‘We had on board large quantities of malt, of which was made sweet-wort ... and given from one or two pints in the day to each man’. So writes Captain James Cook in this article to explain how he lost not a single man to scurvy on this, his second, voyage (1772–1775). As late as 1740, long sea voyages were losing in the region of two-thirds of their sailors to scurvy. Cook also discusses the merits of ‘sour krout’ (i.e. pickled cabbage), ‘portable broth’ and, more familiarly, ‘a rob of lemons and oranges’ (although he had ‘no great opinion’ of the latter and considered them too costly). While we are still in doubt whether it was the malt, which Cook reckoned to be the best anti-scorbutic, or simply the practice of frequently replenishing the ship’s fresh food that caused this dramatic decline in deaths from scurvy, it remains one of the earliest triumphs in the study and endorsement of proper nutrition.
As for Abbott's lack of female appeal, he's decisive, fit and virile, for starters, hardly a turn-off to women...He's a rugby playing, boxing Rhodes Scholar....a surf lifesaver and a volunteer firefighter.
It's going to be one of those elections.
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Tony Abbott's office denies hot Canberra rumours that this will be the Liberal Party's 2010 federal election campaign theme :
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Rudd Too Busy With Obama To Notice Abbott
KevinRuddPM on Twitter reacts to the elevation of Tony Abbott to the leadership of the Liberal Party, and the sudden dumping of support for any carbon tax at all by the opposition :
Good meeting today with President Obama in Washington. Long discussion on climate change. Only 18 days to go to Copenhagen.
All countries now need to push as hard as possible for the strongest global action possible.
We need it for the environment, the economy, for jobs and for our kids.
Stop Laughing, This Is Serious Now
By Darryl Mason
The Rudd government will move fast to a federal election - March 2010 - on the off chance that Tony Abbott will quickly find a comfortable zone of support to build on amongst the Australian public. That off chance is in fact a good chance.
We will now be introduced to Tony 'Reasonable Guy' Abbott. The humble man, a man who has faith in God and himself, but wants to Save This Country From The SmugRudd.
This is exactly how the Liberal Party will market Abbott through the election.
Tony The Reasonable Vs Rudd The Smug.
And that approach will work better than you might imagine.
* The Liberal Party will get a boost in the polls, thanks to Tony Abbott. And it will be big enough to shock the poll watchers and cause some nervous titters in the federal government. I say about a 10 point leap for the Libs.
* Tony Abbott, in his first press conference as leader of the Liberal Party, has clearly been practicising his "I'm A Reasonable Guy, I Am" face. Which probably means, at least for a few weeks, the end of those chilling Abbott Death Stare.
* The five key issues Abbott will fight the first quarter 2010 federal election on are those he hooked into at the start of his press conference : delaying the ETS/Carbn Tax, Rudd's Schools Refurbishment Program, The RuddNet, Interest Rates, WorkChoices/Industrial Relations.
* Abbott claims nobody will ever mention "the phrase 'WorkChoices'" again. Fat chance. Abbott will simply rename the reintroduction of Howard's WorkChoices 'Fuck The Workers' policy something else. But the Australian public won't forget.
* Abbott is reminded by journo that he has referred to the reality of climate change as "crap."
"It was a bit of hyperbole, it's not my considered position," he replied.
Does Tony Abbott believe in climate change now? Yes, yes he does.
"(saying climate change was "crap")....was in the context of a heated discussion, where I was trying to argue people around. I do think climate change is real, and that man does make a contribution. The essential point here...is the mechanism for dealing with climate change. We should not be rushing through a new tax so Kevin Rudd has something to take to Cophenhagen."
In the face of Mr Hockey's insistence that the matter be a conscience vote, Mr Abbott eventually lost his temper.
"So," he summarised bitterly.
"Malcolm Turnbull's for the ETS. I'm against the ETS. And Joe - nobody knows what the fuck you stand for."
Abbott : "I accept at times I have stuffed up. I also believe that when you become leader, you make a new start. The Australian public is very fair, and they are always ready to give the leader of a political party a fair go."
