There are at least six corruption scandals currently taking place in this government, seven things that are horrifying:
1.
Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said Australians should stop shopping at Aldi or Coles if they wanted a sustainable dairy industry.
Agriculture Minister David Littleproud - and whose chief of staff is former government relations manager for Woolworths - calls for boycott of Woolworths' competitors.
2.
The Australian Financial Review has reported that Paladin Group’s $420m of contracts to provide security to refugees on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea was extended by the home affairs department in January after a closed tender process.
The "curriculum officer" at Paladin Solutions PNG is named Karen Dutton - A relative to Peter Dutton? The Home Affairs Minister?
3.
Mathias Cormann admitted under questioning at Senate estimates that on three occasions in the last three years he called Helloworld Travel chief executive Andrew Burnes to arrange his trips.
The revelation came when Senator Cormann faced questions about why he hadn't been charged more than $2,700 for flights to Singapore.
4.
Federal Small Business Minister Michaelia Cash insists she has provided a witness statement to police about raids on union offices — despite the Australian Federal Police (AFP) saying she did not.
A member of her staff tipped off the media that police were raiding the Melbourne offices of the Australian Workers' Union back in 2017; which is now part of a civil court case.
5.
Mr Wilson led town-hall style meetings across the country seeking feedback on Labor's plan to scrap franking credits, which form part of SMSF funds income.
Mr Wilson has confirmed he sought a testimony from a high-profile fund manager and a distant relative, Geoff Wilson, who manages his investments.
Geoff Wilson is the founder and manager of Wilson Asset Management, which manages some of Tim Wilson's investments.
Tim Wilson is the chair of the House Economics Committee; who just happnes to have a conflict of interest as he's a shareholder in Wilson Asset Management.
6.
Peter Dutton reportedly has a business interest in childcare centres, which two constitutional law experts have suggested could amount to an “indirect pecuniary interest” in an agreement with the commonwealth and disqualify him from parliament.
According to Dutton’s register of interests he, his spouse and children are beneficiaries of the RHT Family Trust.
This would disqualify him from sitting in parliament under Section 44(v) of the Constitution.
The government has refused to refer him to the High Court.
And 7:
Secretary of the Department of Human Services, Renée Leon, explained to Senate Estimates that because suicide victims are no longer alive, there can not be a proven causal link between their suicides and the Robodebt scandal following overpayment and demand notices from Centrelink. 2030 people have died. 1778 (87%) were under the age of 65.
The kicker:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/ipsos-poll-support-for-labor-falls-after-clash-over-refugees-and-border-security-20190217-p50ycu.html
Labor has suffered a sharp fall in popular support after a week of incendiary political claims over border protection, with the party leading the Coalition by 51 to 49 per cent in its narrowest result in more than six months.
Voters have shifted against Labor in significant numbers amid the escalating row over the refugee medical transfer law passed by Parliament last week, cutting the party’s lead over the Coalition from the previous result of 54 to 46 per cent last December.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 17th Feb 2019
What is wrong with you Australia? Are 49 percent of you just criminally stupid or deliberately belligerent?
Of course we have also passed legislation which moves sick asylum seekers on medical grounds from one tropical gulag, to another tropical gulag with such inadequate medical facilities that no babies have been born on Christmas Island in two decades (including an asylum seeker from Iran who miscarried in 2013).
This is the government you elected Australia and will likely return to power in May.
February 21, 2019
February 20, 2019
Horse 2513 - My Electricity Problem, The Bigger Electricity Problem, And Why Privatisation Is Stupid
The Problem:
At about 8am yesterday morning, Mrs Rollo was disturbed not by the usual onslaught of feline hostilities which rage from time to time but by a white car and a man with a BA in Clipboardology. He came to the house, shut the power off at the power box, put a tape over the switches which are a criminal offence to remove and drove away.
I had recently arrived at work and had made a cup of coffee (of everyone’s favourite zero star coffee International Roast) and was about to settle in for the morning to do a spot of grunt work when I was told that there was no electricity.
The poles and wires in our part of the world are owned by Endeavour Energy. It was they who sent around their man in the car to switch off the power. However, I wasn’t to know that as in the first instance, I had to ring our retail electricity provider, which was Origin Energy.
Except it wasn’t.
The last bill that we had from Origin Energy was back in November last year. The account was showing $0.00 outstanding and so it was nonsensical to the person who I rang at Origin, why the elecrity was cut off.
I was sent to Endeavour Energy.
Endeavour Energy asked me if I’d run my retail electricity provider. I told them I had. They told me that I needed to track down an order for cut off, so that it could be reversed.
So back to Origin Energy I went.
Origin Energy told me that they had sent no such order to Endeavour Energy and that I should ring Endeavour Energy to see where the order for cut off had come from.
So back to Endeavour Energy I went.
After speaking to someone at Endeavour Energy and having to reexplain the situation, I was then sent on a series of numbers until I found someone who could tell me where they order had come from. It had not come from Origin Energy as I had thought, and who I had been paying our electricity bills with but from AGL.
So I rang AGL.
AGL were incredibly confused. Not only could AGL not identify me as a customer at this address but they had details of me living at a house that I had moved out of more than five years ago. They sent me back to Endeavour Energy to see which National Meter Identifier (NMI) had been cut off.
So I went back to Endeavour Energy.
Endeavour Energy were able to tell me what the NMI for this property was, sort of. There is also a granny flat out the back, and they couldn’t determine which one it was and as they do no have accounts linked to NMIs because they are not the retail electricity provider, they sent me back to Origin Energy to get the NMI.
Which I did.
I then took that NMI to AGL, wherein I had to set up a new account because apparently (and this is the kicker) our property was an AGL owned account but unattached to any customer. This means that AGL have been supplying electricity to us, without us even knowing about it and because the account was unattached to any customer and nobody paid the bill, this is what triggered the cut off order.
So I had to create a new account with AGL, who then sent an immediate order to resupply electricity and the same man in the white car who had been around at 8am, came around at 2:25pm to turn the power back on.
Between three companies, nobody had a clue as to why we’d been transferred from Origin to AGL without our knowledge, or even how it had happened.
The Bigger Problem:
Electricity supply as far as the customer is concerned, something of a natural monopoly. The customer shouldn’t have to care about comparing a godzillion number of plans and rates, in a giant confuseopoly because in the end, electricity is exactly fungible. 240 volts at 10 amps should be exactly the same if it comes from Kalgoorlie to Karratha or from Katoomba to Kiama. I give zero hoots about where it comes from. Broadly speaking, I’d like it to come from less fossil fuel burning, but that should be government policy and not incumbent on the poor consumer who is stuck in the middle of a retail price maelstrom to decide.
Because Electricity supply is both a natural monopoly, and a piece of national infrastructure, then history consistently proves that privatisation is rubbish. I’m not trying to make some grand statement about socialism here but if it takes the best part of six and a half hours and three companies to resolve an issue which could have been solved in less than four minutes, then you can stick whatever comments you have to make about free markets into the sun.
Private companies who have multiple administrations, which are basically duplicates of each other, who are all being funded at the lowest possible rates in the name of spinning a profit, are terrible for the consumer. Had it been back in the days of Prospect County Council which was a state-owned corporation owned by the Government of New South Wales, you would have had a guy called Geoff walk down the corridor to another guy called Steve and ask “Why’d you cut the power off at 33 Banana St?” and there would have been an answer immediately.
Privatisation has not brought prices down for consumers and to be perfectly blunt, it more than anything else was probably the root cause of the 2016 South Australian blackout, when almost the entire state losing its electricity supply due to busted interconnecters and physical destruction of wires due to storms.
The then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that state governments had paid "little or no attention to energy security", and prize knave Queensland One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, blamed the incident on relying on renwable energy sources.
The truth is that without wires, electrity doesnn't flow and the real culprit for not doing proper maintenace was ElectraNet who are 46% owned by the State Grid Corporation of China, 33% owned by a Malaysian company called YTL, and something called Australian Utilities Pty Ltd.
The fact that the electricity isn't owned by the South Australian state government is stupid and all who sold off need to be put into a room with no electricity so they can think about what they've done.
The same goes for the state governments of New South Wales. Whoever thought that this was a good idea and everyone who voted for it, is criminally stupid.
More recently Mike Baird campaigned to lease 49% of NSW's state-owned electricity distribution network and as soon as he got a better job with the NAB, he jumped ship citing "family reasons" (I think that we know exactly what those "family reasons" were). It is decisions like this that stretch back to the 1980s, which explain why it takes three companies to shut off my electricity for no good reason at all.
Conclusion:
More than six hours after the power went off and after I’d been on the phone almost continuously, doing the equivalent of their administration for them, the power came back on again.
I had a phone call later that afternoon from AGL, asking me if I’d enjoyed the customer experience and if I would recommend them in the future.
Seriously?
At about 8am yesterday morning, Mrs Rollo was disturbed not by the usual onslaught of feline hostilities which rage from time to time but by a white car and a man with a BA in Clipboardology. He came to the house, shut the power off at the power box, put a tape over the switches which are a criminal offence to remove and drove away.
I had recently arrived at work and had made a cup of coffee (of everyone’s favourite zero star coffee International Roast) and was about to settle in for the morning to do a spot of grunt work when I was told that there was no electricity.
The poles and wires in our part of the world are owned by Endeavour Energy. It was they who sent around their man in the car to switch off the power. However, I wasn’t to know that as in the first instance, I had to ring our retail electricity provider, which was Origin Energy.
Except it wasn’t.
The last bill that we had from Origin Energy was back in November last year. The account was showing $0.00 outstanding and so it was nonsensical to the person who I rang at Origin, why the elecrity was cut off.
I was sent to Endeavour Energy.
Endeavour Energy asked me if I’d run my retail electricity provider. I told them I had. They told me that I needed to track down an order for cut off, so that it could be reversed.
So back to Origin Energy I went.
Origin Energy told me that they had sent no such order to Endeavour Energy and that I should ring Endeavour Energy to see where the order for cut off had come from.
So back to Endeavour Energy I went.
After speaking to someone at Endeavour Energy and having to reexplain the situation, I was then sent on a series of numbers until I found someone who could tell me where they order had come from. It had not come from Origin Energy as I had thought, and who I had been paying our electricity bills with but from AGL.
So I rang AGL.
AGL were incredibly confused. Not only could AGL not identify me as a customer at this address but they had details of me living at a house that I had moved out of more than five years ago. They sent me back to Endeavour Energy to see which National Meter Identifier (NMI) had been cut off.
So I went back to Endeavour Energy.
Endeavour Energy were able to tell me what the NMI for this property was, sort of. There is also a granny flat out the back, and they couldn’t determine which one it was and as they do no have accounts linked to NMIs because they are not the retail electricity provider, they sent me back to Origin Energy to get the NMI.
Which I did.
I then took that NMI to AGL, wherein I had to set up a new account because apparently (and this is the kicker) our property was an AGL owned account but unattached to any customer. This means that AGL have been supplying electricity to us, without us even knowing about it and because the account was unattached to any customer and nobody paid the bill, this is what triggered the cut off order.
So I had to create a new account with AGL, who then sent an immediate order to resupply electricity and the same man in the white car who had been around at 8am, came around at 2:25pm to turn the power back on.
Between three companies, nobody had a clue as to why we’d been transferred from Origin to AGL without our knowledge, or even how it had happened.
The Bigger Problem:
Electricity supply as far as the customer is concerned, something of a natural monopoly. The customer shouldn’t have to care about comparing a godzillion number of plans and rates, in a giant confuseopoly because in the end, electricity is exactly fungible. 240 volts at 10 amps should be exactly the same if it comes from Kalgoorlie to Karratha or from Katoomba to Kiama. I give zero hoots about where it comes from. Broadly speaking, I’d like it to come from less fossil fuel burning, but that should be government policy and not incumbent on the poor consumer who is stuck in the middle of a retail price maelstrom to decide.
Because Electricity supply is both a natural monopoly, and a piece of national infrastructure, then history consistently proves that privatisation is rubbish. I’m not trying to make some grand statement about socialism here but if it takes the best part of six and a half hours and three companies to resolve an issue which could have been solved in less than four minutes, then you can stick whatever comments you have to make about free markets into the sun.
Private companies who have multiple administrations, which are basically duplicates of each other, who are all being funded at the lowest possible rates in the name of spinning a profit, are terrible for the consumer. Had it been back in the days of Prospect County Council which was a state-owned corporation owned by the Government of New South Wales, you would have had a guy called Geoff walk down the corridor to another guy called Steve and ask “Why’d you cut the power off at 33 Banana St?” and there would have been an answer immediately.
Privatisation has not brought prices down for consumers and to be perfectly blunt, it more than anything else was probably the root cause of the 2016 South Australian blackout, when almost the entire state losing its electricity supply due to busted interconnecters and physical destruction of wires due to storms.
The then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that state governments had paid "little or no attention to energy security", and prize knave Queensland One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, blamed the incident on relying on renwable energy sources.
The truth is that without wires, electrity doesnn't flow and the real culprit for not doing proper maintenace was ElectraNet who are 46% owned by the State Grid Corporation of China, 33% owned by a Malaysian company called YTL, and something called Australian Utilities Pty Ltd.
The fact that the electricity isn't owned by the South Australian state government is stupid and all who sold off need to be put into a room with no electricity so they can think about what they've done.
The same goes for the state governments of New South Wales. Whoever thought that this was a good idea and everyone who voted for it, is criminally stupid.
More recently Mike Baird campaigned to lease 49% of NSW's state-owned electricity distribution network and as soon as he got a better job with the NAB, he jumped ship citing "family reasons" (I think that we know exactly what those "family reasons" were). It is decisions like this that stretch back to the 1980s, which explain why it takes three companies to shut off my electricity for no good reason at all.
Conclusion:
More than six hours after the power went off and after I’d been on the phone almost continuously, doing the equivalent of their administration for them, the power came back on again.
I had a phone call later that afternoon from AGL, asking me if I’d enjoyed the customer experience and if I would recommend them in the future.
Seriously?
February 15, 2019
Horse 2512 - A Company Pays A Living Wage - Oh Der!
One of the things that happens a fair bit on Facebook, is that when people post links to things, they will often tag their friends and family in posts; in what I can only imagine is an attempt to get a huge internet pile-on of likes. As someone who uses Facebook primarily through browsers and almost never on the app, I imagine that my user experience of the platform is significantly different to most people. I imagine that most people get their likes and hearts and then move on; whereas I on the other hand will tend to stew on something for far longer, and want to pick apart the things posted.
Ah yes, Facebook, that bastion of news outlets, that is always at the cutting edge with the greatest and latest news, except when it is not; which is most of the time.
In my Facebook feed this week, a tangential article about the fast food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A, was praised as though it were doing something noteworthy:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chick-fil-a-store-owner-raises-wages-to-17-or-18-an-hour-minimum-wage-living-wage/?fbclid=IwAR3gxKI9j9n90HSxGt_9isjw_o0JdrlD_iFi0vu2mA6x3eQdtFqNl6n0OP4
The owner of a Chick-fil-A location in Sacramento, California, calls it a "living wage." In Eric Mason's view, that would be $17 or $18 an hour, which is what he vows he'll be paying his workers, starting Monday, June 4. The rate represents a sizable increase for employees now making $12 to $13 an hour.
"As the owner, I'm looking at it big-picture and long-term," Mason told a local news station. "What that does for the business is provide consistency, someone that has relationships with our guests, and it's going to be building a long-term culture."
The idea, Mason said, is to hire workers -- he prefers "hospitality professionals" -- who will stick around, a worthwhile goal for a brand known for its customer service that's in an industry that had a 73 percent turnover rate in 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Kate Gibson, CBS News, 1st June 2018
The idea that an employer would pay their employees more, in an effort to reduce turnover is hardly a new one. Reknowned anti-Semite and industrialist Henry Ford famous paid his workers $5 a day in 1914, not because if the alturistic notion that his employees would be able to afford one of his flivvers but rather, Henry started paying a more livable wage because of simple economics. High employeer turnover kills productivity. The obvious solution is that if you pay the workers more, they won’t quit. It is an entirely rational and logical decision; made with cool brute logic.
I have no doubt that Eric Mason probably looked through his accounts and came to that same conclusion. Pay them more and they won’t quit. Incidentally, at 4% inflation (which has been the historial average since the beginning of the Roman Empire), Henry Ford's $5/day or 62.5c/hour, works out to $38.40/hr now.
The truth is that workers who supply their labour, do so for a pretty pragmatic reason - they need to eat and sleep somewhere. Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation", proposed a theory called the "hierarchy of needs"; which is mostly so obvious, you wonder why anyone needed to write a paper on it at all.
