Something to ponder at the end of the week

You know you're getting older when.......

.......most of the thespians named on the back of DVDs lining racks at the local video store are actors that a) you've never even heard of before and b) all look younger than your kids.

Picture: Google Images

FEHVA 2009 Bangalow Art Prize winner

Bangalow Art Prize 2009 winning painting
ROADS AROUND BANGALOW
by Helena Maughan

Other FEHVA 2009 entrants and winners can be found here.

Dirty tricks or dirty politics?

Is Kevin Rudd prevaricating over Ute-gate or is it Malcolm Turnbull who is telling pork pies?
Well..................ask yourself who was it that recently had a merchant bank pay an out-of-court settlement on his behalf, after the liquidator took them to court over the HIH collapse amid accusations of of deception?
With software freely available on the Internet which allows anyone to produce and send a genuine looking email as someone else, I would also be asking for access to the Libs' computers to double-check any 'proof' the Coalition might present.
Fer gawds sake - I could send a fake email as the PM tomorrow and have any reply routed to another address entirely.
So could most Internet users on the NSW North Coast.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Truffles may not have been as smart as he thought.
A small clue might've been the fact that the mate didn't get financial help after all.
But then, maybe I'm a bit biased 'cause I'm plain terrified of the idea of that drongo (who when he was last in government tried to rip-off our North Coast water supplies) ever getting back in the saddle again.

Lost in translation..........

This turned up in the blogosphere recently. It seems to be a case of lost in translation for this look at North Coast Voices by Sustainability Definition.

North Coast Voices: It's crack 'em when they're down despite it at Fiscal Star

Hi! My personage is Boy. I'm a manful bi-coloured tabby cat. Ever since I discovered that Malcolm Turnbull's dogs were allowed to blog, I be subjected to been pestering Clarencegirl to okay me a petite place on North Coast Voices. Departed blue-eyed boy musing: The deddie scintilla has raised its CEO in a blog. The Orstrahyun mentions hearing more a fortune-teller who charges at least $100 an hour crusade of speaking to departed pets and conveying messages. I don't regard as we would be less chatty than beforehand - I'm dependable we would also utter "Let me in", "Let me out", "Just up to snuff behind my consideration intention you", "Why is the dog in my bed?", "Take it away - it's not up to my culinary standards"and "Is Malcolm Turnbull STILL moaning?"An Easter Bunny musing: It was a tittle of a petrify to the Easter Bunny when on Easter Sunday the ABC TV Landline program ran not one but three stories on rabbits - involving profit as good as poisoning, trapping, blowing up burrows and preparing crusade of the gut. ......This entry was posted on Freitag, Mai 29th, 2009 at 15:17 and is filed under Allgemein.

Sometimes those free 'translate this' sites on the Web are just not up to snuff.

A classic WTF?! concerning the Rudd-Conroy internet censorship scheme

The laughs just keep on coming. Screenshot by Mark Newton posting on Twitpic.

Did the editor's dog eat his homework?

How does one account for the Comment in today's Daily Examiner by its editor Peter Chapman?

In a piece titled Banks law unto themselves Chapman has simply reproduced, word-for-word, a media statement released by Senator Steve Fielding.

Okay, let's give Chapman some credit. He acknowledged it was Fielding's work and to make things easier for his readers he turned one paragraph that consisted of two sentences into two one-sentence paragraphs.

Perhaps the editor's dog ate his homework and when it came time to hand up his copy for today's paper he had nothing.

Let's hope other journos at The Daily Examiner don't follow Chapman's lead and simply rehash media statements.

Oh, by the way, Fielding's media statement can be read here.

The coal and oil lobby get serious about blocking moves to limit greenhouse gases

The American Institute for Energy Research has created an off-shoot, the erroneously named Energy Freedom Center.

Reportedly partly funded by Exxon-Mobile, with the help of former US Republican senator George Allen it launched the new entity in early June 2009 and, is busy attempting to dismantle any concerted effort to have the US Congress seriously consider a national scheme to address the causes and effects of climate change.

