Mark Brimble, the surviving husband of Dianne Brimble who died aboard a cruise ship in 2002 is now an advocate for people on cruise ships and some sort of watch dog or spokesperson on safety on these ships. He made the point on the main TV news last night that the Costa Concordia was carrying too many passengers which magnified the difficulty of rescuing passengers from this disaster. I couldn't help thinking that "Overloading Australia" (to borrow *Mark O'Connor's term), carries similar risks but far more people are involved and as far as I know, continent Australia has no life boats. Australia is an infertile land with unreliable rainfall where we hope to survive with an ever greater population in an energy constrained future. Meantime as far as the government is concerned it's *"stacks on the mill, more on still". Those in power now should be held responsible for the inevitable disaster, but they may be suffering like the rest of us if they stick around.
*Overloading Australia" by Mark O'Connor-see his website http://www.australianpoet.com/overloading.html
* sporting term and children's game
Comments
What I take from marine disasters
The marine disasters which carry the most relevant lessons for immigration reductionists are the ferry disasters which have taken place over the last century. At first blush, media accounts have always attributed the disasters as having been the result of their being far "too many" passengers for what the ships were designed to carry. But during the inquest, it has been typically revealed that this most obvious reason was not the critical one. The decisive factor was that the weight of cargo---human or otherwise----shifted from the centre of gravity, inducing a rocking motion known as "slosh dynamics". The lack of secure bulkheads (borders) to prevent this shift allowed overloaded vessels to capsize.
Ferries, by definition, have a deck that is unimpeded by barriers. Thus, even one inch of seawater on the car deck of the Heritage of Free Enterprise (or the doomed ferry off Estonia in the Baltic) was enough to destabilize and sink the vessel. In the first famous ferry disaster off Chicago in the late 19th century, all it took was the ambition of passengers on the top deck to view a regatta from one side of the ship, and it capsized. In the case of the Titanic, the bulkheads were to be compared with an ice cube tray. They did not extend high enough to prevent the water iof the first three compartments from spilling over to the next , so the sheer weight at the front of the vessel made the ship's fate a done deal. Pumps could not keep up.
When naval ships go into action, or are hit by a torpedo, the captain's first order is to "seal" the hatches, in order to prevent the migration of water from one compartment to the next. But what about the people who are trapped in a flooding compartment? Don't we have a moral obligation to them? My uncle, who served on a destroyer in the Royal Canadian Navy during the war told me the protocol. "You secure the hatches, listen to their screams, and for the sake of the ship, you do nothing--and you thank God you weren't in their section of the ship."
That, my friends, is Lifeboat Ethics in a nutshell.
Ships of state can be run by incompetent or reckless captains, like our Captain Stephen Harper, hell bent to pursue growth full steam ahead. But we can remain afloat for a while longer if we secure our hatches and reinforce our bulkheads. Migration is NOT, as Green Party leader Elizabeth May contends, a "trivial" issue. Even the 3% of the global population that is on the move can be and has been very destabilizing to the nations that receive them---like that inch of water on the car deck. When the perfect storm of population growth, resource depletion and climate change hits us, that 3% will balloon to 6% or 16%. The global ship is vastly overloaded, but we must try to ensure that the weight does not shift to that part of the ship which multiply its impact.
If you are ethically troubled by the fact that you have a place in the national lifeboat while billions of shipwrecked swimmers do not, Garrett Hardin had the tonic for your guilty conscience. By all means, trade places with one of the swimmers. Zero net migration is acceptable protocol. Or would capsizing Australia (or Canada or America) with compassion and open hatches serve the cause of social justice for all?
Tim
Bathurst Rally kind to kangas this year!
I'm really pleased to post this link to an article that shows that Bathurst car rally has altered its bad attitude towards kangaroos that caused it to cull 140 poor creatures last year, when we wrote the above article. Congratulations Bathurst Regional Council for changing your mind and showing decency to wildlife.
'Bathurst Regional Council came under fire in 2009 for culling 140 kangaroos in the interest of track safety ahead of that year’s Bathurst 1000, although it was later cleared of any wrongdoing.
Now the council has a policy of zero cullings and has turned to other methods of controlling the large kangaroo population on the mountain during race meetings.
That’s good news for the dozens of roos that have been seen on the Mount just weeks out from the Bath-urst 12 Hour from February 24 to 26.
Acting general manager Bob Roach yesterday said council would put in place a number of procedures to ensure the safety of drivers during the 12 Hour, including additional fencing and deploying extra staff to appropriate areas of the track to control the movement of kangaroos away from the circuit.
“These staff stay in place for the duration of the race,” Mr Roach said.
“That’s how we control them now.”'
More at:
http://www.westernadvocate.com.au/news/local/news/general/reprieve-for-roos/2421873.aspx
The US in Irak
Mr Wooldridge,
Very well put. I feel quite as Tim does.
Craig Dilworth
Growthists are 'buildophiles'
It's time to seriously defend home.
It's time to label growth lobbyists, developers as 'buildophiles'. The term has a nasty ring to it and the more it is used it will catch on unwelcomingly to the target.
I have just concocted it and I plan to use it and it is free to use, unlike those selfish American pseudodemics who try to patent every friggin term they concoct.
Go forth, use it liberally....
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Straightening out BANANAS?
The naked growth lobbyists are extremely powerful and self-centred in their interests. This is about "fighting back" democratic opinion tides, and public opinion by vested interest groups. The constraints of growth are evident to the public, and there are no "counter arguments" to endorse population growth. Nothing can "sway" against the tide. It's the public who are the victims of all this malignant growth.
What's needed is some common-sense, and realistic evaluations of where our society is heading. The property Council and developers are not responsible for fixing mortgage stress, homelessness, debt, crowding, infrastructure shortages, the exploitation of our suburbs and lack of full time employment.
What measured, valued responses to "big Australia" are there? Countering the "negativism" will be hard to find against the "extreme" views that would cap our population to justify ongoing population growth. Governments are elected to represent the people of Australia, not just a few elite. What are the benefits of limitless growth? What ammunition will they have to justify the costs and impacts of population growth? It's all about profits, property development, increasing costs, taxes, lower living standards and debt. Property developers and banks have far too much power, and they will have a hard time manipulating the public to change current opinion.
There are limits to growth that are being denied. How can it be otherwise, no matter how hard the growth lobby "fight back"!!
Future generations won't have the "benefits" of growth that these growth advocates have. If there is a sway of public opinion against all the "developments" and "planning", it's a genuine concern. It can't simply and conveniently be turned for the sake of a few.
Funding for infrastructure comes from the public purse, and already families and struggling to survive. Society must evolve towards a sustainable, and liveable, future. We can't continue to pave our land with concrete at our present rate and destroy the integrity of our landscape, ecological systems and biodiversity.
This is about trying to quash public opinion and disguise the obvious - that our population growth is unsustainable and already Australia is overloaded with people.
Land development has no rational economic purpose
CSI wrote: "They genuinely believe rapid population growth has made the average Australian much wealthier."
Why presume that developers are unaware of the harm that their industry causes to the welfare of other Australian?
Surely any developer who thinks about it for more than five minutes would have to understand that the necessary population growth can only make the living standards of existing Australians worse on average, particularly when undertaken in the chaotic fashion that it now is.
What are the residents of these new developments going to make or grow that they can sell to other parts of the country or overseas?
Because if they don't the wealth necessary for them to live can only come from the wealth currently shared amongst existing Australian residents.
With Australia's manufacturing sector in decline since Whitlam began abolishing protectionism in 1975, there will almost certainly be at most a small fraction of the manufacturing jobs necessry to kep the new residents employed. Housing construction will cover a great deal of arable land so it is hard to imagine many of the new residents being employed to grow additional food.
Ultimately most residents in the new developments, if they are to be employed at all, can only be employed in non-wealth-producing service sector roles - finance, banking, real estate, retail, etc.
Developer's Mindset
First off do these developers really worry that the tide of public opinion is shifting against them? That their industry is under threat? Most of the public is either apathetic or supports them. They have government at every level in their pocket, to the point where its a rare, headline making event when a development is actually rejected. I think they know this, but publically admitting this looks like arrogance. Its always good to pretend to be the underdog, even when you're not.
But lets look at the developers mindset. They genuinely believe rapid population growth has made the average Australian much wealthier. Its certainly made them wealthier. Their pet economists tell them its made everyone else wealthier. Whats good for them must be good for every Australian.
They fully believe this rapid population growth must be continued until at least the end of this century. Why? Because this is supposed to be the century when the "undeveloped world" catches up with the "developed world". Which means massive economic growth dwarfing even that of the 20th century.
Rapid population growth would allow Australia to fully partake in this boom, or so they believe. But of course there is a very real possibility that before too long economic growth as we have known it is going to end, due principally to energy shortages. In this scenario a growing population makes the average Australian poorer. But they can't even conceive of this happening.
Poverty and overpopulation go hand in hand
These authors seem to think that we humans can transcend ecological and environmental limits with impunity. Protection and conservation of our planet's natural resources, ecological functions, integrity, biodiversity and all it's generous services in supporting human populations must over-ride the concerns of its dependents. While we have overpopulation, food shortages, lack of fresh water, growth beyond economic benefits, territorial conflicts, land degradation and species extinctions, "social justice" and "human rights" can't be assured. Once humanity becomes a teaming mass and a plague of numbers, we descend into mayhem and confusion and anarchy. Each person has less rights, and less political power.
Human rights will only decline and be compromised by human overpopulation. It will mean increasing wars, conflict, clashes of ideologies, increased predatory grabs for land and natural resources, and individual human lives will have less importance.
Nations and communities and the economies that support them are a sub-set of ecological functions and environmental integrity. Poverty and overpopulation go hand in hand. The smallest nations are generally the most affluent, and have the highest standards of living. They are able to plan for their future instead of descending into perpetual debt and be forced to cope with continual "shortages" and the impediments of perpetual growth. This is due to good resource management, investment in knowledge and innovation, and strong traditions and patriotism.
Banks face a home loan suit
Australia's banks could be facing a massive new class action over allegations that their mortgage lending practices have put thousands of families in severe financial stress or at risk of losing their homes.
http://www.theage.com.au/business/banks-face-home-loan-suit-20120114-1q0...
Housing is a basic human need, and access to it is a basic human right. Up to 300,000 mortgage holders would be eligible to participate in the class action, which is expected to focus on first home buyers and lower-income households who accepted loans since the onset of the global financial crisis.
They are now under severe financial hardship due to because they have been lent too much money. They are under mortgage stress.
Not only should the banks be facing allegations of corruption and abuse of profiting from a housing rort, but the whole pro-growth pushing capitalists. This includes the land speculators, developers, State government agencies that profit from growth, and the economists who promote their theories of perpetual growth and prosperity. Housing has been extorted as a prime economic commodity instead of primarily a provision for families and communities.
Australia's status of the "Lucky Country" and high rate of home ownership and affordable housing has been exploited and sold overseas to the fullest extent. We now have the highest cost housing in the world, yet the growth pushers are still planning 30 more years of insidious growth. In one generation we have descended from the "Lucky Country" to one of great debt due to cannibalistic policies. Now housing is over and above the ability of average workers to pay for.
Australia's labour shortage a myth
One regularly sees claims put out by the growth lobby that Australia suffers a terrible shortage of workers, and that only high immigration is keeping the country afloat. This has long been a lie, and now Crispin Hull, former editor of The Canberra Times, has nailed it. In reality Australia suffers increasingly high unemployment.
Why is the claim of labour shortage made? Perhaps because it suits the vested interests of employers generally. They know that if they can persuade the government to provide them with a surplus of workers, the market price of labour will fall, and they can keep wages down. Also, many employers need skilled workers but don't want to pay the world market price for skilled labour (or the cost of apprenticeships).
Imported workers often come pre-trained, and because they are getting into a richer or safer or less over-crowded country (Australia) these workers are prepared initially to work for less. Also, since they can't access the dole for two years, they have little choice but to take what employers offer.
Throw in those businesses that profit in other ways from population growth (e.g. developers, property speculators, and major retailers who benefit simply by having more customers) and you have a powerful array of vested interests to fund various fronts and "foundations" that regularly spruik the need to increase our labour force.
However they do not offer to cover the infrastructure costs of these extra people -- at least $250,000 per person. Those costs they pass on to the public, along with the cost of paying the social security of the marginally less skilled or attractive Australian worker whom they sack or fail to employ because they can get a recent immigrant to work marginally harder or for a little less money.
Little wonder Hull comments, "More fuss should be made over the way big industry promotes immigration and high population for short-term gains."
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/workers-go-begging-as-unemployment-numbers-dont-add-up/2419841.aspx?storypage=0
Not laughing - angry at growth lobby antics
I'm not laughing. I am very very angry at these men who have set themselves up to pervert our democracy and steal from us our quality of life.
Curse Hilmer, Hawke and Keating
A thousand curses on Fred Hilmer and all his children and their children's children for doing this to our country. Ditto for Keating and Hawke. I weep.
Migrant workers dumb down the workplace
Migrants are more employable than Australian-born job seekers, because they have lower expectations - income, workplace conditions, treatment - these are typically lower standards overseas from whence they came than in Australia.
