Slattsnews

Refer this article to those who insist on more yakkity-yak, procrastination and breast-beating instead of direct life saving action.
Excerpt:
Another baby was just 17 months when Ronderson Coglin attacked her at Kowanyama. He is serving life for the rape, which drastically injured the child. A psychiatric report said the case of this child amounted to “a major devastating assault with catastrophic physical and mental consequences”.

Who should be saying sorry, now?

Tomorrow is a day of triumph for hypocritical nanny-staters as the Victorian government’s ban on smoking in pubs comes into force.
The same political class that whines like worm-riddled curs about “paternalist” action to save little kids from sexual abuse has no problem with governments interfering with individuals using a legal product.
If tobacco is as bad as wowsers and politicians claim, surely they should ban it completely. And do away with billions of dollars annually in taxes? Not bloody likely. Just once, I would like to hear a politician admit that while this situation exists they are guilty of the most snivelling form of hypocrisy possible.
A far more sensible measure is available for those who don’t want their drink and dining sessions polluted by tobacco smoke.
Publicans should be free to operate smoking or non-smoking bars that are identified by prominent signs. They should be free to hire smoking or non-smoking staff according to the staff’s preference of venue.
The decision on which product will be used in which business premises will then be determined by those who should always decide such matters – consumers.
In the meantime, I’ll buy a packet of durries tonight for my regular Satdee evening session at the local, just so I can be part of history when mine host declares “Butts out”, “last stinks thanks” and “ashes to ashes”.
One publican tells me that not all social distractions are changing in his taproom. A health and safety nazi from the local council chipped him for not regularly clearing out the needle disposal bin in the toilets.
Yep, the publican must assist customers who wish to shoot up illegal drugs on his premises — risking their lives –
but by golly if he permits anyone to light up a ciggy in the dunny, he’s for the chop.
How on earth did we get to have so many retards writing regulations?

Former Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Jim Inhofe, who publishes a blog under the committee’s masthead, reveals a conversion that should strike a chord with impartial Australian media. Courtesy of Margo’s Maid at Tim Blair’s blog.

Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker — better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote. “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’” he added. Evans noted how he benefited from climate fears as a scientist. “And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990′s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn’t believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote. “The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role,” he added. “Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics,” he concluded.

The gasbags, political haters, benign racists and opportunists responsible for appalling instances like this should at least have the decency to shut up, get out of the way and at least try and admit some shame.
These are extracts from the NT Government’s report Little Children are Sacred overseen by Rex Wild, QC, and the respected Aboriginal health worker Pat Anderson, who visited 45 Aboriginal communities and found evidence of sexual abuse of children in all of them.

“In one central Australian community, the clinic nurse told us the following story: ‘I was attending to a mother in the waiting room area one day when her three-year-old daughter, who was naked, laid down on the floor in front of a young boy. This three-year-old girl then spread her legs wide apart and motioned the boy to her vagina.”
The girl showed no sign of sexual abuse, but, the report concluded, “clearly she had been exposed to sexual behaviour and it made her a vulnerable target”.

The report cites this testimony from a jailed rapist:
“When I was six my old man shot my mum, yeah, f—ing shot my mum, bang in the head. They had been blueing all night.
“He made me clean her brains off the floor.
“When I raped that girl I felt like all my pain was going into her, when she screamed, that was me screaming. I know it sounds f—ed-up, but that’s what it felt like.”

This situation has evolved over decades, in a period when policy was driven by foolish, racist notions of separatism embracing land rights, self-determination and noble savagery.
The incompetence of state and territory governments has only aggravated the crime, despair and squalor in remote communities while organisations ranging from local housing co-operatives to ATSIC have been riddled with cronyism and corruption.
Continued degradation has been driven by hare-brained philosophies and hate-spurred emotionalism espoused by academics and the moronic Left commentariat.
Until a few years ago, when frustrated and courageous individuals such as Noel Pearson and Sue Gordon rejected eternal victimhood in favour of confrontational responsibility, anyone who critically commented on the shortcomings of outback apartheid was inviting the damning slur of “racist”.
Finally, someone had the courage to do something.
And that action has the overwhelming support of practical, humane Australians.
It is however opposed by the usual suspects who overnight plunged to new depths in cynical hyperbole.
‘This is our black children overboard’ thundered the The Age’s huge front page headline. (You had to go to page 7 to find the quote was attributed to a Harry Wilson, an ”angrier young man”.
Atrocious journalism in pursuit of action that would ensure more rapes, murder and degradation.

Pearson — my early nomination for Australian of the Year — is also astonished at the intelligentsia’s priorities:

NOEL PEARSON: I’m amazed that anybody would put the protection of children secondary to anything, particularly when those children are subject to imminent abuse, abuse that takes place on a regular basis that’s the subject of binge drinking, week in, week out. I’m just amazed that anybody would put the protection of children secondary to anything else. I think that those who have objections to immediate intervention have to ask themselves whether they’re willing this whole exercise to fail, and geez, if you’re willing the whole exercise to fail, what kind of priorities do you have in relation to the wellbeing of Indigenous children?

