View From The Couch - 27/Jul/2022

EVs With Lithium Batteries For Everybody?

What's been on my mind a lot in recent weeks is this notion that our automotive transportation is going to change over to a fleet of EVs with Lithium batteries. Electric vehicles to begin with are commodity-metals-intensive. They use a lot more copper cable than an ICE vehicle would, and they use things like raw earth magnets for the motors. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells you that if you wanted to replace very gasoline/petrol ICE vehicle with Lithium battery EVs, there wouldn't be enough of a Lithium supply to fill the need. 

I hold shares in some Lithium mines in Australia so I'm biased - I think if the world decides EVs with Lithium batteries, I'll stand to make some money in the mid to long term. Yet the little environmentalist in me is a little uncomfortable with the prospect of crappy manufacturers filling the world with crappy lithium batteries in their crappy electric vehicles. It's the stuff of nightmares just as bad as global warming. Maybe the whole world should have a deep think about whether this is indeed the way we want to go in terms of vehicles. There's no point replacing one catastrophic global problem with another one. 

Toyota is apparently the world leader in patents for batteries. So you would think Toyota would be leading the way with EVs but they are not. If you listen to the corporate communications coming out of Toyota, they seem to think hydrogen fuel cells are a better option than Lithium batteries. Indeed, they're pretty big on hydrogen in general. It stands to reason that if we could connect up the hydrogen economy to renewables, and ran vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells, we would be lessening the overall impact of lithium mining on the world. 

Of course, Elon Musk thinks Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are a mind-bogglingly stupid idea. He's very deeply invested in Lithium batteries. All I'm saying is, there are real arguments for not going entirely with Lithium battery EVs. 

End of Globalism

There's a bit of talk lately about the end of globalisation. The salient argument being, America has been withdrawing from the world, and as it withdraws, it is leaving power vacuums on the world's high seas. The eventual picture maybe that there will be a free trade blocs built around NAFTA, EU, and CPTPP. Only liberal democracies need apply - because those blocs can and would trade with one another, but it deliberately leaves out China, Russia, Pakistan, Myanmar, the Middle East, and Eurasia, as well as Africa. 

Of course, the Middle East will likely hang on as long as oil is needed, but if the world moves on to running vehicles and planes without fossil fuels, the Middle East will likely lose its purchase on the economic relations involving these blocs. It's remarkable really - especially for us Gen-Xers because our generation was the one that felt globalisation was this inexorably, irresistible economic force that would wash away tariffs and protections and lower our standard of living (instead it imported deflation from China and we ended up with ore stuff than we need for dirt cheap, but that's another story). Naomi Klein was all over this space with her books and the big protests in Seattle in the late 90s was in opposition to globalism. Now we find less than a generation later that globalism is surrendering to history, and that our world is going to move back to trading blocs of the sort that existed pre-World War II. 

It's a bit sad that America's withdrawal from Afghanistan has been interpreted as America's weakness rather than loss of interest in global affairs. The invasion of Ukraine and the sabre rattling by China in the South China Seas is all a little disconcerting misreads. It's not the America is weak now; it's more that it doesn't care what the rest of the world does to beat itself up. It's still invested in the status quo, and more importantly, it will look after its allies. That said, it feels a little weird that we have to start building institutions like the Quad and AUKUS to fill in the power vacuum. 

In an ideal world, Russia and China come in from the cold instead of trying to impose their will on their surrounding countries. Nobody really shares in the grand vision of a Great Russia or a Great China if it means their sovereignty gets compromised. There is some level where the onus is on Russia and China to play nice instead of play these dominance games. The long term prognosis for both those countries is not good thanks to their ageing demographics. They are going to need more friends in the future, not less. Making the whole world your enemy is not proving to be a good move by Russia. You kind hope China gets the message but alas it's run by another dictator. 

If globalisation really is in retreat, you would think it would stop these countries dead in their tracks and make the reconsider their place in the world. The history where Russia had few friends or China had few friends were not good for either country. 

