Notional Misconduct

Let's play pretend!

2010-02-22T20:10:00.000+11:00

So from this article, I followed the link to the quoted "Harper's magazine" article and found the following nuggets:

But Kyoto also allows companies to purchase “offsets,” credits from emissions-reducing projects in developing countries. Such projects, which currently account for as much as a third of total tradable credits, are overseen not by the E.U. but by the United Nations.

That would be the UN, that most august and incorruptible organization that has brought you such examples of good governance and oversight such as the Oil-for-food and Sex-for-food scandals. Yup, they're the ones who are going to be overseeing the running of planet Earths' developed industries.

And unlike traditional commodities, which sometimes during the course of their market exchange must be delivered to someone in physical form, the carbon market is based on the lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no one.

I would bet this the first time in history that such an audacious snake-oil sales pitch has ever had such a global scope. Re-read that paragraph, let the understanding of the market for pretend goods sink in.

According to a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the margin of error in measuring emissions from the cement and fertilizer industries can be as high as 10 percent. For the oil, gas, and coal industries, the margin of error is 60 percent; and for some agricultural processes, the margin of error can actually reach 100 percent.

+/- 100% ??!?!?! In what field of human achievement is an error rate of +/- 100% remotely acceptable? Hell, even +/- 60% ??? Yet this is the program the UN wants the entire world to sign on to.

Also the article mentions that Goldman Sachs now hosts a carbon trading desk and is intimately involved with the setup of carbon offsets market in the US. That would be the same Goldman Sachs that aided the Greek government in cooking the books that has precipitated the current Euro(€) crisis and the possible collapse of the Greek economy.

Indeed, carbon exists as a commodity only through the decisions of politicians and bureaucrats, who determine both the demand, by setting emissions limits, and the supply, by establishing criteria for offsets.

So the entire carbon trading "market" has been invented out of thin air by people who's primary job is to lie, policed by a multinational with a reputation of dodgy accounting on nationwide scales, overseen by the world's most corrupt organisation.

What could possibly go wrong?

"World Encircler"

2009-12-31T09:27:00.001+11:00


Apophis	Apophis	Apophis

Apep, the Egyptian demon of Chaos, also known as Apophis, 'Evil Lizard','Enemy of Ra', 'World Encircler' and 'Serpent of Rebirth' (source). He was a demon of the unknown and frightening events, and was so feared that he was never pictured as he 'appeared' so as to avoid giving the drawing magical demon power, so was often depicted as a water-snake. He battled the Sun-god "Ra" daily just beneath the horizon and solar eclipses were "interpreted as a victory of Apep over Ra".

Apophis is also the name of an asteroid (full designation: 99942 Apophis) that NASA estimates to have a 2.7% chance of hitting the earth in 2029. And factors such as "sunlight", a gravity sweet spots may push Apophis a couple of Earth lengths left or right. And assuming it misses Earth in 2029, the closeness of the 'miss' could alter the trajectory on it's return flight in 2036. The calculations are so complex that the NASA boffins cannot with a reasonable degree of confidence tell us where Apophis will end up in 2036...at this time. They will have to recalculate if and when the near miss occurs.

(But don't worry they can tell us with a "high" degree of certainty with a similar if not more complex system what the weather will be like in a 100 years or so...)

Here's an Apophis-eye view of what we hope is a miss:

Should the cosmic pinball game that is our solar system run in such a way that planet Earth becomes the 5000 point bumper, our Egyptian/NASA friends will indeed have aptly named the "World Encircler" as Apophis will have finally overcome his sworn enemy Ra (our sun) by causing a world-wide blackout:

“Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis... would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.”

Oh yeah, and the best bit? The date of the "fly-by" in 2029...April, Friday the 13th.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!

Exploding Sandcastles

2009-12-24T06:05:00.002+11:00

Going away for a couple weeks. Postings will be light until January.

Have a Merry Xmas and great New Year and try not to let Global Warming kill you.

Here's some backwards exploding sandcastles...

Ninjas hijacked my mother

2009-12-22T12:23:00.002+11:00

And something about apple juice...

(via DavidThompson)

Drugs

2009-12-21T10:21:00.001+11:00

A very interesting infographic from the creator of the blog Information is Beautiful.

Using data sourced from the reporting in The Guardian. There are some surprising results.

Check out the complete picture and post available here

Red Green - Green Red

2009-12-20T07:54:00.001+11:00

A common meme among right-wing blogs and other 'denialist' medium regarding the single minded obsession of the environmentalists, is this idea that socialism didn't die in 1989, it just transferred itself to the Green movement (something the co-founder of Greenpeace agrees with) and subsequently underpins the naked hypocrisy and power grab that has become the movement to STOP THE WARMING.

Well to put all that malarkey to rest, here's what happened in Carbonhagen this week when Hugo Chavez, el Presidente for life of Venezuela spoke at COP 15(emphasis mine):

“our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

Lord Monckton who alerted the world to the in-text tyranny of the Carbonhagen treaty, had asked the current PM of the Czech Republic Dr Vaclav Klaus about the 'communistic' tendency of the treaty, and his response was:

“Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.”

And this is from a dude who lived under a Communist regime.

Now where is my tin-foil hat...

Tweepocrisy

2009-12-19T17:45:00.001+11:00

Ms Ross and her husband Steven, who is in the Air Force, have said they want to be left alone to mourn their son.

This from the woman who tweeted her son's dying moments...

The TV Show

2009-12-18T10:25:00.000+11:00

Breakdancers, masked bandits, Godzilla, wars, baseball games, and a TV master control room. And that's only in the first 10 seconds....

Burka Barbie

2009-12-15T16:37:00.001+11:00

From the Daily Mail:

"One of the world's most famous children's toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover - wearing a burkha.

Wearing the traditional Islamic dress, the iconic doll is going undercover for a charity auction in connection with Sotheby's for Save The Children."

So to follow the thinking of the designers of Barbie's 50th Anniversary collection, let's dress up Barbie in clothes that represent the most misogynistic and oppressive political ideas, and then sell it at a charity to help the children.

'I know Barbie was something seen as bad before as an image for girls, but in actual fact the message with Barbie for women is you can be whatever you want to be.'

progress...

Why the burka is so objectionable is explained by Mark Steyn

"The burka, the niqab and the hijab are not fashion statements but explicitly political ones, and what they symbolize in a Western context is self-segregation."

On a supposedly unrelated note, Obama's "Safe School Czar" has a recommended reading list of books for children of all grades. Some of the books

weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers...

The point being that whilst the existence of both the toy and the books aren't necessarily too disturbing in and of themselves, but the values they are promoting to children are perhaps not the ones we as society should be.

I wonder what little girls in Afghanistan think of the Barbie...

Lethal Weapon - Lego edition

2009-12-13T12:26:00.000+11:00

From this:

"I was surrounded by about 6 SWAT guys armed with shotguns and assault rifles. At this point it seemed like a good idea to inquire why I might be in custody. Apparently I had been reported with a gun."

Do not underestimate the power of Lego....

Who throws a shoe??!?

2009-12-11T10:23:00.000+11:00

Remember that "hero" Iraqi journalist that deployed an I.S.P (Improvised Shoe Projectile) at George W. Bush last year? Well, what goes around, comes around.

He who lives by the shoe…may get hit by the shoe

Ask not for whom the shoe throws, it is being thrown at thee….

He who has the last shoe throw…will walk home in socks

From Storyballoon (via Newsbusters)

Judgement

2009-12-10T09:22:00.001+11:00

From this story:

"I'm angry. I'm hurt," Bellamy said. "You shouldn't judge someone based on who they are."

Say what?

Disconnect

2009-12-08T12:55:00.002+11:00

Last week, the Swiss people voted to change the national constitution to ban the constructions of minarets, the distinctive spires on the top of many (but not all) mosques. Switzerland has a type of 'direct democracy' where referendums can be be held for the people to vote on ANY legislation. The majority party, Swiss People Party (SVP) were driving the campaign, and 57.5% of voters voted in favor of the ban, contrary to the results of opinion polls on the vote.

Of course, the Swiss were roundly condemned by their own politicians, and of course the UN condemn it, the EU are critical, the Vatican criticize it (?!?!), the Egyptians believe it is a "grave mistake", the Maltese believe it "is a violation of human rights and religious freedom" and that bastion of human rights and religious tolerance, Iran believe it is an Islamaphobic act, which of course was backed up with a threat, and the Norwegians likened the swiss to Nazis (which given Switzerland's history *cough*WWII*cough* ... well enough said about that)

Norwegian newspaper "Dagsavien" front page, Monday 30th November, 2009
(picture source)

Automatic accusations of "Islamophobia" and racism flew thick and fast with Europe's elites were shocked (shocked!!!) that the Swiss people would resent what they see as the creeping Islamization of their society. And what becomes clear is the disconnect between the policies advocated by politicians, and what the "common people" think. The refusal of mainstream European political parties to talk about issues that are considered to sensitive to mention, is opening the door to extreme right-wing parties to garner public support. Much in the same way the refusal of Australian political parties to talk frankly and openly about immigration allowed a racist fishmonger to get elected to parliament 13 years ago. The Swiss People's Party cannot be compared to the UK's BNP, or France's Le Pen, as they are the majority mainstream party, so the reactions around Europe (and the World) demonstrates how disconnected the agenda of the European elites is vs their own citizens.

SVP Minaret ban poster (picture source)

Some delusions from columnists in The Guardian:

"Populist demagogues blame political, cultural, and commercial elites for the anxieties of the modern world. They are accused, not entirely without reason, of imposing mass immigration, economic crisis, and loss of national identity on ordinary citizens. But if the elites are hated for causing our modern malaise, the Muslims are envied for still having faith, for knowing who they are, for having something that is worth dying for."

(yeah it's the fact that Muslims "have faith" that the masses are jealous of, nothing to do with the specifics of their religious practice.... I think we have here is the first occurrence of Jihad-envy)

And some insightful introspectiveness, from of all places, Indonesia (in an article entitled "Thanking the Swiss Vote"):

"Frankly speaking, we expected more from the Swiss in their vote whether to endorse a government ban on minarets.
...
If a nation as peaceful as Switzerland sees the minaret as a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism, how do other nations who are less tolerant see this symbol of Islam?"

And thanks to this vote, these issues are now being discussed. Taj Hargey in The Times (UK):

"Muslims who have settled in Switzerland (and elsewhere in Europe) should not confuse culture with creed. To become integrated into their surroundings, they must relinquish the cultural baggage of their ancestral homelands. They should practice a Swiss Islam that is rooted in the society in which they live.
Although the Swiss have been convinced by right-wing zealots that minarets are a problem, local Muslims should not embrace a victim mentality. They must confront the toxic radicalisation of their faith that is imported from overseas."

It's no wonder the Swiss want to ban minarets...they're starting to grow on people's heads.
(picture source)

How a conspiracy unfolds

2009-12-05T10:54:00.001+11:00

One of the major questions I get asked about my Warming denialist beliefs is how could there be a global conspiracy of scientists and politicians pushing an agenda if the "facts" aren't in? Well the leak of the CRU emails, or "Climategate" as it is now known, shows precisely how and why this came about.

The answer is, as in any detective story, follow the money.

Brett Stephens from the Wall Street Journal:

“Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums.
...
None of these outfits is per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.”

Why this is such an incredible scandal is precisely because these scientists/politicians (or as I like to call them "activists") want to re-order the world economy and political structures based on the premise that man-made CO2 output is affecting the world's climate. Nothing short of "re-structuring" (read: handicapping) the developed worlds economies and establishing one global government to manage the world's industries will do. You think I'm tin-foil-hat-conspiracy mongering?

Let me quote from the UN's own IPCC "Ad hoc working group on long-term copperative action under the convention" document, or what is known as the proposed Copenhagen treaty (page 18):

"38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:

(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate"

Did you know that the Copenhagen conference was attempting to establish a "government"?

