Horse 3479 - Magna Carta - The BIG Delusion III

4

The keeper of the land of such an heir who is  under age is only to take reasonable sums issuing from the heir’s land and reasonable customs and reasonable services, and this without destruction or waste of men or things. And if we assign custody of any such land to a sheriff or to anyone else who should answer to us for the issues, and such a person should commit destruction or waste, we will take amends from him and the land will be assigned to two law-worthy and discreet men of that fee who will answer to us or to the person to whom we assign such land for the land’s issues. And if we give or sell to anyone custody of any such land and that person commits destruction or waste, he is to lose custody and the land is to be assigned to two law-worthy and discreet men of that fee who similarly will answer to us as is aforesaid.

- 

On the face of it, taking "reasonable sums issuing from the heir’s land and reasonable customs and reasonable services" sounds like a reasonable thing to do. However, the concept of the theoretical "reasonable" person and who exactly got to decide what was actually "reasonable", was already defined at law from before time immemorial. Time immemorial was established in 1275 as being anything before the reign of Richard I, which began on July 6th, 1189.

The theoretical "reasonable" person is one who is imagined as being from the same class and status as the one who is being assized, arraigned, or otherwise being made to answer or asking to answer in court. Since Magna Carta is being imposed by the earls and barons, the unwritten assumption is that the theoretical "reasonable" person will be one of them. 

If you then reread Clause 4 in that light, the clauses "we will take amends from him" and "law-worthy and discreet men of that fee who similarly will answer to us” instead of being benevolent, sounds as ominous and foreboding as the entire weight of the law coming down upon someone should do. Who owns the law? None other than the same earls and barons who will decide what is "reasonable".

Now as this applies to the common folk of the realm such as the serf and slaves, taking their whole estate might well be seen as "reasonable" by the rich and powerful. 

5

The keeper, for as long as he has the custody of the land of such (an heir), is to maintain the houses, parks, fishponds, ponds, mills and other things pertaining to that land from the issues of the same land, and he will restore to the heir, when the heir comes to full age, all his land stocked with ploughs and all other things in at least the same condition as when he received it. All these things are to be observed in the custodies of archbishoprics, bishoprics, abbeys, priories, churches and vacant offices which pertain to us, save that such custodies ought not to be sold.-

-

Clause 3, 4, 5, and 6, all have to do with the inheritance of an heir whom we assume is already a baron, earl, knight, or other landed gentry. As late as the 1830s and the great Reform Acts, the assumption was that heirs and heiresses would either their estates maintained by a guardian until they reached the age of legal majority (which was 21 right up until 1970).

What this means in essence is that all four of these clauses, give right and reward to whomever is in charge of the estate of a minor until the clock ran out. There is of course an obvious internal conflict of interest here. Clause 5 calls for the restoration of an estate to “at least the same condition as when he received it”; which means that any and all improvements, and any and all rewards that might have arisen, belong to “the keeper”. 

This is made all the more delicious for a keeper when you consider that an estate includes only of the things in existence at the time of someone’s death, and if there has been any discovery of minerals, metals, gold, silver, or any increase in flocks and herds, they were all free for the taking by the keeper. Moreover, as an estate and land title only extends to the surface of the land, then mines which might be profitable, could, would, and did continue to operate after the heir had come to the age of majority.

6

Heirs are to be married without disparagement.

-

Whoa, we have a straightforward clause. Or do we?

Remember, an “heir” is already presumed to be a baron, earl, knight, or other member of the landed gentry. Someone who owns their house freehold, is not assumed to in this class; neither are serfs or slaves. In fact, as serfs and especially slaves may be disparaged without legal consequence and the children of slaves maybe sold on as though they were the chattel and produce of the land, then Clause 6 is of no practical consequence to them. 

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What are to we make of these three clauses as they apply to the cookers in court who try to claim that they are Sovereign Citizens. They truth is that few if any of them at all are barons, earls, or knights. At any rate, Sir Such-and-Such is unlikely to make this kind of appeal in court because they more than likely already have the means to pursue actual legal representation. 

All of this means to say that the running tally, of Clauses in Magna Carta which might apply to someone in court in Australia today is:

0/6

Horse 3478 - Magna Carta - The BIG Delusion II

1

In the first place we grant to God and confirm by this our present charter for ourselves and our heirs in perpetuity that the English Church is to be free and to have all its rights fully and its liberties entirely. We furthermore grant and give to all the free men of our realm for ourselves and our heirs in perpetuity the liberties written below to have and to hold to them and their heirs from us and our heirs in perpetuity.

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This first thing demanded was that the English Church, which at this stage is still in communion with the general Catholic church which is headed in Rome, should be free and at liberty to do what it likes. Remember, a 'right' is the ability to do a thing, own a thing, or have interest in a thing. Probably by claiming that the English Church should be free, the barony is trying to curry favour with its domestic clergy.

The feudal system as an organisational set of hierarchies, had the King at the very top, the barons and the lords next, maybe some knights and other landed gentry, then the guild operators and the freemen of the cities, towns and hamlets, and finally the serfs, indentured serfs, and outright slaves. Presumably the "free men" contained in Clause 1, were the barons and the landed gentry and the guildspeople but that's as far as this would be extended. Clause 1 claims no rights for the people who are not 'free'. 

Clause 1 also very much reflects the fact that the entire of society is stratified according to where one was born, and what one inherits. There is no obvious method of improvement or advancement up the strata unless one either is able to gain an apprenticeship of some kind, perhaps buy some land somehow, maybe excel in battle and be given something or be given a title, or at the very top by doing what William had done not quite a century and a half before this charter was issued the first time and go stabby-rip-stab-stab on the fabric of an entire nation. Kill the King; become King.

The fact that the church was the very first thing to be mentioned in the original 1215 text, might suggest that the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, probably saw this as good as any other mechanism to try and needle some more power for the church in England. In this respect, the English Church which was subservient to the church in Rome was in a similar position to the barony in England. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and certainly the combined forces on the continent were a threat to domestic English tranquility.

2

If any of our earls or barons, or anyone else holding from us in chief by military service should die, and should his heir at the time be of full age and owe relief, the heir is to have his inheritance for the ancient relief, namely the heir or heirs of an earl for a whole earldom £100, the heir or heirs of a baron for a whole barony 100 marks, the heir or heirs of a knight for a whole knight’s fee 100 shillings at most, and he who owes less will give less, according to the ancient custom of (knights’) fees.

-

Generally speaking, within the imposed Norman feudal system, if the King wanted to go to war, they extracted taxation from the dukes and barons. The dukes and barons then extracted taxation from the knights and other landed gentry. They then extracted taxation from the guildspeople and the freemen. Presumably this far down the ladder, they would extract labour from their indentured serfs and slaves.

In relation to all of this, the term "fee" is somewhat misleading here. A knight's "fee" is some unit of land which is necessary for the maintenance of that knight and maybe his retinue, for the purpose of sending him off to war. One of the fun things about what the knights and gentry could do if they didn't particularly like the prospect of being sent to fight in a war, was that they could send infantry instead. Of course that infantry would likely be made up of the same poor guildspeople, freemen, serfs, and slaves, from whom they were already extracting taxation and labour from.

Clause 2 only cares about the affairs of earls or barons and while it might talk about there being an inheritance for the heirs who will follow, Clause 2 in operation actually intends to condensate wealth into the hands of fewer people. The people at the top who can no longer extract military service from those below by virtue of them being dead (which is suboptimal) can extract the equivalence but only to a point. The heirs of the dead baron, dead knight, are still to have a useful ability to keep up the maintenance of taxation.

For reference, the going rate for a day labourer in the year 1302 was two pennies per day which at an upper bound is still only £2/6/- per year. As Magna Carta was developed by the barony and the earls, they wanted to extract what they could from below, while being left with an ample estate from above.

3

If, however, the heir of such a person is under age, his lord is not to have custody of him or his land until he has taken homage from the heir, and after such an heir has been in custody, when he comes of age, namely at twenty-one years old, he is to have his inheritance without relief and without fine, saving that if, whilst under age, he is made a knight, his land will nonetheless remain in the custody of his lords until the aforesaid term.

-

This same subject continued more or less confirms the fact that the feudal system which extracted taxation from all below, will continue to do so. Someone who might inherit an estate will not do so until the time that they have achieved majority unless they are made a knight, which by inference means that they will be sent out for military service. In the meantime, which might be as many as twenty-one years if the only heir happens to be a baby, then all of the working produce of the land will be the right of the lord to claim.

If we remember that before the industrial revolution and the installation of water and sewerage lines which meant that clean potable water went into people's houses, that the majority of everyone ever born didn't even live to see their tenth birthday, then this clause is actually a sneaky little mechanism to ensure that lands remain in the custody of lords (and then transfer if the heirs die), for long periods of time.

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What does any of this have to do with the Sovereign Citizen movement? Well nothing quite frankly. Therein lies why I find the whole notion of these people standing up in court and trying to claim something from Magna Carta as the reason why they shouldn't have to pay a speeding fine, or a fine for driving while disqualified, so ridiculous. 

At the end of these pieces, I am going to include a running tally for the number of sections in Magna Carta which by the absolute most generous reading might apply to these people. 

