Horse 2970 - We Don't Know Much About Winston's Dad

The longer that any given TV/Radio/Book/Film/Comic series goes on, the more complex that the world being built within that series will invariably become. Single shot pieces of media generally don't have time to construct a complex world but things that go on for years, will carve out ever more pieces to go on the board. I have not seen anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but I am assured that it is now so big that there are nods to films that were 20 episodes ago. Doctor Who which has been going on for almost 60 years, has several editions of both a Continuity and Discontinuity Guide which have been published. Both The Simpsons and The Flintstones are sufficiently complex enough that they have warranted books about the philosophy of the respective series written about them. The Archers on BBC Radio 4 is probably so massive that it would take an entire lifetime to listen to every single series and you'd still not make it to the present day.

The kids' TV show Bluey on ABC Kids (and Disney + for overseas viewers) has at least three podcasts that I know of, and is already famous enough in Australia that you have celebrities lining up to make cameos in it. Three seasons have been released thus far and as the producers of the show have semi-deliberately built the world within the Blueyverse, it is already sufficiently complex enough to chase down questions to do with characters and settings that are not core to the main story.

As the world of Bluey is told through the perspective of the two main protagonists of Bluey and Bingo, everyone else in this world lies in a series of circles which become more diffuse. We do not really know to what degree Bluey and Bingo's circles of friends overlap but we can be sure that this particular Venn diagram includes areas of non-intersection. 

Within Bingo's group of friends is the character Winston, who is a bulldog and probably named after the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. We do not know if Bluey and Winston get along, though we can assume that Bingo nd Winston do. We have to also assume that Winston is not exactly in Bluey's central group of friends and might not even in Bingo's group of friends at all. That means that the next level outwards on the social chain is Winston's Dad; who we do not even know what his name is. 

What we do know in the limited amount of screen time that we have seen of him, is that he likes to think ahead. 

On election day, we can assume that he expects that the line will be long. We know that this is early in the morning because there is a sausage sizzle in operation (usually put on by the Parents and Citizens' Committee). I can tell you from experience that lines tend to be longer in the morning during an Australian election as everyone gets the same idea at the same time. Winston's Dad also knows this and so is prepared. 

Another time that we get to see Winston's Dad is when the Heeler Family goes to the hardware store Hammerbarn. Hammerbarn is likely modelled after the 'for real life' hardware store of Bunnings and it too shares Bunnnings' likelihood of having a sausage sizzle in operation (put on by charity and community groups).

In both instances, Winston's Dad is seen with not one but two sausages in bread. I think that we can assume that in both instances, Winston's Dad has assumed that he will be in those places for a fair amount of time. It could just be that he just really likes sausages and thinks that it's a good idea and why not? I for one think that this is an excellent idea as one sausage is almost never enough.

This is where I have a vastly different opinion to one of the podcasts that I listened to on the subject of Winston's Dad. Do we know his name? No. Do we know what his job is? No. Do we know if he and Winton's Mum are together or separated? No. Do we need to know? No.

This is the other side of the coin of complex worldbuilding. We as the audience, don't actually need to know everything. Curiosity and Greed got together and had two daughters called 'Give' and 'More' but the truth is that while you can build a world, it's not required that the writers explore every single possible branch of every single possible story. 

I think that the current owners of the Star Wars franchise made a mistake in producing 'Solo'; where a throw away line in the film 'Star Wars' that Han Solo could make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, became the basis for writing a movie. Okay, so the movie didn't stink up the place but it was mostly unnecessary. 

I will express my own weird bias and say that I like the character of Little Jim in BBC Radio's 'The Goon Show'; who usually only ever shows up when someone has fallen in the water with the line "He's fallen in the water." There is never any explanation given as to where Little Jim comes from or why he says this. Little Jim exists purely as a running gag to say one line and then never has any other bearing on the plot whatsoever.

Comedy works in the same way that all stories do. Comedy works through the resolution of unresolved plot points to a conclusion. In the case of comedy, that usually works when the expectation of how a story ends is resolved through a subversion of that expectation. Question and Answer, puns and wordplay, the unravelling of status or vanity, all work in the same way. This particular joke, works by subverting the expectation that there is a resolution. If we ever find out a lot more about Winston's Dad, including why he always has two sausages, then the joke will fall flat.

We don't really need to know a lot about Winston's Dad. I think that it would be funny if his name was Churchill and that he had a catchphrase of "Oh, yes"; which would be a reference to a series of car insurance commercials in the UK for Churchill Insurance (and that might yet be a possibility if the series is continued to be sold to Disney+ in the UK) but this isn't necessary. In fact, it could be argued that this running gag works to some degree because we don't know anything else about him apart from him being seen with two sausages.

Horse 2969 - Who Are We Trying To Appease With Australia Day?

To the people who want to drape themselves in gold and green and ignore the reason why Australia Day exists, I say to you, "go for it". If there's one that unites us as a nation, it's not class, religion or ideology, colour, creed or roots, it isn't Doctor Marten's boots, it's that we all love having a public holiday. I suspect that half the reason that Australia doesn't become a republic is the fear of losing Queen's Birthday Weekend as a public holiday; despite the fact that the queen in question (Queen Victoria) died in 1901 and the day used to be called Empire Day. No, Australians love a public holiday and will accept the flimsiest of reasons for having one. 

Actually, the reason why Australia Day is a public holiday, as opposed to the actual day when Australia became a nation, is that we already had a public holiday for the 1st of January in New Year's Day. Australia Day (or rather NSW Proclamation Day) became popular in the run up to 1888, then in the mid 1930s until 1938, and then again for 1988, for the Centenary, Sesquicentenary, and Bicentenary of white settlement. The date is very much about trying to declare a kind of white nationalism in the void of not really having any other national date to speak of. Australia was started with a vote and not a war; so there's no date of independence that makes any sense other than 1st January.

This is the 26th of January and as such, it is not the day that Australia became a nation (that was January 1), it is not the day that Australia decided to vote to become a nation (that was July 30), and worst of all it isn't even the day that any of the other unfriendly cousins which whom we share this massive island became states.

26th of January is the date on which, after landing in Botany Bay and deciding that Captain James Cook was a grotty little Yorkshireman who got it wrong, Captain Arthut Phillip ordered that the 11 Royal Navy ships which comprised the First Fleet sail around to the next inlet and land there. 

The 26th of January is the day on which Captain Arthur Phillip RN, got off the ship and stuck the British flag into the soil; thus claiming it as the dumping ground for England's ne'er-do-wells. We're not exactly sure where the exact spot where this took place is and it's probably under a building at Circular Quay; so it's not like we could mark that spot anyway.

Nobody bothered to consult the Eora people what they thought when 11 Royal Navy ships of ghost people showed up in Warrane, which was probably a good thing as Captain Arthur Phillip RN spent the next few years blasting them off the face of the earth with repeated musket fire. The name "Sydney" is for Thomas "Turnip" Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney, who was the British Home Secretary at the time. It should be obvious by now that the the colony of New South Wales and the City of Sydney, were started with an act of knavery; backed up by guns and bloodshed.

If we whitewash the facts and truth of invasion, colonisation and dispossession of lands by Europeans on the First Nations Peoples of Australia; the repeated massacres, frontier warfare, deliberate genocides and removal from land of first people with relocation to 'protectorates', 'reserves', 'missions' and 'schools'; if you want to drape yourself in the Australian flag, put zinc on your nose and yell 'freedom' without having a clue what kind of freedom you are calling for, then I ask the question of why we specifically want the 26th of January itself.

Now all of this is probably fine if you are a white supremacist knave who thinks that ideologies such as identity politics and doctrinaire nationalism produces very fine fruit but if you examine that fruit just a little bit, you find that it is full of maggots with Doctorates.

The biggest reason why we continue to have the 26th of January instead of some other dates is twofold. Firstly, it gives the very vocal minority of actual racists something to whinge about. Secondly, if gives the Institute of Public Affairs, something to write pieces and whinge about in daily newspapers. The IPA by whinging about Australia Day, gets its annual whinge about Australia Day. Sections of the rightist media, get a free straw enemy who they get to set on fire. Rather than contributing to national unity, the right gets to  drape themselves in gold and green and ignore the reason why Australia Day exists and to yell about class, religion and ideology, colour, creed and roots. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us get a public holiday; without having to admit that the date actually celebrates the equivalent of Kristallnacht for first peoples.

Horse 2968 - A 4% Swing Is The Magic Number

Unless the Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) thinks that he is in for electoral wipeout, then I do not think that the House Of Representatives election will be decoupled from the Senate election. As the next term for the Senate begins on July 1, then a half-Senate election must be held on or before 21st of May, according to the rules of the Constitution (1900) and the Electoral Act (1918). 

I personally think that the most likely dates for the House and half-Senate election will be 7th, 14th and 21st May because I think that the Morrison Government would prefer to call a March Budget and then a May election, rather than call a March election and then leave the Budget open to the Labor Party.

