Sunday 3 January 2010

Animalia......(6)



Nicole and Warren Lloyd took this snap at their Waterview Heights home, then passed it on the The Daily Examiner 30 December 2009. It's definitely uncommon for a spider to have a young snake over for a festive season bite. The Redback Spider's unusual size can be compared with the Eastern Small-eyed Snake's approximately 200 millimetre length.
I can almost hear the theme music to Arachnophobia playing in the background.

Australia Says No!


From No Clean Feed

Begorrah, bejaysus and begawd! Ireland's new blasphemy law


Just when you think it's safe to let the Irish back in the house (sorry great-great grandpapa!) they come up with this protection for the pious via a new set of defamation laws which include "blasphemous libel", according to blasphemy.ie:

"From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine. The new law defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted.

This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic States led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level."

Go here for the 25 blasphemies published in response to this law which apparently got through the parliament by a margin of one vote.
If you're really interested the entire Irish Defamation Act 2009 is here.

Update:
Traffic on blasphemy.ie is apparently so heavy this morning that a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable notice is currently displayed, so use it's Google cache to read this website if you're having trouble.

Saturday 2 January 2010

Australia Uncensored blows the whistle on who Conroy is actually censoring on the Australian Internet


From Australia Uncensored on 27 December 2009:

The Rudd Government's not censoring the Australian Internet - it's censoring older people

If you read Rudd Government bumpf on the need for Internet censorship and all that nonsense which Senator Conroy mouths, it would be easy to believe that Australian users are mostly innocent children and evil paedophiles just waiting to prey on these sweet innocents.
Small problem with this premise though.
Australian Internet users are mainly adults over 35 years of age (66.3% in all and mostly female) and the biggest proportion of these adults are over 55 years of age according to one 2007 snapshot.
In 2008 Nielsen said that Australians were spending almost 14 hours a week surfing the Net (out of a total of 84.4 media consumption hours) with 94% of all users accessing the Internet from home, and by March 2009 it was reporting that our individual media consumption was averaging 89.7 hours per week with the biggest slice of this being our Internet use.
By 2009 the CIA World Fact Book calculated that over 15 million Australians use the Internet.
Now it's not hard to guess that techno-savvy, usually computer literate from an early age, individuals will be able to circumvent any national filter at will - the Enex report to the Dept. of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy even tells us so.
It's also not hard to realise that older users rely almost solely on the expertise of the big search engines (which are currently not universally filtered for Australian use) to find their way to online information and opinion.
Which leaves the planned mandatory national ISP-level filtering scheme censoring people rather than cyberspace and most of those people with artificially limited access to information and free speech will be middle-aged and older voters.
Potentially making at least 10 million Australians very ticked off with Kevin Rudd and the Labor Government ahead of the next federal election.
I'm one of these, Senator Conroy! I'm not impressed that, having fairly successfully spanned technology which moved from sloping school desks with ink wells and nibbed wooden pens right through to today's cyberspace, you and your Labor Right cronies are trying to tell me that I'm to have restricted access to the world.
Guess where my vote won't be going?

While you were sleeping....more Antarctic whales were being killed


Greenpeace photograph of whales in the Southern Ocean

The whaling fleet subsidised by the Government of Japan is still in Antarctic waters killing whales for so-called scientific research and commercial whale meat. The fleet is not expected to sail back to Japan until sometime between mid-March and April 2010.

This is the person responsible for the ongoing needless slaughter:

So you made a New Year's resolution......


So you made a New Year's resolution again this year to do one or more of the following:
A. Manage your credit card debt a bit better
B. Save money so that next Christmas will be stress free
C. Lose some weight
D. Get fit, maybe even join a gym
E. Quit smoking
F. Drink less alcohol
G. Study hard when school/uni starts again for the year
H. Impress the boss with your get and up and go or just go
I. Bike to work
J. Take up a sport
K. Watch less television and read more
L. Take the pooch for longer walks
M. Ask for her hand in marriage/tell him you're getting a divorce.
N. Eat less take away and cook healthy meals.


Well done! I give you until the end of the month to abandon each and every good intention except for M - we're always attracted to the big mistakes in life.
Yeah, I know, that sounds a trifle jaded, but Professor Richard Wiseman sorta backs me up because his team found that 78% of resolution makers crash and burn.

However all is not lost as Teh Prof appears to have nailed a few decent tips over at his blog:
Last year we tracked hundreds of people who were trying to keep their resolution, asking them to report on their success and the techniques that they were using. The results suggest that many of the ideas recommended by self-help experts simply don't work. We have developed a fun quiz on off the back of this work that predicts the likelihood of you achieving your resolutions – try it here. We have also posted lots more about the work, including ten tips for keeping your resolutions over on the 59 seconds site. Part of the work revealed that you will increase your chances of achieving your aims if you tell others about your goal. So, what's your resolution?

Friday 1 January 2010

How we began the year 2010....


It's now January 2010. The beginning of a new year but not exactly a month with a bright, clean calendar page - it is weighted down by last year's unfinished business.

In January 2009 North Coast Voices was writing about climate change denialists and their opposition to Rudd's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the rising costs of electricity, water, transport, the Liberal Party leader, Conroy's Internet censorship plan, religion, Twitter personas, Monsanto and the plight of Antarctic whales.

Looking back at our posts from last month and forward to those posts scheduled for the beginning of this month, it seems that little has changed for the Australian blogosphere or, to a lesser degree, for the mainstream media.

A quick Internet scan shows that climate change, rising costs, Internet censorship, whales, religion etc., are still on our collective list of concerns in January 2010.
Political, economic and social change continues at snail's pace.

Larvatus Prodeo has an amusing take on the year ahead.

Drawing from I Stand Connected

The Great Australian Internet Blackout is on 25-29 January & Australia Day!



From the protest Website:

What’s the problem?
The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste millions of dollars and won't make anyone safer.

Join us and take action!
The Great Australian Internet Blackout is a
combined online and offline demonstration against imposed online censorship. We’re collaborating with Electronic Frontiers Australia to make sure every Australian knows why this draconian policy is unacceptable.

Go to The Great Australian Internet Blackout and find out how you can take part.

Happy New Year!



From all of us here at North Coast Voices.
May 2010 be a very good year for bloggers and readers everywhere