The red tape protest has started
James Loring in Tasmania has had a great idea to support Peter Spencer. He took something known as “flagging tape”, added a scarecrow, and a slow moving sheep and created this message for the world to see.
The scarecrow struggles against the clauses, enactments and forms of parliamentary legislation known as red tape. Rarely does an eye catching protest fit the theme as aptly as this.
Once this becomes known as a protest against overbearing, complex, self-defeating government rules it will catch on. “Red-tape” your letter box, your fence posts, your trees and your dog*. Tell the world, the government and our laws should serve us, not strangle us.
Please send in photos of your creative displays to me (joanne At joannenova.com.au). I will post as many as I can. (Images that are 600 px wide in gif or jpg format would be ideal. 
)
Who sells Flagging tape?
Forestry workers use it, and industrial suppliers like J Blackwood may have it. It’s about $2-4 dollars a roll, and I have a feeling that there will suddenly be all kinds of red-tape displays all around Australia.
As I get details I’ll update this page with information on where you can get this type of tape. Here are a few I googled.
Prospectors Earth Sciences sell red tape for $2.99 a roll. They sell tapes with messages like “Riparian Management Zone”, “Killer Tree” and “Escape Route” which conjure up tempting ideas, but better stick to Red!
Forestry Tools sells tapes for $4 ea / $2.75 They’re environmentally friendly lasting up to two years before they degrade. Here’s hoping we won’t need them to last that long.
The Agmates Page the idea was born on.
*Making sure no harm comes to any animals in the creation or testing of this product.
I put up TWO posts at once, so if you’re interested in the Peter Spencer story there’s real news here.
The short killer summary: The Skeptics Handbook. The most deadly point: The Missing Hot Spot.
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Posted on
January 7th, 2010 under
Global Warming • Tags: Peter Spencer, Red Tape Protest.
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January 7th, 2010 at 4:59 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vt Conservative, ClimateGate_RT. ClimateGate_RT said: JoNova: The Red Tape Protest has started http://bit.ly/5FoFL8 #climategate [...]
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January 7th, 2010 at 7:00 am
[...] Red tape on green policies. The watermelons at work again! [...]
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January 7th, 2010 at 7:10 am
[...] first saw this post and picture on Joanne Nova’s site . Although this is a Global Warming Protest which was staged and first appeared in Tasmania, [...]
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January 7th, 2010 at 7:17 am
google shows the following bbc excerpt for this URL, but go there now and the alaska line has been ‘disappeared’. funny how google managed to show ONLY this excerpt in the first place, though!
Severe weather continues to grip the UK and cause havoc
BBC News – 2 hours ago
However, while parts of the world suffer freezing temperatures, the seesaw patterns mean other areas are warmer than usual, including Alaska..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8444399.stm
i realise this is not current temp, & december stats may not be released as yet, BUT
Alaska – November
Temperatures in November were lower than normal across the mainland. Bethel and Nome both reported 8.5°F below the average mean temperature for November, followed by King Salmon (6.1°F), Fairbanks (3.3°F) and Anchorage (0.8°F) below the mean for November. The only exception to this was Barrow and Big Delta which were 1.5°F and 0.4°F above normal respectively. Juneau and Ketchikan, along with the rest of the southeast, were slightly warmer than normal for the month; Juneau was 1.7°F above normal and Ketchikan only 0.3°F above normal.
McGrath recorded a record low temperature of -38 on the 20th, surpassing the old low by 3°F. King Salmon recorded three consecutive record low temperatures this month on the 17th, 18th, and 19th, of -20°F, -8°F and -12°F; the previous records were -12°F, -7°F, and -11°F respectively. Kodiak observed a record low on the 17th of 15°F, the old record being 16°F. Valdez also had a new record low temperature on the 20th of 8°F, the old record was 9°F…
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/Summary/current_sum.html
the alaska excerpt shows up on this google news page in the grouping third down:
Severe weather continues to grip the UK and cause havoc
BBC News – 2 hours ago
However, while parts of the world suffer freezing temperatures, the seesaw patterns mean other areas are warmer than usual, including Alaska, …
Video: UK shivers under thick snowy blanket ITN NEWS
Freezing weather brings chaos to Britain Times of Malta
all 1,037 news articles »
http://news.google.com/news?q=alaska%20temperatures&rls=com.microsoft:en-au:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7DAAU_en-GB&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wn
so out of 1,000-plus stories, google manages to excerpt only the alaska bit!!!!
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January 7th, 2010 at 7:19 am
to be fair, must add i was doing a search for alaska temperatures when i came across the news grouping on google, but that changes nothing.
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January 7th, 2010 at 7:53 am
Did anyone notice how many Google results appeared for ‘climategate’ soon after the news broke?
