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.

Horse 2777 - Actually... It's Just About Race (2020 Presidential Election)

 As I write this piece, the results of the 2020 United States Presidential Election are as yet unknown but tending towards a Joe Biden win (the press has already started calling him 'President-Elect' but things are always subject to change). As it currently stands Biden is expected to hold 294 delegates to the Electoral College but only needs 270 to win. Donald Trump's path to victory means that he'd have to mount some kind of legal challenge which would bring the results of the election into dispute and disrepute, and then have it head to the Supreme Court where he would win 6-3. I do not think that any evidence presented by Joe Biden in a Supreme Court case would make even an iota of difference, such is the level of hyperpartisanship of both the Supreme Court and indeed the modern politics which created the current makeup of the court.

Politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century has been increasingly about identity politics and nothing else. When it comes to actual policy decisions, the cultural right hand side of politics across the Anglosphere has decided to play this game far harder than cultural left side of politics. I make this distinction by declaring my own bias as an economic leftist but far more culturally conservative than most people expect. 

Politics for the last 40 years has largely been about the economic right dismantling the mechanisms of the state and privatising them out again. That was certainly the case in Australia and the United Kingdom but in the United States where the state owned fewer pieces of large scale infrastructure, the right spent its efforts fighting a very different fight.

Entities like The Moral Majority which sprung up in the wake of Jerry Falwell's tax disputes with the IRS over the legal status of various Christian Colleges. What brought Falwell and other white evangelicals into common cause with political conservatives in that 1978 taxation ruling issued by the IRS was that the ruling stripped tax-exempt status from all-white private schools formed in the South in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling to desegregate public schools.

Falwell's reaction in founding the Moral Majority is really the beginning of the modern Christian 'conservative' movement; which has over the past 40 years, been able to coagulate the Christian right into a relatively unified voting bloc, and has also attracted what used to be overtly racist demographics to that same cause.

As the Republican Party shifted to the cultural right, the Democratic Party took up positions on the cultural left but not necessarily the economic left. When the Democratic Party nominated and then successfully got the first Black President in the White House and then was able to enact a slightly economically leftist health care policy, the Republican Party went into overdrive and the Tea Party faction and then the so-called Freedom Caucus still fought over economic issues but there was still an undercurrent that the cultural shift which explained why Obama became President and not some other Democratic candidate, absolutely needed to be fought against. The man to fight against that undercurrent, was Donald J Trump.

If Obama was the first Black President, then Trump was explicitly a White President. His political career began by bringing into question Obama's birth certificate and claiming that Obama was illegitimate to be President. His Presidential Campaign which began by coming down a golden escalator and which never really ended, was almost purely about prosecuting the case of Whiteness.

Mexicans were accused of being rapists (even though Trump himself would be shown to have had improper dalliances), black people were either accused of being lazy, or criminals, and Muslims were accused of being terrorists. Trump's policies were mostly about wall building, either literally in the case of the proposed wall along the Mexican border, or culturally in the case of starting a trade war with China, pulling out of NAFTA, or accusing European countries of not paying their way in NATO.

There have been more votes counted since this table was produced by the Associated Press (11pm 07th Nov AEST) and the first thing that it tells you is that through sheer brute force, white people still swing entire elections in America. Raw Votes is a very blunt instrument but it does tell you that white people who voted for Trump outnumbered all non-white people.

Raw Vote (millions) 143.9

                   R         D

White Men     27.629     18.419

White Women     27.068     20.419

Black Men     1.439     5.756

Black Women     0.907     9.166

Latino Men     3.367     5.267

Latino Women    3.454     8.058

All Other Races    5.180     7.771

                         69.043 74.857

Taken as a percentage, white people make up 65% of the vote (for both sides). Also of note that if you solely look at white people who voted for Trump, you end up with 38.01%. For context, Trump's approval rating peaked on 23rd Jan 2017 at 45.5% which was 3 days after his inauguration. The long term average for Trump's approval rating, taken on a weekly rolling basis since 2017 is 37.98%. Now correlation doesn't imply causation but that experiment has been repeated enough times now for causation to produce a correlation. Trump's hard core approval rating has been solidly made up of white people.

