duncanriley.com

Category: General

  • A Proposal to Filter Christian Churches

    This is in response to Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby in the SMH (via Stilgherian)

    Hon Kevin Rudd MP
    Prime Minister of Australia
    Parliament House
    CANBERRA ACT 2600

    Re: proposal to filter Christian Churches

    Dear Prime Minister

    I write to you about the utmost urgency of protecting children from pedophilia and other deviant acts. As your Ministers (particularly Senator Conroy) have repeatedly told the media, somebody needs to think of the children.

    I take this opportunity to ask you to consider a proposal to filter Christian Churches in Australia in line with the Government’s commitment to protecting children with Internet censorship, and indeed would urge you to give this proposal priority status given the shocking risk to children Christian churches present.

    According to statistics published in the United States (ref), around 4% of clerics in the period from 1950-2002 were accused of abusing children. Worse still, this abuse, in over 60% of cases occurred for over one year. Notably, clerics who abused children usually did so at a rate higher than one child per cleric, at a rate of approx 2.3 children per cleric.

    There are, according to some figures around 7,000 Christian Churches in Australia, possibly more, with 2 million people attending a church every week. If the American experience applied here (and there is no reason to believe that it does not, particularly given we have more Catholics as a proportion of our christians) around 280 clerics (possibly more) will be fiddling with children this year. That is an unacceptable risk in a modern society, and it is vital that the Government think of these children.

    I propose the Government introduce a Christian Church filter on the same grounds as the proposed internet filter.

    1. That access to suspect Christian Churches be blocked, with no recourse or means of appeal once they are added to the Christian church filter.

    2. That “unwanted” churches have access blocked as well, such as those that don’t agree with the Government. Again, there will be no recourse should a church be blocked, and no means of appeal.

    3. That the speed of access to all Christian Churches be reduced to up to 87%. A national speed bump scheme would be effective here. Given the cost to Government, private operators could install the speed bumps and charge a toll for the cost of installing them.

    I’d note Prime Minister that the filter is not as effective with smaller speed reductions, and it would be ineffective without being properly implemented.

    4. That access to 3-6% of Christian Churches be blocked at all times, for no reason other than it’s acceptable, and you can never be too sure, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Who is blocked should change daily, just to keep the churches on their toes.

    5. That access to Christian Bibles be limited to adults who choose to opt-in. The bible, as you’d be aware, includes multiple accounts of illegal activity, including beastiality, murder, and even drownings….and sometimes this violence involves children. Children should be spared from this filth.

    Prime Minister, I urge your Government to truly protect the children of Australia from the Christian Church and implement this scheme at the first available opportunity. If the Government does not support this scheme, then truly it must be supporting pedophilia and child pornography, as Senator Conroy believes all opponents of protecting children are.

    Prime Minister, won’t you please think of the children?

    Yours sincerely

    Duncan Riley

  • Obama to the Right

    Via Larvatus Prodeo an interesting piece from The Monthly Review placing Obama to the right in a world sense with this nifty graph.

    skitched-20090112-100116.jpg

    Money quote:

    “In other words, Barack Obama does represent change from the era of the Bush administration. He is the limited change that’s possible within the logic of the current system.”

    More at the Monthly Review here.

  • King St. Newtown the Song

    Via FullTimeCasual, King St. Newtown the song. Besides what I think is an XC Falcon early in, not much has changed on the street. Well, the Hub closed down, long the Sydney Adult Theatre location of choice, and Coles New World doesn’t look that way anymore…but the rest looks very familiar. Still, I’ve only done that drive a handful of times in the last 12 years. My memories are still very much slanted from my childhood growing up in Sydney.

  • Inquisitr December 2008

    Pageviews: 1,962,105 (per Google Analytics)

    Traffic profile: highest post accounted for 13.5% of traffic.

    Finances: profitable (that is, more income than the cost of paying writers excluding me). However unbeknown to us, the ad figures we were working with were make believe from one provider. We’re profitable, but not by as much as we’d believed. Further revenue decreased significantly this month per page view, so while we brought more in, it wasn’t relative to the increase in traffic. We are looking at ways of countering this in January. Whether this is representative of the market, our ad provider or a combination of both is to be seen.

    Technorati Rank:426

  • Bleak Shopping Christmas

    I’ve so far managed to avoid Christmas shopping, not helped by the fact that I can’t stand crowds….probably some sort of medical thing, but I feel claustrophobic in large crowds and ill to the point of near panic. Only at Christmas I might add, I wonder if there’s a phobia for that?

    But I digress: she who must be obeyed spent 4 hours shopping on Bridge Road Richmond yesterday, long famed as one of Melbourne’s cut price fashion strips, and usually busy at the best of times. Her exact words to me is that she couldn’t believe how quiet the shops were.

    She also said that she’d heard shop owners discussing how quiet Christmas trade was this year, and even customers saying they’d been to Chadstone (the largest shopping center in the Southern Hemisphere) and that they could easily find a park, which in good times is hard any day, let alone a week prior to Christmas.

    Our local shopping strip Camberwell has definitely been quieter for months, and while the number of people is up getting close to Christmas, it’s not the mad house you’d expect in a good year. I can drive the strip in under 10 minutes at lunchtime on a Saturday (so yesterday)….

    God knows then how the SMH is saying spending will be up $700m this Christmas. I’m going to head to Chaddy Monday morning for a quick shop, and will report back then, but it certainly smells like bad times to me.

  • How long now for the Australian Car Industry?

