As if reports about the potential threat of a nuclear meltdown in Japan aren’t enough to drive me to despair, enter The Experts.

Every news bulletin unearths its own expert on the situation at Fukushima. He is usually from some obscure university such as the School of Miscellaneous Panic Studies in Antarctica. The interviewer asks him for his considered opinion based on his considerable knowledge of nuclear power only to hear:- “Well, it’s too soon to tell.”

The desperate interviewer prods Dr Mumbles for an atom of information, a sound byte perhaps? but no, the expert pleads ambivalence. “We don’t have enough information as yet,” he explains. “I would be loathe to predict the outcome of this situation.”

“But the situation looks pretty grim, doesn’t it, Dr Mumbles?” prods the interviewer.

“Well, yes… and no, although it’s too soon to tell,” Dr Mumbles responds. “It all depends on…”

“Thank you, Dr Mumbles,” interrupts the interviewer before going back to shots of the steaming nuclear reactor.

“That was Dr Mortimer Mumbles from the University of Antarctica expressing concern over the extremely grim situation at Fukushima.”

What was all that about? I ask myself. They could have interviewed me, and I would have said “Dunno, but it ain’t lookin’ good.” But I wasn’t asked because I don’t have the cachet, the info, the insight, the expertise. My dunno would lack credibility, I guess. However, it is comforting to know that I’m not alone.

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I’m beginning to wonder if a voodoo guy has it in for Australia and is sticking pins into an effigy of our glorious country. And that’s why I haven’t written lately. I’ve just been overwhelmed. Too much has happened in the last two months and so far 2011 has been pretty miserable.

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You could have exploded firecrackers in the streets of Melbourne yesterday afternoon and nobody would have noticed.

It was reminiscent of the scene that greeted the invaders from that 1959 Peter Sellers film, “The Mouse that Roared.” The impoverished principality, The Grand Duchy of Fenwick, had decided to invade the U.S in order to be defeated and thereby be eligible for great sums of money as compensation from the U.S for their losses.

As it happens, everything went wrong and the best laid plans of mice and men came to a tragic end. The Fenwickians had attacked the U.S on the very day that some nuclear war games were being staged and so the streets in the U.S were deserted. There was no opposition to the invasion. Regrettably, The Grand Duchy of Fenwick was the victor.

And so it was in Melbourne yesterday. The gentle folk of Melbourne were either in the stadium or were glued to their TV sets watching a most auspicious Grand Final football match between St Kilda and Collingwood.

We felt like the only people in Melbourne who did not watch the match since we belong to the AFL, the Anti Football Club. That’s not quite true, however. We aren’t against football. It’s just that we simply don’t care.

Anyhow, it turns out that just like the recent federal election, the whole thing ended in a draw and so has to be repeated next week.

Australia seems to be plagued by draws lately, but at least the football will have a rematch while our government is still trying to work things out without a rematch.

What really intrigued me last week was a report of a 70 something year old man being bashed up outside a supermarket. The widower was described as a Collingwood supporter and I wondered what difference did this make in the scheme of things. Had he not been a Collingwood supporter would the attack have been justified?

The whole incident was over some youths who had been rude to the man inside the store and then waited for him outside and bashed him up. It had nothing to do with football. Nor did it have anything to do with the fact that he lost his wife six years ago and had been doing the shopping himself ever since. Many people do their own shopping, don’t they?

What did any of this have to do with the attack? It’s what I call irrelevant padding to make a story seem sadder than it is. “Elderly man bashed up by youths” is apparently not horrifying enough for these reporters. But it should be!

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The past two days I heard two speakers commenting on how Australia has become less tolerant since the new millennium. The first speaker was an elderly retired doctor who reproached the Australian people for not welcoming asylum seekers who arrive by boat. The next part of his talk was about the overcrowding in Australia. Hmm…

The second speaker was novelist Christos Tsialkas who said that he does not like living in Australia any longer because we have become intolerant and remote from world affairs. He is now living temporarily in Scotland which he prefers to England, by the way. He will return to Australia when his writer-in-residence time is up, but he is not looking forward to it.

He says that we have changed since the 1990′s.

I agree with both speakers. We are more wary. We are more insular.

What the two speakers forgot to mention is why this is so. They forgot to mention September 11, the Twin Towers being attacked by Muslim terrorists. They forgot to mention that 3000 people were murdered in a most vicious attack by a group of Muslim fanatics who despise America and all it stands for.

They forgot to mention the subsequent attacks in Madrid. They forgot to mention the attack on the London underground. They forgot to mention the Bali bombings and so on and so on.

These terrorist attacks by Muslim fanatics tipped the world on its axis. They changed the way we regard Muslims. Who are these terrorists who want to destroy the West?

While it would be wrong to blame all Muslims for what happened and what is still happening almost daily in some part of the world, it is only natural that we in Australia as in the rest of the Western world should become wary of all Muslims.

