(31July2009) Bill O'Reilly explains “The Big Con 101” in 3 minutes, Al Gore and Goldman Sachs
Beds not bureaucrats can ease health crisis
(29 July 09) “…..It's a quarter of a century since Medicare was established, but no one is celebrating. No wonder, considering the critical condition of the public hospital system throughout Australia.
Instead we have a 300-page reform blueprint from the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission…… Since 1983 the state health bureaucracies that are responsible for allocating funding, planning services and rationing public hospital care have cut the number of public hospital beds by one-third: from 74,000 beds to just over 54,000. This is a 60 per cent cut, taking population growth into account, from 4.8 public acute beds for every 1000 Australians to 2.5 beds. Overcrowding occurs when bed occupancy exceeds 85 per cent in hospitals, operating near or beyond full capacity…..The queue for free public hospital care now starts in crowded hospital corridors lined with ailing, mostly frail, elderly patients who are parked on trolleys for hours and sometimes days…..The problem is not that hospitals are underfunded. Over the past decade, real expenditure on public hospitals increased by 64 per cent to top $27 billion in 2006-07. The real problem is that not enough of the money gets through to the frontlines……” Beds not bureaucrats can ease health crisis , Jeremy Sammut. The Australian “..... Between 1996 and 2006 the number of acute public hospital beds fell by 18 per cent per 1000. But between 2001 and 2006, the number of administrators increased by 69 per cent. The large and costly area health services that administer public hospitals in most states are better at paying for bureaucrats than for beds, and have a deservedly notorious reputation among overworked hands-on hospital staff for warehousing armies of clerks and managers who have no involvement in patient care…..As more and more people live to older ages, a tsunami of demand will break in public hospitals. Increasing numbers of very old patients will inevitably require emergency and bed-based hospital care due to the age-related onset of chronic conditions. Going by the state of the health reform debate, the hospital crisis will become a catastrophe…..The second step is for state governments to agree to re-introduce local public hospital boards with full financial and administrative responsibility for their facilities. The third step is to close down the area health services and use the money saved to fund vouchers and open and staff more hospital beds……A 50 per cent increase in patients presenting at emergency aged over 85 is predicted over the next five years alone. Bed numbers must increase significantly to equip the hospital system to cope with the unprecedented impact of demographic change. The challenge for policy-makers is to dispense with the failed methods of running public hospitals that have created a continuing crisis 25 years in the making…..”
(29 July 09) The Chicago Way. . . . I donno nuttin !
The legal threat to Christian schools
(29 July 09) “……What happens when equal rights between men and women are so widely accepted mainstream Australia hardly thinks about it? Surely it is time to acknowledge that anti-discrimination statutes have done their job? Not according to the Victorian Government. It harbours the view that discrimination has got sophisticated – so hard to find under current law – that we must widen the law to catch more of it….. Its Attorney-General has his sights set on men-only clubs (apparently it is OK to have female-only clubs and it is OK for men-only rules at gay venues). The Government has also put religion on notice it will come under closer scrutiny. I am actually more worried about indiscriminate behaviour: things like the indiscriminate bashing of innocent people on city streets. Putting an end to that would be a real advance for their human rights. But it's also hard, so let's get back to some easier targets. At present, discrimination statutes don't apply to religious bodies and their schools on the grounds of freedom of religion. So a parliamentary committee has recommended options to extend the power of the state over the province of religion. One proposed change is to restrict the freedom of religious schools to choose their employees on the basis of their religious faith…...The Federation of Community Legal Services told the parliamentary review the current law should change, saying: "To allow religious organisations a broad exemption for conscience encourages prejudice." Think about the moral vanity of that statement. According to these lawyers, a religious conscience leads to prejudice. How did the church arouse public conscience over slavery? How did Florence become a haven for the arts and letters to flourish? How did civilisation develop over the past couple of millennia without the Community Legal Services to guide it? The legal threat to Christian schools , Peter Costello Sydney Morning Herald “….. The question is whether the law should require them to employ people who are indifferent or hostile to their religion in their schools. At present it doesn't. Changing that law will affect not only the schools who employ the staff. Parents who send their children to a Christian school have a reasonable expectation this means the child will get a Christian education. How could the school fulfil its obligation to the parents if it is required by law to employ non-Christian or anti-Christian teachers to provide it? If the law demands this, you might as well close down the concept of a Christian school – which may be what some of the critics intend… The provisions applying to religion have been operating for more 30 years with no great community outrage. So why is a parliamentary committee reviewing them now? Because, we are told, they have to be assessed for compliance against the 2006 Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. This charter was introduced with the promise it would amplify rights and freedoms. There is something so predictable about this. The human rights industry begins with grand promises and ends up intervening in non-problems. We are led to believe that the purpose of such charters is to stop arbitrary arrests, guarantee a free press and guard against dictatorship. In practice, what does it do? It complicates the life of religious schools and open lawsuits against the churches…. As the community legal services make clear – their view is that religious conscience encourages prejudice. Once the churches and religious conscience are out of the way, lawyers will have a clear run. Lawsuits will be used to decide the great moral questions of the age….”.
