(28 March10) From the Andrew Bolt Blog, Can AFL footballers, with 12 years of Australian schooling behind them, name even five Prime Ministers? What a devastating indictment of our education system and culture of proud know-nothingness. How tragic is this
(27 March10) “.....The behaviour of senators suggests that neither party appreciates the depth of the crisis we are in or the pain that will be required to get us out. Last week, Bunning did more than any senator in many moons to raise the consciousness of the country to the magnitude of the deficit-debt crisis. His taking to the barricades may have inconvenienced some, but Bunning forced us all, briefly, to stare into the chasm. Consider. Congress this year will spend $1.6 trillion more than it collects in revenue, with the largest outlays in that FY 2010 budget for defence at $719 billion and Social Security at $721 billion. Thus, if the U.S. Government on Oct. 1, 2008, had shut down the Pentagon and furloughed every soldier and civilian here and around the world, and announced that it would not send out a Social Security check for a full year to any of the 50 million retired and elderly, we would still be $160 billion short of balancing the budget. If you zeroed out federal benefits to veterans for a full year, that, added in, would bring us close.....” Pitching for America , Pat Buchanan “..... Such is the magnitude of the fiscal crisis facing the country. To balance the budget this year would require a 43 percent across-the-board cut in every category of federal spending — defence, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Homeland Security, highways, etc. — or, if one used taxes alone, a 72-percent increase in federal tax revenues. Budget cuts of that magnitude are impossible. They would cause a revolution. And any attempt at tax hikes of that magnitude would drain off all available consumer capital and hurl the economy into another Depression. For the foreseeable future, then, this nation is going deeper into debt... What is the rationale for the United States, the world's greatest debtor nation, putting itself deeper in debt to China to send foreign aid to nations that will never repay us and that vote habitually with China and against us in the United Nations? This city does not seem to grasp that the days of wine and roses are over. We are not in the 1950s or 1960s anymore. Then, we could throw open our markets to imports from the world. Then, we could dish out foreign aid and fight wars in Vietnam with 500,000 men, while maintaining 50,000 troops in Korea and 300,000 in Europe. America is headed for a time when, like the British Empire, she is going to have to make painful choices, or have them forced upon us....”
Mass immigration kills Aussie culture
It's worth reading the story below in the context of the two stories I have re-posted from last October and last month concerning the official immigration policy in the UK, deliberately designed to sabotage that nations culture.
(25 March10) “.....Traditions based on heritage, sporting culture and common language are threatened by mass immigration, a leading demographer has warned. Monash University population expert Dr Bob Birrell has said the huge influx of people with few or no English skills had created social problems in Melbourne suburbs such as Dandenong, Sunshine and Broadmeadows and most major cities were feeling the population strain....In a plea to the Rudd Government to slash the current immigrant intake of 180,000 a year, Dr Birrell warned that the predicted population of 35 million by 2050 would be a disaster for urban living and the environment. "One would have to wander deaf, dumb and blind through Australian capital cities to not notice how urban congestion has already reduced the quality of life," he said......” Mass immigration kills Aussie culture , Herald Sun “..... The intake dominated by people from non-English speaking backgrounds was transforming Australia...."We are losing core elements of what was once shared. Almost all could once aspire to a house and land ... and sharing a common language, sporting culture and heritage," he said. But mass migration was creating ethnic enclaves in suburbs with cheap housing, and planning rules were forcing Australian-born "losers" and non-English speaking background migrants to live in congested neighbourhoods, "cheek by jowl".
Reposted from February 2010
Immigration: a plan to alter the nations soul
The government's policy of mass immigration was intended to remodel the social fabric of the nation,
(16 Feb 10) “......So now we know what Labour's immigration policy was really about. The "open door" was not simply held ajar in order to admit a fresh workforce that would help to fill gaps in the growing economy. Nor was it just a gesture of hospitality and goodwill to those who were fleeing from repressive or inhospitable regimes in order to seek a better life. Both of those aims would have been credible – if controversial and not thought-through in all their consequences...... But as it turns out, the policy was motivated by something far more radical and fundamental than any of this. The full text of the draft policy paper composed in 2000 by a Home Office research unit – the gist of which had already been made public by a former Labour adviser – was released last week under Freedom of Information rules. Properly understood, it is political dynamite. What it states quite unequivocally was that mass immigration was being encouraged at least as much for "social objectives" as for economic ones. Migration was intended specifically to alter the demographic and cultural pattern of the country: to produce by force majeure the changes in attitude that the Labour government saw itself as representing..... try to recall just how much hubris the New Labour tide brought with it in the beginning: the contempt for history and the Year Zero arrogance with which they set about "modernising" the nation's institutions. It was, in this respect, a prime example of the new direction which Left-wing parties were forced to take in the wake of Marxism's collapse.....” Immigration: a plan to alter the nations soul , Janet Daley, The Telegraph “.... Having lost the great economic argument of the 20th century, the Left had to switch its focus to society itself: if humanity could not be transformed through the redistribution of wealth and the socialist command economy, then it would have to be transfigured by altering social relations... the subtext was always self-examination and personal guilt: the indigenous Briton must be trained (literally, by the education system) always to question the acceptability of his own attitudes, to cast doubt on his own motives, to condemn his own national identity and history, to accept the blame even for the misbehaviour of new migrants – whose conduct could only be a reflection of the unfortunate way they were treated by the host population.....The goal was a social revolution abetted by the influx of a huge variety of diverse cultures, which would provide both the need and the pretext for reshaping British life. It may have been relatively new (at least in Britain) as a specific political policy, but it was much of a piece with the conventional objective of Left-wing political movements, which is to transform human nature..... at least since the 1960s, when "raising consciousness" became the refrain of every group that sought change in any sphere, almost all parties have had to talk this way to some extent. It has become part of the politician's acknowledged brief to suggest ways in which the internal lives and attitudes of voters can be influenced or directed. There is scarcely a party leader now who would dare to say that these matters are none of his (or any government's) business. Almost no one seems prepared to discuss the obvious danger: that if politics becomes a replacement for religion by taking upon itself the responsibility for transfiguring human nature then politicians, of all people, become the prophets and the priests. Just at the moment, I can't think of a more absurd idea
Reposted from October 2009
(28 Oct 09) “.......So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened. Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate? The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate. There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage....... It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions. It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another 'multicultural' identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way....” The outrageous truth slips out: Labour cynically plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain without telling us , Melanie Phillips, MailOn Line “......But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners.... It was to destroy Britain's identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country's. A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether.It also conveniently guaranteed an increasingly Labour-voting electorate since, as a recent survey by the Electoral Commission has revealed, some 90 per cent of black people and three-quarters of Asians vote Labour......So that's how New Labour views the white working class, supposedly the very people it is in politics to champion. Who can wonder that its core vote is now decamping in such large numbers to the BNP when Labour treats them like this? Condemned out of its own mouth, it is New Labour that is responsible for the rise of the BNP - by an act of unalloyed treachery to the entire nation.