Quick Shots - 26/Jul/2022

The Reserve Bank Gets A Review

I guess there is some kind of informational osmosis going on. about half a decade ago I was complaining about how the Reserve Bank of Australia miscalculates inflation deliberately in order to suppress interest rates. After all, most central banks benefit from political support if they err on the side of lowering interest rates. Ben Bernanke totally missed the GFC coming his way but once it was underway, he dropped interest rates to maintain liquidity in the market and rode that to the cover of Time magazine. The next time there was a major threat to the economy, central bankers around the globe slashed interest rates and in the case of our own RBA, they made noises to the effect that they didn't see rates going up until 2024. 

Now, to be fair they didn't anticipate the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and also the supply shock of China which is still trying to fight the pandemic with a Zero Covid policy which has delivered unto the world a supply chain shock. These things combined have created the kind of inflation that not even the statistical gimmickry can hide. 

All the same it's been a solid decade of ultra-low interest rates, and house prices have gone stratospheric. In the same decade, the RBA has been struggling to see wages rise, and so there is an affordability crisis that has supplanted the Global Financial Crisis itself. You can understand that as the bill for the GFC has been handed to the Millennials and nobody is taking responsibility. And, as you know, I'm not a Millennial and even I think it kind of sucks for them.  

What really sucks in this turn of events is that the inflation in question still not a demand-driven inflation. It's not like people got massive pay rises and they've gone to spend their pay rises en masse. It's not even all the printed money of quantitative easing because the benefits of those tend to go to banking and other financial institutions and not the regular folks on Main Street. So much for the notion that the RBA wanted to wait to see wages increase before raising interest rates.  

Worse still, companies are using the inflation as cover to rase their prices exorbitantly. "oh there's inflation, our costs are up," they say and somehow they're turning in a truck load of profits in their announcements during this reporting season. It all seems like the central banks of the world rig the markets exactly so the ordinary Joe and Jane can't get ahead. It really is worth asking if the RBA really working towards making people's lives better if the outcome is out of control house prices and stagnant wages. If the exchange is that people have to lose jobs to tame inflation, you sort of wonder who exactly it is that is benefitting from this lowering of inflation through raising of interest rates. i.e. If I have to lose my job so interest rates can go up and then inflation gets beat, who is getting ahead here? 

In that light, it is unsurprising then that the ALP government has decided to review the RBA's role.  It's about damn time somebody looked into this racket. 

Russia Ukraine War Drags On Still

The dumb war without any hope of a Russian victory drags on in Ukraine. Still, the deposit in the Kremlin does not accept he doesn't  hold a hand resembling a winning hand. The world awaits for the penny to drop (maybe, maybe not), or for a coup to happen (less likely) in the Kremlin. A lot of people are needlessly getting hurt and killed all because Putin has lost touch with reality. Worse still he has insisted on his army proceeding with World War II era tactics and the casualties on the Russian side have been spectacular/ horrifying (depending on how you view it).

A basic comparison of the USSR army that invaded Afghanistan in 1978 and the Russian Army of February 2022 shows that the Russians are weaker now than then, and that they waded into a war with an opponent who is quantitatively and qualitatively much better than the Afghanis they faced in 1978. When you factor in the global first world support for Ukraine, there is not a scenario in the conventional war sense that Russia can win. 

None of this couldn't have been how the war was conceived in Moscow. Now that the Russians are finally culminating, it's worth asking if Putin actually has any kind of exit plan. Because staying on in Ukraine is going to kill a lot of young people, and Russia's demographic can't afford that. So really the only question that remains is when the hell is Putin going to realise what we've known for some time? 

I guess we're going to have to wait and see. Whoever replaces him is going to have to give up on they 'Greater Russia' horseshit just to get back to the negotiating table. 

Quick Shots - 24/Jul/0222

The Perils of a Republic

The damndest things occur to you in the shower. 

I was thinking mostly about the transition of power of Boris Johnson to whoever it is they're going to get next. The transition of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden of course was infamously terrible, resulting in the January 6 hearings where all the dirty laundry of democracy-in-strife has been getting an airing. Nobody is going to try and break into Parliament House just because Boris Johnson is being removed from office of Prime Minister. Equally, nobody rioted and pretended that Scomo had been robbed of a winning election night. Things might be dire in the UK and Australia when it comes to democratic values, but they're not as bad as they are in the USA.  

