Saturday, March 19, 2016

Sat Mar 19th Todays News

For Cruz (423) to get the GOP nomination (1237) outright he requires almost (814/1049), 78% of the remaining votes. Trump (678) only needs 53%. Katich cannot get a win, but he can block Cruz. I do not know what happens to delegate votes after they drop out. One suspects Katich supporters prefer Cruz. The entire situation could become more ugly if Trump fails to secure a mandate. But then the primaries look ugly, but they have a tendency to align the major powers, so that whomever wins will have tremendous clout following. The same cannot be said for the Democrats at the moment because their poorly contested primaries have left them with only bad options. Do they trust the failed elderly woman, or the failed elderly man? Luckily Booker didn't run, or they could have had a young failure too. 

 For some, at the moment, the Sex Party has more credibility. 
=== from 2015 ===
Sydney Conservative was working for Mr Morrison today, and the facilities did not have internet, so no research or writing was done. However, between 9 and 4:30 PM Sydney Conservative was able to read a downloaded copy of Dr David Bowles' The Smoking Mirror, and with half an hour to go, finished the work. It is a children's horror story set around the Texan side of the Mexico border in the Rio Grande basin. Twelve year old twins long for their missing mother. Is she dead? Has she run away? None of the possible answers seem good and their father is falling apart. The mystery and fantasy in this book draws very heavily on the mythology of the Rio Grande Basin, but is accessible to all, anywhere around the world, while still being a treasure for those with an Aztec heritage. The poetry may well be authentic, given Dr Bowles translates such work. But there is far more of Dr Bowles in the work, just as Shakespeare appeared heavily in the play named after his dead son, Hamlet. The likeness with the Bard does not flatter Dr Bowles, this work is reminiscent of James Branch Cabell's "Jurgen" or "Figures of Earth" but far more accessible. One can sense Dr Bowles was tempted to drink heavily in parts, cry bitter tears or laugh for joy. There is a journey to hell, an end of world threat, and a sequel being written right now. A coming of age story in which a young girl, at one stage, faced with an obscene suggestion, responds in a child appropriate manner. Delightful. 
From 2014
 It doesn't seem to be reported, although it is a reasonable line, that Obama had given Putin permission to take Crimea as a thank you for not killing his second election chances. Obama has done nothing that could prevent the take over. In the cold light of day, the take over is not the worst case scenario. Neither is it the crime against democracy that some have said. It is an issue. It will affect the way the world operates, devaluing trust in institutions. But the anti democratic movement in the Ukraine which seized control from an elected government is no less damaging to world institutional governments. Russia would never have given up her naval yard based in Crimea since the time of the Tsars. England might choose to send a light brigade, but while glorious, that would not be effective. A bit like that earlier charge. Instead of sabre rattling, and unleashing CNN to propagandise the event, Obama could have chosen diplomacy. He might still choose to do so, once he has organised his community the way he wants it. 

Another travesty for democracy is South Australia. It looks like two independents will commit the same suicide that Windsor and Oakeshott perpetrated. Of course, counting continues. There is a powerful argument for electronic voting. The benefit would be that results would be almost instantaneous. The negative is that in order to get rid of the corruption of voting process that happens right now, electronic voting would have to give up the principle of a secret vote. Not advocating a public vote, but it is essential a voter can verify their vote was registered the way they intended. One problem with that is liars who would claim conflict so as to undermine the process. To break that nexus, a voting card linked to a voter is made which produces the electronic signature. So the vote becomes verifiable and impossible to rort. At the moment, the electoral office prefers corruption.
Historical perspective on this day






=== 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.
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I am moving from Sydney to Melbourne and am desperate for funding. If you have a heart for giving, I fundraise at gofundme.com/abeueaec
===
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
===
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 Jim Sarver, Ella Han and Kevin Chau. Born on the same day, across the years. Remember, birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
March 19: St Joseph's Day (Western Christianity)
Pluto
Not Bingo, but Bing went for a Song. Ferdinand is seventh in line for chief buyer. We photographed the pup. Government have achieved navel gazing. We intervened. Let's party. 
Deaths
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HULK SMASH

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 19, 2016 (3:04pm)

Hulk Hogan sued trash mob Gawker for $100 million over invasion of privacy. A Florida jury rejected that amount, and instead awarded the ex-wrestler $115 million.
Gawker is appealing.
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FIGHT ON, DESPERADOS

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 19, 2016 (3:22am)

Day three of the Great Fairfax Strike, and our penniless comrades are still standing firm:

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They may be veering from rage to sadness, but these desperate defenders of media diversity are managing to sustain themselves on meagre rations of negronis and cheese as the strike drags on. Possibly they will make it through to Monday, assisted by generous donations.
UPDATE. Fairfax’s tilty Tess Ingram has deleted her cheese and negronis post. She’s striking during the strike.
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SATURDAY SONGBOARD

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 19, 2016 (3:08am)

Lynyrd Skynyrd, California, 1977:

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IT’S NEXT TO THE BIG GIRL’S BLOUSE BAR

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 19, 2016 (3:03am)

Probably not the best move to promote a Safe Schools rally at a joint called the Sooki Lounge:

image
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SO MANY CARBONS

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 19, 2016 (2:22am)

Feeling slightly more dead than usual? Me too! And yesterday I couldn’t even open the front door for all the corpses piled up outside. I blame it on carbon pollution:

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Survivors are urged to post a comment immediately. Chances are none of us will make it through the weekend.
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PENSIONER’S HOBBY FUNDED

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 19, 2016 (1:05am)

Your taxes berned: 
Former New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, charging that the Australian Labor Party made illegal contributions to Bernie Sanders’ campaign during the New Hampshire presidential primary campaign, and Sanders’ campaign accepted them.
The O’Brien complaint is based on a video released in late February by the conservative activist group Project Veritas. The video purported to show Australian youths volunteering for the Sanders campaign in New Hampshire and other states while receiving stipends and having their housing costs paid for by the Australian party as part of an Australian federal government education program. 
As Hillary says, the election must be decided by Americans. Given that Australian taxes were involved, these Sanders saps ought to face a few questions here, too.
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Fierravanti-Wells punished. UPDATE: Tim Wilson wins

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (3:30pm)

It seems Liberal Senator Connie Fierravanti-Wells has been punished by pre-selectors today for blabbing about rumours of Tony Abbott’s (non-existent) affair with then chief of staff Peta Credlin.
As a minister with Malcolm Turnbull’s backing she should have been given the top spot today in the NSW Liberals’ Senate ticket. In fact, she has just lost out to autism advocate Hollie Hughes, the deputy NSW Liberal president.
Jim Molan, in my opinion the most credentialed candidate, is still in the fight for the second or third spots.
UPDATE
Fierravanti-Wells gets second spot.
UPDATE
Tim Wilson wins Liberal preselection for the safe seat of Brighton, left vacant by Andrew Robb.  Great news! The Liberals have chosen a warrior, not a backroom person, and one with a record of fighting for Liberal values - not least free speech.
Wilson was with the IPA, as was James Paterson, made a Liberal Senator this month. A terrific tribute to John Roskam, the head of the IPA and an unparalleled spotter and supporter of young political talent. 
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No strategy, no communication, no deeds of his own

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (11:37am)

My warning six months ago:
Here’s Turnbull’s challenge in a nutshell: he stole the prime ministership he could not have won in an election.
He stole it by boasting of superior communication skills he does not have.
He will now campaign on successes by Abbott he could not have achieved himself.
And he will now be the leader of a party he cannot unite.
Dennis Shanahan today:


“It’s ours to lose,” is the typical reaction from Coalition backbenchers and ministers as they shake their heads and ask how this has come to pass.
Essentially the answer is that there was too much reliance on the unpopularity of Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten, and a reticence to adopt the tactics and strategy of the Abbott re-election plan…

Abbott’s intention was to reintroduce the Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation, rejected in August last year, before parliament rose for the summer break, ensuring a solid double-dissolution trigger and allowing for a blitz on union lawlessness and Shorten from the then PM and his workplace relations hard man, Eric Abetz....
Instead of pursuing an aggressive anti-union/Labor campaign, after Turnbull said he didn’t want to be always “yelling” at people, the government was occupied with the tax reform options of raising the GST, changing negative gearing and superannuation taxes. The failure to act on those options has damaged the government’s image, despite a restoration of business confidence…
(T)here is no doubt that there is some disappointment with Turnbull as leader… Labor has exploited such disappointment by portraying Turnbull as not standing for anything, such as same-sex marriage, emissions trading systems or a republic, and declaring he is only adopting Abbott’s agenda on asylum-seekers, unions, climate change, same-sex marriage and tax reforms…
Coalition MPs are concerned that ... a series of policy retreats have left the government without a message to sell...
Gosh, I’m surprised.
Michelle Grattan blames conservatives for the trouble in Liberal ranks rather than accept the inherent instability of having a soft-option Leftist and opportunist like Turnbull lead a party that doesn’t share his values:
We’ve seen over recent months what they [conservatives] can do. Now they [have run] a ferocious campaign against the Safe Schools program, with a petition of more than 40 Coalition signatures calling for a parliamentary inquiry. Imagine what they’d try on a re-elected but weakened prime minister…
Meanwhile, as it moves towards the election, the government’s tax package – to be at the heart of its pitch – shrank further this week, as Treasurer Scott Morrison threw cold water on the prospect of personal income tax cuts, pointing rather to company tax relief.
In just a few months the plan has gone from the prospect of a once-in-a-generation reform with a major tax mix switch – higher GST, income tax cuts to address bracket creep, plus changes to superannuation and negative gearing – to a modest package focused on superannuation, a company tax cut, and higher cigarette tax… [B]ut how how much voter appeal will it have?
Paul Kelly says even a re-elected Turnbull could be in deep strife:
A full-term election would curse any re-elected Turnbull government with a Senate even more unworkable than the present Senate, given the crossbenchers (Nick Xenophon excluded) are the losers from the reform [to Senate voting laws]. The two crossbenchers closest to the government, Bob Day and David Leyon­hjelm, feeling betrayed, were rattling their sabres yesterday…
The crossbenchers could still derail Turnbull’s best plans. Facing electoral elimination, they might reverse position and vote for the ABCC bill in any reconsideration in May. Turnbull is unambiguously on the record: the only basis for a double dissolution is Senate obstruction of the industrial relations bills designed to improve union governance and clean up the building industry.
Sure, Turnbull now has the strict constitutional grounds for a double dissolution, but he would reduce politics to a theatre of the absurd by calling a double dissolution simultaneous with passage of the ABCC bill…
UPDATE
Terry McCrann says it’s never been a more exciting time to be a Prime Minister who cannot deliver on his boasts:
After six months in the job Malcolm Turnbull’s record of policy delivery compares very badly with what Tony Abbott achieved in two years. Three huge trade deals, abolition of both the carbon and mining taxes, versus what exactly?
OK, but Abbott, or more particularly his treasurer Joe Hockey, had two “bad” budgets — the first disastrously and, even more damningly, ineffectively “tough”; the second, just as ineptly, the very opposite.
So in May Turnbull and his Treasurer Scott Morrison are going to bring down a brilliant, policy-reforming, deficit-eliminating, zinger?..

