Horse 2158 - The Sweetest Argument In The World?

http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/australia-and-new-zealand-battling-over-manuka-the-champagne-of-honeys-20160825-gr1ibe.html
There's a fight Down Under over manuka honey, the so-called superfood famed for its antibacterial qualities. On one side, New Zealand beehive owners say they should have exclusive rights to the manuka name. On the other, Australian producers say the manuka tree that gives the sticky stuff its name is an Aussie native and their honey is just as super as its Kiwi cousin.
- The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 Aug 2016

You couldn't make it up, could you? To recap, there is a campaign underway in New Zealand to restrict the use of the name Manuka Honey to New Zealand, on the basis that the word "manuka" is a Maori word.
Manuka is the name in Maori of the nectar of the mānuka tree or Leptospermum Scoparium, which after being found in New Zealand, was also found in Southeastern Australia, it is this flower which bees visit, which makes Manuka honey distinct from regular old normal Honey. The interesting thing is that there is a suburb in Canberra called Manuka which is also named after the plant and for lack of a different word in Australia, the same plant inherited the same name.
I'm not going to hide my contempt here because I think that it is utterly ridiculous that this is even being entertained and here's why.

Usually names if they are to be protected, are done so on a regional basis. Champagne for instance, can not be called champagne unless it comes from the Champagne region of France; otherwise it is just sparkling wine. Balsamic Vinegar Of Modena must come from the region surrounding Modena in Italy. Newcastle Brown Ale even has a protection order upon it, though that is somewhat clouded, and in theory must come from Newcastle Upon Tyne. Manuka, isn't a region or even a place and so, how can it possibly be held under a regional name protection order? It makes more sense that Hereford Beef should come from Hereford because at least Hereford is a real place; unlike Manuka which although is a real place, is not in New Zealand.
I can understand New Zealand's whinge because Australia has been pinching things from its annoying little brother since ages ago. Australia is world famous in New Zealand for stealing Kiwiana and passing it off as our own. Just think about Russell Crowe, the Finn Brothers and the Pavlova. We'll gladly take credit for them even though they came from New Zealand and not Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald's "Australian Of The Century" in 1999 was Sir Donald Bradman which is understandable but in second place was Phar Lap, who wasn't Australian but a New Zealander (and a horse).

We've been linked together as a pair of feuding brothers since before we were both nations. Australia and New Zealand fought alongside each other in the Boer War and New Zealand is mentioned in the Australian Constitution and would have been part of Australia if they had passed the referendum. After gaining nationhood, we continued to fight in World War I, at places like Gallipoli, the Somme and Ypres, as the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps or ANZAC; both nations celebrate ANZAC Day. Our two flags look too much like each other for comfort and many major firms do business on both sides of the ditch.
That still doesn't change the fact that when it comes to things like the Bledisloe Cup, the Olympic Games, the Commonwealth Games and the cricket, we are the best of enemies and the worst of friends.

It doesn't surprise me that there would be a claim from New Zealand on the name Manuka Honey but it kind of ignores one little thing - the English language is a vulture.
The English language stole words from everywhere it's been. The words buffalo, pyjama, jubilee, samurai, orange, banana, potato, kangaroo, billabong, have all been pilfered and put to service in the great behemoth of the English language. The word "manuka" might very well be a specific word to describe a specific thing but I just don't think that it means that the word belongs to the Maori as a thing that can be owned anymore. The word has jumped the fence, left the pasture and has joined the long paddock along with the other words; once it has escaped, I don't think it will ever be tamed again.

This also leads to an interesting dilemma. Suppose that the word "manuka" is wrangled for New Zealand use only, does that mean that businesses in the suburb of Manuka in Canberra should be forced to abandon their names? What if through some bizarre coincidence (which might become a test case), that there was an apirist in the suburb of Manuka, then what? Would a business called Manuka Honey which was from Manuka be forced to change the name of its product even though Manuka Honey was honey that came from Manuka? Would a regional claim which isn't based on the name of a region, hold legal weight over a claim that wasn't based on a region but certainly had a sense of place? Such a thing would be even more specific than just a regional claim.

The obvious question which immediately arises from this is what do you call that particular kind of honey which is made from the flowers of the manuka plant if you cannot use the word "manuka"? Other varieties are named after the plants and flowers which the bees visit, like Tasmanian Box and Redgum, so then what? I don't think that the people making the claim over the word "manuka" care even one iota about the consequences which will be wreaked; nor will they be left with the problem of coming up with a marketable alternative. It seems even more insidious that if the legal claim is successful, then you can't use a descriptor to describe the thing which needs describing.

I hope that the courts who end up deciding the fate of this, come to the proper conclusion that this is facetious and throw it out on its ear. I personally hope that this campaign fails and falls headlong into a vat of sweet sweet goo. Otherwise, this is just going to leave a bad taste in our mouths.

Horse 2157 - T' Queen Is All Northern Lyke Innit

Ey up.
'Ow Northern is the Queen lyke then, eh?

In doing research for summat totally unrelated, I've found out that in addition to her Royal Corgis and racing horses, she's got both a pigeon loft where all of her pigeons wear band with ER on, but she's also got her own troop of racing whippets.
Let me just spell this out. Her son is going to inherit the family business, she's got a place up in Scotland because London is quote unquote "too hot" and she wants summat a bit more parky out and she's got pigeons and whippets.

You can blame her grandad George V for all this when in 1917, he changed family name from Saxe-Coburg Gotha which sounds dead Krauty lyke, to Windsor which is proper English. Start singing rule Britannia and Jerusalem. In fact, he were so much in hurry to show that he were English an' all, that he were first English king t' go down mine. And he were first king t' go to football match.
His son George VI weren't even going to be king until his brother had had enough and racked off tae America. He died really young because he couldn't speak all that good and were always nervous and smoked like 40 Woodbines a day. His lungs packed up an' Lizzie were Queen at age 25.
Charlie boy has been waiting for old Lizzie to pop her clogs for what seems like forever and who only knows when we'll get King Billy IV and George VII.

It ent surprise me that the Queen is all northern. If you look back tae Lizzie I, she didnae have any kids and so Jimmy VI of Scotland went och aye the noo and took the crown of England as well. Of course Charlie I was a madman and ended up splitting the kingdom in twain, so that just proves that if you have a king which is too far northern, things get right daft. Best tae pick summat a little bit more south.

Of course you dinnae want someone who's too much o't' south because then it's all Essex and Home Counties and Burberry and no-one should be bothering wi' all o' that. So that's why the Queen keeps horses and whippets.
You can just imagine her out with her book from Ladbrokes or William Hill and looking at the form guide, or walking through the paddock wi' a can of Special Brew t' give to someone's gee-gee or dish licker in Race 5. What's her spiel if someone catches her on the sly? Well who's going to suspect the Queen? And even if they did, no-one's going to grass her up because... she's the queen.

It was probably her mum that got her on to pigeons, whippets and horses. Her mum, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons was a commoner, and in her case I expect that that meant she hung around real people. When the Second World War came around and old Adolf stupid-moustache started chuckin' bombs about, I bet that it were Lizzy Bowes-Lyons giving it a bit of Whoa and White and saying "No bairn o' mine is gaan sit around idle. She's gaan drive trucks." And Lizzie did.
Mind you, Lizzy Bowes-Lyons is probably the reason why B&H and Gordon's Gin had t' royal warrant on. She lived beyond the century, broke the ton, claimed the triple digits because she were made of tough stock o' t' Yeo (whatever in blinkies the Yeo are).

See that's the thing about the North. If it's all supposed to be grim up north, then why is it all so pretty? This is the land that gave us Peter Rabbit, Hovis bread adverts wi' boys cycling in, Yorkie chocolate, t' Angel o' t' North, Blackpool Rock, the Beatles, Gerry and Pacemakers an' Vauxhall Astras. Can't be all that grim then, eh?
An' did those feet in ancient times, walk upon England's mountains green? Yeah, where are all the mountains? Ben Nevis and Snowdon aren't even in England; so it must've been somewhere else. My suggestion is t' Pennines; and where are they? Up north!

Horse 2156 - Treaty

I was sent an email from someone called Joanna Dudley, which said:

Dear Horse,

I saw your article about why you think that recognising Indigenous Australians in the preamble of the Constitution is pointless and at first I was really angry but then I saw that your solution of setting aside places like the Senate was a practical, rather than having a symbolic solution to issue. I think that your idea is unworkable and would never be seriously proposed but what do you think about a treaty.

