The SMH and more Green astro-turfing

The SMH ran a piece yesterday by Samantha Lee, the co-chairwoman of the National Coalition for Gun Control. It featured all the usual emotional triggers that these sorts of pieces are famed for:

• Spree killer - Martin Bryant - tick
• Columbine massacre - tick
• "military-style" (because anything to do with the military is bad and dangerous) - tick
• "high powered" - tick (can anyone point me at a "low powered" handgun that is useful?)

At the same time, our favourite Green MP, David Shoebridge, put out a press release along the same lines. He got a lot of comments - and sooked up after 2 days and closed them.

Try this for yourself - do a Google search for "National Coalition for Gun Control". I did - and I couldn't find any contact details or a website. I did find this entry on Wikipedia though:

The NCGC has no public contact details and does not solicit public membership and may in fact not have any members at all.

The NCGC has been described as consisting of two people and a fax machine - I guess two people can be a coalition. It has also been described as having been "created to serve the ego of... Lee Rhiannon" - a Green.

Instead of inventing front organisations like this, why don't the Greens have the spine to simply come out and make their arguments in public? I know full well why they use a grandly titled organisation like the NCGC - the words "National" and "Coalition" suggests that this organisation has thousands or tens of thousands of members across the country, when nothing could be further from the truth. It is an attempt to create the appearance of a groundswell of public opinion where no such thing exists. 

I'll leave you with some stuff to read:

The first is a short pamphlet on trends in firearm theft in NSW. It's from the beautifully named WISH - Women in Shooting and Hunting. I think you can guess where they're coming from. The graph below is from their pamphlet.

The second is a Crime and Justice bulletin on firearms and violent crime in NSW 1995-2005. Sure, it's out of date, but it provides some useful context about "gun crime". I find it interesting that in 2005, more people were murdered by someone without a weapon (unless you class fists as a weapon) than with a firearm. And of course "firearms" includes rifles, shotguns and pistols.

Here's a third bit of reading. The killjoys at the NCGC also want to ban paintball in Australia. 

And there was me thinking that painball was just hellishly good fun. I've never thought for a minute that it is a "legitimisation of the American gun culture". These Greentards really need to get out more.

This Roland Browne character keeps his fax machine busy. Here he is writing to the Attorney General, angling for a spot on a committee:

This is a bit rich, coming from a bloke that makes it damned near impossible to join his organisation.

Hang on, after trawling through the AG site, I did find a link to NCGC. Here it is.

Well, that was kind of disappointing. I guess their organisation isn't big enough to include a webmaster.

I just keep digging stuff up. The NCGC suggested I visit the Australian Institute of Criminology, so I did. I found this interesting graph. Again, it finishes in 2006-07, but it's interesting to see that if someone wants to kill someone else, they'll probably find a way to do it.

"There has been a pronounced change in the type of weapons used in homicide since monitoring began. Firearm use has declined by more than half since 1989-90 as a proportion of homicide methods, and there has been an upward trend in the use of knives and sharp instruments, which in 2006-07 accounted for nearly half of all homicide victims."

That's enough for one night. I don't mind that the NCGC and the Greens are working hand in glove - I just wish they'd be open about it when they write an opinion piece for Fairfax. It's the secrecy and hidden agendas and relationships that annoys me most of all.

Me tampering with a photo

The original

I decided to tamper with one of my own photos tonight to see what it looks like after put through error level analysis - how clear is the tampering?


All I have done to the top photo is to compress it a bit - I compress all my photos because long upload times annoy me. But apart from that, there are no changes from when it came out of the camera.

Tampered cloud

I then used the lasso tool to copy a cloud, and I then played with the cloud to make it darker by adjusting the lightness. You can now see a light grey cloud above the big green tree. 

Error level analysis

I then ran this through FotoForensics - you can see that the cloud in question sticks out relatively strongly from the other clouds - including the one I copied it from. However, I didn't tamper with it much, so the error levels aren't that high (the whiter the pixels, the higher the error levels, which means more fiddling).


