Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Tue Aug 28th Todays News

Scott Morrison deserves a chance as PM. Media are going over old history to see if they can overturn him. It is almost as if Turnbull had kept a dirt file and now he doesn't need it he can release it. One issue is the case of Michael Towke, who had been endorsed as candidate in ScoMo's seat before ScoMo was in parliament. The seat had belonged to Bruce Baird and Towke got preselected with over ten times ScoMo's votes. But after a mud fight, Towke was dis-endorsed. ScoMo, who had been party director in NSW then got the seat. Sam Dastyari claims that ScoMo supporters tasked ALP for dirt as Towke had come from ALP, who have a long history of taking ethnic minorities for granted. It was a blue ribbon seat and Towke had a low profile and sued successfully for defamation. Preselections get ugly. ScoMo stopped the boats and successfully held the reigns of treasurer as Turnbull made his life difficult. Morrison can cut through issues to get things done. He is engaged in fighting the culture wars which need to be fought to put forward a conservative view.

Tony Abbott has been engaged to be special envoy on indigenous affairs. He has an excellent track record already.

Mary E White may have been killed by her daughter. The environmental activist may have had dementia her entire career, but the 92 year old was allegedly killed by her 66 yo daughter giving her too many drugs after dementia advanced. This sparks a euthanasia debate for NYT.

Donald Trump has taken Google to task for skewed search results. Google's defence when Bush supporters questioned their results a decade ago was that the algorithms were apolitical. Apparently left wing followers are lying, rude and vicious, and that skews the search results.

From my article on Quora
How would you improve the K1–12 math curriculum?

In Australia, math and related numeracy is well covered by curriculum, but not well taught. We fail to appropriately remediate. We have students who complete year 6 Primary School with some very low standards. We try to address those, when learning difficulties are present, but not those who don’t have learning difficulties, but have missed important cues.

Middle ability kids in high school have often missed learning cues and so, keep missing more. Their learning becomes dysfunctional and they tend to perform and behave badly. But when their needs are met, and they can compete with the highest, they can become very enthusiastic, and sometimes show off their new skills to low ability students. This lifts whole school performance.

Remediation is free, but teachers often cannot pursue it because of the crowded curriculum. Instead of spending big dollars on gender stereotyping, teachers could identify (NAPLAN) and address middle ability students with needs.

There are students who will not be helped, and whose parents are difficult. That is ok, they don’t need to divert time and energy to address that. There are students who would like help if they could be given it. Perhaps their parents cannot afford tutoring. Remediation programs need to be in place in almost every high school. The suggestion is to identify kids in year 8 and year 10 needing remediation in the middle bands. Get permission from parents to withdraw the kids for one period a week with material that addresses their needs. Test to find attainment. Linked with online material and enrichment. This could be an excellent no cost program for any state wanting to improve education in schools.
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A daily column on what the ALP have as a policy, supported by a local member, and how it has 'helped' the local community. I'll stop if I cannot identify a policy. Feel free to make suggestions. Contact me on FB, not twitter. I have twitter, but never look at it.

Gabrielle Williams was appointed Parliamentary Secretary for Carers and Volunteers, working with the Minister for Housing, Disability and Ageing and the Minister for Families and Children. Williams was given those titles when elected in 2014. It is difficult to find what value she has been to Dandenong, but clearly the ALP see her as the future. ALP are spending $11 billion on a shallow rail tunnel to the CBD of Melbourne from Dandenong's direction. It is supposed to save on travel times by as much as 25 minutes to St Kilda Rd and 15 minutes to Parkville. Journey planner on PTV shows it takes an hour and 24 minutes from my home to Parkville, and an hour and eight minutes to St Kilda Rd right now. So the time savings seem inexplicable unless the Parkville stop will not be on the city line. Because the dig is shallow a lot of disruption will be experienced related to the dig for the next seven years. Don't expect an ALP plan to be on budget. Williams, why not dig deeper? It will cost a little more, but won't impede CBD activity for eight years. Trees can remain in place. Trams won't be stopped, nor busses redirected. I'd be interested to hear from anyone on this issue. Will it improve your daily journey to work or school?

As part of the November 24th Vic election campaign I have a petition I want to bring before the Opposition Leader Matthew Guy. I believe Matthew will be the next premier of Victoria and so I am petitioning him as I raise the issues of Employment, Crime and Education in Dandenong. I am also seeking money for my campaign. I don't have party resources, and so my campaign is on foot, and on the internet. Any money I receive that is not spent on the campaign will go to Grow 4 Life. I am asking questions like "What do you love about Dandenong?" and "If you could change something in Dandenong to make it better, what would it be?" I'm not limiting the questions to state issues. I'm happy to discuss anything, and get things done.
I am a decent man and don't care for the abuse given me. I created a video raising awareness of anti police feeling among western communities. I chose the senseless killing of Nicola Cotton, a Louisiana policewoman who joined post Katrina, to highlight the issue. I did this in order to get an income after having been illegally blacklisted from work in NSW for being a whistleblower. I have not done anything wrong. Local council appointees refused to endorse my work, so I did it for free. Youtube's Adsence refused to allow me to profit from their marketing it. Meanwhile, I am hostage to abysmal political leadership and hopeless journalists. My shopfront has opened on Facebook.

Here is a video I made Blue Skies Project 

This is my Final Cut attempt
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"Blue Skies" is a popular song written by Irving Berlin in 1926.
The song was composed in 1926 as a last-minute addition to the Rodgers and Hart musical Betsy. Although the show only ran for 39 performances, "Blue Skies" was an instant success, with audiences on opening night demanding 24 encores of the piece from star Belle Baker. During the final repetition, Ms. Baker forgot her lyrics, prompting Berlin to sing them from his seat in the front row.
In 1927, the music was published and Ben Selvin's recorded version was a #1 hit. That same year, it became one of the first songs to be featured in a talkie, when Al Jolson performed it in The Jazz Singer. Another version of the song was recorded by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra in 1935 [Victor Scroll 25136]. 1946 was also a notable year for the song, with a Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire film taking its title, and two recorded versions by Count Basie and Benny Goodman reaching #8 and #9 on the pop charts, respectively. Crossing genres, Willie Nelson's recording of "Blue Skies" was a #1 country music hit in 1978. It was a major western swing and country standard already in 1939, by Moon Mullican, and in 1962 by Jim Reeves.
"Blue Skies" is one of many popular songs whose lyrics use a "Bluebird of happiness" as a symbol of cheer: "Bluebirds singing a song -- Nothing but bluebirds all day long."


=== from 2017 ===
Some things should not happen, but they do. A UK journalist has claimed Horatio Nelson was a racist bigot based on his toeing a Whig Party line when he was in the house of Lords. Except she is wrong about Nelson's position, which she infers entirely from his position of the side she is a partisan supporter of. Slavery is something that British Labor and US Democrats are connected to by their partisan forebears. Nelson only chose to be a Whig so the press of the day would favourably report him. And they did. In fact, Nelson preferred British sea men on his ships as he bolstered professionalism among his troops. Nelson did not like the shanghai method of employing drunks on his vessels. Further, in opposing pirate slavers vessels which transported sugar from the West Indies, Nelson was relegated for decades from active naval duty. The merchants he offended were well connected in London. 

Revisionist historians are allowed to say what they say, but they should defend it too. A lot of Australian revisionist historians have made claims used by people like Bill Shorten, to claim that there was a stolen generation and atrocities committed by government policy against Australian Aboriginals. Those claims have been acted on by activists (including politicians) to desecrate landmarks, including statues of Captain Cook and Lachlan Macquarie. But the truth is, while some instances of atrocities had occurred, there was no stolen generation and no government policy to harm Aboriginal peoples. Melbourne Radio station 3AW invited a revisionist historian who opposed the activist outrage while still endorsing the apology underpinning the ideological position which is wrong. The Rudd apology, by limiting the intervention, has harmed Aboriginal peoples. The racist position of those patronising Aboriginal peoples is doing what those people claimed happened historically. And by not reporting the truth, 3AW is not being balanced. 

On the issue of Gay marriage, conservatives are supporting a yes vote. Conservatives are also supporting a 'no' vote. However, media are being intellectually dishonest by not reporting on the 'no' case. And the bullying of people into voting 'yes' without reporting a 'no' case is wrong. My position is to vote 'no' because protections for churches are not being offered, but are required for those acting on faith. Civil Unions for gays are legal. Gay marriage is recognised in Australia. The only thing that will be changed is activists could demand to be married in a church which would not endorse it on faith grounds. And that is wrong. The result could mean that churches might choose not to marry anyone. 























=== from 2016 === 
The Northern territory Win for the ALP is so one sided that it looks likely a coalition of independents will be needed to form an opposition. Country Liberal Party, the natural conservative force, is reduced to one, possibly two seats. Six seats are in doubt. The ALP have fifteen definite. CLP 1 seat. Others have three seats. As a rule of thumb, any independent favours the ALP. Of great concern is the fact the ALP have no policy, no plans. They can tax and spend at will. They can raid savings and stifle investigation into any rorts. Stay tuned for stagnation and pork barrels in the Northern Territory. But the sad fact is that it was hard to support the CLP. PM Turnbull distanced himself from them, but he undermined them too when he was campaigning to be PM. Turnbull does not know how to build conservative support. Maybe the ALP will lead a sober responsible government. That can happen. This time last year, the Abbott government was building strong foundations from the support base undermined by Turnbull. It had been so effective, that Turnbull panicked and led a coup early, before the Hastie By Election. Had Hastie won well before the coup, 55 bed wetters might not have trashed PM Abbott. 

For some, at the moment, the Sex Party has more credibility.  
=== from 2015 ===
More illegal immigrants die in Europe thanks to compassionate policy. Strong border protection with a healthy immigration policy accepting refugees is the only way forward, and that is another reason why the Abbott Government deserves support. 

ALP is accepting free legal work. But is it free? How often is it declared? How much is it worth? It is corrupt, and how will the corruption be addressed? Dan Andrews' socialist Victorian government protects the corrupt. ALP and Greens have sold out mine workers in Newcastle. The council is removing investment in banks that hold funds in fossil fuel projects. Bob Hawke tells ALP to support free trade with China. ALP fails to take ISIL seriously. That is a security concern for Australia. 

Joe Hockey has gone wandering away from treasurer work to take an advocates position for a group advocating Australia become a Republic. Were Joe to find the missing $600 billion the ALP lost in government then many would see it as gain to change the name. 

Gay propaganda film has no place in schools. One may have no problem with children being given a view into gay issues. But they should not be subject to the lies and inflations without critical thinking implicit to the film. Gillard back flip on public trust. She once wanted a public vote on Gay Marriage. Now she opposes it. 

Why are leftists preaching tolerance, intolerant? Only killers that are white are racist? 

Science communicator Robyn Williams wonders why people don't trust the science he betrayed in embracing Anthropogenic Global Warming Hysteria.
From 2014
It was in 1927 when on this day five Canadian women petitioned the Supreme Court of Canada as to whether the word 'persons' used in section 24 of the British North America Act 1867, included females. The supreme court deliberated and decided it did not. Constitutions are for states to determine their behaviour and have no business in the issue of gender and race. Unless some racist bigot wants to include gender or race issues, in which case the state may not act rationally. It is bizarre how people want the comfort of the state to accept aspects of their lives. Is their married partner acceptable to the state? Is their car acceptable to the state? Is their house situated correctly for the state? There are things a state has to do, but the level of intrusion is very high in daily lives. Take an example of a female dentist in Iraq whose town was over run by the Islamo Fascist state of ISIS and, because she had treated men in her occupation, she was executed. The state did not approve. Meanwhile, there are some in Australia who want to change the constitution to include race. Once that change is achieved, how will the state behave? Maybe it is better that the behaviours of the state is left, in the constitution, to address how the Federal and State governments  behave with each other, and not to individuals. And, also,the concept of Terra Nullius is not part of the constitution, although bigots may believe they see it. 

