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2005 Archives
You'll see in the archives section above that 2005 is missing. That's some glitch that will hopefully rectify itself eventually. But in the meantime if you want to find my posts from this period they are below:
January 2005
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| Ride the (extremely) wild surf! |
| 12.31.04 (5:02 pm) [edit] |
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When I heard about the giant waves hitting the resorts, I wondered about the surfers who were on the beaches, or out in the waves already. I assumed that since they had experience of raging water and boards to float on, they might have managed to survive. In at least one case, that's exactly what happened. |
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| New name required? |
| 12.30.04 (5:38 pm) [edit] |
| In the light of recent events, I wonder if the owners of this online marketing site are considering giving it a new title. |
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| Amazing photos |
| 12.30.04 (4:54 pm) [edit] |
| I found these satellite images via Instapundit. |
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| Latest tsunami the worst by far |
| 12.30.04 (4:37 pm) [edit] |
| For people curious about how the scale of devastation compares with that wrought by other natural disasters, here's a good summary. |
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| New America/UN faultline. |
| 12.30.04 (4:10 pm) [edit] |
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It's incredible. Just recently the UN was accusing the US of being "stingy" in its response to the Asian disaster. Now they're complaining that the Americans are too willing to act. It's like Iraq all over again. |
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| America accused of stinginess |
| 12.29.04 (2:04 am) [edit] |
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Colin Powell has become quite justifiably miffed after a UN official accused the US of "stinginess" over its offers of aid to tsunami-hit countries. The amount offered: One billion dollars. Stingy as. |
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| Tsunami relief effort |
| 12.28.04 (11:47 pm) [edit] |
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At the risk of sounding trite, it is very heartening to see the immense global effort being made to help the millions whose lives have been devastated by the tsunamis. Governments are all digging deep and individuals are too, as can be seen by this spike in searches for international aid agencies. |
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| Sri Lankan toll |
| 12.28.04 (12:49 am) [edit] |
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The death toll for only one country - Sri Lanka - looks like being 25 000. I'm still trying to get my head around the scale of this disaster. It's beyond cataclysmic. |
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| Mother Nature is a friggin' idiot! |
| 12.27.04 (3:48 pm) [edit] |
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I almost feel bad about commenting on this immense earthquake-caused catastrophe, since it's still all going on as I write and will be for a very long time to come. But anyway, here goes: As I read, see and hear more news of the devastation wrought by tsunamis I keep noticing emotive descriptions. Nature is "wrathful", or even "furious". But it's really not any of these things. It just is what it is. Nature is violent by its, er, nature. To anthropomorphise it is stupid. If you think that nature is "Mother Nature" and that she is being "furious", you must then assume she has a reason to be that way. The most extreme proponents of this line of thought are ferndamentalists, who wag their fingers and inisist that she's hitting back because of all the abuse she's suffered from mankind. But then why are the people who've copped it most horribly the ones who do the least polluting? (And not just in this case. Think of the destruction of Bam, or any number of famines and floods and other disasters in the Third World.) If there were any truth to this "we've got it coming to us" argument, then the industrialised West would be the one copping most of the blows, wouldn't it? Even if it is true, and it is Mother Nature hitting back, then she must be particularly cruel - and stupid. Talk about shitting in your own nest. In that case, why worship her as a god? And, in characterising this cruel, stupid, destructive force as female, aren't they being more than a little, er, misogynous? Barbarians, they are. Civilisation-despising, women-hating, bong-suckling barbarians. What the hell do they have to offer - besides a kind of hell, that is? |
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| Michael Crichton |
| 12.26.04 (4:50 pm) [edit] |
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Not long ago I was walking down King Street in Newtown and passed a bookshop. There was a new novel prominently displayed in the front window. It was called State of Fear by consistent hit writer Michael Crichton. I only glanced at it, immediately assuming that it had something to do with terrorism and was probably strongly opposed in its subtext to America's current aggressive policy. But I was way wrong on both counts. It's about the environment, and the greenie enviro-doomsters are the bad guys! Yet another sign that there's a big cultural shift happening. |
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| Labor, don't give up! |
| 12.23.04 (5:04 pm) [edit] |
