Sexpo 2008...

A few pictures from this, er, fascinating event, forthwith.

Thankfully we also had a few hornbags in attendance of our own, that were somewhat shocked at times on what was on offer.....

Considering the normal saucy things that are purveyed by these fine ladies, we were somewhat amused by their sudden shyness in the presence of so much joyful smut and sexiness.

Just shows that life can still hold some surprises...

More random hornbags from one's wanderings...

Singapore and Indonesia lah!

Good old human interaction, working well with nature again..

Starving bears eat Russian guards
MOSCOW: Bad weather is thwarting efforts to rescue a group of mine workers trapped by hungry bears in Russia's wild far eastern region of Kamchatka.
The bears have already eaten two of the workers.
The bears - apparently starving - killed the men on July 17, it was reported in Russia. As many as 30 bears have surrounded a platinum mine. Both victims worked at the mine as security guards.
About 400 geologists and miners are refusing to return to work, afraid of further attacks. Attempts by local officials to fly to the scene by helicopter and shoot the bears have so far failed because of poor weather, it was reported.
Kamchatka, 12,000 kilometres east of Moscow on Russia's Pacific coast, is one of the world's last great natural wilderness areas. The remote volcanic peninsula is home to the rare Steller's sea eagle, puffins, and brown bears that roam its geysers and snow-covered collapsed volcanoes.
Kamchatka's 12,000-strong bear population is the largest in Eurasia. Recently, however, the bears have faced unprecedented ecological pressures.
Poaching has led to a dramatic decline in the bear's main food source - the Pacific salmon.
Kamchatka is home to a quarter of the world's salmon, but they are disappearing. Poachers have cleaned out entire species by netting rivers.
Last year hunters shot dead at least 300 bears - picking off most of the large ones. At least another 600 were killed illegally, conservationists estimate.
"It's always the bear's fault," said Laura Williams, the director of WWF's Kamchatka office. She said she was seeking further details of the stand-off at the mine amid reports that hunters had been sent in an sports utility vehicle to the region to kill the bears.
About 10 bears have also been seen near the village of Khalino, sniffing fish remains and other garbage.
A village official, Viktor Leushkin, told Itar-Tass that a team of hunters would be sent to shoot or chase away the bears.
"These predators have to be destroyed," he said. "Once they kill a human they will do it again and again."

Siti, a bit of an Indonesian hottie

Yes, it would appear that Siti is well used name in those parts...hearing it mentioned here, and there, whilst grubbing about, one would turn and look for the one we have to come know here in Sydney, and be surprised, by, well, another.This one was encountered with her family in Bogor, and of course put on fine display of cuteness, and tingling in one's netherparts.However, she possessed keen intelligence, perfect English, and is studying to a vet, you know one of them animal doctor type people...That could be a slightly wasted occupation in Indonesia, as wherever there are people, there is a distinct lack of animals.Except for, well, dogs, cats, and rats, all in various states of starvation.This not include the house rat of the infamous backpacker's dive, The Scumbag Vermin, or the Pension Firman to give its real name.The rat in question is exceptionally sleek, and well fed, and delights in taking a shower with unsuspecting western women in the outdoor dunny.Anyway, after, um, all that, here is Siti, forthwith.

More warnings from those, who, well can.

