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Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray

The prompts from the blog platform suggest that I introduce myself.

In short, I am several things.

Firstly, I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. I have been describing myself as that for at least the past 15 years or so.

This description might not be totally accurate.

I am probably not as narrow minded as I boast I am.

Whilst I am of Italian ancestry and reasonably fluent in Italian, I probably think more the iconoclastic way that Australians do, having been born and lived in Australia my whole life.

Nor am I particularly observant religiously, although like most people, 1600 years of Christianity being the dominant religion (‘thank you’ Emperor Theodosius) in Western Civilisation does tend to hard wire us in a particular way. (I do like to amuse myself by claiming that the dinosaurs missed the ark and that the world is just over 6000 years old.).

Peasant? Well, my parents are from peasant stock, as probably most Italian migrants in the 1950s were, and I like growing my own tomatoes in the backyard. But I am a lower middle class office worker really, with the luxury of participating in a post industrial economy. I also have a university education, and not in agriculture.

Whilst I am very personally Conservative, both culturally and socially, I am more Liberal than Conservative, and believe in individual rights and liberties and freedom of choice and conscience etc to the point where I can get quite worked up when I hear of proposals to intervene in the lives of people or to curtail our freedoms.

I also don’t live in Footscray, although I was born there (and proud of it), and lived and went to school there during my childhood and adolescence, and the Western Bulldogs (formerly known as the Footscray Football Club) is my AFL team. I do not live too far from Footscray though. I am in Avondale Heights, which is like a north western outpost of Footscray, and previously lived in Maribyrnong. But just like people from Fremantle claim that they are from Fremantle rather than from Perth, real Footscray people claim that they are from Footscray rather than from Melbourne. I suppose, historically, that it has something to do with the fact that there is quite a distance between the eastern boundary of Footscray at the Maribyrnong River, and the centre of Melbourne, and most of that two mile distance was occupied firstly by a swamp and then by a wasteland involving docks, chemical depots (where were you during the Coode Island fire in 1991?) and quarantine grounds….

Secondly, I am a postgrad dropout. That does contradict a lot of what my first description suggests I am, but we all are complex and many layered people. The MA thesis I was planning to write was about Nietzsche, Hegel and the End of History or some such, which is the sort of topic which would have been pretty passe in 1994 when I was interested in doing it. However, life gets in the way – working full time and getting a promotion at work which resulted in me focusing my energies and attention on my job meant that I did not have much left in the tank for a 30,000 word thesis. And whilst I still enjoy reading Nietzsche for his manic and frenetic style, Hegel is really boring.

As for more? I much prefer the writings of Anthony Trollope over Charles Dickens. I still enjoy re-reading my favourite Nevil Shute novels, and I occasionally re-read my copy of JRR Tolkien. I did ditch Game of Thrones about 100 pages into the first book, and don’t regret it at all. I remain very curious as to whether some of the unpublished novels of JD Salinger from his period of seclusion (I have the general impression he wrote some) will see the light of day during my lifetime, although I loathed Catcher in the Rye whilst finding his short stories fascinating.

More Fun With Business Cards….

It is going to be a while before I run out of the business cards I ordered in late 2024. I did, after all, order 500 at that time.

But when I do, I need to work out what sort of outrageous claims I can make on the card, beyond calling myself by the post nominal ‘Esq’ and describing myself as a ‘Gentleman of Leisure’, which looks rather boring in comparison to some of the others I have seen.

Let’s look at the business card I was given at the Savage Club in late 2024 by one interesting character.

That chap calls himself ‘Man of Action’ and then lists the following services:

. Lions Tamed

. Insurrections Put Down

. Mountains Climbed

. Virgins Cured

. Opinions Given

. Channels Swum

. Wars Fought

. Lawyers Intimidated

. God Disproven

. Casseroles Cooked.

You would think this was pretty original. However, when I was at my Bottle Club at Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar on Thursday, another chap handed me his newly printed business card which described him as a ‘Gentleman and Flaneur’. [In case you are wondering, a ‘flaneur’ is someone who ‘saunters around observing society’.]

The flip side of this chap’s card offers the following services:

. Revolutions started & uprisings quelled

. Tamer of tigers and wayward moustaches

. Souls saved & sceptics convinced

. International adventurer & sometimes casual hero, bounder and a cad

. The difficult done immediately.

. The impossible takes longer.

. Miracles by appointment.

. No obligations, no worries.

You can see some similarities and opposites between what is included in these two totally separate business cards, such as the taming of lions or tigers, putting down insurrections as opposed to revolutions started and uprisings quelled, God disproven compared to Souls saved and sceptics convinced….

The chap who handed me his card on Thursday said that he was thinking of including ‘Virgins cured’ on the card, except that he wants to remain married.

Which leads me to conclude that there is some printer of business cards somewhere in Melbourne who is catering to the whims of the more eccentric members of our Gentlemen’s Clubs, and producing some standard text options for amusing inclusion on cards.

It all does make my simple card look rather boring indeed.

Postscript:

Since typing this blog post yesterday, I did have a bit of a Google search on the subject of such business cards, and have discovered that such business cards with almost identical phrasing have been making the rounds since at least the late 1980s, and not merely in Australia.

Off With His Head! How To Best Resolve The Problem That Is The Andrew Formerly Known As Prince

I am fond of the plays written by Shakespeare, and by extension, those written by his near contemporary (and alleged ghostwriter) Kit Marlowe. The audiences at the time enjoyed a bit of gore, for instance, and so Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon), with its rapes, dismemberments, murders, and cannibalism, is particularly amusing.