The hate that dare not speak it name
Language police should stop tiptoeing and call these terrorists what they are: Islamo-fascists.
(29 July 09) “…..The bodies of slain Australians in Jakarta were not yet back in the country when a new report warned us last week against referring to Islamo-fascists as -- dare one say it -- Islamo-fascists. If we want to reduce alienation and radicalism among young Muslims we must watch our language, says A Lexicon on Terror, a book compiled by the Victoria Police and the Australian Multicultural Foundation. Multicultural Foundation head Hass Dellal told The Age that the wholesale branding of Islam with violence and extremism was of great concern. Speaking at a conference last week Stephen Fontana, the assistant commissioner for counter-terrorism co-ordination, said that "a comment we think is harmless, some communities read as an attack". Would someone kindly lock up these language police for crimes against the English language? An attack is what happened in Jakarta when innocent hotel guests were murdered at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels…. Their new whitewash language is not just daft, it's dangerous. Clarity of language is a critical tool if we are serious about uncovering and understanding militant Islam. After so many attacks and the murder of so many innocent people, why would we cower from identifying the drivers of their Islamist extremism? Yet there was too much cowering and not enough clarity from Attorney-General Robert McClelland when he addressed the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last week…..” The hate that dare not speak it name , Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian “…… Endorsing the language police's Lexicon of Terrorism project, the A-G's speech was littered with references to "violent extremism", "violent extremists", "violent extremist messages", "extremist beliefs" and "extremist ideology". McClelland was too frightened to construct a sentence that included the word Islamism. Instead he quoted from Ed Husain, in his book The Islamist, who has no problem referring to "Islamist extremists". Apparently the A-G believes it is acceptable for a Muslim to speak with factual accuracy but the rest of us must resort to meaningless generalities for fear of radicalising Muslim youth….. In the A-G's woolly world, how exactly does a newspaper report on Islamic militancy if the only acceptable phrase is "violent extremism"? Would the A-G have us refrain from reporting the truth, that a handful of radical Islamic schools is a breeding ground for Islamist terrorists? There are no such sensibilities about calling a spade a bloody shovel when Christian extremists firebomb abortion clinics. No concerns about wholesale branding of Christianity by using the Christian word. Nor is there a fear that using the word will radicalise young Christians. In other areas, too, we don't shy away from using descriptors to explain extremism….When it comes to militant Islam, we are asked to whitewash our language, tiptoeing around the truth for fear of offending and radicalising Muslims. One might have been forgiven for thinking we had long ago rejected this nonsense of letting the Islamist tail wag the Western dog……”
Labor's China Inc is starting to smell fishy
(28 July 09) “......When it comes to Kevin Rudd and his government's relationship with what's increasingly known as China Inc, it's really the Gordon Nuttall question that comes to mind. Or more precisely the now famous Rodd Martin question. Nuttall, the former Queensland Labor minister, was recently convicted on corruption charges involving payments of $360,000. As a result he now resides at her majesty's pleasure. The fact that it took the jury only a matter of hours to reach its guilty verdict was in no small part due to the work of Rodd Martin SC. The chief prosecutor's opening question to Nuttall in the witness box quite probably sealed his fate. His inquiry was as simple as it was deadly: "Three hundred and sixty thousand dollars for absolutely nothing?" he asked. "That's correct," replied Nuttall, not comprehending that he was already toast...... Nobody, not the Prime Minister nor any of his senior government colleagues in federal politics are yet toast or anywhere near it on the available evidence of their increasingly complex and detailed ties to China Inc: the personal, political and state-run hydra of contacts that it is now clear has given its sustained support to Rudd, his frontbench and the Labor Party in Queensland over a number of years. But the question that hangs heavy in the air surrounding Labor and its links to China Inc is Martin's. To paraphrase: "All this for nothing?" All is in fact a great deal......Put another way, the charge facing Rudd and many in his administration is just what did they do or, just as importantly, what did the players in China Inc expect from the money, trips and influence peddling they showered on Rudd et al and which took them in turn to the very top of the regime in Beijing? From Rudd down the answer is Nuttall's: "Nothing." Labor's China Inc is starting to smell fishy , Glenn Milne The Australian “.......Yet it is the scale of the China Inc project that in many people's minds renders this answer unbelievable. And because of that there are a lot of people doing a lot of work to find out more. And many of the lines of inquiry lead to Rudd's old mate Bernie Ripoll...... Now it emerges Ripoll's wife Margy is something of a property developer who bought some land just before it was targeted by a subsidiary of Chinese mining giant Chinalco. There's more to come on her and her Chinese business partnerships, believe you me. But there's no point asking Bernie Ripoll about any of this. In my experience he either refuses to answer any phone calls or e-mails about China Inc. When the tip of the iceberg of his wife's China Inc dealings emerged last week he simply played dumb...... How long Rudd and his ministers can maintain their stonewall on China Inc remains to be seen. But the depth of involvement and layers of contact run deep. Take businessman Ian Tang. Tang gives travel, hospitality, gifts and donations to the Labor Party. Those involved: Rudd, Swan, Agriculture Minister Tony Burke and Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Stephen Smith. Tang is the chief executive of AustChina Investment and Development and Beijing AustChina Technology. He is so closely tied to the Chinese government... Then there's Helen Liu, the member of China Inc whose contacts with then defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon helped bring him undone. Her various gifts, donations and travel sponsorships for Fitzgibbon are well known. Then there's the fact the second biggest shareholder in Liu's Sydney property development firm Wincopy was the Bank of China, owned by the Chinese government. Wincopy made donations to Fitzgibbon..... Meanwhile, Bernie Ripoll is hard at work as honorary president of Chinese businesswoman Deborah Lei's China Australia Co-operation Society. Lei is a former member of the Queensland China Council and has been appointed by the Ipswich City Council an honorary ambassador to China. She has donated to the Labor Party and to Ripoll's 2004 electoral campaign.....”
