Slattsnews

Youssef Kamil is neither poor nor depressed. He is an achieving student and helps out on the family farm.
He’s also a committed suicide bomber who was caught before he could carry out his own Jenin massacre.
He wants to go to Paradise. Someone help him make a solo trip.

This could well be the long-awaited stick in the terrorists’ spokes.
International Technologies Lasers (ITL), which is based in Rishon Letzion, has developed a device that can analyze and identify chemical elements by remote laser sensing harmless to the eyes and body.

This rang more bells than St Pat’s on Easter Sunday:
LIVING IN 2004

You know you’re living in 2004 when…

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.
2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.
3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3
4. You e-mail your mate who works at the desk next to you.
5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends is that they do not have e-mail addresses.
6. When you go home after a long day at work you still answer the phone in a business manner.
7. When you make phone calls from home, you accidentally dial “0″ or “9″ to get an outside line.
8. You’ve sat at the same desk for four years and worked for three different companies.
10. You learn about your redundancy on the 11 o’clock news.
11. Your boss doesn’t have the ability to do your job.
12. Contractors outnumber permanent staff and are more likely to get long-service awards.
AND THE REAL CLINCHERS ARE…
13. You read this entire list, and kept nodding and smiling.
14. As you read this list, you think about forwarding it to your “friends”.
15. You got this email from a friend that never talks to you
anymore, except to send you jokes from the net.
16. You are too busy to notice there was no No. 9.
17. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a No.9.
18. And now you are laughing at yourself!

The modern Left likes to think it not only occupies the high moral ground but has the titans of intelligentsia onside as well.
Heh-heh… from Newsmax’s Left Coast Report:
It seems that Courtney Love has fallen on some hard times. She’s facing felony drug charges. She could lose custody of her daughter. And she’s reportedly broke.
But the former Hole singer has come up with an interesting way of explaining why she’s experiencing the string of troubles. She believes she’s a victim of Republican circumstance.
Love told Rolling Stone that “the last thing I want to say is that I’m a victim, but I am.” She elaborated by saying, “I believe it’s a trickle down from Bush.”

Such a towering intellect!

This has to be the footy fan’s quote of the season:
Nowadays, of course, I barrack for Fremantle. That’s not the end of it though. I also consider myself a die-hard fan of whichever team is playing the Eagles in that particular week. Even if it’s Collingwood. If North Korea put a team in the AFL coached by King Jong-Il, I would definitely barrack for them when they played West Coast. That’s how shit they are.

James Morrow tells readers of The Australian how the ABC broke the Iraqi oil-for-food UNSCAM.
Sorry, not “our” ABC, but the network over the Pacific.
The Australian Bolsheviks Collective is unfortunately not alone in the media in paying minimal attention to this huge scandal. As Morrow points out:
The editorial decision to turn a blind eye to the story puts the ABC in good company with other Western news outlets, most of which have taken a see-no-evil approach to one of the biggest corruption scandals in modern history: the systematic purchasing of friends and allies by the Iraqi dictator.
The blogiverse will just have to keep hammering the story until mainstream media is forced to take notice. That in itself is a disgraceful situation — journalists of just a generation ago would have crawled over broken beer bottles — and indeed, some did — to get a new edge on such a story. I mean it’s the ultimate “absolute power corrupts absolutely” story. At least the cheekiest of tabloids, The Sun, still values news over ideology and delivered a barrel of oil to George Galloway’s driveway. Pissed him right off too.

Noah, get that boat over to Gippsland, quick smart!
The Age has made one of its rare ventures beyond the inner suburbs and, as usual, has become hopelessly confused.

Gippsland got its heaviest daily downpour in two years, said the bureau, with the monthly average for April falling within several days. Mount Baw Baw, with 196 millimetres, was among those areas getting a good soaking.
Senior forecaster Scott Williams said most of Gippsland’s April rain had fallen since Thursday, although there were milder falls of about 25 centimetres earlier in the month.

On top of the weekend’s total, that would make – in old cocky’s parlance – about 18 inches of rain for the month. That’s wetter than an Australian Democrats conference.

They can rage all about oil, sneer at Dubya dumbness, whine about absent WMDs and delude themselves about unthreatened isolation.
But they can’t deny this:

John Spooner’s splendid cartoon accompanies a gutsy appeal to rationale by The Age’s elder statesfeminist Pamela Bone, who often demonstrates that idiocy and left wing commentary don’t always belong in the same sentence.
The freedoms of Western women, their open sexuality, are a large part of the hatred the Islamist men feel for the West. They would, if they could, spread their joyless, sex-denying, life-denying version of religion over the world. They’ve said, many times, this is what they want. They would, if they could, have all our daughters in burqas.