Lord Monckton (an adviser of Margaret Thatcher) said in an address in October:

"I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement."

Video of the presentation:

You would think that if changes of this nature to the world economy and political structures are that important you would want to make sure you get your facts right. Thus the importance of the CRU leaked documents cannot be underestimated, even to to the point where total left-wing greenies are now demanding explanation. Clive Crook from The Atlantic (definitely not a right-wing rag - emphasis mine):

“I'm also surprised by the IPCC's response. Amid the self-justification, I had hoped for a word of apology, or even of censure. (George Monbiot called for Phil Jones to resign, for crying out loud.) At any rate I had expected no more than ordinary evasion. The declaration from Rajendra Pachauri that the emails confirm all is as it should be is stunning. Science at its best. Science as it should be. Good lord. This is pure George Orwell. And these guys call the other side "deniers".

“These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards--at least whenever "the science" calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some independent oversight to go along with the higher standards. “

So what has happened this week thanks to Climategate?

Phil Jones, the head of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit has stepped down.
Al Gore has canceled his Copenhagen USD $1,200 per handshake event
In The Guardian, one of the loudest Warm-mongers and fellow comrade-in-arms to Al Gore, Dr James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (also implicated in Climategate) has said that the Copenhagen Climate talks must fail
And Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled a scary new climate change map.

The Terminator talks about the end of the world...for Californians

Lego Matrix

2009-12-04T12:38:00.004+11:00

Genius...

Unintended Irony

2009-12-02T10:00:00.000+11:00

In 1731, a man called John Hadley published a paper to the Royal Society describing a new instrument for measuring angles. Hadley’s quadrants (also known as the “octant”) were so successful because they allowed a much greater accuracy in measuring longitude and latitude. His brother, George Hadley was in charge of meteorological observations for the Royal Society and had contributed to the theory of “Trade Winds”.

An octant - the very picture of accurate measurements circa 1731
(picture source)

It is after George Hadley that the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change is named. From their own website they are:

“the UK’s foremost climate change research centre. We produce world-class guidance on the science of climate change and provide a focus in the UK for the scientific issues associated with climate change.”

The Met Office Hadley Centre, in cooperation with the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit helped to develop some scary (yet now well debunked) temperature graphs that were used to scare politicians into believing in The Warming. In fact, from the link it appears that the CRU only used the Hadley Centre’s data in formulating the booga-booga temperature graphs.

Booga-booga-you're-all-gonna-die-unless-we-tax-the-living-shit-out-of-everyone
hockey stick graph (picture source)

From a man who helped the world by providing more accurate measurements, to a "research institute" that profanes his name by supplying ‘less than accurate measurements’ (which, due to some unfortunate circumstances, are now lost forever).

The biggest scientific fraud of the century has begun to unravel thanks to leaked emails of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and their brothers in arms at the Hadley Centre.

Ah Irony, thy name is hockey stick.

Is this the face of a murderer?

2009-12-01T16:56:00.000+11:00

Well according to Bolivian police (and Bolivian TV stations), yes it is. And the best thing about it? It's ushered in a whole new era of witness protection technology.

This is apparently real footage recorded off Bolivian TV. I can't really vouch for it, but damn it makes a funny video:

Man-caused disasters

2009-12-01T15:07:00.000+11:00

I have written about the poison Political Correctness has injected into the public discourse, but the US media coverage, nay the US army's handling, of the Ft Hood massacre demonstrates how deep the toxins have penetrated. Right from the top where Obama counselled the US "not to rush to judgement" to a news anchor whining(!) that the "alleged" Ft Hood shooter's last name wasn't "Smith".

And even though the shooter wasn't shy about his own reasons for going postal; from his business cards , to a powerpoint presentation he gave a couple of years ago to Army doctors, to his "battle cry" as he slaughtered unarmed people, the head of the freakin US army is more concerned about the possible adverse effect to the army's "diversity":

“Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,” Casey said."

Imagine that...losing "diversity" is much worse than the slaughter of 13 people and an unborn baby.

And the excuses continue, from Charles Krauthammer:

“And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won't find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as "compassion fatigue." The poor man -- pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.”

The guy all but fixed a flashing neon sign above his head saying "I want to kill lots of Americans", yet as a serving Major in the US army, his colleagues were too damn scared to adversely affect their careers by speaking out against a Muslim.

(picture source)

The idea of scientific enquiry

2009-11-30T16:48:00.000+11:00

The much touted peer reviewed scientific consensus on AGW ( or as I like to call it ... cue the scary music...."The Warming") has been under sustained attack all week thanks to a "hacker" (or more likely a whistleblower) releasing thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. These dudes, along with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies have been the primary pushers of the theory that man-made activities have pumped so much CO2 in the air that it has caused planet Earth to warm up.

Now I have my beefs with the science and the premise (as detailed in all my previous posts here) however, this post is not about that.

This is about how the process of science has been perverted in the name of a political agenda. When the most vocal proponent of The Warming (apart from the Goracle and his immediate circle) George Monbiot is publicly acknowledging the damage of the leak (in the pages of The Guardian no less!!), one would hope governments, NGOs and the disgraceful UN would 'recalibrate', however there is too much money and power at stake for an about face.

So instead of a public mea culpa from the scientists who have been caught red-handed "hiding the decline" via email conversations, we have endless arguments about the definition of "trick":

"Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all."

And how the words "hiding the decline" don't actually mean what you think it means. This also doesn't explain away the very clear, precise and unambiguous programmer's comments in the code.

However, to get a full understanding of how the actions of the staff at CRU are bordering on criminal and how badly they have damaged their cause, read this posting from a guy who attempted to get the data from the 'scientists' at the CRU to replicate their results...you know, how science is supposed to work...

"Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand."
...
This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.

Read it all. It's long, but if you have the time, it's worth it.

World's. Biggest. DUH!

2009-11-30T07:46:00.001+11:00

From The Guardian (re: those hacked emails):

“Jones said the timing of the theft suggested it was intended to cause maximum embarrassment ahead of the Copenhagen climate talks next month: "One has to wonder if it is a coincidence that this email correspondence has been stolen and published at this time. This may be a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks."

Pollen Photography

2009-11-29T12:45:00.000+11:00

Some very nice pictures...of pollen. (via Metafilter)

Check out the gallery

Everyday Normal Guy 2

2009-11-27T09:16:00.000+11:00

"I like red peppers better than the green ones"

Cause for Pause

2009-11-26T07:23:00.000+11:00

From an article supporting The Warming:

"Those emission estimates are not very accurate compared to high-calibration devices," says Michael Woelk, CEO of Picarro, a California-based manufacturer of such a device for measuring CO2 emissions. "No country today is using scientific instruments to monitor and calibrate the effect of policy," not even the European Union, which has an emissions trading scheme for greenhouse gases.”

Yet here we are, in Australia, about to pass legislation taxing CO2 output because the gutless and cowardly Opposition is split about whether The Warming is just a load of codswallop, or does spell the end of days. Just in case my emphasis in the previous quote didn't quite hit home, WE CAN'T ACTUALLY MEASURE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ANY TYPE OF LEGISLATION OF CO2.

From The Australian:

“After an all-day debate over climate change, the Opposition Leader unilaterally declared the Coalition would back Kevin Rudd's carbon emissions trading scheme.”

In a one brilliant move, Mr Turnbull has split the Coalition (the Nats are not going to vote for the ETS), split the Liberal party (skeptics ahoy!) because the fear of a double-dissolution and an election called too soon which would inevitably lead to another 4 years in the wilderness,
Turnbull is making a stand on what he believes the Australian electorate wants.

In some ways he is in a damned if you do-damned if you don’t moment. But the timing of the ETS, the manner of the debate on the legislation (ie. minimal due to KRudd wanting to pass this before the Copenhagen Summit), and the revelations of gross scientific malpractice are not stopping this relentless push for higher taxes that people don’t want, won’t be effective, and will hamstring our economy.

Support the ETS, and split the party and coalition = unlikely to win next election and probably lose the position of leader of the party.

Don't support the ETS, keep the coalition and party together = electorate believe that the Liberals wan't to kill Gaia, unlikely to win next election.

Frickin' Airborne Lasers man!

2009-11-25T09:04:00.001+11:00

I present to you the Advanced Tactical Laser:

Target view of a vehicle of the airborne laser.

Videos here.

Hackers, Hoaxes and Hypocrites

2009-11-23T13:29:00.000+11:00

Hackers hack a climate research unit at a university (BBC):

"E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.
A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission."

Content of emails between scientists published on the internet. Emphasis mine:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers Phil
Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx 
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx 
University of East Anglia Norwich
Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx NR4 7TJ 

Headline from Der Spiegel:

"Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time Out"

Baffled I tell you! I mean how the hell can the record NOT show warming when you have such ethical notaries as the scientists quoted in the email cooking the freaking books.

In other words, despite your shonky scientific methods, your rank hypocrisy and false starting premise, and your decade long ability to modify the data to support your case, and yet still the Earth has not shown a warming trend in the last 9 years!?!?

From the Der Spiegel Article:

"The Hadley Center group (aka University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) whence the emails have come from - Jack) expects warming to resume in the coming years. "That resumption could come as a bit of a jolt," says Hadley climatologist Adam Scaife, explaining that natural cyclical warming would then be augmented by the warming effect caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions...and if not, we'll just make shit up until it looks like it.

(I may have added that last part....but I'm sure he was thinking it)

Reassortment

2009-11-22T10:49:00.000+11:00

Reassortment: The rearrangement of genes from two distinct influenza strains to produce a novel viral strain(link).

From this:

“And in the next few weeks, scientists working there are planning to manufacture a new resident. They hope to test whether the highly transmissible pandemic H1N1 virus could reassort with its deadlier cousin, the H5N1 avian flu, to make a virus with the worst properties of both.” (emphasis mine - Jack)

And shortly after they will infect the hamsters with this new super-virus, who will then go on to develop uncontrollable rage at being treated like guinea pigs, kind of like a "rage virus", biting the scientists through their BSL-4 suits, infecting humans...28 days later...zombies. We've all seen the bloody film, why o why make it a reality?

Links:
H5n1 pic source: http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/details.asp
H1n1 pic source: http://www.cdc.gov/H1n1flu/images.htm

Overstatement

2009-11-21T09:02:00.000+11:00

Overstatement of the week:

A decree banning women from wearing trousers in Paris is still technically in force, it emerged on Monday, making the laissez-faire French capital theoretically stricter than hardline Sudan in the fashion stakes.

Using the same logic, the lack of enshrined right to free speech in Australia makes the theoretically open-society of the “sunburnt country” more oppressive than North Korea.

Regular Everyday Normal Guy

2009-11-20T09:13:00.000+11:00

"My parents are really nice people, mothaf*cka!"

Indulgences? Or just eating the dog?

2009-11-19T12:04:00.000+11:00

Other than the (almost-tongue-in-cheek) suggestion that we should get eat our dogs...to save the earth (a joke repeated about 3 times), the scariest thing about this op-ed is the way the author has internalized the idea that the Australian Goverments Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will save the the planet:

"But the politicians' bickering over the emissions trading scheme demonstrates their shameful unwillingness to tackle this incredibly pressing problem."

If it wasn't for the spineless Opposition, this bill should have been dead in the water yonks ago. And if you think that paying the government (in the form of higher taxes) reduce the amount of CO2, well.... how much did the buying of indulgences in the middle ages reduce the incidence of sin?

(picture source)

Vatican Alien Symposium

2009-11-17T22:23:00.000+11:00

Right on the tails of ‘serious scientists’ grappling with the threat of zombies, now the Vatican is holding a conference on “astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth”. The discovery of alien life forms would raise some troublesome issues for Christians, as “God had made Man in His own image” (Genesis 1:27), however according to Paul Davies who will be attending the conference,

“The possibility of extraterrestrial life is not much of an issue for Eastern religions, which tend to be less Earth-centric”

And also mentioned is that Islam apparently allows for the existence of life beyond earth, although having read the Quranic verses quoted, I’m not convinced. The idea that certain followers of Islam, who are famous for their tolerance of fellow humans, would somehow be cooler about ET than say, Pope Benedict XVI, is a little hard to swallow, however I welcome the hypothetical.

