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James Roberts, Football and New Baby

What the hell is all the whining about James Roberts clearing off to play football while his wife was giving birth??
 
Roberts played football on Friday night, the baby was born on Sunday morning. As well as looking after a new baby, Robert’s wife, Anna Jovanovic, is now having to spend her energy telling ignorant, time-wasting, loser journos to mind their own business and get their facts right.

Subs Scam Could Cost the Election

Since the announcement that Australia’s new submarines were to be built in Adelaide by a French company, from the only poll that ever gets it right, punters:
 
• Labor closes in on the Coalition, odds cut into $3.25 to win the election.
 
• Coalition drifts from $1.25 out to $1.33.
 
• All the interest from punters this week has been for Labor to cause an election upset.
 
Labor, priced at $6.00 just over a month ago, has been cut from $3.50 into $3.25.
 
Punter interest in Labor has been strong over the past week, with Sportsbet taking five bets on Labor for every one bet on the Coalition.
 
People aren’t stupid. We could have had Japanese submarines with proven design and technology built in Japan for $20 billion. About $1,000 cost for every man, woman and child in Australia.
 
Instead we are going to have French subs, not yet designed, with software not yet written or costed, made in Adelaide, for $50 billion plus the extra cost to build them here, estimated at up to 30% more, so a total cost of nearly $70 billion. Over $3,000 cost for every man woman and child in Australia. That is $2000 less in the pocket of every member of your family to spend on what you want and need. To fund less than 4,000 jobs in key marginal seats in Adelaide.
 
That is not job creation. That $2000 less to spend in the pocket of every Australian means job destruction on a massive scale.

Building Submarines in Adelaide… Why?

I cannot join in the general rejoicing about the subs being built in Adelaide.

Submarines and other defense requirements should be built so as to provide the best possible equipment for our defense personnel, at the best possible value for Australian taxpayers.

Building the subs in Adelaide will cost an additional $18 billion. That is, at a cost of approximately $15 million per new job in Adelaide.

$15 million per job in Adelaide in additional taxes which have to be extracted from businesses and workers. Which of course means $15 million per job that can no longer be used in private enterprise to employ people, to research and develop and provide new products and services.

To put this another way, each new job in Adelaide in the sub project will cost the jobs of approximately fifteen people employed elsewhere, because the money that would have been used to pay them will now be going in additional taxes to fund make-work in Adelaide.

This is not job creation; it is exactly the opposite.

Or of course, if we were willing to pay the taxes required to fund an extra $18 billion, that would have been enough to buy an extra four subs.

This decision is not good policy. It is economically illiterate, and very poor value for Australian tax-payers.

Norfolk Island Transition

Over the last twelve months the administration of Norfolk Island has gradually been assumed by the Australia Federal Government.

Norfolk Island is part of Australia, but has been largely autonomous. No outsiders have been allowed to purchase property there, and those who come from outside to provide services are generally limited to a three year stay before they are required to leave. This would be fair enough if the island were genuinely autonomous, capable of running its own affairs. But it is not. Apart from tourist income which does not even come close to paying the bills, every aspect of life on Norfolk  is paid for by Australian taxpayers. After a couple of hundred years of subsidising a lavish lifestyle on a tropical paradise for an exclusive and pampered few, Australian taxpayers have finally had enough.

Now Norfolk Islanders are whining about unfair it is, and how their island is being colonised. See the article on the Norfolk Island transition from the Guardian copied below. Of course if they don’t like what is happening, there is one very simple solution. Declare your independence, and pay your own way.

The former chief minister of Norfolk Island, Lisle Snell, has called for a royal commission into the Australian parliament’s decision last year to revoke the island’s autonomy, and the subsequent running of the island by the commonwealth.

As of 1 July, Norfolk Island will be subject to Australian immigration and border protection rules. Islanders will fall under the Medicare system and will be eligible for social benefits, including the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. They will also fall under Australia’s tax system.

Since May last year, the island has been in a transition period as Australian government buildings are established and the island’s health and welfare systems abolished. The Australian government argued the island relied on the mainland for financial support, and that its laws and government services were outdated.