So too are some of the purported histories Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote. Richard III, for instance, features the king’s brother being drowned in a tub of malmsey (a type of cheap alcoholic drink) whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London. Marlowe’s Edward The Second features the killing of the deposed king by having his bowels burned out with a red hot poker, a scene which would have probably delighted contemporary audiences.

But for all the gore of Elizabethan drama, the reality was not much cleaner. There have been many executions of relatives of kings in actual history. Two of Henry VIII’s queens, most famously Anne Boleyn, but also the hapless Catherine Howard, were beheaded in the Tower of London. This was, given the times, much cleaner and easier than divorce, given how much trouble Henry had with that earlier on in his love life. Lady Jane Grey, who was the figurehead of an attempted coup d’teat, also was beheaded after her reign failed to eventuate.

So too Mary Queen of Scots, someone too dangerous to allow to live, despite being cousins of the Queen Regnant and mother of Elizabeth’s eventual successor.

The lesson that we can take away from history is that if you were a royal, and you were an embarrassment to the sovereign, the cleanest and easiest way to end the embarrassment was with a headsman and a sharp axe.

Doing so inside the Tower kept it discreet. After all, a royal was not a common criminal, and to treat them as such would diminish the status and place of the Sovereign himself.

Which brings us to the arrest a couple of days ago of the Andrew Formerly Known As Prince, for questioning relating to allegedly corrupt practices relating to his former role as a trade envoy for the United Kingdom.

He is the brother of the King and the favourite son of our Late Beloved Queen. He is also a living and breathing embarrassment, who could very well face extradition to the USA to face child sex related charges if it were not that most of the American political establishment, including President Trump, is closely implicated in the entire Epstein scandal. It is not in the interests of the American establishment to extradite him and have him answer for those allegations in open court.

But his alleged misconduct in enriching himself in a public office in the UK as a trade envoy is another matter. The evidence appears prima facie strong enough that the police feel obliged to detain and question him, bringing forth the prospect that he could face public trial and imprisonment, despite his former status as a prince and a senior member of the Royal Family.

In the golden days, which our King might now be nostalgically harkening back to, a beheading was a quick and clean way of ridding oneself of such embarrassments. So too would the Prince of Wales be thinking this way, given that in his early childhood, he did tell a kindergarten teacher when having a tantrum that, when he was king, he would get his knights to cut off her head.

Of course ordering ‘Off WIth His Head’ as one of the Queens in Alice In Wonderland is not realistic in this day and age. But is it too late to arrange a car accident in Paris?

A Game Of Thrones (Or Seats) – Why The Liberals Face An Uphill Battle In The November 2026 Victorian State Election

Only the most unabashedly partisan of voters would argue that the current incumbent Labor government of Victoria deserves to win another term. The most recent revelations of corruption running to a 11 figure number (ie tens of billions) lost in inappropriate payments to entities and personages aligned with the more sinister elements of the union movement, combined with the ongoing technocracy and blatant cynicism (eg the cancelled Commonwealth Games debacle) of this government would cause most fair-minded people to think that State Labor deserves a period in the electoral wilderness similar to that to which the Old Testament God condemned the Israelites.

I am pretty partisan myself, but in the other direction, although the promises of Peter Dutton as Federal Opposition Leader last year caused me to preference Labor above Liberal for the first time in my life.

I am, therefore, hoping fervently that the Allen Labor Government is consigned to electoral oblivion in November, just over 9 months from now. That is despite the tragic departure of John Pesutto as Victorian Opposition Leader just over a year ago and the revolving door which has since followed. [Full disclosure – John is a decent fellow and whilst out of parliament served as the patron of the small Italian community group of which I am a board member.]

But thinking with my head rather than my heart, I am not optimistic about it actually happening.

I do not know much in practical terms about campaigning, but I do know that you need to have two things to be competitive: money and people. Money does help to get you people, in terms of paid staff to run campaigns and administrations. People are needed both to volunteer to participate in campaigns, and also to actually run as candidates.

At the moment there are deficiencies in both areas, and they are inter-related.

My impression is that the Victorian Liberal Party is still suffering from the $2 million fraud perpetrated on them by their then state director, Damian Mantach, which was discovered belatedly in 2015. Immediately after this, I am told that there was a significant fiscal belt tightening at headquarters.

Reduced staffing means a reduced ability to service membership issues, such as maintaining the volunteer supporter base. It also reduces the ability of the party administration to organise important meetings, such as preselection conventions, which are needed to endorse candidates.

The main financial backer of the Victorian Liberals is an entity known as the Cormack Foundation, which is a trust administering legacy funds from the sale of an AM radio station once owned by the Liberal Party very many years ago. After the discovery of the Mantach fraud, the Cormack Foundation trustees felt a natural reluctance to hand over more funding unconditionally without some changes in governance, which then resulted in acrimonious litigation. I am not sure whether they have resolved this difference satisfactorily, but this would hurt the capacity to run actual election campaigns.

The main issue is the one of people, which does tie into money, but I fear goes a little beyond it.

This is where we get to the Game of Thrones, or Seats, if you will, and what is needed to win an election and form government.

In the Victorian Legislative Assembly, the lower house of the Victorian Parliament, there are 88 seats. Of those, 18 are currently held by the Liberals, and 10 by their Coalition partner, the Nationals. There is one additional seat, Nepean, which is about to face a by-election as the former MP, a Liberal, resigned recently for family reasons (due to a smear campaign against his family purportedly run by Liberal insiders).

A quick Google search indicates that the cost to the Liberal Party for running a campaign in this by-election will be approximately $200,000, money it can ill afford to spend in the lead up to the state election.

So, assuming (and this is me being optimistic rather than realistic) that the Liberals hold Nepean, the Coalition is sitting on 29 seats.

