Jacqui’s grandmother passed away a couple of weeks ago. She was 94, and her passing was both peaceful and expected. Jacqui had enough warning to be able to fly up to Ballina, where her grandmother was in a nursing home, and say her goodbyes

The following week the family flew up for the funeral service, and we decided that after the funeral we would all rent an apartment and stay in Lennox Head for the weekend together. It was the perfect antidote to the sorrow of the preceding week.

Here are the photos.

If you’re pissing Cheney off you must be on the right track.

The former Vice President Dick Cheney today sharply criticised President Barack Obama’s handling of terrorism policy and defended harsh interrogation methods that Obama has labeled torture.

Obama moves to quell Guantanamo fears In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on the same day Obama defended his approach to terrorism, Cheney said Obama’s decision to ban tough tactics “is unwise in the extreme.”

“It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe,” said Cheney, long viewed as a leading hawk in the Bush administration.

And what’s with the ‘Obama has labelled torture’ crap? It’s been determined by the courts that waterboarding is torture, and you can bet your last dollar/pound/euro that if it was an American on the receiving end it would be labelled as torture.

The report into historical child abuse in Irish schools run by the Catholic Church was released yesterday in Dublin. It found that abuse, both physical and sexual, was widespread, with sexual abuse “endemic” in Christian Brothers schools.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” it said.

Children in industrial schools and reformatories were treated more like convicts and slaves than people with human rights, it said. Rape was particularly common in boys homes and industrial schools run by the Christian Brothers.

While all this was going on, the Catholic Church knowingly protected paedophiles from prosecution, so they were clearly aware of the problem and chose to sweep it under the carpet. I think it says a lot about a religion when its senior members condone the sexual abuse of minors.

Sure, Catholics may claim that the Church never approved of this sort of thing, but if they knew it was happening, was being perpetrated by people over whom they had authority, and they chose not to punish those involved, then that’s condoning the behaviour. It’s as simple as that.

After the revelations of systematic clerical abuse, Pope Benedict was challenged to hold a Vatican inquiry into the role of Catholic religious orders in Ireland’s orphanages and industrial schools. Irish Soca said it was now up to the Vatican to investigate the scandal further.

Kelly said: “Now that the Ryan commission is finished we call upon Pope Benedict to convene a special consistory court to fully investigate the activities of Catholic religious orders in Ireland.

Yeah, good luck with that.

On Saturday, after relaxing on the couch for the day, by 4pm I was starting to get a bit bored and looking for something to do. I remember that, while running in Centennial Park at dawn or dusk, I’d often thought to myself that I should show up with a camera some time, so I figured I’d head down and take some shots.

Bloody traffic was terrible, so I got down there a bit later than I would have liked and was a bit rushed trying to get around to a few different places before the sun went down, but I still got a couple of nice shots.

The Giro d’Italia started on Saturday, and as is usual now, SBS is covering it. However, since the Giro is not as popular as the Tour, they’re not doing live coverage of every stage, instead providing a 15min stage summary in the morning (Sydney time - so a couple of hours after the stage finished in Italy), and a longer, half hour summary in the evening.

However, Tom mentioned in an email last week that he has bought himself a SlingBox and rigged it up to his Sky TV setup box back in Ireland. He provided me with the details to log into it and try it out, whereupon I discovered that he has Eurosport, and, as it turns out, Eurosport cover most of the cycling season.

So now, I can log into Tom’s set-top box in Ireland, get it to record the Giro stages live, and then log in when I get up in the morning and watch the day’s stage! Pretty cool. It works well, and the video quality is pretty good. Isn’t technology wonderful :)

Freedom continues to be eroded.

Internet service providers are to keep records of emails and online phone calls under controversial new government regulations that come into force today.

ISPs will be legally obliged to store details of emails and internet telephony for 12 months as a potential tool to aid criminal investigations. Although the content of emails and calls will not be held, ISPs will be asked to record the date, time, duration and recipients of online communications.

The new regulations are contained in an EC directive on data retention that already applies to telecoms providers and is now being extended to ISPs.

People would be up in arms if the UK Government decided to just allocate them each a policeman to follow you around and record all details of your everyday life, yet with laws like these and the prevalence of CCTV cameras, that’s essentially what’s happening.

It seems we continue to be our own worst enemies and the powers that be seem determined to do Bin Laden’s dirty work for him. The G20 have been meeting in the UK this week, and as is usual at these things, people protest. Given the current economic climate, who could blame them really.

Yes, there are always a few idiots determined to cause violence, but the majority of protesters don’t cause any trouble and are just exercising their democratic rights. In the UK in particular, those rights are slowly disappearing. After the protest was finished yesterday, everyone was herded, and coralled and detained against their will for up to eight hours. Once the police finally decided to let them leave, they were required to provide their name, address and have their photos taken. I think it’s a pretty sad reflection of our times, and a complete abuse of power.