It's like the concept of physiological needs is one of the Great Ders of History and the fact that it needs repeating, makes me want to cry "Oh Der" repeatedly.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/ask-the-headhunter/column-if-your-business-cant-pay-a-living-wage-it-shouldnt-exist
But when it comes to how individual businesses should decide what to pay, my economic logic is simple. You — and many employers — have already discovered it, even if you all pretend otherwise: Nobody’s going to work for you because it costs more to live than the peanuts you’re paying.
You cannot — or you refuse to — pay fair-market compensation. That’s why you can’t hire the workers you need, no matter what your rationalization is. As I explained last week, the “talent shortage” is a creation of employers’ own making.
Fair-market compensation is an amount people need for shelter, food, transportation and other basics of life. That’s more than $70 a day where most people live.
- Nick Corcodilos, 12th Feb 2019
Oh Der!
The problem is that throughout history, people need to repeatedly yell "Oh Der" because it's almost as if everyone who becomes an employer and would like to pay their employees absolutely nothing if they could get away with it (that's why we have unpaid internships in the 21st Century), instantly forget that people need to eat and sleep somewhere. Oh Der!
"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
...
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, proposed Second Bill of Rights, State of the Union Address (1944).
Oh Der!
Bear in mind that FDR is speaking from the midst of a war here. One of the things about wars is that it suddenly dawns on the people who have power and control, that the people who are out on the battlefield actually have value. You do not win wars unless the people who do the fighting, believe that there is a thing worth fighting for. FDR also realised that wars do not last forever and unless the country recognised the value of its citizenry, then winning a war was pointless if you then do not win the peace.
FDR's proposal for the Second Bill of Rights never materialised because ultimately, it has been consistently proven that the people who own capital and by extension who own the systems which run democracies, do consider the general public as expendable. America has ultimately decided that people really only have value when they are actually fighting wars, because as soon as veterans get home, they are all too frequently discarded by the nation; as a practical demonstration of the value that they no longer have.
In principle, America thinks so little of the value of its people that not only did it not accept the Second Bill of Rights but it also refuses to be a signatory to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights as well as other statements and commitments to the value of people, such as the 1967 Protocol to the Refugee Convention. Speaking of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, it contains the following article:
"Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and for his family an existence worthy of human dignity."
- Article 23, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
Oh Der!
This sentiment echoes on and on throughout the centuries.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, had this to say in his 1776 work "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations":
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged."
- Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations (1776).
Oh Der!
Paul had to write to Timothy in the early days of the church:
"Elders who lead effectively are worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and, “The worker is worthy of his wages.”
- 1 Timothy 5:17-18
Oh Der!
And just to prove this sentiment is as old as dirt, we find it repeated again and again in the old testament:
"Do not defraud or rob your neighbor.
Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight."
- Leviticus 19:13
Oh Der!
"Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin."
- Deuteronomy 24:15
Oh Der!
Time and time again, it seems that people need to be told again that you really do need to pay people a proper wage because they need it to be able to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. How hard is that to understand? Seriously?
Okay, the owner of one Chick-fil-A restaurant realised that people need a proper wage in order to have a decent life; but what about everyone else? The multi-billion and possibly trillion dollar company Wal-mart pays its workers so very very little that it estimated that it costs U.S. taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. How 80% of the employees of a company with turnover of more than $125bn can not still manage to pay a living wage is beyond me.
This is not the sort of thing which should be praiseworthy. You shouldn't be praised for doing a thing which everyone should already be doing. It really just makes me want to yell "Oh Der!" again; which as shown has to be yelled again and again and again.
Oh Der!
Ah yes, Facebook, that bastion of news outlets, that is always at the cutting edge with the greatest and latest news, except when it is not; which is most of the time.
In my Facebook feed this week, a tangential article about the fast food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A, was praised as though it were doing something noteworthy:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chick-fil-a-store-owner-raises-wages-to-17-or-18-an-hour-minimum-wage-living-wage/?fbclid=IwAR3gxKI9j9n90HSxGt_9isjw_o0JdrlD_iFi0vu2mA6x3eQdtFqNl6n0OP4
The owner of a Chick-fil-A location in Sacramento, California, calls it a "living wage." In Eric Mason's view, that would be $17 or $18 an hour, which is what he vows he'll be paying his workers, starting Monday, June 4. The rate represents a sizable increase for employees now making $12 to $13 an hour.
"As the owner, I'm looking at it big-picture and long-term," Mason told a local news station. "What that does for the business is provide consistency, someone that has relationships with our guests, and it's going to be building a long-term culture."
The idea, Mason said, is to hire workers -- he prefers "hospitality professionals" -- who will stick around, a worthwhile goal for a brand known for its customer service that's in an industry that had a 73 percent turnover rate in 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Kate Gibson, CBS News, 1st June 2018
The idea that an employer would pay their employees more, in an effort to reduce turnover is hardly a new one. Reknowned anti-Semite and industrialist Henry Ford famous paid his workers $5 a day in 1914, not because if the alturistic notion that his employees would be able to afford one of his flivvers but rather, Henry started paying a more livable wage because of simple economics. High employeer turnover kills productivity. The obvious solution is that if you pay the workers more, they won’t quit. It is an entirely rational and logical decision; made with cool brute logic.
I have no doubt that Eric Mason probably looked through his accounts and came to that same conclusion. Pay them more and they won’t quit. Incidentally, at 4% inflation (which has been the historial average since the beginning of the Roman Empire), Henry Ford's $5/day or 62.5c/hour, works out to $38.40/hr now.
The truth is that workers who supply their labour, do so for a pretty pragmatic reason - they need to eat and sleep somewhere. Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation", proposed a theory called the "hierarchy of needs"; which is mostly so obvious, you wonder why anyone needed to write a paper on it at all.
It's like the concept of physiological needs is one of the Great Ders of History and the fact that it needs repeating, makes me want to cry "Oh Der" repeatedly.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/ask-the-headhunter/column-if-your-business-cant-pay-a-living-wage-it-shouldnt-exist
But when it comes to how individual businesses should decide what to pay, my economic logic is simple. You — and many employers — have already discovered it, even if you all pretend otherwise: Nobody’s going to work for you because it costs more to live than the peanuts you’re paying.
You cannot — or you refuse to — pay fair-market compensation. That’s why you can’t hire the workers you need, no matter what your rationalization is. As I explained last week, the “talent shortage” is a creation of employers’ own making.
Fair-market compensation is an amount people need for shelter, food, transportation and other basics of life. That’s more than $70 a day where most people live.
- Nick Corcodilos, 12th Feb 2019
Oh Der!
The problem is that throughout history, people need to repeatedly yell "Oh Der" because it's almost as if everyone who becomes an employer and would like to pay their employees absolutely nothing if they could get away with it (that's why we have unpaid internships in the 21st Century), instantly forget that people need to eat and sleep somewhere. Oh Der!
"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
...
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, proposed Second Bill of Rights, State of the Union Address (1944).
Oh Der!
Bear in mind that FDR is speaking from the midst of a war here. One of the things about wars is that it suddenly dawns on the people who have power and control, that the people who are out on the battlefield actually have value. You do not win wars unless the people who do the fighting, believe that there is a thing worth fighting for. FDR also realised that wars do not last forever and unless the country recognised the value of its citizenry, then winning a war was pointless if you then do not win the peace.
FDR's proposal for the Second Bill of Rights never materialised because ultimately, it has been consistently proven that the people who own capital and by extension who own the systems which run democracies, do consider the general public as expendable. America has ultimately decided that people really only have value when they are actually fighting wars, because as soon as veterans get home, they are all too frequently discarded by the nation; as a practical demonstration of the value that they no longer have.
In principle, America thinks so little of the value of its people that not only did it not accept the Second Bill of Rights but it also refuses to be a signatory to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights as well as other statements and commitments to the value of people, such as the 1967 Protocol to the Refugee Convention. Speaking of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, it contains the following article:
"Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and for his family an existence worthy of human dignity."
- Article 23, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
Oh Der!
This sentiment echoes on and on throughout the centuries.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, had this to say in his 1776 work "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations":
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged."
- Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations (1776).
Oh Der!
Paul had to write to Timothy in the early days of the church:
"Elders who lead effectively are worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and, “The worker is worthy of his wages.”
- 1 Timothy 5:17-18
Oh Der!
And just to prove this sentiment is as old as dirt, we find it repeated again and again in the old testament:
"Do not defraud or rob your neighbor.
Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight."
- Leviticus 19:13
Oh Der!
"Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin."
- Deuteronomy 24:15
Oh Der!
Time and time again, it seems that people need to be told again that you really do need to pay people a proper wage because they need it to be able to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. How hard is that to understand? Seriously?
Okay, the owner of one Chick-fil-A restaurant realised that people need a proper wage in order to have a decent life; but what about everyone else? The multi-billion and possibly trillion dollar company Wal-mart pays its workers so very very little that it estimated that it costs U.S. taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. How 80% of the employees of a company with turnover of more than $125bn can not still manage to pay a living wage is beyond me.
This is not the sort of thing which should be praiseworthy. You shouldn't be praised for doing a thing which everyone should already be doing. It really just makes me want to yell "Oh Der!" again; which as shown has to be yelled again and again and again.
Oh Der!
February 12, 2019
Horse 2511 - Why Should Warringah Send Tony Back To Canberra?
...In which I respond to Tony Abbott's column in the Sydney Morning Herald.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-warringah-should-send-me-back-to-canberra-20190208-p50whv.html
In the past two years, I’ve had meet-the-member public meetings all around Warringah for voters to tell me their concerns. Almost to a person, they’re sick of overdevelopment and the traffic jams that make the best suburbs in the world a misery as soon as you want to go anywhere else.
As someone who has been working in the electorate of Warringah, I have personally met Tony Abbott only twice in not quite sixteen years. Admittedly I am only here during office hours but I would hope that Mr Abbott actually speaks to the people of his electorate more often, than merely when it is time to stand upon the stump to pony up for votes.
I’m running again so the Northern Beaches tunnel finally gets built. Yes, it’s the Liberal state government that’s going to do the work but the money is only there because of the Liberal federal government and its funding partnerships. Even though the tunnel is now finally close starting it still needs a champion to get it across the line.
Local people need the tunnel if we’re to get our lives back from spending hours in traffic gridlock. It’s the only local issue that can improve every local person’s life forever and I’m the only local federal candidate who’s 120 per cent for it.
On that note, as someone who lives in the western suburbs and therefore not a constituent of the electorate of Warringah, my opinion counts for very little. Although as a commuter and having to live with the problem of congestion, the reason why there is such terrible traffic in the Northern Beaches, is that by reason of geography, there are only a few select arterial roads which run across the ridge tops.
The best option to remove cars from the road would be to build a heavy rail tunnel. One eight car train removes 2000 cars an hour from the roads. The problem with that, is that the carrying costs are borne by the NSW State Government, and given that the previous Member of the New South Wales Parliament for Manly and the 44th Premier of New South Wales left parliament citing "personal reasons" only to be parachuted into a cushy job at the National Australia Bank, that can not be allowed to happen. The Premier of NSW simply has to build a toll-road, and give the profits to their banker friends.
I’m also running to keep a good government in Canberra that knows how to keep our country safe and our economy strong. In a seat like Warringah, voting for anyone other than the endorsed Liberal candidate would just bring a Labor government closer. And that would mean that 10,000 local retirees would lose thousands of dollars a year in franking credits as well as a much weaker economy due to all the extra taxes and union control that Labor would bring.
I work in an accountant's office in Mosman and I can tell you that running an SMSF makes zero sense unless you have at least $500,000 in the fund because you need to pay audit fees. If you're single and a Non-homeowner then the value of assets that you are allowed to have before the full age pension¹ is reduced is $465,500.
I would like to point out here that currently, investment income a SMSF receives from its assets is tax exempt to the extent that those assets are supporting retirement phase income streams. This income is called exempt current pension income (ECPI).
I want to know how exactly it is just, that someone who derives income from the work of other people, should be assessed at 0% tax, when I who actually does real work for a living, is assessed at effective tax rate which is more than the ASX200.
Thanks to the people of Warringah, I’ve had the chance to lead the Liberal Party out of opposition and into government; where we stopped the boats, repealed the carbon and mining taxes, unleashed the biggest infrastructure program in our country’s history, and finalised the three big FTAs. Sure, my 2014 budget struggled in the Senate but thanks to consistent good management the budget is now finally coming back into surplus and more tax cuts are in the offing.
I don't know if the Liberal Government actually did stop the boats. They have stopped reporting on boat arrivals; which isn't exactly the same thing.
Repealing the "Carbon Tax" was politically expedient. Well done. I'm sure that the people of 2119 will thank you.
Repealing rent resources levies more than likely damaged the structural integrity of budgets; as did successive waves of tax cuts during the mining boom which we completely squandered.
Before that, I was a frontbencher throughout the time of the Howard government and, for much of it, the Prime Minister’s one man Praetorian Guard. I was largely responsible for stopping the Keating government’s proposed sale for development of defence land around Sydney Harbour and for the Howard government’s preservation of it forever in the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust.
Fair enough.
I haven’t just served the people of Warringah in the Parliament but in a host of practical and personal ways too: on patrol on the beach at Queenscliff and on the truck as part of the Davidson Rural Fire Brigade. Then there’s the annual Pollie Pedal charity bike ride that’s so far raised about $7 million, including for local causes such as the Pioneer Clubhouse, the Royal Far West, Bear Cottage, and the Manly Women’s Shelter. Margie and I have always encouraged our girls to take community service seriously but you can’t really preach it unless you live it.
Also, Fair enough.
As is well known, I didn’t support same sex marriage but I gave change a chance with the plebiscite and accept that it’s now the law of the land.
Also, Fair enough.
Climate change is real, mankind makes a contribution and we should take sensible action to deal with it but, with Australia responsible for just 1.3 per cent of global emissions, there’s no point damaging our economy in futile green gestures. And if we’re fair dinkum about drastically cutting emissions, we should at least end the legal prohibition on nuclear that is currently the only feasible form of emissions-free baseload power for Australia.
Hang on a second, if "Climate change is real, mankind makes a contribution and we should take sensible action to deal with it" them why did you openly crow only a few paragraphs before about repealing the carbon tax?
Changing behaviour is often achieved through economic incentive and disincentive. If we accept the premise that " there’s no point damaging our economy in futile green gestures" then if everyone in the world collectively does nothing, then we don't just damaging our economy but potentially the sustained ability of the planet to support life.
The idea that our Parliament should lose people with a proven record of achievement and the insights that only experience brings just because they’ve already been prime minister is absurd, especially if they’re as fit as most people 20 years younger. Likewise, the idea that backbench MPs should refrain from speaking and writing or somehow dilute their ideas lest they be accused of “wrecking” doesn’t bear scrutiny.
I agree with this entirely; however, every single MP is only at the employ of their constituents and while Section 9 of the Bill of Rights Act 1689² does agree with you that "freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament", the ideas that are contained within that same free speech ought to be judges and evaluated. The idea that someone who has previously been prime minister ought to be exempt from that scrutiny is also absurd.
As for the remark that someone is "as fit as most people 20 years younger", I fail to see how that is relevant. If this is a question of physical fitness, then that is not a disqualifier of ability and as for the mental fitness of someone even into their 80s, 90s and beyond, provided someone is sufficiently annoyed and excitable mentally, they are fit for task.
I’d be proud and honoured to serve another term as the Member for Warringah and to devote all the clout that a former prime minister has to the service of my area. And when you think about it, only a dyed-in-the-wool Labor voter would want to deprive the parliamentary Liberal Party of a most effective political warrior.
When it boils down it, in the 40 years that I have been alive, I have been fundamentally betrayed by both of the two political football teams in this country. You've both sold off the family silverware, recently you've both proven that you're cruel and heartless when it comes to the issue of vulnerable people both within and without this country.
To me, so many issues in the political life of the Commonwealth of Australia, are treated as though we are at a Wanderers v Sydney FC game. Hooray. Boo. Hooray. Boo. The difference there is that the songs are wittier at an actual football match, they are more focused in achieving goals, and after 90 minutes the two ends of supporters stop yelling at each other and they go home.
Tony Abbott is the member for Warringah and a former Australian prime minister.
Rollo is a citizen of the Commonwealth Of Australia and who would like to be a paid member of the commentariat, instead of just a hack who has to put up with terrible journalism.
