Philip Field warming up

Fresh supplies of proper English Marmite (1kg) have arrived courtesy of my younger brother so I am able to tackle my travails with renewed vigour.

The ongoing saga, and at present all we can hope for is that it goes on, of Taito Philip Field continues to really underscore what a complete crock all that occurs in the Beehive really is. Far from me to suggest that an ex Labour Cabinet Minister has any hint of bias when making her decisions as speaker, but her very narrow interpretation of what has occured has hardly let the Headmistress down. Ms Wilson is unfortunately one of the few people in the house who is not terminally stupid and I long ago identified her as one of the most dangerous women in the land. Her elevation to the big comfy chair had me worried when it ocurred and that particular pigeon has just come home to roost. What the government wants is to be able to tough all this out for a few days and let the proles forget all about it just as they have done in the past on numerous occasions. All the opposition seems to have left to is to refer the matter to increasingly obscure and toothless other bodies to try and give the former MP his time on the spit he so richly deserves. I'm willing to wager, however, that they will fail as Uncle Helen is exceedingly good at heading this sort of thing off at the pass.

There is a bloke of whom I've not heard, who chips away yet again at the global warming bollocks. Good on him but he is also fighting the Government perceived wisdom and we have already seen even this morning what a thankless task that is. But we musn't give up, must we, because that is what the toads want. Anyway this bloke points out the absurdity of the fact the same people who were confidently predicting the coming of the next Ice Age in the 1970s are now those who are having us all going to our doom on the back of global warming. His main point, well made, though is that all the science the environmental zealots are spending my money on is so flakey that it is not worth the recycled paper it is written on. On an earlier page Augie's mob are lobbying for a Royal Commission of Enquiry into the validity (or more correctly not) of the science. Unfortunately they have as much chance of success as the Nats have of getting Taito Philip Field's head on a plate.

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Farcical Ingram

Another dull morning. So much so that an hour after perusing our esteemed news organ I can remember hardly anything I read.

There is a rather silly piece on the comments pages penned by a gent in very silly red framed glasses. This has the entirely laudable aim of deriding the farce that is the Ingram report but to my mind fails. It says nothing until the penultimate paragraphs and then just emphasises that here in this gwate place we encourage political immorality of the first magnitude by investigating transgressors with toothless reports that are set up to give the outcomes the incumbent government wants. Earlier in the rag there is a whole 'Yes I did, no you didn't' type piece on whether Ingram asked for broader powers or not only didn't, but couldn't. I know who I believe. Old red glasses draws a very unflattering parallel between this week's farce ond the Watergate enquiry of over thirty years ago. Didn't I do just the same twenty four hours ago? My second reason for the unbecoming emotion of smugness in a day - the first involved a 600lb blue marlin.

Sideswipe has had a rather good thread on etymology running all week which I fear has just about run its course. We'll be back to misspelt road signs next week. There is a bit on a couple who were refused entry into an R16 movie because their child was underage - like 15 years and 11 months underage. Despite protestation the family were evicted as junior might have 'absorbed subliminally' all the stuff his tender mind had to be protected from. As I've said before, there is little point in just reporting this sort of stupidity we have to start doing something about it. Well directed Anglo Saxon epithets would be a good start.

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Winston and Singapore

I suspect Winston got nasally dislocated because Cain started talking about free trade which is beyond his brief and he was afronted that he was not allowed to talk about it. Winston then loses control of a situation and I don't think he likes that one little bit.

It does throw into sharp relief what a complete crock Winnie's current bauble of office is though. He is holding down an exceedingly important position whilst effectively being beyond the pale with his ministerial 'colleagues'. He stuffs up and he knows no one will do anything to rein him in. It sucks. The headmistress spent all day avoiding the press so she wouldn't have to talk about and defend totally undefensible conduct from her Foreign Minister. She must hate having to have this non elected double breasted object in her affairs at all. Which brings us back to yesterday and the divergence of idealism and pragmatism. She has to have him so she can stay in power.

God, how I hate politics NZ style. It is all, and I mean all, so false, dishonest and totally divorced from what running a commercially viable country in the real world should be. Rudman mentioned Singapore yesterday. I lived there for a long time and know what I am on about. That's the way to run a small country. You run it like a business (because effectively that is what it is) and if a few small things that we seem to hold so dear here (individual bloody rights over the rights of the whole mainly) get ignored along the way - so be it. Never in the whole time I lived there (thirteen years) did I feel I was oppressed and I enjoyed a standard of living most would give their left arm for.

