Bout Time

THE bodies of Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel will in future be brought home on Australian aircraft escorted by at least two fellow soldiers, defence head Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said today.

Air Chief Marshal Houston said the changes were prompted by the blunder involving Australia's first military casualty in Iraq, Private Jake Kovco, whose body was left in a Kuwait mortuary while the remains of a Bosnian man were sent to Australia instead.

Lucy’s View

Every now and again, I like to say ‘hi’ to a moonbat. Actually, it’s a lot less than ‘every now and again’, but this troll’s level of self-confidence was so indescribably - je ne ces quoi (you need a little magic in your life, after all) - that I’ve decided today is the day! So, let’s all say ‘hi’ to Lucy:
Once a month or so i like to trawl around the murky world of right wing blogs. I also like to leave a little comment to try and spark some intelligent debate but as yet i have not found a spark of intelligence among any of them.
For a small sample of Lucy’s challenging commentary, this was the little missive of the month that so caught my attention, deposited a while ago here at AWH:
All religious books should be banned, it is all dangerous nonsense anyhow.
And, just so you are all in full appreciation mode, here is another:
You want a debate over wars of religions and wars of communists countries although technically they was totalitarian regimes and had nothing in coming with the marxist doctrine except in name.
Well, I was certainly left to do some very deep thinking after reading these pearls. So much so, I decided to take a closer look at this fierce (and intelligent – with sparks) nemesis of the ‘murky’ right.

When i was part of the media i would be the recipient of many correspondence from people of a right leaning persuasion who disagreed with my opinions. . .
Let me hazard a guess that there might also have been a fair few who were simply trying to decipher your syntax, Lucy; a tricky ask, really, given I suspect you would be replying in writing. . .

. . .and that's their prerogative, if i said things that everyone agreed with then what would be the point of me saying them!
Oh, no point at all, Lucy. And I must remember that. Note to self: never, ever say anything everyone might agree with.

Using my knowledge of how pretentious and righteous these bigots can be, I liked the idea of running a blog to keep my hand in as it were, but it seems that the right wing bloggers are afraid to indulge in a little debate, my comments go unanswered and I know that they visit me here because my stats page tells me they have cast an eye this way, but still no debate.
Oh – my – Gawd. . .

In the face of all that ‘knowledge’, and having ‘not found a spark of intelligence’ here among the ‘pretentious and righteous bigots’ (did you like my French, Luc’?), and with such searing debating points left here at AWH by Luc’ such as, ‘It explains why America is going down the tubes quicker then you can say Tiberius the penisless’, or ‘worked though didn't it . . .ha ha ha ha..suckers’, I shall have to seriously consider hanging up my debating spurs. But let’s read on, shall we?

Come on conservative bloggers, have the courage of your convictions and engage with me, i'm not that scary and you don't need to go shy on me. Just because i am a trained professional in the art of text warfare. . .
From what I’ve seen, Lucy appears to be having considerable trouble stringing a coherent sentence together, let alone an argument. But by all means, best of luck with all that ‘art of text warfare’ stuff, Luc’.

. . .and there isn't anything that you can call me that i haven't been called before. . .
I believe you, Lucy.

. . .so what are you afraid of? All i can surmise from the lack of retaliation is that you don't actually have the well rounded views and arguments that you write about so cleverly on your blogs, maybe it's a peacock thing with it all being show.
No, I very much suspect it’s a ‘not wanting to be cruel to dumb animals’ thing.

Take a step into my domain, i will be gentle and who knows, maybe you will become a better person for it and if you ask nicely, i may even write a guest column for you, that would get your readers talking.
Ugh.

An Australian news roundup

Corruption at Telstra

French technology giant Alcatel has admitted that it made a "strategic error" in keeping prices for its internet equipment high, costing Telstra hundred of millions of dollars. Less than a week after a leaked Telstra document claimed it had been overcharged, Alcatel's Australia/New Zealand chief Hilary Mine said the company failed to bring prices down, in line with the global market, for a 1999 contract. Under Telstra's Data Mode of Operation (DMO) project, Alcatel was handed the contract, worth as much as $1 billion, to supply DSL equipment, which turns Telstra copper wires into high-speed data connections. By 2003 Telstra, fed up with Alcatel's prices, named NEC as its new DSL provider, and last year, Ericsson was named as a third supplier....

Last week, an internal Telstra document outlining 15 years of problems with Alcatel was tabled at a Senate hearing. The document was prepared by senior Telstra executives concerned that Alcatel had been handed the whole of a $3.4 billion deal to build a residential fibre and DSL network. Industry sources said Alcatel's pricing was up to 40 per cent higher than its rivals. Telstra's chairman Donald McGauchie last week defended the shortened tender process introduced by chief executive Sol Trujillo, which some insiders have described as secretive and hasty....

Alcatel was recently handed a deal worth an undisclosed sum to provide computer-based "soft switches", despite Telstra's previous management deciding to give that work to rival Lucent Technologies after a long testing process. Telstra is in the process of choosing a new vendor for an upgrade to its long-distance optical networks, and has been discussing the project with Alcatel, according to insiders. Senior networks executive Bill Felix is believed to have raised concerns about Alcatel's capability in the area before he left abruptly last week. "With fixed-line projects, it doesn't matter what the question is - the answer is Alcatel," a source familiar with Telstra's network projects said yesterday....

More here






Nobel winner urges more tax cuts



When one of the world's most respected economists meets Federal Treasurer Peter Costello tomorrow he says he will advocate more income tax cuts for workers. US-based economist Professor Edward C. Prescott, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2004, said he would put the case for the cuts to Mr Costello. "The US has room for more tax cuts too," Professor Prescott said today, after delivering a speech at the University of New South Wales. "When you move to a savings rather than a tax and transfer system, a pay-as-you-go type system, you reduce government expenditure by those responsibilities," he said. "The gain from moving to that is it doesn't distort the ... time allocated between market and non-market activities and time is the most precious commodity."

Professor Prescott, who is the W.P. Carey Professor at Arizona State University and the senior monetary adviser for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said cutting tax increased productivity in the labour market by providing an incentive to work. "Europe, with its tax and transfer system to finance retirement and health, is throwing away 25 per cent of its output," he said. "The Europeans only work about 70 per cent of the Australians or the Chileans or the New Zealanders or the Japanese. Why? They have high tax rates."

More here






Unbelievable police bureaucracy

Tasmania Police is set to break the record for project delays, with a digital radio network first put to tender in 1995 unlikely to be delivered before 2008. Moves to replace the litigation-plagued Tasmanian Mobile Radio Network have been hit by delays, forcing police to continue using the old analogue network. Angry officers working on the analogue system say radio dropouts and outdated technology are putting public safety as risk.

The Police Association has warned that the quality on the analogue network is poor, but the service has admitted that a network to replace one dumped in 2004 after officers complained of poor coverage, will not go to tender until later this year, making it unlikely to be delivered next year as promised. "We've been told it will be February 2007, so we'd be pretty cranky if it was 2008," Police Association president Sergeant Randolph Wierenga said. Deputy Commissioner Jack Johnston, who said last year that he expected to go to tender in August 2005, now says specifications will be available some time this year.....

More here






Another ID card fizzler

The Medicare smartcard launched in Tasmania two years ago has been quietly scrapped, a Senate estimates hearing has been told. More than $4.5 million was spent on developing the card, which featured a microchip with far greater data capacity than the magnetic strips on current Medicare cards. Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott launched the smartcard in Launceston in 2004 as part of the now stalled HealthConnect electronic patient record program. It is understood only 1 per cent of eligible Tasmanians expressed interest in registering for the card.

