Those of you who used to be on Whitepage may be interested to know that cc is back on Vox. She used to live in Sydney  but is in the bush now. You can catch up on her here. http://cc1804.vox.com/

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26506144-952,00.html

BIBLE classes should be compulsory so children have a fundamental understanding of Christianity on leaving school, federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says.

"I think everyone should have some familiarity with the great texts that are at the core of our civilisation," Mr Abbott told the Herald Sun.

"That includes, most importantly, the Bible.

"I think it would be impossible to have a good general education without at least some serious familiarity with the Bible and with the teachings of Christianity.

"That doesn't mean that people have to be believers."

But former Howard government Islamic advisor Dr Ameer Ali, said Mr Abbott's remarks were "over the top".

"It's one thing to say every child needs a good knowledge of history and geography or science," Dr Ali said.

"But it is something else to say all children should have a knowledge of the Bible. That might hurt other people who have their own holy scriptures," he said.

And the Australian Education Union's federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, said that religion was not a priority for schools.

"There is a place for comparative studies of religion in the curriculum, but ultimately we consider it a private matter for parents and their children," he said.

Read more on the Herald Sun's website.

I thought long and hard about posting tonight. This is a time of year when I like to forget the crap of this world, I Iike to dwell on the good things in life. Those simple things we take for granted. Like good health, family, and the miracle of just being alive. But at this moment I am feeling rather despondent. For all his efforts, it seems that Obama will deliver a health system with cosmetic improvements. For all the efforts of a lot of good people, it seems that the Copenhagen talks will deliver a cosmetic "solution" to the climate change challenge that confronts us all. And I'll lay it on the line. Conservatives have brought us to this.

And I have to wonder why. All that Obama wanted to do was to make health care available to every American. I don't think that is unreasonable. After all, all other industrialised countries have provided for this basic necessity for their citizens decades ago.Yet, the richest country in the world refuses to do so. Instead, we are treated to a litany of lies and obfuscation that are really an insult to the intelligence of anyone with average intelligence. I really do feel for my many Vox friends who I know feel the way that I do. I do sincerely wish it was otherwise.

And it seems that the Copenhagen talks will be just that. Talks. And who will be celebrating the failure of the talks to deliver a plan to deliver the world from its folly? Why, those same conservatives who seem to think that so long as they resist change then that is all that necessary in this world. And it seems as though they have won. Only they haven't. We all lost.

Like I said, I'd sooner forget the crap. They sure make it hard, though. Maybe another whisky will help.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26497660-952,00.html

Cruise control driver runs down his critics

My Vox neighbour, Endeesea, has come up with a cracker of a post about the main impediment to much human progress. It's humans. 

http://campaign.constantcontact.com/render?v=001laauDGMXfkVe2Pbk9PlgC2KmENOF0w4WtESOwU9d-0VBhDI-bsBR-sNLXcDcfOAAjmgkfu8-OAIZioPnnWuys2rgVFd1beyQB9E1rIC0vCk%3D

" The purpose of commercial [media] is to induce mass sales. For mass sales there must be a mass norm ... By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry ... assures itself a standard product for mass consumption.":

John Whiting, writer, commenting on the homogenization of corporate media program content

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"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change.": David Barsamian, journalist and publisher

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The foulest damage to our political life comes not from the 'secrets' which they hide from us, but from the little bits of half-truth and disinformation which they do tell us. These are already pre-digested, and then are sicked up as little gobbits of authorised spew. The columns of defence correspondents in the establishment sheets serve as the spittoons.: E.P. Thompson, British historian

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The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell: Eugene Debs 6 June 1918: The speech was given to about 1,200 people and was later used against Debs to make the case that he had violated the espionage Act. The judge sentenced Debs to ten years in prison:

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"[Y]our national greatness, swelling vanity; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages." : Frederick Douglass - 1818 - 1895

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" When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking.": John Wooden

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/industry-sectors/clean-coal-plan-gets-fast-track/story-e6frg976-1225810004615

A MAJOR clean coal power plant and carbon storage project is being considered for planning approval in Queensland, even though a feasibility assessment has not been completed and a site is yet to be found, along with the necessary $4.2 billion in funding.

The Bligh government confirmed on Friday that Co-ordinator-General Colin Jensen had given significant project status to ZeroGen, which is wholly owned by the state with initial backing from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Shell and the coal industry.

The declaration signals the start of comprehensive environmental assessments, even though the project is still at the pre-feasibility stage.

Most stakeholders are awaiting carbon policies to determine the way forward.

A feasibility study, if warranted, would not be completed for almost two years.

But ZeroGen has considerable political support.

The Bligh government declared ZeroGen capable of being one of the first companies in the world to build a commercial-scale power plant -- generating the equivalent of 400 megawatts -- combined with geosequestration technology.

