Make Room Birds, I am expanding my blog

Burrow on side of washout near Alick Creek
North West Queensland Australia
What animal lives in the burrow? What is skeleton of?

This blog will continue to celebrate the natural world, but I am expanding it to include the occasional  opinion piece, a form I have refused to indulge in so far. However the social, political and financial structures of the world are convulsing. I want to know what future will emerge, whether ordinary people will influence the outcome or if we will all be dragged along like thrown riders caught in the stirrups of a mob of bolting horses. 

A flood of responses sprang from yesterday's (Thursday 2nd February 2017) Facebook post by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's News Breakfast about a phone call. This was between Australia's Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull (from the conservative Liberal National Party - the LNP) and the United States President, Donald Trump (from the right wing Republican Party) and the subsequent tweet posted by the U.S. president.n
Many responses to the ABC's FB post were balanced and considered and contributed positively to the discussion from a number of points of view.  I cannot improve on these comments and recommend you scroll through them (ignoring the inevitable idiotic ones) to gain an overview of  the conversation generated by the post.
My following comments are not intended to upset or offend my many US friends (for whose friendship I am grateful). I understand how difficult it is for all of you irrespective of your political affiliations at this time. Nor am I criticising the US which has emerged in modern times from an internal base of horrific violence and oppression and is still struggling to come to terms with that.
We in Australia need to keep a balance in our engagement with world politics and not allow the current obsession with the US president's posturing to become our focus. Reacting to this person's tweets only feeds his megalomania.
When reading or watching articles about US politics we need to remember two things. Firstly our conservative government is no where near the extreme right of the US Republican Party. Whatever our personal political beliefs we are a democratic nation based on a belief in the common good. This is a great concept when it is deconstructed. It has not led us down the dangerous path of so-called 'individualism' that leads to mass murder on a regular scale in a gun-toting nation.
Australia's future in the world is dependent not only on what is happening domestically but also on what is happening on the rest of the planet. If we really care about our country, its people and our future we need to look for meaning beyond the verbal diarrhoea of just one tweeter. We must look to the rest of the world.
While many Australians have been focussing on crazy Twitter feeds European unity and peace is increasingly endangered. The barbarians are profiting from that and will grow fat on the corpses thrown up by the resulting chaos. The UK is positioning itself for a future that may change the lives of its population in unimaginable ways. Putin's Russia is providing a profitable market for arms dealers. The political systems in the nations of Africa change, mutate, distort with little comment in the day to day news.  China has ripped off one political mask and donned another - who purchases those armaments churning out of Chinese factories?  Indonesia, our nearest neighbour, has changed beyond belief in less than a generation, yet little analysis of this has been published. We are part of the countries of Asia and the Pacific yet seem unaware of their journeys along diverse paths. We see Middle Eastern countries only through the lens of war and upheaval. Has anyone tried to explain why citizens of those seven countries were placed on the US restricted list yet the nations that are the puppet masters of the US were delicately bypassed. Oh no, now I've gone back to all that.
Enjoy your weekend and enjoy at least one non-US president focussed article.
My apologies. A podcast of this blog is unavailable while I upgrade the hardware and software for podcasting.
 Follow the links to ABC News Breakfast on FB and scroll down to the post which shows a pic of both heads of state to read these comments.
#ABCNewsBreakfast

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