Yours sincerely,
Joanna Dudley. 
(email address withheld)

What I initially found odd about this email was where it came from. I am a little bit hesitant to reveal even where this was because of reasons of confidentiality. However, it poses an interesting question which I'll now unpack.
As far as I can make out, a treaty at law is an agreement between two entities which come together to either end hostilities, or alternatively to set up some new state of alliance of agreement. Most of the famous treaties such as the Treaty of Versailles, or the Treaty of Paris end states of war; hence the reason why the Korean War hasn't technically ended. Other treaties such as the Treaty of Waitangi or the ANZUS Treaty, set up a new state of being where the various parties work together for a new state of mutual benefit.
This tends to make me think that in general, constitutions and replaceable rules are treaties of sorts. Constitutions set up the rules which govern the rule making process of countries, provinces and states and corporations, therefore I suggest that the preamble to the US Constitution explicitly spells out that the document is itself a treaty; which was entered into voluntarily and which is binding.

The biggest hurdle that I can see which would hinder a treaty being made with indigenous Australians is the question of who such a treaty would be made with. Unlike the Maori in New Zealand, Aboriginals and Torres Straight Islanders aren't a single group but a richly diverse collection of many people groups. Opponents would argue that the nation can't make a treaty to such a varied group of entities but that is rubbish. There are loads of treaties at international law which have been entered into by many countries. Something like the European Union started out as the European Coal and Steel Community and that had six signatories, and it gradually changed and grew to more than twenty. The United Nations has instruments like the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and various rights declarations such as the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights and the Declaration Of The Rights Of The Child, which have been entered into by more than one hundred different parties.
Without a single unified organisation which represents all indigenous Australian people groups, a treaty would need to be entered into by the various people groups separately. Quite frankly, I don't see that as a problem at all. Most, if not all indigenous people groups, have some sort of internal organisation such as elders and they would be the ones who would sign the treaty on behalf of their people. I really don't see how this is different in spirit to covenant arrangements which might have been made between the various groups themselves.
A grand treaty made with the first peoples of Australia might have several hundred signatories on it, from all over the country and if anything, that's a symbolic act where they'd recognise each other as well as the "big mob".

Of course the whole point of a treaty is to spell out what the various parties involved intend to do. The Australian Government as a thing hasn't really had a set of principles to work with in relation to indigenous people and as a result has tended to act in piecemeal fashion and often in an unprincipled fashion. A treaty would actually mean that the Australian Government would have to face up to the fact that the country was stolen by the cunning use of flags, and then had government and nationhood imposed upon people without their say so. No doubt there will be some commentators who will argue that indigenous Australians already receive many benefits but that is to deny the fact that they are being spoken to; rather than being spoken for.
On the other hand, although a treaty would recognise the original invasion of this great southern land, it then asks the question of indigenous peoples of how the intend to move forward. Not only would a treaty require the nation to recognise indigenous peoples, it would also require them to recognise the nation. That means that although an invasion did happen in the past, those sorts of moral claims might need to be set aside. The nation of Australia in 2016 is made up of precisely zero people who stole the land by force and all direct memories of those people has also been extinguished by the march of history. At what point can you continue to hold people accountable for the acts of people who they have never even met? Furthermore, does it even make moral sense to continue to accuse someone if through the act of a treaty, they would be trying to make good upon the actions of the past?

As with any important document like this, the puzzle lies in solving the details and so I imagine that before there was a final treaty to be signed off on, there would be a series of conventions which would undertake precisely that task. Since a constitution is a treaty of sorts between "the people" and themselves, the working out of a treaty with the first peoples of Australia would probably follow similar lines of thinking, argument, discovery and agreement.
 No doubt there would be commentators who think that a treaty is unnecessary but I suspect that all of those people live in places of privilege, have never known hardship and certainly do not know what it is like to be someone who is marginalised. I'm just going to come out and accuse all of them of racism. Polite racism wrapped in the veil of conservatism is still racism; it's just a little bit more insidious; that's all.

As an Australian who has visited the New Zealand Parliament and heard references to "the spirit of Waitangi", that among other things, really makes me ashamed of this country. I think that the guiding principle of "peace, order and good government" as spelled out in Section 51 of our own Constitution, should be instructive in this case and before we even think about the idea of a republic, we should do a lot of growing up first.
I don't know exactly what a treaty between the first people's of Australia and the nation would look like but I do know that it would look better than the 228 years of neglect and dereliction that we've given to the issue so far.

Horse 2155 - US Electoral Reform - Vote 1

Dear America,
We have to talk. Your system of voting is a complete nonsense. From the insane things that are the Primaries and Caucuses; all the way to the Electoral College. It is so amazingly arcane that it has subsequently been adopted by zero countries in the world.

YouTuber vlogger, podcast host and host of educational videos, Hank Green, has made a series of at least fifty videos explaining the process of how to register and how to vote in the upcoming elections in the United States. The fact that he had to, proves that the system is ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7SMwipBlDwBPEwxq8QD8sw

It isn't perhaps immediately obvious to people outside of the United States but along with the presidential election, there are also elections for the House Of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a bunch of down ballot positions for things like judges and school boards, police chiefs and the like; as well as various direct democracy and other proposing issues, which are all being decided on that first Tuesday in November. In Australia, that day is reserved for watching horses run around a one mile track twice.

What would be familiar to Australians in principle at least, is the rather annoying and downright frustrating fact that the United States isn't as united as it likes to think itself as; and the fifty states and the handful of territories, get along about as well as a bickering family. In consequence, every state likes to do things in its own way; hence the need for more than fifty videos explaining how to register and how to vote.
Contained within the US Constitution is the provision of Article IV, Section 4 that the States shall retain republican government:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiv
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, 
- Article IV, Section 4, U.S. Constitution (1789).

That is republican in the sense that there isn't a monarch but beyond that, the Constitution is deafeningly silent and nobody knows for sure what its really supposed to mean. In practice it means that in addition to the problem of partisan deadlock in US politics, the consequence of fifty little bickering children means that the country frequently never has systems which are cohesive across the country and attempts to change anything for the better are met with the pathetic bickering of fifty children and partisan deadlock.

I hold up the example of Australia because by sheer dumb luck, we have ended up with an Australian Electoral Commission which consistently holds well run elections; with proper mechanisms in place for dispute, elections that take place on a Saturday which is the most convenient day of the week for the most number of people, preferential voting, proportional representation in the Senate (which even though it allows wingnuts into the parliament, still reflects the will of the people), compulsory voting and under normal circumstances allows the counting and results to be known in one night.
I don't think that we realise just how blessed we are in Australia. We have ended up with one of the best systems of both deciding who should govern and the system of parliamentary democracy in the world.
Now admittedly getting anything to change in the United States is going to be a monumental task but if nothing does change then it will be like democracy Groundhog Day again and again and again, until the end of time.

In the 150 separate elections for each of the seats in the House Of Representatives in Australia, the election was conducted in exactly the same way. Only the number of boxes on the little green ballot paper for each ocf the seats changed. Likewise, the eight separate elections for the 76 seats in the Senate was also conducted in exactly the same way.
There are already volunteers in the Trump campaign who have signed up to observe that the election for the presidency isn't being rigged.What they wouldn't observe but what is immediately obvious to any outsider is that there will be fifty subtlety different methods of conducting elections. They might include paper ballots, or mechanical or electronic voting machines. Whatever they are, the fact that they're not uniform across the country is problematic to begin with.

I don't like the idea of voting machines in principle because of the possibility that they might be hacked or don't work properly. The "hanging chad" debacle in Florida in 2000, could very well have changed the entire direction of the 21st century but no-one really wants to admit it. Our own schamozzle with the 2016 Australian Census should immediately tell everyone who wants to advocate for electronic voting that they are stark raving bonkers mental. It isn't impossible to commit electoral fraud with a paper ballot system but if necessary it is possible to have both the ballot boxes overseen by police as votes are deposited, the opening of those same boxes overseen and the physical counting of votes overseen. It is also far harder to forge several thousand physical ballot papers if that is a concern.

