Horse 2861 - Actual Real Music Exists On Community Radio

"Lockdown II: Electric Boogaloo" has meant that for the first time in a long time, I am driving to work. As I have a Mazda 2 DJ, this is quite a pleasant experience because unlike the masses in their Turramurra Tractors, I can punt through traffic with joyous abandon.

This time around instead of listening to podcasts, I turned on the radio. Neither AM or FM Radio work particularly well on the train because trains work a lot like a Farady Cage and the biggest noise that you get is RF interferense from the train itself. After being bored by ABC Radio National, ABC News Radio and ABC 702 Sydney which were all doomcasting, 2GB which had Ben Fordham blaming the Sydney Covid outbreak on the Labor Party in a weird case of ragecasting, and rather than listen to Triple M or Triple J for a morning dose of rock, or weird, I bothered to listen to 2Day FM and Nova 969. 

Now admittedly because I am sufficiently old enough that probably have less days in front of me than behind me, that means that in theory I should have a natural bias to say that all of the music back in my day was better, despite and in spite of that being demonstrably untrue. In general, time has a habit of eliminating unmemorable dross by making it unmemorable. The general bias is then backed up by both the Confirmation Bias and the Hindsight Bias, working in tandem, because the music in the present has not yet benefitted from the filter of unmemorability removing the unmemorable. 

Knowing this from the outset, my expectations were pretty low; which is actually a good thing because it meant that I did not have to feel bad if I didn't engage with the music. Once you assume the mindset that you don't have to be entertained by the music and it is just a thing for analysis, then listening to/ignoring it, is a far easier act.

The songs that are being put out for consumption in 2021 after an era of lockdowns and isolation appear to be mostly anthemic variations on the familiar chord progressions:

I - V - vi - IV

I – vi – IV – V

I - ii - VI - V

vi - IV - I - V

The people who write songs, are very good at selling things that are already familiar and that means selling music which followed well-worn familiar chord progressions. I reckon that most of the Top 40 are variations on these for formulae. Also, it is very obvious that the hallmarks of 2010s music and onwards are still the same: autotune, the use of the supertone. 

However what I have found really strange is that the bands and artists who are being interviewed by 2Day FM, rather than using the time and space that the pandemic has afforded them to perfect and improve their music, have talked about their experiences during the pandemic as though it was really profound. I understand that people haven't been able to perform live but not being able to go out has been a common experience of lots of people, not just bands and artists.

If I was a professional musician and I couldn't tour or play live, then I would go back into my back room and either hone my musicianship or use the hurt to produce better writing. What I find absolutely incredulous is that the artists being interviewed by 2Day FM and Nova 969, don't seem to have used the time to have learnt how to play better, write better, or learn basic music theory. It is not uncommon to see five or six credits for the Writing and Producing of a modern pop song and so I wonder how much input that the artist actually has in a song. Of course I am assuming that the artists could play music in the first place; which might very well be a mistake. It is also a mistake to assume that in the age of autotune and pitch correction, that all that many artists can actually sing either. 

The solution to all of this is community radio, where the level to entry is lower and the diversity is massive. In Sydney we have these stations just to begin with:

88.1 - 2RDJ

88.9 - Radio Skid Row

89.7 - Eastside Radio

94.5 - FBi Radio

So far I have heard rock and EDM (which is to be expected), country, the blues, and even new jazz. New Jazz? That's a thing? Suddenly I'm listening to 4ths, Suspended 7ths, key changes and modulations, and chord progressions which are amazing.

This leads me to believe that what happened to the music industry is that as production quality skyrocketed, the sound design became amazing and every single vocal can be polished to the point of technical perfection, is that the wrapper got shinier and shinier but they've forgotten to put anything in the wrapper. Pop music which appears on 2DayFm and Nova 969 today is just empty.

Perhaps community radio which isn't driven as insanely hard by the profit motive, is where all of the crunchiness is. It doesn't change the fact that most of what I was listening to is still unmemorable dross but time will as always apply the filter of unmemorability by removing the unmemorable. What I've found on community radio is a kind of rebellion against the commercial stations by playing bands and artists who don't have the best equipment, who might not be able to sing or play as well but who have spent their time going back and noodling around and playing music. What a novel idea.

Horse 2860 - Peter Brock Probably Is The GOAT

 In most sports there is invariably one person who stands alone above the rest. In basketball it is Michael Jordan. In tennis it is Serena Williams. In cricket it is Sir Donald Bradman; on that note, Bradman is so many statistical deviations above the mean that across all sport, Bradman is the greatest athlete of all sports.

In motor racing, that is easier to quantify because all you need to do is count the superlatives. In Formula One the greatest of all time is Sir Lewis Hamilton. In NASCAR, that mantle is shared by Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Jimmie Johnson. However when it comes to our own backyard and the greatest Touring Car Driver to have graced Australia, that answer is a little more difficult to quantify.

Aaron Noonan on the V8Sleuth podcast recently made the bold assertion that Craig Lowndes' 7 Bathurst victories are greater than Peter Brock's 9. To be fair Brock's 9 also comes with not just 1 but 2 wins where he jumped into the second car to win the race; where that's not simply been allowed according to the rules of late and so I can understand the reason for this. However as the rules at the time allowed it, then those two extra wins quite rightly stand. In order to win a thing, you have to compete according to the rules and if the rules state that you can do a thing then if you want to win, you can do that thing.

There is always the problem that as unreasonably subjective spectators, our own opinions of who the greatest is will be hampered by our own experience. The most intense emotions that someone generally has is between the ages of 13-25 and that 12 year period will often shape loads of our opinions. In my case, I really didn't like Peter Brock because I though he was annoying. That doesn't mean that I didn't have incredible respect for what he did and achieved. There has to be a way of eliminating emotion from the calculation; so that means establishing empirical rules for handling the data.

There is the obvious question of what the relative values of an Australian Touring Car Championship are, as opposed to a Bathurst 1000 win or a Sandown 500. At various times, the Bathurst 1000 was separate to the ATCC and at other times it was part of it. There are also those years early on in the piece where the ATCC was awarded after just a single race. Are those championships worth less because the champion only needed one win or are they worth more because the champion only got one crack at it and had to get it right the first time?

As someone who lives in the land of numbers, when you are faced with a lot of raw data, you have to decide what to do with it and that sometimes means making value judgements. As the value of things are measured relative to each other, then the value that you decide upon has to have some basis in sentiment.

When it comes to Australian Touring Car Racing, then there are some things which help you establish that relative value.

Four time Bathurst winner Alan Moffat once said that the ATCC was "just a warm-up for Bathurst". The actions of Nissan Motor Company in 1984 when they deliberately didn't win the championship by not fielding George Fury at Oran Park, just so they could get concessions in the technical regulations for Bathurst, indicates what they valued. Six times Bathurst winner Larry Perkins once said that "winning the championship only allows you to put number 1 on the door but winning Bathurst writes your name into immortality". 

Bathurst is indeed valuable but I do not think that it is worth more than the championship; especially when some championships contain it as a component. 

If the ATCC is worth 1, then I think that Bathurst is worth 4/7ths; which is slightly more than half. It follows that Sandown is worth half of that at 2/7ths, the Six Hours at various places also at 2/7ths and a 12 Hour Race being worth the same as a 1000 also feels about right to me. I think that the 24 Hours was such a rare thing that it can be rightly afforded the value of 8/7ths and the Round Australia Trials although being rallies, attracted so many touring car drivers that they are also worth 8/7ths. They especially cram thousands of kilometres into a very small space of time; so this also feels about right.

