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The ranks of global warming doubters in the scientific community are swelling. The consensus ain’t so agreeable, it seems.
But now a study of all research papers between 2004 and 2007 indicates only seven percent give an explicit endorsement of that so-called consensus. Forty-five percent give an implicit endorsement. But 48 percent of the papers are classified as neutral — neither accepting nor rejecting the hypothesis. And only one of the 528 papers reviewed makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

At last. The US presidential election run-up is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Finally, the Fredheads can breathe. After months of waiting, former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) will announce his entry into the presidential race next week.

It’s been a while since this subject made the front page. And it’s good news, too.

THE US troop surge in Iraq has thrown al-Qa’ida off balance and produced a dramatic reduction in sectarian killings and a drop in roadside bombings.
David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, said the build-up of American forces in Baghdad since late January had produced positive outcomes. These included the killing or capture of al-Qa’ida fighters, causing the terrorist group to lose influence with local Sunnis.

No mention of this development, as you’d expect, from the ABC or The Age.

Forgive me, Father, I had baked beans on toast and two pints of Guinness and you know how much greenhouse gas that produces.
And Father, although I beseech, cajole and threaten like a Sister of No Mercy, I can’t get the family to recycle the toilet paper.
Further, Father, I was cruel to animals by hunting the bats and rats from the cave you expect us to live in.
And Father, I had impure thoughts when Mary and I were hugging trees.
Father, doesn’t global warming increase every time the gates of hell open to admit a sinner? You could do your bit to help there, Father.

Dom Anthony Sutch, the Benedictine monk who resigned as head of Downside School to become a parish priest in Suffolk, will be at the county’s Waveney Greenpeace festival this weekend to hear eco-confessions in what is thought to be the first dedicated confessional booth of its kind.

NewsMax finds blatant bigotry at the oh-so politically correct Washington Post.

Over to NewsMax:
Note that a smiling Uncle Sam insults an American ethnic group as “nuisances” while forcibly expelling them from the nation in a rickety boat titled “Cuban-Americans,” while these scowling, elderly and Mafiosi-clad people scream “we demand a chance to interfere with the ’08 election!”
By “interfere” we have to assume the cartoonist refers to the right, privilege and duty bestowed upon U.S. citizens known as “voting.” It so happens that the cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, is himself an immigrant to this country. In an interview with Time magazine he admitted to “leaning Democratic” in his politics.
I now invite you to contemplate the reaction from the usual political-correctness police had any other U.S. ethnic group (except overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans) inhabited that boat. Imagine the fire and brimstone (literal, perhaps) if instead of Fedoras (rarely worn by Cuban-Americans, by the way) the group had worn kuffiyeh’s, burkha’s and chadors!

A couple having sex on a “Super Spiral” ride at a Maine amusement park “horrified” a mother with young children who witnessed the act, say police.

Well, the place is called Wild Kingdom.

It goes against every bone in my libertarian body, but gawd, sometimes I think there should be a licence for procreating. But then, imagine administering it.

A Colorado Springs elementary school is banning the game of tag on its playground – after some children complained that they’d been chased or harassed against their will.
Assistant Principal Cindy Fesgen of the Discovery Canyon Campus school said running games will be allowed, as long as students don’t chase each other.
Fesgen said two parents complained to her about the ban, but most parents and children didn’t object.

Bet they’ve banned first, second and third ribbons from the school sports, too.
Thank the lawyers and fairytale-believing educationists for such nonsense.

You could understand the British Bolshevik Collective giving this vicious loon a gig, but Sky Channel?

Little Green Footballs reports that Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the UK-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, told a Lebanese TV interviewer he will dance in Trafalgar Square when Iran nukes Israel.
Bari Atwan is also a contributor to the BBC and Sky News, neither of whom seem to have much of a problem with this.

Since when did Pay-TV mean you pay to hear the fantasies of an anti-semitic, genocidal maniac? Purge needed there. And also at Sky’s increasingly lefty, blunder-prone Australian operation.

In view of the post below, our quote of the week seems apt:
Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

The quote’s author knew all about artistic talent.

