Horse 2792 - 1 Is Not Prime

 This whole post is a reply to someone on Twitter; who has asked what I think is an excellently conceived question because what often appears to be the simplest of things often turns out to be elegantly intricate.

"Okay, you're a smart guy. Explain to me why 1 isn't prime."

This question gets at one of the things in mathematics that everyone takes for granted but when thought about for long periods of time, is like an eel on the end of a fishing line and gets tied up in knots needlessly.

To answer this, we'll come at the problem backwards and eliminate that which doesn't apply because whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.

To begin with, we are concerned only about integers; which are rational, real, and positive. We don't want to concern ourselves with fractions or negative numbers here.

A Composite number is one which is composed of many factors.

12 can be divided into 6 parts, 4 parts, 3 parts, 2 parts, and left alone as one part; all arrive at whole numbers.

A Prime number only has two factors; which are itself and 1.

7 can only be divided into 7 parts. 

A Prime number n, can only be divided into n parts nicely. If you divide Prime numbers into any other number of parts, you get weird bits.

Imagine that we are in charge of Horse Chocolate Factory. We make a bunch of different lines of chocolate but we are best known for our blocks of chocolate.

Composite numbers are like blocks of chocolate that you can divide into rows, columns, or perhaps groups of identical smaller block sections.

Prime numbers are like blocks of chocolate which are in bars; which you can only break into individual squares and still get all of the bits be identical.

Now we know about Composite numbers and Prime numbers; so we're done, right?

No!

We're still left with the problem of 1. There is no meaningful way to break one square of chocolate into any number of pieces and while you could possibly say that it fits the rule for Prime numbers that you can divide it into 1 part nicely and still get 1, without any weird bits, you haven't actually divided it, have you?

1 appears to be a special case which doesn't fit into the definition of being Composite or being Prime, without us looking like a fool.

1 is a special case because 1 can not be divided meaningfully. Dividing 1 by 1 to get 1 sounds like it should be a trivial case except for the fact that it is a unique case. If 1 is 1 and all alone and evermore shall be so, and 1 is the loneliest number that you will ever find, then it's practically standing here screaming out for it's own unique classification in it's own unique voice.

So we give it one.

1 is unitary.

There are a class of these special numbers. The units, or the divisors of unity, are the basic elements of mathematics which have a multiplicative inverse. It probably goes without saying that 1 has an evil twin in -1 and I guess that if we're going to expand our definition to include the Gaussian integers, then we have four divisors of unity which are 1, -1, i, and -i.

1 isn't prime; because as far as the ontological question of how number are classified into basic categories and which exist on the most fundamental level, then we need to be extremely careful with 1 and with primes generally.

Horse 2791 - Fragments XIII: The World Keeps On Getting Hotter And Madder

 PR 24 - Past Rememberence

A wise saw once said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. If may add a supporting reason why that is in fact the case, it is that no society is actually physically capable of remembering anything beyond the memories of its oldest member. Admittedly we have invented better methods of recording the present, such that people have a greater ability to get a sense of what the past was like but this is still at best, only like looking at the world through an expensive looking glass. Once one returns the looking glass to the shelf with all of the other items upon one's dressing table, it is again physically impossible to look at one's self. Herein lies the central problem of the past and indeed of history generally. Even if one chooses to study the past, the vast majority of people will not; they certainly will not remember the implications of what the past might be able to teach them if they have neither studied it, nor experienced it first hand.

And so it is with myself. I am two generations removed from the unpleasantness of last century in which more than one hundred million souls on board this world, were destroyed (some of whom were destroyed more efficiently and effectively due to mass extinction devices) and physically can not remember the past.

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TR 27 - Not 'The' Worst But Still Pretty Bad

I make no bones about the fact that I think that US politics for the last four years has been an absolute horrorshow. Rather than choose someone who had any experience in running civil government, the American people actively chose the star of a so-called 'reality TV show' who then proceeded to run the administration of the nation with as much reality as a reality TV show; actual civil government was allowed to withir and die. Back in 2016 the NPR Politics podcast would report how many posts in government remained unfilled and by about mid-February of 2017, then ceased doing so once it became apparent that those posts would probably never be filled. That number remains at about 1600.

The Trump Administration is not the worst in US political history as is often declared in hyperbole but it's certainly up there in terms of badness and unfitness. It would take something abysmal to knock off James Buchanan's administration which broke the Union and plunged the country into civil war but it was at least as bad as Richard Nixon's or Calvin Coolidge's administrations in terms of patronage and corruption. Right at the very end of its days, the act of questioning the democratic process itself in a desperate bid to hold onto power for power's sake, is currently going on like a fever; which is an apt metaphor for the administration's lethargic response to the Coronavirus pandemic which has now claimed more American lives than all wars combined since World War 2 but yet still hasn't gained even enough of an economic response which is appropriate to the scale of importance of the thing.

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CT7 - What Do They Actually Think We Can Do?

One of the problems with being a spirit trapped inside a bioelectromechanical vehicle is that you can never ever know what anyone else is truly thinking. It's even more apparent when the thing doing the thinking is of another species. I have no idea what or even how the mind of a cat works and I have no idea what kind of powers that they imagine that I posses. 

I was standing at the back door late yesterday afternoon when Micah looked at me, then looked at the sky which was raining, then looked back at me and meowed a sort of complaining and yet questioning meow at me. 

The message although wordless was immediately obvious. Micah had a complaint about the weather and then asked me to do something about it, as if I have the power to do so. What I do not understand is whether or not he actually thinks that I have the power to change the weather or whether this is just a generic complaint.

The fact that humans can open doors and open tins and make food appear is pretty special. I think that both Arthur C. Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and the inverse corollary that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology apply here. 

On reflection though, being able to make food appear is pretty magical.

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RM8 - Ronald McDonald Law

The rules of procedure state that you have to have a detailed basis in law, chose, fact, or action, for what you are doing; and if you don't, then you could be liable for various sanctions and remedies to be taken against you.

It is what's known as the "No Ronald McDonald Law". You can't go to court and act like a clown and you especially can't act like a clown who isn't funny. You can't just show up and fling burgers around the place.

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IM11 - I Don't Understand The Malaise

I really struggle to understand why the whole malaise era of American motoring should have lasted for so long.

Ford of Europe continued producing cars that were smaller than what they were selling in the United States and the Fiesta, Escort, and Cortina should have filled up the entire of the small car line up.

I also do not understand why apart from the Crown Victoria which exists purely as a taxicab and a police car, why the Mustang or Taurus, should have ever been allowed to be anything other than Australia's Ford Falcon. Exactly at no point from the introduction of Mustang II was the Mustang better than the Falcon Coupe and at exactly zero point in time was the Taurus ever as good as the Falcon.

There is a similar story over at General Motors because Opel/Vauxhall with their Corsa, Astra, Vectra and all predecessors, were always better than their American equivalents, and Australia's Holden Commodore was always better than the Impala.

Europe develops better smaller cars than the United States because that's where their market lies and competition is fierce. Ford eventually had to concede the point and introduce the Fiesta, Focus, and Mondeo to the United States. General Motors on the other hand, simply let their smaller car engineering die and so never really understood how to go about making small cars; choosing to import the engineering from Daewoo/GM South Korea.

The Mustang even four years on when compared with a 2016 Falcon, is still not up to par. Panel fit and even just the reliability of the thing is significantly worse. 

When Holden were given the axe, I can only presume it is because that they did show up Chevrolet badly. The SS became an orphan in the lineup, when everything from 3L V6 Evoke, all the way up to Caprice should have been Chevrolets. The Impala was so terrible that when Holden was forced to replace the VF Commodore, Impala 10 came last in every test behind both Insignia B which became ZB, and VF.

All of this is nothing more than speculation now as neither GM nor Ford sell anything other than SUVs and pickup trucks in America and GM only half-heartedly bothers to sell anything at all in Australia.

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KR 9 - Maybe Not Just Karen

I do not know if people's sense of entitlement has increased during 2020 or if it is simply a symptom of increased tensions due to the pandemic. This morning I was walking across a pedestrian crossing in Marayong on my way to the railway station, when a lady in a Hyundai Excel came flying around a corner and point blank refused to slow down. She then proceeded to throw verbal mediocrities at me, accusing me of not looking where I was going, before she got out and then went into the newsagents' shop.

In my defence, I was in the middle of a pedestrian crossing and that she had Give Way signs facing her on that side of the T-junction, and I am a pedestrian which means that in theory I should have the right of way in all circumstances except for motorways but I suppose that in the court of this lady's opinion, I am still in the wrong.

I'd like to think that the general lesson that we've all collectively learned during the pandemic is that we all have to share our public spaces and our civic life but that's looking incredibly naive as it appears that human nature being what it is, with a pathological need to paint ourselves as the hero of our own story, trumps everything. It is almost as if it is simply impossible for us to learn that we are all in this together because we can't ever hope to recognise that there even is anyone else whom we are in this together with.

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EC14 - Let's Go To College

With California's 55 electoral votes, Joe Biden has been confirmed as the president-elect as members of the Electoral College have now cast enough votes to push him past the 270 threshold to win the Presidency. Officially the Congress will count the electoral votes on Jan 6th 2021 but assuming that entire states' Electoral College votes aren't discarded, then the result is finally final. President Trump has said his attempt to overturn the election results is "not over."

Last Tuesday (8th Dec) the US Supreme Court turned out appeals by a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, Mike Kelly, who argued that a state law in Pennsylvania which was passed in 2019 which adopted absentee voting for any reason, and also adopted mail-in voting, was illegal. The Supreme Court noted in its reasons for decision that several courts had already denied the request, and that Mike Kelly waited until after the 2020 election to file his suit when the law was in place well before the election.

