Make a Difference
Music producer Phil Spector has been sentenced to 29 years to life for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson.
Phil Spector Wears a Barack Obama Badge
Yes I know. Murderers might have voted for Bush as well. I’m sure some did. They just didn’t wear badges announcing the fact to their court appearances.
I am not worried by Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor’s apparent belief that being a latino woman makes her wiser than a white male. That is just par for the course.
Newt Gingrich is right to point out that a white male who said his experiences made him wiser than a latino woman would be decried as both racist and sexist, and forced to withdraw from the nomination.
We all know that’s not going to happen with Sotomayor. Despite the hypocrisy of her remarks, conservatives cannot win that argument.
But I am quite sure that Robert Gibb’s assertion (in response to a question about abortion) that Obama is satisfied that Sotomayor’s view of the consititution is ‘similar to his’ is a coded way of saying she is supportive of his view of abortion rights.
That is the most radical view ever held by an American President. Obama does not even believe that care should be offered to children born alive after a failed abortion attempt.
Sotomayor’s views on abortion are a concern for liberals because she is a catholic by birth. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for justice and for the children of America, that means absolutely nothing.
Two headlines over the last week accusing Australia of being racist. Or at least, lots of Australians.
The first accusation came from Sol Trujillo. Sol was employed to run Australia’s largest telco. He liked to think of himself as a rebel, encountering resistance at every turn from shareholders, employees and government. Telstra’s share price dived during his incumbency, but he left with a pay packet of $31 million for four years of work. That includes $3 million paid to encourage him to leave early.
Here’s a bit more from the Daily Telegraph:
Trujillo was always at war with the regulators and the Government. He cut more than 8000 jobs in three years and complaints surged almost 250 per cent. And he earned huge sums of cash from shareholders but purchased almost no shares.
When Telstra announced in February this year that Mr Trujillo intended to leave, the company said he would work until June 30. But by terminating his employment during the notice period, not only does Mr Trujillo bring to an early end what presently appears to be the biggest failure of his career, he also increases the size of his payout.
That’s because Telstra is obliged to pay him an additional $3 million severance if he leaves before he completed his notice period.
The fact is, Sol Turjillo was a dud, who could not adapt to life in Australia and did not have the personal or business skills to lead a major corporation. He wanted to be seen as a creative leader, but could not accept advice or creative ideas from others.
Blaming his massive failure at Telstra on a racist culture is nonsense, a pathetic excuse which is unfair to workers and to Telstra shareholders, who employed him and gave him a huge paycheck for stuffing up one of Australia’s biggest companies.
The second accusation came from India’s High Commissioner to Australia. A number of Indian students have been attacked in Australia over the last few weeks.
It is entirely reasonable and appropriate for India to be concerned about the safety of Indian students living in Australia.
But why leap to the conclusion that such attacks are racially motivated?
A senior Victoria police officer said last night that Indian students tended to travel alone, and to carry expensive items like laptop computers and ipods, making attractive and vulnerable targets. That sounds like nonsense to me.
But at least two questions need to be answered before racism is even considered as a possible factor.
First, are Indian students victims of robbery or violence more often than anyone else as a proportion of the population? Sadly, there are criminals in Australia, just as there are in every country. Any violent crime should be taken seriously. But if Indian students are no more likely to be attacked or robbed than anyone else, the problem is not racism, but law enforcement in general.
Secondly, if Indian students are victims of crime more frequently than other groups as a proportion of population, who is doing the attacking, and why?
I do not doubt that there are racists in Australia. I have seen aboriginal students throwing stones at Sudanese refugees, for example, and ‘youths of middle eastern’ appearance taunting chinese students. I have even heard white people make critical remarks about the fecklessness of some aboriginals, or the number of unassimilated immigrants.
But to claim first up, and without any evidence, that racism by whites is the reason for crime, or for people disagreeing with you, seems to me to be racist in itself. The underlying assumptions are that whitey can’t be trusted, or whitey is stupid, or whitey hates eveyone else.