¹https://www.humanservices.gov.au/individuals/enablers/assets/30621
²http://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/act/consol_act/bor16881wams2c2306/s9.html
https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-warringah-should-send-me-back-to-canberra-20190208-p50whv.html
In the past two years, I’ve had meet-the-member public meetings all around Warringah for voters to tell me their concerns. Almost to a person, they’re sick of overdevelopment and the traffic jams that make the best suburbs in the world a misery as soon as you want to go anywhere else.
As someone who has been working in the electorate of Warringah, I have personally met Tony Abbott only twice in not quite sixteen years. Admittedly I am only here during office hours but I would hope that Mr Abbott actually speaks to the people of his electorate more often, than merely when it is time to stand upon the stump to pony up for votes.
I’m running again so the Northern Beaches tunnel finally gets built. Yes, it’s the Liberal state government that’s going to do the work but the money is only there because of the Liberal federal government and its funding partnerships. Even though the tunnel is now finally close starting it still needs a champion to get it across the line.
Local people need the tunnel if we’re to get our lives back from spending hours in traffic gridlock. It’s the only local issue that can improve every local person’s life forever and I’m the only local federal candidate who’s 120 per cent for it.
On that note, as someone who lives in the western suburbs and therefore not a constituent of the electorate of Warringah, my opinion counts for very little. Although as a commuter and having to live with the problem of congestion, the reason why there is such terrible traffic in the Northern Beaches, is that by reason of geography, there are only a few select arterial roads which run across the ridge tops.
The best option to remove cars from the road would be to build a heavy rail tunnel. One eight car train removes 2000 cars an hour from the roads. The problem with that, is that the carrying costs are borne by the NSW State Government, and given that the previous Member of the New South Wales Parliament for Manly and the 44th Premier of New South Wales left parliament citing "personal reasons" only to be parachuted into a cushy job at the National Australia Bank, that can not be allowed to happen. The Premier of NSW simply has to build a toll-road, and give the profits to their banker friends.
I’m also running to keep a good government in Canberra that knows how to keep our country safe and our economy strong. In a seat like Warringah, voting for anyone other than the endorsed Liberal candidate would just bring a Labor government closer. And that would mean that 10,000 local retirees would lose thousands of dollars a year in franking credits as well as a much weaker economy due to all the extra taxes and union control that Labor would bring.
I work in an accountant's office in Mosman and I can tell you that running an SMSF makes zero sense unless you have at least $500,000 in the fund because you need to pay audit fees. If you're single and a Non-homeowner then the value of assets that you are allowed to have before the full age pension¹ is reduced is $465,500.
I would like to point out here that currently, investment income a SMSF receives from its assets is tax exempt to the extent that those assets are supporting retirement phase income streams. This income is called exempt current pension income (ECPI).
I want to know how exactly it is just, that someone who derives income from the work of other people, should be assessed at 0% tax, when I who actually does real work for a living, is assessed at effective tax rate which is more than the ASX200.
Thanks to the people of Warringah, I’ve had the chance to lead the Liberal Party out of opposition and into government; where we stopped the boats, repealed the carbon and mining taxes, unleashed the biggest infrastructure program in our country’s history, and finalised the three big FTAs. Sure, my 2014 budget struggled in the Senate but thanks to consistent good management the budget is now finally coming back into surplus and more tax cuts are in the offing.
I don't know if the Liberal Government actually did stop the boats. They have stopped reporting on boat arrivals; which isn't exactly the same thing.
Repealing the "Carbon Tax" was politically expedient. Well done. I'm sure that the people of 2119 will thank you.
Repealing rent resources levies more than likely damaged the structural integrity of budgets; as did successive waves of tax cuts during the mining boom which we completely squandered.
Before that, I was a frontbencher throughout the time of the Howard government and, for much of it, the Prime Minister’s one man Praetorian Guard. I was largely responsible for stopping the Keating government’s proposed sale for development of defence land around Sydney Harbour and for the Howard government’s preservation of it forever in the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust.
Fair enough.
I haven’t just served the people of Warringah in the Parliament but in a host of practical and personal ways too: on patrol on the beach at Queenscliff and on the truck as part of the Davidson Rural Fire Brigade. Then there’s the annual Pollie Pedal charity bike ride that’s so far raised about $7 million, including for local causes such as the Pioneer Clubhouse, the Royal Far West, Bear Cottage, and the Manly Women’s Shelter. Margie and I have always encouraged our girls to take community service seriously but you can’t really preach it unless you live it.
Also, Fair enough.
As is well known, I didn’t support same sex marriage but I gave change a chance with the plebiscite and accept that it’s now the law of the land.
Also, Fair enough.
Climate change is real, mankind makes a contribution and we should take sensible action to deal with it but, with Australia responsible for just 1.3 per cent of global emissions, there’s no point damaging our economy in futile green gestures. And if we’re fair dinkum about drastically cutting emissions, we should at least end the legal prohibition on nuclear that is currently the only feasible form of emissions-free baseload power for Australia.
Hang on a second, if "Climate change is real, mankind makes a contribution and we should take sensible action to deal with it" them why did you openly crow only a few paragraphs before about repealing the carbon tax?
Changing behaviour is often achieved through economic incentive and disincentive. If we accept the premise that " there’s no point damaging our economy in futile green gestures" then if everyone in the world collectively does nothing, then we don't just damaging our economy but potentially the sustained ability of the planet to support life.
The idea that our Parliament should lose people with a proven record of achievement and the insights that only experience brings just because they’ve already been prime minister is absurd, especially if they’re as fit as most people 20 years younger. Likewise, the idea that backbench MPs should refrain from speaking and writing or somehow dilute their ideas lest they be accused of “wrecking” doesn’t bear scrutiny.
I agree with this entirely; however, every single MP is only at the employ of their constituents and while Section 9 of the Bill of Rights Act 1689² does agree with you that "freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament", the ideas that are contained within that same free speech ought to be judges and evaluated. The idea that someone who has previously been prime minister ought to be exempt from that scrutiny is also absurd.
As for the remark that someone is "as fit as most people 20 years younger", I fail to see how that is relevant. If this is a question of physical fitness, then that is not a disqualifier of ability and as for the mental fitness of someone even into their 80s, 90s and beyond, provided someone is sufficiently annoyed and excitable mentally, they are fit for task.
I’d be proud and honoured to serve another term as the Member for Warringah and to devote all the clout that a former prime minister has to the service of my area. And when you think about it, only a dyed-in-the-wool Labor voter would want to deprive the parliamentary Liberal Party of a most effective political warrior.
When it boils down it, in the 40 years that I have been alive, I have been fundamentally betrayed by both of the two political football teams in this country. You've both sold off the family silverware, recently you've both proven that you're cruel and heartless when it comes to the issue of vulnerable people both within and without this country.
To me, so many issues in the political life of the Commonwealth of Australia, are treated as though we are at a Wanderers v Sydney FC game. Hooray. Boo. Hooray. Boo. The difference there is that the songs are wittier at an actual football match, they are more focused in achieving goals, and after 90 minutes the two ends of supporters stop yelling at each other and they go home.
Tony Abbott is the member for Warringah and a former Australian prime minister.
Rollo is a citizen of the Commonwealth Of Australia and who would like to be a paid member of the commentariat, instead of just a hack who has to put up with terrible journalism.
¹https://www.humanservices.gov.au/individuals/enablers/assets/30621
²http://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/act/consol_act/bor16881wams2c2306/s9.html
February 11, 2019
Horse 2510 - The Simpsons Should Be Rebooted
I have no idea what prompted Mrs Rollo to ask me when the characters of The Simpsons were born, or even to try to explain the sheer insanity of how time works in that show, but it sent my brain into a series of spirals; gaming out all kinds of conclusions until this conclusion was reached.
There should be a hard reboot.
For the purposes of this hard reboot, I am imagining that the series would begin with a rest date of 2020.
The Simpsons which kind of started in 1987/8 is both the longest-running American sitcom, and the longest-running American scripted primetime television series. The truth is that any TV show which is that long in the tooth, has a tendency to get stale, and it is generally considered that the so called "golden years" of the show were probably between seasons 4 and 10; which was last century. Since then, it appears that even fans of the show think that it is dribbling out towards inevitable irrelevance.
Unlike a soap opera with a rolling cast, or a show like Doctor Who which can recast everyone, The Simpsons appears to be suffering from the fact that there is basically a fixed cast. Every possible story that can be told and arguably should have been told, has already been told by now; to the point where there is even self-parody.
A hard reboot would solve this problem nicely; while retaining continuity.
Before I move on though, here is a review of the in-universe dates of birth of the eponymous nuclear family:
Homer - 12/5/56, age 64
Marge - 1/10/56, age 63
Bart - 1/4/80, age 40
Lisa - 9/5/82, age 38
Maggie - 12/1/89, age 31
What we have here is Homer and Marge, who were both born bang in the middle of the post-war Baby Boom. Bart, Lisa and Maggie who are about the same age as Homer and Marge are/were when the series kind of sets its markers, are all members of Generation Y. All three of them will have grown up in an analogue childhood but due to the coming of the internet, have more or less lived their adult lives in the modern digital world. Probably they will have their own children by now; and they occupy a space which their parents have done in the current series.
This would open up an entirely new range of story lines, and given that Bart, Lisa and Maggie would now have a degree of agency of their own, instead of merely being under the rule of their parents, I think that this would be far more interesting. It also opens the distinct possibility for intergenerational conflict, when you consider real world implications; namely that Bart, Lisa and Maggie will have found navigating the world of work far more difficult.
Probably Homer and Marge are still in the workforce but there is a very real possibility that their children's working careers will have been far more transient. More than likely, Homer will have paid off the mortgage on a single income but their children might not even have ever been paid enough to qualify for a mortgage at all.
There is of course a precedent for this kind of reboot. It has been hinted that the current Dennis the Menace in The Beano, is not the previous one; because his dad is significantly different. This would imply that the current Dennis the Menace is the son of the previous Dennis the Menace.
Star Trek: The Next Generation appears to be explicity set 100 years after the first TV series ended; taking place in 2369 as opposed to 2269 (which itself was 300 years in the future).
There are of course other issues which could be explored. As the comedian Hari Kondabolu quite rightly pointed out in the documentary The Problem with Apu, Apu is something of a very blunt racial stereotype. For comedic effect, Apu was blessed with a set of octuplets; which if they were born on 23rd Nov 1999, would be 19 years old. I would imagine that all eight Nahasapeemapetilon children, would have that quality that practically every second generation person has, in that they are even more of the nationality of their country than other generations. I think that it's true that for people who migrate to Britain, that their children are the most British of all, that the children of immigrants to Australia are the most Australian of all, and that the Nahasapeemapetilon children would be the most exact representation of what 2020 American would be.
I expect that in the 2020 reboot, that the town of Springfield, which seems almost exlusively yellow in 1987/8 would be far more diverse. There would almost certainly be space for an entire slew of cast members who we have never seen before; since the Simpsons itself is a show which has an ensemble cast of probably more than a thousand by now.
We would learn that someone like Kent Brockman in 2020 who would now be aged 80, would be an absolute titan of the world of journalism; of the kind of ilk of say, Mark Shields; that the squeaky voiced teen Jeremy Freedman would be 46 and still squeaky voiced; and that Bart and Lisa's friends will have basically amounted to where their destinies will have taken them. Of course this has the effect that Abe Simpson born 1907, and Charles Montgomery Burns born 1886, are both dead.
But of course, 'should' does not necessarily mean 'will'. The Simpsons' home in the United States is on Fox. As a commercial broadcaster, they aren't exactly inclined to want to fiddle with the show that turned them from "the little network that could" into "the little network that could not be ignored."
The show should almost absolutely and obviously be rebooted but I just don't think that that's likely.
There should be a hard reboot.
For the purposes of this hard reboot, I am imagining that the series would begin with a rest date of 2020.
The Simpsons which kind of started in 1987/8 is both the longest-running American sitcom, and the longest-running American scripted primetime television series. The truth is that any TV show which is that long in the tooth, has a tendency to get stale, and it is generally considered that the so called "golden years" of the show were probably between seasons 4 and 10; which was last century. Since then, it appears that even fans of the show think that it is dribbling out towards inevitable irrelevance.
Unlike a soap opera with a rolling cast, or a show like Doctor Who which can recast everyone, The Simpsons appears to be suffering from the fact that there is basically a fixed cast. Every possible story that can be told and arguably should have been told, has already been told by now; to the point where there is even self-parody.
A hard reboot would solve this problem nicely; while retaining continuity.
Before I move on though, here is a review of the in-universe dates of birth of the eponymous nuclear family:
Homer - 12/5/56, age 64
Marge - 1/10/56, age 63
Bart - 1/4/80, age 40
Lisa - 9/5/82, age 38
Maggie - 12/1/89, age 31
What we have here is Homer and Marge, who were both born bang in the middle of the post-war Baby Boom. Bart, Lisa and Maggie who are about the same age as Homer and Marge are/were when the series kind of sets its markers, are all members of Generation Y. All three of them will have grown up in an analogue childhood but due to the coming of the internet, have more or less lived their adult lives in the modern digital world. Probably they will have their own children by now; and they occupy a space which their parents have done in the current series.
This would open up an entirely new range of story lines, and given that Bart, Lisa and Maggie would now have a degree of agency of their own, instead of merely being under the rule of their parents, I think that this would be far more interesting. It also opens the distinct possibility for intergenerational conflict, when you consider real world implications; namely that Bart, Lisa and Maggie will have found navigating the world of work far more difficult.
Probably Homer and Marge are still in the workforce but there is a very real possibility that their children's working careers will have been far more transient. More than likely, Homer will have paid off the mortgage on a single income but their children might not even have ever been paid enough to qualify for a mortgage at all.
There is of course a precedent for this kind of reboot. It has been hinted that the current Dennis the Menace in The Beano, is not the previous one; because his dad is significantly different. This would imply that the current Dennis the Menace is the son of the previous Dennis the Menace.
Star Trek: The Next Generation appears to be explicity set 100 years after the first TV series ended; taking place in 2369 as opposed to 2269 (which itself was 300 years in the future).
There are of course other issues which could be explored. As the comedian Hari Kondabolu quite rightly pointed out in the documentary The Problem with Apu, Apu is something of a very blunt racial stereotype. For comedic effect, Apu was blessed with a set of octuplets; which if they were born on 23rd Nov 1999, would be 19 years old. I would imagine that all eight Nahasapeemapetilon children, would have that quality that practically every second generation person has, in that they are even more of the nationality of their country than other generations. I think that it's true that for people who migrate to Britain, that their children are the most British of all, that the children of immigrants to Australia are the most Australian of all, and that the Nahasapeemapetilon children would be the most exact representation of what 2020 American would be.
I expect that in the 2020 reboot, that the town of Springfield, which seems almost exlusively yellow in 1987/8 would be far more diverse. There would almost certainly be space for an entire slew of cast members who we have never seen before; since the Simpsons itself is a show which has an ensemble cast of probably more than a thousand by now.
We would learn that someone like Kent Brockman in 2020 who would now be aged 80, would be an absolute titan of the world of journalism; of the kind of ilk of say, Mark Shields; that the squeaky voiced teen Jeremy Freedman would be 46 and still squeaky voiced; and that Bart and Lisa's friends will have basically amounted to where their destinies will have taken them. Of course this has the effect that Abe Simpson born 1907, and Charles Montgomery Burns born 1886, are both dead.
But of course, 'should' does not necessarily mean 'will'. The Simpsons' home in the United States is on Fox. As a commercial broadcaster, they aren't exactly inclined to want to fiddle with the show that turned them from "the little network that could" into "the little network that could not be ignored."
The show should almost absolutely and obviously be rebooted but I just don't think that that's likely.
February 05, 2019
Horse 2509 - PAW Patrol! yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba
I do not have children and so I am not particularly inclined to want to watch ABC 3 of my own volition. Having said that, I think that having a dedicated television station for children on free-to-air is a brilliant idea as I can not imagine that any small child would be particularly interested in the continuing adventures of ScoMo the Scotty Dog and his mate Spud Dutton and they face the evil Blue Shovel in the green room of death.
My only contact with ABC 3, is standing in the queue at the bank, which thanks to the big banks policies of cutting front line staff, makes you wish that you were actually dead; which is no longer a barrier to them charging you fees for advice.
I am quite familiar with the Magic Roundabout which in the 1970s was something of a malarial dream, the Teletubbies which in the 1990s was something of a malarial dream, In The Night Garden which in the 2000s was something of a malarial valium dream, but the show which I have kept on running into lately and have seen more episodes than I care to imagine is the Paw Patrol. which is not so much a malarial dream as a 22 minute advert for merchandise.
The show is produced by TV Ontario, which I remember as producing shows like Eureka!, Today's Special and Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness when I was a kid.