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Official avarice

From feast to famine. Very slim pickings this morning.

That our politicians are men behaving badly is not news. They have a stellar ability to do this what ever their political colour and who would know what political colour Chameleon Winston is this month.

The avarice of councils is not news but Auckland City appears to be in a league of its own with its draconian stance on that well known threat to society, parking. I lie awake in my bed at night worried sick because North Shore City does not employ parking wardens 24 hours a day. There might be someone exceeding a 120 zone in Takapuna at 0300. Brings in a bit (read wheelbarrows full) more revenue? A by product of keeping you, Mr Citizen, safe - and we have to be safe.

One bright spot is some judge in Whangarei throwing out part of Greenpeace's appeal against the decision to proceed with Marsden B on the grounds that he did not have consider potential increase in greenhouse gases in his decision. A small step forward for commonsense.

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Philip Field's first appearance

Not often you chance upon a field day of opportunity such as today brings. Swimming pools, Federated Farmers, sedition and Taito Philip Field caught my attention this morning. In ascending order of importance, or more correctly, descending order of triviality, swimming pools.

On the heels of that woman in Christchurch being told she couldn't change her toddler poolside we have a bloke in Auckland who was stopped videoing his own child on the waterslide for 'privacy reasons'. There can be no one with half a brain who doesn't think all this is absolute nonsense (there is a double spread letters page today and all those I could be bothered to read were in agreement) but people (like me) just saying it is all bollocks achieves nothing. We have to start doing something - like telling the life guard to sod off and just let the cameras roll. Giving some thought as to how you cast your vote at the next election is another wheeze.

Charlie Pederson, the President of Federated Farmers bought a smile to my chops as I read the transcript of his speech in Nelson yesterday. He eloquently verbalises the thinking man's thoughts on the harm the environmentalist zealots are wreaking on this country and the world in general. He decries the religous fervour that environmentalism has become and suggests the politics of the environment have become the succerssor of the politics of greed as the darling of the trendies. Pointing out that modern methods of food production are required to feed an ever increasing world population will be hard to swallow at the tofu bar. The stark reality is that if 16th century methods are used to feed a population of the 21st century some will go hungry and the first to starve will inevitably be the poor. But if you are an idealist of any flavour a little bit of pragmatism is hard to stomach.

Ah, pragmatism and ideology. The headmistress was a political idealist with odious views long before I set foot on the shores of Aotearoa and how things have changed. The pragmatic reality is that if Mr Field were to go, her grip on power would be tenuous at best. So the idealism of the past few weeks celebrating Labour's 90 years of upholding the rights of the downtrodden goes out of the window with her supporting and endorsing the shameful whitewash that is the Ingram report. The deeds of the Minister would appear bad enough to most sensible people but the machiavellian subterfuges that have been engineered to paper it over are, to my mind, a thousand times worse. The terms of reference given to the poor silk were such that he was hamstrung as to his findings. He knew that before he started and there are several not so oblique references to this. Who set down the terms of reference? The political masters. Doing naughty things in politics is bad enough but unfortunately par for the course. The coverups are a factor of hundreds worse. If he were still alive you could ask Richard M. Nixon about that. What will happen from here? One would hope that there would be a Woodward and Bernstein to spring to our rescue but local history would suggest otherwise. Tough it out for a few days/weeks and it will be business as normal. Remember Dyson's drink driving, Helen's signatures, John Tamahere, Benson Dope etc. etc. - the list is endless. Then we have the sedition. The bloke who has gone down for this doesn't appear to be one of the pillars of society on several other fronts but the government has allowed this very rarely used statute to be used to further emphasise to the proles that disagreeing with them or shaking their foundations of power will not be tolerated. Rudman (I really must stop reading him) likens the use of this law to the conduct of the Singapore Government. Singapore is a lot less subtle and a lot better at it and uses the law to support a regime that has very different ideas to our mob. Come next election Labour will again garner in votes like there was no tomorrow.

Why are people so bloody stupid and will they ever learn? This current bunch of politicians are, as a package, morally bankrupt and people stand idly by and applaud.

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Not happy

Not in the best of humour this morning for reasons that don't matter. Open my usual companion to the Marmite soldiers and things get considerably blacker.

We have a mother baled up by the Public Swimming Pool gestapo in Christchurch for changing her sixteen month old toddler into her togs in public as this might offend people and/or encourage paedophiles.

