And the weekend’s here! Also, if you have small humans of your own, the school holidays. And apparently there’s skiing, unless you’re a “warmist” and it would somehow be hypocritical for you to enjoy the snow. (No, that doesn’t make any sense to me, either.)
I was going to write a post about the third and silliest #trollday effort yesterday – an hilariously stupid piece by Steven Kates published by the ABC Drum suggesting that the “inane, juvenile left” was going to cause a “Dark Age to descend”, based on the fact that the sensationalist media is obsessed with Charlie Sheen and Anthony Weiner’s penis (those obsessions are lefty obsessions?) and that there’s “a larger and growing proportion of Americans” that believe there should be some redistribution of wealth towards the poor. Which for some reason will be like the fall of Ancient Rome from anti-Senate emperor Commodus onwards. Seriously – mad stuff, but it kind of satirises itself. (Why the ABC published it; that’s the real question.)
So I’m not going to bother with that one. The other thing I was going to point you towards was this interesting biography of Rupert Murdoch that was linked in the Crikey email the other day, filled with revealing little insights like the news that apparently young Rupert, in the 1950s, was a big fan of Lenin and the Russian Communists. Weren’t his papers recently bashing Lee Rhiannon for daring to have parents who’d had such views about that time?
Other than that, I’ll leave you with another fine weekend Open Thread. Oh, with one more link: this list of first world problems to pity. “I accidentally clicked iTunes and had to wait two minutes for it to open before I could close it again”. “My laptop is low on battery, but the charger is over there.”
May all your problems be first world ones. Enjoy.
UPDATE: Medieval world problems.
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SHV, sadly Cavalier is correct. We’ve had right wing governments since Hawke (at the time we thought Fraser was right wing but by current standards his government was dangerously socialist).
I think Carney’s real point should have been that Labor needs to join the Greens. Whether the Greens should allow this would be doubtful.
OK I’ll take the hints and shut up about TB clinics. Reason I was angry is that I have a young nephew who has come down with it and his treatment options in PNG are not great.
If anyone happened to see channel 9 news this evening, they claimed that Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute has not received government funding for at least 7 years. I am not sure of the context of this claim, as they received at least $2 million in the last round of NHMRC project grants from the federal government (cutting edge stuff, I might add):
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/grants/funding/funded/funding_recommendations_2010_project_grants.pdf
Maybe they are referring to the change from block grant funding of research institutes to competitive grant funding that would have occurred around about that time and it was all a bit lost in translation. Anyway, the Government has not ceased funding heart research at the VCCRI, they compete with other institutes and universities for the same pot of funding, and the VCCRI ought to do well out of it because they have very smart people there. Possibly they are even a tad smarter there than the journo’s at channel 9?
Angra, to be clear on this, you can go on about the TB clinics all you like as far as I am concerned. I personally think closing the clinics was a piss-poor decision from the standpoint of quarantine (they are legally required to allow the disease into the country via the island, so the least they can do is have a clinic to treat it).
What I am tired of is being blamed for something I have no control over. I become angry when someone starts blaming my wife & children (remember, all Australians includes them) for it when they are even further left or completely incapable of even having a minuscule voice in the matter. Just as I assume you’d feel a bit ticked off if I started blaming everything the Coalition, Christian Democrats, and Family First did on you & your family.
I know you guys are going to start a new thread the moment I post this, but … whatever.
Did anyone see this get a mention here?
“The Dutch parliament on Tuesday voted to ban ritual slaughter in landmark animal rights legislation that has been compared to Nazi persecution of the Jews by the country’s Chief Rabbi.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8603969/Dutch-parliament-votes-to-ban-ritual-slaughter-of-animals.html
Given the hyperventilating over this way about those beastly indonesians, I’m surprised this didn’t get front page coverage. New zealand went down this route recently as well (not sure how that turned out, haven’t kept up).
I did a double-take tonight. I was listening to the “everyday ethics” podcast from the beeb’s radio ulster (it’s how I heard about the previous story). They had a lineup of combatants arguing over whether a church should be able to publish a pamphlet claiming that “god will heal you today”, followed by a list of ailments that god was allegedly prepared to cure. One skeptic vs one really quite bizarre (I’d use stronger terms, but … free speech, you know) character claiming he had proof of miracle cures by (obviously) god (it’s never zeus, is it?). In response to a case of cancer, the skeptic said “sure – he had remission”. The other guy retorted, and I’m quoting:
Oh yes, instantaneous remission, that’s the atheist’s explanation for divine healing, yes I know about that … you know, they deny god but they recognize the miracles.
*blink*
Remission is an excuse for divine healing?
Not buddhists, not hindus …
http://www.theage.com.au/executive-style/motors/australias-million-dollar-motor-20110628-1gomq.html
Just a final comment on this DSK thing …
This:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/innocent_until_proven_guilty_which_i_doubt/
Notice how we’ve shifted from jumping on the bandwagon to sneer and heckle a socialist enemy without waiting for the full facts to emerge (previous examples can be found here).