In case those willing failure were practising self-delusion, Pearson amped up the spotlight:

“That’s the horrendous thing here. That the people who are nay-saying any kind of intervention are people whose children, like my own, sleep safe at night … It’s an absolutely shameful hour that has descended on us where even an emergency intervention to protect the safety of our children is hindered, is hindered by people who supposedly have goodwill for Aboriginal people. Those people are willing the protection and succour to Aboriginal children to fail in the same way and as vehemently as they will failure in Iraq.”

A lot of passionate people here share my views — far more eloquently.

UPDATE:
I don’t suppose it had anything to do with cancelled subscriptions, condemnation from the blogging and talkback communities and harsh criticism from journalism professionals, but The Age has taken the extraordinary step of turning over its editorial column to defend yesterday’s news coverage. When you’re in the poo it’s best to keep your mouth shut, lest you end up full of unpleasantness.

The more I hear from Fred Thompson, the keener I am to see him lead the free world. Here, he demonstrates how some people are so stupid that they couldn’t be anything other than intellectuals:

One of the strangest examples comes from Marquette University in Wisconsin — where a Dave Barry quip was banned. Last fall, Ph.D. student Stuart Ditsler printed out a short blurb from one of Barry’s humor columns and stuck it on his office door. It read, “As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.” Of course, anybody who has ever heard of Dave Barry would know that he wasn’t exactly suggesting insurrection.

I wonder how David Marr, Clive Hamilton and all those other repressed champions of the Oz Left will take to this timely essay by Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.
And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?
Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

In other words, they’re privileged, self-centred snobs. An entertaining read.

Heh, heh, normally I wouldn’t cross the street to see a Michael Moore movie. But I might download this one. Just because I can.

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — Michael Moore’s new documentary “Sicko” has been pirated and is now widely available for download on peer-to-peer content sites like www.thepiratebay.org.

It shouldn’t worry an anti-capitalist like Moore, should it?

Give us a break!
Oprah Winfrey has been named the world’s most powerful celebrity.
The US chat show host beat golfer Tiger Woods and Madonna to top Forbes magazine’s annual list, Celebrity 100.
The list takes into account celebrities’ earnings, internet presence and press, TV and radio coverage.

Celebrities are useless people. Tiger Woods does not belong in their ranks.

The Australian calls this a “national shame”.
A landmark report handed down in Darwin yesterday describes a world where degrading pornography circulates freely, and alcohol and marijuana are chronically abused; where sexualised behaviour among young children is widely seen; where white workers prey on young Aboriginal women; and where many people remain unsure about the age of consent.
Sorry, I feel no shame. Just plain white-hot anger.
Fury that 35 years ago, intellectuals could hijack national policy and introduce systems that selectively doled out money to whole communties to sit on their bums in remote places without any inducement or encouragement to work or improve their lot.
And that the same intellectual class could manufacture and gain widespread acceptance of a myth that would ensure no well-meaning or rational individuals or groups would ever attempt to free children from these hell-holes.
Too right, some Australians should feel shame: the Australians who invented sit-down money and the stolen generations.

This is bad news for someone, I suppose. Let’s hope it’s contagious.

France’s Socialists faced a new humiliation after a dismal showing in round one of a parliamentary election Sunday set to deliver a huge majority to President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Reeling from the defeat of their presidential candidate Segolene Royal last month, the Socialists, already in a minority in the National Assembly, look set to lose up to half their 149 seats, projections said.
Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party and its allies were on course to secure between 383 and 501 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, according to projections by polling firms.

Remember the pantsless judge who was pressing charges against his dry cleaners?
Seems he’s not just a time-wasting chancer. He’s a big sook as well.
A judge who is suing a dry cleaner that lost his trousers for $54 million left the courtroom in tears Tuesday after saying he is acting in the interests of all District of Columbia residents against what he claims are poor business practices.

Back in the 1970s, Melbourne’s elite lived in South Yarra, air-kissed Lillian Frank, voted Liberal and were insufferable snobs.
Now, Melbourne’s elite live in Prahran, air-kiss their gay Chapel St hairdresser, vote Labor and are insufferable snobs.
Australian Labor Party candidate Barbara Norman told The Canberra Times this week the electorate in Melbourne’s inner-east was diverse, but impossible to wrest from the Treasurer, who holds it by an 8.8 per cent margin.
While Higgins takes in trendy Prahran and posh Toorak, it extends to the more suburban, family-oriented Ashburton.
“Then at the other end, it has Ashburton, out near Chadstone, which is almost Kath and Kim country,” Ms Norman told the newspaper, in reference to the ABC television show.