January 6 happened exactly because the transition of power between democratically elected heads of state turns out to be vulnerable to intrigue. This is the way of Republics and Presidents. The final authority of government is the President and there's a moment when one is vacating the seat for another - or is supposed to at any rate - and the other has to take that seat where there is a blank moment where authority goes to a metaphorical empty chair. The Constitutional Monarchy model only has that moment when one king or queen dies or abdicates and the crown moves from one head to the next, but because the royal personage wearing the crown is not a political figure it is not vulnerable to intrigue. Allegedly. 

The January 6 event then is merely another entry in the long annals of republics that have come under assault from authoritarians. This isn't ancient Rome, neither is the Senate in Star Wars episodes 1-3, although it bears some thinking upon just why it is that republics are so vulnerable to coup attempts. It is almost as if if you have a republic, then at some point in its history a coup will be attempted. Maybe it's not the system that's the problem but human nature. Even so, the frequency with which republics fall to coups is not something of which I am a fan. 

And then there's the Constitutional Monarchy which get a lot of attention thanks to the UK being the UK.   

The Downsides of a Constitutional Monarchy

There have been any number of politically motivated monarchs and princes, since 1800. All the same, it's not like democracy itself got torn asunder in the UK by a prince. It's interesting in that light that the Whitlam dismissal is a rare moment in history where a Governor General as representative of The Crown exercised the Crown's reserve powers to remove a democratically elected Prime Minister. Australian republicans have been clamouring since then to close that loophole by turning Australia into a republic. It has occurred to them that the problem isn't the structure so much as the person - Sir John Kerr in this instance - who was problematic. 

All the same, the Monarchy can be an all-too-fallible backstop - that much is true. I'm sure those born to the family business of the Monarchy do their best to fill their roles, but clearly some do it better than others. The net effect can be quite shambolic, as we've seen with the modern royals.  

The joke goes, there used to be a line between duchy and douchey. Prince Andrew obliterated that line. Prince Andrew, whatever the hell pervert that he is, is still the Duke of York. It's entirely a medieval concept made flesh, walking around, befriending billionaires and shagging underaged girls from Florida. The entitlement of the man is indescribably obnoxious and let's face it, this is kind of what the Monarchic system is about: Privilege bestowed upon random genetics through inherited processes of history, unquestioningly. So, well might we praise Her Royal Majesty QEII for all her good works and long-live-her-reign and all that, the metaphorical slip is showing with her second son behaving like a medieval aristocrat. That is to say, with the stability you get with a Constitutional Monarchy, you also get Prince Andrew, the Douche of York.   

The point is, to have that impartial final arbiter of officialdom, a king or queen is a very handy thing to have. After all, who can argue against the dumb random luck of somebody being born into one family and not another? The arbitrariness of it actually is weirdly fairer than the contests built on force and violence. And yet to have the one king or queen, you're committed to having a family of these people and the spare prince is always a problem figure. In the olden days, they would send the second prince off to the monastery to avoid him embarrassing the throne. And if the older brother should die, they would yank the spare back into public view. That's what happened to Henry VIII. Alas, no such luck for Prince Randy Andy who got to embarrass himself in public over and over again.

I'm not a big fan of the royal family as such but they do provide some back up to our fragile democracy - I'm willing to admit as much. You might be irritated by all the coverage of the royal family - and who isn't? - but on a broader view, it's all part of democracy. It's every bit as relevant as the idiots who stormed Congress on 6th of January last year. I never thought I would come to that conclusion. 

It could be worse. We could all be living in Russia. 

View From The Couch - 20/Jul/2022

40.3c In London

It sounds like it was worse than just bad. 

The UK has experienced scorching heat like it never has before, and it is causing all sorts of problems in a country built for cool, drizzly weather.  

For the first time since records began, temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius in the country, peaking at 40.3C at Coningsby, a small village in England's Midlands.
It is about 1.6 degrees warmer than the last hottest day recorded, 38.7C in Cambridge in July 2019. 

A new record was also set in Wales on Monday when the maximum reached 37.1C, beating a previous high of 35.2C, while Scotland topped its previous hottest temperature of 32.9C set in 2003, by reaching 34.8C at Charterhall on Tuesday.

The place is not built for this kind of heat. The footage of the fires outside London looked every bit as spectacular as the fires during the Black Summer down here in 2019. 

