Nous ne sommes pas …
Je suis …
Well, me, je suis me.
I’m glad I’m not Charlie, I have an aversion to being shot (and for the record, decapitated as well).
The barbarity exhibited in Paris in recent days has brought a massive response. Consciousnesses have certainly been raised.
The people, the politicians and the cartoonists have led the way.
Let’s have a look at them in a slightly different order. Monsieur Hollande has been quick to reassure France that the French way of life will endure and that this is nothing to do with Islam. Mark Steyn was not impressed …
Yeah, right. I would use my standard line on these occasions – “Allahu Akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here” – but it’s not quite as funny when the streets are full of cowards, phonies and opportunists waving candles and pencils and chanting “Je suis Charlie.” Because if you really were Charlie, if you really were one of the 17 Frenchmen and women slaughtered in the name of Allah in little more than 48 hours, you’d utterly despise a man who could stand up in public and utter those words.
The louder the perpetrators yell “Allahu Akbar” and rejoice that the Prophet has been avenged, the louder M Hollande and David Cameron and Barack Obama and John Kerry and the other A-list infidels insist there’s no Islam to see here. M le Président seems to believe he can champion France’s commitment to freedom of expression by conscripting the entire nation in his monstrous lie.
Is he just pandering? There are, supposedly, six million Muslims in France, and he got 93 per cent of their vote last time round. Or is he afraid of the forces that might be unleashed if the Official Lie were not wholeheartedly upheld? Stéphane Charbonnier said he’d rather die standing than live on his knees; M Hollande thinks he can get by with a furtive crouch.
Harsh words, sadly entirely fair. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the leader of the surrender monkeys, Barack Obama. Such were the forcefulness of his words I almost expected him to draw another line in the sand. Our very own Tony Abbott had a few platitudes to mouth. They ring hollow whilst section 18c remains on the books.
And the cartoonists and their employers, praising the courage of their fallen comrades, there were a couple I liked …
… and one that M. Hollande would have preferred, what we might call the ABC approach …
… it’s all about the backlash.
Guardian Australia cartoonist Andrew Marlton was in no hurry to offend his Muslim audience. As he explained last week …
I don’t depict Muhammad because it’s probably racist and also I don’t get to put my family and my coworkers at risk of being firebombed.
Tim Blair’s turn to be unimpressed …
Now, I’m not particularly against Marlton’s gutlessness over the non-drawing of old Mo, which regrettably has become an industry-wide standard – although his line about racism is interesting (what race is he talking about?).
Instead, Marlton is awarded the yellow sash for the second part of his statement – that he fears his family or the Guardian‘s office will be firebombed if Marlton upsets Muslims.
This is a fellow who makes his living frequently ridiculing what he depicts as an exaggerated fear of Islamic terrorism and who routinely describes as bigots and idiots those who condemn Islamic terrorism. While his leftist fans just lap that stuff up, it now emerges that Marlton himself believes he is just one cartoon away from the possibility of fiery death.
Notably absent from the main stream press were the Charlie Hebdo cartoons themselves. If you need to see what the fuss was about you can find a collection <HERE>. At least one of them would be truly offensive to Muslims, much in the way that putting a crucifix in a jar of urine would be to a christian.
The people’s response was spontaneous and in many ways quite nice. Je suis Charlie, we care, we stand united against barbarism. Charlie’s next edition will happen and it will be a sellout and that is all good. And then they will go back to work and to school and then … what?
Well we wouldn’t want to overreact. Here in Melbourne, Victoria we certainly won’t. Today’s news …
Khodr Moustafa Taha, 35, from Brunswick, allegedly tweeted Victoria Police with the chilling message: “I’m going to hurt your officers.”
Police raided his home and allegedly discovered ammunition and three swords.
Mr Taha, who is Australian-born of Lebanese heritage, was also accused of running several additional Twitter accounts posting material supporting Islamic State.
Another contained a profile picture of the al-Qaeda flag.
Police argued in Melbourne Magistrates Court last week that Mr Taha — suspected of brutally bashing his mother and attacking his ex-boss with a hammer — posed an unacceptable risk of reoffending.
But Deputy Chief Magistrate Jelena Popovic let him walk from court,
“I’ve taken a view, on balance, that any risk can be fixed by the (bail) conditions.
There’s a bad day coming folks, wrap yourself in copies of the Racial Discrimination Act and have your bail conditions ready. Be prepared for the next time you are caught in an Islamic massacre …
Barbarislam …
The difference between civilisation and barbarity is the ability to speak without the fear of violence.
Hot tip …
Shamelessly filched from Visual Consumer … always worth a visit.
Frangible gates …
In the depths of the Clunes State Forest is a railway line. A forest track goes across it. Road traffic would never have been frequent. For reasons that would at first glance seem hard to fathom it was upgraded, presumably at great expense. Then to make sure it was safe gates were put across it. Now there is no traffic.
In June 2007, a few kilometres north of Kerang, Victoria, a truck ploughed into a train killing 11 and injuring 23 others. The truck driver was charged with 11 charges of culpable driving and eight counts of negligently causing serious injury. On the face of it the case should have been a lay down misere, a professional driver familiar with the route propels his truck past the flashing lights into the side of a train at a rail crossing in perfect road conditions. Surely we can expect drivers not to do that.
