Feb 3 - 2010

Front Page

Michael McKenna is perhaps better suited to writing fiction novels. he compares the recent cyclone with a nuclear explosion. An explosion's damage is localised and immediate. A cyclone spreads damage over a large area. Depending on the yield of the nuclear weapon the total average damage could be the same but one does not leave and spread nuclear radiation the years afterwards. He also talks about people "cowering in blacked out homes and emergency shelters," great for a fiction novel.

There were people who did not heed the warnings and stayed. To date there have been no casualties reported. I guess the only remaining question is will there be a hurricane levy?

The most revealing news is that Queensland does not have any comprehensive insurance cover for natural disasters. In fact they are about the only state that doesn't. Instead the government pays 75% of all recovery costs. This is why we have a flood levy, because according to Treasury in Queensland insurance was not deemed to be "a value for money proposition."

Page 2

The dangers of Left government are exposed with the news that all of our amphibious support ships are currently out of action or unseaworthy. In general the Left are antimilitary and do all they can to minimise and marginalise the armed forces.

Page 3

Really? Emergency evacuation centres in Queensland are not cyclone rated! no comment required here really.

Page 4

So the brilliant minds in the powers that be decided to lay, or more correctly string, optical fibre cables from overhead power poles. They decided to do this in cyclone prone areas like Townsville. After the damage assessment expect to read that all of this cabling has been stripped off the poles, and perhaps the poles themselves vanished. This is the brilliance of our NBN people.

Page 6

Along the same lines people are already starting to complain that they will be very close to the new cabling but will never be given access. In some cases the cable even passes through a townbut they will never see high-speed connectivity. The NBN strikes again. ironically it appears that only The Australian Newspaper is reporting on any of this.

Page 10

I love the church sign "whoever is praying for snow please stop" in the US.

Once again showing the brilliance of the military it turns out the U.S. Army whistleblower who passed classified cables on to Wikileaks was considered mentally unfit but was deployed anyway because of the shortages of skilled personnel. LOL.

Letters page 15

It is quite easy to figure out which of the letter writers are Greens. They quote made up facts and rage against anybody with any real data. They also promote the idea that we are all doomed. Sometimes they are just plain dumb. I particularly enjoy the use of truisms as in "maybe there is an element of climate change in all of Australia's rapidly escalating extreme weather events" well duh. This of course has nothing to do with human generated global warming.

Good letter from Frank Pulsford and a few others that action referred to the data.

As a final note good analysis in the article NBN Nirvana eludes Tasmania.