humour

You’re the culprit. Unfolding collapse is down to you.  Forget population overshoot. You’re consuming too much. Own it!

It is generally a good idea to avoid ascribing nefarious intent to actions explained by mere stupidity. But this is a case where mere stupidity cannot possibly explain the long, steady procession of foreign policy errors spanning three decades, all of them specifically aimed at strengthening Russia.

It was a stifling summer night with the usual crowd at the jazz venue Jonathan had frequented regularly for the previous few years. On this particular night he was introduced to Ruth, a rather earnest, slim, dark haired lady, in her early thirties. Jonathan, although somewhat lonely following the recent acrimonious break-up of his marriage to Danielle, and consequent distancing from his young son David, was not seeking a new partner. He felt the need to sort out his feelings and his finances before taking steps in that direction. He and Danielle had sold the family home in North Caulfield, and now he had to find another house with only half the funds, while house prices were sky-rocketing. He really needed to get away by himself to think about his future.

Ruth edged her way from the other side of the table to where his group were seated and suddenly she was sitting next to him. A cold and distant manner came naturally to Jonathan and he found himself using it, despite her insistent, tipsy, approaches. He needed something stronger than beer, but resisted the urge. He felt danger and knew he had to remain sober. In any case, he had to drive home shortly.

As he got up to leave, Ruth jumped up, asking for a lift home. She grafted herself onto his left hand side, walking out with him and waving gaily to the others. Jonathan stiffly agreed to take Ruth home, even though it was out of his way. They passed the Temple Beth Israel synagogue, whereupon Ruth announced she was often part of the congregation there. Jonathan was silent, not wanting to reveal his habits. They arrived at her modest flat in Balaclava, where she almost insisted on a kiss goodnight and an exchange of addresses.

Jonathan felt fleeced by this overbearing woman, but consoled himself that he was not obliged to contact her, even though he had found himself saying that he would! Uneasily, he drove back to his serviced apartment in St. Kilda Road, opened his computer, and lost himself in esoteric electronic musical programs and exchanges with people in Seattle, Avignon, and Brighton, UK. Needless to say, although Jonathan did not contact Ruth, she was sending him SMSs before his head hit the pillow. By 9.00 a.m.the next day she had actually rung him, trying to persuade him to attend the synagogue with her that morning. She insisted, in fact, and Jonathan found himself standing in the lower hall of the Temple Beth Isreal Synagogue, witnessing a Bar Mitzvah of a child who was a complete stranger to him! He felt trapped, and wanted desperately to go home and finish the program he was writing for a musical score about the Holocaust.

His day, however, had been planned for him, and it finished beneath the orderly covers of Ruth's queen sized bed. Looking out the high window of her bedroom, he saw a brick wall, and knew he was in a new prison. Ruth saw him looking up, not sensing his sadness, nor caring really about how he might feel. She remarked how lovely it was to see something as neat as a wall of bricks with no irritating uncontrollable vegetation spoiling the perfection.

In due course, Jonathan bought a small house in a respectable area, next door to an almost identical house built at the same time some ninety years earlier. About a week after moving into the new house, he received a welcoming note of introduction from his next door neighbour, Carole, who had lived there for the previous twenty years.

About three weeks later, when Carole was gardening in the front, Jonathan, from the street, introduced himself and Ruth to Carole. After that and for the next decade, Jonathan kept to himself, and rarely spoke to Carole, or even glanced in her direction, if they were both outside. He once came to her front door to tell her he had been burgled and she, knowing it was a common occurrence, commiserated in a heartfelt way.

About a decade later, Carole noticed that Ruth was present next door a lot more and discussing "issues" with her as though she had taken over the job of attending to anything to do with Jonathan's house. Carole found Ruth rather unsettling as a personality. She would complain about something like too many cars in the narrow street and then she would couch this concern in terms of her global concern that nobody come to any harm. The concern became over-dramatised. Ruth gave the appearance of having befriended Carole, frequently discussing matters concerning the immediate environment. She was what one might once have called a busybody and a gossip.

