Wombats on Parade

Pre-Edit: I think the person I am talking about in this post still reads my blog/LJ. This post is not intended as a “call out” or an “insult”. I respect you and your views, I just don’t happen to share them. Don’t feel obliged to comment or reply in here. If you want to keep anonymity, feel free to message me directly on the usual channels.

Still a little annoyed with what I consider to be a semi-ambush debate I got into last night. I’ve made my personal opinion and stance on guns and gun use very clear. Now someone I do consider on the friend side of acquaintance last night linked me a suggestion on the Australian Liberal Party website that someone wanted to allow Concealed Carry Permits (CCP) for handguns. This is relatively common in the US where most states allow it, and if my memory serves me right Arizona just removed the requirement for people to have a permit to concealed carry.

The discussion around that fell back into my friend and my usual patterns of his trying to show me just how guns don’t alter crime statistics in any negative way, and me trying to debate the opposite. Last night I was in the middle of doing a couple of other things at the same time, so my heart and head weren’t really in the debate, so I was relying on the statistics my friend was providing, which were not clean statistics in my opinion (one of the commentators on the original Liberal Party piece stated that the US had the highest per capita gun death rate in the world, this was challenged and rightly so, as it’s not true.).

One thing I disliked about the nature of the argument that followed however was that the core of the debate was around a suggestion for increased gun ownership in Australia. I personally don’t think that there is any justification for such a thing. My friend is an American who is a reformed gun-hater. He now owns several, has a CCP in multiple states, and regularly shoots and maintains his guns as part of his every day life.

During the discussion though, various stats were brought up – how the gun death per capita was higher in Mexico, Russia and… Brazil? (forgive me, I’m working off memory and I can’t remember the third example given). I tried to ask what a comparative gun death rate is in a first world democracy (as both the US and Australia are. For the record, the US has a gun death rate of ~10.6 per 100,000 people, Australia has a ~2.5 rate. These figures are very approximate, though). After I asked for stats from the UK or Germany, both densely populated nations with fairly strict gun controls, I was given a nebulous quote about high “violent crime rates” in the UK. When I asked for Gun Death figures, I was told I should look for it myself, and that I was “typically apathetic” (misquote I know) about the issue and it was no wonder gun laws were being repealed.

So in response, here we are – the figures from the UK compared to the US. The figures are from Wikipedia, so take that with a grain of salt. They are all attributed on the wiki page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom

By way of international comparison, in 2004 the police in the United States reported 9,326 gun homicides.[30] The overall homicide rates per 100,000 (regardless of weapon type) reported by the United Nations for 1999 were 4.55 for the U.S. and 1.45 in England and Wales.[31] The homicide rate in England and Wales at the end of the 1990s was below the EU average, but the rates in Northern Ireland and Scotland were above the EU average.[32]
While the number of crimes involving firearms in England and Wales increased from 13,874 in 1998/99 to 24,070 in 2002/03, they remained relatively static at 24,094 in 2003/04, and have since fallen to 21,521 in 2005/06. The latter includes 3,275 crimes involving imitation firearms and 10,437 involving air weapons, compared to 566 and 8,665 respectively in 1998/99.[33] Only those “firearms” positively identified as being imitations or air weapons (e.g. by being recovered by the police or by being fired) are classed as such, so the actual numbers are likely to be significantly higher. In 2005/06, 8,978 of the total of 21,521 firearms crimes (42%) were for criminal damage.[34]
Compared to the United States of America, the United Kingdom has a slightly higher total crime rate per capita of approximately 85 per 1000 people, while in the USA it is approximately 80.[35]

One other element that was raised last night was that part of the reason Australia has a lower gun death rate was that we have a much lower population density than the US. While this is true, there are contributing factors that this does not account for (for example massive sections of Australia are near uninhabitable desert, and the majority of the population are located on the coastal strip on the east coast, but I digress here…). To bring the discussion back to the UK/US comparison, here are the relative population densities between the UK and the US:

UK: 254.676 people per km2
USA: 32.101 people per km2
(for shits and giggles, Australia is 2.896, just behind Iceland, and ahead of Namibia)

So one of the points raised last night, that the US’s higher gun death rate is partially due to a higher population density, appears to not bear fruit when compared to other nations.