One of the other things that you learn about statistics is that they are always subject to interpretation when the result leads to many different conclusions that could be drawn. I could have not included the 24 Hours or the Round Australia Trials, or valued things differently and Jamie Whincup would be the greatest of all time. Would that have been a reasonable conclusion given that Peter Brock only won three ATCCs? Definitely. It would certainly reflect the fact that Brock was a relatively bad sprint racer. The argument could be made that Brock at the top of his powers basically had no real competition whereas Whincup won Bathursts and Championships in a highly professional and fiercely competitive era; which is what Aaron Noonan's argument boils down to and it is a good argument.

All that being said, this is the spreadsheet and the raw data:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mkrTkMciUZzlwZmK8vySrgTrreVC9xOP/view?usp=sharing

That gives you the following index:

12.57 Peter Brock

11.29 Jamie Whincup

9.86 Craig Lowndes

9.14 Jim Richards

9.00 Mark Skaife

8.00 Allan Moffat

7.86 Dick Johnson

6.29 Bob Jane

5.57 Ian Geoghegan

4.71 John Bowe

4.29 Larry Perkins

4.00 Garth Tander

3.57 Steven Richards

3.57 Greg Murphy

3.57 Scott McLaughlin

3.43 Harry Firth

2.57 Marcos Ambrose

2.57 Glenn Seton

2.43 Shane Van Giz

2.14 Russell Ingall

2.00 Norm Beechey

1.86 Colin Bond

1.86 Mark Winterbotton

1.71 Bill Pitt

1.57 Bob Morris

1.43 John Goss

1.00 James Courtney

1.00 Robbie Francevic

This mostly feels about right; which is good enough. Brock won 9 Bathurst 1000s and Sandown 500s but did relatively badly in the ATCC. Whincup is the only 7x ATCC Champion but has underperformed at Bathurst. Lowdnes like Brock has underperformed in the ATCC. The GOAT is one of those three; with two stories still yet to be concluded.

Horse 2859 - Voting On Paper - Not Voter ID

Not quite 7½ moths after the 2020 Presidential Election, former President Donald Trump still refuses to concede that he lost the election. With everything from box loads of ballots being fed into counting machines, to massive amounts of voter fraud, to voting machines, all being the subject of accusations as to why Mr Trump lost (as opposed to the public just being sick and tired of corruption, abuse of power, and general incompetence), in states that are predominantly Republican controlled, instead of taking measures to actually address the issues that they've just cited, thoughts have been turned to voter laws.

I don't have a problem with voter ID per se. In places like Norway, Sweden, and Germany, all voters are sent Voter ID cards before an election; and if the voters can not produce the cards upon request then they can still provide proof of who they are with through 100 point identification. That also means that Norway, Sweden, and Germany, all have reasonably up-to-date electoral rolls. In Australia where voting is compulsory, there isn't a requirement to produce any voter ID and all you have to do is state your name and address before you get your named ticked off on the roll. That being said, the number of people actually found to have committed voter fraud is so incredibly small, that the number of elections which could have been swayed is exactly zero; in more than 10,000 elections across Australia (since every seat in every lower house is actually a separate election).

With that kind of data set, the fact that news outlets are trying to dissuade trust in public institutions so that their preferred political football team wins, should be viewed with the same sort of spirit as we afford other terrorists. 

Nevertheless, the lesson that voting systems should be improved to prevent mass tampering, especially from political parties themselves, is a good idea.

Here are some basic preventative measures that can be taken immediately; which cost less than zero in some cases.

1. Paper ballots.

... actually, that's all you need.

Yes. Having people write their choices on pieces of paper. This is an idea which seems so incredibly mundane that in none of the discussions which have been put forward, it has even been mentioned.

The underlying assumption that I suppose that lawmakers have is that technology is always implicitly better, right? Wrong! Paper ballots are in fact slower to count and will mean that the result will take longer to find out but when you are dealing with the appointment of people who have the authority and assigned power to run government, then efficiency and the speed of the count is entirely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that the count is correct. Correctness is dependent on the security of the election and ability to check and counter check the accuracy of the result.

Paper ballots are the most secure method of conducting an election for the simple reason that it is really really hard to mount a scalable attack on them. During an election, you can have someone from every interested party not only check the collection box before the election is conducted but that box can be manned during polling day and then subsequently checked while the counting is going on. If that is happening at every single polling station, then for a foreign actor to mount an attack, then they would need to visit more than 3000 places across millions of square kilometers. 

Furthermore, if everyone is mistrustful of everyone else (which given our current age of politics where trust of institutions is close to zero), then that mistrust should be used as the mechanism to ensure that the result is correct.

The blatant problem with voting machines is that they should not be trusted. With literally every single kind of voting machine, that introduces a second layer of items that have to be checked. That also means that the person who is checking the checking has to be checked. With in person, paper ballots, not only is the record of someone's vote physically present but in the event of a recount, that same physical record is still present to be checked again. 

This came into sharp focus during the 2000 Presidential Election, when the utter failure of voting machines in producing a trustworthy result became democracy manifest. In Florida, the so called hanging chads left behind after a voting machine failed to correctly punch holes into the voting card, became the material of a Supreme Court hearing. That would have never have happened had the election been conducted on paper ballots because the very first check to see whether or not the voters had made their intentions obvious, would have been the voters.

Did anything change after this? No. Even after a proven failure of voting machines to produce a reliable and trustworthy result, they were still used. That is a practical demonstration of idiocy; that is, deliberately taking action in spite of knowing that it is wrong.

In the 2020 Presidential Election, the Trump campaign which although has been living in a fantasy land, accused the machines of Dominion Voting Systems of producing fraudulent results. The accusations remain unfounded and unproven but given that level of mistrust, it should give rise to interrogating the voting system for a better answer.

That answer very simply is that all voting machines should immediately be got rid of and all elections should be conducted on paper. Anyone who tries to convince you that voting machines have any benefits, needs to be ignored.

Getting back to the issue of Voter ID itself (even though it is the wrong answer to the question), believe it or not I actually do not have a problem with the idea of voter ID being required. If it is to be implemented though, then the responsibility of making sure that people have the relevant ID rests entirely with the government.

If the government announces an election on a particular date, then there needs to be some central independent authority which conducts the elections and which issues the relevant identity documents.

Admittedly this opens the door to nefarious self-interested parties using voter ID as a way of suppressing the franchise of people who would choose something different to them; so as before there should be checking mechanisms to ensure that the franchise is properly extended and can be exercised.

The deliberately knavish thing that keeps on coming up during the debates surrounding voter ID implementation is that there is a determined refusal to set up any kind of independence of the electoral systems or the agency to run them. 

The number of permanent employees of the Federal Electoral Commision in the United States is 339. It is argued that because the United States is a collection of republican (small r) states, that the power to run elections should lie with them. That's rubbish if the aim is to produce a reliable and trustworthy result. How anyone can trust a government body to run elections when it is unable to function, due to lack of a quorum, is beyond me. 

