The IPCC issued its bleakest report yet this week, saying that without drastic changes, the world doesn’t have a hope of avoiding uncontrollable climate change.
Unless emissions are halved within 12 years and virtually eliminated by 2050, temperature increases will likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius.
Beyond 2 degrees, scientists predict temperature increases may spiral as the climate breaches a series of unique tipping points, such as the melting of the permafrost.
The top culprit is fossil fuels, and the instructions to Australia and the rest of the world are clear: Quit coal by 2050.
In the U.S. election, Republican Donald Trump took lying to an unprecedented level. Obamacare, the Mexican wall, the war on coal, the environment and many more. And he’s still doing it at an alarming rate.
The same fascination for untruth by conservatives in America has been exported to Australia.
Think about this.
Do you shape the truth for the sake of good impression? On the other hand, do you tell the truth even if it may tear down the view people may have of you? Alternatively, do you simply use the contrivance of omission and create another lie?
I can only conclude that there might often be pain in truth, but there is no harm in it.
So, I have no hesitation, when identifying political liars, of placing the Prime Minister with other serial liars such as Greg Hunt, who continuously lied by omission when Environment Minister. Peter Dutton, who has recently mislead parliament and has lied about conditions on Nauru and Manus. Josh Frydenberg when Energy Minister and Malcolm Turnbull with reference to the South Australian blackouts.
A White House spokesperson this week promised to “look into” a Fox News decision to cease broadcasting of Trump campaign rallies in full.
According to The Daily Beast, the White House is concerned about losing a key platform just before the midterms. Instead of airing the rallies in their entirety, the network has taken to showing abbreviated clips of the events.
Rallies in recent days have drawn significantly lower ratings, Politico reported. In some cases, Trump rallies have fewer viewers than regular Fox News programming.
A senior White House official reportedly said that White House Communication Director Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive, was expected to be in talks with the network about the decision to nix live Trump rallies.
The officials said that Shine would “look into that.”
News Corp Australia follows are we now no longer going to shirtfront Putin?(ODT)
On Sept. 26, 2018, President Donald Trump made an extraordinary accusation against China during his remarks to the United Nations Security Council, saying, “Regrettably, we found that China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November against my administration.” He made the claim without offering any evidence, but he did speculate about China’s motivation: “They do not want me, or us, to win because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade.”
As Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams, called for voters in her state to fight Republican efforts at voter suppression by showing up at polls in large numbers in next month’s election, a national grassroots group reported Secretary of State Brian Kemp—also the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate—to the Justice Department late Wednesday night for blatantly violating the Voting Rights Act in order to swing the upcoming election in his own favor.
A judge who jailed protesters for up to 16 months for disrupting access to a fracking site by climbing on lorries has been exposed for having family links to oil and gas companies.
The Mirror exclusively reported Judge Robert Altham’s links to the energy industry. The trio, known as the ‘Fracking Three,’ were jailed for causing a public nuisance over their demonstration at a Cuadrilla site in Lancashire.
READ MORE: Can US shale stop a global oil supply crisis?
They are thought to be the first environmental protesters sentenced to jail for public nuisance since 1932.
Simon Blevins, 26, and Richard Roberts, 36, got 16 months each while Richard Loizou, 31, was sentenced to 15 months by Altham.
In order to give some substance to his claim that the Coalition are for lower taxes, Scott Morrison has chosen to bring forward by five years tax cuts already legislated for small and medium businesses. To use his oft-repeated phrase, these are nothing new, they are ‘existing’ legislation, just fast-tracked for an election sweetener as Coalition governments always do.
According to ProMo, this will allow tradies and hairdressers and family businesses to hire more people and give wage rises to their staff and invest more in their businesses.
Sounds good…until you actually examine the real implications of this announcement and which businesses it will affect.
What Jones means is, he is not sorry for having berated a woman in power on air, he is only sorry about the impact it had on some people. He admits he was tough regarding the NSW Racing’s apparent right to advertise on the Sydney Opera House because it was important to him. But why is this issue so inflammatory? Advertising gambling of all things on the Opera House is surely not as important as other issues like human rights. So the reason why Jones felt so strongly about it doesn’t add up. Or at least the level of outrage expressed by him surely doesn’t match the issue at hand.
