I wanna be mayor......

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, mayor...

Richie Williamson, 2GF breakfast radio jock and now as yet undeclared second-term Clarence Valley shire councillor, has had a rush of blood to the head after a very solid showing in the first preference count of ballots cast at last Saturday's NSW local government elections.

He now wants to be mayor and like another high-profile conservative, pro-development councillor before him, he mistakes the ballot to elect councillors as a de facto popular election of the mayor.

The Daily Examiner reported Richie on Monday last:

Williamson said he was pleased to have been re-elected so comfortably.
"It's very humbling," he told The Daily Examiner yesterday.
Williamson, who was first elected to council in 2005, said he was keen to continue working for Clarence Valley residents.
"We got a big job to do," he said.
"Some tough decisions need to be made.
"As far as I'm concerned, it is head down, tail up, and let's get on with the job."

Yesterday the same paper has Richie upping the ante and stating:

"I made the decision to stand for mayor of Clarence Valley Council following election on Saturday," Cr Williamson said.
"The vote on Saturday has given me a clear majority and people are expecting me to stand and represent them as mayor of Clarence Valley Council."

Sorry Richie, but across the Clarence Valley electors went to the polling booths fully aware that they were not voting for a mayor - that in fact they were electing 9 councillors.

The mayor is elected by these 9 councillors from amongst their number, to ensure that councillors have confidence in the mayor and in the hope that they will all work well together.

Cr. Williamson has made no secret in the past of his support for that Nationals wannabe and development consultant, Chris Gulaptis, and his personal voting record tends to be rather erratic on social and environmental issues.

He even made the great mistake of allowing that local political pariah to endorse him pre-election:

"The new council needs people like Richie Williamson and I hope for the Clarence Valley he is elected mayor," he said.

If anything these factors would make his installation as mayor a choice which would possibly leave the valley unable to take full advantage of federal and state government goodwill.

Windshuttle trails his denialist cloak

In Quadrant Online Keith Windshuttle is begging for an argument with this QED in the September issue.

Chicken Little Logic

In the ancient fable, Chicken Little thought one acorn dropping on her head meant the entire sky was falling. Today’s Chicken Littles show similar insight.

If there is a one centimetre sea rise through ice-sheet melting in the decade 2005 to 2015, and if that rate doubles in every subsequent decade, by 2095 the sea level will have risen by more than five metres … In a major and inspiring speech, Al Gore, the Winston Churchill of our age, issued a call for his country to move from a fossil-fuel to a renewable-energy economy within a decade.
— Robert Manne, ‘The Nation Reviewed’, The Monthly, August 2008

If Greenland’s ice sheet melts, the world sea level will rise 20 feet [6.1 metres]. Maps of the world will have to be redrawn. Rising seas will inundate Florida, the Netherlands and the cities of San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta and Manhattan. This will create 100 million environmental refugees.
— Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, May 2006

The sea level rises predicted by Gore and Manne depend upon the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland suddenly disappearing, a scenario deriving more from Hollywood than science. Even the doomsters on the UN IPCC scientific panel observe comparatively tiny sea level rises.

Global mean sea level has been rising. From 1961 to 2003 the average rate of sea level rise was 1.8 mm plus or minus 0.5 mm per year. For the twentieth century the average rate was 1.7 mm plus or minus 0.5 mm per year … For the period 1993 to 2003, for which the observing system was much better, the contributions from thermal expansion (1.6 mm plus or minus 0.5 mm per year) and loss of mass from glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets together give 2.8 mm plus or minus 0.7 mm per year.
— UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Report, 2007, Chapter Five, ‘Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level’, p 387

Hence, if the IPCC’s worst-case observations remain the same, by 2095 world sea level will have risen by between 18.3 cm and 30.4 cm. At this rate, it will take between 1741 years and 2902 years for the sea to rise 20 feet.

Repeat after me, Professor. Thermal expansion of sea water, thermal expansion of sea water, thermal expansion of sea water, thermal expansion of sea water.................

Federal Libs remain a headless chook

I don't know what it's going to take to stop the Liberal Party of Australia from tearing around the post-federal election backyard like a chook that has just been parted from its wattled head, but the elevation of Malcolm Bligh Turnbull to parliamentary leadership isn't it.

What little commonsense they had obviously went begging on Monday night.

In a country where the ordinary voter is feeling more and more financial pain and much of that pain is considered to flow from domestic and international corporate irresponsibility, with the R-word looming over us; an egotistical, monied silvertail politician with an HIH court case hanging over his head now leads the Opposition.

