Bruce

Yep, you guys are agreeing with my point. The thing about males being war-prone was an example of the ridiculous idea that you could generalize about a whole gender. Margaret Thatcher was as different from Julia as you could imagine. Here's a confession... At the time of the Falklands war, I was rooting for the Brits, and belligerant as hell. Gosh, I was wrong and silly too.

You could do a similar thing against men... their propensity to spend money on weapons ( penis extensions ) showing how they are totally unfit to be in charge.

What nonsense to lump all women together like that. The reality is that they are as different as men. I reckon Julia was the best pm we have had, although the treatment of Assange was a negative. Anyway, Julia was as different as could be from the fat lady you see buying cigarettes at the shop.

I like this "restorers" work around here. He puts in new motors and transmissions and air-conditioning and you get a great hot-rod. Only the body looks like a 1940's thing, but it has been stripped right back and painted better than when new.

In some subjects, knowledge of the old stuff is necessary and it doesn't go out of date. Mathematics, for example. You need to know a bunch of old stuff before you can understand the new things. Who among us can go from Maxwell's equations to Einsteins E=mc2? I tried but I'm not smart enough . Maxwell's equations are partial differential equations, and they led directly to radio and atomic stuff. They are also about 100 years old. In another modern field, I reckon you need to at least appreciate the Navier-Stokes equations before you can make a real contribution to aerodynamics. Those equations form the basis of modern computer modelling of airflow around objects like planes. I'm surprised that in music, you need recently written material. What about Mozart, I wonder. ( My favs are Mozart and the Everly Brothers ) . Yes, I admit to liking classical pop stuff from Elvis to Abba. I reckon my generation took so much of the good tunes off the market that it is real hard these days to come up with anything both new and good.

I've just been watching the state school's concert... wonderful stuff. No rough kids only there to sabotage it. We could do that everywhere if you had to pass an audition to be let in. That's the deal you have had Octave, but not all teachers have. I reckon they should.

When things started to go bad, it was because the good teachers had all of their authority taken from them. I partly blame their union for this. I know a great teacher who nearly broke down over the fact that the rough kids were now running the classes, and there was nothing he could do about it. He was also responsible for a junior teacher who couldn't spell, so he had to correct all this junior's report cards before they went out. Now I am not saying they should have the power to hit the kids, but they should have the power to exclude them from the class. Appealing to an idiot headmaster is worse than useless, as he can just instruct the teacher to make his lessons so enthralling that the rough kids sit there enthralled.

Growing up in Alice Springs in the 1950's, and going to school there, I never heard about: (1) the Coniston massacre ( 1928, near Alice Springs, the last official punitive expedition against aborigines. 50 were killed, kids and all ) (2) the Boer war... we saw their names on dead soldier's lists, but never heard about the war aims and origins. Yep, the story was so shameful these things were never mentioned. (3) the Darwin air-raids. I was quite old before I found there was more than one raid. And I was never told that Australia declared war on Japan, not the other way around. These days, I reckon that most crime is done by governments, except that they pass legislation to make their crimes "legal". So whats a few lies? Other things I have learned recently... the terrible unnecessary waste of the Kokoda "campaign " , the stupidity of our high command over Singapore, and the loss of life caused by their stupidity and sloth and ignorance of dogs as soldiers helpers. On the wall in the school foyer, there was a portrait of sir william slim, our governor general. We now know him to be a pedophile of the worst sort. That sums up how governments work, they are still in denial about slim.

I'm at a loss in giving advice to my high-school grandkids about what careers are going to be good. A generation ago, I was right to support my son in his decision to go with an apprenticeship instead of university. He has done much better than mates who did engineering. The only union-conditions ordinary job these days is the police. In my time I should have done medicine, but there are downsides to both those jobs. You can ( but don't have to ) grow fearful and suspicious from mixing with bad and sick people. And medicine could well be impacted by artificial intelligence. There will soon be diagnostic competitions between trained technicians running AI and traditional doctors. Besides, I don't think they (the grandkids ) will study hard enough to get into medicine. My present best guess is agricultural science. People will still want to eat and I reckon resource depletion, climate change and over-population are soon going to end this era of food so cheap its almost free. Then they can learn to shear and come and run the farm. Robotics is another possibility. I don't think the present construction employment can continue. Please help, what do you guys reckon is going to boom?

My classroom was unlined asbestos cement and the only heater was a bar-radiator under the teacher's table. But we got a great education. The rough kids had to listen quietly or get the stick. They learned to read and write against their wishes. I reckon we got a better education than the grandkids, who miss out on whole days because the rules these days put retarded kids first.