Mainstream debate about global warming has moved on from the question of what needs to be done to when it needs to be done. There is broad agreement that heat-trapping emissions need to be cut. That is prompted by the science. But there is furious argument over when to start doing it. That is an especially tricky one because it's where the science ends and politics and economics take over.
And while science may be imprecise and incomplete, it is usually a better guide than politics, which Ambrose Bierce defined in his 1911 classic The Devil's Dictionary as "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles". And physical science is generally more dependable than economics, the so-called dismal science. As George Bernard Shaw said: "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
Yet these are the disciplines, or perhaps indisciplines, that societies are obliged to work with. So what do they tell us in answering this question - should a country act unilaterally and cut its carbon emissions even if other countries do not?
Modern history gives us two models for weighing the merit of unilateral action in a highly interdependent world.
One is from the world of military strategy and the other is from trade policy. In the case of military strategy, the Cold War posed the question of whether one of the superpowers should start cutting its nuclear arsenal even if the other did not.
The argument in favour of unilateral disarmament said that doing so would break the cycle of confrontation and escalation, ease tensions, save money, and move the superpowers to a better relationship.
But reality showed otherwise. Unilateral disarmament turned out to be the equivalent of surrender. The Soviet Union abandoned the arms race and lost its empire. The lesson here is clear - unilateral action is a bad idea.
In the case of trade, one of the big questions of the last century was whether a country should cut its protective tariffs even if other countries did not.
We shouldn't cut the tariffs on our car industry, for example, unless other countries do. Because if we did lower our protective barriers unilaterally, other countries will flood our market and ruin our industry. To this day, global trade negotiations are based on this concept of reciprocity - I will if you will.
But in the real world, experience showed that it doesn't work that way. Even if other countries keep their protective barriers in place, the country that liberalises its trade reaps big benefits of efficiency and competitiveness. So the experience from trade is that unilateral action is generally a good idea.
How do these examples help us understand whether to start cutting carbon emissions unilaterally?
The eminent economist Ross Garnaut, the man appointed by the Rudd Government to report on the economics of climate change, put it to me this way: "With trade liberalisation, you are going to benefit whatever the rest of the world does. With unilateral disarmament, you open yourself to a security risk, but at least you save money in the national budget.
"With climate change, it's even worse than unilateral disarmament - if you are the only country to move, there is only cost."
If Australia were to impose a significant price on the right to emit carbon and other countries did not, companies here would be put at a disadvantage.
Some, like the electricity companies, are stuck and would have to sit tight and put up with it. But the ones that sell so-called tradeable goods could just take their factories overseas, and their jobs with them.
And if Australia managed to curb its greenhouse emissions as a result, so what? Accounting for all of 1.5 per cent of global carbon output, it would make no discernable difference whatsoever. Australia would have punished itself economically for no good purpose environmentally.
In his report to the Federal Government released last week, Garnaut likens this to the prisoner's dilemma.
Consider: Two people are arrested for a crime. They are questioned separately. Each may give evidence against the other, or say nothing. If both say nothing, both go free for lack of evidence. But if one rats on the other, he goes free and the other is severely punished. If both give evidence, both are severely punished.
Not knowing or trusting what the other may do, the best individual - or local - strategy is to give evidence against your friend. In climate change, this translates into a strategy of allowing other countries to act while you do not. Or as Garnaut puts it: "With climate change, a country can be rewarded for cheating."
But the best overall - or global - strategy for the prisoners is for them to each trust the other and for neither to give evidence. This way, both go free. Or, in climate change terms, for all nations to agree to act at broadly the same time in roughly the same manner.
This was the aspiration that Kevin Rudd voiced at the G8 meeting in Japan this week, urging the developing countries and the developed to act in unison. But the response from China and India starkly revealed that, even with the US signing up to a communiqué that supports the idea of cutting emissions in half by 2050, the two biggest emerging economies are not interested in acting at the moment.

So does that mean Rudd should take Brendan Nelson's advice and not even start the emissions trading scheme he has pledged to begin from 2010?
Rudd's thinking is that he will proceed with the program. How is this good politics? With the Greens and the environmental movement clamouring for more action from Rudd, and the Liberal Party urging less, Rudd will position himself in between these voices of the Left and the Right at what he calls the responsible reforming centre of Australian politics.
The emissions trading system can start off assigning a low price to the right to emit a tonne of carbon. The Government can set out on a gently-sloping upward trajectory of carbon-curbing. This would keep all Australia's options open as international negotiations proceed.
The Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, including firms such as BP, Westpac, Origin Energy and Visy, has urged the Government to act swiftly because "the longer we delay acting, the more expensive it becomes for business and for the wider Australian economy".
Similarly, an impressive group of 1700 US scientists and economists, including six Nobel laureates, has told the US Government that "the longer we wait, the harder and more costly it will be" to curb carbon emissions.
"The most risky thing we can do is nothing," they wrote.
This is true, but, as Garnaut points out, "only if other countries act eventually". And if not, we should forget unilaterally cutting carbon emissions and start unilaterally building seawalls.
Peter Hartcher is the Herald's political editor.

Today's doom for you...Antarctic ice shelf again, update

Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread': European scientists
July 11, 2008 - 3:57AM
New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.
Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.
"Since the connection to the island... helps stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk," it said.
Wilkins Ice Shelf had been stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles), or about the size of Northern Ireland, before it began to retreat in the 1990s.
Since then several large areas have broken away, and two big breakoffs this year left only a narrow ice bridge about 2.7 kilometres (1.7 miles) wide to connect the shelf to Charcot and nearby Latady Island.
The latest images, taken by Envisat's radar, say fractures have now opened up in this bridge and adjacent areas of the plate are disintegrating, creating large icebergs.
Scientists are puzzled and concerned by the event, ESA added.
The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts northward from the white continent towards South America -- has had one of the highest rates of warming anywhere in the world in recent decades.
But this latest stage of the breakup occurred during the Southern Hemisphere's winter, when atmospheric temperatures are at their lowest.
One idea is that warmer water from the Southern Ocean is reaching the underside of the ice shelf and thinning it rapidly from underneath.
"Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years," researcher David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said.
"Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within 30 years. The truth is, it is going more quickly than we guessed."
In the past three decades, six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed completely -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.

Singapore stunnas lah

Singapore hornbag photograpy, can!For wondrous, glamerous and world class, best practice China girls...oh dear...Best one save for one's ticket while still can...Because after carbon emissions trading, one cannot afford....