We have uniformed feds raiding an eatery in Mission Bay because they were displaying their Liquor License on a side wall of the establishment and not prominently by the front door.

We have a property developer in Wellington who has been done $14,000 plus costs and then $15,000 in reparations for dealing to a Kowhai tree. The amusing coda to this is that after his rather over ambitious pruning the tree entered the terminal stages of its life but the Council still had to get consent to remove it. Oh, and the developer is also the owner of a strip club. Quite what this has to do with the matters in hand I don't know but it makes it all a bit more salacious for the newspapers.

Against all this world shattering trivia teachers who are well past the age of retirement are getting butchered in their classrooms, the police still have to lay charges in a double homicide that occured a month ago when it would appear they have a pool of about a dozen suspects all of whom are well known to them, the country's economy is danger of a serious downturn if the EU bureaucrats can't be persuaded to be sensible over butter (European Bureaucrats sensible - I don't think so) and so it goes on.

We seem to be the absolute pass masters at pursuing things that don't matter a toss to the n'th dgree whilst ignoring the big issues. If I was in a better mood I would feel like expanding on this but I have just been told that 'rules' just brought in say I can no longer have a bottle of water in the room when working and I have to go off for a quick scream - no make that a protracted one.

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Pseudo-science

Bit quiet this morning.

Bloody Rudman again. It would appear that his grasp of bacteriology and epidemiology is on a par with his understanding of most of the other things he writes about. I'm glad I now know this as it explains a lot. I'll let some one else tell him the difference between colonisation and infection.

A little bit of global warming this morning. A bloke at a conference in Tasmania tells us that CO2 levels will double or maybe triple in the next week/year/decade/century. A really precise science this, is it not? I mean the difference between doubling and tripling is hardly anything is it? Well the devil is in the detail of course even if you ignore this imprecision. Double a very very small number or even truple it you still end up with....a very very small number. He claims there will soon by shrubbery all over Antarctica, but then shoots him self in the foot by saying it will then be like it was 40 million years ago when presumbaly there was nothing driving around in 5.7 litre cars, burning wood fires or manufacturing cement.

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Syd and the plumbers

This plumbers, gasfitters and drainlayers thing is a rhum affair. I really don't know enough about it but only one side can be telling the truth.

Councils and their profligate spending habits are getting their deserved amount of newsprint. There is a Q & A type thing on Page 2 this morning. Now this is obviously open to a great deal of filtration and censoring but 'democracy services' crop up twice. Once when a bloke from Waitakere complains about the size of his bill and once when a bloke from the Hauraki Plains winges about being charged for street lights or similar. Both are told that they have to pay for 'democracy services'. These, apparently, are to ensure that edicts of central government are efficiently (sic) passed on to the proletariat and they are also paid to 'organise meetings' and....... Why, oh why, do we let them get away with this?

Poor old Syd. I knew he disappeared from the Pink Floyd line up very early on in the piece but was unaware of the depths to which had reached over the last forty years. Living with his Mum (nothing wrong with that of course) in Cambridgeshire popping down to Sainsbury's on his push bike. All the time raking in quarterly seven figure royalties (pounds sterling here) which Dave Gilmour ensured he recieved until the end. Very sad - many, many years ago I would have loved to have been Syd Barrett.

The comments page often has a piece worth reading as it often has a lot worth not reading. An article by Gareth George (I think) on the great NZ whining culture. All fairly light stuff but with serious undertones. He cites the case of the 'victims' (and there is certainly no shortage of these in this gwate country) of sexual abuse getting uptight about the adverts put up on lamposts advertising the free desexing of cats campaign currently running in Auckland. These fliers run along the line of 'A sex offender has moved in to your neighbourhood' and this, of course, is the moggy awash in reproductive hormones. Our 'victims' naturally find this very offensive and cause for re-traumatisation. Gareth also mentions the Vice President (and Treasurer) of the Featherstone Rugby Club who is going to lay a formal complaint to the Police about incitement to kill if the ABs use the new Haka again. This place is rapidly falling off Planet Commonsense. The point well made is that we, well you, are crying out for people to think for us and not have opinions of our own that might offend people. The Marxist Government of Aoteoroa seems quite happy to fill these shoes.