People tire of anti Islam sentiment, so the story of an Islamo fascist serial killer rampaging through the US might have gone unnoticed as press decided there was no human interest angle. Ali Muhammad Brown killed a gay couple in Seattle after setting up a meeting on a dating site. Apparently that will stop Obama from bombing somebody. Or something. One thing that isn't happening is Islamic leaders showing leadership by denouncing terrorism. Some have said in defence of those leaders that that would achieve nothing worthwhile. However, leadership is not about doing what is popular. A competent leader would speak out in support of what decent people would do. One is reminded of how no ALP member of a recent minority government was capable of taking a stand against corruption, so clearly the bottom line has been met and we see the natural constituents of the ALP. 

PUP might implode, or it might not. Maybe the issue of race will become an issue of respect. Palmer recently apologised for calling Chinese people bad names. Rudd never apologised for calling them rat fuckers. Now Dio Wang, WA PUP senator might not accept the irrational views of his leader. Or he might. There is no evidence Palmer is a rat, but he isn't a good person by his own admissions. Meanwhile some are saying Lambie is ambitious and might leave the pack. But none of them are saying they will vote sensibly on legislation. Big questions need to be asked regarding judicial bias. A high level union rep asked that her prosecutor be replaced on the grounds she had had a short affair with him over twenty years ago. He should have stepped aside before she had to declare it. But he has not stepped aside even so. The ICAC are still focused on smearing Liberals without addressing actual corruption, almost daring the government to disband them because they don't want to have to investigate the ALP. 
Historical perspective on this day
475 – The Roman general Orestes forces western Roman Emperor Julius Nepos to flee his capital city, Ravenna.
489 – Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths defeats Odoacer at the Battle of Isonzo, forcing his way into Italy.
632 – Fatimah, daughter of the Islamic prophet Muhammad had died, with her cause of death being a controversial topic among the Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims.
663 – Silla–Tang armies crush the Baekje restoration attempt and force Yamato Japanto withdraw from Korea in the Battle of Baekgang.

1189 – Third Crusade: The Crusaders begin the Siege of Acre under Guy of Lusignan.
1521 – The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade.
1524 – The Kaqchikel Maya rebel against their former Spanish allies during the Spanish conquest of Guatemala.
1542 – Turkish–Portuguese War (1538–57): Battle of Wofla: The Portuguese are scattered, their leader Christovão da Gama is captured and later executed.
1565 – Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sights land near St. Augustine, Florida and founds the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in the continental United States.

1609 – Henry Hudson discovers Delaware Bay.
1619 – Election of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor.
1640 – Second Bishop's War: King Charles I's English army loses to a Scottish Covenanter force at the Battle of Newburn.
1648 – The Siege of Colchester ends when Royalists Forces surrender to the Parliamentary Forces after eleven weeks, during the Second English Civil War.
1709 – Meidingnu Pamheiba is crowned King of Manipur.
1789 – William Herschel discovers a new moon of Saturn: Enceladus.

1810 – Battle of Grand Port: The French accept the surrender of a British Navyfleet.
1830 – The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's new Tom Thumb steam locomotive races a horse-drawn car, presaging steam's role in US railroads.
1833 – The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 receives royal assent, abolishing slavery through most of the British Empire.
1845 – The first issue of Scientific American magazine is published.
1849 – After a month-long siege, Venice, which had declared itself independent as the Republic of San Marco, surrenders to Austria.

1859 – The Carrington event is the strongest geomagnetic storm on record to strike the Earth. Electrical telegraph service is widely disrupted.
1861 – American Civil War: Union forces attack Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in the Battle of Hatteras Inlet Batteries which lasts for two days.
1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Second Manassas. The battle ends on August 30.
1867 – The United States takes possession of the (at this point unoccupied) Midway Atoll.
1879 – Cetshwayo, last king of the Zulus, is captured by the British.
1898 – Caleb Bradham's beverage "Brad's Drink" is renamed "Pepsi-Cola".

1901 – Silliman University is founded in the Philippines. It is the first American private school in the country.
1909 – A group of mid-level Greek Army officers launches the Goudi coup, seeking wide-ranging reforms.
1913 – Queen Wilhelmina opens the Peace Palace in The Hague.
1914 – World War I: The Royal Navy defeats the German fleet in the Battle of Heligoland Bight.
1914 – World War I: German troops take the city of Namur in Belgium.
1916 – World War I: Germany declares war on Romania.
1916 – World War I: Italy declares war on Germany.
1917 – Ten Suffragettes are arrested while picketing the White House.
1924 – The Georgian opposition stages the August Uprising against the Soviet Union.
1931 – France and the Soviet Union sign a treaty of non-aggression.
1937 – Toyota Motors becomes an independent company.

1943 – Denmark in World War II: German authorities demand that Danish authorities crack down on acts of resistance. The next day, martial law is imposed on Denmark.
1944 – World War II: Marseille and Toulon are liberated.
1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent Civil Rights Movement.
1957 – U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond begins a filibuster to prevent the Senate from voting on Civil Rights Act of 1957; he stopped speaking 24 hours and 18 minutes later, the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single Senator.

1963 – March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech
1964 – The Philadelphia race riot begins.
1968 – Rioting takes place in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, triggering a brutal police crackdown.
1988 – Ramstein air show disaster: Three aircraft of the Frecce Tricoloridemonstration team collide and the wreckage falls into the crowd. Seventy-five are killed and 346 seriously injured.

1990 – Iraq declares Kuwait to be its newest province.
1990 – An F5 tornado strikes the Illinois cities of Plainfield and Joliet, killing 29 people.
1993 – The Galileo spacecraft discovers a moon, later named Dactyl, around 243 Ida, the first known asteroid moon.
1998 – Pakistan's National Assembly passes a constitutional amendment to make the "Qur'an and Sunnah" the "supreme law" but the bill is defeated in the Senate.
1998 – Second Congo War: Loyalist troops backed by Angolan and Zimbabweanforces repulse the RCD and Rwandan offensive on Kinshasa.
=== Publishing News ===
This column welcomes feedback and criticism. The column is not made up but based on the days events and articles which are then placed in the feed. So they may not have an apparent cohesion they would have had were they made up.
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I am 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
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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 Shelly Hargis, Tristan Anderson and Farina Keo. Born on the same day, across the years, along with Emperor Go-Reizei of Japan (1025), George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749), John Betjeman (1906), Jack Vance (1916), LeAnn Rimes (1982) and Quvenzhané Wallis (2003). On your day, Feast of the Assumption (Julian calendar); Krishna Janmashtami (Hinduism, 2013)

1640 – Bishops' Wars: Scottish Covenanter forces led by Alexander Leslie defeated the English army near Newburn, England.
1850 – German composer Richard Wagner's romantic opera Lohengrin, containing the Bridal Chorus, was first performed under the direction of Franz Liszt in Weimar, present-day Germany.
1937 – Toyota Motors, now Japan's largest automobile manufacturer, was spun off from Toyota Industries as an independent company.
1963 – During a large political rally in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, describing his desire for a future where blacks and whites would coexist harmoniously as equals.
1973 – Swedish police used gas bombs to end a seven-day hostage situation in Stockholm; during the incident the hostages had bonded with their captors, giving rise to the term "Stockholm syndrome". Scotland is safe, for now. Wagner gave a chorus for Brides. Toyota was born in a barn. The greatest speech of hope for change was given in '63, made a nightmare by Obama. Lock your friends and yourself away from the critics, and give in to Stockholm syndrome. Live the dream.
Deaths
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Tim Blair

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Andrew Bolt

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Hollow PM needs to grow a spine to lead

Piers Akerman – Saturday, August 27, 2016 (11:15pm)

TWO months after the federal election and with parliament to sit this week, Malcolm Turnbull shows no sign of confidence in his leadership. 
 Continue reading 'Hollow PM needs to grow a spine to lead'
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No leadership, no hope

Andrew Bolt August 28 2016 (9:57am)

Terry McCrann on a crippling lack of leadership - and a rejectionist Senate:
WE are now almost two months since the election and parliament finally starts sitting next week. 
More striking, thanks to the Prime Minister’s “inspired” idea of forcing a double dissolution and the longest election campaign in decades, government was “on hold” for fully two months before that… We have had four months essentially without a functioning government.
That’s more than 10 per cent of the entire life of a government’s normal full three-year term…
Turnbull has done a couple of things; like having an overnight panic and calling a royal commission on the back of a dodgy ABC report. And then stuffing even that up… (T)he Treasurer did knock back the attempt by Chinese and Hong Kong companies to buy the NSW power grid. It might have saved the nation from a serious (undisclosed) security threat, but it also threw NSW’s infrastructure and budget plans into disarray.
The central problem, though, is does anybody believe the government at least “has a plan”?… “(A) plan” would probably be pointless anyway. There’s precious little chance of getting anything much — and certainly anything remotely like tough and painful reform — through the Senate.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
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The invasion of Germany continues: 250,000 more

Andrew Bolt August 28 2016 (9:38am)

More than a million last year, and now this:
The head of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has told a German newspaper he expects a maximum of 300,000 refugees to arrive in Germany this year. 
“We’re preparing for 250,000 to 300,000 refugees this year,” BAMF head Frank-Juergen Weise told Bild am Sonntag newspaper in comments due to be published on Sunday. 
This is going to end very badly, 
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Turnbull must declare his Plan B on gay marriage

Andrew Bolt August 28 2016 (9:24am)

It is now critical that the Liberals and Nationals get Malcolm Turnbull to promise that Plan B is not a free vote in Parliament:
PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s “people’s vote” on same-sex marriage is set to be scuttled, with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten preparing to kill the plebiscite… 
The Labor leader said blocking the plebiscite was a live option…
“I’m worried Malcolm Turnbull will just stuff it up,’’ Mr Shorten said…
“He stuffed up the republic referendum, he stuffed up the NBN and he stuffed up Senate reforms when he promised to fix it.” 
So why this fear of a public vote?
Labor insists that research suggests the plebiscite will fail if it is held.
It is now there for all to see. Labor wants to impose a vast social change on the Australia that it knows the public, if asked, would reject.
The intolerance is frightening. And what else might Labor then demand if same-sex marriage is forced on us? Will priests be compelled to conform? Will opposition and dissent be banned?
(Thanks to readers Vince and Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
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Book in Rome

Andrew Bolt August 28 2016 (9:10am)

My book is on an odyssey, visiting Alaska, Bath, the skulls of Montpellier, York Minster, Shanghai,  Corsica, Croatia,  Ho Chi Minh City, Santorini, London, Scotland, Ithaca, the Bay of Naples, Lake Como, Dubrovnik, Fiji, Aileron,  New Zealand, Sri Lanka,  the Andes,  the Northern Territory,  the Whitsundays,  Kalgoorlie, Condabri, Australia’s most Left-wing Parliament, the Katharine River Mango Farm, a Newcastle christening, a Penrith hospital, the Moreton Bay Boat Club, the  Murray River, the Mt Annan Australian Botanical Garden,  Araluen Botanic Park and Rick Stein’s restaurant in Cornwall.
Reader Chris takes it to Rome:
The Colosseum by the way is far more impressive than any photo conveys. A couple of takeaways - our guide advised that a major element in the eventual demise of the place after 400 years of continuous use as that Christianity was officially inscribed as the Roman religion.  This meant gratuitous cruelty and killing of people for entertainment was no longer formally promoted. 
And then it’s a little dolce vita:
Gosh, I love Italy.
To reward the traveller in your life, order the book here. On-line buyers also get the semi-regular Bolt Bulletin, as will people pre-ordering the reprint of my Still Not Sorry on line.    
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You pay, they trash. The ABC at it again

