An update on Valerie.

You remember Valerie, the miniature dachshund who escaped into the wilds of Kangaroo Island, blogged here.

Today, I see "Valerie the dachshund rescued after 17 months in Australian wilderness/The eight-pound miniature dachshund had transformed from an 'absolute princess' into a rugged survivor" (WaPo).

I had to blog that... in case you were on tenterhooks.

What are tenterhooks anyway?

"We’re pretty surprised, that’s for sure. She wasn’t even just like a dog; she was an absolute princess as well. She had a car seat, and she slept in our bed."

Said Georgia Gardner, 24, about her 1-year-old, 8-pound dachshund Valerie.

Gardner is quoted in "Tiny dachshund survives 16 months on remote island but eludes rescuers/Her owners call her a 'princess.' But little Valerie has likely toughened up, says the wildlife group looking for her, living off roadkill and evading poisonous snakes" (WaPo)(free-access link, so you can see the pictures and read the thrilling details).

A song for Valerie:

And:

"Australia has imposed a sweeping ban on social media for children under 16.... But many details were still unclear..."

"... such as how it will be enforced and what platforms will be covered....  The law... uts the onus on social media platforms to take 'reasonable steps' to prevent anyone under 16 from having an account. Corporations could be fined... for 'systemic' failures to implement age requirements. Neither underage users nor their parents will face punishment for violations. And whether children find ways to get past the restrictions is beside the point, [Prime Minister Anthony Albanese] said. 'We know some kids will find workarounds, but we’re sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act,' he said...."

From "Australia Has Barred Everyone Under 16 From Social Media. Will It Work? The law sets a minimum age for users of platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X. How the restriction will be enforced online remains an open question" (NYT).

"[T]he Ladies Lounge of Australia’s Museum of Old and New Art... a conceptual artwork, is decorated with Picassos and other expensive adornments..."

"... and is separated from the rest of the museum with opulent green curtains. A staff member is posted outside to prevent the entry of any visitor who does not identify as a woman, and guests can indulge in a $325 high tea service featuring fancy finger food.... The American artist behind the lounge, Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to the private museum’s owner, told the tribunal that the practice of requiring women to drink in ladies lounges rather than public bars only ended in parts of Australia in 1970 and that in practice, exclusion of women in public spaces continues.... But she said she 'got a rise' out of the discrimination complaint and was 'pretty excited' when she learned it had been filed over her work. 'It carries it out of the museum and into the real world.'... Kaechele attended the tribunal Tuesday flanked by 25 female supporters dressed in pointedly court-appropriate attire — think pearls, suits and stockings...."

From "She made an artwork that excluded men. A man sued for discrimination" (WaPo).

Here's the museum's website for the artwork. Sample text: "The lounge is a tremendously lavish space in our museum in which women can indulge in decadent nibbles, fancy tipples, and other ladylike pleasures.... [Y]ou are a participant in... the art itself, part of a living installation."

I wonder if the lawsuit, too, is part of the art itself, the living installation. 

You'd think just having a $325 high tea service would be enough to keep the men out. The product itself is exclusionary — exclusionary of everyone who doesn't love stuff like that. But they had a guard to actively exclude any man, and that made a point: See how you feel when the tables are turned? But the point is only made at the men who are not stereotypical men, the men not put off by the service of $325 high tea.

How "Ode to Billy Joe" could become the U.S. national anthem.

BONUS:

"Australia is drowning in wine, with the equivalent of more than 2.8 billion bottles, enough to fill more than 850 Olympic swimming pools..."

"... swilling around in storage tanks or barrels. The cost of its key ingredient has collapsed, particularly for red grape varieties such as cabernet and shiraz.... Much of the wine languishing in giant tanks had been destined for [China], which had developed an insatiable thirst for its red wine. This market virtually disappeared in March 2021, when Beijing, furious at calls from Scott Morrison, then the prime minister, for a UN inquiry into the origins of Covid, imposed 200 per cent tariffs on Australian wine.... The market in China had already been contracting. As in many other countries, there has been a general drop in alcohol consumption.... Oenophiles hoping winemakers will be flooded with cheap Australian shiraz are likely to be disappointed. While the price of grapes has plummeted, other overheads, such as energy, labour and shipping costs, have surged. Vintners are also worried that cutting the price of their posher wines will damage the credibility of their brand...."

From "Australia is drowning in 3bn bottles of wine. Any takers?" (London Times).

The mulga scheme.

I'm reading "In Australia’s Outback, a controversial cash crop is booming: Carbon" (WaPo).

