Is this the beach at the bottom of your backyard? Mapping predicted sea level rise (5)

BEFOREAFTER

This Google Earth mapping shows the effects of a 1 metre sea level rise on a residential area of the New South Wales coast, with the beach gone and surf reaching back boundaries of the houses shown.
The 2009 Federal Government report Climate Change Risks to Australia's Coasts contains a 'worst case' scenario involving a 1.1 metre sea level rise along the NSW coast sometime within the next 90 years.

A light-hearted look at the echo chamber of the Internetz

When cruising cyberspace it's obvious that there's a great deal of repetitive comment out there perpetrated by lazy mainstream media and the blogosphere - everyone wants to get in on the act when it comes to teh topix o teh dae but few are prepared to do any hard graft required to come up with an original angle.
Media releases are not looked at with a critical eye on source, content or motive, but are simply churned back out through the giant sausage machine which is online publication. {yes, I admit that's not exactly an original observation either!}
Here's a light-hearted look at that echo chamber section of the Internetz:

Monsanto's statements are part of a 21-page paper titled "Observations on Competition in the U.S. Seed Industry." In it, the company argues
That opening turned up seven times in Google's search engine results on the 9th January.

He says the state laws have robbed farmers across Australia
Thirty-six instances of this sentence beginning were found in indexed mentions of one farmer when I went a-Googling his name.

big words
This two word language summary featured in over 1,000 online discussions of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

silvertail
The particular descriptor used on more than 3,000 occasions when talking about former Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull.

dour Scot

Something British PM Gordon Brown has been labelled according to 15,000 Google items.

Paris Hilton scandal
This topic was an obvious favourite for in excess of 16,000 journalists, bloggers and YouTube video makers.

world government
A phrase which almost takes the cake when used over 300,000 times in discussions concerning a global response to climate change.

Barack Obama the antichrist
This characterisation turns up more than 700,000 times on Google when people are expressing views on the U.S. president.

I Can Has Cheezburger
Mention of this funny interactive website occurred in Google's index at least 7,670,000 times last time I typed the site name - which probably goes to prove that Internet users are a lot saner than our habit of parroting the latest gossip or rumour (without bothering to fact check) might otherwise lead sensible people to believe.

NSW Nationals Steve Cansdell has egg on his face over hungerstrike protest

NSW Nationals MP for Clarence Steve Cansdell has jumped on the Peter Spencer bandwagon and is spouting the usual inaccurate nonsense. It would appear that there is no political depth too low for this politician to plumb in his efforts to keep his name in print.

This is what Mr. Cansdell told ABC News on 6 January 2010:

A north coast politician has called for people across NSW to support a grazier on a hunger strike over a dispute in a land clearing application.
Peter Spencer today enters day 47 of his hunger strike in a wind tower on his Shannons Flat property outside Cooma, and reportedly does not have long to live.
He is arguing that state native vegetation laws have been used by the Federal Government to lock-up land to meet carbon pollution reduction targets.
Clarence MP Steve Cansdell says farmers across the state are experiencing the same frustration.
"I just hope that Peter gets the support of everyone across NSW to make this Government realise that we have to work together, not against the rural sector," he said.
"He's really there on behalf of all NSW landowners, all of NSW rural industries such as our timber industry, our cattle."

He was more circumspect a day later when quoted in The Daily Examiner:

"While I don't necessarily support Mr Spencer's tactics, it is time for the NSW Government to show some compassion and do something to break the deadlock before a tragedy occurs."

Cansdell is only one of many who are trying to make political capital out of Peter Spencer's situation and his family appears to have had enough.The Spencer family are clearly concerned about antics of the media, certain websites and politicians such as Barnaby Joyce and Steve Cansdell.

This is the public statement the family issued, as reported in The Australian on 9 January 2009:

WE do not proclaim to be speaking on behalf of all of our family, others may certainly feel differently however we do feel that every issue has different opinions so we would like to say the following.

Peter's brother, Graham, is a former farmer who recently sold his dairy farm and retired after 26 years of farming. He was on the board of the Dairy Farmers Association and an active member within his local community. He and other family members had been trying to work with the family members involved to prevent the issue being dragged through the media however we now feel the need to address some issues.

Peter, we love you, and think that it is fantastic that you are trying to help other farmers get due compensation from the government. However, we are concerned by some television, print media and niche internet publications coverage of the issue and its politicisation by various interest groups and parliamentarians to further their own agendas, at the expense of Peter's health and welfare.

