Horse 3337 - Fragments XXI: An Abundance Of Rats

JO24 - The Invention Of The Press Release

When building the New York Subway Lines 2 & 3, in order to quell the rumours that twenty people a day were being killed because of workplace danger (the five-cent press found it easy to sell newspapers by embellishing the truth a.k.a "making stuff up", with sensationalist claptrap), the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. hired a chap called I.V. Leadbetter-Lee. 

Leadbetter-Lee who would late go on to do public relations for the Third Reich and the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda (he was that good at his job), worked out that journalists are at heart lazy and/or openly corrupt. He correctly determined that lazy and/or openly corrupt journalists, if you give them copy which has already been written (which means that they do not have to put in the effort of collecting the story, or writing it), will in fact print it word for word most of the time.

Thus in 1916, Ivy Leadbetter-Lee practically invented what we would now call the Press Release.

It should be noted at this point that giving copy to glorified stenographers who like to cosplay as 'journalists' has only gotten worse in the century and a bit which has followed. Public Relations Departments of big corporations have successfully written all kinds of lovely articles which media companies never check. Those same departments of corporations have on occasion also worked in conjunction with Legal Departments of big corporations and have not only written copy but legislation; which when presented to politicians who have very little legal training,  will in fact present the copy that they have been given word for word most of the time, to parliaments.

RA17 - Can You Eat Rats?

Before we go any further, we need to ask "What is Rat?" What is Rat? Rat, is a small rodent of the class Rodentia. Other things that are rodents, are rabbits, mice, capybaras, and other rats. Are these things fine to eat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. As rodents are for the most part vegetarians which will also eat garbage, they are nominally fine to eat. In fact, in the city that I live of Sydney, we have a professional Rugby League team which is named after the guy who would come around and sell you rabbits for your dinner. The South Sydney Rabbitohs are not named after the rabbits which are on their logo but the guy (the rabbitoh) who would sell you rabbits. Are these things fine to eat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. I have eaten rabbit and guess what? It's fine. Anything that you can do with chicken, or turkey, or duck, or even pork, you can do with rabbit. For that matter, it is probably find to eat mice and capybaras and while we are at it, let's eat pandas as well. Can you eat a rat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. I would.

And here's what I do not understand. We live in the twenty-first century where rats are unlikely to be carrying bubonic plague any more. Your average rat in your average city is unlikely to to have anything particularly nasty that can't be cured by curing them and then putting them through a microwave oven process. Rather than waste what is clearly a resource which we have for free, why not make use of it? It is the same kind of rationale why I think that we should be able to get kangaroo meat at the butcher's shop, or rabbit, or whatever is free that isn't going to kill us. Australia (where I live) has a problem with all kinds of feral animals: deer, camels, rabbits, hogs; I think that we can and should eat all of them.

BN09 - Benny's Wawa Order

This week in "Weird Things That I Learnt", I learned that homicidal and genocidal maniac and mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, spent at least some of his time as a teenager in Philadelphia. MA. I have also learned that Benjamin Netanyahu, spent at least some of his education at Cheltenham High School in Philadelphia. Henceforth, instead of giving this particular knave the deference that he does not deserve, I shall refer to him as Benny From Cheltenham High.

This means that Benny From Cheltenham High, apart from being a future homicidal and genocidal maniac and mass murderer, must have had a Wawa order. As a Jewish kid, one suspects that it might have been kosher but as a rebellious teenager who has subsequently gone on to defy all kinds of laws of decency, I would not be surprised if Benny From Cheltenham High's Wawa Order was a Double Cheeseburger With Bacon because if you're prepared to be a genocidal maniac and mass murderer, then breaking kosher seems like a very low hurdle that you would have jumped over a very lone time ago.

TP02 - Toki Pona Ungood Bugsum

Mrs R and I were watching a video on YouTube about the Constructed Language Toki Pona and how with a total vocabulary of less than 200 words, while it can describe most concepts, it does so with such a degree of vagueness as to be almost useless. It should be apparent very easily that if you limit the scope of what people can say, then their ability to say it is compromised. As an aside, that is the central premise of Newspeak in George Orwell's "1984". By limiting what people can say by means of language, then you even limit what people can think because they lack the language to think it.

One of the things that Toki Pona attempts to do is use only a very small number of words. Mathematicians will tell you that when you only have a very small number of glyphs because the underlying base is small, then the number names get very long very quickly. Take the number 77. In Base-10 that is merely two glyphs. In Base-2, binary, then that same number is written as 1001101. Toki Pona only has word tokens for one and three, and ten. I honestly have no idea what base Toki Pona uses but if it uses base ten, then 77 becomes three-three-one, three-three-one. or perhaps in glyphs 331,331. Already we are using six word tokens to describe a relatively small number.

I happen to be a fan of the dozenal number system, where instead of base-10 it uses base-12. I think that had we all decided upon that then within a few generations, we'd all be happier as 12s can be divided into halves, thirds and quarters, whereas 10s can only be divided into halves and fifths. In base 12, the number 100 divides into, pieces of 60, 40, 30, 20, 16, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1; all nicely. In base-12 our base-10 77 becomes 65, because there are 6 twelves and 5 ones.

On this note (because I like numbers), I think that the old Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency was secretly excellent and that owing to inflation and people's demonstrated hatred of doing maths, that we lost something. One shilling was made of 12 pence. Base-12 is already nice because it can be cut into 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1. However, the old Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency married this with 20 shillings in the pound. One pound could be cut many many different ways.

One Pound divided by: 

1 is 20/- (which is £1)

2 is 10/-

3 is 6/8

4 is 5/-

5 is 4/-

6 is 3/4

8 is 2/6

10 is 2/-

12 is 1/8

15 is 1/4

16 is 1/3

20 is 1/-

24 is 10d

30 is 8d

40 is 6d

48 is 5d

60 is 4d

120 is 2d

240 is 1d

To a modern audience, an amount of money such as 2/6 (which is two shillings and sixpence) seems daft. To anyone who has ever seen a clock though, the idea that you can cut a circle into twelve pieces, is utterly normal. 6 pence is half a shilling. 2/6 is two and a half shillings; which although intuitively feels like it should be a quarter of something, is actually an eighth of a pound. The number of glyphs required to convey that amount of information is only two, whereas in decimal your need four. One eighth of a Dollar is $0.125. One fifth of that again is 6 pence. 6d. is a lot shorter than $0.025

Owing to the fact that I had an Accounting 1 teacher who was the author of the textbook that we were using, which was 31 years old at the time, I think I might have been possible one of a very small cohort to be the last people in the world to have to use the Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency on a regular basis. From an accounting perspective always having amounts divide nicely into discrete pieces  because they are divisible by 12 is excellent. If you multiply quite literally any amount which ends in a penny by twelve (because there are twelve months in the year), they will always always come out to some whole number of shillings with no remainder at all. 2/6 x 12 = £1/10 

It follows that if each glyph can contain a wider scope of information, then you need less of them to convey that same amount of information. Chinese with its compound character system, can contain all kinds of nuanced ideas into a single character; which means that Chinese Language books end up being physically smaller because the information is contained more densely. The flip side to that is that the reader needs to be able to hold all that information in their head as to how to read the glyphs and Chinese with thousands of characters, is an exceptionally hard language to learn to read. It doesn't exactly help that Chinese dialects incluing Mandarin and Cantonese are tonal; which means that you can get close homophones separated only by tone. In that respect, Korean Hangul is a nice glyph set which contains all of the sounds and just like English or any other western language using a Latin character set, very little meaning. C is a nice letter but can be pronounced two ways. Do not even get me started on how you pronounce the letter O (even inside this sentence).

