The Daily Telegraph :



Are there really "respected Australian psychics"?

And if so, why doesn't the Daily Telegraph get rid of their journos and employ psychics instead?

Tomorrow's News Today, literally.


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Shot At Overnight Fame Flames Out

Contrary to popular belief, publicist Max Markson cannot sell any old shit to Today Tonight for a suitcase full of cash :





I will keep trying. But I can't say I'm not disappointed.


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ABC Blinded By "GroupThink" Claims Chairman

ABC chairman Maurice Newman on why he believes the Australia media in general, and to a less defined degree ABC news and current affairs, has been intolerant of climate change doubters. Newman blamed "GroupThink".

Excerpts from an interview on ABC's PM :

"The media hasn't been good at picking these things up and it's really been the question of what is conventional wisdom and consensus rather than listening perhaps to other points of view that may be sceptical.

"And I brought in as well in that vain what's been going on in climate change where there's been clearly a point of view which has been prevailing in the mainstream media, and the fact that again perhaps consensus and conventional wisdom may not always stand us in good stead.

"I think the ABC has probably been more balanced than most in the mainstream media. I think that we've listened to the words of sceptics as well as those who are scientists in the field.

"But climate change is at the moment an emotional issue but it really is the fundamental issue about the need to bring voices that have authority and are relevant to the particular issue to the attention of our audiences so that they themselves can make decisions. So that we are seen to trust and respect them sufficiently that they can make up their own minds about the various points of view that are being expressed through the medium of the ABC.

"....I still have an open mind on climate change, I have an open mind on a whole range of issues because I think that to have a closed mind leaves you in a position where if you take a strong stance you are likely to be wrong-footed.

"I think that what seems fairly clear to me is that the climate science is still being developed. There are a lot question marks about some of the fundamental data which has been used to build models that requires caution."

The Full Interview Is Here

Crikey publisher Eric Beecher :

With just one speech, the ABC’s chairman has returned the national broadcaster to the days of having a politically interventionist board running a culture wars agenda — and he has done it by trashing the editorial independence of some of this country’s finest journalists.

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She Finds Your Lack Of Faith In Her Faith Disturbing :





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But What Kind Of Truth Is It?

I'll be talking on ABC radio at 1.30pm (Sydney time) about popularity of 9/11 conspiracies and the American 9/11 Truther movement, which the American mainstream media is currently pumping as a potentially violent extremist group.

This sudden fresh interest by the US media in the 9/11 Truther movement, claimed by the Washington Post in a lead editorial to be "lunatic", follows the branding of the Pentagon shooter as a "Truther", and the announcement by Architects & Engineers For 9/11 Truth, in press conferences around the world, that they had now gathered the signatures of more than 1000 architects, scientists, engineers, pilots, firefighters for a push for a criminal investigation into the 9/11 attacks, and their aftermath.

This short piece in the Washington Times, the only mainstream American media to mention the February 19 press conferences, lays out their key questions and claims.

A common theme raised in online discussions about this apparently more serious group of 9/11 Truthers is : The Bush administration lied about Iraq being responsible for the 9/11 attacks, they lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, they lied about torture, so why should the Bush administration official version of the 9/11 attacks not be at least questioned, if not re-investigated?

You can listen in at ABC Online Radio here.

UPDATE : For those who were listening to ABC Newcastle a few minutes ago, here's the links to the key sources I referenced and discussed during the interview :

Washington Post Labels Japanese Politician Part Of "Lunatic Fringe" For Questioning Bush Administration Official Story Of 9/11

The Architects & Engineers For 9/11 Truth

Washington Times Says 9/11 Truth Push For Criminal Investigation Has "Political Implications" For Congress

American Current Affairs Show Disappointed Not To Find Ranting Violent Wackos At 9/11 Truthers Convention

Apparently, deputy prime minister Julia Gillard excites the same sort of weird fantasies amongst middle-aged conservative men as Margaret "You Naughty Boy!" Thatcher once did:

"Has she bent global warmist Tim Flannery over the dispatch box in the middle of Question Time and administered a richly deserved spanking with a dead penguin....?"

