Hot Time In The Newest Continent

by Bryan

The Land Down Under is baking and burning. Juan Cole noted that Climate Change is turning Australia Purple with Blazing Heat, referring to the new color they had to add to their temperature graphics to deal with areas over 50°C [122°F].

The ABC noted that Austrailia had its hottest day, on average, since records have been kept, but wrote that the record was not expected to last for long.

While Tasmania is still looking for 100 people who have been missing since wildfires stormed across the island, New South Wales is under a catastrophic fire alert. The map shows fires popping up all over the state in the Southeast corner of the continent.

Meanwhile, as Fallenmonk implies, too many people with too much influence continue to deny the existence of Global Climate Change.

8 comments

1 Kryten42 { 01.11.13 at 7:05 am }: It has been pretty hot here in Central Vic the past couple weeks. People here are saying this is NT (Northern Territory) weather. Thankfully I have A/C and have only had to go out a few times the past week.

Unfortunately I am sane. Otherwise I would use my skills to get a team together for a *Hunt & Eliminate* mission (something my old team was especially good at) on all deniers, since it’s obvious they are the weakest link in the evolutionary chain. *shrug* Someone has to clean the gene pool occasionally. This is what happens when you don’t. You get nothing but scum! And it always floats to the top.

OT: Anyway, on a much more enjoyable topic… I came across this site looking for an Audiobook. 🙂 They have thousands of free eBooks and Audiobooks, mostly true Classics where the Copyright has expired. 🙂

You all might find something interesting here, I did. Enjoy!

Books Should Be Free
2 Kryten42 { 01.11.13 at 7:18 am }: Oh! Regarding that eBook site…

Here is a book every American should read (though sadly, few would comprehend):

The Federalist Papers – Alexander Hamilton 1755/1757-1804

Oh.. How about this one also?

History of the United States: The Colonial Period Onwards – Charles Austin Beard 1874-1948

And they have lots of other great works of Fiction also! Like… The original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Alice in Wonderland… and so on. Not much difference really, just better written! 😆

😈 Yeah… I know. 😛 I couldn’t resist! 😉 😀

😆
3 Bryan { 01.11.13 at 9:42 pm }: When I compare what passes for ‘American history’ today with the information passed down through the family in letters and journals, it’s like looking at two different universes. ‘History’ focuses on the people at the top and the largest population centers of the time, and ignores what the vast majority of people were doing.

As long as the moron in charge of the government keep concentrating on what actions will cost today rather than what inaction will cost in the future, we are in deep kimchi.
4 Kryten42 { 01.12.13 at 4:45 am }: And by a curious *coincidence*, it’s all nothing new. As Mark Twain shows in his wonderfully satirical 1873 novel: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today

Freud would be so sad at having one of his (at the time) outrageous theorems proven correct.

Anyone forced to react against his own impulses may be described as a hypocrite, whether he is conscious of it or not. One might even venture to assert—it is still Freud’s argument—that our contemporary civilisation favours this sort of hypocrisy and that there are more civilised hypocrites than truly cultured persons, and it is even a question whether a certain amount of hypocrisy is not indispensable to maintain civilisation. When this travesty of civilisation, this infallible state that has regimented and dragooned its citizens into obedience, goes to war, Freud is pained but not surprised that it makes free use of every injustice, of every act of violence that would dishonour the individual, that it employs not only permissible cunning but conscious lies and intentional deception against the enemy, that it absolves itself from guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states and makes unabashed confession of its greed and aspiration to power. For conscience, the idea of right and wrong, in the Freudian sense, is not the inexorable judge that teachers of ethics say it is: it has its origin in nothing but “social fear,” and whereas in times of peace the state forbids the individual to do wrong, not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolise it, like salt or tobacco, it suspends its reproach in times of war. The suppression of evil desires also ceases, and men, finding the moral ties loosened between large human units, commit acts of cruelty, treachery, deception and brutality the very possibility of which would have been considered incompatible with their degree of culture.

He was a visionary (even if I don’t agree with everything he proposed. But his primary goal was to make people *think* and *consider* (or to self-reflect), something he had some little success with, but mostly failed to achieve!
5 Kryten42 { 01.12.13 at 4:51 am }: Oh! Perhaps they should reintroduce this Children’s book into Schools (as it once was), written for 8-12 YO. 🙂

American History Stories, Volume I – Mara L. Pratt

“Stories of early exploration and founding of American colonies, conflicts over religion, and troubles with the Indians, culminating in the French and Indian War.”
6 Bryan { 01.12.13 at 8:14 pm }: Actually that is one of the reasons behind the US government labeling everything a “War”, to avoid having to act civilized about the problem. “The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact” is often used as a justification for clearly serious violations of human rights. That attitude is a bit of a problem when the people who are expected to risk their lives to defend the country swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution.

Ending with the Seven Years War is a good move. It lasted 9 years, but there was already a Nine Years War, so the scholars cheated, and was actually the first world war, having been fought in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The French and Indian War was really the American campaign. It was such a great success that the American Revolution and the French Revolution are the result of the governments need to pay for it. That pretty much covers the colonial period, and allows the next volume to be used for the Revolution.
7 Badtux { 01.13.13 at 1:26 pm }: I lived through a turbulent period in the history of my home town — the Civil Rights movement, desegregation, and the collapse of the empire of a Bull Connor type figure who turned out to be in bed with the Mafia running a protection racket for prostitution and gambling while paying for his political campaigns with City money. All of that has been written out of the history of that city today — the day when the city Police Commissoner rode his horse up the steps of the pulpit of the largest black church in town and pistol-whipped the pastor for having the audacity to hold a memorial service for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the day when every city recreational facility was closed after a desegregation order because “we ain’t gonna have no nigras swimmin’ in thah same watah as owah little white chillens” (they never re-opened, new recreational facilities were built in all-white suburbs instead), the year that virtually every single white student left the local public schools to attend private “seg-academies” after court-ordered desegregation came down, the police commissioner who was regularly spotted at Italian eateries eating dinner with “just an honest restaurant owner” who eventually was deported back to Sicily as one of the most notorious Mafia godfathers in the South, all wiped out of the collective memory. The closest you can come to encountering that history is a few eateries and other businesses where the white entrance and black entrance are still there (though not marked as such) and the white dining room and black dining room are still there (though not marked as such anymore). But most of the people eating in those places aren’t aware of the history or why their favorite eatery has a front entrance and back entrance and a front dining room and a back dining room (the front one was for whites, of course, since the back one was subjected to the noise and heat coming from the kitchen in those pre-air-conditioning times).

Of course the powers that be couldn’t do any of this if Americans truly cared about their history, but by and large, Americans don’t care about their history, or anything of any intellectual rigor for that matter. After all, there’s a new episode of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” to watch… :(.
8 Bryan { 01.14.13 at 12:31 am }: I remember stopping by my parents place down here after finishing language school in Indiana on my way to West Texas for further training. Another guy in my class was from Pensacola, 35 miles away, and I suggested that he could just take the cheaper flight with me and I would give him a ride home. He pointed out what we both really knew was true – we couldn’t be seen together down here. Despite all of the laws and court decisions we would both be in trouble because we weren’t the same ‘color’.

My parents had moved back to Florida after several years in New York where I graduated from high school. I had forgotten the ‘rules’ of living down here, but I was reminded.

No one wants to talk about. They want to act like it never happened, like there were never any ‘incidents’. They rewrite the history books, but no one has scrubbed the newspaper archives, and it is all there for anyone who wants to make an effort.