If there is someone in person, who has presented themselves to vote and they have either the card with them or sufficiently enough ID for any reasonable person to determine that they are a citizen/resident then that aught to be enough. The assertion that there are millions of people who vote illegally is a bald faced lie and needs to be ignored. 

Horse 2858 - Three Tribes At War

 For a nation as vast, wide, and unwieldy as Australia, it is remarkably homogeneous. A lot of that has to do with the founding of the modern nation state being so late in time; this is in contrast to the many languages of indigenous people groups who were here before the British stole a continent through the cunning use of flags. This also has to do with the modern nation state of Australia being founded in the electric age; with the unifying instruments of mass media (radio and television) both coming within a single lifetime.

Nevertheless, Australia is still a nation which is marked by regionalisms and cultural differences. It has too many unnecessary codes of football, it has railways that change gauge when you cross a state line, and weirdly it has different names and packaging for the same suspicious meat roll. Woolworths (also called Safeway and Roelf Vos in other states) produces a suspicious meat roll which depending on where it is sold, is either called Polony, Fritz, or Devon.

You can check the ingredients and nutrition information on the side of the packaging to confirm that they are in fact identical. Woolworths changes the plastic wrap depending on where it is going to be sold. This is different from pepperoni and salami which are different things which look similar. Polony, Fritz, and Devon, come out of the same sausage machinery and are in fact the same hot dog type thing. In principle this is Schrodinger's meat, for it is impossible to know what is inside (don't ask what how the sausage is made) and it impossible to know what it is going to be called until it receives its wrapping. 

I can only assume that the name Fritz is given to this thing in South Australia because of the post-First World War immigration from Germany. The Northern Territory which is in a political disunion with South Australia, is influenced more by the by the neighbour to the south than the neighbour to the east.

South Australia started out as a different colony to the rest of the country because it was the only one which wasn't a convict colony. Fritz as a name for suspicious meat roll appears to be an inter-war name, which is almost certainly the result of Germans coming to Australia during the White Australia Policy; who then made some kind of fleischwurst. The other two names are way harder to track down.

The name Polony is more than likely British via Italian and is a transliteration of Bologna, which also becomes Baloney in the United States. I am assured that Baloney is the same kind of suspicious meat roll and because it is made from suspicious meat and filler, the name Baloney has also passed into metaphor for untruth/nonsense. 

Devon on the other hand is a strange strange mystery, for unless suspicious meat roll was coming from that county in the south west of England, then it makes no sense. Devon as a name for suspicious meat roll is so suspicious that even the name is a mystery.

On that last note, the name Devonshire as in Devonshire Tea is a nonsense as the county's name is just Devon. I have no idea why if Cornwall is known for pasties, why Devon gets an incorrect moniker for fancy afternoon tea. Devon and Cornwall are in their own weird battle in the great Scone War, over whether jam goes on the scone first and then cream, or whether cream goes on the scone first and then jam. 

Quite clearly a multi billion dollar company like Woolworths isn't going to question why Australia has a tripartite disagreement over what to call suspicious meat hot dog type roll and so rather than fight it, they acquiesce and merely sell the product according to the name in the relevant market. To be fair, Australia is so vast, wide, and unwieldy, that the three tribes of suspicious meat roll leave the same factory and aren't confused. A batch which is bound for the eastern states is marked as Devon, a batch which is bound for the western states is Polony, and the batch for the inbetween states is Fritz.

Given the vast distances between The markets where Polony, Fritz, and Devon, are sold, I bet that the appearance of the wrong one in the wrong place would cause sufficiently large enough ripples of confusion that it would make page 7 of a daily newspaper. The convergence of news media might mean that the same story would be published across different states but it would still need to be subedited to catch the "they call it this but we call it this" aspects of the article. Even then I can still see them getting it wrong.

Of course the question at the heart of there being three different names for the same suspicious meat roll is, is this necessary? On the face of it, no. Woolworths could if they wanted to, enforce their product name upon everyone in the country and that would be the end of it. Should they? Again, no. In fact, if anything the diversity in names of suspicious meat roll should be celebrated. As a nation divided, we could come together in changing the flag.

Or not.

Horse 2857 - Never Bought, Never Sold, Never Driven

 As someone working in an accounting firm, I get to see a fairly largish range of expenses, as well as receipts for the buying and selling of motor cars. However, there is a really weird blind spot where not much happens; so you don't get to see the consequences. There is a really weird category of motor cars which are virtually silent when it comes to appearing in people's accounts. These are the cars which are never bought, never sold, never driven, and do not incur much by way of maintenance and repair expenses.

Mr Banana (not his real name) is a property developer who lives on the lower northern beaches of Sydney. Mr Banana has an SUV which is his daily driver, his wife has a smaller SUV which is her daily driver, and the younger of his two daughters who lives at home has the family's old BMW 3er; which is pretty beat up and isn't worth very much. He has fourth car which doesn't do very much of anything at all; it is a Peugeot RCZ.

- Cars like this live sad lives in dark garages.

Since I have an interest in motor cars, I was asked what he should do with his Peugeot RCZ. I told him that if he likes it enough to keep it then he should keep it and if he doesn't like it enough to keep then he should sell it. He was confused by my answer because as he explained, he thought that it would make a good investment.

Firstly, the market for cars to actually become a good investment is so long that unless you are committed to the prospect of never ever driving your cheap new car, then you can almost but not entirely forget it. The timeframe for a cheap new car to become a really valuable investment piece, is at least 30 years. Almost all cars that have fetched ridiculous prices at auctions, have been 30-50 years old.

Secondly, the Peugeot RCZ is one of those strange points of automotive data, that is never bought, never sold, and never driven. Partly that is a consequence of that first point and partly because it is too nice to drive as a daily driver. 

Out on the roads, you will definitely see more expensive cars than the Peugeot RCZ. There are plenty of Porsche Cayennes, BMW Xers, Range Rovers and Lexii. Again, this has to do with the SUVification of everything and forty years ago these kinds of cars would have been likely to have been wagons and sedans before SUVs came along and replaced everything. The primary purpose of these cars is their perceived usefulness even though a wagon would in most cases be more useful and be nicer to drive. SUVs exist purely for their perceived utility and not for their coolness. Proper off-road enthusiasts buy proper off-road vehicles; which means that the entire market for SUVs is for people who have a family and who might want to drive on a gravel road once a year, if that. There's nothing wrong with that but it isn't cool, it isn't exciting, and that means that they are treated like the utilitarian pieces that they are perceived to be.

The vast majority of cars are working assets that get used and then cease working. People buy a car because they have a need to cart themselves, their tools, their stuff, their sprogs, and their groceries around. Very few cars are bought for the sole purpose of being a fun machine. The cars that are bought with the express purpose of being a fun machine, are almost exclusively bought by the top pentile of people on the economic spectrum or by car enthusiasts who have a fair amount of money to play with.

Herein lies the reasons why cars like the Peugeot RCZ are never bought, never sold, and never driven. You generally don't find them in car yards because they either get traded in enthusiasts' circles and are therefore only the subject of private sales. As they are never bought, they are also never sold because in order to have a market which operates, you need buyers and sellers who meet at a price. Cars like this are almost never driven because they aren't used as daily drivers and while the idea of using them on track days seems appealing, the kinds of people who buy them are invariably too busy to use them that way. Cars like the Peugeot RCZ are kind of like purchasing a gym membership: the idea is there but the execution is rarely there to accompany it. 