And they will. Watch the polls next week.
* Abbott The Apologist : "I should take this opportunity to apologise for all my mistakes of the past."
Abbott thinks reality is a confessional booth, and all sins are immediately absolved.
That's pretty much what everyone in the media thought, just last night.
News.com.au PreNews Fail earlier today :
Not an unreasonable headline to drop into the system in preparation. The entire press gallery appeared to believe Hockey would win the leadership. I can't think of anyone who predicted Abbott would win. Let me know in comments if you find someone who did.
This is the first thing I wrote as a theme note for this post :
Welcome to the New Ugly Age of Liberal Party Religious Extremism.
Things are about to get very, very nasty indeed.
I don't think they will, after watching the Abbott press conference. They might get shouty, but I think Abbott really does believe, with a self-righteous fervour he appears to have learned to conceal overnight, that he can actually win an election against Kevin Rudd. But he won't win it by hammering Muslims and immigration and embracing, thankfully, nasty minority views.
The truth is, the Rudd government has had a pretty easy time of it, as far as formidable attacks from the Opposition goes, these past two years.
Tony Abbott has polished up his People Skills, and has already debuted his Reasonable Guy persona for the media. We will now see the soft and cuddly Abbott, edged with just enough venom to batter and sometimes better Rudd and Gillard.
Abbott wants to win. And he thinks he can. He Believes He Can Do It.
Look, if anyone in Australia still believes in actual miracles, Tony Abbott is amongst their number.
Can he do it?
Note - The above was mostly written as events unfolded, that's why it reads like a bunch of notes. It is. I just hate the look of 'UPDATE' appearing all over a post. A little * is less intrusive. Something more coherent coming on my theory that Abbott will tone down his religious extremism, not ramp it up. Australians are clearly sick of that kind of crap, the polls show it, the Libs know it. So it will be Tony The Humble Vs Rudd The Smug.
This will be the real battle in parliament. Rudd Vs Gillard. They've been sparring and flirting for years :
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Malcolm Turnbull : Not As Much Fun As Brendan Nelson
As one who supported Malcolm Turnbull’s bid to oust Peter King in the electorate of Wentworth, and his subsequent deposing of former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson, I admit an error in judgment.
The Turnbull I admired then read widely, listened to argument and made up his mind on the evidence placed before him.
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Now, Turnbull has joined Rudd and Wong and global warming tarts like Tim Flannery in denying the work and purpose of those who seek nothing but the truth....
Global Warming Tarts? I've had one of those. The woman behind the counter in the cake shop warned me they were bloody hot, but when I bit into one, I discovered it was actually quite cold.
After showing great promise, and being given great assistance...
Particularly by The Daily Telegraph, and The Australian.
....his political career is coming to a humiliating and inglorious close.
Who are you going to put the kiss of death on next, Piers?
@AlexHawkeMP better hope Akerman doesn't start praising him to the heavens, or he will never get to lead the Christian Liberal/Christian Greens Coalition of 2016.
This isn't widely known, but in the wake of the hilarious fuckapalooza of Godwin Gretch e-mails, Malcolm Turnbull was offered shocking, damning photographic evidence of KevinRuddPM's darkest secrets, but by then Turnbull was too scared of leaks to bring them before the public :
"We Don't Need Maps, We've Got An Aboriginal Elder!"
It's been a long time since I've watched any new movie trailer three times in a row.
This blog has been going for getting onto four years, it has a few thousand regular Australian visitors, I've written here fairly often about new Australian movies, and yet outside of the one publicist working on the ultra-independent movie The Jammed, I've never received an e-mail press release or been sent a trailer link by anyone from either major or minor movie distributors.
You'd think Australian movie distributors, producers and publicists would be going out of their way to find every single online avenue to publicise, promote their movies, even at a blog like this.
And yet, one day we will probably be voting by Twitter, using laptop thumbprint or iris scanners. Gillard :
People don't expect their politicians to just text out a message.
Imagine, you know, "What do you think the defence budget should be?" And apparently a whole lot of tweets come back and you accept that. That's not leadership."
