The ‘deficit levy’ is just a new tax by another name | The Australian

The ‘deficit levy’ is just a new tax by another name | The Australian



And how could the Prime Minister claim the fiscal emergency
was so dire it required a sudden, damaging hike in income tax for
so-called higher income earners when his own bureaucracy is teeming with
thousands of paper-shuffling staff earning upwards of $250,000, while
hundreds of federal government quangos, such as the $25 million Human
Rights Commission, sap wealth and give taxpayers practically nothing in
return. Superfluous public service jobs should suffer before the
genuinely productive workers are taxed further. The commonwealth
Department of Education, for instance, which manages no schools or
universities, still has more than 3500 staff. 

You’re no John Stuart Mill » The Spectator

You’re no John Stuart Mill » The Spectator

Next is the government’s pre-election pledge to make
changes to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, the
Labor-enacted hate speech law that was used (illiberally) to go after
Andrew Bolt… Recall that this section has four triggers that undercut
free speech. Those triggers are the words ‘insult’, ‘offend’,
‘humiliate’ and ‘intimidate’....

But rather than get rid of all four, and repeal the entirety of 18C (which analogously did happen in Canada federally), the talk now
is of how the government might keep the prohibitory words ‘humiliate’
and ‘intimidate’ and either repeal or replace ‘offend’ and ‘insult’. Let
me be blunt. Such a craven compromise is in no way at all the choice of
a government committed to free speech. It basically is window dressing,
leaving the Labor inroads into free speech pretty much where they are.

Try this test Mr Attorney-General. Tell us precisely what the difference
is between offending or insulting someone and humiliating someone. The
fact is our AG cannot differentiate them… So if this government opts for
this sort of half-hearted compromise, it cannot with a straight face
also pretend such cosmetic changes somehow meet its free speech pledge.
Same trial, same judge, same Andrew Bolt, and Bolt still loses if all
that is changed is that the focus is on ‘humiliate’ rather than ‘offend’
or ‘insult’.

I won’t even bother here to do more than mention that the
Attorney-General rather incredibly seems to be mooting adding, yes
adding, some brand new speech restricting criminal law provision — the old one being for him too narrowly drawn or something. Why, you might wonder, are we hearing
these backtracking noises? Alas, I fear the government just can’t be bothered to take on the vested interests. 

***



Politicians of all parties are part of a power elite who are rulers for life, sponsored for life by taxes stolen from us.



They would no more remove big government from our lives than dogbark the chinese national anthem underwater.

America: this is why we can't have nice things.

Where is this heading? | Catallaxy Files

First there’s this:

Dinesh D’Souza, director of the 2012 documentary “2016:
Obama’s America,” was arrested and indicted for campaign finance fraud
on Thursday, Reuters reports.

And then there’s this:

Conservative activist James O’Keefe is accusing New York
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration of targeting his group with document
requests and a subpoena, claiming the Democratic governor’s recent
comments critical of conservatives “aren’t simply words.”

But who cares about this?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 259.

You have to be very brave to be on the right side of politics in the United States today.



***



If only there was some sort of Constitutional guarantee against this sort of thing.

MemoryVault: Ship of Fools reality check

MemoryVault

January 4, 2014 at 11:19 am · Reply

 

Can we please drop the misconception that this jaunt had anything to do with “science”?

It was, from beginning to when it went pear-shaped, a propaganda exercise designed to counter growing climate skepticism, run jointly by Twerkey, the University of NSW (UNSW), the BBC and the ABC, with backup from the Guardian and Fairfax newspapers.

The UNSW provided $1.5 million in seed capital. Twerkey provided the pseudo-scientific veneer, the ABC provided the technicians – camera operators and sound technicians, and the BBC provided one of their chief talking heads as “anchor” – one Andrew Luck-Baker. Given this guy is the BBC’s latest incarnation of Sir David Attenborough, you can safely assume he had his own hair stylist and make-up artist on board as well. Plus a twenty-something “research assistant”.

Also on board were journalists from the Guardian and Fairfax – more of them later.

There is never enough money for these block-buster extravaganzas – just ask George Lucas. Plus they needed some “extras” to be filmed doing “scientifical” things in the background, while Luck-Baker interviewed Twerkey in different locations, discussing dying penguin colonies and receding sea ice, and all manner of things that “proved” climate change.

So Twerkey hit on the idea of advertising for PhD students, science teachers and the like, to pay their own fares (or more likely, for their faculties to pay for them out of public funds), so they could be unpaid TV film extras expedition research assistants. The response was so overwhelming Twerkey had to employ taxpayer-funded professional explorer Greg Mortimer to vet the applications and pick the “best team”.

