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Generally, this blog has a pretty good strike rate around the spring racing carnival. A few years ago, it tipped – in order – the Cox Plate trifecta and two years back, its fancy, Bauer, was beaten a lip in the Cup. Until yesterday I had Shocking as a certainty for Tuesday’s Cup, believing the brilliant So You Think wouldn’t handle the two mile journey. That opinion has been dispensed with following So You Think’s scorching three-length win yesterday over 2000 metres in torrential rain. I still think Shocking’s a strong chance but if So You Think repeats yesterday’s performance, put down your glasses. I’m boxing So You Think, Shocking, Descarado and Americain for the trifecta and with a hope and a prayer that he’ll honour our faith in him two years back, I’ll be I won’t be having a couple each way on Bauer at 60/1.
UPDATE: Down at the pub/TAB last night, a mate tipped me number 5 in the first at Randwick today. I had $5 each way, expecting it to start at around $5. It’s duly saluted and paid a phenomenal $14.50. Now that’s the way to start a day’s racing.

This won’t go away easily. The first tumbling pebble of an avalanche?

POLITICAL instability has struck Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ministry over allegations about the personal behaviour of a Cabinet minister.
In the first sign of trouble for the minority Labor government, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal an MP has approached Ms Gillard’s office to raise concerns about a minister’s behaviour.
Senior party figures are concerned by the allegations, fearing they could derail the Government’s one-seat majority.

Hmmm, Andrew Bolt has put some meat on the rumour bone.

The allegation involves purely personal behavior of no consequence at all to public policy even if the allegation were true, which is denied. And it’s alleged behavior which, if true, is of the kind which has been indulged in by dozens of other MPs and hundreds of journalists.

Whatever could the mystery minister be up to?

Welcome to Victoria, the state of the political hypocrite:

THE Greens candidate for Melbourne in the state election is working for a company that mines “dirty” brown coal.
Barrister Brian Walters is running for the key inner-city seat in the November 27 election while able to earn up to $7000 a day defending La Trobe Valley mining partner Downer EDI in a workplace death case.

And the state of timid leadership when it comes to the most powerful trade union in the land, the Loyal Brotherhood of Legal Sharks:

PREMIER John Brumby has refused to intervene in the dispute ripping apart Victoria’s Office of Public Prosecutions.
Turmoil has engulfed the OPP following director Jeremy Rapke’s public spat with his deputy, Gavin Silbert.
In a letter revealed in last week’s Sunday Herald Sun, Mr Silbert criticised his boss on a range of issues including his relationship with Ms Diana Karamicov, whom he promoted to the post of Associate Crown Prosecutor.

Not to mention the state of sheer bloody incompetence:

THE true costs of Australia’s largest desalination plant are becoming clearer, with Melburnians said to be facing another doubling of water bills to pay for the Brumby government’s $5.7 billion plant.

Are our curriculum building academics so out of touch that they aren’t aware of a British court’s finding that the Al Gore propaganda flick contained at least 11 blatant falsehoods and recommended that: In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.
Or are they so arrogant that they refuse to acknowledge an ever-rising groundswell of public opinion that rejects alarmist positions? Judge for yourselves.

CLIMATE change documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ will be included in the national curriculum as part of a bid to educate students on environmental sustainability across all subjects.

This slipped beneath the radar when first announced.

VICTIMS of domestic violence will be able to take an extra 20 days a year of paid leave under an Australia-first deal struck between a Victorian regional council and a union.
The deal between Torquay-based Surf Coast Shire and the Australian Services Union has been hailed as possibly the world’s most progressive workplace agreement on family violence.

That such a preposterous, unworkable benefit arises on the Surf Coast shouldn’t surprise. They smoke a lot of dope, spend too much time in the sun and vote Greens down there.
HT to Bolta, who points out some glaring impracticalities such a hare-brained scheme would deliver.

Leftwing, government-funded US media network NPR sacked commentator Juan Williams for these remarks he made on Fox News:
“But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

But NPR had no problems with this grotesque comment by its leftist journalist Nina Totenberg:
In July 1995, she said this about Sen. Jesse Helms: “I think he ought to be worried about the–about what’s going on in the good Lord’s mind, because if there’s retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.” Wishing death on the senator’s grandchildren is a particularly nice touch.

A Chinese dog owner clearly has plenty of time on their hands.

Is this the most powerful political ad ever made?

Better than nothing.

A Taiwanese woman left uninspired by the standard of men on offer in her city will finally tie the knot — with herself, Shanghai Daily reported early Saturday.
Chen Wei-yih has bought a flowing white bridal grown, planned a lavish reception and even hired a wedding photographer to mark her unusual matrimony, which takes place next month
Lonely Chen, 30, told local media she was urged to wed by friends and loved ones but could not find a decent husband in Taipei, Taiwan’s largest city.

Can’t remember ever lighting a fire in October. We’ve had the wood-burner going for two days now. Bloody manmade global warming!!!

Snow fell in several parts of the state including Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, while wind felled trees – some hitting houses.
At Kinglake, which was devastated by bushfires on Black Saturday, snow covered roofs, cars and tree tops.
Snow also fell at Mount Dandenong, Croydon South, Mooroolbark, Ballarat, the Grampians and was thick on the ground in the ranges northeast of Melbourne.

UPDATE:
Of course, if you point out unseasonal cold periods to an alarmist they’ll just prattle on about extreme weather of all types. This fits in with their “climate change” theory, the term invented after manmade global warming failed to come to the party.
Nevertheless, if you’re going to argue with the warmenistas, this article, which puts the rational view quite succinctly, is worth boning up on:

It is important to begin by emphasizing that few skeptics doubt or deny that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas or that it and other greenhouse gasses (water vapor being the most important) help to warm the surface of the Earth. Further, few skeptics deny that man is probably contributing to higher CO2 levels through his burning of fossil fuels, though remember we are talking about a maximum total change in atmospheric CO2 concentration due to man of about 0.01% over the last 100 years.
What skeptics deny is the catastrophe, the notion that man’s incremental contributions to CO2 levels will create catastrophic warming and wildly adverse climate changes.

