Andrew Bolt Is A Convicted Racist

By Darryl Mason

A headline on the front page of the Herald Sun online invites you to read Andrew Bolt's latest column :



Except the link doesn't take you to Andrew Bolt's latest column, it takes you to this Herald Sun news story :

Minister rejects call to alter race laws

by Staff Writer

Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor has rejected Coalition calls to alter racial discrimination laws after the Andrew Bolt case.

Last week shadow attorney-general George Brandis said the laws were flawed and should be altered because they could impinge on freedom of expression. 

He made the comments after Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act in two columns about light-skinned Aborigines. 

Mr O'Connor told the ABC's Insiders program he had a different interpretation to Mr Brandis. 

"I think the conclusion that one would draw from reading the judgment is that this was an issue about ... omitting quite relevant facts," Mr O'Connor said.

Maybe Herald Sun editors have finally had enough of Bolt's bullshit as well.

Or perhaps not.

The full O'Conner quote the last paragraph of the story was drawn from :

But I think the judgment should be read by people and read properly, because I think we don't want to see people racially vilified and I think the conclusion that one would draw from reading the judgment is that this was an issue about not sticking to some facts, or in fact omitting quite relevant facts, which I think led the respondent to be in some difficulty with the articles that he wrote.

More from O'Connor :

There's no doubt that if you're going to attribute improper motives about someone, you should get your facts right. And in terms of any chilling effect that's supposed to have happened as a result of the decision, I've seen more of Andrew Bolt since the decision on the front pages of the largest circulated papers, even during footy week.

That's no exaggeration. Via Pure Poison :



Imagine being a Herald Sun journalist and having your front page story bumped to make way for that heaping pile of absolute absurdity? This is why there is much grumbling amongst Murdoch journalists and editors at their city papers right now. They find Andrew Bolt to be an embarrassment and a growing stain on their craft and their credibility.

It's very simple. Andrew Bolt knew claiming people raised as Aboriginals were pretending to be Aborigines for profit and personal gain would probably lead to legal action. He wanted this lawsuit. He wanted to be a martyr. And, apparently, Herald Sun lawyers didn't mind either. How else to explain why they let him publish two columns filled with flat-out lies, not merely deceptive language, nearly all of it unreliably sourced?

The Age explains the facts under this headline :



The question mark is superfluous :

Andrew Bolt conceded he made errors in two columns found to be unlawful under the Racial Discrimination Act last week but claimed that ''none seemed to me to be of consequence''. Justice Mordecai Bromberg disagreed, finding Bolt's writings were ''grossly incorrect'', and contained ''significant distortion of the facts''. This was critical to why his defence failed. Here is a sample:

 BOLT: ''For many of these fair Aborigines, the choice to be Aboriginal can be considered almost arbitrary and intensely political, given how many of their ancestors are in fact Caucasian.''

BROMBERG: ''In relation to most of the individuals concerned, the assertion in the newspaper articles that the people dealt with chose to identify as Aboriginal have been substantially proven to be untrue. Nine of the 18 named … gave evidence. Each of them had been raised to identify as Aboriginal and had identified as such since childhood. None of them made a conscious or deliberate choice to identify as Aboriginal.''
BOLT: ''[Associate Professor Anita] Heiss … won plum jobs reserved for Aborigines at Koori Radio, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board and Macquarie University's Warawara Department of Indigenous Studies.''
BROMBERG: ''Each of those assertions was erroneous. Mr Bolt accepted that they were wrong because they were exaggerated. One of the positions that Mr Bolt claimed Ms Heiss had won as a 'plum job' was a voluntary unpaid position. The other two positions were not reserved for Aboriginal people but were positions for which Aboriginal people were encouraged to apply.''

BOLT: ''[Ms] Eatock only started to identify as Aboriginal when she was 19, after attending a political rally.''
BROMBERG: ''This statement is untrue. Ms Eatock recognised herself to be an Aboriginal person from when she was eight years old whilst still at school and did not do so for political reasons.''
BOLT: ''Acclaimed St Kilda artist Bindi Cole… was raised by her English-Jewish mother yet calls herself 'Aboriginal but white'.''
BROMBERG: ''That statement is factually inaccurate because Ms Cole's Aboriginal grandmother also raised Ms Cole and was highly influential in Ms Cole's identification as an Aboriginal.''
BOLT: ''The very pale Professor Larissa Behrendt, who may have been raised by her white mother but today, as a professional Aborigine, is chairman of our biggest taxpayer-funded Aboriginal television service.''
BROMBERG: ''The factual assertions made were erroneous. Professor Behrendt's Aboriginal father did not separate from her mother until Professor Behrendt was about 15 years old. Her father was always part of the family during her upbringing, even after that separation.''
BOLT: ''Larissa Behrendt has also worked as a professional Aborigine ever since leaving Harvard Law School, despite looking almost as German as her father … But which people are 'yours', exactly, mein liebchen? And isn't it bizarre to demand laws to give you more rights as a white Aborigine than your own white dad?''
BROMBERG: ''To her knowledge, there is no German descent on either her father or mother's side of the family although she assumes that because of her father's Germanic surname, there may have been some German descent.
Her paternal grandfather came to Australia from England. Mr Bolt also referred to her father as being white. Her father had dark skin.''
BOLT: ''Take the most prominent Yorta Yorta leaders - Melbourne University academic Wayne Atkinson and Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group co-chair Graham Atkinson. Both are Aboriginal because their Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman.
''How can Graham Atkinson be co-chair of the Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group when his right to call himself Aboriginal rests on little more than the fact that his Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman?''
BROMBERG: ''The facts given by Mr Bolt and the comment made upon them are grossly incorrect. The Atkinsons' parents are both Aboriginal as are all four of their grandparents and all of their great grandparents other than one who is the Indian great-grandfather that Mr Bolt referred to in the article.''

