The Adventures OfChester The Bear

Divorce 2

2011-04-19T22:28:00.000+10:00

Remember how I wrote about deciding it's time for a divorce?

Well I wrote to the dear soon-to-be-ex about a month ago giving her three options. By this morning, I'd heard nothing so I trundled off to court and lodged a divorce application without her, and then lodged an application for 'Dispensation of Service', which means because I d0on't know where she is or how to contact her, I don't have to serve documents on her.

Well bugger me... I get home this afternoon to find an email from the in-laws in my inbox telling me the girld has (after years of me asking) finally decided to play ball.

Sorry honey, too late. Application's in now and the court date is set.

Earth Hour... Again (Yawn)

2011-03-30T08:37:00.002+11:00

Divorce

2011-03-29T16:12:00.000+11:00

You know, it's been eight years since I last saw my wife and I decided today that it's time for a divorce.

Not that I haven't tried before. Several times actually, but she steadfastly refused to participate in a joint application so I have to go it alone. Actually, when I say she 'steadfastly refused', what I mean is I wrote to her via her parents because I do not have her address. To date, I've had no reply, except one from them saying 'she'll contact you' which she hasn't.

So... today I called the Family Court and asked for advice. What does one do when one's partner just doesn't want to be found?

I took time out this afternoon to visit the Electoral Commission to see if she's registered there. No joy... I found four people with her name but without a birthdate, I have no way of knowing if any are her.

Ah well.

What I may have to do is 'go' to court, stand before a judge, and petition for 'substututed service' so that I can have the papers served on her parents (if indeed they still live where I though they lived), or, if I don't know where she lives, apply for 'dispensation of service' so I don't have to serve them at all.

In desparation, I've sent her parents another email. Give me her address.

Bah!

What Ever Happened To Chester The Bear?

2011-03-23T23:21:00.001+11:00

I'll admit it. I lost interest in this blog for a bit. You know how it is. Got distracted. Had other things to do. Ran out of things to say. Forgot my password. Forgot my email address (I have many... one is easy to forget).
But here I am. Back. Maybe.
So what's changed?
Well I remembered that email address and password. That was a step in the right direction.
And I decided to go back to "work". Not that I wasn't "working", but really, what I was doing just wasn't fun any more and this opportunity came along that sounds... um... interesting. I'll tell you all about it sometime.
I start on the 4th.
I know... what ever happened to that killer web software I told my readers about? Well it just wasn't robust enough, though I'm still rewriting bits of it so maybe it will see the light of day sometime.
And what about the book I was writing? That's nearly finished actually. It's a ripping yarn. Stuff gets blown up. Girls fall in love. Heroes save the world. Of course, finishing it is one thing. Actually getting it published is an entirely different proposition. Maybe I'll sell it as an e-book one chapter at a time... because I dare anyone to stop at just one!
And what of my business? Well we've really wound that back. Too many bureaucrats in the way, and we've had huge supply problems with our biggest selling product.
So all that means Chester is (probably) back.
If you like, comment. If not, comment anyway. You know I don't care what you think anyway.

Domain Names Lost

2010-06-04T10:30:00.001+10:00

Our Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, thinks of himself as a bit of a communicator. He has a flashy website at kevinrudd.com, and I think he's even on Twitter and Facebook too, just to show us how plugged in he is.

Except...

Kevin, when you're trying to build a brand, you need to register ALL of the domain names.

He didn't, so some guys over at Modus Interactive registered ".com.au" way back when he was first elected, and just sit on it.

Sadly, that didn't teach our Kevin a lesson, mostly because he doesn't listen to anything much, other than the sound of his own droning voice, so an opportunity came up yesterday for your favourite bear to register "kevinrudd.info". It cost just ten bucks, and because I already have brilliant content management software, I'm hard at work actually doing something with it.

Sadly, whatever I'm doing, Kevin's not going to like it. Too bad, I say.

And if the guys from Modus read this, maybe they'd like to point their kevinrudd.com.au name to kevinrudd.info. They'd be welcome.

Fatally Flawed

2010-05-28T09:55:00.002+10:00

I'm writing to blow the whistle on yet another Rudd Government stuff up... one that will make Insulation and the BER look like case studies in good management. I have to qualify this by saying that I'm not directly involved, so what I am about to say is second or even third hand, in that I had a conversation yesterday (in an unrelated setting) with an individual (call him “Paul”) who is directly involved. Therefore, what I pass on to you is my understanding of what he told me but be assured Paul does exist, and the conversation did take place.

I'm sorry if that's too distant from the source, and there is always a possibility I have misinterpreted something Paul said. I also apologise for the length of this, but to get the problem across, a little explanation in necessary.

The Rudd Government here in Australia is stubbornly persistent in its plans to proceed with the National Broadband Network, at an estimated total cost of somewhere between $35 and $42 billion.

Now I'm at the front of the queue when it comes to wanting faster broadband, but unfortunately, the NBN is fatally flawed. Of most concern is the lack of security in data transmission.

To put it in simple terms, the NBN is designed like a daisy chain, or an old-fashioned telephone party line. Houses are grouped together in rows. Each row of houses is linked, house to house, so that to get to me, the data passes through equipment in my next door neighbour's home, and to get to my other neighbour, data passes through my home.

At each home, there is a little box on the wall that receives the signal, decodes it, extracts what it needs for me, then sends it on its way to the next house. The NBN people will tell you that data coming down the line to my house is secure. They're right. Unfortunately, though, data going back up line is not.

Let's say I am the CEO of a big mining company. A foreign agent looking to gather evidence in, say, some bribery allegation, moves in a few houses down the street. All he has to do is tinker with his box on his wall, and now he's seeing all of my outward internet traffic... He can read any email I send, he can see what websites I visit, and he can listen to my side of any internet phone call I make.

Or perhaps the foreign espionage example is extreme. Let's say I'm just an ordinary person. A few doors up a low life with a little technical expertise has tinkered as well. He now has access to any data I transmit... passwords, bank account log-in details, email, anything I send. In other words, he now has the keys to my life, and I have no way of knowing he's there.

It's sort of like me going into my study, locking the door and having an intimate conversation with my lover. Unfortunately, my wife might as well be sitting in a chair next to me because all she has to do to listen in is pick up the phone in the bedroom. (Not that I have a lover, but you get the point.)

No high tech wire taps. No need to access exchanges or cables in the street, or even to plant a listening device in my house. The NBN has done all the hard work, so now a spy, or a criminal, or a government, or anyone who wants to keep tabs on what an NBN subscriber is doing, just has to access one of those little boxes in the same daisy chain.

To complicate matters, the Government has shortlisted Huawei Technologies to supply core components for the network. Huawei is a company with links to China's People’s Liberation Army, and some believe it is a front for China's intelligence services.

The government has been warned about this fatal flaw, but has chosen to ignore it. For this government, in everything it does, it seems that it's more important to stick to policy no matter how bad that policy is, than it is to do something right. Maybe Senator Conroy doesn't understand the technology, or maybe he's too arrogant to admit the error. I'd hate to think he's exposing Australians to this level of risk deliberately.

The bottom line... $40 billion+ is about to be squandered on building an already obsolete network that places national, corporate and personal security at huge risk.

Not Islamist Enough

2009-08-17T15:39:00.003+10:00

Life really does immitate art.

Did anyone happen to notice, last week, the goings on in Gaza? It seems the Islamist "Warriors of God" group rose up against Islamist Hamas, accusing them of "not being Islamist enough".

It reminds me of that scene out of Life of Brian...

Wobble

2009-08-10T07:01:00.005+10:00

While politicians, bureaucrats and social engineers around the world debate carbon targets and emissions trading schemes, science continues to pop out research that casts doubt on climate modelling.

One of the cornerstones of the humans-did-it climate debate has been a rise in CO2 levels at the end of the ice age. Climate change proponents point to this rise as "proof" that evil CO2 is responsible for global warming, while skeptics point to the disparity in timing, showing that the rise in CO2 comes AFTER a warming event, therefore can't be its trigger.

An article published today in Science Daily headlined "Long Debate Ended Over Cause, Demise Of Ice Ages?" would seem to support the nay sayers.

Researchers at Oregon State University and other institutions blame known wobbles in Earth's rotation. This imperfection, they say, caused global ice levels to reach their peak about 26,000 years ago, stabilize for 7,000 years and then begin melting 19,000 years ago, eventually ending the last ice age and delivering our currently enjoyed mild climate.

They further suggest that their research proves that melting was first caused by more solar radiation, not changes in carbon dioxide levels as suggested by the pro human-caused climate change proponents.

Ah well. I suppose we shouldn't expect facts to get in the way of a good story, so carbon-induced climate doom will remain on front pages everywhere.

You can read the full SD article HERE.

Practical Thinking

2009-08-04T07:07:00.004+10:00

You can always trust the Americans to come up with simple, practical solutions to problems that bureaucrats want to solve with over-complex regulations and processes. Here's one that is so stunningly simple I'm actually annoyed I didn't think of it myself.

Regular readers will know that I'm a global warming skeptic, but that doesn't meant I'm pro waste or in favour of continues pillage of our environment.

So against that background, here's a great idea...

Make Thursday the new Friday.

It's stunningly simple. A workplace just starts work an hour earlier in the morning and finishes an hour later in the evening, Monday through Thursday, and then is closed on Fridays, with the lights out and air conditioning off. For most, that would mean a miniscule change to working hours because I remember my deskbound days were usually 7.30ish to 6.30ish anyway.

It's already in trial in places like Utah, where about 17,000 civic employees have been working the 4 day/40 hour week for about a year, saving the state around US$1.8mil.

Bloody brilliant. 20% less commuting. 20% less air conditioning and lighting. Big drop in power and fuel consumption. It saves money and the environment at the same time.

THIS is the sort of solution we ought be be looking for instead of stupid emissions trading schemes and meaningless reduction targets.

Brilliant. When can we start?

Cool

2009-08-04T06:54:00.003+10:00

I was paddling around the web a few days ago and found this...

http://www.liveatc.net/

It's a feed from ari traffic control channels around the world. You simply pick the tower channel you want to listen to, and there it is.

Mind wasting, time wasting coolness.

Back

2009-08-04T06:50:00.002+10:00

Ok. So I've ignored my blog for a couple of months. Call it a vacation. Or a sabbatical. Or anything you like. I'm not sure I care what you call it, or even if you call it anything at all.

Truth is, I've been distracted. And my blog had turned into an anti-islamofascist rant that was getting boring and repetitive. I'll try hard to avoid doing that.

Anyway... Chester's back.

Useless Export

2009-04-09T10:31:00.004+10:00

I tried Exporting my blog today. You know... there's a link on your dashboard.

I suppose it works, in so far as all of the posts seem to have been exported (in descending order), and all of the comments seem to have been exported (in ascending order), but there's nothing in the export file that links the comments with the original posts.

Absolutely bloody useless.

So now I'll just do it all for myself, post by post, manually. What a pain in the rear end that will be.

Nothing Nuclear Weapons Can't Fix

2009-04-06T12:32:00.005+10:00

I don't know. Really. Is he a lunatic, or is that thinking "normal" in his part of the world.

How many people actually think like that? Is it possible to get them to all gather in the one place at the one time? You know... times are tough and those tactical nukes are expensive.

Or do we just wait until they actually do this shit, causing the Americans to retaliate such that the whole bloody region glows in the dark?

It doesn't make me angry any more. It just makes me sad.

And what's perhaps even more scary is the tone of the comments. Ok. I know tangle.com is a Christian site, but seriously, who's whackier, the cleric of the commenters.

For example, this gem from someone called Kelsey Louks, who writes "Its a good thing Christianity has never been used to validate violence. " Um. Kelsey. Ever heard of the Inquisition? Hmmm. Probably not. I suspect it's about as welcome on the curriculum as Evolution.

Or there's the whole "The Tribulation is coming. The end is nigh" thing. I'm sorry... expecting God to save us from Islamic loonies is like praying for a win on the craps tables of Vegas.

What can one say?

Amazing World

2009-03-31T09:46:00.005+11:00

I got yet another Nigerian Scam email this morning. This time, it was something about funds being transferred to my bank account. Whatever.

The point is, the scammer put a (fake) address on the bottom of the email. 236 Peckham Rd London.

That address meant I could respond with this...

Jeffrey,
Wow. This is amazing.
236 Peckham Rd.
Wow.
I used to live there. Really. Back in 1997 on a 12 month assignment in London. The big terrace with the green door and the camellias in the back garden.
Has the landlord fixed the leaking tap yet? I bet he hasn't. I called the managing agent every day with that one. It was always "we're looking into it". Seriously. How smart do you have to be to call a bloody plumber?
I remember catching the No 12 bus to work in the West End every morning. We had an office just near Covent Garden market. The bus was always quicker than the tube, and a damned site more comfortable. Too many sweaty people on the tube, don't you think? And from Peckham Rd, The bus was so much more conventient.
Is that great little café still there? You know the one. What's it called? The Como?
And the pub.... The Greyhound. Yes. That's it. Just down the road on the other side of the street. Do you drink there? If you do, say Hi to Annabelle for me. You know. The barmaid with big knockers. She'll remember me. Say "Schlong said hi".
Then there's Wendy's on the way home from the Greyhound after a few beers for a kebab. Not one of the world's great kebab houses, but that made me so homesick, because a lamb kebab on the way home from the pub is just about compulsory in Australia.
Oh... and that pie shop on the corner... Manzes. Fantastic pies, but I just can't bring myself to eat those jellied eels. Have you tried them? Say hi to Michael for me. He's the owner.
Wow.
This is great.
I haven't thought of Peckham Rd for years.
Thanks
Chester

I've never been to Peckham Rd, though I did spend most of 1997 in London working at an office near Covent Garden Market. (They say all good lies have to be based on at least a slither of truth.)

The research took 10 minutes, thanks to Google and StreetView. In a way, that's scary.
Actually, 236 Peckham Rd is a block of apartments. From what I can tell on StreetView, it's a converted terrace, but Jeffrey doesn't know that, I'm sure. There's one to rent there right now, by the way, for about nine hundred pounds a month. Nine hundred quid. For a one bedroom. Pffft.

Another quick Google search yeilded "The Standard Monetary Transfer Control Bank" at that address. It's not real, I'd suspect. You'd think the scammers would invest in some professional web design if they really want to pull his off. Ah well.

See? Isn't the web a wonderful place?

Even More Dangerous

2009-03-20T10:45:00.003+11:00

And while we're on the subject of "dangerous to democracy", there's something happening in Australia right now that is, perhaps, the most dangerous of all.

The Labor Government is trialling new net censorship technology. They say it's to block access to child porn (which I would support... the blocking, not the porn). However, child porn clearly isn't the government's true intention, because the way they're implementing the filtering system is cloaked in secrecy, has no independent oversight, amd no right of appeal.

Last month, for example, the filters blocked access to a US anti-abortion site which the government deemed "inappropriate".

So now it's "inappropriate" sites that are to be blocked, and child porn is just a subset of that. And who decides what's inappropriate?

The government.

No. Stop. You're talking about Australia Chester. It's one of the few places left on earth where freedom and democracy are cherished, isn't it?

Well it used to be, but apparently no longer.

The web content filtering trial isn't about censoring child porn. It's about implementing technology that can censor ANY information that doesn't fit with what the government (or some nameless, faceless bureaucrat) deems 'appropriate'.