Those assumptions are racist.
One of the promises made by the Labor party during the last election was that there would be more transparency in government. I guess that means being honest about information sources, advice received, funding, and who will benefit from what.
That was obviously a non-core promise.
Senator Nick Minchin discusses this in relation to the government’s vastly overpriced and already outdated fibre optic broadband plan.
Mr Rudd and Senator Conroy have repeatedly said they are simply following the advice of an expert panel and also the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Yet they have produced no solid evidence to confirm that to be the case. ..
Its refusal to release key advice in relation to this proposal makes a mockery of its pledge to deliver a new age of transparency. And despite the scale of this project and the billions of taxpayer dollars that will be risked on it, the Government arrogantly dismisses the need for a cost benefit analysis. It claims this network will be commercially viable, yet has also failed to produce a scrap of credible evidence to support these evangelical assertions.
And the key problem with the whole dumb idea:
The Government has no idea how many customers may choose to use this network and how much they will have to pay to do so in order for it to be viable.
It is not as if we have a spare $43 billion floating around that we couldn’t use for hospitals, roads, schools, or research.
How to avoid being ripped off by scammers.
Don’t be greedy. Don’t be dumb. That pretty much covers it.
If an arabian princess emails you telling you she got your name from a friend, and needs you to help her smuggle $20 million out of Egypt, and she’s willing to give you $5 million for your trouble, and you reply, and end up sending her $10,000 to pay bank fees, are you an idiot? Yes. Are you a greedy idiot? Yes.
If you are selling a car and someone sends you a cheque for $2,000 more than the price of the car and asks you to wire $1,000 of that to a friend in Brazil, and you do, are you an idiot? yes. Are you a greedy idiot? Yes.
Also, don’t buy software from anonymous sellers in China.
I don’t think so.
Conservatives less likely to slap their dads, even if dad says its OK? Yes, that I can believe.
Conservatives have less confidence in their own wisdom relative to that of our forebears and fellow citizens. We are also less likely to make exceptions for ourselves – to say ‘ That rule applies generally, but not in my case.’ Consequently we give greater weight to laws and customs, and are generally more law abiding.
Nisholas Kristoff says studies show conservatives ae less likely to act in ways they perceive as disrespectful of authority. That’s a good thing in my view. But then, I would think that.
Kristoff also says studies show conservatives are more likely to experience feelings of disgust than liberals. That I do not believe. Unless it is disgust at liberals’ flouting the rules and disrespecting authority. But I don’t think that’s what he means.
Kristoff says that research show conservatives are more likely to feel disgust than liberals when stepping on a worm, or crawling through a sewer, or skinning an animal. He then extends this to feelings of moral disgust, and draws the conclusion that conservatives are less open minded.
That’s a pretty long draw in any case, but my experience is that it is liberals who are more likely to get upset about things being ‘yucky.’ And as for skinning an animal or working in a meat factory, let alone a sewage processing plant, or anything involving manure, forget it. Conservatives are far more likely to be the ones who roll up their sleeves, get out there and get on with it. That’s why we have red necks.
Can this be extended to moral/intellectual disgust/openness?
I don’t know, but again, my experience is that liberals (I used to be one) tend to talk to each other, and the discovery that people actually exist who do not share their opinions makes them angry. Look at the hate on people’s faces, and the tendency to violence, at leftist demonstrations, for example.
One of the funniest things I have ever read on the internet. From the Peoples Cube.
In an audacious raid Friday, al-Qaeda terrorists managed to slip past White House security and seize President Obama’s teleprompter. Their demands were released in a grainy video, which apparently showed the president’s teleprompter, bound and blindfolded but unharmed, while heavily armed masked men stood behind it, quoting from the Qur’an. The content of their demands is not being released.
