The Ruling Elite think that all voters should be treated like mushrooms. "Keep'em in the dark and feed'em bullshit."
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i. There is no privacy on the internet. Every visit you make to a site is stored on a server somewhere just waiting for someone else to access it and follow your trail. What about the Anonymous Doorways you ask? For those who dont know, there are sites on the web, you can access, that will let you browse the internet through them. Your personal trail will stop at their door and from then on you will only leave an Anonymous trail. Sounds good doesn't it?
Does anyone one remember the book "1984" by George Orwell? It portrays a world where the government is all-powerful, has a hand in each of your pockets and an eye looking over your shoulder at all times; A Big Brother. Now people who grew up with a helpful big brother will have no problem with this but if you had a nasty big brother or no brothers at all you will probably not like this invasion of your privacy. The hero of the book is one of the latter. He eventually finds people of like minds in a society whose sole aim is to remove this intrusion; an anti Big Brother society. One thing leads to another and while our hero is attending a meeting, the Thought Police swoop and arrest everyone. They are taken to the Ministry of Love where they are tortured and/or brainwashed depending on their worth. They are eventually released but only after they showed that they love Big Brother. ( Interrorgators question:- How many fingers do you see me holding up? Brainwashees answer:- How many do you want me to see? ) The book was read by a lot of people so a movie was made to reach an even bigger audience. However an important part of the book was left out of the movie or at least the copy I saw in Australia. You may have wondered how the Thought Police knew when and where the meeting was being held. Simple. The anti Big Brother society was being run by Big Brother. What better way to catch the dissidents. This wasn't in the copy of the movie I saw. I wonder why?
Back to the Anonymous Doorways. Wouldn't they be a great front for Big Brother or his offshoot? How can you prove that the "3 Days of the Condor" firm or the "Goodwill Hun Ting" firm or similar organisations are not running the Anonymous Doorway websites? Even if all the Anonymous Doorways are all above board and they probably are, it puts a question mark over them, doesn't it. You will have to weigh up the pros and cons of using such a site.
ii. While on the web, have you noticed the proliferation of parasitic websites. These are the ones that have no actual info, just a collection of links to other sites, which mostly dont have any info either. There's nothing more annoying, when searching the web for info, than to click on to a site that has just links to other sites, which have links to other sites, which have links to other sites, and none of them have the info your looking for. Unfortunately, Google, and all the other search engines, insist on listing them with the few, very few, sites that actually have the info. This makes it very frustrating to find info on the web. The search engine companies should have a rating system which differentiates the real info-carrying sites from these parasitic link sites. If you agree, send an email to your favourite search engine and complain.
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- There are cameras on the footpaths.
- There are cameras on the city roads.
- There are cameras on the country roads.
- There are cameras on the train stations.
- There are cameras in the petrol stations.
- There are cameras in the plane stations, sorry, airports.
- There are cameras in the planes.
- There are cameras in the trains.
- There are cameras in the, what! no automobiles yet; wont be long.
- There are cameras in the buses.
- There are cameras in the taxis.
- There are cameras in the banks.
- There are cameras in the shopping centres.
- There are cameras in the shops in the shopping centres.
- There are cameras in the lifts in shops in the shopping centres.
- There are cameras in the workplace.
- There are cameras in the toilets, sorry, rest rooms.
- Do you feel left out? Dont worry, they are coming to a place near you quite soon.
Wow! And not a trombone in sight. And you thought those holes in the back of your neck were only in your imagination. I read somewhere that the tiny cameras used for surveilance were originally designed to go in the nose of a guided smart bomb as seen on TV in the Gulf war. Invented for one nasty purpose and then used for a second one. Such efficiency.
Like me, does anyone else think that all this surveillance is a bit over the top? Wasn't it a lot more pleasant and cheaper when we trusted each other?
A thought has just crossed my mind. You've probably heard of the kids that become uncontrollable when they eat certain foods. It's been tracked down to some of the artifical addititives in processed food. Is it possible that experiments have been carried out to find chemicals which, when added to our food, will make every body more angry thus allowing the Ruling Elite to suggest we subject ourselves to ever more restrictive rules and surveilance? In other words the Ruling Elite are putting these chemicals in our food solely for the purpose of creating a police state? Unfortunately some children are more suseptible to them than the general public. North American Indian warpaint contained chemicals which increased the braves' anger to prepare them for battle. If their Elders can do it to them, why cant ours do it to us?
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The above statement was about State Politics but the Federal Political scene is just as bad. On the front page of the SMH 10-8-2005 our Pry Minister was quoted as saying to an MP in the Coalition, "Whatever affiliations you have, your first loyalty is to this Party room." And we thought an MP's first loyalty was to the people who voted him in. Silly weren't we! Are we still that silly?
How many times have you heard a government politician (both flavors) complain about the Opposition, in that they seem to oppose everything just to nark the Government on purpose? Well funnily enough that is the exact function of the Opposition, to oppose everything, even the apparent good things. Because most of the time the people in government quite often wrap a nasty thing inside a good thing to disguise it and try to hoodwink the voters (mind you that's not hard to do). It's the function of the people in opposition to peel away the layers of sugar-coating and expose the unpleasant core. Be very wary when the word "bi-partisan" is bandied about. It is just a way of removing any opposition to an idea and is not a healthy sign.
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Since I wrote the above, the Federal Government is solving this problem by trying to remove the Senate totally, or at least remove it's power to place a double check on any of the Bills the Govt. wants to pass with as little penetrating oversight as possible. And so Australia's democracy sinks that little bit more towards a society in which the people have no say at all in the running of the country, and of course that's no democracy at all.
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This has all been done very cleverly. For instance Self Funded Retirees, who are already saving the government the cost of the age pension, pay tax as well so the govt is winning twice. Now the govt has taken away the savings rebate, worth around $900 a year to a married couple and given them a tax cut of around $900 a year. A fair swap you might think but the tax cut was supposed to cancel out the GST not the removal of the savings rebate. So all self funded retirees have been shafted. All the GST they pay will come out of their pockets with no compensation at all. It's as if the Govt. is making sure self funded retirees wont have much left to leave their children in their wills.
A single Provisional tax payment per year has been expanded with 4 payments per year at best and 12 payments per year at worst for well-off self funded retirees. Before you could be late only once and get punished and fined once, now you can be punished and fined 4 or more times a year. Most self funded retirees are elderly and now there is more chance they will forget a payment and have a bit more of their funds removed against their will. It's as if the Govt., in the guise of the Sheriff of Nottingham, is preying on our elderly and robbing them a bit more.
The changes to the Capital Gains Tax are even more devious and the results even worse. The Govt. has control of inflation. (It's not 30% so they must have.) Inflation means the value of a house increases even if you make no improvments at all. The Govt. messenger (the Valuer General) tells you how much the Govt. says your house is worth. When you sell the house the Govt. makes you pay tax on half the artificial increase that the Govt. told you the house increased. And the tax you pay is based on a yearly salary which itself is based on your normal salary plus half the artifical increase in the value of your house. That artificial increase may have taken 20yrs to build up but you are taxed as though it all happened in one year. It's as if the Govt. is trying to make sure there wont be any new capitalists.
Another change to the capital gains tax is the much trumpeted 'you only pay tax on half of your capital gains'. This does not apply to people invested in managed funds. You, the managedfund investor, pay tax on half the capital gains part of your distribution now and then you pay tax on the other half when you sell your units or leave them to your children in your will. Only people (mostly the very rich) who own shares directly pay half capital gains tax. I checked this with Australia's biggest fund-manager. People who invest in managed funds, and that's what most old people do, get taxed on all their capital gains. The fund-managers dont seem to be doing much about it either. It's as if the Govt. is making sure old managed fund investors wont have much left to leave their children in their wills.
