For your vampire needs

Chanced across these videos from one of my favourite films, Nosferatu: The Vampyre (the 1979 Werner Herzog remake), last night. A mix of beautiful (if at times unsettling) images and great music.

The overture from Wagner's Das Rheingold (as explained by the poster of the video - "The Carpathian Mountains set against the E-flat major triadic-drone of the Rheingold Prelude (beginning 2:22 minutes into the video). One of the great moments in film.")


The US trailer


And finally, the wonderfully creepy (and somewhat unsettling) opening of the film, with the camera panning over the dried husks of his victims

Tonight children will be subjected to unspeakable acts

Well, it's all over and with the country still soggy with white middle class sanctimony and delusion, the voice of reason and hard reality is as unwelcome as ever.

And yes I am pretty angry about it all and I suppose that shows. But I don't suffer fools gladly, and it is all the worse for this week's display of collective madness and studied refusal to face the facts about aboriginal degradation and disadvantage in this country.

I have a terrible premonition that the events of this week may actually make things worse for aboriginal people, and especially aboriginal kids. It appears that all those responsible for the 40 or more years of bad policy that has been the true wrecker of so many lives are now back in the driver's seat thanks to the Rudd government.

Just as we were starting to confront the reality that the greatest threat to aboriginal children are their own families - broken and dysfunctional people in totally debased, hopeless and dysfunctional "communities" who can't or wont look after their children - we are back to the fiction that kids were only ever taken for the wrong reasons and the inaction of white social workers and child care workers, on the basis that they 'don't want another stolen generation', dooming yet more young children to nightmare existences of neglect and abuse and horrible deaths in squalor and filth.

That's the core of my unease here - the events of this week have powerfully reinforced this inertia where people look on as kids literally are neglected and abused to death, (think of that little baby girl who died amidst just the squalor and filth I mentioned in the north of WA, with parents too stupified by drink to care for her), and do nothing. It's bad enough that the stolen generations is a myth, it is so much worse that the myth is killing aboriginal children today.

If it was happening to white kids, there would be an uproar and demands to know why the government and its agencies tasked with the care of children sat back and did nothing.

But apparently the myth is more important than these wretched children and the wretched and miserable lives they must suffer.

So what are the calls now, even as we know that a humanitarian disaster has been happening, and continues to happen, before our very eyes and children only months old are raped so savagely that they require surgery to try and repair the damage to their genitals; malnourished six year olds, unwashed and wearing dirty clothes, who already have a range of sexually transmitted diseases; and as young boys are taken out into the desert by tribal elders to be anally fucked as their "initiation" into the nightmare world of the remote "communities"?

What is the call of the smug and comfortable white middle classes whose own children, as Noel Pearson so devastatingly observes, "sleep safe at night"?

Never, never again! That no aboriginal child ever be removed from his or her parents again.

What, no matter what? No matter how neglected or abused some poor kid may be, no matter that he or she may be in danger of their life, they think this is better?

Are these people mad? Though of course much of the pressure for an apology for the "stolen generations" has really had more to do with the insufferable moral vanity of the white middle classes and their desperate need to feel good about themselves.

So some more dead aboriginal children are reckoned to be an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of their need to feel morally superior and virtuous. Collateral damage if you will.

Such is the danger of myths founded on falsehoods, especially when social policy starts to be based upon them.

And no, it isn't enough that it is well meaning and well intentioned. You can't solve a problem until you've actually understood just what it is. That's why aboriginal Australia is in such a mess today. We allowed ourselves to be sidetracked by the naive nativists who sought to reestablish the "wonderful" hunter-gatherer lifestyle, "uncontaminated" by the modern world and capitalism.

(Not that they'd imagine a similar life for their own children, sent off to the best private schools money could buy and then onto the best universities and well paid careers in the law or medicine.)

But the hunter gatherer lifestyle was never the noble savage fantasy they dreamed of and projected onto their poor unwitting victims.

Never mind too that this lifestyle was already effectively doomed and never to come back.

A policy course was set that dumped small groups of aboriginal people into the middle of nowhere, with no obvious means to make a living, and then just left them to rot.

And rot they did. And the poisoned fruit of this experiment continues to sicken and kill, as one generation of people, reduced to madness by boredom, lack of self-esteem and endless torrents of grog and other drugs, destroy their own children.

And the the best idea we can come up with is to do nothing, other than stand back and watch helplessly (but caringly of course) as children are raped, beaten and starved. To allow one doomed generation to destroy another.

Lara Wieland, who spent eight years working as a doctor in Aboriginal communities in Cape York (thanks to Andrew Bolt for pointing to this article in a post appropriately titled Sorry to these children we will “never, never” save), comments:

IN the eight short years since I started living and working in Cape York communities, I have witnessed a rapid and tragic decline in the environment that
children live in.

