Sharia Law coming to a bank near you

ONE of Australia’s major banks is planning to introduce “Muslim-friendly” loans that do not charge interest, to comply with Sharia law. Instead, the National Australia Bank will structure an Islam-approved line of finance to make money from alternative methods.
For example, to get round the Islamic ban on usury – or unfair lending – a Muslim mortgage often works by the bank buying the property, then selling it to the customer at a profit, with the customer then repaying the entire sum in instalments. In this way the profit margin is built in from the start. It also has the advantage of making the loan immune from future interest rate rises.
I’ve got an idea. Tell people new to Australia that what we do here is charge interest on loans and if you get a loan through a bank, usury doesn’t come into the equation because of competition and government regulations. Some might argue differently but it’s basically true – thus the Islamic ban on unfair lending doesn’t apply. Admittedly it’s a bit different from 12th century finance but it does work.

Greenpeace idiots stuff up society

ENVIRONMETAL activists have shut down a coal digger at an Australian power station that provides eight per cent of the country’s coal-reliant electricity market, to protest against government climate policies.
Greenpeace said today’s dawn protest by around 14 activists at the Hazelwood Power Stationin Victoria was the latest part of an ongoing campaign to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions.
“Australia is digging itself into a hole. By phasing out coal and investing in renewable energy, we can protect our environment and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs,” Greenpeace campaigner Simon Roz said.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs?  How? Laws need to be changed so that Greenpeace can be charged all costs associated with criminal act and the 14 perpetrators should be locked up. People are aware that coal powered electricity is dirty but until we have a reliable alternative we have to keep using it.  

Kangaroo culls

Pat O’Brien, the leader of the anti Kangaroo cull in Canberra claims kangaroos are already being culled and that it would only cost $750,000 to move the roos elsewhere. There are a bout 400 roos in the area so they are suggesting the country spend $1875 per roo to fix the problem. Yeah right! I figure one round per roo couldn’t cost much more than a few bucks and the problem is solved. If we never culled any roos we would be overrun by them, farmers would be in dire troubles and the panel beating industry would be on a winner. The video below has O’Brien explaining how Steve Irwin (now the zoo itself) is funding his anti-kangaroo cull. The video shows O’Brien living in a house owned by the Irwins and goes into details of how he just has to ask and $2,000 a day barristers are paid for by the Zoo. He submits a monthly budget and the money is there just three days later. I have no problem with the Australian Zoo doing there bit for wildlife but some common sense wouldn’t go astray. Helping endangered species would be a start – maybe they could spend a bit of their money culling the feral cats that are putting dozens of species on the endangered list or even helping to protect the bilby but to spend money trying to stop roo culling is pure activist idealolgical bullshit. Wasting money on a waste of time. I know who I’d be culling.

China watch

While the Olympic torch was being run through Canberra I was otherwise involved in ANZAC Day prep and planning so had little chance to blog on the issue. I thought, given a couple of days the media would be investigating how come so many pro-Chinese Chinese arrived at Canberra in such an organized fashion. It was almost as if the Red Army had provided the convoy to move the troops. No one has followed it up so I’ll say it. The move of the Chinese students was too slick to have been organized by a bunch of youths. Someone stepped in and organized and paid for the coaches from other cities and considering that the only organization that`stood to benefit is the Chinese government then it is a reasonable deduction that they planned the event. If this is true then we should all feel very indignant that a foreign power is moving ‘troops’ around Australia for their political gain. I certainly do. The saga of the Red Chinese Guards torch minders being allowed on the streets to run with the torch and ‘protect’ it descended into chaos when the government backed down and left the matter to the poor AFP individual who we all witnessed on TV trying to muscle the Chinese away from the torch carrier. It struck me as undignified and the world witnessed Australia abrogating it’s sovereignty to the Chinese. Not happy, Kevin.

Tax ’em into sobriety

FEDERAL Health Minister Nicola Roxon has blamed the former Howard Government for the rise in teenage binge drinking. Nicola uses some pretty inventive logic to suggest the Howard government is solely to blame for the rate of teenager girls drinking rising from 14% to 60%. Not a mention of state liquor laws, lax club administration or poor parenting. So now she has established the fact that the wonderful, socially aware ALP are fixing an insidious act of the evil conservative government that is killing our babies; while we watch her right hand conjuring up this image we fail to notice her left hand dropping a new tax on us. She has come up with a plan to halt binge drinking, a problem amongst kids, that is supposedly rocking the country. I haven’t seen any good stats yet that back that up only anecdotal evidence but lets take it as a given. The plan? Excise has been almost doubled from $39 to $67 per litre for RDT (ready to drink) products with one paper suggesting that will up the price of a bottle by a dollar. Queensland pubs and clubs currently charge, on average, about $8 per bottle but they can range from $5 specials to $12 rip offs. So, there are two factors to consider here. First. The pubs may or may not throw the rise straight back at kids buying RDTs. They could absorb the excise rise elsewhere in the inventory if they feel it to their advantage to keep the premixes cheap. Even if they simply put up costs by a dollar a drink I can’t see that guaranteeing kids will stop buying them. So it may or may not work but based on my experience it won’t work. If price was the determining factor I would have stopped drinking when a pot went from .30 cents to 45 Second and most important. The government will make a couple of billion dollars from the hike.