Today's tally is:

0/3

Horse 3477 - Magna Carta - The BIG Delusion

One of the fun things about living in Australia is that the kind of nutso whackjob idiocy that the Sovereign Citizen movement has tried cut and paste from America, doesn't really fit here at all. A favourite line of attempted defence when coming before the law is to say that they do not consent to the law, as if their consent actually mattered in an actual sovereign nation. The truth is that there is not right not to follow the law.

On the other hand as we do in the remnants of Empire, then occasionally people who claim to be Sovereign Citizens will try to throw legal treacle at the wall and hope that anything sticks. I have heard people claim that Australia is a corporation which is registered in the United States and ceased to be a country during the Whitlam Government, I have heard entire diatribes explaining how because the Commonwealth of Australia Act was passed in the United Kingdom Parliament at Westminster it doesn't apply here, but the favourite piece of legal treacle is to claim something vague about Magna Carta as though it was like some magic words.

The truth is that Magna Carta was a chart of rights in 1215, which the Archbishop of Canterbury helped to draft as a kind of appeasement covenant, to try and stop a revolt from the English barony who had both the means and the animal spirits to run through the king with many many swords. Having basically sequestered King John and transported him to a fairly anonymous field in Runnymede, the barons put forward their BIG CHART (Magna Carta) of demands, and threatened to turn John into smaller bits of delicious meat for their dogs. 

The real irony was that none of the rights demanded would make any kind of sense or even necessarily apply to the kinds of people who decide to self identify as  Sovereign Citizens. Most of them at best would likely have gained the franchise with the Reform Acts of the 1830s, or maybe even later with various Representation of the People Acts. As far as Australia goes, with the exception of Aboriginal peoples who some cases didn't get the franchise until 1962, most people in Australia had the franchise in 1902; which is still vastly different from claiming that Magna Carta, which wasn't even an Act of Parliament at the time, somehow applied some 687 years earlier.

What's also ironic is that neither the 25 barons who threatened to go stabby-rip-stab-stab on the king, or the king, stood by their commitments and the whole thing was annulled by Pope Innocent III; which eventually led to the First Baron's War, six months later. So much for Big Charters.

The current text dates from 1225 when Henry III reissued it, hoping to quell another revolt; and the formal confirmation of the text as received law in 1297 when Edward I "inspected" it as the Inspeximus issue.

Often when these Sovereign Citizens try to wave Magna Carta all over the place like a banner, judges who are legally trained (obviously) will often ask what these people rely on at law. The answers proffered are often vague and silly, and collapse to the Dennis Denuto school of legal practice of relying on "the vibe".

But what is particularly singular is that what is often the case, is that as Magna Carta is absolutely irrelevant in Australia, and in any legal context here, judges themselves have often never read it. Why would they need to? Judges having never read Magna Carta is like me never having read any of the Medici's treatises on Accounting. Sure, they might be fun to read but why bother?

That last question answers itself. Sure, they might be fun to read but why bother? Why bother? Precisely because it's fun to read. So then, without further adieu, parte the first of Magna Carta - Inspeximus issue of Magna Carta (1297).

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0

Edward by the grace of God King of England, lord of Ireland and duke of Aquitaine sends greetings to all to whom the present letters come. We have inspected the great charter of the lord Henry, late King of England, our father, concerning the liberties of England in these words:

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The beginning preamble to the 1297 text, explains that Edward has "inspected" the charter and intends to reissue it. What makes this particularly interesting is what you can not see in this text. Edward is King of England and can not speak English. The text of Magna Carta was written in Latin as that was the official language of the law and the inns at court. Meanwhile John, Henry and now Edward, like all the kings who followed in the wake of the Norman Conquest of 1066, all spoke French. The first English king to speak English was Henry IV who only came to the throne in 1399.

At this point, Edward is still very much a Gallic king and this 1297 text reflects the fact that he has a boot on Ireland, another boot in French Aquitaine, and still looks down upon England as though it was a thing which is very much beneath him. It should be pointed out that England is not the world superpower that it is going to be by a longshot, though in comparison to the many many kingdoms, fiefdoms, duchies, and city-states of Europe, it is quite stable. It is also a prize worth having because that stability lends itself to a reliable extraction of taxation.

0

Henry by the grace of God King of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou sends greetings to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, sheriffs, reeves, ministers and all his bailiffs and faithful men inspecting the present charter. Know that we, at the prompting of God and for the health of our soul and the souls of our ancestors and successors, for the glory of holy Church and the improvement of our realm, freely and out of our good will have given and granted to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons and all of our realm these liberties written below to hold in our realm of England in perpetuity.

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Herein lies the reason for the existence of the Magna Carta in the first place. In 1215, you had an English populace being ruled by an extractive French monarchy, from outside of England. It took a few generations for the English to regroup but by the beginning of the thirteenth century, they had amassed enough of a force that they could make the French take notice.

Henry III's concession in 1225, which is reaffirmation of Magna Carta in this paragraph, happens while Henry is just 17 years old. Again, this was a case of the barony of England trying to secure for itself rights and concessions, while the king was still a minor. It must be said that as the king grew up, assumed the age of majority and actually could command the field in his own right, his ability to extract taxation from the English also grew. The 1225 addition to the text which seems quite lovely, probably also belies the fact that they English baronry was still very much prepared to engage upon a policy of stabby-rip-stab-stab on the king at a moment's notice. Generally speaking, being stabbed and cut into pieces is suboptimal. 

Horse 3476 - "Grease" Actually Isn't The Word That I Heard

While driving home from a friend's place last night, I twiddled the dial on the radio and stumbled upon the once great and now zombie radio station 2UE. 2UE has gone from being probably Sydney's most raging commercial success to a tired old station, for tired old people, playing tired old music, under the ownership of Nine Entertainment Co.

I happened to stumble into 2UE playing the songs from the musical 'Grease', which unlike the titular track of the same name, no longer appears to have groove or meaning.

As someone who was born not long after the film version of the musical came out in 1978, I have been haunted by this piece of media for a very long time. What I found singularly strange about this particular listen though, is just how 1970s the music actually sounds. This is ironic given that it is supposed to be a satire/homage/subversion/celebration of the 1950s. 

I know what music of the 1950s is supposed to sound like. This was that mad point in time where rock and roll had just exploded, where jazz was still hanging on, and where crooners and ballads and country, all were commonplace. That's mostly not the problem with Grease. It is absurdly easy for a semi-accomplished musician to think about doo-wop changes and 12-bar blues. No. The reason why Grease sounds so 1970s, is the orchestration.

Music from the 1950s was at best recorded onto 4-track tape in the studio and then if other highlights and embellishments needed to be made, they were added by 'bouncing' the existing tracks to stereo and adding the rest later. When it came to the consumer listening to music at home, almost the entirety of music was mono right up until about 1957. This means that music from the 1950s, sounds more compressed and if you want to achieve the proper sound coming from a jukebox, then you need to turn the bass up as far as it will go.

Grease doesn't sound like this at all. By 1978, Stereo was normal, 24-track recording was the industry standard, and in addition to electric organs, the synthesiser was already everywhere. The recording of Grease very obviously sounds like it exists alongside disco. It is definitely not a rock and roll record. Naturally if a thing purporting to be aping the 1950s doesn't actually sound like the 1950s, then I have a problem. If the thing committed to film and record doesn't match the thing it's supposed to be, then what in blue blazes was it originally supposed to sound like?

The actual musical which debuted on Broadway in 1971, has a score which is supposed to be played in real time by an upright piano, 2 guitars (being lead and rhythm, and depending on the number in electric or acoustic), one bass, 2 saxophones, and an unshielded drum kit. It is also supposed to have 4 female and 4 male singers, who are unseen by the audience.

This means that the live performance as originally played, would have likely sounded quite a lot like the 1950s. Coming up with old valve amplifiers would not have been a problem in 1971, as all transistor amplifiers only began to show up in the mid-1970s. Grease as a live show, probably would have sounded like a 1950s show because all the equipment was still nominally identical.

This means to say that the only set of recordings that I have heard are not even a good simulacrum of what they are supposed to be. 

"Their lips are lying, only real is real"

If the only set of recordings that I have ever heard are wrong and if reality itself isn't real, then what kind of game are we playing at here?

It turns out that "Grease" actually isn't the word that I heard, and that the groove and meaning that it has got are wrong. "Grease" is not the time, or the place, or the motion, and it certainly wasn't the way we are feeling.

(and I don't even particularly like the musical either)

Horse 3475 - The Brisbane Metro Opens And The Gunzels Go Mad

 The Brisbane Metro officially opened on the 1st of July (after these buses had been operating on other routes) and transit nerds and anoraks have been freaking out about it as though it was the public transit spawn of Satan.

It is not.

It is a high-frequency bus rapid transit system that if played out properly, will eventually expand to become a network.

I do not understand the transit nerds' and anoraks' meltdown over this. The buses themselves are 3-section bi-articulated buses; with dual engine sections as push/pull. Granted that this is being marketed as buses cosplaying as something bigger but given that this is cheaper to implement, that there are 60 units operating on the M1 and M2 routes, I would have thought that this would have been good enough.

I like the bendy-buses that Sydney Buses/Gladys'-Private-Kids runs, and have travelled on many E, X and L buses right up and down the North Shore and Northern Beaches. I like the Double Deck B1 buses that run up the Northern Beaches and I am sad that apart from B1, 607X and 611X, there seems to be little desire to run more. Partly this is due to the technical constraints of running very tall buses under things like low bridges but mostly this has to do with a lack in investment in hardware. This is exactly what you should expect from vampire capital companies like Keolis Downer and Transit Systems.

