Monday, December 14, 2009

ULTRA-RACIST ANDREW BOLT CAUGHT ATTEMPTING DECEIT.

The Murdoch propagandist and racist, Andrew Bolt of Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper, has been caught yet again attempting to deceive readers with an utterly dishonest narrative relating to Aboriginal history and the removal of children for racial purposes. Bolt claims that the film, ‘The Rabbit Proof Fence’, was a fraud. He says that there was no attempt by the ‘West Australian chief protector responsible for their removal, Auber Octavius Neville, to “breed out the colour” by marrying off half-caste Aboriginal girls to whites as depicted in the film’ endorsing historical revisionist Keith Windschuttle’s view.

Yet we know for a fact from letters from A.O. Neville that he was concerned about half-caste girls marrying full-blooded Aboriginal men. Even Windschuttle in this instance concedes that Neville’s concern was to support a program to “breed out the colour”. Bolt denies there was any program to “breed out the colour” yet the letters from Neville held by the West Australian government show that there was.

Monday, December 7, 2009

MURDOCH PROPAGANDIST TIM BLIAR TWISTS THE TRUTH – YET AGAIN!

In his column today Tim Bliar told his readers that: “Taliban maniacs have killed more than 2600 people in Pakistan in the last couple of years”. He attempts to support this assertion by linking to an article which, if one reads, actually says: “…Lahore has frequently been targeted by Taliban militants waging a two-and-a-half year insurgency that has killed more than 2,600 people in Pakistan.” It does not say that the Taliban have killed 2600 people; it says the Taliban insurgency has resulted in the deaths of 2600 people. Included in that number are Taliban fighters themselves who have been killed by both CIA drone bombing attacks and by Pakistani forces. While Pakistani military claims of over 1400 Taliban killed during anti-Taliban operations during May and June 2009 is likely exaggerated, Taliban casualties over the last two years would account for many of the 2600 people killed. At least another 700 of that figure include civilians also killed by the CIA in drone bombing attacks and written off as ‘collateral damage’.

While I have little time for the Taliban’s ideology and its culture of summary executions and suicide bombings, I have even less for the hypocrisy and arrogance of the US and their allies who go to foreign countries and indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of their inhabitants in the name of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘Big Business’, and even less still for the lying scum in the Western media that support and perpetuate these wars.
The real ‘maniacs’ that are doing the killing in Pakistan are the US and their allies. The Taliban have resorted to extremist behaviour in a desperate effort to get the foreigners to leave their lands alone. The more the US and their allies push them, the more extreme they’ll become, but one thing is for sure; the US and their allies will never be able to defeat them.


POSTED AT PIERS AKERMAN'S BLOG THIS AFTERNOON

Just in case Akerman doesn't see fit to publish it, this is what I said:

Tens of thousands across Europe demonstrated for action on climate change over the last weekend.

However, there were no reports of any pro-pollution demonstrations. None. What does that tell you, Akerman?

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

IT SEEMS TONY ABBOTT ISN’T A CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTIC AFTER ALL.

Last night on the 7.30 Report, Tony Abbott told Kerry O’Brien: “Look, we all want to do the right thing by the environment. This is not about climate change science; (Emphasis added) this is about the mechanism for appropriately dealing with it.”

Tony Abbott is likely to be the very last Howardite stuck-in-the-last-century religious-right paleo-conservative leader that the Liberal Party is likely to ever have. It is for that reason that the Liberal Party will quite possibly fade into oblivion as Australian politics begins its shift from the old unions-dominated Labor versus Liberal mode of the twentieth century to the Green realist versus New Labor frame of the twenty-first century.

The majority of Australians, regardless of party politics, are now green-leaning. They might not vote Green but they certainly are far more interested in the environment today than ever they were before. Most accept, despite the recent nonsense about a few scientists trying to fudge the numbers, that climate change is a very real problem that the world cannot afford to ignore.

What the recent spat amongst the Liberals was about was not whether or not the environment needs fixing as the likes of the extreme right wing pundits like Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and Piers Akerman would have us believe, but, rather, what is the best way of going about it. Bolt, Blair and Akerman, et al, don’t believe there is a problem that needs fixing up; Abbott, as he inferred last night on the 7.30 Report, seems to think we do need to “do the right thing by the environment”. What Abbott is against – as are many Australians – is the idea of paying polluters to stop polluting us. Where Abbott is wrong, however, is in his motivation for objecting to the money being spent. For Abbott it’s not about compensating polluters but about raising a tax to pay for it.

For many Australians who also object to the tax to compensate polluters for the cost of not polluting, it’s about the basic principle of being forced to pay people not to pollute us anymore. Rather than pay the polluters to stop polluting, we should be making them pay a penalty to the people for continuing to pollute us. The money about to be paid to them for not polluting us any more would be far better spent on research and capital for alternative non-polluting renewable energy resources and finding ways to increase their efficiency by improving the technology and decreasing their costs.

We should be looking after our long term interests rather than simply worrying about the immediate costs to businesses and jobs. Sooner or later, and looks like sooner rather than later the rate the world’s growing at the moment, we’re simply going to run out of the stuff we’ve relied on so far. At the beginning of the last century we thought we had an inexhaustible supply of oil and gas; now, we’ve realised that we are quickly running out of it and are frantically running around in search of more. Eventually, though, it’ll all be gone. We’ve got no alternative but to find other ways. If we don’t pay now to find alternatives, the costs in the future will be impossible to meet.
Abbott wants businesses to profit today without any of the costs for tomorrow. God, so Abbott believes, will look after tomorrow.