President Obama, visibly shaken, attempted to address the White House press corps on his own. “Words, uh, um, I, uh, heh-heh, well…”
“We need a verb!” shouted David Gregory of MSNBC.
“I uh, know that,” quipped the president testily. “And… I’ll make sure my staff, uh, gets back with you,” he resumed after regaining his composure.
Leon Panetta, CIA Director: I’d like to address the terrorists, wherever they are hiding: If you did this because you were annoyed by our president saying “uh” too often in his speeches, then stealing the teleprompter is not going to help. Just think about it.
Lots more on the Peoples Cube site, including a photo of the kidnapped, bound and clearly terrified teleprompter. Despite brutal treatment the teleprompter is maintaining a brave silence.
Former Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer has told Australians planning to travel overseas to grow up and take some responsibility.
After about 10 minutes as foreign minister I was a little surprised to learn I was “responsible” for miscreant Australians who got into trouble in foreign countries. No, no, no, don’t get it wrong – drug traffickers, drunks, kleptomaniacs and fraudsters weren’t responsible for their own stupidity – I was.
It’s about time that great nanny in Canberra, the Federal Government, turned around and told people they are responsible for their own decisions.
Mr Downer goes on to say that of course Australia will always be there to help Australians in real trouble, especially in circumstances over which they have no control, and could not reasonably have predicted.
But even then, he notes, the response of many is not an expression of thanks, but more complaining:
I couldn’t help remembering the awful events in those same places three years ago when Israel went to war with Hezbollah.
There were said to be 20,000 Australians in Lebanon at that time and a hefty percentage of them were demanding the Australian Government save them and fast.
Lebanese support groups hit the airwaves screaming that the Government was too slow getting those Australians who wanted to be evacuated to safety. But hang on, Australia’s about 15,000km from Lebanon and we don’t dock ships in the eastern Mediterranean ready to ferry Australians to safety.
And there was something else. We’d issued a travel advisory months earlier warning Australians of the dangers of southern Lebanon and the risks of going there.
It didn’t matter – apparently we had to get them out.
We were lucky. The Australian ambassador, a petite, charming professional called Lyndall Sachs, worked day and night chartering ferries and providing comfort to the evacuees, who hadn’t cared about the travel advisories, and whisked them to safety.
It was one of the great achievements of an Australian diplomat. Almost single handedly, she managed to get around 5000 Australians to Cyprus and Turkey.
We then chartered planes to take them back to Australia. I hope they built shrines to her. Some did, at least metaphorically.
But some just whinged. They felt seasick on the ferry and that was our fault. Could they get frequent flyer points for the free flight back to Australia? And all this cost around $30 million dollars – your dollars.
I’ll tell you this – I didn’t get 5000 emails of thanks but I got plenty of abuse because we weren’t fast enough, the ferries didn’t go from their port of choice and we were slow because we were racist, and so on. I mean, we’d warned them and told them not to go to the south of Lebanon. They went all the same. And when the proverbial hit the fan it was, you guessed it, “our fault”.
It is a well thought out, well written and amusing article. Read the whole thing.
Swaziland has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world.
Swaziland politican Timothy Myeni has suggested that HIV testing should be compulsory, and that citizens testing positive for HIV should be branded on their buttocks.
“I have a solution to this virus. The solution will come from a law that will make it compulsory to test for HIV. Once you test positive, you should be branded on the buttocks. Before having sex with anyone, people will check the buttocks of their partners before proceeding.”
Most HIV sufferers catch the disease because of choices they make about their sexual behaviour. They have HIV because they would not be responsible, would not keep their pants on.
I feel deeply sorry for HIV sufferers. AIDS is a terrible disease, and a terrible price to pay for a few stupid decisions.
But it is still true that the disease is most often a consequence of irresponsibility, irresponsibility that generally does not stop even after a person knows he or she is infected.
Whatever Swaziland has been doing so far has not been working. Myeni’s plan could work. It could even save some lives.