Labor Party Queensland Senator Claire Moore said news that the program had ended was a surprise. "We were informed by Human Services officials that the Tasmanian trial had ended as of last Thursday, and that the lessons from it would flow into the wider access card project," Ms Moore said. "I'm wondering when they would have got around to telling us if we hadn't asked the question."

Since the smartcard was developed, Medicare Australia has become part of the Human Services mega-department, which is planning its own multiple-agency card. A spokeswoman for Human Services Minister Joe Hockey said no final decision had been made on the card, but the Tasmanian trial was being reassessed in light of Government approval for the access card. "We're trying to work out how to manage the transition," she said. "We don't want people to come in and register for the Medicare smartcard and then have to get a new one when the access card is up and running. "We may be in a position to announce what's happening later in the week."

More here






Australia to the rescue yet again

East Timor, The Solomons and now a second time in Indonesia. Strange that I can remember no offers of help from abroad for our own cyclone disaster in north Queensland. But our local North Queenslanders helped themselves pretty well anyway



The first of a team of Australian disaster and medical experts will arrive in Indonesia today to begin work in the earthquake-ravaged city of Yogyakarta. More than 5400 people were killed, many thousands more injured and as many as 200,000 left homeless when the 6.3 magnitude quake struck on Saturday. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who today described the situation as "incredibly severe", said the Government had committed a large contingent of experts to help. "What we are doing is we have sent a seven-person AusAID team that will be in place in Yogyakarta today to establish a support base for co-ordination, logistics and the medical support presence, and we are sending a health team in there of 27 medical and surgical personnel," he told ABC Radio. "There will be surgeons, anaesthetists, operating staff, disaster medicine specialists and so on."

Australia is one of many nations to dispatch aid for the tens of thousands of earthquake victims as the United Nations issued an urgent call for field hospitals, medical supplies and tents. UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland, who helped oversee the tsunami relief in Indonesia's Aceh province, said yesterday the effort should be quicker in reaching quake victims and rebuilding on the country's main Java island. "This time I think it's going to be easier because Java is not as remote as Aceh," he said. "We are now able to help in a matter of hours after an earthquake strikes," Mr Egeland said. "We are better co-ordinated now than ever before." .....

More here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Smart army man trumps scare-mongering media



An Australian military commander has tried to ensure truth does not become a casualty of conflict in East Timor, but embarrassed a TV network in the process. Australian commander in East Timor Brigadier Michael Slater appeared this morning in a live cross from Dili to the Nine Network's Today show, with helmeted and heavily armed Australian soldiers standing behind him. He was pressed by Today host Jessica Rowe about whether Dili really was as safe as the Australian military claimed, given the presence of armed soldiers at his shoulder. Pausing briefly, Brig Slater replied: "Jessica I feel quite safe, yes, but not because I've got these armed soldiers behind me that were put there by your stage manager here to make it look good. "I don't need these guys here. "It is not safe on the streets, as it is back home in Sydney or Brisbane - no it's not, if it was we wouldn't be here. But things are getting better every day."

Rowe apologised, saying she didn't realise the guards had been placed specifically for the interview. But Rowe ran into more trouble when she persisted with her line of questioning, and referred to footage of looting and violence. Brig Slater told her the pictures were a "couple of days old". TV rival the Seven Network gleefully circulated grabs of the interview this morning.

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

The "race card" gets an airing in Australia

A motel manager rents out a room to two people -- one black and one white -- but backs off when four people turn up to occupy the room. That's racism?

A Sunshine Coast motel is at the centre of a race row after being accused of refusing to allow a black couple who had booked accommodation to stay the night. Beenleigh couple Trevor Johnson and Colleen Malone, both 28, have lodged a complaint with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission claiming the motel refused to honour their booking because of their race. The couple, who are of Aboriginal and Pacific Islander descent, claim the motel manager told them: "I don't have to put up with people like you."

Ms Malone said the experience had demoralised them and cost them their dignity in front of their friends, who they had been visiting. "I felt so small. I know it was because I was dark," Mr Johnson said. Ms Malone said she was with a white girlfriend when she went into the motel to book a room in Mr Johnson's name. The motel manager, who cannot be named, accepted a $110 deposit.

But when Ms Malone was joined by Mr Johnson and her friend's partner, the four were refused entry to the room. Mr Johnson claims the manager threatened to phone the police if they did not leave and refused to refund their deposit. "I said to her I was going to call the police, instead. They were dumbfounded when they arrived," he said. "The police advised us she wasn't going to give our money back. We advised her we were going to take her to court."

Ms Malone said they had since been offered $1000 by the manager to "go away" but they refused the money because what they really wanted was an apology. Mr Johnson said he had contacted a lawyer and intended to pursue the matter.

In a letter to the commission, the manager confirmed she had accepted a booking for the couple but claimed she had asked only "the extra people" to leave. "At no stage did I ask all to leave, and as the four chose to leave, that is the decision they made," she said.

"I did not see any reason to refund money as most nights of the year are busy with us, and particularly weekends." The manager said she and her husband had been in the industry as owners and managers for 16 years and could not have survived with "any discriminatory inclination". She said she was offended by the accusations.

The above article appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on May 28, 2006

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Dare you question..

..the green movement!!

Recently that wretched John Howard stirred up a lot of environmentalists by daring to, heaven forbid, talk about nuclear power!! Wind wind wind, I tell you is the future, throw in the Kyoto protocol, and that wretched Bush who won't sign it, and greenies will be feeling all warm and fuzzy inside.

Never mind that windfarms will be built in that eeeevil Bush's home state Texas, or that environmentalist Ted Kennedy opposes them in Nantucket Sound, because the flashing lights on the turbines will steal his precious stars and nighttime views, whats this world coming to when you can't give a free kick to America or conservatives.

This is where Europe (referred to by some, drunk as skunks on common sense, as Eurabia) steps in, in many ways Eurabia seems to be playing the role of Guinea pig. I remember reading somewhere "A fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man learns from another's", I know I should really say wise 'person', but I am hoping the PC brigade will come for me with the wet lettuce, I shall meet them with sharpened steel and boot heel.

But back to Eurabia, they are so progressive that the rest of the world can just sit back and see how to do things and learn from their mistakes. We not only stand to benefit from observing their flirtation with Islamic extremism, but also wind power.
It [Germany] has decided that generating nuclear power is not the way forward, and it has decided eventually to close all the country's existing nuclear power stations.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, Germany is committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions. Wind power has obvious advantages as the electricity it generates is non-polluting.
Learn you fools, learn from Chernobyl, how many millions must die!!
The country's great hope for is for a future of green energy, and in particular wind power. Germany's politicians plan to have 20% of the country's energy coming from renewable sources like wind by 2020.

But a row is brewing over the cost of building the power lines which will be needed. Germany's energy agency says this will cost 1.1bn euros ($1.4bn; £750m) or an extra 17 euros a year for each household.

But energy specialist Professor Wolfgang Pfaffenberger, of Bremen International University, says these figures are too low and it will be domestic customers who will foot the bill. "It is a big problem for industrial users to pay these extra prices because other countries have cheaper energy. To keep the jobs here, and stop businesses from leaving, more of the costs will be pushed to the domestic sector."
Didn't Bush and Howard refuse to sign Kyoto protocol because it would hurt our respective country's economies, imagine that putting their country's interests before mother earth.
For now, few in Germany are questioning the country's wind energy programme. The savings in terms of greenhouse gas emissions are politically popular.
Wait till jobs get blown over the border to other countries, lets see how popular it is then.
So once again we just need to sit back and observe folks, who knows maybe the Germans will be carried away by the winds of prosperity because of this.

