Category Archives: General Musings
Gunslinger extraodinaire
Wyatt Earp eat your heart out. This guy claims to be the fastest gun slinger in the world and I wouldn’t dispute it.
Worth watching …the man is very, very fast. Makes my attempts at Browning 9ml shootouts very ordinary.
Missionary in trouble in North Korea
An Australian missionary being detained in North Korea left Christian pamphlets in a Buddhist temple, his travel companion says.
Which is a pretty dumb thing to do in a communist country, particularly North Korea.
His wife says;
Now, “I know he’s courageous and he’s in God’s hands,’’ Ms Short said in an interview at the offices of the Christian publishing company the couple run.
Ah, such faith, but unfortunately the missionary isn’t in God’s hands at all. He is in the hands of Kim Jon-un. and that’s an entirely different matter. Not only does Kim Jon-un actually exist but he is quite likely cranky at anything Australian.
Only yesterday, listening to the ABC, I noted Michael Kirby getting headlines for his UN report accusing North Korea of crimes against humanity.
Kirby has a point but as usual, considering his left wing attitudes, his belief in the UN and its power is misplaced. He was talking of Kim Jon-un being fronted to the courts for crimes against humanity. Yeah, well good luck with that one Michael – all the report will achieve in the immediate future will be to raise Kim Jon-un’s ire and paranoia.
Of course, a connection between Kirby’s report and the arrest of a silly old missionary may well just be conjecture on my part but the North Koreans are a weird lot and and just to be sure, if I was an Australian of any calling in North Korea, I’d lay low for a bit.
Unfortunately for the silly old missionery there is a precedence set in North Korea. Last year, American missionary Kenneth Bae was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour after being accused of committing hostile acts in North Korea.
Good luck mate.
Buffalo going back home
AUSTRALIA’S live animal export industry has taken a new turn, with the first ever shipment of buffalo heading to Vietnam from the Northern Territory.
The (NT) government says it will also develop opportunities for Indigenous communities to harvest wild buffalo from herds on Aboriginal land. An original shipment of 222 domesticated buffalo will be joined by another 600 next week, and 1500 more in April when the wet season eases. Australian officials will travel to Vietnam in a fortnight to ensure that animal welfare conditions are being met.
This ticks all the boxes; income for the state, income for the enterprise and income for our indigenous mates, therefore animal activists will be all over it as they send covert cameramen to Vietnam to film buffalo being processed.
Thankfully, when the activist films show on Australian TV, the current adult government wont be closing the industry down like that fool of a man Ludwig who ruined the live cattle export business, affecting thousands of people, based on a TV show.
The enterprise can progress and money can now be invested with some sense of security.
I don’t particularly like buffalo as when I was a young tacker in Vietnam, whenever we came across buffalo in the field they would attack us, I guess because we smelt different to the Vietnamese.
Bad lifestyle choice by the buffalo as part of the different smell was made up of weaponry….heavy weaponry….and a lot of it!
Their ABC
It started with the Navy being accused of using profane language, then kicking and punching, then shooting at the boats and then finally torture by burning.
ABC MD Scott
“I don’t think there should be any attempt to somehow suggest that because the ABC raises those allegations, the ABC are advocates for those allegations — that the ABC has acted as judge and jury on those allegations. We have raised them because they are serious, they are important and they raise questions that need to be answered, and we have put those questions.”
So, as I understand Scott, the ABC can cite as news any allegation and present it in such a manner as to be truth. Later, when it becomes clear it isn’t true then the ABC thinks it’s reasonable to ignore facts and keep on citing the allegations as if they were still true.
Not surprisingly, this approach is only applied if the allegations reflect poorly on the Abbott government and it’s three aspects of normalizing Australia. Boat people, Carbon Tax and relations with Indonesia.
Paul Sheehan in The Age;
But the ABC has been worse than dull. It chose to knowingly damage Australia’s relationship with Indonesia by publishing Edward Snowden’s leaks of Australian spying in Indonesia. It then chose to knowingly damage Australia’s reputation in Asia by running for an entire week with accusations of torture by Australian navy personnel, despite not having a shred of corroborating evidence, and despite a super-abundant pattern of false claims made by asylum seekers who have destroyed documents, scuttled ships and claimed abuse…
Allegations by desperate boat people are run for a whole week without corroboration but harking back to allegations against Gillard by Union officials and lawyers, corroborated by affadavits, stat decs and police investigations, the ABC chose to not cover them.
EXPECT astonishment from the ABC’s vast national audience when the federal government places trade-union slush funds front-and-centre of a major inquiry in the New Year.
The rusted-on viewers and listeners will be bewildered because the taxpayer-funded state-owned broadcaster has imposed a regimen of strict censorship on the key element in the inquiry – the misuse of money from the AWU association which was established with the assistance of legal advice from former Prime Minister Julia Gillard when she was a partner in the Victorian Labor law firm Slater & Gordon.
Those who don’t take their news solely from the ABC would be well aware that the Victorian police are conducting a major inquiry into Ms Gillard’s role in the establishment of the Australian Workers’ Union Workplace Reform Association by her then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson and his AWU mate Ralph Blewitt in 1992.
Early last week, The Australian newspaper revealed that Fair Work Commissioner and former AWU boss Ian Cambridge has given sworn evidence of “gross irregularities” in the union slush fund that Ms Gillard advised on.
Not good enough Scott and it’s not good enough to blame News Corp, they are just doing what you should be doing, verifying whether there is any truth in the allegations, and they have found the entire beat up very questionable.
I’m moving into drones
Gary, my mate in South Australia is a Radio Controll model plane nutter and I’ve long been interested myself. I have small chopper that I practice on but I found it too difficult. Like…start up….lift off…crash into ground…start up….lift off…crash into ground…repeat several times…go to hobby shop and buy more blades then start up….lift off…crash into ground…repeat several more times.
