Category: Columns

Geoff has written for publications as diverse as PC User and The Northern Star His weekly columns have been a source of humour and inspiration for tens of thousands of readers and his mailbox is always full.
Here you can find his more recent contributions.

Criminal Gangs

A complete tax holiday PLUS welfare payments to organised crime?

Why pay billions of taxpayer dollars to christian welfare groups when they have been exposed as Criminal Gangs. Not only has the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Sexual Abuse identified the repeat offending of those organisations, it has shown that they abused their political influence and closed ranks to protect their members from prosecution. We can no longer involve these gangs in providing welfare to our most vulnerable.

The evidence thrown up at the commission is more than enough to justify kicking a large proportion of the so called Christian operators of schools, orphanages and other institutions out of welfare for ever. We must curtail the power they have abused by taking welfare out of their hands and putting it in the hands of the community. Right now, the opposite is happening. The community sector is being starved of funds and the money is being poured into the churches.

This argument is not anti-theism.

For a start, my targets are the institutions not the faithful. It is the institutions that have the money and the power to hire managers and staff of the organisations that purportedly house the homeless, protect the vulnerable and feed or clothe the poor.

Second, my charge is not that religious institutions have no place in welfare. That place, though, should be limited to the wishes of its members and their capacity to fund those wishes. To put the church in charge of taxpayer funded programs of government is to grant them inappropriate privilege. To do that at a time when they have failed their flock so criminally is simply insane.

Third, I am not arguing that organisations should be denied funding on the basis of their belief patterns. That would be discrimination of the worst kind. It is appropriately discriminating, however, to conclude that legally incorporated bodies that have repeatedly broken the law and used their institutional power to avoid prosecution are inappropriate bodies to receive public funding to deliver public services.

I am not claiming that religion is evil. Indeed, greed and lust for power is not the exclusive province the christian church. Private operators in the welfare sector have been notorious since Dickens penned Oliver Twist and were no less prevalent prior to that unwelcome notoriety. The religious institutions that are now exposed for harbouring the most heinous criminals while also being largely responsible for the welfare sector reflect the make-up of Australian society. Had the penal colony been founded by Zoroastrian imperialists, I am sure we would be reflecting on the institutional cruelty or the Zooastrian clergy.

Our problem is not the religiosity of these institutions it is that they are being handed ever more money and power as the ideological drive to get rid of the public service pushes more and more victims into their care.

Ponder this as you next take up your burden. May righteous anger leaven your pain.

8 January, 2018
The John James Newsletter No. <211>

The John James Newsletter 211

22 December 2017

I AM TAKING A BREAK.

ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAYS, YOUR FAMILIES AND YOUR FRIENDS

AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT YEAR.

We use 1.4 billion plastic bottles every single day, and only a fraction will ever be recycled, and once they get into the environment they take up to 1000 years to break down

Avaaz

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all

Dale Carnegie

Welcome To The New Arctic: The Region “We Once Knew Is No More”

Despite relatively cool summer temperatures, the region has reached a “new normal, characterised by long-term losses in the extent and thickness of the sea ice cover, the extent and duration of the winter snow cover and the mass of ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic glaciers, and warming sea surface and permafrost temperature. This is not good news. The environment is changing so quickly in such a short amount of time that we can’t quite get a handle on what this new state is going to look like.

http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/20/welcome-to-the-new-arctic-the-region-as-we-once-knew-it-is-no-more/

Indigenous groups unite to make Chevron pay

The 25-year struggle of indigenous communities in Ecuador to get justice from Chevron for oil pollution have already won a $9.5 billion judgement in the Ecuadorean courts, but Chevron has refused to pay. The communities are now trying to collect in Canada, in a case that dates back to between 1964 and 1992 when Texaco, later acquired by Chevron, dumped at least 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the rivers and streams of Ecuador’s Amazon basin and abandoned some 900 toxic waste pits in the rainforest. Indigenous communities were left with poisoned land and drinking water, suffered a cancer epidemic and birth defects throughout a 20,000- hectare zone that locals call the “Amazon Chernobyl.”

