Bruce

Does anybody know what happened? It read like an act of terror was perpetrated by the police. Surely they are not this bad.

Great memories I agree. We had a tv in the drafting office and everybody stopped to watch the moon landing. Over 50 years ago, but I remember is very well. And the Australian connection was something to be proud of.

Yep willie, if you look at those fibres sticking out under a microscope and compare them with raw fibres, you will see they are now different. ( This is what I was told at the time. Cement combines so well with asbestos that it removes the tiny hairy bits ). There is also the numbers thing where the number of these fibres you breath in would be a lot less. Many of those fibres sticking out don't make it to float around in the air. If just one fibre breathed in was enough, we all would have died because it is present in the dust in the air, not to mention in traffic where brake linings were releasing the stuff. But at the factory where they made the sheets, they had stocks of the raw woolly stuff and this was really dangerous. On a visit to a James Hardie factory at the time though, I was impressed at the precautions they were using, such as suction pipes near machines which did cutting. So I reckon you are OK willie. I wonder if it can be checked out, since we all have had some exposure . In the meantime, don't smoke.. I did as a kid but gave up over 50 years ago.

A lot of welfare money is spent on drugs. Once I was on a bus and this guy was going to a free meal because he had spent all his welfare on some drugs. He was complaining about being ripped off because the drugs "didn't do effing nothing". I wasn't that close to him but he had a loud voice. I later wrote to my MP saying I didn't want my tax money being used for drugs, but so far ( 15 months) no reply. What if the government , through the welfare system, is the main customer of the drug sellers?

Thanks octave, I wish we in Australia were better supporters of NASA than we are.

The lack of a sugar tax is impressive. The health profession has been urging this for years, and polls show the public would accept it. On the grounds of fairness, surely the consumers of sugar help pay for some of the financial damage done by excessive consumption? We have this with tobacco and alcohol, why not add the biggest and worst?

Yes Marty, being 5 kg overweight ( which I am ) is twice as risky as flying. I am prepared to do anything to lose it , except for giving up booze and food.

both you guys are referring to raw asbestos. I say that combined with cement, it is a different material.

Here's the thing in perspective, although most of you guys have figured it already. Chance of dying this year ( in your 70's) = 20 in 1000. Yep its up from 10 in 1000 in your 60's. Bugger I'm getting old. You have a 20% chance of dying in the 10 years of your 70's. Chance of dying on your motorbike if you do 7000km a year = 1 in 1000 So go riding say I.

ome, did you hear about the factory making explosive prayer mats? Prophets are going through the roof. But I don't see food prices doing that... be nice though.

The reasons for riding in a group are: Firstly, you are treated with more respect or fear... is there a difference I wonder. Secondly, if your bike is big and heavy and it falls over then you need several blokes to right it again. Just yesterday I had to lift up the farm Yamaha and it was hard work even though by bike standards it is light. I reckon a bike is like flying on the ground... just wonderful.

Here's a true one though.. Lindy Chamberlain was convicted because of the "fetal blood" spray behind the dash of their Holden. NOBODY ( including the defense lawyers) checked other Holdens. They would have found it was spray glue. The forensic woman ( Jocelyn Kuhl ) should have got the sack. Instead she kept on being promoted.

Is it true that some general was awarded the VC for his bravery in having more of his men executed than any other? I hope that isn't true.

Food is way too cheap. Small strawberries are being dumped, as are apples with blemishes from hail. The ag faculties at the universities are closing down. Here in the country, it is better to produce less than pay a farmhand the minimum wage. Even in human history, this has been the case for a tiny period of time. I don't think the cheap food has done us much good anyway. Obesity is rife. Here's my question: How many hours of unskilled labour should a sheep ( one which could feed a family meat for 2 weeks) be worth?

Well I don't really like the story but it needs to be told. Australian soldiers were not killed like this. We have the Breaker Morant saga to thank for that. After Morant was executed in the Boer War, the parliament here decreed that in future Australians were not to be killed by pommy firing squads.

