Now I could be all sage like and rant about the high points of the year from my perspective, or I could get all patronising and tell everyone to take care when out partying, heck I could even offer some prognostication about 2012 but frankly I don’t feel like doing any of that this morning.
So I hope that you all enjoy the celebrations tonight and I’ll get back to you next year 
Cheers Comrades
My beautiful wife gets rather annoyed with me when we watch TV shows together because I am pretty good at working out how the plots will run so I try not to spoil it for her by sharing my expectations of the resolutions of the drama. None the less it does take a lot to surprise me when it comes to drama. The same thing goes for real life drama like the story of the boat being capsized by bad weather in the Whitsundays yesterday. When I saw the news stories about the accident on the News that included vision of the upturned boat towed to the jetty I could not help but think that the most obvious place to look for the missing woman’s body was IN the boat, sadly my suspicion was correct:
click for source
Its one of those things that I wish that I could have been wrong about(with the missing woman found alive) but an unpleasant resolution is nearly always better than no resolution at all in my experience.
Cheers Comrades
Just love this vid because I just absolutely agree with the sentiments here:
Cheers Comrades
While our learned friend wanting to inspect the seaworthiness certificates of asylum seeker boats is utterly laughable and a source of much merriment here at The Sandpit I am happy to share with our readers a pleasant surprise on this issue, namely that at least one Uber lefty finally gets it :
No matter how compassionate you may be about the plight of any individual asylum seeker the reality is that this country can not accept every mendicant who comes knocking at our door, not because the country does not have a capacity to absorb them but because the people will not accept an open door that allows anyone who wants to come here to unfettered access to the wide brown land. As this is a democracy it is the people who get to decide such things and I am pleased to see that even Robert Manne finally realises that.
As for the argy bargy between Julia Gillard and the opposition over the very necessary changes to government policy I can only roll my eyes heavenward while thinking that Labor have learned nothing about the art of negotiation and the simple fact that there is sometimes a big advantage to quickly concede the point and move on to the solution rather than futile haggling with an interlocutor who holds a much stronger hand. Strength of character is better demonstrated by a gracious concession than one with rancour and reluctance …
Cheers Comrades
As shocking and tragic as the recent sinking of an overloaded boat full of “asylum seekers’ is I just can’t help but think that to be honest it is not our responsibility,there is absolutely NOTHING that any Australian government could have done to prevent the loss of life. The boat sank within 40k of the shores of Indonesia yet we have the open door left suggesting that Australia is in some sense culpable for the loss of life. Fools like our learned friend seem to think that because these people were heading in our direction then we should hang our heads in shame that there has been such a tragic loss of life:
Lets first go to his rather stupid contention about them being in “danger” in Indonesia. How precisely would they be in danger? Or more correctly why would they be in any more danger than say a Christian Aussie tourist buying some weed in Bali? Sure they might face arrest but is that a mortal danger? I don’t think so… In fact as Muslims they are probably safer than any Aussie tourist would be in that country.
The second bit of silliness comes from his repeated contention that it would be practical to not confiscate the boats and prosecute those who have been operating them. Am I the only one who has noticed that he does not link back to the last time he tried to get that argument to float? Where even his own Latte sipping acolytes were less than convinced? Jezza Maaate, It was an impractical and stupid idea then and the passage of a little time has done nothing to rescue it from the depths to which the argument sank last time. The fact that you have managed to find only that Loonie Lynot from WA to support you this time does not bode well for you either. So a word from the wise, when you put up an argument that is silly and you learnt that it is silly on the first outing then don’t make your self look a total tool by dragging it out again a few weeks later.
The final thing that I want to say about this tragedy is that no matter how seaworthy a boat is it will surely founder if it is overloaded and it set out onto to a savage sea, there is no doubt that bad weather and 5m waves constitutes a savage sea so and so many people crammed upon a boat not built for such numbers was a disaster waiting to happen and I would dearly love our learned friend to explain just how his “let them keep the boats” scheme would have made the slightest difference in this instance.