Andrew Bolt August 28 2016 (8:23am)

The ABC was created and funded by taxpayers to broadcast things that would raise the cultural tone.
But then the Left took over and used the ABC to celebrate barbarity and to vilify conservatives, as Pauline Hanson discovered long ago.
Tony Thomas says ABC is now at it again:
On July 3, a day after the election, the ABC TV News website ran a story by ABC reporter Kristian Silva: “Election 2016: Will Pauline Pantsdown return after Pauline Hanson’s success in the Senate?”
The ABC has form in promoting “Pantsdown”, played by a media lecturer at the University of NSW, Simon Hunt.
Here, via Thomas, is what Queensland Justice Ambrose ruled in a case brought by Hanson involving an ABC broadcast of a Hunt sliming when she was first elected to Parliament:
There’s a political overtone to the whole exercise which seems to denigrate her personally by making assertions as to her sexual preference and her abnormal sexual attraction with respect to children and so on…I can’t imagine anybody listening to that production would not conclude that the assertion was that Pauline Hanson was a paedophile … or that she was a homosexual and rejoiced in the fact… I can’t imagine that one can avoid liability for injury to reputation… by simply prefacing it by saying, `Well, this is satirical, don’t take this seriously,’ and then playing it over and over and over again.
Thomas:
The ABC then spent more taxpayer funds appealing, only to lose again on September 28, 1998. 
Chief Justice De Jersey (now Queensland’s Governor) said, 
Before the Chamber Judge, [Hanson] contended that the broadcast material gave rise to imputations that she is a homosexual, a prostitute, involved in unnatural sexual practices, associated with the Ku Klux Klan, a man and/or a transvestite and involved in or party to sexual activities with children. The [ABC] essentially contended that the material amounted merely to vulgar abuse and was not defamatory.
Interesting, that the ABC condoned and defended its “vulgar abuse” of politicians it dislikes. That abuse involved gratuitous sexual aspersions as bad or worse than any taunts thrown at Julia Gillard by foul-mouthed bloggers. Remember, this is the taxpayer-funded ABC airing the sexual abuse, not some nutter on the internet.
De Jersey J continued, 
These were grossly offensive imputations relating to the sexual orientation and preference of a Member of Parliament and her performance which the appellant in no degree supports as accurate and which were paraded as part of an apparently fairly mindless effort at cheap denigration.
But it is not just the ABC that has trashed its standards. What of the University of NSW?
Thomas has uncovered an essay by lecturer Hunt, son of a former Supreme Court judge, proposing the ABC film a documentary on himself:
At one night, I did a guest performance with [name redacted] of the organisers.  After getting ‘out of it’, she pretended to ‘#’ me with a dildo. I then ‘woke up’, pulled a dildo out of my mushroom, and ‘fucked’ her. This was all fully-clothed (albeit in drag), pantomime sex. The next year, she became one of my sound students at the College Of Fine Arts, and played a video of the performance as part of her work. The sight of the lecturer, in full little-girl drag, pretending to # one of the female students up the arse with a dildo, proved a little too much for one of the mature-age students, but it led to a vigorous class discussion.” 
You pay for that lecturer and that ABC. 
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What illness is causing these bizarre slaughters?

Andrew Bolt August 28 2016 (8:11am)

Rowan Dean: 
The world of mental health and wellbeing has been rocked to its core by a bizarre global outbreak of inexplicable nervous breakdowns. Researchers are struggling to find a common cause or factor that may link or in some way help explain what is behind this mysterious epidemic of mental, or psychiatric, illnesses. Thus far experts remain baffled as to any similarities between the cases, which to date have been reported with their own specific medical terminology.

Homophobicus orlanditis: In this disturbing case, a young man from an ethnically diverse and culturally rich background that co-incidentally has strong traditional taboos against such modern practices as man on man copulation or woman on woman coupling and yet who exhibited no previous symptoms of any mental disorder whatsoever mysteriously suffered an acute breakdown of his nervous system (or homophobicus orlanditis), when he found himself inexplicably confronted by a tutu-wearing group of cavorting drag queens in a ‘gays only’ nightclub in an American tourist resort. Symptoms of the mysterious breakdown included loudly and repetitively shouting out guttural slogans with strong flat vowel sounds whilst expressing his neurological disturbances via the means of shooting everybody dead. Diagnosis: Unknown mental illness.

Catholicus intoleranza: In this extremely rare case, a young man and his associate, both from ethnically diverse and culturally rich heritages that co-incidentally hold strong traditional taboos against the faith-expression practices of so-called “non-believers” and yet who exhibited no previous symptoms of any mental disorders mysteriously suffered an acute and simultaneous breakdown of their nervous systems (suspected catholicus intoleranza) when they found themselves accidentally confronted by on old priest and two nuns swinging a bowl of incense in front of their faces in a French medieval town. Symptoms of this unusual twinned nervous breakdown include both individuals simultaneously breaking into guttural verbal manifestations with unusual linguistic quirks whilst displaying signs of acute psychological disturbances via the means of slitting the priest’s throat. Diagnosis: Unknown mental illness. 
The full list is disturbing and now includes a case of suspected backpackeritis stabbata. 
===

“Former Liberal” is right

Andrew Bolt August 28 2016 (7:56am)

Immediately unconvincing, before even considering the arguments:
A former Liberal leader, a prominent comedian and an award-winning novelist are among those who have signed an open letter calling on the federal government to abandon plans to cut unemployment payments. 
Sounds like the start of a joke: “A former Liberal leader, comedian and a novelist walk into a bar...” And it is a joke, because as soon as you see The Age ballyhoo such a petition with the words “a former Liberal leader” you know exactly which former Liberal leader it must be, and know he’s once more in the company of people who discredit him.
And sure enough, here is the line up of signatories to a petition actually authored by former Greens staffer Ben Oquist:
Former Liberal leader John Hewson, comedian Corinne Grant, Miles Franklin Prize-winner Anna Funder, businessman John Menadue and former politicians Carmen Lawrence and Cheryl Kernot have signed the letter. 
Know Hewson by the company he now keeps.
What makes such joint letters jar is that they reek of minor celebrities pulling rank, and of Leftists advertising themselves and their friendship groups rather than genuinely fighting for some important principle.
By the way, this “plan to cut unemployment benefits” is in fact a policy backed even by Labor to remove the compensation for the carbon tax now that the tax itself has been removed, 
===

Shorten’s quid pro quo QCs

Piers Akerman – Friday, August 28, 2015 (12:18am)

PRO bono legal aid is emerging as the latest off-the-books assistance enjoyed by embattled Labor figures, including Opposition leader Bill Shorten.
 Continue reading 'Shorten’s quid pro quo QCs'
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Crazy decision undermines workers at coal mine

Piers Akerman – Friday, August 28, 2015 (12:17am)

IF workers can’t trust Labor, who can — the answer is the Greens. In an extraordinary betrayal of miners in the Hunter, and those who work the port of Newcastle, the biggest coal-exporting complex in the world, Newcastle Council’s Labor and Green councillors voted to steer the council’s investments away from banks that hold funds in fossil fuel projects.
 Continue reading 'Crazy decision undermines workers at coal mine'
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Stick with your real friends, Joe

Piers Akerman – Friday, August 28, 2015 (12:16am)

TREASURER Joe Hockey lit another exploding cigar when he agreed to join the sorry circus which is the struggling Republican movement. Without consulting Prime Minister Tony Abbott, he accepted an invitation from his friend Peter FitzSimons, a bandanna-wearing media performer who heads this largely irrelevant political force, to become co-convener with former ACT Labor chief minister Senator Katy Gallagher of a new parliamentary friendship group agitating for an Australian head of state. 
 Continue reading 'Stick with your real friends, Joe'
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Gay push should be kept out of schools

Piers Akerman – Wednesday, August 26, 2015 (10:08am)

BURWOOD Girls High principal Mia Kumar has failed the parents of her pupils by embracing political propagandists who have seized her school’s agenda. And Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has failed the people of NSW with his lily-livered approach to a serial offender.
 Continue reading 'Gay push should be kept out of schools'
===

Yes but no: why inciting the crowd is bad but Goodes

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (1:55pm)

Patrick Smith starts with promise: 
You can’t go running around inciting the crowd and not expect the AFL to intervene. 
But then the quality of argument disintegrates rapidly, something the compensating abuse fails to disguise.
You see, Smith thinks there should actually be an exception - and it’s a racist one.
I suspect Leigh Matthews has the better argument. He certainly has the clarity.
One people, one rule.
===

On The Bolt Report on Sunday, August 30

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (8:09am)

On Channel 10 on Sunday at 10am and 3pm
Editorial:  An army of illegal immigrants marches through Europe, with millions more ready to follow.
My guest:  Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.
The panel: Bruce Hawker, former Labor campaign strategist, and Janet Albrechtsen, former ABC board member and Australian columnist.

NewsWatch: Gerard Henderson, Australian columnist and head of the Sydney Institute.
Hot to trot on the increasingly frantic attempts by Labor to destroy Dyson Heydon; the Canning showdown; fighting the Islamic State; the ABC’s latest sliming of Tony Abbott; and the washed-out Tim Flannery. I should also cut Joe Hockey a lot more slack.

The videos of the shows appear here.
===

Labor and the media Left just don’t take the Islamic State seriously

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (8:00am)

Simon Benson pulls apart the latest conspiracy theory of the media Left:
By this time next week, it is likely planning will be underway for Australian air strikes into Syria, after Tony Abbott’s National Security Committee of Cabinet ticks off on a formal request by the US for broader involvement… 
The wildly ridiculous claims by some that the announcement of expansion ... has been timed around the Canning by-election (a khaki election) ignores fact, as usual.
First, serious discussions around stepping up Australia’s involvement to include Syrian targets began months ago. Prime Minister Tony Abbott first spoke to UK Prime Minister David Cameron on July 7 about UK and British engagement. This was before Don Randall — the now former member for Canning — died.
Second, it was Kim Beazley who has been doing most of the lobbying behind the scenes in Washington to formalise a request by the US for a broader Australian role. One has to wonder whether this was in the back of Abbott’s mind when he extended Beazley’s appointment.
That a former Labor leader has been and is still as hawkish as Abbott on what needs to be done to eradicate the barbaric scourge of IS should serve as an embarrassment for the current Labor leadership… So once again the Labor leadership has its knickers in a knot over how to fight a proper war, opting for the half-pregnant approach ... It did the same thing in Afghanistan when it refused to allow the SAS to chase terrorists across artificial provincial borders.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Only white killers are racists

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (8:00am)

