Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

ALP considers tree preservation adverse to people's housing needs The Victorian State Government appears to be seriously considering the idea that it may not be in the best interests of Victorians to have their housing and development planning being determined by environmental activists and conservationists. The Age, the Victorian outpost of Fairfax Media's plantation of green left enabling sheltered workshops, reports today (lid dip to Tim Blair ) that: LAWS governing the clearing of native vegetation are under review as part of the Brumby Government's response to the bushfire crisis. ... Ideas have included transferring responsibility for managing native vegetation in areas zoned for housing from the Department of Sustainability and Environment to the Department of Planning and Community Development....About 2000 homes were destroyed in the bushfire disaster. "We need to make sure that they treat native vegetation differently in areas approved for building," ....

The Great Recession Cage Match Rudd's tactic : Give out cash prizes to the grateful punters. (Hope nobody notices that the cupboard is now bare) Klaus' game plan : Treat it like flu: let it go through. (If you don't cure it, it takes 7 days. If you do, it takes a week) Quick quiz: Which of these is good management and which is good politics? On 19 February 2009 Vaclev Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic (not to be confused with his predecessor , as I have done, Vaclev Havel), addressed the European Parliament (Lid dip to Eric Falkenstein ). Here is the text of his speech . In amongst the many gems in this magnificent speech, which touches on the excessive restrictions on freedom and the absence of true democracy in the European Union, there is this: . ... the present economic system of the EU is a system of a suppressed market, a system of a permanently strengthening centrally controlled economy . Although history has more than clearly proven that this is a dead e...

Was it a case of missing the forest of fuel, for the love of trees; or missing the fire of trees for the forest of global warming? Either way all the spending and commitment of communities and government was worthless because their strategic decisions were wrong. Out of the despair and grief from the ashes of these horrendous fires there may yet be some forgotten wisdom to be re-learned. Over-indulgence in feel-good greenish solutions and an excessive tilt towards fashionable natural rather than human shaped landscape in habitats in semi-rural Victoria, has contributed significantly to the appallingly high loss of life and injury from Victoria's February bushfires . A failure to heed the outcome of numerous previous enquiries after bushfire disasters throughout the 20 th century, nearly all of which have recommended hazard and fuel reduction by regular hazard reduction burning in forests and the clearing of vegetation around settlements, has significantly contributed to the sca...

Dutch parliamentarian banned from entering UK for holding political views about Islam that the UK government thinks will threaten its community harmony. The news out of Britain just keeps getting worse. The Brits just don't seem to get the importance of human freedom anymore. Neither their government nor their media adequately understood quite what was at stake a couple of months ago when the Cabinet Office and the Speaker countenanced the Met's anti-terrorism squad raiding an Opposition immigration spokesman's office in Westminster over leaks of immigration statistics from the Home Office. And this latest outrage confirms that they truly have almost completely lost any sense of the value of freedom for their citizens. The British Secretary of State for the Home Department (you'd think these people spoke English as a second language the way they label their government offices), via the British Embassy in the Netherlands, has advised Geert Wilders , a member of the D...

The New Deal didn't work. Why are we repeating it? Here is a 270 word book review I wrote on Amity Shlaes' provocative recent work on the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression ( Harper Perennial 2008) . I understand that Paul Krugman of the New York Times has got his knickers in a knot about this book, which suggests it might have even more to recommend it than I originally thought. ... . . The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes This is an unexpectedly refreshing account of the Great Depression in the USA. Although this time is still just within living memory for some, this is a most topical refresher on this destructive and instructive era. It is not so much a history, as an interconnecting narrative of personal misadventures and muddles of both the great and the good. Its title is not a reference to any particular person, as you can be forgiven for assuming. It is rather a reference to the recurring theme of “the forgotten man” from the time....