Last Friday (11th Dec) the US Supreme Court outright dismissed a Trump-backed lawsuit to block four states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) from voting in the Electoral College, claiming that changes made to their election procedures violated federal law. The decision clears the path for the electoral college to officially make President-elect Biden the next President of the United States. The reason stated by the Supreme Court is that: "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot."

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CC17 - The 3 Cs

The United States Center for Disease Control (US CDC) has finally issued a list of three Cs to avoid as the number of deaths due to Covid-19 has now exceeded 300,000 in the United States.

The 3 Cs to avoid are: 

- Crowds

- Close Contact

- Confined Spaces

As of this morning in Sydney, the Northern Beaches outbreak which has now extended to 19 cases and made national headlines, seems to have provide a practical demonstration that the 3 Cs being avoided by rich people who honestly do not give a rip, are:

- Care

- Courtesy

- Common Sense

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CV18 - They Knew What They Were Doing

The emails which are mainly from a chap called Paul Alexander who was in the Department of Health and Human Services, not only makes it abundantly clear that herd immunity was in fact the goal for the United States but that the Trump Administration didn't care about "people who get the virus and die and can't complain".

Now I don't know at what point that treason should be declared but when you have an open policy which is based around actually killing your own people, that has to come exceptionally close.

Nixon's Administration was corrupt, Hoover's Administration was also corrupt, and Buchanan's Administration through inactivity broke the Union in half, but Trump's Administration appears to have actually made a policy of killing more people due to Covid-19 than all wars since World War II combined.

The kindest word to describe this is autogenocide.

Horse 2790 - War on Christmas

Dear Ray Hadley,

You asserted on your 2GB radio show that there is a "War on Christmas". As someone who has been bombarded with Maria Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" and Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" just about every time I have walked into a shop since late October, seen armies of pallets of the official “I know nothing about you but I am still giving you a present” Christmas gift Ferrero Rocher, and seen enough tinsel to hogtie Hannibal's battalions of elephants on skis as they were coming over the Italian Alps, I can safely say that if there is a "War on Christmas" then Christmas is rudely winning.

Love,

Rollo

...

Dear Horse,

As a prolific letter-writer, I feel I must protest about the previous letter. I am nearly eighty and am quite mad. If this sort of thing goes on for much longer... Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom. You symbiotic, patriotic, slam but neck, right? Right!

Yours etc.,

Sir Elmer Frogwhipple VC, ATM, KFC, BBQ.

...

Dear Horse,

I object strongly to the letters on your blog. They are clearly not written by the general public and are merely included for a cheap laugh.

I have the honour to be your obedient servant,

A.Ham.

...

I have no idea when this humbug of a supposed  began but I imagine that this current outrage began as a ploy to turn things like holiday greetings and decorations into potentially divisive political statements. Just like every other "War On..." vague concepts like Drugs, Communism, Terror, Poverty, etc. the vague concept always ends up winning because fighting a perpetual war with no clear conditions that would lead to its conclusion, is not actually about solving the problem but about maintaining outrage. 

For a shade over 40 years, Christianity has been weaponised in the United States for the pure purpose of extracting votes from the public in elections. Following the success of that perpetual campaign, a similar strategy is being employed in Australia but to far less effect because Australia became far more secular far more quickly. Not only that, the last four decades have also seen a dramatic shift in migration patterns of people who haven't come from nominally cultural Christian countries.

The idea of a "War on Christmas" where people use more inclusive phrases like "Happy Holidays" as an imagined insult to Christianity, just doesn't fly that far in a secular country, or where people come from many different faith backgrounds. It is impossible to build the same level of outrage if people genuinely don't care and will continue to have their Christmas with all of the secular paraphernalia.

To give you an idea of the sheer dumbness of declaring a "War on Christmas" where people use phrases like "Happy Holidays", consider just how many holidays there are crammed in this period of the year:

11/12 - Hanukkah Starts (Jewish)

12/12 - Dhanu Sankranti (Hindu)

14/12 - Geeta Jayanti (Hindu)

18/12 - Hanukkah Ends (Jewish)

23/12 - Festivus (Secular)

24/12 - Christmas Eve (Christian)

25/12 - Christmas Day (Christian)

26/12 - Boxing Day (Christian)

27/12 - Kwanzaa (Pan-Africanism)

28/12 - Holy Innocents Day (Christian)

31/12 - Watch Night (Christian)

01/01 - New Year's Day (Secular)

20/01 - Bodhi Day (Bhuddist)

26/01 - Australia Day (Secular)

I don't care about being "politically correct" which itself is another invented "War On..." a vague concept but given that you don't really know what holidays someone celebrates just by looking at them then "Happy Holidays" seems like a pretty good option. People are already running around in a season which is overloaded with jobs, tasks, shopping and a zillion other things that have to be done; so going out of one's way to engage in outrage over a phantom concept, seems pretty dumb. It's already hard to be merry or happy when you've got stuff that has to be finished by the end of the year. If you celebrate one holiday and the person you’re talking to observes another one, by using some kind of generic term, then you’re doing your bit to make sure someone’s holiday actually is merry or happy, or at very least not even more stressful. I find it even more weird that people don't seem to have a problem with the phrase "Season’s Greetings" even though it achieves exactly the same function.

If you really want to see what a "War on Christmas" looks like, then think of the Puritans. The Puritans had in England already successfully waged war against dancing and sport and then went to America to start their own fun hating society after some of them had been arrested for disrupting dances, sport, singing in church, and fairs. The Puritans in their lovely new no-fun America, decided to go even further and from 1659 to 1681 Christmas itself was banned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anyone found celebrating Christmas in the colony would be fined five shillings. People were expected to go to work and churches were barred from holding religious services; until 1870 in some cases.

Back in England, the Puritans dominated House of Commons passed a 1644 ordinance which abolished Christmas, Easter and Whitsun and from 1644 to 1660, Christmas was officially illegal in England. 

I suspect that what Mr Hadley actually objects to isn't an imagined "War on Christmas" but rather, the thought that brown people might be actually having a lovely time. To further undermine the idea that there is a "War on Christmas" going on, I find it odd that immediately before this complaint on Ray Hadley's 2GB radio show, Maria Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" was played yet again. I also find it really odd that in a rant about a "War on Christmas", Mr Hadley didn't once speak about a Jewish kid born in a shed and put into an animal food trough. It's almost as if that doesn't matter at all in the ongoing "War on Christmas".

Horse 2789 - It's Dr Jill Biden. Story. End of.

It's Dr Jill Biden.

Story. End of.

If someone has earned the right to use the title of 'Doctor' either because they have worked their tail off and been through more years of study than what would usually be considered sane and written a thesis, or has become a medical doctor which itself requires more years of study than what most people would consider sane, or has had the title of 'Doctor' honorarily conferred upon them for doing amounts of service and work than what most people would consider sane, then thy have the right to be called 'Doctor'. 

Story. End of.

Granted there might be a good reason why on a medical ward in a hospital that for institutional hierarchy reasons that someone who is a nurse or ancillary staff might not use the title of 'Doctor' within the context of work but that does not mean in any way that they aren't otherwise entitled to use the title.

Story. End of.

The only reason that this absolutely idiotic discussion has cropped up at all is because Donald Trump lost the election and a whole entire side of politics has decided to completely destroy every possible shred of decency and sanity in the name of their unholy god Trump. Trumpianity is surely one of the most pathetic religions that has cropped up and purely exists as a cult of personality. Of course it makes sense that it has displaced the temporary worship of the usual god whom America proudly proclaims to believe in, with that declaration of faith "In god we trust: One Dollar" because Dollar is a silent and incapable god and its shrine leaders are frequently deliberately stupid and cruel. The god Dollar fails in the face of almost every crisis; so people have changed their worship to Trumpianity which has a self-obsessed god who is equally incapable in the face of any crisis.

The god of Trumpianity lost in a general election; so its worshippers have gone full on coco-bananas wingnut.

This is the background to why the Washington Post published a hit piece questioning Dr Jill Biden's right to call herself a 'Doctor'. There is no other context which either this piece, or leader of the shrill choir Ben Shapiro, is singing this hymn with only one note.

Jill Biden had already received a B.Arts in Education in the early 1980s. She then went on to get her Masters degree and then work as both a teacher and as a policy maker; addressing both special needs children as well as looking at how education should be made more accessible. 

Biden then returned to school for her doctoral degree, having the better part of 30 years of practical experience in the field; where at age 55, she received a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in educational leadership from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, "Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students' Needs" was published under the name Jill Jacobs-Biden. This happened in 2007.

Working for three decades and then going back to school to do more study and write a thesis, by any measure earns you the right to be called 'Doctor'. 

Story. End of.

This happened back in 2007. This was even before the 2008 Presidential Campaign which saw Joe Biden lose to Barack Obama and then after many months, be elected on the ticket as Vice President. None of that story has anything whatsoever to do with Jill Biden. Although she was conferred the rather useless title of Second Lady Of The United States, she continued to work in the field of teaching and educational policy; where she was quite rightly recognised as Dr Jill Biden.

Story. End of.

I will admit that the United States has a very strong suspicion of titles, which is due to its myth making surrounding its origin story; and so it doesn't confer titles such as 'Sir', 'Lord', 'Baron', 'Duke' etc. but it absolutely fawns all over itself in recognising titles like 'Senator', 'President', and 'General'; even after people have left the respective offices. 

If it wasn't a problem back in 2007, and it wasn't a problem for the entirety of the time that Dr Jill Biden was Second Lady Of The United States, then why is it a problem now?

I will admit that I do not live in the United States and so I do not share this cultural cringe when it comes to titles and styles. Admittedly we've actively tried to pollute the title of 'Sir' because of republicanism in Australia; which wasn't helped by the Right Honorable Anthony Abbott but even that doesn't invalidate the concept of titles. 

