old man emu

I’ve been watching some videos on Australian political history. When dealing with topics related to State politics, it seems that NSW, QLD and VIC have a culture of political corruption. Don’t know about SA or WA. The list of names of the shonky polies is very long. Probably the worst thing is that the creation of corruption finding organisations does not seem to have been successful in rooting out the crooks.

Now it seems that the AUKUS bizzo could come crushing down as the US takes on a “US First” attitude. Perhaps we should remind the US about Pine Gap and Tindal.

Trump refused the frantic request from Congress to deploy them.

People have commented on the way that Trump walks. He throws his left leg in a sort of circular motion. Now the reason might have been exposed. It is possible that he has a Foley bag attached to his left leg. A Foley bag is a device to hold urine if one has a urinary catheter inserted. As the bag fills, it adds weight to the leg, requiring more effort to throw the leg forward with each step. It is an old technique with horses to fix their gait by fitting a weighted shoe to the leg which is producing the wrong gait. Why would Trump need a Foley Bag? At the kindest, maybe it is a way for him to attend public functions without having to pop off to the loo as men of his age often have the need to do. The unkind would suggest that he has some medical condition. Here's my source.

I got angry when I found out that the US had launched bombers for raids against the Houthis from Tindal in the Northern Territory. That puts Australia into the fight with that mob.

Actually it is not going to be Trump who makes the decision to give us the submarines or not. It will be the person who is President at the time. A condition of the deal is that the Yanks will supply the subs if, and only if, the Yaks have met their requirements for subs. If they haven't, we miss out. At the moment they are about 20 down on numbers, and with a build rate of about one per year, and if they don't lose any, then we are not likely to be getting any for more than twenty years. Turnbull was PM when we started talking to the French, but it was Morrison who pulled the rug out from under that deal with France. In 2016, Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull signed a A$50 billion (€31 billion) deal with the majority French government-owned company Naval Group (known as DCNS until 2017) to design a new generation of submarines, known as the Attack class, under the "Future Submarine Program", scheduled to replace the Collins class. The idea was to have the same design of the boats as the nuclear powered ones, but ours would be conventionally powered. I don't know if any money changed hands before we made our $3 billion down payment to the Yanks.

As former Prime Ministers go, Malcolm Turnbull seems to be the least controversial, or at least his comments appear to be level-headed. In this video he is calling attention to the fact that we have paid the Yanks $3 billion to support their submarine construction industry based on the promise that they will supply us with a couple of subs sometime after 2030. However, in this video he tells us that the supply is contingent on the Yanks having some spare subs after they have met their requirements. However, while they need to build two subs per year to meet their requirements, they are only building one and a bit. Also the deal says that the supply is dependent on Presidential approval of supply at the time of supply, as long as the requirements of the Yanks have been met. He says that while AUKUS is Australia's Plan A, we don't have a Plan B, which means that if we decommission our Collins Class subs and the subs don't arrive from the Yanks, we will be without subs for over a decade. Also, there is no going back the the French, cap in hand, to ask them to make some for us.

A little diversions. I was at Bunnings the other day and saw a Ryobi ride-on battery powered lawn mower. It was a big one that would suit commercial use. The price tag was big, too ... $9990.

This morning there was a brisk W-SW wind blowing, but the sky was clear and the Sun shining down. I happened to look out my window and saw a pair of wedge-tailed eagles soaring on the wind. I don't know if they were actively hunting, or just moving to another of their haunts, but it was a pleasure to see them wheeling about. I was impressed by their wing dihedral.

What if you don't have a laptop, or a camera on your desktop?

Nowadays, the flooding of the Channel country is due to the sudden influx of excess water from far North Queensland. An aim of a plan like Bradfield's would be to maintain a constant, low level inflow in those rivers which would account for evaporation losses as well as the need to keep the flow going. Why does irrigation lead to salinity? It did in the past, but we must have learned something about preventing it. Clearly irrigating by flooding would readily cause salinisation, but what about drip irrigation. Of course drip irrigation is great for orchards, but now we find that we can't sell the fruit grown that way. Don't forget that the plan was to harvest only some of the water from the upper reaches of the coastal rivers and let the rest flow to the sea as usual. Not all the monsoon rain would be diverted.

Diverting the Northern NSW rivers sounds like a good idea, BUT the idea of the Bradfield Scheme is to get the water into the centre of the country. The Murray/Darling system does not contribute water to that area. There are some wrong ideas about where the water would be harvested. The wrong places are in the lower reaches of the rivers. Bradfield envisaged collecting water closer to the headwaters of those rivers in "high" country. In other words, only taking a portion of the excess. His other idea was not to bore through the GDR, but to construct channels along the contours of the land and have the water move itself by gravitational flow, just like the Romans did with aqueducts. There would need to be places where pumping was required, but the electric power for that task could be generated by the water exiting the system at the end of the pipelines it was pumped through. The idea is definitely possible from an engineering point of view. It would seem to be impossible from the financial point of view. The question is, "Is such a financial investment that is big in today's terms worth it for the benefit of future generations?"

A couple of points to answer here. Yes, salination is a problem that needs addressing. But now that we are aware of it - usually due to overwatering - practices could be developed to minimise it. Evaporation: I think that the concept is that instead of irregular flooding, water would be added at the start of the system each year just to maintain a regular flow. The amount added could take into account expected losses through evaporation. Spread of water: The water now spreads out due to the overwhelming amount in flood years. If the input flows were controlled, then the rivers carrying the water could be kept at near constant levels without spreading out. Speed of flow: I believe that the current flood waters are moving at a speed of about 4 kph, which is sufficient to keep the water moving downstream. If the system was kept topped up, that flow rate could be maintained. One thing that hasn't been mentioned here yet is what effect the constant presence of water would have on the ecosystem. We know that after the floods animal populations explode in numbers. Would permanent water result in ever larger populations? There is also the question of what effect would the evaporation of that permanent supply of water do the rainfall patterns. It is considered that the interior dried out within the past 60,000 years due to lack of rain which meant that the rivers no longer held water to be evaporated. If water was put back, would it rain more?

