This article really makes me rage at the fact we’re waiting for up to ten years for this to happen in our areas. It’s an ESSENTIAL piece of infrastructure, worst part is the Liberal party are going to bin the NBN if they get in, which ties my hands as to who I and all geeks will be voting for in future. I really hope other parties wake up though, as it is in Australia we have ultra-conservative Liberal, and ultra-conservative Labor.

Labor dicked us over when Julia Gillard ran a coup, dethroning Kevin Rudd, possibly the most popular PM in our history due to his accessibility through social networks, et cetera. So they really deserve to be punished, although at the last election they held on with Julia because most Australian females thought they were ‘voting in Australia’s first woman prime minister’, when in reality they were just voting in a dog who didn’t care about the voters and wanted power; ultimately costing us trillions of dollars and a GDP to put us in the top three nations globally when she got the nod from the mining giants to run her coup over the mining tax.

Ironically, she’s facing being voted out because after costing us trillions (which no one cared about and voted her in again anyway, al la George Dubya) she is going to cost us an extra $50 a year with a pollution tax. Ohnoes. Sigh, this is why Australia is destined to always be a back water, the voters are so ill-informed and uneducated.

Anyway, enough nerdraging, here’s the article: -

WELCOME to Gunnedah, population 12,000, 440km from Sydney – and the first Wi-Fi town in Australia.

IT walks like the NBN, talks like the NBN – but is about $40 billion cheaper.

Welcome to Gunnedah, population 12,000. It’s 440km from Sydney and is now the first Wi-Fi town in Australia.

Instead of waiting years for fibre optic cables to be laid out to their doorsteps while small surrounding communities were left unconnected, the council teamed up with a new company to deliver high-speed Wi-Fi internet to doctors, patients, school students and every business in town.

The main street boasts free Wi-Fi as the new pilot scheme connects to the web using fibre-optic cables that were laid three decades ago.

Prior to Wi-Fi, the only options for the town were slow dial-up or pricey satellite internet.

Now video conferencing is allowing doctors to talk to patients at home, the mayor to confer with emergency services during storms and students to connect to the school curriculum from home.

Gunnedah Mayor Adam Marshall said it would allow Gunnedah businesses to have high quality internet without the broadband cost.

“We can save the government a heap of money but they are only going to bring it (the NBN) to the edge of town anyway. This uses the existing fibre optic and we can provide that cover to every home in Gunnedah,” he said.

Mr Marshall said the scheme could hook up any community with fibre optics.

“You could argue that it can negate the need for NBN Co to be rolling it out in these communities,” he said.

TUPS Company managing director Geoff Peach said the NBN forgets about 7 per cent of people in the most remote areas.

“There is a massive advantage for the population in having high speed broadband – it’s just the delivery I am confused about,” he said.

“I think if the approach that we had taken in Gunnedah was taken in every town we would save a great bit of money.”

A spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said Wi-Fi would not be as fast as fibre-optic broadband.

“The Wi-Fi service is shared by many users, which causes a decrease in speed for every user accessing the service and is influenced by other factors which also significantly decrease speeds,” he said.

“Fibre to the premises technology is the state-of-the-art, future proof, fixed-line broadband technology that provides consistent speeds to all users. This is why it was chosen.”
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/gunnedah-high-speed-wi-fi-internet-works-as-leaked-reports-reveal-nbn-cost-could-blow-out-to-50b/story-e6frfro0-1226213817476#ixzz1fcQj2ivC

The following article excerpt is from Time, cited in part for commentary purpose (within the DMCA scope): -

In Nigeria’s arid north these days, it may as well be 2003 all over again. This month, news began to circulate that a recent polio outbreak in the predominantly Muslim region was triggered by a vaccine designed to eliminate it, and it is jarring already raw nerves in the historically volatile setting.

In the summer of 2003, Muslim clerics and disgruntled northern politicians banned polio vaccinations in the area, claiming that the drugs were a Western ploy to spread HIV and sterilize Muslim girls. The year-long mass boycott of the vaccine sparked a rash of new infections, and the virus jumped to about a dozen other countries — a devastating rollback for a polio eradication campaign that seemed finally on the verge of success.

Health workers in Nigeria fear they’re on the verge again — of collapse. When the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control revealed in early October that 69 Nigerian children had been paralyzed by polio virus since 2005 — and had contracted the illness through exposure to the live virus found in the oral vaccine drop — it was the nightmare situation public health workers had been dreading: the rare vaccine-related outbreak that could spark renewed paranoia and permanently halt eradication efforts.

In the teeming mercantile metropolis of Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city of some 10 million and the epicenter of the 2003 boycott, glittering mosques rise above streets lined with green steel plates bearing scrawled quotes from the Koran, while women hurry past tucked into their hijabs and veils. There’s no doubt that Kano is deeply entrenched in Islamic fundamentalism. “Religion is really big here,” says Aminu Isa, 32, a taxi driver. “Anything about Islam and the typical Kano man is ready to lose his head.”

Anti-Western sentiments run deep here too, fueled lately by a battle between the Nigerian government and U.S. drugmaker Pfizer. In an $8.5 billion lawsuit filed against the company, the Nigerian government says Pfizer caused the deaths of 11 children in Kano as a result of unauthorized clinical trials of an experimental antibiotic for meningitis in 1996 — charges that Pfizer denies, but which Islamic leaders have exploited as proof of a conspiracy.

Here, Western education is also seen as a pointedly Christian concept — an apostasy — and literacy levels are virtually nonexistent. “By the time Western education came to Nigeria,” says Musa Salisu, 47, an advocate for polio victims in Kano, “most northerners said to anybody agreeing to learn English, ‘When you die, you’ll enter hellfire.’”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1675423,00.html#ixzz1fRzOi71Y

Whilst captive bolt method has degraded since the above lobby groups have pushed that it be a legal requirement it does not cause brain death instantly (claiming that spreads BSE, allegedly), but rather knocks the animal out and doesn’t pierce the cranium this method is still far less horrific than the video footage Australia got to see a while back.

Back in 1998 a halal slaughter house in Melbourne was shut down after video footage was leaked out, but more recently the footage exposed to the Australian public was from Indonesia and the level of depravity depicted was on par with what I’ve seen conducted WITHIN Australia as far as halal and kosher slaughter goes but it was the first time Australian’s had seen the meat industry in all it’s glory.

