Friday, October 31, 2008

John Hodgman: A brief digression on matters of lost time


http://www.ted.com Humorist John Hodgman rambles through a new story about aliens, physics, time, space and the way all of these somehow contribute to a sweet, perfect memory of falling in love.

Headlines Friday 31st October

Principles addressed
Andrew Bolt
I am so glad that Education Minister Julia Gillard is leading a charge to improve spelling standards in schools. No doubt she touched on that matter in this speech yesterday:

Opening address to the Australian Primary Principles
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Britons snowed
Andrew Bolt
Inside the British Parliament:

The UK Climate Change Bill passed another hurdle last night as MPs voted by a massive majority of 460 to back the amended bill…

Meanwhile, on the roof of the British Parliament:

Snow came down in London - the first October dusting since 1934.
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Palin makes a fool of her critics
Andrew Bolt
Elaine Lafferty, former editor-in-chief of Ms magazine, says only the dumb think that Sarah Palin is, too:

It’s difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin’s “intelligence,” coming especially from women such as PBS’s Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I’m agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin.
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Worse is better and less is more
Andrew Bolt
From the same people who didn’t realise their bank deposit guarantee to stop a run would cause one:

THE Rudd Government will press ahead with its emissions trading scheme, arguing that modelling to be released today proves it is pro-growth and good for the nation’s long-term economic competitiveness.

Yes, they really do believe that raising the price of our electricity and all things gassy will give us more growth and cheaper exports.
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Australia, USA to 'jag world into action' on climate change
The federal government will try to engage a new US administration to work with Australia to tackle climate change, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says.

Comprehensive economic modelling released by Treasury today has painted a rosy picture of how emissions trading will affect the economy and households.

The modelling found the scheme would barely impact on economic growth and incomes, both of which would continue to grow.

Mr Rudd today said the government would act responsibly in implementing a scheme, and simultaneously try to "jag the rest of the international community into action".

"That's the hard bit," Mr Rudd told ABC Television.

"But we face an election very soon in the United States, both Republicans and Democrats have committed to action.

"One of our first challenges will be to engage the incoming American administration in working with us on this.

"If America is on board with concerted global action and the Europeans, and critically, the emerging economies China, India and elsewhere, we have a prospect - a prospect - of getting there." -This is the same PM who undiplomatically lied publicly about a phone call to the current US President. I suspect that whomever wins the US Presidency won't have money to throw away on Rudd's pet project to get him elected to the UN.- ed.
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Vic police probed in sex, drugs investigation
Police have been linked to the operation of an illegal brothel, and to corruption involving street prostitutes and drug dealers.
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Rudd announces 2,000 indigenous school scholarships
The federal government will help pay for 2,000 scholarships for indigenous students to attend some of Australia's top secondary schools. - boarding schools? But Rudd just apologized for stealing children from their families - ed.
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“Stealing” them again
Andrew Bolt
Just eight months after saying we will never, never again take Aboriginal children away from their families and dump them in church-run institutions, Kevin Rudd makes an announcement:

THE Federal Government will fund a big expansion of the country’s main indigenous boarding school scholarship scheme to allow an extra 2000 Aboriginal students to attend top secondary schools.
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Oink oink
Andrew Bolt
In a dispute between a factional warrior and a idealist over a big pot of money, I’m on the side of Lindsay Tanner:

A DISPUTE between two senior federal ministers has disrupted Government plans to embark on a multibillion-dollar “nation building” program to help shield Australia from recession…

Accounts suggest that Mr Albanese was unhappy with the legislation produced by Mr Tanner, and asked that it be pulled because it gave him insufficient ministerial discretion over how the money would be allocated.
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Hang the consistency
Andrew Bolt
Hang an effigy of Sarah Palin, and get fame:

The owner of a home that has a mannequin dressed like the Republican vice presidential candidate and hanging by a rope says it’s just a “scary” Halloween decoration… Several locals and tour buses have swung by the house to snap photos of the scene, and some gawkers say it is humorous.

Hang an effigy of Barack Obama, and get arrested
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Keating storms Gallipoli
Andrew Bolt
Paul Keating smashes windows in church, throwing bricks at demons that aren’t actually there:
While launching Churchill and Australia, a new book by renowned Labor Party speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, the former prime minister said: “The truth is that Gallipoli was shocking for us. Dragged into service by the imperial government in an ill-conceived and poorly executed campaign, we were cut to ribbons and dispatched—and none of it in the defence of Australia.

“Without seeking to simplify the then bonds of empire and the implicit sense of obligation, or to diminish the bravery of our own men, we still go on as though the nation was born again or even was redeemed there. (It is) an utter and complete nonsense. For these reasons, I have never been to Gallipoli and I never will.”
I’ve seen thousands of Australians paying homage to the dead boys at Gallipoli. I can’t say I met any who thought our country was born or redeemed there, or thought the campaign there was anything but a disaster.

All they wanted to do was express their sorrow for so great a sacrifice, their admiration of such astonishing courage, and their gratitude that even in the face of a pointless disaster, Australians answered the call to duty.
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Thinking hot, feeling cold
Andrew Bolt
TREASURER Wayne Swan had to get out of his woollies yesterday before telling us the world really was warming - and we must pay.

You see, just days before he stood in Canberra, waving a Treasury document he claimed would help stop us heating to hell, his own family had shivered through a day that should make him finally wonder if there really is any global warming.

Brisbane, his home town, had just endured its coldest October morning in 32 years, yet here was Swan telling us to spend billions in the belief the planet was cooking instead.

It’s not only here that global warming believers are feeling a chill they never expected.
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Going to water in a crisis
Andrew Bolt
THE more the Brumby Government tells us Melbourne won’t run out of water, the more you should panic.

Here we go again, with (No) Water Minister Tim Holding burbling that this time he’s fixed the draining of our dams, now just a third full and falling.

He’s taking water from dusty Goulburn farmers, and is building a $3.1 billion desalination plant, so fixed!

“It’s a solution for decades to come, not for 10 or 20 years, but for 50 years-plus,” he promised.

Except it isn’t, of course. It’s 20 years and a million more Melburnians since we built our last dam, and in 20 years we’ll have yet another million residents in this city, all needing a drink, shower, flush and sprinkler.

So, with rainfall again as scarce as it used to be before the wet decades after the war, it’s no wonder Melbourne Water chairman Cheryl Batagol last week said, well, actually, minister . . .
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Parallel universe costed
Andrew Bolt
The Australian’s headline makes some heroic assumptions:

Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme blueprint: $1-a-day to save planet

It won’t be a $1 and it won’t save the planet.

The Treasury costings it’s talking about - which claim Rudd’s emissions trading scheme won’t cost much at all - makes even more assumptions.
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Never mind that we need him
Andrew Bolt
A decision to make you embarrassed - for its irrationality in this case, if nothing else:

A MIGRANT doctor and his family are being forced to leave Australia, and the Victorian town that desperately needs him, because his son has Down syndrome.
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We deserve better than the ACCC
Australian small business deserves better than the ACCC, which has proven itself to be completely incapable of looking after their interests, argues Alan Jones. - technically, we deserve better from them. The previous government had to go softly with them because they were fighting their battles on IR. The current government benefits from their incompetence. - ed.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Dr. Dean Ornish: Healing and other natural wonders


http://www.ted.com Dean Ornish talks about simple, low-tech and low-cost ways to take advantage of the body's natural desire to heal itself.

