Agmates

I just cannot for the life of me fathom what these people are on about.

“OPPONENTS of water fluoridation have vowed to give LNP leader Lawrence Springborg their vote if he moves to scrap the controversial practice.

Almost 80 per cent of southeast Queensland households are now drinking fluoridated water.”

Welcome to Queensland where residents would rather lose our teeth than drink fluoride in our water. Well some would, not me.

I would hope that Lawrence Springborg and the LNP don’t fall for this blatant political ploy. I mean for god sake, putting fluoride in the drinking water has been done in most other states for the last 20-30 years. Queensland has had none and our rate of dental cavities is almost 30% higher than any other state in Australia.

It’s not a health risk. There are no health side affects in any other state and 20-30 years on we’d know if there was. The only risk is that you may just have to visit your dentist a lot less often. It is a shameful scam how the Queensland Dental Association has lobbied against fluoridation for the last 2 decades.

Those people who are against fluoridation would be the same folks to oppose any and every change. We all hate change and the older we get, the more we resist it. Even if that change is good for our health.

It’s a fact that the only people who like change are wet babies.

So I urge Lawrence Springborg not to take the cheap political opportunistic approach of giving these anti-fluoride campaigners any oxygen. When I moved to Queensland 27 years ago there use to be  a big sign at the Queensland / NSW border that said,

Welcome to Queensland, Please turn your clock back 20 years.

If  Springborg and the LNP give their support to these people for the sake of a few votes, we could prove to the rest of Australia that we really are a state full of backward hicks, with very well healed dentists.

Have Your say!

Good morning Agmates. We had a beautiful storm here last night, a total of 13mm fell with more storms predicted today. As you can see here on the Weather Zone site Gympie has had 89.4mm for the month so far. A bit short of the 135.6 mm which is the 136 year average. Maybe the storms forecast for today will fix that.

Today’s Weather | Weather Zone : A front is bringing strong, showery winds to southeastern SA, VIC, TAS and the southwest slopes of NSW.

The monsoon trough is causing widespread storms and showers across the tropics. Easterly winds in southwest WA are becoming hot.

*****

More Later ….

Have Your Say … to leave your comment on something in the links above or to start you own topic click on Comments.

To make a bold heading for your topic. - <strong> Your Topic </strong> will make it bold.

Some other code you can use -

Quotes - <backquote> Whatever it is your quoting </backquote>

Italics - <em> whatever it is your wanting as italic </em>

Have fun….

How does a community prosper when it has no money? This fascinating film shows exactly how?

The population of an impoverished part of Brazil just invented their own money, with support from local banks. It has enabled them to trade and thrive. The results are incredible..

So you’d have to ask - just what is money?

Agmates Video Gallery.

Have Your say!

The 2008 wheat harvest is finished and as predicted by Agmates, this years deregulation of the Australian Export Wheat market has been a nightmare for growers.

What should have been a real one of those catch-up years for wheat growers after years of drought has turned into a lost opportunity.

Australia’s leading grains trading commentator Malcolm Bartholomaeus [pictured], a market analyst for Callum Downs Commodity News and grain grower at Clare in South Australia said:

“Australian grain prices usually correlated highly with prices in Chicago. But this year, instead of being $10 a tonne lower, he said they had been up to $50 a tonne lower, priced off the cheaper Argentinean and Baltic Sea wheat.”

Prior to deregulation there was only one wheat exporter - AWB, now with deregulation there are 20 exporters to deal with and as Bartholomaeus says they are $50 off the Chicago price.

Growers are not dummies and have taken matters into their own hands storing 60-70% of the crop in anticipation of a better prices.

Whilst multinational traders  say they are happy with deregulation (of course, they are making money) in hindsight any honest wheat farmer would be filthy on the result. What should have been a very good ‘catch -up-year’  has turned out to be a lost opportunity.

Richard Clark [pictured] , chairman of the NSW Farmers Association grains committee, said:

“You couldn’t have picked a worse year to deregulate than this year.”

Richard Clark said it was a complex harvest that showed:

“just how unprepared the industry was for deregulation. It has turned into a logistics shambles”.

He was critical of the storage and handling systems, the slow start to the shipping program and the low prices.

Wheat growers should in particular be asking those state based farm organizations that supported deregulation how the hell they could have supported a process that has turned out to be clearly detrimental to wheat growers incomes ?

The Victorian Farmers Federation, South Australian Farmers Federation and AgForce in QLD quickly spring to mind.

Perhaps a nice ‘thank you’ letter to those organizations and these Liberal Senators who staunchly supported deregulation, Senators Bill Heffernan, and Judith Adams and Liberal MP’s Wilson Tuckey .And of course lets not forget our brilliant Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.

If you need their contact details for your letter of  ‘thanks’ just let me know by way of comment and I’ll post them for you.

Have Your Say!

G’day Agmates. Well 2008 is fast drawing to a close. It was such a beautiful day yesterday that my Princess and i just had the day off. Back into it today.

Today’s Weather | Weather Zone : Moist air feeding into a trough is bringing light showers to northeastern NSW. A low and a trough over the tropics are causing thundery showers and rain. Very warm easterlies are affecting the NT and WA, while cool westerly winds are bringing a few showers to western TAS.

