Given that I went to a government school, my exposure to the Catholic Education system was limited to Monday night indoctrination classes in Grades 4 and 6 at the local parish Catholic primary school, in preparation for my first communion and then confirmation.

Hence I first learned of the Church Doctor Saint Augustine when I binge read all the James Bond novels at age 14. There is a passage where James Bond wryly reflects on the famed Saint Augustine quote ‘God give me chastity, just not yet.’

Since that time, I have read Augustine’s memoir, Confessions, and I do realise that James Bond was quoting Augustine out of context.

However, I have not yet read City of God, so my direct knowledge of Saint Augustine’s theology is somewhat limited.

Whilst teaching myself theology and philosophy (subjects I did not study at university) in my early 40s, I discovered that Calvin’s ideas about predestination and the elect (ie that most of us are doomed to go to Hell and there is nothing we can do about it) were not original. They actually were based on a pessimistic passage from City of God. So we have Augustine to thank for the dark doctrines of Calvinism. Great going Gus!

I was thinking about this early this week, when I watched Bill & Ted Face The Music, a very late third film in the Bill & Ted series. Yet again, just like in the most excellent second film, Bill & Ted get killed by robots sent from the future, and yet again, they end up in Hell (although they don’t end up staying there very long).

Why do Bill & Ted keep ending up in Hell when they die? It’s not like they are bad people. Indeed, they are without a malevolent bone in their bodies, and seem to live in a perpetually childlike state of innocence. True, they are rather selfish, but in an unreflective way, and anything they do which transgresses the rules is more juvenile naughtiness than evil.

They preach their own version of the Golden Rule: Be Excellent To Each Other, and their other idea, reminiscent of Eden before the Fall From Grace is: Party On Dude!

They really do not seem like the sorts who deserve to end up in Hell, unless the scriptwriters are either using this as a theologically simplistic plot line, or have been influenced by that Calvinistic doctrine of predestination.

Personally, I hope that it is the former rather than the latter. Calvinism and the idea of identifying yourself as one of the elect through your works did contribute greatly to the Protestant Work Ethic that drove the development of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, but I do not think that this austere and pessimistic (dare I say misanthropic) doctrine has much more to offer us now.

Harry S Truman’s mother in law never quite felt that Truman was good enough for her darling daughter. I suppose she always saw him as the awkward farm boy courting her, rather than as the returned war veteran who had risen to the rank of major in command of an artillery battery who married Bess. Even years later, when he was US president and she was living with the Trumans in the White House, she still felt that Bess could have done better.

I’ve never been quite able to work Truman out. A few years ago I read David McCullough’s excellent biography of Truman and I can still not see how the goody-two-shoes farm boy transformed into the cigar smoking, bourbon sipping, poker playing politician with the diamond hard edge who led the USA and the free world at a very critical moment in history.

Truman is the last US president to not have obtained a college degree. Perhaps his formative education was as that artillery officer he became in the late stages of the First World War. He went from a militia corporal before the war to a leader, knowing how to give orders. That became critically important when he was sworn in as successor to FDR and became, for the first time, privy to the terrible secret which was the Manhattan Project, and knowing that he would have to give the orders whether or not to use those frightening weapons.

Aside from his marriage, his war service, and his political career, Truman was not very successful at many things he did. He was not very good as a farmer, his furniture business after the war failed, and he did drop out of night school. His mother in law might have been right to be unimpressed by him.

But lack of success in civilian life notwithstanding, when it counted and the power of the presidency fell upon his shoulders, he could bear it and wield that power effectively and decisively.

With the news of the Fall of Kabul to the Taliban in the past two days, I have been thinking about Harry S Truman and the other men who have occupied the modern presidency a whole lot. Not since the Fall of Saigon in 1975 has America faced such a humiliation, the abandonment of a war of attrition.

You can never dismiss someone who achieves the office of President of the United States. Not only are they relentlessly driven and ambitious, but they are intelligent far above the average, able to connect with and convince those around them to support them, and possessed of a certain Will To Power that propels them further than other highly gifted men.

Even the most unsuccessful of presidents are highly driven. During the years since 1901, the least of those, or the most mediocre, perhaps would be Taft, the brilliant jurist, Harding, the figurehead, and Coolidge, the idol of some of those who believe in limited government (because Ol Calvin did not seem to do anything).

And when you look at the growth and survival of American power, you cannot help but see many periods where American presidents have stumbled greatly.

Woodrow Wilson, the brilliant academic and idealist, appears to have been spiteful and emotionally feeble, and destroyed his health in pursuit of a new rules based international system his nation was not yet ready for, and which the old world still rejected outright.