I predicted it would be a month or more before Australia's conservative media elite began claiming that Julia Gillard is planning to, or is "set to challenge", prime minister Kevin Rudd for the leadership of the Liberal Party. I was wrong.

It's Already Begun

The Daily Telegraph online, still classy :



Or to put it another way :

4 Out of 5 Modern Women Mostly Trust Their Men With Shared Finances

So how did the Daily Telegraph get that headline and story out the results of a poll that asked :

Do you or do you not "totally trust partner with shared finances"?

Well, you have to consider that the story was written by Joe Hildebrand.

And that the poll cited comes from Westpac's 'Women's Unit' (a PR unit) and the story concludes with the suggestion that partners having separate accounts for business and home finances will lead to less fighting over money issues.

More accounts mean more bank fees, which, coincidentally, now account for the vast majority of Australia's major banks' profits.

Andrew Bolt, the soon-to-be easy listening morning radio host, thinks this is representative of the "predatory gay" :



Even though they're also wearing speedos in a non-beach setting, this is not gay or even remotely homosexual, nor predatory. At all.



The "predatory gays" at least bothered to put on some footwear.

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This brilliant tilt-shift vid by ZebraFive was "constructed from over 9000 stills shot on location around Sydney using a Canon EOS 5D MKII."

Tony Abbott : It's Time For Big Business To Share The Wealth Around

By Darryl Mason

Tony Abbott on paid maternity leave, July 2002 :

"I'm dead against paid maternity leave as a compulsory thing. I think that making businesses pay what seems to them two wages to get one worker are, almost nothing could be more calculated to make businesses feel that the odds are stacked against them."

Tony Abbott, last night on Lateline, stacks the odds :

"If we are gonna have a comprehensive paid parental leave scheme any time soon, the fairest way to do it is for it to be a cost on business, and the fairest way to make it a cost on business is to ask larger businesses, the businesses that have the greatest capacity to pay, the businesses that have suffered least through the global financial crisis, they're the people who can best bear it."

Tony Abbott wants big business to share the wealth around, in particular to single-income families?

Who does he think he is? Obama?

"(Compulsory paid maternity leave) is pro-family, it's pro-child, it's pro-mother, and in the end, it's gonna produce a much stronger economy, because if we look after mothers in the workforce, we'll have more kids, and there is no greater contribution to the future economic strength of Australia than the kids we have now."

Well, kids, and coal.

Tony Abbott wasn't too keen to be reminded of the statements he made back in 2002 by Lateline host Leigh Sales :

TONY ABBOTT: ....I'm fully aware of that quote, Leigh. I have changed my mind.

LEIGH SALES: I'm sure you are. Our viewers ...

TONY ABBOTT: And isn't it a good thing to change your mind as your understanding grows?

LEIGH SALES: That is quite a change of heart.

TONY ABBOTT: Yeah, no, look, I accept that.

LEIGH SALES: So what's brought it about?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, what's brought it about is deeper understanding of the practical difficulties of women who are trying to juggle families and careers. We should not ...

LEIGH SALES: And how have you come to that deeper understanding?

TONY ABBOTT: By, I suppose, being more conscious of the burdens that friends and family members are carrying and of thinking more deeply about the sorts of choices that I would like to be available for my own daughters.

He wants big business to pick up the tab for his daughters' maternity leave.

So what's good for Abbott's children is good for Australia. I wonder if he had elderly relatives who smoked cannabis to relieve arthritis pain and reduce inflammation he would suddenly be backing medicinal marijuana?

Last night, Abbott also attempted to unleash on prime minister Kevin Rudd :

"It is pretty clear he is a guy who is all announcement and no follow through. He is, t coin a phrase, 'All Hat And No Cowboy'."

Abbott didn't coin the phrase. It's been in common usage in Texas for decades :

"It is not a compliment in West Texas to be referred to as 'All hat and no cowboy'. It is a term of derision used to indicate the person has little real character beneath the very thin veneer of appearance."

It's a good line, but it doesn't sound very Australian.

There is argument that the correct West Texas historical phrase is actually "All Hat, No Cattle", which certainly sounds more local.