Three little "jellyfish" are we...

2009-11-15T18:29:00.000+11:00

Cells subdividing? Jellyfish? A skin care ad with blemishes?

Nope. It's the "Erosion of the south polar residual ice cap"... on Mars.

More really cool pics here.

Douchebags

2009-11-13T13:14:00.000+11:00

Your Friday Funny...

Ft Hood

2009-11-10T19:39:00.001+11:00

From this article:

Other than the fact we have the usual variety of reprobates gleefully celebrating the mass murder that Major Nidal Malik Hasan carried out at Ft Hood, Texas [because the senseless murder of defenseless people adds to the glory of “God”, however you may interpret Him], the real scary sentence in the article is this:

“Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Sunday it's important for the country not to get caught up in speculation about Hasan's Muslim faith, and he has instructed his commanders to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction to the killings at the Texas post.”

Here’s an idea, why not be “on the lookout” for other potential sudden jihadi syndrome/mass murderers to prevent more real deaths, rather than perceived/real/imagined “anti-Muslim reactions”. I would have figured that preventing the very real prospect of more depraved individuals carrying out further attacks was more of a priority than worrying if some beardie-weirdie got teased.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”…no more… however if that weedy kid in 4th grade you teased decides to come to school packing two FN Herstal 5.7mm semi-automatic pistols and starts shooting everybody, well, if we apply the emerging media narrative on Ft Hood, it’s your fault.

Just a bird? or agent from the future?

2009-11-09T19:20:00.002+11:00

From The Age today:

"GENEVA : THE $6.5 billion machine designed to recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time had to be switched off after a bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into it, causing it to overheat."

From the CERN webpage entitled "The safety of the LHC":

"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can achieve an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before, but Nature routinely produces higher energies in cosmic-ray collisions, and the occasional random bird fly-by with a bit of baguette"

(it's entirely possible I may have added something).

So to recap, the most expensive science experiment ever undertaken that is using and observing energies that existed a few moments after the big bang, got broken due to an errant bird and a piece of bread. Call me naive, but surely the nuclear scientists that designed the LHC would have somehow figured for such an eventuality and not had a critical piece of equipment exposed to the outside ??

Or was the bird an agent of the universe from the future, sent back to sabotage our puny efforts at discovering the mysteries of the cosmos?

UPDATE: fixed picture

2012 - The end of the World?...or not?

2009-11-07T11:07:00.000+11:00

1,000 foot tsunamis taking out isolated mountaintop Buddhist monastories, earthquakes splitting the Sistine chapel in half and the St Peter's basilica crashing down on thousands of worshippers, the giant Jesus Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro crumbling and collapsing, the Whitehouse crushed by freakin' aircraft carrier, all of these events depicted in this years ultimate disaster-porn movie "2012"...trailer.

However there are some man-made structures of significance that will be spared:

No Islamic Landmarks Were Harmed in the Making of '2012'

That's a relief....

Wolverine...in 30 seconds

2009-11-06T11:45:00.000+11:00

(via Metafilter)

Altruism

2009-11-04T19:30:00.001+11:00

From here:

"Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes."

Halloween Special - Zombies

2009-10-31T16:12:00.006+11:00

A possible future?

The shambling undead with an insatiable appetite for braaains, blue-grey corpses coming to life to wreak vengeance on the living, mindless automatons that usually overwhelmingly outnumber small pockets of survivors, these are the setups for your average zombie-flick. The ‘first’ zombie film was George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead”, where the shambling un-dead were metaphors for “for homosexual repression, the civil rights movement, feminism, the counterculture, or an unwinnable war in Vietnam” (source)

The zombies have also been made proxies for corporate greed and consumerism
(Resident Evil 1(2002) , Land of the Dead (2005)), class warfare (Day of the Dead (1985)), genetic engineering and worldwide virus pandemics (All the Resident Evils, 28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007)), environmental catastrophe (Silent Hill (2006)) and pretty much any other issue you can think of...oh yeah and death.

It is therefore unsurprising that ‘serious’ scientists and professors have begun to use zombies and the zombie apocalypse for theories in their respective disciplines. First up, a research paper published in Infectious Disease Modeling Research Progress (2009) entitled “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of an outbreak of Zombie infection” (available here).

A "zombie" with the "rage virus" (from "28 days later")

Due to the sheer variety of zombies out there, these professors felt it necessary to define the type of zombie they were dealing with:

“The model zombie is of the classical pop-culture zombie: slow moving, cannibalistic and undead. There are other ‘types’ of zombies, characterised by some movies like 28 Days Later [9] and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead [10]. These ‘zombies’ can move faster, are more independent and much smarter than their classical counterparts.”

And what these scientists have inadvertently stumbled on is the great debate amongst zombie-aficionados, the recent evolution of the fast zombie. Quoting the zombie master par excellence, Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead (2004) in a column for The Guardian:

“You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run.”

Back to the research paper, the scientists used the zombies as a model for any virus outbreak, and using the characteristics of zombies (susceptibility, infectiousness, etc...) they came to some pretty grim conclusions for any surviving humans in the event of the zombie apocalypse.

At this point, Professor of International Politics, Donald W. Drezner published an article for Foreign Policy magazine, “Theory of International Politics and Zombies”, who details various political schools of thought and exactly what they would do in the event of a global zombie pandemic.

For example:

“A structural realist would argue that, because of the uneven distribution of capabilities, some governments will be better placed to repulse the zombies than others.”

or that social constructivists

“would posit that the zombie problem is what we make of it. That is to say, there are a number of possible emergent norms in response to zombies.”

The article is funny and well worth the read. And regardless of your own feelings towards the undead, clearly some serious people are giving it some thought.

Happy Halloween!!!!

A vegetarian zombie - most
likely a social constructivist

Running People

2009-10-30T11:43:00.001+11:00

A disturbing, mesmerizing, repellant yet utterly engrossing, comical and totally weird video of…people..running…in slow motion. (via Metafilter...I think)

Sushi without Japanese

2009-10-28T11:33:00.000+11:00

This is unintentionally funny. In brief, US cities that are commonly held up as role models of ideal "progressive" cities to live in appear to be mostly white.

Using whatever socio-economic indicators to measure these things, amongst the top ten cities in the USA to live in are Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon. So one enterprising "opinion-leading urban success strategist and writer" has looked at the statistics, and found a remarkable correlation between the 'whiteness' of a city and it's consistently high rankings in the top cities to live in in the US of A. The #1 Role Model in environmental and sustainable policies is Portland.

The disconnect between reality and aspirations of Portland has been noted before, here in a 2008 article in the New York Times:

“I’ve been really upset by what I perceive to be Portland’s blind spot in its progressivism,” said Khaela Maricich, a local artist and musician. “They think they live in the best city in the country, but it’s all about saving the environment and things like that. It’s not really about social issues. It’s upper-middle-class progressivism, really.”

I would argue that the "sushi without japanese" phenomena of Portland is exactly what "upper-middle-class progressivism" is all about, and this idea that 'diversity' should be pursued simply because diversity=Good, is a form of insincere self-righteous preening that is the exclusive purview of certain vegetarians, Toyota Prius drivers and Obama voters ("I voted for Obama so I can't be racist")

The strangest thing I came across whilst researching this was that I found Americans openly rank cities based on progressiveness where progressiveness is defined by the proportion of people who voted Green or for the Democrats, and the city council's policies on the environment and global warming, and all the usual feel-good/do almost nothing measures that inevitably follow. I find it very strange that you would choose a city based on conformity of views..."Yeah I was going to move to Sydney but they vote so Labour that I decided on Cairns instead".

And in proving that real-life does not lack humour, here is a screenshot of the Oregonian
viewed at 11:04am (AEST) 27/10/09. No racist stereotypes here, no sir....

Afghanistan

2009-10-27T08:53:00.000+11:00

Some amazing photojournalism from Afghanistan. Link here.

Genocide 4 Gaia

2009-10-26T20:43:00.004+11:00

To prove the anti-human motive behind the hoax formerly known as Global Warming, an editorial in the Guardian states:

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children.

From amorality to barking mad:

As Rachel Baird, who works on climate change for Christian Aid, says: "Often in the countries where the birth rate is highest, emissions are so low that they are not even measurable. Look at Burkina Faso." So why ask them to pay in unborn children for our profligacy?

Yeah why not? Lets get the Burkino Fasolians to offset our babies. Because of the environmental utopia that is Burkino Faso has only a little bit of "ethnic conflict" despite the presence of more than 9,000 UN forces (source CIA World Factbook)

Back to the Guardian:

Could children perhaps become part of an adult's personal carbon allowance?

It was only just recently that they banned incandescent light bulbs. A few short years from light bulbs to children. And just in case you think this crazy man is talking about 'others':

By today's standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis.

A cull of Australians or Americans?!!? Another word for a "cull" of any group of humans defined by race, ethnicity or nationality is..."genocide". It used to be that genocide was not something you mentioned in polite company. Now it is being advocated as a 'cure' to the Warming. One hopes common sense will prevail before the developed world goes too far down the rabbit hole.

Another take down by Mark Steyn.

It's the !@#ing Count!!!

2009-10-23T06:54:00.000+11:00

It's an oldie but worth it...

Future present

2009-10-21T17:01:00.000+11:00

"I have suggested that supernovae are the industrial accidents of advanced civilisations."
--Arthur C. Clarke, October 2007

An element of the Large Hadron Collider (picture source)

Question: What happens when you try to create Higgs boson particle?
Answer: The creation of an observable Higgs boson particle is so abhorrent to the Universe that at some point in the future, when walking monkeys on some minuscule planet in an outer-spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy discover how to do it, the Universe reaches back across time and prevents this happening.

At least that’s what two physicists have claimed in a research paper entitled “Search for Effect for Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider”

The CERN project (of which I had previously written about here) known as the Large Hadron Collider is a machine 27km big that attempts to collide two beams of protons together to observe the resulting explosion and expand our knowledge of the universe or something to that effect. A successful collision would apparently enable physicists to observe the Higgs boson particle.

The Higgs boson particle is a theoretical particle that will ”explain the origin of mass in the universe” (thanks wikipedia). Scientist haven’t seen it (yet), but our current understanding of particle physics predicts it. Particle physics is the research of subatomic particles. Yeah, that explains it.....

The physicist propose an experiment involving a deck of ‘decision cards’ (ie “Run LHC experiment” or “For God’s sake you puny mortals, don’t even attempt this experiment -- yours truly, a future Higgs boson particle”) to model various probabilities whether to run the LHC or not, they suggest that the current difficulties in getting the LHC working, and also what happened to the ill-fated US SSC, may be as a result of future Universe affecting the present.

How can they say this? Well, according to the theory of General Relativity and and the Standard Model of Particles, time travel is theoretically possible:

“Particles and their antiparticles can also be thought of as being the same entity travelling in opposite directions in time.”

In plain english, the physicists are saying that in the future, when a Higgs boson particle is created, the consequence of this is so great that we are feeling the effects of it in the past (ie. now).

Here is a simple diagram I created to show this:

see?!? simple...

Not that I'm suggesting that this experiment could cause a supernova, as the Arthur C. Clarke quote above might imply, although if you happen to be running an experiment that requires so much energy that you have to schedule it around the energy supply of an entire continent, to term a mishap "an industrial accident" may be waaayyy understating it. From the previous article:

"All of this means that when something goes wrong—even something small—there's a very real chance that it will go wrong in a big way."

And a much scarier sentence a little bit further on:

"That's not to say that we have no idea what will happen; rather, there are a range of possibilities, some of which may be out of reach of the energies created by the LHC."

One hopes all the experiments go exactly. to. plan.

