Horse 2889 - Vaccination Hesitancy Hesitancy

 "Lots of people didn't get the vaccine due to hesitancy...whether it was the hesitancy around the AstraZeneca vaccine, that many shared ... but this government didn't share, I can assure you."

- PM Scott Morrison, Question Time, 30th Aug 2021

Can I just say that I am sick of the narrative which the media wants to portray that the reason why Australia is lagging behind when it comes to the vaccine rollout, is because people are hesitant.

Just like blaming people for "doing the wrong thing", this is a cruel and weak line of attack against people who were already vulnerable and already on the receiving end of the consequences of failures in government responsibilities.

Quarantine, vaccination rollout, border control, are all the responsibility of the Federal Government, and the delivery of health care services is under the control of the State Governments. 

None of those things are the fault of the general public and because they are long term and systemic failures, they don't really get that much coverage in the 24 hour news cycle.

Herein lies one of the difficulties in trying to pin down the slowness in vaccine take-up. People live in that very small and strange sliver of time we call 'now' and that means that weeks and months are compressed in people's memories.

It was in November of 2020 that PM Scott Morrison announced that his government had put:

“Australia at the front of the queue for a safe and effective vaccine”.

What queue?

Two months later in January of this year, the Morrison Government announced that the start of the vaccine rollout would happen by the end of February and that 4 million people would receive their first jab by the end of March. The claim was that all 25 million Australians would be fully vaccinated by October 2021.

Things happened. The Australian Government had a barney with Pfizer. It then had a barney with AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca then had a barney with the European Union and then Italy backed by the EU blocked the first quarter of a million doses coming to Australia.

It was only on the 11th of March that the Morrison Government conceded that its target of having Australia fully vaccinated by October 2021 was impossible. It had only taken delivery of 0.7m/3.8m expected AstraZeneca doses.

It was only on the 24th of March that CSL announced that it would be making the AstraZeneca vaccine in Australia.

It was only on the 17th of May that people aged 40 to 49, were allowed to register their interest for a vaccine in NSW. The actual first available slots for that first date of booking was for the 17th of June.

I registered my intent on the 18th of May and my booking was for the Pfizer vaccination, which was at the time the only choice of one that I had. The booking date was for the 23rd of September; which would have been useless consider that the virus doesn't seem to care about booking dates when it moves from person to person.

It was possibly on 11th of June that NSW Health blamed a limo driver in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney for 'inexcusable' actions, by him merely doing his job. He had not been vaccinated because he wasn't eligible due to the policies of both the Federal and State Governments.

It was only on the 26th of June that some part of Sydney entered lockdowns; not all, which is what NSW Health advised the Berejiklian Government at the time.

I watched on tenterhooks while the Berejiklian NSW Government progressively named only Labor voting areas as 'LGAs of concern' and then still didn't attempt any kind of mass vaccination rollout.

It was only on the 28th of June that people aged 18 to 40, were allowed to register their interest for vaccination. Before that date, only a very select group of people under the age of 40 were eligible for anything at all.

It was only on the 26th of July that the NSW Government rolled out the Astra Zeneca vaccine to pharmacists and that people over the age of 40 could go to places that were not hospitals or existing registered health care centres.

At that time the directive from NSW Health was that community pharmacies:

"Must not supply or administer the vaccine to a person who is under the age of 40, or a patient with a contraindication or precaution to vaccination;"

- NSW Health, 26th July 2021

This advice has changed.

It was only on the 19th of August that people aged 16-39 were allowed to register their interest for vaccination.

It is now August 31st and with new daily case numbers in excess of 1000, the media wants to push the narrative that it is the general public's fault for not being vaccinated quickly enough, despite the chain of events listed above.

I received my first shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine, after my booking for the Pfizer vaccine was cancelled by NSW Health and presumably given to someone else. I had to make alternative arrangements. I will get the second shot on the 22nd of August.

Having said that, cancelling vaccination appointments in an LGA of concern by the State Government is not exactly something that they can blame the general public for; when they're the ones who did it.

"Lots of people didn't get the vaccine due to hesitancy..." says Mr Morrison and the inevitable chorus of howling monkeys in the newspapers and talkback radio who can't be bothered to do any journalism beyond 'now'.

Vaccine hesitancy if it exists, utterly pales in comparison to the overwhelming story of systemic failures and missteps from the governments who are charged with the responsibility of the defence of the nation. Vaccine hesitancy is easy to report by individuals who can only see what's immediately around them. Unfortunately, the job of doing long boring rolling journalism to see to what degree that this is either true, or even matters, is lacking. 

I am hesitant to name someone as vaccine hesitant when they might not have been eligible for months, might have complications due to other health reasons, or are genuinely fearful. Yelling at the general public and blaming the general public is shameful. If you want to do it, stop it.

Horse 2888 - Vaccination Objections: Part III

You are probably reading this on a computer or a tablet or phone. Every single one of millions upon millions of devices all connected to the internet is the reason why the internet works so well. Likewise, the system that it was built to parallel, the telephone network, also works and depends on millions of people being connected.

Network effects are seen in a lot of things, such as physical infrastructure like road and rail which connects places, communication systems which not only includes telephony bit various social networks, and even the vaccine rollout.

Telephones, the internet, train systems, and the vaccine rollout, all follow the basic principle of the network effect which basically means that every new thing which is added to the system, increases the overall effectiveness of the system. It is almost self-evident that a telephone network can not work all that well unless lots of people have a telephone. At absolute minimum, you need two people connected. When a critical mass is reached, the system really sings.

The network effect also applies to other things such as gun ownership (which explains why the United States will remain relatively unsafe compared to the rest of the OECD) as well as insurance.

A mass vaccination rollout is actually the answer to an insurance question and as such it also follows the network effect. The thing with insurance questions is that because they are subject to negative self-selection, which means that people only tend to buy in if they expect to be paid out, that it is the people who chose not to buy in or whom are excluded from the network who actually make the network less effective.

It is for this reason especially that we're already starting to see data where unvaccinated people are getting Covid-19 and then infecting people who have been vaccinated. 

Vaccines can only prime someone's adaptive immune system to fight off the virus. They do this by alerting your Memory-T cells that there is a pathogen in the world which needs to be fought off. What a vaccine can not do, is prevent an unvaccinated person who has the virus from passing it on, because as far as the virus is concerned, people are its environment and that includes others whether they are vaccinated or not.

The choice not to get vaccinated is actually a choice by an individual to deliberately make the overall vaccination network less effective. I have written quite a lot on this blog over the years about human rights but in this case, I simply can not admit that someone's right to choose to endanger others because of their own selfish fears, is worth more or a better good than the collective public good of vaccination.

Notice how I used the word 'good' in the singular. Vaccination as a public good is a singular item (albeit a very massive one); and is subject to damage through the deliberate choice of individual inaction.

This all leads me to question the base motivation of someone who refuses to be vaccinated. I can understand a fear of needles, I can understand that they might fear introducing a substance into their own body and I can even understand some kind of notion of religiosity here but it really boils down to whom the individual considers as the most important.

Whether you live in a Commonwealth or a Republic, the common wealth is a public thing. That already implies that as part of living in a nation, or a state, a city, a suburb etc. that you are already inside a civic community and whether you admit it or not, owe other people obligations as part of that civic community.

That also suggests that the civic community does its best work and highest good, when there is the most amount of civic philos. Sometimes this is wrapped in a flag and shows itself as patriotism but most of the time its going to display itself in the more boring civic products of peace, patience with others, and kindness.

The highest outworking of civic philos demands of an individual that they esteem others more than they esteem themselves. You can see that in the basic workings of a family as community in miniature. In the broader context of society generally that means that in humility someone needs to value others above themselves; not looking at the selfish conceit of one's own immediate  interests but the interests of others.

The interests of others also happens to include those people who for actually legitimate reasons can not be vaccinated. Those reasons are almost always because of complications of other medicines, other medical conditions, or being pregnant. By you being vaccinated and making the network effect most effective, you are carrying their burdens. Remember, those people are also more likely to have been vaccinated against Polio; which means that they have always paid forward a different burden.

It used to be that sacrifice of the individual in order to create a greater good for the welfare of others was seen as a virtue. The collective suffering and the deaths of 200 million people, through two world wars, the 1918-20 flu pandemic, and the Great Depression, created a generation of people saw public welfare as being a collective good because it is good. The last 40 years especially, have relentlessly elevated the individual to that highest place; so that welfare is demonised, anyone who might receive the benefits of that welfare and care are also demonised, and any sense of rationality and civic philos is destroyed.

