Ode to joy

Belching Criminals

As if it wasn't enough to outlaw lightbulbs, banning black cars, throwing out your new cars and sending up planes with infra-red cameras to spy on citizens energy usage, here we have the latest insanity inspired by The Warming Hoax (thankfully at this stage still contained in the UK, but watch how this idea will spread faster than swine flu...)

From The Times (May 24, 2009):

"Government advisers are developing menus to combat climate change by cutting out “high carbon” food such as meat from sheep, whose burping poses a serious threat to the environment."

So we have now moved away from blaming farting cows as the biggest CO2 producer but now pointing the sharp kebab stick of blame to the widdle innocent lambs

“We are not saying that everyone should become vegetarian or give up drinking but moving towards less carbon intensive foods will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve health,” said Kennedy."

To paraphrase the late Charles Heston, you can take this kebab from me when you pry it out of my cold-slightly-overweight-due-to eating-too much-carbon-intensive-food dead hands.

A final word from our sponsor, and my official response to David Kennedy "chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change"

Burping Sheep or Climate Change Criminal? You decide...

An Inconvenient Insight

A typical Honda Insight driver	VS	Jeremy Clarkson

(via http://www.metafilter.com/)

Jeremy Clarkson's review on the new Honda Insight. This is a man who loves cars. He does not love the Honda Insight:

It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

Other than the fact that this car seems like total P.O.S, he eloquently puts his finger on the biggest issue associated with this car and it's target demographic:

"The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

Why doesn’t he just buy a Range Rover, which is made from local components, just down the road? No, really — weird-beards buy locally produced meat and vegetables for eco-reasons. So why not apply the same logic to cars? "

Read the whole thing

The politicisation of torture

UPDATE: 3/9/09 - fixed Clinton crosshairs link

It’s curious how you often find reading matter that conforms to your own views. To whit, Thomas Sowell’s column at townhall.com (yes, a conservative site to those a bit squeamish) talking about the revisited (and remanufactured) anger over torture memos, torturing, and all the other evils that the W. Bush regime visited on the world. Specifically about how Obama’s administration has now left open the door for prosecution of US personnel over what has been alleged (and probably occurred) at Gitmo. The crux of the column:

“We have already turned loose dozens of captured terrorists, who have resumed their terrorism. Why? Because they have been given "rights" that exist neither in our laws nor under international law.”

Why do those voices (predominately coming from the Left) demand rights to those who do not operate under the Geneva Convention? Why is it so important to ensure that head-sawing barbarians have ‘human rights’ that they so explicitly deny anyone who gets in their way?

“These are not criminals in our society, entitled to the protection of the Constitution of the United States. They are not prisoners of war entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. “

There was a time when people who violated the rules of war were not entitled to turn around and claim the protection of those rules. German soldiers who put on U.S. military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge, were simply lined up against a wall and shot. “

Why was David Hicks, who was caught fighting with the Taliban, not shot on the spot? He wasn’t in uniform (the Taliban don’t have a “uniform” nor are recognized officially) and as I have previously argued, the Taliban are hardly the types to subscribe to Geneva Conventions or any other recognizably humane code of conduct, so therefore do not deserve to have such protections given to them.

“In his visit to CIA headquarters, President Obama pledged his support to the people working there and said that there would be no prosecutions of CIA agents for prior actions. Then he welshed on that in a matter of hours by leaving the door open for such prosecutions, which the left has been clamoring for, both inside and outside of Congress.”

The argument of whether to torture or not to torture is a larger topic than this particular post, however the politicization of CIA interrogations carried out in the last 7 years will have a very real impact on how the US (and by proxy the West) conducts itself in future conflicts. Guantanemo and tough interrogation techniques are not symptoms of the US and the West losing their moral bearings, more responding to extraordinary circumstances. Besides, is it so important to hold the "moral high ground" if your dead?

To politicise the governmental advice, because you feel that being the leader of the free world is not vindication enough, seems to be rather childish and spiteful. Clinton literally had crosshairs on Osama, but decided for whatever reason, not to pull the trigger. Fast forward 1 year, and there's a smoking crater in Manhattan and 3,000 dead people. There was never any question of pursuing Clinton or his administration for what could be argued as the worlds most obvious case of gross negligence. Allowing criminal charges to be brought up against lawyers who simply advised the prior administration is waste of time, money and resources that could be put to better use.

In this brand new era of Hope and Change™, I thought we were getting beyond the era of old school politics, but it seems like we're just repeating the same ol' same ol'.

The morality of group sex

Every man and his dog is giving up their 2c on this topic (your humble author included thanks to this post), yet this column had an 'interesting' take.

Clearly not satisfied with the explicit details available thanks to round-the-clock media coverage, he opens his column taking a swipe at what Matthew Johns' told his wife:

"I don't know what rugby league legend Matthew Johns told his missus about the night he and a bunch of drunken no-necks showed their true form in New Zealand seven years ago.

But on the strength of it, she's sticking around. "

Given the fact that his wife could pickup any Australian newspaper and find out all the details she wants, one would think that by insulting Johns and his wife on this moot point is a little more spiteful than necessary.