Meanwhile, I say let mean ol' Howard fiddle with uranium cakes and tinker with fissile material, lets see how that goes, just ignore the few scare mongers and usual suspects.

My money is on him.

Dumb but Leftist: Your future doctor

Medical schools are giving students coveted university training places based on "personality assessments" that include asking for their views on the Iraq war and gay marriage. Less academically gifted students are leapfrogging those with better marks by signing up for coaching programs that school them in handling the interview questions - fuelling critics' claims that the personality tests are skewing the selection process for the nation's future doctors away from the best and brightest.

Some interviewees have been asked to debate the rights and wrongs of providing in-vitro fertilisation services to gay people. Other questions include what applicants' parents do for a living and whether they went to a private school.

Some senior doctors are now accusing universities of attempting to "socially engineer" medical school intakes by giving preference to candidates who reflect the interviewers' views, allegedly often left-wing. The interviews - usually conducted by a panel comprising members of the public as well as doctors - often ask applicants to talk about their earliest memories, or discuss their biggest disappointment in life and how they coped with it. The process is supposed to identify "well-rounded personalities" that some claim will make better doctors.

Greg Deacon, president of the Australian Society of Anesthetists, described the situation as "absolutely appalling" and said he had been "speaking to a number of people who have been upset" at the way the interview process at a number of universities - including the University of NSW and Newcastle University - has been conducted. "Questions that are being asked, and that should never be asked, are questions such as 'What does your father do?', 'What does your mother do?', 'Where do you live?' and 'What school did you go to?'," Dr Deacon said. "If you went to a private school, or your father is a doctor, you are simply not going to be selected. The justification is the personal biases of those doing the interviews - they are trying to engineer the selection of medical undergraduates to further their own desires." He said he knew of one student whose HSC results put her in the state's top 40. "She was asked these questions," he said. "Because her father was a specialist doctor and went to private school, she didn't get in. It's hard to comprehend."

Dr Deacon said students' views on Iraq or gay marriage had "nothing to do with ability to be a doctor", and the risk was that interviewers would frown on candidates whose views clashed with their own. But these latest claims are rejected by the heads of Australia's 17 medical schools, which are already under pressure over assertions that the teaching of sciences, including anatomy and pathology, has been cut back to dangerous levels. The medical schools say interviewers are trained to judge an applicant's ability to reason and argue intelligently, not the position they take. But at least one university is scrapping the interview process after finding no evidence that the students selected by panels performed any better during the course.

And experts who assess personalities have cast doubts on the validity of the interviews. A NSW forensic psychiatrist, Julian Parmegiani, does personality assessments in situations such as parole applications and court-ordered psychiatric evaluations. He writes in the latest issue of NSW Doctor, the magazine of the NSW Australian Medical Association, that the interviews "will not identify altruistic, kind and empathetic doctors" but merely the students best able to divine what interviewers wanted to hear. "Successful students might be just a tad more psychopathic, manipulative and intent on recouping their investments," Dr Parmegiani writes.

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Orwellian Seattle Schools

George Orwell foresaw a time when the rulers of society would change the meaning of words so that some types of discussion became impossible. The powers that be in the Seattle public school system are having a good try at doing just that. Note this definition of "racism" on their website:

"The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites).

Source


So blacks cannot be racist by that definition. A pity that they often are, though, as we see here, for example.

Evan Maloney has a good comment on the Seattle situation too:

"The school system also says that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is a form of "cultural racism." In other words, if you believe that group privileges should not be placed above the rights of individuals, you are a racist. The only way not to be a racist is to embrace a "collective ideology," which throughout history has been better known as communism or socialism.


(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Alice in Americaland

Some excerpts:

The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for informing our terrorist enemies who want to kill us that our government was listening to their cell phone calls. A prize? For aiding and abetting the enemy during wartime? The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the CIA held terrorists in "secret prisons" in Europe. The problem is, the same newspaper has since reported that Europeans investigated and found zero evidence that any secret prisons ever existed.

The U.S. Senate is cracking down on illegal immigration with a new law that will allow merely 193 million aliens into the country over the next 20 years. That should solve the problem, since we've had only 12 million illegals sneak into the country over the past 20 years. This way we can increase the flow by 171 million simply by making it legal. That should be a big boost to the school and health care systems, to say nothing of rush-hour traffic.

Iran, which wants to become a nuclear power, says the U.S. is the great Satan and that Israel should be wiped off the map. So we have turned the matter over to the United Nations and its courageous corps of foppish European diplomats, Third World crooks and assorted despots and dictators. If this isn't Alice in Wonderland thinking, what is?...

The ACLU has announced that no one should think it's launching a war on Christianity, despite filing lawsuits for decades from coast to coast to remove any reference to God, bar any utterance about Jesus and prohibit any instruction concerning the Lord from every public venue.

Vanity Fair's magazine cover headline insists global warming is a worse threat than terrorism, despite the fact so-called global warming may have managed to heat the earth all of one degree Fahrenheit over the last century, and fluctuated far more radically hundreds and thousands of years ago, long before factories or SUVs....

Democrat Party chief Howard Dean says his party has evangelical Christian values, even though they are for males committing sodomy with other males, women marrying women, men marrying men, children being raised without a mother or without a father if one of the spouses wants it that way, mothers killing their babies if they don't wish to be bothered by them, cloning humans to destroy them and then harvest their parts, keeping cold-blooded murderers alive, enforcing "charity" by taking your money at gunpoint and giving it to someone else, trying to understand people who have sworn to kill us, keeping God out of schools where children might hear about Him and extending the rights of law-abiding citizens to law-breaking foreigners.

On second thought, I'll keep reading my granddaughter Alice in Wonderland. She's got a really good imagination, but this other stuff is just too hard to believe.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Glory, Glory, VSU-jah

Glory, Glory, VSU-jah!
Glory, Glory, VSU-jah!
Glory, Glory, VSU-jah!
Lefty scum are being smashed.

Oh I love it.

Over at Rational Minded, a link was posted to News.com.au and comments there about the impending VSU legislation. A few were covered in that post but as I read them, there were just too many good ones not to share with you. So I have done. Most of them were not (to my great surprise) leftist wankers showing what worthless scum they are. Of course there were some of them so my mocking of them can continue.

Salty Dog takes a shit on the lawn with:

Most students who say “I never use Union funded services” don’t know half of the things that Union funds are spent on and are more often than not using them without realising it.

There would be an easy fix for this. All the unions would have to do is provide independently audited accounts of how the money was spent. Of course being the utterly corrupt and worthless organisations student unions are, they don’t want people to know what they spend money on because they know there would be howls of protest if students knew exactly how much they were getting screwed

Nick the Dick(head) spews up with:

You could argue then, why should I pay Medicare, or taxes, for things I don’t use? It is simple really, look past your own selfishness and think of the benefits for all.

I don’t mind paying some small amount of taxes. For the roads I drive on, for the protection the military, police, customs etc. But why should I pay Medicare when I pay private health insurance? Were I able to pump the 600 odd dollars stolen from me for Medicare into my private health insurance I could be on a much better lever of coverage which would cover me for pretty much everything. Can any of you leftist dickheads give me a proper answer as to why I shouldn’t be free to do that? Of course not.