Furthermore, alarmists rarely mention the bleeding obvious: of course world temperature stations show a warming trend; because the majority of world temperature stations are in developed urban locations that are warming.

Even man’s changing land use has an effect on measured temperatures, as survey efforts have shown urban areas, which have higher temperatures than surrounding rural locations, expanding around our temperature measurement points and biasing measured temperatures upwards.

Keith Richards doesn’t hold back in his new memoir, Life. Although his long-time partner in rock probably wishes he’d hadn’t told all.

In a final stab, he mocks Jagger’s sexual prowess. He says that Richards’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg found the singer under-endowed and ‘had no fun with the tiny todger’.
It is not just Jagger towards whom he vents his spleen, and no book about the Rolling Stones would be complete without a jibe or two aimed at the Beatles. Or, as Richards calls them, ‘The f****** Beatles’.
John Lennon was ‘a silly sod in many ways’ who came around to Richards’s house with Yoko Ono to take drugs. ‘I don’t think John ever left my house except horizontally,’ he says. Richards reveals he once told Lennon where he was going wrong: ‘You wear your guitar too high. It’s not a violin. No wonder you don’t swing. No wonder you can rock, but not roll.’

That’s on the must get list.

Paul McCartney was never our favourite Beatle. But, by golly, we’re right behind him here.

SIR Paul McCartney told last night how he let rip at a crazed cyclist who nearly ran him down.
Beatles legend Macca, 68, pushed a woman pedestrian out of the way of the speeding courier.

I’ve nearly been skittled a couple of times by biking maniacs tearing along the Southbank shared path as if hundreds of pedestrians are invisible.
And what’s with the fixed wheel bikes these jerks ride?
I had one when I was 11 and doing a paper round and used to dream of having one of those new-fangled three-gear rockets that were coming on to the market. The fixed-wheeler was a back-breaker up hills and bloody near uncontrollable when you got some speed up. It was the most hated machine I’ve ever had the misfortune to own. I saved like a Scotsman to buy a hub-braked second-hander and threw the fixed-wheeler into a shed where it was gradually cannibalised for parts.

“Progressives” must be delighted that some Australian athletes display none of those old-hat, 60s-style values. Like sportsmanship, decent representative behaviour and grace in defeat.

ALL-night drinking sessions and vandalism of rooms in the Delhi athletes village have been revealed.
The reputation of Australian athletes was also marred after two cases of bad sportsmanship, with an unnamed athlete sent home midweek by team chef de mission Steve Moneghetti.

New Zealand government scientists have been caught cooking the books to boost their manmade global warming case.

The specific charge brought against the Kiwi government was that its climate scientists had taken the raw temperature records of the country and then adjusted them artificially with the result that a steeper warming trend was created than would otherwise exist by examination of the raw data alone.
Indeed, the original Kiwi records show no warming during the 20th century, but after government sponsored climatologists had manipulated the data a warming trend of 1C appeared.

Still, Labor and Greens’ clowns in Canberra continue with their idiotic carbon taxing plans which will double the power bills of most Australians and make absolutely no difference to the global temperature.

FURTHERMORE:

US physics professor: ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’

Lefty teachers should be compelled to watch this. And then feel very, very ashamed.

Gratefully lifted from Andrew Bolt’s blog.
One can only hope Tony Abbott witnessed this when he attended the conference and that he was inspired to act on her wishes.

Just pedalled back from following the World Championship road race peloton through Corio. They burnt me off so I decided to wend my way home through the back streets of Norlane. Out of the blue an oik in an old Commodore floored it and with roaring donk and smoke billowing beneath barrelled down a quiet residential street. The idiot didn’t realise that at the end of the street were about 30 wallopers on bike race crowd control duty. There’s a special type of law breaker out that way.

Now, that’s the way to win a premiership. I’d be one of the few Magpies’ supporters to be glad they didn’t win by another goal. Last week I had $50 on them to win by 61 points or more. After the draw I threw my ticket away not realising that all bets were still on. Fifty bucks is good value for the first premiership in 20 years.

A likely story.
OCTOBER 1–A Florida man arrested Wednesday on drug charges told cops that a bag of cocaine found hidden inside his buttocks did not belong to him. Though the suspect did cop to ownership of a bag of marijuana hidden alongside the coke.

Short of wit and reason, the frothy-mouthed Left commentariat increasingly resorts to mindless and tasteless abuse.

Writer Marieke Hardy’s column was pulled down from The Drum’s website yesterday. While some thought it was an attempt at humour, it mostly provoked criticism for being offensive, including a line hoping Mr Pyne would “get attacked by a large and libidinous dog”.

Oh, but don’t you know, they’re so edgy and confrontational.
Er yeah, and dumb and offensive.

Expect much unconvincing obfuscation and “denialist” abuse from alarmist quarters on learning of this measured approach from the most eminent of scientific bodies.

THERE are gaps in scientific understanding making predicting the extent of climate change and sea level rises impossible.
That’s the claim of Britain’s highest scientific authority, the Royal Society.
The society’s revised Guide to the Science of Climate Change has been interpreted as a retreat from politics by an organisation regarded as the world’s most authoritative scientific body following the scandal that engulfed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One can only hope the mainstream media, which like all businesses will suffer unnecessarily from insane carbon tax measures, gives this the coverage it deserves.
The society’s position was among others embraced in this report we told you about in August.