Or perhaps Abbott knows this phrase, too, and decided not to use it to attack Rudd, because it has been popularly attached to George W. Bush since the late 1990s.


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You may feel sorry for the journalists, but the Fall Of Newspapers is set to claim many victims, least of all obsessive-compulsive newspaper stackerers :

Welcome To Melbourne


Photo from The Voxel Agents

A roundup of the freak Melbourne storm, from ABC News Melbourne HQ, with the great shot of a journalist reporting on the storms, holding an umbrella, inside a building, due to the amount of water pouring in through the roof.

Holy Fuck!



Chinaapek details on the above incredible vid of flash flooding in Melbourne earlier today :

I was there having coffee, the sky turned grey within seconds. Withinsecond, hail storm. Within 3 minutes, the street has gone chaos. It was a wave pool and flying branches and bins.

Melbourne's Flinders Street, a few minutes after storm clouds appeared :



Ballistic Freak Hail Storm Slams Melbourne

Now this is 3D :

The storm become curiouser and curiouser for Clemence Harvey, of South Yarra, who was watching the new Alice in Wonderland film with her 13-year-old in a packed theatre at the Jam Factory when water started pouring in front of the screen.

"Water started pouring through the ceiling and a torrent of water was pouring right in front of the screen, then they put a very large bucket down."

And it isn't over yet.

Seriously, how much testing do the weather machines need? They work, okay?

Now they're just showing off.


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Brilliant digital artist Monomauve has 'detooned' Mr Monty Burns.



The Full Ex-ell-ent Image Is Here

Of course Australians have known for years what Mr Burns would look like, detooned :





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Juli-aaaaaahhhhh

By Darryl Mason

Liberal Party activists Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt get started on their campaign to seed division in the federal Labor Party vote, by pushing deputy prime minister Julia Gillard as the person who should leading Labor into the next election.

After all, Kevin Rudd is a one term prime minister, or so goes the new chant, even though polls show nothing like the anger and outrage against Rudd that professional Liberal Party activist-columnists, including Miranda Devine, claim is running wild across the land.

You know what's coming next, don't you? A full-blown campaign from the Friends Of The Liberal Party in the opinion pages of, mostly, the Murdoch media claiming that Gillard "has almost got the numbers" and "is set to challenge for the leadership of the Labor Party."

It's early March now, the election is likely to arrive before late November, so they'll need at least four months to really get those Gillard Vs Rudd rumours flaming up, after they light the first fires of course.

So expect rumours along the lines of "Senior Labor Party officials believe Rudd is dooming the government to one term" and "Gillard knows she can win where Rudd cannot" to start flooding the gruesomely predictable opinion pages of the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph and The Australian in a month or so. Paul Sheehan from the Sydney Morning Herald can be relied on to join in the chanting, too.

Murdoch-funded Liberal Party activists like Andrew Bolt want to get started now, he's champing at the bit, but he knows it's still a bit too soon.

First, Glenn Milne has to fill a Sunday Telegraph page with "leaks" from "senior government figures", and then it's on.

Not the federal Labor government leadership challenge, just the column filler that will breed more columns and heated talkback debate. Anything, anything, to avoid devoting all but the most hostile attention to The Greens, who are shaping up to gain control of the Senate.

The 20th century newspapers have to at least try and give the impression that they can still influence the outcome of elections, even if they no longer really believe it themselves.

And it surely must be only a matter of weeks now before some Liberal Party politician embarrasses himself by claiming Kevin Rudd is an "Epic Fail."

Or maybe they're saving that for some of their 'hip' new campaign ads?

March 10 update : And so it begins, earlier than I predicted :

"Jones and I aren't alone among conservatives for falling for a politician whose choice of books now suggests she's readying to take over from the increasingly friendless Kevin Rudd."

"Watch your back Kevin."

"So while we love challenger Gillard now...."

She's already challenging Kevin Rudd for leadership of the Labor Party? Scoop!

And this note of warning :

"I fear this love for La Gillard may well end in tears, like Act 5 of Romeo and Juliet itself."

Julia Gillard will appear one day to be dead, and Australian conservative journalists will commit suicide and then Gillard will wake up from her sleep to find them all dead and then kill herself out of intolerable grief and loss?