Cheers Comrades
PS
I have to say that due to his repeated threats to sue yours truly I can’t allow any comemnts that suggest that our learned friend is anything less that utterly scrupulous about maintaining his his obligations to his profession and to the ethics that all barristers are obliged demonstrate.
The big question is in the title, so please discuss…
Cheers Comrades
Christmas time and its preamble are not always the most jolly time of the year and it especially unjolly for those who lose loved ones in the lead up to the highlight of the year. I appreciate this myself because many years ago I lost my own little brother to a traffic accident just a few days before Christmas, Today for instance we hear about the death of Christopher Hitchens who was not really my favourite sort of atheist at all, in fact I found his sort of militant and ungenerious stance about people of faith rather annoying. Frankly I think that there is nothing to be gained by being a hateful atheist who is totally dismissive of those who believe in anything supernatural, its what that belief inspires them to do in this life that matters more than the silliness of their catechism. Thus if an irrational belief inspires someone to do things that are worthy of praise, like helping the downtrodden or needy what does it matter that they do so out of a mistaken religious motivation? Its only when a religion motivates a follower to evil that we should be concerned rather than bemused. Anyway one way or the other Hitchens will now know of he was right or wrong about the supernatural and millions of his lefty acolytes will be weeping into their Lattes over his demise from Cancer .
Tenaciously hanging on to life after he fell from a ladder is Ian “Molly” Meldrum the often mocked but very passionate advocate for Australian popular music and a figure who has loomed large in the formative years of so many of my generation who grew up with Countdown. The accident that has laid him so low just shows how dangerous a place our homes can be and just how careful we all should be as we reach ah err “maturity”. Personally I hope that Meldrum makes a full recovery soon enough to celebrate Christmas with his family and friends . Which sort of brings me to what Christmas means to me as an atheist I have long been bemused by the iconography of this festival, I have loved and loathed some of the contemporary faux mythology about Santa Claus, the repeated and eternally re-enacted story of Jesus being born in a manger in Bethlehem but the one thing that still rings true is the self evident fact that it is festival when we share love with those who are close to us and generosity to perfect strangers . What is not to like about that? Its a spirit that needs nothing other worldly for substantiation and one that this unbeliever fully endorses.
Cheers Comrades
I just love the argy bargy of the climate debate,the passion of its proponents (from both sides) and most of all I love the way that the argument is spun without much regard to reality by the followers of the green religion they are at best naive and misguided and at worst deceptive and delusional trying so very desperately to prove that if they assert something with enough conviction then they will make their theory into fact. There is no better example of this than the attempts to make us believe that an all encompassing and enduring world wide agreement to curb emissions is going to be possible and efficacious the withdrawal of Canada from the Kyoto protocol surely demonstrates the folly of this sort of belief:
The problem for and the foundation of the futility of attempts to negotiate a global agreement on emission reduction is that there are so many other agendas in play here that make that which appears simple, insanely complicated. all of those agendas can be summed up in one simple phrase that is at the heart of them all :
That’s right its all about the money and during the the recent eco-gab-fest at Durban it was once again made clear that the fundamental reason that countries in the third world are all hot to trot for the AGW theory is that they see it as yet another reason to extract largess and cash from the richer nations on the basis of their culpability for “climate change” this of course fits in really nicely with the Marxist world view of so many of the useful idiots who keep pushing the AGW scam. However with Canada’s repudiation of the Kyoto protocol we have a most useful precedent for countries such as our own, we too should withdraw from this pointless treaty along with repealing Gillard’s deceptive “Clean Energy Future” nonsense.
Lets work towards a real “Clean Energy Future” which is predicated upon the most efficient use of all types energy rather than genuflecting to a Green liturgy and making futile gestures for political reasons, that way there will be money for altruistic efforts both here and overseas after all its not that we sceptics don’t care about the planet its just that we have well tuned bullshit detectors.