This is where I ask that most banal of questions: who do you love? A great deal of popular media had been generated about that very subject, indeed the music industry practically revolves around it, but while that might be incredibly good at selling product, it does very little at selling the idea of public virtue.

A verb is a 'doing' word. Doing something involves action. Action involves performing work. Putting love into action, in this case civic philos, might be easy to do with people who love us back but appears to be harder in the abstract, when it means doing it for people whom we do not personally know, or even people who dislike us, or whom we suspect want to hurt us. Who do you love? If you refuse to be vaccinated and thus refuse to take action, then what exactly are you demonstrating? 

Horse 2887 - Vaccination Objections: Part II

"Je pense, donc je suis" which is French for "I think, so I am", comes from Rene Descartes' 1637 work, the "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences"; and I think is the logical point of the beginning of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is that period of history where we begin to get our modern conception of the ideas of progress, liberty, the primacy of our senses as the sources of knowledge, the beginning of the modern notion of toleration and the rise of individual liberty and individual reason. 

A series of bloody revolutions happened, which includes the decapitation of the English King by the Puritans, the Treaty Of Westphalia which gives us the idea of the modern nation state, and the initial violent separation of church and state which also includes the codification of the rules by which law is made; which results in the beginning of constitutional government.

As much as I think that science is a sensible ideal worth pursuing, I also think that placing individual liberty at the absolute centre of our philosophical kosmos has wreaked its own brand of havoc. It has set two giant ideas up in conflict with each other: being the rights of the individual and the obligations of the state. I tend to look at this through the lens of economics; which is why Keynes and Hayek, Von Mises and Marx, Smith and Say, and Piketty and Menger can all sit on my bookshelf quite happily. 

What does any of this have to do with vaccination? Yet again we come down to the wishes of an individual with individual human rights and the obligations that the state has. There is also the issue of what kind of control each has. Clearly the Government has both the constitutional right and the legal ability to demand compulsory vaccination and it also has the imperative of responsibility to do so, even though as yet it has not, but where does the individual sit amidst this. If Government is itself populated by monsters, then aren't the products of said governance therefore going to be at least on some level, monstrous? If individuals are all monsters without exception, then aren't the products of their own individual liberty and freedoms expressed, also going to be monstrous?

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

If Mad Jack McMad, the winner of last year's "Mr. Madman" competition is standing in the middle of the town square and swinging his fists around like a madman, then no actual battery occurs unless his fists come into contact with someone. The tort of battery doesn't actually need for contact to be made though, because the intent of causing harm is present. However, if Mad Jack McMad is genuinely mad and has no intention of causing injury, there still may be a case for him to answer and there is still the underlying responsibility of the sheriff to prevent injury.

The great uncountable general public has an interest in enforcing law upon someone if there may be injury caused by deliberate action or even failure to take action. People should not in general (except possibly by absolution of the state for military personnel in times of war) injure other people, nor through inaction allow others to come to harm. 

The central lie of those people who want to find objections to being vaccinated is that because it is their body, they have an individual choice and are therefore not accountable to anyone else. This is a similar argument to the abortion debate but the two are not congruous because unlike whether or not someone is allowed to or not have an abortion, society isn't generally endangered through someone's individual choice or exercise of liberty. As far as I am aware, pregnancy is not a transmissible disease.

Society can not generally punish someone for failing to take proper care of themselves but where there is either definite damage or the risk of definite damage, to other individuals or the public, we move out of the realm of individual liberty and into the realm of both morality and the law, where society actually has a legitimate claim over an individual's body.

It is therefore just that where through the deliberate choice of inaction actually causes the risk of others coming to harm (when clearly an individual has made a choice to roll the dice and let themself come to harm), then where that deliberate choice of inaction is prejudicial to the interests of others, that the individual should be accountable, and may be should be subject either to social or to legal punishments, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is necessary for its protection.

The Enlightenment might have set us on a path towards progress, individual liberty and individual reason but it seems to have made the base assumption that people are intrinsically good and that their behavior can be changed and improved by appealing to those things.

Unfortunately, the centre of the universe is about 19mm behind people's corneas and people tend to notice what is immediate, over and above what is collectively good. If the first word of The Enlightenment is 'I' then an unfettered push towards individualism places the immediate concerns of the individual over the welfare of others. Vaccination which relies upon the network effect to be the most effective, actually forces us to directly arrive at that issue of whether our deliberate choice for inaction causes others to come to harm. 

Horse 2886 - Vaccination Objections: Part I

As a result of several conversations that I have had and multiple things that I have seen on social media, this is a two part blog post with regards to the vaccine rollout and the relationships between an individual, the state, and the rest of society.

Before I say anything further, I must lay out that I am in favour of vaccination, for the obvious reason that they work.

The reason for this is that your adaptive immune system basically doesn't do anything when you are born because it records and adapts responses to antigens that it has seen before and if it has never seen something before, it's practically useless. Your adaptive immune system needs to see diseases before it can fight them and it can either do that by you actually getting a disease or it can happen artificially, particularly through vaccination.
Most vaccines are made of a dead or extremely weakened pathogen, and they work on the premise that a secondary immune response is more intense than a primary response. If you deliberately introduce a pathogen into your body, you are in fact triggering you Memory-T cells to signal to your Natural Killer and Professional Killer cells to be ready to show up and fight hard and fast should that antigen show up again.
We have experience that the antigens from diseases like Mumps, Measles etc. don't change their protein coats much but influenza constantly changes its protein coat; which is why last year's vaccine won't be that effective against this year's flu. When it comes to SARS Cov-2, aka Covid-19, because it is a novel virus, we simply don't know yet.
That doesn't mean though that getting vaccinated isn't a jolly good idea.

Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccination undoubtedly works, there are people who for various reasons, simply do not want to be vaccinated against a disease which has the potential to kill them and the people that they come in contact with.
Setting that aside, I'm going to look at the legal powers that government has, and the responsibility therein.

"Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives."
- Ronald Reagan

"It is the first responsibility of government in a democratic society to protect and safeguard the lives of its citizens."
- A (FC) and others (FC) (Appellants) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent)

"A government’s first duty is to protect its citizens against imminent danger; and protection at times of present and future peril necessitates policy based upon facts and logic"
- David Harper

Time and time again, there is a common clarion call which consistently plays this one note. Whatever system of government that you can devise, from dictatorship to diffuse collective perfect democracy, the first duty of government is to protect the lives of the citizens or subjects, from imminent death and danger.
I think that it is difficult to argue at this point that the 8th worst pandemic in history, which has killed 4.42 million people, does not constitute imminent death and danger. If government's first duty is to protect its citizens, then to do that job, it is justly empowered with the tools to do so.

Section 51 of the Australian Constitution, broadly defines the powers of the Australian Federal Parliament. The general charge that the parliament is given is:

http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s51.html
Legislative powers of the Parliament
The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:
- Section 51, Australian Constitution Act 1900

Admittedly nobody has ever sued the government of the day or the parliament over the specific definition of what "peace, order, and good government" actually is but it is a good start.

If we then travel down through the list of things which that power is in respect to, then we find:

The provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances.
- s.51xxiiiA, Australian Constitution Act 1900

The important thing of note here is that since 1906, there have been 42 Constitution Alteration Bills which have been submitted to a referendum but the Australian people has only approved eight of these. Specifically, Paragraph (xxiiiA) of Section 51 (which gives the Federal Parliament the power, subject to the Constitution, to make laws with respect to a bunch of stuff), was inserted into the Commonwealth Constitution following the successful referendum of 1946; under the Chifley Government.
In theory, that should have meant that Australia was on track to have a kind Medicare system in place by the end of 1946 but the newly formed Liberal Party blocked it until they were no longer able to and it was only passed in 1984.

If you read through the arguments in Hansard, you will find that the then Opposition Leader Robert Menzies, wanted the clause "but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription" inserted because if:
"industrial workers are entitled to be protected against conscription, the members of the medical and dental profession should be entitled to similar protection."
- Robert Menzies, 9th Apr 1946.

The usual objection which is put up by people at this point is that compulsory vaccination constitutes conscription. It does not. Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people to provide labour to the state; merely being forced to comply with the law because of civic duty is not. We have other compulsory duties at law such as doing tax returns, voting, jury duty if called upon, and even following the law itself is compulsory but few would call that conscription.
At any rate, just because people want to declare that getting compulsorily vaccinated is conscription, does not make it so. If I declare that an Alsatian is a cat, then that does not make it so either.

As it stands, people are pretty much compulsorily vaccinated against diseases like Rubella, Measles, Mumps, and Polio. However the actual person which does this is not the Crown as expressed in the Federal Commonwealth but a different person of the Crown as expected in the State.