When Julia Gillard’s father died, he suggested that he had “died of shame” and then later apologised (like he did with Herron). Jones will keep bullying and harassing women in power because there is no consequence to his behaviour. Jones keeps his job.
Don Burke kept his job. Kyle Sandilands kept his job after asking Erin Molan (Footy Show presenter) whether she had breast surgery and suggested that no one is listening to her segment. Australia tolerates misogyny as long as these men are still in jobs. It is embedded in our culture. The second cultural cringe is our appetite for gambling, especially in NSW.
Mensa Master Price doesn’t need to study or peer review any reports by the world’s foremost science experts on the matter. She’s a Liberal MP (ODT)
Federal Environment Minister Melissa Price has argued some of the world’s leading climate scientists are “drawing a long bow” in calling for an end to coal power in a bid to limit global warming.
As of September 1, The Washington Post’s fact-checkers had identified 5,001 untruths over the 601 days of his presidency — an average of 8.3 a day, with the trend accelerating. When Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale watches Trump’s rally speeches, he chronicles the lies in real time on Twitter. The president’s former personal lawyer reportedly wouldn’t allow Trump to testify in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe because he knows Trump is “a fucking liar” who could not help but perjure himself.
Our study analysed 1,366 media articles, examining the sentiment towards minority communities in them. We found that over a third of hard news stories contained negative sentiments towards minority communities, while more than half of the editorials and commentary pieces portrayed minority communities in a negative light.
There also needs to be a concerted effort to change the makeup of Australia’s newsrooms so that the leadership and journalists reflect the cultural diversity in Australia.
The sample included about 80% news stories, 4% features and 16% editorials and commentaries on selected events and issues during a six-month period.
Return to the standard cry that insists fairness doesn’t work (ODT)
Donald Trump put his name to an opinion article in USA Today published on Wednesday, in a rallying cry to voters ahead of the midterm elections and warning that a big Democratic win would bring America closer to socialism and “suffering, misery and decay”.
The president opened with a warning to senior citizens and all Americans of the dangers of a so-called universal healthcare system with guaranteed government health insurance for all.
The reinstatement of the Colonial Spirit. What if an Immigrant manages to escape to the City? Will be labelled a Papillion and the full force of the ABF come after him or her? How about admitting government policy encouraged temporary entry while using infrastructure as a political football against the states holding them to nothing.(ODT)
The Federal Government has unveiled a plan that will settle certain classes of new migrants [to be known as drones] in regional areas for up to five years after their arrival in Australia. These will be required to work as indentured labour and will not be able to leave their servitude until the five-year term of indenture has been served to the satisfaction of their masters.
Minister for Population and Cities, Alan Tudge laid out the plan to bust congestion in Australia’s biggest cities – Melbourne and Sydney – in a speech in Melbourne on Tuesday.
why the people who run the world think everyone is else is also avaricious, just like themselves.
THE JUSTIFICATION FOR GREED
The people who run the world mostly call themselves conservatives, but are really radicals of the most rapacious kind. They have built up a vast armoury of dogma to justify their sociopathic level of greed.
As economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote:
‘The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.’
Neoclassical economics and its ideological offshoot, neoliberalism, provide the bedrock of this dogma.
It provides, indeed, one of the fundamental assumptions of modern economics: “rational self-interest”, or “market theory”. It is the theory that everyone always works to maximise their self-interest — to do otherwise would be “irrational”.
An intelligence service given free rein to commit ‘serious crimes’ in its own country is an intelligence service that is the enemy of its people.
The quite astounding revelation that Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, has enjoyed this very freedom for decades has only just been made public at a special tribunal in London, set up to investigate the country’s intelligence services at the behest of a coalition of human rights groups, alleging a pattern of illegality up to and including collusion in murder.
You can be imprisoned if you disagree with the Israeli State and Australian (ODT)
Alqasem is a graduate of the University of Florida and a US citizen whose grandparents are Palestinian She tried to enter Israel to study on a Master’s degree programme at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, having been granted a student visa by the Israeli Consulate General in Miami.
