Author: bobmcgee

Scolded …

A MUSLIM man standing trial over his role in last year’s violent protests in central Sydney has been scolded for his “disrespect” after refusing to stand before a magistrate.

Mohammed Issai Issaka, 44, has pleaded not guilty to rioting, resisting arrest and assaulting police during the protests last September, organised in response to an internet video defaming the Islamic prophet Mohammed.

As the hearing commenced in Sydney’s Downing Centre yesterday, Mr Issaka refused to rise from his chair as a show of respect to magistrate Jacqueline Milledge as she entered the room.

Ms Milledge then repeatedly demanded the defendant stand, refusing to accept his excuse.

“You can tell me where it is in his religion that it says he cannot stand,” Ms Milledge told Mr Issaka’s lawyer. “I was a magistrate at Bankstown court (in southwest Sydney) for four years and I have never had to deal with such disrespect.”

After a delay of almost half an hour, the case resumed with Mr Issaka waiting outside the courtroom until the magistrate was seated.

Round one to Issaka …

Place …

As a kid growing up in the east end of London, places like Epping Forest had an almost magical effect on me.

Australia is rich in places that have much the same ability, a little shiver and a sudden sense of smallness within a vast universe, others might say numinous but that would admit the supernatural.

My place in the country finds ways of doing it to me again and again.

Saturday morning we had our first frost for the year, as the sun gots its edge over the trees along the creek it highlighted a mist suspended on an inversion about 20 metres above the ground with a red sky backdrop, by the time I got the camera the whole place was enveloped in fog.

DSC_9431My morning walk …

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May thirty-first …

Even more scary than carbon dioxide …

“This is a really big asteroid, similar in size to the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and it’s getting very close to us,” she said. “Fortunately we’ve been tracking its orbit very carefully so we know with great certainty it won’t hit us.

“We don’t need to panic, but we do need to pay attention,” she said.

Is that like, 97% of space scientists agree?

It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT.

Maybe it is, the trajectory of objects is space is about observations and calculations, not computer modelling. Still asteroids pose a far greater risk to life on earth than does CO2.

Full article <HERE>.

After dark …

Burglars in New South Wales should be quite safe from the police during the hours of darkness … but watch out for the vigilantes …

WHEN police scaled back their search for toddler Tyler Kennedy at nightfall on Friday, nearby residents refused to give up, turning out in droves to scour the thick bushland where he had disappeared.

With temperatures plunging to 6C, the community of Johns River, on the mid-north coast (of NSW), feared two-year-old Tyler could die of exposure …

Soon after the official search was scaled down at 5.30pm, more than 100 volunteers joined the only remaining police officer on the scene and the search was back on.

By 1.15am, a group of volunteers found Tyler in thick scrub  … , covered in scratches and bitterly cold, was reunited with his distraught mother Amanda Kennedy. “I was speechless when they said they had to call it off,” Ms Kennedy, 21, said. “My heart stopped and I walked away. I couldn’t handle it.

“We thought, ‘OK, we’ll call in our own search party and get everyone out there to find him’.”

Good answer …

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• Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America …

• India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong by far the least tolerant. In only three of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbor of a different race. This included 43.5 percent of Indians, 51.4 percent of Jordanians and an astonishingly high 71.8 percent of Hong Kongers and 71.7 percent of Bangladeshis.

The full article, including a discussion of possible sources of bias, <HERE>.

Underpants again …

As one commentator put it …

The idea that the Australian authorities, who had just been through a bruising public debate of mandatory Internet blacklists and lost, would attempt to smuggle a new set of blacklists behind the scenes, beggars belief

Totalitarian states block internet access, shut down certain sites and limit their citizens opportunities to know what is going on and it’s happening right here in Australia, right now …

The move is based on the use of Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act, which allows government agencies to ask ISPs for reasonable assistance in upholding the law, a mechanism which is also being used for the Government’s limited Interpol-based filter to block child abuse material. However, there appears to be no public oversight of the process, no appeals mechanism, and no transparency to the public or interaction with the formal justice system. A move by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in April to block several sites suspected of providing fraudulent investment information has already resulted in the inadvertent blockage of some 1,200 other innocent sites.

(My emphasis.)

You can read the whole article <HERE>.

History …

The budget’s in and the love media does its best …

Cornered Labor chooses brave way out

thunders the Silly Morning Herald. Under which, there is a lengthy article that does its best to be kind but can’t quite draw the veil over Labor’s utter incompetence admitting along the way that most of the measures in the budget are unlikely to pass into law before the election and …

No, the purpose of this budget is not vote-buying – it is reputation-rescuing, a last-ditch attempt to influence what history will say about the Rudd-Gillard government  as an economic manager.

But there are savings …

The strength of this budget – should it come to pass –  is that Swan has found sufficient saving measures (90 per cent of them tax increases) to cover the cost of the painfully slow phase-in of the disability insurance scheme, the Gonski school funding reforms and other new spending measures.

… well not so much savings actually tax increases.

The SMH poll reveals …

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In the Fin Review Laura Tingle also plays up the heroism …

Swan’s bold retreat in face of political defeat

… and compares the budget with Russia’s scorched earth policies. She perhaps didn’t stop to think that the scorched earth in question isn’t only the country the new government must march over, it’s also the country we poor peasants have to live in.

At the same time, it is a strategy that locks in its legacy reforms in education and disability.

The ALP have been in power since Saturday 24 November 2007, their so called legacy reforms are not yet in place. A treasurer who cannot budget a year in advance pretends to plan the first ten years of these twin embryos lives! Give me a break.

Colour and movement, like everything else this government gives us, it’s been spun so hard it comes out dizzy. It does serve though, to keep us from thinking about the $1.1 billion dollar surplus promised last year, which over recent weeks has burgeoned auction style into a $17 billion deficit and finally comes in at $19.4 billion.

History beckons, Mr Swan …