It's not leadership. But it's an interesting way to get some instant unfiltered feedback, which is exactly what (pending) Liberal Party leader Joe Hockey did last week on Twitter :
Hey team re The ETS. Give me your views please on the policy and political debate. I really want your feedback.
Julia Gillard, of course, is not on Twitter. Yet.
If you're not on it, you don't get it. And even when you are on it, you still won't get it for a while. And then, one day, whap! you realise what Twitter is all about, what it can do, and, perhaps more importantly, what it can do for you.
And here everyone can play along. If you "follow" the right people, anyone can have a front-row seat. The role of Twitter in providing information during the Mumbai terrorist attack and the Iranian election has been well documented.
But last week we saw Twitter seriously step up to the plate in Australian political reporting for the first time.
New developments, big and small, along with pithy comments were constantly "tweeted" by plugged in journalists around the clock. While still relying on party sources for major developments, I picked up a lot of good information from journalists I trust on Twitter.
----------------------
Like anything to do with press-gallery journalism, there's a healthy dose of competition when it comes to Twitter.
Every journo wants to be the first to tweet something new and there's nothing more embarrassing than thinking you have, only to scroll down and see The Australian's Samantha Maiden posted the same thing 15 minutes ago.
But there's also an interesting spirit of information sharing among competing journalists.
I didn't have much time last week to see or the news during the day, but checking into Twitter once an hour (or a few times an hour when the action in Canberra was heating up), gave me what felt like a front row seat to the historically explosive flurry of activity in the halls and backrooms of Parliament House, as press gallery journalists not only competed with each other to be the first on radio or TV with breaking news, but the first on Twitter. Most of the time, they twooted their scoops minutes before they broke them on air, or hours before they appeared on their news sites.
There are probably more Australian journalists working the twootstream than politicians, but after this week, that will all change. The idea that any serious politician will head into a late March, 2010, federal election without being on Twitter, or at least having someone in their office twooting for them, and reading the @ feedback, will seem bizarre, so very 20th century, and pigeonhole them as being out of touch with their electorate.
If Twitter really takes off with the Australian public, and it certainly seems to be doing incredibly well so far, we will see up-and-coming politicians build their base through Twitter, and arrive in Canberra with thousands of followers, instantly communicating and sharing news with their electorate online.
I'm not seeing a lot of negatives to the above prediction. Eventually, it will be all but impossible for politicians to lie or deceive on Twitter. They'll get absolutely hammered, near instantly, not only by their own followers, but by their political enemies and the digital media always searching for that next Twitter scoop.
For that reason alone, Twitter is great for Australian democracy, and honesty in politics.
The brighter the sunlight, the quicker the dark clouds of spin fade away.
What's God Got To Do With It?
By Darryl Mason
Looks like a photo editor at the Sunday Herald Sun has a sense of humour. Could there be a more non-flattering pic of Tony Abbott (clothed, that is) kicking around to illuminate this story?
The only declared leadership challenger to Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, says he's a "pragmatic common-sense" politician and not a narrow-minded conservative.
Who writes Abbott's material? He should be doing stand-up comedy. Wait, he already is!
Well known for his staunch Catholicism, Mr Abbott said he had never let his religion interfere with his policy decisions....
No. Never. For Abbott, it's always what's best for Christian Australia. And God, obviously.
(Abbott) conceded that colleague Joe Hockey might be considered by some a better choice as Liberal leader if Mr Hockey chose to stand on Tuesday.
Malcolm Turnbull must be sick to fucking death by now of doing so much charity work for the Libs. How much more humiliation can he take?
Abbott :
".....I don't think I am necessarily God's gift to politics...."
Necessarily? He's leaving himself some wiggle room to drop the "I don't think" and "necessarily" should Biblical Armageddon arrive.
"This is not all about me. It's about a change to policy and putting the Liberal Party in the best united state to win the next election."
If the Liberals keep fucking around like they have these past couple of weeks, The Greens and Labor are going to rip away Libseats across the country. Without even trying.