The changes meant that Snell was left without a job. His anger has only escalated since May.

“I took a very bad turn,” Snell told Guardian Australia. “I was distressed for months after my dismissal. To be dismissed in such a manner as was conducted at that time, so illegally, so unjustly, so unfairly … it took me many, many months to get over that. I was forced into semi-retirement, although I can’t afford to be.”

Snell and other islanders have established the group Norfolk Island People for Democracy, which is calling for an independent review of the process of bringing Norfolk Island under Australian governance, which Snell describes as an “illegal takeover”.

“Really what should be done is, a royal commission into the manner of Norfolk Island’s takeover should be held,” Snell said. “There was no proper process done. There should be a royal commisison into the farcical situation that has occured. We are a peaceful people, we don’t like conflict. But the situation has never deteriorated to an extent like this before.”

On Tuesday the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC delivered a petition against the perceived takeover signed by the islanders to the United Nations in New York. It would take months for the UN to reach a decision, Robertson said.

“There is a special committee on decolonisation which will consider the matter later this year,” Robertson told the ABC.

He said he supported the islanders in their fight for autonomous governance.

‘We’re not Australian’: Norfolk Islanders adjust to shock of takeover by mainland

“They will be kicked out of the commonwealth parliamentary unit, they won’t be able to compete under their own flag at the Commonwealth Games, they will have to join an Australian team,” he said.

“What is more, I think, rather pathetic in fact in Australia’s conduct, the first thing the Australian administrator did was to have the radio station ban any criticism of Australia.

“This is typical colonial behaviour, isn’t it?”

Snell confirmed that the island’s radio station was now under Australian government control, and said islanders were barred from saying anything negative about the Australian government on air.

Guardian Australia has contacted the relevant minister for comment on the claim.

Islanders had also received notices from the government that their jobs were defunct or were likely to become so, Snell said.

“The feeling on the island is now one of great distress,” Snell said. “People in administration, those working in roads or mechanical fields, in forestry and so on, have all had their jobs affected. In some cases, both husbands and wives will no longer have a job from 1 July, so there’s now increased unemployment and financial distress.

“They have not been offered the change to upskill or reapply.”

The word “mutiny” had been scrawled on the new Australian government buildings, Snell said, which he said indicated the levels of distress, because “we are a peaceful people”.

Many of the islanders are descended from the mutineers who captured HMS Bounty in 1789.

Snell said many of the island’s roughly 1,200 citizens would hold a rally on Wednesday at the old military barracks. People were fearful of losing their unique language and culture as they come under Australian law, he said.

“We will gather to talk and assist anyone in easing their pain and try to give them clarity and guidance through this,” Snell said.

The Australian federal minister for major projects, territories and local government, Paul Fletcher, has said islanders would be employed where possible. Last month, Fletcher announced Waterway Construction as the successful tenderer to construct the $13m upgrade of the island’s Cascade Pier. Islanders would be employed, Fletcher said, and local businesses would supply building materials.

“Once the project is complete, nominated members of the Norfolk Island community and regional council staff will receive training in the safe and effective operation of the hydraulic crane,” he said.

The New South Wales premier, Mike Baird, has said his state will help the federal government in providing health and education services to the island. Norfolk Island laws are being rolled in to NSW ones, with any legislation on the island that Australia considers outdated or inappropriate removed or replaced.

“The Australian government is committed to providing high quality, affordable and safe health and aged care services for Norfolk Island,” Fletcher said.

“I am looking forward to working with NSW government agencies to ensure the best possible outcomes for the Norfolk Island community.”

Tonga, or Not So Tonga

Tonga pleads with the world: Global warming is real and is affecting us today. Save our pacific island 😢

Two different islands, neither in Tonga

Two different islands, neither in Tonga

There’s only one problem: the picture shows two different islands, neither of which is in Tonga.

The top photo is Kwajalein Island and the bottom photo is Ebeye Island. Although both in the Kwajalein Atoll they are not the same island and are part of the Marshall Islands, a long way from Tonga!

Chemical Free!