Inside the small house, Jonathan hardly had a moment of peace. Ruth had moved in, and he knew that if they ever separated, he would lose half of this house, and his wealth would be effectively divided by four, from where it was before he and Danielle separated. He was worried that, ultimately, he would have little to leave his son, David. But it was too late. Ruth had taken over. She changed the decor of all the rooms, having everything painted a glaring white, covering the subtle pastels and dusty mid-tones that Jonathan had hardly noticed, but which he realised later had a soothing effect on him. Ruth moved his desk, so that he was sitting opposite his neighbour's window, facing straight into her lounge room. These windows, facing one another had until now been treated with the utmost respect by the inhabitants of both houses. Jonathan was uncomfortable, and always looked down, but this was the only place left for him to work, following Ruth's re-arrangements. Ruth was out of control, and he could do nothing about it.

Jonathan retreated from the situation, submerged in arcane electronic and theoretical musical propositions. He no longer knew what was going on outside this constructed virtual world he inhabited.

Ruth was not on medication and her need to order her environment increased with each control she put on the exterior and interior of the house. Jonathan became almost an irrelevance to her. She enclosed the back yard with high fences, and an inordinate amount of wooden lattice on top on two sides. The next task was to block out their neighbour to the south, Carole.

At a dinner party one night, where the conversation centred around property values and activities conducive to increasing the value of the domicile, a young lawyer mentioned the shade cloth method of forcing a neighbour to one's will, with respect to fences. He explained to Ruth and the other enthralled dinner guests, that if one attached shade cloth on top of the existing fence, then the fence height was extended legally by this measure. This would leave the neighbour with no choice but to agree to whatever you want, and to be henceforth in fear of this being done again and again, to any height. The neighbour would be powerless to do anything. Ruth was overjoyed, as this was free legal advice, and she could establish to Carole that she knew her rights, and Carole would be powerless.

Ruth got onto her task right away, bringing in a tradesman to erect half a metre of dark green shade cloth on top of the fence between the two houses. Carole came home from bowls one day, to find that there was a dark green band across all her treasured north-facing leadlight windows. Sunlight had been blocked! This also affected her sunroom a little further away from the fence, with an artificial green glow visible behind her plants. The dappled light and shadows of the varied foliage by the fence had been obliterated.

All Ruth had to do now was to wait for Carole to capitulate and beg her for a high fence and another metre of trellis on top. After all Carole was on her own with no obvious male support, and she would never be able to stand up to this. The council would never intervene, Ruth mused.

Several weeks passed. Carole was mystified about this acton on the part of her neighbour, and made many despairing but fruitless calls to the local council. She had to steel herself each time she made an approach, as the information she gleaned was minimal, and she remained confused and ignorant as to her legal rights. She was certain of her moral rights, but her neighbour seemed equally certain of her legal rights, asserting that she could do what she wanted on her side of the fence! She also told Carole to "go away," when Carole tried to ascertain what was going on.

One day Ruth was patrolling the tiny perimeter of her domain when she saw an errant twig with two leaves and a perfect, very pale camellia, smiling at her over the bottle green shade cloth, just out of reach. She marched to the shed for her secateurs and a ladder. Normally she would throw any of Carole's leaves and branches back over the fence for Carole to dispose of. This time though, she decided to put this specimen in a vase. She climbed up on the rickety ladder but still could not quite reach. Rather unsteadily, she put one foot up on the next rung and reached towards the intruder. The ladder rocked back and forth a few times, and then crashed to the ground with Ruth aboard. Ruth was aware of a chiily breeze seemingly in her mouth. She put her hand to her face and saw that it was covered in blood. She had caught her cheek on a nail protruding from the stake that held up part of the shade cloth! She screamed but her voice did not sound like her.

