Bushfires bushwhack bullshitters.

If ever there was a sign that Australian voters should have fired the lying, spinning, fakes and fascists of the federal government that’s been running or rather ruining the country for the past six years when they had such a red-hot chance back in May, it’s the bushfires currently raging in the Eastern states.

Breaking-out earlier in the year and burning more ferociously than ever, and having thus far cost four lives, around 500 houses, well over a million hectares of bush and grasslands, literally countless numbers of livestock and wildlife and  a fortune in fire-fighting time and money, they’ve really put the heat on this country’s climate-change-denying government.

But rather than taking responsibility for their arsin’ around if not actual acts of arson, the guilty Liberal or rather Lieberal and National/Nazional parties are still desperately attempting to put a smokescreen between the fires and public ire at the clear connection between ‘coal’ and ‘lit’ in their accursed coalition.

Government members have been desperately demonstrating their alleged concern and compassion for the victims by hot-footing it out in the bush to for photo-ops of them viewing the embers, and splashing-out a little federal cash in the hope that this ‘generosity’ is what the public remembers.

But rather than blushing with embarrassment at being ambushed at every turn by people blaming them for their shameless dereliction to do anything about, or even admit to the reality of, climate change, they’ve been going red in the face with rage.

Hotly defending their disgraceful record as a coal-ition of fools dedicated to the support of fossil fuels, and even going so far as to claim, crowalition-style, that they’ve done a great deal behind the scenes – or smokescreen – to tackle the very problem that they doubt or deny exists, and thus that they’re actually quite a coolition.

Lots of these global-warming-denying firebrandhave lost their cool, however, in the face of burning determination on the part of Greens-party politicians, supporters and sympathisers to hold them to account for their record of environmental vandalism, and similarly smouldering resentment against them by the majority of the Australian populace.

For example, leader of the National/Nazional Party and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, a far-from-bright spark at the best of times, fired-off a media response to criticisms of the coal-ition’s record on combating climate change that bushfire victims “don’t need the ravings of some pure enlightened and woke capital-city greenies at this time when they are trying to save their homes.”

To which the aptly-named Carol Sparks, mayor of Glen Innes and Severn, one of the areas most devastated by the fires, replied with a press article that reduced McCormick’s load of hash to ashes by making the point that “while all this is a personal tragedy for my family and myself, it is but one story within an unfolding statewide and global disaster.”

However, coal-ition/crowalition Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his minions continued to – and still do – stick to their story that “this is no time for a debate on climate change.”

This is true, of course, though not in the opportunistically deceitful sense that Morrison and his fellow moronic motor-mouths intend it, as the time for debate about climate change is indeed not now, as the bushfires are burning in 2019, but in fact was back then, 10, 15 or even 20 years ago.

But even by using the weasel word ‘debate’ in the current context, the Australian government and its apologists are still trying to cast doubt over the scientific, meteorological and by many other means observable fact that global warming is a burning issue.

One item that’s by no means up for debate in the Australian context, however, is that, as they recently revealed, a group of former state fire-fighting chiefs months ago begged the government to meet with it and both hear and heed its pleas for more urgent preparation for what it predicted would be a catastrophic fire season this year, including more funds for the lease of specialist water- and fire-retardant-bombing aircraft from the US.

But the government refused all their requests, and, now, due to the fact that climate-change has so extended the bushfire seasons in Australia and the US that they now coincide with or at least overlap each other, all of these aircraft that were earlier available for lease are currently in service in California.

In short,  the bushfires still raging out of control in Australia, or at least the Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales, have certainly bushwhacked the bullshitters who currently mislead and misgovern us; but sadly, not nearly so badly as these bullshitters have bushwhacked, and seemed hell-bent on continuing to bushwhack, us, our proverbially sunburned country, and the rest of our fast-warming planet.

To X with love and xxx.

Dear X,

This is a long-overdue expression of my almost life-long love of, fascination with, and fixation on you.

From the very instant I first set eyes on you, when I was little more than an infant, and thus long before I was lexual or textual, let alone sexual, I’ve been totally transfixed by your X-appeal.

The sight of you in my picture-book of Treasure Island, marking the exact spot on the map at which the pirates had buried their chest full of ill-gotten gold and other such loot was unforgettably exciting.

As was my discovery shortly afterwards that the fame of your name wasn’t exclusive to piracy, as in the X that marked the spot of the buried treasure and the X formed by the crossed bones under the skull of the pirate flag, the Jolly Roger, but was popular to to an astonishing extent.

