After what happened in the US on January 20th and subsequently, I have found myself constantly scrolling through assorted writings on Substack, where a large number of reasonably literate Americans, and some very astute Australians (e.g. John Quiggin, Tim Dunlop) are fulminating, or at least aghast at the idiotic petulance from the Mango Mussolini. I also recently heard this sort of scrolling being appropriately termed ‘doomscrolling’.
The Mango Mussolini has refused to rule out economic pressure or military action to take over Greenland. Greenland is currently one of the two autonomous territories of the Kingdom of Denmark; the other being the Faroe Islands1. Inhabitants of both of those territories are citizens of Denmark and as Denmark is part of the European Union, they are therefore European Union citizens2.
Back when I was at university studying palaeontology, while quaffing our numerous cups of coffee during the day, I and a colleague used to muse about the ideal palaeontological job we wanted, and it usually came down to working at the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics (BMR) in Canberra. We didn’t think it would ever happen, and that we would initially be the most highly qualified ‘check-out chicks’ in a local supermarket.
Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe1 was a typographer by training and owned a printing business prior to entering the German Army in 1934, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant. After his service in the Army was over, he joined the Waffen-SS as an Untersturmführer on November 11, 1939, the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. On January 30, 1940 he was promoted to Obersturmführer and in 1942 he was promoted to Hauptsturmführer (captain).
“Let them eat cake” (actually the strict translation is ‘Let them eat brioche’) is a quote attributed to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution and wife of the last king of France, Louis XVI. As the story goes, it was the queen’s response upon being told that her starving subjects had no bread.
In my last post on this blog, which was written almost two months ago, I stated that while I hadn’t posted anything for about a month, I was ‘getting back into it’1. That was overly optimistic.
Having sold our house, getting rid of stuff before the removalists arrived, and moving out, we are now ‘of no fixed address’. To take advantage of the situation, we have been on a road trip in northern New South Wales for a couple of weeks and a couple of thousand kilometres (with another week to go), visiting friends, relatives and colleagues, and have had only intermittent access to the internet.
Some time ago, I wrote a piece in support of Trove, which was in danger of not being funded properly to guarantee its continuation. In that article, I related a story from my family history, about a policeman uncle of mine who was shot while attempting to make an arrest1. This is another one from the past, and refers to the grandparents of the aforementioned policeman.
The host of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Insiders show, David Speers apparently referred to Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for President of the US in the upcoming election, as a ‘woman of colour’1. You’d think that a supposedly professional journalist would eschew such idiocy. Calling anyone a ‘person of colour’ is simply a way of stating they are non-white. I gather that Kamala Harris has referred to herself as a ‘woman of colour’.