Herbert Hoover, who is widely blamed for the Great Depression, may well have been remembered very differently if he had been elected in 1920 instead of 1928.

I venture that there have been three periods in the past 120 years where America has had presidents who were not up to the task, but where America has, regardless of this, grown or retained its power.

The first is the 1920s, where Harding, Coolidge and Hoover had the inertia and lack of foresight to lead their nation.

The next is the 1960s and 1970s. Kennedy made many stumbles in his brief reign, the Cuban Missile Crisis probably being his finest hour. Johnson led America deep into Vietnam and into domestic debt. Then there is Nixon, the most deeply flawed but insightful man who could, if he had not succumbed to the abuses of power that were Watergate, have been remembered as a great president. Ford, long regarded as inept, achieved the presidency through the high regard he was held by both sides of politics, being the most decent of men. Carter too, a man of principle and yet another former Naval Officer (all the presidents from Kennedy to Carter had served in the US Navy), proved not to be up to the foreign policy challenges.

The third era is now, since 2001. We can look with nostalgia at the presidencies of Reagan, the first Bush, and Clinton as a golden age where America reached the height of its post Second World War power globally, and enjoyed prosperity domestically. Since then, we have had four presidents, the second Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden, who have stumbled into wars and foreign crises whilst progressively bankrupting their nation.

Of course, what I am saying is an oversimplification. The USA is a complex nation, with many difficult domestic issues and more foreign policy entanglements and obligations than the rest of the world combined. Where one president has succeeded in one realm, others may have failed miserably, and from the perspective of the outsider, I mostly focus on the foreign policy, rather than on the problems which overwhelm America from within.

For example, whilst America was busy losing the Vietnam War and abandoning the Gold Standard, it was at the same time implementing policies of greater social equality and liberality and placing men on the Moon for the first time.

Under Reagan, America recovered very strongly from the Vietnam War. It then went during the reign of the first Bush and won the Cold War.

But the Fall of Kabul so quickly after the US withdrawal does leave me wondering as to how the US got it so wrong, and whether this is just a legacy of Trump’s lack of attention to detail, or connected to Biden’s current leadership, or a symptom of a broader malaise within the American polity?

At the very back of my memory is a vague collection of some sort of playground game or custom where, if you touched something icky (eg dog poo or used chewing gum), you would immediately touch someone else and call ‘Needles!’ hence passing the contamination from yourself onto them.

With the way that the Delta variant is spreading, remembering such silly games (or making jokes about the name of a certain very popular Australian songstress) is just about all one can do to see any humour in the situation.

I have been critical about the technocrats of our various governments for a while, particular that of Daniel Andrews, who has spent the past 16 or so months dodging transparency in various of his government’s decisions (eg how the hotel quarantine was set up, or why the curfew was imposed).

About 2 months ago, we had the situation where the Victorian government was running low on Pfizer vaccine. A colleague of mine was, at that time, trying to get a booking for his second shot. When he rang the relevant call centre, the scripts gave a misleading explanation for why he would have to wait longer. Instead of telling him the truth, ie that the vaccine supply was short so they were rationing it out, he was given weasel words about advice having changed as to how long people needed to wait between doses.

A friend has just brought another example of such creativity with the truth to my attention. Until this week, where Canberra went into lockdown, the ACT had not had any Covid cases in over a year, yet it was still considered a red zone by the Victorian Health authorities.

People who have been trying to get permits to visit Victoria (and who in some cases have had several clear covid tests) have been told verbally that they are approved, and that the permit letter will be in the mail.

Despite this, no letter has been forthcoming. Parallels appear easy to draw with the time honoured clique about the cheque being in the mail.

However, when people are being misled in this way about permit approval, it is clear that there is a systemic problem. That is, that staff are following a script giving people the advice that they want to hear, whilst the systems to actually deliver what has been promised have not been put in place.

If a bank was to behave in this way, it would be fined. Where a government causes its agencies to behave in this way, it is far more serious, as it is a symptom of a far greater degree of unaccountability and potential incompetence.

But this is not surprising. Part of the problem with the vaccine rollout is that the websites and call centres that were established to deal with vaccine bookings took far longer to set up to deal adequately with the volumes of enquiries than acceptable. In my personal experience 11 weeks ago, I was on hold to the booking hotline for a long time, and then told that I could hang up if I chose and get called back without losing my place in the queue. I never got called back.