(22 March10) “.....There are fresh doubts about the government's ability to attract private investment to its $43 billion national broadband network after the head of the world's second-largest cable-TV operator said the project's costs were "baffling". Mike Fries, chief executive of Liberty Global and chairman of Australian regional pay-TV operator Austar, said the cost of connecting 90 per cent of Australian premises to a fibre-to-the-home network did not make sense when existing infrastructure could be upgraded to deliver the 100Mbps speeds promised by the NBN ...."Baffling for several reasons: $43bn is an inordinate amount of money . . . Just take Foxtel -- 2.5 million homes in the capital cities (and) you could have 100 megabytes to every one of those homes for less than $100 million...." Cable chief queries NBN cost , The Australian “.....I don't know who's actually running the numbers inside and I believe there's greater battles being fought here than I have any comprehension of, but the economics of the issue don't look particularly clear to me." Liberty Global, established by John Malone, is the second-largest pay-TV and broadband supplier in the US, with global revenue of $US11bn ($11.9bn). Its international portfolio includes a controlling interest in Austar and shares in Australia's Showtime and xyz networks.... Mr Fries's doubts about the cost of the NBN should ring alarm bells for a government hoping to fund half of the project with private sector investment. Mr Fries also questioned whether there was enough demand for the NBN's promised 100Mbps internet access speeds. "Do consumers need 100Mbps? No, what they need is access," he said. "It will evolve, it will get faster, but we sell 100 megabytes in 50 per cent of our footprint and very few people buy it. Most people buy 20, 30 -- that's sort of the sweet spot......"
Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland doesn't quite understand that the trendy, shaved head, tough guy, no-nonsense, thuggish, don't mess with me persona he tries to project, belies the fact that he really is just another wimpy, spineless, politically correct weasel.
(19 March10) “....We didn't need our police chief to finally admit this week he's hiding the truth about our ethnic crime. That deceit was already obvious when police last month published a bizarre appeal on their Crime Stoppers website. They wanted your help to find a man who'd grabbed a 14-year-old schoolgirl walking on an East Brighton street and tried to drag her into a van.....Here's the official police description of him: "The man is described as about 30 years old, 190cm, dark complexion, very white teeth, and short, curly black hair." Hmm. Dark complexion? That could mean we must all look out for some deeply tanned Australian. Or perhaps an Italian. Or are police after an Indian, an Aboriginal or a Maori?....Answer: none of the above. In fact, the wanted man is an African, but the police were too polite to tell you for fear you might get the wrong idea, which in this case is that the man they want you to help find is actually, er, African. And that he's not "dark complexioned" but black. All of which means the police would rather let a potential rapist escape than trust you with his description. But let Chief Commissioner Simon Overland justify this bizarre policy.....” Tell truth on ethnic crime, Andrew Bolt. Herald Sun “..... Asked on 3AW this week if he'd tell the public a wanted man was "black", he waffled: "No, not necessarily. Nor would we say 'white'." Yet police will say "dark complexioned".... “..I guess we've moved away from those terms because sometimes they cause offence." Pardon? To describe a black man as black can cause offence? Er, why? If so, why would calling a black man "dark complexioned" instead not be offensive? Isn't the real game being played here one of pretending to be so blind to colour that you didn't even notice an African wasn't an albino? Heavens, man, grow up. If Overland is truly worried about giving offence, let him consider the offence his would-be rapist might soon cause some other woman now that police have been too polite to pass on to the public his single most obvious identifiable feature. Overland this week was perfectly frank in conceding the police do indeed keep such truths from you: "For offenders we do record ethnicity at the time they're processed ... (but) we don't as a matter of course (release figures on ethnic crime rates) ... "We certainly from an intelligence point of view look at that data and when we pick up trends or issues we certainly act on that ... but I'm not sure it's appropriate to be putting that sort of information out." So the police do know, but won't tell.