Headlines Thursday 30th October

Rudd’s policy as safe as money in the bank
Piers Akerman
KEVIN Rudd and his team of economic ministers have done nothing but compound the economic problems facing Australians since the global fiscal crisis began. - It just occurred to me, this might be Rudd's way of limiting the pay of 'the big end of town.' By making money worth less, Rudd has lessened the disparity between rich and poor .. something Mr Howard couldn't do even though he made poor people much better off. - ed
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How to report an election
Andrew Bolt
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How brazenly Rudd spins
Andrew Bolt
Exactly how many porkies has Kevin Rudd quietly been telling journalists about his chats with foreign newsmakers? We know already how he verballed George Bush, but Peter Costello has another example:

Last Friday Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald told us it was in late March, at a meeting with the Managing Director of the IMF in Washington, that Kevin Rudd became alarmed about the gathering economic crisis. “Fearing the effects on the world economy, Rudd decided to prepare an economic stimulus package for Australia. He and Swan began canvassing specific ideas with their officials”.

Laurie Oakes told us on Saturday in News Ltd papers how Wayne Swan, sitting in a car in pouring rain in January took a call from US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson who wanted to warn him of the dangers in American financial institutions. This explains how according to Oakes “An economic stimulus plan was already on the blocks. As they became increasingly alarmed at what was happening overseas, Rudd and Swan had been working on it, just in case”.

The thing we can confidently say as a result of the co-ordinated media spin over the weekend is that the Government is briefing journalists that it has been working up an economic stimulus plan since January or perhaps March. We are invited to believe that we should be grateful that the Government saw this economic downturn and drew up plans for a fiscal stimulus to meet it.

Unfortunately the facts rather get in the way of this nice piece of spin. The first fact is the May Budget.
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Not the only gay in the village
Andrew Bolt

Little Britain’s Matt Lucas has become famous - and hugely popular - for playing Daffyd Thomas, “the only gay in the village”. Lucas, himself gay, has Thomas constantly outing himself in a tiny Welsh village, only to be disappointed at meeting acceptance, indifference to his sexuality, and more gays than he imagined or wanted.

It mocks the stereotype of a raging queen, and professional victim, but the laughter it invites comes not from a hatred of gays, but a (hopeful) recognition that our villages most certainly have more than one gay and there’s no need to play the lonely martyr. The comedy wouldn’t work if Daffyd’s sexuality was treated with hatred and derision. The fun is in recognising that Daffyd is out of time, protesting against a bigotry he can no longer find, but needs to hide his own shyness and naivity. And in laughing at him, we congratulate ourselves for our tolerance of - or, much better, affection for - the only gay in the village.
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Polls tighten, despite the media
Andrew Bolt
Now even Gallup notices a tightening
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Rudd’s fix makes mess worse
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd is like the pilot who reassures his passengers the plane really is safe - by handing out parachutes only to first class. No wonder that he’s managed to create a run on financial institutions by noisily trying to stop a run on banks that hadn’t actually occurred.

But Terry McCrann has a different analogy for the disaster, which Rudd’s panicky $83 million fix yesterday may only make worse:

IT GETS worse. First the Prime Minister is making a habit of shouting “there isn’t a fire in the theatre”. But I’ve called the fire brigade and I want everyone to flee - err, correction, evacuate the theatre.

And now his ‘policy’ is to turn the entire Australian financial system into banks…
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Mistake-prone Premier won't be listened to
Alan Jones
The recently arrived New South Wales Premier, Nathan Rees needs to be very careful.

There are far too many mistakes emerging.

And the great political risk is that if this continues, the public will stop listening, and that is terminal for any politician.

When he came to the job he said that he would end the spin.

When he went to a public meeting with his Cabinet in Penrith, he said he should get no credit for listening, that's what he's meant to do. But it was the action which followed the listening that counted.

Well, yesterday he was asked whether his Government would guarantee payments to businesses that supply New South Wales public hospitals.

Now the Federal Labor Government had said that any suppliers to Government departments would be paid within 30 days. And Federal Labor said they'd guarantee that.

And if the Government Department failed to meet the deadline, the small business operator would have the right to charge penalty interest on the unpaid debt.

I should point out this is an initiative of the Federal Small Business Minister, a bloke called Craig Emerson who is very able.

Well, Nathan Rees was asked whether he would similarly guarantee the payments to businesses that supply the State Government, and he declined to offer the guarantee.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Who is Obama?

Melanie Phillips can’t believe it:
You have to pinch yourself. A Marxist radical, who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power, anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.
Highlighted by the failure of the media to question Obama, or what he stands for .. as can be seen in this, from the LA times, courtesy of Bolt.
Question: when the voters are almost evenly divided, why has the media coverage been so unbelievably one-sided - and determined to portray John McCain as a pathetic loser?

And speaking of the media being on Obama’s bus, note how far the Los Angeles Times is going to protect their favorite:

John McCain’s presidential campaign today accused the Los Angeles Times of “intentionally suppressing” a videotape it obtained of a 2003 banquet where then-state Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian scholar and activist....

The Times today issued a statement about its decision not to post the tape.
“The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it,” said the newspaper’s editor, Russ Stanton. “The Times keeps its promises to sources.”
Not only does the LA TImes refuse to show the tape, it persists in describing Khalidi as merely “a leading Palestinian scholar and activist”. Here’s another view of Obama’s friend, making clear his work for the PLO, long a terrorist organisation devoted to the destruction of Israel.

Virginia Postrel: The power of glamour


http://www.ted.com In a timely talk, cultural critic Virginia Postrel muses on the true meaning, and the powerful uses, of glamour -- which she defines as any calculated, carefully polished image designed to impress and persuade.

Headlines Wednesday 29th October

Rees boasts his Cabinet even dumber
Andrew Bolt
He says it like he’s proud that his Cabinet is now 100 per cent stupid:

The Premier, Nathan Rees, has blasted former NSW treasurer Michael Costa for being a global warming sceptic, and said a new era of climate change action would start from today.
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Rudd’s $83 million mistake
Andrew Bolt
Taxpayers face the first big bill from the Rudd Government’s bungled attempt to stop a run on the banks - and causing instead a run on other financial institutions:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tonight announced the government will give Australia’s financial regulators an extra $83 million over four years to help them deal with the global financial crisis.
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As in schools, so in our suburbs
Andrew Bolt
Multiculturalism isn’t all felafels and festas:

A teenage student of Lebanese descent had developed a phobia towards young males of Asian backgrounds after he was brutally assaulted by a group of Vietnamese youths, a Sydney court has heard… The man’s lawyer, Tom Hughes, told the court today that there was racial tension at Birrong Boys High School, which had deeply entrenched racial divisions. He said the school’s grounds at recess had areas where students of Lebanese, Asian, European and Tongan descent congregated.
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Pilger’s porky
Andrew Bolt
A terrific example of Pilgerism - and from the master who gave his name to the trick, John Pilger:
A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent “or the result of creative accounting”, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

Oh, really? Aborigines robbed of $3 billion? Let’s check that Sydney Morning Herald article which Pilger (mis)quotes:
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Green dreams answered
Andrew Bolt
Their hunger for Armageddon is as characteristic as their lack of irony. Brendan O’Neill tells of his career as a fake greenheart:

Earlier this year, I wrote an eco-satirical column under the pseudonym Ethan Greenhart, in which I (or rather, Ethan) called upon Greens everywhere to pray for an economic downturn. The column argued that nothing would benefit our human-ravaged planet more than a “big, beautiful, stock-crashing, Wall Street–burning, consumer-baiting, home-evicting, bank-busting recession.”

We need something to stop humans “raping the planet,” I said…

Not 24 hours after the column was published, “Ethan” received an e-mail (my alter ego came with his own inbox) from Valerie Stevens, chairperson of the U.K.-based Optimum Population Trust. The OPT is an influential green-leaning outfit that campaigns for strict controls on population growth. Ms. Stevens, believing — remarkably — that Ethan Greenhart is a real person, wrote: “What a marvellous piece of writing. I feel exactly the same as you!”