*****

More later

Have Your Say … to leave your comment on something in the links above or to start you own topic click on Comments .

To make a bold heading for your topic. - <strong> Your Topic </strong> will make it bold.

Some other code you can use -

Quotes - <backquote> Whatever it is your quoting </backquote>

Italics - <em> whatever it is your wanting as italic </em>

Have fun….

Agmates is now on Facebook and we’d like you to join us.

Facebook has over 70 million users world wide. I’ve been looking at it for a while, and have taken the time over the last couple of days to set up the Agmates site on Facebook.

Here is the link to have a look. If your already a Facebook user please join us as an Agmates Fan.

You can help to whole community learn how to use it.

If your not and would like to get involved just follow the link and register, then join us as a fan.

I’m not sure how this will go, but it’s hard to ignore 70 million users. We can all learn about it together.

It seems to have some pretty useful features for the Agmates community.

It appears that the NSW police believe they can arrest private citizens for disobeying their commands, even when those commands and their actions are unlawful?

A MAN detained and threatened with arrest under the Terrorism Act for filming police on his mobile phone.. Nick Holmes a Court, CEO of web-based media companies BuzzNumbers and ShiftedPixels, was walking to his home near Kings Cross in Sydney about 10pm on December 19.

Mr Holmes a Court said he had started filming what looked like a search after he noticed a group of police walking down his street.

“I went to one guy and asked what was going on but he told me to move along, and if I didn’t they’d be able to arrest me,” he said.

“So I moved down the street a few hundred metres to where my apartment was, pulled out my phone and started filming.”

Mr Holmes a Court said he had stopped filming before two of the police officers approached, demanding he surrender his BlackBerry mobile phone and telling him he had committed a crime if he had recorded them.

Well actually no, he had committed no crime. In fact the police had no legal right to take his phone, search it and delete the footage. But they did it anyway.

Police not wanting to be scrutinized, smacks of a police state, does it not?

Have Your Say!

Dr. Martin Hertzberg, is a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry. In a letter to the USA Today he savages the Gore-IPCC theory that human activity is causing global warming.

“The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence shows that the Gore-IPCC theory that human activity is causing global warming is false….

The global warming alarmists don’t even bother with data! All they have are half-baked computer models that are totally out of touch with reality and have already been proven to be false….

From the El Nino year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C. From Jan., 2007 until the Spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C.”

Have Your say!

NewScientist freelance journalist Bijal Trivedi [pictured] reckons - ‘Kangaroo burgers could save the planet‘.

Bajil claims:

Worldwide, livestock burps are responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions - more than produced from all forms of transport combined.

As we have pointed out previously this figure of 18% is a complete fabrication conjured up by the IPCC Vegetarian chairman Rajendra Pachauri [pictured] .

The FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, made public last year to world acclaim, states that livestock contributes 18 per cent of the global warming effect, even more than transport.

But buried in the report is the information that deforestation - mainly in the Amazonian rainforest - is included in that figure. Without it, livestock’s contribution falls to less than 12 per cent.

One of the report’s main authors, Pierre Gerber, a Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations livestock policy officer, has been openly critical of IPCC Chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri and others, saying they had misused the information in the report.

.

Bajil’s report goes on to say that two Australian Scientists can save the planet:

There is a simpler alternative. Two Australian biologists say there is a sure-fire way to reduce methane emissions without resorting to complex biotechnology… George Wilson and Melanie Edwards, based at Australian Wildlife Services in Canberra, have calculated that replacing a third of Australia’s sheep and cattle with kangaroos would slash cattle emissions and reduce the nation’s entire greenhouse gas output by 3 per cent.

“It’s not a completely wacky idea,” says Wilson

Why don’t we get rid of all farmers and eat stray dog and road kill. Thats idea’s nealy as ‘wacky’ as getting rid of 9 million cattle and 30 million sheep not to mention a third of all our farmers.

Australia’s Livestock emissions are guesstimated on the 18% lie. If so they are in fact a third less. This means using Wilson & Edwards calculations we could reduce our emissions by 2% and hence the worlds emissions by 0.026 percent.  All we’d have to do to achieve that is get rid of about $7 billion worth of livestock.

Now that’s more than wacky - its insane.

Have Your say.

Craig Hodges did a motorbike trip from Melbourne to Broome in September / October this year. He has a terrific blog and this pictorial coverage of Bull Catching on Karunjie Station in the kimberley is excellent. The photos on Craig’s blog take a while to load, but they are really well worth the wait.

Below is a sample of just 3 of them just to give you an idea of the quality of Craig’s photography. Click here to visit Craig’s blog.

A large white shorthorn bull is spotted from the air by the helicopter and skillfully brought out onto open ground. Sam "parks" the bull for the Mick in the bull catcher to chase and knock over.

Lifting the front of the vehicle, this powerful shorthorn bull puts up a fight. The front of the vehicle is repeated rammed and lifted for several bone-rattling moments.

Mick works fast and places his shoe over the eye of the bull to reduce the very real risk of being gouged by the horn of the bull as it tries to break free and get to its feet.

Have Your say!