Crossing the Gulf on the Matilda Highway
Travelling solo with few vehicles on the road it was a lonely drive. Thank God nothing went wrong with the Rangie
Camped at Eagle Nest near Sharks Bay WA
You can just see the glow of my laptop where I was working on a clients web sIte in Tassie hosted through Rumcorps.net servers in Dallas Texas. As good an office as any!
Whales off the NW Coast
A pod of about 20 whales come fast from astern and passed either side of the yacht, frightening hell out of us.
Fire on the road
No flames apparent so I hardly slowed down until I had travelled a hundred odd meters with no visibility. About the time I started to panic I came out the other side.
Abbott and the Japanese
On April 26, 1973, government minister Dr Jim Cairns (centre) shared a platform in the Sydney Town Hall with representatives of communist North Vietnam (whose visit to Australia he sponsored), surrounded by Viet Cong flags and a huge picture of dictator Ho Chi Minh.
Abbott, trying his best to engender a trade agreement for Australia’s benefit says in a speach;
Even at the height of World War II, Australia gave the Japanese submariners killed in the attack on Sydney full military honours. Admiral Muirhead-Gould said of them: “theirs was a courage which is not the property or the tradition or the heritage of any one nation…but was patriotism of a very high order”.
We admired the skill and the sense of honour that they brought to their task although we disagreed with what they did. Perhaps we grasped, even then, that with a change of heart the fiercest of opponents could be the best of friends.
And it goes feral. Abbott haters rush to point out the Japs were uncivilized and committed a host of attrocities and therefore Abbott should be ashamed of himself. Abbott was talking about the midget submariners who attacked Sydney and the fact that the Australian authorities at the time buried the Jap crews with full military honours. You’d have to think that these guys could be considered as just fighting for their country as that is how Australia thought at the time, but no The Abbott haters are bringing out every atrocity the Japs ever committed.
Can’t win, can he. He was talking to the Japanese Prime Minister and Abbott’s speach writer tried to pick a uncontensious moment of WW2 history that wouldn’t upset the Abe or Australians. One doesn’t set up trade agreements by pointing out to the other party that 70 years ago “you guys were a bunch of savages”.
He quotes a WW2 Admiral and the Abbott haters still castigate him.
Which brings to me to the picture showing one-time ALP Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns (centre) entertaining the enemy at Sydney Town Hall just months after Aussie troops withdrew from the war zone; (that’s months, not 70 years) while good friends of mine we still in hospital recovering from wounds, and two years before the invasion of South Vietnam and the end of the war.
Some months later Whitlam recognized China and 31 October marked our trade agreement with them. The Chinese, at this stage, were busy helping the USSR fund the North Vietnamese army’s invasion of South Vietnam.
That, apparently, is OK but for Abbott to try and set up a trade agreement a full 70 years after that war is not on.
Strange days indeed
Aint it the truth
From today’s Australian writing about Carmen Lawrence from Western Australia as she takes over as Premier in 1990
Like most socialists she labours under the misconception that wealth is fixed. The creation of wealth seems not to bother her. Indeed it destracts from the business of spending….
That explains most ALP governments that have existed in my time.
Union membership plummets
UNION membership across the workforce has fallen to its lowest level, with just 12 per cent of private-sector employees choosing to belong to organised labour.
Overall, unions lost almost 93,000 members in the 12 months to last August, with total membership falling to 1.74 million, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show.
ACTU secretary Dave Oliver blamed job cuts and changes in the economy and labour market for the decline.
“The No 1 recruiter for the trade union movement is Tony Abbott,’’ he said. “Australians aren’t going to stand by while the Abbott government and the business lobby go after their penalty rates, seek to cut the minimum wage every year for 10 years and conduct the biggest assault on the social safety net this country has ever seen
How’s that for a “I’m not paying attention” type of statement. Union membership plummets, more than likely as a result of it becoming apparent, even to rusted on ALP supporters, that fraud is rampant in the Union movement as their leaders operate for their own benefit and not that of their members.
Somehow, in his confused mind, the fall actually is not a fall at all as he casts Abbott as the No 1 recruiter for the unions. Abbott recruits but the numbers fall – well done Tony.
Thus now we have the ALP/Union movement representing just 12% of workforce and people still believe that a representation of such a tiny part of the workforce entitles them to government.
Good luck with that!
Scruffs, the lot of them!
Andrew Hansen, one of the Chaser Boys;
ABC’s apologising to Chris Kenny, again. The Chaser isn’t, again. But we’ve agreed not to make more pictures of ABC execs shagging hamsters.”
What an absolute scruff!
In a reasonable world that statement would herald the demise of the Chasers but media in Australia, being what it is, believe the law only applies to those who would support Kenny or his opinions. Those who hate Kenny and Abbott will happily applaud Andrew Hansen even though his contribution to political comment is worse than undergrad humour, (it rates as Bogan Primary Schoolyard) it does attack Liberals and conservatives so it’s cool.
