Targets of lust and sexual repression

It is sadly amusing the way that our latte sipping friends want to insist that there is nothing in Islamic culture that encourages immigrant Muslim men to “groom ” or rape the young women of the countries that have welcomed them. Of course such problems are not evident in every individual who prays in the direction of Mecca but when you have a respected member of the community in the UK admitting that it is a problem.

 

Lord Ahmed warned young Asian girls as well as white girls are targeted

Lord Ahmed, a Labour peer, said he was talking about Asian men in general and warned they can target young Asian girls as well as white girls.

He said: “They are forced into marriages and they are not happy.

“They are married to girls from overseas who they don’t have anything in common with, and they have children and a family.

“But they are looking for fun in their sexual activities and seek out vulnerable girls.

“I get a lot of criticism from Asian people who ask, ‘How can you say this about Asian men?’ But they must wake up and realise there is a problem.”

He added: “While I respect individual choice, I think the community needs to look at marriages in the UK rather than cousin marriages or economic marriages from abroad.

Religions that deny that we are creatures of flesh and blood  and privilege arranged marriages of an individual’s right to choose their life partner  are bound to cause more problems than they solve for humanity especially when they so easily maintain a double standard of socially acceptable behaviour within their community.

Cheers Comrades

The need for speed

I have consequently railed against the outright lie that speed cameras are all about “road safety” rather than being a way of extracting hard earned cash from motorists. So I welcome the reforms to the use of speed cameras that has been announced for Victoria by the new government there.

 

The state's entire speed camera sustem is to be examined to ensure its accuracy. Source: HWT Image Library

Mr Ryan is today also honouring a last-minute election promise by allowing the Herald Sun to reveal the location of previously secret mobile speed camera sites.

He will provide the Herald Sun each week with a list of where mobile speed cameras will be placed during the following seven days.

Mr Ryan said providing the list was part of his plan to make Victoria’s speed and red light camera network more transparent.

He said measures being considered included making fixed and mobile speed cameras more visible by painting them in bright colours.

“Victorians should have complete knowledge of all aspects of the traffic camera system and confidence in its integrity,” Mr Ryan said.

“I believe that public scepticism about cameras has arisen largely from a lack of knowledge about the intricacies of the system, the apparent secrecy surrounding its structure and operations, and a lack of confidence in the capacity to accurately record speed.

“This Government is intent on fixing this problem.”

Mr Ryan has asked the Auditor-General to examine what should be done about tolerance levels, which give motorists a certain amount of leeway before cameras are triggered and fines issued.

He hopes his speed camera shake-up will convince motorists the new Government’s priority is to use Victoria’s 435 fixed and mobile traffic cameras in whatever way is most effective to save lives.

This is a step in the right direction because road safety , like justice , not only needs to be done but it also has to be seen to be done.

Cheers Comrades

Pat Condell on the money , again

 

Cheers Comrades

Stoner scrapheap challenge!!!!

The catapult is a mainstay of Scrapheap challenge

Here at Chez Hall we are big fans of Scrapheap Challenge. My son and I love watching how a group of bodgers manage to make something amazing and wonderful out of junk. Well it seems to me that there must be some Mexican fans of the show as well…

Hilarious Comrades !

“Okay, this hurts, but it must hurt in order to make things more secure, more robust. Evolution through crisis.”

If you area Climate Change sceptic like I am you just have to love the collapse of the European carbon trading scheme because it so clearly demonstrates that it is little more than a glorified ponzi scheme where traders make a quid buying and selling something that does not have any relationship to any real commodity.

 

The European commission has put an indefinite freeze on carbon markets. Photograph: John Giles/PA

The European commission‘s emergency suspension last week of trading in carbon allowances to put a halt to rampant theft of credits by hackers has been extended indefinitely until countries can prove their systems are protected from further fraud.

While the suspension had been expected to end last night, Brussels now says that the freeze in trades had been imposed to give the commission executive some breathing space to figure out what to do.

“The suspension last week was only a transitional measure to give the commission and member states the time to assess the situation and decide the way forward,” the commission’s climate spokeswoman, Maria Kokkonen, said.

“Okay, this hurts, but it must hurt in order to make things more secure, more robust. Evolution through crisis.”

A total of 30 countries that participate in the Emissions Trading Scheme, Europe’s flagship climate change policy, must now send assessments of the situation performed by independent monitors.