This is a strategy called the “kettle”, which sees protesters herded into an area and kept there for hours. Its stated aim is to contain a protest in a small area so it does not spread.

It was justified by the former assistant commissioner (special operations) at the Met, Andy Hayman, in an article in the Times earlier this week.

“Tactics to herd the crowd into a pen … have been criticised before, yet the police will not want groups spilintering away from the crowd,” he wrote.

The containment was backed up at the Bank, first with mounted police and then with police dogs. As people were eventually allowed to leave at about 8pm, they were funnelled out down a narrow exit with a police officer grabbing them by the arm as though they were under arrest, again regardless of age or demeanour.

One officer, asked why people were not allowed to leave under their own steam, replied: “They might fall over.”

People were then asked for their name and address and required to have a photograph taken. They are not obliged to do so under the law, but those who refused were put back in the pen.

Hot on the heels of that are details of the new eBorders scheme, in which the UK police intend keeping a database of every journey on public transport within the UK!

The records of the movements of 60 million domestic passengers will be kept by the police and, if current trends are anything to go by, used for much more than counter-terrorism operations. Not content with introducing what will in effect be an exit visa – you must supply more than 50 pieces of information before you leave the country or will not be able to travel – the government is now erecting internal borders.

A Home Office spokesman confirmed to Lewis the measures would “require passengers to show photo ID, such as a driving licence or the (proposed) government ID cards, when booking tickets for domestic air and sea journeys”.

A fundamental tenet of testing for performance-enhancing drugs in sports is that an athlete can expect to be tested at any time, at any place, without warning. To enable this, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has the ‘whereabouts rule’. This rule states that those athletes on its target list, which in swimming’s case means the Top 50 in the world in each event, must keep WADA informed of where they’ll be for at least one hour each day. In practice, this means that the athlete will enter this data three months in advance, and then can change details via SMS, fax etc. according to circumstances. If a tester shows up to where the athlete has said they’ll be, and they’re nor there, it counts as a missed test. Three missed tests and you’re banned.

Now FIFA signed up to WADA’s anti-doping code ages ago, but they’re now complaining that the whereabouts rule shouldn’t apply to footballers, and that footballers should be treated differently to athletes in other sports.

The Guardian wonders why FIFA expects to be treated differently and mentions the results from a recent French study.

The answer, I believe, lies in the findings of a study carried by a French anti-doping agency, which tested hair samples from 138 professional athletes, including 32 footballers. (Unlike urine samples, where evidence of steroid use is “washed out” within days, hair samples can retain traces of drugs much longer.) The results — published in France last week but completely ignored in this country — revealed that seven players (21.8%) tested “positive” for some form of banned drug, a far greater proportion than that found in sports such as rugby and, ahem, cycling. It is a bad day indeed for football when it places higher in the league table of drug use than professional cycling, although, in fairness, there are reasons to be cautious about the French study.Most obviously, it took place only in France, which may or may not have a different culture of drug use than other European countries. Hair sample testing has no legal status in France, or anywhere else for that matter, and the identities of those who tested positive will never be revealed.

Rolling Stone has an excellent article covering the disaster that is the global finanical crisis (GFC), detailing both how it derailed AIG and also how the bailout procedures are also little more than a Wall Street power grab.

This cozy arrangement [TARP] created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven’t received any funds, they haven’t even gotten a call back about their applications.

“There’s definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not,” says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. “They’re not giving out subprime loans or easy credit,” says Wheeless. “At the community level, it’s much more bread-and-butter banking.”

Nonetheless, the lion’s share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called “systemically important” banks. “It’s like Treasury is picking winners and losers,” says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

The more I read the more gob-smacked I am that no-one bothered to put a stop to it before things got out of hand. You can bet all the bankers at the heart of the dealings knew that they were selling rubbish, but since they were making billions they were never going to stop, and it appears that the regulators just weren’t interested in regulating.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

“But wait a minute,” you say to them. “No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?”

But before you even finish saying that, they’re rolling their eyes, because You Don’t Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they’re on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

That sums it up about right. These idiots should be committing harikari, not being rewarded with multi-million dollar bonuses.

NASA’s Scientific Visualisation Studio has some cool information on their site, but two ones I found today were of particular interest.

The first is an animation based on the output of the best of our current climate models, showing what would have happened if we had not enacted the Montréal Protocol banning the emission of CFCs into the atmosphere. The period covered includes actual data collected since 1978 and modelled data from 2009 forward to 2065, showing a side-by-side view of what is happening on the left, and what would have happened without the treaty on the right. Have a look here.

The second animation show the changing extend of Arctic sea ice based on actual satellite observations since 1979. It’s frightening how much it has changed in the last 30 years. That animation can be viewed here.