Native vegetation laws enacted over 10 years ago by State Governments (and certainly not the ETS proposals and "Carbon Sinks" which are a far more recent development) are not the sole reason for the collapse of Peter's farm, and really have had a very small part to play. For MANY reasons the farm has not been profitable for a long time. Peter spent several years in Papua New Guinea on various business ventures, including an advisory role to the PNG government of the time. During this time he was unable to look after the farm adequately, an issue that was clearly a product of his then circumstance.

Over the years, Peter spent money on trying to develop some fantastic enterprises, including the development of high quality wool and wind farming which unfortunately did not pan out. In order to help Peter, some family members put their financial freedom in jeopardy to use their property as a guarantee for Peter's loan. These family members worked side-by-side with Peter, trying to get the farm up and running.

As any farmer knows, sometimes, despite your best intentions and incredible effort, farming is not always fruitful, especially in a time of drought. Interest payments on the loan could not be made, and faced with bankruptcy, the family had to issue a writ of foreclosure on Peter's farm. The intention is to sell the farm to recover the money from their debts and all remaining money will be returned to Peter. If the family members had not guaranteed the loan several years ago when Peter was facing bankruptcy the banks would have sold the farm only to recover their money and Peter would have been left with nothing. What is so incredibly sad, is that Peter and the family members who guaranteed his loan, were always very close. Now this has torn two families apart. To borrow such a huge sum to help a sibling is a remarkable gift, but to go into bankruptcy for that sibling is surely beyond the call of duty.

We are devastated with the conspiracy theories, innuendoes and utter rubbish sprouted by some members of news forums and websites declaring to support Peter who clearly know nothing about this situation but have taken whatever they have read at face value, and accepted it as gospel. Peter is an amazing, courageous man. But the loss of his farm is not due to governments, big business or climate change. There is no conspiracy by wind companies or any other organisation to rob Peter of his land. What we are concerned about is that certain people may be taking advantage of a vulnerable man faced with losing his property and using him to their advantage. The issues being touted are not wholly true and Peter's situation is a very poor example for any Native Vegetation/Kyoto/ETS/Rudd/Howard/State/Federal concerns and anything else which is being included in the argument. It will do no benefit to any disgruntled farmer's cause by continuing to use Peter as their martyr. If people are genuinely concerned for Peter please convince him to come down. Then find a more suitable way of expressing their concerns. Please remember this is an election year.

In conclusion, while there are some fantastic supporters of Peter's who deserve much praise, there are too many others taking advantage of him for their own political causes. We don't know why people want Peter to continue starving himself, and putting his health at such risk. Here is a man with TOO MUCH TO LIVE FOR and we urge the media to properly undertake research and check claims before merely producing them as "news" and encouraging Peter's plight through politicising it.

• Background post "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

NSW North Coast councils & businesses that just have to lift their game in 2010

Not every local council or business on the NSW North Coast lives up to its promise (or for that matter its promises) and here is a short list of those who could do better this year.
Maud Up the Street wants me to lead this post off with her pet peeve so I'll oblige.

BUSWAYS - contracted by the NSW Government to supply transport across the Clarence Valley this was its inadequate response to holiday travel needs according to its own website:Friday 25th December: No services
Coffs Harbour and Port Macquarie had similar bus timetables for the 25th December. Great Lakes had one of its three bus routes operating on Christmas Day. Seems Busways management thinks that people without cars don't deserve to move around on Christmas Day unless they live in Campbelltown, Blacktown or on the Central Coast. The north-east of the state can go hang!

COLES - this large supermarket chain has a captive market in certain NSW North Coast towns because of the absence of any real competition. In some stores it shamelessly rides roughshod over its customers with frequently understocked shelves and an ever-diminishing range of brandnames\goods for sale. Now after years of being presented with bananas stored too long before being presented for sale, The Australian Banana Growers' Council tells us that "bananas must meet very particular length, girth and colour specifications before Woolworths and Coles take them".
It's ROFL time to think that this supermarket chain likes to think it has fresh food standards!

CLARENCE VALLEY COUNCIL - under the leadership of Mayor Richie Williamson and General Manager Stuart McPherson certain council staff have been getting quite lax if mutterings round the traps are any indication. This Daily Examiner story of alleged council negligence is just icing on the cake and as usual council tries to squib out of responsibility.
There is also a persistent rumour circulating that councillors are not always aware that they're possibly allocating trust funds improperly on a regular basis, because management allegedly is careful to refer to funding sources in monthly meeting business paper items only by internal accounting codes in order to rob Peter to pay Paul in an irregular manner without challenge.