Curiously if you move up the economic spectrum, cars like the Porsche 911 actually are used on a regular basis because they are likely to be someone's only car. People who own that kind of car as a daily driver are also more likely to own other high performance cars like Ferraris and McLarens, and those kinds of cars have a similar kind of turnover to cheaper cars like the Peugeot RCZ.

The Peugeot RCZ sits in the same category as older Corvettes, the Audi R8, and Lexus. They're all quite worthy GT cars but they're not cheap enough to be hurled around in anger, and they're not expensive enough to live pampered lives as concourse queens. 

There is of course the obvious solution to this and that is to just accept that you're not going to make any money from motor cars as an investment. If that is then the framing device through which you look at your motor car, then what you are now looking at is a fun machine which is being wasted.

If I had a Peugeot RCZ, then I still wouldn't use it as a daily driver but you can be sure that within five years, it will have been over heaps and heaps of roads. I'm assuming that if you have that kind of money, then staying in cheap hotels is not an issue for you. There are vast ribbons of black top in this wide brown land; it would be a shame to let that go to waste. It would still be the kind of car that is never bought and never sold but it would be driven.

Horse 2856 - Supercars Should Go Forwards Into The Past

The Supercars category in Australia faces a problem which is entirely the result of its own creation. Broadly speaking the current formula for 5L V8 powered cars, results from the long tail of decisions made not quite thirty years ago. The Supercars are a Group 3A category which is basically the last refuge of the international FIA Group A category for touring cars, except that this particular appendix was designed for the then 5L V8 Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon which regular people drove. Since then, the progressive tumble of falling real wages, the SUVification of everything, the deliberate collapse of the Australian motor industry by the Liberal Party, and the consequent spiralling upwards of performance car prices now means that there are no motor manufacturers who want to play by the 1993 rules anymore. Ford want to campaign their Mustang, Holden no longer exists, and the part time travelers of Volvo, Nissan, and Mercedes-Benz have all been and gone.

The place that we've been left in where no players want to play by the old rules, has meant that the so-called Gen-3 set of rules is having to be made on the fly; to suit two door coupes, which run a 5.0L V8 and a 6.2L V8. If that isn't a recipe for parity calamity then run my nose in the dirt and call me 'stinky'. 

But once again, as someone who has absolutely zero authority change anything, that makes me eminently qualified to pontificate about a subject which I know very little about. As I know diddly-squat about the engineering challenges or about the mechanical trickery needed to make anything work, I am the perfect impartial and objective observer.

If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else, then I would suggest... building Falcons and Monaros.

The category currently sits atop a common floorpan, it has a common gearbox, it has a common wiring loom, and it has a common spool drive. Since the cars are now dimensionally identical, then if what lies underneath the skin can be standardised, then the sheet metal which sits on top should also be standardised.

The thing which NASCAR has taught us for many years is that provided the light clusters at the front and rear and the grille and brightwork looks like the road car, then the entire of the car between the front and rear, including the glass house and everything contained between the A-Pillar and C-Pillar, can be pretty much anything. The Toyota Camry which races in the NASCAR Cup Series is a 6.0L V8, despite the fact that there has never been a road going V8 Camry. It is perfectly fine.

In Australia, we've been fine in the past with the idea that the Volvo S60, Mercedes-Benz E63, and Nissan Altima were 5L V8 cars on the racetrack despite there never being road going variants like that; we've also been fine with the ZB Commodore and the S550 Mustang being stretched and narrowed like taffy to fit the dimensions of the AU Falcon, which is what the current set of dimensions are ultimately based around. 

I have seen funny car dragsters which bear only a passing resemblance to an HZ Monaro, '57 Chevy Bel-Air, '59 Studebaker, late model race cars which only have the front grille and headlights as a sticker on the front, and it's perfectly fine.

All that being said, if it has been consistently proven that what lies beneath the skin doesn't matter and everything between the front and rear of the car ultimately doesn't matter either, then the only thing which does matter is the story which the bodywork conveys. To that end, provided that Ford and GM are fine with race cars looking like long discontinued products, then I don't see any reason why the Supercars category shouldn't run Falcons and Monaros. 

If you have complete control over the packaging of a thing from the outset, which is what Gen-3 affords Supercars to have, then you don't really have to worry about taking the existing panels off of a road car and stretching them like taffy to make them conform to the design requirements. They could be bespoke bits of kit.

The S550 Mustang does look a bit of a gumby but it needn't have done so. As the NASCAR Mustang proves, it could have been made to look pretty reasonable, if the pretense of it having to look like a road car was done away with. By selecting the Falcon and Monaro, which were already two door coupes, the category could mine the memories of the past, to refresh the dreams of the present.

I am even willing to say that if an unbranded engine was made available, which is currently the case in the British Touring Car Championship, then there might be interest from other manufacturers who would be willing to throw money at the sport. 

Yes, the series would bear no relation to what's on the road but considering that you can't buy the Supercars Mustang and can't even buy a Commodore at all any more and more than likely won't be able to buy a Camaro in future either, what's the difference?

Horse 2855 - Sky News Australia Warns Us That Euro 2020 Is A Marxist Plot

I am convinced that the local branch of the bank where I go to deposit the few remaining cheques that we get, lurches between hyper capitalism and ultra communism in its staff's political opinions, depending on who is at the teller's windows on any given day.

On the same set of telescreens I have seen Peppa Pig, Bluey, Dora the Explorer, Paw Patrol, Sharri Markson, Chris Kenny and this afternoon Rita Panahi. Between ABC3, ABC News 24, and Sky News Australia, you would come to the conclusion that the world is either wonderful or awful in a multiplicity of different ways.

On Friday, Peta Credlin was banging on about how Euro 2020 was all a Marxist plot and that the Black Lives Matter campaign and various players across Europe kneeling before a football game was also part of this Marxist plot. I couldn't help but feel that if the tournament was on Fox Sports, instead of Optus, then they'd be singing from an entirely different hymn book.

Speaking as one of the great uninformed and unintelligent masses whom Sky News seems to think needs to be corralled into thinking like they do, I am glad that I have been informed of the Marxist plot which has been bubbling away below the surface because otherwise I would have never have known.

That's where I've been going wrong all these years. I would have never have guessed that Gareth Southgate missing that penalty against Germany at Euro '96 was actually because he was trying to encourage the toiling masses to overthrow the ruling order in favour of a communal system of production; instead of just being a colossal git.

I would have never have guessed that David Beckham actually wanted for everyone to be paid exactly the same, irrespective of where they are in the hierarchy; because the creation of the Premier League and the escalation of wages to many millions of dollarpounds is actually all just a front. Who would have thought that that the television companies were actually massive supporters of Lenin and that there is no bigger supporter of Marxism and Communism than Fox Sports. I would have never have thought that Lord Sugar and Rupert Murdoch were actually bolshie red leftists but there you go.

What's more, Peta Credlin is talking nothing but spun gold truth when she says that if you kneel in support of Black Lives Matter, you are supporting all and every violent event that has ever happened at a Black Lives Matter protest, anywhere in the world.