Meanwhile R&R Partners - Advertising continues to push the interests of the coal industry.

To demonstrate just how far 'dirty' energy will go to maintain the status quo here is an excerpt from the R&R brag sheet:

The Challenge:
To develop a new issue-advocacy and message branding campaign focused on changing public perceptions and influencing congressional action. Included in this effort was a well-funded advertising and earned media strategy designed to position ACCCE as a responsible, positive player in seeking workable solutions to the climate-change challenge facing our nation and in developing a diversified energy policy that includes coal as a critical component.
The Strategy:
R&R and ACCCE created a fully integrated marketing, branding and issue-advocacy campaign to educate our audiences on the importance of coal in their daily lives. Our strategy was to convince our audiences that through the use of modern technology, coal is cleaner than ever and getting cleaner still, and present coal as a vital component in our march toward energy independence.
The ACCCE campaign focused primarily around a fully integrated marketing approach that used the presidential campaign as a platform for our messaging, resulting in highly visible and well-publicized campaign tactics throughout the year. Outreach consisted of grassroots, earned media, paid media and advocacy tactics that created a "surround-sound" effect targeting each of our audiences through all mediums and communications. Grassroots efforts included street teams, walking billboards, mobile billboards and recruitment and mobilization of an ACCCE Army (supporters of ACCCE and its mission) at presidential primaries, debates, conventions and other key campaign events. Earned media efforts included maintaining ongoing media relations and generating consistent press coverage of ACCCE-related issues and successes. A national television campaign focusing on the ACCCE core-message strategy – along with state and issue-specific campaigns that included news and magazine print, outdoor billboards, and radio and online components – comprised the paid media efforts that supported the overall campaign strategy.
The Result:
Coal is now an active voice in the ongoing energy policy debate and is seen as one of our country's chief sources of energy – both now and in the future.
A recent ACCCE poll conducted in October 2008 showed that nearly 70 percent of opinion elites believe that coal is a fuel for America's energy future. This number compares with just 52 percent expressing the same opinion in May 2008. Furthermore, 47 percent of opinion elites believe the successful development of clean-coal technology will promote energy security by allowing the use of American coal, while at the same time reducing emissions. Additionally, 46 percent feel that developments in clean-coal technology will drive down the cost of electricity.
In addition, our subsequent advocacy efforts inside the Beltway have led to the acceptance and support of coal by both political parties, along with President Barack Obama, as an essential component of the energy discussion that will continue during this administration.

All in all this scenario makes Australia's Bolt, Blair, Marohasy, Plimer and Carter look rather like a disorganised rabble.

One has to wonder how effective the Obama Administration's release of the Global Climate Change Impacts Across America report this week will be in countering the push by polluting industries to maintain what they see as a right to continue producing high greenhouse gas levels.

20 page overview of this report here, US regional fact sheets here and full report here.

Eco-Terrorism: and I should be surprised because?

This week eco-terrorism became the subject of an The Australian piece.

Lauren Wilson June 16, 2009

A THREAT of attack by an eco-terrorism group is being taken seriously by Victorian police and the Brumby government.

State Energy Minister Peter Batchelor said a menacing letter left at the home of a power station manager was a dramatic escalation of environmental activism.

The radical Earth Liberation Front yesterday refused to back down from threats against Hazelwood power station chief Graeme York and his family. A US spokesman for the group told AAP Mr York "should consider himself lucky" to have received a hand-delivered warning. And Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland said the letter was being investigated by special intelligence detectives. Although the ELF has not been prominent in Australia, it is responsible for a series of fire-bomb attacks on industrial property and equipment in Europe and the US. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation proscribed the group in 2002 as a serious terror threat.

The letter to Mr York, dropped in the mailbox of his Melbourne home, declared: "You are responsible for the dirtiest power station in Australia and the most polluting in the industrialised world.

"We hold you personally accountable for this assault against our earth. The irreplaceable and precious eco-systems of this earth are worth much more than your manicured lawn, expensive car and opulent suburban house.

