Nasty media people

I am no fan of Dr. and Mrs. Edelsten and there is no doubt that a young and attractive American girl who marries a rich Jewish doctor more than twice her age must raise eyebrows -- but the couple concerned seem happy with their arrangement and it is surely their own business anyway. So I think the cruel remarks about Brynne Edelsten (the leftmost lady in the photo below) are more a reflection on the ones making the remarks than anything else: Just not nice people



The new Dancing with the Stars season opener sparked a Twitter frenzy when the controversial WAG [Brynne Edelsten] was attacked for her dance form on the first night of competition.

New judge Josh Horner made his bid for Todd McKenney's nasty judge tag dubbing Edelsten's appearance as a "bedazzled potato sack".

But it was a back-stage swipe by co-host Sonia Kruger which sent social media into meltdown, telling the disheartened dancer: "I think it's nice you get on so well with your dad" - a dig at the age difference with her 67-year-old husband.

The cheeky remark triggered a tirade of abuse online, with viewers bombarding the program's Twitter feed.

The attack from Twitter fans forced an on-air apology of sorts, with Kruger presenting a visibly upset Brynne with a posy of fake flowers.

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Australia was wiser about immigration in the past

Arthur Calwell was leader of Australia's Federal parliamentary Labor party between 1960 and 1967

The horrors of World War II reduced Europe to a state of absolute chaos, with crushed, displaced people having lost everything as well as their homelands, being confronted by an implacable new foe - communist Russia. Australia's concern about post-war reconstruction and population growth was acted on by the country's most successful and patriotic immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, who, according to his detractors of the day, "became increasingly aware of the splendid human material to be found in the refugee camps".

Between 1947 and 1952, 181,700 refugee and displaced persons entered Australia through the International Refugee Organisation, which was formed in 1946 to deal with the European refugee crisis, but the stringent health requirements quite correctly set by Calwell led to him being attacked again by the usual suspects as using refugees as "grist for the labour mill".

Fast forward to the years of Al Grassby, Malcolm Fraser, Petro Georgiou and all the other multiculturalists who linked arms with their lefty mates in our schools, universities and parliaments and imposed their version of a Brave New World on the rest of us. Fraser invited Lebanese Muslims to Australia in 1976 and our first boatpeople from Vietnam arrived during his government. During the Howard years the number of African refugees increased and I am reminded again of Calwell who said that he "objected to the mass importation of people who will form 'black power' groups and menace the security of Australia when their numbers have grown sufficiently" and become "fiercely anti-white and fiercely anti one another. Do we want or need any of these people here? I am one red-blooded Australian who says no."

Australia's immigration and refugee policies are now one huge mess with boatpeople arrivals in recent years leading to our coastal borders being shot to pieces and the disasters at Christmas Island, Villawood and elsewhere testimony to a government that has no idea what to do next. Sweeping changes to our immigration and citizenship laws are urgently required but mention the word law and a lawyer will be standing at your shoulder. Teams of lawyers jostle with each other to get their snouts in the trough of legal aid monies constantly being topped up by hapless taxpayers as the courts are log-jammed with cases and appeals related to immigration and refugee matters.

Our slavish adherence to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees is a millstone dragging us down and compromises our sovereignty. This was demonstrated by the UN buying into the Villawood debacle by telling protesters that UN officials would talk to them if they came down off the roof.

All Australian governments have done the UN's bidding without question but the Japanese have taken a different route. Not ratifying the UN Convention until 1981, Japan has accepted just 508 refugees from the 7297 applications made since 1982. Maybe salving its conscience, Japan is the third-largest donor in the world to the UNHCR, which could explain why a rapacious UN looks the other way while Japan goes on ignoring refugees and keeping its borders secure.

There is no escaping the dreadful track record of the UN over recent decades - the WHO rorts and scams, the horrible "sex-for-food" scandal in Liberia, the ghastly Rwanda genocide followed by Srebrenica and the list goes on. When was the last time an Australian foreign minister took the UN on? Alexander Downer is on the UN payroll in Cyprus so what hope do ordinary Australians have? Look at the damage John Howard did when he gave Amanda Vanstone the keys to the Immigration Department and then rewarded her by inflicting her on the Italians!