Next door, Carole turned off the vacuum cleaner, as she finished her lounge room. She became aware of the noise from next door. She did not dare go near the fence but she went outside. The screaming and crying were much louder now. She could not see over the shade cloth without a ladder so she raced back through her house to her neighbours' front door.

Jonathan answered the door after less than half a minute. "Something has happened in your back yard. I can hear screaming. You need to investigate!" Jonathan thanked her and raced to the the back door. He had been listening with headphones to a version of his latest composition called "Covid Nineteen, where had you been?" and had been completely absorbed for at least two hours.

He looked around the garden and, there to his left, he saw the ladder lying horizontal, with Ruth's legs tangled in its rungs. Blood was pouring from her face. There was a huge cut right through her left cheek, through which he could see her teeth, as the flap of her cheek folded open.

Jonathan called an ambulance. He couldn't imagine being able to drive, with Ruth in this state sitting next to him in the car and, besides, he wanted to get back to his composition

After Ruth had woken up from her emergency plastic surgery, Jonathan arrived at the hospital. In his hand was a solitary pink camellia in a plastic bag.

Ruth had bandages covering most of her head and all of the left side of her face. She was in significant pain. Jonathan did not stay long but left the camellia by her bedside in a small vase supplied by a friendly woman in a blue uniform.

Ruth was discharged from hospital after three days, but still with her bandages. Her first check up with the surgeon was two weeks later, when she was allowed to see her face. To her horror, her left side was not at all like the right side, and she looked very asymmetrical. There was a large purple scar cutting diagonally across her left cheek and the whole area was swollen with a crimson hue. The nurses changed her dressings and a further appointment was made for three weeks time.

Back home, Jonathan seemed even more remote than before. All Ruth seemed to talk about was her scar, for which she blamed Carole, for having an inconsiderate tree that grew towards the light, in defiance of her shade cloth boundary. Jonathan didn't quite get this logic, and shrugged as he shuffled back to his office to review his composition.

Three months later, Ruth's scar had healed but her face was still noticeably lop sided. The surgeon said that at the the twelve month mark what she would see would probably be the best that her face would ever be. Ruth could go out, but she was grateful for the compulsory face mask dictum from the government to slow the spread of the virus raging in her city. Jonathan and Ruth could not visit friends and nor could they have anyone over. These were the rules. Jonathan felt irritated with Ruth. "She used to put her energies into making fences and blocking out neighbours, but now she comes to me all the time for reassurance about her face. I need a rest," he sighed.

One day, later that year, Carole saw a moving van outside Jonathan and Ruth's house. Carole was surprised as she had not known the house was on the market. By the end of that day, Carole had a new neighbour, Beth, and that is another story!

Carole had heard nothing from Ruth and Jonathan from the time she rang their doorbell to let Jonathan know of what turned out to be Ruth's plight.

One crisp morning a few weeks after Jonathan and Ruth moved, Carole, a masked, rather frail figure, emerged from the front gate for a walk, in the tiny quota of winter sun before a hailstorm expected later that day. Her neighbour on the other side of Ruth and Jonathan's house greeted her in a cloth-y voice through a Donald Duck face mask. Jane told Carole that Ruth and Jonathan had separated after "the accident", and Jonathan had to sell up in order to pay Ruth out her share of the house, and that she and her husband were in the process of negotiating with Beth, the removal of the trellis extension of their boundary fence.

Carole felt a lightness and something almost akin, as she remembered, to happiness. The neighbours' properties would now be free of barriers blocking their views to the sky. This was a kind of freedom, so welcome after many months of the pandemic restrictions weighing on them so heavily, and looming over the minutiae of every ordinary daily activity!

After fruitless and protracted negotiations between the Human Social Justice Union and Mother Nature, U.N. mediator Hoo R.U. Kiddun has booked off. His decision came after the HSJU reps and Mother Nature failed to hammer out a deal in the latest of enumerable all-night bargaining sessions. “The parties are just too far apart”, Kiddun remarked, “To come to an agreement, there has to be some give and take on both sides, but it seems that for 250 years Union members have been doing all the taking and Management refuses to continue giving.”

