Grounding of ship is warning of Port Phillip Bay disaster to come May 9, 2008

Today’s shipping accident involving a relatively small New Zealand cargo vessel is just one more warning for those who live around the bay. It’s hull slid onto the Great Sands and wasn’t deep enough to reach the rocky outcrops the sand hides. This was during mild weather and without the RIP tides being involved. It was relatively easy to drag off. There are an estimated three accidents of this type annually (since 1974).

The real danger is when the tankers with a hull depth of another 3 to 4 metres run onto the sands. It will happen because the mouth of the southern channel has no room for safety. A large ship entering the channel from the RIP is at a an angle, and so a 50 metres wide vessel can be as much as 130 metres wide and the estimated 200 metre wide entrance offers no real safety margins when there is a 14 knot tide running through the RIP and perhaps a storm adding to the chaos.

A fractured hull on a tanker means an Exxon Valdez for Port Phillip Bay. The billion dollar profit alleged from the deepening of the southern channel and the RIP will look puny compared to the $20 billion clean-up ( estimated cost of Exxon Valdez disaster). That was in the ocean were oil could escape. Now, imagine a disaster of that magnitude in the bay. Peter Garret please take notice.

POM’S dishonest bureaucrats are again loose on the channel dredging turbidity April 30, 2008

The Port of Melbourne are blatantly manipulating the turbidity results on their testing of the effect of the Port Phillip Bay dredging. A small glitch occurred while the dredge was undertaking the most delicate task of all at the RIP (or the Heads). That small glitch meant that the turbidity testing was missing for 25 hours. Fortunately for the POM no data was recorded at all during this period. It will be certain to bring down the figures so that the POM won’t have to report any untoward dredging.

This is the usual shit from POM. The last I was involved in was the challenge they made to my documentary’s (The Last Good Summer) figures on the economy.

The documentary could only be shown at the former Premier’s electoral office at a party meeting if POM supplied a senior economist to state how wrong the documentary’s figures were. Unfortunately for POM their figures were blasted out of the water a few days later and, on the strength of that, a new panel of “Yes” people was hastily drawn together for a reinforcement of the government’s proposal.

Rudd’s sweeties hid away when it came to climate change – Canberra has now buried climate change as an issue April 22, 2008

The Rudd smartie weekend revealed how deluded are the politicians, academics and hangers-on when it comes to climate change. Please realise that we have twenty years of the good life left. Well, give a few years less, and we had the mob in Canberra for the weekend patting themselves and their fellow attendees on the back

Al Gore says today in The Age that he imagined that the message on climate change would get through when people realised that the northern polar ice cap will not be there in 5 years. However it hasn’t. We are facing annihilation and the Canberra sweeties hid their eyes when it came to climate change. Understand that our kids have to be trained to survive civil unrest (no food and water) and extreme weather conditions.

Australia is going to be one of the hardest hit countries. This year it seems we will be buying in grain to keep our cereal and bread industries going.

Kevin Rudd’s smarties’ conference is an abject failure – they haven’t considered the planet has only 20 years of resonable environmental conditions April 20, 2008

Kevin Rudd’s smarties’ conference is an abject failure because they’re not taking into account that the planet and life is about to radically alter course.

Maybe Bob Brown has the best chance of revealing what is in store for us, although he’s possibly more optimistic than those out-there scientists that have been prophesysing correctly for the last few decades.

But if you really want to live with the knowledge that the planet has twenty years before it descends into chaos the one good idea for the future is not being proposed. It is the teaching of our youth to survive extreme weather conditions. This would necessitate studying the cultures – and experiencing the conditions – of those who can thrive in what are patently devastating physical environments. The Innuit of Greenland have an opportunistic culture that is firmly based on skills. Green Cross, an environmental group who are desperately attempting to discover the real solutions to an apochryphal future are examining a proposal to send students to Greenland (appropriately chosen) so that they can learn the skills of leadership, undertaken in extremes of physical and mental anxiety

Kevin Rudd needs to pay attention to a planet that is a super organism and will save itself. April 17, 2008

