So right now as I type this, we've got this big wet thing hovering over Sydney. It flooded South East Queensland, submerged Lismore, traveled down the coast spreading its nurturing-but-destructive rain. The Premier Domicron Perrottet said it was a once in a thousand year rain and you have to ask yourself just what kind of luck puts you in such a meteorological miracle.... unless it's not miraculous but entirely man-made through the inconvenient truth of Global Warming? After all if all those ice sheets melted in Antarctica, where exactly was all that water going to go?
If you have a long memory you might recall there were once-in-a-hundred-year flood in the 2000s. Some years later there were floods exactly like it, and people started asking that maybe this was something else. And really that was 11 years ago and I'm writing the same old thing. No growth here - but partly, there's really been not enough movement on the discourse in comparison to the growing threat posed by Global Warming.
Our politicians are largely garbage. Both sides are gormless skanks for ink and votes but hardly heroic or visionary. As such we have nothing to be thankful for when they some times do the right thing. Even the lauded on the left like Julia Gillard promised she wouldn't do anything about Global Warming as her one election campaign. The rightist government that replaced that Labor government has been busy nailing down the coffin that used to be our future. What have we as a people to be grateful for when our houses wash away or burn down in mega fires caused by Global Warming? What exactly should our gratitude look like ink light of our crappy politicians?
Anyway... It's been a weird summer of most entirely rainy days with a few sunny days spotted in-between ten day stretches of rain. The longest such stretch I could think of was back in 1985 when Sydney rained for 40 days straight but it's not like it rained like that for the rest of that year. Of course, this year's rain is the La Nina effect where we get the rain that normally falls in South America. As such, Chile correspondingly has a drought. I bet they're hating every minute of it.
All of this reminds us of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' where the town of Macondo suffers a drought for decades, and then this is followed up with non-stop rain for decades. What was once magic realism and hyperbole in fiction is now a permanent state of reality.
There has been little transparency over the funds, the Per Capita report commissioned by GetUp found, with some allegedly delivered based on political opportunity over community need. Report author Matt Lloyd-Cape noted there were few checks on how state governments spent the allocated funds.
"We spent around three months tracking down data for this project, when really the government should be ensuring that the general public, and more importantly bushfire survivors, know exactly what is happening with the funds allocated to the recovery," Mr Lloyd Cape said.
Only 42 per cent of the $565 million emergency payments have been paid to communities burned out by the fires. A year on, too many families are still waiting for support, says GetUp national director Paul Oosting.
"Scott Morrison must explain to the families still living in tents and caravans, a year after losing their homes, his government's painstakingly slow response," Mr Oosting said.
"There is clear evidence of multiple process failures to allocate funds directly to survivors."
I don't know if it's a conservative person thing to suspect everybody who comes to the government for money is somehow a freeloader to be despised or some shonky charlatan. It's something I noticed way back when I would go to try and get funding for projects, and the government would put up form after form to be filled and then deflect your request int a bottomless pit of other requests that were not met. Even this business of getting a vaccination certificate from MyGov is fraught with this kind of going around in circles of links across umpteen webpages. This government knows how to frustrate people in such a way as to deny them their needs.
The desire for small government is such that it makes it nearly impossible to pin the government down on its responsibilities - but it's happy to chase you around for yours. Heck they chase people around for imaginary debts with robocalls. It's enough to drive people to the areas of conspiracist nut jobs.
And it's proud of it too, this government. Which is pretty freaking awful.
Anyway, I really feel for the people who are now in the second year after their houses burned down, still trying to get some help from the government. It's pretty fucking shameful is what it is. You would not want to be in their shoes.
I'm still bummed about just how many animals lost their lives in the Black Summer bushfires.
I've tried a few times to come at it here but I end up writing ever more of the same kind of denunciation of the current government. It's hard to denounce tis government in new ways given that the way in which they are profoundly so fucked is so singular. At a certain point we have to swallow our discontent and reservations and say it is what it is.
Still, I can't help but wonder if I had any control over the events; and about the only control I had was to vote against this government who had basically jettisoned any idea of proper emissions control back in 2014. I've voted against theme every time, and still they kept winning the hearts and minds of arseholes who think emissions control shouldn't happen or should cost them nothing. A lot of them claim to be patriots which is laughable because how could you claim to love this land if you're willing to let whole ecosystems go up in smoke? Those people have no credibility. We should be incredulous.