Isopropyl alcohol, H2O, sodium hydroxide, acetic acid, …. Nope, no chemicals there. Sometimes I wonder if people can really be that stupid. And then I think, yep, they obviously can!

Lots of chemicals in these chemical free wipes!

Lots of chemicals in these chemical free wipes!

A Cleaner, Greener World Thanks to Coal and Oil

No more the grinding poverty and filth of 150 years ago. Fossil fuels have made the world a safer, cleaner, greener place.

That’s something to celebrate! From Viv Forbes at Carbon Sense.

It was petroleum that provided the kerosene that replaced whale oil in lamps and greatly reduced the slaughter of whales.

Coal saved the forests that were being cut down for smelters, forges, charcoal, heaters and stoves. Steel made with coke then replaced wood for mine props, bridges and tall buildings. As steam engines and iron ships replaced wooden wind-jammers in world navies and merchant fleets, the forests expanded.

Coal gas and clean coal cured the smogs of London and Pittsburgh. Piped gas for home heating and street lighting and the even better “clean-coal-by-wire” (coal powered electricity) worked wonders to reduce air pollution in “The Big Smoke”.

Petrol driven cars and trucks removed horse manure from the big cities, and tractors reduced the amount of land required to grow food for those cities.

Nuclear power is the ultimate “green energy” – enormous amounts of clean energy generated on a tiny footprint, by minute quantities of fuel, with little effect on air or water quality. Its only disadvantage is that, unlike coal and gas, it does not recycle the gases of life to the atmosphere.

Naturally there are risks in every human endeavour but modern energy sources kill far fewer people and wildlife than were once lost in timber getting, horse breaking, wind-jammers, sulky capsize, air pollution and city wildfires. And to believe that man can tweak the climate with carbon taxes is non-sense.

In contrast, the so called “green energy” sources usually lauded on Earth Day have a heavy toll on the environment to produce piddling amounts of unreliable and costly energy.

Both wind and solar energy are so dilute that large areas of land must be sterilised by roads, transmission lines and construction sites to collect significant energy. Already many wind towers have been abandoned and others are being de-commissioned because of high maintenance costs or poor energy production.

Roof-top solar is a joke as a reliable supplier of energy for most of humanity. In most installations of wind and solar power, the facilities would not be built without subsidies and other political props, and it is doubtful that the green-power turbines and panels will generate enough useful energy over their limited life to recover the energy needed for their raw materials, manufacture, construction, roads, power lines, earth works, maintenance and decommissioning.

Green energy is not environmentally friendly.

Where big wind/solar facilities are constructed, many native birds and bats are sliced by whirling swords, or singed and fried by concentrated solar heat rays. Blinded by their obsession with blaming fossil fuels for everything, greens pretend that this unnecessary slaughter of wildlife is not occurring.

Without carbon and nuclear fuels, Earth would be raped for fuel and food by destitute people trying to eke out a living without the greatest boon to modern living – cheap reliable energy. As Alex Epstein, from the Centre for Industrial Progress says eloquently, “fossil fuels are the greenest energy”.

Green Power, Black Death

That is the subtitle of Paul Driessen’s powerful book describing how Western “green” restrictions on the cheap energy the West demands and takes for granted result in suffering and death in the world’s poorest nations:

It could just as well be the tile of Brendon Pearson’s article “Carefree ignore consequences of limiting supply of fossil fuels” in The Australian a few days ago. This is just a few paragraphs. Read the whole thing.

“The response from green advocates is that the emissions from coal and fossil fuels are different — they can be replaced by renewables. Let’s do the maths. Last year wind and solar ­energy produced the equivalent of nine days of global primary energy needs. Coal produced 109 days and fossil fuels combined produced 313 days of the world’s ­annual primary needs. Despite all these power sources, 1.3 billion people still missed out on electricity and a further 1.7 billion only had partial access.

To put this problem into context — the energy used by Christmas lights in the US in an average festive season is more than the ­national electricity consumption of many developing countries, such as El Salvador, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nepal or Cambodia.

Halting or limiting coal or fossil fuels output will simply mean that those with no or partial access to electricity would have to wait much longer in the dark.

