Wait...Does That Mean If I Don't Play Up, I Have To Pay Up?

NSW politicians are easily confused, and the headline for this story won't help a doddle to rein in their bad behaviour in state parliament :

Of Course It Was A Conspiracy

The instant reluctance, almost pathological refusal to consider or even mildly entertain the possibilities of Conspiracy is one of the main reasons why so many of the biggest, most deadly, and most damaging, terror attacks remain unsolved.

ICC referee Chris Broad, who was in a van behind the bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team through Lahore, is not afraid to explain why he fears a conspiracy is behind the horrific terror attacks, carried out by a well-trained, extremely well armed and thoroughly rehearsed team who escaped and remain at large today.

As he tried to make sense of what had happened, Broad said there were several questions he was struggling to answer.

"On the first two days (of the Test) both buses left (the hotel) at the same time with escorts. On this particular day the Pakistan bus left five minutes after the Sri Lankan bus. Why?" he said.

"It went through my mind as we were leaving the hotel - 'Where is the Pakistan bus?' But there were times during the Karachi Test when the Sri Lankans went first and Pakistan went afterwards.

"I thought maybe they were having five or 10 minutes more in the hotel and would turn up later, but after this happened you start to think: 'Did someone know something and they held the Pakistan bus back?'"

Broad said although he had no evidence for a conspiracy, the events he had witnessed had left him perplexed.

"At every junction from the hotel through to where we were attacked and all the way to the ground there were police in light blue uniforms with hand-guns controlling traffic," he said.

"How did the terrorists come to the roundabout and how did they start firing and these guys not do anything about it?

"There were plenty of police there and yet these terrorists came in, did what they had to do and then went again. It is beyond me."

It sounds like an ambush.



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The Conga Line Of SuckHoles Still Suck, But There Are Less Of Them

Mark Latham on the state of Australian political journalism :

“Perversely, the only press gallery specialists who have survived are the so-called sketch writers, frustrated comedians who, more often than not, are as funny as a burning orphanage.”

The Australian Financial Review keeps its Mark Latham columns beyond a payers-only firewall, so you can't read it unless you buy a copy. How very, very 1997.

Get Your Own Damn Pristine Beaches Of Paradise

Australia has plenty of the most beautiful beaches in the world. So many in fact, that other countries trying to lure holidaymakers to their comparably shabby shores think won't miss one or two of our lesser known beaches. Wrong.

Spanish officials have been caught passing off pictures from Australia and the Bahamas as their own in an effort to boost the country’s flagging tourism industry.

Officials from the Costa Brava Pyrenees Tourism authority have admitted using a photograph of a pristine beach and blue seas taken in Australia to illustrate a sun-baked strip of the northeastern Spanish coastline traditionally popular with British tourists.

They had to darken the colour of the sand to make it look more like a beach in Spain.

Sourdough For The SourMan

A smug-looking fleg in the breadshop line is on the phone. He says the following, loud :

"Bullshit. Even gunfire and RPGs can't make cricket interesting."

I don't know if his friend laughs or not, but some of the other customers do. I'm torn between wanting to pelt him with wheat-free Berry Delight muffins and acknowledging the fact that Australians were once very quick to make black-humoured jokes about the very worst of what was happening in the world, and now don't do that so much anymore.

I considered snapping the fleg's photo to run with what I overheard, but then realised I don't actually work for a Murdoch tabloid.

What Crap Can We Make Up About Heath Ledger Today?

Can you smell it? It's the tangy waft of another half-arsed Murdoch media beat up :



This story is total crap. The headline is woefully inaccurate.

The Imaginarium has an Australian cinema release deal in place. It was signed and sealed months ago. Heath Ledger's final movie also has cinematic release deals locked in across England and Europe.

A US cinema release has not been locked into place yet for one extremely obvious reason, and if they'd bothered to do some googling they would have the info easily - director Terry Gilliam hasn't finished the movie, though he's close to being done.

Pre-release deals for The Imaginarium all over the world have already just about put the new Terry Gilliam film, starring Ledger, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp, into profit. That means the producers don't have to go begging to American movie studios like, say, Murdoch's Fox, to get a US cinema release signed and sealed before the movie is even finished.

The Imaginarium is not going to be another Batman Begins, obviously. It's a Terry Gilliam film, so it's going to be extremely weird, and more than a little non-mainstream. Gilliam knew there would be a fairly limited audience for The Imaginarium before he began shooting, which is why it was made on a fraction of the budget of, say, the Rupert Murdoch and Australian taxpayer funded epic 'Australia'.

The Imaginarium will make money for its investors, as almost every Terry Gilliam film has, eventually, despite the cliched guff about The Gilliam Curse. It will be controversial, and the story of how Gilliam refused to shelve the movie when Heath Ledger died mid-shoot and how it was finished with the help of Ledger's friends, like Johnny Depp, will draw the film plenty of attention as it moves closer to a release date.

