The other day we heard a political commentator talking about some Federal Labor Party policy massaging and describing the policy shift as “a sort of lateral arabesque”.

So here is a sort of lateral arabesque if you like, at least as far as our normal content goes.

Borders bookstores are offering 20% off full-priced cookbooks, so if you’re interesting in cooking, or books, or just like looking at pictures of food this might be worth something to you.

It’s valid to Thursday 9 July.

All you have to do is click on the picture and you will see the coupon. Print the coupon as many times as you like, take them to Borders, select the tastiest cookbooks you can find and take them (one for each coupon, we think) to the cashier. The cashier just scans the barcode and you get the 20% discount.

Anyway, cookbooks are a great Australian tradition and some of our most famous chefs are not only national treasures but changed the way we dine. Like Margaret Fulton. Stephanie Alexander. Tetsuya. Tens, perhaps hundreds of others. Womens Weekly……..

btw, we have no commercial interest in this offer

Bon appétit.

Technorati Tags: books, sale, discount, cookbooks, cook, food, coupon, deal, special, Borders, value, Margaret Fulton, Stephanie Alexander, Tetsuya, Womens Weekly

 

 

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Oliver Sacks
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Technorati Tags: prayer, pray, praying, religion, christian, christianity, jesus, christ, god, roman catholic, las vegas, vegas, sacks, oliver sacks, music, brain, mind, bach, beethoven, education, school, children, amygdala, pleasure centres, pleasure center, daily show, jon stewart, values, Australian values, Australian religious values, religious values, morals, morality, hypocrisy, spiked humor, humor, humour, comedy, video

Had to share.
htt Clubtroppo
From stereotypist’s “pictures for sad children”

Technorati Tags: Jackson, Michael Jackson, fame, media, tv, television, current affairs, media values, celebrity, celbrity death

Tony Abbott, the newly outed Strong Man riding shotgun for Turnbull, reacted today to the opinion poll findings that almost half the Australian voting population believes that Malcolm Turnbull was dishonest or somewhat deceitful over his wonderfully theatrical Utegate pantomime by suggesting that he thought people should, you know, take a cold shower over this.

And you know, we think that sort of attitude – that people should more or less get over the dishonesty of Liberal Party leaders – is pretty indicative of what is so wrong about the Liberals in general. It suggests that they still believe they are the natural party of Power and can’t get over themselves, especially being in opposition.

So of course we should get over it. We already know that you can’t expect ethics and morals of the Liberal Party.

And by the way, if Tony Abbott – the mealiest mouth they can scrape up save, possibly, for Christopher Whyne – is the best strong man they have for the job of saving Malcolm, the Liberals are in a pretty pickle indeed.

Technorati Tags: politics, Turnbull, Malcolm Turnbull, Liberal, Liberal Party, Liberal leader, Abbott, Tony Abbott, Pyne, Ute gate, Utegate, opinion poll, poll, government, values, Australian values, political values, Australian political values, merit, morals, ethics, standards, moral values, deceit, dishonesty

Many think of Sir Roger as a mere man of leisure and influence

So what was he thinking when he upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.8? Almost a full day of awful blankness on the blog front! And now a dreadfully strange, newfangled dashboard, strangely-coloured, with pieces missing, oddly-organised and strangely-shaped confronts him.
Nevertheless, typically intrepid Aussie mate that he is, he sallies forth to conquer the vicissitudes of the intertubes – which, by the way arrived in Australia exactly 20 years and three days ago. It is astonishing not only how pervasive it has become, not only how politically influential it has become – as we have seen in just the last two weeks in Iran – but how utterly dependent on it the world has become in such a short time.

I did but I don’t think I got away with it ….

Obama, who has been accused by some Republicans of being too timid in his response to events in Iran, declared himself “appalled and outraged” by the deaths and intimidation in Tehran’s streets — and scoffed at suggestions he was toughening his rhetoric in response to the criticism.

He suggested Iran’s leaders will face consequences if they continue “the threats, the beatings and imprisonments” against protesters.