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/12/11/news/indigenous-groups-unite-make-chevron-pay

How to kill fruit flies

Fruit flies are annoying. So here’s how we get rid of them in my lab: We build a trap. It’s not perfect, but it’s OK.

https://theconversation.com/how-to-kill-fruit-flies-according-to-a-scientist-81740

November temperature was +1.15°C relative to 1880-1920

http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/

AI can figure out a place’s politics by analysing cars on Google Street View

More pickups trucks or sedans in a given city. With a greater number of pickup trucks, the urban area had an 82 percent chance of voting Republican, and with more sedans, there was an 88 percent chance it voted Democrat.

http://www.popsci.com.au/tech/computing/ai-can-figure-out-a-places-politics-by-analyzing-cars-on-google-street-view,478937

Weak energy target threatens 27GW of renewable projects

27GW of large-scale renewable projects proposed, combined with the expected growth in rooftop solar, would mean just over half of Australia’s electricity supply could be met with renewables by 2030. Most of these projects will remain dormant until the government puts its long-term Paris agreement commitments into a legally enforceable policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/21/weak-energy-target-threatens-27gw-of-renewable-projects

Snowy Hydro 2.0 is viable but will cost billions more than predicted

The current estimate for the project is between $3.8bn and $4.5bn, more than the $2bn estimated by Turnbull when he promoted Snowy Hydro 2.0. It involves boring 27km of tunnels linking the Talbingo dam, at an elevation of 552 metres, to the Tantangara reservoir, at 1,233 metres, so energy can be generated by pumping water uphill to the higher reservoir when energy is cheap (say, in the middle of the night) and releasing it back downhill when energy is in high demand and prices are higher.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/21/snowy-hydro-2-viable-government-backed-study

Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units

The Tesla big battery is having a big impact on Australia’s electricity market, far beyond the South Australia grid where it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem. Last Thursday, one of the biggest coal units in Australia, Loy Yang A 3, tripped without warning at 1.59am, with the sudden loss of 560MW and causing a slump in frequency on the network. What happened next has stunned electricity industry insiders

http://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumbering-coal-units-after-loy-yang-trips-70003/ C

Things Cruise Lines Never Tell You

Despite how the cruise pundits like to spin things, there are environmental costs to this controversial industry. The 16 major cruise lines generated over 1 billion gallons of sewage in 2014, much of it raw or poorly treated. One cruise ship can produce 13 million cars worth of CO2 in one day. Lax laws mean ships can dump sewage into international waters three miles offshore from the hot spots they promote as vacation destinations. These behemoth vessels often overwhelm small ports and undermine the very natural beauty and culture they’re trying to sell.

https://www.destinationtips.com/cruises/16-things-cruise-lines-never-tell-you/10/

Guardian to fight legal action over Paradise Papers

Offshore firm at heart of story, Appleby, is seeking damages and has demanded Guardian and BBC hand over documents. Appleby has also demanded that the Guardian and the BBC disclose any of the 6m Appleby documents that informed their reporting for a project that provoked worldwide anger and debate over the tax dodges used by individuals and multinational companies.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/18/guardian-bbc-legal-action-paradise-papers

What lies beneath the sea is very bizarre

From leafy sea dragons to monstrous worms, the world’s strangest sea creatures revealed. Many of these ocean-dwelling species have rarely been seen in the flesh by humans.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-5065469/The-world-s-strangest-sea-creatures-revealed.html

BHP Billiton, acknowledges climate change and quits Coal Group

It represents the latest example of a business that is largely built around traditional fossil fuels responding to investor and government concern over climate change – and it would spend $200 million to acquire a large stake in a solar power developer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/business/energy-environment/australia-mining-company-climate-change.html

With enough cameras we can know who you are and who you spend time with

China has been building the world’s biggest camera surveillance network. 170 million CCTV cameras are already in place and an estimated 400 million new ones will be installed in the next three years. Many of the cameras are fitted with artificial intelligence, including facial recognition technology. The BBC’s John Sudworth has been given rare access to one of the new hi-tech police control rooms.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-42248056/in-your-face-china-s-all-seeing-state

Ancient fossil microorganisms indicate that life in the universe is widespread

The microorganisms, from Western Australia, are 3.465 billion years old. Two of the species appear to have performed a primitive form of photosynthesis, another apparently produced methane gas, and two others appear to have consumed methane and used it to build their cell walls.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171218154925.htm

