(For Steve Camp and Douglas Burtt)
It has been reported that the Pacific island of Tonga has recorded a 10cm rise in sea levels in the past 13 years.
We Christians need to resist the use of scientific instrumentation to make such spurious claims. These instruments were created by unbelievers who think nothing of honouring God, and of putting forward so called "facts" that fit their atheistic, evolutionary, secular, humanistic, satanistic, communistic preconceptions.
Every objective and reasonable person knows that "Global Warming" is just a theory, and that there are ample amounts of evidence that shoot holes through the mangled plastic bag that holds the putrid, polluted water of the theory in place. These so called "theorists" (a radical and activist minority within the world community) actually argue that if all the ice caps melt, all the dry land in the entire world will be covered by water!
We need to remember that, as Christians, God is in control over the creation, and has promised that another world-wide flood will not occur! (Genesis 9:15) More than that, cursory study by reputable scientists indicate that, even if all the ice caps and ice sheets melt, there would never be enough water to cover all dry land on the earth! Yet another blow to these global warming theorists.
(By the way - did anyone ever see that film Waterworld with Kevin Costner? That was funded partly by organisations with ties to the global warming community)
Can we trust these people, these "envronmentalists", to make rational decisions for us? I think not. I have nothing against clean air and water, controlled growth, and organic farming. I'm all for good stewardship of God's creation. But the close association of environmentalism with unrepentant socialism and paganism is a stench in my nostrils. In my heart I'd rather burn the planet down than hand it over to such ruffians.
From the Department of Attempted Humour and Biting Satire.
© 2006 Neil McKenzie Cameron, http://one-salient-oversight.blogspot.com/
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One of the patron saints of the Liberal Blogosphere, Juan Cole, has just written an article which argues that the US should remove its troops and replace them with international forces under the control of the United Nations.
The thing is, of course, that I suggested exactly the same thing back in August 2005, and then expanded it into a full blown article in November 2005.
So yes, another Cassandra moment, where my calls were ignored. It's hard realising just how far ahead of the curve I am... (examines fingernails)
From the Department of ha ha I was right all along and I deserve to be smug
© 2006 Neil McKenzie Cameron, http://one-salient-oversight.blogspot.com/
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I've just slightly modified my Firefox about:config. After doing some research, I have changed the value of nglayout.initialpaint.delay from 0 to, wait for it, 1000000. Let me explain further.
If you use Firefox, chances are you know about about:config. If you don't, simply type it into the address and press enter or click on "go". about:config contains a few hundred lines of small tweaks you can make to Firefox. Of course, changing them willy-nilly may ruin your browsing experience so make sure you do the research first before changing any of the values.
nglayout.initialpaint.delay controls the time the browser takes between receiving the webpage information and its choice to actually show the page in the browser window. If it's set at zero, or some other small amount (I think the default is 250 - the number refers to milliseconds I think), then Firefox will begin to show the page while the information is still being downloaded. You know what this means... it means that you can view the webpage, but pictures and other things are still appearing as you look.
By changing to value to an absurdly high amount (in this case, I have changed it to 1000000), it essentially means that I have told Firefox not to bother trying to show the page until all the information has been downloaded.
In practice, this means that when I go to a website, the screen remains unchanged (if I have gone from one page to another) or is blank (if I have opened a new tab) until the entire page is ready to be viewed. Large web pages (like the Washington Post) can take over a minute to view, while smaller ones with hardly any graphics and information (like Google) take only a couple of seconds.
Of course, if you have viewed the page before, then the amount of waiting time is shorter, since a lot of information is kept in the cache.
Why do this? I have an obsolete processor (Pentium 3 600E) but a relatively large amount of memory (384mb). When nglayout.initialpaint.delay was set at zero, my poor processor strained so hard to cope you could hear the cries of dying slaves coming out of the box - which meant that while I was waiting to view a webpage, everything else I was doing had slowed down a bit. Setting it at 1000000 means that about 25% less processor power is used while, at the same time, all the information gets sent into my ample RAM to wait until it is needed.
I'm not sure whether this will actually enhance my browsing experience, but I'm testing it as I go. So far the only drawback is when I open 5 or more websites simultaneously in tabs - it can take a long time to actually view them all.
America is in a crisis when it comes to savings. For the first time in a long time, American households have reached "negative saving" - they are dipping into their cash reserves and spending it.
The reasons why households (as well as businesses) save money is to "put it away for a rainy day" - in other words, there is a deliberate choice to put off spending money in the present in order to spend it in the future. Saving is a normal economic activity.