The grim reality of this heat wave is that you can sheet ALL of it to Global Warming, and it happens the way it did because we spent the last three decades voting in leaders who were in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby. 

And here we are. What can I say but, Told. You. So. 

Shinzo Abe, Bogey Man Even In Death  

Look, I really like Peter Hartcher's reporting and writing for the SMH. But this one had me scratching my head. 

Abe didn’t wait for formal revision of the constitution. He took a series of incremental steps. He increased the budget of Japan’s so-called Self Defence Forces. He broke the longstanding cap that held defence spending below 1 per cent of GDP to today stand at 1.1 per cent. He commissioned the conversion of two warships into aircraft carriers.
He pushed through parliament a law that allows Japan’s military to operate with US forces and those of other allies, including Australia. And he took the lead in the democratic world’s response to Beijing’s aggression with three policy innovations.

Yeah okay. Then Hartcher lists three ways in which Shinzo Abe tried to confront Xi's China, only to admit that Anthony Albanese is about to do the same kinds of things just to keep Australia secure against China's encroachment. 

Abe proposed that Japan consider sharing with the US responsibility for the “nuclear umbrella” that protects US allies. And he said that any “Taiwan crisis” would also be a “Japan crisis”. This was an encouragement to Japan to commit to the defence of Taiwan against any mainland Chinese aggression. 

Prosperity and pacifism seem no longer enough for the Japan of today. Increasingly, Japan is contemplating active defence of liberty and a liberal world order. More than any other Japanese leader, Abe has brought the country to this point. And Japan’s “martial qualities”? The ambitions of Xi Jinping’s China seem likely to test them anew.

I can't come at that closing paragraph. There's been this view that Shinzo Abe's time in power was all about remilitarising. This is hardly the case. Japan lifted its defence budget to over 1% of GDP, all the way up to 1.1%. Shock! Horror! Germany is moving to 2% and nobody's suggesting Germany's going back to the 1940s. It's not like Japan is suddenly capable of  - what, invading China? Bombing Pearl Harbour? Darwin? It couldn't be further from the facts on the ground. 

Shinzo Abe was in power for the longest period for as long as they hav had Prime Ministers in modern Japan going back to 1868. He did not bring a single draft for the rewrite of the constitution to the constitutional review committee, let alone the floor of the Diet for debate. He might have said he wanted to change the Peace Constitution but he hardly ever followed through on anything resembling what people feared he would do - and he had ample time and opportunity to do so but did no such thing. 

Now that the book is closed, I think we should get rid of these notions that Abe was about remilitarising Japan. It makes good copy for the Herald to sell their rag, but it sure sucks as writing about the history that we just lived through.

 

About Wanting Validation

What Are Humans Wired To Want?

I've been getting a number of calls from my old friend GMS from my AFTRS days. GMS had a weird brain buzz moment and wanted to share it. His insight about humanity, was that humans are all irrational beings that want to experience their emotionality and what gets the humans off is the sense of validation they get. And so according to GMS, humans say they want love but what they really want is the validation they feel from being loved. It's a weirdly Gestalt Psychology sort of observation that we're all players in our own life dramas, and we say we want X but in reality we want the feeling of validation. Essentially we cannot cease to project our emotional needs on to the world at our core, we're all craving for the feeling of validation.

Of course, as GMS tells it, we're all bunch of bunch of emotional babies. Carl Jung argued we were working toward self-actualisation but GMS calls hogwash on that notion. In GMS's view, we just want to feel validated. The reason religion never goes away in spite of its failings is because the one thing it can offer is this feeling of validation to everybody. And so religious people are on average a lot happier about their lot in life because they're likely walking around with more of this validation from their religious source. In a sense those people are happier not being self-actualised "as long as they gets their validations from God."

GMS is acerbic about humanity. Maybe he's downright misanthropic. In his view people are running around trying to collect on this feeling of validation when in reality there is no validation, they are undeserving of any validation and the whole thing is a cosmic joke because the reason they're doing it is because they're hard wired to do it thanks to evolution. Maybe there's something to all of this. I told him if Woody Allen were around, he'd probably say he didn't need any such validation - he'd probably just want his car parking to be validated. 