I have a solution, that is to stop all immigration. We are already way overpopulated. Yep I would let in a number of well-publicized refugees to assuage the bleeding hearts out there. A few thousand at most. These refugees would be selected on completely non-racist criteria, but if they were infected with religion, they may need quarantine.

Nev, I would encourage them to keep taking those precautions. Plus investigate getting a removal ticket. Once on a contract we found that the floors we had to drill through were asbestos-cement. As this had not been mentioned in the specs, we went home and renegotiated the price and came back with masks. But this was mainly about the money, we got more from the job. Personally, I found the mask too bothersome but I insisted the kid keep his on. There probably is a risk in that a snapped or sawn bit of asbestos cement might liberate a bit of raw stuff. This risk would be small compared with the risk of being 5kg overweight, to name just one thing. Is concentrating on a small risk while ignoring a big one a sign of insanity? Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind.

Irrigation systems used to have asbestos-cement pipes as their main lines. There were people who spent all day at work using hole-saws on these pipes. Asbestos cement sheets have been used for many years and the evidence of anybody getting asbestosis from this source is scant to non-existent. Don't forget that asbestos was used in brake linings and cars then had drum brakes, and I don't know for sure, but suspect that the brake linings were not cement based and therefore likely to have raw asbestos in the dust. I remember seeing a mechanic use compressed air to blow a drum clean. It filled the garage with asbestos-containing dust. Asbestos fibres bond very well with cement and form a new material. Even the sawdust from this does not contain raw fibres. Some years ago, my daughter was buying a house in Brisbane which had an asbestos-cement roof. I spent some time chasing up the Qld government people, and they assured me the house was quite safe for the reasons I've said. Strange, methinks, that people who see no danger in global warming, resource depletion and overpopulation manage to see danger in asbestos-cement.

I never understood religion until I came across computer viruses. That's what a religion is, it's a computer virus which exists in the computers in our heads. Human computer viruses are passed on by software means, such as at a religious school, where those who have a good dose of the virus infect the kids. Now not all computer viruses are equally bad, and there is little doubt that the Moslem one is a particularly nasty one. Of course most people carrying the virus are normal and I have to agree that there are many good people among them. The terrorist acts are not done by a few bad apples, they are done by the truest believers. Young men who would have earned medals if infected by a different virus. Yes there are some dreadful things in the bible, the saving grace is that it was written by different men over many years and is full of contradictions. The koran is quite a different thing. I think it would be far more difficult for a biblical true believer to become a terrorist than a true believer of the koran.

There is so much hysteria over asbestos that I actually feel like agreeing with Trump a bit. The problem is real with pure asbestos in the native form. Unfortunately this was used for boiler lagging etc and boilermakers sure died. But when combined with cement, the new material is entirely different. Even cutting-dust from asbestos-cement is quite safe. People have spent their working lives cutting asbestos-cement with no ill effects. Even burning a building containing asbestos-cement does not liberate the native fibres. This difference has been lost in recent years, much to the profit of those bikies who have got themselves asbestos removal tickets. Another thing... asbestos is a natural part of the earth and ordinary wind-blown dust contains the stuff.

Well Nev, if you go back 500 million generations, your grandmother was a fish.

It seems that there is truth in the story about Mountbatten being a pedophile. The scale of the cover-up appears to prove it. How powerful they are that it took till now for me to even be remotely aware of the story.

I have never heard of the pedophilia story, but then I had never heard about William Slim as a pedophile either. Powerful people can sure prevent the likes of me finding out about them. But Nev has a point, and that is what if the rumors are untrue? What an awful crime to bear false witness against anybody. Maybe people in public life need to wear go-pro cameras all the time to protect themselves?

Gosh that automatic censor is smart. Luckily it wasn't censored in my schoolboy Shakespeare. It rhymes with glut.

It has always been so Phil. There is a line at the start of Macbeth which has always haunted me... among other ingredients for the witche's cauldron was: "finger of birth-strangled babe ditch delivered by a slut" The slut was probably a serving girl who was unable to say no to the high-ranking males of the household, till she was evicted for being pregnant.