All sitting Liberal lower house MPs have been automatically re-endorsed, by decision of the State Executive (which, I very recently discovered, was renamed such last year after being known as the spinx-like Administrative Committee for many decades).

When you subtract 29 from 88, you get 59. My understanding is that the Liberal Party is planning to run candidates in 51 of those seats – I assume that the other 8 might be earmarked for the Nationals as coalition candidates.

The magic number to win government is 45. That means that the Coalition needs to win at least another 16 seats from Labor in November.

Where we have a major problem is that there are no candidates endorsed for any of those seats, and therefore no one already campaigning there for the overthrow of this appalling government.

Nominations remain open in 47 of those seats, with no apparent closing date (FYI, I believe that nominations were originally invited in September last year). In 4 seats, which are regarded as most marginal, nominations will close at the end of February.

As we get closer to the election date, the absence of endorsed candidates has two serious issues at the least. The first is that the lack of candidates means a lack of campaigning at the local level, drastically reducing the likelihood of winning more seats.

The other issue is how exactly the diminishing lead time is going to impact on how candidates are chosen.

The preferred manner of choosing lower house candidates in Victoria is for all financial party members of 2 years’ standing in a particular seat to comprise 60% of the membership of a preselection convention, with the other 40% made up of mostly randomly chosen delegates from elsewhere in the Liberal Party. This rule, introduced around 2008 or 2009, was intended to encourage and nurture grassroots participation in candidate selection and hence to motivate local members to donate time and money in their local campaigns.

The alternative manner is to have the State Executive choose the candidates. That is a top heavy approach, where less than 20 people, none of whom are necessarily members of the local electorate, impose their choice of candidate on the rank and file. Several years ago, at the time of the Aston by-election, I wrote at length in this blog about why this was a process which is not going to inspire grassroots participation in the campaign process.

I also feel bad for those people who put their hands up last September to serve the party they support as candidates, and who have been left in a limbo not of their own making, uncertain as to whether they should put their lives on hold until November.

In this Game Of Thrones, I fear that not only are the Liberals going to lose for having started so late on basic administration, but that, more importantly, the people of Victoria will. We cannot afford another four years of this appalling corrupt technocratic government.

We Are Pleased To Announce That We Are Passing On This Rate Increase In Full On Your Variable Home Loan…

The heading for this blog post is taken from a message sent out in the past day by ME Bank to its home loan customers, following the announcement by the Reserve Bank that official interest rates were rising.

This tone deaf message probably marks the dissolution of the last vestige of the myth that ME Bank is there for its customers.

ME Bank started out as a home loan provider owned predominantly by a coalition of superannuation funds (ie the institutions which hold and manage the private retirement savings for most Australians, including yours truly). It was, for much of its history, known as Members Equity Bank.

Customers would have been under the impression that, as an offshoot of industry superannuation funds, ME was on their side, and that it was indirectly owned by them.

The idea that ME Bank is, or ever was, on the side of the customer is of course an illusion, and one which has lingered long since evidence to the contrary started appearing in their business practices and ownership structure.

In April 2020, ME Bank changed the redraw facilities on certain existing home loans unilaterally without informing customers first. This led to considerable customer backlash, as indeed it should, and led to the resignation shortly afterwards of the Bank’s CEO.

A year later the 26 industry superannuation funds who owned ME Bank sold it to the Bank of Queensland. This commercial transaction meant that ME Bank was no longer what it purported to be, a lending vehicle of, by and for superannuation fund members (to borrow my phrasing from Abraham Lincoln).

Now, in a moment of rare commercial honesty, ME has told its customers that it is ‘pleased to announce’ that it is passing on the rate rise in full. I like the lack of contrition. We need more of it in commercial life.

You really do have to wonder why people still think that this bank is different from the ruthless sharks in the Big Four. I’ve never bothered to bank outside the Big Four (except for my back up account with Border Bank, which is a fraction of my actual banking foot print, and which offers an underwhelming app), and I see no reason to go looking for alternatives to my usual banking practices.

I Blame Daryl Somers For The Rise Of Pauline Hanson

As a child, my favourite TV show was Cartoon Corner, which was on Channel 9 every weeknight at 4pm. It was a welcome escape from the weary grind of primary school, and was hosted by Daryl Somers with the puppet Ossie Ostrich as his sidekick.

That was Daryl Somers’ first TV hosting gig, and the show itself had started with another host, although I was too young to remember the previous host.

He and the Ostrich were very popular, and they soon had a spin off show called Hey Hey It’s Saturday, which ran for 3 hours on a Saturday morning. Hey Hey was a very different show circa 1975. It was a longer version of Cartoon Corner, with triple the number of cartoons.

However, the network apparently decided to give Daryl Somers creative control, and the show rapidly evolved from a kids’ show into something quite different, something which primary school age kids would find unwatchable and quite boring. So… by the mid 1980s, Daryl Somers was one of the hottest properties on Channel 9, hosting a show which had moved from Saturday mornings to evenings, and which was definitely not for kids.

I remember in late high school that one bloke in my class wanted to get a few people together to go on the Red Faces segment, solely to stick their fingers in their throats and barf up on live TV.

A shame that did not happen. It would have been very funny, albeit gross.

Daryl Somers had a hiatus from being a TV host for a while, but then made a comeback on Channel 7 as the inaugural host of Dancing With The Stars – a program I am proud to say I have never watched.

He was not the only famous person making a comeback on that show. Pauline Hanson was one of the ‘stars’ who danced in the initial season.

