Ah, a beautiful coal mine. Liberal politicians love things like this because they keep the gold flowing in.

The Liberal senator Ian Macdonald has said children are being “brainwashed” by education campaigns urging Australians to take action on climate change, describing the political debate about how to tackle it as “puerile”.

“The children of Australia have been brainwashed into thinking if you turn off a light in Australia, somehow that is going to stop climate change,” the Queensland senator told parliament on Wednesday.

“This is a puerile debate in its extreme. We have to bring some sense into the debate.”

Because Australia emits less than 1.2% of the world’s carbon, considering an emissions trading scheme was “nonsensical,” he said, adding that “few serious countries” outside of the EU were implementing such schemes.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics places the country’s emissions as closer to 1.5%. According to the Climate Institute, Australia is the largest per capita emitter in the industrialised world.

Macdonald said he did not deny the climate was changing. “As I repeatedly say, Australia was once covered in ice,” he said. “Of course the climate changes.”

But he challenged the theory that humans were contributing to this. “This new theory, I refer to it often as a fad or a farce or a hoax, that suddenly since man started the industrial age, a change of climate has happened is just farcical and fanciful.” [The Guardian]

Yep, that’s the guy who said he hadn’t actually read the report on refugees by the Human Rights Commission, but he knew it was rubbish.

The IQ test for membership of the Liberal Party: Q. What is IQ?

They all have shares in coal mines, oil companies and shale oil miners. They receive large monetary contributions (read that how you like) from these companies. See the revelations coming out of Queensland.

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I bought my first 4K monitor today. I’ve been thinking about it for a year or so and waiting for the prices to fall.

What’s triggered it is that I’m trying to compose my books in Photobook, using 10pt text, and I’m finding it too small to read properly on screen. If the program allowed easy magnification it might be OK, but it’s slow to do it.

As well, ever since I changed to my current computer, I’ve been using a 19″ Acer monitor at its native 1920×1080 resolution. It looks good, but it makes text quite small. My eyesight is not as good now, so I’m having trouble reading the screen.

So today, I bought an Acer 27″ 4K monitor for $537. It has 3840×2160 resolution. That should fix things. Naturally I researched it and I’ve got a new AMD graphics card with a Display Port connection to drive it.

I haven’t connected it up yet – tomorrow.

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The Guardian ran an item today asking for stories about good and bad bosses. Naturally, there are far more bad stories than good.

I started writing and found I could hardly stop. The period from 1989 to when I finally took the redundancy and left in 1999 was the decadus horribilus of my life. Unbelievably poor management. Awful stress. Literally drove me to the brink.

I found I’d exceeded their 5000 word limit without even getting close to finishing, so I had to heavily prune my story, but I’ve saved it and will tell the full story here asap. Stay tuned. It’s an amazing, awful but true story.

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Here we go again:

As published. The tilt is 2.8deg!

Horizon corrected. Why don’t they do this before printing?