So what’s the difference? In my liberal-biased view it would likely be gun ownership in general. The more people who have a gun (legally or not) the more likely it is for those guns to be used. Now the vast majority of gun owners are like my friend. Responsible people who take the utmost care with their guns and have never shot anyone in their life, nor are they likely to except ni the most extreme of instances. That’s true in the USA, that’s true in the UK, that’s true here. What is a big differentiator from what I can see safely hidden behind a few thousand miles of ocean, is that the US has a very gun-oriented culture. Americans love their guns, which is cool for them I guess, but Australia just doesn’t have that mindset. In Melbourne we’re currently having a problem with people being stabbed. It doesn’t change the fact that I, as a knife owner (love my swiss army knives) now have to leave them at home instead of keeping on me if needed otherwise it’s liable to be confiscated by the police.

However… if guns were more freely available, I’m sure those miscreants stabbing people would be shooting people instead. And if I had gotten into the habit, as many younger people have done, of carrying a knife around with me in case someone ELSE was to threaten me with a knife, I’d suddenly realise that that knife was insufficient for personal defense purposes… so I’d also go and get the same weapon being used to potentially menace me to stop being menaced. THAT, in my opinion, is what is happening in the US. Bad Dudes have guns. It only makes sense for Good Dudes to carry guns to, to keep the arms race level.

In Australia, the UK, Germany, New Zealand, etc etc, the Bad Dudes, for the most part, do NOT carry guns, so the Good Dudes don’t feel the pressure to carry a gun for defence.

I don’t want to cast judgement on US gun owners in those statements. If a gun gives you peace of mind and a sense of security, then good for you. You do what you feel is needed to protect yourself, your family, and your property. Here in Australia, we’re not in a security situation where a gun is needed for self defence. It might get to that stage one day, who knows, but I can comfortably say that here in Australia, in early 2010, there is no need for an average person to have a gun for personal protection.

Since the feedback page on Rimmel’s web site has a 750 Character limit, I am posting this letter to them here, with a link to it on the complaint form I have just sent in. Please read and respond, Rimmel people.

———-

Hello there, people responsible for Rimmel.

While I am not a regular user of your cosmetics, my wife is. Because I love her, I like buying her things that she likes, and one of those things is “Rimmel Professional Eyebrow Pencil, Black-Brown 004″. Now, according to my wife, she finds the Rimmel formula the ‘best on the market’, which is great. Top Marks for that one. Unfortunately, there are a few shortcomings that I would like to point out that, as an observer on the whole warpaint industry, might be a slight problem.

Firstly, and most importantly, your manufacturing appears to be faulty. Very faulty. Over the past 3 months or so, I would guess I have bought my wife 4 of your pencils. No, my wife is not a Goth, and does not dress up as Racoon regularly. The reasons I keep buying her these pencils is that they get broken more often than Tiger Woods’ Wedding Vows. Sharpening them appears not to help, and in fact hastens their wood-chippy demise.
It’s getting so bad I’m starting to wonder if the eyeliner part is pre-broken inside the pencil? It’s not the sharpener, I’m quite sure of that. We have tried about 5 different types, and they all do the same thing. Wonderfully sharp compressed wood pulp on the outside, broken eyeliner on the inside.

Can you please have a word to whatever Chinese factory makes your pencils, and see if they can remove the step “run over the pencils with a delivery truck before packaging” from the production line. I’m sure that would help in the long run and stop my wife switching to Almay (which, although they cost more individually, hopefully they won’t have the pre-destroyed makeup inside the pencils)

Thank you for taking the time to read this note, and we hope you have a wonderful day, free from broken makeup.
Andrew Callaghan.

At present, the Australian Parliament is in the midst of debating a bill to introduce Emissions Trading to the Australian socio-economic landscape. Of course, this is all an attempt to reduce our overall carbon production and help Save The Planet™.

Unfortunately, as with most Westminster System parliaments, Australian politics has devolved into a two party situation, with the current government being from the Labor party, and their main opposition coming from a coalition of the Liberal and National parties.

A quick political primer for those who care. The Labor party is a party created originally by Trade Unionists to represent their interests in Politics, after the disastrous Shearer’s Strike of the 19th Century. (Interesting aside, they went with the name Labor, instead of Labour, to show their progressiveness and willingness to embrace the new!). The Liberal Party was a party created by Sir Robert Menzies in an attempt to create a more balanced and fair party to protect the rights of individuals and business owners. The National Party is a renamed Country Party. The party of farmers and… more farmers. They have next to no support in any metropolitan region, but are an institution in regional and rural Australia. (There’s also the Greens, but they’re the same in every country, so no need to expand on them).