By leaving it later, the Morrison Government has ample opportunity to try and change the opinion of the general public just enough, to retain government. By the same token, if the Labor Party wants to win government for what is likely to be their only term this decade (as Australia slowly drifts to the functionally fascist right), then it will have to convince a larger section of the population that it should be in charge. 

I think that the headline number for a swing to change government (assuming that there is a uniform national swing and allowing for stubborn seats to remain in existing hands) is:

4%

There will be numbers ahead. If you don't like numbers, then abandon this post now. Save yourself!

As we were...

The current Newspoll has:

LN/P - 34.5%

ALP - 37.0%

On a two-party preferred basis that equates to:

LN/P - 48.2%

ALP - 51.7%

If we compare that to the results of the 2019 General Election then what we see is a swing to the ALP of 3.3%.

3.3% is a curious number.

I calculate that for the 8 most likely seats to switch, the swing needed to make the seat change hands is as follows:

Swing - Electorate - Current Member - Year first elected

0.4% - Bass (Tas) - Bridget Arthur - 2019

0.5% - Chisholm (ACT) - Gladys Liu - 2019

1.4% - Boothby (SA) - Nicole Flint - 2016

3.1% - Braddon (Tas) - Gavin Pearce - 2019

3.2% - Reid (NSW) - Fiona Martin - 2019

3.2% - Swan (WA) - Steve Irons - 2007

3.3% - Longman (Qld) - Terry Young - 2019

3.7% - Higgins (Vic) - Katie Allen - 2019

Currently the House of Representatives has the current members (*denotes government):

LN/P - 77*

ALP - 68

Oth - 6

If all of those seats changed hands then the new makeup of the House of Representatives would be:

LN/P - 69

ALP - 76*

Oth - 6

The absolute bare minimum number of seats needed to win government in your own right, is 76. 

Any swing towards the LN/P ensures that they remain in government. If the electorate swings towards the LN/P then almost by definition, the electorate approves of the job that the current government is doing and they remain in office. I am not particularly interested in this scenario because apart from more backbenchers appearing on the government side of the chamber of the House of Representatives, I suspect that practically nothing would change in either the cabinet or the policy mix going forward. Why should it? A swing towards the government is a stamp of approval.

However, a 3.3% swing to the ALP (assuming that the 6 seats on the crossbench are irrelevant), means that the ALP would be stranded on 75 seats and not enough to form government. A 0.5% swing to the ALP, means that the LN/P  would be stranded on 75 seats and not enough to form government. 

A 3.7% swing is enough to hand Higgins to the ALP as the eighth seat and that would put them of 77 seats but even then, unless you end up in a situation where you have a neutral MP standing up to be the Speaker of the House (which isn't very likely because the government wouldn't agree to that), then one of those 77 seats would be Speaker and the ALP would still have a majority on the floor of 1.

So why 4% and not 3.7%?

The reason for this is that at 4%, you can start making reasonable assumptions that there will be 77 seats on the floor. Contained within any swing calculation is some fudge factor; where even though you have a swing towards one party or another, it is still in seats which are already held.

Right at the heart of parliamentary democracy, is the unspoken fact that nowhere in any constitution is there any requirement for there to even be political parties or a Prime Minister. Those things are overlays which are designed to organise political factions and act as brands to sell the ideas to the public. To be perfectly frank, we don't really need political parties and the system would still work perfectly well without them. They do exist though and that has mathematical consequences.

I do not know to what degree the political parties in Australia enjoy rusted on voting blocs of voters. There are probably large chunks on both sides who will continue to vote for their preferred political football team beyond the point of rampant corruption and incompetence. We really need not bother about them.

4% of the electorate swinging one way or the other, already tells you that the remaining 96% of the electorate is already spoken for and that is is split 48-48. As it currently stands, that 96% of the electorate accounts for 138 seats in parliament.

4% of the electorate is enough to swing 8 seats and with it, government; which when you think about it, makes sense if both side are both nominally supported by about half the country. 4% changes 48-52 into 52-48, which is enough to satisfy a parliamentary majority.

Horse 2967 - Multi-Layered Haircare

A client of ours came in last week with a rather sad story. She spoke of how one of her friends had met with her to introduce her to "an amazing opportunity to make money"; which involved selling hair care and beauty products online. All she would need to do is go on the Twitface, FaceTik and InstaTok and whatnot, and be a brand ambassador, to extol the virtues of the product. Seeing as everyone has access to a camera and a social media platform these days, this meant that all she had to do was go out and find the potential customers. 

I shan't name the brand (because we have lodged a formal complaint with Scamwatch) but there is no way that this is not a multi-level-marketing scheme; which is the fancy way of saying a pyramid scheme. I thought that these things had died out long ago but it seems that the internet's ability to find an unlimited number of marks, gives licence to an unlimited number of hucksters, to pull an infinite amount of confidence tricks. 

To start the seed project and begin her business, she first needed to buy some of the stock (for more than $400) and she was told that for every ten people that she could recruit to sign up, she would be entitled to a higher rank within the system as well as 5% of all the sales than everyone downline sold. This proved to be a very very difficult first step. Not only would she have to try to endanger he friendships by enticing them to sign up for a commercial relationship which would then put her into competition with her but if we assumed that her potential recruits were people she only had an acquaintance with, then making those connections would be in principle, harder.

Once you understand the maths behind this kind of multi-level-marketing scheme, it becomes pretty obvious that they are nothing more than a set up to extract money out of well-meaning but gullible people. Let's assume for a second that you have decided to sign up for this scheme. Let's also assume that everyone down the chain is able to recruit 6 people.

1 - 1 (you)

2 - 6 

3 - 36

4 - 216

5 - 1296

6 - 46,656

7 - 279,936

8 - 1,679,616

9 - 10 077 696

10 - 60,466,176

11 - 362,797,056

12 - 2,176,782,336

13 - 13,060,694,016

This illustrates perfectly why this kind of scheme is doomed to fail from the beginning. Even if it was perfectly efficient, by the time you hit the 7th level, you already have more "private businesses" selling a product which is competing against all of the other sellers of that same product, than any market can logically absorb. If we assume this was your job and you are getting receipts from 5% of everyone downline from you, then not only do you have to believe in the system that would ensure transparency of payments but you would be at the top of a system employing as many people as entire industries. 

13 levels down, and you've got literally everyone on the planet selling hair care and beauty products. I imagine that these kind of numbers only exist in the realm of science fiction, where you have entire planets who have specialised in producing only one thing. Beware of such planets. They are very close to being on the verge of a grey goo situation or perhaps if the computers are sentient, a Universal Paperclips type arrangement.

Not only are we looking at a system which requires the input of more people to an industry than is sensible (in this case hair care and beauty products) but it assumes that the company at the top is so profitable that it can to afford such a leaky payments scheme. I put it to you that if the product was that good, then the company would just sell it themselves through supermarkets. There are reasons why brands like Cussons, Palmolive, Redken, TRESemmé etc. occupy yards of space in supermarket. Clearly the thing actually being sold in these schemes, isn't the hair care and beauty products but the gullibility of the marks downline. 

Meanwhile, there is no guarantee that the people upline are trustworthy. The opening premise of economics is that people are selfish and I think that it's pretty easy to prove that where there is the chance to spin a profit out of trusting people, then the chances of finding a huckster who will relieve them of the burden of their money is great. There is much wisdom in the proverb that a fool and their money are soon parted.

I imagine that there is an initial adrenaline rush which people get once they have made their first sale and this is enough to sugar coat their expectations. All the while, the person at the top of this small chain has already taken the train to West Woop Woop where presumably they will never be seen again (if in fact their identity was real in the first place). Of course once someone has a batch of stock, then there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy which exists; where people place an obligation upon themselves to get rid of their stock because unless you are a weird old person like my Great Uncle George who had an entire hall cabinet stacked from floor to ceiling with toilet paper, then you don't want hundreds of dollars of hair care and beauty products in your house.

It took until the time to prepare a BAS Return that this lady realised that she'd been taken for a ride. The person above her kept on asking her to buy more stock and she only really grew wise when she grew a spine and told them that she hadn't cleared the existing stock she had. For three months' work, she had made $272 in sales but stil had 66 bottles of stuff left over. Whatever way you look at it, $272 in three months is hardly enough to live on and instead of recruiting 6 people as in the example above, she had only signed up 3. Instead of 5% of downline receipts, she was entitled to 0% of them. 

Multi-level-marketing/Pyramid Schemes might not actually be illegal in Australian Consumer Law. Owing to the nature of a set of voluntary contracts which are entered into by nominally sound people, then the law is somewhat powerless to do anything about this. Hair care, beauty, and nutrition, are the three broadest arears where these things are likely to occur because the stock can be shipped quite easily, the individual items themselves are small and they all manipulate people's vanity to some degree. The particular company in question (which I refuse to name) dirtied its copybook in the United States with a series of highish level scandals but that hasn't stopped it from eyeing this side of the Pacific Ocean because we have no shortage of marks who are prêt à manger.

I find something utterly insidious about all of this. I really really hate it when companies take advantage of gentle people. The kinds of people who are generally marked by perps are people who are easily convinced and more trusting of people than the rest of us. Multi-level-marketing schemes disproportionally target women because power in society is not equitable. At their worst, this kind of thing eats the houses of widows.