The other major advantage that we have in Australia is that with a proper electoral commission, comes a properly managed set of electoral rolls. If you move across the city, across the state or even to a different state, the electoral commission simply updates it's rolls and that's it.
Although there might be a latent threat of people voting multiple times, the compulsion and duty at law kind of means that voting is seen as a necessary inconvenience by most of the population. I suspect that the actual number who do vote multiple times across Australia, even though we like to joke "vote early; vote often", is so small as to be irrelevant. In practice, you turn up at the polling station, get your name marked off and they hand you a ballot paper - simple.
I once voted in a state election where I was out of area on polling day. I fronted up at a polling station, gave proof of my address; where a lower house ballot paper was then faxed through to where I was, and because I was voting in a state election in the same state that I was in, they already had plenty of upper house ballot papers on hand. I'm not sure how such a thing would work in the United States but I can absolutely guarantee that the process for voting in a different state to the one you live in would be needlessly complicated and tedious, if they didn't just throw their hands in the air and fob you off with some lame excuse why you can't vote.

What I fail to understand is why the United States doesn't run federal elections and give the power to do so to the Federal Election Commission under the Supremacy Clause. In one fell swoop you could get rid of all allegations of voter fraud, voter suppression due to ID laws, and while we're at it, get rid of all the Primaries and Caucuses by holding a nationwide Single Transferable Instant Runoff Election with say 7 candidates from each of the parties. It would mean that an election campaign could be compressed into about six weeks and people wouldn't need to engage in tactical voting.
Give the Federal Election Commission some power and watch as it finally does the job properly,

Horse 2154 - Solving The Problem Of The Supreme Court Of The United States

In 2016, The International Year Of The Howling Moron, we've seen Canada elect Pierre Trudeau in the most boring Canadian election in history, Australia return the Turnbull Government with a Senate which contains more wing nuts and loose bolts than any other Senate before it, the United Kingdom all madly run for the exit door of Europe as they voted to leave, and the continuing tempest of madness that is the United States Presidential Election. The scary prospect isn't so much who will win between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump but the fact that as commander in chief come next January, that they will have their finger on the nuclear button.

In the interim we have a growing proportion of the public increasingly becoming concerned that whomever does get to sit in the Oval Office chair in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, will get to decide who the ninth Justice of the Supreme Court is; with the nomination, be able to tip the court out of its 4-4 Liberal/Conservative balance.
No less than President Barack Obama himself, has expressed disappointment and frustration with the idiotic partisanship which continues to turn what should be a functioning democracy into on giant gridlocked mess.

https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/765233486701527040

Historically the Supreme Court Of The United States went from being a forgotten little nerdy room in the basement and down a coal hole, to this weird behemoth of a thing which has the potential to make decisions which fundamentally change the nature of law in the United States. Cases such as Miranda and Roe, are often referred to as markers of the basis of rights, due to the fact that the Bill Of Rights has a very strong effect of blinkering people's vision of what their rights actually are; even though the Ninth Amendment states that the rights not specifically enumerated are retained by the people.
With the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the court was split 4-4 along Liberal/Conservative lines (owing to the weird way that the political parties are aligned on an authoritarian/libertarian axis rather than an economic statist/laissez-faire axis) and the Republican party which controls the Senate refuses to give its "advice and consent" to anyone that President Obama might appoint; which is necessary under Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States.
- Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, US Constitution (1789)

Personally I think that this is yet another fundamental flaw with the whole three ring circus that is the US Government and one which people like Jefferson and Hamilton could have never have imagined let alone conceived of when they drew up the Constitution.
However, there is one minor little clause in there which I think if triggered would shut down this aspect of the grand shouting match; it is something which has been used in the past and would be one of the most hilarious and scandalous party pieces ever pulled off.

It is this:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii
The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.
- Article II, Section 2, Clause 3, US Constitution (1789)

In the olden days when travel was expensive and long, a recess of the Senate would have been harder to revoke. Once senators went on holiday and back home to their families in West Bananatown, East Dakota, they were harder to recall if something needed to be done. Elsewhere in the Constitution it is very clear that only the Congress has the power to enter Wars but this doesn't stop the President from using the military in short engagements. Likewise, this particular clause says that in the event of a recess of the Senate, the President has similar powers of appointment.
If I do a quick rundown of the numbers, if the Senate officially goes on recess on December 26, then there are just 30 days until the inauguration of the next president. In that period of time, this clause could be invoked and voilà, the court would again have 9 members as judges. Obama would transform from a lame duck president to a duck who has swallowed a proximity mine. It would end his Presidency with a bang and provided someone was chosen who was as close to apathetically brain dead neutral as he could find, then would go through relatively peacefully, whatever that might mean.

The sting in the tail of this metaphorical scorpion is that it might be decided by the next Senate that Obama's appointment was unconstitutional. If that be the case, then mounting a challenge would warrant going through precisely the same body which the appointment was made; which would put the court into a decision which would decide it's own fate. No sane set of judges, even ones with a fundamental split in ideology, would choose to depose themselves. Almost certainly the court would decide 5-4 in favour of the recess appointment and that would be the end of the story. There would be outrage, noise, confusion and invective spewed across television, radio and print media but eventually after the fourth estate has thrashed itself silly, it would quieten down.

In theory.

In practice, in all likelihood and in the real world (and not the world of fantastic imagination as invented by some hack with a blog), the chances of this happening are exactly 0%. If someone like Eisenhower had been in charge, he would have had no fear in doing exactly as he pleased; in full knowledge that nobody would say anything. If it had been James K Polk, who got stuff done as president, had enough and went home and died afterwards, then he would have made his recess appointment and barbecued an ox on the White House lawn. President Obama though, has three things which count against him in this case: he is entirely sensible, reasonable and calm.
This leads me immediately to thinking about what a similar set of circumstances would look like in 2020 after President Trump's chaotic four years in office. He'd make a recess appointment as per the Constitution and the chance that the media would have had to object would immediately be outshone by the tremendous bonfire of yet another idiotic thing that he said.
Likewise if President Clinton was faced with a similar set of circumstances in 2020, precisely the same outcome would happy as is happening now. Congress would be equally as hostile and I don't think that Hillary would dare make a recess appointment because like Obama she is entirely too reasonable.

Horse 2153 - Ten Things I Like: No.9 - I Like Advertising

At just after 10pm Sydney time, on the opening day of the English Premier League I was sat sitting on the couch watching the team supposedly in crisis, Hull City leading 1-0 over the reigning champions Leicester City. The only reason that I am able to do this in a world where the market decides the price of everything and the value of nothing, is because someone else has paid for the cost of my entertainment. Mostly this time around it has been a fast food restaurant chain, a motor vehicle manufacturer, a health insurance company and an electrical goods company. Meanwhile, both teams have kit sponsors and there are changing adboards which line the sides of the pitch.
This sounds entirely unremarkable, until you consider the fact that the last time that I saw an English League fixture live on free-to-air television (not the FA Cup) was all the way back in 1992; which was longer ago than many of the players on the field were even alive. In short, I am as happy as Larry and it is all thanks to the wonderful thing known as advertising. I love it.
Well to be perfectly frank, I love the BBC licence even more and I love state run broadcasters because they are not driven by the need to spin a profit but if someone is going to pay for television to be made then it may as well be advertisers.

The story of advertising goes pretty much back to the beginnings of the consumer society. In the 1890s with the bright electric London Underground, advertisers took advantage of the large spaces on the walls on the other side of the railway tracks, to place billboards. Newspapers realised that they could sell space for graphics within their print space and trams and buses carried adboards while they were still being drawn by horses.
Of course it was only natural that the following inventions of radio, television and the internet would also carry advertising. I'm actually surprised that it took so long for sport to get on the advertising bandwagon, with motorsports finally carrying the colours of their sponsors in the 1960s and other sports like football, cricket and baseball only following on in the 1970s. The sport of cycling was incredibly canny, with advertisements and promotional material passing down the roads on events like Le Tour De France before the cyclists did, as early as the 1920s.
As a motorsport fan, advertising didn't just provide the means and ability to place names and colours in front of the public, it has literally coloured motor racing cars themselves. Some of the most iconic cars are instantly recognisable from the colour schemes which they carried. This includes the companies from related industries like Shell, Mobil, Valvoline and Gulf Oil but also includes those brands from the tobacco industry like Marlboro, John Player, Mild Seven and alcohol brands like Martini and Johnnie Walker who wanted to position themselves with a more glamorous status.