Kevin Rudd is far behind on climate change and has no respect for the environment, but he loves kids. The need to talk to them, educate them and look after them shines in all his meeting with children. It’s good to watch. He also likes old people and just about anyone who comes across his path. It’s a pity he’s not doing enough to ultimately help them survive on this planet. Respected scientists are now saying by the end of the century that 60% of humanity will have disappeared from the planet because of lack of food, water and a continuing devastation  by horrendous storms. Remember those who think the planet is a super organism and will always survive. I used to laugh at them. This dust beneath my feet isn’t doing much thinking, I thought. Kevin, pay attention to those allegedly radical scientists. That way things will begin to happen. Not that I agree with them on nuclear power. But if the super organism is intelligent it may help us to help ourselves.

THE US, AUSTRALIA AND INDONESIA ARE LOCKED IN A DEVIL’S PACT FOR OIL April 12, 2008

The US, Australia and Indonesia are locked in a Devil’s Pact to extract oil from East Timor. That’s what the invasion and the incredible diplomatic shenanigans of the past 30 years have been all about. It’s strange that in all the reporting of the East Timor trouble lately there has been no mention of oil, despite well over 200,000 East Timorese being previously murdered over it. For a time it was the only country in the world with a falling population rate. Australia and Indonesia have pulled so many swifties to get their hands on the oil. They have even done deals among themselves (remember Gareth Evans doing a deal with Indonesian Foreign Minister while in the air over Timor) while totally ignoring East Timor. (Of course it has now been decided by the UN that the oil in the Timor Sea is East Timor’s.)

The earlier strategy from Australia was to agree to help remove the Indonesia military from East Timor but in 1999 they allowed – by delaying entering East Timor by several days – the murder of 1,700 dissidents, women and children included, and the complete destruction of all of Indonesia’s infrastructure, mainly the delivery of power, water, transport etc and it has not been replaced. This was punishment for the East Timorese voting for independence in 1999. And it was all about oil.

Now we have decided to be more subtle, having a loony army officer attempt to assassinate the country’s leaders.

And now Indonesia has revealed what a bogus and immoral country they are ( and Australia is just as guilty). They have freed all the Indonesians responsible for the massacres and destruction of 1999. All those army officers were blameless. Notice how Australia is not complaining about the legal scandal. We won’t of course unless the major players, the US decides that it is all too blatant. There is a precedent for that. The right wing Ford Foundation was the first conservative organisation to speak out on the human rights infringements in East Timor after the invasion – an estimated ten years after the event. But it was enough to begin turning the US and Australia around, slowly, so that a “spin” solution could be found.

The eventual spin solution occurred in 1999. How do we know it was spin? because Australia later attempted to defy a UN ruling on the illegality of Australia extracting the oil from a southern tip of the oil field they claimed was in Australia’s territory. It was discovered it wasn’t so now we’re trying to starve and criminally neglect the East Timorese while pretending we’re trying to save the country. See My novel Cleaning Up published by Sceptre (Hodder and Stoughton) in 1993 WHICH STATED THAT UNDER THE GUISE OF SAVING EAST TIMOR THE US, AUSTRALIA AND INDONESIA WERE ATTEMPTING TO DESTROY IT.

This week’s evidence of why we shouldn’t trust governments and business March 30, 2008

Apart from the stockbrokering firm who who went bust for a billion and who sold their clients’ holdings (not illegal just irregular), there are the various spins from federal and state government.

The new billion dollars that was for the Victoria’s Murray-Darling cocooning was actually not new money but for the food bowl programme under John Howard. The Australian allowed us to see that in the columns of Glen Milne’s excellent investigative piece. He didn’t castigate Minister Wong for being part of the misleading spin but maybe he should have. She will be the preventer of all good things to help climate change and the effects of same.

Yes, and the third example is again to do with water. Here’s a quote from political reporter, Rick Wallace, “The First Mildura Irrigation Trust is under investigation by Finance Minister Tim Holding for investing $4.5 million it borrowed from the state treasury in funds affected by the crisis. The trust which is facing the sack, is thought to have lost $750,000. Can we really trust anyone to do anything about climate change?” And it’s only Monday.