Very clearly the learning curve for Chinese text is big but the reward for doing so is a highly nuanced printed language which is able to convey complex things in a very short space. I have a copy of that great Chinese novel (?) "The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms" in three volumes but in the original Chinese, it can be printed in just a single tome which occupies less than half the volume of one of my three. 

I mention all of this by way of comparison to Toki Pona with its vocabulary of less than 200 words. If it was dealing with maths where the concepts are discrete and the object of the language being conveyed is only discrete provable truth, then it might be a useful language. Language is after all, just a set of vocalised word tokens which convey meaning. If a Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency can convey more nuanced and more useful information in smaller units than a Decimal currency system, I really have no idea how Toki Pona is supposed to convey anything other than the most basic information. Anything beyond a list of demands for basic things and Toki Pona from the outside looks to be utterly useless. 

Horse 3167 - Fragments XX: I Don't Always Write Fragments. But When I Do...

M15 - The 15-minute City Conspiracy

I have no idea how the 15-minute city conspiracy theory started but it seems to be one of the more unhinged conspiracy theories that I have heard of. Put simply, the 15-minute city conspiracy theory seems to cite road construction as evidence that civil governments are going to install checkpoints to keep the population from going anywhere and thus keep control of the population somehow. Further supposed evidence for this was that the that the Covid-19 pandemic wasn't real and that it was an excuse to implant 5G micro-tracking in everyone. Just the writing on that sentence makes me question why anyone would think that this is remotely credible.

I don't understand how people can possibly conceive that governments have the capacity for mass tracking and surveillance, when they can't get simple things like taxation processing done properly. One of the reasons why the relatively light touch to keep us within 5km of our houses during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, wasn't due to the overtly coercive force deployed by governments but people's despite to maintain law and order imn the face of an unknown and possibly very dangerous contingent threat. 

I also wonder about the sanity of people who wouldn't want things like schools, hospitals, shopping centres, libraries et cetera within 15 minutes of their house. Are these people seriously actively arguing in favour of having more inconvenient cities, being stuck in traffic for longer, and wanting longer commutes? Admittedly I have no problem with commuting 44km one-way to work but that's because I have a job. If someone wants to pay me six figures to work closer to home, then I am willing to lay that burden down.

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L150 - Levi's 501 Turns 150

According to the flickering advert boards of insanity, in between hawking eau de eye sting, soaps that smell like oatmeal, and sunglasses that have a retail price of more than a small hatchback, the 501 Jean by Levi Strauss & Co. is 150 years old. This means that this particular line of denim, dates from 1873; which is bang in the middle of the reconstruction era; in a state that wasn't really unconstructed.

The State of California, was given statehood pretty quickly after the discovery of payable gold and hence payable taxation streams. The gold miners, 49ers, all flooded to San Francisco to seek fortune, based upon the literal chance of striking it rich. It takes a canny businessman though, to see that the real fortunes to be made were not in dirtying one's hands by digging for gold but sending one's hand into the pockets of miners, by selling them things. Levi Strauss & Co. 

The 501 jean which dates from 1873, is well after gold fever has subsided and the rolling drudgery of normal life has returned. Evidently people still wanted a hard-wearing pair of pants; which given that indigo as one of the first synthetic fabric colours which was properly cheap, must have been pretty neat as well. I do not know if they had hep-cats and cool people in 1873 but there must have been enough people who liked these jeans to warrant their repeated sale.

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A20 - ABC

https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/abc-hires-consultants-amid-nationwide-radio-ratings-slump-20230317-p5ct3t.html

Australia’s national broadcaster has established an internal advisory group and brought in external consultants to try to stop the dramatic decline of its radio audiences in capital cities across the country.

In the first GfK radio ratings survey of the year, all of ABC’s metropolitan stations, as well as respective breakfast and drive time programs, reported a concerning drop in audience share compared to the same time the previous year. The cumulative audience, which quantifies how many people listened to a station at least once during the week, has fallen in every single market.

- The Age, 20th Mar 2023

To be honest, the announcement that radio ratings have fallen at the ABC is not surprising. So-called "legacy" media like Radio, Television and especially Print media has been decimated in the past ten years; to the point where ratings look anemic right across the board. It also does not surprise me that The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which are part of Nine Entertainment Co. are reporting this as a loss for the ABC because they need to feel good about themselves as they too, suffer falls in revenues across their media assets. 

As the national broadcaster and one of the last bastions where actual journalism takes place, the ABC losing ratings is not something that should be merely laughed off. A lot of this has to do with the editorial choice by management to make the ABC run a screen for the tory interests which hand picked them. ABC flagship programs like 7.30 and Insiders, are not quite the hard hitting investigative journalism that we used to have and should expect in a functioning democracy. It is telling that the hardest criticism of the government's spending of more than a third of a trillion dollars on nuclear submarines, comes not from journalists but from a former Prime Minister who is now unchained.

However having said that, this article appeared in both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald; which as Nine Entertainment Co. print media assets, are crowing far too loudly to be taken seriously. Nine Entertainment Co. which also happens to own Macquarie Radio, owns such radio stations as 4BC, 2GB, and 2UE. We can all take a giant belly laugh at the hilarious collapse of 2UE which went from being a fortress and stronghold of talk radio, to the point that having now morphed into a music station whose key demographic appears to the the residents of morgues, now likely has an entire audience which would struggle to fill a taxi.'

The ABC Local Radio Network has lost market share against stations like 2GB; not because they are inherently bad but because commercial radio has almost practically committed suicide. 2GB has managed to hold onto and consolidate all of the ex-2GB/2UE audience into one angry sordid right-wing wailfest. 2GB has decided that it wants to be a close of Fox Radio in the United States; because there is commercial advantage in stoking the fires of racism, xenophobia, sexism and any other culture war which they can light the flames to. 

Of course as expected, I would not be sitting atop my high horse if I didn't intend to ride it somewhere. I fully intend to ride this showpony into the ring and dazzle everyone with my amazing feats of utter boredom. Hey, it's a zero trick pony. My plan to drive audiences and ratings to the ABC is... make stuff they'll like.

Wow.

Inform. Educate. Entertain.

Wow.

If I was Grand Poohbah And Lord High Everything Else, then I would pivot Radio National into something closer in spirit to BBC Radio 4, and leave pretty well much everything as is. The ABC Local Radio network already excellently serves its niche. Triple J is perfectly happy to wear its 'ratbag radio' badge. ABC News Radio already basically is a cousin of the BBC World Service. Likewise, ABC Classic FM already is a cousin to BBC Radio 3. 

I would however make ABC Radio National the actual showcase for comedy and drama. We currently don't really do scripted comedy or drama on the radio and the medium is excellent at trialing out things because the lack of a visual dimension means that everything must live and die on the strength of performance and writing. Also, comedy radio panel shows are excellent. I find it scandalous that we do not have our own news quiz. This is also an excellent place to put on comedy shows from places like the Melbourne Comedy Festival and Adelaide Fringe. 

As for ABC TV, the only real suggestion that makes any sense is to increase the budget. When the ABC produces TV drama and comedy, it draws from the whole pyramid of Australian theatre and is of such good quality, that it invariably gets exported. We are perfectly capable of making our own equivalent to Scandi crime drama, Britain's police procedurals, satire, and panel shows. If the ABC produces drama and comedy, it can then sell those shows overseas. 

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CC13 - The Crown Is A Corporation

It should be noted that the Commonwealth of Australia IS a corporation. This is the one fact that the mad conspiracy theorists have correct. As with any corporation, the Commonwealth of Australia has a set of replaceable rules called a Constitution; which may be changed subject to the rules spelled out within the bounds of said Constitution.