I'd like to suggest that part of this stems from a kind of insane rugged individualism which exists in the United States but I don't think that that's adequate in this situation. What I find particularly on the nose about all of this is the rank hypocrisy here; which is giving off a whiff of putrescine.

The bottom line is that whether we like it or not, we live in a giant interconnected system of mutual obligations. As a result of these mutual obligations, then you should give to all people that which is properly due to them: if you owe taxes, pay taxes; if you owe revenue, pay revenue; if you owe respect, pay respect; if you owe honour, then pay honour. Some people, whether they've been conferred it, or whether they've worked beyond what would be considered sane for it, are owed the right to be called by a title. In the case of Dr Jill Biden, she has earned the right to be called 'Doctor'.

Story. End of.

Horse 2788 - Who'll Come A Sheep Stealing And Arsoning With Me?

Once a jolly swagman, camped by a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolabah tree.

And he sang as he watched, and waited 'til his billy boiled.

"Who'll come a waltzing matilda with me?"

I find it really odd that the words of a poem by Banjo Patterson, which was then turned into a song; about a sheep thief, became a de facto national anthem for Australia and one which is sung at Rugby matches, in spite of Australians' utter hopelessness at singing football songs.

What I don't find all that surprising is that the poem which was actually based on real life events, has become the vehicle for sanitisation and myth making.

By way of background in 1890 the manager of Logan Downs Station, which was a massive pastoral sheep station, a Mr Charles Fairbain, tried to enforce upon the shearers who worked on the station, a set of employment contracts and conditions which would have seen them take increased hours for reduced pay and at the same time, smash their ability to negotiate a collective arrangement through the union. The conflict stretched on so long that it ruined their Christmas and New Years' and spilled over into a strike which began on 5th Jan 1891. All of this was occuring during the midst of a recession.

The shearers had a short list of demands which they weren't willing to compromise on until they had been met. They demanded the following:

- Continuation of existing rates of pay at 1890 rates.

- Protection of workers' rights and privileges, including standardised hours.

- Just and equitable agreements and the ability to negotiate through the union.

- Exclusion of low-cost Chinese labour, which undercut their pay rates.

Politically this is all going on around the time of the formation of the Labor Party in Queensland and the local unions hoped to form into a sufficiently large enough bloc to put seats into the Colonial Queensland Parliament.

Queensland Labor took on these things as policy; including excluding foreign labour from working in Australia, which led to Labor Party policy being adopted by the Protectionist Party and this became the basis for the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which is more commonly known as the White Australia Policy.

It should be noted at this point that the Australian Socialist League, opposed the anti-Chinese demands, even though they were also heavily involved in the strike and would also eventually join the Labor Party.

Yet again we see in history, a racist underclass who is trying to protect their own, forming political alliances with parties and entities who actively seek to undercut their pay and conditions, if it is immediately politically expedient. We've also got another national song in Australia (along with Advance Australia Fair) which is rooted in racism. 

Strikes tend to be infectious because collective effort yields bigger results than smaller pockets of dissent and soon there were strikes all across Queensland. This is where the story turns ugly. 

On multiple occasions, the Queensland Government sent in what was still a colonial army, to attack strikers. Naturally this escalated and shearers who were on strike then formed camps outside of townships; and then armed themselves.

Striking unionists retaliated to arrest and imprisonment by raiding shearing sheds, harassing non-union labour and committing acts of sabotage, although the incidents of actual violence or arson were few.

The whole thing gradually descended into madness as across Queensland, there were thousands of instances of armed soldiers arresting strike leaders and needing to protect non-union labour. Basically for four months in 1891, from February until May, central Queensland was practically on the brink of civil war at any moment.

It was really only after the Premier of Queensland, Samuel Griffith, called in the military on multiple occasions, that what eventually became known as the Great Shearers' Strike was broken. However, that didn't stop flare ups from happening over the next decade and it is in this climate that the conditions for the story of what would become Waltzing Matilda exist.

In September of 1894, some shearers at Dagworth Station were yet again on strike. On this occasion  situation broke into violence, with the striking shearers firing their rifles and pistols in the air and setting fire to the woolshed at Dagworth, killing dozens of sheep.

After arresting some of the striking shearers for arson and malicious damage, thee owner of Dagworth Station and three mounted state troopers gave chase to a man named Samuel Hoffmeister. Rather than be captured, Hoffmeister shot and killed himself at Four Mile Creek south of Kynuna at 12.30pm on 2 September, 1894.

This had ramifications across Queensland and the colonial police arrested thirteen union leaders across the colony and they were charged sedition and conspiracy, taken to Rockhampton for the trial; convicted, and sentenced to three years in gaol on St Helena Island Prison.

I guess that it makes sense that Australia should want a de facto national anthem which has to do with a vague attempt to stand up to authority and a vague kind of justice being metered out by happenstance. People who want to assume the role of the swagman can feel a sense pride in standing up for what you believe in and people who want to assume the role of authority putting down criminal acts in the name of justice can also feel that same sense of pride. 

We look to this rather than any national formation story because Australia didn't assert its independence through a war but a vote, and the racist white elements of society simply refuse to acknowledge that the whole country was stolen through brutality, genocide, and in one instance complete genocide. Our actual national anthem was first sung for the Highland Society of NSW, which would become part of the Advance Australia faction which contributed to the White Australia Policy being adopted in 1901.

We would rather take detached notions of sanitised mischief than actually face up to our country's formation sins.

...and his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong.

"Who'll come a waltzing matilda with me?"

Horse 2787 - #5 Is Dead, Long Live #5A... Maybe

I am hardly a musician and I am certainly not a musicologist but at least (and probably at most) I have acquired through osmosis, some basic music theory as well as a basic idea of how instruments work. I have also inadvertently caught the virus of basic luthiery (thanks to Mrs Rollo); which is why I have built my own three string guitar(s). 

I like to think that this is part of a very small rebellion, which is standing tall but still only managing to spit on the ankle of modern music; which is produced, polished, and pointless. If you have a string which passes over a nut and a bridge and the noise is then amplified either acoustically or electrically, then you have an instrument. Typically cigar box guitars tend to be 1, 2, 3, or 4 strings because although you can build 5 and 6, that generally also needs more fine skills and tooling; which moves the process out of the shed and into a more sophisticated workshop. That's boring.

I don't know if anyone could guess how 2020 was going to turn out but if you've spent this year in a state of voiceless paralysis then don't feel bad about it. Take all of the bits that you like and maybe the bits that you are forced to reuse and build 2021 into a new thing. 2020 could very well have been voiceless but with some new parts and a new set of strings, 2021 will be singing again albeit differently. Yeah okay, that's stretching the metaphor beyond sensibility but it is still true.

The biggest rule in building a three string guitar is that there are no rules. When you have no rules then it's impossible to predict what the results are going to be. After I've done surgery and restrung the guitar, it's going to have a different voice and that's okay.

If you want something that doesn't buzz and has lovely tones, buy a Taylor, Hoffner, Les Paul, or Fender. If you get weird tones and buzzes coming out of a cigar box guitar then that's the sound of the instrument, that's the sound of its unique voice; that's the sound of humanity messing about in a shed.

How many people have you heard say that they are going to write a book and then they never write the book? Look, just write the book. Do it. If you want to go out and build a guitar, just build it. I don't have a proper workshop and have to make my own makeshift drill tables from small logs and scraps, and do it outside. I am sure that you will probably have a better working space.

My black number 5 has had a problem for a while where one of the machine heads was stripping the worm gear. I could tune it to some chord (usually 1-5-1) and then the tension on the strings would cheese the worm gear up even further. It got to the point where it won't hold a sensible tuning and so I have had to replace the machine head.

After starting out with E-B-E on this guitar because I like the whine of a top E string at the 12th and 15th fret, the bottom string kept on going out; so I tuned downwards to hold less tension on the bottom string and then retuned the other two accordingly. I think that it ended up being many cents short of D-flat, with the top string also coming down to an octave above that; with the middle string being what whatever that A-flat/G-Sharp is in the middle of that new insane key. 1-5-1 tuning is very easy to work out and requires no musical theory at all - you just get the same tone at the 5th fret for the middle string and at the 12th fret for the bottom string, as the open top string. As it is, standard tuning on a regular six-string guitar is just a series of relative 5ths.

I know that it sounds strange but most music stores aren't interested in selling you replacement parts for instruments. They want to sell you whole instruments which are packed in a box. Guitar shops will sell you strings but strings are a consumable item. 

The unbelievable truth is that you generally can't buy machine heads very easily, let alone just one of them; so I found somewhere that I could buy a set for a normal six string guitar. Simple arithmetic tells me that six is just two lots of three; so even if I finish the job, I will have another set of machine heads which I can build another guitar with. The virus lives on.

However this is where the story moves into the unknown. I have to make the holes that the tuning pegs fit through, bigger. I have to do some surgery on #5 to replace the machine heads and the risk is that I end up creating cracks in the head of the guitar and the thing falls to pieces. With a properly built guitar that's a relatively simple operation but in order to turn #5 into #5A, I risk killing it altogether. 

I already feel a tinge of sadness when I have to replace the strings of a guitar because that already feels a bit like cutting its vocal cords. As it stands, I currently have a no-string guitar which can not speak. A voiceless guitar fails at its only function.

The other side of the equation though is that if I do end up killing #5 and it can not be reborn as #5A, then the virus of luthiery will drive me to build #6. As it was #3 was already reborn into #3A and then was cannibalised to build #5. If I am forced to build #6 because #5 can't be reborn as #5A, then because there are no rules, who knows what #6 will sound like?

