Thursday, June 28, 2007
BULKER LASERED
Filthy Greens have defiled the Bulker. They should be keel-hauled. An attempt to wrench the Bulker free is now underway; watch all the action on Bulkercam.
UPDATE. All lit up! Lieutenant-Command Thomas Woodrooffe describes a shipping scene. Play the audio first.
UPDATE II. Movement:
Salvage crews tonight appeared to have some early success in moving the Pasha Bulker, the 40,000 tonne coal carrier stranded off a Newcastle Beach.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
ICEBURG
Johannesburg is one of nine cities that in a couple of weeks will host Al Gore’s Concerts Against Warmening. Naturally:
Johannesburg recorded its first confirmed snowfall for almost 26 years overnight as temperatures dropped below freezing in South Africa’s largest city.
In other musical warmening news, Turkey is back in.
(Via Harry B.)
UPDATE. Correction; Turkey is out:
Less than three weeks after Al Gore, the environmental campaigner and former vice president, visited Istanbul to announce its participation in the round-the-world Live Earth concerts on July 7, organizers announced yesterday that the city had been dropped from the roster of nine sites because of a lack of interest coupled with security concerns in advance of general elections on July 22, Reuters reported. ... In South Africa, organizers seeking to stimulate lagging ticket sales moved the Live Earth concert to the 18,000-seat Coca-Cola Dome in Johannesburg from a site 45 minutes by car from the city, Reuters reported.
UPDATE II. Has actual scientist Reid Bryson seen Gore’s film?
“Don’t make me throw up,” he said. “It is not science. It is not true.”
MANAGER INTERVENES
A robbery averted:
Bill Barnes says he was scratching off a losing $2 lottery ticket inside a gas station when he felt a hand slip into his front-left pants pocket, where he had $300 in cash.
He immediately grabbed the person’s wrist with his left hand and started throwing punches with his right, landing six or seven blows before a store manager intervened.
“I guess he thought I was an easy mark,” Barnes, 72, told The Grand Rapids Press for a story Tuesday.
He’s an ex-Marine, former Golden Gloves boxer, and a retired iron worker. The thief may as well have thrown himself in front of freeway traffic.
EMISSIONS REDUCED WITH EVERY DRIVER KILLED
This’ll be news to Al Gore and Sir Nicholas Stern: Chinese car standards ain’t all that high.
(Via Michael J.) Meanwhile, from Bob Parks:
Today Al Gore says Saddam and Iraq has never had terror ties. Today Al Gore says Iraq was never a threat to the US. Today Al Gore and hundreds more say President Bush lied about all these things.
But what did Gore say yesterday on these very topics?
ABBREVIATED NOEL
Noel Pearson’s Lateline appearance, condensed into column form.
UPDATE. Greg Sheridan:
On Tuesday night this week Australia witnessed one of the great political performances in its history. It was the appearance by Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson on Lateline ... His genuine moral and intellectual clarity show the utter feebleness of what passes for intellectual life on most of the Left.
RAGE ON
Islamic Rage Boy is all the ... er ... rage! Besides winning notice from Christopher Hitchens, everybody’s favourite Manic Muslim now has his own advice column. Further pages of rage here.
RECIPE SITE UNLIKELY TO BE VISITED
PETA president (and compulsive correspondent) Ingrid Newkirk writes to Michael Moore:
“There’s an elephant in the room, and it is you,” PETA president Ingrid Newkirk wrote in a letter to Moore.
Newkirk urged the rotund Moore to become a vegetarian, which many nutritionists say is a good way to lose weight, and visit PETA’s Web site GoVeg.com for veggie recipes.
As it happens, elephants are vegetarians.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
ANTOINETTE HELPED
Reader “Blink” recently sent an email to Media Watch pointing out that Muslim Village, the program’s source for its June 18 attack piece, is guilty itself of publishing offensive comments. In response he received the following, apparently sent to him in error, as it appears to be the forwarding note from a Media Watch operative addressed to host Monica Attard and executive producer Tim Palmer:
We have had one or two like this re; Muslim Village (which is the forum on the Islamic Sydney site)
I have emailed this person back and told him to give me a call back to discuss the issue so I can explain that we wouldn’t be following up with a program about the posts on the ‘Islamic Sydney’ site as its our job to make comment on the media not individual sites.
True that someone from this site was helping Antoinette find other comments as she used to work with him.
That rule about “individual sites” is evidently flexible.
UPDATE. Jason Soon:
Let the ABC pay its own way and then it can come back and have another go at dictating standards for the rest of us. Privatise the ABC now!