And still they are in power, letting bad shit happen and claiming not to "hold the hose". It's that kind of hands-off-the-wheel impression this government gives off about anything to do with Global Warming that gets my goat. If they had listened to the professional advice, they would have acted accordingly and put some money aside for the necessary equipment and labour for the fire season ahead. Instead they cut those budgets and spent it on pork barrelling sports rorts instead. After they won their 'miraculous' election (pardon me while I go vomit), they were bewildered to find they still held office and had pressing responsibilities.
It's not that the fires came from nowhere - the government was warned by experts. For them to pretend that things were out of control because this was all 'acts fo God' was ridiculous to the extreme. On some level we can say we brought this on ourselves for having voted in this mendacious government. Except the animals that perished in the fires didn't get a vote - They for one didn't vote for this shitty government. They didn't ask for this mess. What happened to them was totally tragic.
I've written this before. I thought the 1990s were great. It was great in the wake of the end of the Cold War and many things seemed possible. Movies were fun, rock was resurgent, new things were going on in music, books were fun and interesting. It was like a flowering of ideas after a very long repression. I used to wonder how is this beautiful era going to end? I guess we found out with two things. The first was the election of Dubya, aka George W Bush as President. It was a cliff hanger that went to the supreme court and somehow the Republican lawyers wrested the outcome from Al Gore. It was the moment the Republicans allowed themselves to overtly break the rules and law to have their way. It would turn out to be an appetiser for the kind of shenanigans to follow.
The second thing was 9/11. After the Twin Towers came down, all bets were off. The world changed overnight and suddenly we were 'at war' with 'terror'. A flood of rhetoric washed out from the White House that led to things like the war in Afghanistan (probably legit) and the Marin Iraq *definitely not legit) as well as a slew of anti-terror laws and overreach by surveillance. The last two decades continue to be marred by the responses to 9/11 which were more often than not over-reactions. Yes, nearly 4000 people died and a whole slew of system failures were exposed as well as giving birth to the internet conspiracy theory culture, but it has to be said the trillions spent on prosecuting the foreign wars and surveilling the domestic population is a ridiculously expensive price to pay.
In that time America watered down its education and health to move money to its military industrial complex, and essentially created a generation of under-educated idiots susceptible to conspiracy theories on the internet. The worst aspects of that as blowback could be seen in the storming of the US Capitol earlier this year.
Let's say that is all by-the-by. 9/11 happened because of a string of incompetent decisions as well and lack of leadership to act on reports. The FBI had reports it didn't follow up. The CIA delivered reports to the White House that the White House did not follow up. It was so slack entire areas of conspiracy theories have grown up around them but the essential truth is that the government of the day, the Bush Jr Administration, was largely asleep at the wheel. And when the dust settled, the republican administration used it as an opportunity to overreach on surveillance and expand powers. They say in politics one should never let a good crisis go to waste, but that sort of cynicism was exactly what characterised the events that followed. To protect democracy, they decided to circumvent democracy. We are still living with the consequences of those terrible decisions.
My God What Have We Done?
There is a leader of Islamist thought Aga Khan IV who believes that 9/11 is a direct result of the world community ignoring the plight of the human tragedy of Afghanistan at the time. It is hard to argue with it if you remember what Afghanistan under the Taliban the first time around was like. It was repressive, regressive, iconoclastic, and most certainly toxic and misogynistic in a way that is off the scales for contemporary people living civilised society.
Throughout the 1990s we sort of let all of that slide. They were very much on the nose but we had a way of pretending it was too far away to matter. I am certain that we will fall into that mindset again soon enough, but for the record most people didn't know where Kabul was on the map until the Americans finally sent troops.
I think about that indifference a lot. In stark contrast to the globalised congeniality of the 1990s, there were plenty of people suffering under terrible regimes. We were very casual about the plight of people in the islamic world, partly because we didn't want to tell them how to run their governments. The world was celebrating and partying to the end of the Cold War. Bad Islamist governance in Kabul was like a distant problem we really didn't want to know about.
There is a very telling episode of 'Seinfeld' from the 1990s that illustrates this point. It's the episode titled 'The Visa'. It aired in January 1993 which feels like yesterday in some weird way; at least a lot closer to 9/11 than where we are today.
George meets a lawyer named Cheryl (Maggie Han) who thinks he's very funny. When he tells Jerry and Elaine, they enthusiastically plan a double date, much to George's dismay, as he imagines himself being upstaged by Jerry. At the restaurant, Elaine asks Cheryl for advice on dealing with the lawsuit from Ping, the Chinese food delivery boy whom Elaine injured in "The Virgin". Cheryl reveals that she is the prosecuting attorney in the case, as Ping is her cousin. Jerry and Elaine joke about this coincidence, making Cheryl laugh hysterically. While she is away, George makes them promise not to be funny around her. Jerry overdoes it, making comments that are so morbid that Cheryl is depressed by the end of the date.
