Let’s kick off the weekend nice and early with a fresh open thread. Here’s some recommended reading — PBS NewsHour, courtesy of the Mark Twain Foundation, have unveiled a previously unpublished essay; or at least, the fragment of an essay. The topic: “Concerning the Interview”, five paragraphs of genius that modern journalists and interviewees could learn from.
Here’s what we can look forward to on our TV screens (via Leigh Sales and Mike Bowers):
- Tonight’s Lateline (ABC1 at 10:35) has Jonathan Alter, the author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One”.
- Sunday’s Insiders has Barrie interviewing Stephen Smith, the panel is Misha Schubert, Karen Middleton and Gerard Henderson, and Talking Pictures has Fiona Katauskas.
Have at it.
72 Comments
It doesn’t sound like such a bad panel for ‘Insiders’, but I still won’t watch it, on principle. Can the Cass!
Oh Cuppa, it’s fun if they put Gerard on the couch, instead of what became the right-winders’ chair. You can see him squirming at someone else being in his seat. ANd having to share a couch with a ‘left-wing’ journalist.
Stephen Smith should be fun, given the PM’s Timor Solution thought-bubble…
Tobby: Are you able to tweet David Speers to find out who he has on his show, Sunday at 8:30am?
Europe bans illegal timber.
But why is Australia always lagging behind on these issues?
Management question: If He Who Shall Not Be Named is making an appearance on Insiders, are you allowed to mention it in your weekly Sunday show update?
Re the Government’s overdue rethink on web management, I think a new online Ombudsman’s Office would make the perfect online referee. Someone who can keep the bastards honest:
* An independent and powerful body would ensure legal accountability and processes are followed and that the operational management of any filtering mechanism is at arms-length from government.
* A body that ensures that unresponsive web giants like Facebook and Google are held accountable for their dubious data collection practices and often contemptuous customer service procedures.
* An online ombudsman would ensure make sure that, going forward, Australian consumers and the other interested parties have their right to legal due process, their right to appeal against arbitary decision-making, enshrined in the regulatory framework.
* Provide impartial advice to government on new consumer and governance issues as the web speeds ahead in ways presently unseen.
Do you mean Bolt, Shabadoo @ 6? He was on last week, as advised one weekend thread ago.
{Note – I believe Shabadoo is referring to another media commentator, about whom Crikey and Pure Poison have adopted a policy of not publishing commentary. Having clarified that point, further comments will be moderated consistent with that policy. Tobby}
no wonder I missed it.
Ever since that totally OTT Insiders panel from about 4 or 5 weeks ago which was an open Rudd bashing fest to the extent the twitter #insiders went into meltdown, I’ve noticed the show now alternates each week between a wingnut panel and a sane panel.
This week is obviously sane week.
I think the panels on Insiders are carefully arranged so that no-one goes for any other panellist’s throat during the program. But Bolt must make it difficult for them, he would provoke the Dalai Lama to violence. Malcolm Farr looked like he might do him a service last week, and I reckon Malcolm would win that bout.
With Conroy’s filter on the backburner now, this is the only internet filter anyone will ever need.
Confessions@12
That’s superb. Luckily both my kids have a well-developed distaste for religion, and are a joy to their old man. So we won’t need the filter.
I see Bolt leapt into action today when he thought a nasty Leftist had thrown an egg at Julia Gillard….only to be forced into an embarrassing retraction when it turned out that the offender was one of his own.
monkeywrench @14
Echoes of the Grech affair, I’m afraid. After the senate hearings, over at Andy’s place, it was all about who might try to get at him – those evil leftists and wotnot. After the unfortunate reality of the situation became clear (and after the scary music about internal investigations), AB was crowing about how his house wasn’t egged, it was HUEVOED.
So the lovers turned into haters, the moment the facts became known. The brave whistle-blower was a leper, his well-being cast to the wind. Hate. Hate. Hate.
I guess that’s just what skeptics do.
I have a well-worn volume, published at ‘Progress Press’ in Moscow in 1960, of the political writings of Mark Twain. It’s quite inspiring, really-old Sam was a real Leftist,like all decent people,outraged at the injustice and greed of the plutocrats in his country during the ‘Gilded Age’. I can just guess at what he would have to say about the world today, where the parasite class is even more avaricious and have succeeded in destroying the natural world he so cherished as well. What would he have to say about the Gulf oil leak, which the Rightwing media seem so intent now on ignoring, as it inexorably bubbles away.
