my distress. I leave it up to him if he chooses to address the issue. Regardless of your opinion of conservative government, the issue is pressing. Please sign my petition at https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/tony-abbott-remedy-the-persecution-of-dd-ball

Or the US President at
https://www.change.org/p/barack-obama-change-this-injustice#
or
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/change-injustice-faced-david-daniel-ball-after-he-reported-bungled-pedophile-investigation-and/b8mxPWtJ or http://wh.gov/ilXYR
Douglas Sutherland-Bruce via David Daniel Ball
Mr Ball, I will not sign your petition as it will do no good, but I will share your message and ask as many of friends who read it, to share it also. Let us see if we cannot use the power of the internet to spread the word of these infamous killings. As a father and a former soldier, I cannot, could not, justify ignoring this appalling action by the perpetrators, whoever they may; I thank you Douglas. You are wrong about the petition. Signing it is as worthless and meaningless an act as voting. A stand up guy would know that. - ed

Lorraine Allen Hider I signed the petition ages ago David, with pleasure, nobody knows what it's like until they've been there. Keep heart David take care.

I have begun a bulletin board (http://theconservativevoice.freeforums.net) which will allow greater latitude for members to post and interact. It is not subject to FB policy and so greater range is allowed in posts. Also there are private members rooms in which nothing is censored, except abuse. All welcome, registration is free.

Happy birthday and many happy returns William Tan, Nicole Rohde and Michael Mvp Pham. Born on the same day, across the years, along with
1515 – Margaret Douglas, English wife of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox (d. 1578)
1585 – Heinrich Schütz, German composer (d. 1672)
1676 – Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, Spanish monk and scholar (d. 1764)
1834 – Walter Kittredge, American composer (d. 1905)
1920 – Frank Herbert, American author (d. 1986)
1939 – Paul Hogan, Australian actor
1943 – Chevy Chase, American comedian and actor
1943 – R. L. Stine, American author, screenwriter, and producer
1949 – Sigourney Weaver, American actress
1968 – Emily Procter, American actress
1970 – Matt Damon, American actor, screenwriter, and producer
1985 – Bruno Mars, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actor
1997 – Bella Thorne, American actress, singer, and dancer
October 8: Sukkot begins at sunset (Judaism, 2014); Independence Day in Croatia (1991)
Downtown Edmonton skyline
You said 'no' to the silly idea. You fought the battle. You are .. incorporated. You found the weather underground is cavernous. The airports were switched. Now you can party. 
Deaths
===

FAITH DISCOVERED

Tim Blair – Thursday, October 08, 2015 (12:21pm)

The ABC knows when it is safe to mention religious affiliation:

image

(Via Andy M.) 
===

PUTTING THE CON IN CONSENSUS

Tim Blair – Thursday, October 08, 2015 (11:55am)

Tony Thomas takes a look at the awesome science we’ll hear about from Paris: 
The basis for the Paris climate talks in December is “the science” produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The science must be good because it’s coming from the world’s top climate-type scientists, or so the story goes.
Well, the story is guff. 
It sure is. Read on. 
===

BACHELORETTE CITY

Tim Blair – Thursday, October 08, 2015 (11:24am)

It’s a tough assignment, The Bachelorette beat. The toughest in journalism. I was drinking with some of my fellow reporters down at the wrong end of town in a rugged Bachelorette bar – the kind of place where bumping a man’s mojito could easily get you slapped.
Or worse.
The Vietnam War. September 11. Syria. We’ve heard about them all. But nothing prepares you for The Bachelorette‘s brutal uncertainty.
“I was so sure Sasha had this,” muttered Gill, picking the straws out of his drink. “Now … now I just don’t know anymore.”
“He’ll get there,” I answered, but a tremble in my voice showed doubt. And fear. The silence that followed was broken by a croaky rasp from the end of the bar, near the unisex bathrooms.
“You’re both wrong!” said Railroad Jack, a ragged veteran of all four episodes to date. We tried to ask how this was possible, but old Jack was suddenly gone, trailing cigarette smoke and broken dreams.
That is the way of things here. That is the way of things, in Bachelorette city.
(Please continue.)
===

Better Team Australia than the death cult

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (6:43pm)

Rowan Dean in the latest issue of Spectator Australia - go buy it now or subscribe:
But it is on the question of Islamic terrorism and radicalisation that Mr Turnbull’s ‘gentler’ approach is of most obvious concern. On the very day that our new PM hit the airwaves to denounce his predecessor’s talk of ‘death cults’ and ‘Team Australia’, a teenage Muslim immigrant hit the streets of Parramatta to murder a fellow Australian whilst shouting ‘Allah’.
Mr Turnbull may employ whatever language he likes, but the inescapable truth of the matter is that Curtis Cheng and Farhad Jabar would both still be alive today if Farhad’s family, friends and community had pushed him into the arms of Team Australia rather than allowed him to slip into the clutches of a death cult.
===

Who’s saying women aren’t great?

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (6:23pm)

The ABC, normally red-hot against sexism, says nothing about this segregation of the sexes at a lecture by a Muslim activist at Melbourne’s taxpayer-funded Australian International Academy:
image
Ironic, given one of the speaker’s messages, buried amid the too-familiar victimology:
ILYASAH SHABAZZ:  So if we’re talking about Islamophobia, right, here you have someone right in front of you, the world says that people of African Diaspora is not - that we’re not great. They say that women are not great. That we’re substandard. That Muslims are not great, right? But here I am, I’m very proud of who I am.
Who exactly says “women are not great” and “substandard”?
(Thanks to reader Owen.) 
===

An SBS question answered

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (6:18pm)

Why are such journalists commonly found in our taxpayer-funded broadcasters - SBS, in this case?:
image
The answer is yes, if he was shouting “Allahu Akbar” or “global warming is real” or “Heil Hitler”.
Next!
(Thanks to reader don’t-mention-my-name.) 
===

Behind the curtain of the warming wizards

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (6:12pm)

Tony Thomas:
The basis for the Paris climate talks in December is “the science” produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The science must be good because it’s coming from the world’s top climate-type scientists,[1] or so the story goes.
Well, the story is guff.
The IPCC scientists aren’t the best available, far from it. They’re a motley crew assembled via a typical United Nations boondoggle that stacks the scientific ranks with heavy quotas for Third Worlders, along with special consideration for females.
Not just Thomas’s view.
===

Cruz vs warmist. It’s ugly

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (5:11am)

Senator Ted Cruz tests the global warming certainties of the Sierra Club president Aaron Mair.  It is astonishing how little he knows and how much help he needs from staff. Warmists really are not comfortable in debates, have you noticed?
(Via Catallaxy Files.) 
===

Universities train tomorrow’s totalitarians

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (4:54am)

WARNING: our universities are breeding a generation of totalitarians determined to shut down debates.
Take the University of NSW. Its Student Representative Council demanded other students cancel a lecture this week by former defence minister Kevin Andrews.
Andrews was against same-sex marriage, complained SRC president Billy Bruffey, and that would “cause UNSW students to feel victimised and isolated”.
Besides, “Andrews’ views do not conform with those of the University or its students”. Really? Andrews’ views conform with not one of the students’? And by what right does Bruffey stop students from hearing different arguments and deciding for themselves?
Yet how often we now see this effrontery. In South Australia, the Flinders University Student Association’s head declared she was “repulsed” by the proposal to have Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg set up a think tank at the university. Lomborg, she claimed, would run “a climate change denial centre on campus” putting out “Right-wing junk”.
(Read full column here - at the end of the linked article.) 
===