An Abbott government must reconnect with ordinary Australians through hard-headed and strong government but it will need new blood at all levels to help it make the changes. The undergrad apparatchik politics of past years must be swept aside. We must redefine our ocean borders and police them rigorously and the UN must be told the Australian government and its people will decide who migrates here in future.

A recent report tells us that more than 60 per cent of our refugees have failed to get a job after five years and 83 per cent of those households now rely on welfare payments for income. The greatest unemployment rate was recorded among new arrivals from Iraq and Afghanistan with less than 10 per cent finding full-time work and 93.7 per cent of households sucking on the Centrelink teat. I know many people who are not white but who are fiercely proud Australians and we must all stand together. I wonder how many of our current crop of MPs have read Calwell's autobiography Calwell: Be Just and Fear Not.

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Wasting money on climate change betrays sick

LOST opportunities are invisible but deadly. On climate change, the call to buy insurance by pricing carbon is a cop-out. Where is the cost-benefit analysis?

We're thinking of axing Australian medical research yet we're supporting solar panel manufacturers in China. It doesn't have to be this way.

All the money spent employing green police, subsidising solar or researching how to pump carbon dioxide underground is money not spent on medical research.

Opportunity lost is a killer. The path not taken could be lined with happier, longer lives. Only the best evidence and real debate have a chance of helping us see through the fog to pick the better road.

While most scientists agree CO2 causes some warming, there is great debate about just how much. If CO2 has only a minor effect on temperature then spending, say, $1 billion on inefficient roof-top solar panels is not just wasted money, it's a choice that will kill people. We won't be able to say exactly who it will kill but we can virtually guarantee that some people will die in the future who could have been saved.

Why? Solar energy costs us more than five times what coal-powered energy does. So instead of spending $1bn on solar panels, we could have spent $200 million on cheap electricity and used the other $800m to double our medical research budget.

Right now, the government is planning to cut $133m from our $800m annual medical research budget. The Australian government has spent or will spend $3.8bn on initiatives to combat climate change across four years. (The US government was spending about $7bn a year at last count.) When Julia Gillard spends money on climate-related work instead of medical research, she is making a choice about the net benefits and it's supposedly based on science. It's true sooner or later medical research will get the answers right, but for someone who is sick with a deadly disease, sooner makes a life-and-death difference.

If our government-funded climate establishment makes the wrong guess about what humidity does in a warmer world, CO2 emissions become trivial and inconsequential. But the money diverted or delayed from better causes leaves a trail of destruction that cannot be repaired. Money can always be replaced, but lives lost are gone for good.

Julio Licinio, director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, put together a passionate, disturbing advertisement two weeks ago, a plea to stop cuts to medical research funding. His sister died aged four from a disease that is treatable today.

Which four-year-old in 2018 will die because Gillard introduced a carbon tax instead of increasing medical research funding? Which father will die in 2022 who would have lived if we had doubled our funding for medical research? It is for people such as four-year-old Fabiola that we should keep fighting for rational debate. Bad science makes for bad policy. Poor reasoning is deadly.

Medical research is blossoming at a phenomenal, historic pace.

The exponential curve in gene therapy, telomerase research, genomics and glycobiology is barely beginning. Four significant breakthroughs were made in medical research in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000.

These were the kinds of breakthroughs people had worked for decades to make, and some were not predicted even a few years beforehand. The human genome project was finished five years ahead of schedule and for a fraction of the expected price.

Right now, a year of medical research really does make a difference. These are the areas where we will be left behind and it will hurt. These are the industries where we need to stay at the head of the pack, not just to save lives but to save the economy as well.

Access Economics estimated in 2003 that every dollar invested in the Australian health research and development sector returned at least $5 in national economic development.

When government-funded Australian researchers discover treatments, we own vital intellectual property. We not only export products the world wants, we avoid being beholden to foreign patent holders. Some effective cancer drugs cost $2000 a week. Isn't that the kind of research we want to own?

If we lead the world in medicine, the world is our oyster. If it turns out clean carbon technology is useful, we can buy it with the spare change from the profits of medical research. We know we need a cure for cancer. We don't know if the rest of the world will want to pump CO2 underground 10 years from now.

When we lead the world in putting inefficient solar panels on roofs, we only help Chinese manufacturers and we win a race no one wants to win. You can't export second-hand solar panels or resell old pink batts.