Last month, it was the anti-abortion website. This month, it's a Danish site that reveals something of the inner workings of the censorship itself. Next month? Maybe they'll switch off sites that raise concerns about union right of entry in their new IR package, or maybe they’ll turn attention to criticism of their ill conceived stimulus package And after that, how long before they find something on chesterbear.blogspot.com that they deem ‘inappropriate’?

Don’t you get it? Whatever the excuse, and whatever the merits of censoring genuinely objectionable sites (like child porn), no government should be allowed to implement technology like this without independent judicial oversight, because once that technology’s in place, it can be turned on anything a government doesn’t like.

What are we, China? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? Zimbabwe? I'm sorry, but I'm not comfortable with my nation being on that list.

I know the economy is at risk. I know the government’s got the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme all wrong, but there is no greater threat to this nation than giving a government the ability to arbitrarily censor criticism, and if you don’t believe that once the technology’s in place, sooner or later they’ll use it, then you are out of touch with the true nature of politics.

I urge you to write to Senator Conroy, the Minister responsible. His email address is senator.conroy@aph.gov.au.

Also write to people who are in a position to oppose this. Here's a short list.
Malcolm Turnbull, Leader of the Opposition - Malcolm.Turnbull.MP@aph.gov.au
Senator Nick Xenaphon, Independent Senator - http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/senators/homepages/contact.asp?id=8IV
Senator Steven Fielding, Leader of Family First - senator.fielding@aph.gov.au
Senator Scott Ludlam, Greens Telecommunications Spokesman - senator.ludlam@aph.gov.au
Senator Nick Minchin, Opposition Telecommunications Shadow Minister - http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/senators/homepages/contact.asp?id=JX4

And write to your newspapers, call your radio stations, talk about this with your friends and work colleagues.

If we do nothing, we won't have a democracy.

Dangerous

2009-03-09T10:18:00.004+11:00

I read with alarm over the weekend that the Australian Labor Party has effectively taken over the Australian Red Cross, making it a defacto wing. They did that first by having one of their own, former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Robert Tickner, appointed as its CEO. Ok. I should clarify... The Red Cross appointed him, but since that appointment, Tickner has progressively politicised the organisation by appointing ex-Labor staffers and ex-union leaders to key positions.

The've then developed a cozy relationship with Labor Governments, both at a Federal and State level, such the the Red Cross has now become "the charity of choice" for many government initiatives, and is an instrument of Labor policy.

For example, the Red Cross controls the A$200m + that's been raised for the Victorian Bushfire Appeal, to the exclusion of other charities like The Salvation Army which raised $16m of its own, but has been frozen out of the comittee which will decide on how and where the aid is spent.

Salvation Army insiders are reported as saying that they are concerned at the closeness of the Red Cross/Labor relationship, and that, increasingly, to be selected for government partnerships, an NGO has to be seen to be a vocal supporter of the Labor government. Worse, they believe speaking out against government policy means an organisation could be sidelined.

This is a dangerous road for the Australian democracy. It's the sort of corrupt tactic that's commonplace in the third world, where governments attempt to remain in power by controlling every facet of a society.

I'm sure the Red Cross does good work. I just don't believe it ought be become an instrument of politics.

Eloquence

2009-03-09T10:12:00.002+11:00

News Ltd CEO Rupert Murdoch received the American Jewish Comittee National Humanitarian Award this week and I'd like to quote from his acceptance speech. (Rupert, I hope that's OK with you.)

He had delivered a succinct summation of the situation in Israel and Gaza, and he ended with this...

My friends, I do not pretend to have all the answers to Gaza this evening. But I do know this: The free world makes a terrible mistake if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight. In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace … who reject freedom … and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb, and the human shield. Against such an enemy, I will not second-guess the decisions of a free Israel defending her citizens. And I would ask all those who support peace and freedom to do the same.

I encourage you to read the full test of his speech HERE

What Would You Do IV

2009-03-06T09:47:00.002+11:00

How close do you think Iran is to developing nuclear weapons?

What do you think they'll do with them once they have them?

Think about this... think of just about any terrorist attack on Israel, the United States, and The West over the last 20 years, and you'll find the hand of Iran in there.

Those rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel... supplied and funded by Iran.
The Taliban... funded by Iran.
and I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

So here's anotehr hypothetical...

You're the head of a small country surrounded by enemies. One of those enemies, Iran, has vowed to bring about your total destruction. Its leaders use words like "we will wipe you off the map" on an almost daily basis.

That country is actively developing nuclear weapons, and all the while, it lies to the rest of the world about its intentions.

The day when they have enough fissionable material is fast approaching. SOme anaysts even think it has passed.

What would you do?

Make no mistake. A nuclear armed Iran which continues to fund terrorism on a global scale is an extremely dangerous animal. It doesn't just threaten Israel. It threatens you, because the creed of the people with their fingers on the trigger is that through bringing about the deaths of non-believers, they ensure their place in heaven.

Be afraid, and hope someone finds a solution sooner rather than later.

What Would You Do III

2009-03-06T09:14:00.003+11:00

Did you know that Hamas terrorists are still firing rockets from Gaza into southern Israel?

That's right, more than 200 of them since the end of the Israeli military action on January 18.

Yesterday, they launched 5.

Where is the international condemnation?
Where are the protesters on the streets?
Where are the spineless leaders of governments, who fail to stand up and utter any words of condemnation?
Where is the United Nations, the bureaucratic and politicised waste of space that is so quick to condemn when Israel defends itself?

Do I sound pissed off? Good. Because I am... bloody pissed off.

Israel is a beacon of civilisation in a cesspit of lunacy. Every day, thousands of tonnes of humanitarian aid and supplies cross from southern Israel into Gaza... 131,477 tons of aid and 12,701,900 liters of fuel since January 18. Show me one other nation anywhere on earth that would permit supplies to flow across its border into a territory whose leaders refuse to abandon war and calls for its destruction. You can't, because it wouldn't happen.

So let me ask you for a third time... if you were the leader of a nation, and lunatic terrorists hell bent on your destruction and the death of all of your people were firing rockets at you from the territory next door, and the leadership of that territory was either complicit in those attacks or failed comprehensively to stop them, what would you do?

Don't answer, because anything other than "I'd blow the crap out of them" isn't the truth.

Israel is showing extraordinary restraint.

Tara And Bella

2009-03-03T09:07:00.000+11:00

I'll admit it. I cried.

Charge It!

2009-02-19T09:11:00.006+11:00

I noticed yesterday that the world's major mobile phone manufacturers have reached an agreement to standardise phone chargers across all models and all brands. One charger will then be able to charge any phone.

All I can say is "it's about bloody time". It always seemed the incredible waste, stupidity and excess that each time you bought a new phone, the charger was different. I have a box full of the things sitting in my attic... it seems such a waste to throw them out, but, of course, the phones they belong to have long gone.

My only hope is that laptop makers follow the lead.

Validation

2009-02-17T22:50:00.002+11:00

I know this is long (16 minutes), but I can not recommend it to you more highly.

Zac's Day

2009-02-04T17:02:00.003+11:00

The webcam at Zac's daycare caught him in an uncharacteristically quiet few moments today.

Dangerous Felon

2009-01-27T11:05:00.004+11:00

Police in Nigeria detained a goat last Thursday on suspicion of attempted armed robbery.

Really. They did. In fact, not only did they arrest the goat, they paraded him in front of bewildered media at a press briefing.

Police Public Relations Officer, Mr. Tunde Mohammed, explained that the goat is an armed robber who attempted to snatch a Mazda car on Wednesday night, and later transformed into the goat in a bid to escape arrest.

He explained that men of a vigilance group in Anifowose Ipata/Oloje areas of the state capital had chased two armed robbery suspects who wanted to demobilise a Mazda car with the intention of stealing it, and "while one of them escaped, the other was about to be apprehended by the team when he turned his back on the wall and turned to this goat", Mohammed said.

"They quickly grabbed the goat and here it is.’’

The police spokesman said the goat "armed robbery suspect" will not be let off the hook until investigations into the case are concluded. Actually, he's reported as saying "left off the hook", which presumably points to the fate awaiting the goat if he is released.

Really. I didn't make this up. The full story is here in the Nigerian newspaper, The Vanguard.

Stunning Skill

2009-01-18T10:41:00.002+11:00

I hope all of my readers appreciate the stunning skill displayed this week by Captain Chesley Sullenberger, pilot of the ill fated US Airways flight 1549 that ditched into the Hudson River earlier this week.

This is the first time in aviation history that a commercial airliner has made a "water landing" and survived in tact. It was a remarkable piece of flying, because Sullenberger needed to put that plane into the water absolutely horizontal from wingtip to wingtip. Just a few degrees out, and one side of the plane would have hit the water before the other, creating draq and torque that would have turned the plane sideways, flipped it over and smashed it into very small pieces. Just look at what happened to Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 which ditched into the Indian Ocean near a beach in Cormoros in 1996, killing 125 of the 175 people on board.

That could easily have been the outcome on the Hudson this week, if not for the exceptional skill of Captain Sullenberger.

Footnote: At the bottom of a report on the crash in the Sydney Morning Herald today were the usual Googleads, this time spruiking "Fear of Flying" courses.

In Their Own Words

2009-01-17T23:00:00.001+11:00

I don't think I have anything more to add, other than the words of Benjamin Netenyahu...

'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel'

Barak "H" Obama

2009-01-15T08:02:00.002+11:00

I was listening to an NPR report on the upcoming innauguration the other day, and one thing struck me as odd.

They were playing clips from the rehearsal.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the 43rd President of the United States, George Walker Bush" the announcer declared.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the President Elect of the Unites States, Barak H Obama."

Um... his middle name is Hussein. "H"? What's with that?

We'll see what they do on the day.

2012

2009-01-13T16:57:00.007+11:00

There's a doomsday prophecy bouncing around in my head right now that is making me think about planning for the worst.

Now I know doomsday prophecies are usually rooted in serious use of halucinogens or the waving of chicken bones over alternating lines of salt and sand but this one has some scientific legs that are tied to the cycle of solar flares and magnetic storms.

The sun, according to accepted astronomy, operates in regular 11 year cycles. Right now, we're coming out of a "quiet" period, so quiet that some astronomers have called it "the calm before the storm", and so quiet that 2008 was the first year since 1900 that the sun had a period during which there were no sun spots. Solar flare and magnetic storm activity will gradually rise over the next four years, reaching a peak late in 2012.

You probably already know that solar flare activity can interfere with radio communications and can even knock out satellites. What you may not know is that there can be a profound effect down here on the ground too.

Time for some quick science... The earth, as you know, is magnetically polarised. They don't call them the North and South Poles for fun. We're like a giant magnet floating in space, and our magnetic field deflects and traps charged particles ejected from the sun. Without the magnetosphere, we'd be bombarded with radiation and life on earth would be in trouble.

The sun also has a magnetic field, called the heliosphere, only instead of being relatively stable like ours, the sun's magnetic poles shift around erratically.

Each time there's a solar flare or magnetic storm eminating from the sun, it's magnetically charged. If it's oriented one way, our magnetic shield happily blocks it, creating a very pretty dancing light show in the far north and far south of our planet.

If it's aligned the other way, billions of watts of charged particles bombard the earth. The atmosphere is, literally, electrified. A single storm contains enough electrical energy to power all human activity on earth, and without protection from that much energy. trouble is at hand.

In 1859 a super magnetic storm fused the coils in many telegraph stations, shorted wires and started fires. In fact, if it hadn't been for those telegraphs, we probably wouldn't have noticed because you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of other electrical appliances in use at the time.

Today, though, we live in a different world, where everything, and I really do mean everything relies on electricity and/or electronics.

Which brings me back to 2012...

Astronomers estimate that an 1859 style super storm comes every hundred years or so. That means we're 50 years past the due date, and if the next magnetic storm is "the big one", and if that "big one" is oriented the wrong way, every microchip on earth that's not properly shielded will cease to function.

Copper coils will fuse. Some will even melt as they absorb the massive energy from the atmosphere. Copper coils... you know... like the coils in generators, electric motors, power transformers, radio transmitters and even on your computer's motherboard.

The last time it happened was in 1989 when a relatively minor solar storm shut down the power grid in the North Eastern US and Canada. "Minor."

Are you getting the picture?

If the next cycle of solar storms produces "the big one", and if it's oriented the wrong way, everything we rely on to keep our civilisation functioning will stop working.

First, the power generation system will go down. The huge transformers that convert power coming out of the generators to power we can plug out TVs into will be destroyed, and because this equipment is so specialised, there's only enough manufacturing capability to turn out a couple a month to replace the thousands lost.

No electricity means no refrigeration. No refrigeration means no food in the cities. Food supplies will be gone in just a few days.

Food? That's nothing. Water purification and pumping will also stop. No running water. No water treatment. No sewage system. Drinkable water supplies will disappear within 24 hours.

Pumps will stop working, which means subway and road tunnels will quickly flood.

When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410AD, they destroyed the aquaducts that fed water into the city. Almost overnight, the population of Rome dropped from more than a million to a few thousand and the city became unlivable. It was the end of Civilisation as they knew it, and the end of the Roman Empire.

Radio communication will also shut down. That battery powered radio you have hidden away somewhere for major emergencies will pick up nothing but static, if it works at all. No TV either. No phones, mobile or otherwise, and no internet. In fact, no electronic communication of any kind. No newspapers or printing presses either. No means other than word of mouth for getting any message or instructions from anyone in charge to anyone else.

No banking. All of our banking records are held electronically, and while the data won't be lost, the bank's won't have an ability to retrieve it. That means no money, which means commere will cease.

Transportation systems, from your car up will no longer function. The electronics will be fried so you won't even be able to get them started. Actually, that's not entirely true. Some properly shielded military vehicles will run though they will be overwhelmed. A few really old diesels will run too, but you'd need to hand start them first and because of the compression of a diesel, that's no mean feat.

Of course, nothing will be flying for the same reason.

A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences estimates that such a storm could "shut down the United States" for months, if not years. They estimate that recovery from such an event could take ten years or more.

They're being conservative, but even if the shut down was only partial and even if it only lasted for a few weeks, the death toll will be far beyond any natural disaster we've ever experienced.

Guns will still work though. That's a bigger problem in the USA than it is here in Australia, but it's a problem everywhere because governments will have no capability to co-ordinate any law and order effort. For the first weeks after the event, it will be survival of the best armed.

Now here's the spooky bit...

The Aztec Calendar Stone, properly called Cuauhxicalli Eagle Bowl and created in 1479, predicts "the end of the world" on December 24, 2011.

The Chinese I-Ching calendar is said to predict the "end of the world" at about the same time.

And finally, the Mayan calendar, on which the Aztec calendar was based, ends on December 21, 2012.

Hmmmm... better disconnect from the grid, get the bunker stocked and the household electrics shielded. Don't complain that you weren't warned.

One Last Thought

2009-01-12T08:35:00.002+11:00

Journalist Paul Sheehan wrote an exceptional analysis of the Gaza mess in the Sydney Morning Herald today. I commend it to you.

Hybrid

2009-01-08T09:35:00.004+11:00

Hey Honda... if this ad's not really yours, it should be.

And then there's this...

2009-01-08T06:30:00.002+11:00

This is a clip from Palestinian TV.

