In a world first, the Pacific island of Palau has banned sunscreen containing chemicals that are "incredibly toxic" to its coral reefs.

Key points:

• The ban covers ingredients found in sunscreen which can be toxic to wildlife species, including corals
• The legislation is part of a much wider attempt by the Government to protect its environment
• Palau has already banned chemical sunscreens from Jellyfish Lake, a popular tourist destination 

The legislation to ban certain sunscreens and skin-care products came into effect on January 1 and is part of Palau's new Responsible Tourism Education Act.

Stores selling prohibited sunscreen could face fines of up to US$1,000 ($1,387), and bottles will be confiscated from tourists upon entry into the country.

The legislation is part of a much wider attempt by the Government to protect its environment, particularly from tourists.

It follows on the heels of Hawaii, which in May last year became the first US state to ban the sale of sunscreens which include two ingredients that have a damaging effect on coral reefs.

President Tommy Remengesau said the move was to ensure visitors and tourists "become part of the solution to the environmental challenges in our pristine paradise," according to the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) website.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-02/palau-bans-coral-reef-toxic-sunsc...

This Sunday in the Terrorgraph, La Madam Credlin was going on about not paying the fireys... In the long run this silly woman, to whom we owe Turdy Abbott and his trap full of onions, thinks that dying in a firey truck burnt to a crisp is the stuff volunteers do for love not money... Apparently Ausslielundsen (our Orstraya) is world renowned as a land of volunteers. Paying these volunteers would muck up this "image".... I guess this would include those sheep herders and deluded young guns who went to fight in the devious Boer War, without knowing what Rhodes' deception was afoot. 

 

But no. The silly woman should actually give up all her moneys given to her by her vicious denialist employers, such as Uncle Rupe. She should then go to a fire brigade under the command of her silly fare, Turdy Abbut, and fight fires on the moon.

 

Now this is what her stupid headline says:

 

 

Her thumbs down was reserved for those valiant people who expose global warming to her annoyed little brains:

 

 

No-one disputes that lightning strikes and arson can start bushfires. The question of fuel-load is iffy as during winter, the weather was rarely suitable to do long burn-offs. Some of these burn-offs went wild and destroyed more stuff than nor burning anything. And some of the other burn-offs did not save the forests that are burning now. In Queensland some of the rain forests have not been touched by fire in 5 million years and yet this summer they burned.... Why? 

The answer is scientific, but La madam Discreditable does not want to know, as she tries to reverse her dumbness onto the Greens and the likes... This is viciously ignorant. As well she will use the most unscientific records of heat to prove her erroneous understanding. This is uncalled for. The point is that global warming has created a longer drought(s) than usual, more heat (1.52 record on top of long term average) than usual, and possibly more westerly winds... These conditions, with the severe lack of rain, have been the real setting for the exceptional fire season. And as the following years come and go, the situation will not generally improve, in between respites...

 

And what are the numbers in the Paris agreement? At this stage, Australianumbnumb is nowhere near these numbers which I suspect are those demanding reduction of CO2 emissions. Someone like UnCredlined should be sent to prison, for peddling falsehoods that will kill people. 

 

Throw Credlin out... and read from top.

Murdoch’s myrmidons have been exploiting climate denialism for so long, they’ve become trapped by it. Having mounted the denialist tiger to take down Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader and the federal Labor government, they dare not dismount.

And ride a tiger long enough – it’s 10 years since then-senator Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott used climate change scepticism to roll Malcolm Turnbull as Opposition Leader and officially weaponise climate policy – it’s unsurprising to start believing it’s the natural thing to do. It’s the nature of echo chambers to be self-reinforcing.

The tragedy of the Murdoch echo chamber is that it has come to ensnare its readership as well as its editors. Coalition members and voters are the core of that readership

Tell a lie long enough and loud enough, many people will believe it. The ABC’s Media Watch last year demonstrated the point.

 

Read more/see more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/01/02/michael-pascoe-murdoch-climate/?

 

 

Read from top.