I can’t see Scott doing anything as he obviously aggrees with the Chasers and thinks it’s OK to behave like they have. If he thought it offensive, like ordinbary folk do, he would have sacked them and apologised immediately. Instead he spent an untold amount of tax payers money defending the indefensible in court and has only apologized to get the matter off the air.
He’s a scruff as well!
Greenies loss, common sense win
The anti Geneticall Modified (GM)crops mob in Western Australia have been dealt a blow in a recent Supreme Court ruling when a farmer took his neighbour to court over GM contamination.
The West Australian Supreme Court ruled that Mr Baxter did nothing wrong when genetically modified canola from his property blew over Mr Marsh’s farm. In fact, the court found, it was a decision by regulators to strip Mr Marsh’s farm of its organic status after the alleged contamination that was not right.
Farmng groups immediately said the finding would bring certainty to the GM crops sector as it seeks to ramp up production to meet the growing demand from Asia.
Judge Kenneth Martin found Mr Baxter had grown a legal crop, used orthodox harvesting methods and could not be held responsible for an “unjustifiable” decision to revoke Mr Marsh’s organic certification.
I don’t understand the reasoning behind this hatred of GM crops. In effect virtually everything we consume has been genetically modified. The crops the ancient Egyptian grew have no similarity with what we have today. All food stuff has been genetically modified over the centuries as farmers select better plants for a better yield and a better style of beast for better grain conversion factor.
Today, with advanced science, we simply do it quicker.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no worries about organic food but that is based more on the fact that it is grown chemical free, not that it hasn’t been modified.
To feed an ever increasing world population we simly need better crops and genetic modification provides us with exactly that.
Ex Lib leader defects
South Australian politics becomes even more bizare as one time Liberal leader defects to the ALP minority government giving them some security.
DEECTOR Martin Hamilton-Smith has warned his former colleagues to drop their personal attacks or face an avalanche of dirt about years of treachery and betrayal in the South Australian Liberal Party.
The warning came as his electorate office was vandalised with red paint yesterday with the message: “Deserter. The community won’t forget. Your time will come.
Shades of Oakeshott and Windsor who defected and gave us the Gillard/Rudd debacle. I note 54.8% of Hamilton-Smith’s electorate voted for him as a Liberal.
I wonder how they feel now?
Budget woes
The shouting and tumult dies down as the media have allowed every single person dependant on government largesse to vacilitate wildly and often about the budget. The attacks aginst the Abbott and Hockey have been sustained and not without some bias. The ABC did particularly well with Vilma Ward, a Queensland left wing radical activist, being presented as a concerned Pensioner and a sex-line grandmother (there are some sick men out there!) who claims to have been forced into the sleaze business to help pay her rent. When she come on-line ABC’s Faine smiled at Abbott and he winked back. The furore from “The Wink” has gone viral as Faine managed to have a convenient video available even though the ABC claim they didn’t know who she was. Bullshit – they always know who their callers are and what they are likely to go on about.
They don’t just let anyone call, they must be anti-coalition to get a voice and call-id allows them to select callers who have a proven track record of agreeing with the ABC and it’s self-perceived role as opposition to any conservative government.
Glooria, who is actually Judith Power, is a long-time feminist activist and anarchist but insists she has never been a member of a political party, even though Liberal Party twitter accounts claim she is an ALP branch secretary.
In an amusing twist, this sex-line elderly anarchist and radical feminist, who by her own background defines sleeze, accuses Abbott of being a sleazy misogynist.
The hypocracy!
Some sense is rising out of the tumult but there is a lot of work to be done by Abbott and Hockey. Their efforts at selling the budget have been poor to say the least and quite a few have been disappointed that they weren’t more savage in their cuts.
The fight now is all about getting the budget through the Senate and the new Senate, due to sit in July, comes with it’s own problems that occassion dispair at the offerings.
Particularly dispairing to me is the fact that Palmer’s roll call of Senators in both his party and alligned Independants will have the final say in alot of the budget final make-up
PUP senators Zhenya Wang, Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazaruswill be part of the balance of power and to look closely at one of them, Jacqui Lambie from Tasmania, despair can easily turn to depression.
Jacqui Lambie is an ex soldier and a shallow thinker.
- She advocates national service as a means to fix youth unemployment.
- believes “hitting welfare” is not the way the Government should be finding savings and the nation needs “other ideas”
- believes the economy is in good shape and the Prime Minister and Treasurer are panicking.
- believes Abbott and Joe Hockey are nothing less than a pair of deceitful, lying political politicians,”
- believes abuse was an “intractable problem” in the ADF and made such allegations against the ADF that motivated General Hurlley to make an unprecedented intervention suggesting she calm down.
None of which bodes well for civilization.