Upon her arrival at the airport, Israeli officials denied the student entry. Her “crime”, according to the Strategic Affairs Ministry, is that while studying for her bachelor’s degree in Florida, she was president of an organisation that supported the BDS campaign against Israel.
The wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on trial Sunday for allegedly using state funds to fraudulently pay for hundreds of meals, part of a list of legal troubles facing the family.
The start of Sara Netanyahu’s trial was the latest chapter in a saga intensely scrutinised in Israel but dismissed by the Netanyahus as another “absurd” attempt to discredit them.
Israel is implementing collective punishment against the family of a Palestinian suspected of opening fire in a settlement industrial plant on Sunday, killing two Israelis and seriously injuring a third.
These online people didn’t get my meaning, clearly. I wanted to be elsewhere because in a place like Berlin I am not an Aboriginal person living under the unique circumstance of Australian racism. I state I’m Aboriginal overseas and people don’t tend to erase my history, they don’t deny my humanity and they don’t criminalise me. They tend to be interested and respectful. I’m not on the back foot, continually having to prove that racism exists, that Indigenous people experience the brunt of it via being the displaced traditional owners and that our lives matter.
it is probable that the current dramas wouldn’t have occurred if the recommendations were followed last time by Communications Minister Fifield.
It was interesting to watch the change in focus over the week when Guthrie and Milne walked the plank. On Monday, Guthrie was claimed to be someone who was completely out of touch with the demands of the job, by Thursday the narrative had changed to Milne apparently instructing Guthrie to sack journalists who were ‘critical’ of the government, an instruction Guthrie refused, demonstrating how ‘in touch’ she was!
It really doesn’t matter who said or didn’t say what to whom. Milne and Guthrie are victims of a process of the current government to eliminate criticism of their actions.
As the owners of the ABC, we need to remind all politicians that media independence is our expectation and criticism comes with the turf.
Thirteen renewable energy projects are underway or under consideration — from wind farms and pumped hydro-electric power to solar with storage that can shift electricity made when the sun’s shining to meet peak demand in the evening.
“The one great resource we have here in Port Augusta and the upper Spencer Gulf is this wonderful natural resource called the sun,” Mr Johnson said.
“It’s no different to having a massive uranium deposit, a massive gold deposit, a massive copper deposit.”
In a country drenched in sun, this natural resource is particularly abundant in the arid landscape around Port Augusta, and there are also plenty of flat expanses on which to build the facilities needed to exploit it.
Framed by the Flinders Ranges, stage one of the Bungala solar farm stretches over 300 hectares of land owned by the Bungala Aboriginal Corporation about 10 kilometres north-east of town.
Bungala uses a solar photovoltaic technology, with panels mounted on a tilting axis that can follow the sun’s path from east to west, maximising output and efficiency.
Liberal politician Stuart Robert spent almost $17,000 of taxpayers’ money on “personalised letterhead stationery” during the final weeks of the financial year, more than five times the typical spend for an MP.
The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.
Here are five eye witness accounts, one a police document, that I am persuaded establish beyond doubt that Kavanaugh binge drank and was an aggressive, mean drunk and that he lost control of his inhibitions:
The existing political culture, comprising the customary and often glorified Westminster system, meaning government and opposition dominating the parliament, plus the associated SMD electoral processes, present major disadvantages. This combination results in frequent two-party combat. It certainly does not suit a diverse, multicultural society. We need political systems where true majorities are in fact governing, formed by compromises after democratic elections.
This is equally necessary for boards of public organisations that serve the public good and do not exist to make money for their shareholders and outrageous, undeserved salary packages for their executives — such as those of major banks and insurance companies now being investigated. Diversity covers ideas, interests, ethnic groups, gender, age and a fair distribution of income worthy of an egalitarian society.
The ABC’s diligence brought about the capitulation on the Banking Royal Commission that the Government didn’t want (ODT)
The virulence of anti-ABC feeling in some parts of the Coalition sometimes defies logic. Since joining the ABC in May, I’ve been criticised by ministers over pieces that have actually appeared in the Financial Review, not on an ABC platform, because they displayed my “ABC ethic”.