A short while ago people were allowed to pay for their funerals by joining a funeral fund, pay a few dollars a week until they died, thus their dependants would have to pay very little for their funeral. One of the 'we represent the people' parties, when we made the mistake of putting them in government, decided this was no good and outlawed it. Now when their parents die, the children have to find the total lumpsum to pay for the funeral, and of course that will come out of the estate. It's as if the Govt. is making sure old people wont have much left to leave their children in their wills.
Small business is now much more complicated with the Govt. forcing them to be tax collectors using a very onerous tax system and any business without an ABN will be taxed out of existance. A lot of the Mum & Dad businesses are closing. It makes it more difficult to start up a small business. It's as if the Govt. is trying to prevent any new small businesses starting and stamp out the small businesses that already exist.
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On top of this, a 10% GST will be put on all foreign books, including the clever ones, purchased by private citizens, so now, if, after you get your degree, you wish to stay clever and keep up to date, these books will cost 10% more.
An example of this dumbing down of Australians is shown very clearly in the 1999/2000 Jaycar catalog with all the pre and post GST prices (blame the 'Affluence' or should that be 'effluence' Party not Jaycar). Most of them are on the 84 technical books listed. 12 of these are data books which are destined to be purchased by all and have to be periodically upgraded for ever more and you have to pay 10% extra every time.
But what is most galling is that 20 of these books are meant for beginners, that is school children, to enable them to explore the world of electronics and to enable their interest to blossom and possibly become the next Edison or Blumlein. And what does the 'Affluence' Party do? Make it harder for these children with get-up-and-go, by stealing 10% of their pocket money. These children are trying to improve their knowledge by showing some initiative and buying intelligent books instead of mindless games and does the 'Affluence' Party encourage them? Of course not. The 'Affluence' Party punishes them instead.
Not being satisfied in making the standard universities beyond the average person's reach, the politicians have now started attacking the poor peoples uni, the TAFE. Teachers are being retrenched and a new rule is being implemented. You can only attend a technical course if you are working in that industry. Bad luck if you want to change industries. Ie, you can only do fitting & machining if you work for a machine shop. Are there any of those left? Pretty soon Australia wont know how to make anything at all and will have to import the lot. How are we going to pay for it? When are we going to realize that the political parties in Australia do not have our best interests at heart? We are being sold down the river by experts and we are too stupid to see it.
Remember that old saying 'Actions speak louder than words.' Judging politicians by their actions, it seems to me, politicians dont really want Australia to become clever at all, rather its more like the opposite. Incidently the definition of 'politic' in the Collins New Gem Dictionary is 'Wise, Shrewd, Expedient, Cunning'. Which of these words do you think suits our politicians best?
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The GST wont help matters as NSW and Victoria will still be paying the lions share of the federal government income tax and now they will have to pay their own GST as well. If companies are going to pay less tax then the people are going to pay more. The states are no better off. Incidently, notice how the GST makes new things cheaper and second-hand things dearer; it even makes repairing old things dearer; all at a time in our history when we have just about stopped making new things and must import them. Instead of repairing your old posession, you will be encouraged, by the Federal Government, to buy a new one from overseas and make our balance of payments worse. It seems that our elected Government is flat out trying to send Australia broke. I wonder why?
Notice how our Federal Government is looking after its own Territory but is not standing up to Canada and the WTO and defending Tasmania's stand on their reputation for a clean environment. It appears that our elected representatives are defending Canada's right to force us to allow diseased fish into the clean coastal waters of Tasmania. If this happens our fish will be no better than anyone elses'. What is the point of being federated if it only means you have even more enemies? This is really about State rights. The Ruling Elite have been very clever to fan the other States rights issue concerning mandatory sentencing. Public Opinion is being marshalled against the States being able to thumb their noses at the Federal Govt. People will be for Tasmania's stand but against the Northern Territory's stand. A contradiction which will have a winner and a loser. Tasmania will be the loser. The Ruling Elite can have it no other way. As I said before they are very clever and can out-manoeuvre the Australian public every time.
Since I wrote the above Tasmania has won the battle; not because the Federal Government fought for them but because Canada withdrew its complaint!
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Along comes the 'Birthday' Party trying to find friends in big business. Overheard in the corridors of power:- "If we got rid of the old peoples bank, the others could make much more profit. But the people wont let us do that. So we'll have to be devious. We'll convince the people that if we print shares in the old peoples bank, (that is the bank they already now own), they can buy them, (that is pay for their own bank a second time), and become share holders in Australia's biggest bank with branches everywhere and make lots of money. Of course the new 'witch bank' will have to put up fees and close branches to get the profit to pay the shareholders their dividends. But, surely the people are not dumb enough, not to see that, as they are the shareholders and the customers at the same time, they will only be paying the dividends to themselves out of their own money. Of course they're dumb enough. Australians are the most stupid people on earth and you can lead them by the nose anywhere you like. And what's so good about them is that they are so stupid they dont even know they are. They think they're smart and well educated but we've made sure their education has holes in it. Sound of chuckling."
Why dont the people who are unhappy with 'witch bank' stop bashing the bank and start bashing the real culprits, the 'Birthday' Party, who by selling it caused the old peoples bank to close down one day, change beyond recognition, then open the next day again under the same name but with new controllers?
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Do you know at Christmas time when we say we have a live Christmas tree. Well it is actually a dying Christmas tree. It just takes a week or so to die. Australia is going the same way. We're killing it and it is taking a while to die, but dying it is.
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Australia is a large, sparsely populated country, which is mostly desert. Check out the amount of Brown colour on the TV Channel Nine weather map of Australia, or conversely, how little Green there actually is. Over 60% of the country gets very low, irregular rainfall. Multi-year droughts are all too common. The largest lake in the centre of Australia is Lake Eyre, about 4000 sq miles. It is substantially below sea level and yet the rainfall in the area around it is so low that most of the time it is just a large dry salt-flat. Lake George, a smaller lake near Canberra, Australia's capital, is only 100 miles from the great Pacific Ocean and well in the Warm Temporate Region of reasonable rainfall. The main road to Canberra runs along the shore of the lake and though I've driven past it numerous times over 35 years I have never seen it full. Most of the time the water is way out from the road, at least a mile or so.
The country is never going to be able to support a large population. A long time ago a vast section of the southern part of Australia was a sea, which left a large amount of salt not too far below the ground. Smart engineers reckoned they could neutralize the poor rainfall by damming the mighty Snowy River, which carries the melted snow water from the Snowy Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Various dams were built and the water turned inland to the Murray River. The Murray valley became Australia's fruit basket. Masses of water was poured on to the dry ground to force it to produce fruit. Unbeknown to all and sundry, the water table was slowly rising bringing with it the salt. Now larges areas of former fertile ground are coated in salt. Even saltbush is finding the going hard. Wagga Wagga, a large town in the Murray valley, even has salt problems with the grass on its football ground. Where it does rain, the beautiful soil of the Sydney outskirts now sprouts houses instead of lettuces and fruit. I say again, Australia is never going to be able to support a large population.
Having a small population in a large country has its positives and negatives. Along with the above, everywhere is a long way from anywhere else. Transport costs are large. You can go through a tankfull of petrol just driving from one town to another and back. Cars tend to run up the miles faster and wear out sooner. Given the area of the country and the population number, there is about one person for every 1/6 sq.mile not counting the area of ocean around Australia that we lay claim to. Now given that Australia is a sovereign country, then that person owns all the minerals in that 1/6 sq.mile. I assume he/she also owns the airspace over that 1/6 sq.mile, the RAAF certainly believes so as they defend every cu.inch of it. Doesn't that airspace also include the actual air that's in it? (Well they are trying to steal our resourses (see Made in Australia) so they might as well have our air too.)