One of the unique technical problems that the Brisbane metropolitan area has is that it is really a series of connected swamps with pockets of harder land that they've built a city on top of. I imagine that unlike Sydney which is mostly sandstone, or other cities like London which is clay, that Brisbane's swampy and boggy terrain would make building massive amounts of underground railway difficult. The line to Brisbane Airport for instance, is built atop pillars and kind of exists on top of viaducts. Admittedly Queensland uses 3'6" narrow gauge as opposed to 4'8½" standard gauge, which does mean that trains are narrower but that still doesn't change the ground over which the infrastructure runs. 

Maybe it's just the marketing which offends the nerds and anoraks, or maybe it's something deeper? I have no idea if there is a kind of turf war between the gunzels and the bunzels, or even if in Sydney we have funzels, but I imagine that if there is, then it's like a Jets and Sharks type thing from West Side Story. Maybe the gunzels need to stand around getting angry at things, while they stand around in their anoraks or else they freeze to death... even in Brisbane where if the temperature drops below 25°C, the gunzels and bunzels need to throw on an extra coat.

In theory, I can see no reason why I shouldn't like double-bendy-buses. The mere fact that they've stuck a name (Metro) which exists in other cities as the branding for high frequency single deck robot trains is irrelevant. A rose by any other name does smell as sweet. There really is no reason why a metropolitan bus line that runs into the suburbs of the metropolis shouldn't be called a "Metro".

And here's the really ironic thing. Before the Sydney Metro there was the Sydney Metrobus. Again, before Gladys decided to sell all of the buses to her criminal mates (and she was never charged with corruption even in the face of the ICAC ruling), there were many Metrobus lines in Sydney, operating to a 7 minute frequency in some cases. 

Maybe it's just the hard core gunzels but I do not understand what is so bad about giving people more options to get around. As someone who could in theory be a bunzel, gunzel, funzel, and munzel all in the same trip to work, I like having loads of intermodal connections. I hope they expand the Brisbane Metro and have it go to lots more places like the airport, the Ekka, and lots more besides. Good luck to it.

Horse 3474 - The Voice Of America Falls Silent

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/business/media/us-china-russia-global-communications.html

America’s rivals celebrated as the Trump administration set out to dismantle its global influence and information infrastructure, including the media outlets that had helped market the United States as the world’s moral and cultural authority.

The editor in chief of RT, the Kremlin-backed news network, crowed about President Trump’s “awesome decision” to shut down Voice of America, the federally funded network that reports in countries with limited press freedom. “Today is a holiday for me and my colleagues!”

- New York Times, 24th Jun 2025

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/19/chinese-state-media-revel-in-demise-of-voice-of-america-radio-free-asia

Nury Vittachi, a Hong Kong-based writer who has written for state-run outlets, including China Daily, also welcomed the demise of the “US propaganda operatives”.

“These groups issue ‘news’ in 62 languages to influence the minds of 350 million people around the world to take a pro-American slant – and poison people’s minds against Chinese, Russians, Iranians, and other people Washington sees as rivals or ‘adversaries’,” Vittachi said on X.

- Al Jazeera, 19th Jun 2025

It must be stated that I do not live in the United States. As such, I watch American politics as nothing more than a football match of two rival teams, who are mostly evil and incompetent. In the long run, I don't care who wins because the labels that Americans use to describe their political football teams are ultimately meaningless. There are no 'liberals'; there is just a distorted orthodoxy. There are no 'conservatives'; there is just another distorted orthodoxy.

I honestly couldn't give an iota about the idiotic rainbow washing or patriotism, or whatever other else kind of pathetic virtue signalling comes out of either side. Neither do I believe that there even is a 'left' or 'right' in American politics; with there just being a libertarian right and an authoritarian right, with differing amounts of cosplay.

Having said that, I do like various radio programs which come from NPR such as the NPR Politics Podcast, Planet Money, This American Life, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me &c. and while I can listen to them as podcasts, I actually end up listening to things as broadcasts on ABC News Radio.

As someone who lives in the shadows of Empire, very big radio networks like the BBC World Service, Voice Of America, and Deutsche Welle, are regularly heard in this part of the world. 

As one of the consequences of Mr Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is to not only defund NPR and Voice Of America but punitively claw back more than $2bn in previous years' funding, it might have the secondary and likely desired effect of destroying public media in the United States. Now clearly the United States has abandoned the project of actually bothering to give a cuss about promoting the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to themselves and their Posterity, but it seems to also want to make itself a smaller and tinier player on the world stage.

Other radio networks such as Xinhua and Russia Today, would be looking at the vacation of NPR and Voice Of America's radio spaces across the Asia Pacific region with absolute glee. No longer will the United States bother to project soft power via its broadcast media. No longer will the United States be bothered to make its own voice heard. What that means is that the radio spaces are free to be taken over and more importantly for networks like Xinhua and Russia Today, they can speak into the void left behind.

Voice Of America ultimately grew out of the US Forces Network following WW2. NPR and PBS were melded in the heat of the cold war when it was decided, especially during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that it was a good idea to fight communism by having an American version of the BBC World Service. Of course the irony that public media is public, infuriated the Nixon administration, but the people saw the value in truth telling when Nixon was being questioned during Watergate. Truth however is no longer a concern to the American people, whom it seems are prepared to believe actual nonsense.

In the twenty-first century after a very successful campaign by the authoritarian right to make the people drink from the poisoned waters of lies and nonsense, we finally have an administration who looks prepared to punish and destroy its rival all costs, including the cost of American supremacy in other places. This policy as far as I can tell, will likely have the same kind of effect as General Motors' policy of killing off Right Hand Drive cars as well as selling off its European subsidiaries. General Motors went from being market leader in 29 countries, to non-existent in less than two years. The Trump Administration obviously thinks that this is a Big Beautiful outcome.

Peace through strength. Strength through joy. Making America Great Again by degrading it. Winning through surrender.

Horse 3473 - The Curious Case Of Time In Comics

Comics are generally seen as throw away pieces of media, yeah? In print they either occupy a page entirely devoted to them as short form pieces in the newspaper, or as longer form pieces in cheaper newsprint magazine format as either stand alone or as a monthly collection, or they get collated into Trade Paperback/Tankoban.

Also due to the fact that unlike pieces of media with real live people in them, the art in a comic can actually remain identical across many decades. This has some really strange consequences for the protagonists of these stories.

For seven minute pieces of what are essentially Commedia dell'arte, such as most of the output of the Warner Bros, the classic Disney shorts, Hannah-Barbera &c., owing to the nature of the internal world resetting at the end of every single episode, then time is irrelevant. But...

... when it comes to long running series, this poses a curious problem.

Perhaps the most current famous example of internal time being really horky borky and broken, is The Simpsons. The Simpsons has been running for so long that voices are now starting to show extreme deviance (Marge especially) from the initial series, but the characters themselves are still somehow stuck in a strange 1991-92/today hybrid thing. The best solution would have been a reboot; perhaps with Bart now being 40 years old, which would have given him a new set of stories to live inside.

The Flintstones actually did try and solve this problem (which is ironic given that the series was set in the stone age), and Pebbles and Bam-Bam made the jump from being babies to teenagers. What's doubly ironic about this now is that they can only exist in the early 1970s as no teenagers today have access to that kind of free and easy employment or cash.

In series where time is fixed in a weird place, things like birthdays and Christmas which are life and time markers for the rest of us, only exist as plot points.

For the strangest example of time being horked and borked beyond any and all meaningful recognition, then this video essay on The Family Circus is interesting:

https://youtu.be/mOV0BV45NqA?si=fM9xqv_Nd7z2u547

At the other end of the spectrum, For Better Or For Worse was one of the few series to let their characters age. It likely could have gone on as there was someone willing to draw the series, but the author stopped. It is one of the few comic series that could have gone into rolling continuity like Radio 4's The Archers.

As mentioned above, through The Pebbles And Bam-Bam Show, The Flintstones had a reboot by bouncing to the next generation. This is a plot device that forms part of the lore of The Phantom, where one Phantom passes the job onto the next. Of this ilk, possibly the weirdest reboot bounce is The Beano's Dennis The Menace.

In the beginning of Dennis The Menace, Dad looked vastly different to current Dad. The Internal lore of the series seems to suggest that the current Dad is the previous Dennis; because his wife (Dennis' mum) is also entirely different. If there is another reboot of the series, then Dennis The Menace would move into similar plot territory as The Phantom; where just as there is always a Phantom, there will always be a Dennis.

Horse 3472 - The Perilous Premium Pie Problem

 A friend of mine was complaining online about the simultaneous problem of a meat pie costing $7 at a football game, while at the same time complaining of said meat pie being a bad quality meat pie. This particular brand is singularly notorious for being overpriced at sporting events and masquerading under the banner of "Gourmet", and also appearing at petrol stations as the "Premium" offering so that the cheaper options like Mrs Mac's and 7-Eleven own brand will sell more.

The reason why vendors can get away with massively inflated prices at sporting events and inside the airport, is that the vendors know that the market is captured and penned and literally can not go anywhere else. They operate as effective monopolies inside their respective enclosed nations because they know that they are price makers and the general public who might eventually succumb to their animal desires are very much price takers who might yet be forced to take whatever price is thrust upon them, however outrageous.

