New material on Tim Flannery Appreciation page

I have put another piece on my Tim Flannery page.

Not very exiting, you might think, unless you happen to share my sheer unadulterated delight at what Tim says and does, which a dedicated few of think is a total hoot from start to finish. But is this all? But but but?

Dog fails to play with dolphin

I was at the beach the other day, and saw a dolphin very close to the beach, by the rocks.

Perdita loves playing with other dogs, and is not shy of the water, so I called her over, to see if she wanted to play with the dolphin.

White House Candidates

There have been a couple of comments on my previous post.

I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting that the leading Republican candidates are any more fit for office than Obama. Merely that it is not a good look for an incumbent President to seek to prop up his legitimacy for office by a forgery.

And anyway, the rule that an US President has to be born in USA is a silly rule. 

Forgery from the White House looks likely

Now, here is an odd thing.

There are people – possibly a bit loony – who say that President Obama was not born in the USA, and is therefore not eligible to be US President. In order to staunch these claims, Obama’s people last year put a copy of his long form birth certificate onto the White House website.

Now, some more serious people are starting to say that, well, this thing is a forgery. That is not to say, of course, that Obama was born outside the USA, merely that someone may have been a bit over-enthusiastic about providing the proof.

Laughing through our tears

It should be funny. A year or two ago, a barking mad council in New South Wales has stopped home-owners with houses overlooking the beach from doing all building renovations on their homes.  This was because of predictions, back at the height of the “global warming” scare, that sea levels might rise by as much as .9m by 2100. That is 9mm a year.  They did not want people, or any refurbished kitchens, to get wet.

Worrying about the planets

I am worrying a bit about our solar system, having been reading Dava Sobel’s excellent book The Planets.

According to Dava, the sun is one big nuclear explosion, whereby all the hydrogen is getting used up and turned into helium, at the rate of 700,000,000 tons a second, which is really quite a lot of hydrogen disappearing really quite fast. Once all the hydrogen has turned into helium, then things start turning bad.  The helium starts burning, much, much hotter.  So that, when that happens, we are told, the earth will melt.  Now, they say there is plenty of hydrogen left.  Another three to five billions years’ worth.   But talk is cheap.  They said that we had stonks of coal and oil and all, and then a wet weekend later, they are telling us that that is all just about the run out, and what we need to do is to have lots of wind turbines, which will last us for eternity, or at any rate until Al Gore pops his clogs, which feels like pretty much the same thing.  But now we see that the wind turbines are all rusting up, like an elephant’s graveyard; on Hawaii alone (which you might think is a jolly good place for wind turbines, what with it being pretty windy there) there are apparently six wind farms that are now abandoned.

The Careless Taker

Just been having the most awful time.

Jeanie suggested going to the Theatre.  Sounded OK.  But, Oh Boy!

The theatre is question was His Majesties’ in Adelaide. The seats would be about the right size for an emaciated squirrel. The play was Pinter’s The Caretaker, which is 50 year old socialist dirge; about as much fun as Steptoe & Son but without any jokes and much, much, much longer.

Marmighty Power

The news on the radio this morning was that New Zealand is running out of Marmite, the Marmite factory having been put out of action by the earthquake. A note for my American readers: Marmite is a salty yeast-extract that we put on toast or bread: you wouldn’t like it. Indeed, the original version of the preamble to the US Constitution ran:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, get fucking Marmite off our breakfast tables and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

But in the final version, they dropped the reference to Marmite. It seemed, well, a bit petty. 

The Battles of Hastings

I have had rather less time that I would have liked recently to read, but I have rather belatedly enjoyed Sir Max Hastings’ Nemesis: The Battle For Japan 1944-45 (published in America under the title Retribution).  It caused a storm of protest in Australia when it came out because of a short chapter in which he characterised the Australian effort in the later part of the war as one in which the army displayed cowardice and insubordination in the face of its own officers, and the role of Australia as a whole as plagued by sabotage by the trades unions, particularly in the docks.

Views vary as to whether Hastings’ analysis is fair. He does not display any unswerving criticism about Australians, and is highly complementary about the role of the Australian 9^th Division in North Africa, before it was recalled to Australia by the Labor Prime Minister, trade unionist John Curtin.

ACCC Censorship

The ACCC Welcome mat

The Finkelstein Solution is not quite the first attempt by the government to shore up its dogma on climate change by censorship.  It seems that they have had a go already at using the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as a propaganda weapon.

The ACCC has issued a guide, which makes no bones about having been directed  to crack the whip at anyone blaming the government’s new carbon tax for prices rises.