At that time, Pauline was more or less washed up. She had gotten into parliament as a disavowed Liberal candidate in a safe Labor seat in the 1996 federal election, and gone on to make significant waves with her comments on welfare, aborigines, and migrants, comments which resonated with the type of voters whom, in the USA, might currently be called the ‘deplorables’. She had set up her own party, One Nation, and attracted a few supporters around Queensland, and won a few seats in the 1998 Queensland state election with candidates who were not the run of the mill sort offered to voters (one was an artillery bombardier and another was a mechanic and ‘part time Santa Claus’).

Things fell apart however. She did not retain her seat in the 1998 federal election, there were disputes with various of her supporters, and she was targeted by Tony Abbott in particular for alleged misuse of electoral funding. This resulted in her spending several months in gaol until her conviction was overturned.

She even left One Nation for a while, after disputes with various of its officials.

I am not sure about the nous of those supporters. One of the more prominent of those, David Etteridge, suggested that Australia print more money and give it to the farmers.

This statement was enough to immediately turn me right off the idea of choosing her movement as a viable upper house protest vote (I rarely give the Coalition my Senate primary vote and I do retain a soft spot for the DLP).

Don’t take my word for it – the Australian Financial Review did an article in 1998 on this visionary economic thinking, describing it as part of ‘a long tradition of monetary charlatanism’:

https://www.afr.com/politics/funny-money-view-not-new-19980626-k852z

So by 2004, whilst the Howard government prepared to win a fourth term, Pauline Hanson was more or less washed up and marginalised.

And then came Dancing With The Stars, one of those many television programs which provide a vehicle for b-list celebrities to remain in or return to the public eye.

This was a stroke of genius on the part of whoever advised Pauline Hanson to do this. Suddenly, this political has been with her lost seat and legal troubles and rather wacky supporters was in the public eye again, in prime time TV, and dressed elegantly.

Her political comeback proceeded slowly and carefully, culminating in her return to Federal Parliament, albeit to the Senate, in the 2016 Double Dissolution.

Since that time, both sides of politics have seen the mainstream parties (the ALP on the left, and the LNP Coalition on the right) progressively lose more and more of the primary vote which they once took for granted. Independents of various persuasions (Teal and other) have taken numerous formerly stronghold Liberal House of Reps seats in unprecedented numbers.

Various formerly prominent figures, mostly from the Coalition, have defected to One Nation in recent years. Whilst George Christiansen and Craig Kelly joining at the time of their less than voluntary retirements from parliament could be construed as almost inevitable, former Labor Federal Opposition Leader Mark Latham resurrecting his career in the NSW Upper House with One Nation was a surprise, even for one as erratic and petulant as him.

Now, former Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has turned his back on the party and coalition which not only gave him his distinguished political career, but introduced him to his future second wife.

The latest to jump onboard is Cory Bernardi, who used to be a Liberal Senator until he jumped ship after just after his reelection to form his own short lived party, the Australian Conservatives.

The recent poll results show that Pauline Hanson’s personal popularity is now at 38%, in front of Prime Minister Albanese at 34%, Barnaby at 23%, and Opposition Leader Sussan Ley at a niggardly 10%.

In terms of primary vote, Labor remains at 34%, One Nation has leapt to 26%, and the Liberal-National Coalition is at 19% – a record low.

I will be honest – I remain highly skeptical about the viability of One Nation, with its economic illiteracy (I refer you once again to the above AFR link to the wit and wisdom of former One Nation luminary David Etteridge), as an alternative government.

But it has been running a very clever grassroots campaign for several years, using ridicule and social media (particularly in the form of animation) to undermine the credibility of the major parties, and to present itself as a responsible and mainstream choice.

Right wing alternative parties do not usually make a significant impact beyond winning a few seats. There are two major reasons for this.

The first is that the Liberals and Labor are (or perhaps were) significant institutions, supported by an ecosystem in civil society.

Labor has the union movement and the various socially progressive movements and organisations, whilst the Liberals have several think tanks (the IPA and the CIS spring to mind), the Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Both of those parties also, due to many decades of existence, have a core movement of supporters, including not only thousand of grassroots members – the ‘true believers’, but also former political staffers and parliamentarians who remain committed to the party who gave them their careers.

The second reason that alternative parties fail is that they usually are centred on one leader rather than being a genuine grassroots movement.

Bob Katter’s Australian Party is a current example of that, with little support outside FNQ (much as many of us find him personally quite loveable).

Another is the vehicle, in its various names, funded and led by Clive Palmer. As the United Australian Party, Palmer claimed that his party had 100,000 members. However, did any of them actually pay membership fees or have any say when he would pack the party up after elections.

The DLP, in its heyday from 1955 to 1974, was not run by one personality, but was closely tied to B.A. Santamaria, whose Svengali-like presence in the backrooms did drive its decision making. His movement, and the various trade unions which remained affiliated to the DLP until its initial winding up in the late 1970s, provided a link to civil society that other conservative third parties did not have.

Cory Bernardi is, in my view, an even egregious example of the one man political party. He left the Liberals after he was reelected to the Senate to convert his emailing list (of which I was a subscriber) into a political party, the Australian Conservatives (something which I was wise enough to avoid).

He quickly persuaded the Christian based conservative Family First Party, which occasionally would win Senate seats in Victoria and South Australia, to disband and merge into his new party. He also persuaded Victorian state MLC Rachel Carling-Jenkins to abandon the DLP and join his party.

In the first of those above instances, an existing and successful minor conservative party with an existing grassroots supporter base and network was persuaded to abolish itself for the chimera of Bernardi’s rhetoric. In the second, the DLP lost its sole state MP, who then discovered after the event that Bernardi had no intention of running a full service political party (ie in lower house Federal seats or in state elections). He only wanted a vehicle for Senate elections.