Horse 2966 - Yes But Is It True?

I am one of a cohort of people who spent practically my entire childhood without the existence of the internet but  practically my entire working life with the existence of the internet. This means that I can remember a time when if you wanted to know something, in many cases the only way that you could seek out the facts was to go to a library and look in a book to find them. Society generally held a broad assumption that people who wrote books, had done at least a modicum of research before they went to publication. Similar kinds of standards existed for newspapers and some magazines; which in hindsight was probably a bit naïve.

I remember several key events in my youth which broke my trust of newspapers, when after being in a particular place, they reported things which were blatantly untrue. I knew they were untrue because I'd either been there and the things in question simply did not happen, or in some cases this amount of evidence to back up what the newspaper said was zero. I also remember the very early days of the internet, when a teacher in a Computing class set us the task of writing a paper on what we'd learned using only what we'd found on the internet. Someone in the class who was interested in poultry, wrote an essay on ducks and much to their horror, several of the 'facts' that they'd found on the internet were wrong.

In the quarter of a century which has followed, the internet has only gotten bigger; with real time radio, real time television, and with a massive increase in the amount of stuff that simply isn't true. Who'd have thought that if you added several billion users who didn't have to pass through any kind of fact checking before they went to publication, that the amount of truthiness in the world would decrease? We can all drink from the firehose of stuff, without questioning the validity, logic, sensibility, decency, kindness, or truthiness of any of it.

Newspapers and magazines were already a place where the troubling and the trivial and the banal and the sacred, could parade alongside each other; with no context and no indication of the value of importance. Ironically, television and radio which are linear media, are forced to headline the various types of programming, simply to add context to whatever it is that you are watching or listening to. TV news is almost always sensational, scandal, actual news, political, business and finance, sport, weather, in that order. There has been an increasing tendency for news programs to include advertorial as the tabloidisation of news media is driven by profit; which doesn't exactly help the viewer/listener in evaluating truth.

I would like to think that for a period of maybe a century, society was living in a golden age of increased commitment to the truth but thanks to digitisation of newspapers and magazines online, in place like national archives, I have very much come to the conclusion that this was never ever the case. Truth is and maybe always was an irrelevance to those people who want to sell either goods, services, or a political agenda. 

This distinct lack of commitment to the truth has eroded peoples' trust in government institutions and given sufficiently enough space in the world to a very dangerous and unhinged section of the population for whom truth is not actually a concern. The irony is that when you add several billion users to an information exchange system which doesn't have to pass through any kind of fact checking before publication, the propensity for people to self-organise and then believe things which simply aren't true, is massive. 

I find several parallels to the century past. A fantastic gilded age where power and wealth was incredibly concentrated in the hands of only a few people who acted as if they felt no responsibility to anyone else, collided with a pandemic in which millions of people died. At the time, newspapers were full of half-baked conspiracy theories and scandal sheets actively ran adverts for products containing heroin and morphine before governments decided that regulation of drugs might not be such a bad idea. This pandemic doesn't quite have the same concentration of media in the hands of the few but half-baked conspiracy theories, adverts for drugs, and a crowd of people ready to believe literally anything placed before them without any kind of desire to fact-check what they are being told, looks very similar.

Consider the following:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

"Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good."

"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."

"Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will."

"It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise."

"The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it."

- Joseph Goebbels

You might think it strange that I should quote Joseph Goebbels in a piece talking about truth but there is a strange kind of paradox in the fact that those people who want to sell ideas for political purposes, have a commitment to the truth. Someone who is blatantly lying, actually knows what the truth is and will actually acquiesce to that truth, although not explicitly. What they want is for people to believe something that isn't the truth because that way, they can substitute the truth for whatever it is that they want to promote. The sad truth is that quite often, the biggest liars and the nastiest people have learned and studied the mechanics of how the world works; even Goebbels was aware that in order to sell a lie, you needed to be aware of what the truth was in the first place.

There is however a distinct difference between a liar and someone who merely wants to pump crud into the firehose. The liar in promoting falsehood, has at least some purpose for doing so. The liar wants someone to believe what they want to promote, in order to obtain profit and/or power. A crudpumper has no objective. The "do your own research" crowd who have collectively jumped on a bandwagon of some wingnut theory, do not actually want you to do any research but follow their list of links and entanglements without questioning the validity, logic, sensibility, decency, kindness, or truthiness of any of it.

This is a roundabout way of asking you dear reader, to bother and to care. I fear that those basic questions which people used to ask in an imagined golden past (which almost certainly never existed) are never even being thought about any more; let alone asked.

Is the article in question, true? Can the thing that I have been told be reasonably corroborated from a range of reasonably reliable sources. Can I test this thing myself? Do the maths or the basic chemistry work out? Is this a thing when pulled apart and examined, actually able to stand up to any kind of scrutiny?

Is this thing noble? Exactly what is this thing doing in relation to people's benefit, well-being, or character? Have we seen someone acting selfless, or in the interests of others? 

Are we looking at something reputable? If someone has an opinion, do they disclose the basis for that opinion? Does the rhetoric match up with any kind of action? What is the motivation for publishing this thing? 

How authentic is the source? Are we looking at a work of satire? Have we mistaken a piece of comedy, or political theatre for actual facts? Is this satire or parody? 

Exactly how compelling is the thing? Is the thing believable? Or is it so incredibly outrageous that it is not credible and causes outrage?

How gracious is the piece? Does it want you to consider the fate and plight of the vulnerable, the maligned, the hated and the pitied? Does it look at the past and ask to consider correcting the circumstances and making good on past injury? Does it seek to lift people and to empower the powerless? Or does it merely hope to protect private advantage? 

I find that things which are supposed to be affirmative and make people feel better but which ultimately aren't true, are about as insidious that those things which purport to be true but which aren't. A lie which makes the recipient feel good, might very well be more damaging to the world if it makes people with itching ears hear what they want to ear and then act in ways which are damaging to themselves and others. 

Facebook in particular is replete with things that are not much more than banal platitudes. Platitudes are often vague and cute sentiments, which have as much actual meaning in the long run as a greeting card. While these may look nice on decorative paper, they don’t offer much help or compassion during conversation. They tend not to lead to meaningful action. I don't particularly like the one quote post or question, which is only designed to extract likes or short answers because those things become the salve and antidote to thinking. If all a thing is supposed to do illicit a like, or an "aww", a "cute", then after everyone has seen it, it is thrown away. Platitudes with vague and cute sentiments, are worse than greeting cards because a greeting card might contain thoughts which are precious and become treasured and that's highly unlikely with a Facebook platitude.

Again, we come back to that most basic of principles which may have existed when I were a wee lad. That is that things should be tested to see if they are true. Sources should be tested to see if they have a genuine commitment to the truth. Some things are a matter of opinion and truth might some times be relative but there are absolutes in the world and some truth is never relative.

Please do basic diligence and check to see if the thing that you've shared or said is true. Don't just post stuff which you never even bothered to read or check for yourself.

Horse 2965 - Gilligan's Island Called "The Rising Sun"

There are some things that once you know about them, they shipwreck your brain so badly that you remain stuck upon the reef of insanity and bad taste forever. One of these things is the fact that many songs share common meters and as such, the lyrics and music are all interchangeable.

One such set of meters where the lyrics and music are all interchangeable is what's known as the "Ballad Meter". For those who like to analyse meter and poetic rhythm, Ballad Meter is made up of alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. 

An iamb (or iambus) is a metrical foot used in poetry which consists of a short syllable followed by a long syllable. Or to put this in simple terms it is a "ba-baaaah". Alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter means that you get alternating lines of eight and six syllables, or 8.6.8.6

If this sounds complicated, then ignore the technical explanation and just jump straight on in. Ballad Meter is unbelievably common and dare I say it, rudely intrusive. Once you hear it, you can not unhear it. It is used in all kinds of hymns, classic songs, sea shanties, and even poetry. 

Perhaps the most famous example of this is the singing of the lyrics of the hymn "Amazing Grace" (1772) by Anglican clergyman John Newton to the tune of the "House Of The Rising Sun" (#6393 - Roud Folk Song Index) and as arranged by Alan Price for the English band The Animals in 1964. Both the words and the tuns have long passed into the public domain and so, you are free to record and flog your own version of this for profit.

However, perhaps the funnest version of Ballad Meter is the theme song to the 1964-67 TV series "Gilligan's Island" by Sherwood Schwartz and George Wyle. It's best that you don't hear the words being sung to this, so that way you can take any of the following pieces of songs and poetry and jam it into the Gilligan's Island theme song yourself... or any of the other songs that fit into each other's music. I am hardly the first to have noticed this before and in fact there are probably lists on the internet with more of these things. Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of thing is the game "One Song To The Tune Of Another" on BBC Radio 4's "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue"; which explodes the idea further by taking words and tunes that have no way of fitting into each other; this is done for comic effect.

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, A tale of a fateful trip,

That started from this tropic port

Aboard this tiny ship.