(27 July 09) From the Andrew Bolt blog Friedman's home truths
Hitler photo circulated in Israel settlement fight
(24 July 09) “.....Israel's firebrand foreign minister has ordered that his country's embassies and consulates around the world display a photograph of Adolf Hitler with a Palestinian cleric.It is part of a government push for the construction of a Jewish residential development in East Jerusalem. The United States does not want the development to go ahead, but Israel is defying the pressure and making a point of showing that the land in Jerusalem's Arab quarter once belonged to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - a known Nazi collaborator.....” Hitler photo circulated in Israel settlement fight “..... In 1941 Hitler was photographed in Berlin with the then Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini..... Already Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the US demand, saying "unified Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people and the state of Israel"...... "Our sovereignty is non-negotiable. We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and buy in any location in Jerusalem," he said.
( REPOSTED from September 2005 ) The Arab/Muslim Nazi Connection
( REPOSTED from September 2005) Who was the Grand Mufti, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini ?
Superfund votes for Al Gore's sustainable investment fund
(21 July 09) (More) Follow the money
“….. About $2 in every $100 of the retirement nest eggs of 247,000 Victorian public servants is invested in former US vice-president Al Gore's sustainable investment fund . VicSuper, with one of the most aggressive pro-environment investment strategies of any big super fund, has $135 million of its $5.7 billion invested in Mr Gore's Generation Investment Management….” Superfund votes for Al Gore's sustainable investment fund , Herald Sun “….He said Mr Gore, who charges up to $200,000 as a speaker in the US, often visited Victoria because of VicSuper's large stake in Mr Gore's London-based company. VicSuper is a private superannuation company independent of the Victorian Government, but is a "default fund" for many State Government departments and agencies. This means that many public servants' super contributions automatically go to VicSuper unless they choose another fund…..”
Actual quotes from major figures in the current and past environmental movement
(21 July 09) “....Aside from the obvious multi-trillion dollar carbon tax schemes, increasing theft of our rights, and ever more governmental control over the people, there is a much larger and even scarier picture to consider. Read carefully. These are actual quotes from major figures in the current and past environmental movement:
The Morality of Climate Change
(21July 2009) The Morality of Climate Change
International Trade: Promised benefits from free trade fail to materialise
(17 July 2009) “......Avid economic fundamentalist Dr Andy Stoeckel, head of the Centre for International Economics (CIE), is at it again. He proclaims that every Australian family has been made $3,000 better off every year by our embracing "free trade". The CIE has long been a voice of those arguing that farming and manufacturing should be cut free of industry "protection" and left helpless before the full-face of international competition. t helped the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to convince gullible trade ministers - and former Prime Minister John Howard himself - that the various so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) constituted a legitimate part of the overall movement to liberalise trade. Along the way its researches routinely concluded that specific bilateral FTAs greatly benefited the Australian economy and its consumers..... But now, thanks to a Commonwealth Parliamentary Library background briefing by Michael Priestley on FTAs (see reference below), the Australian public have access to figures with which they can assess what has really happened and balance it against what was predicted. Almost nothing has gone the way the CIE led us to believe it would ....
Perhaps there was an unstated expectation that our support for the US in Iraq would get us a better FTA. That hope was immediately dashed when US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage remarkably stated in public that the US believed that an ally as staunch as Australia would want to co-operate with Washington's wishes for the FTA that the US wanted with Australia. He was talking specifically about the tough stand we had been taking on holding on to the status of our pharmaceutical benefits scheme......Let us consider how Australia has fared in the agreements so far concluded....”
