Views which were normal up to a few decades ago are now "sickening"?

A leaflet pointing out a few truths about homosexuality is just beyond the pale, apparently.  I am guessing that there are still a lot of people who would agree with it

An anti-same-sex marriage letter dropped across a Sydney suburb has offended equality advocates.

Human rights campaigner Sally Rugg posted an image of the pamphlet to Twitter. 'Some of the marriage equality "respectful debate" in the letterboxes of Hurstville this morning,' she captioned the photo. 

The A4 leaflet, riddled with grammar errors, is written on one side in Chinese and on the other in English and urges Australians to vote 'NO' to same-sex marriage legislation.

'Homosexuality is a curse of death in terminating the family line and without decedents,' the flyer states.

'The sexual behaviour of a*** sex among some homosexuals is one of the main source of HIV/AIDS transmission.

'Homosexuality is a tragedy of a family, a grave to the family bloodline, a curse of family sonlessness!'

The letter goes on to explain the passing of the law would be a potential safety risk for women, outlining a number of convoluted ideas, including that should the law be passed there would be 'no separate public toilets' for men and women.

Many Twitter users were quick to slam the post with one person citing: 'What vile drongos'.

Another said the group had been door knocking.

One person said: 'If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say they're straight men that only take issue with gay men because lesbian porn is hot.'

A woman under the name 'Sweet lil old lady' wrote: 'I can't believe this garbage. Admittedly I only got as far as the 'no segregated public toilets' before I started frothing at the mouth.' Others said they felt sick. 

The postal plebiscite has been confirmed after the Senate rejected the same-sex marriage vote for a second time.

The Australian public will be able to formally voice their support for the issue later this year through the postal vote. It is non-compulsory and non-binding, and is expected to cost up to $122 million.  

SOURCE





Now they want to ban Australia Day in pre-schools

Push to stop celebrations of national day in child care centres in case it offends Aboriginal people

Activist educators are pushing in support daycare centre's and pre-schools not celebrating Australia Day.

Activists in lobby group Social Justice In Early Childhood are reported to have backed the City of Yarra's decision, in Melbourne, to not celebrate Australia Day because it is a sensitive event among indigenous communities.

The City of Yarra voted to stop acknowledging Australia Day on January 26 this week and the North Fitzroy Childcare Co-operative are reported to not celebrate the event, according to The Australian.

The lobby group has around 4,500 members and is run by prominent academics from the University of Sydney early childhood lecturer and author Red Ruby Scarlet and New South Wales TAFE educator Kathy Gelding.

A worker of an unknown childcare centre wrote on one of the lobby group's Facebook posts claiming 'We never have. We're in Yarra Council', according to the publication.

Other childcare workers came out online to support not acknowledging January 26 as Australia Day, but rather use it as a day of educating children of what occurred on the arrival of the First Fleet.

'I've always taken this day as day to speak the truth about Jan 26th.... that there were already people living here and unfortunately a lot were killed,' another comment read on Facebook.

'You have the right to teach best practice, don't wait for permission, be the change you want to see. And my advice, use this day as an educational day to teach the truth.'

Celebrating Australia Day on January 26 has become an important topic in recent years with many Australians believing the date should be acknowledged as 'survival' or 'invasion day' since it marks the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.

SOURCE





The LionHelmet speaks







Sea ice a ‘handbrake on global warming’

Something else left out of the global warming "models"

Melting sea ice could help cool the planet by flooding the atmosphere with particles that deflect sunlight.

Australian research suggests climate modellers have under­estimated a natural “thermostat” that helps alleviate the rise in temperatures: immense quantities of reflective compounds, emitted by marine microbes, that act like a handbrake on global warming.

The study, published by the American Meteorological Society, suggests an overlooked source of these so-called aerosols — algae living in ice — could jam the handbrake on even harder. Lead author Albert Gabric said with the Arctic expected to see ice-free summers within a decade, far more of the aerosols would be emitted.

“Whether that can slow the rate of warming of the Arctic is the trillion-dollar question,” said Dr Gabric, a marine biogeo­chemist with Griffith University in Brisbane.

