onetrack

Bullying?? This - from one of the most abusive, right wing ranters I have seen on any forum? In every second post you are being personally abusive to other contributors, with personal denigration attacks. You take peoples statements out of context, or amplify them to extreme levels. You abuse Nev because he has reservations about Rotax engine designs, and makes out that he says all Rotax-powered aircraft are going to fall from the sky. I'm not "shit-scared" of getting out of my car in Northam - but I do have personal experience of my wife being threatened with rape in a womans toilet in Northam by a gang of dark-skinned teenage juveniles who followed her in, unbeknowns to me. I do know, with 5 police or ex-police in our extended family, that Northam registers high on crime rates, and I know it's a combination of drugs, poor parenting, and juvenile delinquency. My nephews big industrial property just out of Northam was raided, and the thieves stole every computer in the place, costing him a motza. The crims weren't immigrants. These problems, of poor parenting, drugs, juveniles being led in to crime, are world wide, not just in Victoria. Your state does seem to have a spike in crime by the offspring of Sudanese immigrants, I guess the police will get a handle on it, soon. You live in a world of "left-wing" hatred and abuse, generated by Hanson, Trump, Gina Hancock, et al. It's about time you took a hard look at yourself and put yourself in other peoples shoes. You're obviously very wealthy, you own several trucks, you're a businessman, you own aircraft, you can afford to fly regularly, you probably own more than one property. You've achieved all that, despite "left wing liars" (another abusive right wing tirade - as if right-wing politicians never lie) being in Federal and State power, for a large proportion of the 21st century. You still make good money under Labor control and decision-making. I guess you want to live in the right-wing dream world where there are only white people in Australia, where corporations can do what they like, where poor people are alway just regarded as poor, because they're lazy, and where juvenile criminals are sent to the electric chair for stealing a car. You live in a world of childish simplistic answers and solutions.

Nice buy, Willie. The old Taiwanese pedestal drills are good value if you acquire them for the right money. Even better if they have a Morse taper 16mm chuck. You just have to watch breaking the table mountings/castings with too much pressure. Seen quite a few with busted table mountings, which immediately makes them worthless, as there's no hope of getting replacement parts. They certainly are heavy.

You talk a lot of shit, mate. Your right-wing parties are so useless they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery if they bought their own glasses. As soon as Hanson gets any kind of power, she'll be asking Gina Hancock to help run the country. And Hancock is just a robber baron, shafting every Australian, while she claims we should all bow down and be grateful to her, for ripping all our minerals out of the ground so she can make more millions without lifting a finger. She gets multiple millions a year for just collecting royalties and pays no tax, because it all goes into the Hancock Family Trust. Her old man built a $20M mansion, pissing in everyones face with his blatant ripoff iron ore money, while ordinary people did it tough. Then when his Filipino floozy widow looked like taking over the iron ore income stream, Gina spent multiple tens of millions on lawyers to make the Filipino floozy get just a couple of million, and nothing else. Then Gina flattened the mansion, less than 20 years after it was built. Is this the kind of people you want running Australia? Australia is the land of lack of competition, monopolies, robber barons, and corporate lobbyists who would twist Hanson around their fingers, if Hanson ever got any kind of political power - so they could get more corporate rorts, and more extreme wealth. Now we have BHP refusing to pay electricians good money for doing a prick of a job in extreme dust and heat, and a Liberal or ON Govt would back BHP to the hilt, claiming unions were being greedy. They're the ones who know what greed looks like. Meantimes, corporate CEO's get salaries that look like Lotto wins every week, while they claim they can't pay workers any more money. Banducci, CEO of Woolworths, gets close on $10M in salary and perks, while he shafts Woolies customers and Woolworth employees. Joyce got $25M annually for shafting Qantas customers, and employees. At least Labor goes in to bat for the battlers, the pensioners, the veterans, and those who can't get a step up the rung of the wealth ladder. Labor tries to adjust the tax system so the housing bubble doesn't explode, and tries to help young people acquire an affordable home - and all the Landcruiser-driving, big boat boat-owning, multiple property owners and developers, start screeching they've been shafted, and Labor is a pack of arseholes. No, it's the greedy property owners who keep wanting million-dollar property gains every year, while they pay only a pittance in tax, thanks to all their wangled tax deductions - such as the Landcruisers and boats - who are shafting every Australian, and getting "unjust riches" from property investment. Crime has always been with us, you watch too much TV and social media crap, that blows crime out of all proportion. Were you complaining about gun crime in the 1990's when shootings were just as common as today, but only occasionally reported? When we had the worst massacre Australia has ever had, with 35 people shot down by one bloke, just for fun? What about the Hoddle St massacre, or the Fathers Day massacre in Milperra? Those people weren't recent immigrants. Car thefts were massive in the 1980's and 1990's, and immobilisers were introduced to try and stop it. So car thefts went down for a while, now the car thieves have electronic devices to beat immobilisers. We have more people in jail than ever, and yet you claim crims are getting away with crimes constantly. Not much has changed - just the rabid, rapid-fire media reporting that has increased, because the media of today want stories that attract clicks and eyeballs. You need to take a hard look at yourself and your one-eyed, right wing rants, or go to America and join the MAGA nutters who claim Trump has all the answers, too. And I forgot to add, Hanson thinks Trump has all the answers as well, she worships him as the answer to the worlds problems. So we'll get a Trump-style Govt, if Hanson gets any political power. Decisions on the fly, with no reference to anyone, and decisions reversed daily, so no-one knows what's going on. Hanson is a stunt-puller, and carries the same level of nastiness as Trump, abusing people, including allies, and causing disruption, left right and centre. Albo and Chalmers are doing their best with what they got handed, and a lot of what they got handed, came from Liberal Govt decisions.