Have a look at these Fairfax photos and ponder how much they might have been fiddled with in order to produce the error levels that are evident.

Twitter might be good for something

Top notch Twitter feed (har har) worth having a look at -  #ObamaDogRecipes

Thanks Prick!

Oh not, not you again - extended remix

Add caption

 I'm telling you, this woman is stalking me. We're crossing paths much too often for it to be a coincidence.

I see lots of cyclists on the Anzac Bridge, and plenty of walkers and joggers - but not often do you see a pram.

I put a lot of effort into being comfortable. You might find that a bit strange, given that I choose to ride a bike without springs or shock absorbers and on high pressure tyres less than an inch wide. And I ride regardless of the weather or the road conditions. However, my bike is professionally sized and fitted - I spent several hours on a stand in the bike shop having parts swapped out and various angles and dimensions adjusted. It's been tailored to my body and its peculiarities so that I can cycle long distances with minimal discomfort and stress whilst offering maximum power.

The clown above though did none of that. I have never seen such an uncomfortable cyclist. He was all style over substance, riding a fixie with the most ridiculous handlebars you could find anywhere. This photo doesn't do it justice, but it looked like it hurt just to sit on that bike. Some people are idiots - victims of fashion. I pity the fool.

Hey - clear skies. Haven't seen that for a while.

A bloke in a canoe on the Bay.

And here he is again, in widescreen.

And now for something different. On weekdays, the dominant cyclist is the commuter. They come in all shapes and sizes, and they tend to be encumbered with back packs or panniers and they ride all sorts of bikes. Come the weekends, the commuters have a sleep in and the fitness nuts emerge for long, early morning training rides. I latched onto the back of these two on Saturday morning and hung on for a quick spin down to the Rocks. It was an ...... experience. Let me just leave it at that.

Is Fairfax doctoring photos?

The SMH has run two carbon related stories in the last week:

NSW drops carbon challenge, and

Mac Gen takes $700m carbon tax writeoff

Both stories were accompanied by photos showing big black clouds emitting from chimneys.

I took one look at these photos and figured that they're too good to be true.

Here's the screenshots for each story:

There's an online tool called FotoForensics that you can use to examine photos to see if they've been altered. The tutorial (link above) is worth reading to see how photos can be interrogated.

Here are the error level analysis results of these two photos:

If I've read the tutorial properly, and understand how error level analysis works, it would appear that the bottom photo has been sexed up a bit - all that white in the bottom right hand corner (which appears as billowing clouds) has high error levels, which means it's been altered. You can look at the analysis here and decide for yourself. I suggest you plug in a few of your own photos and see how they turn out for the sake of a comparison. You could even try doctoring one yourself and then analysing it.

Question - if one of these photos has been altered, and that hasn't been disclosed, then is that a breach of ethics? What will the Press Council have to say about that? Why is it that Fairfax have to illustrate every story relating to CO2, a colourless gas, with big clouds?

I realise that is more than one question. But that's too bad.

Can't raise my arms

Just tried doing this. Can barely move my arms now. Wonder if I'll have enough strength to get the dough into the oven once it's finished proving........




This of course is why we invented mixers.

Economics - specialisation

I think he's done about 20 of these now. I'll have to sit down and watch a few more.

Un-ugly Fords (for once)

Imagine trying to tune those...

The road home from Griffith runs through Naranderra, and we'd heard about the annual hot rod show that the town puts on. It's a must see event - it's free, there are things for the kids to do (like show rides etc), you can amble around quietly for as long as  you like and there are no crowds getting in the way of the spiffy looking cars. There's also stalls of jams and knick-knacks and pot plants and knitted stuff for the missus to haggle over.

I've owned two cars with twin-carbs. Both were complete bastards to tune properly. Imagine having eight....

Flaming heck!

8 carbies - yep, that sounds right

I wrote about the cycling group that I went for a ride with being mostly male and mostly 40-somethings. The hot rod crowd was fairly similar, except that the men were a bit older, greyer and had more visible tattoos. And they were uglier. I had one eye on the cars and one eye on the crowd, scoping for Cav. However, even he would have been lost in the sea of ugly old blokes.