Legally speaking, Australia's States which federated into a Commonwealth, still retained responsible government and still retained their own separate persons who are the Crown; which are all different from each other. The states themselves have their own constitutions and in the state of New South Wales where I live, the powers that the New South Wales Parliament has as defined by the Constitution are not quite unlimi and practically unqualified.

http://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/ca1902188/s5.html

The Legislature shall, subject to the provisions of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, have power to make laws for the peace, welfare, and good government of New South Wales in all cases whatsoever--

Provided that all Bills for appropriating any part of the public revenue, or for imposing any new rate, tax or impost, shall originate in the Legislative Assembly.
- Section 5, Constitution Act 1902 (NSW)

Again we see the phrase "peace, welfare, and good government" but unlike the Federal Constitution which spells out what the powers assigned to the parliament are in respect to, the New South Wales Parliament has the power to make laws in New South Wales "in all cases whatsoever". I take it that in all cases whatsoever, means in all cases whatsoever.

That means to say that if the New South Wales Parliament could pass laws to make vaccination compulsory, then there is no legal problem with that whatsoever.

In addition to this, the New South Wales Parliament has passed a law which assigns specific powers to the Health Minister.

http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/pha2010126/s7.html

Power to deal with public health risks generally

(1) This section applies if the Minister considers on reasonable grounds that a situation has arisen that is, or is likely to be, a risk to public health.
(2) In those circumstances, the Minister--
(a) may take such action, and
(b) may by order give such directions,
as the Minister considers necessary to deal with the risk and its possible consequences.
(3) Without limiting subsection (2), an order may declare any part of the State to be a public health risk area and, in that event, may contain such directions as the Minister considers necessary--
(a) to reduce or remove any risk to public health in the area, and
(b) to segregate or isolate inhabitants of the area, and
(c) to prevent, or conditionally permit, access to the area.
- Section 7, Public Health Act 2010 (NSW)

That means to say that the Health Minister ordering compulsory vaccination is legal and is constitutional. The Health Minister ordering that some local government areas be segregated and isolated to reduce or remove any risk to public health in the area is legal and is constitutional.

Insofar as much as the law is stupid, obnoxious, daft, inconvenient or even downright evil, not only is general, ignorance or mistake about the existence or application of legislation creating an offence no excuse, but no right exists at law not to follow the law. You might have conscience objections to it but that doesn't change the fact that there is no right not to follow the law.

Neither am I impressed with the so-called Sovereign Citizen movement because not even the Queen is above the law; the Monarch is still subject to the law and can be charged, indicted and punished. The Sovereign Citizen movement as far as I can tell is nothing more than an attempt to use one's own personal liberty as a cloak for vice.

We probably won't actually get to the point where vaccination is compulsory but even if it was, it would neither be illegal or unconstitutional for the New South Wales Parliament to pass legislation, nor for the New South Wales Health Minister to make a Public Health Order under the Act which would make it compulsory.

Horse 2885 - Dr. ABCDEFGHIJ...

We have a magnet on our fridge which contains a list of things to do and check when someone needs to be resuscitated. The checklist is supposed to be easy to remember by use of the acronym "DRS.ABCD". While "Doctors ABCD" sounds like it might be easy to remember in theory, it is my experience that most people have trouble remembering 8 digit telephone numbers; which makes my wonder how well they would remember 7 things on a card.

I have some advantage in that having taken a first aid course, I was forced to remember this in order to pass but even then the core of the things to remember was still only ABC. Besides which, all of this is easy to remember in theory but when the emotional heat of an emergency is turned up to boiling point, even rational people very turn into dribbling pools of liquid upon the floor. 

This then is an expanded and exploded list of things to remember; which I can guarantee that practically everyone will not. 

Danger - look for danger

Response - look for a response

Send - Send for help

Airway - make sure there is nothing in the patient's airways

Breathing - check to see if they are breathing

CPR - perform CPR if there is no heartbeat

Defibrillation - use a defibrillator if no heartbeat is present

Emergency - telephone the emergency services

Find - find warm blankets to keep the patient from freezing

General - get a good sense of where you are, so that you can inform the emergency services

Hospital - if the emergency services want to send an ambulance or advise that you should take the patient to a hospital, know where the nearest one is

Information - give the emergency services as much information about the situation as possible

Jam - try to have a jar of jam on hand

Kitchen - go to the kitchen and find wet towels if the patient is running a fever

Lemonade - offer lemonade to people who are working hard

Movement - in general do not move the patient in case they have internal injuries which might be aggravated

Neeners - neeners indicate that the ambulance is in a hurry. Transfer responsibility to trained professionals where possible

Oh - Oh! Oh! Oh! The emergency services number is 000, after what people want to run around yelling in an emergency

Podcasts - waiting in the Emergency Department for hours is really boring. Listen to a podcast while you are waiting

Queue - emergency departments are busy places, so do not be resentful if you are not head of the queue

Ready - be ready to render assistance if asked

Tea - literally no problem in the world can not be improved with a cup of tea

Uniform - Uniformed officers, be they the police, fire, or ambulance service are more qualified to deal with emergencies than you. Let the experts be experts and do expert things.

Vaccination - try to find out what vaccines that a person has had and any medication that they might be taking which would interaction with a course of treatment

Whiskey - do not give whiskey to a cold person. Whilst it might make them feel warm, it is merely a vasodilator and makes them lose heat faster. Drink it yourself.

Xero - be calm. Do not lose your head when everyone else is losing theirs. 

Yips - the sight of blood and other fluids such as a code brown, is enough to give some people the yips. It is okay to admit that you might also be in distress.

Zzzz - remember to get adequate sleep in the people that you might be in the emergency room

Already it should be pretty obvious that nobody can remember all of these things and to further prove the uselessness of having too many things to remember, I bet that the only things that you can remember on this list are Jam and Lemonade; they're not medical things.

Granted that people have the capability of remembering a tremendous amount of things but when it comes to doing that under pressure, the entire list may as well not exist.

Except...

When it comes to safety items such as things to do in an emergency, or the use of a fire extinguisher, or a fire blanket, or airline safety card, or defibrillator, or chemical clean up kit, you don't actually need to remember everything out the list. You just need to know where the list/safety item is and then follow the instructions. 

If it hasn't been demonstrated by extremity, even seemingly simple tasks are made all the more complex by the emotional overlay of emergency. People like the police, fire brigade, ambulance service, military service personnel, pilots, and other people in occupations where the potential for things to go wrong very quickly are usually highly trained. The general public is not.

The existence of a safety card displayed in a prominent position, is consistently proven to be excellent.

Get an emergency safety card and a fire extinguisher. Make sure the instructions are on display.

Also make jam sandwiches and have some lemonade... yes, it's not medical advice but it's still a jolly good idea.

Horse 2884 - "A Good Workman Never Blames His Tools" - How About A Bad Foreman?

 Practically everyone knows the proverb that "a good workman never blames his tools". That might be true in essence but I am sure that many workmen would replace their tools with better ones; thus turning good workmen into a great ones. Isn't that why the Church of Bunnings is so large? Moreover, a good foreman provides the tools necessary for a worker to do their job.

If this is a propositional statement were P=Q, then the negative of these statements should also be true where -P=-Q.

"a bad workman blames his tools" and "a bad foreman does not provide the tools necessary for a worker to do their job."

Let's assume that a are a bad foreman. It  follows that if you give bad tools to your workers then the results will be worse; even if the workers are trying really hard.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/increased-fines-test-and-isolate-payments-and-new-compliance-measures-as-nsw-battles

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the vast majority of people are doing the right thing but there are a handful of people who are wilfully breaking the rules and putting the rest of the community at risk.

“The increased fines and heightened police presence are about ensuring people who are doing the wrong thing are caught and punished appropriately,” Ms Berejiklian said.

- NSW Health, 14th Aug 2021.

I do not mean to say that I think that lockdowns are a bad idea when there is a transmissible virus which has the impersonal goal of living inside people (the fact that those people might die is too lofty for a virus to care about) but merely holding people in place, when you've already used other tools badly, lowers the quality of the work being done. Going on to blame the workers because you didn't provide them with the necessary tools of quarantine, vaccination rollout and border controls, while at the same time then not providing them with the necessary vaccinations quick enough, suggests to me that instead of having merely a bad foreman that they look as though they do not actually care about the quality of the job.

I think that a great deal of the problem for the underlying lack of care is that practically nobody within government has lived through a pandemic or a war. The last veteran from the First World War has already died, the people who lived through the 1918-20 Flu Pandemic are at bare minimum 101 years old; assuming that there was a 15 year old veteran on the last day of the Second World War, they would be 91 years old now. The amount of lived experience and thus earned empathy of society, is therefore minimal to non existent.