After all, we don’t know who is being trained right now to carry out another attack.

So it is inevitable that we become suspicious of strangers who want to change our way of life or who may even want to commit an act of terrorism. It has happened to Australians in Bali and we would be stupid to believe that the threat is gone, especially when we are informed by the terrorists, as has been broadcast today from Pakistan that the U.S and Europe will be attacked again very soon.

So if Christos Tsialkas and the retired doctor want to know what happened to make us suspicious and less tolerant, they should remember 9/11 when we woke up to the horrifying shock that there are people out there who want to hurt us just because we aren’t like them.

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Imagine you are the leader of a Hamas terrorist cell and your daughter has a tumour in her eye. An Israeli aid organisation funds her successful operation in Jerusalem. The tumour is removed.

You then go back to your village in the West Bank and two weeks later you arrange an attack on Israelis. Three Israelis are ambushed. One who was about to be married is killed while the other two are wounded.

No doubt you think that you are a hero, but in reality you are the lowest of the low.

There is no honour in your actions. You, who are prepared to accept help from Israeli doctors and at the same time stab them in the back.

FOR SHAME!

Source for this article.

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This piece of news was kept away from the rest of the world. A group of Australian soccer fans was attacked and robbed by South Africans. One of the fans was a policeman who had his head trodden on. A female was sexually attacked and yet this was not publicised. Why is that?

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I believe that children’s lives are too structured nowadays. They go to school, where they are organised. After school they have organised after-school activities which consist of extra courses, organised sport or even structured playing with a selected “play date”.

It’s as if someone has to timetable their total lives in case they have some free time to do what they want or, heaven forbid, spare time in which to get bored.

Mankind needs to get bored occasionally so that creative juices spill forth to dispel that boredom. In the same way, children need to invent ways to amuse themselves without having to be constantly entertained by someone else.

I can hear complaints from mothers right now. “We can’t let our children get bored cause they’ll get into mischief. We have to monitor them all day. It’s a crazy world out there.”

The truth is that it’s always been a crazy world and it ain’t going to get less crazy. The best thing you can do for your children is to allow them to develop some self-reliance skills. If they get bored then there’s a good chance they’ll make up some games, do some drawing or even read a book because they feel like it.

Or they may just sit there and reflect. Dream a little. Let their imagination take over.

To have most of your day organised for you is like living in an institution. It is stifling and robs a person of autonomy. I’m suggesting that this is true for children as well.

In an age when imagination has been stifled by force feeding from computers, in byte size pieces of information rather than ideas, I believe that it is more important than ever to allow children to develop their own creative skills. Not all the time. Just some of the time.

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While parts of Melbourne were being trashed by the terrible storm yesterday, we attended a stamp auction at the Brighton Philatelic Society.

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This week we received a Christmas greeting from our weekend newspaper delivery guy. We didn’t even know we had a weekend delivery guy until he left an empty envelope beside our newspaper with a bit of paper attached to the outside of the envelope wishing us all the best for Xmas.

It took us a couple of bemused minutes to work out why the empty envelope. Apparently, we were supposed to fill it with a bit of green Christmas cheer. 0/10 for finesse…

This reminded me of what used to happen to us when we first arrived in Australia in the Fifties. During the week before Xmas the garbage collectors or “garbos” as they are known in Oz would wake up the entire neighbourhood with their hootin’ and a hollerin’ at daybreak. The first time this happened we asked our neighbour what it was all about. She said it was to remind us that Xmas is coming and we should leave some cans of beer on the footpath for the garbos. We had to do it or else our garbage would be strewn all over the road… “an offer we couldn’t refuse.”

It was a kind of traditional protection racket and if you questioned its ethics, then you weren’t a good sport. This was then and this is now. That sort of pollution would be frowned on today and I hadn’t thought of it in years until our newspaper delivery guy reminded me of the good old days. lol

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Here we go again. More Muslim bashing. Apparently, some swimming pool authorities somewhere in France are complaining that Muslim women who wear full cover-up outfits for swimming are being unhygienic. I don’t quite see why, but that’s what the news ticker tape read this morning.

According to a report on the Fox Channel modesty also obliges Muslim men to be covered from the naval downwards. I think they meant “navel” but you never know with these ticker tape announcements as they usually don’t make sense.

Muslim women are meant to be covered from the neck to the ankles and I’m all for that, but not for religious reasons and I think many people who aren’t even Muslims should follow suit.

One observes such revolting bodies exposed on the beach that for aesthetic reasons they should refrain from revealing themselves in public. I would go further and suggest that some of them should wear a paper bag over their heads as well and stop polluting the panorama.

However, we in the West live in free and democratic societies and I suppose if we want to parade our imperfections and spoil the scenery then we are free to do so. More’s the pity.

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