by cameron | Oct 20, 2009 | climate change, Uncategorized
A lesson in the power of having a network for those people who still snort when you mention Twitter (who are, I’m sure, the same people who still snort when you mention climate change).
About a year ago, I dropped my Macbook Pro – twice. Both times I was traveling and the shoulder bag I had it in slipped off of my shoulder while I was wheeling several suitcases around France. The result of the drops was pretty severe damage to the case of the Macbook. It still worked fine, it was just dinged up pretty badly. Until recently. A few weeks ago, I stopped being able to shut the case properly and then the piece of plastic that holds the screen in the lid cracked and broke.
I knew it was time for a new Macbook case.
So, I emailed photos to a couple of local Macbook repair places.
The folks at Next Byte were completely useless. All they could tell me was “you’ll have to bring it in for us to look at it”. If I had time to bring it in, I wouldnt have bothered sending photos, you useless morons.
The folks at The Mac Doctors in Annerley, were, as always, very polite, friendly and helpful. They emailed me back a quote – $2500 – and explained why it would cost so much (the screen comes with the case, no way around it) and suggested I’d probably be better off buying a new Macbook.
Instead, I posted a question on Twitter: “Does anyone have a dead Macbook Pro 17″ they’d be willing to sell me?”
Within an hour I had three “yes” replies. Adrian Lynch was the first and after a quick phone call, we’d negotiated a deal. I put the money in his account and had a courier pick up his dead machine (he’d drown his keyboard in wine).
Yesterday, when his dead unit turned up at my place, I took it into The Mac Doctors and today I picked up my perfectly good Macbook Pro – my drive and motherboard stuffed into Adrian’s old case and screen.
Total cost, including his unit, the courier and the hatchet job?
A little less than $500.
The power of Twitter.
by cameron | Aug 24, 2009 | activism, climate change, environment, Podcast
A few days ago I had a chance to chat with Jon Dee, founder of Planet Ark and the new Do Something! initiative, about his life and goals. We talked about everything from his involvement in Rock Aid Armenia (where he pulled together a list of top Brit Rockers to perform a charity concert and record a new version of Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” to raise funds for earthquake victims in Armenia) to deciding, with friend Aussie tennis pro Pat Cash, to start Planet Ark, and his new venture Do Something!, which aims to create positive social and environmental change.
[display_podcast]
Here’s the version of Smoke On The Water that Jon produced back in 1992!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odeztf1nK8s&hl=en&fs=1&]
Do you want an independent media?
The Podcast Network is supported by:
neo.org – a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves
and
our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.
by cameron | Jul 31, 2009 | banksters, capitalism, climate change
Following on from yesterday’s story about Goldman Sachs as the root of all evil, today we get the information that:
Nine banks that received government aid money paid out bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year — including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000 employees — despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil. … The nine firms in the report had combined 2008 losses of nearly $100 billion.
(Source: WSJ)
And if you think things are going to change, don’t be deluded. Here’s what the Obama White House had to say:
"The president continues to believe that the American people don’t begrudge people making money for what they do as long as…we’re not basically incentivizing wild risk-taking that somebody else picks up the tab for," said White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs.
What happened to Obama’s feigned outrage last year before the election? It’s all gone, baby. It disappeared to the same place as his promises about Gitmo, prison camps, climate change and health care.
If the NBA has a salary cap, why can’t American corporations? One of the key problems with capitalism is the open-ended nature of the upside. It breeds unlimited greed. Surely we can combine the good aspects of capitalism – eg incentives for creativity and effort – but restrict the upsides? I know we have tiered taxation, which effectively acts as a way of channeling some of that upside back into the system, but it doesn’t stop companies and individuals trying to bleed the economy for as much money as they can get their hands on, despite the negative consequences.
It still seems to me that we need another system, one that limits the greed but retains the incentives.
by cameron | Jul 27, 2009 | climate change, environment, Melbourne, science
Zombie Time has this great report on a book co-authored by Obama’s new science ‘czar’ John Holdren (with Paul and Anne Erlich) back in 1977 called "Ecoscience" which predicted that the world is going to become overpopulated which will in turn lead to massive famines.
A snippet from the post:
In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:
• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.
This reminds me of a talk I heard on the ABC a couple of years ago by Melbourne neuroscientist Dr John Reid where he talked about overpopulation and what we are going to have to do about it. ABC host Robyn Williams actually quoted Paul Erlich’s most famous book, The Population Bomb, in the introduction to the show.
Reid quoted Elliot Morley, Britain’s Special Representative on climate change, by saying the human race is on a ‘sleepwalk to oblivion.’ I like that phrase.
He goes on to say:
If we do not delude ourselves, and if we accept the calculations made by the Global Footprint Network and WWF (and I know of no scientific analysis that refutes the basic validity of the model) there is only one ineluctable conclusion. The population of the world must be very quickly reduced to 5 billion (that is, if 6 billions equals 120% of capacity, then 5 billions equals 100%). And then, as the average level of affluence rises, fairly quickly reduced further to, say, 2 to 3 billion.
The urgent discussion then becomes, how do we achieve these targets? Leaving aside uncontrollable natural events, such as a collision with a large asteroid or comet, or the eruption of a super-volcano, there is only a limited number of ways population decrease can be achieved. These ways are all painful, and most are brutally painful in their effect.