Don’t get me wrong, no preconceptions required here, I’m not a tree hugger, a hippie, or a vegetarian. I see the economical and ecological viability and requirements around me and adopt them as ethical business practice however. Therein lay my frustrations with Nico Botha and his ilk. The type of person who through negligence of their own part then plays off to the media as an ‘Aussie battler’ out to make a fair crust when in reality their own stupidity looks to be their downfall, yet ultimately they file a claim and underwriters fix it all whilst they get to trap off at the press and be used as a political lynch pin or bargaining chip.

As reported today on News.com.au:

Nico Botha owns Moola Bulla station in Western Australia and he told heraldsun.com.au he will start to cull cattle tomorrow because he can’t keep feeding them.

“Rather than let them starve to death over two or three months, I’m going to shoot them quickly,” Mr Botha said.

“My property is over-grazed and I have got too many cattle, I have to look forward to the next year or two.”

Mr Botha slammed Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig for failing to work through the problems properly and for leaving cattle stranded.

“It’s going to be far worse, now animals are going to die in their thousands in paddocks and nobody cares about that.”

A ban on live exports to Indonesia was put in place after horrific images of cows being tortured and harassed before slaughter were broadcast on the ABC.

“Moola Bulla,”
“Hello, may I speak to Nico Botha please?”
“Speaking,”
“Hello Nico, I saw your recent issues in the news, I hear you’re in rough times financially?”
“Yep,” said almost hopeful, as though I’m some carrion media mogul about to throw him money.
“I just wanted to congratulate you first on purchasing Australia’s largest cattle farm back in ’07, for $25 million you got it at a steal, especially given it coincided with the drought breaking, business must be boomi.. oh wait, no. It’s not, that’s right.”
“What?”
“Well, you see, I can’t help but question your logic and paralel it to say, slave masters in the Southern States of the US demanding that the average tax payer refund them for slaves they had to let go, when they knew full well that they were dealing in an industry that was unethical in numerous ways and had been abolished in most other nations, surely they saw this coming as much as meat industry farmers.”
“What?”
“Okay, I’ll try something easier. Did Nike complain and demand money from Governments when they suddenly were astounded to find out the sweatshop labor they employed used forced child labor? If you can’t afford to stay in business because of one contract that has a history of being up in the air ethically, as well as being banned outright in many European nations, surely dropping your cattle in paddocks or starving them to death is kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face isn’t it mate?”
“What am I meant to do? They put me out of business, I can’t feed my cattle.”
“Well for starters you could just slaughter them humanely and sell them on the Australian market like all other meat producers have been doing since colonization, but I find it far fetched you demand money from REAL Aussie battlers whilst pleading poverty. I don’t think Nike had the audacity to try that one.”
“But what am I meant to do?”
“I just told you mate, sell locally. You got caught out, you made a dangerous investment, you lost, thems the breaks. Get a loan, talk to a business advisor and financial planner and make your business profitable ethically, you’ll sleep better at night.”
*Nico, shamed by this logic, terminates the call; because putting a hand out and demanding is easier than working for a dollar.

Nico doesn’t want you to know his multi-million dollar property is one of the largest in the nation, is adjacent to a high class golf course, Halls Creek Airport, and a thoroughbred race course. He didn’t want to have a bar of logic, because it’s far easier to use empty threats to scare them city folks into line with horrible acts committed to animals. The brutal reality is, the animals are bred to be slaughtered, they’re going to die, the only thing controlled is the manner in which they die so let him have at it with a rifle and then watch him file false insurance claims for business loss (which he happens to have with GE, something the media in their lack of research missed (it’s amazing what you can find through google, and how many country folk talk big on forums)) and get the big money he wants rather than support the economy of the ‘Aussie battler’ he’s trying to steal the image of for the media to kowtow to.

Ironically, Moola Bulla station was also historically involved in the slaughter of aboriginies; I’m sure the occupants back then were hands out when they realised their gamble on exploiting the ‘black fellah’ hadn’t paid off also.

Whilst I have a feeling it’d be falling on deaf ears, here’s the blokes details should you wish to reach him:

(08) 9168 8910
(08) 9168 8911

Although if you want to make a difference, I suggest writing to (but be sure to ring them first and foremost and demand that a stop be put to Nico’s threat of a cull):

Senator Joseph Ludwig
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
Australian Labor Party

Parliament Contact:
Phone:     (02) 6277 7520
Fax:     (02) 6273 4120

Waterfront Place,
1 Eagle Street
Brisbane Qld 4000

GPO Box 2477
Brisbane Qld 4001

Phone:     (07) 3229 4477
Fax:     (07) 3229 4140
Toll Free:     1300 301 944

I would recommend in doing so you strongly suggest perhaps the Senator see to it that Nico is held liable for negligent managing of a business involving livestock, negligent management of property, and cruelty to animals through the afforementioned negligence. Nico volunteered that his property is ‘over-grazed’ (given it’s size this is highly unlikely and if true is a clear sign of property mismanagement bordering on ecological disaster on a small scale), and that he has ‘too many cattle’, again a clear proof that he was wilful in his negligence for the purchase, breeding or obtainment of so many head of cattle.

The RSCPA can be contacted on:

(08) 9209 9300 or
1300 CRUELTY
(1300 278 3589)

For legal reasons the RSPCA cannot accept anonymous complaints, however details will be kept confidential.
Provide them with a link to this article.

One can only hope should indigenous rights ever be respected that the indigenous peoples of that area take him to the Lands and Environment court for ameliorative waste as another avenue to stop this obvious half-wit from using what’s left of his brain to cause even more ecological harm, not to mention ethical and moralistic furor.

While playing the victim card, he identifies himself as the ‘head of’ a family involved in a so far bloodless fued that has caused several shootings and one bombing over the past week.

On Fairfax Radio, and cross posted on News.com.au he went on to state “No one helps me in this country, no police, not any community, no St Vincents (de Paul), no one … I tell them I want to protect my family. No one cares about this. They want to give me all the responsibility for this and I don’t know nothing. I give them my statement but still no one cares in this country.”

Heaven forbid if a man has responsibility. Especially over caring for his family. Especially while waging war on another family. I’m sure he’ll play ignorant, but I’m pretty sure families just don’t outright try and kill each other for no reason; even more so in a nation where gun laws are so pedantic even our Olympic shooters are fleeding to other nations, losing us dozens of gold medals because of it.

Of course he won’t stand up, take responsibility, and disarm his kin who’re running around in revenge attacks either. That’s too much responsibility for him to handle.