    Key Automotive Statistics 2007.pdf (page 15 of 29)

    The above chart comes from Key Automotive Statistics from the The Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

    With GM likely to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy before Christmas with the bailout package failing to pass the US Senate, and Chrysler and Ford not far behind it, how long now for the Australian Car Industry?

    It’s getting so bad that even Toyota is starting to make cuts, be it primarily at the top, although reports from the States also indicate some production lines are stopping due to a backlog of inventory as well.

    No amount of money from Rudd is going to save the Australian car industry now.

    Ironically it may be our best export earner and best local innovator who may be the first to go. According to stats, the bulk of our export market is to the Middle East, with the bulk of those sales coming from Holden.

    Maybe they might hold on to Holden even in bankruptcy, but don’t count on it. The chart above shows 3 years of losses leading into this year; the product might be good, but a couple of billion in exports doesn’t counter growing loses that are bound to be far worse this year with Australia slowly sliding into a recession (and we’re only not in one due to farm output).

    Ford is the best placed of the US car makers going forward financially, but they still lag behind GM (Holden) locally, so the Ford plant will be at risk.

    Toyota is easiest to swap out, after all Toyota makes Camry’s the world over, and the Aurion is just a Camry with a V6 engine and some different body work, not exactly hard to replace with an overseas plant.

    My prediction: at least one manufacturer will quit Australia in the next 6 months, possibly sooner. If we have any car industry left by 2010, it will be either by miracle, or so much Government subsidy that each car could be given away for free.

  • Fence sitting on an Australian Bill of Rights

    So the Governments latest shiny media promotion tool is an Australian Bill of Rights, starting with a “nationwide consultation on human rights.”

    I’m not quite sure where I sit on it, at least until what’s going to be in it becomes clear. The Libs have come out hard against it naturally, and any over extension of the nanny state caused by a Bill of Rights is something that should concern most fair people.

    However I might be for it if it included one magic ingredient sorely missing from the Australian Constitution (and presuming a Bill of Rights would be enrished by Constitution amendment you’d presume it would have similar standing). Free Speech.

    Free speech that includes freedom of the press and freedom for any citizen to speak within reason.

    Sadly though it would appear at least now that an Australian Bill of Rights would result in a chilling effect on free speech, with targets including “promotion of religious tolerance and fundamental human rights” sounding an awful lot like you can’t speak out against a religion for example.

    Free speech IS a fundamental human right. The fact that the Government hasn’t mentioned it isn’t surprising given they’re trying to censor with internet and they arrest journalists for keeping sources secret. The nanny state has a fringe of big brother about it in 2008, lets hope that a Bill of Rights doesn’t make the situation worse.

  • More sloppy newspaper reporting on job ads

    You’d think it was the end of the world when you see things like this crap from The Oz

    “Ads in newspapers suffered the biggest two-month fall in the 30-year history of the ANZ job ads survey.”

    Of course the newspaper figures are always quoted first

    Jobs ads in newspapers fell by 12 per cent to 11,767, following October’s 12.1 per cent fall, and declined by a yearly pace of 42.7 per cent.

    And then the internet job stats follow

    Internet advertisements, meanwhile, dropped by 8.4 per cent in November, to a near two-year low of 199,433, following October’s 5.5 per cent drop, and falling by an annual pace of 16.6 per cent.

    Notice the meanwhile, because the internet job ads are an after thought.

    But look at the hard figures: 11,767 newspaper job ads vs 199,433 internet job ads.

    Memo to Australian journalists: no reasoned objective view of these figures could possibly maintain the primacy of newspaper job advertising rates in any report on job ads. Indeed, the newspaper job advertising marketplace in Australia is so low, there would be a reasoned argument that they shouldn’t be mentioned at all.

    You wouldn’t mention a drop in the sales of Alfa Romeos as being representative of the whole car sales market, so why in 2008 are Australian newspapers still doing the same with job ads.

    Fail with a dose of delusion on top.

  • Ghostbusters Video Game

    Via Lee, Want. Imagine playing this with a Wii remote.

  • Missing F9 + F11 new Mac Keyboard

    So my old Mac keyboard died earlier this week, or to be more precise the TAB and CAPS LOCK keys stopped working, so it was time for a new keyboard.

    I’d seen the new flat key Mac keyboards before, but after 25 years of typing I liked having raised keys. However I wasn’t impressed by the non-Apple keyboards at StreetWise (a great Apple reseller in Hawthorn) so I purchased one of the flat keyboards instead.

    Not the wireless one, because bizarrely Apple did away with the numeric keypad on that, and I need a numeric keypad, 2 years at Bankers Trust in 94-95 where I spent a couple of hours a day data entering numbers into Excel means today I can enter numbers with 99% accuracy blindfolded using the numeric keypad. Hence I also rarely enter numbers using the numbers on the Qwerty side.

    First let me say a couple of days in: best keyboard I’ve ever owned. The flat keys make typing easier. I’m not sure if it’s the angle, the need to press them less, what ever it is….but I’m typing more quickly and my fingers are taking less stress.

    But there was a catch: the F9 and F11 keys weren’t working.

    F11 is Expose and F9 clears the Windows off the screen. Combined they are two of my favorite features of a Mac, and I use both constantly.

    Stranger still, unlike my Macbook Pro, the new keyboard doesn’t have a function key, so that wasn’t the trick.

    Hit Google, and here’s the answer if you ever get caught: F11 is now F3, and F9 is Command+F3. There’s even a little Expose graphic drawn on F3.