PAW Patrol!
PAW Patrol!
yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba
PAW Patrol!
PAW Patrol!
yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba
I have no idea what the theme song to Paw Patrol actually says and to be honest, I don't think that I particularly care. I have now seen probably about a dozen full episodes of Paw Patrol while standing in the queue at the bank, and not even once has the audio been clear enough for me to hear the dialogue properly. Being from TV Ontario, everyone is probably speaking English but they may as well be speaking French for all I care.
Let me try to explain this show, if that were at all possible.
There is some kind of giant tower thing, in which a boy lives with an undisclosed number of puppies. For some unknown reason, the town lacks any sort of municipal services, save for this one boy and the PAW Patrol, PAW Patrol, yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba.
There is a lady who I am not sure what kind of position she holds, which invariably will cause some kind of civic disaster while chasing around her pet chicken, and due to her ineptitude, the only person who seems able to do anything about if it is this one boy and the PAW Patrol, PAW Patrol, yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba.
The puppies themselves appear to be some kind of parody of the Village People, with a fire fighter, a builder, a policeman etc. who then go out and fix whatever disaster happens to be the plot device for the episode, wherein they are rewarded with a treat and presumably the boy if financially recompensed because I can think of no other reason why a boy has a giant hamburder tower thing in a town. This is very much like looking upon Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron, because when I gaze upon it, all hope leaves me.
I don't know what lessons if any that PAW Patrol, PAW Patrol, yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba is supposed to teach me but the only thing that I take away is that it is a cautionary tale against the gig economy. The town appears to be clean but there are only about 10 or so people who live in it and the town's services are handled by the boy who contacts the puppies by some sort of shock collar thing.
It seems obvious to me that the boy has the eventual aim of replacing the puppies with robots, as he has already built a robotic dog, who I can only assume will in time take their jobs as well.
Maybe the lesson that I am supposed to take away is that if you let a kid get away without any parental control (seriously, why is a boy even allowed to have a puppy army?), then they turn into a tyrant.
Also, if you are an adult who can not control a pet chicken, maybe you should consider getting a coop.
My only contact with ABC 3, is standing in the queue at the bank, which thanks to the big banks policies of cutting front line staff, makes you wish that you were actually dead; which is no longer a barrier to them charging you fees for advice.
I am quite familiar with the Magic Roundabout which in the 1970s was something of a malarial dream, the Teletubbies which in the 1990s was something of a malarial dream, In The Night Garden which in the 2000s was something of a malarial valium dream, but the show which I have kept on running into lately and have seen more episodes than I care to imagine is the Paw Patrol. which is not so much a malarial dream as a 22 minute advert for merchandise.
The show is produced by TV Ontario, which I remember as producing shows like Eureka!, Today's Special and Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness when I was a kid.
PAW Patrol!
PAW Patrol!
yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba
PAW Patrol!
PAW Patrol!
yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba
I have no idea what the theme song to Paw Patrol actually says and to be honest, I don't think that I particularly care. I have now seen probably about a dozen full episodes of Paw Patrol while standing in the queue at the bank, and not even once has the audio been clear enough for me to hear the dialogue properly. Being from TV Ontario, everyone is probably speaking English but they may as well be speaking French for all I care.
Let me try to explain this show, if that were at all possible.
There is some kind of giant tower thing, in which a boy lives with an undisclosed number of puppies. For some unknown reason, the town lacks any sort of municipal services, save for this one boy and the PAW Patrol, PAW Patrol, yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba.
There is a lady who I am not sure what kind of position she holds, which invariably will cause some kind of civic disaster while chasing around her pet chicken, and due to her ineptitude, the only person who seems able to do anything about if it is this one boy and the PAW Patrol, PAW Patrol, yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba.
The puppies themselves appear to be some kind of parody of the Village People, with a fire fighter, a builder, a policeman etc. who then go out and fix whatever disaster happens to be the plot device for the episode, wherein they are rewarded with a treat and presumably the boy if financially recompensed because I can think of no other reason why a boy has a giant hamburder tower thing in a town. This is very much like looking upon Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron, because when I gaze upon it, all hope leaves me.
I don't know what lessons if any that PAW Patrol, PAW Patrol, yaba-da-daba yaba-da-daba is supposed to teach me but the only thing that I take away is that it is a cautionary tale against the gig economy. The town appears to be clean but there are only about 10 or so people who live in it and the town's services are handled by the boy who contacts the puppies by some sort of shock collar thing.
It seems obvious to me that the boy has the eventual aim of replacing the puppies with robots, as he has already built a robotic dog, who I can only assume will in time take their jobs as well.
Maybe the lesson that I am supposed to take away is that if you let a kid get away without any parental control (seriously, why is a boy even allowed to have a puppy army?), then they turn into a tyrant.
Also, if you are an adult who can not control a pet chicken, maybe you should consider getting a coop.
February 04, 2019
Horse 2508 - Deliberately Hamstringing The Horses #B12Hr
https://www.supercars.com/news/bathurst12hour/de-pasquale-explains-illegally-fast-bathurst-laps/?sf207114923=1
Anton De Pasquale has had his two quickest times in Bathurst 12 Hour qualifying deleted, having gone below the permissible benchmark time for his MARC II V8 entry.
As part of their eligibility for the Invitational Class at the event, the purpose-built, Australian-made cars are allowed to lap no quicker than 2:05s during any session.
Erebus Supercars driver De Pasquale clocked a 2:04.7910s and 2:04.2585s on consecutive laps in qualifying, before finishing his run with a 2:05.3653s.
- Supercars.com.au, 3rd Feb 2019
I want to take nothing away from the Earl Bamber Motorsport team, who with their three drivers Matt Campbell, Dennis Olsen and Dirk Werner, took their Porsche 911 GT3 R to victory in the Bathurst 12 Hour yesterday. Endurance racing is in my opinion, the pinnacle of team motorsport and anything over 500km is a test of machinery. To even survive 12 hours is a feat unto itself.
But something deeply bothers me about the regulations of the Bathurst 12 Hour. It is mostly a mix of GT3 and GT4 cars, both of which are run to a set of international regulations, and then there is an invitational class which as the above article indicates, are deliberately hamstrung so that they have no chance of winning anything.
That's stupid.
Although in race trim, the fastest race lap was only 2:03.53 by Josh Burdon in the Nissan GT-R GT3 on lap 300, the fastest qualifying time was 2:02.93 by Raffaele Marciello in the Mercedes-AMG GT3. That means that the MARC II Mustang V8 would have qualified a lowly 25th had it been allowed to; that still isn't really fast enough to bother the faster cars, let alone even challenge for a race win. I just think that arbitrarily imposing a limit of 2:05 is really really churlish.
It also speaks to a far far deeper problem that we have in Australian motorsport generally.
Since 2017, when the last VF Commodore rolled off the Elizabeth production line, there have been no cars manufactured in Australia. Well, I say none but I don't actually know because there could have been cars made by garagistas somewhere but the point remains that we do not have a motor industry any more.
Because we no longer have a motor industry any more, the capacity to produce race cars, which itself is only a very minor secondary market in the grand scheme of things, has been severely reduced. It is no longer possible as was the case with a Commodore, Falcon, or Camry, to get a shell before it went through the rest of the production process. Impressive race cars are almost always purpose-built anyway, but this just makes the job that much harder.
It also doesn't help that if we want to run a race and have the rest of the world turn up, we need to run to a set of international regulations. The result of that is that virtually every single race car which competes in a race like the Bathurst 12 Hour, is imported as a complete car, which is fine I suppose, except then you end up with this sort of thing happening.
In 2010, the GT300 category in Japan's Super GT series, found that an increasing number of teams chose to buy European GT3 cars instead of locally produced cars. In response, Super GT introduced the JAF-GT class and even went to the effort of making a "Mother Chassis" available; as well as an unbranded engine which was a Nissan VK45DE V8 in everything but name. As a result, we have ended up with some truly wonderful cars in the class over the years including the bespoke Mooncraft Shiden, a Toyota Corolla AE86 which had a V8 in it (the chassis was 20 years old), and even a Toyota Prius running the 3.6L V8 from the GT-One Le Mans car which was then mated to the Prius Hybrid system. It is gloriously delightful and proves that if you design a set of rules properly, then loveliness can happen.
Super GT openly admits that it runs a racing series and that it deliberately hamstrings cars as a disincentive for teams to win the series by throwing money at it. Super GT runs quite a very strict Balance of Performance regime.
But we refuse to do that in Australia. Nope. We hate it.
The FIA already runs a set of Balance of Performance regulations which fiddles with power and weight, as well as aerodynamics and things like fuel restriction, which like Super GT are designed to stop a manufacturer from running away with it. That's fine but the problem in Australia is that we have no domestic manufacturers anymore; so all work to homologate a car to be competitive in a GT3 race, has to be done independently, which is functionally impossible.
Mosler Automotive which ran the MT900 tried to get a GT3 version of the car homologated by the FIA but were told that because there were no road going production versions, they would not be allowed to. A Mosler was allowed to run in the invitational class in the 2011 Bathurst 12 Hour but it only lasted half an hour. It never returned. Therein lies a problem.
Instead of letting the MARC cars actually race, CAMS uses the bluntest of blunt instruments and has simply decided to penalise the MARC cars if they are even close to being remotely competitive in the series. During the rest of the year, it neither knows how to rate them, not cares to do so, and puts them into the Sports Sedan category. Meanwhile, the Australian GT Championship which is open to to FIA GT3 cars, runs almost exclusively second hand machinery from overseas and because there is no longer any domestic automotive manufacturing, that's really all it can ever hope to be.
If I was Grand Poobah and Lord High Everything Else, then I'd have CAMS and the Bathurst 12 Hour adopt a set of regulations which actually encouraged garagistas to build equivalent machinery to GT3, in the same way that the JAF does in Japan. I would love if a standard Mother Chassis was developed and although we probably wouldn't use the debranded Nissan VK45DE V8, we probably would allow racing crate motors provided that they came from the same manufacturers as the cars. If I had unlimited dollarpounds then I can imagine running the 2.5L SKYACTIV-G Turbo in-line 4 from the Mazda CX-9 in a Mazda 6. Most of the aerodynamics are standard anyway and if need be, a Mother Chassis underneath would be cool.
I would also have CAMS get off their high horse and actually let MARC unleash their horsies. Provided their Mustang/Focus/Mazda 3 were GT3 or JAF equivalent, then why shouldn't they be allowed to race. I would want to encourage this sort of initiative. I mean have you heard a V8 Mazda 3 go around? It's genuinely lovely.
I want to see how an Australian engineered car would go against the rest of the world. It is bad enough that Detroit decided that they didn't like employing Australians anymore, it adds insult to injury that our own confederation of motorsport is too stupid to let Australians play in their own backyard because they can't work out how to do it; despite the fact that the problem has already been solved overseas.
Anton De Pasquale has had his two quickest times in Bathurst 12 Hour qualifying deleted, having gone below the permissible benchmark time for his MARC II V8 entry.
As part of their eligibility for the Invitational Class at the event, the purpose-built, Australian-made cars are allowed to lap no quicker than 2:05s during any session.
Erebus Supercars driver De Pasquale clocked a 2:04.7910s and 2:04.2585s on consecutive laps in qualifying, before finishing his run with a 2:05.3653s.
- Supercars.com.au, 3rd Feb 2019
I want to take nothing away from the Earl Bamber Motorsport team, who with their three drivers Matt Campbell, Dennis Olsen and Dirk Werner, took their Porsche 911 GT3 R to victory in the Bathurst 12 Hour yesterday. Endurance racing is in my opinion, the pinnacle of team motorsport and anything over 500km is a test of machinery. To even survive 12 hours is a feat unto itself.
But something deeply bothers me about the regulations of the Bathurst 12 Hour. It is mostly a mix of GT3 and GT4 cars, both of which are run to a set of international regulations, and then there is an invitational class which as the above article indicates, are deliberately hamstrung so that they have no chance of winning anything.
That's stupid.
Although in race trim, the fastest race lap was only 2:03.53 by Josh Burdon in the Nissan GT-R GT3 on lap 300, the fastest qualifying time was 2:02.93 by Raffaele Marciello in the Mercedes-AMG GT3. That means that the MARC II Mustang V8 would have qualified a lowly 25th had it been allowed to; that still isn't really fast enough to bother the faster cars, let alone even challenge for a race win. I just think that arbitrarily imposing a limit of 2:05 is really really churlish.
It also speaks to a far far deeper problem that we have in Australian motorsport generally.
Since 2017, when the last VF Commodore rolled off the Elizabeth production line, there have been no cars manufactured in Australia. Well, I say none but I don't actually know because there could have been cars made by garagistas somewhere but the point remains that we do not have a motor industry any more.
Because we no longer have a motor industry any more, the capacity to produce race cars, which itself is only a very minor secondary market in the grand scheme of things, has been severely reduced. It is no longer possible as was the case with a Commodore, Falcon, or Camry, to get a shell before it went through the rest of the production process. Impressive race cars are almost always purpose-built anyway, but this just makes the job that much harder.
It also doesn't help that if we want to run a race and have the rest of the world turn up, we need to run to a set of international regulations. The result of that is that virtually every single race car which competes in a race like the Bathurst 12 Hour, is imported as a complete car, which is fine I suppose, except then you end up with this sort of thing happening.
In 2010, the GT300 category in Japan's Super GT series, found that an increasing number of teams chose to buy European GT3 cars instead of locally produced cars. In response, Super GT introduced the JAF-GT class and even went to the effort of making a "Mother Chassis" available; as well as an unbranded engine which was a Nissan VK45DE V8 in everything but name. As a result, we have ended up with some truly wonderful cars in the class over the years including the bespoke Mooncraft Shiden, a Toyota Corolla AE86 which had a V8 in it (the chassis was 20 years old), and even a Toyota Prius running the 3.6L V8 from the GT-One Le Mans car which was then mated to the Prius Hybrid system. It is gloriously delightful and proves that if you design a set of rules properly, then loveliness can happen.
Super GT openly admits that it runs a racing series and that it deliberately hamstrings cars as a disincentive for teams to win the series by throwing money at it. Super GT runs quite a very strict Balance of Performance regime.
But we refuse to do that in Australia. Nope. We hate it.
The FIA already runs a set of Balance of Performance regulations which fiddles with power and weight, as well as aerodynamics and things like fuel restriction, which like Super GT are designed to stop a manufacturer from running away with it. That's fine but the problem in Australia is that we have no domestic manufacturers anymore; so all work to homologate a car to be competitive in a GT3 race, has to be done independently, which is functionally impossible.
Mosler Automotive which ran the MT900 tried to get a GT3 version of the car homologated by the FIA but were told that because there were no road going production versions, they would not be allowed to. A Mosler was allowed to run in the invitational class in the 2011 Bathurst 12 Hour but it only lasted half an hour. It never returned. Therein lies a problem.
Instead of letting the MARC cars actually race, CAMS uses the bluntest of blunt instruments and has simply decided to penalise the MARC cars if they are even close to being remotely competitive in the series. During the rest of the year, it neither knows how to rate them, not cares to do so, and puts them into the Sports Sedan category. Meanwhile, the Australian GT Championship which is open to to FIA GT3 cars, runs almost exclusively second hand machinery from overseas and because there is no longer any domestic automotive manufacturing, that's really all it can ever hope to be.
If I was Grand Poobah and Lord High Everything Else, then I'd have CAMS and the Bathurst 12 Hour adopt a set of regulations which actually encouraged garagistas to build equivalent machinery to GT3, in the same way that the JAF does in Japan. I would love if a standard Mother Chassis was developed and although we probably wouldn't use the debranded Nissan VK45DE V8, we probably would allow racing crate motors provided that they came from the same manufacturers as the cars. If I had unlimited dollarpounds then I can imagine running the 2.5L SKYACTIV-G Turbo in-line 4 from the Mazda CX-9 in a Mazda 6. Most of the aerodynamics are standard anyway and if need be, a Mother Chassis underneath would be cool.
I would also have CAMS get off their high horse and actually let MARC unleash their horsies. Provided their Mustang/Focus/Mazda 3 were GT3 or JAF equivalent, then why shouldn't they be allowed to race. I would want to encourage this sort of initiative. I mean have you heard a V8 Mazda 3 go around? It's genuinely lovely.
I want to see how an Australian engineered car would go against the rest of the world. It is bad enough that Detroit decided that they didn't like employing Australians anymore, it adds insult to injury that our own confederation of motorsport is too stupid to let Australians play in their own backyard because they can't work out how to do it; despite the fact that the problem has already been solved overseas.
