Monday, August 08, 2016

Mon Aug 8th Todays News

The news hasn't blown up as it should. World Vision has been accused of giving money to terrorists. And the CEO has welcomed a trial, saying he does not know how it was done. Aid of the type World Vision are engaged with are hard assets like farms, not liquid funds like cash or checks. However Halabi, the employee who was identified as responsible for the transfers, is alleged to have been radicalised in 2004 and tasked with penetrating an aid organisation to get money. And it is not hard to embezzle solid assets like farms, too. Particularly if there is no oversight as Costello alleges. There must be no monitoring of the performance of donated or developed assets. It is in line with the scandal of falsifying progress of sponsored children. It is good to give, but not to terrorists. Give money only to trusted recipients. Not World Vision. 

 For some, at the moment, the Sex Party has more credibility.  
=== from 2015 ===
The technical deficiencies the Australian Cricket Team have demonstrated in England in the Ashes series are set to claim the Australian Cricket Captain Michael Clarke. Clarke has not shown the confidence and stroke play he possessed prior to his back injury. But that is not the reason for the team's failure. Neither is it the case the death of Phil Hughes, or Richie Benaud is the reason for failure. England have played with skill and aggression, but they are supposed to. The reason why the Australian bats have failed on tour is because the Australian coaches have not adequately prepared them. And that comes down to players like Watson not doing their homework. Even so, Australia have been competitive at times. Players need and deserve more matches prior to the first test to acclimatise. Hopefully Smith's future will see greater competence by authorities and less union style sabotage from cancerous lead players.

All Blacks outplayed Wallabies in Rugby Union at ANZ Stadium. But at the forty third minute, Wallabies were outscoring them 10 - 6. And at the end, Wallabies outscored NZ 27 - 19. You don't have to be a better team to win. 
From 2014
It was a reasonable statement to make by someone who was not a researcher when Minister Abetz linked research showing an increase of breast cancer among abortion women. The resultant hysteria was predictable too, so that a reasonable person might believe that Abetz was denying abortion as a cure for breast cancer. It is apparent that the hysterical anti conservative lobby can inflate anything. Russia has reacted badly to sanctions put in place demanding that Russia stop helping ethnic Russians fighting for their lives in Ukraine. Under what circumstances might they have acted well? A Liberal Party MP, Cornwell, has stood down after admitting he accepted bribe money. The role of Tripodi does not seem to be examined, but it impinges on how a cover up has perpetuated of the death of schoolboy Hamidur Rahman and a bungled pedophile investigation. Sadly, the issue is with the federal Attorney General Brandis. Obama is bombing civilians in Iraq because he doesn't want to start another war. 

On this day in history, in 1220 Sweden was defeated by Estonian tribes at the battle of Lihula. In 1503, King James IV of Scotland married Margaret Tudor, sister to Henry VII of England. A hundred years later James VI would be King of England and Scotland. In 1576, The cornerstone for Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory was laid on Ven, Denmark. In 1647, Irish forces were crushed by English parliamentary forces. This was to precede Cromwell's 1649 take over of Ireland. In 1709, Bartolomeu de Gusmão demonstrated the lifting power of hot air in an audience before the King of Portugal in Lisbon. It is possible Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão is related. In 1786, modern mountain climbers climbed Mont Blanc. In 1793 an insurrection li Lyon against the French Revolution took place. It was put down in bloody terms. In 1863, following Gettysburg, General Lee tendered his resignation to Confederate President Davis, who refused it. In 1876, Edison patented the Mimeograph, which was still in use in NSW schools in the 1980s. In 1885 more than one and a half million people attended the funeral of U.S. Grant in NYC. In 1908, Wilbur Wright made his first public flight at Le Mans. In 1918, the Battle of Amiens began, with a hundred day offensive which forced an end to the war. In 1940 Hitler authorised the preparation for Operation Barbarossa which would see him open a second front against the Soviet Union. In 1963, the Great Train Robbery occurred with 15 robbers stealing  £2.6 million in bank notes.  
Historical perspective on this day
Not done
=== 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.
===
Thanks to Warren for this advice on watching Bolt
Warren Catton Get this for your PC or MAC https://www.foxtel.com.au/foxtelplay/how-it-works/pc-mac.html Once you have installed it start it up and press Live TV you don't need a login to watch Sky News!
===
I am publishing a book called Bread of Life: January. 

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

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

List of available items at Create Space
Happy birthday and many happy returns Kya, Holly Sarah Nguyen, Thomas Ling and Kenny Philipsz. Born on the same day, across the years as Bob Smith (1879), Jack Ryder (1889, a cousin of mine), Benny Carter (1907), Dino De Laurentiis (1919), Esther Williams (1921), Terry Nation (1930), Dustin Hoffman (1937), Paul Hogan (1939), The Edge (1961), Roger Federer and Vanessa Amorosi (1981). Also on your day, Eid al-Fitr (Islam, 2013); Father's Day in Taiwan
1786 – Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat completed the first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc in the Alps, an act considered to be the birth of modern mountaineering.
1918 – The Battle of Amiens began in Amiens, France, marking the start of the Allied Powers' Hundred Days Offensive through the German front lines that ultimately led to the end of World War I.
1963 – The Zimbabwe African National Union was formed when Ndabaningi Sithole, Robert Mugabe, and others decided to split from the Zimbabwe African People's Union.
1988 – The 8888 Uprising, a series of marches, demonstrations, protests, and riots against the one-party state of the Burma Socialist Programme Party in Burma, began.
2008 – Eight people died and 64 more were injured when a EuroCity express train en route to Prague, Czech Republic struck a part of a motorway bridge that had fallen onto the track near Studénka station in the Czech Republic and derailed. You have climbed your mountains, and split from that which holds you back. Hold fast to the Lord, for he has great things for you, conceived in love.
Deaths
===

SUNNY DAY

Tim Blair – Monday, August 08, 2016 (3:56pm)

The Guardian a few days ago: 
Bill Leak’s Indigenous cartoon prompts Suncorp to cancel ads in the Australian. 
But now: 
Suncorp Bank will not withdraw advertising from The Australian, despite reports it would pull ads following the publication of a controversial ‘racist’ cartoon last week.
“Suncorp would like to clarify that it is not removing its advertising from The Australian,” a spokesperson told AdNews. 
===

CENSUS 2026

Tim Blair – Monday, August 08, 2016 (4:29am)

The 2016 census, due to be completed tomorrow night by everyone in Australia, contains new questions intended to better reflect our changing society.
“Australia has beautiful diversity as a country,” Duncan Young, the head of Census 2016, recently explained.
“So it’s really important that we understand that diversity, understand where our different cultural groups live, understand the different languages that people are using in their homes to make sure that services are really relevant and valuable to all Australians.”
That’s just fine, so far as it goes, but diversity’s progress must continue. Let’s jump forward a decade and see what our census form will be asking in the year 2026:
Question 1: Where is this dwelling located?
• In an area threatened by flooding due to global warming.
• On illegally occupied Aboriginal land.
• At a PokeStop.
Question 2: List the identities of each person including visitors who spent the night of Tuesday 11 August 2026 in this dwelling:
• Spouse
• Ex-spouse who still has a key.
• Adult children who can’t take a hint.
• Kevin Rudd, who is refusing to leave until we sign a petition demanding he be appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Question 3: What’s that racket down the road?
• It’s just the mosque. You get used to it after a few years.
• At least it isn’t as loud as the other mosque.
• They say the new mosque will be quite a bit quieter.
Question 4: Are you male or female or lesbian or gay or bisexual or transsexual or intersexual?
• Yes.
• No.
Question 5: What is your relationship to others at this dwelling?
• Hostile.
• Passive aggressive.
• A lot better since I installed the restraining chair.
Question 6: Are you of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander origin?
• No, and I’m sorry.
• Yes, and you can’t prove otherwise.
Question 7: In which country were you born?
• Syria.
• Iraq.
• Afghanistan.
• Other.
Question 8: Are you attending a school or any other educational institution?
• Yes.
• No.
• I’ve got a BA (Hons) in gender fluidity, a Masters in ethnomusicology and a Doctorate in Saussurean semiotics.
Question 9: Impressive. So where are you working?
• In program development at the ABC.
• As a senior editor at Fairfax.
• Across multiple disciplines at several universities.
Question 10: Where are you really working?
• At the car wash.
(Continue reading Census 2026.)
===

MONDAY NOTICEBOARD

Tim Blair – Monday, August 08, 2016 (4:24am)

Oh my! Extreme heteronormativity is being taught in Australian schools: 
The president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, which runs six schools across the country, has said students are taught they should not practise sex until they are married — and it should not be with someone of the same sex.
“This is something that is clearly spelt out in the Koran and the hadith, that sex is only ¬between a husband and a wife who are of the opposite gender and we have absolutely no mandate to change the grace of God,” Keysar Trad told The Australian …
The principal of Al-Faisal college in Sydney’s west, Ghazwa Khan, said the school had never had a child who was gay – because they were taught at home that being homosexual is “not recommended”.
“We’ve never had any child who says these things because they are being taught at home how to behave and know that this is not recommended,” she said. 
Over to you, social justice warriors. Unleash your fury.
===

THE ABC WILL DECIDE WHAT ANIMALS ARE KILLED AND UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES

Tim Blair – Monday, August 08, 2016 (3:58am)

Plead guilty to being an accessory to murder in NSW and – given the right conditions and the right parents – you might be out in just two years.
Get caught running a greyhound race in NSW and your sentence might be just one year shorter: 
Anyone caught organising a greyhound race after the Baird government’s ban comes into effect next July will face up to a year in jail or an $11,000 fine. 
Remember, all of this greyhound panic came about because the ABC broadcast footage of live animals being ripped apart by dogs. Why, then, isn’t the ABC investigating one of its own staff? Perhaps greyhound trainers should switch to training packs of fox-slaughtering chomphounds. The ABC evidently woudn’t have a problem with that.
===

THE REGULATOR HAS SPOKEN

Tim Blair – Monday, August 08, 2016 (2:07am)

Even when we terrible denialists are right, we’re still wrong: 
Andrew Bolt’s comments about climate change on his television show were so hyperbolic and subjective that no reasonable person would think he was providing a “concluded scientific position”, the television regulator has found …
In particular, by showing a graph of global temperatures from 1997 to present, Mr Bolt was correct to say “there has been no real warming of the atmosphere for some 18 years now”. However, the full chart goes back to 1979 and shows an increase in temperatures from 1979 to 1997. 
Key words: “Mr Bolt was correct.” The previous increase is irrelevant. Bolt showed a graph demonstrating no increase from 1997 until now. That was his point. 
ACMA noted that, while climate change was occurring, the code’s requirements for accuracy only applied to statements of fact, not statements of opinion. 
It isn’t an “opinion” that warming halted in 1997. It’s a fact. The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s report is hilarious: 
“Much of Mr Bolt’s language was hyperbolic, such as ‘great global warming scare campaign’, ‘Australians aren’t stupid’, ‘can’t be fooled for long’, ‘all that propaganda’ ... The use of hyperbole indicated that Mr Bolt was giving his subjective personal opinion about the matters being discussed and was not presenting a concluded scientific position about global warming in the segment.” 
Whoa! It’s hyperbolic to state that “Australians aren’t stupid”? Meanwhile, the genuinely hyperbolic would have us believe Australia’s dams are empty.
===

BRAZIL’S NATIONAL SPORT

Tim Blair – Monday, August 08, 2016 (1:53am)

The Olympic Games are dull, but there’s an easy way to thrill viewers who are tuning in to Rio. Simply stop covering events inside Rio’s Maracana Stadium and other sites and instead film random streets.
That’s where the action is. News Corp photographer Brett Costello discovered just how exciting Rio could be last week when a thief stole $40,000 worth of Brett’s camera gear, plus his jacket.
It was an impressive operation involving two decoys who expertly distracted Brett at a coffee shop while the theft took place. The robbery would have been the perfect crime except that one of the gang later turned up at the Olympic Games archery centre – wearing Brett’s jacket.
This probably wasn’t the smartest move, particularly because Brett himself happened to also be at the archery centre. In a city of more than six million, our photographer caught the thief within just two days.
Rio’s gigantic criminal community obviously has a fetish for cameras and a talent for diversion. Earlier in the week, Chinese hurdler Shi Dongpeng was strolling around with a cameraman when a man suddenly rushed up and vomited all over them. Dongpeng quickly found a bathroom to clean up while the cameraman chased their fleeing attacker.
It was another wily ruse. Briefly-unattended camera gear was immediately snatched by the vomiter’s accomplice. How many times they can pull this off per day is probably limited only by appetite.
(Continue reading Brazil’s National Sport.)
===

On The Bolt Report and on radio tonight

Andrew Bolt August 08 2016 (10:18am)

On The Bolt Report on Sky News Live at 7pm tonight:
Editorial: Rio wins gold for Leftist hyperbole.
My guests:
I go to a bar with PJ O’Rourke to discuss who is worse - Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? And which of us is most sick of these new bullies of the Left?

