Sandwiches …

Miss Gillard had to duck a verbal sandwich from PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill.

He was fairly blunt in telling the prime minister of the donor country that props up the PNG government with aid money (this year about 8.5 per cent of the PNG budget) that many of his fellow compatriots are offended by Australia’s visa requirements.

Miss Gillard has announced that the visa process will be streamlined. I guess a woman has to be careful in Papua New Guinea …

In early February, a 20-year-old mother of one, Kepari Leniata, was stripped and burned alive in front of a crowd at a market on the outskirts of Mt Hagen.

She had been accused of witchcraft by her killers.

In Southern Bougainville last week, one woman was beheaded and another grievously injured when a mob accused the pair of practising sorcery.

and

A US academic says she was gang-raped by an armed mob in Papua New Guinea and wants to publicise her ordeal to raise awareness about rampant violence against women in the desperately poor Pacific country.

As Jean G Zorn puts it …

Rape is endemic in Papua New Guinea, and the courts in Papua New Guinea have not been effective at decreasing its incidence.

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.