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Emeritus Professor Philip Stott observes at his splendid Global Warming Politics blog that the world has indeed gone completely bonkers. The Prof expounds:
‘Nessie’, Scotland’s fabled Loch Ness Monster, apparently no longer ‘exists’. Legendary Nessie hunter, American Robert Rines, is abandoning his search for the beast after some 37 years [‘Veteran Loch Ness Monster Hunter Gives Up’, Daily Record, February 13]. And the cause of Nessie’s sad demise? You’ve guessed it – ‘global warming’:

New Idea is probably the most successful of the airhead magazines. That’s probably because it is run by airheads.

A commenter over at Bolta’s led me to Norman Borlaug, accurately described as a secular saint. Here’s part of his profile at Wikipedia:

During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.[3] He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

“Saving over a billion people from starvation”: How’s that for a rep? Never fear, there’s always the misery-guts classes viewing the half-full cup as bone dry.

His work has faced environmental and socioeconomic criticisms, including charges that his methods have created dependence on monoculture crops, unsustainable farming practices, heavy indebtedness among subsistence farmers, and high levels of cancer among those who work with agriculture chemicals.

These same gloomsters have whined their way into getting governments to adopt stupid anti-global warmening policies while I’m sitting here in a heavy pullover in February.

Avoid Swedish feminazis. They emasculate the most ferocious of males.

Edward Morrissey pretty much covers all bases on the lousiest piece of journalism to surface this week. It’s such a woeful use of the medium that the individual under attack is no longer the story. That honour now belongs to the messenger.

Geert Wilders, a Dutch MP whose film on Islam has fuelled the debate on race in Holland, says he has nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam.
This brave libertarian says: ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology’.
He wants an end to mosque building and Muslim immigration.
Demonstrating the love of freedom and equality that spurred thoughtful radicals a generation ago, Wilders says he is inspired by Dutch iconoclasm, Scandinavian insistence on free expression and the right to provoke.
Of course, the dopey Trotskyist Guardian surprises no rationalists with its wildly inaccurate political pigeon-holing, as it brands Wilders rightwing and repeatedly aligns him with European far rightwing movements.
Seems that to the Guardian’s perverted editorial judgement, opposing Islamic extremists’ bashing of homosexuals and subjugation of women is a “far rightwing” position.
What exactly does the Left stand for these days?
We already know that in Australia it stands for the continuation of horrific child abuse in remote communities.
I repeat: it must be embarrassing for anyone with brains and a conscience to line up with the Western Left.

What would we do without those clever dicks who manage to churn out topical jokes while the subject is still in the headlines?

BBC interviewer: Well, Sir Paul, in view of your post-nuptial tribulations, do you expect to be going down on one knee again?
Sir Paul: Er, Clive, I think you should refer to her as Heather.

This is an offer a pantsman like Henry Kissinger must have found hard to refuse.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chairman Mao Zedong made what Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.

Trouble is, after half an hour you feel like another 10 million.

Here comes the judge. And ain’t he purty?

A Boston-based federal judge wore a black cocktail dress, fish-net stockings and high heels when police arrested him for drunk driving after he rear-ended a pickup truck last week, sources said.

That’s not an earthquake, it’s just a threat. This is an earthquake!

With all those trillions earned from oil, you’d reckon Saudi royalty would have done a little more to drag their country out of the seventh century:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 14 (UPI) — Human Rights Watch called on the Saudi king Thursday to void the conviction of a woman facing execution for witchcraft.
In a letter to King Abdallah, the group said that Fawza Falih had been beaten to extort a confession she later repudiated in court. The charge itself has no basis in Saudi law, the letter argued.

Read this piece and be prepared to experience searing anger. Direct the anger at those chiefly responsible: the political class that wallowed in self-congratulations this week over their pathetic sorry symbols and platitudes. And as a former chief bureaucrat in Queensland, Kevin Rudd must bear a large lump of blame for the tragedies that Lara Wieland describes.

They hardly bat an eyelid at events that would make your stomach churn. A young mother in a drunken state beats her young child with a stick and screams that she is going to kill him. The next day, that same mother, sober, hugs her child and does not even think about the lasting emotional scars. Why would she when her mother did the same to her, and her neighbours do the same, and no one has ever told her that it is wrong?
Children who have had sexually transmitted diseases and have been raped and molested are now parents. No one ever helped them or told them that what happened to them was wrong or not normal. Today’s teenage parents grew up in homes with hardly any furniture or toilet paper or soap or toothpaste.

The destruction, pain, loss and despair that saturates remote Aboriginal communities was not always there, as Wieland points out.
No, the damage has occurred mainly in the past 30 years as “noble savage”, self-determination policies have prevailed under the reign of southern socialists and Aboriginal industry opportunists.
Another round of apologies is due now. Fat chance of it being made, considering who’s responsible.

Mal Brough presents more depressing evidence that this week’s apology means zilch on the frontiers:

“Tonight there will be children who will be subjected to unspeakable acts; who will see their parents or relatives with whatever form of substance abuse; who will actually live in the most deprived and depraved circumstances; who will put their heads down on concrete floors not having bathed for days, if not weeks; with lice and scabies; who will get rat bites tonight. All in Australia, all at a time when we are celebrating in our nation’s capital a new beginning.”