The whole thing is just a bloody mess, driven by a political agenda of hatred lies and manipulation.

And To Underscore The Point...

2009-01-07T08:19:00.002+11:00

Underscoring the point about media bias against Israel is the headline news today about the deaths of 40 Palestinian civillians who were sheltering in a UN school which was hit by Israeli fire.

The headline screamed "More Than 40 Killed In UN School", but a little way down was a quote from a UN spokeperson who said "troops fired mortars at the premises after gunmen mortared their positions from inside al-Fakhora school ".

Why didn't the headline read "Hamas Human Shields Killed"?

I'm personally saddened that 40 innocents died in that attack, and in the end, it will do little for long term peace and stability, but do you blame the Israelis, or do you blame Hamas for putting fighters in what should have been a neutral safe zone.

So here's another two hypothetical questions...

First, let's say you're a Hamas commander and you want to maximise the effectiveness of your Jihad warriors. Do you put them a) hidden away in buildings, or b) in a UN compound that harbours civillians.

The answer is "b". While "a" might offer you short term protection, once the position is identified, those Jihadists are going to meet their virgins in heaven. In choosing "b", you offer them some protection to allow them to maximise their effect, and if the position is hit, you can capitalise on the bad PR it will generate for the pig Jew infidels. You're not worried about civillian casualties because there's a place in heaven for those who are killed (though you haven't been clear on what the mothers and children are going to do with their 72 virgins each, but that's for another post, I guess).

Second, let's say you're an Israeli field commander, and you identify Jihadists firing on your troops. Do you a) let them go, or b) eliminate them. If you said "a", it's time you went to another blog because opinions expressed here will probably offend.

What Would You Do?

2009-01-05T16:54:00.003+11:00

Here's a hypothetical for you...

Let's say you're the President (or Prime Minister) of a successful democracy. And let's say that things weren't so good in the country next door.

Let's then say that extremists won an "election" there, and since they took control, had fired more than 8000 rockets at your towns and cities along the border.

And every day, their leaders made speaches about how evil you were, and how they vow to destroy you.

What would you do?

You have a few options. You could cut off their electricity, which you supply. That way, the rocket makers would be working in the dark.

You could cut off their water, all of which comes from your water treatment plants.

You could stop delivering fuel. After all, if they can't drive the rockets to the launch sites, they can't fire them.

Or you could stop deliveries of food. You see, unlike your people, who, by hard work, made your nation what it is, your neighbours don't seem especially interested in intensive farming.

Come on... we all know the answer... don't pretend otherwise... you wouldn't do any of these things... you'd send in warplanes and bomb the crap out of them, and if that didn't work, you'd send in the tanks.

And it wouldn't have taken you years to make that decision either.

Yet today, it is Israel copping the scorn of mainstream media. It is Israel being described as the aggressor.

Ask yourself... what would you have done?

Ask yourself what the United States would have done if hundreds of missiles a day were raining down on San Diego from the other side of the Mexican border. At least the USA isn't being hypocritical in this. For all his faults, George W understands, and knows exactly what he would have done.

So more to the point, ask yourself what Great Britain would do if those missiles were raining on Dover from the other side of the Channel, or what Russia would have done if rockets were raining down from Georgia.

Israel, in fact, has been far more patient that any other country on earth would have been. It has tolerated daily rocket attacks, and the more it tolerated them, the more rockets Hamas chose to launch. Sooner or later, enough was going to be enough.

It's not even about "occupation". Israel pulled all of its troops out of Gaza years ago, handing the Palestinian leadership a golden opportunity to build a nation with the billions of dollars of aid that poured in. Instead, they squandered the chance.

However, the Palestinians leadership, and especially the leadership of Hamas, has learned one lesson very well over the last ten years or so. They've learned how to fight the war of public opinion and in this conflict, the truth is in danger of being lost.

Here are some facts you might like to consider, facts you won't see or hear in mainstream media. because some have used the opportunity to spread misinformation about Israel’s actions, intentions and the overall situation in Gaza.

Following are examples of fabrications – refuted by factual accounts provided by international aid organizations, Arab leaders, and Palestinian journalists.

Fiction #1: There’s no food in Gaza and people are starving.
News reports, including one produced by TV station France 2 on Dec. 29, showed a Gaza resident in a food store saying:“Apparently, there is nothing, as you can see. There are no natural products for the kids. There is no milk. There is nothing here.”
Fact: Warehouses in Gaza are filled to capacity, according to international aid groups. In the same France 2 TV clip referenced above, upon closer inspection, shelves filled with food can be seen in the reflection of a refrigerated door in the store.

The World Food Program informed Israel that it would cease shipment of food to Gaza because the warehouses there are at full capacity, with enough food to last two weeks.

During a one-day period alone – Dec. 31– Israel facilitated the transport of 29 truckloads of food, including 15 truckloads of flour, into Gaza. As Hamas was firing rockets and mortars during Israel both during and after the ceasefire, Israel facilitated the delivery of 2,500 tons (delivered on 93 trucks) of humanitarian aid, medical supplies and medication through the Kerem Shalom cargo terminal.

Since the beginning of the current conflict, about 6,500 tons of aid have been transferred into Gaza at the request of the international organizations, the Palestinian Authority and various governments.

Fiction #2: Gaza has no medical and other aid supplies to help the injured.
Fact: During the first 5 days alone of Operation Cast Lead, Israel has facilitated the delivery of 6,500 tons of aid – 179 truckoads -- into Gaza at the request of international organizations, the Palestinian Authority and various governments. The deliveries include basic food commodities, medication, medical supplies and blood units. Another 106 truckloads of humanitarian aid are expected to arrive in Gaza on Jan. 31. The crossings to Gaza are open for the transfer of humanitarian aid from all international organizations, in full cooperation with the Israeli authorities and without restriction. In a one-day period – Dec. 31 – Israel enabled the transport of 9 truckloads of medicine and medical supplies, along with 10 ambulances, into Gaza.

Fiction #3: Israel is refusing to allow injured Gazans into Israeli and Egyptian hospitals for treatment.
Fact: Israel has allowed a number of Palestinians into Israel for medical treatment they couldn’t receive in Gaza. On Dec. 31, for example, 12 Palestinians accessed Israel for medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. Two of those evacuated were injured children; the remaining were chronically sick people, and their escorts, who were allowed into Israel for treatment not available in Gaza.

Further, Hamas – in an effort to exploit the suffering of innocent civilians - has refused to allow injured Palestinians to leave Gaza to go to Egypt for treatment. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abu al-Gheit said earlier this week that Hamas was not allowing wounded Palestinians to cross the border into Egypt for treatment: “We are waiting for the wounded Palestinians to cross. They are not being allowed to cross.” Asked who was to blame, he referred to Gaza by saying, “Ask the party in control on the ground in Gaza.”

Fiction #4: Israel is purposely targeting civilians.
Fact: While Israel goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas actually places civilians in harm’s way and uses them as shields. Because Hamas is known to use civilian residences to hide their weapons, on Dec. 27, the Israeli military – before launching an attack on such storehouses - called thousands of civilians in Gaza on their cell phones and left Arabic-language messages urging them to leave homes being used for weapons storage.

On Dec. 30, a reformist Iranian newspaper published a statement by a student organization that criticized Hamas for risking civilian lives, including children, by hiding its forces in nurseries and hospitals. The Iranian Culture Ministry shut down the newspaper after it printed the statements.

Israel has publicly stated time and again that it regrets the loss of any civilian life and considers each one a tragedy. However, both Iran-backed Hamas and Iran-backed Hezbollah have a history of faking deaths and funerals. For example, in Spring 2002, Palestinians were filmed as they attempted to stage a fake funeral as part of a gross exaggeration of the number of people killed in Jenin. The film shows Palestinians wrapping, then carrying a ‘corpse’ on a funeral pier; the ‘corpse’ falls off several times and gets back on – including in front of a large and surprised crowd.

Although some reports say a quarter of the deaths during “Operation Cast Lead” have been civilians, Palestinian terrorists’ history of deceptions and false claims require reporters to work to verify such information.

During Israel’s defensive war against Hezbollah two years ago, the phenomenon was so common that it became known as “Hezbollywood.” One of the best-known instances was when a man purporting to be a rescue worker at the site of a bombed village appeared in various photos in the international media, repeatedly displaying the same child’s dead body at different times – and in different poses – throughout the day. The man, identified as Salam Daher, wore a green helmet in all of the photos, earning himself the nickname “green helmet guy.” Daher was also found to have directed a camera shooting the scene.

Fiction #5: Israel has cut off electricity to Gaza.
Fact: In the past, Hamas officials have committed deceptions such as pulling dark curtains in mid-day while holding a meeting to make it look as though they were being forced to work by candlelight – a sham exposed by journalists who showed that it was actually daylight outside at the time. The ruse was carried out with the complicity of some Arab satellite TV stations. More recent such deceptions have come to light as recently as November 2008, when Palestinian Authority officials said Hamas staged new blackouts to try to get sympathy from the international community and provoke civilian violence against the Palestinian Authority and Israel. Further, terrorists in Gaza have fired rockets at – and hit - the power station in the Israeli city of Ashkelon that provides Gaza the majority of its electricity. The terrorists also have fired on Israeli workers at a depot that provides fuel to Gaza and a suicide bomber destroyed lines providing electricity from Israel into Gaza.

"There's no shortage of fuel in the Gaza Strip and the Electricity Company is continuing to function normally," a PA official said in November. "Our people in the Gaza Strip have told us that the blackouts are all staged as part of the Hamas propaganda…There's enough fuel in the Gaza Strip,” he said. "Even when Israel reduces the fuel supplies, Hamas continues to smuggle tens of thousands of liters through the underground tunnels."

Fiction #6: Palestinian journalists are unbiased and show what’s ‘really’ happening in Gaza.
Fact: Some Palestinian journalists are manipulating and exploiting unintended victims of the Israeli strikes. Said one Palestinian journalist, members of the Palestinian media are ‘directing’ civilians to cry and telling them what to say in interviews: "A mother of one of the martyrs stood by the door of the intensive care unit while crying... relatives and those around her were telling her what she should say to the television cameras: 'Say your son [before he died] prayed and went out.' Another tells her: 'Curse the Arab leaders'... The journalists [in the hospitals] are going overboard in their insensitivity and taking advantage of the [difficult] moments, with the explanation that they are showing this to the world. One cameraman told a mourning mother: 'Hit your face, cry, do some action.'"

Again ask yourself, what would you do if you were the leader of a country facing daily rocket attacks from your neighbour. You'd cut off their electricity. You'd stop sending food and medical supplies to your enemy, and then you'd launch military strikes. You certainly wouldn't call the people in the way of the bombs on their cell phones and tell them to get out of the way, or send them ambulances.

So next time you, or your freinds, work colleagues or family, start making moral judgements about what Israel has done over the last few days, ask yourself the question... what would you have done?

A Most Worthy Cause

2009-01-03T10:53:00.001+11:00

It must be worthy. It's a message from the Government.

Happy Fat-Man-In-Red-Suit Day

2008-12-24T15:40:00.002+11:00

Dear Santa...

2008-12-22T10:03:00.004+11:00

Dear Santa,

There aren't many things I want or need in this world. The few things on my list are mostly spiritual in nature, and I know that you're a materialistic kind of guy so I've been looking around for the perfect gift for you to bring me pm Christmas Day.

I've decided I like one of these please. No... "like" is a bit mamby-pamby. I WANT one of these, and frankly, I'll be pretty pissed off if, after I've gone to all the trouble of finding it, you don't deliver.

So thanks in anticipation, and yes, I have been a good boy all year.

Chester.

Essential

2008-12-22T09:58:00.002+11:00

Exposed

2008-12-16T12:09:00.006+11:00

Anyone remember "Global Warming"?

You know... evil humanity destroys all life on earth by triggering cataclysmic climate change caused entirely by over-indulging in greedy consumption of fossil fuels to enrich their selfish pathetic lives. Or something. I think that's how it went.

Apparently, it was a lie, and the people telling the lie clearly knew it. But like all lies, they were eventually undone by their own duplicity.

The unraveling started in a tiny little nation called Australia, which was responsible for just one hundredth of the total "carbon emissions" that were allegedly destroying the world.

It was there that ex-bureaucrat Prime Minister Kevin Dudd announced, with big fanfare, his government's commitment to reduce that country's "carbon emissions" by a whopping 5% by introducing a new "carbon tax', which he then promised to give back to everyone who asked. Yes, finally, a government had found a way to tax the air you breathed.

Now some maths are important here... five percent of one percent is five ten thousandths which, last time I checked, is hardly anything at all. I mean, imagine you have a hundred bucks, and you accidentally lose 5c. Or let's say you're on a two hour and forty five minute flight, and the captain announces that you're going to arrive five seconds ahead of time. Yes, That's the amount by which Prime Minister Dudd was going to reduce "carbon emissions".

Remember too, that 5 percent of 1 percent was actually 5 percent of 1 percent of 2 percent, the two percent being the total contribution to all of the world's "carbon emissions" made by human activity. So Kevin Dudd was prosing to cut, by Australia's action, the total amount of "carbon emissions" going into the atmosphere each year by one one hundred thousandth. That was such a small amount that the instruments capable of measuring that reduction don’t exist.

It was a joke. It must have been, because surely, if "Global Warming" was the problem everyone was being told it was, and "carbon emissions" were to blame, then governments around the world would actually be doing something about it. After all, the technology existed to fix it. All that was missing was the will.

That's when people started realising that this Global Warming thing was a scam. They realised that the government's policy was all spin and rhetoric, with no substance at all. They realised it was all about raising taxes and about ideological dogma. They realised it was about "giving the masses something else to worry about" to distract them from inept and corrupt government.

They realised it was pathetic.

Homeless World Cup

2008-12-10T11:55:00.004+11:00

They've just finished playing the "Homeless World Cup" football (soccer) tournament in Melbourne. Hundreds of (homeless) players from 56 countries were flown in for this week-long tournament, which was apparently won by Afghanistan (who beat Russia 5-4).

Oh... where do I start...?

Look. I feel awfully sorry for homeless people. There, but for the grace of God (and the generosity of family) go I. No-one actually chooses to be homeless. Well... nearly no-one anyway.

It is therefore natural that I support any initiative that makes their lives better, in so far as everyone "supports" initiatives that makes their lives better, keeps their smell away, and hides them out of site so we can get on with our Christmas shopping.

I guess, in this respect, bundling them onto an aeroplane and sending them somewhere else serves a real purpose, in much the same way that Rudi Guilianni served a similar purpose when, as Mayor of New York, he scooped up all the homeless people he could find and bought them a one way bus ticket to San Francisco (where many remain today).

But is this really "helping"?

The Homeless World Cup website contains some interesting statistics. For example, there are around 200,000 homeless people in Canada, costing the Canadian economy $6billion a year. If you put your calculator through its paces, you'll soon realise that this is $30,000 a year each, which, if handed to each homeless person, would deliver an income so far over the poverty line that there are people in full time employment who go to bed at night dreaming of an salary that high.

Of course, it isn't handed out to homeless people. It's spent on "programmes" which, you'd have to conclude, haven't really done much to reduce the numbers of "homeless".