Social Justice Negotiators Fail to Gain Concessions from Mother Nature

CBCnews.ca November 16, 2016

After fruitless and protracted negotiations between the Human Social Justice Union and Mother Nature, U.N. mediator Hoo R.U. Kiddun has booked off. His decision came after the HSJU reps and Mother Nature failed to hammer out a deal in the latest of enumerable all-night bargaining sessions. “The parties are just too far apart”, Kiddun remarked, “To come to an agreement, there has to be some give and take on both sides, but it seems that for 250 years Union members have been doing all the taking and Management refuses to continue giving.”

After humanity had reduced the global wildlife population by 40% since the first Earth Day in 1970, and raised global temperatures by 1.03 C since 1750 when the industrial revolution began, Mother Nature has threatened to lay off 7.5 billion people unless the Union agrees to major reductions in wages and benefits, including medical, dental, and vision care, and carbon emissions. In fact, it appears that human civilization itself is on the chopping block, but apparently the Union is cool with that as long as the social safety net remains intact.

The Union in fact, for its part, refuses to believe Nature’s claim that there are no more cookies in the cookie jar, or at least, not enough to satisfy the growing appetites of a rapidly growing union membership. “Let her show us the books---what is she hiding?”, asked chief negotiator J. Simon. “She is sitting on a cornucopia of natural capital while crying poor. If indeed there isn’t enough to go around, she should call on us for help before wielding the axe. There is a lot of intellectual capital on our side of the table---all she has to do is plug into it. We are ideas people and there are no limits to our ingenuity.” When questioned about whether boundless human ingenuity will be able to resurrect the millions of species that his members have extinguished, Mr. Simon refused comment---or place a bet.

But Kiddun reported that Mother Nature is intransigent, and refuses to move on any of its demands for voluntary cutbacks, or modify its biophysical laws. Her chief negotiator, I. Asimov, said that the Union could demand anything it wanted. “It can demand that every human being has a right to have his or her basic needs satisfied. It can demand that everyone has a right to access the bathroom in their apartment at any time day they want to—free of charge. They even can put it in the Union Constitution. But our problem is that we can only provide one bathroom and there are 7.5 billion tenants in the apartment. “

One Union negotiator, Bernie Sandpaper, rejected Asimov’s contention as absurd. “As a socialist”, Sandpaper said, “ I have to believe that if resources are fairly and equally distributed, there is enough to go around. All tenants in our national apartment can have free and universal access to quality bathroom care if we tax the rich and double our national debt to $38 trillion. Moreover, we can accommodate any and all the tenants from other apartments in the building who aspire to move to ours.”

Green HSJU negotiator Jill Stoner concurred. “All we need to do is reduce our footprint, move over and squeeze tighter for more and more incoming migrants ad infinitum. Migrants have rights too, and their rights and needs trump ours--no pun intended.” Another outgoing member of the team, Billary Winer, added, “We need to build bridges, not walls. Instead turning people away, we need to extend the table…ours is a vision of inclusivity, not exclusivity.” Ms. Winer is even rumored to have told a banker she wants to allow uninhibited traffic between all apartment suites, even to the point of tearing down bearing walls. “I want man-servants who will cook and clean for substandard wages,” a leaked email had her saying, “and if deplorables lose their jobs I am going to call them racists.”

Upon receipt of her comment, Asimov was reported to have said that Winer could extend the table all she wants, but there is not enough food in the kitchen to feed all the diners she wants to invite, nor enough energy to run the ovens or the stoves. “And we anticipate that energy costs will skyrocket to the point that customers are going to go home hungry……I expect fights to break out”, he added.
“Some may even burn down the restaurant.”

Kiddun, reflecting upon the impasse, sadly concluded that the fundamental problem was that the Social Justice negotiators just can ‘t rap their heads around the reality of scarcity. “And they don’t acknowledge that there are limits to growth….

