A little while ago I did go to the above post by Stuart Bramhall. I ask myself what is going on in the Middle East?
So this is in the news: “Donald Trump to announce $350bn arms deal to Saudi Arabia.” What does it mean?
On my little walk this morning I passed Fowlers Road and the bridge over Brooks Creek. I checked the water level of the creek looking down from the bridge along Flowlers Road. Alas, I could see hardly any water despite the recent rain. There is a lot of vegetation along the creek. Things are growing immensely, There is not much room left for the water to flow along. And I guess that bit of water that flows along the creek feeds all this vegetation more and more.
This is what Michael Lacey says today in a comment:
michael laceyApril 23, 2017 at 8:39 am
Recent figures from the Australian Taxation Office show that in the 2014-15 tax year, 48 millionaires paid no Australian tax at all on earnings of $110 million, but paid accountants and tax advisers over $20 million.
Dr Stuart Bramhall says that the videos are are lot better than the post – She says: “All I’m trying to do is inspire people to watch them.”
This is what I am doing right now.
I found the following in YouTube:
Published on Jun 3, 2014
“The Gods of Money” F. William Engdahl is an American German freelance journalist, historian and economic researcher. “The Gods of Money” lecture is based on Engdahls book “Gods of Money”. The dollar financial system of Wall Street was born not at a conference in Bretton Woods New Hampshire in 1944. It was born in the first days of August, 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After that point the world was in no doubt who was the power to reckon with. This lecture traces the history of money as an instrument of power; it traces the evolution of that power in the hands of a tiny elite that regards themselves as, quite literally, gods-The Gods of Money. How these gods abused their power and how they systematically set out to control the entire world is the subject.
When Peter had surgery in Wollongong Hospital last month he stayed after surgery in a general surgical ward. The following morning Monika gave me another lift to Wollongong on her way to work. So she dropped me off at the hospital just a few minutes after 8. When I went up to the ward to visit Peter I was allowed in immediately. Peter was in good spirits and was already sitting up having his breakfast.
As it turned out Peter had to stay in hospital only for one night. After several tests on the morning after surgery it was decided that he could go home. Monika had offered to come to the hospital again after work. The night before she had come to the hospital after work to visit Peter after surgery. I had still be with Peter. So Monika drove me home that evening.
Peter had been familiar with that ward he was in already from his previous surgery a few months ago. On that occasion Peter had to stay in hospital for two nights. Peter was in a ward with the main specialty being urology. We found the ward was very well equipped with all modern facilities. All the staff was extremely friendly.
By lunchtime Peter had been given permission by his doctor to go home that day. He was asked, did he have transport home. Well, he said, his daughter could drive him home after work. But that meant he would have to wait for until she finished work. Peter discussed it with me. He said he did not like the idea that he would have to wait till evening to be driven home. He felt okay walking. He had been walking with me to the kiosk in the hospital for some coffee. And we had been walking together out onto the terrace on level 2.
The Terrace in Wollongong Hospital
It did not take long and Peter came up with the idea that we could catch the bus in front of the hospital that would take us to Dapto near the taxi stand. And we could catch a taxi from the Dapto taxi stand rather then catching a taxi all the way from Wollongong. Nurse said she had to ask the doctor whether Peter could go on the bus. The doctor gave permission.
Peter checked the bus timetable. He went to the toilet before we went out to the bus stop right in front of the hospital. The bus arrived on time. At this time of the day very few people catch the bus to Dapto. For the whole trip I think only another two or three people did come on the bus. The trip from Wollongong to Dapto lasts only for about 15 minutes. But once we arrived in Dapto Peter had to go to the toilet again. So before catching our taxi he went over to the shopping centre toilets. I waited with all his things near the taxi stand. The taxi home cost us only nine Dollars (including a tip of one Dollar). A taxi from Wollongong would probably have been more like fifty Dollars. We thought this was a great saving. Very happy we arrived home at around three o’clock. And Peter gave Monika a message that we were home already. For Monika it was good too that she could go straight home after work on that day.
While visiting Peter in his ward at the hospital I had copied the following from a poster that was displayed for the public:
“Welcome to Ward B 4 East
We are a general surgical ward with our main specialty being urology.
Our team will make every effort to meet your needs and make your stay with us as pleasant as possible.
Please do not hesitate to ask any questions or to inform us of ways that we can help you.
Wollongong Hospital has open visiting hours for our patients between 8 am and 8 pm every day of the week.”
I copy here parts of the last part of that blog, and further on I’ll try to explain then in English what Peter has been writing about. So, please bear with me:
“Der 18. März ist auch ein historisches Datum, denn 1848, allerdings ein Samstag, kam es in Berlin zu Kämpfen zwischen Preußischen Truppen und revolutionären Untertanen die gerne Bürger sein wollten. Es gab etwa 260 Tote.
