Author: bobmcgee

Smoking guns …

It is absolutely clear.

There were doctors in cahoots with big tobacco. They were paid to say that there was no link between smoking and lung cancer. Meanwhile big tobacco poured money into the coffers of corrupt politicians to dissuade them from legislating against big tobacco.

Proof positive that climate change causes bush fires. And that Tony Abbott is putting a match to our grandchildren’s future at the behest of big oil.

As a wise man once said …

Throughout most of my life, I’ve raised tobacco, I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve chopped it. I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.

Indeed, the very same man accepted $16,690 from tobacco industry political action committees from 1980 to 1990. Bear in mind that the link between smoking and lung cancer was recognised by Dr Fritz Lickint in 1929 and  solid epidemiological evidence was published in the 1950’s. The Surgeon General of the United States recommended smokers should stop smoking in 1964.

Which must make Al Gore very angry, oh hang on that is Al Gore I’m talking about, so it must make him an expert on climate change, or hypocrisy or something.

 

A woman has been charged after she allegedly drove past police in Broome with a man wearing a dinosaur “onesie” and a snorkel on the bonnet of the car.

Police were on their way to Gantheaume Point Cable Beach at 7:20am on Sunday, when they spotted a white Ford Falcon wagon travelling about 60 kilometres an hour, with a man lying on the bonnet.

Police stopped the car, with the man still lying on the bonnet facing the driver, smoking a cigarette, dressed in a dinosaur onesie and wearing a snorkel.

A police spokesperson said the 23-year-old female driver was charged with driving with a blood alcohol level in excess of 0.05% and reckless driving.

The vehicle was seized under hoon legislation. The woman will be summonsed and appear in court at a later date.

Both the male and female are French nationals of no fixed address.  It is believed they are backpackers who were living in the vehicle.

dinosaur353-300x0

The picture shows a dinosaur onesie, de rigeur in France.

Smoking through a snorkel … ?

Obesity is not a disease …

Recently the fire service had to demolish two walls of a house in south Wales so that a 63-stone teenager could be taken to hospital. This required more than 40 emergency service workers at an estimated cost of £100,000. Over the past five years, fire services have been called to more than 2,700 incidents to assist ‘severely obese’ people, including some who had got stuck in the bath. Rescuing fatties is now a routine operation, with its own entry in the Fire Brigade incident reporting system (filed under ‘bariatric persons’).

More people are now fat and fewer of them care. Read all about it <HERE>.

Climate shock …

Is it surprising that the government would support an alarm lacking scientific support? Not really. In our study of situations that are analogous to the current alarm over scenarios of global warming, we identified 26 earlier movements based on scenarios of man made disaster, including the global cooling alarm in the 1960s to 1970s. None of them were based on scientific forecasts. And yet, governments imposed costly policies in response to 23 of them. In no case did the forecast of major harm come true.

by Kesten C. Green, J. Scott Armstrong, and Willie Soon.

You can read the whole article <HERE>.

There is a significant warming trend evident in Australia. In Melbourne for example, an increase of 6.2 degrees Centigrade in average daily maxima can reasonably be expected by January (BoM figures). Summer’s like that. But sometimes there are cooling trends. Someone should do something about it …

But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

That of course is from the 1975 Newsweek article telling us of our imminent plunge into the next ice age, it canvassed such spectacular strategies as “melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers“. You can read it <HERE>.

polarbearscooking

Give a dog …

… a bad name and then hang him.

I have no brief for Geoff Shaw, if he has corruptly misused his government car and other entitlements then let him face the consequences. If a former prime minister permitted the corrupt misuse of her government car let her face the consequences, too. But, hey, fair go with the other stuff.

Yesterday we saw some ugly footage of Mr Shaw pushing over a protester. You can find it on Youtube, I won’t bother putting a link. It shows just enough of the incident to give the impression of nasty Mr Shaw pushing over a poor old man. Today we can see the incident from an earlier point. You can watch it <HERE>. Clearly on this charge Mr Shaw has no case to answer.

Politicians should have safe access to their workplace, it is ridiculous that they should have to run the gauntlet of violent protesters.

And how useful were the protective services officers at the top of the steps?

One down …

Michael Williamson has pleaded guilty to plundering the Health Services Union of getting on for a million dollars. The one time president of the Australian Labor Party and head of the Health Services Union was being paid $513,294 per year at the time. Jail looks likely.

Wouldn’t trust union officials as far as I could throw’em. You would have to wonder why the ALP recruits so heavily from that arena.