The panel: former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman and former NSW Treasurer Michael Costa on the free-speech sell-outs, Liberals in strife and the ACT’s dangerous move to ban criticism of Islam and other faiths that a judge rules is hateful.
Podcasts of the show here. Facebook page here. 
On 2GB, 3AW and 4BC with Steve Price from 8pm.
Listen live here. Talkback:  131 873.  Listen to all past shows here.
===

The Twitter urinal has an echo

Andrew Bolt August 08 2016 (9:00am)

Chris Mitchell nails the danger of Twitter to journalism and politics:
Academic research has shown that in political terms social media skews left.
Twitter is the worst. I would call it little more than a left-wing echo chamber for various highly politicised activists, including many journalists…

Who, for example, could follow Channel Ten’s Paul Bongiorno or Crikey’s Bernard Keane on ­Twitter and ever imagine they were impartial reporters?…
Now for conservative politicians especially, the idea of speaking to a young, relentlessly left- wing and largely undereducated minority that throws blue language around on social media like confetti does not seem an effective strategy. Sure, sometimes you have to speak to your opponents. But more often than not politicians hope to speak to their supporters and especially their rusted-on voters: those considered “the base”.
So why do they do it? Often it’s their staffers who want to emulate the social media success of the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Modern political staffers get their juice from watching West Wing, whatever side they work for. And whether working for Labor or Liberal politicians, they are often way to the left of their bosses.
Paul Kelly called it out during the Gillard years when he wrote in Inquirer that most staffers in the Gillard government were not even Labor voters and overwhelmingly supported the Greens. 
===

Shut up, the Human Rights Commission explained. UPDATE: Liberals help to ban criticism of Islam

Andrew Bolt August 08 2016 (8:54am)

The race industry denies you your freedom to speak your mind.
Now it also wants to deny you your freedom to tell it to its face what you think about its tyrannical ways:
The Human Rights Commission wants the public prevented from expressing views to an inquiry into the handling of a controversial ­racial hatred case against univer­sity students in Queensland.
The inquiry is examining complaints by three Queensland University of Technology students that their human rights were “flag­rantly” breached by the commission in a case brought by QUT administrative officer Cindy Prior under the Racial Discrimination Act’s controversial section 18C.
Commission president Gillian Triggs has appointed Sydney ­barrister Angus Stewart SC to run a rare inquiry into the internal workings of the organisation after the students’ lawyers Tony Morris QC and Michael Henry invoked a little-used legislative provision to trigger action and scrutiny.
The students are accused of ­racial hatred over Facebook posts which allegedly caused offence to Ms Prior, who is indigenous, after she had turned them away from an Aboriginal-only computer lab in QUT’s Oodgeroo Unit in May 2013. Ms Prior says she suffered significant stress and she is seeking more than $250,000 damages after not working for most of the past three years.
Mr Henry, the lawyer for stud­ent Alex Wood — who is being sued because he wrote on Facebook “just got kicked out of the ­unsigned ­indigenous computer room. QUT stopping segregation with segregation” — wants ­citizens to have the right to make public submissions to the inquiry…
But the Human Rights Commission’s lawyer John Howell told Mr Stewart that it would be wrong to “call for submissions from the ­public"… “Submissions of the kind envis­ioned in Mr Henry’s email would have no relevance to your ­inquiry.”
UPDATE
Let us hope the new crossbench in the Senate will shame more Liberals out of their cowed silence and into a defence of your free speech:

Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm plans to introduce a bill to change racial discrimination laws, saying section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act should be removed.
“Free speech is free speech, there’s no qualification to it, let’s just remove 18C entirely and everything that goes with it,” Senator Leyonhjelm told Insiders.
The newly re-elected senator said Family First Senator Bob Day also planned to introduce more “modest” changes to the law…

“Offence is always taken, not given. So if you don’t want to be offended, its up to you, don’t be offended, that’s it...”
New One Nation senator-elect Malcolm Roberts ...  told reporters on Friday that Section 18C “needs to be addressed because [it is] curbing free speech...\
“You can call me short, you can me fat, you can call me a Queenslander, you can call me a cane toad,” he said.
“Whatever you want to call me, the only person who decides whether I’m upset is me.”
Then there’s Derryn Hinch:
Senator and former broadcaster Derryn Hinch ... said he would push to amend 18C of the Federal Racial Discrimination Act.
“It should not be a crime to offend or insult somebody. I am offended and insulted by a law that can put you in jail for offending or insulting somebody,” he said.
This morning on ABC Radio Breakfast, pundit Michelle Grattan bizarrely claimed these laws weren’t really stopping people from speaking their mind, only to immediately qualify that in the case of the two articles of mine which were banned. But how can she know that these were the only cases, when the Human Rights Commission settles hundreds of other cases in secrecy, and when it is now engaged in a legal case that has left the students above too scared to repeat their arguments?
Grattan is simply saying something untrue to avoid having to change her mind and defend free speech.
Do Liberals really want to be seen as equally weak on free speech - and certainly too weak to repeat what the likes of Hinch, Lleyonhjelm, Day, Roberts and Pauline Hanson so freely say? That is a very quick way to persuade conservative voters of the need to vote for braver representatives in the Senate - and maybe not just there.
UPDATE
This is so sinister:
Vilification on the grounds of religion is now illegal and in serious cases could result in a criminal conviction with a fine of up to $7500, under laws passed by the ACT parliament on Thursday.
Both Labor and Liberal supported the move put by the Greens Shane Rattenbury, who said the display of hatred, intolerance and offensive behaviour towards Muslims was one of the biggest intolerance issues in Australia today.
How dare the Liberals pass laws to intimidate people out of criticising a creed and an ideology. What a debased political party. 
===

Muslim school boasts not one student is gay. Left looks away

Andrew Bolt August 08 2016 (8:47am)

They’d be ripped apart by the Left if they were Christian, but they’ll get away with this on the grounds of their approved faith:
The president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, which runs six schools across the country, has said students are taught they should not practise sex until they are married — and it should not be with someone of the same sex.
“This is something that is clearly spelt out in the Koran and the hadith, that sex is only ­between a husband and a wife who are of the opposite gender and we have absolutely no mandate to change the grace of God,” Keysar Trad told The Australian…

The principal of Al-Faisal college in Sydney’s west, Ghazwa Khan, said the school had never had a child who was gay ­because they were taught at home that being homosexual is “not recommended”.
===

Malcolm Turnbull does nothing in 11 months

Andrew Bolt August 08 2016 (8:28am)

IT is 11 months since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister. What on earth has he done in all that time?
Last September, Turnbull said Tony Abbott had to be sacked because “ultimately, the prime minister has not been capable of providing the economic leadership our nation needs”.
But in the 11 months since Turnbull took over, name one thing of substance he has achieved.
Name one single thing that Turnbull has done that makes your lives better. Makes your future safer.
Hello?
Now consider this: the media pack that supported Turnbull for so long used to say Tony Abbott was a failure. A dud.
Yet after just one year as prime minister, Abbott, that failure, had already scrapped the mining tax that was hurting investment, and scrapped the carbon tax which had sent your electricity bills soaring.
He’d also signed huge free-trade deals with Japan and South Korea, and saved billions of dollars by reforming Labor’s out-of-control national broadband network.
And, of course, he’d stopped the boats that had brought 50,000 illegal immigrants to Australia and caused the deaths of 1200 boat people.
By the way, that’s just a partial list.
But Turnbull? What has he done?
(Read the whole article here.) 
===

Could you trust your secrets with Clinton?

Andrew Bolt August 08 2016 (7:16am)

Hillary Clinton has had a shocking week, although she still leads in the polls.
Did her reckless use of a private server help Iran track down an informant for the US?
Hillary Clinton recklessly discussed, in emails hosted on her private server, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed by Iran for treason, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday… Cotton was speaking about Shahram Amiri, who gave information to the U.S. about Iran’s nuclear program.
The senator said this lapse proves she is not capable of keeping the country safe…

Amiri disappeared while on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in 2009, but he then resurfaced a year later in the U.S., where he visited the Iranian interest section of the Pakistani embassy and demanded to be sent home to Iran… U.S. officials said he was receiving millions of dollars for information he provided about Iran’s nuclear program.
The scientist shows up in Clinton’s emails back in 2010, just nine days before he returned to Iran.
“We have a diplomatic, ‘psychological’ issue, not a legal one. Our friend has to be given a way out,” the email by Richard Morningstar, a former State Department special envoy for Eurasian energy, read, according to the Associated Press. “Our person won’t be able to do anything anyway. If he has to leave so be it.”
Then she lies about telling untruths about the server:

[KIRSTEN] WELKER [of NBC News]:  This week, you told two separate news organizations that FBI director James Comey said, quote, my answers were truthful and that what I said is consistent with what I have told the American people… Director Comey did say there’s no indication that you lied but to the FBI, but he didn’t weigh in on whether or not you were truthful to the American people. So my question for you is, are you mischaracterizing Director Comey’s testimony...?
CLINTON: ...  Director Comey had said that my answers in my FBI interview were truthful. That’s really the bottom line, here. And I have said, during the interview, and in many other occasions over the past months, that what I told the FBI, which he said was truthful, is consistent with what I have said publicly. So I may have short circuited it…

WELKER: Is the one inconsistency, though, that you said you never sent or received classified material? And he did say there were three e-mails that were marked classified at the time. Is that an inconsistency?
CLINTON: ... I sent over 30,000 e-mails to the State Department that were work-related e-mails. Director Comey said that only three out of 30,000 had anything resembling classified markers.. And in questioning, Director Comey made the point that the three e-mails out of the 30,000 did not have the appropriate markings. And it was therefore reasonable to conclude that anyone, including myself, would have not suspected that they were classified… So, that leaves the 100 out of 30,000 e-mails that Director Comey testified contained classified information, but again, he acknowledged there were no markings on those 100 e-mails. 
===

Should Hanson really be bashed into silence?

