Heard 'round the traps

An elderly man leaving a Grafton shopping centre to his mate:
"I've seen the future. I can't afford it."

A reminder to Pandora Archives on the folly of Internet censorship

Went to Pandora Archives yesterday to look up some information on a contentious blog and found this:

This resource has been restricted in Pandora
Access to this item is restricted for 70 Year(s) from the date of archiving. During this period it is only accessible to National Library staff for preservation purposes.

Which begs the question - haven't the archives heard of the Internet Wayback Machine which happily allows everyone who read Club Troppo's Missing Links yesterday to find out what Caz and The Hack had been up to (over 50 snapshots of homepages) even if they had never followed that contentious blog.

All the Australian Government's Pandora Archives has done with its 70 year restriction is hold government up to ridicule.

Well done, NSW North Coast

The 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours list contained the names of a few Northern Rivers folk who well deserved their recognition.

An Order of Australia Medal (OAM) to Jim Agnew of Yamba, who has been taking on government and bureaucracy for years in an endeavour to obtain decent health care for his town.

An Order of Australia (OA) to Elizabeth Davies of Minnie Waters and Braunstone, for her long service to nurse and midwifery education.

An Order of Australia (OA) to Laurie Marchant of Grafton, for services to the community spanning decades.

An Order of Australia Medal (OAM) to John Beasley of Lennox Head, for services to the lifesaving movement.

An Order of Australia Medal (OAM) to John Mace of Northern Rivers, for his work with bush fire brigades.

An Order of Australia Medal (OAM) to James Crethar of Goonellabah, for his work with youth in the Lismore area and beyond.

And to any other NSW North Coast quiet achievers I may have missed here - well done!

Yes we can! Barack Obama asks an Australian cat for campaign donations

It seems that politics and pets make strange bedfellows.
Regular readers will be aware that clarencegirl receives Obama for America campaign emails from time to time.
They would also be aware that Boy the Wonder Cat blogs in the North Coast Voices sidebar and lists his own email address there.
Image my shock on finding (when doing a periodic check of the cat's emails) that Boy was now on Senator Barack Obama's mailing list and was receiving multiple requests for political donations along the lines of this received on 8 June:
Boy --
Hillary Clinton announced her support for our campaign today.
Senator Clinton made history over the past 16 months -- not just because she has broken barriers, but because she has inspired millions of Americans with her strength, her courage, and her commitment to causes like universal health care that make a difference in the lives of hardworking Americans.
Our party and our country are stronger because of the work she has done throughout her life, and I'm a better candidate for having had the privilege of competing with her.
Senator Clinton will be invaluable to our efforts to win in November, and I look forward to campaigning alongside her to bring this country the change it so desperately needs.
Hillary and her supporters are joining us at an urgent moment.
It's going to require a new level of commitment from every single one of us to build a national campaign in the general election.
And we're going win this election the right way -- by growing our grassroots network of ordinary people giving only what they can afford.
Will you help by making your first donation today?
If you give right now, a previous donor has agreed to match your gift, doubling its impact. Help us reach our goal of 20,000 new donors by making a matching donation today:
https://donate.barackobama.com/match
It's time for all of us to come together to take on John McCain in the general election. John McCain offers another four years of George Bush's policies, which our country simply cannot afford.
To win, we must continue building an unprecedented organization in all 50 states. And that will only happen if we all work together, side-by-side.
Thank you for joining this movement and supporting a new kind of politics.
Together we can do more than just win an election. Together we can change this country, and we can change the world.
And we are honored to have Hillary Clinton at our side as we do it.
Barack
Paid for by Obama for America
This email was sent to: catlives9@hotmail.com

Boy has now been unsubscribed from this mailing list, but I'm beginning to wonder about the good senator from Illinios......

Howard awarded Queen's Birthday AC but not everyone is impressed

John Winston Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia, has just been awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia.
Not the Order of the Garter or Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports with which he hoped to emulate his dead idol, Robert Gordon Menzies, but better than nothing ('Mrs Bucket' apparently sees the AC as a stepping stone to greater honours).

Of course not everyone was or is impressed.
Saturday's online mention of his AC honour only came up on Google News once and yesterday he might never have rated a mention if he had not shared billing with Australian supermodel Elle or "The Don" centenary wasn't coming up.

War crimes is still the phrase which more readily trips from the lip when Bush, Blair and Howard are mentioned.
At last count Google Search came up with 128,000 mentions of war crimes and Howard.
War crimes outrank honours anytime.

Here are some example article links.
Australia`s Howard accused of war crimes over Iraq: Report [Indonesia]
Bush, Blair, Howard wanted for war crimes [Estonia]
Australia group seeks ICC war crimes charges against ex-PM for Iraq deployment [USA]
Oz PC racism & ICC complaint over Australian & Coalition war crimes in Iraq & Afghanistan [Australia]John Howard a 'war criminal' [Australia]
Howard is war criminal, says former colleague [Australia]

Update:
By this morning Google News mention of Howard's honour had risen to four (after the original Saturday item was shifted or renamed). Perhaps his taxpayer-funded assistant did a quick ring around to wake the media to the momentous event they were otherwise ignoring.

Australian Housing Affordability Map

Map found in BankWest Key Worker Housing Affordability Report 2008 based on salaries of nurses, ambulance officers, teachers, police and firefighters.