[T]he two biggest policy initiatives which his government has, to use a word loosely, delivered have more than a faint scent of Sandy Stone-like camphor balls about them…
The first is the proposed changes to the media rules… Whoopee, Fairfax and the Nine Network can now merge. If it was still 1995 they’d be able to build a media powerhouse.
Where is the policy innovation to at least comprehend and incorporate not just the very different world of 2016’s globalised media, but which will be dynamically supportive of 2026’s and 2036’s media?..
The second major policy initiative is even more a march back deep into the 20th century: the embrace of the so-called “effects test” in competition regulation… One could go on at length on why the “effects test” is just awful... The way it seems even specifically, if perversely, designed to stifle the very innovation that “other” Turnbull purportedly espouses.
So, the PM wants to protect the corner milk-bar and the dairy farmer both from Coles and Woolworths. Has he heard of Aldi and Amazon?
Two other words the Turnbull six months conjure are “timidity” and “frozen” in the spotlight — again, the very antithesis of leadership, far less bold, forward-directing leadership. What we’ve seen in the past six months is a prime minister defining himself as an empty suit.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
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Victorian Labor Government deceives on Safe Schools. UPDATE: Has Dowsett changed on pedophiles?

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (11:22am)

It says something sinister about the Andrews Government that it is against explicitly Christian Christmas carols being sung in schools but supports this:

Victoria plans to sabotage the Turnbull government’s new ban on homosexual role-playing classes in schools by promising to pay for the Safe Schools program if it loses federal funding.
Malcolm Turnbull yesterday quelled a backbench ­revolt by conservative MPs by ­ordering the Safe Schools ­Coalition to curb its classroom campaign or lose its remaining $2 million in taxpayer funding.
The changes give parents the right to veto the controversial gender and sexuality lessons, and will ban the independent Safe Schools Coalition from referring students to third-party websites such as Minus 18, a gay and transsexual youth group that had promoted links to sex shops and gay nightclubs.
But Victorian Education Minister James Merlino declared that Victoria would pay for the anti-bullying program in full if the Turnbull government cut federal funding. “No changes to Vic safe schools program in wake of Turnbull Govt recommendations,’’ he said in a tweet last night. “Total cave-in to bigots. We know Safe Schools saves lives.’’
I am very much against bullying of children on the grounds of their sexuality. But I am also against the many other kinds of bullying in schools - about weight, height, pimples, nerdiness, race, religion, lack of coolness and so much else that can make school hell for some children.
But this program is not actually about stopping bullying, as the Victorian Government claims. Here it from the program’s Marxist author herself:
…we hear the stories of ‘but we don’t really have any gay students in our school’. Because they’re not necessarily visible, right? So we have got to think about really explicit physical cues that are very clearly about gender and sexual diversity. So we think very specific posters work really well - very specific messages from school leadership. Very specific messages things written in the school newsletter about Safe Schools Coalition is about supporting gender and sexual diversity. Not about celebrating diversity, not about stopping bullying - about gender and sexual diversity, about same sex attractive, it’s about being transgender, about being lesbian, gay, bisexual - say the words, transgender, intersex. Not just ‘be nice to everyone’, ‘everyone is great’
This is preaching another lifestyle, not preventing bullying. And the Victorian Labor Government is either a dupe or a fraud for endorsing it.
UPDATE
How on earth are we to understand Dowsett’s astonishing views of pedophiles in 1982? Has he changed his views since? Or do they reflect his true agenda still? How much of the Safe Schools project is influenced by them?
I also have a friend, a paedophile, who is working very hard on making sense out of his relations with boys. These relations consist of, among other things, a large amount of nurture and support for these boys, a real caring for their welfare and growth….
…a new political position is needed for there are significant political struggles at stake. First, we have three legal/social questions to win: custody rights for gay men and lesbians; the legal right of paedophiles and their young lovers; and finally the sexual rights of children as a whole ….
Many mothers and some fathers will agree that children are sexual and generate sexual responses in their parents. Cuddling, breast feeding, bathing together, playing, kissing and fondling kids are immensely pleasurable activities for them and for us. And it is not uncommon to feel sexually aroused by that closeness, that touch of that love. How different then is that gentle, tentative sexuality between parent and child from the love of a paedophile and his/her lover? From all their accounts and from many academic studies (some worse than others), that kind of love, warmth, support and nurture is an important part of the paedophilic relationship.
I’m not saying that mothering/fathering is paedophilic; but I am saying that they are not mutually exclusive. Nor is the social parent so different from the child-lover ….
The current paedophilia debate then is crucial to the political processes of the gay movement: paedophiles need our support, and we need to construct the child/adult sex issue on our terms …
Why is the media, so hot to persecute Cardinal George Pell for his views on pedophiles in the 1970s, so silent on Dowsett’s in the 1980s?
Roger Franklin says the ideologues behind this radical gender agenda don’t come cheap:
LaTrobe University’s Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society has been in the headlines for the Safe Schools program it developed. Deputy Director Gary Dowsett also keeps himself busy with what might strike some as rather arcane research topics and large grant applications…
Indeed, if Dowsett’s CV and list of funded research is any guide, some gays now do very well indeed by being out and proud. Below, just a few of the research topics and remarkable sums that have underwritten the career of the deputy director and chair at the university’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society, which produced the Safe Schools curriculum… Helpfully, at the foot of his 41-page CV, Dowsett tots up what these and many, many other academic explorations of gay themes have cost various funding bodies and the public purse: 
Career Research Total: AU$ 7,345,677; US $2,494,898
Alas, no specific funding figures are made available for three of the more striking among Dowsett’s many published papers. It would be interesting to know the price tags on ‘I Type, Therefore I Cum: Technologies of the Body-in-Sex‘, ‘The Ethics of Barebacking‘ and the intriguing ‘De-Centring the Penis: The New Masculinities and Men’s Sexual Subjectivity‘.
UPDATE
Anti-bullying or recruiting?
Sex education in schools is being dictated by activist-driven research projects aligned to gay and lesbian groups, resulting in the significant overstatement of the rates of same-sex attraction among young people and questionable claims about the degree of homophobia in the schoolyard.
The latest National Survey of Australian Secondary Students and Sexual Health, conducted by La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, claims that 16.8 per cent of 16-19-year-olds reported being attracted to the same sex.
The ARCSHS figure is more than double that cited in earlier incarnations of the report and more than four times higher than the number of same-sex-attracted people identified in the 2013 Australian Study of Health Relationships, the nation’s most comprehensive study of sex and relationships.
(Thanks to reader Randell, Owen and many others.) 
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The natural home of the bully is the Left

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (10:46am)

What is it with the Left and political violence?

In the US:
The Secret Service, FBI and New York Police Department are investigating what sources tell CBS News is a threatening piece of mail sent to Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump.
The mail, sent to Eric Trump at his posh Manhattan residence at 100 Central Park South, also known as Trump Parc East, was opened by his wife Thursday. A source close to the investigation said the letter had a Massachusetts postmark and warned that if Donald Trump doesn’t withdraw from the race for the Republican presidential nomination—paraphrasing—harm will come to the kids.
And:
The hactivist group Anonymous has begun to carry out its threat against Donald Trump, distributing an extensive amount of personal information about the Republican presidential front-runner online.
The group posted to Pastebin, a site that Sony’s hackers used for distributing information stolen from the film studio, to publish extensive details about Trump — including what purports to be his home address, social security number, birth certificate and phone numbers.
In Australia:

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THE “full force of the law” should be brought to bear on protesters who trashed Senator Cory Bernardi’s office and targeted his children’s school, he says.
The university students and high-school pupils, who were protesting against his opposition to the Safe Schools anti-bullying program and ongoing debate about same-sex marriage, engaged in abuse, vandalism and threats…
They also overturned tables and chairs, wrote messages in chalk on the carpet and chanted slogans such as “racist, sexist, anti-queer, Bernardi is not welcome here”.
Senator Bernardi’s wife, Sinead, and staffers retreated into other rooms.
Once police arrived, the students went outside, knocking over a fence on their way and leaving paper and rubbish strewn around the office. One sign read: “Eat rainbow, bigot."…
During the office protest, the students claimed they were heading to the school because it was where Senator Bernardi was educated. [Tom Gilchrist, Adelaide University’s Student Representative Council president and ... from the socialist group Student Voice later said they had not caused any disturbance at the school.
“We put up the banner and walked away,” he said.
Bullying to (allegedly) stop bullying. What would such people do if ever they got real power?
(Thanks to reader WaG311.) 
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Madonna strips girl to reveal her breast part. Where are the feminists?

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (10:38am)

image
Can you imagine the outrage if a man had done this to a 17-year-old girl? If a Catholic priest?
THE teenage girl whose breast was flashed to the world when Madonna pulled down her top at her concert in Brisbane says it was the best moment of her life.
Gold Coast barista and aspiring model Josephine Georgiou, 17, has defended Madonna for exposing her breast when she was invited on to the stage during Thursday night’s concert at the Brisbane…

“Seriously, why would I sue Madonna for the best moment of my life?,” she told The Courier Mail.
But when a female singer does this - on stage before a huge audience in the hall and via video - it is OK? The “best moment” of a girl’s wanna-be life?
Where are the feminists? Having a girl stripped before a crowd so it can oggle her breast as the best part of her is surely the cheap objectification of women we should abhor. 
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Scenes of the tribalising of Australia: brick hits two-year-old

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (10:17am)

One again, this kind of violence and aggressive you-owe-us mentality suggests a tribal division:
A two-year-old boy was hit in the face with a brick after being caught in the crossfire when three attackers threw them at a 26-year-old man for refusing to give them a cigarette.
The pictures at the link suggest I am right. 
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Why did Europe let them in?