Naturally there is massive outrage.
Another one to add to the bleeding obvious list.
Government grants (ie, giving other people’s money) to new home owners, amount to $21,000.
Because they have a larger deposit, (sometimes the grant is their only deposit) first home buyers are able to arrange larger loans. Which they are often unable to afford.
The average loan size for first-home buyers has risen by $52,000 – or 23 per cent – in the past two years, raising fears that the much-publicised government incentives for young buyers are artificially inflating the market.
Imagine governments encouraging people to take out home loans they can’t afford. Why, if they’re not careful that could cause some problems, maybe.
In addition, throwing tax payer funds at the housing market causes inflation, so that in many cases the total cost of a new home is more than it would have been if the government had minded its own business, not handed out unecessary grants, and saved my tax dollars for something useful.
Who was it who said the only thing we learn from history is that no one learns anything from history?
You know all those annoying hoax anti-virus messages that people used to send around?
They described in breathless terms some new virus which antivirus products could not remove, which would cause your hard to crash, losing all your data unrecoverably.
Now there is a virus which almost matches that description.
virut ce can cause serious problems with key Windows system files, making your computer impossible to use. For example, disabling the Windows interface so you cannot access the task bar, start button, icons, etc, disabling internet access, Windows key functions and task manager.
And it is extremely, and I mean extremely, difficult to remove. It sometimes infects necessary Windows files which have to be deleted. Even if your anti-virus can remove the infection, and many commercial products cannot, you may be left with a computer which will not start again without help.
I strongly suggest not using p2p programmess until standard anti-virus programmes can find and remove this virus. Stay away from porn sites. Be more than normally careful with web browsing and with opening email attachments.
Some removal tools:
Dutch chemist Dr Hans Schreuder drew on the work of a number of climate and other scientists in his address to the Northern Ireland Climate Change Committee, which is considering legislative controls of ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions.
The UN’s IPCC bases its dire forecasts on nothing more than computer models that regard the earth as a flat disk bathed in a constant 24 hour haze of sunlight, without north and south poles, without clouds and without any relationship to the real planet we live on.
Despite much rhetoric and research over the past two decades, there is still not a single piece of actual evidence that the now-maligned carbon dioxide molecule causes global warming (or “climate change”).
Any and all schemes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are futile in terms of having an effect on reducing global temperatures or affecting the climate and any and all carbon trading exchanges are a fraudulent exercise amounting to no more than hidden taxation.
If this Committee does come to the conclusion that emission controls need to be imposed upon the people of Northern Ireland in order to make a difference to global temperatures, then it will have failed to a substantial degree in understanding the issues in hand.
I have said repeatedly over the last several years that the key question is whether there is any evidence of a correlation between human output of CO2 and changes in global climate. The answer is that there is not and never has been any such evidence.
via Ice Age Now, which also notes hundreds of low temperature records around the world over the last few months, reports of which have been strangely missing from the mainstream media.
You can imagine the headlines and warming hysteria if it were hundreds of high temperature records!
Ice Age Ending - Our Fault
From memory, those are the opening words of M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Travelled
It is true, of course. And the more you try to achieve, the truer it seems to be.
Rambling for a minute. When I was a teenager I remember reading a story about a woman in the US who had sued her local men’s baseball team. They had discriminated against her by refusing to let her join. She won. It was America, after all.
After playing two games, she was struck and slightly injured by a fast pitch. She promptly sued the club again, this time for failing to take account of the fact that she was a woman, and therefore had slower reaction times. Even at the age of fourteen, this struck me as the perfect example of the women’s movement in practice.
Feminists want to be treated like men, but when they are treated like men, they complain bitterly.
Men are competitive. They constantly test each other. And it is not hard to understand why. If you are going out hunting mammoth, or fighting the Viet Cong, or trying to win a critical contract for your firm, you need to know that the person next to you can take the strain. This is the purpose of ‘hazing.’