Cheers Comrades
One thing that I always find funny is the people who have some sort of deep belief in the viability of Wikipedia as a source or worse yet when they believe in the idea of Wikipedia and that public and open editing of its entires will ultimately assure the veracity of its content. Maybe on uncontentious articles like those about a car or something like it. However as soon as you start to look at its entries of a political or contentious scientific nature(like “climate change”) it becomes altogether more muddy and less reliable as our learned friend has been discovering:
(click for source)Personally I have always realised there is the inherent flaw in the Wikipedia concept which is why I have repeatedly dismissed those who use it as a citation for their arguments, heck even I have edited Wiki when the muse has inspired me to do so, there is simply no prerequisites to edit Wiki and while that remains the case there will be no reason to believe that it is a trust worthy source.
Here ends the lesson Comrades
Jo Chandler
c/o Melbourne University Press.
G’day Jo,
I am reading your book, ta for that, much appreciated. I note the unease, but have some good news for you. What follows immediately is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely …
(I see this got very long, so skip it, if not of interest. But I will send it anyway)
First, carbonism is a classic millenialist movement. It sells fear and angst, as they all do, and it is as difficult for the devotees to see as part of a continuum, as ever. But, this time it is different, don’t you see? The Catholic church, with which you may be familiar, has sold little else for 2,000 years. It is a good business model. Then they sell indulgences. Now the new folk sell panic tastefully relieved with carbon credits. To cleanse the soul. I suggest, of course you got a trip to Antarctica. You are a very valued part of the sales team. I have read what you write. Stirring stuff. It stirs up the grant money. The heroic hermit priest, braving the elements, wrestling with the demonic forces implicit in the knowledge of the imminence of Doomsday.
Pull the other one Jo, it has an Angora goat tied to it. You clearly do not believe that anthropogenic CO2 is wrecking the future or you would immediately stop flying about in giant carbon dioxide-belching aluminium cans, to conferences and to the Antarctic, to sample assorted cocktails. And, you would definitely have told your son not to dream of making a career of piloting such canisters. When I believed that, we stopped Concorde overflying Africa. We did some hopeless minor protests, but the boss of FOE in South Africa told the Nigerians their cows would abort – very effective, that was. Instead, Concorde aborted and had no further offspring.
I am not as sensible as you, so when I first heard CO2 was a problem, in ’74, and was setting up environmental groups across South Africa at (white English –our union had lost the rest) universities, I hitched all round the country. The secret policeman I had temporarily displaced from the job declined to do so and flew instead. Sensible man. By the way, I have also had moments of existential wonder in Maputo. My brother and I where there when it became Maputo, just as the Portuguese were winding up their empire. Our great contribution was helping a lady anthropologist pack her Austrian bentwood chair, and then being formally welcomed to liberated Mocambique by the leader of Frelimo in the slums, and drinking a toast to that with the last bottle of fizzy drink left in the community. While Chissano (sp?) headed straight for the Polana Hotel, and somehow never got around to meeting his local commander. So, we share some cynicisms.
Like you, now, I am a warmist. But not a carbonist. Like you, I wonder what makes both the planet and society tick. I have been at geology for 40 years now so am just a beginner, geological time being what it is, and am just learning how to get everything wrong and what a wry sense of humour Murphy has. I did some anthropology after getting to be a field geologist, under a delightful and exquisitely-credentialed elderly lady, and so have been studying the fascinating new religion – in which I am some kind of marginal cleric – namely “Science,” for forty odd years also. I have now had the luxury of five years to assess the climate science data, with no boss other than myself to pester. So, I read everything I could find.
Being an unrepentant member of the radical green left, an active prospector and an ex- and unrepentant director of FOE, I am now perhaps the most awkward person in the climate debate – anathema to the carbonists and a leper to the sceptics. I live in rural splendour on our organic subsistence farm and a fleet of old exploration caravans, best friend, after Denise, a donkey called Wills, who is much amused at the climate fuss, as are all the ant and bird people here. I am as green as ever, but just more than a little uneasy about the environmental movement being hijacked by the carbonists, who have all the answers and denigrate those who do not with extraordinary ferocity. The extremists call for jail terms for sceptics. And equally uneasy about the radical right monopolizing, and exciting to violence from the other side. The extremists call for jail terms for carbonists.