As for Godwin Grech and the infamous Senate hearings,I watched them,and the performance by Grech and Abetz was the most blatant example of leading and clear collusion one could imagine,but-can you believe it?- not one reptile from the ‘free press’ noticed? I know that Twain had a goodly contempt for ‘yellow journalism’ and its practitioners but he was at least spared having to deal with the current crop of rogues, the detritus thrown up by decades of Murdochism.
Brumby plans to wind down dirty old Hazlewood….but wait! Wasn’t this to be one of the evil, back-to-sackloth plans the nasty Leftist Greens wanted to force on the good burghers of Victoria in their plan for world governablenance?(copyright Capt.Col)
Of course it was! ….which leaves Andy increasingly up the famous Strontkreek without een peddelen. Hilarious!
A CORRECTION: Matthew of Canberra @15
It wasn’t Andrew who quipped about the egging (at least, I don’t think he did). It was a different columnist.
mw @17
governablenance?
governmenance?
governominance?
governominancement?
The sexy spies are back in the USSR … (1)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/10/2950001.htm
It sounds like the US got a good trade – 9 fairly useless russian layabouts (and one fairly cute, ambitious businesswoman) for at least one american who’d been sitting in the clink for 6 years on proper espionage charges.
But a curious question: What happens to their stuff? The photogenic one had, apparently, built a business worth a couple of mil. Is that sort of thing just forfeited to the IRS? Is it liquidated and given to the CIA retirement fund? Does she get a check in the mail?
(1) They don’t know how lucky they are, boys
Probably the dumbest piece of self-centred Americano bullshite you will read all weekend ( unless you’re a frequenter of the Fox News website). This poor sap is aghast the Obama has locked up the Gulf to deepwater drilling. The US oil price might hit ( drum roll please) $US5 a (US) gallon. That’s a whole $AUS 1.32 a litre!!1!
I hope he and I live another 30 years at least. I’ll be sitting with a blanket over my knees, my knarled old fingers tapping away, asking him what he thinks of the frickin’ gas prices NOW!
Matt@19
Gubernatoriafasciblenance?
monkeywrench @21
OPEC could well (and probably will) respond and increase production – the oil industry isn’t static. So what (world) prices actually do in practice is somewhat disconnected from anything that obama does.
I think a blanket ban is just stupid. The right thing to do is review safety standards and work out ways to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The oil is going to be drilled sooner or later (really – it will be. Every last drop of it), so it would make sense to “use” the crisis to improve the state of the art, rather than let some republican in 15 years open it back up without doing it.
Right now obama’s just putting on a little stage show. Conservatives were harrassing him for not appearing sufficiently angry (read: irrational), so he’s doing random angry stuff to appease them. I hope he’s smart enough to not actually believe any of it.
MoC @20
Just watched a news bulletin from last night – apparently they forfeit their stuff.
Peter van Onselen has a very good article about the asylum seeker issue that was played out this week. He clearly explains why it is that political leaders are reluctant to establish on-shore processing here, much better than anyone else I’ve read.
In another place recently, a commenter observed that PvO is the closest thing the conservative side of politics in this country has to a thinking intellectual. This remains to be seen I suppose, but at least he isn’t just a rampant cheersquadder for the Liberals like most of his colleagues at Fox News With Words.
On the AS issue, two things come to mind for me:
1. where is Big Religion on this issue? Why aren’t church groups publicly aghast at the way in which disadvantaged people are being used as a political football by the major parties? Or is this just further evidence that Big Religion is now just a cynical political lobby group rather than an organised movement for social justice?
2. why isn’t anyone asking Abbott how he reconciles his christianity with his demonising of asylum seekers by boat? Or is it that we just accept our political leaders’ religious faith is expressed solely for political expedience, and they don’t actually have any attachment to the teachings of their respective churches? Or perhaps it’s because the MSM are largely bone idle these days, preferring to just regurgitate press releases than do any actual original reporting at all?
mw @22
I see you speak welsh.