Hard times build character. Collective hard times might build empathy and compassion, if and only if people are working together towards a common end.

The First World War especially, was fought by societies with very little amounts of common empathy. Often, the generals and politicians in charge of sending people off to their bloody fates, were either in tents that were not up and close to the battlefield, or in mahogany and leather lined rooms that were miles and hundreds of miles away. The actual price and cost for wars, is generally paid by the poor and less well off.

At least as far as Sydney is concerned, the costs of this war (as indeed most wars) disproportionately fall upon the poor and less fortunate. There are intersections of Venn diagrams which also include migrants and refugees. Those costs include the curtailing of civil freedoms in order to protect everyone else, and a disproportionate economic cost. The people who are generally the most well off, also have access to passive forms of income such as rent, interest, and dividends. The less well off in addition to generally being paid less by those same people, still have to meet their regular outgoing expenses which especially includes rent for housing and interest on mortgages. The people who can most ill afford to go without wages are being involuntarily conscripted to do precisely that; while at the same time continue to supply the most well off with rents and interest. This is the Matthew Principle in operation - to whom who has, more will be given; but from whom who has not, even what they have will be taken away. That's not how a cohesive society is built and certainly not through enacted and enforced policy.

This current war against an unseen enemy, is an outworking of bad foremen not giving sufficiently good enough tools to the workers which are necessary to do the job. If this is a war, then it is like sending troops out into the battlefield with no guns. The government has some vague set of slogans and the eerily familiar refrain that it will be over by Christmas. Meanwhile, that's scant comfort for those people who are trapped inside a lockdown, who might not be able to go to work; but who still have to meet obligations of rent and interest payments as well as utilities, food etc. That is separate from any responsibility that governments might have with regards vaccine rollout.

Still, the current orthodoxy being trotted out by the people who control the banks, the press, the Government, and the means by which a lot of people get their living, is that we're all in this together; even though through policy and outcomes, that's increasingly looking like it's untrue.

It is a strange state of affairs when it is the state government which claimed to take ‘best health advice’ when clearly it has ignored the advice of the Chief Medical Officer. It is a strange state of affairs when after failing to lockdown early, the official government statements start blaming us for the catastrophic numbers. It is a strange state of affairs to insist that the New South Wales lockdown is the harshest in Australia when anyone who has access to the internet and can read the terms of lockdowns in other states can see that that’s patently false.

You can not just yell at people to get vaccinated if you do not provide sufficient vaccines for that to happen. You can not yell at people and order them to stay at home indefinitely and then provide no indication of the terms in which those orders end. You can not simply yell at people to stay away from work and then not consider how they are supposed to pay the rent and mortgage, let alone anything else. You also can not blame people for getting sick in the middle of a pandemic. You may as well yell "keep warm and well fed" while leaving them on the side of the road. I think that it's unfair for a foreman to blame their workers, when the tools given are so inadequate.

Horse 2883 - Why The New Normal Will Look Identical To The Old Normal: It's Infrastructure, Yo!

 It is almost self evident that no punishment seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of virtue, of goodness, of patience and peace for those who have been trained by it. It is also self evident that what we are currently living through, is also unpleasant and is a directionless kind of collective punishment which is being visited upon the world. What is not evident at all, is what if anything, that people are going to learn. As far as I have seen, the new normal looks exactly the same as the old normal, except with slightly different infrastructure. So it goes.

Small architectural design features like wine windows and dwarf doors which appeared in Europe from about the 1300s onwards in response to the Black Plague probably aren't coming back, but it was interesting to see how plexiglass screens appeared in supermarkets, buses, and banks, more or less instantly. Those plexiglass screens make things doubly more difficult when you consider that people who are on both sides of them are both wearing masks.

We don't have city walls any more because cities are massive and populations equally so; so the defensive features of ancient cities such as walls and gates which were used to shut out unfriendly enemies, unfriendly diseases and in the case of inferior insulae in the ancient city of Rome unfriendly poor people. 

What we do have which marks out this particular plague, is the appearance of green ticks and marks indicating where one should sit and stand. Speaking as both a first born child which makes me prone to follow rules and as a satirical misanthrope, I rather like the idea that one's own personal space is demarcated and visible.

In the before times, some of my personal peeves were people who would nudge you with their shopping trolley to move forward while in a queue, people who do not understand the unwritten rules of bus queueing, and people who take it upon themselves to assume that because they are in a hurry that their can assume permission to push in ahead of you in a queue. Now that we live in an age where the space on the ground is marked and you can move through the queue like frogs moving from lilly pad to lilly pad, or like actors in the art of thesp who stand upon taped marks behind the praesidium arch of the stage, this is still open to impatience but is vastly improved.

I expect that at some point in the future when this pandemic becomes endemic and that we actually will be able to live with the virus instead of dying from it, that the great masses will again return to the trains and buses. I have quite enjoyed my space and serenity travelling in practically empty trains but I know that that was only for a time. What I expect when the masses return to mass transit systems, is that the new normal will look identical to the old normal. Trains and buses will again become full and there will always be those select few who refuse to know how queues, waiting, and politeness works in offering up one's seat. There will likely be a few people who have like having the extra space and this time will have trained them that taking up space with their bags is actually a public health measure rather than an act of selfishness.

As for the change in architecture which happens inside humans, although throughout the pandemic, we’ve had the news try to celebrate essential workers, uplifting local businesses (and companies like Google, Officeworks, and Woolworths all market this as a virtue), you would expect that this would translate into a better sense of appreciating what we have. Sadly, it does not. 

If my reading of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and The Truth, from a hundred years' ago during the 1918-20 flu pandemic is anything to go by, any sense of public philos and altruism is probably not going to last.

The 1918-20 flu pandemic was immediately followed by the 'roaring twenties' where people made monumental efforts to leave the pandemic with gay abandon and were keen to put it behind them as soon as possible. If that experience is to teach us anything it is that society will probably be less concerned with what other people and that the new normal will be just as brutish and boorish as it was before.

Companies like Doordash, Menulog, and Deliveroo, are already training people to think of others in the world (who get paid as little of a pittance as Uber and Lyft drivers) as little more than dancing sandwich monkeys. Push  button on your app and then someone who is even below having a name, arrives with a sandwich. They then disappear and you never have to deal with them ever again; which means that there are zero consequences for how you treat them. Helpfully, we've been redesigning economic over the past 40 years so that an even smaller select few live in Magic Land and the rest have to scrobble for toilet paper.

I would like to say that in eighteen months' time that there will be production of civic virtues of goodness, of patience and peace etc. in people who have lived through this pandemic but I do not think that the new normal will be markedly different from the old normal. People's impatience in a pandemic seems to produce works of immediate panic when the pandemic yells itself into existence and then produces works of complacency once everyone has forgotten  about it as soon as it’s ended. The physical destruction of assets and infrastructure is a widespread and visible sign that calamity had been and gone and demands a collective effort to rebuild everything. A pandemic does none of this and since the produce is invisible, it seems to me that it is only fleeting because of this fact.

Horse 2882 - "People are knowingly doing the wrong thing and pretending they don't understand."

 "Let's not pretend that people are doing the right thing. People are knowingly doing the wrong thing and pretending they don't understand."

- Gladys Berejiklian, Premier of NSW, 11:24am 13th Aug 2021.

I do not think that the Premier understands irony. As the days roll into weeks since I last went to work, I have made it a daily mission to watch Gladys O'Clock, where the NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian attempts to convince the good and fair people of New South Wales that her Government still has some semblance upon the nature of reality.

The date of August 28 now looks more like a serving suggestion than any kind of meaningful date, as the rest of the Government is playing with more bananas than Donkey Kong at the Coffs Harbour Banana Festival. It's really really bananas.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-10/brad-hazzard-refuses-to-make-covid-health-advice-public/100365386

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard has refused to publicly release documents detailing the COVID-19 advice chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant provided about locking down Greater Sydney.

Dr Chant said the formal advice to lock down the region was provided in writing to the NSW crisis cabinet on June 25, the same day stay-at-home orders were announced.

But when asked to publicly provide the documents the Health Minister strongly shut down the request.

Chant said the formal advice to lock down the region was provided in writing to the NSW crisis cabinet on June 25, the same day stay-at-home orders were announced.

"I'll answer that because obviously those issues go to crisis cabinet, which is a subcommittee of cabinet. But Dr Chant is under oath, and she's giving you the evidence, which is quite clear, so she won't be providing any documents," Mr Hazzard said.