Those lucky enough to be amongst the “Chosen Few” paid between $8,000.00 and $19,000.00 each, for the privilege, the amount depending on how much of the voyage they were partaking in – it was apparently broken down into “legs”.

The end result of all this was meant to be a BBC documentary on the “Effects of Climate Change on Antarctica”, which would be screened jointly by the BBC and the ABC. Obviously advance publicity would boost audience viewing numbers, hence the presence of the Guardian and Fairfax reporters, who were supposed to provide a continuous supply of articles for the print and online versions of their respective newspapers.

How do we know all this? Because the ABC, the BBC, the Guardian and Fairfax were running stories on this “largest and most expensive Australian Antarctic Expedition ever”, fully a month before it ever left. Only back then they were all “climate scientists”, not “passengers” or “tourists”.
To the best of my memory, this is the largest, most blatant, fraudulent misuse of public funds in my lifetime. That they were funds allocated from the Education Budget at a time when we are being asked to throw even more billions into that socialist-controlled cesspit just makes it even more astounding.

That this fraud was an attempt to use Australian taxpayer’s funds to produce a climate change propaganda film to be used by the ABC and BBC, both publicly-funded bodies themselves, just adds to the indignation. That the effort has now led to the ruination of not one, but three countries’ Antarctic research for this year, simply heaps on more shame. That the entire disgusting sham was hidden from public view by outright lies propagated as “news” by the ABC, adds a completely new dimension to the concept of dishonesty.

But as outstandingly disgusting as all those facts are, none of them represent the absolute bottom of the sewer. That place is indisputably reserved for the members of our duly elected “conservative” government, who individually and collectively have managed to remain totally silent as all this has unfolded. Ten days of drama and revelation of wrongdoing involving millions of dollars and with ongoing international ramifications, and not so much as a peep.
.
So bring on your red thumbs, all you Liberal Luvvies. After this display of wanton cowardice any of you who still think this mob of gutless, lazy, corrupt trough-swillers are any different for the last lot of gutless, lazy, corrupt trough-swillers, is in serious need of psychiatric help.

 http://joannenova.com.au/2014/01/australian-taxpayers-will-pay-400000-cost-for-climate-scientists-ship-stuck-in-ice-total-cost-millions/

WHY WE FIGHT

WHY WE FIGHT

"Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return."

Fredrick Remington, writing his employer William Randolph Hearst from Havana in 1897

"Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

William Randolph Hearst's response to Remington regarding what became known as the Spanish-American War.'

(Source: Citizen Hearst, W.A. Swanberg, 1963)

The famous exchange above indicates the unprecedented power a media owner has. In this case, a few extremely wealthy individuals, notably Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, were able to manipulate the government into the Spanish-American War by inflaming public opinion with propaganda and yellow journalism.

For a short time in the early part of the twentieth century, there was a great diversity of opinions present in the media: "muckraking," as its detractors called investigative reporting, was at its zenith. Ida Tarbell had won international fame with her brilliant exposé of the Standard Oil Company, serialized in McClure's magazine before becoming a book. Upton Sinclair exposed the hideous practices of the meat packaging industry through The jungle, a work which was serialized in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, a year before being published as a book. But as World War I broke out, criticizing the establishment became taboo, and the U.S. Post Office refused to deliver Appeal to Reason and other similar publications. Advertisers pressured the media to lighten up. And fairly quickly, muckracking disappeared from the scene, never to return to the same degree. From time to time, journalists like George Seldes, I.F. Stone, and more recently Robert Parry, would self-publish when they realized they could not tell the truth boldly and fully in other people's publications. But these small circulation newsletters and journals could never compete with media giants such as CBS or the New York Times.

The Establishment in this country knew early on how important it was to control the press. Just as the representative form of government was set up to prevent direct democracy, or rather, "mob rule," so too did the press have to be protected from what Walter Lippmann called "the defective organization of public opinion." Truth could be a powerful weapon, one the elites were loath to share with masses. But keeping the truth out of the press presented a quandary. The elites themselves needed to know what the truth was. How could the elites get the information and still manage to keep it hidden from the rest of the world? As Lippmann (who served in an intelligence unit designed to aid the U.S. negotiating team in Paris as WW1 ended) argued, in his essay Public Opinion,

"representative government cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts [of the new world] intelligible to those who have to make the decisions."'

In a 1937 work, Harold Lasswell, one of the fathers of modern communication theory, made a similar and more explicit suggestion:

"Propaganda must be coordinated with information and espionage services which can supply material to the propagandists and report progress of propaganda work."