The rest of the world is beating us over the head about our per-capita carbon emissions. Notice that term "per-capita". They chose that term because it skews the allowable total of actual carbon emissions towards the big, over-populated Western nations. Apparently they believe that most of our air belongs to them. They over-populated their countries causing their carbon emissions to be more than 10 times greater than Australia's and yet we are not allowed to utilise this plus (having a lot of air per head of population) to cancel out some of the minuses (the tyranny of distance and drought). They are effectively telling us that the air, we are allowed to use, is not the amount over the whole of Australia but only that over Tasmania. They want to allocate the rest of our air to their own populations, which allows them to burn even more carbon and the greenies are on their side, not ours. I wouldn't be surprized if the Australian continent produces less total carbon emissions than any other continent in the world (the pristine Antartica not included).
We could shut down Australia completely. That is, put everyone into suspended animation and we would only save 2% of the world's carbon emissions. The rest of the world pumps out 98% of the pollution. Now, let's get real. Any money we spend will have a tiny effect, if any at all, on the pollution but it will have a big effect on the ability of our companies to compete with overseas ones. When the rest of the worlds population gets down to our miniscule levels of total carbon emission per cubic ft of air then, and only then, should we start reducing ours.
If we said the allowed amount of carbon emissions per head in each country were to be based on the amount of cubic feet of airspace per head in each country, Australia would be the cleanest Western nation in the world.
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I dont know if it is or not but there are two groups very interested in it. One, which would love to have a reason to tell all the nations of the world how to run their countries and thus bring in a world government, really wishes it is and will bend over backwards to convince the rest of us that it really is warming up through our fault. The other group, which makes masses of money flogging the products which may cause the warming, really wishes it isn't and are also bending over backwards to convince us it isn't. Where does that leave us? Caught between politics on one hand and greed on the other.
Even some at our "Alphabet Broadcasting Company" appear to be firmly in the warming camp. Not long ago there was a scientific panel show on AlphabetTV. Like the seating on a wedding table, the moderator sat in the middle with, I think, two people on either side of him. Also like a wedding table it appeared that the more important people sat next to the moderator and the least important people sat the furthest from the centre. On the far left-hand-side sat the climate scientist. When the discussion finally got round to global warming, the moderator asked the climatologist for his words of wisdom on the matter. He replied that the x dollar thermometers on the ground said the globe is warming whereas the y million dollar global climate monitoring satellite system said it isn't. Now you'd expect an un-biassed moderator to ask further questions along the line of "That's interesting, are there any possible reasons for this, could you explain it to us?" But instead the moderator jumped straight in and said "The Government wasted its y million dollars hasn't it". Makes him a bit one eyed, dont you think. If we cant trust "our Alphabet" to be un-biassed, who can we trust?
I guess we'll just have to make up our own minds before we're brainwashed one way or the other. Consider the following:-
- The Earth's biosphere is dynamic, not static, and has quite a lot of feedback loops and control mechanisms.
- The planet's surface is more than 70% water.
- The oceans can store an incredible amount of heat with only a small rise in temperature. The specific heat of water is 1. (This means for a given amount of heat, of any material on the planet, water will have its temperature raised the least.)
- Heat is absorbed when water evaporates.
- Trees and plants evaporate water.
- Trees and plants absorb heat and transform dynamic heat energy into chemical potential energy.
- Sea water is dark.
- Dark colours absorb and radiate heat very well.
- Clouds are white.
- White colours are good reflectors of light and heat.
- If water is in the clouds then it cant be in the ocean.
- The temperature at the North Pole is -18 degrees C and the South Pole is minus 50 degrees C.
- It gets warmer the further you are from the poles.
- There is a large field of floating ice at both poles.
- Water expands as it freezes.
- The various active volcanos round the world pump out millions of tons of carbon dioxide every year.
- Now a little bit of info which may have a bearing on this matter or then again maybe not. The total population of the earth is about 6,000,000,000 people. Divide this number by 4 and put each group of 4 persons in a house on a quarter acre block. The whole of the earth's population could fit into the State of Queensland with room to spare. The earth is a very big place and it's actually quite empty.
All these statements on their own dont seem to amount to much but taken together they say that the population of the earth is still insignificant with respect to the size of the earth. Our CO² may add to the earths total but it can handle much more than that. The majority of the planets surface is water. It will take a lot of heat to cause the ocean temperature to rise. The dark sea absorbs and re-radiates heat without much temperature rise. Some temperature rise will cause more water to evaporate forming clouds which, being white, will act like a mirror and reflect a lot of heat before it reaches us. (Nuclear Winter) If there are more clouds the water level will drop as there is more water in the atmosphere. Increased rain from the increased clouds will put more water into the earth where it spends a very long time filtering its way back to the sea. Therefor more water inside the earth means less water in the oceans. Increased rain from the increased clouds will dissolve more of the CO² than normal and wash the atmosphere. Trees and plants help to absorb heat and not re-radiate it into the atmosphere whereas roads and buildings reflect heat straight back to the low level atmosphere heating up the air. The more trees we cut down the hotter the atmosphere will get.
If after all this, the temperature rises a couple of degrees, the poles will have moved from -18C to -16C and -50C to -48C, still frozen, but the outer edges of the floating ice-pack will begin to melt. As the floating ice melts the water level will drop. Try this experiment. Fill a glass to the brim with water. Gently lower an ice-cube into it. Some water will spill over the sides but the meniscus will still be above the edges of the glass. Look at the water level in the glass after the ice-cube melts. It will be lower than it was. The oceans will expand slightly as they heat up. Some landlocked snow and ice will melt so we've got three reasons for an increase in sea-level and three reasons for a fall in sea-level. I wonder which will win. Some scientists have proven that the average water level goes up and down at least 6ft on its own without any help from us.
Currently Australia's army of "spin doctors" (bigger than our army of Medical Doctors) is trying to convince us that the ocean levels have risen already and are eating away various small islands causing their populations to look elsewhere to live. Unfortunately these spin doctors have completely forgotten High School Physics, assuming they ever learnt it in the first place.
Water always finds its own level. If the sea rises anywhere on the planet then it rises everywhere on the planet within a week. It is not possible for the sea to rise at a few islands and yet not rise in Sydney Harbour. If the islands are being inundated then it is because they are sinking, not because the sea is rising.
The biggest sin, that the Earth's human population has committed, is to remove most of the planets plant-life leaving the majority of its surface without the (heat) energy-to-matter (chemical) conversion that has so far allowed the planet to survive under the onslaught of the suns high energy output.
Some of the alternatives, to solve the overheating problem, put forward so far worry me no end.
- How anyone can say that Nuclear Energy is cleaner than burning coal is a mystery to me. The earth could recover from an overdose of carbon dioxide but how can it recover fron an overdose of radio-activity like a dozen Chernobles for instance. I dont know of any trees that suck up radio-activity.
- Putting up wind turbines will interfere with the flow of the air currents and change the weather for various localities.
- Very large solar plants will form cold spots above them surrounded by warm spots. I would think this would force clouds to form. So much ground would be needed for solar collectors that ultimately we would be forced to live underground.
- The idea I hate most is the one about putting super large solar collectors out in space and beaming the energy back to earth as radio frequency energy. What a weapon that would make. But besides that, try this experiment. Get three mirrors about 1ft square and set them up to reflect the sun so that they all hit the same place on a wall and then go and stand there. Within a couple of minutes you will be sweating and very uncomfortable in five. This is what it would be like if we had three suns. Now imagine super size mirrors out in space doing the same thing to the earth. As pretty much all the electrical energy used ends up as heat, this is what the solar collector RF beam system would effectively be doing to the planet. The earth evolved under the light and heat of one sun. More than one wont give you global warming, it will be more like global cooking.
See also Stealing our Air.