Consider what this means. The head of one of Britain’s most vocal Green lobby groups feels “exactly” that people who work in shops are comparable to “concentration camp guards”; that humankind is a “poisonous bacteria in Gaia’s bloodstream”; that “consumerism makes us mentally ill”; that the consumer society has “turned us into savages . . . well, not us, obviously, but certainly them”; and that a disease should come and decimate “the plague that is mankind.”
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STUNNED RUDD
Tim Blair
According to The Australian, Kevin Rudd recently took a call from George W. Bush
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Who made Henry the target?
Andrew Bolt
Peter Costello notes the Rudd Government’s use of Treasury secretary Ken Henry as a political prop:

I can’t remember a time when a Treasury Secretary did so many media events with ministers.
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NSW ALP Shambles Along
Andrew Bolt
It’s incredible that voters can’t sack these clowns for another three years:

PREMIER Nathan Rees has threatened to legislate to overturn $60,000 pay rises for the state’s top bureaucrats following The Daily Telegraph’s revelations yesterday of a secret Government pay deal…

After being forced to admit that he had known about the pay rise for more than a month but had failed to make it public, Mr Rees said he would now seek a reversal from the NSW Remuneration Tribunal which awarded it....

So shambolic is this outfit that this now counts as business as usual
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Realisation dawns: we won
Andrew Bolt
Now Strategy Page agrees, too:

The war is over.

The realisation that we’ve won the war in Iraq has been slow to dawn on the media, although it’s been clear for a year. I guess you don’t see what you don’t want to see.
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Hogan votes for humans
Andrew Bolt
I’ve said Paul Hogan’s tourism ads are far, far better than Baz Luhrmann’s new ones:

Paul Hogan’s “shrimp on the barbie” ads, after all, remain the most famous and loved, remembered even today by many who saw them 20 years ago.

How irresistible was his Australia - of beaches, bikinis, barbecues and an Opera House on the sun-lit harbour. It was an Australia populated by charming people who said “g’day” in charming accents, and not at all like Luhrmann’s - at its best without a local to be seen or endured.
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Bush corrects Rudd’s fantasies
Andrew Bolt
George Bush calls out Kevin Rudd for telling untruths about their phone call (see column below) and Rudd backs off:

The (Australian) story ... reported that when Mr Rudd argued for using the G20 as the forum for addressing the (financial) crisis, “Rudd was then stunned to hear Bush say, ‘What’s the G20?’ “

Now the Washington Post has reported that a US official who monitored the call “denied that Bush made any such remark”. In addition, the official said, Mr Bush told Mr Rudd in the call that other leaders favoured a G20 summit.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister last night said Mr Bush had been deeply engaged with the G20 and the role the G20 would play in dealing with the financial crisis.

This was the topic of the conversation between Mr Rudd and Mr Bush and the reason why Mr Rudd had called Mr Bush, the spokesman said.
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The Prime Blabber
Andrew Bolt
KEVIN Rudd blabs. Kevin Rudd betrays. What’s more, Kevin Rudd seems to make things up.

And on Saturday our Prime Minister managed to commit all three fouls at once against US President George W. Bush.

Trying to sell himself as a statesman, he blabbed to The Australian all the details of a private talk he’d had with the President of our most important ally.

Not only that, he betrayed Bush by retelling their conversation in ways to make the President seem a donkey, and Rudd the genius who trained him to behave. And Bush has noticed.

Still not satisfied, Rudd then apparently made things up - to take public credit for a decision Bush had already made.

I can’t recall a greater breach of confidence, a more studied insult to an ally or a more craven attempt at big-noting from an Australian Prime Minister.
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Viva Julia, the classroom revolutionary
Andrew Bolt
JULIA Gillard isn’t leading the revolution you’d expect from an ex-boss of the militant Socialist Forum.

Her “education revolution” turns out to be not the clenched-fist kind, but more the revolving one.

Gillard, both Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister, is in fact turning us back, at least in part, to where we were before education experts went mad with ideology. She is now restoring some “three-Rs” conservative basics that should never have been ditched.

No wonder madder Labor MPs are aghast. Julia Irwin, for instance, blasted Gillard’s reforms last week as a “so-called education revolution”, demanding she do the traditional Labor thing instead of robbing private schools to pay state ones.

The Australian Council of State School Organisations even damned her for pushing a “half-baked idea dreamt up by bureaucrats and a handful of neo-conservative newspaper columnists”.

But the good thing for Gillard is that it’s all true. She has indeed gone from heading a socialist outfit that recycled ex-communists to heading a push to recycle conservative policies. - Bolt overstates things. It isn't that Gillard is conservative, but her state based colleagues have been sol left wing activist that she looks conservative in contrast. - ed.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Paola Antonelli: Design and the elastic mind


http://www.ted.com MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli previews the groundbreaking show "Design and the Elastic Mind" -- full of products and designs that reflect the way we think now.

The Lords Prayer in Parliament

The practise of opening parliament with the Lord's Prayer has been brought into the spotlight recently. The government is keen to find an issue which doesn't show them as bad economic managers and which highlights the religion of conservative leaders.

It has been said that the practise is similar to the extreme practise of other religions. Like this.

Headlines Tuesday 28th October

Rees is on the same old track to nowhere
Piers Akerman
NEW Premier Nathan Rees, whose performance in his two former portfolios _ water utilities and emergency services _ never suggested he was anything other than a plodder, seems determined not to deviate from the dismal performances of his failed predecessors, Bob Carr and Morris Iemma.

But at least he has admitted that the people of NSW were right not to believe the State Government when it promised big rail projects.
Given Labor’s history of failure to deliver almost all of its major projects, except the brilliantly successful Olympics (and the bid was run by the former Fahey Liberal government), the real wonder is why NSW still has a Labor government after 13 years.
The answer, perhaps, is that Labor is better at reading the polls and delivering populist messages.
(Remember the scare campaign about the number of public servants a Liberal government would axe, should it win office, which the ALP ran before last year’s election?)
Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph’s State political reporter Joe Hildebrand revealed that a decade after outlining a huge transport initiative for Sydney, the Labor Government had failed to build a single rail project.
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Licence to dissent
Andrew Bolt
British journalism lecturer and warming alarmist Alex Lockwood says my blog is a menace to the planet. Sceptical bloggers like me need bringing into line, and Lockwood tells a journalism seminar of some options:

There is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate scepticism online is free to contest scientific fact. But there is enough here already to put forward some of the ideas in circulation.

One of the founders of the Internet Vint Cerf, and lead for Google’s Internet for Everyone project, made a recent suggestion that the Internet should be nationalised as a public utility. As tech policy blogger Jim Harper argues, “giving power over the Internet to well‐heeled interests and self‐interested politicians” is, and I quote, “a bad idea.”

Or in the UK every new online publication could be required to register with the recently announced Internet watchdog...

Strangely, Lockwood sees no irony in canvassing controls on dissent in order to defend “media freedoms” - apparently believing that media freedom is at best the freedom to agree with him
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Save them
Andrew Bolt
Geoff Strong explains why we need to change the way we foster children from wrecked families:

Our experience is of a system driven by an ideology that the solution for all children is to stay with their biological family at just about any cost, and that this will somehow be possible if resources are thrown at the problems.

Foster or permanent care parents are made to feel the least important part of the solution.

Even before we met her, Chloe gave us a clue as to what was really missing in the life of such a child. When told there was a couple willing to bring her up, her first question was: “Can I call them Mum and Dad?”
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If he were more popular, we’d be ruined
Andrew Bolt
It shows how spin beats substance:

KEVIN Rudd has emerged from the days of the financial crisis as popular as he ever was and has overtaken Malcolm Turnbull on economic management.

The Government’s $10.4 billion emergency economic boost and the guarantee for all bank deposits has been enthusiastically endorsed.

Of course, handing out cash for Christmas will always be popular - until Rudd’s bill comes in. But praising the bank deposits guarantee as well?