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (10:04am)

Yes, good, but remember how many people he helped to kill before he was caught:
“We’ve got him” was the jubilant tweet by Brussels migration minister Theo Francken as Europe’s most wanted man, Salah Abdeslam was shot but arrested alive in his home town in Brussels.
Abdeslam has been on the run since the devastating November Paris terrorist attacks on the Bataclan theatre, the Stade de France and Parisian bars, which killed 130.
And think how Europe so wilfully imported the terrorism that is now helping to drag it to its knees:
Abdeslam was a key member of the Paris attacks and the brother of Brahim Abdeslam, one of the suicide bombers. He is a childhood friend of the ringleader of the attacks Abdelhamid Abaaoud…
Several other accomplices believed to be involved in the Paris attacks were also arrested in this morning’s raids. They were named locally as Monir Ahmed Alahaj and Soufyane Kayal who was an associate of another Paris connection Algerian national Mohamed Belkaid, who was killed in the shootout in Forest.
And this, I suspect, will turn into a disaster and near-existential threat to the very idea of Germany:
Internal government reports now suggest that as many as 1.5 million asylum-seekers arrived in Germany last year. This constitutes more than 1 per cent of the total German population. A similar number are expected this year and in the years ahead (and this is before anyone takes into account the right of those who have arrived to bring their families to join them). Across Germany, social services are straining, private buildings threatened with requisition unless they are handed over for the housing of refugees, and public sympathy is diminishing.
It is utterly bizarre - a dangerous misreading - for Germany to be negotiating a “solution” that merely imports much the same kind of danger from elsewhere:

In a move to diminish the numbers of migrants from Syria coming into Europe through Turkey, Merkel negotiated an arrangement with Ankara that has two advantages for the latter. The first is that the cash-strapped EU will pay €3 billion ($4.4bn) to the Turkish government. The second is that Merkel and her EU colleagues have begun negotiating with Turkey to ease visa travel restrictions into the EU for the country’s 75 million ­citizens.
UPDATE
In Britain:
NEARLY a third of people arrested in London each year are not British, the UK’s top police chief has revealed. Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said 28 to 29 per cent of the capital’s 250,000 arrests per year are foreigners...
(Thanks to reader Barry.) 
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Aston in the ruins of France

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (9:40am)

Joe Aston is in Paris and worried:
Muslim French have by far the highest birth rates. And their population in Marseille is already 40 per cent. One in five Parisians is Muslim.
Aston may be a Fairfax reporter, but he’s reading a book I highly recommend and which may help to explain his mood:
On the 9:17am Eurostar to Paris I start on Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission. Imagine it is 2022, and with the support of France’s Socialist Party, the Muslim Brotherhood sweeps to victory in the presidential and National Assembly elections. The new government promptly sets about implementing sharia law. Turkey and Morocco join the European Union. Islamic rule spreads across the West like a second Ottoman Empire…
For me, it evoked a brilliant and terrifying essay I read a decade ago by the learned prison doctor turned polemicist Theodore Dalrymple (who, by another coincidence is speaking at the Centre for Independent Studies in Melbourne next month) entitled The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris. Dalrymple recorded, with brutal clarity, the lived experience in the public housing projects, known as cités, that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially, colonised by African Muslim immigrants and their descendants, a steaming example of the calamitous failure of France’s multicultural project…
Dalrymple describes their young inhabitants: “Intellectually alert but not well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence and crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously explain your predicament, justify your wrath… and guarantee your salvation?”
But it’s other signs of decline that worry Aston as much - the decline of a Western society losing faith in its values or the rigor to live by them, so that the only game is self-interest and the scrabble for the power to secure it:

This country’s cultural malaise forms a virtuous circle with its ludicrous economic order… Labour market rigidity protects those who least need it, while “condemning the most vulnerable to utter hopelessness”, that hopelessness begetting violent social upheaval.
The response of the proletariat? This week the state-owned railway, SNCF, is out on strike. At Charles de Gaulle, taxi drivers physically drag passengers from the back of Ubers and strew their luggage on the road. Air France faces bankruptcy, yet when management held consultations with staff about job cuts, workers stormed the meeting and literally ripped the shirts from the backs of two senior executives. In France, barbarism is not exclusively the preserve of Muslims and the poor… Taxes are poured into the black hole of languorous government, where the elites are guaranteed comfortable postings, after their guaranteed places in the best academies, their cinq à sept with the mistress, and so forth. 
UPDATE
Aston tries to remind his Fairfax colleagues that striking is exactly not the way to to help their struggling newspapers survive. His colleagues and ex-colleagues respond with all the civility, reason and economic understanding so evident among the Twitter Left. Oh, and Fairfax reporters, but I repeat myself. 
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Journalists protest at Fairfax’s fall - and show they just don’t get it

Andrew Bolt March 19 2016 (9:24am)

Fairfax journalists are on strike to force their employer to keep employing more journalists than it can afford.
This is already a crazy response to an unrealistic aim. Surely the proper response to the Fairfax sackings is to work even harder to create a product that actually sells both newspapers and advertising?
Given this harsh commercial reality, some of the responses from reporters at the Quill awards demonstrate a know-nothingness about capitalism, audiences and the source of the reporters’ bread and butter.
For instance, blaming Fairfax rather than the readers and advertisers - or themselves - seems misdirected.
Moreover, to demand Fairfax hire more journalists than customers will pay for while you clutch a glass of wine at a swish dinner is not a great way to appeal to sympathy. Do these journalists know their market?:
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One reason Fairfax has no money to pay for so many journalists is that its main competitor on-line is the state-subsidised ABC, which gives free the news and views that Fairfax must sell to survive. So getting an ABC journalist to blame Fairfax rather than the ABC for the effects of this unfair competition is bizarre. Or is Cassidy assuming that Fairfax, like the ABC, can just get more cash from the Government to pay for what the audience won’t?:
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An Age journalist retweeting the support of the country’s most lawless and corruption-plagued union, the hard-Left CFMEU, actually reminds people that The Age too often seems to side with the Left against the best interests of the majority, which has turned the paper from mainstream to slipstream:

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The Age journalist who retweeted that - and posted the pictures above - has a job title that sounds extremely worthy, but in a way that suggests why The Age has struggled to sell enough papers and advertisements to employ a fifth of her colleagues:

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And these tweets of support from fellow Leftists completely miss the point behind the decline of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald:
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Fairfax readers demanding more diversity? There’s an irony.
Actually, what Fairfax needs are readers and advertisers.
It would have got more of both had it actually shown more diversity in its papers. For instance, despite having traditionally sold most papers in Liberal electorates The Age became a paper of the Green Left, and to the point where it has in years not had a single on-staff conservative columnist. Why would non-Left readers now buy it?
Moreover, diversity of another kind is exactly what is killing Fairfax. There is a diversity of media now for readers to choose from, much of it free on the Internet - as well as a diversity of advertising platforms, such as real-estate.com.au. In fact, there is a diversity of Leftist media in particular that is stripping The Age of readers: not just The Guardian on-line, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, the Daily Mail on-line and a thousand other things on line, but the behemoth of the state-funded ABC.  To think the Left won’t have anything to read if Fairfax disappears is a self-evident nonsense. In fact, the Murdoch papers have many Left-wing columnists themselves.

I don’t say these things to gloat over the decline of a rival. I worked for The Age and have been angry at its hijacking and trashing by the Left. I am very sorry indeed that so many journalists have lost their jobs. And I know that News Corp is also under severe pressure from the sluggish economy, the huge loss of advertising dollars to on-line outlets advertising cars, jobs and real estate, and the explosion of competition in the news media, driven even by things like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
But for Fairfax journalists to simply blame their boss for being a cheapskate who should keep funding their excesses is not just bizarre but an insight into the kind of thinking that helped to destroy these once-great papers.
You want Fairfax to survive? Then provide news and views that people can use. Offer stuff people will pay to read. Go sell your paper.  Don’t demand but offer.
And for goodness sake stop holding award nights where journalists congratulate journalists for doing what journalists like. If you must have approval, seek it from the audience that has your job in its hands.
UPDATE
Absolutely astonishing. Some Fairfax journalists actually want Fairfax to lose even more of the money it needs to employ them:
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Do these journalists actually know where the money in their pay packet comes from?
(Thanks to reader Jason. Thanks also to reader Housos for correctly reprimanding me for not emphasising enough the leaching of advertising dollars to on-line sites selling cars, jobs and real estate.) 
===

THEY’RE NO OIL PAINTINGS

Tim Blair – Thursday, March 19, 2015 (3:41am)

A press release announces Sydney’s greatest-ever art exhibition: 
In one of the featured works by HotHouse staff, Our Water, Our Place presents hundreds of water samples donated by Sydneysiders to create a reservoir of personal associations and anecdotes: rainwater from a kitchen sink in Warrimoo; storm water collected from a gutter outside a pub in Alexandria; saltwater from Middle Harbour. 
So much for Tim Flannery’s prediction that Sydney might run out of water by 2007. Eight years later we’ve got so much excess water that even art exhibits are slopping the stuff all over the place.
But to hell with boring water. What about the far more diverse and impressive medium of oil? Creative readers are invited to photograph their own unique oil shots – olive oil, motor oil, baby oil, peak oil, anything at all from the entire oil spectrum. Send your images to blairt@dailytelegraph.com.au and we’ll try to score a grant.
UPDATE. Entries are pouring in, at an appropriate level of tensile viscosity. Keep ‘em coming.
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CURSE OF THE DERYA

Tim Blair – Thursday, March 19, 2015 (3:13am)

James Delingpole on the lemon-sucking reaction to Monday’s column: 
This is what, in the old days on London’s Fleet Street, we used to call a “joke”. But as Steyn rightly notes, modern journalistic culture is so po-faced and up itself, that most of the younger generation of hacks wouldn’t know what a joke was if it bit them on the **** (as they’re obliged to call even an arse these days, such is the culture of prudery that goes hand in hand with this humourlessness.) 
Quite so. One small correction to James’s piece: I didn’t interview Mr Derya. Rather, I quoted – with attribution – a Fairfax piece. This is the curse of Furkan Derya; barely anybody can write about him without making a mistake. Even Fairfax’s initial piece spelled his surname as “Denya” in a photo caption, which would have required me to make a joke about what people say when watching Family Feud.
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ALL HIS DUX IN A ROW

Tim Blair – Thursday, March 19, 2015 (3:09am)

Media Watch receives a dose of its own medicine. With the difference that this is far more impressively researched.
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SPONGE BOB’S SCARE RANTS

Tim Blair – Thursday, March 19, 2015 (3:01am)

Bob Ellis’s latest prediction: 
Luke Foley will win government, with an absolute majority, in New South Wales. 
Bob Ellis’s previous prediction: 
‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, a Liberal supporter, seemed set to lose power in the Holy Land. 
His every instinct is infallibly fallible. Bob remains the George Costanza of Australian politics.
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FLIGHTBAT

Tim Blair – Thursday, March 19, 2015 (1:57am)

US academic Dr Karen Halnon fired up in more ways than one after her flight arrived at Miami airport: 
A woman who was arrested on an American Airlines flight after lighting a cigarette, blaming somebody else then ranting about Obama can be revealed as a Penn State professor of sociology …

She was caught on camera lighting up shortly after the flight had landed – but stubbed it out and thrust the butt into a seat pocket when flight attendants came over.