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Now we have many people unemployed. We cant, or worse still, the Ruling Elite dont want to, pay them the dole. A very high percentage of the workforce have junk go-nowhere jobs with no security. A few people get obscenely high salaries and the rest are fighting just to keep their heads above water. Funny how one salary, then, was enough to run a family of six, and two salaries now, are barely enough for a family of four. (Ever noticed that the heads of big companies are usually foreign, get very high salaries, only last about two years then go back home to their own country taking their money and millions of dollars worth of shares with them. No wonder our country is going broke.)
Children are put into creches so that parents can make ends meet. Unfortunately this means the parents cant infuse into the children the ideals of being frank and forthright that go to being an Australian. Children have to get these from TV and Movies, which are predominatly not Australian and suspress these characteristics. No wonder our culture is disappearing. We have bred a generation of traitors to their own country and culture, and they dont even know it. They dont understand that if they pay a bit more for the Australian made products it will come back to them tenfold. More people working means more people paying tax means everyone can pay less tax. More people working means less social security payments which means less taxes. More Australian products made means less imports and less borrowings overseas. More savings in Australia means more infrastructure projects which will improve the standard of living. etc.etc.
But how can we blame our children for being traitors when our Governments, of both flavors, indulge in un-Australian activities. The Ruling Elite are telling our government to let foreign companies take over Australian companies and are now arranging for the people to pay more tax (GST, especially the old and poor) so that the foreign companies can pay less (30% instead of 36%). Why dont we just reduce the tax to zero and give our resources away and be done with it. (Well we're getting around to it, give us time. We've got the dollar down to a dirt cheap level. We'll tell you it's good for exports but actually the lower it goes the cheaper we get your resources.) They force us to make compulsory donations to their coffers (pay tax) and then tell the government run organisations to buy overseas manufactured products just because they are a bit cheaper. Then they tell our companies to compete with the foreign companies, all the while placing strict rules on just about every possible thing that an Australian company must do to operate its business. In other words we have to compete with one arm tied behind our back. We are told we have to compete on a level playing field. The trouble is our playing field is not level, it favors other countries. There should be tariffs (import duty) on any product made in any country with less restrictions on their companies than ours and who treat their workers worse than we do. The ultimate slap in the face dished out by a government run body is the fact that the Australian flags to be waved at the Olympics will be made overseas. (Could it be that, as most of the money to stage the Olympics comes from overseas, then a decent proportion of it has to be spent overseas and we had to agree to this before we were given the Olympics?)
I dont know about you but I want my Aussie tax dollars spent on Australian products made by Australians in Australia. Dont you?
The frank, open Australian is disappearing, being replaced by someone who is afraid to speak out, to get involved, to stand up for what is right. In an interview once, Prince Charles was asked how did he like his stay in Australia, at Timber Top, when he was young. How did he like the blunt openness of the other people he was with? He answered it was great because he could be open and blunt right back at them. This says a lot about the 'watch what you say' environment in England at the time. Now we have gone the same way. Free speech has all but disappeared and with it open discussion on a lot of topics that the Ruling Elite dont want discussed. A whole population has been muzzled. This wouldn't have happened if parents had passed the importance of being open on to their children. How could they when they spend less time with their kids then the creche supervisors and TV producers do.
Notice how our Federal Government is not standing up to Canada and the WTO and defending Tasmania's stand on their reputation for a clean environment. It appears that our elected representatives are defending Canada's right to force us to allow diseased fish into the clean coastal waters of Tasmania. If this happens our fish will be no better than anyone elses'. What is the point of being federated if it only means you have even more enemies? This is really about State rights. The Ruling Elite have been very clever to fan the other States rights issue concerning mandatory sentencing. Public Opinion is being marshalled against the States being able to thumb their noses at the Federal Govt. People will be for Tasmania's stand But against the Northern Territories stand. A contradiction which will have a winner and a loser. Tasmania will be the loser. The Ruling Elite can have it no other way. As I said before they are very clever and can out-manoeuvre the Australian public every time. (In fact Tasmania won this battle, not because of the Federal Government's efforts, but because Canada withdrew its complaint.)
I believe the Communists have taken over Australia. Now before you start laughing, you might like to know how I came to that conclusion. Actually just a simple bit of logic. The policies, that 'won-nashun' are now putting forward, are considered to be coming from the far right, but in the 1940s & 50s these same policies were considered to be middle of the road, that is the majority of the voters aggreed with them. So, for middle of the road policies to become the far right policies, the country must have moved to the far left, which in the 40s & 50s was Communism. Hence I say again, the communists have taken over Australia, but they're not the same Communists of old. They are a new highly sophisticated form of Communist and 'Communist' may not be the right word to describe them as they are quite willing to use Nazi and Facist methods when necessary. Maybe they should be called the Ruling Elite. Maybe Globalists would be even more accurate. They have borrowed some trappings from Communist countries such as, all people should be born equal, people must realise that they only live at the pleasure of the state and must be exposed to state organised discipline by making them wait in long queues everywhere, by passing laws that they know will clash with religious teaching (no capital punishment in schools as allowed in the bible), then closing down any religious schools that dont comply with this anti-religious law. The Globalist Ruling Elite are a highly educated (highly educated overseas that is) group of people who have influential representatives in every political party. They use words like The Civil Society, Socialisation, Humanism; just new names for subtle Communism. In a TV program recently, the presenter said the following, "Civil Society, the quite but profound revolution underway that heralds a new approach to community." They push the idea that everyone needs to belong to the all-encompassing group. Some contrarians might say 'the suffocating group' which will tolerate no discord or conflict, no contradiction or dissent, no discrimination or diverse opinions. The Globalist Ruling Elite believe in one world government and no individuality, all people must be the same. If they weren't then countries would be different and you cant have a world government if the governed countries want to be different. All laws have to be the same and applied in the same way. Australia appears to have a democracy where we actually have little say, other than to change the glove-puppets. Organisations own just about everything. Private individuals think they own things but in reality they just pay for temporary custody of them. Take your house block for instance. Your land can be resumed by an organisation at any time for a number of reasons ie. building a road, building an airport, digging up minerals. Actually one political party believes that no one should own their home, period; 'no private home ownership'.
If you want to know who the Globalists are, just remember they are trying to create a world where the member states have no individual control over their own future. In other words the Globalists are trying to remove the sovereignty of each country, which of course means removing the Sovereign from each country. The word Sovereign is just a fancy word for the King or Queen of a country. And who are the people currently trying to remove our Sovereign?
There was a book called "the one minute manager". Amongst its treasure trove of glib generalities was one which describes Communism down to a T. "There's nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals." Isn't that what Communism does? Isn't that what the Globalist Ruling Elite are doing?
The takeover of Australia has been done in a very sophisticated manner. So subtly done that the public didn't notice. They were too busy watching TV, going to the clubs, being swallowed up in the exaggerated sport culture, and finding solace in the bottle. The group have bought about the destruction of Australian industry, education, and are currently working on our culture and our financial well-being. When they are finished we will be in so much debt we wont be able to get out of it unless we toe the line they draw for us. When they finish, that person, who was the archetypal Aussie, will be just a fond but private memory. George Orwell got it dead right.
The only booming business in Australia is the production of debt. Every day we get in deeper and every day the Globalist Ruling Elite, via their puppets, say 'Dont worry, everything is rosy and right on track'. On track to what, the poor house? (See above) Australia does not pay its own way. We survive by borrowing money from foreign countries. (Did you know that the spendthrift lifestyle of Australians living in three bedroom bungalows is maintained by borrowing money saved by the thrifty Japanese who have to live in houses not much larger than shoeboxes?) What happens when the rest of the world gets fed up with loaning us money, or do they have a guilty conscience about something we dont know? We are just 19 million useless people who are expendable. No-one would miss us if we just disappeared. (See Wiaiao) Remember the Phoenix. If you want to bring in a new system you have to destroy the old one first and raise the new out of the ashes of the old.