 

 

Its amazingly like the AGW argument: “all sound and fury signifying nothing “

So here is a challenge for or resident Warministas like JM or PKD:

Please explain just how such schemes are supposed to affect the climate again because this one seems to have failed…
Cheers Comrades

Unpleasant ingredients or dirty hands can spoil the pudding

Lets hope that the colour comes from Chocolate rather than anything nasty in the Labor cook book

Assuming that the Gillard government can actually get this through the parliament (which may not be that easy until the new members of the senate take their seats in the middle of the year) is this whole thing really necessary is the obvious question here.

Unveiling the $5.6bn flood rescue package in Canberra, Ms Gillard said the government was adopting a “pay as we go” policy towards rebuilding after floods devastated Queensland and other parts of Australia.

Queensland will receive an immediate $2bn advance payment but the state’s finances remain in a precarious position. Treasurer Andrew Fraser will today update the state budget, which will be hit by a sharp cut to coal royalties receipts.

The Queensland Resources Council yesterday predicted that coal production for the March quarter would crash by between 25 and 50 per cent. Queensland’s gross state product for 2010-11 would take a hit of at least $4.5bn, rising to $8bn on the QRC’s worst-case scenario.

The federal government has structured its rescue levy to exempt everyone earning less than $50,000 and also the 500,000 people expected to claim a $1000 government handout for flood damage that has not been means-tested.

The levy will be struck at 0.5 per cent of additional income earned over $50,000 and 1 per cent on incomes over $100,000 and is to last for one year from this July.

Treasury estimates that about 4.8 million taxpayers will be hit by the levy while 5.1 million taxpayers will be exempt.

Someone earning $80,000 would pay $150 a year while a person on $150,000 would pay $750 a year. The levy will wipe out more than half the tax cuts received in 2010-11 by everyone earning over $100,000.

Ms Gillard made no excuses for targeting the well-off , saying the levy was “highly progressive” and “it’s been calibrated very deliberately so high-income earners pay more”.

Leading economists and business groups sounded the alarm on the levy, saying it would reduce consumer confidence and the flood damage bill could be financed without it.

To be entirely honest I tend to agree with the pundits who have suggested that a great deal of the necessary funds could come from dropping some of Labor’s sillier programs like the “cash for clunkers” scheme or any further spending on the BER program or even just cutting the amount of free air travel used by MPs, there are lots of ways that the money could be found just by a bit of judicious review of government expenditure elsewhere.
That said there is always the issue of just how confident any of us can be that the costs of the rebuilding will not blow out and just how confident can any of us be that the government  will get value for money here.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating so lets just hope that there is not that same bovine faecal after-taste that we experienced in both the BER and the Pink batts recipes after all a good cook is mindful of good hygiene and the last thing that we can be sure of here is that Julia Gillard has clean hands.

Cheers Comrades

Less is more when it comes to automotive design

click for link to source

One of my favourite arguments about the future of motoring is based upon the notion that less is more when it comes to automotive design. less weight and less drag in particular. This new car designed by VW ticks all of the right boxes for a future which finds the price of oil inexorably rising .

I am particularly pleased that the use of modern materials and it seems likely that this car will have a much longer life span that anything made now.

I also just love the rear wheel spats

Cheers Comrades

 

Rrrrrrrrrrr 18 Games

 

Christmas  must be tough if you are a “grown up”  would be vegetarian who likes to play computer games and you want them to have more “adult” content. One such is of course the learned friend of this blog who has for some time bemoaned the fact that the most adult games that can be bought in this country are rated MA. The graphic violence of say  “Call to duty, Black opps” is just not enough for him. So just what can Santa put in his stocking ? Anyone would think that the most violent and explicit games currently available were things like “Telletubbies vs Playschool “from the way that our learned friend goes on about this issue.

Frankly I have been looking at couple of them and I wonder precisely how much different games like Grand Theft Auto IV could be were it to be rated R rather than the MA that it currently carries and really how would the games have to be  different to earn an “R” rating? The level of profanity in a game like GTA4 is very high and whenever someone is shot or otherwise maimed you see blood-spatter and hear cries of pain from the maimed and killed. Does our learned friend want the violence of such games to be more graphic? Just how would that improve the game play?

