Bruce Tuncks

OME, I was surprised by your apparent skepticism about puritans and pain-killing drugs. My understanding has always been that puritans thought that any pleasure of the flesh was sinful. Why else was the entire anti-drug business done?

Personally, I think that puritanism is a seriously bad brain poison,( mind you some drugs are pretty awful too).  Australia in the 1950's was quite puritan and it still is but less so.

Anyway, it is not hard to find references about religious organizations opposing any relaxation of anti-drug laws. The Baptists are distantly related to the puritans and they are particularly opposed according to their publications.

While I do like your academic rigor, I find it just a bit like the insistence that the molested orphanage boys produce proof against the governor-general. Why was the onus on them when they had no resources and the governor-general had unlimited means?

I looked the matter up and some councils do allow people to look up the info. Ours does not. It charges a bit over $200 to tell you if your dog was found.

That dogtag we got only has a mobile number, not our address. A few weeks ago, the dog got confused and ran after some kids. He finished at a local school, and they read the tag and rang us up. The dog had a great time with lots of attention.

But that is good advice about a "for sale" sign. We might be selling our house soon to retire to the farm, and my current thought is to declare it "open agency" and not have any sign.

I reckon secrecy is one of the worst government evil things they inflict on us. 

Here's a trivial example... for christmas, my dog got an aluminium tag which has his name and our phone number, and we recently got him returned immediately because of this. 

Now the official rego tag only has a number and the info is only available to council officials. If questioned, they would come up with "privacy " nonsense which is clearly secondary to the satisfaction they get from hiding stuff away from those who pay their wages.

There are far worse examples.

Here's what I do....  An electric chain-saw to cut the branches ( up to 15 cm diameter) to lengths which will go onto the trailer...  up to 4 or 5 m long.

Then back to the electric table-saw ( $200 from Bunnings ) for cutting into bits for the fire. Yes, the manual for the table saw says not to use it for firewood.

Electric chain saws are just great!

The NZ Maoris were better at fighting. The treaty of Waitangi was signed by whites who were well aware that their military supremacy could be lost by the sinking of a couple of ships.

The fact that they later double-crossed the Maoris is now lost on the court hearings about Maori rights.

This is only a repeat... Brazilian orange grove workers do not earn enough to buy their kids any orange juice.

Not a finding of innocent of all the charges, just an opinion that there was insufficient proof. 

As if schoolboys could obtain legally watertight proof against such a senior cleric.

I have noticed a similar thing about Sir William Slim. How disgusting to ask of orphan boys that they obtain and present proof against the governor general.

Well in this case the boys, now grown men, knew enough to not even try. And so the official history calls the story "unproven allegations" and dismisses it all.

This is a much tougher test than the history one, which says that a person is a historically recognized person if there are at least 2 independent accounts .

When I was a kid, the Alice Spring School had in its foyer a portrait of QE2 ( Elizabeth ) and Sir William Slim. The latter  was the Governor-general and the Queen's rep in Australia.

I reckon Penny Wong is gorgeous, but I can never forgive her for forsaking Julia because this was her ( penny Wong's ) best interests.

I sure agree about Julia.. Best pm we ever had, but she was not given a fair go.

I am still waiting for an example story about how a careful person caught the virus. The stories I have found are about how people went to a party or a pub or were in an old-folks nursing home or stuck at work in close proximity to an infected person. I reckon I can avoid all of those things at the moment. Good thing, this being retired huh.

Interesting thing about sleep...  you are safest in a group where some are unable to sleep properly or at all. Those soldiers were all young and had worked hard I guess.

Why is richard contracted to dick? I understand richie, but not dick.

Once I was at an event where richard was suddenly unable to do the speech...  " No dick tonight" said the MC

Quite right Jerry. I would argue that " they didn't see the need" was more like " they never imagined the possibility". Gosh, they often starved and they suffered from exposure.

They used the tactics  of deliberately starting fires and poisoning water holes, which sure would get a whitefeller into trouble these days. They abandoned their old folk to die when they couldn't keep up with the tribe, and they treated their women so badly that they didn't try to escape when kidnapped by a white squatter, being better off than in the tribe.

There are some good things about their culture though,  the lack of land ownership being one of them.