People often say that they don't like advertising but the simple fact of the matter is that in order to do stuff or get stuff done, you need to pay people to do it. In the late 1590s, Shakespeare's theatre company was one of the first in the world to charge admission prices to see their plays. Before that time, people voluntarily paid to see theatre productions, or rather didn't most of the time. If four hundred years ago, it wasn't economical to rely on the kindness of strangers to support a single playhouse, then to rely upon the general public to voluntarily provide the necessary resources to run something like a radio or television network, is the mark of naive madness. The entire rise of organised mass media, is predicated on the ability to raise funding either through compulsory means such as a radio or television licence, or the selling of advertising space in that media.
The commodity being sold when advertisers buy space in the media, isn't as most people presume the ability to put their messages in front of the public but the attention and mindspace of the public itself. Just like a motor car is supposed to be driven, or a gun is supposed to be fired, and advertisement is supposed to be seen or heard and a thing which fails to do its job, from an economic perspective at least, may as well be considered as nothing more than an art project.
It should go without saying that an advertisement is an investment in the mindspace of the general public and is made with the intention of collecting an increase by means of sales of goods and services, over and above the initial cost of that investment.

One can't deny that advertising itself is a shared cultural experience. Advertisments by their nature are designed to be memorable in order that you buy the thing being advertised and the thing about being memorable and being remembered by a great number of people, is the very stuff that a shared culture is built upon. "We're happy little vegemites", "not happy Jan!" and "Matter of fact, I’ve got it now" have all passed into the national psyche if not idiom. Then there are countless jingles and songs associated with advertising; which also form part of the shared cultural fabric of society.
From a purely selfish standpoint, I like it when other people pay for my stuff. In the case of radio and television, advertising is the means by which other people pay for my entertainment. Granted, radio and television is often provided by government and when properly funded often turns out to be quite excellent because it isn't constrained by the commercial motive to spin a profit but when it comes to things like sport, movies, drama and comedy, which are mostly also always commercial enterprises anyway, then advertising is the necessary and I think best way of ensuring the greatest possible access to a shared cultural experience, other than direct government funding.

Horse 2152 - Ten Things I Like: No.8 - I Like The Silliness That Is Cricket

Regular readers of this blog will notice that a statically significant proportion of posts are about sports of various kinds. Once you mentally separate the influence of commercialisation of sport, then it becomes only one of a few pursuits in the whole of humanity where it is possible to achieve perfection within the defined parameters. Apart from mathematics which is the only truly exact science, sport is possibly the only human endeavour where you can achieve the thing you set out to do, perfectly.
I think that along with being social creatures, humans are ranking creatures. We like things that are ordered; we like comparing things; we like making lists of things (I'm looking at you Buzzfeed) and we like pitting things against other things to find out which one is the best.

Australia owes quite a lot to sport. Largely because as a nation, we didn't start with some violent revolution, sport became the nation's proxy by which it both defined and measured itself. Any credible list of great Australians must include sporting people. I remember in 1999 when the Sydney Morning Herald tried to compile such a list of the greatest Australians of the twentieth century, first place went to Sir Donald Bradman and second place went to Phar Lap; who isn't even a person.
Sport gave Australia a ready made set of conditions to compare itself and a ready made set of competitors. Australia had been sending cricket teams to England for more than two decades before it had achieved nationhood and the Australasian Olympic Team went to the 1896 games in Athens four years before federation. Australia does have a fine military tradition but let's be honest, we rather achieve glory on the sporting field than the battlefield.

I must admit, I like the absurd, the silly and the daft. This is probably why I like cricket so much. As a sport, it both covers itself in tradition and yet it makes fun of its own vaingloriousness. Because of its level of complexity, it remains mostly incomprehensible to most of the world outside of the former British Empire and inside the countries that do play the game, it achieves levels of fanaticism which are comparable to other sports.
After I got married, I suffered something of a walletectomy and she objected in the strongest possible terms at the prospect of being a cricket widow. Even though I had about as much skill with the bat as Dr Samuel Johnson had with a scalpel (he was a doctor of letters and not a medical doctor), and my prowess with the ball was mediocre, I still quite enjoyed the eternal struggle of leather unleashed at 22 yards on willow. As a player, even one with no hope of playing a standard any higher than St Miserable's Parish XI, I very quickly gained an appreciation of just how difficult it is to play this intrinsically silly game.

You can not convince me that it is a remotely sane thing to be standing out in a field for six hours. A day's play of cricket is basically the equivalent of playing three games of any other sport except with lunch and afternoon tea interspersed. The fact that the thing which a batsman is standing in front of is called "the stumps" and the bat is pretty much a long development of either a paddle or a shepherd's staff, says to me that the game can only have been invented by farmers who have hours and hours to kill in summer. The fact that someone decided to codify the rules of what is otherwise Calvinball, can only have come from a land which ignored the Romans, shunned the Vikings and resisted all attempts by the Normans to influence them with Gallic ways. Cricket is a game which mostly exists without good reason; to be played by those who lack good reason.
Only a game which takes so long to play lends itself to the generation of as many statistics as cricket. Other sports like football, baseball, basketball, motor racing, tennis, cycling et cetera et cetera et cetera have fans but only cricket has boffins. This is the game which attracts writers: EF Hornung, AA Milne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were all aficionados of the game and it has attracted the eyes of MPs and PMs.
Of course with such a dearth of time, of talent and statistics, the game lends itself to that most brilliant of things: waffling on. If reduced to just nine column inches in the newspaper, all you are likely to get is just a list of names and numbers. However, if you open it up to television and more importantly radio, suddenly with as much as eight hours of broadcast time to fill in a day, suddenly you find that commentators will actively go looking for all sorts of rabbit holes to dive down. I have heard talk of philosophy, fashion, politics, science and literature; all within a single day's commentary.
One of the benefits of the game moving so slowly is that you can be doing other things while listening to the cricket. In an Australian summer, I might be out in the garden but in the winter when cricket in England is piped around the world by internet radio, I have fought battles and conquered worlds. During this last match between England and Pakistan was on, I was sweeping across Asia with a horde of Mongol Cannon and Musketeers while Joe Root was sweeping and driving deliveries to all parts sundry on the boundary. The visual metaphor of modern helmeted warriors armed with clubs wasn't lost on me either.

Owing to a long series of historical accidents, I have ended up ten thousand miles away from the sceptered isle. In most sporting contests, and probably because I am addicted to disappointment, I follow England. Unlike Australian fans of sporting teams who get annoyed when they lose, England fans expect perpetual failure and don't know what to do if England wins anything. Just like when the sun comes out and in a stunning turn of events it's not raining in England, when an England team wins anything, the warm glow is so much more enjoyable.
I weathered the storm and gloom through the period of Michael Vaughan, Michael Atherton and Alex Stewart's tenures as captain; when England were genuinely rubbish and couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag with the top open and holes in, and so when England climbed to the top of the Test rankings a few years ago, its was almost like a reward for playing by proxy. England might not be ranked number one in the world at the moment but at least those dark days are long gone. I would hate to be a fan of the West Indies, having lived through the period where the opening lineup of Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Richie Richardson and Viv Richards would tear bowling attacks to pieces, in what was possibly the best cricket team of all time; to now where they're kind of bobbling around number seven in the world and just not that great.
Or maybe I wouldn't hate to be a fan of the West Indies. Maybe I'd look forwards to a time when they might rise again, This is yet another reason why I like this patently absurd game. Almost more than any other sport in the world, cricket has a depth of stories of old and replenishes hope in the future by providing new heroes. It still provides that ability to make lists, to compare and rank things, and to argue forever. Raw statistics are dull and a sport like football is over in an hour and a half but cricket, which goes for six hours a day and takes five days, allows time to tell stories both about itself, the world and most importantly nothing in particular.

Horse 2151 - Citizens Censorious of the Census

Who could see that coming from twenty miles away? If fourteen million people all try to log onto a website at once, then of course it's going to crash; even Blind Freddy can see that. Or rather, Visually Impaired Unnamed Person because he refused to give his name in an act of subversion.
Census 2016 will be remembered for a very long time as the night that the website collapsed and the people revolted.

I can understand the sort of paranoid hysteria that flew around in the run up to the census, where people either didn't want to put their name on it, or simply refused to fill it in altogether because human nature hasn't changed in thousands of years and people can always be made to be afraid of the "other"; especially when that other can be dehumanised and there's nothing easier to dehumanise than government bureaucracy. In this case, the existential threat is that governments once they have collected the data, might match it with other data that they already collect and then use it for nefarious purposes unknown. Never mind the fact that some of the most savage regimes which have ever existed, didn't need to collect data before they carried out their plans. Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler (Godwin's Law invoked!), all carried out their terrible trail of destruction with the help of ordinary citizens and they never needed to collect data or carry out a census to do that.
I think that it takes a monumental leap of imagination to think that the government is going to use the data to round up people based upon their ethnicity, race, religion or nationality. In all cases where governments have done this type of thing, there had already been a prevailing level of animosity and hatred towards these groups of people by these governments and it's not like a mere census magically gave them the keys to the murder machines. Besides which, most prejudices, discrimination and vilification that people face are from other people and that's based on direct contact and not census data.