“Once more”, Kiddun continued, “their Green wing doesn’t understand that it doesn’t make any sense for their union members to cut their consumption in half, only to turn around and double the number of members.” “They can argue until they are blue in the face, but Mother Nature won’t give. She doesn’t care about per capitas. Per capita energy consumption, per capita waste, or per capita carbon emissions. She only cares about TOTAL energy consumption, waste and C02 emissions. In other words, the number of members times their average consumption ….

“What we have here is a failure to communicate…. Mother Nature’s books are open, but the Union just doesn’t seem willing to read them …..

“I suspect that their brains just don’t do reality. They can’t cope with it. Reality is so ugly that denial is an essential coping mechanism. It is a part of their nature. They can deal with the short term, but aren’t interested in the long term”, Kiddun remarked, “They are neurologically f***ed.”

The consensus among seasoned observers is that massive layoffs are now inevitable.

Tim Murray
CBC Bullschiesse News
November 17, 2016.

My three-month-old granddaughter has finally fallen asleep so I gotta bang this article out fast before she wakes up and I don't have a lot of time to run all this down to you ad infinitum. Thus I'm only going to explain it to you once. So listen up.

If you are a disenchanted western Muslim youth and you are considering running off to the Middle East to join ISIS and fight to protect the name of the Prophet, I only got one word for you. "Forget-about-it".

Let's face it, guys. If Mohammed (PBUH) was living today, he would be absolutely horrified by ISIS. Horrified! Absolutely. Muslims hacking Muslims to death like they were bloody chickens being slaughtered for Eid and Muslim men raping Muslim women like they were cattle instead of humans? Forget that. Just forget it. The Prophet would be totally appalled.

But if you really really do want to fight to protect Islam, then go to Damascus and join Assad's heroic Syrian army instead. Or go fight for Hezbollah. Or join the Houthi in Yemen. Or decry the slaughter of Muslims in Gaza. Are you pissed off at the western neo-colonialist imperialist Empire of Chaos for unjustly demonizing your religion and destroying the Middle East? Then put your freaking anger where your mouth is. Go fight against ISIS -- not for it.

You need another reason to fight against ISIS? I got another one here.

ISIS was originally created in order to spread chaos in the Middle East so that western neo-colonialists could easily swoop in and take over once all those pesky Muslims who actually own the land (and oil) there are finishing slaughtering each other. And you disenchanted western Muslim youth want a piece of this? Really?

Fighting these neo-colonialist bastards' wars for them is definitely not halal!

Anyone who does even the slightest bit of research and anyone who is even slightly intelligent enough to question all the American, Israeli, European and Saudi neo-colonial lies and propaganda that we are constantly bombarded with has just got to know that western imperialists are equipping, training and backing ISIS -- for both fun and profit. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/22/secret-intel-reports-on-syria-iraq-revealed/

So if you are a good Muslim, don't even think about joining ISIS because the western Empire of Chaos will have all the fun -- and you will be left getting none of the Prophet.

And after the American, Israeli, European and Saudi neo-colonialist bastards get done destroying the Middle East, they are gonna turn on America, Israel, Europe and Arabia next. You think I'm wrong? It's already started to happen.

Oops, gotta go. The baby's awake. And it's time for disenchanted western Muslim youth to wake up too.

Jane Stillwater was an independent observer at the 2014 Syrian elections. Her blogspot is http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/. This article was first published on that blogspot, here: http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2015/05/wanna-defend-islam-then-forget-about.html

The new science of ecology will now describe animals as they really are---moral agents, not biological automatons. And as such, they are to be charged with a moral responsibility to constrain their cravings and live simply so that other animals like them can simply live. Or as they now say on St. Monbiot Island, “Be the reindeer you want the world to be.”