I just love that interior - and check out the stubbie holder sitting on the shifter.

Is this golliwog black enough for you?

Fords...good looking Fords. I must be dreaming.

Going for a ride in the country

I forgot all about Earth Hour - or Human Achievement Hour as I prefer to call it. I even walked around the house at 9pm that night turning off the lights in unoccupied rooms, since that's what I do every night. Blast - I forgot to raise my carbon footprint that night.

I made up for it over Easter though - I drove 1300km just so that I could go for a bike ride.

Going for a ride in the country is certainly very different to my daily commute. For starters, I got to sleep in - country cyclists get up at a more sensible hour. They don't need to be up at the farting of the sparrows in order to avoid the traffic - because there is no traffic. It was also a lot colder out west than what I'm used to - nearly 10 degrees so, even though I was starting over an hour later than usual. I hadn't thought about that, so I was a bit chilly when we started.

One feature that is exactly the same is this - it's easy to find a cycling group on a weekend  morning to ride with - you just ride around the likely starting points (cafes, pie shops, servos, bakeries, parks) until you see a gaggle of riders, and then you ask if you can join. You might also see a few lone riders riding around - you just tail one of them and see where they end up. More than likely, they're heading for the starting point for a group ride.

Which is how I found my group. They were used to blow ins from every where, getting one or two each week. The make up of the group was pretty typical - 9 out of 10 were blokes, and 9 out of 10 were in the 35-50 age bracket.

The pace was comfortable, and we were soon out of town and riding on a back road - they avoid the highways like the plague. Our choice of routes that morning was limited by the recent flooding - some roads were still badly chopped up by the passing floods, with big washaways still unrepaired. The road we took had a few chunks missing every now and then in the low lying patches, where the passing waters had ripped up bed sized sheets of tarmac and whisked them away.

The only problem was the wind - we spent the first half of the ride pushing into a howler, and it was hard work. There was nothing to hide behind, as in no wind breaks, and the road was flat and straight for miles. I'm used to a route that loops around like a small intestine, so you're never pushing into the wind for long. This was quite different. My legs gave up after about 15 kilometres and I dropped out of the front pack - only to find that most of the group had long done the same - they were spread out on the road behind me for several kilometres.

Although the ride was almost dead straight across completely flat countryside, it was interesting for it's differences. It was jarring see a "watch for kangaroos" sign as we left the edge of town. Kangaroos were the least of our problems - everyone was chatting about the brown snakes they had seen of late, so we were on the lookout for any sunning themselves on the bitumen. We also had to swerve around a few dead animals - the "kangaroo" sign referred to both living and dead. I think we saw 3 cars all up - and I was warned to be careful of them, as they see a lot of drunken drivers on the back roads at that time of the day.

I could do with a few more rides like that - I rarely get into a rhythm in Sydney - it's always stop, start, turn etc etc. You're always accelerating or slowing down. You never get the chance to just lope along on the flat at a good pace (which is why my legs died after a while - they're not used to putting out a constant output over a long period).

The post ride activities were no different either - we stopped at a cafe for a coffee and a yarn, and we yarned for much too long. It was good. I'll have to do this more often.

How to make a Greenie shut up

I'll have to admit that until today, I had no idea how to make a greenie shut up. However, it seems that a sure fire way to do it is to expose them to the wider world.


I'll admit that the only reason I have ever heard of this bloke is via Andrew Bolt. There's not much point in following that link, as Michael Quall has protected his tweets. I'm amazed it took him this long to figure out that if you want to get elected to any office in this country, it's not a good idea to run around calling people "cunts" on a regular basis. Especially in print.