Brennan report is a Trojan horse
(19 March10) “.....There is a false view that the only risk to sound government in the Brennan report on human rights in Australia is its recommendation for a human rights act, a perception that overlooks the radical transformation it envisages for the country's system of administrative law and judicial review.... Commonwealth public servants will face a grim, uncertain future with their decisions subject to a list of human rights as relevant considerations over and above the requirements in their operating statute. These proposed changes to Australia's culture of governance will lead to the demise of some of the best features of Australian public administration. No amount of sophistry can conceal the severity of their impact. Chairman Frank Brennan wants to amend the Judicial Review Act to make it a legal error if public servants' decisions fail to take into account Australia's international and human rights obligations as a relevant factor . This list is to include some rights from the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as economic rights to an adequate standard of living including food, housing and clothing, to the highest attainable standard of health, and to education (recommendations five and 11)....Take a decision by a public servant that a person is entitled to a pension. Ordinarily, this will not occur if the applicant has not met the criteria set down in the statute and the regulations. But under Brennan's system the public servant will have to consider not just the criteria set down by parliament but the list of rights.......” Brennan report is a Trojan horse , Margaret Kelly, The Australian “...... As well as civil and political rights, Brennan would have the decision-maker take into account the rights to an adequate standard of living including food, housing and clothing. Of course the government and parliament have already considered these matters in framing the legislation....This recommendation is an invitation to administrative hell. But there is more. If the decision goes to the courts for judicial review, how are they to determine whether the rights were taken into account? Ask to see the check list? Check the principal act? But there will be nothing in the principal act, just these new relevant considerations imposed through Brennan's new system. This is an inducement to judicial adventurism, with nothing to guide the courts except their own perceptions. This is not the function of judicial review..... The core misconception in this debate is the idea that each administrative decision must uphold human rights. This is nonsense. The obligation on the decision-maker is to honour the law of the land, and often this means protecting the revenue and the national interest. For unelected judges, with little policy expertise and no jurisdiction to engage in weighing competing policy and political interests, to interpret statutes in the light of an aspirational list of rights, when rights have already been considered before and during the making of the legislation, is misconceived. It will lead to a weaker public service and a flawed system of public administration, and is an inefficient way of protecting human rights. The Brennan recommendations amount to a legal Trojan horse. They will bring an army of litigants, a besieged public service and an opportunity many judges would find hard to resist.
Liars, cheats, thieves: the terrible truth about the mean greens
(18 March10) “…..Every now and again there comes along a scientific study that proves beyond reasonable doubt what you instinctively know to be true: wine is good for you, exercise is dangerous, and self-righteous environmentalists are lying, cheating, thieving degenerates. I'm exaggerating only a little. Do Green Products Make Us Better People ? a paper in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science , argues that those who wear what the authors call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal….The short answer to the paper's question, then, is: No. Greens are mean. The authors, two Canadian psychologists, came up with an intriguing explanation for this. "Virtuous acts," they write, "can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviour…..” Liars, cheats, thieves: the terrible truth about the mean greens, Iain Hollingshead, The Telegraph “ ….What this study really does is to confirm our deep-rooted suspicion that there is something fishy about people who profess to be greener than thou. Those climate-change scientists in East Anglia didn't do their cause any favours with their emails. The most inconvenient truth for Al Gore was when reporters discovered just how large his home energy bills were. As with the worst type of religious zealot, there is nothing more annoying than the zeal of the converted, especially when it is tainted with the hypocrisy of self-righteousness…people are more likely to buy environmentally friendly produce in shops than on the internet. Being seen to be green is more important than anything else…We have been kind to these unkind people for far too long. Now that their halo has fallen and they can no longer boast their green credentials as a shorthand for moral superiority, it is time to fight fire with fire. How about a little compensatory ethics of our own? Double the tax on organic food as a deterrent; it is clearly a starter drug to a lifetime of amorality…..”
(18 March10) “......The welcome ceremony is part of a mindset that locks Aborigines out of the world in which they desperately need to engage. Government ministers offer a rote acknowledgment of traditional custodians but don't enforce truancy laws to make Aboriginal children attend school. Ministers will hold hands, walk over bridges and spend taxpayers' dollars on busybody schemes, but to do something effective such as forcing a child to attend school in the face of an ignorant parent: never.... There are problems with its apparently simple wish "to show respect for Aboriginal culture and heritage and acknowledge the ongoing relationship traditional custodians have with their land". It is a gesture full of holes and with some weird fellow travellers. One-quarter of Aborigines do not recognise a particular area as their homeland and one-quarter live in areas that may have some relationship to their original land, but those are the poor beggars who are worse off by a long way.....” Welcome To Endless Poverty , Gary Johns. The Australian “...... by overplaying the historic claims to all Australian land, the welcome acts as the original sin: it can never be expunged unless the whitefella leaves. Peter Adam, principal of Victoria's Anglican theological institute Ridley College, was stupid enough to suggest this, saying last year that all non-Aboriginal Australians should be prepared to leave if the indigenous people wanted that, "making restitution for the vile sin of genocide". "The prosperity of our churches has come from the proceeds of crime. Our houses, our churches, our colleges, our shops, our sport grounds, our parks, our courts, our parliaments, our prisons, our hospitals, our roads, our reservoirs are stolen property," he said. What should the three-quarters of Aborigines who are of mixed descent do? Stay or go? ....Undertaken at the wrong time and place, the traditional acknowledgment serves the purposes of those determined to lock Aborigines out of the modern economy. If ministers don't agree, they should stop doing it.....”