And The Imaginarium will divide people firmly between those who hate it, because it is Gilliam weird, and those who love it, because it is Gilliam weird.

If the Murdoch tabloids are looking for a story angle, maybe they should have pursued this
one (and they probably still will): Heath Ledger filmed a shocking suicide scene for Gilliam's movie shortly before his death. Will it be cut? Should it be cut? Will scenes of Ledger hanging from a noose upset too many people for it to remain in the movie?

An image of the Ledger suicide scene from the Just Jared website



I can't wait to see The Imaginarium. Ledger turned down some major movies and big paydays to join Terry Gilliam on this adventure because he loved the story, and the director's vision for what he wanted to bring to the screen. It promises to be one very strange, fun, magical and challenging movie, like all of Gilliam's.

More On Heath Ledger And The Imaginarium Here



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He Only Helped Kill A Few Hundred Thousand People, What's The Problem?



The Professional Idiot hasn't actually seen W., the Oliver Stone biopic of the man who started and couldn't end two extremely deadly wars, didn't catch the terrorist leader he promised he would bring to justice "dead or alive", failed to stop the 9/11 terror attacks and bankrupted the United States. At least The Professional Idiot doesn't give any indication he has seen the movie in this dim bulb example of his ongoing, losing battle with his own post-conservative era hysteria.

But that doesn't stop The Professional Idiot from raging against the new movie about George W. Bush, that mostly disappoints because it goes so easy on one of the greatest calamities to ever befall the United States.

Does The Professional Idiot actually review the movie in this column? What? Do you think he's some kind of journalist or something? Hell, no. How can you serve up bizarre Oliver Stone-ish conspiracy theories about Evil Pagan Lefty Arts Community/Film Reviewers Anti-Bush Group Think if you'd seen actually the movie?

Instead The Professional Idiot reviews the reviewers :

Our arts community can’t tell a kiss from a kick - or not when the person being kicked is its pet target of group-hate.

......

Here, for instance, is Philippa Hawker of The Age: “If you were expecting director Oliver Stone to skewer George Bush, you’ll be sorely disappointed ...”

West Australian’s Mark Naglazas also claimed W was a “surprisingly understated and even-handed account”, yet, totally oblivious to the contradiction, continued: “the 1960s veteran Stone ... cannot resist depicting Bush as he has been for much of his presidency—a shallow buffoon who, in a just world, would struggle to get a job cleaning toilets in the White House.”

Pardon? That’s an “even-handed account” of a man who gained an MBA? Ran a successful baseball franchise? Served as a popular governor of Texas? Won two terms as president? Liberated two countries from fascism? Prevented another terrorism attack on US soil since 9/11?

Good God. That's the kind of glowing summary of a blindingly obvious failed double presidency that even Karl Rove wouldn't dare attempt to pass off under his own name. He'd have to use the Murdoch media to try and get that stupendous fluff into the media.

So what's behind this hilarious love letter to the former president who can now only get a bigger book deal than Condoleezza Rice if he promises to admit he really kinda sucked during his time behind Lincoln's old desk?

Is The Professional Idiot joining George W. Bush on a speaking tour double-bill when the former president tours Australia later this year?

Yet again and again this country’s leading reviewers repeat this patently absurd argument—that Stone has been even-handed by describing Bush as an incompetent, alcoholic, idiotic party-boy, haunted by his father....

Bush, by own admission, was an incompetent, alcoholic party-boy. He was still joking about those days when hundreds of corpses of Americans were rotting away in the flooded streets and submerged basements of New Orleans. And Bush's rivalry and clashes with his father are not exactly a big secret, nor that unusual, or even unexpected, in any father-son relationship when high levels of work-related stress and pressure are involved.

But forget all that. The Professional Idiot has uncovered a brimming latte barrel of anti-Bush Crazed Lefty Group Think conspiracy. A big conspiracy it must be, across dozens of Australian newspapers, following the opinion of more than 7 out of 10 Americans.

Here's Evan Williams of The Australian: “On the whole, Stone plays fair ... The portrait of (Bush) that emerges is rounded and humane ...”

Yet Williams then gloats: “Dubya comes across as inadequate and impressionable, driven by half-baked notions of revenge, troubled by his early experience of business failure, academic mediocrity and alcoholism.”

The Sydney Morning Herald also praised Stone’s “fair-mindedness” and “restraint”. The ABC’s Margaret Pomeranz called W a “not unsympathetic depiction”, while David Stratton agreed it was “not a strongly anti-Bush film”.

The group-think is the most unmissable thing about this baaing of reviewers who see the crudest monstering as the least Bush deserves.