Horse 2786 - No One Who Currently Has Power Likes Democracy

 There is a saying which goes something along the lines of "among all of the various forms of government that we have tried, democracy is the least worst". While that might sound like an altogether harmonious and splendid aphorism, it is worth pointing out that we have never actually tried pure democracy either.

Democracy, insofar as it exists in parliamentary systems, is the surrendering of the authority to various elected officials, as opposed to actual democracies in which things are decided by the general consensus of a population; which usually involves some kind of majority vote directly by the people concerned. Now obviously in a population of any more than about a thousand, direct election and consensus becomes unwieldy; however there are jurisdictions which still pose important questions to the people in direct referenda but most of the time, democracies usually involve one or multiple people representing some constituency. In that respect, representative democracy could be said to resemble pure democracy but only really at the point of the election of officials and at no other point in time.

That being said, although questioning the means by which those representative officials are elected is perfectly reasonable, disparaging the system despite all evidence, looks really really stupid and actively undermines the polity's confidence in the system.

I don't wish to get into a discussion about the details of conspiracy theories which are being touted as news and truth by self-interested profit taking media companies, but the existence of those theories points to two underlying conditions that are always bubbling away below the surface; which occasionally burst forth like an ill maintained sewer. Those two conditions have to do with the tension between freedoms and authority, and the maintenance of power and governance.

If we have been taught anything by the last 200 years of history, it is that democracy is fundamentally a good idea; not because of the goodness of people but because of the undeniable truth, that people are universally terrible. I completely reject the suggestion of philosophers like Rousseau who think that people are fundamentally good, based upon the overwhelming evidence that this is simply untrue. One only needs to look in any daily newspaper, or the news on the radio and television, or the abundance of cases being taken to court, to see this truth writ large.

Suppose for a second that we could install some kind of surveillance chip into people's skulls that would record every thought that someone had in a sample week. Ideally, in order to find someone who would be suitable to be Governor, King, President, Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else etc. we would first need to find one individual who be worthy enough to be fit for the job at hand. My bet is that we would find no suitable candidate in the entire world.

Let me run this thought experiment further. If I tell a lie to my cat, there is literally zero consequence. If I tell a lie to my wife, the consequence is that I might end up sleeping on the couch for a very long time. If I tell a lie to the central authority, through the civic means of say taxation or perhaps by violating the law through perjury or some such, then the consequence might be that I go to prison. If we are looking through the data on the surveillance chip to find anyone who might be suitable for the job, where they are in charge of the central authority, then I very much doubt that we'd find anyone who was not only fit for the job but also sufficiently good enough to avoid prison. I will even go so far as to suggest that Mother Theresa, Michelle Obama, Dr Victor Chang, all thought about stealing someone's delicious apple cider at some point. 

I would further suggest that deep down, we know this to be true; which is why tyrants of varying degrees of competence have worked out that you do not need to present the truth to people in order to get them to make you the Governor, King, President, Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else etc. All you need is a catchy slogan; to disparage the systems in place; and then declare "I alone can fix it", thus getting people to voluntarily select someone for the job whom our theoretical surveillance chip has said should rightly be in prison.

Democracy exists and was fought for because not only should all people quite rightly be in prison (which by my estimation includes literally everyone in the whole world) for some crime but people should not have unchecked power. Unchecked power always only ever leads to a single place; that is, unchecked cruelty. The unchecked power and unchecked cruelty of Governors, Kings, Presidents, Grand Poohbahs and Lords High Everything Else, results in suffering; which is why groups such as the barons, freemen, burghers, guildists, chartists, abolitionists, reformists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists, have all spent the better part of centuries trying to place checks on power and by extension, cruelty.

It is for this same reason that I personally think that the right to bear arms is dangerously stupid. A weapon that does not kill people has failed in its only purpose; so anyone who tries to tell you the lie that they want weapons for their 'defence', as someone else who is also openly unfit to be in charge of unchecked power, openly lies to both you and themselves because what they really want is the maintenance of power and governance and they want the means to kill you in order to keep it. Killing someone, even if it is under the banner of 'defence' is still cruelty.

British Labour Party MP Tony Benn, who repeatedly championed the cause of the vulnerable and stood up for the people who would become targets for whom the British Government would send planes to bomb, put forward five questions to ask powerful people:

1. What Power Have You Got?

2. Where Did You Get It From?

3. In Whose Interests Do You Exercise It?

4. To Whom Are You Accountable?

5. How Can We Get Rid Of You?

If you can not get rid of someone in power, then you do not live in a democracy but something else. That is why no one who currently has power likes democracy and also why every generation must struggle to win it again and again and keep it. If we do not, then the people who currently have power, will tend to start making changes in order to keep it; which includes voter suppression and putting in place barriers to voting such as really arcane and draconian ID laws. The great historical struggle, for the past two hundred or so years has always been over the scope and character of democracy and of the rich and powerful's attempts to snuff it out.

When those people in power begin to question the legitimacy of the process which is going to get rid of them, then the most logical assumption is that they intend to maintain their hold on power and governance by undemocratic means. If the people for whom they wield that power is not the people but the already rich and powerful and private corporations, then the marriage of the state and private privilege starts to border on functional fascism.

It is also worth being extremely suspicious of people touting personal responsibility as some cure-all to the necessary problems of government. What they really mean to say is that they would prefer smaller government and for the state to get out of the way; so that private entities can fill the void of power and governance. Private power and governance, which isn't actually answerable to the people, is the equivalent of privately run oligarchies who act as if they have no responsibility to the state or the people at all; and if you think for a second that they will do a better job than the state because of some notion of benevolence, then I should remind you that as compared with GDP, total charitable donations works out to be consistently less than 2% across the world. That isn't enough to run an old age pension system, much less any of the other functions of government.

A wise saw once said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. If may add a supporting reason why that is in fact the case, it is that no society is actually physically capable of remembering anything beyond the memories of its oldest member. Admittedly we have invented better methods of recording the present, such that people have a greater ability to get a sense of what the past was like but this is still at best, only like looking at the world through an expensive looking glass. Once one returns the looking glass to the shelf with all of the other items upon one's dressing table, it is again physically impossible to look at one's self. Herein lies the central problem of the past and indeed of history generally. Even if one chooses to study the past (and the vast majority of people will not), they certainly will not remember the implications of what the past might be able to teach them if they have neither studied it, nor experienced it first hand.

And so it is with myself. I am two generations removed from the unpleasantness of last century in which more than one hundred million souls on board this world, were destroyed (some of whom were destroyed more efficiently and effectively due to mass extinction devices) and physically can not remember the past. I find it bordering on insanity that the nations which fought against fascism now find it so easy to themselves shift to the right and embrace those same things; while private interests try to convince them that the state can not help them, or rather is not capable of doing so.

I make no bones about the fact that I think that US politics for the last four years has been an absolute horrorshow (and this spirit of horrorshow is quickly infecting Australia). Rather than choose someone who had any experience in running civil government, the American people actively chose the star of a so-called 'reality TV show' who then proceeded to run the administration of the nation with as much reality as a reality TV show; actual civil government was allowed to wither and die. There should have been a warning that the person was unfit for the job when he uttered those words "I alone can fix it" on multiple occasions.

He then went on to repeatedly prove that he had no intention of fixing anything through demonstrated inactivity. Back in 2016 the NPR Politics podcast would report how many posts in government remained unfilled and by about mid-February of 2017, then ceased doing so once it became apparent that those posts would probably never be filled. That number remains at about 1600.

The Trump Administration is not the worst in US political history as is often declared in hyperbole but it's certainly up there in terms of badness and unfitness. It would take something abysmal to knock off James Buchanan's administration which broke the Union and plunged the country into civil war but it was at least as bad as Richard Nixon's or Calvin Coolidge's administrations in terms of patronage and corruption. Right at the very end of its days, the act of questioning the democratic process itself in a desperate bid to hold onto power for power's sake, is currently going on like a fever; which is an apt metaphor for the administration's lethargic response to the Coronavirus pandemic which has now claimed more American lives than all wars combined since World War 2 but yet still hasn't gained even enough of an economic response which is appropriate to the scale of importance of the thing.

For the rich and powerful, Democracy itself has to be attacked for the simple reason that those same rich and powerful, who have benefited and profited from the anemia of the state, have sensed that they might finally have a chance to smash what was built by human blood. Democracy, insofar as it exists in parliamentary systems, is the surrendering of the authority to various elected officials; if it will not be surrendered then they have decided to fight to take it by legal force.

Horse 2785 - America Could Fix Its Elections By Bothering Just A Little Bit

Partly because I follow both sides of politics across several nations and partly because everything on the internet eventually gets distilled into the most extreme version of itself, my social media feed across Twitter and Facebook has been one in which conspiracy theorists are spinning the engines of malarkey and wingnuttery almost like a perpetual motion machine. 

Let's assume for a minute that the current conspiracy wingnuts are actually correct and that there has been a massive systemic failure of security in this last presidential election. I find it completely incredible that the Presidential Election was fraudulent but that the concurrent elections for Representatives, Senators, Governors, and local government positions weren't but then again, that's because I think that if you are going to design a conspiracy theory then it had at least be somewhat internally consistent. Even so, if we make that assumption, then the only logical action is to do what they did in the Western Australian Senate election a couple of years ago and run the whole thing all over again.

I find it utterly stupid and abysmal of characters that supposedly the 'greatest democracy in the world' can't run elections properly.

The more rational explanation is that the side who lost, just really belligerent and of such poor character that they can not accept the results without having major dummy spit. It is as though two year old children were put in charge of the kitchen, smashed up some glassware and started banging on the pots and pans, and are now chucking a tantrum because mummy has had to come in and clean up the mess.

America, grow up.