If its not the way that violence is depicted that our learned friend wants to be more adult then is it the sex that he wants to be more graphic? In GTA4 the entertainment includes visits to strip clubs where the women are never more naked than wearing skimpy gee strings and you never even see a nipple depicted. I this the part of the Games that our learned friend wants to be made more “adult”?

I would dearly love our learned friend to explain just how games and gaming would be improved by the change that he proposes and It would be nice if he could provide some examples of the more adult games that we in this country  are excluded from so that those listening to his argument would really appreciate what he is arguing for here.

That said today I offer a fisk of the first outing of Jeremy’s most recently created creature (which is yet to be incorporated) the rather misnamed  “Australian Family Lobby”. I find it a very sad indication of this, ah hem, “organisation” (really just Jeremy Sear, Keri James and a couple of their friends) that this is the first issue that they hang their colours on. The simple fact is that for most families this is simply not a big  issue.

FAMILIES LET DOWN BY FURTHER DELAY TO R18

There is one thing Jim Wallace of the so-called “Australian Christian Lobby” got right in his attack on ratings reform on this site on Friday: “When it comes to protecting children and community standards, the authorities are asleep at the wheel”.

My immediate reaction to this opening was to thump the desk and mutter about the pot calling the kettle black because I think that it is rather rich for Sear to call into question the right of anyone  to represent themselves as a lobby group when he himself is doing precisely that. Hmm this is not such a good start

Unfortunately, it’s the delaying tactics relied on by out-of-touch members of the Fundamentalist Right that have had that result.

Surely it is for those who advocate change to make their case that the change that they propose is both efficacious and needed, and as most people with actual families are correct to suggest that we proceed slowly with any reform in this area.

The issue in question is finally removing the loophole in the classification of interactive entertainment (in the main, computer and video games) that forces content designed for adults into the rating category appropriate for 15 year olds – either with no, or very minor changes. The unavoidable flipside of our rating system being unable to distinguish between adults and children because the distinction is not available, is not only that adults are treated as children – it’s that children are treated as adults.

 

What I would have liked to have seen at this point in our learned friend’s missive is some exposition on just what aspects of any games content are used to classify any game, in particular just how graphic the depiction of violence has to be to put something into the “R” category in the games in question and how explicit does any depiction of sex or nudity have to be?

The only way to treat children differently from adults is, obviously, to have an adult rating – as we have had, for a long time, in most other media.

Thus the campaign for an R18 rating, a sensible reform that will help parents know which games their kids should and absolutely should not be playing.

This could have only come from a man who has never raised any children because it is a rare parent who thinks that the rating of any piece of media is all you need to decide just how suitable any particular film or game is for your children. At best such things are only a vague guideline what parents need is a more detailed description of the content that they can use to access the suitability of the game for their individual children

It’s not about helping Australian jobs in the sector presently seriously undermined by our outdated classification system – although it will certainly do that. It’s not about recognising that the average gamer is now in his or her 30s, and the target audience for much of this medium is adults, not children – although that’s true. It’s not about the fact that restricting adults to the same content as teenagers is nanny-state censorship (cue the sadly appropriate Mark Twain quote about censorship being “telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it”) – although it is.

Just how is it going to make a squib of difference to the games makers here or elsewhere? Anyone in the content creation business has to be aware that different countries have different expectations and different concerns about the content of games. and they can and do make variations of those games to suit different markets now and that will not change if even if the way that games are classified here does change.

Most importantly, this reform is about protecting our children – and giving parents the tools they need.

Which is why 80% of Australians support it

Strangely I doubt this. While it is likely that most Australians do support the general concept that games should be properly classified depending on their content though  I wonder just how many care much beyond the generalities.

Jim Wallace apparently thinks it’s the video of supposedly R18-style content that was shown to the politicians that made them accede to his lobby’s demands for further delay. Maybe they’d never seen an R18 film before, and were surprised when the adult content designed for adults and for whom an adult rating is sought was, well, adult. Not appropriate for minors. Conflicting reports suggest it might not have been the video put out by the censorship advocates (which tends to include material that would NEVER be rated R18 in Australia anyway) so it would not have been any worse than content we already see at video libraries around the country.

There is a certain madness that pervades the “progressive” brain they are mad keen to change everything and to do it at the earliest opportunity with the rather vague hope that it will give us a desirable outcome. Fortunately for the rest of us there are lots of people who think that nothing should be changed in haste and that it is better to take longer deciding what to change than to have to revisit the issue again  because that hasty act was a move in the wrong direction.