Aboard this tiny ship.

Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free.

We've golden soil and wealth for toil.

Our home is girt by sea.

Our home is girt by sea.

Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found;

Was blind but now I see.

Was blind but now I see.

There is a house in New Orleans they call "The Rising Sun".

It's been the ruin of many a poor boy.

And God I know I'm one.

And God I know I'm one.

Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep,

The silent stars go by.

The silent stars go by.

There's a yellow rose in Texas that I am gonna see.

Nobody else could miss her,

Not half as much as me,

Not half as much as me.

While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground.

An angel of the Lord came down,

And glory shone around.

And glory shone around.

I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony.

I'd like to hold it in my arms,

And keep it company,

And keep it company.

I'd like to be somebody else and not know where I've been.

I'd like to build myself a house,

Out of plasticine.

Out of plasticine.

I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, I go to the lavatory.

On Wednesdays I go shopping and

Have buttered scones for tea,

Have buttered scones for tea.

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.

For purple mountain majesties,

Above the fruited plain.

Above the fruited plain.

There is a green hill far away, without a city wall,

Where the dear Lord was crucified,

Who died to save us all.

Who died to save us all.

From Aztec Shore to Arctic Zone, To Europe and Far East,

The Flag is carried by our ships,

In times of war and peace,

In times of war and peace.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved

How precious did that grace appear,

The hour I first believed,

The hour I first believed.

I'm gonna be a mighty king, so enemies beware.

Well I've never seen a king of beasts,

With quite so little hair,

With quite so little hair.

Because I was afraid to speak, when I was just a lad.

Me father gave me nose a tweak,

And told me I was bad.

And told me I was bad.

While other nations of the globe, behold us from afar,

We'll rise to high renown and shine,

Our glorious southern star;

Our glorious southern star.

Mister Sifter sold me songs, when I was just sixteen

And now he stops at traffic lights

But only when they're green,

But only when they're green.

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.

The Carriage held but just Ourselves,

And Immortality.

And Immortality.

Of course, you could have used any of the other songs that use this meter but a song like "Amazing Grace" or "The House Of The Rising Sun" is bound to be more serious. The Gilligan's Island theme song is far more jaunty than most other songs that use Ballad Meter and as such, is one of the better options to use as the tune.

The other thing of note is that the Gilligan's Island theme song repeats the last line, which isn't necessary for Ballad Meter but it is fun. It is useful if you are in a group of people and you are throwing around turns to decide who gets the next verse of a song because it gives you just enough thinking time to be able come up with something on the fly.

Horse 2964 - Wordle: Thing About Cakes

Just like Pet Rocks, Tamagotchis, Candy Crush, and 2048, Wordle has become a craze which will rise and fall and will be over within six months and then leave a hard core of fans.

What is Wordle? Wordle is a word game about words where you must guess a series of words before you get to the Worldle word and win Wordle. Some people have likened it to the board game Mastermind or perhaps the very old TV game show Password but unlike those things, Wordle is more of a chance to show off how quickly that you solved it by sharing it on Twitbook, Facegram and Instatok.

Young people think that this game is hip and edgy; old people think that it makes them look smart and refined. I think that its a relatively simple exercise in logic; which can always be solved in four moves because the English language follows unwritten rules which also affect how consonants and vowels interact with each other.

The basic premise of the game is that you get six attempts to guess a five letter word. The game then informs you if you have any of the letters right and whether or not you have any letters in the right spot. From here, it is just a matter of using the information that you have been given to arrive at the answer. 

I have it on good authority that the average number of attempts to get any given words right, is 4.83. This is actually sort of skewed as the game never counts anything beyond six attempts. This means that the majority of the time, people are getting the correct answer on either the second last or last try. Naturally when I saw this game, I wanted to invent a strategy to beat everyone and so I decided that the first three moves of Wordle should always be:

THING

ABOUT 

CAKES

The reason for this is that these three words contain all of the vowels. Rather, these three words contain all of the glyphs that we commonly call vowels. There aren't many words that do not contain the vowel glyphs and those that do, like "rhythm" or "gym", contain 'y' which takes the place of a short 'i' sound which is still a vowel. 

If you ignore the meat and bones that make up humans, and also ignore the cushion shaped bag of thought meat in someone's skull, then the other interesting things about humans are the system of bellows, reeds, and valvework which humans use to make useful communicative sounds.

There are about 15 actual vowels employed by the English language but by accident of space and time and history, English chooses to employ five and half glyphs to represent the vowels. Vowels are basically the result of air being bellowed through the reeds and then through the valvework, which then changes the tonal quality and timbre of them.

Consonants on the other hand are what happens when that bellowed air hits the valve work and is interrupted in different ways. There are plosive, dental, fricative etc. consonants and even then, English glyphs are inadequate to describe the diphthongs such as 'ng', 'th' 'ch' etc. 

All of this taken together means that all words much contain vowels; so getting them out of the way in a hurry is the quickest way to sort through all of the dross. 

When it comes to the consonants, the English language likes using: t, r, s, d, l, n and g the most. Alfred Mosher Butts who invented the board game Scrabble (no, I did not make that up), allegedly went through a a bunch of newspaper including the New York Times and counted the incidence of all the letters used and then assigned distributions and point values based on the relative frequency of all the letters. I suspect that S is deliberately underrepresented in Scrabble because that makes the game more fun.

These three words contain all of the vowels as well as most of the common consonants; which means that with these three sieves, you should be able to shake out what is and is not hidden in the game. Truth be told, 'THING ABOUT CAKES' probably isn't the most efficient method of eliminating the common letters but it isn't bad. 'THING ABOUT DARES' is more efficient but less fun. Why shouldn't every word game be about cakes? I will go so far as to say that if this thing was printed in the newspaper, it would be played by lots of people with a cup of tea/coffee as well as a bikkie or piece of cake.

That's just the beginning of it. There are some combinations of letters such as the diphthongs which always appear in concert. 'nd' will appear at the ends of words but almost never at the beginning and 'e' has a fun power which makes it the second last letter in many words because it appears in terminal suffixes like 'er', 'ed', 'es'. There is also a weak tendency for the vowels to appear in alphabetical order as you progress down a word. You need to analyse a sample size of words of at least 100,000 words before this becomes apparent.

By applying a little bit of logic to this game, of the now 50 games that I have played, I have solved 50; with 47 being on attempt 4, 2 on attempt 5 and 1 on attempt 6. This give me an average of 4.08 as opposed to 4.83. That's roughly 15% better than what I suspect are people's undefined strategies.

However, this leads me to an hypothesis. I suspect that people have already subconsciously absorbed a whole bunch of rules to do with how consonants and vowels interact with each other. We as collections of meat and bones with bellows and valve work, have to make sense of the world and that includes the language that we speak. Wordle itself is a game which exists within the Anglophone world and would probably be nigh on impossible in a symbolic character language like Chinese or the syllabaries of Korea and Japan. It might work in Urdu or Arabic scripts and it might work with Cyrillic scripts but that is not for me to say.

Probably the hard core Scrabble players and the players of TV games like Countdown (aka Letters and Numbers) should be better at this game than I because they've also gone to the effort of memorising thousands or words; whereas I haven't actively done that. I just have a few strategies which work marginally better than the majority of the population.

Horse 2963 - A 4-0 Series Win Isn't Good Enough For SEN Radio - Or: Why Australia Still Lost

In an effort to take my mind away from the Novac/Cyclone/COVID/Supply chain/Refugee/Price gouging/Deliberate lack of planning/Buying weapons that we don't need/Diplomatic crisis, I thought that I would listen to SEN Radio on my way to being charged more than a thousand dollars to replace an air-conditioner compressor in my car. That was a mistake.

Australia is currently 3-0 up in the 2021/22 Ashes Test Series and would have been 4-0 up if it wasn't for a tenth wicket stand on the final day of the Fourth Test, which left England 9 wickets down and narrowly avoiding defeat. It was the kind of performance from England which would normally be considered dire but given that England started the first day of the First Test with an all out innings of 147, then 270/9 chasing an impossible 388 showed quite a lot of pluck. Australia has already won the series but the carry on from SEN would have you believe that the Australian Test Team is a national embarrassment for failing to win a 5-0 whitewash. They would be right. 3-0 up in the Ashes series and letting the chance for a whitewash slip through their fingers is a national disgrace, and Pat Cummins should hang his head in shame.

The Australian Test Cricket Team demonstrates why perfection is awful. England fans are fine with losing. This is not a situation that we haven't seen before. If you don't expect to win, then anything fun that happens is fun. Usman Khawaja may have made 137 and 101 not out but Jimmy Anderson's 0 not out off six deliveries, was worth far more in context. Expecting to lose means that you're not disappointed when the inevitable happens but if you expect perfection, then anything less than perfection is tyranny.

This is why Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Mercedes fans are such inglorious bores. Having sup'd at the cornucopia of victory, anything less is vile. They will give you chapter and verse about how their team is the bee's knees, the cat's pyjamas, how they are all that and a bag of chips, but as soon as anyone else beats them, they have nothing left to stand upon. The Australian Cricket Test Team after staring at the peak of the mountain, saw it fade away and all the hopes that they had, instantly disappeared.

