I’ve passed through NW NSW, plenty of cotton on the QLD side of the border too.
Chap I was speaking to works for a Canadian superannuation fund aka ‘Big Wheat’ with properties in southern NSW and over the QLD border.

I imagine, for you, it would be bliss…kinda like a good shit after a significant bout of constipation. Making stuff up about his forefathers certain made Bob feel better, superior even.

More popcorn, anyone?

Yep, Parrothead had an opportunity to differentiate himself

dum parrothead’s only credential for the top job is he drew the short straw when Photios knew not even he could make Keane likeable ……..

Suit hits Loudoun schools’ ‘mafia tactics’ against students and parents

They just can’t help themselves. Or perhaps it’s exactly what they wanted in the first place.

Deafening Drumbeats for War – Biden Sends More U.S. Troops to Ukraine Border, 101st Airborne Deployed, Six Destroyers to Mediterranean, F-35 Squadrons to U.K.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/06/29/deafening-drumbeats-for-war-biden-sends-more-u-s-troops-to-ukraine-border-101st-airborne-deployed-six-destroyers-to-mediterranean-f-35-squadrons-to-u-k/#more-234620

Do mask mandates work? Bay Area COVID data from June says no.

It’s all a Lie – Government reports prove Cost of Living Crisis & Travel Disruption is being done on purpose to advance ‘The Great Reset’

Planes, trains and automobiles. All three of these things are constantly being talked about in the mainstream media at the moment alongside a cost of living crisis, war in Ukraine and an alleged monkeypox outbreak.

Flights are being cancelled left, right and centre ruining planned holidays for thousands. Trains are about to come to a halt in the UK thanks to a “spontaneous” national rail strike. And the average person can just about afford to get to the end of the forecourt after filling up thanks to the spiralling cost of the price of fuel.

Whilst on the face of it, these things may seem like unfortunate events occurring at random, the truth is they are actually all occurring by design, and official government reports alongside historical data prove it.

Why?

Well, reports suggest it’s all to do with meeting ‘zero carbon targets’. But that is another charade in itself, so the real reason has something to do with advancing the fourth industrial revolution, where you will own nothing and apparently be happy about it. An agenda that Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum likes to call ‘The Great Reset’.

I was talking to an international farm worker at the hotel last night, he mentioned some people were angry about the amount of water cotton farmers use.

It’s one of those memes the environmentalists like to trot out, same for rice.
The return on Mgl/ha is substantial which supports a host of manufacturing/trades and ag supplies companies down to small owner operator contractors.

This summer has been “cold” which has meant lower yields and quality and I hear the cotton gins are using a lot of gas to dry the raw product before processing, which must be lopping a lot of the cream off.

Climatically WNSW and CQ/SQ are some of the best areas on the planet for cotton, with the Riverina being the same for rice.
You can’t tell a greenie that though.
They only want less people on the planet.

Re the cotton module cutting; I’d look closely at the demographics of said locals.

The German Asiatic Squadron went on to a significant victory over a second-line RN force at Coronel, and annihilation by modern battle cruisers off the Falkland Islands

There’s an account by one James Phelps about how the Australians seized German code books from German merchant ships on the outbreak of World War One – by reading the transmissions between the Asiatic Squadron and their colliers, they were tracking the squadron, and had the Admiralty listened to them, the disaster at Coronel may have been avoided.

Half way through. I think the age warnings are because of some of the video of the party has some very attractive young ladies in very skimpy bikinis cavorting.

^ locales

The big bastard came straight across out of the bush, hit me on the drivers door

Certainly gets the heart rate to jump.

AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman interviewed on ABC RN AM today.

Would not directly answer any question.

Just repeated pre-written lines using buzzwords “firming”, “transmission”, “investment”…

BusinessTerry McCrann

Why Chris Bowen is the weakest link in the Albanese government

Faced with the biggest energy crisis in Australia’s history, Chris Bowen has done a combination of absolutely nothing and doubling down on the lunacy that caused the mess in the first place.
Terry McCrann
Terry McCrann
3 min read
June 29, 2022 – 9:03PM
The Australian Business Network
68 comments

There’s one huge and dangerously potent exception to the ‘Labor-starting cautiously’ theme I argued yesterday.

This is the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen.

Coming into office to be faced immediately with the biggest energy crisis in Australian history – with prices of both electricity and gas going through the roof and with the very real threat of actual electricity blackouts and also gas shortages at the same time – what did Bowen do?