And finally today, Sideswipe which merits comment purely because I was mentioned in dispatches yesterday. The campaign to rid the world of the influence from Redmond is gaining a little traction with one bloke going to boycott Air New Zealand because of their descriminatory stance towards Macs. I don't have to do this after they yesterday announced that they were no longer going to fly to Singapore which is pretty much the only foreign place I want to fly to.

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Powerful stuff

Rates, power and Tony Blair are all connected this morning.

Rudman (I must be ill, reading this bloke again) asks why we have accepted that annual rates increases in the region of 10% have become accepted as the norm. A bloody good question. This above a piece outlining where some of the money in the Auckland region is going. The stand out obscenity is Bob Harvey's Waitakere spending $38mil on new Council buildings. This informative box is surrounded by council spin from some clown claiming that the councils are spending responsibly but the real problem is the costs of compliance with Central Government regulations. He cites complying with buiding controls and, wait for it, the RMA as part of the problem. They, the councils, are struggling on manfully in face of this 'intolerable pressure' (to quote Charlie Dempsey) from Wellygogs. He points out that the Council is ensuring we have clean beachs etc. etc. I'll send him a photo of the sign outside my house warning people not to swim in the sea after heavy rainfall. There is an answer to the compliance with RMA type things - vide infra.

Transpower's laughable attempts to cover up their maintenance inadequacies (the dog ate the reports) led Old Mother Hubbard to opine that Auckland needs a power generation facility North of Auckland. Great command of the bleedin' obvious. What better than a little nuclear number. Kaiwaka sounds a good location to me. This hot on the heels of Tony Blair announcing that the UK is to build six nuclear power plants (along with some tidal bizzo in the Bristol Channel that will supply up to 5% of the country's power needs - must be a very big bizzo indeed). Notice TB did not say they are thinking about it, they are going to build them. He predicts opposition to this (great command of the blee....) and delays often caused to projects by consent processes (I assume this to be the UK equivalent of the RMA). What to do? Fast track the bureaucracy which amounts, in practice, to ignoring great chunks of it. The Headmistress is often heard to say how close the NZ Labour Party is to its UK equivalent. Any chance of borrowing a few ideas. No I would say when our only trans-sexual MP sees getting equal rights for her ilk sorted out as a thing she must do before she leaves parliament. Then we have to sort out the pressing matter of same sex couple adoptions. I think this nice red striped deckchair would look much better over by the shuffleboard court.

The real highlight of todays Herald, however, is your correspondent getting his name in print in Sideswipe carrying his campaign to rid the world of Bill Gates' influence beyond the hallowed bandwidth of fishing.net.nz

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Loonies

A lot ot wade through this morning with it being Monday and everything, Rudman on trees, Trotsky Locke on tasars, differing views on the WTO and a proper stouch over good old global warming in the offing.

I usually avoid Rudman's piece like the plague as he irritates me like mad. But you always get to see what he is on about as he has scored prime real estate on page two. Although I cannot agree with most of what he has to say - as usual - he does serve some function this morning by highlighting the level of interference the men with clipboards have gained into our lives. He uses as an example the Auckland Council, but I am certain it is the same up and down the land. The amount of bureaucracy that we have allowed to spring up to surround bloody trees is mind boggling. Consents to prune a pohutakawa (but ensure that the pruner is acting on behalf of the correct authority depending on whether the tree's canopy overhangs Council or private property) is usual fare. Rudman then says there is a glaring gap in local legislation because there is no regulation governing the planting of trees and saplings which may then grow into protected objects (>6m for natives, >8m for exotics etc. etc.) later down the track. Give me strength.

If you thought Comrade Carter ws my least favourite denizen of Wellington then I am sorry you were mislead. Keith Locke is in a league of his own. The Green's Foreign Policy wallah is a shocker. He holds the sort of political views most of even the lefties of the world grew out of forty years ago. He tells us that the police have proven themselves to be unworthy of the public's trust by accidentally getting some pepper spray on a small girl and a couple of pregnant mums. Therefore, no 50,000 volts for plod. Get back in your cave, Keith.

Two vastly differing stances on the WTO on the Comments page. Mike Moore (who remember was a Prime Minister not from the National Party) arguing the sensible and pragmatic view that without proper world trading patterns development stops and then the new co-leader of the Greens (whose name I have mercifully forgotten) telling us that trade is evil and has been since the days of muskets and mirrors. Cites some nonsense about Antigua and internet casinos as 'evidence' for his warped view of the world. Go and join Keith in the cave.