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Dippy feminist bimbo Anne Summers attempts to rally fluffs against their appalling right-wing foes in Oz and the United States. If she's not way, way off in her analysis, she has a blinding talent for stating the obvious. Of Dubya Bush, she says: He may have won the election but he is clearly losing the war and this, strangely enough, seems to give a lot of people energy - and hope. Well, he isn't "losing the war". He is trying to weather a ruthless, brutal assault from pre-mediaeval barbarians who have no respect for humanity whatsover. But the second part of the above sentence is spot on. And this is exactly what the majority of Americans finds so creepy and loathsome - that these malignant "pacifists" are glad to see the carnage in Iraq, and would like nothing more for it to continue to the point of making the US - now the country's only hope of finding democracy, or any kind of order for that matter - give up entirely and leave. And these people wonder why they lost the election? Crikey. Of her fellow travellers in Oz she writes, accurately: A lot of political junkies I know are going cold turkey at present, disavowing interest in anything political, asking what the point is when their influence seems negligible. Then, inaccurately she concludes: The new disengagement may be the easy way out, but it will also ensure the Government has a free ride. That will be joyful news indeed for Howard. She still doesn't get it. The best lobby groups for Howard are Labor and any group to the left of it. If they were to shut up for a while, there is a risk that we might forget what a thuggish, malicious, self-indulgent pack of bloody Stalinists they are. Then, God forbid, they might actually get back in. Ugh. So, I'm with Summers: Keep giving John Howard hell, fluffs! The more you whinge, whine and squawk, the more obvious it is that the people of Australia made the right choice. And the longer the Liberals' reign will be. (Also, we need all the laughs we can get.) |
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| Tim Blair's secret? |
| 12.23.04 (3:08 am) [edit] |
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Australian blog king Tim Blair has just posted his month by month summary of the year that was. It often amazes me how he remains so prolific. Some people say he never sleeps. But I reckon he's cloned himself, kind of like this guy. |
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| Climate change... change |
| 12.21.04 (5:39 pm) [edit] |
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Only thirty years ago, the doomsayers were having a field day predicting massive climate change. But then, the scenario was the exact opposite of what it is now. I'm willing to bet it will all go full circle again within the next thirty. |
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| Lisa Montgomery |
| 12.20.04 (11:24 pm) [edit] |
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I almost couldn't believe what I was reading when I first learned about this bizarre murder. Here was a woman so completely insane she killed a pregant woman, and cut the bay from her womb. It won't be long before the twisted sisters start equivocating like crazy over this. They always do when a woman does something truly barbaric. I'll bet that somehow they'll blame it all on Western, patriarchal "society" and how it places such huge pressure on women to have children. |
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| Santa Claustrophobia |
| 12.20.04 (5:15 pm) [edit] |
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Australian fluffs just loathe Christmas. It reaffirms three things they just can't stand: our Eurocentric cultural identity, the concept of the family, and capitalism. They get all queasy and uneasy as it approaches. And they're forever griping and writing grouchy articles about it. A lot of their complaints are just plain dippy. Maybe that's why they call it "the silly season"? Here's an example. The writer is deeply concerned about the fact that the myth, or ritual of Christmas is not literally true. Well, of course it's not literally true. (It's a crock. All myths and rituals are a crock.) But the fact that it's a crock is not the point. The point is that it embodies a few things that we as a society hold dear; things mentioned above (as well as others). It could easily be argued that the Fast of Ramadan is also a crock. Would the writer be willing to hold that ritual up to the same scrutiny she applies to Chrissie? Of course not. The fact that fluffs are forever omitting to do this in their Claustrophobic diatribes is more revealing of their actual motives than what they do write, I reckon. |
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| University group-think |
| 12.19.04 (4:45 pm) [edit] |
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Here's a good piece by Greg Melleuish about the depressing fluff-dominated intellectual conformity within Australia's institutes of higher learning". It contains this description: No surveys have been conducted, but any sustained contact with the humanities and social sciences in Australian universities brings one face to face with a stultifying conformity that is soon quite mind-numbing. There is the obligatory Howard bashing, anti-Americanism and belief in the depraved past of both Australia and Western civilisation. Academics in these areas are possibly the only group in the country, outside doctors' wives, where Green voters are in a majority. Spot on. Still, I'll say something in defence of quackademics: At least they get up and go to work, and regularly put in monster 17 hr weeks. They do actually produce something occasionally - even if it is postmodern gibberish. Artsville is worse. It has all the ideological conformity and is afflicted with a terminal bong-addled apathy as well. Many of the wanktors and standup commie-dians I've met are so bloody unmotivated, they can't even be stuffed showing up to their state-funded gigs half the time. Oh shit it's depressing. |