In other gems he went on air with, “I’ve been sleeping in the car. They give me two days in a motel like a fucking gypsy,” nothing like a bit of racial vilification to add to his charm.

And in the best nonsensical passage of drivel I’ve read or even heard: “I’ve had enough of this stress. Australia country they bring on 2006 from Lebanon all the citizenship, they spend 20 million thousand dollars but no one can spend $1000 to save my family. I tell them I want to go back, I don’t want to stay in this shit country like that.”

The fued is between the Kassab family and the Tiba family, and of course Mr Bigbeard-littleresponsibility has no clue why it’s happening or why his house in Guildford Street, Coolaroo is being targeted.

“If I know I tell the police. I don’t know,” Mr Tiba said on Monday to Fairfax journalists. Police have said they have spoken to the families but have received no co-operation, so it seems they’re adamant to duke it out and put innocent lives at stake for some petty blood fued, yesterday at 3pm in Glenroy, on a busy street, they did just that by carrying out a drive by shooting.

For my international readers, I have to stress, this just doesn’t happen here, and it’s only a minority of a minority who carry out such foolish acts.

News.com.au stated that a house in nearby Jacana was shot at last Thursday and again on Monday morning, followed by a car chase that ended in more shots being fired at a playground. They also stated that Mr Tiba’s house has been shot at twice, had a home-made bomb thrown through the window and been rammed by a truck and so far no one has been injured in the incidents.

So, without further ado, I wish to offer to buy the lot of them tickets back to Lebanon, where a lot of refugees originated during their civil war and other violence in the Middle East, most of which are thankful to be here while a minority brought the attitudes of warmongering hate fuelled stupidity across with them (kind of makes you wonder if we accidentally let in people who started the grief over there and not the victims of it per se!).

Again, to international readers, I just wish to stress that shit like this doesn’t happen here, this is a first for our country. And by no means tar all refugees by the same brush, as these two families are a special kind of fuckwit. The kind that clearly comes from thousands of years of incestuous inbreeding, drinking sea water, and eating strange mushrooms down the end of the yard, mixed with liberal dashings of head droppings as children.

In two states that I know of, police often confiscate things from the populus, like disgruntled school teachers. I once had a utility / dive knife (2″ blade, tiny) secured to a dive belt confiscated that was locked in the boot of my car by Manly Police (known as notoriously pathological and unstable authoratarian nutjobs to most Sydney siders) that was given to me by my dead father on my 13th birthday as a reward for my first successful scuba. I explained it had priceless emotional value to me, and they said the alternative is a huge fine, I stated even if it’s a few grand, give me the fine. They took the knife.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of very over the top policing practices in Australia, a nation with a crime rate one tenth that of Britain where police (aside from being polite, nice, and there to help the community and capable of being approached and chatted to, whereas here (specifically NSW) the police have a chip on their shoulder, won’t talk to you (unless you’re female, as one colleage just pointed out to me), and wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire) are unarmed and … well, normal. Here they drive high performance luxury cars (which if you live near Reservoir Road, in Prospect, you’ll quite often see them doing burn outs at the old drive through when they think no one is watching) that cost a packet, and carry melee weapons, chemical weapons, electroshock weapons, and firearms.

This all probably stems from the ‘us and them’ mentality of Australia originally being a penal colony, the police here really do think they’re NYPD and that we’re all gangbanging black guys who need a good Rodney King’ing to teach us our station in life. The attitude is unbelievable, especially when it comes to civil rights matters. Hell, in NSW they try and strong-arm protestors into believing they need police permission to protest and that police can tell them how long for, what they can and can’t do, whether they’re allowed to use bull-horns, or even carry signs. It really is an ugly, ugly thing to behold, as an international (British citizen) who’s toured the world many times over and encountered enough to make this ugly sore on human rights insult me personally to such a degree, moreso the fact that Australian citizens tolerate it, albeit are brainwashed into thinking it’s a good thing.

Maybe they’re just not a 18-35 year old white middle class male (who tend to cop a lot of harassment because the police know they’ll cop it on the chin, and pay any subsequent fines like a good bitch and not take it to court), and especially not indigenous (who have a notorious track record of instances of police abusing move on and profanity laws to persecute them if they ‘get smart’). You’ll always have that posse who’d argue to my prior parenthetical comment that it ‘serves them right for getting smart’, but I’m sorry to say, such an argument is fundamentally flawed; it’s their perogative to express their freedom in whatever way they choose and it’s the police REQUIREMENT that they remain patient and not be tossers. Except in Australia.

In the last five or so years laws to allow them to impound vehicles have come into play. Recently, in Adelaide (South Australia, for my international readers) five Nissan Skylines were impounded, a mere google shows multiple POLICE WEBSITES lauding that ‘hoons’ will ‘lose their cars for good’ under new ‘hoon laws’. This isn’t going to solve the problem by any means, as education is the only reform possible, but merely impact financially on people and clog up the courts, let alone the occasional innocent victim being wronged so harshly by the government given the price of vehicles over here.

POLICE have impounded five Nissan Skylines after a video of six cars racing through Adelaide’s Heysen Tunnel was posted on YouTube.

Five men, aged 21 to 34, also face a range of driving offences in relation to the race in May when the cars reached speeds of up to 143km/h in a 90km/h zone.

Police used the YouTube video, along with closed circuit camera vision, to identify five of the six cars.

A light-coloured Skyline is the only car outstanding.

Officer in charge of traffic support Linda Fellows said the cars would be impounded for 28 days.

“Police will take every opportunity to investigate dangerous driving behaviour and take people off the roads if they can’t obey the rules and drive responsibly,” Superintendent Fellows said.

“We have a rising road toll and it’s actions like this that can result in further carnage and road trauma.

“Police will not tolerate the public being put at risk by the reckless and irresponsible actions of a few.”

Whilst their agenda seems idealistic, and perhaps a bit on the goose stepping storm trooper line, the apalling part is that this is arguably constitutional and thus even more of an alarming proof that we NEED a bill of rights in Australia, there are three RIGHTS which the Constitution guarantees against the Commonwealth – religious freedom, trial by jury, and “just terms” compensation. (A referendum proposal to amend the Constitution to clarify these rights and to make them good also against the States was defeated in 1988.) As will be seen, guaranteed access to the High Court can itself amount to an important right. And the guarantee of free trade and commerce was for a time interpreted as something like an individual right.

