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 …

article-2325502-19D0189E000005DC-313_634x274_popup

• 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 …

Screen Shot 2013-05-15 at 7.21.46 AM

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 …

John Frum …

On the 21st of December at 10.12pm Australian eastern daylight time the Mayan Calendar came to its conclusion and the world ended.

Well, it didn’t actually, I exagerated. A lot of people thought it would, though, but so far all predictions of the last of days have proven false. So don’t drink the Koolaid.

Not all vacuous predictions are so pessimistic. For all the glass half empty folk there’s got to be the odd glass half full person. In the opposite corner we have the cargo cults. Things have gone bad, they ain’t what they used to be, young people these days … but if we renounce the new evils John Frum will come in a very large aeroplane and deliver all manner of material wealth and we will all be rich, like we had our very own carbon tax or mining tax.

In 1941, followers of John Frum rid themselves of their money in a frenzy of spending, left the missionary churches, schools, villages and plantations, and moved further inland to participate in traditional feasts, dances and rituals. Wikipedia.

That was in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu. It worked, of course …

… some 300,000 American troops were stationed in the New Hebrides during the Second World War, bringing with them large amounts of supplies, or “cargo”.

And I am sure it will work again, Wayne Swan’s new John Frum is a mining magnate, Wayne’s done the “frenzy of spending” bit, but I’m pretty sure that none of the missionary schools were given new school halls, the churches are under investigation, villages and plantations even factories have been abandoned, we have been urged to move back from the coast. The labor party have indulged in no end of “traditional feasts, dances and rituals” especially, but not exclusively in NSW …

After the war, and the departure of the Americans, followers of John Frum built symbolic landing strips to encourage American aeroplanes to once again land and bring them “cargo”.

We must do likewise to bring back the mining boom, share out the wealth, cast out the snakes and carbon pollution …

Pink batts, I am sure, would make excellent symbolic landing strips …