And not just literally popular, as in speaking and writing, but figuratively even more so, considering the plethora of ways in which you were portrayed as an X-symbol.

As X for ‘multiplied by’, which is the first ex-piracy example of encountering you that I can recall. And next, of course, you made a rare appearance as a hex, as in X for ‘incorrect’, which, never maximally talented, numberswise, I often saw marked on my arithmetic tests.

Soon after, of course, you turned up as X the ‘unknown’ in algebra, and then, though I never learned much about this or indeed any other known kind of mathematix, I graduated to a new school.

A school who’s name, incredibly enough, started with the initial X, which allegedly stood for Xavier, but since the Saint of that name was Spanish, the local pronunciation of if as ‘zayvier’ instead of the proper Hithpanic ‘harvier’ was X as in incorrect.

But even so, it was there that I soon met my true X again, this time in Latin class, this time in the form of the ancient-Roman number that, thanks to later mathematical innovations imported from India and Arabia, we now call ten and write as 10.

But don’t be sad, dear X, as to me you’ll always score a Roman X out of X in not only X-appeal but also X-rated, or in other words sex-appeal.

Because I found the arrival of puberty not only an ecstatic physical and emotional experience, but also an extremely exciting verbal and scientific one.

Verbally, my love for you, my dear X, was vindicated for once and for all by the clearly evident fact that the look, sound and very concept of the word ‘sex’ comes not from its ‘se’ start, but from its climactic ‘x’ ending.

As anyone who cares to can check for him/herself by experimenting with replacing the ‘x’ in ‘sex’ with such perfectly unexceptionable but far-from-erotic alternative consonants as, say, ‘t’ or ‘w’.

But what even more excessively blew my mind than your expert way of bringing the word ‘sex’ to such an appropriate climax, my beloved X, was the crucial role I discovered you playing in sex at a cellular level.

When I exited school and entered university, one of the first-year subjects I studied was genetics, in which I learned that females are chromosomally XX, and we males are XY.

Leaving aside the consideration that feminists persist in trying to vex us males by mis-labeling us as XWhy? and thus implying that we’re expendable, I’ve treasured this insight into the fun as in fundamental difference ever since.

And in the process made a great many X as in incorrect moves, including marrying two XX wives who both wound-up wondering XWhy they should tolerate my extramarital exploits any longer, and thus are now very ex wives indeed.

Whether my current XX spouse is extravagantly tolerant of my

XY antics, or I’ve reformed to an extraordinary extent, or simply so aged as to wonder XWhy? bother with any further sexplorations I’m not sure.

But, whatever, I’m way ahead of myself, having thus far failed to pay due tribute to you, my lovely X, by recalling that you’ve always been there for me through lots of earlier XXs and exes.

Plus, of course, exits, like my ejection and exile from university after years of excruciating exam results, and my subsequent exciting career in advertising, first in Sydney, Australia, and later in Asia as, appropriately enough, an ex-pat.

This career as a copywriter in advertising started back in an era when we clacked-out copy on typewriters, and when other factors fostering my eccentric love for you, my precious X, virtually exploded.

Every typing mistake we made had to be either expunged by the application of a kind of white paint that came in brands called Typ-Ex, Correx and such, which could be typed-over when it dried, or else simply exterminated with savage volleys of Xs, as in, for example, xxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, before we continued on.

But perhaps the ultimate moment for us, dear X, arrived when not only I was, as ever, so lavishly loving you, but every office-worker on the planet also fell head over heels with you in your new incarnation as the Xerox copier.

Now, today, as I soundlessly and perhaps even senselessly type this post-to-be without even using paper, and with a backspace key or delete function with which to correct mistakes instead of covering them in xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxs, and we’re so familiar with X-Files, X-Men, X-Boxes and even a generation called X, it’s hard to communicate the degree of enjoyment excited by Xerox.

Not only for its extraordinary ability to copy documents, but also, as I recall, its capacity for producing recognizable if not crystal-clear images of the X-rated body parts of staff who became intoxicated or otherwise over-excited at office Xmas and other parties.

I could go on forever about the love story we’ve been so lucky to live through, dear X. But I’m afraid you must excuse me, as the sheer extent of letter must be exhausting the patience of even the most persistent reader.

