ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is contemptuous of the  individual with strawberry-coloured hair and facial piercings who asssaulted  Tony Abbott in Tasmania -- as his way of promoting homosexual marriage, apparently




When you have got no answers, abuse your opponent

The Left do a lot of that and it would be amusing if it were not so frequent and so frequently relied on.  We see a classic example of it below -- from the ever-whining "Guardian".  In response to criticism of the BoM using actual temperature measurements, the BoM representative addresses the facts and figures not at all. He mentions not a single temperature measurement.  There is no reasoned debate over temperatures at all.  He just whines how nasty the critics are to the BoM.  The BoM have no facts and figures with which to answer.  The critics have shown their crookedness like it is


Misleading attacks on Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology by climate deniers in the Australian are “debilitating” to the agency and limiting its ability to predict risks and protect the community, the former head of the bureau has told the Guardian.

Rob Vertessy, who retired as director of the BoM in April 2016, said climate deniers’ attempts to confuse the public about the science of climate change were dangerous, in an interview for the Guardian’s Planet Oz blog.

“I was exposed to a lot of it and it took up a lot of my time that’s for sure,” Vertessy said. “I feel for my successor and the team at the bureau having to constantly devote energy to this. It’s really quite debilitating.”

Vertessy was succeeded by Andrew Johnson, who has since had to deal with a barrage of criticism led by the rightwing thinktank the Institute for Public Affairs and expressed mostly in the pages of the Australian newspaper.

Earlier this week, the former Abbott government adviser Maurice Newman accused the bureau of “fabricating temperature records” and said it represented a “smoking gun that threatens the integrity of global temperature records”.

Vertessy said these sorts of attacks were dangerous.

“From my perspective, people like this running interference on the national weather agency are unproductive and it’s actually dangerous,” he said. “Every minute a BoM executive spends on this nonsense is a minute lost to managing risk and protecting the community and it is a real problem.

“As the costs of climate change accumulate in the years ahead, I can see that leaders of this climate change denial movement will really be seen as culpable.”

He said the government had done a “pretty good job” of supporting the bureau and independent experts. But he said politicians’ jobs had been made difficult by the Australian.

“It will just continue and it will limit the ability of the government to focus on more important matters – not just climate ones but all the works of government. It’s distracting for politicians to have to deal with this chatter.”

SOURCE






Another violently intolerant  believer in tolerance

Former prime minister Tony Abbott says he was shocked when a man wearing a "Vote Yes" badge assaulted him after requesting a handshake in a "sign of trust and peace".

He said the man approached him on a Hobart street last night, asked to shake his hand and then headbutted him before running away swearing and saying Mr Abbott deserved to be hit.

"It's a shock to have a fellow Australian seeking to shake your hand turn a handshake into an assault," Mr Abbott told reporters in Hobart this morning.

"Normally a handshake is a sign of trust and peace, it's a sign of two people wanting to deal openly and courteously with each other."

Mr Abbott said his injuries were minor and included a slightly swollen lip.

The attack occurred around 4.30pm, before Mr Abbott attended a Young Liberals cocktail party on Thursday evening.

Mr Abbott said it was "more than a little disturbing that some supporters of same-sex marriage behave this way".

"There is no doubt that there has been some ugliness as part of this debate but I regret to say that nearly all of it seems to be coming from one side and that is the people who tell us that love is love," he said.

Tasmanian police said they had spoken to several witnesses to the incident that occurred on the footpath in Morrison St opposite Custom's House Hotel, and urged the alleged attacker to come forward.

The alleged attacker is described as being approximately 40 years old, of medium build, with spiky sandy, strawberry-coloured hair and facial piercings.

Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz — an outspoken critic of the same-sex marriage push — told ABC News Breakfast the incident highlighted "yet again another example of the ugliness of the Yes campaign".

"Their slogan of 'love is love' is unfortunately shown in practice to be intolerance, not wanting people to be able to have their point of view," he said.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten also condemned the incident and said he rang Mr Abbott to convey his concern.

SOURCE






Free market basics need to be re-learnt

Robert Carling

The twentieth century taught us enough about the limits to government intervention that the Australian energy market debacle — a failure of intervention, not of markets — could not happen. But it did, and it is just the latest and most egregious example of a growing anti-free markets theme in government policy.

The federal government is prepared to slap controls on gas exports. It is trying to strong-arm AGL into keeping the Liddell power station operating against commercial criteria. In the sphere of banking, it has imposed new regulations (the Banking Executive Accountability Regime) limiting banks’ freedom in hiring and remuneration. These extraordinarily intrusive regulations — announced in the federal budget — would have received much more attention had it not been for the accompanying bank tax, which grabbed all the headlines. These are but a few examples of a broad trend back to the interventionism of the past. And this is coming from a government that claims to champion free enterprise and deregulation.

It does seem that the lessons of the twentieth century have been forgotten and that the defenders of free markets have to go all the way back to basics. The economic problem is scarcity of resources (factors of production such as labour and capital) relative to peoples’ wants, and free markets are the best system known to achieve an allocation of resources that comes closest to constrained maximisation of peoples’ well-being.

That is not to say markets are perfect. Market failure exists and it might justify government intervention. But there is also government failure, such as when governments intervene even in the absence of market failure, or when there is market failure but intervention makes the situation worse.

Governments are too eager to intervene. They needs to choose their interventions more judiciously and design them more carefully.

SOURCE





Why we need the Phonics Check

Jennifer Buckingham

The 'Simple View of Reading' conceptualises reading as having two key components -- word identification and language comprehension. Children need to know how to decipher the words on the page, and have a store of vocabulary, factual and conceptual knowledge to give the words meaning. A deficit in either one of these areas means that reading is difficult or impossible.

Pretty much all educators acknowledge that phonics is an essential element in learning to read and write. Phonics is both a body of knowledge and a skill: children need know which letters represent which sounds and vice versa -- and they need to be able to use that knowledge to read and spell.

All children can and should know how to use phonics to decode words. Unfortunately there is good reason to believe many children are not acquiring this fundamental knowledge and skill, thus hampering their ability to become proficient readers.

It was for this reason that the advisory panel I chaired recommended a Phonics Check for Year 1 students -- a simple, five minute, teacher-delivered assessment based on the Phonics Screening Check used in all primary schools in England since 2012. The Phonics Check would identify children who are struggling with decoding at this critical stage in learning to read, and provide schools and systems with immediate detailed data about strengths and weaknesses in phonics instruction that would allow them to respond accordingly.

Objections to the Phonics Check came in thick and fast when the advisory panel's report was released earlier this week, but many were misinformed about the nature of the assessment and the rationale underpinning it.

The loudest protestations against it have been that teachers are already assessing phonics and that 'another test' is unnecessary. However the panel found that -- while all state and territory government schools and all non-government schools are conducting literacy assessments to varying extents -- none of the systemic assessments had a strong phonics component. The phonics assessment items were either too few or were poorly designed. In some cases items listed as 'phonics' were measuring a different skill: phonemic awareness. The best assessment was in the Northern Territory, which is making significant in-roads in phonics.

It is now up to the state and territory education ministers to carefully consider the recommendations of the panel, without being unduly influenced by the teachers unions and a few professional associations that seem to be very worried about what a Phonics Check might reveal. If we can put politics aside and get phonics right in the early years, we may finally see a reduction in the number of children struggling with reading.

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