The Constitution however clearly gives the Commonwealth power “with respect to … the acquisition of property on just terms” in Section 51(xxxi). By contrast, the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution contains a prohibition: “nor shall private property be taken … without just compensation”. The differences between acquisition and taking, and between terms and compensation, combined with the fact that the Australian provision is expressed as a positive grant of power coupled with a limitation, have been read so as to weaken the Australian guarantee relative to the American one.

The use of the term “acquisition” has been abused by the government so as to require that the Commonwealth (or some other party for a Commonwealth purpose) actually acquire possessory or proprietary rights over the property in question, or at least some benefit so that the mere extinguishment of a person’s proprietary rights by the Commonwealth (or a prohibition on effectively exercising them) is insufficient to amount to an acquisition¹. And “just terms” has been taken to mean something less than “just compensation”; in particular, it does not necessarily require payment to the owner of the value of the property when it was compulsorily acquired². The Australian film The Castle addresses this issue also.

These issues are very disheartening as a person who has had much life experience and done the rounds and seen what the rest of the world experience and live with. It honestly often makes me question how I can be a dual citizen, live here, let alone pay taxes to finance such lunacy. But the worst part of Australia, if you ask me, is their cattle-like complacency with their rights being stripped from them.

From internet censorship, through to a duly elected Prime Minister (the leader of our national, like the US President) having a bloodless coup d’etat run against him because he was negotiating a fair 50/50 split to our resources and minerals with mining giants, only to have the leader of the coup (or rather the muppet who was given the nod by the mining giants and those protecting their interests) RE-ELECTED (albeit the votes stated she didn’t win, but they claimed they did and then got a few independent senators to share power) as Prime Minister.

That makes Australia’s first Prime Minister an anti-democratic dog who has screwed us out of trillions of dollars, ironically she may face the axe soon because she’s bringing in an environmental tax that will make our ecology significantly stronger, our overall health increase, and make us billions from high poluuters but cost families $50 a year or so. So she cost us trillions, but because she’s going to cost us $50 a year but make us billions, she’s out. I mean, what the fuck?

Okay, that’s the end of my rant. But seriously, be thankful you live in a sane nation. Unless you’re an American. :P

I always find it ironic when sexism loldrama hits the tabloidal news over here, with claims women get paid significantly less than men and get treated worse, when in reality … well.

I propose anyone who believes that shit should run a little test. Hop on say, an MMORPG, roll a female character and a male. See which one gets given free shit, leveled, helped out, aided and entertained all day every day. You can play that game from begining to end game as a male and never actually even get a single word from another player.

As a male, I’m kind of fucked off at all this bullshit. I often promote mannimism, a reversal of feminism, trying to oppose outright sexism against men as the worthless sex.

If you support this ideal, follow @maninism on Twitter right now and let’s get something happening about it.

The New York Times said today the covert effort also includes attempts to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries.

The operation involves a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “internet in a suitcase”, the report said.

Financed with a $US2 million ($1.9 million) State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communications over a wide area with a link to the global internet.

The Times said some projects involve technology being developed in the US while others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers from the so-called liberation technology movement.

The State Department is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya.

The US Government has also spent at least $US50 million ($47.2 million) to create an independent mobile phone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country, according to the newspaper.

It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, the report said.

I’ve been reading the Dalai Lama’s drivel for quite some time on Twitter, and he is currently in my fair nation of Australia at the moment running around skirt lifting and being a twat for very large fees to trendy wanky folks who’re into contemplating division by zero. I’ve never really found him compelling in any way.

His Twitter feed reads like a Multi-Level Marketing scammers empty headed random quotes.txt. In interviews he takes the generic asian mystic role of spouting utter shit as answers trying to pass himself off as deep or intellectual when in reality koan style responses are just batshit zealot cop outs. But what I want to address is, is he dangerous?

“Rather than working only to acquire wealth, we need to focus on the welfare of humanity as a whole.”

That’s a dangerous idea. Why? Because it deflects the problem, the starving suffering masses NEED to acquire wealth, and not touch each other in the pants and sing kumbyah.

Here’s a little snippet from a TED talk that I hope the Dalai Lama can check out to try and get a LITTLE bit of understanding before spouting crap. Sure, he thinks he’s Yoda, that’s his pitch, it’s how he pulls the bitches, but really; he needs to get a grip, his guru babble puts poisonous ideas into already unintelligent peoples minds who seek out a little asian Yoda in the first place to fill a void in their souls (or minds, given that souls do not exist). But I digress.

So, here we see a perfect example of why altruism won’t solve a situation that a clear lack of finances and especially food will.

“Friends, genuine friends, have much more to do with whether we have a warm heart, not money or power.”

Another example of hippy communist bullshit. People need money. Money is inadvertantly power, the power to control your future, the power to control your life, and the power to be able to obtain resources needed to survive. Circle jerks won’t feed you (aside from protein, if a sao is involved) and good feelings won’t put a roof over your head. This is again nonsense from a man who lives in extreme comfort, toting a rolex, and not in the piss poor nation he is from or represents. That brings me to this little gem.

“We should value our enemies because they provide us with unique opportunities to practice patience, tolerance and forbearance.”

This is from a man who was run out of his own country. He’s definitely not scared of mincing words, oh wait, actually he is, as this excerpt from The Australian from August 22, 2008 outlines: -

PARIS: The Dalai Lama has denied telling a French newspaper that Chinese soldiers may have shot dead 140 Tibetan protesters on Monday. The exiled spiritual leader was quoted in Le Monde as saying troops fired on protesters on Monday and 400 people have been killed since unrest erupted in March.

But his office said he denied a comment attributed to him by Le Monde that 140 people had died on Monday when the Chinese security forces opened fire. His office said there were casualties.

“The Chinese army again fired on a crowd on Monday August 18, in the Kham region in eastern Tibet,” said the Nobel Peace prize winner who is on a 12-day visit to France.

Le Monde quoted him as saying that up to 140 people had been killed, though the figure was not confirmed.

“His Holiness did not mention any number of casualties,” his office said in a statement after the interview was published, adding that “he clearly stated that we had no specific information on the number of casualties.”

Another gem:

“To arrive at certainty, you need to start from a skeptical posture. The best scientists are impartial, not swayed by their own beliefs.”

I particularly find it hillarious when religious nuts comment about science, scientists or skepticism. If he followed his own advice, he’d stop wearing dresses, buy himself a nice suit, and entirely give up his religious faggotry. And I don’t meant faggotry of the fun kind. Another example:

“The aim of spiritual practice is to become the friend of all beings, concerned about them and ready and able to help them.”