John Hinderaker on the media Left’s racist coverage of two racist killers:
We now know that Vester Flanagan was a sort of mirror image of Dylann Roof: black instead of white, gay instead of straight, but like Roof a nut with a cause. Like Roof, Flanagan’s cause was race. Flanagan was race-obsessed and, like Roof, wanted to incite a race war. 
I agree with Hugh Hewitt that it is a mistake to pay attention to “manifestos” left behind by insane killers. It only encourages them. But ... Dylann Roof‘s racist ideology was taken very seriously, to the point where Confederate flags came down across the South. In Flanagan’s case, the focus is on gun control rather than his equally racist ideology.
Flanagan was consumed with race hatred, and was disciplined by the television station for which he worked at the time for, among other things, wearing a Barack Obama button while he stood in line to vote. So why do we not retroactively conclude that images of Barack Obama are hateful, like the Confederate flag, and must be banned? Glenn Reynolds asks, “Will Obama apologize for the behavior of one of his followers?” Of course not. But imagine if a racist white killer who worked for a television station had been similarly disciplined for wearing, say, a Ted Cruz button. Do you not think that fact would be deemed highly relevant, and highly embarrassing to Senator Cruz?…
Conversely, in the aftermath of Vester Flanagan’s appalling crime, liberals have no desire to explore the roots of Flanagan’s hateful ideology. No one is blaming President Obama or suggesting that he should take responsibility for dividing the nation along racial lines, for the sake of political gain. No one is saying that the Black Lives Matter movement should disband, and stop stirring up race hate. Instead, the focus is on demands for more gun control, however useless the liberals’ prescriptions may be. The difference between the two cases is entirely political. 
Ben Shapiro makes the same point:
On Wednesday, America met a deeply evil human being: Vester Lee Flanagan II, also known as reporter Bryce Williams. 
Williams murdered two people while they were live on air on WDBJ in Virginia: reporter Alison Parker, and cameraman Adam Ward…
Williams is black. Parker and Ward were white.
Williams is gay. Parker and Ward were straight.
None of which would be relevant, except that Williams specifically cited his identity as a factor in the killings. In a 23-page rambling letter sent to ABC News, Williams wrote that the Charleston church shooting in June should have provoked a race war: “Why did I do it? I put a deposit for a gun on 6/19/15. The Church shooting in Charleston happened on 6/17/15…What sent me over the top was the church shooting…You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE …(deleted)!!!” According to ABC News, he claimed he had “suffered racial discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying at work,” that he had “been attacked by black men and white females,” and that he had been “attacked for being a gay, black man."…

Had a white straight man killed a black gay man, released first-person tape of the shooting, and then unleashed a manifesto about being victimized by affirmative action and anti-religious bigotry from homosexuals, the media would never stop covering the story. They’d be eager to report that shooter’s motives with all the attendant politically correct hullaballoo about the racism and homophobia of the United States more broadly. We would hear about white supremacy…
We would hear excoriations of the Republican presidential candidates for their failures to stand with the Black Lives Matter movement–and their opposition to same-sex marriage. In similar circumstances, the entire political and media establishment determined that the Confederate flag was somehow to blame for Dylan Storm Roof’s brutal slaying of nine people at a historically black church; just last week, the media tried to blame Donald Trump’s anti-immigration stance for two thugs beating up a Hispanic homeless man in Boston. But Bryce Williams’ self-described victim status, even while murdering innocents, will merit no rethinking of the divisive politics in which he apparently bathed. We won’t have a conversation about whether pushing a perennial picture of victimhood for blacks and gays in the most black-friendly, gay-friendly country on the planet could drive supposed victims to violence. We won’t talk about whether the Democratic Party’s takeover by the Black Lives Matter crew has encouraged some people to believe that only black lives matter, since only black lives are in danger – and even then, only some black lives matter, namely those killed by white people. Instead, we will be assured that Bryce Williams is an outlier by the same people who blamed Sarah Palin for Jared Lee Loughner shooting Gabrielle Giffords.
===

Unions party under the Andrews’ Socialist Left government

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (7:29am)

Daniel Andrews’ Socialist Left government won the last Victorian election by buying off public service unions with big pay rises, funded by taxpayers.
Now other unions want their chop, too - particularly ones with political leverage - demanding pay rises that most taxpayers could only dream of:
The decision by the Rail, Tram and Bus Union to plunge the transport network into strike-induced chaos on a cold, wet Thursday did seem premature, with the union and Yarra Trams scheduled to continue talks on Friday morning. 
And to many Victorians, Yarra Trams’ pay offer – worth about 15 per cent over four years – would probably seem pretty reasonable, even generous in the economic climate.

Indeed, wage growth has been relatively modest. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, average hourly pay rates (excluding bonuses) in Victoria crept up by 2.6 per cent over the year to June…
Part of the problem faced by Labor is that pay expectations are at a heightened level, with a generous pay deal given to paramedics being used as an industrial template. The Health Workers Union, for example, wants a 20 per cent pay rise over four years.
The Police Association also appears to be preparing the ground for a bold pay claim… The trouble is, such play claims are inevitably expensive. State treasury is understood to have estimated that every 1 per cent increase in police pay costs about $12 million, including on-costs. For nurses, the hit to the budget from a 1 per cent pay increase is more like $30 million.
UPDATE
Judith Sloan:
But you have to give it to Dan the Man Andrews and his comrades, they really know how to get on with the job, to punish their enemies and install their mates in well-paid positions. 
Seconds after they had been sworn in:
- The government construction code was abolished;
- The move on laws (unionists and their mates blockading businesses)were rescinded;
- Right-of-entry for union officials was made easier;
- The East-West Link contract was cancelled and Victorian taxpayers have paid in excess of $600 million for nothing (real figure will forever be fudged);
- All the members of the water boards were sacked
- The board of Ambulance Victoria was shown the door and an egregiously generous settlement was made with the ambos who had (illegally) defaced public property and refused to deal with the Coalition government, knowing all along that they would be generously rewarded for their political support;
- The Victorian Efficiency and Competition Commission was abolished and all the workers were sacked, notwithstanding the entreaties of former Labor premiers, Bracks and Brumby (they are both out in the cold; sensible advice is not welcomed by the Andrews government); - The board of VLine was sacked.
The Andrews Government has closed more projects than it’s started. 
===

Labor’s smear campaign against a corruption buster may backfire

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (7:14am)

Bill Shorten is running a protection racket for crooked and corrupt union officials. And next year this protection racket could be the government of Australia.
Janet Albrechtsen:
Is this a political stitch-up that will blow back on Labor and the unions? 
Dyson Heydon has delayed until Monday his ruling on claims by unions that he ought to stand down as royal commissioner on the ground of apprehended bias.Regardless of Heydon’s ruling, voters may make their own ruling that Labor and the unions are involved in a reprehensible stitch- up, an act of “whatever-it-takes” desperation to taint Heydon and distract voters from the work of the royal commission…

Come the next election, what will voters remember? That a royal commissioner accepted, then declined, to give a legal lecture to a group of Liberal lawyers? Or will they remember the evidence of union thuggery, illegality, fraud and secret payments, including an undisclosed $40,000 to Shorten to fund his 2007 campaign?
This is the kind of racket Labor is trying to protect by destroying the reputation of one of our finest judges:
The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union has fallen under the control of “criminal elements” who are using black bans to send a message to the sector that they are in charge and the law doesn’t apply to them, according to Boral chief executive Mike Kane. 
Boral, the country’s largest building materials manufacturer, is embroiled in court action against the union, claiming its blockade had caused the company to lose more than $20 million in revenue as part of the CFMEU’s action against developer Grocon.
Mr Kane backed the embattled Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, calling the issue about Dyson Heydon’s planned appearance at a Liberal Party-organised event a “distraction” and a “smokescreen”.
UPDATE
I’m listening to Labor’s employment spokesman, Brendan O’Connor, smear Heydon as Tony Abbott’s “captain’s pick” with a conflict of interest. Not mentioned by the ABC interviewer is O’Connor’s own conflict of interest - his brother Michael is head of the CFMEU, the union most strongly criticised by the Heydon’s royal commission for corruption, bribery and links to organised crime. 
===

Beware the bullies of the Left

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (6:55am)

Many Australians are now wondering why the Leftists protesting for tolerance are so intolerant. Why the Leftists protesting for “equal love” seem so full of hate. When the Leftists protesting for more freedom deny the freedom to disagree with them.
Well, author and theologian CS Lewis famously noted how moral crusades appealed to bullies:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Or as Bertrand Russell crisply put it:
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Miranda Devine on the latest example:
THE NSW Department of Education has been telling lies about the Gayby Baby controversy to cover up its covert campaign to “de-normalise” heterosexuality.
This newspaper reported accurately the concerns of numerous parents at Burwood Girls High over the planned compulsory screening to all 1200 students of the overtly political documentary promoting same-sex parenting…
Yet ... a department spokesperson was quoted in The Guardian on Wednesday, saying: “The school has not received any complaints from Burwood High School parents.”
That wasn’t true. But the official disinformation has resulted in a campaign by GetUp against this newspaper, which includes a petition, a complaint to the Press Council, vituperative emails and a planned protest outside our offices. The idea is to intimidate us into silence…
Last night the department admitted the school has received complaints, directly from parents and through proxies…
Ostensibly designed to stamp out homophobia, the Proud Schools program aims to eradicate the idea that heterosexuality is the norm in human relationships. When parents complain about this propaganda, their concerns are airbrushed out of existence. And when this newspaper reports these facts we are subjected to a campaign of intimidation.

I have no problem at all with the film itself, and worry that the backlash will hurt the brave and articulate children who appear in it:
But I do hate bullying. So I support schools which want to show the film, but not the schools which insist all students must see it and must approve.
I would also like to see those schools screen a defence of traditional marriage.  But what are the odds? 
===

Giant lectures pygmy: Bob Hawke tells Bill Shorten’s Labor to back China deal

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (6:38am)

It is frightening to see Labor now siding with a xenophobic union campaign against a trade deal that will create jobs and wealth. Bill Shorten’s Labor is a sick joke when compared to Bob Hawke’s:
Bob Hawke has issued a stern warning to the Labor Party and the trade union movement not to oppose the China-Australia Free-Trade Agreement, arguing it is in the national interest that it be adopted. 
“I am all in favour of it,” Mr Hawke told The Australian. “The party must not go backwards on this issue — the party and the trade union movement. Talk of opposing it is just absolutely against Australia’s best interests.”
Mr Hawke, a former Labor prime minister and ACTU president, is at odds with the party, which has refused to support the agreement without substantial changes.
The ACTU is mounting a ferocious campaign against the trade deal and has called for it to be dumped. Bill Shorten has described it as “a mess” and a “bad agreement"… The China, Japan and South Korea free-trade agreements are worth a combined $24.4 billion to Australia and will create nearly 8000 new jobs.
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Gillard loses faith in the public that didn’t want her

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (5:47am)

Julia Gillard was against gay marriage, now she’s for it. She was for a people’s vote, now she’s against it. Something tells me that for Gillard it’s always the side, not the principle:
Trust the people. Julia Gillard, June 23, 2010: 
It is the job of good governments to take on major … challenges and work through them in a way that makes sure every Australian can participate in creating the solution … Consensus … should not depend solely on a fragile agreement between political parties … It must be a real debate involving many real Australians … And so today I announce that if we are re-elected, I will develop a dedicated process — a Citizens’ Assembly — to examine over 12 months the evidence on climate change, the case for action and the possible consequences of introducing a market-based approach to limiting and reducing carbon emissions.
Trust the pollies. Gillard on Wednesday: 
What makes reform harder in an age like this? One could point to many factors … but surely the one at the top of the list must be inviting electors to believe that parliamentary decision-making is an inadequate, even shoddy, way of creating change. This is the real danger of the proposal for a plebiscite or a referendum … There is no logical reason for having such a vote on same-sex marriage … The only foundation stone for the idea of a plebiscite or referendum is an appeal to the all-too-popular sentiment that politicians are inadequate.
===

Robyn Williams wonders why we don’t trust his science

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (12:15am)