I personally think that the United States is badly constituted and this has been comprehensively proven by the fact that that same constitution is one of the root causes as to why the country had a civil war in 1861 and why it has been copied by exactly nobody. The framers made it deliberately difficult to amend and chang because of highly self-interested reasons and 231 years later, it still echoes with that same deliberate set of difficulties.

Nevertheless, there are some key aspects to how elections are conducted which can be changed without any amendment to the constitution whatsoever and if I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else then I would set about making those changes by executive order almost immediately.

1. Get rid of Voting Machines and conduct elections on paper.

It seems utterly absurd to me that anyone would allow elections to be conducted on a machine. Not only are there the costs of maintaining said machines but the integrity of the result will always be in doubt. Someone can accuse the other side of rigging the machines, or of being open to man in the middle attacks, or of direct denial of service attacks or a heap of other things that can go wrong.

The only way of ensuring complete integrity of the vote is by every vote being written on paper and also being treated with suspicion. Paper ballots should be counted by hand and in the presence of a representative from the relevant political parties. Where possible, the vote tallies should be signed off by representatives from the various interested parties as well. As a paper ballot is also the most reliable instrument upon which to do a recount.

2. Saturday Voting.

Voting on a Tuesday may have been sensible in 1789 when the Constitution was written but it isn't sensible now. Actually, in 1789 it wasn't sensible either. Typically, an election would be held over several weeks; with some physical polling booths moving from town to town. The idea that you could ever hold an election on one day, has more or less always been nonsense and the suggestion that pre-polling is somehow undemocratic is an outright lie.

Voting on a Saturday means that the most number of people don't have to amend their day, just to go to the polls. Most people are already not at work on a Saturday. Also, this ensures that school halls and other civic institutions which normally are open during the week and that have sufficient space to be able to be operated as a polling place, don't have to close because they already would be anyway.

3. An Independent Electoral Commission

Apart from the Secretary heads of a department, almost everyone else within a government department has a life span which is longer than the elected member. Politicians may come and go but the underlying civil service is eternal. As such, although they have the job of implementing the sometimes stupid whims of their temporary masters, they have the more important and co-objectively self-interested job of maintaining the continued operation of the actual machinery of governance.

Staggeringly, the United States doesn't really have a proper Electoral Commission and instead chooses to let the states run their own elections. Not only is the entire process excessively politicised but it combines that with being hideously inefficient; and both of those factors are perfectly acceptable to the political parties already in power, who don't actually have to compete in the marketplace of ideas. 

3a. Provide enough polling places.

As we're now holding elections on a Saturday, every school hall and most major civic institutions which have halls (such as the Town Hall or the Courthouse) will be closed. Those spaces are now instantly available to be able to put votig booths into. As we're now holding elections on paper, those voting booths can be made out of cardboard and erected in about two hours for an entire room of 60. If they already come pre-folded so that all the polling officers have to do is pop them out and fold some flaps down, then it should be a pretty simple job.

3b. Provide Voter ID

If voter fraud is the big boogeyman which you are worried about despite all of the evidence, then as the date of an election is known, then there should be a process to provide people with the necessary ID which you are demanding from them. I can guarantee that the vast majority of people in the United States will have a photo ID card as their Driver's License; so this should already be acceptable but where people for whatever reason, be they old and no longer driving, or too young to drive, or perhaps they are homeless etc. then the ability for these people to be able to obtain something to prove their identity which you are demanding from them, should be made readily available and obtainable in the several months before an election.

...

I am of course fully aware that originalists will argue that because the states have a 'republican form of government' that the original authority to be able to conduct elections lies with the states but invariably, those same people are the same people who are currently the children chucking a tantrum because of their imagination of voting fraud.

If you think that the system is systemically broken but do not want to actually fix the system, then I don't care what your complaint actually is because it's internally nonsense. I don't think that it makes sense to complain about a thing being broken (which it clearly is) and then refuse to fix it, just so you can go on complaining about the problem.

Horse 2784 - The 400th Anniversary Of The Mayflower... It's Complex.

 This month marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower to America in 1620. The story of the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers has become a kind of creation myth for the United States; but reality is far more complex than the myth seems to let on. 

The very long background to this moment in history is the result of serial philanderer and angry ginger, King Henry VIII. One of the popes wouldn't let Henry get a divorce from his wife and being a man with enough chips on his shoulder to fill an entire bag, Henry made himself head of his own church, the Church Of England, got his divorce by virtue of being able to make up all of the rules, and promptly went around confiscating the Catholic Church's stuff and had their monasteries burned.

England entered a period of slight chaos after the death of Henry VIII and after all the odd imprisonment and beheading and three monarchs later, Elizabeth I became Queen and continued the anti-Catholic purge. Quite frankly, the Puritans which had sprung up as a fanatical sect, quite liked the idea of destroying Catholic stuff and paraphernalia and sort of developed their own brand of asceticism.

After Elizabeth I died, there was no one left to succeed her as she had had polio as a child and remained sterile. James VI of Scotland was installed as James I of England and his attitude was far more permissive than what had been under the Tudor monarchs.

James who knows himself to be a foreign king, tried to consolidate his power through the instrument of the church, by allowing a greater degree of pluralism but at the same time, opened up the availability of the Bible to more people by commissioning his own Authorized Version of the Bible. The Puritans upon realising that they have the ability to impose their will on society, more or less immediately began to do so; and it is in this climate that witches are burned across the north of England and why eventually it will be the same Puritans who grow increasingly annoyed at what they see as the degeneracy of Charles I and why they will have his head cut off and one of their own installed as the de facto king in Oliver Cromwell.

The Puritans are a kind of radical expression of Protestantism which arrive at the conclusion that the reformation hasn't gone far enough; so not only do they think that the ornamental frippery of the church should be done away with (stained-glass windows, kneeling, the vestments etc.) but they also reject the episcopal nature of the church and monarch and think that a local church should be the authority that is answerable to nobody. The Puritans will rage against the increasing tolerance of society in England, as well as being more nativist and racist (they absolutely hate the Jews), as well as the bishops and county magistrates and the King and parliament in Westminster.

This is where the story gets weird. The core group of Puritans which will become the Mayflower group, came from a town called Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and in order to raise enough capital to get to America, they depart for the Netherlands which is the then trading capital of the world. The Scrooby group of Puritans were strict Sabbatarians who objected to a whole host of activity on Sunday; including the playing of sport and their repeated interference in shutting down things on Sunday, eventually caught the ire of the Archbishop Tobias Matthew, who in 1607 raided homes and imprisoned several members of the congregation for repeated disturbances of the peace and under the provisions of the 1558 Recusancy Acts. They eventually got the point that English society was far more tolerant of various practices than they were prepared to allow and left England in 1609, to emigrate to the Netherlands. Unfortunately for them, they found out that Dutch society was even more permissive than English society and while they were tolerated in the Netherlands, they become even more determined to start an even more hard line society in America. 

Some of the group ended up being in the Netherlands for about nine years before they finally raised enough capital, through investors who were keen to get in on the North American fur and fishing trade business; and so of the 102 people who end up leaving on the Mayflower after one of their ships (which was amusingly called the Speedwell) started taking on water before it had even left the harbour, roughly half were a kind of adventure merchant class of people. They left the Netherlands in August of 1620, ended up collecting more people in Plymouth and left September of 1620 and didn't arrive until the 11th of November 1620.

What I find strange about the mythologising of the Mayflower in particular, is that the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia happened in 1607 which is thirteen years before the Mayflower shows up. That colony had already been through winters and famines and war with first peoples and yet this weird myth about the Pilgrim fathers trying to escape persecution seems to have entered the public consciousness. 

Even weirder is the idea that they were escaping religious persecution; especially in the light that the Mayflower group and the so-called Pilgrim Father, would eventually have their colony at Plymouth merge with other Puritan groups to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony; which showed even harsher intolerance to other religious views, including Anglican, Quaker, and Baptist theologies; which would have been tolerant to them. That same strand of Puritanism led to the English Civil War (which they won) and in the capital of colonial Massachusetts, a return to accusing people of witchcraft, which culminated in the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Horse 2783 - The Fundamental Problem With Sir Bobo Gargle

 For a while long enough for it to be considered part of the cultural furniture of Australia, Sean Micallef's satirical news comedy p(r)ogr(o)am(me) 'Mad As Hell', has thrown tomatoes, bananas, and gherkins of comedy at the establishment and the rich and powerful from a position elsewhere in the establishment. A comedy news comedy p(r)ogr(o)am(me) is about as establishment as you can possibly get without becoming a mindless cackledrone on Sky News.

Mad As Hell is most likely principally written by Micallef and I suspect that the reason why he has made a string of these surrealist kinds of semi-newsy kind of comedy shows is a product of both his legal background and of the comedy that he absorbed. Not only does Mad As Hell lay out its comedy influences blatantly by giving its characters names that wouldn't be out of place on Monty Python's Flying Circus or The Goon Show, but it lays down the necessary visual language of comedy by employing roughly the same sorts of weapons against its comedy targets on both an audio and visual front.

One of the staple characters (as played by Francis Greenslade) is Vice Rear Cabin Boy, Sir Bobo Gargle.

Comedy works by taking an expected structural narrative and then subverting that narrative in some way. The prime methods of doing this are by the use of sarcasm, vanity, satire, punnery and wordplay, substitution of meaning generally, direct parody as well as exaggeration. Surrealist comedy, of which Mad As Hell very heavily leans into, likes to play with the forms of meaning through exaggeration quite frequently; which is what the character of Vice Rear Cabin Boy Sir Bobo Gargle very obviously is. He is very broad parody of type as well as by mannerisms and catchphrase (which itself has also become the subject of meta-comedy through playing with the very form of the thing itself). 