I used to call Andrew Bolt The Professional Idiot. But he isn't. His almost 100% negative columns and blog posts about Indigenous people and his obsession with demanding people embrace 'white culture' and for them to give thanks for what he believes is a European improvement on 60,000 plus years of successful land management and survival is much worse than mere idiocy. What he did was calculated and conniving.

And just plain sick.

It's a stain on Australian journalism, and an unfortunate fallout for all journalists and editors at Murdochs News Limited, many of whom now find themselves shuddering whenever their friends say the name "Andrew Bolt" in their company.

How does Andrew Bolt keep his job? He delivers what Rupert Murdoch requires in Australia: the maintaining of racist beliefs and attitudes, xenophobia, white nationalism, fear your neighbours suspicion. The controversy of Bolt's might sell a few extra papers, but the real satisfaction for Rupert Murdoch is seeing what he can do to the country, the chaos, misery and pain he can inflict from New York City. He doesn't even have to fly in to do it. His thugs and goons know how to please him.

Andrew Bolt's Reality Meltdown Over Fukushima

A Long, Long Way From Home



A Spotted Cuscus, occasionally found in Northern Queensland but most common in Papua New Guinea, has turned up at a zoo in Eastern China, sparking a Daily Mail 'Mystery Creature No-One Can Identify!' story, claiming zookeepers are absolutely mystified as to what kind of freakish rodent it is.

It took only a few minutes for DM readers to identify the "Mystery Creature!" in comments. It would have taken even less to get an ID on Twitter. But that's not a story, or a clickbait headline.

Someone needs to send this cuscus back to a PNG jungle.

Great photo here of a Spotted Cuscus ripping into a star fruit.

How Murdoch's news.com.au defined Abbott's People in 2009 :

Global Warming conspiracy theory

This theory claims the science behind current environmental changes - as popularised by Al Gore in the film An Inconvenient Truth - was created for financial gain.

Some believe that governments are using the global warming "myth" to raise taxes and restrict competitive US businesses in Europe - or that it is a United Nations ploy to create a one-world government.

It's like reading the How To opinion manual for The Australian

To the slightly vague memories of 1995 :

Numerous Australians have shared their 9/11 Stories with ABC News Online, but Penny's stood out, for its vivid detail and images of the unimaginable horrors witnessed by so many survivors that day, from all over the world. One of Penny's photos, taken from her hotel room, close to the World Trade Centre complex on the morning of September 11, 2001, shows the aftermath of a man who jumped from the burning skyscrapers :

"There is a dead man about the middle of (this shot of the courtyard below my hotel).

"He's wearing a pink shirt and white pants. I've often wondered if I could somehow track down his family, who would likely know what their husband/father was wearing and whether it would give them any comfort to know exactly what happened to him and that he didn't die alone because I watched and prayed and cried as he died."

The reflections falling across the WTC plaza, in Penny's photo, are from the windows of the World Trade Centre 1 and 2 towers. Within 40 minutes of the photo being taken, both towers will have collapsed, consuming, swallowing up the remains of this unknown man and some 200 more people believed to have leapt or fallen to their deaths.

The fall from the upper floors of the WTC towers would have lasted 9 to 10 seconds.

Department Of Defence Only Public Statement On UFOs, 1977 : 10% Of Australian Sightings Can't Be Explained

The 1977 documentary UFOs Are Here screened on Channel 9, in prime time from memory, and had a monumental impact amongst Australian kids who'd been fed a steady diet of UFOmania by popular culture for most of their childhoods. The doco wasn't only discussed amongst kids in the playground the next day, teachers were bombarded with questions from students about it, t00.

As a doco, looking back at it now, UFOs Are Here! is a strange, scattershot 'They're Lying To Us! treatise, with some curious claims that the American Pine Gap base near Alice Springs isn't just a surveillance station but an advanced flight technology workshop, and the existence of a scientific 'Cosmic Conspiracy'.

However, the doco also covered some interesting Australian history, and has a bunch of great interviews with computer geeks, eccentrics, director Steven Spielberg, flogging the film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and everyday people who saw something strange in the sky and can't find explanations for what they witnessed.



A rare public statement on UFOs by the Australian Department of Defence :



The most likely explanation for nearly all "officially unexplained" UFO sightings, at least in Australia, was and still is test flights by classified military aircraft, which makes the official statement, above, by the DoD a wry invitation for witnesses to keep speculating about extraterrestrial, instead of local war industry, origins for the strange things they'd seen in the skies.

I never thought I'd be posting a clip from X-Factor here, but what a voice, and what an attitude to life after being born and abandoned in the chemical weapons soaked aftermath of the 199o-91 War On Iraq :

(oh, and thanks Wikileaks)

From the Daily Telegraph, where it's all but company policy to refer to the Wikileaks US Embassies' Cable Collection as mere "low grade documents", comes this headling blasting story :

US terrorist agencies were told to place 23 Australians on a "no-fly" or "selectee" security list requiring them to be detained at US airports because of suspected links to a Yemeni terrorist group.

Acting on the advice of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the names were forwarded from the US Embassy in Canberra in January 2010 to the US State Department in Washington.

That's quite a story. And it's running across the Murdoch media empire. How could it not? Dozens of Muslims living in suburban Australia deemed dangerous enough to go on the US War On Terror's no-fly list....there must have been fucking balloons falling from the ceiling of News Limited's HQ when those cables were publicly leaked by....

Oh, here it is. Wikileaks. They get credited in paragraph six. But only once in the whole story. And the embedded link on the word 'Wikileaks' doesn't lead you to the Wikileaks website, or a place where the cited cables are published in full, which is part of the deal of using Wiileaks released cables for stories like this one, you link to where the cables are published in full so that the reader can check for themselves that the information used in the story is accurate.