 I didn't get to screen dump his tweets before he protected them, but I can re-type them from my phone:


@cameroncollie you just stuck your flute in your pussy on your own time then?


community development at the end of my fist, anger is a gift.


free speech doesn't mean what you think it means, you stupid, vile, racist, dog whistling cunts


andrew bolt is a vile cunt of a man. I openly condone hunting him down and beating him within an inch of his life. bit.ly/lmi3lk


@witheyesshut CUNT


next cunt to compare 0ne d1rection to the beatles is gunner get a harsh capslocking right in the fucking face #TheProject


@MartinGHodgson christopher hitchens was a deadset cunt. their self-righteous zealotry has no higher moral ground than pell et al.


BWAHAHAHAHAHAH - "@BriggsGE: 'You're like the white biggie smalls' <- every second cunt...I'm Black y'all!"


And those are just some of his tweets from the last day before he protected his Twit-stream. This bloke has 8 kids - I hope he doesn't talk that way in front of them.


Did anyone from the Greens bother to background check this bloke before they endorsed him as a candidate? If they didn't, then I guess that makes them a pretty hopeless bunch of cunts. If they did, and they read through that pile of tripe and didn't ask him to tone it down.....it makes you wonder.


What really makes he laugh is that this bloke was asked to write a blog a while back for my least favourite charity, ActionAid. Just for laughs, here is a screenshot from the ActionAid site today - note the twitter feed over on the right "Saudi woman sentenced to flogging for swearing in text". The irony - it burns.

On a more serious note, let's be thankful that we still have enough freedom of speech in this country to be able to call other people cunts. If this cunt wants to call a cunt a cunt, I'll support him. 


But just be careful not to call him "white" - that might land you in court.

How Gaia must be weeping...

Prior to the GFC, I believed that any wine that cost less than $30 a bottle must have originated in the urinary tract of an equine species. Then a few years ago I found that I could buy plonk from Griffith for six bucks a bottle and feed that to the missus and she'd be happy, supposedly leaving me to drink the $90 a bottle stuff that I bought at post-GFC knock down prices of $30. You'd have to be happy with that. But I had a revelation - I actually liked the stuff that the missus was drinking, so we now visit Griffith several times a year to stock up. My taste in wine changed a bit after getting clobbered by a car - I reckon the taste part of my brain was scrambled when it collided with the concrete. The expensive stuff just doesn't do it for me anymore. What's done is done - and no one weeps any tears when we drink 3 bottles of plonk over dinner. It's not goon by any means - it's just good plonk that doesn't cost a bomb.

The latest sojourn to Griffith coincided with the annual Rice Festival parade in nearby Leeton. I'd never heard of it - we happened upon it by chance when driving towards a Leeton winery that we wanted to try. The only parade we tend to get in Sydney is the Mardi Gras, which I am completely over. From now on, I'm going to make the pilgrimage to Leeton every Easter.

For starters, they had no problems hurling great gouts of CO2 into the atmosphere. There were half a dozen hot air balloon baskets on floats, and the operators spent most of their time trying to melt the plastic decorations criss crossing the street. We were a long way back from the kerb, and I just about had my eyebrows singed off when they let rip in front of us. The crowd loved it. Then again, the crowd (of 10,000) also applauded the weed spraying truck - they don't mind the idea of covering Gaia in chemicals in order to keep the noxious weeds at bay.

There was also a float of very macho moto-cross riders. The kids down the left hand end must have been about 8. I can't think of anything better than tearing up the muddy face of Gaia with a loud, CO2 spewing motor bike. I had to settle for second best - after the parade, we visited an area that was still partly underwater after all the flooding, and I got the 4WD sideways whilst getting out of a patch of clay. Thankfully, the sideways motion didn't finish with the car being wedged up against a fence post.

What's the thing on this float? It's water wheels - the sort of wheels used in the irrigation channels to move water around. Yep - they openly celebrate the capture, storage and use by humans of millions of gallons of water. And unapologetically so. Fancy that. They've been doing it for a hundred years, and they want to do it for another hundred.

Smoke puffing ancient tractors were allowed to drive up the main street without a carbon tax being applied (and these things really did spew out a lot of carbon).