I suspect, too, that "homeless" means different things in different parts of the world. Think about it... the Afghan National Football Team could probably qualify as "homeless" given the crappy state of affairs over there. It's no wonder they won. The same could be said for Zimbabwe and a long list of other tin-pot African disaster zones. And let's face it... "homeless in New York" is going to mean something very different to "homeless in Mogadishu". This is reflected by the number of competitors who came to Melbourne, saw how good the homeless there have it, and immediately applied for assylum.

Put yourself in their shoes. Here you are, living on the street, eeking out an existence and barely surviving from one day to the next. The following day, you're on a plane to Australia, you're put up in a hotel, you're fed and clothed, and your only worry for seven days is whether you kick he ball to the wing or the midfield. Then you're bundled back on a plane, and the following day, you're trying to shoo away some homeless guy who moved into your spot under that overpass while you were away.

Not that I begrudge any of them the trip, and the respite from the desparation of their lives. Good luck to them, and I hope they had a great time.

But at the end of the tournament, where does that leave the homeless?

Millions of dollars spent. Sponsorships. Press releases. The usual 1:1 ratio of hangers-on pretending they're really helping. And a select and very lucky few who got to do something which, even by the standards of the non-homeless where they live, was extraordinary.

The answer is "still homeless".

Suspended?

2008-12-08T08:21:00.005+11:00

I was flicking around the channels looking for something moderately interesting to watch at 5.30 this morning (couldn't sleep... feeling it now... bloody tired). We have Fox cable with the whiz bang on screen TV guide thingmy, to aid in viewing choice.

Fox Sports had this synopsis...

NY Giants v Philadelphia

The Giants will be without star receiver Plaxico Burress, suspended for 4 weeks for accidentally shooting himself.

I'm sure it's an old story for those of you living in the Excited States, but for the rest of us, the whole concept is absurd.

Phew

2008-12-01T10:24:00.002+11:00

Yes. It's nearly finished. I'm referring to Wroof!, my fab content manager that I stupidly announced would go line on August 24.

It's been a slog, and the hold up has been a complete rewrite of the part of the user control panel that alows you to create stories.

At 10.22 this morning, that task was done, tested and ready to go.

To be honest, I feel a little empty. I mean, this bloody project has been all consuming and the last three months have been a vivid demonstration of the need to know what you're doing before you start doing it.

There's still a little way to go, but the rest is definitely downhill... just some loose ends to tie up which would only take a few days.

And after that, I get I'll have to do some real work.

Vegas and Other Stuff

2008-11-28T22:37:00.003+11:00

You know your lucks out in Vegas when you pass a slot machine which is loudly named "Luck Changer... Change Your Luck Here"... and it's out of order.

TV
We watched a little TV in the Excited States. It seems there are more commercials for drugs now than there were. Actually, I think they were all commercials for drugs, and they went something like this...
Announcer:
Suffer from [insert disease here]?
Ask your doctor about [insert drug name here].

Another Announcer (at double speed):
[Insert drug name here] may cause blindness, deafness, impotence, increased appetite, reduced appetite, headaches, nausea, vomiting, difficulty breathing, rash, stupidity, gout, diabetes, pancreatitis, kidney failure, liver failure, depression, bowel cancer, infertility, hayfever, palpitations, heart failure, club foot, hair loss, hair growth, sleeplessness, drowsiness, anaphalaxis, leprocy or death. If you experience any of these symptoms, please see your doctor.

The first announcer takes about 5 seconds. The second, 25.

And I want to take [insert drug name here] because...?

Toys
I did catch an absolutely appalling ad for a new Fischer Price toy in between drug ads.
It featured a hispanic looking child creating a toy burger at his own toy burger restaurant. They even had a counter with cash register and toy money, and a microphone into which the child, after careful preparation, shouted "number 34, your order's up".

I'd hate to think the good folk at Fisher Price were pitching this toy as future vocational education.

If I can find it on You Tube, I'll post it.

The Grand Canyon Skywalk
Bloody awesome. You stand on a glass platform out over the edge of the Canyon. The only bummer is that they don't let you take your camera out there.

Directions
Regular readers will know I love America and Americans. I've spent a lot of time there and find the whole experience akin to slipping on a favourite sweat shirt. That's code for saying "critical comment coming, but I hope it's in some way constructive".

What is it with Americans and directions... or... more to the point... a lack of maps. We drove a fair bit... from Vegas to the Hoover Dam, and then from the dam to the Canyon Skywalk. No-one had maps. All they had were little cards with directions, which were either incorrect, or omitted key information that would get me to where I was supposed to be going.

"Take the 95 south." Oh... Ok... Which way is South? (And before you say "The signs of the freeways all say which way is south, I'll correct you... no they bloody don't.

Just give me a fecken map. I can read maps. Apparently, the average American can't. It's a shame really.

Red Rock Canyon
We have a couple of hourse to kill at the end of our conference, so we drove the 10 miles or so to the Red Rock Canyon. It was sort of like looking at a miniature Ayers Rock. Probably worth it if you're sick of faux Roman buildings, fountains and the tinkle of slot machines next time you're in Vegas.

Just head west on the 215, and then west on Charleston. You can't miss it.

Blue Angels
Possible the coolest thing I saw in eight days in the US were the Blue Angels (is that what those stunt planes are called?).

There was a big airshow at Nellis Air Force Base, just out of Las Vegas, and these guys were practicing formation flying... right over me... so close that I think one of the pilots had a scar on his left cheek.

It was bloody awesome. F16s flying very fast, very low, and just a few metres from wingtip to wingtip. And there were other planes too. I think one might have been the new Raptor because it kept disappearing... rally... it'd fly overhead, go straight up, and then... poof... it was gone, only to be seen again coming from somewhere it wasn't just a second ago.

Election Fever

2008-11-28T22:34:00.003+11:00

I know. The "Election" is old news, but I was there, in 'Vegas' and watched the whole thing... well as much of the thing as is possible on CNN/Fox News.

I have just one comment... which is that for the few days after Mr Obama won, Americans of a darker colour seemed to hold their chins just a little higher, and their chests just a little further out. Actually, some acted like they own the place.

It was nice.

Woo... Wheer Has The Time Gone?

2008-11-28T22:30:00.002+11:00

Bloody Hell!

It's been more than a month since my last posting. Where does the time go?

You must think I'm slack. Really. If I didn't have a couple of really good excuses, I'd think I was slack too.

Excuses?

Well for one, I've been away... in Las Vegas and Fiji (an odd combo, but stopping over slashes about 50% off the airfare).

And second, I've had my head buried in Wroof!, which is just days away from being people ready.

Oh... and I nearly forgot... I've had the mother of all colds... picked in in Fiji I think. Laid out flat for a week and a half. Much coughing and blowing of nose. The sort of pox you wish on enemies if you just want to inconvenience them for a few days.

Ok?

Hood Lumps

2008-10-23T14:51:00.002+11:00

You've gotta love those Nigerian Scammers.

This came today...

FROM THE DESK OF INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT,INDEPENDENT CORRUPT PRACTICE COMMISSION(ICPC).MAITAMA-ABUJA,NIGERIA.

This management is hereby to inform you that,out of our records,for the year investigation,it is dawn to us that you have been victimized by the men of underworld(Pretenders).However,the management has been dutifully empowered by the Investigation bureau office of the President and Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Federal Republic of Nigeria to curb all illicit transaction and workload of this perpetrators.

In line with the Anti-corruption crusade of the presidency,Umaru Musa Yaradua(GCFR),you are by this Email notification to stop any contact regarding this illegal transaction with this Hood-lumps.Out of our finding,the image of this country has been dented Internationally during the past administration of the Federal Government of Nigeria.Presently,we have employed a strategy to remit sanity,and vow to terminate the activity of this fraudsters,by consolidating our security Network all over the country in view to monitor all outgoing and incoming communication to enable fish out and avert all illegal and suspicious transaction both domestically and internationally respectively.

Moreover,it occur that some of our Financial Institutions(Bank) serve as a conduit pipe by which this fraudsters use to perpetrate the undo crime.We have signalized all these financial institutions to implement scrutinized investigation before carrying any transaction.Any bank found culpable of breaching the law,must have their operational license revoke.

In accordance with the criminal and other related offense act,25 of
1999 constitution, we have been officially compel by Senator.
A.Aminu(JP),Chairman, Senate committee on Foreign Affair to mapped out billions of Dollars from the Annual Budget to compensate all defrauded victims as part of the ongoing National Reform Scheme of the presidency,and means to radiate immunity for criticism.

In view of this,we have been informed that you are still dealing with those hood-lumps in all your attempts to secure the release of your fund.We wish to advise you that such an illegal act has to stop if you wish to receive your payment since we have decided to bring a solution to your problem. Do be informed that we reserve the right at our discretion to sue you for damage on recognition of further contact with this people.

You have been approved US$550,000 as a compensation funds.Therefore you are required to contact the Verification department for proper evaluation into your file.Do be informed that your file security code is W53889BR.You are to quote these file number for proper identification when contacting this office.Contact the Head of the Verification Unit::

Name: Prof.Bellow William
E-mail: verificationdepartment.icpcngr@live.com
Direct line: +234-803-85-30542
Fax:+234-80-688228

You are to contact this office upon receipt of this notification immediately to enhance proper consideration and immediate release of your approved compensation funds as the defrauded victim.

Vision:
To fight corruption to a standstill and restore Nigeria to the enviable standard of respectability and dignity within the comity of nations.

Best Regard,
Justice O.David Kenneth Akanbi
(Chairman,Independent Corrupt Practice Commission,ICPC.)

Can they remit some of that sanity to my bank account?

Ratchet Saved

2008-10-22T06:00:00.003+11:00

Anyone following Ratchet's story (see a few blogs back) will be pleased to learn that he arrived in the US today to be re-united with the American soldier who rescued him from a burning pile of garbage in Baghdad.

More than 65,000 people signed the Save Ratchet petition, forcing the US Army to relax its strict "no pets" rule.

Prison Break II - Take Your Friends

2008-10-18T10:55:00.001+11:00

Good Dog!!

Prison Break

2008-10-18T10:54:00.002+11:00

Must Have

2008-10-16T08:58:00.001+11:00

Click on the image for a closer look.

Save Ratchet

2008-10-15T07:29:00.002+11:00

There's a story on the News website this morning about efforts to save "Ratchet", a dog rescued by US soldiers in Iraq. Apparently, US Army rules prevent the rescuing soldiers from taking Ratchet home.

The story is HERE.

The petition to save Ratchet is HERE. By the time I singed it, more than 32,000 others had done the same.

Baby What?

2008-10-12T21:22:00.002+11:00

Thanks to Rove and Peter Helliar for bringing Baby Pee Pee (or Wee Wee, depending on which side of the Atlantic you live) into my life.

Or this one, which is even more disturbing...

Yet Another Representative

2008-10-12T16:38:00.002+11:00

They just keep coming. This yesterday...

Dear,Friend.

It is my pleasure to let you know about my success in getting those fund transffered under the cooperation of a new partner from Japan. I didn't forget your past efforts to assist me in transffering those funds.

Now contact my secretary Mr. Sunday Henry his email.
(henry_ifeanyill24@yahoo.co.uk) ask him to send you the total($800.000.00) cheque which I raised for your compensation .so feel free and get intouch with him and give him your address where to send the cheque.Do Let me know immediately you receive it ok.

Best regards,
Dr.Johnson Williams

I replied, of course, because it would be rude not to do so, wouldn't it?

Dear Mr Henry,
I appreciate the notification from Dr Johnson Williams, but unfortunately, problems with the Tax Office here prevent me from accepting delivery of the funds at this time.

Therefore, please be a good chap and invest the $800,000 in Kitty Litter futures. With the current global financial meltdown, my sources tell me there is likely to be a massive world shortage by the end of the year. Those sources have a 100% track record so far, and I'd be foolish to ignore them. Please open the futures account in your name and I'll split the profit with you when we sell early next year. My sources are predicting the price will quadruple by the end of January next year so the $800,000 will become $3.2mil. Your share of the profit would be $1.2mil (if my arithmetic is right).

Thanks

*Sigh* You'd think I have nothing better to do.

Ain't Democracy A Wonderful Thing

2008-10-12T16:34:00.000+11:00

My Representative

2008-10-08T20:52:00.003+11:00

This arrived in my inbox yesterday...

新しいメールアドレスをお知らせします
新しいメールアドレス：
Good day dear,We have been instructed to effect the release of your funds meanwhile we receive a letter from a lady your rep. instructing us to pay her, do we pay her?
Confirm ASAP- Colly Williams

So of course, I replied...

Yes. Pay her and confirm amount by return email.
She is our representative.

Of course, there is no "her" so I thought that might be the end of it. I was wrong. This came today...

THANKS FOR YOUR URGENT CONFIRMATION, WE WIL PAY HER AS INSTRUCTED. THANKS.
DR COLLY WILLIAMS.

Bizarre.

Where's Wroof! ?

2008-10-02T08:06:00.003+10:00

Yep. It's delayed again. If this goes on much longer, Wroof! will start to look like a New South Wales Government project.

But here's why... I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I want Wroof! to be right. I want it to be worth the wait. And each time I tinker with a part of it to make it better, there's a domino effect, which means I need to tinker with another part of it, and then another, and another.

It's close. Really. Just a couple more weeks.

PS. All this explains why postings from Chester The Bear have been a little thin of late.

Logic

2008-10-02T07:37:00.003+10:00

We've just changed telephone companies, and received our first invoice today.

The email said this...

Dear Chester,
Please find attached your current invoice for your People Telecom services. A detailed breakdown of the charges is found within the attached invoice.If this invoice has been sent to the incorrect email address, you can change the address online.

Um... so they're sending an email to my incorrect email address to tell me that if it's an incorrect email address, I can change it. Does anyone else see the fatal flaw in that logic?

And While We're On Spam...

2008-09-17T16:27:00.004+10:00

As if to underscore the damage that spammers like Jayne or Solway are doing to our economy, I thought, in a moment of free time over lunch today, that I'd classify the spam just one of my accounts has received in the last 72 hours.

Here are the results, and I'm sure you won't be surprised.

Out of 215 spam emails (vs just 28 legit emails), they divide up as follows;

Spam flogging Viagra, Penis Enlargement or some other male sexual performance enhancement product: 152

Spam flogging fake watches, usually Rolex (though Patek Philippe and Tag Hauer got a mention too): 39.

Scams of the Nigeria style, or notifications that I've won fictitious lotteries: 16

Spam inviting me to a porn site: 6 (which is unusually low)

Spam offering pirated software: 2

213 is the number of spam emails that managed to slip past my mail server spam filer and actually arrive in my mail box. Our server tells me that the number of filtered items that didn't make it that far is around six times that number, or 1,200. Fortunately, the it's configured to kill the spam it filters completely.

1,400 emails in 72 hours, only 28 of which were legitimate.

"Constitutional right" my arse!

Constitutional Right? Bah!

2008-09-16T07:26:00.005+10:00

See the guy on the left? Remember his face. Throw darts at it. Deface it with a felt pen by drawing horns on his head, or perhaps a little Hitler moustache, or, maybe, Joseph Goebels glasses. That's "Super Spammer", Jeremy Jayne.

He's a free man today, because the First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to "anonymous" free speech.