I have been patiently (huh!, ask Denise about the steam coming periodically from the ears) explaining, as friends drift away, just as you have found, that the heat that is changing the surface planetary temperatures, starting with the oceans, is coming from the core-mantle boundary, either as the result of, or as the cause of, the shifts in the z or vertical component of the geomagnetic field at that depth. There is the Holy Grail, very simple, found purely by chance, no great privation in the Namib Desert required (been there, done that, quite useless) but unfortunately invisible, even in broad daylight, to those who are not blessed with contour map vision, preferably with both first and second derivative insight also. They used to hand it out in the Boy Scouts, at least in the basic form, but now, it is very rare.
The maps of where the surface temperature is changing most and most consistently – Eastern Siberia north of Lake Baikal, the Antarctic Peninsula, the coast of Angola, and the region around the Caspian Sea, and the north magnetic pole – all match, to near perfection, the now extremely well-plotted shifts in the secular shifts in radial, or z or vertical, component of the magnetic field at the core-mantle boundary – 3,000 kms directly below your left foot. The surface warming regions never match, ever, the regions of high mid-troposphere CO2, and just for added fun, those never, ever, match where we generate CO2 in our industrial cities either, unless you fake the data. And just in case you want confirmation, the seismic velocity anomaly maps of the lower mantle match the first two sets very neatly. Keep in mind, seismic velocity anomalies track heat (sort of), not magnetic field shifts. So, the confirmation is independent, and all from Royal Society p-r papers, long there for all to read.
Once the basics of the carbonist case unravels, it all unravels. Some years back, I started with the Vostok core, noticed the mainly negative slope between peak CO2 and peak temperatures (it is not simply 800 years, it swings out to 3,000 and is, at occasional times the other way, unless we have stratigraphic core loss, which is highly likely). Then applied some of the basic tenet of core-logging (extreme scepticism about the writing of vast historical novels based on small pieces of inscrutable drillcore) and the physics of ice in continental glaciers – always moving – and of ice cores coming to surface un-pressurized. Coming up, from the phase diagram of CO2, the deepest cores go through two phase shifts, probably explosively, so Petit et al are slightly in dreamworld, I think, in thinking we can possibly know the nueric value of ancient CO2 peaks.
And, some 50 million centrifugal pumps are doing sterling work lowering water tables , with a very neat match in the volumes, after isostatic rebound is allowed roughly of the order of 1,000 cubic kilometres per year. That pretty much explains the enigmatic rise in sea levels – I did once work in eustatics, once had an irrigation business, and have run centrifugal pumps on my subsistence farm for decades now. Etc., etc. I have a 500-page book on all that, with lots of pretty maps and graphs. Never read, far as I know, by anyone.
But, surprise, surprise, Nobody on both sides of this fraught debate, or the public, or the science establishment, or the publishing world, wants to know even the one-liner. Which is where what would otherwise be depressing, in fact all gets interesting, from the anthropology point of view.
Deduction: The science establishment promotes stories, just as you do, but is not quite so honest about it. The editor of the Royal Society’s journal, for instance, found she could not, in a blue fit, pass on my email explaining, to Paul Nurse, the president of her own society, whose grasp of geophysics is not exactly up to speed. As one of the spin-offs of seeing that the heat is from below is being able to see the heat build-up before earthquakes, on the NOAA sea surface temperature maps and it works – I have got about seven in advance now (though with a lot of false positives), and Geonet in NZ said ta and is on the lookout for the patterns, and NASA also said ta, – , one might have thought the Royal Society for the Advancement of Knowledge would at least have been prepared to read the essay and attached maps.
