Horse 2996 - The Best Person For The Job Of Prime Minister

In the ongoing melee which News Corp and Nine Entertainment Co. wants to pick with the Labor Party, with regards bullying following the death of Senator Kitching, have correctly decided from a legal perspective that this is fair game because they know that legally it is impossible to defame the dead. A dead person can not speak for themselves and any accusation of bullying that News Corp and Nine Entertainment Co. they lay can not be disproven or falsified, for that very reason. If you are a trashbag media organisation which is morally bankrupt, then this is perfect. Meanwhile, even the act of defending itself is painted as cause non gratis by this pair of media hucksters.

In an election year (we are absolutely going to the polls on or before May 21; if only for the Senate election which must be held), splattering your political enemy in any kind of muck that you are able to throw at them, is a long standing tactic. 

Perhaps the brightest beacon of sensibility in all this, is Senator Penny Wong. From the floor of the chamber and standing in front of the side of the chamber which is reasonably assumed to be the government but has decided that it is in fact the opposition, with all of the skill of  a surgeon she shut down debate and extracted the cancer from the day's proceedings:

"I will not return anger with anger, or blame with blame."

- Senator Penny Wong, 28th Mar 2022.

The Constitution makes no mention of the Prime Minister. The role of the head of executive cabinet was already well known since about the time of William Pitt and by the time that the six colonies in Australia were all granted responsible government, they'd all assumed some kind of executive government with a Premier of some kind. Here's the thing though, at the time of the Federation of the six colonies into a Commonwealth, the idea of the Prime Minister (that is the head of executive cabinet) coming from either the House of Commons or the House of Lords had already established itself as normal practice. The suggestion that we don't have a Prime Minister who comes from the Senate because of unwritten convention, is only ever put forward by people with neither an understanding of political history nor the imagination to consider what could be and what is best for the country.

I would like to put forward that the best person for the job of the Prime Minister of Australia is Penny Wong and that she should do the job from the Senate.

Paul Keating famously derided the Senate as 'unrepresentative swill' and let's be honest, he was right. From the outset the Senate was always designed to be unrepresentative. Less people live in the Northern Territory than in my local government area and yet the Northern Territory is entitled to two Senators. Less people live in Tasmania than in western Sydney and yet Tasmania is entitled to twelve Senators. 

On the face of it, this puts an absurd amount of power into the hands of Senators from less populous states. That is of course until you realise that if just the two states of New South Wales and Victoria could ever agree on anything, they could dictate the legislation for the rest of the nation forever, through sheer numbers on the floor of the House of Representatives. 

With the twin features of proportional representation for the election of its members and the fact that the smaller states have a bigger voices, this means that almost by design, or at least by operation, the Senate has a wider selection of voices speaking into it. The Senate as the house of review, has a calmer culture and almost by design has to be more conciliatory.

Since the role of Prime Minister is to be both a minister of the Crown without portfolio as well as to be the public face of the executive cabinet, then I think that that almost demands a calmer and more sensible voice than merely someone who can command the numbers in an unruly caucus. Since the Liberal Government came to power in 2013 it has had a brawler who remained as de facto leader of the opposition even while Prime Minister, a sensible statesman who tried unsuccessfully to hold his own party together, and the current opportunist who having obtained the top job, has repeatedly demonstrated that he still has no idea what he wants to do with it but that he really really likes having the power.

I think that the role of the Prime Minister as it is currently imagined, tends to allow more brawlers and political pugilists than it otherwise would do, if the Prime Minister came from the Senate and not the House.

As a Senator, Penny Wong has spent the last 9 years on the Opposition's side in the upper house as it tries to negotiate, compromise, reconcile and review legislation before it gets assent and becomes law. The Opposition as it stands in the Senate, ultimately needs to cross the floor on occasion if it wants to get anything done. The most important thing about that, is that unlike the Opposition in the House, the Opposition as it is met in the Senate by the Government and actually gets a chance to talk to it, instead of meeting a barrage of knavery. There is little to no compromise by a Government which controls the numbers on the floor of the House but in the Senate where that is less likely, the chamber itself has a hand in shaping legislation.

Penny Wong has been shaped by the chamber which she has stood in. I think that her calmness and poise either would not have been developed or allowed to come out in the House of Representatives, in the way that it has done in the Senate. 

On various select committees, both when reporting in the Senate itself and the Federation Chamber, Penny has had to put up with an abnormal amount of insult and abuse, in part because she is gay. The House is usually known for its raucous behaviour but the Senate with fewer members but being the same physical size of space, means that any abuse can be directly targeted. How she has dealt with insult, actual cat-calling and abuse, is to show obvious justified annoyance and anger at times but with a degree of control that puts other MPs to shame. 

Part of the problem with positions of power is that there are invariably people who want the job who are ill-suited to do it. The best people who do responsible jobs are almost always those people who didn't ask for it but were noticed by someone else and then put forward to do it. That is the reason why Dwight Eisenhower is almost certainly the best President that the United States has had since FDR. Is certainly the reason why Angela Merkel was the best person for the job of Chancellor of Germany. I think that Penny Wong still has the idea that the section 51 charge that the parliament shall have the power to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth, is in principle a good idea. 

Anthony Albanese is fine as the Labor leader of the House of Representatives. He's going to get the job of Prime Minister almost by default because of the unwritten conventions which exist. I do not think that those conventions are necessarily sensible if it means that we don't get the best person for the job. Albo will do a fine job as Prime Minister but will he do the best job? I think that the person who would do the best job out of the 227 MPs which we are going to get, is Penny Wong and not Albo and the biggest reason why I think that this is the case, also happens to be the biggest reason why she won't get the job - she doesn't want it.

Horse 2995 - Lamingtons And The Elephant In The Room - Budget 2022

Last night we witnessed on the floor of the House of Representatives, a man who was staring down the barrel of not having that job in two months as well as possibly not having a job at all. With the 2022 General Election looming larger than an elephant in a china shop, Josh Frydenburg had the unpleasant task of looking into the eyes of that elephant. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. There must be at least a half-Senate election on or before the 21st of May. The Morrison Government can choose to uncouple the election until the 3rd of September but such a thing has only been done once in 122 years of the Commonwealth as far as I can tell. Mr Frydenburg faces not only the possibility of sitting on the other side of the chamber after the election but also the non-zero chance of the people of Kooyong being sufficiently annoyed with him, so as to throw him out of his own seat. You can not be number one if the people are at sixes and sevens with you. If that's the case, you're in a land of number twos. That preferential voting - like wow, daddy-o.

Frydenberg being constrained by the mechanics of circumstance, couldn't very well present a particularly ambitious budget. There was no case for reform. There was no grand plan put forward. Really, apart from the odd fiddling with the tax rates here and there and the headline Lamington sweetener before the election, this was a cut and paste job from Appropriation Bill No.1 2021 but could it have been any other way? Not really. Unless... (see the Aside below).

The only thing that will get people's attention this morning is the Low And Middle Income Tax Offset (LAMITO) adjustment for practically everyone who earns a wage, below AWOTE. LAMITO in this case will be a $420 offset which will reduce the amount of tax that people have to pay in the 2021/22 tax year. 

LAMITO as applied to roughly 11 million people will cost the Commonwealth a shade over $4.6 billion in lost revenues and has been painted as temporary relief to help with "cost of living pressures". In reality though, $420 divided by the 155 weeks before the 2025 election is only worth $2.71 per week to a taxpayer. LAMITO might not even be worth the cost of a Lamington per week.

LAMITO as applied to pensioners and anyone below the $18,200 threshold is exactly worthless. As LAMITO is a tax offset, it does precisely nothing for those people who never paid any tax in the first place. As someone who does the tax returns for a number of old people, it is already weird to have to explain to people that they do not get a refund for the tax that they never paid in the first place and this special LAMITO sweetener will mean that they will also get an offset for the tax that they never paid in the first place and still not get a refund.

The other major thing from this budget which is likely to get people taking is a cut in the Federal Government petrol excise of 22 cents per litre. The war between Russia and Ukraine has temporarily sent the price of a barrel of oil and by extension the price of petrol, to above the $2/L mark at the bowser. As far as oil shocks go, this isn't even close to the 1970s oil crisis, the weird correction that happened after the first Gulf War in 1991, or the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. 

My Frydenburg looked around at all things that he could do and decided that the most visible one was the best policy. He can conveniently sell this as a thing to take to the election and then because he has personally and permanently thrown an axe into the tax base, he can conveniently blame Labor if they get elected, for their poor economic management. 22c/L is a perfect price to pay; especially if you're not paying it. I also do not think that even if the Morrison Government was returned that this cut can be justified to be extended beyond September.

No doubt the Australian, Daily Telegraph, Courier-Mail, Herald-Sun and Adelaide Advertiser will all praise Mr Frydenburg's budget as being "the golden fleece which fell out of the sky, like oh my goodness where did it come from?" though really, this budget is not particularly exciting and was never going to be. 

Aside:

The clock is ticking. As this budget is a parliamentary bill, being Appropriation Bill No.1 2022, then the provisions of the Constitution will apply and the hidden time bomb is that a particularly spiteful Coalition could block its own budget in the Senate and force another General Election under the six month provision for the dissolution of parliament from 29th Sep. This would cause as much of a ruckus as what happened in 1975 and the chances of this happening are close to one in a million but they are still not zero.

Horse 2994 - Oh... Canada?!