Migrants are more desperate to get work because they have less choice than locals - less access to a network of support and perhaps no access to unemployment benefits (below the breadline as they are). So migrants get the jobs because they are cheaper workers and accept more crap in the workplace.
As a consequence, employers know they can save on labour costs and have less effort to retain migrants instead of locals. The workplace becomes dominated by cheaper foreign labour that expects less. The workplace is thus dumbed down. The quality is also dumbed down. But then corporate and government employers are focused on the short term, so in the short term they benefit. In the long term the country is dumbed down.
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
'Fair competition' advocate uses citizenship to sell 'education'
I note that University of NSW Vice Chancellor Fred Hilmer, who is peddling this scheme, is the same Fred Hilmer who was commissioned by the Hawke/Keating Labour Government to chair the National Competition Policy Review Committee, which led to the introduction of National Competition Policy in 1995. At the time the report (http://www.ncc.gov.au/images/uploads/Hilmer-001.pdf - pdf 42M) was released it was greeted by our newsmwedia with sycophantic adulation and was subject to almost no informed critical scrutiny. It become the retrospective justification for Paul Keating having foisted his extreme "free market" dogma on the Australian public without any elctoral mandate in 1983 and was to become the dogma with which all Australian Governments thereafter were expected to comply --- or have hell to pay. Essentially, government was to privatise as many wealth-producing and and service providing entities as possible wealth-producing and service proving entities as possible and, as far as possible, not regulate the "free market".
That, in order to give the Australian tertiary education industry a competitive advantage over foreign universities, Hilmer is prepared to offer prospective foreign students a still easier path to citizenship as well as paid employment denied to many Australian residents, reveals what a sham Hilmer's professed belief in fair competition always was.
Immigration juggernaut is frightening
The people behind the immigration jugganaut seem to be psychopaths or so wrapped up in their own short term ambitions that they are prepared to destroy our country.
"UNIVERSITIES will be allowed to entice foreign students with quick visa approvals and the right to two years of work after graduation as part of a reform package to stem further losses of overseas student income.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen and Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans said yesterday they would act on a remarkably frank report on Australia's education export industry by former NSW politician Michael Knight.
By mid-next year, foreign students keen on an Australian university degree will have access to a new, fast-track visa system.
Students from supposedly high-risk countries such as China will no longer have to show $75,000-plus in a bank account to prove they can cover fees and living costs. Instead, as with students from developed countries such as the US, they will be able to simply declare they can support themselves.
Onerous financial requirements have been bitterly criticised as an overreaction to past failings when migration was the motor of education, especially in private colleges."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/visa-rule-reforms-give-unversitieis-a-lifeline/story-fn59niix-1226144082762
The reason for unleashing this likely flood of people who will never go home and who will take places from Australian students and keep housing prices high is supposed to be to save our universities. Our universities survived for nearly 200 years without this kind of prostitution of our tax-funded services.
Torture
Looking at and listening to the clip was torture and I don't know how this creep can sleep soundly at night. His plan is to pay a team to issue pro- growth propaganda throughout the media in order to brain wash the Australian people and with the aim of changing a 20/80 ratio against growth into a 45/55 one or better to allay politicians’ fears about doing just what the people do not presently want. Salt acknowledges that individuals would not be able to do it and that it requires a paid army, yet he derisively talks of articulate anti development retirees "with too much time on their hands" interested in a "power kick" and who would easily swing to any cause. It would be a real coup for the growth lobby harness the energy and talents of these mature aged people that BS sees as looking for a cause. They may even be able to get a good stream of Bull Shit going for less than the suggested $2-3 million per year! Instead he says to give up on them and work on the young people.
I noted only one brief reference as to how growth and development benefit the recalcitrant 80% of people who are against it. It was reference to superannuation a sort of never- never distant hope to be financially catered for in retirement. He did say the young would appreciate the employment opportunities of a growing population but does a larger pool of labour increase employment opportunities?
The time for words seems to be over. Who can spend their lives arguing against the rubbish that paid prostitutes put our in favour of demolishing the cities we know and building higher denser ones, covering our countryside with endless suburbs, killing our wildlife and burying our farmland in tar and cement ? It's a time and energy issue, not an issue of who has the brain power to counter their predictable propaganda.
See no truth, hear no truth, speak no truth.....
We have an overpopulation problem and in the face of that problem deniers and ‘business as usual’ enthusiasts often say cavalierly, “Have the courage to do nothing.” That ideas of this kind are ever associated with word courage is the height of dishonesty and duplicity. Such expressions are also the most profound examples of self-serving thought and individual cowardice I can imagine. That such a point of view is broadcast by the mainstream media is a sign to us of its wrongheadedness.
Let us not fail for another year to examine and report on extant research of human population dynamics/human overpopulation. The refusal of many too many experts to assume their responsibilities to science and perform their duties to humanity could be one of the most colossal mistakes in human history. Such woefully inadequate behavior by deniers, as is evident in the collusion of many too many experts, will soon enough be replaced with objective observations and truthful expressions from those in possession of clear vision, intellectual honesty and moral courage.
Why not acknowledge science regarding human overpopulation and, by so doing, take a path toward sustainability? If we keep repeating the mistakes made in the past by denying science, nothing new and different can happen. Without an open acknowledgement of the root cause(s) of what is ailing the human family, how are we to move forward to raise awareness of the global predicament? Once awareness is raised among a critical mass of people, it becomes possible to organize for the purpose of formulating policies and actionable programs. Denial has kept us and continues to keep us from gaining momentum needed to address and overcome the human-driven challenges that currently threaten human well being and environmental health.
Most Australian jobs going to immigrants
George Megalogenis, Migrants claim bulk of the jobs, The Australian, 11 January 2012
"MIGRANTS are officially more employable than Australian-born jobseekers, claiming 81,000 new jobs over the past year while 38,000 locals lost their own jobs.
The British, Malaysians and Filipinos are the main immigrant groups that enjoy lower unemployment rates, while New Zealanders and Indians have higher labour force participation rates than the Australian-born.
A detailed analysis of the Bureau of Statistics jobs data shows that while immigrants account for less than 30 per cent of the labour force, they have claimed more than half the jobs created since the start of 2010.
Rather than struggling to fit in, as opposition citizenship spokeswoman Teresa Gambaro suggests, newly arrived immigrants are going straight to work and helping keep the economy growing. The figures for November, which are not seasonally adjusted, place the unemployment rate for Australian-born at 5 per cent and the overseas-born at 4.8 per cent."
My comment: I bet they are being paid less than Australians. This is a race to the bottom. And the Murdoch press has a big responsibility for high immigration and the destruction of our industrial protection laws by encouraging Mr Howard.
Population crash inevitable?
I don't know about the likelihood or not of a population crash. But look at the graph of population numbers in the past couple of centuries. This is exactly the pattern what you would see in any animal which just gained access to a new food resource. Ignore all the clutter of economics, philosophies, politics and just look at that graph.
For all our intelligence we are behaving just like any other animal. And when any animal grows like this, there is always some kind of crash afterwards. Some people point out that the growth rate is declining, but in other animals near the peak of growth you see the same sort of decline, but its never enough to prevent the collapse.
Trolls and Spruikers
Wow, this is a real eye opener, though I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised.
I always knew the real estate industry was corrupt but this is taking things to a whole new level.
Any chance of getting this out to the masses via Today Tonight or A Current Affair etc?
I know those shows appeal to the lowest common denominator sometimes but they reach a wide audience.
People need to be made aware of how much lies and propaganda they're being fed by the industry.
Kudos to candobetter.net and AustralianPropertyForum.com for bringing this to public attention! Nice work!
D Mitchell.
This film is dynamite - BSE, childhood leukemia, ionizing rad
I should add to my hasty remark in the first comment that the main subject of investigation is the harmfulness of ionizing radiation to living cells.
The detail and the names make the film's contribution enormously important to what is happening in Japan today.
Busby also shows how criminally negligent committees reviewing material on Mad Cow Disease and childhood leukeimia have been. He names names, some of them on the editorial board of the Royal Society, some of them still in high positions in institutes of epidemiology, and those institutes in receipt of public and charitable funding.
GetUp has destroyed archives, still wanting your money
Personally I have never been impressed by GetUp.
It was too well-funded from the start to be a grassroots organisation and I know it ignored suggestion after suggestion to include population numbers, going years back. All their campaigns are just stuff that the mainstream media already allows to run because they know it is useless or it serves their purpose. As far as I can see it is a way of siphoning money away from the community by giving them false hope. GetUp also takes names and contact details from contributors and so it has a record of who thinks what. It seems to me that its major function is as a polling device, to feed back information about public concerns, demographics and activists to the corporates and the political majors. I would not give them my real details.
I was incensed when I tried to follow the link for your campaign for Direct Democracy todayand found all the archives of suggestions destroyed, but still the organisation which is obviously quite rich, is asking for my money.
GetUp has destroyed the record of your campaign suggestion and of all the other campaign suggestions. What an insult to the people who proposed them!
If you go to this link for your suggestion for Swiss style democracy, you are told that the account has been closed:
http://suggest.getup.org.au/forums/60819-getup-campaign-suggestions/suggestions/2150467-changing-the-australian-constitution-to-enable-sw
"Campaign suggestions
As of December 2011, GetUp's suggest tool will no longer be operating. Thanks to everyone who has been a part of such colourful discussions!
Stay tuned in 2012 for new ways to get involved with progressive issues and bigger, better tools for taking campaigning into your own hands.
Want to be the first to hear about GetUp's new innovations? Drop us a line on [email protected]. Include your name and your whereabouts - we'll keep you in the loop!"
Yeh, sure. And I bet they will include a bunch of corporates and pollies in that loop as well, with the information about public opinion that you and I provide.
Most people want to breed for their own benefit
Yes, an incremental population reduction would be better, but there is no sign of that.
Most people want to breed for their own benefit - especially developing nations - India, China, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh.
It is a species trait to procreate and humans are the most efficient and have most capacity, a high base (7 billion) and are culturally encouraged to breed.
Australia even had an official $5000/baby bonus up until a few months ago, and with it one of the highest breeding rates - especially from immigrants.
Top 10 Extreme Breeding Nations
Nations doing catch up breeding - Note: Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as well as African nations Niger, Zambia and Uganda are absolutely going for it at over 3% annual growth! Don't send these countries encouragement aid! Send them conditional aid - family planning support!
But also the United States is having the greatest pathogenic impact - high population compounded by high per capita consumption.
As for taking local control, the strong/rich helping the weak/poor - our historic record to date is not good. A litmus test will be how the 'Occupy Movement' fairs...
The big problem is convincing people and governments that human overpopulation is a problem - economists are winning the propaganda war with their theory that population growth is good for economic demand.
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
I'm not convinced about population crash...
No, I do not believe that we HAVE TO crash. I'm saying that with the current socio-economic establishment - the system and its "leaders" - we WILL crash, but I do not believe that is the only possible future, and I think a slow population reduction to 2-3 billion is still a possibility. How to get there as a practical 'exercise' starts by throwing out current regimes and socio-political ideas, taking local control, and having the strong/rich help the weak/poor for a change. Whatever the agenda may be once that becomes achievable would be basically up to the localities, but it is not hard to imagine 10 or 12 basic principles that would be applicable just about everywhere. BTW, I think the current situation is serious enough to be openly contemplating a 'revolution' of this nature and would be happy to discuss any of this here or elsewhere. Basically, if enough people want it, they can have it.
Busby on peer review - amusing, awful but true
Great film! Very interesting - and not only on the subject of nuclear power. On the subject of academic competition and the failure of peer review due to a variety of institutionalised problems that we all suspected. Thanks, Tony.
Whaling is a cultural sport
Whaling is a sport. It is not scientific. It is not a primary industry because there is stuff all market for whale meat and the only way it is sold is because the Japanese Government subsidises the cost. Whaling is a cultural sport only and a backward cultural one at that. It is all about game.
The Japanese are traditionally a patriarchal society. Japanese males violating Australian waters for foreign whales for sport is consistent with Japanese male cultural history of violating foreign women they euphemistically called 'comfort women'.
Such Japanese culture is backward and foreign and has no place in Australian waters and the Australia Whale Sanctuaries that Australia is custodian for.
Check map of: Australia Whale Sanctuaries
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Pathogenic rights?
Yeah, it's like as a pathogen we're pleading pathogenic rights!
It's up there with psychopathic rights, pedophile rights and sadomasochism rights.
Save the pathogen!
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Japan's whaling is illegal
The Environmental Protect Biodiversity Conservation Act 1990, among other things, prohibits actions that, both directly and indirectly, are likely to have a significant impact on the environment. The Act also establishes the Australian Whale Sanctuary, which includes waters of the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone adjacent to the Australian Antarctic Territory.
The Australian Whale Sanctuary corresponds to Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone.
On Saturday, Sea Shepherd helped three members of the environment group Forest Rescue board the Shonan Maru 2 near the Western Australian coast. The boarding took place in an area of waters where Australia’s Contiguous Zone (CZ) and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) overlap. Australia can only police the customs, fiscal, immigration and quarantine laws that apply in Australian territory and Territorial Sea (which reaches to 12 nautical miles from the coast). In the EEZ Australia can regulate fishing (and whaling), other resource activities (such as mining), and can take action to control pollution. But it cannot extend Australian law generally or exercise jurisdiction over foreign ships for any reason it pleases.
