Old Koreelah

Almost unique… (a bit like being almost pregnant.) What about Canada, NZ and other members of the Commonwealth?

Our First People are NOT just another minority group; they were here FIRST. They are the people who were pushed aside to allow our nation to be built. Despite the appallingly things done to them, most have shown commendable hospitality to the newcomers. Like many of my countrymen, I’m happy to see Aboriginal Australians given a smidgeon of special treatment; seeing their red, yellow and black flag flying makes me proud of of my country.

Good grief, that’s a very poor argument! The mining industry and churches have always had enormous influence over governments.

That idea is being adopted widely in India. Not only reducing water losses through evaporation, but no farmland gets covered by solar panels!

Robodebt was one of the nastiest acts by a government in Australia. Tax avoidance and fraud by the big end of town costs Australia billions each year. Those parasites were left alone by Morrison’s morally bankrupt mob. Instead, they declared war on our most vulnerable people. We will not forget.

Many Serbs were raised on stories of their Croat neighbours helping Nazis commit atrocities against them.. I’ve watched Nazi film of Serbs being systematically shot and dumped into the river. Intergenerational ethnic hatreds run deep in that part of the world. A Croat brother-in-law told me of growing up in utter fear of reprisals from Serbs. Liberal democracies like Australia absorbed millions of people damaged by this sort of madness. As trump and his copycats have shown, it’s not hard to scrape off the veneer of decency to once again unleash man’s worst nature.

The Tangerine Toddler:

I believe several post war French cars also combined the two. Modern Hybrid cars could surely use the ruddy great electric motor as a starter.

Allowing everyone to speak freely is the ideal, but history has shown that can lead to the mob being wipped into a destructive frenzy. How to prevent this? Properly educate everyone, so they have the skills to detect crap when they hear it.

I recently attended a gathering of extended family. One thing stood out: those rellies who had allowed their lives to be governed by their church looked older, more worn and not as happy as the rest of us.

Quite likely, PM. I doubt that the deviant who organised young girls for famous rich old blokes did it just for fun; lots of opportunities to take pix and video to blackmail them with. That’s one reason I decided not to become rich!

Seems there’s a lot of it about. When mine was done in August, I was in a room full of old people recovering from hip replacements. Among the vistors was a nice old lady who came over to my bed and proceeded to describe how her hubby had died within a few months of breaking his hip. Great encouragement!

In my dad’s youth linesmen had mobile telephones in their saddlebags: they could reach up from the saddle to clip onto overhead wires.

We built our place in the 80s, inspired by the passive-solar designs common in coffee table books at the time. We try to run hungry stuff like pumps and washing during the day, when our solar panels provide the power, but most nights we cook with electricity. Our typical bill:

Thanks for that expose, Willie. I always wondered how those ejector seats work. My brother once showed me a used escape pod from a F-111; much safer option. I have sat in a F/A18 and was shown the harness that pulls in he pilot’s lower legs; essential, as mine are so plurry long! I have been developing an ejector seat for the LiFEPO4 battery of my camper. Much less complex, but gives me peace of mind re the rare chance of it catching fire. I wish I could do the same for the battery in my plane.

We live in a golden age of freedom, where anyone who is different has some chance of a normal life. In the last couple of years I’ve met a mature-aged bloke who turn up in women’s clobber- possibly his mother’s. After decades of hiding, he finally feels safe enough to trust a few blokes in our small town with his true identity and the rest of us don’t feel threatened by him.

I guess this situation is very similar to 1950, when the USSR suddenly provided lots of hardware to North Korea; even a seasoned pilot doesn’t learn to fly a MiG-15 in a few days. There were lots of allegations of experienced Soviet pilots fighting UN forces.

Same also happened in the education sector. The old promotion system appeared archaic- teachers seeking promotion were put through rigorous inspection and if found efficient enough, were placed on The List. When a vacancy came up somewhere, they could apply for that position. This ensured teachers moved around the state, bringing new blood, new ideas to every school. It was replaced with bulls1t bingo, which encouraged teachers to lie and cheat their way to the top. (Mine is one of the broken bodies they walked over to get there.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo

I disagree that kids of today don’t use nicknames. Almost all my Aboriginal students had colourful names that everyone used, teachers included. Some names were family-based; kids had nicknames derived from their parent’s. It was only around report-writing time that we used their official, white-fella names.

Actually it was Peter Costello’s baby bonus. https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-baby-bonus-generation-is-starting-to-turn-18-has-it-saved-australia-s-population-20220624-p5awfg.html I like the WA approach to abandoned cars; in NSW burned-out wrecks often pollute the roadside for weeks.

These sort of animal lib crusaders have every right to express their opinions, but no right to impose them on the rest of us. (Just like the bluddy Republican-backed religious extremists in the US.) Our whole way of life depends on exploiting animals; the best we can do is treat them well and reduce their suffering wherever we can. Most farmers have always been conscious of this. A beef-grower neighbour of mine was almost in tears every time he had to take some of his cattle to market. As a farm boy I saw the best and worst of animal husbandry and have been a vego for almost fifty years- but also support the rights of meat eaters and their suppliers. If we phased out eating animal products whole species would no longer have a role and disappear from our world. Perhaps the best thing the extreme animal lobby can do is reduce their own impact and not have kids.

Good point, OT. I guess it’s part of the perennial debate: should the highway be an express route between two major centres, or connect all the little places in between? (That also applies to the new Inland Rail in the eastern states.) The road through the Old Koreelah valley where I grew up crosses numerous creeks; the cost of building, maintaining and replacing all those bridges is humungous. On the other side of the creek an old pioneer’s road runs parallel, with narry a bridge; but it doesn’t connect with local farms, so it fell into disuse generations ago.