The older generation, the last few threads holding the social fabric together, is disappearing. The few who survive have become powerless, bewildered and despairing, living at the mercy of their dysfunctional families who harass them for money and steal their food.

Members of a generation who were raised by people under the control of substance abuse and welfare dependence are now becoming parents themselves. Many of these young parents have known nothing other than violence, mostly towards women, neglect of children, and an almost complete lack of understanding of the wider world.

The older generation with the strong morals, parenting skills and courage remember Christmas as a time when functional, self-sufficient families gathered after church to share good food, laughter and traditional dances. All today's kids can remember from last Christmas is fighting and drunkenness and the interviews they had to give police when their little friends were raped.

Worst of all, we are increasingly being left with a population that does not even understand the gravity of its situation. As Noel Pearson says, the dysfunction has become "normalised".

Or:

Boys raping younger boys becomes just boys “playing gay” - to be “told off”. Yes, young boys do often engage in explorative sexual play but that is completely different to non-consensual acts where pre-pubescent boys sodomise little kids with objects while they scream out “no”, or where older teenagers or adults watch as they make younger teenagers rape little kids, who then have nightmares....

I think one of the great tragedies of the last election was that Mal Brough is no longer the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, and we now have a naive and foolish leftist who will blunder along and turn back what little progress has been made over the last year or so.

It's from him that I've drawn the title of this post and anyone truly interested in the welfare of aboriginal children needs to read what he has to say.

Tonight there will be children who will be subjected to unspeakable acts; who will see their parents or relatives with whatever form of substance abuse; who will actually live in the most deprived and depraved circumstances; who will put their heads down on concrete floors not having bathed for days, if not weeks; with lice and scabies; who will get rat bites tonight. All in Australia, all at a time when we are celebrating in our nation's capital a new beginning.

And:

I can take you tonight to houses I can guarantee you that you would not allow a pet to live in because the RSPCA would go in and charge the owners and the owners would be on A Current Affair tomorrow night.

But our best idea is to leave these children where they are and to their inevitable tragic and pathetic fate.

Party Boy Corey Interviewed on Insiders

Very cleverly done - even people outside of Australia may have heard of Corey Delaney - a 16 year old "legend" who threw a particularly wild party while his parents were away and made the news internationally.

Apparently he is now the new leader of the opposition. Thanks to Andrew Bolt.



Plus the Naughty Corey Song - Music Video!

Reasons not to panic

The phrase "catastrophic climate change" is bandied about quite freely these days and some are even losing sleep about it, including children.

But what is the evidentiary foundation of these claims?

How do we know that any temperature rise caused by a doubling of preindustrial levels of CO2 will be "catastrophic"?

Or put another way, what is the "climate sensitivity" to said doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Nobody doubts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and has a warming effect on the Earth, so additional CO2 must mean some extra warming.

But by how much, (that is, what is its climate sensitivity), is an unresolved question.

Not that the basic physics is difficult or not understood. If the Earth's atmosphere was as simple as a vial of gases in a laboratory the answer is around 1 degree C. That is to say, a doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere should, all other things being equal, increase the global average temperature by about 1 degree C.

That's all.

So where do we get all these dire predictions of impending doom, citing temperature increases of 4 or 5 degrees or more, or even of "runaway warming" frying the planet, from?

Where do they get much higher numbers for the climate sensitivity of CO2?

In a word, feedback.

What this means is that the Earth isn't a simple glass vial in a lab, but rather an enormously complex and chaotic system that is in a constant state of flux and that changes to one element of the mix affect others and that these effects can either work against another change or make it stronger.

So if any warming effect of CO2 is made stronger by one or more of these other components of the system, this is known as positive feedback.

If they work against the warming effect (in a manner of speaking - push back against it), this is know as negative feedback.

Thus the warnings of catastrophic climate change are based on the assumption (and it is only an assumption, because we only partly understand what the feedbacks are and how they work) that the climate feedbacks are positive and that this multiplies the base sensitivity of CO2 several times.

But as the short video below explains, it is very unusual for stable systems to be built on positive feedback regimes.

But the IPCC and other alarmists have assumed positive feedback in their calculations of likely future temperatures.

So what do real world observations have to say about the projections of the IPCC based upon their assumptions of substantial positive feedbacks and figures for climate sensitivity of anywhere up to 6 degrees C or more?

Well, watch the video and find out. But I can say that they haven't been doing very well and they've had to try and find something else to explain why the planet isn't warming as fast or as much as they think it should be.



Video from Climate Skeptic blog

Bad News

Got a terrible shock this morning reading the Instapundit and learning that Tim Blair has been diagnosed with cancer, and will have major abdominal surgery next week.

Tim talks about it here.

I can't pray or do anything like that, but for anybody so inclined - please say a prayer, light a candle, burn some incense, anything.