Phatty Adams is in spleen-venting mode today, getting stuck into pundits who don’t view the world from his socialist millionaire perspective.
His theme is as childish as it is ignorant of colloquialisms; he describes his commentating opponents as Bushwhackers! Get it, they are mesmerised by Dubya, so they are Bushwhackers. Laugh, gawd I thought I’d bust a gasket. Hang on though, don’t you generally whack things you don’t like? Ain’t that so, Tex?
Anyway the Paddington poseur has an anaemic payout at, among others, Blair, Imre, Bolta and Gerard Henderson. They are, Lard-arse says, grovelling acolytes in Australia who fill their speeches, their broadcasts or their newspaper columns with uncritical drivel and bunkum. Week after week they try to out-twaddle and out-bunkum each other, their styles recalling the obeisances of palace eunuchs or the propagandists of Kim Il Sung. And they don’t hesitate to produce snarling slanders on anyone who sees Bush for what he is. And for the danger he represents.
No examples though, you’ll just have to take Phatty’s word for it. Although “obeisance” is not a word I’d remotely connect to Tim Blair’s lean, mean prose.
Adams gets my dander up, however, when he rounds on one of Australia’s great journalists, Frank Devine, accusing him and daughter Miranda of “dumping” the Pope because His Holiness opposed the Iraq war.
I gather Devine’s Catholicism is extremely important to him. Thus Adams’ assumption is arrogant and bigoted, attitudes he constantly accuses his foes of having.
But then the dunny lane imperialist is as well known for his hypocrisy as he is for his pedestrian, regurgitated, unoriginal ramblings.
Compare Devine’s delightful celebration of ageing with Adams’ fly-blown bilge to see who holds all the trumps when it comes to putting thoughts to paper:
As a registered septuagenarian of some years’ seniority, I am, in fact, more amiable than I was when young. When I wake, I contemplate the day ahead with unreserved pleasure. I have set myself a few deadlines and duties, like going to mass, writing for publication and granting grandfather audiences, but the day belongs to me more than days used to. The 4pm session is ideal for movie-going because it finishes at that magical moment, cork-drawing time.
That, more than anything else, explains why Adams is such a blathering bore: he’s tee-total and has never known the joy of cork-drawing time.

Here’s a time-passing challenge.

Wottha??!!! The absent Professor Bunyip, After Grog, UberScott, Caz and the Snarkers and fewgawdzakes, Yobbo — all enjoying guest spots on the Margo Show. Infiltration, subversion and domination, is that the aim?
Scott gets bagged for not being inclusive. Suspect it’s got something to do with the perfectly rational view that governments should avoid patronising special interest groups at the expense of others.

It’s started — the luvvies getting the vapors over Lacker’s commonsense take on the multiculture industry. Extract from SMH letter:

Mr Latham, diversity is not, and should never be, celebrated for itself. It should be celebrated for its ability to generate tolerance of difference, whether it is racial, cultural, sexual, religious, or political. The fundamental cause of the bulk of the world’s current and past conflicts has been intolerance of difference. The basis of these conflicts has generally been the need to either eliminate those who are different, or to force “our” values, attitudes and culture upon “them”.

And where’s it from? Why the land of the bleeding-tickered basket weaver, where else?
Les MacDonald, Balmain

“Bloody Bolt”, the learned scribes in the field will be muttering. “He’s turned our editors’ attention to the United Nations’ bucks for oil scam and now we have to take a break from Vietnam comparisons, quagmires, skerdaddling Spaniards and the creation of mountains out of Iraqi thug molehills and report on some wrong-doing by those on our side.”
Yep, Bolta has brought the UNSCAM to the Herald Sun’s great unwashed readership and try as they might, the lefties in the media won’t be able to wish the story away. Rather like the early days of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal when it just wasn’t happening for big media until Drudge et al shamed them into it.
Tim Blair hopes to track down one of the ringleaders who is reported to be in Australia.

UPDATE:
Here’s a blog dedicated to unravelling UNSCAM.

Paul Keating has got an old mate to dispute ex-wife Annita’s version of their bust-up.
Bad call, Paul.
Who the hell’s going to believe Phillip Adams?