Andrew Bolt August 07 2016 (10:44pm)

This sounds far too much like victim blaming:

PAULINE Hanson cost taxpayers an estimated $1 million in police protection when she was last a federal MP and will again qualify for security if threats are made against her in her new role as a Senate powerbroker.
It’s not Hanson who is costing us that $1 million in police protection. It’s the Islamists and Leftist who threaten to bash and kill her.
Amanda Vanstone, now the kind of Liberal only the ABC (her employer) would like, is so stupid as to say this:
Former Justice Minister Amanda Vanstone said yesterday it was her view that the police protection only emboldens Ms Hanson at ugly rallies because she knew that whatever she said the Federal Police were offering around-the-clock protection.
“She had close personal police protection. And I think that only made her comments stronger.
“Quite simply, it emboldened her,’’ Ms Vanstone said.
Is Vanstone seriously suggesting that violent Leftists should be allowed to determine what Hanson says in public? That sparing her from a violent mob is a mistake?
And which of Hanson’s comments does she specifically believe were made only because police were there to stop her from getting assaulted? 
===

Hyperbolic abuse from ACMA and the Age when they can’t fault my warming facts

Andrew Bolt August 07 2016 (9:58pm)

Free speech, Global warming - propaganda, Media, three

Once again, someone allergic to the facts and to free speech calls in the censors - this time the Australian Communications and Media Authority - to shut me down.
ACMA describes how this farce began (and, note, this was before the recent spike in temperatures caused by the El Nino):
In April 2016, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) commenced an investigation under section 170 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (the BSA) into a segment on The Bolt Report broadcast on Southern Cross Ten by Southern Cross Communications Pty Limited (the licensee) on 8 November 2015.
The ACMA received a complaint alleging that a statement about the interpretation of a graph broadcast during a segment on global warming was inaccurate and misleading…
The complaint to the licensee was: 
I would call into question the graph used by Mr Andrew Bolt on his program “The Bolt Report” aired on 8 Nov 2015.
It is a small section of a much larger graph that clearly shows climate change is increasing as predicted by science, taking small sections of larger graphs is neither accurate nor scientific.
It is a way to manipulate data to give a false impression of the overall problem…
I feel that both Ch 10 and Mr Bolt should be ordered to issue a retraction and apology for not checking facts and for repeatedly publishing false and misleading information.
Small problem, as ACMA reluctantly concedes:
Despite some contestability about this issue , Mr Bolt’s specific comment about there being no real warming of the atmosphere over the last 18 years is consistent with the surface air temperature records for this period referred to in the 2013 IPCC report and by Remote Sensing Systems....  [O]f itself, the factual material was accurate.
That should have been the end of the matter. I drew attention to a pause in the previous warming trend - a trend I have never denied or hidden. Indeed, in the show I quoted a sceptical scientist specifically referring to “the warming we’ve seen since the 1950s”. So end of complaint. What I said was both true and in context. Go away, Anonymous Denouncer.
But ACMA could not leave it there. It could not resist going further to add a bit of partisan snark - not surprising, given its membership - that goes way beyond its remit.
Much of Mr Bolt’s language was hyperbolic…
Hyperbolic? As in exaggerated, and not meant to be taken literally? That’s rich, given that I’m arguing against extremists who claim the world is superheating so badly that our cities will drown, all our rivers dry and humanity faces a wipeout within a century.
So what does ACMA identify as my “hyperbolic” statements?
Much of Mr Bolt’s language was hyperbolic, such as, ‘great global warming scare campaign’, ‘Australians aren’t stupid’, ‘can’t be fooled for long’, ‘all that propaganda’, ‘scaremongers’, ‘there’s been no Armageddon’ and ‘no wonder’.
Pardon?
It is hyperbolic to claim “Australians aren’t stupid”? Could ACMA explain why this statement is exaggerated?
It is hyperbolic to say “there’s been no Armageddon”? Could ACMA explain why this statement is exaggerated and not to be taken literally?
It is hyperbolic to say some warming alarmists are “scaremongers”? Could ACMA say why this is an exxageration, when it actually quotes in its judgement this passage of my show:

Andrew Bolt: The scaremongering that followed was a scandal, pushed by a media that swallowed the most preposterous claims.
Footage of an interview with Professor Tim Flannery, Environmentalist.
Tim Flannery: Even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems.
Footage of an interview with Mark Lynas, Environmentalist.
Mark Lynas: If temperatures soar by six degrees in less than a century, we’re going to face nothing less than a global wipe-out.
Footage of a report from American ABC news.
Voice over: But this city itself could be dying from the effects of global warming. Imagine a city that could look like this just one generation from now. A near permanent state of drought, a dramatic rise in bush fires, tsunami-like tidal surges, heat related deaths soaring. It’s a doomsday scenario.
Footage of an interview with Professor Mike Archer, UNSW Science Dean.
Mike Archer: Life as usual is not going to be here for much longer.
Is ACMA seriously suggesting that those I quoted are not scaremongers?
An unbiased ACMA would have agreed that “scaremongers” - when applied to Flannery, Lynas, American ABC, and Archer - is not hyperbole but the obvious and unvarnished truth, and even more so given the facts I went on to cite in the show about booming crops, subdued cyclonic activity and more.
Indeed, that quoted passage suggests this question: why am I dragged before ACMA but Flannery not, when it is crystal clear here that I am right and Flannery profoundly wrong?
Why weren’t any of the other shows from which I quoted - all making false and alarmist claims about global warming - investigated and criticised by ACMA?
And why isn’t the ABC in the dock alongside Flannery, its favourite warmist talent?
See, ACMA goes on to quote a part of the transcript of my show in which I also nail a gross misrepresentation by the ABC of a CSIRO survey:
Andrew Bolt:  This week on Melbourne Cup Day the CSIRO quietly snuck out this report on a massive survey last year of 5000 Australians asking what they thought of global warming. The findings are incredible. For the first time in years the Australians who believe humans are heating the world dangerously are outnumbered by Australians who don’t. We have more sceptics now than believers. Here are the figures. Nearly 46% of Australians say they believe humans are mostly to blame for the warming we’ve seen, but they’re outnumbered by the nearly 39% who say the warming is natural plus the 8% who think there’s actually been no warming, at least lately. The sceptics are in the majority particularly when you add those who don’t have an opinion.... These are huge results. They show the media has failed. Its non-stop message of a manmade global warming doom is no longer believed by most of us. In fact, the media could not be trusted even in reporting this survey. The ABC implied most Australians were still buying the scare.
Graphic of Michael Brissenden, host of AM.
Michael Brissenden: A five year study of Australians’ views on climate change has found 78% believe it is happening.
Why was the ABC and Michael Brissenden not investigated instead of me?
ACMA’s statements are bizarre, and little more than partisan abuse. ACMA also demonstrates here how such free-speech police operate, in effect, to harass and police only one side of the debate, and the rational one at that.
Why do such bodies even attempt to meddle in such important public debates? Why do they attempt to arbitrate on highly contested matters of science?
UPDATE
Note, by the way, that my accuser remains anonymous, and is not ordered to pay my employer’s costs for defending truth. He or she denounces, abuses, causes trouble and expense and then walks away without paying a cent. Even their identity is protected, despite given full license to smear my own reputation.
UPDATE
An Age reporter, Lucy Battersby, rang me on Friday to ask me to comment on the above finding, of which I knew nothing. I said to her I would not comment on something I had not yet read, and to a reporter who would - being of The Age - be sure to write something critical of me, regardless of the facts. Battersby claimed she was not so predictable.
She is wrong. She was utterly, utterly predictable, writing to a mendacious and abusive script , just as I told her she would, along lines I could have dictated to her on the phone. Not a reporter but a propagandist:
Andrew Bolt’s comments about climate change on his television show were so hyperbolic and subjective that no reasonable person would think he was providing a “concluded scientific position”, the television regulator has found.
How pathetic. Not one of my facts was challenged by ACMA, but Battersby - clearly disappointed - decides to falsely imply that I’ve argued that there was not warming before 1997, and then seeks to give this straw man a kicking:

However, the full chart goes back to 1979 and shows an increase in temperatures from 1979 to 1997.
Yes, Lucy, that would be the full chart that I’ve published myself. In fact, in the very show ACMA investigated, I quoted a sceptical scientist referring to “the warming we’ve seen since the 1950s”.
Battersby then concludes her article by quoting what seems to be her guru of global warming - a man famed around the world (well, the Twitter bits of it) for his profundity, moral rectitude and deep knowledge of climate science:
Co-host of Ten another show, Waleed Aly, criticised Mr Bolt’s show a month after it aired, saying Mr Bolt could not keep denying climate change because of emotional or incorrect reasons. 
Seriously?
My piece was actually factually accurate, and exposed the factual inaccuracies of Aly’s fellow travelers. Yet Battersby still manages to suggest I “keep denying climate change” (which I actually don’t) “because of emotional or incorrect reasons”.
Go figure.   
===

Who let them in? Now a spruiker for Hamas, the terrorist group?

Andrew Bolt August 07 2016 (9:47pm)

Who lets these people in? Who invites them?
Are we really talking about a tiny, unrepresentative minority?
Mark Durie:

A fundamentalist Islamic preacher who says Hamas “are not terrorists, they are freedom fighters” is planning to come to Australia after being refused a visa earlier this year.
Sheikh Zahir Mahmood is headlined as a speaker at the upcoming United Muslims Association (UMA) conference to be held in Sydney on Sunday 14th August. 
Zahir Mahmood made the claim about Hamas in Birmingham in 2009 at a meeting where he likened modern Israel to Nazi Germany.  
Mahmood had attempted to come to Australia in May but was his visa was refused by the Department of Immigration. The UMA organised a conference where gender segregation was enforced, despite the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir losing a court case over the same issue.
Other speakers at the conference include Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman and Bilal Dannoun. Sheikh Shady came to national attention recently for his comment that “homosexuality is spreading all the diseases “ describing them as “evil actions”. He is President of the National Imams Council, and was a guest at the Prime Minister’s recent Iftar dinner. 
Bilal Dannoun was identified in 2007 by national security as one of the fundamentalist clerics supporting Wahhabism. Dannoun responded by claiming that terrorist attacks were not being carried out by followers of Wahhabism, such as al-Qaeda. He said: “if following the teachings of Islam, following the way of the Prophet is called radical, then ... call us radicals.”  
===

The Palestinian election campaign: vote for the biggest Jew-killer

Andrew Bolt August 07 2016 (9:44pm)

Fatah, which rules in the West Bank, is meant to be the moderate Palestinian party. Hamas is the terrorist party that has seized control of the Gaza Strip.
But this is how Fatah in its campaign literature explains why Palestinians should vote for President Mahmoud Abbas - with text in parenthesis from MEMRI translators:
To those who argue [with Fatah], to the boors, and to those who do not know history: 
- Fatah has killed 11,000 Israelis
- Fatah has sacrificed 170,000 Martyrs (Shahids)…
- Fatah was the first to carry out operations [i.e., terror attacks] during the first Intifada [i.e., Palestinian violence and terror against Israel, 1988-1993], and it was the first Palestinian faction to reach the nuclear reactor in Dimona [i.e., 1988 murder of 3 working mothers on way to the Dimona plant].
- Fatah was the first to fight in the second Intifada [i.e., PA terror campaign 2000-2005] (Baha Al-Sa’id, an officer in the Preventive Security Forces, infiltrated an Israeli settlement on the border with Gaza) [parenthesis in source]…
- Fatah led the Palestinian attack on Israel in the UN.
Is this how to persuade the “moderate” Palestinian to vote for you?
UPDATE
Meanwhile, here is how Australians, donating to World Vision, have allegedly been helping the Hamas terrorist group:
Israel has accused a manager working for U.S.-headquartered Christian charity World Vision of funneling millions of dollars to Islamist militant group Hamas.
Mohammad El Halabi ...  had run the organization’s Gaza operations since 2010.
According to Israel’s Shin Bet security service, El Halabi diverted around $7.2 million of World Vision money to Hamas each year. That is the equivalent of 60 percent of the charity’s total annual funding for Gaza.
Some 40 percent of the funds aimed at civilian projects — some $1.5 million a year — were “given in cash” to Hamas combat units, according to a statement issued by the Shin Bet…
A lawyer appointed by World Vision to represent El Halabi told NBC News that his client denied the charges against him…
Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip and has fought three wars against Israel since it overran the coastal territory in 2007, is designated a terrorist organization by the United States. 
===

THE DANCE SECTOR

Tim Blair – Saturday, August 08, 2015 (3:38pm)