Consider: to prevent a run on the banks that may not actually have occured, the Government rushed in a deposits guarantee that was so badly flawed that it caused a run on other financial institutions
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Cooling to warming “solutions”
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd gets a poll boost in the polls, thanks to the financial crisis, but is also sent this wise warning:

FEARS of the global financial crisis are driving people from the Rudd Government’s carbon reduction plans, with most Australians now either against an emissions trading scheme or wanting it delayed beyond 2010.
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Bias wins, democracy loses
Andrew Bolt
Michael Malone, of America’s ABC, rightly protests:

(N)othing , nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign… (E)ven Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass—no, make that shameless support—they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press…
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Even Osama could donate to Obama
Andrew Bolt
No one has raised so much money for a US election campaign as Barack Obama, with $600 million raised so far and counting. If he were a Republican the media would scream about the buying of this election.

But attorney Scott Johnson at the New York Post says the Obama campaign’s famed on-line donation system “invites fraud”:

It has chosen to operate an online contribution system that facilitates illegal falsely sourced contributions, illegal foreign contributions and the evasion of contribution limits.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything


http://www.ted.com Physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi presents a controversial new model of the universe that -- just maybe -- answers all the big questions. If nothing else, it's the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you've ever seen.

Headlines Monday 27th October

Stop pandering to addicts with taxpayers’ funds
Piers Akerman
The Daily Telegraph’s shocking disclosure that complicit doctors are assisting drug addicts obtain a taxpayer-subsidised heroin substitute for injection at the NSW State Labor government’s protected shooting gallery is a further argument for closure of the facility and a re-direction of the State’s resources.
The black market in oxycodone, a prescription pain killer subsidised under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and the Repatriation Pharmacuetical Benefits Scheme, is fuelled by greedy doctors and accelerated by the encouragement drug addicts receive from the welcoming staff at the government’s King Cross facility. -Evidence can be a tricky thing for some people. Della Bosca has said on 2GB that he cannot do anything about NSW health because everyone he might order into action is already doing something, and so anything Della Bosca does is counter productive. I think that a fine argument for Reese to consider not having a health minister. But where is the evidence?
Hamidur Rahman died in ‘02, and the coroner called it an accident. The coroner was not aware of information held back by the department of education. Della Bosca was asked to intervene to protect the officer reporting the incident and instead chose to refer that officer to a named abuser. But then because the death was already ruled an accident, what is the problem?
I have known drug users who shared the view that harm minimisation is effective until they found that they couldn’t stop without actual help. The government has their names .. - ed.

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A hole lot of warming lessons
Andrew Bolt
Another fiercely-defended scientific consensus is questioned - billions of dollars later:

A University of Waterloo scientist says that cosmic rays are a key cause for expanding the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole — and predicts the largest ozone hole will occur in one or two weeks.

Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy who studies ozone depletion, said that it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth’s ozone layer is depleted by chlorine atoms produced by sunlight-induced destruction of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere. But more and more evidence now points to a new theory that the cosmic rays (energy particles that originate in space) play a major role.

Lu is predicting an even bigger hole than the one NASA measured just two years ago:

NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists report this year’s ozone hole in the polar region of the Southern Hemisphere has broken records for area and depth.

This may surprise you, because - as CNN notes - the man-made gases we primarily blamed for the ozone hole were phased out a long time ago:

Those gases originate from man-made products like chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which were phased out under a global agreement two decades ago but continue to linger in the atmosphere.

And here is something even odder. Now that we’ve agreed that our wicked gases were mostly to blame, and spent all the money to cut them out, the panic over the ozone hole above us has vanished - even though that hole is getting bigger almost by the year.

Shouldn’t we panic even more now, or was that past panic just a tool? And did it panic us into doing stuff that was actually a bit dumb? Scientists now debate that very point.
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When skin argues against faith
Andrew Bolt
At some stage it must occur to some global warming alarmists that they are protesting about something that hasn’t happened for 10 years now
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Dam predictions
Andrew Bolt
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LONG LIVE TRADE
Tim Blair
India’s Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar endorses McCain, for excellent reasons:
McCain is one of the few American politicians in either party with the courage and conviction to stand up to protectionist populism. By contrast, Obama embodies protectionism.
===
TAKE A STAND
Tim Blair
Jim Treacher has two words (or more, if you’re Joe Biden) for his fellow liberty-minded Americans: “Stop. Whining.” And here’s some advice from Mark Steyn:
You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present,” you can stand down.
===
PETER WALLSTEN, HAND OVER THAT TAPE
Tim Blair
The Los Angeles Times claims to have newsworthy videotape of a Presidential candidate.
===
MAYBE HE THOUGHT THE FOX GUY WOULD BOMB HIM
Tim Blair
Victor Davis Hanson observes strangeness in Chicago:
There was a strange scene when the Fox reporter caught up to Bill Ayers and stuck a microphone in his face as he went up the sidewalk of his rather impressive home: Ayers, with a bright red star on his T-shirt, shoos away the reporter with the apparent mumble “this is private property” before the police arrive. How strange that an advocate for communalism and an erstwhile attacker of police stations reverts to the notion of property rights and police to protect him from an intrusive reporter. Right out of Thucydides Book III and the strife on Corfu, when the historian warns that those who destroy the protocols of civilization may well one day wish to rely on them.
===
VT&C BEATS NYT
Tim Blair
Let Obama have his precious New York Times endorsement. It’ll be a climate-changed day in hell before he gets any support from Vacuum Technology & Coating:
Electing Barack Obama to the presidency would have catastrophic consequences to our country, and our freedom, far beyond the consequences to our economy.
===
BULB MAN HAS VAST POWER RESERVES
Tim Blair
A directive from central climate command:
Peter Garrett has called on Australians to “learn to love” wind farms, warning that too many alternative energy proposals have been rejected because of opposition from “not in my back yard” activists.
===
P-P-P-PAY ATTENTION TO C-C-C-CLI …
Tim Blair
The colder it gets, the more they protest:
Student volunteers from colleges around New York State braved freezing cold temperatures on their bikes Wednesday to send a message to state and federal political candidates: pay attention to climate change.
Watch ‘em shiver (all four of them; this was news?). The chick in the full-length woollen gloves holding a “stop global warming” sign is especially convincing.
===
Beware the new faith
Andrew Bolt

===
Rudd betrays Bush - then steals his credit
Andrew Bolt
Did Rudd not only betray a President’s confidence, but steal George Bush’s credit?

Let’s have another look at this leak which Kevin Rudd clearly had placed in The Australian on Saturday to make himself look like a real player:

KEVIN Rudd was entertaining guests in the loungeroom at Kirribilli House in Sydney when an aide told him George W. Bush was on the telephone.
===
Er, Cathy Freeman is Aboriginal, Gabriella
Andrew Bolt
I was so struck by Gabriella Coslovich’s ill-informed burbling about The First Australians, that I missed her even more ill-formed burbling in the same Age article about a government document
===
In need of some lesson’s
Andrew Bolt
In the week that a draft national curriculum recommends teachers once more teach the formal rules of grammar and punctuation, a state school teacher emails his colleague’s
===
Media hears an exciting echo
Andrew Bolt
Mark Steyn exposes the engine driving the hype of a Barack Obama win:

According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.
===
An ad Al Gore could have made
Andrew Bolt
===
A hole lot of warming lessons
Andrew Bolt
Another fiercely-defended scientific consensus is questioned - billions of dollars later:

A University of Waterloo scientist says that cosmic rays are a key cause for expanding the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole — and predicts the largest ozone hole will occur in one or two weeks.
===
Even Caravaggio was no Henson
Andrew Bolt
David Marr mocks moves to scrap the “Henson defence” - the legal leeway given to artists to paint children nude
===
A Scientologist bleeds
Andrew Bolt
Paul Sheehan runs an eye over the balance sheets of James Packer, whose late father was once our richest man:

Since James Packer took control of the family corporate empire, he made a huge bet on the future of the empire. Like father like son.
===
Rudd panicked, investors suffered
Andrew Bolt
Professor Milind Sathye compares the Rudd Government’s rushed decision to issue a free, unlimited guarantee on bank deposits - a decision that triggered a devastating run on other institutions - with the calmer decisions made overseas, and concludes:

It seems that with the stock market tumble on October 11, panic buttons got pushed. Granted the markets needed a boost, but the Government could have moved in stages rather than taking hasty action with resultant adverse effects.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

NSW Lib Updates

Nathan Rees Cuts Frontline Hospital Services: Bulli Surgical Theatres To Close
Written by Jillian Skinner MP
Nathan Rees has cut frontline hospital services in Wollongong, with surgical theatres at Bulli Hospital to be closed permanently from Christmas, Shadow Minister for Health Jillian Skinner said today.