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Dont you think its terrific that back in 1948, George Orwell could see in the future, using his knowledge of human behaviour and the fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, to a time where the government of the day would do the exact opposite of what it says it will do? The ministry of truth that manufactured lies. The ministry of love that tortured people. I believe it is already happening in Australia and it started in the 1980s. Consider the following occurrences:-
- One weekday, back in the 1980s, I was at a scrap metal dealer in Bulli, an outer suburb of Wollongong, about 40 miles south of Sydney. This particular dealer also had a vast array of electronic parts which he sold at only a little bit above scrap prices. At this time there were quite a lot of people out of work in this area and he did a roaring trade. I was pokeing around the various rows of shelves when a middle aged bloke came in looking for a valve for his old radio. He had a 7 or 8 yr old girl in tow.
Now you have to visualise this. A scrap yard is not the cleanest of places and everything was covered in dirt. The prevailing colour was a drab grey and it coated everything. The little girl wore a colourful dress and stood out like a single little flower growing in a quarry. The scrap dealer, being a grandfather himself, leant over the counter and asked what was a lovely little girl doing in a scrap yard. The father said she was staying home from school. Why, was she sick? No, the class was going on an outing which cost an amount of money the out-of-work father couldn't afford. Cant the DSS (Department of Social Security) help with this? The father had been to them and the woman behind the counter said she couldn't help him. If he had been anything else than anglo-australian she would have been able to give him some allowance or other, but as he was, she couldn't. I couldn't see the old scrap dealer but by the sound of his voice I'd bet this brought a tear to his eye because he gave the father the valve for nothing.
The tear in my eye coalesced into an angry gleam and I thought what 'Bastards' our politicians were (and probably still are) to do that to the people who set up the DSS in the first place. Obviously, if you live in Australia and your ancestors come from Gt Britain, the letters DSS become DSI (the Department of Social Insecurity).
- I always thought The ACCC () was set up to make sure competition didnt disappear altogether, wasnt it?
Consider the following:-
- There are two reasonably large shopping complexes near where I live. One has a large Woolworths supermarket and a small Franklins store. The other has a large Franklins Fresh supermarket. The ACCC has allowed Woolthworths to buy Franklins Fresh and now we will have a Woolthworths supermarket in one shopping complex and a Woolthworths supermarket in the other shopping complex and no Franklins of any sort. From a choice of three to a choice of one. That's maintaining competition in the marketplace?
After a number of years passed we finally have a small Franklins store back in the shopping centre where it once was but it is no match for two large Woolworths.
- Remember back to about 6 mnths before the dreaded GST was introduced. The ACCC was warning all businesses not to increase prices more than 10% after the GST came in and then blame it on the GST.
There is a large hardware store not too far away and it has all the prices clearly marked. About 5 mnths before the GST came in I was there buying a few things. Each thing came from a different section of the store. I have a reasonable memory and can remember the prices when I go to the checkout. On three out of the four items the computer said the price was higher than I remembered it. I queried each price and the checkout girl called for an assistant to check the price. I went with him to each item and showed him the marked price. He agreed the marked price was lower, saying a lot of prices had risen recently and they hadn't got round to changing all the price stickers. The price increases on my items ranged from to 7% to 14%. If the price stickers had been changed on time I would never had known about these increases.
A thought flashed across my mind that the ACCC was warning that prices couldn't rise more than 10% after the GST came in but it never mentioned anything about before the GST came in. Couldn't a clever company put all its prices up before the GST came in and then tell everybody that when the GST came in, it would wear the GST increase for the time being, all the time having already allowed for it. This way they could get the kudos for wearing the GST increase and pocket it as well. Talk about having your cake and eating it too. I thought the ACCC might be interested to hear of this possibility.
I rang the ACCC and told them the idea. They said they couldn't do anything without proof. Did I have any receipts for the same items before and after the price rises? Of course I didnt but they had 4 mnths to make enquiries. Nothing happened so I assume they didn't.
Doesn't what I've just said make their warning about after the GST implementation a bit of a farce?
- There are two reasonably large shopping complexes near where I live. One has a large Woolworths supermarket and a small Franklins store. The other has a large Franklins Fresh supermarket. The ACCC has allowed Woolthworths to buy Franklins Fresh and now we will have a Woolthworths supermarket in one shopping complex and a Woolthworths supermarket in the other shopping complex and no Franklins of any sort. From a choice of three to a choice of one. That's maintaining competition in the marketplace?
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- There are some nice people out there, there are some nasty people out there and then there's the NRMA. See if you can figure out who is what in the following three stories.
Story 1. Around 30+ years ago I bought my first car, a big 2nd hand one. I kept it for 6 yrs then traded it in on a new small one. I had just discovered that our beloved steam trains were disappearing at a great rate and I needed a reliable car to drive round the country trainspotting the last few running. As with all new cars the manual said to drive gently for the first 500 or so miles until the motor had run in. I had run up only 200 miles in the first couple of months when I found out that there were still steam-engines being used at Bathurst, albiet only for pusher duties. They helped diesels over a few hills then returned to Bathurst to help the next train. This repetitive to-ing and fro-ing made it possible to get that ultimate railfan experience, a footplate ride.
I chose a Friday night as rail traffic usually seemed to be heavier then. I left home (Sydney) about 6.30pm. I would get to Bathurst by 10.30pm after a sedate drive over the great dividing range via Katoomba, the gentlest route. The car was going beautifully and I got to Lithgow about 9pm. Just as I was passing the Lithgow turnoff the "gen" light came on and the headlights went slightly dull. I pulled up and had a look at the engine. This car had a generator whereas the previous car had an alternator which never missed a beat in the 6yrs I had it. I looked at the generator with inexperienced eyes and saw nothing untoward. I gave the regulator box a bash which did nothing to improve the situation. Obviously the generator had stopped charging the battery but when? How much charge was still left. The engine ignition circuit draws about 5 amps and the lights another 7 amps. Could the battery supply 12 amps for another hour and a half till I reached Bathurst? Lithgow is pretty small whereas Bathurst is quite large and more help would be available there. I decided to 'push on' but in order to improve the situation somewhat I switched off the headlights to conserve the battery. There was enough traffic on the road to illuminate the way without my headlights being on. I was lucky that on this car the front parking lights were in the headlights so other drivers would just think I had very dull headlights.
I drove this way to Bathurst with no dramas and pulled into the first large service station. I explained my predicament and the mechanic on duty (at 10.30pm) had a look and soon found the generator brushes were so worn they didn't make contact any more. But the car is only 2 months old I protested. He asked me to start the car and used a screwdriver to push down on the brushes. Blue and pink sparks shot right round the armature. The armature has shorts and has burnt out the brushes, he said, you'll need a new one. I didn't have any money for that sort of thing. Having just had a new baby, a new house and a new car and paying off all of them, I was near on broke. I barely had enough money for petrol. Letting him know of my monetarial situation, he said there was one trick he could try. He broke a wooden match into short pieces and placed it between the brushes and the springs that hold them in. Now the spring was pressing against the wood and the wood was pressing against the brush which was now pressing against the armature. Sparks flowed but so did electricity and the gen light went out and the headlights got brighter. That should do for a short while, he said, it might even get you home. He would take no money and wished me good luck. As I was back in business I thanked him and drove off the find the steam engines. I would worry about the generator tomorrow.
Tommorrow rolled round soon enough and I pondered on what to do. A match is only about 1/8 of an inch (3mm) thick and part of that was used up already. Would the brushes last till I got home, 4 hrs away? I thought not. The best bet would be to get some new brushes, I could afford that but how to replace them. I hadn't done it before and the car was still under warranty. Maybe I shouldn't fiddle with it anyway. I know, I'll go to the NRMA. I'd been paying for the road service for 6 yrs and only used it once when the battery died of old age in my previous car.