Bei dem Luftangriff am 18. März 1945 gab es 336 Tote, 357 Verletzte und 226 Vermisste. 79785 Menschen wurden wohnungslos.
Am Sonntag, den 18. März 1990 gingen die Mensche in der DDR frei wählen.
Am Sonntag, den 18. März 2012 wählte die Bundesversammlung einen neuen Präsidenten, Joachim Gauck. Er ist ein früherer Bürger der DDR. Er ist der oberste Bürger der Bundesrepublik geworden. Vielleicht hat sich der Kreis geschlossen. Er begann seine erste Rede nach seiner Wahl mit den Worten:
„Es ist ein schöner Sonntag!“
Es gab einen Schlager während des Krieges, „Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei. Nach einem Dezember folgt wieder ein Mai!“
Peter refers to the March revolution in 1848 which is explained here in Wikipedia:
260 people died on Saturday, the 18th of March 1848.
On Sunday, the 18th of March 1945, there was one of the most severe air-raids that Berlin suffered during World War Two: 336 people died, 357 were injured, 226 were unaccounted for and 79785 lost there home on that day.
People of the GDR had free elections on Sunday, the 18th of March 1990.
Joachim Gauck, President of Germany (Bundespräsident), assumed office on Sunday, the 18th of March 2012.
I still did not finish reading the whole novel on ‘kindle’. Today I thought about it that we once watched a film version of the book. I wanted to see, whether wikipedia said something about the movie. I did find quite a bit about different movie versions. I also found the following entry about the book in wikipedia.
Here is a bit of what it says on the above page of wikipedia:
“Ambiguity
Almost all of the information about the world beyond London is given to the reader through government or Party sources, which by the very premise of the novel are unreliable. Specifically, in one episode Julia brings up the idea that the war is fictional and that the rocket bombs falling from time to time on London are fired by the government of Oceania itself, in order to maintain the war atmosphere among the population (better known as a false flag operation). The protagonists have no means of proving or disproving this theory. However, during preparations for Hate Week, rocket bombs fell at an increasing rate, hitting places such as playgrounds and crowded theatres, causing mass casualties and increased hysteria and hatred for the party’s enemies. War is also a convenient pretext for maintaining a huge military–industrial complex in which the state is committed to developing and acquiring large and expensive weapons systems which almost immediately become obsolete and require replacement.
Because of this ambiguity, it is entirely possible that the geopolitical situation described in Goldstein’s book is entirely fictitious; perhaps The Party controls the whole world, or perhaps its power is limited to just Great Britain as a lone and desperate rogue nation using fanaticism and hatred of the outside world to compensate for political impotence. It’s also possible that a genuine resistance movement exists, or that Oceania is indeed under attack by outside forces.”
I say all this sounds pretty ambiguous. But what I remember about the novel and the film and what I’ve re-read this far this is the sort of picture I do get from this novel. All in all some pretty scary ideas about an imagined world. Sometimes these things do sound a little bit too true for comfort!
With the following link you can find a piece about what our Orwellian destiny might b e written in the AIM Network by By Ad astra:
Climate change doubled the likelihood of the New South Wales heatwave
February 16, 2017 6.10am AEDT •Updated February 17, 2017 1.29pm AE
The heatwave that engulfed southeastern Australia at the end of last week has seen heat records continue to tumble like Jenga blocks.
On Saturday February 11, as New South Wales suffered through the heatwave’s peak, temperatures soared to 47℃ in Richmond, 50km northwest of Sydney, while 87 fires raged across the state amid catastrophic fire conditions.
On that day, most of NSW experienced temperatures at least 12℃ above normal for this time of year. In White Cliffs, the overnight minimum was 34.2℃, a new record for the state’s highest observed minimum temperature.
On Friday, the average maximum temperature right across NSW hit 42.4℃, beating the previous February record of 42.0℃. The new record stood for all of 24 hours before it was smashed again on Saturday, as the whole state averaged 44.0℃ at its peak. At this time, NSW was the hottest place on Earth.
A degree or two here or there might not sound like much, but to put it in cricketing parlance, those temperature records are the equivalent of a modern test batsman retiring with an average of over 100 – the feat of outdoing Don Bradman’s fabled 99.94 would undoubtedly be front-page news.
And still the records continue to fall. Mungindi, on the border with Queensland, broke the NSW record of 50 days in a row above 35℃, set just four years ago at Bourke Airport, with the new record now at 52 days.
Maximum temperature anomalies across NSW on February 11, the peak of the heatwave.Bureau of Meteorology, Author provided
This is all the more noteworthy when we consider that the El Niño of 2015-16 is long gone and the conditions that ordinarily influence our weather are firmly in neutral. This means we should expect average, not sweltering, temperatures.