“After promising not to cut services, Nathan Rees is closing the surgical theatres at Bulli Hospital – cutting frontline operating services,” Mrs Skinner said.

DPP Cuts Hurt Victims And Scrap Frontline Workers
Written by Greg Smith SC MP
Premier Nathan Rees’ claim that the Mini-Budget would spare frontline troops has been shown to be ‘rubbish’, Shadow Attorney General Greg Smith SC said today.

“Premier Nathan Rees’ assurances that frontline workers wouldn’t be cut in the fallout from his $42 billion debt bomb has proven to be nothing but more hollow rhetoric,” Mr Smith said.

From The Ditherer To The Gibberer: Rees Policy Confusion Deepens
Written by Barry O'Farrell MP
NSW Labor has gone from the ditherer in Morris Iemma to the gibberer in Nathan Rees who continues to confuse the entire state with his ideas made up on the back of a lemon squash coaster, NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell said today.

“Nathan Rees latest thought bubble leaves the people of North West and South West out in the cold,” Mr O’Farrell said.

Frontline Cancer Cuts Exposed: Health Dept To Take Over Cancer Institute
Written by Barry O'Farrell MP & Gladys Berejiklian MP
The State Labor Government is planning cuts to frontline cancer services risking lives across NSW, NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell and Shadow Minister for Health Jillian Skinner said today.

Leaked documents obtained by the NSW Opposition show Premier Nathan Rees and Assistant Health Minister Tony Stewart are planning cuts to bowel cancer screening, anti-smoking programs, frontline clinical staff and cancer research grants.

Monthly Figures Show Labor Failure To Act: NSW Lib/Nats
Written by The Hon Greg Pearce MLC
New Treasurer Roozendaal has finally been embarrassed into publishing the State’s monthly accounts for June, July and August and they highlight Labor’s 13 years of waste and mismanagement, Shadow Treasurer Greg Pearce said today.

“The results show that the NSW Government has to urgently address the problems that have beset NSW over the last 13 years,” said Mr Pearce.

6,700 Nurses Quit NSW In 12 Months, Labor’s Response: Shutdown Nurse Training
Written by Jillian Skinner MP
A total of 6,700 nurses have quit the NSW health system in the last year and the only response from the State Labor Government has been to shutdown paid-on-the-job enrolled nursing training which will seriously reduce nurse numbers in NSW, Shadow Minister for Health Jillian Skinner said today.

Freedom Of Information documents obtained by the NSW Opposition show 6,700 nurses resigned between July 2007 and June 2008 (an average of 558 per month). Meanwhile, the State Labor Government has changed the way Trainee Enrolled Nurses do their training – so that they can no longer earn a wage whilst undertaking on-the-job training.

Rees Squibs It On FOI Reform: Refuses To Commit To Ombudsman Recommendation
Written by Barry O'Farrell MP
Nathan Rees’ approach to Freedom of Information (FOI) provisions underscores that he is the ultimate hollowman of NSW politics, NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell said today.

“It’s pretty extraordinary when you even spin about FOI,” Mr O’Farrell said.

Blue Mountains Mothers: Labor Told Them Lies And They Are Being Put At Risk
Written by Jillian Skinner MP
The birth of a baby in the back of an ambulance on October 9 after she was turned away from Blue Mountains Hospital shows Labor’s lies are putting mothers and babies at risk, Shadow Minister for Health Jillian Skinner said today.

Unpaid Hospital Bills: The Accounts Add Up To Many Millions
Written by Jillian Skinner MP
Shadow Minister for Health Jillian Skinner took the State Labor Government to task in Parliament over the growing list of unpaid hospital bills.

In a speech to Parliament, Mrs Skinner revealed a large medical supplier who declined to be named was owed, as of today, a total of $11 million in accounts over 30 days old, and $4 million in accounts over 60 days old. This is just one of a number of large companies which are owed money by the State Labor Government.

More...
Minister Agrees To Summit To Help Homeless Youth
Rees-Cycled Spin: It’s Become So Natural He Just Can't Help Himself
NSW Liberal/Nationals Plan To Secure Sydney Ferries
Keep All Fire Stations On Line And Avoid Fire Risks
Duplication Does Not Compute

James Nachtwey: Use my photographs to stop the worldwide XDR


http://www.xdrtb.org Photojournalist James Nachtwey sees his TED Prize wish come true, as we share his powerful photographs of XDR-TB, a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis that's touching off a global medical crisis. Learn how to help at http://www.xdrtb.org

Headlines Sunday 26th October

Mums and dads stranded by PM bungling on the run
Piers Akerman
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has advice for the White House, advice for UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, advice for NATO and advice for the G20 group of nations but, when it comes to the economic crisis he has engineered for his own nation, his advice is pathetic. -Whatever plans Rudd makes he won’t discuss them with anyone else .. they always get leaked. At least his conversations with Hu, George and Brown seem to be public very soon after they are made .. with detail as to how Rudd was notified that the world leaders were hanging for his pronouncements on some subject. I understand he even explained to George what the G20 was.
There are comic aspects to no thought planning, but thre are scary side effects too. One might guess what Rudd was thinking when he made Bryce GG. It is sad, but one would probably be right. He was probably thinking the same thing when he was watching that stripper in NY. - ed.

===
Rudd loses credit
Andrew Bolt
Facing up to Kevin Rudd’s bungling:

SELF-FUNDED retiree Greg Russell is the human face of the Rudd government’s mishandling of its response to the global financial meltdown: he now has $5 in his bank account.

Because he put his money into a cash management account, Mr Russell’s assets are frozen, along with those of his wife Debbie and the savings accounts of his two children.

And, because he is in the process of selling his business, he still owes the tax man a big bill for his quarterly Business Activity Statement (BAS)…

He’s had to take out a $50,000 loan to cover his BAS commitments and to maintain his, and his family’s, living costs.
===
Other people’s dreams are boring
Andrew Bolt
It’s been another week in which Sydney Morning Herald journalists prefer to write about imagined conversations rather than real ones.
===
Praying to the tribe
Andrew Bolt
From worshipping a deity to a tribe:

SPEAKER Harry Jenkins has called for debate about whether the Lord’s Prayer should be replaced by an Aboriginal acknowledgement at federal Parliament.
===
Cabbages are kings
Andrew Bolt
The Sunday Age is underestimating the pantheistic threat:

Then just last year, a parliamentary panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians in Switzerland, charged with devising new rules for genetic testing, published a treatise on preserving the “dignity of plants”. Its edicts included that it was “morally impermissible” to decapitate a wildflower by the roadside without rational reason.
===
Some things aren’t black or white
Andrew Bolt
Farcical. If you need court cases to prove your ethnicity - and hence suitability for appointments to race-based positions - then you are clearly insisting on distinctions that are so trivial as to be utterly irrelevant:
TASMANIA’S peak Aboriginal body faces a racial discrimination complaint from a former ATSIC commissioner, in a case set to reopen divisions about Aboriginality in the island state.