An uplifting piece on last week’s Senate hearing into arts funding: 
“This is getting more depressing by the hour,” Senator Scott Ludlam lamented midway through the public hearing ... 
As a general rule, anything that is depressing to Scott Ludlam works like a pure endorphin megadose on the rest of us. 
Speaker after speaker representing dance, theatre, visual arts and literature spoke of the threat to the “pipeline” of independent artists flowing to and between companies large and small.
Some said international tours had already been cancelled or postponed, schools residencies suspended and jobs were in doubt. 
See what I mean? Read those two paragraphs again and feel the euphoria kick in. 
The importance of the arts to regional audiences and in exploring social issues were persistent themes of the hearing. Esther Anatolitis, director of Regional Arts Victoria, raised the stakes by describing arts outside the cities as “a matter of life and death”.
She invoked the role of arts projects in bushfire-affected regions. “The preparedness in a community to respond to disaster is best handled when people have already come together to talk ... and to make something together.” 
Has your house burned down? Perhaps a family member was incinerated. Let’s all make puppets! 
KAGE artistic director Kate Denborough said the company’s touring dance theatre work Sundowner, about younger onset Alzheimer’s, had been seen by 40,000 people. 
And none of them can remember it. 
The dance sector … 
Excuse me … the what? 
The dance sector warned funding instability would have flow-on effects to tertiary and TAFE courses, with graduates possibly facing fewer job opportunities. 
If you’re a dance sector graduate, getting a job was probably never an extremely high priority.  
Choreographer Lucy Guerin claimed the changes were in danger of “eventually severing the future of artistic development in Australia and setting us back 30 years. It’s that serious.” 
Why, we’d be back to the dark days of 1985. Which, as it happens, was an excellent year for all forms of creative expression.
===

BAT DEMANDS DIVERSITY

Tim Blair – Saturday, August 08, 2015 (2:45pm)

A denouncement of conformity in the Sydney Morning Herald: 
Australians. We flatter ourselves as larrikins, carousing like noble loons across the culture-scape but, actually, we’re tame as. We think we’re individuated and diverse but, in fact, we’re staggeringly conformist. 
And who might be the author of this rousing call for individualism? None other than Elizabeth Farrelly, whose embrace of nonconformity tends to vanish if a truck driver briefly defies Sydney’s parking rules. At that point, Farrelly demands instant and total obedience. She also doesn’t care for those who don’t conform to Farrelly’s view of her own importance.
In other Fairfax frightbat developments, Clem Bastow thinks Tony Abbott is Australia’s head of state. 
===

SERVERS GLOBALLY WARMED

Tim Blair – Saturday, August 08, 2015 (2:09pm)

Rolling Stone rounds up a list of recent climate catastrophes, including: 
The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. 
Computer servers are typically located indoors, where environmental factors are less of a consideration. Of course, it is possible that the Guardian‘s servers are made from ethically-sourced timber and are located in an open area of rainforest, which would make them excellent gauges of any climate alterations.
(Via Waxing Gibberish) 
===

THIS ADVICE ALSO APPLIES IN OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES

Tim Blair – Saturday, August 08, 2015 (1:27pm)

A tip for young batsman: when a ball is doing its level best to leave you, it’s probably best to let it go. For example, in the below image we see Australian batsman Steve Smith desperately reaching for a ball that wants nothing to do with either him or the stumps. It’s a ball that enjoys the solitary life. It wishes to remain undisturbed and to seek its own counsel. It is the Greta Garbo of cricket balls.


Smith’s second-innings bid to establish contact with this reclusive delivery ended in predictable misery.
===

On The Bolt Report tomorrow, August 9

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (8:16am)


On Channel 10 tomorrow at 10am and 3pm (NOTE: this week the 3pm repeat is on ONE everywhere except Perth):
Editorial:  On Bronwyn Burke. Or is that Tony Perk?
My guest: Labor’s Anthony Albanese.
The panel: Bruce Hawker, former Labor campaign guru (and fellow admirer of John Peter Russell) and political scientist Jennifer Oriel.
NewsWatch: Greg Sheridan, foreign affairs editor of The Australian and author of the engaging new memoir, When We Were Young and Foolish, which includes fascinating material on his old friend, Tony Abbott. We’ll discuss the old Abbott, even watch some old vision, and show how his past explains his latest media woes.
Plenty to get stuck into: Building dud subs, Labor hypocrites, Trump vs Bush, the expenses uproar, greens killing a mine, the price of the “stolen generations” exposed and more.

The videos of the shows appear here.
===

Abbott’s strategy emerges, but the grumblers still need dealing with

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (6:34am)

There is a strategy slowly settling into place, but there are also bad polls, stumbles, grumbles and white-anting. Above all, there is unemployment at 6.3 per cent.
Dennis Shanahan:
Tony Abbott ... wants to declare the upcoming parliamentary session as being “about jobs and growth”. 
Abbott’s announcement in Adelaid­e on Wednesday of $89 billion in naval projects; his declaratio­n on Thursday that Australia as a nation can’t afford to allow the courts to be used to “sabotage” mining projects; and continued pushing for the passage of the China-Australia free-trade agreement are all signs of where he wants the next few days — and also the next 18 months — to go…
Yesterday in Tasmania the slogan­ was being refined: “Ships mean jobs. Roads mean jobs. Freer trade means jobs and a more vigorous farming sector means jobs"…
But Abbott faces a renewed round of internal complaint from Liberal ministers who are reviving the criticism of Hockey’s performance as Treasurer and Peta Credlin as his chief-of-staff. Some see Hockey as not doing enough in the political debates. Others claim that, despite a much lower public profile since the white-hot criticism of Credlin’s “command and control” of the PM’s office last year, “nothing has changed” as far as barriers to wider advice reaching Abbott are concerned. Senior Liberals still say Abbott is not listening to a broad-enough range of advice and making political mistakes as a result.
Chris Kenny:
[Bronwyn] Bishop went not for the crime [of claiming lavish expenses] — let the MP who has not sinned cast the first stone — but because of the pile-on. She has been widely loathed and resented by the gallery and the opposition since the day she was installed… 
The controversy has been a damaging distraction for the government… Worryingly for Tony Abbott it again has revealed a persistent lack of political strategy and unity in his upper echelons…
If you had decided (as Labor and most of the press gallery had) that Bishop’s transgression was somehow of a higher order than the dozens (nay, hundreds) of previous cases of over-claimed expenses being repaid, then she needed to be forced out quickly…
[But] you only have to look at Tony Burke’s family holidays, Shorten’s trips to ALP events and many other cases on both sides of the aisle to see that if Bishop’s transgressions warranted resignation, a bunch of others should go too. A sharper political operation would have responded to the Bishop attack by running hard against the Labor transgressors earlier.
But the Coalition still lacks an attack dog, or a strategy, to run such assaults. 
Bringing over Tony Nutt, still under active consideration once he’s clear with pressing NSW Liberal Party issues (probably next month), is fast becoming a totemic test of whether the Government has listened to its internal critics. Totemic, that is, for Abbott’s critics and for Peta Credlin’s. It is almost at the point where genuine considerations of which role Nutt should perform for the party’s greater good are entirely secondary. The symbolism of the move, either to Abbott’s office or the federal secretariat, counts more.
Dumb and in part malevolent. Yet these considerations must be heeded by Abbott.
And, yes, the Bishop matter has exposed a bad media and political strategy to deal with. Nor are we seeing any more selling of Abbott the person.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Obama’s insane war talk - as phoney as his Iran deal

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (6:28am)

Greg Sheridan, one of my guests on The Bolt Report tomorrow:
Obama’s presidency is now a deformed caricature of its former self… I reach this melancholy and unattractive conclusion following Obama’s truly bizarre argument that the only alternative to his capitulation to Iran is war. 
This is a statement almost clinically deranged. It combines everything that is bad in the Obama presidency: rhetorical overreach, emotional blackmail, supreme arrogance and an almost demented failure to confront reality.
Obama’s deal with Iran is the worst possible deal… The Obama agreement with Iran grants complete legitimacy to Iran’s possession of every part of the nuclear cycle, including advanced uranium enrichment… The enforcement and inspections regime is so weak — 24 days’ formal notice and advance negotiation of access for any inspection of a non-declared nuclear site — that the ability of Iran to cheat on this deal over time is spectacular…
The result of the deal is that a vastly stronger Iran will in time certainly have nuclear weapons, sophisticated air defences to protect them and long-range missiles to deliver them. So, was the only alternative to this turning of all four cheeks submission really war?… Continued and intensified sanctions, coupled with comprehensive arms and technology embargoes, offered the best chance of seriously delaying and perhaps preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. But this would have yielded no moment of fatuous and fantastic triumph, such as Obama is awarding himself now. 
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Why gag debate? Why the fear? Why the intolerance?

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (6:20am)

 It is increasingly difficult for groups defying the Leftist consensus to exercise even their right to speak:
A lobby group has accused the Seven Network and Network Ten of refusing to run their television advertisements which endorse a traditional view of marriage… 
The Marriage Alliance (MA) launched their nationwide multimedia campaign on Monday, highlighting their belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman. The MA claim they have been denied the right to broadcast their concerns that law changes could erode children’s and citizens’ rights.
No reasons given:
A Seven spokesman said: “We couldn’t accommodate their booking request. That’s about it.” 
A Ten spokesman said: “As company policy, we do not talk about our commercial arrangements, out of respect for our advertisers.”
A Nine spokeswoman confirmed the ad is airing on the network “but in very selective timeslots”. 
My guess? Fear of Leftists who tolerate everything except dissent.
(Thanks to many readers.) 
===

We’ll be skint for skinks

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (6:02am)

Steve Kates is astonished that a few reptiles - adopted by green zealots - are allowed to stop a $16 billion mine:
Here is the key para about the decision in the Federal Court: 
It is understood the refusal to allow the mine relates to Mr Hunt’s failure to take into account departmental advice given about the Queensland species of the yakka skink and ornamental snake.
On the other hand, balanced against the rights of the snake and the skink was this:

...An exasperated Mr Abbott said the federal government ­approval for Indian company Adani to develop the $16 billion coalmine in central Queensland, which was overturned by the Federal Court on Wednesday, was a vital project. 
He said if Australia did not allow such developments, “we have a problem as a nation”.
“Lets face it: this is a $21bn ­investment of which some billion dollars has already been spent,” Mr Abbott said.
“It will create about 10,000 well-paid jobs in Australia. And if it goes ahead, it will provide for decades to come for 100 million people in India who currently have no power.”
But Quadrant is even more surprised that the mine has been halted for the sake of reptiles that don’t seem so scarce at all:
Good question, the stock answer being that, to quote the anti-mining activists behind the successful Federal Court challenge, the ongoing existence of both those unfortunate reptiles is threatened — a claim that might surprise the herpetologists who compile the Australian Reptile Online Database. Their map of the yakka skink’s distribution is marked in pink below, with confirmed sightings indicated by purple dots. It covers an area rather than larger than Adani’s planned hole in the ground:
Same for the ornamental snake, whose turf is also marked in pink: 
There is plenty of room in Queensland, a reasonable person might conclude, for reptiles and miners to co-exist. Sadly, while they are very organised, the extractive industries’ enemies are anything but reasonable.
But naturally The Age and the ideological fellow travellers now heading so many institutions seem to me to prefer to whack Abbott than analyse such idiocy:
Courts do not exist to further the interests of governments, the NSW Bar has told Prime Minister Tony Abbott, as it delivered him a sharp lesson in the separation of powers. 
The rebuke came after Mr Abbott on Friday said the overturned approval of Australia’s largest coal mine meant courts could be used for “sabotage"…
NSW Bar Association president Jane Needham, SC, expressed concern at Mr Abbott’s remarks. “These comments demonstrate a lack of understanding of the independent role of the courts in our democracy,” she said. 
For evidence of Needham’s ties to the NSW Labor Lawyers (undisclosed by The Age) go here, here and here.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.)  
===