MoC@23
It’s clear that the oil industry regulation in the US needs a massive shakeup before any further deep-water drilling can go ahead, so Obama is quite right to have put a short-term embargo on it. I’m afraid he’s got another Bush-era hatful of good-ole-boy laissez-faire detritus to clean up again. But in the long term, drilling for every last drop is going to be a fearsome waste of money which could be spent on developing alternatives….unless America doesn’t want alternatives. In which case we are going to see one almighty civilisation collapse, and devil take the hindmost. I’ll be safely esconced on a self-sufficient hideaway with a crate of .32 calibre by the window.
Holey moley. Let’s visit the gutter:
Mel Gibson (allegedly) going off at his ex: http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2010/07/world-exclusive-audio-mel-gibsons-explosive-racist-rant-listen-it-here
Awesome. He’s clearly not one to bottle up his emotions.
I guess some sensible disclaimers apply – the tape has been neither confirmed nor denied and there is (I think) an ongoing court custody battle for their son (possibly explaining the tape’s release, one might be inclined to suspect). But I guess the potential message here is – “Treat Every Phone Like It’s A Live Phone”
The funniest thing is the copyright claim in the top right: “WARNING: This audio may not be reproduced or republished.” Um, yeah. Right. It’s all about the protection of rights, isn’t it? Leak a sneaky, compromising recording, that’s fine – but damn anyone who dares to copy it from your website. That’s fair.
I’m obviously holding back on the criticism of gibson himself – I’ll let dear reader form his own conclusions. I made my mind up about him a couple of decades ago, when I saw an interview (taken in adelaide, I think), whence he compared the economy with his ferrari and paul keating was a bad mechanic. *slaps forehead* He flipped the bozo bit then, and it’s never flipped back. Nothing matters now.
I see I’m still giving pleasure to the great unwashed. Enjoy some more.
Don’t read this.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/#more-21629
CC @29
I’m curious – why does Michael Crichton even warrant a mention? He wrote a bunch of blockbuster novels. Ok. Well … how about we truck out Tom Clancy? (I have no idea what Tom Clancy thinks about AGW, btw). Should we all gather ’round to hear what William Gibson has to say? How about Neil Gaiman? Why not ask Dave Sim? They’re all just celebrities with an opinion, whether we happen to agree with them or not. He might HAVE something to say – he certainly said some interesting things about the media, although I don’t know enough to know if they were original or if he just got cred because he was famous. But just being Michael Crichton doesn’t cut it – while simply linking to the text of the lecture seems to imply that it might.
How about you tell us, in your own words, what he said and why it matters. Then we don’t need to read it.
Poor old Private Col. To refute the 97% of climatologists, all the Academies of Science and all the learned societies of the planet, who broadly support the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis, Col has to rely on a third-rate pulp novelist. Still Crichton probably writes at the Private’s level of understanding, and the scientists….well they’re all ‘know-it-alls’ and ‘smart-arses’, hey, Col?
@29. Ah Michael Crichton! Someone who thinks Michael Crichton should be listened to on global warming is like someone who read Rising Sun in 1992 as a guide to Japan’s future global domination.
MoC @30.
Don’t overreact and get all uppity. Authors can occasionally string together a coherent and convincing argument on something they are interested in. I found this was a persuasive piece. Judge for yourself if you want. If you dont, then don’t.
Here’s the gist of it (for others that haven’t read it).
It’s about why we shouldn’t trust consensus in science (you know those 97 percenters) because they’ve been wrong before.
But you knew that.
I did say, don’t read it. But there’s always something about the way a story’s told that can be pleasing even if you don’t agree with the message.
Matt @ 28
If only you could be as outrageously outraged at, say, Sean Penn and all the deranged things he has said.
I laugh at all these idiotic actors hyping sharing the wealth, gunning for more taxes, praising socialism and actually believing their voice is an important, necessary one.
And then they do everything they can to avoid paying those taxes, they squirrel away as much as they can in foreign countries, and spend millions to prevent us poor, filthy public (who actually DO pay taxes) getting anywhere near them.
Unbelievably these morons actually have the gall to tell us that it is so sad that everyone is not equal, and they want any idea of “class” just plain eradicated.
Yet they’ve got jets and mansions in every state. They’ve got lawyers and accountants who manipulate MASSIVE demands for money for a few months’ work – way more money than one of those nasty bankers might earn.