BTW

Just trying something new here...

This is the new single I've got out at the moment. Please check it out. You'd be supporting a good cause called me.

More On The Killing Of Shinzo Abe

Picking Up The Pieces

The picture we are getting about the slayer of Shinzo Abe is in some ways rather strange. From the first note that the perpetrator claimed his killing of Abe was not political, through to the alleged findings where he fired off a home made shotgun, to how he was making other guns from common parts found from hardware stores, all add to a very peculiar picture of a perhaps very sick man. This isn't your Lee Harvey Oswald claiming to be a patsy, this isn't even Sirhan Sirhan. It's more Travis Bickle from 'Taxi Driver'. 

Then again not all killings of men of history are the same. In the aftermath of an assassination you might feel bad about the lost potential - but Abe had probably fulfilled his historic mission already. This isn't about lost potential. And yet there is something very troubling - if anything what's most troubling about the killing of Shinzo Abe is that it wasn't really political at all, and thus fails to be an assassination - it is simply murder by a deranged madman. And if that is the case, we cannot ever find proper meaning to his passing. And maybe that's the point of the reportage. 

That's all to one side. Yet the whole episode demands we dig a bit deeper. More on that later. There may be a blatantly political reason why the police did not identify the organisation that is the target of the perpetrator's fury. 

Just for some context, I've also had discussions about political assassinations in Japan with some people. I myself have a distant relative who was a party too this thing here. My maternal; grandmother's great uncle was one of the 17 men from Mito who teamed up with the man from Satsuma Jizaemon Arimura. This is the guy, if you can read Japanese. After he was executed, he was later enshrined in Yasukuni. That's right. The Meiji government figured that the assassination of the Tairo Ii Naosuke was a patriotic act. That's the same Yasukuni shrine to which Shinzo Abe used to go for visits.   

So it's not like I'm personally holding to any kind of belief that political violence is completely foreign to the Japanese. However things have to be put into some perspective. 

The Meiji restoration essentially put an end to the Edo period, and with it went the Samurai. This essentially put an end to politics through violence from the general population. However, political violence carried out by military officers took their place, and Japan was plagued by political violence through the 1930s which led to World War II. It's really the end of World War II that brought about the current era where the average Japanese person is a peaceful pert, and political violence is unimaginable.

Gun laws are strict in Japan so any political violence this side of 1945 has involved blades or blunt instruments or hand-to-hand assaults. There was a prime minister who was assaulted with an ash tray in 1980. Gun violence is absolutely exceptional to ordinary life in Japan. And so to understand the outlier quality of this killer, you have to understand that somebody in this context where gun laws are strict, went and built their own guns to circumvent gun laws, and walked up to a political candidate on the street and opened fire. Does this really count as political violence of the same kind as the ones before World War II? If so, then just what the hell does this event portend? 

We can't know, because we can't understand the thinking the madman who pulled the trigger. Or is this some new kind of bullshit we've not really categorised? You can see right there that information control is letting the narrative move towards this being an act of a madman. 

What Was The Organisation The Perpetrator Hated?

All the same, it's starting to leak out slowly that the unnamed special organisation that was hated by the perpetrator is the Unification Church, a.k.a. the Moonies. The perpetrator Tetsuya Yamagami is claiming his family was sent bankrupt by a religious organisation, and somehow Abe was giving this organisation support. A little googling reveals Shinzo Abe was tightly linked with the Unification Church through political donations that came from the church. More importantly, his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was instrumental in bringing the Unification Church to Japan from Korea as part of his anti-communist stance. It is no surprise that Abe himself who inherited his grandfather's political apparatus through his father was well connected to the money from the Unification Church.

Was he a believer? Likely not. Shinzo Abe was a believer in whatever the hell form of Shinto that takes place at the Yasukuni Shrine. He spent a lot of political capital shoring up that one so it's hard to believe that he was also a closet Moonie. What is becoming apparent is that Abe and his faction took money from the Moonies, and in turn he offered his own support to them. He delivered some speech via video link to one of the Moonies' group wedding events and Donald Trump no less was also sending videos to this event. The speculation is running that Trump is closely aligned with the Moonies in America, and so, Abe was able to move closer to Trump upon his election through the Unification Church channels.