She then pointed at the man in a seat next to her when challenged over her behavior – before launching into a pro-communist rant attacking the United States for applying economic sanctions on Venezuela …

According to her faculty page she is an expert on capitalism, Latin America and mad women. 
She sure is. After her release, Flightbat Halnon gave a remarkable interview which included a claim that her smoking – which she tried to blame on another passenger – was a necessary political act of Thoreau-like civil disobedience: 
I expressed an act of civil disobedience. But that act was necessary …
The problem is U.S. military global domination. And they want the oil. And they want the water. And so I found that this act was a necessary Thoreau-like act of civil disobedience. I had to speak out now. The situation is dire and urgent, and any sacrifice I make for my own self, if it saves lives – there have been far too many lives lost due to U.S. global military domination …
Listen, the point is, I am a sociologist, and I live in an intellectual world. A sociologist always thinks in terms of symbols. And every revolutionary I know smokes. It was identifying with the revolutionary cause. And then, beyond that, it is a symbol that the United States is a smoking gun. The action was necessary. They are going to kill many more people …
I made some mistakes here, but it wasn’t a mistake to speak out. I would do it again today. Ask anyone who knows me. 
Halnon’s PhD thesis was about hysterical women. 
===

Mark Dreyfus should be ashamed of his hypocrisy. UPDATE: media, too

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (6:45pm)

Hypocrite alert.
Labor frontbencher Mark Dreyfus, who is Jewish, flew in a rage at Tony Abbott at Question Time today for referring to Bill Shorten as the “Dr Goebbels of economic policy”.
Labor went into uproar, too, keen to beat up another “gaffe” controversy.
Small problem. Drefyus, the hypocrite, has himself invoked Goebbels to attack Abbott:
Leaving aside the Goebbellian cynicism of labelling a scare campaign a ‘’truth campaign’’, I think it shows Abbott’s contempt for the Australian electorate.
Wouldn’t apologise, either:
In an opinion piece today, Labor MP Mark Dreyfus described Mr Abbott’s so-called “truth campaign” on carbon as Goebbellian. 
The term takes its name from the Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels…
Mr Dreyfus says he was referring to the nature of Mr Abbott’s campaign, not calling him a Nazi.
“I think its a pretty recognised idea in propaganda, Goebellian cynicism,” he said.
“It’s intended to refer to people that go out, deliberately spread misinformation and think that if they keep spreading the mis-information it’ll come to be accepted at fact.” 
Abbott apologised, Dreyfus didn’t.
What a hypocrite.
But watch the media do yet another gotcha. Watch it show the usual confected outrage and double standards.
UPDATE
Can you spare me the sanctimonious outrage of Labor MPs adopting moral poses for political advantage?
Labor MP Jill Hall today proves her superior morality with vicious abuse - and stunning hypocrisy:
Abbott has just demonstrated what a disgusting individual & grub he is #auspol #qt
The same Jill Hall in 2006:

They have vilified asylum seekers and refugees in a way that would make Goebbels blush.
Is fellow Labor MP Graham Perrett also “disgusting” and a “grub”, Ms Hall?
He did not mention the global financial crisis. That two years has been taken out of the LNP history books. It is almost a Goebbels -type experiment in removing things from history: ‘This did not occur.’ 
Was Labor leader Simon Crean ”disgusting" and a “grub” for also likening Abbott to Goebbels, Ms Hall?: 
Day after day the Minister for Health and Ageing comes in here repeating his Goebbels chant: John Howard is the best friend that Medicare has ever had. 
UPDATE
Absolutely typical. Mark Kenny of Fairfax abuses Abbott for his “willful overreach” without once mentioning Dreyfus, Crean, Hill and other Labor MPs have used the same abuse without any media comment at all.
ABC 7.30 reporter Sabra Lane shows footage of Goebbells in full rant and only at the very end notes that Dreyfus did use the same insult once, but she does not add the exquisite detail that he used it against Abbott.
Sky News Agenda has Labor’s Michael Danby express at huge length his disappointment to an agonised host, who only lightly taxes him at the end with mentions of past Labor sins.
This is astonishing, and it happens again and again. Gillard and Rudd told jokes about Irish boozers, but the media is angry only with Abbott.
John Howard, Bob Brown, Scott Ludlum and Paul Keating all referred to economic or environmental “holocausts”, but the media is angry only with Abbott.
Dreyfus, Simon Crean, Graham Perrett and Janet Hill all use the “Goebbells” insult, but the media is angry only with Abbott.
This is sick. 
===

Art Laffer gives us our cure

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (4:54pm)

 Ronald Reagan’s former economics advisor, Dr Arthur Laffer, gave a stunning talk for the Institute of Public Affairs this week.
He had a six-point plan to revive a flagging economy - and, no, it didn’t include racking up record deficits by splurging taxpayers’ money on look-at-me “stimulus” schemes.
Steve Kates summarises:
- introduce a low-rate broad-based flat tax 
- bring in genuine spending restraint
- base monetary policy on a sound-money imperative
- ensure free trade is the basis for international trade
- keep regulation of industry to an absolute minimum
- leave the market to itself to solve the problems businesses find themselves in.
Given the circumstances, I think the Abbott Government is doing reasonably well in attempting at least four of the above. But, gee, it’s hard work in this culture of ours. 
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Labor damns us to Greece-style debt. So why is Abbott blamed?

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (9:41am)

The Intergenerational Report showed that we’re headed for astonishing - and very dangerous - deficits unless changes are made. We really are on the road to Greece, thanks to the feral Senate’s blocking of Abbott Government reforms:
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As you can see, I’ve noted the gap caused by the obstruction in the Senate by Labor, the Greens, Palmer United and assorted crossbenchers.
We now see lots of commentators attacking the Government for not doing a better “selling job” of its reforms.
This criticism may well be deserved, but misdiagnoses the problem and misdirects the criticism.
First, no selling job could persuade Labor, the Greens, Jacqui Lambie, Glenn Lazarus and Clive Palmer, for instance, to drop some of the opposition, which is based on spite, deep ideology and rank populism.
Second, there should be no need for a “selling job” to persuade Labor to back spending cuts and vote on the national interest.
No, the criticism really should be on Labor and the Greens for betraying the national interest and condemning Australia to a rapidly snowballing national debt that could destroy the economy.
Now I hear some on the Left - the ABC’s Barrie Cassidy and Jon Faine, for instance - start to attack Abbott for not going in harder on savings cuts, when they were among the many commentators who savaged him for trying in the first place.
We are in a very sick place, where Abbott-hatred is driving us over the cliff.
Paul Kelly on the latest economic vandalism of the Senate, the rejection of higher education reforms demanded by 40 of Australia’s 41 vice-chancellors:
The political class is selfish. It is naked in the way it puts its own individual and party interests and ideology before the interests of the people. Listening to the self-justifications of key senators is a sad and shoddy experience. These are manifestations of a system in ­decline… 
Neither the politicians nor the media want to concede this. How much more evidence do they want? Such denials, however, serve a purpose because neither the political nor media class want to concede their share of responsibility for the demise of our public policy debate and outcomes.
Our political system is not delivering. This is now obvious to the community. There is little sign the political system can address the nation’s problems: a fractured budget, unsustainable spending programs, unproductive industry, entrenched inequity and insufficient infrastructure…
Labor is in denial of the university funding crisis it bequeathed, having deregulated ­student numbers without any mechanism to finance the needs of the expanded system. Having taken an ideological stand against deregulation, it refused to ­negotiate.
Too many of the Senate crossbenchers refused to engage with the issues: they reject deregulation in principle yet are clueless about how to solve the problem. Their attitude is “not my problem” but this is not how parliaments are supposed to behave…
The voices of the aggrieved dominate the media and political debate at the expense of the public interest. The media weight given in the 1980s to national interest reform is long since lost....
If you want to understand how honesty works in politics consider the NSW election, where Premier Mike Baird is being honest: he has put long-term leasing of the electricity network on the table. What is the result? Baird faces one of the most dishonest campaigns in the past half century with every expectation Labor will be rewarded with a significant swing.
UPDATE
More evidence of a feral Senate driving us over the cliff:
Senate crossbenchers [have firmed] in their resolve to sink a $22 billion cut to pensions… 
Palmer United Party’s Zhenya “Dio” Wang and independent senator Glenn Lazarus have signalled their opposition to Scott Morrison’s fresh bid to change pension indexation - where a lowering of the indexation rate would be accompanied by regular reviews of pension adequacy.
Senator Wang and Senator Lazarus’ opposition follows that of independent senator Jacqui Lambie and strong reservations expressed by South Australian senator Nick Xenophon… The change in pension indexation has been projected to save more than $22 billion over 10 years by the Parliamentary Budget Office.
Add those Senators to feral Labor and the Greens, and that’s another saving gone.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

ABC host makes mistake of believing ABC host’s anti-Abbott spin

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (9:18am)