I recall the number growing rapidly to about 32 million entries, but now there are less than 4 million…
I used to think conspiracy theorists were nutters.
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January 7th, 2010 at 8:27 am
I recall there being over 50 million
Also notice when I search climate related issues – especially skeptical ones the amount of searches returned keeps diminishing
eg southern hemisphere cooling – used to link to stories, graphs etc – they are all out there and now you get virtually nothing
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January 7th, 2010 at 9:06 am
I use Bing. Not because of the systematic climategate blackout at google, although that helped, but because Bing has a new picture on their homepage every day.
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January 7th, 2010 at 10:11 am
G’day Joanne,
Thanks for promoting the Agmates wrapped in red tape campaign against over regulation ruining ordinary Australians lives.
The Rudd governments proposed CPRS is just a huge new tax and huge bureaucracy making the over regulation at Federal, State and Local Government levels much worse than it is now.
This campaign is the idea of Tasmanian farmer James Loring and is another member inspired social justice campaign launched by the Agmates community.
Thank you for helping to spread the word and we hope that your readers will join in this simple but effective protest.
Cheers Steve
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January 7th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Send rolls of red tape to Rudd and his cronies!
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January 7th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
The U.S. has had a pretty effective “pink slip” campaign going for awhile.
might look into combinations?
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January 7th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Where does sovereignty fit in to this issue? My understanding is that land issues, such as clearing etc fall into the NSW State Govt. area. If the State Govt was willing to stand up for itself, it would say to Peter Spencer, you go right ahead and clear the land. If the federal govt wanted to stop NSW clearing land, NSW would demand compensation and pay something on down to farmers. This is so obvious that I conclude that the stopping the clearing by the NSW govt. has other objectives. The involvement of any Federal politicians of any stripe on other than humanitarian issues is irrelevant.
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January 7th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
LoL…. That is a wonderful picturescape with the scarecrow, the sheep and the red tape…. Very natty.
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January 7th, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Hi Joanne…
I just came across this website, Climategate.com, which I’m thinking you might be interested in. Some very interesting news articles, etc.
Didn’t see it on your sidebar list.
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January 7th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
John @ 6,
and global warming comes in at about 37mil.
Climategate was catching warming, we can’t have that now can we?
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January 8th, 2010 at 2:21 am
I wonder if James’s elected Senator, Christine Milne, would endorse James’s creative protest?
Ha ha
Seriously though, Christine Milne made her mark as “protester.” That’s how she gained fame! – or became a familiar name, at any rate.
James in Tasmania, however, finds himself on the wrong side of Senator Milne’s sentiments.
That probably makes James a “loudmouth” or “bully” in the Government’s eyes.
Tasmanian residents deserve better than Christine Milne.
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January 8th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Bing has 50mil references for climategate. Google 3.7mil.
What’s goin’ on?
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January 9th, 2010 at 2:59 am
Nick,
As a guess — I don’t know for sure — Google does a literal search on your query. Bing supposedly applies some “intelligence” to your query, which may account for the difference.
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January 9th, 2010 at 7:06 am
You guys should understand that those numbers that show up in google are estimates based on a statistically efficient but strictly imperfect indexing system. Once there are more than a million hits on a given topic, then search engine knows perfectly well that no one is going to thumb through a million items so it never actually checks them all, most of the computational effort goes into pruning the list back to the most relevant items.
For example, when searching for “climategate”:
Results 1 – 10 of about 5,280,000 for climategate
Then thumb some pages deeper:
Results 521 – 530 of about 27,000,000 for climategate
Results 701 – 710 of about 3,810,000 for climategate
That’s the last page in the stuff that a “normal” search would bother collecting, a total of 740 items. But they index knows perfectly well there are millions of items — only 740 are considered important enough to actually get looked at by the algorithm.
If you force it to go as deep as possible, you get down to:
Results 991 – 1000 of about 3,780,000 for climategate
Note that the query time gets bigger and bigger for the deep search so google don’t let you go past 1000 items to prevent their servers getting trashed by a single massive query.
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January 9th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Ummm…people? Why is this whole “woot this million results” thing important? Shouldn’t we be discussing the actual issue, not some random search engine that has little bearing on the real world? Its only electrons, after all.
I personally think the red tape thing is brilliant.
Time to ship a dozen crates of it to that Obamanation we have for president. Or wish that I could even get my hands on it.
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January 9th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Tel and Saint,
I think that sorts that
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January 12th, 2010 at 7:23 am
Hmmm, Peter Spencer’s story reminds me of two great Aussie movies: The Castle and The Bank.
I think that resemblance could — and should — be used to good effect by journalists!
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January 13th, 2010 at 10:58 am
Test message. Please ignore.
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