Island in the Behring Sea Renamed To Reflect New Paradigm

Guilty as charged:
Fat, Greedy and White---guilty ungulate “Rudy” reacts to news that responsibility for the infamous St. Matthew Island Reindeer die-off is now attributed to his appetite, rather than to excessive reindeer numbers. Had he eaten lichen modestly, a scientific report says, other reindeer could have lived and the island’s bio-capacity would not have been exceeded. According to data released by the GHN (Global Hoofprint Network) in San Francisco, if all reindeer consumed as much as Rudy did, four planets would have been needed to supply the species sustainably.

Reuterz News Item:

A 137 square mile island in the Behring Sea made famous by the spectacular increase of an introduced reindeer population of 24 in 194 which became 6,000 in number in just two decades ---only to suddenly collapse in a matter of months by 99% until only 42 were left in 1966---was renamed recently in a ceremony to mark the occasion. http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/st-matthew-island

What was once known as “St. Matthew Island”, the remote and desolate island is now to be called “St. Monbiot Island National Park”, in honour of renowned environmentalist writer George Monbiot and his trademark “Monbiot Mantra”--which goes something like this: “Overpopulation has little to do with it--it is our appetite, not our numbers. Especially the gluttony of old middle class white guys looking for a scapegoat to deflect attention from their culpability.”

The decision to rename the island came in the wake of a report commissioned by the Sierra Club—and paid for by billionaire David Gelbaum and several of their big corporate donors like natural gas fracker Cheasepeake Energy---that while greedy reindeer of the Northern Hemisphere make up only 5% of the global ungulate population, they account for fully 25% of the total amount of lichen consumed in a given year. Constant repetition of that statistic is now mandatory for every college student who hopes to graduate with a degree in Environmental Studies, Political Science or Communications. Education ministries across the continent have now determined that rote memorization of clichés like these is more cost-efficient than actually teaching young people four years worth of real science.

In other words, the name change was thought necessary to fit the new paradigm, and signalled a watershed moment in the evolution of environmental thinking. Gone is the hopelessly unfashionable and politically incorrect foundational formula of the environmental movement, which assigned critical importance to the population level of a given species when gauging its ecological impact.

Animals redescribed as moral agents

Henceforth, no researcher or environmental commentator will dare to say that any species will grow its numbers to meet the available food supply (the Hopfenberg Hypothesis). Instead, cultural conditioning ---typically in the form of mass advertising and the promotion of a competitive “keep up with the Joneses” mentality---will be regarded as the key driver of environmental degradation and the demise of all species. The new science of ecology will now describe animals as they really are---moral agents, not biological automatons. And as such, they are to be charged with a moral responsibility to constrain their cravings and live simply so that other animals like them can simply live. Or as they now say on St. Monbiot Island,

“Be the reindeer you want the world to be.”

When asked to comment on the historic name-change and park dedication, Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May---an aspiring United Church of Canada Minister---remarked that

“With this announcement, it is to be hoped that the scourge of sociobiology will never again raise its ugly head. Now that it has been laid to rest, biology itself must now finally be exposed for what it is---a fascist concept.”

“It is not how many reindeer there are,” she continued, “but how they choose to live. The reindeer on St. Matthew Island could have lived like Ghandi, but instead they chose to live like Gates.”

Ms. May recommended that the environmental movement continue to follow its true mission---the inculcation of guilt for bad behaviour, and the pursuit of “good feelings” among its adherents by making trivial lifestyle changes rather than measuring their success by the achievement of meaningful concrete results.

“Self-righteous self-abnegation and the worship of green pie-in-the-sky technologies is the New Christianity,”

she exclaimed with buoyant pride. Making an obvious pitch to the social media generation, May continued,

“ You can continue to be a dope-smoking, lying adulterer and fornicating flake and be blessed, so long as you go vegan and give up your car.”

Citing the United Church of Canada as her model,

“The Church of Green is inclusive and diverse,”

Ms. May concluded. Moreover, it has been speculated that in keeping pace with evolving standards in the United Church, in the new ‘progressive’ Green Party even unqualified reindeer will not only be welcomed but ordained. (It is not as if the Green Party has set its leadership bar too high, is it?)