Ok... for those of you who don't follow this sort of stuff, here's some background. Way back in December 2003, the State of Virginia filed felony charges against this scumbucket under anti-spam laws that make it a criminal offence to falsify email header information. In other words, it was against the law to send out an email that you pretend is from someone else. That's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for spammers, who hide like cowards behind the complexities of the web by faking return addresses and originating server information on their junk emails.

Sadly, this week, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the conviction, deciding unanimously that the law was in breach of the US First Amendment right to free speech. The court actually went further, deciding that free speech really meant "anonymous" free speech, citing the example of the one of the key triggers for the American Revolution, the "Federalist Papers", published anonymously under the pen name "Publius". They were actually written by US founding fathers James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.

In its ruling, the court found that, had email been around in 1776, the Federalist Papers may well have been sent by anonymous email. It therefore concluded that protecting the right to send such emails and to falsify their origin to attain anonimity was entirely consistent with the spirit of the First Amendment.

Hmmm. I have to admit to very mixed feelings on this.

On one hand, I'm a passionate advocate of free speech, and I'm a great admirer of America's founding fathers whose collective intellect in framing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States laid the foundation for a world of unprecedented wealth, comfort and freedom.

However, there is a line in the sand with this, and the challenge is to have the wisdom to draw that line in the right place. For example, we have Racial Villification laws in Australia that make it an offence to denegrate anyone based merely on their race, religion or sexual preference. I support that, even though it impinges the right to free speech we enjoy.

We also have laws which amke it a criminal offence to incite a riot, and I'm not so excited about that. Inciting a riot is, after all, the first step toward revolution, and while government would have have to be exponentially worse than it is now, I still want to retain the right to chuck it out.

But defining spam as free speech? Nah. I don't think Americas founding fathers would have considered the ability to send email flogging fake Viagra as a "right" worthy of protection under the Constitution.

I also don't think the court thought this through. The principal difference is that spam in my mailbox costs me money. If you don't understand how, CLICK HERE for a post I wrote way back about another Super Spammer, Robert Solway.

What the court has decided is, in effect, that the US Constitution mandates that I pay for the delivery of the message when someone who I don't know, and who has never ask my permission, seeks to exercise his right to free speech. In a perverse kind of way, that's taxation without representation, the very notion that started the whole shebang in 1776 in the first place.

It is clear that the judges sitting on the Virginia Supreme Court do not understand just how much, in real dollars, spam costs their economy.

I am expecting the Virginia decision to be overturned in the US Supreme Court soon.

And Even More Silly Politics...

2008-09-12T10:07:00.003+10:00

I forgot to memtion that our local municipal government elections are being held tomorrow (Saturday). Voting is compulsory, which means one is required to turn up, scribble something on the ballot paper (like "None Of The Above), fold the ballot up and stuff it in a big cardboard box.

I'm going to be elsewhere, so I took the opportunity, while on a walk with Zac this morning, to drop into the Council offices and vote.

Surprisingly, there was a gaggle of candidates outside jostling to thrust a "How To Vote" card into my spare hand. Of course, in these more environmentally conscious times, it isn't card any more but rather a very thin "recycled" piece of paper. Recycled is politically correct, apparently, and somehow makes wasting resources on this nonsense ok. It clearly doesn't occur to them that recycled paper is also a finite resource.

One of tha candidates was from The Greens... which is the party you vote for if you want everyone else to think you're young, hip, in-touch, and are concerned about "global warming".

Oh oh. Regular readers will know my views on that. I politely listened to the Green candidate tell me her party was determined to make our municipality "carbon neutral" by 2012.

I then told her I didn't believe in anthropomorphic global warming and she started to sprout the party line about carbon, and greenhouses, and other less interesting things.

You can probably predict the outcome... I opened fire (metaphorically, of course). I gave her both barrels.

"Well we'll have to agree to disagree on that, but really, this election is about local issues", she said.

"No it isn't. You just told me you want to do the carbon neutral thing. Global warming's about as far away from as local issue as it gets."

"But we're opposed to selling the local bowling club", she quickly added.

It was at this point that another candidate joined the fray. "But there is no proposal to sell the bowling club", he said.

"Yes, but we're opposed to its sale anyway", replied the Green.

It reminded me of a wonderful scene from one of my top 3 fave films, "Wag The Dog", which is really a documentary and ought to be compulsory study in any political science degree.

In the scene, the "Political Consultant", Conrad Breen (played brilliantly by Robert DeNero) is planning a diversion from a breaking story that the President had been caught having sex with a girl scout in the Oval Office. He points at one of the President's staffers and says "You, call the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Scott. Get him on an aeroplane to Seattle tonight."

He points to another and says "You, I want a press release saying General Scott has not gone to Seattle to talk to Boeing about premature deployment of the B3 Bomber."

The first aid says "But there is no B3 Bomber".

And Breen replies "which is exactly why General Scott has not gone to Boeing to talk about it."

Brilliant. And so, today, life reflected art.

On a more serious note, I was offended that they wouldn't let Zac vote. He lives here too, and some of the decisions our Council will make will effect him directly. It's an outrage.

Politics... Bah!

2008-09-09T09:30:00.002+10:00

Mark Twain once wrote "It doesn't matter who you vote for, you still end up with a politician."

There's interesting political shows on right now on either side of the Pacific, and they're worth a comment.

Now that the interminable American primary season is finally over and the candidates are oficially endorsed, the US Election can get down to the pointy end.

And the candidates are...
Some young handsome black/white dude with a silver tongue and very nice suits, who has chosen Mr Boring as his second, or some old white guy who managed to get himself captured by the Vietcong (which qualifies him as a war hero), who has, appropriately, chosen Rambette as his second.

And one of these two will be the Leader of the Free World. Are you kidding Americans? Seriously? You couldn't find anyone better?

Here's my take...

Obama is The Hollow Man. He's all talk, with absolutely no substance. From this distance, it seems all he's ever done is promote Obama, though if success in what you've done is an indicator, then he's going to make a fine President because he's clearly promoted himself extremely well.

McCain is eight years too late. I like the guy, and suspect he would have made a great President in 2000. If the job hadn't gone to The Idiot, I think the world would be a different place. But now... I just get the feeling he's past his use by date (though at least he can pronounce "nuclear").

Ah well. Dr J and I will be in America on election day. I'm really looking forward to that.

Over on this side of the Pacific, our State government has imploded, and in such a spectacular way as to remind us of just how disgustingly slimy and self serving those who seek public office in this country really are.

The outgoing state premier's press conference said it all. "I'm resigning today, because it's best for the party that a new team be allowed to take up the reins. In my entire career in politics, The Party has always come first."

Um. Mr Premier, don't you mean "the voters come first". No apparently not.

His successor is a nobody, very much like Mr Obama. He's been in Parliament for just a couple of years, and really hasn't distinguished himself. But here's the problem...

Before that, he was chief of staff to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, a guy called Milton Orkopolis, who is currently serving a jail term for luring under-age boys to his Parliament House office, supplying them with drugs, and having sex with them. (Yes, if nothing else, politics in New South Wales can be "interesting").

There can only be two possibilities...
Either, as Chief of Staff, our new Premier was incompetant in not knowing what his boss was up to, which means he shouldn't be Premier, or he turned a blind eye to his paedophile boss, and if that's true, he should be sharing the prison cell.

Sadly, the next state election is in March 2011. That's more than two years away, a lifetime in political speak. The long suffering people of this state are counting the days.

And on that... when the politicians in this state moved to a "fixed term" (previously, the Premier could call an election any time during his term), I campaigned to adopt an American style "recall" system, which would allow The People to fire an inept or corrupt government. Sadly, the suggestion was howled down by the self serving slimeballs who sit in our legislature.

What a pity.

That Announcement Was Premature

2008-09-09T08:51:00.005+10:00

More than a few weeks ago, I proudly announced at "Wroof! Is Coming". I even set a date, August 24. I blew my trumpet long and loud. "Brilliant", "Inspired", "Stunning". The dictionary of superlatives was depleted.

And then I hit a bump... a crash of Photoshop which I was using to tidy up some graphics.

It was then that I realised that Wroof! just wasn't good enough yet. I say "yet" because it will be all of the things those superlatives describe. In many ways, is IS all those things, but not entirely.

You see, it isn't finished, and by "finished", I mean polished, shiny and very warm to touch.

It took a tiny little bug to make that penny drop. It was something to do with the way Wroof! handles shopping carts, and as I was trawling through lines of code looking for the error, I started to see some big design problems.

For example, Wroof! lets you choose fonts and colours for your pages. On testing, I discovered that the method for passing the page reference from one page to the next was flawed. It wasn't a bug... it worked exactly the way it was supposed to... it just didn't do the job required. It needed to be fixed, and the fix meant combing a hundred thousand lines of code to insert a page reference whenever your site's visitor moves from one page to the next. Boring, time consuming, and a pain in the rear end.

There have been more like that... errors in logic or design that haven't bothered me in creating our company websites, but which would break your patience if you tried to use it.

As if those issues weren't enough, I looked at the two pages where you get to decide how your website will look... the two most important pages in the whole thing... and they sucked. Big time. Really sucked. They were clumsy, unintuitive and clunky. Wroof! has to be better than that so a rewrite was required. It was a timely reminder of one of my mantras... "if you're going to do something, spend a little more time and do it right".

Wroof! is still coming... but I've put the date back a little... to October 1. Given the history of the last few weeks, I'm not going to set that in stone... but I'll be bloody pissed off if I need to push that date back again.

Freezing Balls

2008-09-02T07:49:00.003+10:00

I received a little linguistic history in my mailbox yesterday that makes me feel whole lot more comfortable about using an expression sometimes spoken to declare unusually cold weather.

Back in the days when sailors were real men, ships were made of wood and Britania ruled the waves, engineers struggled with a rather serious problem.

To rule those waves, ships needed cannon, and a cannon is just an expensive ornament without cannon balls. There's not much point having cannon balls, thouigh, unless they're right next to the cannon that's destined to fire them. The problem is, they're balls, which, by their very nature, like to roll around under (or over) your feet.

So how do you store the balls next to the cannon safely and securely, especially when your deck isn't a stationary platform?

You put them in a box, right? Wrong! If you put them in a box, they're too difficult to get out. Remember, life or death could depend on the speed of reloading, and besides, anything wood might be damaged in battle, which would mean all you'd have to do to render your enemy's cannon inoperative would be to break the box holding the balls.

The best storage method was one you've seen in any swashbuckler... stack them in a square based pyramid... one on top, resting on four, resting on nine, resting on 16, stacking 30 cannon balls right next to the cannon. The problem with that, though, is that you need to stop the bottom layer from sliding out under the weight of the rest. First, they tried creating a wooden square on the deck but they quickly found that under the weight of the balls, the wood would eventually wear down, making the pyramid unstable. Wood also flexes, which is great if you want your ship to survive the first volley of shot, but really bad if you want something held in place by the wood to stay exactly where it is.

So the engineers struggled with ways to keep those pesky cannon balls on deck next to the cannon without them rolling around because as effective as these things were against your enemy's timber, if they went-a-rolling, they were even more effective against your ankle.

The solution was a heavy metal plate with 16 round indentations, called a "Monkey". In their simplest form, monkeys were the bashing bits at the end of pile drivers, and you could imagine that, with repeated bashing, the pile driver would develop a pile sized indentation in the metal.

Make a monkey with 16 indentations that exactly matched the configuration of the cannon balls and your problem was solved... almost. Unfortunately, if the monkey was made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it so engineers turned to the next available metal, brass.

Yes. It was called a "Brass Monkey".

Brass, though, has an interesting property. It expands and contracts with temperature much more than iron and an unfortunate consequence of that meant that if the temperature dropped too far, the plate would shrink to a point where the indentations would no longer line up with the cannon balls and your beautifully stacked pyramid would collapse.

It was, quite literally, cold enough to "freeze the balls off a brass monkey".

Like me, you probably thought the expression was some vulgar reference to testicles and brass ornaments. How quickly language forgets its roots.

Exceptionally Cool

2008-08-27T21:04:00.002+10:00

Go here and fly. (Use the mouse to control direction.)

More Bloody Brilliance

2008-08-25T08:34:00.002+10:00

I saw this for the first time last night, though I'm led to believe it debuted a year ago.

Bloody exceptional!

Catastrophe!

2008-08-19T11:55:00.004+10:00

Photoshop stopped working last night. It just won't load. And before I hear any sniggering behind my back, yes, it is a legit copy.

This is going to put the Aug 24 launch in doubt because there's a mountain of graphics that need to be tidied up to make everything look nice. (And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that looking nice is important.)

Frustrating.

UPDATE: It's now 11:30pm. Photoshop's been off line for more than 30 hours. I've been working on this all day, and finally found the solution buried deep in the web. It seems my Photoshop preferences file was corrupted, though how or by what I know not.

I'm exhausted. Tracking down a failure like this is bloody hard work. Damned computers. Today was a timely reminder of an important axiom... "the problem with computers is that they don't work, so as long as you start from that basic preconception, everything you get from there is a bonus".

The upside... Wroof! is back on track (sort of).
The downside... I've decided to take some pressure off and put the launch back a couple of weeks.

Quality Representation

2008-08-15T10:33:00.003+10:00

There's no doubting it... a career in politics is attracting quality candidates in Australia.

This is Jason Wood from the opposition Liberal Party and MP for LaTrobe, who, in June this year, was trying to get his head (and tongue) around whatever benefits GM foods will actually bring to the people of Australia.

Thanks, but I'm happy with mine just the way it is.

Nine Days, Sixteen Hours...

2008-08-14T08:00:00.004+10:00

So much to do, and so little time. And, of course, it doesn't help that I've decided to make a few changes, just to make life a little more interesting.

Imagine having a blog, just like this one, where your entires are arranged by category on different pages.

And imagine those different pages having different formats... on one page it's your regular blog, on another a photo gallery, while on another, your own private forum.

It's all possible with Wroof! In fact, that barely scratches the surface.

Wroof! is coming. August 24.

Bloody Excellent

2008-08-13T21:40:00.001+10:00

I got me one of these.

It truly is an inspired piece of technology, and I have to admit that I didn't understand what all the fuss was about until I got mine home and started playing with it.

Put the iPhone on Chester's "highly recommended" list.

Going To Hell!

2008-08-12T17:14:00.004+10:00

Yup. I'm sure, if I believed in that sort of thing, it would be true. I'd be going to hell. Fortunately, I'm Jewish and we don't believe in hell, so I guess I'm safe.

This arrived in by spambox today...

Hello ,
It is a pleasure meeting you at last for I have waited for this golden moment.I am Roger Bird manager in one of the prime bank in united kingdom.Six months ago ,my late customer died in a fatal accident and was buried at the state cemetry.My late customer (Sir mark jones ) has an accountwith a credit balance of twenty million pounds (20,000,000:00),which has beendormant for a very long time.
All efforts to contact the named beneficiary to late Sir jones's estate,with the supplied information proved futile.My good friend ,am contacting you because i want you to claim this money with me. i have the necessary information and documents that would enable us this claim.Please kindly send me your urgent reply to enable me know which other step to take towards the claim of this money.
Regards,
Roger Bird

I hated it. It's poorly written and unconvincing, and I couldn't help myself. I just had to rewrite it so I sent the following back to the scammer...