Money & influence: ExxonMobil vs Greenpeace

I've said previously that Greenpeace is basically a money making racket, but I never imagined it was so successful at separating the naive, the gullible and the stupid from their money! Over $US2 billion since 1994.

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/01/well-funded-well-funded-denial-machine.html

So, what is the very well funded lobbying organisation that is distorting and debasing the climate change debate?

No convincing evidence for decline in tropical forests

"Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds."

So where do false green claims end? Greenpeace was saying 20 years ago that 30,000 species a year - that's right, a year! - were going extinct, so give us money. The evidence? They had no idea, just heard it somewhere and it sounded like a lot of extra donations.

Turns out it was based upon a mathematical model built upon false assumptions like these about forest loss.

Then another paper gets published recently saying that upwards of 50,000 species may be going extinct a year. The evidence? There was none, none at all, just the same dodgy mathematical modelling.

Now, I realise many possible extinctions could be of insects and other arthropods that haven't even been formally described yet, but the hard question remains valid for people making these types of outlandish claims - name, say, just 10 animals (insects, birds etc) that have definitely gone extinct in this time due to forest loss.

For those of us in the know, we realise just how hard this question is because we know that the list of actual confirmed extinctions over the last 100 years is a very, very short list.

read more digg story

Update on the average global temperature for 2007

Warning - 10 years of data is probably still too short a time to be speaking about trends one way or another, but if there is any trend, it's a small downward one of 0.05 degree C.

http://denerding.blogspot.com/2007/12/global-warming-earth-cooled-005c-in.html

King's College Choir - Once In Royal David's City

A bit late for Christmas, but I only chanced upon this today. You don't have to be religious to appreciate the beauty of this tune or the choir that sings it.

But why miss an opportunity to diss our ABC yet again? Why it has made the decision not to show the service of Nine Lessons and carols on Christmas Eve any more I don't know, though I suspect that small-minded parochial nationalism is behind this.

Now all we get is a similar kind of thing from an Australian cathedral. The simple fact is that the choir of King's is head and shoulders above the quality of any local one. And this service is a long standing international Christmas tradition.

I'm all for the ABC supporting local choirs and giving people an opportunity to hear them sing, but why play around with this?

And do we really need to see the Anglican archbishop of Melbourne pretending to be an Orthodox hierarch, giving the blessing at the end with the tip of his fourth finger touching that of his thumb? I think not.



And while I'm at it - The Seven Joys of Mary:



Finally, one of my favourites, the old Basque carol The Angel Gabriel:

Are Carbon Emissions the Cause of Global Warming?

(Gratuitous advice for those whose jobs depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming: Find another job to pay your mortgage and feed your kids!)

read more | digg story

“Let them drink rat’s milk” #4

Fixing global warming is important to Google co-founder Larry Page - so why fly 600 guests to a small Carribean island for you wedding, all by private jet? Sir Richard “We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment” Branson will be best man and also flying by private jet.

read more | digg story

Cold 2007 defies warming predictions

With just a few weeks to go it’s looking like 2007 will be the coolest year this century and possibly the coolest since 1995. If so then one more year like this and we will begin to have enough statistical information to speculate about a downward trend, though a few more years will be better.

read more | digg story

Stolen generations myth claims yet more children

Andrew Bolt explains why the "propagandists who invented the “stolen generations” myth have blood on their hands."

The trees were kidding: world was warmer just a few centuries ago

The IPCC used it in its third assessment report. Al Gore used it in his movie. In fact, no graphic has had such a huge effect as the infamous hockeystick produced by Michael Mann, who used tree ring data to allegedly show that the last century’s warming was unprecedented, and the globe had never in 2000 years been this hot:

read more | digg story

UN chief snows us on Antarctica

In fact, while we’re told to panic about rising carbon dioxide levels, the globe still refuses to warm above the maximum temperature recorded in 1998. Indeed, South America has become very chile chilly, as Alexandre Aguiar of Brazil’s MetSul Weather Center complains:

read more | digg story

The greenest thing about Gore’s company is the cash

“GIM’s portfolio is a run-of-the-mill mix of financial service, healthcare, consumer products, technology and industrial materials companies that hardly seems to live up to Gore’s rhetoric about social and environmental sustainability allegedly driving GIM’s investment choices”

read more | digg story

A professor catches Rudd red-handed on green spin

Rudd was less than honest in the way he described the modelling by MMA, especially in associating it with Monash University.

read more | digg story

Wind power: Ugly, expensive and next to useless

The latest VENCorp annual planning report has yet more bad news for wind farms.

read more | digg story

Greenland celebrates local warming

It’s a reminder that Greenland was once named Greenland for a reason, in days even warmer than these before the deep ice came.

read more | digg story

Best joke ad of the election?