Neal gets called a nosey parker :-)

Someone finally wrote a letter to The Daily Examiner on 1 January 2009 voicing what quite a few have been quietly thinking about this photo snapping little man:

Parking rights

NEAL MORRIS, of Maclean Neighbourhood Watch, seems to think that he is a ranger, parking inspector or a police officer. (Neighbourhood Watch Column, Coastal Views 18/12/09).
Parking in Maclean or anywhere in the Valley has absolutely nothing to do with him.
Absolutely none of his business.
Whilst we all agree that many people are breaking the law re parking, it is not up to him to scrutinise it.
It is the job of the expert authorities such as police or council employees.
I think maybe your unpaid voluntary neighbourhood 'watching' has gone to your head, Neal.
Leave the job of parking patrol to those who are legally authorised and paid to do so.

S Aloi,
Yamba

Update:

Neal goes feral in his letter to editor in response on 6 January 2010.........

Crime watch is for all

I HAVE received a copy of a letter (DE 1/1/2010) from an inane scribbler under the possible pseudonym of 'S Aloi' welcoming the New Year.
It is quite normal for the guilty conscience to appeal against the law, if this appears to be the case and it is to remain anon, please send a photo of.the vehicle concerned so we can relate to the offence and recognise the individual with whom we deal.
For your information, the reason all crime exists in your area is simply because of this attitude shown in the letter which clearly states that it is only the responsibility of the police and or council.
This is so far from the truth it's unbelievable, as it is a normal requirement that all residents should watch out for any unsociable or criminal acts for their own and their neighbour's welfare and have the intestinal fortitude to act immediately.
The police are far too undermanned and the rangers due to workload are unable to watch for such things as the writer apparently commits, and as a consequence if we are unable by our actions to get a staff increase to cover all aspects which is our aim. Then we are all in trouble.
To the decent persons in Grafton and Maclean who advised me of this tirade, many thanks for your help.
For future reference please note. Maclean District Neighbourhood Watch will continue to assist all in need against any unsociable acts and all information gleaned from the public and or our actions will be forwarded to the authorities for their dealing.
FOR MACLEAN DISTRICT NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH,

Neal Morris JP, area controller, crime prevention network

Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops On Pesiticide Use

The opening paragraphs of a November 2009 report commissioned by The Organic Center Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops On Pesiticide Use in the United States: The First Thirteen Years:

This report explores the impact of the adoption of genetically engineered (GE) corn, soybean, and cotton on pesticide use in the United States, drawing principally on data from the United States Department of Agriculture. The most striking finding is that GE crops have been responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of herbicide use in the U.S. over the fi rst 13 years of commercial use of GE crops (1996-2008).

This dramatic increase in the volume of herbicides applied swamps the decrease in insecticide use attributable to GE corn and cotton, making the overall chemical footprint of today's GE crops decidedly negative. The report identifies, and discusses in detail, the primary cause of the increase -- the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds.

The steep rise in the pounds of herbicides applied with respect to most GE crop acres is not news to farmers. Weed control is now widely acknowledged as a serious management problem within GE cropping systems. Farmers and weed scientists across the heartland and cotton belt are now struggling to devise affordable and effective strategies to deal with the resistant weeds emerging in the wake of herbicide-tolerant crops.

But skyrocketing herbicide use is news to the public at large, which still harbors the illusion, fed by misleading industry claims and advertising, that biotechnology crops are reducing pesticide use. Such a claim was valid for the first few years of commercial use of GE corn, soybeans, and cotton. But, as this report shows, it is no longer.

An accurate assessment of the performance of GE crops on pesticide use is important for reasons other than correcting the excesses of industry advertising. It is also about the future direction of agriculture, research, and regulatory policy.

PDF full report download

Fair dinkum, you're a bit of a political b*tch aren't you Kristina!

