709-218-7927 The Landfall Garden House 60 Canon Bayley Road Bonavista, Newfoundland CANADA A0C 1B0 |
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Saturday, April 25, 2020
The Press
I claim that “the press”, or perhaps “the media” has sunk to a new low. Truth is where you think it is, but the frequency of disprovable statements seem to be on the rise. I could probably locate the references to the following statements if asked. They are quite recent.
The Australian Bushfires of 2020
The Guardian puts out a podcast, and one episode had the reporter stating excitedly (but unfortunately not breathlessly) “Bushfires are now burning right across Australia”. I may be mis-quoting here, but I am confident in the “across Australia” bit. The statement might have been “Fires are burning out of control across Australia”.
My attention focused on the concept of “right across”.
Now you can look up this data in any schoolroom atlas or the gazetteer in your book case.
The area of Australia is about 3,000,000 square miles.
The area of the USA is about 3,000,000 square miles.
If you are more familiar with the USA than you are with Australia you can visualize “Australia” as “The USA”. These landmasses too are about the same shape; very roughly rectangular.
Western Australia is 1,000,000 square miles in area; one-third the Australian landmass.
Make a north-south line just off the coast of California and move it eastwards until you think you have divided the USA into one-third and two-thirds. You are somewhere in Texas, right? Western Australia is all the USA land reaching back to the Pacific ocean. One-third the landmass of the USA.
Western Australia is mostly sand; desert. Southern Cross, at the eastern edge of the wheat belt, has an average rainfall of ten inches per year and an average evaporation of a hundred inches per year. That is desert!
The south-west corner of Western Australia is lush, it is true. Jarrah forests, Karri forests, dairy cattle. Don’t be misled by the sheep in the wheat belt. The sheep are an insurance policy. If the year is too wet for wheat, at least you’ll get a crop of wool. They are not high-priced meat-sheep.
Make a list of the deserts in Western Australia. Stop when you get to ten. All around the coast in the north you will find mangrove swamps, but by and large the state of Western Australia is sandy desert. Stony desert (Gibber Plains) is just sandy desert where the sand has blown away leaving smooth wind-blown pebbles.
There’s no use using Google Maps and Street view to see the land in the interior. Google maps didn’t go there because there are no roads, because there are no people, because there is no rain.
Sand does not burn.
That takes care of one-third of the Australian landmass.
Moving eastwards, the same arguments can be made for The Northern Territory and South Australia. Sand.
That takes care of another third of the landmass.
Queensland is largely sandy desert. Think “ Mount Isa ”. I would take one half of Queensland as lush, one half desert. North-western New South Wales likewise dry sandy soil; not much rainfall.
The main mass of Australia is sandy or stony desert and cannot burn.
So much for “Bushfires are now burning right across Australia”.
How do these statements arise?
I believe they start, like a bushfire, with a few smoldering bits of data. Someone puts out an accurate map showing that there are, say, four major bushfire areas. The four areas are marked as four splodges of paint or felt-tipped marker-pen on a map. Fair enough. There are four major regions of fires, each identified by the nearest major town.
A second news party needs a map, but can’t use this accurate map; copyright, you see. You are not allowed to be seen stealing. So the four splodges down the east coast of Australia (lush dairy and crop country) are instead presented by a curved line that encloses those four splodges and the announcer is told to report that “Fires are out of control in the area outlined above”. That is a true statement, although “the area outlined” might be 100,000 square miles and the total fire area might be only 10,000 square miles.
A third news party needs a map, but can’t use the second vaguely inaccurate map; copyright, you see. The curved line that encloses those four splodges are filled in (with a different colour of pen) and the announcer is told to report that “Fires are out of control in the area outlined above”. That is a true statement, although because the area is filled in, we are led to believe that that solid block of colour (it will be orange, or red) represents fires. That is, fires are wall-to-wall in the area.
A fourth news party recognizes that the filled-in area represents the most heavily populated area of Australia, and figures that the fires threaten the bulk of the Australian Population.
And so it goes until “out of control bushfires are threatening almost the entire population of Australia”.
I had one person in the café, shake my hand in sympathy and ask “Where are they going to live?”. “They” being, of course, the entire population of Australia since it now sounds as if every house, coast to coast, 4,000 kilometres, had been burnt to the ground.
The Impact of COVID-19 on the Australian Economy
The economic downturn caused by the Covid virus is, of course, a myth. A virus is smaller than a bacteria. Viruses are so small that they can weasel their way into a bacterial cell. A virus can not impact a national economy.
Politicians can impact the economy by grandstanding “We are here to help you” and imposing isolation edicts (“mandatory house-arrest”), enacting laws to force businesses to close, putting hourly-wage earners out of money. I have lived pay-check to pay-check and it ain’t pretty.
Australian politicians, or at least, this year’s Australian Government, have had two massive windfalls and it is only March.
First the bushfires, then the virus. This year’s Australian Government had gone out on a limb and promised the first balanced budget in twenty-nine years. Dream on! Now the fires and virus have, of course, provided a scapegoat for failure.
Still, that doesn’t stop a pollie from grandstanding. A thirty-seven billion dollar scheme has been announced for “direct financial aid to those who are affected by our stupid decision to close airlines, tourism, industry, domestic economy, schools, libraries …”. I’m paraphrasing of course. No politician admits to a mistake.
When a grant is announced you can bet that it had better be managed. When the dust settles the cost of administering this sum will need to be added in. I am guessing that all up, including the cost of dry-cleaning the minister’s suit after he spilled coffee in the limo, will come to about $60,000,000,000.
Now take the population of Australia as 30,000,000.
Do the math.
Every man, woman, and child is going to receive, on average, a thousand dollars or so. But the cost of this thousand dollars will be two thousand dollars.
Where will this money be found? Taxation!
Thus for every dollar you receive you have to pay us two.
Where else in the world except in a western democracy can you rob people and claim that you are making them better off financially?
Death By Virus
Another day, another podcast. “Chris Greaves, The federal minister for embezzlement, has been struck down by the Covid virus”. Paraphrasing again, but “struck down” were the words used.
After the utterance of that last word “Virus”, the podcast cut to a sound bite from the minister concerned who, I must say, sounded chirpy, bright, and alert. Cheerful, almost. As are all politicians when the ABC phones and wonders if they would like to make a public statement. “I have been tested and found positive for the virus but as yet I have no symptoms”.
He may, of course, have a runny nose or a sore throat by the time you read this. Or he may not. His immune system might have already defeated this month’s version of ‘flu virus, and the battlefield might be strewn with brass buttons, peaked caps, and spent .303 shell casings, or the RNA equivalent: fragments of amino acids.
My upbringing was different from yours. When I was growing up “struck down” was used when the evil Sir Blackbeard back-handed the generous Filbert Readytohelp with a steel gauntlet, sending young Filbert sprawling face-down into a nearby dung-heap. Humanity advanced and “struck down” was what happened when John Wayne, bare-handedly back-handed the drunken cowboy into a nearby horse trough. And it wasn’t even a drunken cowboy; it was a stuntman trained to rotate, flex at the hips, and fall bum-first backwards into water.
Struck Down, to me, suggests coming up from behind with a club and bashing the brains out of your skull, or at the very least giving you such a concussion that the doctors will advise you to stay away from American grid-iron football for a week or two.
But today, “struck down” means that you are healthy and ready for your radio interview.
“Struck down” is what sticks in people’s minds.
It certainly struck me.
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709-218-7927 The Landfall Garden House 60 Canon Bayley Road Bonavista, Newfoundland CANADA A0C 1B0 |
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