The septics look to be getting ready for a right royal battle over, in particualr, car emissions. There are big, no make that humungous, amounts of money involved here and lawyers are going to be in the market for some serious gamefishing battlewagons 'ere long I would venture.

Bit rushed this morning as I have to go and do some work

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History and madness

Captain Cook, Fishing isn't a Sport and then normal service has been resumed on the global warming front this morning.
The Aussies are pushing for history to be taught in schools with a factual basis. Is there any other sort you may ask? Well you could ask any Japanese school child that question and see what you get. The Aussie teachers are being urged to put Captain Cook back into the curriculum and teach history as history and not some drivel that emerges on the other side of a marxist/PC filter. History is good stuff, indeed vital stuff. I reckon it is no coincidence that a lot of well respected political leaders over time (and I am not referring to the clowns we have to put up with here at the moment) took to writing historical pieces in the autumn of their lives. W. S. Churchill springs readily to mind.
Sideswipe has a bit that lists one bloke's ideas of what are non-sports being screened on ESPN. Bikini Modelling and Spelling are there but so is fishing. We have right of reply.

The comments page comes to the rescue as it often does. There is a piece from the mouthpiece of the NZ Business Society for Sustainable Development or some such. I suppose they represent the country's manufacturers of rope sandals and worry beads but claim to speak for 28% of the nation's business. Hmmm. This bloke is barking. He starts off with the usual scaremongering stuff, focussing on this occasion on rising sea levels. Apparently my front room will be history by about next Thursday as this tsunami of ever increasing high tides sweeps down the East Coast Bays. We then have the usual oxymorons of blaming both the 1999 drought and last years Manawatu floods on the evil global warming. Then we get into the meat of it - it's all our fault. He then goes on to enumerate all the things we must do now to save ourselves (and of course our children - we must not be selfish, must we?). He goes a lot further than most of these fruitcakes though and starts lauding the merits of farming algae on sewerage ponds for use as bio fuel. Deary me. Then comes a very odd bit. He starts espousing the merits of Jaguar cars - where does this come from? Read on and it all becomes clear. He only likes the namby pamby eco friendly 2.6 litre straight 6s and not the proper 400 BHP Supercharged 4.2 litre V8s that real men drive.

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Comrade Carter

Disappointing morning. Apart from that well known pantomime country North Korea making the front page there is nothing at all until we get to the Comments page and then a couple of false starts.
Picture of my mate Comrade Carter (how I wish I could raise my opinion of him to one of scorn) suggests we might be up for a bit of sport but the shot accompanies an article on the twentieth anniversary of homosexual law reform. Who cares? That is one area of wretch Carter's life that has absolutely nothing to do with me and it also interests me less than the Bangladesh football results. Damn.
Below this a headline on 'environmental' stuff. This is more like it. More damp squibs. All about moist homes and asthma, unsanitary water supplies and infant diarrhoeal disease. For the most part factual and for the whole nothing new. Fizzles out mightily.

Never mind, there's always tomorrow.

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Trifecta

Almost the perfect trifecta of my favourite topics this morning with a great piece about Comrade Carter potentially getting himself very deep in the poo in the High Court, a little on The Crock that is Kyoto but unfortunately nothing on OSH's latest madnesses. However to make up for the latter there is a bit on NCEA with an ultimate irony piece just below it.

I don't need affirmation that NCEA encourages mediocracy and dissuades students from striving for excellence. My now 19 year old daughter worked out how to get exactly what she wanted from NCEA with minimum effort years ago. A piece this morning from a 15 year old girl (not an acaedemic, an educationialist or a social planner) saying exactly the same. She is frustrated that once she has reached her credits for pass there is no incentive at all to go on and try and achieve 'Merit' or that swear word 'Excellence'. It frustrated the hell out of me when my daughter was espousing the same sentiments a couple of years back and I thought it was just her. But no, it appears to be a feeling that this system, as practiced in this country, has bred on a more global footing. And the irony? Just below this piece we learn that one of the 15 year old scrotes giving evidence in the 'Concrete off the Motorway Bridge' trial couldn't read his statement out in court. Why? He can't read.

Kyoto. I'm less worried about this than I used to be as I can't see it surviving and surely even this bunch of Governmental Wallies wouldn't send my money to an organisation that no longer exists. They wouldn't do that, would they? Please, they wouldn't. Anyway, that well known advert for tooth whitening and Botox was earnestly (she does everything earnestly) prattling on with her usual bollocks about saving the planet from something we can do nothing about. Same old, same old.