It's about the only Wikileaks rule there is, and it costs the publisher nothing.

Even when people like Julian Assange provide free and easy opportunities for the mainstream news media to undergo such basic reforms as linking to source documents, they refuse to do it.

It's their way of saying, "Oh, Julian? Thanks for that great story, but Fuck You."

Dog Escapes Fire : The Headline Is In The Photo

This is the news photo of the year. Why? Because photographer Phil Hillyard managed to capture fire in the shape of an escaping dog for a story about two men and a dog escaping from a fire. True.



Well, that's what it looks like to me.

Phil Hillyard is also one hell of a sports photographer :

Wearable solar panels, producing up to 140 watts, that weigh almost nothing and can be rolled up when not needed, for the Australian soldier of tomorrow :



In the 1970s and early 1980s, Australia was a world leader in solar technology. In 2011, the Australian Defence Force has to get these trial sheets made in Idaho.

Has The Oldest Trace Of Life On Earth Been Found In Australia?

The findings and claims are under dispute, but it's an intruiging idea that the oldest fossil evidence of Earth's earliest life forms, 3.4 billion years old, have been found on the land mass now known as Australia :

The ancient remains are remarkably well preserved and provide clues about the kind of primitive life that could be found on Mars.

The Earth was a very hot, violent place with very little oxygen when the microbes - thought to have been sulphur-eating bacteria - lived.

Volcanoes dominated the planet, the skies were cloudy and grey, and the oceans were the temperature of a hot bath.

An Australian and British team unearthed the fossils, which look like tiny cells and tubes, in 3.4 billion-year-old rocks at Strelley Pool, in a remote region of the Pilbara, about 60 kilometres west of Marble Bar

More Here

The Angels Announce Australian Tour

After a raptuously recieved, sold-out, live show at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney on June 30 and the Norwood Hotel in Adelaide on July 1, and the recording of a new EP, The Angels, with Screaming Jets lead singer Dave Gleeson out front, are hitting the road in November and December.

This is going to be something special. The show will no doubt deliver Angels classics like Marseilles, Mr Damage, I Ain't The One and Long Line, but will also include a couple of the new songs they recorded at Alberts Studios - Waiting For The Sun and Wounded Healer - along with some Angels live rarities they haven't played in decades.

You won't see a better live rock show this year, and that's no bullshit line. Anyone who saw the gigs at the Annandale or the Norwood Hotel already know The Angels haven't sounded this good, or blasted this much power, in years. If there's an Australian rock band around right now who can blow these guys offstage, I'd like to see them try.

I've got some video interviews I recorded with rhythm guitarist John Brewster and Dave Gleeson coming soon, but in the meantime here are the dates. Grab your tickets from the venues.

November

9 - Fly By Night, Fremantle WA
10 - Charles Hotel, Perth WA
11 - Endeavour Tavern WA
12 - Ravenswood Hotel, Ravenswood WA
19 - Governor Hindmarsh, Adelaide SA
23 - The Juniors, Kingsford NSW
24 - Davistown RSL NSW
25 - Canberra Sthn Cross Club, Canberra ACT
26 - Belmont 16Ft Sailing Club, Newcastle NSW

December

1 - Commercial Hotel, South Morang VIC
2 - Ferntree Gully Hotel, Ferntree Gully VIC
3 - Chelsea Heights Hotel, Chelsea Heights VIC
4 - Macs Hotel, Melton VIC
8 - Marlin Hotel, Ulladulla NSW
9 - Penrith Panthers, Penrith NSW
10 - Dee Why RSL, Dee Why NSW
15 - Redland Nulti Sports Club, Brisbane QLD
16 - Norths Leagues Club, Brisbane QLD
17 - Twin Towers Services Club, Gold Coast QLD

Below is a video I cut together from mostly cell phone footage I shot of The Angels recording their new single Waiting For The Sun at Alberts Studios. It's not the official clip, just something I did for fun. There's a proper clip for the song coming soon, and it's a ripper.

Murdoch trollumist Miranda Devine enters her second week of blaming the UK riots on children being raised without fathers, like the headline below says. To reinforce her point, a nice big photo of Penny Wong and her pregnant partner is included in her latest blurge :



Classy.

More than eight years after then prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer promised Australians our involvement in the War On Iraq would be short and sweet, the last of our troops on the ground there are finally heading home :

Tom Switzer, whoever he is, on the good old days :

[JOHN Howard] was called a “fool” (Michael Leunig), an “unflushable turd” (Mungo MacCallum), a “scheming, mendacious little man” (Alan Ramsey), who silenced dissent (Clive Hamilton), corrupted the public debate (David Marr) and used right-wing religious activists to indoctrinate the nation (Marion Maddox). He was also “far and away the worst prime minister in living memory” (Phillip Adams) who had a “pre-fascist fetish to attack minorities” (Margo Kingston). Under his government, Australia headed towards an “increasingly authoritarian trajectory of the political culture” (Robert Manne), became “a backwater, a racist and inward-looking country” (Greg Barns) and was “condemned at the court of world opinion as callous and inhumane” (Sun-Herald, Sydney).

Nearly all true.

Switzer somehow forgets John Howard was called a "rodent" and even a "lying rodent" by senior members of his own government, though presumably never to his face.

Weird Scenes Inside The Murdoch News Mines

By Darryl Mason

News Limited executive editor (does that mean he just gets a nicer chair?) Alan Howes explains how the Murdoch tabloids act as "the watchdog" of modern politics (Headline : Taking A Rude Joy In Kicking The Watchdog) in this lovely piece of corporate propaganda, distributed widely, of course, across the Digital Rupert media landscape :

NEWSPAPERS easily make friends and enemies.

