If the killer tomatoes don't get you that half-glass of wine will!

Non-iodised salt is bad for you. So is refined sugar. Ditto caffeine, processed meat, dairy fats and all those trans-thingummyjigs. Nicotine of course will almost always kill you.

It's not healthy to drink water during a meal, it's unhealthy to drink water at the end of a meal.
Food dyes, MSG and food cooked over charcoal or in a microwave are harmful. No wait, well maybe. Fresh air good. Sunlight dangerous.

Exercise every single day to live longer. You don't have to exercise each day to live longer.
Don't make your home near power lines, main roads or mail clearing centres (someone may go postal).
Cities are unhealthy places, however you will get sicker during an illness if you live in the country.
Pain is universal, but you will feel less of it if you are well off.
Your fate is in your genes. No your fate is in your own hands.

In whatever manner you behave you might eventually die from SARS, bird flu, haemorrhagic fever, tidal wave, hang nail or an attack of the killer tomatoes. The experts all agree - every body dies!

Now we're told that imbibing any alcohol whatsoever will eventually raise our cancer risk.

For heavens sake - will those professional moral panickers forever running to the media give us all a break. Modern life is full of risk, every day and every minute. Life's like that. In fact it has been like that since the world began.
Because life is more than the political agendas of professors, politicians, parsons and bureaucrats.

Psst....heard the one about a republic?

Anyone else notice just how fast talk of an Australian republic died down after Federal Labor's Australia 2020 summiteers disappeared into the sunset?
Roy Morgan Research gives a clue as to why in the results of a telephone poll taken last weekend.

In early May 45% (down 6% since Feb. 2005) believe Australia should become a Republic with an elected President, while 42% (up 2%) support Australia remaining a Monarchy and 13% (up 4%) are undecided — according to a special Morgan Poll of Australians taken last weekend (May 3/4, 2008).---
Gary Morgan says:
“Despite the discussion generated at the recent 2020 Summit on Australia’s future, Australians’ support for becoming a Republic with an elected President has fallen to its lowest level in nearly 15 years.
“Roy Morgan ‘Issues Research’ due to be released next week at the Future Summit shows Australians are more concerned with economic and environmental issues than they are with symbolic issues involving changes to the Australian Constitution that has worked well for over a century.
"What would please the Monarchists is 64% of those aged 14-17 say Australia should remain a Monarchy, with 23% supporting a Republic and 13% undecided."
“Kevin Rudd and his “Republican” colleagues should forget about changing the Constitution over the next few years and concentrate on making sure working Australians can “survive” with higher interest rates and higher prices.”

Even those of us, who are less in love with a monarchy than they are deeply afraid of what politicians and elites (who believe in the divine right of each to govern the majority) would do to the Constitution, will be pleased to see Kevin Rudd get a black eye on this issue.
It was arrogant of him to try and force a debate in the first place.

The low dingo intends government to be carbon neutral by 2020

Little Morrie Iemma was shouting it from the rooftops yesterday.
"The Government's plans to become carbon neutral include reducing green house gas emissions from building energy use to year 2000 levels by 2020."

Yeah right - take another twelve years to get government administrative operations and buildings to go carbon neutral.
While this year or next you privatise, and remove from full state control, that dirty greenhouse gas producing electricity industry for the multinationals to play ducks and drakes with.
Morrie you're a low dingo.

Telstra drops appeal against ACCC now patchy Next G network in place

ABC News yesterday.

 

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says Telstra has dropped an appeal against findings that the marketing of its Next G mobile phone network was misleading.

The Federal Court ruled that Telstra had been deceiving by claiming that Next G gives coverage equal to or better than the CDMA network.

Telstra must now pay the ACCC's legal costs.

 

This is what Telstra now says of Next G with the CDMA network finally closed down since the end of April.

 

Like any other mobile network, Next G mobile telephone coverage depends in part on where you are, what particular handset you are using and whether your handset has an external antenna attached.

Only in America......

Well there it is - an advert with the words Swiss, gold and terror.
I guess that it would only be in America that the history of gold, particularly Swiss gold, could be completely forgotten by advertising agencies.
For heaven's sake - towards the end of the Nazi era Swiss banks were allegedly accounting dental-grade gold from Germany, according to Adam LeBor's Hitler's Secret Bankers.
This internet image is not the smartest way to puff up an 'investment' firm which apparently specialises in US gold and silver coins.
Image came from www.worldnetdaily.com with this blurb.

A look back at the Carma Report. Has anything really changed in the politics of water?

For the last ten years public discourse in Australia has been focussed in large measure on what to do about water security.
In June 2007 Media Monitors put out a press release about this debate.
Watching the continuing debate in 2008 it is hard to see any significant progress made in either the level of debate or policy solutions offered.
It appears that the "drought of action" remains.

The Water Debate in Australia –
A Drought of Action; A Flood of Politics, Vested Interests and Nimbyism----
The analysis concluded that the Australian public is likely to be confused by the current debate as it is presenting dire warnings of a chronic water shortage, but little by way of agreed practical solutions to deal with the problem.
Among a number of key findings, the research found that the majority of discussion about water aired in the media continues to be in relation to the problem, rather than solutions.---
Furthermore, it reported that all solutions presented were being deadlocked in claim and counter-claim. "While some media have devoted space and time to presenting the public with simply explained factual and scientific information on water usage, storage and management, the vast majority of debate and discussion is contradictory claims and counter-claims by various Federal and State politicians,environmentalists, farmers’ groups and other vested interests such as landholders affected by proposed dams or residents potentially affected by infrastructure projects."----
The analysis, undertaken by the research unit of Media Monitors, reviewed almost 82,000 news reports, features articles, columns, letters to the editor and radio and TV program segments discussing water between 1 January and 30 April 2007 and conducted in-depth content analysis on a sample of 1,200 media articles in national and major metropolitan newspapers. The analysis was undertaken independently by Media Monitors with no paying client or sponsor of the research. Media discussion of water provided a total of 3.5 billion ‘Opportunities to See’, according to the Media Monitors study (the number of articles multiplied by the circulation of each media). "It is unlikely that any adult or child over the age of reason in Australia is unaware that there is a water crisis," the research concluded.
"What is less clear, however, are the most effective solutions to address Australia’s water shortage," it found. The analysis warned that there is very limited objective information and education for the public to make informed decisions.----
The report warned that there is a danger that when the drought breaks and dams fill, many Australians will believe the water issue has been resolved, as much discussion has focussed on drought, a natural disaster, as the cause of drying dams and river systems rather than fundamental endemic and systemic problems requiring a cohesive and coordinated national water management strategy.

Full Media Monitors 2007 Carma Research Report here.

This week's graph of domestic media mentions.

Australia 2008: What the unions create the unions can take away

Neither Our Kev or Little Morrie have had their history hats on over this last month or so as they both push the privatisation of NSW power industry assets, in the face of widespread general public and union opposition to this plan.
Both the Prime Minister and the NSW Premier are forgetting that in the 19th century it was the unions which birthed the Australian Labor Party and then nurtured it to adulthood.

With Labor now so far to the right of centre on the political spectrum that it seems almost indistinguishable from the Liberal Party most of the time, many ordinary Australians are browned off and beginning to ask themselves who represents their interests now.
Perhaps the time has come for the labour movement to birth another political party which more accurately represents the 21st century Aussie battler.

I know that if the unions put together another party based on notions of equality, equity and social justice I would probably vote for its candidates.
Any vote for Labor these last thirty years has usually been a compromise between a bad choice and an even worse choice.

Thanks to Club Troppo for displaying the pic of a young comrade.