Team work and individual effort

They are a team

There is an air of desperation clearly evident when a party is considering changing their leader just months out from an election But I think that when it comes to our federal government they have been such a team effort that there would be very little brand differentiation between Labor lead by Rudd and Labor lead by Gillard The have after all been very much a gymnastic duo…

Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane yesterday said the Coalition would attack Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard.

“The Coalition is ready whenever Labor calls the campaign. Australians are concerned at Kevin Rudd’s poor leadership and they are concerned at Labor’s reckless spending and mismanagement of which both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have been key parts,” he said.

“We’re ready whenever the election might be called.”

But while many Labor backbenchers are showing increasing anger towards the Prime Minister, The Australian has spoken to several Queensland Labor MPs who warn that Ms Gillard would be electorally unpopular in Queensland — where Labor is under the greatest threat.

“She would go down like a lead balloon in Queensland,” the MP said.

The thing is the public have been rather good at seeing through their disguise, of late and when you get under the skin Both Rudd and Gillard are pretty much the same. And they can both be beaten either individually or together.

Cheers Comrades

I have a thing about apostrophes.

I have for years had to defend my writing because, to put it simply, I am orthographically challenged and that err “disability’ is not helped by the fact that I have a love of words, especially grand sounding ones like “orthography“. There are times when I give thanks to a deity that I don’t believe exists for spell checkers and the modern computer technology that gives me that little red line under a misspelled word. Like David Mitchell I also  have a thing about apostrophes.

Meanwhile there’s no counterbalancing evidence that correctly applied apostrophes keep comma numbers down, or that the grocer’s ones encourage pesky hyphens. Misuse or omission of the apostrophe seldom confuses meaning and its extinction would do no real harm and is probably inevitable.

The Queen’s English Society (to which my knee-jerk response is: “No she isn’t. Doesn’t everyone say she’s mainly German?”) takes a different view. It’s decided that English needs an academy so that it can compete with less successful languages such as French and Italian. “We do desperately need some form of moderating body to set an accepted standard of good English,” it says, while the academy’s founder, Martin Estinel, a 71-year-old who claims still to use the word “gay” to mean “happy”, declares: “At the moment, anything goes… Let’s have a body to sit in judgment.”

Obviously this is absolute horseshit. By what authority would they sit in judgment? Where is their evidence that manacling our language to past usage is at all helpful or necessary? It would only stand in the way of the all-conquering self-diversification that has made English the global lingua franca, and allowed “lingua franca” to become an English phrase, while the French kick impotently against “le weekend”. Fortunately, people won’t take a blind bit of notice of this self-appointed academy and will continue, quite rightly, to use words exactly as they find convenient.

David Mitchell

I must say though I have never got the fear of snakes and arthropods that so many city dwellers have. Respecting them seems most sensible but fear? Don’t think so! They are generally most elegant and beautiful creatures which is sort of how I feel about the apostrophe. It is an elegant creature that seems somewhat at risk due to the over use of text messaging  and Twitter where its omission saves a precious character or a couple of key strokes so let‘s preserve it by using it appropriately and may I suggest that those who repeatedly misuse it to pluralize a noun should be in the first instance admonished, severely beaten for a second offence, and for consistently doing so then the only sanction that is appropriate is that they be hung , drawn and quartered.

Cheers Comrades

Public service post – if they sell out you miss out

The Deni ute muster (in Deniliquin) attracts 20,000 bogans. They cannot all be wrong. These blokes in this photo are about to participate in the great traditional Deni 'Ute Root'. This could be you!

This is a public service announcement and Im making it as a public service.

Tickets for the Deni Ute Muster in October are selling out. And its only June!

And when you take a look at the great line up of great acts and legends it is not hard to understand why. Wrap your eyeballs around these. So much class has never before been assembled in one place to perform to so many bogans. Its a world record.:

Organisers revealed last week that legendary Australian rock band Cold Chisel would be giving their only major performance of the year at the muster.

They join country superstars Lee Kernaghan, Kasey Chambers, John Williamson and James Reyne in performing at the two-day event.

With the Cold Chisel announcement today ticket sales are going beserk.

Its a cavalcade of great Aussie Rock & Country Legends & Superstars. With beer. And utes. And bogan chicks.

Get in for a Deni ’Ute Root’.

Book now or you will miss out. Tickets are available at http://deniutemuster.com.au and you can get some by clicking on the clever hyperlinks I have inserted and imbedded in two places. (look for the words that are underlined and click on them).