The hypocrisy is hilarious but for some bizarre reason, the left embraces everything and everyone Hollywood.
Someone please explain that to me.
Just a snip from Col’s link:
“In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever.
In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no.
In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no.
In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.”
there’s only one problem with taking these examples: the “consensus” in each case was formed by non-scientists. Yes, that’s right: people who would not have had the right to form scientific opinions in our time because none of their work was peer-reviewed or subject to government regulation. The consensus was wrong because no-one could challenge it. There exists nowadays copious opportunity for the true sceptic to challenge the consensus by publishing appropriate studies for peer-review. The scientists who can produce conclusive proof that “GW” is not “A” will like as not receive a Nobel Prize.
But no-one’s standing up waving a paper, Col: because they have NOTHING.
So next time, try finding us a climate scientist instead of an author of potboilers.
Matt on Obama: “I hope he’s smart enough to not actually believe any of it.”
Oh dear. Looks like someone’s still clinging to that whole Obama HOPE thingy.
The man is a clown, Matt. Accept it.
Good grief, the Cap stumbles from one bufoonish quote to the next….
Here’s a laugh:
From the thread about the egg-missile. Initially, AB pinned it on the left (more on that shortly):
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/how_to_show_your_greater_compassion_assault_a_female_prime_minister/desc/#3516065
Ok, now when you’ve stopped laughing about that premise, consider – Andrew apparently expected an apology from Josh Gordon because Andrew had been betting on a gillard putsch and Gordon hadn’t:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/they_pay_these_pundits_to_predict/
But what we get from AB in this instance is:
I don’t think “jumping the gun” is fair. His quotation of the original article was critically incomplete. If you read what AB cut/pasted and compare it with what the ABC originally reported, you’ll notice that the ABC was quite obviously talking about a different protest when it described the protesters as “protesting against the Federal Government’s policies on asylum seekers and the environment.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/09/2949175.htm
It is impossible to interpret that ABC article as saying that this description applied to the egg-thrower. But reading andrew’s version, you can ONLY get that impression:
IMHO, he didn’t jump the gun. He either misunderstood the article, or misquoted it.
A disclaimer is appropriate here: It’s possible that the ABC changed that page after Andrew posted. I don’t see a mention of that from AB, though, and I’m fairly confident that if that had happened, we’d know about it. Also, the dates (visible and metadata) suggest that AB had the final version approximately 30 minutes before posting his thread. So I’m running with this assumption for the time being, and I’m sure I’ll be feeling pretty stupid if I’m wrong.
Given that assumption, this isn’t, IMHO, an oops that anyone might have made. Andrew all-too-often leaves out important bits of information or context that undermine his conclusions. That’s what makes him so much fun to debunk – often it’s just a matter of looking for an independent primary source. In this case, had he left in that critical second-to-last paragraph, the mischaracterization would have been immediately obvious to at least some of his readers.
And that’s what makes that comment from michael of melb so funny. It’s the part about “the law of averages”.
There’s a point by point rebuttal of Crichton’s screed here:
http://www.reasic.org/2009/08/michael-crichton-“aliens-cause-global-warming”/
Note that the rebuttal avoids using sensational language etc. It is a simple, methodical destruction of Crichton’s main points.
I found this using Google, there are no doubt many others of equal value.
Pedro @36
“Oh dear. Looks like someone’s still clinging to that whole Obama HOPE thingy.”
Nope. As I’ve said before, I’ll judge him on what he does.
“The man is a clown, Matt. Accept it.”
No, that’s Biden. Obama’s the evil one.
Captain Col @33
I was actually hoping you could do something with the Tom Clancy reference. Dave Sim’s got some skeletons in the closet too. But I hear Neil Gaiman’s pretty cool.
See – you could have said what chrichton said, and to some extent I would have agreed with you. But just having somebody famous say something doesn’t make any difference to the argument itself.
Pedro @34
“If only you could be as outrageously outraged at, say, Sean Penn and all the deranged things he has said.”
I actually have no idea what Sean Penn has said. I can’t be bothered looking. I don’t care a toot what actors think about, well, anything other than acting … and even then, I tend not to believe any of it. Unless they’re cute.
