It must be one hell of a mutt because the rear end at :42 looks like merele rear end (Queensland or Australian Sheppard) but the head at 1:14 totally looks like a German Shepard. The one defense I would have for it being a Queensland or Australian Sheppard is that it would totally fit the personality.

>> ^visionep:
1:14 -- German Shepard

Of course it's in Queensland, lol.

That would be a tree kangaroo, they're far cuter than the ordinary type. They come from PNG, or far north Queensland in Australia.

>> ^ghark:
Fracking is coming in a huge way to Queensland, it looks like earthjustice.org is focused only on the fracking in the states unfortunately.


Wish we had proper legislation against this. We don't need it in Australia.

It isn't like the gas is going anywhere until we find a better and safer solution to extract the gas too. As it has been shown, this stuff gets more exensive the longer you wait anyway.

Fracking is coming in a huge way to Queensland, it looks like earthjustice.org is focused only on the fracking in the states unfortunately.

@RedSky That'd be quite some trek But obviously worth it, I mean it's Melbourne, a place of wonder and delight. We'll have to make it a real 'sample the delights of Melbourne' type of affair at this rate. All you foreigners (Yeah, I classify Queenslanders as foreigners )

The revolution will not be televised.

By the way, I was at a special corporate evening last night and the main speaker was an oil CEO. They found huge gas seam reserves here in Queensland and there are plans to drill tens of thousands of wells over the next few decades to extract it. So we got propoganda fed to us for nearly 30 minutes, about how it was Queenslands future, and it was unavoidable. Watch "gaslands" the movie documentary if you don't know how badly fracking fucks up the environment and the people living nearby.

All this so a few offshore companies can make fortunes on the back of our own ruin, the biggest irony is that the gas isn't even going to be used in Australia, it's all getting shipped overseas, so our local gas prices are going to increase due to the huge amounts of it needed to run the extraction operations.

So god damn sickening.

When I first heard about this, I thought 'only in America'. Then I found out the same thing is going down in Queensland, Australia. The environmental impacts on groundwater are completely unknown, and yet more and more bores go down. It's madness.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I was playing to the Americans. Like Paul Hogan - putting another shrimp on the barbie.

>> ^kymbos:

"Cantaloupe"? You do realise that in Queensland, if someone catches you saying that word they can legally bash you with a rockmelon? Oh, and happy birthday, you mincing pimp.

"Cantaloupe"? You do realise that in Queensland, if someone catches you saying that word they can legally bash you with a rockmelon? Oh, and happy birthday, you mincing pimp.

@GeeSussFreeK

I didn't say GDP, I said GDP per capita. Both Finland and the US have roughly the same GDP per capita.

My assertion is that crimes are more likely to be committed by criminals who are empowered by guns. Suicide has nothing to do with this and that's why I didn't address it.

Murder rates are the only universally comparable measure when you consider various violent offenses are classified differently and with varying degrees of tolerance in difference countries.

I think it would hardly be a stretch to assert that guns allow criminals and delinquents to dish out far more death per violent incident - being a reason why crime is average/above average, but murder (especially by firearms) is astronomical.

Either way, I want to address murder singlehandedly as I think it's certainly still an important (and far less finnicky) topic to argue in and of itself, not crime generally.

Crimes again are classified and reported to varying degrees in different countries.

Again, I want to point out that my argument isn't about gun legislation but about gun ownership rates. I have no doubt that if you were to ban guns immediately in one state, there'll not be a chasm of a decline in gun murder rates. Arguments that look at gun laws ignore the blatant fact that US borders are very porous as far as I understand, and that even then, gun laws take years, decades perhaps to have meaningful effects on ownership rates and as a result, general availability at above minimal cost to criminals. Looking at the wikipedia page for California's gun laws, the only meaningful law I see is a 2005 ban in San Fransisco on all firearms and ammunition. Something like this would take at least a decade to have any meaningful effect though, I'm sure I would agree with you here when I say that smuggling guns into simply a city of all places (not a country with customs, or even a state) and selling them on the black market would hardly be difficult - where surrounding areas have no such ban.

I agree that no legislation will prevent a determined terrorist or capable individual from inflicting massive damage if nuclear weapons were readily available and manufactured in large amounts in one area of the world. A concerted and enforced gun ban on the other hand (with restrictions for hunting in some areas, target shooting, and potentially eased laws for protection in remote areas with low police presence) would do a great deal to reduce availability and reduce the incidence of gun murder by petty criminals which makes up the majority of gun deaths in the US.

Take for example our legislation in Australia. There's nothing exceptional about it, I'm just most familiar with it:

"State laws govern the possession and use of firearms in Australia. These laws were largely aligned under the 1996 National Agreement on Firearms. Anyone wishing to possess or use a firearm must have a Firearms Licence and, with some exceptions, be over the age of 18. Owners must have secure storage for their firearms.