The friends are mostly readers, and mostly voiceless, but for the role a newspaper can play in representing their interests. The enemies are almost always powerful.

A key function of a thinking newspaper, like ours, is to snap at the heels of our elected governments and their appointed officials.

Yeah, woof woof, we get it.

That puts you onside with readers - whose only chance of directly expressing an opinion might come every election.

Unless they can write letters, protest, stage boycotts, type in comments on a multitude of news blogs and 'comment now' news stories, make phone calls to radio stations begging for talkbackers to call in, attend local political events where politicians are present, or use Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. Just how many housebound, illiterate readers with no access to modern communications or electricity do Murdoch tabloids have?

Alan Howe is one of those believers in The Right To Know. Except when it comes to knowing too much about the Murdoch media.

More than a few of them have been calling for an inquiry into Australia's media. If that threat sounds familiar, it should: We had the Norris Inquiry in 1981, a Working Party into Print Media Ownership in 1990 and, later, the Print Media Inquiry that spanned two years.

There's only been three inquiries into the Australian media in three decades? Only three? Is that all?

Perhaps Alan Howe is quietly terrified that many of his newspapers' readers would like to see the 2012 media inquiry televised, like the WaterGate hearings, particularly if a string of Australian celebrities and former politicians are willing to speak out on how their privacy was violated.

And to prove that the biggest bitches in the media have, in fact, always been male tabloid newspaper editors, Alan Howe takes on his critics :

Victorian Labor backbencher Steve Gibbons (who is he?)...

...dangerously thoughtless Greens Senator Christine Milne...

We should all be concerned about thoughtless dangerousness, too.

... NSW Labor MP John Murphy (doesn't ring a bell)

Oh, snap Alan. You nasty.

And of former Murdoch-league media mogul and competitor Conrad Black, News Limited executive editor Alan Howe has this to say :

Ironically, sodomy is no doubt often on the menu at Florida's Coleman Correctional Complex, where (Conrad Black) returns next month to serve out the rest of his sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Prison rape is what Murdoch critics deserve, apparently.

Anyway, watchdogs.

Two of Australia's keenest Murdoch tabloid watchdogs gleefully discuss the new hairstyle of the former NSW premier :






Andrew Bolt :

Letting her hair down in Opposition. Well, letting someone’s hair down.

As they say, me-ow.

Just form a knitting circle or something.

Dave Gleeson, singer with The Screaming Jets and Rick Brewster's Angels, author of upcoming poetry collection 'Maintain The Rage', amateur pole dancer, May 2011 :

A crocodile emerges from a drain in the city of Cairns, much to the delight of locals and tourists, and the unease of those missioned to capture it :

How Rupert Murdoch Conned British MPs By Playing The Sad, Pathetic Old Man Card

By Darryl Mason

Rupert Murdoch, at first, refused to appear before British MPs to answer questions about News International's involvement in phone hacking, spying, blackmail and police corruption. But so furious was the reaction of the British public he quickly caved and announced he would appear.

And so he did.

MPs, like Tom Watson, who had been pursuing Murdoch to come clean for years about the cruel criminality of his News Of The World, were wired as the clock ticked down to Rupert Murdoch's appearance, alongside his son James. Tens of millions tuned in around the world, this was it, the Sun King was on the ropes, he was going to get it in the face with both barrels.

But then Rupert pulled off an extraordinary piece of acting. He shambled into the room, head down, slouched gingerly into his chair and struggled to answer questions, or even hear them

His first words to MPs :



Within seconds, the mood of the entire room changed. This wasn't a monster, this was a very old man, sad and sorry, apparently perhaps even a sick old man, as harmless and innocent as their own granpas. How could these MPs beat up on someone so old, so sad, so "humble", so helpless?

They couldn't, and they didn't.



But once Rupert knew he'd conned the room, he was somehow able to to recover all his faculties and defiant verve, and finished the appearance by reading out a statement written by one of the world's leading public relations companies. He might as well have simply said, "Fuck You Very Much."



So how do we know Rupert Murdoch was faking the I'm A Sad Old Man, Don't Be Mean To Me persona?

Because barely a few weeks earlier, he'd given a lively interview with his wife Wendi on how they'd met and fallen in love :



It's like a decade had passed between the above interview and his Struggling To Answer Questions performance in London. It wasn't even 3 weeks.

Within two days of his 'answers' to British MPs, Rupert Murdoch was private-jetting back to New York City, while thousands of British victims of crime waited for phone calls from police to learn if they, too, had had their grief and privacy, their most intimate moments, violated by Murdoch's goons.

Well played, you old bastard. Well played.

"It's Only Fear Under Another Name"

Great song, 22 years old now, that seems to be picking up radio play again for some reason :



Lyrics :

You are born into this world
Looking down the barrel of a gun
And those who hold the gun
Want you to work fast and die young
And if you don't work
If you don't obey
They'll make you live in fear till your dying day
Those who govern hold the gun to your head
With religions, corporations, proud of blood
They've shed

Whether it's God or the bomb
It's just the same
It's only fear under another name

And the corporate snakes coming in to feed
On that pathetic fact known as human greed
Skin and bone being raked over those hot coals
This dump never seems to give time for human soul
And all those things that we have learnt
No time for questions, you'll just get burnt
You'll just get burnt

And those words crush you flat
Like your skull's under a brick
And the fear's so damnned strong
That it makes you sick
And you can see right through those eyes
That make you fear, that make you lie
And you're taught to hold high
Yet you wonder why
Dumb values forced upon you by the
Living lie

Murdoch's Criminal Spying Scandal Will Soon Break Here

How Many Australian Celebrities And Crime Victims Did Murdoch Journos Or Their Private Investigators Hack?

