Slattsnews

Suddenly the Greens don’t appear to be the strength in Australian politics they would have you believe.
Now that the media — in the form of Australia’s biggest selling paper – has finally produced policies espoused by Greens dingbats, anyone who sticks up their hand as a supporter of Bob Brown’s raving loonies risks getting laughed out of town.
Trouble is Screaming Lord Sutch was taking the piss. Brown and his munchkins are deadly serious.
Here are some of their policies as presented by the Herald Sun and on their own web site:

The Greens manifesto backs official supply of the dangerous drug ecstasy as well as state-sanctioned heroin and marijuana sales at what it calls appropriate venues.
The ecstasy policy suggests distributing the drug to users while providing official information detailing the dangers of the drug.

On the bright side, their policies might create new jobs; in press-gangs for the bike industry:
Increase the proportion of bicycle trips to 20% by 2010

The bong must have been really flaring when they got round to formulating shipping policy:
Develop targets for the transfer of inter-regional and interstate freight from air and roads to trains and ships
Cap the number of port sites at the present number
Let’s see, they’re going to encourage more shipping but discourage more ports. Just what we need: crowded, inefficient ports with an ever-increasing risk of environmental accidents.

They’ve got a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict:
Reject violence and its promotion, particularly against civilians, whether perpetrated by a state, an organisation or individuals
The next time a murderous raghead slaughters innocent teens in a disco I’ll look forward to the Greens condemnation of the vile act. Strange, I haven’t heard of them doing it before.

They’re open-minded on the arts. Well as free-thinking as your run-of-the-mill tree-worshipping idealogue is permitted to be.
Believe that arts funding must be free from political and aesthetic manipulation
Er, just as some are more equal than others, some manipulation is really…. um, persuasion…?
Believe our publicly owned and funded arts institutions have a responsibility to promote environmentally sustainable work and recreational lifestyles through exhibitions, performances and public programs that acknowledge and promote Australia’s unique environment and immediate ecological needs

It’s on population where the Greens demonstrate the type of shallowness and confusion that defies comprehension:
Develop, through extensive community consultation, a population policy directed towards ecological sustainability and global social justice
human settlements should be designed and built to minimise environmental harm and maximise social well-being.
The Greens can undertake all the extensive community consultation they want, they wont find much agreement for this policy:
Call for asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa to be housed in open reception centres until health and security checks are completed or 14 days has passed, whichever occurs first, and then assisted without delay to move into the community with appropriate support

In the past week there’s been any number of bloopers in media to suggest the dumbing-down of the post-boomer demographic proceeds at pace.
In The Australian alone (supposedly our highest quality blat) I came across someone who was “unphased” by a predicament and the second reference to a dame of the realm as Dame Smith (can’t recall the lady’s surname).
It’s not just the illiteracy that irks, although that’s troubling. It’s the lack of general knowledge in a generation that has learnt nothing of history (other than the different-truths manufactured version), great English literature, even basic names-of-places geography.
Therefore the howler on Channel Seven news last night should not have surprised, given that most Sunday newsrooms are occupied by the greenest of journalists.
A fire, thought to be deliberately lit, raged through a suburban Uniting Church early Sunday morning. The Uniting Church is an amalgam formed about 40 years ago of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregationalist flocks. It is about as far removed from the papists as you can get.
Yet twice, the bulletin referred to parishioners confronting the damage when they turned up to attend MASS!!

Finally, an election has been called for October 9.
The ALP and their mates in the media have been playing it hard and it’s not enough for Howard and team to wield just a straight bat. They’ve got to fight just as dirty as any Labor faction fascist and seize the advantage.
Two points must be placed front and square before the public. Immediately.
1) Scrafton’s fine, reprimand and counselling for downloading porn on his PS computer. And most importantly his lying explanation: that he downloaded 1300 items mainly at weekends when no one else was around because he was researching it.
Yeah, right, is the reaction of anyone but the most naive ninny. He is shown clearly to be a liar and therefore his attacks on Howard’s credibility carry no weight. End of matter.
2) Mark Latham’s call for a progressive expenditure tax.
On the tax side of the equation Latham again seeks the democratic solution, to restore public confidence in the integrity of the tax regime. If you can raise peoples’ confidence in the purposes to which taxes are applied and in the manner in which you raise them, you are a long way towards obtaining office. Latham’s pet scheme is just that, a progressive expenditure tax. It aims to shift the incidence of tax from earning to spending, and apply a highly progressive tax to consumption. This overcomes a principal Labor objection to the consumption tax, its flat rate. Under PET those taxpayers with the highest level of consumption would pay the highest proportion of tax. A slug to the idle rich.
Remember how hysterical the left was about the “regressive, unfair, undemocratic, fascist” Goods and Services Tax? Wadda they gonna say about this. And how good a weapon is that for Cossie to belt Lacker around the ears with.
Gentlemen, to your corners.
This blog welcomes other suggestions for ensuring the best federal government in memory is retained.

