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the rich weather wafties (2012)...The Sydneysiders on the North Shore are depressed... Business is slack, shops are deserted and going broke, street malls are empty, the summer weather so far has been crap... On top of this, most of the North Shore is the electorate of Tony Abbott. This by itself would be depressing... and more depressing still — for many of the North Shore Siders Tony is Jesus of Nazareth, walking on water and coming to save Australia from its Labor sins... (author's note: this was written in 2012 when the Australian economy was doing better than most nations on the planet, under Labor, and when climate change was tackled with a price on carbon. Since then, with Tony Abbott as Prime Minister — Turdius Bullshitor Deviousii of the North Shore — the Australian economy has tanked, the social unrest is visible, climate change is running riot, the moral compass has been flushed down the dunny, the "age of entitlement" has been terminated except for rorting parliamentarians... and windmills are shaking in their boots...) Update: Bronwyn Bishop is under pressure to resign her North Shore throne... Update: She has resigned as speaker but still hangs on to her north shore seat of retirement villages after a helicopter mishap. Update: since September last year, Tony Abbott has been polishing the backbenches with his butt — having been deposed by Turnbull-the-Debonair. The Liberal (CONservative) government has rekindled its stars, though it is still serving the same shit. It is incompetent, inept, idiotic, lunatic, follic, stupid and bullshitting — all with elegance. People love all that glitters, even turds... Update: Tony Abbott wants to seek re-election in his fiefdom, with the premise "he will improve the roads and transport to the North Shore". Pigs will fly before that.
Update: Still in the 2018 parliament, Tony Abbott is now responsible for the fall of FIVE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENTS, including his own. Read on... 2012 — The North Shore is an area of Sydney where the money is —or was — still is... but they are penny pinching because Tony like Moses on the molehill, keeps telling them the economy is bad or is going to be bad or should have gone bad yesterday, while things are still cruising along quite reasonably compared to the rest of the world... The mining stocks went up to a 17 month high yesterday, the approval from home loans has hit a relative jackpot for a few months now, the price of iron ore is up... What else do they want?... They want to get rid of Labor. They hate Julia. Labor helped the poor and the larger part of the middle class, unlike the Liberals (conservatives, including the North Shore) who would have helped the rich, during the Global Financial Crisis... Labor helped the country stay afloat — ahead of everyone else. This is highly resented by the rich, because financial acumen is an area of Liberal (conservative) privilege — stomping on the workers to be feasting on bonuses... The result is that the rich, in an anticipatory move, might have exchanged their dough into US dollars, but now the Aussie dollar is so high, they cannot move the money back without loosing more of their pants... They resent that. Mind you, there is money nearly everywhere in Sydney, especially if you have a view of the water, live on the water's edge or own acreage... or even have a big mortgage in the "inner city suburbs" from Pyrmont to Kings bloody Cross... Point Piper in the Eastern Suburbs could be the most expensive place to live on this planet, if Elizabeth Bay did not have a couple of magnificent homes better (but smaller) than Buckingham palace... until one discovers it's ONLY a place to live and die, with a fantastic view from a manicured estate... On the "lower" North Shore, there is Mosman where old money has been kept in families for yonks — families that own big mansions. Even the small mansions are being "extended" to make them look like bigger mansions. Most have views of the city, of the harbour, of the ocean, of the sky... of their own navels and bank accounts. But the "upper" North shore siders are generally a special breed of rich... The upper North Shore is a space created by god himself: beaches, surf, sun, leafy nature reserves, palm tree gardens, more jewel beaches edged by gem-like little villages sunk between rocky cliffs and oasis of flowers. It's pretty. The blond bronzed kids who grow up there become surfies and/or drug addicts. Not all of them though. Some become junk-bond traders and make it to the 200 rich list. The lesser crafty intellectuals of them enter trades... Even these tradies are trendy, polite, half-naked and showing muscular bods like Michelangelo statues... and they go to the pub with their mates, the traders. In the past, they wore singlets and thongs by day's end... Dee Why was a bit of a genteel heavenly dive. I knew Dee Why in the seventies... It was a bit like Mount Druit on the beach... Plenty of unmarried young women pushing prams filled with unplanned babies, in a burb that looked crappy to say the least and overrun by billboards — out of control advertising had turned what could have been a