What a farce!

And deeply dishonest:
‘Audits exonerate ABC over bias claims
Two independent audits into the ABC’s coverage of the federal election campaign and the asylum seeker issue have concluded it was impartial and its news coverage of asylum seekers was of a high standard…’
Oh really? The supposedly “independent” audits were commissioned by the ABC and were by former This Day Tonight reporter and 60 Minutes executive producer Gerald Stone, and former BBC journalist Andrea Wills.
I’ve long ago given up expecting honesty from the ABC, but these farcical “audits” demonstrate barefaced contempt for the Australian taxpayer.

‘SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS’

‘Like ObamaCare, Obama’s massive budget proposal has all sorts of horrible things in it, but one of them is more horrible than the rest.

“That of the funds appropriated under title III of this Act, not less than $575,000,000 should be made available for family planning/reproductive health, including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.

It’s hard to misread this as anything except promoting birth control/abortion of humans to protect endangered species.’           Daniel Greenfield

‘A Star in a Bottle’

‘Years from now—maybe in a decade, maybe sooner—if all goes according to plan, the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest in the South of France. The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
….For the machine’s creators, this process—sparking and controlling a self-sustaining synthetic star—will be the culmination of decades of preparation, billions of dollars’ worth of investment, and immeasurable ingenuity, misdirection, recalibration, infighting, heartache, and ridicule. Few engineering feats can compare, in scale, in technical complexity, in ambition or hubris…’

Rest in Peace, Mr. Guarnere. And thank you, sir.

William “Wild Bill” Guarnere, one of the World War II veterans whose exploits were dramatized in the TV miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died. He was 90. His son, William Guarnere Jr., confirmed Sunday that his father died at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.

Bureaucracy is killing us

Judith Sloan, writing in The Australian (subscription required) on the Workplace Gender Equality Agency:
‘…Larger companies – and note that the cut-off of 100 employees is quite a low figure – will be employing additional staff (women, most likely) simply to fill in this form demanded by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
But I come back to the fundamental question: what is the point?
According to Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, “organisations of 100 (employees) or more reporting to an agency which is dedicated to holding data about gender is absolutely critical as a piece of gender equality machinery in this country”.

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