January 26, 2019
Horse 2507 - The State Of The State Of The Union
Unless things have changed by the time this is posted at 7:17am AEST in Sydney, the United States Government is still in partial shutdown, due to the political machinations of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The idiocy of this whole thing isn't that this is over a truly petty matter but that this current government shutdown is now the longest in American history, affecting about 800,000 federal employees out of 1.8 million full-time civil servants, not counting military personnel and postal workers. Of those, about 380,000 have been furloughed, meaning that they either cannot work because the offices are shutdown and/or the more important and immediate problem is that they are not getting paid. The rest, whose positions are categorized as essential, are working without pay.
This is madness. This is idiotic. This is the second worst administration in history.
There are four basic components to this mess, that fit together like the world's most idiotic puzzle. Yet I fear that in 1776, the founding fathers would have looked at all of this and laughed with glee because their checks and balances have ensured that everything has been perfectly balanced to a big fat zero in every column and no checks are being written.
I'm going to attempt to explain those four components as I understand the state of play and why the TV Guide for Sydney which lists the State Of The Union Address for tomorrow morning, is wrong.
1 - The Budget Process
As nonsensical as this might sound to a set of Australian ears like mine, there is not one US Federal Budget but actually twelve. Instead of just the single Appropriations Bill No.1 20XX which makes perfect sense and which is what we have in Australia or the Finance Act 20XX which is what they have in the UK, the US Federal Budget is comprised of twelve bills, which the twelve Appropriations Subcommittees have determined shall be the discretionary funding for various government functions. This explains why it is possible to have a partial government shutdown because if some budget bills have been passed into law, then funding has already been secured for those functions of government; which is currently what we have now.
As it stands though, all twelve budget bills have been passed by both the House and the Senate. This means that even before the changeover date when the Democrats took control of the House, that the bills which had not yet been signed were actually all Republican bills. It might very well be possible that the newly elected Democrats would want to propose a new set of budget bills but that would need to pass the Senate before it reached the President.
President Donald Trump is actually refusing to sign the budget bills which were proposed by his own party, when the Republicans had control of all three rings under the big top that is the circus of government. To claim that this is a Democrat shutdown is simply materially untrue.
2 - Only Three of Twelve Appropriations Bills Remain
It is surprisingly difficult to work out exactly which of the twelve Appropriations Bills remain unsigned because the US Government is a rather diffuse organisation. I did eventually track them all down by looking through the lists of bills tabled before the House and Senate though. The ones which remain outstanding and unsigned, are perhaps telling as to what the agenda of this President are:
Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.
This oversees funding for the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, NASA, and other agencies. Of these, the most important to Mr Trump is the Department of Justice because within that department is the Special Counsel's Office investigation, headed by Robert Mueller, which is a counterintelligence investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere, with primary focus on the 2016 presidential election; and to look into a potential obstruction of justice by Trump and others associated with the 2016 Trump Campaign.
Technically, the Department of Justice is not currently funded; that includes Robert Mueller's investigation. I'm wondering if Mr Trump is hoping that by taking away the dog's dinner, that the dog will go away. I suspect though, that this only makes the dog hungrier and want to bite harder.
State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee.
The Subcommittee oversees funding for the U.S. State Department, USAID, and related programs. Mr Trump probably doesn't care about USAID or other programs and kind of wishes that they'd all just go away.
I suspect that Mr Trump has a particular gripe with the State Department because one of its former Secretaries was Hilary Clinton and one of its prime functions is to represent the United States at the United Nations. Not wanting to fund this particular part of government appears to be a matter of personal vendetta more than anything else. It is probably not a conindicence that it the the State Department who has oversight when it comes to foreign relations with the US; that means that while it is closed, the diplomatic channels which might be usful to Special Counsel Mueller's investigation also remain closed.
Homeland Security Subcommittee.
As you would expect, this subcommittee oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The most public face of the DHS is at airports and so this where most people are likely to come into contact with it however, it would be the Department of Homeland Security's budget which contains the line item for the Border Wall with Mexico, or rather, does not.
By Mr Trump refusing to pass this Appropriations Bill, he is saying that he wants his wall really really badly. Admittedly $5bn out of a total budget of $4094bn is tiny but it is still enough to kick up a stick as a symbol to say that he did something as President.
3 - Pelosi Closing The House Of Representatives
Nancy Pelosi who is now the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, can also direct the day to day functioning of the House. Just like our own United States House of Representatives, the Speaker has the authority to direct the Sergeant at Arms of the House. Functionally this is identical to the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, who has the ability and responsibility to open and close the doors of the legislative chamber. This is important because just like our own House of Representatives or the United Kingdom's House of Commons, the head of state is not allowed into the legislature without express permission.
Ms Pelosi as the Speaker, is completely entitled to refuse permission to the President in any and all circumstances; especially in a case like this where both houses of Congress have done their job and he refuses to do his.
4 - The State of the Union Address
Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution states:
He (the President) shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.
The President is required by the Constitution to give to the Congress information of the state of the union, however the Constitution does not in any way shape or form, prescribe the manner in which it should be done. Up until about 1914 the vast majority of the State of the Union adressses were simply written and sent to the Congress wherein they would be read aloud. Woodrow Wilson was probably the first president to be physically present when delivering the State of the Union Address, on an annual basis. There have been addresses presented in the Senate chamber and in the case of FDR, his 1944 State of the Union Address was delivered on the radio because he had had the flu. The main reason that I can see why the The President delivers the State of the Union Address in the chamber of the House is because there's more seats in there.
The thing to remember though is that although Ms Pelosi controls the functioning of the House, President Trump could if he wanted to, "convene both Houses", "as he shall think proper". That means by extension that he could, if he really wanted to, force all 538 members of Congress to attend a rally, or deliver his State of the Union Address from the car park of a Burger King.
Where we are:
Trump could sign the three appropriations bills into law at a moment's notice and end this. They have already passed the House and Senate and are sitting there in the Oval Office. This is entirely, 100%, without question, absolutely his fault and nobody else's. Instead of bothering to do any proper negotiation, the supposed author of "The Art Of The Deal", has decided that the best way to move forward is to hold the wages of 1.8 million full-time civil servants to ransom, just so he can get his stupid wall.
There you go. That is The State of the Union. It is one giant mess; caused by one man who probably shouldn't be there and who is probably obstructing justice as well as the normal functioning of government, just so he can get a legacy promise built.
And by the way... Happy Invasion Day.
Addenda:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47007081
Speaking on day 35 of the shutdown in the White House Rose Garden, Mr Trump said he was "very proud to announce" the agreement would fund the government until 15 February.
He said federal workers affected by the political imbroglio, whom he called "incredible patriots", would receive full back-pay.
- BBC News, 26th Jan 2019
This is madness. This is idiotic. This is the second worst administration in history.
There are four basic components to this mess, that fit together like the world's most idiotic puzzle. Yet I fear that in 1776, the founding fathers would have looked at all of this and laughed with glee because their checks and balances have ensured that everything has been perfectly balanced to a big fat zero in every column and no checks are being written.
I'm going to attempt to explain those four components as I understand the state of play and why the TV Guide for Sydney which lists the State Of The Union Address for tomorrow morning, is wrong.
1 - The Budget Process
As nonsensical as this might sound to a set of Australian ears like mine, there is not one US Federal Budget but actually twelve. Instead of just the single Appropriations Bill No.1 20XX which makes perfect sense and which is what we have in Australia or the Finance Act 20XX which is what they have in the UK, the US Federal Budget is comprised of twelve bills, which the twelve Appropriations Subcommittees have determined shall be the discretionary funding for various government functions. This explains why it is possible to have a partial government shutdown because if some budget bills have been passed into law, then funding has already been secured for those functions of government; which is currently what we have now.
As it stands though, all twelve budget bills have been passed by both the House and the Senate. This means that even before the changeover date when the Democrats took control of the House, that the bills which had not yet been signed were actually all Republican bills. It might very well be possible that the newly elected Democrats would want to propose a new set of budget bills but that would need to pass the Senate before it reached the President.
President Donald Trump is actually refusing to sign the budget bills which were proposed by his own party, when the Republicans had control of all three rings under the big top that is the circus of government. To claim that this is a Democrat shutdown is simply materially untrue.
2 - Only Three of Twelve Appropriations Bills Remain
It is surprisingly difficult to work out exactly which of the twelve Appropriations Bills remain unsigned because the US Government is a rather diffuse organisation. I did eventually track them all down by looking through the lists of bills tabled before the House and Senate though. The ones which remain outstanding and unsigned, are perhaps telling as to what the agenda of this President are:
Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.
This oversees funding for the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, NASA, and other agencies. Of these, the most important to Mr Trump is the Department of Justice because within that department is the Special Counsel's Office investigation, headed by Robert Mueller, which is a counterintelligence investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere, with primary focus on the 2016 presidential election; and to look into a potential obstruction of justice by Trump and others associated with the 2016 Trump Campaign.
Technically, the Department of Justice is not currently funded; that includes Robert Mueller's investigation. I'm wondering if Mr Trump is hoping that by taking away the dog's dinner, that the dog will go away. I suspect though, that this only makes the dog hungrier and want to bite harder.
State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee.
The Subcommittee oversees funding for the U.S. State Department, USAID, and related programs. Mr Trump probably doesn't care about USAID or other programs and kind of wishes that they'd all just go away.
I suspect that Mr Trump has a particular gripe with the State Department because one of its former Secretaries was Hilary Clinton and one of its prime functions is to represent the United States at the United Nations. Not wanting to fund this particular part of government appears to be a matter of personal vendetta more than anything else. It is probably not a conindicence that it the the State Department who has oversight when it comes to foreign relations with the US; that means that while it is closed, the diplomatic channels which might be usful to Special Counsel Mueller's investigation also remain closed.
Homeland Security Subcommittee.
As you would expect, this subcommittee oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The most public face of the DHS is at airports and so this where most people are likely to come into contact with it however, it would be the Department of Homeland Security's budget which contains the line item for the Border Wall with Mexico, or rather, does not.
By Mr Trump refusing to pass this Appropriations Bill, he is saying that he wants his wall really really badly. Admittedly $5bn out of a total budget of $4094bn is tiny but it is still enough to kick up a stick as a symbol to say that he did something as President.
3 - Pelosi Closing The House Of Representatives
Nancy Pelosi who is now the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, can also direct the day to day functioning of the House. Just like our own United States House of Representatives, the Speaker has the authority to direct the Sergeant at Arms of the House. Functionally this is identical to the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, who has the ability and responsibility to open and close the doors of the legislative chamber. This is important because just like our own House of Representatives or the United Kingdom's House of Commons, the head of state is not allowed into the legislature without express permission.
Ms Pelosi as the Speaker, is completely entitled to refuse permission to the President in any and all circumstances; especially in a case like this where both houses of Congress have done their job and he refuses to do his.
4 - The State of the Union Address
Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution states:
He (the President) shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.
The President is required by the Constitution to give to the Congress information of the state of the union, however the Constitution does not in any way shape or form, prescribe the manner in which it should be done. Up until about 1914 the vast majority of the State of the Union adressses were simply written and sent to the Congress wherein they would be read aloud. Woodrow Wilson was probably the first president to be physically present when delivering the State of the Union Address, on an annual basis. There have been addresses presented in the Senate chamber and in the case of FDR, his 1944 State of the Union Address was delivered on the radio because he had had the flu. The main reason that I can see why the The President delivers the State of the Union Address in the chamber of the House is because there's more seats in there.
The thing to remember though is that although Ms Pelosi controls the functioning of the House, President Trump could if he wanted to, "convene both Houses", "as he shall think proper". That means by extension that he could, if he really wanted to, force all 538 members of Congress to attend a rally, or deliver his State of the Union Address from the car park of a Burger King.
Where we are:
Trump could sign the three appropriations bills into law at a moment's notice and end this. They have already passed the House and Senate and are sitting there in the Oval Office. This is entirely, 100%, without question, absolutely his fault and nobody else's. Instead of bothering to do any proper negotiation, the supposed author of "The Art Of The Deal", has decided that the best way to move forward is to hold the wages of 1.8 million full-time civil servants to ransom, just so he can get his stupid wall.
There you go. That is The State of the Union. It is one giant mess; caused by one man who probably shouldn't be there and who is probably obstructing justice as well as the normal functioning of government, just so he can get a legacy promise built.
And by the way... Happy Invasion Day.
Addenda:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47007081
Speaking on day 35 of the shutdown in the White House Rose Garden, Mr Trump said he was "very proud to announce" the agreement would fund the government until 15 February.
He said federal workers affected by the political imbroglio, whom he called "incredible patriots", would receive full back-pay.
- BBC News, 26th Jan 2019
January 25, 2019
Horse 2506 - Fragments IX: Part 9 Debt Agreements Have Serious Consequences
ST23 - The Sirius Tower Is Siriusly Hidius
I honestly can not think of anyone who likes the asthetics of the Sirius Tower. As Australia is almost always late to the party, the tower designed by Tao Gofers in a decidedly Brutalist style, was only commissioned pretty well much after the rest of the world had abandoned the movement. I think that the NSW Heritage Minister, Mark Speakman, quite rightly rejected the application to have this monstrosity heritage listed and although I defnitiely feel sorry for the people who have been displaced, having this awful and unsightly building on Sydney Harbour is a disgrace.
I think that this building looks like a nuclear bunker, which instead of being built underground, was mistakenly allowed to be placed above ground.
On the appeal to the Land and Environment Court, the new Minister for Heritage, Gabrielle Upton wrote that:
"My role is to decide whether the building has aesthetic value and, if so, whether that value is such as to satisfy heritage value at a state level; while the Sirius building is distinctive, in my view, it is not a landmark worthy of state heritage protection."
I couldn't have said it any better myself.
DS-1 - The DS-1 Workshop Manual
I was in Kinokuniya looking for a copy of the Master Tax Guide for the beginning of 2019 when just a couple of shelves along; in the technical section I saw one of these:
The first thing that struck me was that this wasn't included in the humour section of the book shop; which means that whoever filed this either didn't know what it was and put it with the other manuals, or else they did know what it was and played this straight and deadpan.
What I find worrying is that there IS a Haynes manual for a DS-1 Orbital Battle Station. It is never completely explained in the films but you'd think that with a thing of that size and magnitude that someone, somewhere, must've seen what was going on. How exactly do you hide something of this magnitude.
With something as big as this, there must be technical manuals for every single system on board; and if that's the case then how come the Rebels didn't just buy one of these in the films? The whole point of Rogue One is therefore pointless. You don't need some clandestine mission to steal secret plans when you can just go to some bookshop in Kettering and ask for a copy.
Also, considering that this is a Haynes manual, there is a good chance that the Defense-Sphere 1 had Lucas electrics throughout; in which case one needn't have gone to the effort of blowing it up - just sending it through the drive-through car wash would have been enough.
PKMN - Where Are The Fast Food Joints in Pokemon?
My experience with the entire world of Pokemon isn't quite as large as other people and admittedly I am something of a Genwunner because 151 of the things is already beyond my ability to remember; rather than having some weird kind of hatred for Vanillite which is an ice-cream cone and Trubbish and Garbodor which are garbage bags. It's a weird game. Get over it.
I do not remember there being anything in the towns by way of restaurants or fast food places. There are Poke Centres and Shops and there's even department stores but there seems to be a distinct lack of pubs, taverns, coffee shops, or other places that in other games you might recruit adventurers. The premise of "everyone meets in an inn" is so old that Chaucer started out The Canterbury Tales with his merry band of pilgrims meeting in an inn.
I suspect the reason that there are no pubs, taverns, coffee shops, or restaurants, is that that means that there has to be food and drink at these places. You probably can not have places selling alcohol in a children's game, which is fair enough, but as soon as you introduce restaurants to the world then that means that people are going to want to eat meat.
How do you tell all the Miltanks, Tauros, and Flaffys that they are now on the menu? This is rather the same dilemma that the makers of Star Wars Episode VIII have when Chewbacca suddenly develops a conscience and shudders at the thought of eating Porgs. In universe though, the Pokemon have no problems being right royal jerks to each other. They already fight each other and presumably if the people weren't around, they'd just fight and eat each other anyway.
This is why you need Charizard. Charizard is one of that rare class of Pokemon who couldn't give a hoot about anyone else. Charizard will burn your house down for fun. If you could somehow tame that rage for good, he might be useful.
Would Charizard or do well at a Burger King? It's the home of the flame-grilled Whopper. He could be out the back cooking the burgers to flame grilled perfection. Then again, Charizard would probably get tired of working for a spotty teenager boss and just as easily burn down the whole Burger King.