half-decent agglomeration of fake fisherman huts and housing commission flats, into a mecca for extreme crass low-end consumerism... The main pub was claimed to be the biggest (or the most patronised) in Australia. There, as the youth got seriously smashed, were launched the careers of many famous Australian bands on a stage set like an island with flashing lights, in a sea of beer... I have been told, the pub got demolished to make room for a bigger pub with more class and a 15 storey tall building. Like the rest of Dee Why, the crassness has vanished somewhat... It's been gentrified, polished, de-billboarded, tradied, re-plumbered... The plumber who comes to fix your leaky tap (good god... the entire world is going down the gurgler) will be the young brat you discreetly snooted the family of, when you collected your own kids from school... But he has smartened up now and earns good money, while your own rich kids, now grown up, are still bludging from you... The school bullies have become politicians, or aspiring pollies by filling the benches of some organisation with the word organisation in it... The North Shore Siders are generous to a fault... The North Shore Siders who can afford acreage and mowing vast expanses of lawn the size of the Versailles gardens really love the quiet, the quiet and the very quiet, except when they mow, blow or mulch something... For some it could take half an hour by car to go and buy a carton of milk. It's pricey isolation. Some go and drive half an hour to buy a loaf of bread impulsively, just to diminish the boredom and say hello to someone... This is where the votes for Tony Abbott ferment... Most North Shore Siders are Liberal (conservative) and they think global warming is crap... True. Look at summer... Barely a day so far to get a tan on that fine James Bond cut face with blue steely eyes and a blond fringe on top. But comfort tends to make some of them — even those who have retired — a bit lazy, complacent somewhat... Not to the point of reading a serious book but the hunger in the belly has been replaced with whale watching from the bay window, with a telescope that the Palomar Observatory would envy.... Those who used to follow the stock market and made their fortune, don't follow things too closely these days until they find someone, possibly a neighbour, took them for a ride and they lost a couple of millions on a dicey "little" sure thingy venture... Or a rich neighbour objected to the council about their plans for a bigger swimming pool and that huge concrete pergola. That hurts. Transport on the North shore is still travelled on roads that were drawn, like most of Sydney's network, by goats on the loose... So one can be in a Beamer or in a tradie's truck and it takes longer to drive from Palm Beach to the city, than to travel to Wollongong. The North Shore Siders dream of better roads... Trains? You're kidding aren't you.?... The place would end up looking like Strathfield... Secretly, they think that better transport to the area would bring twice as many hordes of Westies to the beaches than it does now... Sure the local councils make a killing from car park fees, but there are other problems than over-crowded beaches. The topography that is so pretty is also a curse for roadways. One would have to destroy the landscape to put a highway through.... Even where there is a short six lane highway, here comes the constriction of the Spit Bridge — built in 1958 and back then already too narrow. 54 years later, with compounded doubling of road traffic every ten years, things are not pretty. The buses get a slightly better run because of exclusive Bus Lanes, though the rich drivers in Mercs and 4-wheel-drives will flaunt the rules and zoom into them as if per mistake. That is their explanation to the cops usually waiting at the bottom of the hill... They don't care about being booked... They have lawyers. Or they are lawyers. Or they know someone in the system, high up... Or the fine is like the discounted price of a chocolate bar to you and me. Anyway, I've seen 10 lanes of heavy traffic from three major roads going into one lane while the other three lanes of the bridge are dedicated to the opposite traffic... The North Shore Siders blame the inaction of the successive state Labor governments for their traffic woes... When there is a Liberal government in place — their favourite colour of political paint — they hope the transport status would improve but they know it won't... Should a Labor government come back, they will blame it for the problem, again... They would not live anywhere else for quids... It's where they were born and bread, mostly blue-eyed Aryans-like, apart from a few rich Japanese who took over a suburb in the 1990s and may have left since — who knows — when the Japanese economy tanked.... Multiculturalism on the North Shore is tolerated, as long as you have money... Plenty of money. The summer dress code is often pressed-casual with expensive labels, apart from the geezers who go to the city in Savile Row shirts and Versace pinstripes... Gold is de-rigueur... Mums do not push prams anymore, they drive ultra comfortable monster-trucks disguised as 4-wheel-drives, to the schools... They often park in the middle of the road, to let junior and his friends (not mates) out via a long ladder... After this, they go to the tennis club. The North Shore Siders don't "believe" in global warming... See, the 2012 summer so far has been crap... Really crap. That's a sign that things are cooling... 