Now we’re jumping on the bandwagon to sneer and heckle the socialist enemy’s accuser … also without waiting for the smoke to clear before assessing the facts.
Clearly the case is in big trouble (the charges might have even been dropped by now). But SOME of the claims against the accuser are coming from the prosecutors, SOME of the claims are coming from the defense team and SOME of the claims seem to be just appearing straight out of the thin air. At this stage, I wouldn’t be putting too much weight on some of the claims that have hit the news-sphere.
Skeptic. Indeed.
Antony Green’s Lord Palmerston Schleswig-Holstein moment re Gerontius’ claim that Lib preferences elected Rhiannon – this is a 105 page pdf document that only about 20 people in the country apart from myself would understand. which he then goes on to explain in detail that even Rusty, Pierless & Shannanou could understand, were they so open minded.
It was a pleasure to watch Inciters yesterday as MegaGeorge caused Gerontius to shrink further & further into foaming irrelevanct inaccuracies then cowered in the corner of the couch for the rest of the show. It seems that the rabid Right armchair has been suitably sanitised as both David Marr and Annabel Crabb have now occupied it without, apparent, contamination/ill effect.
AR:
Insiders is improved immeasurably whenever Mega is on. Same with Tingle. I’ve got a feeling both Mega and Green will feature in Nancy’s whinge this week.
The editorial in today’s Australian is an example of hypocracy, myopia and poor critical thinking by the self-styled “heart of the nation”.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/foreign-investment-built-much-of-australias-wealth/story-e6frg71x-1226086716037
OK, so the Australian now sees world hunger as a catalyst for foreign investment and making lots of dosh from feeding the world, as long as it can be done in such a manner that supports enhanced global trade in food. A world food market if you will… like a traded commodity market perhaps?
But what they do not do IN ANY WAY is address why the globe cannot sustain its current population. Oh no, that would lead the reader to the nub of the problem which doesn’t exist… CLIMATE CHANGE.
I can link to plenty of articles pointing out that there is a direct causal link between changing climate, and what the Australian likes to call “food security”… for example here’s one from 2009:
http://www.ifpri.org/publication/climate-change-and-hunger?print
So, if there’s a buck in climate change for Australia we should jump on the bandwagon, but lets not address the cause at all… that might cost someone a bit of money.
More importantly, lets rebadge the issue into something that enables us to metaphorically pound the table on one hand and cry poor on the other. To take what little money these starving people have for food, and continue to make it harder to address the real cause of the problem by pumping CO2e into the atmosphere.
I really feel quite nauseous: Heart of the nation with absolutely no heart at all.
What on earth?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/saint-bob-brown-steps-into-spotlight/story-e6frgd0x-1226086702210
So … what did brown actually do to “[use] the Senate to benefit the business dealings of the Greens’ $1.6 million donor, Graeme Wood”?
He asked this question in parliament.
The question relates to protecting species and hectares of high conservation value forest, and whether public money would be spent to help an offshore company buy a pulp mill. You know – pretty standard, predictable totalitarian greens stuff.
Turns out, the gunns company has predicated the sale a mill on the “satisfactory progress” of a forestry agreement. Bob brown, being the green sort from the apple isle (a green apple? mmm … tasty), has a long-standing interest in the sort of “satisfactory progress” that gunns likes to see, and therefore asks a number of questions in parliament about what it might look like.
The problem is, if the sale of that mill falls through as it is, there’s (apparently – I haven’t bothered to check because the rest of the oz’ case is so ridiculous anyway) another buyer expressing interest for an eco-tourism project. And that buyer donated a packet of money to the democracy-hating greens.
So, by doing anything at all that might tend to defend tasmania’s native forests from the gunns logging company, bob brown risks upsetting them and causing them to spit the dummy and not sell that mill to a company that will run it as such. Presumably, following the oz’ line of “reasoning”, they’ll then leap inexorably, unthinkingly into selling it to bob’s donor who’ll turn it into some sort of ganja-smoking hell hole for platypuss-huggers. Gunns will have NO CHOICE in this matter … for some reason. And this whole devious mechanism, like clockwork, will have to take place because bob brown challenged the forestry minster about protecting native forests in tasmania … which he’s conspicuously chosen to do after many years of having … um, no interest?!?!
Bullsh1t. What an undiluted cup of crap. Who does the oz think would be so idiotic as to believe this rabid conspiracy theory?
Oh …
Skeptic. Indeed.
““What’s needed is an investment in Papua New Guinea that builds up services, but we must not stop the Torres Strait clinics – they are the clinics that stop tuberculosis island hopping from Papua New Guinea down and infecting Australian citizens.”
Oh won’t somebody think of the white people.”
Because of course we all know, don’t we Daniel, that all Australian citizens are white — monumentally stupid comment.
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