Climate scientists have long known that aerosols help mitigate global warming by bouncing sunrays back into space, and by altering clouds to make them more reflective. Experts believe half of the ­potential warming from greenhouse gases may be offset in this way.

Much research has focused on aerosols produced artificially, through the burning of fossil fuels and vegetation. Scientists worry that if China switched to renewable sources of energy overnight, it could trigger a massive surge in warming.

Aerosols are also produced naturally by volcanoes — such as the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in The Philippines, which is credited with cutting global temperatures by about 0.5C for two years — and by marine ecosystems.

Algae known as “phytoplankton” are a major contributor, with increasingly massive blooms of these marine creatures emerging in the warming Arctic waters.

The new study analysed terabytes of satellite data to track atmos­pheric aerosol concen­trations. For the first time, it identified sea ice as a “very strong source” of the airborne particles.

Dr Gabric said “ice algae” had evolved to tolerate the subzero temperatures of sea ice and the water that formed it. They used a compound called dimethyl sulfide as an “antifreeze” to survive the chill. “When the sea ice melts during spring, these algae don’t need that protection any more. They expel these compounds, which are degassed to the atmosphere and converted into sulfate aerosols very similar to what you get from burning sulphur-containing coal.

“This happens every year as the sea ice melts. The difference in recent decades is that the ice is melting a lot earlier. We now think that within 10 years there won’t be any ice in the Arctic during summer.”

He said the process had “absolutely not” been factored into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models of global warming. “The whole aerosol question and its relationship to warming is the biggest uncertainty to projecting what’s going to happen this century.

“This is a new area of ­research, primarily because people can’t get up there and measure it very easily. You need an ice­breaker and a big gun to shoot any polar bears that might want to eat you,” he said.

SOURCE




Lefty media elite live cut off from where real life happens

Let me float a theory about how the socialising tendencies of journalists help to ruin our politics. Like any clique, most journalists yearn for peer acceptance and earn it by trying to fit in with their colleagues and floating with the zeitgeist.

Yet one of the most profound influences on contemporary politics is the widening chasm between journalists and the mainstream, the audiences they are supposed to serve. This failing is easily recognised by anyone prepared to join the dots, yet it is seldom addressed by media: it tends to be phlegmatically accepted by the public as a fact of life.

This great divide has played out dramatically of late. The accepted wisdom is that through the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit triumph and the rise of protest parties and figures of the extreme left and right, the established political order has been rejected by large slabs of voters in Western liberal democracies.

That these trends were missed by the vast majority of journalists proves the disconnect. And if we look closer we can see how media coverage actually ­fuelled this backlash.

To see how this chasm is widening we only have to look at how, instead of learning from these mistakes, much of the media is doubling down on the misinterpretations and railing against democratic outcomes.

Hysterical coverage of Trump remains the touchstone on these insights, as does ongoing activism to overturn Brexit. But on our own shores the trends are evident in coverage of gay marriage, climate policy, border protection and, this week, the wearing of the burka.

We can start with Tim Minchin’s musical incursion into the marriage debate. Borrowing the famous Peter Allen song I Still Call Australia Home, Minchin suggests the same Australians who idolised and loved Allen are homophobic. “I’m always travelling but wherever I stay, people love Aussies and they generally say,” sings Minchin, “they think we’re kind of fun and funny, tall, tanned and toned — and a little bit racist, and a little bit homophobic.”

Just in case there were any doubts, Minchin’s ditty goes on to denounce the plebiscite and say, “at least we’ll know how many Aussies are bigoted c..ts.” Now, keep in mind that on the face of it, aside from any self-promotion, this bloke is trying to convince people to vote yes.

This is the sort of hectoring that saw Hillary Clinton canvass for votes by dubbing half of those aligned against her as “deplorables” who were “racist, sexist, ­homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”.

We saw how well that worked out for her.

Minchin, like Clinton, was playing to the superiority complex of the media/political class and was rewarded with its warm embrace. On ABC TV’s Insiders, host Barrie Cassidy ended the show with a craggy smile to “cue” Minchin’s slur against his compatriots.

