Slattsnews

Kevin Myers explains why a certain end is nigh for all those in the western world who thought they could go on forever living beyond their means.

Pretending anything is free is the cruellest and stupidest aspect of any creed, because it injects a bubble of self-righteous gas right into the heart of the work-ethic. Hundreds of millions of people across Europe now believe they are entitled to “free” health services; and they believe this most acutely if they are not prepared to work. The welfare state’s original safety net became an occasional hammock which became a permanent bed. Hence the malingerer’s unspoken refrain: “No, thank you, waiting on tables or picking fruit is beneath me: I will live on the state, and illegal foreigners may do the work that I choose not to do: but please do not allow these parasitic immigrants to become legal.” That is the brainless heresy which unites Athens, Aberdeen, Athlone and even Arizona.
Or rather, did unite. It’s over. That model is finished. The era of inter-generational grand larceny is coming to an end. So back to the drawing board, chaps.

Comment of the day to Bolt’s blog
from The Old and Unimproved Dave:

Am I ever gonna lead Labor again?
Doc Neeson could tell you, Kevin….

Sting once wrote Dead End Job with The Police in which he sang:
Don’t wanna be no millionaire,
don’t wanna own no mint,
I don’t wanna be no tax exile,
And I don’t mind being skint.

Hmmm, the Daily Mail Online reports:

Rock star Sting has avoided paying 50p income tax on £20million of his earnings by giving himself a bumper payout, it was revealed today.

Can’t be too critical, I suppose. He’s at least made poverty history – for himself:

The singer and poverty campaigner saved himself up to £2million just before the rate was raised, his latest filings with Companies House show.
Accounts for Sting’s firm, Steerpike (Overseas) Limited, disclose he earned £20.045million in the calendar year 2009.
The massive payout – which pushed his company into a loss of £20.49million – came ahead of the imposition of the 50p tax rate in April last year.
It meant he was legally able to avoid £2million in income tax – paying £8million at the 40 per cent rate rather than £10million at the 50 per cent rate.

At Port Fairy’s Star of the West hotel you can watch your hard-earned gurgle down the pipe as another red hot cert fails to greet the judge.
For your convenience the pub has Sky Racing monitors mounted above its urinals.
The downside for pub cleaners is that in the excitement of the race, the odd punter could stray from his target.
Not so in certain English pubs where techology has been employed to keep “gotta-go” customers on the straight and narrow.
Reckon there’s a huge market of wives and mums out there champing at the bit for Bunnings to stock a household version of this aim-and-shoot technology.

Every day we get closer to that tipping point: when the vast majority wakes up to the fact they’ve been utterly had.
Random comments from Son of Climategate:
<3373> Bradley: I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year
“reconstruction”.
But what about the consensus?

<0810> Mann: I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s
doing, but its not helping the cause
And this is supposed to be about science, not politics?

<2440> Jones: I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the
process
What else are they hiding besides the decline?

It is my opinion that we need to re-assess the urbanization effect on surface air
temperature records for at least some regions of the continents. I am glad that you are
going to redo it using the updated dataset. I expect you to obtain the new outcome.
You don’t like my scientific principles? That’s OK, I’ll find some new ones.

Now, if the above doesn’t produce much ducking and weaving in Canberra, this revelation will have champions of an ETS scurrying for cover like kerosened cats.

Not content with dragging the world economy toward Purgatory, Euro busybodies have come to another astonishing conclusion:

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration
Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.

Next? Fire doesn’t provide warmth, there’s no merriment in beer, pies don’t fill your belly and John Cleese isn’t funny?

Mark Steyn has a terrific piece about a hit novelty song from the sixties. Be warned, the bloody tune will stick around all day.

There was an omen First Four bet in the last at Doomben yesterday for every poor blighter who has done time in the doghouse or worse.
You needed to finish in order: G’day Old Mate, Rock Home Late, Hangover Henry and Carry Me Bluey.
Alas, fate dispensed with the preliminaries, and Carry Me Bluey saluted the judge, with the contributing factors finishing well back in the pack.

Non-stop cringing in this household during the week at the pathetic fawning by Gillard et al toward a certain failed experiment in US politics. The quivering voice, the hand on the presidential bum, the cow eyes as he spoke, were beyond nauseating. If these embarrassing actions were made under advice, then the PM’s advisers are even more out of touch with the voters than I would have thought possible. Everyone of this household’s acquaintance, whether crusty conservative or as far to starboard port as politically possible, was repulsed. Whatever happened to the dignity of prime ministerial office?
Regrettably, Gillard’s lovesick teen performance was almost pipped in the gauche stakes by Speaker of the House Harry Jenkins who sent best wishes to Obama’s “cheese and kisses” and “billy lids”.
Add these puerile utterances to state gifts of Vegemite and Sherrin footballs and you can only wonder what intelligent US obervers make of us. They’ve probably concluded that Kath and Kim is a documentary.

Talk about cursed! I left the saltmine yesterday by the usual route – from the office tower foyer, one floor down in the elevator to the car park. As the lift door closed, I realised the previous occupant had left a paint-blistering bum bomb. Fortunately, the ride was swift and I didn’t need to take another breath.
Now, 99 times out of 100 I’d step out of that lift to an empty passage.
But yesterday, as I staggered out enveloped in this sickening pong, three blokes stood there waiting for the lift. And their looks said it all. And more.