To Peter Hartcher, everything not Green must seem “hard Right”

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (5:29am)

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher sure lives in some bubble of inner-city Leftism to think that opposing things such as higher power prices, closing our coal industry or same-sex marriage are just concerns of the “hard Right”:
In a desperate effort to just hold his job, Abbott has turned increasingly to a reactionary stance to mollify the group he sees as his final bastion of support, the hard right of his party. 
On renewable energy, coal mines, gay marriage, Abbott chooses a truculent defence of a right wing minority over a broader national interest approach.
Hartcher, who is yet to apologise for sliming Abbott as a possible homophobe on false evidence, seems once again to be consulting his Leftist prejudices and grudges and not the facts.
Abbott’s stand on renewable energy and coal mines is in no way just a pander to the pejoratively titled “hard Right”. They are not only personal convictions but mainstream Liberal positions.
As for Abbott’s position on gay marriage, once again he reflects the overwhelming view of his party room, contrary to the impression Hartcher gives. My evidence:
The Australian Marriage Equality ... analysis shows 18 Coalition MPs and senators support same-sex marriage but 83 oppose it. Another 22 are either undecided or have not yet declared their position. 
As for Abbot allegedly lurching to the Right, more nonsense. Square that booga-booga theory with Abbott pushing his disastrous recognition campaign, compromising on his renewable energy target plan, dropping some of his tough spending cuts, buying off the build-them-here lobby with a $20 billion order for Adelaide frigates and icing talk of cutting Sunday penalty rates.
Hartcher is describing a demon world of his imagination, not reality.  
===

Pyne’s perk

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (4:57am)

This was strange:
Christopher Pyne has leapt to the defence of his political opponent Tony Burke, saying a $50,000 six-day trip to Europe he took as a minister was completely legitimate… 
The government’s leader of the house told the Nine Network’s Today program the media should stop taking “pot shots” at MPs for doing their jobs. “All these stories about Tony Burke, so far none of them have been in breach of the rules. If the rules are the rules, and people stay within them, you can’t then criticise them,” he said. 
Stranger still:
On Wednesday, the manager of government business in the House of Representatives, Christopher Pyne, contacted a colleague who was due to do a media interview that day, telling him not to go hard on Labor’s Tony Burke for his (mis)use of entitlements. It had been reported that Burke flew his family to Uluru business class. 
The Liberal parliamentarian was surprised by Pyne’s request, especially given that earlier that day the Assistant Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, had described Burke as a “hypocrite” for going after Bronwyn Bishop so relentlessly given Burke’s own actions. Liberals saw this as their chance to pay Labor back for its dogged pursuit of the former Speaker. “Why is he making Labor a protected species?” the Liberal thought to himself. “What’s Christopher got to hide?”
Now we understand:
Parliamentary documents show [Education Minister Christopher Pyne] claimed taxpayer-funded business-class flights for three family members from Adelaide to Sydney on Boxing Day 2009, returning six days later, at a cost of $3843… 
While staying in Sydney at taxpayers’ expense, Mr Pyne filed an article to The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide that mocked “jolly big spending” and criticised Labor government spending decisions while ordinary families struggled with the cost of living.
“My family and many others will tighten our belts through January,” Mr Pyne wrote. “Yet … the federal government is still expanding fiscal policy."… Mr Pyne told The Weekend Australian he held a “planning day” during the Sydney trip in 2009 to talk to Tony Abbott, who then was opposition leader.
===

Shorten faces new grilling as investigators dig

Andrew Bolt August 08 2015 (4:26am)

Bill Shorten has more explaining to do about a secret union deal to cut conditions for kickbacks:
Senior building industry figures are prepared to challenge claims Opposition Leader Bill Shorten made under oath over his involvement in deals that delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks to his Australian Workers Union. 
The executives are expected to testify before the royal commission into union corruption… Fairfax Media understands royal commission investigators have targeted a new batch of documents relevant to Mr Shorten’s negotiations with Thiess John Holland over the EastLink project in the mid-2000s…
The commission is especially interested in a secretive deal over EastLink that delivered more than $300,000 in payments to the AWU.
A Fairfax Media analysis has found that almost half the payments made by Thiess John Holland to the AWU appear to involve suspect invoices for services never provided, including advertisements in the AWU magazine not published, for “Red Card” training provided by the employer not the union, and for “back strain” research.
Lawyers expert in corruption say that anyone involved in, or with knowledge of, such falsifying of invoices faces the possibility of criminal charges.
In 2005, the AWU signed a landmark workplace agreement on EastLink that cut standard industry conditions established by rival, the CFMEU, and delivered savings of as much as $100 million to Thiess John Holland…
But the royal commission is focused on Mr Shorten’s role in the secretive side deal and $100,000 a year plus GST in payments to his union… Mr Shorten told the commission he did not “particularly remember” such discussions, later refining his evidence to acknowledge he may have raised the idea of the AWU providing training “and the like"… He denied any involvement in, or knowledge of, the issuing of bogus invoices. 
UPDATE
Nice piece by Andrew Rule - very insightful - on the good Bill vs the bad Bill.  There’s plenty about his acts of kindness and competence, as well as his rudeness and arrogance, but this perhaps struck truest:
One former Labor heavyweight who now watches from a distance puts Shorten and Gillard in the same category. “They are both symptomatic of the modern Labor Party and trade unions,” he says, repeating a judgment he made privately nearly a decade ago. “It sort of happened in the Libs as well, but Bill and Julia epitomised it in the ALP. They hijacked a party of noble idealists. It’s careerism on steroids.”
===

CARLTON LIGHT

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (3:42pm)

Veteran Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton resigned this week rather than face suspension for hisabusive and obscene online comments. The SMH is reportedly considering replacing Carlton with John Birmingham, who lives in the remote northern Sydney suburb of Brisbane, Queensland.
But is Birmingham any less abusive or obscene? Let’s see how Carlton’s possible replacement conducts himself online

 Continue reading 'CARLTON LIGHT'
===

THE REAL BOSTON HORROR

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (3:34pm)

Leftists are more upset about a Boston bombing victim being photoshopped than they were about the actual bombing.
Well, not really. They’re fake upset, for the purposes of anti-Murdoch outrage. If they were genuinely concerned about the feelings of Boston bombing victims, they might have spoken up about describing terrorism as a mere “irritant”just days after the bombing. Or they might have said something about pathetic attempts to shift blame. But they didn’t, because they are morally useless.
UPDATE. Sydney resident Darryl Mason, author of a Twitter site called The Murdoch Times, claims to have a ”NYC News Corp source.” Sure he does. And he talks to Darryl at 3am, New York time.
===

GENTLE ANSWER TURNS AWAY WRATH

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (3:22pm)

Melbourne frightbat Clementine Ford meets Tennessee’s Dana McLendon, of the Hot/Crazy Matrix:
===

CULTURES COMPARED

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (1:40pm)

In 2012, an Islamic fellow playfully interacts with police during Muslim expressions of hurt feelings over a YouTube video:


Last week, nearly 10,000 Sydney Jews gathered to express their solidarity with Israel. Police had a slightly easier time:


(Via Dan L.)
===

THEY DIDN’T CHECK

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (1:10pm)

Research-averse feminists turned to American Apparel for their Frightbat t-shirt requirements. Here’s the latest on that deeply ethical company: 
American Apparel has been accused of resorting to ‘underage porn’ to advertise its ‘Back to School’ range of miniskirts.
The fashion retailer, renowned for its provocative campaigns, posted an image of a girl wearing one of the skirts on its UK Instagram page yesterday.
In the photo, the model is seen bending over a car in the green plaid skirt - with both her bare legs and part of her buttocks on display.
Social media users were quick to express their disgust over the photo, with many deeming it ‘sexist’ and claiming it objectified women. 
Over to you, Vanessa Badham. When does the boycott of your own shirts begin?
(Via Dianne)
===

ABC FINDS A FRIEND

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (4:18am)

After interviewing official Hamas Jew-hater Osama Hamdan, the ABC now turns to creepy little Zaky Mallah for expert insight on security issues:
===

CAPITA WAPITA

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (4:07am)

Leftists love the per capita argument when it applies to Australia’s emissions of alleged greenhouse gases. But they hate the per capita argument elsewhere: 
Australia is the most generous country in the world when it comes to resettling refugees. Yet refugee advocates keep denying it …
On raw numbers, we rank third in the world. We took 5597 refugees in 2011, under our humanitarian resettlement program, which was the third-highest total, after Canada’s 6827 and the US’s 43,215.
But, when you work that out per capita, Australia is No. 1 … 
Read on.
===

PEAK BEAK

Tim Blair – Friday, August 08, 2014 (2:23am)

Pelican mayhem in Adelaide: 
Adelaide City Council will relocate at least two pelicans involved in a spate of attacks on people eating food on the river banks …
Owner of the river boat Popeye, Tony Shuman, said his staff first raised the issue of the pelicans four months ago with council workers.


“They have been causing lots of grief,” Mr Shuman said.
“I’ve actually seen a child’s head in a pelican’s beak.
“He just looked at the sandwich he was eating and thought I may as well take the lot.” 
I would pay $500 to witness a sandwich battle between Adelaide’s Sarah Hanson-Young and one of her city’s lunch-stealing pelicans. Sarah for the win.
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Israel: Hamas has now broken the fifth ceasefire, too

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (4:04pm)


UPDATE
At least 10 rockets have been fired by Hamas, which clearly wants this war to keep going:
Palestinian militant organisation Hamas has rejected any extension of the three-day ceasefire in Gaza, which expired on Friday morning.
It said that Israel had failed to meet its demands, including the re-opening of Gaza Harbour to shipping. Several rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel as the ceasefire ended at 08:00 local time (05:00 GMT). Israeli forces have not yet responded to the attacks.
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On The Bolt Report, August 10

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (4:00pm)

On Sunday on Channel 10 at 10am and 4pm…
Editorial: We’re muzzled, yet hate-preachers rant
My guest:  Labor immigration spokesman Richard Marles
The panel: Peter Costello and Michael Costa
NewsWatch:  The Australian’s Sharri Markson.  Mike Carlton’s fall, Media Watch’s silence and the perils of embed journalism from Gaza,
Plenty of talk on the Abbott Government’s communications disasters and an even bigger disaster comes home to roost at the White House. Plus the most powerful speech I’ve heard in years.
The videos of the shows appear here.
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Another Liberal takes cash that he shouldn’t

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (9:55am)

If I were a Liberal I’d feel sick that the party has so many MPs in NSW who seem so venal and so stupid:
LIBERAL MP Andrew Cornwell has admitted that being given $10,000 by a property developer for a painting worth far less was an attempt to bribe him, and that he had obtained a personal financial benefit… 
The former NSW government whip told the Independent Commission Against Corruption that Newcastle property developer and Lord Mayor Jeff McCloy had called him out of his veterinary surgery in October 2010 and given him $10,000 in cash… He knew Mr McCloy was a prohibited donor under NSW rules and that the sealed envelope contained cash…
Asked why he hadn’t told the police or just given the money back, he said: “It was just a huge mistake. I just froze. It was just a big mistake.”
He said he handed the money over to his Liberal Party branch treasurer, who in turn donated to the party under the name of a family company.
Mr Cornwell admitted he knew that when another property developer, Hilton Grugeon, paid his wife $10,120 for a painting worth far less, it was an attempt to bribe him, or curry favour…
He agreed with counsel assisting the commission Geoffrey Watson SC that the $10,120 was clearly inappropriate, far more than the real value of the painting, and an attempt to bribe or curry favour with him. He had not banked the cheque for some time, but eventually used it to pay a tax bill. 
Call me naive, but I had no idea we had so many such politicians in this country. I’m not a Liberal, but I now feel sick, too. 
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Why are so many Liberals talking themselves into trouble?