- ABC News, 10th Aug 2021

I last went to work on the 26th of July which was the Monday after Blacktown City Council was placed into the "areas of concern" on the Sunday night before. My going to work may have been illegal but such is the completely arbitrary and plenary nature of the power which the NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard currently wields under the Public Health Act 2010, who honestly knows? Blacktown City Council became the 8th "area of concern", which at the time included 6 local government areas but has now been increased from 6 to 12½.

That Sunday night was also the first night which Blacktown was also included in the nightly surveillance operation, where the NSW Police Force flies PolAir helicopters over the western suburbs and sometimes in concert with the Army and RAAF. Yesterday evening, we had a new addition to our surveillance/compliance missions with an F/A-18A Hornet. I don't exactly how a fighter jet helps with the mission of combatting an unseen and submicroscopic enemy but there we go.

The fact that Brad Hazzard doesn't want Dr Kerry Chant to provide any details about the decisions to go ahead or not go ahead with stay-at-home orders is telling, as it sort of suggests that the government has something to hide. Whether or not the decision not to lockdown areas of Sydney's Eastern Suburbs was political in nature or the decision to lockdown the Western Suburbs was, now can not be seen by the general public. The Minister with his arbitrary and plenary power, has outright refused to let the chief medical officer of the state, tell any kind of truth.

Not that I am surprised though. Any reading of history will tell you that consistently across the centuries (pandemic aside) is that the effects of wars tend to visit the less fortunate than those people who control money and power. Especially during the First World War, bullets and bombs tended to fall upon poorer people who were out on the front lines, than the officer class who were in tents well back from the front or perhaps tucked up in bed at home, where they could read about it in the newspapers.

Right up until the invention of universal health care, which is an incredibly modern invention and very late in time, health care was dispensed upon the basis of those who could most afford it. 

The rollout of vaccination across NSW, with specific charismatic cases to do with private schools in the eastern suburbs, skews very much according postcode. Partly that is because the first people who were eligible to be vaccinated were quite rightly, elderly people who are at most risk of dying from the virus. There is a general correlation between age wealth. I am not sure if there is a deliberate bias towards wealthier areas (though a good case can be made) but there certainly is no obvious strategy to increase vaccination rates in less affluent areas and achieve and equitable result. The biggest mass vaccination hub is at Olympic Park; which happens to be within the boundaries of exactly zero areas of concern.

Also, the idea that you can just walk in and be vaccinated, across great swathes of Western Sydney is mostly a nonsense. NSW Health still runs a booking system and while some individual pharmacies are doing vaccinations, they might also require a booking.

It is going to be an interesting set of optics if the Premier decides to continue with plans to ease restrictions for local government areas where there higher rates of vaccination on August 28. As it stands, that would mean that the relaxation of restrictions would still follow lines of economics. Relatively wealthy suburbs on the North Shore (where she lives), the Northern Beaches, and the Eastern Suburbs (where the current outbreak of the Delta variant was allowed to get out) would go free; while less the less well off are in Western Sydney and South West Sydney would remain locked down and presumably like me, locked out of going to work.

I can stay here like a good compliant citizen because I understand that my individual rights and freedoms are less important than the obligations that we have to other people's welfare and lives but at some point, there will be a lot of people who are going to be in real financial trouble because they've been bearing the costs of this war against the unseen enemy, while the people who have access to money and power conduct affairs with no regards for them. 

That attitude comes into sharper focus when you see this kind of thing going on:

https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/nsw-s-risky-10b-bet-on-markets-20210805-p58g0r

The NSW government will borrow more than $10 billion to inject money into a fund buying stocks and other global financial market assets, in an under-the-radar budget strategy that public finance and credit analysts warn will put taxpayer money at risk.

- Australian Financial Review, 9th Aug 2021.

This wouldn't be after Dominic Perrottet made a hash of the NSW iCare Workers' Compensation Scheme, would it? Playing games with financial markets while the state has other serious issues, seems a bit reckless to me. I wonder if he's in contact with the former Premier Mike Baird who quit the Premiership after finding a golden parachute into a seat at the NAB. 

We ask how much I need truth, must we explain?

We need some answer, like roses need rain.

We ask how much we need truth; I'll tell you true:

Until the Twelfth of Never and that's a long, long time.

Horse 2881 - The Motor Accident That I Never Knew I Had

 I was sitting in the back room as the afternoon sun came streaming in through the window when I received a phone call from someone informing me that I had been in a minor motor accident and that they wanted my details.

This was a curious thing. For a start, I am currently in a hard lockdown in Sydney's Western Suburbs and am not allowed to travel more than 5km away from the house. Secondly (and this is perhaps the most telling), to unless the supposed accident happened in my driveway, then I think that I would know if I was in a motor accident. Mrs Rollo might very well accuse me of having my head in the clouds but I would hope that if I was in a motor vehicle accident that I would at very least be aware of it.

When I asked the person at the other end of the line (who was very obviously in a call centre) where the supposed accident happened, they refused to tell me. When they asked for my name, not only did I not tell them but they then proceeded to become abusive and tell me that I was going to go to gaol for fleeing the scene without providing my details. The kicker was that they then asked me for my number plate details, or rather asked me to "confirm" them. When I told them that I would confirm the details if they could tell me what my number plate is, then I told them that I couldn't "confirm" any detail which they didn't have.

Not only can they not tell me where the motor accident is supposed to have happened, they don't know my name, they don't know my number plate, and apparently they don't even know what kind of car that I drive. All of that seems totally believable if they want to serve me with a notice of claim or demand. I am really curious as to where they would send the notice, considering that they appear to know literally nothing about me or my car whatsoever; except that I answered the phone.

I feel really sorry for the person whose car that I hit. I imagine that this faceless, nameless, imaginary person was having all kinds of imaginary motor accidents, in thousands of unspecified locations all over the world and probably many of them simultaneously. Not only is this poor unfortunate imaginary person having loads of imaginary accidents, they don't even know where they are.

On some level I am intrigued by the puzzle of how this scam operates. They probably have photographs of an existing dented car, or perhaps they even have a dented car which they are then presenting to an insurance company or perhaps the court. Maybe this is merely an operation to collect number plate details so that they can get some kind of refund on an e-tag? I honestly have no idea and find it both interesting and knavish.

To be honest, I am surprised that the person lasted that long because during the course of getting precisely zero information from me, they became increasingly belligerent and abusive before telling me that they were going to do nasty things to my children (which is again really difficult, as I don't have any). 

For the record, the phone number of this rather abusive and blunt fishing expedition is 0402577479. I assume that this phone number also isn't real.

My hope is that other people who will receive such calls are not deceived into giving any personal and/or financial details. 

I do not understand how this scam operates exactly but I do know that the operators are rather unpleasant and they probably see people as acceptable targets.

Horse 2880 - Rational Choice Fails Us Because It Can't Exist

One of the problems that happens when you try to build models of the kosmos is that because the kosmos is bigger and more complex than your model, it sometimes refuses to be contained within the confines of your model.

In building your model of the kosmos, it is almost self-evident that you need to build it out of components that are simpler than the thing that you intend to simulate. Take a map as an example. You can not very well make a 1:1 map of Canberra because it would need to be as big as Canberra. Invariably, your model needs to have symbols and theories about how the kosmos works, and that involves making assumptions.

One of the assumptions that keeps on arising in both economics and social behaviour is the theory that people make rational choices.

Rational choice theory is more like a set of guidelines rather than hard and fast rules and basically states that individuals will make and use some kind of rational calculations to make rational choices and achieve outcomes that are aligned with their own personal objectives. This more than likely stems from the somewhat obvious statement that the centre of everyone's universe is about 19mm behind their corneas and as such humans are the hero of their own story and as a result, selfish. As selfish and self-interested beings, rational choice theory suggests that in maximizing an individual's self-interest, that they will make decisions which they expect will provide them with the greatest benefit and satisfaction, given the limited option they have available.

There is a caveat in that behavioural economics does at least try to explain why people sometimes make irrational decisions and why their behavior does not always follow the predictions of economic models. This is where rational choice theory tends to leave behind economics and enters the realm of psychology. 

I think that all of that sounds fine provided that we lived in an ideal kosmos. I would agree that people would make optimal decisions that would provide them with the most benefit and satisfaction, except that we do not live in an ideal kosmos and individuals are not playing with all of the available information which they might need.

The problem with humans generally is that people are often motivated by emotions, which themselves are subject to immense change within even one day, and affected by an unknowable amount of external forces. People are like The Doctor's TARDIS in that they are so much bigger on the inside than mere models can contain.

"Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

- "Song Of Myself, 51", Walt Whitman (1855)

It is a hideous understatement to say that individuals do not always make rational decisions. It is also a hideous understatement to say that individuals do not have perfect access to the information they would need to make the most rational decision every time.