Links:

The New York Times article
The website of the ill-fated Supercolliding SuperConductor
Wikipedia page on Supernova

Deep in the Matrix

2009-10-19T11:32:00.000+11:00

A Toyota car ad

Making international headlines last week was “Woman Sues Toyota over terrifying Prank” :

In a lawsuit filed Sept. 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Amber Duick claims she had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work during March and April of last year after she received e-mails for five days from a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police.

I wanted to know how a marketing campaign could have gone so wrong (or perhaps “so right”)? And although no one has ever become poor by underestimating the stupidity of people, I was curious how a marketing campaign could provoke such a reaction. From a country with a history of people suing advertisers (like this one where a man sued the makers of Bud Light for making ads involving tropical fantasies of beautiful women coming to life, because, and I'm dead serious here, he didn't have that experience when consuming Bud Light), I initially assumed that the woman suing Toyota was, how you say…a couple of beers short of a six-pack?

A Toyota car ad

But researching campaign, I noted that it was not just TV or Radio ads, but fake MySpace profiles, print ads,personalized email spam, text messages, phone calls....

I'll let the Art Director responsible for the campaign describe it to you (short flash video). It's worth checking it out as it is a very involved campaign.

In brief: How it works is that someone would sign up one of their friends selecting one of the 5 "maniacs", and then that friend would be spammed with a variety of personalized communications by said maniac, and in the case above, threaten to come and live at their house and get them to help pay for hotel damage bills.

The campaign was targeting the 35 year old males demographic, with no life commitments and are "sick of advertising". Keeping this in mind, it's no wonder that a clever campaign like this managed to avoid looking like advertising, thereby "terrorizing" unwitting participants, however I'm not quite sure Saatchi & Saatchi are culpable, and I'm not sure it's fair to accuse the women of stupidity. The campaign was designed to be a disturbing prank, and it succeeded. Blending the power of Web 2.0 technologies and slick personalized advertising messages, it blurred the distinction we consumers have come to understand between advertising and 'real-life'. Despite the lawsuit (in fact I would argue because of the lawsuit) expect more clever campaigns like this in the future.

A Toyota car ad

Links

A couple of the "maniacs" MySpace pages:
http://www.myspace.com/racoonie
http://www.myspace.com/sakura_on_fire

A video with another description of the case:
http://www.autonews.com/article/20091002/ANA08/910029986/1221/mobile&template=art4

The breakdown of the “Your other You” campaign is described here:
http://tmspreview.com/yoycampaign/

A further discussion of the campaign:
http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com/2008/04/addesign-toyota-matrix-campaign-who_06.html

The Art director's website:
http://www.nickluckett.com/matrix-your-other-you/

Picture sources
http://adverlicio.us/toyota_matrix_sebastians_academy_of_pub_fighting_728x90_unbranded
http://blog.signalnoise.com/?p=265

Another clever Toyota Matrix campaign
http://www.marketingmag.ca/english/creative/featuredcampaign/article.jsp?content=20080430_142446_9020

An awesome website dedicated to ridiculous lawsuits:
http://facesoflawsuitabuse.org/

Getting people to...care

2009-10-17T09:51:00.001+11:00

From The New York Times:

The money sentence:

"Getting people to care about a climate threat that is decades away is hard enough, they say, without adding in the vagaries of natural climate cycles."

How about that? Imagine colouring this debate with facts of "natural climate cycles"??!?! I don’t know why it hasn’t been tried before….

It has to be noted that the brain trust that came up with the above statement were “social scientists”, clearly THE authorities on climate related problems.

Friggin Space Traffic

2009-10-16T06:53:00.000+11:00

Watch it to the end...

BBC Warming up to skeptics

2009-10-13T18:45:00.000+11:00

A skeptical Warming article on the BBC? Didn't think I'd see the day.

Entitled "What happened to Global Warming?", the article publishes a fact that the IPCC and it's many Global Warming Hysterics have yet to admit, that the Earth has not warmed in the last 11 years, and the hottest years "on record" is 1998.

"And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Admitting the blatant inaccuracies of climate models AND the inconsistencies of our carbon-dioxide models..in the same sentence?? Please note that the Australian Government is trying to rush through legislation for an Emissions Trading Scheme (E.T.S) which will affect all Australian households and business based on carbon dioxide emissions.

There is of course the mandatory questioning of the evidence:

"Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

And of course the defence of current climate models (ALL of which failed to predict this 11 year cooling phase):

"The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models."

But don't worry believers, an article daring to venture the skeptical viewpoint would not have got by the Editors if it didn't support 'overall' the Hysteric point of view:

"What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up."

Of course, once you factor in the Medieval Warm Period and take a reasonable sample of historical global temperatures, the spectacularly debunked hockey stick disappears, and that according to Jack's research, shows the long term trend is certainly not going up (at least not by a scary woo-woo 1C...in 100 years....maybe....)

However there is comfort in the last sentence:

"One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up."

Someone please tell Al Gore....

Total rubbish

2009-10-01T20:02:00.000+10:00

Hand over your rubbish...or else...

From this story:

concerned neighbours saw mysterious men emptying their bins into black sacks and loading them into an unmarked white van.

When homeowners questioned the official binmen an hour later they learned their council was conducting a survey of what was being thrown away.

Now, try as I might, I can't really link this in to The Warming hysteria, although the current Western obsession about all things environmental probably has something to do with it. The UK does seem to be leading the world in spying on their own citizens to ensure, amongst other things, efficient energy usage. And like every other viewer of CSI, I know that garbage left out on the street can't really be 'stolen', however I don't see the need for unmarked vans, hoodies and all the secrecy.

It's just a little...weird.

Friday freak out

2009-09-25T08:00:00.000+10:00

Brought you courtesy of Mother Nature:

G'day!

A louse that replaces a fish's tongue.

Links

Read a M@#$@$%ng book!

2009-09-18T09:04:00.000+10:00

Tortuous

2009-09-16T21:44:00.000+10:00

Today for your delectation, I offer the coherent tirade Andrew Sullivan (an ex-conservative who has moved leftward...and leftfield) who writes an open letter to "Dear President Bush" . It's a four page rant in which you could easily ignore pages 2-3, but encapsulates the (still!!?!) current rage against Dubya as exhibited by most of the mainstream media and about 53% of Americans.

The timing of this column is to provide support for the Obama administration's imminent prosecution of CIA officials and interrogators who were doing their job. More on that later.

"In long wars of ideas, moral integrity is essential to winning, and framing the moral contrast between the West and its enemies as starkly as possible is indispensable to victory, as it was in the Second World War and the Cold War."

There is a well established school of thought that suggests that the moral high-ground is THE only place from which a war can be won, justly, thus the comparison to the greatest ideological battles fought in the 20th century against the default evil of Nazism and the still not dead bad-guy of Communism. Here, the moral high ground was aparently not hard to see (although not so obvious to Charles Lindberg, King Edward VIII of England, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg , Obama's friend William Ayers, etc, etc..) The problem I have with the position: "If we don't have the moral high ground, what do we have?" is what use is the moral high ground if you're dead?

Perhaps the reason this position is logically untenable, is that if you look at diaspora of Western society as a whole including old and new immigrant groups, we are constantly told that no one culture or value set is superior to any other (a notion I explicitly deny). So if there is no one set of morals, or absolute values that is the "correct" way to live, then how can you claim any moral high ground if there is no 'ground'?

"I have come to accept that it would be too damaging and polarizing to the American polity to launch legal prosecutions against you, and deeply unfair to solely prosecute those acting on your orders or in your name. President Obama’s decision thus far to avoid such prosecutions is a pragmatic and bipartisan one in a time of war, as is your principled refusal to criticize him publicly in his first months"

Except that Obama IS moving forward on the prosecutions and despite the so called repeated view that "[CIA interrogators] should not be prosecuted if they acted within legal guidelines laid out at the time" it's pretty clear that the Attorney General could not proceed with the prosecution if Obama didn't want him to. And what about the interrogators that did use illegal methods of torture, yet obtained information that prevented a terrorist attack? Will they roll back the security measures and actions taken? If not, then the current administration are morally complicit and have blood on their hands.

"You have also claimed that defending the security of the United States was the paramount requirement of your oath of office. It wasn’t. The oath you took makes a critical distinction: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It is the Constitution you were sworn to defend, not the country. To abandon the Constitution to save the country from jihadist terrorists was not your job."

"It is the Constitution you were sworn to defend, not the country." I may be being naive but what is the point of a constitution if there is no country? The charge that the US Government abandoned the Constitution wholeheartedly at multiple levels is a little hard for me to swallow. And somehow, saving the country from jihadists is exactly what I would expect from the elected leader of a country.

"Western freedom begins with the right to protect one’s own body from government power. That’s what habeas corpus means. What was done to Jose Padilla makes a mockery of that freedom and, in fact, establishes a precedent that, if left in place, could destroy it."

Habeas Corpus is protection for an individual citizen against unlawful imprisonment. The Habeas Corpus Act was adopted by the English Parliament in 1679, and was incorporated into the the US Constitution (U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 2.) The full text reads:

"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

And even though I Am Not A Constitutional Lawyer (IANACL), I am pretty damn sure that this particular clause refers to the group identified in the first six words of the Constitution

"We the People of the United States."

Which would not include most of the current inmates in Guantanamo.

What follows in page 2 and 3 are descriptions of torture, and of course the mandatory inclusion of Abu Ghraib. What happened at Abu Ghraib was despicable, amoral and criminal. And the conflation of Abu and Gitmo is a convenient mash-up of all things American Evil, and photogenically illustrates the depravity of a superpower gone mad, crushing and torturing poor innocent Iraqi farmers in a repurposed Saddamite prison. The ever so slight problem with this is that Abu Ghraib has NOTHING to do with Gitmo, the torture memos, Rumsfield-Cheny-Bushhitler, the Christian Right and the Crusades. It was an aberration, a disgraceful example of what happens when the chain of command breaks down, and redneck hick reservists are left to rule the roost with no oversight.

Abu Ghraib has as much to do with American ideals and policy as Nazism had to do with the Enlightenment, ie nothing. Linking the lawlessness and the abuse that occurred in one prison in Iraq to the policy in practice of the US Government is disingenuous, but effective since the photos from one can be used as a surrogate for the other. There is a very important debate about State sanctioned torture in democracies, however it is important to distinguish between the actions of those that were carrying out orders, and those that were acting without. It does not diminish the seriousness of the abuse, but to merge these two issues to score an emotional point is a rhetorical flourish that neatly allows you to avoid answering the question: what if it works? What if information gained by the physical abuse of one individual allows you to save the lives of many? Would that change the moral calculation?

To bring the whole thing back to current events, this is currently what is happening on the political scene in the US, with the summary provided by Jennifer Rubin:

"The CIA discovers misconduct, which the CIA inspector general investigates. The information seems to suggest misconduct. They go to DOJ. DOJ tells them to stop and that [Justice] will now look at the issue, gather evidence, and investigate it themselves. They must decide if there is a reasonable belief that they could obtain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. They looked at it. They made a decision and declined [to prosecute]. They go back to the CIA, which can, and in several instances did, review the matters for internal discipline. "

Obama's Attorney General is bringing another department in to investigate the DOJ's handling , and move forward with prosecutions of CIA officials if they possibly can. It is a flagrant waste of time and resources, motivated by partisan intent to punish anyone they can from the hated Bush regime, and in the process make the US and World less secure. Why the the World? Well, as far as I understand, there is cooperation amongst allied intelligence agencies and I know for a fact that Australia relies on it's relationship with the US to supplement their own intelligence needs; how willing do you think international agencies are going to be to help the US if there is the prospect of being prosecuted? Or in other words, why would ASIO give the CIA information gained by dubious means if it meant that sometime down the road, they could be sent to jail for doing their job?

This is not meant as a defense of Guantanamo or torture, but an attempt to show that the Obama administration is pursuing partisan objectives couched in terms of morality that will endanger the World, and there is no end to fellow travelers that are supporting this position.