What could be lower than a postmodern artist? A postmodern artist who’s also a lawyer?
Ho hum, a couple of poseurs claiming to be artists have produced works of mind-numbing unoriginality: creations intended to offend Christians.
For a national religious art competition, an artist with a tattered copy of the book of cliches has produced a “provocative” statue of the Virgin Mary shrouded by a Muslim burqa, while the stunningly ignorant artist-lawyer has created a holographic image of Osama bin Laden that morphs into Jesus Christ when moved on an angle.
However, the arty attorney claims she is no fan of bin Laden.
Or of up-do-date news either, it seems.
She believes the elusive terror kingpin should be extradited and put on trial.

Alan Tudge has a deft putdown for Peter Garrett’s bone-headed proposal to ban electric hot water systems because they produce up to three times the CO2 of alternative systems.

Garrett’s position, however, does not stand scrutiny. Putting aside the cost to families of this particular initiative (estimated by The Australian at $6.5 billion), the policy of banning products because of the CO2 levels they produce is fundamentally flawed. Consider the logical consequences. If an electric hot water system is banned because its greenhouse gas emissions are up to three times the level of alternative systems, then other products with similar characteristics should also be banned. Top of the list must surely be large-engine cars and four-wheel drive vehicles, which produce many times the greenhouse pollution of small cars or hybrids.
Following Garrett’s logic, other electric appliances in the house should also be banned. Old electric heating systems, for example, are horribly greenhouse-gas-intensive compared with modern heaters. The same goes with whitegoods, particularly refrigerators.

Tudge could have added that raucous, tuneless rock bands should be banned, too. After all, they are responsible for tonnes more greenhouse gases than say, string quartets.

As a vigourous critic of dumbed-down education policies, Kevin Donnelly no doubt deplores the high level of illiteracy issuing from modern schools.
Kevin would certainly have pointed to the traps involved in letting kids rely on Word spell-check to clarify their written efforts.
For that’s where schoolboy howlers incubate.
Kev in The Australian today (no link, yet).
As the saying goes, there are lies, dammed lies and statistics.

I’ll leave it to the family psychologists to explain this one:

KEVIN Rudd’s sister-in-law yesterday admitted to her secret past as a stripper, saying it was a period of her life she regretted.

Greg Rudd tells how true love blossomed at the strip club:

“Yes, she did tell me she was a part-time exotic dancer. Yes, I did visit her at the club where she worked.
“Yes, we started going out and when we started going out she stopped working at the club.

Notice, the brothers Rudd answer questions the same way, as if they’re the questioner.

A question Kevin Rude needs to answer: Even though you hope the average Aussie bloke will empathise with the lapse in control that found you in a strip joint in the Naked City (the way this is going we will end up with eight million stories), do you seriously believe the same fellas will swallow your line about phoning the missus next day and fessing up?

If by some amazing possibility it were true, you’ve got to worry about having such a masochist at the helm. I mean, anyone who phones across an ocean to tell the beloved he’s been perving at naked ladies must love punishment. China better keep an eye out. He’s likely to declare war on them just to get a thrashing. Hmmm, come to think of it, Kev would not be out of place with the British tories.

Seriously though, Rosemary comments sagely at the Bolta blog says that if Krudd did spill all to his wife, serious guilt was about.

In my experience, very young children when caught out in misbehaviour will outright lie to your face or say ‘they can’t remember’ in order to try and avoid punishment.KRudd’s supposed memory lapse reminds me of that and flies in the face of ‘fessing up’ to his wife the following morning. So what was he confessing to be a goose over? Usually referring to oneself as being a bit of a goose, means being a bit of an idiot. Was he idiotic about excessive drinking? Probably but thats ‘not’ normally the thing you’d apologise to your wife over (especially if she wasn’t there at the time). In my mind the ‘being a bit of a goose’ means that he was acting inappropriately with other women – thus the apology to his wife the morning after. If he had been cautioned by the establishment as well, then he must have obviously and evidently stepped across their line of acceptable behaviour.Yes he was and is a goose and a dill. Most men who have acted such usually front up shame-faced towards their wives afterwards. If KRudd was PM-material then he wouldn’t have tried to weasel his way out of this by citing memory loss. He would have told the entire truth and then weathered what came next. But no, maintaining the squeakly clean image is all important for KRudd and his actions and those of the left-wing press and his spin-doctors are the truth of that.One thing is for certain, is that if a senior federal coalition politician had been reported engaging in similar antics, the press and the opposition (and their hangers on) would have been baying for both blood and his resignation.