Alan Wolf, who was an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander commissioner for seven years, told The Australian yesterday that he had lodged a complaint against the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission.

In the complaint, Mr Wolf claims the centre has discriminated against him by refusing to recognise his Aboriginality despite several federal court rulings that he is of Aboriginal descent.
What a waste of our money. What an insight on the insulting absurdities of government-sponsored race-based politics and political preferment.
===
Now Bryce lectures Rudd, too
Andrew Bolt
Quentin Bryce just can’t help playing politics. Now even Kevin Rudd must be getting worried about having appointed this professional activist as Governor Activist General, given that she’s abusing her position to not just promote his policies, but lecture him, too:

Quentin Bryce said farming communities were crying out for national leadership on climate change and drought…
===
Coslovich on ignorance
Andrew Bolt
Leftist arts poppet Gabriella Coslovich burbles about our ignorance and racism - well, yours, actually:
Baldwin Spencer, a scientist, at the turn of the 20th century recorded in film and words the ways of the Arrernte people, with the help of Gillen. This was at a time when indigenous culture was, in the words of Gillen, being “trampled” by white men. Spencer and Gillen’s book, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, became internationally renowned, yet in Australian cultural history, Gillen and Spencer are ignored.
Actually, Gabriella, there’s a statue of Spencer in your Melbourne Museum, placed there by another fashionable Leftist, anthropologist John Morton, as a reminder of this same racism which you deplore. Only this time Spencer is not hailed as a challenge to our cultural arrogance but a manifestation of it. The statue is inside a glass case with Aboriginal artifacts, and has this up-yours caption (quoting the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre):
We do not choose to be enshrined in a glass case, with our story told by an alien institution which has appointed itself as an ambassador of our culture.
The museum even screens a video in a nearby room of an actor dressed as Spencer being harrangued by another actor, dressed as the Aboriginal “King Charley” of Alice Springs, who attacks him for trampling so boorishly on a wonderful, even superior, black culture.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

One of those alleged Fox News airheads

utterly destroys a pro-Obama academic:

Thanks to Tim Blair for the heads up.

James Burchfield: Sound stylings by a human beatbox


http://www.ted.com Human beatbox James "AudioPoet" Burchfield performs an intricate three-minute breakdown -- sexy, propulsive hip-hop rhythms and turntable textures -- all using only his voice.

Liberal Messages Saturday 25th October

Government must act to end savings freeze
The Government must immediately address the worsening situation in Australia’s financial markets. This has been caused by the Government’s rushed and flawed unlimited bank deposit guarantee policy and its inexcusable delay in addressing the matter when the unintended but foreseeable consequences quickly became apparent.

Senate Estimates: policy on the run, broken promises, waste, and heartlessness
This week in Senate Estimates, questioning by Coalition Senators revealed numerous examples of policy on the run, broken promises, waste and heartlessness by the Rudd Government.

Turnbull Doorstop - Deposit guarantee
We’re seeing today the human consequences of Mr Rudd and Mr Swan’s mismanagement of the deposit guarantee. Tens of thousands of everyday Australians have seen their savings frozen as a consequence of Mr Rudd and Mr Swan’s decision to set up an unlimited bank deposit guarantee. Now, we know that last week they were urged by the Reserve Bank to fix this as a matter of urgency. The advice has been published, the written advice has been published, and a week later nothing has been done. Just dithering policy on the run, excuses and today, in probably Mr Swan’s most inept performance of all when confronted with the tragedy that people whose life savings have been frozen, the best he could suggest was that they go down to Centrelink.

Policy on the run leads to crippling savings freeze
In the midst of a so-called ‘rolling national security crisis’ we are being forced to trust a P-plate Treasurer who is now turning tens of thousands of Australians over to Centrelink and causing widespread confusion and worry in the markets and in the lives of ordinary Australians.

Rudd cuts out financial services’ key players in global crisis
Chris Pearce urged Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan to consider the broader ramifications of their actions and to include all sectors of the financial services industry in their deliberations, as a matter of urgency.

Coalition calls for submissions from non-govt schools
The Coalition today called on all non-government schools concerned about the changes to the Schools Assistance Bill 2008 to make submissions to the Senate Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Parents want a guarantee on ABC Learning, not lip service: Mirabella
Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education and Childcare, Sophie Mirabella has today slammed Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard for the appalling incompetence over the Rudd Government’s so called contingency plans for ABC Learning Centres.

Conroy office must stop bullying critics of labor internet 'clean feed' censorship plan
It's extraordinary that Minister Conroy’s office has moved from not only wanting to censor the Internet to actually attempting to silence those who don’t agree with him.

Louise Markus congratulates war widows guild
There are 108,023 war widows / widower and the War Widows Guild has worked tirelessly to improve the well-being of its 25,000 members and their families.

Rudd leaves AFP with $43 million deficit
Efficiency dividends enforced by the Rudd Labor Government have left the Australian Federal Police (AFP) with a $43 million deficit.

Where is the urgent infrastructure legislation?
Three weeks ago, in response to the global financial crisis, Mr Rudd said that he wanted ‘to get cracking to bring major infrastructure projects online earlier than would otherwise would have been the case’ and that his challenge to the Opposition was to ‘support this legislation through the Parliament because we want to get on with the business of nation building.’... However, three weeks after first being raised, and despite being on today’s House of Representatives Daily program, there is no legislation to discuss; much less support.

Government must outline its 'contingency plans' for ABC Learning: Mirabella
The Minister for Education, Julia Gillard said today that she is ‘working on contingency plans’ should ABC Learning’s operations collapse, but she has refused to outline what these contingency plans are.

Government treats Senate Estimates with contempt
Either the Government must change the scheduling of Supplementary Budget Estimates for 2009, or guarantee that all Departments’ Annual Reports will be tabled prior to the 19 October commencement of the 2009 Supplementary Estimates.

Not another Rudd 'talkfest' - Small businesses need a rescue plan
I want to know why the Prime Minister thinks tomorrow’s business summit in Brisbane will be any different to the one last week in Sydney which does not appear to have generated any outcome for Australian businesses - Ciobo.

Government delays Innovation, TCF responses
It was revealed today in Senate Estimates that the Rudd Government will delay its responses to both the Innovation Review, and Textile, Clothing, and Footwear reviews into next year, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Senator Eric Abetz, said today.

Labor MP's behaviour falls below standards
The Report by the Committee of Privileges and Members’ Interests of the inquiry into the exchange between the Member for Robertson, Ms Belinda Neal MP and Mrs Sophie Mirabella MP, Member for Indi on 29 May 2008 was tabled today in the House of Representatives.

ANSTO faces more funding cuts: Estimates
It was revealed today in Senate Estimates that the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) faces more funding cuts, Shadow Minister for Science and Research, Senator Eric Abetz said today.

Sustainability relegated to 'optional extra' in taxpayer-backed housing scheme
The Rudd Government today missed a golden opportunity to embed clear sustainability obligations in the taxpayer-funded National Rental Affordability Scheme the Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities Bruce Billson said.

Treasury modelling dead in the water - white paper must be delayed
Revelations that the Government’s much delayed economic modelling for an emissions trading scheme will inexplicably not take into account the global financial meltdown has left it dead in the water.

Burke asleep in the wheelhouse
Health policy officials and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) confirmed yesterday that no work is occurring on Labor’s pre-election promise to ‘simplify and strengthen food labelling laws.

Headlines Saturday 25th October

A question, as you queue at Centrelink
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government couldn’t even predict the unintended consequences of a mere bank deposit guarantee, forcing some financial institutions to close their doors and investors to go to Centrelink for some cash.
===
The green sickness
Andrew Bolt
It’s spreading. Earlier this year I reported that Melbourne psychiatrists had diagnosed the first known case of ”climate change delusion”.

