A far-right extremist, Smotrich has used his new platform to incite violence. Just days after Israeli settlers carried out a pogrom in Huwwara – killing one Palestinian and inflicting huge destruction on homes, businesses and vehicles – Smotrich called for that West Bank village to be “wiped out” by the Israeli state.
Source: Face the facts: Israel relies on settler violence | The Electronic Intifada
Australia has experienced its hottest year on record, its most intense flooding and an unprecedented coral bleaching — all in the last few years — as the climate warms, says a new report.
Source: Report details Australia’s hotter, rainier and more dramatic climate
Dutton doesn’t let facts get in the way of politics.
As Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton doesn’t have to deliver anything until the next election. He has plenty of time to seek information, take advice, form a considered opinion and explain how his proposals would benefit Australia and Australians into the future far beyond the potential timeframe of either an Albanese or Dutton government. Pity he seems to be not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.
Source: Coming back to haunt you – » The Australian Independent Media Network
In his pitch for re-election, Scott Morrison is hammering several talking points that the facts overwhelmingly refute, as Alan Austin reports.
Source: Scott Morrison has ten key election messages — nine are not true
Mr Frydenberg’s claim is misleading.
The first reason is that the figures the Treasurer has quoted are from different years. Australia is sourced to 2020, New Zealand and Canada to 2019 and the OECD to 2018.
This inconsistency is particularly problematic as emissions figures to 2020 include large reductions as a result of the pandemic, and not government policy, while prior years do not.
Figures for 2020 are available for New Zealand, Canada and 32 of 38 OECD countries.
The T
The Promise and the Bubble: I’ll sign a Stat Dec
However, before he signs his statutory declaration to say he didn’t do what he likely did, he should consider the fact that accusations against him are not malicious, bitter slurs or in any way offensive if they are true. Now Morrison says the only reason he would be required to sign a statutory declaration is if a court ordered him to do so.
Morrison says the LNP are the best economic managers and that’s no lie. Well the facts prove otherwise.
Today we heard him say that his government has instituted more changes than any other to deal with bullying and sexual abuse in the work place. When you bunjee jump and publicly take the LNP to the lowest state ever in the history of the parliament any changes made could be considered the “most” ever. However the historic record public humiliation still shows the Morrison government the worst. So much so the changes were in fact slow and forced on him by the victims and not really any SNAGs male or female in the LNP ministry or Scott Morrison himself. How clear was he whe he said he wasn’t going out to speak to the protesting women. He was too busy. Compared with the ALP the Morrison LNP remains lower in the eyes of the public than any other time in history. Victims sacked, mocked and gone while the perpertrators merely slapped on the wrist praised and then promoted.
I’ve just finished watching Dopesick about the Sacklers,their Pharmaceutical Company, Oxycontin and how they managed to avoid prosecution for years by applying the same token strategies as Morrison. Who like the Sacklers was found praising himself for some nominal changes while continuing to carry on down the same road. Morrison has the ad-mans confidence but he certainly lacks any real leadership skills.
Recent economic data brings the tally of failures in economic management by Prime Minister Morrison and Treasurer Frydenberg to 40, as Alan Austin documents. WORLD BANK DATA shows the value of manufacturing in Australia as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) was 13.83% when that dataset began in 1990. It stayed above 12% until 1999, when a decline began. This fell to an all-time low of 5.64% in 2019, six years after the Coalition was elected on promises to ‘re-invigorate manufacturing industry’. The 2020 level was 5.72%, the second-lowest ever. The Australian Sovereign Capability Alliance reports that Australia now has the lowest manufacturing self-sufficiency of any country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Source: Morrison Government notches up 40 ‘worst on record’ economic outcomes
We voted for them and this is what they delivered NOTHING
In the last eight years of Coalition rule, there have been more than 20 different climate and energy policies, which have been announced with fanfare before fizzing into the background, or just being trashed altogether. Here’s a short rundown of what the last eight years has looked like.
We learned this week of the tragic death of a 27-year-old man from Sydney who had COVID-19. This follows a 38-year-old woman who died from the virus last month. Throughout the current Delta outbreak in New South Wales, we’ve heard young people are making up a greater proportion of people in hospital compared with earlier in the pandemic. We’re seeing similar patterns overseas.