I have a very long standing conspiracy theory that because the home countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland as a thing, have four permanent places on IFAB (which is the International Football Association Board and the organisation which decides the rules of the game) while FIFA only gets four, that when it comes to refereeing in international football, there is this unspoken continuous hatred against the English speaking nations. For a very long period of time, key penalty decisions just always seem to go against a nation that happens to speak English and this in part helps to explain why England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the USA, and Australia are perpetually rubbish at football on the world stage. The fact that these nations are rubbish and put their domestic funding towards other sport is neither here nor there.

Frequently forgotten Canada, as the frozen great white north of North America and CONCACAF, has also always been perpetually rubbish at football. The reason for this is very likely because everyone in Canada is more likely to watch the exploding pizza and "Hockey Night In Canada" or  watch the exploding pizza and the ever perplexing game of Canadian Football (where it is possible to have the Rough Riders v Rough Riders) than every watch football but the point remains. Football in Canada is at best, the third or fourth sport in the Canadian psyche.

Imagine my confusion then, when reading through the newspaper this morning, I read that Canada has topped the CONCACAF standings with a resounding 4-0 thumping of Jamaica.

Canada 4 - Jamaica 0

Larin 13'

Buchanan 44'

Hoilett 82'

Mariappe 88' (OG).

Imagine my further confusion when I read that not only did Canada top CONCACAF but their record over the past five games has been WLWWW. This kind of thing is just plain confusing. Canada? Canada?! 

My confusion was put to rest when I looked at the highlight reel for Canada v Jamaica. This Canadian side playing mostly 4-5-1 looked like a side that was prepared to be patient and play a containment strategy before rushing forwards. With only a lone forward, they concentrated on keeping the ball just short of what I would consider sensible in the middle third and were more reluctant to just attack up route 1 than either a USMNT or Australian side might. Canada looked in control and deathly sensible.

To be fair, Jamaica are not exactly the stiffest of opponents. It also didn't help that this match was played in Toronto's light snow, which is quite rare in Jamaica. It also didn't help that Besiktas striker Cyle Larin, as the lone striker was allowed to roam around the front of the park because Canada plays so close to their own half. How do you mark someone from a zonal perspective if they hardly ever enter the zone?

The only other time that Canada did qualify for a World Cup was back in Mexico '86; which is most famous for Diego Maradonna blatantly punching the ball over the head of the England goalkeeper and the goal despite being the most obvious handball in the history of ever, being allowed to stand thanks to the unspoken hatred against the English speaking nations. In Mexico '86, Canada was thrown into a group which included the then European Champions in France, Hungary and the Soviet Union. Suffice to say, Canada had less chance of escaping that group than Satan had of assembling a team of demons to play a home game of ice hockey against Le Montreal Canadiens. Canada was torn to ribbons with France scoring 1, Hungary scoring 2, the Soviet Union scoring 2, and Canada losing three games and scoring nil.

In Qatar in 2022, Canada will probably become my chosen second team (behind England) because Australia has imploded and its chances of qualifying from this point are very dim indeed.

I like the idea of the little teams going up against the big ones because in the 92 years of football World Cups, only 8 nations have ever won them. I like teams like Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Senegal, Croatia, New Zealand and now Canada bringing something different to the table. Of course I don't expect Canada to escape the group stage but at least they'll have fun for a bit while they’re there.

One question remains for me though. Is Canada an English-speaking nation and does the unspoken hatred against the English-speaking nations stand against them? If Canada is an English speaking nation, then it might be lights out for them but if the Canadian Football team is Quebecois and Français, then who knows? 

Je suis désolé... que tu sois un buffoon!

...

O Canada, Terre de nos aïeux,

Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!

...

Allez, Allez, Allez,

Allez les Rouges tabanak!

Of course if Canada turns out to be an English-speaking nation, then it won't be 'Oh, Canada?' but 'Oh... Canada.' before they too a dispatched and made to walk the long walk home again.

Aside:

Not to disparage Jamaica but I do not understand why they even exist as a national side. Hear me out. Jamaica as a sovereign nation has every right to play as a nation but given that there are other nations in the Caribbean with less people than in the suburb that I live in in Western Sydney, there is no way that they are ever going to escape qualification to make the group stage of the confederation, much less the World Cup.

The nations of the Caribbean have for many years played in cricket as the West Indies and it must be said that the West Indies as a test playing 'nation' is one of the most beloved and celebrated teams in the world. I think that it would make sense for those same nations to play as the West Indies in football as well. 

Likewise, it would also make sense for the island nations of the Pacific Ocean to play as a single unified Oceania team. When Australia was in the OFC, the only sides that had any realistic chance of escaping the group were Australia and New Zealand. Admittedly the Solomon Islands and Fiji could occasionally put up a fight and score the odd goal here and there but the proof is that the only nations which have ever qualified for a World Cup from Oceania are Australia and New Zealand.

Horse 2993 - Giz Remembered That It's Touring Car Racing

In Race 3 of the Supercars Championship at Symmons Plains, defending series champion Shane van Gisbergen found himself in the court of public opinion after passing Will Davison with a bump pass on lap 10 and then repeated the maneuver on lap 17 with an almost identical pass on Cameron Waters.

At the time, former champion Marcos Ambrose from up in the commentary booth called this "breaking new ground in the sport" and understandably, both Davison and Waters were less than impressed. At the time, Will Davison used a turn of phrase that would make a sailor blush, and Cam Waters decided to give van Gisbergen a wave as he went past but chose not to use all of his fingers.

Van Gisbergen won the race by an eon over Davison, with Waters finishing another yawning chasm of time behind and despite the complaints and protest, no investigation into either pass was investigated by race stewards and no penalties handed out.

I would like to say that Shane van Gisbergen is not in any way "breaking new ground in the sport". What I think has happened with evidence of complaints here, is that either everyone seems to have forgotten that this is touring car racing, or that this isn't touring car racing any more and that this is unusual because the world changed.

Almost before anyone out on the gird was alive, the prince of the privateers Allan Grice, was famed for leaning on people's door handles as he passed people on the inside of corners. This kind of behaviour was called out by Allan Moffat at the time and there are photographs of Grice's Commodore in the paddock with a mock bullbar made of cardboard tube and with the number 43, which was Moffat's number at the time. It was reasonably common right up until the mid 1990s for a car to have suffered some kind of battle scar and it still to be visible weeks later. This was also at a time when there was a size disparity between various makes; with the Ford Falcon being massive compared to the Mazda RX-7, Nissan Bluebird, and the little cars such as a Holden Gemini or Ford Capri.

Likewise, the British Touring Car Championship is also famed for touring car racing with elbows out. Ash Sutton is currently known for his particularly dastardly pushing of other cars; which the stewards are reasonably fine with.

Part of the close quarter racing is a function of the kind of track that the cars happen to be on. At speeds of more than 200km/h, a sense of self-preservation kicks in but at wee ickle goat tracks like Symmonds Plains or Winton, or in the BTCC at Thruxton and Knockhill, the inbuilt penalty of physics and flying off into the never-never and the fields of West Woop-Woop, just don't exist. van Gisbergen can perfectly afford to lean on people's door handles and give people a rub as he scoots on by at a place like Symmonds Plains but he'd never dare such a thing at Bathurst where the inbuilt penalty for getting it all wrong, is to be out of the most prestigious race in the country.

It could be that this kind of move can only happen at Symmonds Plains or Winton because of the nature of the track but equally, it could be that the reason why this kind of thing is rare these days is because of the increasingly rarified nature of this category.

In lesser categories where you have owner drivers paying their own bills, they are less likely to want to do this kind of thing because they personally bear the brunt of the costs. Move upwards just a little bit though where you have sponsors paying the bills and the desire to race harder kicks in. However, this only happens to a point. You just do not see this kind of bumping in GT Racing such as in Europe or Super GT in Japan. Nobody really wants to upset the aerodynamics of their car and so drivers are less likely to use the audio method to let someone else know that they are there.

Supercars may have finally crossed over the line from touring car to GT sports car. When the Falcon FGX exited the category, so did any pretense that these were cars that you could buy in the showroom. From VE Commodore onwards (which also includes VF and ZB) it became a bespoke piece of kit. When the Car Of The Future arrived with its common platform, the Nissan Altima, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo S60 were also all bespoke pieces of kit. Ford's replacement for the Falcon in the Mustang, is also a bespoke piece of kit. When Gen-3 arrives maybe in 2023, neither the Mustang or the Camaro will share any components whatsoever with their road going counterparts.

I think that a scratch built race car as opposed to a road car that has been modified and improved, in this context counts as a GT sports car rather than a touring car. That means that the on-track etiquette of the drivers has invariably changed. Also, as the shop has been deliberately closed and the drivers are no longer exposed to gentlemen drivers and amateurs, a layer of professionalism and polish has meant that they are less inclined to want to play dirty.

For Shane van Gisbergen to have used some skills which he developed as a proper touring car driver in a lesser category, probably does look odd. I can understand Davison's stream of invective over the radio and Waters' single-fingered salute but that's because they are motor racing drivers and hate to lose. However, to say that this is somehow new or breaking new ground is to forget where this particular category of motor racing came from and it's a little bit worrying for its future because I don't think that Supercars quite understands what it is, or where it wants to be.

Horse 2992: Fragments XVI: The Power... To Move You

P24 - Words Should Mean Things

The gosh darn internet which is both the suppository of all information and an open sewer into which all kinds of muck flows into, got that way because the overwhelming majority of users (that is, 100% of all of them) are irreparably flawed beings who have a right to free speech and will use it, regardless of forethought or content. People's rush to say things without thinking results in great swathes of nonsense and gibberish; which upon any kind of inspection at all, is revealed for the nonsense and gibberish that it is. 

