October | 2008 | The Dog's Bollocks

October 31, 2008 • 1:30 pm 4

Scientists claim proof humans to blame for polar warming

Oh dear!. Yet IPA’s corporate environmental spokesperson Jennifer Marohasy continues to live a world where Arctic ice may actually be increasing, and hey, Britain has had some unseasonably cold weather so clearly global warming is just a leftist tax-eating conspiracy design to deprive corporations of their well-earned profits accrued purely in the service of the progress of mankind.

Scientists say they have been able to prove for the first time that human activity is contributing to the warming of both the Arctic and Antarctic.

Scientists claim proof humans to blame for polar warming – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Filed under: Environment, Wingnuttery, Arctic, Climate Change, Global Warming

October 30, 2008 • 9:51 pm 0

The Intervention – The Katherine Klusterfuk

The impact of The Intervention on remote aboriginal communities outside of Katherine is, as a local community worker lamented, some kind of madness, extreme. There are no winners here.

Self-respecting liberal Howardians should be appalled at the crushing of individual liberty and initiative of decent law-abiding indigenous Australian citizens, especially the dismantling of employment projects in order to facilitate quarantining of income. CItizens who find their families once again under direct government control while the media brand loving and caring fathers as alcoholic child molesters, peadophiles and wife bashers. Kind and decent humans made to feel substandard, disempowered and demoralised.

And Kevin Rudd should be ashamed for allowing it to continue.

Help is needed, but it has to be shaped from the hearts of minds of everyone – it can’t be imposed from outside.

That is all.

The Intervention

Filed under: Ass Hattery, Howardians, Indigenous, Katherine, The Intervention

October 14, 2008 • 8:44 pm 0

Is Green the new Red, White and Blue?

Driving home on the Great Ocean Road this afternoon I heard a ripping conversation between Thomas Friedman and Philip Adams. Well worth a listen for a straight-shooting analysis of economics and the realities of survival in an overcrowded environment and our toxic addiction to growth that has lead to petro-authoritarianism. Friedman was highly amused by Adam’s reference to the USSA.

US author and columnist Thomas Freidman has won three Pulitzer prizes, his last book, The World Is Flat, was an international bestseller. In his new book he argues green politics has to be re-branded in the US, so that it is no longer the sole domain of liberals, but is something every red, white, and blue NASCAR Dad and Soccer Mom sees as patriotic and essential.

Thomas Friedman: Hot, Flat and Crowded – Late Night Live – 13 October 2008

Filed under: Big Picture, Economics, TheFuture, Thomas Friedman

October 7, 2008 • 8:53 pm 0

Risking Our Kids

All those narcissistic whingers writing to the papers complaining about the inequity of childess taxpayers subsidising paid parental leave should have a listen to what Fiona Stanley has to say about the health of our children and the social and economic implications it has for our future.

Following Fiona Stanley and her team of scientists from their cutting edge laboratories to remote Aboriginal communities and into increasingly wealthy but unhealthy homes around Australia this film builds the case for what is being called the “the modernity paradox”. Can it be that our contemporary western lifestyle is delivering a toxic physical and social environment in which children are growing up sick?

Risking Our Kids, the first of ABC’s Future Makers series, will not be comfortable viewing for free market deregulation progress-at-any-cost junkies. Stanley lays responsibility for the health crises among the young people of the world at the feet of Teh Global Economy. She warns that if we don’t act to turn it around we face a future in which 25% of the adult population will be unable to participate in the economy and will be an economic burden on our national capacity.

So much for dickheads like former Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott defending the right of junk food corporations to profit from advertising their wares to young children. So much for those who hapily degrade the quality of community and family life in the pursuit of excessive and unsustainable levels of material affluence.

Check it out if you’re not afraid to have your complacency challenged.

Filed under: Big Picture, FionaStanley, Health