"I know words, I have the best words."

Now that Donald John Trump has been certified by at least 270 of the 538 members the US Electoral College, there is no getting away from the fact that come 20 January 2017 the most powerful nation in the world will be ruled by an incredibly ignorant man with an inflated opinion of his own abilities.

Trump has said of himself “I went to an Ivy League school, I’m very highly educated, I know words, I have the best words.”

One has to wonder if family wealth purchased his college degree, because his command of the English language is nothing short of woeful for a college graduate.

His grammar and word choice appears never to have developed beyond that of the average eight to nine year-old Australian child while his spelling is best described as highly erratic.

A charitable person might suggest that Trump’s use of language is the result of the political choices he made during the presidential election campaign and is geared to a belief that American voters are uneducated and downright stupid.

However his spelling gives the game away. He is not faking ignorance, he is ignorant.

Anyone could be forgiven these typos – after all who hasn’t suffered from ‘fat thumb’:

However, errors such as these indicate a man who never really learned the basics:

Unpresidented for unprecedented, waite for wait, rediculous instead of ridiculous, Phillies for Phyllis, creats instead of creates, there for their and moch for mock, all give the general impression that U.S. president-elect Donald Trump rarely has the best words.

CCRAP and the Adani Group

Adani Mining Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of India's largest coal trader the Adani Group, intends to dig an enormous hole in the ground costing over $16 billion and the odd billion or two it can extract from gullible federal and state governments in Australia.

This hole known as the Carmichael Coal Mine and Rail Project will comprise six open-cut pits and five underground mines; supported by five mine infrastructure areas, a coal handling and processing plant, a heavy industrial area, water-supply infrastructure, 189-kilometres of rail line (Adani has applied for a $1 billion loan from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund to build the rail link), as well as off-site infrastructure including a workers' accommodation village and airport.

All of this running roughly parallel with the Great Barrier Reef and the Abbott Point port required to ship all this coal overseas at considerable risk to fresh water security, coral sustainability and marine biodiversity.

http://envlaw.com.au/carmichael-coal-mine-case/

To facilitate its aim of environmental vandalism for corporate profit the Adani Group has registered the following companies which are all currently operating out of an office tower in Eagle Street, Brisbane:

Abbot Point Operations Pty Ltd

Adani Abbot Point Company Pty Ltd

Adani Abbot Point Holding Trust

Adani Abbot Point Terminal Holdings Pty Ltd

Adani Abbot Point Terminal Pty Ltd

Adani Australia Coal Terminal Finance Company Pty Ltd

Adani Australia Coal Terminal Holdings Pty Ltd

Adani Australia Coal Terminal Pty Ltd

Adani Australia Company Pty Ltd

Adani Australia Holding Trust

Adani Minerals Pty Ltd

Adani Mining Pty Ltd

Carmichael Rail Finance Company Pty Ltd

Carmichael Rail Holdings Pty Ltd

Carmichael Rail Network Holdings Pty Ltd

Carmichael Rail Network Holdings Trust

Carmichael Rail Network Pty Ltd

Carmichael Rail Network Trust

Carmichael Rail Pty Ltd

Carmichael Rail Pty Ltd

Galilee Transmission Holdings Pty Ltd

Galilee Transmission Holdings Trust

Galilee Transmission Pty Ltd

Mundra Port Holding Trust

Mundra Port Holdings Pty Ltd

Mundra Port Pty Ltd

Juice Media put this mocking video together to let the Adani family and the world know what many people in this country think of this mining scheme.

https://youtu.be/n_C8S4Bz91M

Thanks to Simon Chance for this link

Published on Dec 4, 2016

The Australian Government just released this advert about the proposed Carmichael Coal Mine and it's surprisingly honest and informative. 