And besides, exactly how much do you think Obama is doing different from Bush?

"It's now apparent that the biggest sham in American politics is Barack Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo and, more generally, to dismantle the Bush/Cheney approach to detaining accused Terrorists."

The 'permission' to hire males

2009-09-13T16:21:00.000+10:00

From this story:

"The eastern suburbs special school was given an exemption by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to employ a man to supervise the youngster, because he is too dangerous for women."

The frightening thing here is that the school had to apply to VCAT for an exemption from Equal Opportunities law to be able to employ a “man”. The question here is why did they have to apply for exemption? The case as reported clearly requires someone with an ability to control (and restrain) a pre-teen boy, and therefore by virtue (or as some feminist theorists would posit “by vice”) of genetics, men will more likely have a suitable physique to be able to fill the role.

However, the school had to approach the State before being able to advertise exclusively for a man. The point here is why should any enterprise need to get government approval to be able to advertise for a suitable candidate?

On the other side of the coin, we have the Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls actively campaigning to implement quotas for female representation on executive boards. Why is this even necessary? Is “diversity” a good in and of itself?

Charlie Sheen is a bit crazy

2009-09-11T19:09:00.000+10:00

The post September 11 political landscape in the US is populated by a small, but loud minority who “question the official version” of events that fateful day in 2001. They use this “just askin’” excuse to advance the most ridiculous conspiracy theory evar…namely that that George W. Bush and his administration was responsible for or enabled September 11. In the same breath, the nutjobs that have this opinion usually carry on to say what a retard Dubya is.

Well you cannae’ have it both ways; either he ‘s stupid and unable to organize a conspiracy to tie his own shoelaces, or his is a scarily smart supervillain genius that was able to change the melting point of steel and orchestrate a plot to allow the US to invade the Middle East (again) for oil money…and look what a resounding success that was.

The Democrats allowed this “truther” movement to grow as it attacked the incumbent Republican administration because they were often linked to and protested with the hysterical anti-war Left, which served the Democrats needs. Well to paraphrase Obama’s preacher the ‘good’ pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Van Jones was appointed the Whitehouse “green jobs czar” in [who cares]. His government appointment was to presumably oversee the creation of green jobs which are [no really, who cares?]. The important thing is, he was working IN the Whitehouse, had the ear of the President and a nice unelected portfolio to manage. Except, back in the crazy days of 2002, he was a paid up “truther”. The evidence that he publicly called for and supported not one, but four investigations questioning W. Bush’s involvement in September 11 is irrefutable, and after about a week of blog-led protests, he was shown the door.

“You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier -- a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.”
--Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 10th September 2009

Whilst I have neither the time nor the energy to debunk the many many insane claims made by the “truthers”, let’s just say that if you have sympathy for their views, odds are if you’re reading this post, you’ve probably lost your way on the internet. Alex Jones is perhaps the most well-known of the “truthers” because along with a friend he created the “internet sensation” film “Loose Change” stating in excruciating detail his argument for the biggest conspiracy since the moon landing (hint: Bush caused 9/11). I’ve seen videos of him threatening the life of conservative bloggers and generally think I have a good enough grasp of his, frankly, lunatic opinions.

All this was a long winded way to show that Charlie Sheen has penned a fictional interview of himself with President Obama, confronting him with the “evidence” of 9/11, on Alex Jones’ website. It’s not worth excerpting, and you’ll probably feel a little disappointed with Mr Sheen (as I was) if you like him as an actor.

Charlie Sheen wants answers!!!

Here it is: http://www.infowars.com/twenty-minutes-with-the-president/

(I’m not linking to it because I think Alex Jones is a loon and I don’t want this blog to appear on his website visitor stats)

Chicken Hariyali

2009-09-11T12:48:00.000+10:00

"Why???" I hear you cry...well because everyone wants a cooking show done Bollywood style. And no one looks this cool in a matching coloured chef hat and apron...

(via MetaFilter)

Orwell's future

2009-09-09T17:11:00.001+10:00

Writing about the frightening ubiquity of CCTV cameras everywhere in the UK, Steyn elaborates:

“…in the twilight of his premiership, with his usual control-freak instincts, Tony Blair mused on the possibility of banning hooded sweatshirts in order to prevent “anti-social behaviour” and restore “respect on our streets.

But “respect” is a two-way street. And on Britain’s two-way streets, where the government cameras whir 24-7, the security state signals its contempt for the citizen.”

Thinking that his description of a London Transport poster put up recently was a bit of an exaggeration, I googled it and there are plenty of links (picture source):

Seriously, are they !@#ing kidding??

George Orwell must be turning in his grave; from the beacon of civilization and individual rights to giant eyes in the sky, proudly advertised by the State.

Making the world safer?

2009-09-08T09:29:00.000+10:00

As I previously wrote, there are ramifications regarding the US Attorney General prosecutions of CIA interrogators that will flow far from the borders of the United States. This is not about torture or righting wrongs, this is a vindictive partisan bloodletting, pure and simple.

And here I was believing that The One was going to help us evolve past these petty political urges (you know how he was going to get us "beyond politics"). These actions taken by the Obama administration are going to endanger the US and the West. And whilst The One will do the merry tap-dance to distance himself from the prosecutions, it is highly improbable that the Attorney General would be doing this without the explicit consent and encouragement from the Commander-in-Chief.

Reprising his take on this, Thomas Sowell has an excellent breakdown of what this will mean for the US...and the rest of us:

"Britain's release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi-- the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people-- is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in the Western democracies in our time."

Speaking of the ongoing hand-wringing and outright creation of "rights" for those I would term "barbaric animals":

"So many "rights" have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don't meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn't protect you." (emphasis mine)

Read it all.

Calling them out

2009-09-05T12:10:00.006+10:00

Whatever you think of Russell Crowe, there is always much schadenfreude to be had at the expense of snarky journalists. A snide gossip article about Rusty's fitness regime appeared in Sydney's Daily Telegraph having a go at him for having a ciggie break during one of his bicycle rides. Even the caption was heaping on the sarcasm:

In response, one of Rusty's crew called the Daily Telegraph columnist and challenged her to "get on her bike" to race the Master and Commander. Showing a Proof of Life, the columnist stopped her L.A. Confidential and prepared to go head to head, Gladiator style, with a Beautiful Mind hoping that his Virtuosity on the two wheeled contraption was as overestimated as she had reported. Well, it turns out it wasn't a Good Year for Annette Sharp, when she realised that a race with Rusty, it was The Quick and the Dead, and she got Romper Stompered near the finish line when she fell on the track as the American Gangster proved he was quicker than the 3:10 to Yuma.

From the BBC article, the columnist said:

"When you make a living throwing stones you expect that one day someone is going to lob one back. This was that day."

This post brought to you by the letters IMDb

An Inconvenient Baby

2009-09-03T20:44:00.002+10:00

This story is disturbing.

"The star fullback's fiancee Shannon O'Malley will have their daughter's birth induced today instead of waiting until her September 16 due date so he can concentrate on the finals."

I'm sorry Mr Superstar AFL player that your daughter's birth is at such an inconvenient due date. I hope the little tike doesn't impact your ever so important sporting career in the future by you know, getting sick or depriving you of your sleep the same week as an important match. And I definitely think the fiancee "Shannon O'Malle" is as stupid and culpable as him for going along with it, if not more so.

Escaped Libyan jailbirds - redux

2009-09-01T20:33:00.004+10:00

Following up on my previous post of an 'escaped' convicted mass murderer, it's not like this is a surprise to anyone.

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.

With any luck, this particular incident will bring down two corrupt governments, however the more things change....

Climate Changeology

2009-08-23T12:47:00.001+10:00

The scenario should sound familiar. The amount of carbon in the oceans and atmosphere changes suddenly and dramatically. The oceans are acidified and significant extinctions result. On land, global temperatures increase anywhere from five to nine degrees Celsius, causing widespread habitat disruptions. Despite the sudden onset of the event, its impact lingers for 100,000 years.

This might sound like a worst-case situation for the current anthropogenic influences on climate, but it's actually an historic event that the public is generally unaware of: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, which occurred about 55 million years ago.

The rest of the article suggests that maybe, just maybe, on top of all the hysteria, science-is-settled-debate-is-over memes running through the media about The Warming, that perhaps our knowledge isn't so consensus-settled after all and there may be larger and smaller cycles and feedback loops in our climate system which we are still unable to account for in our climate models.

Colour me surprised.

In fact when scientists in the year 2009 only now decide that 'insignificant' motions such as swimming jellyfish can greatly influence the "water-mixing" that occurs in the oceans, given that the sum of energy from wind and tides don't seem to account for it, well excuse me if my cynicism grows in direct proportion to the hysteria of the alarmists.

The humble jellyfish: agent of The Warming?
(picture source)

On top of this already CO2 laden rant, it is especially confusing when you find that true believers (in The Warming) are starting to say the same thing that skeptics like myself have been saying for a long time. Anne Applebaum on Slate:

But I do doubt the wisdom of assuming that eight or 10 politicians will ever solve this problem during a meeting at an Italian conference center—or any conference center, for that matter. I also question whether even several hundred politicians—plus their scientific advisers, assorted environmentalists, and lobbyists—will solve this problem at the Copenhagen climate super summit due to be held in December.

I realise that my constant ravings on this issue have the possibility of alienating my one reader (who is still a believer in this malarky), however would you take the word of the "Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology" ?

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.

The idea that we can prevent The Warming, without having effectively proved that man is causing it, or that we have the ability to stop it if we want, is as noxious as CO2...okay...CO2 is not that noxious (someone tell the greenies)...let's say as noxious as CH4 (Methane). Why is it noxious? Why do I bother ranting on about this ridiculous hoax when ultimately the intentions seem good? I mean I would love to eliminate pollution and waste, use energy more efficiently, run my home from solar panels and not have to beg middle eastern countries for oil to drive my car to the movies.

No, the reason is much more involved than that, and I'll let the good prof elaborate:

The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself.

This is the reason why this idea must be resisted. Politicians, scientists and environmentalists all want to charge head long in attempting to legislate our way out of what is a natural process. Every concession, every bit of legislation, every lightbulb that we sacrifice to this phoney deity will make it all the more harder to resist once this becomes established dogma.

What are they thinking?!?!

2009-08-21T12:09:00.008+10:00

The Scots have released the only person convicted for the bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. The accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, was released from life imprisonment on compassionate grounds because of a terminal illness.

Compassion? (picture source)

The Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill

agreed that Megrahi had shown no compassion to his victims.

Yet they still released him. In a letter to Mr MacAskill

Megrahi said: 'My continued incarceration in HMP Greenock is not conducive to my well-being as my life nears its end.

Boo-f@%#n-hoo. My opinion is if someone is directly responsible for the murder of 270 people, ya cannae’ really claim compassionate grounds. And of course the Libyan’s have given this dude a hero’s welcome. Classy.

A hero's welcome for a mass murderer

I have no idea what Scottish interests are served by sucking up to Libya, but you can be damn sure other would-be plane bombers are looking at this as a victory.

Links:

Trailer to the Air Crash Investigations episode on the Lockerbie bombing.

Idiocracy

2009-08-16T13:53:00.003+10:00

This column by the foppish Mayor of London is a riot. My favourite paragraph:\

"... a big road sign that went up in Swansea. The English version said that this was a residential area and there was no entry for heavy goods vehicles. But it was the Welsh translation that represented a masterpiece of Extremely Stupid lobbying. This read: "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfielthu." It was a few months before someone had the nerve to point out that this gnomic message meant: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."

Truly a trophy monument to bureaucratic hubris.

About that Joker...

2009-08-06T20:12:00.000+10:00

(picture source)

A fantastic Republican rant on the media about Obi as Joker...

Looks like it's not just me...

2009-08-05T20:27:00.000+10:00

that believes in a not-so-in-the-closet socialist leader of the free world. (click on the link below the pic for the full story)

(picture source)

The start of a new internet meme perhaps?