McDonalds had no problems putting up their signage in front of a WWII era war-mongering anti-aircraft gun. And no one had a problem with McDonalds sponsoring an event in a public park. Or eating their food either.

Imagine how mental the hippies will go when they see this 8 year old girl driving a car that's towing a CO2 spewing device. Surely this is a hate crime? The parents will have to be locked up for mentally torturing their daughter with the idea of getting anywhere near such a dangerous device. 

Check out those gouts of flame - 1,2, 3. 

And this old beast burns.....wood. Yes, it eats the Children of Gaia and spits them out as smoke.

Plenty of big rigs were in the parade, and all of them featured young kids yanking on the air horns.....and none of them were restrained by seat belts. Did the cops look worried? Nope. I think I'm going to have to move to this town. Speaking of cops, the whole thing was policed by 2 cops on foot who spent most of their time chatting with the locals. When the parade was over and the crowd left, the streets and footpaths weren't ankle deep in rubbish either. In fact, they were spotless.

Plenty of old muscle cars were proudly on display too - although none of them got to do a burn out.

The crowd even applauded when this monster Gaia-raper was driven past. I missed getting a photo of the tree-lopping truck that went past. 

This beast wasn't able to drive up the street - it sat in neutral on a trailer. However, the crowd loved it every time the driver tickled the throttle. The sweet sound of an unmuffled V8 could be heard several blocks away.


So all up, it was a great parade. And we got a boot load of good, cheap plonk. I even sat through a sermon that endorsed chocolate easter eggs. How good a holiday was that?

Oh no, not you again

Once you start photographing cyclists on a regular basis, it's not long before you start recognising the same people in different places. I overtook this lady three times in one day - once going around The Bay...

...and then again going into the city (I took the low road and she took the  high road, and I was in the CBD afore ye)...

...and then again on the way home that night. I think she's stalking me.

I don't put much effort into taking photos at any time, let alone when on the bike. This bloke was lugging a camera tripod around on his back - he must have been after some special shots.

Pretty spectacular sunset. It actually wasn't all that dark - this was taken with a camera phone, which is a bit more limited than my Ixus.

Ghosts on the bridge....again, the camera phone isn't up to low light conditions.

The wrong trousers

Been way too busy of late to blog. Actually been too busy to perform much more than a cursory perusal of the blogs that I normally read every day. Stuff to do....stuff to do.


Which takes me to a spot of trouser shopping the other day. I am big fan of Paco Underhill's (no, not that Paco) book "Why we buy: The Science of Shopping". As far as "science" goes, it's more believable than most climate "science", his research didn't cost the taxpayer much (if anything) and it's a good yarn.

It's been years since I pulled it off the shelf, and I am too busy to flip through it tonight to extract a few snippets in all their exactitude. What you are about to read is the product of my thoroughly dodgy memory.


His team watched what men and women took into change rooms and then measured what they purchased. Women try on a lot of stuff and don't buy much, whilst men pretty much buy whatever they take into the change room (assuming it fits). When men shop, they are on a mission. They're hunting - they know what they want, and they want to go home with what they set out to buy. 


Like me with my trousers. After discovering that I have been walking around for a while with a hole in the crotch of one pair of my suit trousers, I decided it was time to get some replacements.


After being measured, I was happy to discover that my waist is a bit smaller than when I last went trouser shopping. But there was just one problem - when presented with several pairs of trousers that were the right size for my waist, I found that I couldn't get my legs into them. Years of cycling have turned my legs into tree trunks. Not quite like these, but they're larger than your average office dweller's  leg.

OK, I could get my legs into the trousers that were offered, but I couldn't bend down or sit without risking splitting the seams in all sorts of awkward places. I had to go up a size and then get the waist brought in.

The thing is, even with the leg size problem, the entire transaction was completed in less than 15 minutes. That included trying on 4 pairs of trousers (to get the size right), putting in the pins for the tailoring and then paying for them.


The point of this story? I'm not really sure - but go check out Paco's book. Perhaps the point is that there might be a market for lycra trousers.....