Queensland Mines and Energy Minister Stephen Robertson said the Bligh government was showing its commitment to reducing carbon emissions.

"Integrating a coal gasification power plant with the capture and storage of (carbon dioxide) emissions to generate low-emission electricity for the national electricity market will put Queensland in the driver's seat when it comes to clean coal technology," Mr Robertson said.

The Rudd government last week announced ZeroGen was one of four projects for its $2bn carbon capture and storage flagships program.

But even if successful, ZeroGen would only share in $120 million in commonwealth funding for pre-feasibility work, and the proponents are operating on tight timeframes in their bid to have the power plant running by late 2015.

ZeroGen chief executive Tony Tarr said last week the project would help to safeguard Queensland's coal industry while putting the state at the forefront of technological development.

"It is widely understood that if several large-scale integrated CCS (carbon capture and storage) projects are not developed within the next decade, there is a real possibility we won't be able to deploy the technology in time to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from exceeding reasonable limits," Dr Tarr said.

Federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson said the commonwealth government was, through its CCS flagships program, contributing to the G8 goal of at least 20 large-scale integrated CCS projects globally by 2020.

Drilling tests have continued in central Queensland's Northern Denison Trough in an effort to find a location for about 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to be stored over the life of the project.

The project was greatly revamped early last year, when its proponents succumbed to pressure to double ZeroGen's planned electricity output and fast-track development of a commercially viable plant.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/libs-fear-joyce-will-overpower-hockey-20091213-kqdc.html

Libs fear Joyce will overpower Hockey

December 14, 2009

Nick Minchin was the first Liberal to try to rein in Barnaby Joyce. It was April 2005 and Joyce's reputation preceded him.

Elected six months earlier, Joyce was still two months away from taking his place in the Senate. He was already on the record opposing various Howard government policies ranging from the sale of the remainder of Telstra to the abolition of compulsory student unionism and the scrapping of state awards for a single federal award system.

Minchin, the Liberal Senate leader, left Adelaide's eastern suburbs for Joyce's home in St George, Queensland, to make his acquaintance, meet the family, chew the fat and spell out the rules. At the time, the strategy concerning Joyce was ''to kill him with love'' and it was believed Joyce would calm down once he entered Parliament. ''It's a long walk to go and sit with the other side with your mates watching you,'' one of Joyce's colleagues said at the time.

Three years later, Peter Costello, in his memoirs, summed up the failure of the Liberals to contain Joyce and the bad taste it left in the Liberal establishment. Joyce, he said, was ''a populist'' who ''believed that the hope of the National Party lay in distinguishing itself from the Liberal Party''.

''Since the Government had a majority of one in the Senate, Joyce was able to grandstand on practically every issue. He felt no loyalty to the Coalition. He wanted to share the Coalition's record of achievement in economic management but he also wanted to oppose the measures necessary to deliver those results. The more he demanded, the higher his profile became.''

Costello noted that Joyce was supported by the same people who were behind the disastrously parochial Joh-for-PM campaign that wrecked John Howard's 1987 election campaign.

Joyce, once more, is topic du jour thanks to his elevation last week as the Opposition spokesman for finance and debt reduction. It was part of Tony Abbott's bare-knuckle approach. Joyce, the so-called ''retail politician'', would use the same populist style that helped swing sentiment against the emissions trading scheme, to range across a swag of issues while banging on about Labor's debt.

Joyce rose with the full imprimatur of Minchin and Abbott but he drove a hard bargain. He wanted the key portfolio and demanded the shadow ministry be expanded by one so his entry did not result in a fellow National being punted. There are 14 Nationals in Parliament - nine MPs and five senators. Nationals make up 15 per cent of the Coalition caucus and 20 per cent of its shadow cabinet.

If the idea of promoting Joyce was to get him into the tent to curb his excesses, it failed miserably in week one. Joyce aired the gamut of his policy beliefs including his trenchant opposition to Chinese sovereign investment, his support for greater bank regulation, his support for unconstitutional zonal tax treatment, and his alarmist statement that the United States and Queensland could default on their debts.

There will be no reining in of Joyce. As he told the Herald on Tuesday: ''It's not as though you have a personality transplant when you go into cabinet.''

The less apparent danger for Abbott is the internal damage and ongoing unrest Joyce will cause. While the weekend papers were full of warnings of what Joyce could do to the Coalition's economic reputation, the internal ill-feeling that Costello articulated began to well up by the end of last week.

Since the election two years ago, Joyce has led a ramped-up push to differentiate the Nationals from the Liberals. This has caused him to be frequently disloyal to the Coalition and contemptuous of the Liberals, so much so that Malcolm Turnbull, before he fell, was under real pressure to split from the Nationals for good. Then, in one fell swoop, the leadership changed and Joyce became a lead figure in the Coalition.