Because fair's fair then it follows that if you support the Australian Flag then you are also supporting every occasion that it's been flown; including war crimes in Iraq and the locking up of refugees on tropical gulags, especially if they require medical treatment and/or they've been born in Australia. Presumably that also means that Scott Morrison is also a follower of the teachings of Ivan Milat or Martin Bryant, or perhaps the True Blue Crew and Reclaim Australia.

It's a good thing that Sky News Australia warned us that Euro 2020 is a Marxist plot because I would have never have thought that playing a flat back four instead of a stopper and a sweeper and playing Marcus Rashford up front as a lone striker in a 4-5-1 formation was in reality an attempt to set up a farming collective which is communally owned by the peasantry.

I also wouldn't have guessed that Nike, Reebok, Umbro and Adidas weren't sports and leisurewear companies but actually fronts for the Bolshevik Menshevik People's Revolutionary Workers Party.

Here I was thinking that Black Lives Matter had something to do with institutional racism, which results in the incarceration and murder of black people by the police in disproportionate numbers.

Apparently I have had it wrong when I thought that the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia is particularly concerned with the outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are also incarcerated and ill-treated by police in disproportionate numbers. Apparently I am also wrong in thinking that there is an historical element to this, as I live in the local government area called Blacktown which was named after an internment camp/school for indigenous peoples before their lands were confiscated and their populations exterminated in what is unofficially called the 'frontier wars' because we refuse to admit that they happened; so what do I know?

When a global movement emerges committed to combatting racism following repeated murders in one country and it then inspires other countries to look seriously at their own pasts, then according to Sky News Australia, it's not actually real.

To be honest I am kind of surprised at how Sky News has taken what should be a pretty obvious statement and turned it into a designated acceptable point of hatred. There's nothing Orwellian in that at all. 

The more rational explanation is that Sky News Australia is more likely to be a right wing media outlet, which stirs up really stupid outrages, while their supporters push the government even further to the right. Sky News Australia loves to rail against glib slogans because it is politically expedient.

The problem that Sky News Australia has is that 'Black Lives Matter' is a pretty simple and somewhat obvious slogan, so they have to invent reasons to oppose it. In the case of Euro 2020 and players kneeling, Sky News Australia has to declare Black Lives Matter as a Marxist plot because  they would otherwise have to openly admit that as part of the media group which has been found guilty of violating the Racial Discrimination Act, they are institutionally racist.

Of course in daring to suggest such a thing and publishing ungoodthink, how do I know that I am not part of this Marxist plot? 

Horse 2854 - THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE v THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA [2021] - Judgement

The Fake Internet Court of Australia

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE v THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA [2021] - Judgement

H2854/1

"We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language."

- Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, (1882)

It has come to this fake internet court's attention (again) that the American usage of the word 'check' is very very silly. The American usage of the English language is not quite as silly as the Roman usage of the Latin language; which it must be said is pretty lively for a supposedly dead language. Oscan was the most widely spoken Italic language before the spread of Latin; which marched through the Empire, while hanging off the skirt tails of the Roman Army's Tunica. Latin has a nominative, a vocative, accusative, a genitive, a dative and ablative. It is amazing that the Romans got anything done at all with such a silly language.

Judgement Praecido:

Latin, you are dead. Go back to your grave.

Back to the case at hand:

We had a client who visited us recently to have their income tax returns done. Everything went cordially and efficiently but at the end of the meeting they asked the rather odd question:

"Could you send me the check (?) when it is all done?"

My boss looked decidedly confused but I answered that we would include the invoice along with the tax returns and the meeting concluded with the usual flurry of pleasantries and salutations. 

This is where linguists, sociologists, and other people from the humanities department of a university start speaking about intersectionality as though it was some ultra-über hip and happening concept. Yeah, I'm home with the downies; I'm a real hep cat. Speaking as someone who lives in a land of numbers and from my apartment on Pedant Corner, the only thing that I hear whenever I hear the word 'intersectionality' is the ensuing honking of horns from the traffic jam of nonsense which is about to follow.

If we interrogate what this person said, we run into the problem which George Orwell hints at in the appendix to '1984'; which is that when an idea can not be expressed in words, at least so far as thought is dependent on words, then it  should be literally unthinkable and makes all other modes of thought, impossible. Can an idea actually exist if it can not be thought? We have the dual problem of the word 'check' trying to act in places where it really shouldn't and this wouldn't be improved with the written word either because American English makes no distinction between a 'check' and a 'cheque'. Clearly this is an issue which needs to be resolved.

This is different and distinct from this court's opinion on that blackguard and scoundrel Webster Noah whose crimes against the English itself are wanton and deliberate. His deliberate attempts to produce a new language for a new nation represent not an act of negligence but of abject culpability against the flower of English.

This case and dispute is not about mere spelling, or whether or not a dictionary should be prescriptive about how to use spelling or descriptive of how it is actually used but rather it is about the very meanings of words themselves; as distinct units of conveyances of thoughts and concepts.

That great sage Pauline Hanson ('sage' in the sense of that herb) once had her words twisted to say "My language has been murdered; my language has been murdered; my shopping trolley murdered; my groceries just gone." I could make a pretty convincing case that the twisting of those words produced more sense  than the entirety of Ms Hanson's political career but I want to focus on the central message and implications of those words. When we murder language it leads to unfortunate consequences; such as the loss of groceries in this case.

These are the facts as this court sees them:

There are three things which need separate and distinct words because they are separate and distinct things. The prime purpose of language is the presentation of information which is then understood by others. While it is fun to live in the land of ambiguity, it is like living in a permanent fog and is quite unproductive. For clarity, these perfectly cromulent words will embiggen people's understanding.

Bill - in the sense that is relevant here, a bill is a list of demands. Bills of Rights are the official list of demands of rights, that a people group and/or citizenry is claiming. A Bill of Sale, which is what is handed to someone in a restaurant, is a demand for payment which is based upon an itemised list of things provided (which is usually the various components of a succulent meal).

Cheque - a cheque is an instruction to pay. A cheque is usually drawn upon a bank and is an instruction for that bank to pay some other person or their nominated bank account. It is named after the chequered cloth upon which the Chancellor of the Exchequer would sit; who then pays out the coin/money of the realm from atop a bank of monies.

Note - a note is a statement that a thing exists. Technically a bank note is a promissory note which states that the issuing bank (usually the central bank of the nation) promises to pay a sum specified. A Twenty Dollar Note states that the bank promises to pay the bearer on demand, the sum of twenty dollars. In the past this may have been twenty gold or silver dollars but since the age of fiduciary currency, this promise is merely for the abstract concept of whatever a dollar happens to be at the time.

--

When you go to a restaurant, they hand you a Bill which is a demand that you pay them; based upon a list of things provided. You will then either hand over some Notes which are promises from the central bank that the amount of money stated is good for payment, or you will hand over an instruction for your bank to pay theirs; which is called a cheque.You do not ask for a cheque. You do not hand over a bill; in fact, the bits of paper/plastic that you hand over as payment, will actually state that it is 'note'. 

Judgement:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

The problem with this line of thinking and abuse of language is that if language is mangled so that anything can mean everything, then nothing means anything at all. The purpose of language is the conveyance of meaning and while dictionaries are best at being descriptive of how language is used, as opposed to being prescriptive for how it should be used, the underlying language shouldn't be murdered or otherwise everyone's groceries will be just gone.