Maybe you want Charizard for a tailgate. He could be there with sausages and hot dogs; just sort of burning them. No. Check that. You don't want Charizard for a tailgate.
ZB-11 - ZB Commodore Is Absent
I went on an excursion on my last day of holidays to look for a guitar amp and some strings. Having acquired the necessary equipment to make my fingers hurt (I haven't yet acquired sufficient skill to make cool licks happen), I dropped in at two car yards because I think that that is fun. I sat in a Mazda CX-3 and came to the conclusion that there is virtually no difference at all inside the cabin to the Mazda 2 which I own, and I reached the same conclusion about the Mazda MX-5. Basically, get the Mazda 2. I then headed north on my journey home and walked through the Holden dealership wherein I saw precisely zero ZB Commodores.
I think that General Motors have more or less reached the conclusion that they are a spent force in Australia. Both the Astra and Cruze sedan which is sold as an Astra are massively underrepresented on the roads, the Barina is sort of there but the dealers don't like to sell them because there's hardly any profit in it for them, the Colorado is outclassed by the Ranger and the Hilux and the BT-50 and the Amarok and the Triton and even Great Wall's V240, and despite wanting to promote the ZB Commodore in the Supercars, demand for them has fallen off a cliff to such an extent worldwide, that Opel keeps on suspending production. There is of course no replacement plan for the Chevrolet Impala and so Holden is completely helpless in this respect when the contract with Opel ends in 2021.
Not that it matters much because if there are literally zero on the lot, they can not sell what they do not have.
PH-10 - Dark Dark Local History
What exactly was going on in this part of the world in the early 1800s?
The main drag of the suburb that I live in is named after a guy who made a small fortune in the early days of the colony of New South Wales by collecting bounty payments for the heads of dead Aboriginal people. The myth that before 1967 that the first peoples of this land were considered to be fauna is indeed erroneous but the truth is even crueler, as they were actually treated like vermin with an extermination price on their heads.
In addition to that, a suburb four stations down the railway line is called Pendle Hill. It is named after the Pendle Hill in Lancashire and is perhaps most famous for the series of witch trials and exterminations during the 17th century. I suspect that most witches were probably just old ladies who had no means of support and had to live by foraging from the land. Through experience they learned which things were edible and I bet that a bunch of so called witch's potions and remedies were actually just ad hoc medicine which had to be invented so that they wouldn't starve to death.
In the other direction, there is a suburb called Quakers Hill; so in between native people genocide and rounding them up into a place called Blacktown, and religious zealotry and a place named for where they killed witches, it must be said that I live in a pretty macabrely named kind of place.
BRx-19 - Brexit Means Brexit. Cameron Means Bad Man.
Of course the one who is standing out of the limelight and laughing his wee ickle head off into the history books is David Cameron. After having won an election and then announcing the referendum on Brexit to appease the more idiotic and racist parts of the Tory Party (and the walking punchline to a joke that gets progressively less funny the more times it is told, Nigel Farage) he then resigned after the Leave vote won and instead of staying in the parliament to help guide some semblance of sanity in the way that John Major did, he resigned to the Chiltern Hundreds and disappeared on a pedalo made of smoke; into the ether and never to be heard from again. He then assigned all of the 'miserable ghost at the feast' powers to Teresa May, who it must be said has the hardest job in the world of politics today. That job has been given an extra degree of difficulty with the barking insanity of Jacob Rees-Mogg (Minister for the 1920s) and Boris Johnson (Minister for Wiff-Waff), acting as Opposition Leaders from within and Jeremy Corbyn (as Shadow Secretary for Corduroy) as Opposition Leader from without.
Having successfully made it to January with nothing to give to Brussels (for them to reject out of hand regardless), and kind of holding on to the premiership but occasionally losing control of the House Of Commons, instead of a hardboiled or soft boiled Brexit, or even a half-baked Brexit with a soggy bottom and a soft border, Britain will be taking back control with a no deal, unbaked Brexit. If you have a no deal and it is unbaked, then when it is time to open the golden suitcase and see what you've won, then all you get is a mess of cracked eggs, flour, milk dribbling all over the place, and a giant mess on the floor of both the House Of Commons and the Euro Bureau. That's what you get when you try to bake a democracy cake in a suitcase. It was always a terrible idea and David Cameron doesn't have to clean any of the mess up.
BT - 12 - Twelve Buck Sandwiches?
Unlike the business world before the 1990s which I imagine was either fuelled by booze, cocaine, and tobacco, the modern business world is increasingly powered by caffeine and smug. Granted that it was caffeine that powered the first golden age of journalism and probably most of the enlightenment, it was tea that lubricated the British Empire, and coffee and sleeplessness that sent the Americans to the moon but I just don't see what this world of caffeine and smug is going to do except build more smug.
There is a café in the city which I whizz by every day while on the top deck of a bus, which sells a super fancy version of the classic BLT which they call a BRAT - Bacon, Roquette (sic.), Avocado and Tomato sandwich - price $12. To be honest I am horrified at the thought of paying as much for a single sandwich as I would in a week of making my own.
The first time that I noticed this dozenal dollar item on the shop's board out front, I immediately thought of Bernard Salt's now infamous column talking about Smashed Avocado sandwiches which cost $22. In that column which is probably a work of satire that he prefaces the whole thing by vaingloriously proclaiming the virtue of his generation for comedic effect, he talks about young people not being able to afford a house because they're all loading up on Smashed Avocado sandwiches. My experience of working in Mosman for a decade and a half, coupled with being sent into the city on multiple occasions, as well as observation of looking to see who is in these cafés leads me to believe that there are no young people in there because they like me, baulk at the idea of paying more for a sandwich than an hourly wage.
I told Mrs Rollo about this and she jubilantly suggested that if you replaced the Bacon with Prosciutto for even greater fanciness, then this sandwich would be called a PRAT.
I honestly can not think of anyone who likes the asthetics of the Sirius Tower. As Australia is almost always late to the party, the tower designed by Tao Gofers in a decidedly Brutalist style, was only commissioned pretty well much after the rest of the world had abandoned the movement. I think that the NSW Heritage Minister, Mark Speakman, quite rightly rejected the application to have this monstrosity heritage listed and although I defnitiely feel sorry for the people who have been displaced, having this awful and unsightly building on Sydney Harbour is a disgrace.
I think that this building looks like a nuclear bunker, which instead of being built underground, was mistakenly allowed to be placed above ground.
On the appeal to the Land and Environment Court, the new Minister for Heritage, Gabrielle Upton wrote that:
"My role is to decide whether the building has aesthetic value and, if so, whether that value is such as to satisfy heritage value at a state level; while the Sirius building is distinctive, in my view, it is not a landmark worthy of state heritage protection."
I couldn't have said it any better myself.
DS-1 - The DS-1 Workshop Manual
I was in Kinokuniya looking for a copy of the Master Tax Guide for the beginning of 2019 when just a couple of shelves along; in the technical section I saw one of these:
The first thing that struck me was that this wasn't included in the humour section of the book shop; which means that whoever filed this either didn't know what it was and put it with the other manuals, or else they did know what it was and played this straight and deadpan.
What I find worrying is that there IS a Haynes manual for a DS-1 Orbital Battle Station. It is never completely explained in the films but you'd think that with a thing of that size and magnitude that someone, somewhere, must've seen what was going on. How exactly do you hide something of this magnitude.
With something as big as this, there must be technical manuals for every single system on board; and if that's the case then how come the Rebels didn't just buy one of these in the films? The whole point of Rogue One is therefore pointless. You don't need some clandestine mission to steal secret plans when you can just go to some bookshop in Kettering and ask for a copy.
Also, considering that this is a Haynes manual, there is a good chance that the Defense-Sphere 1 had Lucas electrics throughout; in which case one needn't have gone to the effort of blowing it up - just sending it through the drive-through car wash would have been enough.
PKMN - Where Are The Fast Food Joints in Pokemon?
My experience with the entire world of Pokemon isn't quite as large as other people and admittedly I am something of a Genwunner because 151 of the things is already beyond my ability to remember; rather than having some weird kind of hatred for Vanillite which is an ice-cream cone and Trubbish and Garbodor which are garbage bags. It's a weird game. Get over it.
I do not remember there being anything in the towns by way of restaurants or fast food places. There are Poke Centres and Shops and there's even department stores but there seems to be a distinct lack of pubs, taverns, coffee shops, or other places that in other games you might recruit adventurers. The premise of "everyone meets in an inn" is so old that Chaucer started out The Canterbury Tales with his merry band of pilgrims meeting in an inn.
I suspect the reason that there are no pubs, taverns, coffee shops, or restaurants, is that that means that there has to be food and drink at these places. You probably can not have places selling alcohol in a children's game, which is fair enough, but as soon as you introduce restaurants to the world then that means that people are going to want to eat meat.
How do you tell all the Miltanks, Tauros, and Flaffys that they are now on the menu? This is rather the same dilemma that the makers of Star Wars Episode VIII have when Chewbacca suddenly develops a conscience and shudders at the thought of eating Porgs. In universe though, the Pokemon have no problems being right royal jerks to each other. They already fight each other and presumably if the people weren't around, they'd just fight and eat each other anyway.
This is why you need Charizard. Charizard is one of that rare class of Pokemon who couldn't give a hoot about anyone else. Charizard will burn your house down for fun. If you could somehow tame that rage for good, he might be useful.
Would Charizard or do well at a Burger King? It's the home of the flame-grilled Whopper. He could be out the back cooking the burgers to flame grilled perfection. Then again, Charizard would probably get tired of working for a spotty teenager boss and just as easily burn down the whole Burger King.
Maybe you want Charizard for a tailgate. He could be there with sausages and hot dogs; just sort of burning them. No. Check that. You don't want Charizard for a tailgate.
ZB-11 - ZB Commodore Is Absent
I went on an excursion on my last day of holidays to look for a guitar amp and some strings. Having acquired the necessary equipment to make my fingers hurt (I haven't yet acquired sufficient skill to make cool licks happen), I dropped in at two car yards because I think that that is fun. I sat in a Mazda CX-3 and came to the conclusion that there is virtually no difference at all inside the cabin to the Mazda 2 which I own, and I reached the same conclusion about the Mazda MX-5. Basically, get the Mazda 2. I then headed north on my journey home and walked through the Holden dealership wherein I saw precisely zero ZB Commodores.
I think that General Motors have more or less reached the conclusion that they are a spent force in Australia. Both the Astra and Cruze sedan which is sold as an Astra are massively underrepresented on the roads, the Barina is sort of there but the dealers don't like to sell them because there's hardly any profit in it for them, the Colorado is outclassed by the Ranger and the Hilux and the BT-50 and the Amarok and the Triton and even Great Wall's V240, and despite wanting to promote the ZB Commodore in the Supercars, demand for them has fallen off a cliff to such an extent worldwide, that Opel keeps on suspending production. There is of course no replacement plan for the Chevrolet Impala and so Holden is completely helpless in this respect when the contract with Opel ends in 2021.
Not that it matters much because if there are literally zero on the lot, they can not sell what they do not have.
PH-10 - Dark Dark Local History
What exactly was going on in this part of the world in the early 1800s?
The main drag of the suburb that I live in is named after a guy who made a small fortune in the early days of the colony of New South Wales by collecting bounty payments for the heads of dead Aboriginal people. The myth that before 1967 that the first peoples of this land were considered to be fauna is indeed erroneous but the truth is even crueler, as they were actually treated like vermin with an extermination price on their heads.
In addition to that, a suburb four stations down the railway line is called Pendle Hill. It is named after the Pendle Hill in Lancashire and is perhaps most famous for the series of witch trials and exterminations during the 17th century. I suspect that most witches were probably just old ladies who had no means of support and had to live by foraging from the land. Through experience they learned which things were edible and I bet that a bunch of so called witch's potions and remedies were actually just ad hoc medicine which had to be invented so that they wouldn't starve to death.
In the other direction, there is a suburb called Quakers Hill; so in between native people genocide and rounding them up into a place called Blacktown, and religious zealotry and a place named for where they killed witches, it must be said that I live in a pretty macabrely named kind of place.
BRx-19 - Brexit Means Brexit. Cameron Means Bad Man.
Of course the one who is standing out of the limelight and laughing his wee ickle head off into the history books is David Cameron. After having won an election and then announcing the referendum on Brexit to appease the more idiotic and racist parts of the Tory Party (and the walking punchline to a joke that gets progressively less funny the more times it is told, Nigel Farage) he then resigned after the Leave vote won and instead of staying in the parliament to help guide some semblance of sanity in the way that John Major did, he resigned to the Chiltern Hundreds and disappeared on a pedalo made of smoke; into the ether and never to be heard from again. He then assigned all of the 'miserable ghost at the feast' powers to Teresa May, who it must be said has the hardest job in the world of politics today. That job has been given an extra degree of difficulty with the barking insanity of Jacob Rees-Mogg (Minister for the 1920s) and Boris Johnson (Minister for Wiff-Waff), acting as Opposition Leaders from within and Jeremy Corbyn (as Shadow Secretary for Corduroy) as Opposition Leader from without.
Having successfully made it to January with nothing to give to Brussels (for them to reject out of hand regardless), and kind of holding on to the premiership but occasionally losing control of the House Of Commons, instead of a hardboiled or soft boiled Brexit, or even a half-baked Brexit with a soggy bottom and a soft border, Britain will be taking back control with a no deal, unbaked Brexit. If you have a no deal and it is unbaked, then when it is time to open the golden suitcase and see what you've won, then all you get is a mess of cracked eggs, flour, milk dribbling all over the place, and a giant mess on the floor of both the House Of Commons and the Euro Bureau. That's what you get when you try to bake a democracy cake in a suitcase. It was always a terrible idea and David Cameron doesn't have to clean any of the mess up.
BT - 12 - Twelve Buck Sandwiches?
Unlike the business world before the 1990s which I imagine was either fuelled by booze, cocaine, and tobacco, the modern business world is increasingly powered by caffeine and smug. Granted that it was caffeine that powered the first golden age of journalism and probably most of the enlightenment, it was tea that lubricated the British Empire, and coffee and sleeplessness that sent the Americans to the moon but I just don't see what this world of caffeine and smug is going to do except build more smug.
There is a café in the city which I whizz by every day while on the top deck of a bus, which sells a super fancy version of the classic BLT which they call a BRAT - Bacon, Roquette (sic.), Avocado and Tomato sandwich - price $12. To be honest I am horrified at the thought of paying as much for a single sandwich as I would in a week of making my own.
The first time that I noticed this dozenal dollar item on the shop's board out front, I immediately thought of Bernard Salt's now infamous column talking about Smashed Avocado sandwiches which cost $22. In that column which is probably a work of satire that he prefaces the whole thing by vaingloriously proclaiming the virtue of his generation for comedic effect, he talks about young people not being able to afford a house because they're all loading up on Smashed Avocado sandwiches. My experience of working in Mosman for a decade and a half, coupled with being sent into the city on multiple occasions, as well as observation of looking to see who is in these cafés leads me to believe that there are no young people in there because they like me, baulk at the idea of paying more for a sandwich than an hourly wage.
I told Mrs Rollo about this and she jubilantly suggested that if you replaced the Bacon with Prosciutto for even greater fanciness, then this sandwich would be called a PRAT.
January 24, 2019
Horse 2505 - Australia Day And The Virtue That We Are Signalling
Everyone has an opinion on Australia Day, from Aboriginal peoples who will quite rightly tell you that according to the Crown, the 26th of January marks the day which Australia was formally annexed by occupation (also see the principle in action in Mabo v. Queensland No.2 (1992), to Scott Morrison who thought that it was disrespectful to wear a t-shirt and thongs despite the fact that it's likely to be more that 40°C on Australia Day (which is 104°F); to the Liberal Party who have decided to go full-on culturally fascist with the remark:
https://twitter.com/LiberalAus/status/1087256359844728832
The Government is taking action to protect Australia Day from activists. Click here to show your support for our national day:
- Liberal Party of Australia, 21st Jan 2019
https://www.liberal.org.au/celebrating-australia-day
Australia Day is a day for unity and coming together. As Australians, we have much to celebrate, including our freedoms, our values and our unique Australian way of life.
It is a day for looking forward to our future together.
Unfortunately, the Greens and some activists are seeking to divide Australians, waging political campaigns to change Australia Day. Some Labor MPs are also advocating changing the date.
The Government has taken action to stop activist Councils to stop undermining Australia Day, by requiring them to hold citizenship ceremonies on our national day.
Let's celebrate Australia Day. Please sign up here to show your support.