The EPBC Act also establishes the Australian Whale Sanctuary, which includes waters of the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone adjacent to the AAT, and Regulations under the Act specify approach distances and appropriate behaviour for aircraft and vessels in the vicinity of cetaceans.
Japan's whaling is under the smoke-screen of being "scientific research" which they and we know is not valid. It's phoney as whales can better be studied without being lethal.
Japan’s whaling activities are contrary to its international obligations, in particular, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. Despite Australia repeatedly calling on Japan to cease its illegal whaling activities, Japan has refused to do so. That is why the Australian Government has taken this case in the International Court of Justice.
The Gillard government has slammed the actions of three anti-whaling protesters as "unacceptable" and warned that others who carry out similar protests will be "charged and convicted". However, the government should be preventing crimes in our near oceans, and illegal whaling, not condemning the actions of law-enforcers trying to do what they should be doing!
Nothing ethical about overpopulation
There's nothing nice or politically correct about any way to address human overpopulation. People are cautious about suggestion voluntary birth control. China's one child per family is something forced onto them, and controlled through abortions.
The general trend is to accommodate it, and expect our land to produce more food, and technology to provide better services. Few leaders or thinkers have the courage to offer real ways to stop humans continuing in their pathway to ecological overshoot.
Nature will eventually limit our numbers, but that won't be nice either. The proposeal to sterilize people via drinking water is of course abhorent, but Tigerquoll has a point. The consequences are also abhorent.
We need a reality check. Australian government still has an appetite for population growth, despite our rising costs of living, obvious economic constraints with the cost of housing the highest in the world, our environmental/species destruction and the cost of our lifestyles adding to our ecological footprints. They imagine that all our growth can continue, and prosperity will follow. On the contrary, Australia is being downgraded as a generic, global, international non-specific resource. So many people are born overseas, and our culture, our common sense of being, our history, our unique identity, and heritage - social and natural - are being eradicated.
Natural vessels keep being filled but eventually they must be declared FULL. However, when it comes to human numbers, any natural resource, and our planet, is thought of as being infinite.
Yes we have to crash because we have become a pathogen
Yes we have to population 'crash' because at 7,000,000,000 we have become Earth's Pathogen.
If it were another pathogenic species, we would be spraying it!
Read more: 'Human sterilisation via global drinking Water
:@
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Actually I'm quite serious
Actually I'm quite serious and I too encourage debate.
When one compares the implications of current out-of-control exponential global human overpopulation with involuntary/indiscriminate sterilisation, the latter is far more ethical a solution.
The only downside is clucky-frustration - couples not able to procreate.
Study history and compare past alternatives of mass reduction in human population - none is ethical since each involves horrendous suffering.
Why is sterilising humans involuntarily via their drinking water unacceptable?
It is decidedly NON-violent - that is the point!
When human population reaches 35 billion would your opinion change?
When human population reaches 350 billion would your opinion change?
When human population reaches 3500 billion would your opinion change?
Are we compromised here by ethnocentric relativism?
Step back from this proposed solution to the seriousness of the problem. Then try to suggest an alternative.
The problem is truly worse left unchecked than my proposed solution.
I invite ethical alternatives, but I have not found one yet!
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Do we have to crash?
Right. But do we have to crash to get from the current 7 billion to the sustainable 2 billion or whatever population size you think would be sustainable? (You do not seem to think 2 billion is a good idea, or is it just the notion that we can take our sweet time in getting there that bothers you?) No, we do not have to crash to get there. We can have a soft landing by something like 2040 - 2100, if we really want it. BUT NOT WITH THE CURRENT POLITICAL/ECONOMIC ESTABLISHMENT! WHEN IS THE 99% GOING TO TELL THE 1% THAT IT'S TIME TO GET LOST?
Environment Minister Tony Burke has "no plans" on anti-whaling
The Gillard government is grappling with a diplomatic crisis over three Australian anti-whaling activists being held on board a Japanese whaling fleet ship and facing possible criminal charges in Japan. Of course, boarding a ship is illegal, but these activists are trying to draw attention to their illegal and criminal commercial whaling, and complete disregard for international environmental sanctions against the poaching of whales in a whale sanctuary.
The protesters climbed aboard the security ship Shonan Maru No. 2 in darkness on Saturday night off the south coast of Western Australia. They are not just "environmental activists" but concerned that protected whales are being harpooned illegally, and their lives are in danger - so that Japan can assess their ages from their inner ears?
The Environment Minister, Tony Burke, has repeatedly rejected calls to send the Ocean Protector south this summer, saying the government had ''no plans'' to do so. He is blatantly abrogating his duty to our nation, and lazily shrugging off our anti-whaling status.
Our government ministers are paid, with tax-payers' funds, to have policies that represent the interests of the people of Australia, and implement them. With the whalers also calling for a patrol ship from Australia, it's obvious that our policies on whaling are ambiguous, despite years of diplomatic pressure on Japan to end their "research". Our government's inaction is actually aiding and abetting Southern Ocean commercial whaling operations,
We are in a strategic position to uphold international environmental laws and policies. As the Minister for the Environment of a democratically elected government, Tony Burke is not in a position so simply dismiss the use of the Ocean Protector as a means of ending the peace-threatening conflicts.
It's time Tony Burke ended his holidays, got back on duty and made some "plans" according to his role as an accountable Minister of a democratically-elected Federal government.
Another great conspiracy theory analysis site!
Oh gosh, another great conspiracy theory site!
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread83236/pg1
Fantastic Conspiracy Theory analysis site found
The owner of this site has evolved an excellent conspiracy rating system and some very good analysis:
http://conspiraciesthatweretrue.blogspot.com/
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Conspiracy Theory Rating Scale
This is just an idea of mine that's been bouncing around in my head for awhile: I've never seen any sort of objective rating system whereby a current conspiracy theory could be rated as to it's validity or possible truth. The hardest part in doing this would be setting up the criterion to apply for the rating. The actual ranking would go something like this:
5 = An event that has essentially been proven true, but initially was considered conspiracy theory (See the post "List of Proven Conspiracies" on the second page of this blog - I'd consider most of those a "5")
4 = An event that has a large body of circumstantial evidence to suggest that there is a strong liklihood that it is true, and that an "official version" of the story is probably not entirely true.
3 = An event that could go either way, something that has a lot of troubling unanswered questions, a lot of "loose ends" that haven't been adequately explained, but the "official version" could be just as valid - just a lot of unanswered questions. An event that in all liklihood needs "filling in the blanks". Many theories fall into this category - there just hasn't been enough research to tie everything together or adequately explain everything.
2 = An event that can, through use of such techniques as Occam's Razor, investigative reporting, a specialist's knowledge of science and/or engineering & physics, usually be successfully de-bunked. Usually scenarios in this category involved plots that seem a little too complicated or logically unlikely, and are sometimes based on assumptions that are false to begin with.
1 = An event or belief in something that can be very easily dismissed, even by those who have no more knowledge than the average person, using commonly held knowledge and common sense.
Using this scale, most of the conspiracies listed in the "List of Proven Conspiracies" would in my opinion be rated a "5".
An example of a "4" would be the conspiracy theory that the JFK assassination involved more than a single bullet, and possibly more than one shooter from different locations, and that it was the product of an elaborate conspiracy rather than a lone deranged nut firing a single shot from one location.
The conspiracy theory that states that the moon landings were staged and faked might get a 3 - some things have been debunked, but not others. The mysterious "disappearance" of the original videos of the landing is troubling too - they didn't disappear until lately when computerized digital video enhancement techniques became available. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Buzz Aldrin leaving a question and answer meeting in tears when asked to describe what it felt like to walk on the moon.... What was up with that anyway?
Example of a 2 would be something like the standard tinfoil hat thing, because we are supposedly the target of mind control - things like that.....
1's?? The Flat Earth Society, etc.
Will continue working on this to develop it..... Later.........
Posted by the Curmudgeon at 2:14 AM 0 comments
More here
Conspiracies, a part of daily life?
Hi Lorna,
I hope you will actually argue your case against Chussudovsky and the others instead of reiterating the mainstream slur and leaving it at that. You must have some evidence. As you would be aware, history is chockerblock with conspiracies (where there is power there are always conspiracies from the Little Princes in the Tower to faction formation and leadership coups in political parties to advertising messages and mainstream media designation of what is 'news') so to say something is just a conspiracy theory and therefore should not be considered isn't enough. You have to argue with it. I hope you will try.
Much of Stalin's political manoevering against other members of the communist party involved conspiracy. Military conspiracies are arguably necessary for military manoevers to go ahead, such as the one where Rosevelt authorised getting the Japanese to make the first move at Pearl Harbour which US army high-ups knew of 3 or 4 days in advance. But the media presented the Pearl Harbour attack as a big surprise, which most people retain as the truth to this day.
Here's another you can work out logically: the privatisation of public assets and services, like telecommunications and banks has been justified with obviously false arguments about the economic and social benefits to wider society. There must have been powerful motivators to get governments to privatise, but these real reasons are never provided to the public. Yet privatisation continues against every objection and political parties and the press collude to ensure that it never becomes a factor at election time, despite some impressive ostensible attempts to stop it and other unworthy activities: John-Paul Langbroek and why the Liberal National Party won't survive unless Labor Governments reform
Some other big ones: the Enron scandal; Weapons of mass destruction and the government persecution of a CIA agent who tried to alert it to the evidence (dramatised in the film Fair Game); Health Insurance in the United States as exposed by Michael Moore in Sicko, where senators were receiving money to vote down reform - it might be legal, but it sure was covert; Watergate; the Benign Demographic Transition ideology as an excuse for colonisation and corporatisation.
How could the global banking industry and sharemarketeers continue to dominate in favour of the interests of a few without continuing conspiracy with lawmakers - politicians and lawyers - to legalise what they are doing?
The concept of 'willful blindness' which seems to be often a necessary component of conspiracies is explored in a great book by Margaret Heffernan, who gives some amazing examples of conspiracy where 'wilful blindness' helped it along. She writes about collusion by beneficiaries of X-Ray technology suppressing for several decades until the mid 1980s scientific evidence that use of X-rays on pregnant women was causing many childhood cancers. Heffernan also gives the example of a whole town suppressing evidence of the link between asbestos mining and mesothelioma despite a huge local death rate. Part of this 'wilful blindness' was the reluctance of the public to see themselves as victims or to believe that the town and industry authorities would treat them with such contempt. Turning away from the recognition of your own powerlessness is also a reason for wilful blindness. Why acknowledge persistent powerlessness? - it is too painful. This blindness in the asbestos town was considerably helped by the kind of denial that accompanies unavoidable danger as well. So then it could be exploited by those who benefited from continuing to mine asbestos or from continuing to pretend - continuing to conspire - that asbestos did not cause cancer etc.
And how about the conspiracy by industry beneficiaries to downplay the dangers of fracking for gas? France has totally outlawed fracking, yet some countries - mine and yours - continue to defend it.
And it seems to me that in Australia, half the laws are the results of conspiracies by vested interest with politicians to defraud the rest of us. Laws reducing our land-rights are particularly rife at the moment. Here there is also a conspiracy to confuse the public about what the immigration numbers are, to increase immigration and to open Australian land-purchase to anyone in the world simply in order to increase the demand for housing and thus the profits to be got from developers. This is really systemic fraud and conspiracy. We have some interesting related scandals which you could read about here:
Australian Labor Governments or Commercial Corporations?
And some really unusual long-running associations that inexplicably draw international money and patronage:
My own feeling is that the success of the ideology that "it's usually a stuff-up rather than a conspiracy" and that people who question mainstream opinion are 'conspiracy theorists' in a derogatory sense may come from that sense of powerlessness many citizens may feel as they recognise the hollowness of their so-called democratic rights. And 'conspiracies' are made to seem so difficult to prove. As a sociologist, however, I found a very useful political theory about how vested interest can organise much better than those larger masses it exploits.
The theory comes from James Q Wilson, ed., The Politics of Regulation, Harper, New York, 1980. Wilson puts forward a framework derived from four types of politics classified according to whether the benefits and costs of policies are concentrated or diffuse: client (cb,dc), interest group (cb,cc), majoritarian (db,dc), and entrepreneurial (db,cc). Narrowly focused benefits mean that those benefiting from something are consciously aware of this and are able to recognise each other and organise to keep those benefits flowing. [Those in receipt of narrowly focused benefits may organises to keep those benefits flowing overtly or covertly. Where costs are diffuse and fall upon a disparate population at many different points in many different ways, they are difficult to identify and there are no obvious political rallying points for the public to organise a protest around. The organising by the focused beneficiaries is often conspiratorial because they do not want to make the connection between their 'upstream' activities and the 'downstream' impacts obvious because that would engender protest. From this theory comes a methadology of looking for activities that will reveal the focused and diffuse costs and benefits of unpopular processes or activites and then to look at media, laws and other activities, to see who is promoting those processes and activities. It's like throwing an ultraviolet light on a murder scene - all the evidence lights up.
Also, my own experience of NGOs shows them to be a hot-bed of conspiracy; they are like small towns with office bearers and other influentials fighting to maintain their hegemony and their footing in what has become their society and identity in a world where so much is disconnected. And NGOs are involved in terrifically important work, which usually goes unrecognised, so the internal struggles can be titanic, with life and death principles at stake.