I located the NRMA representitive, pulled up outside and went in to tell him of my predicament. He said no problem. It would cost x dollars for a new set of brushes and y dollars to fit them. What!!! "Why do I have to pay to fit them?" "You are not broken down", was the answer. "But you agreed that I wont make it home with the car like it is", I said. "Thats right", says he, "When you break down I'll come out and change the brushes for only the cost of the brushes". I couldn't believer my ears. Had I woken up on a different planet. "But my telling you before I break down will save you the cost of travelling time and wear & tear on your vehicle", I said. "Yes, it might sound odd but them's the NRMA rules. If I changed the brushes here they would not pay me because you're not broken down." I was having some dark thoughts about the NRMA road service right about now. "But I dont have the money to pay you to change the brushes, so I'll just have to drive off home and call you when I breakdown 30 or 40 miles away." What a waste of time and money. I was walking back to the car when he came running after me and said, "Drive down the road a few blocks and phone me. I'll drive out and change them for you. This will save me time and the NRMA the cost of wear & tear on the NRMA vehicle."
Sanity at last, well, some. I did just that and he did what he said he would and I sparked my way home, straight to the car dealer who didn't flinch when told of the problem. It had happened to other cars of this type. There were a bad batch of Australian made generators. Leave it with him and he would fit a new one. Would you believe the second new one failed 4 months later and they fitted a third new one. This one must have been a goodie as it is still in the car and it still has the original brushes in it.
Story 2. About 5 yrs ago I was driving to work one afternoon in yet a different 2nd hand car when suddenly it sputtered and stopped. No amount of cranking would make it go. It didn't take long to find out there was no spark. As it was pay day and the credit union would close before too long and I was broke as usual I called the NRMA straight away. 15 minutes later that welcome blue & white sight appeared and luckily could park right in front of me. The young bloke listened to what I knew then also didn't take long to find no spark. He then found the points were very badly burned. I informed him they were ok a month ago when I checked them. Shortly after he found the points capacitor open circuit and said that's why the points had burnt away. The capacitor is there to stop them burning. He said it would cost x dollars for a new set of points and y dollars for a new capacitor. I informed him I was on my way to get paid and didn't have enough money for new components. He said ok and pulling out a points file, cleaned up the point contacts as much as possible and adjusted them. He then said he knew a trick his father had taught him and disconnected the radio interference capacitor and connected it in place of the points capacitor. It worked and the motor sprang to life. He said to replace those bits as soon as possible and wished me good luck. I got to work in time, got paid and replaced the bits next day. A nice young bloke just like the one in the NRMA TV ad.
Story 3. About a year later, in yet another 2nd hand car, I took the family on a scenic driving holiday to Bright, Victoria, in the summer. On the way home we deviated via Khanchoban, Perisher, Cooma and Canberra. We reached Khanchoban around 3.30pm and paid the toll to drive through the Snowy Mountains National Park and started up the winding Alpine Way. Unfortunately we had picked a time when the road was being widened and graded pretty much all the way to Perisher. The road was dust from one end to the other. Being a front wheel drive car the front wheels were sending up clouds of dust which was coating the back wheels and more importantly the bearing hubs and breakshoes and drums. Just before getting to Perisher a repetitive squeak started coming from the passenger side rear wheel, the one which copped the most dust. I thought most likely it was dust in the brakeshoes but just in case it was the bearing I decided the call into a service station at Perisher.
Having located same we pulled into the driveway and I found the owner. I told him of my problem and asked if I could borrow a big spanner to undo the big nut that holds the back wheel bearing together. He said no, he was just shutting up as it was 5 pm. Taken aback I said could I have a pot of wheel bearing grease. He said ok that will be $6. I only had a $10 note. He said he couldn't give me any change as he had already locked the till. As a result the grease cost me $10. He graciously said I could work on the car in his driveway as long as I didn't make a mess.
I jacked up the car and using his hose and water, (he hadn't shut it off, thank heaven for small mercies) I gave the under side a good wash especially the passenger side wheel. After this the squeak was much reduced and I discovered that the wheel did not squeak when turned backwards (an important clue as you will eventually see). After much forward & backward spinning of the wheel the squeak faded right away and all was well or so I thought. We gingerly drove round Perisher's shopping area and all was quiet. Beauty, let's go.
A bit further along the road to Cooma was the turnoff to Guthega. We had driven about 2miles along this road when the squeak started again but louder this time. I backed the car up a bit and this stopped the squeak. We decided to give Guthega a miss and returned to the main road. A few miles along this road the squeak started again and was starting to sound vicious. Nothing good could be making that sound. I pulled to the side of the road which was very wide at this point. Infact we were outside a large Chalet which was closed for the summer. The sun was just going down and as I was poking around the back wheel with my torch, a person came out of the chalet with a garbage bin. He came over to enquire about our problem. It turned out that he was the summertime caretaker of the chalet and offered his telephone for us to ring the NRMA. He said for me, my wife and our three grown up children to accompany him to his caretakers quarters where he plied us with tea and cake while I phoned the NRMA road service. I finally got on to the local NRMA rep and told him of our predicament. He asked if we were broken down and I said not exactly. We could still move but I didn't know for how long before the wheel jammed up. He said he couldn't come out if we could still move and were not broken down. Not again! 20yrs have gone past since the last episode and nothing has changed! I had now paid into the NRMA road service for 30yrs and for what? I was not going to risk coming to a screeching halt somewhere on the two lane twisting & winding Alpine Way in the dark. It was a recipe for disaster. I told the rep what he could do with the NRMA road service and hung up. The caretaker asked what was I going to do. I said we would sleep in the car and see what happens tomorrow in the daylight. He said we couldn't sleep in the car. It will get too cold, even though it is summer, because we're so high up. He said he would open up a room in the chalet and we could stay there. I said we couldn't afford that and he said there would be no charge as long as we promised not to steal any thing. We couldn't get over how nice this bloke was and of course made the promise. He said he was a late riser, so dont bother trying to find him in the morning, just go when we were ready. We spent the night warm and snug in the well-insulated room and left a small token of our appreciation on the bed.
Next morning we went out to the car and I jacked up the wheel and miraculuously the squeak had completely gone. We drove down to civilisation and I went to the first service station I saw. The mechanic listened to the jacked up wheel spinning and said he couldn't here any thing wrong with it. He said you might as well keep going so we did. We got to Cooma and the wheel was still all right. It was here we were going to deviate on to the mountain-top road which goes past the Deep Space tracking stations and would you believe it, just as we got to the turnoff, the wheel started to squeak softly. That was the end of any idea of travelling along the mountain-top road. We decided to go straight to Canberra along the Cooma to Canberra highway, albeit slowly.
About half way to Canberra the squeak suddenly got very loud and vicious. We had just passed a service station so I backed up (still no squeak in reverse) and pulled into the driveway. After a chat with the operator it turned out that this was only a petrol sales station. It had no tools what so ever on the premises. However a few hundred feet up a side road was a general store and the owner always seem to be fiddling about with cars on jacks so I might like to try my luck there.
I backed up to the store and tracked down the owner. After hearing of my problem he offered me the use of a pair of stands and a large shifting spanner to remove the rear wheel. In short time I had the wheel off and the bearing exposed and all was revealed. One of the cross struts in the bearing roller cage had broken off at one end and twisted around 90 degrees and was pointing straight at one of the rollers. When the wheel spun forwards, the roller jammed up on to the point of the strut. When the wheel spun backwards, the roller moved away from the strut and rolled free. All I had to do was bend the strut back round parallel to the roller and we would be ok. Easier said than done. The bearing cage was made out of very tough metal and my small needle nose pliers would not budge it. I found the store owner again and showed him the cage. He whistled and said I was lucky that the roller was only squeaking and had not seized solid. He pulled a tool out of his shirt pocket and straightened the bent strut. The tool was a Leatherman all purpose multi-tool and terrifically strong. I jotted down the number printed on the bearing for future use, then greased and reassembled it. The wheel now spun quietly in both directions, as it should. The store owner would take no money for the use of his tools, wished me luck and said I should have no problem getting a new bearing in Canberra. We drove gently to Canberra and I got a new bearing and a spanner and fitted it in the driveway of our Motel after I had promised not to make a mess on the driveway. End of story.