90 per cent of them are denialists because that's what Tony Abbott believes despite making semi-mitigated noise to the contrary... If Tony Abbott did not believe that global warming was crap, they would turf him out in a jiffy. They would replace him with someone harbouring more rabid views on the subject... Bernardi sounds good. Anyway they know by talking to the guy that Tony's solution to the "problem" is crap and they know that Tony thinks that too, but no-one can let the cat out of bag until he's there, implanted in Canberra... and starting to flog the workers back into submission, for profit... and remove that tax... on carbon... What was this crap? I ask you... The rest of the North Shore Siders (apart from a few rabid Laborites), would think that a) humans are not responsible for a warming which does not exist and b) humans can't do anything to solve a problem of such magnitude that only exists in mad communist scientists' mind, as asserted to them by Alan Jones and Lord Monckton... No, no. They don't listen to Alan Jones. They tell him what to say... The North Shore, I have been told, is thus going broke... Pity... The North Shore Siders are going broke because they once believed in Greenspan, the old financial guru, when he was whispering sweet nothing into the US president's ears — while Monica was taking care of another part... So those North Shore Siders over-invested in their business, homes and gas guzzlers when things-financial were wanking at full speed. Then they found out in 2007 that things were starting to go south... The value of their homes (plural) was halving by the minute... And not only that, they had also invested much of their pocket monies in businesses like Channel Ten and Channel Nine — as sure things — but now these shares are tanking fast as well... As business models go, these things were terrible compared to the NBN which they hate, because Uncle Rupe hates it... Sure they diversified their portfolio, but there is so much one can invest into mining, when Gina owns the lot... And all those people who had bough a nicknack-store with dreams of making it big, would have saturated their market with oil scented wax candles in three days max... No, don't get me wrong, I like the North Shore and its people... Plenty of good people there. Though I wish they would drop Tony Abbott as their representative... And pick someone decent (mentioning Bernardi was a joke). The way Tony and his mob of wolves went after Julia in regard to an old union-onion twenty years ago smells of bullies punching females in a university election lost by the said Tony... Dropping Tony would be an improvement. A weight would lift from the shoulders of this nation. The air would feel fresher instantly and the future would soon rekindle the North Shore Siders tarnished silver... I'd even give them a medal. Their pigheadedness and beliefs on global warming are hard to take... They have no scientific basis, only religious-like beliefs that this cannot be happening on their watch of burning sacred carbon to the god of comfort... The only reason their power bill has gone so high has nothing to do with the air conditioning running all day nor the poles and wiring being replaced at the average price of gold, for wood-sticks in dirt. It all has to do with that wretched carbon tax which won't save the world from anything that does not exist... Those doing the whale-watching of course also blast the anti-whalers with loads of venom, like they did in the past about Greenies saving trees in forest, when the North Shore Siders had plenty of them in their acreage. Anti-whaling gives the nation a bad name to our friends in Japan. Should the North Shore Siders be in charge of the coast guards, they would put these pirates in prison, or sink them whichever came first... Yes, some glorious ancestors of theirs might have been a commercial whaler — hence the family fortune.... Who knows... But on a morning like today, the 12th of the twelfth, 2012, when one looks up at the sky, one can feel a tinge of global warming.. unless it's my rotten knees indicating an unsettled weather... The humidity through the night was around 99 per cent — no rain but heavy dew... The temperature is not high, just weird in the mid range. The planes on landing are creating their own moving clouds, as the dew point was low. The disturbance of the air below the low clouds was enough to create another cloud as if attached to the plane. But this is not enough to tell us that things are not quite right and even if climate change was happening, it would not be an anthropogenic global warming anyway — on the North Shore... Even the North Shore had its first few threatening bush fires of the season. If one looks around, most lawns are parched dry despite the humidity in the air... Some normally resilient plants get leaves burnt by the sun on a hot day... It does not rain much. Elsewhere