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