- Liberal Party of Australia, 21st Jan 2019
In other words, the government wants to tell you what to wear and to enjoy a day of compulsory fun. I have to say to the Liberal Party of Australia, which in this case is not acting particularly all that 'small l' liberally, that the most Australian Australian thing possible, is to take the mickey out of a thing and especially the government. We don't do patriotism particularly all that well in this country; nor should we. Being overly patriotic unless it is a sporting is unAustralian.
In the run up to this Australia Day, as we do every year, people on the opposing sides of whether or not we should continue to have this as a day of national celebration, accuse each other of either virtue signalling or perhaps of vice signalling.
I think that virtue signalling in the first place is based on a completely false assumption. That assumption is that somehow (don't ask me how because I don't understand a thing I don't understand), it is invalid to express an opinion unless the person expressing said opinion either takes concrete steps to make it happen, or is a member of the group which the opinion is about. The theory it seems is that the person doing the signalling, only does so because they want to make themselves look virtuous (hence the label of virtue signalling). As a rational (mostly), thinking and feeling indivual, nothing could be further from the truth.
I don't really care about looking virtuous the majority of the time. Especially if I am expressing an opinion on something like government policy, or the provision of services, or complaining about injustice, I know that I have very little ability to achieve action; hence the reason why I am expressing an opinion. Further to that, opinion doesn't even have to be well thought out to be expressed either. By the same token, complaining about virtue signalling is itself virtue signalling. In this case it is saying that the thing being signalled by the other party aught not to be signalled and that the things that they are signalling aught to be.
This bring us nicely to the subject of Australia Day itself and the very essense of what a public holiday is. Unless the public holiday is a public holiday for the sake of having a public holiday such as New Year's Day or the Spring and August Bank Holiday in the UK, then every single public holiday is a government sanctioned case of virtue signalling. It is the government saying that the thing being celebrated or remembered aught to be celebrated or remembered. In the case of Australia which is a day for patriotic jingoism, it is exclusively for waving the the flag around and being as Australian as possible.
When it comes to the national day of a nation, that usually indicates some key event in the formation of the nation. France has the storming on the Bastille on the 14th of July, the United States chooses the 4th of July which is the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Canada Day on July 1st is the date that the Constitution Act 1867 came into effect; but Australia, by virtue of coming into existence on January 1st 1900, chooses not to celebrate that day because it already is New Year's Day.
We could have chosen the 31st of July; which was the date in 1900 when Western Australia voted in favour of Federation in the referendum; which approved the Constitution of Australia Act 1900 and hence the actual formation of the nation but we choose not to. To be fair I'd rather that the virtue signalling being done through the nation day tell the story of the actual formation of the nation; but we can not have that. Instead, it seems to be imperative that we absolutely must choose January 26; and hence celebrate the annexation and the perpetual refusal to ever address the issue properly.
What I find especially worrying is that rather than showing any attempt to be either conciliatory or any spirit of reconciliation, the Prime Minister appears to be doubling down on this refusal to address the story of this nation:
“Bill Shorten can sneer at our history if he wants. He can disrespect having an understanding of what our history means. For years; decades; we have had political correctness in this country which I fear is raising kids in our country today to despise our history, to despise how we have grown as a nation, and I am disappointed that Bill Shorten would want to feed into that.”
- Scott Morrison, 23rd Jan 2019.
I don't know how you can come to arriving at a proper "understanding of what our history means" without first reading it. Coming to terms with the fact that there was an original injury, which has never been corrected and which has been turned into some kind of glorious settler myth as part of patriotic virtue signalling, should be a very big part of "understanding of what our history means".
I will also say that just as a day can be lionised and turned into a vehicle for the kind of virtue signalling that a government wants to do as part of its own agenda, the abandonment of a holiday can also be just as useful. In the United States, the observance of Columbus Day has gradually fallen out of favour a because the day marks the beginning of the waves of genocide (though sometimes not intentional) of the American Indians. For the same reason, I would argue that the continuance of Australia Day as a thing, very much continues to paper over the ongoing actions and injustices by current government towards the indigenous peoples; who are the desecendants of those from whom the land was stolen by annexation.
Going back to the tweet from the Liberal Party:
The Government is taking action to protect Australia Day from activists.
and:
The Government has taken action to stop activist Councils to stop undermining Australia Day, by requiring them to hold citizenship ceremonies on our national day.
This looks very much like the activists are the government themselves. I would argue that the people trying to "divide Australians" and "waging political campaigns" are the Government themselves. This is hideous virtue signalling by a pack of knaves who refuse to understand "what our history means" and by doing so undermine Australia Day itself.
It is worth remembering that this argument goes back to before there even was the Commonwealth of Australia. In 1888, the Premier of New South Wales and the "Father of Federation", Henry Parkes, was asked what if any plans were being made to include for Aboriginal peoples in the celebrations marking the centenary of British colonisation of Australia; to which he replied: “And remind them that we have robbed them?"
This then can only be the thing that Liberal Party wants to continue to say by the observance of this date in particular. January 26 is not the date of Federation; nor the date of the referendum. What our history means, is that this land was annexed and that this event is the virtue that we'd like to signal as a nation.
The Government is taking action to protect Australia Day from activists. Click here to show your support for our national day: https://t.co/bTlfAaqr1k— Liberal Party (@LiberalAus) January 21, 2019
https://twitter.com/LiberalAus/status/1087256359844728832
The Government is taking action to protect Australia Day from activists. Click here to show your support for our national day:
- Liberal Party of Australia, 21st Jan 2019
https://www.liberal.org.au/celebrating-australia-day
Australia Day is a day for unity and coming together. As Australians, we have much to celebrate, including our freedoms, our values and our unique Australian way of life.
It is a day for looking forward to our future together.
Unfortunately, the Greens and some activists are seeking to divide Australians, waging political campaigns to change Australia Day. Some Labor MPs are also advocating changing the date.
The Government has taken action to stop activist Councils to stop undermining Australia Day, by requiring them to hold citizenship ceremonies on our national day.
Let's celebrate Australia Day. Please sign up here to show your support.
- Liberal Party of Australia, 21st Jan 2019
In other words, the government wants to tell you what to wear and to enjoy a day of compulsory fun. I have to say to the Liberal Party of Australia, which in this case is not acting particularly all that 'small l' liberally, that the most Australian Australian thing possible, is to take the mickey out of a thing and especially the government. We don't do patriotism particularly all that well in this country; nor should we. Being overly patriotic unless it is a sporting is unAustralian.
In the run up to this Australia Day, as we do every year, people on the opposing sides of whether or not we should continue to have this as a day of national celebration, accuse each other of either virtue signalling or perhaps of vice signalling.
I think that virtue signalling in the first place is based on a completely false assumption. That assumption is that somehow (don't ask me how because I don't understand a thing I don't understand), it is invalid to express an opinion unless the person expressing said opinion either takes concrete steps to make it happen, or is a member of the group which the opinion is about. The theory it seems is that the person doing the signalling, only does so because they want to make themselves look virtuous (hence the label of virtue signalling). As a rational (mostly), thinking and feeling indivual, nothing could be further from the truth.
I don't really care about looking virtuous the majority of the time. Especially if I am expressing an opinion on something like government policy, or the provision of services, or complaining about injustice, I know that I have very little ability to achieve action; hence the reason why I am expressing an opinion. Further to that, opinion doesn't even have to be well thought out to be expressed either. By the same token, complaining about virtue signalling is itself virtue signalling. In this case it is saying that the thing being signalled by the other party aught not to be signalled and that the things that they are signalling aught to be.
This bring us nicely to the subject of Australia Day itself and the very essense of what a public holiday is. Unless the public holiday is a public holiday for the sake of having a public holiday such as New Year's Day or the Spring and August Bank Holiday in the UK, then every single public holiday is a government sanctioned case of virtue signalling. It is the government saying that the thing being celebrated or remembered aught to be celebrated or remembered. In the case of Australia which is a day for patriotic jingoism, it is exclusively for waving the the flag around and being as Australian as possible.
When it comes to the national day of a nation, that usually indicates some key event in the formation of the nation. France has the storming on the Bastille on the 14th of July, the United States chooses the 4th of July which is the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Canada Day on July 1st is the date that the Constitution Act 1867 came into effect; but Australia, by virtue of coming into existence on January 1st 1900, chooses not to celebrate that day because it already is New Year's Day.
We could have chosen the 31st of July; which was the date in 1900 when Western Australia voted in favour of Federation in the referendum; which approved the Constitution of Australia Act 1900 and hence the actual formation of the nation but we choose not to. To be fair I'd rather that the virtue signalling being done through the nation day tell the story of the actual formation of the nation; but we can not have that. Instead, it seems to be imperative that we absolutely must choose January 26; and hence celebrate the annexation and the perpetual refusal to ever address the issue properly.
What I find especially worrying is that rather than showing any attempt to be either conciliatory or any spirit of reconciliation, the Prime Minister appears to be doubling down on this refusal to address the story of this nation:
“Bill Shorten can sneer at our history if he wants. He can disrespect having an understanding of what our history means. For years; decades; we have had political correctness in this country which I fear is raising kids in our country today to despise our history, to despise how we have grown as a nation, and I am disappointed that Bill Shorten would want to feed into that.”
- Scott Morrison, 23rd Jan 2019.
I don't know how you can come to arriving at a proper "understanding of what our history means" without first reading it. Coming to terms with the fact that there was an original injury, which has never been corrected and which has been turned into some kind of glorious settler myth as part of patriotic virtue signalling, should be a very big part of "understanding of what our history means".
I will also say that just as a day can be lionised and turned into a vehicle for the kind of virtue signalling that a government wants to do as part of its own agenda, the abandonment of a holiday can also be just as useful. In the United States, the observance of Columbus Day has gradually fallen out of favour a because the day marks the beginning of the waves of genocide (though sometimes not intentional) of the American Indians. For the same reason, I would argue that the continuance of Australia Day as a thing, very much continues to paper over the ongoing actions and injustices by current government towards the indigenous peoples; who are the desecendants of those from whom the land was stolen by annexation.
Going back to the tweet from the Liberal Party:
The Government is taking action to protect Australia Day from activists.
and:
The Government has taken action to stop activist Councils to stop undermining Australia Day, by requiring them to hold citizenship ceremonies on our national day.
This looks very much like the activists are the government themselves. I would argue that the people trying to "divide Australians" and "waging political campaigns" are the Government themselves. This is hideous virtue signalling by a pack of knaves who refuse to understand "what our history means" and by doing so undermine Australia Day itself.
It is worth remembering that this argument goes back to before there even was the Commonwealth of Australia. In 1888, the Premier of New South Wales and the "Father of Federation", Henry Parkes, was asked what if any plans were being made to include for Aboriginal peoples in the celebrations marking the centenary of British colonisation of Australia; to which he replied: “And remind them that we have robbed them?"
This then can only be the thing that Liberal Party wants to continue to say by the observance of this date in particular. January 26 is not the date of Federation; nor the date of the referendum. What our history means, is that this land was annexed and that this event is the virtue that we'd like to signal as a nation.
January 23, 2019
Horse 2504 - Yes, America Should Build The Wall
There. I have said it. The Congress should approve Mr Trump's plan and give him more than $5bn to build his wall.
I think that it is terrible policy which is grounded in a pathetic form of nativism; which has allowed the racists and the nutbags to crawl out from whatever maggot infested rock they have been hiding under and I think that the current policy of starving government workers of the food from their table is cruel and borderline evil but nevertheless, Congress should act to let him build his idiotic project. Why?
Because it will stand as a monument to cruelty and stupidity. The finished wall will be monument to the utter horror of this President, who I think has descended to the level of the second worst president in US political history¹.
At the time of writing there are about 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. Of those, about 5.4 million are unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and 5.3 are from elsewhere. However the number of people actually caught trying to get over the border, is tiny. In 2017 the US Border Patrol arrested 130,454 Mexicans and 180,077 non-Mexicans at the borders.
If we assume that the number of people caught trying to jump the border is indicative of the general population of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, then that means that we're looking at roughly 2% of all people arriving in the United States this way. That means that the number of immigrants who have arrived illegally and have evaded immigration control, are extremely likely to have entered via legal means and simply just overstayed their visa. In fact just for the fiscal year of 2017, the Department of Homeland Security found that the number of immigrants that overstayed their visas was more than double of those who were arrested at the border.²
The idea then, that there is a national security crisis on the southern border, which Mr Trump has cited as being the trigger for wanting to declare a national emergency, is simply ludicrous and untrue. Then again, ever since the day of his inauguration, the assumption that everything that the President says is simply ludicrous and untrue, has been consistently proven to be a sensible default position.
The question then if I think that this is a stupid proposal, which is based on a lie, made by a nativist and supported by racists, why do I think that Mr Trump's racist propaganda wall should still be built? Because as a monument to white supremacy, racism, the ideology of dehumanisation of refugees, and the declaration that migrants are an enemy, the wall can be dismantled after the racist carrot is gone.
If you think about the famous walls in history, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Berlin Wall, and even the Detroit Eight Mile Wall, eventually, they all cease to serve their function. The Great Wall of China was a mostly ineffective defensive set of structures, as was Hadrian's Wall. The falling of the Berlin Wall marked one of the greatest periods of celebration, when a country divided was finally brought back together as one. Although the Detroit Eight Mile Wall was originally intended to be a physical barrier to separate white and black communities in Detroit in 1941, through physical racial separation, from what I can gather by about 1980, there were sufficiently enough black people living on either side of the wall that it had utterly failed in its intent.
Quite frankly, I think that Mr Trump is so incredibly vainglorious, that in exchange for the wall, legislators could put all sorts of things into the legislation. If I was Nancy Pelosi, I'd seriously consider putting a universal healthcare act, before the house as well as movement on DACA to cover additional illegal immigrants, because as long as Mr Trump gets his precious wall, he then has something that he can claim that he's actually done. The long game here is that just like a lot of temporary discomfort, Mr Trump is only for now and he too will pass. Unless the American people are collectively monumentally stupid, I do not see him being reelected in 2020.
The actual pros for building the Trump Racist Propaganda Wall might not be immediately obvious but I think that they are at least twofold.
Firstly, the passing of legislation is worth the economic cost of keeping food on the table of government employees. People who get paid, spend money; which in turn allows other people to spend money and so the wheels of the economy keep on turning. But greater to that is that the $5bn which is spent on building the wall, actually acts as a stimulus package of sorts. The employment generated and the wages which are paid therein, increase the income of the local community, and due to various multiplier effects, the total value of the stimulus would probably become a good deal greater than dollar amount initially spent. Of course you could make the argument that having someone walk down the street, chucking rocks and smashing all the windows, gives employers to glaziers and you would be right in thinking that it would be more sensible to build housing and other infrastructure but the politics of this is already stupid to begin with.
Secondly, if this is about legacy building, then building the Trump Racist Propaganda Wall will be an exercise in deliberately scarring the land, just to prove how nativist and bad at governing that this president is. If you are going to set out to be horrible, then leaving a monument to your cruelty would be a good reminder to the American people to never make this same mistake again. I would hope that looking forward to the year 20XX, that a future president would see this physical scar and want to pull it down. I might even go so far as to insist that the event be televised, so that in the year 20XX, future Donald Trump can witness his legacy literally being torn down in front of his eyes.
Build the wall; so that it can be torn down again. The nation will learn to move on; it outlive him when he's gone.
¹The worst was James Buchanan who did nothing while the Union broke in half.
²https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/08/07/dhs-releases-fiscal-year-2017-entryexit-overstay-report
I think that it is terrible policy which is grounded in a pathetic form of nativism; which has allowed the racists and the nutbags to crawl out from whatever maggot infested rock they have been hiding under and I think that the current policy of starving government workers of the food from their table is cruel and borderline evil but nevertheless, Congress should act to let him build his idiotic project. Why?
Because it will stand as a monument to cruelty and stupidity. The finished wall will be monument to the utter horror of this President, who I think has descended to the level of the second worst president in US political history¹.
At the time of writing there are about 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. Of those, about 5.4 million are unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and 5.3 are from elsewhere. However the number of people actually caught trying to get over the border, is tiny. In 2017 the US Border Patrol arrested 130,454 Mexicans and 180,077 non-Mexicans at the borders.
If we assume that the number of people caught trying to jump the border is indicative of the general population of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, then that means that we're looking at roughly 2% of all people arriving in the United States this way. That means that the number of immigrants who have arrived illegally and have evaded immigration control, are extremely likely to have entered via legal means and simply just overstayed their visa. In fact just for the fiscal year of 2017, the Department of Homeland Security found that the number of immigrants that overstayed their visas was more than double of those who were arrested at the border.²
The idea then, that there is a national security crisis on the southern border, which Mr Trump has cited as being the trigger for wanting to declare a national emergency, is simply ludicrous and untrue. Then again, ever since the day of his inauguration, the assumption that everything that the President says is simply ludicrous and untrue, has been consistently proven to be a sensible default position.
