onetrack

Bruce, wasn't that the basis of all the old Scottish/English charitable/benevolent care organisations and groups, such as the Ancient Order of Foresters, Buffaloes, Masons, etc, etc? The Order of St John is the oldest sick care organisation in the world, it started during the Crusades in the 11th century.

Is that really you, Donald? Surely you aren't planning on taking on the global pharmaceutical companies and the medical instrument/equipment suppliers??

Being adaptable to vastly changed circumstances in jobs, industries and occupations, is all part of our life paths, and many people re-train more than once during their lifetimes. I have changed occupations multiple times, and had to learn new skills each time. Most of the changes were forced on me, I just rolled with the punches, and kept going. I've bordered on "technical bankruptcy" a couple of times, and been quite wealthy at other times. The only constants in life, are change, death, and taxes.

Timor Leste just sounds like a 3rd world sh**hole country, so good enough reason to keep them out, according to the MAGA doctrine.

Queue.

There's nothing quite like American arrogance. Australia doesn't rate too highly for invasion, as the Chinese already own everything they want here, anyway. But Taiwan has the worlds most technologically-advanced computer-chip manufacturing, and 5 of the worlds leading, cutting-edge, computer-chip factories. That's what the Chinese REALLY want - and the Americans will stop them from getting it. So on that basis, Australia is only useful as a base for operations, same as WW2.

I could spend 30 minutes trying to work this out, and still not find the answer!

It's gotta be another old bloke who acted in Westerns, 50 or 60 years ago.

Australian manufacturing wasn't "stopped", it was over-run and soundly beaten, cost-wise, by low-cost, large-production output Asian manufacturers, particularly the Chinese. When was the last time you bought an Australian-made product from Bunnings - at a high price - in favour of the dirt-cheap Chinese one? That's right, you did the same as every other Australian, you went for the cheapest crap you could buy. Where is the car made that you drive, and why did you buy it, instead of an Australian-built one??

Ian Verrender writes very good articles, and his latest article on the ABC News website, points out what a scam the last AU-U.S. Free Trade agreement was. But Trump has torn that agreement up without the slightest consultation or discussion with us, so we're free to do as we please now, to advance Australia's interests, over and above the U.S.'s interests, every day of the week, from here on in. Let's start with an entry fee for every American Serviceman entering Australia. We could call it a "Trump Tariff" entry fee. After all, we go to other countries (Bali and Turkey come to mind, straight up) and we get slugged an entry fee - why not an entry fee on American troops entering Australia? After all, they're only coming here to look after Americas interests, not Australias interests! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-16/verrender-us-free-trade-analysis/105053766