Penrith is currently the hottest place on earth and is sweltering through the hottest ever day recorded in Greater Sydney.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) recorded a reading of 48.9C at 3pm, smashing the previous record of 47.3C set in January 2018.

BoM recorded a high of 47.7C in the city at 2pm. It surpasses the previous high of 47.3C which was set on January 7, 2018.

The sweltering heat, which is forecast to last several hours, comes as the Western Sydney community at the foot of the Blue Mountains is on high alert over the potential fire risk in today’s state of emergency.

 

Read more:

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/penrith-press/penrith-hits-record-temperature-of-485c-as-heatwave-strikes-nsw/news-story

 

 

Note: As a gesture of goodwill, the Murdoch press (media) has removed the "pay"wall on all stories about the bushfires in Australia. Thank you. Now two things, for you to consider, Rupert (I met you in the 1980s — oh boy we were still young-ish then):

 

a) Global warming is real and anthropogenic.

 

b) the world awaits you to say the words: "Freedom for Julian Assange!"... and many of your dark secret sins will be forgiven...

 

See also:

 

science is brutal... and of the birth of fake news and of the seasons...

"We see that, to arrive at the solution of these two questions, it was first necessary to know well the analysis and the nature of the body likely to ferment, and the products of fermentation; because nothing is created, neither in the operations of art, nor in those of nature, and we can posit in principle that, in any operation, there is an equal quantity of matter before and after the operation ; that the quality and quantity of the principles is the same, and that there are only changes, modifications…”

                                                                                          Antoine Lavoisier.


This has been extrapolated to “nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed…”

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier forever changed the practice and concepts of chemistry by forging a new series of laboratory analyses that would bring order to the chaotic centuries of Greek philosophy and medieval alchemy. Lavoisier’s work in framing the principles of modern chemistry led future generations to regard him as a founder of the science.

———————————

Science became brutal. It rebutted thousands of years of metaphysical, philosophical and godly wanderings, though some clever Greeks had their fingers on the pulse of reality before Lavoisier:

A fundamental tenet of Eleatic theory is that what-is-not cannot be. Phew. I was working on my next act for “Australia’s got talent” which involved doing the impossible once more. So, Parmenides, argued that coming-to-be and passing-away are therefore ruled out, because genuine coming-to-be is change from what-is-not to what-is, while destruction is change from what-is to what-is-not. Thus, says Parmenides, what-is is without start or stop, since coming to be and passing away have wandered very far away, and true trust drove them out. Anaxagoras accepts this principle, explaining apparent generation and destruction by replacing them with mixture and separation of ingredients.

Now I know why it is so hard to make some of the French sauces :

The Greeks do not think correctly about coming-to-be and passing-away; for no thing comes to be or passes away, but is mixed together and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they would be correct to call coming-to-be being mixed together and passing-away being dissociated.

What seems to us to be generation of new entities or destruction of old ones is not that at all. Rather, things that appear to us to be born, to grow, and to die, are merely arrangements and re-arrangements of more basic ingredients. The sauce has curdled. Bugger.

But such arrangements and re-arrangements can have their problems. A explained by the shit-pumping island cacas-flare philosophus, on 29 December, 2019, Piers Akerman : “… each of these entities operate in a tiny echo chamber in which they agree to agree with each other and permit no alternate commentators…”

Thus everyone stay on their respective shore, with no change possible. This would chagrin a scientific Lavoisier no end, and would be funny should Piers not choose his own silly season's ablutions to bash yet again the ABC. 

“...it is not ours, although we pay the taxes which provide the salaries and maintenance of this huge monolithic bureaucratic misinformation machine…”

Excuse me. The greatest misinformation machine on the planet is of course the Murdoch empire of which the master philosophus inepta, Piers, is a tiny cog thereof, operating in a microscopic echo chamber in which he agrees to agree with himself and permits no alternate commentators… He’s white, you’re black. Global warming is an illusion brought to you by the communists who have thus transformed the bushes into smoke, by using the Greenies.

Meanwhile, we must acknowledge that the ABC is trying very hard to be neutral in the cut-throat turd-polishing business.