No dissent from this party line is even considered or uttered. None of this tribe defend Bush as some will defend even Saddam Hussein, the psychopathic killer he toppled.

...what is most remarkable of all is that not one of these reviewers can detect their own blind bias, witlessly praising as “fair” and “understated” a sliming as juvenile and angry as graffiti.

But what is most remarkable about The Professional Idiot's run through of Australian film reviewers who he believes Group Think Hate Bush, with psychotic zeal, is that he managed to totally avoid mentioning one of the most pummeling and stinging Australian film reviewer's write up of the alcohol-abuse brain damaged former president. This review, from The Professional Idiot's own newspaper, The Herald Sun :

Demonised and declared a dunce, Dubya formally vacated the White House last month.

During his two terms in office, Bush generated both the highest and lowest approval ratings of any US President since the advent of public polling.

......

(Actor Josh) Brolin’s depiction of Dubya works well enough as a straight physical impersonation. However, what he really gets right is the unique mix of idiocy and innocence that planted this plonker on the world stage.

How did The Professional Idiot manage to miss that biased, tribal group-thinking and utterly scathing review of his hero George W. Bush in the pages of his own newspaper?

Maybe, like most Victorians, The Professional Idiot only reads The Herald Sun for its sports pages.

The Writer Is Dead, But His Fiction Is Our Reality


Philip K Dick portrait by GK Bellows

By Darryl Mason

Yesterday, March 2, was the 2yth anniversary of the death of one of America's greatest thinkers, novelist Philip K Dick. PKD basically wrote himself to death, at 54 years old, and he was very aware of what he was doing to himself, in the year before he died. Only a few months before his death, Philip K Dick sat down to watch the opening minutes of the cinematic classic BladeRunner, a movie adapted from one of his best and also strangest novels Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? PKD died knowing his legend was already all but set in stone, and that BladeRunner would most certainly, at the minimum, introduce new generations to his decades of writing, philosophy and wild imagineering.

I don't think Philip K Dick would be surprised (or should that be, is surprised?) to learn that nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, he is now one of the most famous, and most intensely argued and discussed writers, in history.

When he was physically alive, Philip K Dick recognised that the world, in particularly America, was becoming more and more like one of his novels everyday. This didn't bring him much pleasure. He rarely wrote about paradise on earth, or utopias.

He often said he wrote his books to stop certain realities becoming real (he believed, for a while, that the reality you experience is a reality of your own, and your loved ones, and your enemies', making), but life delivered up the ultimate of all ironies, which could have only made hm laugh : that what he so often warning-wrote about it, to stop it happening, became reality thanks to the effect (in part) his books and writing and imagination had on a generation of young tech-gurus in California, and England, and Japan. And yet, Philip K Dick gave those who saw both profit and power in using technology as a tool(s) for oppression plenty of inspiration, and help, as well.

Here's some of the things he wrote about as far back as 1955 that have become our reality :

Criminals being tracked by satellites, remote control robot sentries and machine-gunners, synthetic and cloned pets, robot hookers, swipe cards to enter buildings and malls, laptop computers, reality television, personalised advertising, hacker anarchists, mega-global corporations that rule entire continents, instantly globally shared information, android babysitters, a military controlled United States divided into police-state zones (post-Hurricane Katrina, this was New Orleans), whole towns as nostalgia amusement parks, a technology-interconnected global humanity and a president who bankrupted his country and created fictional wars to distract his people from their darkening reality.

Philip K Dick might not have been the first writer to detail a post-apocalyptic nuclear world where robots ruthlessly hunt down human survivors hiding in the ruins, but he was certainly the first to write about killer robots who, in imitation of their human creators, set about building robots to kill other robots.

More on Philip K Dick here

To finish off, here's a fat handful of Philip K Dick Quote(s) Of The Day, from Your New Reality :

"History executes those who will not go where the truth takes them. This is a fact."

"The future is not a place where we go but a construct which we create. The shared world, to me, is the only one worth living in; in fact it is the only one we can live in."

"The universe is an idea in the minds of men."

"....a barrier of of fear and doubt may universally lie between us and what we most want, want and deserve."

"Only when a man chooses to act does he become real…"

"If this is what you get when you win, what the hell do you get when you lose?"

"I promise I won't try to convert you; in any case my religion is not orthodox but really my own; for instance I never go to church, and so to creed Christians I'm a combination of atheist and heretic, if you can imagine that, which I evidently can."

"What amazed me, in my suicide attempt, was the way my body literally fought back."

"Either we're onto something important....or we're just nuts."

"Mental illness is nothing more than an unvoiced NO to experience, to the new, to adventure, to being; it is a calcification, an ossification, an ending of the unrolling spool of inner life."

"Sometimes I try to figure out where I went wrong in my life, and then I wonder if indeed I did go wrong. "

"I know the feeling of being a character in a Phil Dick novel. It happens to me, too."