I don't know who all the wingnuts are that think that the government is carrying out some sort of terrible conspiracy but as we saw last night, the Australian Bureau Of Statistics couldn't even make one website work for one night; I don't know what they think that that same government entity might do but the evidence suggests that this is the most incompetent conspiracy  ever.
As for myself, I have no problems whatsoever with giving details about myself to the government. What is the worst that they could do? Oh no, there's been a 195% increase in the number of children who were born in the area. Quick, we'd better build an evil evil government school  and baby health care centre before anyone notices! Argh, this suburb is now full of older people. It would be such a tragedy to close down neonatal clinics and replace them with renal care facilities, wouldn't it? Who's going to stop this evil evil provision of services, based upon changing demographics? Man the harpoons! Let's just run from side to side like brainless sheep, shall we?

In theory Australia is a country of 24 million people. I say in theory because if 24 million people all suddenly decided to not give their details in the census, then how is the government expected to know?
As far as I can make out, the only people who really need to worry about the census, are those people who intend to carry out some nefarious project in the future. If you're not doing anything wrong then you really have no need to fear a benign and demonstrably incompetent government entity.
I for one quite like the fact that the British Government has been collecting people's names and addresses for well over two centuries. It means that if you do happen to be compiling something like a family history, then you can follow the fortunes of people in the past as their circumstances changed. The television program "Who Do You Think You Are?" regularly illustrates this as it often shows people's details from censuses of long ago. In contrast, Australia which hasn't been collecting such details, has no facility to do this at all. The best that we can hope for is to look at electoral rolls and guess at someone's life based upon what the average demographics of that electorate happened to be at the time.

As far as I'm concerned, the census in addition to providing a useful snapshot of the nation so that governments can make planning decisions based upon what currently exists, that same snapshot is useful long after we've all taken the eternal lie down and appear as a name on a lump of rock and no more censuses.

Aside:
#CensusFail in 2016 provides me with two of the best arguments against electronic voting.
Firstly, that if people are that concerned with governments collecting data by computer, then why should  they trust those same governments to conduct fair elections by computer?
Secondly, if a nation of 24 million people all trying to log onto a system for the census can make it crash, what makes anyone think that an electronic system for running the election (which must be conducted in one day), is not going to crash? If you weren't able to do the census last night, then you still have about a month to complete it. If people en masse couldn't Lodge their vote in an election, then not only does that mean that the election gets mucked up but as we saw in Florida in 2000 with the "hanging chads" the very fate of the election itself can have national implications.

Horse 2150 - Vincent Van Gogh Pun Run

You may have heard of the rather famous painter Vincent Van Gogh, who among other things is known for his peculiar ear complaint but did you know that he was just one of a whole host of interesting people who were all just as colourful as he.

His aunt Flamin Gogh - moved to Florida to take up ornithological studies of large pink birds.

His cousins Grin Gogh and Amy Gogh - decided to go to Mexico and became a popular comedy double act.

His sister Chica Gogh - moved to Illinois, where she had a long and successful career on the stage and played music in blues clubs and all that jazz.

His nephew Wells-Farr Gogh - was going to live with his mum Chica but got a job as a stagecoach driver and eventually ended up in California.

Wells-Farr's first son Bendi Gogh - was living in California with his father but failed to strike it rich in the gold rush in 1849. When he heard about gold in northern Victoria, he decided to seek his fortune there.

Wells-Farr's second son Key Larh Gogh - didn't do well in California and headed to Florida where he became a shrimp catcher.

He had a fall out his brother Yuu Gogh - who moved East and ended up in Sarajevo. Eventually his descendants would start a motor company.

Yuu would eventually marry a Thai lady named Tanh Gogh - who was an excellent ballroom dancer.

They had a son who they named Fandangh Gogh - who followed in his parents' footsteps.

Yuu's grandson, who was named Pokkimonn Gogh - made an absolute fortune from developing games for mobile devices.

Their daughter Manh Gogh - didn't pursue a career on the stage but went on to run a tropical fruit farm.

Vincent had two younger brothers. The older one, called Whiskiahgo Gogh - moved into the nightclub industry and set up shop right on Sunset Strip West Hollywood, California.

Vincent's younger brother Quan Gogh - hated that sort of iniquity and got a job in a semi government related entity.

Vincent of course didn't follow in the family business. His father Carr Gogh - ran a very successful haulage business.

His first uncle Drohn Gogh - stubbornly refused to give up the old ways of doing things and continued to run a delivery business using donkeys and drays.

His second uncle Bonh Gogh - played some loose skinned drums in a very cool beatnik skiffle band.

Unfortunately for Vincent Van Gogh, he only sold one painting in his lifetime and it was reported by his brother that before he committed suicide after being plagued by mental illness that "The sadness will last forever".

Horse 2149 - Ten Things I Like: No.7 - I Like Big Orchestral Music

As I am sat sitting on the 06:49 train to the city, I am wearing a pair of Hub brand headphones which I bought from Woolworths for the grand total of $7. The irony isn't lost on me at all as I have just literally heard the theme tune for "A Fistful Of Dollars", then the theme tune for "A Few Dollars More" and am currently listening to the theme tune for "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly".
Elsewhere in this folder are Mason Williams' "Classical Gas", the theme of "The Magnificent Seven", Grieg's "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" and the Imperial March from "Star Wars". They're all big bold, massive pieces of music that are probably all scored in C Major and they all demand that the sound level gets turned up to the threshold of pain.

People who listen to rock music already know that the only proper way to listen to it is to turn the volume up to the point where the windows start to shake and your ears begin to bleed. Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy (of 5 books) about a about a rock band called Disaster Area who played their instruments remotely from a spaceship and the best way to listen to their music was to listen from an underground bunker on the next planet. All I can say is that that's loud enough; bring it on.
Sheer loudness isn't the same as bigness though. I think that one of the proofs of this will be in the year 2066 when through the great filter of time, the vast majority of dance music which is currently played in nightclubs will have long since been thrown into history's memory hole; never to be heard again. Even a one hit wonder like Pachelbel's Kanon dur D Minor manages to infect music a couple of centuries later.

Movie makers have long known of the power of a good soundtrack; the Academy even awards Oscars for Best Score and Best Soundtrack in films. My personal favourite examples of when music has been used so perfectly in movies actually both come from the same film. It took someone with a mind like Stanley Kubrick to use an otherwise forgotten "And So Spake Zarathustra" and Johann Strauss' "On The Beautiful Blue Danube" and marry them to the vision of spacecraft in flight. It wouldn't have even been possible for Strauss to imagine such a thing and here I am almost fifty years on the other side of the film and I can't imagine it any other way.
It is little wonder that the movie houses like Disney and the Warner Bros employed the use of orchestras for the use in something as frivolous as cartoons. Disney always knew that he was making pictures which would outlive him and let's be honest, Fantasia is still probably the most rewatched movie where there isn't an overarching plot. I can guarantee that almost nobody will know the name of the piece "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" but I bet that virtually everyone in the west who was born between 1930 and 2000 can hum its main theme as a result of watching Warner Bros cartoons.

Of course sport often conscripts big pieces of music for its cause. Both the Olympic Games and the European Champions' League have their own fanfares and they easily rival something that you might hear at the coronation of royalty. Mind you, if your mottos are "Citius, Altius, Fortius" and "Die Besten, Die Mannschaft, Les Grandes Equipés, The Champions", then it's safe to say that you have tickets on yourself and will sell tickets for your event at prices which could be described as equally as impressive.
The people of Australia who have heard the message that "a hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer and the best cold beer is Vic", during those scorching summers where the cricket is on the telly on Channel 9, have probably internalised the theme tunes from "The Magnificent Seven" and 1970's cop drama "Bluey" without being aware of the existence of either.
More mundanely, in a survey which decided the most popular advertisement in Britain of the twentieth century, the winner was an advert for Hovis bread; in which a kid walks his bicycle to the top of a hill in Yorkshire to deliver a loaf of bread and then rides back down again. I don't think that this can be explained by any other factor than the soundtrack was an excerpt from Dvorak's "Symphony For The New World". It's strange to think that what people remember from an eleven minute behemoth of a thing, is a one minute slice.