So, for now, here’s loving you but never leaving you, your ever-extra-faithful fan,

DJ XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

Writing writ, wit and Whitelock.

You may recall, dear reader, or maybe not, that I recently wrote in the introduction to to a post titled ‘Writing writ and wit’ that if there was one lesson that my 20-odd years of tutoring adult evening classes in writing had taught me, it’s that, even with the best will and the sharpest wits in the world, you can’t teach anyone so much as a whit about how to write.

But at least I didn’t keep this a secret from my students. In fact, though some clearly saw me as a bit nit-witted for admitting the truth, I always told them up front that though it was impossible to actually teach them to write, I might be able to feed them a few tit-bits of information to help them learn it for themselves.

And that to aid them in this task I’d make strenuous attempts to appreciate and proffer due praise of the efforts they made on the writing assignments I set them each week for completion and reading-aloud in the next class.

In addition to this, I also undertook to do everything in my power to encourage and even inspire them to persist in practicing, not only through the eight weeks of the course, but, if possible, forever after.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight when one the these long-ago students that, as promised, I’d conspicuously failed to teach anything about writing, turned up as a commentor last week on my my latest Facebook post under what happens to be not only both her real-life and Facebook names, but also her nom de plume, Ali Whitelock.

The mention of nom de plume of course signifying that, at least as far as I know, she’s the only one of my hundreds of former writing students to have had a book commercially published.

Then just days after commenting on my post, this morning she further astonished me by appearing in person at a sidewalk table of a cafe my wife and I happened to passing on one of our frequent expeditions to the irresistably raffish counter-cultural attractions of Sydney’s Newtown.

After the first flurry of huggings, air-kissings and exclamations in celebration of our meeting for the first time in ages, or, as we Australians and even the Scottish-accented Ali are wont to say, in yonks, we immediately proceeded to relate our recent histories, in the course of which Ali revealed that since we last met she’s followed-up her first book of prose with another of poetry, and that she has a third tome well on the way.

In response to this news I couldn’t help reminding her, as I’ve done many times before, that I considered her my best, or in other words worst student ever, as the opening story in her first published book, Poking seaweed with a stick and running away from the smell, happened to be the first piece of writing she read-out in my course, before I’d had any time to demonstrate that I couldn’t teach her a thing.

Or, to put this another way, it’s proof-positive that, my non-teaching theory and practice of writing instruction works, or in other words absolutely doesn’t work, as promised.

It certainly taught her nothing whatever about writing poetry, of which she’s now produced one and almost a second book-length collection, and for which she’s additionally achieved a considerable degree of popularity for reading to rapt audiences on Sydney’s literary circuit.

In fact, though this may have been a rush of rash enthusiasm rather than serious intent on her part, she told me that she was thinking of publicly praising me for my total non-contribution to her writing success by dedicating either her next or some future book “To Dean Johns, who taught me nothing whatever about writing.”

In addition, she was gracious enough to recall that I’d been true to my word about at least providing her with some inspiration, though we both agreed that even this had been of a rather negative nature.

One of the book/author combinations I’d listed in the notes for Week 2 of my course to stimulate students to wider reading was Women, written by Charles Bukowski, who I described to the class as possibly the hardest-drinking, most politically-incorrect, misogynistic and otherwise disreputable figure in modern American literature.

Ali, as a fervent feminist and an outspokenly Glaswegian one to boot, was so outraged at the thought that such a flagrant offender against both good taste and her gender could get to first base with his poisonous prose, and his doubtless even worse verse, let alone achieve fame for scribbling such stuff, that she went out next day and bought all of his books she could find.

Then, surely as much her own astonishment as to mine, she proceeded to fall so helplessly head-over-heels for Bukowski and his work as to start incorporating a few hints of his style into her own.

So that I can pride myself on not only on having taught Ali nothing, and thus not only made her writing so much as a jot better; but also, by exposing her to Bukowski’s mad, bad influence, having achieved the even more difficult feat of making it, at least in the vulgar-language department, a whole lot worse.

Such terrific twin student-learning outcomes that, at least as far as I’m concerned, no tutor, teacher, or other species of alleged educator of students in the dark arts of writing can truthfully boast of, let alone ever hope to beat.

 

 

 

Read on, Eddie et al.

This morning, while I was drinking my customary wake-up cappuccino at Mrs. Underwood’s cafe, the proprietor of the adjoining Sydney Dry Cleaners and also both Facebook and real-life friend, Eddie Liu, joined me for a chat in which he first made my day by declaring that he reads every one of my posts, then proceeded to ruin my mood by revealing that he never gets further than the first three lines.