Moreover, people value different things for equally irrational reasons. Concepts like hyperbolic discounting suggests that people value some dollars more than others. Politics, partisanship, paternalism, patricianism, patronage, and privilege, also means that people value different people differently. 

This therefore is the underlying reason why I am currently at home in a lockdown. Literally nobody is playing with anything like a complete set of information, from the lowest of the low, to the Premier of New South Wales. Some people are led to believe theories which defy logic, some people are simply selfish beyond the point of normal spitefulness as well.

I would wager that it is literally impossible to expect anyone to conduct any kind rational thinking, rational choice making and any kind of rational risk assessment, when the collective response ranges from borderline hysteria, through to culpable neglect of others, through to complete denial of reality.

The problem with hindsight is that it is always in 6/6 vision whereas looking into the future is often like looking into a blurry void. Hindsight tells us that what the Premier should have done was declare an immediate and very hard lockdown and then double and triple down on any vaccination rollout. The Premier failed to do this because she was under pressure from the economic liberal wing of her party which values some dollars more than other dollars and some people more than other people. That meant that the Premier tried to control the problem without resorting to lockdowns or border closures.

Aided and abetted by commercial news media which backs her part, the narrative has now been spun that the people of southwest and western Sydney have a “compliance” problem; rather than addressing the issue at hand by putting resources into greater income support and better communication, especially on vaccination. 

The long, slow, and wiser option may have been to improve the model of the kosmos from the outset and choose to give the general public more information about the various kinds of drivers and morbidities, such as lung and respiratory complaints, various kinds of blood related conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes, as well as the more generalised morbidities such as overweight and obesity, and other kinds of issues like cancer.

Even that kind of information campaign will still not have been terribly effective as those people who would have otherwise made irrational decisions would have continued to do so. It means that all we are left with is the incorrect assumption that people make rational choices, and that they need to be coerced into some kind of compliance by force of law and reinforcement of fear. The problem is that reinforcing fear won’t be effective long-term. Fear is the mind killer, the anaesthetic of bravery, the anaerobic oil slick which smothers the mind; the biggest reason why rational choice theory is bunk.

Horse 2879 - THE PEOPLE v PIZZA [2021] - Test Case

The Fake Internet Court of Australia

THE PEOPLE v PIZZA [2021] - Test Case

H2879/1

It has come to this fake internet court's attention that in previous prognostications which have ruled out pineapple on a pizza and also ruled out the more egregious and heinous crime of banana on a pizza, that the people are crying out for, nay begging for, directions on what the best thing to go on a pizza is. 

While it is a long standing precedent that people will like what they like and that they are entitled to like what they like, of itself that doesn't actually determine what the best thing is. This fake internet court could make a general directive with regards a host of various components but really the answer is best uncovered by discovery of minimum expectations. That establishes a floor upon that which is best, may be allowed to stand.

It is generally assumed that pizza is made from some kind of pizza dough with a thick crust. Thin crusts where the edges are either non existent or where the edges are like that of the outside of a loaf of bread while they might please some, will not please as many as a fluffy crust.

I'm also going to make the assumption that the pizza sauce upon which everything else is placed is a spiced tomato type affair. Barbeque sauce may be used in pizzas like Barbeque Chicken or Barbecue Meat Lover's but already the concession has been made that they are inclined to please less people. Also, while pizza can exist without a layer of cheese, it is ill-advised and generally a bad idea.

The question then is, what is the definitively best topping and is that enough by itself?

Broadly speaking most of the various kinds of meats could stand alone on a pizza, though few would. Most come as a duo; such as prawn and garlic, ham and pineapple (which is an abomination), chicken and mushroom etc. There is a place for some kind of vegetable combination but again, a combination vegetable pizza while fine, is not the best.

It is the opinion of this fake internet court that this is self evident. The single best pizza topping is pepperoni. 

This is going to sound absurd but pepperoni, just like the invention the hamburger, is an American invention. Pepperoni kind of lives in the land of the Calabrese salami tradition, and is a relative to other Italian dried salamis like Soppressata.

This fake internet court has also discovered that there is an almost unique case of chemistry going on. Pepperoni is different from other salamis in that it steamed, as opposed to a normal process of being aged and cured. 

This means that while any given slice of pepperoni is under the grill, the proteins will tend to shorten in the heat, fat will be rendered out of the meat, and the slice itself will tend to curl up and cup; which leads to even more drying out and charring.

Ham, bacon, ground beef, chicken, other salamis, prosciutto, and various kinds of sausage, simply do not do this. Soppressata more than likely will curl and render and char but pizza is the food of the people and doesn't really belong in a fancy restaurant.

The bottom line is that if you ask most people if they like pepperoni pizza, they will say 'yes'; because there is no such thing as a bad pepperoni pizza.

That being said, if pepperoni pizza is classe d'oro of pizza, is there anything at all which can improve it? Surprisingly, there is - Red Onion.

Brown onion will tend to caramelise under a grill, however brown onion is too sweet for a pizza. In principle, the biggest reason why pineapple is unsuitable for a pizza is that although it does attempt to balance ham, all it can do is become like a fairground candy. Red onion on the other hand is almost a little sour; which is the perfect accompaniment to pepperoni. 

As pepperoni renders under the pizza grill, both the fat from the pepperoni and the cheese, will help to fry the onion. This is chemistry working at its delicious best.

Should anything else be added? No. Other pizza toppings exist but every single topping is inferior to pepperoni. Supreme pizzas are presumed to operate on the principle that more is better but in reality, all it is is that more is more.

Final Judgement:

It is at this point that this fake internet court would usually make a decision with regards one of the parties who has violated some deep and primal force of nature but this is a test case to derive what is most excellent rather than exact condemnation.

Pepperoni can stand alone although it will share the small stage with others. Pepperoni and red onion is the best pizza of all, though pepperoni pizza by itself is already iconic and better than every single other kind of pizza bar one.

If expectation is the root of all heartache and things done well exempt themselves from calamity, then deciding upon a thing which is impossible to get wrong is never a bad choice. 

This case is closed and there being no further business for today, this court intends to adjourn to a proper proprietor of pizza and prove this proposition.

- ROLLO J

Horse 2878 - Rollo Chocolate Bar Ratings Index

 The problem with listicles is that they are really bad for your brain. A listicle has no other purpose than to drive and generate traffic for the website in question. It is a kind of tnetennba, if you will. For this reason, as far as the end user is concerned, they appear to be of low effort. While that might be true if the list only contains ten things, the cognitive load on the author more than doubles for twenty items and when it comes to 56 items as is the case here, suddenly the author find themself spiralling into a vortex of obsession.

This list, which is now the official Rollo Chocolate Bar ratings index, is one such spiral into the vortex as time begins to cease to have any meaning during Lockdown II: Electric Boogaloo. The RCB for 2021 is by no means exhaustive, by no means fixed, and by no means sensible. Please note that it is subject to change, on an arbitrary whim and at any given point in time with no explanation whatsoever.

A1 - Rolls Royce Tier

1. Nestle Yorkie Mystery

2. Nestle Yorkie Original

2. Nestle Yorkie Rum And Raisin

4. Nestle Yorkie Fruit And Biscuit

5. Nestle Club

6. Cadbury Old Gold

B1 - Extremely Fine

7. Nestle Club Rum And Raisin

8. Cadbury Old Gold Rum And Raisin

9. Nestle Club Fruit And Nut

10. Cadbury Old Gold Fruit And Nut

11. Nestle Club Caramel

12. Cadbury Old Gold Caramel

13. Whittaker's Peanut Slab

14. Fry's Turkish Delight

B2 - Very Fine

15. Whittaker's Milk

16. Nestle Milk

17. Cadbury Dairy Milk

B3 - Fine

18. Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel

19. Cadbury Dairy Milk Pineapple

20. Cadbury Dairy Milk Strawberry

21. Cadbury Top Deck

22. Cadbury Dairy Milk Turkish Delight

23. Cadbury Dairy Milk Raspberry

24. Cadbury Dairy Milk Peppermint

25. Cadbury Dairy Milk Hazelnut

C1 - Fair

26. 3 Musketeers

27. Dreamy (Aldi)

28. Milky Way (Australia)

C2 - Adequate

29. Moro

30. Mars

31. Milky Way (US)

32. Chokito

33. Snickers

34. Picnic

35. Boost

36. Nestle Crunch

37. Polly Waffle

C3 - Acceptable

38. Violet Crumble

39. Crunchie

40. Aero

41. Flake

42. Twirl

D - Junk Rated. Please see me after class.