A new book claimng that John Kerry has not been exactly truthful about his service on deck is set to torpedo his presidential campaign.
A group calling itself Love Boat Veterans Against John Kerry has begun an all-out attack, claiming that Kerry’s Love Boat service, which only lasted 1 1/2 episodes, has been grossly misrepresented by the Kerry campaign. Several crew members, along with Charo, a special guest on an episode in question, claim that Kerry did not find love aboard the ship at all. In fact, he was described as “surly”, “boring”, and as one anonymous source said “a loose cannon.”

SHANE Maloney is an entertaining enough writer of crime novels. But his stories are pretty parochial, revolving around the implausible antics of a world-weary Melbourne Labor Party apparatchik and I suspect the author’s appeal diminishes with the miles.
Like his novels, Maloney’s social attitudes are steeped in the culture of inner Melbourne: conformist middle-class left and riven with prejudice, ignorance and envy.
The Herald Sun today publishes with minimal comment this disgusting generalised diatribe he delivered three years ago to Scotch College students.

WHEN crime writer Shane Maloney took the cane to one of Melbourne’s elite schools, he didn’t think the sting would last this long.
But so scathing was his attack on Scotch College, that three years later the welt caused by his previously unreported attack is growing: this time on the internet.
He struck a nerve when he told an assembly of boys their school was “simply a machine for the transmission of inherited privilege”.
Scotch College had invited the award-winning author of the Murray Whelan series of Melbourne-based thrillers to talk to the students — and talk he did, with a barb on his tongue.
Maloney said the school had little to recommend it in the eyes of the wider community.
“It is a place where boys from middle-class backgrounds are sent to improve their material prospects and to reproduce the values of their class, or where the boys of insecure parents are sent to fulfil the distorted ambitions of their fathers,” he said.
Maloney attacked parents and went on to say their children were victims of their choices.
“It is not your fault; after all, your families decided to institutionalise you,” he said.
“It is not your fault that your mothers and fathers elected to place you in the emotionally distorting and educationally deficient environment of an all-boys school.

Let’s see, so far he’s maliciously defamed the kids’ parents, teachers and anyone associated with running the school. If he’s not sexist — and an inner urban bo-bo could never be seen to be that — he’d no doubt conclude that a state-run all-girls school here where local lefties like to send their daughters provides an emotionally distorting and educationally deficient environment.

“Right now, you are the victims. Later, of course, society will be your victim, and will suffer from the attitudes with which you are indoctrinated here.

He may be right in one instance here. Former Victorian Labor premier John Cain is a Scotch old boy. And God knows, Victorians suffered under the Cain-Kirner administration.

“But who knows?
“Just as prison does not always break the spirit of all who are incarcerated there, perhaps you will not turn out to be a burden on society.”

Have you ever come across a more insufferable, condescending, no-nothing, cliche-spouting bore?

Maloney told the Herald Sun last night he was mystified why the address was being distributed again.
But he said he stood by his words: “I don’t resile from the comments. “My intention in the context of the address was to stimulate discussion.”
Scotch College would not comment yesterday.

Lid dip to ilibcc.

Bloody hell, a Geelong woman has won an Olympic event.
For friggin’ Austria.
And she beat an Aussie to do it.
Our reporter asked her brother how did it feel to have family involved in a gold robbery.

Austrian Kate Allen surged past Australian Loretta Harrop meters from the finish line to claim the Olympic women’s triathlon gold medal.

