You know how sometimes you get all nostalgic for the old days (Are there any other days to get nostalgic about?) so you go read the newspapers from places that you used to live in? I used to live in the Northern Territory.
There's been a lot of talk about drought and climate change and whatever. I think that in the bush we're just going to have to get used to it. We've only been in this country for a couple of hundred years (He says, completely ignoring the aboriginal history of the place.) and I think that only now are we starting to get a grip on how the place works. It would seem to me that what we consider to be drought may in fact be the standard weather pattern, if not in the past, then certainly into the foreseeable future.
Although the Canadian alleged climatologist I heard on the steam powered wireless the other day who said that, "Australia is not experiencing a drought; you are just using too much water." seems to have been out in the sun a bit too long. How does using ground water cause below-average rainfall?
I'm not entirely convinced by the doomsayers of climate change, either. Mainly because I don't understand the science. They seem to receive pretty much uncritical acceptance from the purveyors of pop-science, but you only have to look through past issues of Popular Mechanics or New Scientist to see what sort of track record the futurologists have (Remember the millennium bug?). I do not entirely discount the climate-changers, I merely wish to say that I do not take as gospel that which I don't understand. I am not one of those people who say that the accepted forecast in the seventies was climate cooling, therefore we should ignore them now as they obviously don't know what they are talking about.
Opinions change as new information is found and greater understanding is reached. New ways of observing the relationship between disparate pieces of information are utilised and new ways of gathering and interpreting data are created. Complete knowledge and understanding does not spring forth fully formed from an initial observation. If this were the case then we would already know all there is to know about pretty much everything.
Some Famous Guy once said that,"With God, there are four options: If I choose to believe and there is no God, nothing happens. If I choose not to believe and there is no God, nothing happens. If I choose to believe and there is a God, I go to heaven. If I choose not to believe and there is a God, I go to hell. I choose to believe."
Apart from the fact that if there is a God, He ain't gunna be fooled by the lip-service given to him by some tool 'deciding' to believe and you gunna burn, baby, burn, I think that there is something in that quote for all of us. It seems to me that there is more upside to believing than downside.
If we treat climate change as a furphy and it is a furphy, life goes on unchanged. If we treat climate change as an actuality and it is a furphy, there will be some fairly major economic upheavals and quite a bit of inconvenience for quite a lot of people. If we treat climate change as a furphy and it is an actuality, a lot of people will die, a lot of people will suffer and almost everybody's life will be adversely affected. If we treat climate change as an actuality and it is an actuality, there will be some fairly major economic upheavals and quite a bit of inconvenience for quite a lot of people.
As you may or may not know, I am a farmworker. One thing that I have learned from being a farmworker is that you always make your plans expecting the worst. You never allow yourself to be caught by a series of setbacks; you make your plans with these setbacks in mind. If you do this correctly it allows you to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. In much the same way that this has allowed us to expand and look at maybe putting on an extra man at a time when For Sale signs are going up and people are being laid off, I think that by embracing climate change as a fact (Whether or no.) and behaving accordingly, at the very least Australia will be relatively better off than if we ignore it.
Most of the suggestions put forward by the more rational section of the Church of Greenhouse would seem to be pretty good housekeeping whatever the situation is.
Most people have landmarks in their life which they remember with great clarity and which they use to calculate the exact chronology of other lesser events. Four eggs ample a mother may say something like, "Let's see, you were born on the Tuesday after Laurie Fowler ironed out Big Nick (Hallowed be thy name) in the first quarter of the Grand Final, so you'll be thirty four next birthday." There aren't many people who don't know where they were when they watched a man named Armstrong walk upon the moon. I know that I was driving home from Brisbane when I heard on the radio that Princess Di was on the radio, too. And the glovebox and the dashboard and the bonnet. I think everyone knows what they were doing at the time. Unless they are too young. If you are too young to remember this event, can I just say to you with all sincerity: Fuck off, emo kid. Go harm yourself and leave the adults in peace. There are other, more personal landmarks in people's lives - first day at school, first kiss, first car, etc. I can vividly remember the first time that I had sex. I doubt if the girl involved has quite as distinct a memory. In fact, I'd be surprised if she even noticed it happened. Faster than a speeding bullet and all that. Going even further back, I can remember my first wank. Wasn't as much fun, but it took longer. And I didn't have to share it with anyone. For those interested in such things, here is a brief list of personal firsts: Album: Livin' In The Seventies, Skyhooks Motorcycle: Jawa 250 First motorcycle I actually paid for: Yamaha DT250 Car: HR Holden station wagon I could go on an on, but it is starting to look a bit like one of those meme things and they suck. There is one more first: the first time that I met someone without whom life would feel incomplete. It wasn't all that long ago, really.