Unlike a limited liability corporation such as a listed or unlisted company (usually denoted by Limited in their name), or a Non-Limited Company of the form that mining companies like to use, or a Proprietary Limited Company, shares in the Commonwealth of Australia can not be bought or sold. However, just like any other corporation the Commonwealth of Australia has a share, which happens to be owned by itself; through the rather opaque concept of the person of the Crown. The Crown is Corporation Sole which means that not only does it theoretically have a share which presumably is inheritable, but as a Corporation it has all of the useful powers of legal personhood in that it can buy things, own things, sell things, can enter into contracts, sue people, and be sued by people. Also like any other Corporation, it appoints a board of Directors which we call the Parliament, and it appoints agents in the Civil Service who carry out the functions and the business of the Corporation.

Get it? Got it? Good.

So the reply that the racists have that they are not responsible for the actions of people before them, is in fact perfectly legally true. Why should we hold people alive today responsible for the actions of people long since dead? The truth which racists will generally always deny, is that the Commonwealth of Australia which is corporation sole, and this also goes for the Six Several Crowns of the States, are still the same legal persons that they always were. 

There is a very good case to be made that the Crown of the State of New South Wales came into existence upon the declaration of the colony which traditionally is settled at 26th January 1788. At that point, Captain Arthur Philip was no longer just a Captain of a Fleet of 11 ships but the Governor of a Colony, which was corporation sole and intertwined with the legal person of The Crown. Various Acts of the British Parliament followed including the passage of responsible government in 1855, which handed more control to the Crown of NSW. A similar series of events occurred for each of the other five several States. Likewise, the proclamation of the Commonwealth Of Australia on 1st January 1901, invented a new Crown as Corporation Sole, bound by the replaceable rules of the Constitution. 

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SS17 - Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan's Terrible Plan

There are some questions that I get asked about that really make me question whether or not there is intelligent life on Earth at all. The real reason why we've not seen aliens is because they've already seen us and decided that we're stupider than a bucket of sentient space slime.

The question was: How much Soy Sauce could someone drink and still be safe?

This question came to my boss via a client via their 18 year old son. That ought to be enough information right there to frame this nicely. Nevertheless, if you ask a silly question you deserve a silly answer, or rather you deserve a sensible answer to show you just how silly you are.

As best as I can determine, the only thing in Soy Sauce which is likely to kill you is salt. Salt is a very simple chemical with only two elements and the bonds between the Sodium and Chlorine atoms are so strong that the chemical is dealt with exclusively as a solid component. 

The LD.50 of salt, that is the Lethal Dose which would typically kill 50% of the population is a lower bound of 0.74g/kg of body weight. For the purposes of this calculation, I'm going to assume that our genderless victim called Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan, weighs 60kg.

60 * 0.74g = 44.4 of salt

A tablespoon of Soy Sauce (20mL) contains 900mg of salt, or 0.9g.

Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan who  weighs 60kg would need to drink 49.3 tablespoons of Soy Sauce, or 987mL of Soy Sauce.

It probably goes without saying that Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan, if they drank almost a litre of Soy Sauce, is going to have a bad time. They're not going to experience the same kinds of lightheadedness as alcohol, water, or other kind of intoxication and the kind of coma that they lapse into will be quiet. Perhaps the biggest deterrent to drinking almost a litre of Soy Sauce, is the prospect of drinking almost a litre of Soy Sauce. I don't know about you but there are far more pleasant things to be drinking a litre of. 

Horse 3123 - Fragments XIX: A Murder Of Crows? No. Corvid-19

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7P - PORSWI - Ronaldo Can't Find The Sixth

Ronaldo must've been licking his lips at the thought that it was all so easy and when he drilled it home, he probably thought that he has somehow would back the clock to a time when he could destroy sides at all. The man with the flag had other ideas and Ronaldo like a mad thing, blew his lid like a pressure cooker.

The replay showed the supreme height of his arrogance. Not only was Ronaldo significantly offside to the point that there was nobody else around him but as the only other person in the Swiss half apart from the Swiss goalkeeper, this offside was so blatantly offside, that it could be seen from space.

At 5-1 the match had already devolved into a circus. Gonsalvo Ramos was clearly the ringmaster and directing everyone else around him as a series of sideshows, whereas Ronaldo trying to entertain the crowd wasn't just a clown, he was the whole clown car.

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6C - MMM Country

During the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar, as the late game begins at 6am Sydney Time, I have mainly watched the first half of the 6am games and then listened to the rest of the game on a pop-up Digital Radio station called SBS Football 1. SBS Football 1 usually takes its live feed from BBC Five Live in the UK but has also taken the English language feed from DW, CBC Radio 1, stations affiliated with NPR in America, and done commentary in house for matches where it couldn't get a live feed. SBS Football 2 will usually be the same game in one of the languages of the countries playing the match, or will take French services from France Radio and Spanish services from Radio Espana et cetera.

Australia uses DAB+ which is excellent if you are on the train, because AM radio will pick up the RF junk from the motors of the train (trains in Sydney are all EMUs), and FM radio will be completely obliterated because train carriages act as giant Faraday cages.

This post is not about football on the radio.

Since I have my wee little DAB+ radio with me, I like to scan the airwaves for other radio stations which pop in and out of existence. Apart from the main stations, the ABC hosts ABC Jazz, SBS has SBS Pop Asia and SBS Pop Desi, stations like Elf Radio have appeared for the Christmas season, Nova Radio has Nova 90s and Nova 00s, and Triple M in Sydney has MMM Classic and MMM Country.

MMM Country is a truly bonkers radio station. Being on DAB+, it like all digital stations can only be received with direct line of sight to the transmitting tower; which means that it is utterly useless at being broadcast to presumably its target market, people in the country. I have no idea if MMM Country actually does broadcast in country areas but I suspect that it does not. This begs the question of who this station exists for and I fail to have any kind of sensible answer.

So not only have I found a radio station which I do not understand who it is for, I have a radio station which I do not understand its content either.

I am bewildered by country music. I absolutely love the talent on display, which absolutely must exist because country music is generally played live, in front of bigger audiences, and with actual instruments instead of keyboards, sequencers and drum machines. Technically its amazing. However the subejct material, once you remove the universal stories of love, loss, poverty, anger, revenge, and going around the carousel of human emotions to do it all again, is really weird.

As someone who is very clearly not countrified, it seems to me that one could write a country song with only a few select words:

- warm night

- cold beer (whiskey, tequila are also acceptable)

- pickup truck

- tanned legs 

- blue jeans (painted on) 

Now again, the whole idea of having a repetitive and catchy song isn't a problem because pop music has been doing this ever since the Sons of Korah were doing call and response songs on the ten-string lyre but what is bonkers to me is that as evidenced by the sheer numbers of these kinds of songs on MMM Country (which I suspect isn't a very good sample size) is that someone thinks that people will buy them.

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2C - Copyleft

Broadly speaking there are three kinds of things that fall into the realm of copyright law. Copyright usually refers to sequential works, like books, television and films, and songs and other audio works. The fact that a thing has been published in usually enough to assert the right of the owner of the work to the right to claim royalties and remuneration from it. Then there are devices, wordmarks, logos and other visual detritus which a person wants to assert is their mark for establishing a brand. The last broad category are registered designs and patents; with the former being the physical look of a good which has been produced and the latter being control over some process which describes how to make a thing.

I do not dispute that someone should have the right to extract proper profits from their work. I do not dispute that someone who owns the rights to a book, film, design, patent, computer software, or other some such has the right to be properly compensated for the use and enjoyment of their stuff. What I find annoying is when copyright law actively impedes the enjoyment of an end user, long after the original rights holder has reasonably vacated the space and extracted their benefits first.

There is a delicate balancing game going on, where a work, such as a film or book, is owned by its readers. There is such a thing as author intent but when it passes into the hands of the reader, they are free to extract any kind of meaning or importance that they like from it. Where I find the impedence of the enjoyment of the end users particularly annoying, is when after a long period of time, there have been fandoms and/or communities built around the shared enjoyment of a thing; yet they aren't allowed to transform or borrow from the original work which brought them together.