While I was reading a motoring website, one of the adverts that came up was for an 'energy drink'. If you compare the actual amount of energy contained within various kinds of fizzy sweet drinks, of the ones which contain sugar, the amount of energy doesn't vary all that much. On the actual metric of using energy to compare drinks, then Sprite and 7-Up are about the same as Coca-Cola, V or Red Bull. What the 'energy' drinks contain is increased amounts of caffeine, taurine, guarana and other drugs; which almost unironically is how Sprite, 7-Up and Coca-Cola were originally marketed in the first wave of soda fountain tonic drinks. In the unregulated period of drug sales before the First World War which is also known as 'The Great Binge' when everyone was on everything, it was common to find drinks which contained cocaine, lithium salts, and maybe laudanum. 

This post isn't about what does and doesn't constitute and 'energy drink' though. The advert which was flashed before my eyes, proclaimed that their energy drink which helps you do dumb things faster, was 'plant based'. Already my mind was in apoplectic fits of confusion because there aren't that many drinks which aren't plant based. You already know what they are. They are the milk drinks which includes coffee and flavoured milk which is the preferred drink of tradespeople for reasons that I do not understand, and broth and yeast extracts, which includes things like Bonox and Bovril. 

I can imagine a meat based energy drink and no doubt because I have imagined it, then someone else will have also imagined it and maybe even sold it but all the drinks containing coffee, citrus, and any fruits at all, are plant based. Unless you invent a drink which is purely made from industrial chemicals such as esters, then stating that a drink is plant based is borderline absurd.

This advert then announced something else which makes my blood curl and my hair boil. It said that the drink was 'organic'. This is where marketing people have stolen a word and sucked all of the meaning out of it. In the simplest possible terms, something which is 'organic' contains carbon atoms. Indeed 'organic chemistry' looks at the various amazing ways which carbon atoms arrange themselves into chains, planes, rings, and three dimensional structures. Arguably diamonds which are made of an allotrope of carbon in which the atoms are arranged into tetrahedra are 'organic'.

Every single living thing is mostly made of just four elements. Plants, fish, elephants, bacteria and men are mostly nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. You are organic. You contain carbon chemistry. Now although  single living thing is mostly made of just four elements and one them is carbon, this makes every single plant in the world 'organic'. It also follows that every sugar in the world is also organic. The other side of this was when I saw a bottle labelled 'organic water'; which is idiotic because it was just water. Water as a chemical contains only hydrogen and oxygen and is therefore inorganic and to say that it is organic is a lie.

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E9 - Politics of Envy

There is an interesting phrase which exists in rightist politics and authoritarian politics; which is couched in the language of virtue ethics but is actually a cover for the maintenance of private vice. That phrase when deployed states that their enemy Mr Banana is engaging in the "politics of envy".

I think that we can agree that 'envy' is looking upon the goods, whether real or unreal, of another person and desiring them for ourselves. Using the phrase the 'politics of envy' immediately burns all grounds of discussion about whether or not the person who is the subject of alleged envy, acquired those goods, whether real or unreal, or the position, station, situation and conditions that they enjoy, justly or not. By invoking such a phrase, the person who has said such a thing, has invoked an immediate demand to be above any and all scrutiny; including whether or not the very system which put them there is fair or not. In fact, they refuse to admit that the system which gave them those goods, services, benefits, station and/or position can be unjust at all. 

This makes me wonder about the employment of the phrase 'politics of envy' itself. Is it really a case of envy, when people who actually pay tax are then treated with utter disdain by the people who benefit from it? While the very poorest in society might receive the bulk of transfer payments from the government, it is the next two quintiles upon whom the greatest disproportionate brunt of the burden of carrying the entire tax system sits.

The top quintile pays 48% of all income tax but they also receive 51% of all incomes. If anything that's an argument that the very top of society are undercharged for the privilege of have the other 80% of society be stable enough for them to sit atop their gilded towers. You would expect that the next quintile down is where the bulk of the taxation burden lies but as a proportion of income, people who are already materially satisfied do not spend orders of magnitude more in consumption in keeping with their income. Money itself tends to have an ever marginally decreasing utility the more of it you have because there are only so many restaurants you can visit, so many houses you can live in and so many hours in a week that you can leave all the lights on and the water running out of all the taps.

Envy implies that being desirous of goods and services which you do not have is a bad thing. What it doesn't describe is questioning why when you have paid for something, why someone else who already has more should reap the benefits of your effort. That turns the Matthew Effect (that is that to those who have more, more will be given; and to those who have not, even what little they have will be taken away) into public policy. A desire not to be robbed blindly by people who lets be honest would send you to the battlefield to die for their benefit, isn't envy, it's asking for justice.

The phrase 'the politics of envy' is said by those people who are skilled in the art of public sanctioned theft and want to lie to justify their moral turpitude.

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C16 - Getting A Cat

The one piece of vital information that is relevant here is that when you go to bed, although a cat might very well go to bed at the same time that you do, the chances of it staying there are exactly nil. At some point during the night, the cat will be up and about doing cat things, irrespective of what you want it to do. If it wants to go somewhere, it will. This is the reason why cat owners generally sleep with their doors open. It is not because they want their fuzzy little friend to sleep with them but because a cat as an uncontrollable force which does as it pleases, will have scratched at doors in the night and broken their will.

Cats will always do their business of catting, irrespective of what you want them to do. When the lights go out, a cat does not think that this is the time to go to bed, a cat thinks that this is the time that it claims every single thing in the house and there ain't a thing that you can do about it. A cat is going to cat.

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I15 - 15 Items Or Less

If I see a sign in the supermarket which says "15 Items Or Less", part of me dies inside because there are rules about countable and uncountable things, and about tangible and intangible things. Those rules should lead one to the conclusion that the sign should in fact read "15 Items Or Fewer". However I also look at such a sign and immediately back down because English is a vulture of a language which steals from everywhere and ignores all rules; including its own. "15 Items Or Less" is perfectly acceptable because in a war between the prescriptivists who want to set rules and the descriptivists who want to describe how things really are, the descriptivists win. 

The semantics of language matter far less to me than the truth which the language conveys. One of the things that my Accounting 101 teacher said in the very first lesson of the class was that "the purpose of accounting is to provide information". The sign "15 Items Or Fewer" provides that information concisely and the prescriptivists who want to set rules can not disagree with that.

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B22 - The Power To Be Left Alone And Uncared For

One of the superpowers that I have as a 43 year old white male who is 6 feet tall, is the power to be ignored by everyone. This superpower stems from the fact that as a 43 year old white male who is 6 feet tall, I have the potential power to harm people and for people to be quite rightly afraid of that potential. The downside of having this superpower is that along with practically everyone in the world ignoring you, it also comes with an accompanying state of affairs where nobody in the world cares about you either.

For a short period of time when I had my arm in a sling and was walking around with a walking stick, the amount of societal apathy and disdain that I would normally encounter, was cancelled and replaced by a temporary kindness. Now that I am not wearing a sling, nor using a walking stick, that kindness is not extended by very many people and we have returned to the default setting of society where my superpower causes people to be afraid of me.

I know that we are in the middle of a pandemic and that people are used to having more space around them, however at the moment when I am tapping this out on my phone and barely six weeks after getting a broken leg and a broken arm, my superpower has created so much of a forcefield that people's bags now have more priority than I do, at least in their minds. As I am standing on the B1 bus with both my arm and my leg screaming out in silent pain, I am simultaneously aware of the power that I have supposed to be able to wield and my inability to do so. 

I do not get undesired attention from members of the opposite sex, such is the curse of being the gender of which I am not a member; I have the amazing power of being able to walk home at night completely safe in the knowledge that I will remain intact; and there is the base assumption that I know what I am talking about despite the fact that I like everyone else is merely pretending to be an adult and in reality, we're all really just big children who want other people to be nice to us. However, thanks to men who have been before and have spent every last penny of societal trust, I am not even afforded basic decency. I would like to say common decency but let's be honest, it's as rare as hens' teeth. 

My reward then, is to stand on the bus in pain but being left alone. I suppose that's something. I shouldn't expect anything.

Horse 2991 - Non-Fungible Tokens - Are They Worth Anything?

What do you think about NFTs? Are they a good investment? 

- name withheld

Sometimes Horse gets asked questions directly for comment. The problem with being a generalist and being across many subjects is that although I might be able to explain things in a broad sense, you're better off going to a specialist if you want proper advice. Advice is worth the usefulness of information and truth that the expert in question is able to impart upon the the person asking for it. As someone who is a jack of many trades but a master of none, then my advice is to go and speak to a professional. Even then, I still have a very dim view of most of the investment world and financial system, who derive their riches by moving the giant pile of money from one place to another; which is backed by the work of real people in the real world.

To address the actual questions though, I think about NFTs very little. From the outside of this particular world, the whole thing looks like previous bubbles such as the company craze, the tulip craze, both the market crazes of the 1890s and 1920s, the credit craze of the early 1950s, the era of when greed was good in the 1980s, and the dot-com bubble of the 1990s/2000s. From the outside NFTs look as solid as Box-Tops, Pogs, Pokémon cards, strips, and will only be useful as an investment vehicle when a long market emerges. Are they a good investment? I would be more inclined to buy shares in the Commonwealth Bank, BHP, Woolworths and Telstra because I know that those companies are reasonably likely to be here in 12 months but even then, asking me for investment advice is like asking me about the weather. 

In the broadest possible sense though, I think that investing in NFTs sounds like an insensible idea; not because I am a Luddite and don't like technology but because I have feet which walk in the real world and not the virtual one. There's something potentially very hokey to me about a thing which you can not even hope to hold or touch.