Being misleading about matters around permits or vaccination bookings is a form of fibbing. Fibbing amongst children in the playground, tapping each other and calling ‘Needles!’ is one thing – it could even be considered cute. Fibbing as a form of public administration service delivery principle, on the other hand, is unforgivable.

I went for a walk at lunchtime through the deserted city.

In the Bourke Street mall I decided to look up and appreciate what I can see above street level.

In our every day lives we often keep our foot on the ground and our eyes in front. It’s sometimes good to look up and see the everyday beauty around us.

It irritates me greatly when the Australian news media, as has been its unpatriotic and irritating habit of the past 15 years or so, to refer to Soccer (aka Association Football) as Football.

In Australia, particularly in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and the NT, Football means Australian Rules, which I consider true football. In NSW and QLD, they probably would prefer, at the moment, to refer to one or other of the two Rugby codes dying in popularity as Football.

But definitely, referring to Soccer as Football is highly inappropriate. I do wish that Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes (both originally Victorians) would do something to stamp out this degenerate practice.

I would not go so far as to say that Australian Rules should be an Olympic sport, although I do not disagree with those people who do feel that this would be apt to be introduced by 2032 in Brisbane: https://www.clownworldau.com/story/australian-olympic-glory/

I simply think that it would be rather one sided if we were to have true football played at the Olympics. Other sporting nations would get annoyed with us and argue that other forms of Football, like Gridiron or Canadian Gridiron should also be introduced to the Olympics. [Perhaps that would be a good thing actually – a few more sports that the PRC have no chance of ever winning.]

But the case for Cricket to return to the Olympics is a strong one. Not only I do I dispute Soccer’s claim to the name Football, but I dispute its claim to be the World Game. Cricket is the true World Game. When you add up all the people in nations with Cricket Test status, the total comes to about two billion, across all continents except the Americas (and the West Indies is very close to there).

The Americans also should abandon that distorted version of Rounders that they play and return to the sport that they used to love 200 years ago, ie Cricket.

It is time for Cricket to return to the Olympics. Immediately.

One of my late kinsmen was the village idiot of Sunshine North. He happily used to live some of the time on a vacant block there which resembled a garbage tip with abandoned cars and machinery he collected.

He also would have trouble with the RSPCA from time to time as he would harbour wild brumbies which roamed the area, and much as he loved horses and feral dogs, he did not really have the wherewithal to feed and water all these animals which tended to occupy his land.

Owning horses is an expensive proposition in reality. There is no longer any economic purpose for them, just a recreational one. Thus my impecunious late relative’s endeavours at possessing equine livestock on a shoe string budget were doomed to failure.

This morning I learned that Bruce Springsteen’s daughter competed for Team USA in an Equestrian team event at the Olympics and won a silver medal overnight.

Equestrian sports are very elitist, in that you need to possess and be willing to spend a lot of coin on ponies and the like to get good at horse riding.

In this, as a friend has observed, the Springsteens have departed from their working class roots. If they were to remain true to their origins, instead of riding horses like posh people, Springsteen’s daughter should be NASCAR racing.

I have long been in the habit of occasionally reading extracts from Mao’s Little Red Book for laughs. Yes, I do need to get a life.

But just in the past few days, I have discovered The Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party’s answer to the BBC and Voice of America, and I must say that I am hooked.

The sheer naivety apparent in the tone of the ‘journalism’ in the articles in The Global Times is fascinating. Take the following passage from a current article supportive of China increasing its nuclear warfare capacity:

Even many ordinary Chinese people feel the urgency of strengthening China’s nuclear deterrent is common sense. We don’t know if those structures shown in the satellite photos in Yumen and Hami are silos or the foundations of wind power plants as some scholars have speculated. But if it does turn out that they really are silos, Chinese public opinion will definitely support the construction of them unconditionally.

Translation: We don’t know if those are missile silos, given we have a more secretive and repressive regime than most that does not tell us such things. But we are cool with it.

Of course, the Olympics gets a great mention, given the PRC has won even more gold medals than the tax funded Australian team, the adulation will put even our own one-sided sporting commentators to shame:

Overcoming the obstacles and opposing voices under the shadow of the unprecedented pandemic, the Tokyo Olympic Games, which is drawing to a close, turned out to be a huge inspiration to athletes, spectators and the world.  

On the field, a total of 37 gold medals by Saturday morning have lifted Team China to the top of the medal table, more than the US. China is eyeing its best overseas Olympic record as well as the first time as gold medal leader outside China.  