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| Stuck in the seventies |
| 12.17.04 (4:35 pm) [edit] |
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In today's Feral, Julia Baird rails against the wowsers who didn't like the, er, "new" version of our national anthem. But much of the criticism of it wasn't from fusty, crusty old farts who found it too "irreverent". A lot of people (myself included) didn't like it because it was crap. If anything, the, er, conservative indignation came from the fluffs, who wheeled out all the old gripes about how Australia is stuck in the fifties, can't accept anything new, etc. But if Clover Moore and Co wanted a musical form that's "young, and free" and now, why choose one that's synonomous with the bloody seventies? What's slated for next year? Will Human League be asked to do a version? |
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| Ol' Dirty Bastard |
| 12.16.04 (5:11 pm) [edit] |
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There seem to be two main prerequisites for being a rap star (aside from having talent, that is): You have to have a really funny name. And you have to die an early, horrible, often violent death. Ol' Dirty Bastard fits the bill on both counts. |
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| Conspiracy theory |
| 12.16.04 (12:09 am) [edit] |
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Some rich nut in America is offering over a hundred thousand bucks to anyone who can prove that the 9/11 attacks weren't "an inside job". Nothing will shift his belief in his theory, of course, because he's obviously barking mad. (And even if he isn't, and his hypothesis were plausible, it's almost impossible to "prove" a negative.) Personally, I'd like to see him try to prove that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job. |
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| Showbiz compassion |
| 12.14.04 (11:42 pm) [edit] |
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Here's another pithy piece (also in today's Oz) about how fluffs are forever wringing their hands and banging on about how much they care, but actually doing sod all. I like this part: This ethical shift taking place in Australia and elsewhere recognises that while emoting sentimentality might make some people feel satisfied with themselves, it can often do great harm. This is because true compassion involves engaging in appropriate action that alleviates a problem. It's not a show-biz phenomenon. Whis is exactly why so many showbiz types find the pseudo stuff so appealing. |
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| Global warming hysteria |
| 12.14.04 (4:05 pm) [edit] |
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Here's a pithy summation by Bjorn Lomborg of why so much of this concern about global warming is misplaced. Lomborg lays out the absurdity nicely. But I'd like to add something about the motivations behind the global warming hysteria. Quite frankly I think they're sinister as all get out! Basically, ferndamentalists want to have something really ominous and scary to threaten people with. But they don't have God, so they've done the second best thing: They've (unconsciously) nicked a couple of Biblical myths (about roasting in hell, and that story about Noah and the flood) and rewritten them. They paint an apocalyptic scenario - conveniently a very long way into the future - and then use it to start bossing people around in the present. In this, they're not unlike the people they most despise: fundamentalist Christians. The fire and brimstone preacher yells: "You will all burn in hell if you have sex out of wedlock!" Ferndies shriek: "It'll get really hot and sweaty, and whole countries will become submerged if you don't ratify the Kyoto protocol!" One of the big holes in their argument is that the Earth has been experiencing massive variations in temperature anyway over time. So, who's to say that even if we didn't have man-made global warming, nature wouldn't have heated up the planet on its own (or cooled it down massively, for that matter)? And who's to say that another, far more catastrophic scenario won't present itself? Take a collison with an asteroid, for instance. That would really put this global warming problem in the shade... Ferndies have this naive assumption that nature is always good and constant, and man (especially technological man) is always bad and violent. They live in a kooky little Rousseauvian fantasy land whining, "It was all perfect. Then the evil White Man came along and ruined it all!" But have a good hard look at nature and you'll see it was never perfect. Nor will it ever be. Hell, we're just a bunch of bald monkeys on a bloody great rock hurtling through space. The best we can do is make it up as we go along. (That's what nature's doing too, by the way. The difference is we can do it thoughtfully, with some kind of moral direction, and with our own best interests in mind.) |
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| Abuse in madrassas |
| 12.10.04 (6:59 pm) [edit] |
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The widespread sexual abuse of children in the Muslim religious schools (or "madrassas") of Pakistan is finally being publicized. There's some information on it here in the Washington Times. The ABC has also reported it, although notably makes no mention of the actual religion involved. Interesting. You'd think that would be vital information. Now, considering all that (justified) leftist outrage over sex abuse in the Catholic church, when do you think the fluffs are going to get angry about this? Don't hold your breath... |
| 0 Comments |
| Labor violence |
