ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is defending Pansy Lai, one of the opponents of homosexual "marriage".





Australia's own academic moonbat

There are some loonies in Australian academe but Tim Anderson takes the cake. Years ago he was a member of Ananda Marga, an Indian organization that espouses a sort of Hindu communism and which is known for violence.  Margis have never got on well with the Indian government and when the Indian Prime Minister came to Australia, they resolved to bomb him, but he escaped.  Tim Anderson was convicted of planting the bomb but was later acquitted for lack of evidence.

More recently he went to Damascus  to praise the brutal Bashir Assad.  Now he is sucking up to North Koeara.

Why does he do it?  He can't expect anybody much to be persuaded by his antics so I suspect that he just wants to appear an idealist and a bold individualist to impressionable young female university students.  That probably works for him


A CONTROVERSIAL Sydney University lecturer who backed Syria’s murderous al-Assad regime has travelled to Pyongyang and pledged “solidarity” with the North Korean dictatorship against “aggression” from the West.

Amid increasing threats by despot Kim Jong-un, Sydney University international politics lecturer Tim Anderson organised a “learning and solidarity visit” to the regime’s capital.

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the one-week trip was an “embarrassment” to “academia”.

“It’s one thing to foster debate at university but you cross the line when you back an evil dictatorship that murders its citizens and is posing an increasing threat to global security,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Anderson with journalist Eva Karene Bartlett (right) and Young, their translator.
“Mr Anderson has shown time and time again his extreme views should not be given a platform to shape the minds of students.”

Yet the university is refusing to take action against Dr Anderson, who is paid up to $130,000 to teach international politics. because “staff can spend their leave however they wish”. In April, Dr Anderson alleged the US had “covertly financed and armed ALL the terrorist groups in Syria”, blaming the West for a sarin gas attack which killed 87 ­people.

One of Mr Anderson’s North Korea happy snaps, with Ms Bartlett holding up the North Korean flag.
Dr Anderson visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone during his late August North Korea trip, and said it was the US which “refuses a peace treaty”.

With “independent” journalist Eva Bartlett and a North Korean tour guide called “Young”, Dr Anderson also visited Kumsusan Palace in Pyongyang, where North Korean founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il are buried. Dr Anderson called them “two historic leaders”.

Dr Anderson, who did not respond to a request for comment, also visited schools and hospitals, criticising United Nations sanctions.

On September 1, he tweeted a picture of Ms Bartlett holding up a North Korean flag in the country with the following words: “SolIdarity with the independent #Korean people in the face of renewed US aggression. #DPRK.” Ms Bartlett is a regular contributor to the Kremlin-funded Russia Today, often described as a Russian government propaganda outlet, including by the British media regulator.

Praising Dr Anderson, Ms Bartlett posted on Facebook that she had visited “amazing infrastructure, free housing and medical care, impressive agriculture and green energy”.

SOURCE





The marriage equality movement and the new intolerance

Many important issues now can't be debated openly without inspiring immediate hysteria. Same-sex marriage is one of them. Anyone who tries to defend traditional marriage – or even highlights the risks that the campaign poses to religious freedom – is instantly treated with shock and distaste.  

Note the paradox. The marriage-equality movement has succeeded in changing public opinion across the Western world by championing love and acceptance. Polls show Australians have become more tolerant of the LGBTI community, so much so that support for same-sex marriage is now a majority view. And yet many activists have become intolerant of people who might subscribe to religious or more traditional positions.

The principal of Frankston High School says a mother's comments in a TV commercial promoting a "no vote" to same-sex marriage is false.
Thus, Australian company board members who defend traditional marriage have had to endure a hysterical witch hunt at the hands of a social media mob.

A Catholic archbishop of Hobart was regarded as engaging in hate speech because he voiced the church's scepticism about same-sex marriage.

In the US, a chief executive was run out of business after it turned out he had donated money to a state referendum opposing gay marriage.

Tennis legend Margaret Court, a devout Christian, said she would not fly Qantas because of the company's barracking for same-sex marriage. She was immediately given the pariah treatment.

It is nothing short of outrageous that these people should have been subjected to such vitriol because of their opinions. Yet they are just some of the many people who have become the target of the Twitter crowd.

