The Dog’s Bollocks

Truth is like a dog’s bollocks – pretty obvious if you care to look.

Vic Liberals tough on Laura Norder

The Victorian Opposition has emerged from a front bench shake-up with a promise to be tough on law and order. Oh yay. Truly the last resort of a desperate, clueless and cynical political party. Never mind that crime and lawlessness is actually declining.

What next? A war on drugs and education? FFS.

Mr Baillieu says having several law and order spokesmen will put pressure on the Government.
“We have been talking for months, and indeed years about the problem we have with crime and violence in this state, and we want to elevate that focus,” he said.

Opposition shuffles front bench – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Politics,

Won’t you think of the children?

The ACCC’s Unit Man has certainly pressed some buttons for the IPA‘s, Chris Berg – paternalistic nanny statism through to a damning indictment of our school system! It is Cup Day, after all, so it’s a slow news day, I guess.

No, the government doesn’t decide Australians aren’t smart enough to figure out the cheapest way to buy cereal – it decides that duopolistic supermarket chains engaged in price gouging Australian consumers should make it clear how much they are paying for each unit they purchase.

If I go to the supermarket to shop for a family of four and purchase say 50 items, there will be at least 6 choices for every single item – so that’s 300 mental arithmetic calculations for every shopping trip. Yes, I can do them with ease, but it’s much simpler and a more efficient use of my time to read the unit price on each shelf label. And try doing it with toddlers in tow. Let’s face it, even within brands there are size and quantity variations designed for different consumer needs, with opportunities for extra profit margins arising from the confusion.

I’m sure the supermarket duopoly can handle this – the unit prices no doubt ship through the supply chain labelling software so it’s no big deal – they have to print labels anyway. What’s a few extra lines of program code? Or must we protect the rights of supermarkets to confuse customers about pricing?

Perhaps in a future article, Berg could cover the anti-competetive practices of the supermarket duopoly – from manipulating prices paid to suppliers and growers through to restrictive leasing arrangements in shopping malls and precincts.

Good to see Berg back in form and thinking of the supermarkets. I was worried after being in full agreement with him last week on his realistic and reasoned assessment of the asylum seeker issue. There’s a first for time for everything.

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Economics, Politics, , ,

Peter Costello is confused


And I have this much credibility.

Peter Costello is both confused and confusing.

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Howardians, Politics

Teh Evil People Smugglers!

Prat.

Prat.

PRIME MINISTER Kevin Rudd has said people smugglers are the “vilest form of humanity” and that they should all “rot in hell”. Mr Rudd also called people smugglers “the scum of the earth”. I guess the Liberal Party would agree with him on that one.

Why do they continue to insult our intelligence so? “Ooohh.. this really complex issue is all the fault of Teh Evil People Smugglers!”
Give us a break.

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Politics

The Intervention – The Katherine Klusterfuk

The impact of The Intervention on remote aboriginal communities outside of Katherine is, as a local community worker lamented, some kind of madness, extreme. There are no winners here.

Self-respecting liberal Howardians should be appalled at the crushing of individual liberty and initiative of decent law-abiding indigenous Australian citizens, especially the dismantling of employment projects in order to facilitate quarantining of income. CItizens who find their families once again under direct government control while the media brand loving and caring fathers as alcoholic child molesters, peadophiles and wife bashers. Kind and decent humans made to feel substandard, disempowered and demoralised.

And Kevin Rudd should be ashamed for allowing it to continue.

Help is needed, but it has to be shaped from the hearts of minds of everyone – it can’t be imposed from outside.

That is all.

The Intervention

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Howardians, Indigenous, ,

Germaine Greer and tall poppy parochialism

You couldn’t help but notice that Germaine Greer is in Australia promoting her latest provocative essay on the significance of rage in the social dysfunction of many indigenous men in many aboriginal communities.

Rather than engage with her argument that white Australia has failed to recognise a significant contributive cause to the poor state of aboriginal communities and that progress will be difficult until we deal with it, the MSM and our finest journalists choose to dodge the issue by pushing the conservative ‘individual responsibility’ line and defending Howard’s Intervention.

In her Age op-ed today Tracee Hutchison is critical of Greer, not for what she is saying, but because she doesn’t live here anymore so therefore she shouldn’t comment on life in ‘the colonies’.