Money and politics have a way of going in hand. For a political party to look to a source for funding is par for the course (they literally make these deals on the golf courses). The traditional way this went in Japanese politics was through a 'General Construction Industrial Complex' that funnelled money into the LDP and then the LDP would parcel out general construction jobs from government. This old style landed quite a number of LDP politicians in prison in the 70s, 80s and 90s. As the 'GCIC' waned, so did its contributions. As the LDP went through a reformation in the mid to late 90s, it seems inevitable that they opened themselves up to religious organisations donating money to replace the GCIC. 

In the case of Shinzo Abe, it appears that he was very open to taking money from the Unification Church because of his family's own history in inviting them into Japan, but also a vague similarity in stated world views. Who doesn't want world peace as a stated objective? It's this kind of banal rhetoric that characterised Abe's speeches (and also invited much derision as if he was a retard). It is not irony or coincidence then that just as his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the target of an assassination attempt, he too had become a target.

What is kind of terrifying is that Abe's second government - as early as Feb 2014 - was accused of letting the influence of the Unification Church into Cabinet. By 2019, he was being accused that the separation of Church and State was being blurred by having so many Cabinet members who had some kind of organisational involvement with the Unification Church. And this is no ordinary denomination of Christianity - let's be blunt, it's a cult from South Korea. The cult is highly exploitative and Yamagami's leaked statement says his family lost everything to this cult. If Abe was going to endorse this church, Yamagami explained he was fair game for his grudge. The greater irony is that Yamagami himself doesn't think his act is a political act. He has expressly said his murder wasn't about politics. That might be true in his mind, but unravelling all this shows it was totally, entirely, political. 

This means it wasn't just murder, it really was an assassination. I'm wondering if at a future date, Tetsuya Yamagami is going to be identified as a patriot and get enshrined at Yasukuni. Now that, would be ironic. 

View From The Couch - 08/Jul/2022

Shinzo Abe (21/09/1954 - 08/07/2022)

An assassin walked up to the former Prime Minister of Japan as he was delivering a speech and let off 2 shots. Mr Abe was taken to a hospital but died form his wounds there. The assassin Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested on the spot. He is allegedly an ex-Maritime Self Defence Serviceman. The shotgun used was allegedly hand made. He has been interrogated by police and so far has offered that he did not do it because of political beliefs or convictions. More news to come.

People have been messaging me for an opinion and to be honest, I don't really have one. If Shinzo Abe was not assassinated for his political beliefs, then he must have been killed over a personal beef which we cannot fathom right now. If anything, of all the Japanese politicians, he might have been the most likely to Abe assassinated for his political beliefs, in as much as he was vilified for a lot of strange things during his long tenure as Prime Minister the second time around. 

The image of Shinzo Abe differs greatly from inside Japan compared to the rest of the world To the rest of the world, he was the affable yet staunch supporter of liberal democracy, who tirelessly met with many foreign leaders and kept the liberal democracies focused on their joint security. The tributes pouring in from world leaders are an indication of just how energetically he represented Japan and this notion of liberal democracies. Albanese, Turnbull, Scomo, Kevin Rudd all offered tributes, as have Jacinda Ardern, Boris Johnson, Tsai Ing-wen, and Nerandra Modi. The picture emerges of an active participant in global processes such as the G7 and G20.

In Japan, however, he's seen more as a throwback to an older style of politics. He is from a political dynasty of Liberal Democrats. His forebears were Prime Ministers, his father was a senior LDP politician, and his brother is currently a senior LDP politician as well. There is this unrelenting feel of nepotism, entitlement, and money-politics all entwined in the classic LDP manner. Perhaps this is why people sought to frame him as corrupt, but at the same time, none of the alleged scandals really turned up any real dirt. It was more image than substance, and the image was possibly couched in terms of an older politics from the days of his forebears. 

The fear had always been he is government would somehow re-write the 'Peace Constitution' of Japan and turn it back into a fully militarist war mongering nation. The people who accused him of these plans never really found the evidence that he was doing such things. In the 8year 9 months in power the second time, he did no re-write the constitution. This may partly be because he seemed to spend an inordinate time defending himself from the suggestion that maybe his influence as Prime Minister might have been fraudulently mis-used by a friend of his wife to obtain public land to build some school.