A young tosser named Adam1 then has a big cry:

I’m a year 12 student now and I’m despairing at the prospect of three years+ of study with fewer ‘perks’ than I’m getting at school. VSU will reduce the number of activities I can take part in and make the remaining ones dearer...fantastic

Awww. Boo hoo hoo. Suck it up cry-baby. Notice how the young leftists are just like the old ones (or should that be the old ones just like the young ones?) in that they know nothing about the real world and how things actually work.

Next we have a dipshit named Sickofthestupids. He/She/It claims to be sick of the stupids, and given the utter stupidity of his/her/its post, clearly he/she/it must be sick of his/her/its self.

We live in a welfare society and I’m proud of it

Yes you read that right. This piss poor excuse of a person is proud of living in a welfare society. It’s the single greatest reason why Australia is being held back. All this lazy leftist scum all over the country thinking they are entitled to everything instead of getting off their stupid lazy shitbag arses and earning it.

Then we have someone called Esther with this load of crap:

It isn’t the cheap beer and childcare being destroyed by VSU that makes me angry, but the bigger issue of the university community being destroyed. Students already have little free time because of working a job as well as endless uni assessments which makes it very hard for student magazines, drama clubs, support groups, environmental groups etc etc to get members. Why do you think student protests aren’t in the news any more? Many people are interested but don’t have time to contribute.

What can I say but good! No student magazines? Boo hoo hoo. Just more leftist propaganda being funded by hard working student’s fees. And as for the protests, only left wing dickheads are interested in protests. Everyone else is out there being a useful and productive member of the community.

And from Tony Hackett we have this load. It would be funny if he weren’t so serious.

This article is a disgrace and makes a mockery of what VSU will really do to campus life, especially at regional universities. Oh no, they’ve had to shut down 2 out of 5 bars in South Australia. What about here in Lismore where we’ve had to shut down the free denist, shut down the student magazine, lay off half our staff, including our student rights advocate. Not to mention the clubs and societies, child care, the women’s room, the organic food shop - all of this is gone now.

Here’s an idea - how about shutting down your rent a crowd protest filth and stop trying to destroy public property instead of shutting down your student advocacy. I have already told you how to have a decent student advocacy service. If you leftist scum are really concerned with that, why haven’t you started to implement it? And the women’s room. Boo hoo. Oh no. Women will now be treated exactly live everybody else. Equality, horrible equality! And as for the fag food shop – is there a bigger waste of student funds? Only good is done by getting rid of that shit.

Here we have something from Zebubble. Not a leftist himself but something that shows exactly what shit leftists are:

The University paid to renovate the toilet stalls at a uni so that they were nice for the start of the new year… the first day written in permanent marker were the words ‘Kick Liberals out!!!’ Yep that’s a really good use of student union fees as I have no doubt that the Left which were in power were responsible...not only that but they also don’t believe in recycling.

And now we come indisputable proof of what pure scum leftists are.

Trev

How about a news article on 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians!

Lord Admiral Guntrun

VSU will kill university culture and the social experiences.
Schooling in the 19th century was once touted as the factory for producing ‘sane and socially proper individuals’. With legislation like this, we’re turning our unis into degree factories. If I can now voluntarily pay fees for services I do not use, can I use the same principle in regards to taxes? I’m not a big fan of paying money to murder iraqi civillians.

This truly shows what scum leftists are. Trev and the entire left are so completely intellectually bankrupt and dishonest that not only can’t he argue on the topic, but they even have to use proven lies and bullshit to attempt to make a point off topic.

Same with Lord Admiral Cockhead. Once again, blatant lies and falsehoods in a dismal attempt to make an off topic point. And as for the degree factories and sane and proper people – good. Look at how unis today are infested with worthless leftist trash. The best thing we could would be to turn universities back in the 19th Century when you actually learned something of value.

As I said at the start of this post, I expected this comment thread to be full of leftist dickheads but I was pleasantly surprised. Numerous other decent, upstanding citizens had taken it upon themselves to mock leftist dickheads over the VSU issue:

From Scott:

If we require CSU - Compulsory Student Unionism, how about :
CBD - Compulsory Blood Donation
CMS - Compulsory Military Service
CCC - Compulsory Chess Clubs
CWD - Compulsory Wednesday Doughnuts
COD - Compulsory Organ Donation
Ohh… Thats right, we live in a country where we have both FREEDOM and CHOICE.. If the CSU is so bloody good then all students will be flocking to join. In reality it is only good for those who mooch off the other students. The ideal of the Left!

Reality Check chimes in with

My message to those lamentling the end of the “gravy train”, focus on earning a degree that will actually help you get a job, and if you want anything in life, get out there and earn it yourself.

Peter nails it:

Typical scaremongering. I would have thought Uni pubs would be the most profitable of all - why are they being forced to close?? The socialist student union leaders are the only ones who have been enjoying free rides and these are their dying gasps.

Justin states the obvious...well, obvious to anyone with more than two functional brain cells (i.e anyone not a leftist):

and the other ‘services’ seem to be based around providing a plaything for wannabe student politicians. What a joke: these same ‘poor’ students that’ll lose their bar will have an extra $400 a year to spend their money on what they want.

Matt mocks with the best of them:

The left wing greeny cash cow of CSU is almost dead. People with cushy admin jobs are now going to have to find real work. Who will pay the rent for the rent a crowd protests now? It’s so sad. Long live VSU!!!!!!!

Mark W hits the target dead centre:

Have you ever seen a bigger bunch of naive, incompetent fools than the losers who bludge either on the councils or as workers in these student unions.... if us students had had to rely on you lot to “mentor and guide us”, we would have been better off putting a gun to our head....

Ang J on the end of an era:

But I do think that VSU will be the end of an era, we’ll no longer be subjected to torrents of left-wing union propaganda on campus. Students won’t have to watch as the NUS pays to subsidise extremists performing illegal acts at detention centres of support unpopular protests with other unions such as the MUA as they did in my undergraduate days.

And Pete S sums it up very nicely:

My heart bleeds.
Welcome to the real world. Great isn’t it !!

Too bloody right!

And to all the leftist scum who are going to ooze by this site, let me just say:

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

(cross-posted at The Asylum)

Centrelink bankrolls terrorist suspects

Cross-posted at the Australian Libertarian Society and Majority Rights

Thanks to Tim Blair, we learn the heart warming news that the benefits of multicultural diversity have not been lost on Centrelink case officers


AUSTRALIA'S 22 terror suspects and their families receive more than $1 million a year in taxpayer-funded welfare and legal aid.

And simply because the men were locked up, their families received a social security pay rise of as much as $1700 a year. One of the jailed Melbourne men, Abdul Nacer Benbrika -- leader of a radical group of Islamists -- has been in Australia for 10 years and has never had a job.

Mr Benbrika was among 13 Melbourne men charged with belonging to a terrorist organisation.
Of Algerian descent, he has a Lebanese-born wife and seven children.


This is a smashing victory for tolerance; my innards are positively glowing as we speak. Why should any sovereign country be allowed put its own interests before the well-being of unemployable jihadists who breed like vermin?


Under Centrelink rules, she is entitled to almost $50,000 a year in welfare while her husband is in prison, awaiting trial.

Ahmed Raad, another Melbourne suspect, has a child and his wife is entitled to about $21,500 a year, as are the wives of Ezzit Raad and Abdullah Merhi.

The wife of another suspect, Hany Taha, who has three children, is entitled to up to $30,000 a year.


The fact that worthless scum such as Benbrika and his confederates are allowed to receive so much as a dime from the taxpayer, let alone being considered even remotely applicable as candidates for residency, is a calculated insult to all productive citizens of this country.

