Author: bobmcgee

Plagiarism at the ABC …

Lies, damned lies and ALP spin …

Consider this Emma Alberici paragraph …

Back to that $96 billion “Labor debt” inherited by the Howard government in 1996 – which actually comprised $40 billion of Fraser government debt that carried through the Hawke-Keating years taking the true level of Labor debt in 1996 to $56 billion. Bringing down that debt wasn’t all about constrained spending and higher taxes, in fact neither of those things were characteristics of the Howard-Costello years. Government asset sales between 1996 and 2007 worth $72 billion wiped the net debt out entirely with $16 billion to spare.

Read Sinclair Davidson on its history and innacuracy.

 

Creature of the night …

Across the creek from the McGee country estate, in the Central Victorian Goldfields, is a bushland reserve.

Someone loves the reserve and has put up some nest boxes. I pass two of the boxes on my morning walk. Both are chewed and worn around the opening in the front, indicating that some creature has used them. One of them, though, has since been taken over by feral bees.

Having seen nothing come or go during daylight I deduced that the inhabitants might well be mammalian, perhaps there might even be gliders at the bottom of my garden.

One evening in summer I took a camp chair and staked out the box, through the twilight and into darkness. I provided a considerable feast for the mosquitoes but saw not a glimpse of a glider.

I subsequently bought a Trail Camera from Faunatech. It is mosquito-proof. I mounted it where it could see the box and also the canopy. It sat there for two nights and three days. It took pictures, almost exclusively of the canopy swaying in the breeze, by day this looks conventional enough, at night it uses infrared. I then examined more than 1200 photographs of a tree, a box and some swaying leaves and found four photos with a critter included. Here’s one …

IMAG1005

My working diagnosis is Sugar Glider but I am discussing this with a more knowledgable friend, a scientist with Parks Victoria.

Congratulations to the people who provided the box. I will be erecting a few on my side of the creek.

Back up …

Apologies for any friends and followers who misunderstood my recent post. My bizarre sense of humour leads me to pretend to be whatever McGee is making world headlines. The punchline is hidden in the link, that section of text that changes colour when your cursor passes over it, click on that and you get to visit the web page that fills in the missing detail.

And on personal stuff, congratulations to Andrew Mids and his dearly beloved who have a beautiful baby daughter, and a there is also a very proud grandfather in the background.

Burn, baby, burn …

Book burning (also biblioclasm or libricide) is the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material … Book burning is usually carried out in public, and is generally motivated by moral, religious, or political objections to the material.

Book burning can be emblematic of a harsh and oppressive regime which is seeking to censor or silence an aspect of a nation’s culture. In some cases the works destroyed are irreplaceable and their burning constitutes a severe loss to cultural heritage. Examples include obliteration of the Library of Baghdad, the burning of books and burying of scholars under China’s Qin Dynasty, the destruction of Aztec codices by Itzcoatl, and the Nazi book burnings. Wikipedia.

sjsu_bookfire

Here we have Drs Bridger and Clements from the San Jose State University Meteorology Department showing how its done. I’m unsure whether their motives are moral, religious, or political. The author of the book, Steve Goreham, also had the temerity to publish an article in the Washington Times. I guess the good doctors couldn’t find an argument to match it … so they just found a match.

Consensus …

When the truth of an issue is easily knowable one would expect consensus to be at a high level. When an issue is complex, observations difficult to interpret and the conclusion untestable one would not expect consensus to reach 97%.

Entire industries face extinction as the world’s governments seek to impose trillions of dollars of taxes on carbon emissions. The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman approvingly writes that Australian politicians—not to mention public figures through the world—now risk “political suicide” if they deny climate change. But if carbon dioxide turns out not to be the boogey-man that climate scientists have made it out to be, tens of trillions will be wasted in unneeded remediation. Much of the world—billions of humans—will endure a severely diminished quality of life with nothing to show for it.

Click the link to read an interesting essay by BRUMBERG and BRUMBERG.

Hookers …

It’s a long time since I read it but I do recall that Guy Du Maupassant wrote a very elegant and touching story concerning a young man, a courtesan and a raffle.

Compressed into 25 words or less it goes something like this. Nearing the end of high school the boys put in a franc each and the one whose name was pulled out of the hat got to spend the jackpot on a high class hooker at a high class bordello. Once the deed was done the lucky winner explained the means by which he had come by such a princely sum. The lady, both touched and amused, declared that she couldn’t possibly take his money … and gave him back one franc.

Perhaps the first known case of crowd sourcing for hookers. If you’re inclined you can contribute to the modern version <HERE>.