There's something visceral about playing a massive soundtrack over the mundane things of life. You might get a great deal of happiness from listening to your favourite songs while out in the car but start playing something like Holst's "Mars: The Bringer Of War" and even the smallest of cars suddenly feels like you are driving the starship Enterprise (NCC-1701) and the RMS Queen Mary rolled into one.
Start driving down the motorway with "The Dambusters March" on the car stereo and instead of just an engine with the cubic capacity of less than a bottle Coca-Cola under the command of the right foot, you suddenly have the power of RAF Bomber Command.

There is a far more practical reason why I like big orchestral and instrumental pieces of music in particular and it's the same reason why I can't listen to the radio or television and read at the same time. The part of my brain which is responsible for speech can only deal with one stream of input at a time. I am not cursed with an internal monologue which needs to speak every written all as I read it but nevertheless I still can not cope with both. Music invades a separate part of the brain and that means that I can turn it up loud and proud and not have it interrupt anything as I work or write.
Besides which, if I'm looking at a bunch of people who are milling around and waiting for a train or something, I can change the soundtrack for my own amusement. That might include Rezső Seress' "Suicide Song", Satie's " Gymnopédie No.1" or even more of The Blue Danube, then that's better than listening to that infernal song by Beyoncé that I've heard coming out of someone's headphones that I still can't be bothered to work out what it is. I think it says "All the single lettuce" but I really don't care.

Horse 2148 - Senator Malcolm Roberts Hates 18C But Probably Doesn't Know What It's For

Let me open this by saying that I like the idea of free speech. It is a good and reasonable thing that people do have the right to disseminate and publish their ideas; no matter how unhinged they happen to be. Free speech, which should also include the right to assembly and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, is the sign of a functioning and healthy democracy.
Hand in hand with the idea of the right to free speech, comes the right to be judged upon that same speech which has disseminated and published.

New Senator Malcolm Roberts, I can forgive for looking clumsy when it comes to issues such as free speech but as someone who has the responsibility of making laws for this country, I will exercise my right to judge what he has said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-04/final-senate-make-up-confirmed-with-11-crossbenchers/7689788
We need people to speak up freely and deliver what they really believe and yet they get slammed for that, I'm looking at [section] 18C under the Racial Discrimination Act — that needs to be addressed because that is curbing free speech.
When we have free speech curbed, it means we don't talk about the real issues — tax, Islam, terrorism, the economy.
- Senator Malcolm Roberts - as reported by ABC News, 4th Aug 2016.

Personally I think that this sounds nuttier than a packed of mixed nuts owned by Nat Nutt. I agree that having free speech curbed means we don't talk about things like tax, Islam, terrorism, the economy and whatnot but none of these things are even remotely connected with Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

To remind you, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act provides that:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/rda1975202/s18c.html
Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin
(1)  It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:
(a)  the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and
(b)  the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.
- Section 18C, Racial Discrimination Act 1975

I think that's fair enough. The explanatory note says Subsection (1) certain acts unlawful. Section 46P of the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 allows people to make complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission about unlawful acts. However, an unlawful act is not necessarily a criminal offence. I think that's also fair enough.

Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act provides a solidifed pathway to seek remedy if someone has acted, disseminated or published something whilst exercising their right to free speech. There have in the past, been helpful opinions on what free speech is and is not at law as well:

"'Free' in itself is vague and indeterminate. It must take its colour from the context. Compare, for instance, its use in free speech, free love, free dinner and free trade. Free speech does not mean free speech; it means speech hedged in by all the laws against defamation, blasphemy, sedition and so forth; it means freedom governed by law."
- James vs Commonwealth of Australia 1936¹

That's a very interesting and important turn of phrase, that: "governed by law". James v Commonwealth eloquently says something which is common to all of legislation; that by its very existence all legislation imposes limits to absolute freedom.
Common Law which had been refined for about 500 years to that point, had long since come to the conclusion that not only did the law apply across all of the realm (hence the reason why it was called "Common") but the thirty years which immediately preceded it had also demonstrated that the law applied even to the highest office in the realm - the king. The Bill Of Rights Act which arrived in English Law in 1689, had come after the execution of King Charles I, the English Civil War, the period of the Commonwealth which was rule by Oliver Cromwell and then his brother Richard as king in all but name, the restoration and then the so-called Glorious Revolution in which William of Orange was installed as king.
Consider the right to bear arms as contained within the Bill Of Rights Act 1689:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/act/consol_act/bor16881wams2c2306/s7.html
That the subjects which are protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.
- Section 7, Bill Of Rights Act 1689

Again we see the phrase "and as allowed by law" but it's worth remembering what sort of allowances that the law made at the time and for whom. There are quirks of law which make it allowable for the universities to defend themselves with swords for instance. Estate owners in the 1680s still faced the prospect of wild foxes destroying their livestock. The idea of modern policing wouldn't arrive for another century and a half; so the military was the de facto and default police force. It would have been entirely inappropriate even in 1689 for wide swathes of the population of the cities like London to be armed with guns and so regulations with regards firearms followed reasonably quickly.
The people who framed the Bill Of Rights Act in 1688, would have been well aware of the chaos which had rocked England to the core and so the law was designed to act as a hedge against future chaos.
The Bill of Rights which was tacked onto the end of the United States Constitution, had faced opposition to its existence before it had been approved. The right to bear arms as currently worshipped in the Second Amendment says the following:

Thanks to 227 years of manipulation by the US Supreme Court and various lobby groups, the words "well regulated" now only seem to be applied to a militia (which doesn't exist) and any attempts to impose any sort of sane regulations, even in the wake of cases like 20 school children being destroyed, or 50 people being shot to pieces and destroyed at a nightclub, are quashed in the name of freedom.
Intriguingly, one of the most influential framers of the United States Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison that:

But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.
- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Popular Basis of Political Authority, 6th Sep 1789

This indicates that even they thought that law should change to reflect its circumstances. Having said that, Jefferson also write that:

Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith, 13th Nov 1787

It's comforting to know that the blood of those 20 children who were destroyed at Sandy Hook, was a just price to pay for people's freedom. I hope that people like the NRA remember that they equate the blood of children with natural manure.

I digress.

18C exists as a hedge against injury which is caused by what people have published. The Bolt case, which is perhaps the most famous case brought under the legislation illustrates the need for 18C's existence rather pointedly.

Broadly speaking, the nature of her complaint is that the articles conveyed offensive messages about fair-skinned Aboriginal people, by saying that they were not genuinely Aboriginal and were pretending to be Aboriginal so they could access benefits that are available to Aboriginal people. Ms Eatock wants the law to address this conduct. She wants declarations and injunctions and an apology from the Herald & Weekly Times.
- Eatock v Bolt, Federal Court of Australia (2011)²

As far as I can make out, the only reason why Section 18C ever rose to fame at all, was because of the Bolt case. Precisely because Andrew Bolt was an employee of The Herald and Weekly Times Limited and he lost, it meant that The Herald and Weekly Times Limited, the rest of News Corporation, their friends at the Institute of Public Affairs and the Liberal Party, had a giant cuddle puddle pile on. It is precisely this example which illustrates why Section 18C needs to exist.

Bills of Rights are about a population asserting a desire not to suffer injury because power has been exercised by the powerful. The hope of a bill of rights is that by giving power to the previously powerless, that a new balance is established. Legislation though, is almost always about either restricting the power of the powerful or regulating society into some sort of manageable order.
Courts exist to interpret law and decide what is fair and just based upon their interpretation of that law; be that the law of equity, common law, statute law or constitutional law. Courts themselves are bound by law and employ tests to prove the worthiness of the cases that are set before them.

If you're having your name dragged across a newspaper and media network as large as News Corporation's, then it's kind of obvious what sort of injury is caused to someone's reputation as a result of that.

The esteem in which he is held, or the goodwill entertained towards him, or the confidence reposed in him by other persons, whether in respect of his personal character, his private or domestic life, his public, social, professional, or business qualifications, qualities, competence, dealings, conduct, or status, or his financial credit ...
A person's reputation may therefore be said to be injured when the esteem in which that person is held by the community is diminished in some respect.
- Radio 2UE Sydney Pty Ltd v Chesterton, High Court of Australia (2009)

When it's a matter for the courts to test and find out, to what material degree that the injury occurred and whether or nor a remedy should be instructed. This is a useful thing to look at because it admits in principle that injury doesn't have to be physical and spells out the kind of tests which are used in such cases.