And, man, and I thought I had some weird fantasies :

Has (Julia Gillard) bent global warmist Tim Flannery over the dispatch box in the middle of Question Time and administered a richly deserved spanking with a dead penguin....?

Weirdo.

The Sydney Morning Herald headline promises to reveal "The Dark Side" of a missing Australian nuclear scientist.

So what have they got?

His personal website reveals a man with bower-bird interests. These ranged from an obsession with suicide rates in the United States, Japan, Britain and Australia, the writings of Japanese Kamikaze pilots, Quebec's suicide ''hot spot'', ''suicide clubs'', The Complete Manual on Suicide to holocaust scenarios of nuclear attack, chemical poisoning, terrorist attacks and extensive works on the morality of war.

That's a bit thin to label someone having a Dark Side, isn't it? Bit weird, perhaps, but what if most of it is related to his research?

The story of the missing nuclear scientist is strange indeed.

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Weaponised Fruit

As you may have already heard, British prime minister Gordon Brown has a temper of Ruddian proportions. But new reports keep hitting the British media about just how fiery and abusive Brown's temper can be. Even innocent fruit does not escape the Brown wraith.

An excerpt from an article in The Sun :

A factory worker claims that during an official visit to his plant the PM hurled a tangerine into a laminating machine after flying into a rage while on a phone call. He said: "The fruit got stuck in the machine and clogged it.

"It was very embarrassing, we had to stop the tour and he got even more angry. He called the person that gave him the tangerine an idiot."

Actually, Gordon Brown called him a "citric idiot."

You think The Sun just makes up stories like this?

No. A real newspaper with real journalists sources and fact-checks claims that the prime minister is a fruit thrower.

And the tale of the furiously hurled tangerine came from a clearly reputable source :



The UK Telegraph also reported this 'incident' as fact....



....and the tangerine tale even became part of a Hong Kong news agency's animated round-up of Brown abuse atrocities :

Robert Popper is responsible for 'TangerineGate'


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@Tara_Moss asks is this the 'Headline Typo Of The Year?' It may be Typo Of The Decade :



However, the story is good news. The Royal Institute For Deaf and Blind Children celebrated its 150th anniversary today. Author Tara Moss joined Therese Rein at the celebrations, which included the unveiling of a video conferencing room at the new library. Video conferencing that will eventually allow hearing impaired kids to talk to the world, and hear all those voices talking back.

Sometimes I want to give the miracle of digital technology a big hug.

The Institute's website is here, where you can also donate.



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Fox News = Quality Geography

THR notices Fox News is still struggling with its geographic disability :



It's not the first time Fox News has made such a mistake.

(Via @sreejd and @chaslicc)

Poodle-Kitty spotted in Erskineville :

Northern Territory : Fish Fall From The Sky Twice in 2 Days

Local : "Thank God It Didn't Rain Crocodiles!"


grab from photo by Christine Balmer.

Last Thursday and Friday afternoon, residents of a Northern Territory town saw hundreds of fish fall from the sky. Locals claim the fish were still alive when they hit the ground.

On both days, the rain of fish began around 6pm.

'Newsbreaker' Christine Balmer told the Northern Territory News :

"Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere.

"I haven't lost my marbles. Thank god it didn't rain crocodiles."

I would go see that movie. As long as the rain of crocodiles fell over a city.

Lajamanu is the town where the fish fell from the sky. It sits on the edge of a desert, hundreds of kilometres from lakes, or the coast.

Even more bizarrely, rains of fish fell on Lajamanu in 2004, and in 1974.

A weather forecaster told The Northern Territory News that a tornado could have been responsible, but there were none in the area on the days the rain of fish occurred.

Go Here For More

This story is now being picked up by the Drudge Report, Reddit, Digg, thousands of bloggers and the news wires. The Northern Territory News has found its clickbait tale of the year.

And it's a good, more accurate choice by the NTN to use the term 'Newsbreaker' for what other media call a 'Citizen Journalist'.

In other Northern Territory News news, a monkey disguised as a normal everyday cat is running across roads. Points for the headline, though : 'Chimp My Ride.'

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