So, in conclusion, conspiracies are everywhere, IMHO, but it is easier to call them covert or unrecognised or unofficial social adaptations, since it is very hard to establish motive unless there is a clear money trail.
I look forward to some debate!
Where is the evidence of Chavez's or Morales' "neoliberalsm"?
It's hard to know how to respond, when Lorna has yet to substantiate some of her claims either here or in any resource linked to from here
If, as Lorna claims, explicitly or implicitly, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Naomi Klein and others are "neoliberal phony leftists", then what political leader or intellectual of any consequence is not?
A trap I fell into in the past was acceptance of the "far left" schema which presumes that anyone who attains any political stature whatsoever in a capitalist world could only have done so by compromising his/her principles.
An obvious exception to this is former President John F Kennedy, who selflessly stood up to the military-industrial complex to prevent wars including, on at least three occasions, the horror of nuclear war. In spite of this, the "far left" have used this schema to imply that Kennedy could not have been any better than any of the other Democrat or Republican leaders, corrupted by money from vested interests. This has been used in turn by them to help the Warren Commission's cover up of the conspiracy to murder him.
The evidence I have seen, including their demonisation by the corporate newsmedia, suggests to me that those labeled by Lorna as "neoliberal phony leftists" are, to the contrary, leaders who are acting for their people against vested interests and will stand by that assumption until I see evidence to the contrary. This is not to say that all of these people are without flaws, but it still seems to me that they are people with good intentions. If more leaders were like them we would have a much better world.
your heroes with clay feet
Evo Morales is a cut above the rest of the Latin American neoliberal phony leftists but his plan to build a major superhighway through the
northern part of Bolivia, right through the Beni rainforest area, is no better than what Exxon and agribusiness and multinational corporations are
planning as they conspire with Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Peru and Venezuela to despoil indigenous areas in the rainforest and Andes. Naomi Klein has lent her
leftist credentials, for whatever they are worth, to that fraud named Bill McKibben, who has no ideas or plans whatsoever to counteract global warming, is funded by the Rockefellers, reaches out to corporations telling them how they can make more profits by "going green" and eschews political organizing completely. Global Research director Michel Chossudovsky is the most notorious and least trustworthy of all the snake oil salesmen alive, promoting conspiracy theories and
other spurious scientific and political twaddle. But you did get it right by putting Noam Chomsky on the Dark Side. Now add all these others to that category.
Australia being auctioned off as an Asian nation
Australia's doomsday auction is the selling off of Australian brands, infrastructure, housing, manufacturing and farmland to overseas buyers. It in acknowledgement that Australia has little future as a nation and is to be absorbed into the Asian economy.
Australia has already made plain its hope to see a greater US engagement in the ''Asian century'' as the Obama administration withdraws from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The decline of American influence and the rise of the Asian century seem to have become true. Asia however still strives to have the lifestyle and paraphernalia of the United States, probably a retro concept anyway with their rising debt and poverty.
The shift in the world's economic and strategic weight to Asia has prompted the Australian government to commission a White Paper on 'Australia in the Asian Century'. Australia's Trade Minister, Craig Emerson, says the White Paper will drive debate and public policy over the next 10 to 15 years and provide a basis for high-skill, high-wage jobs and "greater prosperity for all". Just how much input will the public have in these debates? Little, no doubt. He actually means greater prosperity for big corporations and trading partners, not the public.
Asian economies last year purchased almost two-thirds of our exports, worth $175 billion. In fact, all the growth in our exports over the past five years has been due to growth in demand from Asia, led by China. Similarly, foreign direct investment coming to Australia from Asia has doubled over the past five years
http://www.smh.com.au/business/chasing-the-fast-boat-to-asia-20111219-1p2dc.html
Development activity in Australia involving foreign companies has reached levels not seen in more than two decades. Foreign investors have spent a record $12 billion buying up Australian farmland and agricultural businesses over the past year, but have put off investing a further $14 billion until the outcome of a Senate inquiry in March 2012, a new report by Ferrier Hodgson says.
The nation's sugar industry has recently been targeted by the Chinese and offshore investors have also sunk massive sums into Australia's meat processing and wheat sectors.
Some of the country's best farms are also being snapped up by overseas investors who mask their identity with complex corporate structures. We are being swallowed by foreign interests, and the evils of globalization are wreaking havoc on Australia, due to our permeable borders and low-level sovereignty.
The global auctioning off of Australia's natural and man-made assets are threatening the future of Australia as a nation. It's a fire-sell off in recognition that as the driest continent, declining food production and rising population, we cannot survive climate change, global economic predators, and provide adequate security, so we must be sold off as an Asian nation.
Species disappearing on our planet
"Human population growth has caused significant habitat degradation across the globe, typically in support of agriculture and urban development," lead researcher Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle from University of Queensland said in a statement.
Governments need to select which animals can be saved, as species losses are inevitable. The combination of habitat loss and climate change is "catastrophic". Human population growth is causing climate change, and habitat losses. Population growth alone is impacting on species. Current management is inadequate against the massive tide of human growth.
"More proactive management strategies such as moving species, engineering habitat, and even abandoning our efforts to save certain species in one area in favour of other areas may be more effective."
The most important determinant of habitat loss and fragmentation effects, averaged across species and geographic regions, was current maximum temperature, with mean precipitation change over the last 100 years of secondary importance. Habitat loss and fragmentation effects were greatest in areas with high maximum temperatures. Conversely, they were lowest in areas where average rainfall has increased over time.
A recent study suggests that, despite 250 years of taxonomic effort, a mere 14% of the world’s species are recognised by scientists. Worryingly, anthropogenic effects, including habitat loss, climate change, and invasive species, threaten to exterminate thousands of species before they are even described.
ESA listing (Endangered Species Act) decisions often become political because listings have the power to stop development projects that impact listed species.
The polar bear has emerged as a powerful image in the debate about climate change, with environmentalists arguing that the fate of the largest land predator on earth is a dramatic indication of what is at stake. However, silently species are disappearing and being threatened in our back yards.
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/australian-scientists-create-world-...
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
Dear Friends,
Recall the words of a poet.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot
A new year has begun. We likely share the view that the movers and shakers in the human community cannot keep adamantly advocating and relentlessly doing the things we are doing now without precipitating some sort of unimaginable global ecological wreckage, probably sooner rather than later. A finite and frangible planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth cannot much longer withstand the unsustainable pressures produced by the gigantic scale and anticipated growth of human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities worldwide.
Perhaps we will help one another in 2012 see the world in a new way and effectively give voice to an unforeseen and unexpected vision of ourselves in all our wondrous human creatureliness and of the world we are blessed to inhabit. If we can see anew the unchanging landscape before our eyes, communicate what is visible to us (something I continue to fail abjectly at doing), and act accordingly, then we have a chance to move in the direction of sustainable lifestyles and right-sized corporate enterprises, and to rescue biodiversity from the wicked jaws of extinction.
We are on a night sea voyage with only the light from the stars and the best available science to guide us. This missive began with words from Eliot. It seems somehow fitting to close with his words,
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare Forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
Always,
Steve
Candobetter discourages violent illegal activity and censorship
The above comment about sterilising humans demands response and debate. Candobetter.net does not like censorship and advocates real debate instead.
Any act of sterilising humans involuntarily via their drinking water is unacceptable. Tigerquoll offers this idea as logically beneficial according to a paradigm where human overpopulation is otherwise unavoidable. That paradigm lacks detail. The suggestion of affecting water resources on a grand scale has a certain irony since that is just the way that wholesale fluoridation has been promoted - as a necessary good. Who would imagine that anyone would go so far as to pollute or alter in a drastic way a community's drinking water? Yet that is what state after state in Australia has done with fluoridation and what is being done again in the name of desalination (which alters peoples' control over pricing and access because it places supply of a natural resource in the hands of a few human beings who happen to have control of an expensive technology.) It is also being done through excessive fertilisation of agricultural land, through excessive run-off, and through other industrial processes that accompany high population density and high intensity of human activity. Those processes should not be allowed either, no more than involuntary mass sterilisation. Overpopulation should never be encouraged in the first place. Individuals and organisations that profit from it should have their profits taxed into oblivion
Human-sterilisation via global drinking water
On January 2nd, 2012 Tigerquoll says:
Now at 7 billion and exponentially breeding, humans have become Earth's Pathogen.
It is our sheer numbers that are the root cause driving ecological harm across the planet - deforestation, salination, pollution, climate change, wildlife extinctions, sprawl - all compounded by decadent consumerism since the Industrial Revolution. We have become a rat race.
To curb human overpopulation we need human-sterilsation in global drinking water. Add it to the fluoridation globally. It's a simple cost effective solution to curb humanity's pathogenic impost on the planet. Wait three generations and until there's about half a billion of us humans left. Then adjust the sterilisation treatment to maintain the half billion threshold with each nation a quota. That was our global number pre-'Industrial Civilisation' circa 1700, before our exponential ecological carnage. Half a billion humans globally may be thought of as our 'healthy equilibrium capacity'.
The planet and its inhabitants will breathe anew! Melbourne would be like leafy quiet Suggan Buggan - paradise!
While it's not politically correct, it sure beats China's cruel one child policy. What are the alternatives to Earth's Pathogen? 17,000,000,000 by 2050 and 35,000,000,000 by 2300 as predicted by the United Nations? How else can current exponential human population growth be reversed and reduced substantially and quickly? GM water sterilisation sure beats famine, plagues, genocides, nuclear holocaust, etc. - and no-one gets hurt, just 'clucky-frustrated'. I'd award the inventor the Nobel Peace Prize and the planet will thank them.
:)
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Population growth and the increasing demand for meat
{Reposted by Editor on Jan 6 2012 due to original having been lost to site damage.)
On January 2nd, 2012 Vivienne Ortega says:
Sixty billion farm animals are already used to produce food annually, the majority in industrial-scale factory farms. Citizens in developed countries eat four times more meat than those in developing countries, a far greater difference than that which exists for grain consumption. In the United States alone approximately 10 billion animals are slaughtered every year.
Due to the increase in human population and the high demand for meat products at a cheap price, there is now a system of 'extensive' farming. But instead of producing ‘goods‘, animals are reared in the quickest and cheapest possible way before being slaughtered. The fate of millions of future factory farmed animals is a bleak one indeed.
Rising incomes, populations and demand for meat has resulted in the global poultry population quadrupling since the 1960s to about 18 billion birds in factory farms today. The pathogenic H5N1 form of avian flu does not usually develop in wild birds or backyard poultry because their populations are too spread out and diverse. Thus we have bird flu, swine flu and mad-cow disease. These horrific places are tinder-boxes for disease, with monocultures of animals crammed together reliant on antibiotics.
A report from United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management says: "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products".
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has also urged people to observe one meat-free day a week to curb carbon emissions. Why not 7 days a week? We wouldn't need a carbon tax if we all avoided livestock products.
A veg*n/vegetarian diet is not only kinder on the planet and animals, but more people can be fed.
When will the cruelty end?
The way farmed pigs, chickens and dairy cattle are treated is totally unacceptable. The only way I can see an end to this is when humans get themselves back in proportion, numerically with the rest of the animal kingdom. This is not the direction we are going in, rather we continue to increase our numbers. It will get worse for other species before it gets better, unfortunately. Whilst animal welfare activists will win some battles along the way I just see the screws tightening more and more on animals who provide humans with food. It's great that Father Christmas visited the pigs that night and the music lends a real poignancy to the film.
Originally posted on Jan 2, 2012 but lost due to site damage. Reposted by Editor on Jan 6th.
Happy Victoria?
On January 3rd, 2012 Mary (not verified) says:
Public transport fees, childcare, education, electricity and water costs are all increasing. Houses are unaffordable, and renters and mortgage holders are saddled with big burdens. The growth paradigm is unsustainable in the long term. Population growth is increasingly destroying economies of scale, and the carbon tax will add a further blow-out for families. Growth is unsustainable, and economists refuse to acknowledge the finiteness of our planet and natural resources. Developers and big businesses continue to profit, but the costs are passed, undemocratically, onto those who can least afford it.
Victoria is sinking in debt, and thus our leaders speed up growth in an effort to pay for it! It's a downward cycle of costs, congestion, and an unrealistic economic formula towards environmental and economic doom.
Reposted Jan 6th 2012 because original lost in site damage. - Ed.
Human economy self-destructive feeding on growth
On January 2nd, 2012 nimby (not verified) says:
Modern humans have been on our planet for about 200,000 years. Our indigenous peoples lived here for about 40,000 years, in harmony with the environment. In a 220 years since European colonization, the landscape of Australia has changed and declined considerably. Our cities are sprawling and causing a cancerous spread of concrete and heavy scarring along the east and west coasts, fertile lands being transformed into sterile wastelands of housing, roads, and a atrophy of dead land and waste.
Obviously "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron, and it is also obvious that we cannot continue for 40,000 years, and certainly never 200,000, with a self-destructive economy that feeds on perpetual population growth. Nature and human infrastructure will implode eventually under your own weight, and the toxic waste we are producing.
We must have a DNA that will end our time on this planet.
Ed. This comment, originally posted on January 2, was lost through site destruction but reposted by the editor on 6 January 2012.