In closing, I have found a fantastic replacement for the Dalai Lama, and I propose should he or his representatives read this (you’d be surprised how many people I @reply in my titles of blog posts read the posts in question, I do have an 8 millionpw reader demographic after all), this person has the same character, intelligence, education, and charisma as the Dalai Lama and I propose she should step into his role forthwith.

How can anyone NOT prefer her, at least she can answer fucking questions put to her. Feel free to check out her other videos, she will definitely culturally enrich the readers of his Twitter feed far more than he is currently doing. Enjoy.

Addendum: For the record, I am not Chinese, I am not being paid by the Chinese government, I am not racist, I hate all races equally, I’m not sectarian, I’m a hypocritical Roman Catholic Jewish Atheist Ninja (it’s a religion!) with Jedi leanings who believes in the Ancient Astronaut theory and evolution (and other wonderous scientific mumbo jumbo!), I am also not in any way being paid, bribed, or given free shit to post this blog post, I just sincerely hate fucking moochers who run around touting hypocritical party pieces who live in comfort and tell everyone also living in comfort that circle jerks will cure all the woes in the world rather than addressing the food shortage or even the fact that PIG’s in the UNITED STATES alone consume SIX TIMES the food supply that it would take to FEED THE ENTIRE WORLD each year. Fuck. Seriously. He’s a fucking putz, what more can I say.

</rant> :)

Recently another instance of this has occured, where the ABC showed footage taken covertly in helal slaughter houses across Indonesia. Over 200,000 Australians have responded in a backlash against these disgusting acts.

You get a lot of propaganda by religious mobs on this issue as they see it as encroaching on their freedoms as opposed to pointing out that in the last six thousand years human understanding of animals biology has grown significantly, as has .. well, everything but religion, and that it is a social imperative that we enforce social normatives on those who would ever inflict barbaric acts on humans or animals alike.

You’ve got two lobbies who are obssessed that animals are chattals of man put there for exploitation and that they have no feelings nor souls and do not count as living entities, it’s hard to argue logic with them, but it’s easier to argue logic with politicians. Scary thought, isn’t it.

Thus, I ask every one of you to go here and sign this petition: http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/animals/live-export/ban-live-export

If you want to go the extra mile email Nick Xenophon urging your support of his push to outlaw kosher and helal slaughter not just outside of Australia facilitated by live export, but within Australia too.

There are far too many slaughter houses using barbaric practices, and even more so they’re using outdated research and propaganda including bullshit fear mongering regarding BSE / mad cow disease to try and outlaw captive bolt guns which are currently not allowed to pierce the animals brain (causing instant death) but rather just knock the animal unconcious after a few agonizing attempts.

This lobby MUST be stopped, we can’t turn a blind eye to cruelty. I don’t give a fuck what a persons magical sky fairy demands, cruelty to animals is not on, and is NOT something that any Australian or in fact any one from ANY nation should ever tolerate on their watch.

As some of you read, the libs replied to an email (after a friggen month) where I outlined that I can’t endorse or vote for them given their anachronistic censorship policy (they actually tabled the Orwellian filter that Labor were running ahead with) and a few other minor issues. At present they’ve announced their plan for the NBN, they’re going to hack it up and sell it off which is stupid.

They’ve promised we’ll get ‘at least 12 mbps’ and that’s all they’ll guarantee. That’s like my current @Telstra plan where they call it ADSL2+ but only guarantee speeds that barely fall into ADSL (Yes, just ADSL) category. We NEED the government to push ahead with something like this because our telco’s won’t. They don’t give a shit about progress or proper infrastructure, I mean at the moment I’m paying $129 for 10mbps pretending to be ADSL2+ (Which is set at 24 mbps, of which 4mbps bleeds out to the 7km range it’s meant to run from DSLAMS) and only getting half my 100GB quota before getting shaped because they count upstream. This is plain unfair conduct, but it’s perfectly legal and legit. The only way crap like that will end in this country is if the Government steps in.

If the Liberal party can come up with a realistic NBN plan, or even adopt Labors, I will vote for them, I’d even fucking campaign for them. But the ball is in their court and I’m sure they’re not as tech savvy as Labor and probably don’t read such things like ALP’s PR team do scouring the net for blogs about them. But we’ll see. C’mon Libs, get real. It’s bad enough we were a bipartisan politics nation, now we’ve only got one political party? Really?

Don’t be that guy @LiberalAus.

Attached: News. Ltd. Article on NBN fail.

The Coalition today revealed its alternative to the Government’s costly plan to roll out fibre-optic cables to almost every building in the nation.

It says it will use a patchwork of different services and funds to encourage private sector development and improve broadband connections on an individual basis where necessary.

It’s a much cheaper, but slower, alternative. It will cost about $6bn compared to the Government’s $43bn network.

But the Coalition will only guarantee a minimum of 12 megabits per second (Mbps). The Government says speeds on its network will begin at 100Mbps.

During a heated debate on communications policy this afternoon, Senator Conroy said the scheme was “second-class”.

“We will give a gold-class broadband network to every Australian,” he said.

Shadow communications minister Tony Smith said he made no apologies for deciding not to spend big on broadband.

“We’re not running fibre down every street at the taxpayer’s expense, whether people want it or not,” he said.

Key elements of the Coalition’s plan include:

FIBRE-OPTIC backbones to populated areas that all internet providers can access.

The Coalition will provide $2.75 billion to build them, while $750 million will need to come from the private sector.

A $750 MILLION fund for “broadband optimisation”, to upgrade connections on an individual basis.

“That is for people today who can’t get a decent service over copper,” Mr Smith said.

A $1 BILLION grant fund to encourage the private sector to create wireless networks in rural and regional Australia.

ANOTHER $1 billion to invest in metropolitian wireless networks to address blackspots in outer metro areas.

“Together these initiatives will ensure that 97 per cent of Australians have a baseline minimum 12Mbps peak speed,” said Mr Smith.

“Of course many will have higher speeds.”

The tax rise, which has been leaked not been announced, will add 24c to a pack of 50 cigarettes and 13c to a pack of 25s. A smoker who buys a pack of 25 cigarettes every day will pay $58.24 a week in tax. The original surprise tax rise pushed up prices by $1.44-$3.60 a pack for cigarettes, although punters were looking at (in reality) price rises of $5-$8 per pack due to dodgy mark ups. Beer drinkers will pay more from Monday with a tax grab of 21c for a full-strength slab of 24 cans – taking the total excise on the carton to $14.28.