This is why I thought it really strange that the team at SEN Radio sounded so very sad that England had held on for a draw. I guess that it must be really difficult to accept that there is another team on the pitch who is trying to win, or on this case, not lose. Most of the discussion involved trying to play armchair coach, to solve the problem of the Australian Test Cricket Team, as though they'd committed some heinous crime against the dignity of the nation instead of narrowly taking the fourth test victory in a row. I would have thought that winning the Ashes was something to celebrate; not something to sing a dirge for.

If England had won a test match and Australia were 2-1 up at this stage, dare I day that the commentariat would be happier than they are now. 2-1 up would have meant that England were an opponent against whom it was acceptable to lose against but as it stands, 3-0 up when it could have been 4-0, suggests that Australia lost against themselves and that's now cause for dissecting what went wrong through augury.

In the grand scheme of things, this is the fifth of the last six test series against various nations that England has gone 3-0 down; so this shows that the Australian side really is nothing special. As for England winning the Ashes in Australia, that has only happened 3 times in my lifetime; being 1978/79, 1986/87 and 2010/11. In theory that should mean that England are next due for a test series win on Australian soil is 2036/37.

Australia lurches awfully from this draw with Marcus Harris having only scored an average of 29.83 this summer, being replaced at the top end of the order by Khawaja who has a hopeless test average of 96.80. Quite frankly, anyone who only almost goes out and scores a century every time they go out to bat, just doesn't cut it in the eyes of SEN Radio who demand that Australian batsmen go out and score an Octoton, with Australia declaring at more than 1000/6 on Day Two. Meanwhile, England are likely to make six changed to their batting lineup, as their squad looks increasingly like the triage tent in the Crimean War.

There's the distinct possibility that Joe Root could very well be the top scorer of the series. Okay, the fact that we will have been the only batter to have gone out into the centre on ten occasions in the series might very well be the reason for this but in a world where you've let perfection slip through your fingers like a dropped catch that dribbles harmlessly to Deep Gully but Even if Australia absolutely pounds England into the dust, they'll still only win the series 4-0 and that's just not the 5-0 whitewash that could've been. 

Horse 2962 - Case Numbers Won't Go Up If We Don't Do Any Tests

https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-nsw-updates-new-case-numbers-health-minister-brad-hazzard-explains-why-expected-case-surge-is-actually-a-good-thing/88337871-fabf-40d4-8916-599005ab3975

People who fail to register a positive rapid antigen test result on the Service NSW app will be fined $1000, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has said.

It comes as New South Wales has again hit a new deadliest day of the pandemic, with 21 deaths and 34,759 new cases of coronavirus overnight.

Mr Perrottet said anybody who had tested positive with a RAT since January 1 needed to log their result.

- 9 News Sydney, 12th Jan 2011

Forgive me if I have failed to understand the implications of the news.

The NSW State Government, in an attempt to open up the state for business, embarked upon a 'let it rip' strategy which everyone including Blind Freddy could have seen would result in high amounts of transmission and infection from a highly transmissible and infectious disease. 

The Morrison Government in refusing to 'undercut' business, decided to let private enterprise price gouge the public and gave a heads up to businesses like Chemist Warehouse and Harvey Norman to stock up on Rapid Antigen Tests; knowing full well that private businesses would extract private profits from the public.

At the same time, other states like Queensland and Victoria demanded negative tests from the public before they allowed people to cross the borders into their states. This created massive amounts of demand from people who wanted to go travelling over the Christmas and New Years' period, thus leading to a more than tenfold increase in the number of PCR tests that needed to be done and a complete pillaging of Rapid Antigen Tests by the public; to the point where they are unavailable a lot of the time.

Premier Perrottet has now issued the directive that he intends to fine people $1000 for failing to register a positive Rapid Antigen Test result with NSW Health.

Exactly how does Mr Perrottet plan to find out who to find out who has tested positive with a Rapid Antigen Test? Surely the easiest way not to test positive is to simple not do a test. Assuming that one did test positive, you can report this fact to NSW Health and not get a $1000 fine. Assuming that one did test positive, exactly how does NSW Health to find out? Does NSW Health intend to rat through peoples' bins to find RATs?

Compare fining people for failing to report positive Rapid Antigen Tests with previous phases in the Covid-19 pandemic.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/27/western-sydney-disproportionately-fined-for-covid-lockdown-breaches

Police disproportionately fined residents of western Sydney for Covid-19 breaches during the most recent outbreak, new data shows, despite surveys suggesting its residents were among the most compliant in the state.

The state’s premier crime statistics agency has warned the high volume of fines issued to residents in Sydney’s areas of concern will pose a “significant burden for some sections of the community who are already vulnerable” and urged the government to monitor the longer-term impact of the police response.

...

Most of the breaches were dealt with by a fine, typically of $1,000, and usually involved unnecessary movement outside of a local government area (LGA) and visits to other households.

People in LGAs of concern, younger men, and those with recent involvement with police were most likely to be targeted. Roughly half the breaches – about 18,200 – involved a person who police had charged with another offence in the preceding five years.

About 13,292, or more than one-third of all breaches, occurred in the LGAs of concern.

- The Guardian, 27th Oct 2021

Perhaps you could make the argument that in that previous phase, it was about making sure that people who didn't  have any protection against Covid-19 remained safe by enacting punitive measures against poorer people. Now that we've reached a sufficiently large enough proportion of the population who have been vaccinated, the risk to incurring public health expenses has in theory gone down.

This looks like an exercise in using a business model to fight a public health issue. In phase one: lock people down and then fine them for non-compliance. In phase two: unleash the virus into a vaccinated population and then fine people who get the virus? Not quite.

The intended consequences of the current policy are to stop people from using Rapid Antigen Testing, thereby making New South Wales' Covid-19 figures look bad. Even if the law is passed and the NSW Police Force could instantly hire another 100,000 officers, there would still need to be a change in the law to allow police to access private health records. That isn't going to happen.

Speaking as an amateur economist, if I were asked the best way of achieving minimal reporting of Covid-19 cases I would recommend: 

1. making testing scarce and expensive

2. fining those who test positive for not reporting to the government  

Does this look familiar?

The Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government (that in itself should tell you that we're not being run by a government committed to the art of public service) Victor Dominello told 2GB Radio yesterday that as at 4pm, 53,909 people have uploaded the results of a positive Rapid Antigen Test to Service NSW. Those figures are terrible. It would have been much better had they not reported. The only reason that these people are reporting a case is because they fear a $1000 fine for failing to report. From the government's perspective, that $53m in fines that could have been collected.

This policy is not about public health at all. The intended purpose of this policy is to reduce the number of reported cases. It is as simple and evil as that.

Horse 2961 - Fighting COVID-19 With Battle Tanks

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-commits-to-3-5-billion-tank-purchase-from-the-us-20220109-p59mub.html

Australia has locked in its purchase of more than 120 tanks and other armoured vehicles from the United States, at a cost of $3.5 billion, as part of a major upgrade of the army’s fleet.

The commitment to buy 75 M1A2 main battle tanks indicates the government is committed to an advanced fleet of armoured vehicles despite the focus in recent years being on other major acquisitions such as submarines, jet fighters and long-range missiles amid the rise of China.

- Sydney Morning Herald, 10th Jan 2022

What a top idea.

This not only further represents the Australian Government's commitment to Australian workers but also represents the Morrison Government's kowtowing to American business.

Remember, Scott Morrison said that he won't 'undercut' businesses by funding free rapid antigen COVID-19 tests. At a wholesale cost of $2.75 and five Rapid Antigen Tests per person, that's just $343m to supply every single man, woman, and child in the country. $343m is unaffordable but an amount of money which is just 10 times more than that, at $3,500m is affordable.

"The government can not keep spending on COVID-19 as it has done over the last two years. We've invested hundreds of billions of dollars getting Australia through this crisis. We're now at a stage of the pandemic where you can't just make everything free, because when someone tells you they want to make something free, someone's always going to pay for it and it will be you."

- Scott Morrison, 3rd January, 2022

The Australian Government has run the numbers and decided that the health of the nation is collectively worth less than a tenth of a percent of what it costs to kill people overseas.

Furthermore, after having successfully destroyed the Australian passenger motor industry which means that the automakers which no longer exist can not build this kind of automotive hardware, rather than award the contract to someone like Volgren who manufactures buses in Dandenong, or Kenworth Trucks Australia who manufactures trucks in Kilsyth, or even Thales Australia who manufactures the Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle, the Morrison Govrnment decided to give Australian workers a giant two-finger salute and collectively told them to go to hell, along with the rest of us.

With regards not buying tanks from Thales Australia, Thales Australia is what used to be known as Australian Defence Industries and used to be an Australian Government owned company. It was progressively sold off by the Howard Government from 2006 onwards. The parent company Thales Group is a CAC 40 Component and given that the Australian Government decided to give a giant two-finger salute to the French Government and buy American submarines which we don't need instead of French submarines which we don't need, then buying tanks which we don't need seems like a natural fit.