% Of Votes

R D

White Men 19.20 12.80

White Women 18.81 14.19

Black Men 1.00     4.00

Black Women 0.63         6.37

Latino Men 2.34     3.66

Latino Women  2.40       5.60

All Other Races3.60 5.40

47.98 52.02

If you take the percentages of the votes and just look at them on a partisan basis then you get this:

% Of Votes

                 R D

White Men         60 40

White Women        57 43

Black Men         20 80

Black Women            9 91

Latino Men            39 61

Latino Women 30 70

All Other Races 40 60

This election has been a sad reminder that white people are ignorant to the fact the majority of them refuse to give up their racism and privilege. Actually, if you really want to see who the agents of change are, then the data also provides a very very strong spike. This election, insofar as much as there is a balance of power, is actually Non-White Women. Non-White Women account for 36.01% which means that they cancel out all Non-White Men's votes and the difference between White people's votes generally. 

Therein lies a problem in itself. Whilst it is true that demographically white people have had power for a very very long time and specifically white men have been the direct beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world (namely the last 400 years of the history of the world) and that anything which tilts it a little bit, starts to look like reverse discrimination, it is not the same white people who benefit now. They are all dead.

Categorically, white privilege exists because of historic, enduring racism and biases but that's still mostly irrelevant if you still happen to be on the losing end of structural change. Remember, Brexit and Trump are actually aspects of the same root cause; namely, white people throwing other white people out of the boat, upon the basis of class.

Trump offered the hope that someone who at least pretended to be outside of the system. might be listening to them. Trump's voter base which is made up of a lot of less than college degree, rural and/or poorer white people, voted for him not because his policies benefit them, but because his racism resonates with them. Trump as the logical end point exactly articulated what people were against; rather than enlarging people's vision of what they could be for.

The real breaking of the Democratic Party in the South was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the time,  President Lyndon B. Johnson said "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come."

Four years before that, to a staffer by the name of Bill D. Moyers he said: 

“I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

- Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960.

It's not at all surprising that The South voted just 13/167 in favour of Biden which is 7.7% of all delegates for what would have been the Confederate States of America. The number of members of the House and Senate who voted in favour of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was 9/115 or 7.8%. That central core of racism in The South; plus the mid-west, is what has defined the Republican Party base since about 1980.

Domestically, the rise of Trump gave the same kind of people who would have wanted to exact brutality on people of colour, the implicit permission to give voice is to those opinions. When people actually did start organising to protest at the treatment that they'd be given, in response to police brutality, in movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement or Antifa which grew in response to actual Neo-Nazis, the act of speaking us was decried as being unpatriotic. Patriotism, fealty, and Americanism as expressed by President Donald Trump, while not necessarily being overtly white supremacist, definitely titled in that direction and excused actions which resulted in the death of people who appeared to be other.

Demographically speaking, the detail is in the data and apart from the stark geographical divide which tends to separate the United States (with Democrats tending to poll better in the more populous parts of the country) the split of voting tendencies along the lines of race is perhaps the most important distinction which explains the last decade of politics.

Horse 2776 - And The Count Goes On, La Dee Dah Dee Dah.