There is, naturally, extremes that have to be avoided. If there is too much saving, less money is allocated to normal economic activity and causes an economic downturn. In this sense, an overdose of saving can actually be very harmful to an economy. On the other hand, if the savings rate is too low, then the economy is far more vulnerable to any economic shocks that happen - ordinary households would not have the "safety net" of savings available to cushion the blow.
The problem is that saving money differs from culture to culture and from country to country. While America (and to a lesser extent, my own country Australia) are reaching dangerously low savings levels, the Japanese, the French and other peoples are saving quite well thank you very much.
Another problem is that the strict definition of saving involves having money set aside. There is no doubt that many people choose not to set aside money because it is much better for them to invest in something else, such as their house or in the stockmarket. In this sense, although "savings" may be low, there are plenty of people who see their investment in stocks and property and other things as an alternative form of saving. Given the choice between cash and the mortgage, many people would naturally choose the mortgage since more money will be gained in the long run - or so they believe. For example, if the cash rate is 5% and the value of their property is going up 7% per year, then choosing to put the money into the house is a no-brainer.
It's this final issue that is causing historically low savings rates. Rather than setting aside cash, households are investing in other things, as well as increasing their consumption.
Should we be concerned about this situation? Yes. We should be very concerned.
Saving is the main way that households can cope with any future downturn. While the price of other assets may plunge, the value of money will stay more or less constant. The reason this is so is because of the Federal Reserve, who will not let money devalue more than it needs to. When money devalues, inflation is the natural result. To control inflation, the Fed raises interest rates. The Fed sees price stability as one of its main goals, so while the economy may be suffering, at least you can still buy things with your dollar.
But the Fed backs nothing else - not property nor stocks, only the dollar. If households have invested money into property and stocks and a recession comes along that knocks these investments out, the Fed can do nothing about it directly. The only mechanism the Fed has is controlling the money supply, and when faced with a recession the Fed usually increases supply by dropping interest rates - a process that helps, but which will not guarantee that property and stock prices return to their previous state. The upshot of this is simple - if a recession comes along, those who have not got sufficient cash reserves will be hurt the most.
So what is the solution? In today's New York Times, an editorial focuses upon a bold new plan that will increase the national savings rate. The basic plan is to set up an "automatic individual retirement account", whereby employees set aside a small amount of money each week that is directed towards this particular account. The plan, which has been proposed jointly by the Heritage Foundation and Brookings Institution, has received a great deal of praise from the NYT editorial.
But this plan fails to take into account one very basic thing - the reason why savings is so low. Rather than try to understand why such a rate is low, people have instead tried to focus on setting up schemes to solve it. But in order to properly solve such a problem, one must understand why it exists in the first place.
The simple reason why the national savings rate is low is because households have decided that there are more valuable things than cash. I have mentioned two - property and stock - but there are a multitude of others. In order to increase the national savings rate, money itself needs to become more valuable. When this occurs, the market will naturally respond by increasing its cash reserves.
So how can money be made more valuable? Again, the answer is simple - it is the actions of the Federal Reserve that give money its value. It is therefore up to the Federal Reserve, not schemes and plans from various thinktanks, to solve this problem:
The best way to boost national savings is to increase interest rates.
At this present moment in time, America, Australia, the U.K. and a number of other countries are experiencing a boom in asset prices. Yet such a boom will naturally come to an end. The reason why such a boom has taken place is, I believe, because the "target rate" of inflation that central banks have been using has been too generous. While inflation rates of 2-3% per year sound normal, I would argue that such a practice has inevitably led to this asset-price boom - a "bubble" if you will. The "bubble" has not been quick in inflating, but it has grown to become a very serious problem. If Central banks lowered their inflation targets (I would argue for zero inflation), bubbles such as these would be exceptionally difficult to form, and money would be valuable enough for the market to have a healthy savings rate.
Unfortunately, raising interest rates causes problems of its own. In the current environment, there is no doubt that setting rates high enough to keep inflation at zero will result in a recession. However, I have always argued that the effects of a recession are worse the longer it is delayed - which, in this instance, means that the recession caused by inflation-less monetary policy will not be as bad as the future recession that occurs due to the asset-price bubble popping.
But, of course, what I am arguing goes against the tide of modern economic thinking - yet there is no doubt that the best solution for increasing the savings rate would be to make cash more valuable in relation to everything else... and to do so would require a shift in thinking within the world of monetary policy. After all, monetary policy at the moment is hardly preventing the horrific national savings rate.
