The crooked BOM again

Canberra Thermometer Is Carefully Sited Next To A Huge Parking Lot



They are frantic Warmists at the Bureau of Meteorology so will do anything to pump the official temperature up.  This is a classic example of an urban heat island effect

I have heard that the station has finally been moved to a more reasonable location so it would be interesting to see what "adjustments" accompany that. Adding a constant to the new measurements would be my guess but they are unlikely to tell us.  Like all Warmists they are secretive

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Melbourne Airport terror swoops

COUNTER-terrorism officers ­intercepted 11 suspected terrorists at Melbourne and Sydney airports in less than a month in a multi-agency security crackdown.

Officers who searched the grounded suspects found images of beheadings and other violent Islamist propaganda on electronic devices and seized tens of thousands of dollars in ­undeclared cash allegedly being smuggled out of the country.

A twelfth man, 19-year-old Ahmad Saiyer Naizmand, of NSW, allegedly flew out of Sydney on his brother’s passport before Australian officers raised the alarm and had United Arab Emirates authorities deport him back.

ONE suspect’s luggage was deemed “inconsistent with his stated planned travel movements’’, and he missed his flight after he was searched.

SIX people were caught with violent or objectionable material. Of them, two were issued with infringement notices and three had their electronic devices seized.

ONE man was refused entry to Australia after arriving on a flight to Melbourne from Malaysia and found to have “visa inconsistencies’’.

THREE of the suspects copped infringement notices.

OTHERS were caught committing visa and passport fraud.

Customs and Border Protection said the Australian Government had changed the instruction to its officers from “facilitation as a priority to security as a priority’’.

“That means that on occasion, flights will be held, people and baggage will have to be unloaded ... but this is important for our national security,’’ a spokesman said.

The terror suspects were intercepted by Customs and Border Protection, the AFP or the new Counter-Terrorism Units.

The CTU came into force in late August less than nine months after Sydney man Khaled Sharrouf escaped Sydney Airport in December on his brother’s passport to fight for Islamic State in Syria.

Sharrouf caused international outrage by making his seven-year-old Australian-raised son, with him in Syria, pose for photographs holding a severed head.

In addition to the 11 main intercepted suspects, a further six people were stopped and searched by authorities, missing their flights, between August 9 and September 1 at Australia’s largest two airports.

A currency detector dog sniffed out one man trying to leave Melbourne Airport on August 31 without declaring he was carrying more than $10,000. He was also found to be in possession of extremist propaganda images.

In one incident at Melbourne Airport on August 27, five people, thought to be members of the same extended family, were offloaded from a flight and searched.

On the same day at Melbourne, a man was pulled from another flight, searched, and was found to be in possession of more than $30,000 in undeclared currency and violent propaganda images.

One man caught in September was found not to have Islamist propaganda, but was instead in possession of child abuse images.

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Tony Abbott  might be a feminist

The Prime Minister is, in my view, a Beyonce Feminist. He believes in the political and legal equality of women and men. This is the feminism described by Annie Lennox as "Feminism Lite".

I'd call it a minimalist feminism. It's the sort of basic legal rights feminism that was radical when the Prime Minister and Germaine Greer were at university.

Greer was known for flouting convention by being intellectually exhilarating and verbally terrifying - and also for showing off her rather fine legs in controversially short skirts. 'First Wave' feminists threw off the modest dress of patriarchy and let the sun warm their gloriously liberated skin.

The feminism I grew up with rejected girdles, corsets, hats, gloves, pantyhose, low hems and high collars as symbols of patriarchal oppression. Partly because freedom means self-expression and partly because modest dress is strongly associated with sexist philosophies of sexuality which hold a woman must cover her temptress flesh lest she incite a good man to temptation.

This is the sort of thinking expressed in the move by Uganda to criminalise the wearing of Greer-esque mini-skirts. The Guardian reported Ugandan Minister for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo as saying the measures were necessary to prevent men from being encouraged to sexually assault women.

Many Muslim women argue that wearing the headscarf has become a feminist act. The new language of 'intersectionality' is used to position it as a gesture against western-defined notions of women's empowerment. Headscarves are posited against the Beyonce school offeminism, which it can be argued does nothing to fight the tyranny of women being judged by their gendered qualities. 

However, as a writer at Feministe pointed out "There are certainly oppressive aspects to any article of clothing that is required to be worn by women under patriarchal authority".
Raised on a feminism that rejected modest dress, I am - like the Prime Minister - uncomfortable with the burka and the niqab. I wouldn't dream of banning them. I wouldn't ever want a woman excluded from her parliament simply because she covers her head or even her whole face. I certainly don't want girls excluded from school for how they dress or women kept at home because they can't reconcile their faith with public life. But that doesn't mean I have to celebrate modest dress. It doesn't mean I want to join Everybody-wear-a-hijab Day.

Freedom of religion must include the freedom (within the law) to practice that religion, or it means very little. That means a turban for some, orange robes for others and, for a small minority, a burka. Since it is women who wear the more obvious symbols of Islamic faith, hysteria about dress codes punishes all Muslim women for the actions of a small minority of Muslim men. It is a profoundly sexist reaction to fears about Islam.  

Feminism has been appropriated and overcomplicated and adapted to so many new causes in recent years that the simple straightforward feminism of the 1970s is long gone.  Were it still holding sway today, the PM's discomfort with extreme modest dress would have been viewed as pretty unremarkable.  Tony Abbott may not be everybody's kind of feminist but on this one issue at least, he is my kind of feminist.

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ACT grabs chaplain funding for schools

The ACT government will be forced to accept religious-only conditions on school chaplain funding from the federal government.

This leaves the jobs of 25 secular school welfare workers in doubt, with the ACT government saying while it will try to absorb as many as possible under existing school funding arrangements, this cannot be guaranteed.

The federal government was forced to redesign its $244 million National School Chaplain Scheme after the High Court ruled it invalid in June. Under the new arrangements the federal government will fund state and territory governments to administer the scheme.

In August, ACT Education Minister Joy Burch said the ACT would demand secular workers were included and for the existing arrangements funding 56 school welfare workers and chaplains to be continued.

Victoria, WA, the Northern Territory and Tasmania, however, accepted the scheme as is in late September, somewhat scuttling chances of other states to negotiate to include secular welfare workers.

Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education Scott Ryan gave the rest of the state and territory education ministers until last Friday to accept the funding.

Ms Burch wrote to Mr Ryan on Friday saying the ACT would accept the funding and she was "disappointed" the Commonwealth did not agree to the inclusion of secular counsellors.

"Requiring that these schools apply for a religious-based chaplain without the option for a secular worker is inconsistent with the principles in which they are based," the letter read.

In a final effort to limit increased religious influence in public schools, Ms Burch is urging the federal government to not make provision for new religious chaplains to be appointed.

"It is the ACT government's position that...public schools participation will be limited to seeking funding to continue employing individual chaplains already in the program," Ms Burch wrote.

As of May there were 22 chaplains and 14 secular welfare workers funded in the federal chaplain program in ACT public schools.

Mr Burch said the territory would comply with the scheme's condition to form a cross-sector public, private and Catholic school panel to help administer the scheme.

The panel will be responsible for selecting the reduced number of 47 schools to receive religious chaplains.

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