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (9:51am)

Another self-inflicted wound. Why even go on the show in the first place?
THE AMA has attacked comments by Coalition frontbencher Eric Abetz appearing to link abortion with breast cancer. 
However Senator Abetz has today denied drawing such a connection, saying he was cut off during an interview.
Senator Abetz, the leader of the government in the upper house and Employment Minister, appeared on Channel 10 program The Project and was asked if he believed the “factually incorrect’’ statement that abortion leads to breast cancer.
“I think the studies, and I think they date back from the 1950s, assert that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer,’’ he said. The senator then said there were organisations, other than the Australian Medical Association (AMA), that had differing views.
Abetz is also a victim of the witchhunting mentality that demands he endorse a scientific consensus which the media finds useful without being familiar with the evidence on which it is based.
And, please: no, I am not saying abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. 
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Turnbull to the rescue

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (9:49am)

Leaving out Malcolm Turnbull was indeed a mistake:
MALCOLM Turnbull’s “blow up” in cabinet on Tuesday over mandatory retention of telephone and computer records was seen by some in the Coalition as a “hissy fit” and “Malcolm being Malcolm”. Others saw it as “sage advice” that should have been tapped into before the decision was made. 
Some in cabinet circles see his exclusion from the committee decision as technically correct and proper process involving the nat­ional security committee. Others see it as missed opportunity to use the best ministerial skills available born of paranoia.
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Greens like the green folding stuff as much as any party

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (9:41am)

Alistair Coe, the deputy Opposition leader in the ACT, has had enough the Greens pretending they are pure when it comes to money politics. He yesterday read from a Greens fund-raising manual:

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'Greens like the green folding stuff as much as any party'
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The extermination of a people. As we watch

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (8:48am)


Please, please, watch this video. You will not hear a more electrifying and moving speech.  Ask your politician how we can help.
Here is some background:

 Can the Obama administration really keep ignoring the havoc it let loose by pulling out too soon from Iraq?
The U.S. military is considering launching airstrikes and dropping emergency relief supplies into Iraq to aid members of a religious minority driven into the mountains last weekend by Sunni extremist militants who now are imperiling other areas in northern Iraq, U.S. defense officials said… 
[Islamic State] extremists took over Sinjar, a Kurdish-controlled town with a large population of Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking group that follows a pre-Islamic religion.
The advancing militants killed many of the Yazidis who remained in the town, part of a pattern by extremists of stamping out non-Islamic religious observation… United Nations groups have estimated as many as 40,000 Yazidis have fled to the mountains without food or water. Many refugee children are reported to have died, and there is a critical shortage of food and water for the Yazidis hiding in the mountains.
Then there are Iraq’s Christians:
Christians from the town of Qaraqosh were fleeing today after it was taken by fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on Wednesday night… 
Qaraqosh, a Christian village of 50,000 people… had been cut off from water and electricity ever since Isis took Mosul…
On Wednesday night, ... overstretched Kurdish Peshmerga forces left their posts and the town, as well as a string of neighbouring Christian villages, fell to Isis. Under Isis rule, Christians face a stark choice: convert or die. “I was given three days to decide whether to become Muslim, pay jizya – a special tax imposed on Christians under Islamic rule – or leave,” says Khalil Touma, a 43-year-old driver from Mosul… In the last month, every other Iraqi Christian has also left Mosul, which was once home to a Christian population of 60,000.
Will our own church leaders agitate for the thousands of Christians being killed as they agitated for the residents of terrorist-led Gaza? 
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Our police should be their police, too

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (8:36am)

This doesn’t inspire confidence in our Muslim leaders and their commitment to our safety:
AUSTRALIA’S Grand Mufti has called on “all fair-minded Aus­tralians” to support a campaign by Muslims against the federal government’s proposed new suite of anti-terrorism laws… 
The leader of the Australian National Imams Council, Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, last night boycotted an annual Eid dinner in Sydney hosted by the Australian Federal Police, and vowed the council would “vigorously campaign” against the planned anti-terror laws.
The grand mufti was joined yesterday by the Sydney-based Lebanese Muslim Association, which labelled the federal government’s plans to beef up terror laws “deplorable” and “divisive"…
Professor bin Mohamed declined to be interviewed, but his adviser, Samir Benegadi, said the ANIC had “always been outspoken” in condemning jihadism…
Islamic Council of Victoria secretary Ghaith Krayem said he was angered by the suggestion that the Muslim community had not been loud enough in condemning violent images emerging from the Middle East, including the gruesome pictures involving Elomar. “We don’t feel the need any longer to have to go out there and be judged every single time something occurs overseas,” he said.  
Reader Rod:
I had a quick look at the press release section of the Islamic Council of Victoria’s website and Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) website, but couldn’t find anything condemning extremist activity over the last 12 months.
The Government’s decision to placate Muslim leaders by dropping its free speech reforms turns out to have been as successful a sop as introducing a new wealth tax to placate critics of the Budget’s “unfairness”.
UPDATE
Once again, Australia’s most prominent Muslim apologist, ABC presenter Waleed Aly, argues that the problem of extremism lies not in Islam but in the reaction of non-Muslims to it:
By presenting divisive politics as a security concern, the government is implicitly accepting the social dimensions of terrorism. It suggests that terrorism gathers around feelings of alienation and social exclusion; that intelligence flows best from communities that feel valued and included rather than surveilled, suspected and interrogated. This, as it happens, accords with the best research we have on the psychology of radicalisation and effective counter-terrorism policing. 
Such an analysis does not explain why it is only Muslim Australians - not, say, Buddhists, Sikhs or Mormons - who are turning to terrorism and have comprised 21 of the 21 Australians convicted of terrorism-related offenses. The figures alone suggest Islam has some agency in the creation of this unprecedented threat to our security.
So what is that agency? Aly, a lecturer in a university school of terrorism studies, has never to my knowledge said.
Aly’s logic leads inexorably to this strategy for placating Muslim Australians: give in. The fault lies with you, not Islam. Submit. Anything else is to “alienate” and “exclude” - and provoke. And so many in our media class, desperate to wish this problem away and seem morally superior in doing so, are only too eager to hear Aly’s message.
Consider, for example, fellow ABC presenter Virginia Trioli, who once agreed it was “quite a possibility” that the September 11 terrorism attack on the US were actually an inside job, and suggested the “realistic” way to deal with terror chief Osama bin Laden was to consider his complaints:
What if that involved bringing him somewhere, absolutely safely, sitting down with him, treating him like a human being and talking about it, and then Osama bin Laden going home again, not bombing the hell out of bin Laden?
Submit. 
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Unemployment is now 6.4 per cent. So why are we still importing 240,000 people a year?

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (8:17am)

Immigration guru Bob Birrell says our immigration intake is too big and too rorted - and Australians are paying for it with their jobs:
Net Overseas Migration is running at some 240,000 a year. The result is that, as of May 2014, the number of overseas-born persons aged 15 plus in Australia, who arrived since the beginning of 2011, was around 709,000. Most of these people are job hungry. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Labour Force Survey, 380,000 of these recent arrivals were employed as of May 2014. Over the same three years, the net growth in jobs in Australia is estimated by the ABS to have been only 400,000. This means that these recent overseas-born arrivals have taken almost all of the net growth in jobs over this period. 
They are doing so at the expense of Australian-born and overseas-born residents who arrived in Australia before 2011. This is showing up in increased unemployment and decreased participation in the labour force in this resident group. The hardest hit are amongst young people seeking entry-level semi-skilled jobs and recent graduates in a widening range of professions, including nursing, information communication technology and accounting. 
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Meta-data explained

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (8:05am)


Helen Dale explains the Abbott Government’s plan to capture meta-data on your internet use.
UPDATE
No collection of browsing history, says Turnbull:
The federal government has sought to further clarify the government’s intentions on data storage as part of a suite of controversial new national security measures, saying the plans now do not include retaining a person’s website browsing history. 
On Friday, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was left out of the initial decision to proceed with the policy, said: “I just wanted to be very clear that the security agencies are not seeking that the government require telcos to keep a record of your browsing history . . . your web surfing activity, that’s a very important point.” Mr Turnbull said the intelligence agencies simply wanted the telcos to store IP address assigned to individual terminals accessing the internet but stressed that would not include the websites visited. 
(Via Sinclair Davidson.) 
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Dallas Scott on taking milk with coffee

Andrew Bolt August 08 2014 (7:19am)

The politics of race


Dallas Scott, a strong coffee man, deals with this claim:
“I am too Aboriginal.  It’s like Coffee, you don’t stop calling it Coffee just because you put some Milk in it!”
From his brilliant satire: 
Big companies began to commit to drinking a certain percentage of Coffee every day, and so did the Government, Hospitals and Universities.  But things still just weren’t going well for a large percentage of the Coffee, despite all the investment and legislation and money spent.  Coffee when mixed with Milk had found a real niche, and found a far greater acceptance among the Milk.  So accepted in fact, that the numbers of Coffee that were mixed with Milk outnumbered the Coffee almost 5 to 1, and were almost commonplace by the turn of the last century.  Much of the Coffee noticed this, but the mixed beverages had more power and sway than them, and had lobbied to be included and thought of as Coffee the same as them years ago.  Most were fond of mixed beverages, so speaking in a way construed negative to them was something they avoided.  So the Coffee sat and suffered in silence instead, for a few more years.  
And:
Anyone who made any mention of the content of Milk in a mixed beverage was threatened with punishment under the law, and it didn’t take long for a case to be brought before the courts. 
It ended up being one of the most divisive cases for the island in some time.  The accused maintained that he was not a Coffee Snob, but was agitating for change to a system that was leaving large portions of Coffee without any assistance.  A proponent of the “We’re all Beverages, why can’t we get along” camp, he didn’t deny the problems facing Coffee, but he just didn’t think they were being helped by the policy of defining mixed beverages and Coffee as the same.
Read it all. Dallas Scott really is a fine and largely undiscovered writer.
UPDATE
Scott on Adam Goodes - with a little detour to collect Eddie McGuire.
(Thanks to many readers.) 
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Sometimes I feel creationists give God too little credit. - ed
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Billionaire George Soros’ philanthropy is bad news for Israel, according to an in-depth report from the NGO-Monitor watchdog group.
The report listed the many causes in Israel, or pertaining to Israel, that are funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Among the top beneficiaries of OSF funding is Human Rights Watch, which has been criticized for targeting, and falsely libeling, the state of Israel. Another is J Street, which describes itself as “pro-Israel” but has been termed anti-Israel by others for, among other things, welcoming proponents of a boycott on Israel at its national conference and honoring IDF soldiers who refused orders.
Another recipient of OSF funding is the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which, NGO-Monitor reports, is headed by staff who have accused Israel of war crimes and have termed Israel an “apartheid state.”
NGO-Monitor expressed concern primarily over “problematic” OSF recipients in Israel.
Among the Israeli recipients is Adalah, which promotes the so-called “right of return” to Israel, which would allow millions of descendants of Arabs who fled Israel during the War of Independence to claim Israel as their home (without reference to the many more Jews displaced during the fighting and in the years that followed).
OSF also funds Al Haq, an Arab organization based in the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah, north of Jerusalem. NGO-Monitor’s researchers described Al-Haq director Shawan Jabarin as “a human rights campaigner by day and a terrorist by night,” who is among the senior members of the PFLP terrorist group.
The extreme-left Israeli group B’Tselem also receives OSF funds. B’Tselem is notorious for publishing one-sided reports, and for inflating Arab civilian casualty figures. For example, the group included hundreds of Hamas policemen in Gaza as “non-combatants,” and counted Sheikh Ahmed Yassin – then the leader of Hamas – as not a definite combatant.
B’Tselem has listed OSF as a source of support, but OSF has not listed B’Tselem as a recipient, indicating that the grant may have come through an overseas entity.
The report listed several other controversial, far-left Israeli groups that receive direct or indirect OSF Funding, including Rabbis for Human Rights, Ir Amim, Yesh Din and the New Israel Fund.
Overall, information on Soros’ OSF “suggests a deliberate emphasis on influencing the highly complex Israeli-Palestinian arena,” NGO-Monitor concludes.
“There is no comparable focus by Soros family and OSF gifts or his foundation network on promoting democracy or economic development in Palestinian society, nor on surrounding Arab societies,” it added.
NGO-Monitor called on Soros philanthropies to implement transparency regarding overseas grants, and to ensure that beneficiaries “act in strict accordance with universal moral principles by abstaining from the promotion of totalitarian regimes, such as in Iran, as well as from participating in demonization of Israel through the exploitation of the language of human rights.”
The group noted that there is no indication that George Soros himself or his family are hostile to Israel, despite frequent criticism of Israeli policy.
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ABSTRACT: This study examines the role of the Bosnian and other Yugoslav volunteers who fought on the Arab side in the Palestine war, Israel’s War of Independence, in 1948. Previous studies have only mentioned these volunteers in passing but through the use of intelligence reports, archival sources and recently published interviews with surviving participants this article reconstructs their role in the war. The case of the Bosnian participation in the 1948 war is of consequence today because of the frequent use of globalized Islamic imagery to promote the interconnectedness of conflicts throughout the world to Muslim communities and encourage recruitment of Muslims for ’Jihad’ in an international context. The role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husayni, in recruiting local Bosnians to fight in Palestine is an early example of this tendency in modern times.
http://www.rastko.rs/cms/files/books/4f1df5c13f1da
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Vilenberg was 20 when the camp was liberated. Despite his advanced age, he continues to tell his story to youth groups and IDF soldiers in order to pass on testimony from the Holocaust.
He spoke to MK Avi Wortzman (Bayit Yehudi) during the ceremony. “I feel good,” he related. “It’s hard to walk, but I’m still walking.”
“I’m a Polish hero,” he continued. “In Israel I’m not a hero, they have different heroes there,” he added with a cynical smile.
He was briefly thrown off when a foreign journalist approached to ask him what his connection was to Treblinka. “What does that mean, how am I connected to Treblinka?” he asked in Hebrew.
“I woke up in the hotel in the morning and said, ‘Let’s go to Treblinka,’” he told the journalist, who preferred not to ask further questions.
Vilenberg explained how he survived the death camp. “I was here for ten months, and they ordered me to work on the fences. There’s no doubt that the job saved my life,” he said.
His hope, and his parents, gave him strength to continue, he said.
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At a protest in downtown Toronto over the weekend, a speaker identified as Elias Hazineh, made this statement:
We have to give them an ultimatum. You have to leave Jerusalem. You have to leave Palestine … When somebody tries to rob a bank the police get in, they don’t negotiate and we have been negotiating with them for 65 years. We say get out or you are dead. We give them two minutes and then we start shooting and that’s the only way they’ll understand.
As JTA reported yesterday, Hazineh is the former president of Palestine House, which lost Canadian governmental support last year because of what Ottawa called a “pattern of support for extremism.”
Today, the Centre for  Israel and Jewish Affairs, the lobbying arm of the Canadian Jewish federation, announced it was submitting information about the rally to police for review.
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Reuters broke with Big Media’s muddled mantra that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the region’s “core conflict.”