Simply, instructively and ominously, a combination of absolutely nothing and doubling down on the very cocktail of drift and the killing off our gas and real electricity generation that has caused the mess we are already in and has taken us right to the edge of a truly cataclysmic cliff.

Bowen, in the privacy of his delusions, undoubtedly thought he was given an agenda-setting landmark speech to the National Press Club in Canberra Wednesday. It was in fact a mess of sludge and – clearly to Bowen, utterly uncomprehended – contradiction.

He ruled out banning future coal and gas projects, but said he would not approve anything that was “inconsistent with our mandate”. That’s a mandate which effectively totally bans certainly coal-fired power stations and is all but incompatible with gas-fired power stations.

Does anyone seriously think this Labor Government and this ‘Energy’ minister is going to even grudgingly approve far less aggressively push for either coal or gas?

I put ‘Energy’ in quotation marks because it is seriously important to note that Bowen is the “Climate Change and Energy” minister – not the other way round. This government has made it officially clear that the main policy objective and focus is on ‘Climate Change’. It is officially not on ‘Energy’. Not on actually securing energy for 26m Australians – far less, securing that energy at the cheapest possible price and reliably and without rationing. That is secondary.

That in itself is disturbing enough in a generalised sense. But putting the preference for ‘Climate Change’ over ‘Energy’ in the hands of Bowen makes it far worse, for he is the very worst combination of ambition unmatched by ability and rather petulant enthusiasms. He’s not one that takes even discussion far less contradiction well. And in his short and unremarkable ministerial career he’s shown a predilection for childish enthusiasms. In his portfolio space his enthusiasm is clearly not energy for Australians but Rudd-style climate change posturing – made dangerously worse by exactly the same energy unicorn delusions of the official Dark Greens.

In his Wednesday posturing Bowen said the – my words, very definitely not his: utterly insane, devastatingly destructive and completely unachievable – 43 per cent CO2 emissions cuts by 2030 was not a ceiling but a floor.

That’s to say, give me more – climate change-posturing cuts, not more actual real, reliable, electricity and gas. Yes, he walked into an inherited mess that boiled over thanks in part but only part to Russia, so far as gas was concerned. The electricity mess was all entirely home-grown. But what has he done about it? What did he commit Wednesday to do now to cut prices for electricity and gas and guarantee supply?

Zero, zip, nada nothing. His speech was almost all about the wonderful world of Australia’s (fantasy) renewables future.

The one ‘today thing’ he boasted about was encouraging more EVs and building more EV chargers?

Does he understand – and it is a serious question, given that we are talking about Bowen – that EVs take electricity from the grid, they do nothing to add electricity to the grid?

Be afraid, be very afraid: he’s the ministerial twerp shaping your energy future.

Let me finish with one prediction: the seismic event in this Albanese Cabinet’s future could well develop to be a titanic struggle and climactic clash between Bowen’s lunacy and Treasurer Chalmers realism

Be afraid, be very afraid: he’s the ministerial twerp shaping your energy future.

And the above mentioned Westerman is the man charged with drawing the blueprint.

Australia, your luck just ran out.

“I still have my 8 year old and somewhat busted Casio Mudman (which just had first battery change since I first bought it about 3 months ago) for when I go railroading for money.”

My Citizen Eco-Drive (quartz with hands, stopwatch, & alarm, 30m water resistant) has never needed a battery in nearly 40 years – about 2 mins/day in full sunlight (which it gets from driving most of the time) is enough to keep it going. Went several years sitting a drawer and was dead flat – at the time I was doing high current 50VDC wiring and had seen someone melt a metal watch band shorting the supply out, so decided probably better not to wear it, which then became a habit until I stumbled across it years later looking for something else. After 4 hours of full sunlight (sat on window sill for a day), it came back and hasn’t missed a beat yet.
Seems to be about +-2 secs/month compared to railway and/or mobile network time.
Damn near impossible to break – I’ve smashed the face into bolt heads etc many times, and the worst is a scratch on the face that you can only see if you hold it just the right way. Titanium case and band, so quite light, and there are no marks on that – anywhere – other than the occasional bits of grunge from skin, sweat, oil and assorted grime etc, which is easily scraped off when it starts to look bad.
Very expensive watch in the day (IIRC, RRP in 1980’s was $800+), but worth every cent.
No idea if they still make them, but if so, highly recommended.