10 Indications the US is a dictatorship

Today we are entering a nebulous world where our “enemy” cannot be defined, has no particular allegiance to one country, and is able to adopt new leaders at will. Rather than encourage a sense of resilience and independence in its citizens, America has chosen to amplify the terror threat in order to concentrate power in the hands of the State. The very first signpost on this historically familiar road to tyranny is an atmosphere of hate, suspicion, and vindictiveness. It first begins as an outwardly directed aggression and then rather abruptly turns inward upon itself.

https://www.activistpost.com/2011/05/10-indications-united-states-is.html

From the Sierra Club

America is being turned into a third-world country. Poverty is everywhere, poverty of people and of the earth itself, of its plants and animals. And the rich are moving out, assuming that money will save them from the dragon their greed has unleashed.

https://newslettercollector.nl/newsletter/60-things(3)/

22 December, 2017
Subs ain’t subs: WooMembers bundle

Despite being the darling of IT developers, the failure of WooCommerce Subscriptions to support traditional content developers
has serious implications for WooCommerce’s reputation in the wider community.

With 2 million stores using WooCommerce it is by far and away the most popular solution for ecommerce in the world. It has been gaining market share from other similar platforms over the last five years and remains almost ten times bigger than its main rival, Shopify, which is aimed at the absolute beginner market happy to use a hosted shop to sell a handful of goods.

It is little wonder then, that the official WooCommerce stamp on Woocommerce Subscriptions has seen it race ahead of its rivals in the market and attract a significant volume of business. Its role as one of the lead components in the Woocommerce Membership package has not hurt its reputation either.

The WooCommerce Members Bundle retails for $299 per year and provides a membership solution, subscriptions, management of downloadable files, a stripe payments gateway, a bidding system (Name your Price) and a bunch of themes.

It is billed as the complete solution to managing a commercial memberships site and we compared that with Memberpress and a number of other comprehensive products in the market before recommending it as a suitable solution for our client.

All the products making up the bundle claim to be comprehensive but as you get down to the nitty gritty, they are generally designed for a purpose and have been stretched and st

WooCommerce Subscriptions, by Prospress, is ideally suited to software developers who want to monetise their tools and widgets by extracting regular payments from customers who, a decade ago, would have downloaded the product once and then reluctantly paid for support or upgrades every five years or so.

It is not quite so well suited for content developers, though.

Clear thinking, clear communication: Brilliant results

Content sales do not work

The challenges emerge when you want to use it to do what every magazine and newspaper publisher in the world does, that is, sell content to some people under different packaging arrangements. In this world, a subscription generally means an advance payment that gives you access to content that other people have to purchase.

For example, I might sell memberships to a certain class of customer using the integration between Subscriptions and Memberships to manage the renewals of the membership sales. As soon as I assign any content to that group of customers, though, it becomes their exclusive property and everyone else is simply told they have to buy a membership to see it.

The first line of challenge is that WooCommerce Subscriptions are supported by Prospress , Memberships by SkyVerge and Subscriptions Downloads by the WordPress Woocommerce team known as Automattic. You very quickly start to get referred around in circles unless you can identify a specific problem as “belonging” to one or the other of the three parties.

The second problem is that the “support” that is offered is really just pre-sales hand holding. Any one who can read the basic manuals provided can answer the questions most people will have on installing the product and setting it up.

As soon as your request crosses the line of “our product does not do that out of the box” you are directed away from the support area to the advanced users forums and facebook pages, where there are lots of traps for young players. On one hand, the more straight forward enquiries tend to be met with, “I hate to be the a..hole, but can you explain what is advanced about that question?”

On the other hand, as soon as the question has any serious content the standard responses tend to be “Why don’t you get yourself a developer?”

We quickly gathered a library of comments at both end of the spectrum.

Most of those problems we found workarounds to, without any support from the software companies but some support from independent freelancers who know woocommerce well.

Once we started to delve into GitHub and the code itself, to get some serious answers to the more pesky questions, though, we realised there are some really serious problems with this software.

Bugs and denial

Our problems quickly fell into a couple of areas.

Missing functionality

Automated emails Despite being advertised as a complete commercial solution for managing a membership and subscription system with lots of glowing descriptions of the automated emails that would relieve your admin staff of every having to work again, it turns out you have to buy an additional product Follow Ups to get all but the most basic email features. Neither Prospress nor Automattic deigned to answer our email suggesting that it was an unreasonable exclusion given the marketing hype around automation.