Before someone can buy a firearm, he or she must obtain a Permit To Acquire. The first permit has a mandatory 28-day delay before it is first issued. In some states (e.g. Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales), this is waived for second and subsequent firearms of the same class. For each firearm a "Genuine Reason" must be given, relating to pest control, hunting, target shooting, or collecting. Self-defense is not accepted as a reason for issuing a licence, even though it may be legal under certain circumstances to use a legally held firearm for self-defense.[2]

Each firearm in Australia must be registered to the owner by serial number. Some states allow an owner to store or borrow another person's registered firearm of the same category."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia

There is a very good reason why this has led to a 5.2% ownership rate among citizens and a murder rate by guns of between 29% and 19% that of the US per capita depending on which numbers you use from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

If you want to come back to saying that people simply murder in different ways, then look at purely the murder rate - the number goes up just slightly to 35% (the rate of murder per capita in Australia of that in the US).

Gun laws aren't punishment. Just like nuclear weapon bans aren't punishment. Or Sarin Gas bans. They're good policy.

Just like making everyone buy basic health insurance to reduce risk among consumers and lower prices, where the poorest are subsidised. If you insist on using analogies, I think this compares incredibly well to a gun ban which makes allowance for recreation and hunting (and at least in my view, allowances of 'for protection' licenses in remote areas with limited quantity and strict restriction to avoid smuggling).

Just like the compulsory third party car insurance we have here, that ensures that if you are at fault and damage another car, the innocent party is guaranteed to have their car repaired.

What I hope you understand coming from a libertarian position (and this is repeating the first thing I said in this whole discussion to blankfist) is that libertarianism is not a flat and universal position on individual rights. You, just like anyone I would imagine, have limits to how far you go with individual rights. You recognize the validity of a system of laws to limit the impact of one's individual's actions on another, and the retribution they should receive for violating it. You simply draw the metaphorical line on rights further right on the ideological spectrum than I do.

Therefore you can't simply justify gun ownership by claiming individual rights and the notion that everyone's entitled to them as they are not presumed guilty. You have to consider whether it does harm in society or not, just like the rest of us.

I hope I've laid out a pretty convincing arguments based on the statistics (speculative of course, I have neither the time nor resources to do a rigorous analysis controlling for a multitude of variables) that gun ownership does lead to more (gun) murders. If we were taking about a 10-20% difference, sure it would be debatable, but we're talking about a 2 to 3 fold increase. Let's not kid around about what causes this.

If you think that individual rights are so incredibly important that they trump this palpably gargantuan increase in death (and suffering) then that is certainly a position you can take, but let's be honest about this if that's the position you want to take.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't think they are. I think the opportunities for self defense, the willingness to use a gun of most people, the willingness of normal and ration people to risk death for losing their property are small. The sheer empowerment and impetus a gun (easily available from a nearby store at a price anyone can pay) can give a criminal on the other hand is huge.

---

Just a quick recap on things I didn't cover.

If you want to demonstrate guns are less devastating than drugs then kindly provide data to support this. If you are referencing the drug war or even if you are not, this is totally irrelevant to the question I posed to you.

Comparing guns to drugs and referencing the opium war is just not a good analogy. Colonialism. Colonialism. Colonialism.

Yes cars kill people, so do airplanes. So do pretzels. In fact, just about everything kills people (although yes car accidents are far more significant than pretzels). We do have a plethora of legislation that increases car safety. Guns are of course unique in that supposedly (if you would believe people in the US), more guns and LESS gun legislation protects you from the more guns you now have and so on. Let's look at this objectionably just as I compared the benefits to defenders versus aggressors for gun ownership. Cars provide an obvious benefit and are fundamental to commerce and modern life (unlike guns 99.9% of the time for private defenders of civil liberty). More legislation and safety requirements can obviously reduce death rates. To me it seems pretty obvious how to proceed here.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'toowoomba, flood, australia' to 'toowoomba, flood, australia, queensland' - edited by spoco2

Tags for this video have been changed from 'flooding, flood, brisbane' to 'flooding, flood, brisbane, queensland' - edited by spoco2

You think snakes are the worst part?
Think again - Delta Crocodiles!



Muthafucking crocs the size of a boat!
>> ^spoco2:

On top of this insane demonstration of power and speed that the floods have shown today, this flood has been going since the new year, and has flooded an area larger than France and Germany.
Oh, and Queensland has a lot of our really deadly snakes, and so they are sort of... In the water. hundreds of them.
So, yeah, Snakes in the Motherf cking Floods man!

On top of this insane demonstration of power and speed that the floods have shown today, this flood has been going since the new year, and has flooded an area larger than France and Germany.

Oh, and Queensland has a lot of our really deadly snakes, and so they are sort of... In the water. hundreds of them.

So, yeah, Snakes in the Motherf*cking Floods man!