We need some levity back in this thread. Cartoon author is unknown, so I can't acknowledge them.

Carole King - Tapestry. Geez, these pictograms you're digging up, wouldn't be solvable by anyone under 60!

Peter's fast on the draw tonight. 😄

You've lost that lovin' feelin'. The Righteous Bros.

"I'm not crazy, my mother had me tested". From Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory.

These are some of the most infuriating "progressive developments" of our time...... 1. Intrusive and annoying ads or pop-ups, that pop up ceaselessly, when you're trying to read an article on a news feed website. I click the site off, I don't need that kind of constant crap. 2. Indians on help desks, who speak English with an accent that sounds like they're speaking with a mouthful of thick custard. Why do businesses do this? Everyone I speak to, has the same complaint. 3. The pop-ups that Willie speak of - the ones that carry on about how Joe Bloggs from Outer Dumbsville has purchased a gimmicky product. Who cares? I don't, and I don't need the annoying distraction. 4. "Help desks" that are no help at all. They provide FAQ's that never answer your question. Then, when you're asked if you want to speak about a problem, you're handed over to a chatbot. If you get to the point where the chatbot actually hands you over to a real person, you get a recorded message saying you're 4th in the queue, and the wait time to speak to the "help" person is 13 minutes. 5. The sites with pre-programmed forms to fill in that refuse to recognise legit records. Every time I change my phone plan, I go through the ID quizzing, and the forms refuse to recognise my MDL, saying "there's a problem" with that type of ID. I don't have any way of getting around this "problem" unless I try a different form of ID, usually my passport, which is then accepted. But if I go into my Telstra store, talk to a real person in the form of a Telstra employee, and present my MDL - their system accepts it, as he/she types in the details, no problem at all. 6. The websites that refuse to give you the freight cost of an item, until you've put the item in your cart, filled in all your personal and shipping details, and gone through to the "payment" page. I fill in a lot of gobbledegook, such [email protected] for email address, and some spurious basic address such as 1 xxx st. - with a correct postcode, of course. I'm starting to simply avoid these sites, and look for ones that show freight charges upfront.

The minerals and elements in the soil definitely affect the taste of the fruit or nuts. In my neck of the woods, the gravelly ironstone soils of the Darling Range produce superb-tasting citrus and stonefruits. Your Pacific Ocean-facing slopes are possibly mineral deficient, after millions of years of increased rainfall causing soil leaching, as compared to the lower rainfall, Western slopes of the GDR. The water in the Perth Hills is highly mineralised, with dams having a blue water colour, due to the mineralised water. The minerals are generally calcium, magnesium and silica, and they are leached out of the weathered granite and dolerite rocks, the pipe clays (kaolin) and the lateritic (ironstone) gravels, that are the common rocks and soils of the Perth Hills. This water is used to irrigate the orchards and provides additional beneficial minerals to the fruit and nut trees. "Cracker dust" (fine dust from dolerite or granitic rock crushing for roads and ballast) is often used as a fertilising agent, which dust acts as a slow-release provider of calcium, magnesium, silica, and other beneficial minerals to plants, as it breaks down over time. Elsewhere in W.A. where "light" sandy and sandy gravel soils proliferate, there is a need to apply trace elements to enable the plants to take up the nutrients in the soil. Failure to apply trace elements means poor crops and trees, and plants that struggle to thrive - even if you have applied other fertilisers such as nitrogen, phosphate or sulphate fertilisers. The primary trace elements needed are copper, zinc, manganese, and molybdenum. As indicated, only "trace levels" are needed in the application, but the results are impressive when carried out. For many decades, "light" sandy soils were regarded as useless in W.A., especially for grain cropping, until an ag researcher at the UWA in the early 1930's, found that trace elements were needed on the sandy soils to enable the plants to uptake the nutrients in the soils. Once this was done on a broadacre farming scale, the yields of wheat, barley, and oats multiplied enormously, and large areas of light land were then cleared for agricultural use. Trace element application is generally only needed every 5-10 years, it is a long-lasting soil beneficiation treatment.

This is pretty appropriate news...... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/kpmg-contracts-with-federal-government-650-million-dollars/106789994

They call the Wind Maria. From the Rodgers and Hammerstein production, "Paint your Wagon".

Tom Cruise - Mission Impossible

There's a lot to be said for a very major reform of our taxation system, one that ensures taxes are paid according to the rules, and which system would not allow "creative accounting" or "loophole exploitation", as practised by many global corporations today, and who have done so, for many years. When the GST was introduced, it was supposed to result in a fairer and simpler system. It has turned out to be anything but that.

This is classic, check out the detail in the cartoon, even down to the instructions on the kneecaps...... The cartoonist is David Rowe.