ABC science presenter Robyn Williams:
....how come science is being systematically trashed by propaganda machines? How come that restrained even conservative magazine National Geographic in March had a cover story called The War on Science showing warning that climate research, evolutionary theory, vaccination and much else was being “discredited”? 
Robyn Williams, 2007:
Andrew Bolt: I’m telling you, there’s a lot of fear out there. So what I do is, when I see an outlandish claim being made...so Tim Flannery suggesting rising seas this next century eight stories high, Professor Mike Archer, dean of engineering at the University of NSW… 
Robyn Williams: Dean of science.
Andrew Bolt: Dean of science...suggesting rising seas this next century of up to 100 metres, or Al Gore six metres. When I see things like that I know these are false. You mentioned the IPCC report; that suggests, at worst on best scenarios, 59 centimetres.
Robyn Williams: Well, whether you take the surge or whether you take the actual average rise are different things.
Andrew Bolt: I ask you, Robyn, 100 metres in the next century...do you really think that?  Robyn Williams: It is possible, yes. The increase of melting that they’ve noticed in Greenland and the amount that we’ve seen from the western part of Antarctica, if those increases of three times the expected rate continue, it will be huge.
Eight years later:
Sea levels worldwide have risen an average of nearly 3 inches (8 centimeters) since 1992, the result of warming waters and melting ice, a panel of NASA scientists said Wednesday. In 2013, a United Nations panel predicted sea levels would rise from 1 to 3 feet (0.3 to 0.9 meters) by the end of the century. 
The new research shows that the sea-level rise most likely will be at the high end of that range, said University of Colorado geophysicist Steve Nerem. 
That leaves Williams more than 99 metres short of his warning of 100 metre rises. And I never got an apology or correction. Instead, Williams now resorts to getting comedians onto his “science” show to laugh at how wrong I must be.
The ABC is out of control. 
===

More illegal immigrants die

Andrew Bolt August 28 2015 (12:02am)

The invasion of Europe is costing lives:
The partly decomposing bodies of as many as 50 people assumed to be migrants being smuggled across Europe were found in a truck abandoned on a highway east of Vienna on Thursday.
And:
Rescuers have saved about 3,000 refugees but found more than 50 dead on boats near the coast of Libya, according to the Italian coastguard… The coastguard did not say what caused the deaths, which add to a toll already thought to have exceeded 2,300 so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.
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THE NORTH ISLAND IS OURS

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (5:04am)

University of Otago climate scientist Simon Hales: 
In NZ we are very worried about a potential influx of Australians, you know, escaping heat waves and lack of water and infectious diseases … 
Read on. I’ve already secured a zone in Hamilton for my own personal climate escape. Here’s a recent snap.
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HATERS EVERYWHERE

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (4:55am)

Hate mail in Sydney. A hate incident in Los Angeles. Retro hatred in Europe. And then there’s Ali Muhammad Brown, whose deadly coast-to-coast hatefest in the US seems to have attracted only modest media attention: 
For two bloody months, an armed jihadist serial killer ran loose across the country. At least four innocent men died this spring and summer as acts of “vengeance” on behalf of aggrieved Muslims, the self-confessed murderer has now proclaimed. Have you heard about this horror? Probably not. 
Among Ali Muhammad Brown’s victims were a gay couple in liberal, tolerant Seattle. Brown set up a meeting through a dating site then murdered the men to avenge American military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Further on this renewed hatred from Andrew Bolt.
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SHY ICED

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (4:45am)

To her credit, Sarah Hanson-Young takes the ice bucket charity challenge:

A slightly younger child doesn’t cope so easily:

Better than either: a farmer cops the biggest challenge yet.
===

SLAB x 4.125

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (4:32am)

In Austin, Texas, it’s the world’s biggest slab:

That’s 99 cans of beer in a box, friends. We may have just discovered why Iowahawk is moving to the Texas capital.
===

WHAT’S THE GOOD WORD?

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (4:24am)

It’s a well-known fact that Australian Prime Ministers are often naked. Paul Keating has issues with this. 
===

COULD HAVE BEEN ANY OLD BODIES

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (4:13am)

One of the most unusual comments ever published at this site, from reader Helen: 
Thanks for posting this story. I used to live in this county, enjoyed many delicious breakfasts at Sneakers, and my company installed the roof over the building many years ago. Long before any of that,I was apprehended for dumping bodies off the nearby bridge. But that was all a big misunderstanding. 
Er, OK.
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FILLED WITH TEARS

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (3:57am)

Sydney’s dams are now at 85.6 per cent of capacity. No wonder Tim Flannery, who predicted our dams might havedried up seven years ago, is looking so unhappy.
===

GRAND OLD TIMES

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 28, 2014 (3:13am)

Reader Smike this week received a New York Times subscription offer he found extremely easy to reject:

That’s $1099.95 for a year of pretentious rubbish. Writes Smike: “C’mon baby, MoDo needs a new pair of pumps.”
===

Labor Senator: Abbott just “hyping” threat

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (10:05am)

Can Labor really be trusted with your security when it has Senators like Sue Lines?
Labor senator Sue Lines says the Government seems determined to only talk about terrorism and not its tough budget cuts.
“It’s [the Government] hyping it up, it’s invented the term Team Australia - you’re either in the team or you’re out of the team,” she said. “And it’s looking for opportunities in the media and elsewhere to try and scare the Australian public and to distract everyone from the budget.”
Yes, the Abbott Government could have chosen to say nothing about an Australian boy holding a hacked-off head, about ASIO warning of the danger of return jihadists, about security agencies demanding new powers to protect us, about a US journalist being beheaded by Islamists warning the West we’re next, about jihadists rallying in our streets, about genocidal attacks on Christians and Yazidis appealing for help; or about the US plans to go back into Iraq.
Yes, all this demanded no comment at all from the Government. It’s all mere spin, says Lines - who seems to me to be simply furious that the world is not behaving as she would wish and that jihadists are naughtily interrupting her spin with undisciplined head-hacking.
Same deal with another Labor MP:
Senator Lines’s comments have been echoed by fellow West Australian Labor MP Melissa Parke, who tweeted on Wednesday: “Team Australia is a moronic ripoff from 2004 ‘Team America: world police’ parody film. Intolerant nonsense rhetoric, unbecoming of a PM.”
But isn’t that exactly the Left? Believing the world to be as they would wish, not as it is? 
===

The real reason we keep asking Muslim leaders to condemn terrorism

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (9:43am)

Julie Szego in The Age:
What I can understand is Muslim leaders’ frustration in having to constantly condemn – and thus, by implication, own – the barbaric atrocities of their communities’ fringe dwellers. The obsessive demand for Muslim leaders to “condemn terrorism” borders on bullying. 
Many Muslim leaders make the same complaint, not understanding that simply in doing so they fail in an important duty.
When Australians demand such “leaders” condemn jihadist atrocities they aren’t wanting them to “own” the horrors. They aren’t even wanting only that these leaders use their great influence to try to stop jihadism.
Perhaps more importantly, Australians also want reassurance that these leaders actually share their moral values and have the same reaction to atrocities which threaten us. They want reassurance from those who claim to best represent Islam that these atrocities are not part of their faith. They want to know they share a common morality, without which there is no community.
That is why the demands to “condemn terrorism” - tiresome though they may be - are critically important in building trust. And it’s why the reactions to those calls are so frightening, leading to ever more anxious calls for condemnation.
Even Szego concedes:
But the way [these leaders] respond to these calls can be revealing. 
In a statement condemning the image of a young boy, thought to be the son of Australian Khaled Sharrouf, holding up what appears to be the severed head of a Syrian government soldier, the Australian National Imams Council said: “Just as ANIC denounces the unspeakable atrocities committed in Gaza, so too do we speak out against the brutality carried out in Syria and Iraq...” The statement included the oblique rider: “The current trend by many world leaders… for injustice, unilateral aggression, duplicitous foreign policies and infringements on basic human rights, will only aggravate the state of global fear and violence.”
The Islamic Council of Victoria, in a release explaining its refusal to meet with Abbott last week, put the case more explicitly. “The question of why young Australians would willingly put themselves in harm’s way is much more complex than some spurious notion of religious extremism,” said the Council, which claims to represent 150,000 Muslims. “We would point the Government to its own foreign policies as a starting point. The government stance on the issue of Israel and the massacres in Gaza over the last four weeks has done more to ‘radicalise’ people than this boogie monster of radicalisation that it uses to periodically scare the community… and divert attention away from reality.”
...the leaders’ persistent deflection to Israel, a tendency shared by some on the hard Left, suggests an inability, or reluctance, to look reality in the face.
To follow the Islamic Council’s logic, some Muslims are so angry about the Australian Government’s support for Israel’s actions in Gaza that they head to… Syria and Iraq, where they butcher, with orgiastic delight… other Muslims, Sunnis as well as Shiites. I don’t get it....
And I wonder what it would take to keep aspiring jihadists in the fold? ...  If next week the Government miraculously engineered the establishment of a Palestinian state, would the caliphate’s appeal rapidly dissolve? Or would that require the complete dismantling of Israel? And if the Abbott Government even managed to pull that off, are we there yet? Would this fix the “unilateral aggression” and “duplicity” the Imams complained of? Would this be enough to calm the bloodlust of young men yearning for the caliphate? 
We keep asking Muslim leaders to keep condemning terrorism because we so often get the “yes but” answers that imply a great threat. Given that, it’s a fair question to keep asking. Indeed, the real trouble starts when non-Muslims conclude it’s pointless to keep asking for an unqualified answer. 
===

Why even explain to Macdonald?

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (9:28am)

Tony Abbott should not have felt the need to justify himself to the likes of bitter Ian Macdonald. And having bit, he should not have blurted how he arranged his travel to make sure it was free.
Niki Savva:
If voters hate anything more than smelling even the faintest whiff of misuse of entitlements — and the only person to have hinted at that is the Prime Minister — it is when they smell it as they are being asked to cough up more for visits to the doctors or cop less in family benefits. 
Many politicians, including those on the Labor side, do what Abbott did and tack on a legitimate function to cover what could be seen as a questionable one; however, few of them blurt it out in a brain snap in front of a roomful of people, not all of whom are well disposed towards them.
===

Dio Wang has Clive Palmer saying sorry again

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (8:58am)

Clive Palmer apologises a second time to China, but it’s really Senator Dio Wang he’s desperate to placate:
The first letter was intended to defuse the growing hostility that Mr Palmer’s ABC TV Q&A insults about China a week earlier had aroused…
Mr Palmer said in it: “We must always have an open mind; an open mind allows us to put ourselves in the other person’s position and brings greater under­standing and less conflict to the world."…

[Pro-China activist Qian Qiguo], ...who came to Australia from Beijing in 1988, earlier organised a protest against Mr Palmer by about 200 Chinese Australians outside parliament in Canberra…
After arriving in Canberra, Mr Qian discussed Mr Palmer’s letter — of which he had been sent a copy — with Senator Wang in the latter’s office… Following this, he said, the senator passed the message to Mr Palmer, who in turn sent a second letter to [Chinese Ambassador] Ma, which discarded the “open mind” references. This amounted to a modest victory, he said.
Mr Palmer had flown to Perth for talks with Senator Wang last week, amid a furious reaction to his Q&A remarks… The former parliamentary leader of the PUP in Queensland, Alex Douglas, said yesterday Mr Palmer’s decision to say sorry to China was largely about placating the senator, who was more likely than any of the other three to quit the party… “Dio would have seen Clive’s outburst as pig-ignorant and reckless… Dio is a highly principled, measured and intelligent man who wants everyone to set high standards. Of the four senators (PUP-aligned Ricky Muir of the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, Glenn Lazarus and Jacqui Lambie), Dio is the one most likely to leave the PUP...”
===

Nothing in it, journalists told Gillard, now called by the royal commission

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (8:47am)