"Your property will not remain safe so long as Hazelwood continues to pollute at such an inexcusable level, swallow millions of litres of fresh water every hour and cough out hydrochloric and nitrogen acids in return."

While I unequivocally condemn threats of violence, I am hardly surprised that such threats are beginning to surface.

With so much at stake and so little being done by governments and industry to address climate change, the only thing that surprises me is that it has taken this long for resentment to find an Australian focus.

Ben McNeil recently writing in New Matilda looked at the disconnect between climate change science and the political process during the Howard years and observes; It seems for many years the Australian government reflected a broad and dangerous public misconception about combating climate change: that is it has nothing to do with Australia's long-term economic prosperity or national security.

Perhaps the Rudd Government should reconsider its limited stance on climate change impacts mitigation and factor in the possibility that home-grown political protest may take a violent turn when faced with weak government responses to the urgent need to address long term water/food supply security and resource hungry/polluting industries.

Piers Akerman proves why both he and The Daily Telegraph have such lowly reputations

This was what Piers Akerman said in The Daily Telegraph on 14 June 2009 when he pointed the finger at Kevin Rudd and shouted I accuse!:

On Monday, May 25, Rudd stood in Parliament and said: "Today the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs also activated the Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment to provide further assistance to help those in northern New South Wales affected by the flood disaster.

The Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment will be a one-off immediate payment of $1,000 to adults and $4,000 to children. Claims for assistance can be made through Centrelink.

"Today, in recognition of the severe damage to local communities in northern NSW, the Government has agreed to a request from the NSW Premier to extend the current assistance being provided to small business and to primary producers in the flood-affected areas in northern NSW.

"This assistance will include one-off grants of up to $15,000 for small businesses and primary producers that can provide proof of expenditure on flood-related recovery. The New South Wales Rural Assistance Authority will administer these payments.

"I have also today authorised this assistance for people affected by the earlier floods in New South Wales in late March."

Notice that Akerman's last sentence in this quote is a separate paragraph and so appears to apply to all payments/grants mentioned?

Akerman then goes on to state:

But on Tuesday, May 26, Rudd's office advised Hartsuyker that contrary to what the PM had said on Monday, the victims of the March 31 flood would not be eligible for the one-off cash payment, only those affected by the May event.

Very nicely implying to his readers that it is Rudd, not he Akerman, who is lying about who promised what.

But Hansard clearly shows that what Kevin Rudd actually said was:

Today, in recognition of the severe damage to local communities in northern New South Wales, the government has agreed to a request from the New South Wales Premier to extend the current assistance being provided to small business and to primary producers in the flood affected areas in northern New South Wales. This assistance will include one-off grants of up to $15,000 for small businesses and primary producers that can provide proof of expenditure on flood related recovery. The New South Wales Rural Assistance Authority will administer these payments. I have also today authorised this assistance for people affected by the earlier floods in New South Wales in late March.

Now it is evident that what had been agreed to was that small business and primary producers (caught in that earlier flooding which Nationals MP Luke Hartsuyker had apparently approached Akerman over) will be afforded the right to apply for a one-off grant. Not individual home owners.

I really feel for everyone caught by flooding on the NSW North Coast, but Luke Hartsuyker's cynical political ploy utilizing the likes of Akerman is doing more harm than good.

Phishing lures received this week

St. George Group

Dear Customer,

Due to recent account takeovers and unauthorized listings, St.George Bank is requesting a new account verification procedure. From time to time, randomly selected accounts (seller and/or buyer) are placed under an advanced updating process based on merchant accounts/bank relations and on-file credit cards. St.George Bank may also request in an email message scanned/faxed copies of one or more photo ID's. Your account confirmation may go wrong if your credit card/bank account has expired, or if you have changed/replaced your credit card without letting us know about the change.

An email one doesn't reply to!