Here's my take on the Amazon scams; 1. Amazon is run by the biggest scammer around, Jeff Bezos is a bigger scammer than Zuckerberg, and that's saying something. I cancelled my Amazon account due to Amazon's sleazy tricks, such as signing you up to their Amazon Prime membership, when you didn't even agree to it! 2. My phone holds no personal information that useful to scammers or thieves. I keep no bank details on it, no passwords, no addresses. If I give someone my personal details to facilitate a deal, or pay for something, I delete the SMS after the deal is done. I refuse to use my phone as a "payment device". They're basically a very insecure system. 3. I don't do surveys - not even for big, well-known companies. All surveys are scams, designed to get your personal information and data. 4. I don't scan barcodes unless I know the company and know their reputation. I'm certainly not going to scan any random barcode that comes in the mail or in a parcel. 5. I'm wary of any social media promotions, I treat all Tik-Tok videos as scams, and even if they aren't outright scams, 99.9% of Tik-Tok videos are worthless, time-wasting crap. 6. Despite my belief in being internet-savvy, I still get scammed a couple of times a year. I got scammed last week, buying parts online. Here's how it worked. I learnt that a good Taiwanese company. "HJL Autoparts", sells quality timing chains for Nissan engines. I found their website offering good deals on their timing chains, so I bought one - using PayPal and my credit card. As I went to finalise payment, I noted a millisecond flash of a website redirect at the bottom of the page. Uh-oh, this doesn't look good. Oh - Did I mention I got a 2 factor SMS with a code from PayPal for my scam transaction, too!? So I go to PayPal and I see a payment has been made to some Olive Oil Company in the U.S. I check up on that company and it's defunct. So I try to reverse the PayPal transaction, and PayPal tells me I can't reverse the transaction until it's been processed!! WTF??? PayPal are the biggest scammers aid as well!! So I have to wait a couple of days for the transaction to be processed by PayPal, and only then can I start the payment reversal process with PayPal. But when I start the reversal process, I'm given a choice of "ticks" for the reasons for reversing the transaction. Surprise, Surprise! There's no "fraud" or "scam" choice in the reasons for reversing the transaction!! I can only tick, "item not delivered" and nothing else that comes anywhere near the reason for reversing the process. Fortunately, the "item not delivered" did complete the process and I got the payment returned to my CC. But now, the scammers have all my PayPal details and CC details and phone number, so no doubt they've been sold to other scammers on the blackmarket - so now I have to be doubly alert to PayPal scam SMS's and false delivery scam SMS's and Credit Card fraud warning scams ..... sigh......... Only LATER, do I find the GENUINE "HJL Autoparts" - and all the warnings about the fake "HJL Autoparts" website - which copies the genuine site, EXACTLY - except for an additional "S" in the website URL. FAKE WEBSITE - https://www.hjlautopartss.com/ GENUINE WEBSITE - https://www.hjlautoparts.com/ The bottom line is, you can trust no-one on the internet until you have done personal verification outside the internet - and not even huge companies like PayPal or Amazon can be trusted. Interestingly, I've reported the fake website to Google and it still comes up high in Google searches, thus proving that Google cares little about scams and scam websites.

Interestingly, the W.A. Dept of Agriculture did a study on evaporation levels from farm dams quite a number of years ago. They discovered that greater levels of evaporation occurred on warm windy nights from farm dams, than during the day - and especially where the dam mouth faced the prevailing winds (South-Easterlies in the lower part of W.A.). This was due to the fact that the amount of wind played a larger part in evaporation, than the hot sun during the day. Quite often, hot sunny days here have relatively low levels of wind, and it's the wind that moves the evaporated moisture.

We had a drought between Oct 2023 and May 2024, with virtually zero rain, only a few mm's in that period. Then we had a short but near-average Winter rainfall, with more rain falling in the Northern and Eastern Wheatbelt and adjoining Pastoral areas further North, way above average. The cropping season for W.A. 2024-25 was the 3rd largest on record, despite the season looking dismal at the start. We produced over 20M tonnes of grains, and that makes 4 of the last 5 years for W.A. farmers, as bumper cropping years. But the rain petered out again in early Oct 2024, and we've endured the hottest December, January and February, since the early 1960's. In the Wheatbelt, the December 2024 average temperatures were 3° above average, 4° above average in January, and 1.5° above average in February. We had a big thunderstorm roll in from the North-West on Thursday (13th Mar.) that gave us 13mm in the city, 20mm at Perth Airport and around 25-30mm over many other areas of the State, including the Wheatbelt. Albany and a small area North and NW of Albany, collected a massive downpour as the thunderstorm passed over it, heading South - Albany recorded 126mm for the day, an all-time record rainfall for one day. The rain has refreshed everything, and it definitely feels like Autumn now, with some cool nights. I fully expect we'll have an above-average Winter rainfall, this normally happens after Qld has had huge Summer rains, we get heavy Winter rains as a follow-on. An old farmer told me about this pattern in the mid-1960's, and he'd followed weather patterns for 50 years before I spoke to him. 1974 was when Brisbane had its massive floods and the 1974 Winter here in W.A. was the wettest for decades, it was a wipeout, there were flooded paddocks for weeks.

Marty, I know most of us elders are a little hard of hearing, but you don't have to keep repeating yourself... repeating yourself... repeating yourself!