In 1938, Dr. John Bradfield, of Sydney Harbour and Brisbane's Story bridges, proposed water diversion scheme that was designed to irrigate and drought-proof much of the western Queensland interior, as well as large areas of South Australia. It involved diverting water from the upper reaches of the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers in Far North Queensland which are fed by the monsoon, and flow east to the Coral Sea. It was proposed that the water would enter the Thomson River on the western side of the Great Dividing Range and eventually flow south west to Lake Eyre. In 1944, author Ion Idriess wrote The Great Boomerang. In it, he added to Bradfield's idea by pointing out that Nature had already created the drainage system that would carry water from the western side of the Great Dividing Range through to Lake Eyre in South Australia. That this system works is currently being amply displayed as water from recent cyclones has reached Lake Eyre after flooding vast areas of the Channel Country. Bradfield, Idriess and others of that era were not to know of the coming climate change which, this year (2025) /appears to be responsible for the massive rainfall that is now filling Lake Eyre. Also, they were not to know of the advances in mechanisation that now allow us to carry out massive civil engineering projects. In those years, the idea for Snowy Mountains Scheme was probably not much more than embryonic. The reasons for the failure of Bradfield's to get the green light in his time was most likely political, or more correctly the ability of the Queensland Government to allocate the, even then, substantial money needed to complete the engineering works. However over the years, the Bradfield Scheme has been recycled every few years in the form of feasibility schemes, revisions and hybrids, only to be dismissed or rejected once more. Often the rejections have been based on inaccurate or insufficient data. It appears that while the idea to move water to where it could be useful to agriculture, various industries, population dispersion and maybe even climate improvement is most often stymied by the money needed to carry out the diversions. However, as with most things which call for taxpayer money, costs are considered in the here and now. It is extremely rare that approval is given to spend now for the benefit of future generations. It has been said that an old man will never sit in the shade of the tree he planted in his youth. Perhaps it might be good this time to think of our grandchildren picnicking in the shade of a tree we planted.

Can you see this woman being able to take legal action? The only winners, once again, would be the legal eagles.

My understanding is that several years ago, before AI took off, she did a job for a Swedish company in which her voice was recorded reading books or some such. In recent times, that company sold the recordings to an AI mob who used it to fulfil the Scottish Rail job. So her voice comes from something that was done before the current application of AI was even thought about. Who knows what future technology will do when entering a contract today?

Here's a definite abuse of AI. But I hope that Sky news can be trusted with this one. I suppose you would have to be in the UK to recognise the woman's voice.

Trump has directed his Secretary of the Treasury to order the cessation of the production of one cent coins. For once, that is a financially sound decision as it costs the US Mint 3.6 cents to make a one cent coin. If they don't mint them they will save something in the order of $80 million per year. It is said that there are about 250 million one cent coins sitting in jars and piggy banks. The problem that the Yanks will face is that now the price at the cash register will have to be rounded to the nearest five cents, as we have been doing for ages. The need for one cent coins is a result of the weird way they apply sales taxes. There are local government sales taxes, State sales taxes and Federal sales taxes. Of course your average Yank won't understand that overall they will lose nothing (swings and roundabouts), but I bet you can already hear the cries of loss of liberty and erosion of Rights.

Then there's Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter in the Cotswolds.

The ABC is going to rebroadcast that series "Walking with Dinosaurs", starting on 3rd June. The advertising blurb talks about the monstrous beasts that ruled the planet. But what about the little dinosaurs? We all know about the leviathan dinosaurs, but surely there must have been heaps more little ones running around under the feet of the big ones. Just think of the plains of Africa and North America in present times. There are hundreds of big animals, but do we ever hear of the little ones? The have to be there. And back in the Age of Dinosaurs, there had to be little ones. I bet that mammals didn't evolve from 50 tonne behemoths. Those big animals were at the end of their evolutionary development. Let's give our support to Compsognathus, a "chicken-sized" dinosaur. Compsognathus longipes is one of the few dinosaur species whose diet is known with certainty: the remains of small, agile lizards are preserved in the bellies of both specimens so far discovered.

Well, they did ban two stroke lawn mowers.

The problem for all our governments at the three levels is that things cost a lot of money and there is not a large enough population to create an economy that will generate the income needed. Left, Right or Centre, the story is the same for any government. The other problem is that out culture has become one that expects the government to provide all. I guess we haven't got over the concept of drawing from the Government Stores that began with the first meal after the First Fleeters stepped ashore.

At the risk of being labelled with something I'm not, I have to ask, "Is there a link between the use of machetes and the country of origin of the users?" Not many years ago, machetes were virtually unknown as weapons in urban areas. I hope that if a law is created regarding the possession of machetes, then it includes the words "without reasonable excuse". Those words permit the possession of these things if they are to be used for, say, making a path through long grass or scrubby bushes. It would definitely prohibit their possession in urban areas.

Apparently, if the difference in numbers of votes, after distribution of preferences, is less than 100, a recount is automatically begun by the AEC. That's happening in another electorate.

I'm still amazed how bright it is away from city lights. It's only around the time of the New Moon when it really gets dark. If there is any part of the Moon showing, you don't need a light.