old man emu

So much for waiting "two weeks" to either talk or fight. Will Saturday, June 22nd, 2025 live on in History as a Day of Infamy? Are the events of today Iran's Pearl Harbour? I think it's time for Australia to tell the USA: "P!ss off. Get your military off our soil. You can't be trusted to maintain global security. Call yourself the World's Policeman? You are the World's Terrorist." To give you an idea of what was involved in those raids, watch this video from time stamp 1:52 to see how the bombs work and what the results are likley to be. Take notice of the information of how multiple bombs are used to "drill" down into a structure. Trump said that the bombers dropped "full loads" of bombs, which suggests the drilling procedure was employed.

Sometimes circumstances beyond our control dictate oor outcomes. The computer that I had which was running WIN 10 got the Royal Order of the Rigid Digit. So I had to but a new one. Luckily I the computer shop offered me a reconditioned one for $495. It has 8 GB of Ram, a 256 GB SSD drive and 1 TB of SATA storage and WIN 11 installed. I don't know what all that means, but I'm told that it will be sufficient unto my needs. I had to buy a personal copy of MS-Windows. I also bought and external hard drive caddy into which the shop fitted the hard drive from my very original computer. The shop was able to retrieve recent data from the hard drive in the computer that failed. I've got everything connected, but I have to work out how to move folders onto my desktop from where they are held. But that's a job for later. I've also got to activate the spellchecker to overcome the current plague of keyboard mis-strikes that seems to be affected some of us. Apart from a bit of a different look about it, I haven't had a problem with WIN 11. But then, I haven't explored it much either.

Apart from a very few who are in goal for white collar crime, or for a one-off offence, the majority of persons in goal suffer from lack of education. A lot are more illiterate than your average First Grade primary school kid. That illiteracy means they can’t get permanent employment, so exist on “the dole”. That sort of existence has been happening for several generations now and has become a sub-culture. Lack of education and its accompanying poverty lead to criminal activity. Attempts at rehabilitation whilst in goal fail because education is not provided until the end of sentence is approaching, by which time the person has become enmeshed in another sub-culture, that of the prison yard.

Have you ever got a traffic ticket, or a parking ticket? I bet that if you had, you’d bitch about the heavy penalty.

I’d say that an EV mower’s battery and motor would probably be lighter, or equals in weight to an ICE with battery and fuel. There is a only one thing I have against an EV mower, and all battery-powered devices in general, is that once the stored energy has been used, it takes more time to replenish the energy than simply pouring a liquid into a tank. It’s OK if the job has been done and the battery can be being charged when it is not required to complete a job, but running out of power in the middle of a job is like getting a Three-Cornered Jack in your underdaks.

You can’t cry over spilt milk. And you can’t compare the political culture of 75 years ago with that of today. Who’s fault was it that the Right was in power for 20 years? Labor was cutting its own throat during that time (Laborites think that unfortunate). It was the era of the Cold War and the Conservatives played the “Reds under the Bed” card for all its worth. The voters, weary from the Depression years and WWII, were trying to concentrate on their own battler lives, and had little time to think of politics. They know that affecting how the country was run was pretty much out of their ability. Come the late 60s and the ideas of the Common People began to change and have continued to do so. It’s called Social Evolution. Just like everything since the beginning of the 20th Century, the pace of change has so much faster than ever in Mankind’s past.

Of course Whitlam could not change anything before the 1972 election - the Labor Party was in Opposition, as it had been for twenty-odd years. You make it sound like every conscript was given a firearm and sent off to Vietnam. That is not correct. Also, you are looking at a 20th Century culture through 21st Century eyes. The culture has undergone changes since the 1970s, and even more so since 2020.

I didn’t realise that my off-handed comment would cause so much interest. It’s more than I get for some of my serious posts. 😀 I have a tad under 1/4 acre to mow, which I can do in just under two hours. I use a petrol mower. Pushing it around gives me a bit of exercise. I’ve only mowed a couple of times since last Spring because the hot weather stopped the growth (I can’t afford the electricity to pump the water to irrigate my ground.) Regarding the quality of ride-ons, it is said that in the cheaper ones, the drive gears are not metal, but polymers of some kind, which means that can fail before the mower itself is worn out.

The art of the deal?? Knowing how to deal from the bottom of the pack.

We are accustomed to the issuing of a declaration of war being issued when a country starts using military might against another country. I believe that under International Law such a declaration invokes certain rules of engagement, mainly to protect non-combatants. At present we have the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran using military weapons against each other, and very often without consideration for the safety of non-combatants. I have not heard that a declaration of war has been issued by either Nation. So are they engaged in a war, or are they ignoring International Law. I suppose that if they are not signatories to those laws, they both can do what they like, but their actions put them outside the pale of acceptable, civilised behaviour. What gets me is that the government of the State of Israel claims that it is acting in self defence, however I see no invading army crossing its borders. In the 21st Century, does the word “invasion” now mean an aerial crossing of a border by destructive devices?

Remember Trump’s meeting with the leader of South Africa when Trump claimed that White farmers were being murdered and their land taken? Not the smart thing to do when the leader of the country is sitting beside you. Trump could destroy the US aerospace and car industries by getting the leader of South Africa offside. It all arises from the availability of the metal Vanadium. Vanadium is used to make an alloy of steel which has extensive uses in those two industries, as well as many others which require high grade steel. There are four main producers of the ore that Vanadium is extracted from - China, Russia, South Africa and Brazil, in that order of most to lesser amounts. You can see the difficulties with the two biggest producers, so the USA would be relying on No.3. Not a wise move to piss off your relatively secure supplier.

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.