Not only is our welfare system - estimated to cost a record $91 billion this year according to treasury documents - an utter joke, our immigration policies are nothing short of a train wreck. What this amounts to is a conscious policy of reverse eugenics. The stupider and less useful to society you are, the more the government pays you to breed. And the more talented and fruitful you are, the more cash you must fork out (which could be better spent passing on your genes to a worthy cause) to facilitate morons to rear an underclass of idiots.

In God's name, what self-respecting civilisation runs such insane, suicidal policies? You would think our government, hell-bent on punishing virtue and rewarding pathology, was controlled by a Chinese fifth column (speaking of the Chinese - you will freeze in hell before they ever copy our abominable social policies), so dedicated it is to ruining whatever future this country might otherwise have enjoyed as an independent, sovereign, entity.

And the connection between the immigration of unassimilable aliens and the welfare state has never been more plain. As long as Australia remains a country with virtually unlimited voting franchise, the awful truth is that importing people with sub-average talents will lead directly to bigger government - the foreign mendicants clearly have every incentive to vote en masse for whichever electoral coalition is most dedicated to mulcting the economically productive while continuing to import large numbers of ne'er-do-wells.

Freedom? What freedom?

Free citizens, living in a democratic, civilised Western country are subject to the local council's ideas about how families should function....
What a sad, sick joke. The idea that Britons are a free people is now just that - an idea.



Arnhem hero kidnaps wife from a care home
By Alan Hamilton



SIXTY-TWO years ago as a young soldier at the Battle of Arnhem, Dennis Cramp fought for his country. Now, at the age of 80, he has another fight on his hands: for the right to have his wife spend her last years with him at home.

Maria Cramp, who suffers from dementia, has spent the past three months in a care home. But her husband, determined that they should be together in their house in Accrington, Lancashire, mounted a daring rescue mission.



Unable to stand life alone, Mr Cramp took a taxi to The Hollies home in nearby Clayton-le-Moors, wheeled his wife out in her wheelchair and took her home.

But, like the British paratroopers in Holland in 1944 who underestimated the firepower of the German defence, Mr Cramp reckoned without the blitzkrieg tactics of Lancashire County Council’s social services department. Within four hours of his apparently successful repossession of his wife, it went to Blackburn County Court, where a judge granted it an order giving it legal custody of Mrs Cramp. Its officials took her back to The Hollies.

Mr Cramp was told that, if he tried to rescue his wife again, he could face arrest. The guardianship order is for six months, but will be reviewed in two weeks when the court will decide who should look after Mrs Cramp.

Mr Cramp was distraught yesterday. He had been told that his wife would be released from the nursing home last week, but at the last minute social services assessed her case and decided that she should remain in care for a further six months.

“I feel desperate. Why can’t we be together? Why can’t we die together? This is all wrong,” Mr Cramp said. “I have shown I can care for her. For the past four weeks she has been coming home once a week.

“It is obvious she wants to be with me; she indicated she wanted to stop with me and not go back to the home. She was cheerful, sociable — everything you would not expect of someone they wanted to detain.”

Mr Cramp said he remained determined to overturn the order, which he described as diabolical, given that the council had closed 32 of its 48 care homes to save on running costs.

A spokeswoman for Lancashire County Council said that it would not comment on individual cases, but added: “We act on the advice of a team of professionals who decide on the most appropriate course of action to take. If a family wishes to pursue a course of action that we feel is not in the best interests of a person, then we have no option but to apply for a guardianship order.”

To Dennis Cramp and his comrades involved in the disastrous Operation Market Garden to try to gain entry to Germany by the back door, the attempt to take the Rhine crossing at Arnhem proved a bridge too far.

Now, for one survivor of the battle, The Hollies may prove to be a similarly insurmountable obstacle.

Good God!!

What is this world coming to when you can refer to God publicly, let alone in the constitution, without fear of ridicule or having your head chopped off. I thought European leftists had finally rid themselves of the wretched Christians and were in the process of marginalizing them in the US.

After the hang-out-dry and subsequent fleeing of Hirsi Ali and the EU Paper shufflers desperate to secure free travel for Hamas officials, I thought the Europeans were just about negotiating which aspects of Sharia they could adopt and which parts they could hold off (for now) in return for possessions and land. But no, it seems not all, are ready to pick out burqas and familiarise themselves with daily prayer times and routes to the local mosques.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken out in favour of a reference to God in the EU constitution. Speaking in Saarbrucken, Christian Democrat Merkel said "We live in a world in which we want to understand and communicate with other religions and cultures".

This includes knowing your own roots and being aware of them which is why God and the Christian belief should be included into the EU constitution, she indicated. Europe would lose something if it were to push its historical reference to the side, she said.

It is the first time Berlin has spoken out in favour of a Christian reference in the EU constitution, and could potentially reopen one of the most bitter debates surrounding the drawing up of the document four years ago.
'Bitter debates' folks, that's what is has come to, oh those wretched christians, why oh why.. I wonder if the debate would be so 'Bitter' if the reference were to Allah.
Spain, Italy and Poland were among the most active countries in pushing for a strong Christian reference in the constitution - Germany's Christian Democrats were also very vocal but they were then in opposition.

At the time, the rhetoric surrounding the religion debate led Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, to accuse the EU of acting like a Christian Club.
Christian Club? Oh my, wait till they find out about the drugs, alcohol, prostitution, gambling etc in Europe, the Islamists with their whips and cranes are going to be very very busy.

Your point of View

While Amnesty International is blasting 'wretched' Australia for giving illegal migrants free room and board on lovely tropical islands, you would be hard pressed to find anything about Aung San Suu Kyi on their website. Heck I even typed 'burma' in their search engine and came up with nothing; perhaps I misspelt it or should have included 'Hicks' in there somewhere.
Burma's military rulers have extended the detention under house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, government officials have said. Ms Suu Kyi's latest period under house arrest expired on Saturday, raising hopes that she would be released.

The pro-democracy leader has been held since May 2003, and has spent 10 of the last 16 years under house arrest. On Friday UN Secretary General Kofi Annan appealed to the head of Burma's military junta to free Ms Suu Kyi.

"I am relying on you, General Than Shwe, to do the right thing," Mr Annan said, addressing the head of the junta. But within hours Burma said Ms Suu Kyi, 60, would remain in detention.
You see, Kofi, the problem is their view of the 'right thing' is not quite the same as your's. Instead of begging, nagging and diplomatic waffling, I suggest you pick up the phone get the Europeans onside. Then tell the Junta, come down to their level (Super Nanny style, if needed) and tell em, if you don't release this woman and get out of power, then my 'soft power' buddies are going to follow you around in their war birds and provide you a fiery escort everywhere you go. Bombs and missiles will shadow you until you arrive at my negotiating table in a nervous wreck.

I'm sure they'll 'realign' their views after a few of their buddies get blown to smithereens.

Leftists again..

..promoting free speech, debate and free exchange of ideas.
A call to boycott Israeli academics is expected to be brought to a vote on Monday by members of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, Britain's largest academic trade union.

The vote is planned for the conclusion of the union's annual conference, which is taking place May 27-29. It concerns a motion calling for a boycott of Israeli scholars and academic institutions that do not publicly declare their opposition to Israeli policy in the territories.

Your regulators will protect you: Yet another botch from Queensland Health

A cosmetic surgeon who quit Victoria after botching seven operations has been disciplined in Queensland over another surgery bungle. Gold Coast-based Graydon Ronald Van Houten was found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct over an operation to remove a cyst from the ear of Browns Plains retiree Bob Martin in August 2001. The wound failed to heal and specialists had to remove part of Mr Martin's ear after a routine check-up three months later showed the cyst was a carcinoma.