Stop telling untruths about this terrorism

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (4:47am)

Islamism, Malcolm Turnbull

image
THEY treat us like fools. Police and politicians are telling untruths about what inspired Farhad Jabar to kill.
Those untruths are meant to build trust with Muslim Australians, which we need. But everyone else will wonder: “What other lies are we being told?”
Consider: Iranian-born Jabar went from his mosque to the Parramatta police station where he shot a Buddhist accountant and shouted “Allahu akbar” — Allah is the greatest. In his backpack was a letter reportedly containing Islamist extremist literature.
Police have raided Farhad’s mosque and are checking sermons given there. They are also investigating an alleged ring of sympathisers of the Islamic State, which quotes the Koran to legitimise the murder of nonbelievers.
“Kill the polytheists wherever you find them,” goes one such passage in Islam’s holiest text.
Yet police and ministers of the Turnbull Government still pretend this murder was not religiously inspired, but politically.
(Read full article here.)
UPDATE
Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells last night came back on our 2GB and 3AW show and spoke again about the Parramatta shooting. This time she did acknowledge a religious element. Listen here.
===

This isn’t about Islam, but it is

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (3:56am)

Islamism

Muslim counter-terrorism experts tend not to give me confidence. Last night again on Lateline:
HUSSAIN NADIM: I’ve been an advocate of this idea that radicalisation has really nothing to do with religion.... It doesn’t have much to do either with poverty or social status… Radicalisation is really about the identity crisis and how that triggers a lot of these kids into questioning why they are here, what they want to do.
EMMA ALBERICI: So you’re saying they don’t feel like they fit in to the Western society in which they live?
HUSSAIN NADIM: And it’s very hard for them to fit in. I mean, look at what the basic problem with the Muslim community over here is. The parents want to teach their children to stay away from certain evils of what they see as the Western society - stay away from alcohol, stay away from dating. That’s not what they see as a Muslim culture. So they - in order to attempt to that, the Muslim parents convert - teach these kids very ultra-conservative ideology of Islam. Now, when they grow up and they go to the universities or schools, that’s where they see their ideology and their teachings coming head-on with the Australian culture. And then they question their parents, that they were taught about this certain thing, but this is not how it is. And then they look for answers and the way they find their answers is not through parents. They look for the answers on social media and that social media has a monopoly of the religious radicals as well.
So it has nothing to do with religion, apart from the bit where their religion teaches them to hold themselves apart from our society, and their parents teach them a “very ultra-conservative ideology of Islam”, which is then made worse by “religious radicals” on the Internet. So it’s nothing to do with religion, apart from all those religious teachings.
EMMA ALBERICI: How do you define who’s at risk?
HUSSAIN NADIM: I mean, it’s impossible to define it. I mean, anybody could be harbouring any sort of support for ISIS in Iraq, but he hasn’t been acting. How do you define that person as a threat to the national security of Australia so that it becomes problematic?
Well, I define anyone who supports ISIS as problematic. We’re talking about support for grotesquely cruel jihadists who enslave Yazidi women for sex, slaughter civilians, cut the heads off journalists and aid workers, roast prisoners alive, crucify opponents, hack the feet and hands off errant children, stone adulterous women, throw gays off tall buildings and urge Australian Muslims to cut the heads off unbelievers. That’s problematic for me, right there.
HUSSAIN NADIM:  If you look at the patterns of radicalisation all across Europe, US and also in Australia, it’s not because these kids have any lack of opportunity. A 16-year-old kid who did what he did in Parramatta wasn’t doing it because he thought, “I wouldn’t get a job.” He was just 16 years, still in school.
EMMA ALBERICI: So why did he do it yet?
HUSSAIN NADIM: That’s because of ideology.
EMMA ALBERICI: I mean, we don’t know yet, but is it attached to a religious belief?
HUSSAIN NADIM: No. I don’t think religion - religious (inaudible), because frankly I don’t think in a 16-year-old kid is that religiously inclined that he would act on behalf of religion.
EMMA ALBERICI: So what is the ideology that makes him commit such a heinous act?
HUSSAIN NADIM: The current project that I’m doing is specifically on this subject, on understanding the Muslim world view and that is at the centre of understanding radicalisation. There are certain themes that Muslims have grown up, in fact my own self, we were grown up believing certain things. One of the themes was that there would be a clash of civilisation eventually. There will be a resurgence of Islam, partly because of the entire colonisation period, Muslims have been mobilised by communities, there will come have a time when we will have our glory back. So that idea has kind of, like, travelled down to today where Muslims are looking at resurgence of Islam in a sort of global khilafah. The second idea is that Muslims generally feel that Islam is under attack. Now that has something which has very, very strong, not religiously, but politically and socially, that has a very strong value that somehow we are being under attack and the events globally might not be related to religion, but they are proving them to be right. I mean, 9/11 happened. After that there was Afghanistan. A lost Muslims said that that makes sense because 9/11 happened. But then when the US went into Iraq and then when Iran was being threatened, then Syria and all these places - I mean, look at - ask Muslims over here in Australia: who is sponsoring ISIS? And the answer you will get is that it’s the US. Now that’s something very disturbing because that’s not really true. But the Muslims are looking at this problem as something which is driven by the US foreign policy and hence they are looking at this as a very political way which they want to counter.
Some of the above is true - particularly the observation that the Parramatta killer cannot be said to be acting for lack of opportunity in this country.
But trying to divorce the “ideology” from Islam is absurd. What gives that ideology content? What underpins the victimology, conspiracy theories and that exaggerated us-vs-them world view? You cannot understand such a culture without understanding that the Koran preaches that Mohammed divided the world into two parts — Dar al Islam, where Islamic law rules, and Dar al Harb, the land of war, where Muslims live at best only in a state of truce. You cannot understand the Muslim tribalism unless you know the Koran urges Muslims to shun unbelievers and to demand to live under Sharia law.  That is why Nadim himself acknowledges there is a “Muslim world view”. It is informed by Islam.
And saying that a 16-year-old (actually 15) can’t be acting in response to religiously inspired teachings, being so young and untutored, completely ignores two things. First, that religion is a major influence of the cultural values which shape our opinions and behaviours, even of teenagers, and, second that you don’t have to have much knowledge of religion to get the overall drift. It is no accident that the Islamic State repeats key Koranic phrases again and again to underline that it is a movement acting in Islam’s name, and therefore worthy of a Muslim boy’s support. The teenagers joining it seem in no doubt that it is the “good” side in a holy war.
HUSSAIN NADIM: Families are at the core of this radicalisation issue. When we were dealing with deradicalisation projects in Pakistan, we realised that the first and the foremost focal point of deradicalisation strategy has to come from the family… For instance, if the kid is deradicalisised, you can’t just focus on deradicalising that kid. What you need to also focus is on the parenting issue, what the parents are teaching their children. What sort of ideology they are filtering into their children. And that is what really defines whether the kids will fit into Australian society or whether they’re gonna get seclude and then go online and realise that, “Oh, this is what really Islam is.”
So it isn’t about religion, but it actually is. No, but yes. Hear it from Nadim himself.
(Thanks to readers Wanda and Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

A bit too much like something Rudd would say

Andrew Bolt October 08 2015 (3:46am)

Not entirely inspiring:
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has told Christopher Pyne to release his “inner revolutionary” as Industry Minister and not to worry about how to pay for big new ideas to make Australia’s economy more innovative.
Mr Pyne, the Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science, said Mr Turnbull had encouraged him to be less “orthodox” while developing policies to boost innovation…
“After our first meeting, he said, ‘That’s great, but I’d like you to release your inner revolutionary.’
“I said, ‘That will cost money.’