The problem could be solved by allowing teachers to ban certain naughty kids from their classrooms. One day I asked a grandkid what he did that day in school. " nothing Grandpa", was his reply "Seb was being naughty" Now Seb is a mentally-sick kid and he is allowed to get away with murder. I reckon he should not be there mucking up the class for the rest of the kids. At a high-school I know well, there was this teacher who used to mumble his lesson to a rioting classroom, with his eye on the clock so he could run away as soon as he was able. I blame the pretend bleeding hearts for this debacle. Actually, I don't think they really believe their own stuff, I think they are intent on sabotaging the state school system.

I would have some sympathy for your opinion pmc, if I had not visited the glaciers of New Zealand's south island. Well isolated from any interference, ( except the planet's temperature ) they are all shrinking terribly. You have to go miles further than you did a few decades ago if you want to see some ice. There are lots of similar examples available, but not ones where I have personally been there. The notion of a conspiracy among left-thinking scientists is harder for me to accept, but we see something like that in Australia with insane environmental regulations which expose us to worse bushfires than necessary. Take the guy in Qld who was prosecuted and fined for making his firebreaks too wide. Why were there not scientists defending him? I could list other examples of government insanity, they are easy to find in history and in current affairs. So the idea of a conspiracy is possible, it would just be another insane thing.

I liked their music too ( Buddy Holly etc ) . But getting back to religion, the 3 abrahamic religions ( Judaism, Christianity and Islam ) have a great deal in common. I reckon that if Judaism is an FJ holden then Islam is like the Commodore and Christianity is maybe the Kingswood. Their common god is one of the nastiest characters in all fiction.

Yep, at 1/6 gravity, strap-on wings might work! ( no jokes about other strap-ons please ). There were at least 2 human colonies on earth which died out... the Greenland Vikings and the Port Victoria Australians. I reckon the dust on Mars would be dreadful. The moon is dusty too, but with no wind, it wouldn't get everywhere. I'm an expert on surviving Mars on account of having seen the movie.

When I was wiring remote aboriginal outstations for computers in their classrooms, I looked very carefully at providing solar and wind plus storage batteries to replace the diesel stations with their fly-in attendants. Bugger the figures just didn't add up to make this viable, but that was 17 years ago and things will have changed. One thing which has changed is that aborigines are being moved into Alice Springs because the cost of providing services like electricity to outstations is too high.

Well it happened with Australia and we are still here. Just dumped here. I reckon the moon is the best colony start. There is lots of energy there, a solar collector near a pole on a hilltop will work all day. Plants will grow well in moon soil. I'd go if I could. We would sell metals refined in a true vacuum to start. Bugger, I would have to leave the planes behind.

There are magistrates to match the crook police. My son challenged a speeding fine. The police person concerned was a punk-looking young woman who had no idea on how to work the radar gun. She used it on the slant and through some foliage and got the reading quite wrong. When being questioned by my son, she started displaying her ignorance, so the magistrate called a recess during which time the police person was coached. The magistrate was amazed that anybody would have the gall to question the police.

wow...what a good argument for automatic cars. Personally, I have often had my left hand up her dress in the innocent belief that you didn't need both hands on the steering. Changing gears would be a bugger huh.

In the shower this morning, I thought of a new test for religious belief, at least for creationist types... When they get sick, do they go to a priest or to a doctor? I think that somebody who chooses to use prayer instead of medicine is probably a true believer. In the middle-ages, prayer was the only treatment for disease and there are plenty of faith healers still around. You read of miraculous cures in some evangelical type churches. Typically, the person hobbles in and dances out. Only cynics doubt the cure and wonder if its staged or if the person being cured is semi-hypnotized and not really cured. Personally, I don't know anybody who passes this test of belief.

I was on the committee of our club when this police check stuff came in for instructors and passenger pilots. We made sure that the volunteers themselves didn't have to pay. I wish we had OME there to tell us if we ( the club ) really needed to pay or not.

There you go gareth. They are out of line and I reckon you should complain politically, which means from your local member up through to the prime minister.

So you were going to be a volunteer but the card was not going to be free? So you were going to have to pay to be a volunteer? I can't see how they get any volunteers at all.

I sort of knew that the greens sabotaged any action, but I didn't know just how bad they were. How could the greens say they wanted an impossible deal or nothing? Why didn't they get what was possible at the time and then keep arguing for more? Don't they understand the concept of "least worst" ? I blame the greens more than the liberals. At least the liberals are predictable.

Idi Amin, Pol Pot too and NO TRUMP! But the book was 20 years old.

Nev, it is NOT kosher to say you have been trumped these days. Guess who has put the term into disrepute. But the "3 thing " would be hard to explain to a moslem you are trying to convert huh. What would you say when he asked just what you meant? I had a book of the world's most wicked men, and Constantine had a whole chapter. So maybe he was trying to cause trouble? ( Stalin and Hitler and Constantine and a few others were in the book )