When I criticised the singer on Twitter it led to an unexpected exchange. I disagreed with his characterisation of Australians as homophobic and racist, and he urged me to listen again. “I comment on our international reputation for being a bit racist,” wrote Minchin, “I don’t assert it myself.”

So the song is not about what he thinks, it is just what others think. Bit of a cop-out but nice that Tim tried to withdraw his slur.

The point here is the chasm between this progressive media/political class and the mainstream; and the way it is so often expressed in a sneering, insulting way.

In this age of identity politics the easiest way to identify as one of the enlightened ones is to deride the views of others, usually people portrayed as selfish suburbanites or regional rednecks who may vote for the Coalition or even flirt with One Nation.

Obviously Minchin and Clinton and any politician or voter has every right to run any line they like, whether you or I see it as virtue-signalling, self-defeating or not. The dilemma for our politics is that at least part of the reason we are seeing so much acrimony and dysfunction is that the media/political class, including academe, the bureaucracy and large swathes of the corporate world, is at odds with the priorities of the mainstream.

We know most of the population supports strong border protection and cheap and reliable electricity, and is derisory about the false priorities and wasted efforts in social engineering that infiltrate our schools and gov­ernment agencies.

Yet the media/political class is antipathetic to immigration security, committed to climate gestures over practical solutions on energy and fully subscribed to every bit of social engineering that springs forth, from safe schools to Invasion Day, and from the Australian Human Rights Commission to the public broadcasters.

These are the people dubbed insightfully by Robert Manne, from within, as the “permanent oppositional moral political community”. This political/media class, for instance, will welcome an “LGBTQI helpline” to help ABC staff through the gay marriage plebiscite while mainstream voters are likelier to roll their eyes and wonder how governments find such ways to spend our money.

But here’s the thing. Political journalists in Canberra and elsewhere seem to have succumbed to Stockholm syndrome.

They are supposed to hold politicians ­accountable on behalf of the mainstream but they have become captive to the political class.

Journalists want to be respected by politicians who want to be respected by journalists. And journalists write stories to impress other journalists who affirm each other’s view of the world and share a disdain for the rough-hewn logic of the masses they serve.

Social media was supposed to democratise the media and give consumers a direct line into this world. But, log on, it has become an extended echo-chamber where members of the political/media class stroke their egos by agreeing with their shared assessments and deriding any view not firmly rooted in the green left.

It at least gives us a window on their true thoughts and provides an alarming insight into the distance between their views and those outside inner suburbs of the capitals.

So when Pauline Hanson went for the cheap and provocative stunt of wearing a burka into the Senate, we saw over the top condemnation from the Coalition, Labor, Greens and most of the journalists.

Somehow the burka — a medieval garment used by some Muslim cultures to hide women from prying eyes when in public — was given the status of a “religious garment” and apparently was beyond mockery.

Surely it was possible to criticise Hanson’s stunt and oppose her proposed burka ban yet not overreact in a way that offers respect for this uniform of oppression. Most Australians, including most Muslim Australians, surely don’t want little girls growing up in this country to face the possibility of this kind of cultural imprisonment.

Instead of a nuanced response, we had people parading their tolerance by denouncing Hanson. They seemed to accord Islam a level of sanctity or protection that no other religion in this country is given. We can indulge the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Piss Christ but don’t dare question the antiquated dis­crimination of forcing women to cover up.

My Sky News colleague Caroline Marcus dared to write a Daily Telegraph column this week arguing that people such as Minchin and other media haranguers for the yes case may drive wavering voters to the no side. Her harshest critics were fellow journalists. Some of her critics pretended not to understand her point; either that or they didn’t notice Trump’s win, Brexit’s success or the resurrection of One Nation.

As we worry about all the chaos and dysfunction in Canberra, volatility in the White House and uncertainty in Europe, we need to consider more than the voters and the politicians. We need to think about the media’s role as a two-way conduit between these blocs and how they should be aligned with the voters but are more embedded with the ruling class.

What is worrying is not to see journalists in disagreement but to notice how most of them only ever agree with each other. If they dare air a contrary view, like Marcus, they’ll be ostracised or learn to meld their views so they all fit in to the same insiders’ club, and we all lose.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here