Very funny.
First ABC 7.30’s Sabra Lane verbals the Prime Minister (as do many other journalists, as per usual):
What Tony Abbott actually said: 
Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the coalition joint party room meeting on Tuesday the government was facing what he called a “feral Senate”. 
What the ABC’s Sabra Lane told Senator Jacqui Lambie Abbott said: 
On the Government handling in the Senate, the Prime Minister told a meeting of the joint party room today that the Senate crossbench were “ferals”. How do you respond, how do you respond to that? Do you feel like ferals?
An adjective becomes a noun, with a nastier connotation. The object in changed from the Senate generally to eight cross-benchers personally. Your ABC at work. 
But see what happens when another ABC presenter, falling for the spin, then plays a grab of Abbott which actually contradicts her assumption, to her great confusion.
Reader Relevance Please explains:
From the Drum on ABC. Host Julia Baird (yes Mike’s sister) trying to further beat up the false allegations Sabra Laine made [the night before] on the 7.30 report that Tony Abbott called the crossbenchers ferals. Listen from the 7:25min mark. 
Baird began with claiming the PM called the crossbenchers feral. They then go to a screen grab where the PM says he has a constructive relationship with the crossbench but Labor and the Greens are absolutely feral. The look on Baird’s face was priceless when they went back to her. It was clear she was also taken in by Sabra’s spin. She should have known better than to trust the ABC on anything to do with the PM.
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Islamists kill 17 tourists in Tunisia

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (8:54am)

 How nihilistic is this Islamist barbarismthat tourists are murdered as they admire Islamic civilisation?
NINETEEN people have been killed after a shooting attack at a Tunisian museum with two gunmen taking hostages before they were shot dead. 
Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid said that 21 people had died, including the two gunmen. The seventeen tourists who died were from Italy, Poland, Germany and Spain. They died alongside a Tunisian security officer and a Tunisian cleaning woman… Mohamed Ali Aroui, an Interior Ministry spokesman who detailed the deaths at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, called the attackers Islamists in remarks on national radio.
UPDATE
An Australian is believed to be among the dead.
Julian Burnside might care to revise his opinion. 
===

Why does the ABC not declare Tony Jones’ earnings from Big Warming?

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (7:35am)

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ABC host Tony Jones is a warmist who has earned considerable money by moderating and MC-ing conferences of the global warming industry.
He was MC at the 2012 CarbonExpo for “emissions intensive business and low-carbon economy product & service providers”.  He was also a moderator at the 2008, 2009,  2010 and  2011 CarbonExpo conferences, too, as well as for ABC Carbon, a climate change consultancy.
Surely that commercial interest and that bias should have been disclosed when Jones last night had a very chummy interview with fellow warmist Geoff Cousins last night about the “polluters” both claim are heating the world dangerously.
Note the spin - and the omissions - in their too-friendly chat. Some highlights:

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Tonight the Australian Conservation Foundation, under its new president, the former ad man Geoff Cousins, is launching back into the climate change debate. 
The vehicle for doing it is a report on the top 10 greenhouse gas polluters in the country.
“Polluters”? That is a very loaded and emotive word. “Emitters” is correct. We do not yet know whether their emissions of carbon dioxide - an invisible gas critical for plant growth - is truly damaging.
In this case, the list includes some analysis comparing what these companies say about climate change with what they actually do. It makes for rather interesting reading. So do their statements on climate policy and their political donations.
If the influence of money on the global warming debate is an issue, shouldn’t Jones declare what he earns from the climate change industry?

Australia’s top polluter, top of the pops in a chart you don’t want to be on, is Energy Australia, with 20.8 million tonnes of Co2 equivalent emitted.
Another loaded comment. Energy Australia is actually on a chart of companies supplying cheap power which help lifts the world from poverty.
Number three on the list is AGL Energy, an Australian company. Most of its emissions come from dirty brown and black coal-fired power stations.
“Dirty”? That strikes me as a very deceptive term. It invites viewers to imagine dirty, sooty gasses belching from the power stations, when in fact they don’t - what is emitted is basically steam and invisible carbon dioxide.
So, as all top ten lists do, the top ten polluters will create debate and maybe even water cooler discussion. Maybe you’ll come up with your own fantasy polluters team. Or maybe like businessman-turned-greenie Geoff Cousins, you’ll use it to fuel righteous outrage.
“Righteous outrage”? More bias. The correct term is “self-righteous”.
Thanks for being here. 
GEOFF COUSINS, ACF PRESIDENT: A pleasure.
Of course it is.
Then one soft question after another:

TONY JONES: Now, did you sit around and think, “Top 10 top big polluters; that’ll focus people’s minds”? 
TONY JONES: Well do you want consumers to get onto this list and start reacting against the companies? I mean, what’s your purpose in doing it?
TONY JONES: Now [Hazelwood is] owned and run by a French company, but as we mentioned, the biggest polluter on your list, the number one, is the Chinese-owned Energy Australia. They’re the number one polluter, the main culprit, if you like. But as we’ve learnt, AGL are about to become number one because they bought the second biggest polluter, Macquarie Generation. And I guess what I’m asking here is: these are hard-headed businessmen; they’re making big decisions with big money in investing in these coal-fired power stations.

TONY JONES: Well, I mean, the rationale too - because you can look at it in their statement, some of which you’ve put into the report. I mean, they understand very clearly that the economic rationale for doing this is all based on there being no carbon tax. So they were clearly predicting that would happen.
TONY JONES: Well, it seems that it ran towards the certainty of the carbon tax disappearing. But you argue in the report what’s more concerning than even the latest pollution data, even the top 10, is “the efforts of these companies to” - to quote you - “the efforts of these companies to halt or slow Australian policy on energy and climate change.” What is the evidence of that?
TONY JONES: Now the data on political donations as a way of exerting influence, if you like, in your report is inconclusive, it seems to me… Most of the countries make donations to both sides of politics.
TONY JONES: Well the RETT in particular, I mean, the main industry body for these energy producers says the RETT should be abolished, that it’s uncompetitive, that it’s against the market… I mean, you’re a former businessman. It is in a sense distorting the market, isn’t it?
TONY JONES: Well I’ll just make this final point because you also in the report make the point, or you make the point personally that the transition ought to be to clean energy, to solar energy, to wind energy, but of course, the middle path, the path that was going to be followed but wasn’t followed, was to transition to gas-fired power. Now that never happened and it’s still puzzling as to why not. Was this purely an economic decision? Coal is cheaper. If there’s no carbon price, it’s even cheaper. 
TONY JONES: And we have to remind ourselves that you used to advise John Howard, while we’re sitting here. 
Cousins is not picked up on a single exaggeration or misleading statement. For instance:
GEOFF COUSINS: [John Howard} was the first Prime Minister to recommend an emissions trading scheme.
Not mentioned: Howard does not recommend it now.
For instance:
But of course, if you’ve got a Prime Minister who’s running around the world saying, “Coal is good for humanity,” when every other leader of a developed country is saying the opposite…
In fact, Abbott is right and not every leader is saying the opposite. Moreover, whatever the anti-coal rhetoric, coal use is at record levels because it is such a cheap way of creating electricity, so important in fighting poverty.
...at the last election, both the major parties, Labor and the Coalition, went to the electorate saying, “We will keep the Renewable Energy Target,” and now it’s - you know, people are trying to disassemble it and change it. 
Cousins is wrong to suggest the Liberals are breaking a promise not to change the RET.

And, of course, no mention at all of the elephant in the room - the failure of the world’s atmosphere to warm for some 17 years, contrary to the warmists’ predictions.
How can the ABC, which is by law meant to provide a balanced debate, keep pumping out this kind of propaganda, unchallenged?
And why no declaration of Jones’ vested interests? 
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Why have taxpayers had to fund an anti-fracking film?

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (7:19am)

 The movie is vehemently anti the coal-seam gas industry:
Frackman tells the story of accidental activist Dayne Pratzky and his struggle against international gas companies. Australia will soon become the world’s biggest gas exporter as more than 30,000 ‘fracked’ wells are sunk in the state of Queensland where Dayne lives. He and his neighbours have unwittingly become the centre of a massive industrial landscape and they have no legal right to stop mining on their land. Dayne embarks on a journey that transforms him from conservative pig-shooter to sophisticated global activist as the Frackman.  
This is in fact taxpayer-funded activism against an industry that the Chief Scientist of NSW says can be done safely if done properly - as other reputable studies agree:

TAXPAYER-funded Screen Queensland and Screen Australia have spent more than $400,000 to fund a documentary on one of Queensland’s most radical of anti-coal seam gas activists. 
Although the State Government is a keen supporter of the industry its film funding agency, Screen Queensland, poured $220,000 into Frackman, The Movie, based on former Tara resident Dayne Pratzky.

The gas industry has described the film, which won’t be released until next month, as propaganda designed to scare people rather than inform them but Mr Pratzky thinks it’s hilarious that Screen Queensland has put so much money into the film. The film includes footage Mr Pratzky admits he gained illegally by trespassing on privately owned land and has been a longtime thorn in the side of the gas companies because of his protest antics where he often dressed up as Frackman. 
Joe Aston wonders how the funding was green-lighted:
Frackman, which chronicles the social and environmental ruination wreaked by coal seam gas fracking, and was significantly underwritten by public money… 
ScreenWest tipped $156,000 into the doco’s budget… Screen Queensland and Screen Australia also provided grants of $200,000 each…
Freedom of Information request[ed] ... internal documents ... shed light on the judging process at Screen Australia.
Remarkably, in August 2013 two of the three “assessors”, Mary-Ellen Mullane and Sam Griffin, did not recommend funding the documentary, preferring instead to “shortlist” it. The third assessor, who’s name has mysteriously been redacted by Screen Australia, did recommend funding it…
(S)ix of the 14 pages of the judging process were fully redacted. An appeal has been lodged to access the information.
Mullane had written earlier to one of the film’s producers, Simon Nasht, in May 2013, requesting an updated contract that “removes [former GetUp! national director] Simon Sheikh as a co-producer and strips out any editorial/creative control. GetUp!’s contribution can only be considered as an alternative distribution strategy, not a co-production partner."… Documents that will reveal ScreenWest’s and Screen Queensland’s methodology for arriving at funding Frackman are also the subject of live FOI requests. Watch this space.
But it’s just in time to influence the NSW election:
Frackman is now screening in politically selective theatres in regional NSW – less than four weeks before the state election. This week it is airing in Narrabri, Tamworth, Grafton and Armidale, before the world premiere on Saturday night in Byron Bay.
How is it that the Left is so expert at extracting public subsidies for its propaganda?
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
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It’s the Anything But Conservative broadcaster, and you can sure tell

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (6:17am)

The Left’s long march through the institutions has march right over the ABC, now home to paid activists:

THE Media Watch researcher who worked on a program lampooning a wind turbine study conducted by an acoustics expert was previously a paid publicist for a group co-founded by a Greens senator that focuses on climate change and has been described as an “extremist organisation”.