6 WAYS YOU CAN HELP STOP CCRAP:

1. Tell PM Malcolm Turnbull you don't want your tax dollars to be used to subsidise CCRAP: https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/gr...
2. Join GetUp!'s Fight for the Reef: https://fightforthereef.getup.org.au
3. Donate to the Wangan & Jagalingou defense fund: http://wanganjagalingou.com.au/donate
4. Follow the Wangan & Jagalingou on Facebook to keep up to date with the campaign to stop CCRAP on their lands: https://www.facebook.com/WanganandJag...
5. Find out more about the Wangain & Jagalingou traditional owners: http://wanganjagalingou.com.au
6. Share this video.☛ CREDITS: Written & created by Giordano. Performed by Matylda. Voice by Lucy. Thanks to Adso, Kajute, Miriam, Anthony, Adam, Benna, Damian, Dave and Dbot for helping out! Photos and Footage of Wangan & Jagalingou people used with permission from Wangan & Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Council. ☛ Please SUPPORT the Juice Media to help us make more videos: https://www.patreon.com/TheJuiceMedia

BACKGROUND

Financial Review, 6 December 2016:

Challenges:

Finance – There is a reason the Galilee Basin has been left undeveloped for the past 50 years. For a start, it's close to 500 kilometres from ports on the coast, meaning whoever is going to build the project has to outlay billions of dollars to get the project built. And the quality of the coal is not as good as others in the closer Bowen and Surat Basin.

India's Adani Group also has to find $10 billion to finance the project. There are also questions raised about whether the project is economically viable after a plunge in the coal price following the end of the coal boom. But even though the price of thermal coal has recovered to above $100 a tonne in recent months, it is less relevant because Adani is using the coal for its own power stations rather than selling to other customers. The Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis director Tim Buckley – a vocal critic of the project – says Adani's parent company is struggling with current market capitalisation of equity at $US1.1 billion, against which it has net debts of $US2.4 billion.

Environmentalists – Adani's Carmichael project has become the lightning rod for anti-fossil fuel activists and environmentalists who want to stop the building of any new coal mines in Australia. It also fits into the narrative about Australia's changing energy mix – from one dominated by coal and gas to renewable energy such as wind and solar. Environmentalists claim the extra coal exports will damage the World Heritage-protected Great Barrier Reef, although it has received environmental approval from both state and federal governments. As the Turnbull government releases its 2017 climate review this week, the argument over the Adani mega-mine also ties in with the debate about whether Australia,- which has one of the largest emissions per capita,- should be building another large coal mine that will release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Well-funded and media-savvy environmental groups have also been very effective in targeting banks about lending to the Carmichael mine. Some banks, under pressure to make sure they look like good corporate citizens, have promised not to lend to any future coal mines.

Legal activism – One of the reasons the project has been progressing at a snail's place the past seven years is because environmental and Indigenous groups have used the legal system to their advantage and challenged virtually every aspect of the project. The mining lease, environmental authority, and native title have been challenged by a range of parties, including the Australian Conservation Foundation, little-known group Coast & Country as well as Indigenous group, the Wangan and Jagalingou. They have successfully held up the project, resulting in the former Abbott government threatening to change the laws to make it harder to challenge big mining projects.

Last month, two legal challenges were thrown out of court, leaving three appeals – two before the full bench of the Federal Court over the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act and native title, and there is also a judicial review of Adani's port expansion at Abbot Point which has been brought by local residents in the Whitsundays – before the project can be given the green light.

Scandal  – The Adani Group has been plagued by allegations of corruption surrounding its projects in India. Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani is one of India's richest men, whose personal wealth was valued at $7.1 billion in 2014 by Forbes magazine. There have been allegations of environmental vandalism in relation to the development of the Port of Mundra, which is owned by Adani, as well as claims of tax evasion. Adani's Australian chief executive Jeyakumar Janakaraj has also been dragged into the scandal by failing to disclose his history running a mining company in Africa that pleaded guilty to serious economic harm. So far, none of these allegations have failed to bring down any of Adani's executives, but it adds to the controversy over the project.

UPDATE

ABC News, 21 December 2016:

Giant Indian conglomerate Adani, which plans to build one of the world's largest coal mines in Queensland's Galilee Basin, has set up a complex network of companies and trusts in Australia which are owned in one of the world's major tax havens, the Cayman Islands.

The Adani Group is also attempting to shift ownership of the existing Abbot Point coal port — which it bought for $1.8 billion — to a Singaporean company ultimately owned in the Cayman Islands.