“He said, ‘Let me worry about the money, you get on with the ideas.’
===

No such thing as bad kids, only bad parents

Miranda Devine – Wednesday, October 08, 2014 (12:55am)

IT’S not easy being the parent of a teenager but most of us struggle through, guiding our children through adolescence as best we can.

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'No such thing as bad kids, only bad parents'
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Hate blinds twittering fools from the evil truth

Miranda Devine – Wednesday, October 08, 2014 (12:54am)

THE undeniable atrocities being committed by Islamic State have leftists all at sea. They have made common cause with Islamism against their real foe, the Judaeo-Christian capitalist west, and it’s all a bit uncomfortable.

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'Hate blinds twittering fools from the evil truth'
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Abbott wants powers to ban preachers of terror

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (5:43pm)

I am very wary of banning any group unless the incitement to terrorism is explicit. But Hizb ut-Tahrir’s latest event sounds like it comes close:
image
The Islamic State’s campaign of jihadist terror is “blessed”?  “Noble”? And Muslims here should decide how to react to our campaign to defeat the “most potent uprising in the Muslim world”?
So I understand Tony Abbott’s concern:
TONY ABBOTT has pledged to “red-card” hate preachers from entering Australia, but has admitted his government can’t yet ban the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir…

“We’ve looked at banning them, but we were advised under exisiting law we can’t do it,” he told 2GB Radio.
But Mr Abbott said a change to the law, that he hopes comes into force by the end of the year, will make it an offence to also promote terrorism, “not just to engage in terrorism”.
“Then I suppose we have to have another look at Hizb ut-Tahrir to see whether they fall under the definition of promoting terrorism.
“But there is no doubt they are an organisation that campaigns against Australian values, that campaigns against Australian interests and they are a thoroughly objectionable organisation.”
Mr Abbott said the action he wants to take “swiftly” in the meantime is “put in place a system whereby these preachers of hate ... are not allowed into Australia.”
“By all means let Australians who want to say stupid things say stupid things, but there’s no point importing trouble-makers from overseas to stir people up and that’s what I want to see in place very, very swiftly...”
The headline speaker at a public lecture organised by the group in Lakemba in south-western Sydney on Friday night was an example of such a preacher, Mr Abbott said, while admitting to being “frustrated and angry”. 
Again, I am not yet sure Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned. But I have been very worried that it has not been opposed more strongly by Muslim leaders and parts of the media.
UPDATE
Can we really allow the preachers of hate to whip up this kind of trouble? 
UP to three Australian passports a day are being cancelled on security advice, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says.  

On September 29, Ms Bishop said she had cancelled about 50 passports on national security grounds, including three that week. Ms Bishop said on Wednesday in Perth that since then she cancelled a number of passports based on security advice but didn’t have the total figure, although it was less than 100. 
That’s up to three wanna-be jihadists a day still among us. 
===

A 30-year war, under a commander with no heart for the fight

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (10:06am)

A war that will last years, and take us for beyond Iraq:
Americans should be braced for a long battle against the brutal terrorist group Islamic State that will test U.S. resolve — and the leadership of the commander in chief, says Leon Panetta, who headed the CIA and then the Pentagon… 
“I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war,” he says, one that will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.
In his first interview about his new book ... Panetta argues that decisions made by President Obama over the past three years have made that battle more difficult — an explosive assessment by a respected policymaker of the president he served… Panetta says Obama erred ... (b)y not pushing the Iraqi government harder to allow a residual U.S. force to remain when troops withdrew in 2011, a deal he says could have been negotiated with more effort. That “created a vacuum in terms of the ability of that country to better protect itself, and it’s out of that vacuum that ISIS began to breed.”
Charles Krauthammer:
If it was only [Leon] Panetta, and he’s trying to sell a book, you could write it off. The problem is that it’s been said also by Bob Gates, who was an honorable Secretary of Defense. And also in a muted way by Hillary Clinton who said, ‘don’t do stupid stuff is not a doctrine for foreign policy.’ 
There was agreement among the top advisers of Obama himself, his top notch security advisers, that he was indecisive, that he let opportunities pass, the most important one of course is the one that Obama disputes, and that is the abandonment of Iraq, the withdrawal of all our troops, when the military and all the advisors, including two Democrats and one Republican, his highest advisors were telling him to leave behind a residual force so that we could influence the government in Iraq as we had before and to prevent the sectarianism which led to the renewal of the civil war, and the renewal of involving us again. That was all predictable. So this a way of his advisers saying he made the wrong choices at a time when we were at a crucial crossroads and he has been afraid. I think what we’re seeing now with his inability and unwillingness to help in the fight in Kobani, to a very critical fight where ISIS now has the upper hand, Obama seems to want to contain the situation until the end of his term and then hand it off.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
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Growth forecasts down, forecasts of Budget trouble up

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (10:01am)

With the Senate blocking the repair of the Budget, this news is especially grim:
THE global economy faces another five years of stagnation, the International Monetary Fund warned overnight as it cut its growth forecasts for the third year in a row and urged nations to ­reinvigorate economic reforms… 
The IMF ... now expects world growth will reach 3.3 per cent this year, the same as last year, and 1.4 percentage points lower than it thought likely when preparing its forecasts three years ago. Before the financial crisis, global growth rates in excess of 5 per cent were the norm.
The fund says growth should lift to 3.8 per cent next year, helped by better performance in a few nations led by the US and Britain, but there is a danger there will be no further improvement in growth for an extended period…
The IMF is also concerned about the outlook for China. It is expected to grow by 7.1 per cent next year, down from the 7.3 per cent expected in April, but the fund says there is a risk of a much weaker result… [Reserve Bank Governor Glenn] Stevens also pointed to the RBA’s concerns, saying China’s growth appeared to have softened in recent months and “weakening property markets there present a challenge in the near term”.
The Abbott Government now seems trapped between being unable to make what are deeply unpopular cuts anyway, and being unable to halt the Budget losses as it promised.
UPDATE
Panic:
More than $20 billion has been wiped off the local sharemarket at the open as investors follow a global selloff amid rising fears of slowing global growth.
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It’s “our ABC”, the ABC cries. But we knew that

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (9:40am)

I missed this rebranding change:
The channel’s tagline will be ‘#ourABC 
Their ABC indeed.
(Thanks to reader CA.) 
===

Greens celebrate. $1 billion wasted on CCS plant

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (9:13am)

Global warming - general

The Guardian celebrates:
Canada has switched on the first large-scale coal-fired power plant fitted with a technology that proponents say enables the burning of fossil fuels without tipping the world into a climate catastrophe. 
The project, the first commercial-scale plant equipped with carbon capture and storage technology, was held up by the coal industry as a real life example that it is possible to go on burning the dirtiest of fossil fuels while avoiding dangerous global warming.
Only just “commercial-scale”: this 110 megawatt plant is just one-twentieth of the size of Victoria’s Loy Yang A.
It is is not actually commercial, depending on a subsidy of at least $1 billion. The reality:
Boundary Dam Unit #3 is a relatively small power plant, and retrofitting it with a CCS system has cost a lot of money. 
SaskPower [SSPOW.UL], which is owned by the Province of Saskatchewan, has invested almost C$1.3 billion ($1.2 billion) in the project since 2009. The capital investment includes a contribution of C$240 million from the government of Canada to help fund the demonstration project…
Boundary Dam Unit #3 has cost much more than the U.S. $350 million typical for an advanced coal-fired plant of its size, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration…
Saskatchewan has unique circumstances that make it favorable for CCS, which will not be easy to replicate elsewhere. Boundary Dam can offset some of its higher capital and operating costs by selling some of the captured CO2 for injection into depleted oil fields in southern Saskatchewan for enhanced oil recovery (EOR).
(Thanks to reader Rocky.) 
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A better analogy. UPDATE: A challenge - confront the Koran

