The police follow & harass the group, exposing these individuals to behaviour that would be abhorred if it was directed at any other individual or group in the community.

The police want more powers to deal with the criminal element inside these gangs but we will be forced to sacrifice more civil liberties for all in order to provide those additional powers. Liberties do not come without a cost. Sometimes the cost is accepting that certain individuals &/or groups will find ways to control arbitrage situations associated with banned activities/behaviour/psycoactives.

There is always a ‘grey space’ that connects law enforcement and the bad guys. Take a look in the 'grey space' these two groups share.

• The wearing of patches & badges
• Initiation/passing out ceremonies’
• Ability to project power & control
• Desire for control
• Association with negative events including violence and death

 

There is currently a global high speed rail explosion with many first world countries expanding or developing high speed rail networks.

This week, the Chinese government awarded a $4 billion contract to build 80 high speed (236 mph maximum) electric train sets for the new 3,700-mile-long high speed train network it is building. Half of the contract went to Bombardier Sifang, a Chinese joint venture with Berlin-based rail giant Bombardier Transportation. The company will begin delivering the trains in 2012 and finish by 2014— boom, done.

Russia is taking the plunge into high speed rail as well, spending nearly $1.5 billion to upgrade 401 miles of track between Moscow and downtown St. Petersburg, and buy eight electric Sapsan trains made by German conglomerate Siemens (ETR: SIE) with a top operating speed of 217 mph. Four runs a day will make the trip in less than four hours, compared with an average five hours to make the trip by airplane, including the time wasted getting to and from the airport and running the check-in and security gauntlets.

France already has the wonderful 200 mph high speed TGV network, with 1,100 miles of track, more than 400 trains, and the third-highest ranking of rail passengers per year, behind Switzerland and Japan.

Perhaps the population in WA does not warrant a high speed rail network just yet but as we expand our population along the coast between Kununurra and Albany we should expect to see a high speed rail network emerge as the longest single high speed rail network on the planet. The potential for powering the network with clean energy sources such as solar, wind, wave & geothermal is a reality too.

 

 

The Australian and New Zealand governments have agreed to join forces to bid for the A$2.5 billion (NZ$3.1 billion) international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The formal arrangement will be signed by New Zealand’s Economic Development Minister Gerry Brownlee and the Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, at the Australia-New Zealand Leadership Forum in Sydney this morning.

The SKA is a large-scale, new-generation radio-telescope that will be by far the most powerful of its type in the world, with a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than current instruments. The SKA will see up to four thousand antennas spread over a five thousand kilometre baseline to create a single deep space listening device.

 The telescope – able to see back to the formation of the first stars – is one of the world’s most significant mega-science projects – on a par with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. Australia and New Zealand are one of the two shortlisted sites – the other is in Southern Africa. If the array is constructed it will be constructed in Western Austalia. Read more about SKA

The future of electric cars got a nice boost last week when the French government announced that it would spend about $2.2 billion to create a network of battery charging stations for electric cars. One million charging stations will be built under the plan by 2015, with 90% of them in private homes and the rest in parking lots and other sites. Additionally, all apartment buildings with parking lots will be required to install the charging stations after 2012, and all office parking lots must install them by 2015. This should result in a total of four million charging points by 2020. The new charging network will support France's goal of putting two million electric and hybrid cars on the road by 2020. Currently, the country has only a few thousand such vehicles. To jump-start their deployment, the government will give carmaker Renault €125 million to develop of a new battery manufacturing plant and a €150 million loan to build an electric car factory. Another €100 million will be made available for other electric carmakers. Fleet orders for electric vehicles are expected to reach 100,000 units by 2015.

Western Australia has one of the lowest population densities on the planet as well as one of the longest sparsely populated coastlines. The last couple of centuries have seen a steady migration of people from all corners of the planet into the most attractive locations particularly Perth.

Coastal living has always been highly valued, particularly where there has been access to fresh water at points where rivers merge with the ocean and where the sea has provided bountiful supplies of sea food. With a particularly dry climate, the expansion of populations along the West Australian coast has been limited.

With falling solar energy costs and more sophisticated desalination systems there is every reason to believe that human populations will spread out all along the WA coast line.