Bob Brown must be laughing himself to sleep.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Science Used To Be Fun
He was mates with Albert Einstein :
This quote pretty well sums up how I feel about the double-hysteria of "Look! Warmy World Government Conspiracy!" surrounding hacked/leaked global warming researchers' occasionally dodgy e-mails, and a fresh ramping up of pants-staining predictions of apocalyptic climate doom :
"Both sides want to maintain this idea that science is this pure thing, this source of clarity, exactness, and truth. Of course, it isn't. It's a human endeavor, a social endeavor. The people who do it are people full of imperfections."
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"Don't Leave The Building. One Of The Trade Towers Just Fell....Please Be Careful"
My first (and hopefully not last) story for ninemsn, on the leaking of Secret Service, US military and emergency services pager TXT messages sent on 9/11, beginning minutes after the first attack on the World Trade Centre. Excerpt :
The whistleblower website Wikileaks last night began to publish some 500,000 pager messages sent on 9/11: many of the messages contain the names and phone numbers of senders and receivers along with intimate details of their relationships.
Wikileaks claimed its release of the pager messages was justified by the historical weight of the information, claiming the half a million texts make up "a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time".
I do still have a story on The Chaser coming, focusing on producer/writer/performer Julian Morrow's quest to come up with a new TV show format that will go beyond anything they've done so far, but will not go down the predictable route of easy outrage. As he put it in a recent speech, how easy is it to offend conservatives? Too easy. He doesn't sound interested at all in heading back into that territory.
The story I've been writing is long, getting onto 8000 words, and I think I'll break it up into three parts.
Part One will focus on the shooting of one of their last big public gags (the "One More Picture" bit that aired in the final show).
Part Two will focus on the interview I did with Morrow, the recording of the final show, and what happened at the after party.
Part Three will focus on the speeches Morrow has given since The Chaser's War On Everything ended, and his feelings about what the the War On Everything achieved, where they failed, and what they might be getting up to next.
So thanks for being patient, and I'm sorry it's taken so long.
I hope to get Part One up late next week.
Feel free to post abuse in comments if I miss this hazy deadline.
God : "I Got Nothing To Do With These Racist Fucking Arseholes"
By Darryl Mason
When I wrote this piece the other day, about a leaflet being letterboxed in Sydney by Fred Nile's Christian Democratic Party, I was hoping it would turn out to be fake. It had to be fake. This is Sydney, Australia, 2009. Surely nobody could be that fucking stupid?
Well, yes, they can be, and were. The nasty little leaflet is real. And many of the people who received the leaflet in their letterboxes - asking if the electorate was supportive of giving the federal government the power to deport "any Muslim" and stop the building of more mosques and Muslim schools, while introducing an immigration policy to "give preference to persecuted Christians" - are not happy about it. At all.
A survey of North Shore voters has been condemned as “racist hate politics” by residents, politicians and Christians.
West Pymble friends Bronwen Hanna, a Christian, and Surur Arain, a Muslim, said they were horrified to receive the survey in the mail on Tuesday.
“I felt disbelief that something like this could be written,” Ms Hanna said. “I actually thought, ‘this is a joke’.
“The views and the stereotyping was so extreme.”
Mrs Arain said: “It was really distressing to see those words in print. Implicit in those statements is stereotyping people that they are so bad they could be deported at any time.”
Greens candidate Susie Gemmel.....described it as “an ugly style of hate politics”.
“Fred Nile ... is distributing material that shows a racist, even fascist, ideology behind the Christian Democrats,” she said.
Incredibly, the Christian Democratic Party claims they don't support any of the ideas expressed in the leaflet, they are simply "asking questions."
If Jesus did return, and saw the shit that some people were doing in his name, he'd purgatory them all.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Will Architect Jan Utzon Be Hounded Into Silence For Questioning The Collapse Of World Trade Centre 7 On 9/11?