Greer grew up here, has friends and family here, regularly returns here and no doubt reads widely about events in Australia using the same sources as does Tracee in her comfortable suburban residence so who’s to say she isn’t well-informed, even if you don’t agree with her?

Parochial piffle passed off as journalism worthy of the editorial pages! More like thinking man’s Bolt. Bolt-lite for the intellectual reader.

Like her or loathe her, one thing we can be sure of – Greer will be the subject of future historical consideration of Australian intellectual and political culture. The same can’t be said of Hutchison’s ‘journalism’.

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Indigenous, Media, ,

Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion note


Zimbabwe, grappling with a record 2.2 million per cent inflation, has introduced a new 100 billion dollar bank note in a bid to tackle rampant cash shortages, the central bank has said.

Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion note – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Looks like Zimbabwe’s economic disaster may well do for Robert Mugabe what an election didn’t.

Unbelievable stupidity in the cause of personal vanity.

Filed under: Ass Hattery,

Marohasy pwned on ‘Climate Change Delusion’

Jennifer's press photoJennifer Marohasy’s blog yesterday reported on a 17 year old male inpatient admitted to the Psychiatric Unit of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. With an 8 month history of depression, the boy ‘had visions of apocolyptic events’ and had ‘developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.’

Co-contributor Paul Biggs, who works in medical research at Birmingham University, was responsible for the post and suggested that ‘psychiatrists are treating a 17-year-old tipped over the edge by global warming fearmongers?’

I happened to be the first to comment (what else are you going to do on a wintry day during school holidays?):

Well Jennifer – this takes the cake and sets a new low for even your blog’s standards. Clearly, the 17 year old was suffering from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Paul would have us believe that this boy’s condition was brought on by ‘global warming fearmongers’.

I’m convinced.

Of course, I was immediately taken to task for my lack of evidence about the boy’s diagnosis and for being a deluded global warming alarmist, and in manner typical of the comment threads at this site, the discussion went off all over the place.

I was challenged by one commenter as to whether I’d read the actual journal article and he ‘kindly’ provided the link. The article was a ‘pay-per-view’ which I wasn’t about to cough up for. Turns out the challenging commenter hadn’t read it either. Never mind that my objection was about the scurrilous and unscientific manner in which this story was being being used to score a cheap cynical point, not the content of the journal article.

Despite being asked, Paul didn’t post the text of the article. Eventually another commenter provided the full text which allowed me a final comment on the whole hilarious saga:

“The final diagnosis was major depressive disorder with psychotic features. “

So the boy was having a psychotic episode…

“This case provides another fascinating illustration of the cultural and environmental specificity of manifestations of psychosis.”

And the ‘climate change delusion’ was a manifestation of the psychosis with nary a mention of causality or suggestion of a mechanism by which the psychosis resulted from being ‘tipped over the edge by global warming fearmongers?’

See first comment. QED.

It’s very rare to score a point on these kind of blogs, so in a self-congratulatory kind of way I thought I’d share the moment here.

As resident environmental skeptic for the IPA, Jennifer values ‘evidence-based’ science. In the case of Paul Biggs, she may want to exercise a little more editorial rigour. Otherwise her blog is slowly but surely descending into the realms of Bolt and Blair, complete with a handful of loyal and faithful rabid winged monkeys.

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Blogging, ,

Cherry picking with Jennifer Marohasy

You can learn all kinds of amazing scientific things at Jennifer Marohasy’s Politics and Environment Blog. Global warming alarmism is causing paranoid psychosis in our young people and water policy reform for the Murray Darling Basin isn’t going to end the drought!

Not that there really is such a thing as ‘drought’. It’s more a Cyclical Rainfall Deficiency kind of thing. We don’t really need water regulations depriving corporate cotton and rice of valuable profits and destroying the economy, we just need more rain! Not that ‘drought’ is caused by climate change or global warming, mind you, because Jennifer is always able to find modeling that shows the planet is actually cooling. In fact, we’re probably heading for an early Ice Age even as we speak.

On the other hand, any climate modelling which predicts global warming climate change is clearly flawed and treated with the contempt it deserves. And only expert climate scientists are allowed to argue the merits of the global warming case. And conversely, anyone can argue against climate science with authority, even if one isn’t a scientist at all!