I reckon we should appeal on the grounds that she got lost in Europe and can’t spell.

Now, who did that headline suck in?

That spluttering on the horizon this morning sounding like 1000 Leyland P76s leaving the garage was in fact indignation emanating from the nation’s lefty chalkies.
A highly-credentialled study has refuted the teacher unions’ dodgiest shibboleth: that class sizes determine the effectiveness of school education.

REDUCING class sizes does not improve academic performance at primary or secondary school level, according to an unprecedented Australian study that has widespread ramifications for state governments pushing for smaller classes.
The study, involving 1540 Victorian primary and secondary schools, shows that academic achievement is unrelated to the number of students in the class. “On almost all tests, class size was rarely important,” the study, conducted by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, and obtained by The Australian, concludes.

Those of us in mobs of 40+ who learnt the 3 Rs from the Sisters of No Mercy always knew this. But then we were always aware they were a tad slower in the state education institutions, even if in this case it’s the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

UPDATE:
Prosecution of the above case can be rested. The leading feeble attack on it comes from one Dr Jenny Miller of Monash University who is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and can deservedly lump some of the blame for lamentable education standards in Victorian schools.
Miller’s letter to The Australian today is launched with such a barrage of 80s edu-babble, one suspects a mullet and padded shoulders are her fashion accessories.

YOUR front page story (“Smaller classes don’t aid students”, 25/8) shows an alarming ignorance of class dynamics, teacher’s work, student’s needs, integration of disabled students, socio-economic context and cultural backgrounds of students, teacher stress and burnout and other critical factors needed in any study on class size.
Classrooms are only partially about literacy and numeracy tests. They are also about relationships, attention to individual learners, individual feedback, cultural and linguistic diversity, performance variables, and social development.
I wonder which teacher’s work and which student’s needs Miller would like us to be less ignorant about.
Reckon 99 per cent of parents would be happy to do a deal with Miller. Drop the classroom concentration on relationships and social development and we’ll let you pay more than partial attention to literacy and numeracy.

Sorry for not continuing with her letter, but the next paragraph contained the word “decontextualised” and my eyes glazed over. I may recover.

In a delightful tete a tete between Colin Powell and PJ O’Rourke in Atlantic Online, Powell recalls how the sum of things rate on the domestic front:

Let me give you a perfect example. It’s a nuclear example. When you looked at how you had to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, there was a certain way you went about it. We’re a fairly contained country, between two oceans and three time zones. They’re across about three continents and eleven time zones. And the industrial base is different. They knew what they had to do to our industrial base, and we knew what we had to do with their much smaller industrial base. So it was two absolutely asymmetric target problems. But we had almost exactly the same number of missiles. We all worked like the devil, not so much to deal with what we needed to do for targeting, but to make sure they didn’t have more than we did … It was that kind of zero-sum mentality.
My favorite story is, after we got rid of the Pershing IIs and they got rid of their SS-20s, my counterpart Mikhail Moiseyev, chief of the Soviet military general staff, visited Washington in 1991. We had brought one of each of the missiles to the Smithsonian. And he and I are down there with adoring fans watching this unfolding of their SS-20 model and our Pershing. Well, the SS-20 is a big thing. And the Pershing is small. It’s much more efficient, a better missile. And so everybody is looking at this. And my wife, Alma, is with me. She pays no attention to any of this military stuff. She’s only been a military wife for the past forty years. And she looks at it and says, “How come theirs is bigger?”

Grab a drink, put aside 20 minutes and enjoy.

Lid dip to Wee Georgie

If Bush is a dill, he’s at least fighting an epidemic of stupidity.
One legacy from his first term is a gigantic leap in kids’ skills for acquiring knowledge.
One can only hope his efforts are replicated in our increasingly dumbed-down country.

From his gubernatorial days, Bush already had a good idea that the evidence was leading straight to phonics. Following Lyon’s advice, he had pushed local districts in Texas to adopt phonics-based curricula and saw reading scores in the state shoot up, particularly for minority kids. The number of third-graders—52,000—who failed the reading test at the start of the Bush governorship declined to 36,000 when he left for the White House and has since dropped to 28,000, now that all his reforms are up and running. Since then, the evidence has become irrefutable. After reviewing dozens of studies—some using magnetic resonance imaging to measure differences in brain function between strong and weak readers and among children taught to read by various methods—the National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress, concluded in 2000 that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, required phonics-based instruction.