So, we cannot pass Claire Harvey, for looking at herself in the mirror… and who terminates her own Murdoch rant, the last for 2019, with “See you in 2020 with great hair and hopefully, guns to match.”… Did she mean “buns”? 

Who knows, as usual, she floats from NYE resolution to resolution like a dippy butterfly looking for nectar — choosing a cabbage family rocket puny dead bloom to expose her own failures. 

Yes, the Daily Terrograph isn’t a repository for philosophical discourse. Nor is there an ounce of scientific knowledge oozing from the pages — but plenty of support for ignorant vandals, from Borice Johnson to our own Morice Scuttleson. We cannot expect more than this... 

I should not laugh but I will.

So what is the future of us, when we get assaulted by such Murdoch drivel?

It’s a question of privileges and who will be allowed to rob everyone else with impune exclusivity. Sorry, this Gus exposé is slowly sinking into a meditative sewer. Can I rescue my line of thoughts? It all started when looking at Aristotle and the three-act play. Then Anaxagoras raised his head above the fray…


Signposting in a tragedy. 

Trump would have had to get advice in his decision to "murder the Iranian General". How did this advice come to him and who advised him and who advised the advisors? Though it could be said that this was the epitome of Trump's capriciousness, there is more to this and there is often a follow up to that, in the play of life, which is the basis for Aristotle three act play — in tragedies, and comedies alike. In this, there is what's called “signposting”, a subtle indication early in the piece, on where the play (film or story, comedy and tragedies) is going to go for some of the characters. 

One such signposting is often seen in Dad’s Army, this brilliant little show that had some small twitching tragedy included. Signposting is evident for those who know the trick. Some idea will be mentioned early but not used till the end or such. You would have been forewarned, yet your surprise doubles when you get the gist. Ah, I see!

————————
A History of Three-Act Structure...

Posted by Teacher Lanouette on Monday, December 24th, 2012 

[This article was originally written in December, 1999.]

Incredible as it may seem, back in the early 1980s when I studied screenwriting in Columbia’s Graduate Film Program, my classmates and I had no textbooks. Our teacher Frank Daniel, a Czechoslovak refugee from communism who had studied with Pudovkin and Eisenstein in Moscow, would give us titles of playwriting manuals to read. But most of those books were out of print and hard to find. So we faithfully attended class, took lots of notes and hung on his every word.

Clearly, all that has changed. Rather than a dearth, we now have too many screenwriting manuals fiercely competing to make a definitive statement as they present a confounding variety of techniques and terminology. Remarkably, though, among all this disagreement, there does exist a consistency on one point–the acceptance of the division into three acts as the fundamental structural model for the creation of screen drama. While the terms used can differ greatly, the basic shape of setup (Act I), development (Act II) and climax and resolution (Act III) remains the same.

However, despite this resounding consensus, there is a notable lack of interest in the historical precedents for this dramatic form, with the exception of an occasional reference to Aristotle’s theories, which are invariably misrepresented. This neglect of the past creates some misleading impressions, specifically that, first, the division into three acts is solely a screenwriting phenomenon and, second, that it was developed only recently by screenwriters themselves. Unfortunately, both of these perceptions are counterproductive to the further development of screenwriting as an art form.

That three-act structure might be peculiar to screenwriting alone suggests a static, self-contained form, allowing the unimaginative writer to follow its parameters in a limited and literal way. One who can see that three-act structure has evolved throughout drama history can also see that what is practiced now is, still, only a contemporary understanding. Likely, three-act structure will continue to evolve. The more contemporary screenwriters are aware that they are working at a point in time on a larger historical continuum, the freer they will be to push that point forward.
Read more:
https://www.screentakes.com/an-evolutionary-study-of-the-three-act-struc...