Editorial of the year in The Australian today.
Excerpt:
While the Left is still fighting the intellectual battles of the 1970s, the rest of the world has moved on. Progressive only in their own, inflated self image, the commentariat finds itself stranded on the outer fringes of the national debate, stuck in an intellectual cul-de-sac without the courage or confidence to retrace its steps. Their voices have not been silenced, they have simply lost their relevance. While the mainstream debate is conducted elsewhere, the progressives are stuck in the corner, muttering darkly among themselves. Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they are rebels without a cause still trapped in dialectical Marxist maze.

You could imagine hundreds of thousands of political “progressives”, bleeding hearts, amnesty types, mainstream journalists, academic activists, peace protesters and latte-lefties turning up for this tribute to the victims of tyranny.
That’s all you could do — imagine. For it won’t occur in reality.

Enter conservative scholar Lee Edwards and former Ambassador Lev Dobriansky, who conceived of and now have brought to fruition a Victims of Communism Memorial, to be unveiled in a major ceremony on Tuesday, June 12 at 10 a.m.
To be located at the busy intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues (and ‘G’ Street), NW, in Washington, D.C., the Memorial will feature a statue modeled on the “Goddess of Democracy” used by the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that statue itself deliberately reminiscent of our own Statue of Liberty. Its inscriptions, front and back, will read as follows: “To the more than 100 million victims of Communism and to those who love liberty,” and “To the freedom and independence of all captive nations and peoples.”

Whenever I ponder the left’s selective outrage, I’m reminded of the response of a lefty scribbler to my point that on body counts alone, communist regimes were at least 10 times worse than the Nazis.
That may be so, he said, but the Nazis were worse because they went about genocide in such an industrialised manner.
Yes, it was so more humane out there in the killing fields — the fresh air, the pastoral surrounds . . . the blood-soaked ground.

That gawd-awful sound from underground? That’s the howl of subterranean bagpipes rolled on by Willy Wallace and Robert the Bruce as they spin in their graves.

Scotland’s biggest teaching union has voted by a clear majority to call for a ban on the armed forces targeting recruitment campaigns at schools.
The move follows an emotional debate at the EIS annual conference in Perth.
Supporters of the motion claimed the military was tackling a shortage of recruits by targeting impressionable teenagers in deprived areas.

Of course, there’s so many alternative career options for teenagers in deprived Scottish areas: trafficking drugs, soccer hooliganism, race rioting, belting up pensioners. Although if they’re too stupid to make a go of those capers, they could always become Scottish teachers.

A peculiar report from Reuters reveals again the foolish attitude prevalent in much modern journalism that should the world, nay the universe, change in any way then catastrophe must follow. The great irony in all this is that those who expect a never-changing world sneer at conservatives.

NEW YORK: Aboriginal rock art at Australia’s Dampier Archipelago has been named among the planet’s most endangered sites, joining treasures threatened by war, climate change, development and tourism.

And the morning cuppa was sprayed across the breakfast table on sighting a sidebar to the report in The Australian. Under a sub-head stating Global warming was the declaration that “Scotts Hut, Antarctica is being engulfed by vastly increased snowfall thought to be a result of changes in the weather”.

Who needs enemies when you’ve got Paul Keating on your side?
PAUL KEATING: They’ll do him no good. Because in the end those kind of conservative tea-leaf-reading focus group driven polling types who I think led Kim into nothingness, he’s got his life to repent in leisure now at what they did to him. They’re back, they’re back. Gary Gray lost the ’96 election with me and then lost ’98. He’s been given Kim Beazley’s best seat in Western Australia.
The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of their own shadow and won’t get out of bed in the morning unless they’ve had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out.

Communication lines between Greece and California were close to meltdown as Tony Mokbel’s people tried to set up a meet with Paris Hilton’s people.
However, latest reports from LA-LA land suggest it could be a futile quest and Hilton’s new-found freedom may be short-lived.

Boris Johnson lets fly. And who can blame him? Some pommy health nazi has come up with the insane idea of putting warnings on wine bottle labels. Take it away, Boris:

As a great French historian has pointed out, the vineyards of France are perhaps the single greatest cultural legacy of the Roman empire, and it is now more than two millennia since people in Britain first became aware of the intoxicating powers of wine.
In all that time, no government in history has yet thought the people so moronic that they needed to be told, on the bottle, that wine could go to your head; and Flint’s proposed act of desecration is all the more shameful and baffling when you consider – in your state of agreeable post-prandial rapture – that a bottle of wine is really a thing of quiet beauty.
For hundreds of years, the play of light on the glass and the liquid has entranced the eye of our greatest painters, from Caravaggio to Manet. Think of all those bottles twinkling away behind the bar girl in the Folies-Bergeres; think of that Van Gogh still life – the bottle, the bread, the cheese.
That’s what we want: simplicity, elegance – not some plodding Flintogram plastered all over the thing and telling you that wine is potentially bad for your health.

If this goes ahead, I’ll take odds-on it will be mandatory in the People’s Republic of Brackistan before you can utter “health and safety fascist nuttos”.

I’ve liked the cut of this bloke’s jib since he wiped the floor with Mongoose Moore.
Now, he’s got his own website. Bit short of content, though.