You need to see this

because you need to see this

Cheers Comrades

This is for JM and PKD

The issue at hand is whether the observational record could, in principle, be used to test a climate model’s assumption that the climate has high sensitivity to forcings such asCO2 increases. By using compensating parameters for forcing and sensitivity, climate modelers guarantee that such testing against the observational record cannot happen: models are effectively immunized from empirical challenge. More precisely, as Retto Knutti, a contributing author to the IPCC’s 2007 AR112 explained in a paper published after that report’s publication, “models with high sensitivity (strong feedbacks) avoid simulating too much warming by using a small net forcing (large negative aerosol forcing), and models with weak feedbacks can still simulate the observed warming with a larger forcing (weak aerosol forcing)…”113 Put slightly differently, the reason why the major climate models can all reproduce the late 20th century warming pretty well even though they don’t agree at all on the fundamental question of how climate responds to various forcings (the parameter S in equation (1)) is because they make whatever assumption about aerosols is necessary to adjust the radiative forcing ΔQ so as to be able to reproduce temperature changes ΔT observed during the late 20th century.114 But these assumptions are far from innocuous. As recent work has shown, if the (negative) aerosol forcing turns out to be much smaller than assumed, then the ensemble of GCM’s used by the IPCC would have to have a much larger climate sensitivity (with the mean moved up a full 2 degrees centigrade) in order to remain consistent with observations. On the other hand, if the negative aerosol forcing is even larger (more negative), then the ensemble GCM’s would fail on the other side, simulating too little warming. This “mismatch” between observed and simulated 20th century warming would mean that “current agreement between simulated and observed warming trends would be partly spurious, and indicate that we are missing something in the picture of causes and effects of large scale 20th century surface warming.”115

Hat tip to Graham Young from Online Opinion who says:

The arguments are not new, but put together with exhaustive documentation. Also puts the lie to the claim that there is nothing to challenge the IPCC in the peer reviewed literature.

Read it and get back to us   Its a long PDF  but most illuminating.

Cheers Comrades

The dreaded foot in mouth syndrome

A guest post by Leon Bertrand

Our old friend Jeremy Sear has put his foot in his mouth again with this ridiculous post, which endorses the following quote:

“Former American Marine Says He Forcefully Took Pistol, Rifle From Israeli Commados Because They Were Executing Gaza Flotilla Passengers In Front Of Him”

The problem is that nowhere does the author and alleged witness state that he saw Israeli soldiers ‘execute’ anyone. In spite of the title of the post Jeremy links to and quotes, the only ‘evidence’ is that the alleged witness allegedly saw that one of his ‘brothers’ was shot between the eyes. But he didn’t see the actual shooting.

Furthermore, one only needs to read the alleged witness’s rant to know he’s a bit of a nut:

I argued that the only viable way to stop the invasion was to conduct a mass migration to Iraq. A migration in which people from around the world, especially western citizens, would position themselves at sites in Iraq that are supposed to be protected by international law, but which are routinely bombed when it is only Iraqi, Palestinian, generally non-white, western lives who will be killed. I felt 10,000 such people could stop the invasion, or at the very least, expose the invasion for what it was from the start, an act of international aggression, a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Hardly the most credible and impartial witness. So the question is why Jeremy would be so keen to promote the idea that IDF soldiers had executed those on board the ‘flotilla’ when there was very little basis for such  conclusion. Did he only read the heading? Or is he a hater of Israel?

Democracy has spoken in Holland

The results in the Dutch election are most interesting , most especially with the very strong result for Geert Wilders and his Freedom party.

But I can’t help wondering just how pleased my learned friend will be at the news because the reason  (apart from its policies being popular) that Geert Wilders party is now is such a strong position is the fact that Holland has proportional representation, so popular support for his policies has been translated into his party being in the running to be part of the next Dutch government.

I am just waiting for someone to whine about how this is a terrible result. But if you want to argue that PR is an unmitigated good thing then a result like this has to be accepted and even celebrated. After all this is a  most democratic result.

Cheers Comrades

Britney does it again

This is an interesting one about the celebrity/singer who seems to have done  a very good job of  job of proving that money won’t buy you good sense, elegance or grace.

 

Britney Spears has been accused of sexually harassing a minder Source: The Courier-Mail

“Working for Britney is tough. She’s a nightmare to deal with and her emotions are totally out of control. She runs round the house naked and yelling at staff.”

The situation had increasingly become “unbearable” for Flores, but he was finally motivated to quit when he was blamed by Spears’ father Jamie for the singer going out without any underwear.

My daughter is just starting to listen to “pop” music and of course I worry about just what sort of message she is getting form it and we just can’t pretend that there is a distict separation between  the lyrical  content of the songs and just how the singers’ lives are lived in public.