Not that I was surprised by the news that Eddie self-edits my writings, witterings and wrantings in lieu of persisting in reading them right through. Having long been aware that he’s a performance-vehicle enthusiast, or, in the local slang, rev-head, speed-freak or rubber-burner, I’d already assumed he was more into speeding than reading.

But his confession that he plays so fast and loose with my posts as to almost totally short-circuit them rather than just cutting a few corners shocked me into realising how many others must be doing likewise.

And not only rev-heads or boy-racers too intent on speeding, but gourmets and gourmands too busy feeding, baking enthusiasts kneeding and keen gardeners weeding, not to mention the countless members of my potential audience too busy sexting or even breeding, to bother heeding, let alone reading, more than mere particles of my anybody else’s articles.

In short, I owe more than a word of gratitude to anybody with such a good attitude as to have persisted so much further into this post than the pathetic three lines, if indeed any, reached by Eddie and other devotees of speed-reading, and will never proceed any further despite all my bleeding pleading.

Though, my having said that, who knows? Just possibly, having spotted his name in the heading of this post, and a repeat mention not much further on, fast Eddie might be still with us thus far, and even tempted to show and celebrate this one-off reading achievement by leaving a ‘like’, just as I’m so thankful that you, one of that all-too-rare breed of real, all-the-way readers do.

And we we won’t have to hold our breaths waiting, as whatever Eddie does, as long as it doesn’t look either pedestrian or too much like hard work for words, he does at literally breathtaking speed.

 

 

Horoscope/hurrahscope 2020.

Though sceptical to a quite astronomical extent about astrology and all other superstitions, both secular and allegedly ‘sacred’, I have to admit to having high hopes that my sister’s reading of what the stars have in store for Australia’s and other countries’ conservative governments next year.

Because, as she confidently informed me the other day, her expert reading of the horoscope, or at least the Western one, reveals an ill-starred start to the coming year for horror governments around the world.

But even if her prediction comes true, as I heartily hope it is will, I fear it will not necessarily prove a total hurrahscope for us citizens of these misruling regimes.

Because, though we will certainly horocelebrating our happy horoscape from them, we’ll still be left facing the fact that they’ve taken us so far down the slippery horrorslope that it will take efforts of truly heroic scope to repair the damage they’ve done.

In other words, righting the wrongs wrought by all these wrong-wing, fright-wing, might-is-right-wing regimes and restoring bright-wing, see-the-light-wing government of, by and for the benefit of ourselves, the people, will likely prove horribly hard.

And could be even more difficult than my dear sister realises, as she’s thus far totally failed, as far as I know, to take the Eastern horoscope into account.

So that when the switch comes on January 25, 2020 from this year of the pig to the next year of the rat, we may either not see an end to hegemonic governments hogging heaps more than their share of power and prosperity, or else they could become even more rodent-like, if possible, than they are already.

But whatever, there’s at least one long-standing prediction we’re certainly not destined to see realised, and that’s Dr Mohamad Mahathir’s much-vaunted ‘Vision 2020’ for Malaysia to achieve ‘developed’ status by this coming year.

Presumably, since he’s proven to be the same old doctator as ever despite now heading a new but regrettably far-from-reformist coalition government, he’s rebranded his original program as ‘Revision 2030’ or whenever.

In any event, you’d need a mighty powerful crystal ball to foresee how long it will be before Malaysia will be blessed with a government with the balls of steel it will take to beat the nation’s triple bugbear of race, religion and royalty into some semblance of a genuinely civilised democracy.

Just as it could take some mighty powerful tea-leaves, Tarot cards, and other such allegedly fortune-telling agents to align themselves with the stars and planets on whose positioning my sister puts so much faith.

And on whose reliability, let’s face it, I have no confidence whatever beyond what can be clearly recognised and thus written-off as wishful thinking.

With governments like Australia’s progressively, or rather regressively advancing their nations in reverse on every possible front from financial and social fairness to honesty, truth, and transparency on the part of legislative and executive institutions, the future looks very, very far from promising.

For not only those citizens domestically dependent on welfare as distinct from the various nefarious forms of wealthfare that governments of the so-called ‘Christian’ right are so faux-righteously and un-Christianly given to; but also for Planet Earth at large, given these self-styled potentates’ determined denial of global warming, and persistently unstinting support for continued vandalisation of the environment.