Oh come on 'Roger'. If you're going to run this scam, you have to do better than this. There are too many typing and/or spelling mistakes in your email for this to be real.
Seriously... I thought you scammers were more professional than that.
The email needs to look something like this...
-----------------------------
Hello,
I have been given your email address by a former colleague of yours who has asked not to be identified. He has told me you may be interested in a "special transaction" that will significantly benefit both of us.
First, allow me to introduce myself and give you a little background. My name is Roger Bird and I am an Account Manager at Prime Bank in the UK.
About eighteen months ago, one of my Personal Banking customers, Sir Mark Jones, passed away. He had considerable wealth, and left no will.
Thus far, the bank has gone to much effort to locate next of kin, but it appears Sir Mark left no living relatives. In cases like this, the Bank holds deposited funds for a fixed period of time, usually two years, before passing those funds on to Her Majesty's Government, where they end up in Consolidated Revenue, doubtless to be wasted on useless ideology inspired social engineering or some Ministerial junket.
With all avenues of inquiry now exhausted, the file has arrived back on my desk to be closed, which is a shame, because Sir Mark managed to accumulate some twenty million pounds in his less than reputable business career.
Without a validated claimant, all that money will disappear into some treasury black hole, never to be seen again. I have the necessary paperwork to validate such a claimant, but as a bank employee, I'm unable to approve a claim of my own. That's where you come in...
What I'm proposing is that you claim the money. I'll validate your claim, and we can split the account 50/50. Interested?
Please reply ASAP, because I'm not going to be able to hold this file in my top drawer for too long before someone notices it's not been processed.
Warmest regards
Roger.
-----------------------------
It's written in English, it makes sense, and it doesn't try to hide the fact that there's a big scam going on here, which means anyone who falls for it deserves what they get!
Feel free to use it... just remember where it came from and let me know if you get anyone stupid enough to bite.

Look for it in your spam box soon.

18 Days 9 Hours And A Handful of Minutes.

2008-08-05T13:34:00.005+10:00

I've generally tried to keep business and blog separated by a wide gulf. It's better that way. After all, this blog isn't a subtle advertisement for our latest nutritional products... it's just a bear pontificating, pretending he knows more than he probably does.

Today though, and for the rest of August, I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to bombard you with some unashamed self promotion.

About 6 years ago, I started something... a small web programming task that was supposed to take a couple of weeks. Now don't get me wrong. Those of you who know me will quickly point out that I definitely don't have a pocket protector and that I used to find it too easy to pick up girls to be a programmer. No. I was just dabbling, writing something called a "content manager", mostly because I wanted to teach myself something new.

A "content manager" is software that's supposed to make it easy to create and update web sites by storing the content of the site in a database. You know what I mean because Blogger is a content manager.

We were trying to write an on-line magazine for a little side-project I was involved in back then, and creating the content manager seemed easier than coding a brand new web page each time I wanted to add a story. If only I'd known then what I know now, but there's nothing like a retrospectoscope to clarify one's thoughts and I don't have one.

So when that business was stillborn, I kept the code and continued to work on it, and work on it, and work on it, and work on it. (Six years. That's nearly 20% of my adult life. Fuck! What a potentially huge waste of time.)

My simple project's grown a bit since then, and we use it in my other business every day. (If you want to see it at work, go to http://www.rplus.com.au/, though what you're looking at there is the version before the version before last... what I have now is way more powerful and infinitely easier to use.

So for six years, line by line, piece by piece, sometimes by evolution, sometimes by osmosis and sometimes by blind luck, I've been cobbling this thing together. It's probably been harder than it otherwise might have been because I'm not a really great code cutter, but oh my...

... the end result is brilliant. Really, it is. And if you had the slightest inkling of how it actually works, and the pain I suffered to make it work, you'd think so too.

What's so brilliant about it? Oh. I'm glad you asked.

Wroof! (that's what it's called) is the ultimate in content management. You can create a magazine, with stories, forums, blogs, photo galleries, and comments. You can allocate different sections in your magazine to different editors, and then tie magazine stories into products in the built-in shopping cart, which is then linked to an optional built-in multi-store point-of-sale system. Wroof! even comes with an up-to-date currency converter.

You can put different content on different pages, and control who sees what content via an 8 level security system. You can even sell subscriptions to your site, with different subscription levels having access to different content.

And that's just the beginning.

Wroof launches to the world on August 24... 18 days 9 hours and a handful of minutes away.

Want to see for your self? Go to http://www.wroof.com/ and watch the little clock count down.

Care Factor = Zero

2008-08-05T13:28:00.003+10:00

The Olympics are coming. Just days away, apparently. TV's full of stories. Presenters sit in the Peking smog inhaling lungfulls of toxic fumes, trying to get us excited about the world's premier drug trial. "The Olympics this". "The Olympics that". Blah Blah fecken blah.

Does anyone care?

My Dog Needs What?

2008-08-04T17:26:00.002+10:00

Regular readers will know how much I love our K9 friends, but even for me, this might be a little over the top. Or maybe not.

Apparently, there are dog opthalmologists in the USA who can determine, from the shape of Rover's eyes, whether he needs glasses or not. Yes. You read that right. Glasses. For your dog. Apparently, the dog opthalmologist prepares a prescription which is then sent to Doggles, better known for their stylish, high quality dog sunglasses and protective eyewear. (The dogs involves in the WTC rescue/recovery mission wore these, so they must be ok.)

I have just one question... no... that's not right... I have a long list of questions, but I'll start with this one... how do I convince Zac to keep the glasses on?

YouTube With Neurones

2008-07-28T23:22:00.004+10:00

I came across the most wonderful website today. It's called TED, and you can find it at www.ted.com.

Refreshing, energising, stimulating, expanding, thought provoking, captivating, mind blowing. I'm sure there are more superlatives but it's after 11 and I'm tired, mostly from spending much of the evening stimulating my brain.

You see, TED's tagline should give you a hint. "Ideas Worth Spreading."

I'd like to think of it as a YouTube for people with a 3 digit IQ. I can guarantee you that you won't find anything that remotely resembles "Funniest Home Videos", "Big Brother" or even "Cops". What you'll find is a collection of great minds sharing great thoughts.

Go to TED. Spend a few hours. Expand your brain, your horizons, and your outlook on life. I did, and I've just scratched the surface.

I just love this ad...

2008-07-27T08:00:00.002+10:00

It just makes me smile every time I see it... and for hour, I walk around the house singing "Boomdeeyahdah boomdeeyahdah" in my head.

Invading The Land of the Long White Shroud

2008-07-13T08:29:00.003+10:00

Of course, the easiest part about invading New Zealand is that most of them are already here, in Bondi, so one strategically placed low yeild tactical nuke would go a significant way towards getting the job done (and leave some prime beachfront land cleared and ready for redevelopment).

Woo Hoo! I Won! I Won!

2008-07-12T23:16:00.003+10:00

I'm SOOO excited. This came to my inbox this evening...

Microsoft Promotion Award
20 Craven Park, Harlesden London NW10,
United Kingdom.
Ref No: BTD/976/06
Batch No: 401978G
Dear Lucky Winner
WINNING NOTIFICATION-------Ref No:BTD/976/06---Batch:401978G The prestigious Microsoft and AOL has set out and successfully organized a Sweepstakes,we rolled out over 100,000, 000.00 e-ticket for our Monthly Draws.The selection was made through a computer draw system attaching personalized email addresses to ticket numbers.
Your email address as indicated was drawn and attached to ticket numbers 008995727495 with serial numbers SBTD/9080648302/06 and drew the lucky numbers 14-21-25-40-40-47(21) which subsequently won you (£500,000.00)(Five Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds)as one of the jackpot winners in this draw.
To begin the claim processing of your prize you are to send the below informations to your Claims/Fiduciary Agent.
NAME:.....................
SEX:.....................
AGE:.....................
DIRECT PHONE NUMBER..............
ADDRESS:..................
OCCUPATION:...............
NATIONALITY:..............
COUNTRY.................
CHOOSE MEANS OF RECEIVING YOUR WINNINGS.
1.COURIER DELIVERY
2.BANK WIRING
File your winnings by sending the above informations to our Claims/Fiduciary Agent by Email for the processing of your winnings.
MR DONALD GRAY,
Email : remitclaims_dept@live.com
CALL :+44-704-574-0889
***Reply to this email only***
Mrs.Gloria Bent
(Microsoft Award Coordinator).

Wowee zowee! I didn't even know I'd entered...

...seriously people... does anyone believe this crap? [If answer 'YES' then they deserve whatever's coming to them.]

Second Amendment

2008-07-10T09:18:00.002+10:00

It's sometimes difficult for those of us born and raised outside the United States to understand the American love affair with firearms.

Especially when we read stories like these two, pulled from the Fox News website this morning.

Story #1
Man Accidentally Kills Pregnant Wife While Cleaning Gun
Associated Press
ORLANDO, Fla. — A pregnant woman and her unborn child have died in central Florida after being accidentally shot by the woman's husband, authorities said.
Yailen Abreu, 23, and the fetus died Tuesday at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Orange County sheriff's officials said Abreu was hit in the stomach while her husband was cleaning his gun late Monday at their Orlando-area home. She was six months pregnant.
The bullet struck 39-year-old Enio Abreu in the hand before hitting in his wife, authorities said.

Seriously tragic.

Story #2
Woman Shoots Herself While Trying to Kill Mice
Associated Press
POTTER VALLEY, Calif. — A Mendocino County woman who was trying to kill mice in her trailer with a gun ended up shooting herself and another person.
The 43-year-old woman pulled out her .44-caliber Magnum revolver after she saw the mice scurrying across the floor of her trailer on Highway 20 in Potter Valley, sheriff's officials said.
But she accidentally dropped the gun, which went off as it struck the floor. The bullet went through the woman's kneecap, bounced off the keys sitting on the belt loop of a 42-year-old man in the trailer and grazed the man's groin before ending up in his coin pocket.
Authorities did not release the shooting victims' names.
The mice escaped the shooting unharmed.

I'm somehow comforted that the mice escaped unharmed.

How Big?

2008-07-06T15:37:00.003+10:00

Regular readers will know how much I enjoy the occasional trawl through my spam folder, and today's catch nearly made me blush.

I'm not sure there's any need to explain what this is about...

What you can expect
First month you will notice an increase in size of up to 1/2 inch, you will also notice an increase in sexual desire, stronger erections and more enjoyable sex.
Second month you will notice an increase in size of up to 1 inches, plus an increase in Girth (Width) of 5%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Third/Forth month you will notice an increase in size of up to 3 inches, plus an increase in Girth (Width) of 10%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Fifth/Sixth month you will notice an increase in size of up to 4 inches, plus a increase in Girth (Width) of 20%, plus all the benefits of the first month.

Now I'll tell you that wasn't one of the guys standing around in the school change room with a ruler, so I have no point of reference other than my own, but an EXTRA four inches seems like a mighty uncomfortable size for any purpose. Ah well. Maybe if you're going to get sucked in by this spam, it's very very small to start with.

Owen And Emzee

2008-07-03T07:14:00.008+10:00

Very occasionally, stuff arrives in my email inbox that's worth sharing. Today, an email with these pics arrived.

Accompanying the email was a story credited to AFP...

NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.

The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.

'It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother',' ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.

'After it was swept away and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,' the ecologist added. 'The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it followed its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,' Kahumbu added.

'The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,' he explained.

I suggested to Dr J that we could adopt the little fella, but she quite rightly pointed out that with two cats and a dog already vying for the available free space on the bed, there probably isn't room.

Beans

2008-06-26T08:18:00.003+10:00

There's a man in those beans somewhere. Really. I kid you not, and once you find him, you'll wonder why you ddin't see him instantly.

I don't know where this came from, but the story in the email (thanks Robin) suggested that if you find the man in the coffee beans in 3 seconds, the right half of your brain is better developed than most people. If you find the man between 3 seconds and 1 minute, the right half of the brain is developed normally, and if you find the man between 1 minute and 3 minutes, then the right half of your brain is functioning slowly and you need to eat more protein. If you have not found the man after 3 minutes, the advice is to look for more of this type of exercise to make that part of the brain stronger.

It took me a little while. I was too busy looking at the Predator (from the movie of the same name).

Are We Going Mad?

2008-06-20T08:45:00.004+10:00

"Young people today have no respect!"

I used to hear my father say it, and his father before him. My great grandfather probably said it in some foreign Eastern European language, and I suspect there's probably a well worn Latin or Ancient Greek version.

It seems each successive generation looks at those who come after with disbelief, fearful for the future of society and the world. Despite those fears, each successive generation seems to muddle through, and the world our forefathers have built is a pretty good one.

That's changing because I believe that world is about to come crashing down.

Young people today really do have no respect. They don't respect the law. They don't respect those around them. They don't respect standards of common decency.

Why? Because our generation of stupid bleeding hearts has removed punishment as a sanction. If you're under 16 these days, you can do pretty much anything you like knowing that the worst that's likely to happen is you'll get a session of "counselling" during which some limp do-gooder will tell you in their softest, most unthreatening voice, that what you might have done may not have been appropriate.

No criminal conviction is recorded. You're not sent away to some child correctional facility, and no-one is allowed to give you a swift kick in the backside (literally, not metaphorically).

So that there's no mistaking the point I'm trying to make, let me state it clearly. I believe the success of Western Civilisation has been built on mutual respect and a sense of community. At every level of society, our forefathers acted (mostly) for the common good. Yes, they had a degree of individual freedom, and yes, that freedom allowed them to do much as they pleased, but there was an understanding that expression of that freedom came with a responsibility to use it to preserve common values and build a better future.

Today, young people are raised to believe it's everyone for themselves. We pander to the excesses of youth with plattitudes... "oh... they just need better guidance", or "they're just expressing their individuality".

We don't even draw proper boundaries. Last week, the government here in New South Wales was forced by public outcry to withdraw a brochure advising teenagers of how they should experiment with drugs "responsibly". They called it "harm minimisation", and all the bleeding hearts were shouting "but kids will take drugs, so we have to give them the right information".

Crap. It's the wrong signal. It says "look... we know these drugs are illegal, but we also know you're going to take them and that's ok." No. It's NOT ok, and to say it sends very mixed signals indeed.

Take the case yesterday in Canada, where the Quebec Superior Court overturned a father's decision to ground his 12 year old daughter as punishment for disobeying his direction not to visit websites he deemed "innapropriate". (She had disobeyed him by going to a friends house to post improper photographs of herself on some "social networking" site.)

Are they serious? First, what is a 12 year old girl doing taking her parents to court so she's not grounded. Second, why is the state funding this stupidity, and third, what was the judge thinking?

I don't know what it's like in Canada, the UK, the USA, or any of the other places my readers live. I just know what it's like here in Australia. Children are an undisciplined rabble, subject to minimal parental cotrol, prone to binge drinking, antisocial behaviour and an utter disregard for theose around them. They seem born to accept that the world owes them, and that there are no sanctions for ill manners, or even criminal activity. They get into their 20s unemployable, with a sense of entitlement that they have not yet earned.

Enough is enough. It's time we wrested control back from the social engineers and began applying and enforcing standards of decency and behaviour. If we don't, Western Civilisation will continue to teeter towards the edge of a precipice.

No Substitute For Stupidity

2008-06-18T06:35:00.005+10:00

These are pictures of the wreck of a brand spanking new Etihad Airbus A340-600. Etihad, as my well traveled readers will know, is the National Airline of the United Arab Emirates and sprukes itself as the "world's best new airline".