The incident has raised concerns about how Dr Van Houten was allowed to practise in Queensland despite the adverse findings against him in Victoria. Mr Martin, 64, reached an out-of-court settlement with Dr Van Houten which prevented him from naming the surgeon. But searches of public documents, which name Dr Van Houten, reveal The Medical Board of Queensland in January ruled the 60-year-old not be allowed to perform various skin procedures until he completed courses on skin cancer practice.

Mr Martin said the ordeal had devastated him. "When I walk into shopping centres now people point at me say, 'Look at that man, he has only half an ear.' People are always saying, 'What happened to you?' " Mr Martin said. He said the compensation amounted to "chicken feed" after his legal and hospital bills were paid.

In its findings, the panel noted the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria in October 2002 had found Dr Van Houten had engaged in unprofessional conduct of a serious nature in the treatment of four patients and unprofessional conduct not of a serious nature in the treatment of three other patients. He escaped suspension because he had moved to Queensland and his Victorian registration had lapsed.

Mr Martin's lawyer Bruce Simmonds said the Queensland panel, despite being aware of the Victorian cases, had imposed little punishment on the doctor apart from requiring him to undergo some training. "I understand he is offering the same types of services here which led to the complaints in Victoria," Mr Simmonds said.

Marilyn Van Houten, a practice manager at her husband's surgery, defended him. "He has no problems that he isn't working through. He's addressed the issues at hand," she said. "Why aren't the newspapers supporting doctors . . . we're not talking about Dr Patel here." The Medical Board of Queensland said recent changes in legislation had led to improved checks on interstate doctors and a public register being established where patients could check doctors' records.

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Queensland: Sick priorities of a so-called justice system

A woman who escaped the clutches of a mentally ill killer was blocked from finding out if he had been set free. Natalie Schindler, 24, is living in fear that he will one day track her down and harm her. But health authorities told her they were more concerned about protecting their patient than passing on details of his whereabouts to her.

"I am disgusted ... they would not tell me anything ... they said they had to protect him," Ms Schindler said. "I got quite emotional. I told them I was sick of this system which protects killers."

The Queensland woman contacted the Mental Health Review Tribunal after reading an exclusive report in The Sunday Mail last week about a mentally ill killer given day release. The man was hospitalised after he was declared to be of unsound mind and never faced a criminal court for the horrific crime.

Ms Schindler, who got out of the man's car and discovered later that he had killed her teenage girlfriend, had concerns that it could be the same man now back in the community. She said she rang the tribunal immediately but, a senior official would not give her details of the offender's movements, even after confirming she had been closely connected to the case. "They said their first priority was to protect the patient., not his victims, she said.

Ms Schindler said that in 2002 she had made a submission to the tribunal about the on-going custody of the killer. She had not put her name on the register of interested parties because she did not want repeated reminders of that terrifying day. However, she believed that because of her close link to the case she should have been advised automatically by the tribunal if the killer was to be released. "People have a right to know ... is it really good enough that the tribunal is satisfied that he will not harm himself or others? "Is the tribunal going to watch over him every minute of every day ... and if he kills again. will they take responsibility?"

Details emerged this week that five Queensland killers sent to secure hospitals after being found meutally unfit to stand trial had been returned to the community. Mental Health Review Tribunal president Barry Thomas said the tribunal was "well aware of its responsibility to make sure there was not an unacceptable risk to community safety".

The above article appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on May 28, 2006

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Political parasites

In our modern politicized economy - which National Journal columnist Jonathan Rauch called the "parasite economy" - no good deed goes unpunished for long. Some people want to declare Google a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest, perhaps by a federal Office of Search Engines. The Bush administration wants Google to turn over a million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from a one-week period. Congress is investigating how the company deals with the Chinese government's demands for censorship of search results by Chinese users. So, like Microsoft and other companies before it, Google has decided it will have to start playing the Washington game. It has opened a Washington office and hired well-connected lobbyists. One of the country's top executive search firms is looking for a political director for the company.

What should concern us here is how the government lured Google into the political sector of the economy. For most of a decade the company went about its business, developing software, creating a search engine better than any of us could have dreamed, and innocently making money. Then, as its size and wealth drew the attention of competitors, anti-business activists, and politicians, it was forced to start spending some of its money and brainpower fending off political attacks. It's the same process Microsoft went through a few years earlier, when it faced the same sorts of attacks. Now Microsoft is part of the Washington establishment, with more than $9 million in lobbying expenditures last year.....

Microsoft went through the same hazing, though with more of an edge. A congressional aide said, "They don't want to play the D.C. game, that's clear, and they've gotten away with it so far. The problem is, in the long run they won't be able to." Sorta like, "Hey, Bill, nice little company ya got there. Shame if anything happened to it." And companies get the message: If you want to produce something in America, you'd better play the game. Contribute to politicians' campaigns, hire their friends, go hat in hand to a congressional hearing and apologize for your success.

The tragedy is that the most important factor in America's economic future - in raising everyone's standard of living - is not land, or money, or computers; it's human talent. And some part of the human talent at another of America's most dynamic companies is now being diverted from productive activity to protecting the company from political predation. The parasite economy has sucked in another productive enterprise.

More here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

An Australian news roundup

Goldmine for lawyers ends in Victoria

Reforms outlawing many personal injury claims in Victoria have led to a huge drop in the number of court cases. Figures from the County Court show public liability lawsuits dropped from 1734 in the year before the reforms to 84 last year. The drop in all causes of action for personal injuries was from 5418 to 801.

Now the Law Institute of Victoria has called for the laws to be wound back because they had stopped injured Victorians from gaining proper compensation. LIV vice-president Geoff Provis said many injured people could not meet the State Government's test for compensation of 5 per cent physical impairment or 10 per cent psychiatric impairment. "Whether intended or unintended these reforms have simply gone too far and Victorians with genuine injuries are being denied access to fair compensation," Mr Provis said. He said the tort law reforms were introduced in 2003 in response to a perceived insurance crisis.

The Bracks Government rushed through changes to medical and public liability laws to curb the soaring cost of medical indemnity and public liability insurance.

Source






Illegal fishing fine too lenient: court



The Federal Government has welcomed a court ruling that substantial fines should be handed to foreigners found illegally fishing in Australian waters. The ruling by the South Australian Supreme Court sets a precedent for fines issued to future illegal fishers and comes after an Adelaide magistrate last month caused outrage by fining three Indonesian fishermen just $5 each. Fisheries Minister Eric Abetz said the ruling vindicated his decision to ask the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to appeal the $5 fines. "The $5 fine now sets no precedent," Senator Abetz said. "(Supreme Court) Chief Justice (John Doyle) has clearly indicated that this was wrong, and has indicated to magistrates in South Australia that the appropriate fine for offences of this kind was one of at least $4,000."

Adelaide Magistrate Andrew Cannon last month fined the captains of three Indonesian fishing boats $5 each, reasoning they deserved a more lenient penalty because their boats had either been seized or destroyed and they did not have the financial capacity to pay a large fine. The maximum fine for illegally fishing in Australian waters is $27,500.

Chief Justice Doyle said Dr Cannon should have imposed a more substantial fine, adding that almost 200 illegal fishers had appeared in court during the past year and a consistent approach to sentencing was needed. "The magistrate thought that a substantial fine was an exercise in tokenism, because it was unlikely that it would be paid," he said. "But to take that approach is to accept that capacity to pay is the decisive consideration, which in my opinion it cannot be. "I consider that a substantial fine was called for, even after making allowance for the loss of the vessel and the period of (time spent by the fishermen in immigration) detention. "I would have imposed a fine of not less than $4,000 on each count, amounting to a total of not less than $8,000 to be paid by each defendant."