“And then they do everything they can to avoid paying those taxes, they squirrel away as much as they can in foreign countries, and spend millions to prevent us poor, filthy public (who actually DO pay taxes) getting anywhere near them.”
I’m with you there. But … aren’t you sort of arguing my case?
If you think aliens are responsible for climate change, then I’ve got a ouija board to sell you. We could find out what Enid Blyton thinks of the whole caper.
Watching “Silence Of The Lambs”. I just watched the first scene between Clarice and Lecter, in the dungeon of the asylum (past Dr Chilton), with the plate glass and procedures.
It’s quaint.
In the age of lady gaga, tatu, bachelorettes and katy perry … I think there are plenty of modern girls who wouldn’t even blink at multiple meggs” comment (although they might flip the bird), or anything that Hannibal had to say about starling’s social advancement (the sticky fumblings, the good bag and the cheap shoes).
I can’t imagine that the fragility that Jodie Foster portrays (bless her) will be a norm for much longer in the west. Eventually somebody’s going to do a parody, and the FBI student will taunt the sod about not needing to get laid. She might even get the psychopath to swallow his tongue.
I think that’s a good thing. But that’s just me.
Blast. Revise, revise, revise. I’ve got to stop doing stream-of-consciousness.
“about not needing to get laid” should have been “about needing to get laid”
I saw the best minds of a generation, cut down by spelling errors ….
Well, van Onselen did a reasonable job on Sky of trying to extract from Christopher Pyne precisely what “towing the boats back out to sea” actually means. As I thought, Pyne, like Abbott refuses to say what this means, and we get flowery rhetoric about ‘naval discretion’ (whatever that means), or returning the boats back to Indonesia (yeah, good luck with that).
PvO did mix up his centuries for the Spanish and English Armadas, so jury still out on whether we can claim him as a thinking conservative in this country.
While on the subject of outrageous conspiracy theories, this article by Angela Shanahan (via LP) is a beauty. Money quote:
FMD you can’t script this shit, it’s absolutely hilarious. Was Shanahan drunk when she wrote it? The historical stuff is best left to people who actually know about the history of the ALP, but her tinfoil hat hand-wringing about political communism still ongoing in this country? Take a deep breath and restore oxygen to the brain would be my adivce.
As conservatives continue to tell us, the ‘green movement’ isn’t new: it was supposedly Thatcher who embraced the modern environmentalism in a political sense. Are they walking away from that now?
And the ‘gay lobby’ came out of an evolving community desire to see an end to discrimination against gay people, and for them to achieve genuine equality. This is actually something to strive for Angela! You have to ask yourself why anyone would be opposed to that, as Shanahan appears to be with her insinuation that gay equality would somehow destabilise our society.
There’s a more serious discussion about the article at LP, but I think that just gives Shanahan a legitimacy she clearly doesn’t deserve with this rubbish. Yes it’s offensive in parts, but remember, at the end of the day, Rupe has solved the problem of over the top, offensive bullshit emanating from his newspapers: a paywall. Coming soon to a Murdoch outlet near you.
If Obama is a ‘clown’ then logically, since he has continued most of Bush’s policies – except of course for the socialist ‘evil’ we take for granted here – public health services – then the only way Pedro could have a shred of credibility here is to admit Bush was also a clown.
Come on. put your spiteful idiocy where your mouth is.
MoC @ 26 “mw @22 I see you speak welsh.”
Ummm, MoC, what part of “Gubernatoriafasciblenance?” appears Welsh to you?
That word looks distinctly Anglo-Saxon to me – with the emphasis on the Angelic and Saxonic origins of the Germanic – sorry, English – language.
Plus your and Monkeywrench’s delight in adding all the words together to make a complete new one fits into that Germanic scenario.
We Welsh have a far more lyrical and flowing language, of Celtic origin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymraeg
A language where ‘w’ and ‘y’ are considered vowels, and we use double letters to produce other sounds. Famously there is the ‘ll’ of many towns, such as Llanelli, and one of my names – where you put the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, and whisper the ‘l’ around it. But also where a ‘dd’ can mean a ‘th’, and ‘ff’ is a single English ‘f’.