An exhaustive search of company filings and documents across the globe has cast light on this opaque structure of ownership and control.

It has alarmed environmental activists and legal experts, who fear it could make it harder to gain compensation from Adani in the event of an environmental disaster from Adani's planned mine and port expansion on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef.

"I've been a businessman for most of my life, as well as an environmental activist, and the risks are great," said Geoff Cousins, former Optus CEO and chairman of the George Paterson advertising agency, now a board member of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

"With these kinds of approvals of big mining operations or port operations, you always get a set of conditions that the Government puts on.

"But those conditions aren't worth anything if, when something goes wrong, you try to find the company responsible and either it has no money or if it has money it's in a tax haven and you can't reach it."

It is a view echoed by David Chaikin, a professor of business law at the University of Sydney.

"The advantage of having the money in tax havens is that you are able to conceal the source of money, the use of money, and also to minimise tax," he said…..

Adani has created four companies and two trusts in Australia for the rail project.

The parent company for all these entities is Carmichael Rail and Port Singapore Holdings Pte Ltd, a company registered in Singapore where the corporate tax rate is 15 per cent.

This Singapore parent company is in turn owned by Atulya Resources Limited, a private company controlled by the Adani family and based in the Cayman Islands.

The port expansion has a similar structure: five companies and two trusts in Australia, ultimately controlled by Atulya Resources in the Cayman Islands……

Adani has created four companies and two trusts in Australia for the rail project.

The parent company for all these entities is Carmichael Rail and Port Singapore Holdings Pte Ltd, a company registered in Singapore where the corporate tax rate is 15 per cent.

This Singapore parent company is in turn owned by Atulya Resources Limited, a private company controlled by the Adani family and based in the Cayman Islands.

The port expansion has a similar structure: five companies and two trusts in Australia, ultimately controlled by Atulya Resources in the Cayman Islands.

The port expansion has a similar structure: five companies and two trusts in Australia, ultimately controlled by Atulya Resources in the Cayman Islands.

The vast expansion of the coal port planned by Adani has sparked enormous controversy.

It will involve dredging 1.1 million tonnes of spoil from the ocean near the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and poses a potential danger to the environmentally-sensitive reef, which is listed on the World Heritage Register.

Critics say the company structure set up by Adani raises serious concerns about the value of strict environmental approvals placed on the project.

Ownership of the existing Abbot Point Coal Terminal is in limbo.

Adani bought a 99-year lease over the coal port in 2011 for $1.8 billion through a company listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd (AZPEZ).

That company said it "sold" the port three years ago to a Singaporean-based Adani family company "subject to regulatory and lenders approvals".

But the sale has not been completed, because of objections by the State Bank of India, which lent Adani $US800 million ($1.1 billion) for the port purchase.

In its latest filings with the Australian corporate watchdog, Adani still lists the port as being owned by the Bombay-listed company.

But ASPEZ's 2016 annual report said it had "recorded the divestment" of the port to Abbot Point Port Holdings Pte Ltd, Singapore: an entity which lists as its sole director Vinod Shantilal Adani, the brother of Guatam Adani, head of the Adani Group, and which is ultimately owned by Atulya Resources in the Cayman Islands.

Transferring ownership of the critical port infrastructure to a Caymans Islands' company "means it will be unregulated, unaccountable," Tim Buckley, director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analytics told the ABC.

"It will be non-transparent to the Australian Government as to what is going on, who owns it, who are the directors. To me it is a matter of national security."

Companies and trusts created by Adani for the proposed Carmichael mine are ultimately owned by Adani Enterprises, a publicly-listed company in India, but the control flows via a company registered in the tax haven of Mauritius, Adani Global Ltd.

Adani Global Ltd. is based at Suite 501 St James Court, St Denis Street in Port Louis, Mauritius, and since 1998 has operated as a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises Limited which was incorporated in March 1993 as Adani Exports Ltd with the name change effected in 2007.

In October 2010 Adani's Australian subsidiary, Adani Mining Pty Ltd, made an application for approval of the Carmichael Coal Mine and Rail Project.