The AWU scandal

2007 - as recalled in Jacqueline Kent’s biography of Julia Gillard:
Today:
THE royal commission into union corruption is calling Julia Gillard and a serving Federal Court judge, her former boss at law firm Slater & Gordon, to give evidence about allegations of fraud in the AWU slush fund scandal… 
The hearings will occur over three days from September 9 when the anti-graft probe returns to its investigation of a union slush fund, which was established with legal advice from Ms Gillard to her then boyfriend, allegedly corrupt Australian Workers Union boss Bruce Wilson.
Justice Murphy headed the industrial unit at Slater & Gordon until he and Ms Gillard left the firm in 1995 amid a breakdown in trust among the firm’s partners over the discovery of the fund and a public controversy over another matter....
The AWU Workplace Reform Association registration documents that went to the West Australian government claimed its role was work safety and training.
During the confidential internal probe, Ms Gillard told Mr Gordon in a tape-recorded interview in 1995 that the association was really a “slush fund” for union elections. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid by Thiess into the slush fund.
Ms Gillard has vehemently denied wrongdoing, saying she had no knowledge of the operations of the fund. Mr Wilson has also denied wrongdoing…The decision to call Justice Murphy, a solicitor who was appointed to the Federal Court by Ms Gillard’s then attorney-general, Robert McClelland, will surprise many lawyers as it is rare for senior serving judges to be called to a royal commission.
Oh, and about the money:
In June this year, several witnesses at the royal commission — former AWU staff member Wayne Hem, former AWU official Ralph Blew­itt and retired builder Athol James — testified that Mr Wilson was behind the payment of thousands of dollars to Ms Gillard, including for the costs of renovating her home in inner Melbourne. Ms Gillard has emphatically and repeatedly declared since 2012 that she paid for her renovations.
===

A professional communicator on Q&A

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (8:30am)

Marxist Ali Alizadeh is a Monash University lecturer in creative writing. I couldn’t help but be struck by how creatively he expressed himself on Q&A on Monday.
On Tony Abbott’s “Team Australia” appeal:
I was just going to say, look, firstly I think - I don’t want to mention the B word, but I think the government is having issues with something that begins with B and ends with T. “Ba-get” something like that. I don’t want to mention it because we will end up talking about it. So I wonder if they are trying to divert attention from that “B-thing” by dividing and conquering the community. But the second point is I mean, it’s interesting, patriotism versus religion and here I am in my sort of Marxist atheist corner and I’m just seeing the, you know, last refuge of the scoundrel versus the opium of the masses and I just think that’s a really poor choice really. If people are expected to side with nationalism or religiosity, then surely there should be more other options for subjectivity and being and activity and participation than, you know, I don’t want to behead people and post it on Twitter or wave the national flag. I mean, that’s really impoverished.
On multiculturalism:
Well, look, I have an – I actually agree with Paul. I’m critical of multicultural but from very opposition - well, different political perspective because I think, look, I’m not sure if I believe in culture. I think culture is a bad, fake, fantasy invented to prevent us from engaging with political social realities. Culturism – you see, there is a problem right there. When we’re being told to focus on cultural differences, cultural identity and so on and so forth, because it is so fake, it is so provisional, it is so disconnected, I would say, from material realities and our political needs.
On whether multiculturalism divides:
But, I mean, but that’s the problem, though, isn’t it? I mean, I would say that if that is being - if that’s the sort of policy that is being propagated, you know, for probably very good intentions, I wonder what the outcomes of it would be in the long run if they could create sectarianism and so on, but if they could disconnect us, they could divide, if they could extract us from our material reality and conflicts that we should all be participating in together. So I’m not sure if what you mean, that sort of metaphor of an explosion, if you think there is going to be a sectarian conflict between different groups within Australia or not. I don’t think that’s going to happen because we are not a militarised society but, yeah, I’m quite - I’m not quite sure. I have my issues with multiculturalism myself.
On political instability in Canberra:
I’m just amazed that you guys write and turning this stuff into books that are publishable and readable. I mean, you know, I’m sorry, you know, I’m a fiction writer and a poet and I think you should be teaching creative writing because, to make this stuff creative and readable is amazing because it’s very dramatic. I mean, Shakespeare had interesting monarchs. They killed each other in very colourful and interesting ways...
===

Too scared to seem racist, too scared to save children

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (7:59am)

Ironically, our fear of seeming racist is so great that on strong legal advice I’ve had to remove a reference to our blindness to a dysfunction in Aboriginal communities - a reference that is true but potentially offensive, and therefore cannot be published without copious evidential material for which there was no space this time. This country’s laws against free speech are obscene and stifle honest discussion about terrible social problems that badly need fixing.
 FEAR of seeming racist is now almost as dangerous as racism itself, as a report into child trafficking in a British town showed this week.
Professor Alexis Jay investigated sexual exploitation of about 1400 children in Yorkshire’s Rotherham over the past 16 years.
Her report details astonishing depravity: children as young at 11 “were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities ... abducted, beaten and intimidated ...
“There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”.

But even more shameful is the cowardice of authorities, too scared of seeming “racist” to admit predominantly Pakistani gangs were responsible: “By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage ... with the Pakistani-heritage community.
(Read full article here.) 
===

Or maybe he just wanted stimulating reading for the flight

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (7:54am)

No, nothing to worry about at all:
A SUSPECTED Australian terrorist was dragged from a plane at Melbourne Airport by Border Force officials after allegedly trying to fly to Syria to join a jihadi group… 
The Melbourne man, who is an Australian citizen, was flying to Beirut in Lebanon with three family members when he was detained aboard a flight on a Middle Eastern airline on Monday.
He was searched by Australian Federal Police officers, who discovered he was carrying around $30,000 in Australian currency. He was also allegedly in possession of terror-related images including photographs of beheadings, and images of the flag flown by the murderous terror group ISIL, which is rampaging across Syria and Iraq.
The man must be presumed innocent. After all, he could have been so horrified by the images that he was flying over on a peace mission.
UPDATE
We are so often told to be wary of the backlash that we perhaps don’t pay enough attention to what some might (unfortunately) lash back over. From the US:
For two bloody months, an armed jihadist serial killer ran loose across the country. 
At least four innocent men died this spring and summer as acts of “vengeance” on behalf of aggrieved Muslims, the self-confessed murderer has proclaimed. Heard about this horror? Probably not. The usual suspects who decry hate crimes and gun violence haven’t uttered a peep. Why? Like O.J.’s glove: If the narrative don’t fit, you must acquit. 
(Via Tim Blair, who has more.) 
===

How could Abbott be so cruel to such battlers?

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (7:47am)

Politics - federal

WE’RE told that battlers — like some surprising pensioners in the papers lately — are being rescued from sheer horror by Labor and so-called billionaire Clive Palmer.
Labor leader Bill Shorten, for instance, is determined to save such people from the Abbott Government’s “unbelievably tough cuts and cruelty”.
He means cruelty like the Government wanting to slow the rise in the age pension, now claimed in full or part by 90 per cent of Australians of retirement age.
Or like making school leavers go on training schemes rather than stay home on the dole.
Or like those other tweaks the Government plans to the $70 billion a year we’re now spending to keep an incredible three million Australians on one of the four main welfare payments — the dole, age pension, disability payments or single-parent handouts.
Palmer, for instance, wildly claimed he knew pensioners who were left with only $15 a week of spending money after their nursing home’s cut, which so moved him that he joined Labor and the Greens in the Senate to reject government plans for a $7 Medicare co-payment.
In fact, “we’re not going to have a co-payment of even one cent”.
No, no, no. Don’t ask pensioners to pay even one cent for a trip to the doctor! Send the Medicare bill — now $18 billion a year — to the rich!
Even though we’re now spending billions we don’t have on an exploding welfare bill, we could not possibly ask battlers to pay even one cent more for anything.
But let’s now put some faces to this welfare class to illustrate its utter deprivation. Here are three people, taken at random from newspaper reports over the past fortnight — people needing Australian workers to dig ever deeper for them.
(Read full article here.)   
===

And even if it’s real it could be gone

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (7:26am)

The painting still looks great, but is close to worthless if the wrong hand painted it:
A RENOWNED art adviser and an art dealer who has previously been sued for selling fake artworks are facing the prospect of jail time for their involvement with allegedly forged works that sold for millions of dollars as Brett Whiteley paintings. 
Victoria Police yesterday charged art conservator Mohammad Aman Siddique — who advises significant collectors on acquisitions — and dealer Peter Gant with fraud offences at the Melbourne Magistrates Court.
It is believed to be the first time Mr Gant has faced criminal prosecution despite a long history of litigation that has repeatedly questioned the provenance of artworks he has sold.
The charges relate to three works which were sold or offered for sale as part of Whiteley’s iconic Lavender Bay series, inspired by views from his home overlooking Sydney Harbour. Police allege that Mr Siddique produced the works while Mr Gant was involved in their sale as authentic Whiteley works.
The accused both insist they are innocent. But you’d be right to be growing paranoid if you were a collector, after this case earlier this year:
Christie’s is in the thick of an ongoing case regarding a work purportedly by the Australian artist Albert Tucker, Faun and Parrot, that its owner bought from the auction house but discovered was a forgery when she tried to resell it through Sotheby’s ten years after its purchase.
On 1 May 2000, Louise McBride, a barrister, bought the work post sale (it was bought in at Christie’s) through her adviser, Vivienne Sharpe, and with external financing for A$75,000 ($70,000), plus commissions (A$10,000 to Christie’s; A$2,000 to Sharpe). McBride is suing Christie’s Australia, Sharpe and Alex Holland—the previous owner of the work—and his gallery, in a case that opened in the New South Wales Supreme court in July. McBride’s complaint brought evidence that Christie’s “had concerns about the painting and its provenance” and that the auction house had two conflicting provenances on file by the time financing on the work had concluded in early June 2000. Around mid-2000, a Christie’s specialist contacted Lauraine Diggins, a Tucker expert, who—together with a panel of other experts—concluded that McBride’s work, and another purported Tucker that Christie’s subsequently sold, were fake. Diggins’ affidavit says that she contacted Christie’s with this information after the meeting. 
Again, the accused all insist on their innocence and the judge has reserved her decision.
Then there are those other hazards for the collector. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be shown this lovely painting:
The mystery began on an autumn night in April 1991, when a burglar broke into the Blairgowrie home of elderly retiree Albert Watt. According to the police report, the only item stolen was Mr Watt’s cherished Rupert Bunny painting, Girl in Sunlight, which hung above his dining table and is worth about $250,000. 
===

Labor battles for the writing class

Andrew Bolt August 27 2014 (7:12pm)

Labor now represents not the working class but the writing class, with many former Labor ministers curiously eager to document their roles in one of the worst governments in our history:
That will bring to nine — by one calculation — the number of books from [Julia Gillard] and former colleagues on roughly the same subject.
Nine?
I don’t think Bryce should so flagrantly confirm she leaned to Labor - at times in office:
Next month former Governor-General Quentin Bryce will formally launch My Story, the memoir of former Prime Minister Julia Gillard. 
===

ABC goddess charged

Andrew Bolt August 28 2014 (8:38pm)

February on the ABC:
TONY JONES: Good evening. Welcome to this special edition of Q&A from the Seymour Centre at Sydney University. I’m Tony Jones. Please welcome tonight’s special guest, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde. Thank you. Madame Lagarde is a pioneer. She was the first woman to lead an international law firm, then the first female Trade Minister of France. Now as head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde is shaking up the global economy with her emphasis on environmental issues, economic equality and gender inclusion. 
Now:
IMF chief Christine Lagarde, one of the world’s most powerful women, announced Wednesday she had been charged with “negligence” over a multi-million-euro graft case relating to her time as French finance minister. 
The shock announcement came a day after she was grilled for more than 15 hours by a special court in Paris that probes ministerial misconduct, the fourth time she has been questioned in a case that has long weighed upon her position as managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
===
David Bowles
"Atticus-" said Jem bleakly.
He turned in the doorway.
"What, son?"
"How could they do it, how could they?"
"I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they
did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it- seems that only children weep."
===
More Atticus Finch: "As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it- whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."
===
MSNBC host Karen Finney called into conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt’s program on Monday for the first, and likely final, time. She ended up hanging up on Hewitt after she grew increasingly frustrated with the host’s persistent questions on “McCarthyism” and whether communists had actually infiltrated the U.S. government in the 1950s.
Hewitt began the interview with a clip from Finney’s weekend MSNBC show in which she compared Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to Joe McCarthy in their shared “paranoia” and “fear-stoking” behavior. Things just got more and more tense from there.
===
Kelly O'Dwyer.