Broadband Network Will Be $43 Billion White Elephant
(16 March10) “......The present federal budget describes the Rudd government's $43 billion national broadband network as the single largest building infrastructure project in Australian history. But it could end up as one of Australia's biggest and costliest infrastructure debacles. And that's saying something when you look at the financial disaster that has engulfed the home insulation program and the amount of taxpayers' money wasted on the mismanagement of the primary school building revolution. What has emerged from these multi-billion-dollar spending splurges is an absence of good governance. Political rhetoric and spin have taken precedence over economic common sense. The NBN is no exception. It is just that the financial cost of failure is so much higher..... this project has not been the subject of any cost-benefit analysis... cost to the consumer is a critical and as yet undefined factor in the success of the NBN and it is not confined to the cable, which the government wants connected without needing permission to more than nine million homes, schools and businesses across the country. Once NBN lays the cable a retail service provider will install a set-top box inside or outside the premises. This box, which will cost several hundred dollars, will be the gateway for broadband, phone, television and other services into the home.....” Broadband Network Will Be $43 Billion White Elephant . Malcolm Colless, The Australian “.....What is clear is that the cost of internal rewiring required in most established homes to operate this new system will have to be met by the householder. And this is before the regular bills for using the new broadband and wireless services start flowing in. Once the coin drops on this it won't be long before the government comes under intense pressure to subsidise these associated costs to offset public confusion and hostility in an effort to keep the NBN project alive. The hard reality is that the volume of traffic will be driven predominantly by price, not speed..... Telstra already offers the same 100 megabits per second service to more than a million homes in Melbourne on a $269 a month two-year contract. But just 200 have taken up the service and the company has shelved plans to extend it to other capitals. The NBN is another example of the government's "father [Kevin] knows best" approach to the country's administration....as one industry expert predicted last night: "Within 10 years at the latest the use of 4G wireless services will show that Rudd's decision to extend the broadband rollout from the node into the home was just plain stupid......”.
Emissions figures don't stack up: professor
(14 March10) “.....The Rudd government ramped up the environmental benefits of its botched $2.45 billion home insulation scheme by grossly overstating the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that could be achieved by households, expert independent analysis says. The independent analysis undermines claims by Kevin Rudd and Environment Minister Peter Garrett that the retrofitting of insulation into 2.7 million homes would produce reductions of 49.4 million tonnes of carbon by 2020. The Department of Climate Change - which did much of the modelling for the Rudd government - has told The Australian the claim of 49.4 million tonnes came from working out that new insulation would result in each household cutting its emissions by 1.65 tonnes a year on average....But the benefits claimed by the government were twice the size of the benefits claimed by the two biggest beneficiaries of the insulation scheme, manufacturers CSR and Fletcher, when they were vigorously lobbying the government to fund a national rollout of insulation. Further, the benefits claimed by the government were four to five times higher than the number derived from conservative calculations by associate professor Terry Williamson, a thermal performance expert at the University of Adelaide.....” Emissions figures don't stack up: professor, Hedley Thomas. The Australian “.....Dr Williamson has relied on the official government figures and studies from the Environment Department and the former Australian Greenhouse Office into household energy use and household emissions. He concludes that the benefits - as currently claimed - are bogus.... "The benefits have been exaggerated by a considerable factor, and none of the government's numbers stack up," said Dr Williamson. The average household's energy use is responsible for about eight tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year. Dr Williamson said the most optimistic scenario could see the emission reduction get to 0.4 tonnes per household, which meant that the total carbon reduction by 2020 would be about 10 million tonnes. This would mean that the scheme had cost taxpayers more than $200 a tonne.....”
(14 March10) “.... In the long-running controversy about people-smuggling, language often has been misused to disguise what is going on. Instead of relaying the facts about people-smuggling, carefully chosen words are creating an entirely false impression. George Orwell would be turning in his grave.... When people downplay the boat arrivals issue by trumpeting the numbers of asylum-seekers who arrive by plane they neatly skirt around this point: that those arriving by plane arrive legally, with visas in hand. They may illegally overstay those visas and then claim asylum, but the fact remains they arrived legally, with authorities knowing who they were and where they came from. Orwell believed language should be used to simply and directly convey what we mean. He identified that sloppy use of language could contaminate political debate, and vice versa: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." And so it is that every few days or so we are alerted to another boat load of asylum-seekers being intercepted by Australian customs or navy patrols....” Language thrown overboard , Chris Kenny, The Australian “......This is a most misleading use of the English language. The skippers of these people-smuggling boats know exactly where they are going and what they want. They head for Australian waters, usually near Ashmore Reef or Christmas Island, and their aim is to be met by an Australian vessel and taken for processing..... So these boats and their passengers are not intercepted by Australian vessels, they seek them out. To say they are intercepted is to say I was intercepted at the Martin Place station in Sydney yesterday by the train to Central. Lucky I had a ticket ready.... Whether we agree with the government's policies or not, let's not create the impression that our vessels are out there intercepting unauthorised boats, preventing them coming to Australia. Let's not pretend these rendezvous are not welcomed by the asylum-seekers. Let's not confuse rescues and interceptions with successful deliveries of asylum-seekers into the hands of Australian authorities.....”
Rocker's long fall from the top
Edited extract from House of Hits: The Great Untold Story of Australia's First Family of Music, by Jane Albert (Hardie Grant, $49.95).