At Jerry's apartment, Kramer returns early from baseball fantasy camp, where he accidentally punched Mickey Mantle. Elaine sees Cheryl with George and thanks her for persuading Ping to drop the case. She says that she did that because they all seemed like such nice people. As Elaine is giving Jerry the mail that she has been holding for him while he was out of town, Babu Bhatt, the Pakistani who Jerry tried to help in "The Cafe", is hauled off by the INS. Jerry had helped him get a job and the apartment down the hall. Jerry and Elaine discover Babu's Visa renewal form in Jerry's belated mail; it had been delivered to Jerry's address by mistake. They go to the jail where Babu is being held. When they tell him what happened he becomes angry. Jerry promises to straighten things out.
Jerry has lunch with Cheryl, where he continues his morose façade, so that he can ask her to solve Babu's problems with the INS. When she sees George, she confesses that she is attracted to Jerry's dark, disturbed personality. George, realizing his scheme has backfired, tells her the truth. Stunned at this revelation, she gets up and leaves.
At Jerry's apartment, Elaine sees Ping and thanks him for dropping the case. He sneers and tells her the case is back on because they all made Cheryl mad due to Jerry's deception. Babu's brother enters and says Babu has been deported, since Cheryl neglected to follow through on the favor after George's revelation. Back in Pakistan, Babu swears eternal vengeance against Jerry.
Ouch. At the time I watched this episode, I really felt for Babu. I laughed - but I knew Babu's problems were very real, as opposed to the decidedly trivial preoccupations and obsessions of all of the characters in 'Seinfeld'. The reality gap as it were, was what made it very black humour. It turned out to be very prescient. When 9/11 happened, Babu came to mind. 9/11 was Babu exacting vengeance upon us for our indifference.
How Did We End Up There?
We may ask ourselves how it is we were still stationing troops in Afghanistan all these years later, until last month. The protracted history of bad decisions goes a long way back, but it may point to the funding and arming of Mujihadeen resistance fighters against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By training those people and arming them, and then beating the Soviets out of Afghanistan they decided that the West could be beaten. And in abandoning Afghanistan to its own devices in the 1990s led to a Taliban government which saw fit to harbour Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Without going into the various theories - conspiracy and otherwise - about whether Al Qaeda was really a thing or merely a designation/conflagration by the CIA, it is true that Afghanistan as a state went rogue and allowed itself to sponsor terrorism abroad, and it was this lack of judgement that led to 9/11 and the subsequent war and occupation of Afghanistan.
That's all on one side. The other side is the utter lack of judgement on the side of the what became known as the Coalition of the Willing. That was the countries led by the USA that was happy to march into both Afghanistan and Iraq. Australia's part in it is pretty sorry. We sent our best troops and as they stayed and stayed, they became psychopaths on safari, committing acts that can only be described as war crimes. Nobody thought we would be there for so long, but without judgment there was no way of pulling out of Afghanistan without pulling down the state of Afghanistan we set up in the wake of the Taliban.
It took a President even worse than George W Bush to get the USA out of Afghanistan and his solution was simply to give up Afghanistan to the very same Taliban the USA ousted in 2002. The mind boggles. It's as if Donald Trump slept through 9/11 and missed it completely. Or didn't really care. Maybe he did us all a favour in ending a forever war, and we are all looking that gift horse in the mouth. Maybe Afghanistan is better off under the Taliban, as a beacon of intolerance and religious extremism and medieval legalism. After all, why should we spend money on a place that doesn't want to conform to a civilised world? Maybe we can enjoy a decade of no wars; because I feel like we should maybe party a little bit like it's 1999, once this pandemic lifts.
There are people in Afghanistan who are angry the West left, and let them in that terrible Dark Ages limbo. Yet it is easily arguable that we shouldn't have been there at all for as long as we were. At some point we can't fight the geopolitical gravity forever. Whatever goes up to Afghanistan must come down.
So Will It Happen Again?
With any luck, with all the civil liberties we have given up, and all the compromises to our democracy, the one thing that won't happen again is a 9/11. Is it a high price to pay? Probably in as much as it still doesn't guarantee it won't happen again - but it is highly unlikely. Bitter lessons were learnt at all levels of government everywhere.