PKD Quotes source : Philip K Dick Collected Letters, 1977-79


How Obama Reached The Presidency Preaching Philip K Dick Philosophy

Philip K Dick And Carbon Credits

"My Mind Is More Important Than My Possessions"

Philip K Dick's 1980 Top Ten Predictions For The Future That Have (Mostly) Come True

Robots Are Being Given Human Emotions

Philip K Dick Defines The 'War On Terror'....In 1963

Philip K Dick And Carbon Credits

Philip K Dick Does Disney - Disney Does Philip K Dick




.

Not Again : The Victorian Fires Part Two

Five Million Australians Get "Emergency Warning" Text Messages

In just a few hours from when this story has been posted, huge, hot winds will begins blasting across Victoria, where at least four major fire fronts are still burning. Some towns have, reportedly, already been all but emptied, and during the night, hundreds more families fled what may, or may not, turn out to be another horrific day of death and tragedy.

From ABC News :

Victorians are being urged to secure their homes ahead of strong northerly winds expected around dawn.

Around 5,000 firefighters are on high alert with the winds due to hit western Victoria, before extending across the state and reaching Melbourne.

The weather bureau's Terry Ryan says wind gusts could top 100 kilometres per hour

"Those stronger winds will pick up in the Melbourne area about 6:00 am or 7:00 am, winds 60 to 80 kilometres per hour developing quite quickly, gusts possible to 100 [kph]," he said.

"The alpine area a little bit later, gusts to about 120 [kph] in the alpine area, those winds will turn west with a change entering the west of the state around midday to 1:00pm."

Hundreds of schools, 30 national parks and and Melbourne's Botanic Gardens will be closed.

It is feared the gusty conditions will result in four major fires jumping containment lines and spreading rapidly.

One of the most effective fire-fighting methods used so far in battling the weeks of fires across Victoria that have claimed more than 210 lives and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property, homes and businesses, has been waterbombing planes and helicopters.

But if wind conditions get too intense today, these aircraft will be grounded. Then it will be all up to the thousands of firefighters to do what they can to stop the flames.

Little rain has fallen anywhere in Victoria since February 7, and some of the biggest fires are now burning in what has been described, soberly, as "difficult terrain."

And once again, the fear looms of some pyromaniac setting fires in the path of the huge winds that could lead to further, and only recently unimaginable, carnage.

"If other fires start, if they are unable to be quickly pounced upon, those fires will rapidly spread and obviously wind is the great enemy in that case...."

Some three to five million mobile phones in Victoria (and some in Tasmania) have received messages warning of the terrible dangers that today could bring. A number of news reports have claimed that every mobile phone (registered and unregistered) in Victoria received a warning message.

Here's how it was done :

The state's major telecommunications networks — Telstra, Optus and Hutchison — sent warnings from Victoria Police to their mobile customers yesterday afternoon, warning of high wind and fire risk, and advising they listen to ABC radio for emergency updates.

The networks sent the messages to more than 3 million phones, using technology that isolated Victorian numbers, and sent the texts in bulk through a dispatch centre.

Premier John Brumby said the technology trial was a first for the state and a supplement to warnings made through the media.

However, he said the system was not suitable for an immediate threat, such as a terrorist attack or tsunami, because it could only deliver texts at a rate of up to 600,000 an hour.

"We can't provide an instantaneous warning," he said. "We're not in a position to do that yet, we don't have the capacity or the technology.

Maybe Victorians will get a weather miracle before the fires get out of control. A much-needed dose of unexpected, near miraculous, heavy rain, or a sudden shift in the predicted winds that will turn the fires back on themselves, back towards land already burned.

It's like firefighters are battling a war against an almost unstoppable enemy, huge fires have been burning constantly across Victoria for almost a solid month. How the fiirefighters maintain their sanity going in again and again to take on such a force of often unstoppable destruction is incomprehensible to those who have never had to do it.

No wonder so many firefighters talk about the flames as though they are living, killing, unstoppable beasts, monstrous things taller than buildings, longer than freeways, that burn your skin to a crisp long before you even see the flames.

Fire lives and breathes, and it eats and kills voraciously, without mercy.

They cannot stop it, they can only turn it back, calm it down, contain it, until it runs of breath, out of fuel, out of energy. Until it returns again later in the year. But not late enough for the many in Victoria who have been psychologically shattered by the horrors and loss of the past few weeks, and who must now dread next summer, like the arrival of hell itself.

UPDATE : Damn, maybe I should go into the miracle-predicting business (is there one?).

Rains doused Melbourne this morning, and winds have not been as strong, or as widespread, as expected. Threats to lives and property posed by fire fronts remain strong, but the rest of today is not expected to unfold as ultra-dangerously as predicted by weather forecasters and fire fighting officials :

While Melbourne, Geelong and surrounding suburbs are getting damp, fire authorities said the drizzle would be nowhere near the amount needed to douse fires.