(14 March10) “......A curious sight greeted customers of the House of Merivale and Mr John, the up-market menswear store in Sydney's CBD in 1971: Stevie Wright, international king of pop, could be seen with a tape measure slung over one shoulder, offering to take measurements for suits to order. It was the last place you might expect to find the celebrated Easybeats front man, whose reputation as a sex symbol almost rivalled that of his onstage prowess. But life had taken an ironic, almost savage, turn for Wright. The frantic few years leading up to this point had been a merry-go-round of international tours, performing before screaming fans, interviews, celebrity appearances and plenty of sex and drugs and partying: in short, a life of superstardom. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, it was over. At 22, Wright found himself without a job, a home or any real inspiration..."Stevie was still a great performer, still a great singer," Young says. "So Harry and I got to work to see if we could come up with something that could put him back in the charts." The album was Hard Road and the single was Evie. No one could have anticipated the phenomenal response Evie generated. The single was released in June 1974. It shot to No 1 and remained in the charts for 26 weeks, the biggest Australian single of the year and the only pop song over six minutes to reach No 1.....Chugg says he would occasionally wake up to find Wright hammering on the front door of his North Sydney apartment, saying he needed a $30 advance to buy groceries for himself and his young son, Nick. Chugg would then go cap in hand to Albert and request the advance. He says it took a couple of years before he figured out what the money was really for...." Rocker's long fall from the top , Jane Albert “......Two hours later I'm lying on the floor backstage at the Myer Music Bowl spewing and throwing up. And it took nearly two years before I'd worked out that the 30 bucks for the groceries, and the money I used to go and be humble to Ted for, was for f . . . ing drugs." Wright was in the grip of an unrelenting addiction to alcohol and drugs. Tragically, it ultimately overshadowed his talent as a singer and took over his life.... Chugg did what he could to help Wright dry out, even asking Wright's wife, Gail, and son, Nick, to move out so he could move into their Newport home north of Sydney and attempt to control Wright's drug taking. Eventually, he decided he could no longer cover for Wright and deceive everyone else in the process. One night he discovered Wright using heroin in the recording studio. "And I've walked around to George and Harry and said, `Listen, come with me, I just want you to know what I've been going through for 2 1/2 years.' And they walked around and he couldn't see us, and I said, `He's been doing smack, he's been doing it for three years.' And it was very painful and emotional." That was the end of Wright's recording career with Alberts..... Wright has been in and out of rehab and now lives on the NSW Central Coast with his devoted partner, Fay. There is a glimmer of excitement when we talk about those early, heady days, even a rare sparkle in his eyes that gives a hint of the cheeky Stevie Wright of old. But a palpable air of sadness surrounds him....”
At the United Nations, The Curious Career of Maurice Strong
(14 March10) “.......Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear. But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization....Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world's environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.'s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions... Along the way, Strong has also been caught up in a series of U.N. scandals and conflicts of interest. These extend from the notorious Oil-for-Food program to the latest furor over cash funneled via U.N. agencies to the rogue regime of North Korea, which involves, among other things, Strong's creative use of a little-known, U.N.-chartered educational institution called the University for Peace. Above all, the tale of Maurice Strong illustrates the way in which the U.N., with its bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach, lends itself to manipulation by a small circle of those who best know its back corridors......” At the United Nations, The Curious Career of Maurice Strong , FoxNews.com “......Officially, Strong cut his ties to the U.N. Secretariat almost two years ago, as federal investigators homed in on the discovery that back in 1997, while serving as a top adviser to then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he took a check for almost $1 million that was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein's U.N.-sanctioned regime. The check was delivered by a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who was convicted last summer in New York Federal Court of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials on behalf of Baghdad. Strong denied any wrongdoing and said he would step aside from his U.N. envoy post until the matter was cleared up..... China is a special place for Strong, a self-declared, life-long socialist. It is the burial place of a woman said to be one of his relatives, the famous pro-communist American journalist Anna Louise Strong, a vociferous supporter of Lenin and Stalin until the mid-'30s, and a strong booster of Mao Zedong's China... And from China, Strong has to this day maintained a network of personal and official connections within the U.N. system that he has long used to spin his own vast web of non-governmental organizations, business associates and ties to global glitterati. Within that web, Strong has developed a distinctive pattern over the years of helping to set up taxpayer-funded public bureaucracies, both outside and within the U.N., which he then taps for funding and contacts when he moves on to other projects.... Styling himself as a guru of global governance, Strong also helped to launch a major campaign for the U.N. to entwine its murky and graft-prone bureaucracy with big business, via so-called public-private partnerships. Strong introduced this process in his 1997 reform proposal as the bland notion of "consultation between the United Nations and the business community.".. Strong's behind-the-scenes maneuvering has also put him in the cockpit of global power politics. From 2003 to 2005, he served as Annan's personal envoy to the nuclear-crisis-wracked Korean peninsula.....”
EDITORIAL, The Washington Times : Global warming winners
(10 March10) “........The greatest scandal connected to global warming is not exaggeration, fraud or destruction of data to conceal the weakness of the argument. It is those who are personally profiting from promoting this fantasy at the expense of the rest of us. Al Gore is the most visible beneficiary. The world's greatest climate-change fear-monger has amassed millions in book sales and speaking fees. His science-fiction movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award for best documentary and 21 other film awards.... Meanwhile, Mr. Gore was laying his own foundations. As he was whipping up hysteria over climate change, he cannily invested in "green" firms that stood to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) from increased government regulations and sweetheart deals from connected politicians and bureaucrats. The multimillionaire climate dilettante was given a free pass by reporters, who refused to ask him hard questions about the degree to which he was profiting from the panic he was causing. With the global-warming story line unraveling, the New York Times allowed Mr. Gore to run what amounted to an unpaid advertisement for his brand of climate-change hysteria. This screed, published Saturday, reiterated his claim that the world faces an "unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it........” EDITORIAL, The Washington Times : Global warming winners“......Mr. Gore is not the only one profiting from climate fraud. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace prize with Mr. Gore, is also the director general of the Energy and Resources Institute. The New Delhi-based research group has received substantial financial grants to examine the issue of the world's vanishing glaciers, a purported crisis that was highlighted in the 2007 IPCC climate-change report. The glaciology unit is headed by Syed Hasnain, who in 1999 claimed that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035, which became a noted scare quote in the IPCC report......The greatest potential profits are possible in the ill-defined "carbon trading" industry, currently valued at $126 billion. The trade in carbon emission credits - a key aspect of the beleaguered "cap-and-trade" energy bill now stalled in Congress - will make quick fortunes for the "carbon brokers" assisting companies with reducing their carbon footprints. But because carbon quotas and the acceptable means of measuring them will be determined by the government, this will benefit those who combine presumed expertise with political access..... Mr. Gore is heavily involved in this scam through Generation Investment Management LLP, which he chairs, and Mr. Pachauri also has been accused of making millions from carbon trading....Given the clear conflicts of interest of those who both promote and profit from climate-change alarmism, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize should be rescinded.....”.