Dear costumer ,

For your security, we have temporarily prevented access to your account. We have reasons to believe that your access may have been accesed by someone else than you. You may be getting this message because you are signing on from a different location or device.
If this is the case, your access may be restored when you return to your normal sign on method.
For immediate access, you are required to follow the link below to secure your personal account informations.
https://ibanking.stgeorge.com.au/InternetBanking/welcome.jsp?loginattempt=max&resetid=emailID29953291
Thank you for helping us protect your account.

© St.George Bank Limited ABN 92 055 513 070 AFS Licence No. 240997

The spelling gives this attempt at Internet fraud away.

Rudd must've been smiling, surely?

Saw a Tweet from Kevin Rudd in which he signed himself KRudd.
Perhaps our Kev is finally embracing the very Aussie moniker Kruddy?

And you thought he would be different?

As the days mount in Barack Obama's presidency, the word 'change' has been firmly shelved when it comes down to actual government practice.

Reverting to what looks suspiciously like right-wing Christian fundamentalism, the Obama Administration through the US Justice Department has now argued against same-sex marriage in a 54-page motion to dismiss in the matter of Smelt & Hammer v The United States of America.

Incredibly at Page 28 of the motion the legal argument appears to draw an analogy between same-sex marriage, underage marriage and incestuous marriage (but was careful not to mention polygamous marriage).

Not content with this about-face, Obama's troops are also out there arguing in support of the restrictive use of 'state secrets' legislation when it feels US political interests are threatened, as well as continuing to support warrantless phone tapping.

Jewel v NSA has now been joined by Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v Obama and the earlier Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., has just developed an extra twist.
With the Obama Administration arguing against a recent ruling on limitations when invoking state secret provisions (the court had ruled that government could not prematurely invoke privilege) and petitioning the court of appeals full panel of judges to rehear an earlier Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that victims of extraordinary rendition and torture could have their day in court.

The rehearing application hypocritically states in part:

This is one of those few cases warranting review by the Court en banc.
The panel has significantly altered the contours of the military and state secrets privilege – a constitutionally-based means by which the Executive protects critical national security information from disclosure.
The panel's approach is flatly inconsistent with decisions of the Supreme Court, this Court, and this Court's sister circuits on questions of exceptional importance applying the privilege.
We emphasize that the Government's request for en banc review is based upon the most careful and deliberative consideration, at the highest levels, of all possible alternatives to relying upon the state secrets privilege.
As the President made clear two weeks ago, while the state secrets privilege is necessary to protect national security, the United States will not invoke the privilege to prevent disclosure of "the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government."1

Full copy of Petition for Rehearing here.

It seems that from American presidential election to presidential election POTUS remains POTUS in the worst sense of this public office.

Update:

In Padilla & Lebron v John Yoo currently before the courts it appears that John C. Yoo, former US Justice Department counsel, former advisor in the President's War Council and author of the infamous Bush-era torture memos, has also unsuccessfully attempted to invoke 'state secrets' to avoid legal scrutiny and litigation. US District Court June 2009 ruling here.

I've just read The Punch......

......and I'm asking myself why I'd even bothered to have a looksee.
It abounds with journalists I've thankfully rarely heard of, a smattering of recovering pollies, a number of Coalition MPs, a cluster of minor academics, a smattering of meeja types, one or two students and all padded out with a couple of right-wing apologists for just about everything detrimental to life and limb.
I swear the bios in Punch's About Us are longer and more interesting than the opinion posts and probably contain more substance.
I expected Mike Rann to fall for the start-up hype from News Ltd. - but what on earth are Mark Abib, Anthony Albanese, Kate Ellis and Natasha Stott-Despoja doing in the middle of this disaster in waiting?

Greatest problem! Crisis! It's extravagation time at Tabloid City

Image from The Daily Examiner on 12 June 2009, page 14 and pointer on the front page

There is a reason why newspaper journalists were just two places off the bottom of the Roy Morgan June 2009 poll, which rated public perception of the ethics and honesty of Australia's main professional groups.