An NFT or Non-Fungible Token is as the name suggests, some token which is a string of digital information (which can be a picture, video, string of text, etc.) which as the name suggests is non-fungible. By being fungible, we mean that a thing is identical to other items like it. Petrol is a good example of a good which is fungible. Your motor car doesn't really care if you fill it with 30 litres of petrol from a Shell, Mobil, BP, Conoco, Texaco, Eneos, Union 76, Ampol or any other petrol station you can think of. A non-fungible item is a thing which isn't identical to another thing. Someone's house is non-fungible as there is neither another house which is like it, nor any other house which is in the exact same spot.

An NFT is similar to a house, in the respect that its non-fungibility is backed by a verifiable blockchain which is attached to the string of digital information in question. A blockchain for want of a better description, is like take Torrens Title for digital information, where every calculation can be independently verified in the same way as anyone can go to the Lands Titles Office and look at all of the mortgages, caveats, liens, stamping etc. that has been attached to a particular piece of property. An NFT is just a piece of digital property with a verifiable string of title that can be established.

That's all sound in principle but the question is is an NFT worth anything? That question hinges entirely on what you think that the concept of worth and value is. Someone who buys or mines an NFT in a blockchain, does so with the expectation that at some point in the future, they will be able to sell their NFT to someone else for some kind of value. Again we've run around to the concept of value; which isn't helpful.

Value as it relates to a thing being bought and sold, relies exactly on the agreement of the buyer and seller at that moment in time. The whole idea of money being a universal fungible token system, relies exactly on the agreements of all of the the buyers and sellers at any moment in time and the general fidus that they will continue to be fungible and acceptable to future buyers and sellers at a future moment in time. One dollar is only worth whatever goods and services that it is capable of being exchanged for. When carrots are worth $2/kg, then one dollar is worth half a kilo of carrots. The question of whether or not an NFT is worth anything, is entirely dependent on what its buyers and sellers happen to agree upon at this moment in time and what future buyers and sellers will agree upon at a future moment in time if the intent is to keep it.

The thing is that if nobody wants a thing, then it really doesn't matter what you paid for it in the past. Future buyers and sellers of a thing couldn't give a rip about what a thing sold for, except as far as it informs the story of what they will agree to now.

I get paid by my boss in Australian Dollars for the performance of doing work. I accept Australian Dollars with the reasonable expectation that I can them use them in a future exchange for goods and services. That doesn't mean though that those Australian Dollars are worth the same now as they were ten years ago, what they will be worth six months from now, or what they would be worth in another country. If I am paid Au$200 for a week's worth of work then I am exceptionally rich in 1975 where the Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings was only $75. If I am paid Au$200 for a week's worth of work then I am miserably poor in 2222 where the Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings might be $9000. If I take my Au$200 to Italy, then in the first instance my dollars are useless if I want to get a sandwich. An NFT will only be useful in as much as it is acceptable or even wanted by some future person who is prepared to take it in exchange for money or goods or services at some future date.

What do I think about NFTs? I don't care. As an investment vehicle they are only as useful as what the expected future market thinks about them. Any given NFT might be as valuable to someone in the future as a Type II Adelaide Pound or a Beanie Baby.

One of the slightly hidden things about the share market is that apart from the ASX200, the rest of the all ordinary shares are populated by many many companies which are only ever worth cents and tenths of a cent per share, which never pay dividends, and which go through an entire life cycle of going through an IPO, existing for a while and then being wound up at nil distribution to their share holders. I have no reason in principle to suspect that NFTs are any different to any other instrument which exists on any other börse. Probably some will do okay but mostly likely, most NFTs will be pointless. Besides which, I would rather spend many many dollars on a thing which I already know that people are likely to want to buy.

Horse 2990 - NASCAR Goes To Le Mans (Again)

https://www.autosport.com/le-mans/news/nascar-next-gen-has-to-have-hybrid-for-le-mans-24h-entry-says-aco/9083976/

Race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest has confirmed that acceptance of the entry from Hendrick Motorsports for the grid slot – reserved for what it describes as an “innovative car” – is dependent on the Chevrolet Camaro ZL-1 running an energy-recovery system.

That would give NASCAR the chance to test the hybrid technology on its Next Gen machine in competition ahead of its introduction in the premier Cup Series, which could happen as early as 2024.

- Autosport, 18th Mar 2022

When I heard this last week, I immediately thought that this was a simultaneously brilliant, hideous, amazing, and bonkers idea, all at the same time. The truth is that American race teams aren't exactly heralded outside of North America because they invariably end up being rubbish against better engineered opposition. At home where they race on high speed ovals where power is everything, American race teams are king. Formula One is the domain of British and Italian engineers, sports car racing belongs to the French, Germans, Italians and Japanese, and although Americans occasionally make the odd foray into the rest of the world, they demand instant success and when they don't get it, they give up.

Entering a NASCAR Cup car in an invitational class at Le Mans, will not change the overall result. The last time that NASCAR Cup cars did attempt the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the furthest that any of them got was 11 hours. Although a NASCAR Cup car produces more than enough power, it is all of the other stresses to do with braking, multiple gear changes, change of direction, and the sustained running for 24 hours, which breaks cars at Le Mans. It is not uncommon for a team with three cars at Le Mans to send out one as a hare with two tortoises following and for the hare and a tortoise to break. Very occasionally a hare will win the race and this causes everyone up and down pit row to build a faster car for next year and the cycle of breaking fast cars begins anew.

A NASCAR Cup series car is a massive thing. At 1500kg, they are 150kg heavier than a V8Supercar, 400kg heavier than a GT3 car, and more than 500kg heavier than the fastest Le Mans Prototypes. At identical speeds, all that extra weight has to be sprung, mounted, carried, and moved through the corners. Objects are lazy and they like to keep on doing whatever it is that they are doing unless they are forced to change their behaviour by something else. That something else is brakes, tyres, suspension, aerodynamic devices; and it should be pretty obvious that a heavy thing which contains more mass is going to need more force and more stress to change its behaviour than a less massive and more nimble thing. This is the reason why womens' figure skating exists at the Winter Olympics - originally there was only an open event but women who are generally smaller and more nimble, end up being magnitudes better than men for this very reason.

It is they physical size of a NASCAR Cup car that will be its downfall against smaller and slipperier opposition. A NASCAR Cup car is an exceptionally huge thing in the world of motor racing and that's in part because of the story of how they came to be. In the 1960s and 70s when petrol retailed for mere cents per gallon, nobody in America cared about trying to build sophisticated machinery. It had to be reliable and fast; thus, NASCAR Cup cars made exceptionally fast, exceptionally big but dumb power. It was only in the 1980s that they reined in the size of the cars to what people drove on the street and even then, the platform was still very wide.

At 110in (wheelbase) by 76.5in (track) a Cup Series car is an exceptionally wide thing. 110 inches is about the same wheelbase as a large family sedan, which is very quickly becoming extinct. The VE/VF Commodore was sold in the United States under the name plate of the Chevrolet SS and for a while became the pace car for NASCAR. When directly compared on track to the NASCAR Cup Series cars, the Commodore looked tall and skinny. Anyone who owns a Commodore though, knows that they are a massively massive family sedan.

The Oreca 07 which is one of the standard prototypes used at Le Mans has a 118in (wheelbase) and 61.8in (track); which means that they'll be about as long if you allow for bodywork but at almost 15 inches narrower that's absurd. From the side, the NASCAR Cup car will look about the same size but from the front it will look like someone is racing a wide wall.

In terms of going out and being competitive, I expect the project to be mostly a failure and for the prototypes to us the Cup car as a drafting plug but it will be interesting to see if it survives at all; let alone how they work out changing drivers, brakes and maybe rotors on the fly.

The thing is though, failure is the perfect option. Failure is useful because it tells the engineers and boffins where stuff breaks so that they can improve it. One of the things that NASCAR is learning on the fly this year is that lower profile tyres have a habit if separating from wheels at the bead when pushed through sideways skew forces across the face of the tyre. It's tolerable but borderline embarrassing. 

Why bother sending a NASCAR Cup car to Le Mans? The Le Mans 24 Hour Race is a test bed for trying out new stuff until it breaks. NASCAR and Chevrolet want to be able to test a hybrid system and they want to do it in the white hot heat of competition but that's impossible in the regular NASCAR season. My suspicion is that this entry will be on a hiding to nothing and won't make it into the top 10 outright, but I guess it is the perfect place to use as a test bed for new stuff.

Horse 2989 - No, Our Voting Machines Can Not Be Hacked Because We Don't Have Any

I think that we can take it as given that the 2008 Presidential Election the first time that anyone saw the power of social media in organising large groups of people in the middle of a political campaign. I also think that it's fair to say that within ten seconds of Barack Obama being elected as President, the opposition was already circling the wagons and trying to work out how best to fight.

Politics very quickly worked out that all you needed to do was make people angry, and by 2012, rightist parties around the world had already realised that simply making people angry was enough. Truth as we know it as a useful weapon, was probably abandoned in the political process by the end of 2012. In Australia 2013, Tony Abbott's Government was elected on the basis of nothing more than making the electorate angry and repeating three word slogans at them. By about 2015, leftist parties finally caught on to the idea that making people angry was reasonably effective and elections since have mostly been about who can be the either the angriest or loudest.

The Tories, Trump, Abbott, Morrison, Biden... I would not be surprised that the interested parties who would benefit from having certain outcomes of elections (which includes nefarious foreign state actors, business groups, media companies, and the political parties themselves) have probably all engaged in hiring armies of lower paid people in troll farms in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Laos, and the granddaddy of them all The Philippines, to act like people in the countries where they want to change election results, and present disinformation. If you are being paid a wage to present lies and you don't really care about the results at the other end, then I suppose that for the people in the troll farms, that it's just like any other job because it is.