Import export The Subscriptions developer, Prospress, offers a beta version of an import feature which failed to carry out a number of functions. We eventually got it to work on a basic subscription but it failed to deal with the variable subscriptions our client was selling adequately. A commercial product by Xadapter, worked well but did not handle subscription downloads. On being advised of this, Xadapter had a working solution within 48 hours.

A product is charged for each time a file is attached to it

Good old fashioned bugs

Xadapter responded to our bug report without missing a beat. Yes you are right our product does not do that and it should, we will notify you when it is fixed, and then it was fixed.

Automattic, on the other hand, has been sitting on the report of a major bug for two weeks and despite regular contact has not once provided a road map for repair, or acknowledgement that the problem is serious. And it is. If you have a subscription product with three files attached, that product gets listed and charged three times in the renewal. This means that customers are getting invoices for multiples of the price they agreed to pay.

Undesirable behaviour

These are always the hardest problems to fix, because one customer’s core business may be on another customer’s wish list and a long way down the developer’s forward plan.

We understand that, and indicated a willingness and a desire to be pointed to the right areas of the software to make the changes ourselves.

We have already tweaked the system to allow subscriptions to filter the available product by date (not out of the box) and to prevent downloading of streamable content (get yourself a developer) and to bypass the restrictions that woocommerce downloads places on audio and video players (we did not even ask).

The main problem is one that affects all content developers who sell content as individual products but would like to package it as part of a subscription as well. I have already talked about the failure of the Membership system to differentiate between a free and a paying customer, with the subscription system it gets worse.

I can sell someone a subscription and then supply them with free content during the life of their subscription that other people can buy at the same time.

A $149 subscription renews at thousands of dollars

So far so good.

The nightmare occurs when it is time to renew the subscription.

Now the system checks what products form part of the subscription and charges the customer for the renewal of their original subscription, plus ALL the products that have been given to them during the life of the subscription. When this is compounded with the bug that causes the multiplication of the number of products by the number of files each product contains, our client has subscribers who are being charged $7,000 for what they thought was a $149 subscription!

This is a serious PR disaster.

Is WooMembers bundle for you?

If you are a software developer monetising your products this product works perfectly. It was built for people like you, by people like you.

If you are a content developer looking for something to manage your business model make sure that your development cycle allows you to test your business model in this software within the 30 day money back period. You can achieve this by thinking hard about what your business model is, and then setting out a plan to implement a test case of this before you download and install the software on a trial basis. Once you have verified that it will do what you need, then you can take the time to work through the cosmetics and the customer messaging.

18 December, 2017
The John James Newsletter No. <210>

The John James Newsletter 210

16 December 2017

Nuclear annihilation is ‘one impulsive tantrum away’

Beatrice Fihn

When the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority

Nicolas Machiavelli

We did not quit basic treaties that are cornerstones of the global security, we did not exit from the ABM Treaty or START: The US did it, unilaterally

Vladimir Putin

Stocks look blatantly overvalued. Bonds look even more so. Art has never fetched such big prices. The bitcoin is only an absurd appendage to what is already a bubble in everything

Financial Times

Commercial ships carrying oil, consumables and equipment emit more C02 than the whole of the UK from all sources

UK World Fleet Register

Remove life and planet earth is just an inconsequential wet rock with a poisonous atmosphere revolving pointlessly around an ordinary star on the outer fringes of an undistinguished galaxy

William Rees

Some people with less than 5 hectares own 30% of the farmland but produce 70% of the food. The tragedy is that global demand for crops could double over a generation or two, but the land to grow them will not exist.

George Monbiot

Bitcoin is a potentially catastrophic energy guzzler

The recent upsurge in the price of Bitcoin seems to have finally awakened the world to the massively destructive environmental consequences of this bubble. the most widely used estimate of the energy required to “mine” Bitcoins is comparable to the electricity usage of Denmark, but this is probably an underestimate

https://theconversation.com/the-utopian-currency-bitcoin-is-a-potentially-catastrophic-energy-guzzler-88871

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

Ever since its inception Bitcoin’s trust-minimizing consensus has been enabled by its proof-of-work algorithm. The machines performing the “work” are consuming huge amounts of energy while doing so.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Bitcoin Frenzy: The Fever Chart Of A Deepening Crisis