It’s an excellent article that shows Bush has the ability to identify a crucial problem, get the right people to solve it and swiftly and effectively launch a course of successful action.
That’s my kind of dill.
It’s intriguing that this badly-needed exercise could be straight from the democratic socialist handbook.
It’s therefore doubly ironic that such an interventionary measure is necessary because of decades of educational vandalism by supposedly democratic socialist pedagogues.

North Koreans don’t hold back when criticising their foes.
A spokesman for the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-II:

“This clearly proves that the DPRK was quite right when it commented that he is a political imbecile bereft of even elementary morality as a human being and a bad guy, much less being a politician,” the North Korean spokesman said. “Bush is a tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade.”

Such unhinged rhetoric from a brutal buffoon who resembles a third-rate Chinatown Elvis impersonator seems familiar. They are sentiments shared by other ugly bastards who fancy themselves as entertainers.

“[Republican control of the House has resulted in] Poison in the water, salmonella in the food, carbon dioxide in the air and toxic waste in the ground.”
– Barbra Striesand

When Pat Buchanan noted that Castro “has denied” Cubans “free elections for 40 years,” Asner fired back: “We didn’t have a free election in 2002.”
– Ed Asner

“I think 9/11 gave this generation an identity, and its identity is potentially fascist. My skin crawls when I think of the first week after 9/11. I was looking out of the window and there were people marching down the street carrying flags. It reminded me of spontaneous, angry Nazis and I thought, ‘Oh, man, we are in a lot of trouble’. There’s a whole bunch of people who have flags hanging from their cars and who are mistaking fascism for patriotism.”
– Ricky Lee Jones

“Bush means Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and all these f*cking crypto-fascists are gonna get in and start carving up the pie and handing in all their markers to the Republican Party that’s been itching to get back into power.”
– John Cusack

“Bush is a f**king idiot.”
– Jennifer Aniston

“F–k money. I don’t rap for dead presidents. I’d rather see the president dead. It’s never been said, but I set precedents and the standards and they can’t stand it. … We as Americans. Us as a citizen. We’ve got to protect ourselves …”
– Eminem

“That’s so weird that you ask that because we were just talking about I.Q.s the other day – you know, George W.’s I.Q. is like 92 and Bill Clinton’s was like 190 or something.”
– Sandra Bernhard

When I first read about the holes in John Kerry’s story about taking his swift boat on an illegal mission into Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968, I presumed this could be the turning point of his campaign.
Kerry claimed his mission was at the behest of the Nixon government. Trouble was, Nixon was not president at that time.
Furthermore, Kerry supporter Douglas Brinkley wrote in his book Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, that Kerry was on patrol 50 miles from the Cambodia border on Christmas Eve 1968 and spent Christmas Day writing journal entries back at his base.
The black hole in Kerry’s repeatedly told tale of his Cambodian Christmas caper was all over the blogs for a couple of days earlier this month but then slid off the radar.
The TV networks, the New York Times and the Washington Post didn’t run the story. After protests from the blogiverse, big media paid some attention, bundling it into down-the-bulletin “dirty campaign tricks” type stories.
If the confected outrage in the kids-overboard Howard-hate furore is any indication, nothing short of the rack would be in store for a presidential candidate not from the left caught inventing tales about his war service!
But who really benefits from such media lies? Plummeting ratings and circulation figures suggest that blatantly biased news management is financially harming commercial media. So why do major media stockholders let their managers get away with it?
Whenever I find an unbalanced “news” report in the paper I buy daily. I make a point of registering my complaint with the company running the nearest advertisement to the article. This ploy is not plausible in the case of bias by omission, such as with the Kerry-Cambodia story.
It might be worthwhile for someone to set up a central internet site where news bias, selective omission and distortion can be identified, followed by concerned contact with companies whose advertising is carried by offending outlets. I’d register for a nominal figure, say $5.

