Thursday, April 24, 2008
ANZAC DAY
The way Jimmy Downing, who was a solicitor from Victoria, describes it, he was in the brigade that attacked around Villers-Bretonneux from the north. There was another brigade, an Australian brigade, to the south. And the idea was to sort of envelope Villers-Bretonneux and cut off the Germans there.
Anyway, the way that Jimmy tells it, once they got going and they actually ran into the Germans, for some reason the Australians just went mad. And they literally yelled and charged. They yelled so loud on Jimmy Downing’s side that the Australians on the other side of Villers-Bretonneux - and it is a fair way away - they could actually hear the yells and they just literally bayoneted every German they could see ...
These men in Jimmy Downing’s brigade had been at Fromelles and in part it was probably revenge for that. But it was a very bloody encounter and the Australians in fact saved Villers-Bretonneux that night.
ICEBERGS MELTPROOF
Windsor Mann on Styropolitics:
In the last two years, one city after another has rediscovered a common pariah in the form of polystyrene foam, commonly known as Styrofoam. More than 100 cities including Portland, Oakland and San Francisco have banned it from restaurants and supermarkets …
Because it is not biodegradable, Styrofoam is a nuisance to dispose of. Each year people throw away 25 million Styrofoam cups, which then make their way into landfills where they linger but do not decay. “Even 500 years from now, the foam coffee cup you used this morning will be sitting in a landfill,” reports the Environmental Protection Agency. Styrofoam is waste that doesn’t waste away.
This fact upsets environmentalists, who, though willing to give fossils and ancient artifacts a pass, abhor foam’s apparent immortality. An oped in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last year proclaimed Styrofoam to be “an environmental evil” that needs to be eradicated.
But it’s so useful as a movie prop.
RANCIDNESS UNDONE
Gather a few hundred people who agree with you and you’ve got yourself a mandate, according to Lavatory Rodeo reader Paul Burns:
Its much more than a looming republic - its that Rudd has a popular mandate to undo the rancidness of the Howard years - even greater than he got at the election - as a result of the 20/20 Summit.
20/20? Presumably he refers to this event and not eyesight, an ABC News program, or an abbreviated form of cricket. Always difficult to tell with Paul, who has problems with numbers.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
SHOUTING FOR GAIA
A calm and rational warmenist offers his opinion.
UPDATE. Deep thoughts from our angry friend:
• “It’ll be a few years before it stops snowing.”
• “I’m actually 100% right.”
• “Let’s send the deniers to the moon!”
• “It’s VERY important to acknowledge human activity is the cause of this problem.”
• “Science doesn’t seem to mean much to some people.”
• “All the denial ‘arguments’ are bullshit.”
• “We’re facing catastrophe if we don’t change things.”
• “Logic isn’t a strong point with deniers.”
• “When faced with insanity and wilful ignorance, anger is the only sane response.”
• “Some people would still be denying it as their house sank.”
• “The science has conclusively proven that human activity is accelerating climate change to a catastrophic point.”
• “I prefer the term climate change to global warming.”
• “I picked a suburb far enough from the sea it will be waterfront property in my lifetime.”
• “The changes are already here.”
• “The trends are currently unmistakable.”
• “It’s quite possible to improve the situation if people will stop avoiding the truth.”
• “The scientists are the ones who get to define science.”
He sounds like one of the warmthers who get slapped around in climate forums.
SPORKTACULAR
Sporks! Sporks will save the planet!
(Via Saint)
UPDATE. “Forget the Spork,” emails ArmyAirforces.com’s Scott Burris. “Go with the superior Knork.”
LAND OF ETERNAL SORROW
The Sydney Morning Herald frequently wrote that Australia’s drought was a cause of depression. We’ve had a little rain lately, yet the SMH reports continuing sadness:
Sydney’s run of rainy days in a row - 11 - is the most in April for 77 years ...
NSW Bureau of Meteorology climate estimation officer Mike De Salis said the rain was getting people down.
Not the people mentioned in those earlier articles, you’d assume. One fellow who must be feeling blue, however: rainmaker Tim Flannery, who in 2005 foretold of Sydney’s dams running dry by last year. Flannery is currently cooling his heels in Canadian snow, possibly to prepare for global coldening:
Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that - far from warming - the globe is about to return to an Ice Age.
Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory showed no spots on the sun.
He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.
Hmmm ... this happened during the year Al Gore organised the Live Earth warmy concerts, was awarded the Nobel Prize, and his Styrofoam movie won an Oscar. Global Gore Effect!
“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Dr Chapman writes in The Australian today.
“If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.”
A few people have argued that it was never a big deal to begin with. Meanwhile, Lubos Motl notes an encouraging trend in Amazon’s climatology book sales:
1. Roy Spencer, realist (#116)
2. Bjorn Lomborg, realist (#959)
3. Fred Singer, realist (#1324)
4. Brian Fagan, neutral (#6156), a book about the little ice age
5. James Lovelock, Gaia priest (#8706)
6. Wallace Broeckner, alarmist (#9202)
7. Mark Lynas, alarmist loon (#10308)
8. Patrick Michaels, realist (#12027)
9. Tim Flannery, alarmist loon (#16135)
10. Henrik Svensmark, realist (#16309)
11. Dennis Avery and Fred Singer, realists (#19266)
Climate scepticism is positively raining down:
China’s plans to force Mother Nature’s hand with “cloud seeding” and keep rains at bay during the start of the Olympic Games this August may be all wet, one scientist said today.
“I’m very skeptical about what they claim they can do,” said Roelof Bruintjes, the lead researcher for U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research ...
(Via Peter N., Chris P., Arnaud, and Gaia Her Bitchin’ Self)
UPDATE. Further brilliant enviro news: mud crabs - delicious mud crabs - are back. Everybody loves mud crabs. They’re like Prozac in a shell.