He also persuaded some disillusioned long term Liberal party ranks and file members (I know at least two) to jump ship for his new movement.

Ultimately, when his new party did not draw the electoral success he was hoping for, he disbanded his party. Did any of those party members who joined him have any say? All he did was to destroy one existing third party and seriously damage another. Well done Tory Cory!

Now he, along with various other big political egos, has joined One Nation, a party which, in its current form, has a constitution which guarantees the undisputed leadership of Pauline Hanson.

One Nation has had a history of fragmentation over the past 30 years. Its current veneer of unity is unconvincing to me. But with the various grassroots protest movements campaigning against both state and federal Labor governments, and which include the sort of people unlikely to ever be seen in Liberal party branch meetings, it may for the first time be taking up roots in civil society and developing an ecosystem of its own.

If that is indeed the case, then One Nation may actually be, for the first time, becoming a real and viable alternative. It has happened before in other countries – with the collapse of established governing parties in Italy in the early 1990s and their effective replacement by parties further to the right, and with the merger of the long existing Progressive Conservative Party in Canada with the Canadian Alliance in 2003.

I do not think that the potential collapse of the Liberal Party would be a good thing for our democracy, much as they are so uninspiring at the moment. Most of the prominent defectors to One Nation have been men who, in public life, have shown erratic and irresponsible tendencies, and whose economic views range from intelligent (Cory Bernardi despite himself) to cheap populist (Barnaby). If these people were to have a greater say in the corridors of power than they have had an opportunity to in the past, their irresponsible and ego driven tendencies would ruin the country.

And it all traces back to Pauline’s comeback on Dancing With The Stars. Shame Daryl Somers, shame!

Iran At A Crossroads?

I was not quite 10 in early 1979 when the Shah of Iran flew into exile, preempting the takeover of that country by the mullahs, led by the odious fanatic the Ayatollah Khomeini.

That was not the only thing going on around that time. The USSR rolled tanks into Afghanistan a few months later, and Communist China attempted an unsuccessful invasion of Vietnam.

I suppose that this period was my introduction to geopolitics, given that I did not really understand much on the news before that time in my childhood.

Soon afterwards, we watched as the US Embassy in Iran was stormed by Islamist students with the tacit approval of the new regime, in violation of The Hague Convention on diplomatic relations. The Iran Hostage crisis stretched out across late 1979, all of 1980, and into early 1981, burying the Carter presidency’s chances of a second term.

Since that time, Iran has been controlled by a theocratic regime, where unelected mullahs have the constitutional authority to disqualify election candidates and overrule the parliament. Over these intervening 47 years, the regime has regressed Iranian society, taking it backward from the late 20th Century into an earlier more regressive time.

In recent weeks, the Iranian public has revolted against this regime, protesting in all major cities, resulting in an internet blackout and the murder of at least 2000 and possibly 12000 civilians.

This is one of the big stories of the moment, rivalling the sideshow in Greenland and the Venezuelan intervention.

So what is going to happen in Iran?

I am very pessimistic about the overthrow of the regime actually succeeding. The various agencies and movements connected to the theocracy are quite powerful, including not only intelligence services and the military, but also a religious vigilante militia known as the Baseej, which is best known for enforcing hijab on women and beating transgressors.

The state apparatus is quite hardened with half a century of experience in repression, and well equiped to commit violence against its citizens.

I might be wrong. I do hope so. The Velvet Revolution of 1989-1991 saw the end of the communist occupation of Eastern Europe, and then the Arab Spring saw some regimes overturned across the Middle East just over a decade ago. But I also remember Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, which did not change anything.

But if we witness the collapse of the 49 year old Islamic Republic of Iran, what will we see replace it?

Crowds are chanting for the return of the Shah (actually the son of the Shah who fled in 1979). Apparently what little they remember of the relatively liberal and progressive society (as compared to post 1979), they identify with the rule of the Pahlavi family.

Many either do not know, or are willing to overlook, that hundreds, if not thousands, were killed by the security forces during the Pahlavi regime, and that many dissidents were arrested and tortured, even if not killed outright.

The regime also, from 1953 onward, was effectively a puppet government protecting the interests of US and UK oil companies, and serving as a local enforcer of US foreign policy interests. 1953 is a significant milestone, because it was at that time that Kermit Roosevelt, CIA officer and grandson of a former president, orchestrated a coup, overturning a democratic elected government in order to prevent nationalisation of the oil industry.

I am of the view that it is not possible to consider (and feel indignant about) the 1979 US Embassy Hostage crisis without using the CIA coup of 1953 to provide some context. The US lost its local legitimacy as an honest broker in 1953, and what happened in 1979 at their embassy was in part a direct result of their intervention a quarter of a century earlier. [I will qualify that with the observation that Russian diplomats had been murdered in Iran/Persia previously, so the sanctity of envoys was not something embedded in Iranian political culture.]

So I am skeptical about the type of regime which might replace the mullahs if it were to be led by the return of the Pahlavi dynasty. They had a lot of blood on their hands, even if it were nowhere near as much as what the mullahs have shed in the past half century. [And whilst I am in general terms a monarchist, I do feel skepticism towards royal families who have not done the right thing by their people in the past – eg the House of Savoy in Italy.]

What are the prospects of an actual working democracy emerging, one which would be somewhat more similar to the social democracies of mainland Europe or the liberal democracies of the Anglosphere? That is something which we would be more comfortable with, from our safe vantage points in the Western World.