Decline and Fall (a book review)

2009-08-03T20:18:00.002+10:00

(amazon link)

Just finished the "Decline and Fall - Europe's Slow Motion Suicide" by Bruce Thornton. The first part of the book attempts to explain just why Europe is failing, and he focuses for a most part on the rejection of Christianity and Judeo-Christian principles.

Reading this from an agnostic perspective, I find it hard to stomach the constant focus on religion that American authors appear to have when discussing this subject, and I also doubt that European society is failing solely because they are less religious. However he makes the valid point that in a conflict where one side only thinks of pleasure in the here and now (played by the 'native' Europeans who demand that their governments insure them from the cradle to the grave against the random occurrences of life) versus a side that has an iron-clad conviction in the numinous and the after life, and a deeply held belief that they are carrying out God's will (played by the emerging and aggressive immigrants); which side would you put money on in a fight?

Detailing how the newly transformed anti-Semitism (anti-Zionism) and the still live hatred of capitalism that infects the political discourse in Europe, converge neatly into an overt anti-Americanism, the author plots out logically how this came about. Socialism is alive and well and has clearly never quite died.

The thesis of the book isn''t new (for anyone who may have read "The Clash of the Civilizations and the New World Order" by Samuel Huntingdon ) and the focus on Europe and why it matters is both interesting and depressing.

Blind Justice?

2009-07-21T21:02:00.004+10:00

The big news in the US last week was the confirmation of Obama's pick to the US supreme court, a hispanic woman by the name of Sonia Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor is most well known for her saying:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,”

Overlooking the blatant relativist fallacy of that statement, and the Democrats defence that it was a once off taken-out-of-context remark (which by the way...it wasn't), it smacks of an ideologue that puts their worldview before the Law which isn't necessarily a desirable aspect in a 'prospective' Supreme Court judge.

To demonstrate how this worldview translates to action, whilst being an Appellate Court judge on the 2nd Circuit (whatever that means), there came before them a case of Ricci vs Stefano, where the city of New Haven had set aside results of a legal and vetted promotions exam for firefighters because, get this, not enough African-Americans passed with high scores. Fearing a discrimination lawsuit, the city of New Haven decided to throw out the baby with the bathwater and denied promotion to a bunch of whiteys and a hispanic that had passed the test. From the Slate article:

"They appealed to the 2nd Circuit, the court on which Judge Sotomayor sits. In an unusual short and unsigned opinion, a panel of three judges, including Sotomayor, adopted the district court judge's ruling without adding their own analysis. As Judge Jose Cabranes put it, in protesting this ruling later in the appeals process, "Indeed, the opinion contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case. … This perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal."

In other words, Judge Sotomayor sided with the city of New Haven but didn't say why. The high court recently sided with the plaintiffs (the firemen) and Sotomayors lack of, if you'll excuse the pun, judgment was especially noted by the Supreme Court.

So now you have the background, here's a column from the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, who is kind of like The Age's Catherine Deveny, except Maureen can write, is occasionally funny, and despite being a dyed in the wool Bush/Republican hater, she can sometimes see opposing arguments. However, this is not one of those times. Dripping with barely disguised hatred of 'dem old white males, speaking of the serving justices:

"After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that."

Any of the achievements and/or hardships these guys may or may not have overcome are not expanded on, just the age old trope of old school tie network and shadowy secret societies that put these guys on the bench, not merit.

And for the meat and potatoes:

"President Obama wants Sotomayor, naturally, to bring a fresh perspective to the court. It was a disgrace that W. appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men. And Sotomayor made it clear that she provides some spicy seasoning to a bench when she said in a speech: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging, but I accept there will be some based on gender and my Latina heritage.”

And for those not familiar with of US Supreme Court history, there's no mention that the "disgraceful W.'s" dad (George H.W. Bush) nominated the second African-American to ever serve on the Supreme Court. Freakin' racist Texans...

Looking past that, the idea that any job can be done better by someone due to their race or ethnicity is quite simply racist if it is 'minority' ethnicities discriminated against, and "diversity" if it is whitey that gets the sharp end of the stick. Artificially enforced sex or racial quotas seems to go against that idea that "all men are created equal" (and yes, that is "men" as in "mankind" which also includes wise latina women). Whilst not arguing that wrongs were not committed in the past, primarily by white males, I don't see how appointing someone on the basis of race rather than merit is a way of redressing those wrongs.

Cyber-rhetoric

2009-07-17T13:15:00.002+10:00

On July 4th this year (American Independance Day), a cyber-attack was launched against a bunch of US websites including the Secret Service, Department of Defense, New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. A lot of these websites went down for a couple of days, and by Tuesday 7th July, most of them were up and running. However the attack had shifted to a few South Korean websites including the Ministry for Defense and the presidential Blue House. Given the targets, both the South Korean and US authorities implicated North Korea as the big Bad behind the attacks.

A US politician Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan)

"the lead Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the U.S. should conduct a “show of force or strength” against North Korea for a supposed role in a round of attacks that hit numerous government and commercial websites this week."

At first glance, I thought the honorable Representative was, to put it mildly, speaking out of his a***, giving in to the well established political instinct to be seen to be reacting to things and speaking authoritatively on matters that they know nothing about. The actual attack came from 'infected' computers in over 74 countries (with Australia coming in as number 6 in the total numbers of infected "zombies"), and the relevant authorities have yet to conclusively prove where the attacks originated. Since on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog the attack could just as easily have been initiated by an elite team of super hackers in some super secret bunker working for an 'evil' regime, or some fat kid somewhere, working from his bedroom at his parents house with too much time on his hands and a beef against the US government; not necessarily a small demographic by any stretch.

A North Korean super-hacker?

The ethics of initiating a cyber-attack, or in this case a cyber-counterattack, are still a bit hazy. Whilst the injuries and casualties may be less obvious than a convential armed attack, the effects of a cyber-attack could theoretically be just as damaging. One could be excused thinking that that the inability to view the latest episode of Sea Patrol on ninemsn.com.au could lead to death or injury, but what if the website being attacked was CFA bushfire information line or the Department of Health in the middle of a pandemic?

Most large governments are developing offensive cyber-capacities and for an elected politician to suggest a cyber-attack as "pay back" is perhaps reaching for the gun a bit to early. And given the internet penetration of domestic households in North Korea, one could argue, totally ineffective. However if we look at Rep. Peter Hoekstra's comment in the context of recent geopolitical events, I suspect that the comments are not aimed at the North Koreans but perhaps made to embarass Obama-wan-kenobi into action. On July 4th this year, the North Koreans decided to test fire 7 missiles. This followed a test launch of their long-range ICBM on April 5th this year. Given the collective world-wide yawn on that particular test, Kim Jong "Insane" Il clearly decided he could test a few more.

North Korea fires 7 missiles off coast

Obama's reaction to the April launch:

"We will immediately consult with our allies in the region, including Japan and the Republic of Korea, and members of the U.N. Security Council to bring this matter before the Council."

-- (ooooh scary scary. That'll put fear into the heart of a dude that runs a country with concentration camps)

Biden (US Vice President) reaction to the July 4th launch:

"Look, this has almost become predictable behavior. Some of it seems like almost attention-seeking behavior,"

So the Obama administration has a recent history of belittling the angry squeaks of the NORKS, which in all fairness is not too surprising given the Nork regime's inability to provide electricity to their whole country, or indeed feed all their people, however there is a clear trend of escalation. And for a country that allegedly has nukes and is only separated by 5km of bushland from their 'sworn enemy', it would behove the US to support their ally South Korea with perhaps a bit more teeth in their rhetoric and actions.

Instead, we get this:

"This administration -- and our military -- is fully prepared for any contingencies," Obama told CBS when asked about the possibility that North Korea could fire a missile toward Hawaii on or about July 4, the US Independence Day.

Asked if that meant Washington was "warning of a military response," Obama answered: "No. It's just we are prepared for any contingencies."

No no military response, just 'contigencies'. I predict that the emptiness of Obi's rhetoric will rebound on him, sometime in the next four years, and the world will be a poorer place for it.

Links:

"U.S., South Korea Targeted in Swarm Of Internet Attacks" - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/08/AR2009070800066.html

Good technical breakdown and analysis of the cyber-attack - http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/mydoom/

Cry me a river

2009-07-16T16:47:00.002+10:00

So one of the men charged with the highly vicious (and thanks to the Hungry Jacks CCTV) very public assault of a 19 year old in Chapel St on the weekend

"fears an angry public will retaliate against his family, a court has heard." (source)

Not wanting to interfere with his 'day in court', but if the charges hold true (and if you check the CCTV footage link above, you can be pretty sure the police got the right man), maybe, just maybe, the poor little lamb should have thought about his family before viciously bashing a guy unconscious, in front of half a dozen witnesses and a CCTV camera.

Further on:

"The family are very concerned about repercussions,'' Mr Gattuso said.

As they damn well should be. Here's a thought, if the accused's family had perhaps impressed on the 'young' lad (32yrs old) that bashing one guy along with five of your mates is perhaps not the best way to resolve your differences, he probably wouldn't be facing a jail term right now.

Best picture...

2009-07-14T14:52:00.003+10:00

of the lowest altitude fly-by you will see today:

(picture source)

Al Gore vs the Nazis

2009-07-12T18:58:00.001+10:00

A headline from the office of the totally balanced, impartial, and most scientifically-consensused Super Eco Warrior Al Gore:

"Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill in battle against climate change"

Don't bother watching the video. It doesn't even have the line in question. Anyhoo, allegedly when speaking about the 'battle" for climate change, the Amazing Goracle said:

"“Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.” "

Winston Churchill was the wartime president of England, held out and defeated the Nazis (with a bit of help) that threatened the entire world. The official death toll of the war is around 59 million people , from 1939-1945. (source). This blog would be in japanese if not for Winston Churchill and his pals.

The exaggeration and profanity of Gore's statement is hard to understate.


A very small fraction of what the Nazis did	What Global Warming does

UPDATE (13/07/09): Fixed formatting on table.

Reverse chill

2009-07-09T17:11:00.003+10:00

I don’t know if there is a better writer alive or dead that can come close to Mark Steyn. Writing about the insidious, velvet-booted tyranny that’s taking over Canada, and in some ways, the West. The ability to freely dissent from official dogma has been one of the greatest innovations of liberal democracies. Protesting and attacking the status quo where it is seen wanting has allowed western civilization to evolve. Without free speech and public dissent, you end up with with North Korea. Canadian “Human Rights Commissions” have had a particularly rocky couple of years thanks to Mssrs Steyn and Levant. Steyn, writing about a “human rights” sub-committee hearing in the House of Commons (Canada):

“Professor Martin very politely suggested that free societies do not “establish an official version of history and punish anyone who might deviate from the official version.”

And so it went, the Liberal members declining to engage with the very concept of principle. Indeed, their principal principle seems to be a principled objection to principle: They disagree with what you say but they will fight to the death for the right not to have to listen to it. That’s why we need government agencies to police all these opinions and determine which ones are sufficiently homogenous to be compatible with a diverse society.”

Read the whole thing.

And here’s Ezra on the chief of the Canadian Human Right’s Commision, Jennifer Lynch, and her definition of “debate”:

"When Lynch heard it would be me against whom she would have to debate, she tried to veto my appearance.

She tried to censor me -- and, much more ominously, CTV.

She tried to bully CTV into blackballing me from their show.

She tried to tell them how to run their news business.”

Free speech is more than just a nice side-effect of a liberal democracy, it is perhaps the central tenet from which all other aspects of a democracy are possible. Everyone should have a right to their opinion, no matter how obscene or offensive, and in the same way, be prepared to have said opinions ridiculed and taken apart. State enforced protection from "offense" is both unachievable and pointless. Take any single opinion about anything, and someone will be 'offended' by it. In Canada, they now have ~~star chambers~~"Human Rights Commissions" that decide what opinions Canadians are allowed to hear. And if you think that these institutions (and the ideas motivating them) are confined to the North American continent, think again.