One only needs to look at Vice Rear Cabin Boy Sir Bobo Gargle to see that the visual language being employed to make fun of rigid authority systems, is one of exaggeration.

On the most obvious visual reading of Sir Bobo Gargle, it is apparent that he has way too many medals to be sensible and I think that that is as far as the visual joke is supposed to go because nobody would seriously analyse him any further, would they? Well I would. I would because that also is itself a form of meta-comedy through exaggeration.

Probably without any attention to detail, Mad As Hell just asked the ABC props department to provide the character with some kind of navy uniform and didn't care much beyond that. Sir Bobo Gargle isn't actually wearing an Australian Navy uniform but an American one, and a Naval Commander's uniform at that.

Also without attention to detail, those far too many medal ribbons aren't just some random affair but actually can be read and matched with the accompanying medals. Admittedly I haven't yet been able to crack all of the codes yet but I have had a red hot go at it.

I think that some of them are as follows:

Right Side: 9 Rows

Row 1: US Vietnam Gallantry Cross - US Bronze Star Medal - US Purple Heart

Row 2: X - Air Force Organizational Excellence Award (1969) - The Most Noble Order of the Garter

Row 3: X - X - X

Row 4: X - X - X

Row 5: X - X - X

Row 6: X - X - Victoria Cross

Row 7: X - X - X

Row 8: X - X - US Armed Forces Service Medal (1996)

Row 9: US China Service Medal (1942)  - France & Germany Star (1945) - Navy Cross

Left Side: 4 Rows

Row 1: X - US Vietnam Service Medal (1965)

Row 2: X - X - X

Row 3: X - X - US Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal (1961)

Row 4: X - X - UN Medal (UNTSO, Middle East) (1948)

I suspect that whoever originally made this fake uniform up, had some references to play with because my suspicion is that the entire medal group on both sides is completely genuine. I have no idea who exactly would have been that decorated but the fact that there are so many medals for gallantry, indicates to me that whoever this was was a career naval officer who would have been otherwise useless in civilian life.

The other major point of noteworthiness here is that this medal group is likely to have ended in the 1960s/70s which indicates that this is taken from a colour photograph but one that is swiftly running away into the past. I think that this person would have been a World War II/Korean War/Vietnam War veteran.

How this relates to the character of Vice Rear Cabin Boy Sir Bobo Gargle is that his rank is blatantly an act of stupidity, his title of 'Sir' is impossible if he is an American, and he is also not working for the Royal Australian Navy if he is dressed in an American Naval Commander's uniform. There is literally nothing believable about Vice Rear Cabin Boy Sir Bobo Gargle and yet, the character type of a gloriously incompetent naval officer of great (?) authority is possibly more real than the actual characters who inhabit the news cycle.

A common feature of good writing generally and of comedy in particular is that it essentially builds a stripped down model of some aspect of the human condition and plays with that. 

The fundamental problem with Vice Rear Cabin Boy Sir Bobo Gargle is that because the underlying writing is very good, and because Francis Greenslade is also a very good character actor, Sir Bobo Gargle is able to inhabit a larger space than the unreality in which the model should allow him to inhabit. Especially in the twenty-first century where actual people in authority and power try to stay on script, they end up being far smaller than the position in reality that they occupy.

Our Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) tries to project an image of being a daggy dad; which might very well be true but not necessarily as the premier of a parliamentary cabinet. There's a really strange kind of dynamic at work where characters like Sir Bobo Gargle, Vomitoria Catchment, spokesborg Darius Horsham and Brion Pegmatite, end up being more real and more believable than the character types that they are trying to satirise.

Of course the very real danger for society is what happens if they decide to vote for and install a character from unreality into positions of power. Instead of someone like Sir Bobo Gargle who is trying to smuggle truth in with the blatant lies that he is selling us, we get someone incompetent, awful, or nefarious, trying to put just enough truth in with the lies that they are trying to make us swallow.

Horse 2782 - The Superb Ibis: Unjustly Maligned

 In a time of general plague where the streets have been vacated by humans due to miasma (this pandemic is genuinely caused by miasma as it is an aerosol borne virus; it's just that the original theory was wrong), great volumes of the built environment which have been vacated have been subsequently invaded by nature which cares not for the rules of spaces.

I have seen video on the internet of racoons, bears, cats, stags, and even tigers, which have decided that without the immediate threat of humans in the streets they can go nuts and have their own raves. In my own part of the world, that means that birds have decided to have their own private raves and go woo-hooing in the streets. I have personally seen galahs, cockatoos, ravens, rainbow lorikeets, possibly a flock of Eastern Rosella, and Sydney's famous Ibises.

I think that Ibises are unjustly maligned.

There is a flock of about 60 Ibises in Marayong which particularly like to travel between Quakers Court and the car park behind the shops at Marayong Station. I have no idea where they go to sleep at night but I suspect that they like Marayong as a suburb because Marayong has quite a long series of connected parks and a creek; which is some kind of Ibises' paradise.

To give them their proper name, Superb Ibises can be found all over Sydney and they have done remarkably well for themselves. Yet probably because of their silvery colours, Ibises have a reputation for being dirty, which just isn't fair. They have a reputation for being noisy, which isn't fair because they are birds; they have a reputation for eating garbage, which isn't fair because they are just making use of the facilities of the built environment which we have created. Ibises have the nickname of the "Bin Chicken" which although being very very Australian because we like to cut down everything, it also isn't really fair either. We just don't give this kind of name to Rainbow Lorikeets even though they are just colourful hoodlums; nor do we give this kind of name to Magpies even though they will openly attack us and create crimson tides from our heads.

The conception of a city has maybe only been on the continent of Australia for the past 200 years. The white peoples' notion that nature was something to be conquered and scraped away is vastly different to first peoples' notion that nature should be lived in harmony with and in and around. Nobody ever told the Ibises that the expectations were changing and so they are still quite timid around people in comparison with other birds. There are flocks of galahs and cockatoos which in comparison, will let people walk straight through them because they don't care. Likewise there are flocks of pigeons, rainbow lorikeets, and Australian Ravens which also will just stare at you while you walk on by. We have magpies which are genuinely cantankerous and will swoop at you and will draw  blood, if they think that their nests are being attacked. Ibises though, are relatively calm things; albeit a wee bit noisy.

If you were walking along and found a ten dollar note on the footpath, then you'd probably think that was pretty ace. Imagine that you are an Ibis and you don't care about ten dollar notes but bits of scrap food that tastes amazing and was just left laying around everywhere. You'd have a field day and think that you were all of that and a bag of chips, or the king of town. That's basically what we leave out for the Ibises; with no explanation or anything.

It might be because our usual interactions with Ibises only ever seems to be watching them raiding the rubbish that we have left behind, or making deeply functional and utilitarian noises, that our impressions of them are so hideously tainted. 

The truth is that with their long necks, even longer beaks, and surprisingly massive wingspan, when they are up in the sky they are incredibly graceful. This is most likely where they got their proper name of Superb Ibis from because, they are.

There is a kind of secluded valley near Mosman Wharf with quite a nice park at the bottom and because it is virtually impossible to build houses on and to scrape away nature, it remains more of an accurate representation of what Sydney might have been like before white people showed up. The Ibises on the other hand, don't really care about what its civic purpose is and instead have more fun with the natural environment and the fly dynamics of air.

Probably because of the shape of the landscape and the fact that there is an open patch of land at the bottom which is warmed by the sun, that park spontaneously creates rotating thermals of rising air. The Ibises which are excellent gliders, they will hitch a ride inside the thermals and slowly rise up with the rising air. You can sometimes see dozens of them at once, all going around effortlessly like a Ibis carousel; slowly, upwards, to the tune of some unknown song which they know the words.

From what I have observed, Ibises are highly social creatures which appear to enjoy their own company and dare I say it, engage in play with each other. I've seen what I think is a game of peekaboo played by Ibises behind trees, which I would dismiss if it was isolated but it keeps on happening.

I for one actually like the carefree attitude of the Ibises; that they eat whatever they can find, that they go wherever they like, and that they hang about and play in and around wherever they are. When they are up in the sky, they look like superb pieces of engineering which is why they got that moniker in the first place. I think that the Superb Ibis is unjustly maligned but I can see how the name "Bin Chicken" might be a sign of affection. If there was a state/city bird, then the Superb Ibis should be Sydney's. They're ace.

Horse 2781 - The Cover-Up of Afghanistan War Crimes Is Equally Disturbing

Yesterday, the 19th of November 2020, the final report examining the conduct of Australian Special Forces during the war in Afghanistan was released by the Defence Chief General Angus Campbell. In the report, it discloses "credible information" relating to allegations made about 39 unlawful killings and two allegations of cruelty involving 25 current of former Defence Force personnel in 23 separate incidents. 

Defence Chief General Angus Campbell has unsurprisingly unreservedly apologised to Afghanistan for unlawful killings by Australia’s special forces. 

Very obviously, if you give men guns and power, then they will want to use them and the fact that this has happened is unsurprising but nevertheless still both a deep tragedy for the families of the deceased as well as a complete moral failure by the Defence Force. Saying sorry doesn't bring people back to life and apologising from the other side of the world, is weasely. 

However, quite apart from the incident itself is the lengths to which there has been a mass cover-up and the equally morally hazardous use of power at home.

There are several things to note about this:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-05/abc-raided-by-australian-federal-police-afghan-files-stories/11181162

Australian Federal Police officers have left the ABC's Sydney headquarters more than eight hours after a raid began over a series of 2017 stories known as the Afghan Files.

ABC managing director David Anderson said the broadcaster "stands by its journalists" and "will protect its sources". An AFP statement said the warrant was not linked to an AFP raid on a Canberra News Corp journalist's home on Tuesday. The stories, by ABC investigative journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clark, revealed allegations of unlawful killings and misconduct by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and were based off hundreds of pages of secret Defence documents leaked to the ABC.