A viable democracy requires a civil society where there are working institutions outside of the state, and where there is a political culture which is willing to express and work out its differences without a tendency to resort to violence. Such civil societies do not sprout overnight like mushrooms – they need to grow. In Eastern Europe after the Velvet Revolution, there were trade unions like Solidarity to foster such a culture, and where the separation of Church and State meant that the adherence of many Eastern Europeans to their religions had kept a healthy skepticism towards authority alive during the Cold War.

What about Iran?

Taking the power of religion as a transformative force first. The ‘Twelver’ sect of Shia Islam is the religion, at least nominally, of the majority of the population. It has provided Iran with the mullahs who have tyrannised it for the past half century. Shia Islam is not going to contribute to the growth of a civil society which would be tolerant and skeptical of authority. Other versions of Islam could possible provide even worse repression – the Sunni fanaticism of ISIS across large tracts of Iraq and Syria has not receded as a threat to the people who occupy those regions.

Then there is the ethnic diversity of Iran – various linguistically differentiated Kurdish groups live across Iran (perhaps 10%), and who might wish for separatism, as their compatriots in Iraq and Turkey have tried; about 20% of the population are Azeri, and there are others. The most oil rich areas have Arab majorities. Historically, ethnic minorities in the area have been repressed, including violently, and much of the civil war that has infested neighbouring Afghanistan in the past 50 years has been between ethnic divides at least as much as religious.

The main hope I would have for Iran is in the diaspora across the world. Much as emigres to Western Europe, North America and Australia would have contributed to the birth of democracy and freedom in post communist Eastern Europe, emigres from Iran can similar contribute, through both remittances of money and more tolerant liberal ideas.

But western style democracy is not something that can be imposed on a non western country. After the US intervention in Iraq in 2003, the American Spectator (a conservative magazine which used to have an actually offline format) ran rather naive ads in which it promoted fund raising for translation into Arabic of a play about the US founding fathers. It argued that Virginians were dominant in the colonies at that time, just as the Sunni minority had been politically dominant in Iraq, and that if enough people in Iraq read this play about the US, it would help them form a US style democracy. Do I really need to say how breathtakingly naive and culturally arrogant that endeavour was?

I remain pessimistic. The mullahs are, to my mind, likely to remain in power. The alternative might be another repressive restored monarchy. A democracy, in the form which we would like, would be very difficult to have take root.

And I have not really talked about foreign intervention. Russia and the UK intervened preemptively during the Second World War to occupy Iran. Then the US, with tacit UK support, got rid of a nascent democratic government in 1953. I think that Russia or the US or both seeking to intervene in Iran would be the worst possible of outcomes, as it might push the world closer to actual superpower confrontation at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.

It Is 40 Years Since 1986 And I Am Still Discovering Things That I Missed Then – Thoughts About The Outfield

I had a lot more on my mind in 1986 than the usual teenage angst, and realising that it is now 40 years since that fateful year started comes with a bit of a shock, given that I am now on the upper edge of 56 rather than 16, with my 57th birthday less than 11 weeks away.

Not only was I about to endure my final year of high school, which was still then called the Higher School Certificate, but my father manifested the first signs of cancer in late January, was given a terminal prognosis in mid February and died mid July.

So I don’t really think that I was in a very good headspace back then. There are probably a lot of things which went on around then which I did not notice. Not enough bandwidth to cope with too much outside my own precarious world.

Despite being in late middle age now, and much closer to my own mortality (although hopefully not THAT close), I think that I am far more relaxed and content than I was as a teenager. But being a teenager sucks at the best of times. That was not the best of times, to borrow from Dickens.

Moving on, but trying to stay on track: I’m a relative newcomer to Facebook – I only signed up to it in August 2023, not long after starting my extended pre-retirement leave. It is addictive and probably quite a negative influence on the balance, as I have an unfortunate tendency to doom scroll AI generated toxic stories which have all the morbid fascination of rubber necking a car accident.

One thing that has been a rare positive in my social media journey is discovering music from that era which was totally unknown to me. One song, which gets used a lot on Facebook ads promoting t-shirts for Gen Xers, is Your Love, by a band completely unheard of by me before the past year or so, The Outfield.

The song is, despite now being 40 years old, very fresh and new to me.

Here’s a link to that song on YouTube (perhaps maybe):

If it doesn’t work, google will find it for you. You won’t regret listening to it.

There is a lot that is surprising to me about that band and their music.

The first thing is that despite their very typically American name (why would anyone but an American name a band after a baseball term), they were actually English.

The other is their sound. They do not sound English at all. They sound distinctively American. The lyrics sound American, as does the melody, and the voices.

It also does not sound like 1986. It sounds like, well… 1989 to about 1993 perhaps.

Everything about The Outfield screams anomaly at me. There is no way that I would have ascertained on my own that this was an English band doing a song in 1986 rather than an American band in perhaps 1992. That they were able to create a sound which sits totally outside their home environment is both remarkable and rare.

They, like many other more famous acts, continued to record for several decades. But the two main creative forces of the band have now been dead for several years, and indeed died in early old age. Seeing them in the video clip for Your Love looking so young and full of life feels very poignant.

Memento Mori.

Obviously It Is All About The Oil

At the start of that surreal period of history which was the Covid Pandemic, we did have a run on toilet paper. I, like most other people, went out of my way to acquire as much toilet paper as I could, not knowing how long the crisis and the shortage would last.

But I was a little more relaxed about it than most people, because I already had a large stash of toilet paper put away in my spare room next to my wine collection.

You see, when there was a toilet paper shortage in Venezuela circa 2010, I decided that I needed to take proactive steps to protect myself and my comfort.