Since Christmas, much of eastern Australia has been in a flux of extreme temperatures. This increased frequency of heatwaves shows a strong trend in observations, which is set to continue as the human influence on the climate deepens.
It is all part of a rapid warming trend that over the past decade has seen new heat records in Australia outnumber new cold records by 12 to 1.
Let’s be clear, this is not natural. Climate scientists have long been saying that we would feel the impacts of human-caused climate change in heat records first, before noticing the upward swing in average temperatures (although that is happening too). This heatwave is simply the latest example.
The useful thing scientifically about heatwaves is that we can estimate the role that climate change plays in these individual events. This is a relatively new field known as “event attribution”, which has grown and improved significantly over the past decade.
We compared the likelihood of such a heatwave in model simulations that factor in human greenhouse gas emissions, compared with simulations in which there is no such human influence. Since 2017 has only just begun, we used model runs representing 2014, which was similarly an El Niño-neutral year, while also experiencing similar levels of human influence on the climate.
Based on this analysis, we found that heatwaves at least as hot as this one are now twice as likely to occur. In the current climate, a heatwave of this severity and extent occurs, on average, once every 120 years, so is still quite rare. However, without human-induced climate change, this heatwave would only occur once every 240 years.
In other words, the waiting time for the recent east Australian heatwave has halved. As climate change worsens in the coming decades, the waiting time will reduce even further.
Our results show very clearly the influence of climate change on this heatwave event. They tell us that what we saw last weekend is a taste of what our future will bring, unless humans can rapidly and deeply cut our greenhouse emissions.
Our increasingly fragile electricity networks will struggle to cope, as the threat of rolling blackouts across NSW showed. It is worth noting that the large number of rooftop solar panels in NSW may have helped to avert such a crisis this time around.
These impacts have led state governments and other bodies to investigate heatwave management strategies, while our colleagues at the Bureau of Meteorology have developed a heatwave forecast service for Australia.
These are likely to be just the beginning of strategies needed to combat heatwaves, with conditions currently regarded as extreme set to be the “new normal” by the 2030s. With the ramifications of extreme weather clear to everyone who experienced this heatwave, there is no better time to talk about how we can ready ourselves.
We urgently need to discuss the health and economic impacts of heatwaves, and how we are going to cope with more of them in the future.
We would like to acknowledge Robert Smalley, Andrew Watkins and Karl Braganza of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for providing observations included in this article. This article was amended on February 16, 2017, to include updated weather observations.
I googled today some reviews of this book.
The links to the two reviews at the top I publish to show how much two reviews about the same book can actually differ.
My thoughts on reading this book:
I am now more than halfway through Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity”.
I would agree that for me this book is not all that easy one to read. There are pages with a lot of information which at times I find rather difficult to digest and remember. However I can sense that all the information provided shows a lot about our modern world and how people in it are affected. Other sections in the book are very easy to read and show, how complicated ordinary lives can become in our modern world. I like being able to read parts of the book for a few hours in one go. Making it possible to read for an extended time, the book seems to be getting more and more interesting. I can’t wait to find out more about its characters!
“Sydney airport recorded its hottest February day ever at 42.9C, breaking a 37-year record. Wood said the month was on track to be the hottest on record in both Sydney and Brisbane, following on from their hottest January on record.”
Here is an article by the ABC about Australia’s heatwave:
We live in Dapto, 100 km south of Sydney. Today, Saturday, we expect 41c. Right now it is still early morning and the outside temperature is only about 23C. We plan on driving to Warrawong later on, spending some time in the shopping centre and in the afternoon we want to visit the GALA Cinema to see a French movie: Rosalie Blum.
Yesterday afternoon my lady friends came over to my place. It was our Friday games afternoon. Erika is away in Geelong, Victoria, visiting some friends. But Barbara, Irene and Marion did come despite the heat and I not having any air-conditioning. I had our ceiling fans in the living room going the whole time. Blinds and curtains were in front of all the windows. We started playing at 2 pm. I think our inside temperature was then only about 28C. But three hours later, when the ladies left, the inside temperature had climbed to 32C.
Rangewriter wrote a very interesting blog on the following subject:
“Digging deep to understand different Viewpoints”
I made a comment to it and asked a question about drones. She gave me a very comprehensive answer on her thoughts to the subject of drones and drone warfare. I wanted to make the following comment to what Linda wrote but the comments were not published at the time. Here is what I wanted to send to Rangewriter:
Thanks very much , Linda, for your thoughts on this subject. What you say, are good explanations. It seems to me that Americans (and we, their allies) are in a constant state of war. But why, why, why?
I read in a highly praised book the following:
” . . . greater equality, socialism, participatory democracy and peace are all within our reach, but nuclear war, work camps and slavery are also possibilities . . . ”
AuntyUta 