Kangaroos get reprieve so they can starve to death

THE planned cull of kangaroos on defence land in Canberra has been put on hold after the department asked the ACT Government to approve a trial of moving them. Read ‘The Department has been told by the government, who have been told by the Left/Greens, to ask the ACT government to approve a trial of moving them…or anything that would take it of the front pages. The debacle over the Government supporting anti-whaling terrorists is bad enough but to have the animal activists preaching hypocracy is worse ACT Animal Liberation president Mary Hayes and the ACT Greens are against the cull for the usual uneducated reasons. Bob Green says his usual anti-anything mantra and about 70 activists have protested. This small group of second rate players and unwashed activists have dictated terms to a government and one of it’s largest departments. Two weeks ago the Rudd government/Defence were happy for the cull to go ahead and now they’re not. The Greens have held sway and a solution has been turned into a crime. Defence have been forced to back down and announced today;
….it remained interested in researching options other than a cull, particularly given public opposition to that plan. “Approval has therefore been requested from the ACT Government to undertake a scientific trial of kangaroo management techniques, including translocation,” defence said. “Pending the ACT Government’s response to the defence proposal, the cull of kangaroos … will be placed on hold.”
We cull millions every year but a the thought of culling a few hundred in the ACT force the government to back down. Who’s running the country again?

State’s sky to get heritage status

THE sky above New South Wales is to be given heritage status by the National Trust. The National Trust of NSW is set to classify both the day and night sky above the state as worthy of preservation.
National Trust NSW president Zeny Edwards said the sky viewed from NSW had extraordinary aesthetic, historic, social and scientific significance for all Australians. The move was timely with Earth Hour on Saturday, when switching off city lights would allow the sky to be seen clearly, he said.
What on earth is she on?

More symbols

From todays Strewth column in the Australian
Clueless Viking THE voyage of the Australian Customs Service ship Oceanic Viking ends when it docks in Fremantle this morning after a seven-week, 5000-nautical-mile voyage to monitor Japanese whaling activity in the Southern Ocean. About the only useful thing the ship did was to help transfer two anti-whaling activists, Benjamin Potts and Giles Lane of the vigilante conservationist group Sea Shepherd, from a Japanese harpoon boat back to the Steve Irwin. Crew aboard the Ocean Viking took photographs and video of the Japanese operations that it has been claimed may be used in legal action against Japan. Strewth hopes ACS chief executive Michael Carmody enjoys his home movies because legal experts are at a loss to nominate in what jurisdiction legal action can be taken against the Japanese.
I commented earlier
I do not sit easy with the fact that the government of a country like Australia is acting as a paid up member of a radical organization that terrorizes people going about their legitimate business. The entire affair is very untidy and leaves Australia’s reputation as a reasoned and intelligent player shattered.
Nothing is going to happen. Rudd got his mileage from the non thinkers by misusing a ship for political gain. The Greenies swooned, the young voters said ‘cool Dude’, the Japanese rolled their eyes and ignored the ship and all is sweet with the world of the crazy left. I would have to take DD McNicoll to task over his suggestion that transferring Benjamin Potts and Giles Lane from the Whaler to the Steve Irwin (so named to tug on warm and fuzzy Aussie heartstrings) was useful. The idiots should be have been left on the Jap whaler as playthings for the crew – their only chance in life of being useful. Anyone like to comment on how much each Greenie vote cost the country once the costs of seven-week, 5000-nautical-mile voyage are factored in. Even if it’s one cent per it’s too much.

Whaling

The Australian now agrees with me on whaling
After a clumsy three-week delay, the Oceanic Viking finally left port on its mission of official government activism, apparently to collect more evidence for what is already well-documented activity, for some future but unspecified legal action against the Japanese Government. International law has to date offered little resolution in this regard. The action appears to have done little more than antagonise Australia’s biggest trading partner at the highest levels and weakened the Government’s ability to act diplomatically and strategically to actually do something about moderating the Japanese whale cull.
and this
The Japanese fleet plans to take about 935 minke whales in the Southern Ocean this season. The IWC estimates there are somewhere between 500,000 and over a million swimming around those parts. As environmentalist Tim Flannery pointed out, you can hardly mount a case against it on sustainability grounds. The managed harvesting of thousands of other equally sentient mammals for food occurs every day in Australia without so much as a murmur.
The country needs to know that the entire anti-whaling operation is based on activists and their agenda. Paul Watson, ‘Captain’ of the Steve Irwin (so named for it’s Australian appeal) is nothing short of a lunatic with an unhealthy hatred for all fisherman. I particularly note this quote from the above link.
When a former Greenpeace colleague criticized Watson for sinking half a fleet of Icelandic whaling boats in 1986, Watson replied, “So what?” he he said. “We did not sink those ships for you or for any of the six billion hominid a–holes on this planet…we could not give a damn what human beings have to say about the actions.” “The world will be a much nicer place without us [humans],” he said on another occasion, adding that he “owed no allegiance to humanity.” This message is incongruous with his assertion that the SSCS is “a vehicle to empower people.
This man has the Australian government dancing to his own sick tune. I do not sit easy with the fact that the government of a country like Australia is acting as a paid up member of a radical organization that terrorizes people going about their legitimate business. The entire affair is very untidy and leaves Australia’s reputation as a reasoned and intelligent player shattered.

He has his mother’s eyes

Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research denied the whales were mother and calf and accused the Government of misleading the public. ICR director-general Minoru Morimoto said the variance in size was simply “random sampling”. However, a spokesperson for Mr Garrett said he had received independent scientific advice that the whales were, in fact, related. Oh well, that’s different then…….no….hang on, Minister for plastic bags how does that work. Have the people who gave you scientific advice been on board the Japanese whalers and DNA tested the two bodies? No! Then what are they saying? Like mothers the world over…look at him, he has his mothers eyes? Give us a break Garrett!
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