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Post by angra on Aug 9, 2012 22:24:31 GMT 10
And how many SA friends appreciate being referred to as living in the "bodies-in-a-barrel" state? blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/more_shocking_shocking_stuff_from_the_bodies_in_the_barrel_state/Where does that leave Victoria (the State of Under-your-Belly but Into-your-Gut?); or NSW (The Balanglo State of Discovery)?; or Qld (the Daniel Morcombe State of Appreciation?); or Tasmania (The Martin Bryant State of Shooters and Fishers); or NT (Dingo Dinner Territory)? Maybe we can commission new number plate tags. "Aren’t you sick of the outrage game, in which politicians compete to take outrage at stuff that doesn’t really offend them in the slightest? " Replace 'politicians' with 'journalists'.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Aug 9, 2012 22:36:39 GMT 10
It's probably unnecessary, in this company, to point out that anyone who actually READS gillard's speech knows full well that she's not suggesting that anybody put pensioners at risk. Bolta's taken a couple of promising-sounding lines out of a few pages of text and presented them out of context, implying that the PM wants service providers to cut corners in order to not meet peak summer demand - and she's clearly not doing anything of the sort. She's calling on providers to get smarter, and on state governments to stop padding their budgets in the expectation (justified, as it happens) that everyone will blame the carbon tax.
Anyhow - how many struggling pensioners do folks here know who get by on refrigerative aircon? Any? I'll wager that the ones who're willing to shell out that sort of coin to stay chilled in summer aren't going to be the ones dropping like flies because the leccy goes off for a couple of hours. Those ones aren't doing it tough (although these days every australian will tell you they're doing it tough, as they back the X5 out of the two-car garage to take up to the snow)
I have standalone evaporative coolers. I have two of them, and they're basically just big fans with water pumps. They're fairly good ones, they weren't cheap. But I've had them for several years, and they've paid for themselves. They keep a sizeable two-story place quite comfortable, thanks. They use, between them, a bit less than one shower's worth of water every couple of days, assuming they're on full-blast. My summer power bill is tiny. My WINTER power bill, that's a whole other thing.
I think the "pensioners frying because they're not allowed to run their energy-guzzling house-freezers" is a load of rubbish. Certain commentators get away with it because they're used to not being challenged on their nonsense. But it obscures the real problems.
The pensioners who keel over from the heat aren't the ones running the 10kw reverse-cycle roof-mounted units. They're the ones who don't have anything at all, so it doesn't much matter whether the power is on. And it's not the conservative side of politics that's been trying to help them.
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Post by angra on Aug 9, 2012 22:37:31 GMT 10
To score a complete hand, there is also WA - The State Where We've Had Greenenough.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Aug 9, 2012 22:50:12 GMT 10
"And how many SA friends appreciate being referred to as living in the "bodies-in-a-barrel" state?"
As an ex-adelaidean, I'm basically fine with it.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Aug 9, 2012 22:51:52 GMT 10
"Replace 'politicians' with 'journalists'"
My first thought also.
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Post by angra on Aug 9, 2012 22:55:46 GMT 10
MoC - as usual it's complete tosh. His 'evidence' is from a study on the effects of a power cut in summer in Adelaide some years ago. Nothing to do with the 'carbon tax'. My mum reduces her power bill by opening the windows on hot days and resorting to bed with a couple of doonas on cold days. I asked her why she doesn't use the r/v aircon.
Her reply? "I grew up as a kid when we had no electricity, let alone these things. My parents lived into their nineties, so it wont hurt me. A good fire in winter and an open window in summer and I'm OK."
She's 89 and is a wise and beautiful old lady.
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Post by jack on Aug 11, 2012 19:45:58 GMT 10
Damn... I looked! Andy continues to rake over the 'connection' between Gillard and the Bruce Wilson AWU scandal... The Age and Sydney Morning Herald has typically run dead on this scandal, although it curiously ran this video as the news started to break into the mainstream media. It is an interview with Peter Gordon, who was Gillard’s boss at the time and gives this oddly indirect character reference:
I think she has a very robust sense of her own integrity and she prefers that view to those who would assail it. Gordon is silent on his own view of that integrity.