'Twas the whalers wot done it!

Peter Alford and Matthew Franklin writing in The Australian at 12am this morning are pretty certain of who hit whom on the high seas in Antarctica:
"Sea Shepherd and the Institute of Cetacean Research, which co-ordinates the Japanese whaling program, have released videos they claim demonstrate the other side was to blame for the dangerous collision.
Both appear to show the Ady Gil moving only slowly when the Japanese vessel swerved towards the speedboat, running over its bow and forcing it down into the water, as activists tumbled over on the deck.
The six crew members - one with broken ribs, according to Sea Shepherd - were rescued. The $2 million vessel, according to Sea Shepherd leader Paul Watson, is unsalvageable."
As most of Australia is asleep right now, I wonder exactly which hemisphere is clicking on the article's accompanying poll question "Who do you think is to blame for the collision between a Japanese whaling ship and Sea Shepherd protest boat?"
At the moment the results are almost neck and neck in the blame game.
While over at the Herald-Sun another poll question this morning brings a vastly different response.

Could this mean that Japan's PR team over at Omeka Public Relations prefers to read The Australian first thing in the early hours of the morning rather than the Herald-Sun? I wonder......

When it's raining on the NSW North Coast......

One North Coast Voices reader who has been keeping rain gauge records since the mid-1980s emailed me this week to say that in 2009 he registered a total of 1937.5mm in the backyard rain gauge of his Yamba home and that the official BOM record for 2009 taken at the Pilot Station was 1777.6mm.

Yamba's official annual rainfall appears to have peaked in 1950 when 2716.8mm fell over the space of a year and it experienced its lowest annual rainfall in 1915 with 679mm.

Ballina doesn't have complete rainfall figures for 2009, but in 2008 in had a total of 2353mm and Byron Bay had 2205.6mm of precipitation in 2009.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

The playful observation on life Hanlon's Razor is said to go something like this: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".

It immediately came to mind this week when I read numerous blog posts and online comments concerning one Peter James Spencer who is currently sitting atop a pole after delivering his version of the Jerilderee Letter, the Saarahnlee Entreaty (with supplement), to the former Howard Government then firing off another letter of demand to a new Prime Minister while waiting for the world to deliver him from this current episode of foolishness.

Mr. Spencer's relentless self-promotion and hunger strike have managed to ignite the conspiracy theorists and wingnuts into a veritable passion of, well, wigging out and baying for Kevin Rudd's blood.

Peter Spencer is now seen by many as a victim of unfair conditions imposed on rural land, which robs farmers and graziers of their God-given right to clear native vegetation from any part of their property at will.
With encouragement from Mr. Spencer the finger is also being pointed at the United Nations and the Kyoto Protocol as the reason why he is burdened with debt and about to lose the farm.
To anyone who will listen he asserts that he has been denied just compensation for his alleged loss of property rights, as well loss of carbon storage values worth $35 million.

From what Peter Spencer has written in the past (eg., The war on farmers) or presented to various authorities one can deduce that here was a man with little or no personal farming experience who had a rather romantic notion to rekindle his family's connection with the land.
Something many others in his age group have done in the past, for after all most Australian families of that era are only one or two generations away from the farm.

In 1980 he purchased a block of agricultural land in the Cooma-Monaro district and then left it untended for (if my maths is correct) at least a decade. Somewhere along the line he seems to have leased adjoining lots until the property was in the vicinity of 5,000 to 14,000 hectares, a size which tends to vary depending on who Mr. Spencer is addressing at the time.

When eventually returning to live on the property he embarked on a number of rural business ventures which failed and by the start of the 2000s was finding matters rather difficult.
This again is not an unusual occurrence for a somewhat wet behind the ears farmer - a situation made easier for Peter Spencer to bear because he could point to NSW native vegetation law and blame that particular bogey man for his financial troubles.

However Mr. Spencer was made of stern stuff and, instead of looking facts squarely in the face and taking the avenues open to him which would relieve him of his mounting debts, he decided to soldier on with his 'farm'.

Things unravelled and sent Peter Spencer off on a most unusual tangent, when the shire council successfully obtained a judgment against him in the Local Court in February 2007 concerning the matter of his unpaid rates.