The bitcoin mania forms part of a much broader development in the global financial system since the financial crisis of 2008-2009. One of the main factors in sustaining the bubble has been the promise of major corporate and income tax cuts for the for the ultra-wealthy

http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/13/bitcoin-frenzy-the-fever-chart-of-a-deepening-crisis/

US refused N Korea offer to freeze nukes

Earlier this year, North Korea said it would freeze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for an end to US and South Korean war games, an overture rejected by the Trump administration.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/north-korea-offers-nuke-freeze/

Daniel Ellsberg Warns of Nuclear Winter and Global Starvation

The inside story of the Cuban missile crisis and the 600 million deaths both leaders were prepared to risk for the sake of pride.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42826-daniel-ellsberg-reveals-he-was-a-nuclear-war-planner-warns-of-nuclear-winter-and-global-starvation

Tillerson’s new North Korea strategy praised by China and Russia — but undermined by Trump

Trump has sought to pressure Pyongyang to surrender its nuclear capabilities. Tillerson’s approach would allow the US and North Korea to begin peace talks without the prospect of denuclearising.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tillersons-new-north-korea-strategy-praised-china-russia-but-undercut-by-trump-2017-12

The Big Melt

From 1960 the Alpine snow season has shortened by 38 days—starting an average of 12 days later and ending 26 days earlier. Europe experienced its warmest-ever winter in the 2015–16 season, with snow cover in the southern French Alps just 20% of its typical depth. Last December was the driest in 150 years of record keeping, and the flakes that did manage to fall didn’t stay around long. In the Dolomites, it takes 4,700 snow-blowers to keep trails covered.

http://time.com/italy-alps-climate-change/?xid=homepage

Switzerland Just Had the Worst Month for Skiing in 100 Years

The ski season is a month shorter than it was four decades ago. The Jungfrau ski region, around the resort villages of Wengen and Grindelwald, suffered a 25 percent drop in visits

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-10/how-much-snow-is-there-in-the-alps-this-year-for-skiing

Are we truly this stupid – its the new normal.

Shrinking Bee Populations

Heavy pesticide use on fruit trees caused a severe decline in wild bee populations, and trees are now pollinated by hand.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/humans-bees-china_us_570404b3e4b083f5c6092ba9

We Can’t Keep Eating Like This

Brexit; the crushing of democracy by billionaires; the next financial crash; a rogue US president: none of them keeps me awake at night. This is not because I don’t care – I care very much. It’s only because I have a bigger question on my mind. Where is our food going to come from?

http://www.monbiot.com/2017/12/13/we-cant-keep-eating-like-this/

UK to bring back beavers in first government flood reduction scheme of its kind

Beaver family will be released in the Forest of Dean to stop a village from flooding. The government may support other schemes to restore the beaver four centuries after it was driven to extinction in England and Wales.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/12/uk-to-bring-back-beavers-in-first-government-flood-reduction-scheme-of-its-kind

Macron summit touts green finance progress – despite Trump

In the private sector, 225 investors launched Climate Action 100+, a campaign to bring the world’s 100 biggest corporate climate polluters in line with the Paris goals. The announcement followed a day after Exxon Mobil bowed to shareholder pressure and agreed to publish analysis of how its oil and gas assets will fare in a 2C world.

http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/12/13/macron-summit-touts-green-finance-progress-despite-trump/

Mapping The Stunning Complexity Of The World’s Shipping Routes

You can watch hundreds of millions of individual ships from represented by multi-colored dots float across the world’s oceans over the course of 2012

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3059346/mapping-the-stunning-complexity-of-the-worlds-shipping-routes

Welcome to the Age of Digital Warfare

The internet has made acquiring information near-instantaneous. If a hacker knows where to look for the databases, can break through digital security measures, and can make sense of the data, he or she can acquire years’ worth of intel in just a few minutes. The enemy state could start using the sensitive information before anyone realises that something’s amiss. That kind of efficiency makes James Bond look like a slob.

https://futurism.com/welcome-age-digital-warfare/

How Trump Manipulated Mass Consciousness

This explains why people who would never ordinarily have voted for Trump cast their ballots for him anyway. He is not a moron, and he’s certainly not crazy.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/12/08/Trumps-Manipulation-Of-Mass-Consciousness/

