Commie scientists claim intellectual superiority

A new study by David Amodio of New York University claims to show that left-leaning voters have “twice as much [brain] activity in a deep region called the anterior cingulate cortex” as those on the right.

Furthermore:

This area of the brain is thought to act as a mental brake by helping the mind recognize “no-go” situations where it must refrain from the usual course of action.

Of course, a true conservative thinks with their gut, not their head, so this proves nothing. And if we didn’t push ahead into “no-go” situations, we would never have liberated the Iraqi people from Saddam. Madness!

But, once again, we have “scientists” pushing their left-wing agendas under the guise of academic discourse. Just last week, we had the intelligentsia pushing their “dragon-killing asteroid” theory (and, like evolution and Newtonian physics, is just a theory and not a fact!). This bias towards brain activity is just more of the same.

One of these days, APEC…

Down in Sydney, Australia at the moment is a little shindig called the APEC summit — the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual meeting. Basically, a bunch of political leaders jet over to the host city, where they then wait to be dehydrated by the Penguin before Batman can stop him.

What’s great about hosting the APEC summit is that the host city gets screwed for a week and the residents get no say about it and see no direct benefit. This is heavy-duty stuff: in essence, the whole city has been shut down. Party on!

At least with the Olympics here, you could see the Equestrian event while your tax dollars were being pissed away.

I don’t live in the CBD or even the metropolitan area, and even up here, we’re getting fucked for our troubles. Why? Every bastard from Sydney metro is crawling out of the gutters and heading west, clogging the roads and making life hell.

My solution: with all the moonbases currently in the planning stages, they can host the next APEC summit there. Even if the moonbase is some Hollywood set constructed to fool everyone but the most perceptive of nutjobs, at least the rest of us will be spared this rampant political masturbation.

A Quiz For the Aus Folk

Who were the first explorers to cross the Blue Mountains?

Name the first and second Prime Ministers of Australia.

What is Australia’s national flower?

Name the GREATEST cricketer of all time.

What is the year of Federation?

What year did the Melbourne Cup start?

These are all questions on the new Australian Citizenship test. Aspiring citizens must get at least 12 out of 20 answers correct. Yes I do know the first Prime Minister of Australia (Sir Edmund Barton) but this is a factlet I looked up because Australians are famous for having no idea what the answer to this question is. If you went out in the street and began quizzing folk it could take you hours to find anyone who knew this.

I will hazard a guess that the national flower is the wattle. If it isn’t the wattle I want to know why!

The sports questions are completely embarrassing to me. Yes I should accept that for many Australians sport is art, religion, tribe and joy but I would like Australia to accept that for many of us it is none of these things. A bunch of blokes running around after balls like dogs.. perhaps now that sport is included in the citizenship test this is a treasonous sentiment.

I will be very interested to read the whole test when it is released. Will there be questions about famous Australian artists? Pioneers in the medical field? I certainly hope so if sports events are going to be memorized by migrants as part of an Australian catechism.

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Painting is “Copper Delight”

by Cairns artist Ingrid Douglas

filthy politics

This week Australia was rocked by the news that Kevin Rudd, aspiring CEO of our Great Land, spent an evening in a bar in New York pissed as a fart and ogling the breasts of paid female employees. Oh how can we ever trust this man again? Betrayer! Pervert! Anti-feminist exploiter of half your electorate! Will the Labor party survive this blow? We, the nation, shall surely maintain our disgust.

But wait.. let’s not get carried away here. We should not forget who the real evil doer is, the man so overlooked by wowsers but with so much to answer for. Bob Brown fills us in:

Greens leader Bob Brown said the issue should be kept in perspective. “Four years ago Kevin Rudd got drunk and took himself into a strip club,” Senator Brown said. “Four years ago John Howard, sober, took Australia into the Iraq war. I think the electorate can judge which one did the more harm.”

Yes Bob, thank you for that. Now, to the strip clubs!

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Painting by Charles Thompson

The man with the golden gun

Saddam Hussein’s golden Tabuk rifle has inspired me…

He had no WMD’s
Desert Storm cost him the lot
A dictator second to none
The man with the golden gun

He hid in a farmhouse in Tikrit
Evading his capture for months
But soon his plans and schemes came undone
The man with the golden gun

The Ba’athists adored him, Iranians scorned him
He bested them with Rumsfeld loyal
But Kuwait got greedy, America needy
They wanted a source for oil

Once he was captured he met with swift justice
His half-brother soon lost his head
But Saddam had nowhere to run
The man with the golden gun

Easy to see was his fate to be
Whither Iraq?
We shall see. Oh yeah!

The Ba’athists adored him, Iranians scorned him
He bested them with Rumsfeld loyal
But Kuwait got greedy, America needy
They wanted a source for oil

Once he was captured he met with swift justice
His half-brother soon lost his head
But Saddam had nowhere to run
The man with the golden gun
His schemes came undone
But he had some fun
With his golden gun

Nuclear Waste In A Container Near You

It seems according to this article that nuclear waste is joining legions of smokers and hanging out in car parks out of sight. Stuffed into a shipping container behind a hospital I wonder what series of roadblocks drove those responsible for it to these measures. One great advantage of secret nuclear waste storage is that protesters do not have a site to stand in front of. But Australia it is time to get real on the matter of massive amounts of very bad rubbish and what to do with it! Once again it melts down to (meltdown, haha..) an Australian identity problem. From greenie to Liberal party suit everyone’s bobbing their heads and wringing their hands and rubbing themselves up against America’s bloated ass while fiddling with Europe’s special bits. Because of course being all first world and western and stuff their problems are our problems and their solutions are our solutions. You wouldn’t dump nuclear waste in the English midlands so why would you dump it in the Simpson desert?