This man then decided to initiate legal action in March 2007 against the council and its solicitor with a claim for pecuniary penalty in the form of a liquidated demand for the lordly amount of $165,000.000 against the Shire Council, and $33,000.00 against Mr Angove - based on his being a victim of crime and the crime perhaps being that he had been asked to pay his council rates. Although he does not seem to have actually identified a crime or criminal conviction of any sort to the obvious puzzlement of the presiding judge.

At about the same time he was seeking a sizable penalty against council he began to initiate a slew of litigation in a scatter gun approach. At one stage seeking an interim payment from the defendants of $5 million and informing the court that no judge appointed and dependent upon any of the defendants for his or her livelihood, can bring a fair, just and impartial mind to this dispute, and consequentially I claim the tribunal of fact introduced into Anglo-Celtic law by the Magna Carta from 1295 [sic] until the present day, derived from the passage in the New Testament of the Gospel of Matthew verses 15-20 and I claim by s 116 Constitution and the appearance of either the word The Queen, or Her Majesty forty times in the Australian Constitution that the Coronation Oath 1688 (Imp) is thereby incorporated into the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, and that the provisions of the Holy Gospels that Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second has agreed to uphold, are by that Act, incorporated into the law of Australia.
Needless to say such sentiments give a fair indication that his legal arguments would result in additional costs being awarded against him over the years.

These are details of some of the court cases which can be accessed online at AustLII Databases:
Spencer v Australian Capital Territory and Ors [2007] NSWSC 303 (4 April 2007) [90%]
(From Supreme Court of New South Wales; 4 April 2007; 71 KB)
Spencer v Cooma Monaro Shire Council Anor [2007] ACTSC 42 (29 June 2007) [90%]
(From Supreme Court of the ACT; 29 June 2007; 11 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2007] FCA 1415 (31 August 2007) [93%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 31 August 2007; 17 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2007] FCA 1787 (1 November 2007) [94%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 1 November 2007; 18 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2008] FCA 1256 (26 August 2008) [25%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 26 August 2008; 214 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia (No 2) [2008] FCA 1378 (28 August 2008) [92%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 28 August 2008; 15 KB)
Spencer v NSW Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Water [2008] NSWSC 1059 (10 October 2008) [88%]
(From Supreme Court of New South Wales; 10 October 2008; 55 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2009] FCAFC 38 (24 March 2009) [93%]
(From Federal Court of Australia - Full Court; 24 March 2009; 88 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2009] HCATrans 95 (1 May 2009) [87%]
(From High Court of Australia Transcripts; 1 May 2009; 10 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2009] HCATrans 126 (5 June 2009) [87%]
(From High Court of Australia Transcripts; 5 June 2009; 44 KB)

Now forgive me if I seem to smile at the absurdities found both within this over-hyped situation and amongst the arguments put forward by Peter Spencer's supporters, for no matter how hard I try I cannot see a legitimate figurehead for rural concerns in the person of this man - all I see is a cranky old mount determined to kick the horsestall down just for the hell of it.

Photograph from the Cooma-Monaro Express

Update:

From The Australian on 8 January 2008:

Graham Spencer said his brother owed "more than a million dollars" to a family member after being given a loan to prevent the bank seizing his farm. "Peter doesn't owe money to the bank, but to the family," Graham Spencer said.
"One of the family members lent him the money, and I think the arrangement was he would make the interest payments."
Graham Spencer said the family had made numerous attempts to accommodate Peter Spencer's failure to pay the debt, which had been outstanding for some years.
But in October the family had been forced to seek a writ of possession that could force the sale of the property.
"It's nothing to do with the banks - it's a straight family dispute, and that's where it should stay. Let the family sort this out," Graham Spencer said.
He emphasised that the family wanted only to recover the debt, and said that any extra money raised from the sale of the property would go straight to Peter.

Who's searching for whom on the Australian political scene as we enter the mother of all election periods

Over the next eighteen months Australians will go to the polls across Australia to elect a Federal Government (probably in 2010 but by April 2011 at the latest) and electors will be voting at state level in South Australia (March 2010), Tasmania (May 2010 at latest), Victoria (November 2010), and New South Wales (March 2011).

According to the Australian Elections Timetable the Northern Territory won't hold a state election until August 2012, the Australian Capital Territory is next at the polls in October 2012, West Australia does not have to hold an election before June 2012 at the earliest and Queensland does not go have to go to the polls until June 2012.

All in all, somewhere in the country voters will be having campaign spin forced down their throats (with varying degrees of resistance) for some time to come.