Monotonous…Frustrating.
I felt I needed to have a real flying licence endorsed for Blackhawk to be able to fly but technology has stepped in, in the form of a pocket drone.
Start up…fly! Much better – I can now concentrate on photos and videos of my bush 4WD expeditions rather than the actual flying. Take your hand off the stick and it hovers; battery almost flat and it returns to base. With a “Follow Me” mode it will be easy to film driving the old Rangie up steep inclines and across rivers. Great videos to further bore my kids and friends.
It’s all about software.
Advanced software and systems with autopilot and “follow me” mode
- State of the art flight controls, algorithms and connectivity
- APM compatible flight controller 6-axis accelerometers, 3 axis gyroscopes, barometric sensor (altitude)
- Integrated onboard autopilot Flight planning with Google Maps
- Fly by GPS waypoints
- “Follow Me” mode (requires mobile device with GPS)
- Altitude Hold
- Return to home (RTH)
- Headfree mode (orientation independent flying)
- Load/Save and repeat/replay flight missions
- Real-time flight data
- Artificial Horizon
- Altitude Heading indicator
- GPS signal strength
- PC, Mac and Linux compatible
- Mission Planner or QGroundControl Compatible
- Android compatible (tablet and phone)
- iOS compatibility coming soon
Available in late April in the US I look forward to another great challenge – controlling drones.
More here if you are interested
Two laws
A “deeply ashamed” judge who was drink driving when she struck a cyclist in Adelaide has been banned from sentencing drunk offenders.
Justice Anne Bampton, 51, appeared in the Adelaide magistrates court today and was fined $1300 and disqualified from driving for eight months 14 days.
I’m a JP (Qualified) in the state of Queensland and if I get done for drink driving I am deregistered.
“It appears one law for the legal fraternity, and another for the average person”
Not good enough.
Remembrance Day
Terry Sweetman can’t keep ideology out of todays remembrance as he talks of good and bad wars in a piece entitled Remembrance day silence a time to contemplate the pointlessness of-war.
He starts;
We should think of lives lost, lives shattered, lives squandered, and lives given in service of what good men and women rightly or wrongly believed were good and just causes.
and I respond
Your article and the above quote makes me think the value of sacrifice of those who served in “bad” wars is less than had they died in “good” wars.
You question why we served in earlier wars but the Maori Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the Sudan War, the Boer War and WW1 were all fought during a period when most people in Australia thought of themselves as British Australians who were similar to British Canadians or British South Africans. It was a case of Britian is at war, we are British, let’s go.
Who could argue about the good or bad of WW2. Who would ever suggest we shouldn’t have contributed to the downfall of Hitler and Tojo. No one surely and the arguement that Japan was never really going to invade Australia was lost on my Father as he endured 64 Japanese bombing raids on Darwin.
Korea might be officially still under a truce but the communist regimes of China and North Korea didn’t take over the South and it has flourshed so that’s a win.
The Paris Peace Talks ended the Vietnam war in a truce as well. All beligerants went home but while the West lost interest and political will the communists never did and North Vietnam, rearmed by the USSR, finally invaded. It took them nearly 15 years to win the hollow invasion and it cost them dearly. We held them up for all that time and sapped their economies so surely that’s a positive. Korea, Malaya and Vietnam were all battles of the Cold War and that was won in 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down.
The more recent “good ” and “bad” wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, are battles of the war against terrorism. Both have given the local populace an inkling of democracy, secular education, better health and education outcomes and some hope of a better future. Al Qaeda and theTaliban are somewhat depleted, albeit not destroyed, and I think the point is, the whole affair is a generational campaign that will bear fruit in days to come.
The battles aren’t done and the war continues.
I’m tired of being told I fought in a “bad” war with 7RAR in Vietnam while the later 7RAR troops who fought in Iraq also copped the “bad” war service but the next rotation to Afghanistan of the battalion served in a “good” war. We don’t see it that way. The country called and we served under the rising sun, as did our fathers, in an apolitical manner.
I would rather the line quoted at the start be;
We should think of lives shattered and lives given in service of what good men and women believed were good and just causes.
Leave the “rightly or wrongly” and “squandered” to the politicians lest the words start appearing on gravestones and memorials.
In the meantime I await the news of my mate Percy who yesterday was given 24 hours to live. Percy served in one of the “bad” wars in an exemplorary manner and in doing so proved himself a better man than Sweetman ever will be.
1920s 4WD action
No wonder Dodge vehicles had a good reputation. This film was made by the Dodge Brothers in the 1920’s to promote their vehicle.
Try this in your modern SUV or 4WD; it wouldn’t be easy.
107 year old film
This film was “lost” for many years. It was the first 35mm film ever that has come to light. It was taken by camera mounted on the front of a cable car as it`s traveling down the street. You feel as if your really there, standing at the front looking down the street, amazing piece of historic film.
The number of automobiles is staggering for 1906. Absolutely amazing!
The clock tower at the end of Market Street at the Embarcadero wharf is still there. …. How many “street cleaning” people were employed to pick up after the horses? Talk about going green!
Great historical film!
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=NINOxRxze9k
This film, originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record, even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!).. It was filmed only four days before the Great California Earthquake of April 18th 1906 and shipped by train to NY for processing. Amazing, but true!
No wonder there had to be laws created to regulate driving habits. This is insane. Good thing they couldn’t go very fast.
Look at the hats the ladies were wearing and the long dresses. Some of the cars had the steering wheels on the right side, I wonder when they standardized on the left? Sure was still a lot of horse drawn vehicles in use. Mass transit looked like the way to get around.. Looks like everybody had the right of way.
Perhaps the oldest “home movie” that you will ever see!
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