Source






One of Australia's disgusting public broadcasters finally bends to reality

The B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) welcomes the decision by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to recognise Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations. The ADC's Executive Officer, Mr Manny Waks, says "While it is difficult to understand what has taken so long for the ABC to arrive at this obvious conclusion, we must nonetheless congratulate the ABC on this decision."

Four years ago the ABC's international chief, Mr John Tulloh, prohibited ABC journalists from referring to these groups as terrorist organisations.

The ADC acknowledged the work of Senator Santoro and more recently by Senators Ronaldson and Fierravanti-Wells in pursuing this matter. For three years the ABC executives have been intensely questioned by the Senators. "They have shown great persistence and determination," Mr Waks said. Mr Waks also said that "the ADC supports Senator Ronaldson's hope that SBS would come to similar conclusion to the ABC and concede that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah are indeed terrorist organisations."

Source






Sydney: 'Gay-friendly' child care slammed

Little kids being harassed over sexuality -- out of the public purse

A council-run childcare centre is teaching toddlers that gay, lesbian and "transgender" parents are normal in a bid to "challenge the perception" of young children about sexuality. The Tillman Park Children's Centre in Tempe - which receives council and government funding - has devised the gay-friendly curriculum for children aged six weeks to six years. Marrickville Mayor Sam Byrne said the centre had "successfully adopted several strategies to encompass lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and inter-sex issues". These included ensuring images were reflective of "diverse families" and "actively affirming the identity of lesbian and gay families". He said the centre challenged "children's perception of what is 'normal' gender and sexual identity".

The centre uses controversial Learn to Include books, which feature Jed and his Dads and The Rainbow Cubby House. Mr Byrne applauded staff and families at the centre for "broadening the minds of our future generation". "At Marrickville we believe in offering children and families an inclusive program based on social justice," he told The Saturday Daily Telegraph. "These are reflected through an open environment where alternative perspectives, values, beliefs, lifestyles and people's identities are respected and accepted." ....

More here






Nowhere for her to give birth

What happens when you rely on the great god "Gubmint" and their wonderful "planning": An interstate trip to give birth!

A critical bed shortage has led to a pregnant mother expecting twins having to travel to Canberra Hospital yesterday because of a gridlock in infant intensive care wards. A rush of multiple births - including triplets at Nepean Hospital - put pressure on an over-burdened system. The woman was flown by air ambulance to Canberra early yesterday morning. High occupancy rates in maternity and neo-natal wards across Sydney caused a serious shortage across the state.

A spokesman for ACT Health confirmed they received a NSW patient early yesterday, and said interstate transfers were "routine". "A pregnant woman was transported to the Canberra Hospital from Sydney because there were no neo-natal beds available elsewhere in Sydney," he said.

A lack of specialist nurses is aggravating the situation, prompting one Sydney hospital on Thursday night to call in off-duty nurses. "This is a recurrent problem, it happens all the time," one specialist told The Saturday Daily Telegraph. ....

More here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Shocking racism in Missouri

The police allow blacks to get away with heaps because of the colour of their skin. Since blacks commit crime at roughly 9 times the white rate, the police should be stopping blacks roughly 900% more than they stop whites. In fact, it is only 42% more

The disparity gap between the number of white and black drivers who were stopped by Missouri police last year grew wider, according to a report that Attorney General Jay Nixon released today. The report, delivered to the General Assembly and Gov. Matt Blunt, tracks the demographics of more than 1.5 million police vehicle stops made by 624 agencies across the state in 2005. It shows that African-American drivers were stopped at a rate 42 percent higher than expected based solely on their proportion of the driving-age population. That number increased from 34 percent in 2004.

When compared with whites, African-American drivers were 46 percent more likely to be stopped. The 2004 report showed that African Americans were 38 percent more likely to be stopped than white drivers, based solely on their proportion of the driving-age population. "The information in this report serves as an important basis for dialogue between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve," Nixon said in a release.

In the St. Louis area, several of the largest departments saw the disparity gap shrink between black and white drivers stopped. The Jefferson County Sheriff, St. Charles County Sheriff and St. Louis County Police departments were among them. St. Louis city police saw nearly no change in its statistics. Nixon noted that the overall number of vehicle stops recorded increased by 10 percent, to more than 1.5 million stops from 1.37 million from 2004. A change in the law that took effect in August 2004 requires law enforcement to report on a wider variety of stops, including investigative stops.

The 2005 report also showed that an African-American driver who was stopped was 78 percent more likely to be searched than a white driver. Statewide, Hispanic drivers were stopped at a rate about three percent less likely than their proportion of the population. Those Hispanic drivers who were stopped, however, were almost twice as likely to be searched as white drivers who were stopped.

Racial profiling can neither be proved or disproved by statistics alone, Nixon said in a statement. The statistics do not prove that police decide to stop a driver based solely on his or her race. "Missouri law enforcement should continue their constructive efforts to eliminate any perceptions that traffic stops are being made solely on the basis of race, rather than for legitimate reasons," Nixon said. State law requires every Missouri police agency to adopt a written policy regarding racial profiling, provide annual training to officers and promote the use of effective, non-combative methods for carrying out their duties in a racially and culturally diverse environment.

More here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

No consistency or principle on the Left

Burt Prelutsky (below) thinks Leftists are nuts. The relevant clinical diagnostic category is psychopathy

The thing that has me stumped is trying to figure out what leftists want. For example, when left-wing judges take it upon themselves to legislate from the bench, liberals are quick to say that the Constitution is a living document and that it has to evolve to accommodate a changing world. However, whenever a conservative suggests that the 14th amendment, which grants automatic citizenship on any person born in America, ought to be changed to deny that gift to those born to illegal aliens, those same people carry on as if the Constitution, like the 10 Commandments, was carved in stone.

But, really, we have no reason to believe that the Founding Fathers, who fought a war to gain sovereignty for this nation, wouldn't have entertained second thoughts if they'd ever envisioned a foreign invasion numbering in the millions. I mean, it's a basic tenet of the law that nobody is entitled to profit from a crime. To suggest that the child, the beneficiary of his parents' illegal act, doesn't profit is patently absurd. To argue that he shouldn't be deprived of the advantage because he didn't break the law, is ridiculous. You might as well suggest that if a bank robber gives his ill-gotten gains to his wife and kids, the family should get to keep the loot because, after all, they weren't the ones who drove the getaway car.

Another thing about liberals I can't begin to figure out is their abiding devotion to failed economic theories. The fact that communism hasn't worked anywhere in the world doesn't cool their ardor in the slightest. The fact that Marx's brainstorm invariably metastasizes into a despotic tyranny - be it in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Cambodia or Venezuela - doesn't make the slightest impression on them. Neither does the fact that socialism has brought much of Europe to the brink of moral and financial bankruptcy faze them in the least.

In our own country, the most obvious failure of socialism is Social Security, the single largest pyramid scheme ever conceived by the mind of man. When Ponzi did it, he went to jail for fraud; when Roosevelt pulled it off, he was hailed as a savior. As someone or other once observed, if you're going to steal, steal big.

