Bruce

Yep Nev, a gun sure is a good symbol for the masculine member. I reckon the US is crazy because the founding fathers were puritans. I cannot think of a more awful brain-virus ( like a computer virus ) to infect anybody with. So their thwarted appetites take satisfaction from violence. And symbols become a substitute for the real thing. This is not my original thinking. It has been stated for years and even had a slogan during the Vietnam war.. " Make love not war" was a popular tee shirt.

Well we are not free people, we are subjects. This was reinforced by the monarchy thing years ago.

Some years ago, a girl visiting our house had a mental health crisis and the GP rang for an ambulance. He was initially refused on the grounds that they only had a female crew on duty and a potentially unruly mental-health patient needed at least one male attendant because of strength issues. Why did they not have a strength test to get to be an ambulance driver? OME you are quite right..

I like Phil's point. Why oh why do you need machine guns? On the farm, a single shot rifle would do nearly all the time. I would accept the odd problem where a rapid second shot would help. Automatics and semi-automatics are insane.

The old narrow gauge was done for cheapness. It gave a swaying ride and the speed was down. I just loved the old ghan... it was so slow on an upcline that bored young guys would get off and jog alongside. One day , one of these got left behind when the train went from an imperceptible upgrade to an equally imperceptible downgrade.

Queen Adelaide didn't speak the queen's english, she spoke German. And apparently Bonny Prince Charlie only spoke Spanish. This last one must be true, cos it was told on television by a Scottish comedian.

South Australia actually had 3 gauges. Broad gauge to port Pirie, Standard gauge to Maree and narrow gauge to Alice Springs.

My model planes have been electric for years. And today I started using a new 54 volt chainsaw and its great.. Far better than the 2 stroke one for my small personal firewood jobs.. So electric cars for city use make sense, except for the load on the grid if more than a small percentage had one. You really need to be off the grid . Except you would need a special sort of wife who could cope with a funny fridge. In the meantime, what about an electric bicycle? I'm looking to get one since they have finally come down to a few hundred dollars instead of thousands.

Good grounds for complaints guys. I recommend checkout rage. Here's what sets me off at a checkout .. you wait for ages while the woman in front searches in her purse for the right change. THEN she holds up the line for nearly as long repacking the blasted purse before moving along.

And what about budgies? did Tony really smuggle budgies in his speedos? Tough on the budgies and yabbies too I reckon. I would nip if it as me.

gosh Storchy, I was only reminded of tony abbott yesterday when I heard of this guy who smuggled yabbies to Thailand in his undies. Apparently no customs people want to search inside a blokes undies. Aha said I, many years behind the action, " thats why they called tony's bathers " budgie smugglers" Has anybody here done this with yabbies? Did they nip?

We have the most amazing ability to choose our belief and then selectively choose the bits of evidence which support it and ignore the rest. Burt Rutan is a brilliant man who is also a climate-change denier. He tells how ,under communism, Siberian settlements got more heating oil if they reported lower temperatures. So there were plenty of record lows which found their way into the history books. But to be complete, Burt needs to explain shrinking glaciers and arctic changes, which he has ignored.

Yep unobtainium would make a good soul trap. When I googled it up, I found there have been many attempts to catch the soul. One of the first was let a person die in a sealed barrel with just one small hole, through which the soul would obviously have to escape.

Has anybody theorized about what gods are made of and how they can interact with the physical world? I guess they are made of the same stuff a soul is made from, whatever that is. In the middle ages, they thought the pineal gland was the site of the soul on account of how there was only one of them in the brain. I.m sure that there have been experiments on the nature of the soul and how it leaves the body when you die. Maybe it could be caught up in the right sort of trap?

But don't give up Marty. I like reading your posts and I agree with a fair bit of what you say.

Just for the record, Mike Borgelt has a degree in science ( Meteorology) and his first job was as a meteorologist in WA. In his last year at school, he topped the state of WA in physics. These days he makes the best gliding instruments ever.

I would like the sceptics to explain: Glacier shrinking; Greenland icecap melting and sea level rise as measured to date. Unless they have a scientific explanation to these things, I will have to conclude the warmists are right, even if their timing far from exact.

AND the population is growing by 2000 a day, and the 2 major parties reckon this is ok even if they are quiet about it.

I reckon the climate-change stuff from our 2 major parties is so bad that it is even worse than honest denial. It amounts to dishonest denial. Here's what would do some real good: go to nuclear electric generation and pay farmers to produce charcoal for burial. Which party is going to do either of these? They are as bad as Hanson in outcomes. in fact worse because of the bigger population.

Old K but if you google up the question " is Australia a net importer of food" you will get "yes" for an answer. France beats our prices on some items because it has cheaper and more reliable electricity, using Australian uranium in their nuclear power stations. Just why the greenies ( who ban nuclear power in Australia ) do not protest about importing food from a nuclear-power country is a mystery to me. Surely they must think this food is contaminated.

There is a protest vote against the establishment and I for one understand why. But this protest vote put Trump into power much to my surprise. I would have voted for Hillary, but with misgivings because she stood for large-scale immigration. Hanson will reap a similar anti-establishment vote and I am considering voting for her. As long as the SA rep is not too loony. Who else wants to reduce the immigration rate to sane levels? And those immigrants and their offspring will be around forever while politicians come and go. Australia is now a net importer of food, and we are mining non-renewables at an insane rate to produce the food we are eating today. I wish Dick Smith would start a party.

With respect to ABC bias... Have a read of Dick Smith's book where he has a chapter on the issue. I reckon we are headed for disaster from overpopulation, resource depletion and climate change. And the ABC is part of the problem. They are not quite censoring the issues, but darn close to. Many years ago, I stopped listening to the ABC when the breakfast announcer and some mate of his conducted the worst misogynistic hostile interview I had ever heard. It was against a female labor senator and it was as close to a gang-rape you could do for a radio interview. She was interrupted from her answering one sneering question after another till I turned off, never to turn on again. I reckon we can and should demand high standards from the ABC, and I do think there should be checks in place to keep it straight.... but I would not trust an Abbott appointed person to do this either. On Hanson... her climate-change denials bother me but her stance on immigration more than makes up for this. Effectively Hanson has the greenest proposal out there.

Good point Marty. I shudder to think whats going to happen to them when the wheels fall off the whitefellers gravy train. Then we would say they were better off feeding themselves and being left alone.

There is a bit of a movement in Australia to refer to the arrival of whites as "invasion day". Well in the central Australian area I grew up in, the aborigines were ( in time ) saved by whites from a terrible existence similar to the first cartoon. I have actually had that confirmed by an old but lucid aboriginal elder. Not that the first whites were benign ( except for the missionaries ) but because their lives before were so terrible.

Gosh space , you have the best "no" argument I have ever heard. Neither of my kids are married to their partners, and I would be horrified if they decided to be married and it was going to cost me big money. I'll give you a barbie in the hangar for a reception ( I would say ) and pay ten grand off your mortgage but I will not pay for some mumbo-jumbo and a reception at some fashionable place.