43. Take 5

44. Milky Bar (all varieties)

45. Hershey's Cookies and Cream

E - Banned From The Mickey Mouse Club Tier

46. Cadbury Marvellous Creations

47. Cadbury Popcorn

48. Reece's Pieces

49. Reece's Peanut Butter Cup

50. Mr Goodbar

51. Butterfinger

52. Curly Wurly

F - Cat Vomit Tier

53. Whittaker's Kiwifruit

54. Cadbury Vegemite

55. Hershey's Milk

56. Hershey's Kisses

In general, everything arranged by the letter categories has remained in those places for a very long time. It should also be noted that although items in Category F are edible, they thoroughly deserve their ranking and that there are clearly better options. Items in Category A are excellent and will result in genuine delight if offered as a present.

Horse 2877 - Who Is Norwest Station Actually For?

Of all of the railway stations in Sydney's vast rail network, there is one in particular which is especially perplexing to me. That station is Norwest on the North West Metro line.

I have no real idea what the alignment of the North West Metro runs the way that it does through that part of the world because I have been unable to find any of the discussion papers which went into the policy making process.

The North West Metro which was discussed in the run up to the 2011 NSW Election actually came with the promise by the then Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell that it any work was undertaken by the then Kenneally Labor Government, that his government would fill in all of the holes.

When the project was finally greenlit by the O'Farrell Liberal Government, the line mysteriously stopped 2222m short of connecting with the Richmond Line at an interchange at Schofields. The other end of the line just happened to be at Chatswood which just happens to be in the electorate of Willoughby and the then Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian (I wonder what ever happened to her?)

I didn't really have that much of a problem when the then Macquarie Line connected Chatswood to Epping via Macquarie University and the Macquarie Centre. That was a sensible connection because both ends were connected to the existing network. My problem with the North West Metro terminating at Tallawong is that it could have gone the extra 2222m and connected at Schofields but someone took the deliberate decision for that not to happen. Remember, politics is the art of the enactment of policy and policy means that someone has made choices.

Norwest Railway Station which is on the North West Metro, does this almost unique trick of not actually being useful to the majority of the residents which live within the boundaries of the suburb which bears its name.

There are two enclaves of houses within Norwest and the one in the northwest of the suburb is almost borderline too far away to make the railway station useful. The enclave to the south side of the suburb, has as far as I can tell, absolutely no direct route by car to get to the station and the set of houses have a single sad footpath that doesn't open up into a place where the railway station is easily accessible.

The suburb of Norwest as being a distinctly new thing was demarcated as a business park and so I would expect that the railway station is supposed to serve them in the same way Macquarie Park or Wynyard serves the business community immediately around those places. Again, Norwest Railway Station is far away from practically every business in the suburb.

The question then is, who is this for? Apart from the Norwest Markettown shopping centre on the other side of the street which has adequate parking (because you'd expect people who are grocery shopping to take a car), the only entity that I can see which properly benefits from the existence of Norwest Railway Station is Hillsong.

Norwest Railway Station is unique on the North West Metro in that it is the only station which doesn't have free commuter car parking. There are roughly 4000 parking spots up and down the line; with the very big carparks at Tallawong which has 1000 spots and 1360 at Kellyville.

The carpark which is on Solent Circuit is owned and operated privately by Hillsong and charges roughly $200 pet month, though church-goers, staff members and students of Hillsong Campuses are exempt from paying the cost.

Norwest Station is labelled as a 'destination station' in the North West Metro official documentation in the same way that Wynyard or Museum Stations are. This means that Transport For NSW expected in principle that it mostly wouldn't be used by locals and residents to commute outwards from. As a destination, they expect people to arrive there. This is curious because of the businesses that are in the area, most of them are outside of sensible walking distance from the station; with only a few along Norwest Boulevard which might make use of the facilities. If you are coming in from the west and west, then the station is virtually useless to you as there is no western end rail connection with anything; so you may as well drive. If you are coming from the south, then you are more likely to take a bus if you intend to take public transport, and if you are coming from the east, the first connection point with the rest of the rail network is Epping.

If Norwest Railway Station doesn't really serve the businesses there, and it doesn't really serve the shopping centre there, and it's practically useless to the commuters who are actually in the suburb, then the only reason why I can imagine that it was placed where it is, is the Hillsong Head Campus complex on the opposite diagonal corner of the intersection.

Given that Peter Costello, Alexander Downer, Helen Coonan, Kevin Andrews, Alex Hawke, and Scott Morrison have all spoken at Hillsong Conferences in the past, it doesn't take that much of a leap of faith to work out why Norwest Railway Station just happens to be placed on the other side of the street from Hillsong. The thing about railway trains is that they are impartial but once you lay down the lines, that's where they run. 

Horse 2876 - On Pessimism And Lament

I will readily admit that I am the eternal pessimist. I used to say that the chances of some bad thing happening in my lifetime which were as big as the Great Depression or the two World Wars, was 1. As a student who is prepared to listen to the lessons of history, history as a schoolmaster teaches that the world frequently goes through upheavals, wars, plagues and other unpleasantries. 

If I consider the world in which my grandparents grew up in, all four of them lived through the Great Depression and through the Second World War and were born during the First World War. My parents were alive during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the 1970s Oil Crisis. I have been alive during the 1987 Stock Market Crash, the 1990s Recession. The First and Second Gulf Wars, and the war in Afghanistan. There has also been the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and now this.

Covid-19 is not necessarily an unexpected thing, it just happens to be the particular unpleasant thing in which we currently find ourselves.

Speaking as the eternal pessimist, there is a comfort in knowing that things will at some point turn to total calamity and also that unless you happen to live in a period of longish terribleness, that the calamity will pass. The kosmos is simply too dynamic and chaotic to remain static for very long. I do not think that pessimism is a bad position but rather, a realistic position from which to give a very hard stare to the future. 

Nobody sensible goes out on the road without car insurance. Insurance in principle is an gamble against a thing from happening. It is a gamble that you really do not want to win as that would mean that the bad thing has happened and you have suffered some kind of loss, which you are now collecting winnings for. Expecting a bad thing to happen, is the mark of prudence. Expecting a thing and then taking defensive action, is wise.

Precisely because of this pessimists tend to experience higher levels of self-confidence than optimists. There's probably also a higher degree of superbia which might occur but when you also include yourself in the domain of things that can be unreliable and also turn to calamity, then expecting the worst ironically creates a better payout when things turn out better than expected.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jclp.10094

This study that followed a group of university students found that defensive pessimists seemed to have higher self-confidence as compared to those who experienced anxiety and that some pessimists had higher self-confidence scores than the typical optimist.

Being constantly worried though is mentally taxing. This is why I do not want to dismiss mental health issues like anxiety disorders and what not. That is where pessimism and worry ultimately has no place to land. There is something to the analogy of the flight or fight response, where defensive pessimism says that you are best being hunkered down in a storm but anxiety always wants to fly on and fight. It's okay, you have permission to land.

There is also a case to be made that being angry, disappointed, saddened, or frustrated at the storms of life, is a rational, logical, and reasonable response. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9PSg0sQyfs

David Mitchell's rant about poor customer service is excellent because it's so very very true.

“Why have a cheesy grin on your face if you are working in an awful supermarket?”

"Well, it’s the sign either of a liar or a moron.”

In both instances here, both with the imaginary person who is having an awful day and David Mitchell's reply, is the recognition that life sometimes throws up unpleasantness. What's also being recognised is the humanity of someone else who is going through unpleasant times and permission being given to demonstrate a rational response. Being angry, disappointed, saddened, or frustrated, is the proof that all of the instruments are switched on and that they are in fact functioning properly.

Aside:

If you do not want to think about religion, exit now.

Why, Lord, do you stand far off?

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

- Psalm 10:1

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

- Psalm 13:1-2

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me,

so far from my cries of anguish?

My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

by night, but I find no rest.

- Psalm 22:1-2

O God, why have you rejected us forever?

Why does your anger smolder against the sheep of your pasture?

- Psalm 74:1

Being pessimistic, angry, disappointed, saddened, and frustrated with the world is not only a rational response but I think an expected one.

I really think that in the aftermath of the unpleasantness of the earlier half of the twentieth century with the two World Wars and the Great Depression, that somehow in an attempt to scrub out the unpleasantness of what life can throw at us, that we've sanitised our response to it, beyond the point of stupidity.

I think that we need to regain the importance of lament. 

If one of the base assumptions of Christianity is that the world is messed up and God himself provided a solution to it being messed up, then why would He not want to hear from us about that same subject?

Read through the Psalms and you'll find that not only are the Psalms of lamentation shouting at God, I think that they are giving us permission and an invitation to do so.