Hansen at GISS said all enquiries re the AQUA satellite data were to go to him, then declined to answer the awkward questions, as to why he disappeared all the AQUA satellite CO2 maps, without any explanation. Briffa and Jones of EAU do not reply. The “Nature trick” email was significant, because Briffa’s Yamil hockey stick, refuted by the Russians who did the original fieldwork – they published a dead flat one from the same data – is the only graphical support in the literature for the Mann hockey stick, a point all commentators have missed. Since time-series contour maps, even though they contain two orders of magnitude more data than a line graph, are not in favour in this debate, faking the Yamil graph with the spliced on blade, was in fact scientifically serious distortion.
CSIRO likewise does not reply coherently. Flannery keeps mum. Monckton for the blue team thought the 50 million centrifugal pumps story, see below, was the only new thing in the debate in a decade – nice of him to say so – but did not like me suggesting he stop railing about it all being a commie plot, if he was coming to Oz, and so changed to hinting it may be a Nazi one. And then he quite forgot to ask his geophysicist friend to check the basics of what I had sent.
Geomagnetics? That some version of geomancy? The ABC is stone deaf, at about six different programs, the BBC ditto, and the eyes glaze over, on commercial radio, at about the second sentence, if not the second part of the first word. They have to carefully explain to listeners what a magnet is, as they do not use them in Footy. And in science the truth is, very few scientists are game to say, “I do not even know the units used, in the field you are talking about or which end of a proton precession magnetometer goes in your ear.” We are very pompous shamans.
Power, to contradict that bizarre man Chairman Mao rather emphatically, is largely about the ownership of the currently fashionable stories, and nowhere more so than in science. Scientists depend for a living on telling simplistic stories, reality being far too complex for all us rainforest monkeys, even the smartest Ph.D.s. Infinite number of variable, one arrow of time, link any three and you have a fine PhD. Or, an infinite possible series of them. We in science have no magic formula for finding the truth, we just sell fairy stories. First to ourselves, then to friendly journos, then to taxi drivers.
If you come from a successful and long-undisturbed culture like Australia, one inevitably ends up with a low skill-level in questioning the establishment and its stories. I had the curious privilege of growing up under a system most of us hated, to wit apartheid, so deep scepticism was endemic and rather popular. Also, we had many local cultures loathing the system from several inspired angles. Everything the political establishment told us was suss, so, slowly, we learned to be sceptical of our own culture also; that in my case being the tattered remnants of British imperialism. And, of determinist science.
I have had a go at trying to persuade all sorts of folk to simply look at the satellite temperature anomaly and geomagnetic anomaly maps with the brain in gear. They are free on the Internet. If you can read a contour map and are able to compare two, it is not difficult to see that carbonism is utterly untenable.
It may be worth keeping in mind that the interested reading public (the one that ever needs to be educated by the informed establishment) was sold on evolution for decades before the establishment stopped backing the legend of the homicidal sky fairy they called God being in charge of geology and species design on the basis of personal itches and insane rages. Buck House debated evolution in 1844, at a garden party given by H. M., around Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation . Read Wells (1812), Matthew (1831) for even earlier stuff, and the reviews of the day on those. And read Darwin himself in the third edition of the Origin, where he very honestly listed 33 prior claimants to evolution, several of them invoking natural selection. But the Darwin industry wound itself to fever pitch again, recently, with the same old silly mantra as to his precedence.
The fashion parade in kindergarten science marches on. Arrhenius, on no sane grounds whatever, discounted the heat from below – read the 1898 original – the evasion is pathetic – it is that heat going below during the day will be lost during the night. An indoor chemist, he obviously never saw basalt lava. The temperature at the cmb is about 4,000 degrees C. Liquid metal, maybe nickel iron, maybe ultra-high-pressure silicates acting as metals, flows erratically down there and generates vast electrical currents and vast heat flows. Those flows can be and have been mapped. Basalt, as you will know, needs to be at 900 degrees C, minimum, to get to the surface as lava. The planet wobbles, as you noted, and so the temperatures deep down fluctuate hugely on decadal and centennial and every other scale, as the geomagnetic field forever wobbles towards and away from the occasional full flip. The temperature in space is just a little colder than that in the emantle. So, who said the crust is a perfect insulator? Same bloke as said continental glacial ice is a perfect leak-proof trap for CO2, over three-quarters of a million years, maybe? We are petrified that the climate has shifted a few degrees in a century? Given how it is down below, does that sound remotely sane?