I love the fact that the Morrison Government is so openly knavish. Since Australia consistently decides that it will allow sports people to lie about their circumstances to pass through immigration but leave refugees and asylum seekers languishing in detention centres for almost a decade (some as a result of the wars that we choose to fight on behalf of the United States - we have no foreign policy whatsoever), then at least we're not deluding ourselves that we're a nation of cruel cruel bastards who pay to kill people rather than try to do good in the world.

A chap much wiser than me once said that "Whereever your treasure is, there your heart will be also." and Australia proves that it would rather spend public coin propping up private business, and foreign private business at that, than it would in spending that same public coin on public services. Our treasure lies less with paying our own citizens to do work (which also by the way might have included building weapons of war) but throwing our treasure at the feet of private oligarchs who conduct business within our democratic state. Those people aren't answerable to us an act as if they have no responsibility to the nation.

We are not the clever country. We do not offer free tertiary education and so we can never aspire to be that. We aren't a kind nation. We aren't even a good nation. We didn't take any preventative measures or even measures of mitigation before we embarked upon a "Let It Rip" strategy. Instead, the Morrison Government (and the newly installed Perrottet Government (which looks suspiciously identical to the Berejiklian Government)), just decided that the best strategy was not to have a strategy and to let any future crises fall as they may. All of the current problems such as staff shortages because people are infected and sick, leading to distribution issues and empty shelves in supermarkets were of course entirely predictable by anyone who had more than an ounce of common sense. The question was never if a variant like Omicron would arrive but when.

Opening up the market for Rapid Antigen Tests was always going to lead to price gouging because that's what business does. Business looks at ways of finding profits. Opening up isolation rules and abandoning tracking regulations, was pure economic theatre put on for the benefit of private business.

Still, having seen what looks like another problem unfolding, the Morrison Government rather than reacting to the problem with an appropriate response, had decided that the way you save money is by spending ten times more and the way that you prevent a public health crisis is with battle tanks.

We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.

...

We have no butter but I ask you: would you rather have butter or guns? Shall we import lard or steel? Let me tell you: preparedness makes us powerful: butter merely makes us fat.

- Hermann Göring

Horse 2960 - Senator McGrath Would Privatise The ABC And Leave Voters In The Dark

If anything became painfully obvious over 2021, it is that living in Western Sydney is like living in a regional centre. The physical newspapers ceased their physical print runs in 2019 and while the big media companies pretend to keep the mastheads alive online, those mastheads are hidden behind paywalls and the actual news stories which pretend to sit exclusively behind them, do not. 

It used to be that the local newspapers, in return for publishing an unruly amount of real estate adverts (because that's all that the Australian economy appears to have been reduced to these days), would send out reporters to small sports days, people pointing at minor complaints in the community, and to council meetings. None of those things happen any more. Whatever news about the local area that we get, has to come from outside; which means that in effect, Blacktown is not a lot different to Bega and Mt Druitt is not a lot different to Mt Isa. 

That meant that during the council elections late last year, I bet that only a very minor percentage of voters did any kind of due diligence at all and bothered to find out who any of the candidates were; much less look into their backgrounds. When it comes to state and federal politics, people might have an idea of who the Prime Minister, Treasurer, Premier and State Health Minister are, but beyond that they won't have much of an idea. As it stands though, people made decisions about who was going to be responsible for local government; more than likely without a clue who they were voting for. In a media environment where you have no idea who anybody is, how are you supposed to make informed choices about democracy?

In Sydney, there is a semi-famed imaginary line called the "Red Rooster Line"; which is defined by the existence of a Red Rooster restaurant in an area. To the left of the line is where all of the Red Roosters are and to the right, is where all of the Charcoal Charlie's are. I have no idea if the two chains are owned by the same group or not but it is telling that they do not encroach upon each other's patch. 

I bet that if you were to take a survey of where all of the journalists in Sydney lived, then I would be surprised if any of them lived to the west of the Red Rooster line. Furthermore, I doubt whether any of the journalists have been west of the Red Rooster line for reasons other than reporting on sport, accident, or crime. 

Imagine then, my abject horror when on the evening of the 23rd of Nov, Senator McGrath of Queensland said in the Senate:

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansards/25183/&sid=0248

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation needs to be reformed to be saved from itself. The ABC is a $1.1 billion organisation funded by the taxpayer, yet the ABC, along the track, has wandered off course, leaving us in the unfortunate position we are in now, wondering what we should do with the ABC. We saw that today in the Senate where Labor and the Greens combined to stop an inquiry into something as innocent as the complaints process within the ABC. What we're seeing is a grotesque, left-wing, back-scratching orgy of flatulent arrogance from the ABC and those on the Left. This ABC who sneers at us is led by an arrogant chair who sees the ABC as a country apart from Australia. And that is quite sad.

The inevitable result of decades of free rein, of grossly excessive budgets and diminished accountability is that we've ended up with an inner-city hive of woke workers, hiring woke friends to do their woke work in their quest to wokify the world. But in conjunction with the first-night crowd, the chair of the ABC and her fellow first-nighters are at the opera, chinking their champagne glasses, sneering at middle Australia and at those who believe in a pluralistic, diverse media market. It is time for there to be reform of the ABC. It is time for the recruitment process to be opened up. It is time for their inner-city headquarters to be sold and for their staff to be shifted to regional Australia. It is time for there to be a proper review of the charter of the ABC.

But it needs to go beyond that. I have written to the minister for communications calling for an inquiry into the future of public broadcasting in this country. We have the ABC model, which is essentially an old wireless trundling along, yet we have a pluralistic, diverse media market. And the ABC, this taxpayer funded monolith, is not fit for purpose in the 21st century. So we need an inquiry into the future of public broadcasting in Australia. We need to determine whether there is a need to fund triple J and all these different TV and radio stations. I will say, as someone who lives and spends a lot of their time in regional Queensland, there is a place for a taxpayer funded broadcaster in regional Queensland and regional Australia because there is not a diverse media market there. But in terms of the rest of our country, it is time for a royal commission into the future of public broadcasting in this country. It is time that we stood up for the taxpayers of this country who are not getting value for money, and it is time that the board of the ABC—that most arrogant organisation—realise they are losing middle Australia because we have choice. There is so much diversity in our media market and it would be sad if the ABC were to fail and fall over. I want the ABC to be saved. I want it to be reformed so it can be saved from itself.

- Senator McGrath, Senate, 23rd Nov 2021

The one thing that Senator McGrath is correct about is that the ABC is somewhat city centric. However, his suggestion that the ABC sells its studios in the cities, is monumentally stupid and deliberately so.

The ABC, as indeed media generally in Australia, is generally based towards the centre of major cities and that's because that's where the majority of news happens. All of the parliaments in Australia are in the capital cities, most of the major sporting venues are within the capital cities, all of the stock/business exchanges are in the capital cities, and the transport networks which ferry people forth and back are primarily designed to connect the capital cities. Now had Senator McGrath spoken of plans to decentralise government generally, then maybe there might be some merit in his proposition but as he is nothing more than a slimy ideological parasite with no plans beyond destroying public assets, then his suggestion needs to be firmly thrown into a wastepaper basket and set on fire.

There is more than a hint of irony that in calling for the privatisation of the ABC and SBS, the shutting down of Triple J and the abandonment of ABC News Radio, that I heard his malevolent bleating on ABC News Radio (630AM in Sydney). It has been comprehensively proven that private media organisations simply will not cover news if they do not see any profit in doing so. This is the reason why the entirety of what once was both the Fairfax and News Corp local newspaper networks, is now exactly nil. News Corporation even had $30m of public monies thrown at them to improve local news collection; they promptly retrenched virtually the entire workforce of what was 121 local news papers and now there are none.

I fail to see in what realm Senator McGrath thinks that privatising the ABC is going to lead to either an expansion of local news services, or increased training of media staff, or the apprenticeship of new media staff, or more local content, when thus far all private media companies have demonstrated that they refuse to any of those things. Private media groups are essentially parasitic when it comes to the skills base of the media industry.

Having said that, there is one grain of truth which is wrapped in this many layered pass-the-parcel of lies. In addition to the fact that no major news organisation apart from the ABC really bothers to gather, collect, report, and analyse the news outside of the capital cities, they also don't really employ anyone from outside of the richer areas of those capital cities either. I bet that if you were to do a survey of every presenter and column writer across tv (both FTA and Pay), radio, and print media, in my fair city of Sydney, that less than 5% of them would live west of the Red Rooster Line. That also goes for News Corp, for whom Senator McGrath has gone in to bat for.

During the height of the pandemic lockdowns in Sydney in mid-2021, although media companies might send camera crews into the west to take reconnaissance footage, they would retreat back to the east. Now that the most visible threat of the pandemic has past, the media can get back to quietly ignoring us except if there's something on fire, someone has been murdered, or there is a sporting event. There are no other narratives which exist out here according to the media. 