Generally speaking, registered designs expire after about 20 years. The exceptions to this are when those registered designs are part of an enduring and ongoing use. Nobody for instance would dispute the right of the Coca-Cola company to assert their right to their famous bottle. Not only is it in current use but is features very prominently in their ongoing brand and marketing.

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30T - These Is Thesises

The point of the matter is that if I want to, I can generate about 2000 words a day. This means that for a thesis length document, I could have that kind of job done in less than two months. However, writing a thesis is no mere matter of vomiting a hundred thousand words onto the page, be it electronic or paper. A thesis is by definition an academic research paper and that means by default that there has to have been at least a hundred thousand words of research worthy material which gets put through the grinder and sausaged.

The art of writing a thesis then, is not the art of writing 100,000 words. Any fool with two months can blork up a thesis length piece of gibberish nonsense schnick nuck neigh. No, the art of writing a thesis is the art of doing hours and weeks and months and years, of tedious and often difficult research and work to test hypothesis, to finally wrangle truth out of existence. 

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24C - O 0 Oh Canada?

During the first half of this game, Canada have looked as if they have no idea that they are supposed to lay down and die at the feet of Belgium. Belgium started out this match with a sense of entitlement as they made the pitch very very big indeed, by stretching out passes and making the Canadians run further than they've ever run before. Canada though, has a squad in which exactly zero players were alive when they last featured in a World Cup. To give you an idea of just how long ago Mexico '86 was, Canada's last match in a World Cup tournament proper, was a 1-0 loss to the Soviet Union.

Canada, after they got over the initial shock of being made to run like rabbits, spent a great deal of the first half pressing forwards and getting in the face of the Belgian back three. They were rewarded 11 minutes into the first half with a penalty after a handball the ball in in the six yard box. Alphonse Davis did not deliver Canada's first goal at a World Cup.

The rest of the story of the first half as Canada is concerned is that they were simply unable to convert any of their 11 chances into a goal. Belgium when they did press forward looked like they were supremely cool and when X scored the only goal of the match, any kind of Canadian confidence instead of big and bouncy was deflated and became wrinkly and small.

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23S - The Net Weight Of A Cruise Ship

During the voyage of a cruise ship, the net weight of that cruise ship is the heaviest immediately after all of the passengers have been loaded on board. Matter can not be created nor destroyed; which means that the only thing that can happen from this point onwards is that all of the fuel on board, both for the ships engines and the people on board for their internal combustion, is chemically converted and some of it is burned. The results are then energy and the release of two major gases, which are Carbon Dioxide and Dihydro Monoxide. 

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17M - Prithee Mustang?

There's just something which feels altogether wrong about the Mustang. The wheelbase is slightly longer than a Falcon but not markedly wider. The seating position is lower but you don't really feel any more grounded. Although I have driven Falcons where the steering was vague, or the suspension tired and floaty, it still did a better job of communicating its road attitude through the seat of your pants to you.

I am not sure if this is the kind of car which does well in A/B testing with an American public, who likely wants smoother cars so that they can eat up the miles on smoother interstate highways but it just doesn't do it for me. The Toyota GT86 which is very pitchy, or a BMW 4er which is equally as anonymous in communicating its road dynamics to you, both do the job better.

Maybe the Mustang is for people who like the thought of the 8 cylinder rock concert up front but are too old to rock out properly. The Falcon coupe that I had oh so many years ago, was only a six cylinder but the amount of power and torque coming from up front was more than enough to scare the jinkies both out of you and back into you.

The current Mustang is in my not very well paid opinion a true GTO type car - Grand Turismo Obligato - that is, it exists because Ford feels that they are obligated to make this car. Mustang II was like this at the time. Fox Body Mustang which has now received a sort of nostalgic love, is looked on more fondly now that it was at the time. Mustangs 3 and 4 were both anonymous. It could very well be that the problem here is me. I have driven both the original Mustang and various Falcons; so in my mind, the car is supposed to somewhat good but instead, the current Mustang is just this vague thing which isn't sure of itself and doesn't communicate anything to the driver.

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Horse 3091 - Fragments XVIII: On Meetings, McMuffins, Magnitude, Mangling, and Michael

C21 - Conventions

The really useful thing about not having a written Constitution is that the inverse of a thing being unconstitutional and then causing a massive bunfight (which is a feature of the United States' political process) is that there can't actually be anything unconstitutional without a constitution to strike that off. What this means is that the British Parliament is always in a perpetual state of flux; where the rules are decided on an almost ad hod basis and convention lasts exactly as long as it needs to. Convention breaks down either at the point where it is no longer useful or at the point where the players in the system have already caused so much of an outrage that breaking an unwritten convention is the last straw the breaks the camel's back.

What we saw at the end of the Johnson premiership is that he was forced out of the job after everyone agreed that he was unfit for purpose. What we saw at the end of the Truss premiership is that she forced herself out of the job after she decided that the purpose was unfit for purpose. As I write this where nobody is in charge and everyone is free to eat Milo out of the tin (om nom nom nom), is that the general consensus is that the King should dissolve parliament because parliament itself is unfit for purpose.

It this sounds like an outrage of Royal Prerogative, bear in mind that the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis was resolved in the most sensible way possible when the Governor-General dissolved parliament and in a pique of democracy, sent the public to a General Election. Just imagine that. The 2022 Conservative Party omnishambles can best be resolved through the most democratic means possible. The best thing about not having a constitution is that Parliament can't very well complain that it is undemocratic to refer the problem to the people via the most democratic means. If they people then decided that they still wanted chaos and disarray, then it will be democratic chaos and disarray and not at all unconstitutional.

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M19 - The Burgerverse

The Sausage McMuffin exists. Sausage and Egg McMuffin exists. Egg and Bacon McMuffin exists. All of them have cheese on them. The only way that you can normally buy a McMuffin with Sausage and Bacon together is with a Mighty McMuffin which has Cheese, Sausage, Egg and Bacon; which is actually a Sausage McMuffin plus a Egg and Bacon McMuffin minus a McMuffin.

I do not know what kind of falling out that Sausage and Bacon had. It is clear that the mediator in the relationship is Egg, for in the middle of a Mighty McMuffin it is Egg who keeps them separate. Egg is very obviously the one in this group who is the boring friend but without whom the whole group would descend into chaos. Cheese who is everywhere, is just happy to flit between every clique on the menu and even hangs out after breakfast has ended. Cheese will play with Chicken, Beef, Fish. Bacon will also kind of play after breakfast but neither Egg nor Sausage will dare show their faces after 1030am.

Not that I am all that likely to spend very many of my Dollarpounds at the Scottish restaurant because as I walk through the Queen Victoria Building of a morning, I see the McDonald's next to a Luneburger which reminds me of the smell of spew, and Lush and Oz Hair which both interfere with my eyes. Somehow or other, the landlords of the Queen Victoria Building have managed to create a magic roundabout which is a horse tornado of unpleasant smells. 

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O14 - Order Of Magnitude

I have used this turn of phrase on a number of occasions, with a very specific meaning, and the other day my boss said that he always assumed that it just meant 'a lot' and sort if intuitively knew what it meant but this morning he asked me what it means. To be fair, I love things like this where you have a technical term for something but yet you can use it in normal conversation and people will kind of already know what you mean without actually knowing what you mean.