The obsession with carbon driving the ice ages and the present shifts is, it seems to me, simply a function of the consensus-majority of the climate community never having done Geology 101. Or, with the few who did, not being game to speak up. My best mate at uni, now head of an august department never mind where, one day said Pete, you may be right, but we are in the very competitive business of getting funding, so I cannot possibly say so publicly. I said, the consensus of the privileged is not always quite the same as the consensus of the informed. We had a good chuckle.
Your taxi driver is not a field anthropologist you want to dismiss too lightly. The science establishment has to toe the going line, as above. But the thousands of folk the taxi driver talks to have to decide whether to go look for work in Mackay, plant potatoes this year, invest in an inner city unit or a farm or gold, or have another kid. They – we – have no real insurance – the compulsory pension funds having been invested in fairy floss – other than observing reality, as best we can. We do not get to faraway cocktail parties to either back or oppose fashion statements. And so, the collective wisdom of a couple of billion ordinary observers is a little more trustworthy, often, that that of the paid priestly establishment. Lots of geos, by the way, are really just cabbies in disguise, as the field used to be popular, too many of us were trained and got tickets, and there is not often enough work to go around. As we get older, we get tired of the heavy labouring standbys. Then we yap away and bore the other cabbies to tears, but it does get into the brain. Also, when billions of people look at an argument, and say that, well, if it was in my field, I would not buy it, so I am sceptical, just maybe, collectively, they are not as stupid as the media and the paid priesthood assumes. It does not matter if the folk wash hospital sheets or sell mortgages or fix diesel motors or raise cows for a living, a lot of people are into complex logic, just to survive. Not all sell stories with salaries or grants attached.
So, I do not wish to disturb your religious beliefs, but if you would like to contribute something new to this debate, have a read of Why Carbon is Innocent or at least skim the pretty pictures, and then, if so inclined, get back. You could cause quite a stir, rather than simply running the old mantras, sprinkled with well-adjectives about heroic scientists. When I was a kid, I was also brought up on the culture of heroic expeditioning, hence the field geology, the truck expeditions, the hitching here and there, the kayaking, etc. Then, though, the mythology was about Johnny-come-lately geographic and cultural exploration. We did not see ourselves as angst marketeers.
I do not claim my case re climate is correct, it would be quite bizarre if I had something so complex all correct, or perhaps even partly so. Geologists have been at this ice age problem for 200 years, in the present run, and since Outzi, in reality. But what is disturbing is this. From both sides, everybody goes to ground, claiming that all sorts of experts, over there somewhere, none of whom know very much, if anything, about mantle geophysics, geomagnetics, remote sensing data, geochemistry, physical oceanography or the vagaries of priestly cultures, knows perfectly well what is driving climate change. Since no-one on this planet is up to speed in those fields – least of all me – one would expect some doubts to be expressed by the devotees of carbonism.
But. Not one human has ever got back with detailed questions, except for one string of queries, that wanted to know who was paying me (no-one), and what I had published in the anonymously-censored-by-the-in-group, profit–and-copyright-for-large-corporations peer review system. The answer to the second is also zero, as I publish in ordinary English, on the net, in the public domain. I may still own www.publicdomain.com, but it is defunct as no-one a decade back chose to contribute. Google and the surname will find some of the other climate change wreckage, among all the antiwar stuff.
