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Did they really get a C130 so bogged they couldn’t take off again and then had to fly in other aircraft to get everyone out? Sounds a bit chaotic. Surely the pilots would have seen and avoided soft sand and picked a better place to pull up. I assume they didn’t shut down the engines while they were there. I don’t think we’re necessarily getting the full story. Maybe the Iranians damaged them? No mention of any casualties either except for the rescued weapons officer.

Until Hegseth fires him.

I've noticed the level of traffic on the roads is down by at least 20%, and many people are travelling much slower. For my country trips, where I used to sit 110-120kmh, I'm now sitting on 95-100kmh. It makes quite a difference to fuel consumption, travelling slower, and with cruise control it's easy to sit on a selected speed. The downturn has its benefits. I picked up a nice 2012 PMX C-P7 camper trailer for $1200 over the weekend. The sellers started off wanting $3000 for it, about three weeks ago. It's only ever had 2 owners, and it hasn't been abused. It's got 3 near-new tyres, and a pneumatic jockey wheel tyre. It hasn't got the fancy independent swing-arm coil suspension of the later ones, it's just a regular axle with shackle-style leaf springs. It's good enough for me, it's a tried and foolproof setup. It's fully galvanised, has a stainless steel water tank and electric pump, came complete with a good 120A/H deep cycle battery, and all the canvas is in good condition. It does need some wheel bearing attention, as with all Chinese campers/trailers. I grabbed one wheel and shook it, and it wobbled around pretty badly. The owner was shocked, but I think he was the type of bloke who wouldn't think to check wheel bearings like that. There's a broken wire to the water pump (easy fix), and the zipper on the top protective cover is busted. It has velcro as well as the zip. But I found you can easily buy FixnZip (Australian-made, too!) to fix busted zips, without having to stitch in a whole new zipper, at great expense. So, I'm off to Whitworths tomorrow to pick one up. A mate and I are going to camp out in the caravan park in the little country town where I have my block, next week - because SWMBO is heading off to the Gold Coast to see her son and DIL and 12 yr old grandson. The GC doesn't draw me any more, it's a ratrace, and the place has way too many people. You can't get parking anywhere, and it's starting to see a major increase in crime. So, my mate and I will have an enjoyable time, cleaning up my yard, fixing stuff, and sitting around BS-ing - because he lives way down South in the forests now, and we don't get to catch up like we used to. I've got a sea container that needs re-organising, and it needs a new floor panel installed (28mm ply, which I've already bought), so that will keep us occupied for a couple of days at least. After that, we'll probably go onto some shed frame building, and also do some more repair work on my Chamberlain tractor. I've got no end of jobs that need doing, and with two of you, things seem to get done a lot faster. On top of all that, the weather forecast looks great, between 13° - 25° and 18° - 30° all week, with no rain in sight. https://fixnzip.com.au/?srsltid=AfmBOoozzxauxhN15nGx5O7QBUhc9uCxBmAQ8-_q3Bh4mMsNBeqANxJu

A lot of people can't see the woods for the trees. Some who are unhappy with the rise in popularity of One Nation delude themselves that the problem is all One Nation and it's supporters who their critics perceive as a bunch of ignorant, redneck idiots. Fact one: One Nation wouldn't be having this rise in popularity if the major parties were doing a half decent job. Fact two: The major parties have been complacent for too long, and as long as they have their comfortable two party system of your turn/my turn without any major threat to their voter base, they will never get any better. For sure, a lot of the rise in One Nation is a protest vote against that laziness, complacency, and disregard for ordinary Australians that a lot of people see in the major parties. The voter erosion to One Nation is the kick in the pants that the status quo needed and still needs. They won't voluntarily get any better, so they need a boot up the rear end like this to to make them get off their backsides and start performing better to provide Australians with what they want and need from a government. If the threat of losing voters in possible election losing numbers keeps the major parties on their toes, in my opinion that has to be a good thing and an incentive to provide good government. I'm not defending One Nation or any other party, but just trying to point out the small minded nature of just blaming One Nation and their supporters and dismissing them as fools. Throwing rocks at them is not going to make them go away. You need to ask yourself why. Why are so many people abandoning parties they have supported for years. The problem the major parties have is not One Nation. The problem is within themselves. They need to ask themselves why do so many people not want to vote for them any more. To be honest, nothing much in politics surprises me, but I have been surprised lately by the sheer numbers of people I run into who say they are changing their vote to One Nation at the next federal election. A lot of these people are the last people in the world where I would have expected to see that. There's a problem for the One nation critics who are stuck in that rut of name-calling, ridicule and stone throwing in their stereotyping of supporters. While they're so distracted doing that, they're not seeing what's really happening. There's a big groundswell of a protest vote building, and I think it will keep rolling. I don't personally think what's happening now is just a flash in the pan. The way I see it, the Greens are immune from it. The Coalition has already taken significant hits and a lot of it by their own hand. And Labor, well I wouldn't be too complacent about if I was one of their supporters. At the moment, they are almost guaranteed to win the next election, and that's about as far ahead as most pollies can think, but they are already starting to bleed blue collar votes and that loss will continue to grow. For anyone who doesn't want to see One Nation grow in size, the challenge is how to create an environment where those lost voters will return. That's where they need to spend their energy. Ridiculing and blaming those lost voters for leaving in the first place is unproductive, and as I said earlier, small minded.