Not to mention their approval for the persecution, prosecution and punishment of Wikileakers like Julian Assange and other so-called ‘whistleblowers’ for exposing the crimes that such governments commit or permit against their own and other peoples.

Mention of which misdeeds inevitably brings us to the horror governments of China, Russia, Syria and Turkey, to instance just a few of the worst, plus, of course, the US, to which three years of Trump has caused a catastrophic slump in global power and prestige.

And then, of course, there’s the UK, whose conservative government has cost it three years of Brexcruciating confusion, and will very likely also cost it the entire country of Scotland as soon as sometime in 2020.

But all that being said, I find it difficult to foresee, a matter of mere months from now, that political panderers for the powerful, prosperous and otherwise privileged, plus, of course, their personal self-interest, are going to stand for our turning their happy-ever-after whorescopes into their worst horrorscopes.

Though there’s always at least some hope of a hurrahscope in favour of us honest citizens, I suppose, as long as we can collectively summon-up the hutzpah to support the self-sacrifices of such current and future heroes as Julian Assange, Greta Thunberg and millions of their fellows and followers who foresee a far better future for us all than the hollowscopes that current governments seem to have in mind for us and our system of democratic self-rule.

Dementia discovery!!!

Back in 2017, I wrote a couple of Malaysiakini columns about dementia, in an attempt to both express my sympathy for sufferers of any of its many varieties, especially the senile ones,and to try and exorcise my own dread of becoming similarly afflicted in my increasingly old age.

A concern that, come to think of it, could well be classified as a kind of anxiety technically termed dreadementia.

I also attempted in these old columns to comfort myself and any fellow old crocks still sufficiently compus mentis as to be capable of reading and comprehending my writing that there are myriad varieties of juvenile or at least pre-senile dementia that we could count ourselves fortunate to have avoided or at least by now out-lived.

In the case of we men and boys, for example, I instanced he-mentia, the ages-old and still seemingly ineradicable dick-headed delusion or, if you prefer, phallic falsehood, that males are somehow superior to females.

In this context I also mentioned she-mentia, various versions of which, like, for example, prementia, some claim to be evident in girls, women and even ladies at certain intervals and in specific life-stages.

But, wisely, I think, I decided not to discuss she-mentias in any intricate let alone intimate detail, for fear of arousing the wrath of rampantly feminist readers.

And similarly, out of due respect for the naturally fair-haired of all sexes and genders, and admittedly a dash of self-interest, as I happen to be a member of this most unfairly joked-about group, I made no mention whatever of blondementia.

I did, however, touch on quite a few other deficiencies of mind/ mentia that all-too-commonly afflict people of any or all ages, stages or sexual tendencies or gender agendas.

Like, for instance, those conditions classifiable in such clearly self-explanatory terms as d’ohmentia, dimentia, air-headementia and dunderheadementia.

And then, somewhat less obviously, I touched on what can justly be called cementia, that condition in which sufferers’ thoughts, opinions and other attitudes of mind are set as solidly as concrete, never ever to be changed save perhaps with jack-hammers; and the closely-related sedimentia, in cases of which victims’ beliefs, ‘faiths’ and prejudices all settle like so much sludge to the bottoms of their minds and strongly resist all attempts to dredge them up into the light.

Of course, as pretty well always when I write about a topic, I’ve subsequently realised that I made a few mistakes or omissions in my original columns on the subject of dementia.

For instance I now see that I erred in describing, or, if you prefer, prescribing academentia, or education, as an effective treatment for many of the other early-onset dementias, because even academentia can lead to apparent madness in over-dosages.

And I quickly regretted describing doughmentia, the obsessive love of money to the point of madness if not also badness, as “about as dire as pre-senile dementias get”, because I soon realised that me-mentia, self-love to the point ego- or even monomania can arguably prove even more destructive to both sufferers and those doomed to suffer their antics.

But, incredibly, or even outright incredimentially, it wasn’t until yesterday that I stumbled across what could well prove a landmark discovery in the dementia field.

It all started when I received a rather forbidding-looking and stern-sounding letter some weeks ago informing me that, as a person of 75+ years old, it was time for my annual medical check-up.

This must have triggered a moment of that all-too-common but relatively benign condition I think of as misreadementia, because I failed to properly peruse the letter, and presumed that the annual check-up that it mentioned was for the medical certificate required by the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority for seniors wishing to retain their licences to drive.