Carbon emissions are of no concern. They may even help to improve agriculture in Greenland and that’s clearly a good thing. Not that the climate is actually warming, mind you, but if it were. And the world food crisis? That’s the fault of food crop demand for the biofuel industry caused by those hypocritical Greenies and their environmentally destructive hybrid vehicles. Anyway, Jennifer has a simple solution to the world food crisis. Monsanto™ GM crops! Too easy.

Jennifer reinforces her credentials as a concerned environmental scientist with regular posts about the wonderful and strange creatures found in rainforests and cute stories about endangered species. Not koalas, though. Nor polar bears, for that would suggest that the Arctic Ice cap is disappearing when actually it’s probably increasing.

After about a decade of field work, Jennifer Marohasy is now a Fellow at the IPA. Jennifer has worked for the Queensland sugar industry and Murray Irrigation Limited. She helped establish the Australian Environment Foundation – ‘a different kind of environment group in that it is evidence-based, solution focused and works from a basis that environmental protection and sustainable resource use are generally compatible.’ A quick perusal of their website includes illuminating evidence-based articles such as:

  • Feeding the world
  • Are environmentalists on the road to Damascus?
  • The Greens: illogical and treacherous
  • Fighting for Red River Gums
  • Red Gum Lock-up is not the Solution
  • Global warming zealots are stifling scientific debate
  • The Great Great Barrier Reef Swindle
  • Climate recantation: IPCC models don’t predict and are unscientific
  • High price for load of hot air – climate change hysteria is costing us billions
  • GM: debate the science not the values

Jennifer says she is motivated by her interest in the environment – ‘how it can be farmed, mined and harvested for food, fibre, timber, minerals and energy and also how wildlife and wilderness areas can best be protected.’

Given that her employer, the conservative (but not Right Wing) Liberal Party thinktank, the Institute of Public Affairs receives funding from special interest groups, including Murray Irrigation Limited, Visyboard, Telstra, Western Mining, BHP Billiton, the tobacco industry, Gunns Limited and Monsanto, I suspect she came in through the Overton window.

Ok that’s my annual Jennifer Marohasy (Mahr oh hassee – the first ‘a’ is long and the second ‘a’ is short) rant. I will try not to read anymore of this dissembling pseudoscientific nonsense. I promise…

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Environment, Politics, ,

Nelson to tackle tackling Climate Change

Bruce Petty - The AgeBrendan Nelson is buoyed by a ‘stunning’ result in which two conservative candidates defeated a Labor candidate to retain a seat held by the National Party for the last 40 years. The MSM are convinced that the defeat sends a message to the federal Rudd government, although no-one is entirely clear exactly what that message is. Apparently the electorate is unhappy about the cost of living and reckon that Rudd needs to do something about global oil prices, the rorting of grocery prices by our supermarket duopoly, the tax on alcopops, and falling share prices as the sub-prime shake-down continues. Or something.

Nelson is convinced the electorate is responding to the price of petrol and his plan to cut the fuel excise by 5c a litre. Now he is warning: “I suspect there’s a high probability that we won’t support what the Government chooses to do.”

Never mind that the Garnaut draaft report won’t be released until Friday and the Government won’t outline its options until July 16. Never mind that one of the reasons the Howard government was dumped from office was its climate change denialism and the electorate’s desire to do something done about it. Nelson is, to be fair, not a denialist – he wants to tackle climate change too. Just as long as we don’t have to actually do anything about it and it doesn’t cost us anything. Well apart from using a few government-subsidised energy efficient light bulbs, and maybe some minor carbon trading scheme for those able to make some money out of it.

Good luck with that one, Brendan. There’s nothing like re-fighting the last war as a strategy for winning the next one.

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Environment, Media, Politics, , ,

The Dog’s Bollocks

What they say

The Dog's Bollocks: "Bollocks" is one of my favourite words, and this is now one of my favourite blogs and I've only been reading it for five minutes. – John Surname

This is the person who tried to analyse Hayek. This is actually a person who needs a shrink. – JC

Shut up slim. You’re an idiot.
Just you stay honest and keep that thinking cap on. – GMB

Insightful perspectives on politics and discussion of matters epistemological? I’m sold! - Bruce

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