A carton of light beer will increase by 8c, a six-pack of full-strength cans rises by 5c with a 2c rise for light beer. Those who prefer spirits face the biggest tax rise. The Federal Government is adding 27c to a 700ml bottle, taking its share on every bottle sold to $18.81.

Welcome to the Lie Downunder, home of the surprise tax.

Australian Labor Party politics are a joke. Absolute dogs for shanking the PM who saw us go through the GFC with the strongest economy emergent, and the most popular first term leader ever; backstabbing is a favorite past time in politics though I guess. I’m just disappointed that our first woman PM is through dog tactics and not election.

Allegedly angered by a morning newspaper report leaked from the Prime Minister’s office, questioning her loyalty, Julia Gillard called senior powerbroker and fellow Victorian MP Bill Shorten. “It pissed everyone in the caucus off,” said a NSW senior factional leader. “And it pissed her off, too. She has been nothing but loyal. And to have that happen was not only stupid but unwarranted.” Sadly actions speak louder than words as our first female Prime Minister–something much overdue–may very well be in power through skullduggery as opposed to free election. This taints all progress of equal rights for women in Australia and will put the potential of our first female PM into a situation where people will point out that it wasn’t the fill of the people.

Just before Question Time at 2.30pm, the Deputy Prime Minister assembled a select group of Cabinet colleagues and co-conspirators. They had been trying to get her to challenge his leadership ‘for weeks’, giving strong backing to the claims from the Prime Ministerial office questioning her loyalty to the elected leadership and the will of Australian voters.

By late afternoon, Shorten, fellow Victorian Senator David Feeney, NSW MP Tony Burke and South Australian right wing factional leader Don Farrell went to see Ms Gillard in her office.

They had been conspiring for the past week and they wanted her to challenge. Powerful AWU boss Bill Ludwig told the ABC Mr Rudd is “toxic”. “We have a better chance of holding government with Julia Gillard that we would have with Rudd,” Mr Ludwig said. Former Premier Peter Beattie has backed Ms Gillard, telling the ABC “she is a very talented woman”. Transport Union boss Hughie Williams said Ms Gillard will prevail. “It’s quite obvious they have the numbers. We’ll have a new prime minister of Australia,” Mr Williams said.

Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce said the overnight coup attempt against Mr Rudd has been engineered by factional leaders who have taken over the running of the country. “It is running on auto-pilot in the face of faceless people and faceless men who (were) never elected,” Senator Joyce said.

“We’re basically realising that the whole direction and metaphor of this Government was flawed and we’re off to – gosh only knows.”

It is interesting to note that many conservative biased media outlets are painting this as ‘loyal Gillard reluctantly challenges leadership’, media outlets that tend to follow the normative Liberal bias, however it should be noted that the ‘factions’ behind this coup are ultra-conservative Laborites and traditionalists as opposed to progressives.

Shortly after 7pm, Ms Gillard’s office called the Prime Minister’s Office and told them that Ms Gillard wanted to see the PM. The pair had been due to have dinner later in the evening at the Lodge. Mr Rudd was called back from a function to celebrate the 20th anniversary of parliamentary service for Senator Nick Sherry, around the corner from his office in the Ministerial wing of Parliament House.

With Ms Gillard was Defence Minister and fellow left-wing factional heavyweight John Faulkner, a NSW senator.

She informed the PM that she intended to challenge him for the leadership. She wanted a ballot. The pair remained behind closed doors for almost two hours.

As the two were locked in an intense negotiation, interrupted twice by Rudd loyalists Anthony Albanese and Lindsay Tanner, the factional leader from NSW Mark Arbib hit the phones.

Shorten, dining in the Canberra suburb of Kingston with colleagues including Sports Minister Kate Ellis, was also glued to the phone. But by 9pm the conspirators were confident they had the numbers to swing behind her should she decide to do it.

The answer was revealed at 10.20pm when the PM called a press conference and revealed he had been visited by Ms Gillard, and confirmed that the challenge was on, after media outlets erroneously claimed his press conference was because he was ‘resigning as prime minister’.

This morning, at 9am, she goes into a special caucus meeting with the conspiratorial bulk of the members of the NSW Labor Right, the Victorian Right, the South Australian Right and the Victorian Left behind her.

Queensland right-wing powerbroker, Senator Joe Ludwig, was also on board. The deal was that Treasurer Wayne Swan – the man who voted against Rudd in the spill against Kim Beazley – would be Ms Gillard’s deputy.

The Victorian Right had been courting Gillard for the past two weeks, urging her to challenge. “We can’t win with this bloke,” they told her. Ironically, if Labor enact a change in leadership the chance of them winning at the next election, or next several elections is slim to none given that trechery is not really smiled upon by the average punter.

Arbib, the NSW numbers man who put Rudd into the leadership in 2006, had been sounding out support among select MPs for a change.

The internal polling provided by the party’s national secretary Karl Bitar was worse than the public polling, which had already put the Government in a losing position. But some outlets Gillard’s loyalty prevented her from doing the unthinkable.

A caucus is something most non-Australians may not be familiar with, but it’s fundamentally a government within a government allowing crazed parliamentarians to push batshit agendas that aren’t representative of Australians or the people who voted for them. The caucus can turn on the Prime Minister and screw him over, as we’re seeing for the first time. Kevin keeps pointing out that he was elected by the PEOPLE of Australia and not factional leaders.

While I’d be chuffed to see Australia have their first woman PM, I don’t agree with Gizzard’s coup, as loathsome as K-rudd can be at times with not following through. This is why we should elect the person, not the party, and vote for WHO we want to represent us, not just a brand name with a random and (obviously) changeable line-up. It’s abhorrent.

Ps: Early rumours that he stepped down were incorrect, there will be a secret ballot held by the Labor caucus tomorrow at 9AM.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communication (They don’t represent us, just batshit vocal minorities, I assure you) have stated that all Australian’s should be forced to install anti-virus and firewall software on their computers before being allowed to connect to the internet under a ‘new plan’ to ‘fight cyber crime’. And if their computer did get infected, internet service providers could cut off their connection until the problem was resolved.

Those are two of the recommendations to come from a year-long multi-million inquiry into cyber crime. They spent all the money on K-Rudd’s crack and then did an all nighter the night the findings were due. Results of the inquiry, titled Hackers, Fraudsters and Botnets: Tackling the Problem of Cyber Crime, were released last night in a 260-page report, there is no mention whether it met copyspace clearance however and may have been plagerised from first year ethics students at UWA.