As of that day, governments have given licences to themselves to compromise your privacy in exchange for security, and maybe we're all safer for it, but we are definitely not better for it. And I for one believe it when military people say we will be back in Afghanistan soon enough. It's just a terrible enough situation to draw us in. With any luck it will be the Chinese who end up trying to sort out that mess instead of us. That, would be a better outcome. Let somebody else suffer Afghanistan instead.
Speaking Of Coal Mines... Who's Going To Pay For The Damages?
There's a fellow over at Extinction Rebellion who has an important post that I want to quote from. No, I didn't get his permission, but I'm sure he'd like his thoughts spread far and wide so, I imagine he'd be okay with it. Besides which I make no money here on this blog. If he wants a percentage, he can ask for whatever percentage of nothing. I'm sorry - but we're all in this together so, let's unpack this...
One of key reasons why XR is being unsuccessful is because it refuses to communicate accurately and concretely in everyday language what is going to happen in the next two decades. This can be summed up in six words: the fiscal crisis of the state. Forget dolphins, whales and icesheets – there is only one reality here and it is what the state does when it runs out of money. This has very little to do with politics or values – it’s much deeper than that. The first principle of the state is to maintain itself. And when it experiences extreme economic stress it raids society to get cash. This means it takes money from unproductive parts of the society to pay for the parts that are productive. So, for instance, in World War Two the UK government raided the assets of the rich to pay for the war. This was done by Tory MPs – it was not a matter of politics but national survival. So you know what is going happen in a decade or so when western countries are having to pay for the massive cost of electrifying their economies, retro fitting their entire housing stock, and dealing with “defence” costs of social breakdown in the sub tropics: it’s going to raid the pensions of my generation. The brutal reality is that the interests of the retired won’t matter.
And that right there should be grabbing the attention of politicians right now. If they leave Global Warming off the priority to-do list, the bill is going to come in sooner than you think, and it's going to be bigger than you think, and society is going to suffer greatly to pay that bill. So who will governments raid to pay for that bill?
Well just consider that our children and their children will have no motivation to act any differently than us. Payback time is coming. It could be merely structural. The younger generation will come to power and the logic of the state, as mentioned, will lead to the rapid impoverishment of my generation, presently in our 40’s and 50’s as we get into our 60’s and 70’s. But more likely there will be a visceral contempt: you created this shit and so you can pay for it. Polluters pay and all that. We are not heading into some ecological steady state circular economy new civilisation. Much more likely we are heading into a time when people over 60 will be spat at as they walk down the street, and be literally left to die in urine stinking death homes.
It gets very frank:
If you want to speak with some effectiveness about the actual reality of the climate crisis to the public, this is what you have to start talking about. <edit> In 2021 our governments are locking in this horrendous social stress because my generation of adults are refusing to go into civil resistance to stop it. It’s as simple as that. This is our war, but we are refusing to fight it.
Unsurprisingly this part of the talk along with the other “tell the truth” sections were taken out by the middle class liberal “let’s not upset people” regime that soon took over XR. But taking things out of talks which upset you does not stop then from happening: that is the post modernist conceit.
That much I can agree with wholeheartedly. The mere substitution of 'Climate Change' for 'Global Warming' was one of the most dishonest swicheroos pulled exactly because governments didn't want people to panic. Truth be known, Greta Thunberg is right: we all need to panic like our houses are on fire, because, they are.
If you're into scary truths - and you ought to be - you can find his lecture here:
Some things are just too awful to let pass. That's how I feel about the mega-fires that visited our land in the summer of 2019-2020. Combined with the unpreparedness, the wilful ignorance of the Federal Government, runaway heatwaves, under-investment in infrastructure for dealing with mega-fires, and you had a catastrophic failure of leadership that manifested as a total, unmitigated disaster.
And it's one thing if idiot Queenslanders voted for Clive Palmer's mob as a 'hedge' and found themselves with this terrifyingly incompetent government were the ones getting burned out of their houses. Instead it was innocent wildlife was getting hurt and killed in these fires. You can blame the idiot humans who voted for the idiot government, but the wildlife is blame-free - and yet they bore the burnt of the consequence.
I'm not some Animal Liberationist nut job - but even I can see how disproportionately the piling up of bad decisions and their horrible consequences are falling upon those without the power to withstand it, or change it, move away from it, or voice their concerns.