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (8:57am)

The Left has a deceptive new slogan: the Islamic State is to Islam what the Nazis were to Christianity.
Here’s a more accurate slogan, better capturing the ambiguity:
The Islamic State is to Islam what Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin were to socialism.
UPDATE
Tanveer Ahmed, himself of Muslim background, says Muslims must confront Islam’s more violent exhortations:
THOSE Muslims who cry Islamophobia repeatedly when asked about terrorism and Islam do themselves a disservice by not ­engaging with the ideas inherent in Islam that might lend themselves to actions of violent ­confrontation. 
Islamophobia is becoming its own industry with university departments and experts, an extension of the leftist view that an underbelly of racism is the root cause of everything from terrorism to our border protection policies.
The almost universal action of religious Muslims is to assert that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, as if the actions of ­Islamic State, the Taliban, al-Qa’ida, Boko Haram, just to name some of the best-known but tiny proportion of modern Islamists, arose out of thin air.
The undercurrent of this is centuries of subjugation and failure within the Arab world, something for which many Muslims blame only the West and its interventions, conveniently avoiding the sclerotic decay inherent in the countries and region.
Islam is primarily a religion of conquest. The fact the vast majority of Muslims are peace loving and committed to Australia is not because of Islam but despite it. They have too much to lose to interpret Islam too literally. But that does not mean there are not thousands of Muslims from around the world, including Australia, who may not take such a liberal view. 
(Thanks to readers holierthanthou and doc molloy.) 
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Let Rowe deliver an entire show in a niqab

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (8:46am)

imageimage
Janet Albrechtsen on a “feminist” campaign that totally misses the point on oppression:
That millions of Muslim women are forced to wear a veil as a medieval form of oppression should be Feminism 101. Instead, it’s beyond the wit of many Western feminists. The recent social media hashtag campaign #WISH (Women in Solidarity with Hijabs) saw women including television personality Jessica Rowe support their veiled Muslim sisters by posting “selfies” — photos of themselves dressed in a hijab, a head-only veil that leaves uncovered their pretty faces done up with lipstick and mascara. That’ll make a mark, girls. Instead of intelligent debate and serious questions about a form of dress that is too often aimed at treating women as inferior, here was yet another empty-headed social media stunt. Instead of thoughtful nuance and reason, here was faux, feel-good compassion… 
The feminist angle of the #WISH warriors is a curiously one-sided, one-dimensional affair. What about solidarity for the burka, the full-body veil with a tiny netted slit for the eyes, or the niqab, similar garb that leaves a small opening for the eyes? Could it be that a burka or niqab interferes with the entire point of the social media campaign, yet another narcissistic show of self to feel good? Like being in space where no one can hear you scream, what’s the point of a burka selfie when no one can see your face?
UPDATE

Miranda Devine on the Left’s bizarre attempts to relativise Islamist terrorism out of debate:
THE undeniable atrocities being committed by Islamic State have leftists all at sea. They have made common cause with Islamism against their real foe, the Judaeo-Christian capitalist west, and it’s all a bit uncomfortable. 
But when even the United Nations confirms that IS is beheading, raping, enslaving and torturing innocent civilians, they still can’t bring themselves to condemn the evil in front of their eyes.  Instead they evade, distract, ignore, and attack with all sorts of false moral equivalencies…
Crikey’s Bernard Keane tells us we should focus on “less glamorous subjects” than terrorism which “kills fewer Australians than even the most exotic causes of death”.
The ABC’s Jonathan Holmes pours scorn on Attorney-General George Brandis’ claim that we face an “existential threat” from the Islamo-fascists, and declares climate change is much scarier. Tell that to the beheaded Christians and Yazidis.
University of Western Sydney academic George Morgan pops up on the opinion pages of The Sydney Morning Herald to tell us Islamophobia is more of a threat than Islamist terrorism…
The moral gymnastics reached its apogee last week. As news from Syria and Iraq became ever more dire, Twitter activists coined the witless hashtag #JSIL.  This stands for Jewish State in the Levant, which they claim is the moral equivalent of ISIL, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, now calling itself IS.  
(Thanks to reader WaG311.) 
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Standing up for Muslims

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (8:27am)

 No, this isn’t a nation of Islamophobes, as even the Macquarie University Muslim Students Association discovered:
In a social experiment orchestrated by filmmaker Kamal Saleh, we see a woman in a hijab being harassed by a young man. 
In another scene it is a young boy who is the target of the discriminatory abuse.But it’s the reaction of passersby that makes you proud to be Australian; in every single scene, people young and old, rush to the defence of those being mistreated.
Congratulation to the association.
UPDATE
There are some morons and thugs, however, and some more of this high-profile policing would be handy:
POLICE have cracked down on Islamophobic racism by charging a man who threatened to set fire to a Muslim student’s headscarf. 
Queensland police yesterday charged a 44-year-old Brisbane man with common assault over a racist attack in the suburb of West End last month. Police allege the 26-year-old Indonesian woman had left an Islamic centre and was walking down the main street when three men approached her outside a pub on September 9. One of the men allegedly threatened to set fire to the woman’s headscarf.
(Thanks to reader Mick.) 
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Sarah Hanson-Young wants only a certain kind of whistlebower

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (8:07am)

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young welcomes a whistleblower:
Traumatised children who were held on an Australian Customs ship on the high seas for almost a month will wait two months to see counsellors on Nauru, a whistleblower working on the island nation says. 
The detention centre worker has contacted Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s office, saying they are particularly concerned about the children’s mental health…Senator Hanson-Young called for the Australian Human Rights Commission - which is undertaking an inquiry into children in immigration detention - to be granted access to Nauru.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young calls the cops to hound a whistleblower:
The Australian Federal Police has been asked to investigate Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and his staff for leaking details of a confidential internal security report from Nauru to a journalist. 
It was reported in News Corp publications on Friday that internal Transfield security documents from the offshore processing centre in Nauru revealed that it was “probable” that Save the Children staff were encouraging asylum seekers to self harm… Greens senator and immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young has written to the AFP to say Mr Morrison’s staff may have contravened the same section of the Crimes Act by providing select confidential information to a journalist. 
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Four members of some faith or other arrested in London

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (7:58am)

More members of a tiny, unrepresentative minority:
Four men have been arrested in London as part of an investigation into Islamist-related terrorism, Scotland Yard has said. 
It is understood that one of the four is suspected of having a connection to Islamic State (Isis), the violent group that has captured large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, and that the arrests are linked to a possible plot.
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Not so super union

Andrew Bolt October 08 2014 (7:16am)

The conflict of interest in a union-run super scheme is clear: 
A report into the leaking of personal information from the Cbus superannuation fund to the construction union on 59 occasions over a 16-month period to May of this year will be kept secret while the royal commission uses its considerable powers to investigate.
An excerpt of the report reveals that in 12 of the 59 incidents, information relating to an individual Cbus member was emailed to external sources…
The interim report, prepared by KPMG, is being kept confidential while the commission continues its investigation of the links between Cbus and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.
In shock evidence to the commission last Friday, Cbus member co-ordinator Lisa Zanatta admitted she had lied to the royal commission about being involved in providing members’ details to outside sources. She said she had done so to protect “Cbus and the CEO”.
Chief executive David Atkin has since denied any involvement.
The Cbus board has been informed and will meet following the finalisation of hearings into the matter by the royal commission. The board is ... chaired by former Victorian premier Steve Bracks, who is overseas until the end of October. Also on the board are Australian Council of Trade Unions president Ged Kearney, CFMEU national secretary Dave Noonan and Master Builders Australia chief executive Wilhelm ­Harnisch. They have been told to leave any public comments to Mr Atkin.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
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Caroline Glick.