The fun thing about a pie vendor in a football stadium or an airport, is that they know that we know that we don't really believe the descriptions of "Gourmet" or "Premium" but need to play that idiotic game, because of the expectation of economic signalling. In order to charge an obscene price for a bog standard product, one merely needs to add a few superlative descriptors, without actually needing to improve the product. This is also why placing a premium product next to a cheaper one has the effect of inducing demand for the cheaper product.

We can see this with wines as well. The unbelievable truth of the matter is that unless you devote yourself to the proper tasting of wine, there isn't really a lot of discernable quality between a $6 bottle or a $60 bottle. I saw an experiment by Heston Blumenthal on telly once, where he more or less demonstrated that people couldn't actually tell the difference between Blue Nun which had been put into a Soda Stream and Bollinger. 

The obvious question then is "why?". Why do people buy more expensive wine if they likely know or suspect that cheaper wine is just as good? Because there the economic signalling is not to the general public but to other people. If you are going to someone's place for dinner or a celebration or something, then you're going to stump up for the more expensive product because of the perception that a special event calls for a special bottle of wine. In actual fact, the truth is that neither you nor your colleagues can likely tell the difference.

A client of ours who is a motor dealer by trade, thinks that the reason why Lexus exists, is actually to induce demand for Toyota. People who know a bit about motor cars, likely know that they are owned by the same company and that the mechanical parts under the badges are exactly the same. People are still prepared to fork out more money and chain themselves to higher repayments for no other reason than to display to the world that they are a better class of person, as evidenced by the car that they drive. 

Now as someone who wants a fun small car, that kind specific of promotion doesn't really work on me. I am generally not prepared to pay more for a more 'luxurious' version of a thing because I just do not see any increase in my perceived utility. In fact if anything, electric mirrors, electric windows, leather seats &c. are a nonsense to me because those are just more things which can break and/or fail. However, I might be induced to buy a peppier and more powerful version of the same car if the price was right. This is why badges like GT, GTi, R, and SS exist. Again the truth is that we all know that we're actually unable to use that extra performance if we're stuck in traffic going at 25km/h but at least we can pretend to ourselves.

I am highly price resistant, which means to say had I been at the football match with the $7 meat pie, I simply wouldn't have bought the pie at all. That would have been so outrageous to me that no monies would have been exchanged. It also doesn't help that that particular brand of pie is sufficiently disappointing enough that its very name acts as a warning label to me - do not buy this pie.

Horse 3471 - The Worst Team In Australia

 As I stand on a train to the city in temperatures outside the train which will not climb into double digits until well after Morning Tea time, I am clad in a cheesecutter hat, a big black scary Crombie Coat, and the brown and yellow scarf of the Hawthorn Football Club.

In my lifetime, the Hawks have won 9 Premierships, which is in addition to the 4 that they had previously won; making a grand total of 13. The Hawks are not by any stretch of the imagination or statistics, the worst team in Australia.

I make mention of this because objectively there has to be a worst team in Australia. And no, I do not mean in terms of quality because very obviously Melbourne City could easily wail on a group of 11 year olds and that wouldn't at all be remarkable. Being the worst team isn't therefore a matter of the absolute quality of a team but rather, their proven ability to do the job which all teams have as their telos - to win championships and flags.

In the A-League, there are four teams which have never won the league. They are Auckland FC, Western United, MacArthur FC, and Wellington Phoenix. Of these four teams, one of them only just joined the league, two arrived in 2018 but Wellington Phoenix who arrived in the third season have been there since 2007.

In the NRL, if we ignore the Redcliffe Dolphins which only arrived in 2023, then every other club has won at least one Premiership except for the New Zealand Warriors. They have been around since 1995; which means that in 30 years, they have won nothing.

Likewise, in the AFL, the Gold Coast Suns, Greater West Giants, which showed up in 2011 and 2012, are both relative newcomers but the Fremantle Dockers arrived in 1995; which means that just like the Warriors in the NRL, in 30 years they have won nothing.

This is where I have a philosophical problem. Never winning a Trophy, which means that you have failed at the entire telos of your team is empirically bad. Is it better or worse to have never won a Trophy at all, or to have won one which it is literally impossible for you to remember?

St Kilda have but a single Premiership Flag to their name and that came in 1966. This means that they have the dubious honour of appearing twice on the table for the period of longest premiership droughts at 69 years from 1897 to 1966 at now 59 years from 1966 to date. St Kilda also holds the equally dubious honour of winning the most wooden spoons of all major sporting codes in Australia at 27.

So this is where the dilemma lies. This is similar to Alfred Lord Tennyson's famous quote, that: "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".

How do you qualitatively compare the thought of never winning a flag with winning a flag but it being literally impossible to remember? I shall assume that these things are identical because therein lies the solution.

The nearest analogue that I have to this is watching Australia as opposed to watching England at the World Cup. Australia is unlikely to ever win a World Cup but we're still insane and mad enough to believe that it is an outside possibility. England has had a number of oh-so-nears and the shadow of 1966 still looms large over the possibility of making it two. Perhaps it is coincidence that St Kilda also won their only flag in 1966.

As for where these three teams sit now?

NZ Warriors - 3rd

Fremantle Dockers - 8th

St Kilda - 14th

The Warriors are highly likely to make the finals this year, Fremantle are dancing on the cusp of success/failure, and while St Kilda are not yet woeful enough to be in contention for the wooden spoon they will not be seeing finals footy this year. Herein is contained the answer. As we are still in the regular season, the one thing that remains is that most absurd of concepts: hope.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

- Emily Dickinson 

In my lifetime, St Kilda have made the Grand Final three times. The NZ Warriors have made the Grand Final twice. However, the Fremantle Dockers in their entire history have only made the Grand Final once, and not only did they lose it but they were behind in all four quarters. To make your only Final and know that you were never going to win it, is surely worse than making multiple finals and be leading at some point. At least St Kilda have a trophy sitting in the cabinet even though it is from so long ago that you probably need to be a minimum of 60 years old to remember it.

The Fremantle Dockers are officially the worst team in Australia; which is why as a casual fan, you should jump on that bandwagon. I can guarantee that the dull pain of losing will be continuous and sad but when the payoff of winning does happen it will be euphoric. 

Horse 3470 - We Need A Big Glowing G

 In the twenty-first century and because we have all been trained for the last 25 years to care about percentage rates of charge in our mobile phones, when people then decide to get an electric car, it appears as though the anxiety about rates of charge has also translated one-to-one to cars. As I do not have an electric car I do not experience this and can only hear about this as second hand information but it appears to me as though range anxiety is not only real but pervasive among electric car owners.

It doesn't need to be.

I currently operate cars within the architecture of the petrol based built environment. To that end, it doesn't matter if I jump into my wee ickle Mazda 2 or someone else's big ol' Truckosaurus Chunkmonster 350, if we're both pootling down the motorway then what happens is that we burn down the miles, the needle on the petrol gauge slowly falls from 1 to ¾, ½, then ¼, and finally E for "Eh, there's not much left" and we're eventually greeted with a big glowing Shell, or stupid Big Green Flower Sun, or a big Pegasus. See one of those and we're fine. 

Petition Stations, like the giant yellow arches, or Col. Sanders smiling face, are all designed to be seen by people from hundreds of metres away; before you whizz past them at 100km/h. The whole point of the very big glowing thing in the night, is to get you to see them and then respond.

I do not think that I have ever seen an electric charging station with anything like that kind of visibility. There are no glowing yellow lightning bolts, or giant light bulb signs; which surely means that as we the general public in our petrol cars are blissfully unaware of exactly how much petrol that we have left and do not care, our motoring brethren in their electric cars must always be in a constant state of panic.

This could very easily be solved with two very simple measures.

Firstly, get rid of the percentage numbers of charge left on the dashboard. Do electric car drivers really need to know or care if the amount of charge that they have drops from 64% to 63% ? If not, then get rid of it. Three-quarter, Half, A Quarter: is good enough. It is only really when you get below about 15% or 10% that discrete granularity matters.

Secondly, since people have to stop on the motorway anyway, then why not install big glowing icons for the temples of automotive electric charge? I don't know if Apple or Google own or operate electric charging stations but if you had a forecourt of sixty charging points and a restaurant/burger joint, then people are hardly going to feel anxiety while they bite into beefy cheesy yumminess. If this sounds ridiculous, then just remember that motorway services already have big forecourts where cars come and go as well as restaurant things where cars are then parked as well. 

An Apple branded charging station with its big white apple with one bite taken out, glowing into the night, would already have massive amounts of brand recognition. As for Terry Google And Sons, his glowing G already fits into a whole design language which already includes Chrome, Home, Lens, Authenticator and what not; so a Google branded charging station is not out of the ordinary.

If all of this sounds silly, then just remember that once upon a time, the whole idea of petrol stations was utterly unknown. An electric charging station is just the latest iteration of the various kinds of staging posts and houses which have existed for thousands of years. It used to be before the advent of mass motoring, that if you wanted to fill up your petrol car then you needed to visit a chemist or pharmacist who had access to petrochemicals and other motor spirits.

Of course this means to say that a place like Westfield which already has thousands of car park spaces, could just as easily turn every single spot into a charging station and charge a small amount for people to charge their cars while they shop; instead of the half dozen or so spaces which they currently have. The difference between a motorway services with electric charging stations and a Westfield, is really only a matter of location.