In real life, there is a lot of boring bits in between the elements of our drama. We condense. Hitchcock prefered the classic trick of not showing the kill, but to alude to it before and after. Theses days, many movies are boring as shit because they indulge, in an ugly competition with each others, in showing the gory bits, with blood oozing from bodies, in order to shock. All this does is numb the senses and debase the brain away from its higher intellectual philosophical function. Sure we might be horrified, but not really. We do not think, nor even react, as we accept the painless blows to us, as if they were in another world. This is why many war games are stupid, yet addictive, and why many veterans of wars kill themselves, unless they can find the recompensial cherry for having killed the “enemy” — a cherry like a scrap of food given to a trained dog for chasing seagulls and other scavengers, at the Gallery. Rather than being a skill to shoot, it becomes a burden when we are shot and maimed, including psychologically damaged. The birds are getting their revenge… 

The bush is burning and we now feel the heat...

Thus like Hitler waiving a finger to crowds, The Trumpidiot holds court with a bellicose twittering finger. “If you take revenge, our revenge will be 51 times far worse…” This is Infantilism that has led the world since the year dot, under the pseudo-guidance of a vengeful god, on whatever side He (god is a male) chose to be. You fucken idiots…

In our improved days and ages, we do not invade anymore. We destroy — you. End of story… or is it?

The play does not stop here. We are left in suspense as to who will do what next. Who will be the worst idiot? We do not have kings and rulers, but psychopaths running the roosts. So the tragedy never ends, even if our play fritters.

And there is a lot of conflicting signposting… We get confused… and we worry the next won’t be pretty. It never is… Thus we come back to "coming-to-be and passing-away; for no thing comes to be or passes away, but is mixed together and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they would be correct to call coming-to-be being mixed together and passing-away being dissociated".

And the Donald will do more silly things, applauded by the Murdoch scribes whose mind will never change… This is the only certainty.

GL

Read from top.

See also:
official assassinations...

Australia's bushfire emergency is being exploited on social media, as misinformation is spread through cyberspace via hundreds of thousands of posts.

Key points:

• Bushfires attracting high number of "bot-like and troll-like accounts"
• Twitter users using arrest figures to downplay climate change warnings
• Misinformation can "spread wildly, much like bushfires can"

 

Out-of-date photos of survivors and inaccurate fire maps have been widely shared, including by international celebrities.

.........

"Given the nature of misinformation, it can spread wildly, much like bushfire can," she said.

"Some information has measurable facts in it and other information has value-laden judgments, and you can't necessarily check information that has people's values."

Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook allow users to flag potentially misleading or false content.

In general, experts recommend using trusted media outlets, checking multiple sources and avoiding sharing content without a clear attribution.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-being-spread...

 

Read from top.

----------------

"In general, experts recommend using trusted media outlets"?... As explained in this line of articles and comments, the Murdoch media isn't to be trusted, as well... The views of the Murdoch chief opinionators should be carefully flushed down the toilet.

A senior News Corp employee has accused the company of “misinformation” and diverting attention from climate change during the bushfire crisis in an explosive all-staff email addressed to executive chairman Michael Miller.

The email accuses News Corp papers, including the Australian, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, of misrepresenting facts and spreading misinformation to focus on arson as the cause of the bushfires, rather than climate change.

The email was sent by Emily Townsend, a commercial finance manager at News Corp, in response to an all-staff email from Miller detailing the leave arrangements available to staff and announcing other bushfire-related initiatives.

“This does not offset the impact News Corp reporting has had over the last few weeks,” Townsend wrote. “I have been severely impacted by the coverage of News Corp publications in relation to the fires, in particular the misinformation campaign that has tried to divert attention away from the real issue which is climate change to rather focus on arson (including misrepresenting facts).

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jan/10/news-corp-employee-climate...

 

Read from top.

 

See also:

when the fox and his minions are solely responsible for global warming...

Rupert Murdoch’s son has strongly criticised his family’s news outlets for downplaying the impact of the climate crisis, as bushfires continue to burn in Australia.

James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, issued a rare joint statement directly criticising his father’s businesses for their “ongoing denial” on the issue, which has been reflected in the family’s newspapers repeatedly casting doubt on the link between the climate emergency and the bushfires.

“Kathryn and James’s views on climate are well-established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well-known,” a spokesperson for the couple said, confirming a report in the Daily Beast. “They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.”

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jan/14/james-murdoch-criticises-f...

 

Read from top.

 

See also:

when the fox and his minions are solely responsible for global warming...