In mathematics and by extension in the sciences, an 'order of magnitude' is a multiple of the base that you are using. If you say that the new Capulet Firenza with the 4.0L V8 engine can four-wheel-drive costs $22,000 and it actually costs $220,000 then that is an order of magnitude difference because it costs 10x as much. The difference between 1 metre and 1 kilometre is 3 orders of magnitude because it is 1000x smaller, 1 kilometre is 1 meter times ten times ten times ten. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is also 3 orders of magnitude; Leon Musk owns more than one house or ten houses or even a hundred houses, he could buy a thousand houses; which seems like too many houses to have.

Magnitude is just an embiggenment of a thing. 'Magnify' means to look at something that has been embiggened. 'Magna' means an embiggened version of a Lancer. 'MAGA' means an embiggened version of a narciscist.

Harry Potter And The Order Of Magnitude is when Harry Potter does something ten times more impressive than a regular wizard, like actually writing that document for you instead of say "It looks like you are writing a letter. Would you like help with that?". 

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T26 - Weird Accent Shift

It has to be said that the purest expression of any accent, be it regional in the case of a vast unwieldy place like the United States, or a tiny place with discreet pockets like Britain, a broad shaded type of affair like Germany, or a mostly uniform place like Australia, is always that part of the population who are not only the most receptive to their parents accents but also their friends; that is, small children.

Kids up until about the age of 5 do not really develop meaningful accents. From about the age of 5-10 when they interact with other children, is when the twin forces of home and school start making massive changes to the way someone speaks; to the point that by about ages 10, 11 and 12, the process is complete.

In Australia we have a 'broad' and a 'refined' accent; with small regional variations but there isn't very much. Moreover, there isn't really a lot of variation between the Bogan West where I live and the decidedly posh Northern Beaches where I work. Whether I want to or not (usually not), I get to hear lots and lots of primary school and high school kids having conversations on the train and buses. I was already aware that there is a difference between my lack of Australian Questioning Intonation (AQI) and more people, I was already aware of my slightly different vowel constructions but recently I became aware of mid-tonal dips in long vowels.

I had always assumed that this was a feature of people's speech which I didn't understand; as though mid-sentence it sounds as though the world was falling apart. To my, a mid-tonal dip in a long vowel sounds like a whinge. What I am finding though, is that this is happening in perfectly boring sentences by a lot of younger people. I do not know if this is the impetuousness of youth or if this is in fact a slight change in the way that our flower of Australian English has bloomed.

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R7 - The Right to Vote

There is no explicit right to vote in the US Constitution. The 14th Amendment states that the right to vote can not be denied because of a previous condition of slavery and the 19th Amendment states that the right can not be denied on the grounds of sex. Neither of those Amendments prevent a legislature from denying someone to vote on some other grounds and neither of those Amendments express in a positive sense that the right to vote actually existed in the first place.

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M23 - Michael Jordan

To be perfectly honest, basketball is not a sport that I care much about. I have some broad idea about how it works but beyond knowing the names of a few teams and a few players, I can not say that I am a fan. Even so, even I who does not care about basketball, has heard of Michael Jordan. Probably as much as 30 years after Michael Jordan was at the height of his basketball tidying skills (basketball is a tidying-up game), you can still see kinds on the street who are wearing Chicago Bulls jerseys with the famous No.23 on them. 

What I want to know, is if the people who are wearing a Chicago Bulls Jordan #23 jersey in 2022, actually know who he is. I imagine that there must be at least some portion of the population who wear the jersey in the same way as people wear Ramones t-shirts; never having seen them live, or even on video.

The weird thing is that I have probably seen more of the Jordan #23 on the sporting field in the past two years than I ever cared to in the 1990s. Michael Jordan owns half of the 23XI Racing Team in NASCAR, along with Denny Hamlin; so #23 is currently in use as a sporting number. I seriously doubt though that the kids who are walking around in a Chicago Bulls Jordan #23 jersey in 2022 are likely to know this. I could be wrong.

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G5 - Good Enough

The people who really really appear to love burgers from the Scottish Restaurant (if you dare mention it's name then the ghost of Halloween past, dressed as an evil clown, will get you) are mostly small children and parents who want to appease small children. If you ask most adults, there are likely not many who will tell you that their favourite restaurant is the Scottish Restaurant but they will admit that it is good enough.

"Good Enough" is a similar principle to YAGNT (You Ain't Gonna Need That). If a product is good enough then it doesn't need to try harder to chase profits, and the general public who are life support systems for bank accounts and wallets with credit and debit cards will give up their dollarpounds for products which are not super satisfying but good enough.

It is said that perfect is the enemy of good. That is that in chasing perfection, a solution which would have done the job might be overlooked. Good enough is the slightly shabby cousin of good, where the solution doesn't explicitly have to be fantastic.

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H31 - Halloween

It is weird that in Australia, when it is still daylight outside after 7pm, that people want to appropriate a Northern Hemisphere post-Harvest festival. It is also weird that as we have no such holiday as Thanksgiving in Australia, that Christmas things are already in the shops and Christmas songs are already being played over the tannoy in shops. Santa Claus is coming to town but he has to walk past all of the pumpkins to get there.

The Mosman Chamber of Commerce issued no requests to businesses in the area to be equipped with lollies, as in previous years and so the number of children that we had arrive at our offices this year was only two. I heard a knock at the door, walked downstairs and saw a boy and a girl standing there, just sort of starting at me. One of them yelled "Lollies!" before they thrust their hands out and when I told them that I didn't have anything, I heard "****head!" before they both ran off back down the stairs giggling as though they'd made some funny joke.

Horse 3024 - Fragments XVII: On Conservatives, Commons, Calcium, Characters, Cars, Cackles and Cats

18T - Tories

In opposition to popular conception, the word 'tory' does not come from the word 'conservative' or 'conservatory'. The former of those two terms deals with a political position to maintain things the way they are and to change slowly if need be and the latter is to do with a room attached to the back of a house which is full of plants.

The word 'tory' is derived from the Irish 'toraigh' and means 'robbers' or 'thieves'. This sounds like a strange moniker for a political party to add to themselves and truth in point, they did not. The term exists in the wake of annexation of Ireland by the United Kingdom and in a time when there are various but unorganised factions within the House of Commons. Tories, Whigs, and Conservatives all pop up from time to time, as well as specific factions named after specific Prime Ministers, such as 'Peelites' who are named for Sir Robert Peel.

I like the use of the word 'tory' as a descriptor rather than a formal name because invariably, tories have as their grand project, taking away anything and everything that is and was owned in commonwealth and privatising it away their knavish mates. I have lived through a period of intense toryism where just about everything which was in the silverware cabinet has been hocked off to the lowest bidder. The bank, ferries, buses, telephone, electricity, companies that I use, all used to be owned by us the general public in commonwealth and have all been sold off to private tory interests.

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17Q - Queensland Seats

Good luck in actually trying to guess who is going to win the election and form government because this election will be won and lost in Queensland.

Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the two territories account for just 23% of all of the electorates in Australia. This means that the lion's share of 77% of all electorates are in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. New South Wales and Victoria both have reasonably stable and uniform voting patterns which means that you can apply a uniform swing calculator and get a sensible result. Queensland on the other hand, continues to act like an airliner where everyone wants to sit on one side of the plane or the other and so Queensland lurches one way or the other.

The problem with trying to predict Queensland is that the press is an unreliable narrator. Effectively Queensland has only one newspaper in the Courier-Mail and it never ever changes its position from always backing the LNP. In Queensland state political history, the Liberal Party basically ceased to be and was absorbed by the National Party before the new thing changed its name to the Liberal National Party and became one entity. Queensland state politics lurches between the Labor Party and what used to the be National Party and runs on impossible to see margins. Although you can apply a uniform swing and plug those figures into a spreadsheet, it may as well be meaningless as almost every seat in Queensland has an uncanny ability to snap in either direction.

I think that the likely fallout of the election will be:

ALP - 80

LNP - 65

Oth - 6

but this is still dependent on Queensland being somewhat predictable. It is not. Give up now. Save yourselves!