Google Trends comparison of Internet searches for Leaders of Government and their Opposition counterparts - Kevin Rudd & Tony Abbott (Federal), Anna Bligh & John-Paul Langbroek (QLD), Mike Rann & Isobel Redmond (SA), David Bartlett & Will Hodgman (TAS), John Brumby & Ted Ballieu (VIC), Colin Barnett & Eric Ripper (WA), John Stanhope & Zed Seselja (ACT), Paul Henderson & Terry Mills (NT) and Kristina Keneally & Barry O'Farrell (NSW).

Langbroek, Redmond, Hodgman, Ballieu, Ripper, Selselja, Mills and O'Farrell all rate low on a search query scale at home or overseas, but although still battling against an incumbent with a higher profile Tony Abbott tracks fairly steadily against the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and interest in him has shown a spike since he became Leader of the Opposition.

Only in Tasmania and the ACT did there appear to be sustained and vaguely comparable levels of search term disinterest in both government and opposition leaders.

It will be interesting to see if how these politicians trend on the Internet bore any relation to how they fared at the next elections.

From the 2010 Antarctic Whaling Hall of Shame

New Zealander Glenn Inwood of Omeka Public Relations
Allegations here.

The King Canute of Cyberspace! (Yes, I'm laughing at you, Kevin Rudd)

For a man who appeared to hold some promise when he became Australia's prime minister in November 2007, Kevin Rudd is now descending into absurdity with the eager assistance of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.

Their plan to impose mandatory ISP-level filtering on Australian Internet access via a URL blacklist is an expensive joke perpetrated by the right-wing of the ruling Labor Party.

A scheme allegedly created to protect children by partially blocking access to the world wide web for 21 million or so citizens - many millions of whom don't appear to have dependant children living in their homes.

This pathetic ACMA-inspired blacklist currently stands at around a thousand website/page addresses and is expected to grow once national digital censorship is imposed.

However, there is not hardware or filtering software available to Australian servers with which to blanket filter the entire indexed Web before it reaches Australian citizens, without either these servers malfunctioning dramatically or just quietly letting most of those supposed 'nasties' slip through their nets.

This is what the Google Inc. official blog said in 2008 about the number of URLs already out there in cyberspace:

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.

To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

Now how is your pathetic little blacklist going to keep up with that, Prime Minister?
Or are you intending (once this censorship becomes Australian law) to approach Google Inc. with a view to this corporation creating a censored google.com.au for Australia, as it did for its search engine in that notoriously authoritarian regime China?

Photo from Google Images

Classic Bob Ellis musing about the so-called War on Terror

Bob Ellis starting the year well over at ABC The Drum:

We bomb Afghanistan so well-educated Nigerians don't blow up aeroplanes over Chicago. Or that's the theory, it seems.

We bomb Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan so well-educated American-born Muslims don't shoot up their fellow soldiers in Fort Bragg. We bomb Iraq, and Gaza, and Afghanistan and Pakistan so well-educated British Muslims don't blow up Glasgow airport.

We have no alternative to this, it seems, in this necessary war, this just war on terror. This is why we're in Afghanistan, and why we have to be there for five or 15 more years, to stop well-educated people with exploding powder in their underpants from getting on planes in Oslo, or Paris, or Shannon, or Kingston, or Honolulu, or Cairns.

Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it. They clearly go to Afghanistan to learn how to put exploding powder in their underpants, and unless we bomb them there, they'll come over here, they'll get on a plane in Oslo...and they'll... Well, they'll...So we have to bomb them in...We have to bomb them in...Let me read that again.

Why are we in Afghanistan?

Is Hartsuyker in danger of losing his Cowper seat?

For months rumour has been saying that the Nationals Luke Hartsuyker is in danger of losing his seat at the next federal election.

Possum Comitatus' seat rankings (based on a proposition that an election was held sometime in the last 3 months) appears to verify that all is not well in Cowper.

Extreme Risk – being those Coalition held seats that would almost certainly have fallen to the ALP. It would have taken an historical anomaly for any of these seats to have been retained by the Coalition.
High Risk – being those seats that would probably have fallen to the ALP. A large majority of these seats would have changed hands.
Moderate Risk – being those seats which would have been in some danger of falling to Labor. For nearly every High Risk or Extreme Risk seat which did not fall, there would most likely have been a seat in this Moderate Risk group that would have taken its place.

* Click on list to enlarge

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