I think that it takes a certain kind of malevolent denial to imagine that closing the ABC and SBS is going to lead to any kind of expanded regional reach of the media. Senator McGrath of Queensland lives, in Queensland. I know that sounds obvious to you and me and even Blind Freddy knows that, but Senator McGrath of Queensland doesn't appear to know that he lives in Queensland. Queensland is basically a three newspaper state; with only one daily newspaper in Brisbane (the Courier-Mail) and has even less editorial independence than where I live in Sydney. The Courier-Mail carries stories from newsdesks in Sydney and Melbourne and only really makes a concession to the fact that it is in Queensland. 4BC buys in national radio feeds from 2GB in Sydney on a regular basis.

The ABC on the other hand has a network of local radio stations which is the biggest in the world. Most nations are too physically small to warrant the need to set of local offices and so that only means that the United States, Russia and China are large enough to even need this kind of state infrastructure. 

NPR (National Public Radio) in the United States is not really a network but a lot of semi-affiliated stations that buy in NPR programming from each other, but mostly from Washington, Chicago and Boston of all places. From what I can determine of Russian radio, there is one national broadcaster and everyone else is left to fend for themselves. China as far as I know has a few provincial state-run radio stations but nothing as vast as ABC Local Radio.

Senator McGrath I assume would have the ABC Local Stations broken up and sold off but if Fairfax and News Corp have proven with their mostly ex-newspaper networks, there simply wouldn't be a buyer who could be bothered to but them. I can say categorically that no private company would dare but the ABC as a working concern for the simple reason that the amount of capital needed to buy all of it is massive and unless you are someone like Amazon, Wal-Mart, or Apple, you do not have that kind of capital. Even if you did, the existing players in the TV and radio market would be horrified to have someone with that much capital and presumed power, simply entering their space. Seven West, Nine Ent Co, Ten, Nova Radio, and even News Corp itself would defend the space that they've eked out for themselves because while they pay lip service to the idea of competition, they're really really anti-competitive.

Furthermore, I do not see by what mechanism that the proceedings in parliament would be reported upon or analysed without the ABC being the front line broadcaster. There is no profit in broadcasting parliament and while it can be said that that could be streamed out of the parliament's own websites, Senator McGrath's own demonstration of voting against any kind of Federal ICAC indicates to me that he would prefer that those proceedings simply never be reported at all.

More generally I have the question of who exactly has paid off Senator McGrath. If nobody, then this idea to privatise the ABC and SBS has come out of his own head and therefore I have to consider him to be an economic terrorist who intends to destroy the assets of the Commonwealth. If he is being paid off by someone else, then we have malevolent actors who also mean to destroy the assets of the Commonwealth and as their agent, I think that should render him disqualified to hold the office of Senator under the vagrancies of Section 44 of the Constitution.

Horse 2959 - Magna Carta In 2021: There's Not Much There

As I am an amateur essayist and not a professional legal person, you would think that that would make me unqualified to write about questions of law. The truth is that anyone with half a brain, half an hour, half a cup of coffee, and a lot of patience, can actually write quite a lot about the law. All it requires is for you to read the law with some amount of understanding and then a degree of sense to see how it fits in with other law. 

The idea that you need a law degree in order to practice law, exists because barristers and solicitors found it convenient and more profitable to close the shop. They can also practice discrimination about who is allowed to practice law on the sly.

In fact, the first Justice to be appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court of the United state who even attended an actual law school was Levi Woodbury, appointed to the Court in 1846. This soon became the norm and James F. Byrnes and Stanley Forman Reed, were the last two Justices not to have gone to law school with their tenure ending in 1942 and 1957 respectively.

One used to "read the law" and if anything, I have been taught under the tutelage of the courts themselves because I am not completely naive when it comes to the law. I have been in and around various courts and tribunals for the better part of two decades, in various capacities as either a court recorder, or legal gopher for a member of a tribunal and so I have seen a lot. One of the jobs that you get to do as a court recorder, subject to what can at times feel like peonage and umbrage, is to sit in the District Court of New South Wales, listening to various callovers and petty matters before the court.

I have listened to lots of cases where loons have decided to represent themselves in court and challenge a full house of charges including assault occasioning bodily harm, assault of police officers, illicit drug use, but mostly break, enter and steal.

I reckon that I must have first heard someone try to use the astoundingly buckwild appeal to Magna Carta that someone was claiming to be unlawfully arrested under the common law, around about 2001. The current "sovereign citizen" movement is a new phase of buckwild shenaniganry which is just the latest round of repackaging on ancient lunacy.

There have probably been appeals made in courts to Magna Carta ever since the barons decided to acost King John in the field at Runnymede, down the road from Windsor, on that summer's day in the Ides of June 1215. The great myth that Magna Carta must be some holy document instead of a list of demands by self-interested thugs to another self-interested thug, took off during the period of the puritans, through the Commonwealth and the period of the republic and through the Glorious Revolution; each time people reimagined it to be something magical and wonderful, instead of a thing which took 82 years to enact; in the reign of Edward I.

Jump forward another 807 years and very little remains operative. Although Magna Carta formed part of the corpus juris adopted in Australian Law under various reception statutes, very little of it is even relevant. My general working theory is that most people who want to invoke Magna Carta as part of some wingnut claim as to why the laws of the land don't apply to them, have never read the document, don't understand what any of it means, and have no idea of what is still on the books and whether or not those sections are relevant.

For the record, there are only 4/5 clauses which are still operative and they are listed below:

https://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/read/magna_carta_1215

Clause 1:

We have first of all granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed, for ourselves and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church is to be free, and to have its full rights and its liberties intact, and we wish this to be observed accordingly, as may appear from our having of our true and unconstrained volition, before discord arose between us and our barons, granted, and by our charter confirmed, the freedom of elections which is deemed to be the English Church’s very greatest want, and obtained its confirmation by the lord pope Innocent III; which we will ourselves observe and wish to be observed by our heirs in good faith in perpetuity. And we have also granted to all the free men of our kingdom, for ourselves and our heirs in perpetuity, all the following liberties, for them and their heirs to have and to hold of us and our heirs.

Clause 1 almost seems to suggest that the barons have some say in the election of various ecclesiastical posts within the church as it is landed in England. The weird thing is that the Church of England as a separate and distinct entity away from the Catholic Church didn't happen until Henry VIII made that formal separation in 1534.

I do not know what kind of liberties of the English Church that the chartists were claiming but I do know that the relevance for the modern claimants of the Sovereign Citizen movement here, is exactly nil.

Clause 13:

And the city of London is to have all its ancient liberties and free customs, both on land and water. Moreover we wish and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns and ports are to have all their liberties and free customs.

By way of background, Henry I granted the people of London a Sheriff along with control of the county of Middlesex. This placed Middlesex under the control of the 'commune' of London. This is not quite a charter but it is close. By 1141, both Middlesex and London were considered to constitute a single community and this included the whole body of male citizens over the age of 30 who were landholders or who were free citizens of the City. This at some point between 1141 and 1189 the city was given a charter and the City of London Corporation, gained the right to appoint a Mayor. The right to directly elect the Mayor came in 1215; after Magna Carta.

The ancient liberties and free customs include items such as the aforementioned right to elect the Mayor but also that the City barred the Monarch from entering the city without permission. Evidently the chartists thought that worthy enough to remind the King that this was not to be messed with.

Again, I do not know what relevance that the great wen upon the Thames has to do with someone standing in a court in Australia. Maybe as long as they gaze on Waterloo sunsets, they are in paradise?

Clause 33:

All fish-weirs are in future to be entirely removed from the Thames and the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea-coast.

I have no idea what kind of relevance someone in Australia thinks that this has in this country. I fail to see what the existence of fish weirs in a river, which from about 1550 until 1985 had no fish at all in it because it was so heavily polluted, has to do with a country which is more than 10,000 miles away. 

"What's that got to do with the price of fish?" Quite a lot if you're trying to evade the law by claiming the law doesn't apply to you but a piece of 807 year old legislation does.

Clause 39:

No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.

Clause 40:

To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.

Clause 39 is curious. A "free man" is generally a landowner, who had various rights of passage throughout the kingdom and the right to hold, sell, and buy land. 

Clause 40 is a promise by the chartists, to abandon the practice of selling justice; which is related to the concept of scutage which is found in Clause 12 (repealed). Apparently in addition in scutage which allowed knights to pay their way out of having to do military service, they were also being charged if they wanted justice to fall in their direction. Clause 40 is basically the chartists promising to abandon institutional bribery.

Someone who is brought before a court in Australia is already being proceeded against, through the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land. That would in fact be why they are there in the first place. Also, someone who is being asked to pay a fine is not being sold justice. A fine is money to be paid as punishment for an offence and not the court's charge for the privilege of having justice metered to them.

<><><><><>

Basically, 807 years later, while parts of Magna Carta might technically be on the books, it is not much more than a shiny historical bauble. Since it was sealed, it has been nullified, revised, forgotten, remembered, repealed and now venerated. It certainly should not be relied on in practice by people who have decided to break the law. 