Source: Younger adults can get very sick and die from COVID too. Here’s what the data tell us
Hillsong pastor Brian Houston has been charged for allegedly concealing child sexual abuse by his late father Frank Houston.Mr Houston, who has been living in the US and recently travelled to preach in Mexico, was charged following a two-year investigation into allegations he failed to report the alleged abuse of a boy in the 1970s.
Source: Brian Houston charged by police for allegedly concealing father’s child sexual abuse
The forever wars that the US launched after 9/11 led to a surge in military suicides, a new study claims, with traumatized soldiers taking their own lives as they are repeatedly deployed in conflicts that have no public support.
White Nationalist TV News: Even Networks and CNN are falling for ‘Border Crisis’ Propaganda
“So far this year, immigration patterns — including those involving unaccompanied minors — are no different than they were in 2020 or 2019. A quick look at the number of unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border shows that the count goes up each spring and summer, and that it does not seem to be correlated with the U.S. government’s efforts to stop the human flow. As of today, the case cannot be made that Biden’s policies are causing higher numbers of unaccompanied minors and other immigrants at the border.”
White Nationalist TV News: Even Networks and CNN are falling for ‘Border Crisis’ Propaganda
On the eve of the most important election of our lifetimes, more than 200,000 Americans have died, more than 7 million have been infected, and the numbers in many states are still getting worse. And now, an outbreak centered around Trump and his White House has further exposed just how careless and callous his response to the virus has been. This timeline details how we got here.
Superspreader in Chief – Mother Jones
Despite the slagging off at Labor by the Coalition, simply because of debts accrued to maintain the economy through an unexpected crisis – namely the GFC – the Coalition now finds itself in the same situation through COVID-19, and has to go down a similar path. Have they done as well as Labor did? NO! Why not?
We need truth and facts – not lies and spin – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Australia’s seen enough shut shops and Centrelink queues to disbelieve the old beat-ups. So why is the prime minister restarting them?
Economists are calling the impact of coronavirus a “depression-level crisis”; it is stunning to consider the Liberal government refusing to remember the lessons of the Depression. Pandemic or not, sacked workers cannot furnish markets with spending, and neither can the workers without jobs to go back to when jobseeker payments are halved and jobkeeper taken away – scheduled for September. They won’t be spending big in the Laundy family’s 30 pubs.
They’ll be fighting to keep their families together – nursing a bitter awareness of just who abandoned them, and for how little.
and
Finally, what would you like American audiences—our listeners—to keep in mind as they try to get their heads around this ongoing catastrophe?
The part about this that Americans are paying attention to is the ISIS threat, and this is a major concern. These people all breaking out of prison is obviously not going to be good for anybody. At the same time, it’s important for people far away from Syria to understand that this is a part of Syria that has had a relatively normal life. This is a place where children are going to school, families are working, people are meeting in cafes. It is the closest that Syria has had in a very long time to normalcy, and suddenly, people’s live are being ripped apart. People are having to flee, people are being killed. There have been civilians executed on highways or activists being killed. This is being perpetrated by our ally, Turkey. This is a member of NATO. This is not ISIS. These are people that are close to us, that we support.
Listen to the entire interview on The Mother Jones Podcast here:
via “A Stab in the Back”: How Trump and Turkey Blew Up Syria’s Most Stable Region – Mother Jones
Your right to know has been eroded by
1) Attacks on the ABC.
2) By the very business model MSM Private media has adopted to operate on.
Since the turn of the century the the ABC has been a target of constant LNP attack to be diminished as it was seen to be in direct competion with the profit goals and business model adopted by private media like News Corp and now Ch9. News public information,government and corporate accountability were less and less the domain of the media and the ABC was increasingly showing that reality up rather than competing with it. The domain of private media had become a public relations agency and it’s mode of operation an excercise for profit. It’s target client was oviously where the money was concentrated and that was just 1% of private enterprise and its allied associations and political crusaders. Those political parties that supported the mega- industries with the money their associations and donors. In contrast with the ABC the difference was not just striking but magnified and amplified and had to be muted at all costs and with the coming of Tony Abbott it has and continues to be. Now the attacks will begin to be turned on the digital and independant media sources that don’t really have the focused power of distribution and coverage. Furthe the model is no longer just national but global as exemplified by Murdoch media in the English speaking world.(ODT)
Acts of legislation enacted over the last six years of LNP-dominated Governments have eroded press freedom, with its collected effects ranging from cloak-and-dagger secrecy to threats of prison to journalists and whistle-blowers.