Leave Melbourne now
Proles leave Melbourne now.
Southern Shanghai is only going to get larger, higher and take on more of a persona of its namesake.
Notice the Ministry of Truth has already demonised our cultural aspirations for the quarter acre block
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Ed. This comment reposted by Candobetter.ed on 6 Jan after original destroyed in site damage on 1 January 2012.
Argentina moves to protect national assets in farmland
ARGENTINA has imposed new limits on foreign ownership of farm land.
The move will give the government greater control over agriculture.
Non-Argentines will be banned from owning more than 1000 hectares.
And no more than 15 per cent of Argentina's farm land can be sold to foreigners.
There will also be a limit of 30 percent of foreign-owned land that can be held by people of the same nationality.
A national land registry will also be etablished to enable the government to determine who actually owns land.
The move has come amid growing concern in Australia over foreign buy-ups of farmland, and the lack of monitoring of land ownership.
The current Australian control of approval of sales over $231 million has come under heavy fire from farm groups in 2011.
Argentina president Cristina Fernandez is believed to want to have greater control over farms, which deliver a large chunk of tax revenue for the Government.
See Argentina limits foreign farm ownership of 24 Dec 11 at
http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2011/12/24/423391_latest-news.html
Victorian Government - big on growth but short on common-sense
According to a recent report, every Victorian now has a share of about $10,000 in the State Government's ballooning $56 billion debt. Auditor-General Des Pearson has warned the state's ability to service that debt is on the wane.
Victoria sinking in an ocean of debt
This puts pressure on the Baillieu Government's ability to fund core services such as schools, hospitals, roads, bushfire prevention and public transport.
Government borrowings will total a whopping $46.9 billion by 2015, or $8108 for every man, woman and child in Victoria within four years.
An economy based on perpetual growth is causes more problem than it solves. It means a continual cycle of debt and growth to service the debt.
According to Kim Wells MP, Shadow Treasurer, Victoria should have been in a good financial position over the Budget estimates period to benefit from expected world economic growth post the crisis.
However, on this point, the Brumby Government has failed Victorians.
The reasons –
1. Labor’s financial mismanagement, characterised by waste and incompetent
project management;
2. Steeply increasing state debt; and
3. A failure to properly plan for Victoria’s high population growth.
However, if population growth outstrips available funding, housing, public services and infrastructure, who really benefits?
He also said that the Victorian economy has been increasingly reliant on the housing sector and population increases to drive growth. Obviously, this can't continue indefinitely. Kim Wells has the benefit of hindsight, but kept silent during the Brumby era.
Access Economics in its September Quarter 2009 report described population growth as “underpinning” the State’s economic growth.
Our economy is thus on very weak footing as it can't be maintained for the long term. Future State governments have further to fall financially, with more people to support without little manufacturing and sustainable economic foundations.
Hundreds of thousands of Victorians are waiting too long for care in the state's hospitals, and waiting times in emergency departments are dangerously high. We are being choked by queues, congestion, housing, nurse, and teacher shortages, and even potential food shortages. Our government continues to advertise "skills shortages" in Victoria and immigration to meet demands.
Live in Victoria - visas and immigration
Rather than "shortages", what we have is a surplus of people!
Our government still prefers roads and freeways over public transport upgrades. There is a myth that freeways relieve traffic congestion. In fact, they may provide some short-term relief, but within a short time the extra road capacity generates more traffic than there was before. In the long term freeways just allow congestion to grow further rather than reduce it.
Public Transport Users Association
It promotes more car usage, and urban sprawl. Also, those who hold the purse-strings and back-room political power prefer roads and freeways to service the mega-stores, big businesses and supply chains. They pull the strings for perpetual growth. Public transport is begrudgingly supported as it's basically only for the public.
We have a big shortage of common-sense in the Victorian government.
We need an investment of who and what we have in Victoria, not an obsession with expensive and destructive growth.
We are drowning in debt with a noose of "shortages" around our necks.
Some odd statements re minority populations in Vietnam here
"The health ministry reported that the imbalance of the sexes at birth has been at an alarming level where the sex ratio (the number of males per 100 females) at birth had increased from 110 in 2006 to 111.9 in 2011."
This statement sounds alarmist to me. My suspicion is that it comes from the growth lobby because the statistical variation is over such a short period and is unlikely to be reliable.
"The rate of new-borns with congenital deformities also was on the increase. Situation of early marriage and in-breeding in some ethnic and minority groups were problems causing race degradation."
This statement seems scientifically unlikely to me, unless it is indicative that the population base of minorities has dropped to catastrophic levels, affecting traditional healthy tribal endogamy/exogamy balances. Then you would have to ask yourself why those populations have dropped or why their health has been noticably affected. More likely to be associated with land-loss, nutritional deficiencies or local industrial effluent. I'd like to know more.
Abortion for Chinese Students
China doesn't do sex education. D'uh.???????? Isn't China the only country with an effective one-child mostly population stabilisation program?
International student education racket is not education -- never has been -- it's backdoor PR on the cheap. tHE REST OF USl pay to provide the roads, houses, hospitals, public transport, dams, pipes, power stations, poles and wires. Chattering class lefties employed in the unis on huge salaries, with huge holidays get richer and richer on this decades old, palpable spin. Melbourne Uni -
[Candobetter Ed. Person's name deleted because needs three source verification] cannot name ONE international who has returned home. Contrast the Colombo Plan 40 years ago.
Come on progressives, dont fall for the bullshit !!!!
See no truth, hear no truth, speak no truth.......
Everywhere we look there are virtual mountains of evidence to be found of the clever manipulation of human intellect by 'the brightest and best', usually for the purpose of securing selfish interests. Self-proclaimed masters of the universe, their many highly educated sycophants and absurdly enriched minions are established experts at ignoring 'reality' when it serves their pragmatic desires. The step that makes it possible for human beings with feet of clay to subordinate personal interests so as to see what is before their eyes, is not an easy one. All of us get use to seeing the world in certain ways, according to what is logically contrived, politically correct, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerable, culturally prescribed and ubiquitously shared through the mass media. Most of the time popular ways of viewing the world are sufficiently reality-oriented. But occasionally advances in science disturb even the most widely held and consensually validated understandings with regard to the way the world we inhabit works as well as about the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things. Perhaps we are witnesses to such a scientific advance, or maybe not. Whatever the case, whatever the 'reality' of human population dynamics, let us make sure that the CanDoBetter community is not simply and plainly just one more academic bastion of intellectual cowardice. When the subject is human population dynamics, it seems to me that there are currently enough "ivory towers", professional societies and international organizations whose members favor intellectual dishonesty, hysterical blindness, willful deafness and elective mutism.
Abortion clinics and health care for international students
There are recent reports of public hospitals locking out international students.
Politicians, bureaucrats and university administrators are ducking for cover. They come here and find themselves denied services taken for granted by domestic students, like transport concessions. International students, having been required to take out private health insurance, often find themselves no better off than uninsured locals. They can be denied public obstetrics services – something Australians enjoy automatically. Health industry workers tell stories of international students – sometimes innocently, sometimes not – adding pressure to a stretched public hospital system.
See Duck and weave by John Ross in The Australian of 2 Dec 11.
Sources also claim some students are subverting insurance rules by cancelling policies once they’re here and pocketing the unused portions of the premiums, but privacy laws protect them from being exposed.
Reports also reveal that medical specialists are losing thousands in unpaid fees because overseas student health insurance offers little gap fee coverage.
Health figures say that after GPs’ bills, maternity and termination services are the most commonly claimed insurance “items”. One in three abortions at the Women's and Children's Hospital is performed on international students, University of Adelaide research has found, predominantly carried out on Chinese students.
Opposition families and communities spokesman Stephen Wade says he has been told the figure could be as high as three out of four abortions being provided to international students.
International students are not cash cows, and we owe them support in return for the money, experiences and cultural diversity that they bring here. However, the reality is that they are here for their economic benefits, and as such, they should not burden our already stretched health-care system. They should have sufficient income and savings to ensure that they can continue their studies, allowing for health, accident and other issues, or else be sent home immediately.
Students come from countries who don’t extensively elaborate on sex education. Asian parents are known to be unwilling to speak about sexual health with their children. They start being sexually active in Australia, without traditional support and limitations.
Policy
!. End visa free entry for Kiwis. Kiwi net intake to be subracted from permanent quota.
2.
[...] [Verb commented out because it advocated a violent and illegal action. Candobetter does not publish illegal matter. Candobetter ed.] undocumented illegal maritime arrivals.
3. End onshore visa granting to international students -- ie they must return home and then apply.
4. An infrastructure fee of $100,000 for all permanent immigrants. A equal bond for "temporary" tourists and students and 457 visas. They never go home anyway. Otherwise all immigrant live in tents around the airport and they form workgangs to plan, fund, and build their own infrastructure. It has taken us 50 - 100 years to build and pay for the infrastructure that immigrants lust after.
5. An end to the Victorian Red Cross under Robert Tickner giving FREE HOUSES and FREE NEW CARS to refugees, while old Australian taxpayers are on 30-year waits for Housing Commission flats. Funded by the [... ...]
[adjectives commented out due to unverifiable quality and associated defamation risk- candobetter. ed] Andrew Metcalf. Letting boat arrivals live in the community is the name of this latest self-flagellating madness.
5. An answer as to why AESP-SPA has been a policy free zone for so many years.
End of growth near
When will the growth phase end? When will our cities ever be declared full?
Our political and business leaders will never declare our cities to be full. They are drunk on perpetual, rapid population growth. They can't conceive of it ending. But the end is in sight, with the end of cheap energy.
I remember talking to someone about population growth. I said that the growth will end by the end of this century. They expressed disbelief "but the population just grows, that's what it does". Actually population stability is the historical norm, growth is abnormal. But we've known rapid growth for several generations now, so all of us have come to believe that rapid growth is normal and will never end. Then I said something like "but what about the end of cheap oil?" and they looked at me in honest confusion "but what has oil got to do with population growth?" And the answer to that is everything.
Malignancy of overpopulation
When will the growth phase end? When will our cities ever be declared full? It must be obvious that we can't have perpetual population growth. When are the constraints to growth going to be acknowledged? We humans can't keep destroying bushland and biodiversity for housing estates and urban sprawl. Our economic growth-addiction model sets a treadmill for destruction with the eternal quest for growth to pay the debts. It's a continual loosening of environmental controls, and the concrete overlay destroys habitat and natural values forever. The growth of our cities is a cancer, a malignancy. It means a loss of plant and animal species, and the destruction of systems that supports lives. There's no moral justification for Sydney's growth. The human species now displays all the major characteristics of a malignant process.
Why be beholden to failure?
Labor supporters are questioning their support. So if unconvinced, resign, move on.
Holding on to Labor is like holding on to its poisoned Tree of Knowledge.
Labor never replanted hope at Barcaldine. It put in place a memorial.
A native graceful Ghost Gum replaced by an Brezhnevesk split concrete Boston City Hall blight.
Accelerate by!
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Merry Yule
Eurus, we call upon the east wind
Notus, we call upon the south wind
Zephyrus, we call upon the west wind
Boreas, we call the north wind
Spirit mother hear thy pagan son
.
On winter solstice night
Waxing mon reveals a new dawn
(The) dark king transforms to infant light
The cycle of ancient times has begun
Io'Evohe we are reborn
.
Candlemass brings the (growing) child sun
The triple goddess comes shining down
As witches sing with inspiration
Spiral dancing round and round
.
The spring equinox rises high
(The) dark maiden returns to us
The woods abound with faery goblins
Pan performs his songs of lust
.
Rejoice in the beltane sabbat
When lilac performes this magickal night
Naked we leap the sacred fire
And feast upon fruits and violet wine
.
On the day of summer solstice
The sun king will embrace the litha queen
And perish in the wake of Lughnasad
So may a splendid harvest be reaped
.
On Mabon we follow the lord of shadows
The empty season is upon us
Lady autumn blows leaves of sadness
Chanting as our offerings turn to dust
.
Ancestor wraiths ride on Samhain night
To proclaim the mystery of passing
Wearing a death cloak smiles the waning king
Let us see what the future will bring
.
Death is rebirth
The end brings new beginning
Ever turning
The wheel of the Pagan cycle
.
Anadia... Klephera... Nuit... Mercury... Hestia...
Horus... Brigit... Vulcan... Aphrodite...
Ea... Isis... Akasha... Io Evohe!
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Citizenship, careers sold to prop up 'education' industry
How many fellow Australians do you know, who are enrolled and studying at a University in any of the countries, from which foreign students enrolling in Australian Universities, come?
I don't know of one.
I would be interested to see the statistics, perhaps in the 2011 Census results are published. Perhaps some are to be found in the 2006 Census. I somehow doubt that the two sets numbers are even remotely comparable.
Is it possible to imagine that Australian Universities are that much better than Universities from those countries?
Or are foreign students, prepared to pay up-front fees that fewer and fewer Australians are able to pay, also getting something else that the Australian government and its corporatised tertiary education sector aren't being up-front with the rest of us about?
Are foreign students, being offered citizenship and careers that were previously given, as a matter of course, by the Government and business sectors, to young Australians, but which are now denied to them in our now highly credentialised job market?
How could former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who did not even complete Year 12, have stood a chance if he were to have started out his career in the Australia of 2011 that he helped to create?