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/law_firm_wants_permission_to_release_its_wilson_files/ That's actually, er, less than correct. About half a minute earlier in the same video, Gordon in fact says of Gillard... I do recall about her that she was always very steadfast about her own integrity, even when it was under attack. I think she's got a very balanced inner sense of what her mission is, and what's right and wrong.
media.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national-times/inside-julia-gillards-character-3276345.html In their entirety, Gordon's remarks about Gillard could frankly almost be described as 'glowing'. That's particularly interesting considering that, according to the Gillard biography Andy himself cites, there were "tensions between Peter Gordon and Bernard Murphy, and Gillard was a Murphy ally." (Jacqueline Kent, The Making of Julia Gillard, Viking, 2009, p. 93.) But Gordon's somewhat glowing estimation of Gillard is, of course, rather inconvenient to the narrative Andy wants to construct in his post - namely, that Gillard allegedly left Slater & Gordon under (unspecified) disgraceful circumstances. Sadly for Andy all he has is innuendo informed by his standard selective presentation of material.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Aug 11, 2012 20:47:20 GMT 10
Bolta also seems to be failing to sense any sort of problem for his (tenuous) case in the news that the law firm wants to open its files. It wouldn't be doing that unless it thought it would show them in a better light than current press coverage tends to do. In doing so, it isn't inconceivable that gillard as well might end up being defended by that information. It would mean another liberal/NEWS smear shown to be bunk when the evidence emerges ... but not before the damage is done.
I'm not a betting man, but I have a feeling that this feted release of information is going to get a lot more attention from the conspiracy nuts at news before it actually happens than it will afterwards.
I've just been reading a couple of things:
One was a wrap up of the shrieking about liz warren's "part cherokee" claim, from a blogger who seems to have worked hard to turn it into a national scandal. It's like reading moon-hoax reasoning. They have a few bits of information, and they just stare at them harder and harder until patterns emerge, then they're convinced. As near as I can tell, warren really did believe (on the basis of family lore, which was referred to as well by at least one other family member) that some great-grandparent was cherokee. Those stories might or might not be true, because nobody's been able to prove one way or the other. But if that word had been "irish" instead, it would be just a quaint family tale. But in the US' race-obsessed landscape, native americans are one of those "special interests" that allegedly get all the goodies. So when warren ticked that box when she got an early academic appointment (apparently hoping, but failing, to meet people like she thought she was), she left a timebomb for herself - because years later, nut-jobs then claimed that everything she ever had came down to that minority-status claim. Everyone who's ever employed her for anything says if was either unknown to them or irrelevant, but those wingnuts ... they just know better, because the voices tell them so. What a hoopla over nothing.
The other thing I just re-read was bolta's (apparently) "suppressed" articles. Reading them, I just kept thinking "what if somebody replaced the word 'aboriginal' with 'jew' - how would these read then?" Take away any assumptions that aboriginal people have to be black and I think it's a useful analogy.
I suggest folks try it. It's an astonishing result. Downright creepy even.
I still think those columns were (intellectually) indefensible (it turns out legally, too). Every attempt by Teh Rights to recast them as anti-racist collapses on another reading.
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Post by angra on Aug 11, 2012 21:14:26 GMT 10
Bolta has another story about "Today's Boat!" with a touching picture of little four-year-old Yousif Mohammad Rashad Al-Yassin, feared missing
Except that little Yousif wasn't on the boat that his story is about. He was on a boat six-weeks earlier.
And note that Yousif and his family were Palestinians who fled persecution in Iraq. They were in Iraq to escape from benevolent treatment by the Israelis.
Doesn't quite fit the Blot narrative does it? But never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
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Post by angra on Aug 11, 2012 21:21:26 GMT 10
"And how comic it can be. We get non-Jewish looking Dr Mark Rose, director of Melbourne University’s Centre for Jewish Education, falsely claiming as “a member of the western Victorian Hebrew Nation” that the Bar Mitzvah is banned to women.
We get Daniel Browning, host of ABC radio’s Oyeh! program for Jews, insisting he’s a Jew when he looks more like one of his Egyptian ancestors, and could just as correctly claim to be South Sea Islander, English, Australian or who-cares.
To me, this Jewer-than-thou offends the deepest humanist ideals."
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Post by angra on Aug 11, 2012 21:33:24 GMT 10
Mr B's obsession with demanding physical traits as proof of racial identity is extremely suspect.
I'm not making any accusations, but it strangely resonates with this...
"Thus our German neighbors have ascribed to themselves a Teutonic type that is fair, long-headed, tall, slender, unemotional, brave straightforward, gentle, and virile. Let us make a composite picture of a typical Teuton from the most prominent of the exponents of this view. Let him be physically as blond and mentally as unemotional as Hitler, physically as long-headed and mentally as direct as Rosenberg, as tall and truthful as Goebbels, as slender and gentle as Goering, and as manly and straightforward as Streicher."