The big hole in the carbon-sceptics case has been the lack of an alternative model with real data to back it, but they are obsessed with external solar changes. So they also flatly refuse to look at the vast body of hard geophysics data, against the satellite temperature data, and their really ever-so-simple and clear maps. No-one will look at the AQUA satellite AIRS CO2 anomaly maps (280 of them) with the brain in gear and some memory of where our industrial cities are located, either. Those cities are not actually in the western Sahara, where the deep sedimentary basins naturally put out huge volumes of CO2 annually. You can fit a lot of blue-green bacteria etc,. in the cool and delightful environs of the biggest sandpile on the planet, just a couple of metres below the solar-heated roof. The CO2 comes from there, and from warming and de-pressurizing (upwelling) seawater. Or, so say those heretical satellite maps. Not a lot of big factories where the Humboldt and Benguela currents surface, either.
Real concerns? We are a species overrunning its resource base on many fronts, not least the metals sector. Peak copper? Peak zinc? Peak iron? Peak lithium? Peak iridium? Peak aluminium? Peak phosphorus? Only the last has surfaced so far. We have mined out, in 200 years, all the high-grade metals it took 4 billion to accumulate, so there is no way back to the Bronze Age. All the high-grade ore is gone, so we are locked into gigantism, as surely as the dinosaur was. How do I cope with the depression? Easy – species, as species, never survive, but we live now and life overall goes on. Specieism is like nationalism. Virginity is curable, but those two are brain diseases. Me, I am cheering for the ant and mosquito people, who are much better at prospecting and mining than we are and have lesser metals footprints. Meanwhile, fly with a clear conscience. We have coal for 20,000 years, believe me, checking that that is part of my professional game. South African Airways, though you may know, is already flying on avgas from SASOL coal. There is enough of the black muck to get rid of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere and get back our long-lost methane one. I cannot say anything coherent about oil, or non-coal seam gas, not my field.
There is no such thing as free insurance, so the precautionary principle being invoked by carbonists may yet sink us as a species. The numbers of individuals of any species – plant, bacterium or animal, are a direct function of the cost of energy to the individual. So, push up energy costs rapidly and numbers go down. With humans, that usually means war. So, we are playing with fire.
Me, I have made my own solar shower out of scrap and have made and sold one electric bike at a very fine profit, and grow enough food – just – to get by. So if it all goes pear-shaped and the supermarkets stop supplying food, I will be perfectly all right – for the two days it will take the urban hungry to remember our orchards. My Dad was a heavy machine-gunner in the Western Desert and an Uncle ran a heavy battery on the Somme, but I am simply too lazy for all that so we will not be able to explain properly, why hungry folk should go away empty-handed. Not entirely academic as two years back, my father-in-law got himself murdered by the irate citizenry, when in hospital and almost on his death bed, back in the good ole RSA. I think every member of Denise’s family has been attacked at least once, by folk feeling understandably a bit aggrieved about the resource distribution system in general. So here, we do not now explain it all with any vigour to the channel-billed cuckoos, ten other bird species, the water dragons and the fruit bats, so we now get few mulberries, where we used to freeze huge crops. We are in training.
We cannot collectively change what is happening at the cmb, and we best know it. Half of humanity, in the mouse traps called cities, is a very high-risk strategy – Stalin sent townies out to a few kulacks, and even that did not work overly well. And if you now look closely, you will see that exactly where the uproar is in N. Africa and the Middle East is where the ground temperature is up, crops have been failing, and where, deep below, the magnetic anomalies at the cmb are changing most. Allah Akbar? I would have merely said he was on leave or mischievous. We cannot change cmb magnetic shifts – the devil down there is just that little bit beyond our reach and is laughing at our hubris. We best know it, so we can attend to food security and stop jet-jumping to meaningless feel-bad conferences, in exotic locations.
Get back, if so minded. If you come to think I may have the odd thing right, it could give you a very different journalistic career – and a lot of flak to catch.
I have pretty much run out of interest in the topic, so I am not fussed either way. I do value your concern, but.
Best, either which way,
Peter Ravenscroft.
How’s them apples Comrades?