Here’s this weekends PP task for all of you – learn how to pronounce this famous non-Germanic place name:-
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Go on, I dare you to try……………..
oh and as for Crichton, he would be wiser to stick to science fiction and film production…
his talent for real science has been debunked repeatedly, yet dills like the Cap keep dragging the dead horse out
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michael-crichtons-state-of-confusion/
Adam Rope@48
Well, being from Bridgend and spending many a dull school hour learning to siarad Cymraeg from an early age, the challenge of Llanfairpwll is one I am personally up to.
As a party piece in the 80′s in Melbourne, I used to parrot it off to girls ( a Welsh accent is a great asset at Australian parties, especially if you can Burtonise it a bit) but when I met my wife ( a Kiwi lass of Maori heritage) I was forced to learn a new trick: the longest Maori placename.
“Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu” , although containing none of the Cymric dipthongal challenges ( that even Shakespeare, who had a Welsh schoolmaster, found too difficult, as Fluellen from Henry IV testifies), does have one linguistic twist: in Maori, ‘wh’ is pronounced as a very soft, breathy ‘f’. Give it a go, bychan.
btw, I think Matthew of Canberra was being humorous, and may well have seen me bandying Welshisms with RobJ , another of our kind……
Bolt apologises for not being as prolific as usual. After all, one has to take time off occasionally from being the Voice of the Ordinary Man, when one is shopping for Persian fetta, and goat-curds. Nothing elitist there at all.
Oh, for pete’s sake. AB’s jumping on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAhmYKlsWW4
Actually, in the situation the US currently finds herself, I think she’s probably right. The US unemployment benefit is (I think) about 1200$ a month. That’s not a great deal, and isn’t going to be enough for most people to live on long-term. But if you’re going to evaluate short-term economic stimulus tactics, it’s perfect – all of that money will be spent straight away, and (sniggering aside) it’ll be spent productively – i.e. on what the spender actually needs most, from the most competitive available sources. There is no bureaucracy, no lead-time, no overheads. It’s straight back into the economy.
That, IMHO, was one of the smartest parts of our own economic stimulus – the direct payments back to tax-payers. But in the case of the long-term unemployed, that money isn’t going to be spent on luxury goods, and it’s not going to be banked. It’ll go straight back into rent, food, transport, clothing, utilities – i.e. local jobs.
So actually, in the context that Pelosi is speaking about, she’s dead right.
On the other hand, the sniggering about the US’ high unemployment rate and the benefits of not paying benefits sort of implies that the 9.8% (or whatever it is right now) simply doesn’t WANT to work. That suggestion is ridiculous. Nobody who has experienced and accepted the vastly superior benefits of professional employment is going to freely choose unemployment instead. Get a grip, people.
monkeywrench @52
I find it fascinating when he rattles off his menus to his readers. Notice that he’s never just cooking some macaroni and cheese? Or a nice bit of pie? It’s always along the lines of “hand-reared aragula with south-south-eastern persian chevre, dusted with a sprinkling of granite-ground pepper from the western sliopes of … … to be served with a reserve riesling vintage, hand-picked from the 5th and 9th rows of jim barry’s private Clare plantings”
What do you suppose he’s saying?
monkeywrench @51
Actually, I was trying to be humorous. But I was probably just talking tish.
MoC @53
It occurs to me that the reps could be making a mistake in opposing that measure. Sure, it’s probably marginal, but surely a lot of people who have never been unemployed before, who would probably usually vote republican, must be watching this and asking why the party that claims to support them is quibbling over a few thousand bucks and throwing them to the wolves.
There’s that old saying that “a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested” … I wonder if a liberal, if only temporary, can also be a conservative who’s been chucked out of his job along with the rest of his town, through no fault of his own, and watched his local MP imply that he’s a lazy sod who doesn’t deserve any help from the government that takes his income taxes.
MoC@54
He’s just showing off, and not for his regular readership either. I’ve said it before, I believe he would actually be distinctly uncomfortable with his core support base in the blog, which is ever the problem with the populist who despises the populace. “I speak for the common man, but my tastes are far superior to his.”
Daft article by David Mitchell, a British journalist with the Observer and a very bad hairstyle ( here published in The Guardian). He plays devil’s advocate for Murdoch’s paywall experiment. The only thing he overlooks is that the British (and ourselves) pay a government-controlled broadcaster very large amounts to provide an outstanding service that Murdoch can only envy, and wishes to destroy.