Global Plug-in Deliveries

As one can see from the graph, the major volume driver for PEV expansion has been China, with this country being responsible for almost half of sales this year.

http://www.ev-volumes.com/

Leave Syria Or Else! ; Iranian General To The US

When the battle against ISIS will end, no American soldier will be tolerated in Syria or they will be considered as forces of occupation. Russia conveyed to the US that Iran will stay in Syria as long as President Assad decides.

https://elijahjm.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/qassem-soleimanis-letter-to-the-us-leave-syria-or-else-could-al-hasaka-2018-become-beirut-1983/

In Syria ISIS Is Defeated – The US Is Next In Line

The UN resolution which allowed other countries to fight ISIS within Syria and Iraq no longer applies. But the U.S. military, despite the lack of any legal basis, wants to continue its occupation of Syria’s north-east. The attempt to do so will fail. Its Kurdish allies in the area are already moving away from it and now prefer Russian protection. Guerrilla forces to fight the U.S. “presence” are being formed.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/syria-isis-is-defeated-the-us-is-next-in-line.html

US to Remain in Syria Indefinitely, Pentagon Says

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-remain-in-syria-indefinitely-pentagon-officials-say-1512752450

Jared Kushner is wreaking havoc in the Middle East

The entire Middle East, from Palestine to Yemen, appears set to burst into flames after this week. The region was already teetering on the edge, but recent events have only made things worse. And while the mayhem should be apparent to any casual observer, what’s less obvious is Jared Kushner’s role in the chaos.

http://johnmenadue.com/jared-kushner-is-wreaking-havoc-in-the-middle-east/

Congo displacement crisis ‘worse than Middle East’

Conflict has forced 1.7 million people to flee their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year. It’s a mega-crisis. The scale of people fleeing violence is off the charts, outpacing Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42250230

Gene Extinction Weapon Developed By US Military Can Wipe Out Specific Races

$100 million dollars has already been invested into the “gene drive” research in an attempt to “tweak” the ability to wipe out certain races based on their genetic makeup. If the threat of thermonuclear war with Russia wasn’t harrowing enough, another potentially apocalyptic technology is being weaponized to kill vast swathes of the human population.

http://www.neonnettle.com/news/3338–gene-extinction-weapon-developed-by-us-military-can-wipe-out-specific-races–

US Air Force Admits To Harvesting Russian Tissue

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-01/us-air-force-admits-harvesting-russian-tissue

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions highest on record

Despite massive jumps in wind-generated electricity emissions from transport were at record levels. Carbon emissions are not going to drop until proper climate policy is in place. “If you don’t foster renewable energy, it’s only going to get worse,”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/australias-transport-emissions-in-past-year-the-highest-on-record

Women Who Have Accused Trump of Groping Speak Out

Women who have accused Trump of sexual harassment and assault came together in New York City on Monday to share “their firsthand accounts of President Trump groping, fondling, forcibly kissing, humiliating, and harassing women” and demand that Congress launch an investigation into their allegations.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/11/watch-women-who-have-accused-trump-groping-fondling-forcibly-kissing-humiliating-and

What is the true cost of owning a Tesla Model 3?

We compare to the Honda Civic & BMW 3 Series

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR_ub5eL9n0

What the study of whales and dolphins can reveal about the basis of human intelligence

The relationship between social structure and brain size is partly driven by increasing social-behavioural flexibility It is not merely group size, but the quality of social interactions that correlate with brain size. Culture, behavioral richness and cognition are intertwined and can create a positive feedback loop: larger brains can support a larger social repertoire and a larger repertoire can support a greater carrying capacity, potentially offering learners greater opportunity and variety for learning.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/12/ceta-d12.html

Air Pollution Has a Massive Impact on Early Brain Development

The most crucial stage of the brain’s growth comes during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. Air pollution has been found to damage the blood-brain barrier, which can lead to conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease in later life. exposure to air pollution can be linked to weaker verbal and nonverbal IQ and memory, reduced test scores, and various other neurological behavioural issues.

https://futurism.com/air-pollution-massive-impact-early-brain-development/

Environment funding slashed by third since Coalition took office

The programs hardest hit by funding cuts are those designed to maintain biodiversity by protecting ecosystems and shrinking animal and plant populations with deeper cuts promised into next decade.While the federal budget has expanded by $36bn since Tony Abbott took office, funding for the environment has been cut by nearly half a billion dollars so far, an analysis by two conservation groups found.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/13/environment-funding-slashed-by-third-since-coalition-took-office

