Category: Travels

Oz Reich (2)

Behind Enemy Lines

Following on from yesterday’s post about Festung  Australia comes a report from an Oz resident:

[Victoria Premier] Andrews has vastly increased state power under a “state of emergency” that was promised to run for four weeks. It’s now been in place for over a year, with no end in sight. The only sunset clause in Victoria is that the premier has declared it out-of-bounds to sit on the beach to watch the sunset.
Police in Victoria may now detain any person or group for as long as “reasonably necessary,” restrict the movement of any person in the state, close any premises, and “require the destruction or disposal of anything.” Police can enter homes and seize property without a warrant.
Police and army patrol the Murray River—the border between Victoria and New South Wales—like Stasi watching over the Berlin Wall. Drones buzz in the Melbourne skies, and snitches diligently scan social media for WrongThink.

Horrifying.

You know, the reason I’m banging on about this is simple.  Were this kind of stuff taking place in some Third World hellhole, former Soviet satellite state or Muslim pisspot, I’d be largely unmoved, because tyrannical oppression is a longstanding albeit ugly tradition.

But this bullying is taking place in the Anglosphere, to one of our longest-standing allied people and in a country I’ve always respected (although it may not seem that way at times).

And the pity of it is that I don’t see it ending soon, and don’t see it being changed nor even challenged at the polls either.  It’s pretty fucking bleak, Down Under.

#MeToo

Travels

Here’s Salena Zito, talking about the most famous highway pit stop in America:

Everything about Wall Drug, arguably the most iconic and long-lasting drug store in America, exemplifies a doggedness. It took persistence not only to survive but also thrive against insurmountable odds in a place few thought a small business had any business starting an enterprise in the first place.
In 1931, when Ted Hustead and his wife Dorothy were looking for a place to open a drug store, he told the local paper years later he picked the thinly populated town of Wall because the local doctor told them he’d give them all his prescriptions.
Despite all their hard work, though, most of their potential customers passed their little prairie town along the highway, rarely noticing the store.
The Husteads’ dire future all changed one hot summer night when Dorothy Hustead could not sleep. Irritated that the parade of cars along U.S. 16 was keeping her awake, she wondered how could they make all of those people at least stop at their store and maybe buy a thing or two.
Out of that mild irritation came a plan: Plant signs along the highway offering free ice-cold water to weary travelers. And not just any signs, but clever ones like the humorous Burma Shave signs that were famously posted all along small highways in the 1920s.
Her idea was both simple and genius. More importantly, it worked.
Within a year, they went from no employees to eight, and the signs went from a handful to hundreds of billboards. And today, Wall Drug is a 76,000-square-foot, multimillion-dollar slice of Americana where you can still get your prescription filled, but you can also get hand-crafted moccasins, divine homemade donuts, out-of-print books on the American West, cowboy boots, clothing, ice cream, western art, homemade pies, and bumper stickers. If they don’t have it, it’s probably not made.

I’ve been to Wall Drug.  And unless it’s fallen off the display, you can see my picture (along with thousands of similar ones) inside.

That was taken in September 2004, in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris.

By the way:  I bought some gun gear at Wall Drug, and when we stopped at the Cabela’s store in Mitchell SD, I saw exactly the same stuff — only priced about 20% higher.

One More Reason Not To

Mocking Furriners, Travels

Let’s just go through the catalogue of ways to die in Australia:

  • dingoes which eat babies
  • brown snakes
  • funnel-web spiders
  • sharks
  • saltwater crocodiles
  • Sydney traffic
  • unchecked, uncontrollable bush fires
  • box jellyfish
  • blue-ringed octopus
  • its cousin, the blue-lined octopus
  • stonefish
  • Australian paralysis tick
  • and so many more

Now we can add mouse plagues to this list:

At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down.
Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.
The plague is a cruel blow to farmers in Australia´s most populous state who have been battered by fires, floods and pandemic disruptions in recent years, only to face the new scourge of the introduced house mouse.

And of course, plagues of mice sometimes result in follow-up plagues of… you guessed it, snakes, which treat this as some kind of Roman orgy of gluttony, and not only gorge themselves but create still more snakes to take advantage of the bounty.

Predictably, this mouse plague is being met with customary Aussie ingenuity and just as predictably, activities like this are being greeted with horror by the Usual Suspects (almost all of whom, of course, live in areas untouched by the mouse plague):

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on Tuesday pleaded with farmers not to kill ‘curious animals’ that are ‘just looking for food to survive’.
‘They shouldn’t be robbed of that right because of the dangerous notion of human supremacy,’ PETA spokeswoman Aleesha Naxakis said.

“Human supremacy”, eh?  We should also drop this bunch of rodents into drowning pits and fire barrels.

As a lad, I used to enjoy hunting for mice in the fields nearby our house, armed with my trusty Diana air rifle, but I think my best day only yielded a dozen or so.  This Oz thing is something else altogether.