HOME DEFENDED
Although full details are yet to emerge, it doesn’t seem as though this fellow had much choice:
A man has been charged after allegedly firing a shot through the front door of his home to deter would-be intruders terrorising the occupants.
Police said the man, 43, fired one shot from a rifle through the front door of the home in McNeil Avenue, Geelong East, about 10pm last night.
The would-be intruders had thrown rocks through the front window and cut the home’s power supply before trying to jemmy open the front door.
They fled after the man, who was inside with a woman and young girl, opened fire.
Police recovered the rifle and charged the man with conduct endangering life and firearm offences.
Surprising they didn’t also charge him with doorslaughter.
(Via Mark C.)
FAILURE WILLED
Noel Pearson interviewed on Lateline:
It’s an absolutely shameful hour that has descended on us, absolutely shameful hour where even an emergency intervention to protect the safety of our children is hindered, is hindered by people who supposedly have good will for Aboriginal people and in fact, those people are willing, they are willing the protection and succour to Aboriginal children to fail in the same way and as vehemently as they will failure in Iraq.
In the face of considerable (and sometimes very personal) criticism, Pearson isn’t backing down at all. Nor should he.
A FATHER LOST
You can never beat the old man, as Texas Bob knows: “I feel just like I did that time when I was 16 and decided I could take the old man several seconds before five fists of lightning flashed into my stomach and face, sending me hurtling into the wall.”
As a kid, I lived up the street from two brothers whose eternal ambition it was to one day take the old man. They loved him dearly, but he represented a physical challenge neither could resist.
The old man whipped them at every attempt. Here’s the glory of the typical old man’s situation: by the time his sons truly are able to take him, they’ve likely grown out of the need to. The old man, God bless him, retires undefeated.
Yesterday at work I was sitting opposite a friend when he took a call informing him his father had unexpectedly died. Theirs had been a fractious and complicated but adoringly close relationship, connected beyond genes by a shared ability for writing. The son is competitive and gifted, and may have sought to beat the old man with his talent for words.
My friend wept, struggling to keep control. Co-workers gathered around him. A car was quickly sought to take him home, to his wife and daughter.
You can never beat the old man. And you can never beat a son’s love.
PREDICTIONIST CLAIMS ACCURACY
A column by Tim Flannery in the London Times appears below this headline:
Ten predictions about climate change that have come true
All are so vague and non-proveable (“species would start going extinct”) they might have been written by a carnival psychic. As for Flannery’s more precise predictions, check this, made in June 2005:
The ongoing drought could leave Sydney’s dams dry in just two years.
Well, Flannery’s wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. Oh, last month he also predicted:
Brisbane and Adelaide - home to a combined total of three million people - could run out of water by year’s end.
Again, Flannery is wrong. Yet he’s sticking to his guns. And from the Times piece linked above, Flannery’s seventh prediction about climate change he claims has come true: “That Australia would start drying out.”
Wrong.
(Via Graham B., Murph, and Andrew R.)
Monday, June 25, 2007
SCIENTISTS GORED
If only scientists had listened to Al Gore:
In an extraordinary outburst aimed at America’s failure to tackle global warming, Al Gore says that if scientific agreement on the climate crisis had been reached sooner it would have been easier to “galvanise the public and persuade Congress to act”.
The failed presidential candidate claims that the stronger scientific consensus he knew was about to emerge meant “we in the US were about to shift into high gear in addressing the climate crisis”. Mr Gore argues that if he had made it to the White House, he would have been able to use the office as a “bully pulpit” to achieve change.
“The nature and severity of the climate crisis had seemed painfully obvious to me for quite a long time,” claims Mr Gore, writing in a new foreword to a revised edition of his book, Earth in the Balance, being published this week.
In a swipe at the scientific community, he says: “I wish that we could have had in the 1990s the deafening scientific consensus that has emerged in more recent years.”
They’re just a little slow, Al. Please don’t be mean to them with your planet-sized enormobrain.
UPDATE. Another manifestation of the Gore Effect!
KURTZ GAMBIT ALWAYS RISKY
Media Watch’s comments-attacking gambit has been attempted previously; it backfired then, too. I love Media Watch executive producer Tim Palmer’s excuse:
While admitting the comments were inappropriate, he said Media Watch was “caught by surprise by the sheer volume” of emails to the site last week.
Imagine how much more difficult it might be for a lone blogger to police comments ...
USEFUL BILL
Finally, Bill Maher serves a useful purpose:
On the issue of global warming, he wondered if conservatives somehow had their own air and, therefore, didn’t need to worry like everyone else.
That useful purpose? He reminded me of this fine column by James Lileks, written way back in May, 2001, during the Great Republican Arsenic Crisis.