 Avogadro - 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000

Jenny - 8675309

Over - 9000

Pennsylvania 6 - 5000

M*A*S*H - 4077

Horse - 2776

Atari - 2600

A Space Oddessy - 2001

NCC - 1701

THX - 1138 

Experiment - 626

Levi’s - 501

Daytona - 500

Fahrenheit - 451

Error - 404

Spartans - 300

Biden - 264

Trump - 214

MDK - 187

Blink - 182

Pelham - 123

Dalmations - 101

Luftballons - 99

Windows - 95

Rollo - 75

Route - 66

Eiffel - 65

Heinz - 57

Area - 51

Slick - 50

AK - 47

Nescafe - 43

Sum - 41

WD - 40

UB - 40

Brut - 33

Baskin Robbins - 31

Hours from Tulsa - 24

Catch - 22

Matchbox - 20

Covid - 19

Apollo - 13

Plataform - 9¾

7 - 11

James Bond - 007

Blake's - 7 

Up - 7

Maroon - 5

The Jackson - 5

Schalke - 04

U - 2

Steak Sauce A - 1

Hawaii Five - 0

Hotel - Trivago

Horse 2775 - Predicting The Result Of The US Presidential Election

I didn't end up writing a prediction piece for the 2020 Presidential Election because at no stage since it was obvious who the candidates were going to be, did the favourable vs unfavourable opinion of Donald Trump move outside of the window of 38%-44% approval and no matter how often I tried to plug the relevant numbers into swing calculators for the Presidency, did I ever get a clear answer. In fact, I saw several opinion polls which indicated that the final outcome hinged upon one or two states swinging in either direction and as such, living with that kind of ambiguity in the data, made any meaningful prediction impossible. In fact, as I write this, it is still possible for this whole thing to end in a 269-269 draw.

The question isn't so much what went wrong for the Democratic Party because should Donald Trump win again, that mean that for the second time in a row and the sixth time in history, the President will have been elected upon an unpopular vote basis (which means to say that Hamilton's idea for the Electoral College is actually working as intended). 

Hamilton who was either hideously naive or willfully blind, proposed the Electoral College as a way of giving the smaller states a deliberately unequal say in how the President would be selected. If it had come down to purely based upon population, then the slave owning southern states would have been able to collectively control the Presidency for the immediate future; so Hamilton's solution was to declare some people as being worth only 3/5ths of a person upon the basis of race, then by deliberately over egging the pudding in favour of the mostly white people in the north east (which his own New York State was a part of).

Fast forward two hundred years and following the erosion of the Voting Rights Act 1965 by a series of cases in the Supreme Court and unless there is a massive shift from the cities to the fly-over states, we have again arrived at a situation where there is an outsized voice of white people living in predominantly rural areas. While it is true that there is a very fine strip of black voters across three states in the south, unless there is a major radical shift in politics, the results of elections are determined upon the blinking apathy of white males who either do or do not go to the polls. Demographically speaking, America's elections are now decided by two massive factions; which if you strip away the cladding of political parties, resolves to just two main categories of "white people" and "not white people".

Where does this leave us? In trouble, that's where; whatever the result.

If I were to tell you that there was a political coup where the legitimacy of the election was being brought into question, in a country where there are more than a billion guns and roughly a trillion bullets in circulation, and that country had a history of oppression of minorities, and that country was a nuclear power, that should normally give you cause for setting off the six bell fire alarm. This is kind of situation where the UN would send in impartial observers to make sure that the elections were conducted fairly. Yet this is precisely what we have in the United States as of this moment.

This bit is relevant:

https://twitter.com/davidschneider/status/1323894350154268674?s=20

If I may draw your attention back to the first parallel that I can think of, in 2009 the Former President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed victory before counting finished. In that instance, both Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and their respective sets of supporters claimed that electoral fraud had occurred. In that instance, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stepped in and formally endorsed Ahmadinejad but it led to 19 months of violence on the streets in Tehran especially and in retaliation also led to arrest, imprisonment and torture of protesters.

Another set of parallels that can be drawn was that after Ahmadinejad has seized power, he claimed that there had been foreign interference in the election; especially from either Israel or the United States, while Israel claimed that the Iranian Government itself had hired Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon on a contract basis to fight protesters.

America probably won't head down that road but the fact that the President is claiming that the election process is broken before it has even run its course as a normal election, says that America was prepared to tolerate and enable someone who was not only eminently unsuitable for the office but actively terrible for both it and democracy. 

It's not like any of this wasn't known beforehand either. Mr Trump was asked if he would accept the results of the election if he lost and this was met with the response of "we'll see"; which is exactly the same response that people with power usually give when the answer will eventually be "no" but they want to appear to be diplomatic.

Hamilton either devised or endorsed the Electoral College because in 1787, the distances across the 13 United States was measured not in miles but days. The idea of sending Electors was to stop someone from being elected to the role of head of the executive and the head of the armed forces, if it was found in the intervening months which followed that the incoming person would be unsuited to be President. Some state constitutions have now bound the Electors to the result of the election; which has subsequently been upheld by the Supreme Court. Thus, the inbaked issues with the underlying states' demographics remain allowed to stand and indeed endorsed by law. 