My reasoning was that if a communist government like that of Chavez or Maduro could cause a toilet paper shortage through the incompetence of their economic policies (these criminal morons went as far as naming their kleptocratic economic policies ‘The Great Leap Forward’ in honour of Mao’s similarly titled plan which killed fifty million people through famine), then a communist government like that run by Julia Gillard might similarly cause us to have a toilet paper shortage.

Metaphorically perhaps, I was tongue in cheek in my reasoning, but when the Covid happened, our own answer to Maduro, Dan Andrews, took technocratic rule to its logical extreme and we did have our own toilet paper shortage. Thankfully I was prepared, and I have the communists in Venezuela to thank for being forewarned.

The intervention by the USA in Venezuela to detain and depose the detestable criminal Maduro is not something I will shed too many tears about. He and his co-conspirators, such as the late and unlamented Chavez, have run a dictatorship for many years, one which has forced 8 million people to flee their country. The number of extrajudicial killings under this regime has not been properly measured, but some of the sources online suggest that the numbers stretch into the tens of thousands. Maduro and his henchmen lost an election in mid 2024, and then merrily ignored the results.

Apparently, he is so unpopular that his bodyguards were exclusively Cuban army officers, given that he cannot trust his fellow countrymen with his safety.

But having said that, is intervening in Venezuela appropriate either morally or under International Law? I very much doubt the latter. But my understanding of International Law is mostly limited to the Rome Statute and the Refugees Convention & Protocol, so I will not rabbit on about the legal arguments. [As Socrates might imply, I know nothing, so I am a wise man not to assert that I do know.]

Let’s look at the morality of the matter.

Maduro is a criminal – one of the worst sorts because he is part of a gang which has seized control of a country and brought untold misery to its people. Him now sitting in a cell in the same detention block as the highly annoying P Diddy is not a cause for sadness, although many of the AI generated videos on social media about the two sharing a cell are cringeworthy.

But there are many appalling regimes around the world who enslave and murder their own people. Take North Korea for example, or Iran. Or many of the places in Sub Sahara Africa. Or Pakistan. Why not take action on the leading sponsor of fundamentalist Islamic theology, Saudi Arabia?

It is hard to argue that acting in Venezuela alone rather than taking a similar mission to the other dark places on the Earth is particularly moral. Unless the USA is going to embark on a Woodrow Wilson-like mission to try and make the world safe for democracy, then any action in Venezuela lacks any real moral basis.

The morality of such action is further undermined by the open talk about controlling the oil production in Venezuela, with the fig leaf of ‘narco terrorism’ to justify taking the regime’s leader on a trip to New York. And did not Trump recently pardon another former Latin American president who had been sentenced by an American court to many decades in prison for drug related offences?

Nor has the leader of the Opposition been installed as interim president. Instead, the existing regime has been allowed to appoint the vice president as interim president. There is no regime change, just another of the criminal gang who has been looting Venezuela for the past 20 years getting a chance to be put in charge. Will anything really change? I doubt it.

The main reason that the USA under Trump has intervened in Venezuela is because it can, and because it does not want its rivals Russia and Communist China to have ready access to those oil reserves.

What Trump has done is not unique in American History. There has been regular intervention, almost since the foundation of the United States, in other nations, mostly to protect their interests. As a student of History, I am well aware of what they have done over the past 225 years.

What happened this week is not about right, it is about might. It rarely is about right.

When the USA intervenes in other sovereign nations, it does so with its own interests first and foremost.

The first example that comes to mind was in 1801, when the United States entered into a war in the Mediterranean against the Barbary pirates. The first lines of the US Marine Corps hymn talk about the ‘shores of Tripoli’ as one of their early battle honours.

That war probably was justified, given that it involved opposing a pirate kingdom who enslaved their hapless captives. But given that the USA was still 60 years away from the point in time where they addressed their own slave owning situation, their actions and those of President Jefferson, a prominent slave owner, do reek of hypocrisy.

A much later and more insidious of their interventions, which was mostly about oil (as is the case right now), was the CIA led overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. That regime was determined to nationalise the oil industry, threatening the interests of American petroleum companies and also making the USA nervous about possible Iranian realignment towards the USSR.

The Shah, who had been just a figurehead, was then enabled to rule as an autocrat for the next 26 years, with thousands of people murdered by his secret police.

The result was that the USA, who had been regarded in the Middle East, possibly due to Woodrow Wilson’s idealism , as a beacon of democracy and decolonialisation lost all its prestige and became seen as just another sinister Great Power, only bigger.

Who knows what would have transpired if Iran had continued on a democratic and secular path? Perhaps the current theocracy would never have arisen.

I will leave the tragedies of the invasion of Iraq and the ultimate resurrection of the Taliban regime alone. They have been talked about enough in the past 25 years. Nor will I talk about the debacle of Vietnam, something which has been almost unanimously seen as a catastrophic mistake in policy (the main exception to this view being that of Professor Philip Bobbitt, who happens to be a nephew of Lyndon Baines Johnson).

Most of America’s interventions have been in Latin America and the Caribbean, and given what has just happened, I will reflect more on that. Just in my lifetime there have been the intervention in Grenada in 1983 (a place which until then was only known to me through my postage stamp collection), and the deposing of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989. The latter dictator was very involved in drug trafficking, and also had benefited for many years from close cooperation with US intelligence agencies, which does undermine the morality of his removal from power.

Such interventions have been occurring for well over a century. The US Government was a prime mover behind the independence of Panama from Columbia, principally to facilitate the construction of the canal. Theodore Roosevelt intervened regularly during his presidency, asserting the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of Latin American nations in what became known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Then of course, during the Mexican Civil War, border incursions by gangs of Bandidos provoked Woodrow Wilson, a man who combined idealism with spitefulness, vanity, and deep vindictiveness, to order a US Army expedition into Mexico. This was a complete failure, an embarrassment which is only briefly touched upon in American History and biographies of Wilson.