The really amusing thing for me about this story is how a man may be using laws primarily intended to reign in male excesses in the workplace to bring to account a woman who is behaving very badly indeed to her employees.

Sadly I think that there are a lot of blokes for whom this scenario would actually be the stuff of their fantasies.

Cheers Comrades

 

The Latte sipper, your typical Greens voter…

One of the things that I have long delighted in is taunting the lefties with the epithet “latte sipper” and boy do they hate it! They hate more than anything because they know that that there is some truth in the suggestion that they are wealthy  dilettantes who make a big show of the righteous solidarity with the poor and downtrodden, although they really have nothing but disdain for those who are really doing it tough. You know the ones that our Latte sipping friends would call “Bogans”, or Westies .  Latte sippers are generally university educated, they are quite often members of the cultural  elite they just love their  overseas holidays, they always have the latest phones, the flashiest lap tops, an Ipod (never one of those very cheap generic MP3 players), they wear nice designer clothes, live at a fashionable address, but perhaps one of the most defining features of the species “lattius Sippius” is that they tend to vote for the  Loopy Greens

The Greens rally in Adelaide for the 2007 campaign. Sarah Hanson-Young, seen with her daughter, Kora, won a Senate seat in that election. Picture: Tait Schmaal Source: The Australian

Greens votes in 2007 were defined by what they studied at university: arts, society and culture, architecture and education. Professionally they tended to be consultants, or worked in the media, health or education.

Greens 07 were very well-paid inner-urban renters who made extensive use of public transport and had few religious convictions. They tend not to have children until their late 30s, if at all, which makes them even richer and gives them lots of spare time to organise local political activities and annoy the rest of us.

Some of them still haunt uni campuses, churning out more Greens arts graduates, but increasingly now the Greens comprise a well-heeled professional group. Most are inner-urban dwellers in their 20s and 30s, sending their one rather indulged child to a private school. In their 40s and 50s, they adjourn to nice spots such as Noosa or a pretty little tax-deductible farming property, dabbling in winemaking or exotic fruit, while they send their children to the same inner-city private school, but as five-day boarders.

In their dotage they move back to the outer suburbs, with worm farms and backyard chook pens, tending their raised vegetable beds according to the Peter Cundall weekly gardening guide.

In retirement, their income from superannuation is second only to that of the average Liberal. They’re still rich compared with Labor voters and they’re still dependent on income from shares through superannuation. They also start buying more shares.

In all phases of life, Greens are distinct from the typical Labor, Liberal or Nationals demographic but remain supportive of Labor for social rather than economic reasons. Not unlike middle-class Catholics in the 1950s and 60s.

But, as in the 50s and 60s, the evidence from 2007 shows the Greens bloc is shifting away from Labor in terms of voting for its economic, rather than its social, interests.

Politically, in 2007 the Greens were strongly linked to all the main groups swinging to the Coalition after preferences. A big Greens vote in the inner-city professional seats meant a swing to the Coalition after preferences, because the Greens took more primary votes from Labor candidates than they gave back in second preferences, even though their preference drift to Labor averaged almost 80 per cent.

The rest of the piece from the Oz goes on to argue that with the sort of drift to the Greens from Labor’s primary vote and the fact that even a relatively small percentage eventually finding their way to the coalition could cost the Labor party government.I love the way that the piece also supports my contention that many of those Greens are really the epitome of what I call the “silver-tail socialists” who espouse a far left set of sensibilities while they take an almost guilty pleasure in trying to make astute investments in stocks and shares  or houses to rent out and how they agonize about their superannuation.

They are also very keen to employ economic experts and investment advisors, but you probably can’t hold that against them, quite simply because they actually have to do this to compensate for their natural ineptitude in matters financial.

Cheers Comrades

A hat tip to  “Kevin Lusk” who tells me he is a fan of this blog

The protest

Is hes saying "Julie Julie Julie I wanna root you"?

It’s making news all over the Internet today so it might as well be here too Iain.

I know you will have a different opinion to Jeremy & Ray about this but I put it up as the INDEPENDENT POLITICAL POLIOEMICIST that I am.

Whatchya think about this little snap?

Look into my eyes…. you really do love this house

I’m off out today to have a good look at the house that my mother in law is looking at to buy so I was rather amused to come across this fluff piece in today’s Courier Mail. Hypnosis? you have got to be kidding! any way just in case I will have to wear my mirror sunglasses!