Comrade Carter. Despite my rantings on the Machiavellian intent of the Department he heads last night it would appear that even they saw he was on the fast track to the High Court when he was determined to stick his ministerial beak into the Whangamata Marina decision last March. He was warned to be very careful as to who he spoke to and what opinons he gave when consulting with only one side of the argument just prior to his constitutionally abhorrant decision. Would he listen? I think he probably did but 'No one is as blind as the man who will not see'. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you have the country run by rather unintelligent, tenured zealots you end up with what we have to currently endure. The High Court next month should be the venue for some fun of monumental proportions. I'm not that confident however as Carter is probably, as I type, down at the tailors getting measured up for a natty little number in pinstripe Teflon

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More DoC

DoC currently administers somewhere between 30% and 40% of New Zealand's total land area and that is likely to rise to nearer 50%. They have their beady eyes on coastal waters. They are supposed to be have no policy making role at all but spend vast amounts of their time and ever increasing budget doing little else. They are in a unique position where they can claim that any failure on their part to turn any land under their control (be it a Natonal Park or landfill, and they do control some of the latter apparently) into a purely conservation and nothing else area means they are underfunded and need more resources. To date they always get it. They are not allowed to consider anything else (economic developement, heritage, nothing) apart from returning land to its 'native state' when they make decisions about anything. The countering and balancing views on these subjects are supposed to be supplied by other peri-governmental agencies which over the years have mysteriously failed to appear at all or have become so atavistic as to be useless. The Minister's decisions are not subject to any avenue of appeal - we have already seen this in action this year. The set up is beyond belief.Be very afraid of this mob. They suggest policy, represent themselves at any 'public hearings' on same, seem to be able to lose opinions that don't agree with theirs and then administer the result with the sort of 'black and white, no shades of grey, we are only following the rules' methodology so beloved of totalitarian outfits. Nasty bits of work.

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DoC

What have we this morning?

Our friends at DoC, the minions answerable to Comrade Carter, are flexing their not inconsiderable muscle up on the Rodney Coast between Leigh and Omaha. Apparently there are seven baches right on the coast (although pictures of them make them appear more of the dimensions Clark Kent would use as a changing room) that have been there since WW2 when they were set up as accommodation for American servicemen (eh?). These abodes are on land that is a) a designated cemetary (gazetted in the 1890s) and b) on DoC land.

I put it to you that the amount of disruption these seven dwellingettes are causing to anything is approaching zero. The only way you can get to them is along the beach or across private land via a locked gate. Admitted by all is that they discharge no raw sewerage into the sea. Been there for sixty years, just leave them alone would be a sensible man's stance I suggest.

Oh no you don't. They have to go 'cos the rules (i.e. DoC's draconian powers under its charter or what ever it has) say so. DoC are asking Rodney Council how long this situation will be 'tolerated'. What are these people on? What good does moving these baches do for anyone except the DoC Jobsworths who presumably can put another notch in their clipboard and regain their bragging rights at the tofu and feta bar. DoC is an organisation out of control and has been allowed to become same by a succession of administrationis of varying flavours over the years. Having a particularly virulent strain of the Marxist government in Comrade Carter currently at the Department's helm gives no confidence that the siuation will be righted anytime soon.

A little background reading that some might find illuminating:

Scary report on the Department of Conservation

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Granny is Born

A few musings collected whilst ingesting the Marmite soldiers prior to another days toil in the fields.

Front Page: The sort of pseudo science/statistics beloved by newspapers re the meningococcal vaccine. Now don't get me wrong, this vaccine is excellent and is probably doing a wonderful job but to report the decline in disease incidence after the introduction of vaccination as 'cause and effect' without presenting the raw data is not good. If it hoodwinks (and it probably is not, as the data is probably pretty much true) me over my brekky who cares but if this is the sort of level of evidence that the Government uses to spend squillions of my money then I am horrifed. I suspect, however, this is true - vide infra Kyoto.

Cartoon: Very good spoof on a Vodafone ad by 'Nagafone'. Get out of my bloody life you lefty, do gooder toads.

Comment near the back: Syndicated (from the Observer as I recall ) as a lot of good stuff in the Herald is. This points out that spending money on the Kyoto Protocol is not only a scientific crock but is also a very poor way of spending money in a value sense if you are going to throw great globs of cash at making the world a better place.

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