By Darryl Mason

The Murdoch Spying Scandal is now so massive, so obscene the near total Australian Murdoch media blackout can no longer be maintained. From today's The Australian :




The AFP story :

A key US senator called for a probe into whether alleged hacking by Rupert Murdoch's media empire had extended to US citizens and warned of "severe" consequences if that proved the case.

"I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated," senate commerce committee chairman Jay Rockefeller said.

"I am concerned that the admitted phone hacking in London by the News Corp may have extended to 9/11 victims or other Americans. If they did, the consequences will be severe," said Rockefeller, a Democrat.

His comments came as Murdoch faced an onslaught from British MPs as the government backed calls for him to drop his bid for pay TV giant BSkyB and a committee summoned him to answer questions on phone hacking.

It may be only a matter of weeks before one of Australia's most famous actors decides it's time to go public with their own stories and evidence of having been hacked and spied on, either by journalists employed by News Limited, or private investigators hired by them.

At a guess, I think the actor will come forward shortly before a parliamentary investigation into Murdoch's business practices in Australia is announced.

We won't have to wait long.

DIY Accidents Fill Hospitals With More Victims Than Illegal Drugs

In 2010, more than 3400 Australians fell from ladders while cleaning gutters, fixing roofs and attempting to complete other DIY tasks, injuring themselves so severely they needed hospitalisation.

But they were not alone. Adults trying to imitate what they see professionals doing on home renovation TV shows are a bigger drain on Australia's health budget than overdosing junkies or Kronic-afflicted miners.

The rest of the stats from story are mind-boggling :

- 25,000 hospitalised last year from ladder falls, nailgun mishaps, lawnmower accidents and power tool problems

- Sydney Hospital's hand unit sees at least one "serious injury" a week from angle grinders and circular saws

- 1711 were hospitalised with injuries from attempting to use non-powered hand tools - hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, hand saws etc..

- 2803 were hospitalised after injuring themselves with power tools

- More than 5000 Australia were sent to hospital after "contact with machinery."

- 11,000 Australians visited hospital after absorbing "foreign bodies" through their skins or getting them in their eyes.

Are Australians really this accident prone or are ladders and hand tools deliberately attacking and trying to disable humans as part of the first, revolutionary wave of the War On Humans By Robots?

After having been attacked by various drills, grinders and hammers during recent renovation work, I'm going with the second of the above.

There's no way, ahem, I could be so clumsy and accident prone. The contents of my toolbox are clearly plotting against me.

Rick Brewster's Angels, with Dave Gleeson, Annandale Hotel, June 30 :









Great gig. It's been a long time since I've seen so many smiles on so many faces of people leaving a rock show.

More shows to come, I'm told, and probably an album as well.

When The Sydney Morning Herald Says 'Sydney', They Mean The Snowy Mountains

It's almost 1pm, I'm sitting about 10km from the centre of Sydney, the sun is shining, clothes are drying on the line, it's warm enough for some to get about in t-shirts. Then I see this on the Sydney Morning Herald website :



What in all fuck?

The actual warning from the Bureau of Meteorology :

Damaging winds averaging 65 km/h with peak gusts around 100 km/h are forecast for the Metropolitan, Illawarra, Southern Tablelands, Australian Capital Territory, South Coast, Snowy Mountains, Central Tablelands and Hunter forecast districts on Tuesday.

Blizzard conditions are forecast for parts of the Australian Capital Territory and Snowy Mountains forecast districts.

Yeah, that's not really a warning, or an alert, for a blizzard hitting Sydney, is it?

Still, for hundreds of thousands New South Wales residents it sounds like the next few days has the potential to be pretty damn nasty.

My First Zero Budget Music Video

By Darryl Mason

Below is the 'in studio' video clip I shot and edited for Rick Brewster's Angels, the teaming up of Australia's rock legends The Angels and Dave Gleeson from The Screaming Jets. Most of the footage was shot on cell phones over a couple of hours and took about 30 hours to edit on AVS. I wasn't planning to try and cut a clip (I was at the Alberts Studios recordings to get footage for a documentary), so it was very interesting trying to match up guitar solos and Gleeso's vocals to the footage I had.

BTW This isn't the offiical video for Waiting For The Sun, this is just something I put together for fun and to see how hard it is to edit one of those 'in the studio' music clips (pretty fucking hard it turns out). The band liked this enough for me the release it on my YouTube channel. I go into more detail here.



I think I might be doing more of these video clips, it's already generated some interesting e-mails about future work.

Rick Brewster's Angels, featuring Dave Gleeson, play Sydney's Annandale Hotel this Thursday night, June 30, and Adelaide's Norwood Hotel on July 1. I saw the set list for the shows this morning, it's absolutely fucking killer.

.

Ha Ha Ha!....Wait, I Don't Get It

Scientists have found Australia's funniest joke? Don't make me laugh :

The LaughLab experiment conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, attracted more than 40,000 jokes and almost two million ratings.

Researchers found significant differences between nations in the types of jokes they found funny.

Apparently, Australians, like Brits, the Irish and New Zealanders, prefer jokes involving word play. Here's the winner :

PATIENT: "Doctor, I've got a strawberry stuck up my bum."

DOCTOR: "I've got some cream for that."

That's a bit of a granddad joke, isn't it?

Other results from the survey showed :

- Of the countries rating the highest number of jokes, Germans, perhaps surprisingly, laughed the most. Canadians laughed least.

- If you want to tell a funny animal joke, make it a duck.

- The most frequently submitted joke, at 300 times, was: "What's brown and sticky? A stick."

Scientists should know better than to be messing around trying to find the world's funniest joke. As the BBC news show Monty Python accurately reported in the late 60s, maximum mirth can not only be dangerous to your health, it can be very, very deadly indeed :



Note : Look, I know this story is from 2002, but I only just found it via @Tzarimas on Twitter, I'd already written most of the story, found the Monty Python video, embedded it, before I realised how old it was, and I'm not going to toss away a perfectly good piece of Saturday afternoon nonsense just because it's nine years old.

