Time to get back into it. New podcasts, new Cut & Paste Trophies, new new sections TO BE REVEALED, and a whole new week to do it all in.
(While we’ve been off, someone suffering withdrawals from the Cut & Paste Trophy threads has actually started collecting inspiring Herald Sun reader comments on Twitter.)
Sadly, I suspect I’m not alone in doubting that the Sunday Telegraph‘s end-of-week debacle will be the only foolishness of concern in the national media this week.
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Anyone notice The Whitlams are shamelessly copying Roxette?
If you dont’ believe me listen to this –
‘I’ve got a thing for you’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FmDJcGnLA
MoC @ 30 – I’m with you there. I can’t get my head around it, but just can’t look away from her. I even tried reading her autobiography for a glimpse of what it could be, but couldn’t handle the psychiatrist bill that would inevitably result from consistently wanting to stab myself in the eye.
Eponymous @ 44 – No comment for legal reasons.
Media release from Minister for Home Affairs, Jason Clare:
The Herald Sun’s shipping news editor hasn’t yet issued the communique, to his fellow shipping enthusiasts (“Yet Another”), to report this resumption of the FLOOD OF ARRIVALS — which, strangely enough, dried up when he went on leave and has resumed on his return from overseas.
Scooped ya, Andy!
AB is back with the same old crap.
He’s having a laugh at ‘greenies’ by claiming that windmills kill millions of birds.
Yeah very funny – dead birds will always raise a laugh.
“Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines might be killing six million to 18 million birds and bats a year…”
Here are some more reliable figures on causes of bird deaths…
Feral and domestic cats
200 million por more [source: AWEA]
Power lines
130 million — 174 million [source: AWEA]
Windows (residential and commercial)
100 million — 1 billion [source: TreeHugger]
Pesticides
70 million [source: AWEA]
Automobiles
60 million — 80 million [source: AWEA]
Lighted communication towers
40 million — 50 million [source: AWEA]
Wind turbines
10,000 — 40,000 [source: ABC]
Angra, Andy’s indifference to the extinction of the dodo and the golden sun moth puts paid to his faux concern for wildlife.
Anyway, it may be a point too subtle for Bolt, McCrann and their general readership, but there may well be some urgent issues around the impact of wind turbines on some critically endangered species of birds (which, on Andy’s past logic, can only be “begging to be made extinct”).
But the technology, and ways of dealing with its down sides, is still very new and still a work in progress. McCrann, et al, seem to me the kind of ‘conservatives’ who might have ridiculed the early railway engines as an “expensive progressivist folly”, perhaps urging it be limited to 5 mph with a human waving a red flag ahead of the infernal contraption.
Be afraid:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-18/antibiotic-resistant-tb-found-in-india/3779494
““Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines might be killing six million to 18 million birds and bats a year…””
As much as I agree that building propellors that kill birds is a serious problem, those figures don’t pass the sniff test. At the high end, that’s 1000 birds per year, per windmill. A few years at that rate, and you wouldn’t be able to walk around one of those things without the sound of crunching bones. The carnage would be very visible.
I took a look at the web site (with the help of google) and as far as I could tell, those figures are offered as some sort of wild guess, without any obvious attempt to back them up. The word “might” is rather conspicuous.
But yes, I do agree that if these things are killing birds, that’s a problem and it needs to be taken very seriously.
But when did AB’s droogs give a crap about animals? Read the comments on the threads about those three sea-shepherd bozos – they don’t appear to give a rat’s about japan grinding up whales to make burgers, so I find any expression of concern about crows to be highly suspect. These are the same marionettes who dance to the “animals have more rights than people” tune whenever there’s a story about somebody getting busted for kicking quokkas or setting fire to their cat or whatever. They’re more angry at labor for ending the live cattle exports to indonesia than they were at the people who were bashing cows to death. I find their concern to be highly selective.
“McCrann, et al, seem to me the kind of ‘conservatives’ who might have ridiculed the early railway engines as an “expensive progressivist folly”,”
It would depend on whose idea they were.
You gotta be kidding me.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-18/cruise-ship-passenger-says-grandmother-survived-titanic/3779552
That’s newsworthy? Well … I’ve (I’ve been told) got a distant relative who was on the USS missouri for the japanese surrender ceremony. I can’t wait to see a couple of drunks get in a fight, because I’ll be calling up the ABC for an interview!
Is that really worth a whole article?
I’m sure you’ve heard of the ‘Reefer Madness’ public info film. But the US Government was looking after everyone’s interests in other way’s as well.
Here’s an amazing short film about the ‘danger of old homosexuals’ calleed Boys Beware.
Classic closing line “One never knows when a homosexual is about. Remember they may appear normal.”
Steve Fielding would be proud.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3S24ofEQj4&feature=related
Angra @ 59,
I’m afraid of Americans!
And the little boy in the movie who didn’t know ‘Ralph is sick’? “Jimmy Barnes”!
SHV – that one is genuine, but comedian Harry Enfield has made some great spoofs.
Here’s one on the dangers of women driving –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39qdhbkTko4
Angra @59 – Jimmy looks pretty happy to get a lift, amongst other things.
