What a whiner!

By the names mentioned, the guy originates from a Muslim country -- Pakistan. Why am I not surprised?



A REAL estate agent who was denied entry to a trendy bar claims the refusal left him psychologically damaged, and lost him clients because he can no longer socialise. Waise Yusofzai, 38, says he felt "half a person" when security staff refused him entry to the Establishment bar in George St because there were too many males inside the venue at the time. He eventually gained access when a female friend exited the bar and escorted him inside on her arm.

But since the incident in November 2005, Mr Yusofzai claims his "confidence is shot to pieces". "Since this event I really don't feel like going to bars anymore," Mr Yusofzai told the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal yesterday. "I feel very uncomfortable walking in."

Mr Yusofzai is suing the Establishment bar - owned by businessman Justin Hemmes. He is claiming $20,000 for psychological injury and $30,000 in lost income from clients. "Part of my role is not only entertaining clients, but to take clients out for drinks on a camaraderie basis," he said. "I have been cast aside by some clients I no longer drink with on a regular basis or entertain. "(The refusal) has made me feel inadequate and really discourages me from wanting to go to these places. "My confidence has really been shot to pieces. I certainly don't have the edge I used to."

Counsel for Establishment, Kate Eastman, said Mr Yusofzai's claim for lost earnings and other expenses had been "totally and utterly exaggerated". Ms Eastman said the bar did not dispute that Mr Yusofzai and a male friend were told by a security guard at the door: "There are too many guys inside, you can't go in." But she said the bar manager informed Mr Yusofzai it was a "safety issue" relating to "the number of persons who may enter the premises".

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Grotesque hysteria about Australia drowning not really surprising

We're told so many mad scare stories about global warming, why shouldn't Art Bell believe this one, too?

And so the radio host and best-selling author last weekend read out to his audience on Coast to Coast, one of America's most listened-to shows, this latest report he'd picked about our warming horror: "Shocking reports from the Kremlin today are showing that the Government of Australia has entered into secret negotiations with the United States and their Commonwealth allies for the proposed evacuation of upwards of 11 million of its 20 million citizens." On he went, telling millions of Americans that our drought was so bad - curse you, global warming! - that the Howard Government might soon hire cruise ships to send us somewhere cooler, once it figured who'd take us.

To Bell, this was the last straw. "I wonder when the climate sceptics are going to finally catch on," he raged. "Will it take something like this? Like evacuating half a nation, before we wake up and realise that it is actually happening?"

Oh, I've caught on all right to what's happening, Art. Caught on to you, for a start. You might think the moral of this farce is not to trust even million-hit websites such as WorldNetDaily, which ran the story Bell read out so credulously, or the news site run by the New-Age nutter who actually dreamed up this hoax, a blogger posing as Russian scientist "Sorcha Faal".

[There is indeed a Russian writer named "Sorcha Faal" and Art Bell is in fact a popular American "paranormal" broadcaster who uses hoaxes from time to time but Andrew Bolt (the writer of this article) appears to have been taken in by Bell's claim that the Russian report ran on "WorldNetDaily". It did NOT run on "WorldNetDaily" and seems to be no more than another hoax dreamed up by Bell]

But the real moral is that global warming fear-mongering is now so shameless and grotesque that otherwise sane people are prepared to believe half our nation is about to head for the boats. You might also think Bell must be on his nutty lonesome to fall for a story so wild. But don't admired global warming cultists say things just as extreme, to huge applause? Why wouldn't Bell think we'd be evacuating in our millions, when Professor Tim Flannery, our Alarmist of the Year, warns that global warming may soon force us to flee our parched cities?

"I think there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis," Flannery has blithely claimed. Indeed, he added the other day, "some time in the next 30 years, we face significant destabilisation, rapidly rising sea levels, maybe up to 6m and hundreds of millions of refugees, because there are whole cities going under".

Why wouldn't Bell think we'd need to resettle the populations of coastal Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, given that ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams recently told me on air we could face seas this century 100m higher? Why wouldn't Bell think we'd all be on the move to Alaska or Norway, given that Professor James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory, last year told the ABC Late Night Live show, hosted by an approving Phillip Adams, that the rest of the world would soon be uninhabitable? As Lovelock so often puts it: "Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic."

Good gosh. If that's what even our most admired "experts" tell us, as approved by the ABC, what's so crazy about Bell believing 11 million Australians will soon board ships as global warming refugees? How else does Flannery think we'll pull out of Perth or drowned Sydney?

Apologies. I should now calm you because it's only too easy to be spooked by scares as crazy as these if enough people tell you often enough. And they sure do, in this all-but-unchallenged trillion-dollar racket that is global warming.

So, take comfort that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the influential United Nations scientists who do most to promote global warming, admit such scares are bogus. As its latest report concedes, its models predict the seas will rise this century at worst by 59cm, not 100m. Antarctica, home of 90 per cent of land-based ice that could drown us, is cooling, not warming, and gaining ice, not losing it.

What's more, a minority of other scientists, some from the Russian Academy of Sciences, say this recent warming may well be caused not by humans but a change in solar activity that has changed again, and we instead face global cooling. Heart stopped racing? But, if the truth isn't really so scary, how did we get to believe stories this freaky? Let's rejoin the babbling Art Bell.