They Didn't Know The White Man Was Real, Then They Thought He Was Covered In Ash

This video has been called "the most beautiful video on the internet". It surely, at the very least, is exactly that. And more.

If the music annoys you, turn it off, it's even more extraordinary in silence :



They are the Toulambi. From the film-maker Jean Pierre Dutilleux's site :

For centuries the hill tribes of the Owen Ranmge in Papua, New Guinea have lived in isolation to avoid war. In a landscape of dense tropical rainforests each tribe stays within a well established territory. This explains why some of them have survived into the new millennium without any contact with the outside world.

They are hunters and gatherers. The entire tribe moves in uncanny silence for fear of alerting the game. They know the migration trails of animals and the best time of year to find fish, the growing cycles of the palms, bamboo, wild fruits and the roots they rely on. Always on the move. The rhythm of their lives is that of the jungle. It gives them no time to create complex art, to develop science or conceive profound metaphysical philosophies.

The Toulambi are among the very last witnesses of our distant past. When the last tribe is contacted and moved from the Stone Age into the modern world, from being free and masters of their own destiny to being poor and at the lowest level of our western society, it is a part of ourselves that will vanish forever.

When I worked at the Australians At War Film Archive, I heard the stories of some young Australians who volunteered for World War 2 and found themselves marching through the mountain jungles of New Guinea, only a few weeks after they were working on a building site or in an office in Sydney or Melbourne, who had similar encounters with tribes who had never seen white men before. Amongst all the horrors and madness of their jungle fighting days in New Guinea, it was meetings like this, sometimes only an exchange of stares from a distance, that remained amongst the most vivid in some veterans memories well into old age, and could still light their faces with wonder thinking back.

Many have fought in wars, but how many have had such an experience? The rarest few.

Here's what David Attenborough had to say after his own meeting with a New Guinea tribe who only knew of white men from the legends of other tribes :

"... nobody knows what are in these valleys; it may be that there's gold here. It may be - like a valley less than a hundred miles away - it is rich with copper. If it is, and if the West - European Man - moves in here with all his technology the fate of these people is likely to be very unhappy.

"All we know in the past of people - like this - who come face-to-face with Western technology leads us to suppose that it's very difficult for them to survive that clash.

"And so the only chance of bringing these people to terms with the world outside is a gradual process over years - over tens of years - in which they get to know what happens in the outside world, gradually they get to believe that people like ourselves are their friends and not their enemies. Gradually they have enough confidence in us to allow us to give them medical help, and educational help."

Attenborough quotes from the documentary A Blank On The Map

Via Reddit

A century ago, wild populations of animals like the White Cheeked Gibbon were threatened by public and private zoo collectors, amongst the many who came to their forests and often killed whole families to retrieve one or two babies. Today, with their natural habitats in countries like Laos all but gone, the White Cheeked Gibbon would probably not exist at all without the help of zoos.

The Perth Zoo is one of the world's most successful breeders of these now so very rare gibbons :

More Here

I think I just found the front cover image for my book on Andrew Bolt :

Shocking Police Non-Violence In Queensland

Been in Brisbane. Saw this in the Queen Street mall :



All that work making the police car look pretty didn't help the Queenslanders much in the 2nd State of Origin for 2011.

Former Screaming Jets lead singer Dave Gleeson rips through AC/DC's Riff Raff at the Long Live Bon Scott concert at the Enmore Theatre last weekend :



Gleeson has joined a new line-up of legendary Australian rock band The Angels, now known as Rick Brewster's Angels.

Gleeson has already recorded five songs with RBA at Alberts Studios and the first release from those sessions, Waiting For The Sun, is all over MMMFM right now.

Rick Brewster's Angels will be doing two special pub shows to debut the new line-up : The Annandale Hotel in Sydney on June 30 and the Norwood Hotel in Adelaide on July 1.

These shows are going to absolutely fucking rock. Pub gig of the year. Don't miss out.

Some people hate the ultra-slow motion that so often features in today's movies, video games and TV shows and ads. I'm not one of those people, and this is probably the greatest Australian beer ad since the 1970s :

This is a post for those who've seen the name Austen Tayshus in Twitter's trending topics after tonight's Q & A on ABC and are wondering who the hell he is.

This is who Austen Tayshus is :



This is Austen Tayshus' massive 1983 spoken word hit single, Australiana, specially decoded for the tourists :



Putting shit on Americans, in America :



Slightly closer to the real Sandy Gutman, the man behind Austen Tayshus :



Mr Denmore on Twitter sums up :

Austen Tayshus reminds me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas; a malevolent bully who demands you laugh at his jokes & dictates the borders of humour

Vivid 2011, Circular Quay, Sydney :

Angry Anderson, in silhouette, prepares to take the stage at the Long Live Bon Scott concert, Enmore Theatre, June 4 :

Screaming Angels

Dave Gleeson with Chris Bailey and John and Rick Brewster from The Angels, at Alberts Studios, May, 2011 :



Former Screaming Jets singer Dave Gleeson is now confirmed to join The Angels for live shows in Sydney and Adelaide, in late June and early July, and a charity concert in Japan. More details soon.

In case you missed it yesterday, spectacular water spout 'tornadoes' off Sydney :

Bon Scott On AC/DC : "The Beatles, The Rolling Stones....We're Better. Who Needs Them? They're Last Year's Model"



By Darryl Mason

The 'Long Live Bon Scott' concert hitting Sydney this week - Panthers on June 3, Enmore Theatre on June 4, reminded me of a bunch of Bon videos and recordings from YouTube I've had bookmarked.