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9E - Elements

One of the theories that I have read suggests that the maximum size for an atom would be at about element 137. At that point, the electrons would be travelling around the nucleus of the atom at speeds which would exceed the speed of light. That places an upper bound on the number of electron shells that an atom has and the kind of shells that can be created.

What I do not know, is what kind of chemistry could be done with elements that massive. If element 119, which presumably has a lone electron whizzing around in a distant s-block shell, comes in contact with a halogen, would that create an ionic bond and a supermassive salt? If element 119 and 117 were to share an ionic bond, short of metallic bonding, would this be the biggest possible atomic pair ever?

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14S - Stereotypical

It is possible to state that something is stereotypical but is it possible to call something monotypical? Something monotypical would only have one channel of quality; which is nearer in meaning to the cut down impression of the thing which is being conveyed. Reverting to a stereotype imagines the thing and the world less complexly than a multi-channel impression being conveyed in quatravox or Dolby 5.1, 8.1 or 13.1. 

If a stereotype reduces everything to just black and white, then we call that monochome. Monochrome monitors from the 1980s which either displayed things in green or even rarer orange, might have had only two states for the individual pixel in question but those two states were either on or off. If a thing is portrayed as a one-dimensional character, then isn't it better off being described as monotypical? 

Of course the opposite of a stereotypical character is something that is imagined complexly but we run into another defect of language with the use of the word 'colourful'. A 'colourful character' is the euphemism used for someone who may or may not have a borderline criminal element (allegedly). 

Also, Fanta in its adertising says that it is for 'colourful people'. This is both amusing and unfortunate when you consider that 'colourful' is the description for someone who we might reasonably assume (but can not prove) is dancing with the edge of law, and all the more shockng when you remember that Fanta is an invention of Coca-Cola in Germany, when they had their syrup supply from America cut off, due to the fact that Germany had a Nazi government.

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30C - How Do You Solve A Problem Like Corolla?

I genuinely think that there are no 'bad' cars on sale in Australia any more. Even the cheapest end of the market with the Chinese-built MG3 has a level of refinement and build quality which leaves some cars as little as 15 years ago in the dust. So to this lady with two kids, who occasionally wants to drive over dirt roads, the choice of which car she should get is obvious - any of them.

Which car she actually wants comes down to a matter of which packaging that she wants to wrap around herself and her two kids. If I was in that situation with two kids, then I would be wildly gesticulating for a Ford Focus hatchback, or a Mazda 3 hatchback, or upon failing both of those choice and Mrs R absolutely wanting an SUV (although I fail to see any kind of net benefit in them and she does not want one anyway), then I'd be after a Ford Puma or a Mazda CX-3.

If you really wanted to pound dirt roads all day long in comfort, then my go to choices would have been the Ford Falcon and the Holden Commodore (VF and before) because both of those two cars were extensively pounded over dirt roads beyond the point of reasonable sensibility. Seeing as neither of those two cars are made anymore, then my choice naturally reverts to something which is smallish, fun to drive, and relatively cool.

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20H - Watching A Hen's Night On The Bus

By the time that I got on the 100 bus from Mosman to the City, the party was in full swing and the contestants in this game of silliness were already well on the way to self-marination. The bride to be wore a tiara, a set of L-plates, and marscara which was already running down her face from when she'd been crying. This ensemble was capped off by a pink Adidas jacket which was a colour only appropriate for the race leader of the Giro d'Italia, hi-vis workers on a building site, or a six year old girl.

I suspect that if you added up the collective IQ of the herd by this stage, you'd still get change from the price of a sole Chuppa Chupp. In the semi darkened rear of the bus, I gave up trying to listen to the politics podcast that I was attempting to follow, as several women who glowed with splotches from the contents of a broken glow-stick, sang along to a mobile phone which was suffering the punishment of having to play "Eternal Flame" by the Bangles, Madonna, Atomic Kitten, or some other starlet. A music theorist would tell you that this song as sung by them, is difficult to analyse as it had no tonal centre and modulated between the Key of S and the Key of N. I am quite sure that there were sharps and flats being sung that were previously unknown to human ears.

I can only assume that the herd did what is known as "pre-loading" of fermented vegetable product; which would explain the herd's rauckousness and their level of happiness. At some point later on in the night, my assumption is that the herd would turn from singing to crying because there is an urban proverb which states that pouring gin into a lady is the same as pouring diesel into a petrol car - they both result in whining before shuddering to a screeching halt.

When the herd got off the bus at Wynyard, they disappeared into the bowels of the station and then off into the night. I walked onwards and upwards to Platforms 3 and 4 where I was met with a silence completely alien to the 20 minutes which had gone on immediately beforehand. 

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26C - A Cat's Got Stuff To Do

The thing about cats when they are outside, is that their "don't give a rip" attitude also goes with them. Outside, cats will adopt a sense of self-preservation as per normal but if they want to do something and go somewhere, they have no qualms about doing precisely what they feel like.

I have lived with cats long enough to know that their planning process for any given thing, is about as long as the average collision in the middle of an atomic acceleramoeterbob. A cat's thinking process mostly consists of "I want" phrases and "I don't want" phrases.

When placed into action, cats will just go. If you see a cat walking across the street, at no point will it look like it has no idea where it is going even though the actual plan of what it wants to do might very well be non-existent. It kind of helps that a cat is a being with a directional purpose because their form belies the very real possibility that they might not have any.

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 2898 - Fragments XV: Of Fabrication, Flying, First Aid, Faffing About, and Folding

D16 - Own Research

"Do your own research" is in fact a terrible idea most of the time.

The idea that you should weigh up both sides of an argument sounds like a common sense thing to suggest but if you have different things that deserve different weights and the person who is being asked to weigh up both sides of an argument is either not aware or not trained in the art of the field in question, then that's potentially dangerous.

If you have a headache and someone asks you to take "some" aspirin, then would you be wise to take two tablets and 250mL of water? No! You would be utterly stupid and very possibly dead if you were to take 250g of aspirin to go with your 250mL of water. Munching your way through a cup full of aspirin tablets is obviously not sensible but that sensibility is already informed by not weighing up both sides of an argument. Some things which are beneficial in small doses are objectively dangerous in large quantities. This is the problem with truth and lies. Lies, simply do not deserve any weight, let alone to be given equal value with truths. 

If you ask someone to prove an assertion and their reply is to "do your own research" them not only are they refusing to supply you with what they based their opinions on but they are in effect inviting you to tumble down the rabbit hole into Wonderland with them. 

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F35 - Skywards

I live in one of the "LGAs of concern" in Western Sydney; which means that the NSW State Government's response to us has been to set up mass vaccination hubs outside the area, put extra Police on the streets, and enforce a curfew. The Federal Health Minister's response to NSW with regards to the "LGAs of concern" has been to deny NSW's requests for assistance and to liaise with the Defence Minister, to put Army helicopters into the skies, and other Air Force planes.

So far during the 38 days of lockdowns, I have seen the Eurocopter Écureuil, Eurocopter Tiger, Lockheed C-130 Hercules, Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, and I can now add a new aircraft to the list of things that I've seen... The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II.

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G20 - First Aid

I am woefully unqualified to render any kind of medical assistance to anyone other than basic First Aid. You would think that having worked in an abatoir that I would have developed a tolerance to the sight of blood and while that might be true for animals, the sight of human fluids is still incredibly icky to me.

If you are in trouble and I happen to be on the scene, you are probably better off writing your last will and testament, and praying for your eternal salvation because for the most part, I will be utterly useless at ensuring your temporal salvation.