John Williamson sucks. Really sucks. I mean, time is distorted when he passes by he sucks so hard. While Old Man Emu suspension components don't suck at all. They are incredibly overpriced but they are quality items. Anyway. For reasons best known to persons who know reasons for things, emus seem to be a fairly good guide to the state of play regarding weather around these parts. Specifically, emu numbers give a very good indication of the amount of feed available. Contrary to what would appear to me to be basic logic, emu numbers increase more rapidly as feed availability decreases. Doesn't make any sense to me, either. It has taken years of research by NASA, the CSIRO, NASCAR and Steve Irwin (and his heirs and inheritors) to deduce why this is. Unfortunately, they aren't telling anybody. Arseholes. I took these photos while ploughing the new place we bought. Ever since I started in this paddock there have been big mobs of emus roaming around. For the first couple of days I didn't pay much attention to them as they were all a couple of miles away at the other end of the paddock. As I got closer to them I started to watch them a bit closer. For a little while. Emus are boring. There are/ were three mobs, each with about eighty birdies in them, but yesterday they had a meeting of the ways, making one big mob with two- or three-hundred bush chooks gathered together to talk about that big noisy red bugger ruining their nice paddock. Some progressive birdies took the floor and told the old reactionaries about the joys of ploughed land and all the nice fresh dirt it contained. Either the progressives were persuasive or the reactionaries were scared, but all the emus wandered across from the unploughed country to the tilled land in a slow mass exodus. The photos don't do justice to the actual numbers there because they were all strung out in one long stream and ran every time I stopped the tractor anywhere near them, so I took these shots through the window as I was going along. Trust me, there were shitloads more than this - would I lie to you.
I am lazy. Really, really lazy. To prove it, here is a link-and-comment type post: It is never easy to present a balanced view on topics such as these, so I'm not going to. When are Muslims going to realise that discrimination is still discrimination whether you are being discriminated against or doing the discriminating yourself? I don't care whether your stupid goatherders superstition revered religion prevents you from carrying dogs or alcohol; the solution seems to be pretty bloody obvious. Go get a job which doesn't contravene your beliefs. Which one of the alleged men in the photo which accompanies this story doesn't deserve a kick in the nuts?* I'm lazy (I may have mentioned that already) so guess how much research I did*. Why God's Kitchen? I'm glade the Pope is giving us advice on reconciliation™ because the Catholic Church has such a long and proud tradition in this area - ask any meso-american. In other news, I watched a fair bit of Bathurst yesty and was quite pleased with the way that things worked out. It was the first time in about five years for me and I was impressed. I channel surfed quite a bit before the race started because, although Peter Brock was a legend in his field I hate it when people wear their heart on their sleeve and try to glorify themselves by the amount of grief they can exhibit. The race started out well when Mark (Public School Patrician Poonce) Skaife got punted and just kept getting better. At least, the coverage did. The race pretty well sucked until the last bit when they decided to actually race instead of have a procession behind the safety car. My pick won, too. Yay me. *Correct answer= 0
I need a sub-editor so that I can have wittier post titles
Da Boss bought another block of land the other day. 16,000 acres, making for a grand total of 71,000 acres (I didn't even knead a calculator to work that out. Clearly I am not a recent school leaver.) The block is about twenty kilometres down the road. No water comes with it, although there is a little river running through it. At least; there is a little river running through it when the little river is running. It still has some pretty useful waterholes in it, which is more than the rivers on this place has. Da Boss is trying to arrange a sharefarming deal on a 7,000 acre paddock between the new place and the old place which has been pulled but not raked. This would allow us to operate it as basically one big farm instead of one medium and one small farm. I went for a bit of an explore the other day and found a sheep bridge over the river which is bigger than that coathanger thing Sinny people are so inordinately proud of. There is only one paddock of cultivation which is 2200 acres. I've been running the offsets over it for a couple of days, by my calculations there are fourteen more days of ploughing ahead of me. In the same paddock. Sometimes farming isn't as exciting as being a stunt man or an international powerboat racer. In other news: did you know that it costs just over fifty times as much to call Vietnam as it does to call the US or UK? Neither did I. Wanna buy a kidney?
For reasons best known to persons who know reasons for things, emus seem to be a fairly good guide to the state of play regarding weather around these parts. Specifically, emu numbers give a very good indication of the amount of feed available. Contrary to what would appear to me to be basic logic, emu numbers increase more rapidly as feed availability decreases. Doesn't make any sense to me, either.
It has taken years of research by NASA, the CSIRO, NASCAR and Steve Irwin (and his heirs and inheritors) to deduce why this is. Unfortunately, they aren't telling anybody. Arseholes. I took these photos while ploughing the new place we bought. Ever since I started in this paddock there have been big mobs of emus roaming around. For the first couple of days I didn't pay much attention to them as they were all a couple of miles away at the other end of the paddock. As I got closer to them I started to watch them a bit closer.