But for the 7.5 people who somehow managed to miss the past 34 years of bad faith and horrible behavior from the mullahs, here is Rouhani bragging about how he gulled the Americans into believing Iran was suspending its nuclear program during talks in 2003 when it actually sped up development.>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6-gJ1zI3D4
But for the 7.5 people who somehow managed to miss the past 34 years of bad faith and horrible behavior from the mullahs, here is Rouhani bragging about how he gulled the Americans into believing Iran was suspending its nuclear program during talks in 2003 when it actually sped up development.>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6-gJ1zI3D4
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http://exm.nr/16MSj75 and shutting down the 100% privately owned Mount Vernon> http://bit.ly/1b02OS5
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In a video clip now gaining fresh attention as the international community seeks to assess his credibility, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani bragged on Iranian state television just four months ago that he and the regime utterly flouted a 2003 agreement with the IAEA in which it promised to suspend all uranium enrichment and certain other nuclear activities.
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JTA — When Rina Attias phoned to say that she was trapped with terrorists inside Nairobi’s Westgate mall, her husband Albert replied with a short instruction: Hang up right now.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, on October 6, 2013. (photo credit: Reuven Kastro/Flash90)
In a marked change in emphasis from a speech at the same podium four years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday voiced doubt over the possibility of a two-state solution, citing the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
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Charter boat captains in Florida have been informed by the National Park Service that the Florida Bay is closed due to the government shutdown.
The captains, who make a living by taking tourists and anglers on deep-sea fishing trips, are prohibited from fishing in 1,100 square miles of ocean until the shutdown ends. They are also banned from Biscayne National Park.
Rangers will be on duty to enforce the ban. In fact, the personnel and resources required to shut down the ocean will probably cost more than keeping it open. Brilliant.
Breitbart reporter Mike Flynn hit the nail on the head:
This is governing by temper-tantrum. It is on par with the government’s ham-fisted attempts to close the DC WWII Memorial, an open-air public monument that is normally accessible 24 hours a day. By accessible I mean, you walk up to it. When you have finished reflecting, you then walk away from it.
At least that Memorial is an actual structure, with some kind of perimeter that can be fenced off. Florida Bay is the ocean. How, pray tell, do you “close” 1,100 square miles of ocean? Why would one even need to do so?
Apparently, according to an anonymous Park Service ranger, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
Americans from both sides have criticized the unnecessary theatrics that the shutdown has brought. It’s called Washington Monument Syndrome, and it’s basically when officials close down the most popular government services with hopes of upsetting the public enough to pressure lawmakers to act a particular way.


Conservative Daily.

Leave it to this administration to try to close an ocean...
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An Ohio daycare employee has been arrested after police say she raped an infant — and even captured it on video.
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 http://facebook.com/theblaze
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Holly Sarah Nguyen
Lord, I am unworthy, yet You have given me so much worth and value because You accepted me and loved me for who I am. May I do the same to others. Amen.
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Rabbi Ovadia Yosef: Photos from a Great Man's Life

Photos trace the rabbi's path, with many of Israel's great leaders.

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"The continuation of settlement construction is the main obstacle to the success of the peace process," the PLO leadership said in a statement that completely ignored the calls for jihad by several Palestinian terror groups.
As the U.S.-sponsored peace talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority continue, Palestinian terror groups are preparing for jihad against Israel.
At the negotiations, the Palestinian Authority representatives are talking about the establishment of a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines, namely the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.
But the voices coming out of the Gaza Strip's various terror groups are talking about preparations to "liberate all Palestine, from the river to the sea."
Since the resumption of the peace talks about two months ago, these groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have repeatedly announced that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas does not have a mandate from Palestinians to make any concessions to Israel.
"Hamas's eyes are set on the liberation of Jerusalem and the prisoners," declared Abu Obaida, spokesman for Hamas's armed wing, Izaddin al-Kassam. "Our hearts are set on Lod, Ramle, Al-Majdal [Ashkelon] and other all the villages in occupied Palestine."
Abu Obaida said that his group, which consists of several thousand militiamen, possesses "strategic weapons" that would be used against Israel.
Another terror group, the Unification Brigade, announced this week that its men were also preparing for jihad against Israel. The group is affiliated with the Popular Resistance Committees, an alliance of various terror organizations operating in the Gaza Strip.
Members of Fatah's armed wing, Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, have also come out against the ongoing peace talks with Israel. Leaflets published by the group in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past few weeks have affirmed its commitment to the armed struggle against Israel as the only option to "achieving Palestinian aspirations and rights."
These terror groups are not lacking in weapons and motivation to engage in another round of violence with Israel.
Despite the security restrictions imposed by the Egyptians in Sinai and the demolition of more than 300 tunnels, these terror groups have managed to find other ways to smuggle more weapons into the Gaza Strip.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip say that some of these groups are armed with anti-aircraft missiles and long-range missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and even further north.
The preparations for war coincide with public opinion polls that show that a majority of Palestinians anticipate a third intifada if the peace talks fail.
One poll showed that 58% of Palestinians predict the outbreak of a new intifada if the talks collapse.
Another survey indicated that more than 70% of Palestinians believe that the armed struggle against Israel remains the only option to "liberating all Palestine."

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With no military threat, Iran has no incentive to stop its nuclear progress. Iran might well conclude that the sanctions could disappear in the course of endless rounds of diplomacy. No one in Israel seeks war, but a central tenet of its own defense doctrine is that Israel cannot depend on any external power to deal with existential security threats.
The coming weeks probably represent the last opportunity for Iran and the international community to reach an enforceable deal that will dismantle Tehran's nuclear weapons program, before Israel concludes that time has run out, that Iran has gotten too close to creating its first atomic bombs, and that the time for a military strike has arrived.
Despite Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's well-planned and deceptive charm offensive at the United Nations last week, so far not a single uranium-enriching centrifuge has stopped spinning in the underground nuclear facilities in Natanz and Qom. The heavy water plutonium facility at Arak is moving forward, and Iran has already amassed enough low-enriched uranium for the production of seven to nine atomic bombs.

Iran conducts test launches of its long-range Shahab-3 missiles, in 2008.
The speech given by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the United Nations last week, in which he warned that Israel would act alone against Iran if it needed to, is an authentic warning, and serves a dual purpose.
First, the speech reintroduces a credible military threat and aims it squarely at the Islamic Republic.
This notice is important as deterrence against Iran has waned significantly since August, when President Barack Obama hesitantly climbed down from his commitment to carry out a military strike on Iran's ally, the Syrian regime, over its use of chemical weapons to massacre civilians.
A diminished threat of military force leaves diplomatic efforts with Iran almost no chance of success: it leaves Iran with virtually no incentive to stop its nuclear progress, despite the painful economic sanctions it faces.
With no military threat, Iran might well conclude that the sanctions could disappear in the course of endless rounds of diplomacy, in which skilled Iranian negotiators would succeed in getting some of the sanctions lifted while giving up very little in return.