Why the Palestinians Don't Want a State
(9 March10) “.........President Barack Obama will soon be entering the lion's den of Middle East politics with the same conviction that has guided all his predecessors -- that the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict lies in the Two-State Solution, leading to the early establishment of a Palestinian state...... there is increasing evidence that the Palestinians themselves are of two minds about the prospect of their own statehood.... The first piece of evidence is the unchallenged observation that Palestinian leaders have rejected or sabotaged every proposal for statehood since 1947. In that year the Palestinians rejected the UN-sponsored division of the former British mandate into Jewish and Arab states on the grounds that they did not want to share Palestine with the infidel Jews. Instead of developing trheir own state, they tried through armed conflict to eradicate the nascent Jewish state. Their leaders took this big step just two years after the end of the Holocaust; and, guided by Hitler's associate Haj Amin Al-Husseini, their implicit goal was to continue the slaughter. But if you start a war of politicide plus extermination you had better win it; otherwise, like Hitler, or Tojo, or the Palestinians of 1948, you will very likely end up with a bombed-out wasteland, or -- in the Palestinian case -- as a defeated rabble of landless refugees...... the next time a state was practically handed to them, they again turned it down, in favor of war with the Jews. Thus, when Clinton and Barak, reviving the stalled Oslo Accords of 1994, made Arafat an offer he couldn't refuse -- 95% of the West Bank, control of the Temple Mount, border adjustments, etc. -- he refused it, while giving an ultimatum that only a thoroughly defeated Israel could accept: the resettlement of some five million "refugees" within the boundaries of the Jewish State..... Why don't the Palestinians learn their lesson? Why won't they accept the grant of statehood? This is the age of the sanctified victim; and any person or group who can claim that title is automatically in a state of grace......” Why the Palestinians Don't Want a State, David Gutman, The American Spectator. “.......Nobody is allowed to "blame the victim," and so these lucky unfortunates can follow any course, however bloody, so long as they can blame their violence on their victimized condition...... They are the darlings of the UN and of European elites: The West Bank hums with idealistic foreign youth eager to interpose their bodies between Palestinian flesh and Israeli tanks, as well as with foreign NGOs..... But under statehood, the Palestinians will no longer have their special charisma as the world's premier victims, innocent agrarians suffering under a harsh occupation. When the fickle world turns its attention to the latest victim du jour , their welfare benefits are likely to be sharply cut..... the Palestinian resistance to statehood has also less rational but equally compelling bases. Foremost among these is the legacy of collective shame. With the possible exception of the Japanese, no culture is so vulnerable to a sense of shame and humiliation as the Arab world. Even in the 21st century, Arabs continue daily to lament Crusades that occurred nearly a thousand years ago. They still feel shame over the loss of Spanish Andalusia (" Andaluz " to the Arabs), their last European redoubt, evacuated in the 15th century. More recently, Palestinian Arabs have been exposed to traumatic humiliation by their defeat during the Israeli War of Independence..... The calculus of Shame dictates that the Palestinian stigma of defeat can only be removed by a bloody victory over the Jews who inflicted it. By the same token, their state cannot be handed to the Palestinians by some benign international arbiter, or by a generous Israeli government. These are people who elect Hamas, who celebrate the "Victories" of Hezbollah, and who dance in the street when Israeli teenagers are blown up in a pizza parlor. The gift of a state that was not won in battle would only increase Palestinian shame.....”
George Soros: International Man of Misery
(7 March10) “.....The term “euphemism” refers to the substitution of a vague or milder term for one that may be considered harsh, offensive or blunt. Example: George Soros is a “philanthropist”. If by “philanthropist” we mean one who creates chaos, destruction and financial ruin for his own personal gain, it's a perfect fit. Calling Soros a philanthropist is rather like referring to the Nazi block wardens as Neighborhood Watch. Soros certainly gives lots of money away. But a philanthropist acts to improve the human condition. Soros acts solely to improve the Soros condition. Despite the lofty sounding rhetoric about an Open Society, Soros' objective is to wreck the United States. Actually Soros never really defines his Open Society. The concept arose in the 1930s with the notion of a moral code based on “universal principles”. After tweaking the concept to suit his own purposes, Soros adopted his own version of an Open Society which would be one in which the US has no power... Later passing himself as an official's godson, he accompanied his benefactor confiscating valuables from innocent Jews. (David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party. 2006). Soros would later tell Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes that he had no remorse about what he had done....Soros amassed his fortune by speculating in the currency markets. He got a lot of attention for tanking the British pound in 1992. More than once, Soros has used his status as an investor to manipulate markets...” George Soros: International Man of Misery , Canada Free Press “.....Soros was actually convicted of insider trading in France. His opinion moves markets. He is one of the most powerful people in the world entirely due to his ability to get other people to part with their money. His tentacles are everywhere. He uses numerous foundations and associations to keep money flowing and spread around. It's no secret that George Soros is fond of deceit and subterfuge. He is a radical in the mold of Saul Alinsky....Soros candidly admits he finds destruction easier than creation... Soros opposed Bush's War on Terror and provides funding to pro terror groups.....When Soros gets hold of power in any government, he makes money. It is difficult to find examples of Soros invasions that leave the target country better off. But that is not Soros' concern..... Obama's monstrous “Stimulus Bill” (euphemisms again) fits neatly into Soros' paradigm. You can read Soros' economy recovery plan on the Huffington Post (February 12, 2009.... Nobody knows more about how to destroy a currency than Soros. We have assumed that the peculiar short selling patterns and over hyped economic “collapse” were staged to get Obama elected. If an inept, inexperienced and radical president has his way, which Obama surely will, the net result is pretty predictable. Is that kind of social and economic chaos designed to open up a power vacuum that a guy like Soros just can't resist...? .