Yeah he is. Nobody who knows that persian fetta and taleggio are things you can buy from any gourmet shop in Australia gives a shit that Andrew Bolt is eating it. He’s totally showing off for his readership: look how tolerant I am – I eat multicultural foods! And from the look of comments, they are all lapping up their all-knowing, all-eating, messiah.
Matthew @41, interesting interview between Robyn Williams and Stephen Schneider. The gist of which is how to judge credibility of people who are quoted with regard to AGW.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/2943480.htm#transcript
I”m hoping there’ll be a thread about this tomorrow, but check out this AB post for sheer mind-bending insanity from the respondents:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/teaching_children_that_fear_of_terrorism_is_racist/desc/P20/
This, for example:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/teaching_children_that_fear_of_terrorism_is_racist/desc/P20/#3517888
What part of “xenophobe” does bh not quite understand? What exactly is he/she scared of? I think he/she would be surprised by how much kosher/halal stuff there is … if he bothered to check the labels. How about this one …
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/teaching_children_that_fear_of_terrorism_is_racist/desc/P20/#3517851
I’m sure parlirama will be astonished to find himself not being prosecuted. Laughed at, ridiculed, potentially even pitied. But not prosecuted.
Then there’s this ripper:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/teaching_children_that_fear_of_terrorism_is_racist/desc/P40/#3517808
Answering his no doubt earnest question … I suggest Turkey and Indonesia. But that’s just gravy – the rest of that post is pure gold. I particularly like the claim “I’m not being prejudiced.”
Now, you’re probably thinking “oh, Matthew – you’re just picking the worst ones to make Andrew’s friends look bad”. No, I think somebody got rid of those before I even spotted the thread – as this post suggests:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/teaching_children_that_fear_of_terrorism_is_racist/desc/#3518387
So the stuff I’ve been quoting is apparently what’s left AFTER somebody did a clean-up.
I’ve been reading more of comments on that thread, and I discover that the ones I quoted here don’t even begin to represent the collective madness – and (apparently) that’s after somebody did a cull of the worst. Andrew lifted a rock with that post, and there were some nasty little creatures under it.
Have I missed something, or is there a concerted campaign to push Bolt onto more of the unsuspecting public by increasing his reach? He now has a column on Mondays in the Northern Territory News and regular slot on Channel 9′s Today.
Jon Stewart is an American comedian who has a satirical commentary on the week’s news (The Daily Show) on Comedy Central. His style of comedy is not really to my taste (Media Watch meets Mr Bean) but he has had a recent put-down of anti-Muslim phobia in the main-stream media which is pretty good which you can see here –
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/07/jon-stewart-takes-on-the-anti-muslim-discourse-in-the-media/
“Whats next? Should we allow the Irish to vote?”
MoC61/62
Doesn’t surprise me one whit. The moron who threw away his kebab after finding it was halal takes the prize. These are the people Bolt likes to impress with his swordfish steaks and Persian fetta. One presumes the “Persian” fetta was halal also.
Wow, what a gross and grubby bunch of neanderthals.
“his talent for real science has been debunked repeatedly, yet dills like the Cap keep dragging the dead horse out”
That’s a bit tasteless, isn’t it?
But seriously, if Crichton’s so smart, how come he’s dead?
LOL well I was referring directly to the man’s rather loose interpretation of science, not so much his own mortal state…frankly I forgot he was dead.
I am concerned about eating Halal (or Kosher) killed meat, basically because there is an increase risk that the animal will suffer while being dispatched. Remember the rules for this religious slaughter were written down long before stunning or captive bolt ‘sticking’ were invented. Both Kosker and Halal (as far as I can work out) involves going ‘straight for the jugular’, so the animal is conscience as the skin on the neck is cut and the blood vessels severed. So given the choice, I would go for Western Enlightened killed meat.
PeeBee, I genuinely applaud your concern for any increased humane treatment of animals, and let’s face it, if they’re going to be slaughtered its a slippery slope…but I think you are quite confused if you think thats why cretins like that gross ignoramus are throwing their halaal kebab’s away..in fact, i think the humane treatment of ANYONE is the last their on their minds…if there’s any to BE on those minds apart from vomiting wacky talkback gibberish.
anything to BE
http://www.abbottshospitalcuts.com/