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Even Kenya?>

http://londonregionalpressoffice.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/barak-obama-hussein-ii-born-in-kenya-in.html
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Current Gallery on all Photographs

Please click on below link:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/307958525882739/photos/

Jewellery & Gemstone Gallery

Colour your world with gemstones !

A Gallery of Jewellery, Diamond News,Gems & Gemology promoted bywww.diamondimports.com.au
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How many times have you, as a Jeweler or Lapidary said that it would be so great if the consumers truly understood just how difficult and time consuming the process is of getting a piece of Jewelry from the Mine to the piece of Jewelry in your store...

"Sharing the Rough" is a documentary that aims to do just that!   ...and YOU can assure that it happens!!!!

The project will document the process of mining a gem - cutting a gem - designing a piece of jewelry to present that gem to the market - and the actual production of the piece of jewelry. 

YOUR Donation on their Indiegogo Funding Page is crucial to seeing this project happen...and you have several funding options with some really great PERKS!   

BUT - if you do nothing more than coming in at the $30 or $50 level - insuring that you will get a copy of this film when it is produced...PLEASE - do just THAT! 

Imagine the value! If you are  hosting a "Colored Gem Roundtable" at your Jewelry Store or Lapidary Club and could include a private viewing of this dramatic film documenting the journey of a gem to its final destination as a piece of jewelry.
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Goodbye Blue Sky 

This morning I awoke to the news saying that a fire had broken out under the western span of the Bay Bridge... I knew immediately what happened. A photographer wanted to make an epic image out of an already epic location and decided to "spin wool" in the dry grass hillside under the bridge. Spinning wool, is a term used for spinning fire around and over your head, using homemade tools that allow sparks to fly while you spin the fiery object around you... it looks cool, but is something to be careful with. This particular person wasn't and now a whole community of Photographers is looking to be the ones who pay the price for this one individual's actions, and lack of thought on a high risk fire danger day. It was already a risky ordeal to jaywalk a quarter of a mile up an on-ramp to the bridge and then pay no heed to the several warning signs saying Government Property and Keep Out. Then the trek down was not necessarily dangerous, but not safe either... loose shards of metal adorn the ground, and cliffs with straight drop offs are the things to look out for while shooting. Not too many people were coming down to this spot when my friend Steve and I first went down. Steve had studied the area for over a year and was being very cautious, and once he told me, I pushed him hard to go, and so we did. We were scared out of our minds, keeping in touch by cell phone and hoping against hope not to get busted. Steve asked if he could post his photo first, and I rightly agreed. He immediately had over 10,000 views on Flickr and went from being somewhat known for his immense skills to very well known. When I posted four days later the excitement had all but died. I continued to visit this location, and so did many other photographers. It got to the point that this spot was so commonplace (even photographers from as far away as Europe had started making the trek and getting the shot) that I took 12 photographers at one time down the hillside to shoot this scene. Still, even though more commonplace, it was amazing and special to me, listening and feeling the rumble of the cars passing by while the city seemed so calm and peaceful from this vantage point. I was hoping to return. My skills as a photographer have grown and I wanted to get a certain shot from the beach below for a possible calendar I want to make. That hope now seems to have been dashed. The island security will no doubt go bananas after this event, and probably even fence off the area. Fines will become part of the landscape of getting caught, and it will be many years before anyone is able to get back under the bridge if ever. This and government shutdowns of many of our most beautiful lands has me feeling a little down today.

This marks the possible end of an era.
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http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/claim-of-australian-threat-to-west-papuans-in-bali-consulate-protest-20131007-2v4cg.html
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Once again, I’ve been proved right in one of my theories on humanity: when it comes to those brazen broads who hawk their wares in the world of entertainment, the nipples go south and the nose goes north. 
The former sex kitten is born again as Lady Muck, coming over all moral once she’s been mugged by gravity, and more than happy to sit in judgment on her younger sisters. 
And like all ‘morality’ driven by hypocrisy, it’s highly irritating — and rather amusing.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2236578/As-Suzi-Quatro-blasts-raunchy-modern-popstars-Julie-Burchill-responds-Selling-pop-sex-Well-started-Suzi-old-hypocrite.html#ixzz2h7EauUPH
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Lol, it isn't the Wowsers who are complaining. For precisely the reason you give, I am ambivalent. The people complaining are ones who once profited.
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Allen West
What is happening in Washington state? First two blacks attack and beat a World War II combat Veteran to death and now another one of America's combat Veterans has been stabbed to death. Could SPC Geike have been Obama's son? Does Obama feel compassion and need to make a press conference out of this tragedy? I suppose the killing of Army SPC Geike just does not fit the president or the liberal media's race-baiting agenda. One has to wonder what the headlines would be if things were reversed? Hate crime, damn right it is. A bunch of losers hating on honorable Americans, but that is the new order in Obama's realm.
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This is an absolute disgrace by the Yarra City Council. Fleecing ratepayers to fund a discredited doomsday alarmist.

http://m.theaustralian.com.au/news/ratepayers-may-pay-for-tim-flannery-climate-council/story-e6frg6n6-1226734337554
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Queen Elizabeth II in Western Australia watching a traditional performance welcoming her. (MOGENS JOHANSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

The United States' self-imposed federal government shutdown has a way of making people around the world shake their heads in bewilderment. As Georgetown professorErik Voeten wrote for The Washington Post's new Monkey Cage political science blog, "I cannot think of a single foreign analogy to what is happening in the U.S. today."
But there actually is one foreign precedent: Australia did this once. In 1975, the Australian government shut down because the legislature had failed to fund it, deadlocked by a budgetary squabble. It looked a lot like the U.S. shutdown of today, or the 17 previous U.S. shutdowns.
Australia's 1975 shutdown ended pretty differently, though, than they do here in America. Queen Elizabeth II's official representative in Australia, Governor General Sir John Kerr, simply dismissed the prime minister. He appointed a replacement, who immediately passed the spending bill to fund the government. Three hours later, Kerr dismissed the rest of Parliament. Then Australia held elections to restart from scratch. And they haven't had another shutdown since.
Here's how it happened. Australia, like the United States, has both a Senate and a House of Representatives. In 1975, the chambers were controlled by different parties. The House had passed an appropriations bill to fund the government, but the Senate refused to pass it because it believed that the government was spending too much money on unworthy programs during an economic downturn. The opposition party that controlled the Senate said it would not pass the spending bill unless the government met its somewhat outlandish demand. Does this all sound familiar so far? In the Australian case, though, the opposition's demand wasn't repeal of a health-care law -- they wanted early elections, which they believed would unseat the ruling party.
And the ALP begged her to intervene .. on their behalf .. ed
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 projects. (I tried, once, but didn't make my goal.) There are sites which will let you keep a lower percentage of the cash, if you don't reach your target goal, too. Wiser, in my observation to keep something, rather than nothing >
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Yehuda Avner..
JPost..
First published 07 October 09..

Succot, 1936. The newly appointed German consul-general to Jerusalem, Herr Walter Doehl, stood at his office window hung with an extravagantly tasseled swastika banner, and gazed with curiosity at the sight of clusters of bearded Jews, all draped in prayer shawls and resplendent in the styles and furs of late-medieval Poland, entering and exiting a ramshackle foliage-thatched booth on the other side of the Street of the Prophets where his legation was situated, each clutching what seemed to him to be a lemon and a palm frond.