Can we start looking at the cost benefits of all our policies instead of reasoning by fallacy? The precautionary principle is no principle of science: it's a blind tool that works for both sides of any debate.

To quote Licinio: "In 1964 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma of childhood was 100 per cent fatal. Now the cure rate is over 80 per cent, thanks to medical research. When Fabiola died I was so upset that it took me decades to recover. From protracted mourning to survivor guilt, the impact of that death shaped my life. For someone like myself who suffered tremendously due to a disease [that] was incurable and whose cure has been subsequently achieved through medical research, the proposed cuts to the NHRMC [National Health and Medical Research Council] budget are unconscionable.

"On a very positive note, my mother, Aurea, lost her own mother early on. My grandmother died at age 47 due to malignant hypertension, which was out of control, and sky-high blood pressures. My mother suffered enormously because of that death; and she knew that she had the exact same disease. Later in life, my mother also developed breast cancer. However, medical research always caught up with her and her blood pressure was always well controlled. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer she had state-of-the-art treatment, guided by medical research. My mother died in 2007 neither from hypertension nor from breast cancer. Medical research gave my mother 40 years of active, happy and highly productive life."

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Kids just can't be kids, says archbishop

THERE is a crisis in childhood so alarming, it is no longer an enjoyable time for many kids, one of Australia's top church leaders says. Melbourne's Anglican Archbishop Dr Philip Freier said kids were being robbed of the fun of childhood because they were experiencing the problems of adults - including sexualisation, depression and body-image blues - too early.

Dr Freier condemned the diet of sexual images children were being fed and said it was disturbing parents were giving children as young as eight spray tans.

He spoke out ahead of an address to a seminar on child sexualisation this month, being organised by the Australian Council on Children and the Media and Kids Free 2B Kids.

"There's a real crisis in many aspects of wellbeing of young people and children," he said. "To take that one step further, there's a crisis in childhood. "Young children are wanting to dress and depict themselves in an adult, sexualised way. "There are issues of self-harm and coping with adult concepts that they are not equipped to handle. "Childhood is under a great deal of pressure. "For many children it isn't a long period of time they enjoy."

His comments come as:

* A MELBOURNE child psychiatrist revealed children as young as eight are suffering depressive disorders.

* THE Education Department revealed it had fielded a series of complaints about sexualised, lewd behaviour by toddlers in childcare.

* CHILDREN as young as seven are being admitted to hospital for eating disorders.

Dr Freier has ramped up his calls for a major government inquiry into the state of childhood in Australia. He made a submission to the 2008 Senate inquiry into sexualisation of children in the media but said research into the issue needed to be broadened.

Royal Children's Hospital head of academic child psychiatry, Professor Alasdair Vance, backed the archbishop's comments, saying children faced more pressure to perform academically and adopt adult roles. He said depressive disorders were presenting about three years younger now in children.

Melbourne mother Rhonda Lord understands the importance of protecting childhood. Her family has even removed its TV from the house. "It's in the garage if they want to watch it, but they don't even miss it now," she said. "They spend time having fun with friends, doing creative play."

Parenting author Steve Biddulph said mums and dads could help stop the "toxic flow of rubbish" swamping children on TV by removing it from bedrooms and censoring shows.

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Hindus learning from Muslims



We read:

"UPSET Hindus have welcomed apology from an Australian swimwear label over the depiction of image of Goddess Lakshmi on swimwear at Rosemount Australian Fashion Week in Sydney last week.

Indian activists of the right-wing Hindu organisation Shiv Sena held photocopies of models wearing swimwear featuring Lakshmi as they burned an Australian flag during a demonstration in Amritsar.

A statement attributed to Lisa Blue Swimwear, headquartered in Byron Bay said: "We would like to offer an apology to anyone we may have offended and advise that the image of Goddess Lakshmi will not appear on any piece of Lisa Blue swimwear for the new season, with a halt put on all production of the new range and pieces shown on the runway from last week removed.

In a statement, Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, said the apology was “a step in the right direction”. He said inappropriate usage of Hindu deities or concepts for commercial or other agendas was offensive to devotees. Symbols of any faith should not be mishandled, he added.

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Maybe it's time for Christians to get on the bandwagon and do a bit of shouting, fist waving and flag burning etc. Christians in both Britain and America certainly get a lot of hate poured out at them by atheists and the Left.