More Ruddie-nuddie fun:

KEVIN Rudd’s name has been linked to another strip club, in another embarrassing blunder for the Opposition Leader.
Yesterday, Rudd was the top friend on social networking site MySpace for Melbourne strip club Goldfingers, after his office accepted an offer in the morning for him to be a friend of the club.

Jack Marx’s talent, wit and readiness to suffer for his research should be a beacon for every young Australian writer. Oh, as far as I can tell he’s not political either, unless disturbing the Romper Stomper’s skirts is a form of activism. So Marx hits the imagination key and produces a very funny, clever hypothetical of Kev in Never Never-touch Land.

Kevin would have smelled her – the silky perfume, the hint of sweat, the musky other. Perhaps, out of sheer drunken instinct, he’d have reached up to touch, her finger shaking in front of his eyes, firmly, but seductively. She would have whispered a gentle admonishment; he’d have felt her breath in his ear, seen her naked breast become the universe in his eye. His glasses would have fogged to near zero visibility as she nestled her bosom on the crown of his head, her breasts as saddlebags over the man’s steaming ears. And, through the leaden swamp of drunkenness, to the sound of Tweet’s Oops Oh My, an erection would have creaked to life in the trousers of the future Australian Opposition leader.

Can’t have smart-arses attempting to make the Leader look even sillier, can we? So from Fairfax, it’s hit the road Jack.

For once, Kevin Rudd — er, Kevin Rude — wasn’t following John Howard’s lead down to the last detail.
More like Howard’s former boss, Malcolm Fraser.

It’s a statement that should be discussed on street corners, over dinner tables, in school rooms and certainly prominently in the mass media.
Instead, Mal Brough’s searing summary of the forces that brought about the utter disgrace of remote aboriginal communities is buried in midweek op-ed pages.
The next time some wide-eyed young idealist (been there) asks why can’t the government make everyone be nice and share just like in kindergarten, refer them to Mal:

“What got lost in the debate was people thought it was the holy grail, that releasing land would free people and empower people,” he said.
“It’s done just the opposite. It’s actually impoverished them.
“We need to actually recognise that communism didn’t work, collectivism didn’t work. It doesn’t work to say a collective owns it and you don’t have anything.”

Our quote of the week demonstrates not a great deal changes over the ages:

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannise their teachers.
– Socrates
(469 BC – 399 BC)

Here’s another weird apology for the sins of forebears:

A tribe in Papua New Guinea has apologised for killing and eating four 19th century missionaries under the command of a doughty British clergyman.
The four Fijian missionaries were on a proselytising mission on the island of New Britain when they were massacred by Tolai tribesmen in 1878.

It’s been a long time since a politician spoke this much sense. One can only hope the Republican Party and US voters agree.

His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending “unsustainable,” and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government’s fiscal ledger — spending and revenues — the next generation will suffer.
“Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it,” Thompson said. “So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less-unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges.”
Thompson readily concedes that he does not know “where all those chips are going to fall” when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could assure a better future for their children.
But these issues — national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath-care costs — “are worth a portion of a man’s life. If I can’t get elected talking that way, I probably don’t deserve to be elected.”

Very illuminating.

Aaarrrgghhhh, yer scurvy-ridden, lice-infested sea dog, get yer sorry carcass ter Dover Castle:

People with the surnames Morgan, Rackham, Bonny, Read, Kidd or Teach, are being invited to discover possible connections with the likes of Blackbeard and Calico Jack, in a series of events by English Heritage. Dressing as a sea dog is optional.

Accepted, Olaf. Now where’s my compensation?

Danes say sorry for Viking raids on Ireland
We are not proud of the massacres, says minister
Apology marks arrival of replica longboat in Dublin