And now:

Psychiatrists in America have identified a new mental illness that threatens the very fabric of society: an obsession with saving the planet. Some people are so addicted to cutting their carbon emissions that they seem to have gone quite mad.
===
How to write an Australian play
Andrew Bolt
Michael Connor mercilessly dissects Australia’s grants culture, so destructive to the arts it purports to nurture. An example of the hand-out phenomenon he discusses:

The printed edition of Wesley Enochs play The Story of the Miracles at Cookies Table is fifty-four small pages, which could have been written on a couple of wet weekends in Brunswick… Wesley Enoch explains how the playwriting began:

I was going through a really rough trot in my life and I decided to drive to Melbourne from Sydney. Driving along the Hume Highway I got the flash of a story about a tree being made into a table and being the depository of story and history. I then applied and got a three-month residency in Paris and I started writing there.
===
But a Democrat’s smear is just a joke
Andrew Bolt
Former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry complains:

There is a Republican attack squad that specializes in trying to destroy people and be negative.

In fact, he helpfully provides an example of a negative attack
===
As I told Bush to his face
Andrew Bolt
Memo to foreign leaders: speak in confidence to Kevin Rudd at your peril. No man is keener to boast of his chats to the stars.

The Australian is the latest to have its ear bent:

KEVIN Rudd was entertaining guests in the loungeroom at Kirribilli House in Sydney when an aide told him George W. Bush was on the telephone.
===
Rudd’s mess, but Turnbull’s blamed
Andrew Bolt
Wayne Swan tries to contain the disaster caused by the Rudd Government’s bank deposit guarantee:

Wayne Swan waited until after markets had closed yesterday to reveal that, from November 28, banks would have to pay the Government a fee of between 0.7 and 1.5 per cent for the privilege of a government guarantee for their wholesale funding. Buying the guarantee will be optional for big deposits, while deposits of under $1 million will receive a government guarantee for free.
===
How green was my off-set?
Andrew Bolt
Former Liberal politician Roger Pescott had a great deal for green investors - blue-gum plantations that would not only produce wood for paper production, but help fight global warming:

The Project is environmentally friendly… Further, a growing forest acts as an effective ‘carbon sink’ absorbing carbon from the atmosphere...
===
Who’s “we”, Kemo Fadi?
Andrew Bolt
The nervous Sydney Morning Herald twice uses the wrong “m” word - in its headline and in its report:

Crime, machismo: deadly cocktail killing young men

A PROMINENT youth worker has used the funeral of a young Lebanese man shot dead on Wednesday to appeal for other young men in Sydney to turn from a life of crime and empty machismo.

“All we seem to do is just turn against each other. That’s why we’re just dropping like flies,” Fadi Abdul-Rahman told hundreds of mourners at the funeral of Mustafa Assoum, 26, at Lakemba Mosque.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Headlines Friday 24th October

Read this while you can
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government plans to censor the Internet. If this report is indeed true, I’m worried:

Internet providers and the government’s own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent. - no doubt a skill obtained from the Chinese Government. - ed.
===
ABC on warming: it’s doom or devastation
Andrew Bolt
Lateline last night interviewed three scientists and a UN official about global warming. Showing his famed concern for balance, host Tony Jones presents a range of views from this:

PROF. ANN HENDERSON-SELLERS, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY: A lot of people like myself, and I believe many, many scientists now, who are frantically, hysterically worried.

To this:

PROF. DAVID KAROLY, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY: The only way that I could see the climate system in 50 years time or 100 years time being cooler than at present is if the earth got hit by an asteroid and basically human civilisation was destroyed.
===
Fitting the media narrative
Andrew Bolt
How can Joe Biden make so many stupid - and dangerously stupid - statements without the media piling on as they do with the saner Sarah Palin?

Kirsten Powers explains:

Part of the problem is their “Obama love,” but we’re also seeing the media elite’s belief - prejudice - that anyone with an R behind their name is dumb. So, if they say something dumb, they must be dumb. A Democrat, like Biden, can make wildly inaccurate or outrageous comments and they are ignored because the TV and press insiders feel they “know who he really is.”
===
We are detaining our leader
Andrew Bolt
UN secretary-general candidate Kevin Rudd sure loves to hobnob with the powerful overseas. And he rings them so often about events he can’t control, that he had no time to ring his own Reserve Bank Governor about events he could - and which he then stuffed up in his rush.

Now he faces another such clash:

(T)he Prime Minister has found his diary crowded: Washington, November 15, G20; Canberra, November 17, Council of Australian Governments; Lima, November 22-23, APEC. Rudd’s international agenda is clashing with his domestic reform one.

How does he resolve this clash? Simple! Put off the domestic meetings:

Yesterday his officials were busy trying to reschedule the COAG meeting — which has been built up as a crucial occasion for advancing the Government’s program on vital issues, including health and education — and work out the logistics of making Washington and Lima two trips or one...
===
Rudd sends investors to Centrelink
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government has so mucked up its unlimited bank guarantee that customers of non-guaranteed funds now have to go to Centrelink for a handout:

(I)t emerged fund managers Perpetual and AXA had frozen redemptions in $4.1 billion of investors’ funds, as a rash of investors attempted to withdraw their money. Perpetual and AXA have followed Challenger Howard, the country’s biggest mortgage fund, which froze $2.8 billion of redemptions earlier this week.

The latest freezes take total suspended property and mortgage funds to $20 billion…

(Treasurer Wayne) Swan said Perpetual customers who were dependent on access to funds should contact Centrelink to see if temporary help was available.
===
Even Croatian police can read
Andrew Bolt
IT’S that ugly Schapelle Corby phenomenon again. But this time it’s Croatia’s turn to be damned as brutal and bungling.

This time, following the death of Britt Lapthorne in Dubrovnik, it’s the turn of Croatian police to be accused of lacking “common decency”, and being “unco-operative”, “bizarre” and nothing more than “traffic cops”.

This time it’s the turn of a Croatian judge to be ridiculed, having Australian reporters hound him at his home and mock him as unfeeling.

And, also on cue, it’s the Australian Federal Police’s turn yet again to be spat at for not charging to the rescue of an Australian in peril overseas, pushing aside the stupid foreigners as if we sahibs ruled the world.
===
Repeat after the teacher
Andrew Bolt
ANOTHER week, and another student tells me of a teacher who’s turned preacher instead.

This student, a very honest boy, tells me he was asked on Tuesday to give a summary on global warming.

Naturally, he included one plain fact: the planet hadn’t warmed since 1998, according to satellite measurements.

Check with Britain’s Hadley Centre. Or with Dr Roy Spencer, US head of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite.

No, no, no, said the teacher, brought in by the school to give a few lessons on learning techniques. You mustn’t believe such a thing. That was just put out by that Andrew Bolt, and, ha!, he was in a room of his own.

“Really?” replied my son.
===
Drought ended by committee
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government’s hand-picked Drought Policy Review Expert Social Panel seems stuffed with people who read George Orwell’s 1984 as good advice, and not a warning:

GOVERNMENT experts say the word “drought” is making farmers feel bad and want people to use the word “dryness” instead.
===
Hogan was as useless as Luhrmann
Andrew Bolt

John Richardson, a former assistant general manager of the Australian Tourist Commission, says I’m right to say that the new Baz Luhrmann tourism ads won’t work.

But he says I’m wrong to say the famous Paul Hogan ads ever did.
===
Entrapped in the forest
Andrew Bolt
Looks bad, from this carefully cropped angle, and the language (warning!) is even worse.

Space.com News

Strange Weather on Alien Planets Explained
A new model explains the exotic weather on distant "hot Jupiters."