This court hereby orders that the words 'Bill', 'Cheque', and 'Note' be used properly, and that existing usage of 'check' when you mean 'bill', 'check' when you mean 'cheque' and 'bill' when you mean 'note' be stopped immediately. 

The United States Of America, you are guilty of both conspiracy and deception. You have brought hateration and holleration into this fake internet court and as you have no business mucking with a language that doesn't even bear your name, we order you to cease, desist and stop this egregious pretense. If we ever see you back before this court, the penalities will be severe. Get out; lest you make a mockery of my courtroom. We are already perfectly capable of making a mockery of this fake internet courtroom as it is. You are malevolent and have now ensnared others in your villainy. Can you not see what trouble thou hast wrought? 

- ROLLO75 J

(this case will be reported in FILR as H2854/1 - Ed)

Horse 2853 - Defund, Degrade, Destroy, Privatise. (The Future Story Of Sydney Buses)

This week I had the strange experience of filling out a survey on board a route 100 bus from Taronga Zoo to City QVB; getting on at Spit Junction and getting off at Wynyard. We were told on board the bus that this was to help improve the service, I think that this is actually just ruse before the whole region is privatised. 

Late last year the cotracts for the Sydney Bus Regions 7, 8 and 9, that this the northwestern suburbs, northern beaches, and eastern suburbs, were all marked for privatisation and handing over to private operators between November 2020 and the end of the year. That hasn't happened presumably of because the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic but given the Liberal Party's proven track record to hand over government services to their criminal friends for a peppercorn (which is why Sydney Ferries is a subsidiary of Transdev Australasia) it looks like it will happen at some point in the future.

I can already blame the then Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian for her abject refusal to connect the North West Metro to the Richmond Line, for her part in the process which gave Hillsong Head Office its own Metro Station while being practically inaccessible to the suburb of Norwest which it is named after; so this just looks like more of the same. The current Transport Minister Andrew Constance used to work as a lobbyist for industry bodies and was parachuted into a safe seat with which he had no connection on the basis that he was the former President of the Young Liberals. I suspect that he has been employed to deliver infrastructure projects to Liberal voting areas before flogging them off to his mates. Both he and Gladys will probably both go the way of former Premier Mike Baird who jumped ship to join the NAB.

I have been told by some of the drivers (yes I speak to bus drivers) that they were allowed to look at a document which had the suspicious looking stamp of "sensitive" on the outside and it said that everyone who wasn't directly employed as a driver, which includes all admin, finance, and scheduling staff, everyone who maintains the fleet, all of the cleaners, would not be guaranteed to retain their job when there was a new private operator.

I suspect that I am a victim of blind A/B testing; where the bus services are being deliberately made worse, to test the bottom limits of people will accept. The 100 bus operates as an "all day" service with no real time table, the B1 bus also runs on this basis and they have decided to run fewer buses. Running fewer buses is fine from an operational point of view because it reduces costs but if you are waiting for a bus on the second to last pick-up stop on the route, then seeing buses with "Sorry Bus Full" signs on them are not helpful. One day last week, I had to wait 36 minutes for a bus to arrive which wasn't full. I have a big black scary coat and so I am fine when it is 8°C and windy but when it is 5°C and raining, it is unpleasant.

Normally if you had to wait 36 minutes for a bus, then I would either think that you were waiting for a long distance service, or a service in a suburban/semi-rural area. Buses from Sydney to Melbourne might run once or twice a day. Buses in suburban/semi-rural areas are more likely to run on a half hour service; so a bus being 6 minutes late might not be a problem. I live in a suburban area and so waiting for a bus for half an hour is not an unusual thing, however this is a photograph of what in theory is just seven kilometers away from Wynyard Station. 

There has existed a thing in tory politics for so long that it makes me wonder if it is a guiding principle. Obviously the people who fund tory politics and the political machines therein want to act as if they have no responsibility to the nation or society whatsoever but politics is the art of the enactment of policy; in this case denying and abrogating any responsibility that you might have to the nation and its people, then metastasises into actively destroying the assets which are held in common. In Australia at least, the perpetual slogan of the Liberal Party (which has now abandoned the pretense of being in favour of liberal democracy) should be "Defund, Degrade, Destroy, Privatise." Of course if there is a collective action problem which comes along, then the same people who demand that kind of policy are all only too happy to then demand a public bail out when it all turns to nonsense.

I suspect that Andrew Constance will say that privately-run buses will be better able to stick to the timetable or other such nonsense. Andrew Constance as MP for Bega and who almost certainly doesn't actually live there, seems to deny reality itself because no buses, either public or private, can outrun the swirling conurbation that is traffic within the five million souls of the metropolis of Sydney. Timetables aren't set by Sydney Buses but by the State Government and the Ministry for Transport and Roads itself. Private operators as private business always have the prime incentive to cut costs and reduce service standards in order to extract profits from the public. Transport choices tend to be rather inelastic in demand because even when the price changes, even when the level of service is deliberately degraded, we still need to get to and from work. If only there was a responsible Transport Minister.

Horse 2852 - Is It Okay For Helio Castroneves To Try And Go For A Fifth Indy 500 Victory?

There has been a discussion on an Indianapolis 500 Facebook group page which I am a member of, about whether or not it is right for Helio Castroneves to try and go for a fifth Indy 500 victory. In winning his fourth Indy 500 this year, he joins a club which only has AJ Foyt, Rick Mears, Al Unser Sr., and now himself. 

 - Helio Castroneves, the pink and black #06 car

As this is a matter of not much consequence beyond the myth and story of the race itself, I think that it serves as a very good reminder of the power of stories. I personally think that all records are there to be broken and that anyone who competes and plays at games, aught to try and win within the established rules of the game or be inventive enough to force someone to have to invent rules. 

Long before I was born, Juan Manuel Fangio was a five time Formula One Champion. He won Formula One Championships for different teams; in part necessitated by the tragedy of the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hour Race, when 82 people were killed and Mercedes-Benz withdrew from all official competition for decades. Fangio moved from Mercedes-Benz to Maserati and still won championships. Five Formula One championships was for the longest time, a seemingly impossible record to equal. Jack Brabham, Jackie Stewart, Niki Lauda, Nelson Piquet and Aryton Senna all got to three, Alain Prost won four but five was still out of reach. Then Michael Schumacher came along and not only won five but six and seven Formula One Championships. I was happy when Schumacher won his fifth and then equally as happy when he won his sixth and seventh.  Likewise, now that Lewis Hamilton has made it to seven, I absolutely want to see him win an eighth.

I think that records are meant be broken. Peter Brock went on to win 9 Bathurst 1000 races, after equaling and smashing the previous record of 4. Mark Taylor retired on 334 not out and didn't want to pass the then Australian Test Cricket record of Sir Donald Bradman's; only to have it smashed by Matthew Hayden who would score 380. 

If you do have the ability to go out and win a thing a record number of times, if you have the ability to go out and be the fastest, or the strongest, then you absolutely should. 

Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said that:

"Somebody said that football's a matter of life and death to you, I said 'listen, it's more important than that'."

Shankly's quote is often taken with no context but put back into the proper context, in an interview which happened after his career 

"Well everything I've got I owe to football, and the dedication I put into the game. You only get out of the game what you put into it, Shelley. And I put everything into it I could, and still do. For the people I was playing for and the people that I was manager for. I didn't cheat them out of anything. So I put all my heart and soul into it, to the extent that my family suffered."