The question then if I think that this is a stupid proposal, which is based on a lie, made by a nativist and supported by racists, why do I think that Mr Trump's racist propaganda wall should still be built? Because as a monument to white supremacy, racism, the ideology of dehumanisation of refugees, and the declaration that migrants are an enemy, the wall can be dismantled after the racist carrot is gone.
If you think about the famous walls in history, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Berlin Wall, and even the Detroit Eight Mile Wall, eventually, they all cease to serve their function. The Great Wall of China was a mostly ineffective defensive set of structures, as was Hadrian's Wall. The falling of the Berlin Wall marked one of the greatest periods of celebration, when a country divided was finally brought back together as one. Although the Detroit Eight Mile Wall was originally intended to be a physical barrier to separate white and black communities in Detroit in 1941, through physical racial separation, from what I can gather by about 1980, there were sufficiently enough black people living on either side of the wall that it had utterly failed in its intent.
Quite frankly, I think that Mr Trump is so incredibly vainglorious, that in exchange for the wall, legislators could put all sorts of things into the legislation. If I was Nancy Pelosi, I'd seriously consider putting a universal healthcare act, before the house as well as movement on DACA to cover additional illegal immigrants, because as long as Mr Trump gets his precious wall, he then has something that he can claim that he's actually done. The long game here is that just like a lot of temporary discomfort, Mr Trump is only for now and he too will pass. Unless the American people are collectively monumentally stupid, I do not see him being reelected in 2020.
The actual pros for building the Trump Racist Propaganda Wall might not be immediately obvious but I think that they are at least twofold.
Firstly, the passing of legislation is worth the economic cost of keeping food on the table of government employees. People who get paid, spend money; which in turn allows other people to spend money and so the wheels of the economy keep on turning. But greater to that is that the $5bn which is spent on building the wall, actually acts as a stimulus package of sorts. The employment generated and the wages which are paid therein, increase the income of the local community, and due to various multiplier effects, the total value of the stimulus would probably become a good deal greater than dollar amount initially spent. Of course you could make the argument that having someone walk down the street, chucking rocks and smashing all the windows, gives employers to glaziers and you would be right in thinking that it would be more sensible to build housing and other infrastructure but the politics of this is already stupid to begin with.
Secondly, if this is about legacy building, then building the Trump Racist Propaganda Wall will be an exercise in deliberately scarring the land, just to prove how nativist and bad at governing that this president is. If you are going to set out to be horrible, then leaving a monument to your cruelty would be a good reminder to the American people to never make this same mistake again. I would hope that looking forward to the year 20XX, that a future president would see this physical scar and want to pull it down. I might even go so far as to insist that the event be televised, so that in the year 20XX, future Donald Trump can witness his legacy literally being torn down in front of his eyes.
Build the wall; so that it can be torn down again. The nation will learn to move on; it outlive him when he's gone.
¹The worst was James Buchanan who did nothing while the Union broke in half.
²https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/08/07/dhs-releases-fiscal-year-2017-entryexit-overstay-report
January 21, 2019
Horse 2503 - Trump And Brexit: or Why Australia Should Not Become A Republic
The current US Government shutdown which has now lasted for more than a month, is I think an object lesson in why Australia should absolutely not become a republic. Meanwhile, as dysfunctional as Brexit is, it is also an object lesson in why Australia needs to stay as it is.
I think that it is almost certain that the people of Australia want to elect the head of state. The 1999 referendum on the republic, proposed a system which fundamentally didn't alter anything apart from having the Govenor-General elected by a super-majority of parliament. That was turned down; not because there's inherently anything wrong with the idea but because the people of Australia just won't wear it. It must be said that the President of Germany is elected by the Bundestag and electors from the 16 Bundesländer (states) and that the system works very well but that's mainly because Germany has 8 parties and a massive chunk of non-aligned members; Australia on the other hand has a very strong two-party system. Australia probably wants a system similar to Ireland; where the President is elected by the people and holds similar powers to the Governor-General.
The problem with an Australian President as I see it, is that there is no reason in principle to assume that an Australian President would be benign. Australia's political climate, including since before Federation, has always been one akin to a gladiatorial fight to the death; to such a degree that the Parliament of New South Wales has gained the nickname of "The Bear Pit".
Setting aside the fact that in the United States, the President is personally vested with the executive of the nation, the power of veto that the President has is functionally identical to that of the Queen in Britain, the Governors-General of Australia, Canada and New Zealand and the Presidents of Germany, Ireland and France. It is also worth noting that when Japan settled on its Constitution after the Second World War, they cribbed heavily from the best aspects of both Australia and the conventions of New Zealand, and the Emperor of Japan sits over the top.
Having the power of veto, is exactly the reason why this current President is holding the normal functioning of government; holding government workers to ransom without pay until he gets what he wants.
I have complete faith that a President of Australia, who would be elected by the people of Australia, with the same powers as the Governor-General and nominally the same as the President of Ireland, would be a spiteful knave. Although in the United States there is a myth that anyone can be President, both you and I and Blind Freddy can see that that is consistently and demonstrably untrue. The only people who have ever been successful at becoming President of the United States have either been military generals, politicians who were already inside the system, and the current resident who has shown that with sufficient fame and money, actual political skill can be negated and overcome.
That doesn't mean to say that just because the current resident of the White House is a petulant man-child who is willing to hold congress to ransom until he gets his way is an oddity. The grand list of United States presidential vetoes is truly terrifying with more than 1500 pieces of legislation being directly vetoed by the President; with who knows how many more being refused, as is the situation now.
Australian politics is such that knifing Prime Ministers is almost a pastime. That means to say that political climate inside parliament can often be described as "stabby-rip-stab-stab". If the people of Australia were given the power to elect a President then I have no doubt that the weight of that election would create a mandate for that president to do something. Given what I know of Australian politics, that would mean handing the power of veto with mandate to a spiteful knave.
Suppose that Cat Party holds government; so the Cat Party is able to pass the budget on the floor of the House of Representatives via Appropriation Bill No.1 20X5. If they manage to wrangle enough votes in the Senate, which may or may not be hostile, then Appropriation Bill No.1 20X5 would pass to the President. So far so good. What if the President is a member of the Dog Party? Dog Party voters who elected a Dog Party President, have faith that the President not pass Cat Party bills that they don't like. If Appropriation Bill No.1 20X5 does not get Presidential Approval, then the functions of government no longer have a budget or the authorisation to continue; whilst Australian budgets tend to have conditions which would roll forward, unfunded portions of government would have to close; which is exactly what we're seeing in America.
I have no reason to believe that Australia is capable of electing an independent President. I have no reason to believe that if Australia were to elect a President, that we wouldn't get a "stabby-rip-stab-stab" child-President who with the power of veto, would not be a spiteful knave.
This brings me nicely to Brexit. Brexit would from the outset appear to be a tremendous calamity and proof that the system doesn't work. Actually what Brexit proves is that the system works perfectly and it is politics which is broken. The Brexit legislation which was turned down and which is actually the single "worst" turn-down by the House of Commons, is proof that you need a majority of members on the floor of the House to pass legislation. The Tory Party then went on to hold confidence; which coupled with the fact that the budget was previously passed, is also is proof that you need a majority of members on the floor of the House to hold government. If Brexit legislation does manage escape the House of Commons, there will be some adjustment in the Lords no doubt but the power of veto, will almost certainly no be exercised.
The Queen who sits outside of all of this and who is a non-elected person, has seen 14 Prime Ministers in her time, of both major political tribes, passes everything put to her. The last time that Royal Assent was refused was back in 1708. In Australia, I actually can not think of a single piece of legislation which the Governor-General turned down. In effect, the legislature which is made up of elected members is where the power actually lies and because nobody really knows what powers the Governor-General has, they are loathe to use them. I like Australia's benign Governor-General because although they are not elected, nobody really cares about them. A benign nobody is preferable to a spiteful knave.
I think that it is almost certain that the people of Australia want to elect the head of state. The 1999 referendum on the republic, proposed a system which fundamentally didn't alter anything apart from having the Govenor-General elected by a super-majority of parliament. That was turned down; not because there's inherently anything wrong with the idea but because the people of Australia just won't wear it. It must be said that the President of Germany is elected by the Bundestag and electors from the 16 Bundesländer (states) and that the system works very well but that's mainly because Germany has 8 parties and a massive chunk of non-aligned members; Australia on the other hand has a very strong two-party system. Australia probably wants a system similar to Ireland; where the President is elected by the people and holds similar powers to the Governor-General.
The problem with an Australian President as I see it, is that there is no reason in principle to assume that an Australian President would be benign. Australia's political climate, including since before Federation, has always been one akin to a gladiatorial fight to the death; to such a degree that the Parliament of New South Wales has gained the nickname of "The Bear Pit".
Setting aside the fact that in the United States, the President is personally vested with the executive of the nation, the power of veto that the President has is functionally identical to that of the Queen in Britain, the Governors-General of Australia, Canada and New Zealand and the Presidents of Germany, Ireland and France. It is also worth noting that when Japan settled on its Constitution after the Second World War, they cribbed heavily from the best aspects of both Australia and the conventions of New Zealand, and the Emperor of Japan sits over the top.
Having the power of veto, is exactly the reason why this current President is holding the normal functioning of government; holding government workers to ransom without pay until he gets what he wants.
I have complete faith that a President of Australia, who would be elected by the people of Australia, with the same powers as the Governor-General and nominally the same as the President of Ireland, would be a spiteful knave. Although in the United States there is a myth that anyone can be President, both you and I and Blind Freddy can see that that is consistently and demonstrably untrue. The only people who have ever been successful at becoming President of the United States have either been military generals, politicians who were already inside the system, and the current resident who has shown that with sufficient fame and money, actual political skill can be negated and overcome.
That doesn't mean to say that just because the current resident of the White House is a petulant man-child who is willing to hold congress to ransom until he gets his way is an oddity. The grand list of United States presidential vetoes is truly terrifying with more than 1500 pieces of legislation being directly vetoed by the President; with who knows how many more being refused, as is the situation now.
Australian politics is such that knifing Prime Ministers is almost a pastime. That means to say that political climate inside parliament can often be described as "stabby-rip-stab-stab". If the people of Australia were given the power to elect a President then I have no doubt that the weight of that election would create a mandate for that president to do something. Given what I know of Australian politics, that would mean handing the power of veto with mandate to a spiteful knave.
Suppose that Cat Party holds government; so the Cat Party is able to pass the budget on the floor of the House of Representatives via Appropriation Bill No.1 20X5. If they manage to wrangle enough votes in the Senate, which may or may not be hostile, then Appropriation Bill No.1 20X5 would pass to the President. So far so good. What if the President is a member of the Dog Party? Dog Party voters who elected a Dog Party President, have faith that the President not pass Cat Party bills that they don't like. If Appropriation Bill No.1 20X5 does not get Presidential Approval, then the functions of government no longer have a budget or the authorisation to continue; whilst Australian budgets tend to have conditions which would roll forward, unfunded portions of government would have to close; which is exactly what we're seeing in America.
I have no reason to believe that Australia is capable of electing an independent President. I have no reason to believe that if Australia were to elect a President, that we wouldn't get a "stabby-rip-stab-stab" child-President who with the power of veto, would not be a spiteful knave.
This brings me nicely to Brexit. Brexit would from the outset appear to be a tremendous calamity and proof that the system doesn't work. Actually what Brexit proves is that the system works perfectly and it is politics which is broken. The Brexit legislation which was turned down and which is actually the single "worst" turn-down by the House of Commons, is proof that you need a majority of members on the floor of the House to pass legislation. The Tory Party then went on to hold confidence; which coupled with the fact that the budget was previously passed, is also is proof that you need a majority of members on the floor of the House to hold government. If Brexit legislation does manage escape the House of Commons, there will be some adjustment in the Lords no doubt but the power of veto, will almost certainly no be exercised.
The Queen who sits outside of all of this and who is a non-elected person, has seen 14 Prime Ministers in her time, of both major political tribes, passes everything put to her. The last time that Royal Assent was refused was back in 1708. In Australia, I actually can not think of a single piece of legislation which the Governor-General turned down. In effect, the legislature which is made up of elected members is where the power actually lies and because nobody really knows what powers the Governor-General has, they are loathe to use them. I like Australia's benign Governor-General because although they are not elected, nobody really cares about them. A benign nobody is preferable to a spiteful knave.
January 17, 2019
Horse 2502 - Dear Or No Deal Brexit
After having the House of Commons reject the Brexit legislation, 24 hours earlier, the Prime Minister and the Tory Government have done what would have always been expected after Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a no confidence motion, by winning a the vote by 325 to 306. This means that the Prime Minister Theresa May remains installed at Number 10 Downing Street, like an appliance that's on the blink but that we're to scared to replace.
Of course it was always going to stand to reason that a no confidence motion would fail. The so-called "rebel" Tory MPs are never going to voluntarily remove themselves from government and and the DUP who en masse rejected PM's Brexit plan were also never going to voluntarily remove themselves from government when they hold the balance of power.
I not that if all 10 votes from the DUP had gone the other waym then the no confidence motion would have passed by 316 to 315 and because any government formed out of the rainbow coalition mish-mash would have to provide the speaker, the whole system could be upended by Sinn Fein who nominally don't take up their seats in the House of Commons.
What I find particularly disappointing, is that the Opposition Leader and leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, came on the news on Radio 4 and gave a wafting wobbly speech about how Theresa May's government was now a zombie and had lost any mandate to govern. I find this particuarly annoying because as an Australian the phrase "they should resign" is yelled like a mantra whenever an opposition doesn't like something that the government of the day does.
Government by tradition is formed from a majority of members on the floor of the House of Commons; as indeed is the case for every Westminster Parliament. The only two conditions that a government needs to be in government are the ability to pass the budget and to maintain the confidence of the house, which relates to that first requirement which is the ability to pass the budget. That's all there is. There isn't any more.
Although the Prime Minister as minister without portfolio (usually) is the leader of the executive of the government, the actual power resides not in the office of the Prime Minister but the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Although almost always named as the Second Lord of the Treasury behind the Prime Minister, because the Chancellor of the Exchequer controls the purse strings of the nation, they are in reality the one who is responsible for making sure tha the functions of govrenment happen. It is like the Director and Producer of a movie, in that while the Director is able to tell people what to do, if the Producer decides that they don't want to pay people, the production of the movie stops.
Jeremy Corbyn has a right to be outraged at the failure of the government to pass legislation but the truth remains that if they liked the deal, they could have overwhelmingly passed it. That is true for every single piece of legislation. It is also true that if the Labour Party had come up with their own Brexit legislation, deal, no deal, hard Brexit, soft Brexit, Brexit with bacon, Brexit with egg and spam, spam Brexit sausage and spam, and Brexit with a soggy bottom, and they could get the numbers on the floor of the House to agree, then they could have passed that as well.
The one piece of legislation that the Labour Party absolutely can not pass is to propose another referendum. As the rules for referenda are spelled out, including the timetable, it is already too late to hold a referendum before the impending Brexpocalypse on 29 March.
Therein lies Corbyn's problem. If he somehow manages to win government on the floor of the House of Commons because the DUP decide that they want to change allegience over matters of supply and confidence, B-Day is still coming and there's no way to flush out the muck. Labour can't exactly negotiate not to leave the EU because precedent has already been set that the Great British public will want a referendum, which means that they must come up with some kind of leave plan. The Tories have been monumentally incompetent at that task and instead of having two years to try and work it out, there's only two months. I'm sorry but a party which hasn't been in government for nine years, would find it nigh on impossible to pull that off.
The problem now sits back on the doorstep of Number Ten Downing Street like a ticking parcel. Although Ms May has made some sort of noise that she would like Corbyn to reach across the aisle and find some kind of constructive strategy, because Corbyn faces the problem that many in the Labour Party don't want Brexit to happen at all, then he'd suffer criticism for even showing up to Downing Street.
Teresa May though is back to square one again. It is as if she is playing a game of Snakes and Chutes (there are no ladders). Ms May as the Prime Minister has the support of the Tory Party because somehow she ended up with the job and nobody else wants it. Ms May as the Prime Minister has the support of the House on matters of confidence and supply but that's it. We've now been shown that there are no legislative solutions and that a no deal Brexit while undesirable, will probably be what happens despite it being in the interests of nobody. Looks like we're going to get No Deal.
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