It makes sense for people in the west to blame designated enemies like Russia over the interested parties in our own countries because we like to cling to the belief that we're somehow better; even though all the evidence points to the contrary. It is probably part of the budgets of political parties to pay keyboard armies to spread propaganda and attack critics. Political parties and media groups alike probably think nothing of using paid commentators, trolls, and bots to harass journalists and erode trust in the media, if it means influencing elections.

This is why I don't understand the latest wave of obvious trolls on Twitter and Facebook. I have been told several times over the last few weeks that the voting machines in the upcoming 2022 Australian General Election have been supplied by Dominion Voting Systems and that we should be very very suspicious of them. This is obviously designed to erode trust in the validity of the election and give even angrier and more militant organisations, licence to do very nasty things if the election doesn't go the way they want. The 2020 Presidential Election and the subsequent insurrection on January 6th 2021, is often cited as supposed evidence that if it can happen there it can happen here.

Except it can't.

That chain of events with regards voting, is impossible in Australia. Why? Because we do not use voting machines and we do not elect a President. When it comes to the latter, we have a Prime Minister who is head of the executive cabinet and who is selected by the party which has gained control of the majority of seats on the floor of the House of Representatives; so the suggestion that we even vote for the Prime Minister, is stupid and the people spouting this idiocy are reprehensively stupid. When it comes to the former, we do not not use voting machines and to say that we do means that the person reading such a suggestion has to deny reality itself.

If you want to call it a voting machine, then this is the 'machine' that we use:

Australia uses paper ballots and always has done. Whether it is for the House or the Senate, you get your little green paper ballot or your big white tablecloth of a ballot, go over to a booth and number the boxes according to your preferences. There are no voting machines. Voting in Australia has been compulsory since 1921 and so not only are there no voting machines but every single voter in Australia who is alive, knows that there are no voting machines.

What kind of idiotic trolls can not even bothered to do this basic research into how elections work in Australia? If you're going to tell us lies, then at least have the decency to tell lies that can't be verified. In this case, every single voter knows that this is a lie. 

For the people that have forwarded this to me on Facebook, I have something quite scary to tell you. You are stupid; really stupid at that. Stupidity which is distinct from intelligence, happens when a person who is in command of the facts, then actively decides to do a deliberately bad/injurious/idiotic thing. If you have forwarded on an article or a meme which tries to tell people in Australia that we have voting machines when quite literally everyone including yourself knows that that simply isn't true, then you have chosen to tell a lie and a stupid one at that.

The second part of this stupid that the voting machines in the upcoming 2022 Australian General Election have been supplied by Dominion Voting Systems, suggests that the counting can not be trusted.

Again, if you want to call it a counting machine, then this is the 'machine' that we use:

After you put you ballots in the boxes, the boxes are either sealed when they get full or remain out on the floor of the polling place until they come back to be opened and the ballots counted. The boxes are overseen by representatives from the interested political parties and the people that do the counting are volunteers who mostly come from community groups like the Parents and Citizens associations attached with schools.

I can tell you, having done counting at a polling place that on the Saturday night of an election, that the people from the various political parties hang around like a bad smell and so if you want to accuse anyone of collusion, then it would mean that the political parties themselves would have had to come to an agreement. That's a stupid suggestion. The counting 'machines' if you want to call them that, are mostly older ladies who are fuelled by tea and coffee, sandwiches and scones and pizza.

I think that its fair that on top of having one of the best parliamentary systems in the world with preferential voting for single-member districts in the House and proportional representation in the Senate, with compulsory voting, voting on a Saturday, with a culture that has sausage sizzles a cake stalls at polling places, that the actual method of voting on paper ballots that are then counted by hand, is also the best system in the world.

It might be possible to hack our elections but it can not be done electronically from overseas. You can not hack the voting machines because we do not use any. You can not stuff ballot boxes with papers because the amount of cross scrutiny from parties who nominally dislike each other is immense. Attacks on the integrity of a paper system don't scale very well either. There are 151 electorates in Australia with thousands of polling places; so to hack such a system would need thousands and thousands of people all in on it to begin with and such a conspiracy would be so massive that ordinary police would have found out about it, as well as the Federal Police and ASIO. You can not even hack the counting machines because old ladies and especially old ladies from the P&C are the most formidable opponents in the universe. 

Political parties, media groups, and nefarious foreign actors would think nothing of paying keyboard armies to spread propaganda and attack the integrity of our elections. I fully expect that knaves and very bad people would do that. Spreading obvious lies that can be easily debunked by every single voter in the country and which require people to deny their own lived reality, is a special kind of stupid. If you have chosen to do this, then why shouldn't I put you in the same category as the unscrupulous parties, media groups, nefarious foreign actors,  knaves and very bad people. If you have chosen to be that stupid, then you deserve to be judged as such because it was your choice.

Horse 2988 - He's The Hero Gotham Deserves But Not The One It Needs Right Now, Or Ever

Why?

Just why?

Holy guacamole, Batman! Why?!

In a world... where the only people who spend large amounts of money at the cinema are nerds, the movie studios have in their wisdom, and in the pursuit of profits, decided that the world needs another Batman movie. 

By my reckoning, if you include the 1940s movie shorts, the 1967 film with Adam West from the TV series, Tim Burton's 1989 film and the subsequent sequels, and the apparently endless numbers of reboots and rerereboots, there are too many Batman movies. To be fair, I like the 1967 movie and the Lego Batman movie because Adam West plays the role so seriously and earnestly as to turn the whole idea of Batman into farce (which given the rest of the series is apt) and the Lego Batman movie which may as well be a parody of itself. I just don't understand why we need more darker and edgier derivations of similar stories.

This is the problem with Batman. The 1939 Detective Comic series, had him play as a detective in the post Art Deco 1930s Gotham, which works reasonably as part satire and part commentary on the then tarnished New York City which had practically created the Gilded Age and the Depression through the art of speculation on the markets by an unsympathetic idle rentier class. Batman was the comic book equivalent of the outworking of The Great Gatsby, had anyone in that novel lived anything other than a destructive unthinking life. Gotham never improves. Batman only makes enemies. The system survives.

During the 1940s and 1950s, something weird happened. Things generally got better for people and rather than sell the idea that people were terrible, the post-war period ended up being this time of a golden age for everyone. As the economic wheel has turned seven full times now (1962, 1974, 1987, 1992, 2001, 2008, 2020) the optimism of the post-war has been spun off and we've now got this new gilded age, in which Batman doesn't do satire and the unsympathetic idle rentier class is applauded and even worshipped. The purpose of Batman exists but nobody really wants to explore it because to do so, means critically looking at  the kinds of people who have the money, needed to produce a Batman movie.

Marvel and DC have thrown out so many superhero movies in the last 20 years that the weight of their own work has collapsed in on itself. If I go to the cinema, I want to see a movie which I can have a nice time watching. I don't want to have to have read and seen several peoples' thesis worth of material to have to understand what I am looking at.

"If you think you can do better, why don't you?"

I think I will.

Picture this.

Leave the premise of the story intact. I like the idea that Bruce Wayne is an eccentric aristocrat with more money than sense. Give him a butler and a ward. The story is already daft enough. Here's the rub. Set the story in Gotham. Gotham is a small and rather insignificant village in Nottinghamshire. Gotham and Nottinghamshire are Robin Hood country. 

Have Bruce Wayne run an architectural firm by day and by night, make him return to doing the work of a private detective. The villains instead of being these weird flamboyant creations of a strange comic book world which could never have existed, would now become the kinds of petty eccentrics that you'd find in a classic English crime drama.

The Penguin actually does run an umbrella shop on the high street. Mr. Freeze is not a person but an air-conditioning company. The Joker is just the nickname of a man in a green suit who likes to race whippets. Catwoman is one of those delightfully weird ladies who runs a cat sanctuary. Give Batman a Ford Mondeo as the Batmobile. Have the Batcave be a lockup in a backstreet.

The world doesn't need any more darker and edgier retellings of a story which it has heard before and is quite frankly, sick and tired of. The one Batman story that the world hasn't heard in over 80 years, is the one story which Batman was created for; that is, a work of satire which is set against the monied classes. I think that this should be overlaid against an English village because in our current world of plagues, wars, fires, floods, corruption in government, product shortages and unemployment, what we need is not something being darker and edgier but something which involves more tea, jam and scones.

Horse 2987 - Panicky People Proclaim Petrol Price Problems

Apart from the ongoing plague, the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, existential crises such as pollution, sexism, racism, ableism, and the terrible horribleness that is Putin's war on Ukraine because he is an expletive deleted, this thing that people are now most worried about apart from toilet paper shortages and the results of widespread flooding, is that within the week, petrol prices have gone from $1.72 to more than $2.50 per litre at some pumps. In general, most people don't give a brass razoo about massive problems until they have to pay a brass razoo for something. 

The psychology of petrol is different to practically any other good that people buy because unlike groceries, internet and telephony, water, gas and electric bills, the price of petrol needs to be shown in big lights from far away so that people will come in and buy the staff.

Of late I have seen three broad reactions to the increase in petrol prices:

- people are panicking in abject terror because it will now cost them more than $100 to fill the tank.

- people are being smug because they drive an electric car and the price increase doesn't affect them an iota.

- people are making jokes about taking their boyfriend/girlfriend somewhere expensive for the evening and then showing pictures of the tower showing prices at a petrol station.

It must be said that although humans have a capacity to remember the past, they generally learn very little from it. The arc of history never tends toward progress no matter what idealists might say but rather, those who have the power to spin a profit from the results of making decisions will always do so; including when those decisions involve causing other people to die. 