He has some pretty scary recommendations. I remember bring horrified when I listened to the talk but then again, he’s right – unless we significantly change the size of our global footprint, it’s hard to see how the human race is going to survive the 21st century. Perhaps Kurzweil is right and nanotech will save us. I hope so.
by cameron | May 25, 2009 | Christianity, climate change
I’m reading tonight about the case of Dale and Leilani Neumann, an American couple who let their 11 year-old daughter, Madeline Kara Neuman, die of diabetes last year. When it was obvious that she wasn’t well, her parents didn’t seek medical care for her. Instead, they prayed to God.
Last week, Leilani Neumann was found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide.
Then there is this mother who is on the run with her 13 year-old cancer-stricken son to avoid chemo.
This highlights what I’ve often said is one of my major concerns with religion. It invariably teaches that faith is not only equal to reason but actually superior to it. I’ve often said that this is a dangerous and despicable kind of brain washing. The death of this child is just one example of why faith is dangerous. On a larger scale, it seems to me that once people come to accept that faith is all you need, they are less likely to challenge authority figures when told things like "Saddam is going to use WMD on us" or "climate change is natural". If we live in a society that conditions us not to say "well hold on a second, where’s the proof?" but "ummm okay, if you say so", then we can be lead like sheep to the slaughter house by figures of power and authority.
Madeline Kara Neumann, known as Kara, died on Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008. Three weeks before that, on Feb 28, her mother wrote this article on a Christian site called "America’s Last Days". In the article, she talks about how she and her husband had been ‘laying their hands’ on people so that, as with one woman they touched, "the power of God fell on her and she immediately felt the Holy Spirit fill her with His Presence". She also writes:
"Many times The Lord has told me things that are going to happen many years down the road…"
Apparently he neglected to tell her that her daughter had Type 1 diabetes, was going to die in three weeks, and needed to see a doctor urgently.
The Neumann’s are part of a church called Unleavened Bread Ministries which is run by the preacher David Eells. Apparently in his conversations with God, the subject of Kara’s disease didn’t come up either.
Even worse than adults being inculcated with faith is when kids are brain washed before they are old enough to know better. In a press release Leilani wrote after the trial, she claims:
"Madeline Kara was a very mature Christian of deep faith in God’s Word; she did her own study on doctors and medicine exactly one week prior to her death…. Kara found out through her study of God’s Word that the Bible did not advocate doctors or medicine but, rather, that modern-day medicine is a counterfeit to God’s healing power."
I’m torn between feeling genuinely sorry for the Neumann’s and feeling disdainful at their ignorance. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to lose a child. And I don’t doubt for an instant that they thought they were doing the right thing. On the other hand, believing that your imaginary friend is going to heal your sick child is just plain stupid and irresponsible. There’s no excuse. She writes:
Dale and I thought we were within our rights to pray for our daughter’s recovery.
I agree. But why not take her to a doctor as well? What about Kara’s right to live? What about her right to have medical care? As a society, where should our priorities lie – respecting people’s religious beliefs, no matter how primitive and ignorant, or protecting children from their irresponsible parents?
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in the case of Prince v. Massachusetts ruled:
The right to practice religion freely does not include the right to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill-health or death… Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.
Neumann writing about the progress of her daughter’s illness:
Later on Sunday, I recognized a change in Kara’s condition, as we witnessed the deep sleep and a completely limp body, but for reasons some may not understand, I was not fearful — thinking this was something my daughter could fully recover from. Again, I did not understand what the changes in Kara’s body meant, whether good or bad, so we sought for answers from God.
"We sought answers from God." No doctors.
Now – if you’re a Christian reading this, and you’re saying to yourself "oh yes, well those people are obviously stupid Christians, but my particular kind of Christianity has it right", let me ask you: what’s so different between what you believe and the Neumann’s believed?
I continually talk to Christians who tell me that they have a "relationship" with God or Jesus and that one or both of them "talks" to them. What makes them different from the Neumanns?
Perhaps you’re thinking "well *we* would have taken our child to the doctor." Well good for you. But what areas of your life *do* you put faith ahead of reason and facts? If you put faith ahead of facts in any circumstance, then I submit to you that you are just as deluded and dangerous as the Neumanns.
Faith is dangerous. The people who told you that faith is superior have brain washed you so that you won’t question them while they pick your pocket and lead you down a blind alley. Faith is basically not thinking for yourself. Anyone who tells you not to think for yourself is someone who you should not trust.
The only sensible way to evaluate anything in life is to collect as much data as you can, think about it as best you can, and make the most educated decision you can.
“’Faith’ means not wanting to know what is true” – Friedrich Nietzsche
by cameron | May 16, 2009 | climate change
John Quiggin blogs about a slap down of climate change skeptic Ian Plimer that ran in the Australian recently:
In the Oz of all places, a demolition of Ian Plimer so scathing, and so convincing, that it’s hard to imagine how he can salvage any kind of academic reputation, other than by a full retraction (which would be a pretty impressive move, admittedly).
As Plimer seems to be the last person of any credibility denying human-caused climate change in Australia, this has got to be a blow for his supporters.