(7 March10) “.....I blame myself for Keith Windschuttle having perhaps wasted the last few years writing what is his most important book. It was 2003, and I believed then that mere truth would triumph over the ‘stolen generations' myth ..... I was sure a great fraud had been committed: the preaching of a racist crime that never occurred. That crime, as every schoolchild has been taught for a decade, is that Australian officials stole up to 100,000 children between 1910 and 1970 just because they were Aboriginal.....The maddest thing was that this monstrous theft of children allegedly took place without anyone noticing. As Windschuttle shows, the ‘stolen generations' did not rate a mention by Aboriginal activists for decades; not until 1981, in fact, when a young academic, Peter Read, let his wife convince him to change the title of a pamphlet he'd dashed off in a day from The Lost Generations — too boring! — to The Stolen Generations.... My own attention was first caught by Read when I read a speech he gave in 1996, naming as the two most prominent ‘stolen' children Charles Perkins and Lowitja O'Donoghue. Raised in the Northern Territory, I smelled a rat. Perkins was an Alice Springs boy, and it's well known in those parts that his mother Hetti, deserted by the last of her partners, had pleaded with Father Percy Smith to give the smartest, and perhaps best-loved, of her children a good education. In fact, Smith's Adelaide boarding school taught Perkins so well that he became the first Aborigine to head a government department. But now Perkins was ‘stolen'? By racists? In fact, O'Donoghue later confessed that she was not stolen, either, despite being co-chairman of the National Sorry Day Committee. She'd been left by her father at South Australia's Colebrook Home...” A killer myth. Andrew Bolt, Spectator.co.uk “..... It's since been far easier to count the people who falsely claimed to have been stolen than those who actually had. Examples? Peter Gunner, found by the Federal Court to have been sent to a school in Alice Springs by his mother; Lorna Cubillo, rescued at age eight from a bush camp without a known guardian; Molly of Rabbit-Proof Fence fame, taken to a home after warnings she'd been rejected by her tribe and was ‘running wild with the whites'; and Annette Peardon, compensated by the Tasmanian government for having been ‘stolen', even though her mother had been jailed with hard labour for neglect... Equally deaf have been the academics. Take Manne, who has been unable for years to meet my challenge to name just ten of the 100,000 children allegedly stolen for being Aboriginal. The few names he's suggested include a 12-year-old with syphilis, a 13-year-old girl found pregnant out bush, and even children evacuated from war zones in the second world war. So if facts mattered, Windschuttle's book would kill the ‘stolen generations' myth stone dead, yet we know the myth will be taught as gospel for years. He's wasted his time, then. Unless we add one more chapter to excuse the truth, and here is what it might say. Manne cannot name ten children who were stolen, but we can name ten who were not.... There's the ten-year-old Aurukun girl given to a loving white foster family after she'd been pack-raped — until new case workers diagnosed a case of ‘stolen generations' and ordered her return to her hellish community, where she was pack-raped again...There's the NSW Child Death Review Team, which checked why the children of Aboriginal drug addicts were 10 times more likely to die under the noses of welfare officials than those of white addicts, and blamed the ‘stolen generations', saying it should not now lead to ‘an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk'. But it has. These children, and a dozen more I could name, are paying for the ‘stolen generations' myth. Those who created it have blood on their hands.....”
How the IPCC's sponsor, the UNEP, and key IPCC individuals have misled Governments into supporting the notion of manmade warming
(7 March10) “....The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the sponsorship of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The UNEP's belief in manmade warming in the late 1970's led to a stage-managed conference in Villach in 1985, which in turn led to the political decision to form the IPCC. ... The IPCC rose to prominence because people with clear bias were appointed to key positions where they could influence the development of the entire organization. Bert Bolin, the first chairman of the IPCC was already heavily committed to the notion of manmade warming having worked previously for the UNEP, WMO, the Brundtland Report, the SCOPE 29 report (on which the first IPCC report was largely based) and, very crucially, having documented that the Villach conference reached a consensus that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide were to blame for variations in climate.....The other key factor for the IPCC was the adoption of the UNEP's methods of coercing governments and the general public. Those methods included (a) the use of the environmentalists' catch-all the "precautionary principle", (b) a penchant for creating models based on partially complete scientific understanding and then citing the output of those models as evidence, (c) the politicisation of science through the implied claim that consensus determines scientific truth, (d) the use of strong personalities and people of influence, and (e) the manipulation of the media and public opinion.....Since the publication of its Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been severely criticized by several writers, myself included. These writers have highlighted the IPCC's use of questionable data, weak evidence, wild assertions, failure to abide by its own procedures, distortion of the normal peer review process, mendacious statements of some of its senior people and, overall, its attitude of advocacy and the continued defence of a dubious and discredited hypothesis....” Climate Science Corrupted , John McLean “......To understand how these attitudes became an integral part of the IPCC we need to look at the influence of its two sponsoring organizations on both the creation of the IPCC and its ongoing operations....The roots of the IPCC can be traced back to a conference in Villach, Austria, in 1980, hosted by the WMO, UNEP and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), with the aim of providing a "carefully prepared scientific assessment of the CO2 question to provide them with guidance in their future activities and advice to nations". According to Franz1 , this conference concluded that the scientific uncertainties were so significant that no CO2 management plan could be proposed.....The same three organizations tried again in Villach in1985, but this time the 100 attendees participated as individuals rather than representatives of their countries, and they were selected by the three sponsoring agencies. These agencies pressured the attendees for policy recommendations with the UNEP representative asking for a recommendation about moving away from fossil fuels, the WMO asking for clear statements about the state of knowledge and for advice to policy makers and the ICSU asking for "necessary policies at the national and international level". That one sponsoring organization was already asking for a movement away from fossil fuel and another asking for certain "necessary" policies shows that they had decided on the conclusion even before the conference began....This conference included the presentation of several papers, which according to Boehmer-Christiansen and Kellow2 were both commissioned and peer-reviewed by the conference organizers. These pre-approved papers went on to be cited in the report of that conference, which seems to be trying to imply an independence of thought that they really did not have......”