Buying a car doesn't in principle cause other people to die but it can have the effect of making one's future self suffer in the future. Again, a problem for a future version of one's self is generally something that most people don't give a brass razoo about massive problems until they have to pay a brass razoo for something.

The last time that there was a major oil crisis to speak of, apart from the 2008 global financial crisis which was a blip in peoples' incomes, was all the way back in the 1970s. Assuming Generation X started in 1965, then that means that Generations X, Y, Z and Alpha have never experienced a massive spike in having to have to pay a brass razoo for petrol hikes. Generations X, Y, Z, and Alpha can not remember and the Baby Boomers and what's left of the Silent and Greatest Generations, don't drive in sufficiently large enough numbers anymore for them to be worried. That also means that the kinds of cars which Generations X, Y, Z, and Alpha are currently allowed to buy, have been shaped by not only demands in functionality buy by a distinct lack of pain. 

The SUVification of everything came in response to three very big changes in the buying public:

- young people tend not to buy new cars in anything like the amounts that they used to because we have decided not to pay them proper wages any more. The 1965 Mustang sold more than a million units because Baby Boomers, the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation, were all experiencing rising wages in real terms. That hasn't happened in Australia since Q3 of 1978. In fact, in real terms, wages and the median wage relative to AWOTE have both been on a wobbly slide downhill since then.

- people are on the whole, larger than they were in the 1960s. This is mostly because food companies in an effort to maxinise their profits have been able to sell cheaper quality stuff and more of it. As peoples' impulse control is mostly terrible, then that means that people are bigger. It is a simple fact that bigger people demand bigger cars.

- the combination of both of these things has meant that both the number of second cars in a family has dropped off 

It also means that the number of people who now buy a truck as their primary vehicle has also gone up.

These three things together have meant that the market segments for the kinds of cars that people buy now have shifted. It used to be that the top selling cars per month were Falcon, Commodore, Camry, Corolla. Now the top selling cars per month are Ranger, HiLux, Triton, D-Max.

As for the small car market, General Motors told Australia to take a long walk off a short pier and now don't sell anything here at all, Nissan axed the Micra for Australia, and Ford have almost axed the Fiesta except for keeping the ST line around because there still is a niche market for hot hatches.

The marques and models left in the small car market are thus:

Ford Fiesta ST - $33,490

Fiat 500 - $21,750

Kia Picanto - $15,990

Kia Rio - $19,690

Mazda 2 - $21,890

MG 3 - $17,490

Mitsubishu Mirage - $14,490

Peugeot 208 - $15,300

Suzuki Baleno - $19,990

Suzuki Swift - $20,890

Toyota Yaris - $23,740

Volkswagen Polo - $19,290

Admittedly 12 models in the small car market is not a bad selection to pick from and it also has to be said that every single one of these is excellently put together. If you want a car for under $20,000, you still have a choice of 7. I deliberately haven't included cars like the Corolla, Focus or Golf because they are the next class up. Even the Mini is not that Mini, and while the Mazda MX5 and Fiat 124 might physically small enough to meet the criteria, unless you are committed to owning a convertible, they are not going to be your commuter car of choice. If you are though, then well done. You are one of the people who have decided that small things are fun and I applaud you.

Everyone that I have heard complain about the price of petrol going up, owns a car which is bigger than any of these 11. They are living the consequence of their own past self making one's future self suffer in the future. That future has arrived today. Sure, there might very well be good reasons for owning a bigger car but this is one of those cases where current pain is the direct result of one's discretionary decisions in the past. 

The SUVification of everything happened because we didn't pay kids properly, because people got bigger, and because car makers are in the business of making profits by selling stuff to people. There are always larger margins to be made on more expensive items and the fact that less people have been buying smaller cars and sedans, is what caused the virtual wipeout of the family sedan and wagon, and the hollowing out of the market for small cars.

Addenda:

Now is the time for me to lay out my own cards in this game:

I have a Mazda 2.

I am one of those people being smug because although I don't drive an electric car, I do take an electric train and public transport to work and the price increase of petrol doesn't affect me very much. I have owned some big cars in the past such as a 6.9L V8 Mercedes-Benz but the cars which I have loved the best were a Ford Ka, the current Mazda 2, and a Peugeot 206. 

I suppose that I could be convinced that a Ford Puma might be an okay SUV to own but I'd want it put back on 15 inch wheels and 70 spec tyres so that it could go on dirt roads properly. 

Horse 2986 - Forget The Ides Of March - Beware The Ides Of May

The Roman calendar's most famous feature isn't the Nones which nobody seems to know about any more, nor the Kalends which is where we probably get the name 'calendar' from, but the Ides which are the dates in the middle of the months. The reason for this is that the Ides of March are the date in the Roman calendar when debts were traditionally settled and the most famous example of this is the assassination of Julius Caesar, in which a funny thing happend to him on the way to the theatre and an an unfunny thing happened thereafter. Roman politics gave us the most famous example of The Festival Of The Thirsty Knife; which William Shakespeare cashed in on by adapating the story for the stage.

The Ides of March in 2022 will not be a day for settling debts. However, with the Federal Budget set for March 29, then if you assume that the writs for the dissolution of parliament for the 2022 General Election will be submitted by the Friday on the following week, then the number of logical days for the election are only 3: 7 May, 14 May, 21 May.

It is possible that although the Ides of March 2022 will not be the day of reckoning for the government but the Ides of May instead. I suspect that I am not alone when I think that the Morrison Government is bumbling its way towards electoral wipeout. I will admit that after an election has been called that opinion polls temnd to tighten and I will also admit that opinion polls themselves tend to be more reactionary than the general public for the reason that if someone is happy with the way things are then they tend not to complain but even so, the latest Newspoll spat out the following results:

Two Party Preferred:

LNP:45

ALP:55

That equates to a number of seats if an election was held tomorrow of:

ALP - 93

LNP - 52

Oth - 6

Those 6 others come with an interesting caveat. It could be 6 seats or it could be 7 seats or it could be 5.

The seat of Warringah which is currently held by Zali Steggall is probably a safe IND seat. I say probably because the previous member (Tony Abbott) was so toxic that he may have poisoned the electorate for many election cycles. I also say probably because there is a possibility that this traditionally conservative seat, has only been held by major parties on the right and by independents on the right. Warringah may remain IND or drift back to LNP.

The seat of Wentworth which is currently held by Dave Sharma. Mr Sharma is currently facing a challenge from Allegra Spender, who has developed quite a popular following. Whether or not that equates to enough votes to swing the seat back to IND remains to be seen but with a current Two-Party Preferred split across the country of 45-55, this is certainly in play to be flipped.

All of the other seats held by independents are likely to remain in their hands. Independents if they survive a second election, generally go on to have relatively long careers in Australia. Those electorates seem to like the idea that their candidate will not be swayed by the major parties and in some cases, Independent MPs have careers that span decades.

What does this say about the potential 20 seats that might be flipped over. One of the strange things about parliamentary democracy where government is formed out of the majority of members on the floor of the lower house, is that a seat which was part of the government after being flipped will then go on to be part of the next government but under a different political party. The so-called bellwether seats (like Eden-Monaro was famous for being) not only have long streaks of picking who is likely to form government but by extension, those seats end up being part of the government (albeit with changes in political party) for extended periods of time.

As it currently stands, not only are the Labor Party ahead in the polls but for the first time Anthony Albanese is ahead of Scott Morrison in the polls for the preferred Prime Minister. Those two things together are an indicator that we are more likely to have a change in government because together they indicate that there is an appetite for change. Mr Morrison who ran away to Hawaii during the biggest bushfires in the history of the world and whose government dithered and bungled its way through the pandemic, is now in danger of being turned on in large numbers in Queensland due to further incompetence when it comes to flood response. 

It is probably too late for the Liberal Party to knife Morrison and put up someone else as the Prime Minister to lead the party to reelection. The likely candidate would be Peter Dutton. The problem there is that with a 2PP distance of 45-55, the seat of Dickson which Dutton occupies, is well within the domain of seats that would flip is we assume that the swing across the nation is uniform. 

Knifing each other in the back in a metaphorical sense is the domain of parliamentary caucuses. General Elections aren't like the Festival Of The Thirsty Knife. They are more like the Festival Of The Stinky Wheelbarrow where the electorate at large gets to dump out one pile of muck in preparation for an empty wheelbarrow, which will then get progressively filled up with new muck until it to is dumped again and so the cycle begins anew. If the election is called and held on May 14, then it is not the Ides Of March which our debts will be settled but the Ides Of May.

Although...

Actually in all likelihood, this government has been so utterly pathetic at governing that it will probably kick the can down the road to 21 May. Decoupling the House and Senate election is the path to utter suicide and holding it any earlier than that, doesn't give the party propaganda machine enough time to rehabilitate the corpse. I reckon we're going to a 21st May election as the ice cream truck of inevitability crashes into the twitching zombie of fate.

Horse 2985 - Chevrolet: The Sad Tale Of A Bow Tie Fading

Partly because I am an Australian Australian and partly because I have an appreciation of the sheer insanity of putting a single country on such an unwieldy and daft continent, I have long come to the conclusion that things developed specifically for Australia by Australians are generally better than overseas counterparts. Aircraft refitted and engineered for our military need to fly further than most other air forces because we are so isolated, our voting system which was built of deep mistrust of political parties and political manipulation is the best in the world, and even out humble sandwich toasters are the zenith of small appliances (Breville is Brilliant). When Australians are allowed to engineer and build stuff, it is invariably the best in the world because Australia is such a harsh place that things that are inferior show up pretty quickly and fall apart.