A little bit further on, he talks about the "victim" (being the woman) at the centre of this scandal and how the Rugby players treated her:

"Of course, they didn't love her. They didn't like her. They didn't know her."

So now "love" is an essential ingredient for (group) sex?? This is an interesting moral standpoint, albeit an old fashioned one. But I digress; his hatred for this kind of professional sporting culture screams at you and I believe it colours what sensible points he could have made, and forces him to make an extraordinary claim:

"Trish Johns, who clearly has a strong stomach, says her now jobless husband "told me very specifically every last detail of his involvement in the incident and I believed him".
...
"Trish Johns should come clean about the other names. Her contemptibly weak husband refuses to. "

Does a wife or partner, not directly implicated in this issue, have any 'moral' directive in airing other couples dirty laundry?!? Would Mr Howe be happy if his wife/partner came forward to the media to help put the boot in if he was accused of a crime? It's a bloody stupid thing to say and if Trish Johns wants to stay with her husband and keep mum about charges brought forward in the court of public opinion by a disturbed woman, then that's her business.

Professional footy/rugby culture has a real problem in Australia, as pretty much any institution that gives 20 year olds 6 figure salaries and no oversight. There are plenty of good arguments to be made on reforming the culture and criticising the boys locker room mentality that seems to grab all the headlines. However taking shots at Trish Johns is not acceptable, and Mr Howe should keep his nose out the Johns' bedroom.

Things that make you go hmmm....

Further to my post about Mr Calma attending the UN anti racist-hatefest, and the confusion as to why someone representing Australia would attend, when the "official" government position was to boycott the conference. In an Andrew Bolt column on Rudd's post-PM ambitions, there was a sentence that caught my eye:

"He [Rudd] also waited until the last minute to pull out of a UN anti-racism conference last month rather than lead in condemning what was in fact a festival of hatred for Israel."

By all accounts, ALL the media coverage about Mr Calma attending was of the "shock and surprise" that a public servant would dissent from the official position. What is of concern is if Mr Rudd did in fact want an Australian presence there but could publicly decry it. The presence could serve as part of Rudd's future campaign to a UN posting whilst his public announcements would serve as a signal to the Aussie electorate that he is taking the "proper" stance.

Let me reiterate, the Durban II conference was nothing but the clearest indication that the UN project is failing allowing the most racist, most tyrrannical regimes in the world a voice to criticise liberal democracies for their alleged failings in human rights. In the end it just results in a lightly worded condemnation of Israel, which most of the world ignores. The wikipedia entry
demonstrates that the problems with this conference are well documented, and I would argue that the correct position was for Australia to boycott. However if it turns out that Mr Calma attended with the tacit acceptance of Big Kev, solely to improve his chances at being elected the
big cheese at the UN after his term as PM, then you might want to ask exactly what other decisions and policy positions he is taking with this aim in mind...

Increasing sales of Uranium to the Chinese?
Introducing an Emissions Trading Scheme?

Can I use "internationalist" as a pejorative term?

Things that make you go hmmm..
(picture source)

Rice wine

Friday on the herald-sun photo gallery, we have pictures of a recent live fire exercise Chong Ju by the Australian Army. Although I could only find a press release for the last Chong Ju in 2007 with some groovy photos, I assume that these herald sun pics are of a more recent exercise.

What grabbed my attention was the name: Chong ju. A fairly specific name for an Australian Army exercise. A bit of research (0K…0.2 seconds of Googling) revealed the following:

• It is the name of a battle that 3RAR(An Australian regiment) was involved in in the Korean War in 1950
• It is the name of city in South Korea:
• It is the name of a US maintained forward deployment air base in South Korea
• It’s Korean rice wine

Cheong-ju rice wine

I’ll leave it up to you to work out if perhaps the naming is a subtle message to certain crazed regime somewhere off the mainland of china. And just in case my readers think this is a bit far fetched, let me propose a not so hypothetical:

In 2003, a North Korean cargo ship “Pong Su” moored offshore near Lorne, Victoria was seized after being used to smuggle heroin into Australia.

In 2006, the Australian Government decided to get rid of the ship. Did they:

a. Send it to a ship recycling yard to re-use the scrap metal?
b. Refurbish it and sell it to a shipping company?
c. Tow it 200kms off shore and send in an F1-11 with laser guided bombs to blow the ship up?

Answer here

Article here

Zombie Ants

No really, this is a post about real-life zombie ants.

The headline: "Parasitic flies turn fire ants into zombies"

"It sounds like something out of science fiction: zombie fire ants. But it's all too real.
Fire ants wander aimlessly away from the mound.
Eventually their heads fall off, and they die."

And if that's not freaky enough for ya, apparently this type of thing happens in nature...

From here:

"On the night before the parasites kill their host, events take a bizarre turn. Through some unknown mechanism, the larvae compel their host spider to build a web that is very different from that it has always constructed before. Instead of a flat, round web, the spider builds a stout, reinforced platform which is much smaller. Once the new web is complete, the larvae kill their host, and cocoon themselves on the structure. "

Seriously. @#$%ing. scary.

With Apologies to A.A. Milne