However, a weather spokesman told 3AW radio that the drizzle has prevented winds reaching expecting highs, and should prevent temperatures rising to a forecast 32.

They Told Me To Tell You That They Do Not Control My Mind

Just brilliant. 'Nic' posting repeatedly deleted comments here, offers up another that I simply have to preserve here, so it will never be lost :

"Last chance. Leave this post up as confirmation that I have never suggested that you, freemasons and greys are controlling my mind and you will not hear from me again."

Last chance? Or what? The Freemasons and Greys will blow up 'Nic's' head with psychotronic weapons from their orbiting space station?

Of course, if your mind is actually being controlled by The Freemasons and the Greys, they're not too happy if you go blabbing about it all over the internet. Believe me.

Then again, if your mind is controlled by The Freemasons and Greys, would they not be able to stop you in the first place from blabbing about it? Unless they secretely, cunningly, want 'Nic' to get out there and deny they secretely control his mind, while secretely controlling it, in some kind of devilish exercise aimed at making 'Nic' look like some kind of downward-spiralling loon.

That's the problem when your mind is being controlled by Greys and Freemasons. You can never be 100% certain that they are, or are not, secretely controlling your mind.

Fantastic.

UPDATE : Now Nic realises that The Freemasons and the Greys may be monitoring internet communications for any big mouths, like him, spilling the beans about the existence, or non-existence, of their nefarious mind-contrology*, panic sets in :

If Jeremy won't let me respond without deleting, will someone else who has been following please do Jeremy and I a favour and post a comment stating that I have never mentioned freemasons, aliens, or Jeremy as controlling my mind?

Meltdowny.

* I think it says a lot about Google Blogger that the phrase 'mind-contrology' does not register in its automatic spellcheck. At least, it doesn't on my Blogger account, which may be further proof that Nic is really onto something here. Or on something....

Death To Bloggy Fun

By Darryl Mason

Well, the Australian blogstream is going to become a hell of a lot less fun, scandalous and interesting now that (apparently) News Limited's lawyers are threatening legal action against those who try and hold News Limited's more rank, intolerant and smear-spreading corporate bloggers (apparently) to account for the serious damage they inflict on Australian society (apparently).

Pure Poison, the blog set up on Crikey by Grodsters and Jeremy Sear, has caused all sorts of commotion and controversy in its handful of days of existence - an all round successful launch in other words - and while some of News Limited's corporate bloggers (apparently) have few problems with small audience independent bloggers whipping them for stirring up racism and intolerance, when it comes to a heavily trafficked, mainstream media site like Crikey, well, certain News Limited bloggers start getting all whine-y and litigious (apparently).

Certain corporate bloggers, protected by News Limited army of lawyers, love to dish it out to individuals who cannot afford or can't be bothered to defend themselves through legal action, but when it's them under scrutiny, with a media-and-politics-and-business heavy audience watching on, as with Pure Poison at Crikey, they sure can't take the heat.

Here's Crikey editor Jonathan Green apologising for allowing commenters at Crikey's Pure Poison to state some (apparently) all-too-obvious truths about The Professional Idiot (apparently), aka Andrew Bolt :

The first thing here is to apologise, sincerely, to Andrew Bolt. The second, to acknowledge the traps for the unwary in tapping too innocently into Web2 interconnectivity.

In recent days, comment strings on the new Crikey blog Pure Poison have been a little too lurid in their attacks on the controversial Herald Sun columnist. There are some things you can’t say in polite journalism. “Racist” is one of them. “Liar” is another.

But The Professional Idiot (apparently) sure likes to accuse so many others of being racists, or liars, or both, just about every day he takes another swim through his mind sewer.

The thing that Crikey has learned from its first real encounter in this past fortnight with the more floridly opinionated fringes of angrily politicised blog commentary is the importance not so much of immediate moderation of comments (that is now very much an given) but rather ensuring an overall tone in the conversation. To put it more simply we don’t want to be that kind of site. We’d rather build a reputation for reason and well-turned argument than for insult and glib denunciation.

Well, they certainly can't try and compete with certain News Limited bloggers when it comes to "insult and glib denunciation", they've pretty well conrnered the market on both (apparently).

The internet is a land of many underbellies. Apparently respectable newspaper sites court google traffic with layer on layer of celebrity-studded, skin-laden picture galleries, opinion bloggers draw short of the unmentionable under their own names and leave that dirty work to their legions of regular commenters … and given the right cues, that dirty work is done.