But on the whole it was an awful life they led, and most of the awful things were the result of lack of technology.

These days they are well-off, and a typical family group gets thousands in their social security pay, bolstered as it is with special allowances and royalties. Many people, obviously 90% white, choose to be legally aboriginal if they can achieve it. For example, the first "aborigine" to graduate medicine here was a blonde woman.

I well know a guy who is claiming aboriginality ( which I never noticed in 40 years ) to get some royalty money, about $5000 a year.

Yep, I would like to be a legal aborigine too.

I personally am not worried about Chinese influence. Gosh we have gone from war to war in order to be the best friend of the US. And we are a sovereign country and we could  tax overseas owners as much as we wanted.  I bet  this would upset the US more than the Chinese.

If I had my way, we would be making nukes using our own uranium and get  Jabiru designed drones ( with inertial nav systems )  by the thousand and not be at the mercy of anybody.

I'm not anti-US , I have good mates there and I like the place to visit.

I agree about the establishment protecting its heroes. Sir William Slim turned out to be a paedophile, but to this day his memory is protected.

There was little need for white men to kill aborigines. All you needed to do was to give a  nearby tribe some guns and they would kill all the other tribe they could.

It was no different in the USA except that the redskins were more formidable. Apparently the first whites into the Mississippi valley only met a remnant of the thousands of tribespeople that were normally there. Smallpox had decimated the redskins before they faced the whites.

Well our Aborigines were very bad at defending their world. So bad that they declared it  terra  nullius"

The second were the germans... did you ever see a movie where they crept up on a sentry and quietly killed him? In reality, those sentries all had dogs.

Good onyer onetrack. That is the best defence of Australias military leadership I have ever heard.

BUT... My uncle Jack was on a patrol out of Milne Bay in WW2. He was nearly killed by a tree-borne sniper. And the dog that should have gone ahead to sniff out the sniper? He was not there. That's why I reckon our WW2 generals were worse than stupid.

Did you ever see the movie " saving private Ryan?" well in reality half of those groups had dogs and the dog-lots had half the casualties. But it was only the Us army that used dogs fully at that time.

Yes OME, the most common cause of a dog failing the seeing eye test is if they can ignore other dogs or not.

In the war, US dogs were recruited by the army and many failed because of their fear of loud noises.

I do know that many fail as sheepdogs because they don't circle far enough around the flock to keep it together.

I wonder about police dogs... they may want some aggression in them. Once in ww2, Eisenhower gave an army  dog a medal ( the dog had attacked a german machine gun emplacement) and the dog bit him.

I reckon the lack of smart usage of dogs is good evidence that Australia had very poor military leadership.

Sorry Ian, but my opinion is worthless cos I didn't even notice a difference. As a matter of principle though I would vote for whatever is cheapest.

My son doesn't drink either. I take credit because in his late teens i paid him $1000 a year to not start. He says that it was not the money but the bad example I gave him by drinking myself. His sister says I ruined his social life.

Once we were stopped in Alice Springs for a random breath test, my son was driving and blew zero. I asked if i could blow and he let me and to my surprise he said it went over.

But he couldn't say by how much because the beat cops only had a "yes/no" reading .

Part of my problem is that I don't even know any person who has the virus. It is all very theoretical to me.

A big risk I got from reading the stuff was that low-paid will not take time off if they feel sick. This is a policy thing which they were slow to do in Australia, but I think that now you can get welfare quickly enough to live on if you do this and the employer is not allowed to victimize you.

But the main thing I get is that in some occupations, it is harder to avoid catching the virus than in others. What about retirees? surely we should be able to avoid catching it if we know the traps...  Like stay away from meatworkers and ICU workers. I'll add these to the one about not drinking with strangers in a pub.

Getting back to aborigines, I have to say that I disagree with the "first nation" description.

They were not a nation in the slightest sense of the world. They were a bunch of warring tribes who hated each other even more than they hated whites.

The reason they didn't get inbred was that if 2 groups inadvertently met, the women from the weaker group would be herded over to the other group. If they were just raped, there was no need for a fight.

Most lost whites were killed out of hand. Those who survived did so because somebody in the tribe thought they may be a reincarnated dead relative. Sure, they were now white, but dying and being ressurrected  would surely be a traumatic experience which may well have physical side effects.