 

Which begs the question – why maintain the loophole?

Wallace, who was ghoulish enough on this page last week to rhetorically link the adult content he dislikes with the Tucson shootings, thinks “what we play” has more of an effect than what we watch, by virtue of its interactivity. He doesn’t present any evidence for this claim – not even the cherry-picked “studies” from dodgy no-name American universities on whom his colleagues tend to rely.

Here we once again see the tendency of our so called “progressive” friends to insist that there has to be some grand and expensive “research” to discover the obvious. The simple fact is that all you have to do is watch children and adults play and then you will see just how much more deeply immersed they become in computer games than they become in other non-interactive media like film or television. Surely its obvious that the more immersed that one becomes the more effect that the media has?

But that’s because, in reality, it’s besides the point. If – and that’s a big if – interactive media were shown to have more of an effect, then that would be an argument for tailoring the classification guidelines for each rating category – not for refusing to distinguish between kids and adults. If what’s appropriate for an adult in film is not appropriate for an adult in games, then that would be a reason to have tougher guidelines for games than films – not to claim that what’s appropriate for an adult is appropriate for a 15 year old. Which is what having no R18 rating does.

Really as a parent I am far more concerned about  what is appropriate for a ten year old compared to what is appropriate for an adult because when it comes down to it by the time a young person is fifteen they are in many ways an adult already .

Nobody here is seriously suggesting extreme, dangerous content that really requires banning full stop should be made available for adults. Nobody is suggesting a free-for-all: when R18 is eventually implemented, extreme content will still be refused classification, just as it is now with films.

Jim Wallace is fighting the wrong battle – he should be arguing about what content he thinks that an R18 rating should permit, not whether it should exist or not.

If Jim Wallace is fighting the wrong battle then so too is our learned friend who should be enunciating precisely what he criticising Wallace for failing to do here.

Because the one thing we should all be able to agree on is that adults and children are different. That children deserve to have their innocence protected from the things that are appropriate for adults.

And any sensible classification system would recognise that simple fact, with an adult, not-for-kids classification.

Yes we all want a system that appropriately classifies game content but I can see that classifying something like a game is clearly a much bigger ask than the task of classifying a film the sheer time it would take to go through the content of a game means that an entirely new skill set to that required to classify a film. That said there is no good argument for haste here either.

 

It is long since time that ours did.

A further year’s delay is absurd, and lets down every Australian family.

What amuses me is that this little missive is the first official outing for the Australian Family Lobby and to be honest it seems to me that the issue has only a limited connection with the Raison d’etre for Sear’s invention. That sort of sums up how serious this group is doesn’t it? While real families worry about housing or the education of their children the first cab of the rank for our learned friend’s  lobby group  is a bid to get access to  more violent and sexually explicit material where he can make manifest his torture fantasies and his joy in killing in the most blood thirsty manner possible. strangely the picture that I link to here does not appear on the Australian Family Lobby website and I have to wonder why that is so and if it yet another example of our learned friend flying under a false flag.

 

Cheers Comrades

Ban the bullbar

You gotta wonder why people fit bullbars like this one to there cars. What does it say about them? In this case it says “I’m an idiot from Adelaide on P Plates and I wanna kill someone”.

If you have a bullbar fitted to your car you might as well go the full hog and put a sticker of the Aussie flag on your back window and another one that says “I’m a redneck and proud of it – get out of my way you f*ckers”.

So why do I raise this contraceptive subject one day before Australia Day you ask? Because its in the bloody news, that’s why:

The Federal Government is considering a change to the national road rules that could see bullbars banned.

The Government has invited public comment on proposed changes to the design rules for cars.

Aimed at improving safety for pedestrians, the changes include the mandatory redesign of cars from 2012-13 and could see bullbars being outlawed.

The executive director of the Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association says there have been similar changes to road rules in Europe.

Stuart Charity says the changes will effectively eliminate bullbars on the grounds they are a danger to pedestrians.

“The bullbar industry in Australia is a $300 million industry and it’s at significant jeopardy with these regulations being proposed,” he said.

But Mr Charity is concerned the regulations do not address the issue of passenger safety.