Like most ideological fanatics, Greens and their supporters tend to adopt an intellectually superior attitude.
But, increasingly, the really clever people are laughing at them.
Chortles across the net sparked by this tip at VexNews.

A Canberra source tells VEXNEWS:
Your little mate SHY (Greens Senator and Kennedy Room stalwart Sarah Hanson-Young) who wants to end the ANZUS alliance was doing all she could to meet Obama last night, like an ugly teenage schoolgirl trying to meet a rock star. Haven’t seen her move that quick since maccas had free lentilburger vouchers…

“Tool”, I think, is the correct term from the young’uns vernacular.

Imagine the chorus of “But . . . But . . . But” echoing from the climate alarmists camp as they frantically search for refutation.

The new emissions data support the arguments of skeptics asserting carbon dioxide emissions do not impact global temperatures as much as IPCC computer models predict. In light of the 2010 data, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen by fully a third since the year 2001, yet global temperatures have not risen during the past decade. Global warming activists argue that carbon dioxide emissions are the sole or primary factor in global temperature changes, yet global temperatures show no change despite a 33% increase in global carbon dioxide emissions. The fact that global temperatures are not rising despite such a significant increase in carbon dioxide emissions provides validation of skeptical arguments, not a cause for heightened alarm.

By Jingo, Barnaby Joyce possesses a deft turn of phrase. Well worth a few minutes to read:

Keating never really blew my hair back. My initial vision of Keating, on the mentioning of his name, is a man proclaiming to the nation that ”this was the recession we had to have”. He was generally the narrator more than the architect. He remains a doyen of the press gallery, and is now deified from musicals to bookstores, but I am always searching for the ardent navigator inside the incisive invective that the media continually proclaims to the world he possesses. He was good but he was Dean Jones not Bradman.
His forebear does, I believe, hold a far more intriguing narrative. Hawke, the drinker, the Rhodes Scholar, the charmer, the statesman, with an innate sense of the Australian people. Hawke was confident and his love of people put him at ease with the electorate and vice versa. Hawke is the triumph of the America’s Cup, the round of golf and a person who was genuinely Australian yet had that presence which resonated in the faces of other world leaders.

Who says we don’t have some tough buggers at News Ltd who’ll go all ends out to get the story?

The journalist, Simon Eroro, won the annual in-house award run by News Limited – Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm – for a story which required him to cross rivers and jungles to reach a group of rebels, only to be told he must first agree to the circumcision as part of a cleansing ceremony. Mr Eroro agreed – and got the interviews.

Even if someone beat Simon to the interview, he still qualified for Scoop of the Year. As Guru Bob would have once said: ”Tink about it, Tony”.

Bet this gives Wayne Swan ideas:

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

Hmmm, can’t you just see it? Taxes on Easter eggs, birthday cards and Father’s Day pressies. On the plus side, taxpayer funded busybodies might not be so eager to ban Christmas celebrations if they’re doing themselves out of public shekels.

Wouldn’t we have some fun here and in other blogs if this nasty piece of totalitarianism ever saw the light of day.

NEWSPAPERS and magazines could be fined up to $30,000 for “exceptionally grave” or persistent breaches of media standards.

Marvellous, isn’t it, how the most obvious trait of would-be dictators is their stupidity.
Just as the proliferation of online media refutes dated claims of restricted media concentration, any action to punish reports or commentary the lefties don’t like will be stymied by bloggers and the like copying, spreading and commenting on the offending pieces. All the try-on tyrants will do is draw greater attention to what irks them.

UPDATE:
Professor Bunyip elaborates on dopey despots who’d license opining. And the Prof promises to keep the bullies busy:

Whatever they end up calling the coming media regulator, it will be peppered immediately with so many of the Professor’s complaints that the staff will need to double at the very least.

Me too!

For a minute there, I thought Mark Steyn was pulling our legs. But I checked and yes, this is true:

Stanley Thornton Jr. of California receives Supplementary Security Income disability checks from the Social Security Administration in order to sit around the house all day, wearing a giant diaper and a giant onesie, sucking on a giant pacifier and playing with a giant baby rattle. Stanley Jr. runs a website for fellow “adult babies” called BedWettingABDL.com. I believe I first heard of the “adult baby” phenomenon some years ago in London. If memory serves, there was a club, and the members lay around in giant cribs being read bedtime stories by a bosomy nanny. Minor celebrities and possibly backbench Tory Members of Parliament may have been involved. In those days, it was what we called a “fetish” and you had to do it on your own dime. Now it’s a “disability” and the United States Government picks up the tab. And, if that’s not progress, what is?

Wait, there’s hilariously more:

Last week, several dozen members of “Occupy Las Vegas” occupying land located under the final approach to Runway 19 at McCarran International Airport narrowly missed being hit by a 50-pound slab of what’s euphemistically known as “blue ice” that fell from the bathroom of the president’s plane. Perhaps, as a symbol of the new post-self-reliant America of adult babies, Air Force One should be fitted with a giant diaper.

Our left wing parties would totally condemn any instance of racial vilification, wouldn’t they?
Wouldn’t they?

LABOR and the Greens have voted down a Coalition motion to condemn environmentalists who called indigenous leaders “toxic coconuts” for speaking out in favour of the Kimberley gas hub.

Hypocrisy – they have it on their Weeties every morning.