International Trade: Promised benefits from free trade fail to materialise , Colin Teese former deputy secretary of the Department of Trade, www.newsweekly.com.au “.....With Thailand in 2004, bilateral trade has doubled. But the deficit on our side has increased by $A711 million to $A3.5 billion. The main sources of gain for Thailand have been in computers (up 105 per cent), cars (up 317 per cent) and household goods (up 93 per cent). On the Australian side, exports are up 44 per cent - mainly comprising oil, aluminium, gold and copper. Do we really need an agreement to sell these goods to Thailand?... As to the bilateral trade agreement we concluded with Singapore in 2003, the Parliamentary Library reminds us that a study undertaken before negotiations began could identify no benefit to Australia from any bilateral agreement. Nevertheless we went ahead. In the period since until 2007, bilateral trade between the parties increased from $A9.4 billion to 14.5 billion - mostly to Singapore's benefit. Our deficit rose from $A3.0 billion to $A6.5 billion - apparently due to a big increase in the price of refined oil we import from Singapore. No gains for Australia have been identified....
As to the US, the 2005 bilateral agreement we negotiated with our most important ally is by far the most important, and most comprehensive, that we have concluded. Gains identified in advance singled out our agriculture and manufactures as the likely big winners. Since most of the provisions for agriculture are being phased in over long periods, it is not yet possible to quantify the benefits to Australia. Australia's motor vehicle exports, with a big tariff reduction, were also expected to gain. Yet, in 2006 and 2007, our car exports to the US fell 200 per cent from their 2004 peak. Vehicle parts exports also fell by 100 per cent.... Finally there is the agreement with Chile concluded in 2007. Trade with Chile is quite small, but since the agreement our deficit with that country has doubled. So what can be said overall? Well, first, in every bilateral agreement thus far negotiated, the result for Australia has been a widening trade deficit - and, as well, in the case of the US, an actual fall in the overall trade flows. How does all this sit with what is claimed by the Centre for International Economics? If all these agreements are so beneficial to Australia, how can we explain the fact that, in every case so far, our deficit with the partner countries has worsened?.
Communist Ties
(15 July 09) If Al Gore Jr. ever runs for President, he'll have to answer some embarrassing questions about the source of his family's wealth....
“.....One of the minor mysteries of American politics has been the source of wealth for the family of Vice President Albert Gore Jr.," observes Joseph Goulden of Accuracy in Media. "When Gore's father was first elected to the House of Representatives in the late 1930s," Goulden continues, "he was an impecunious Tennessee school teacher who eked out extra dollars by playing fiddle at church weddings. But later, as a United States Senator, he lived in the plush Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row in Washington, and sent his son, Al Jr., to the pricey St. Albans School, the haunt of kids from Social Register families."..... In a recent issue of the Washington Inquirer, Goulden summarizes the contents of a new book called Dossier, written by investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, which "shows that the senior Gore had a silent partner who for several decades insured that his pockets remained comfortably filled. He was Armand Hammer, the multi-millionaire businessman and oil promoter who apparently collected art and politicians with equal zeal." Goulden notes that Al Gore Sr. was "Hammer's designated door-opener in official Washington......” Communist Ties , F R Duplantier “..... The handsome compensation that Gore Sr. received for his services culminated in a half-a-million-dollars-a-year position with Armand Hammer's oil company, Occidental Petroleum. Al Gore Jr. picked up where his father left off and "put the family's Senate seat at Hammer's service." .... Hammer's powerful influence on Al Gore Sr. and Jr. would have been bad enough had he been nothing more than an unscrupulous businessman. Like his father Julius, however, he was a lifelong Communist and a friend of the Soviet Union. "Some scattered hints that Hammer's ties with the USSR went beyond business friendship have surfaced over the years," says Goulden. Documents discovered in Soviet archives, however, leave no doubt that Hammer was "a man who bribed and cheated his way to great wealth -- and who started with Soviet gold." Edward Jay Epstein's new book, Dossier, makes a compelling case that both Al Gore Sr. and Al Gore Jr. were the willing partners of a very powerful and very wealthy man, Armand Hammer, who was not loyal to the United States of America. A truly independent press would have exposed these connections decades ago, long before Al Gore Sr. and Jr. rose to their prestigious and influential positions.....”