More than 100,000 people have died in the Syrian conflict and violence has flared again in Iraq, with over 1,000 killed there in July alone, many at the hands of al Qaeda. Tensions over Iran’s disputed nuclear program have also risen, while a struggle for power between Islamists and the military is playing out on the streets of predominantly Sunni Egypt.

Arguably, none of these crises will come any closer to being settled should, by some miracle, Israel and the Palestinians finally agree to divide the land where they live . . .

In public, Muslim leaders have traditionally railed against Israel, happy to fan ordinary Arabs’ sincere anger about the plight of the Palestinians – and perhaps deflect criticism of their own failure to make badly needed reforms.

Arab leaders can no longer get away with this.
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If Independent editors refuse to refer to any Palestinian as a terrorist, is it really a surprise that they will try to defend their reference to a murderer as a political prisoner?===

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Yehuda Lev, an iconoclastic journalist and veteran of World War II and Israel’s War of Independence who established a European underground route to smuggle Holocaust survivors to Palestine, has died.
Lev died Aug. 3 in Providence, R.I., following a prolonged illness. He was 86.
Lev became the first associate editor of the newly founded Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in 1986, continuing until 1993. He was best known for his column “A Majority of One,” which went after the Jewish community’s sacred cows.
Lev was born in New York City and raised in Forest Hills, N.Y., as John Lewis Low, the son of a successful businessman and a mother noted as one of the first female labor lawyers.
He dropped out of Cornell University to enlist in the U.S. Army during the latter part of World War II and was discharged in Germany when the war ended.
Moved by the plight of Holocaust survivors languishing in Displaced Persons camps, Lev established a route, mostly by foot, to bring the DPs to Mediterranean ports, where they embarked on “illegal” ships past the British naval blockade into Palestine.
Returning to the United States, Lev earned master’s degrees from the University of Chicago in political science/Arabic studies and Stanford University in communication arts.
He set off in 1947 to Palestine to help the Jews in their struggle to establish an independent state. Changing his name to Yehuda Lev, he joined the Israeli army when war broke out in May 1948.
While on patrol in the Negev, Lev’s jeep was blown up by a land mine that killed everyone else and shattered his feet.
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<The administrator of one of Fatah's official Facebook pages has reposted a series of facts about Fatah terror attacks in which dozens of Israelis were murdered. Fatah presents these terror attacks and killings as heroic achievements.

The celebrated attacks include the most lethal terror attack in Israel's history: a 1978 bus hijacking in which 37 civilians were murdered. Also praised is the attack on the Israeli Olympic team, in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered at the 1972 Olympic Games. Fatah's Facebook page also celebrates a series of terror "firsts" achieved by Fatah: the first suicide bombing against Israel, the first suicide bombing by a woman against Israel, the first missile attack from Gaza against Israel, and others. The page glorifies an attack that it claims killed the "the most" Israelis in a single terror attack: a double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv's central bus station in 2003. Fatah boasted it "killed more than 30 and wounded more than 200" in that one attack.>
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<Former jokes about siccing the IRS on his enemies or using Predator drones to go after suitors of his daughters are as eerie as they are comedic.>
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<Obama’s ‘promises’ to do “something” to Iran’s nuclear program was made to Bibi to force Israel to give in to Abbas. They will soon be exposed for the lies they always were.>
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<Israelis like to celebrate November 29 as a pre-Independence Day holiday, because that was the day when the newly established United Nations voted to approve a Jewish State. I don't consider that act to be all that worthy of our celebration for a couple of reasons.

One is that even though a majority of the members of the time did vote to approve a Jewish State, none of them was willing to do anything at all to ensure that the Jewish State would actually exist or survive the onslaught of Arab armies and terrorists which tried to destroy it.

The second reason is that we did and do not need the approval of international bodies for our legitimacy, our existence. We owe our survival and existence to G-d and only G-d. Our victories go against all logic and rules of warfare.
These two points must be remembered.>
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<Undercover in Regents Park Mosque: A Shocking Expose
A reporter goes undercover in the Regents Park Mosque in England, a mosque whose mission is supposed to be to integrate Muslims into British society. The mosque holds many interfaith events and hosts famous politicians, but the preaching to men and women when no "infidels" are present tell a very different and shocking story.>

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Wednesday that the situation with regard to Iran’s nuclear weapons program is “not getting any better” but is “actually getting worse.”
Speaking to a pro-Israel congressional delegation to Jerusalem led by United States Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Netanyahu said that newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani could not be trusted, despite the fact that he is perceived to be more receptive to negotiations over the country’s nuclear program than his predecessor.
“I know that some place their hopes on Iran’s new president. He knows how to exploit this, and yesterday he called for more talks. Of course he wants more talks.  He wants to talk and talk and talk. And while everybody is busy talking to him, he’ll be busy enriching uranium,” Netanyahu said.
Rouhani, labeled a relative moderate by some commentators when compared to former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insists that he is determined to resolve Iran’s confrontation with the West over its nuclear program. Netanyahu, however, has made it clear he does not believe that Rouhani, who assumed the position of president on Sunday after the eight-year tenure of Ahmadinejad concluded, is serious.
“[Rouhani] says, ‘I talk and I smile and I enrich uranium.’ This is unfortunately going on as we speak. Iran’s work and quest towards the achievement of atomic weapons not only continues, it continues unabated – it’s actually accelerated,” he told the delegation.
The United States has said it would be a “willing partner” if Iran was serious about finding a peaceful resolution to the issue.
Iran’s critics say that it has used previous nuclear negotiations as a delaying tactic while continuing to develop nuclear weapons-related technology. Netanyahu, perhaps the most vocal among them, agreed, telling the delegation, “Iran is determined to get the bomb and we must be even more determined to prevent them from getting it.”
Watch a video of the Prime Minister’s comments below.
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Pepsi apparently didn't mind their association with Hamas terrorist leaders:

Further research showed that the sponsorships were done by a local Gaza bottling company, Yazegi, that apparently has permission to use the Pepsi logo when sponsoring sporting events and the like.

Pepsi never responded to inquiries about their public association with Hamas.

Now, this year, Gaza is again seeing the "Pepsi Cup" football championship during Ramadan. The Yarmouk Stadium that hosts the tournament was bombed by Israel during Pillar of Defense because it was used as a launch site for terror rockets aimed at Israeli civilians, and Yazegi helped repair or cover up the damage that is still there.>===
Marriage can't be part time, even though the journalist tries to sell it that way. - ed

'EVERYONE always says to me, how can you do that? And I just say, 'I can and I have and that's my life.'
Meet Justin, 39, a Victorian man who is married to Eva, a freelance writer and sex worker.
The couple first met in high school, have now been married eight years and are raising their nine-year-old daughter.
Justin told news.com.au that Eva's choice of career has never bothered him.
"The main reason is that I'd love to be a sex worker myself but because I'm not gay there's just no market for it. And why wouldn't I want to do it? Who wouldn't want to get paid for doing that - having sex," he said.
Not surprisingly, Justin and Eva's marriage arrangement comes with several caveats - for a start they've found it necessary to separate love and sex.
"Love is emotional and sex is just physical. It's like playing squash or something. You can do that with anyone, sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not," he said.
The couple have what they call an 'open relationship', meaning Justin is also free to pursue sex outside the marriage.
"I don't have as many opportunities as Eva to do this but when I do we have an agreement that we can just go for it. The idea is that you don't miss out on anything great," he said.
Justin also said the couple regularly host swing parties and "play with friends".
"I do think men can probably do the whole separation thing a bit easier than women," he said.
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It angers me that Israel has been sold down the river by all parties and groups in politics. So that the word 'peace' becomes a bad joke at which a decent person might spit. But consider that when GOP has a President they must be balanced and not take sides, but when Dem's have the Presidency then it is said to be best for peace that the existence of Israel be threatened. - ed