ABC researcher Flint Duxfield said the articles and advocacy work he performed for AidWatch — including one where he asserted humanity was “addicted” to fossil fuels — did not reflect his personal views but declined to comment on whether his background should have been disclosed in the Media Watch segment.
The information came to light after Quadrant Online revisited the reporting dust-up, in which the ABC program slammed the work of acoustic expert Steven Cooper on the effects of the ­Pacific Hydro wind turbines on local residents, and this newspaper’s coverage of it.
The program included ­material only from pro-turbine ­figures and ignored submissions from those who backed Mr ­Cooper’s work, including US acoustics expert Robert Rand, the principal of US-based Rand Acoustics.
Media Watch’s February 16 ­report championed the work of Sydney University public health professor Simon Chapman, who has referred to wind farm ­opponents as “wing nuts” and ­advocated for the industry.
Previous Duxfield efforts at Media Watch include emailing the Daily Telegraph a list of extraordinary questions demanding to know why it hadn’t covered anti-Abbott marches more thoroughly.
To sum up his CV:

Did the worldview of long time protest banner loving, fair trade advocate, social activist, Friends of the Earth published, global warming alarmist, fossil fuel objecting, climate change conference and workshop facilitating, Lee Rhiannon endorsed, ‘Make Poverty History’ supporting, Howard government criticising, Maurice Blackburn represented, Crikey intern, Wendy Bacon collaborating, New Matilda contributing, and Jenna Price UTS journalism school graduate influence current ABC Media Watch staffer Flint Duxfield in his Daily Telegraph #MarchinMarch protest coverage intervention?If you wrote a caricature of the modern ABC staffer’s CV you could not possibly top this reality. 
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Abbott haters are the Irish joke

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (5:27am)

How the Left hates

 WHAT a shameful beat-up by journalists of the Prime Minister’s St Patricks Day “gaffe”.
How deranged have the Tony Abbott haters become?
Sydney’s Lansdowne Club of Irish Australian businessmen had invited people to come “enjoy a Guinness or three” at its annual St Patrick’s Day lunch.
Abbott couldn’t make it, but sent a video in which he said this was “a great day for ... everyone who cares to come to a party”. He was sorry “I can’t be there to share a Guinness or two or maybe even three”.
See anything offensive there?
(Read full article here. Scroll down to end.) 
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The SBS affair: a war on marriage

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (5:10am)

The new morality

 TWO opposing commercials were booked this month on SBS, the broadcaster we pay $287 million a year to make us more civilised.
Guess which was banned for offending good taste?
The first commercial promotes the Ashley Madison website, a dating service for married people wanting affairs. It shows a woman with a zombie for a husband. He’s dead in bed, lying asleep on her bored body in his dressing gown.
He’s so repulsive that the wife is then shown holding a baseball bat in her hands, tempted to bash out his brains.
But help arrives! The wife sees an Ashley Madison website promoting adultery and — kazaam — she’s instantly transformed into a vamp in hot underwear, ready for sex with some stranger as her husband sleeps.
You may think this is the ad too off for a broadcaster using your money to make us better citizens — to “educate ... all Australians”, as its charter says.

Ah, but the second commercial is even worse. Or so the SBS has ruled.
(Read full article here.) 
===

The madness of the smoking sociologist

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (5:04am)

 This woman is licenced to teach university students? Or is sounding bat-crazy actually a qualification in sociology?
Here is some of the interview given by Karen Halnon, professor of sociology at Penn State Abington and author of Women’s Agency In Hysteria and Its Treatment, to explain  why she smoked on a plane:
 Can you comment on your arrest and on the videos of you on the plane that are circulating? 
I do have a comment. I know that I expressed an act of civil disobedience. But that act was necessary.
Why so?
I’m very knowledgable about that part of the world. I teach about U.S. imperialism in Latin America. And the U.S. has declared war against Venezuela. That means military aggression. They tried to take out Hugo with a coup, and then they took him out with cancer…
The problem is U.S. military global domination. And they want the oil. And they want the water. And so I found that this act was a necessary Thoreau-like act of civil disobedience. I had to speak out now. The situation is dire and urgent, and any sacrifice I make for my own self, if it saves lives — there have been far too many lives lost due to U.S. global military domination.
What happened once you landed in Miami?
The FBI and TSA tortured me. My voice generally doesn’t sound like this. I was put in a room with two fans in the ceiling, it was freezing cold for hours and hours and hours… But they ignored me, and I defecated on the floor. And they made me pick it up and laughed at me.
That’s awful. But what of the cigarette?... Listen, the point is, I am a sociologist, and I live in an intellectual world. A sociologist always thinks in terms of symbols. And every revolutionary I know smokes. It was identifying with the revolutionary cause. And then, beyond that, it is a symbol that the United States is a smoking gun. The action was necessary. They are going to kill many more people. 
(Via Tim Blair.) 
===

Andrews Government sends message: don’t invest in Victoria

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (5:04am)

Tearing up contracts, breaking promises, turning Australia into an investment pariah - just another Labor government at work:

THE Andrews Government has begun drafting legislation that could see it avoid paying compensation for scrapping the East West link… 
Talks over the East West Link have reached a stalemate, with both sides arguing over hundreds of millions of dollars in potential compensation after the government walked away from the $6.8 billion project…
Premier Daniel Andrews has repeatedly dismissed the plea from global investors and the Prime Minister Tony Abbott to avoid introducing laws to avoid a payout.
Last week Mr Abbott wrote to Mr Andrews saying legislation could “damage investor confidence and jeopardise further private sector investment"…
In January it was revealed the consortium had pushed for up to $1.2 billion in compensation after the Labor Government cancelled the 6.6km road.
According to the latest reports the bankrollers were willing to walk away from the cancelled project in return for a payment of between $525 million and $700 million. Meanwhile the Andrews Government has defied upper house orders to release the contract for the East West Link, which it promised to reveal after the election.
===

The West attacked: killers to the right, ferals to the left

Andrew Bolt March 19 2015 (5:02am)

 Islamists on the Right, anti-capitalists on the Left. It’s sometimes hard to tell them apart in their choice of enemy and love of destruction and violence:

Dozens of people have been hurt and some 350 people arrested as anti-austerity demonstrators clashed with police in the German city of Frankfurt. 
Police cars were set alight and stones were thrown in a protest against the opening of a new base for the European Central Bank (ECB)… 
Tyres and rubbish bins were set alight and police responded with water cannon as firefighters complained they were unable to get to the fires to put them out. One fire engine appeared to have had its windscreen broken. Police said as many as 80 of their officers had been affected by pepper spray or an acidic liquid. Eight suffered injuries from stone-throwing protesters.
=== Posts from last year ===

Angry lefties mad as a March marcher

Miranda Devine – Tuesday, March 18, 2014 (10:09pm)

IT makes sense that those who have made a career out of refugee activism, like barrister Julian Burnside, would applaud the March in March protest over the weekend.

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'Angry lefties mad as a March marcher'
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BUFFET BAN

Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 19, 2014 (3:25pm)

It’s a fatwa against fatsos: 
A Saudi cleric named Saleh al-Fawzan has issued a fatwa against all-you-can-eat buffets in Saudi Arabia.
Fawzan said the value and quantity of the food sold should be pre-determined before hand.
“Whoever enters the buffet and eats for 10 or 50 riyals without deciding the quantity they will eat is violating Sharia (Islamic) law,” Fawzan was quoted on al-Atheer channel.
The fatwa attempts to add plate piling eateries to the long list of things outlawed by religious edicts. It has been the subject of condemnation and debate on social media channels. 
(Via Brat)
===

CITY OF LEOS

Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 19, 2014 (3:19pm)

Making money in Canberra is as easy as falling off a bike. In other Canberra news, Liberal senator Arthur Sinodinos has stood down as assistant treasurer while corruption investigations into his role with Australian Water Holdings continue.
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Labor settles for second-rate, as long as it’s the ABC

Andrew Bolt March 19 2014 (2:35pm)

Says so much about Labor especially, given that David Speers and Kieran Gilbert, while excellent Sky News hosts and fair, do lean Left:
Even by Parliament House’s standards it seemed a particularly petty squabble: a dispute between Coalition and Labor politicians over which television channel to watch in the parliamentary gym. 
The brouhaha erupted earlier this month when Tasmanian Liberal MP Andrew Nikolic and Immigration Minister Scott Morrison were watching Sky News while exercising. This sparked an intervention from Queensland Labor Senator Claire Moore who asked for the channel to be changed to the ABC…
To resolve the dispute, Senator Moore asked for the Department of Parliamentary Services, which runs the gym, to poll politicians on whether the TV should be tuned to Sky or the ABC during sitting weeks.
Advertisement
The debate that followed split largely along party lines with none other than Prime Minister Tony Abbott weighing in with a preference.
“When I go to the gym I normally ask those who are on the treadmills or on the exercise bikes if they would mind if I turn it onto Sky,” Mr Abbott, a well-known exercise junkie, told 2GB. ”Labor people tend to prefer the ABC and Coalition supporters tend to prefer Sky.”
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Sinodinos steps down

Andrew Bolt March 19 2014 (2:06pm)

Arthur Sinodinos has stepped aside as Assistant Treasurer while he answers questions at the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
I do not believe there was any case against him that required him stepping down. I do not even know what the allegation against him is. All ICAC has said is that he was chairman of a company which put him in line for a $20 million payday if he clinched a deal with Sydney Water. What we’re also told is that the corrupt Eddie Obeid was a secret shareholder - a fact that Sinodinos has long said was unknown to him. No one has yet has offered any evidence to suggest Sinodinos is lying and ICAC has not suggested he has, either.
It is right for ICAC to question Sinodinos closely, and it’s right for Labor to put the whole matter under the microscope.
But the only reason Sinodinos has stepped down is that Labor was making him a political target, and the Government was hurting as a consequence.
This, so far, is just politics.  
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Russia takes Crimea, Obama humiliated