This was also true for the motor industry. Australian built cars might not have been the most luxurious but they were generally the best engineered in the world. When you combine the design requirements of roads that are worse than France, distances that are further than the United States, and temperatures that are hotter than most of Africa, then that describes the abuse that Australian cars need to stand up to.

Commodore, Falcon, 380, Cruze, Corolla, Laser... probably without exception since about 1968, whenever there was an Australian built version of a car, or there is a pretty good overseas analogue to a car built in Australia, then then Australian built version would be better and very very obviously so.

There is an admission by American motoring enthusiasts that the United States went through a period of producing awful machinery. The American motoring industry in its quest to produce ever more power, never really bothered to pursue the line of enquiry of making cars with better technology and when the 1970s Oil Crises hit, the American industry fell headlong into a ditch and the immediate period of the late 1970s and 1980s is known as the "Malaise Era".

The cars which followed the Malaise Era were kind of the turnaround of the American motoring industry but they never really learned how to make small cars at all and the sedans/wagons/hatchbacks that America did make, were only ever okay at best. Even now, although the American motoring industry produces an insane amount of SUVs, they aren't exactly the pinnacle of world engineering. The thing that America does still excel at, is making a small amount of cars with crazy-go-nuts amoutn of power without slapping hypercar price tags on them. Admittedly, those cars are still out of the range of most people but that's probably for the best.

This leads me to the curious case of Chevrolet in the United States. I think that Chevrolet in particular tried to hang on to producing its own bad cars for far too long. Ford basically admitted that its domestic cars were rubbish and thus Ford in America sold the Fiesta, Focus, Mondeo (as a Fusion) and its only deviation was the Taurus which was always worse than the Falcon, and the Mustang which was also always worse than the Falcon.

Chevrolet on the other hand tried to make cars for the American domestic market, despite the rest of the GM family always making better stuff than anyone in America. In some cases the other GM brands such as Saturn, Geo, Pontiac, and Buick, would capture overseas stuff and sell it but it never lasted all that long because better engineering comes with a slightly bigger price tag and the one consistent thing that the American car market wants, is cars at the absolute cheapest price; regardless of how terrible the quality is.

Aveo/Sonic

Some of this story relates to GM North America not having any kind of small car at all, since the end of the T-car which became the world's most badge engineered vehicle in the history of ever. I have found 27 different combinations of the T-car, which was sold in Australia as the Holden Gemini and in the United States as the Chevrolet Chevette.

The Aveo/Spark was a GM Daewoo product which was built in Korea and then built at a cheaper price point for the United States. Intrinsically it is not a bad car but when GM still owned Vauxhall/Opel, it had access to a better vehicle in the Corsa.

The ironic thing is that the Corsa was sold in Mexico as the Chevrolet C2, after Europe had changed to a new model and the older tooling shops and IP got exported. Even after that, a Mexican C2 was always still a better proposition than an American Aveo. 

Spark

As for the Spark, it is a brilliant little machine which could have been replaced with the Opel Adam which was marginally better in every single department.

Cavalier/Cobalt

This is a tale of sadness.

The Cavalier was North America's attempt at trying to reproduce the Astra G coupe but with worse parts. The replacement Cobalt was a second attempt to reproduce the Astra G sedan but not hatch; also with worse parts. Neither the Cavalier or the Cobalt would have been up to par in Europe and they certainly weren't up to par in Australia where Holden opted to take the Corolla under the Button Plan and then took the Astra F, G but missed out on H except when Opel imported the whole car themselves.

The Cruze which replaced the Astra for Holden and the Cobalt for Chevrolet, was a joint Australia/Korea developed car; where the final engineering was completed by Holden. Holden also built the Cruze hatch.

The Cruze J300 proves my opening assertion that things developed specifically for Australia by Australians are generally better than overseas counterparts because even if you admit that the Astra has always been a neat machine, the Cruze J300 is quite frankly excellent. America got the Cruze as a Chevrolet; wherein they immediately set about reducing the quality of the parts in an effort to make them cheaper. 

Malibu

The Malibu name plate has been applied to a number of vehicles, which are mostly uninspired dross. Malibu 5 was a Chevrolet native thing which was awful and should have been replaced with the Opel Vectra B.

Malibu 6 was a reengineered Vectra C but like the Cobalt, Chevrolet decided to make it with cheaper parts than the Vectra. About the best thing about the Malibu 6 was the Family II engine which was built at the engine shop at Port Melbourne among other places.

The next two generations of Malibu could have been replaced by the Opel Insignia A. For a time, both the Insignia A and the Malibu 8 were sold concurrently in Australia. The Malibu 8 was so shocking that it sold in the tens. The Insignia although an excellent car, was sold as a Buick Regal in the United States because they knew that the price point demanded by Buick customers could cope with better built and engineered cars.

Malibu 9 is supposedly related to Insignia B but again, its been reengineered so that it's built on the cheap. I expect that Malibu 9 will never be replaced by Malibu 10 because it like so many other Chevrolet products, is so poorly built that the public aren't fooled.

Impala

The Holden Commodore from VN onwards, would have coped excellently at being the Chevrolet Lumina and then from VT onwards the Commodore was almost exactly equivalent to the Impala 7, 8, and 9. At no point whatsoever was the Impala better than the Commodore. In fact, in most cases the V6 engines in the Impala and the Commodore were the same engines, except that the Commodore oriented it north-south and drove the rear wheels as opposed to it being east-west and it driving the front wheels.

Commodore also had the wagon (which was never sold in the United States), the ute (which was also never sold in the United States but which would have sold a packet). The Holden Monaro which was pun out of the VT Commodore, was sold in the United States but was unloved as it was sold under the Pontiac GTO label but had it been sold as a Chevrolet Monaro which was a name which didn't mean anything to America, I think that it would have fared better.

Commodore also had the SS which was just a trim level in Australia which had the V8 (either 5.0L, 5.7L, 6.0L or 6.2L depending on the model) in addition to the 3.0L V6 and the 3.8L and then 3.6L V6.

In the United States though, SS was just sold as its own orphaned model with no context. Although Chevrolet used it as the thing that they were trying to market in NASCAR, this weird orphaned sedan which was mistakenly sold as a 'sports sedan' instead of the family hack that it was, didn't do particularly well. Any why? Because the Impala existed.

Once upon a time there was such a thing as a Monte Carlo SS and then an Impala SS; both of which were front wheel drive V8s that weren't exactly that well engineered. As Holden always had to pound its cars over dirt roads and over tracks that may as well have been a suggestion of road, Commodore and the Commodore SS was always a competent car. 

Camaro

I don't understand what the mentality behind developing the Camaro is. Camaro 5 was built atop the Zeta platform which was developed for the Commodore. That means that underneath the surface, that Camaro 5 was what the Monaro VE would have been had it existed. VE/VF Commodore to be honest, are still the best sedans ever produced by any manufacturer.

Camaro 6 had its own platform developed for it and although it is stiffer, it seems a bit redundant to reinvent something which was perfectly useful. The Camaro 6 platform is a make operation, despite and perhaps in spite of the Zeta platform being excellent.

Corvette

This is where Chevrolet produces one car which is a superstar. The Corvette is a raw brawler in a world of refinement, or at least it used to be. The current Corvette by all accounts is a worthy supercar.

...

The problem with this strange tale of Chevrolet is that from 1995 until 2019, apart from Corvette, they actually didn't need to make any cars of their own and on every occasion when they did, they were all worse than what the rest of the world had to offer. A full and proper lineup would have been:

Corsa, Astra, Vectra, Commodore, Monaro, Corvette.

Instead, Chevrolet sold:

Aveo, Cobalt, Malibu, Impala, Camaro, Corvette.

Almost consistently from 1995, Chevrolet chose worse options and then wondered why the market slowly crept away from it in disgust. Of course the SUVification of everything happened and General Motors in their wisdom decided to blow apart every single connection that they had with the rest of the world; so now the cars that they now sell which aren't SUVs are the Spark, Malibu, Camaro and Corvette. The Spark is a fun little machine but it is unloved in America. The Malibu probably okay. The Camaro is as good as its going to be and yet still isn't as good as it could have been. The Corvette is a shining star of brilliance.

Horse 2984 - I Want To Boogie On The Disko Highway

When it comes to what is hip, happening and groovy, it is pretty obvious that I am neither hip, happening, groovy, or whatever it is that the kids on fleek are saying these days. In a recent meeting that we has with some clients, I honestly thought that 'Cardi B' referred to someone's cardigan and I wondered if they were the latest thing to come back around of the carousel of fashion. 'Cardi B' as it turns out, has nothing to do with knitwear.

While I am sitting here in my knitwear of irrelevance, let me discuss that great moment in music history "I Love The Nightlife (Disco Round)" by Alicia Bridges and came out in 1978.

Australians will probably remember this song slightly more than the rest of the world, as it kind of had an echo boom in popularity in 1992 when it was rereleased in conjunction with the film 'Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert'; which also came out that year. The remade film clip has Hugo Weaving in it apparently but I do not care to bother to look up either the film clip or the movie. I suppose that I could care less although I fail to see how.

The accounting firm which I work for, has an office which is directly above a hairdressers' shop. This means that I am involuntary subjected to listening to show tunes, songs from musicals, and selections such as 'I Love The Nightlife' because the people who work in the shop below, like that sort of thing. This song has been on high rotation of late and so I thought that I'd break it open and explore the meaning behind the song.

"I love the nightlife. I've got to boogie on the disco highway."

As someone who has recently been hit by a car and who has broken bones, my first thought was that boogying on the 'disco highway' is not advisable. With a bit of google-fu though, I can report that it might not be as ill-advised as I first thought.