Oh, yes, it sure is. If you're a blogger who has ever had the unfortunate experience of being mentioned and linked to by certain blogger(s) now under the protective dome of News Limited, then you'd know what it's like to be bombarded with comments threatening violence, rape and "profesional ruins (sic)". I never felt threatened by any of those dimwits because where I grew up you learned quickly to spot bigmouth softcocks for what they were, and for the non-threat to you that they actually were.

More from Crikey's Jonathan Green :

The point is not to be outraged at someone’s argument, or their untenable, maybe mischievous, maybe pointedly distorted point of view. The argument is not with the writer, but with the view expressed...

What the hell does that mean? Is not the view expressed by a News Limited blogger that of the writer/blogger themselves? Or is this a sly confirmation/allegation from Green that what some News Limited bloggers do is not actually opinion-writing, or opinion-blogging, but simply hit-based-revenue-raising infotainment relying on fermented outrage and disgust for more comments and page views and thereby more revenue?

Eh, whatever. Blog Wars are notoriously boring for non-bloggers to read, or even hear about, most of the time.

And from what appears to (apparently) be a flurry of serious legal threats now hurricaning through the Australian blogstream (apparently), you probably won't hear much more about this current Pure Poison Vs Certain News Limited Suddenly Sensitive Corporate Bloggers' Blog War. At all.

Apparently.

The Flight Of The Conchords' Jermaine and Bret offer US President Barack Obama some solid, sound financial advice :

Any thoughts on the president’s new stimulus package? What do you recommend forthe U.S. economy?

Jemaine: Budgeting.

Bret: Yeah, the government should do a budget.

I believe we already have a budget.

Jemaine: It doesn’t seem like it.

Bret: They need to put aside a certain amount each week for rent and then some money for food and then some money for partying, having a good time.

Jemaine: Put aside some for invasions!





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Wreckage

The most haunting images from the Victorian Fires of February 7 are easily those of burned out, crashed cars spread along the road leading into and through Kinglake. Perhaps as many as 20 people died in a series of horrific car accidents that day, including at least six children, and one infant. Families perished as their cars slammed into each other at high speed, fleeing heat and fire so intense it melted tyres and alloy wheels as they tried to escape. Cars ploughed into trees and plunged into ditches as drivers became lost in the smoke of the massive blaze that few in Kinglake, that afternoon, even knew was coming for them.

We've heard the stories of hundreds of survivors of the February 7 fires, but we know almost nothing about the final moments in the lives of the people who died in these cars. The fear, and terror, they experienced is unimaginable.











All photos from this extensive gallery of Victorian Fires images



ABC reporter Michael Vincent on the crashed cars of Kinglake :

"I came in with a CSA officer and it was just here there was still smoke drifting across the road..."
"Lots of debris, trees, corrugated iron roofing, power lines dangling across and then the many, many, burned out car wrecks - close to, I'd say, 20 on the main road alone.
"[There are] obvious accidents, head-on collisions, and five cars concertinaed with a motorbike had gone into a ditch.
"It's quite scary to imagine what these people went through. And some of them apparently did survive.
"There were some cars being taken away last night by the police and I imagine there were bodies in those cars. I couldn't physically see any, but the police were taking them away.
"A lot of people did panic and jumped in their cars at the last minute. It came on that fast. They had 15 minutes between when they saw it over in the far distance, 25 kilometres away, before it hit.
"So a lot of people, last minute, not realising that it was the last minute by the time they were on the road."

A terrible, incredible story of survival amongst all the death :

A Kinglake survivor saved a family of five but had to leave another man to die.

Karl Amatnieks, 56, and his wife Jane were fleeing when they saw the family trapped in a car.
They stopped as the inferno bore down and pulled the family into their car.
But Mr Amatnieks says he is no hero.
"I could not leave five people lying there waiting to die -- it's that simple," he said.
The couple were racing along Kinglake-Whittlesea Rd when they saw the family in danger.
"As we got to the bottom of the hill, we came across this couple with three kids who were stranded. They were stuck on the side of the road after slamming into the back of another car. It was horrific."
He said heavy smoke and ember sparks made driving almost impossible.
"As we got them in the car and took off, another car came down the hill and slammed into (the first crash)."
He said he felt helpless as he drove away, leaving the crash driver to die.
Moments later the inferno engulfed the pile-up.