That is an uncomfortable but incontrovertible fact. If you limit something or make it more expensive to the poor then you are delaying or denying that access. Not just for weeks, months or years, but generations. Hundreds of millions of people will live shorter, more miserable lives as a result of the choices of the comfortable and warm.”

That is it exactly. The cost of cozy green self-righteousness is that hundreds of millions of people will live shorter, more miserable lives.

The Nazis and Sustainable Development

A longish article from Mark Musser on the origins and continuing influence of the theory of sustainable development:

Understandably, Albert Speer Jr. has spent much of his life trying to escape the long shadow of his father, Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect during the 1930s who later was baptized as Hitler’s Armaments and War Production Minister during the heights of World War II. Albert Speer Sr. died in 1981. After serving 20 years in Spandau Prison, Speer made millions off of his best-selling books that described his life deep inside the Third Reich. In 1984, Albert Speer Jr. began a very successful architect company in Frankfurt, Germany called AS & P, or Albert Speer & Partners.

Today, AS & P is a very profitable high end international architectural company that has building projects in Germany, the Middle East, and in China. Much of Speer Jr.’s earlier financial success in the 1970s took place in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. Speer Jr. loves the Middle East and Arab culture. He is currently working in Qatar. Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup because of Speer Jr.’s audacious plans to design a carbon neutral sustainable arrangement of soccer stadiums.

AS & P pursues a holistic approach to architectural design that roots all building activities into the surrounding culture, landscape, and regulatory environment. AS & P proudly advertises its emphasis upon sustainability in the area of ecology, economics, and social quality. AS & P has even published a “Manifesto for Sustainable Cities – Think Local, Act Global.” Albert Speer Jr. is also an international lecturer on environmental sustainability. According to Der Spiegel, Speer Jr. is credited with having introduced the idea of sustainability into German urban planning. Others consider him to be the green conscience of the construction architect industry and one of the first sustainable practitioners of green building in Germany itself.

While Speer Jr. has publicly stated he has purposefully tried to place as much distance between himself and his father as possible, this is not exactly true. In reality, Speer Jr. has followed his father’s footsteps, not only in terms of being an architect, but also because of his obsession with sustainable development.

Read the rest at American Thinker.

Osama Was Her Pin-up

Roger Franklin writes in Quadrant Magazine:

On the western flood plain of the Maribyrnong, the lesser of Melbourne’s two brown rivers, Buddhists have built themselves a handsome temple and, most arresting, a gigantic golden statue of their guiding philosophy’s founder. It is quite the spectacle and well worth a glance as your Werribee-bound train approaches Footscray station. But unless you have a particular interest in the sound of one hand clapping, a glance is all it’s worth — and, obligingly, Buddhists don’t see any need for grants and government programs to promote “understanding” of their creed. Alas that another religion were so content to mind its own business. As Fairfax Media demonstrates today with a series of profiles — Australia’s Muslims Speak Up — it seems that one cannot be regarded as a fair and unbiased citizen without an obligatory knowledge of Islam, its adherents, their agonies and the bigotry we are told yet again makes the lives of Australia’s faithful so very difficult.

That, at any rate, is the series’ intent. The end result, however, is the polar opposite. Unwittingly, wrapped in its gush of multi-culti pablum, at least one of the profiles illustrates why one doesn’t need to be a peddler of prejudice to find Islam more than somewhat alien and not a little unsettling.

Read the rest.

Reading Aisha’s story in The Age, it seems clear that her every experience of islam was violent or at least unpleasant, from her failed marriage to her repressive and hostile high school, and most of her experiences of non-muslim Australian society were by contrast warm and colourful and welcoming. Yet all this seems to prove to her is that Australians are racists and it is no wonder so many muslims are angry.

Why Socialised Medicine Does Not Work

I don’t usually copy and paste entire articles, but this, by John Stossel on his hospital experience, is just too accurate to ignore:

I write this from the hospital. Seems I have lung cancer.

My doctors tell me my growth was caught early and I’ll be fine. Soon I will barely notice that a fifth of my lung is gone. I believe them. After all, I’m at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. U.S. News & World Report ranked it No. 1 in New York. I get excellent medical care here.