By Darryl Mason
Sydney Opera House architect Jan Utzon expresses a healthy professional curiosity, and asks reasonable questions, about the collapse of World Trade Centre 7 in New York City on September 11, 2001 :
Utzon, like hundreds of other architects, engineers, scientists, former military officers and intelligence officials from around the world, stated simply and truthfully that the 'official story' of 9/11 doesn't always make sense, and that three steel framed skyscrapers collapsing from fire damage is an event that has never happened before. He concludes that new investigations are warranted.
The Sydney Morning Herald decides to do some gate-keeping and claims Utzon has "signed up for September 11 conspiracy theories", comparing respected architects who have questions about how three skyscrapers can collapse from fire damage to those who believe The Moon landings were faked.
An Opera House spokeswoman said Mr Utzon was ''entitled to his personal views outside of his professional work as architectural adviser to Sydney Opera House''.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology spent three years investigating Building 7. It names fire as the culprit. Fire - fuelled by office furnishings, aided and abetted by the thermal expansion of structural elements.
"Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down," said the lead investigator, Shyam Sunder.
Explosives? The institute concludes that the smallest blast capable of crippling the third tower's critical column would have produced a "sound level of 130 to 140 decibels at a distance of half a mile''. No witness reported it.
TV news reports from 9/11 of explosions coming from the vicinity of World Trade Centre 7 before it collapsed. "Keep your eye on that building, it's coming down", "the whole thing's about to blow up" :
Here's a video of an investigator from the National Institute of Science & Technology claiming there was no evidence of molten steel in the ruins of the World Trade Centre buildings. His claim is utterly contradicted by firemen and rescue workers who spent months digging through the wreckage :
The NIST used computer modelling for its theory explaining the collapse of World Trade Centre 7, as all material evidence was removed from the site before the NIST investigations began.
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Murdoch Journo Calls Reading Newspapers For Free Online "Piracy"
In yet another article by a Murdoch-employed journalist pumping the coming new reality of "You Will Pay!" access restrictions on Digital Rupert 'news' stories, Terry McCrann does exactly as the headline claims :
The obvious problem is of course getting people to pay for online media and especially newspaper content. Like this one, part of Murdoch's News Corp.
A series of problems actually. The technical one -- how do you actually do it?
The, for want of a better word, piracy one -- how do you stop the content being accessed anyway, by the way that links on the internet work.
Or by the way bloggers will adapt to deal with pay walls around online news they want to "klepto".
You Give God A Bad Name
This is a photo of a leaflet being letterboxed in Sydney, claiming to be from Fred Nile's Christian Democratic Party : (click to enlarge)
Excerpts :
* We should do what the Greenies want and let any foreigners in
* Australia needs no more Muslim schools and no more mosques
* The Federal Government should have the power to deport any Muslim
* We should back brave Israel even to the point of blockading Iran
* Immigration policy should give preference to persecuted Christians
I look forward to updating this story with a mainstream media news story link proving the leaflet is a fake, despite the claimed authorisation by the Christian Democratic Party's campaign organiser, Michael Darby.
If Tony Blair Is A War Criminal, Then So Is John Howard
By Darryl Mason
I've been saying it here for years, but has any Australian journalist ever asked John Howard, "While you were in Washington DC, between Sept 11 and Sept 15, did you make a commitment to President George W. Bush that Australian troops would fight the War On Iraq?"
Leaked docs reveal then British PM Tony Blair committed troops to the War On Iraq as early as February 2002.
Did President Bush use Howard's Sept 2001 commitment to fighting the War On Iraq to push Tony Blair to sign on, too?
The documents - transcripts of interviews from an internal defence ministry review of the conflict - disclose that some planning for the Iraq war had begun in February 2002. Major General Graeme Lamb, then head of Britain's special forces, was quoted as saying he had been "working the war up since early 2002", according to the newspaper.
In July 2002, Blair told lawmakers at a House of Commons committee session there were no preparations to invade Iraq.
Critics of the war have long insisted Blair offered President George W Bush an assurance as early as mid-2002 - before British MPs voted in 2003 to approve UK involvement - that Britain would join the war.