Big_Nambassays:
June 30, 2022 at 9:22 am
Jab jab booster…………………..

Despite 95%+ full vaccination of adult populations in Australia, TrialSite has continued to report on surges in new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

I remain ‘unjabbed’ and have yet to get this virus thingy. I have a ‘top notch’ immune system it appears. So, I have been talking to a top Pharma Group on how I can replicate my immune system, bottle it and sell the stuff. I could be a Billionaire overnight maybe. Naaaaaaaaaah. They can’t bottle it unfortunately. However, the Australian Federal Government ‘bottled it’ by caving into Big Pharma bigtime. Useless bunch of Muppets these ‘Pollies’ are…………………………..

The transcript should be up at RN in a day or so.

…attributes those figures to “poor whites” claiming ancestry for benefits and prestige.

Easily solved with the same welfare system for everyone regardless of “identity.”

Jab jab booster…………..

https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2022/06/29/safe-and-effective-69/

“The big bastard came straight across out of the bush, hit me on the drivers door and then did more damage on the wheel arch of the tub. Bull bars aren’t much use when they take a late run at you.”

Mate of mine ran a country smash repairs/dealership in northern NSW.
Had the case where one roo damaged two cars (a dusk or dawn thing IIRC – the worst time).
Bastard landed in the middle of the road just as two cars were passing each other.
Head into A pillar/windscreen of one, body into grill/engine bay of the other.
No one hurt other than minor scrapes, but the windscreen guy LOOKED like he was badly hurt because of all the roo blood and brains inside the car.
Only realised it was the same roo because they both ended up in the same shop, and they managed to notice the missing bits of the roo under the bonnet etc matched the windscreen one, then spoke to both drivers and confirmed it was one roo that damage both cars.

The turbo died on our Audi Q5 earlier this year, approaching 65 thousand on the clock.

What?

A turbo should be designed and manufactured to last the expected life-time of the engine, which would be at least double 65K.

A very good picture of the results of Covid & Vax coercion in the USA by commentator Alex Berenson:

On Covid, schools, and the death of the liberal expert class
Alex Berenson

The New Yorker just ran its second big negative piece on Ron DeSantis in a week, proof of how much the woke media fears the governor of Florida. (Yes, I read the New Yorker so you don’t have to.)
The article is nominally about DeSantis’s support for age-appropriate teaching of gender and sexuality in public schools. Or, as the Democrats like to call it, “Don’t Say Gay.” The wokesters have not figured out that label is not quite the devastating comeback they think.
Plenty of parents of six-year-olds are fine with not having teachers say “gay” – they think that even if they support same-sex marriage (as I do), they and not outsiders should decide what their first- or second-graders hear about sex and family structures. Then again, these are the people who thought “defund the police” was an electoral winner, so their political instincts may not be the best.
But I digress, briefly. As you would expect, the article treats DeSantis as a political opportunist. But, unlike most woke media reporters these days, the author actually took the time both to talk to conservatives who support DeSantis’s views and to try to understand why those views are gaining so much ground right now. (As opposed to just repeating Fox News misinformation racism misogyny America is the worst endlessly.)
The result was something close to the truth – and the best explanation I have seen for the way Covid continues to drive our politics, even if no one is talking about it anymore. I urge you to read these three paragraphs – especially the sentence I have bolded – closely:
When I asked Republican activists and operatives about the rise of the school issues, they told a very similar story, one that began with the pandemic, during which many parents came to believe that their interests (in keeping their kids in school) diverged with those of the teachers and administrators. As Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, put it to me, parents who were in many cases apolitical “became concerned about these overwrought lockdowns, and then when they asked question after question, there was no transparency about them, which led them to pay more attention when their kids were on Zoom. They overheard things being taught. They asked questions about curricula. They were just stonewalled every step of the way.” The battles regarding the covid lockdowns, Roberts told me, opened the way for everything that came after. “This is the key thing,” he said. “It started with questions about masking and other aspects of the lockdowns.”
Both parties right now are trying to answer the question of how fundamentally covid has changed politics. “From 2008 to 2020, elections were decided on the question of fairness—Obama ’08, Obama ’12, and Trump ’16 were all premised on the idea that someone else was getting too much, and you were getting too little, and it was unfair,” Danny Franklin, a partner at the Democratic strategy firm Bully Pulpit Interactive and a pollster for both Obama campaigns, told me. But the pandemic and the crises that followed (war, inflation, energy pressures) were not really about fairness but an amorphous sense of chaos. “People are looking for some control over their lives—in focus groups, in polls, once you start looking for that you see it everywhere,” Franklin said.
Both parties had shifted, in his view. Biden had sought to reassure Americans that the government, guided by experts, could reassert its control over events, from the pandemic to the crisis in energy supply. Republicans, meanwhile, had focussed on assuring voters that they would deliver control over a personal sphere of influence: schools that would teach what you wanted them to teach, a government that would make it easier, not harder, to get your hands on a gun. A moral panic about gender identity might seem anachronistic, but it served a very current political need. Franklin said, “It’s a way for Republicans to tell people that they can have back control of their lives.”
SOURCE
The problem – for Biden, for AOC, for the New York Times, for all the people in Park Slope who went to the right schools and believe in the current thing and know paradise is just around the corner if only we raise our taxes a little more – is that “the government, guided by experts” hasn’t had a great couple of years.
To say the least.
The profound failure of lockdowns and now vaccines have woken many average folks to the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, expert overconfidence, and authoritarianism in the name of safety.
They took our rights. The media and public health authorities would like you to forget the closed playgrounds and shuttered malls and mask mandates of 2020. And the vaccine mandates of last fall. They want you to forget that for a while, the federal government tried to take the right to work from tens of millions of unvaccinated people. State and local governments went even further; and countries like Canada and Australia further still. UNTIL 10 DAYS AGO, CANADA DID NOT ALLOW UNVACCINATED PEOPLE ON PLANES – effectively curtailing their right to travel in a country that stretches more than 4,000 miles from British Columbia to Newfoundland.
And they took our rights FOR NOTHING.
You and I and they know everything they did failed.
The proof sits in super-cold freezers where millions of vials of mRNA shots, the greatest medical breakthrough since fentanyl, sit slowly decaying. The proof is in the hospitals and pharmacies that are not offering those jabs to kids under 5, because demand is near-zero… and maybe because some of the physician-administrators who make millions of dollars a year running those hospitals know in their hearts that the risk-benefit analysis for mRNA shots for kids is all risk/no benefit and actually want to do the right thing for once. Not enough to say anything publicly, let’s not get crazy, but enough to make the shots a little harder to get.
And Dr. Anthony Fauci – double-boosted Anthony Fauci – gave us some more proof today.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer megalomaniac. (This is your excuse to retire, Tony! You got yerself the long Covid!)
So, no, I don’t plan to let Covid and the vaccines go anytime soon. Those of us on Team Reality can’t let the Faucis of the world run from their failure, we can’t pretend it didn’t happen. No mulligans here. Especially because the mRNA shots may have long-run risks we are still just beginning to see.
So the New Yorker frames the proposition the two parties are offering exactly right. The Democrats offer expertise, Ivy League brilliance, the smartest folks in the room; the Republicans personal control.
But why wouldn’t people trust their own judgment over that of “experts” after the disaster of the last couple of years? What the left cannot seem to understand is that I’m not the problem – which is why kicking me off Twitter didn’t save the mRNA shots or the mandates. Ron DeSantis is not the problem either.
Reality is the problem for the left. Reality wants a course correction, and in four months voters are set to deliver that message to the Democratic Party with a foghorn blast.

Sorry, WITHOUT major mechanical repairs.

I haven’t dared yet to turn on the Sports mode but will give it a burl on a longer trip soon on the way to my 80th birthday party down south to Jervis Bay.

Happy 80th Lizzie! There’s still a lot of living to do! Still love the South Coast of NSW. We had a beach house down there (Manyana) years ago and have many wonderful memories – especially when the grandchildren were small. Beautiful, beautiful beaches and hinterland. I believe that it is starting to suffer the same overdevelopment of many coastal oases – so I guess we had the best years.

Dr Faustus says:
June 30, 2022 at 10:10 am
AEMO calls for urgent investment in key projects to shore up electricity supply

Good analysis. I can sum it up in 2 words: we’re fucked.

Someone, apparently the Queensland Leader of the Opposition, talks tough. Damned tough.

Palaszczuk to face ‘day of reckoning’ as ‘damning’ integrity report slams government

I note Palaszczuk has pre-empted him by embacing the report enthusiastically.

Queensland, state of corruption.

One of my son’s has a friend from schooldays (private school) who applied for and got a favourable house loan because he identifies as aboriginal. First I’d known of it!

The funny thing is he’s pro-Trump!