Al Gore and friends create climate of McCarthyism
(15 July 09) “…..Anyone who questions green orthodoxy is accused of committing treason. Discussions ab out global warming are marked by an increasing desire to stamp out "impure" thinking, to the point of questioning the value of democratic debate. But shutting down discussion simply means the disappearance of reason from public policy…..In March, Al Gore's science adviser and prominent climate researcher Jim Hansen proclaimed that when it comes to dealing with global warming, the "democratic process isn't working"…… Hansen argues that "the first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections ….Less well-known pundits make similar points, suggesting that people with "incorrect" views on global warming should face Nuremberg-style trials or be tried for crimes against humanity…..” Al Gore and friends create climate of McCarthyism , Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian “….. There is clearly a trend. The climate threat is so great -- and democracies are doing so little about it -- that people conclude that maybe democracy is part of the problem, and that perhaps people ought not be allowed to express heterodox opinions on such an important topic…. Even if every Kyoto-obligated country passed its own, duplicate Waxman-Markey bills -- which is implausible and would incur significantly higher costs -- the global reduction would amount to just 0.22C by the end of this century. The reduction in global temperature would not be measurable in 100 years, yet the cost would be significant and payable now…. Is it really treason against the planet to express some scepticism about whether this is the right way forward? Is it treason to question throwing huge sums of money at a policy that will do virtually no good in 100 years?....Wanting to shut down the discussion is simply treason against reason…..”(15 July 09) Always follow the money , In less than 5 minutes, Joanne Nova lifts the lid and exposes the world greatest scam. “...Do your own thinking, you can't outsource your thinking....” Damn right!!!
(12 July 09) “.....So grave was the crisis in western China that President Hu Jintao canceled a meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8 summit and flew home. By official count, 158 are dead, 1,080 injured and a thousand arrested in ethnic violence between Han Chinese and the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs of Xinjiang. That is the huge oil-rich province that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several Central Asian countries that seceded from the Soviet Union... In 1989, fear that what was happening in Eastern Europe might happen in Beijing produced Tiananmen Square. The flooding of Chinese troops into Xinjiang bespeaks a fear that what happened to the Soviet Union could happen to China.....The larger issue here is the enduring power of ethnonationalism...... Ethnonationalism caused the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, triggered World War I in Sarajevo, and tore apart the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Ethnonationalism birthed Ireland, Turkey and Israel......Ethnonationalism in the 1990s tore apart the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and broke up Czechoslovakia, creating two-dozen nations out of three. Last August, ethnonationalism, with an assist from the Russian Army, relieved Georgia of Abkhazia and South Ossetia......Russia has its own ethnic worries in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia....” It Can't Happen Here, Pat Buchanan, HumanEvents.com “....The ethnonationalism that pulled Ireland out of the United Kingdom in 1921 is pulling Scotland out. It split the Asian subcontinent up into Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Iran, Iraq and Pakistan are all threatened.....Persians are a bare majority against the combined numbers of Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluch. Each of those minorities shares a border with kinfolk -- in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq and Pakistan......Turkey has fought for decades against Kurd ethnonationalism.....Evo Morales in Bolivia, Ollanta Humala in Peru and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez are stoking the embers... The contrast between insouciant America and serious China today is instructive. China is protectionist; America free trade. China is nationalist; America globalist. China's economy is export-driven; America's base is consumption. China saves; America spends. China uses its foreign exchange to lock up overseas resources; America uses foreign aid for humanitarian assistance to failed states. Behaving like ruthlessly purposeful 19th-century Americans, China grows as America shrinks.... Indeed, we now happily predict the year, 2042, when Americans of European ancestry become a minority in a country whose Founding Fathers declared it set aside for "ourselves and our posterity." Without the assent of her people, America is being converted from a Christian country into a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural Tower of Babel not seen since the late Roman Empire.....”
The Assault on Anzac, The Legend and the Left
(10 July 09)“.....In a previous article ( Quadrant , June 2009) I discussed the revisionist attack on the history of Gallipoli and the role it has played as the central component of the Anzac tradition in Australia. I pointed out that this campaign is explicitly being undertaken by the intelligentsia and the Left as we approach the twin centennials commemorating the outbreak of the Great War in 2014 and the Gallipoli landing in 2015. In this article I undertake a broader exploration into the attack on the Anzac legend, focusing on revisionist attempts to degrade and demean the tradition; I describe the basic revisionist approach and review many examples of it by prominent and influential academics and others; I provide an historical context in which this antagonism can be best understood; and finally I emphasise how gratuitous, grotesque and ahistorical these attacks are, especially when viewed against the background of the real threat that Australia and our allies faced during the Great War, when so many young men fought gallantly, sacrificed themselves, and gave birth to the Anzac legend......Viewed historically, the Australian Left has always had problems with the Anzac tradition.....” The Assault on Anzac, The Legend and the Left , Mervyn F. Bendle, Quadrant “......For example, on Anzac Day 1919 the crowd heard speaker after speaker wrestling with the meaning of the spirit that they had come to commemorate: extolling “sublime heroism”, “a solemn memory”, “a name and glory that will never die”, “a great brotherhood of sacrifice”, and “the spirit of unselfishness”...... The Anzac legend was therefore denounced from the outset as backward-looking, conservative and reactionary.....Like all historians on the Left, the Anzac legend is a propaganda tool of manipulation.....It is revealing of the mind-set of these writers that when Moore writes of a police state, and of “ruthless, systematic, and effective repression”, it is not the Soviet Union of which he speaks, but Australia.... A similarly blighted view of the Anzac tradition as a tool of the ruling class has been developed to an extreme level of abstraction by Associate Professor Anthony Burke of the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy..... Burke claims that the Great War saw the “manufacturing [of] a monolithic Australian subject: the ‘Anzac tradition'”, which “linked security, sovereignty and identity into a potent subjective and historical unity”..... It is an indication of the Left's long-term adherence to its anti-Anzac obsession that such views expressed in 2008 so closely resemble the arguments of the Communist Party of Australia eighty years earlier.....”.