Last night I appeared on QandA where we discussed Paid Parental Leave, Murdoch Press and other Coalition Policies, because the Government refuse to talk about their own or their record. #auspol 
http://youtu.be/sstgUUOfF30

===
Israel. The only place in the middle East where an Arab can openly speak out against the government without fearing for their life.
It is good to be an Arab in Israel - 
READ MORE : http://www.i24news.tv/en/opinion/130826-it-is-good-to-be-an-arab-in-israel
===
Mo Gelber
'Terminally ill man loses right to die court battle'
He may have lost the battle but something tells me he'll eventually win the war.
===
C. H. Spurgeon
The more you know about Christ, the less you will be satisfied with superficial views of Him.
===
Time for a 'Plan B'? - Israel National News

Conference held Sunday, 25 August 2013, though the substance of historical truth and not continued fabrication, must be elevated to the far reaches of public and diplomatic attention and policy's scope. To wit:

"Here The Kingdom of Jordan (originally known as "Transjordan") was established in 1946, on three quarters of the territory previously allocated for a Jewish state in the famous Balfour Declaration in 1917.

It was the result of a partition of the British Mandate of Palestine as a compromise between Jews and Arabs - a compromise which began at the 1922 San Remo Conference, when the Arab population received the lion's share (77%) of the country, to the east of the River Jordan, and the Jews received the remaining portion to its west.

But instead of handing over control to the local Arab population, the British government installed the Hashemite tribe of Jordan's King Abdullah I (grandfather of King Abdullah II), which was sympathetic to British imperial interests.

That ushered in an era of autocratic, minority rule which lasted until today, and left the local Jews and Arabs to continue to fight over the remaining 23%.

Despite being the majority, Palestinians in Jordan are subject to widespread discrimination and repression by the government. Recently, sensing the growing threat from disgruntled Palestinians, the Jordanian government began stripping large numbers of their Jordanian citizenship, dealing another blow to their collective civil rights, and illustrating how it relies on their disenfranchisement to survive." - (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/171185#.UhzQrBaXuFJ)

http://paper.li/allysonchristy/1338794440
===




For African migrants in Israel, a life in legal limbo




Read more: http://www.jta.org/2013/08/20/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/for-55000-eritreans-in-israel-a-life-in-legal-limbo#ixzz2dGR9iFS2
Sad. It isn't their fault their people are so terrible .. the UN is culpable in its dealings .. ed
===
Israelis are pretty passionate about their dairy products. So important is cottage cheese to the average Israeli that the price of the product was the poster issue for the Israeli social protests three summers ago.
But Joshua Miron, head of the Ruminant Sciences Department at the Volcani Center in Israel, says his work is much more than about a love for milk.
===
With sports in the US getting more competitive every year, a torn knee ligament can mean “game over” for a professional footballer, tennis star or basketball champion.
Yet these kinds of injuries are becoming more and more common, with an estimated 700,000 tears of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) –– the most common type of knee tear –– every year.
===
Hot, dry summers put forests at great risk of fire. Since January of this year alone, hundreds of wildfires destroyed large swaths of Australia, while Colorado’s Black Forest experienced the worst blaze in state history.
The devastation might not be as vast in the future, if firefighters adopt Israel’s unique Matash Fire Forecasting System, developed by the research department of the Ministry of Public Security in reaction to the record-breaking Carmel Forest fire of 2010.
===
FORMER Prime Minister Julia Gillard returned to her Federal electorate of Lalor to say goodbye to the community yesterday.
On her visit, Ms Gillard did a tour of the Wyndham Vale GP Super Clinic which is under construction and attended the opening of the Mambourin Cafe at Isis Primary Care in Hoppers Crossing.
The Lalor MP of 15 years, who announced she would retire from politics in June after losing a leadership poll to Kevin Rudd, was flanked by the Labor candidate for Lalor, Joanne Ryan.
Ms Gillard also farewelled the community at a Civic Reception held by Wyndham Council last night.
Ms Gillard thanked the community for their support and said she had a continued interest in the community and its issues.
She said despite her decision to move back to Adelaide, she would return to Wyndham regularly to attend Werribee Football Club games and stay in touch with the community.
Is the image of Gillard trying to find her electorate on a map? - ed
===
The Earth Story
Airglow over Mono lake.

It's not just auroras that fill our sky with eerie light. A weaker phenomenon called airglow (aka nightglow) also exists, and unlike the aurora, which are focussed towards the poles by Earth's magnetic field, it can be seen from anywhere on Earth with luck and a dark sky or long exposure photo. Both phenomena arise from excited atmospheric atoms, but with different solar sources for the excitation energy. Like aurorae, airglow can be patchy and shift on a scale of minutes across the night sky. It is also present during the day but hidden in the glare.

Aurorae are due to high speed collisions with the high energy particles in the solar wind, usually during a coronal mass ejection that is pointed towards our planet and funnelled down our world's field lines. Airglow arises from high energy components of ordinary sunlight, in this case short wave ultraviolet and X-Rays. Several mechanisms combine in the lower reaches of space to produce this glow.

Between 80 and 100 Km up from the surface, oxygen atoms get chemically excited and ionised (the electrons are stripped off from the nuclei by the energy). They then react with hydroxyl molecules (OH) to form water, or recombine into O2 and start to glow green from both chemically stimulated energy and the decay of those atoms excited by cosmic rays (just once in my life I think I've had the blue flash of Cherenkov radiation in one eye reported by astronauts). They only occur at high altitude because lower down the nitrogen in the atmosphere quenches the reaction. Other types of atom also recombine to contribute to the effect, such as nitrogen and oxygen forming nitric oxide (NO), emitting a photon of light as they do so.

It was first identified by the Swede Angstrom in 1868, and subsequent laboratory studies have shown the chemical pathways that create the light as an energetic by product of the photochemical reactions. It limits the sensitivity of ground based telescopes at visible wavelengths, and is one of the reasons space telescopes are so useful to astronomers, as they can see faint objects normally masked by airglow. It usually appears bluish green, and seems brightest about ten degrees above the horizon. Only part of the layer of air that forms our bubble glows, too high up and the atoms are too tenuous to combine, too low and their density means that the energy is dissipated by collisions rather than photochemical reactions.

While it is normally quite weak, and the photographer tells me that this picture has an unusual intensity for the phenomenon, he states that a friend obtained similar results when shooting from the same place in the same direction.

Sometime in the next couple of days, we'll put up a photo of airglow from space, so you can see the shimmering band that encircles our wonderful Blue Marble.

Loz

Image credit: Matt Granz,https://www.facebook.com/mattgranz

http://mattgranz.zenfolio.com/p605465417/h480576aa#h480576aa

http://www.atoptics.co.uk/highsky/airglow2.htm

http://www.universetoday.com/89688/what-is-airglow/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/10997/airglow
===
“Attempts to bypass the Security Council, to once again create artificial, unproven excuses for an armed intervention in the region are fraught with new suffering in Syria and catastrophic consequences for other countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said in a statement posted on the Ministry's website."

http://en.rian.ru/world/20130828/183002667/US-Gathers-Intl-Support-for-Possible-Syria-Military-Action.html
US action is too late While Obama was community organising, the opportunity to use diplomacy was passed. Obama referred to a red line which was a challenge for Syria to step over. Thing is, Syria is merely an Iranian puppet. Hit the puppet and make things worse. But pulling the puppet's strings .. that would have been good last week or month .. ed
===

From AMSA today:

PAN PAN
FM RCC AUSTRALIA 280606Z AUG 2013 AUSSAR 2013/5809
CHART AUS 4708 AUSTRALIA WEST COAST AND INDONESIA
ASYLUM SEEKER VESSEL WITH 55 PERSONS ON BOARD IN POSITION 07-03.73S 105-05.63E AT 280430UTC AUG 2013 ENCOUNTERING HEAVY SEAS AND REQUESTS ASSISTANCE. VESSELS WITHIN 30NM OF POSITION ARE REQUESTED TO MAINTAIN LOOKOUT, PROVIDE ASSISTANCE AS NECESSARY AND REPORT SIGHTINGS TO RCC AUSTRALIA VIA TELEPHONE +61262306811 INMARSAT THROUGH LES BURUM (POR 212,IOR 312), SPECIAL ACCESS CODE (SAC) 39, HF DSC 005030001, EMAIL: rccaus@amsa.gov.au OR BY FAX +61262306868.
NNNN

That location is only 30km from the West Java coast, but of course WE will be expected to come to the rescue.
===
Oh Japan. You never are one to do things by half are you? This dinosaur prank will delight everyone, especially Jurassic Park fans, not only because the dinosaur looks so real, but because the poor prankee's reaction is just brilliant. It's probably informed by a lifetime of cultural influence from Godzilla. Poor guy.
===
Nobody likes to be a whinger. But there are some situations in which you absolutely shouldn't put up and shut up: a cockroach runs across your table in a restaurant; your new-ish mobile breaks down; you fork out for a fancy weekend away and find the accommodation needs a serious facelift.
When bad things happen, you have to be able to complain - and get results.
Dr Catriona Wallace is the chief executive of customer experience analyst Fifth Quadrant. According to its research, complaints account for 1 million of the 21 million interactions Australian consumers have with organisations on any given day. While that sounds like a lot of whining, Wallace says Australians are actually reluctant to complain. ''It's tied into mateship culture that we, sociologically, don't really like to complain,'' she says.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/money/planning/how-to-make-complaining-work-20130828-2spp1.html#ixzz2dFzTe09S
My wife says it is ok for me to complain, but I shouldn't *sound* like I do, when I do. But I enjoy ABBA. - ed
===
School is a prison -- and damaging our kids

Longer school years aren't the answer. The problem is school itself. Compulsory teach-and-test simply doesn't work

BY 
Yes, but your perspective is too narrow .. the assumption being an adult at home provides leadership of a type .. most are not like that .. reated in an attempt to raise literacy .. everyone in Great Britain was to read and write to a year 8 standard. Catholic church initiated a similar program at about the same time. from early 1800's to mid 1800's, students became teachers of the younger years .. boot strapping .. and records were kept of attainments .. rewards given on assembly. Then in mid 1800's, teacher training began at university to make teachers who would inculcate moral values .. this article is asinine .. I use it as a counter example of good scholarship .. ed
===

my grandma was trying to fill out a form for the UK pension ..
It asked for her birth year and began 19 with two spaces .. but she was born in 1898 .. true story .. you don't care? Do you!! ed
===
A Canadian woman took matters into her own hands when her bike was stolen last week.
Kayla Smith followed the appropriate channels, filing a police report when her $1,000 bike went missing outside of an apartment building in Vancouver, even though it had been locked. But when she saw an ad on Craigslist featuring her bicycle the next morning for $300, she devised a way to get it back on her own, according to the Vancouver Sun.
===
Craig Kelly
KEVIN'S LATEST HALF-BAKED IDEA

Where did Mr Rudd latest half-baked idea of moving the Garden Island Naval base come from ?

• It can’t have come from Defence – it’s clear today Defence was not consulted

• It didn’t come from former military leaders – former chief of navy Russ Crane and former chief of army Ken Gillespie say moving navy’s HQ is impractical.

• It didn’t come from the Labor Government – which released a defence white paper in May making it clear Garden Island facilities and staff would not be relocated

• And it’s not clear whether the idea came from Kevin Rudd’s Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith. Where was the Minister for Defence yesterday when the Garden Island announcement was made?