On 14 October 2015 the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment granted approval of 'controlled action' subject to conditions following re-consideration of project under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

In 2014 Adani and Posco had agreed to build rail line in Australia and the following year Adani signed an MoU with Australia's Woodside Energy for Energy Cooperation.

Adani media release, 25 November 2016:

Adani welcomes court decisions Adani Group today welcomed decisions by the Queensland Supreme Court to dismiss activist lead appeals against the granting of a Mining Lease and an Environmental Authority in relation to the company’s planned $21 billion coal project. The company said the decisions were further positive steps towards starting work in the September Quarter 2017 on the Carmichael Mine in central western Queensland and associated projects – a near-400km rail line and port expansion at Abbott Point. Adani said it would now examine the full decision documents and make no further comment.

Adani letter to the Indian stock exchange, excerpt, 8 December 2016:

Live Mint, 21 December 2016:

Adani Enterprises Ltd is aiming to start production at its $16 billion integrated mining project in Australia by end of 2020, after facing a four-year delay because of stiff resistance from environmental groups. 

In an interview, group chairman Gautam Adani brushed aside concerns about the group’s indebtedness and said it was looking at investment opportunities in sectors such as defence, coal conversions and water. He added that the group continues to explore opportunities in the mining sector as it looks at an integrated “pit-to-plug” strategy encompassing mines, rail and the port sector. 

The Carmichael mines in Galilee, Australia, will produce about 25 million tonnes of coal a year in fiscal 2021. The group has invested close to $4.5 billion in the first phase, Adani said. It is planning to use the coal to fuel its Mundra and Udupi power plants. 

Adani also said he sees the ports business—one of the group’s most successful ventures so far—to meet its target of setting up 200 million tonnes of cargo handling capacity by the end of 2018, two years before schedule. 

So where did you say your news was coming from?

An interesting snippet from Australian Newspaper History Group, Newsletter, No 90, December 2016, pp.

90.1.3 China (1): Supplement to SMH and Age

On 23 September both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age carried an eight-page supplement entitled China Watch, which contained China news and views.

The supplement clearly indicated that it had been prepared by the China Daily and that there had been no editorial involvement by the Sydney Morning Herald and Age.

This follows a precedent where in recent years the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age have regularly carried similar sponsored supplements containing news and views of Russia.

90.1.4 China (2): Australian media

Yan Xia, the editor of Vision China Times, a Chinese-language newspaper published in Australia, says a Beijing-based immigration agency was forced to pull an advertisement from his paper because it was regarded as an “anti-China” paper (Australian, 10 October 2016). The Ministry of State Security, the agency in charge of counter-intelligence and political security, had allegedly harassed the agent.

Yan Xia said, “Our lost client illustrates but one of the mounting pressures faced by independent Chinese media in Australia. Tensions have heightened over recent months, with Australia’s Chinese media under pressure to support President Xi Jinping and Beijing’s foreign policy. That pressure is part of China’s exercise in ‘soft power’. Broadly speaking, there are three types of Chinese-language media in Australia.

“The first consists of those that rely on the Chinese government and Chinese commercial ties for revenue. These outlets tend to echo and take their cues from state-run mouthpieces. The second group consists of media directed by religious groups aiming to expose China’s political, educational and socio-economic situation while promoting human rights and religious freedom. And the third is independent of political and religious influence. Its reporting is largely in line with the ideals of Western mainstream media and generally gives holistic views of Canberra’s policies and sentiments.

“Our outfit fits this last category. While independent media outlets are standard in the West, a one-party state cannot accept that media outlets “do not follow directives” and, by its reckoning, do damage to ‘national interests’. In China, national interests are synonyms for ‘the party’s interests’.

“In recent months it appears the Chinese government’s influence in Australia has become more open and, thus, more easily observed. For Chinese media platforms whose goal is to serve as the bridge between the Chinese community and the Australian mainstream, the challenge lies in reporting fairly and accurately on matters of conflict between the two countries. We choose to remain unyielding in our approach, reporting according to Western journalistic ideals. This has been tested during recent times, which have seen a deluge of articles examining issues that Beijing considers unpalatable.”