—"We Europeans" p. 171
Huxley/Haddon, 1936
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Post by jack on Aug 12, 2012 0:12:38 GMT 10
When you want to move on from your present employer, ask for an "oddly indirect character reference" like the one Peter Gordon gave for Julia Gillard.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Aug 12, 2012 10:07:45 GMT 10
"long-headed" ?!?!
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Aug 12, 2012 10:46:05 GMT 10
Oh, andrew. Nice try. Sadly ... it'll work, too. Bags of spoons. Today the internets is ablaze with a story about one Dr Peter Hart who allegedly held up an qantas A380 out of LA because they didn't have some fancy 1st-class PJs. This story actually sets my BS detectors tingling. That doesn't mean it's not TRUE but I'm suspicious that, at the very least, we're not hearing the whole story. Sadly, nobody's checking any of it, so we might never know. The mere fact that the airline said such nice things as these (somehow left out of bolt's quoting)" But all seemed to be forgiven and the couple were escorted through the international arrival gates at Melbourne Airport by a chauffeur, an hour and 20 minutes after their plane landed, before being driven away in a black Chrysler. Says to me that there's something more to this. But hey, I'm no hifalutin' journalist. But rather than just leave it at that, bolta has a go ... "It’s the kind of tanty I’d never dream of throwing, but as I laugh a nagging voice asks: “Is this aggressive sense of entitlement why he gets to fly first class and you don’t?”"That's a bit odd. Nobody get to fly 1st just because they really WANT to. Somebody has to pay for it. So let's have a look at the bits that bolt decides his audience DOES need to know and see what we can find that might suggest that Peter Hart isn't paying his own bills ... Dr Hart is an industrial and organisational psychology expert, focusing on employee wellbeing, and an honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne.Ooooh, I see. A university! Well. A couple of things. One, I don't think he IS a fellow at unimelb. As far as I can tell from his online profile, he's a fellow at deakin. But that's a small matter, and I'm sure my lack of being a "real world" journalist means I'm wrong. But more importantly, Dr Peter Hart is actually the director of what would appear to be successful consulting company: www.insightsrc.com.au/content.php?id=58Which means that first-class travel is very likely to be paid out of private resources. Whether that be his own pocket, or part of his salary package, who know. But it's his money either way.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Aug 12, 2012 14:52:46 GMT 10
Some thoughts on today's Pull Factor (which apparently doesn't rate well enough against video hits to get a run in canberra). Telco analyst Kevin Morgan warns the NBN will cost at least $70 billion - nearly twice what Labor first claimed. I wonder if anyone can show any piece that kevin morgan has ever written, anywhere, that did anything other than spruik telstra's interests? I've been having a google, and it's pretty consistent, regardless of the topic. Here's a comment from a crikey blog that suggests I'm not the only one who has noticed this: www.crikey.com.au/2010/09/29/a-slippery-start-to-parliament/#comment-101203And here's an exchange back at The Old Blog along similar lines: blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2010/11/25/wont-somebody-think-of-the-universal-service-guarantee/comment-page-1/#comment-40021Peter Reith tips a problem for Labor with Slater & Gordon asking the AWU's permission to release information about what really went on with the Wilson scandal in the mid 1990s. Oh. Peter Reith! Well, that convinces me. Personally I think this can go either way - slater and gordon hardly does itself a service by dropping one of their ex-partners in the poo. She did, after all, represent them at the time. Suppose this whole thing was about somebody who isn't in the news - let's call him Joe Smuggs. Why would S&G go and release a bunch of files that showed that Joe Smuggs, while a partner at their company, knowingly engaged in corrupt activity? That's just not going to be good for their corporate profile. Let's wait and see, I reckon. Let's see if NEWS shows as much interest if those files show no wrongdoing on the part of the PM. Remember - First To Be Wrong, First To Move On!Lindsay Fox says he cannot remember when free speech was this constrained, and says employers aren't free enough to manage their workplaces. Bullshit. Where are these laws we keep getting promised/warned about that are supposed to have us living in soviet russia? A couple of people got pinged for making defamatory claims about a serving PM. And a minister had a whinge about massively rich, powerful business interests buying up a significant news publisher - the significant news publisher, incidentally, that isn't already giving the mining industry a free %@#&job with every story. People who think gina and twiggy and various chinese mining interests would run the country just fine aren't all that concerned. Other people are. Oh, and one columnist broke a law that had been on the books for 15 years, and got sued for that rather than defamation. Let's sit that alongside tony abbott and the missus suing bob ellis for much the same thing. Or maybe the apparently similar threats to crikey from certain quarters. No, free speech is struggling along just the same as it's been since ruddock's changes to our defamation law. No change.
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