Testing gives you confidence in your own strength, and that of your fellows. While hazing can sometimes trip over into bullying, it is not a bad thing in itself. I would not be confident on a battlefield with a buddy who burst into tears if someone laughed at the ladders in her stockings, or who complained about breaking a nail while on basic training.
Women (again generalising) test each other in different ways. When they choose to place themselves in a predominantly male environment, the prestigious world of garbage collection, for example, and are treated by men as those men treat one another, women often seem to interpret this as being picked on, belittled, put down. In fact, it should be taken as a compliment. The male workers are assuming that she can be one of them, that she can work on an equal basis.
This interpretation of equal treatment as unfair can be particularly evident in the workplace.
Again, to ramble for a minute, I worked in a bookshop where some books were stacked on high shelves. To reach them for customers or to restock, staff had to stand on a small step ladder. The female staff refused to do this, because people would be able to see their knickers. The same applied to changing lightbulbs, dusting, etc.
When I suggested that they knew this was part of the job, and that they should therefore dress appropriately, either wearing pants or longer skirts, I was berated for assuming the right to tell them what to wear.
Feminists tell women they do not, cannot succeed, because they face constant unfair discrimination. In fact, women who can do the job, and are willing to make the sacrifices (physical discomfort, repeated rejection, long hours, etc) that are needed, can do, and do do, as well as men.
Efforts to to achieve equality in employment at executive levels for women and minority groups by forcing employers to hire less qualified or able women, blacks, or whoever, only make the situation worse. People hired under such schemes will be the object of annoyance and frustration, and the knowledge that they have not genuinely earned their jobs reinforces rather than mitigates negative stereotypes.
It is not liberating or empowering for women to be told that they will never succeed because they face insurmountable obstacles of injustice and discrimination. The truth is, as Penny Vincenzi points out in this article, it is not an imaginary glass ceiling that holds women back from the top positions, it is not working as hard, not working as long, or simply not being good at their jobs.
Life is not fair. Work is not fair. Just stop whining and get on with it, and you will do as well as anyone with your commitment and abilities. That is the liberating truth.
North Korea conducted a powerful underground nuclear weapons test today.
The UN security council will meet. No doubt Kim Jong-il is quaking in his tiny boots as he contemplates the arrival of another letter telling him how angry they are.
President Obama and other world leaders have said they are gravely concerned. All to be expected. Not so expected is that China has also condemned the test.
Share markets have fallen slightly in response to the news of the test. Asian oil prices have also fallen.
On the other hand, shares in defense related companies jumped.
I think Kim Jong-il is on a mission to change his theme song. I’m So Ronery just isn’t doing it for him any more.
But if he wants to start singing ‘So What,’ I think I like Pink’s version better.
This column by a physicist and climatologist is a week old. But it is worth reading because of its clear comparison of the predictions of global warming theory with real word observations.
The conclusion: global warming theory is: a political movement with nearly all the recognised climatologists throughout the world dissenting from the man made global warming theory. This can be seen on the US Senate Environment committee web site with over 700 leading climatologists from 24 different countries including Nobel Prize laureates all dissenting from the man made global warming theory.
The magnificent Cardinal Pell, a champion of compassion and common sense, also notes that global warming just doesn’t seem to be happening:
… history shows the planet is dynamic and the climate is always changing, sometimes drastically.
Contrary evidence is already changing the debate. Australia, with its tiny economy, is no longer aiming to lead the world. The threat of massive job losses and increasing awareness of new evidence will provoke even greater caution in the future…
Evidence shows the wheels are falling from the climate catastrophe bandwagon.
The end to the global warming nonsense cannot come soon enough. Eventually governments will stop wasting vast amounts of time and money, and sabotaging key industries, to prevent something that isn’t happening.
Perhaps then, at least until the next mindless scare, we will have the will to deal with some of the world’s real problems.
© 2024 Qohel