In her foreword, committee chair Belinda Neal said cyber crime had turned into a “sophisticated underground economy”, before taking a rasping breath from the pipe under the table. “In the past decade, cyber crime has grown from the nuisance of the cyber smart hacker into an organised transnational crime committed for vast profit and often with devastating consequences for its victims,” Ms Neal said. I postulate whether she is referring to the ‘russian mobsters’ who ‘hacked’ a dentists website and ‘uploaded child pornography’ to ‘make money’ as Senator Conman Conroy stated when asked why a dentists office was on the super secret government black list.

During its inquiry the committee heard a growing number of Australians were being targeted by cyber criminals and that increasing internet speeds were likely to make the situation worse. Something we don’t inherently need to worry about in Australia given that we still pay several hundred dollars per month for speeds not exceeding ADSL1 technology branded as ADSL2+ with a lot of fine print that anything over 56k dialup ‘in their terms’ is ADSL2+ (forget international standards here folks).

It also heard the problem was costing Australian businesses as much as $649 million a year. Including dentists with large kiddy porn collections replacing their virtual store front. The committee looked at several different examples of cyber crime, including hacking, phishing, malware and botnets. They intently carried out this research by leeching torrents, using Back Orifice on inter-office computers, and asking each other for their banking details from fraudulent hotmail accounts, such as imnotsenatorconroy@hotmail.com.

Among its final 34 recommendations were:

• The creation of an around-the-clock cyber crime helpline. This, I agree with. I don’t pay for phone calls so I will ring them and chant “Cocks, cocks, cocks.” until the end of time.
• Changes to the law to make unauthorised installation of software illegal. What the fuck, seriously.
• Companies who release IT products with security vulnerabilities should be open to claims for compensation by consumers. This I agree with. Microsoft, give me moneys.
• Another of its recommendations was to create a new “e-security code of practice” that would define the responsibilities of internet service providers and their customers. Cocks, cocks, cocks.
• The code of practice would see companies like Telstra give their customers security advice when they signed up and inform them if their computer ever appeared to be compromised. More fine print we won’t read and will click yes to.

For their part, customers would have to install anti-virus and firewall software before their connection was activated and endeavour to keep the software up-to-date. It pisses me off enough as it is when they ask what kind of computer I’m using to access the net, when half the time I’m not even using a computer at all, nor any OS they’d have heard of. Find me anti-virus software for my xbox, or my iPhone hard-booted to run Lunix (yes, Lunix, no, it’s not a typo)  please K-Rudd.

If a customer’s computer was infected by malware, the service provider could introduce gradual restrictions and eventually cut off their internet connection entirely until the machine was “remediated”. This implies that the Government will not only be ‘filtering’ us, but also packet sniffing our shit in a clandestine way.

This entire thing just makes me want to pre-emptively ring that hotline, or maybe Senator Conroy’s office. In fact, brb, cocks, cocks, cocks time.

“The Rachel Corrie has been intercepted 35 miles off Gaza,” a spokesman for the welcoming committee, Amjad al-Shawa, who talked with the boat, told AFP in Gaza City, the vessel 5 nautical miles off coastal waters, thus pushing the case that these seizures in international waters amount to piracy. “Several Israeli boats surrounded them and prevented them from reaching Gaza,” said Mr Shawa.

“They try to take the boat maybe to (the southern Israeli port city of) Ashdod or maybe to another place,” he said. Mr Shawa said communication with the boat had been “completely cut” but the committee would keep trying to reach them. Martin Quigley, a Dublin based spokesman for the vessel, which is carrying 15 people and tonnes of aid for Gaza, could not confirm the information and said he had not been in contact with the boat. “They had agreed to call us the minute they spotted any Israeli ships,” he said, saying he had not been able to reach the passengers on the satellite phone. “It sounds like the phone is off the hook.”

A spokeswoman for the Israeli army denied the boat had been taken over, telling AFP: “No… we are not aware of any information about that”.

Israeli governmental credibility is on the ropes after autopsies on the bodies of nine Turks revealed most were shot in the back of the head or the back, the Turks were killed in an Israeli raid on an aid ship bound for Gaza found they were peppered with bullets and many were shot at close range, a British newspaper said Saturday.  Citing Yalcin Buyuk, the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice on Friday, the Guardian said the men were shot a total of 30 times.

One 60-year-old man was shot four times – in the temple, chest, hip and back, Buyuk said. A US-Turkish citizen was shot five times at close range in the face, the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back.

Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, Buyuk said.

Israel has said the commandos only opened fire after they came under attack with clubs, knives, guns and other weapons, although no weapons other than deck poles were found on the vessel, and night vision footage taken by the IDF revealed that the crew only began to try and repel the attackers once weapons fire had already commenced against the unarmed civillians on board the ship.

Bulent Yildirim, head of the Islamic charity Foundation of Humanitarian Relief, which spearheaded the Gaza aid fleet, said activists used iron bars in self-defence after Israeli soldiers fired indiscriminately when they stormed the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara.

It’s a brilliant idea, given how many ports they’re setting up for them, however it’s 2010, if they had even half a clue the helmet would be attached to the bike and ‘unlock’ for use when the bike is released from the port, and the bikes would have rudimentary electric motors (I believe the going rate of such a bike in China is about $50 AUD IIRC.) and would recharge from a simple solar cell added to the base station.

Who knows, maybe some company searching for keywords during the data mining part of their marketing team research might see this and pick up the game in the corporate sector providing a real transport solution for their state.

Long have we theorised the above line by a madman bearing a labtern not to be talking about the literal God believed in by so many theists. Instead, we interpret, he is talking about what this god represented for European culture, the shared cultural belief in God which had once been its defining and uniting characteristic.

So to has man thrown off the yolk of theism, every element of the divine has been replicated at large through science, trickery, art, illusionism except one final element; the creation of life.

Until yesterday when flamboyant geneticist Craig Venter held true to the pledge he made nearly 15 years ago, unveiling his magnum opus. This landmark of scientific progress, published in the Journal of Science, stands on the shoulders of his race to decode the human genome in his own laboratory, egotistically his own DNA I might add.

The madman carrying this lantern has indeed created the first instance of purely synthetic life, opening the doors nanoscience falter at with the potential to create designer microbes for special jobs such as production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals, through to filtering contaminents from air and water.