And all this has played out against the backdrop of an unrelenting assault on the ABC by News Corp papers which assign compliant journalists — or those not in a position to say no — to pursue controversies about the broadcaster which are often so ludicrous as to be laughable.
(The relentless pursuit of the question of who was hiding behind the aspidistra in a re-enactment of a political story is just one recent example).
“it was the diligence of ABC reporting that exposed the various corporate outrages that finally forced the government to bring the royal commission into existence. And there could be no better reminder of the value of the public broadcaster than that.”
Almost all the directors of the ABC’s eight-member board were appointed directly by the minister for communications, Mitch Fifield, and some were appointed after being rejected by the merit-based nominations panel, documents obtained by the Guardian show.
This woman passed the polygraph test did Brett Kavanaugh (ODT)
“I believed he was going to rape me,” Ford, a California psychology professor, told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday local time, recalling an event she said occurred 32 years earlier. “It was hard for me to breathe and I believed that Brett was going to accidentally kill me.”
Kavanaugh responded with an angry, defiant and politically-charged defence, saying he had been the victim of “a calculated and orchestrated political hit fuelled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election”.
Trump had reportedly been disappointed by Kavanaugh’s performance in a Fox News interview earlier in the week, believing he was not aggressive enough in rebutting the allegations against him.
The consensus in Washington DC – including on Trump’s favoured television network, Fox News – was that Ford’s morning testimony was calamitous for the Trump administration and had badly damaged Kavanaugh’s chances of taking a seat on the nation’s most powerful court.
“This is a disaster for Republicans,” Fox anchor Chris Wallace said.
Andrew Bolt had us believe otherwise that Marr was seemingly an instigator and approved of the change. There is no mention by him that he was wrong. (ODT)
I woke up on Saturday morning to strange news in the Australian. The rules of the Horne prize – named after Donald and run by the Saturday Paper – had been changed. I’ve judged the prize a couple of times and was due to again in 2018. But not after what I saw on Saturday.
The destruction of an Australian Icon is at hand and only the ALP can save it and Australian Democracy and values.(ODT)
In June this year, the Liberal Party’s peak council voted by 2:1 to privatise the ABC, as proposed by the Institute of Public Affairs, whose alumni includes communications minister Mitch Fifield, an arch-plotter who backed Turnbull over Abbott, Dutton over Turnbull and then Morrison over Dutton. Turnbull and Fifield insisted at the time that the ABC would never be sold, but those assurances are surely worthless now. With News Corp on the attack, and the Coalition so bitterly divided, it is hard to see anyone inside the government dying in a ditch over a high-minded defence of the ABC.
The Australian had another extraordinarily well-timed piece this morning [$], in which media diarist Stephen Brook reported a rift between chair and MD, including deep background that Guthrie had been upset at the chair’s push for the quixotic “Project Jetstream” overhaul of the ABC’s digital infrastructure. There was obviously more to that story. Whether or not Guthrie deserved to be sacked so summarily – and she is today reported to be devastated and considering her legal options – the ABC now appears vulnerable, poorly led, and in need of public support more than ever.
Australia’s obsessions with social media and search engines, alongside a cloud computing drive from corporations, is powering the growth in energy intensive data centres, which now use as much energy as regional cities.
It’s a defensive acquisition with an aggressive price.
Comcast is clearly looking to massively increase its geographical reach and swell its subscriber numbers, across the US, UK and Europe which this deal will achieve.
It would appear that this bulking up is what Comcast sees as its salvation – and its management was crowing loudly over the weekend about Sky TV’s great platform, it’s wonderful brand and talented management.
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Independent journalism is a far more reliable source of news than the mainstream media’s biased coverage of events, with emerging sources of critical thinking banding together to keep the spirit alive, writes John Pilger.
they say that Murdoch’s primary interest in politicians is not political; it’s commercial,” Davies writes.
“He may be a highly political animal, they say – obsessed with the details of life in the corridors of power and personally possessed of some extremely rightwing opinions – but what he most wants from politicians is favours for his business. He’ll betray his own principles, he’ll embrace politicians for whom he has very little respect, just as long as they have the power to help the company get bigger.”