But as a consumer reporter, I have to say, the hospital’s customer service stinks. Doctors keep me waiting for hours, and no one bothers to call or email to say, “I’m running late.” Few doctors give out their email address. Patients can’t communicate using modern technology.

I get X-rays, EKG tests, echocardiograms, blood tests. Are all needed? I doubt it. But no one discusses that with me or mentions the cost. Why would they? The patient rarely pays directly. Government or insurance companies pay.

I fill out long medical history forms by hand and, in the next office, do it again. Same wording: name, address, insurance, etc.

I shouldn’t be surprised that hospitals are lousy at customer service. The Detroit Medical Center once bragged that it was one of America’s first hospitals to track medication with barcodes. Good! But wait — ordinary supermarkets did that decades before.

Customer service is sclerotic because hospitals are largely socialist bureaucracies. Instead of answering to consumers, which forces businesses to be nimble, hospitals report to government, lawyers and insurance companies.

Whenever there’s a mistake, politicians impose new rules: the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act paperwork, patient rights regulations, new layers of bureaucracy…

Nurses must follow state regulations that stipulate things like, “Notwithstanding subparagraph (i) of paragraph (a) of this subdivision, a nurse practitioner, certified under section sixty-nine hundred ten of this article and practicing for more than three thousand six hundred hours may comply with this paragraph in lieu of complying with the requirements of paragraph (a)…”

Try running a business with rules like that.

Adding to that is a fear of lawsuits. Nervous hospital lawyers pretend mistakes can be prevented with paper and procedure. Stressed hospital workers ignore common sense and follow rigid rules.

In the intensive care unit, night after night, machines beep, but often no one responds. Nurses say things like “old machines,” “bad batteries,” “we know it’s not an emergency.” Bureaucrats don’t care if you sleep. No one sues because he can’t sleep.

Some of my nurses were great — concerned about my comfort and stress — but other hospital workers were indifferent. When the customer doesn’t pay, customer service rarely matters.

The hospital does have “patient representatives” who tell me about “patient rights.” But it feels unnatural, like grafting wings onto a pig.

I’m as happy as the next guy to have government or my insurance company pay, but the result is that there’s practically no free market. Markets work when buyer and seller deal directly with each other. That doesn’t happen in hospitals.

You may ask, “How could it? Patients don’t know which treatments are needed or which seller is best. Medicine is too complex for consumers to negotiate.”

But cars, computers and airplane flights are complex, too, and the market still incentivizes sellers to discount and compete on service. It happens in medicine, too, when you get plastic surgery or Lasik surgery. Those doctors give patients their personal email addresses and cellphone numbers. They compete to please patients.

What’s different about those specialties? The patient pays the bill.

Leftists say the solution to such problems is government health care. But did they not notice what happened at Veterans Affairs? Bureaucrats let veterans die, waiting for care. When the scandal was exposed, they didn’t stop. USA Today reports that the abuse continues. Sometimes the VA’s suicide hotline goes to voicemail.

Patients will have a better experience only when more of us spend our own money for care. That’s what makes markets work.

Judge Refuses to Jail Girl Who Stabbed Pedophile Who Raped Her

He raped her when she was eight, but was not sentenced to jail because, you know, cultural differences.

“A judge offered to pay a teenage girl’s court fine as he refused to jail her for stabbing the pedophile who abused her as a child.

Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC told the 15-year-old it would be a ‘disgrace’ to send her to prison, despite the fact she had attacked the man, 56, in his own home, stabbing him close to his heart.

And he refused to impose a mandatory victim surcharge on the girl when she appeared at Bradford Crown Court, after hearing that the paedophile had destroyed her life, adding: ‘If anyone tries to force you, I will pay it myself.'”

Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC (pictured) offered to pay a teenage girl's court fine as he refused to jail her for stabbing the pedophile who abused her as a child.

Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC (pictured) offered to pay a teenage girl’s court fine as he refused to jail her for stabbing the pedophile who abused her as a child.

Thank goodness there is still some decency and common sense on the English bench.

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