The story of Benjamin Banks is very different again. A car crash, he believes, saved his life :

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong when Benjamin Banks tried to escape the Kinglake inferno.
It was a head-on car crash, his third crash within minutes, that ironically saved his life.
He also survived a "fire tornado" that peeled the paint from his car, and another incident when the house he eventually took shelter in also caught fire.
After a "big night" on Friday that ended about 6am on Saturday, Mr Banks was woken about 2pm by his cousin Dean, 18, as smoke enveloped his Kinglake West home.
....Mr Banks' second car failed to start and he had to change the battery.
"I knew I had to save my cousin. I wanted to save him before me. I didn't realise how intense it was and didn't realise how thick the fire had gotten."
Mr Banks' car then hit a tree lying on the road. He ploughed through it before hitting a second.
"Then this big whirlybird tornado of flame hit us. I remember looking up at it and it was as high as the trees."
The car almost tipped over and Mr Banks watched the paint peel off the bonnet and the car window melt, dripping molten glass on to his hand.
"I tried to drive again but there were no tyres left. I could feel steel on steel and could hear the steel rims grinding on the road and I was stuck on this tree."
Suddenly, headlights appeared and collided head on with Mr Banks.
"But I think that was my saving grace because if it had not hit me we would have burned to death in the car."

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Murdoch Media Spreads More Eco-Alarmism : The Great Human Cull Is Coming, You're All Doomed! Doomed I Say!

Rupert Murdoch's worldwide media empire continues to be the most powerful, most influential distributor of climate change related hysteria, following Murdoch's June, 2007 announcement that "climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats".

Today we learn, at News.com.au, that up to 90% of the world's population will be wiped out by extreme climate change by 2100 :

Alligators bask off the English coast, the Sahara desert stretches into Europe and 10 per cent of humans are left.

Science fiction?

No, this is the doomsday prediction if global temperatures make a predicted rise of 4C in the next 100 years. Some fear it could happen by 2050.

Vast numbers would have to migrate away from the equator and towards the poles.

National borders would have to be knocked down and humans would become mostly vegetarian with most animals being eaten to extinction.

Fish numbers would drop dramatically as acid levels rose in oceans.

People would live in high-rise cities to preserve fertile lands for food, and scientists suggest energy could be supplied by a giant solar belt running across North Africa, the Middle East and the southern US.

The number of humans could drop to a billion or fewer.

So will The Herald Sun's Andrew "Global Warming Has Stopped" Bolt and The Daily Telegraph's Tim "Global Warming Is Utterly Bogus" Blair finally admit the truth? That the media company that pays them to mock climate change alarmists is in fact Climate Doom Central?

Or will they do their usual trick of just linking to similar reports in The Age or Sydney Morning Herald when they attack these latest "You're All Doomed!" claims, completely ignoring the fact their boss and media company are spreading more eco-fear-mongery than Al Gore could ever dream of?

UPDATE : Andrew Bolt, examplifying exactly why I've been calling him The Professional Idiot for two years, jumps on this latest example of "eco-porn" :

Hands up anyone who seriously believes this scenario - given serious treatment by a newspaper - is remotely likely within 100, let alone 50, years...

A newspaper? Well, no, News.com.au is not a newspaper, it's an internet news portal, and it's part of the parent company of the newspaper this shameless liar works for.

Of course he knows this, he links to the news.com.au story, but he knows most of his readers will never click to read the full story and thus will not learn that the corporation that pays The Professional Idiot is responsible for helping to spread the exact same kind of "eco-porn" he continually claims he is denouncing.

Shit Guilt

It's bad enough they're constantly on our backs about enjoying quoll fillets, coal bonfires, baby koala tennis and blue whale burgers, but now Greenpeace have simply gone too damn far.





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When A Nuking Is Preferable...

CarlosLabs have an interesting Google Maps toy. Enter the name of your closest city, choose from a variety of kilotons for a nuking, hit the nuke it button, and find out whether you'd die from vaporisation, flaming flesh or radiation cancer.

Here's what survives around Sydney after a 340kiloton nuking :



This is damage impact zone if a (Dinosaur age ending) asteroid smashed into Australia, with Sydney as ground zero :

"You Will Let Me Know When Those Carrots Stop Screaming, Won't You Clarice?"


A plate of mixed murder victims from my garden.

By Darryl Mason

The Good Weekend's Food & Wine Issue last Saturday (not online) dipped into 'Fruitarianism', which I always thought was a joke food-consumption preference, going one better than veganism, that is you eat only lots of fruit, and steer away from vegetables that have been torn cruelly from the ground, against their will.

But Fruitarianism, according to the Good Weekend, is real enough, even though I was convinced it was invented by Monty Python for a TV skit they probably never actually did. Key quote from the story :

"Fruitarianism is not just about health. There's the ethical thing as well. You're not killing anything. You're not uprooting plants and killing them."

I slaughtered the fuck out of fat handfuls of beans, spinach, baby carrots and two kinds of basil in my little garden this afternoon. Of course, I had to block my ears with wadded tissues to blunt the shrieks of pain and desperate dislocation filling the air as I did so. And oh, the terrible cries of those baby carrots...so pitiful.

But taking a stance in refusing to uproot tasty, crispy edible plants because you're "killing them" raises some interesting questions.

When exactly does a carrot die? The moment it is pulled from the ground?