If someone advocates for the removal of any piece of legislation, immediately I begin to question why. If somebody wants something then what is my motive driving the desire? It's all very well to yell "free speech" but when the ability to publish anything is so widespread, then it is deeply dishonest to claim that it is merely about a right to be heard. If you are specifically talking about a desire to remove a hedge on the ability to publish material which is racist or to remove all possible remedies to the injury caused by the publication of racist material, then the only conclusion that I can draw is that that person either wants to be openly racist and cause harm and injury or the just don't want to be held responsible for any injury that they have caused as a result of clumsy negligence.

When a political group like One Nation spruiks its desire to remove the hedges to the remedies of racist material, then what other conclusion should I draw other than they have a desire to be racist? When Pauline Hanson stood up on the floor of the Parliament in 1996 and declared that we were in danger of being swamped by Asians, then that indicates to me that at least then, that conclusion was likely to be true. I note that the new designated target has moved on to Islam. The problem is that Islam as a religion, not only isn't covered under the proivisions of the Racial Discrimination Act, Section 116 of the Consitution prohibits the Commonwealth from imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion.

In the words of Senator Malcolm Roberts, we do need people to speak up freely and deliver what they really believe. They also need to be slammed for that if it happens to be just plain stupid, or in this case with regards Section 18C, completely irrelevant to the legislation.

¹http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/UKPCHCA/1936/4.html
²http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2011/1103.html
³http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/HCA/2009/16.html

Horse 2147 - The Trolley Problem, The Law And Me

I saw something on the telly, recently which yet again made use of that Philippa Foot's 1967 though experiment the "trolley problem"; yet again, I though to myself that it was a load of tosh.
For those unfamiliar of what the  "trolley problem" is, it runs something like this:

Supposed that a runaway tram is heading down the track towards a group of five people. Now suppose that in between the  runaway tram and the group of five people, is a set of points. If you pull the switch, the points move and instead of killing the group of five people, the tram moves onto a slip track where there is an unsuspecting worker who will be killed instead.
Do you pull the switch?

In this version of the problem, most people would say that they would pull the switch and move the points; thus sending the trolley onto the siding and killing the one worker, rather than the five people. This decision is mostly grounded in utility - one person dead is a better outcome this five people dead.
If you go back and read Ms Foot's original work though, she sets up the problem within a general discussion of a legal framework. As I live in New South Wales, then the relevant piece of legislation which would cover the trolley problem is the Crimes Act 1900 and it has this to say:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/ca190082/s18.html
(a) Murder shall be taken to have been committed where the act of the accused, or thing by him or her omitted to be done, causing the death charged, was done or omitted with reckless indifference to human life, or with intent to kill or inflict grievous bodily harm upon some person, or done in an attempt to commit, or during or immediately after the commission, by the accused, or some accomplice with him or her, of a crime punishable by imprisonment for life or for 25 years.
- Section 18, Crimes Act 1900

And:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/ca190082/s211.html
(1) A person who:
(a) does any act on or in connection with the operation of a railway, or
(b) omits to do any act on or in connection with a railway that it is the person’s duty to do,
with the intention of causing the death of, inflicting bodily injury on or endangering the safety of any person who is on the railway, or who is in or on any locomotive or other rolling stock on the railway, is liable to imprisonment for 25 years.
- Section 211-1, Crimes Act 1900

I wonder if the shadow of the law changes people's opinions about how to think about this. Before, there was only the utilitarian trade off between five people and one person but as soon as you introduce the law, then things begin to change for most people I suspect.
As I understand it, a magistrate would look at the act of pulling the switch and sending the trolley onto the siding as a deliberate act. As soon as you start talking about the deliberateness of actions and especially with reference to the Crimes Act,  then pulling the switch begins to look more like outright murder. More than likely, a magistrate would see the act of pulling the switch as a violation of the Crimes Act and order a gaol sentence in accordance with the law.

I am not an ethicist or a magistrate and so I don't know whether a judge would look at what a railway employee's duty is to do. Is omitting to flip the switch and immoral act, when it would cause the deaths of five people instead of one? Does simply the act being present in what is a horrible situation, constitute a case of moral obligation or duty to act?

From a moral standpoint, is it better to actively commit murder than through inaction to cause the deaths of five people? The Crimes Act seems to think that it isn't. I think that it would be very difficult to prove negligence if someone didn't pull the switch, if they weren't even a railway employee. Probably the act of touching the switch in the first place is a violation of the law because that would mean operating railway property without authorization. On the other hand, if the person flipping the switch was a railway employee, then maybe they could argue that they had a duty of care to the public.

There is a second iteration of the trolley problem; which generally reads something like this:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

In the second scenario, saving the five people means pushing a fat man in front of the trolley. Most people when pressed would argue that pushing the fat man onto the tracks would be wrong, even if they'd argued in favour of pulling the switch in the first scenario.
Again, the Crimes Act has this to say:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/ca190082/s211.html
(2) A person who:
(a) does any act on or in connection with the operation of a railway, or
(b) omits to do any act on or in connection with the operation of a railway that it is the person’s duty to do,
with the intention of causing any locomotive or other rolling stock on the railway to be derailed, destroyed or damaged, is liable to imprisonment for 14 years.
- Section 211-2, Crimes Act 1900

As before, a magistrate would would look at the act of pushing the fat man in front of the trolley as a deliberate act. Deliberate acts with reference to the Crimes Act look very much like murder. I've even heard variations on this where instead of a random fat man, the person who you push in front of the trolley is a villain who has tied up the five people and put them on the railway tracks. Time and time again though, I have seen in courts where magistrates have reminded offenders that it isn't for the general public to self administer justice but for the police to enforce the law and for judges to make rulings and interpret the law; so destroying a villain, isn't going to acquit you either.

I have read various studies based on the trolley problem and the results generally come out to be that, for about 80% of the time people will pull the switch to make the trolley change lines but they'll baulk at pushing the fat man in front of the trolley. What this says about the human psyche is that is probably a trade-off between the utility of happiness and personal responsibility. Speaking for myself, I probably wouldn't pull the switch because I don't want to be personally responsible for someone's death and I certainly wouldn't want to push the fat man in front of the trolley; however, if you change the stakes, I probably might have pushed a villain who tied up the five people and put them on the railway line.
This whole problem though is flawed. What people say that they will do in theory is totally different to what they will do in the real world. In some respects it is like trying to extrapolate the entire universe from a crumb of black forest cake. The other thing which I think is really weird is that anyone thinks that pushing someone in front of a trolley is remotely going to slow it down. A "runaway" trolley car is probably doing in excess of thirty miles an hour and at those speeds I don't care how massive the man is that you push in front of the trolley, if he gets hit, he's probably going to be ripped apart at the joints and the trolley would still go on its terrible journey of destruction. This is the problem with thought experiments - it's really easy to break the apparatus.

Horse 2146 - Ten Things I Like: No.6 - I Like Cats

A task which is supposedly impossible is to put a cat into a box. I can tell you from experience that it is an exceptionally easy task - simply open the box. Likewise the equally mythical job of herding cats is also supposed to be difficult when in reality all it requires you to do is walk slowly behind them. What in actual fact is a difficult task is to get a cat to come to you if it doesn't want to. I have spent many an evening with the back door open, waiting for the cats to come in. Forget cows, at least waiting for the cows to come home has a semi predictable time frame - cats operate on their own internal logic; which as far as I can tell is more unknowable than the dynamics of an electron and even Heisenberg described those things with an uncertainty principle.

It is a mistake to assume that cats do not love you. People who say that have misunderstood the basic workings of cats. Like everything else in a cat's world, they can choose to love you but they will do so on their terms and their terms only. Cats are the physical embodiment of selfishness, wrapped in a furry coat. Should you decide that you would like to have a cat, then in effect you have volunteered to be a servant to it. You do not and will not own a cat, they will choose to own you but they will do so on their terms and their terms only.

The other common household pet, dogs, have had many stories written about them. There are cases of dogs displaying loyalty and commitment to their owners even after they have died. Dogs are social and hierarchical beings, they want to know their place in the pack and will gladly accept it. Cats on the other hand already know their place in the pack, they are the rulers of their domain and they treat all attempts to change the status quo with quietly confident ridicule.
The best example that I can think of that displays this fierce confidence is the story of Matthew Flinders' cat Trim, who travelled with him extensively on board ship. Flinders' diary records that on a trip around Van Diemens' Land, in the middle of a howling gale, Trim was standing on the poop deck totally unconcerned about the tempest raging all around and the sound of him meowing for his dinner could be heard above the thunder and the shock of the lightning. In the midst of mortal peril, Trim knew that he owned both his servant Matthew Flinders and even the ship for that matter, and ruled his domain with an iron paw. Next to the State Library Of New South Wales, the statue of Matthew Flinders is overlooked by a statue of his master, Trim.