Horse 2958 - Amendment XIV, Section 3: The Useless Amendment

https://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution.htm#amendments

Section 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

- Amendment XIV, Section 3 (1868)

The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution is one of the most litigated and contested parts of the Constitution. Since it's rather riotous passing in 1868, in the reconstruction era, it has become one of the more heralded parts and has become the cornerstone for such cases as  Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Roe v. Wade (1973), Bush v. Gore (2000), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), just to name a famous short list. However, all of these cases centre on the litigation of the first section of Amendment XIV. 

As far as I am aware, Section 3 was only really used in the wake of the Civil War and even then for the most senior officials of the Confederate States of America. The Amnesty Act of 1872 further removed penalties relating to XIV for most people and Congress itself lifted the disqualifications from both Confederate general Robert E. Lee and Confederate president Jefferson Davis in 1975 and 1978 respectively.

The only other time that Amendment XIV appears to have been invoked was to bar Representative from Wisconsin Victor L. Berger from taking a seat in the House, after he had published anti-interventionist views during WW1 and was convicted of violating the Espionage Act. This was later overturned by Berger v. United States (1921) and he would go on to win three terms in the office.

Section 3, being only invoked once in 153 years would have remained a dusty appendix to the Constitution had it not been for the actions of one Donald J Trump. The events of one year ago, suddenly brought it back into the light. On January 12, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, formally asked Congress for their views on Amendment XIV, Section 3. Here is where the story ends.

Was January 6 an "insurrection"? What even is an "insurrection"? Roaming  around the Congress building and threatening to kill the Speaker and hang the Vice-President sounds like an insurrection. The breaking and entering of the building is certainly violent. Was this whole thing something else though?

When Mr Trump stood on the platform and promised to walk up the mall with the protestors, is that "giving aid" or "comfort to the enemies" of the United States? When Mr Trump made his speech saying "We can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you," is that "giving aid" or "comfort to the enemies" of the United States?

Amendment XIV gives no direction about who has the power to interpret, enforce or invoke it. It gives no indication about how to challenge it other than if someone has been barred from office as result of its operation then Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. It is little wonder that apart from preliminary discussions which took place in the House in the fortnight after the January 6 incident, that nothing more was actually decided with regards this Amendment. 

This is a problem which courts and readers of the law, consistently find with the US Constitution. As it is somewhat conservatively written, it almost always refuses to nail anything down. As it refuses to nail anything down, this always leads to labyrinthine machinations to try to resolve anything.

The other problem is that as things like impeachment and appointment of judges are political processes from the outset, the idea of impartial justice and impartiality of the law is practically non-existent. The United States doesn't have the idea of equity at the centre of its court system but rather, it has the idea of the individual making claims at the centre.

Assuming that January 6 2021 was in fact an insurrection, then the people who would have to decide upon the consequences of its operation, would be the very people who were inside the Congress building when it was attacked. Half of those people would vote against Mr Trump in just pure spite; others are beholden to him as the de facto leader of their party, despite him not even being in any public office anymore. Immediately this is a partisan political process which would never even consider things like equity or justice. 

Even if the Congress did manage to pass a simple resolution which barred Mr Trump from running for the office of President again, he'd more than likely use that as a chance to start another media circus and launch another tilt for the White House. I would think that Congress already knows this and that's why they'd rather not do anything. Apathy is the best policy in a system where action causes idiocy.

For this reason, even if January 6 2021 was an insurrection by a riotous mob and even if Mr Trump gave aid and comfort to the mob, either beforehand or after the event, under Amendment XIV, Section 3, it is virtually impossible to make anything stick. Probably it was always meant to be an act for show as barring members from the House of Representatives of 13 states in the Union would have lead to more unrest. The whole reconstruction era was already fraught with tension and the operation of this section of the Constitution wouldn't have helped matters; so it didn't and when it might have been useful in the twenty-first century it still doesn't.

Horse 2957 - A Pence 2024 Campaign Is Not Impossible

In the modern era of open presidential primaries (which began after the disastrous and idiotic conventions of 1968) most Vice-Presidents who have decided to throw their hat into the ring, have been made their party's presidential nominee at some point.

VP Mondale (77-81) [D] - 1984

VP HW.Bush (81-89) [R] - 1992

VP Quayle (89-93) [R] - failed

VP Gore (93-01) [D] - 2000

VP Biden (09-17) [D] - 2020

That leaves speculation about the 2024 Presidential Election open about who is even going to run, far less of a shot in the dark than it otherwise would have been in a normal election cycle.

Presumably former President Trump will run again because being a one term president, not only is he still entitled to run for President but even if he was convicted of a crime, he would still be eligible because Article I, Section 1 contains no disability for criminals to run for President.

On the 16th June 2015, when the mogul took a trip down the golden escalator to announce his tilt for the White House, I think that almost everyone though that this might have been nothing more than a political joke; perhaps it was. I think that as the debates wore on and that people actually started voting for him, that this was beyond a joke and I do not think that at any point that Trump actually had any kind of plan for beyond 9th of November 2016.

To put that on the same time frame for the 2024 Presidential Election would mean that announcements would be made around about June of 2023 but things changed on that summer day in New York City in 2015. I think that it is fair to say that the 2020 Presidential Campaign started on the day that Trump won the 2016 election and that his 2024 Presidential Campaign started on the day that he lost the 2020 election.

If Trump has already begun to plot a 2024 campaign, then we can assume that any other potential Republican nominee and perhaps any potential Democrat nominee, must surely be in full panic mode.

Presumably if Trump decides to run again, then most political pundits would pit Biden as incumbent against Trump who would technically be the outsider again. The only other President to have won non-consecutive terms is Grover Cleveland. 

Polls such as Quinnipiac and Gallup, seems to suggest that we are heading for a Trump/Biden rematch but that presumes that Biden is running again and that Trump would take the Republican nomination again.

What happens if Mike Pence decides to run for President? I do not know to what degree that Trump would savage him in the same way that he tore his rivals for the 2016 nomination to shreds but in doing so, he might very well end up tearing down his own platform.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/03/politics/pence-trump-january-6/index.html

Speaking at a dinner hosted by the Hillsborough County Republican Committee in New Hampshire, the former vice president said he and Trump have spoken "many times" since leaving office and he remains proud of their accomplishments.

But, Pence added, "I don't know if we'll ever see eye to eye on that day."

- CNN, 4th Jun 2021

There is more to that video on CNN's website but this was the starting point where Pence has appeared to put distance between himself and the President that he served under. During the January 6 insurrection, for the first time in four years, Pence appeared to find a spine as he refused to  to do Trump’s bidding by illegally subverting the Electoral College count.

This video also has Pence extolling some of the accomplishments of the Trump administration; which I suppose is him trying to claim some sort of credit by inference. What that does is put Pence in a unique position because rather than trying to attack Trump from without, he can claim to be working from the inside; which nobody else can. 

Now I have no idea where that places Pence in any kind of head-to-head polling against Trump but I do know that Pence wants to follow the rules of politics like he always has done and that might be attractive to Republican voters who feel alienated by a party which has shifted to the racist right under the de facto leader of Trump. They might feel as though their party has been taken away from them by a boorish git and Pence can stand in as the well-meaning level head at the wheel.

Given all of this and with the benefit that I can be completely wrong, then these are my predictions for what I think are the four most likely outcomes:

Biden v Trump = Biden win

Harris v Trump = Trump win

Biden v Pence = Pence win

Harris v Pence = Harris win

Biden was chosen by Democrat voters in the Primaries because he was seen as a safe pair of hands. Basically, once Bernie Sanders dropped out of the running, there wasn't really any other sensible alternative. We have no idea if Biden will run again in 2024 but if he decides not to, Harris is the likely next candidate as she would represent continuity in the administration and as the United States Senator from California, she has competence in how governmental process works.

Pence as both a former Representative from the state of Indiana and as a former Governor of that same state, already possesses competence in how governmental process works and in running an administration. He was probably picked as Vice-President in the first instance, precisely to be that safe pair of hands if former President Trump died in office. None of those things changed while he was Vice-President.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-09-02-0278

"But my Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived: and as I can do neither good nor Evil, I must be born away by Others and meet the common Fate."

- John Adams, to Abagail Adams, 19 Dec 1793.

The office of Vice-President as observed by Adams was from the outset, almost but not entirely useless. For the opening period of Trump's Presidency when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate, as the only function that the Vice-President has apart from presiding over Senate deliberations, is to cast a tie-breaking vote. During Congress 115, it was split 52-48; so there was never any need to break ties. During Congress 116, it was split 51-49; so there was never any need to break ties. That means that for the entirely of Pence's term as Vice-President, he had no actual function and as his President paid no attention to him, he had no pretended or delegated function.

That may work to his advantage. If Pence can convince the boring conservative voters of Republican caucuses that he wasn't responsible for the actions of the loon in the White House, that just might be enough to draw them to vote for him. Pence 2024 could very well be a perfectly reasonable thing to vote for in the minds of a lot of Republican voters. A Pence Presidency would be a nothing presidency in the same way that the Biden and Obama presidencies were. However, since elections are about gaining control of positions for the here and now, the idea of a long legacy continuing in 2028 are too long to game out.