The case against carbon trading - but is it a fair assessment?

It seems the debate over carbon trading just won’t stay out of the headlines at the moment. The opposition party in Australia - in their usual blatant political opportunism - have decided this week to unveil an alternative climate change policy to carbon trading. However, in spite of calling carbon trading “a great big fat tax”, they have yet to specify how their own policy will be funded - and even worse, it will basically mean business as usual for big polluters anyway. So it’s basically a climate change policy for those who don’t believe in climate change, and for those who think profits for big business should always take precedence over everything else. They want to appear as though they are doing something without actually doing anything useful, while incurring costs to the consumer and pretending it won’t cost them anything. This is hardly surprising, given their present leadership. Read the rest of this entry »

This just a quick post to let everyone know that my private web cam service is finally beginning at midday today (Australian Eastern Standard Time)! After feedback from my fans, we’ve decided to use Skype exclusively for my web cams and chat, to allow for everything from simple text and audio chat, all the way to two way video chat. I hope this unique new service will have been worth the wait!

Oh yes: I’ve also extended my working hours to start two hours earlier, which I hope will be helpful to those of you in a different time zone - which I’d say accounts for almost all of my fans, actually.

It seems my previous post has turned into a pretty heated discussion as to the merits or otherwise of carbon trading, so seeing as you want to talk about this issue, I thought I should devote a post to it, and move that discussion here (as it is off-topic for that thread). Although I am very certain we should take action on climate change, I am not sure whether carbon trading is the best way to go about it or not. I can certainly see enormous potential benefits to it (especially for the third world), but it is also very complex, and potentially susceptible to corruption and excessive bureaucracy. Anyway, as I’m not sure where I stand, let’s have everybody’s opinions so I can make up my mind.

As to whether carbon trading is a conspiracy or not, I will be devoting a future post to our peculiar willingness to believe in conspiracies, which I suspect is related to our tendency to believe in God. I certainly do not think action on climate change generally is a conspiracy though, as it is very much against the short term interests (in other words, short-sighted greed) of big business. After all, they have always opposed it in the past - and with very good reason, as it hurts their short term profits.

No, I’m not talking about the cricket - I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand how anyone could watch a game that goes for five days without slipping into a boredom induced coma. I’m referring to the continued attacks on Indian students in Melbourne (I’m happy to say that this isn’t happening in the part of Australia I live in), the news of which has been a very sad reflection on Australia in the international media. The Victorian police and the Australian government have both tried to deny that there is a racist element to these attacks, but while that may have been true when there were only a few of them, there have been so many now that I think a racist motive must be undeniable to any reasonable person. I don’t believe Australia is a racist country, but like every other country on earth, there are certainly still plenty of racists here. And neither the police nor the government will be able to do much about them while they bury their heads in the sand and pretend they don’t exist.

Indeed, the government and the Australian media seem to have taken to blaming the Indian media for stirring up this problem. Once again, there was originally some truth to this, and I’m sure it did amplify the hatred of the racists behind these attacks. But that doesn’t even come close to being an excuse for these attacks, which really have been happening (and they are continuing to happen, with the result that one Indian man has now been murdered, and another doused and set alight). This is totally and utterly inexcusable, and it has been going on for far too long now. The recent cartoon in the Indian media portraying the Victorian police as the Ku Klux Klan was certainly over the top, but I can understand how they feel - why is it taking so long for the Victorian police to get any leads on these attacks, when they’ve been going on for so long now? It just doesn’t seem to make any sense.

The Australian government and the Victorian police need to stop trying to deny the obvious racist element to these attacks - and trying to blame the Indian media for them - so they can take serious action to stop these terrible crimes. If nothing else, our huge foreign student industry depends on it.

I am now available to take bookings for my new phone chat service - web cams and live performance are coming very soon! I’m hoping that I will eventually be able to do this full time, which will free me up to start doing photos again, and allow me to completely devote myself to my internet activities. This will also allow me to do my own promotion for my books, so that I can finally self publish them. If you have any suggestions for improvements to my new services, please tell me here or via email.

Happy new year to all my readers and fans! Indeed, I hope it will be a very happy one, as I have an exciting announcement to make: our “secret project” will finally be going live on Monday January 4!