Super Tuna

2009-07-03T12:31:00.005+10:00

Clearly nothing bad will come of this:

"A team from Japan’s Fisheries Research Agency, The University of Tokyo and Kyushu University is close to completing the genome sequence of the bluefin tuna to unravel the secrets of the chemical building blocks of the fish and expects to be able to start a breeding programme next year."

Artist impression of one of the new super tuna herding the other tuna to their inevitable demise.

Irrelevance in reporting

2009-07-02T09:14:00.001+10:00

In an article about an Australian spy (?!?!?) that was jailed 10 years ago in the US for well, trying to sell documents to an "unknown" country, there's this little gem at the end:

"He is believed to have spent much of his time in jail learning Spanish and has been visited by Quakers."

Picture source

Banning BMW

2009-06-30T10:52:00.005+10:00

This is so stupid. Aparently BMW encourages Victorians to hoon, so much so that their new ad campaign has been banned from TV.

“Australia's advertising watchdog outlawed the ad for a BMW convertible because driving stunts shown in the clip would break Australian road rule laws.”

And again, demonstrating the futility of said ban, the article describing the ban actively links to the ad .

However if our benign overlords in the government who want to control everything Australians are allowed to see on the internet, had their way, would we be now prevented from accessing www.bmw.com? And anyway, if you are going to take away “speed” and “dangerous driving” from a car ad... exactly what would you be left with?

Probably not this…

"Burnout Paradise" - a computer game with truly awesome photorealistic car crashes.

What about movies with car chases? Does the advertising watchdog really believe Australians are so stupid that watching a BMW with painted tires skid around a warehouse is going to encourage hoons to skid around on real roads? Clearly the timing of such a ban is linked to recent tragedies and seems like a knee-jerk reaction which really won’t attack the underlying causes of these tragedies.

Or could it be that the advertising watchdog is too tied up not dealing with AMI ads that they needed to show Australians they’re actually doing something?

life doesn't get any better than this

2009-06-29T15:00:00.000+10:00

Thursday, June 11, 2009 8:16 PM
From: a friend
To: me

So, pretty exciting day here.

I bought a toaster.

I don't think I've ever owned a toaster before.

I brought it home, set it up, and realised ... you need bread for a toaster.

So I went out again and bought some bread.

You'd be proud of the toaster though. I went the practical option - chrome finish so if ever anyone tries to sneak up behind me in the kitchen I can grab the toaster and smack them over the head before they get to me.

Yep. I think I'll enjoy owning a toaster.

a friend

Naughty Computer Games

2009-06-28T12:38:00.001+10:00

The Australian government is attempting to introduce an internet censorship ostensible to “protect the children” from the bogeyman of child pornography. As I previously wrote here :

The scheme will use a blacklist of web sites that every internet company will be forced to use.
This blacklist will be decided by the government.
This blacklist has been 'protected' by Freedom of Information laws (FoI) so that ordinary Australians will not know which websites have been banned, and therefore will have no recourse to protest the banning of certain websites

One thing I had not emphasized is that that there will be no oversight of this scheme. Whatever the government decides should be censored from Australians will be banned. No recourse, no protest, no take backs, do not pass Go. Do Not collect $200. Given the exemption from FoI laws, Australians will not even know “what” sites have been banned.

As with pretty much every government scheme with no oversight and a faulty mandate, mission creep is inevitable. So from The Age (June 25), we now have an example of how this scheme will evolve:

“The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block websites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds.”

From the article, because Australia’s current censorship scheme does not have an R18+ rating for computer games, any games with ‘unacceptable’ content are simply banned and you can’t buy them. Blanket banning game downloads or online games seems to be overstepping the bounds of stopping child pornography, and kind of smacks of ‘ideological convenience’ or a quick fix to something that really wasn’t a problem to begin with.

Box graphics from a computer game Hilary Clinton had an issue with

I’m not arguing that there are not games that do not have content that is offensive or disgusting (as a recent title from Japan demonstrates) however I don’t believe this falls under the mandate of this scheme. From the Australian Government’s own website:

“The Government's election commitment was that filtering would block content using a blacklist of prohibited sites maintained by the This link sends you off DBCDE's websiteAustralian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in accordance with legislation. The ACMA blacklist is a list of internet web sites, predominantly comprising images of the sexual abuse of children, which are defined as 'prohibited' under Australian legislation which has been in place since 2000.”

I’m not sure why computer games that do not have violent, degrading or illegual sexual imagery are banned, such as "Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure", which if Wikipedia is to be believed was “Banned [in Australia] because of high impact violence and the glorification of graffiti”

I totally understand how the “glorification of graffiti” can, in its’ own way destroy society, however there is a fairly strong argument that this could be overstepping the bounds of what is deemed unacceptable and censorship-worthy. Also, from this 2006 article, it is clear that ACMA, has wanted expanded powers to ban and censor online content for all Australians for a little while:

If prohibited material is hosted in Australia, ACMA can issue take-down notices or inform relevant law enforcement agencies to take action but its powers dramatically wane when faced with overseas hosting, as is the case with Postal.

"With overseas hosting, ACMA can refer the content from the downloadable source to manufacturers of content filters so ISPs can block the offending URLs," Barnard said."

In 2006, ACMA did not have those powers. If the Australian government successfully implements their internet content filtering scheme, they will have them.

Today, it’s the “glorification of graffiti”, tomorrow “climate change denial”?

Links:

GTA "Hot Coffee" link (warning: badly rendered polygons made to look like two people having sex): http://www.spike.com/video/hot-coffee/2673401

More videogame sex scenes: http://www.ugo.com/lifestyle/best-video-game-sex-scenes/

Genesis v2.0

2009-06-26T08:31:00.000+10:00

The best video you will see this Friday....

"Go forth and multiply yourselves....but not in those words"
(via Metafilter I think)

Life imitating art?

2009-06-20T12:00:00.000+10:00

el Pollo - meanest vigilante gringo in all of Argentina

An employee of a chicken shop, wearing a chicken suit, foiled a wannabe car thief (I think). From this article (via Metafilter)

"Un empleado de la pollería de Lavalle y Soler que hace promoción en la puerta del comercio disfrazado de pollo atrapó a Luis Alberto Armani (de 20 años), quien minutos antes habría intentado robar un auto."

Or in badly translated English

"An employee of pollería of Lavalle and Soler that makes promotion in the door of the disguised commerce of chicken catched Luis Alberto Armani (of 20 years), who minutes before would have tried to rob a car."

For those who haven't yet seen the glaringly obvious pop-culture reference...here it is:

And the sequel, Chicken Fight Two

And the next sequel, Chicken Fight Three

The most powerful man on Earth kills a fly...and PETA complain

2009-06-19T14:53:00.006+10:00

Regarding this:

is enough for these guys to complain. I have my own problems with the One, but his killing a fly on live TV doesn't even rate. Just goes to show that no matter what you do, someone is going to take offence.

A "humane bug catcher" like the one PETA sent Obama
(picture source)

A giant &@#%ing bird eating spider eating a bird, native of Queensland,
for which PETA's "humane bug catcher" probably wouldn't work.
(picture source)

Girls on Film

2009-06-17T09:00:00.000+10:00

OMG, who gives a crap?!?! This ‘open letter’ to Pixar (one of the world’s best animation studios) is from a fan who complains that in the last 10 movies, not one had a lead female heroine (they were apparently all support characters)

A Pixar non-Princess female character

Soooo inane…And what does that say about me, commenting on the inane!?!? Why the gibbons do people these days think they can dictate artists/creatives/production companies ideas to match their “diversity” agendas?

From here:

“So I'm not complaining; I'm asking. I'm asking because I think so highly of you.

Please make a movie about a girl who is not a princess.”

Another Pixar non-Princess female character

Dear Mr Dali, can you please show more representation of digital clocks? All you paintings appear to favour analog clocks, and coming from someone who can’t read those clockfaces, I feel that your work is prejudiced and not representative enough of my digital generation. Please make a painting about a clock that isn’t analog.

Dear Mozart, Could you please please please, start using the 3^rd harmonic starting at D#. I find that a lot of your music is in a jaunty major key that clearly biases G major, and there are those of us that really want to listen to depressing D# minor. Please make a musical piece about D# minor that is not about G major.

Dear Mr Van Gogh, can you stop doing !@#ing daisies and you know, focus a bit on hydrangeas? Please make a painting about hydrangeas that aren’t daisies.

Only 2 female characters in a family of five, demonstrating
a total ignorance of appropriate diversity quotas.

Dear Mr Hitchcock, please make a movie about a girl that isn’t killed by a psycho.

Dear Mr Ford Coppola, please make a movie about the Vietnam war that doesn’t end badly…like the war did

Dear Mr DeNiro, please make a movie about a gangster who isn’t fat.

Dear Mr Spielberg, please make a movie about an Extraterrestrial that isn’t cute.

I could seriously keep going…..

Cybermob Justice

2009-06-11T12:51:00.005+10:00

(picture source)

Fascinating article about "human flesh search engine". No this is not about porn (sorry Gramps) but about "digital lynch mobs". The major story in the article was about the "Kitten Killer of Hangzhou", where a chinese woman videos herself torturing and killing a kitten in the most stomach churning way, and then posts the video to a chinese version of YouTube. The torch and pitchfork carrying villagers (in this case played by the cyber-citizens of China) are so revolted by the act that they:

"were able to discover her location by analyzing the background of the video. Then they matched the shoes worn in the video to an online purchase. With this information they uncovered her identity and address. These details were posted online and she was attacked with thousands of phone calls and threats. She was mercilessly shamed, lost her job, and was forced to post a video apology online where she acknowledged her actions and asked for forgiveness."

Justice is served? Well that's an interesting concept. The comments on the blog where I came upon this story were varyingly retributively approving:

"The internet-justice connection is also about making information easily accessible to the public. And sometimes the public know what the police don't.
... "

or fearfully insightful:

"I also have a very bad feeling about this. If it is ok for kitten killers then it will be ok for whatever topic X society doesn't like as long as there is enough of society to make an impact in their personal lives."

I suspect that whilst the idea of collective 'justice' is not just a Chinese phenomenon, and this particular narrative has equivalents in every country that has the internet, lynchmobs are probably not the best way forward. However it does raise the question of exactly what can individuals or groups do when the justice system breaks down?

The mob quest for justice can have unintended consequences: In the US in 2008, Lori Drew was convicted of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because she had intentionally created a fake MySpace profile with which to taunt her neighbours daughter which resulted in her suicide. The case got a huge amount of publicity, and in a statement that the father of the victim read to the court:

"“I am no longer married to Megan’s mom,” he said, halting to catch his emotions. “We are both financially ruined, and I have gone through a living hell.
...
Ron Meier disclosed that after news about Drew’s role in the cyberbullying went public and the Drews received death threats, he had been advised by authorities to maintain a daily log of his activities and make sure that he was never alone, because if something happened to Lori Drew or her family, he was told, he would be the first suspect."

So whilst the actions of Lori were ethically and morally reprehensible
a: the laws of the land had not caught up the crime (which is why she was convicted of Computer Fraud, being the only law available to prosecutors due to the uniqueness of crime) and
b: cybermob-justice had unintentionally made life more difficult for the victim's father.

An "eye for an eye" speaks to a deep seated human desire to see evil punished. Society in liberal democracies has a range of checks and balances that supposedly weighs the rights of the individual relative to the State. The legal system prevents lynchmobs taking the law into their own hands and providing their own brand of justice. The internet promises unrestricted (and anonymous) freedom of speech which includes the ability of anyone to post personal details of alleged perpetrators without any oversight. Should there be?

Newspapers and the broadcast media have laws governing what they can and can't write about and broadcast. The internet provides a media and publishing outlet to individuals, which the vast majority include personal rantings and ravings (including this particular blog). Should it be regulated? Is it possible?