Tom Cummings has an excellent roundup of the fact-free reporting in the MSM today over the poker machine reforms.
http://www.cyenne.com/discussion/i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy/
A “peer-reviewed” CSIRO study has apparently found “much stronger public support for
slaughtering birdswind farms than media coverage of the issue would suggest.”Naturally a news report like that would demand scrutiny down at Southbank, where Andrew Bolt only yesterday gleefully reported a study from Spain that suggested Spanish wind farms “might” kill millions of bird annually.
Sure enough, Andy seized upon a detail in that news item that a CSIRO scientist (and deputy director) was “one of the reviewers of the report.”
“Pardon?” Andy asked. “CSIRO peer reviews its own work?”
That’s a fair point — not withstanding Andy’s motives in querying this CSIRO study are as predictable as his accepting, on face value, the Spanish bird-kill study.
So, come on Andy! You’re a journalist, aren’t you? You can contact them to… you know, find out the troooth!
It took me all of half a minute to google that CSIRO project team’s particulars, then a couple of minutes to shoot off an email to the designated contact person asking for clarification. By this afternoon, I had my answer.
Andy, in an update to his post, seems to have tentatively settled on his own answer, suggested by one of his readers — it was simply a case of “misreporting”.
He’s wrong.
I was informed that CSIRO reports are generally reviewed by CSIRO staff who aren’t part of the specific project team, but who have expertise in the field, and who will frequently review work by other scientists outside of the CSIRO. Further external review may be solicited if the work is to be published in external journals.
There it is, Andy — scooped ya again! Thanks for the lead.
So yes, it’s possible that such a process of ‘internal peer review’ (as my CSIRO contact frankly put it) could make the CSIRO’s work prone to something like “group think”. It would require a rigorous regime of internal checks and balances to address that risk.
It that isn’t already the case, then beefing up the review processes for their published work would certainly improve the CSIRO brand.
The Chairman and Chief Executive of Newsquest Media is a bloke called, drumroll…..
http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/hearings/
“TIM BLOTT”!!
Amazing but true coincidences.
My God – the ungrateful bastards.
I mean we come to their country uninvited, kill a few thousdand, blow up a few weddings and torture a few dozen on their behalf, and now they have the gall to complain about a couple of frisky fellas doing a bit of innocent kiddie fiddling on the side!
What is the world coming to?
Next they’ll say they don’t like cricket!
Damn and blast.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-19/afghanistan-demands-british-child-abuse-probe/3781836
“Next they’ll say they don’t like cricket!”
Not likely. I’ve read that they’re cricket mad over there. The yanks have tried to explain baseball, but all the kids want to do is learn to spin, swing the willow and beat pakistan at cricket.
What’s with this supposed Internet strike against SOPA? All sites seem to be working as normal for me.
The anonymous proprietor of invasionbysea.com has sunk to such a low that I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it’s some kind of weird parody site.
This was posted yesterday:
I’m having difficulty believing a fellow Australian could harbour such abysmal ignorance and MALICE in their souls. And pay money to register a dot com domain, “proudly powered by WordPress,” under which to publish such toxic drivel. Maybe I’m naive.
Again, I decline to link to the site — google if you must, but try not to give this creature oxygen.
Jack, you should put Marilyn Sheppard onto that blog, just for laughs.
In other news, I’ve been chuckling all day at Capt. Schettino’s “I fell into the lifeboat” tale. The case for the reintroduction of the putting people in stocks and pelting them with rotten fruit has never been stronger.
Greg Jericho* makes some good points on this.
He makes sense (as usual).
* Apt, as these new guidelines are nicknamed the “Jericho Amendments”
Murdoch staff “destroyed evidence, lied to investigators”:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/19/uk-newscorp-hacking-compensation-idUKTRE80I0OT20120119
Luckily it was just a few bad apples. All the way over there.
And, nothing remotely like that could ever happen here because even though lots of people who now work here, like Emma Chalmers for example, were working over there while all this was going on, well… it’s all the way over there.
And the Murdoch culture in Australia is unique and completely different from everywhere else the Murdoch culture is the same.
If you don’t understand that, you’re probably an enemy of free speech and want to live in a totalitarian dictatorship where all you get is propaganda all day long with no titillating stories about girl’s bottoms and racy tales laced with fallacious inuendo.
Anyway, Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi! ‘Love It Or Leave – And Take US Citizenship’.
Jack, it could be a Poe.
Or even a clever ‘sting’ to easily get clown wannabe extremists to propose something ‘extreme’ resulting in a quick arrest and conviction.
The FBI and our own spooks have been using such tactics for years to nab poor, simple-minded and easily led imbeciles who voice some vague concern about the way things are.
I’ll put my money on”sucker-bait”, thanks.
Female voters save Labor’s seat
Misleading headline of the day for me. The supposed extra female votes turn the result from a mega-landslide to a supermega-landslide and the headline is “save”?
It’s funny that the LDP is picking up Liberal voters, but I’m not saying it’s a refection of how deeply Liberal voters think about their vote.
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