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The Burning Times
01/01/2020 10:00 pmIt's been a quiet start to the new year over here in the wild west which certainly cannot be said for the east coast of Australia.
The photos and videos are scary enough. So the reality must be very frightening indeed. And now a wicked twist has turned up. Over the last 20 years and especially since the advent of smart phones, the internet has slowly taken over everything. It has become the main source of news and information for so many people. That's OK as long as the lights are on and the mobile phone tower infrastructure is intact. But that is no longer the case in many of the areas affected by the fires. The fires have burned down many power lines and it is far too dangerous to fix them. So even if the mobile phone network is functioning, once the batteries are gone, it has become very difficult to recharge them
The ABC local radio is one of the major sources of disaster information for when apps no longer work but most folks these days don't have old fashioned radios but use their mobile phones for that purpose. So it turns out that one of the most important and resilient channels for information is no longer reaching its intended audience.
My trusty little transistor radio is now more snap, crackle and pop than crisp and clear sound and the Radio National channel to which it is almost permanently tuned is particularly sensitive to dead zones. Basically anywhere with a lot of electrical or electronic activities such as shopping centres or bus stations are veritable dead zones. So I resort more and more to listening to programs as podcasts where the sound is much better and clearer and never just drops out due to loss of signal. But of course audio just eats phone batteries.
There have been people driven to the beach to escape the flames, skies that are pitch black in the middle of the day and trucks and cars just picked up and thrown by the wind. That is how a firefighter died just the other day.
And now Scomo wants to have an all government meeting in March to discuss the catastrophic bush fires. Greg Mullins, one of the country's most experienced firefighters wanted to have a meeting with the Prime Minister LAST March but he wasn't interested back then. Too busy cosying up to his Murdoch mates
Scomo will soon discover that the economy is a 100% fully owned subsidiary of the environment. And when that goes down in ashes and flames, the economy will not be far behind.
Now that even for people who have not lost their homes and everything, the sense of safety and normality has been shattered, shopping and buying stuff is going to be the very last thing on their minds
Strange and scary times indeed
The photos and videos are scary enough. So the reality must be very frightening indeed. And now a wicked twist has turned up. Over the last 20 years and especially since the advent of smart phones, the internet has slowly taken over everything. It has become the main source of news and information for so many people. That's OK as long as the lights are on and the mobile phone tower infrastructure is intact. But that is no longer the case in many of the areas affected by the fires. The fires have burned down many power lines and it is far too dangerous to fix them. So even if the mobile phone network is functioning, once the batteries are gone, it has become very difficult to recharge them
The ABC local radio is one of the major sources of disaster information for when apps no longer work but most folks these days don't have old fashioned radios but use their mobile phones for that purpose. So it turns out that one of the most important and resilient channels for information is no longer reaching its intended audience.
My trusty little transistor radio is now more snap, crackle and pop than crisp and clear sound and the Radio National channel to which it is almost permanently tuned is particularly sensitive to dead zones. Basically anywhere with a lot of electrical or electronic activities such as shopping centres or bus stations are veritable dead zones. So I resort more and more to listening to programs as podcasts where the sound is much better and clearer and never just drops out due to loss of signal. But of course audio just eats phone batteries.
There have been people driven to the beach to escape the flames, skies that are pitch black in the middle of the day and trucks and cars just picked up and thrown by the wind. That is how a firefighter died just the other day.
And now Scomo wants to have an all government meeting in March to discuss the catastrophic bush fires. Greg Mullins, one of the country's most experienced firefighters wanted to have a meeting with the Prime Minister LAST March but he wasn't interested back then. Too busy cosying up to his Murdoch mates
Scomo will soon discover that the economy is a 100% fully owned subsidiary of the environment. And when that goes down in ashes and flames, the economy will not be far behind.
Now that even for people who have not lost their homes and everything, the sense of safety and normality has been shattered, shopping and buying stuff is going to be the very last thing on their minds
Strange and scary times indeed