In keeping with my image as the thinking man’s glamour model, we bring you something absolutely unique: the thinking man’s (and woman’s) private web cam and phone chat service! This isn’t the usual “show us your pussy” type of adult web cam or phone chat - this is your chance to talk to a beautiful and intelligent woman about whatever you like, while I wear whatever you like (including nothing at all). While we can of course talk about sex (and I’m certainly very capable of that!), we can also talk about relationships, dealing with sexual suppression, health and beauty, psychology, religion, politics, and many other interesting topics. Optionally, I can also perform for you, including yoga, playing piano, singing (in English, Mandarin Chinese or Japanese), striptease and belly dance!

We will initially be starting with phone chat only, then we will roll out web cam and live performance over the next month or so. We will be using our own infrastructure for all of this, so we thought it would be wise to release it in stages, so we can make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.

Okay, yes I know I posted this video last Christmas, but it’s just so damn funny that I had to post it again! Besides, I thought some of my newer readers may have missed it when I posted it last time. A word of warning though: this video may be highly offensive to Christians of delicate sensibilities.

Speaking of Christians, I’ve been starting to receive emails letting me know that not all Christians are extremists who want to force their beliefs on other people. Well of course I do know that: if all Christians practised the sort of modern, progressive and - above all - peaceful and tolerant outlook advocated by such people as Bishop John Shelby Spong, then I wouldn’t feel any need to write about Christianity at all. But sadly, we know that isn’t the case, especially in the US, where fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise. And many moderate Christians make apologies for such people, instead of attacking them head on as the threat to the future of humanity (and indeed Christianity) they are.

So having said that, I would like to wish a merry Christmas to all my more progressive and tolerant Christian readers and fans, and a happy holidays to all!

After looking as though no deal might be struck at all, a last minute agreement has been reached at the Copenhagen summit on global change. Although the deal is disappointing, as Obama says, it is only the beginning, not the end, and in my opinion far better than no deal at all. At least now we have something to build on - as Australia’s leading campaigner on climate change Tim Flannery has said, I think we have to accept the political realities, and accept this deal as a positive outcome overall. Read the rest of this entry »

Outspoken atheists like myself obviously spend a lot of time debunking the so-called ‘evidence’ for the existence of God, but it often seems to me that evidence is largely irrelevant to theists. Their beliefs are based on a need to believe in God for emotional reasons, and there are many. I’ve talked about some of these before (fear of death, fear of the unknown, the need for a “higher justice” etc.), but there’s one very big one that I haven’t tackled directly yet: morality. It seems that a big reason a lot of theists feel they have to believe in God is that without him, humans would have no morality.

Let’s begin with their most often cited ‘evidence’ for this idea, the great tyrants of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il etc. These people were supposed to have been atheists, yet they are responsible for the greatest acts of genocide in the last 100 years. Surely this must prove that - whatever problems religion might have - atheism is actually far worse? As a matter of fact, it doesn’t prove that at all - indeed, when we look at the evidence more closely, it actually leads us to the opposite conclusion. For a start (unlike the countless examples of people killed in the name of God), none of these people committed any of their atrocities in the name of atheism. They committed them in the name of Nazism, Communism etc., which tells us what is actually going on here. These were in fact new religions - the only reason these tyrants denounced other religions is so that they could become Gods themselves. It is noteworthy that communism spread far more effectively in the east than it did in the west, and I think there are two key reasons for this. One is that the oriental countries have basically always accepted the idea of their king, emperor etc. being an earthly God, so it wasn’t really anything new to accept their communist leader as one. The other reason of course is that full democracy was already well established in the west, which naturally leads the people of those countries to question their leaders, and not blindly follow them. Which leads to my next point. Read the rest of this entry »

With Obama’s announcement of a 30,000 strong troop surge in Afghanistan, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look back on the so-called “war on terror”, and how well it has been prosecuted by both US administrations involved (Bush and Obama). Although I’ve always been of the opinion that the war in Afghanistan was probably a losing battle, given that the US and its allies are already there, I guess it makes sense to try and “finish the job” with a massive troop surge. It is different from the situation in Iraq, in as much as Afghanistan actually was a haven for terrorists, and likely will be again should the Taliban regain control of the country. Importantly though, there must be some kind of deadline for when the US and its allies pull out, regardless of whether the surge is successful or not. Obama’s timeline of a staged pull-out starting in 18 months seems reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »