Bruce

If state governments and local councils have any relevance, the evidence I see is that the smaller the governed area the better. In South Australia, most discretionary government money is spent very close to the parliament house. In the NT, they have the "Berrimah Line". Berrimah is a southern suburb of Darwin, below which government money dries up. With councils in SA, there was much spin on how bigger councils would give economies of scale. The opposite has been the reality, as bigger councils are more removed from the hapless ratepayers and cease to treat them with any respect. So I would have voted for Brexit for sure. Gosh they just might even get an aviation industry up and running, if they can just curb industry-killing excessive regulation.

I asked my GP for some smart pills. He told me there was no such thing, but did I have any other requests. Yep, said I , how about some young pills. I've since been told I should have asked for some rich pills too.

the dead sea scrolls predated Jesus by 400 years and contained the Jesus parables. Yep Phil, That is a danger I know. Also they might be like the terminator. Well I didnt say its a big chance, but what other hope is there?

There are tests, OME. One is if there are independent accounts with reference to that person, for example a tax record. I think that Mohamed would pass that test but Jesus does not. There are other tests which Jesus also fails... for example," his " parables were actually written by another guy hundreds of years before. But here is a frightening thing I read.. the majority of English teenagers think Winston Churchill was a fictional character.

Of course all those points are correct and rational. The only one I would question is the assumption that Jesus was a real person and not a fictional character. HOWEVER religion is not rational and our psychology is not rational. There is good evidence that belief in spirits is a side-effect of the way our brain works ( everything is caused by some entity is what our brain thinks, and when it comes to rustling noises in the darkness, there is survival value in this ). This is why primitive people are chock-full of religion and superstition and atheism is the province of the intelligent and educated. As for getting people to be one religion, well that flies in the face of our instinct to divide into tribes..remember the Catholic/ Protestant wars?... among " Christians"? There are evolutionary reasons for dividing into tribes so this is also built into our brains. The one hope is that computers will become sentient and take over and be nice to us . They ( the computers ) will be atheist I bet.

Equal numbers of both genders sure make sense on big ships. The Russians discovered this on icebreakers, some of which got caught frozen in for a winter. If there was a gender balance, they survived this ok, being like a village. US warships should have done this too but they are too infected with puritanism, so they have mainly men. This means they need shore leave every 6 weeks or so, or the sailors start to answer back . On the shore, they disrupt the host port by providing a bonanza to girls who become prostitutes.

was he sacked? if not. the religion was endorsed

A guy I knew was surprised on an airliner in Africa when a voice came on..." Dis here is de captain speakin".

Present policies will have us ruled by childless women. They will have the gender advantage without the loss of time spent at home with babies. Some of these are man-haters. This is not an extreme theoretical possibility, I know of a high-school principal who fits this category.

I have this daydream of a politically correct politician about to be operated on by a retarded surgeon. The surgeon thanks the polly for the affirmative action policy which made this possible.

Saw one of the solar cars yesterday 50 k north of Adelaide. It was the University of Michigan second place getter and going at nearly 100 km/hr. The ultimate racing aircraft would be like a glider with every upper surface covered with solar cells and it would be able to fly above the clouds and the race winners would use winds and wave lift to go faster than the rest.

Just because islam was advanced thinking 1000 years ago doesn't make it good today. In fact. one of the problems is that it is so clearly written that it locks people into what is now barbaric medieval thinking. But 1000 years ago it was new, although I accept what people have posted here and now say that the times which produced islam also produced scientific breakthroughs.

Another point robin.. people are only able to pursue science if they can do so without being killed for blasphemy or heresy.

Point taken robin, but seriously important advances did take place in that part of the world at that time. I think that western Europe had become ossified and there needed to be a break from the influence of the too-established theocracy established there.

Without Islam, we would likely still be in the dark ages, when the church was all-powerful. Life expectancy was short and ignorance and cruelty prevailed . There is a story of a merchant from Baghdad presenting the holy roman emperor Charlemagne with a clock, like presenting a mirror to a savage. Islam created the dawn of science, with proper numbers. Here's an arabic word... algebra. Without algebra we would still be using prayer as the sole medical treatment for everything.

But there sure is room for your lot Jerry. But please be careful how you proceed, the immigration lot here do the strangest irrational things. For example, they are importing tribespeople from Africa who need to learn basic civilization, but they stopped a mate of mine who had been working at the Alice Springs yank base ( Pine Gap) as a CIA Korean-language expert. He had the mayor of Alice Springs vouch for him, and he had a US pension coming in. He was going to be no burden to the taxpayer. He just liked Australia and his kid was settled well in school here so he wanted to stay. To this day, I don't understand what their reasoning was.

The only reason why Australia was a food exporter was that we had such a small population. Not now. Our soils are the worst in the world... 6 inches of topsoil and 400 mm of rain is good country in Australia... In Europe, they have a metre of topsoil and a metre of rain. And much of our soil has been cycled from sedimentary rock 5 times... no wonder we need imported fertilizer to make things grow. Britain has always produced more food than Australia, they could actually have fed themselves during ww2 if they had done more horticulture. Mind you, the navy was having great fun thinking the population would starve without them... who would have had the heart to tell them otherwise?

The aborigines used to live 90 percent on what the women gathered as the male hunting parties generally came home empty-handed. Well think how hard it would be to kill a kangaroo with just a spear. When they got a decent kill, the men would feast on it that evening and throw scraps out to the women, piccaninnies and dogs waiting behind.

Having two thirds of the parliament having to agree on the head of state would ensure the head was more even-handed than having just the prime minister install him. Just ask Gough .

Wrong Marty. There are jobs where you might have to lift a person, like ambulance or police or fireperson ( see how wonderful I am when I didn't say fireman?). These jobs need somebody who can lift more than 16kg. If this were done properly, there would be some strong women but more men would pass the strength test and get those jobs. AND I am still annoyed that I have to clear the branches off the paddocks myself because it is impossible to get one of the hundreds of unemployed in the district to help.

What a bunch of wimps we are.. In the middle-east,I have seen street electricity wires being tapped through big clips with wires going into an upstairs window. There was no sign of a meter to enable the inhabitant inside the window to pay for his power.

There are far too few males in primary school teaching these days, and the kids are missing out. The best primary teacher I had was a Barossa Valley german-heritage guy who saved me from the awful English idea that people who worked with their hands were somehow second-rate. He had us growing vegetables in little plots and bringing the kites and stuff we made on weekends along as "homework", which he praised us for.

Certain animals have top status individuals who have won their way to that position. There are no animals, only humans, who can win that status so soundly that they can hand it on to their offspring forever. Thats what a monarchy is, and North Korea is a modern example of it happening before our eyes.

What a puzzle huh. By description, he would be a gun-loving republican voter, like many of his victims. But while I'm not one of them it would be the sort of concert I could well have been at. And he had 2 planes... i wonder what they were and thank goodness he didn't use a plane to crash into the crowd.

There is a quote from Benjamin Franklin which is more true now than when he said it... " Those who would trade essential liberties for a bit of temporary safety will finish up with neither liberty or safety." well that's my recollection of the quote, and I reckon it applies perfectly to the whole "aviation safety" scene as well as the "terrorism" scene here and now.