The Australian just keeps getting better. Today’s editorial “Coalition of the whining still wrong on Iraq” delivers a severe whacking to the appeaser class and includes a real-time Fisking:
He nonsensically compared the occupation of Iraq with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – because they are both about “two occupying forces coming up against unstoppable opposition” – and in a stunning piece of moral relativism equated both with the French occupation of Algeria.
Republican Paul Kelly gets a tad wanky and promotes Lacker to Field Marshall in the forces of reason in the culture wars. Howard’s not going to hand over that baton so easily. Nevertheless, Kelly identifies Latham’s position as on stolen Howard ground with an offer of a finer, better nationalism.
The most complex and radical of Latham’s ideas is his redefinition of multiculturalism. Once again, he argues that the people have decided – they accept our diversity. It is a given in schools, streets and popular entertainment. The task is no longer to propound a policy that is about differences and separation. Second-generation migrants see themselves as citizens rather than as Chinese Australians or Greek Australians, defined by ethnic group.
Because Kelly has been trapped in the urban elite vortex, he doesn’t realise the mainstream community have respected Howard for years precisely because he understood their rejection of hyphenated diversity.
Still, it’s a deft profile of Lacker’s political drive shaft and as always wonderfully written.

Gotta hand it to Lacker, he keeps coming up with news making ideas. And this latest one in which 45 per cent of immigrants would be transferred to regional areas to ease population congestion in big cities is a beaut. Bit of devil in the detail, I’d expect, but it’s sound policy and good politics.
Howard should embrace it and welcome the opportunity of joining Labor in the implementation of sound, commonsense policy. That would piss the latte-left off mightily.

Mark Latham is so hungry for power he’s finally let discipline slip the leash. How else can you explain his electorate-defying promise to resurrect the republic issue?
Less than five years ago, Australians roundly rejected a referendum proposal to cut ties with Britain and have a politically appointed head of state. This was after two years of brow-beating by every windbag, has-been, self-server, schemer and political extremist ever brushed from the corridors of Australian power.
The vote was 55 per cent against to 45 with the ratbag people’s republic of Victoria the only state to vote in the affirmative (ed. wrong, it was the ACT). Since then polls have shown 72 per cent of Australians are satisfied with the status quo.
But boofhead Lacker, ever-eager to impress his mentor “Crash-through or Crash” Gough Whitlam — Australia’s worst-ever Prime Minister by a country mile — said last night that Australians would vote on a republic by 2007 if he became prime minister.
He said he’d kick the process off by holding a plebiscite within 12 months of winning the election.
Great politics: vote for me and I’ll make you vote again in 12 months!
I’m all for an Australian head of state — directly elected — but I’m prepared to wait until a majority agrees such an issue is a priority. In the meantime I want a federation more suited to the 21st century.
Lacker would win greater approval by suggesting we get rid of the states and form regional parliaments drawn from the resources of combined local government. You could have states for, say, North Queensland, the Kimberley including Darwin, the Gold Coast to Newcastle, the entire length of the Murray…
Present state boundaries are as relevant as buggy whips and steam trains and serve only to bolster the outdated, wasteful concept of bulging capital cities.
But those capital cities are where the safe seats are occupied, aren’t they? And we can’t have the dispensers of government protection taking risks, can we?

Geelong Football Club should consider doing this for its supporters who are dying for a premiership.

One would hope the Federal Government will have the good sense to hang on to those ATSIC programs that have been successful.
I’d forgotten about the ATSIC-Army Community Assistance Program, one of the Howard Government’s first efforts at practical reconciliation. It involves defence force units going into remote communities to upgrade housing and infrastructure while training residents in building, technical, health and communications skills. The army benefits by incorporating projects into training exercises.
It’s a program that doesn’t blow its trumpet enough, but if the communard’s 7.30 Report deems it worthy of uncritical coverage it must be enjoying marvellous success.
I’d like to know more about the program. Any of the Diggery got any contacts?
Thanks to Tim Blair for mentioning the program.

UPDATE:
Former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Peter Howson has some forthright suggestions for solving remote community problems. Listen for the howls from Leftoids who think Broadmeadows is a deprived remote community.
Howson’s way:
The tragic fact is that the great majority of Aborigines in remote communities has become welfare dependent. Accordingly, policies should now concentrate on measures to prevent further deterioration in the lifestyles of those in remote communities, to ensure they don’t become even more ghetto-like.
To this end there should be a significant reduction in the number of communities eligible for future federal infrastructure and service assistance (as has, in similar circumstances, recently been done in Canada).
Those communities to be no longer eligible should be given (say) 12 months’ warning, with a view to encouraging their residents to move either to urban areas or to larger communities.
Incentives, including the subsidisation of transport costs, should be offered to those residents prepared to move and/or to take up employment outside remote communities.

Wallace Craig has had one of those great weekends in which he revisits his youth and reminisces on one of those larger-than-life heroes smaller communities sometimes produce. Wal’s a black backgrounder, but at least he’s lifted his type size.