Not only do the aggrieved Liberals feel the Nationals are overly represented in shadow cabinet, Joyce is now espousing views that are anathema to Liberal philosophy of the free market, foreign investment and less government regulation.

Mainstream Liberals feel as though they are having their noses rubbed in it. They fear Joyce will overpower and dominate the senior finance spokesman Joe Hockey - just as he rendered irrelevant the Nationals leaders Mark Vaile and Warren Truss - and become the economic voice of the Coalition. What may go down well in the front bar of the pub in St George is unlikely to resonate in Collins or Pitt Street.

''This is going to be a disaster,'' said one MP. ''Great retail politician? Sure, but so was Pauline Hanson''.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/cartoons

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26479878-952,00.html

Climate change is a clear and present danger

Kevin Hennessy

SCEPTICS have questioned the evidence for climate change and whether human activities contribute to global warming.

You'll mostly find their views in books, the media and the internet.

Very few of these sceptics are climate scientists actively publishing their research in peer-reviewed literature. Yet the most reliable information comes from scientific journals because the articles have passed a process of peer review.

Once an article is published, its ideas can be challenged or supported by other scientists with peer-reviewed articles.

Without the peer-review system, publication of research findings would be arbitrary, and possibly influenced by personal, social or political agendas.

An assessment of peer-reviewed literature for climate change research is published every five to six years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

The fourth assessment in 2007 involved more than 1250 authors with comments from 2500 scientific experts and hundreds of government reviewers.

Concise and reliable information about climate change science is available in the Summary for Policymakers for each of the three reports in the assessment, approved by officials from 113 governments.

In the past two years, more information about climate change science has been published in the peer-reviewed literature.

These publications provide additional support for the IPCC's conclusions, and in some cases indicate that changes are happening faster than expected.

In Australia, the CSIRO's climate scientists have investigated several topics raised by sceptics, some of which were mentioned in an article by Jennifer Marohasy (C-M, December 4). A few key points need to be made.

First, human activities have increased greenhouse gases and contributed to global warming.

Climate models are based on well-established laws of physics and they have been used to assess the major drivers of past climate change.

In the first half of the 20th century, increasing greenhouse gases, increasing solar radiation and a relative lack of volcanic activity – which has a cooling effect – all contributed to a rise in globally averaged temperature.

In the 1950s and 1960s, global average temperatures levelled off. This is most likely due to a tug-of-war between an increase in aerosols – which has a cooling effect – and increases in greenhouse gases. Since the 1970s, increases in greenhouse gases have dominated all other factors, and there has been sustained warming. It is very unlikely that 20th-century warming can be explained by natural causes alone.

Second, global warming hasn't stopped.

Variations in global-average temperature over the past half century indicate a significant warming.

The long-term warming trend is overlaid on short-term fluctuations due to such factors as El Nino and La Nina, which cause warm and cool years from time to time. We don't expect every year to be warmer than the previous year.

Some sceptics have claimed there has been no warming during the past decade. Data over the past decade provides little insight into long-term trends; the period is simply too short, so trend magnitudes are highly sensitive to the choice of start and end years.

For example, there has been an insignificant warming trend over the period 1998-2008 – due largely to the strong El Nino in 1997-98 – but a significant warming from 1999-2008. The World Meteorological Organisation recently announced that 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record.

Third, further increases in greenhouse gases will lead to more global warming.

Climate models have consistently shown significant warming and rise in sea level and increases in extreme weather, in response to projected increases in greenhouse gases.

Although the warming effect of greenhouse gases is well understood, uncertainties associated with other factors may enhance or reduce this warming and associated sea level rise – such as changes in aerosols, ice-cover, ice-sheet dynamics, cloud properties and the biosphere.

With increasing computer power and better understanding of climate processes, future models will include finer resolution and better represent key processes. This will lead to some reduction in uncertainty but not remove it altogether.

Decision-makers need to incorporate this uncertainty in risk management.

Fourth, managing climate risk involves both adaptation and emission cuts.

Adaptation will be needed to address effects from the warming which is already unavoidable due to past and likely future emissions. A wide array of adaptation options is available, but more of these adaptations have to be implemented to reduce vulnerability.

However, adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, especially over the long term. Many effects can be avoided, reduced or delayed by cutting global greenhouse gas emissions.

Efforts over the next two to three decades will have a large effect on opportunities to slow global warming.

Kevin Hennessy is a principal research scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research with more than 22 years' experience researching the subject. He was a co-author of the 2007 report on climate change in Australia and a co-ordinating lead author of the Australia and New Zealand chapter of the 2007 IPCC assessment of climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.