The mere existence of these roadside shrines to the motor car, has been the solution to range anxiety for petrol cars since 1913. That's so much of a long time that it rarely even enters people's psyche. The existence of petrol stations as the solution, negates the initial anxiety caused by having highly granularly graduated charge status numbers in the first place.

Anxiety is a very useful thing in the world of marketing because you can induce people to slide their wants into needs. However anxiety which is impossible to satisfy, isn't particularly useful at all. Also, since the vast majority of profits at petrol stations actually come from the sales of all of the incidentals at massive markups, then it seems to me that inventing some kind of charging/restaurant which satisfies the need while taking in profits, is the most obvious solution.

Horse 3469 - Rocket Bombs Turn Israelis And Iranians Into Chunky Marinara For No Reason At All

 "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

- George Orwell, The Lion And The Unicorn (1941)

As I write this, some 84 years later, the nations of Israel and Iran are flinging rocket bombs at each other; presumably for the gratification of people like Benjamin Netanyahu and Masoud Pezeshkian, so that they can go back to their respective people and use this as a propaganda device to justify flinging more rocket bombs at Tehran and Tel Aviv.

The trigger for this was that before dawn local time on Friday the 13th of June, Israel started chucking rocket bombs at several places in Iran in what they called Operation Rising Lion.

Allegedly this caused damage to key nuclear sites and killed Iran's top military leadership, though I wonder what kind of pleasure that the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad, actually get from attacking of ordinary Iranian citizens under the excuse of supposedly the private residences of senior officials, military installations, and imaginary nuclear facilities. Given the glee that they have taken from turning Palestinians into chunky marinara and making Gaza flow with red milkshake like slop, then doing this against Iran also seems like fun for them. 

This isn't to say that Iran is somehow a rolled gold voice of peace and integrity though. Iran has essentially been a rogue state since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979, and has repeatedly conducted terrorist attacks all over the world; including places like Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, Paris; and was probably at least partially responsible for the October 7 attacks as well. As an aside, Iran is also the largest external supplier of drones to Russia in the ongoing conflict for fun and profit against Ukraine; so that Vladmir Putin can get his jollies and can go back to his own people and use that as a propaganda device.

The usual chorus of idiots in the United States who have turned what used to be Twitter into a constant raging bin fire of hatred for brown people, all think that if they treat God like a vending machine, then if they pray a bit and support Israel unblinkingly, then they will receive blessings. Push button, receive bacon.

Meanwhile, arms manufacturers like Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, et al. think that this is lovely. They are mostly the reason why Americans don't have basic universal health care as well, because it is too hard to pay for the things that make people's lives happier, if you are busy paying for the profits of weapons manufacturers. I say this without a hint of dramatic irony, as 14th June 2025 also just happens to be the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. As they have a giant military parade which looks all the world like it could be in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, or Israel, the band plays "Hail To The Chief" while the United States wraps itself in the flag and congratulates itself.

As all of this goes on, the United Nations secretary general General Antonio has called on Iran and Israel to stop the "escalation", adding "peace and diplomacy must prevail". I can't help but feel that this is like a nerdy kid in the schoolyard asking politely that the two bullies who are currently engaged in pugilism, stop for a bit. The UN when it comes to this kind of thing is historically impotent, and given that the United States, Israel, and Iran have all consistently defied any instruction from the UN which they find inconvenient, then the UN's impotence must invariably continue. 

Meanwhile:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-857619

The Wing of Zion, Israel’s own version of Air Force One, took off from Ben-Gurion Airport on Friday morning as Israel initiated an assault on Iranian nuclear facilities as part of Operation Rising Lion, Israeli media reported.

The aircraft, which serves Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog as their official vessel of transportation during international visits, departed for Athens on Friday morning amid fears of an Iranian retaliatory attack.

- Jerusalem Post, 14th Jun 2025.

If you ever needed proof that the leader of Israel in addition to being a worthless knave, was also a complete and utter coward, then this is it.

This is the attitude of the leader of Israel?

Having thrown the people of his own nation into harm's way, he is able to get his own gratification as he watches Jews, Iranians and Palestinians all get turned into chunky marinara.

I'm even going to go so far as to say that Netanyahu is so much of a cussjack, that he is secretly happy that his own people are being killed. I think that he actually wants this. His government would be happy if Iran massacred thousands of Israelis because then it would give him an excuse to go full out against Iran and drag America into the war.

When oppression goes unchecked for decades, consequences become inevitable.

Iran didn’t start this, but they’ve shown they won’t be silent either. This is what resistance looks like when it's backed by resolve. Both sides in this conflict are deeply evil; and the price is not paid by any of the leadership of any of these countries but by innocent people. 

Unless the leaders stop this immediately, I can only hope that their respective nations get rid of them.

Horse 3468 - I Don't Get Pet Sounds

 On the day that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys died, invariably there was always going to be remarks on social media inevitable mentions of their 1966 album "Pet Sounds"

https://x.com/cosmicjester/status/1933007646036275528

"Listening to ‘Pet Sounds’. It’s pretty good"

- Cosmic Jester, via X, 12th Jun 2025

https://bsky.app/profile/bencrazy.com/post/3lrem5kxqlk2x

 "Took a nice long walk listening to Pet Sounds, Smile, and Pacific Ocean Blue"

- Ben, via BlueSky, 12th Jun 2025

There is something that I just don't get about the Beach Boys album "Pet Sounds" but rather than just have an opinion, I am reminded by something that my Year 7 English teacher said: which is that it is perfectly okay to have an opinion about something, provided that you can reasonably articulate why you hold the opinion. This is distinct and slightly different to the premise that people can like what they like and dislike what they dislike, without having to justify why. I neither like nor dislike Pet Sounds for the simple reason that I can not get attached either way.

Pet Sounds is an undeniably and unequivocally pretty album. The harmonies on the album are very tight, the instrumentation was basically unheard of in 1966, and the musical density of the album is a technical wonder. 

I absolutely understand why Pet Sounds is seen as a defining point in popular music, and it absolutely deserves its place as a hinge point in music history; so much so to the point where we are still talking about it 60 years later. Aspects about this have been emulated, copied, parodied, and pastiched again and again and again.

But all of that still doesn't get at my core problem with the album. Even though it is pretty, and technically brilliant, I still don't get it at all. It remains somehow inaccessible to me. 

From a lyrical standpoint the first song sounds interesting and I think that it was clever if the lyrics are intentionally ironic. If they are not, then they are still amusing enough to be memorable. 

Beyond that though, most of the album is pretty standard fare: boy wants girl, boy can't stop talking about girl, boy has sad existential crisis. It's the kind of cheesy and relatively unsophisticated stuff which knows exactly where it is on a pop album.

I'm not even complaining that it sounds nothing like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan. It is perfectly acceptable that this isn't psychedelic, or savage, or raw. This is designed to be something else; I just don't understand what that something else means, or what its telos is. 

Pet Sounds is an album that is trying to sound like it is pure and wholesome; without bitterness or rage or angst. It sounds as though it wants to sound innocent or evoke some kind of beauty. Maybe that's why I don't get it. 

People make art because they like making art. People like listening to music because they enjoy listening to the art which has been made. The impression that I get from Pet Sounds though, is that deliberate choices were made for an audience in mind, and that audience is not me.

I like some music that is tragically pretty. I understand and get why Erik Satie or Claude Debussy are trying to pull silk through your head. I even think that Procol Harum who were contemporary to the Beach Boys, totally nailed a piece similar to "Air on the G String". Pet Sounds sounds like it should be as good as any of this, and it is extraordinarily well executed, but it just can not make me care. 

I think it's because I like The Beach Boys earlier albums, which is why I think that Pet Sounds misses that one important thing that they had: Fun.

I have a similar kind of problem with The Beatles after "Revolver". Sgt Pepper is a landmark album but it simply isn't fun. "With The Beatles" is not really an album but a collection of songs that they played and I think that it is their best work because it is the funnest.

Pet Sounds sounds mature and pretty but I just don't have fun listening to it. Perhaps they hinted at this when they sang that "she'll have fun fun fun, 'til her Daddy takes her T-Bird away". Well that has already happened by Pet Sounds. Daffy took her T-Bird away and now she works in a shirt with her name tag on it, drifting apart like a plate tectonic; all she wants to be, is a million miles from here and somewhere more familiar.

Horse 3467 - The Others - 4: On Poverty

 One of the interesting things about having a class system is that it works pretty much identically to having a racist system. In some respects, a class system is a kind of advanced form of racism because it allows you to discriminate against people who look like you.

Perhaps more importantly, unlike rascism and to a lesser degree religious intolerance, is that if you are in possession of the vast majority of capital and the rewards of other people's labour, then you can actively rig the game in your favour in the long run. Working hard produces a smallish reward. Controlling other people's labour gives you the reward which would otherwise be due to them. However, controlling capital and especially other people's money, means that the rewards which would be due to wages, rents, dividends, and management fees, condensate to you far harder and faster than to anyone who has to actually work for a reasonable living.

Let's assume that it costs ₱10,000 to live a rudely boring and middling life in Pallet Town.

If you get a job at Silph Co. making Silph-scopes and other gadgets and widgets, on a wage of ₱10,000, then: 

₱10,000 - ₱10,000 = ₱0.

This is in fact the set of conditions most people, in most cases. They earn a wage to live, and there isn't really a lot left over.

