Bruce

I used to like Bob Brown until he ditched the green's sustainable population platform for political reasons ( it was too much like Pauline Hanson's ). And the greens have shown that they think coal is better than nuclear, so they are scientifically illiterate. I used to like Flannery too, but I have been told that he has bought a harbourside place in Sydney, so maybe he doesn't really believe his own stuff. With regards to water.... everywhere is better than Adelaide. The water here has gone though at least one sewer and several cows before it is filtered up for us. BUT did you know that Adelaide had the first truly modern sewage system in the world? By modern, I mean that the poo is kept completely separate from stormwater. Back on the subject... this guy was fined $50,000 for making firebreaks bigger than allowed. His was the only house to ( barely ) escape being burned down for miles around. I think he should get an apology and his money back.

Of course we should be going to clean energy. If Australia were to stop mining coal and join in with sanctioning the countries who continued to mine the stuff, that would be great. We could even suck some co2 out of the air for geological time if we charred and buried organic stuff. But I am writing this from a farm which is not permitted to construct any firebreaks due to green regulations, at least I think. The regulations are very obscure. There is something about red-tailed cockatoo overlays, whatever that means.

There was an analysis of what sort of people bought urban 4wd's. They are nasty people who want the other party to die while they walk away.

I reckon the greens and the left are about 10 percent responsible. The main thing is climate change, but land-clearing for fire hazard reduction is nowadays regarded as a tricky business. Try as they might, the greenies cannot escape the fact that stories like the landowner fined a million dollars for making a firebreak too wide are out there. Now there is an imbalance between the unlimited power of the state and the means of the private person. The state, through a bureaucrat who has never passed a sanity test, can bring on a prosecution which many cannot afford to fight. There are scrub areas on this farm, and just finding the regulations and seeking any permissions discovered to be needed , looms as a very big and difficult job. So the job has never been done.

We should be comparing the costs of inaction ( all the current fire costs for example ) with the costs of taking action. The least worst should be the way we go and I am sure that this would be to minimize co2 production. I would like to see Australia phase out coal mining and start paying farmers to make charcoal.

Why is there not a standing reward, say $2000, for dobbing in the guy who just sold you some illegal drugs? Is it because the sellers are a resource which guarantees continuing jobs for police etc? If I had my way, there would be thousands of people out there trying to buy illegal drugs just for the $2000 reward. Then the nabbed seller would be offered say $10,000 to do a similar thing to his supplier. Plus a new identity if needed. Hit men would be offered a great reward for dobbing in their employer instead of carrying out their contract. Of course there are lots of details needed to be done right, but to my knowledge, there are no efforts in the direction of using greed and fear against the drug traders at all, and I wonder why not.

That's a wonderful story pmc. Thanks for sharing it.

There was nothing magical about the pyramids... here's an example.... After a level was completed, they built a small clay wall around the pyramid and sealed between the blocks with clay too, then they flooded the level and trimmed off the protruding bits. There are clay stains on blocks to this day, and the levels are tilted very slightly but measureably, away from the prevailing wind. Of course, the main thing about the pyramids was the stupidity of their very idea.

I don't like the idea of money in cash in your safe. Thugs just bash you or the wife till you open it for them. The safest thing is if nobody knows about it. If it is known, you need to keep some cash there just in case the thugs come. My daughter bought house in Brisbane many years ago, and a few years later they were changing the carpet and there was about 2 hundred dollars under the old carpet. I wonder if a previous owner had his nest egg and died without telling.

Being anti-science has a poor track record. For example, you finish up having your U-boats sunk and you could have got an atom-bomb on Berlin. I wish I could think of a way in which climate-change deniers could be made to put their money where their mouths are. Doomsday merchants can be tested for true belief though... you offer to buy their property cheap, with the settlement date AFTER the doomsday event. Apparently some have actually accepted this deal this in the past. I have had a bet out for some years now, in which I pay out for every day cooler than the long-term average and vice-versa, with a small correction to ensure that if there was zero change, the denier would win a bit. This generous offer has been met with a dead silence. When pressed for an answer, they say that "the climate always changes for reasons which have nothing to do with our activities", so they decline the bet... what a wimpish cop-out, says me.