Robert Corr has responded to my earlier challenge to produce a refutation of the point that if the kids weren’t chucked overboard, adult illegals scuttled the boat anyway to criminally imperil the tykes.
Rob has referred me to the loquacious Ken Parish who seems a little confused. Without considering the important fact that career public servant Scrafton has no documentation of an appeal for advice from the PM, Ken’s prepared to take the word of the porn-hoarder against the nation’s leader. Which is his right.
But one minute Ken says the PM lied, the next he’s telling the truth — or as Ken puts it, partly the truth; I hear there’s a few part-virgins up in the Top End.
I’m with the majority as this latest manifestation of Howard-hate slips deservedly from media attention (from chats at the local last night I gather it never really had much public attention, therefore was a waste of media resources in the pursuit of left wing outcomes, but that’s nothing new): The kids were put at risk of drowning by mad, bad bastards who would be in jail had they been Australian citizens.
Anyway, you be the judge.
Ken’s say:
The issue is whether Howard lied, and he did.
But while I’m on the point of peripheral (to whether Howard lied) but important points, I should note that although children clearly weren’t thrown overboard, and Howard clearly knew that by 7-8 November but lied about it, I’m certainly not saying that the SIEV 4 mob were lily white. Although they didn’t chuck their kids into the water, they DID deliberately sink their boat the very next day to ensure they had to be taken for asylum processing, and their kids ended up in the water. Thus, Howard’s original point, that these were people who were prepared to put their children at risk to get to Australia, was partly true.

UPDATE:
Habib has the last word of advice for Scrafton and the hating class:

Generally, the advice from this source, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, is sound. The author shares an unusual surname with the straightest bloke I’ve ever known, and he was a leftie. Gawdknows what Brian Smiddy would make of the middle class dregs that control his beloved party now.
Point of view – oil prices
The price of oil has reached record highs, in nominal terms, in recent days. For Australian oil producers, the rise in the US dollar price of oil has been partially offset by a stronger Australian dollar in 2004. 8090100110120130140150160Jun-03Sep-03Dec-03Mar-04Jun-04Common baseWPLSTOWTI In the six months to 30 June 2004, Woodside reported an average realised oil price of A$47.65. This is only around A$3.50 more than it received in the second half of 2002 and the first half of 2003. The performance of Woodside and Santos shares are compared to the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) in the chart. Over the year, Woodside’s price has been more correlated with the oil price. A fire at Santos’ Moomba processing facility affected the stock in early 2004. We expect oil prices to remain high during 2004 and 2005. However, oil is not expected to remain at these levels into the long term. Commonwealth Bank Commodities Strategist David Thurtell expects oil to trend down to US$32 per barrel in early 2006. A recent report by Bear Stearns argued that current oil prices are not justified by the economic fundamentals of the oil market. It stated that the price of oil is $18 to $22 dollars above the level justified by supply and demand. The current price includes a large terrorism premium and has been pushed higher by speculators. Bear Stearns argues that: − OPEC has 2.1 million barrels a day of spare capacity; − US crude inventories have risen 9.4% since January; − No terrorist act has resulted in the loss of a meaningful quantity of production and OECD government reserves exceed 1.4 billion barrels (2 million barrels a day for two years); − Any Russian outage from Yukos’ problems is unlikely to be for long; and − major oil companies have found more oil than they have produced in 8 of the last 10 years. In addition, Venezuelan production — which has fallen every year since 2000 — grew strongly in early 2004. Offsetting this, problems with Japanese nuclear reactors means that country will burn more oil.
Michael Smiddy
Senior Utilities Analyst

Oh, the sweet irony. A smart-arsed elitist lefty is copping the mother of all shellackings for hurling a politically incorrect slur:
NATIONAL DOWN SYNDROME SOCIETY SLAMS MAUREEN DOWD FOR “INSENSITIVE AND DEMEANING…SLUR”

Anderson’s angry. So Lexie Downer should take notice. Excerpt;

If I may play shamelessly on my half-Chinese ethnicity, I’d like to make a few observations about the blokes running the PRC.
First of all, they’re doing a top job. No, really, they’re doing just super.
After all, how would you like the job of holding together the world’s largest country through the painful process of urbanisation, industrialisation and the move to the Information Age, all of which stages are happening at different places in the country? Or dealing with 100,000,000 unemployed people thrown out of work as sclerotic state-owned enterprises collapse in the wake of the death of communist economic theory? Or handling a bunch of fanatics and terrorists in the Western provinces while pouring cash into those backward areas, hard-earned cash which you need to bully out of the money-men on the Eastern seaboard.
Second of all, they’re ruthless bastards.