Give me my dinner. Now.

A dog can be trained and will learn something in the order of about a hundred different commands. As dogs view practically the entire of life as one giant game, this can be manipulated and this is why training a dog can be done reasonably well by those people who have that sort of skill. Cats on the other hand are far harder to train, largely because they have to choose to be, but in contrast cats can learn more than two hundred and fifty words. The words that my two cats have learned are almost entirely specifically related to their interests (about being fed, escaping the cold, going outside) because the the words that they have chosen to learn, they have done so on their terms and their terms only.

Likewise cats have their own vocabulary, which as far as well can tell is mainly about manipulating people into doing things for them and expressing things that are relevant to their interests. From the mouths of my two cats I have heard pleading, demanding, annoyance, pain, enquiry, domination of a space, affection, confusion and yelling simply because it's fun. I suspect the range of emotions that cats feel are more intense than people because they very much live in the moment but are far more short lived.
In my experience, they have a concept of the future but they only care about how it relates to them. Their internal clocks know when it is time to be fed and woe unto those who try and defy it. Their concept of the past is equally tied to the past. When Kipper demands his nightly milk, if he has already had some, his demand will change in tone from one of desperation to one of almost apology. I suspect that he hopes that we will not have noticed.

Two cats is an acceptable number. Three cats is crazy cat lady territory.

A dog is someone who will show you unquestioning, unending loyalty - a cat in contrast, who will leave you in the midst of a burning building; not because they don't love you but because they are too selfish to go and get you. They would rather curl up in front of the fire.
Although cats are often mistaken as being aloof, what they have in abundance is independence. Sometimes a cat will want something from you but they're equally fine with not being the centre of attention. If you leave a cat be, they're quite happy with doing their own thing. I've spent many a pleasant afternoon or evening with a cat close by and they have been in their own realm of joy, sometimes in a sunbeam.

I think it hardly surprising that people like Samuel Johnson, Winston Churchill, Isaac Newton and Charles Dickens all had cats. Cats are the best pet to have around if you are conducting the affairs of a nation, or investigating the boundaries of science and literature. However it was Ernest Hemmingway who perhaps said it best:

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1937

Horse 2145 - Ten Things I Like: No.5 - I Like Utes

Charity begins at home. Why can't it begin at my home?

I am ready to accept your charity - ute please ^_^

If I look at the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis, two are from Canada's CBC, six are from America's NPR, four are from Australia's ABC and seven are from Britain's BBC; of those six are on Radio 4. Even though I follow the England Cricket Team and the England Football Team, I still can't escape the annoying fact that without unlimited money, most of the things in my life tie me to Sydney, Australia and the green passport thereof.
Nevertheless, there are some things which I like about this country including the system of voting, the legacies left over from a time when we were still looking towards the UK for inspiration such as Medicare, the ABC and the fact that our physical isolation meant that we were allowed to grow up into whatever this country would be. One of those products of isolation was the Australian invention of the coupé utility, or as every decent Australian would call them, a Ute.

Famously the result of a letter to Ford Australia in 1934, when a lady wrote in (in 1932) and asked for a vehicle that she could drive to church on Sunday in and take the pigs to market on Monday in. Legend has it that Ford designer Lew Bandt penned it and when Herny caught wind of it, he dismissed it as a "kangaroo chaser".
Style in the front; substance in the back. If General Motors Holden wanted to crow from the rooftops that it was as Australian as "football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars" while pinching the jingle from Chevrolet, then the ute is as Australian as "cyclones, fairy bread, wombats and knifing Prime Ministers".

Even though the ute was invented by what is really an American company and built by three American companies in Australia, it is still possibly the single most Australian thing ever invented. Forget Wi-Fi, the Hills Hoist, the stump jump plough and penicillin, utes are so Australian that six weeks after one particular Prime Minister decided to put the number plate C-1 on a ute, he hurled himself into the sea and was never seen again. Okay, so that story might not be true but the fact that there is a swimming centre named after him, in what surely is either a sign of poor taste or utter bravado, most certainly is.
When I say "Ute" I don't mean "Pickup Truck" either. Pickups are way cool but from the outset, they are only pickups. The Ford Ranger, Holden Colorado, Toyota Hilux and the VW Amarok are all competent and useful machines. They are all solid workhorses and loyal mules that will give many years of service. Utes on the other hand are the Martin Skrtel, the Barry Hall and the Buddy Franklin of the automotive world. They will do their job admirably and excellently but you always know that there is more than a hint of the insane about them. If you want a truck which is unbreakable, then get a Hilux. If you want a car/truck with a soul, then get a Falcon Ute or a Commodore Ute.

There is much merit to the wishes of that lady in the 1930s. Pickup trucks are designed to be a work vehicle from the outset and as such, most of them end up being massive. Regular readers of this blog will already know my sentiment towards big chunky and mostly useless blobs of status projection, SUVs. I feel that a lot of pickup trucks tend towards that same sort of spirit. A Colorado is a big thing that obnoxiously dominates the space around it and that is particularly unfriendly in car parks but because utes are based on regular sedans and wagons, they're far more civilised.
This also translates to on road behaviour. Pickup trucks because they are bigger and chunkier than the average size of traffic, tend to be driven both more aggressively and less well. I bet that between a Mazda 3, Mazda RX8 and Mazda BT-50, that the BT-50 driver is less likely to use their indicator when changing lanes and more likely to cut you off in traffic. Granted that a Holden Maloo driver is more likely to be charged for furious driving but that's probably a function of the fact that there's a big stonking 6.2L V8 under the bonnet.

The strange thing is that very few motor manufacturers have ever attempted to build a true ute. By my reckoning, there's GM, Ford, Chrysler, Subaru and Datsun and that's it. El Camino, Ranchero (and badge swap equivalents), Kingswood, Commodore and Falcon, Valiant, Royal and Rampage, Brumby and 1200/1600. I guess that the Suzuki Mighty Boy could be considered to be a ute but I honestly don't know what it is except to say that it is very very cool indeed.
In fact, without exception, all proper utes belong in either the Cool section or the Sub Zero section of Top Gear Mk2's Cool Wall. I tried to think of an uncool ute and failed. There are plenty of uncool pickup trucks on the road and the measure of this is how much I want one without having any obvious need for one. There are plenty of utes that I see that I'd secretly like to have.
One of the weird consequences of being based on a station wagon and not an SUV, is that the tray bed in the back of a ute tends to be longer and wider than most pickups. This was especially exploited in the 1970s, when the ute's cousin the panel van, was often fitted with a queen size mattress in the back. In both a ute or a panel van, you can throw a bunch of camping gear in the back and magically, millions of kilometers of road open up across this massive continent and your accommodation goes with you everywhere. I am a tall and lanky sort of chap and the only two utes or pickup trucks that I can lay down flat in the tray, are the Commodore and Falcon utes. Everything else is simply too short.

A ute satisfies three desires at once: the need to haul stuff, the need to get places and the wish to do it in style - part truck, part car, part sports car. To the latter of those three, I have to say this:

Dear Holden and Ford,
Along with Toyota who make appliances, you have decided to end motor manufacturing in Australia. Apart from the fact that you are literally killing off an entire industry, one of the side effects is that you are ripping out something which speaks to the very heart and soul of this wide brown land.
You've both spent almost half a century in sending the two tribes into combat against each other and especially on that hallowed mountain of motor sport, Mount Panorama at Bathurst, but now not only are you ripping out our hearts but by killing off the Ute, your also stomping them into the ground.
This is a love story which has turned sour and a jilted bride has been left at the altar. When you kill off the ute, part of this country dies inside. 
I hope that you're happy with what you've done because the good and fair people of Australia are certainly going to vote with their wallets. You will both be consigned to the destiny of being just another car company and this place will remember you not. The children of 2020 will most definitely not look upon you with the same affection as the children of 1990 and before did. You are stealing their tomorrows.

Love, Rollo.

PS: You both had fifty years to send a ute to the Le Man's 24 Hour Race. They wouldn't have won anything except the hearts and minds of the world. The fact that you didn't is a disgrace. 

I like utes but sadly, their days are numbered. The very last Falcon has already left the body shop and by this time next year, that will also be true for the Commodore. The sad thing is that the last ute on the planet will be the Ford Fiesta bakkie in South Africa and I can't lay down flat in the back of one of those.