“Our real concern is that the regulations only address the pedestrian impact safety element, and not the vehicle occupant impact,” he said.

“Bullbars in the Australian context play a critical role in keeping the occupants of vehicles safe, stopping vehicles being stranded and so on.

“The incidence of animal strikes in Australia is huge. Our initial data shows that there’s around 25 to 30,000 insurance claims as a result of animal strikes a year.”

The Northern Territory Government says it will fight any national move to ban bullbars on cars.

I know there are *some* valid reasons in some parts of Oz for protecting yourself from stray cattle and water buffalos but maybe just slow down? I once hit a pretty big kangaroo which did a fair bit of damage to my car not to mention the roo that when I went to check on it I was amazed to see its head was on backwards. It was very dead. I guess if I had had a roo bar fitted (whats the bloody difference between a roo bar and a bull bar? Buggered if I know) then it might have been pushed forward instead of flipping onto my bonnet and hitting my windscreen – or would it? Do they carry out scientific tests on these things and if so how?

I think I agree that we should ban these bullbars because they are just designed to give people a false sense of security.

And while we are at it why not go the whole hog and ban those big and annoying gas guzzling 4 wheel drive passenger vehicles too? You know, the ones that usually have bullbars.

Jeremy Sear is no patriot

Jeremy Sear sneers at patriotism

In a post titled ‘We Aussie patriots only came to the conclusion that this is “the best country on Earth” after careful study and research‘ lefty blogger Jeremy Sear quotes an anti-patriotic article by Michael Brull:

I know there are those who think it a form of disloyalty to not believe that Australia is the greatest country on earth. Certainly, they have their counterparts across the world. There is a strange correlation between being born in a country and believing that it is the greatest country in the world. This hasn’t yet given pause to the super-patriots here and elsewhere. Yet this is suggestive that patriotic fervour is not always entirely rational, or motivated by a sober evaluation of the merits and flaws of one’s homeland.

Jeremy then goes on to ridicule Australian patriots by sneering sarcastically:

Correlation does not equal causation, mate. I bet if the patriotic Aussies had been born in America, they’d still have grown up declaring Australia “the best country on Earth”. Just like if Jim Wallace had grown up in Iran to a Muslim family, he’d DEFINITELY still be a fundamentalist Christian because his chosen religion is the result of years of careful research and study. Seriously, we’ve watched TV programs about other countries. Jim met a Jew once.

But does patriotism involve thinking that your country is the best on earth? Let’s consult the dictionary:

patriotism 

 –noun devoted love, support, and defense of one’s country; national loyalty.

No mention of any belief in superiority there. Perhaps Jeremy and Brull should have used other words that would more closely fit what they are trying to describe. After quick examination, their big argument turns out to be nothing more than a straw man.

This is not the first time Jeremy has misunderstood something before attacking it. You would think that such a self-appointed guardian of “intellectual honesty” would take some time to understand the views of others before misrepresenting and attacking them. Sadly not.

The reality is that patriotism need not be racist, belligerent or chauvinistic. All it involves is a love of Australia. That Jeremy rejects patriotism by conflating it with other things is pretty poor form for a fellow supposedly devoted to exposing “intellectual dishonesty” in others.

Here’s another really awful instance of Sear’s intellectual dishonesty:

That tweet was in reference to this episode, where Bob Brown made a fool of himself when he blamed the coal industry for the Queensland floods. The substance of Brown’s comments was not changed at all by News Ltd. Jeremy’s attempt to be very cunning with language by suggesting that the meaning of Brown’s comments were altered is extremely dishonest indeed.

Given that Jeremy is an anti-patriot, it’s not surprising that he believes in the irresponsible economic and immigration policies of the Australian Greens which would only make Australia less strong and prosperous.

By de-legitimising patriotism, he is able to argue for policies which are against Australia’s interests. A bit of intellectual honesty would recognise this.

European ETS feels that warm glow of fraud fueled failure

Regular readers of the Sandpit must surely remember the many times that I have written about the stupidity and ineffectiveness of any sort of emissions trading scheme. It is my opinion that such schemes will do nothing except enrich the spivs and shysters while having absolutely no effect upon the climate. So it is with some wry bemusement that I note how the European scheme seems to be on the verge of collapse due to fraudulent trading.

a Warminista in search of a cure for "climate change"

Connie Hildegaard, the EC climate commissioner, claimed that the scheme was a victim of its own success. “Over the last years, the market has reached a size which makes it a potential target of fraudulent practices.