If I am forced to pick this election, even after it has been held (which itself is an absolutely bonkers crazy go nuts situation), then my prediction is as follows. 

The 2020 Presidential Election was ultimately pointless and the last fifteen months have been a waste of time.

Both sides will launch claim and counter claim in the courts and the whole thing will be taken to the Supreme Court for an omnibus decision. The results of this election were determined four years ago and irrespective of who has voted for whom now, the result of the election will be that Trump will be the next President by a margin of.

6-3.

Horse 2774 - Confessions

There is a man from a prominent family whom my family hates, who stands outside of my balcony and tells me that he loves me and rather than confront my family who would be opposed to our courtship sight unseen, I am considering faking my own death and possibly committing suicide if the plan goes wrong.

- J, Verona

I wanted to destroy other people's real estate but due to my asthma, I ran out of breath when I came to the third and more substantial property and was unable to do so.

- BB, The Woods

I mistakenly stabbed someone through a curtain and killed them.

- H, Denmark

I pulled my sister's hair and stuck my tongue out before saying rude words, on Christmas Day, no less. I ruined Christmas and they still gave me some plum pie. I still said that I was "good", unrepentantly.

- JH, The Corner

I design machinery with no regards for occupational health and safety and when my son came around to visit this one time, we had a dispute and I cut off his hand with a laser sword. He fell down a very large vent shaft because I didn't install hand rails.

- DV, DS-1 Orbital Defensive Sphere

I live in a city with very obvious crime and law and order issues but rather than adequately fund the police force or invest in city housing projects, I have purchased and built my own private arsenal of improbable and expensive weaponry.

- BW, Gotham City

I design highly risky plans to catch and kill one specific kind of fast moving poultry, which frequently results in personal injury; when I could have just as easily gone to any freezer cabinet in a supermarket and found some other kind of poultry.

- WEC, The Painted Desert

I am so unsuited to managing the civil administration of a small town that practically everyone has moved away and I subcontract out my responsibilities to a small boy who has his own unholy army of puppies. I am also unable to keep track of my one and only pet chicken.

- MH, Adventure Town

Even though I am contracted to star in a 24 minute television program, I actually only write 18 minutes of content and fill up the other six minutes by asking a question directly to the audience and then stare blankly at the camera, under the premise that I somehow have the ability to listen to them.

- DR, The Explorer

I actually shot JR.

- JRE, Dallas

We actually filmed the moon landing in a studio. What we didn't tell anyone was that we had to pack up an entire sound stage and send it to the moon.

- NA, NASA

I didn't check the weather before I went to Gloucester and drove into swollen river. Rather than admit personal fault, I simply refuse to make house calls to that city any more.

- Dr.F

I secretly commit murder on a contractual basis but nobody has ever suspected that I did any of them because I am an old lady.

- JM, St Mary Mead

-- -.-- / .--. --- - / .--. .-.. .- -. - ... / .- .-. . / .- .-.. .-.. / -. .- -- . -.. / ... - . ...- .

- S, Dunsfold Aerodrome

I became increasingly jealous and irrational towards my boyfriend, whom I suspected of having love affairs with other women; and rather than bothering to read his response to a  telegram which I sent to him, I comitted suicide by throwing myself under a train.

- AK, Moscow 

I frequently get myself into minor moral predicaments and when I try to get out of them, I get caught and have to face my day who gives me lecture regarding my extremely petty moral turpitude.

- TC, Mapleton Drive 

I was attacked by birds in retribution for running a pet store, when they all decided to gang up on me after getting lawyered up. I caused an explosion at a petrol station, accidentally caused the death of a neighbour, and had to have the military intervene.

- MD, San Francisco

Horse 2773 - Playing The Hand You Have Built Against The Coronavirus

 At the weekend, former assistant to Prime Minister Tony Abbott and current host on Sky News, Peta Credlin, hosted a program which was supposed to be revelatory with regards what it tried to prosecute as Victorian Premier Dan Andrews' 'shocking' handling of the pandemic. This is despite the fact that currently there is a streak of zero community transmission cases of coronavirus and a streak of several days of zero deaths. 