As I said above there are a lot of nice people out there but I dont think many of them work in the NRMA's head office.
- Under 25s Insurance Ripoff. As you know it increases insurance charges, both comprehensive and green slip, if the car is going to driven by an under 25. It says this is because they have more accidents than other age groups. Now these charges are blanket charges and apply to all under 25s every year. I believe this is discriminating against good under 25 drivers that dont have any accidents. Now I might be wrong but I thought that insurance was just a way of gambling. You bet the company that you will have an accident and they bet you that you wont and they give you odds at about 10 to 1.
Now if a thirty year old insures a car they pay X dollars. Most of them wont have an accident. If an under 25 insures a car they have to pay X plus Y dollars because the company bets they will have an accident. If at the end of the year they have not had one then the company was wrong and the under 25 should be treated exactly the same as the 30 year old and pay the same cost. I believe the first year the cost can be the X plus Y dollars but the next year, if there has been no accidents the Y dollars already paid should be credited to the new insurance year and so on. This way good under 25 drivers will be rewarded for driving carefully and not penalised just because of their age. If you agree write a letter to the NRMA requesting this discrimination be stopped and let's start rewarding good driving, especially from the under 25s. But dont hold your breath waiting for anything to change.
- Remember the peoples bank which kept the fees of the other banks low until it was turned into a private enterprise company. The NRMA is at present doing the same thing for insurance charges. Once it is turned into a private enterprise company you watch the insurance costs go up.
- I have watched the Motoring side of the NRMA become a pimple on the backside of the insurance company. Places to get your car checked are disappearing. The Map section in the branches has disappeared along with any useful maps.
- The original strip maps were terrific. They only went from one town to the next and on the back was printed all the places of interest to see and street maps of the important towns. You would go to an NRMA branch, front up to the smiling person behind the map counter, tell them your route and they would assemble a number of strip maps that covered exactly where you wanted to go. No fighting with maps printed on great big sheets of paper in the front seat. The person behind the mapcounter was usually quite knowledgable on the geography of the state and would make suggestions saying, 'seeing that your going here dont forget to visit such and such as it is only 10 miles further and it would be a pity to miss it'.
- The strip maps were got rid of and were replaced with district maps which had a different scale and had places closer together so as to fit more on the map which of course was now bigger and you had to learn to fold it properly. The whole back of the map had places to see and important town street maps on it but not as many as the strip maps. These district maps actually overlapped each other so that you could get from one town to the next only using one map. They were only printed in one colour on white paper but different districts had different colours.
- They were got rid of and out came full colour maps. Very pretty but they had a number of advertisments on the back so now there was less places to see and less street maps. But the worse thing of all was the fact that now they didn't overlap. this meant that on some roads, even highways, getting from one town to the next involved having two of these maps open simultaneously on the front seat because the road zig and zagged off one map edge on to the other and back a few times. Absolutely disgusting for a motoring organisation to produce this shambles.
- A number of people must have complained as they were dropped and map booklets were produced. These had every thing in the one booklet. The accomodation directory, maps sliced up into non overlapping pages with the thick binding getting in the way of some towns and/or roads, A small amount of places to see and some streetmaps. Some districts had an extra large map pushed into the book. These maps were huge. You could use them for a table cloth. The were, in my opinion, dangerous to unfold in the front seat.
The idea of these books was, I assume, to try to get back to the original made up booklet of strip maps but without having to employ any staff to hand them out. You have to get them from any one of the insurance people to whom you are directed by serendipity. The problem with the new books is that they cover a large area, probably more than you want and each map page is just a slice of a bigger map and you have to switch pages back and forth as you follow a road back and forth whereas the old strip maps were purpose drawn to go from one town to the next so you only had to look at one page at a time.
One thing you may not know, that I learned from a number of country NRMA reps, is that every time the NRMA brings out a new map system it puts out an edict that all the country NRMA reps return all the old maps for destruction. Quite a number of country reps told me, that as they had so many complaints from members about the deteriation of the map quality, most of the country reps disobey the return order and hang on to the older district maps. (Of course this only applies to the country towns not big enough to have a NRMA shopfront which follows headoffice orders and has no old maps whatsoever.) Every time they offer members these old maps instead of the new mapbooks, the members choose the old maps over the new ones and extend their appreciation that the country reps had the foresight to keep them. So now the NRMA headoffice is even out of touch with most of its country reps. What a disgrace.
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Bring back the strip maps and the knowledgeable, smiling person behind a map-counter.
- As I understand it, the current proposal is for the insurance division to be floated but the road-service division to stay the same. The insurance arm is going to commandeer the well known symbol, which was made well known and respected by the dedication and hard work of the road-patrolmen of the road-service division. This is disgusting. The road-service division should retain ownership of the symbol and the new insurance company rent it off them for an amount of money each year. This would guarantee a stable income for the road-service division. As it is put currently, I dont agree with any floating of any part of any division.
Since I wrote the above 80% of the other members disagreed with me and took the money. In ten years time they will have paid all that money back in increased insurance charges. Then what are they going to do.
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Nazi NSW. NSW in the 1990s and Nazi controlled Europe in the 1940s have something in common. The Gestapo (council rangers & pet catchers) have the power to stop a person even if they are in good health (pet dog or cat) walking down the street and demand to see their identity papers (identification tags). If they cant produce their papers the Gestapo (council rangers & pet catchers) bundle them into the car and take them back to HeadQuarters (the pound). After a week of interrogation locked in a cell (cage) and if no information is forthcoming they are handed over to the SS (veterinary surgeons) to be shot (put to sleep). I always thought that the SS, sorry veterinary surgeons, had an oath which says 'First thing do no harm'. People (pet cats and dogs) are only allowed to survive if the High Command (premier state government) says so.
The Nazi High Command also decided to put some of the native born 'purebred Aryans', who were not in good health, out of their misery as well. The High Command (premier state government) has decided that purebreds (native wildlife) who are crippled or incapacipated in some way will not be allowed to live and has authorised the SS (veterinary surgeons) to do away with them (put them to sleep and out of their misery). Apparently the High Command doesn't want any visitors seeing any purebreds that are limping. Native born purebreds (wildlife) are only allowed to live if the High Command (premier state government) says so. Be very wary of your local SS. Taking an injured animal to them may not be in the animal's best interest.
And they write 'New South Wales The Premier State' on our number plates.
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Just recently all dogs in NSW have to be injected with with a microchip (12mm long by 1mm dia, not that micro, especially to a 3 month old puppy, the equivalent of a 3 month old baby copping a 60mm by 5mm pencil in the neck) in the back of the neck near the shoulders. We are told this will make it easier to locate the owners of a lost dog or a dumped dog. Apparently they want to return the dumped dog to the people that dumped it. Poor dog. Not only does it have this nasty thing in its neck but it's forced back to live with people that obviously dont want it. But there is a sinister side to all this. The microchip is actually a passive receiver/transmitter and when a low power radio-signal is received by it (from the reading wand) it transmits a coded signal using the received radio-signal for power. Microchips can heat up and burnout if they receive too much power and probably burst releasing nasty chemicals into the dog and remember it is not far from the dogs spinal-column. It doesn't take much imagination to see the dog being paralysed. You just need a portable high power transmitter on the right frequency. Not a problem in this day and age.