These  are the kinds of aids that I can offer:

Lemonade

Mislaid

Milkmaid

Unpaid

Mermaid

Prepaid

Bridesmaid

Chambermaid

Afraid

Plaid

Police raid

Hair braid

Aforesaid

Soothsaid

Underpaid

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I22 - Irregular verbs:

I'm a whistleblower, she's a dobber, he's a Chinese Spy.

I have an independent mind, you are an eccentric, he is round the twist.

I give confidential briefings, you leak, he has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.

I'm a Pepper, she's a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too?

I live in a purple aeroplane, you live in a lemon flavoured tram, we all live in a yellow submarine.

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AZ21 - Letter Of Complaint

Dear Vauxhall Astra Zeneca,

Some of my friends who are absolute dinguses and wingnuts, believe that the vaccine is part of some global conspiracy to get us connected to 5G with quantum fresh dots or other such.

Since I have been jabbed with your vaccination I have not yet been able to:

- play the piano

- drive a Unimog

- use mental telepathy to go on the internet

- scan my head at the grocery store for discounts

Please advise what I am doing wrong. Or, are these conspiracy theories really a load of twaddle and it's the wolfmans, vampires and skeleton dudes that I should be worried about.

Love, Rollo.

PS: No, that's an unholy army of bin chickens, it's just that the Superb Irises are scavengers.

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T22 - Topology Is The Talk On An Infinitely Malleable Cereal Box

What is a Topologist? Someone who can't tell the difference between their coffee mug and their doughnut.

Topology is that branch of mathematics which looks at the geometrical properties of things and the various spatial relations of things, and it doesn't care about the shape or size of the things.

Topology talks about it being unaffected by the continuous change of shape or size of things; which means that what it's really concerned about is things being infinitely stretchy for the purposes of doing maths to things. That's really really useful. It means that topologists can build maps and models of the world and define things in the language of mathematics.

Out here in the real world where we don't need to care that much about maths, it is still really useful to think about the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged. If I want to go from Marayong to literally any other station on the Sydney Trains network, then if I ignore distance and time, then the number of times that I actually need to change trains by switching at a node is either 1 or 0. The train map itself is also a topological marvel as it also mushes together and stretches out the distance between railway stations to provide information about how to use the network. Electric circuit diagrams do exactly the same thing.

What is the topological genus of a human? It's either 5 or 7, depending on whether the fact that I can blow air through my tear ducts indicates that my eyes are orifices.

That is to say, connected to the main (digestive) tube, there are two nostrils, two ears (joined via Eustachian tubes), and two eyes (which may or may not be connected).

Horse 2844 - Fragments XIV: Of Badness, Beasts, Burglary, Boundaries, and Bob

SF14 - Spanish Flu

I am going to suggest that the chances of most people getting Covid-19 in their lifetimes is going to approach very close to 1. Granted that there are vaccines currently being deployed but even if you account for that, the likelihood of rolling out a vaccine which is going to have the same take-up rates as the smallpox vaccine or the polio vaccine, in my lifetime is not great. It took the destruction of more than a hundred million people in two world wars to produce a work of community sufficiently large enough in societies, such that they saw very big collective action problems as requiring very big action answers and solutions. I do not think that societies have that same spirit of community and forced altruism today.

If what I have said is true (and I do not know if it is or not) then Covid-19 will follow the same kind of timeline as H1N1 which is more famously and incorrectly called the Spanish Flu.

The only reason that it was called the Spanish Flu was that because Spain wasn't embroiled in the First World War, the Spanish media was actually prepared to report the news in the newspapers.

One of the better theories that I have read was that it started in the United States and came to the Western Front when America threw its hat into the ring. Of course nobody who is fighting a war wants to admit that troops are dying left, right, and centre, due to a flu because that would look poxy and weak in the face of the enemy. So whereas France, Britain, Italy, Germany etc. wouldn't report the truth due to trying to keep morale up, Spain had no such reason. 

In 2020 we saw an equally weird propaganda war where instead of this an epidemic and then a pandemic, which should have absolutely been prepared for and expected in the long run, Covid-19 became this thing which was started in a laboratory. This is in spite of all available evidence that engineering anything like this is as far as we know, orders of magnitude more complex than anything that we are currently able to do, and ascribes imagined power to a designated enemy which they simply do not have.

Moreover, if this was genuinely considered to be the act of a skilled state actor in an act of war, then the United States' response to refuse to enact universal health care in the face of this, suggests to me that the administration is by design incompetent on both sides for the purpose of extracting profits from the general public.

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SM7 - Scott Morrison

Is Scott Morrison hanging on to the Premiership purely because he likes the office or is it because the government is otherwise so internally divided that nobody wants the job? I genuinely do not think that it is reasons for ideology or agenda because this government repeatedly demonstrates that it has no obvious ideology or agenda driving it except for letting business abrogate any obligations that they might have to the economy and people of the Commonwealth of Australia.

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AS12 - Aryton Senna Is Not The GOAT

If you win a competition by being worse than your opponent and by fluke of the rules, then almost by default, you aren't eligible for greatness.

In 1988 Senna dropped many zero points paying positions (in some cases where he'd either crashed or blew up the engine), whereas Prost was forced to drop second place positions. Prost finished in more races because he was both kinder on the equipment and because he made fewer mistakes. By operation of the rules though, Prost was penalised for being better and that is stupid.

In reviewing 1989, the very charismatic accident which took out Senna and Prost going into the final chicane at Suzuka could probably be attributed as a 50:50 incident. However, taken in context of the season where Senna had already taken out Mansell in Portugal, and the fact that James Hunt predicted in the commentary that the accident was going to happen before it did, then what looks like a 50:50 incident, begins to look like a 55:45 incident.

That would be fine except that this doesn't exist in isolation and a year later, there is no doubt whatsoever that Senna deliberately rammed Prost off the road in the first corner at Suzuka. He should have been banned for life but instead he was rewarded with the 1990 championship. As far as I'm concerned, if you deliberately use a car as a weapon, in an action which would normally result in criminal prosecution and a prison term, then I am simply not going to admit as evidence anything which happened after the event.

I strikethrough Senna's 1988 championship because he was worse than Prost. I strikethrough Senna's 1990 and 1991 championships because he was a knave. 

Someone on 0 championships is not the GOAT.

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BU23 - Burglary

Robbery is the act of stealing property. Robbery can occur directly from a person or from a premises. 

Burglary on the other hand, is the act of stealing property from a closed premises. The assumption of a closed premises means that the owner/proprietor/occupier is not present at the time that the stealing took place.

My guess is that the word 'burglary' relates to the concept of the burg and burghers. These are principally city dwellers as opposed to people out in the country and my further guess is that stealing from a premises in a small city, is more daring, more audacious, and more rude, because it happens within the supposed presence of others in the city. I can not say for sure but I think that the act of burglary which happens in close proximity to a great number of people is deemed to be more offensive because it could have happened to anyone. It's weird because stealing things from a farm with wide open spaces seems somehow easier and ruder to me because you could kill someone out in the middle of a field and nobody would be any the wiser. 

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BD4 - Cricket Without Boundaries

"We want to see a bigger future for cricket after this pandemic is over. We want to imagine a better world and cricket without boundaries."

- NatWest spokesborg on BBC World Service

I completely understand Faustian bargain that sport has to make with advertising because essentially sport is an otherwise inherently useless endeavour, where the only actual products are temporary entertainment and narrative building. Sport in that respect is no different than crime dramas, talent competitions, and game shows, where the advertising space pays for the performers and the media companies broadcasting the show.

As someone who follows motor racing, the link with advertising couldn't be more obvious as since the 1960s, the entire liveries of race cars have been coloured by the advertisers as mobile billboards. The most famous articles of clothing in bicycle racing are also the direct result of advertising; with the Pink Jersey in the Giro D'Italia being coloured for the colour of the newsprint of La Gazetto Della Sport and the Yellow Jersey being coloured for the colour of the newsprint of L'Auto respectively.