Andrew Bolt March 19 2014 (12:45pm)

And so the borders are redrawn in a world in which the US is weak:
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Crimean leaders have signed a treaty to make the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol part of the Russian Federation. During his address in parliament the Russian leader stressed that Crimea has always been Russia’s integral part and everything in Crimea has always been related to the Russian history.
Charles Krauthammer on the humiliation of Barack Obama:


He is being ridiculed, by Russians especially, because the statement and the policy are ridiculous. He doesn’t have a lot of cards, but he has some cards. And if he thinks that sanctioning seven Russians of a population of about 150 million is a sanction, he’s living in a different world.
The one thing that we could do is to respond to the Ukrainian request when the president was here last week. They asked the Pentagon for weapons and we said no because somehow to arm the victim of aggression is a provocation. So we said no, we’re going to offer them MREs, offer them rations. Well, that’s going to hold off Russian tanks, I’m sure. And this response of, you know, we are now going to calibrate as if Putin—they’re going to sanction 11 Russians now, so I’ll have to stop where I am is really preposterous. Again, if you are going to do something, do it, otherwise, say nothing. But this really is a humiliating response by a president who can’t even get the Europeans to join him in effective sanctions, which we could do.
===

Hear the march of the green stormtroopers

Andrew Bolt March 19 2014 (12:34pm)

Global warming - propaganda
Professor Don Aitkin, former vice chancellor of the University of Canberra:
So the orthodox [warmists] go on waiting impatiently for the warming to return, and becoming even louder and more aggressive in their contempt for those of us who ask for good argument and good data and point out what seem to be problems in the orthodoxy… So to the first of [two recent] articles, which is by Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director of the ANU’s National Centre for Public Awareness of Science. What do you think of this? 
The fact is that the time for fact-based arguments is over. We all know what the overwhelmingly vast majority of climate science is telling us. I’m not going to regurgitate the details here, in part because the facts are available everywhere, but more importantly, because this tactic is a core reason why climate messages often don’t resonate or penetrate. If, like me, you’re convinced that human activity is having a hugely damaging effect on the global climate, then your only responsible option is to prioritise action.
I don’t think that what he proposes is at all a ‘responsible option’. The most responsible surely would be to look hard at what you think are the facts. Like Bernie Fraser, however, of whom he speaks well in this essay, Mr Lamberts knows what ‘the vast majority of climate science’ is telling him, though he won’t tell his readers.. We don’t need any more facts, he says, we need action. Nor is it clear what sort of action he has in mind, other than noisy behaviour.  But then we get this: What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means.
That really worries me, and it should worry anyone. That is not how democracies should behave, and indeed it is what people object to about people who think they know The Truth: they are always telling the rest of us what to do. Mr Lamberts says that deniers should just be disregarded.  Ignore them, step around them, or walk over them. I object to this sort of talk, especially from an academic at the ANU, from which I have my PhD. It is stormtrooper stuff, and has no place either in universities or in a website funded by universities.
The second essay is by Lawrence Torcello, an American academic who teaches philosophy in the USA. It ... is certainly another good illustration of the aggressive style which you can find from the ‘believers’. Here is a sample: 
We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus… What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.
Nowhere in this is any attempt to define anything; apparently it’s not needed by philosophers like Mr Torcello, though I would have thought ‘climate denial’ at least needs some kind of explanation if funding it is to be regarded as criminal behaviour. As I’ve said a few times, I am simply unaware of any funding that flows to me or to the others with whom I discuss AGW…
No matter. Any innocent reading this will come away with the view that ‘climate deniers’, whoever they are, should be jailed. It’s different stormtrooper talk, and just as objectionable. 
(Thanks to reader Neville.) 

===

No to racism, yes to free speech. Abbott stands firm

Andrew Bolt March 19 2014 (9:11am)

Free speech

The Prime Minister is as firm in his defence of free speech as he is adamant in his opposition to racism - and he is also a man of his word:
TONY Abbott has resisted Coalition rebels and defied criticism from ethnic communities over looming changes to racial discrimination laws by insisting the reforms will “reconcile” support for freedom of speech and the rejection of racism... 
Mr Abbott tackled the Coalition concerns in a partyroom meeting that heard calls to maintain the section 18C provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act, which make it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person on the basis of their race… The robust discussions followed a report in The Australian yesterday suggesting Attorney-General George Brandis was considering a proposal to remove the words “offend”, “insult” and “humiliate” from 18C but keep “intimidate”, and amend the “good faith” provision in section 18D, a key part of the law that led to the finding against Bolt… Senator Brandis said late yesterday that the government was committed to “rebalancing” the human rights debate in Australia to better protect freedom of speech
I’m told this was cheered in the party room:
Queensland backbencher George Christensen and Sydney MP Alex Hawke spoke in support of his stand yesterday. “Freedom of speech is a God-given right - if we don’t allow the things we don’t want to hear, we don’t really believe in free speech at all,” sources claimed Mr Christensen said.
No to racism, yes to the free speech that allows us to oppose it.
UPDATE

The Australian makes the case for more freedom to discuss what needs discussing on the politics of “race”:
In modern Australia, we should be able to talk about racial issues without being branded racist... 
Unfortunately, the timbre of debate over racial issues in Australia was skewed by “guilt politics’’ arising from the 1997 Bringing Them Home report that erroneously referred to the treatment of the Stolen Generations as “genocidal’’ and “a crime against humanity’’. Such hyperbole engendered irrational guilt and anger among many people, regardless of the varied circumstances under which Aboriginal children were removed from their families and local communities from 1910 to 1970. At the time the report was released, about 90,000 Aborigines in outback and northern Australia out of a total indigenous population of 350,000 were struggling with woefully low life expectancies and Third World living conditions. The urban-based Aboriginal lobby, however, egged on by the green-Left, focused almost exclusively on the grievances of the Stolen Generations and their 10,000 descendants, including those in comfortable circumstances in cities. These numbered only a tiny fraction of those suffering acute health, housing and other problems in remote areas. The spat between Professor Langton and Bolt is grounded in complex issues. His original comments about light-skinned Aborigines seeking advantage reflect the views of many Aborigines themselves. For the benefit of our most disadvantaged citizens, Australia needs a mature, sophisticated debate on the best policies to “close the gap’’. The chances of such debate were stymied, however, when Bolt was found guilty in 2011 of racial vilification under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The complainants about his commentary, including Ms Behrendt, the Federal Court found, were likely to have been “offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated’’. Australia needs to shake off such shackles on free speech and move beyond “guilt politics’’ and the habit of labelling those who express opposing views on indigenous issues with the “racist’’ tag. We should be able to deal in fact on this issue, rather than feelings based on identity politics.
UPDATE
Richard Ackland, the former Media Watch host and Fairfax columnist, is a fool, recklessly ill-informed or simply deceitful. The whole premise of his article is false. No, I never threatened defamation action against the ABC, and in fact repeatedly stated I prided myself on not suing. No, Langton’s apologies were not, when first issued on radio, simply for my hurt feelings but for falsely accusing me of racism and falsely accusing me of believing in a “master race”.  No, I didn’t ask the ABC to apologise for offending, humiliating or otherwise hurting my feelings, but for broadcasting false claims which host Tony Jones falsely termed “facts” - false claims about me heaping “foul abuse” and “racist abuse” on a woman, arguing she had no right to call herself Aboriginal and driving her from “public life”.  Ackland also omits a critical point: that when challenged on radio, Langton repeatedly refused to defend those “facts” because, as I’d proved, they were false.

Is Ackland seriously suggesting I had no right to ask the ABC to apologise for spreading deeply offensive, damaging and false claims about me?
And here is the point. I’ve written all this already. Ackland only had to read  my request to the ABC for an apology to establish the basic facts. Instead, he chose to wilfully misstate the case.
UPDATE
We should not have laws to stop us discussing whether we should really insist on trivial distinctions of “race”, or should formally divide the country on the basis of the “race” of one or more of our great-grandparents.
The only restrictions on our free speech should be on racist abuse and actions of the kind to make people fear for their safety. I mean racism like this, recently filmed in Perth:

(Thanks to many readers.) 
===

Excuse me, but who is the true shock jock here?

Andrew Bolt March 19 2014 (8:46am)

Weird. A union leader vilifies as woman as a “filthy animal” and talks of a boss needing a bullet “somewhere in the back of the head”. Yet I’m the “shock jock” for objecting:
UNION leader Gary Kennedy has apologised for his verbal attack on Gina Rinehart and Alan Joyce during Newcastle’s March In March rally, after metropolitan shock jocks Andrew Bolt and Ray Hadley seized on his abusive comments on Tuesday.
This from a Fairfax journalist who’s strongest condemnation of Kennedy’s vile comments was this:
Given recent debates over the abusive language aimed at former prime minister Julia Gillard it wasperhaps surprising that Kennedy used such descriptions in a public forum, but I believe it would be a shame if they were taken as symbolising an event that was emphasised by its organisers as a ‘‘peaceful’’ protest.
That kind of journalism is what is truly shocking - a failure to be shocked by depravity. 
===

Not a soldier for Australia but for Islam

Andrew Bolt March 19 2014 (8:25am)

For an army which has deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, a worrying example of conflicting loyalities:
A WESTERN Sydney man who died fighting with rebels in Syria has been revealed to be an Australian soldier who went absent without leave more than three years ago. 
Caner Temel, 22, is believed to have become radicalised and died fighting with jihadists in January… The rogue combat engineer is the first soldier from a western country to have been killed in the Syrian civil war.
He died while fighting for the extremist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant against more moderate rebels…
Mr Temel’s death came days after the killing of Sydney man Yusuf Ali and his wife Amira near Aleppo. It was reported they were killed during fighting between rebel factions. Last September, a Melbourne man became the first Australian to die as a suicide bomber in Syria after blowing himself up at a checkpoint.
The Patriot (2000)
- Complete Movie -

http://youtu.be/z9auROPt3Pg

The Patriot is an American historical war film directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Robert Rodat, and starring Mel Gibson, Chris Cooper, and Heath Ledger. It was produced by the Mutual Film Company and Centropolis Entertainment and was distributed by Columbia Pictures. The film mainly takes place in rural York County, South Carolina and depicts the story of an American swept into the American Revolutionary War when his family is threatened. The protagonist, Benjamin Martin, is a composite figure based on four real American Revolutionary War heroes: Joseph Plumb Martin, Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan and Thomas Sumter.
===
CARR SLIPS THE KNIFE IN GILLARD... but Windsor throws her a lifeline .. Larry Pickering

Bob Carr claims the report is "inaccurate". If it is then one news group and three Labor MPs are lying. 

