National Goanna Pulling Championships, Wooli Sunday 8 June 2008

This Sunday, Wooli on the NSW North Coast will be holding the National Goanna Pulling Championships at the Wooli Sports Ground.
This annual event kicks off at 9am through to 4pm. Entry is free.
Winner in the heavyweight division takes home a cash prize of $500.
Day also includes kids fun events, foot races, market stalls, beer garden and mobile farm nursery.

This hilarious and intensely competitive sport is something like a tug-o-war match between two competitors pulling from a strap attached around their necks. The belly-down position up on two legs and the backward-scuttle motion required to gain ground is reminiscent of a goanna's gait.

Contact Details:
Australian National Goanna Pulling Competition
Wooli Sports Ground
Wooli, NSW 2462
Telephone: 02 - 6649 7540

Totally underwhelmed by the latest Bright Idea, Prime Minister

Everyone's noticing. It's almost as though the Prime Minister can't stand one moment of media time passing without an announcement of one of his Bright Ideas.
Yesterday it was teh vision for South-East Asia.
Something to rival the European Union and presumably the UN (after all our Kev doesn't think small).
To be smooched into place by veteran diplomat Richard Wilcox in time for, you guessed it, 2020.
Anti-terrorism, defence, free trade, regional politics, energy and resource security - all would be resolved through harmonious cooperation.
Yeah, Rudd wants it all and he wants America in the mix. I'm sure adding an imperial barracuda like the US would seal everyone's fate and possibly destroy the region.
Oi, Kev! Hold the horses, mate. Did you even run any of this by the Australian electorate in the lead up to last November's federal election?
Any mention you might have had slipped in during a workshop at the unrepresentative, undemocratic and elitist Australia 2020 summit earlier this year doesn't count.
Fer gawd's sake! Will the Deputy PM gather a few sane Labor souls and have them bundle Rudd into a quiet, dark room for a week until his hyperactive imagination subsides.
At the very least - don't let him on Sunday's flight to Japan unless he is sufficiently medicated.

US 08 and the media: change we can believe in?

It seems that some American online media and I suspect the Obama for America campaign team have a desire to manipulate impressions of the obvious crowd-drawing strength of the Democratic candidate for the 2008 US presidential election.
It is all image, image, image.

The Washington Post online edition yesterday ran what looks suspiciously like an undeclared montage or digital enhancement.
Although this is not the first manipulated image of the senator, it is perhaps the most clumsy.
It also highlights how easily media slips into grey areas surrounding ethics and partisanship.

There is a little Mugabe in every world leader

No-one should wonder at an UN conference on world food security which allows the attendance of a despot like Robert Mugabe who has reduced his own country to abject poverty and food shortages.
The fact that neither the UN or any other international organisation have found an answer to chronic food shortages or cyclical famine lies in the nature of modern societies and their leaders.
Each and every one is willing to make symbolic and one-off gestures to assist the world's poor and starving, but none are willing to abandon their single-minded pursuit of political power and economic dominance.
Like any despot they all only look to their own personal interests and that of their immediate entourage and ignore all else.
Like Mugabe they each point a finger of blame when they should be remedying their own failings.
So when Ban Ki-Moon calls for a 50% increase in world food production to help feed the 100 million food poor, you know it will only happen if major food exporting nations are able to reap substantial profits.
That many Western nations would prefer to write a cheque like Great Britain, rather than seriously look at how to increase the agricultural self-reliance of the poorest nations and reduce the world's reliance on energy intensive farming and the associated costs of water, fuel, fertilisers and copyrighted seed.

The shortsighted view relying on successive foreign aid fixes has resulted in above world map found at BBC News yesterday.

Link to International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations, website and debate on who pays the price.

Don't vote - it only encourages them

I seem to remember that during the 2007 Australian federal election campaign, both sides of politics promised us a civilised parliament this time round.
Polite and respectful.
Listening to Question Time this session and it seems that everyone is determined to keep ignoring this election 'promise'.
I had been hoping that (after it's initial cardboard cut out nonsense) the Coalition would have learnt something and altered its approach.
Instead, behaviour in the House of Reps is just as counterproductive to the passage of business as it always was and, Wee Brennie Nelson and his mates now have the hypocritical hide to accuse the Rudd Government of ramming bills through the House and cutting off full debate.
Tactics used by themselves when they were part of the former Howard Government.
However, Rudders and his gang do not get off free here. After all they appear to be using many of the very tactics they strenuously objected to when in opposition. The Australian Parliament is just as its always been - a place where political point scoring outranks any consideration of good governance.
A nest of snakes operating on basic species loyalty.

It's confirmed - NASA press office lied about climate change evidence

The Washington Post on Tuesday.

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters----

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs.

 

The million dollar question is whether a President McCain or President Obama will have the political will to stop presidential appointees trying to direct both science and government policy.

America is such an economic giant that if it does not squarely face the obligation to tackle climate change, there will be little incentive for those other emerging giants to do so.

The end result being that people the world over, in areas like the NSW North Coast, will then be faced with social and economic devastation. 

Google thinks people willing to pay for online content

Yesterday the World Association of Newspapers told us that:

• Digital and mobile advertising revenues are projected to grow to more than 150 billion dollars by 2011, a 12-fold growth from 2002.
• Wireless subscriptions continue to grow, from 1.1 billion in 2002 to a projected 3.4 billion in 2011, an expansion of more than three-fold.
• Broadband is expected to grow from 51.38 million households world-wide in 2002 to nearly 540 million households in 2011, a growth of more than ten-fold.
• The mobile customer base has grown from 945 million in 2001 to 2.6 billion in 2006.

According to Google these households will eventually pay for their mainstream online content.

The first question here is - what social and economic demographic do these numbers represent?
Those living in absolute poverty cannot afford the technology and, even individuals or families living in comparative poverty in OECD countries struggle to afford the most basic forms of this technology.
The second question is - will the fact that large Internet players are now thinking in terms of conventional economic models (when looking to expand markets and profits) begin to exacerbate the divide between rich and poor?
Thereby locking even more people out of the full range of news and information sharing sources.