From the Osostrian School Department
© 2006 Neil McKenzie Cameron, http://one-salient-oversight.blogspot.com/
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Hello, my name is Mrs. Norah J. Postlethwaite. I live on a housing estate highrise in Thamesmead in East London and I am 56 years old.
This is my home. It was built in 1970 and has been described by some as being an example of "Brutalist Architecture". I live nearer to the bottom floor however - too many stairs gives me back pains and my arthritis plays up.
One day I was walking my dog. My dog's name is Beck, whom I named after the American musician, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Beck and I love going for walks and afterwards he goes to sleep on my lap while I have a cup of tea and watch ITV.
As per usual, those unemployed halfwits who live and breed in our housing estate use the courtyard for their rubbish tip. The shopping trolley had been there for a month, while the paint tin and other muck had been there since last Thursday (pension day). For some reason some git left his tellie there.
I was sick of those losers dumping stuff there, so I let Beck look for a place for him to do a wee wee.
I then heard a strange noise. I hoped no one knew that I was letting Beck do his business here.
Suddenly, an electric spark jumped from the tellie at Beck. I had no idea it was still plugged in. I couldn't see a power lead, so it must have had some battery inside I suppose.
Well, Beck got very angry and began barking at the tellie for electrocuting him.
Now my story begins to get very strange. While Beck was barking, this weird guy appeared on the screen. I hadn't seen anything so strange since The Quatermass Experiment was on the BBC. He started singing this stuff that I couldn't understand but my my it sounded evil.
"Oh my goodness gracious me, my dog's soul is being sucked into the tellie!"
Well after that I really needed a nice cup of tea and a sit down. Trying to cope with the vision of having Beck being eaten by a tellie meant that I had to use the nearest wall to lean against.
I walked around the corner and what did I see?
A bunch of kids with ponytails and beards staring at me!
Apart from the goatees and ponytails, these little kidlets were normal, playful little devils. They ran around the carpark under the housing estate in joyful abandon while I found myself a rusty seat to rest in.
Then what do you know? As they played around one of them picked up the malfunctioning tellie and ran around with it. I yelled at them to stop, saying how dangerous it was and that it could electrocute them or eat their souls, but they ignored me.
Just at that point, Martin, the nice young man who lives in the flat next door walked out of the stairwell and started heading for his car. The young kiddies then began throwing rocks at him. Instead of confronting them, Martin decided to run away from the bunch of kids. Bad move.
When he reached the car, one of the children ran up to the car window and smiled madly at him. Martin was terrified but couldn't seem to start the car.
One of the kids then put the dangerous tellie on the bonnet of Martin's car...
...and Martin screams as his soul is sucked into the small screen. At this point I was worried. Without Martin to take out my garbage bin, what could I do? I asked this of the bearded children who laughed at me and told me to follow them where they would take out the garbage for me.
Skipping and playing innocently and happily, the young children led me to the place where the garbage bins were stored.
Well obviously I was a little concerned about their health when they got there. Not only did they start throwing all the garbage everywhere but they also started fighting with one another. This old spinster's warnings did them no good however, and I was wondering if they had been innoculated against some of the more common preventable diseases. What parents let their kids do these days...
Then one of them picked up the tellie and dropped it on the ground. While I was relieved that the tube didn't break, I was concerned when bright flashing lights began to shine everywhere.
And wouldn't you know it! Martin pops out of the tellie, except he's covered with some membrane that looked icky. It was as though the tellie had given birth to him, only there were no midwives around.
I gawked as Martin stood up. There was something strange about his demeaner.
Then he began screaming at me: "You boring old Cow! Don't you understand that I hate putting out your garbage? Don't you understand that you have old person smell? And why the heck did you name your dog Beck? Huh?" It was terrible, all the more so because of the gust of wind that came through the car park and ruined my hairdo.
But Martin had a kind heart and immediately apologised for his harsh words, which was nice. "Come on back to my place!" I said "...and I'll fix you a roast beef dinner that'll put some meat on your bones!". And we all lived happily ever after.
Do not click here
I have seen this phenomenon quite often and have mostly thought that it was due to technical issues with the satellite data, but I have just witnessed something else that puts paid to this.
Often I watch how the clouds are going over Australia from the Weather Satellite feed from the Bureau of Meteorology. The images are taken every hour, and the feed I look at has a loop of four images showing the movement of the clouds.