With something of a carefully stage-managed publicity blitz Kristina Keneally launched herself as NSW Premier late last year.
She faced the meeja on taking office and promised a government focus on five main issues - one of which was the "most vulnerable members of the community".
Now it didn't take long to see that this touchy-feely sentiment was going to be a load of hot air.
You can't get much more vulnerable than those Aussies living on or below the poverty line but I didn't see the new premier rushing to roll back the former Rees Government decision to take a big bite out of the Federal Government's one-off basic payment increase for quite a few single pensioners later this year, and this week the state government she heads is defending its Solar Bonus Scheme levy which will see those families on very low incomes and pensioners without assets subsidizing the cheaper power supplied to people rich enough to be able to install solar power throughout their houses.
"Effectively, the costs of the feed-in tariff paid to a customer with a solar PV system will be spread across all customers on the network."
This on top of the fact that the NSW Government is about to give the nod to yet another hefty increase in electricity pricing (after a plump increase in 2009) so as to cover the black hole it allowed to develop in power supply infrastructure which needs to be quickly papered over if government wants to sell-off state energy assets.
Yeah, Kristina - that's really governing for the vulnerable that is!
I don't care how small the buyback levy may or may not be for the average family - it's the bl**dy principle.
Why should the interests of silvertails still rule in New South Wales and a hypocritical blow-in premier dare to act as if that's a really bonza state of affairs.

Pic from KKK's scrap book of media images

If you thought the number of natural disasters was growing you're probably right

Does it sometimes feel as though there are more natural disasters occurring around the world rather than just more events being reported in the media?
Perhaps that vague feeling is more accurate than previously thought.

Since 1988 the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) has been maintaining an Emergency Events Database EM-DAT. EM-DAT was created with the initial support of the WHO and the Belgian Government.

This database now has a number of graphs and maps of natural disaster trends including country profiles.

Australia rates in the highest number of instances category for drought (1976-1985), windstorm (1974-2003) and in the second highest for flood (1974-2003).

Click on graph to enlarge

Or another way of looking at similar data can be found at UNEP which gives more weight to improvements in information access affecting results.

Munich Re calculates the losses incurred due to severe weather-related natural disasters at an estimated US$ 1,600 billion since 1980. The Times reported at the end of 2009 that Natural catastrophes have left the world’s insurers with a claims bill totalling $22 billion (£13.7 billion) this year as the number of disasters linked to climate change increased markedly and insurers met $770 million in damages and repairs in Australia last year.

National Geographic natural disaster information including videos

Slippery Slope 101: this is what happens in a country with voluntary Internet filtering

If this is what happens in a country with voluntary ISP-level Internet filtering, (and where government is not actively participating in blanket domestic Internet censorship) what on earth can we expect from our own increasingly rabid Rudd Labor Government?

Below is the transcript of a message displayed when attempting to access a COP15 spoof site which had been taken down at the request of the Canadian Government:

Website suspended

Serverloft blocked the IP-range for this server because of the content of the client's website and would only unblock the IP-range if we suspended the website. The website was used in a spoof by The Yes Men.

Serverloft blocked the IP-range without a warrant and without calling us and thus affecting servers hosting 4500 of our customers' websites until we ourselves discovered the problem, and convinced Serverloft to unblock. Serverloft did send us an email explaining that they would not unblock the IP-range until the websites were taken offline. The email was sent 5 minutes after they cut of the access to the mail server, so we only received the email after the 4500 websites were back online.

Convincing Serverloft that their systems had blocked access on purpose was hard because Serverloft frontline support claimed that all their systems were working fine and they therefore assumed that the problem was a configuration problem on our server. They refused to help troubleshooting the issue.

Serverloft could simply have called us and asked us to deal with the situation. We would then have asked the Canadians for a warrant. If the Canadians had shown us a warrant we would have taken down the site immediately. As others have pointed out the Canadians could probably just have gone through CIRA and have the domain suspended, which would not have affected any of the other 4500 websites.

As we cannot go through every single page that our customers put on their websites we anticipate a similar situation may arise again. We have therefore asked Serverloft to revise their procedures so we at least would get a phone call before they cut our connection. They have so far refused to do so. They have answered:

your net was blocked because of hosting phishing sites. I've attached the information, we have, below our signature. I'm sorry, but we cant call every costumer for abuse. In some cases we've to respond very fast and have to block the net or server.

While I appreciate Serverloft respond fast, it is no good if the collateral damage is more than 1000 times as big. Had they called I am sure we would have found an arrangement that would satisfy both of us.