Marty - Ahh, O.K., now I recall the policeman in the Magic Pudding. It's only been about 65 years since I last read the Magic Pudding right through! I don't get the same FB feeds as Red750, but I believe I know who it is. He's been dead for nearly 40 years, and I don't think there's too many photos of him as an old man, mostly as a young man, or in his prime. He was a prolific star in movies, mostly Westerns.

Let's get back to the POSITIVE additions to this thread, shall we? Trump has his own thread. For last weeks and this weeks positive addition, SWMBO and I went to a couple of shows put on by the W.A. Museum and the W.A. Maritime Museum. The W.A. Museum show was "The Kimberley Experience", and the Maritime Museum show was "Empress Josephines Garden". The best part was, both shows were FREE admission! The Kimberley Experience was all about viewing the Kimberley's tourist places, without the need to actually travel there - and the Empress Josphines Garden show was all about the early French explorers of the W.A. coastline, and how they took home large amounts of W.A. flora and fauna to the Empress and Napoleon, which flora and fauna Josephine nurtured, and expanded to many other places in France. The French took home marsupials and emus, and W.A.'s Black Swans, which all survived for some time, it appears. Both shows were "immersive" experiences, where you were surrounded by big screens - and in the case of the W.A. Museum Kimberley show, we actually wore VR headsets, the first time I've ever done so. The VR headsets take you right to the camera lens view from drones and cameras fixed to choppers, and it was startling to look down with the headsets, and to suddenly feel like you were hanging in space over gorges and rivers. Both shows were very enjoyable and it's good to be out and about and socialising, which SWMBO believes is very important for your mental health, as you get older.

There's steadily rising anger at Musk's "slash-and-burn" terminations of agencies and employees. The Veterans Affairs administration is one area that is being targeted for "waste". It appears Musk and Trump believe Veterans are malingerers and bludgers, and a burden on society, and they have to go and work, rather than get treatment and accept compensation for war injuries - which injuries often make them unable to work full time. Mental health treatment should always be part of veterans treatment, and suicides amongst U.S. veterans are causing concern - even to the new VA administration. But the Musk and Trump cuts are going right to mental health treatment for veterans. However, the newly-appointed (by Trump) head honcho of VA is one Doug Collins - a former U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force chaplain - and in civilian life, a lawyer who defended Trump against his impeachment. He's setting out to fire 80,000 employees from VA. To do this, with the level of damaged war veterans the U.S. has, can only mean reduced services and benefits for veterans. How this gent, with his lack of major public service administration, got this job, is eyebrow raising. He got it simply because he's a Trump ar**-licker, and for no other reason - and his primary aim is to reduce VA to a shell of what it is now. Interestingly, somewhere around 25% of VA employees are former Veterans. Collins is effectively saying VA is just a big job-creation scheme for injured veterans, which is creating massive anger amongst the veterans and their supporters. In this interview (below), Doug Collins come across as a typical Trump BS-artist, couching dismantling of the VA Dept in waffle-speak, bouncing around with unrelated sentences, and trying to appear like he actually cares for veterans, when he doesn't. It is purely disingenuous lawyer-speak or political-speak, and nothing else. https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2025/03/06/va-secretary-insists-massive-staff-cuts-needed-to-refocus-department/ It's interesting to note that many "home-terrorism" attacks and murders in the U.S. were carried out by mentally-scarred veterans who did not receive the treatment they really needed. Amongst those attacks and murders is the greatest act of U.S. home-grown terrorism, the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, and which was carried out by two deranged veterans.