Meet The Man Who Has Exposed The Great Climate Change Con Trick
(10 July 09)“......Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore's imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill — the largest tax in American history — which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy. Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change. ‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,' says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you're unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority....One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy' .....” Meet The Man Who Has Exposed The Great Climate Change Con Trick , Spectator.co.uk “..... ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I'm talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It's the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.'..... Until this year, environmental legislation has enjoyed a pretty easy ride through the parliaments of the Anglosphere and the Eurosphere, with greener-than-thou politicians (from Dave ‘Windmill' Cameron to Dave ‘climate change deniers are the flat-earthers of the 21st century' Miliband) queuing up to impose ever more stringent carbon emissions targets and taxes on their hapless electorates. In the days when most people felt rich enough to absorb these extra costs and guilty enough to think they probably deserved them, the politicians could get away with it. But the global economic meltdown has changed all that. As countless opinion surveys have shown, the poorer people feel, the lower down their list of priorities ecological righteousness sinks.... Does he really believe his message will ever get through? Plimer smiles. ‘If you'd asked any scientist or doctor 30 years ago where stomach ulcers come from, they would all have given the same answer: obviously it comes from the acid brought on by too much stress. All of them apart from two scientists who were pilloried for their crazy, whacko theory that it was caused by a bacteria. In 2005 they won the Nobel prize. The “consensus” was wrong.....”.
Green Industrial complex gets rich from carbon laws
(8 July 09) “......The word environmentalist usually conjures images of down-at-heel campaigners in tie-dyed T-shirts who eat only organic muesli. In truth, going green has become big business. We are witnessing the emergence of a green-industrial complex, an alliance between national governments, corporations and powerful individuals that is using the politics of fear to transform the economic and political worlds. For a snapshot of the government and business interests intertwined in the rise of green capitalism, consider Al Gore. He's getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.....Gore is chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, an outfit that seeks to "persuade people of the importance, urgency and feasibility" of going green. It recently launched a $US300 million ad campaign to coax American people and politicians to embrace the carbon-lite lifestyle. But Gore is also chairman of a green investment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies, and which invests in firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organisations, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle that will furnish one of his other multimillion-dollar organisations, General Investment Management, with booming business...Gore's activities provide only a glimpse into the new collusion between greens, businesses and government. So speedily has this network come together that according to one critic of the politics of environmentalism, Bjorn Lomborg, it is not going too far to liken the new green-industrial complex to the military-industrial complex that president Dwight Eisenhower warned of in the 1950s.....” Green Industrial complex gets rich from carbon laws, Brendan O'neill, The Australian “.....the international evidence suggests the attempt to create green jobs will hamper economic recovery. Obama cited Spain as a country where green jobs have improved economic matters. In fact, according to a study by a professor of economics at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, for every green job created by the Spanish government in recent years, an average of 2.2 other jobs were destroyed to make way for it. Furthermore, green jobs tend not to be permanent; in Spain, only 1 in 10 green jobs exists for a significant period..... green activists talk openly about the recession being a good thing. A leading European scientist whose views inform the Copenhagen Climate Council recently said, "It's a cruel thing to say ... but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage." This captures the complex's cavalier attitude towards individual hardship and its disdain for anything other than big government-big business solutions. This is about creating a new mission for the elite while enforcing a culture of low horizons among the "little people"....The company whose collapse precipitated the credit crunch, Lehman Brothers, enthusiastically embraced the idea of carbon trading...Lehman was inspired by European carbon-trading schemes....Far from ushering in a brighter future, the green-industrial complex's activities hinder economic experimentation, individual initiative and human aspiration. Theirs is a recipe for economic stagnation rather than recovery and for a new form of politics dominated by an elite green clique and closed off to us mere mortals.