WTF?

2009-06-05T15:27:00.000+10:00

A japanese computer game trailer.

Probable target demographic: Large muscle-bound homosexual gym junkies who like dressing up like rabbits...or something.

Ode to joy

2009-05-31T13:21:00.000+10:00

Belching Criminals

2009-05-29T17:01:00.000+10:00

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

2009-05-26T17:08:00.000+10:00


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

2009-05-24T08:29:00.003+10:00

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

2009-05-22T14:00:00.000+10:00

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....

2009-05-20T17:13:00.000+10:00

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

2009-05-17T22:58:00.006+10:00

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

2009-05-14T13:41:00.004+10:00

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

2009-05-03T14:05:00.002+10:00

ANZAC regrets

2009-04-25T17:47:00.006+10:00

On this ANZAC day, where Aussies and Kiwis commemorate the deaths of thousands of soldiers who fought in wars to keep Australia free and the idea of a liberal democracy alive in this lonely corner of the planet, I came across this news and was depressed at how far some Aussies have travelled into the La-La land of ideological madness.

AUSTRALIA'S Race Discrimination Commissioner Tom Calma is attending the controversial UN anti-racism conference in Geneva, despite the Rudd Government's decision to boycott the event because of fears it would become a platform to attack Israel.

The idea that an indigenous "Race Discrimination Commissioner" needs to go to a conference which last time resolved after a couple of weeks of ~~junket~~ deliberation that the only country worthy of racist policies was Israel, is some sort of wacky.

Mr Tom Calma (picture source)

The actual criticism is in point 63 of the Durban declaration (document available here):

63. We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion;

Whilst it's not entirely comparing Israel with Germany circa 1939 (the benchmark of evil), it is curious that in the entire 62 page document, Israel is the only nation that gets a special mention. What this anti-semitic conference will teach the indigenous "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and Race Discrimination Commissioner" (to use his full title) is beyond me and even the Rudd government. The US, Canada, Israel and Australia have all officially boycotted this farce of a conference (as if a UN conference is anything but) yet Mr Calma insists on going.

I'm sure the OIC delegation will have much to teach an indigenous Australian about racism...

Antarctic Ice expanding...IT'S THE WARMING!!!!

2009-04-24T13:09:00.001+10:00

April 6, 2009; The Age: "Antarctic ice melting faster than expected"

"UP TO one-third of all Antarctic sea ice is likely to melt by the end of the century, seriously contributing to dangerous sea level rises, updated scientific modelling on global warming shows."

April 23, 2009; ABC News: "Antarctic sea ice increasing: study"

"Scientists in the United Kingdom have produced a study which shows ice has grown by 100,000 square kilometres each decade in the past 30 years."

but don't worry alarmists...

"The increase is being put down to the hole in the ozone layer."

Yayy!!! We can still blame humans for what is most likely a natural climate cycle.

Funny thing is, the Antarctic ice expanding goes against all the computer models that the Goremeister, his partners in crime the UN's IPCC and all the other hysterical ninnies that believe the only way we will be able to stop this climate change thing is by submitting all developed countries economies to totalitarian (read:UN) regulations and creating a fraudulent and ridiculous "market" in CO2 trading or whatever the hell they call it now.

Brave new cold/warm/icy/temparate world.....

Oh and the ozone hole thing causing the ice expansion? Yeah, probably not.

Pirates vs Flipper

2009-04-16T18:01:00.005+10:00

Those crazy ol' somali pirates arrrr at it again, getting all the headlines. First there's the news that US Navy snipers took out 3 pirates simultaneously when they threatened an American ship captain. Then the pirates vowed revenge on all US and French targets (not sure the Yanks are too happy to be lugged in with the cheese-eaters), however despite their impressive gains in productivity and being able to seize ships the size of US Aircraft carriers, threats from dudes in wooden boats that are frightened off by dolphins are probably not so scary to the only country that has actually used nuclear weapons.

anti-pirate dolphins

However on that note, given the impressive militarism of Obama's administration, the pirates threats might actually work. I'll let Mark Steyn takeover on these pirate "distractions" to Obama's true goal (whatever that is):

Powerful states protect one-man psycho states. One-man psycho states provide delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. Apocalyptic ideological states fund nonstate actors around the world. And in Somalia and elsewhere nonstate actors are constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.

Didn't we get rid of pirates, like 200 years ago?

Hitchens vs the SSNP

2009-04-10T09:47:00.000+10:00

My favourite writer Christopher Hitchens on his recent adventures in Lebanon. I can’t really do it any justice, so I recommend you read it all.

However here’s a little taster. First, there’s the meeting of Hitchens & Co. with an Syrian Social Nationalist Party Flag (SSNP):

“Well, call me old-fashioned if you will, but I have always taken the view that swastika symbols exist for one purpose only—to be defaced. Telling my two companions to hold on for a second, I flourish my trusty felt-tip and begin to write some offensive words on the offending poster. I say “begin” because I have barely gotten to the letter k in a well-known transitive verb when I am grabbed by my shirt collar by a venomous little thug, his face glittering with hysterical malice.”

Too [transitive verb]ing funny...

And a little bit further:

“However, it remains the case that those who inconvenience Syria by their criticisms are bad liabilities from the life-insurance point of view.”

A perfect mix of facts, cynicism and wit. A man truly after my own heart.

Comrade Obama

2009-04-08T10:16:00.003+10:00

This makes me distinctly uncomfortable:

"The White House confirmed Wagoner was leaving at the government's behest after The Associated Press reported his immediate departure, without giving a reason."

That the CEO of GM (a privately owned company) should have left, I would have it thought an issue for the board, stockholders and the market, not the president of the United States or for that matter any government official. But hey, ask the government for >USD$20billion, ya gotta expect some sort of 'return' on their investment. Something about getting in bed with devil would be appropriate here...

Far be it from me to once again suggest, imply or otherwise state in plain English I believe Obama is really a not-so-in-the-closet-socialist, lets hear from that the PM of that other great shining example of capitalism, the former USSR.

From this article:

"Russia's [PM] Dmitry Medvedev hailed Barack Obama as "my new comrade"

Nothing to see here, move along. Just business as usual in the land of the free markets and liberal democracy.

And if you think that now the Russkies and Uncle Sam are all rolling around in a geopolitical lovefest, here's the parting shot Medvedvedvedved made speaking of their recent 'expedition' into Georgia (which I have previously written about here, and here):

“"Everything that has happened, I will tell you frankly, that the leader of Georgia is responsible for everything. That is my direct and honest and open opinion.
"A lot of people had to pay for the mistakes of one man. We love and appreciate the Georgian people. But I do not want to have any relations with President Saakashvili."

Not a good time to be Georgian...

NORKS vs DORKS

2009-04-06T14:00:00.004+10:00

So the NORKs (press speak for North Koreans) are preparing to launch a long range ICBM, ostensibly to launch a satellite, but probably to test the range of their ~~BigDong~~ TaepoDong 2 (TD-2) missile. At the time of the announcement of the test (in complete contravention of a UN resolution...but we all know how much they’re worth), initially the US, Japan all got their knickers in a twist and threatened to shoot it down, and South Korea threatened to file a UN Security Council violation. As the missile’s projected trajectory takes it right over Japan, it is understandable why the Japanese are more than just a little concerned.

However, despite having the capacity to do so courtesy of two US Navy destroyers in the region , the clear thinking and brave new administration of the Obama whitehouse has pretty much stuck it’s hands over it’s ears and gone “la-la-la-la-la can’t see anything la-la-la”.

From the article:

“Appearing on "FOX News Sunday," Gates said North Korea "probably will" fire the missile, prompting host Chris Wallace to ask: "And there's nothing we can do about it?"

"No," Gates answered, adding, "I would say we're not prepared to do anything about it."

The North has said it would consider any interference an "act of war"

UPDATE: So I wrote this blog last week thinking I had till wednesday, but the crafty Norks got ahead of me, and it was launched Sunday.

"U.S. and South Korean officials claim the entire rocket, including whatever payload it carried, ended up in the ocean after Sunday's launch"

However, now, after the fact, the Obama administration "urges action". Not wanting to restate the obvious, but it seems that the US did indeed have the means for "action" prior to and during the launch.

For your own good

2009-03-29T18:04:00.006+11:00

It's been a busy month for The Warming propaganda machine. Firstly, it appears that in early March, the Nobel Laureate Al Gore allegedly refused to debate the current 'president' of the EU (who is also the actual president of the Czech Republic), Mr Vaclav Klaus. Mr Klaus is an outspoken skeptic of this Warming malarkey (and he also compared the EU to a Communist State, something Mr Klaus is intimately experienced with having lived in one).

Mr Vaclav Klaus

From the ar ticle:

""A dialogue (between Klaus and Gore) was to take place on one stage. We accepted the U.S. proposal positively. But the organisers reassessed the idea in the end," Klaus's spokesman Radim Ochvat told the paper.

"Gore might have feared such a clash," he added."

It is remarkably curious that the most public advocate of this hoax is afraid to be publicly challenged about it. But as I have hinted previously, this isn't really about concern for the Planet, it is all about political power. And if you think I'm exagerating, here's Dr James Hansen (Gore's right hand man in the Warming posse...I've touched on his work previously here and here) in the Guardian:

"James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said."

The implications of his views have now been ably demonstrated this week by a local council in England:

A scheme is already under way in Broadland District Council in Norfolk, which has spent £30,000 hiring a plane with a thermal imaging camera.
...
The aircraft took images of homes and businesses, with those losing the most heat showing up as red, while better insulated properties appear blue.

The council's head of environmental services, Andy Jarvis, said the original plan was to target businesses but it was realised the scope could be extended to include residental properties.

Note the inevitable mission creep, from monitoring businesses environmental impact to monitoring individual citizens.

'The project we put together was for a plane to go up on various nights flying strips of the district and taking pictures,' he said.

'Through those images, a thermal image photograph can be created in which you can pick out individual properties which are losing a lot of heat.

'We do a lot on domestic energy conservation already and realised it would be useful to see if any of the homes which were particularly hot were properties where people had not insulated their lofts.

Now if the fact that local councils send up spyplanes, using your tax dollars, to spy into the homes of individual citizens doesn't disturb you, I'd recommend you have another look at this film to see how much fun it is to live in a society with 24 hour State surveillance.

Not only is the project unlikely to stop, but other councils are interested, This statement is particular illustrative (emphasis mine)

Council leader Simon Woodbridge said the project would 'effectively pay for itself within a few weeks in terms of the amounts of money we can help people to save'.

Paraphrased: "We are invading your privacy and peering into your homes for your own wellbeing."

On a less scary note but no less stupid, California legislators now want to ban black paint on cars:

In a move that will likely get California's consumers in a huff, impending legislation may soon restrict the paint color options for Golden State residents looking for their next new vehicle. The specific colors that are currently on the chopping block are all dark hues, with the worst offender seemingly the most innocuous color you could think of: Black.

You can't make this shit up. First they came for the lightbulbs...

A potentially illegal yet "environmentally friendly" Toyota Prius (picture source)

Space - the final frontier...for bats and high-school kids

2009-03-25T20:45:00.000+11:00

picture of the stratosphere taken with a high school extra credit DIY project (source from the article)

So with the news that 4 Spanish high-school kids with the help of their teacher and a budget of less than £100, made a DIY weather balloon-camera contraption that successfully took pictures of the stratosphere, I will firmly state that:
a: My high-school education was lacking in certain areas
b: It's entirely possible the sovereign state of Iran has been able to launch satellites

Also, the US Space program seems to have their own fare share of troubles, what with all the bats attempting to get space-borne.

close up of a bat clinging to the orange foam of the main shuttle rocket booster at launch March 15, 2009

For the animal lovers out there hoping for a happy space-faring ending:

Flight director Paul Dye said no one has seen the bat since. "I heard that it was clinging to the tank at liftoff, but I don't think anyone has seen it since," he said.