Australians have been consistently voting in support of the abuse of refugees for thirty years. And then we consider the situation of Indigenous Australia…
We are very much majority racist. OTOH, at least we’re not majority fascist. Unlike the Trumpkins.
Don’t get me started on the latest bullshit. Fucking inhumane bastards should be cast adrift themselves. Several hundred miles off the South coast of Tassie.
Needs some anti Trump/Hanson palate cleanser.
Australian Mistletoe:
A bush turkey on the pull:
Wiseman’s Ferry:
Dixon Sands:
(these are all from places I’ve worked over the last week)
One day I’ll go to Australia. I gotta see all your weird animals, and fun people.
I’m particularly keen on seeing the glow worm caves on the Gold Coast.
That can only mean one thing
If you do, then:
Go to Tasmania. The sort of beauty spots that you’d hike for days to reach on the mainland are just the background noise down there. The places that Tasmanians hike to get to are mind blowing.
Go to the central deserts. And do it properly; don’t just fly in to Alice Springs and stay at a resort. Start at the coast, get an old Kombi or somesuch (a bike would be even better) and take the week to drive there. Turn off the aircon and roll down the windows; feel the heat, taste the dust, smell the roadkill. You need to give the desert a few days to fuck with your head on the way in if you want the real experience.
Lol, driving from Western Washington to Salt Lake City fucked with my head plenty. Once I was on the east side of the Cascades the vast empty flatness of the midwest triggered my agoraphobia like I’ve never felt it before.
Suddenly I’m thinking “the sky is way too big… I really wish there were trees… anyone with a good pair of binoculars could see me from a hundred kilometers away!”
[quote=“LDoBe, post:24, topic:88643, full:true”]I’m particularly keen on seeing the glow worm caves on the Gold Coast.
[/quote]
Not just Queensland: http://www.infobluemountains.net.au/rail/upper/glow_worm.htm
You’ve said you do back country surveying or something like that right? PM me some of your favorite places!
Gonna put in a plug for the Kiwis when it comes to glow worms. The caves at Te Anau were something else.
There’s no daylight between the major parties when it comes to refugees, because they’re both pandering to arsehole swinging voters. IIRC, 63% of Australians disapprove of refugee policy.
It sure would be nice if 63% of Australians didn’t vote for the major parties, though.
As a citizen of the United States…
And possibly in Maine in the future:
Back when I was healthy enough that using me as a representative wasn’t counterproductive, I used to spend election days hassling people on behalf of these fine folks:
I hope it passes there.
Preference ranked voting while not perfect is so much better than the electoral college and our two-party districting system in the US that it’s, in my opinion, completely unethical not to switch to it.
Voting is the most important way US citizens interact with the government, and hindering its efficacy or ignoring better systems is so undemocratic it makes me angry.
(I think “the midwest” usually means the states between the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, and the Mississippi … not sure if there is a regional term for the inner northwest.)
True, but those rain shadow desserts East of the coastal ranges can look pretty vast and empty. Nothing like Iowa with 360 degrees of corn though.
(Iowa has hills too, but they’re small, so driving across it is just undulating corn. Maddening…)
Honestly, my mental model of the US calls anything between the cascades and the rockies the “midwest”.
But really, I should just call it the “mostly empty”.
And yeah, like @null says, once you’re east of the Cascades it feels like a gigantic litterbox with some rivers, but still mostly flat.
Southern Idaho was instructive. The topsoil there is so thin. Like a few inches between the surface and granite. You’d see all these streams and creeks running into the rivers and then realize all of that water, all of it is just runoff from irrigation, because it has nowhere to go but travel across the granite to a river.
Did you know the ramp for Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon jump is still there? You can tell how incredibly thin the topsoil is there too. Seriously, it looks like someone just took a sharpie and traced the granite and that’s the topsoil.
(not my photo, but it shows how little topsoil there is. I marvel at it, because in Western Washington, it’s so deep you usually can’t even get to the less rich stuff with a shovel digging all day.)
Idaho’s Bitterroot range is pretty. Eastern Oregon and headed from there into Idaho is pretty desolate.
