One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when - KERPLUNK! - an acorn fell on her head.
"Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king."
Thanks to emissions trading...coming soon to a store near you...
Unlike George W Bush when he first got news that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre and that the situation was being assessed (people initially thought that it was a small, private plane), Barack Obama had all of the facts of the Fort Hood attack and yet still chose to dribble on about the organisation of the event he was at and how he looked forward to next year's event et blah.
US soldiers are lying dead and he has the temerity to smile and crack a joke???
Unbelievable. He should call George W and get a lesson in respecting the military.
Words fail me in the same way as Obama failed to respect the dead and wounded at Fort Hood.
Australia's worst ever prime minister, Kevin Rudd, seems determined to sell Australia's future generations down the financial river in order to feed the here and now of his megalomaniacal ego.
I cannot for the life of me understand why he is trying so hard to implement an economy-wrecking emissions trading scheme in advance of the Copenhagen Convention.
Does it give us any leverage at Copenhagen? Can't see how, myself.
Is such an expensive political wedge worth it in the long run?
When Anthony Watts first posted the link to the text of the treaty to be negotiated I took the time to read through it and became more and more concerned with what is in there.
While nobody has been looking, Australia's climate negotiators have been working on a treaty that will cost Australian working families over $7 BILLION per year.
Where will the money go?
To the United Nations so that they can give it to third-world and developing nations as payment of the West's so-called 'climate debt'.
Who in their right mind would think that the bulk of the money would not end up in the hands of UN middlemen and tinpot dictators?
Why would the West want to continue to donate to Africa, for example, when the more than $2 TRILLION of aid already given to that benighted continent has been so appallingly wasted?
I wonder whether the Average Joe Labor supporter is concerned with his side's abandonment of fiscal responsibility in the name of 'saving the planet' or dealing with the 'global financial crisis'?
Anyhoo, here are a couple of logos that are more appropriate given the times we live in:
I think that ninemsn is doing its best to try and put up a poll question that gets a favourable response for asylum seekers but the Australian public refuses to co-operate.
The other day I posted their poll question "Should the army get asylum seekers off the Oceanic Viking?" which went 3:1 in favour of using the army.
Today's question is "Should we adopt a softer approach to asylum seekers?". So they've turned the question from being hard - use of the army - to soft.
The previous 3:1 has blown out to 7:1 against the asylum seekers.
This is also at a time when it is being reported that 20 people may have lost their lives when a boat traveling to Australia capsized northwest of the Cocos Islands.
Australians are generous to a fault but we really get riled up when people take the mickey out of us, which these so-called asylum seekers clearly are.
Andrew Bolt has more on their non-real asylum seeker status and how the despicable Greens tell lies in order to further their agenda.
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"is part of a phrase attributed to the 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, among others, and later popularized in the United States by, among others, Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." The statement refers to the persuasive power of numbers, the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments, and the tendency of people to disparage statistics that do not support their positions. The phrase is not found in Disraeli's works nor is it known within his lifetime and for years afterward. Many coiners have been proposed. The most plausible, on current evidence, is Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911).
How remarkable that in the 21st century a phrase that was coined before air travel, before radio, before telephones, before elevators and (gasp) before the Internet can be so applicable.
Financial market models and global warming models are just two examples du jour.
Health care is another. Have a look at the following from good.is:
The 78.11 is life expectancy and $7,290 is the cost of health care. If you knew nothing else then you would think that Americans spend a lot of money to achieve ordinary outcomes. Zooming in on the graph gives:
(click to embiggen)
Gee, higher infant mortality than Norway? Worse cardiovascular results? More money spent? What a waste? Right?
Wrong.
You see, nearly every country listed on the image leeches off of the innovation of the US health sector in order to provide their health outcomes. Take away the US and the cost to each nation would be much, much higher, as they would be forced to take on the R&D costs currently borne by the US.
Not that left wing politicians and their supporters will ever make that argument, of course, in spite of its truth.
Here is an inconvenient fact for people who believe the above represents the whole picture - if you are diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and a whole host of other conditions you will live longer post-diagnosis in the US than anywhere else in the world.
The issue in the US is not quality of care but access to care, brought about completely by ridiculous government intervention in the market, which restricts access across state lines, as well as tying health care to employment.
There is another problem with the above image - it compares a nation of 300 million people with much smaller ones.