What is really disturbing is that these campaigns are justified in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity". The activists are supposed to oppose bigotry, yet they impose a new stifling orthodoxy of their own. It is as if gay marriage is made a taboo subject – unless you hold the approved point of view. Who is really being intolerant here?

Our civil society should be vibrant enough to tolerate all people of whatever sexual or religious instincts. But the same-sex marriage lobby will lose the goodwill of many voters if it keeps turning its agenda into a political orthodoxy from which there can be no dissent.

Why the panic? Attitudes are shifting rapidly. As recently as 2013, Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton opposed gay marriage. Even Penny Wong was to the right of Dick Cheney! Like many westerners, they have changed their minds.

So the case for altering the definition of marriage has gathered steam. But a political debate over the subject is precisely what many of its supporters do not want. They instead want to impose a national solution via either the judiciary or the Parliament, even though the Turnbull government went to the last election on a pledge to resolve the matter via a plebiscite.

Whatever one's views, the democratic process – the plebiscite or, if the High Court approves, the postal vote – is a good thing. Both sides play by the same rules and can accept the people's verdict as legitimate. And as support grows for a legally sanctioned union between people of the same sex, the politics will follow. Isn't that how democracy works? Or are socio-cultural changes more durable when they are imposed from the top?

Alas, anyone who dares to express views outside the mainstream is regarded as a fanatic, who has to be subjected to absurd scrutiny.

We saw a telling example of this when ABC News presenter Joe O'Brien asked the Australian Christian Lobby's Lyle Shelton whether he could in good faith support gay athletes in sporting endeavours. The contorted logic here is that if you oppose gay marriage you must be a homophobe.

Yet Shelton's sin is to hold views that held sway for millennia, views shared by virtually all priests, bishops, imams, rabbis and other religious leaders.

John Stuart Mill would be aghast. In On Liberty, the great 19th-century British liberal warned: "Unmeasured vituperation, employed on the side of the prevailing opinion really does deter people from expressing contrary opinion, and from listening to those who express them."

This is a matter of grave concern that goes to the heart of contemporary public discourse in Australia. The new intolerance should appal all genuine liberals.

SOURCE





Mother claims she was 'lunchbox SHAMED' by a teacher for giving her son, 5, chocolate milk

This is absurd.  Milk is the perfect food.  Adding flavour to get kids to drink it is therefore sensible

A mother-of-four has slammed her son's primary school teacher after learning he was forbidden from drinking his 'unhealthy' chocolate milk during recess.

Constance Hall, a prolific Australian mummy blogger, claims a teacher 'lunchbox shamed' her and told her five-year-old son Arlo he had to wait until lunchtime to consume his dairy snack.

'He said, 'Oh I wish you didn't get me the choc milk, the teachers don't let me have it. They make me have it at lunchtime because they don't think it's healthy enough for recess

'So I said to the teacher, really? The options are that or juice and because he can’t have any bread or anything substantial I give him the milk to line his tummy a bit because he’s probably hungry.'

According to Constance, her frustration reached breaking point when she realised her son had been forced to wait until lunchtime to have his chocolate milk every day for three months.

The 33-year-old blogger, who lives with her fiance Denim Cooke, has four children of her own and step-parents her partner's two sons.

Speaking about the 'awkward' nutritional lecture from her son's teacher, Constance said she felt as if she had sent her child to school with the 'worst breakfast ever'.

'There are people like me who work full time and have six children that just sort of need things to go smoothly,' she said on the air.

'There's other mothers who can't even afford to do lunch orders and then for them to get shamed about what they're giving their kid for recess, I just don't like it. I don't like the whole thing. It feels icky to me.'

As an often 'frazzled' mother, Constance says she might have reacted badly to the shaming if she was not a 'confident' woman.

She also warned other mothers with less time, money or freedom may not be able to handle the humiliation of being told how to appropriately feed their children.

'When I was at my lowest and I couldn't even afford to do lunch orders and I had twin babies, newborn babies, I was living on my own, and I couldn't even get to the supermarket,' Constance said.

'Imagine if someone turned around and said to me, 'Yeah your son's not allowed to have choc milk at recess because it's not healthy enough.' I would have burst into tears and gone straight to my psychologist and hyperventilated the whole way there.'