The Australian Tertiary Education 'industry', of which former Prime Minister Keating boasted so much in the promotion of his recent tome "Afterwords" is yet another scam that is being used to enrich a few at the expense of the rest of Australia and future generations.
Religion of mulitculturalism - the destruction of Australia
One of the reasons for high immigration which fuels the Government promoted and taxpayer funded policy of multiculturalism is the erosion of our heritage, history and Western culture. In recent years, Asian immigration into Australia has expanded to make up 40-60% of yearly intakes. Paul Keating in 1995 said: cultural-demographic integration was to be achieved by promoting the new state religion of multiculturalism, facilitating Asian immigration into Australia, using Australia's high quality (but under-funded) educational system to attract fee-paying foreign students, teaching Asian studies and languages in Australian schools and universities, and fostering cultural exchanges between Australia and East Asian countries. The discrimination is in favour of Asian immigrants and on the acceptance into our universities of large numbers of foreign students from Asia. Most multiculturalists are internationalists so that Australia's interests may have to be over-ridden by so-called international interests.
HItler WW2 - comment moved
This comment has been moved to here, because I consider that it disrupts the discussion on this page - Ed (13/5/16)
The Labor party betrayed their traditional supporters
The Labor party betrayed the interests of their supporters through their free-trade policies. Those who traditionally voted Labor saw their jobs lost and factories closed due to competition with imports, from countries with cheaper labour. Keating secured support for his proposal to develop the role of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), established in 1989. The Howard government continued the work with even more zeal and now both major parties champion the scrapping of subsidies, tariffs and government preferences for Australian manufacturing – in the name of “Free Trade”.
Our mining industry was once almost entirely Australian owned, as was dairy, sugar, meat process, railways and major construction. This is most certainly not the case today, with about 80% of mining companies being foreign owned.
It is estimated that in total the three agreements have cost Australia 26,000 manufacturing jobs.
The free trade supporters said propping up "uneconomic factories" forced everyone to pay the high prices for their goods, which damaged the economy overall. If nations did not erect barriers against each other’s trade, all their economies would grow more and there would be less international tension. However, the livelihoods and welfare of voters and their incomes and jobs transcends the welfare of the Economy. The Economy has become an end in itself instead of a means to an end.
Prime Minister Paul Keating in a speech to the Australian Chinese Forum in Sydney on October 12, 1995 said "Asia is emphatically where this country's security and prosperity lie. It is where an increasing number of our people come from and - unambiguously and wholeheartedly - it is where we want to be... Our efforts on free trade, multiculturalism, and education and training are all part of the same strategy."
Pauline Hanson, MHR said that we were in danger of being "swamped by Asians". 1996. And after two years of 'so called' debate, this statement is still the subject of bitter dispute.
The question which must specifically be asked is, "Are there plans to turn Australia into an Asian country?" Her concerns were quite legitimate.
The Age, 16/3/98, reported this statement by Phillip Ruthven, Chairman of IBIS Business Information:
"By 2025 Australia was likely to have ceded some sovereignty over population and some financial and legal matters to a grouping based on our closer neighbours in the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) countries".
Mr Ruthven is saying, in effect, that we will be governed by an Asian group of countries known as APEC, with no control over our population level, economy or law.
Lee Kuan Yew (former Prime Minister of Singapore) sees a steady and inevitable Asianisation of Australia, with our European population ending up as the white trash of Asia.
In May, 1993, the then Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating was openly touting a European Community type of agreement for the Pacific but warned that the region must integrate economically before it commits itself to such an ambitious plan.
It aims at reducing wages and conditions of Australian workers to the levels of the country's Asian trading partners (the so-called "level playing field").
Outcome was as if Keating had intentionally colluded with Howard
Paul Keating has bizarrely attained a stature amongst the supposed liberal intelligentsia of Australia as a visionary and passionate reformer when he was nothing of the sort.
This is exemplified in that curious interview with Richard Fidler on 2 November. (Mp3 file of 24Mb here).
In 1983, without any electoral mandate whatsoever, Paul Keating as Treasurer in the newly elected 'Labor' Government of Bob Hawke introduced the extreme "free market" dogma which has has since spread to constrain every level of Government in Australia from retaining ownership of wealth generating-facilities or providing the services we once expected of Government. This commenced, when out of the blue, Keating announced that he would 'float' the Australian Dollar so that its price would henceforth be set by speculators and not in any way by Government regulation.
As a result, in 2011 governments retain ownership of only very few, if any, of the banks, insurance companies, power generators, water utilities, railways, buses, airlines, and other facilities that they once owned. The crowning jewel of Telstra was privatised in 2006 against the overwhelming wishes of the Australian public. Australia Post is still publicly owned but run as a profit-making corporation and it will surely only be a matter of time before the Federal Government attempts to flog that off as well.
There is almost no difference of substance between Howard and Keating, certainly not enough to justify the seeming animosity displayed in public between the two. Given how they colluded so effectively to impose neo-liberal policies on the public, since at least 1991, whichever of the two formally held Prime Ministerial Office, I can only conclude that the their apparent dislike for each other as shown in the embedded YouTube broadcast below, was only intended for public consumption.
Original broadcast at youtube.com/watch?v=roIeVEf5alk.
Given that Howard won the subsequent 1996 Federal election and was handed a pretext to dishonour his commitment not to slash and burn services, thanks to Keating's concealment of the true magnitude of the Federal Budget deficit during that campaign, the laugh in the above video was not on Howard, but on us.
Keating and Howard
How wonderful to hear the names of Paul Keating and John Howard uttered as a free market duo in the comment above! This is symbolic of the lack of choice in main political parties in Australia over past decades.
Concerns about Ron Paul's "small government" philosophy
Whilst I have much admiration for Ron Paul's courageous stance against the US war machine, I personally have concerns about Ron Paul's "small government" philosophy, which on the surface seems to have much in common with Australia's home grown 'free-market' extremists such as Paul Keating and John Howard. Nevertheless, I think it unlikely that if Ron Paul had been in the shoes of John Howard in 2006, he would have defied the will of the vast majority of public opinion opposed to the sell-off of Telstra. He certainly would not have led this Government into the illegal 1991 war against Iraq (largely based on the "incubator babies" lie) as the Hawke/Keating "Labor" government did, nor the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan as Howard did.
Flora, fauna threatened by motor rally in Northern NSW
Subject was: Surveys.
I agree with Fiona but no I have never visited the Hairy Quandong site nor was I directed to account for flora at that distance from the road edge.
Supreme Court orders stop to logging
Environment East Gippsland presented the Court with official Victorian Government maps to show that the disputed area is a protected National Rainforest Site of Significance. VicForests submitted that the maps were wrong, and that the government department was scrambling to move the boundaries on the official maps before Court resumes next Tuesday 20 December 2011.
"It's a huge win for the forests today", said EEG secretary Liz Ingham who attended the court. "The Court stopped the logging in the nick of time, to prevent a rainforest reserve being logged."
"VicForests blamed the government, saying the rainforest reserve maps were wrong. This is a suspiciously convenient excuse", she said.
"For a very long time, the government has presented the public with rainforest reserve maps. They didn't alter the reserve boundaries when VicForests moved in to log the reserve. They only decided to move the reserve boundaries after our non-profit community environment group took VicForests to court. How convenient. VicForests is a state-owned enterprise with Premier's brother in law on the Board."
"Up here on the ground, those blockading this area hung on for their lives in the forest waiting for the result. They are absolute forest heroes", said Ms Redwood.
The case returns to Court on Tuesday 20 December at 10.30am, at which time the Court will address a further halt to logging.
For comment: Jill Redwood - 5154 0145 / Liz Ingham 0409 333 595
Multiculturalism denies worth of Australian culture
We had the bones of Australian "Multiculturalism" laid bare a few years ago with the furore over assaults and robberies of foreign students and Taxi drivers, notably those of Indian origin.
Panic set in among the ruling class over the economic damage "Racist Attacks" were doing to the multi billion dollar education industry and their wider effect on trade relations with Asia.
That the Indian students and Taxi drivers retaliated using economic means, blockading a major city intersection with their vehicles speaks volumes about their understanding of multiculturalism as opposed to the locals.
The feedback on Political Correctness I've had from many of the non-European migrants I've spoken to isn't favourable, one African acquaintance of mine finds the whole idea and it's practitioners contemptible, he takes delight in tormenting them, his dark skin allows him to make a great sport of tying the poor souls in knots and making them squirm. He actually said to me:
"You people have a culture, it's ridiculous that you try to disown it, Africans are not like that".
Growth of housing units
A phenomenon I'm seeing a lot of is developers taking a modest sized suburban house, demolishing it and putting a block of 6 or so units in its place. This might not be so bad if the units were modestly and affordably priced. However the developers will typically charge a similar or greater price for each unit than what they paid for the original house. And people will buy them. This is a license to print money and of course the local councils let the developers get away with it.
As to these oversized block-filling single dwellings, we do seem to live in an age of excess. Our current paradigm of constant economic growth requires it. 3%+ GDP growth per year where the population growth rate is much lower (although way too high) means people have to spend extravagantly to keep the whole thing afloat - and people do, so I guess advertising works. But of course it can't last. Its almost at an end probably.
Academic courses taught "Australia has no culture"
A Vietnamese woman studying "Multiculturalism" at one of the Melbourne Institutes of learning a few years ago told me that the students were taught in discussing the topic, that there were no arguments against multiculturalism - only those for - and that Australia actually had no culture. What I found strangely disrespectful was that she had no compunction in saying this to me as an Australian!
How many countries do you visit where you would sit down to a friendly meal with the locals and tell them they come from a nil culture ? Unbelievable, but true!
Multiculturalism is a smokescreen for fraud
"BraveNewWorld", your observations would resonate with most Canadians---at least----Canadians of my generation and older.
One by one, our traditions and symbols are falling like bowling pins, except for one courageous action by our much reviled "Conservative" government. They restored the word "Royal" to the name of the Canadian Air Force. The hypocritical reaction by the "left" was predictable. Like the republicans in Australia, they said that keeping such symbols was indicative of a colonial mentality, proof that we had not yet "grown up" as a nation. Hmmm. Yet they are willing to see Canada colonized by cultures from across the globe, and are gleeful by the exponential increase in the number of "ethnic" (that is foreign) enclaves in Canada's urban centres.
It is absurd to say that keeping the Queen as our politically impotent head of state is a symbol of subservience. The fact that I kept my father's surname ("Murray") is not a statement of my subservience or lack of independence from my father. It is simply a tribute to his contribution to my well-being and character. He is part of me, but not the whole of me. And I will not renounce his name to make someone else feel comfortable.
The British, the French and the indigenous peoples are not mere fragments of a Canadian "mosaic" but FOUNDING PEOPLES in a distinctive CANADIAN culture. Apologists for multiculturalism often remark, "What is a Canadian anyway?", as they see the cultural fragmentation of our country proceed unchecked with the arrival of 700,000 migrants a year 90% of whom from "non-traditional" sources. But Canadians of my father's generation, the ones who stormed Juno Beach in Normandy or flew in the RAF, RCAF or served in the "Royal" Canadian navy as my uncles did knew what a Canadian was. And so did the people they left behind at home.
In just 30 years I have witnessed the deliberate and calculated demolition of a nation. A nation that our founding peoples created long before the Johnny-come-latelys joined the party. My great grandparents---the first of my family to make Canada their home---were Scandinavians----and they were proud to salute the Red Ensign (with its Union Jack), make an oath of allegiance to our CANADIAN head-of-state (Queen Victoria), obey British-based laws and speak one of our official languages (English) without aid or encouragement. And their attitude is still typical of most immigrants today no matter where they came from. Who then is behind this policy of official multicultural-schism? Answer-- two groups---those who have found it politically convenient to harness and mobilize ethnic voters as a bloc vote in support of the growth lobby. And those cheap labour employers who want a large pool of unskilled labour to draw from and more consumers to sell to.
It is time that the ideology of multiculturalism be exposed for what it is. A fig leaf for the corporate agenda of growing the labour pool under the guise of 'diversity and tolerance'. Multiculturalism, aka "Diversity", is just a smokescreen for a criminally destructive Population Ponzi Scheme. When will so-called "left wing" dupes see it for the scam it is? When will they understand that the best friend that workers have is a TIGHT LABOUR MARKET? When will environmentalists understand that mass immigration has a profoundly negative ecological impact, and that in effect, more "cultural diversity" comes at the expense of "biological diversity", as new housing sprawls over our best farmland to accommodate immigration-driven population growth, putting 500 species-at-risk?
Tim Murray
The story of a Melbourne suburb
Suzanne, your website is the story of a Melbourne suburb which I know well but the story could apply in just about any population centre in Australia. What is happening is wholesale destruction of a living environment. It is happening piecemeal but very quickly. The older you are and the longer you have lived in a place that is being destroyed the more you will notice and feel the changing surroundings. Now, if I find a piece of Melbourne's suburbia that looks relatively intact my feeling is not relief, but anxiety that it will be the next victim. One could come up with a litany of horrors in Melbourne far more extensive than Don Giovanni's lovers, but just around the corner from where I live sat an Edwardian brick villa on a generous but not huge block of land covered in vegetation including old trees. The house was sold after which there was an expensive and time consuming wrangle about the proposed development ending up in V.C.A.T. which the local residents lost. The house was demolished and the block was totally mined for every cubic centimetre of space that was legally possible to procure. From fence to fence it was excavated to a depth of about 3 metres. A very bulky dark grey 2 storey, 3 level box like structure now occupies the site leaving about 2 metres at the back back as an outdoor area. The windows are small square portholes and after about 5 years of industry this gloomy monolith is still empty and unfinished.