Bell is also famous in a small way for co-authoring a New York Times bestseller, The Coming Global Superstorm, which claimed global warming would monster us with worse storms (not proved) and fast-rising seas (not true), and may soon shut down the warm Gulf Stream (untrue, says the IPCC) sending cities like New York into an ice age (not this century, pal). This is the hyperventilating book that became the smash movie The Day After Tomorrow, which helped to whip up the warming panic.

It didn't matter that scientists dismissed the film as another warming beat-up. There were only too many cause-pushers badly wanting to believe it -- or wanting the gullible masses, at least, to believe enough of it to be scared into submission to their new apocalyptic faith. Even now we get Nonie Sharp, publications editor of the Leftist Australian magazine Arena, fervently declaring: "The first half hour of The Day After Tomorrow was a time of awakening for me." Note Sharp's born-again tone -- so typical of a faith that's taken over the cry of so many past prophets: "Repent, for the end of the world is nigh."

For that message to work well, of course, you must first persuade likely converts that the end of the world really is nigh -- that we really will be down to a few breeding pairs in the Arctic, as the winds wail through the ghost cities of Australia. Get us believing that, and you'll even get some - like Bell - to believe we'll soon have to sail somewhere cooler. In fact, we're losing our reason so fast it won't take long before people will want to reserve tickets for the evacuation.

I see a win-win opportunity here. So let me help the feeble-minded, so eager to trust a Flannery, a Lovelock, a Williams. Book your seat on the SS Evacuate Australia right now. Book today with Tim Flannery and avoid the rush as our cites drown in rising seas of hype, or get swallowed by hot clouds of bulldust. We sceptics will be at the docks to wave you off on your voyage to Nirvana. I can't tell you how sorry we'll be to see you go. I honestly can't.

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Gross spelling errors in High School textbook

Our Leftist "educators" are even too dumb to use a spellchecker



A PRACTICE Core Skills booklet widely used by Year 12 students contains seven major spelling errors in two paragraphs. The mistakes, pointed out yesterday by an irate parent, include "dagnerous" for dangerous, "gudance" for guidance, "anddetection" for and detection, "detemrine" for determine, "readio" for radio, "teh" for the and "mehtod" for method. The book, Queensland Core Skills Test Workbook, was written by Peter J. Spence, BA BEd Grad. Dip RE, and B.J. Lewis, BA BEd MEd Admin, and published in Brisbane by Education Support Programmes. This is the fifth year of production of the book, which is compulsory in many Queensland schools.

The company did not return phone calls or emails yesterday. The errors occur on page 116 in a science practice question about small robots known as millibots.

Education Minister Rod Welford said: "I hope the students doing the Core Skills Test check their answers more carefully than the authors of this book." The Queensland Studies Authority, which oversees the Core Skills Test, said it had nothing to do with the book. "The QSA publishes its own QCS Test support materials for schools and students," a spokesman said. "Copies of the QSA publications What About the QCS Test? and All You Need to Know About the QCS Test are provided to schools for distribution to all Year 11 and Year 12 students."

Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations executive officer Greg Donaldson said: "Someone has let the side down by obviously not using the spellcheck."

The parent who drew attention to the errors said the students had wondered at first if it was a "correct the spelling mistakes" question, but clearly it was not, as it asked for a calculation to be performed. "What sort of an example do you think this will set for a generation that already struggles to be literate?" she said.

The Queensland Core Skills Test, which will be held on September 4 and 5 this year, is a common statewide test for Year 12 students testing 49 common elements in the curriculum. It gives students individual results from A to E, and group results are used to help calculate overall positions (OPs).

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Dangerous Qld. government fire-service pennypinching

But there's plenty of money for an ever-growing army of bureaucrats, of course

FIRE engines equipped with special rescue equipment are being left at stations during emergency calls because of cuts in overtime payments. And to cover the problem, specialist engines stationed in Brisbane are forced to attend fires at the Gold Coast - pushing response times in some cases from 12 to 40 minutes.

The overtime restrictions, which allow just seven overtime shifts for sick leave a month per fire engine, can reduce the number of firefighters on duty at a station. This means that fire engines carrying special equipment, such as extension ladders on turn-tables, don't have enough firefighters to man them and have to be kept off the road.

Union leaders told The Sunday Mail the appliances were being left behind as often as once a month in some parts of the state. Last weekend, Beenleigh fire station exhausted its supply of overtime and had to leave its rescue vehicle behind. As a result, a crew from Mount Gravatt station was forced to cover the Gold Coast area to Carrara.

A Queensland Fire and Rescue source said the "ludicrous" cost-cutting was putting lives at risk. "It's absolutely criminal that the Government is allowed to get away with this. "If there are fires in high-rise apartments or units we need to have a vehicle with rescue equipment to reach people who are trapped. "It means a 12 to 14-minute response time will blow out to 30 to 40 minutes," he said. "People could lose their lives because of this ridiculous policy."

Mark Walker, state president of the United Firefighters Union, said the policy was in place to stop unwarranted sick leave. "This is just about the Government trying to keep the budget down. "We don't believe any fire engine should ever come off line. Taxpayers pay for the service to have vehicles there to be used."

Opposition emergency services spokesman Ted Malone said it was a ridiculous situation to be in. "This is yet another example of the Beattie Government's mismanagement and bureaucratic bungling," he said. A spokesman for Emergency Services Minister Pat Purcell refused to comment saying it was an "operational matter".

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