Norway has a population of under 5 million. Every other country on the image has a much larger population than Norway. The bigger question is how is it that Norway can have such poor outcomes compared to the rest of the countries listed?
Of course, the comparison of the US can only be valid when compared to the whole of the European Union (500 million) or the whole of South America (385 million). There are states of the US that outdo Norway, Canada, Germany or Australia. So what?
Speaking selfishly, I hope that the health care bill as proposed in the US is defeated, otherwise our healthcare costs here in Australia will start to increase, as they will in the rest of the world.
And another thing - if health care reform is so urgent then why won't it be implemented until 2013, after the next presidential election?
So there's a bunch of Sri Lankan economic refugees and assorted ex-Tamil Tiger terrorists living on the Oceanic Viking somewhere off of Indonesia in a political tug-of-war between crap knows who but mainly involving Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, trying to look compassionate, tough and statesmanlike all at the same time; a stance that he has failed spectacularly to achieve, which comes as no surprise to those of us who think he has little diplomatic skill and a decidedly nasty streak about him.
So here's the boat. There's 78 Sri Lankans camping on it.
Now, here's the bit that will drive the cultural left crazy.
Outspoken Liberal MP, Wilson Tuckey, suggested that the government may need to call in the army in order to remove the Sri Lankans from the boat and place them in detention in Indonesia.
Cue the usual whinging and carry on from Australia's left.
Here's the current status of ninemsn's poll on the issue - Should the army get the asylum seekers off the Oceanic Viking?
(click to embiggen)
Queue-jumping asylum seekers have very little support from the Australian people. We have a strong sense of fairness and these people are well past what we consider acceptable.
Now, would the cultural left accept the result of the poll?
Surely they would twist it into an example not of Australia's fairness but of its inherent racism?
No doubt there'll be much chatter among the chattering class over the injustice of it all.
The loopy left must really be hating the fact that the fraud that is climate change is being exposed for all to see right before the Copenhagen Climate Junket is due to take place.
Here's Liberal Party senator Cory Bernardi putting into simple language the reason why the proposed emissions trading scheme is such a disaster for Australia.
You know, when a company changes its brand it's normally because the old one has problems.
Thus, when the earth's climate stopped doing what climate astrologers predicted it changed from global warming to climate change, which allowed activists to ditch the inconvenient truth of the old brand and include a whole bunch of other apocalyptic consequences - flood, famine, drought, pestilence - to scare the kiddies with.
Simple. as. that.
The greatest threat to freedom does not come from Wall Street or the Religious Right or even Islamic Fascism.
The greatest threat to freedom comes from Big Environmentalism.
Afghans held at an Australian-funded immigration detention centre in Tanjung Pinang, a town on an island south of Singapore, allege they are beaten at night.
Now, a reasonable person would read the headline and the opening paragraph and draw the conclusion that Australia is funding a 'Guantanamo-style' detention centre.
The article continues:
It is the same place where 78 asylum seekers aboard the Oceanic Viking are being taken.
Speaking from behind barred windows, an Afghan man calling himself only Hashim shouted out that there were currently about 80 men inside the Tanjung Pinang detention centre.
It is believed to be capable of holding up to 600 people but to date, 200 has been the maximum held there at any one time.
Hashim said he was from Kandahar but most of the men inside were ethnic Hazaras, and that there were also some Sri Lankans inside.
He said they had been there from two to six months. While they received three meals a day, he said there was no air conditioning or television and nowhere for them to exercise.
"Sometimes the immigration people take some people during the night," Hashim shouted.
Let's get this straight. They are being detained in a facility at one-third capacity, so no problem with overcrowding, are getting three square meals a day while at the same time complaining about no air-conditioning or TV?
Nearly halfway through the article and we're yet to get any evidence of the beatings. So how do we know they happened?
Let's continue:
Asked whether they were beaten, he replied, "Yes. There isn't any human rights. We aren't getting any human rights."
Get that?
"Asked whether they were beaten..."
A journalist asked whether they were beaten? Why the hell would he do that? He has plucked the question out of his arse, got the answer he wanted and then used it as a headline for his article.
Just when you think that journalism is at its nadir the ABC manages to plumb new depths.
How about this for a headline? "Detainees fed three meals a day, receive medial care, complain about no TV"