A quick search on Google Maps reveals that there is no major thoroughfare with the name of 'Disco Highway'. Immediately this makes me think that Ms Bridges is playing in the land of metaphor but as I am neither hip, happening, or groovy, I thought that maybe there was a chance that I had made a spelling mistake.

The island of Disko is about 3km off the west coast of Greenland. It is a barren place and had a population of only 11 at the 2020 Census. The main road which runs through the town of Diskofijord which is de facto capital of Disko, is probably the best candidate for the title of 'Disko Highway' and it has even been visited Google Maps.

I have no idea if Alicia Bridges was aware of this island in 1978 but I am reasonably sure that a place with a population with less than a dozen, is unlikely to have a particularly vibrant nightlife. Although having said that, if it was a nice night outside and someone had a guitar, and there was a fire going, and there was fermented vegetable produce or even distilled fermented vegetable produce being imbibed by the locals, then I could very well be wrong. I tend to think though, that any trace of night life is likely to disappear once a core of about 6 people have decided to walk home and go to bed though.

Admittedly, as the Disko Highway appears to be a single lane road which mainly has foot traffic and the only motorised vehicles which are likely to travel along it are probably farm quad bikes, then it should be reasonably safe to boogie on the Disko Highway. A traffic jam would probably only happen is someone was moving cows from one field to another and this got in the way of someone on said quad bike. Ms Bridges boogying away in the middle of the road is unlikely to cause that much chaos to local traffic because they can just walk or ride around.

Assuming the remote possibility of any of this being true, I do not that Disko is well within the range where the Aurora Borealis can be seen in the northern skies and given that Diskofijord is such a small village, it is unlikely to throw up enough light pollution to cause a problem. Boogying on the Disko Highway might very well be an amazing experience, if you had a pair of headphones in and the northern lights were on full display.

The chance of any of this being true is near enough to zero as to be declared as such. Nevertheless, now that I have put this into the world, I bet that someone on the trillion monkeys with typewriters device that we call 'the internet' can probably make this happen. 

If someone wants to throw an unfeasible amount of money at me to make this happen, then I am prepared to accept the burden of cash however large and turn this into a project: to temporarily increase the population of Disko to 12, bring the nightlife and boogie... on the Disko Highway.

Horse 2983 - Why The Right To Bear Arms Endangers Common Liberty

In the twenty-first century when we are supposedly smarter, more civilised, and better at being a society, it is pretty obvious that when you look around at the amount of disdain that a lot of people have for the poor, refugees, the elderly, and anyone who looks different in terms of race and/or nationality, that the improvements made in society were all fought for by the masses and won and then fought against by the rich and powerful, who are now very much winning.

Society doesn't tend towards justice, it doesn't tend towards equality, it doesn't tend towards equity, it doesn't tend towards what is morally good or what is kind, or what is fit and proper. Everything has to be fought for. Since everyone fights for what they think is to their personal advantage, then competing interests will naturally fall to whomever can control the most power. Power in society is very closely correlated to how much capital one has and can control.

On the whole, people have always been naturally selfish but as the last forty years have seen the silverware of the state sold off for a song and the size and scope of government shrink to the point where it has become anaemic and increasingly unable to function, the level of people's selfishness and outright hostility to anyone vulnerable has more than made up the difference.

We don't really live in an Orwellian future because government is too small to care about the details of people's lives except when they might owe taxation or other obligations to it. The future land that we live in is more like the drugged up Huxwellian 'Brave New World', Arendt's banal evil metastasised, and Bonhoeffer's merry land of stupidity where sections of the population are more likely to speak in slogans than actually engage any part of their brains to consider anything. Life in western nations is becoming more brutal, nasty and short; empirically.

This brings me to the two most popular pieces of duckspeak which are yelled by the vocal band of howling stupids. These are 'rights' and 'liberty'; which are nominally very noble words which used to mean things but are now employed as magic words by people who look sillier than a crowd cosplaying as wizards. These are the bands of howling stupid people who walk around with upside down flags and spout notions of maritime law, while being a hundred miles inland.

Words should mean things. Although I like the semantics of whether or not a '15 Items Or Less' sign at a supermarket checkout is acceptable or not, or whether the use of the word 'literally' as an intensifier is wrong but meaningful, using words like 'rights', 'liberty', and 'freedom' implies that the speaker wants to convey some quanta of information. Using words in duckspeak where no inform is being conveyed at all, is worse than using words incorrectly. I intend to take some words back and add meaning to them before I go further.

A 'right' is an ownable interest in some good, which may or may not be real, or an ownable interest in performing some action. That ownable interest is always backed up by force of law; because if it is not, then the good in question or the ability to perform the action, may be carried off, stolen, or destroyed. 

If we want to be brutally brunt about it, the only genuine inalienable right is one's right to life. Literally every other right which exists is backed up by force of law, whether statutory, common, or natural. The reason for this is that although someone's life might be destroyed by the actions of another or even one's self, one's right to life is unable to become aliened because nobody can give their life to someone else. You can not give away minutes or hours of your life, any more than you can package it up in a gift box.

All of the crimes against a person or against humanity, are crimes which destroy people's lives outright or violate that part of someone which is inseparable. I do not care if you believe whether or not there is a god in this line of argument or not, we shall take it as fact is that there is some essential part of a person which is somehow attached to the electrobiomechanical meatbag which they inhabit; which in the olden days was called a 'soul' and which secularism doesn't really have useful terminology for. This is important.

You can argue the toss until you are blue in the face about what kind of things constitute one's rights but at very least, one's right to life is the most essential and basic. It is the unit from which all other rights extend.

Crimes such as torture and rape, are so hideous because although they fall short of outright destroying someone's life, they very much violate people's soul and people's dignity. 

'Liberty' on the other hand is a condition where one is free from obstacles and hindrances to do an action. I argue that every instance of the existence of law, is an impedance of liberty in some regard. When people talk about freedom, they are taking about the application of liberty, in that freedom is the crystallisation of liberty to do something or the crystallisation to be absent from something. I am at liberty to do a thing if there aren't any impedances to me doing the thing.

To the one person who I am specifically addressing with this blog post, this is where we have a fundamental disagreement. The right to bear arms is specifically a right to an ownable interest in arms and is explicitly stated and defined by law. Whether it is Section 7 of the Bill of Rights Act 1689 or the United States' Constitution, those are both ownable interests defined by and backed by force of law. To suggest that it is God-given when the thing that you rely upon as evidence is a piece of statute law which was passed by sweaty and smelly men in small rooms, is a nonsense and a lie.

Second to this, statute law can be and is changed by acts of parliaments, congresses, referenda and even modified in operation by judges in courts, all the time. If you can not amend a thing called an amendment, then what exactly is it? For the love of banging one's head against the wall, it's literally called an amendment.

Also, I do not think that one can speak about liberty without acknowledging that every increase in the right to bear arms is itself a reduction in the liberty of other people.

Remember, 'liberty' is a condition where one is free from obstacles and hindrances to do an action. The widespread ownership of the instruments which destroy people's lives is very much a hindrance to liberty. One can not say that one is more free to do things if there is an increased expectation that someone else can and will kill you. If you want to talk about the intangible goods of rights and liberties, then you have already conceded that placing obstacles and hindrances to other people by virtue of creating a threat, almost by definition reduces liberty of other people. 

"Your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins."

I assume that comments like this from around the 1890s are designed to say that the purpose of civil government is only to prevent bloodshed, adjust rights, and settle disputes. I reject this claim outright, on the basis that if any intangible goods can be claimed then they can also be violated by intangible means. The law has the right to rule on anything where danger might arise, where order might be violated, and where things aught to conform to a common standard.

The only reason that someone owns a weapon is that they want the ability to do harm to some thing or someone else (that also includes for sport). As a gun is purely an offensive piece, its only purpose is to attack someone else. There might be an excuse that guns are used for one's defence but as they fire projectiles, this excuse is a lie. Defence is the state of diffusion of an attack and it is virtually impossible to stop a projectile moving at hundreds of metres per second with another projectile which is moving at hundreds of metres per second. The defence against attacks almost by definition are shields and walls, and parries and blocks. There are no defensive uses of guns. 

The desire to own a gun is itself a tacit admission that one's individual liberty has been reduced. Clearly such a person admits that they are not free to go about their business in quiet enjoyment of their surroundings if they need to 'defend' themselves against a threat. 

As for the suggestion that a ban on guns would mean that only criminals would get them, I am unmoved by this line of argument as a gun is an offensive piece which its only purpose is to attack someone else. The prevalence of gun shops and legal methods of obtaining them, means that the United States has more guns and more guns per capita than any other nation in the world. It is far easier for a criminal to obtain a gun in the United States than in most countries in the world.

Also, the fact that there is a right to bear arms means that criminals also have the right; which merely means that if someone 'needs' a gun, them it is because of the operation of the law in the first place. 

I also reject the platitude that "an armed society is a polite society" because there is simply zero evidence to prove this statement. Killing people is very very rude indeed. By demonstration, the most vocal individuals who are in favour of expanding the right to bear arms, are some of the most boorish and rudest people in the world. Remember, they are fighting for the instruments to cause harm and death, on selfish grounds because they want people to have the means to violate other people's life and liberty. 

It makes sense that societies which have decided to abandon their responsibility and care for the vulnerable should demand individual rights at the expense of other people's lives and liberty. People who demand rights at the expense of people's liberty have already decided that other people's lives and liberty are acceptable carrying costs. If you view everyone else in society as expenses and not assets to be defended, then it follows that the improvements in society were all fought for and won are no longer worth the effort.