- 5th Jun 2019, ABC News

Firstly it means to say that the ABC, that is Australia's national broadcaster, dared to tell the truth and still got raided by the AFP.

Secondly and I find this bordering on criminal, there is reason to suggest that the phone call which tipped of the AFP came from an (02) 9288-XXXX exchange number. I know for a fact that there were news reporters from other media outlets who were informed about this before it happened and given that a raid by the AFP on the national broadcaster makes for excellent television ratings, that means that those rival media outlets have profited as a result of this. The beauty of this for them is that because advertising contracts aren't directly connected with the passing on of what should be classified information, then the Proceeds Of Crime Acts do directly apply.

Why the AFP were alerted by an (02) 9288-XXXX exchange number will probably never ever be investigated but using the instrument of the police to prosecute truth telling, ought to send chills through the people of Australia. 

Thirdly, the former ADF officer David McBride who had the bravery to speak up against what is almost certainly a war crime, is still facing prosection for having done so. If telling the truth is going to send you to prison and using the power of the AFP is the weapon deployed by the relevant Minister, then you can expect that even more morally hazardous actions resulting in death, will absolutely occur in future.

The worrying thing about this is that although there will be investigations into the alleged unlawful killings (notice the difference between 'unlawful killing' and 'murder') because the justice process quite rightly needs to determine matters of fact before considering what is appropriate, the actions of the Minister, the Australian Federal Police, whoever made the phone call, and the media outlets involved, will not be investigated. Questions to do with how those various parties both received information and how they passed it on, generally aren't either criminal or civil torts. Someone acting with serious information and passing it on to someone relevant are the actions of a standard reasonable person; it's just that what's legally reasonable, what's authorised, what's morally hazardous, and what is corrupt, are often way to expensive to bother to prosecute.

Horse 2780 - We Need To Change

 Some of the jobs given to forensic accountants, actually have less to do with accounting than you might imagine. For instance, the firm that I work for was asked to look at the data to do with late night trading for pubs and clubs and draw some conclusions and/or suggestions. We determined that from a purely economic efficiency point of view, that it would make more sense for pubs and clubs to remain open all through the night, so that people weren't all vomited out into the streets where they would find inadequate public transportation to take them home and where the combination of alcohol and coldness made people more irritable and more likely to be involved in street violence. 24 hour trading actually has the net benefit of spacing out people's exiting times from venues and provided that public transportation is adequate, that translates into far less associated on costs due to hospital admissions.

Accounting and Forensic Accounting is sometimes the art of looking at the movements of costs and prices and trying to suggest better and greater efficiencies to be gained. In that respect, forensic accounting can be like management accounting while travelling backwards.

One of the jobs that we've been given, along with a bunch of other forensic accountants, is the job of deciding whether or not to finally ditch the five cent coin like New Zealand did and/or to suggest some overhaul of the existing system.

To be fair, the Reserve Bank of Australia has been testing the waters with this kind of thing for a while. The planchets that the Royal Australian Mint uses are based on a standard to do with the Pound Stirling which dates from 1849 and are king of rapidly becoming increasingly unfit for purpose. A few years ago they released a few 25c commemorative coins to basically test the public's reaction; who were as you might expect, completely ambivalent.

At the heart of the coin conundrum is a mathematical mystery called the change-making problem. That problem looks at how many coins is the fewest for any given transaction; given a series of standard coins. The change-making problem (that is the question of finding the minimum number of coins of certain denominations, that add up to a given amount of money) has been around for hundreds of years. Since coins are the physical assets of a universal token exchange system, then designing an idea system should a snap? No? The 1–2–5 series of coins relies on the fact that in base-10, these are the preferred numbers because they are factors.

Famously, Coca-Cola approached the US Treasury and the President to and asked them to mint a 7.5c coin especially for use in vending machines. They were turned down. From 1851-1889 the United States minted 3c coins and $3 because of postage rates dropping from five cents to three cents.

In the case of a 3c coin, having a step between a 1c and a 5c is much of a muchness in either case if it be 2c or 3c. In the case of Coca-Cola, while on the face of it it seems highly self-interested (because it is), the knock-on effect would be that a 7.5c coin would have become the default price for things in vending machines; in much the same way that quarters would come to fill that role in America later on in the century. 

Those two stories while they're not directly relevant, actually illustrate one of the expectations that we have for coinage. Yes, coins are the physical embodiment of the idea of some small amount of money but that physical embodiment is also asked to do some small amount of work; by not just being a physical transfer of some small amount of money but actually being the physical keys which open the door for the transfer of goods and services.

The coins that you are likely to get back at most NCR automatic cash register machines are a 5c, 10c, 20c, and $1. The coins that you are almost never going to get back are the 50c and $2. This is because the NCR automatic cash register machines are specifically designed for American change and will give back a Penny, Nickel, Dime, and Quarter. America does have a Half Dollar but it is virtually never used and it has a Dollar coin which is deeply unpopular for reasons that I simply fail to understand. 

The truth is that countries like Australia, Ireland, and a lot of Europe, simply eliminated their 1c and 2c coins a long time ago. New Zealand took the action of removing its 5c coins as well, and Japan removed all of its fractional currency 

(the smallest coin is a 1¥ coin but once upon a time, that Yen used to be made of 100 Sen) and is now on the path that places like Italy was and South Korea currently is, where the base unit of currency is so small that it is useless.

Underlying all of this is the basic story that money itself is just a useful universal legal fiction which acts as a universal token system. One Wurnik as the currency of a fictional country called Elbonia, can be worth practically anything that a writer of fiction wants it to be. In fact 1 Wurnik could be massive or miniscule and the people of Elbonia would take it on faith that their fiduciary currency would be worth exactly as valuable as everyone else thinks that it is.

Since the value of the currency is itself a useful universal fiction, then the physical tokens (that is, the coins and notes) can also be whatever a nation devices them to be.

The American Dollar which is 100 cents (and technically 1000 mils) has the primarily used physical tokens of 1, 5, 10, 25 because going back to the invention of the United States when the Spanish 8 Reals (otherwise known as the Spanish Dollar, which takes its name from the Thaler which kind of became a generic name for a big coin), it was clipped into quarters to make smaller change.

Australia inherited the British Pounds, Shillings, and Pence, system; and made its currency backwards compatible with the existing coins by making the Shilling and Ten Cents as the direct equivalents before and after decimalisation (for the second time). Britain carried its Pound over with a 1:1 equivalence and adjusted its coins accordingly. Britain also uses a 1-2-5 series of coins but still has its 1p and 2p coins. In some respects we are already ahead of Britain when it comes to the kinds of coins that we should use, even though we are using an inappropriate series of planchets.

The data that we have been given suggests (unsurprisingly) that the most common ending after the decimal point is .00 There is also a spike at .50 and smaller spikes where the amounts end at the ten cent increments. That would suggest the prices stated are already self-adjusting with respect to what lies beyond the decimal point. This is already obvious to anyone who has bought any tangible big thing; nobody would honestly expect to see the decimal point when buying a house, or a car, and to a lesser extent whitegoods. At the restaurant that I was at on the weekend, prices also didn't have the second digit after the decimal point and for main meals they didn't have the decimal point stated at all.

All of this is to be expected because the amount of change that people are prepared to carry around with them is not that great. People might dare to carry as much as a thousand dollars in notes but they'll almost never carry any more than about twenty dollars in loose coins.

Admittedly that almost 30 years into the project of eliminating smallest of coins, absolutely nobody is lamenting not having a 1c or 2c coin any more. The last bastion where you actually see individual cent prices is at the supermarket and even then, people buy so many items that the existence of a coin to represent that last digit is annoying to lots of people. The 5c coin has virtually exhausted its usefulness and I do not think that we would lament its passing either.

Sorry, but you need to go now.

Curiously, if we wanted to improve the efficiency of the currency by introducing some crazy go nuts bonkers coin, then just like Coca-Cola suggested introducing a 7.5c coin, the coin that would currently produce the outcome of the fewest coins needed per transaction would be a $1.80 coin. At that amount, the fewest number of coins that would be needed on average to give out change, falls from 3.7 to just 2.1 On average, you would need it plus some other coin and maybe another but only occasionally.

I also think that it would be useful if we reduced the size of the existing fractional coinage. New Zealand has already got rid of their 5c coin and reduced their coins and several years on from doing that, the country carries on because its almost unremarkable. 

We were asked the question of whether or not we think that people would benefit from replacing the $5 note with a coin but considering that the life of a plastic banknote is already beyond 25 years, there seems little benefit to be gained.

Horse 2779 - The Most Important Election In Modern History

 Owing to the fact that we now live in a media landscape where everything has to be hyperbole all of the time, where everything is awesome, everything is terrible, everything is the best, everything is the worst, where we live in a surfeit of wisdom and an age of incredulity, et cetera et cetera et cetera... the 2020 United States Presidential Election has been declared as the most important ever...

...111 RoXoRz da BoXoRz, lulwut. etc.

Indeed while the implications of what has happened and the consequences of the various players have certainly made sure that all available oxygen in the room has been sucked out to the exclusion of all else, the long game of history will eventually judge all of this as being a weird blip in the past, as you and I both die and the memories of this moment and indeed the memories of the people who were living in this moment, were all swept away upon the winds. History as the wind which follows in the wake of the Destroying Angel Of Death who has an appointment with everyone, blows most things away as dust and our place remembers us not.

Maybe it will be remembered as myth as is the case for someone like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln but the fact remains that practically nobody remembers the worst President in the history of the United States, James Buchanan, and perhaps quite rightly so. In the moment, everything seems consequential but history in playing the long game, consigns everything to mere memory and even then, only as long as there is someone actually still alive to remember it.