Off the field, observers noted that the success of the Tokyo Olympics under huge pressure is a desperately needed inspiration for the world. Tokyo’s experience in carrying out a major international event under such circumstances sets an example for next year’s Beijing Winter Olympics, experts said. 

The article goes on to report:

“As Chinese athletes have won the most gold medals, we often get admiring glances from athletes from all over the world in the Olympic village,” a Chinese medalist who preferred to remain anonymous told the Global Times on Thursday. 

“As a Chinese athlete, I am very proud, for we are strong not just in sports, but in overall national strength.”

What can I say? That such commentaries flow off the keyboard of some hack CCP propagandist cum journalist without any smattering of irony?

I once met a retired journalist who had been nominated for a Walkey award for best headline. If Communist China has such an award, they should surely consider the author of the article title ‘China’s youngest Olympian wins national respect for spirit’.

I know that a lot of people in the Anglosphere complain about the Murdoch Press and its apparent bias and its influence on democracy. However, I think that the Murdoch Press is a doyen of impartiality compared to the Global Times.

So, this is our sixth lockdown in Victoria the failed technocrat Daniel Andrews has inflicted on us since this plague reached us 16 months ago.

I don’t normally bother watching the press conferences for him or any of the other technocrats currently ruling us by decree, but a group of us in the office gathered around a computer screen yesterday evening (why the blazes did he wait til 4.15pm to make the announcement) as we would need to act immediately on the implications of the lockdown announcement.

It is hard to find a silver lining, but as I was watching the Premier make his statement, which involved much self-indulgent self-justification, I did find one. Imagine if the alternative to Andrews, current state opposition leader Michael O’Brien was premier and holding forth in a press conference.

Yuck. This is the stuff of nightmares. O’Brien is someone with a face only a mask could love, and a personality to match.

Why can’t the state Liberals get their act in order and get rid of him?

I have no sage like powers. In retrospect, I would have been better off to have left my money in the share market last year rather than to pull it all out in March 2020 and then trickle it back in over the intervening 16 months.

But this week, I was reminded of an anecdote about the tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy (father of JFK) in 1929. On the way to his office, he stopped to get his shoes shined. The shoeshine boy proceeded to give him some stock tips.

This disturbed him sufficiently that he went to his office and immediately not only sold his share portfolio, but took a short position on the market. He not only saved his fortune but he increased it.

I am not sure how true this story is, just that it does give one pause for thought. When a rank amateur such as a shoeshine boy thinks that he know how to play the market, it is probably time that the smart money gets out. All the suited sharks who know how to play the game professionally know a lot better than the mug punters when to get in, and when to get out.

I think it is probably a fairly safe bet to suppose that when all the most uninformed mug punters are pouring their money into a particular asset class, they are propping up the price whilst everyone else is getting out.

I was thinking of that shoeshine boy earlier this week. There was an ad on the inside of the tram I was riding advertising a particular app which enables you to trade cryptocurrency. Once you sign up, you get $10 worth of bitcoin. That evening, on the same tram route, there was a poster ad at the tram terminus on the tram shelter advertising another website which enables you to trade cryptocurrency.

I think the opportunity to make money out of cryptocurrency has probably passed, and that any money that is left to make is on the greater fool theory, that you might be able to find some greater fools willing to get in late and trade to them on price fluctuations. There could be very many people willing to sign up to such sites and start investing small parcels of money into cryptocurrency, especially people who have never invested in anything before. The main effect of this will be to hold the price of cryptocurrency up whilst those who have already bought in at much lower prices are able to liquidate their holdings and get out with large fortunes.

I may be wrong about this, but personally, I don’t really care. I have always thought of cryptocurrency at best as the financial equivalent of magic beans. I am not going to trade the cow for them. And if you recall the fairytale, even when the magic beans worked, getting a return on investment involved a lot more risk than just watching a beanstalk grow. Fee Fie Fo Fum….

Sometimes it’s good to be wrong. Just over 6 months ago in this blog when we hit 100 million Covid cases I wearily predicted that at the then current rate of infection we would double to 200 million cases by Easter.

I was wrong and I’m glad. Instead, it’s taken about 27 weeks instead of the 9 weeks it then looked like.

But the slowing of the speed by which this plague doubles is the only cause for celebration.

At that time, there were 2.1 million fatalities out of the 200 million cases. We now have 4.2 million fatalities. The plague, if anything, is at least as lethal as it was six months ago, and possibly more so, given vaccination roll out in many parts of the world.

When do we reach 300 million? I will predict start of next March based on recent rate of 500000 new cases per day globally. I really hope I am wrong again and it takes a whole lot longer.