Glenn Twiddle uses hypnosis to teach real estate agents how to sell houses Picture: Darren England

NOW, concentrate solely on my voice . . . real estate agents are using hypnosis to clinch deals.

The latest skill in the salesperson’s arsenal is to appeal to the subconscious mind of buyers and sellers. But it is far more subtle than waving a pocket watch in front of your face and asking you to count backwards.

“It’s more along the lines of choosing your words carefully in a way that compels someone that, if they were so inclined, they might take action or it might just increase your odds of someone agreeing with a proposition you might have,” said Brisbane-based real estate trainer Glenn Twiddle.

If it turns out that the agent is just an honest bloke I shall be happy and I just hope that the vendor wants a quick settlement. Unfortunately there is a tenant in the place at present but I’m sure that they can be turfed out quickly enough should the need arise.
Cheers Comrades

Heroic wistleblower, idiot or traitorous villain ?

This one will get poor  JM into a lather as it seems that the man who leaked that vid to Wikileaks has outed himself and has of course been arrested and faces many years in a military prison as a result of his treachery.

But Californian Adrian Lamo, a former hacker turned journalist and security consultant, who once infiltrated The New York Times computer system, dobbed the soldier in to authorities after Manning started discussing classified information.

”He just wanted somebody to talk to, somebody he could confide in, and I wish to God he had left it to that instead of going on to discuss classified material with me,” Mr Lamo said.

A spokesman for WikiLeaks declined on Monday to say whether Specialist Manning had been a source but said he believed that the person behind the leak ”whoever it is, is protected by law”.

In messages via Twitter, the group elaborated: ”We never collect personal information on our sources, so we are unable as yet to confirm the Manning story.” It noted, however, that ”if Brad Manning is the … whistleblower then, without doubt, he’s a national hero”.

But WikiLeaks said suggestions that it had received 260,000 documents ”are, as far as we can tell, incorrect”.

Relatives of civilians killed in the gunship attack criticised Specialist Manning’s detention. ”Justice was what this US soldier did by uncovering this crime against humanity,” said Nabil Noor-Eldeen, whose brother, Namir, was one of the Reuters employees killed in the strike. ”The American military should reward him, not arrest him.”

Personally I come down on the traitorous villain  (or idiot) side of the argument, there are ways to bring concerns about the behaviour of your fellow soldiers to the attention of those further up the hierarchy if you think that they have done the wrong thing but if the claims that Army Specialist Bradley Manning has passed on thousands of pages of classified documents to wikileaks then he has committed the most serious treason and perhaps throwing away the key is the best that he should hope for.
Cheers Comrades

Let’s play wheel of fortune

Why is the porno star lookalike ’Baby’ John Burgess pointing to his crotch and whats hes saying to (now dead) Adriana  in this photo?

Here is my caption. You can fill in the blanks:

P _ T   _OUR   HAN_   H_RE   O_   _Y   C_CK

You can also make up your own captions if youlike. In the comments. (cLick on “leave a comMMent”)

No virgins for Ahmed Luqman Talib

While I am considering the way that the Fairfax press writes its news stories I offer another example from Paul McGeoh where he reports about and Australian citizen who was among the “activists” on that ship stormed by the Israeli navy.

Screen shot of the piece from the Age Click for source.

The whole piece is focused upon the way that this “activist was treated by the IDF and not one word of it explains just how this young “devout Muslim ” was in harms way in the first place because I want to know if this chap was wielding an Iron bar, a piece of pipe or even a knife. Instead of any background of just how Ahmed Luqman Talib happened to be in harms way we get a piece that is intended to evoke sympathy for someone who is being portrayed as some sort of noble victim rather than a willing combatant who got shot.

I just wonder if Ahmed Luqman Talib had made a video before he set out on this voyage…

What else would you expect from the Fairfax press???
Cheers Comrades

The Sydney Melbourne dichotomy

Being a Queenslander I find the rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney rather amusing. I have spent time in both cities and it is clear to me that there is quite a difference in the tone and the mood in each. I also find that sometimes a comparison between the two Fairfax flagships  and how they report the same news  can be rather amusing and interesting.

Click to read the Ages's take on the latest Nielson poll

Click to read the SMH take on the latest Nielson poll

The thing is which ever way that you look at it this is a far better result for the Coalition than it is for Labor and I agree with Christopher Pyne’s suggestion that there are many people  are “parking” Their votes with the Greens but that when it comes to crunch time that many will give their support (either directly or as their second preference) to the party that they think can actually govern  rather than to a mob of pie in the sky merchants.

Jimmy Scullen your long wait is over,  Kevin will be joining you soon

Cheers Comrades