So there I was, 20 minutes ago, looking at the clouds move across Australia when suddenly every single cloud, including those to the north over Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, "jink" southward for one cycle. In other words, there I am watching clouds heading east when suddenly their trajectory heads south-east. I have seen this before, and every time this has happened, once the southward "jink" has happened, the clouds continue along their previous trajectory.
I have had two theories about this. The first is that somewhere in the atmosphere there has been such a disturbance that the entire atmosphere "moves" to compensate. The burning up of a large meteorite or comet would cause a change in the barometric pressure all over the place, but since the burning up happens in the upper atmosphere, the lower atmosphere would only be affected in a small way.
Of course this possibility is exciting, but I have always maintained that the reason is probably due to the electronics in the weather satellite. The satellite may have moved slightly in its orbit, causing the clouds to look as if they have "jinked", or maybe it was some recurrent malfunction in the data or the processing. Of course this is not terribly exciting, but it was my preferred explanation up until tonight.
As I write this, the Williamtown Radar is detecting a large cloud mass heading towards me from the west. Like the satellite, the radar images can be put into a loop to show the speed of the clouds as they head east. And so there I was watching it when, suddenly, the rainclouds made a slight but noticeable "jink" towards the southeast.
So, in other words, a completely different and separate detection device was able to verify that the cloud masses "jinked" south-eastwards. I have saved the images on my hdd just in case.
Any ideas? Dr Stephen Yeo would be helpful at this point...
1. Family has had the 'flu since Friday.
2. I have had the 'flu since yesterday.
3. Hot weather makes me itch, badly - especially in the morning after I wake up. Night-time temps need to drop below 20°C for me to have a good sleep.
4. New evening service at Church.
5. Aiden in his third week at school.
6. I feel everything I have been saying about George Bush has been said and is being slowly proven in the last few weeks.
7. The world we live in has the "the calm before the storm" feeling.
8. Psychocandy (The Jesus and Mary Chain).
9. Wasting away with my potential unmet.
10. Why do Aussie Cricketers now have trophy wives? (with the notable exception of Brad Hodge)
11. Saturday Cricket - my first regular sporting activity since 1987 - has been thoroughly enjoyable, not least because our team has been winning. My goals for this season are: to get into double figures; to hit a boundary. My friend Tom took 8-31 on Saturday - his best ever bowling figures - and I took a catch off his bowling, which was my first catch this season.
12. Ripped my CD collection - 13.2 GB. One day I will get a portable player too.
13. My friend Tom (8-31) has started work as a teacher again and will probably move house and church later this year.
14. Before the flu hit, I was averaging around 11,500 steps per day.
When I look back on my life, I can at least take joy in the fact that I helped a young girl overcome her poor literacy levels.
It was 2003. I was working as a tutor in Charlestown in Newcastle. I was given a year 7 girl with poor literacy levels to work with. She was 12 years old but had the reading and writing ability of an 8 year old.
The strange thing was that her low literacy had nothing to do with her motivation. She was already involved in competition waterskiiing and had a bit of swimming talent - she was training 6 afternoons a week and would often come to tutoring with wet hair and carrying a towel (the pool was across the road from the tutoring business).
She had ambitions to go to the 2008 Olympics, but she still had problems reading. I tried to work out what was going on - she was not intellectually impaired and her marks in other subjects (including mathematics) were never as poor. Was it dyslexia? I got her to read things on blue paper but that didn't seem to make an impact. Finally I suggested to her mother to get her eyes checked. Guess what! She needed glasses.
With glasses now prescribed, she made incredible progress in her literacy levels. Every week I bored her with spelling tests and reading tests and got her to write simple reports. It was hard work - she didn't always enjoy it, but as time went by her results began to improve. By the time I had finished my tutoring, she had turned 13 and had the literacy levels of an 11 year old - still not up to scratch but certainly a massive improvement.
And what of her ambition in swimming? Click on this link to find out.
Update:
I also taught this bloke at Hunter Valley Grammar School.
Oh my goodness! The Rolling Stones, singing songs that have been broadcast for 25-30 years, have had "certain" lyrics censored by the 5 second delay! These pernicious rocksters need to be stopped for using such terrible culture destroying words just in case the audience is damaged.
On another note, apparently the "Lingerie Bowl" (featuring models playing football and dressed in helmets, shoulder pads and not much else) was a wild success among the viewers.
I know that there are some people who like dogs, and others who like cats.
I also know that there are people out there who absolutely hate cats, and will do all they can to run them over.
But, to butcher a phrase used by the pro-gun lobby, "Cats don't kill people, Dogs do"