Horse 2875 - Helicopters Over Western Sydney, or: How To Be Seen To Be Doing Something

As I write this paragraph, it is 11:16 on a Tuesday night and we are being buzzed by a Eurocopter Tiger, which has been deployed for the purposes of watching over the 8 local government areas of Western Sydney, as we are in a 5km lockdown cage.

I know that it is a Eurocopter Tiger as over the last 10 days, we have been visited by a number of different types of aircraft which are operated by the Australian Army, the Royal Australian Air Force, and the NSW Police. This has meant that even if we aren't allowed to travel more than 5km (I am currently banned from leaving and going to work), we can at least look upwards to the skies and watch some people who are allowed to travel outside of their local government area.

The thing about the Eurocopter Tiger is that it is a multirole attack helicopter which was originally developed as an anti-tank platform. As an attack helicopter, it's purpose is the destruction of people, assets and buildings; which makes it near enough useless in the war against the unseen enemy of the virus. It is however, equipped with night vision; which means that it can spot people who are outside in the darkness. The only person that it would have seen outside in the 5° nighttime was a nerd in glasses, looking up into the night sky; wondering why an anti-tank platform has been deployed to spy over Western Sydney.

...

As I write this paragraph on Wednesday morning, I am looking towards the western skies and watching as a C-130 Hercules is wending its way towards me.

According to Lockheed Martin, the C-130J Hercules 'goes where other airlifters can’t, won’t or don’t go.' I do not think that Lockheed Martin ever thought about its aircraft flying reconnaissance missions over civilian populations in friendly countries.

Again, I do not know what purpose flying reconnaissance missions over civilian populations is designed to do, against the unseen enemy of the virus.

...

Also every night for the last 10 days, we have had the NSW Police PolAir service in the skies, presumably enforcing the lockdown regulations. 

The NSW Police Force has five Eurocopter AS350 Écureuil helicopters; which are all equipped with blue and red flashing lights and which also have searchlights which they can use to shine down upon people.

They seem to be very happy up there, doing laps following the major roads and highways. Presumably as there are eight local government areas in Western Sydney which are the declared red zones, that the five PolAir helicopters are all covering wide ranges. I can only guess this as since the rules have been put into place, apart from walking around, I have not been very far at all.

...

I have also seen of late, a Blackhawk and what I think is a C-17 Globemaster, though I can not imagine what purpose either of those are serving.

...

In this lockdown, I have seen the police on literally every trip that I have made that wasn't by foot; including yesterday when I went to the supermarket and saw two police officers inside Westpoint Blacktown, who were checking-in with the cashiers of an Aldi. The rest of the shopping centre was closed save for a chemist and presumably the Coles and Woolworths further up the building.

...

As a first born child I am predisposed to follow the rules and owing to my belief set I am also predisposed to follow the rules, including when they are inconvenient, annoying and quite frankly, harsh. The rules in this case, exist for the protection of people's lives. That doesn't prevent me from opening up the teleology of those rules.

It seems sensible me that there should be a lockdown if the virus is transmitted by an airborne aerosol pathway. It also seems sensible to me that there will be people who are unlucky and have to bear the cost of fighting a war against the unseen enemy of the virus. It also seems sensible to me that because people are selfish and can not be trusted to follow the rules, that there needs to be enforcement of those rules.

I also think that having fluffed the job of containment in the eastern suburbs, the NSW State Government needs to be seen to be doing something and that means putting police helicopters in the sky and a visible police presence on the streets. The Federal Government having fluffed its job of border protection, quarantine, and vaccine rollout, also needs to be seen to be doing something and that also means putting army helicopters into the sky. These things are great for PR but ultimately useless in actually solving problem.

The media of course loves it. Army helicopters and officers in fatigues makes for great television and if you also overlay this with a narrative that people aren't following the rules, then the fact that the government hasn't adequately done its job can be ignored; which is fine if the government happens to be your favorable political football team.

In the case of Federal Government, announcing that you are sending in the Army (300 personnel) is also great way to be seen to be doing something.

However:

https://www.army.gov.au/our-news/army-exercises-alerts/australian-defence-force-training-new-south-wales-july-december-2021

"Australian Defence Force personnel will conduct maritime counter-terrorism training in Sydney Harbour and New South Wales coastal waters from the Central Coast to Jervis Bay from July to December 2021."

The training will be conducted during the day and night. 

....

The thing that really amuses me is this:

"This essential training is vital to maintain Australia’s world-class military capability. It is not a part of the Australian Government’s COVID-19 response. The training is being conducted in a manner that accounts for COVID-19 restrictions and good health management processes."

The fact that this paragraph needed to be included looks more like a wink and a nod by a magician who is conducting a game of Three Card Monte. It is easy to look like you are doing something when you have already allocated resources to a similar project.

It would of course be far more effective to be actually doing something rather than merely to be seen to be doing something. That would require actual effort to fully vaccinate the population until herd immunity is reached. Until then though, to be seen to be doing something is about as best as we can hope for and the helicopters will continue until morale improves.

Horse 2874 - The Not Countries At The Olympics

One of the saving graces of having world sports day delayed by several months and into the 20th month of 2020, is that it has just happened to coincide with the gold standard military enforced lockdown in Western Sydney.

Last Thursday, Alessandra Perilli won the bronze medal in the Women's Trap Shooting final, which was the first Olympic medal for the oldest country in the world, San Marino. Yes, San Marino is the world's oldest country and dates from the year 301. It was never absorbed into the Roman Empire beyond that, nor any of the other countries which came and went in the 1,719 subsequent years.

While that is indeed fun, and if you ignore Russia competing under the Russian Olympic Committee flag, there's some really weird maths when it comes to the number of countries at the Olympics.

A lot to this has to do with how you define a country but the most agreed upon way is to ask if they have a seat at the United Nations. Immediately we run into our fun problem.

There are 206 countries at the Olympics but only 193 countries which are recognised by the United Nations. Simple maths tells you that there are 13 extra countries in the Olympics, which aren't in the United Nations and that's weird.

If we eliminate the 'countries' which totally aren't countries, then:

- Guam

- Puerto Rico

- Amercian Samoa

- US Virgin Islands

These are unincorporated territories of the United States. This means that they aren't states but they shouldn't really their own country either. Puerto Rico has now held a few referenda on statehood and the people voted yes but the United States more or less rejects their wishes. Especially this proves that Puerto Rico is not a country.

That's 4.

- Bermuda

- UK Virgin Islands

- Cayman Islands

These are British Overseas Territories, which look as close to being countries as they possibly can but aren't really.

4 + 3 = 7

- The Cook Islands 

This is an island nation with political links to New Zealand that just can't be bothered to apply for UN status even though it totally could.

The Cook Islands is almost the opposite of what is above. Those things are not countries masquerading as countries while the Cook Islands is a country masquerading as not a country.

- Hong Kong 

I do not think that Hong Kong has ever been a country. It is a "Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China" which is as weird as the British Overseas Territories.

- Aruba 

This is maybe the weirdest thing here. Aruba is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; which would be like if Scotland or Wales competed at the Olympics in the same way as those countries compete in football most of the time.

Then there is the Refugee Team which actually isn't a country at all but a loose confederation of displaced persons who still compete at the Olympics. The Refugee Team is at the Olympics but not as a country and it also isn't a country that also doesn't have a seat at the United Nations... isn't not doesn't... NO! We are not playing this multiple negative parsing game. 

So far 4 + 3 + 4 = 11.

This leaves you with two countries at the Olympics which look so much like countries that it isn't funny but aren't in the United Nations.

- Palestine 

Whatever you say about Palestine and the Middle East, it's far more complicated than that. Palestine is a country which totally looks like a country but only has "non-member observer state" status in the United Nations because of Israel and the forever unpleasantness which those two countries share. Israel has reasonably powerful friends in United Nations who get to decide who is in and who is out.

- Taiwan 

Taiwan is in a similar situation as it competes at the Olympics as Chinese Taipei because although Taiwan is for all intents and purposes in every way a proper country but the United Nations likes to pretend that it doesn't exist because of China.

4 + 3 + 4 + 2 = 13.

There is one country which like Palestine which only has non-member observer state" status in the United Nations and so doesn't count in the 193 nations there, and which also hasn't sent anyone to the Olympics but intends to in 2024. The Vatican City has an athletics federation and has even won a silver medal in synchronized swimming in London in 2012.

4 + 3 + 4 + 2 +1 -1 = 13.

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."

- Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa's criteria for what a country is excludes a lot of countries that are either too small or have state religious objections to alcohol. All of the countries on the Zappa Country Development Index are in the Olympics and there are 160 of those.