[ ... ]

Obama borrowed language from struggles throughout history against oppressive governments to condemn the efforts by Iran’s rulers to crush dissent in the wake of June 12 presidential elections. Citing the searing video circulated worldwide of the apparent shooting death of Neda Agha Soltan, a 26-year-old young woman who bled to death in a Tehran street and now is a powerful symbol for the demonstrators, Obama said flatly that human rights violations were taking place.

“No iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice,” he said during a nearly hourlong White House news conference dominated by the unrest in Iran. “Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”

Absolutely. The idea of peaceful protests being violently crushed by a thuggish and ruthless government which cannot abide dissent from its absolutist policies is anathema and unthinkable in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free.

Such a ruthless crackdown resulting in deaths and serious injuries to students rallying peacefully against injustice, political dishonesty and abuse of power is utterly unimaginable in the world’s greatest democracy. And a righteous President with every historical moral justification for taking the high moral ground would never avoid (for fear of the obvious hypocrisy) mentioning any strikingly similar event that might have happened in his own country, would he? … say, oh, 39 years ago? On May 4, 1970?

Ah, the peace of God which passeth all understanding! Praise the love of God which bringeth the milk of loving kindness into the breasts of all those who believe in Him and keep His commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself! What a beautiful world of tolerance and compassion His devoted followers in the three great Semitic religions always lead us to! Hallelujah!

And just because we heard it for the first time today:

I don’t really like Harleys that much. They’re sort of farting armchairs.”

Technorati Tags: Iran, Obama, Kent State, Ohio, massacre, May 4 1970, Vietnam, peace, march, rally, demonstration, National Guard, political values, values, American values, politics, government, democracy, Neda Agha-Soltan, Neda Soltani, Basiji, Khamanei

There is an email going around claiming to be about a “Critical update” for Outlook. It looks real enough. They usually do.

Don’t click on the link!!!!!

Delete the email.

It is either phishing or an attempt to drop something nasty on your computer.

The text of the link is

http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftofficeupdate/isapdl/default. etc

but the actual link is to

http://update.microsoft.com.llikhf.com/microsoftofficeupdate/isapdl/default etc.

That is, it’s bogus and if you click on it no good will come of it and it will all end in tears.

The Subjects we have seen are:

“Microsoft Outlook Critical Update” and

“Install Update for Microsoft Outlook”.

This has been another free, public service from Values Australia.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, scam, email, bogus email, outlook, microsoft outlook, email scam, phishing, trojan, virus, keystroke logger, Microsoft Outlook Critical Update, Install Update for Microsoft Outlook, values, Australian values

If you didn’t see it yet, suck in your breath and be strong and watch this week’s Four Corners on repeat or on iView. It is a Channel 4 Discovery program called “Saving Africa’s Witch Children”.

It is hard to take.

Christian pastors in Akwa Ibom state in Nigeria, of the ultra-loony Pentecostalist variety, are identifying children as young as 3 months old as witches who are supposedly causing death and destruction in their families and villages. According to the 4 Corners report these children are abused and starved to extract confessions and, if not killed, are abandoned by their families. The pastors, or evangelists, or as they like to style themselves, “prophets”, extort large amounts of money (in Nigerian terms) to “cure” the children of their “witchcraft”.

The problem appears to have escalated because of films like End of the Wicked, produced by Liberty Films, owned by a very rich female Pentecostalist prophet, ‘Evang. (Mrs) Helen Ukpabio’.

According to the Wikipedia entry

Mrs. Ukpabio has published her views in several books, the most notable being ‘Unveiling The Mysteries of Witchcraft’, in which she states that:

If a child under the age of two screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health he or she is a servant of Satan.

…[T]hese symptoms are common in young children, especially in areas like Nigeria with poor health and high levels of malaria.

She also produces a number of films to spread the view that children can become possessed by evil spirits through her film production company, Liberty Films, part of the Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries franchise.

The most famous of these is ‘End of The Wicked’ in which child actors are shown to eat human flesh and kill their parents in horrific ways.