DEMOCRATS ADVISED
McCain adviser Mark Salter is shaping as the best official jokester of Election ‘08:
Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign is content to let Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fight on.
The prospect for an even longer Democratic battle resulted from Clinton’s defeat of Obama in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, meaning the contest is likely to last at least another two weeks until May 6, when North Carolina and Indiana vote.
As top McCain adviser Mark Salter said, Democrats should “take their time—don’t rush.”
UPDATE. Obama plagiarism!
FINALLY, NYT GENERATES BUZZ
NYT chairman Arthur “Pinchy” Sulzberger calms shareholders:
“This company is not for sale,” Mr. Sulzberger said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in New York. “This company will continue to have the ownership it enjoys today” …
Mr. Sulzberger drew a laugh when he joked about a bee buzzing around his head, saying the insect was one of the joys of having a garden in the company’s towering new headquarters just off Times Square.
Sulzberger should read his own troubled newspaper, which reports that bees are a sign of economic destruction:
In a county with one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates, empty houses have attracted a new type of nonpaying tenant: bees.
WE ARE A TASTY SNACK
Australia finds itself perilously close to Michael Moore’s mouth:
Strange Maps reports:
For cartophiles, the main problem with this map is not that interviewer Larry King’s head covers most of Europe, or that the bulky figure of his guest, moviemaker Michael Moore, obscures much of America. The problem is not what it hides, but what it misplaces.
See the huge island continent of Australia? Well, you shouldn’t. Most of it should be hidden beneath the desk, in between Messrs King and Moore. But Oz seems to have lost its mooring, drifting north to the latitudes of the Philippines, immediately off Australia’s west coast, and Hawaii, not far from the Queensland coast (but obscured by Moore’s black sweater – an unfortunate choice and probably proof he’s not a regular viewer of the show).
(Via CW)
IT TAKES A MODO
Determined to include Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” line somewhere in today’s column, Maureen Dowd devises a perfectly elegant solution:
Now that Hillary has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival.
BPSO RESPONSE
Black and Progressive Sociologists for Obama respond following Hillary Clinton’s Pennsylvania victory.
CORRECTION. It’s actually “The Black and Progressive Sociologists for Obama Working Group”. Apologies.
CORRECTION II. Scrolling down to “Purpose”, the full title is revealed to be “The Black and Progressive Sociologists for Obama Working Group (Working Group)”. Again, my apologies.
UPDATE. “This still might not be right,” cautions wronwright. “It could be a pronouncement by the ‘Working Group for the Black and Progressive Sociologists for Obama Working Group (Working Group)’”. Good point. And Hanyu offers “a year’s free subscription to the Black and Progressive Sociologists for Obama Working Group (Working Group) blog for the person who most accurately completes the following sentence (from ‘Purpose’)”:
Given the demands of academic life and the limited resources of sociologists ...
2020 X 2
The Great Australian Cringe is back, according to 2020 summiteer David Marr:
More troubling is the return of a cringing question that disappeared in the Howard years. “What does the world think of us?” was the theme of a one-hour Sky News broadcast for which the thousand delegates were co-opted …
The delegates were co-opted in more ways than one. Speaking of Howard, here’s the Age’s Catherine Deveny:
Man, we loved to hate Howard. Back in the good old days of 2007 it was wall-to-wall leftie love-ins of hatred. The hate brought us closer together. Now, who’ve we got? We can’t hate Brendan Nelson. That’d be like picking on the retarded kid.
Nice lady. We’ll pick on Peter Garrett instead, which isn’t like picking on the retarded kid. Hater Pete was a summit star last weekend, but he had an unfair advantage – in the mid-90s Garrett participated in a forum called 2020 Vision: Australia’s Future. A book on the event, by Craig Emerson and Fleur Kingham, summarised proceedings:
Garrett’s vision for 2020 is a nation in the process of transforming its economy into a steady state, where - apart from mining, which would still play a part - it did not use up the continent’s environmental capital. He envisions a nation that has cleaned up its rivers, reclaimed its soil and where solar and wind energy provided at least half its energy needs ...
For the coming 25 years, Garrett calls upon Australians to repair the damage already done to the environment and to move to an ecologically sustainable society where nonhuman communities act like natural communities and live within a natural ebb and flow of energy from the sun and plants.
Nonhuman communities acting like natural communities … looks like Pete got his wish.
(Via Miss S.)
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
NERF DAY
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth alerted the world to the dangers of global foaming:
ABC News reports one of the most famous shots in the movie — of Antarctic ice shelves — is a fake. The film’s visual effects supervisor says the film took the shot from the fictional movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” which created it from Styrofoam and scanned it into a computer.
“Yeah, that’s our shot,” she says. “That’s a fully computer-generated shot. There’s nothing real in there.”
ABC wanted to ask Gore whether it was wrong for a documentary to use a fabricated shot to make a point, but says he did not return their calls.
He was probably out trying to rescue endangered plastic turkeys.
FAKENESS UPDATE, via Mike M. in Montreal:
Reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a primary target of the Kyoto accord, was a central theme in An Inconvenient Truth, produced by former U.S. president Al Gore.
Monday, April 21, 2008
23 MILLION PRISONERS
AFP reports:
The US has the world’s largest penal population with some 10 percent of the adult population behind bars.
If true, this means the US prison population would be larger than the population of all but two states. The actual figure is closer to one per cent.
UPDATE. A lefty fell for it.
WHITE WELFARE
Something I’d have added to this column, if I’d thought of it at the time: being aware (one presumes) of welfare dependency’s destructive effects on Aboriginal communities, why does Australia’s arts community think more welfare is such a good idea for our artists?
UPDATE. “Come on, people! Did Ghostbusters teach us nothing?”