Well, that can't be so, because I've replanted the same carrots two or three times when the freaky ones had outgrown their former beds and I'd wanted to see just how big they would get. Did they die when I pulled them from the warm bossom of Mother Earth and then resurrect Jesus-like when I replanted them somewhere more comfortable?

Is a carrot still alive when I carry it inside to the kitchen?

Is that carrot still alive when I go at it with the vegetable peeler? If the ethics of Fruitarianism is correct, then I'm literally skinning those carrots alive. And then once I've stripped them of their skin, I cut them to pieces and throw them in a sizzling wok for a stir-fry.

How goddamned brutal is that?

I never realised before just what a complete fucking monster I am. And how hungry writing all that has made me. Death to potatoes, death to spring onions and brocolli. I will make them beg for their lives, and still kill them.

Mercilessly.

Do hunter-eaters of deer and moose get these same kinds of cheap thrills?

Will taking pleasure in the suffering of innocent vegetables one day form part of the pyschological profile of a potential serial killer?

And how exactly do you give a handful of organic baby carrots a humane death?

So many questions. So many murdered plants to eat.

Maybe He Could Mime The Words Instead?

Pundits and oppo-pols are having lots of fun imagining what songs are going to fill up the 20 minute set that Midnight Oil will play at the Bushfire Relief gig in March. Any Midnight Oil fan will know that there are dozens of songs, and some of their most famous, that the current Environment Minister won't want to be seen singing now he's a professional politician, and no longer apparently believes that nuclear energy, logging and the 'US' are evil incarnate.

Of course, The Chaser anticipated exactly this kind of quandry for Peter Garrett back in mid-2007.



But Midnight Oil will only be playing a 20 minute set, and the following Oils classic will cause Garrett no political headaches, plus it will fill a good chunk of the running time :



Even though Garrett's jerking-electric shock dance moves are seared into the national consciousness, it's still going to be a little strange to see a senior minister in the federal government rocking out onstage like that. It's a good cause, though, and it's pretty obvious Peter Garrett is hugely missing the addictive buzz of performing for an audience, in front of such a truly great band as the Oils.

My pick for the list, jokes about doing only instrumentals aside, will be some of the blasting, mostly politics-free songs off 1979's raucous Head Injuries album (Bus To Bondi for example), and the soaring anthem 'One Country', the lyrics of which follows :

Who'd like to change the world, who wants to shoot the curl
Who gets to work for bread, who wants to get ahead
Who hands out equal rights, who starts and ends that fight
And not not rant and rave, or end up a slave
Who can make hard won gains, fall like the summer rain
Now every man must be, what his life can be

So dont call, me, the tune, I will walk away

Who wants to please everyone, who says it all can be done
Still sit up on that fence, no-one Ive heard of yet
Dont call me baby, dont talk in maybes
Dont talk like has-beens, sing it like it should be
Who laughs at the nagging doubt, lying on a neon shroud
Just gotta touch someone, I want to be

Who wants to sit around, turn it up turn it down
Only a man can be, what his life can be
One vision, one people, one landmass, we are defenceless, we have a lifeline
One ocean, one policy, seabed lies, one passion, one movement, one instant
One difference, one lifetime, one understanding
Transgression, redemption, one island, our placemat, one firmament
One element, one moment, one fusion, yes and one time




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Murdoch's Warning To The World

The Drudge Report claims a scoop, or a handy leak designed to reassure Rupert Murdoch's media companies' stockholders that he is about to go on one hell of a sacking spree to rein in costs....and by the way, you're all doomed, Doomed!

Media baron Rupert Murdoch issued an urgent internal communication late Monday, warning his staff: "We are in the midst of a phase of history in which nations will be redefined and their futures fundamentally altered."

Murdoch doesn't actually say this is a bad thing, overall.

"Many people will be under extreme pressure and many companies mortally wounded...."

Murdoch's got his eye on some media properties that can be brought up and downsized, then folded into New Corp, cutting thousands more jobs.

"Our competitors will be sorely tempted to take the easy beat, to reduce quality in the search for immediate dividends."

But Murdoch has no intention of letting The Greater Depression reduce the...ahhh, quality of his media products, like Fox News, or Sydney's The Daily Telegraph or the New York Post, shimmering icons of news-o-tainment.

"Let me be very clear about our company: where others might step back from their commitment to their viewers, their users, readers and customers, we will renew ours.

"The direction of the business now and over the next few years will define the character of our company for decades."

He's going to fire a shitload of journalists, and make user-generated content play a bigger role in his media products, so he doesn't have to pay so many people so much money for all that content.

Hunting 3 Metre Bull Sharks In Sydney Harbour

Wild video here of fishermen snaring a three metre long bull shark in Sydney Harbour, with the Bridge and the Opera House as a backdrop.





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