“Therefore, as the market matures and grows further, it is critical that it continues to be subject to appropriate and effective regulatory oversight.”

The Department of Energy and Climate Change said at the weekend that it supported the moves to tighten systems around Europe. “The security of the carbon market is very important and this period of time will allow registry administrators to address the security of their registry. The UK Registry Administrator, the Environment Agency, has assessed the risk to UK account holders and concluded that because of the security systems used in the UK Registry successful attacks are unlikely.

But the EC has further enraged sections of the carbon market by botching an announcement late last week on new “offset” procedures whereby companies in the developing world can claim carbon credits for building “green” industrial schemes designed to take carbon out of the atmosphere.

One senior banker said Brussels “career” civil servants running the EU emissions trading scheme should hand over control to a new independent financial body. On Friday, their latest gaffe was to botch a key announcement, causing the price of carbon to gyrate. “These foibles used to be faintly amusing, but now they’re becoming threatening,” he said.

Meanwhile Andrew Hedge, a partner from Norton Rose law firm, said that more companies involved in carbon trading are calling for an EU backed insurance fund to be set up to cover any such losses. He warned that no system could ever be 100% fraud proof, despite promises by the commission to tighten software security in the light of the growing problem with fraud.

“The Commission is now pushing for stronger security and has taken welcome action to insist national registries are secure. But you can never have 100% security – there will always potentially be a corrupt individual or a more sophisticated cyber attack. It’s incumbent on the EC and member states to protect participants in the market. Many players would like some sort of insurance mechanism set up so that if they unwittingly buy stolen allowances, there is a mechanism by which they can return these to the authorities in exchange for replacement allowances.”

To be honest I am entirely unsurprised by this sort of thing. I have been expecting that the Spivs would keep pushing the envelope until it broke. The reality is that when the emperor is not only wearing a new set of clothes but also selling those same magic shirts and pants to the gullible it will eventually be noticed that those who try on the magic garments will all eventually be told by some small boy that their bum looks big in that.
An ETS just can’t work, it produces no social good to “trade” an idea when said ideas can be endlessly created with the fiction that they are not only worth something but that the value will endlessly increase.
Cheers Comrades

Gaia weeps at the betrayal every time a lefty buys bottled water

The University of Canberra plan to ban the sale of bottled water. (ABC News: Giulio Saggin)

Call me old fashioned if you like but I have just never bought into the concept of buying water in plastic bottles, water is obviously an essential to life but the idea of getting people to pay for the stuff when it comes  so inexpensively from our very safe and, by any standard that matters, pure* reticulated supplies in our towns and cities has to qualify as a a masterpiece of capitalist enterprise. I even love the irony that the most avid consumers of this product are your younger Latte sipper types who are also so Gung ho about the environment. So imagine my amusement when I saw this little story on the ABC website:

“If the 13,000 students and staff at the University of Canberra can do this, there’s no reason why every other university in Australia cannot do the same,” he said.

“It will save students money. The water’s better for their health and it will make a really big environmental difference.”

UC vice-chancellor Stephen Parker says the ban makes environmental sense.

“The evidence is now really strong that bottled water does environmental damage,” he said.

“The bottles themselves take about 200ml of oil to make, you can use up to 3 litres of natural water to produce 1 litre of bottled water and we also know that about 43 per cent of bottles are recycled so the rest ends up as rubbish or landfill.”

Professor Parker says on-campus retailers agree to the change.

“Given that Canberra’s got good and plentiful fresh water we just can’t see the environmental argument to continue the sale of bottled water,” he said.

“What we’re also doing as part of this whole measure is introducing new bubbler machines and vending machines for different kinds of water sales, all of which will use refillable containers rather than the bottles that are currently sold.

“So actually we’re hoping that consumption of water will go up on campus. It will be fresh and natural tap water. It won’t be bottled water.”

The ban is being phased in with sales of bottled water on the campus to end by March 22.

Well its a good step forward to bring sense to the minions of the left.  All that we need  now is a way to reform their pretentious coffee habits and we may have  a chance of saving their souls, by  making them live true to their faith , if  they like it or not.