How embarrassment will be the least of it if his leadership goes pear shaped!

Costello on the pension ...

Decisions, decisions, decisions!!

Former treasurer Peter Costello must be a worried man. The poor bugger has a dilemma - he has to decide when he will leave the federal parliament.

Peter Martin, The Age's economic correspondent, has taken a look at the options Costello has.

1. As a backbencher, the former treasurer is earning $127,000 a year. But calculations performed by The Age using tables prepared by the Finance Department suggest that if he retired instead, his annual income would jump to $176,633 courtesy of Australia's parliamentary superannuation scheme.

That payment would grow with increases in parliamentary salaries and would stay with the 51-year old for the rest of his life.

2. If he wants, he can halve his $176,633-a-year pension and turn the rest into a lump sum of $1.77 million.

Let's put all that into perspective.

Single old-age pensioners get $273 a week.

Yes, they get $14,196 a year.

Putting it another way, that's "a mere 8% of what the former treasurer will make."

Perhaps Costello is looking for a shoulder to cry on as he contemplates how he'll survive after he departs the Canberra scene.

US 08: Children of the Revolution

I suspect that a Democrat U.S. president in 2009 who turns out to have a similar foreign policy and anti-terrorism stance as a Republican president in 2008, will come as no surprise to the British and Australian national governments.
However, I suspect that it will come as a big surprise to many across the blogosphere and more than a few hopeful idealists around the world.

So it was good to see Jeff Sparrow of the Overland Magazine writing in Crikey yesterday remind us that Obama is no 60's peacenik:

But the Bush presidency hasn’t been the work of a single idiot. There’s plenty of smart people behind W., making decisions that by and large reflect the concerns of the US elite. Had a Democrat occupied the White House for the last two terms, US policy might have been sold better, but it’s doubtful that decisions have been very different.
Pick any of the Bush administration’s most heinous policies and you’ll implicate a Democrat. "Extraordinary rendition", for instance, was pioneered under Clinton, with that cuddly environmentalist Al Gore playing a leading role.

And Derek Shearer quoted in The Age observes:

"One of the interesting things about the Obama campaign is almost all of the policy advisers are former Clinton administration people — so many of my good friends are involved day to day," he said.

From the latest published Gallup poll of registered voters, I doubt whether it will come as any surprise to the American children of the 60's revolution, as they have currently settled down to what is basically a statistical tie between Democrat Obama at 45% and Republican McCain at 48% preference in their age group.

Update:

According to the New York Post today.

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

Monsanto's role in "Fat Boy" A-Bomb

It is nice to see that Mr. Monsanto still follows North Coast Voices and clicks on to read what we may have to say on biotechnology.

So as not to disappoint this reader, here is the following from Wikileaks which suggest that Monsanto apparently had a contract with the US Government team when the atomic bomb Fat Boy (which eventually devastated Nagasaki) was being created at Los Alamos:

Scale of American effort where known Appreciable;

Monsanto contract on Po. Chem. 1-2 Physicists 3-5 chemists at Los Alamos

From MetroActive:

1939-1945--Monsanto conducts research on uranium for the Manhattan Project in Dayton, Ohio. Dr. Charles Thomas, who later served as the company's chairman of the board, was present at the first test explosion of the atomic bomb.

From Dayton Daily News in February 2007:
While they worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s, employees of Monsanto Chemical Co.'s Dayton Project unknowingly were exposed to radiation that would be a carcinogenic time bomb for some of them.
Now, thanks to a federal decision this month, dozens of cancer- stricken Cold War workers and their widows may finally be compensated for on-the-job toxic exposures they sustained some 60 years ago.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt has approved special status for the Monsanto workers, meaning they don't have to prove an occupational link if they have suffered from any of 22 cancers known to be caused by radiation.

Yes, GM seed giant Monsanto really has a corporate track record to be admired.

It truly inspires confidence in their assurances that genetically modified crops are always benign and will be so in Australia.

Photo of Fat Boy from Google Images

Two faces of the Australian pensions debate

A well-fed and expensively attired Leader of the Opposition displays his hypocrisy when debating his futile and belated wedge in support for an increase to old age pensions.

Photo from The Australian

Australian bloggers display their heartlessness.

Tuesday 9 September 2008, 3:58 pm #Wah
Farmers should shut the f**k up and grow things. And pensioners should accept that they are now useless to society thus should only get the crumbs. In the animal world they would know when to just f**k off and die - it’s about the herd, not the individual. [edited to avoid filters]