The point is, he was hardly the militarist everybody feared him to be. If he ever really were one, he was all talk. Instead he went around the world shoring up the flagging fortunes of liberal democracies and kept working towards things like the Quad. As it turned out, he was decidedly a lot more interested in security than conquest. All this internationalism and concern for global security was maybe rare coming from a modern Japanese Prime Minister, but in that sense he redefined Japan's role in the world through better diplomacy. 

And then he resigned. The last 2 and a half years of living through the pandemic made his presence a lot lighter, paler and less defined. Shinzo Abe ultimately embodied the best and worst aspects of politics in modern Japan. Perhaps then it is unsurprising that his demise comes from the barrel of a hand-made gun, fired by an ex-MSDF, non-political assassin (if such thing is even possible). The contradictory strangeness and preposterousness of his assassin oddly befits the complicated persona of his political life. Yet the plaudits are correct. Democracy and globalism lost a champion today. 

End of an Era for Stupidity

And Boris Is... Going

So say the news. 

It truly is some kind of an end of era. First it was Trump not winning in 2020, followed by the January 6 Capitol mess. Arguably, it took a while but Australia corrected itself at the electorate and removed the mendacious Scott Morrison and his government of corrupt miscreants. Not importantly it marked the end of Australia's time that started with the election of Tony Abbott, the most incompetent PM in Australia's short history. Finally, we're seeing Boris Johnson being tuned out by his own party who can no longer abide his zero-governance style of government. 

What they all have in common is that they are all governments pushed upon us by the Murdoch press and TV. Any rational mind could see Tony Abbott had no idea - no fucking idea - about how to run a country, let alone a chook raffle, but somehow Australia ended up with him just so the hard right nut job brigade could run a solid defence against actually doing anything about Global Warming. Compared to the decade of travesty that followed, perhaps Boris Johnson is not as bad. But then a pile of steaming poo is not as bad as a lake of diarrhoea. As for Trump and his entourage of corrupt minions and family, hoo boy. 

Jeez y'know, it makes you wonder about all kinds of things like the efficacy of all that private school education and bullshit if it yields leaders like these. It's hard to tell where all that money went. It also makes you realise that you can deny reality only for so long. You can pray and make a song and dance out of your religiosity like Scomo but ultimately Black Summer Fires and a bunch of once-in-a-hundred-year flooding events will put you squarely in the context of not knowing what you're talking about. Equally, if 40 of your own side ministers quit on you, maybe you don't know just what the fuck you're doing as Prime Minister of UK. It begs all kinds of questions about a society that gives rise to a process that allows this kind of thing to happen. If it were only America or only Australia or only the UK, you're be forgiven for saying it's a cultural quirk. But for these 3 Anglophone countries to all be beset by this kind of anti-intellectual incompetent troglodyte governments does make you search of answers. 

And really, it's staring in your face if you're a news junky. It's the collective effort of the Murdoch press that delivers these terrifyingly stupid outcomes for so long. Perhaps it is the sign that demographics are shifting - the greying nut-job Murdoch-press-consuming dickheads are dying out, and this is creating just enough of an edge for sanity to prevail. I guess we'll see. 

The Other Stupid Keeps Hanging On

Goodness. What the fucking fuck are we going to do about Russia and Poo-tin? The unhelpful answer is that we should somehow come up with a way to talk him off the ledge of history. 

The West is “blindly” marching towards World War 3, one expert says, and warns one act could trigger a “disastrous” global war. 

Henri Guaino, a French politician and senior advisor to the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, says an “all-out” war could be triggered by treating Putin like Adolf Hitler – an act which would make Russia “the most dangerous country in the world”. 

"The moment we compare Russia to Nazi Germany and Putin to Hitler – we must be prepared for an all-out war,” Mr Guaino told Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom. 

“It is impossible to stop the war against Hitler. If we are facing someone like Hitler – we have to go all the way, at any price, and we will be walking into a disaster. Alternately – we must find ways out. This is the responsibility of politics.”

Look, I know it scares people to sobriety that Poo-tin might just go for the nuclear launch codes. It needs to be said that it's also true that whoever goes for the launch codes first invites the other to do whatever the hell they like, up to and including Mutually Assured Destruction. 

