This is gruesome.

Police have released an x-ray picture of the head of Chen (aka Anthony) Liu, who was murdered in Sydney last year. He was shot in the head multiple times with a nail gun.

I’m not sure why police released the photo, or how this could help them with their enquiries. No one has been arrested yet. Police are asking for help, particularly from anyone who might have seen Mr Liu’s car in Rockdale or Connells Point around 19 October 2008.

It beats me how anyone can do something like this to another human being.

Iranian President Imanutjob said at a conference in Teheran on Wednesday that Israel is ‘a regime that only understands the language of violence and force. I am confident that there will come a day when all Zionist criminals will be brought to justice.’

Being consistent means he’s predictable – it isn’t too hard to guess what he’s going to say. And that means, as I have pointed out before, that the UN officials who said of his similar speech at the racism conference in Geneva, ‘Oh gosh, how awful, we had no idea, how could we have known?’  are either stupid, or were simply lying.

Oh.  My mistake.

That was another Hitler birthday event.

These dual blade saws look pretty cool – powerful and precise.

When you see it in action, the dual saw seems such a great idea you wonder why no one thought of it before.

They don’t seem to be available in Australia yet. Damn.

I watched Phelim McAleer’s documentary ‘Mine Your Own Business’ again last night.

It is difficult to watch and not feel angry at the easy complacency of western environmentalists who, from the comfort of their air-conditioned homes, tell people in the developing world that their way of life is quaint and worth preserving, and that even though they cannot afford basic medical care, or to feed their children, they are rich in other ways.

A bit like our own Russell Crowe, who knows far better than the people of Cape York and the government of Queensland what is really good for people in remote regions of Australia. In Russell’s view, it isn’t job opportunities, better housing or decent roads, or any of the things he takes for granted and would throw a massive trantum if he was deprived of for even a few minutes. No, none of those things matter when you have a spiritual connection to the land. What contemptible tripe.

A few excerpts from a review of Mine Your Own Business:

Half a world away, when confronted with the argument that denying the people of Fort Dauphin a chance to obtain jobs would keep them poor, the leading critic of the ilmenite project and the owner of a luxurious catamaran pontificates to Gheorghe Lucian, an unemployed Romanian traveling with the film’s crew: “I could put you with a family here and you can count how many times people smile … and I can put you with a family that is well-off in New York and London and you can count how many times they smile, and then you can tell me who is rich and who is poor.”

You can imagine what this esoteric interpretation of wealth sounds like to Lucian, the Romanian who graduated from Rosia Montana’s Technical College and is desperate to find a job. Two-thirds of his fellow villagers lack running water and use outside bathrooms even in freezing winter. For him, as for the other 700 prospective employees of the mining project back home, the choice is literally “between having a job and leaving.”

The film crew also traveled to the Chilean Andes to find out who was leading the fight against Barrick Gold. It turns out—as one local villager explains—that those who oppose the investment are mainly rich landowners who don’t want the peasants working on their lands for a pittance to flock to the mines for twice their current wages.

McAleer tells us that the claim the mining project will displace three glaciers that provide irrigation for local agriculture is false. The glaciers will not be affected and the company will build a reservoir to guarantee that local farmers have a decent supply of water.

Will this industrial progress in Romania, Madagascar or Chile pollute the environment? Well, the alternative is much worse. Communist-era gold mining, which was technologically backward, bureaucratic and unaccountable, turned Rosia Montana’s river into disgusting filth. In Madagascar’s Fort Dauphin, slash-and-burn agriculture—the sort the rural poor resort to in order to survive—has destroyed the rain forest.

As one of the people interviewed in the documentary points out, it is wealthy, well developed societies which are able to divert funds and energy into conservation. Wealth and development are not just good for people, but also for the environment.

And anyway, who are we to tell people whose children are starving that they cannot have jobs and industrial development because we would rather their cute lifestyle and pretty village stayed exactly as it is?

That’s the fifth boat in a fortnight, the forteenth since the federal Labor government made changes to immigration policy last September.

No doubt we will soon be hearing repeats of the ‘Jesus was a refugee‘ motto, with the implication that anyone who questions the instant acceptance into Australian society of anyone who turns up must therefore be unchristian and uncaring. Because if you turn anyone away, then you would have turned Jesus away.

It’s all very well wanting to appear compassionate. And if appearance is all you care about, then sure, let’s just take anyone who has the money or other means to push their way to our shores.

But the fact is we cannot take everyone who would like to come. We don’t have the water, we don’t have the infrastructure to take a large proportion of all the refugees in the world, certainly not in a short period of time, and equally certainly not without careful planning.

And the wish of others to come has to be balanced against the right of those already here to be protected from people would would bring to Australia the violence or intolerance or whatever it is they want to escape from in their homeland.

In other words, we have to be selective. We should be generous. If we want to continue to be able to be generous, we must also be careful about how many, and who, come to Australia.

Those who appear in Australian waters uninvited may not be, and probably are not, the most needy or deserving. They are simply those who have the money or other means to try to shortcut a system of review that is designed to find and help those most in need of help. In the case of the last few boats, the people on them had already travelled half way around the world, and through at least half a dozen countries to get here.

A truly compassionate approach will do everything reasonably possible to discourage illegal immigration, because the need to shelter, feed and process illegal immigrants, and to provide them and their children with medical care and education, all takes money and resources that could be spent finding and welcoming people who do not have the resources to push their way to the head of the queue.

As I have noted before, the result of the Labor government’s wanting to appear compassionate is actually more suffering, both for those who come expecting a softer welcome and are turned away, and for those who wait in refugee camps around the world, and will have to wait longer because resources that could have gone to preparing them to come to Australia must instead be utilised supervising queue jumpers.

This from the current edition of The Professional Edge, the journal of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geo-Scientists of Saskatchewan. This links to a PDF file. See from page ten on.

A couple of excerpts:

Add a dash of guilt and fear of the apocalypse, and how can the citizenry resist the call to “save the planet”? But when you stop and think about it, the apocalyptic predictions don’t quite make sense scientifically…

Therefore the suspicions of any scientist should be aroused by glib assertions like “the science is settled” or “there is a consensus,” because this is not how scientists and engineers operate. Al Gore’s movie and books are so appallingly riddled with mistakes and outlandish exaggerations that they would be laughable if they weren’t taken so seriously by so many…

There has grown a whole industry of  taxpayer-funded climate modellers whose equations can’t reproduce last week’s weather let alone past climate change at all, but whose crystal balls universally forecast impending disaster (and of course the urgent need for more research money)…

Why haven’t physicists pointed out the basic mistakes in the science? Why haven’t more geoscientists stood up to correct the misconceptions about natural, long-term climate change?

Via Small Dead Animals

The U.N. Durban II (Geneva) conference for racism and anti-semitism was planned and organised by the world’s worst perpetrators of racism and human rights abuses. A representative of Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi, Mrs. Najjat al-Hajjaji, has chaired the Durban II Preparatory Committee for the past two years, and at the beginning of the conference was elected chair of the Durban II Main Committee.

The rank hypocrisy of Durban II was exposed before the world this week when UN Watch surprised the Libyan chair — by bringing a victim of Qaddafi torture to confront her on Libya’s brutal torture and scapegoating of five Bulgairan nurses and a Palestinian doctor.

From UN Watch – this links to the video.