For more information: contact Ole Tange ole@tange.dk

The HuffingtonPost on the story

Google cache of Environment Canada spoof site.

The Yes Men post on website takedown.

Snapshot found at aviary.com

The Australian Christian Lobby believes in censorship, but is perhaps a trifle sceptical about man-made climate change

Every time I turn around in cyberspace it seems that the Australian Christian Censorship Lobby is lurking behind the next Google search result concerning the Rudd Government's plan to impose blanket censorship on the Internet as seen in Oz.
If the ACL is for excising all the naughty bits from television, radio, print, film and now the Internetz, what is it actually against?
To find out I went to its inaugural edition of Viewpoint online magazine which purports to give perspectives on social policy (this is a second ACL magazine as it also launched Debate in 2007) and, first cab off the rank was a six-page article by that prominent climate change denialist Bob Carter which tells all good believers that anthropomorphic climate change is bunk and a nasty national emission trading scheme is unnecessary.
It follows that with a piece on the problems with climate change denialism just to balance things out a bit and then both opposing authors battle in out in reply articles, as though there really was a genuine international debate about whether man-made climate change exists.
The magazine goes on to give house room to articles about how religious freedoms are at risk and then a final article on censorship which it rather slyly refers to as "classification standards".

Of course it comes as no surprise that more censorship is recommended. It seems that Australia's already strict standards need to be strengthened to save our souls from vile corruption.
ACl media releases show that this lobby group is also opposed to same-sex marriage, the supposed ease with which women can obtain abortions, any formal charter of human rights, ABC Broadcasting self-regulation, GetUp advertising, Bill Henson, the Sex Party, The Greens social policies, lesbian parents, euthanasia, and the powers of High Court judges.

I've a sneaking suspicion that the ACL is really only in favour of the 'rights' of Christians and feels the rest of Australia is composed of morally bankrupt, undeserving morons.

Graphic from Google Images

Animalia......(6)

Nicole and Warren Lloyd took this snap at their Waterview Heights home, then passed it on the The Daily Examiner 30 December 2009. It's definitely uncommon for a spider to have a young snake over for a festive season bite. The Redback Spider's unusual size can be compared with the Eastern Small-eyed Snake's approximately 200 millimetre length.

I can almost hear the theme music to Arachnophobia playing in the background.

Australia Says No!

From No Clean Feed

Begorrah, bejaysus and begawd! Ireland's new blasphemy law

Just when you think it's safe to let the Irish back in the house (sorry great-great grandpapa!) they come up with this protection for the pious via a new set of defamation laws which include "blasphemous libel", according to blasphemy.ie:

"From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine. The new law defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted.

This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic States led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level."

Go here for the 25 blasphemies published in response to this law which apparently got through the parliament by a margin of one vote.
If you're really interested the entire Irish Defamation Act 2009 is here.

Update:
Traffic on blasphemy.ie is apparently so heavy this morning that a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable notice is currently displayed, so use it's Google cache to read this website if you're having trouble.

Australia Uncensored blows the whistle on who Conroy is actually censoring on the Australian Internet

From Australia Uncensored on 27 December 2009:

The Rudd Government's not censoring the Australian Internet - it's censoring older people

If you read Rudd Government bumpf on the need for Internet censorship and all that nonsense which Senator Conroy mouths, it would be easy to believe that Australian users are mostly innocent children and evil paedophiles just waiting to prey on these sweet innocents.

Small problem with this premise though.

Australian Internet users are mainly adults over 35 years of age (66.3% in all and mostly female) and the biggest proportion of these adults are over 55 years of age according to one 2007 snapshot.

In 2008 Nielsen said that Australians were spending almost 14 hours a week surfing the Net (out of a total of 84.4 media consumption hours) with 94% of all users accessing the Internet from home, and by March 2009 it was reporting that our individual media consumption was averaging 89.7 hours per week with the biggest slice of this being our Internet use.

By 2009 the CIA World Fact Book calculated that over 15 million Australians use the Internet.