But not at all, as my GP informed me when I presented myself for my almost 76-year roadworthiness check, just a friendly invitation from the medical centre of which he’s a member to come in, if I felt like it, for a battery of what I suppose you could call routine physical and mental maintenance tests for people whose manufacturer warranties have long expired.

At first I felt foolish for having come in on what turned-out to be a mistaken mission, but then I quickly consoled myself with the thought that, just as penicillin and some other medical breakthroughs resulted from serendipitous accidents, maybe my boo-boo could prove to be a similar case.

And the more I thought about this, the more I found myself fantasizing about the media furore that could follow my discovery of a form of dementia previously unknown to medical science, and even about the prospect of nomination for a Nobel Prize.

Just imagine! An old fart like myself, mercifully free of discernible symptoms of every seriously mind-sapping syndrome from he-mentia, d’ohmentia and dimentia, through cementia and sedimentia and all the way to doughmentia and me-mentia, and yet presenting as history’s first-ever recorded case of confusion as to why I’ve come to see the doctor.

Or, as this breakthrough discovery of mine is most likely to become known if it ever it becomes sufficiently commonplace as to deserve its own special jargon word, medimentia.

Trump dumps Kurds for crude.

If Donald Trump imagines that his assassination of Islamic State/Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi will divert attention from his disgraceful deliverance of his Kurdish allies in Syria into the bloodstained hands of the Russians, Turks and pro-Assad forces by withdrawing US troops from the North of the country, then immediately announcing his beefing-up of US protection of oilfields in its Eastern region, he’s doomed to disappointment.

Because many if not most of us still vividly recall the US’s previous craven and cruddy double-crossing of the Kurds. Back in 1996, having urged Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq to rise-up against Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, the then US President, George Bush Senior, similarly dumped them, as Trump has now done again, and left them for dead.

But even cruddier than the US concern for oil over loyalty to its allies this time around has been Trump’s triumphalism over the death of the late, unlamented al-Baghdadi. As richly as this messiah of the murderous Islamic State surely deserved to die, Trump did himself nothing but damage by so typically shooting from the lip in celebration, and spewing lots of crude, ugly crud like “he died like a dog”…whimpering and crying…a coward’s death.”

Trump also couldn’t resist falsely portraying ‘his’ achievement in presiding over the assassination of al-Baghdadi as more significant by far than that of former President Barrack Obama’s overseeing the killing of the then head of al-Qaeda and mastermind of the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre, Osama bin Laden.

I haven’t heard yet how Trump’s latest bestie, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, for whom Trump recently hosted a State Dinner, is planning to respond to this latest act of Donald the cruddy dud’s derring-do.

 

Perhaps Morrison is still carefully considering his response, having first shot himself in the foot following the withdrawal of US support for the Syrian Kurds by immediately claiming that it made good sense, and then realising to his consternation that he had thus outraged the relatively small but extremely outspoken community of immigrant Kurdish voters here in Australia.

Chances are he’ll play safe and elect not to respond at all, any more than he has to the threat of global warming, to criticisms that that alleged government that he now heads has done little or nothing in its long years in office to properly manage Australia’s dwindling water resources; to prepare for the inevitability of droughts like the current one by any means beyond recommending that we all pray for rain; or to tackle the myriad other problems besetting the nation.

Though, now that I come to think of it, Morrison and his chief henchman in his government’s demonisation of refugees and so-called ‘asylum-seekers’ will probably seize on the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as ‘justification’ for stepping-up homeland security in anticipation of reprisals by Islamic State terrorists against the the US and its allies – allies no longer, of course, including the now twice-betrayed Kurds – for butchering their leader.

At least Islamic State apparently had some bleeding leadership, which is more than I or anybody else could say of many of its sovereign democratic-state antagonists, like the US, UK and Australia, the majority of whose voters have so stupidly saddled themselves and the rest of us with Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison and other such leadershits.

Or, in other words, such cruds as to prefer crude oil over Kurds, and the privileging of their their own personal and political self-interests, plus of course those of their people-pillaging cronies and supporters, over other far more important and pressing considerations.

And thus, as far as these misleaders, bleeders and rude, crude right-wing wrong-thinkers are concerned, those of us calling if not crying-out for genuinely transparent government, enlightened social progress and protection of the ever-more extremely endangered environment can all go get screwed.