“This is the first synthetic life that has been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromasome, made with four bottles of chemcals on a synthesizer from information on a computer,” Dr Venter said.

Lauded as a tour de force by Prof. Mattick from the Australian Research Council, Dr. Venters work is as ground breaking as science gets these days, the applications for man made life are phenominal and limited only by our imagination. That being said, mans imagination can often be self destructive, so think of all the fantastic synthesized zombie viruses the US military will make with this!

The bacterium used decoded DNA from Mycoplasma mycoides imprinting the synthetic DNA and inserting it into living bacterium, in this case Mycoplasma capricolum, allowing the bacterium to flourish with both it’s own and the synthetic DNA within, then finally using an antibiotic designed to kill all but the synthetic DNA allowing only the synthesized organism to proliferate and produce protein strands from the original Mycoplasma mycoides creating, simply, artificial life.

Klatu barada neck-tie?

You know, that almost makes you sound like a rapper. I am writing this merely to mock you, knowing the people reading it will appreciate the tongue in cheek as I illustrate the ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle’ you’re dishing out to smokers. I’m aware you’re about as detached from reality as a politician can get, but I do know the 12 year old korean sweat shop workers you have in your off shore PR department will read this and hopefully also get a chuckle at your expense.

Smoking, filthy habit, right? Some say it’s as hard as heroin to kick. In Australia, the land of the ‘surprise tax’ as I like to call it (we’re already one of the most taxed nations yet we have ‘stamp duty’ tax on … everything, which is usually 10% (see: bankrupting on your first home or car purchase by surprise tax) as well as road tax, breathing tax, you fucking name it tax) but now we have taxes on taxes. Cigarettes were always taxed at a premium, where a pack of fags would set you back $7 in the 80′s and early 90′s as opposed to $1-2 outside Australia.

Smokers clog up the healthcare system, right? What with their dying all the time and stuff, why not tax them? Fine. Smokers pay a lot more tax than any other Australian, with almost 90% of the price of them being ‘tax’ all going to the medical system. But fuck giving them organs, they’re smokers. Hell, let’s tax them more. Now we’re nearing $1 per cigarette, and what happens? The price of ‘quit smoking aids’ which always work out to cost more than cigarettes go up too.

As much as governments pretend to want us to not smoke they realise that the tax they can milk out of us by keeping us alive an average 10 years more is far less than what they can by taxing our addiction. I say this as an intermittant lifelong smoker, who quits as often as he restarts, but fairs fair this new tax has gone way too far.

Heroin addicts get shooting galleries, social support, free housing, $380 a fortnight and FREE methadone to inject instead. Smokers get mortgages, bills, two point seven five children, two cars, and a fuckload of surprise tax on top of their taxed taxes of cigartaxes and placebo ‘quit’ substitutes that freely state in their instructions that they won’t give you the ‘fix’ or ‘buzz’ of cigarettes (and thus never last more than a week in a smokers addiction).

So, I propose this K-rudd, rather than making heroin far more appealing to Australian’s, how about you cut back on the smoking tax, or even it out across the three big killers, obesity (being the biggest killer in this nation) and alcohol (and see how long it takes until parliament house is burnt down and you’r nailed to the flag pole given how crazed Aussies seem to be about drinking (coming from a non drinker here)), which I might add are two elements I do not participate in. Maybe we should have photos of the mega-litres of fat sucked out of womens arses and thighs and the horrible chaffed cellulite gone necrotic fat people get attached to every edible product? Why stop there, why don’t we up the gore level and throw up some awesome pics from ogrish of splatter deaths from drunken road kills of people?

Or better yet, maybe repeal the tax and stop being a cunt, eh?

Much love,

BaSH (Your #1 Fan) PR0MPT

Ps: Why the fuck did I vote for him? I guess he was Obama before Obama, he looked good because the competition was horrendous, and promised the right things, then backflipped on all of them.

Yesterday Kevin Rudd betrayed his promise to act on climate change, deferring action until 2013: six years after he called climate change the moral challenge of our age.

So what can we do about it? To start, we have to ensure this doesn’t go unnoticed – doesn’t go unanswered. Every Australian who took the Prime Minister at his word should see this video of his climate backflip.

The Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was a mess of a policy: a paltry 5% target, and what the Govenrment’s own advisor, Prof. Ross Garnaut, called “one of the worst examples of policy making we have seen on major issues in Australia.”2 But this is about far more than another policy delay.

Time and again, Kevin Rudd has betrayed the support Australians gave him last election. And yesterday, he broke faith with us on “the great challenge of our time.”3 It is time to say enough. It is time to take a stand and declare a vote of no confidence in Kevin Rudd’s leadership on climate change.

We could say a lot about this latest backflip, but Kevin Rudd himself perhaps said it best. Here’s what he said just months ago about delaying climate action:

“….When you strip away all the political rhetoric, all the political excuses, there are two stark choices – action or inaction.”

“…The resolve of the Australian Government is clear: we choose action, and we do so because Australia’s fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action. Action now. Not action delayed.”

“…the eighth excuse cannot be far away – which will be to wait until the next year or the year after until all the rest of the world has acted at which time Australia will act.

“…What absolute political cowardice. What an absolute failure of leadership. What an absolute failure of logic.”4

The Prime Minister said it right, what absolute cowardice. And as he said in that same speech:

“It’s time to remove any polite veneer from this debate. The stakes are that high.”

Right again: it’s time to remove the veneer and speak truth to power. Please share this post with friends, and click below to join the vote of no confidence in Kevin Rudd’s climate decision, just a warning though do NOT donate to GetUp!, their donations are spent how they see fit and it is VERY rare they will put much of the funds to use on the topic at hand. One example was the anti-censorship issue, they raised $300,000 and donated $1,000 to the cause and spent the rest on self promotion under cause-oriented guise.

www.getup.org.au/campaign/climateinaction

PS – On refugees, on human rights and now on climate change, Kevin Rudd has broken faith with all Australians.

–Sources–

1The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP, Distinguished Speaker Series, the Lowy Institue, 06/11/ 2009.
2Prof. Ross Garnaut, The 7.30 Report, ABC, broadcast: 12/10/2009, reporter: Kerry O’Brien.
3The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP, Opening Remarks to the National Climate Change Summit, Parliament House, Canberra, 31/03/07
4The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP, Distinguished Speaker Series, the Lowy Institue, 06/11/ 2009.