Press freedom is democratically essential, so protections must be enhanced
– July was the hottest month ever recorded, i.e. the hottest since about 1850 when scientific records began being kept around the world using modern thermometers. So writes Chelsea Harvey at Climate Wire via The Scientific American.
July was more than 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than the late 20th century average. That is huge. Enormous. The surface temperature of the earth includes Antarctica and the oceans (which are deep and cold). To get an average rise of a whole degree means that some places on land are 15 degrees warmer. Some places on land were already 110 F. in July, so adding any increase at all is a severe health risk to people who live there.
Is it any wonder the LNP do what ever Newscorp asks they just might print the facts (ODT)
Annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) in the December quarter was a dismal 2.34%. The quarterly rise was just 0.18%. The latter ranks an appalling 32nd out of the 36 OECD members. It ranks 77th out of the 92 countries worldwide which record growth quarterly. Lowest ranking ever, by far.
With an election looming these numbers should remove any lingering doubt regarding the Coalition’s incompetence in economic management.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg hailed this week’s growth data with the mix of half-truths and blatant falsehoods we now expect from this Government:
‘With the unemployment rate at its lowest level in seven years … our economic foundations are in good shape’
Again, quite false. Australia’s jobless rate is at 5.02% is the same as it was back in 2011, when the whole world was in the worst global financial crisis in eighty years. Australia’s jobless rate then ranked sixth in the OECD. Now, after five years of strong global recovery, Australia ranks 17th.
They may have a point. Language is powerful. Take the recent ABC tweet:
“Far-right activists and young men of African appearance have clashed at St Kilda Beach, after the activists refused to stop filming the men while they played soccer.”
The comments that followed basically fell into three categories: Those who questioned the need to point out that the young men were of “African appearance”, those who objected to the term “far-right activists” and those who warned that young men of a darker complexion playing soccer made people feel unsafe so we need laws to change so that police can arrest such people for the crime of inciting racism by their appearance.
Of course, I wondered why the tweet didn’t read:
“Adult male filming attractive teenagers at the beach refused to stop even after police request”
What did Donald Trump claim?
In an early morning (US time) tweet on Monday, the president said:
“The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition.
“Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!
1)What do the crime figures say?2)The latest official crime figures we have from Germany show that 5.76 million crimes were reported in 2017. As a percentage of the population, this means crime is now at its lowest level for 30 years.
3)What about crime by foreigners?Crime by foreigners specifically is also down significantly – and even more sharply. The figure of crimes by non-German nationals fell by 23 per cent since last year, from 950,000 to just over 700,000.
via Why Donald Trump is wrong about Germany’s crime rate | The Independent
The Government and the ACCC
the confident assertions on the Liddell Power Station by the ACCC Chairman Rod Sims remind me of the surgeon having completed a brilliant operation to save the sight of an elderly patient — he removes his mask, smiles and acknowledges the admiration of his team when a junior nurse puts up her hand and says rather apologetically, “But Sir, the patient has died”.
There are economists on the ACCC Board who would have been expected to review the full life-cycle costs of coal before Mr Sims made his statement. Did they ignore or were they unaware of the work of eminent Yale economist William Nordhaus? Nordhaus demonstrated, using full cost accounting of all externalities, that coal now has no value to the community — work confirmed by other groups of economists.
Indeed coal is the most expensive energy modality apart from nuclear energy. It requires exceedingly good discipline by the government to do a “John Cleese” and not “mention the war” – the war being the word “health” – for to do so would undermine the ideology that coal is “good for humanity“.