Up steps the defence. The alternate theory of the crime was that the State of Victoria dunnit. Victoria’s rail crossings were unsafe. The jury bought it. The driver went free. I wonder if they would like to buy a bridge in NSW that I have for sale. Looks a bit like a coat hanger and yields an excellent return in tolls.
The good folk of Victoria now have 80 km speed limits anywhere near rail crossings.
This particular rail crossing is the only road access to a chunk of forest. There could be an emergency. Think about it, brain storm it. I’ve got an idea, let’s make the gates breakable.
Breakable, ooh, that could be an invitation to every hoon in the neighbourhood.
So lets call them frangible they won’t know what that means. (My spell checker doesn’t).
Hope the signs are frangible, too.
Conned …
Amnesty International has admitted being ‘conned’ into helping the Sydney siege gunman to get a refugee visa in Australia.
The admission comes after News Limited obtained a letter from a refugee coordinator at Amnesty to the Department of Immigration which urged the government to issue Monis refugee status believing he was a top-level Iranian spy.
The letter which dated back to April 1997 argued that Monis would be at risk if he was forced to return to Iran.
Monis’ application was subsequently approved in 2001.
Amnesty International refugee coordinator Dr Graham Thom told News Limited that they aid group was duped.
I wonder how hard it is to do that … ?
Emerging from the bush …
A happy new year to all and sundry. I am full of optimism, it can’t be anywhere near as disastrous as Tim Blair predicts …
I woke up to 2015 in Victoria’s Sunset country not far from this sign …
This is the part of Australia that achieved fame when Apple Maps was launched. Version one directed people going to Mildura into the wilderness. The press made much of the prospect of people dying of thirst or succumbing to snake bite. I did neither but I did make an excellent start to my 2015 bird list.
A couple of people have taken on the challenge of the Calendar Game. I will post my progress from time to time, hopefully they will inform us all of their progress in comments. So far this year I have seen 110 species, so I’m safe until April 20th.
Summer is harsh. Weather is always a topic of conversation in Victoria because it changes frequently. The cycle runs from a hot north wind through a cold change from the west, a couple of cooler days then the wind turns northerly and things hot up again. The dramatic moment is the change itself, it can drop the temperature 15 degrees in half an hour. In summer that’s usually very welcome.
When it’s very hot and windy the fire risk is high. Fires tend to start during the northerly, all too often because some nutbag deliberately lights it. Initially the fire front travels south, burning embers often travel ahead on the wind, starting spot fires that make firebreaks ineffective. Despite reports that it travels faster than a speeding bullet the front is likely not to exceed 16–20 km/h. After five or six hours then the area affected will look like a relatively narrow triangle with its base in the south about 100 km from the apex at the fire’s origin.
The change arrives with a strong westerly wind, the fire front now becomes the eastern side, much longer than the southerly base. If the change is accompanied by heavy rain … great. In summer it often isn’t. In Victoria the loss of life and property is usually greater after the change.
The most recent weather cycle produced the fires in the Adelaide hills, South Australia, which has destroyed at least 26 houses, and fires in western and southern Victoria that have been less destructive. Looking west from my front gate the change looked like this …
My fire plan is simple. There is a road leading south and another going east. Fire from the north, McGee goes south, fire from the west, McGee goes east.
But on a brighter note, my meanderings over the last couple of days have turned up some beautiful sights …
The old trestle bridge at Archdale, and below a Rainbow Bee-eater at Newstead.
The calendar game …
In 1998 I visited Townsville in Queensland, it was shortly before new year. I bumped into some local birdwatchers and went out with them on Townsville Common. Like most birdwatchers I meet, they were very generous with their knowledge, you can’t beat local knowledge, and they put me onto some other birds to tick off before heading back to Victoria.
Amongst themselves topics of conversation included the start of the new year, the start of a new year list and preparation for a game that they played among themselves. You were in the game on January first. To stay in the game you had to have added at least one species to your year list for each day elapsed. They were plotting a big day out for that first day. A one hundred bird day would see them safe until the beginning of April. The last one to go out would be the winner or by reaching 365 (plus one in a leap year) there could be any number of winners. They were laughing about who had lasted how long in the year then coming to a close.
They restricted the game to birds seen in Queensland. It would be tough but not impossible to see 365 species in a single year in Victoria, my home state. McGee’s Victoria list stands at 386 but that includes birds that don’t turn up here every year. McGee’s Queensland list stands at 438 despite the fact that he only spends a small fraction of his time there.
Since then I have played the game privately, allowed myself the whole of Australia to play in, and it is one measure of how successful a year has been. If I allowed myself the whole world to play in it would be just too easy, this year’s world total was 632 (with 12 hours to go). However my birding within Australia has been confined to Victoria, no further east than Melbourne. I was out of the game by the end of June.
I won’t be posting for a couple of days …
2014, almost over …
Thank you for reading my words … it’s the only thing that makes it worth writing them. The blog was launched in April 2012. Posts passed the thousand mark late in the year. Visitors came from 59 countries this year which is only one more than last year but traffic has doubled. Most visitors came from Australia but the United States & France were not far behind.
I shall endeavour to avoid being too parochial this coming year and when I can’t resist I will try to explain the issue so that it can be understood widely, although explaining how cricket works is beyond my skill. I had better try not to use terms like cheese eating surrender monkeys (for Kazakhstan readers that’s a reference to French people).
I do wish you a happy and prosperous new year.
Cheers
Rob
bobmcgee 