Here is a perfect example of modern gutter journalism - The Daily Examiner indulging in a little Ngaru Village bashing (calling it the shame of Yamba) and in the process telling us that no-one wanted to talk to the newspaper even though it was going though politically correct channels.

According to the editor's Comment article; an urban residential area, with no more than fifteen unit clusters/houses (about twelve occupied) and a handful of kids, is apparently causing the greatest problem facing the Clarence Valley community today.
In fact it's a crisis!

In increasingly breathless purple prose the editor expects that any car he travels to the village in will likely be pelted with stones and abuse will be hurled.

Yes, I can really see his point.
Disregard the fact that many of the Yaegl traditional owners live quietly in the wider 6,500-strong Yamba community and, that there are around 50,000 people living across the Clarence Valley on any given day which means that the combined weight of the dominant groups outnumber these original Australian families.
Forget that it is the personal experience of many Yamba residents that when travelling into Ngaru Village they are only met with a quiet and dignified politeness.
Completely ignore those indigenous families where a parent works full-time and the children go to school regularly.
A few kids in one area are allegedly busy turning our cherished, otherwise major problem-free, whitebread way of life to dust if the hyperventilating editor is to be believed.

The day Peter Chapman published this tripe I happened to pass a Yamba home mourning the recent loss of a young indigenous person to suicide - but blinked editors don't even think about the sort of conditions which cause this all too frequent tragedy, do they?

Oh, but I am remiss! I am forgetting to mention that the very next day after his Comment went to print the editor offered to 'help' Ngaru Village.
How did he do that? Why by splashing out on the entire front page of The Daily Examiner's Saturday issue with this supposed offer, in which his opening paragraph stated that the Yamba aboriginal community...is collapsing.

Then on Page Four filling the personally-penned article with hearsay, outright gossip and ill-formed opinion.

As well as admitting that he had sent an apparently uninvited photographer into the village at 6.15am the previous day (when the Yamba air temperature was 7 degrees Celsius according to BoM and sensible folk were still inside eating breakfast in front of a heater) to take surreptitious photographs of one of the three dwellings that had already been scheduled for demolition years ago and what appears to be one occupied house.

Which seems to encompass the entire range of spurious help the editor offered.

Peter Chapman is indeed the ugly face of Australian journalism.

Update:

A letter to the editor (very similar to this post) was sent to The Daily Examiner, which published same on 16 June 2009, along with a lengthy Editor's Comment attached.

The comment was a laugh and a half as it stated in part; you are so far wide of the mark you couldn't find your way back with a guide dog, a compass and a map.

The editor rather strangely went on to say that this [my] attitude of indifference was what has caused all the problems at Ngaru Village.

However, what produced the greatest laughter was Peter Chapman's assertion that when publishing the letter in question he was not deleting any of your diatribe.

Poor man just can't help himself, as this was yet another extravagation - he had indeed deliberately deleted eleven words in the middle of a sentence; the Yamba air temperature was 7 degrees Celsius according to BoM and.

Apparently the rest of the Clarence Valley was not supposed to know that he sent the photographer out in cold weather!

Just as that Saturday's frontpage story and Page Four article have not been posted on The Daily Examiner website to date.

Fair go, Andy!

I pulled my miserable cold-laden head out of a Vicks infusion last Friday long enough to read Google News for Australia and discovered that Andrew Fraser over at The Australian (helped along by that perennial attention seeker, Bernard Salt) was having a go at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for his dated "folksy idiom".
Andrew complains "that only Australians over the age of 70 spoke like that these days".
Leaving aside the fact that 70 is really too high a bar for defining common use of Australian slang, the fact remains that older Australians now make up at least a quarter of the Australian population.
So if Rudders wants to occasionally pitch his song and dance routine to this demographic (which let's face it, is part of Liberal Party heartland) more power to him.
Andrew may not realise it but Baby Boomers like myself do use the odd "folksy idiom" or two and don't feel dated doing so.
As for Bernard Salt. Gawd, the chap thinks we are all channelling Chips Rafferty.
No Bernie - Rafferty was aping a mob just like us!