Call me old-fashioned but this normally broadminded old beggar is astonished that this poster is allowed to stand in a place as busy as the corner of Flinders and Elizabeth streets in Melbourne and that the usual whiners about sexism in media are silent about it. Surely, it’s not because the deviate behind it claims it’s art. It’s not art and it’s certainly not original. Morons have been daubing dunny walls with such representations for millenia. In the meantime it’s a pedestrian traffic hazard as strollers stop dead in their tracks on sight of the obscenity, causing freeway-style pileups in their wake.

Picture removed following Melbourne City Council’s decision to tear down posters. For those who came late, it was a photo of a poster in central Melbourne for a sculpture exhibition titled “C***S” and featuring representations of female genitalia.

Haven’t seen any press coverage. But then it would be a terribly difficult story to write while remaining within the bounds of decency.

UPDATE:
Seems this ‘confronting’ venture into depravity is brought to you by the Victorian Government with the assistance of the City of Melbourne.

UPDATE 2:
Reader Walter Plinge says the posters are gone. After a complaint to Neil Mitchell MCC had them taken down. The exhibition itself will have a warning posted outside.
The picture will be taken down in a few hours. The site gets enough offensive pollution from a certain troll.

It’s a battle to not let it get you down. For there is little doubt this society is becoming madder, badder and sadder.

Whoo-hoo, seems Mars is just a million smiles away.

The picture was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is on a scientific mission to the planet.

Katherine Prudhomme-O’Brien gets close and uncomfortable with Hillary Clinton:

I was not too far from the former President so I called out to him but he didn’t see me. Hillary came up next and I held out an old light green colored postcard towards her as others were holding tickets, baseballs and stuff like that.
She took my postcard, signed it and asked “Whose is this?” I said it was mine and asked her if she believed Juanita Broaddrick. “Who is that?” she asked.
I replied “The woman who said she was raped by Bill Clinton in 1978.”
“I don’t know anything about that” Ms. Rodham Clinton said, still holding my card
“I sent you a videotape of the interview she gave to Dateline NBC and I’m sure you have received it, I sent it by certified mail and that’s the receipt showing your office got it that your holding.”
At some point around this time someone behind her asked my name so I told them what it was.
She gave the receipt back to me.
I asked her again if she believed Juanita Broaddrick.
“I don’t know what your talking about.” she then started going back towards the direction she had come from, away from her husband.
I had to yell so she would hear me over the music as I asserted “That’s not true!” and went on to ask her “Why are you doing this? You’ve always been so good to rape survivors.”
I was thinking about how she started Arkansas’ first rape crisis hotline and helped start its first rape crisis center. I would have loved her way back then for that.
The people around me suddenly discovered they did not like me and began making vehement requests to have someone get me out of there.
A well groomed, handsome man in a suit with one of those clear, curly wires in his ear, a Secret Service agent perhaps, grabbed both my arms above the elbow and began pushing me backwards and telling me I had to leave.

We seek it here, we seek it there, where the hell is the global warmening?
In the wake of last week’s record freeze in China we hear of millions shivering in India.

Mercury levels in Mumbai have dipped and the temperature has been hovering around 9 -10 degrees Celsius over the past two days forcing the people to wear woollens and huddle around bon fires.
Youngsters said that they have never seen temperatures dipping to such levels in their life time.
“After so many years in Mumbai, we are facing cold wave conditions,” said Rakesh, a resident.
According to the Met office, the temperature of 9.4 degree Celsius recorded on Wednesday was the lowest in the past 58 years.

Even here it’s pullover weather and that’s unusual in February. Turned around from a planned bike ride this morning by misty rain, a chilly south-westerly and mercury hovering around the 15 degrees mark.

The British Government, to its credit, has wasted no time in shooting down a preposterous suggestion by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams that aspects of Islamic (sharia) law should be introduced in the country.
Revealing just how inadequate he is in his role, Williams said on Thursday he believed that the introduction of sharia in Britain was ‘unavoidable.’
It’s fortunate the archbishop wasn’t around in 1939. The Poms would now most probably be goosestepping to swastikas.
Of course, back then institutions like the Anglican Church stood for something other than appeasing every noisy minority group.

Brown’s spokesman said it was the government’s position that Islamic law ‘cannot be used as a justification for committing breaches of English law, nor should the principles of sharia law be included in a civil court for resolving contractual disputes.’

UPDATE:
Perhaps the archbishop thinks sharia law could provide the solution to Britain’s lager lout problem:

TEHRAN — A young Iranian man has been sentenced to hang for repeatedly drinking alcohol which is strictly banned in the Islamic republic, the Etemad newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The 22-year-old, identified only as Mohsen, was handed down the death penalty by a criminal court after being found guilty of drinking alcohol for a fourth time, the daily said.
“The defendant in this case has been sentenced to death and the official notification will be given soon,” it quoted Judge Jalil Jalili as saying.
“According to article 179 of the Islamic penal code, if someone drinks twice and is punished for it on each occasion he should be executed on the third offence,” Jalili said.

Barbarians!

Fat chance of this happening here in Victoria with the plods under the rule of Christine “Big Kev” Nixon:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The central Mexican city of Aguascalientes is considering paying a cash bonus to local police who slim down, amid the increasingly common sight of overweight officers in Mexico.
Aguascalientes city hall plans to decide next week on whether to pay 100 pesos (5 pounds) for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) that officers lose, a police spokesman said on Thursday.

Comment of the day over at Bolta’s:

Hillary carries a lot of baggage and has had 15 years to show her wares since becoming First Lady in 1993. To no avail. She may go close. But no cigar.