However, someone who owns ₱250,000 can expect to get a 4% return on capital in the long run (being the average rate of inflation since 1 Anno Urbitae). Thus: 

₱250,000 x 4% = ₱10,000.

Yes, ₱10,000 - ₱10,000 = ₱0 but such a person would still be able to work and earn their own wage; which means that in the long run, the gap between people who need to work as opposed to those who could in theory merely live off the interest, must invariably widen.

If you are in possession of capital, then you can also 'invest' in the apparatus of society itself, such as schools and universities, guilds and associations, by making these fee collecting institutions. Fees are a barrier to entry; which means that you can keep out the people who have to actually work for a living. This also has the added benefit of acting as a set of economic signals; which means that future employers can actively discriminate on the grounds of things like postcodes and where someone went to school, to actively keep entire classes of people out of your places of privilege.

Of course if you are in possession of capital, then you can also change the narrative and openly lie about the fact. Since people believe that working hard is what generates rewards, then you can hold out the lie that if people work hard, then they will be rewarded. This is despite the fact that you by virtue of controlling other people's labour and capital, already collect their rewards as well.

It is even better if you can actually make poorer people subsidise your schools and universities, guilds and associations. If you can manipulate government so that they will pay your preferred institutions subsidies (using the narrative that all children deserve an education), then not only can you exclude poorer people from entry but you can make them pay for the places that they are excluded from. 

Since buildings are very big pieces of capital infrastructure, then if you pay people so very little wages that they have no choice but to rent somewhere to live from you (because while being homeless is an option, it is not desirable), then you can take away their wage almost immediately after you've given it to them. 

The really fun thing about all of this is that if you are in possession of media outlets, then you can gently wash the general public's mind in the marination of "personal responsibility". People will naturally resent having to pay anything in taxation, so by constantly purring the message that you should be responsible for your own fate (even though all of the above suggests that that isn't actually true), then you can actively make the moral argument that poverty is actually their fault. Furthermore, because richer people also resent having to pay anything in taxation, then you can also poison their minds into actually othering all of the poorer people to the point where they are seen as less than, and maybe even subhuman. 

Since we've already established that there are different schools and universities, guilds and associations, then we've already segregated people since birth. Because people never have to look at poorer people, then they don't even have to imagine them as being people with lives. They are just economic units to be plugged in where (and if) appropriate. That's the most hilarious thing of all because then we can come after their ₱10,000 and take that away by replacing them with machines which cost ₱100 per year, and it will also be poorer people's fault for not working hard enough.

Horse 3466 - The Others - 3: On Nationalism

 If you have a place which is sufficiently big enough that it has many different kinds of people who are racially diverse, or you have a place which has people who are religiously diverse, then a fun way to demarcate who is "Not Us" is simply to wrap everything up in a flag and make up some myths about the founding of your nation.

It does not matter if there were native people who were there before you lot showed up. It does not matter if you exacted violence upon them, or if you engaged in systemic clearance and genocide (and still have the accounting records to prove it). It does not matter if the people who came after you decided to declare your national project also engaged in systemic extermination of people. As long as you are able to tell some kind of story that people will sign up for (it doesn't even have to be coherent or logical), then congratulations, you have just invented a sense of nationalism.

It helps if you have either some founding fathers whom you can turn into demi-god like figures, because then you can project whatever your current political aims are upon them and because they are all dead, they can not sue you for defamation. It helps if you have some kind of constitution (don't worry if you have never read it, or if it is objectively bad legislation) because then you can employ strict constructionism or invoke the spirit of law, even if you have no idea whatsoever what either of those things mean. 

Nationalism is handy because it means that you can go to war on the premise of lies, and then have some veterans left over, whom you can continually refresh the mythology with. Again, it doesn't matter if as a nation you honestly couldn't give a cuss what happens to them afterwards (shell-shock, battle fatigue, PTSD), because you can decry any of them who step out of line as being not patriotic enough.

Then after having gained some token veterans, you are free to invoke the caterwaul of 'freedom', any time you like; all while demonising anyone whom you don't like.

Nationalism is handy because it comes with a set of visual language and maybe some songs. This means that you can reduce your followers to unthinking plebs who will even sing along to your hymn sheet. Anyone who dares protest, is a heretic and you can them accuse them of hating your nation. It is even better if they choose to wrap themselves in anything other than your flag. If they even as much dare to wave a different flag, then you can accuse them of being self-confessed demons, and then use your military on them with impunity.

If you can find a few token members of the people whom you hate, then you can drag them out in front of your propoganda machines, as examples of what 'those' people should look like.

If you run the line of nationalism far enough, then you can strip people of their humanity and your followers will keep on singing your praises while you do it. You can deport people who have arrived 'illegally' (you can make up the rules on a whim), and if you have gone far enough down the line, you can exterminate them.

You can even subvert the church if you like. Since your followers can be relied upon neither to read the constitution nor the scriptures which they supposedly follow, then you can pick and choose whatever you like as proof that you are in the right. Remember, a lie can run half way around the world, even before the truth has had a chance to put its boots on.

Taken far enough and you can even exact violence upon the people whom you don't like, paint them as less than, maybe even kill a few and spin their deaths as though they deserved it, and because you've wrapped the whole thing in the flag, your unthinking followers won't even so much as bat an eyelid. You have provided the designated enemies, you have othered them to the point where whether they live or die is irrelevant, concepts like justice and truth need not trouble your followers minds, all while the band plays the songs of your nation and your praises. 

Horse 3465 - The Burning Of The Angeles

 The United States in its mad dash to the far right, has taken a few more steps down the school corridor and like all true madmen, is armed. After successfully removing the shackles from the law, and with the Supreme Court and the Congress choosing to remain silent and impotent, what is occurring in Los Angeles at the moment is nothing short of barbarous and the perfect excuse for the Federal Government to send the military on its own citizens.

President Donald Trump’s rush to deploy California National Guard troops upon the citizens of Los Angeles, was so quick that they hadn't even arranged proper sleeping arrangements, with troops being forced to pack together in one or more federal buildings, resting on the floors of what appear to be basements or in loading docks.

The state troops federalized by the Trump administration over the weekend to confront immigration protesters, without the approval of California Governor Gavin Newsom, were wildly underprepared. The deployment is so makeshift that they arrived without federal funding for food, water, fuel, equipment or lodging.

What I find utterly disappointing is that this kind of thing is more or less exactly how one might imagine that the United States drifts inexorably to the right. It has had its equivalent of the Enabling Acts of 1933, this is its Burning Of The Reichstag, and soon to follow will be its World Cup and Olympics which look like Italia '34 and Berlin '36 but in the same country.

To be honest, I do not understand California Governor Gavin Newsome doesn’t activate the rest of his army guard to prevent the president from it or force him to overrule it. He could then take the fight to the Supreme Court on Second Amendment grounds, which guarantees a state a right to a militia. The question then posed before SCOTUS would be how can a state have a militia if the president can simply federalize it?

From a cultural standpoint, anyone claiming that the United States is a "Christian" nation, or resembles anything like one, is either deliberately stupid, dog ignorant, or seriously delusional.

The folks hollering about “family values” are out in the street tearing families apart with unlawful ICE raids, militarized police, & the weaponization of government; all while ripping away food & healthcare from working-class families.

This is all coloured by the fact that this has been baited and egged on by the right wing media who must be absolutely beside themselves after having gained some official designated enemies for whom people can direct their Two Minutes Of Hate at, and they can sell advertising space. 

For decades the NRA and other gun nuts told the American public that their guns were to protect everyone from a tyrannical government. So when a tyrannical government actually does arrive, all they do is either all sitting on their hands, or applaud. Meanwhile, the people who want gun control have to take to the streets to defy the tyrannical government instead.

I am not condoning violence. Setting cars on fire and causing damage to property is not acceptable and should be condemned. What does need to be made clear though, is that this doesn't happen in a vacuum and the right wing media and the people cheering this on, because they can now claim some kind of moral high ground, are evil.

If you think a guy standing on a vandalized Waymo car with a Mexican flag is a bigger issue than the president calling for the arrest of a Governor for no reason, you may have lost the plot...

...or you might very well be one of the howling masses trying to sleepwalk and goosestep at the same time. We have seen this before. 

Horse 3464 - The Others - 2: On Religion

 Literally everyone in the kosmos and everyone who has ever lived, has had at lease some basic belief set about how they expect the kosmos to operate. It is impossible to literally believe in nothing whatsoever. This means that while it is possible to believe that there are no god/gods and be an atheist, it is impossible to be an apistist. As religion is a set of practises based upon what one believes (indeed the word 'religion' comes from the Latin 'religare' which is an observance), then even atheists have some kind of religion because they act in the kosmos.

What is up for contention is how those practices are played out. While there is a common assertion that religion is responsible for more deaths and wars in history than anything else, that kind of immediately falls to pieces under even the lightest of interrogation, when you consider that apart from diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, plague, influenza, and dysentery, the actual thing that casus the most wars is weaponised selfishness. That is: "You have what I want; I am prepared to kill you and your family/nation to take it." Then there is the argument over what constitutes a person; in which case abortions conducted in both capitalist and communist countries, both voluntary and involuntary, might in fact change the numbers by hundreds of millions of not billions of people.