"It's one of their festivals - Tabernacles," explained the man by his side, in an almost unintelligible guttural German. "They're coming from their synagogues for schnapps. And they wave those things around when they pray for rain."

The man was Ludwig Buchalter, chief of the Nazi Party in the German Colony - a pastoral, red-tiled roofed Jerusalem neighborhood, built by the messianic Templers and studded with monumental stone buildings, statuesque pine trees and picturesque alleyways. Though he had never set foot in Germany in his life, Buchalter looked every bit a Bavarian burgher. The skull of his moon-shaped face was shaved, and beneath his bulbous nose drooped a Hindenburg mustache. He was wearing a short, leather-buttoned, olive-green jacket with rounded lapels, to which a swastika badge was pinned.

That day, he was also sporting a Nazi armband. In making this first call on the new German consul-general he wanted to show off his impeccable National Socialist credentials with their subliminal message that he, Herr Buchalter, was largely responsible for Herr Doehl's appointment to Jerusalem. For months he had been exhorting the Foreign Ministry in Berlin to get rid of the incumbent, a Dr. Heinrich Wolff, because "he is married to a woman of Semitic origin."

No wonder he was so thrilled at finally being able converse with a fellow Nazi in authority concerning the party's goings-on in the German Colony. And how proud he was to be standing there in that opulent room, with its brass chandelier that hung low from the domed, lofty ceiling, bringing out the shine in the waxed black-and-white tiled floor, and the brilliant hues of the ceremonial Nazi flag draped on the desk next to the silver-framed portrait of a smiling Adolf Hitler shaking hands with an adoring Walter Doehl.

In fact, Buchalter was so elated that when he took his leave he executed a cracking click of the heels, a perfectly rigid straight-armed salute and a fervently loud "Heil Hitler," almost colliding as he swung about with the next caller - a Dr. Werner Senator.
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Oh no! Chuckle. The New York Times now favors the extinction of the Jewish state. Shudder. Let’s see. Sulzburger fought in the Confederate army; then the newspaper virtually ignored the Ukrainian famine and the Holocaust, then reported that Fidel Castro was a moderate, then reported Islamist terrorists are moderates.

That’s a pretty accurate record right?

The headline of this article is accurate

Look, I know the author of the one-state solution article and I can tell you he’s been pushing this drivel for at least 35 years. People in Israel don’t want to be turned into a repressive Sharia state from a flourishing country a model of prosperity and one of the highest world ratings of happiness.

I might mention that Israel won every war and has a far stronger army. It is even the great Arab hope for bashing Iran and an ally of Egypt and Jordan!

So what is this nonsense?

I remember an evening when I was invited to a couple that were well-known anti-Israel activists.

We had pleasant enough conversation until late in the evening when I thought we had agreed on a West Bank- Gaza state living alongside Israel. Then the guy said, “But of course Israel will not be allowed to remain as a state.”
You can tell what your opponents really think if you listen to them. If you doubt that you should listen some time to what Palestinians say. I’ve been doing that for decades.

But of course this is nonsense. And in fact it is an endorsement of de facto genocide—make no mistake about it.
What is true, though, is a changing atmosphere. The Democratic Convention rejected by a majority vote that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel (It also voted by a majority against G-d).

Now a lot of administration officials, including Vice-President   Joe Biden, are speaking at J Street. You should understand that this not a liberal, pro-peace group but an organization created by a former Arab lobbyist to destroy Israel, or at least support for it. among the American people and especially Jewish community and Congress.
I will just quote what Jesse Jackson said several years ago. I don’t mean this to be taken literally, but it a sign of h the transformation Obama’s anti-Israel views are, except of course to the majority of American Jews.

Like this one. Can you imagine a foreign policy team more hostile to Israel? Jackson, of course,was not a part of that team, but can see the obvious.

The New York Post just quoted him as having said in a French speech in October 2008 that "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" will lose much of their clout when Obama enters the White House.

Speaking at the World Policy Forum event in Evian, France--the place where Jewish refugees were doomed at a 1938 conference when European counties refused to save them--Jackson promised 70 years later--""a"fundamental change.” Jackson "criticized the Bush administration's diplomacy and said Barack would change that," because, as long as the Palestinians hadn't seen justice, the Middle East would "remain a source of danger to us all." Of course, Palestinians have been given billions of dollars and offered a state but still staged thousands of terrorist attacks since then and still denied Israel's right to a state.

It's called argument through blackmail. Can you imagine what massacres there would be? How about a one-state army commanded by Palestinian Arab generals? Jews who most of the Arabs hate and revile being reduced to the status of minority Christians in the Middle East. Can this be advocated by anyone serious? Nobody but a fool or liar (probably the latter) could advocate such a thing,

And Israel has had nothing to do with the Afghan Taliban, the Iran-Iraq war, al-Qaida,'the Egyptian revolution, the Tunisian revolution, and the Syrian civil war.

The Obama Administration denied Jackson’s words at the time but since then has proven them. Even an Egyptian government makes no difference if it wants to fight terrorism and preserve the peace treaty rather than the opposite policy.

But then why has the Obama Adminstration kept enthusiastic support from AIPAC? Because of the strategic situation. The prince is the prince and Israel hopes that one day--it hopes in vain--that Obama will act against Iran.
But just for three more years.

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A military concept of arrogance swept Israel’s leadership forty years ago. It required a heroic performance by the IDF to snatch victory from the jaws of oblivion during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
A geo-political concept of a peace-driven Middle East — the 1993 Oslo Accord and its derivative, the Two State Solution — swept Israel’s leadership twenty years ago. It has been trounced systematically by the terror/war-driven imploding Arab Street.
A demographic concept of doom — dismissing the prospect of massive Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel and projecting an Arab majority there — was defied 116 years ago and 65 years ago, respectively, by Theodore Herzl, who established the Zionist Congress and David Ben Gurion, who established the Jewish State.