Sea Level Rise; A Major Non-existent Threat exploited by Alarmists
(8 July 09) “......Climate change is a major battlefield in the US political war over the amount of government power and control. Diminution of the truth and exploitation of falsehoods are rife and public credulity is exploited by general lack of understanding. A common comment after a presentation is “I had my suspicions, but I didn't know enough to know.”.......For years I've asked, “What's wrong with having global warming?” It's a question that flummoxes people swamped by nothing but disaster predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mainstream media television that have hourly “Severe Weather” or “Extreme Weather” reports. After some thought most people say their concern is sea level rise. What they don't know is that, like CO2 induced warming, it is another falsely presented threat..... A week before Gore received the Nobel Prize a UK court ruled there were nine scientific errors and that some of these were done to enhance “the context of alarmism and exaggeration”...... Despite exposure of Gore's unjustified extremism, sea level rise continues as a major concern? But what are the facts? What do we know? The facts, as usual, show what is happening is perfectly normal with no evidence of a human influence......” Sea Level Rise; A Major Non-existent Threat exploited by Alarmists Dr Tim Ball, Canada Free Press “......Sea level has risen as the vast continental glaciers formed during the last ice age melted. It was some150 meters (490 feet) lower 18,000 years ago and has risen since that time. The massive glaciers were built up by water evaporating from the oceans and accumulating as snow on the land that changed to ice. Melt began 18,000 years ago but most occurred from 15,000 to 8000 years ago and sea level rose at an average rate of 14 mm a year. From 3000 to 100 years ago the rise was approximately 0.2 mm. Now sea level rise is directly and simplistically linked to melting glaciers and in turn linked to global warming..... Everything was done by IPCC to attribute the increase to global warming especially through increased sea temperature..... As with everything they do the IPCC extrapolate their perceived trend forward predicting increased sea level rise of 2 feet, far from Gore's ridiculous 20 feet. It is also far from what other experts are saying. Nils-Axel Morner is better qualified to speak about sea level than most and certainly Al Gore. In an interview Morner said , “If you go around the globe, you find no rise anywhere. But they need the rise, because if there is no rise, there is no death threat. Truth about sea level is a major casualty of the war to implement whatever is deemed necessary to implement legislation to increase government power and control......”
( 7 July 09) This is a brilliant and comprehensive site on dihydrogen monoxide if for no other reason than it demonstrates how, if something is marketed with a slick webpage, and presented with great authority and gravitas (think, Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth') the gullible and stupid will tumble right in every time. In vox pop street interviews it was suggested that Dihydrogen Monoxide been banned. The people agreed.
So much for these enlightened times.
( 5 July 09) Check this out...Your tax dollars at work. This is unbelievable although not surprising. Pages and pages of grants . But wait a minute!!!! We all thought the science was settled. It looks more likes it's for sale rather than settled...
( 1 July 09) “.....By an odd coincidence, Hal G.P. Colebatch's excellent article "UK bill an attack on faith" appeared in yesterday's The Australian about five days after I had the pleasure of delivering the annual St Edmund Campion lecture at Sydney's Campion College.... Anyone familiar with Elizabethan history in Britain may recall that Campion was tortured and executed in 1581 for trying to keep alive the old faith - Catholicism - in Britain after Henry VIII's historic rift with Rome in 1533.....Now, instead of finding itself persecuted by Elizabethan spies, informers and hangmen, Catholicism finds itself under severe assault from the self-righteous, politically correct social engineers of Britain's political Left. Thankfully the same thing has yet to happen in Australia, but with the increasing politicisation of public education here by an ideologically driven Marxist Left, something very similar may not be far away. Already Christianity in all its forms is treated with increasing contempt in societies that basically believe they have evolved and so distanced themselves from what they imagine are the old-world superstitions - and attendant moral constraints - of their past......Until the advent of postmodernism, communism was Christianity's most persistent and relentless recent foe.....” The Left is killing religion , Giles Auty, The Australian “.... Now postmodernism in all its largely Marxist-inspired guises - political correctness, gender theory, feminism, post-colonialism, determinism, deconstruction, relativism, structuralism, historical revisionism - has become a stealthier and thus even more sinister adversary that flourishes, generally unremarked, in our midst. Why has Western society, with all its proud history, generally allowed such an abject internal collapse? American Roger Kimball, who is one of a number of international cultural commentators with whom I have corresponded through the years, explains the whole matter as well as anyone: “In America, scattered if much-publicised episodes of violence have wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls. The success of America's recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values.” Postmodernism corrodes society largely through assaults on its soft underbelly, principally through theeffective hegemony it has created in the arts, education and culture generally.....as Colebatch makes clear, the postmodernist Left is intent on wiping out the remaining pockets of resistance that exist in private and religious schools.....”