But despite her anger, Constance admits she stopped herself from angrily emailing the school's principal about the awkward ordeal, worrying it might have been 'petty'.

'Power to the people! Let them drink milk!' the mother-turned-radio-host added.

SOURCE





Bill shock looms unless more coal-fired generators come online

Australians are at risk from a dangerous shortfall in baseload power that could drive up household electricity bills, according to a new report to the Turnbull government that comes as more voters turn away from paying higher prices for renewable energy.

The government has been warned of a looming gap in the national electricity supply as coal-fired power stations shut down, highlighting the need for urgent decisions to build new generators that operate around the clock.

The findings, delivered to Malcolm Turnbull and key ministers yesterday, come as consumers ring the alarm on the hit to their budgets from the upheaval in the energy market, with 49 per cent declaring they will not pay a cent more for renewable power.

A special Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian, ­reveals an increase in the number of voters who refuse to pay a premium for renewable energy, with the number rising from 45 per cent in February. Although 25 per cent of voters say they are willing to pay an ­additional $100 a year for renewable energy, this has ­fallen from 28 per cent in a similar survey last October.

The government is shifting its focus to the reliability of new ­energy generators, as well as the push for a clean energy target, amid a fundamental Coalition divide over whether to offer more incentives to wind and solar farms. The new advice from the Australian Energy Market Operator to Energy Minister Josh ­Frydenberg emphasises the need to fix the shortage of baseload power by using coal or gas generators alongside more renewable generators.

The Australian was told the ­report warns of a shortfall that will worsen over the next decade as old coal-fired power stations are closed and the east coast grid loses huge amounts of “dispatch­able” electricity that has been supplied for decades regardless of weather conditions or the time of day.

The government is determined to fix the “dispatchability” issue as well as the “clean energy” demands that come with its stated commitment to meet internat­ional targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Driving the agenda is advice to government on the planned closure of the Liddell power station in NSW in 2022 and Vales Point in NSW in 2028. Those closures would take 3200 megawatt hours out of the east coast grid, double the capacity lost when Victoria’s Hazelwood power station shut down in April.

You can download the graphic here

The advice to the government from several reports, including modelling prepared for the ­energy review by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, shows the next wave of dispatchable power can come from coal as well as a combination of sources including renewables.

Some of the findings counter a push from Coalition MPs for a mammoth investment in a new coal-fired power station in Queensland, using more efficient “ultra supercritical” technology being rolled out in Asia.

A new coal-power station would take seven to eight years to build and could face fierce competition from wind and solar by the time it starts generating, given the steady fall in the cost of ­producing renewable energy. The ­expansion of an existing coal-fired power station is seen as a more ­viable option to add baseload power as quickly as possible.

Liberal National Party MP David Littleproud is calling for the expansion of the Kogan Creek power station in his Queensland electorate of Maranoa, a supercritical generator that is linked to a nearby coal mine and could be ramped up from its existing ­capacity of 700 megawatt hours.

The government is also alive to the potential of new solar farms, given advice that a new facility with a capacity of 800 megawatt hours could be rolled out in less than a year. The latest solar photovoltaic panels can produce 50 per cent more electricity at the same cost as earlier technology, while being combined with battery storage to guarantee reliability.

The government believes the Snowy Hydro scheme expansion can increase its capacity by 50 per cent to 3500 megawatt hours or more, turning a huge amount of solar or other renewable power into baseload electricity to be switched on as needed. While this could take up to six years, the project would add capacity quicker than a new coal-power station.

The Coalition partyroom meets today with MPs at odds over whether to endorse a clean energy target and whether to set a target that could include coal. Backbenchers said yesterday they were reluctant to start a debate on the issue until Mr Frydenberg had considered the AEMO report.

Mr Frydenberg said the report would show that there would have to be “sufficient dispatchability” in the network and that coal was a way to achieve this. “The cheapest form of existing power generation comes from existing coal,” he told Sky News. “It’s also a stable, reliable form of dispatchable power. So if we can keep our coal-fired power stations going for longer then that can provide a good outcome for Australian consumers. We recognise that we need coal in our system and we will ensure that that continues to be the case.”

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