“We have your back Prime Minister”, yelled Paul Howes to Julia Gillard at the recent AWU National Conference. It was a prescient yet vacuous assurance in an alcohol fuelled environment.

What Howes meant was that the AWU was fully aware knives had been unsheathed for some time and Gillard, the AWU's creation, was the target.

Gillard was certainly the creation of the AWU but only through the acquiescence of Bob Carr’s NSW Right.

Without Carr, Gillard ceases to exist. Thus his appointment.

Time is now of the essence as Gillard’s supporters succumb to the inevitable.

Bob Carr, a major player in the corrupt NSW Right and in tandem with Graham Richardson, is a significant defection as it was he who assisted Gillard to topple Kevin Rudd.

It was he, as NSW Premier, who buckled under pressure from Richardson and Ludwig and appointed the dangerous Ian Cambridge to the NSW Industrial Relations Commission.

The “Cambridge Affidavit” is scathing of Gillard and her lover Bruce Wilson.

Cambridge, an AWU General Secretary, at the time was pressing hard for a Royal Commission which would have destroyed Gillard.

Cambridge had said, “I am not prepared to turn a blind eye to these matters...” Later, as PM, Gillard appointed him to the Bench of Fair Work Australia.

Once on the Bench he said, “I don’t retract what I said … but now I am a member of a quasi-judicial tribunal. As a member of (Fair Work Australia) it is not appropriate for me to make public statements.”

But apparently Gillard’s appointment of Carr to the Senate vacancy and the plum Foreign Ministry was insufficient to guarantee his loyalty.

With those who will now fall in behind Carr, Gillard will have insufficient numbers in Caucus to survive a ballot but that does not mean Rudd has sufficient numbers to take her place.

Gillard’s fall from dubious grace has begun and without a parachute in sight.

Past assurances of loyalty mean nothing as ALP Members cling furiously to their seats in a last ditch clutch at survival.

Only Tony Windsor came to Gillard’s aid.

Last night on the ABC’s Lateline he threw a lifeline to his beloved Julia and the interviewer completely missed the significance of what he said.

With his normal bumbling delivery he said (and I paraphrase): “The ALP needs to get its act together. If it doesn’t they might find there’s an election sooner than they think. There are documents you know...”. Incredibly the interviewer then cut him off.

What Windsor was actually saying is this (and I paraphrase): Sack my Julia if you want but remember it is she who I have “The Agreement” (documents) with, not the Labor Party. If she goes so do I... and so too does the Government.

You see Windsor is aware of Carr’s defection and an imminent challenge. He was issuing a thinly veiled threat, an ultimatum... "Do not sack Gillard or I will take you all down with her."

He wasn’t speaking for Oakeshott but he may as well have been because Oakeshott too has finally had enough.

How could the interviewer have missed such a defining moment? But she did.

A challenge to Gillard could not have happened without NSW factional agreement.

Carr will now marshal those factional forces against Gillard and a challenge is certain unless... well, unless he considers the unheeded threat offered by Windsor last night.

Who can replace Gillard? I don't know but it makes sense that the NSW Right faction will need to placate the Ludwig/Howes faction and that means Shorten.

But will Bill Shorten accept the poison chalice?

Regardless, Gillard will live to rue the day she lured into the Senate that treacherous man who keeps his used chewing gum in his coat pocket.

But she who lives by the sword....
===

Denying children a new and loving family

Andrew BoltMARCH192013(7:52am)

Jeremy Sammut says we’ve got to get over this sentimentalising over the evils of adoption when there are so many children in desperate need of a stable family: 
Taking legal action to permanently remove children and provide safe and stable homes by adoption into suitable families is taboo (despite being a proven and effective child welfare strategy) because this is considered akin to forced adoption policies of previous eras.

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March 19: Saint Joseph's Day (Western Christianity); Father's Day in various countries
Sydney Harbour Bridge
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“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” - Romans 15:13
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

March 18: Morning

"Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." -Galatians 3:26

The fatherhood of God is common to all his children. Ah! Little-faith, you have often said, "Oh that I had the courage of Great-heart, that I could wield his sword and be as valiant as he! But, alas, I stumble at every straw, and a shadow makes me afraid." List thee, Little-faith. Great-heart is God's child, and you are God's child too; and Great-heart is not one whit more God's child than you are. Peter and Paul, the highly-favoured apostles, were of the family of the Most High; and so are you also; the weak Christian is as much a child of God as the strong one.

 "This cov'nant stands secure,
Though earth's old pillars bow;
The strong, the feeble, and the weak,
Are one in Jesus now."

 All the names are in the same family register. One may have more grace than another, but God our heavenly Father has the same tender heart towards all. One may do more mighty works, and may bring more glory to his Father, but he whose name is the least in the kingdom of heaven is as much the child of God as he who stands among the King's mighty men. Let this cheer and comfort us, when we draw near to God and say, "Our Father."

 Yet, while we are comforted by knowing this, let us not rest contented with weak faith, but ask, like the Apostles, to have it increased. However feeble our faith may be, if it be real faith in Christ, we shall reach heaven at last, but we shall not honour our Master much on our pilgrimage, neither shall we abound in joy and peace. If then you would live to Christ's glory, and be happy in his service, seek to be filled with the spirit of adoption more and more completely, till perfect love shall cast out fear.
Evening
"As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you." - John 15:9
As the Father loves the Son, in the same manner Jesus loves his people. What is that divine method? He loved him without beginning, and thus Jesus loves his members. "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." You can trace the beginning of human affection; you can easily find the beginning of your love to Christ, but his love to us is a stream whose source is hidden in eternity. God the Father loves Jesus without any change. Christian, take this for your comfort, that there is no change in Jesus Christ's love to those who rest in him. Yesterday you were on Tabor's top, and you said, "He loves me:" today you are in the valley of humiliation, but he loves you still the same. On the hill Mizar, and among the Hermons, you heard his voice, which spake so sweetly with the turtle-notes of love; and now on the sea, or even in the sea, when all his waves and billows go over you, his heart is faithful to his ancient choice. The Father loves the Son without any end, and thus does the Son love his people. Saint, thou needest not fear the loosing of the silver cord, for his love for thee will never cease. Rest confident that even down to the grave Christ will go with you, and that up again from it he will be your guide to the celestial hills. Moreover, the Father loves the Son without any measure, and the same immeasurable love the Son bestows upon his chosen ones. The whole heart of Christ is dedicated to his people. He "loved us and gave himself for us." His is a love which passeth knowledge. Ah! we have indeed an immutable Saviour, a precious Saviour, one who loves without measure, without change, without beginning, and without end, even as the Father loves him! There is much food here for those who know how to digest it. May the Holy Ghost lead us into its marrow and fatness!
===

Dan 

[Dăn] - he that judges.

The fifth son of Jacob, and first of Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid. Dan was the full brother of Naphtali and founder of a tribal family (Gen. 30:6;2 Sam. 24:15).
The Man Whose Name is Blotted Out
With our finite minds there is a mystery about Dan we cannot solve. The history of the tribe of Dan is darker than the history of any other of the twelve tribes of Israel. When we come to the sealing of the twelve tribes (Rev. 7), Dan's name is left out. The omission is absolute - the tribe is cut off from its brethren and its name blotted out. Yet we cannot be absolutely certain that the tribe of Dan is finally cut off, for in Ezekiel's glowing prophecy there is a portion for Dan (Ezek. 48:1).
The prophecy of Jacob concerning Dan carries a twofold character - "Dan shall judge his people as one of the sceptres of Israel." Tribe also means sceptre (Gen. 49:10). No man among the Judges did so much for Israel single-handed as Samson the great Danite.
A further thought is associated with Jacob's prophecy of Dan. "I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord." This is the first mention of salvation in Scripture. But Dan's history is adverse to the salvation predicted of him. His birth arose out of jealousy and inordinate desire. Dan became the Ishmael of Jacob's family. Persistent idolatry clung to the Danites from first to last. It was because Dan was likened unto a serpent that some of the early fathers predicted that Antichrist would come from him. "They are not all Israel which are of Israel." As there was one among the Twelve Apostles, so there was one among the Twelve Tribes who had not the seal of God. This we do know, Dan's glory as one of the sceptres of Israel with courage as a lion's whelp, is of no avail without the seal of God upon his forehead.
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Today's reading: Deuteronomy 32-34, Mark 15:26-47 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Deuteronomy 32-34

1 Listen, you heavens, and I will speak;
hear, you earth, the words of my mouth.
2 Let my teaching fall like rain
and my words descend like dew,
like showers on new grass,
like abundant rain on tender plants.
3 I will proclaim the name of the LORD.
Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
upright and just is he....

Today's New Testament reading: Mark 15:26-47

26 The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS.
27 They crucified two rebels with him, one on his right and one on his left. 29 Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, "So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, 30 come down from the cross and save yourself!" 31 In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. "He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! 32 Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe." Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him....

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Today's Lent reading: Matthew 21-22 (NIV)

View today's Lent reading on Bible Gateway
Jesus Comes to Jerusalem as King
1 As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, "Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away."
4 This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:
5 "Say to Daughter Zion,
'See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.'"

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Today's Prayer

Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
For all the benefits thou hast won for me,
For all the pains and insults you have borne for me.

O most merciful Redeemer, Friend, and Brother,
May I know thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
And follow thee more nearly:
For ever and ever.

-- Richard of Chichester

Today's Scripture Reading: 1 Peter 3:18-22

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits--to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also--not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God's right hand--with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.

Today's Quote

Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
Christ in the fort,
Christ in the chariot seat,
Christ on the deck,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
-- from the prayer of St. Patrick

Something to Think About

When people hear your words or witness your actions, do they see a reflection of Jesus Christ? If somebody were to eavesdrop on your everyday interactions at work, school, and home, would they want to know more about the Savior you serve?

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