A thought to ponder.....

@Loud_Lass

On the problem of fake news....

Digital Trends, 6 December 2016:

It’s been half a decade since the co-founder of Avaaz, Eli Pariser, first coined the phrase “filter bubble,” but his prophetic TED Talk — and his concerns and warnings — are even more applicable now than they were then. In an era of fake news, curated content, personalized experiences, and deep ideological divisions, it’s time we all take responsibility for bursting our own filter bubbles.

When I search for something on Google, the results I see are quite different from yours, based on our individual search histories and whatever other data Google has collected over the years. We see this all the time on our Facebook timelines, as the social network uses its vats of data to offer us what it thinks we want to see and hear. This is your bubble…..

Filter bubbles may not seem too threatening a prospect, but they can lead to two distinct but connected issues. The first is that when you only see things you agree with, it can lead to a snowballing confirmation bias that builds up steadily over time.

They don’t overtly take a stance, they invisibly paint the digital landscape with things that are likely to align with your point of view.

A wider problem is that with such difference sources of information between people, it can lead to the generation of a real disconnect, as they become unable to understand how anyone could think differently from themselves.

A look at any of the left- or right-leaning mainstream TV stations during the buildup to the recent election would have left you in no doubt over which candidate they backed. The same can be said of newspapers and other media. In fact, this is true of many published endorsements.

But we’re all aware of that bias. It’s easy to simply switch off or switch over to another station, to see the other side of the coin.

Online, the bias is more covert. Google searches, social network feeds, and even some news publications all curate what they show you. Worse, it’s all behind the scenes. They don’t overtly take a stance, they invisibly paint the digital landscape with things that are likely to align with your point of view…..

This becomes even more of a problem when you factor in faux news. This latest election was one of the most contentious in history, with low-approval candidates on both sides and salacious headlines thrown out by every source imaginable. With so much mud being slung, it was hard to keep track of what was going on, and that was doubly so online, where fake news was abundant.

This is something that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried to play down, claiming that it only accounted for 1 percent of the overall Facebook news. Considering Facebook has near 2 billion users, though, that’s potentially a lot of faux stories parroted as the truth. It’s proved enough of an issue that studies suggest many people have difficulty telling fake news from real news, and in the weeks since the election, both Google and Facebook have made pledges to deal with the problem.

Also consider that 61 percent of millennials use Facebook as their main source of news, and you can see how this issue could be set to worsen if it’s not stoppered soon…..

While Zuckerberg may not think fake news and memes made a difference to the election, Facebook employee and Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey certainly did. He was outed earlier this year for investing more than $100,000 in a company that helped promote Donald Trump online through the proliferation of memes and inflammatory attack advertisements. He wouldn’t have put in the effort if he thought it worthless.

Buzzfeed’s analysis of the popular shared stories on Facebook shows that while fake news underperformed compared to its real counterparts in early 2016, by the time the Election Day rolled around at the start of November, it had a 1.5 million engagement lead over true stories.

That same analysis piece highlighted some of the biggest fake election stories, and all of them contained classic click-baiting tactics. They used scandalous wording, capitalization, and sensationalist claims to draw in the clickers, sharers, and commenters.

That’s because these sorts of words help to draw an emotional reaction from us. Marketing firm Co-Schedule discovered this back in 2014, but it’s likely something that many people would agree with even without the hard numbers. We’ve all been tempted by clickbait headlines before, and they’re usually ones that appeal to fear, anger, arousal, or some other part of us that isn’t related to critical thinking and political analysis. Everyone’s slinging mud from within their own filter bubbles, secure in the knowledge that they are right, and that everyone who thinks differently is an idiot.

And therein lies the difficulty. The only way to really understand why someone may hold a different viewpoint is through empathy. But how can you empathize when you don’t have control over how the world appears to you, and your filter serves as a buffer to stories that might help you connect with the other side?

Reaching out to us from the past, Pariser  has some thoughts for those of us now living through his warning of the future. Even if Facebook may be stripping all humanity from its news curation, there are still human minds and fingertips behind the algorithms that feed us content. He called on those programmers to instill a sense of journalistic integrity in the AI behind the scenes.