Go read the lot. It’s passionate and informed and why the Libs aren’t polishing a federal seat for him explains much about the shortcomings of that outfit.

Can anyone point me in the direction of any bleeding heart who has attempted to refute this point, so wittily put on The Australian’s letters page today?

GEE, if I had known the refugees hadn’t actually thrown their children overboard, but instead had merely sunk their own boat – effectively dumping everyone into the water – I would have voted Labor.
Andrew Brough
Wingello, NSW

Forget the “he said, I said” storm in a teacup fuelled by Howard-haters over a three-year-old incident, the issue that will reverberate with swinging voters is an extraordinary act of poor judgement by Mark Latham and his advisers.
Hospitalised with an inflamed pancreas, Latham who is on more than $200,000 a year and well equipped to have health insurance, demanded and got a free public hospital bed.
It’s been ignored by Melbourne news makers, but got a run in the Sydney Daily Telegraph (the link has now been shut).
But Lacker’s selfish demand has already prompted a flurry of angry letters, with few of the signatories recognised as regular contributors.
This has occurred in an era of public queueing for beds because State Labor governments squander federal health funding on health management positions for party hacks and over-generous pay rises for their nurses union mates.
In our local regional hospital alone, five new sectional directors’ positions have been created in the past two years. And of course, the nurses, like the coppers and ambos, got wage rises in excess of increases paid in the private sector — a recipe for financial collapse if ever there was one. But then, that’s what Victorian state Labor governments do best.
And the waiting lists for surgery continue to stretch.

UPDATE:
Looks like I won’t be apologising to Saclack (see comments).

Refusing a private hospital bed on principle, he was transferred on Wednesday to St Vincent’s Hospital in inner-city Darlinghurst and treated with morphine and antibiotics.
But a row flared yesterday over whether high-income earners should take up space in the public hospital system.

Hey, the man’s got principles!

A national survey has found that almost 50 per cent of 12-15 year olds believe democracy is absent in Australia.
At one Sydney school, Year 10 students did not know what democracy meant and some students said that Australia was not a republic so it could not be a democracy.
And where does this ignorance emanate? Well, 75 per cent of the dumbed-down little buggers rated teachers the most trustworthy source of political information.
Move along now, nothing new there.

Memo to Dubya: Keep it simple, mix in some humour and above all, keep it short. I got home from work last night in time to catch John Kerry’s address to the veterans’ convention on Fox News.
What an 18-carat, lantern-jawed bore. Not one memorable line, not even an attempt at levity; he just droned on and on about how as president he’d do this or that, all with such a lack of conviction I could have sworn he’s now just going through the motions.
Gawd knows I’m no fan of his, but he couldn’t even get me cranky. Just bed-bound.
This invaluable cure for insomnia is here.

Bloody hell, another myth shattered. You know how remote mining towns are the last bastion of the rugged individualist. And Coober Pedy is the epitome of those harsh enclaves where strong, silent types bend their backs for years chasing the dream of one day uncovering a fortune. A place you’d imagine where they don’t want to give much to government and in return want the state to keep out of their business.
Well a posse of state ministers came to CP recently and the rugged individualists turned out to be just another mob of tuggers of bureaucratic coat-tails.
Trevor Berry, internet opal seller, asked what opal miners should do to attract government assistance for their industry. Mineral Resources Development minister Paul Holloway said they should get together and make a common voice instead of a fractured approach. He said 92% of the Precious Stones Field had not been explored yet.
Health minister Lea Stevens was made aware by Fiona Collins that all expectant mothers have to go south for delivery, but because they are not going to see a specialist, they cannot get the Patient Assistance Transport Scheme funding.
Councillor Mike Maylin said that police numbers and availability in Coober Pedy were seriously low. Miner Frank Novasel said that if the current amount of stealing keeps going much longer, someone was likely to be killed. Premier Rann’s response was that vigilantes would be put behind bars quick smart.

Yeah, right, Rannie.