The impact of the name-change has already been felt across all North American campuses and Biology Departments, which are now faced with an imminent overhaul. In an arguably futile attempt to save the discipline, Biology Department heads all over North America are now calling their field the “The Sociology of Flora and Fauna” , and in some cases, “The Moral Philosophy of Natural Selection”. Eventually, however, it is expected that biology courses will soon fall under the rubric of “How- Zionism-Caused-the-Sixth Extinction-Event”. Such is the chill that has descended upon academic discourse in the wake of this announcement that when one professor was heard to remark that the fate of St. Matthew’s reindeer might have been related to their unchecked fecundity, his college was quickly censured by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) following a complaint from a professor at the Women’s Studies department at Hampshire College. In her words,

“No one should be able to tell female reindeer what to do with their bodies.”

So it is all now official. There is enough lichen in the world to go around, if only it is shared equally and consumed responsibly. Breed on.

Tim Murray

November 22, 2012

Elizabeth May:

Now I don’t claim to be an A student baby or an authentic Green Party Leader either, and I ….

Don't know much about history,
don't know much biology.
Don't know much about a science book,
don't know much about the french I took.

But I do know that I love you,
and I know that if you love me, too,
what a wonderful sustainable world this would be.

PS Readers will understand that the quotes cited in the foregoing parody are fictional and made only to highlight the absurdity of predominate green ideology. They are the responsiblity of the author alone. Tim Murray

See also: 9/11 activist hands himself in to British police for "peddling lies" that 9/11 and 7/7 were staged (1/10/14).

I knew there had to an answer to the 9/11 conspiracy theorists that would make the facts clear to non-experts. This 5 minute video (Also at YouTube) demolishes the fantasies peddled by extreme right and looney left paranoids.

It is unfortunate that ABC Local Radio Melbourne 774 presenter Jon Faine neglected to make use of the evidence contained in the above video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE3pMPObcGU) in his altercation with Kevin Bracken in October 2011.

Authorities are bracing in northern Australia for an influx of protesters representing Gouldian finch societies and breeders throughout the globe. Police fear a repeat of last years bloodbath when Mitchell hopping mouse advocates protested against further degradation of the marsupials habitat in South Australia.

Lovers of the popular aviary finch are incensed at the inaction of Australian governments in protecting what little habitat remains for the endangered bird. Gouldian finch societies from Australia, the USA, South Africa and many European countries have banded together to raise awareness of the damage that pastoral activities and modern fire regimes are doing to the birds habitat.

Australian Gouldian Finch Society spokesperson Terry Anderson has made an emotional plee to the Australian public to help fight for the remaining Gouldian finch habitat:

“There are only 2500 of these beautiful birds left in the wild…. All Australians have a responsibility to prevent this species from becoming extinct in its natural environment and we are here to remind them of that responsibility”

Police in Katherine, NT are expecting hundreds of protestors and are expected to use a zero tolerance policy after similar protests in South Australia last year resulted in 15 arrests and several police officers injured. Sgt Mackey of NT police states:

“Whilst the 2009 confrontations with South Australian police were instigated by breeders and owners of Mitchell’s hopping mice fighting for habitat protection… we must anticipate that the Gouldian Finch people are capable of the same emotionally driven violence that have made the hopping mouse advocates a household name”

Wildlife advocacy groups and other critics of Gouldian finch breeders claim that dwindling finch numbers are due in no small part to the aviary trade and poaching continues to be a problem as demand for the finch increases. Furthermore they claim that breeding of the finch involves colour and behaviour selection that does not mimic wild Gouldian finch populations. Terry Anderson refutes these claims:

“They’re just nit picking. If the Gouldian becomes extinct in the wild, we are the ones they will come running to”

Outspoken supporter of keeping native animals as pets Prof Mike Archer was (unusually) unavailable for comment.