Senator Steve Fielding has revealed today that he was sexually abused as a child. One instinctively feels sympathy and anguish for Fielding, as one does for anyone assaulted by someone charged with their care.
But quite why Fielding felt the need to reveal this today, on the morning when hundreds of representatives of the Forgotten Generation arrived in Canberra to hear an apology, and emotional speeches from Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, is a mystery.
Volume 316 of how the press routinely just makes stuff up.
This morning came the improbable story that a CPRS deal was “in the bag” because the Government had agreed to the Coalition’s demand for exemption of agriculture. “Australia is likely to have an emissions trading scheme locked in by the end of next week,” we were told.
God it’s shite finding yourself on the same side as Bob Carr. The sinister little gollum is in the Oz today, whining about the PIR campaign he helped lose.
A director of Dymocks and the ‘face’ of their front-group the Coalition for Cheaper Books’, Carr lost to a motley bunch of basketweavers and it shits him.
His piece demonstrates in miniature all the arrogance and mendacity of the big chains participation in this campaign.
Even if you oppose PIR (as I do) you can’t pretend that the savings will be 30% or more on most books.
‘Cheap the precious books’ the Gollum mumbles, arguing that…
There’s nothing special about war damage in the Balkans, but most of it is what the locals have done to one another over the years. This isn’t:
It’s in Belgrade, which was bombed by NATO in 1999, during Kosovo’s war of independence. Most of it’s been repaired or rebuilt, but there’s a few things like this still visible – I don’t even know what this building was, although it’s just across from what is now the ministry of foreign affairs.
Why do ordinarily good people do bad things? One of the big questions that underlie all the debates on university colleges, male sports teams and other forms of hooliganism, is why do some groupings encourage thuggery? Often this as a male thing, because aspects of sexual aggression in masculinity are too often still seen as appropriate.
Young men too often are encouraged to blindly bond to prove mateship, loyalty and team spirit through mindless animal acts. This form of belonging often condemns non conforming males as nerds and killjoys but seduces camp followers into risky behaviour and imitative stupidity.
Not least among the joys of Four Corners gobsmacking report on the climate change lunacy among the Libs, was Nick Minchin’s remark that climate change was just another stage in the anti-industrial campaigns of the Left ….first communism now the Green movement.
The esteemed Keane has pointed out the way in which the Right has oriented itself around anti-Leftism in the climate change debate, but what is also so bizarre about Minchin’s comments is how oooooold they are.
This dude is alcan foil hat central…
For a former fully paid-up member of the Greenhouse Mafia, Ian “Chainsaw” Macfarlane has come a damn long way. To see him admitting on 4 Corners last night that he had changed his views about the role of humans in climate change was semi-gobsmacking. Here was one of the principal figures in the Howard Government’s efforts to deny, delay and derail action on climate change lamenting the difficulties of getting a deal on Labor’s CPRS through his own partyroom, at one stage declaring he wasn’t sure whether Penny Wong or his own party was the more difficult interlocutor on the issue. Macfarlane’s trajectory goes even further than that of Andrew Robb, another former “sceptic” who threw himself into carbon trading issues when Malcolm Turnbull made him his point man on the ETS after becoming leader.
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