It sure looks like a swift kick in the nuts for those lovers of Hardley-Dawdlesons in the EU! 😢 https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/12/eu-strikes-back-against-us-steel-and-aluminium-tariffs-with-retaliatory-package

Whoa!! Hasn't anyone told the Don that the price of good ol' hamburgers is going to skyrocket, once he whacks a 25% tariff on Australian (and Canadian and Mexican) Beef? That's going to hit home, right at the White House dinner table!! https://mecardo.com.au/tariff-time-impacts-on-beef/

It's not even a $5.00 raise, it's actually only $4.60 a fortnight for a single pensioner and just $3.50 a fortnight each for couples. There's a lot of anger over the miserly increase, directed at the Govt by the pensioners out there, as evidenced by the comments on many "seniors" sites. The Govt claims that inflation is under control and back to 2.4% - that doesn't jell with all the current increases in pricing, in nearly everything I want to buy. https://www.dss.gov.au/system/files/documents/2025-03/rates-list-20-march-2025-upload.pdf

He wants to get rid of DS Time, and replace it with Trump Time - which comes at a suitable price, of course - payable out of U.S. Taxpayer funds to Trump Inc. When the country is in Trump Time, reality is reversed, bad is good, justice is evil, public servants are all money thieves, and they all belong to a secret cohort that is running the country contrary to how he wants it run, and Donald Trump is the true Saviour of the World, not that imposter Jesus Christ bloke. In Trump Time, there will be no Wars, because as soon as anyone starts one, he'll use the strength of America and its resources to ensure the attacking party immediately wins, stating the attackers had every right to win, as they were thoroughly sick of the people they attacked, anyway. During Trump Time, the sun will rise and set whenever Donald says so, and not a minute before or after, otherwise there'll be Hell to Pay, he'll launch an attack on the Sun, just to show it who actually runs the Universe. Of course, there is the potential that if Trump officially removes DS Time - in many parts of the world, Time will promptly go backwards. It has already started to do so, in places such as Florida and Washington, thus showing that Donald Trump is already exercising his powers over the transit of Time.

Anywhere you have water, some warmth, and smooth hard surfaces, such as rocks and concrete, you're going to get algae growth. It is deadly slippery! In the North of W.A., the algae growth on concrete creek crossings will make big heavy trucks slide off the concrete floodway, with only a small amount of water flow.

The story is in a book produced by a re-incarnation promoter, a German bloke by the name of Trutz Hardo. The story changes in some places, to the body found, being of a man. The Druze believe firmly in re-incarnation, so it's a re-incarnation promoter seeking out other re-incarnation believers, so he can do more re-incarnation promotion. Hebrews 9:27 in the Bible appears to refute re-incarnation. https://biblehub.com/hebrews/9-27.htm The perfect details on every fact, are all just too good to be true. I have no doubt there are strange things that happen that defy explanation, and have psychic overtones, but this story is too perfect. "The boy, of the Druze ethnic group, was born with a long, red birthmark on his head. According to Druze beliefs, birthmarks are related to past-life deaths. When the boy was old enough to talk, he told his family that he had been killed with an axe blow to his head. As is the custom, the elders took the child to the home of his previous life, to see if he remembers it. And sure enough, the boy knew the village he was from, and once he arrived there, he remembered the name he had in his past life. Locals told the elders that the man who the boy was claiming to be, had gone missing four years earlier. When asked, the boy also remembered the full name of his killer. When the alleged killer was confronted, his face turned white, but he did not admit to murder. The boy then took the elders to where the body was buried, and in that very spot, they found a man's skeleton with a wound to the head that corresponded with the boy's birthmark. They also recovered the axe with which he had been killed. Faced with the evidence, the killer then admitted to the crime. The boy's full story has been documented in the book, "Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today" by German therapist Trutz Hardo."

OME, your rainfall region is subject to wide seasonal variations, but the current climatic trend for your region is also inclining towards drought. You could be worse off, spare a thought for the rural South Australians, a lot have even run out of drinking water. The S.A. farmers have just endured the worst cropping season in 80 years, with inadequate rain through last Winter, accompanied by savage frosts. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/02/they-cant-drink-water-they-cant-flush-the-toilet-low-rainfall-in-the-adelaide-hills-has-left-thousands-on-the-brink

Neil Diamond, not looking too bad for a bloke who turned 84 in January.