Sometimes, tragedy and irony may arrive together. Now that it is reportedly back “on track,” the so-called Middle East Peace Process threatens Israel with additional dismemberment, and eventual disappearance.
Aware of these intolerable prospects, thousands of Israelis who are opposed to any further existential surrenders may soon prepare for an appropriate response to “Palestine.” Whatever its particular shape and expression, this "post-peace" response to a new Arab state, one that would be carved out of Israel's own still-living body, may take some recognizable form of civil disobedience.
To be sure, the Netanyahu Government, inexplicably confident in Palestinian compliance with pre-state agreements on “demilitarization,” will object strongly to any such tactics. Nonetheless, civil disobedience has a long and distinguished tradition in jurisprudence and democratic theory.  In part, as the following argument will make clear, certain roots of this tradition actually lie in Jewish Law.
From its  beginnings, Jewish law has been viewed as a manifestation of God's will.  Biblically, the law is referred to as the "word of God,” never of humankind.  God, therefore, is the sole authentic legislator, and righteousness necessarily lies in observance of His law.  Moreover, for ancient Israel as well as for the ancient Greeks, the absence of righteousness is expected to place at risk the lives and fortunes of the entire community.
In ancient Israel, law was always regarded as the revealed will of God.  All transgressions of the law were consequently offenses against God.  The modern idea that human legislators might somehow make law independently of God's will would have been incomprehensible.
As God can be the only true legislator, the sole function of human authorities was to discover the extant law, and thereafter to ensure its proper application.  According to the Talmud, “Whatever a competent scholar will yet derive from the Law, it was already given to Moses on Mount Sinai."[1]
In the Jewish tradition, the principle of a Higher Law is not only well-established; it remains the core foundation of all legal order.  Wherever the law of the state stands in marked contrast to this principle, it is null and void.  In certain circumstances, such contrast positively mandates opposition to the law of the state.  Here, what is generally known as "civil disobedience" is not only lawful, but genuinely law-enforcing.
Exactly what sorts of circumstances are we describing?  Above all others, they are circumstances that place at grave risk the very survival of the state.  In such circumstances, which were already defined in the widely-disseminated 1995 Halakhic Opinion, issued by Prominent Rabbis in Eretz Yisroel Concerning Territorial Compromise,[2]  the matter is one of Pikuach Nefesh (life-threatening situation, a halakhic principle, ed.), and demands apt forms of resistance.
Israel, it was duly recognized, cannot endure strategically without Judea, Samaria and the Golan.  As the Torah is a "Toras Chaim," a Torah of life, Jewish authorities in theState of Israel are "forbidden, under any circumstance," to transfer Jewish land to still openly-genocidal Arab authorities.
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Lol .. woof .. meow .. in some ways, I am such a robot .. ed

Researchers at Toshiba’s Akimu Robotic Research Institute were thrilled ten months ago when they successfully programmed Kenji, a third generation humanoid robot, to convincingly emulate certain human emotions. At the time, they even claimed that Kenji was capable of the robot equivalent of love. Now, however, they fear that his programming has taken an extreme turn for the worst.
“Initially, we were thrilled to see a bit of our soul come alive in this so called ‘machine,’” said Dr. Akito Takahashi, the principal investigator on the project. “This was really the final step for us in one of the fundamentals of the singularity.
Kenji was part of an experiment involving several robots loaded with custom software designed to let them react emotionally to external stimuli. After some limited environmental conditioning, Kenji first demonstrated love by bonding with a a stuffed doll in his enclosure, which he would embrace for hours at a time. He would then make simple, but insistent, inquiries about the doll if it were out of sight. Researchers attributed this behavior to his programmed qualities of devotion and empathy and called the experiment a success.
What they didn’t count on were the effects of several months of self-iteration within the complex machine-learning code which gave Kenji his initial tenderness. As of last week, Kenji’s love for the doll, and indeed anybody he sets his ‘eyes’ on, is so intense that Dr. Takahashi and his team now fear to show him to outsiders.
The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.
“Despite our initial enthusiasm, it has become clear that Kenji’s impulses and behavior are not entirely rational or genuine,” conceded Dr. Takahashi.
Ever since that incident, each time Kenji is re-activated, he instantaneously bonds with the first technician to meet his gaze and rushes to embrace them with his two 100kg hydraulic arms. It doesn’t help that Kenji uses only pre-recorded dog and cat noises to communicate and is able to vocalize his love through a 20 watt speaker in his chest.
Dr. Takahashi admits that they will more than likely have to decommission Kenji permanently, but he’s optimistic about one day succeeding where Kenji failed.
“This is only a minor setback. I have full faith that we will one day live side by side with, and eventually love and be loved by, robots,” he said.
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Unbelievable facts
Scientists have created a scientific version of marijuana called ‘Dimethylheptylpyran’. When smoked, it’ll keep you high for at least 2 days.
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I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward. -Charlotte Bronte
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How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a weary world. - William Shakespeare
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Palestine never existed
Attacking babies by Palestinians

This baby is an Israel, Jewish, baby girl, by the name of Na'ama, that was stoned by a Palestinian in the face! But, there's nothing on the Israeli leftist media, and the international media. SEE what the Palestinians are doing, but suddenly the whole world is blind!

If it was a Palestinian person (NOT EVEN A BABY!), the whole world will rumble in screams to stop the Israeli occupation, and the apartheid, together with the Israeli Leftist Media such as Channel 2, Channel 10, Channel 1 etc. Immediatly the UN would have called on sanctions towards Israel RIGHT WAY!

But, this baby is not Palestinian, it's a Jewish baby, that didn't do nothing wrong. And yet, no one is doing anything. NO ONE is doing anything to stop the Palestinian mosters! And why? Well because of two reasons:
1. The most common - Everyone is buying the Palestinian lies, that the Israelis are the problem.
2. The real reason that everyone refuse to accept - ANTI-SEMITSM. Because of the Anti-Semtism towards Israel, and the interior treason in the country by the hands of the Leftist activists and Media, no one will deal with it.

I'm stating now what is obvious - All the world nations are hypocrits. Including the UN.

The baby girl, Na'ama, only 1.5 years old, survived, with injuries on her nose and face. She will recover. Her face will recover. But the wound in the new family, will never recover.
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Allyson Christy
"I’m a 23-year-old psychology student from Sydney and in June this year, I was subjected to a horrific torrent of abusive tweets from fans of touring American rapper Tyler Okonma. I challenged Okonma’s lyrics which encourage rape and violence against women by vocally supporting a petition on change.org that suggested he shouldn’t be playing all-age shows.

At Tyler’s concert in Sydney the next day, he told his fans he hoped my children got STDs, and “dedicated” songs to me that included lyrics like “punch a bitch in her mouth just for talkin' shit”." - Talitha Stone

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/us-rapper-tyler-the-creator-unleashes-a-torrent-of-hate-on-sydney-activist-20130806-2rbbf.html
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TWO QLD DISASTERS RETURN... with no guarantee of success

So, not only do we need to endure the return of a walking wanker called Kev, we are now faced with an incompetent called Pete.

Peter Beattie’s elevation to ALP candidate in the seat of Forde is yet another example of Labor’s lack of democracy.

It’s still very much the old ALP.

Branch pre-selection means little in Labor Party circles and the very injustices that Uncle Kev claims to have reformed he now heralds with the dumping of the properly pre-selected candidate, Des Hardman, in favour of Peter Beattie.

Julia Gillard did the same with Crossin yet Tony Abbott can’t, and won’t, do the same with the hapless Diaz. Is it the Libs who run the more democratic party? Seems so.

Beattie, a self-confessed media tart, will campaign with old enemy Rudd with neither showing any sign of embarrassment.

Yet both are returning to the hustings with a record of destruction any arsonist would be proud of.

Forde is no easy target for Beattie, it’s a marginal semi-rural seat and Queenslanders remember him well. He handed Anna Bligh a poison chalice of all his own work.

Old ALP failures mostly have opted for retirement and now a retiree wants to rejoin the fray. Golly!

Oh well, Rudd and Beattie will make a lovely couple holding hands, pretending they like each, while ignoring their previous disastrous tenures.

If both are returned, a new set of kitchen knives will be in demand.

The old set is just about worn out!
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community channel
As I get older my pms gets worse. I just cried at a picture of cats that said "friendship" underneath. This is it guys. I'm losing my mind.
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J.John
  • When we stop going to church and start being the church, something wonderful happens.
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Pastor Rick Warren
I trust Him when my heart is weak
I trust Him when I cannot speak
I trust His plan is good and best 
By trusting Him I find my rest
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Pastor Rick Warren
Trusting God completely in radical abandonment,even when it doesn't make sense, is what turns ordinary people into saints.
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Pastor Rick Warren
Doing what's right even though it costs you and no one will ever know about it, is integrity.
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August 8: Father's Day in Taiwan
LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin
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“For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; it is he who will save us.” Isaiah 33:22 NIV
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon


Morning


"The upright love thee"
Song of Solomon 1:4
Believers love Jesus with a deeper affection than they dare to give to any other being. They would sooner lose father and mother than part with Christ. They hold all earthly comforts with a loose hand, but they carry him fast locked in their bosoms. They voluntarily deny themselves for his sake, but they are not to be driven to deny him. It is scant love which the fire of persecution can dry up; the true believer's love is a deeper stream than this. Men have laboured to divide the faithful from their Master, but their attempts have been fruitless in every age. Neither crowns of honour, now frowns of anger, have untied this more than Gordian knot. This is no every-day attachment which the world's power may at length dissolve. Neither man nor devil have found a key which opens this lock. Never has the craft of Satan been more at fault than when he has exercised it in seeking to rend in sunder this union of two divinely welded hearts. It is written, and nothing can blot out the sentence, "The upright love thee." The intensity of the love of the upright, however, is not so much to be judged by what it appears as by what the upright long for. It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough. Would that our hearts were capable of holding more, and reaching further. Like Samuel Rutherford, we sigh and cry, "Oh, for as much love as would go round about the earth, and over heaven--yea, the heaven of heavens, and ten thousand worlds--that I might let all out upon fair, fair, only fair Christ." Alas! our longest reach is but a span of love, and our affection is but as a drop of a bucket compared with his deserts. Measure our love by our intentions, and it is high indeed; 'tis thus, we trust, our Lord doth judge of it. Oh, that we could give all the love in all hearts in one great mass, a gathering together of all loves to him who is altogether lovely!

Evening


"Satan hindered us."
1 Thessalonians 2:18

Since the first hour in which goodness came into conflict with evil, it has never ceased to be true in spiritual experience, that Satan hinders us. From all points of the compass, all along the line of battle, in the vanguard and in the rear, at the dawn of day and in the midnight hour, Satan hinders us. If we toil in the field, he seeks to break the ploughshare; if we build the wall, he labours to cast down the stones; if we would serve God in suffering or in conflict--everywhere Satan hinders us. He hinders us when we are first coming to Jesus Christ. Fierce conflicts we had with Satan when we first looked to the cross and lived. Now that we are saved, he endeavours to hinder the completeness of our personal character. You may be congratulating yourself, "I have hitherto walked consistently; no man can challenge my integrity." Beware of boasting, for your virtue will yet be tried; Satan will direct his engines against that very virtue for which you are the most famous. If you have been hitherto a firm believer, your faith will ere long be attacked; if you have been meek as Moses, expect to be tempted to speak unadvisedly with your lips. The birds will peck at your ripest fruit, and the wild boar will dash his tusks at your choicest vines. Satan is sure to hinder us when we are earnest in prayer. He checks our importunity, and weakens our faith in order that, if possible, we may miss the blessing. Nor is Satan less vigilant in obstructing Christian effort. There was never a revival of religion without a revival of his opposition. As soon as Ezra and Nehemiah begin to labour, Sanballat and Tobiah are stirred up to hinder them. What then? We are not alarmed because Satan hindereth us, for it is a proof that we are on the Lord's side, and are doing the Lord's work, and in his strength we shall win the victory, and triumph over our adversary.

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Today's reading: Psalm 72-73, Romans 9:1-15 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Psalm 72-73

Of Solomon.
1 Endow the king with your justice, O God,
the royal son with your righteousness.
2 May he judge your people in righteousness,
your afflicted ones with justice.

3 May the mountains bring prosperity to the people,
the hills the fruit of righteousness.
4 May he defend the afflicted among the people
and save the children of the needy;
may he crush the oppressor.
5 May he endure as long as the sun,
as long as the moon, through all generations.
6 May he be like rain falling on a mown field,
like showers watering the earth.
7 In his days may the righteous flourish
and prosperity abound till the moon is no more....


Today's New Testament reading: Romans 9:1-15

Paul's Anguish Over Israel
1 I speak the truth in Christ-I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit- 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, 4 the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. 5Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.
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