I once asked a mate who still has a bit of a scottish accent why they didn't vote to leave the UK. His reply was that they were all on the dole, and that the english paid the dole. Well he is a bit blunt, but it made sense to me. But to be honest, I have actually seen on telly that they are not all on the dole. There are some who are in the army and they play bagpipes at the tattoo.

gareth, how about buying a little bit of bullion and burying it somewhere? The value will grow faster than inflation I reckon. Just don't die without telling a trusted younger family member. A neighbor had this calamity happen in his family and they dug up all of grannie's backyard to no avail.

We also have a stultifying and bloated bureaucracy here in Australia. The only thing they produce is poverty. Some other countries are even worse off, and a few are better. China went through this stage hundreds of years ago, and they were turned into a failed state. Now they are better than us by far... just ask Bex. I reckon that they constitute a serious obstacle to doing anything here.

Me too nomad, there are 3 bonfires I don't dare to light, for the same reasons.

Those 5 tonnes should have been turned into charcoal and you should have got about $200 a tonne. If the whole world stopped mining coal and paid landowners to grow timber for charcoal, we could suck a lot of carbon out of the air. Alas, there is no big money in this for the top end of town and so it won't happen.

We will never know for sure Old K, and there is no doubt that the Russians shook them. I reckon they realised that the Germans had been right and they should have attacked Russia instead of the US. But I think those atom bombs were the main reason for surrendering.

Careful Nev, you are getting a bit close to Buddhism. They would be to closest to an intelligent religion were it not for their reincarnation nonsense.

Yenn, have you talked to the local CFS guys? I have seen them present at burning-off events, probably not on total fire-ban days but certainly in the summer. My understanding is that you should be able to get a permit. I would like to know more about all this myself.

My understanding was that the 3 days from Hiroshima to Nagasaki was to give them a chance to surrender but they didn't. Personally, I reckon they should have demonstrated the power of the bomb before using it as they did, and this was the war crime. In hindsight, they probably would not have surrendered on the basis of a demonstration, but it would have influenced me to know that they ( the US ) had tried to do it humanely.

As Dawkins has pointed out, the very central idea of christianity is insane... God arranged for his son to be sacrificed so that he ( god ) could forgive third parties ( some of them not even born yet ) for their sins. Just imagine a guy who arranges for the death of one of his own kids so he can find it within himself to forgive the bikies in the next town. His lawyer would advise him to plead not guilty on account of insanity.

Oops it was Mitsubishis (?) not Chryslers, and the Leyland was already gone.

Gosh, in 1986 when Keating said that we should keep our sophisticated industries going to avoid becoming a banana republic, Australia made Chryslers, Fords, Holdens, and Toyotas. They have all gone now.

Temperature is quite a difficult thing to measure. For the air temperature, you need to exclude any radiant energy and this is difficult. The standard is the Stevenson screen over watered and mown grass, well away from obstructions. I can imagine that there were lots of bad readings in the old days. There is a true story about US rainfall records. Their most reliable observer suddenly started posting crazy figures... it turned out that this observer took his rain-gauge with him to Florida on a holiday. He didn't trust anybody else with his responsible job. The point of that story is how the education of the observer is very important, and this would have been poor in the olden days too.

Tiw lost his hand to a monster wolf. They were tying it up with magical ropes, and the wolf only agreed to let them do this ( he didn't know the ropes were magical ) if he had one of their ( the viking gods) hands in his mouth, as a surety against being double-crossed. Well that wolf sure was doublecrossed, and Tiw lost his hand. Woden had one eye, but this is another story. Thor dressed as a woman to be married to an ice-giant, yet another good story. They had fun, those old viking gods.

I agree Yenn. WW2 was basically a continuation of WW1. It was only the freak thing of Churchill being in power that caused the poms to be in it at all. The alternative, lord halifax, was not going to war with Germany. And I also thank the atom bomb for the peaceful time I have lived in. The atom bomb put the top leaders in the front line and stopped them starting wars, well at least until they found that backwards countries which had no atom bombs were safe to go to war with, at least for the top brass.