An Australia-wide comparison placed the NSW North Coast's Bryon Bay in the top ten least affordable towns and rural areas for key workers.

The Far North Coaster online magazine reports:
The BankWest Key Worker Housing Affordability Report released this week based on ‘key workers’ salaries found Byron Bay the most expensive place to live in regional NSW, with Kiama second, Ballina third and Tweed fourth.---
The report used a median house price in Byron Shire of $501,500.
The median house price in Ballina Shire was $435,000, while in Tweed Shire it was $433,500.
The report based its figures on average salaries for teachers, nurses, police officers, ambulance officers and fire-fighters.
Average salaries used in the study were: nurses $48,661; teachers $54,835; police officers $65,913; fire-fighters $55,783; and ambulance officers $61,893.
An area was classified as unaffordable if median house prices are more than five times a key worker’s annual earnings.

Apparently we are in the middle of National E-security Awareness Week

It seems we are all in the middle of a very low key National E-security Awareness Week in which the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy 'launched' a new a new email security alert service for homes and small business.

Went to the Federal Government's Stay Smart Online website to look up details and found this site's homepage was last updated on 10 April 2008. Not a good sign.
Clicked on the sidebar for the new email security alert service and then tried to register for this feature. Opps! not possible it seems. Trying to register simply takes you off site to another page showing current alerts and advisories.
However the sidebar there does allow for registration.
For a site under the aegis of the Minister, this has to be a rather clumsy way of registering.

But what is really interesting is the following found on the pages updated 6 June 2008:

Related Frequently Asked Questions

I use Bigpond web based email and can't subscribe to the SSO Alert ServiceIf you have a Bigpond email account and use Bigpond web-based email to read your email you may have encountered problems with completing the SSO Alert registration process. You can tell if you use a web based email program if you use a web b...
I am using a Hotmail email account and can't subscribe to the serviceIf you wish to use a Hotmail or Live (Live Mail) email address to register and subscribe to the Stay Smart Online (SSO) Alert Service, it has been discovered that Hotmail.com and Live.com are currently blocking all emails sent by the Stay Sma...

Oh, and don't bother clicking here for Stay Smart Online "Newsletters" because there aren't any yet.
As for the e-security self-assessment tool, that's just a dinky questionnaire which eventually directs to advice frequently not updated since January.

All in all, not a good look Senator Conroy. Think he might miss out on reaching a lot of Mum and Dad computer users.

Something to ponder as you sit down to Sunday dinner amid the ruins of the UN food crisis summit

From The Independent today:

Spam flies off the shelves of American supermarkets; looted shops burn in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and the food crisis elbows climate change off the UN's agenda at a summit that draws more heads of state and media than any in recent memory – yet reaches no useful conclusions.

The food crisis has gripped the whole world in the past year, from the wealthiest countries to the poorest: from Japan, where beef has vanished off school menus in favour of less costly chicken or pork, and the US, where sales of Spam have shot up 10 per cent, to the poorest nations, where 70 or 80 per cent of people's income goes on food (in the UK the figure is 10 per cent).

Thirty-seven countries are confronted by a crisis in food costs, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), while riots have broken out in two dozen.

Haiti used to grow its own rice, and its farmers were protected by high tariff barriers. But as a condition for an International Monetary Fund loan in 1986, it was compelled to slash tariffs, and within two years the local markets had been flooded by heavily subsidised American rice. Local farmers, unable to compete, went out of business. The process was repeated in 1994. Globalised Haiti, no longer able to feed itself, was at the mercy of the world food prices.

Meanwhile, the price of food has become a pawn in the hands of financial speculators. Speculative trading in agricultural commodities has grown by more than 1,000 per cent in the past four years, to more than $150bn (£76bn). With the price of oil – the key ingredient in fertilisers and agrochemicals – surging unstoppably, food prices are expected to remain at historic highs for the next decade.

A sane world would at this point reverse course and do some of the worthy things that UN summits are so good at talking about – helping some of the 96 per cent of African farms dependent on rainfall to build irrigation systems, for example.

But the business-driven priority, as endorsed by the FAO summit, is to gouge open the world's economies even faster, via a speedy conclusion of the Doha round of trade liberalisation. That is likely to make it even harder for the poor to feed themselves.

Further article links here.

America goes down the rabbit hole once more

It is never easy to decide if the United States of America has absolutely no grasp of the ironic or it simply knows the way to Alice's wonderland.

With the US having little credibility left concerning its own human rights record, yesterday News.com.au reported:

THE US has decided to limit further its involvement with the UN Human Rights Council due to its "pathetic" record.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "has taken the decision that we will engage the Human Rights Council really only when we believe that there are matters of deep national interest before the council, and we feel compelled", said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
"Our scepticism regarding the function of the council on human rights in terms of fulfilling its mandate and its mission is well-known. It has a rather pathetic record in that regard,'' he said.

At the same time Human Rights Watch comments on America's 2.3 million people behind bars:

"The new incarceration figures confirm the United States as the world's leading jailer,'' said David Fahti, HRW's US program director.
"Americans should ask why the US locks up so many more people than do Canada, Britain, and other democracies,'' he said.
The new figures show a sharp racial imbalance in the US prison population, with blacks outnumbering whites by six to one.
Nearly 11 per cent of black men aged 30-34 were in prison, according to Justice Department figures.
HRW said blacks in the US were12 times more likely to be sent to jail for drug-related crimes than whites, even though drug use among the two races was about the same.