Keeping busy in retirment is a good thing

Dawn, Robin, Christina, Elliott

Sometimes I wonder how I found time to work.

My last job was at a high security installation 25 km west of Alice Springs. I'd get up at 6 am, shower, iron a shirt, get dressed, have breakfast and be ready to depart at 7:00 if I travelled by the bus provided or 7:20 if I drove myself.

I'd drive out listening to AM, an Australian radio show on the ABC and arrive around before 8 am. By the time I'd gone through security checks and walked to my office, it would be 8 am. I'd crank up my computer and begin my day's work. At 4:15 pm I'd lock my office, head through the security system and be heading home at 4:30 pm.

Since retiring, I wake up at 6:30 - 7:00 am, switch on the kettle and make a cup of coffee. I then crank up my laptop and read my email. While doing so, I check my calendar and write on a notepad several things I need to, or want to do during the day.

I have breakfast about 10 am unless I have somewhere to go beforehand. I'm never hungry before that, so I don't see any sense in eating. This moves lunch out to around 2 pm.

The rest of my day is filled in with housework, cooking, car washing, or other jobs that don't disappear when you leave work. I also volunteer for three different organisations, one of which I am heavily involved with; the Returned & Services League. I created and manage their internet site (blog site), run the membership program, apply for and manage grants from the three levels of government, work behind the bar when our Hut is open, clean occasionally, buy supplies, and otherwise help keep the place running. This includes turning up for sausage sizzles - see the photo above. 

I'm president of an organisation's management committee and with the help of a secretary, hold and run meetings bimonthly.

Thursdays I attend a Men's Shed where I turn lovely pieces of wood into something else.

Friday is the day I attend any medical or other appointments or go for a drive to a vineyard or go out for lunch.

Between times, I've been writing my autobiography for my children and grandson so that, when I take that journey from which nobody returns, it might answer some of the questions they have later in life. I know when my mother and father died, I wished I had asked them much more about their lives before I joined them.

Psychologist Erik Erikson posited "Eight Ages of Man". In the Eighth Age, one of Integrity versus Despair he said:

... that people in late adulthood reflect on their lives and feel either a sense of satisfaction or a sense of failure. People who feel proud of their accomplishments feel a sense of integrity, and they can look back on their lives with few regrets. However, people who are not successful at this stage may feel as if their life has been wasted. They focus on what “would have,” “should have,” and “could have” been. They face the end of their lives with feelings of bitterness, depression, and despair."

I'm in the integrity part. I've had a great life and have no bitterness, depression or despair about being older and heading towards the crematorium.

I'll keep busy, enjoying the rewards of 51 years of work, helping others through volunteering and continue with a positive outlook until I can't continue.

Robin

Carrying Knives and Prohibited Weapons

When I was a police officer, knives weren't as huge a problem as they are now. These days, many more assaults and murders are committed with knives so police have had to crack down on people who carry them.

My SA Knife

This makes it difficult for people like me who are law-abiding, have never been convicted of anything, but who carry a small pocket knife in their pocket and a larger knife in their car. These knives are visible in the photo above.

Why do I carry a Swiss Army pocket knife? For many years as a Traffic Accident Investigator I needed something to cut seat belts, makeshift tourniques, webbing, and bandages or materials that we were using as bandages. There seemed to be always something that needed a knife and when you're out on some highway at midnight, it's not easy to find one unless you carry it.

Later, as a training manager I often had parcels of student materials I needed to open, IT equipment that needed a screwdriver occasionally, a bottle opener before screw-off beer caps that I needed sometimes after work, and very rarely a can opener when staying overnight on Aboriginal communities where I ate tinned foods. My Swiss Army knife has been a lifesaver. Why, I've even sharpened pencils with it!

Sometimes I find when I buy take-away food I need the knife to cut pieces of meat into more edible proportions. The wooden knives now in vogue don't cut it. (Pun?)

Why do I have a survival knife in my car door? 

The knife I have in my car door, shown above, has a belt cutting attachment, a glass breaking knob, and a larger knife blade if I need it. If I have a traffic incident and finish up conscious in a waterway or in the scrub in my car, I want to be able to get out as soon as I can. Cars sink in water. I've recovered several people who drowned in their cars. Cars catch fire. I've recovered the burnt bodies of people burned in cars. I'm not keen to do either if I can avoid it.

So, am I worried about being charged with being in possession of prohibited weapons. No.

I've read the South Australian Summary Offences Act and Regulations and by my reading, neither of my knives is classed as prohibited. Additionally, I never get pulled over by police except on rare occasions for a drink driving test.

Every state and territory has its own laws regarding prohibited weapons. I take pot luck that if I'm pulled up and my knives found, the police officer concerned will have sufficient nous to realise I'm not a likely candidate to attack anyone with either knives.

I could kill someone with a large spanner from my tool box, why would I need a knife?

Also, bear in mind that I don't carry either knife when I visit a hotel of an evening and if I was still going to discos and piss drinking extravaganzas I wouldn't be stilly enough to take either knife with me.