Now it's not hard to guess that techno-savvy, usually computer literate from an early age, individuals will be able to circumvent any national filter at will - the Enex report to the Dept. of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy even tells us so.

It's also not hard to realise that older users rely almost solely on the expertise of the big search engines (which are currently not universally filtered for Australian use) to find their way to online information and opinion.

Which leaves the planned mandatory national ISP-level filtering scheme censoring people rather than cyberspace and most of those people with artificially limited access to information and free speech will be middle-aged and older voters.

Potentially making at least 10 million Australians very ticked off with Kevin Rudd and the Labor Government ahead of the next federal election.

I'm one of these, Senator Conroy! I'm not impressed that, having fairly successfully spanned technology which moved from sloping school desks with ink wells and nibbed wooden pens right through to today's cyberspace, you and your Labor Right cronies are trying to tell me that I'm to have restricted access to the world.

Guess where my vote won't be going?

* What Rudd & Conroy attempt to censor now on the Australian Internet

While you were sleeping....more Antarctic whales were being killed

Greenpeace photograph of whales in the Southern Ocean

The whaling fleet subsidised by the Government of Japan is still in Antarctic waters killing whales for so-called scientific research and commercial whale meat. The fleet is not expected to sail back to Japan until sometime between mid-March and April 2010.

This is the person responsible for the ongoing needless slaughter:

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama (standing)

So you made a New Year's resolution......

So you made a New Year's resolution again this year to do one or more of the following:
A. Manage your credit card debt a bit better
B. Save money so that next Christmas will be stress free
C. Lose some weight
D. Get fit, maybe even join a gym
E. Quit smoking
F. Drink less alcohol
G. Study hard when school/uni starts again for the year
H. Impress the boss with your get and up and go or just go
I. Bike to work
J. Take up a sport
K. Watch less television and read more
L. Take the pooch for longer walks

M. Ask for her hand in marriage/tell him you're getting a divorce.

N. Eat less take away and cook healthy meals.

Well done! I give you until the end of the month to abandon each and every good intention except for M - we're always attracted to the big mistakes in life.
Yeah, I know, that sounds a trifle jaded, but Professor Richard Wiseman sorta backs me up because his team found that 78% of resolution makers crash and burn.

However all is not lost as Teh Prof appears to have nailed a few decent tips over at his blog:
Last year we tracked hundreds of people who were trying to keep their resolution, asking them to report on their success and the techniques that they were using. The results suggest that many of the ideas recommended by self-help experts simply don't work. We have developed a fun quiz on off the back of this work that predicts the likelihood of you achieving your resolutions – try it here. We have also posted lots more about the work, including ten tips for keeping your resolutions over on the 59 seconds site. Part of the work revealed that you will increase your chances of achieving your aims if you tell others about your goal. So, what's your resolution?

How we began the year 2010....

It's now January 2010. The beginning of a new year but not exactly a month with a bright, clean calendar page - it is weighted down by last year's unfinished business.

In January 2009 North Coast Voices was writing about climate change denialists and their opposition to Rudd's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the rising costs of electricity, water, transport, the Liberal Party leader, Conroy's Internet censorship plan, religion, Twitter personas, Monsanto and the plight of Antarctic whales.

Looking back at our posts from last month and forward to those posts scheduled for the beginning of this month, it seems that little has changed for the Australian blogosphere or, to a lesser degree, for the mainstream media.

A quick Internet scan shows that climate change, rising costs, Internet censorship, whales, religion etc., are still on our collective list of concerns in January 2010.

Political, economic and social change continues at snail's pace.

Larvatus Prodeo has an amusing take on the year ahead.

Drawing from I Stand Connected

The Great Australian Internet Blackout is on 25-29 January & Australia Day!

From the protest Website:

What’s the problem?
The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste millions of dollars and won't make anyone safer.
Join us and take action!
The Great Australian Internet Blackout is a combined online and offline demonstration against imposed online censorship. We’re collaborating with Electronic Frontiers Australia to make sure every Australian knows why this draconian policy is unacceptable.

Go to The Great Australian Internet Blackout and find out how you can take part.

Happy New Year!

From all of us here at North Coast Voices.

May 2010 be a very good year for bloggers and readers everywhere