Here in the “mulga belt,” which stretches into northern New South Wales, is the unassuming epicenter of Australia’s roaring carbon-farming industry. In this area alone, roughly 150 properties have collectively made at least $300 million from carbon credits in less than a decade, according to government records.... 

"Under the new Wollumbin Aboriginal Place Management Plan, the whole of the mountain is considered a 'men’s site.'..."

"'Wollumbin is interconnected to a broader cultural and spiritual landscape that includes Creation, Dreaming stories and men’s initiation rites of deep antiquity,' the group said.... However, local Ngarakbal Githabul women have said placing male-only gender restrictions on the site, as proposed in the plan, would 'dispossess' Indigenous women with deep spiritual connections to the area. Stella Wheildon, a north coast Indigenous woman, told The Daily Telegraph that the contested area also contained scared female sites. She said she had conducted extensive research on the history of Indigenous Australians in the region and found that the Yoocum Yoocum ancestors, and the Ngarakbal Githabul people were originally from the area in question. 'The Wollumbin Consultative Group has discriminated against the women and our lores,' Ms. Wheildon said...."

From "Plan to ban women from Australian national park sparks outrage" (NY Post).

"Calling American and Australian behavior 'unacceptable between allies and partners,' France announced on Friday that it was recalling its ambassadors..."

"... to both countries in protest over President Biden’s decision to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. It was the first time in the history of the long alliance between France and the United States, dating back to 1778, that a French ambassador has been recalled to Paris in this way for consultations. The decision by President Emmanuel Macron reflects the extent of French outrage at what it has a called a 'brutal' American decision and a 'stab in the back' from Australia....  Australia on Wednesday canceled a $66 billion agreement to purchase French-built, conventionally powered submarines, hours before the deal with Washington and London was announced."

The NYT reports.

"The engine behind CLIP+VQ-GAN consists of two neural networks – algorithms designed to mimic a human brain – one of which classifies images (CLIP) and one that generates images (VQ-GAN)..."

"... CLIP is trained to recognise images using a mountain of raw data drawn from the internet, where people routinely upload images and identify them with captions. Given the text prompt ('Australia') it combs through a library of 400 million images to find visual elements that correspond with this term. The image results CLIP produces have been described as like a 'statistical average of the internet.' According to the image above, the elements that best correspond to 'Australia' are roads, a desert horizon, the ocean, and a few furry and scaly creatures. Once it has its image results, CLIP then feeds these to VQ-GAN, which has been trained to assemble and compose original images of its own. This happens mostly out of sight, but you can get some sense of the process in this video of CLIP+VQ-GAN making the image."

ABC News reports on the awesome computer wizardry that yields some atrocious looking art and a disgusting hint of the junkpile of cliché and obviousness that's out there in the outback of the internet. Here's that video of the AI in action:

"It’s just incredible, when they blow in the winds they look like wave. It does look creepy the way it covers all the signs and everything."

"You can’t really see it in the photos but there are spiders all over. It’s like thousands and thousands of spiders."

Said Jena Beatson, quoted in "'They look like waves': spider webs blanket Gippsland after Victorian floods Flooded roads and paddocks disrupt local spiders which seek higher ground on road signs, trees and any tall grass they can find" (The Guardian).

Why "Vegemite" is trending on Twitter.

Thanks to the Helpers. Let’s take care of ourselves and each other. Hanx pic.twitter.com/09gCdvzGcO

— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 15, 2020

"Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to..."

"... and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen. The images of the fires are a cross between 'Mad Max' and 'On the Beach': thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.... As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, 'the system as we knew it became untenable,' he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?"

From "Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide/As record fires rage, the country’s leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom" by the novelist Richard Flanagan (NYT).

"Many of the Anangu themselves live in a trash-strewn community near the rock... a jarring contrast to the exclusive resorts that surround the monolith..."

"... where tourists seated at white tablecloths drink sparkling wines and eat canapés as the setting sun turns Uluru a vivid red. Those tourists point to other dualities, too. While Uluru is so sacred to the Anangu that there are certain parts that they do not want photographed or even touched, they welcome the visitors who tool around its base on camels or Segways, or take art lessons in its shadow. Then there is the challenge that comes with making the case that the rock is sacred without being able to say why.... 'They can’t tell you the secrets it holds, because then they’d be breaking their traditional law, and if they break their traditional law, they’re rubbishing their inheritance,' [the author of a book about Uluru] Ms. Cowley said.... Some people who say the rock should remain open to climbing argue that it is part of a national park and therefore should belong to everyone. And there are those who discount the indigenous claims that climbing the rock offends their laws, pointing to photos from decades ago showing indigenous guides leading white people up Uluru.... 'Every day, thousands of people are climbing; they’re expressing their opinions by their actions,' [a geologist] said. ;Everyone has a right to experience this place on their own terms without being bothered by petty bureaucracy and the religious views of others.'"