Police officers should assess the place and conditions under which a person is carrying a knife (or multi-tool with a blade), consider the person's criminal history (if any), and the likelihood it is being carried as a weapon for self-defence. That's what I did as a police officer. I never arrested farmers who had knives on their belts who had dropped in to their local for a beer on their way home. I did arrest gang members engaged in brawls late evening who had knives in their possession.

Common sense must prevail.

My advice: check the relevant legislation in the state or territory where you spend most of your time and comply with the legislation.

Robin

Goodbye Net Zero?

 

The more I read about the deteriorating energy situation in the UK and Europe due to an over-reliance on so-called renewable, green energy - wind and solar, I'm beginning to see the end of Net Zero.

Since leaving full-time work in 2012 and retiring (Goodness me, is it really a decade?) I've had time to read extensively about global warming (now climate change), renewable energy, and associated topics.

My opinion, following that reading, is that global warming has been so low, it's negligible. Carbon dioxide is more benefit to the planet and humans than stated and there is no link between temperature and C02.

Additionally, evidence is that we are heading for a cooling period (climate is cyclical, not linear) and more people die from hypothermia than hyperthermia. Remember Texas? Something around 700 people died during 2020-21 due to power failures and lack of warmth although there were debates about actual numbers. Even one unnecessary death is too much.

Claims by alarmists since the 70s of life-ending, world-destroying heating events have not eventuated, not on even one occasion.

Now, as a result of government decisions based on dodgy scientific advice, billions of pounds have been wasted on wind turbines and decommissioning of coal-fired power stations. The UK imports billions of pounds worth of gas from Russia and elsewhere so that it can avoid gas fracturing at home.

Most of the components of wind turbines are manufactured in China which has an open-slather agreement when it comes to C02 emissions. Strange that. We simply move our emissions to somewhere else so we can claim to be "green".

The public is beginning to become aware of the vast cost to their countries to implement an unnecessary, unhelpful Net Zero by 2050 policy and a fight back has begun.

The war in Ukraine has also helped people reconsider their energy needs and futures.

Goodbye Net Zero!

Robin

"Follow your own dogma, not that of others. Live your own life, your own way."

The New Woke Order

The stable, sensible, friendly society we once knew seems to be unravelling at a great rate. 

The Left-wing/Marxists are gaining ground as they knowingly or unwittingly help implement the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Great Reset. A reset that will be disastrous for most men and beasts, although the beasts won't have to put up with the stupidity or the totalitarianism because they live in ignorant bliss.

The WEF is an unelected body run by the incredibly wealthy, so-called "elite", masterminded by Klaus Schwab and supposed to ensure we will, "own nothing, owe nothing and be happy".

Sounds wonderful doesn't it?

You'll live in a world where technological automation has taken over your job, productive organisations instead of elected governments run the show, and you receive a Universal Basic Income to keep you in a suspended state of dependant poverty. Dependant on the oligarchs who will be ruling the roost. 

There's still no such thing as a free lunch. If you are reliant on someone else to provide your income, they control your life. That's what the non-so-great Great Reset is all about, control.

The UN, WEF and others have been preparing us for this for decades and all the changes we see in society are leading us into the lion's den. 

We've managed to insinuate many of the UN's Agenda 21/30 aspirations into our communities already. 

"Over 20 goals comprise the "new world order" the United Nations will focus on as part of its "Agenda 21/2030 Mission Goals," according to the claim. Items on the agenda include one world government; a single cashless currency; government-owned and controlled schools, colleges and universities and an end to single-family homes." (HREF)

The "wokeism" to which we are currently inundated is part of this platform. The idea that the stupid vegan activist has in the capture above, calling animals by a pronoun, is part of a significant problem we have with Leftists trying to convince us that gender is "fluid" and "assigned after birth", not as a result of birth. Even Australia's premier science organisation, the CSIRO has adopted this lie, they have reportedly implemented special leave provisions for staff who are gender reassigning and now agree that it's not biology that determines gender, but the gender a person decides to adopt. How many genders that includes, I'm not sure.

I do know, it's an unusual stance for a supposedly scientific organisation to adopt, but it seems that government agencies and some private sector organisations bend over backwards to adopt any of the latest politically correct, woke ideologies pushed by the Marxists. Critical race theory, historical revisionism, climate alarmism, gender fluidity, and even the latest religion of Net Zero.

As rainfall that Australia's Principal Scientist, Tim Flannery once said would never fall again, inundates much of our east coast, some of our fellow citizens blame unfortunate Prime Minister, Scott Morrison for not managing the climate as if he could wave a wand and tell it all to behave.

These people vote and breed, probably offspring like the lady shown above - half-wits and morons.

Next, some true believer will tell us if we had implemented a carbon tax, none of this flooding would have occurred. Our species is intelligent, but as yet not intelligent enough.

I'm glad that I'm much closer to taking that journey from which nobody returns than I am to beginning a journey. I feel sorry my children and grandson will have to put up with this nonsense. It seems to get worse each week.

Robin