Australia's harsh reality: adapt or perish

Rivers run dry … the once-thriving Murray River wetlands at Mildura, Victoria. Under Professor Garnaut's worst-case scenario, the rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin could deteriorate to a trickle by 2050. "By 2100, 97 per cent of agricultural production will be lost."
Latest related coverage

AUSTRALIANS must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll, economic loss and the eventual destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the snowfields, Kakadu and the nation's food bowl, the Murray-Darling Basin.
That is the stark ultimatum presented yesterday by Professor Ross Garnaut in the first comprehensive assessment of the impact on the country of climate change.
Arguing that Australia must introduce an emissions trading scheme in 2010 to discourage the use of polluting forms of energy, Professor Garnaut said the more forms of energy encompassed by the scheme, the lower the price rises would be. This included petrol and other transport fuels.
He said the impact on petrol prices would not be as large as that being caused by the present oil shock and argued against compensating motorists at the pump by reducing fuel excise.
Offsetting the price by "a few cents would not destroy the scheme" but "it weakens the message", he said.
His 537-page report, commissioned by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and released yesterday, says: "Climate change is a diabolical policy problem. It is harder than any issue of high importance that has come before our polity in living memory."
He warns that, as well as environmental degradation, taking no action would by the end of the century result in $425 billion being wiped each year from the economy and a reduction in wages of almost 8 per cent.
The report recommends adopting an unconstrained emissions trading scheme from 2010.
This would involve charging high-polluting industries such as coal-fired power stations for each tonne of carbon they emit. They would have to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases and the costs would be passed on to consumers, encouraging them to use less and driving everybody to look for cleaner energy sources.
Professor Garnaut said Australia alone could not have any significant impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions but, unless the developed countries moved first, the polluters in the developing world would not act.
"Any effective remedies lie beyond any act of national will, requiring international co-operation of unprecedented dimension and complexity."
It would be delusional to argue for a delay based on scientific uncertainty and only cost more in the long run.
He criticised the lack of action by the Howard government, saying it should have moved years ago and that Australia had given the US an excuse to do nothing.
The Government will respond on July 16 with a green paper that will indicate for the first time the shape of the scheme it proposes.
The Garnaut report recommends starting the scheme in 2010 but gives an option that would allow a transition to a full scheme in 2013. If there were a transition period, the Kyoto Protocol would define Australia's emissions reduction target and permits would be sold at a low, fixed price. These years would be used to pursue effective international global agreements.
But the Government is unlikely to opt for a delay and will probably start the scheme in 2010, an election year. Sources told the Herald there were ways to soften the immediate impact of the scheme, such as setting a low initial target to reduce carbon emissions. This would result in a low carbon price and only small increases to energy and consumables.
The report warns that current high prices will create political difficulties.
"The emissions trading scheme is likely to be introduced into an environment of recent and perhaps continuing large increases in fuel, electricity and fuel prices - precisely the goods and services whose prices will be affected most by the scheme," it says.
The price increases caused by the scheme will be lower than those being caused by current factors, but consumers will not know what is causing what.
"Households will not be able easily to distinguish between the varying sources of price increases, while agitators against the scheme will be busy spreading disinformation," the report says.
The Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, said the report "makes it absolutely clear that the time for playing short-term political games is over".
She backed Professor Garnaut's recommendation that all the billions to be raised by auctioning permits should be returned as compensation.
"Every cent of revenue that we gain through the introduction of an emissions trading scheme will be invested to ensure we assist families, households and Australian businesses to adjust to the impact of a carbon price," Senator Wong said.
The report recommends half the money should go to those on low incomes through tax cuts or social security payments.
Another 30 per cent would go to industries disadvantaged against unconstrained international competitors, and 20 per cent would be invested in developing and commercialising low-emissions technology.
Professor Garnaut said bipartisan support was essential.
But the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, demanded yesterday it be delayed by at least a year so it was not botched.
He repeated that the impact on petrol prices should be offset by a reduction in petrol excise because "$1.70 a litre is a significant price signal for the average Australian motorist".
"To further increase taxes as a result of climate change policies without some other kind of off-set is something that will be opposed by the Opposition".
Professor Garnaut says that in the next 20 years climate change will affect Australia in familiar ways - longer, drier periods, with city people forced to cope with water rationing and country people worried about the ability of the land to remain productive.
But then it will get much worse, he warns. By 2050 the snowfields will be all but gone and the Great Barrier Reef will barely be hanging on.
By the end of the century the Murray-Darling Basin will have collapsed as a food-producing region and people will be moving away. "By 2100, 97 per cent of agricultural production will be lost."
Professor Garnaut said climate change held a serious threat to tourism. "With unmitigated climate change, on the basis of the mainstream science, we won't have much, if any, of the Great Barrier Reef, of Kakadu, of a number of our great environmental assets that are important attractions for international tourists."