And here’s the crux of the problem. Each of our political parties has basically got a single massively vested interest and background. So the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has turned out to be, surprise surprise, a massively compromised, virtually ineffectual exercise in uselessness.

From today’s The Age article on the ETS:

The Government has offered the Opposition less than they wanted for heavy-polluting, trade-exposed industries – but will keep current rates of free permits to industry at 94.5 per cent and 66 per cent for more than the initial five years.

The Government has also offered extra additional assistance to the natural gas industry, food processing, manufacturers, and has excluded agriculture from the scheme.

The Government has also proposed additional but limited green measures to increase energy efficiency in homes and allow those carbon savings to be additional to national emissions targets.

So what does this mean? It means that we’re left with a trading scheme that gives the heaviest carbon emitting industries a free pass to do whatever they’ve been doing to get us to this point in the first place.

“BUT!!!” cry the captains of industry, trade unionists, and farmers who are desperate to keep their jobs “BUT! Australia produces much less than 1% of the world’s Carbon Dioxide!”

Well, yes, we do, but the really BIG polluters like Russia, China, India, and even Brazil (the so-called BRIC nations) look at first world economies like us and the USA and rightfully say “Why should we reduce our emissions when those guys aren’t changing a damned thing and they have a much better standard of living than we do!”.

Lead by example, people. We have shitloads of sunlight. We have stable geological conditions. Get out there. Get alternative energy production methods implemented. Get off your asses and stop protecting coal minters and aluminium smelters. If you don’t none of us will be able to have a job anywhere.

The wonderful tradition of absolute idiots running Government policy for IT in this country (Hi there ex-Senator Alston) our current Minister for Communications is Senator Stephen Conroy, sadly from my own home state of Victoria (at least I can honestly say I didn’t vote for him).

As you may or may not have heard of, the Rudd Labor Government is planning to implement at national content filter for all internet traffic. Originally, this was to be an opt-out filter that was in place to protect the kiddies from the horrors of child-pornography and other evils on the internet. At least that’s what it was going to be during the election campaign.

Since their election, the filter has now become a filter that cannot be opted out of, and will not only block sites related to child pornography, but “anything illegal”. Wikileaks last week released a leaked copy of the sites on the blacklist and as has been widely reported, it included such dangers as a Queensland dentist, an association of School Tuckshops and a wide variety of online poker sites. What was truly fascinating, though, was none of these sites had any idea they had been targeted by a blacklist. At all. And how could they? The list itself is illegal to view, illegal to post, and in fact posting links to any of the blacklisted sites can result in a fine of $11,000/day.

Yes, that’s right, you can be fined for hyperlinking to a site that’s illegal to know it’s illegal to hyperlink to.

I’ll let that try and get processed by you, ‘cos I sure as hell don’t understand it.

And what of our wonderful Senator Conroy? What does he say of the filter, specifically questions as to why we need it? Well, anyone who questions the filter is, by Senator Conroy’s reckoning, a supporter of child pornography and wants to harm Australia’s children. Sites on the list that ostensibly have nothing to do with Child Pornography? Poker Sites? Redtube? Abby Winters dot com? Doesn’t matter, if it’s on the list, it’s (apparently) automatically child pornography.

Really? Well while I respect your right to an opinion, Senator Conroy, fuck you.

Child Pornography is sick. It is evil, it is wrong, it has no place in a civilised society, and perpetrators of it should be thrown in jail and have the key thrown away. But normal, legal, pornography is fine. If consenting adults want to watch it, more power to them. You, Senator Conroy, have no right to arbitrarily declare a site to be child pornography or whatever criteria you use to add it to the black list, and then deny Australians to not only view that legally viewable website with legally viewable content, but also deny the viewers of the site AND THE SITE ITSELF, the right to know it’s on the list, and also deny any right of appeal to the list.

How long till the Greens or the Liberal Party websites appear on the list? I personally dislike the hamfisted approach to failure riddled censorship. Am I about to appear on the list?

This is dictatorial and wrong, Senator Conroy. You have no electoral mandate for this as it was announced AFTER the election. You have no moral obligation for this, a child’s parents are wholly responsible for the moral protection of a child.

I hope, for you and your party’s sake, that you abandon this ill-conceived and patently stupid plan.