Setting all of that aside, the subject of this post is about the demarcation line of who is 'Us' and 'Not Us', is the subject of religion. Already we are off to a tenuous start as we can and have put a very very big asterisk on the subject.

Organised religion (as opposed to the disorganised religion of an individual - see above) usually comes with a set of scriptures/mantras/rules/laws/covenants et cetera, which readily inform the adherents of their belief set. This ready cut intellectual material is really useful in defining who is 'Us' and 'Not Us' and does so on all kinds of grounds such as race, geography, gender, and even observance to the physical things that the intellectual material demands.

The internal problem and the big question which results is: does a religion actually give someone licence to hate someone else, as opposed to what they do, or what they are, or what they decide, or is this the excuse to hate someone else? In deciding who is 'Us' and 'Not Us', the follower of a religion not only has to filter this choice through the intellectual material of their religion, but also decide if the intellectual material lends itself to this conclusion, or even if the intellectual material is internally consistent and/or valuable enough to apply.

Here is where the entire field where religion becomes the excuse to condemn people as other. In very many circumstances, we can find that someone is prepared to accept their own kith and/or kin who happens to do something which violates the moral code of their religion but if someone is more than a couple of arms' lengths away, it suddenly becomes acceptable to wish not only existential hellfire upon them in the abstract but immediate and present harm and danger in the here and now.

Think about the so-called "religious wars" that have happened. Was the Catholic v Protestant fighting in Ireland really over the practice of religion? Not a bar of it. The English has invaded Ireland under William III and everything which followed including "The Troubles" has been about the control of Ireland. Not once have I ever heard even so much as a peep of reference to anything in scripture. The current war in Gaza also has nothing to do with religion. Hamas and Likud are about as far away from Qu'ran and Torah as you can possibly get, and the current Netanyahu Government has openly stated that this is about land clearance; with the destruction of innocent people as collateral damage. The people of Gaza have been othered to the point where they are no longer seen as people.

On the other hand, the great waves of the Islamic Caliphates, were also never really about promoting Islam. Rather, they were about conquering land, controlling resources, and finding new and cheap sources of labour to do the dirty work; all with the threat of the sword and the power of the state. This is hardly a new concept at all. Whether it was the Arabs in the 600s, the Spanish in the New World, or the British in the immediate wake of the Industrial Revolution, money and power are what drive the rise of Empire; with religion being used as a paintbrush after the fact.

The "religious right" in the United States which appears to be in the ascendancy right now, also likes to cover itself with the iconography of Christian Nationalism, which is ironic given that they also want to weaponize the state to destroy their designated enemies. Say what you like about the moral conception of and treatment of gay people, trans people, illegal immigrants and whatnot, because it all seems to ring a bit hollow in a nation that on one hand wants to kill unborn babies for economic convenience and on the other thrown poor people to the weeds, also for economic convenience. Caring for the poor and vulnerable, all looks like anathema to the so-called "religious right".

I do not know how you can hold the ideas of civic philos and charitable agape in the same hand as a gladius. I do not know how you can demonstrate love for someone while actively banishing them. I do not know how you can show respect for your god/gods while at the same time othering someone else who is made in the same humanity as yourself.

However, I can understand all of these things if you made the decision to other someone else, to put them outside of your religious space, and to render them as less than human. Because if you render someone as less than human, then you are at perfect liberty to take their money, their house, their bodies, their dignity, their land, and their lives, because if they are less than human then it isn't really stealing, is it?

Horse 3463 - The Others - 1: On Race

People seem to forget that the entire of the twenty-first century, all follows on from the fallout of the Sep 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. The need to fund two wars based upon the premise of lies, meant that the US Government borrowed money from the general public by issuing Treasury Bonds which were then sold to financial institutions, who then saw it fit to sell cheap unregulated housing loans which then caused the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. 

On the back of trying to find any kind of hope in the midst of the worst economic downturn of that generation, the people of the United States voted in Barack Obama as the first black president; which then gave rise to the TEA Party and then Obama's one misstep in making fun of Donald Trump in the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.

That act of provocation became the single hinge point which led to Trump deciding to run for the Presidency  and finding compliant token sycophants who know that they are being used on a contractual basis in return for their fealty.

Trump was not the first white president but he was the first explicitly white president in direct opposition to a black president. Trump's rhetoric almost from the get go of announcing his candidacy has always been firmly grounded in race; which included one of his very first press conferences containing the assertion that "some Mexicans are rapists, some are good people"; as well as trying to blame China for any and all of the United States' woes.

Trump was also not the first explicitly racist President but he was the first in a while; which seems to indicate that racism was always bubbling away under the surface. The very existence of the United States as a nation was predicated on punitive taxation measures which were designed by the Lord North Government to bring the 13 Colonies to heel, over the issue of slavery; to the point where slaves were considered to be "three fifths of a person" within the bounds of the Constitution and because this issue was never properly resolved, arguably even with the Civil War, the existence of Trump is a symptom rather than a root cause of the current wave of racism. What he has done is given permission on the world stage, for various kinds of explicitly white nationalist causes to flourish in other countries.

The big through line here, is that racism which is closely linked to nationalism, is about demarcating lines to divide those people who are 'Not Us' from 'Us'. The anarchists who would like to smash the patriarchy almost hint at the root of the thing that they are fighting against. The 'patriarchy' defines its terms by the 'pateras', that is the big question of 'who is our father?' and 'who is our father's children?'. If we are children of a common father, then the people over there who are not, are 'Not Us'.

In fact many nations explicitly have their national stories defined either by some founding fathers, or by some mythos which defines the nation itself as the 'Fatherland' or the 'Motherland'. Within the context of empire, the 'Mother Country' is often the one which decided to go off on its path of conquest; the irony here is that after having arrived and convinced local populations that they should be like the Mother Country, it is the children of the shadow of Empire who are often the most resentful and explicitly racist if those peoples then show up in the Mother Country. 

To wit: In Australia there is quite an explicit undercurrent of overt racism who resents people from India and the sub-continent arriving here. Usually the excuse is that these people refuse to 'assimilate'; when in actual fact it is the children of Indian migrants who are out on the sporting fields playing cricket of an afternoon. I find it somewhat ridiculous to accuse people of not assimilating when they are better at actually living out your culture than you are.

At the vanguard of this movement are organisations like Advance, which as far as I can tell is a front company of some kind and largely funded by former Liberal Party operatives. If it was set up in opposition to GetUp as an astroturf group, then it has expanded beyond its original remit. 

Racism at its core, is the incredibly lazy form of othering based upon the outward appearance of people. It exists to create the "Not Us" through nothing more than looking at people from the outside and then deciding that they do not fit the imagined ideal of what "Us" should look like. To that end, depending on what the "Us" actually is, people can be scaled as being not enough of "Us". At various stages, Jewish people, Chinese people, and Eastern European people have either been determined to be enough or not enough of us depending on circumstance and the current political climate. Of course this assumes that we view the world through a white lens. In some parts of Africa the lens is differently coloured and reversed. 

Speaking as someone who lives in Western Sydney, where there are people who look different to me all over the place, I really do not understand either the point or the effort required to enforce racism. I also work in a firm in which everyone else can speak Chinese and I can not; which means that there are many conversations which occur which I have no idea what is being said; and that's totally fine. Even doing a simple count of the number of nations where people from my local church came from, I count 17. 

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus"

- Galatians 3:28

I am assuming that most people who read this are not people of faith and that is fine. This part is not directed at you. This part is directed at the people who supposedly believe in "Judeo-Christian values" but then immediately start spewing nonsense, which demonstrates that they really do not understand the "values" which they like to cosplay in. The Old Testament contains many many commands in Torah to look after the vulnerable, widows, orphans, and aliens. The New Testament, which was written entirely underneath the rule of the Roman Empire, very much is about opening up the The Way to people who are not the same as "Us". Explicitly, the Roman Empire which was the biggest superpower of the day, stood as the overarching enemy; which meant that issues such as race dissolved in the face of the common foe. Of course, Christianity itself stands in stark opposition to racism; by virtue of the fact that it declares that there is one race, the human race, and we are all sinners in need of salvation.

Private corporations are different in that the members and owners of the corporation, have an interest because they chose to buy into the organisation through the purchase of shares. The nation state which owns itself, doesn't really have that kind of subscriber model; nor does it make sense to define who is "Us" and "Not Us" by those same terms. Being born into a family at a particular place and time is entirely a lottery. Literally nobody chooses where they are born. Nobody chooses who their family are. The nation state is different in that people who are not automatically citizens by accident of birth, can choose to join another national project (subject to rules of course). The nation state, especially when it is made up of people of various kinds of races, both internally and externally, is completely agnostic and apathetic to the notion of race entirely unless otherwise and/or explicitly stated. 

Yes, I understand that the nation state exists because there are things like language and religion which mean that people have been sorted, but the nation state itself in essence is just a very big collective purchasing and organisation tool; which is one of the biggest pieces of community and commonwealth there is.

I do not know how you can look at other people and come to the conclusion that they are not worthy of dignity. I do not know how you can look at other people and come to the conclusion that they are not worthy of decency. I do not know how you can look at other people and come to the conclusion that they are not worthy of being considered your confederate.

In short, while I understand why racism exists, I think that the people who want to engage in it, do so because they are cruel knaves who refuse accept the notion that someone who looks different to them, can ever be included as "Us".

