Grumpy Old Nasho

The Fed govt said there'll be no US bases in Australia ... but look what we've got now, thousands of Yanks and their military equipment stationed up north. Or does every one of them piss off at the end of a joint training exercise? I don't think so.

Yes, it's best to keep out of them.

Yes thanks for the corrections. I was typing from memory and that's in a poor state of repair these days. Gerry's wife was a Kiwi, I used to wonder if he'd ever get married, they must have really clicked when he first met her. He was a bit reserved around women when I knew him, but he had a sense of humor and I don't think he realized that that was enough to get the women in (I should say "girls", we were all pretty young then, in our late teens). It hits me hard when friends lose their lives. Another was a young tradesman, a conscript too, in my platoon at basic training. He was blown up in a crater that the N/Vietnamese had booby trapped, his Dad told me years later when I called him. They ran into an ambush and ran for cover. I read about his death in a newspaper at the same time I was doing kitchen duty that night. It was a shock that took me a week to shake off, a young tradesman dying like that for no good reason.

Of course - Granville Tech. I might mention that a fellow apprentice, who was an avid scuba diver, eventually went to live in Marracoota on the south coast. He more or less started the abalone business down there, which grew tremendously and paid good money, everyone got in on it. He met a woman and got married there, had three offspring. I can mention his name because he and his wife were passengers on that fatal plane brought down by the Russians, so the story goes. Jerry Menke. R.I.P. We worked together for a little while in H/Dehavilland's laboratory as apprentices. We travelled home on the train together. I think he was of Dutch descent hence flying in a KLM plane. You remember that don't you? the plane that was brought down by a rocket. Very sad story.

No, Hawker DeHavillands at Lidcombe.

48 thousand were conscripted, 15 thousand went Vietnam. I knew a bloke who wasn't conscripted, just joined voluntarily and then volunteered to go and fight there. Unfortunately, he was involved in a friendly fire incident where one guy was too far out in front and was mistaken for an enemy combatant ... my mate shot him, sadly. I guess it was hushed up, but I got it from the horses mouth when he was back here at home. For brave acts he performed at other times, one in particular, he received bravery medals from every Western nation involved there ... all but Australia, he went on to tell me. He was not just a little peeved about that.

Just as well. I was already crazy enough with anger from being unable to work in my trade, they wouldn't let me. I went from being a fitter & turner working in a large Engineering factory (Hawker DeHavilland), to being a lowly driver in the idiot Army, as it was then. My trade meant everything to me.

When I was doing my two years conscription, a corporal fired his sub-machine gun in front of us while we were lined up out in the training field getting a lecture about being aggressive towards the enemy. He swung the weapon around in an arc firing as he went trying to get us to pay attention to what war can be like. The bullets hit the ground of course, but an officer standing beside him said nothing. I'm sure this was an illegal act as a basic training method. Many of the training corporal were just back from Vietnam and they were crazed, their minds shot and heading for PTS, if they didn't already suffer from it. What we learned from the lecture was that we didn't want to end up crazy either, and that Vietnam has the potential to make you that way.

If you asked traditional Americans what they thought, you'd probably get a different response. They would most likely tell you that they must suffer a little pain until the United States has been put back into order again. A lot of damage has been done, not by President Trump, but by previous administrations, and now Trump is righting the ship. He's fixed the southern border. He's preferencing local corporations over foreign parasitical companies. He's keeping Chinese influence in the US in check, and he's not afraid to use the military when needed to keep a lid on the proliferation of nuclear weapons ... and miscreant terrorist organizations He's doing all the things that we should help him do, but can't because we're weaker, and we're governed by altruistic "international" Fabian socialists.

Yeah, but that's all you keep sayin'

Well the two party system has seen better days. What we should do now is change from voting for candidates, to voting on issues, because it's the issues that are dividing our nation so much. The Governor General can appoint administrators to manage the issues that the voting public have given priority to by majority vote. Old habits die hard, so this proposal will be viewed as radical, but only until it's not. The present system of parties with their own stalwart conflicting opinions is not achieving real harmony or contentment. They're only producing division, nationally incongruent protests and murders in the streets. We need to finish up with the bitter verbal chundering and get on with finding a better way.

Well, let's start searching through my posts to find those where I've made OFF comments about other posters. If there are any, they would be 100 times less than the abuse I've copped. The best I can remember, I've only suggested a member may be a Labor supporter.

The psyches of the ALP and the Coalition have run their course in Australia ... now they're just relying on brainless international socialist elites' policies. If they want to do that, why don't they apply to work for the UN, like Gareth Evans did. They could join him and hold hands while giving speeches to like minded Fabian socialists.

I won't ever vote for the ALP or the Coalition. A Labor party is like Hitler's Nazi party, it never changes it's mind, and we get things like the attempted beheading of a helpful white guy, by a Sudanese blackie in the UK the other day, Labor sticks up for these murderous creeps and allows it to happen time and again. The white guy was only trying to help the blackie. He lost an eye and nearly his life - this is the UK Labor for you, they keep importing murderous ratbags. Albanese goes on about "rightwing" parties being divisive, yet Albanese and the Labor party are the biggest dividers of all. They've split our population into 200 parts, each with their own national flag. And their favorite part seems to be the muslim drug dealers. It's a wonder they don't attend the funerals of slain drug lords.

PHONey wouldn't be woke about it, judges would be instructed to hand down a sentence of 20 years for such a crime. Build new jails to accommodate them.