Since the days of Alexander the Great, binge drinking has been a very popular past time - leading to him apparently killing a friend and burning down Persepolis while drunk.

Those are some Great shoes to fill.

Yet, governments, schools and the media have repeatedly tried to teach us of binge drinking's dangers. 

Dartmouth University has taken the lead, instigating a new nationwide policy to curb heavy drinking by their students.

Pour me another glass.

Binge drinking is defined as "the consumption of five or more drinks in a row by men — or four or more drinks in a row by women — at least once in the previous 2 weeks. Heavy binge drinking includes three or more such episodes in 2 weeks."

Seems I don't know anyone who isn't a heavy binge drinker.

Do you think this definition should be changed or should we change people's attitudes? Or should you follow HPD's no fools guide to drinking a lot but not dying?  . . read more

A sober website is doing the rounds, listing "100 items to disappear first", starting with generators, water purifiers, portable toilets, 'seasoned firewood', thermal underwear & garbage bags . The futurist paperback of the moment is Cormac McCarthy's, The Road, an eco tear jerker of tremendous power, which some of my friends are too scared to read, although it is a plausible and, yes! - empowering scenario. Meanwhile, politicians look to corporates for solutions, which is like begging Satan to design the Garden of Eden.

The future may not be easy or pretty. It cannot be outsourced. It can only be insourced. It will need poets & gardeners & scientists with soul. It will need camaraderie. It is too late to whistle in the dark.  . . read more

In the past few years, thousands of new large hydroelectric dam projects around the world have been announced or are in the planning and early construction phases. Hydroelectric energy has been adopted by the world’s nations as an appropriate strategy to combat global climate change and offset predicted water shortages. Over a thousand large dam projects have been announced in China. Every river on both sides of the Himalaya will be modified in some way...

Map out where dams are planned or being built. Add an overlay of biodiversity hot spots. Add another overlay of cultural diversity, where the worlds remaining indigenous groups and ethnic minorities reside. And, then, add a final overlay of known and as yet undeveloped mineral and energy reserves. You will see a dismaying convergence. The proposed and planned dams will generate a lot of hydroelectricity allowing the extraction and processing of gold, nickel, copper, silver, uranium, oil shale, and other critical resources, and providing the power to transform the water molecule, thus creating hydrogen fuels for the cars of the future. And it will most assuredly threaten, if not wipe out, a huge portion of the world’s remaining cultural and biodiversity. [More] . . read more

Everything now hinges on stopping coal. Whether we prevent runaway climate change largely depends on whether we keep using the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Unless we either leave it - or the carbon dioxide it produces - in the ground, human development will start spiralling backwards. The more coal is burnt, the smaller are our chances of future comfort and prosperity. The industrial revolution has gone into reverse.

It is not because of polar bears that I will be joining the climate camp outside the coal plant at Kingsnorth. It is not because of butterflies or frogs or penguins or rainforests, much as I love them all. It is because everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for - food, clean water, shelter, security - is jeopardised by climate change. Those who claim to identify a conflict between environmentalism and humanitarianism have either failed to read the science or have refused to understand it. [More]

He gave us in An Inconvenient Truth a melee of graphs based on sound scientific data; the affect of which was amazing in bringing the issue of climate change to the homes and cinemas of the middle-classes. 

However in a worrying change of tone, Al Gore stated yesterday in a speech in Copenhagen that:

''Reason based analysis has thus far proved of limited value in motivating action''

Now this may be true but the alternative- to rely on emotion and fear- plays right into the hands of deniers who claim the climate change movement is one built on unlikely doomsday prophecies. 

The risk is also enormous when you consider what has happened to the climategate emails. Those much analysed documents seemed to show a similar reasoning by renowned scientists who were frustrated by inaction so they used their credibility, and reputations to fuzz the numbers. 

Now it may have been a throw away comment, but I really hope that Al Gore- still the climate change movement's most prominent face- stays patient and prudent.  . . read more

The spectre of the thought police pulling down Bill Henson’s show in Sydney is now followed by the red necked council of Camden in Sydney’s south rejecting the creation of a 1200 student Islamic school ‘based on concerns surrounding the impact on traffic flows, loss of agricultural land, highlighted in the planners report and not on religious grounds.’ Oh yeh!

Our hopes for a more progressive Australia following the heinous Howard regime have been seriously dented in just 5 days. Where is the leadership promised by the Australia 2020 summit? It is certainly absent from the mealy-mouthed Front Bench.

Attention now shifts ironically to the Opposition where shadow treasurer Malcolm Turnbull is the lone progressive voice in a sea of mediocrity. He has the guts to point out the precious nature of our artistic freedoms which are being sorely pressed by political ratbags and the citizens of Middle Earth.  . . read more

By Sean Maguire

From your grey-to-change citizen of ambivalence, to your hug a tree hippie- the last few weeks have been depressing for Australian environmentalists of every hue.

Last night with the release of Rudd's third Budget their concerns seem amplified.

The CPRS has been shelved till 2012, $238 million has been cut from the Department of Climate Change and local projects such as Landcare have lost millions from their budgets. 

So as pundits praise Rudd's prudency and restraint remember that he's pushing back the changes that will soon be inevitable and making them all the more impossible to achieve.

There are few people in this world who would defend Gaddafi as a sane and viable leader of Libya; but I think there would be even less that would see the logic in the U.S selling guns to someone as psychotic as him and then parading about as world police.

It's the equivalent of a sheriff giving an outlaw a six-shooter and then acting surprised when he starts popping off the town folk. 

The second one U.S plane gets shot down by one U.S surface-to-air missile, all the military big wigs should get together and make a decision once and for all - "we have to stop shooting at tyrants we've given guns to".

What do you think about Libya? What do you think about the obvious contradictions in U.S foreign policy and how do you think they should be addressed? Tell us and remember...Disqus!  . . read more