These days, there’s a significant consensus here that the Iraq invasion was a “terrible mistake,” a “tragic error,” or even the “single worst foreign policy decision in American history.” Fewer voices are saying what it really was: a war crime. In fact, that invasion fell into the very category that led the list of crimes at the Nuremberg tribunal, where high Nazi officials were tried for their actions during World War II. During the negotiations establishing that tribunal and its rules, it was (ironically, in view of later events) the United States that insisted on including the crime of “waging a war of aggression” and on placing it at the head of the list. The U.S. position was that all the rest of Germany’s war crimes sprang from this first “crime against peace.”
via Trump’s Fascination with appointing War Criminals to High Office
The inaccurate notion that abortion is an unsafe or “risky” medical procedure was put to rest this month, with the release of a new report from The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), The Safety and Quality of Abortion Care in the United States. But as usual, Fox News didn’t let facts stand in the way of a sensationalist segment attacking abortion as unsafe.
via New report confirms abortion is safe. Fox News immediately claimed the opposite.
Getting it right: the best reporting on white supremacists and neo-Nazis
Media coverage of white supremacist groups has faced severe criticism but the past year has seen some exemplary reporting
via Getting it right: the best reporting on white supremacists and neo-Nazis | World news | The Guardian
New official crime figures show Victoria is safer than it has been at any time for the past 10 years.
The Bureau of Statistics count of recorded crime across all states shows just 75,860 offenders in 2016-17, down from a high of 87,695 under the Baillieu government in 2012-13 and the fourth successive annual fall.
This news model also allowed climate denialists and before them cigarette cancer denialists to manipulate the system. If every story has two points of view and they are equal, then you have to present both. But where one side in this debate is factually incorrect, it means you are doing the opposite of journalism. You are diluting the truth with false, paid-for propaganda.
Cable news is now pumping out Trump talking points hourly to millions of people around the globe, because of their broken business model. It is degrading our society and our human values. The editors and the CEOs need to look at themselves in the mirror and decide if they really want brown shirts beating up their children in the streets, because that is where this thing is going.
via The worst thing about Year One of Trump: Fascistization of Cable News | Informed Comment
At least 2,600 Bedouins have been made stateless, according to official data.
Source: How Israel robs Palestinians of citizenship | The Electronic Intifada
So, the Australian Bureau of Statistics told us this week, the rate of unemployment fell a click to 5.6 per cent in July. Trouble is, most people know the official unemployment rate understates the extent of the problem.
Source: The truth of the matter about the extent of our unemployment problem
In a stunningly successful first week for the Trump administration, the US has seen the creation of over two million new facts, spurred on by increased confidence and growing productivity.
Fact-creation was one of Mr Trump’s key policies during the presidential campaign, but even he is said to be surprised by the growth achieved in just the first seven days.
Analysts have put the growth down to the ‘Trump Effect’, which has seen a boom in investment in the fact-making industry, which is now close to capacity.
In other first week data, unemployment is down eight percentage points, growth is up eleven per-cent and America’s trade balance is back in positive territory.
We are facing a monstrous, growing crisis of credibility and we cannot be complacent
Source: Facts are dead, long live facts: there’s no simple solution for how to dissolve the fog of lies
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was appointed by prime minister Bob Hawke on August 10 1987 to investigate the high rate of Indigenous deaths in custody. At the time there was 1 Indigenous death in custody every 11 days. The commission reviewed 99 deaths between 1980 and 1989, factoring in the cause, likely reason and underlying social factors.
Source: Infographics: Indigenous incarceration in Australia at a glance | NITV
Political reporter Stephanie Anderson looks into just how accurate Peter Dutton’s comments on the dangers of an increased refugee intake are.
“Good” Muslims have been condemning radical Islam long before you even knew what it was.
Source: The World’s Largest Muslim Group Has Been Opposing Radical Islam for 90 Years
Something that needs to be addressed.
If it seems like terrorist attacks are happening more and more often, it’s because they are.
And you wonder why Congress is so homogeneous?
After the murder of Curtis Cheng the speculation about how Farhad Jabar ‘was radicalised’ began. Any real expert will tell you it’s too soon to say
olddogthoughts 