Sea Shepherd has been riding worldwide headlines all this past week, having been given the wonderful gift of a couple of SSCS activists being held against their will for a couple of days after storming the Yushin Maru II. What’s the appeal?

I’m certainly not a tie-dyed hemp underpants wearing California-group-hug greenie- you can take my coal-fired air conditioning when you pry the remote control from my icy-cold (and dehumidified) dead fingers. Saving whales just isn’t something which dominates my daily thoughts, although I do believe there’s no valid reason to kill the beggars. The lame excuse that any scientific research is being done by slaughtering more than a thousand of them a year has well and truly worn out. There’s an astonishing paucity of peer-reviewed scholarly writing coming out of the flimsily justified slaughter. (more…)

image: Australian Department of Defence

When the Australian Navy catches Indonesians poaching fish in Australian territorial waters, the crews are arrested and their boats burned to the waterline.

In 2003, the Navy pursued the Viarsa 1, which had been poaching patagonian toothfish, for over 7000km through international waters, before arresting the crew and escorting the seized fishing vessel to Australia.

The North Korean vessel Pong Su was seized by the Navy in 2003 after having been suspected in use as a heroin courier vessel. Though some non-DPRK Pong Su shiphands pleaded guilty to aiding heroin trafficking, most of the DPRK nationality Pong Su crew were exonerated in the landing of 125kg of heroin on Australian shores. Regardless, the Pong Su was used by the RAAF for target practise– two laser-guided, 2000lb bombs sent her to the bottom, approximately 140 kilometres off Jervis Bay.

Now, despite a ruling by the Federal Court that the Japanese Government’s poaching (and the Orwellianly-named Institute for Cetacean Research is operated by the Japanese Government) in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary and in the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone is illegal and despite two Sea Shepherd activists being kidnapped and unlawfully imprisoned after they boarded the Yushin Maru harpoon boat to try to deliver a message to the captain… the Australian Government have no plans to intercept the whalers! (more…)

From the ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ department:

Hatzistergos fears ‘imposition’ of rights charter

New South Wales Attorney-General John Hatzistergos says he fears academics are trying to pressure the Federal Government into creating a national charter of human rights.

The Federal Government says it will look into the possibility of introducing a national charter, after a Victorian model came into effect this week.

The NSW Government opposes a charter, and Mr Hatzistergos says he hopes the Commonwealth is not rushed into it.

“There seems to be some academics and some law schools that have made an industry out of developing this concept and trying to shove it down people’s throats,” he said.

“I think what’s important here is that we have a genuine consultative process and we don’t have some do-gooder academics running around the country trying to impose some sort of social order upon them.”

Considering that the sole purpose of human rights charters and bills of rights is to rein in excessive exercise of government power, you get an idea of where Hatzo and the NSW Gubmint are coming from in their objection to codified civil rights for citizens.

-weez

Dear Senator Conroy– I’d like to offer you the very same advice I gave your predecessor…

From the ‘not clear on the concept’ department- it’s Helen Coonan

Senator Coonan is obviously clueless about the intarwebs.

One teck-nee-cal term Coonan needs to become familiar with in a great big hurry is ‘proxy server.’ Anywhere there is a computer connected to the web, there can be a proxy server relaying traffic- and proxies can be set up literally on a moment’s notice.

[…]

Absent one being able to set up a proxy (or use one of the squillions already online belonging to someone else), there’s always ‘onion routing,’ which relies on several relay paths to connect a browser to a server. Tor is an onion router which bounces packets through a random matrix of Tor servers so the web browser isn’t connecting directly to the target website, rather through several ‘layers of the onion.’ Tor is a small application which runs on the browsing PC, available for free download. Coonan better get busy banning all those Tor servers- there’s thousands.

The only way Coonan will be able to effectively block Australians from browsing non-Australian sites she doesn’t like is to cut the trans-Pacific cables as they head out to sea- and shoot down all the direct-to-user satellites.

They’re not making them any smarter down in Canberra, are they?

And they’re STILL no smarter, a change of government later.

Tweens, teenagers and paedophiles alike will be around Conroy’s filters, quite literally before you can say “candy, little girl?”

Bad parents try to save kids from drowning by banning water- good parents teach them how to swim.

-weez