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Washington is paralyzed over what to do in Syria. By all accounts, the president's choices range from bad to worse. But Syria is actually a symptom of a deeper intellectual malaise. America's foreign policy establishment is suffering from an adjustment disorder.
After rejecting the neoconservative policies of George W. Bush following his ill-fated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the foreign-policy herd rushed to embrace the Obama Doctrine. America would now choose not to wield its military power to influence world conflicts – particularly in the Middle East. In many ways, we chose not to have a foreign policy, choosing instead to focus on domestic considerations in the wake of a debilitating recession.
But that strategy is obviously not risk-free. The Syrian slaughter that the United States has chosen to largely ignore, currently tallied at 110,000, is rapidly reaching the estimated 125,000 civilians killed in the wake of America's Iraq intervention. And the longer the United States has stayed on the sidelines, the stronger al Qaeda has grown, threatening not only Syria, but also its neighbors. The lesson here is that doing nothing can sometimes be just as dangerous as doing too much.
Even the president, who has given many Americans foreign-policy whiplash as he has vacillated on how to respond to that chemical weapons attack, appears to now understand the limits of the Obama Doctrine. Barack Obama spent the last five years decrying American military intervention in the Middle East ("I was elected to end wars, not start them"), and emphasizing the need to reach consensus with our international partners, only to deliver a national address pleading for public support to unilaterally bomb an Arab country that has not attacked the United States.
Obama's problem is that he did too good of a job delegitimizing his newly discovered bellicosity. He has hemmed himself in, which explains why he continued to scrap and revise battle plans and while his senior advisors issue a cacophony of policy directives that have left the American public bitterly divided over plans to prevent mass slaughter. It also explains why he leapt at the chance Russian President Vladimir Putin offered, however slim, to get him out of his jam with a Congress that wasn't likely to grant him the authorization he sought.
No matter what happens now in Syria, Obama appears to understand that he cannot ignore some simple realities that were previously derided as neoconservative issues. Al Qaeda, its affiliate groups, and the violent Islamist ideologies that drive them, are not dead and are not receding. The democracy deficit in the Middle East will continue to spawn instability. Autocrats and strongmen with weapons of mass destruction still pose a grave danger. Iran, an unflinching ally of the Syrian regime, has remained on a belligerent course, despite intermittent attempts at cosmetic change.
In Washington, as conversations with legislators, congressional staffers, civil servants, State Department officials, and other foreign-policy professionals over the last few weeks have made clear, there remains a deep and abiding desire to meet and overcome all of these challenges. Admittedly, many foreign-policy hands feel hamstrung by America's financial burdens. And some feel that the volatility of the region in recent years, accelerated by the Arab Spring, has presented too many difficulties to tackle.
But it is nevertheless clear to a silent but growing group of practitioners that Washington sorely lacks a comfortable framework through which these and other policy challenges can be processed and understood. Few are brave enough to revisit neoconservatism in Obama's Washington, yet it's not hard to recognize that the Obama Doctrine has failed. Washington seeks a centrist approach to these challenges. Washington seeks a neocentrism.
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“A psalm of David. When he was in the Desert of Judah. You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.” Psalm 63:1 NIV
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

Morning

"Wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant?"
Numbers 11:11
Our heavenly Father sends us frequent troubles to try our faith. If our faith be worth anything, it will stand the test. Gilt is afraid of fire, but gold is not: the paste gem dreads to be touched by the diamond, but the true jewel fears no test. It is a poor faith which can only trust God when friends are true, the body full of health, and the business profitable; but that is true faith which holds by the Lord's faithfulness when friends are gone, when the body is sick, when spirits are depressed, and the light of our Father's countenance is hidden. A faith which can say, in the direst trouble, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," is heaven-born faith. The Lord afflicts his servants to glorify himself, for he is greatly glorified in the graces of his people, which are his own handiwork. When "tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope," the Lord is honoured by these growing virtues. We should never know the music of the harp if the strings were left untouched; nor enjoy the juice of the grape if it were not trodden in the winepress; nor discover the sweet perfume of cinnamon if it were not pressed and beaten; nor feel the warmth of fire if the coals were not utterly consumed. The wisdom and power of the great Workman are discovered by the trials through which his vessels of mercy are permitted to pass. Present afflictions tend also to heighten future joy. There must be shades in the picture to bring out the beauty of the lights. Could we be so supremely blessed in heaven, if we had not known the curse of sin and the sorrow of earth? Will not peace be sweeter after conflict, and rest more welcome after toil? Will not the recollection of past sufferings enhance the bliss of the glorified? There are many other comfortable answers to the question with which we opened our brief meditation, let us muse upon it all day long.

Evening

"Now on whom dost thou trust?"
Isaiah 36:5
Reader, this is an important question. Listen to the Christian's answer, and see if it is yours. "On whom dost thou trust?" "I trust," says the Christian, "in a triune God. I trust the Father, believing that he has chosen me from before the foundations of the world; I trust him to provide for me in providence, to teach me, to guide me, to correct me if need be, and to bring me home to his own house where the many mansions are. I trust the Son. Very God of very God is he--the man Christ Jesus. I trust in him to take away all my sins by his own sacrifice, and to adorn me with his perfect righteousness. I trust him to be my Intercessor, to present my prayers and desires before his Father's throne, and I trust him to be my Advocate at the last great day, to plead my cause, and to justify me. I trust him for what he is, for what he has done, and for what he has promised yet to do. And I trust the Holy Spirit--he has begun to save me from my inbred sins; I trust him to drive them all out; I trust him to curb my temper, to subdue my will, to enlighten my understanding, to check my passions, to comfort my despondency, to help my weakness, to illuminate my darkness; I trust him to dwell in me as my life, to reign in me as my King, to sanctify me wholly, spirit, soul, and body, and then to take me up to dwell with the saints in light forever."
Oh, blessed trust! To trust him whose power will never be exhausted, whose love will never wane, whose kindness will never change, whose faithfulness will never fail, whose wisdom will never be nonplussed, and whose perfect goodness can never know a diminution! Happy art thou, reader, if this trust is thine! So trusting, thou shalt enjoy sweet peace now, and glory hereafter, and the foundation of thy trust shall never be removed.
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Today's reading: Isaiah 28-29, Philippians 3 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Isaiah 28-29

Woe to the Leaders of Ephraim and Judah
1 Woe to that wreath, the pride of Ephraim’s drunkards,
to the fading flower, his glorious beauty,
set on the head of a fertile valley—
to that city, the pride of those laid low by wine!
2 See, the Lord has one who is powerful and strong.
Like a hailstorm and a destructive wind,
like a driving rain and a flooding downpour,
he will throw it forcefully to the ground.
3 That wreath, the pride of Ephraim’s drunkards,
will be trampled underfoot.
4 That fading flower, his glorious beauty,
set on the head of a fertile valley,
will be like figs ripe before harvest—
as soon as people see them and take them in hand,
they swallow them....

Today's New Testament reading: Philippians 3

No Confidence in the Flesh
1 Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you. 2 Watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh. 3 For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— 4though I myself have reasons for such confidence.
If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless....
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Shallum, Shallun

 [Shăl'lum] - recompense, retributionor spoilation.
  1. A son of Jabesh, who slew Zechariah, son of Jeroboam II. He became King of Israel for one month just before the near extinction of the nation, and was slain by Menahem, son of Gadi (2 Kings 15:10, 13-15).
  2. A son of Tikvah and husband of Huldah the prophetess in the days of Josiah (2 Kings 22:14; 2 Chron. 34:22).
  3. A son of Sisamai and father of Jakaniah, also a descendant of Judah (1 Chron. 2:40, 41).
  4. The fourth son of king Josiah (1 Chron. 3:15).
  5. Grandson of Simeon, second son of Jacob and a descendant of Shaul (1 Chron. 4:25).
  6. The father of Hilkiah, a member of the high priestly family of Zadok and an ancestor of Ezra (1 Chron. 6:12, 13; Ezra 7:2). Called Meshullam in 1 Chronicles 9:11.
  7. The fourth son of Naphtali, the second son of Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid (1 Chron. 7:13). Called Shillem inGenesis 46:24.
  8. A son of Kore, a Korhite and chief porter at the sanctuary (1 Chron. 9:17, 19, 31; Ezra 2:42; Neh. 7:45).
  9. The father of Jehizkiah who opposed the reduction of Jewish captives to slaves (2 Chron. 28:12 ).
  10. A Tabernacle gatekeeper whose foreign wife was put away (Ezra 10:24).
  11. One of the sons of Bani who also had taken a foreign wife (Ezra 10:42).
  12. A son of Halohesh, ruler of the half of Jerusalem, who with his daughters assisted in the repair of the wall (Neh. 3:12).
  13. A son of Col-hozeh, ruler of part of Mizpah, who repaired the gate of the fountain (Neh. 3:15).
  14. The father of Hanameel , uncle to the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 32:7, 8).
  15. The father of Maaseiah, an officer of the Temple in the time of Jehoiakim (Jer. 35:4).
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