In practical terms, Davies says that often comes down to a repeated demand to be freed from regulation and for the state to be cut back to make way for private enterprise.
But sometimes News seeks regulation to protect its own position. Like right now, when News is angling for regulation to thwart the advance of social media juggernauts such as Google and Facebook.
News’s campaigns to protect or further its commercial interests are often cloaked in principle that sometimes obscures another financial interest beneath.
“It helped to expose the myth that the base of the Liberal Party is monolithic and all watch Sky News ‘after dark’.”
“I think tonight we can give a great example to our country, and a great example to our party, by showing that we are capable of rallying together, uniting together, and giving our country the leadership it wants.”
The request was straightforward, but some members fed up with his role in Canberra’s leadership convulsions and immovable conservative views on social issues were in no mood to comply. Shortly after his war cry, 32 per cent of members voted against endorsing his preselection. One in three preferred an empty chair to a former prime minister and Liberal leader. Abbott walked out of the RSL club a weakened figure, and facing questions over his political future.
A senior Liberal who opposed Turnbull’s toppling of Abbott in 2015 says “goading” doesn’t go close to describing the force of Abbott’s interventions: “Tony’s actions are destructive, selfish, and driven by bitterness and revenge. Unfortunately, that has proven very effective for him in the past.”
Michael Regan, the popular Northern Beaches Council mayor who was elected in 2012 with 56.33 per cent of the vote, played down the idea that he would contest Mr Abbott’s blue ribbon Sydney seat of Warringah as an independent but he stopped short of ruling it out.
In pointed criticism of both sides of politics, he said the community was “fed up with the power plays and ego-driven games taking place in Canberra”.
“Our Parliament’s become a laughing stock and all of us deserve better,” he told Fairfax Media.
Friday’s vote has again exposed the deep rift between moderates and conservatives inside the Liberal Party.
But the Far-Right is OK. It’s just part of our Liberal Party. It’s normal. Nothing to see here.
Q&A represents the echo chamber of the political mainstream, but not the balance of the Australian people. The Liberal Party is tearing itself apart precisely because its Far-Right hijackers can’t seem to get the people to follow, so they blame the latest leader.
Remember when Q&A admitted an Islamic State suicide bomber into its studio? At least, that’s what the News Corp tabloids portrayed on their front pages after Zaky Mallahasked a question from the audience. Mallah had admitted to making threats against the lives of ASIO officers and served his time, but had been cleared of a terrorism charge. He was working to prevent young Muslim men from being sucked into ISIS.
There was a robust exchange. The Liberal panelist basically dismissed the legal process and said Mallah should simply be deported at the Minister’s discretion. Malah responded that the Liberal’s attitude would provoke young Muslim Australians to join ISIS. He was shut down by Tony Jones and a Murdoch frenzy ensued. The ABC grovelled and disavowed actual robust debate.
But it was Liberal John Howard’s Government that joined the illegal invasion of Iraq against the clear wishes of the Australian people and in the face of clear warnings, amply vindicated, that it would make us a target of terrorists. Who’s putting us more in danger?
Beyond that, Far-Right extremists advocate radical social engineering, steadily dismantle our open society and democracy, and exploit racism, xenophobia and any other social division they can get their tyre iron into.
Billionaire Frank Lowy has offered a scathing assessment of Australia’s current political climate, describing the recent spate of leadership challenges as unacceptable and urging democracy to be “treated with care”.
“Having five prime ministers in five years is not acceptable,” he said in the speech in front of political and business heavyweights on Thursday night.
“Democracy needs to be nurtured and treated with care.”
Conscientious people applying appropriate methodology are always at risk of ridicule from right-wingers — it’s an extension of the right’s anti-science, anti-expertise bias. Conservatives regularly suspect researchers and experts of bad faith and political bias — see the climate change debate, or the smearing of the inspectors who correctly determined that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
Trump is wrong and the George Washington researchers are right — but they’re researchers, so of course they’re an easy target for conservative know-nothings.
olddogthoughts 
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