When you see footage of people rescuing wildlife amid the chaos and turmoil of the fires, you have to ask yourself, how exactly did we get to this point? When will the comeuppance visit themselves upon those who are ostensibly responsible for this land, the idiot politicians? Why do the animals have to lose their dwellings for the idiot politicians' bad decisions? Why can't the idiot politicians lose their houses and family and habitat?
There's really no justice on that account. There ought to be. I'll leave it at that.
Suffice to say the accounts of what happened last summer in Australia were harrowing as they were bewildering. Harrowing because so many lives were lost, not just humans but much wildlife as well. Some put th e figures at 1 billion. It might have been conservative. It was also bewildering because the Australian government's preparation and response to the Firesign general were all too slow, inadequate and mostly laughable if the tragedy unfolding weren't so dire.
People spent the night in the waters off the pier, up to their necks in the waves as they watched the sky glow red and black embers fell and they could hear screams of burning koalas from the burning tree tops. It's not way to bring in the new year. People talk about how bad 2020 was in relation to the COVID-19 but make no mistake, from Day 1, it was a crap year.
So yeah, I guess I had to write a song about that. One year on, I'm still livid at the Global Warming Denialism of this Federal Government. I mean yes if we changed out of fossil fuels, it would be a hit the GDP and the wallet of people like Gina and Twiggy Forrest. But honestly, they can wear that pay cut - and they won't exactly starve or lose their houses. Seriously, what price our planet?
Our Premier, the Hon. Premier Gladys Berejiklian is an odd duck, even in the ranks of female politicians who toil in the ranks of conservatives. She must be good at whatever it is politicians do to get ahead of the pack because let's face it, she's got the weird woggy surname, and a visage that is most unlike that of say a TV breakfast host intros country. She seems to be nice on some level, compassionate, even. You wouldn't want to be the guy wagging a finger at her telling her her policies stink, lest people think you're the bully.
Thus it seemed appropriate to at least discuss this by writing a song about her being Gladys, the Koala Killer, destroyer of trees, water tables, and the pristine environment of our bushland, amongst other horrible deeds.
I don't want to badmouth my own country but a year on from the massive bushfires, there are days where you just draw a deep sigh.
When one reflects on everything that happened in Australian politics in the last decade, you're left with a profound sense of lost time. It's all time that could have been spent on doing things better - certainly better than the internecine party-politic-infighting that was a feature of the decade. If the ALP burnt itself out on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd imbroglio, the Liberal Party regaled with no less than a Turnbull-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison turn of leadership spills. 6 Prime Minsters in the decade shows the country was in political strife, most over the issue of Climate Change.
Needless to say the decade was punctuated by an exclamation mark in the massive bushfires last summer and still there is no indication the culture wars over Global Warming has come to an end. There were many villains in the story, but if there was one traitor to this country that deserves special mention, it must be Andrew Robb who sold out this country from his position in government and now receives a fat salary from our burgeoning enemy China.
All that said, our country lurches on without a policy or apology. just bumbling around trying to find a fig leaf to put over the glaringly obvious absence of a credible climate policy. Again, I won't go into the idiocy of the situation we find ourselves, but it has to beside that making the future precarious through the misapplication of partisan politics is the height of stupidity. As such, it is inescapable to understand that the government we have is a execrable mess.
So, what exactly is this luckiness we credit ourselves when we must live with such stupidity that undercuts that luck?
It's weird that this comes out the week after the US elections but, it wasn't planned that way. It's a happy coincidence - and honestly, I'm okay with Biden winning. If anything the shit referred to in the song is more in line with the 4 year misrule of the Trump Administration which ignored all the warnings about Climate Change. Indeed, I'm really talking about the 2019 Australian election where the Morrison Government was returned, only to promptly ignore expert warnings about the drought and the catastrophic summer weather that led to the massive fires up and down the east coast.
I mean, what were people thinking really? In the olden days I would've come on tooth's blog and vented but of course nobody is persuaded by some blog telling them they are fuckheads for voting in a conservative government that doesn't believe in Global Warming. Instead, they pretty much need to lose their farms and houses to 40m tall walls of fire roaming the landscape, burning everything to the ground.
As such the only thing left for me is to write a song about it and stick it out there, commemorating the abject stupidity of the electorate that opted to return this miserable, intellectually stunted, execrable government to office. For indeed they are shit and this is what they voted for. It's a sobering feeling every election to find that at least 48% of your fellow countrymen are willing to burn the planet to make a buck and think that is the most important thing, followed by cutting deficits (or some other piece of economic nonsense). It's amazing how they win more often than not and give us the shit we need not ought to have had.