"Do you regret that at all?" (Shelley Rohde)

"Yeah I regret it very much."

Shankly who was a fierce socialist, put everything into the game of football because he knew that people out here in the real world often have scummy jobs and difficult life circumstances, and that football in particular and sport generally matters so very much because it is intrinsically pointless. Shankly believed that everybody should work for each other and his job was to make people happy by building a team that worked together. Having said that, sports and games are always only ever played for the benefit of the participants and everyone watching who are in effect playing by proxy. Sport matters because it doesn't matter. 

Everyone watching sport and playing games wants to see something fun. We want to see who wins, we want to see records smashed, we want to see people try and fail at the attempt and we want to see people try and succeed. Precisely because sports and games are intrinsically pointless, the only thing that is created after the thing has ended is the story and the legend. People will hang on waiting for years and decades for a story to be written and they want to see the seemingly unattainable thing be realised. Once that thing is finally attained, it then becomes the new thing.

If it isn't about whether you win or lose but how you play the game, then that last qualifier demands that you ask the question of 'how' you play a game. If you aren't playing to achieve some kind of objective, then what's the point? If you are in a field of many and you have no realistic chances or expectations of actually winning, then you should still compete as though you were going to. If you are 5-0 down in a game of football, then you should still play to win; even if that's impossible. Sometimes if you are playing a game and you can't win, then assuming the role of a spoiler and kingmaker is still a role in which you can win at. 

If you are one of those kinds of people who isn't competitive, then you should play games where the objective is to be creative and/or collaborative because there is still an objective and a point. Playing games to create mirth and fun, is still playing to win. 

As for the question of whether or not it is right for someone to reach, attain, and then pass a record, that's always on the table if it is within someone's power to do so.

Aside:

Helio Castroneves' win in 2021 was the first time that a car won with a 0 at the beginning. Meyer Shank Racing racing has almost always run the number 60; so 06 is just those numbers reversed. 

Horse 2851 - Thirroul Wants To Yell "Get Off My Lawn!"

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-03/road-toll-proposal-grand-pacific-drive/100188294

Does the solution to the northern Illawarra's growing weekend and public holiday traffic woes lie in the dirtiest of words for motoring enthusiasts: a road toll?

During a discussion of new plans to alleviate the growing tendency for the entire length of the main road through Thirroul to look like a car park on weekends, Viv texted in to ABC Illawarra with the toll suggestion.

"Regarding Thirroul and adjacent suburbs with traffic. How about a toll to take the tourist drive?" he messaged.

- ABC Illawarra, 4th Jun 2021

What a top idea!

Installing a punitive, pecuniary penalty, in an effort to reduce traffic will absolutely work. Installing taxes upon things that we want to discourage is a good method of discouraging behaviour. As just about everything is subject to the forces of supply and demand, then deliberately increasing the price without changing the supply will generally move a market to a new equilibrium position where lower amounts of the goods and services will be demanded. Sometimes tolls and excise will have practically no effects on the amount demanded; so these kinds of taxes are a good way for governments to find new sources of revenue without much effort.

Toll roads as they are used in NSW do two things.

Firstly they act as a source of private revenue for private people, by charging motorists for using a road which as a taxpayer they've already helped to bankroll. It doesn't take much of a leap to come to the conclusion that this is yet another example of privatising profits and socialising losses; which is to be expected considering that we have an entire rentier class of people in NSW who actually contribute nothing of value but because they sit on massive amounts of capital, act as though they are entitled to the rewards of the economy.

Secondly, for people like myself who refuse to use toll roads on the basis that I think that it is morally outrageous to pay for roads which my taxation in both registration fees, taxes on motor insurance, as well as multiple 3x3 levies which everyone seems to have forgotten about; as well as people who simply can't afford to use toll roads, we run rat races on other roads because we will not use toll roads. I find the whole idea that Epping Rd through Willougby and Lane Cove is only one lane, completely morally bankrupt.

Toll roads as they are used in NSW are completely in line with tory philosophy. Remember, the word 'tory' comes from the Irish language 'toraidhe'; meaning, 'Outlaw, Robber, Brigand.' I think that it is a neat coincidence that the words predatory and obligatory also use -tory as a suffix. If you want to install a toll on a road which steals directly from people's purses, then people will go elsewhere where their purses are not being stolen from.

As for the grand question of whether or not a road toll would ease congestion on the Illawarra's Grand Pacific Drive, then of course it will. If you are a tourist and want to go down the coastal road through Waterfall, Otford, Stanwell Tops, Clifton, Austimere, Thirroul etc. and there's a toll on the road, then you are discouraged to some degree from going there. This is exactly the same argument why councils right up and down the coast in Sydney want to put parking charges for parking next to the beaches. The excuse given is that they want to reduce congestion but really, it's both a revenue raising exercise and an attempt to keep out the people from the western suburbs, the wrong people, from using their stuff.

I will personally take it as a slight and suggest that if I am not good enough to use a road, then you are not worthy enough to receive my tourist dollars. If Wollongong City Council has decided that it wants to punish me for passing through an area, then I will respond by not passing through the area. That's perfectly fine if all you want to do is reduce congestion but I do wonder what all of those businesses that get money from the passing tourist trade are going to do when people like me no longer pass by. If the locals in Bulli and Thirroul in particular are fed up with congestion and they want to sent people like me elsewhere, they are of course quite welcome to. You only have to look at towns like Jugiong and Tarcutta to know that if you remove the passing traffic, that passing tourist trade dries up to practically zero.

Heat is work, and work's a curse, 

And all the heat in the universe,

Is gonna cool down,

'Cause it can't increase.

Then there'll be no more work,

And there'll be perfect peace.

Yeah, that's entropy, man!

Horse 2850 - Christian Porter's Defamation Action Ends

 "The ABC had been forced by my taking this action to say that they regret the article. I never thought that they would concede that the accusations that were put in the article could never be proven, could not be proven to the criminal/civil standard."

- Christian Porter, 31st May 2021

This week, former Attorney-General Christian Porter dropped his defamation case against the ABC and Louise Milligan but still tried to claim victory despite failing to secure an apology or retraction from the public broadcaster.

His statement indicates that he is trying to claim some kind of moral victory by stating that ABC could not prove guilt to a criminal or civil standard. The problem with this is that because the subject of the article was the allegation of raping a 16-year-old girl in Sydney in 1988 by "a man who was now a member of Cabinet" and that that woman took her own life in June 2020, then proving guilt to a criminal or civil standard was always impossible. Not only could the ABC not prove guilt to a criminal or civil standard, it never sought to do so. 

Furthermore, his actions inside the court case itself, in trying to push the ABC off of claiming the truth as defence, appears to have backfired. In forcing the ABC’s defence to be publicly redacted, whatever incriminating evidence that the ABC may have had against Porter, will like be forever hidden from public view. Thus, not only will the public never actually know what the ABC had in its defence that made Porter back down, but the public will also never actually know if Christian Porter is a fit and proper person to be a Cabinet Minister. In that respect, he has won most elegantly because in putting more spin on the case than Nathan Lyon can put onto a cricket ball, his tenure as MP for the Division of Pearce is secure.