Of course, we have Cuba, where America probably would have been better served by annexing it after the Spanish American War. The failed attempt to remove the Castro regime during the Bay of Pigs invasion provoked Castro into requesting the USSR to place nuclear weapons on the island and thus almost led to nuclear war.

All of this stems from the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, which was drafted by John Quincy Adams, one of the most brilliant statesmen of his time.

So let’s look at what it says:

The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

It continues on to state:

We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt, the first American president to look further than the horizon, then elaborated somewhat further in his corollary:

All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

So when we look at what has just happened this week, this is not a situation unique to the current Presidency, or to any erratic behaviour on the part of Trump. This is just the latest of a long history of interventions by the United States in Latin America. American foreign policy has, for the past 203 years since President Monroe spoke in his State of the Union address, asserted with growing clarity, what rights the United States considers that it has to protect its interests in the Western Hemisphere.

Is this behaviour morally right? Is this legal? Probably not. But the USA can do this because it can, and because whilst we talk about the burgeoning power of international law, there remain three major world powers who, provided they do not directly confront each other, can operate virtually unrestricted by such talk of rule based interaction between nations.

As TS Eliot put it in ‘Choruses from the Rock’ (and I quote this way out of context but still find it apt):

It is hard for those who live near a Bank
To doubt the security of their money.
It is hard for those who live near a Police Station
To believe in the triumph of violence.
Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World

And that lions no longer need keepers?

The Misuse Of ‘Fortunate Son’

I was watching Die Hard 4.0 yesterday, the one where Detective John McLane takes on cyber terrorists. He does not start getting really violent until after his first phone conversation with the chief villain. In that conversation, he is informed that his 401K account (ie his superannuation fund) has just been wiped out. Immediately after that, he more or less knocks down a helicopter with his bare hands.

I too would be extremely angry if someone did something to my retirement fund, particularly as I am enjoying my defined benefit pension (with 2.1% increase this coming Thursday) right now.

Die Hard 4.0 featured the Vietnam War era protest song ‘Fortunate Son’ prominently, both during one early scene, and during the end credits.

I have been hearing ‘Fortunate Son’ a fair bit in the past couple of days, mostly over Facebook clips celebrating the American incursion into Venezuela to capture the dictator Maduro.

Which does not really seem the right context for playing ‘Fortunate Son’.

Credence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogarty wrote ‘Fortunate Son’ in 1969 in a fit of rage about how the poor and unprivileged were being conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, whilst those who were sons of powerful fathers were able to avoid that morass. He had one particular fortunate son in mind: David Eisenhower, who was both the grandson of former President Eisenhower and son-in-law of President Nixon. Eisenhower grandfils had been able to avoid conscription by serving as an officer in the Naval Reserve for several years – a far safer path of service than that forced upon sons of poorer and powerless families.

I suppose that, in the course of the intervening 56 years, ‘Fortunate Son’ has become part of the soundtrack of the Vietnam War, featured in movies and TV shows about that conflict, and through that, it has been distorted from a cri-de-cour protest song into a theme song for action scenes.

Which leads us to the present day, where Facebook trolls are posting pro-Trumpist celebratory clips about the Maduro intervention with ‘Fortunate Son’ playing loudly as the backing track.

I guess it could be worse. Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lot Of Love’ used to be played loudly on speakers as US armoured units drove through the Vietnamese jungle – something which I suspect inspired the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ helicopter assault scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’….

The Problem With American Eagle

For some reason, I am never really relaxed unless I am wearing blue jeans. I own a couple of pairs of black jeans sure, but I don’t feel as relaxed in them – I tend to wear those with a business shirt and blazer on occasions where I need to dress smart casual.

My main trousers of choice are Levi 516s, in what I supposed is usually called a straight fit. I have been wearing those for quite a long time, although I also own a couple of pairs of 501s.

When there is a rip in my jeans, I immediately toss them out and buy a new pair.

This happened on the weekend, when I found a tear along the seam of the seat of a pair of Levis. I tossed them out and headed off to Highpoint West to buy a replacement.

Whilst Levis are my usual choice, I decided to try American Eagle for a change.

Six months or so ago, I had not heard of American Eagle. But then all the crazies connected to Cancel Culture decided to go nuts over an advertising campaign featuring the delectable Sydney Sweeney, currently considered the sexiest woman on the planet (she might well be) by many.

You’ve probably heard about the campaign slogan: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. All sorts of hysteria was generated by woke and foolish people about alleged hidden means and racism.

Some people probably also complained that featuring a beautiful woman to promote jeans is discriminatory towards the more ordinary or pudgy looking of us, or that it possibly involved a subliminally eugenic agenda. Maybe, maybe not. The hysteria and stupidity of the echo chamber which is contemporary social media knows no limits.

So anywho, I decided to pop into Myers and browse the American Eagle display.

That is where I encountered a problem. Virtually all of the jeans were a maximum of size 32. I’ve spent most of my adult life at size 36 (although one of my pairs of suit trousers doesn’t fit me anymore, and it involves a lot of inhaling to get my dinner suit trousers on the two times per year I attend black tie events).

There was only one option for me – size 36 in baggy style.

I must say, it is very comfortable, but it really doesn’t look that great.

I probably will give American Eagle another try next time I buy a pair of jeans, but where slightly overweight middle aged men like me can’t find the style of jeans we are accustomed to wearing, then I might have to stick to Levis.

That, friends, is a first world problem.