Parliament and the media cover up the looming climate crisis

There is not one climate scientist in the Australian Parliament. The world’s leading climate research organisations (NASA, NOAA, NSIDC, Berkeley Earth, Potsdam Climate Impacts, Hadley-Met, Tindale, CSIRO, BOM) have confirmed current trends toward a world of +2 degrees Celsius and +4 degrees Celsius above mean pre-industrial temperatures.

http://johnmenadue.com/andrew-glikson-parliament-and-the-media-cover-up-the-looming-climate-crisis/

Burn-offs have almost no effect on bushfire risks

Burn-offs are a routine part of preparations for bushfire season, but modelling suggests fire authorities need to target 30% of land to have any meaningful effect on taming future wildfires. We need to introduce on the outskirts of towns and cities clever landscape designs that included irrigation and green fire breaks in the form of parklands, that could work in conjunction with burn-offs.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/15/burn-offs-bushfire-risks-australia-tasmania

Too big to jail

Criminal money laundering not a crime – if you are big enough. A report on the powers used by a handful of bank intentionally to coerce governments.

https://www.brasscheck.com/video/too-big-to-jail/

Land use per gram of protein, by food type

Average land use area needed to produce one unit of protein by food type, measured in metres squared per gram of protein over a crop’s annual cycle or the average animal’s lifetime. Values are based on a meta-analysis of studies across 742 agricultural systems and over 90 unique foods.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-per-gram-of-protein-by-food-type

16 December, 2017
Religious tax-exemption protects the state

From Nic Forster

There are good reasons why we don’t tax religions:
1. They would mostly claim charitable status anyway
2. It opens up the possibility of a government making discriminatory or punitive anti-religious policies
3. As tax-paying institutions, they would earn the right to engage in politics
4. It undermines the separation of church and state & damages constitutional secularism

Tighten rules by all means; but don’t mash our political safeguards!

Don’t forget The Cross earlier posts on this topic

and some of the comments

William Bryant Scrivener The safeguards don’t seem to prevent the infiltration of theocrats into Australian politics.

Ashley Locke These safeguards also appear to have done nothing to stop religions from comport in themselves like businesses and engaging in unregulated and unethical conduct that would NEVER be lawful for any private enterprise.

Ryan Lee If the churches stop using their tax free money to influence the politics, if religious people stop hurting the lgbtiq community, if we can get the bottom of child sex abuse done by churches. I would not care tax church or not. It is not possible to taxthe churches anyway as the churches have the majority support in Australia.

Nic Forster : they do, however, prevent religions themselves from engaging directly in political activity. Abbott, Abetz, Bernardi and Hanson are more products of Australia’s political failings than anything else.

Neil Cotter The Anglicans gave $1 million to the No campaign. Hillsong hosts conservative politicians regularly. There is nothing stopping churches from engaging in politics at present, certainly not their tax-exempt status. The Catholic Church was behind the DLP for decades, and continues to influence both major parties to this day, most obviously the ALP via the SDA.

Michael Thorp What about your hyper-profitable juggernauts like Hillsong. How do you feel about a tax-free threshold of sorts to prevent obviously highly profitable businesses hiding under the banner of a cross from making an extra 30%?

Neil Cotter

1. If they can claim charitable status for their activities anyway, let them do that. I think you are over estimating the proportion that they can do so, but I don’t see why taxpayers should subsidise proselytising or religion generally.

2. What does tax exemption have to do with “discriminatory or punitive anti-religious policies”? The government discriminates between religions and beliefs at present by not giving some tax exemptions.
3. Churches are already engaged in political activity. Unlike other charities they are not being targeted by the government for this.
4. The status quo is undermining church and state separation by giving privileges to churches rather than just treating them like any other association.

15 December, 2017
Russia’s corporate army in Syria

Russia’s corporate army is on the streets of Syria

Source: Al-Monitor

As the civil war in Syria officially draws to a close, the imperial states withdraw with much media fanfare. Their influence, though, remains in the form of corporate armies paid by national governments to maintain the pressure where their interests demand. Russia maintains a significant corporate army in Syria, though it has stepped back a little from a direct combat role after suffering significant casualties.

12 December, 2017