Now the Authorities have a way to stop your dog defending you. Stopped dead in its tracks so to speak. Why do they want the general population to have no way to defend itself. Our Army is almost non-existant and has to apologise for the noise it makes defending us. Our Navy has submarines that cant do what submarines are supposed to do well; sneak around quitely. Our Airforce is loosing pilots to private enterprise in ever increasing numbers. The ones who survive the peacetime crashes that is.
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Most organisations appear to operate on the user pays principle, the more you use it the more you pay. Have you noticed that our phone companies operate on the exact opposite principle? Not only the more you use it, you dont pay more, you actually get a discount! The big one has just dropped the cost of calls to big users and increased the cost to pensioners who need the phone for safety reasons but dont make many calls. Now either 'the user pays' system is the right one or 'the user gets a discount' is the right one but I dont see how they both can be the right one. Somebody is getting ripped off here and I bet it's the poor people, the ones who can least afford it. What a pleasant society we live in!
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If really pushed hard the average person could design a bridge. Of course the first few would probably fall down but eventually one would work. You would probably find all the materials would be far thicker than necessary. An engineer would come along and pulling out his calculator (slide-rule in the old days) would design you a bridge with much thinner struts that would work just as well. Along will come another younger engineer trying to make his mark in the world and say the struts dont have to be that thick and trim them even more. Some where along the line the struts will become too thin and the bridge will fall down. (Melbourne, Israel, even Sydneys olympic games venue had the struts too thin on one construction until pointed out by unionists!.) You cant do more with less. Eventually something has got to give.
The same applies to Digital TV. We are told that the new digital tv system has a compatible mode where the horizontal resolution is the same as the current analog tv system. In Australia it's usually quoted as 400 lines in a width equal to the picture height. As the ratio of our picture width to picture height is 4:3 then the picture is 1.33 times wider than the height so we can have 533 lines across the whole width. That is 266 black lines interspersed with 267 white lines. So you can see that quoting the horizontal resolution this way shows you the thinnest vertical line that can be seen on the tv screen. Digital tv equipment has been built based on this resoultion and, as Nyquist stated that you need a number of samples slightly more than twice the number of resolution lines, the digital pickups need more than 1066 pixel sensors to handle 533 resolution lines. (One trick used in some digital cameras is to offset the green ccd pickup by half a pixel to the red & blue ccd pickups. As the black & white signal (luminance) is generated by adding the red & green & blue signals together (following the formula L=0.3R+0.59G+0.11B) it appears to be coming from a single ccd with a pseudo 2000 pixels which, due to the half amplitude o/p from each, is probably more like 1500. This would give you a reso of about 700 lines.
However analog pickups, ie camera tubes, have an almost infinite number of pixel sensors limited only by the grain in the photo-sensitive material used in their manufacture. The limited number of sensors in Digital TV will have a big impact on what I will call Positional Resolution.
I've always reckoned that analog photo-pickup devices (cameras, telecine chains etc) produce smoother looking pictures than digital ones. I believe it is due to the infinite positional resolution available on the analog devices (The scanning beam width has a limiting affect on the number of lines that can be resolved but not on the positional resolution.). If you have a door jamb in the picture on your screen, and the camera pans slowly causing the jamb to move gradually across the screen, its single sharp vertical transition line will move absolutely smoothly only on an analog system. In a digital system the sharp vertical transition line will have to switch from one pixel to the next. An optical low pass fuzzy filter is usually fitted to try to cover this switching action but it is an artifical fiddle which only partially works. As all the pixel pickups are actually in fixed positions with gaps between them, the only way they can see the transition when it is between them is by reducing the amplitude of one while increasing the amplitude of the next and hoping the psycho-optical characteristic of your eyes and brain will see an edge where it isn't. (It will get even worse when the TV set screen is digital as well.) The analog system uses this for its vertical resolution, switching from one scan-line to the next as a sharp horizontal transition line moves up or down the screen. (Origininally the scan lines used to be vertical but observor complaints of apparent poor picture quality soon had them changed to horizontal.) Unfortunately those old lessons have been forgotten and we've turned the clock back to the beginning of television with digital.
In case you think I'm the only one whose worried about this poor positional resolution in digital tv you may find the following interesting. In case I haven't already mentioned it, I used to work in a large TV station in the electronic maintenance section. I was not a University trained engineer, just a TAFE trained technician type. As it was a large TV station we used to get a lot of business reps showing us the latest in electronic test equipment. Just before I left, a lovely TV test signal generator of European manufacture was demonstrated to us. It fairly bristled with knobs and switches and generated every test signal known to man and some we didn't know. I watched closely and after showing us all manner of test pictures and waveforms the rep appeared to be finished but there was one switch left that he hadn't demonstrated. I asked the obvious question and he said "ah! I've been saving that till last, that's the Digital TV test switch". We all had puzzled looks on our faces. How could one switch run all the Digital TV tests. Simple. He flicked the switch on and every test picture and waveform the unit made, began to move around the screen. He said the hardest thing for a Digital TV system to do was to portray moving images. Isn't this the very thing we use TV for, and Digital cant do it properly? Hmmm!
But what Digital can do very well is put more channels in the same bandwidth that one analog signal needs and now we know what we've lost to do it; the infinite positional resolution of analog that makes the pictures look so smooth.
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I think its amazing that the writers of this episode were predicting our planet's demise 30 years into their future. Not only do we have Radio and TV towers pouring out the RF energy but we now have Mobile Phones by the millions and Mobile Phone Towers by the thousand, and on top of this we are, at this very instant, contemplating putting billions of small RF transmitters in Computers and peripherals, just to get rid of the connecting cables !!!!!
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- I wonder how many people know that their Digital phone transmits a pulse per second for every second that it is switched on even though they are not using it ie. switched to standby waiting to receive a call. It does this to let the phone system know where it is at all times. Funny that, because if they know where the phone is, they know where you are at all times. This assumes you are carrying the phone and isn't that why you bought it? The Analog phones didn't do this. Is that why they got rid of them? Didn't know where you were at all times, you see?
- Another nasty thing about these Digital phones is that they pump out up to 8 times more radio-wave power (4 watts) than an Analog phone (0.5 watts) to get the same range.
(Phones work at a frequency of about 0.9 gigaHz, 40yrs ago TV station links ran at about 1 watt on a frequency of 6 gigaHz. Each unit had a warning plate on it telling people to keep away from the business end when it was switched on, even if it was just running on the repair bench.)
People with mobile phones radiate their brains and their eyes when they are talking on them and radiate their testes or ovaries when they are not. (Most people put the phone, when it's on standby and pulsing once a second, in their jeans pocket or in their purse or bag on their lap, just inches away from their ovaries or testicles. And there's no bony skull either to provide even a small amount of protection. God help the fetuses.) (I hope the woman in this photo, from the Sunday Telegraph 23-9-2001, and all the others seeing it dont think this is a good idea and start doing it.)
- Radio-waves cause minute amounts of cooking of your eye's lens. The problem is that this effect is cumulative and the lens gradually turns milky, eventually becoming opaque and then you're blind. Now you could have the operation to replace your milky lens with a tiny plastic one but the world's greatest treasurer took this operation off the free list, thus putting it beyond reach of a lot of people. Let the blind see but not in Australia. I dont think Fred Hollows would be very happy with this callous act.
- Even Telstra knows the problems this radiation causes. In one of their public documents on solving dropout problems with your computer modem they ,Telstra, suggest, to make sure you keep your Digital phone away from the modem cables even if the phone is only on standby and you are not actually using it.
- If you don't think that radio waves are harmful talk to your nearest ham radio operator, especially the older ones that have been exposed to high-powered radiowaves for a long time. I'll be amazed if you don't find them a bit strange.