The absolutely abysmal contemporary domestic edifices that generally replace and now dwarf the remaining original houses in suburban Melbourne have absolutely nothing to do with quality modern architecture. Of course the AV Jennings style houses of the 50s also suffered from a designer by-pass but they were relatively modest in size, occupied a site rather than dominating it, were protected from overhead sun with generous eaves and once surrounded by their gardens, actually combined together to form rather pleasant distinctive neighbourhoods. The late 1950s and 1960s gave rise to some absolutely lovely houses in places like Eltham, Beaumaris and Templestowe. Characteristically they were more open plan than the AV Jennings style, with crazy rock fireplaces, large windows, often flat tilted roofs or as a contrast cathedral ceilings, usually nestled almost hidden in their bushy blocks. Maybe they were a bit shy? It's a pity that the dross that now passes for housing design and dominating Melbourne's suburban landscape are not shy as well. The whole genre whether it is mock Georgian, a columned confection or an aborted impression of a 3 dimensional Mondrian sans primary colours, it should be totally embarrassed about what it is and what it displaces. It is difficult to articulate an aesthetic and no doubt I have failed but the constant demolition of serviceable dwellings for much larger ones is cause for outrage in itself.
Like your page, Suzy.
Your page is fantastic, Suzanne. Please write for us as well.
Oh, I can so relate to
Oh, I can so relate to this... I have lived in the same neighborhood (Bentleigh) all my life, and, like in almost every other suburb, it is relentlessly being destroyed by ugly developments. Seeing the changes is a constant source of upset and stress as the new developments are so ugly and barren, replacing smaller houses and nice gardens. (I did a webpage about it.) It would not be so bad if the developments were harmonious with their surroundings, but developers seem incapable of being so considerate. (I do also feel sympathy for the Aborigines, for whom the destruction of the land they had occupied for thousands of years must have been considerably more traumatic.)
Childish simplification
To say that Melbourne would continue to grow even without increases from immigration really says very little at all as it ignores magnitude! The implication seems to be that it doesn't really matter if we double or more than double our rate of growth! It is hard to believe that a "grown up", let alone the Victorian Minister for Planning could bother making a statement that makes him appear utterly innumerate and hoping everyone else is too!
Multiculturalism assumes we don't have a unique culture
"Two generations of students have been taught to believe that all cultures are created equal, that we do not have a legitimate made-in-Canada or made-in-America cultural identity deserving of protection....".
The same mentality exists in Australia. After 70 years of "White Australia" policy, we are meant to feel guilt and thus we need to have open borders and open minds and allow "diversity" and multiculturalism as an ideal. Patriotism for Australia is considered "racist" but other settlers are encouraged to cherish their national/cultural identities.
Multiculturalism assumes that Australia doesn't have a culture. Our early poets, bush-ballads, traditional songs and dances, folklore, visual arts, indigenous culture, colonial and Federation architecture is undermined by modern-day celebration of "Harmony" and "Diversity". How many school kids would recognise or recite one of Banjo Patterson's poems now?
"Multiculture" is not a culture itself, but a salad of mixed ethnic identities. It's been used to justify mass immigration. There's no "glue" to hold together any common ideals - and there are strong sanctions against any discussion or criticism of it.
Even the ANZAC Day memories are becoming of little significance, but for a few who remember their fore-fathers who fought in the two world wars, it is being embraced as a symbol of our past.
Legal Injuction VicForests - time and place
MEDIA ALERT
Legal injunction to stop logging.
WHEN: 10:30am Weds 14 December
WHERE: Supreme Court, Court 10, cnr William and Lonsdale Street Melbourne.
WHAT: Application to stop logging in National Rainforest Site of Significance in East Gippsland. EEG will lodge writ to sue VicForests to prevent illegal logging. Meanwhile, forest activists are blockading the site.
WHO: Environment East Gippsland
"This is a National Rainforest Site of Significance. They shouldn't be touching it with scissors, let alone a chainsaw," said Ms Ingham
For comment: Jill Redwood - 5154 0145, Liz Ingham (at Court) - 0409 333 595
Taking a path toward sustainability while there is still time.
?'Kicking so many cans down the road' and denying responsibility for our reckless overconsumption, relentless overproduction and rampant overpopulation activities today can fulfill nothing more than the promise of a disastrous future for children everywhere tomorrow. Choosing now to live outrageously greedy lifestyles that are patently unsustainable provides all the wrong lessons to our children, who must learn to live sustainably before it is too late for human behavior change to make a difference.
President Lincoln on reponsibility for tomorrow
“We cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
- Abraham Lincoln
Sea Shepherd being obstructed by our Government
Our so-called anti-whaling government is not only failing to support Sea Shepherd's campaign, but they are actively obstructing their efforts. They are trying to delay plans to confront the Japanese whaling fleet.
Chris Aultman, who has been their helicopter pilot annually since 2005, was denied a visa to Australia. He was not given a reason for this decision.
Chris Aultman is veteran of the U.S. Marine Corp, a professional helicopter pilot, a star of Animal Planet’s Whale Wars series. He is a hero, a man who does not have a criminal record. It is his job to spot the whaling fleet, and report to the activists.
There is obviously collaboration with Japan, to protect their interests.
(reprinted from Sea Shepherd web site
Captain Paul Watson spoke personally to Australian Environment Minister Tony Burke while attending the Australian Antarctic Expedition’s 100th year anniversary dinner in Hobart on December 1st.
Captain Paul Watson: Mr. Burke will you be sending a ship to keep the peace this year?
Tony Burke: That’s not going to happen.
Captain Paul Watson: I think it would be the responsible thing for Australia to do considering the potential threat from the whalers who have indicated they intend to be far more aggressive this season.
Tony Burke: Look, Japan requested that we send a ship to protect their ships from you. If we turned them down it’s only fair that we deny your request also.
Captain Paul Watson: Well, except for one thing. Our ships carry Australian citizens on our crew and we will be in the Australian Antarctic Territorial waters and it is your duty to protect Australian waters and Australian citizens.
Tony Burke: (shakes Captain Watson’s hand) It’s nice to meet you and stay safe down there.
Captain Watson said after that conversation, “I wonder what the Minister will say if the Japanese injure any Australian citizens in Australian waters? I think this is grossly irresponsible of the government to refrain from due diligence in keeping the peace. Australia has stated that Japanese whaling is illegal and they recognize that it is being carried out in waters claimed by Australia. They know that Australian lives will be at risk and yet they refuse to get involved.”
The denial of the visa for Chris Aultman is another indication of the Australian government’s hostility towards Sea Shepherd’s opposition to illegal whaling.
Will never find a closure for "affordable housing"
"Figures show that Melbourne would still increase by 500 a week even if there was no immigration. So what do we do about that?"
So that even is people weren't migrating from overseas, Melbourne's population would still increase by the same amount? What sort of weird logic is this? It's more than 500 per week anyway. It's more like 1500 per week.
The need for "affordable housing" is justifying Matthew Guy's job, and he isn't likely to downgrade his position. The need for housing will never find closure. While we build houses in one week, more keep arriving. The need for "affordable housing" is continuous.
Demand for housing keeps prices high
According to the ABS: "In Australia, successive governments have used overseas migration for economic and nation building goals".
This means that our overall GDP will increase through net population growth. However, population growth does not increase personal wealth - it just distributes it between more people. Like livestock, adding more increases the farmer's wealth, but not necessarily the welfare of the animals.
ABS: "Recent increases in immigration reflect Australia's relatively strong economic growth as well as the engagement of Australia in the wider global economy, and especially the provision of education services to large numbers of overseas students".
This means that we are part of the "wider global economy" and must, according to global trends, continue to accept population growth. The large number of overseas students allows education to be a route to residency - it's cheaper than investing in domestic education.
ABS:"Although unauthorised arrivals do not have a visa, they are counted in NOM statistics and hence may be included in the population estimates, subject to their duration of stay".
Officially we accept 13,000 humanitarian immigrants per year, but it's not clear if asylum seekers arriving here are included in this number. They are insignificant in the overall NOM- but capture all the media "immigration" attention.
ABS: "Natural increase (births minus deaths) accounted for an increase of 8,600 people in June quarter 2010. Net overseas migration contributed a similar increase (8,800) in the same quarter, and has consistently been the largest component of population growth since December quarter 2006".
To say that with or without immigration we would still have the same increase in population is simply a denial. Natural growth and immigration numbers were very similar. Also, part of our "natural" growth would be attributed to immigration.
According to a WestPac report: "Outlook for Australian Property Markets Report - 2010- 2012" August 2010, "Although annual growth in population has finally peaked, it remained a healthy (?) 114,000 people in the year to December 2009, Immigration was the key driver accounting for 70% of the growth".
Also: "The immigration is fueling a need for more dwellings and helping boost economic growth. The risk to the markets are potentially tighter immigration laws and lower numbers should there be a change in Government".
Immigration is good news for those investing in property and land speculation. It increases demand for housing, and ensures the prices remain high.
Cooperation is our downfall
It's interesting how so many people say, when talking generally that we must all pull together somehow, allow high rise and high density to accommodate an ever rising population. Somehow they have swallowed the propaganda in the main media that growth is inevitable and we must accommodate it (ad infinitum) by increasing the density and height of our living arrangements. This is all very cooperative and nice and the changes can be tolerated in the short term as long as the adverse effects are not directly in one's face, like next door! The catch is that the effects - e.g. increased traffic and increased rates to cover the upgrade of infrastructure, greater competition for use of public parks and gardens are felt when it is too late if one did not notice it coming because the offending overdevelopment was 2 blocks away rather than in the same street. This is one of the reasons the growth lobby and associated developers get away with what they are doing. We are eager to do our bit with everything, saving water (for ever greater population) relinquishing our back yards, but for what? People only seem to get fired up about what is detrimental to them when it is amplified by being in direct confrontation. If it is in the next suburb or "over there" (as a friend of mine described a proposed high rise development in his suburb that was not next door , therefore acceptable) then it passes under the notice of most but is felt by degrees as this process is repeated.
Renewable energy and perpetual motion
Thanks, Tim for such an interesting and informative article. If humankind had been better educated decades ago in these matters of scale of energy production and materials needed for technology from excellent articles like Dawn Stover's,
which you cited, and Sheila Newman's The Final Energy Crisis (2005, 2008)
then maybe humankind could have acted more decisively against the dire peril we now face, when it could more easily have made the necessary difference.
Of course I can't accept the way you have dismissed efforts by Americans and Australians to stop the Iraq War:
Without the United States Navy to impose its power and police the seaways, it is unlikely that you could drive your car to the local shopping centre to buy your latest gadget or load up on groceries. You know, that car with the "End the Iraq War" bumper sticker on it. (Never mind. Dump the car, live off the grid and wear a Ghandian loin cloth if that fits the image you want to project. But spare me your hypocrisy. You aren’t baling out of the industrial system or your dependence on the violence it’s built on.)
Even if the life-styles of some anti-war activists depended to some extent upon resources mined from countries that have been colonised or re-colonised in the wars they tried to prevent, how were their actions hypocritical?
The real hypocrisy was committed by people who have claimed to oppose those wars but whose actions have caused the opportunity to stop those wars to be lost.
In 2003, the largest protest marches since the Vietnam war occurred in Australia. They were against Australia's participation in the "Coalition of the Willing" which used the fraudulent lie of Iraqi "Weapons of Mass Destruction" to launch that illegal invasion. After the invasion of Iraq occurred, the 'leaders' of that protest movement allowed it to fold.
Quite possibly some of those mis-leaders may have acted consciously to protect their own material self-interest, but I think if you had put it to most of those who participated in the marches:
"Would you still oppose the war even if it meant that would have to adjust to a less affluent lifestyle?
... I am sure that the overwhelming majority would have still opposed the war.
In any case, most people in the US and Australia don't gain that much from the wealth plundered from countries like Iraq and Libya.
'Economists' can make families, which own two or more cars, mod-cons and houses with inflated values, etc., appear affluent. Certainly such life-styles consume an unfair proportion of the earth's non-renewable natural resources, but how happy can families in which both parents now have to work and work overtime and spend hours each day of the week commuting to and from work through grid-lock traffic truly be?
Humankind has faced mortal peril a number of times in modern history a well as in earlier times. This includes the threat of global nuclear holocaust.
By acting on no less than three occasions to stop the US military-industrial complex from launching global nuclear war, the late President John F Kennedy showed it was possible for humankind to act to prevent calamity.
I believe that an examination of history, particularly since the start of the twentieth century, will show us that most of the calamities humankind has suffered could have been avoided.
Knowing how they could have been avoided and why they weren't could at give humankind some guide as to how it could prevent calamity in future, whether it be from war, overpopulation, resource depletion, global warming or whatever.