The gullible, rural Nigerians apparently believe this stuff implicitly because their priests tell them it’s true.

There is a centre, the CRARN – Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network – which, along with Gary Foxcroft’s Stepping Stones Nigeria, helps some of the children by taking them in and educating them.

You can listen to this morning’s Fran Kelly interview with Foxcroft on the RN site.

As our beloved Peter Cundall used to say, “You know what comes next”…

There is no difference in quality between the evil that these preachers perpetrate and the evil that has been perpetrated through the centuries by other branches of the Christian religion, not to mention by other faiths. Salem springs to mind. The Inquisition springs to mind. Iraq springs to mind. 9/11. The Gaza Strip. Gullible people fooled into believing the delusional nonsense of fakers, charlatans, mercenary manipulators, the power-mad and the terminally up-themselves like George Pell and Peter Jensen.

And there is no difference in quality between the awful, nauseating stupidity and ignorance of the Nigerians who are their victims and those in the West who continue to believe similar nonsense, because they, too, believe their lying priests who tell them it is The Truth.

As it says over there on the left, “Civilisation will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.” (Zola) “When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.” (Wilde) And as Voltaire¹ said, “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.”

Let no Christian ever claim that their religion is a fount of love and humankindness in contrast to the wickedness of the atheists and humanists. You can see in Nigeria today the horrors which are entirely and uniquely the product of Christianity and its righteous missionary zeal to spread the word of the gospel: horrors like the mentally disabled little girl with a hole in her skull where the long nail was driven into her brain to release the “demon” that had possessed her.

“The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.” (Bertrand Russell)

¹Voltaire also said, “All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” That is the only reason Bush, Cheney, Blair and Howard are not yet in prison.

Technorati Tags: child abuse, Religion, Nigeria, Akwa Ibom, christianity, evangelical christianity, pentecostal, Witchcraft, Peter Cundall, Four Corners, iView, Channel 4, Discovery, Saving Africa’s Witch Children, hell, demon, devil, End of the Wicked, Ukpabio, Okpabio, Liberty Films, prophet, priest, evangelist, Wilde, Zola, Voltaire, Russell, Salem, Inquisition , Iraq, Gaza, 9/11, CRARN, Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network , Gary Foxcroft, Stepping Stones Nigeria, religious values, Australian values, morals, morality, ethics, humanity, inhumanity, principles, decency, humanism, atheism

I did not have Stimulus Package relations with that car dealer ….

Technorati Tags: Rudd, Kevin Rudd, stimulus, stimulus package, politics, federal politics, Australian politics, government, economy, recession, car dealership, car dealer, Senate, inquiry, senate inquiry, scandal

Our loyal visitors, wanting to know how to react to Peter Costello’s decision to disappear up his own arse at long last may have been waiting with bated breath to hear Sir Roger’s wisdom on the issue.

Sir Roger’s view? Who gives a fuck?

Peter Costello “reaching out to the Australian people”

I’m at dinner, Jan!
On the building Iran crisis Values Australia modifies what it said two weeks ago about China and 6/4:

if you have to force the people … to obey the dictates of your Glorious Religion, if you have to kill people to force them to agree with you, then you are doing something very wrong, your basic religious premises are seriously fucked and your religion is after all not nearly so glorious as you might want to believe, however desperately.

The same goes for any religion.

Here is what is probably as close as anyone has come to our view of politics, democracy and religion, and from a Christian, no less:

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is going wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated.

- C. S. Lewis Of Other Worlds,

To keep up with events in Iran you can go here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/iran-social-media/ They have good links to social media from Iran, like Twitter.

Technorati Tags: costello, peter costello, politics, government, political values, political culture, Australian politics, costello resigns, costello bows out, Liberal Party, Liberal leadership, Prime Minister, treasurer, Iran, iranian election, Ahmedinajad, religion, Islam, Christianity, China, religious values, religious culture, christian values, islamic values, islamic state, fundamentalism, morals, morality, ethics, values, principles