“We need the gatekeepers [of information] to encode [journalistic] responsibility into the code that they’re writing. […] We need to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. They need to be transparent enough that we can see what the rules are and […] we need [to be] given some control.”

That sort of suggestion seems particularly pertinent, since it was only at the end of August that Facebook laid off its entire editorial team, relying instead on automated algorithms to curate content. They didn’t do a great job, though, as weeks later they were found to have let a bevy of faux content through the screening process.

While it may seem like a tall order for megacorporations to push for such an open platform, so much of a stink has been raised about fake news in the wake of the election that it does seem like Facebook and Google at least will be doing something to target that problematic aspect of social networking. They can do more, though, and it could start with helping to raise awareness of the differences in the content we’re shown…..

Maybe it's time to view this video now that the gun lobby is continuing to push for import of more fast-action shotguns into Australia

https://youtu.be/1nAfWfF4TjM

Meanwhile in Australia..........

News.com.au, 3 December 2016:

AUSTRALIA’S import ban on the lever-action Adler A110 shotgun can be lifted next year with a national agreement on a new D licence, limiting it to a handful of professional shooters.

In a major victory for the gun-control lobby, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and state premiers are now set to ratify the new rules when COAG meets on Friday.

The deal will act as a de facto ban, with the gun only able to be imported and owned by limited to a tiny number of professional shooters who specialise in pest and feral animal control on a D licence.

That is likely to trigger calls for a taxpayer-funded national buyback of thousands of retrofitted Adler shotguns already in the country that will be rendered illegal if they have a magazine capacity of more than five.

The Martin Place siege was the trigger for a review of the National Firearms Agreement and the current Adler import ban will continue until there is unanimous agreement with all jurisdictions about how to classify lever-action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than five.

The Sunday Herald Sun can reveal the gamechanger was NSW Premier Mike Baird’s decision to roll his own Police Minister Troy Grant in cabinet on the controversial shotgun on Thursday.

It was revealed last Sunday that NSW Police had urged cabinet to stare down the pro-gun lobby with a tough D classification.

Mr Grant had publicly campaigned for a weaker B classification for the Adler shotgun in the lead-up to the Orange by-election in NSW that was won by the Shooters Party as the Nationals attempted to court shooters.

The NSW cabinet decision is pivotal, because there is ­already broad national consensus that the Adler should be ­reclassified as a D licence firearm and NSW was the final barrier to a resolution.

The Prime Minister confirmed the National Firearms Agreement will be on the COAG agenda on Friday.

Although COAG did agree to restricting the importation of Adler A110 shotgun, this is definitely a retrograde step as there is not a total ban on this weapon.

Changes to the National Firearms Agreement also have to go to state parliaments in 2017 for ratification.

ABC News reported on 10 December 2016:

Under Category D, the Adler will only be available to professional shooters under certain conditions.

However, the premiers and chief ministers will have to pass the changes through their parliaments first.

This may prove difficult for the Queensland Labor minority Government, where Bob Katter's Australian Party is threatening to block the restrictions and the LNP Opposition has not decided how they will vote.

"I'm confident that state national parties will stand by shooters and hunters and evidence-based policy making," Senator McKenzie said.

She has previously crossed the Senate floor over the shotgun.

North Coast Voices readers may recall that the man behind plans to import the Turkish-made gun is Robert Nioa, the son-in-law of Bob Katter. 

Will Northern Rivers residents be able to believe what they read in many local newspapers in 2017?

Rupert Murdoch and News Corp own The Wall Street Journal.

According to @TerrySerioThe Wall Street Journal on the left was circulated in New York, while the one on the right was circulated in Texas, USA.

Murdoch and Newscorp now own The Daily Examiner, The Northern Star, Coastal Views, Northern Rivers Echo, Ballina Shire Advocate, Byron Shire News, Tweed Daily News and Rural Weekly which circulate in the NSW Northern Rivers region.

How reliable will the news content of these newspapers be in 2017?