in the world, glaciers are melting faster than ever... Presently, Sydney weather is strongly influenced by the south east coast current, running around 24 degrees... The cold air from the south picks up moisture and heat from the surface, but being "too warm" this southerly wind that would normally drop the temperature to below 21 degree C and form a southerly "buster", cannot do so... It often fizzles before getting there. Because the energy in the air has become nearly tropical in nature... Too much confused warm energy in the air and the clouds stay low and fuzzy instead of shaping up into a front... Except last weekend when the unusual strong wind vas blustery and whirly for two days, but still no rain despite a small drop in temperature. Too warm. El Nino is having a hell of a time getting a foothold, despite all the factors being in place. The humidity combining with EL Nino makes it behave like a warmish dry La Nina... Weird... Now the wafty clouds have disappeared and the sun is shinning. The North Shore is back on track for a brilliant day at the beach... Global warming is thus far from the mind of the North Shore-siders... They know how to make serious money (and lose it too) but they know zilch, nada, nothing, niet about global warming apart from repeating the mantra that "global warming is crap"... Some of them might venture to say that the "science is not settled on the subject" as a way to shut the argument... Global warming does not exist on the North Shore. And if it did, a few more degrees would make the place, the North Shore, become like Queensland... Beautiful one day, perfect the next... And Tony is on track to be the king of the castle... Everything is great in the North Shore paradise. Except the North Shore Siders are gloomy. They have been told to be gloomy by Tony... I would despair if I was not determined to show the proper science over and over until my knuckles hurt... Meanwhile, on a day that Peter Slipper's case was thrown out of court (12/12/12), as "a politically motivated case" to put it mildly, one can smell the little rat droppings on the North Shore will try another stunt soon to debase the Labor government... Gus leonisky (picture at top by Gus)
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rising dangers...
Global warming has become perhaps the most complicated issue facing world leaders. Warnings from the scientific community are becoming louder, as an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases — produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and forests.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in 2011 and were likely to take a similar jump in 2012, scientists reported in early December 2012 — the latest indication that efforts to limit such emissions are failing.
Over all, global emissions jumped 3 percent in 2011 and are expected to jump another 2.6 percent in 2012, researchers reported.
The new figures show that emissions are falling, slowly, in some of the most advanced countries, including the United States. That apparently reflects a combination of economic weakness, the transfer of some manufacturing to developing countries and conscious efforts to limit emissions, like the renewable power targets that many American states have set. The boom in the natural gas supply from hydraulic fracturing is also a factor, since natural gas is supplanting coal at many power stations, leading to lower emissions.
But the decline of emissions in the developed countries is more than matched by continued growth in developing countries like China and India, the new figures show. Coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, is growing fastest, with coal-related emissions leaping more than 5 percent in 2011, compared with the previous year.
read more: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html
the south australian wafties...
Of course, my exposé of the Sydney North Shore was a broad brush artistic depiction... I for example did not include in this leafy paradisio, the things that could make tourist squirm... The Funnel Web Spiders, the Ticks, the Mozzies, the Leeches, the bluebottles, the occasional flotsam and jetsam....
So talking of things that float, something came up to our general attention:
THIS WEEK, the Liberal Party showed its true colours, as South Australia’s Liberal Senate ticket was announced, with Cory Bernardi again in the number one position.
I know many of you will be thinking this is a bad thing, however I disagree.
I think that it is vitally important that the public be made aware of the kind of policy ideas and the opinions and attitudes that will take you to the top in the modern day Liberal Party.
Bernardi spent a lot of time in the U.S. studying the workings of the Tea Party; you may remember them as the right-wing lunatics the Republican party can’t distance themselves enough from these days. These were the party faction that was so far to the right that even Dick Cheney needed binoculars to see them.
It all went south for the Tea Party after their darling, Sarah Palin, ran a television campaign that showed various democrats in gun sights and a social media campaign showing the same. The apparent result of that being the