The program looked into the use of private security firms and tried to paint a portrait of incompetence, even though the policies in Victoria were more or less identical to that used in both New South Wales and South Australia. Victoria's 800+ deaths appears to be a case of bad luck more than anything else; due to the fact that a virus is an unseen enemy and that because it is a novel virus, no measures are going to be absolutely effective.

News Corp generally has tried to paint the Labor Premiers as being the embodiment of The Devil himself and their treatment of Labor Premiers across print and television has been vastly different than their coverage of Liberal Party Premiers; which is naturally to be expected. The rather boring truth is that all of the Premiers and indeed the Prime Minister at Federal level, have all done a rather excellent job in handling the coronavirus through reasonable policy based on whatever information was currently available at the time. Unfortunately, boring competence doesn't sell advertising space.

To use the analogy which has been oft repeated throughout this pandemic, I think that the Premiers and the Prime Minister have generally played with the hand that they have been dealt quite well. To take this analogy beyond the point of sensibility, this post is about looking at what all of those cards are.

6♦ - Insurance

Insurance is a collective pooled risk sharing arrangement. That is that people who pay into the pooled fund, do so as a kind of hedged bet against a bad thing from happening which they will suffer some kind of monetary loss from. When that bad thing happens, they expect that the collective fund will cover the cost of the loss for the thing insured. 

On the other side of the insurance contract, the insurance company is making a bet that the chance of a bad thing happening can be calculated and that as a result of them calculating the chances of that bad thing happening, they can charge just a little bit more across the entire population of things being insured and keep the remainder as profit.

Probably the purest form of insurance is motor insurance because the data collected for all of the bad things happening can be sorted by age, sex, car type etc. and because the value of the things being insured (cars) is either known or agreed upon, then the known chance of a bad thing happening to someone's car plus profit practically becomes the price of the insurance contract. 

6♠ - Negative Self-selection

The unavoidable problem with insurance is that the people who want it the most are also the ones who are the most likely to want to be paid out. 

Healthcare as an insurance question demonstrates this perfectly because the people who are most likely to be in hospital or going to see a General Practitioner or a Specialist, are older people. The unavoidable problem with insurance and with health insurance in particular is that people generally don't get out of life alive. The Grim Reaper is not some hooded spectre of doom but something far scarier - he is a balding accountant from Kettering who perpetually walks around with the nerd voice saying "well actually, I think you'll find..." He walks around with a checklist and has never had a day of fun ever; although you might be able to negotiate with him for a bit, he will eventually collect. Health insurance always has to fight against the problem that people get old and die. 

The inverse of the people who want health insurance because the Grim Reaper is walking close by, are those people for whom the Grim Reaper is far away. Young people who are otherworldly fit and well and who normally present no health issues at all, have no immediate need to draw funds from a health insurance find and quite rightly they generally don't want it because they don't see the need. When young people do require medical treatment, it is more likely to be due to physical injury and sudden catastrophe. 

6♣ - Public Health As A Public Good

If we ignore the whole question of healthcare as an insurance question, and even setting aside the political question of whether or not governments should be responsible for the healthcare of their citizens, the notion of healthcare as public good only becomes apparent when it becomes catastrophic.

It took wars for people to realise that a common defence force was a good idea and this is why nation states generally replace city states. It took great fires for people to realise that public fire departments as opposed to private fire brigades are a better solution to the problem of fire because waiting until the building next door to something that you have a private insurable interest in, is both impractical and inefficient. It took general lawlessness for people to realise that centralised police forces and the judiciary are a good idea.

Public goods which are non-rivalrous tend to be a really good idea but people have to be made to pay for them through the instrument of the state or otherwise, they aren't bought. Mass literacy is something which massively benefits economies but only the state is in any position at all to force people to pay for the education of other people's children. Sewerage systems and potable water is also really desirable because people don't like dying of cholera but only the state is in any position to force people to pay for other people's well being.

2♣ - Pandemics As An Experiment

Probably the chance of a catastrophic worldwide pandemic causing mass death is about 2% in any given year. If we assume that the current COVID-19 pandemic is a once in a century event which lasts for two years (don't expect any vaccine at all before 2022) and the last pandemic happened in 1918-20, then it would make sense for economies to permanently set aside 2% of GDP in case.