So much for Global warming! Yesterday and today have been bloody cold for Queensland in December yeah I know the difference between “weather ” and “climate” but just a few weeks out from Christmas and I am wearing a jumper! Anyway as the rain falls here I ma looking forward to going to my children’s school for their bush dancing event this morning and tomorrow evening its the awards ceremony where I know (because she was given the modest bursary at the graduation dinner) that my daughter will be acclaimed as Dux of the school for 2011, considering the fact that the academic year is over its been very busy here at Chez hall for the last week or so, Monday was taken up with a grade eight orientation day, yesterday was spent getting new tyres on the back of my car and fixing may angle grinder which decided to stop working just as I was about to do something unspeakable to the Morris , No that’s no quite right I planned to cut down the battery box to facilitate the fitting of the engine and when I went to use the tool nothing! some testing revealed that the switch had shat itself. So I spent the next two hours seeking a suitable replacement switch. Eventually I found one and then I needed another connection block which took another hour to find. Fixed and working now I cut down that battery box and now the engine bay looks ready to host the engine, if only I can get it here!
To be honest I am already in a sort of school holiday mode and I am just waiting for the end of the school year as keenly as my children are, I literally dream of not having to do battle every morning to get them up and dressed, breakfasted and brushed for the new day before the bus induced deadline so its once more into the breach this morning and tomorrow is their last day for the year…
Cheers Comrades
GD sent me this and it ticled my fancy...
I vividly remember laughing heartily when I first saw this skit in the early seventies, in fact calling each other Bruce, to avoid confusion, was a running gag between my late father and I for quite a while, as Pommies living here we sort of got the parody of Australians in this sketch they were loud brash and often intolerant of difference. However over the last thirty odd years I have seen them change to be far more inclusive tolerant and welcoming of diversity. Its also clear that the attitude to homosexuals has changed a great deal over the intervening years since this sketch was made and now we live in an age when a homosexual person can be entirely open about their sexuality and that the law recognises their unions for all of the practical issues that matter. As a libertarian when it comes to the way that individuals choose to love I am more than happy to endorse the social changes that have been wrought on this issue . However I can’t help but be amused by the way that certain polies try to balance the competing imperatives of their support base, top of my jollies list is Julia and the ALP who have devised a really cute way of having the cake and eating it as well:
It seem to me that this is a grand way to please nobody and yet appease all, the grand gesture is there but it is also sure to fail a conscience vote in the house if the opposition refuses to allow a conscience vote on any bill to change the definition of marriage.
Up here in Queensland we have just had the parliament pass a law recognising civil unions for same sex partnerships and to be frank this is something that I endorse:
I have always favoured a separate legal recognition of enduring homosexual partnerships and the civil unions legislation here in Queensland seems to me to be a very reasonable reform. It is however not something that the opposition feels that it can’t just endorse for rather obvious political reasons. Some of its supporters clearly object to any changes to the law that gives any marriage like recognition to the partnerships of those who bat for the other team. Clearly one of the reasons that this law has materialised now is to attempt to wedge the LNP and alienate some of its more religiously conservative supporters. To counter this possibility Campbell Newman is trying a rather amusing tack :
The Bligh Government will race to make same-sex civil unions available within the next few months, amid a Liberal National Party threat to tear up the law if no one had registered their relationship by the time of a change of government.
During an interview with brisbanetimes.com.au on Friday, LNP leader Campbell Newman vowed to repeal the recently passed civil unions law if the LNP won the election and no ceremonies had occurred by that time.
But Mr Newman said the abolition of civil unions after couples had already entered into such arrangements would be “unacceptable and intolerable” and signalled an LNP government would not pursue repeal in that case.
I just love good steam punk stuff like this effort from Russia
You don’t need Russian to appreciate this stuff or the craftsmanship of these creations. Big hat tip to Bike EXIF for their newsletter as well.
Another day in the shed for me today as I plan fit the Corolla diff under the Morris and weld up the new Master cylinder mount in the engine bay then the car will be back on its wheels for the next stage of the build process. an update coming soon to the Morris blog once I get a new card reader for the camera.
Cheers Comrades
Give it up Tim, NO one belives your crap any more…
Cheers Comrades