The leaked documents are likely to be supplied to a public inquiry established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to scrutinise prewar intelligence and postwar planning, and which will hold its first evidence sessions later this week.
Brown appointed ex-civil servant John Chilcot to lead the panel, which will call Blair and the current and former heads of Britain's MI6 intelligence agency - John Sawers and John Scarlett - to give testimony in person.
When will John Howard finally face the kind of interrogation Tony Blair is about to undergo?
....a confession that threatens to end his political career.
The former barmaid, Michelle Chantelois, says she had an affair with the Premier in explosive allegations that could end Mr Rann's seven-year rule of the state.
The AAP journalist who wrote this story wasn't willing to put his/her name to it.
Would you?
Rude Words Cause Boring MoralOutrage! Alert
900,000 Australian TV viewers had no problem with the most recent episode of Good News Week. Some viewers, however, who need to keep themselves in the headlines, didn't :
Crude language, sex and violence on the box has a family group claiming TV is becoming nothing more than a septic tank of dirt and garbage.
In Monday's Good News Week, bad language was rife -with the f-word dropped once every 10 minutes. The popular satire program also featured jokes about masturbation, child molesting, erections and sex with dogs.
The usual suspects are involved in these fresh yelps of MoralOutrage!
"It used to be about coming up with good ideas and talent to entertain people; now, it's all about scraping the bottom of the barrel to be more shocking than the last guy," he said. "It's like diving into a septic tank. There's just too much gratuitous sex and violence on television. The networks should be held accountable.
"Not everyone can afford cable television, so poor people like us are stuck with whatever the networks dish up to us."
Must not have any good books worth reading. Or any thick books based on myths written in the 4th century, and rewritten in the 15th century worthy, of another flick through. Are there no Christian video games yet?
Some viewers"It's not acceptable, particularly on the ABC and SBS because our tax dollars subsidise them."
900,000 other Australians didn't have a problem with that Good News Week. But who cares what they think?
Firefighters will be given no reprieve with weather conditions expected to deteriorate today with winds and high temperatures forecast.
Overnight 70 fires were burning across the State, mostly in remote and inaccessible terrain in the Blue Mountains the Hawkesbury region and northern areas.
Much of New South Wales is expected to get above 40 degrees, with winds gusting at up to 60 kilometres an hour forecast.
The RFS says under these conditions, firefighting will be extremely difficult and there may be significant threats to property.
It says people on rural properties to the west of Kandos and Rylstone should follow the advice of firefighters.
"If you do not have a Bush Fire Survival Plan, or you have doubts about your ability to protect your property, leave early," a spokesman said.
"Under these conditions fires will be uncontrollable, unpredictable and fast moving.
"Embers will be blown ahead of the fire, creating spot fires in many different directions.
"Spot fires will start up to six kilometres ahead of the main fire and they will move quickly.
"These spot fires may threaten your home earlier than the predicted main fire front."
In the outskirts of Sydney, up into the Blue Mountains, there are some 1.5 million people living in what could be described as "bushland settings." If conditions in the future were ever to mimic Victoria's on February 7, where would all those people go? And who would do all the evacuating?
In Australia, it's impossible to evacuate 500,000 to 1.5 million people from an area under threat. China evacuates millions, some years more than 20 million, from flood zones every time the super-rains come and rivers rise dangerously so. But it takes days to do it safely, and it's a fantasy to think that we have anywhere near the resources to stage such mass evacuations. In Victoria or New South Wales, unlike China, most of those evacuated would have nowhere to go, and state governments would have nowhere to even tent all those people while a bushfire threat passes.
If climate change has in reality given us an horrific preview this year of what's to come, perhaps the now impossible problems of massive evacuation in Australia will be overcome, eventually. Maybe.
The Rural Fire Service says about 1,000 firefighters are battling more than 100 blazes across the state as temperatures head towards the 40-degree mark.
But the Rylstone and Kandos blazes remain the biggest concern, after a fire threatening rural properties at Gunnedah in the state's north was brought under control.
The Twitter feed of updates from the NSW Fire Service is here :