When it comes to the broader question of what was the most important election in modern history (and I use that in the incredibly narrow sense that there are still people around to remember it and/or the consequences) then the election which brought Hitler to power in the 1930s certainly is up there but even that falls into a much larger narrative of generational hatred which was revisited roughly every 30 years for the previous 300. Even someone as horrible as he has been and gone and his place is beginning to remember him not.

I think that the election which was actually the most important is also one of the more boring ones; which is often the case with history. We tend to have this view that history is a series of unfortunate events which turn on the actions of few great men but really, the long game of history takes the collective actions of millions and often gives leaders the words to a song that the great unsung multitudes were already singing.

During the midst of the Second World War and only after it became obvious that the world was changing, the British people voted to change from Winston Churchill's Conservative Party to Clement Attlee's Labour Party as the party in charge of government. Domestically, the Labour Party had a very large vision for the future and it was able to bring the British people with them. That vision included nationalising key industries as well as the setting up of the welfare state (which included the establishment of the National Health Service), based on the immediate evidence that the people had worked together to see off Nazi Germany and Hitler and that a shared collective future would be the best placement for the next immediate phase of history.

Of immediate importance was what should happen to the Union Of India. All of India had basically been run from a single office in Whitehall for decades and during the years of the Attlee Government from 1945-1951, the world changed in ways that it hadn't for at least a hundred years before and in some cases in a way that it hadn't for a minimum of not quite 1900 years. That is the kind of scale of importance we are talking about here.

Not to put to fine a point on it but actions of the British Government from 1945-1951 immediately changed the course of what is now at least 8 countries, a current population of 2.3 billion people, probably helped to kick off at least six wars, was partly responsible for changing the course of the Cold War and may have had a hand in the Korean War.

I think that it is almost impossible to overstate the importance to modern history of the stance that the British Colonial and Foreign Offices took. 

Independence for The Union of India and what would subsequently be India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh was a question which had been posed since the beginning of the century. 

There were lingering questions surrounding what would happen to Palestine and Israel which were British Mandate Territories which had been won after the defeat and breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and there was also questions to do with Burma, Sudan, and lesser questions that had to do with the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

The Attlee Government was forced to immediately confront the fact that Great Britain wasn't quite so great and that its star position of being World Superpower No.1 had faded and died. Britain almost meekly stepped away from its former colonial possessions and while that's a vast oversimplification, it explains why Britain has sort of ended up as this insane little hermit kingdom just off to the side of Europe, wedged between American imperial capitalism and Europe's barely held together quasi-collectivism. 

History has been so quick to cast aside the memory of who was in the administration of the most important and boring set of decisions of modern history, that I had to look up who they were:

The Secretary of State for India and Burma was Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who had already spent the earlier part of the 20th century campaining for womens' sufferage. He was involved in more the negotiations that led to India's independence; including meeting with Gandhi on multiple occasions.

Christopher Addison who became Leader of the House of Lords under Clement Attlee, basically oversaw the implementation if Labour's post-war anti-imperialist policies and was the responsible minister in charge of the transformation of the Dominion Affairs Office into the Office of Commonwealth. 

Ernest Bevin's appointment as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, gave him the job of overseeing the end of the Mandate of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel.

Almost certainly there were mis-steps with disastrous consequences but given that the job of overseeing the independence process of many countries is far bigger than just a few offices in Whitehall, which was part of a government which also had to oversee the rebuilding of a shattered country as well as how it related to an equally shattered Europe and world, then its easy with 75 years' of hindsight to see why and how there were mis-steps. 

This late in time, the 2020 United States Presidential Election looms large because it has an out sized voice in our ears at this moment but even if it ends up as a root cause for a second Civil War (which I very very very much doubt that it will), that's still nowhere near as big as the consequences of the 1945 British General Election which in its own way, helped to shape maybe a third of the world as it currently exists. The election of the President of the country with the second largest economy and only 4% of the world's population pales in comparison to the election of a government which was vicariously responsible for 20% of the world's population.

Horse 2778 - The Group A Falcon That Might Have Been But Never Was

Long time readers of this blog will know that I am a motor racing fan and that being an Australian motor racing fan, that invariably means the Australian Touring Car Championship.

While the number of rule changes over the years has been many, they broadly fall into a period before the adoption of Group C, a period where cars were running to international Group A regulations, and lastly the creation of the V8Supercars regulations which are actually just a series of increasingly divergent rules which were based upon Group 3A within Group A.

That period of international Group A racing is more interesting as the current V8Supercars because the kinds of machinery which was being entered, was as diverse as the countries which all ran it. That large kind of diversity is kind of what I think has informed the framing of the current FIA GT3 regulations and the buckwild flood of fabulousness that is Japan's Super GT300 category. Equally as interesting though, is speculating what could have been and what never was. 

Group A started in Europe in 1982 and Australia adopted it in 1985. For any car to be eligible it had to be produced in a minimum quantity of 5000 units per year (though what defined a "year" remained unclear. Engine modifications were limited and sensible. Gearboxes and brakes were free provided they were homologated by the manufacturer. And suspensions could be modified provided they maintained the road car’s original design and mounting points.

There were three classes based on engine capacity  (less than 1600cc, 1600-2500cc, and over 2500cc) and the thread that tied these classes together was a sliding scale of performance that matched different engine capacities with minimum weights, maximum tyre widths and fuel tank capacities. Naturally, the weight/tyre/fuel dimensions increased with engine sizes. The FIA descided to run a very blunt equivalency factor for turbocharged engines (cubic engine capacity x 1.4) to keep them in line with non-turbo engines; which was also woefully inadequate given the huge power increases that occurred.

Then the requirement for a minimum 500 ‘evolution’ versions of the base model car saw street-legal race weapons created like the turbocharged Volvo 240T, Ford Sierra-Cosworth RS500 and BMW M3. By the time the definitive twin-turbo, all-wheel drive Nissan GT-R arrived in 1990, the category had already self-destructed in Europe and Australia and other countries inevitably followed. It is worth mentioning that although Holden played by the rules that they thought everyone else had agreed to, they also failed to build the required 500 cars for their VN Commodore SS Group A SV in 1991.

From what I understand, the following modifications were allowed according to FIA Group A regulations:

- Full suspension geometry and layout but the original mounting points must be preserved within a 20mm radius

- Engine internals including camshafts, crankshaft, valves. Other engine components can be machined. The engine bloc must be preserved

- Engine peripherals (Radiators, intercoolers, turbos?)

- Engine management

- Gearbox,  gear ratios, number of gears and gear selection type

- Differentials

- Final drive ratio

- Electric equipment

This is where is gets incredibly curious. 

Ford stopped making the Cleveland V8 in 1982. That meant that their supply of 4.9L and 5.8L V8s dried up mid way through the run of the XE Falcon. Dick Johnson built his own turbocharged version of the 4.1 litre six cylinder Falcon which put out 190kW; which made the 5.0L V8 VH Commodore look pedestrian at only 126kW.

Johnson took the four-speed manual gearbox, clutch and the limited-slip-differential from the Falcon V8 ESP (European Sport Pack). 50 examples were built; which given that they were modified from existing production cars, actully might have complied with Group A regulations.

What I can never know is if Dick Johnson was able to turn the 4.1L Thriftpower Six into a turbocharged engine, whether or not Ford Australia would have ever been persuaded to come to the party and build the necessary 500 of them to homologate the car. I also don't know if the Confederation of Australian Motorsports would have given the Turbo Falcon special dispensation to run in Australia if the 500 examples required under the rules were never built. My suspicion is that they would have done and that the entire trajectory of Australian motor racing would have been changed.

If Dick Johnson who was obviously a decent engineer and had some pretty good engine builders in the Stone brothers, who would themselves eventually go on to become race winning team owners, then it will come as no surprise that Ford Australia would eventually make the Thriftpower Six into a production turbocharged engine and put it in the Falcon XR6 Turbo (albeit the later 4.0L version)

Dick Johnson bought two Fox body Mustangs from Zakspeed in Germany and it must be said that in comparison to what they were up against in Germany they were fine but when they came to Australia and went up against the likes of the Holden Commodore VK, Nissan Skyline GTS Turbo, Volvo 240 Turbo, and even the underpowered BMW 635, they were hopeless. Dick Johnson would himself campaign Ford Sierras which ended up being the fastest in the world and being the only cars to pose any real threat to the Nissan Skyline GTR R32 when it arrived but there was a curious car that I only found out about recently which I think could have been a proper missile.

The strange new unknowable future may have very well seen Holden throw their Piazza Turbo and then the Calibra Turbo 4WD against the Nissans and that would have been brilliant. We might also have had road racing versions of the cars which were being entered in the World Rally Championship such as the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, Subaru Impreza WRX etc. which was exactly the reason why the FIA had made the Group A regulations for both rallying and circuit racing initially identical. Both the Ford Sierra Cosworth and the BMW M3 saw use in both disciplines.

The story might have ended differently in another way as well. There was one XE Falcon with the 351 Cleveland V8 which had been modified to comply with the Group A regulations which was run by Bruce Anderson in New Zealand. It was definitely modified from a car of which there had been 5000 standard cars and 500 homologation examples built. In that respect, I can only think that the sliding scale of weights must've crippled the Falcons in Australia which is why nobody chose to run one here.

Since Ford Motor Company of New Zealand Limited was essentially a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Canada, there is a posibility that had NZ not lowered its tariffs in the mid 1980s then an Australian produced XF Falcon might have landed in NZ without an engine and then been fitted with the 302 Windsor V8 like it eventually was with the 1991 EB Falcon. There is an outside possibility that there could have been a Group A 5L V8 Falcon, six years before it actually arrived but again, all of this is mass speculation.