I’ll tell you why. The United Kingdom has a population density of 246 people per kilometer. Practically a wasteland compared to this the United States has a population density of 31 people per kilometer. And Australia has a population density of 2.6 people per kilometer. The vast unpopulated areas of the United States are rich in forest and agriculture. The much vaster and more unpopulated areas of Australia are not. Why are we so terrified of building a secure nuclear waste storage facility in the desert? Low seismic activity, the water table no where near the surface and technology that is more than up to the task of keeping this nasty stuff sealed away. It would seem that just as other nations are rich in arable land we are rich in hundreds of thousands of kilometers empty of people that will never be tilled or lived in. And yet we don’t see this as a natural wealth of our country. If you can’t stockpile nuclear waste in the Amazon then surely it must be just as bad to do so in middle of the wide brown land.

This same cultural cringe used to take place about nappies. You wouldn’t pass the greenie test if you were adding to nappie mountain with disposables. Any true lover of this land would be swaddling their infants in cloth and washing, washing, washing in a responsible manner. Of course while the one thing we do have is empty space upon which all the baby nappies of Australia would make but the tiniest bump the one thing we dont have is water. But somehow it was considered better for Australia to be using as much water as the Franklin river every single day in Simpson washers across the land. If this was Holland, land of too much water and no space (pop. density 392 per km) washing would be the ecologically sound choice. Australia, land of too much space and no water needs to see that our choices should be dictated by our unique geography not by what our European allies see as the correct choices for them.

Australia: not Europe, not America and (sorry Paul Keating), not Asia. If climate change predictions prove accurate we could soon be facing problems closer to those of Northern Africa. Let’s hope we’re not still freaking out over plastic bags and hiding our nasty stuff in big boxes in the middle of cities in ten years but have instead embraced our geographical distinctiveness.

Bush Baby

President Bush said, “After the surgery and the hormone treatments, I expect to be a C-cup or hopefully a bit more.”

Diplomacy By Any Other Means

On a lighter note, Robert Mugabe demonstrates how he greets female Western diplomats.

Dictionary Warfare

In this BBC article referring to the capture – kidnapping, really – of the UK sailors on the Cornwall by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, apparently the UK was holding out for a stronger statement from the UN security council, one that used the word “deplore” instead of the phrase “grave concern”.

Oh, yeah, the Iranians are really going to care about that. These are people who execute (by hanging) 14- and 15-year olds for having homosexual sex with each other.

Anyone remember what Israel did when a few of its soldiers were kidnapped?

[EDIT: I left part of this in the comments trail, but I thought it was worth moving here :]

I’ve been thinking about it over the weekend – believe it or not – and I don’t know if military action is the answer. The UK can’t necessarily afford a war with Iran who, I’m given to understand, is better equipped to fight a war, plus the hostages would then be killed. But they do need to do something more definitive than exchanging diplomatic notes, which I’m willing to bet Tehran use for toilet paper.

Of course, the UK could ask the US to ask Israel to do them a favour. Israel have a long history of successfully messing with the Iranians.

The US has a policy : We don’t negotiate (with terrorists). In other words, if you kidnap our guys, we won’t allow you to hold us to ransom over them. Kill them, we don’t care – although we’ll fight like hell to get them out. As an official policy, it seems to have worked (ever since Beirut). I’d love to say the UK should adopt this policy (in fact, they may have it already), but that would mean sacrificing fifteen lives to prove a point, and I’m too much of a bleeding-heart liberal to want to see that happen. It’s a tough question. I haven’t checked the news today yet, but my big question is Where Is The US? Or is the “special relationship” completely one-sided now that Churchill isn’t in the driving seat on the UK side, and the guy who is needs a baby chair and a driver’s licence?

If you don’t look for it, you won’t find it…

In this BBC story, the discovery of five or so species of troglobite spiders has halted a proposed ten billion dollar mining venture, with an Australian EPA ruling that the mining venture would cause the extinction of at least five species.

Good for the spiders. I hate them, and they’re creepy, but they do represent a unique species. Apparently exposure to ultraviolet light will kill them. (So, if I do go on my proposed emigratory trip to Australia, I will carry a UV lamp with me, along with a frozen-ammo paintball gun for the Cane Toads. Although the spiders live only on “organic matter” deep underground. No mention of what the “organic matter” actually is…which is even creepier…)

Given the Cane Toad epidemic, the rabbit epidemic, that mysterious thing that happened to all the foxes, you’d think the Australian government have learned their lesson about messing with ecosystems. And it appears they have. But the Opposition Environmental spokesperson had this to say :

Because [the government has] upgraded the requirements of the mining sector in the environmental approvals process to find what’s out there, they go out there and find things.

Yes, that’s right : he’s annoyed that the environmental impact specialists employed or contracted by the government or the mining company to look at environmental impact are doing their jobs. It’s fairly obvious he would prefer that they all be blindfolded before setting out to do their survey.

And, hey, let’s be realistic : should five spider species really stop a ten billion dollar mining venture that might provide employment for a lot of people? Probably not. But it doesn’t hurt to take a step back, and say “Well, let’s think about this for a bit”.

On a contrasting note, New Zealand seem to have the right idea. On a recent trip there, a friend of mine got a two-hundred dollar fine for having dirt on his shoes when going through customs. They’re pretty serious about preventing non-indigenous species from interfering with their ecosystem.