Ricky Muir from the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, has signed an agreement to vote along PUP lines but seriously, I always worry about single issue politicians. Does he have a solid background in business or economics that would indicate some rational thought might be attached to his vote in the Senate? His party claim to want to have a “national conversation” about safer driving but I worry that he posted a video – subsequently deleted from the internet – showing his eight-year-old daughter driving a car and doing ”burnouts”.
Now that’s a good start to have about safer driving….not!
Independent senator Nick Xenophon, who is already on record as saying the budget will not pass in it’s current form and adds that the budget itself is unfair, mean and shortsited, doesn’t appear to be thinking about the big picture. Other that saving a few millions by forcing MPs to travell cattle class he doesn’t to offer up any solutions to the nations problems.
Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm has some opinions that resonate but suggesting a radical plan to charge asylum-seekers $50000 to come to Australia isn’t one of them.
I wouldn’t like to comment on Family First’s Bob Day but you could follow the link and decide yourself whether he will help or hinder our recovery
The Democratic Labour Party’s John Madigan doesn’t appear to be radical and well may help the situation.
Amidst all this is Shorten in denial about the cause of our current financial budget woes and I have still to hear him make any positive statement or suggestion as to how we might alleviate the situation that he and his cohorts created in the first place.
It aint going to be easy!
Men’s Health
Last June I had an incident that had me in Emergency. The incident proved benign but the nurses weighed me and as a result of that shock I went to my GP and he sent me to a Dietician and an Exercise Physiologist.
The result so far are shown in the IPhone graphic below…When I resigned from the Army I weighed 100 kilos and had for twenty odd years previous. When I left the Army I had just been posted out of the Regiment in the West so there was little fat at that weight. My target is to get back to the 100 kilos.
The dietician is so petite that the doctor’s wife told me she shouldn’t be allowed out in public as she shamed virtually every other woman. I told the Dietician the base line was I should be able to drink my two or three large flat whites per day made with real milk (I did come from a dairy farm after all) and should a social event occur, like most Friday, nights I would still have a beer or rum.
You can’t be anal if you want to maintain a long term program.
Portion control was the answer, eating nothing more than would fit in a small Royal Doulton sweet dish and eating something every couple of hours to restart my metabolism.
Fruit instead of pies, no coffee milk and plenty of salads.
All that plus the motivating effect of having the crap scared out of me by the scales at Emergency has worked.
The Exercise Physiologist had the biggest impact. I wrote a testimonial for his website;
As a highly-trained Exercise Specialist, Luke has a strong anatomical knowledge, has learnt the moves and drills, but to motivate people to change their attitudes to life is a rare skill and Luke has it in spades. Luke has changed my attitude and if you think yours needs changing then you need to talk to him.
A Personal Trainer has a TAFE Certificate; Exercise Physiologist have a degree and they know the body - they are the professionals in the game.
This post is not about “Look at me – I’ve lost all this weight!” but more a case of the dangers of letting yourself go and the subsequent need to recover. If I hadn’t lost the plot in the first place I wouldn’t have had to go through this regime.
The lesson to us older guys, and even young ones, is if you have arrived at a bad situation then do some thing about it. The sooner you recognize the need, the better the outcome.
See your doctor, find a dietician, go to the gym, find an Exercise Physiologist and restart your life!
If you live in Brisbane, click on the graphic above – I recommend them, not because this is a paid advertisement, it isn’t, but because I believe professionals like Luke at Restart give us a chance to get back where we should be.
If you live elsewhere see your Doctor and follow the path I did.
It works!
Polls down for Abbott
SUPPORT for the Coalition has plunged to its lowest level in almost four years and voter dissatisfaction with Tony Abbott has jumped to the highest point since he became Prime Minister as the government prepares to deliver across-the-board pain in its first budget.
Amazing, isn’t it? The poor bastard has to fix a huge deficit left by the ALP and he is in trouble.
Mind you it’s totally expected. With the media, the ALP, every organization that lives off government handouts and the weird left wing screaming about mean Abbott and amongst all that, nobody, least of all Shorten, are calling it for what it is – a budget to try and get us out of the very deep hole the ALP have left us.
There is a fair chance the rich are going to pay for it. Bit unfair really because they didn’t cause it and are highly unlikely to have vote the spendthifts in. In a perfect world we would be able to isolate those who did vote them in, particularly the second ALP government, and give them the bill.
Wont happen of course.
What will happen, what has happened since Whitlam got booted, is that the Libs come in to fix the deficits. Over the first year hard decisions are made and their polls plummet with too many people thinking ME and not the country. LNP management starts to produce results and the polls climb to give them another run at government. The country stabilizes, surpluses appear and productivity lifts after union power is curtailed. Everythin’s rosy, people get complacent and with the memory span of a lightening bolt, forget how bad the ALP is at managing finances and everything else except looking after the unions and they fucking vote them back in.
The mysteries of the cycle of life.
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