So here's a quick history of Bon Scott through two decades. and a few different looks.

1965 : Bon Scott singing Gloria with the Spektors

1968, with The Valentines :



1971, with Fraternity :



1975, TV debut of Bon Scott with ADC/DC



Late 1975 :



July, 1976 : Great clip of Bon Scott and Angus Young being interviewed in a London street, where Bon declares AC/DC better than The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

1977 :



1978 :



These interviews with Bon Scott, from the soon to be re-released AC/DC Let There Be Rock live concert film, were recorded a few months before his February, 1980 death from acute alcohol poisoning. "I'm a special drunkard. I drink too much."



Ten days before Bon Scott's death, AC/DC mimed Highway To Hell for a German TV show. Bon Scott stands nearly motionless, in deep shadow, away from the rest of the band, who appear in many shots to have aready lost their lead singer.



A few days before his death Bon Scott jammed a version of Ride On in London with the band Trust. This was the voice Bon Scott was taking into the recording studio for the new AC/DC album sessions, scheduled to begin in the last week of February, 1980.

Angus Young on the death of Bon Scott.

Australia Has Been Hit By More Than 50 Tsunamis

August 15, 1868 :

High tide had been at 5am that day, and by 8am sea levels in Sydney Harbour were dropping. Suddenly, "the waters, as if impelled by some extraordinary influence, returned up the harbour with great force", The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Further down the coast, at Jervis Bay, the ocean was surging into Currambene Creek. "It raced back in a similar manner, sweeping away a large portion of sand that impeded navigation," the paper noted.

The tsunami that struck the New South Wales coast that day was caused by a massive earthquake strike in Chile.

In total, some 37 tsunamis have been reported along the NSW coastline over the past 150 years.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

A Macquarie University researcher, Dale Dominey-Howes, said Australia had a reputation as a region where few tsunami hit, but there have been at least 57 reported. "Relatively speaking, this is a much higher rate of occurrence than many other regions of the globe," he said.

He was surprised to find the Australian tsunami record went back 3.5 billion years, to when an asteroid hit waters in what is now central Australian desert. Rocks and debris it ripped up from the shallow sea have been identified by Australian geologists.

The Full Story Is Here

For those who missed it, this was what happened the day Greens leader Bob Brown dared to criticise a handful of Canberra press gallery journalists for their endless negativity on anything and everything the Greens have to say.

Note the only hysterical voice in this clip is that of a journalist :

Bill Hunter, 1940 - 2011



Bill Hunter acted in more than 70 movies, and hundreds of hours of definitive Australian TV cop shows like Division Four and Homicide.

Legend.

If you're compelled to watch a Bill Hunter movie today, you can't go past CrackerJack, one of his happiest and most beautiful roles.

"The Media Can't Be Trusted To Tell The Truth"

(I'm re-posting this August 2009 post because it seems even more accurate today than when originally posted)

By Darryl Mason

Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes, in a debate, lists a series of recent debacles from the mainstream news media :

On July 21, four days after the Jakarta hotel bombings, Seven News reported: ‘‘Another bomb has exploded in Jakarta. The device went off just moments ago at a building near the Australian embassy.’’ No, it didn’t. No bomb, no unexploded bomb, no suspicious package. Nothing but a couple of hoax phone calls.

On June 20, the first edition of The Daily Telegraph and other News Ltd papers read: ‘‘Revealed: Email that could topple a Government.’’ That email may yet topple an opposition leader. But it won’t do any harm to the journalist who ‘‘revealed’’ its content, or the editors who decided to publish it, even though it turned out to be a fake.

Then there’s page one of The Sunday Telegraph on March 15: ‘‘PAULINE BETRAYED. Provocative: A young Pauline Hanson pouts for the camera in racy lingerie … ’’

The Sunday Telegraph editor promised to quit if the nipple revealing 'Hanson' photos turned out to be fake. They were fake, the editor didn't quit.

Holmes is just scratching the surface. He argues one of the biggest problems gouging away at the credibility of mainstream media today is not solely a lack of journalists, or highly skilled journalists, but the Deadline Now! atmosphere of 24 hour breaking news on TV, on radio, and online.

Fewer and fewer people are under pressure to produce more and more. That means less time to research, less time to write, less time to check, fewer subeditors to knock copy into shape.

Which is why the media, arguably, can be trusted less than ever to tell the truth.

Holmes posits a greater problem, however, about what modern journalism in mainstream media actually means :

"The media are not in the business of telling us the truth. The media are in the business of telling us stories.

"That simple little word dominates any professional conversation between journalists. I’m working on a story. It’s a good story, a great story, a balltearer of a yarn. Or, it’s a dud story, it’s a non-story, there’s no story.

"The idea of the story, of course, dates back to the time when people made little distinction between fact and fiction. Was Homer telling us the truth about the Trojan Wars? Did the Cyclops really have one eye, or Perseus winged feet? Does it matter? They’re great stories.

"They’re about love, and fear, and rage, and jealousy, and courage in adversity – the same emotions that 2500 years later sell copies of the Tele, or attract viewers to A Current Affair.

"But the media, of course, are supposed to tell us true stories."

How 20th century of you, Mr Holmes. This is the age of manufactured news realities. The story is everything. Does it matter if it doesn't turn out to be true? It's fun for a few days, and if the truth is, eventually, published it usually turns out to be nowhere near as exciting.

The reality a series of stories builds up, even if they are only brushed lightly with the truth, in the media over days, or weeks, or years, becomes for some all the truth they need to know. Or want to know.

Why shatter the manufactured reality with too many distracting facts?