In November 2007, an Etihad flight crew was given the responsibility of moving their still unfinished aircraft out of the hangar to the aircraft run-up area. We're really talking "unfinished". The 'plane was an empty shell... no seats, no carpet, no overhead lockers, no entertainment system, no catering equipment, nothing. Just a very light empty aluminium tube with wings, a cockpit, a tail and a few engines.

The Airbus supervisor, in an oversight that I suspect will never be repeated, decided he didn't need to accompany or supervise his Arab friends, so they were left to figure it out on their own.

For reasons I'm not sure anyone will fully understand, the Etihad crew took all four engines to takeoff power. Maybe boys were just being boys, or maybe the gene pool needs thinning a little (or both), because they had no clue just how light of an empty Airbus really is. No chocks were set (not that it would have mattered at that power setting), and the brakes weren't going to hold the 'plane back at full power.

The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because the computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not yet been fully configured. Somehow, it didn't occur to these guys to simply throttle back... or maybe that wouldn't have been as much fun. They decided instead, in what can only be described as a stroke of pure genius, to pull the 'Ground Sense' circuit breaker to silence the alarms.

Big mistake! All they did was fool the aircraft's computers into thinking they were in the air. As soon as they did that, the computers automatically released all the brakes and set the A340-600 rocketing forward. The poor bastards had no idea that this is a Safety feature so that pilots can't land with the brakes on.

The result is pictured. [*sigh*].

Oops.

2008-06-12T10:49:00.003+10:00

I forgot to put the bins out last night. You know how it is. You're tired. You're grumpy because your state just lost a big football match. You just forget. It happens.

But by the reception from Dr J this morning, you'd think I'd had a personal hand in scheduling trains during the WWII.

Dr J: You didn't put the bins out last night.
Me: Oh. Of course. Wednesday was garbage night. Sorry. Are they out now?
Dr J: Yes. I was able to put them out just in time.
Me: Oh. Good. That was lucky. Has the truck been? I'll bring them in.
Dr J: No.
Me: [looking puzzled... brain trying to redefine 'just in time']
Dr J: I am not happy. [glare]

Seriously. What is it with women and the putting out of the garbage?

Good Dog! Woof!

2008-06-01T21:18:00.001+10:00

Vacuous

2008-06-01T08:34:00.007+10:00

We've spent a great deal of time in my business skirting around the edges of an industry that can best be described as vacuous, shallow and facile. I'm talking, of course, about the "Beauty Industry", that collection of salons and pseudo spas dedicated to the shrines of youth and beauty.

Today, Beauty Business launched their on-line magazine, leading with a story archetypally titled
"Tanning: Choosing the right shade for those cooler months."

Other stories in this launch issue included
"Hair Removal: Why winter is the BEST time for removing the fuzz"
and
"Celebrity Beauty Tips: Demi Moore, Beyonce Knowles and more."

*sigh*.

This is a magazine pitched at the "beauty therapists", and it would be nice to think their industry magazine was devoted to improving professional standards and elevating the knowledge base. Sadly, it isn't, not because the editors are incapable of creating such a worthy tome, but because the magazine, as it should, reflects its target market.

And what's really scary is that in Australia, according to our market research numbers, we have one salon for every 100 women aged between 35 and 60. I'm guessing the numbers are similar in the US, Canada and parts of Europe.

In a thousand years, when historians are giving lectures on the decline and fall of Western Civilisation, there will be an entire semester devoted to this cult and culture of bimbo.

I suppose, if you're interested, GO HERE. (But only if you must.)

ET or BS

2008-05-31T07:34:00.004+10:00

In another bizarre piece, appropriately headed "ET or BS", Fox News linked to a Denver Post story about some grainy footage of "aliens" peering out of a Denver window.

The frame, above, was apparently extracted from a 3 minute video, taken after a guy installed surveillance cameras because he thought someone was spying on his teenage daughters.

I've told you "Stargate" is a documentary. And Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado.

Homeless

2008-05-31T07:24:00.002+10:00

There was an Associated Press piece today on the Fox News website that I thought I'd share with you.

Apparently, a homeless woman was arrested in Japan today after living undetected in a man's closet for the last year. She was caught after he became suspicious that food was disappearing, and set up comeras to relay images to his mobile phone.

Police found the 58-year-old woman hiding in the top compartment of the man's closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone and one of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home after he had left. He called police believing it was a burglar, but when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.

"We searched the house ... checking everywhere someone could possibly hide," Itakura said. "When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man's house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.

She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."

This raises two important issues.

First, someone else was living in his house and he didn't notice? I think I'd notice. Wouldn't you?

Adn second... this guy had room in his closet? Seriously? What's his secret? It wouldn't matter how many closets I installed here, they'd be full in a week.

Illusion

2008-05-29T10:30:00.002+10:00

I was (metaphorically) thumbing through Scientific American online today, and came across a great piece on illusion. GO HERE.

The pic above is an example. Square A and Square B are actually the same shade of gray. No. I didn't believe it either, so I copied the pic into photoshop, cut out a piece of B, and watched amazed as it disappeared when I moved it over A.

The point of the article? Nothing is real. What we see and feel of our outside world is only an immaginary construction by our brain of what it thinks the outside world is like...

...which all comes back to a point I've made time and time again here... beware of what you see. Beware of what others see, and try to push on you as "truth". It's all just made up.

Patches

2008-05-28T00:20:00.001+10:00

Ideology Drives An Awful Wrong (Or Two)

2008-05-25T17:45:00.005+10:00

In what can only be described as a stunning, sickening decision, a court in Melbourne last Friday granted a twelve year old girl permission to begin hormone treatment prior to a sex change operation.

Lawyers for the girl's mother successfully argused that the girl, at twelve years of age, had a full understanding that she was actually a man trapped in a girl's body. Those lawyers were paid for by the Victorian Government, heavily supported by ideological special interests.

Are they mad?

Look, as far as I'm concerned, once you're 18, do whatever you like with your body. It's none of my business. Change it from female to male. Change it back again. Even change it into an elephant for all I care. It's your body and you're an adult, making your own decisions.

But is a twelve year old really equiped to make this decision?

The story's here.

Which brings me to the other furore involving a twelve year old this week... a photographic exhibit at an art gallery in Sydney featuring photographs of nude male and female 12 year olds.

Furtunately, the police reacted swiftly, impounded the offending "art works", and are pressing child pornography charges against the gallery and the "artist".

Let's leave the issue of what the children's parents were thinking when they granted permission. This is bigger than that.

What's amazing about this is that the art elite are incensed. They believe "art" is somehow "pure", and "artists" are above the law.

I'm sorry. There's something not right about taking full frontal photographs of a naked 12 year old girl or boy, even in the name of "art".

It's stunning that the "art community" doesn't get it. Their warriors, some of them curators at the biggest publicly owned art galleries in the country, bombarded the media in defence of the artists right to express his creativity. Somehow, they thought it was ok.

Really... they just don't get it. What's the difference between their "artist" taking pictures of naked children and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars in the name of "art", and some low life taking pictures of naked children and posting them on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference.

And I'm sorry, even if I buy the "art" line... I don't care how pure the art is... some sick bastard is going to look at that "art" and get his jollies. You might not be a paedophile, but you're certainly feeding them.

The ideological left is screaming. "Censorship", they cry. Yes. It bloody well is... because you start drawing that blurry line between "art" and child pornography, and you're on a very slippery slope.

*SIGH*

Is the world going mad?

Human Global Warming Now Apparently Effecting Jupiter

2008-05-25T10:49:00.005+10:00

Jupiter's Three Red Spots Credit NASA, ESA, M. Wong, I. de Pater (UC Berkeley), et al.

This picture, taken by the Hubble Telescope, was published on the NASA website a week or so back, along with the following description;

Explanation: For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue.

Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown.

For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August.

Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.

Of course, Al Gore has already issued a statement blaming the increaseing storm activity on Jupiter on Global Warming, and the UN International Committe on Climate Change has recommended further drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Bureaucrats are already drawing up appropriate protocols, and climatologists have again altered their modelling to accomodate these new Jovian variables.

Do I need to say any more?

Chester At War

2008-05-17T07:15:00.004+10:00

It's official. In response to repeated incursions into my privacy and sleep, Chester formally declared war today on his two neighbours.

This is a real David and Goliath struggle, because on one side, the neighbour is a BP service station and convenience store, and on the other side, it's a construction compound operated by one of the largest builders in the country.

"You live where?" I hear you ask.

It's kind of a long story. When Dr J bought her townhouse twelve years ago, it backed onto a mechanic's workshop. About 6 years ago (before I met her), BP acquired said workshop and built a mega "BP Connect" centre there. At the time, Dr J was distracted by other things and didn't pay attention to the Notice of Proposed Development stuffed into her mailbox.

So now, right over the back wall, we have a 24 hour petrol station lit up so brightly you could, I'm sure, see it from space. Compounding the problem, the actual convenience store closes at 10pm "for security reasons", and customers pay for their fuel at an outside "pay point", which, of course, means that at all hours, said customers shout something like "pump number 4 mate, and can you get me a pack of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild, a carton o' milk and a sausage roll with sauce" through glass about a foot thick.

A few weeks ago, another Notice of Proposed Development l0bbed into the mailbox. BP has decided it wants the site seen from other planets and not just low earth orbit, so it needs more illuminated signage.

Not on your bloody life, and the first shots in the war were officially fired in response to this callous provocation.

Before that, we've had border skirmishes but nothing you'd call real war. We regularly complain about deliveries at 11pm, or 5am on Sundays. They've pretty much ignored the complaints. We regularly complain about the shouting customers. They ignore us.

I even regularly poke my head over the back fence and shout something pithy and eloquent at roudy customers at 3am... usually something like "hey dickhead... shut the fuck up". This generally doesn't work because as anyone living in Sydney will know, those who are awake at 3am have most likelybeen clubbing since about 9pm, and are therefore too pissed to respond with anything more intelligent than "fuck off".

So in response to the Notice of Proposed Development, the Bear penned a nuclear tipped strategic missile and aimed it right at the local town council. The weapon went through BPs application with surgical precision, citing case law and slamming the applicant's callous disregard for human life (aka, my life). It also contained lots of big words and a few important sounding expressions like "amenity of the adjoining property", and "failure to organise their business activity to ensure minimal impact".

Boom. Round one to The Bear, and a shocked council planning inspector was forced to come to my back yard and actually look at the devastation first hand. Now irrevocably drawn into the conflict, he responded the way only bureaucrats can... with a letter back to BP.

Round two happens on Tuesday when I meet with BP's lawyers. They expressed "shock, distress and surprise" at the war declaration. They wish to sue for peace, but they'd better come prepared to meet our terms.

Across the street, the guerilla war's been raging for years.

The construction compound was created to build a new underground tollway, and while the land's zoned residential, they have planning exemption to use it for what can only be described as "neighbourhood destroying activity".

The compound created two problems. The first, during the day, is the incessant "beep beep beep" as assorted bobcats, back hoes and dump trucks flit around the site. It's an extremely annoying distraction, but there's not much I can do about it.

The second is far more important. They sometimes do it at night, and unlike the BP station, which is on the other side of the house to my bedroom, the compound is right at the bedroom window.

This week, they escalated, turning the occasional incursion into full blown war games. I say "games" because that's clearly what's happening. The workers on the site have obviously been briefed about the grumpy neighbour with the sharp and offensive tongue, and so they sneak onto the site at 4.30 am, do some beep beep beeping, and then bolt as soon as they see my flowing white bathrobe appear at my front door. One brazen truck driver actually turned towards me and gave me the finger this week as he gunned his giant two megawatt diesel motor.

Fortunately, they're nearly finished, though their "decomissioning" process involves lots of jack hammers, after which, they'll sell the site to a property developer who, I'm sure, will deliver another year of hell.

After that, if the world if still here, it should be quiet.

Familiar, Comfortable World

2008-05-07T13:25:00.005+10:00

Over at my other blog, Chester Writes A Book, I wrote a piece a few days ago about the need to create a comfortable, familiar, consistent and contiguous world in which to set my story.

What I didn't realise was how important that idea is to my other great creative endeavour, Wroof! (Or maybe deep down I did but just hadn't been bothered to do anything about it.)

Wroof! is an internet Content Manager. A what? Ok. It's a way to make a website look like a magazine or on-line newspaper... sort of a bit like Blogger only a)it works, and b)it does way more.

Wroof! has been 95% finished for a very long time, but it's now so big and so complicated that each time I try to smooth out the edges so that anyone other than me can use it, I break a bit.

Last week, for instance, I broke the shopping cart, which was bad because customers could order something and pay for it, and instead of ending up back at a web page that says something like "thanks for ordering", they got an error message that went something like "No $to parameter in line 47 of mailer.php". Bad.

What I realised, though, after my CWAB piece over the weekend was that this philosophy probably more applies to Wroof! than it does to some as yet unwritten book. I realised I need to make the whole Wroof! environment familiar, consistent and contiguous so that navigating your way around its control panel (blogger calls it a dashboard, which I rather like), needs to be comfortable and intuitive.

It's something Microsoft has known for a very long time (though they seem to have forgotten with Vista and Office 2007) and it's something I bleat on about whenever I look over what other people do, but applying that to something I've done... it just didn't occur to me.

The best part is that once I started going through Wroof! screen by screen to make everything look familiar and comfortable, the whole process of finishing the bloody thing got easier. I shelved plans to rewrite it from scratch with a better design, because I realised that, other than a few bugs that I've been fixing along the way, what I have actually works. The reason I didn't think it did had more to do with the look and feel of the thing than the actual functionality.

It's a very big leap forward.

AGW Skeptics Gaining Momentum

2008-05-03T13:42:00.002+10:00

I know. I sort of promised that I wouldn't rant about global warming any more because it's getting boring. What I really meant is that I was getting boring, because the Global Warming debate is really hotting up.

For years, the champions of Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW), that is, the "Humans-Did-It-Evil-CO2-Emissions" crowd, have had ascendency. It's an easy sell for the media... doom and gloom, and apparently, you're responsible. Politicians have staked their careers, not to mention the future of nations on adopting it as Dogma too.

Sadly, there is more and more evidence that we humans don't have much to do with it. There's an excellent website, www.climatedebatedaily.com, that has two columns... one on the left for the AGW Champions, and the other on the right for the AGW Skeptics. What's becoming more and more clear is that world climate is influenced by two core factors. The first is sunspot activity, as mentioned in my last posting on this issue, and the second is variations in our orbit around the sun. I add a third, which is geothermal forces, though I suspect these are linked to orbital position.

Many of the scientists who have been shouting unheard for years are now finding listeners. They argue that rather than catastrophic global warming, the earth's headed for a rapid transition to a new Ice Age. We're talking rapid, imminent transition... that is, within our lifetimes.

For example, each previous Ice Age was preceeded by thirty or so years of increasing temperatures, rapid retreat of glaciers and melting of ice caps, followed by a few years of climate instability. And then whammo, the Ice caps started reforming, and just kept growing.

Some parts of the Ice Caps have, according to some of the data, begun to reform.

Do I believe we're headed for an imminent Ice Age? I don't know, but the scientific evidence is compelling, in that there is a direct straight line correlation between our orbital position and global climate, going back more than a million years.