After my last post I thought it fair to make a comment on US politics this time.

Sort of.

Now, obviously, I’m not American, but I do watch US politics with interest because of the huge influence the US has in the rest of the world. Even though I’m not a US citizen, I have a preference in US politics – namely the Democrats. I think their message is generally more human and caring than the self-first attitude of Republicans. But having said that, dear god, what were these Democrats thinking?

http://littledemocrats.net/

These books are utterly ridiculous. Brainwashing at it’s finest. Let’s look at a few pages, shall we?

Of course, no Republican wants teachers in Schools. Hell, let’s close the schools and replace them with a Kwik-e-Mart.

This book is supposed to teach kidlings about why a parent has a preference for one party over the other, not to blindly tell the kids what the GOVERNMENT does, regardless of who is in office.

Again, the implied message here is that Republicans want to destroy the earth, Emperor Ming style?

OK, fine, you love your political party, but producing propaganda pieces like this drivel isn’t the way to do it.

Seriously, some people…

No, not the Obama/McCain show, or the new one in Canada with what’s-his-name. As with many of my previous posts, it’s been election time again in Australia. Well, not all of Australia. Not even where I live. In Western Australia. Yes, a state election for not my state.

So why am I talking about it? Well, after Fearless Leader Rudd’s glorious victory last year, this was the first state to have an election. (Yes, the Northern Territory had one, but it’s not a state so it doesn’t count). The result appears to be a hung parliament in WA.

As much as I dislike him, Federal Treasurer Steven Smith said that the result wasn’t a negative for Labor. It just showed that voters dislike Governments. And I have to say I actually agree with him.

On the weekend there were also two by-elections held in the seat of Mayo (in SA) and Lyne (in NSW. I think). In Mayo, the Liberals BARELY hung onto the seat, even without Labor having a candidate, and in Lyne the Nationals lost to an independent.

So what does it all mean? It means that the voting public are sick and tired of the crap that both big parties are going on with. They don’t want either party claiming “victory” in an issue. They don’t want either party blaming the others when something goes wrong. They don’t want to see parliamentarians acting like 3 year olds during question time. They want to see real action taking place. They want to see obvious problems fixed. They want to see planning for the future for the environment, for public transport, for the economy, for schooling, policing, education, and everything that the government takes an obscene amount from our paycheques every pay day. They want the people they vote to represent them in all levels of government to stop arguing, stop posturing, stop bickering, and START DOING WHAT THEY WERE CHOSEN TO DO.

Along with a lot of other religious organisations throughout Christendom, the Catholic Church has a number of problems it’s facing in this modern world. The two main problems are constantly reducing attendance numbers for masses, and the difficulty the Church is having finding new clergy.

My personal belief is that the two problems are intricately linked. The current clergy of the Catholic Church is rapidly aging. The average age of a priest in Australia is something like 58 years. Obviously without a constant intake of younger priests this age is only going to increase, and eventually the reduction in numbers will decrease as the priests either retire or pass away.

I think the change in mass attendance figures correlates with the reason that recruitment of new priests can’t keep pace with the increasing age of existing priests

Relevance

The Church as an entity, specifically under the conservative direction of the current and previous Popes, has staunchly maintained traditions in the Church that have not kept pace with the changing world around it. From a ‘recruitment’ standpoint the Church’s decision to maintain the Celibacy laws enacted 1000 years ago, forbidding priests to marry, as well as keeping women effectively marginalised in the church, with their only role being in the Sisterly Orders.

A priest, innuendo about sex scandals aside, is the centre of pastoral life within a congregation. They lead the sermons, they write the homilies, they are the “go-to” guys for the parish. They are the ones the congregation need to relate to, to go to, if they have any problems or need advice. As the clergy gets older, their relevance to the daily lives of their parishioners diminishes. There’s no denying the with age brings experience, but there is a limit. If I were having problems with my marriage I wouldn’t go to my grandparents to ask about it. In the same way, how could I feel I could relate to someone the same age as my grandparents?

So what can be done about it? Well, here is a big bone of contention between myself and my loving wife. I grew up in a very non-traditional catholic lifestyle. My father was Methodist, and my mother was a lapsed Catholic. I identified myself as a Catholic fairly early on in life and started going to mass and the local Catholic youth group. My home and school life was very secular, and to be honest there is quite a bit of catholic doctrine I lack knowledge in. My wife, however, grew up in a rather traditional Catholic household. She went to Catholic schools. She knows a hell of a lot about the Catholic machine.