Cheers Comrades

*I’m prepared to cut Adelaide residents some slack on this issue because I know that their water is just horrible

It’s the economy, stupid

Ross Sharp thinks those who care about the economic impact of the Queensland floods are "bores", "dullards" and "$hitheads"

 

One of my recent posts discussed how a smug leftist in Victoria thinks that the people of Queensland shouldn’t be furious towards looters and how looting during a major natural disaster is no worse than stealing in ordinary circumstances.

Now, a Queensland leftist reckons that we should “f*ck the economy” and not worry about the financial cost of the Queensland floods:

F*ck the “market reports” that clutter up the daily and nightly news reports with obtuse bullshit dribbling from the mouths of bullshit-artists, shills and shell-game shysters whose sad, denuded lives comprise little more than spewing out utterly worthless speculations about the possible “cost to the economy” of this and the estimated “cost to the economy” of that, the rise of this and the fall of that.

 

What the leftist in question doesn’t seem to realise is that the cost to the economy as a result of the floods is going to be felt by people. Real human beings. People whose houses were flooded and will have to pay tens of thousands if not hundreds of dollars to fix their homes, or sell them for much less. People under financial strain who weren’t able to go to work for days because all paths between their homes and their workplaces were flooded. People who couldn’t go to work because their workplace had been flooded. Businesses that go bust because they were uninsured, or their insurance didn’t cover this type of flood. The employees of such businesses that have to join a Centrelink queue and look for another job, not knowing when they will find an equally good position. Businesses that will have to spend a lot in order to fix their premises and start properly trading again. I could go on but you get the idea.

Then there’s the insurance companies that will have to pay out their customers who were covered by the floods. It’s because of disasters like these that premiums are not cheap. And there’s the cost to the taxpayer when the government steps in.

Disasters like these do inevitably cost a lot of money, although there are of course non-financial costs as well. And since the cost impacts on real people, it is certainly worth quantifying just to give an idea of the massive impacts of the floods on the people of Queensland.

The leftist also links to discussion about Tony Abbott’s proposal to divert funds devoted to the NBN to the floods and moans that “Making progress, advancing as a civilisation, developing something that may resemble a “culture” costs money. Science, education, health, research and development costs money. Public infrastructure, transport, homes, roads, the basic things we require in order to live a life costs money”.

Well I don’t think anyone was arguing otherwise, but the question concerning the NBN is whether the benefits exceed the massive cost of $43bn. Passing a cost-benefit analysis is a minimum requirement before a proposal involving substantial expenditure should ever be ticked off. The fact that the government has defied calls for such an analysis indicates that it is not confident that the NBN would pass such a test.

That people would support the NBN without insisting on a cost-benefit analysis shows the same hubris as not caring about the economy: the effects of the project failing will affect ordinary people. If the NBN’s costs end up well exceeding its benefits, then ordinary taxpayers, including low income earners and families, will have to foot the bill. Those who claim to have compassion for others should be weary about plans to spend lots of money forcibly acquired from the poorest members of society which are not subjected to proper scrutiny concerning their merits.

Ross Sharp obviously thought highly of his post, since he posted it on his personal blog and Groupthink. But despite his high opinion of his own work, on this occasion he has produced a dud.

The UnAustralian Australian Of The Year

The search for the most UnAustralian Australian of the year is over.

And the winner is an Aussie who has lived in England for more than half his life to date!

I give you Geoff Stephens, who is suing his bosses after accusing colleagues of making racist comments:

The council worker is suing bosses after accusing colleagues of making racist comments – including constantly greeting him with ‘G’day, sport’.

Mr Stephens, 48, is a community warden who has lived in Britain for 26 years.

He said he was on a ‘cocktail of anti-depressants’ because of the constant abuse which he claims will ‘eventually kill him’.

He added that he asked fellow wardens to stop making Australian jokes, but they continued. They regularly greet him by saying ‘G’day, sport’ and ‘Is your girlfriend called Sheila?’. Other phrases include ‘throw another shrimp on the barbie’ and jokes about kangaroos.

… (Stephens) has been off sick since August with depression and is attending counselling sessions. He said the comments were ‘race-inspired’, adding: “I’m now on a cocktail of medication. I’ve only been able to sleep for three hours a night since August, and the physical and mental exhaustion will eventually kill me. I feel like my life has been ripped apart.”

Now let me get this straight Geoff. You’re an Aussie and (by the look of it) you probably descended from British stock.