Remember, Insurance is a collective pooled risk sharing arrangement where people pay into the pooled fund, do so as a kind of hedged bet against a bad thing from happening which they will suffer some kind of monetary loss from. A pandemic is a collective bad thing which happens to everyone and when that bad thing happens, it is best to be prepared as an economy, that the collective fund will cover the cost of the loss for the thing insured. 

2♥ - Pandemics As A Public Good Question

Pandemics do not care about the economic circumstances of individuals. People do not get a virus but rather people become the environment for a virus. As such, fighting a pandemic is more about making sure that the environment in which we are fighting the unseen enemy, is capable of making sure we survive. The ammunition of testing for the disease, needs to be as available as possible to as many people as possible so that the disease doesn't steal territory by stealth and win.

Framed as a national defence question, health care starts to look quite a bit different. Instead of individuals fighting individual battles with their own independent economic means as the biggest criteria of whether they live or die, health care as a national defence question becomes one of mass collective endeavour.

A General fighting in a war doesn't ask the question of how much bullets and tanks cost and in a total war, nobody ever asks to surrender unless they know that they will lose. Surrendering to a pandemic has exactly the same result as throwing troops in front of the enemy's machine guns until you have no more bodies left to destroy. The coin of the battlefield is people's lives and in a pandemic, the unseen enemy will forever fight to the death of the last troop.

Defence of the realm is an abstract public good and although the actual abstract good is consumed the minute that it is produced, the general infrastructure, the maintenance, and the experience of the professionals engaged in fighting the war, of that abstract good does in fact survive from one year to the next; even if the good in the abstract does not. I think that deliberately running into retreat and letting the enemy kill people, is criminally stupid and governments who want to pursue this as a policy should expect massive amounts of deaths when a pandemic strikes; that they have deliberately not prepared for.

The Complete Hand:

You can argue about the small details of how well the hand has been played and the fact that New Zealand has practically no Coronavirus cases and a domestic landscape which has kind of approached some kind of normality, means that a similar hand can be played reasonably well; even if News Corp in Australia in Australia wants to accuse New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of murderous puppies.

Domestically in Australia, we've looked at the cards and although the numbers of 66622 to some might look like evil socialism and turned up to eleven twice, having healthcare as the reasonable responsibility of a reasonable government for the peace, order and good governance of the nation, means that we can stare for a very long time at the unseen enemies of pandemics. It also means that because everyone has front line access to healthcare, the entire system is cheaper because an actual universal system exactly mirrors the risk profile of the system because the entire population of insurable items is captured and very effectively subsidised by otherwise fit and well people who do not use the system very much.

6♦ 6♣ 6♠ 2♣ 2♥ is a Full House and took a long time to cultivate. When a pandemic struck, it was a very good hand to have. 

"You should write about America"

Addenda:

In theory the biggest economy in the world should have the necessary resources to provide the best answer to a pandemic but it doesn't. Instead, it has repeatedly taken decisions to make terrible decisions in cultivating its hand.

America has as its base mythology, the premise that hard work and industry is all that is needed to make it big. That may have worked in an agrarian society when everyone was collecting spades and for brief periods of time, America has done great things and worked together.

The American Revolution was one such occasion where a concerted collective effort, was able to beat a largely disinterested monarchy across the waves.

J♠9♠7♠6♠4♠   vs K♣K♦Q♣Q♦7♥ - flush beat two pair.

Repeatedly though, America goes through gilded ages where the benefits of the economy go to a limited few; so that when a pandemic strikes such as in 1918-20 and 2020, although it has cultivated some highly powerful industries, those industries do not go together or work together to fight the unseen enemy of disease.

During WW2, President Roosevelt tried to start the ball rolling on universal healthcare while America still held a flush but a small portion of the population has had sufficient sway to swap out the cards in favour of their own private advantage for 76 years. That project of universal healthcare has never happened and since a pandemic doesn't care about class, privilege or private advantage, the 40 million people who had no access to healthcare were more likely to become the environment in which the coronavirus thrived. The virus is now in all 50 states and if this is framed as a war, then America has lost more lives due to coronavirus than all wars it has fought since WW2 combined.

A♠K♠4♠7♠ J♦ is not a winning hand at all.