I'm not going to say much more on this issue... but please stay informed by going to sites like ClimateDebateDaily. (Who am I kidding... I can't stay silent, but I will be less frequent.)

Changes Afoot

2008-05-01T21:17:00.003+10:00

I know I've been slack lately, not just in updating my own blog, but also in visiting blogger friends. You already know what sort of month I had in April, but this trend's been apparent for a lot longer than a month so I'm not sure the dramas of the last 30 days are the real reason. Instead, I'd rather admit that I've been distracted in ways only someone with ADD will understand.

And besides, I've written just about all I can about bloody global warming and it's probably getting boring. I mean, how often will my readers be bothered with my sanctimonious tirades.

Therefore, I'm making changes. Chester's going to share his pontifications a little less often. Exactly why I'm cutting back brings me to the focus of my ADD. I know. That's an oxymoron. Focus and ADD can't go together... except that, bizarrely, they somehow do.

You see, I've decided to write a book. A novel.

There's been an idea running around in my head for years. I even wrote a chapter a very long time ago, but that draft is sitting deep in landfill somewhere making a very nice home for worms. Over the last few months, the idea's been bubbling back to the surface, distracting me from just about everything.

So the other change is that, I'm going to share the process with you in a new blog... Chester Writes A Book. Don't worry. I'm not going to spoil the plot, or reveal any part of the story. All I'll tell you is that it's actually two books, the first set in World War II, and the second more or less now. It's nothing high brow or noble. Rather, it's a rollicking adventure story unlikely to win any literary awards, but if I'm any good, it will be a page turner. Either that, or it will be what most who set out to write a great novel end up producing... which is a badly written, rambling and predictable story full of cliches, bad grammar and awful prose. Time will tell.

Whether the new blog's interesting enough to read, only you can decide. That's not the point. What I need is a way to focus, and setting down progress in a blog will both organise my thoughts and motivate me to get the book written.

Which isn't to say this blog's dead. Far from it. I'll still update, but posts will perhaps come a little less often while I focus my limited creativity on something more useful.

I invite you to join me on my new journey.

Understatement (Again)

2008-04-30T08:59:00.004+10:00

A front page story on the Sydney Morning Herald's website this morning tells of a 93 year old woman found dead on her couch. Apparently, she'd been dead for months, while others continued to live there.

Police, who had been called to the house by a neighbour to do a welfare check, also found a dead dog in another room.

Dallas police spokeswoman Janice Crowther said months have passed since anyone apparently last saw the elderly woman. Electricity was still on at the home and the lawn and exterior were well-kept, but police described the interior as "messy".

"Messy"? So leaving dead people and animals lying around the house is "messy"?

That's an interesting redefinition, and makes me feel a whole lot better about my study.

Another Nail or Two

2008-04-29T23:42:00.003+10:00

I watched a few grinding minutes of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" the other day, not by choice, but because Dr J wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

It didn't surprise me that this film was made by a politician... you know the joke... how do you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. So it was for An Inconvenient Truth. In one staggering scene, Gore stands before a world audience and shows a Powerpoint slide proclaiming that not a single scientist now doubts "humans-did-it" global warming. Seriously? Not one? People, he won a fecken Nobel Prize for this bullshit.

I have said before... beware anyone who uses lies, deception and untruth to try to control your life, and I don't care how worthy the cause. When truth is sacrificed, the end does not justify the means because you just never know which truth is next.

Which leads me to a few more nails in the coffin of this global warming myth...

The first is HERE. It's a story about Sunspots, and how they effect Global Climate. Apparently, according to the story, the more sunspots, the less cloud and rain. And at the moment, there are no sunspots, which explains the really shitty weather we've been having here in Sydney.

Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman was the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA. His observations show that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C. This, he says, correlates to a drop in sunspot activity to zero.

According to Chapman, "this is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930."

He goes on to say that "if the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over". He even suggested that if sunspots don't fire up soon, we might be headed for another Ice Age.

And here's more...

I was trawling about the web the other day and came across a paper written in 1999, that looked at rises in sub sea floor temperature off the US coast. The researchers were trying to extrapolate that the increase in temperature deep in the mud of the sea floor was a result of an increase in water temperature at the sea floor, and, like all scientists who care about their research grants these days, they were trying to pin those increases on global warming. What they actually found was an increase in mud temperature of between 6 and 10 degrees over the last 150 years, far beyond anything that could be explained by increases in sea temperature. They also found that the geothermal gradient, which is the increase in temperature as you drill down into the earth, had not changed. (If the temperature increase was coming from the water, the gradient would have decreased.)

Sadly, they didn't reach the conclusion that maybe the Earth might be heating up from the inside, but if they had stopped to think about it for a bit, that makes perfect sense because many geologists believe the molten core of the earth is sustained by a low level nuclear reaction caused by radioactive material under pressure.

Temperatures go up. They go down. Sea levels rise and fall. Ice Ages come and go. It happens. Get over it. Forces way more powerful than mankind are at work here, forces so great it's near impossible for us mere mortals to comprehend.

Sunspots, fluctuations in the brightness of the Sun, and geothermal activity are the core drivers of climate on Earth.

Yet Governments around the world are committed to spending trillions "fighting climate change", as though bureaucrats might be able to regulate the climate to stay the same. Here, we even have a "Climate Change Fund" splashing money around on "measures to protect us from inevitable warming", all overseen by the "Minister for Climate Change".

One day, soon I hope, we'll look back on this arrogant buffonnery for the silliness it is because much as we might like to think otherwise, whatever humans do to our climate is insignificant by comparison to those forces of nature.

An April To Forget

2008-04-26T13:04:00.005+10:00

Whew! Can anything else go wrong? I suspect not!

And before I go on, let me include a spoiler right here in case you're unduly concerned for my wellbeing. Everything's fine. Ok? Just fine.

So let me tell you why everything needs to be bloody fine, because this April has been one I'd rather forget.

First, I rolled over on my ankle. Sprained it and got to limp around for a few days eliciting some small degree of sympathy from those who crossed my path. As sprains go, it was pretty bad, but nothing compared to the time I did the same ankle on a cobblestoned street in Istanbul.

The ankle took about four days to shrink to tennis ball size, and as long as I didn't try running or skate boarding, I was fine.

And then, a week later, I rolled on it again. Crack. Down I went, leaving a near perfect face print in the mud. That snapping sound was so loud that a dozen or so people in the dog park came running over, certain I'd broken something. I was sure I'd broken something too, and it took all musterable strength to load Zac back into the car and drive the few blocks to home.

I cried. Really. I know it's not a manly thing to do, but the pain was pretty fierce, though I do suspect the tears were, in part, out of frustration for having done something that stupid again.

Dr J and I talked about rushing off to hospital but with the state of the public health system in Sydney, we decided that sitting in Emergency for 12 to 14 hours just for the privilege of being seen by an overworked, tired first year intern probably wasn't a productive use of time. It's just lucky I had a hidden stash of Panadeine Forte to get me through the night.

The next day, the ankle was grapefruit sized, but I could walk on it so I figured it probably wasn't broken after all. It still warranted a trip to the local GP though and that's where the real problems started.

It had been two years since I'd seen my doctor. She'd actually wondered if I'd perhaps died or moved away. Whatever. All that meant was that while my ankle was rather large and warranted immediate X-Rays, she was more concerned about my off the cuff "short of breath with chest pains" answer to her otherwise innocent "how have you been feeling?" question.

We'll get back to those chest pains later. In the mean time, the X-Rays were fine, but she was concerned I'd snapped a tendon so she ordered an MRI and casually declared that my snow boarding and mountain climbing careers were over. I'm picking up the MRI results on Monday, and I'll let you know. It's probably academic. "If you were an elite athlete, then we might consider surgery. You're not, so we won't." Thanks doc, for reminding me once again of my athletic inadequacy.

As it turned out, the MRI and the appointment with the cardiologist were on the same day. I've been seeing the heart guy for 20+ years to keep an eye on a dicky aortic valve, and the last time I saw him, he basically said "Go away. I don't want to see you for another 5 years." If that hadn't been good news, I suppose I might have taken it a little personally.

That he remembered me was nice, and that he remembered that I was seeing him two years too soon was nice too, I think. He was unamused that my heart appeared to have deteriorated, which didn't make my day. He ordered an echo cardiogram, basically an ultrasound of the heart valve, where the main thing they look for is the speed at which the blood is squirted out of the left ventrical. This, I'm told, is important because in a stunning design flaw, if the blood comes out of the heart too fast, it misses the little inlet arteries that actually take it into the heart muscle, which makes the heart want to beat harder, which means the jet of blood is moving faster, which means even less of it gets into the heart. Eventually, the hearts just throws itself over on its side and says "screw this, I'm outa here", and you die.

Which is not to say I died, or even came close to dying, mainly because the ultrasound showed the jet at about half the speed it would have needed to be for me to be dead (though, come to think of it, if I was dead, then presumeably, there would be no speed at all).

The raw number was 38. Don't worry about what 38 means. Just know that in the last fifteen years, it's deteriorated by just 8. In normal people, it would have deteriorated by about 30 in the same timeframe. Hooyah! Score 1 for Chester.

That didn't deter the cardiologist though. "Chest pains and shortness of breath. Damn. I was sure the valve would explain that... I think we'd better do an angiogram next week."

Oh. Ok then. Next week it is.

So it's Thursday. I'm scheduled for a day in hospital next week with a potentially clapped out heart, and I get a phone call from my bro'.

"Mate, I just got a cryptic call from Dad's travel agent. He's been taken off the cruise ship and rushed to hospital in China with internal bleeding. I don't even know where in China."

There's nothing like a crisis to focus someone with ADD. I guess the imperative speeds up one part of the brain so it matches the speed of the other part, and we ADD people become super efficient. It took ten minutes to track Dad down to a little hospital in Tianjin, and another ten to get enough of the story from his travel insurance company to know that he was being looked after. Unfortunately, dear Mother hadn't signed the release forms before they left, so the good people at the insurance company couldn't actually talk to me about what was wrong with Dad, they could just tell me where he was.

Think it can't get much worse? You're wrong.

On Sunday night, I felt a familiar twinge behind my right ear. I won't go into the graphic details... suffice to say that every six months, I get swelling inside my ear and it's excruciatingly painful. I knew that within 36 hours, I would be in agony, and doped to the gills on the aforementioned Panadeine Forte, unable to sleep and barely able to function at all.

Thirty six hours would make it Tuesday... the very day I'm scheduled for the angiogram.

So there I was, off my face on very nice drugs, and about to have a test that's supposed to tell me how my heart's going, and whether I'm going to need heart surgery. I still can't walk properly, Dad's bleeding to death in a foreign hospital where no-one speaks English, and my ear is agonising. Really agonising. Think of how it would feel to have someone drive a really big flat blade screwdriver into your ear drum and twist. That's not it. It's worse than that.

This was not fun people. I didn't want to tell the family about the angiogram because no-one needed the additional worry, and I was reasonably sure it would be fine. Unfortunately, this meant bro' kept calling to co-ordinate Dad's evacuation from Beijing (he moved to a shiny new hospital there on that same day). Seriously, if I'd been able to take the phone into the operating room, it wouldn't have stopped ringing.

So here's the wash up...

Dad's problem ws a bleeding ulcer... bad, but not nearly as serious as first thought. He and Mum are due home today thanks to the very fine work of his insurance company.

The ankle's only a bit swollen now. I'll pick up the MRI results on Monday, and I suspect there's not much I can do about it other than being more careful. I have cancelled the Extreme Adventure Sports Vacation scheduled for August, and have promised to go somewhere a little quieter.

The ear has a way of fixing itself that I won't describe in case you're eating.

And the heart? Perfect. To use the cardiologist's own words... "surprised as I am to have to say it, especially given your self confessed poor diet of deep fried take-away, and your flagrant disregard of your cholesterol levels, your heart is more like the heart of a 30 year old than a fifty year old."

So that's been my April.

I do suspect things will improve... the sun came out for the first time in 17 days and the superstitious remnant left in my more evolved brain thinks this might be a sign.

Neanderthal Speak

2008-04-19T06:51:00.006+10:00

There was a curious piece this week on one of the many on-line news sites I waste time with.

Apparently, according to the story, research anthropologists at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton reconstructed a Neanderthal voice box to find out what they would have sounded like.

Ok. Um. So they got a research grant to listen to Neanderthals. Hmmm.

Here's the really curious bit... apparently, they discovered that the shape of a Neanderthal larynx meant that they would have had trouble with "e"s, so "beat" would have sounded more like "bit".

So... um... they think a Neanderthal sounds a bit like a Kiwi? Yeah. I can see that.
The article also describes Neanderthals as "a dead-end offshoot of the human line". So... um... someone sounding like a New Zealander is a dead end offshoot. Yeah. I can see that too.

Perhaps they could have saved all that research money and just had a holiday in Willingtin.

Freedom Of Thought

2008-04-13T13:59:00.005+10:00

There's a new movie opening this week across the USA that stirs up some very important soup.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" is a doco about the politics of science, and the lack of freedom of academic thought. Specifically, Ben's got himself in a lather over the Darwinism v Intelligent Design debate, a real with-us-or-agin-us stoush where "mainstream science" accepts one view as fact and villifies anyone who promotes or even contemplates the other.

If you haven't been following it, Darwinism states that life evolved by trial and error. Who or what we are is the product of a series of accidents, starting from the very moment life appeared on earth. Intelligent Design proponents believe there's a greater hand in there somewhere. They don't dispute evolution per se, they simply say "maybe the evolution is the result of some intervention somewhere".

Intelligent Designists point to the one question Darwinists can't answer, which is "how was life created?"

Now I don't want to get bogged down here in any creationism v evolution debate. Intelligent Designists don't believe the world was created in 6 days, after which God went off for a beer. All they say is "maybe there was a Hand of God in the evolution of life somewhere".

I don't mind that view. I really have no opinion one way or another, and if they're right, they certainly answer a few hitherto unanswerable questions without challenging a core, scientifically provable fact, which is that life has built within it, a magnificent self replicating, self programming structure called DNA with which it can change (or be changed?) to suit whatever is happening to it.

What does concern me is that, once again, one view, in this case Darwinism, is accepted as unimpeachable truth such that anyone holding an opposing or questioning view is labelled a heretic and figutatively burned at the stake. Don't take this the wrong way. Darwin was a brilliant thinker, and he's on my hero list because he observed and spoke out against the mainstream.

However, what the mainstream Darwinists are now doing to their Intelligent Design colleagues would make Darwin spin in his proverbial grave.

There is a saying in science... "first they ridicule you, then they revile you... and then they adopt your ideas as though they are their own."

Science has no room for dogma. Webster defines this as "A doctrinal notion asserted without regard to evidence or truth; an arbitrary dictum". Yet isn't this what we now see in mainstream academia?

Ask yourself... is "Humans-Did-It Climate Change" provable science or politically motivated dogma?

Is "High Cholesterol Is Bad For You" the mantra of a vested interest, or is it also just more dogma?

None of this is new, of course. Medicine use to think washing hands before surgery was quackery. Physicists used to think matter was made up of solid stuff. And Astronomers used to think the Sun revolved around the Earth

I don't care what the issue is. No Thought Police State is acceptable under any circumstance. Scientists must be free to follow the evidence, and not the money, fashion or vested interest.

To watch the trailer, click HERE to go to the Expelled website.