I very much do not need to be reminded of why sport has to dance like a monkey with cymbals in order to chase the corporate and general public's coin. However, a quote like this is a reminder that people who live in corporate land are often gormless and humourless, and very often do not bother to do basic research about the things that they are being corporate partners to.

For one of the things that both defines the field of play and the scoring of the game of cricket, is the boundary and "cricket without boundaries" defies both the logic and the laws of cricket itself. How exactly does one score a Boundary 4 or a Boundary 6 if you are playing in a game of cricket where there is "cricket without boundaries"?

Unless of course this corporate spokesborg is trying to make a weak pun; in which case I appreciate that and will give it an appropriate "hurrrrrr" for being so horky borky. Does NatWest want to tell Dad jokes?

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GN21 - Guinea

Especially through the era of hammered coinage, British currency is notoriously complex. The Sovereign for instance, at the time of Elizabeth I, was a big flat gold jobby which was tariffed at 30 shillings and not at 20 as it later came to be.

The Guinea which was named after the source of gold in Africa where it came from, was initially tariffed at 20 shillings but as it was purer than other gold coins, it came to be as high as 30 shillings at various points.

The so-called "spade guinea" of the 1790s, seems to be a response to The City of London's request for a trade coin for use within the guilds. At some point in the 1780s, there is a Guilds Act of Parliament which affixes the charge out rates of guilds to firms getting a pound and clerks getting a shilling. The value of the spade guinea at 21 shillings or £1/1/- appears to reflect this in physical form.

I have previously alluded to the fact that Bob Cratchitt in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is very handsomely paid at the rate of 15 shillings a week which is akin to about $130,000 a year now. The firm of Marley and Scrooge as private money lenders, is likely taking in at least 15 guineas a week, if they are legally covered by the Guilds Act (which I suspect that they are). At bare minimum, we can assume from the text that both Marley and Scrooge are taking home £7/10/- if Bob Cratchitt is on 15 shillings a week. If this is true then they are taking home £390 a year; which is an astonishingly astronomical amount of money. If we calculate this further, at the long rate of interest as alluded to by Honoré de Balzac in "Old Man Goriot" then Marley and Scrooge probably have a lending book of at least £20,000 under management. No wonder heaps of people hate them. 

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KN18 - I Know Nothing

We know so very little about the world, it's laughable. I have almost no idea how my own body works, much less how my soul managed to operate this electro mechanical meatbag device.

I have no what most people in the world are thinking (literally everyone in the world minus one) and on top of that, I have no idea how a thought works or even where it lives. If I imagine an apple for example, we (and I mean boffins who know just a little more than I) don't know where in the brain that thought is, nor do we know why some people can not imagine an apple in their mind's eye. 

Having said all of that, when we have a thought that we know that we think a thing and it turns out not to be true, the general reaction in people tends to be one of deep confusion and even spills into anger.

This explains why when after Pluto was declared not to be a planet any more, lots of people got angry. I use this example because it is the biggest reaction to the most trivial thing that I can think of. The actual influence that Pluto has on any of our lives is actually nil. Yet the reason for people's visceral reaction to Pluto not being a planet any more, is that people had put some amount of work into getting a handle on this one thing and that someone can take that away, is outrageous.

Imagine then what happens if that kind of reaction spills into things which actually do matter. People invent narratives about how the world works, even if those narratives run counter to fact. People have gone all kinds of crazy when presented with the fact that people who look different to them might have inherent worth, value and dignity.

I find it maddening that people have to invent wild parts of cruel narratives, just so they can shoehorn in reasons to kill people.

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FC5 - My Five Cents

Why do we still have 5 cent coins?

I feel that the act of picking them up is more rubbish collection than actual picking them up to collect value. Evidently most other people also consider this to be true or else they wouldn't be left lying around with such alarming regularity.

There has to be some point when the utility of their existence is so small as to be minus. At that point they fall in their only function, which is to be part of the universal token system for the facilitation of the exchange of goods and services. That point has not yet arrived, it seems.

To highlight the decidedly bonkers nature of its current almost non existent utility, I shall now enumerate just how many you need to do some basic transactions.

It takes 13 of then to buy a can of baked beans. It takes 20 of them to buy a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven. It takes 40 of them to buy a loaf of bread and maybe another 19 to put something on that bread if you want to make a sandwich.

This presumes that you're only going to use 5 cent coins in these transactions. However, if you do choose to use other coins then by practical demonstration, you've already proven the current almost non existent utility of the little things.

You're better off using them for something else. Drill holes in them to make washers. Use them as tokens for card games. Put a whole bunch of them in a blunderbuss and use them as buckshot; or rather 1/20th of a buck... shot.

My current favourite use for then is as a plectrum for a guitar, which was made famous by Brian May. It certainly isn't for using in a transaction; including when transaction is helped by a robot.

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VS8 - Supercars' Closed Premises

The Bathurst 1000 is five months away but because we are currently in a time of weirdness with sport running limited and cut back schedules, it means that with less going on, various teams are making longer term announcements.

Already we've had full driver lineups for the 1000 announced; as well as announcements for so-called wildcard entries where the bigger teams in particular have planned to run a third car. Already there have been two such wildcards announced.

While that's all good and fun, it still only brings the total number of cars in the field up to 26; which is poxy compared with the fields of 55 which used to occur when I was a lad.

The excuse given is that there's simply not enough space for everyone but as I confirmed in person at the track in April, there are in fact 36 double garages with space in between them, which means that it is probably possible to pit 108 cars and certainly possible to pit 72 cars.

What this means is that not only is there enough space to house the entire field multiple times over but given that the number of cars entered in Super 2 and Super 3 is less than the remaining 46 available spaces, they could all have their individual garages. In fact at last year's Bathurst 1000, that is precisely what happened. Super 2 and Super 3 got their own garages for the weekend but still didn't compete in the main race. They competed in their own race which counted for their own championship.

The problem is that Supercars as it stands is a closed shop. The teams which exist have decided that the number of teams allowed to play is more or less fixed by instruments called Racing Entitlement Contracts; the kinds of cars allowed are specifically mandated in Vehicle Specification Documents. With both of these being closely held by the existing teams, it means that the number of new competitors allowed to play, is tiny. The pandemic allowed the existing teams the ability to close the number of entries to 24 and although they are playing with the idea of expanding that to 26, once you add the possibility of 'wildcards' which they deign to admit, then that means that for the foreseeable future, three will be a maximum of 30 cars at most.

There is exactly zero opportunity for a new team to join unless someone else either sells up or they hope for new REC to be released. This is a very far cry from the days when privateers could show up and play.

There will of course be people who actually like this new era of increased professionalism but I do not think that it is good for motor racing in this country and the proof is that the Bathurst 12 Hour has become the race where the rest of the world comes to play, and the Bathurst 6 Hour is set to become the place where the same kinds of people who would have been privateers in the past come to play. The 1000 apart from being the race meeting for a category which rudderless and which doesn't really know what it wants to be, is no longer the place where dreams are made. 

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

 PR 24 - Past Rememberence

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

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

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

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

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

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CT7 - What Do They Actually Think We Can Do?

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

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

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

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

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

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RM8 - Ronald McDonald Law

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

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

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IM11 - I Don't Understand The Malaise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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KR 9 - Maybe Not Just Karen

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

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

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

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EC14 - Let's Go To College

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

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

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

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CC17 - The 3 Cs

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

The 3 Cs to avoid are: 

- Crowds

- Close Contact

- Confined Spaces

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

- Care

- Courtesy

- Common Sense

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CV18 - They Knew What They Were Doing

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

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

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

The kindest word to describe this is autogenocide.