I think the biggest problem in getting people into the clergy nowadays is the celibacy rules. I know more than one person who have left the seminary because they couldn’t cope with that particular rule. I think the Catholic church should follow the lead of the Anglican church in allowing ordination of female priests. Sure, nuns have a place in the Catholic church, but I feel they’ve been relegated to “support” roles in the organisational structure.

In the world of business and politics, there are no laws preventing people’s career progression because of people’s marital status or gender. This is not the case in the Catholic church.

If I wanted to be an architect, I would simply have to go to University and get qualified as one. I wouldn’t need to make an undertaking not to have sex with anyone for ever more, nor would I be prevented from taking the job if I happened to have boobies. All of this happens in the Catholic church.

Personally, and I know there is a lot of disagreement on this point, I believe that the Catholic church needs to wake up, realise it’s the 21st century, and adapt to the world around it. Priests want to get married? Go for it. Women want to be priests? Go for it. By denying those two basic ideas, the church is denying a huge base of potential future clergy, and the church as a whole is weakened because of it.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/deadly-redbacks-force-hospital-closure/2008/04/23/1208742996497.html

Deadly redbacks force hospital closure

Christine Kellett
April 23, 2008 – 12:03PM

Experts have blamed warm, humid conditions on an infestation of deadly redback spiders that has forced a Central Queensland hospital to shut its doors.

The Baralaba Multi Purpose Health Service, about four hours north-west of Bundaberg, will be closed for 24 hours while pest controllers fumigate the building, which has come under attack from the poisonous arachnids for several months.

Only three hospital patients and aged care residents are expected to be affected by the closure.

Queensland Health said the patients would be transferred to nearby Moura Hospital, and arrangements made for a GP to treat anyone who needed urgent medical attention in Baralaba, home to about 290 people.

Queensland Health’s rural director of nursing, Ellen Palmer, said the hospital had always had problems with redbacks, but recently numbers had got out of control.

She said attempts to keep the spiders at bay with monthly spraying had failed, leaving fumigation the only option.

The process will have to be repeated in five weeks’ time.

“We thought the best way to ensure minimal disruption to patients was to move them out for 24 hours,” Ms Palmer told brisbanetimes.com.au.

“The spiders are mostly in the ceiling but we are also finding them in the main part of the hospital.

“I wouldn’t say it was a plague. We believe the best way to deal with them, and the safest option for staff and patients, is to have the whole building fumigated so both the spiders and their eggs are killed.”

Pest controller Bruce Dekker said even though there had been little rain in the area recently, high humidity had created perfect breeding conditions for redbacks and other nasties, including termites and mosquitoes.

“We have been inundated,” Mr Dekker said.

“We have had them in toys and Tonka Trucks, under kids’ bike seats and even in toys and sand pits where kids are playing.”

brisbanetimes.com.au

NZ man sentenced after claiming to have been raped by a wombat

A New Zealand man who claimed to have been left speaking Australian after being raped by a wombat has been sentenced to 75 hours community service.

Arthur Ross Cradock, a 48-year-old orchard worker, admitted in the Nelson District Court yesterday to the charge of using a phone for a fictitious purpose, after calling police with the message, “I’ve been raped by a wombat”.

Police prosecutor Sergeant Chris Stringer told the court that on the afternoon of February 11 Cradock called the police communications centre, threatening to “smash the filth” if they arrived at his home that night.

When asked if he had an emergency, he replied “yes”, Mr Stringer said.

On a second subsequent call to the communications centre, Cradock told police he was being raped by a wombat at his Motueka address, and sought their immediate help.

He called police again soon after, and gave his full name, saying he wanted to withdraw the complaint.

“I’ll retract the rape complaint from the wombat, because he’s pulled out,” Cradock told the operator at the communications centre, who had no idea what he was talking about, Mr Stringer said.

“Apart from speaking Australian now, I’m pretty all right you know, I didn’t hurt my bum at all,” Cradock then told the operator.

Mr Stringer said alcohol had played a big part in Cradock’s life. However, defence lawyer Michael Vesty said alcohol was not a problem that day.

Judge Richard Russell said he was not quite sure what motivated Cradock to make those statements to the police.

In sentencing, he warned Cradock not to do it again.