From "A Climbing Ban at Uluru Ends a Chapter. But There’s More to This Australian Story/While the ban on ascending the iconic rock is a once-unthinkable victory for an Aboriginal people, they still face material hardship and a measure of resistance" (NYT). Today is the last day for climbing Australia's big rock.

Lots of photos at the link. To my eye, the people look awful on the rock, and I like the ban if only as a preservation of beauty. Stand back and look. Don't put yourself on the thing and ruin the sight. I don't need a claim of longstanding religious belief to say that. It's sad that people won't simply honor the Anangu and accept their refusal to say why they understand the rock to be sacred. I'm surprised that people are willing to be so disrespectful — is this really happening? — as to question the sincerity of their professed beliefs.

Harbinger of a 2020 Trump victory?

"Scott Morrison, Australia’s conservative prime minister, scored a surprise victory in federal elections on Saturday, propelled by a populist wave — the 'quiet Australians,' he termed it — resembling the force that has upended politics in the United States, Britain and beyond. The win stunned Australian election analysts — polls had pointed to a loss for Mr. Morrison’s coalition for months. But in the end, the prime minister confounded expectations suggesting that the country was ready for a change in course after six years of tumultuous leadership under the conservative political coalition.... The election had presented Australia, a vital American ally in the Asia-Pacific, with a crucial question: Would it remain on a rightward path and stick with a political coalition that promised economic stability, jobs and cuts to immigration or choose greater action on climate change and income inequality? By granting Mr. Morrison his first full term, Australians signaled their reluctance to bet on a new leader, choosing to stay the course with a hardworking rugby lover at a time when the economy has not suffered a recession in nearly 28 years."

The NYT reports.

"Morse and Figliomeni unpacked their boxes, filled with thousands of frozen sausages they produced at a factory south of Perth, according to a recipe developed by a man they jokingly called Dr. Death."

"It called for kangaroo meat, chicken fat and a mix of herbs and spices, along with a poison — called 1080 — derived from gastrolobium plants and highly lethal to animals, like cats, whose evolutionary paths did not require them to develop a tolerance to it. (The baits would also be lethal to other nonnative species, like foxes.) As the sun brightened the brume, the baits began to defrost. By midmorning, when Morse helped load them into a wooden crate inside a light twin-engine propeller Beechcraft Baron, they were burnished with a sheen of oil and emitted a stomach-turning fetor. The airplane shot down the runway and lifted over the gently undulating hills of the sand plains that abut the Indian Ocean. Rising over the mantle of ghostlike smoke bushes that carpeted the ground to the treeless horizon, the plane traced a route over the landscape, its bombardier dropping 50 poisoned sausages every square kilometer.... Dr. Death, whose real name is Dr. Dave Algar and who is the principal research scientist in the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions for the state of Western Australia, told me that he began developing the recipe for the poisoned sausages by examining cat food in supermarkets and observing which flavors most thrilled his own two cats. As Morse said: 'They’ve got to taste good. They are the cat’s last meal.'"

From "Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats/Feral felines are driving the country’s native species to extinction. Now a massive culling is underway to preserve what’s left of the wild" (NYT).

The highly rated comments at the NYT support what Australia is doing. Example:

We used our yard to create an environment for native birds and insects. It worked. Our land was a perfect habitat for many species of birds, both local and migratory. Until our neighbors got two cats. Six years later I have only the nuisance birds (English sparrows, starlings, ring-neck doves) nesting in my yard. The ground-nesting birds haven't fledged babies since the cats were turned loose to pillage. Not only do they destroy birds, but gardening for food is also now difficult because they defecate in my raised beds. I have had to kill baby bunnies left gutted on my doorstep because the neighbors' cats have decided to 'treat' me. The owner says they bring in dozens of dead and dying birds, lizards, small mammals and snakes every week. Cats that are allowed to roam are a scourge. Australia has it right.

AND: Another NYT commenter:

If there were millions of feral dogs roaming the USA in packs, attacking deer, turkey, water fowl, mammals like raccoons and opossums, and other game and native wildlife, you could be darn sure we would be hunting them down.