Horse 3462 - Unchain The Indy 500

 In an act which has been quite rightly seen as 'cheating', the two cars of Joseph Newgarden and Will Power were pulled up before qualifying for the 2025 Indianapolis 500, were denied their runs and will start from the last row of the grid.

Joseph Newgarden and Will Power, both of Team Penske, were found by the IndyCar technical inspectors to have filled a seam to close off airflow over the rear attenuator.

The rear attenuator is a safety device designed to absorb and reduce the force of impacts. Most likely the seam was filled in an attempt to gain an aerodynamic advantage; in a sport where even a thousandth of a second makes a difference.

One thousandth of a second at 200mph, is about 4 inches. Multiply that over the course of the Indianapolis 500 and you have the length of a cricket pitch.

Of note here is that IndyCar is a spec series which uses spec parts and the rear attenuator is one such spec part that is not allowed to be modified.

Now while I understand the desire to create a level playing field because we want to maintain the veneer of sporting competition, I think that the Indianapolis 500 in particular is a race looking for a series and the very act of trying to make the sport fair, runs counter to what the spirit of the event should be.

When the Indy 500 started back in 1911, the rules set was such that the bound box which competitors found themselves in was massive; and they basically got to play with whatever they wanted. 

Various engine capacities limits have come and gone, in some cases there was turbocharging and supercharging allowed, but probably the most impressive things that were ever raced in the Indy 500 were Freddie Agabashian's Cummins Diesel Special of 1952, and the series of gas turbine cars which culminated in the Lotus 56 'red wedge' of 1968. The fact that Joe Leonard's Lotus 56 retired from the race while leading; just eight laps from the finish was enough to scare the organisers into regulating gas turbine cars into extinction.

As someone who is interested in the history of motorsport and how that relates to what we get on the road, that's tragic. Companies like Chrysler and General Motors both experimented with gas turbine cars and the fact that this line of innovation was semi-killed by motorsport, kind of resigned us to missing out on what could have been a jet car future. 

If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else, then the rules set that I would run the Indianapolis 500 by would be to give the teams a central safety cell, a set of standard tyres and maybe brakes, and then tell them to have at it. 

I think that the Indianapolis 500 should be the laboratory of speed where the most bonkers mental hatstand ideas should be allowed to flourish. If you can build a car which uses the safety cell and can rip around the famous two-and-a-half mile speedway at 307 mph, and you can find someone daft enough to sit in the driver's seat, then go for it.

Because if the rules set is so loose that practically anything is possible and allowed, then not only does this remove the entire argument about cheating, but we'd get to see the actual greatest spectacle in motorsport. 

Horse 3461 - Nobody Sensible Is In Charge: Let's Eat Milo Out Of The Tin

 If you'd have asked me a week ago, who the worst leader of the Liberal Party was, I would have said Peter Dutton. As a leader, he led the Opposition to the lowest primary vote in the party's 80 year history, and also the fewest number of members on the floor of the chamber, ever.

However, it turns out that the Liberal Party had even lower to fall, and in their attempts to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to find a new leader, they picked upon Sussan Ley.

Apart from being an absolute punkwomble and a cussgibbon, she has proven to be so bereft of actual leadership ability that under her tenure, the Opposition has snapped in half.

The relatively new leader of the National Party, David Littleproud, stunned Canberra this afternoon, when he formally announced that as of 20th May 2025, the Coalition would be suspended.

This is not necessarily a new thing in Australian politics. In Queensland the National Party decoupled itself from the Liberal Party under the tenure of Sir Joh Bielke-Petersen, and ruled in Queensland in its own right for a while.

In contrast, in the 2001 Queensland State election, the Liberal Party won a paltry 9 seats, and in 2004 they actually achieved complete electoral extinction. By the 2007 election in Queensland, the Liberal National Party was not just a formal enmeshing of the two parties, it was the admission that the Liberal Party was unelectable but still had the necessary resources to be able to run a political party. The Queensland LNP is essentially 100% National Party members using the Liberal Party's stuff. 

It is therefore not surprising at all that David Littleproud and the National Party has decided to bail on the Liberal Party. Littleproud is a Queenslander; so this means that this is nothing special to him. 

Naturally it left Sussan Ley fuming. Having just realised that she was not in control of the smaller of the two parties of the coalition, her reactions to the press were both curt and acrid. Being Opposition Leader was already a pretty horrid job, being the first Opposition Leader after a party has just lost an election is a degree worse; this is one step beyond.

So what does any of this mean for the numbers on the floor of the parliament?

93 - Labor 

28 - Liberal

15 - National 

1 - Green 

1 - Central Alliance 

1 - Katter 

9 - Independents

Take note of that. 15+1+1+1+9 = 27

The absolute insanity of how the numbers on the floor currently sit, is that all it would take would be one member of the Liberal Party to slide up the chamber and join the National Party, and suddenly the Green/Green/Orange/Brown/Teal/Grey peloton could form their own spite coalition. Remember, a Westminster parliament cares not even an iota about the makeup of parties or members who sit inside it.

In fact, if I had a seat in the whole sort of general mish-mash (WSOGMM), then I'd seriously be canvassing for the most hilarious thing of all - to form the WSOGNM Coalition and install Bob Katter as the Opposition Leader. 

If politics is a game, and all the men and women merely players, then why not go for the most hilarious outcome possible. If we don't do it then Australia faces untold horrors because "in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland."

... if not politically by north Queensland. 

Horse 3460 - Forbidden Chocolate Milk

 I am now ten days into a new job; which is interesting because already my mind has become accustomed to the fact that the world looks different. Just like my previous workplace, where although the world that waits outside exists, because I mainly look at a wall and screen, the only indication that I have of time actually passing is the occasional glance at the bottom right hand corner of the screen and noticing that the numbers have changed.

I have the immediate job of transferring information from one accounting system to another and for the most part, this first task is either a series of cut and paste jobs, or trawling through 30 years' of documental detritus to find someone's email address, or phone number, or company number, et cetera et cetera cetera. Already I am the "calm" one of the office. As I am used to having to fend for myself for most jobs, then if something doesn't make sense, or doesn't fit, or can not be explained, then I just see that as a mere puzzle piece that has to be found. Quite literally, nobody else can help me in this case because they do not understand the systems which I previously used; nor will they be ever asked to do so.

The weirdest thing though is how my perception of time has changed. Time used to be a thing which swung one way and then then other. What is really curious about time now, is just how much it drags while I am aware of it, and how much it just doesn't exist when am not. To go from 0830 to 1230 is like every minute is extracting teeth; then 1230-1330 passes in an instant, and then 1330 to 1645 is equally infuriating; before in an instant the clock jumps from 1646 to 1707.

Some of this is likely due to the threshold effect, where having entered a new environment, one's brain does an immediate info dump of what went before and tries frantically to absorb everything which is new. Except in this case, I not only need to retain the information which I previously held, but as I am now responsible for holding and transferring information which I previously did not need to know, I guess that my brain is trying to accommodate all of the change in circumstances through some kind of mental time dilation. 

I imagine that this kind of thing is what Formula One drivers report when they say that they can slow down time while in the motor car. With so much information screaming at you constantly and the pressure to deliver, my guess is that this is what is happening in their mind. It is actually probably easier to be a Formula One driver, if you consider the fact that they generally are paid many millions of dollarpounds to do what they love, whereas in comparison each of my seconds are remunerated by less than a pennycent. The other major difference is that a Formula One driver otherwise lives quite a comfortable existence when they are not at work, whereas I like the great grey glob of people who have to do work to keep the rent collectors away, am decided not.

I am also not quite at the stage where my lunch hour is sensible. Notwithstanding the fact that I have the CBD of Chatswood which is perpetual funland of a thousand businesses all wanting to sell me something, which I can not afford to buy; and which tries desperately to vomit a thousand colours into every single possible space. This for me is not a sensory overload problem but rather palace after palace of pure irrelevance. I have found a bookstore, a post office, a park, and the rest of it need not bother to exist. I am not prepared to spend as much money for lunch, as the myriad of places want me to spend.

What has made this all the more irritating is that on top of having a body which constantly screams out in pain (which likely isn't even real) because of an accident from three years ago; my guts have decided all on their own, to rebel and hold some kind of mutiny. Anyone who has worked on a motor car knows that when you see the forbidden chocolate milk coming out of the tail pipes, then something has gone wrong. In my case, when forbidden chocolate milk is coming out of the tail pipe, then something has also gone wrong.

Once again I am confronted with the fact that in many respects, I am a consciousness enclosed inside meat, with a mind/body/soul/spirit set of operating systems, which I do not understand and which I am mostly not conscious of. It is also weird that a great deal of the biome which also lives within the bag of meat, shares no DNA with me whatsoever. This is the kind of thing which aught to drive essayists and novelists who deal with the metaphysical insane, but it does not. I find it frustrating that there is precious little literature which is able to even deal with what it is like to feel pain, in any meaningful way at all. In fact, the only major work that I have ever read on anything like this is by Virginia Woolf:

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

- Virginia Woolf, "On Being Ill" (1925)

Perhaps the weirdest thing of all about this current bout of unpleasantness is that I now have a mental map of where all the toilets at at home, a Blacktown, Parramatta, Strathfield, Central, and Chatswood Railway Stations, where they are in the new building where I work, and in the juggling game of time, where I need to be in order to make best use of any of them. Both time and my guts are currently broken... which indicates that something has gone wrong in operating systems which I do not understand.