I mean, “Geoff Stephens” does not exactly sound like a Muslim or African name. You don’t look Jewish either and no one is calling you that.

And your skin looks as pasty white as any Pom’s. It’s not like they’re calling you “abo” is it?

So how do these taunts affect you and make you depressed? That’s like being taunted for being a Kiwi living in Australia – big f*cken deal!

Seriously I dunno how these remarks would affect anyone who was even half normal in the first place and I think Geoff might just have a severe case of the inadequacy blues. Or maybe hes just sick of working and is looking for a big payout by pleading “they called me names, you know, like Skippy.”

Either way this guy is a national disgrace and is giving real Aussie men a bad name. He should have his Aussie citizenship stripped. Immediately.

Mind bending and benders

Personally I don’t give  a rats arse who any adult chooses to have sex with as long as that  other person is a consenting adult  and as long as they do it in private (so they don’t scare the horses) then I am completely at ease with just about all expressions  of human sexual desire. However there are some people who find their own homosexual desires troubling enough that they seek the services of the mind bending profession to help them be the person that they want to be. Frankly if a gay man or a lesbian has the desire to be straight why should it be considered wrong  for a psychologist to help them achieve this result?   Why is there such a fuss and such a witch hunt from the homosexual lobby against anyone who provides such therapy?

Mrs Pilkington was targeted by a gay journalist who persuaded her to help him change his sexuality. Patrick Strudwick attended sessions with her with a tape recorder strapped to his stomach and then published a critical article about her in the Independent newspaper.

She is now appearing before a professional conduct panel of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and faces losing her accreditation if she is found to have breached its rules.

The Christian Legal Centre, a group that is supporting Mrs Pilkington in the case, said yesterday: ‘Shortly before the hearing, BACP required all witness statements to be passed to them with contact details.

‘Immediately after supplying the statements, an expert witness received several menacing phone calls, threats and intimidation, telling the witness not to attend.’

The organisation has reported the alleged intimidation to police and called for a full investigation. A BACP official confirmed yesterday that the hearing was adjourned.

The ‘conversion’ therapy practised by Mrs Pilkington, 60, is held in contempt by gay lobby groups.

Mr Strudwick runs a campaign called the Stop Conversion Therapy Taskforce, and has said: ‘Every major mental health organisation in Britain and America is opposed to attempts to change someone’s sexuality. There is good evidence not only that it doesn’t work but that it is harmful.’

Mrs Pilkington has treated ten patients over the past decade using a programme called Sexual Orientation Change Efforts. She says that her gay son is among those she has been able to help.

The psychotherapist has said that she was entrapped by Mr Strudwick, who she said approached her claiming he was depressed and needed therapy. She added that she had told him she worked within a Christian and Biblical framework and he had agreed to that.

Andrea Minichiello Williams, of the Christian Legal Centre, said yesterday: ‘Mrs Pilkington deserves to get a fair hearing by her professional body. In this case the homosexual lobby has been extremely militant and sought to silence by threats and intimidation.

There is one thing that we can say without doubt and that is that sexual desire and its gender focus is not an either or situation it can be very strongly focused on one gender or it can be very malleable depending of lots of different factors and it seems to me that far too many Gay activists are far too invested in proving that their desire for members of their own gender is “natural” to accept that some people may want that “natural” desire changed to a desire for the opposite gender. I know a couple of people who were quite clearly homosexual in their youth and who now are exclusively heterosexual and yes I know that that is purely anecdotal but to claim that people can’t change is just not credible. The important thing here is that the homosexual who wishes to “convert” should no more be demonized than the straight who wishes to take up the hobby of buggery; its their choice and if they want to seek the help of a mind bender to achieve their wish for change  then that therapist should not be subject to threats and intimidation either. The important factor here has to be that the the wishes of teh individual seeking therapy have to be respected, so if they seek to comes to terms with being homosexual that is the direction that the therapy should work towards but if they want to change then then that should likewise be respected by the therapist.

That said I don’t think that the dogooder industries (Psychiatrists, Psychologists,  , and various social workers) have as much of a handle of helping anyone change their lives as they think they do.  these “professionals” may be well intentioned but they too have their barrows to push and they sometimes to more harm than good. Which is why they are all so good at paving a certain road.

Cheers Comrades