So the Russians bleating about how they have nukes and if they keep on getting mistreated by the world, they might just go for them, is just show. They keep talking about nuking London, but the moment they let off that sucker, it invites NATO to surge across the border and head for Moscow in a conventional war. And given how depleted the Russians are, the West can win that one without nukes. Therefore, the Russians can't just let off one as a warning or do proportionate damage if they go first. The only option once they decide to go nuclear is in fact Mutually Assured Destruction. Now, the Mutually Assured Destruction scenario is where everybody loses, but that everybody includes Russia at the front of the queue. Any World War III of the nuclear kind would guarantee Russia loses. The rest of it leading up to World War III is a pantomime to see if Poo-tin can be made to wear the responsibility all by himself. 

Poo-tin is not as stupid as say, Boris Johnson or Scott Morrison. He understands this calculation. This is probably why he is getting other mouthpieces that are not him to put these ideas out and about. Yet it still has to be said, the dumbest guy in 2022 isn't Boris Johnson or Scott Morrison - it's the guy who ordered his army to invade Ukraine. What an idiot. 

Quick Shots - 05/Jul/2022

Been A While Folks!

I've managed to get my self a higher paying job. The thing about people paying you more is they expect better outputs from you and that takes more time and effort. It's blessing to make more money but the subtraction in time makes some things slip off the radar. Like writing this blog - that's my life right now in the abstract. 

More specifically, I'm working on a parody of Sgt Peppers, apropos of nothing. The songs are coming together a bit slowly because un-surprisingly, I'm not used to writing in the Lennon-McCartney vernacular. I think I'll get it finished maybe sometime next year. 

In the mean time, I thought I'd pop in here and drop a few comments.

Why Isn't Trump Arrested?

Inquiring minds want to know. This Jan 6 Committee thing is dredging up all kinds of incriminating stuff that should put him up for charges of fraud alongside treason.  

Here's something that made me laugh:

Election defense fund was ‘big rip-off’

Trump’s campaign raised at least $250 million from supporters claiming the money was to be used by an “election defense fund” in a battle to prove the election was stolen via voter fraud. But committee member Zoe Lofgren of California said that “big lie was also a big rip-off.” 

Instead, the committee provided a video presentation and research that it said showed money was diverted to Trump’s Save America PAC and some money was given to pro-Trump organizations and entities.

“I don’t believe there is actually a fund called the Election Defense Fund,” Hanna Allred, a former Trump campaign staffer, said in the video. The Trump campaign’s director of digital advertising and fundraising, Gary Coby, said in video testimony the “Election Defense Fund” was just a marketing tactic.

I mean, why doesn't that on its own get Trump indicted right now? America is weird, man. I guess they have to work through the process first. 

A scheme for fake electors. Knowledge of the potential for violence. The lack of caring about that violence. 
A White House lawyer concerned about potential obstruction of Congress and defrauding the country charges. 
Members of Congress and others inside Trump's inner circle asking for pardons. 
And now oblique threats against committee witnesses. 

"I think most Americans know that attempting to influence witnesses to testify untruthfully presents very serious concerns," Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. said.
The committee is leaving lots of bread crumbs for prosecutors to peck at.

So one hopes this all leads to something that trows Trump in the slammer, but as long as they sort of just meander along, it's not exactly adding to the confidence level. 

Them Yankees Are Historically Good

It's been a longtime since I've been motivated to write anything about baseball. This season's kind of been something special so I guess I'll have to say something about it. 

Take a look at this.

It's the standings after 80 games. The Yankees are at 58-22. Their run differential is an astounding +162. That's a 116 win pace. If they went .500 for the rest of the way, they'd still finish the season with 99 wins. 

The next best team in the American League is Houston, and their run differential is +91. They're a great team, with a 52-27 record. That's nothing to be sneezed at, good for a whopping .658 winning percentage. After 79 games, their average differential per win is 1.75 runs. The Yankees are clocking in at 2.79 runs per win. That is to say if the Yankees played a .500 team, they'd probably win with a 3 run margin on average. 

We've not seen something like this since '98. That's almost a quarter of a century ago. Feeling old yet?

So pardon my relapse. This is just too notable not to mention.