A nuclear facility providing nuclear fuel is a dud March 14, 2008

The Guardian is such a great newspaper. It always covers – unknowingly – the results on many of my speculations. This time they report on a nuclear plant, built for over a $1 billion, to provide atomic fuel for foreign power stations has produced almost nothing since it was opened six years ago.

And where did they get this information? From the government. The Sellafield plan which was opposed by green groups as uneconomic – was predicted to produce 120 tons of the stuff annually. It barely managed 2.6 tons. Notice how green groups’ predictions are mostly proved right.

My prediction was a little different. It was that the plant would lay waste to the surrounding countryside and, finally, cost billions to clean up. That announcement is still to come. It’snot quantum physics to establish such logic, America’s Washington State is in such shock over its nuclear waste it will be getting rid of future stock to Australia.

Premier F***k Features Brumby needs a lesson in reality March 4, 2008

“Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.” A Lewis Mumford quote I read on a blog today and it is in total contrast to Fuck Features Brumby’s pathetic plans to build Melbourne as a mediocre city of the future. Let’s go further out, he says. Let’s add another million people by 2028. Problem is the city will have at its centre a dead bay, engineered courtesy of Cunt Features, and thousands of acres of sprawling housing without any sense of community. Check the suicide rates on the present housing estates, their lack of libraries, entertainment centres, children’s bookshops, and wonder just where this Melbourne Club backed numbers man checked in his soul. Progress, he rants. Progress towards what? he should be asked. He has no vision for urban community centres, beyond that they should be built.

Doesn’t the poor bugger realise that the planet cannot cope with more: rain is becoming a rarity, and sprawling cities are not making for great lifestyles. Smaller communities are better and they encourage social interaction and creativity. I’m living in a town of 300 odd but we have a famers’ market that caters for 4,500 every third Sunday of the month. There are thirty committees in town and they’re often quite comic but when the library was closed, in existence since the gold rush, a third of the town turned up to protest. As a crime reporter I’ve observed the total disintegration of families and kids that live in the high rise abortions that previous visionary (not) governments foisted on us with great fanfare. There needs to be organic growth. And by the way, the answer to affordable housing (one of the reasons he’s opening up agricultural land to subdividers)is taxing those that are driving up our cost of living. These include mining, oil and power companies, and massive agricultural corporations. They are making the money not those on pitiful wages. And yet everything they produce is reflected in in the inflationary figures. And does Brumby have a plan to slow down production and replace such consumer substances with progress in social education and how it can be encouraged? Because spin is Brumby’s reality he only imagines he has

Let’s leave the last word to Lewis Mumford, from his mammoth book, The City in History: “Will the city disappear or will it turn into a vast urban hive? – which would be another mode of disappearance.”

Our political motor mouths haven’t woken yet to the chaos about to descend. They discovered the environment six months ago.

Brumby and Port of Melbourne are pushing Victoria on its face over channel dredging February 25, 2008

The Port of Melbourne Authority, the Brumby government, and local businessmen who are all supporting the gouging of almost pristine Port Phillip Bay should have, for the planets sake, erred on the side of caution.

It appears that not only will they endanger the Bay but will also be lined up for the damage to the planet (remember UN laws allow us to sue those responsible for careless decisions leading to the delivery of carbon into the atmosphere).

A leaked UN study (John Vidal, The Guardian) states that the true scale of climate change emissions from shipping is almost three times higher than previously believed. Shipping is responsible for 1.12bn tons of CO2, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions of main greenhouse gas. Aviation is responsible for 650 million tons, just half that of shipping. It’s under intense pressure to lower that figure so imagine how shipping is about to feel it.

What mugs we are in Victoria. We think the game now is fast development wins. Sorry, now the environment of the planet is going under, a slow approach to development is required. And it won’t be us controlling the visits of ships but the UN (with its laws on environmental responsibility). Perhaps all countries should retire from Free Trade and all the rampant carrying of cheap goods between countries. It would appear that we should have encouraged manufacture here. It’s a different game now boys, but of course we’ll try and squeeze as much money out of the transport system as we can.