Germaine Greer adds her two cents worth–Pt. 5 of a series

This is the second time that I have agreed with the gist of comments from Germaine Greer. This woman gets it!!  The first time that I agreed with Greer was about the causes of the devastating bush fires in Australia two years ago. In that instance Greer took the Greenies and the Globull warmists to task over their attempts to claim that the most devastating fire in Marysville and other areas in Victoria was due to Globull warming. On that occasion Greer made observations that I had also learned in the classroom.

This time Greer is refuting the attempts by Globull warmists to claim that the floods in Queensland have something to do with climate change (it does not).

Here is a part of what Greer had to say in her column:

 

What’s going on in Australia is rain… The ground is swollen with months of it. The new downpours have nowhere to go but sideways, across the vast floodplains of this ancient continent. We all learned the poem at school, about how ours is “a sunburnt country . . . of droughts and flooding rains"… And yet we still don’t get it. After 10 years of drought, we are having the inevitable flooding rains. The pattern is repeated regularly and yet Australians are still taken by surprise.

The meteorologists will tell you that the current deluge is a product of La Niña. At fairly regular intervals, atmospheric pressure on the western side of the Pacific falls; the trade winds blow from the cooler east side towards the trough, pushing warm surface water westwards towards the bordering land masses. As the water-laden air is driven over the land it cools and drops its load. In June last year the bureau of meteorology issued a warning that La Niña was about “to dump buckets” on Australia. In 1989-90 La Niña brought flooding to New South Wales and Victoria, in 1998 to New South Wales and Queensland… In Brisbane the benchmark was the flood of 1974; most Queenslanders are unaware that the worst flood in Brisbane’s history happened in 1893. Six months ago the meteorologists thought it was worthwhile to warn people to “get ready for a wet, late winter and a soaked spring and summer”. So what did the people do? Nothing. They said, “She’ll be right, mate”. She wasn’t.

It takes La Niña to bring rain to the inland, in such quantities that it can hardly be managed. Manage it Australians must. The Wivenhoe Dam on the Brisbane river was built to protect the city of Brisbane from another flood like the one of 1974. For years it has been at 10% of capacity [er, that’s a gross exaggeration, actually, but, yet, it was alarmingly low for a while], so when it filled this year nobody wanted to let any of the precious water out. It eventually became clear that the dam had filled to 190% of its capacity, and the authorities realised with sinking hearts not only that the floodgates would have to be opened [even wider, actually], but that the opening would coincide with a king tide in Moreton Bay. The question nobody [pardon?] has been heard to ask is whether or not the level of water in the dam should have been reduced gradually, beginning weeks ago…

 

Hat tip: Andrew Bolt

 

The poem that Greer mentions is “My Country” by Dorothea Mackellar. We all had to learn that poem by rote. We had to recite it perfectly when we were in school. Here is the full poem:

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold –
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

I have changed the colour of the relevant stanzas of the poem because Dorothea Mackellar in her poem has encapsulated the truth about the Australian landscape. The droughts and the floods are a normal part of this country. This is why Governor Lachlan Macquarie designated the five Macquarie towns for settlements. He picked areas on high ground so that people would not be impacted by those floods.

Yet Australians today seem to not understand the very nature of the Australian weather patterns. This is yet another reason why these rains seem to have caught many people unawares. They should have been prepared, but they believed the big lie about Globull warming, and they believed the lie that the days of soaking rain were finished. They failed to understand the nature of La Nina.

Germaine Greer totally sets aside her Catholic past

I have long been the critic of the feminist movement and this latest piece is one of the reasons that I continue to be critical of certain feminists, and in particular Germaine Greer.

The thing about Germaine Greer is that she was educated by the Presentation Sisters at the Star of the Sea convent in Elsternwick, Victoria. What is amusing to me is the fact that two of my teachers also taught Greer at least 10 years prior to my entering into high school level. Both of the nuns were quite exasperated because of the manner in which Greer expressed herself, but to give the good sisters their proper credit, they did not stifle her creativity.

The reason that I point to the Catholic background of Greer, is that I believe that the comments that she has expressed regarding rape in Darfur is probable evidence that Greer has totally forgotten her Christian roots. I find some of the comments to be very bothersome:

 

I then asked why it was that Western feminists seemed so reluctant to speak out against things such as honour killings.

Greer: “It’s very tricky. I am constantly being asked to go to Darfur to interview rape victims. I can talk to rape victims here. Why should I go to Darfur to talk to rape victims?”

Questioner (me): “Because it’s so much worse there.”

Greer: “Who says it is?”

Questioner: “I do, because I’ve been there.”

Greer: “Well, it is just very tricky to try to change another culture. We let down the victims of rape here. We haven’t got it right in our own courts. What good would it do for me to go over there and try to tell them what to do? I am just part of decadent Western culture and they think we’re all going to hell fast and maybe we are all going to hell fast.”

Too “tricky” to speak out against honor killings, and you can’t teach an old feminist new tricks.

What is so very bothersome is the fact that Greer says “it’s very tricky…. why should I go to Darfur to talk to rape victim?”

I do not think that the women of Darfur need Germaine Greer to come across and talk to them. What they need is women in the western world to be willing to speak up on their behalf and to show how the actions of the men of Darfur are contrary to the civil rights of women, and especially the rights of a rape victim.

One means that I have adopted in attempting to speak up for those who are so helpless because they do not have a voice on the world stage is to use the medium of blogging. In this way, I can scan media releases and the like that deal with the many serious issues that are continuing to emerge from countries that practice Sharia rule. In those countries a woman who has been raped can end up being stoned to death, imprisoned or being given at least 100 lashes.

The situation in the western world is entirely different from the situation in Islamic countries where women continue to be treated as though they are chattels, and continue to face punishment if they even show a little bit of ankle. Our justice system is not perfect but in recent times we have seen males being punished for gang rapes because the victims have been willing to confront their attackers in a court of law, and despite the ordeal they have managed to ensure that the attackers cannot make false allegations.

As a Christian I do feel concern for the women in Islamic countries and the way in which they are treated as second class citizens. At the same time I also feel disgust that a woman who was educated by the Presentation sisters in Melbourne can forget her own Christian roots to the point that she is not willing to speak up against the cruel practices against women that are found in Darfur as well as in other Islamic countries. There is nothing tricky about it, unless one is a coward, and a dhimmi at the same time.