So why is it that leftists continue to promote these half-cocked alternatives to capitalism, the only economic program that's ever motivated people to aspire, to compete, to achieve and to innovate? Well, I hate to be impolite, but when people keep doing the same thing in spite of getting the same rotten results, we have been told by experts in the field that it's a pretty sure sign of insanity. And just in case any doubt remains, you merely have to look to those who speak on their behalf. Assuming you're not a cuckoo yourself, can you possibly imagine rallying around the unappetizing likes of Gore and Kerry, Schumer and Durbin, Kennedy and Rangel, Leahy and Biden, Byrd and Boxer, Sharpton and Jackson, McKinney and Waters, Al Franken and Michael Moore, George Soros and Norman Lear, Hillary and Bill, and Jimmy Carter?

More here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Great! "Ethnic" law to be scrapped in Australia

No hope for Sharia now

The Howard Government has widened its plan to remove legal recognition of Aboriginal customary law in criminal sentencing to include the cultural beliefs of all ethnic minorities. The extension of the plan beyond Aboriginal tribal law is understood to have been triggered by concerns that a law directed only at indigenous offenders could be in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act. Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock last night said no one convicted of a crime in Australia should be able to plead their cultural practices and beliefs as mitigating factors in their sentencing. "We are not a nation of tribes," he said. "There should be one law for all Australians. Our expectation is that when people come and settle in Australia they are under an obligation to accept the law and the principles that go with it."

The Government's move came after Northern Territory Opposition Leader Jodeen Carney asked Mr Ruddock last week to check if planned restrictions on Aboriginal customary law being used as a mitigating factor when sentencing violent offenders would breach the Racial Discrimination Act. Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough this week said he would put a proposal to scrap consideration of cultural law in serious crimes to state and territory governments at a national summit. He said customary law had been "used as a curtain that people are hiding behind". The minister's remarks followed a national outcry after a 55-year-old Aboriginal elder was sentenced to a month's jail for having anal sex with a 14-year-old girl promised to him as a wife.

Territory Chief Justice Brian Martin, who sentenced the man, admitted this week he had made a mistake by placing too much emphasis on the man's belief that under tribal law he had the right to teach the girl to obey him. Ms Carney urged the Government to change the Racial Discrimination Act if it considered restrictions on customary law would amount to a breach. Mr Ruddock is understood to have sought legal advice on the possibility of changing the Racial Discrimination Act, but his preference is to extend the exclusion to all minority groups in the community.

The scheme drew qualified support yesterday from Islamic civil rights leader Waleed Kadous but was condemned as impractical by the legal profession. "I don't think any member of the community should expect any special privileges because of their cultural background," said Mr Kadous, co-convenor of the Australian Muslim Civil Rights Advisory Network. "Speaking for the Muslim community, we understand we are not entitled to any special privileges in the courts - nor should we be," he said. Judges should always have some discretion to consider a person's circumstances "but our cultural background should have no major impact on how we are sentenced", Mr Kadous said.

However, Law Council of Australia president John North said the Government's plan was "totally impractical". "An important part of the sentencing process, apart from retribution and revenge, is to look carefully at the subjective features of each individual before the court," Mr North said. "Those characteristics may involve cultural or what can be termed customary law matters, and this has long been held by the High Court to be a proper exercise in the use of sentencing discretion. "To try and legislate across the board to remove this discretion would, in our view, prove impossible."

Mr Ruddock said Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough would be urging the states to change their sentencing laws to fall into line with the Government's plan. While he believed the plan would not cause a breach of the Racial Discrimination Act, he indicated that the commonwealth would be prepared to change federal laws - including the Racial Discrimination Act - to achieve its goal.

Source

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Is English-Sign Rule Racist or Cautious?

Metro Detroit:

"A plan to require English translations on foreign-language signs on stores, bakeries and other businesses has caused an outcry in Sterling Heights that could put the city in the midst of a national debate.

Councilwoman Barbara Ziarko recently asked the city's legal staff to prepare an ordinance requiring the translations on exterior signs. "This is for the safety of our residents as well as our police and fire (personnel)," Ziarko said. "If emergency crews can properly identify a location, they can know if there are chemicals or dangerous substances (on the premises)."

But in one of Metro Detroit's most diverse communities, critics say the idea is ill-timed at best and racist at worst."

Source


It would once have been seen as a proper requirement for U.S. residents to use English in public where they could -- part of the requirements for being American. In the name of social cohesion, perhaps it should still be. The Senate has, after all, just passed a bill making English the national language of the United States.

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U.N. sanctions




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Australians now objectively better off than ever before

Spending power may have increased by $9000 for every man, woman and child over the past decade, but the Government statistician has ducked the curly question of whether Australians are generally better off. A snapshot of the nation by the Bureau of Statistics found that Australia has become wealthier, healthier and more educated over the past 10 years, but the environment has suffered, crime rates are slightly higher and the indigenous population continues to seriously lag.

After examining economic, social and environmental indicators, the bureau's Measures of Australia's Progress report concluded that there was no single answer to the all-important question: "Has life in our country got better or worse?" "It does not always follow that improving, particularly, living conditions will make a person happier or more satisfied, as people place different importance on the different aspects of their lives," the bureau said.

In terms of money, at least, Australia is powering ahead. Over the past decade, real disposable income per capita has been growing steadily at an annual average rate of 3 per cent, reaching more than $35,000 per person last financial year, compared to about $26,000 in 1994-95. The spoils of economic growth over the past decade also appear to have been reasonably evenly shared. The bureau said the average weekly income of low-income earners leapt 22 per cent to $300 over the nine years to 2004, while weekly incomes for high earners increased 19.3 per cent to $1027.

Despite the huge wealth gains, most studies indicate that satisfaction levels have barely changed over the past 50 years. Bernard Salt, a commentator on consumer, cultural and demographic trends, said he believed economic prosperity had delivered increased feelings of satisfaction and well-being, despite the cliche that money does not buy happiness. "Economic prosperity really does account for - not all - but a substantial part of our happiness and wellbeing," Mr Salt said. "I think the Australian public is feeling rich, fat, happy and complacent and I think this is why the Coalition was voted in so confidently at the last election."

Australians are also living longer. Boys born in 2004 can expect to live three years longer than boys born in 1994, while girls can expect to live two years longer. Despite the rise in life expectancy, the proportion of people classified as overweight or obese has in the past decade leapt from 52 per cent to 62 per cent for men and from 37 per cent to 45 per cent for women. For indigenous Australians, however, the average life span is about 17 years lower.

The environment also appears to be suffering. Over the past 10 years, the number of bird and mammal species listed as extinct or endangered rose by 41 per cent to 169, with Australia's waterways deteriorating rapidly. Australia also has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Shadow treasurer Wayne Swan said that despite 15 years of growth, many families were still finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.

Source

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Ya Gotta Laugh!



Remember the riots in much of the Islamic world about the Mohammed cartoons? Iran was of course a great source of protest at the time. But guess what? The Iranians themselves are now being subjected to riots over a cartoon!

Lots of Iranians think that one of their ethnic minorities -- the Azeris -- are dumb. And a cartoon was recently published in an Iranian newspaper that portrayed the Azeris as cockroaches! So: Big riots from the Azeris!

So the erring cartoonist has now been carted off to prison and the newspaper has been shut down by the Iranian authorities. Why? Because the mullahs fear that the USA might use the Azeris to stir up trouble against them! Details here and here

Pesky things, those cartoons. It sounds like lots of third worlders would die a death if they were exposed to the sort of fierce cartoons that appear in Australian newspapers. See this one about Australian blacks, for instance. Australians just turn the page. Even the Left can't be bothered. And nobody bothers about ones like this either, insulting though it is to Australians.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)