BTW: there ARE millions of feral cats roaming the USA, killing millions of song birds every year. Why are we letting that happen? Because cat people are totally unrealistic and rather difficult to deal with!

"An illegal fishing boat has run aground and been found abandoned in crocodile-infested waters in northern Queensland, Australia."

"Authorities have found 11 people and think more are hiding in mangroves near Daintree, north of Cairns... About 40 people are thought to have been on board, reports say.... 'We don't know whether these are illegal refugees or we don't know if these are fishermen who were maybe fishing illegally and have ended up in Australian waters and the boat's gone bad and they've got trapped,' [said Queensland state MP Michael Healy]... If the boat was carrying asylum seekers, it would be the first successful landing by such a vessel in Australia for years.... Even if found to be genuine refugees, they are already blocked from being resettled in Australia. They can either return home, be resettled on Manus or Nauru, or go to a third country...."

BBC reports.

On the subject of Nauru, here's a report in The Guardian from a couple days ago, "'Begging to die': succession of critically ill children moved off Nauru/Girl refusing food and water the latest out of dozens of children referred for transfer by medical staff."

A girl suffering “resignation syndrome” and who is refusing all food and water has been ordered off Nauru by an Australian court, as a succession of critically ill children are brought from the island.

At least three children have left the island since Thursday, and reports from island sources say at least three more children, as young as 12, are “on FFR” – food and fluid refusal....

“Before she got sick, she was the best-performing student,” a source familiar with the girl and her condition told the Guardian. “She had a dream to be a doctor in Australia and to help others. Now, she is on food-and-fluid refusal and begging to die as death is better than Nauru.”

The girl told her Australian advocate: “I can’t live in this island anymore. I hate everything and everyone around me. I hate to go outside. We left our country to have a good and better life, but we faced the worst life ever, the life which forced us to end it.”

At the Ancestral Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want (and buy whatever you want through the Althouse Portal to Amazon).

I got my iPhone camera out at an exhibit called "Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan & Levi Collection" at the Chazen Museum here in Madison. Australian Aboringinal artists work in what is a continuing artistic tradition going back many thousands of years— perhaps 40,000 years.



The painting that's in the center of the first photo and fills the frame in the second is by the Yuendumu Women's Collaborative and is called "Mina Mina Dreaming." The wall card says that "Mina Mina" means "home or living place," and it's a place "where ancestral women stopped to sit under desert oaks, get water, and collect snake vines to wrap around food bowls and cure headaches."

50 years ago yesterday: "It was a quintessential Australian death. On 17 December 1967, Australia’s 17th prime minister, Harold Edward Holt..."

"... waded into the churning surf at Victoria’s Cheviot Beach, defying a swift current and a strong under-tow that left others in his party refusing to enter. Within minutes Holt was swept up and out, 'like a leaf … so quick, so final,' and never seen again.... It was an ordinary death, a shockingly banal one that still befalls dozens every summer. That it happened to a prime minister, swimming alone in dangerous conditions without bodyguards, made it extraordinary. Photos of Holt in snorkel gear, surrounded by his bikini-clad daughters-in-law, only propelled the sense of intrigue and the view of him as a carefree, careless playboy... The failure to find his body fuelled conspiracy theories for decades – his judgment was dulled by opiates he was taking for a shoulder injury; he was a Chinese spy and had been taken by a Chinese submarine; he was depressed, driven to the point of suicide by Liberal party factional battles; his personal life was in turmoil and equally driving him to insouciance and danger...."

From "Harold Holt: the legacy is evident, 50 years after his disappearance" (The Guardian).

Can you take a little time to care about Australia or are you already working on a comment speculating that others will comment about the potential for Trump to go swimming?

I used Google Street View to visit Cheviot Beach and got an aptly ghostly, disconnected picture:



Imagine being driven to insouciance.

"Why is it, exactly, 'immoral' for a nation to have a certain preference as to whom it allows to migrate in?"

"It may not be consistent with a choice we would make, but are we the world's standard, something we are otherwise routinely trashed for. I can certainly see the NYT defending a Muslim nation making such a choice (no doubt to 'protect its unique culture and heritage' or some such language) or at the very least remaining silent lest any criticism be blasted as hateful."

Top-rated comment on a NYT op-ed titled "Australia’s Immoral Preference for Christian Refugees."

Second-highest rated: "Good for Australia. At least one western country has come to its senses. A country can define who it allows in however it wants, depending on how the country feels that person or group of people will fit into their national fabric."