The consequence of this situation is that there's no level playing field in climate research, just one biased by the heavy hand of government. The sequence of events is as follows:
1. Governments accept the IPCC's claims.
2. Governments allocate climate research funding in line with IPCC findings.
3. Research proposals are presented in a manner best likely to result in funding.
4. Research papers are produced with conclusions in line with government beliefs in order that future funding is not jeopardized.
5. The IPCC has a wider selection of papers to cite in its next report and present a more convincing argument to government (or claim that the number of papers is somehow evidence).
This is a self-perpetuating spiral with each cycle binding governments more tightly to the IPCC.
This ‘adventure in democracy' is unfair and unbalanced
Far from representing a democratic spread of opinion, the ABC's Q&A program overwhelmingly favours progressive types over conservatives, argues John Styles
(5 March10) “.........Take Q&A, ABC1's Monday night panel show hosted by Tony Jones. It is billed by the network's promotional machine as ‘adventures in democracy'. It is a proposition supported by another line that Jones likes to drop frequently: Q&A is ‘the show where you get to ask the questions'. In the spirit of telling it like it really is, here is a more accurate slogan: Q&A is the show where you get to ask the questions… but we get to decide which ones. Indeed, if Q&A is Auntie's idea of the media's role in a democracy, and an example of how it fulfils its obligation as a taxpayer-funded broadcaster to produce current affairs programs that are fair and balanced, it is time to sell off the corporation to the lowest bidder (as a blog commenter recently quipped) and let someone else have a go...... Q&A is democratic only in the mould of those infamous ‘democracies', of which the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is the best example..... At the ‘democratic' ABC, Q&A's central planners screen the audience, pick most of the questions and select the panel. Jones has described how the panel questions are screened. Some of the audience send in their questions before coming into the studio, he told Melbourne ABC radio. When the camera comes on at 9.30p.m. on Monday nights, the Q&A team have already handed about a dozen questions back to the audience so that they know they will be able to ask them.....” This ‘adventure in democracy' is unfair and unbalanced , John Styles. Spectator.co.uk “......The theme for the 22 February program could be summed up as: Let's Get Tony Abbott. Conservatives can point to several Q&A episodes that are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of balance and fairness, and that particular edition is typical..... The share of voice given to each panellist on the climate change/ETS topic was revealing. The Abbott/Coalition critics enjoyed collectively almost 12 minutes of talk time. Roskam, the lone anti-ETS voice, spoke for about a minute.... Even when the program ostensibly takes a break from politics, like it did this week, we end up at the Adelaide Festival with a love-in for cultural lefties, who are still railing against the Howard government, and with Christopher Pyne cast in the role of token conservative.... A number of very articulate and highly effective right-of-centre intellectuals, moreover, have been conspicuously absent from the Q&A guest list. Gerard Henderson, David Flint, Keith Windschuttle, Jim Allan, Greg Lindsay, Paul Sheehan, Andrew Shearer, Sandra Lee, Andrew Norton and John Lee, to name just a few, have never appeared on the show. If the Greens deserve a place on the panel when climate change is on the Q&A agenda, why not also put out the welcome mat for Ray Evans, Bob Carter, William Kininmonth and Ian Plimer? Or how about Joanne Nova, the science presenter, author and, yes, climate sceptic?... ....... An adventure in democracy? More like a mockery of democracy.....”
NBN fiasco whole lot worse than insulation
(5 March10) “.....The Rudd Government's crazy pursuit of a national broadband network and its associated extraordinary attack on Telstra is getting extremely disturbing. In very simple terms it is all shaping up to utterly swamp the insulation debacle in the scale of financial and governance disasters. Insulation only wasted a couple of billion of your money; the NBN threatens to cost a multiple of 10 or more of that. To end up who knows where. The whole thing is at the same time utterly incoherent and disturbingly focused on 'getting' one company: Telstra.... Rudd and his communications minister Stephen Conroy spent their first year in office running a tender for a $12 billion FTTN (fibre to the node) NBN. Then almost literally overnight they dumped that because it couldn't work and unveiled an even more grandiose $43 billion FTTH - fibre-right-into-the-home - proposal........” NBN fiasco whole lot worse than insulation , Terry McCrann. Herald Sun “......Telstra would be forced to break itself in two; it would be allowed to keep key business assets only at the government's gift; and unless it bent to the government's will, it would be effectively banned from doing some basic business.....There's the practical rub in the current impasse. The government effectively wants Telstra to give away its key assets to the NBN company. The price offered is so ludicrously low, that even accounting the cost of the penalties the government will impose - will try to impose? - it makes more sense for Telstra to pay those penalties. Why is it so low? Because for the Government/NBN to pay any more would make the already completely unviable exercise even more unviable....So the legislation which finally surfaced will allow the NBN to be a retail company in direct competition with Telstra - and all the other telcos. In a complete betrayal of its supposed rationale, to be the true wholesaler that Telstra never was.......”
(2 March10) This give you an overview of the monitoring powers of the Carbon Cops as contained in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation. The only power you have against this grotesque Orwellian insanity is your vote later this year.
For other interesting features be sure to visit February 2010