MISSIONS/LAUNCHES
Space Tourist Settles in Aboard Station
New Observatory Set to Scan Solar System's Edge

SCIENCE/ASTRONOMY
Doorstep Astronomy: Mercury in the Morning
NASA Hits Snag in Reviving Hubble Space Telescope

RECENT HEADLINES
One Mystery of Jet Streams Explained
Mysterious Mars Moon a Pile of Rubble
FAA Approves Rocket Races
A Major Moon Dust-Up

COOL STUFF
New Video: ESA's eXperimental Vehicle
Image of the Day: Worlds in Collision
New Video - IBEX: Interstellar Boundary Explorer
NASA's mission to map the boundary of the solar system. Credit: NASA/GSFC

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Headlines Thursday 23rd October

Trade union mini-me joins Labor circus
Piers Akerman
THREE months ago Unions NSW secretary John Robertson said: “This Government is a disgrace when you think about the campaign they ran.”
===
Mark it in your diary
Andrew Bolt
Some victory. But let’s hold Wayne Swan to his claim:

TREASURER Wayne Swan has declared victory in the war against inflation as the rate hits 5%, double the Reserve Bank’s target…
===
Covering up for Belinda
Andrew Bolt

Politicians are sure reluctant to police their own. Check the video and tell me how Belinda Neal escaped being found guilty by her colleagues of misleading Parliament:

EMBATTLED Labor MP Belinda Neal has been heavily criticised by a powerful parliamentary committee, with even her own colleagues claiming her behaviour fell “far below” acceptable standards....

(But) Ms Neal narrowly escaped a finding she deliberately misled Parliament, one of the most serious charges that can be made against MPs.
===
Don’t argue
Andrew Bolt
Utterly, utterly absurd:

A DEFAMATION expert yesterday warned warring families to watch what they say after a woman who called her in-law a paedophile during a “family feud” was ordered to pay him $30,000 in damages.
===
Who now polices the freebies?
Andrew Bolt
Is Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon setting police officers a bad example by accepting a freebie of her own - a $30,000 trip to Los Angeles?
===
McCain rises
Andrew Bolt
Almost all the media coverage of John McCain has painted him as the loser who should apologise already. So it says something about the refusal of voters to buy the media line that we get polls now like this:

The presidential race tightened after the final debate, with John McCain gaining among whites and people earning less than $50,000, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll that shows McCain and Barack Obama essentially running even among likely voters in the election homestretch.
===
Henry’s defence: Not warning, but ignoring
Andrew Bolt
Even the papers which buy the Henry line can’t make it sound convincing
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Turnbull wrong. Reserve Bank DID back dud plan
Andrew Bolt
Ken Henry denies The Australian’s report that the Reserve Bank hadn’t supported parts of the Rudd Government unlimited guarantee of bank deposts
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Green plan meets jobless hordes
Andrew Bolt
By 2010, says JP Morgan?

AUSTRALIA’S jobless rate will more than double between now and 2010, when over one million people are expected to be out of work, as the global economic slowdown weighs on China, a leading international bank says.
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Conservatives blamed for what they tried to stop
Andrew Bolt
Economist Paul Sweeney blames conservatives for the financial crisis:

Just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of Communism, so the collapse of Wall Street (the Wall was actually removed in 1699) has signalled the collapse of neo-conservative economics.

He’s far from alone in the Left, of course, in cackling over the ruins, convinced he’s staring at evidence of conservativism’s disgrace. But let’s go back to September 30, 1999, to see how the Left-leaning New York Times welcomed the biggest single political factor in the disaster that’s now unfolded::
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Headlines Wednesday 22nd October

AN INCONVENIENT BLURB
Tim Blair
According to French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, an Obama win would mean “the complete victory of the battle begun in the ‘60s.” The Sixties. The worst decade in history. The decade that gave us this, among other horrors. Yet the Obama campaign itself seems keen to bury this terrible era, particularly in terms of any squalid Sixties remnants who are connected to their candidate:
Beautiful Sunset
That sunny promotion for flag-stomping bomber-hippie William Ayers’ book was written by Barack Obama in 1997 (when he was not eight years old). Take another look at Obama’s blurb, because two Obama staffers now deny it was ever written. - apologies Tim, I don't usually copy entire articles .. but I felt it important . -ed
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Government admits: too many migrants
Andrew Bolt
Another backflip by the Rudd Government. Just five months after announcing - amid growing signs of economic strife - the biggest migrant intake in our history
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A man told a man who told Rudd
Andrew Bolt
It’s not enough that the Rudd Government hands out $10.4 billion in pump priming without revealing a single forecast on which it based that decision.

Now it’s confirmed that it gave a dangerously flawed bank deposits guarantee without even speaking to the Reserve Bank governor - a detail it fudged when announcing the move:

THE Government has backflipped on its free unlimited bank deposit guarantee after it emerged Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens gave advice to impose a fee for large sums to avoid distortions to the financial markets....
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A defence of the accused
Andrew Bolt
This cannot be right. One anonymous allegation, ambiguous and untested, and a politician’s distinguished career is over.

Theo Theophanous is finished as a senior minister in the Brumby Government because a woman has accused him of raping her during a late-night tour of Parliament House 10 years ago.

Theophanous, 60, has stepped down as Minister of Major Projects, Industry and Trade while police investigate, but his grave is already being dug, and not because he’s guilty.

It’s enough that he’s merely accused. - the problem with corruption is the lack of transparency. How does one prove their innocence when coreect procedure is so rarely followed? - ed
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What Bradley effect?
Andrew Bolt
The polls say Barack Obama is a sure bet to become president. The only danger now is said to be the “Bradley effect’’ - the idea that let’s-seem-nice white voters tell pollsters they’ll vote for the black guy, when in fact they’ll secretly vote for the white.

The effect gets its name from the shock defeat of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a popular black politician who’d been leading in the polls in the race for governor of California in 1982. But William Bradly, who worked on that election, says the theory is as dodgy as the opinion poll on which it is based.
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Biden agrees: Obama means trouble
Andrew Bolt
Want big trouble? Then vote Barack Obama:

Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

Says who? Obama’s own running mate, Joe Biden:

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities.
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Suddenly Sony sorry
Andrew Bolt
Sony frantically withdraws a computer game that offends one world faith:

One of the most anticipated PlayStation 3 games of the year will be recalled from Australian stores and destroyed this week after Sony discovered it featured background music with excerpts from the Islamic holy book, the Koran.... Game creator Media Molecule said it was “shellshocked and gutted” by the discovery…

But Sony offered no such recall when it insulted another world faith:

Entertainment giant Sony has apologised to the Church of England for using Manchester cathedral as a backdrop to one of its violent computer games....
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Scapegoats in suits
Andrew Bolt
It sure is scapegoat time:

CORPORATE high flyers would be hit with a 50 per cent tax rate when their salaries reached $1 million under a tax plan backed by federal MPs…

The blueprint follows a pledge by PM Kevin Rudd to crack down on “extreme capitalism”.

And cue the New Left reruns of the old Bolshevik attacks on bloodsuckers trampling on widows and orphans:

Greens leader Bob Brown said the global financial crisis highlighted a culture of corporate excess.

“The average punter would think this is a very fair re-adjustment now that harder times are coming,” he said…

Labor senator Doug Cameron said it was “legitimate” for the issue to be considered.

“Given the obvious problems with the international financial system, a whole range of issues need to come into play,” he said.

“That includes whether these executive salaries provide any benefit to society.”

Governments deciding whether salaries paid by private businesses “provide any benefit to society”? I thought that thinking collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Note that some multi-millionaires are being exempted from the Left’s jihad against the “corporate” rich and their huge paypackets. There’s not a peep about the mega-earnings of artists such as Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman, or film directors such as George Miller and Phillip Noyce. Or even sports stars such as Lleyton Hewitt or Chris Judd. - better to be the scapegoat than the sacrificial lamb. - ed