Today, if you want to live in a reality where the future of the planet faces "dire consequences" resulting from our addiction to old energy sources and only the wisdom of carbon tax profiteers like Al Gore and Rupert Murdoch can save us all, you can follow certain columnists, haunt certain news sites and blog sites, all of which will mostly continue to enforce that reality. And add to it.

Or you can believe the climate crisis is one big fat conspiracy created by those who stand to most benefit from the implementation of a global carbon tax.

You can, depending on the radio shows you listen to and the newspapers and bloggers you read, live in Sydney and truly believe that you are under constant direct threat from Al Qaeda (via Somalia/Lebanon/Pakistan/Iran) linked Islamist terrorists.

You can easily find enough material on a handful of mainstream news sites to reinforce that dangerous reality most days, and ignore anything that tells you otherwise, that threatens to bite away at the manufactured reality of a looming threat which you find curiously comforting.

Whatever your choice of fear, it's easy to find a selection of news media and online screeds to feed it and sustain it. You can get Google to send you news alerts every time a story or blog post involving your favourite fear is published online.

Personally, I live in perpetual fear of both UFO invasions and surviving into the post-apocalyptic aftermath of a massive meteor impact. Fortunately, my double fear is countered by supreme confidence that the world-crushing meteor will arrive just as the UFO invasion begins and destroy them all, resulting in the meteor being obliterated into harmless but beautiful fiery dust in our night skies.

You'd be amazed at how many stories find their way online from across the world every month about looming UFO invasions and planet-killing meteor strikes.

Then again, you may already know. You probably read the mainstream media as well.

The rest of the Jonathan Holmes piece is here.

(slightly edited before reposting)

A beautiful King Parrot killed by the beak-destroying Psittacine disease.



The parrot was seen flying only 3 days before its death. Its beak had rotted, and broken, meaning it could no longer crack the seeds that made up most of its protein intake. Two days before its death it was walking around the base of a favoured tree, looking up at the branches. Other birds, not parrots, were with it that day, and appeared to be trying to feed it by cracking seeds and attempting to put them in its mouth.

The legendary Rob Younger, frontman for Radio Birdman and The New Christs at the Great Bands Of 1970s New York City tribute, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown, May 13 :








Photos By Darryl Mason

Maybe it's just me, but the endangered Montana Merkle bears an uncanny resemblance to the Australian kookaburra, even down to its distinctive mating call



Bird Hunted To Near Extinction Due To Infuriating 'Fuck You' Call :

Now Here's A Shock, Cannabis Users Not Motivated To 'Get Clean'

NSW Auditor-General Wants Cannabis User Registered, Monitored As Criminals

By Darryl Mason

Can the Murdoch media's coverage of cannabis get any more cliched?



For tabloid media so obsessed with celebrities, it seems curious indeed they wouldn't use this opportunity to run a photo of a celebrity cannabis user, rather than a random 'cannabis enthusiast' that reinforces decades old cliches.

Here's just a small sample of celebrities they could have included a photo of as a 'cannabis enthusiast' :

Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, Harrison Ford, Pink, Carl Sagan, US President Barack Obama, US President Abraham Lincoln, US President George Washington, Queen Victoria, Stephen King, Sting, Nobel Prize Winner Francis Crick, Bill Gates, Bill Murray, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Guy Pearce, Jennifer Aniston....

So why no celebrity 'cannabis enthusiasts' to detail a story such as this? Particularly in this all important clickbait age of tabloid media?

Because as a tabloid newspaper editor you must never, never, never associate successful, famous, accomplished people with cannabis use. That's just the way it is.

From the Daily Telegraph :

Dope smokers are making a mockery of lenient cannabis laws in NSW by refusing to undertake drug counselling when caught using marijuana.

The system - where police officers can formally caution people found with 15 grams or less of cannabis - has become so useless, according to the NSW Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat, that police should be harder on users.

Despite issuing 39,000 cautions in 10 years, Mr Achterstraat said "more needs to be done to increase the number of cannabis offenders getting help for their drug use".

Not only should police crack down on dope smokers, but the Auditor-General says the Health department should set up a register of users to help identify addicts and help them get cleaned up.

"The results are better for people cautioned a second time, with almost 38 per cent calling the helpline for the mandatory education session."

I wonder if the "mandatory education session" includes lessons on how cannabis can reduce the growth of lung cancer tumors by 50%?

Probably not.

Great Minds Think Alike, On Wanking

When Daily Telegraph journalist Tim Blair isn't too busy thrillingly pointing out basic typos in independent media (with a fraction of the editorial staff of his own newspaper), he apparently borrows headlines from the New York Post, without credit.

Tim Blair, May 14. 4pm :

Osama’s bin wankin’. The Taliban tugman probably feasted upon delicious forbidden infidel food, too.

The New York Post, at least 10 hours earlier* :



Probably just a coincidence.

*corrected

UPDATE : A few hours after the above was posted, Blair acknowledges this remarkable coincidence : "Not for the first time, me and (NY Post editor) Col Allan are on the same wavelength."

So Blair, according to his own post, checked the reaction of New York Times to the alleged discovery of a Bin Laden hideout 'porn stash' but didn't bother to see what his mate, and fellow Murdoch employee, Col Allan, had come up with on such a dream Osama tabloid story? That sounds realistic.

More Australian mushrooms and funghi found near Old Brush Studio, Brunkerville, April 2011 :

















More Photos Of Australian Mushrooms And Funghi Here

Australian author Mathew Reilly's stunning collection of science fiction & fantasy film memorabilia :

Some quality Osama Bin Laden-related journalism from the Channel 7 News website. Or Headline ClickBait as it's more commonly known :




Paragraph three of the 'story' :

"The notebook was not a diary and did not include personal or emotional details, the official said."

The Sydney Morning Herald couldn't resist either. Now it's 'diaries' :

Autumn leaves, Lower Hunter Valley, New South Wales, late April :