It's clear that Mr. Rudd is just making it up as he goes along.

While it’s one thing for Mr Rudd to roll-out a series of half-baked ideas that damage the economy – when Mr Rudd’s half-baked ideas threaten to damage our nation’s military & defence infrastructure – it should be an ominous warning of the clear and present danger that Mr Rudd is to Australia.

The pattern of this Labor Government has been chaos, dysfunction and division, making it all up as they go along - continues.

Nothing’s changed.

If Labor are re-elected it won’t just be another three years as bad as the last six – it will be even worse. More debt, more deficits, more chaos, more disunity and more sheer dysfunction.

Australians deserve so much better than this
===

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Larry Pickering
DEAR UNCLE KEV...

I am really happy you can come to my school so we can all have our pictures taken with you. Everyone is soooo excited!

Guess what Uncle Kev, you know our school essay on, “What a silly man Mr Abbott is”? I copied a story in The Age and my teacher gave me top marks. I got 3 stars and a big ribbon.

Anyway, my Dad says you have no money left and that’s very sad, so everyone is bringing some food for you. My Dad’s coming too, but some of the fruit he is bringing is a bit old.

Mum has bought some high protein free-range eggs and my brother, Shamus, has a hessian bag full of vine-ripened tomatoes.

We won’t let you go hungry, Uncle Kev, we Australians all pull together to help poor people.

I am really worried about you tho’, Uncle Kev, ‘cos I have seen horrible pictures of all those starving little children with big tummies and I noticed your tummy is getting bigger all the time.

My Dad says you’re a psychopathic megalomaniac, I think that means ‘movie star’. So, hurry up and come to see us.

My name is Phoebe and I’m here to help you Uncle Kev.

Love,
Phoebe, (8)
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This is Papakolea Beach, this is one of only four green sand beaches in the World.

Here are some more beautiful images:http://tmblr.co/Znyl3utTQFOQ
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Ann Coulter slammed President Obama and all Democrats for that matter on foreign policy. Tonight on Hannity, she reacted to the developing situation out of Syria and possible missile strikes by the United States on the country. “Do not vote for Democrats for commander in chief, America. This is what happens.”

Read more: http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/08/27/ann-coulter-obama-bomb-syria-so-he-wont-look-idiot#ixzz2dG6RoDvP
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A former high school teacher in Montana will only serve 30 days in jail, despite being convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl who later committed suicide.
The sentence was handed down on Monday by Judge G. Todd Baugh to Stacey Dean Rambold, 54, who admitted to having sexual relations with Cherice Morales, a then 14-year-old student.
Baugh reportedly sentenced Rambold to 15 years prison for nonconsensual sexual intercourse, but suspended all except 31 days. The judge then gave the former teacher credit for one day served, reducing his total jail sentence to just 30 days.
According to The Billings Gazette, the judge said 14-year-old Morales was “older than her chronological age” and Rambold’s lawyer asked the judge to “consider how he’s been punished to this point.”
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The immigration bill seems to be stalled in Congress right now. In an attempt to speed up the process, the American Catholic Church is urging its congregation to support the bill. The issue? Some of that will take place in sermons during mass.

Read more: http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/08/27/catholic-church-push-immigration-reform-sermons#ixzz2dG79yBkZ
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Pastor Rick Warren
Fear makes everything seem impossible.
Faith makes everything seem possible.
"With man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26
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Despite being wrapped in red tape and taken for granted, we think small business owners are local heroes. Tag your local small business hero here to tell them are #2BIG2IGNORE
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The Greens claim to support democracy and open debate, but their actions speak louder than their words. Help stop the Greens todayhttp://ow.ly/nCMYg
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Pastor Rick Warren
Anyone can handle one problem at a time, but to be a LEADER you must learn to handle multiple attacks at once without giving up.
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Holly Sarah Nguyen
God decide who you MEET, but you decide who you KEEP.
God brings people together for a valid reason, and it's your
full time responsibility to keep or hold on to who God has
placed in your life. If you agree say: Amen!

Amen .. and I'll add .. I have really troublesome relatives .. but I see them as an inheritance. I have no idea what to do with them or how God wants me to work with them, but they are there. - ed
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The Zionist project was based on the historical necessity, to use a Marxist phrase, of creating a safe haven for European Jews as a reaction to 19th-century anti-Semitism.
But this miraculous process of Jewish reappropriation of the military also spurred the conflict between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel. Such a state for assimilated Jews could have been actualized in Argentina, Uganda or Birobidzhan.
The consequences have been Amona, Homesh, Gush Katif, Kadim, Gadim, Migron.... Ruthless and merciless experiments of Jewish self-exile which have dramatically tested even the faith of non-Jews who believe in the State of Israel.
Now the Eretz Yisrael's mountains, valleys, borders, historical identity, cultural affections, national passions which characterize the entiremountain range from Jenin to Hevron - historically, culturally and religiously the Jewish land of the Bible, where lie the greatest Jewish names of hope and redemption - Elon Moreh, Itamar, Negohot, Beit Haggai, Yitzhar, Tel Rumeida - have been put on the "negotiating table" once again, like meat at the market.
And to the names of the historic destroyers like Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, Commander of the Roman Legions, we risk adding the Jewish names Rabin, Peres, Barak, Olmert, Livni - and now Netanyahu.
Everybody knows that a Palestinian Arab Islamic state cannot come into existence if the Jewish "settlements" remain in their present locations. And this is a consequence of terrorism.
It began with the slogan "only a political solution will end Palestinian terrorism", which was echoed by IDF commanders who lost the war on terrorism. It was a war that for seven years (1987-1994) they were never required to win. Cynically, the governments directed things so that there was no possible solution but surrender.
IDF strongholds have been abandoned, dismantled, even looted by Palestinian mobs. Above all, the prime ministers' pronouncements isolated "Jewish settlers", questioned their legitimacy, defamed them, and tried to break their spirit. They also made life in some of the besieged "settlements" impossible.
Everybody also knows that evacuating the IDF from Palestinian Arab-populated areas will primarily affect the Jewish population in Jerusalem and the center of the country. A hostile foreign army will not face obstacles on the way to Tel Aviv.
The shocking memories of synagogues ablaze in Gush Katif is a sight unseen since the Nazi Kristallnacht and was now repeated in the State of the Jews by the Jews. Could it happen again? Why not?
For me, the Jewish cause transcends everything. Israel is the Jewish state; Jerusalem is Jewish, and exclusively Jewish; Hevron is forever Jewish.
If the "settlements", the world's Jewish designated sacrifical lamb, will be abandoned and destroyed, for the first time since the days of Joshua, the holy land will become the home of a foreign, vicious people. This is what I learned from the Bible.
No real pro-Israel friend will be able to be comforted after the day the Jewish state forsakes the most precious pieces of real estate in the world.
Let's hope that the tragedy of Oslo, the very grave of the Jewish people, will never repeat itself.
A post-retreat and rationalistic-hedonist State of Israel, which gives up the heartland for the sake of "democracy" and under the threat of the PA death sentence for the Jewish people, doesn't deserve my activism and support.

What genius in the UN thought to have Jerusalem separate? ed
===

In his defence, she was an embarrassment ed
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Tom Thumb
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“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you.” Isaiah 26:3 NIV
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

Morning

"How long will it be ere they believe me?"
Numbers 14:11
Strive with all diligence to keep out that monster unbelief. It so dishonours Christ, that he will withdraw his visible presence if we insult him by indulging it. It is true it is a weed, the seeds of which we can never entirely extract from the soil, but we must aim at its root with zeal and perseverance. Among hateful things it is the most to be abhorred. Its injurious nature is so venomous that he that exerciseth it and he upon whom it is exercised are both hurt thereby. In thy case, O believer! it is most wicked, for the mercies of thy Lord in the past, increase thy guilt in doubting him now. When thou dost distrust the Lord Jesus, he may well cry out, "Behold I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves." This is crowning his head with thorns of the sharpest kind. It is very cruel for a well-beloved wife to mistrust a kind and faithful husband. The sin is needless, foolish, and unwarranted. Jesus has never given the slightest ground for suspicion, and it is hard to be doubted by those to whom our conduct is uniformly affectionate and true. Jesus is the Son of the Highest, and has unbounded wealth; it is shameful to doubt Omnipotence and distrust all-sufficiency. The cattle on a thousand hills will suffice for our most hungry feeding, and the granaries of heaven are not likely to be emptied by our eating. If Christ were only a cistern, we might soon exhaust his fulness, but who can drain a fountain? Myriads of spirits have drawn their supplies from him, and not one of them has murmured at the scantiness of his resources. Away, then, with this lying traitor unbelief, for his only errand is to cut the bonds of communion and make us mourn an absent Saviour. Bunyan tells us that unbelief has "as many lives as a cat:" if so, let us kill one life now, and continue the work till the whole nine are gone. Down with thee, thou traitor, my heart abhors thee.

Evening

"Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth."
Psalm 31:5
These words have been frequently used by holy men in their hour of departure. We may profitably consider them this evening. The object of the faithful man's solicitude in life and death is not his body or his estate, but his spirit; this is his choice treasure--if this be safe, all is well. What is this mortal state compared with the soul? The believer commits his soul to the hand of his God; it came from him, it is his own, he has aforetime sustained it, he is able to keep it, and it is most fit that he should receive it. All things are safe in Jehovah's hands; what we entrust to the Lord will be secure, both now and in that day of days towards which we are hastening. It is peaceful living, and glorious dying, to repose in the care of heaven. At all times we should commit our all to Jesus' faithful hand; then, though life may hang on a thread, and adversities may multiply as the sands of the sea, our soul shall dwell at ease, and delight itself in quiet resting places.
"Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth." Redemption is a solid basis for confidence. David had not known Calvary as we have done, but temporal redemption cheered him; and shall not eternal redemption yet more sweetly console us? Past deliverances are strong pleas for present assistance. What the Lord has done he will do again, for he changes not. He is faithful to his promises, and gracious to his saints; he will not turn away from his people.
"Though thou slay me I will trust,
Praise thee even from the dust,

Prove, and tell it as I prove,
Thine unutterable love.
Thou mayst chasten and correct,
But thou never canst neglect;
Since the ransom price is paid,
On thy love my hope is stay'd."
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Today's reading: Psalm 120-122, 1 Corinthians 9 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Psalm 120-122

A song of ascents.
1 I call on the LORD in my distress,
and he answers me.
2 Save me, LORD,
from lying lips
and from deceitful tongues.
3 What will he do to you,
and what more besides,
you deceitful tongue?
4 He will punish you with a warrior's sharp arrows,
with burning coals of the broom bush.
5 Woe to me that I dwell in Meshek,
that I live among the tents of Kedar!
6 Too long have I lived
among those who hate peace.
7 I am for peace;
but when I speak, they are for war....

Today's New Testament reading: 1 Corinthians 9

Paul's Rights as an Apostle

1 Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord? 2 Even though I may not be an apostle to others, surely I am to you! For you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord.
3 This is my defense to those who sit in judgment on me. 4Don't we have the right to food and drink? 5 Don't we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas? 6 Or is it only I and Barnabas who lack the right to not work for a living?
7 Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat its grapes? Who tends a flock and does not drink the milk? 8 Do I say this merely on human authority? Doesn't the Law say the same thing? 9 For it is written in the Law of Moses: "Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain." Is it about oxen that God is concerned?10 Surely he says this for us, doesn't he? Yes, this was written for us, because whoever plows and threshes should be able to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest. 11 If we have sown spiritual seed among you, is it too much if we reap a material harvest from you? 12 If others have this right of support from you, shouldn't we have it all the more?
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