As I have shown elsewhere the Pacific War of 1942-1945 could have been prevented if the US had not imposed sanctions on Japan. These sanctions resulted in the downfall of the Government of Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye "that desperately did not want a war with the United States."
Examination of history prior to 1939 reveals that a number of opportunities to prevent the whole Second World War were lost. These include the defeated Spanish Revolution of 1936-1937 of which George Orwell wrote in "Homage to Catalonia", the German workers' revolutions which followed the First World War, the defeats of which paved the way to Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the defeat of the 1926 General Strike in Britain, etc.
If the Second World War, with its loss of over 60 million lives and devastation inflicted on much of the rest of the world, could have been prevented, and if nuclear holocaust has been so far prevented, then I don't see why we don't also stand a chance of stopping resource shortage and overpopulation causing the collapse of human civilisation.
Population Bomb
I totaly agree with all this. Look at the population increase graph. Exponential growth is always usustainable in a finite envirionment. All, or at least most of our problems are down to the numbers of us crawling over the planet.
Some suggest that as the lesser developed counties develope then their birth rates will fall to those aproximating those of the West, this may be the case if that is what was actually happening. It seems to me that the number of poor is increasing, especially in remnant agrarian societies where the farms get smaller as the populations get bigger.
Having said that. The other question is , do we want larger populations. There is QUALITY of life to think about. Do we want to live in the conditions that are now common in many of the worlds mega cities. Might be OK if your rich, but not much fun if you're not.
Mary nails it
Can't argue with that, Mary. You are absolutely on the nail.
A property-based economy
Victoria's economy is almost totally reliant on the growth and dominance of the property and housing market. Many of these high rises are not for Australians but are sold overseas. It's a lucrative market, and brings in foreign money to our economy. The fact that is isn't democratic or consultative is neither here nor there any more. Planning has more to do with breaking down barriers and regulations of any previous restrictions and plans, and is more about a frenzied property industry than common sense or transparency. The developers have all the cash, and they are able to "buy" favours. The State government is just a facilitator of the real estate market. The corruption goes down deep, but we are fooled by the facade of democracy. Population growth must continue because we need a continual influx of buyers, and many residents are unable to afford, or desire, the high density and high rises being built now.
Australia's only national radio talkback show axed
The following was adapted from a post I made to a forum discussion which followed from a recent ABC Radio National Auatralia Talks program.
The opportunity that "Australia Talks" has up until now, given ordinary Australians to challenge the mainstream orthodoxy that is fed to us by mot of the media, including much of the ABC, and which is being promoted on this page by some contributors, will no longer be there.
If we are to hope for any decent future it is urgent that people who have been using "Australia Talks" to promote democracy and human decency find other means to express their views. While we still have a free Internet, this opportunity still exists.
Use it!
If you have not already done so, establish your own blog and link to other resources on the web which promote truth and open dicussion. Go to forum discussion sites like onlineopinion.com.au, johnquiggin.com, larvatusprodeo.net, candobetter.net, webdiary.com.au to argue your case and hold to account our political and business rulers and the biased newsmedia ('alternative' as well as mainstream) as we are doing here now.
Evidence that FDR wanted Pearl Harbour attack
About 4 years ago I read in "Towers of Deception" (2006) by Canadian Malthusian and truth activist Barrie Zwicker:
By August 6 1941, Japanese forces were poised to attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii where the Pacific fleet had purposefully been exposed to them. The US high command had broken all the Japanese codes (although the Japanese did not know this) and could have prevented the attack, but Roosevelt made sure that it was unopposed.
I put this claim to one side in my mind, but today I read an article, Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor? of 7 Dec 2011 by Patrick J. Buchanan which confirms this claim beyond any doubt:
Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four-year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.
Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.
The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.
On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.
The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.
Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.
On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.
Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.
On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.
On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.
On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.
On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska, or anyplace designated by the president.”
No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.
In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.
At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”
The bloody Pacific War in which much of South East Asia was brutally occupied by Japan and in which Australia and New Zealand came very close to suffering the same fate, would not have occurred if Prince Fumimaro Konoye had remained Prime Minister, but FDR's War Council wanted war just as much as did General Hideki Tojo.
According to the same article:
“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.
Given that the war lasted nearly 4 years and that the Japanese came close to winning he Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942 it seems that the US War Council had badly miscalculated? But had they?
So may other decisions made by the US and Britain elsewhere actually served to prolong the Second World - the failure to make a serious attempt using means that they had at their disposal to prevent German conquest of the Italian Peninsula in 1943 (Operation Achse) after the Italians had overthrown Mussolini's Fascist Regime in July 1943 and the D-Day invasion of France in June 1944 which advances through Italy (although at needlessly terrible cost) had made unnecessary are two of a number of examples which come to mind.
It was as if the prolongation of the European War actually enabled the war industries to make more profit (even if paid for at terrible cost to the rest of the US economy and in lives). So, would a war which lasted only 3 months in the Pacific have been as profitable for the war industry as the 4 year war which actually occurred?
Ad hominem cannot replace substantive argument
Simply labeling a political group, the goals of which you oppose, "TERRORIST" adds nothing of value to this discussion.
Why violence committed by an insurgent movement (e.g. the Libyan National Transitional Council) should be any less reprehensible than the violence of the government fighting the insurgency (e.g. the former Libyan Government of the late Muammar Gaddafi) has not been explained.
Make a call to protect the Pilliga from coal seam gas
Another urgency:
Water quality test results show gas company Santos is dumping toxic water into Bohena creek in the Pilliga forest, threatening aquatic life with raised levels of ammonia and methane.
According to the Wilderness Society, Santos must stop discharging water immediately until there is a full scale investigation and water can be shown to be safe.
Currently, there are 92 coal seam gas wells in the Pilliga, but Santos have plans for 1100 gas wells, increasing the volume of water being discharged by more than 10 times.
It’s up to us to tell Minister Burke: We don’t want the unique Pilliga Forest and downstream rivers polluted by coal seam gas mining! He should be taking action to protect our natural assets.
Please take one minute to call and leave a message for Minister Burke.
Tel: (02) 6277 7640
Email: Tony.Burke.MP AT aph.gov.au
The constant demand on our environment for economic growth will mean loosening of our environmental protection regulations.
We must stop the greed, and head towards a sustainable "steady state" economic model.
Collective denial
According to the UN, our planet must ramp up food production by 2050 to from 50% to 70% more than we do now, to feed 9 billion people. Is this going to magically happen? No, it's obvious. On the contrary, farms and soils are degrading, and declining. There's not magic wand to increase food production. The "experts" on the main continue to fool around with comforting words, or deny this loaded bomb.
There are significant natural obstacles to increased food production.
Projections indicate that by 2050 Asia’s urban population will increase by 1.8 billion, Africa by 900 million and Latin America and the Caribbean by 200 million.
There are reports, workshops, conferences, and political platitudes, but nobody states the obvious hopelessness of this situation.
- World population will increase from about 7 billion today to over 9 billion by 2050.
- Global urban population will increase from 49 percent to around 70 percent, or 6.3 billion people.
- Due to rising prosperity in Asia, global meat demand per year will rise by an estimated 180 million tonnes, to reach 465 million tonnes.
The production of 1kg of beef uses 12 times the amount of water needed to produce 1kg of wheat, and more than five times the amount of land.
Where will all these animals be stored? The quantity of water and food and pollution demanded by the more prosperous, on top of the food pyramid, with exacerbate the food security problems. Market forces will determine who has the priority in being fed.
For the first time in humanity, more than half the world's population now live in cities.
Already the developing world represents 95 per cent of global population growth. And if this rate continues, by the middle of this century 86 per cent of the world's population will, in fact, live in developing regions.
To simply maintain pace with population growth, we need to raise agricultural productivity across the globe by 1.5% annually, and importantly by an average of 1.8% in developing countries. These rates do not account for the additional challenges presented by climate change, loss of arable land, declining water resources and urbanisation.
Not one expert or official suggests a global population stability/reduction plan. It all about supply chains, efficiency, rationing and improving infrastructure.
Optimum Population Trust UK said:
"We believe that investing in improved reproductive health and encouraging a lower global birth rate are the best ways of achieving long term food security and must be an important contributor to those efforts."
OPT chief executive Simon Ross commented:
"We have to act now to both provide the 200 million women who currently lack access to modern contraception with the means to manage their own fertility."
Uganda has struggled with promoting family planning in regard to acceptance, and today it has one of the highest total fertility
rates in East Africa. Entrenched habits/practices and customs, such as having lots of kids, can be quite hard to break.
Where's all the common sense, priorities and urgency on the obvious and pertinent population issue?
Was Martin Bryant the Port Arthur killer?
All I can say is that while viewing the TV at the time of the massacre and during the siege, I think it was a direct telecast. I heard distinct rifle shots that went like this: bang---bang---bang-bang---bang. Being an army person those shots were fired in a split second, and that could only be fired in such precision by a trained person. Interesting to note that the recording was never seen or heard again. Secondly, there was so much devastation conducted in the cafe in such a short time that once again could only be the handiwork of a trained person. And a person with an IQ of 66 couldn't be a trained person.
I have never seen as biased article as this one
Subject was: "I have never seen a biased article as this one"
This does not even take into consideration 'Tamil Tigers' are categorized as TERRORISTS by 32 countries. So many countries don't ban an organization for no reason.
7 billion is many too many....
We have to think globally and act locally, I suppose. Any thoughts?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XQIxr4gRQM&feature=player_embedded
http://www.7billionactions.org/story/1187-steven-earl-salmony
http://www.youtube.com/?watch?v=_KkmFuM77qU
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Chapel Hill, NC
Some responses to Evan's challenges to Madeline
On December 7th, 2011 Evan Jones (not verified) wrote:
Re/Madeline Weld, “Feeding The Raging Monster...” Weld asserts that increased living standards are fertility stimulants. Without statistics to support this claim, it is no more than anecdotal and apocryphal.
SHEILA: Virginia Abernethy's fertility opportunity tested this in "Not Tonight, Sweetie; No Energy". She is a well-known population anthropologist with a profound knowledge of demographic rules.
Also, if higher living standards of international migrants can lead to increased fecundity, so too can regional migration. If migration from Nova Scotia to Quebec might lead to increased birth rates, why not proscribe such migration?
SHEILA: The answer here is to have locally imposed limits on building permits in line with democratic (rather than commercially speculative) views that seek to keep local populations within the bounds of local water catchments, soil arability etc. In reality this is what local communities have always done. Immigration that is beyond the control of local communities is always imposed undemocratically and generally by people in power who stand to benefit from that immigration, which costs the local community control and security over resources and rights. So, increase citizens rights and local self-government.
If the fecundity of international migrants is the raging monster, why is futile border control the favored response over the proven efficacy of education, family planning, reproductive health, and women's empowerment? If population growth is the concern, how can we be silent on the reckless and contributory birth practices of the many major indigenous religious and cultural groups which promote large families?
SHEILA: The "efficacity of education, family planning, reproductive health, and women's empowerment" is not 'proven'. These are conditions which co-exist with other conditions, which may be part of the story. For instance, as the Great Depression bit, birthrates dropped in Western countries - Australia, France, America. Why? Because people could see that they could not afford to have children. At the same time education for women and women's rights as well as public education, access to contraception, housing shortages and laws against child labour were also increasing. Probably laws against child labour, along with access to contraception and the perception that bad times are settling in, plus limited housing, are the major disincentives to productive unions/marriage/families. See Doepke's theory on how Korea managed to cut down its birth rate when it enforced laws against child labour compared to Brazil, which allowed child labour. Poor people only have their labour to sell and their children's. If they cannot make money out of children then it does not make sense for them to have many. If they have to educate those children before they can get work, those children will become too expensive. There are other very strong factors in population stability, in different systems of land-tenure and inheritance laws, but I will save these for some other day.
If lower migrant population is the goal, a specific plan should be proposed for migration control. How much will it cost to implement, what will be the source of funds, and where/when has this approach been used successfully and in a sustainable way in the past?
Migration control was part and parcel of every local community in the past. In countries with strong democracies, such as those in Europe, where citizens actually have real rights, their rights to housing and income take precedence over those of potential new citizens. In those countries private power is still less than the state and makes it difficult for moguls to increase their capital by increasing demand for assets and resources that they own through influencing high immigration policies.
Interdiction of migrants at national borders or by fiat has proven as successful as controlling migration of Canada geese and butterflies. Lacking a detailed plan to present to the authorities, Weld risks the accusation that she is doing little more than “preaching to the choir.” Hard facts, data, and realistic action proposals are needed here before Weld can begin to be taken seriously.
In Europe those with power are citizens. Legal immigrants have some rights but not the same ones as citizens. Local communities (through prefectures etc) control the granting of work permits, accommodation and public order and building permits. The communities and government have the power to enforce policing of illegal work. Although there is a lot of illegal immigration, it does not get the same permanent foothold as in the US and Canada because it is so difficult to compete with citizens to survive well. For instance, in Europe where all education, including university education, is free, illegal immigrants cannot obtain this - so it becomes very difficult for them to remain for generations. My feeling is that all peoples need to have systems that grant strong rights to citizens and lesser rights to capital. We all need to relocalise power and to focus on local feedback as the priority when considering having children and emigrating. Communities must have the right to self-government, including limiting building permits as they agree democratically.
Addressing climate change without population is futile