( 1 July 09) “.....The rapid expansion of wind and solar "green power" will waste billions of dollars and destroy far more jobs than it supposedly creates. That is the damning message from what appears to be the first serious analysis anywhere in the world of the actual real-world performance and impact of subsidising and force-feeding these very expensive and semi-useless alternative energy sources. That in itself is damning. That governments, including both state and federal in Australia, have embarked on massive multibillion-dollar wind and solar schemes, without anywhere engaging in even the most basic analysis of cost – let alone (perish the thought) their actual energy effectiveness – is worse. You can search in vain for any serious cost-benefit analysis from our utterly compromised Federal Treasury, which used to be a bastion of reason and intellectual substance, but is now an institutional apostle of climate hysteria. Its purported analysis of the impact of cutting emissions was an embarrassing extended 292-page joke....The analysis has two major conclusions. That for every "green job" the state manages to finance, at least 2.2 jobs are lost elsewhere in the economy. And that does not count the extra jobs that could have been created if the money poured into wind and solar had been spent elsewhere......” The enormous cost of hot air , Terry McCrann, The Courier Mail “.....That's the second point: the huge waste of money. The study calculates that, since 2000, Spain has spent $571,000 ($A1 million) to create each "green job", including subsidies of more than $1 million per wind-industry job. Indeed, it goes on to discover that the whole process has created a surprisingly low number of jobs, two-thirds of which came in construction, fabrication and installation. A further one-quarter were in administrative positions. Just one in 10 jobs had been created at the permanent level of actual operation and maintenance of the renewable sources of energy....Even with its huge commitment, Spain is only getting started down the alternative energy route. As the analysis noted, despite solar power being subsidised at seven times the mean price of the power pool, it was yet to get to 1 per cent of Spain's total electricity production. And conventional power is already much more expensive in Europe than here. So the extra cost from solar and wind would be much greater here than there. If we seriously tried to get to 20 per cent "alternative", the cost on consumers would be huge, the destruction of real jobs massive.....”
REPOSTED:
I first posted this Giles Auty essay to my website in June 2000 and thought that in light of the recent writing by Giles Auty and Hal G.P. Colebatch, it would be timely to dust it off and take another look at it. It is still ten years on a fascinating read..
“......It is widely believed that as we grow older we tend to look back on earlier times in a spirit of generally unjustified nostalgia. Yet let us suppose for a moment that life really was qualitatively better in certain vital and readily identifiable ways thirty, forty or even fifty years ago. Why has it become so impossible for us to admit this?.... The rhetoric of radicalism is one of the most potent forces in society today, yet is essentially anti-intellectual. Perhaps its most damaging effect is the way it manages to sell the idea that ill-conceived and destructive initiatives are automatic examples of progress, and all who resist or obstruct them are reactionaries, conservatives or worse. The rhetoric of radicalism permeates so much of contemporary thought that many people have become inured to its essential intellectual dishonesty...... The trick, from a progressivist point of view, is to get the first fallacy past the publics guard while it is not paying proper attention, in order that the superstructure can later be built upon it. The seminal lie of radicalism is that all change is automatically for the better, even though much of our experience of life teaches us otherwise. It was on the basis of this simple lie that self-styled radicals were first able to seize and retain the moral high ground and to pour hot oil from there on any doubters or dissenters below......How did Western society allow itself to tumble into such an intellectually dishonest morass? The answer as in so many other cases, has been a general lack of vigilance and vision or will to safeguard our freedoms. By contrast, most of those who have been swept along by cultural fashions and catchphrases fail to foresee the likely consequences of their actions......” Postmodernism's assault on Western Culture , Giles Auty, Quadrant June 2000 “,,,,,,, Frequently they are too young to do so and, lacking knowledge of other political systems an almost universal problem for young Australians have no idea of the value of the system they are attempting to destroy..... Marxist-inspired revolutionary initiatives of the late 1960s did not simply go away. Driven by the teachings of influential figures such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci, the would-be subversives in our midst next targeted those more vulnerable areas of Western life which form the soft underbellies of our nations: education and the arts. If these could be subverted successfully from within, corrosion might soon succeed where political confrontation seemed likely to fail. Political programs which would not stand a prayer at the polls thus simply by-passed the inadequate defence mechanisms of democracy and achieved a choke-hold on our cultures instead. I do not think the communist parties in Australia or Britain ever polled even one per cent of the vote n general elections; yet Marxist ideas control much of tour contemporary education and culture.......back in the 1970's some of the earliest manifestations of political correctness seemed so silly that intelligent people were more inclined to ignore or laugh at them than bother to answer their allegations. In the event, the folly was probably ours for failing to foresee how inexorably political correctness and related movements would grow in stridency if not in moral force..... Most ordinary people remain as confused to this day about what postmodernism is as they do about its aims and origin. They are merely aware that a great number of things with which they disagree totally are slowly changing their lives. So what is postmodernism? One easy answer is that it is radical relativism gone rampant. But the answer I prefer is that it represents an attempt to usher in a new kind of left-wing totalitarianism via the unlocked back doors of democracies. Postmodernism represents the neo-Marxist conquest of Western cultures by stealth.