| 12.07.04 (4:28 pm) [edit] |
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During the recent Oz election, John Howard responded to the argument that the two main parties were pretty much the same on major issues by pointing out a philosophical difference: the Libs are about facilitating choice, while Labor aims to bring about a certain mode of behaviour (that is, narrow choice). I think that's true. But there's also a cultural difference. Over the years I've met quite a few Labor Party members, hangers on and wannabes. They all have one thing in common: a scary, almost operatic intensity. They describe it as a "passion for justice", but I've never been convinced of that. I think it's closer to primitive tribal bloodlust. Take Latham and Keating, Robert Ray, John Faulkner. These guys are really vicious. Take Julia Gillard. Her grim vindictiveness just drips off her. (Pity, because she looks great!) Compare this aura to that of the Libs, whose worst qualities could be summed up as a kind of formal tight-arsedness. No wonder they keep winning. |
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| More on Team America |
| 12.06.04 (3:31 am) [edit] |
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Andrew Sullivan does a great job of describing how the themes of individual responsibility and moral courage pervade Team America (and another film, The Incredibles). I had barely heard of the second film but I'm interested now. Might give it a look. But just re TA:WP: The thing I liked about it was that it had the balls to be pro-war and ultimately pro-Bush; had the good grace (and good humour) to make fun of the right as well; was never at any point preachy; and was always funny as all get out. This is the exact opposite of so much leftist "satire", which is invariably smug and monomaniacal in its POV; utterly refuses to take the piss out of itself; and is basically just... not very funny. Watch anything trying to fob itself off as satire on the ABC over the last few years (or even the last coupla decades!) and you'll see what I mean. |
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| Re: Team America |
| 12.05.04 (5:27 pm) [edit] |
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Tim Blair describes a review embodying exactly the kind of lefteous indignation about the subtext of Team America I mentioned below. |
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| Team America |
| 12.05.04 (12:21 am) [edit] |
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Saw Team America: World Police the other night. It's a hoot. One of the most refreshing things about it is its covert right-wing subtext. The vicious mockery of pompous pinko Hollywood celebs is particularly enjoyable. No wonder so many fluffs in the media were disappointed, or offended by it. I've read a few reviews, most of them grudgingly acknowledging that yes, it is funny, but the subtext is disturbing. So, they can't wholeheartedly endorse it. Well, for the reviewers it is disturbing because like most in the media they are die-hard fluffs and simply cannot accept that satire is truly satire if it isn't "from the left". They look at it and think: "But they're not allowed to do that!" They are now reacting in exactly the same way that they (often falsely) accuse conservatives of doing. Well, I'm all for this new approach. And I look forward to more of it - particularly here in Oz. (Although, somehow I don't think it's going to really take off anytime soon.) |
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| Eureka bullshit, pinkos! |
| 12.02.04 (3:34 pm) [edit] |
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There's a controversy surrounding the appointment of David Hicks' father Terry in the walk commemorating the Eureka uprising in Ballarat. The walk has been captured by the lunar left, who are using it as shameless propaganda. I saw the organiser, Graeme Dunstan, interviewed on the TV last night, on Today Tonight I think. He had that grim, tribal, malicious aura about him that all Stalinists have. Here he is trying desperately to look joyous, wise and life affirming, when it's clear as day that he's a talentless mediocrity with a head full of bullshit and a heart full of hate. Have a read of his psychobabbling biog. It's a classic. It's so chockas with New Age, leftie bullshit, it's like a parody of itself. He's like this guy 20 years on. He proudly states that "he now lives the nomadic life travelling alone with a dog and two sheep". Well, good to know he's among intellectual equals. In the interview he said that if David Hicks could come along to lead the march, he would be more than welcome. That just reaffirms the obvious: that Terry Hicks is only there because they can't get hold of his son. Which begs the question: If Dunstan believes in human rights and freedom of political affiliation, then why choose as a symbol a man who was seduced by an inhumane, destructive ideology such as the Taliban's? If the Taliban ruled in Ballarat, would Dunstan have the right to publicly disagree with them? No, he would be dead before he could even begin organising anything as provocative as he has done now. (Actually, that's probably not the best analogy to use, since I suspect he wouldn't be with the rebels in this case, but the oppressors.) As for Terry Hicks: What a tragic old twit. He's stupidly allowed himself to be used by those who clearly despise - not support - the admirable tradition of dissent symbolised by the walk. I used to wonder how David Hicks could become an Islamofascist after growing up here. Talk about a step back! Now, seeing his old man's pathetic behaviour it becomes obvious. Terry is a moral mollusc, and was clearly a negative role model for him. |
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