Speaking as a member of the general public with no actual ability to look inside the case, then the most likely story which fits the available facts is that Porter's legal team probably hit the wall of lack of evidence, in trying to prosecute the case. As he was the one who got out in front of the media and announced on 3 March 2021 that he was the person named in the allegations, then trying to make the claim that he had been defamed when the original allegation did not name him, that he was "readily identifiable" and that the article was intended to harm him, might have been impossible. As he was the plaintiff who initiated the civil lawsuit against the ABC, then the burden of proof rested upon the him in respect of every element or essential fact that made up the case. Not only does that burden of proof never shifts to the defendant,  there is also no obligation whatsoever on the defendant to prove any fact or issue that is in dispute.

I think that likely story is that the whole thing is what is colloquially known as a SLAPP suit. SLAPP is a backronym which stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation; which is where plaintiff doesn't actually expect to win the lawsuit but intends to burden and intimidate the defendant with sufficient costs of mounting a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. This is especially effective against poorer people because they do not have much money and so it is relatively easy to bankrupt them but much harder against an organisation like ABC. Warfare by exhaustion works if the enemy is small; not when it is big. Porter probably had no intention of prosecuting it to an actual trial, it was just an attempt to bully and intimidate the ABC. Unironically, this is a normal course of events where you have knavish plaintiffs in sensitive cases relating to domestic violence and rape.

If his plan was to force the ABC to defend itself on the burden of truth which would have been spun as finding him innocent, then I think he has failed. If his plan was to scare the ABC into a monetary settlement, then I think he has failed. If his plan was to push the ABC in seeing what kind of information that the ABC holds, then he migh have won. If his plan was to wave his magic legal wand and have all obstacles magically disappear from his path, then I would like Mr Porter to explain why he he is not implicated in Kate’s rape, just as as he promised at his press conference, oh so many moons ago.

The one case that Mr Porter will not be able to control is what the South Australian Coroner's Court decides. Given that NSW police detectives met with Kate in Sydney in February 2020 and had contact with her on at least five occasions until June; on June 23 she indicated in an email to NSW Police she did not wish to proceed with the complaint; then on June 25 SA police advised NSW Police that she had died to to suicide, that may yet warrant an inquest. If the SA Coroner does decide to hold an inquest into the circumstances that contributed to the alleged victim's suicide and if Mr Porter is called up, then he must provide evidence, even in circumstances when it may incriminate him or lead to a civil penalty. If the Coroner's Court calls for information, then it won't be asking for Mr Porter to prove guilt or innocence to a criminal or civil standard, it will be asking for the truth.

Also see:

Horse 2818 - https://rollo75.blogspot.com/2021/03/horse-2818-christian-porters-defamation.html

Horse 2849 - Gemini, Year Of The Metal Ox: Laughter Is The Very Best Medicine. Remember That When Your Appendix Bursts Next Week.

 Last week before the eclipse of the moon, we had a client who we did a tax return for and she was quite excited for this upcoming event.

She then wanted to pursue a line of questioning by asking when my boss' date of birth was, and then asked what mine was; so that she could do an astrological reading. That would involve charting the positions of the stars and planets on the day that someone was born; before applying a set of rules, to invent some kind of narrative; with the air of semi-legitimacy. My boss wouldn't tell her his birthday but I was asked what my birthday is.

"33rd of Undecimber. I was born in the year of the Cat." was my reply

Immediately she knew that she wasn't going to get an answer because if you know anything about the legend of the Chinese Zodiac, the Rat tricked the Cat into thinking that they the animals were supposed to present themselves to the Jade Emperor on a different day. The Rat who rode on top of the Ox, is at the front of the list but the Cat who was having a nap, slept for the whole day. When the Cat did show up, it was the wrong day. Consequently, there is no year of the Cat. 33rd of Undecimber exists in some accounting packages as the 13th period in which to make adjustments in. The accounting package that we use at work, has 40 days available in every month and 20 months in the calendar year. 40/20/2021 is a legitimate date in our accounting system.

Forty days hath September,

April, June, and November.

All the rest have forty as well.

Which makes this rhyme, a pointless spell.

I absolutely think that astrology did provide a useful service to science back in the day. In order to come up with their charts, astrologers needed maps of the heavens. I do not think that astrology provides a useful service today, given that the planets are probably dead pieces of rock and gas, which are subordinate to the laws of physics.

That isn't to say that science hasn't also thought of its own kind of self-referential circular naval gazing logic. While I can see some value in categorising personality types and developing policy based on observable and repeatable experiment, the way in which some personality exams are administered is no more useful than horoscopes. The Meyer-Briggs Personality Test which generates 16 types based upon a series of yes/no if/then logic gates, pens people into 16 types which look all the world like the various Zodiac signs of both western and eastern mythology.

The problem with the Meyer-Briggs Personality Test is that under the cover of pseudo credibility, it basically pulls the same broad tricks as most horoscope readings. By using a series of established rules, a definitive outcome is achieved; which is then useful for generating what amounts to a confidence trick.

Because the centre of the observable universe is roughly 19mm behind someone's corneas, not only is everyone's experience of the universe unique but they are justified in believing that are the centre of the universe, for it is literally impossible to view anything from any other perspective. When you attach by means of electro-biomechanical hardware and software, a fully functioning ego, superego, and id, to that unique perspective, then the only possible consequence is that everyone thus becomes the hero of the narrative which that series of systems must invent. Specificity is the soul of narrative; narrative is a story constructed from aggregate points of specificity. You can not get more specific than the singular point of observations which are uniquely available to any given individual.

When you apply a given set of rules to points of data in order to derive some cohesive narrative, then people can very easily make the leap to apply that narrative to themselves. The western horoscope sets out 12 little pots into which simple colours can be poured. The eastern horoscope sets out a different set of 12 little pots into which colours are poured and then adds five textures. The Meyer-Briggs Personality Test contains a list of ingredients on the side of the bottle which sound more credible but really it's just 16: little pots of colour.

Humans love to paint the world in the colours provided, and horoscopes and personality tests if used recreationally, are no more useful at creating a picture than a child's finger painting set. Yet because humans are pattern seeking machines which are driven by a single point of perspective, we are very good at making those pictures, however terrible that they might be, about ourselves. 

We are keen to apply labels to ourselves because that's useful in defining our identity and whereas horoscopes were an appeal to authority in order to justify a hokey story, personality tests like the Meyer-Briggs Personality Test is also an appeal to authority but happens to be an appeal to a more scientific authority. The story is still hokey. 

Horoscopes and the Meyer-Briggs Personality Test have so much traction, not because they are necessarily true but because self-interested, self-seeking, self-important individuals who are the heroes of their own story. There is probably a correlation with people who like these sorts of things and whether or not someone believes that they have an internal or external locus of control in life. If people think that external factors or forces beyond their influence have a greater bearing on what happens to them, as opposed to peoplewho think that they are controllers and directors of their own narrative, then I suspect that people are more likely to pay attention to astrology. It seems to be a defence against uncertainty, in a very uncertain and chaotic kosmos.

For the record, my Meyer-Briggs Personality is an Undecided Seeking Systematic Repairer (USSR); which means that my superpower is sending rockets into space. Then again, as someone who was born in the year of the Cat and whose zodiac sign is Ferrero Rocher, you should have already known that. See? I can invent hokey stories as well.