A Dog's Breakfast

I do sincerely apologise for the late publication of this week's blog.  Twenty four hours late is unacceptable and I can promise you that it will never happen again, though I should warn you that my paws were firmly crossed behind my furry back as I typed that.  So, why is this post so terribly tardy?  Well my male staff was trying to organise a trip to England to visit his dad, and in the same way that hairdressers always have terrible hair, doctors are always sick and dentists always have bad teeth, travel agents' own travel arrangements are always a dog's breakfast.

He must have looked at every single airline in the world and could not find anything at all that suited. Actually come to think of it he hasn't looked at Iran Air or Aeroflot yet, I must make a point of suggesting those to him when he starts looking again later today.  Both offer almost unlimited opportunities for adventure.  He's never flown on a Russian built aircraft yet - you can tell that because he's still alive, but surprisingly he doesn't seem to get over excited by the thought of unlimited supplies of vodka and borscht that are doled out by the Aeroflot hosties.  I can see why they carry such large supplies of vodka on Aeroflot planes.  It's so that in the event of the airline being refused aviation fuel as stopover points (and this has happened) because they have run out of credit, they can fill the fuel tanks up with enough vodka to fly to the nearest airport where they can still get credit without the captain having to walk up and down the aisle holding his cap out, asking the passengers for a contribution.  (That too has happened.)

Iran Air offers a different kind of excitement.  They have plenty of fuel, but because the Americans have long since had an embargo on the export of spare parts to Iran, all their aircraft, both civilian and military are held together with shoelaces, pipe cleaners and clothes pegs.  Consequently the things are falling out of the sky all the time.  You can barely go for a quiet walk in the country without being clobbered by the aileron of a 1971 Boeing 747 or a door from a 1969 Boeing 727.  These are not safe places to fly, and yet no doubt my male staff will consider them eventually when he discovers that none of the airlines with slightly better safety records meet the constraints of his budget.
  
So anyway, that's my excuse and I'm going to stick with it until I can think of something better, but now I will get on to more serious matters; matters that are causing me to be a cranky cavy this week.
Actually lets face it, there are many things happening in the world that make a deceased guinea pig very angry at the moment.  There's the wanton destruction of wildlife habitat for short term profit for a few greedy human individuals. There's the deliberate dismissal of the threat of climate change by many governments, most notably our own here in Australia, where the Prime Minister continues to demonize science, as if it's all a lefty pinko conspiracy to deprive his mates in the coal mining industry of some of their fat profits.  But most of all, the thing that is angering deceased guinea pigs everywhere is the current refugee crisis.  How sad that it took a single photo of a drowned three year old child face down on a Turkish beach for you humans to start thinking that 'Well, maybe we should consider doing something..........let's not rush into anything though.  If we look too anxious, people might start thinking that the developed world is somehow responsible for all this chaos and misery."

Am I the only one on the planet who thinks that most of this current state of affairs could have been avoided if a certain George W Bush and his "coalition of the silly" had confined themselves to rooting out the evil bastards who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity from Afghanistan instead of pursuing regime change in Iraq in order to gain control of Iraqi oil.  Let's face facts for once shall we.  Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/ll.  Indeed he was a sworn enemy of Osama bin Laden.  Sure, he made life miserable for the majority of Iraqis, he was a brutal, criminal psychopath, but there are at least a dozen others who fall into that category - Robert Mugabe for one, but does Zimbabwe have anything else the developed world needs? No, unless you count tobacco.

It's not too long a bow to draw to say that Saddam's demise triggered the Arab spring uprisings throughout north Africa and the middle east in which oppressed populations rebelled against their despotic leaders, cheered on from the sidelines by the USA and others including Britain and Australia.  In most cases, but particularly in Libya, Egypt and Syria this destabilised the nations so much that anarchy took hold in the vacuum left by the ousted rulers.  This of course played right into the hands of the Islamist nutters that we are all so scared of now.  And why are we scared of them?  Because our government tells us to be.  Australia's Prime Minister looked people in the eye and said "The evil ISIS dealth cult is coming after you."  This suits his own political agenda of course, because an incumbent government with a serious security crisis usually gets re-elected, no matter how bloody awful they are otherwise.  Just ask Maggie Thatcher, she'll tell you the same.  Wait, you can't can you - she's dead and probably playing backgammon with Saddam Hussein and Augusto Pinochet.  Tony Abbott is obviously taking a different tack to that of his old boss John Howard, who during the security crisis that followed 9/11 coined the phrase "Be alert, not alarmed."  Abbott's message is "Be alarmed, not alert."  An alert population would never vote for him again in a million years.

So, where does all this leave us?  It leaves us with a huge humanitarian crisis.  It leaves us with a bunch of nations who actually indirectly, if not directly caused the crisis desperately washing their hands of the blame for it.  It leaves us with millions of Syrian refugees trying to escape the misery of life in a war torn land and it leaves us with a handful developed nations spending billions of dollars happily bombing ISIS, chasing them from Syria to Iraq and back and doing absolutely nothing whatsoever to treat the cause of this awful disease - injustice.

BACI'S BALONEY

I've got no eyedear wot Uncal Billy is banging on abowt.  He's got sum sort of bee in his bonnit abowt sum place called the Midda  Leest.  Now, like most Orstraliuns or Merrycuns I've like got no eyedear wot soeva where that is, but I don't think Uncal Billy's mail staff intends to go that way wen he goes to Inglund.  Cum to think of it I don't no where that is eyetha.

Insuddently, Uncal Billy's feemail staff fownd this green thing in the toylut the otha day. She fished it owt and put it in the garden.  Dunno wot it is but it ain't a ginny pig.