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.

Quite a few years ago (time does fly), there was a locally written novel in our bookstores by a Melbourne English teacher Peter Minack, titled ‘CWG (Campaigning With Grant)’. It is written from the first person perspective of Brigadier General John Aaron Rawlins, aide to Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army in the latter stages of the US Civil War.

It is remarkable that such a novel can be written by an Australian, rather than someone in the United States itself, who would be far more likely to be immersed in the knowledge of American history.

But Peter Minack is a rather remarkable person. Under his highly inappropriate stage name of ‘Ron Hitler-Barassi’, he was the lead vocalist for the avante-garde alternative Melbourne band TISM (short for ‘This Is Serious Mum’) which enjoyed great cult success in the 1980s and 1990s.

TISM were very satirical, and possibly too clever for their own good (I think they all were Melbourne Uni Arts and Law students), but clever they were. I remember listening to their EP Form And Meaning Reach Ultimate Communion (with TS Eliot on the cover) in mid 1987 in the John Medley Library at Monash University. Their song about TS Eliot was extremely witty.

I had reason to think about TISM recently. I have the habit, at work, of ironically exclaiming ‘GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!’ several times per day, in imitation of our sports commentators. It is the Olympics after all. A colleague said that this reminds him of TISM’s 1995 album Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, and it’s 1996 bonus disc GOLD! GOLD! GOLD for Australia! which includes a very dark take on our excessive enthusiasm for the Olympics and similar sporting contests.

The members of TISM would be in their late 50s or early 60s by now, and the sort of fiery satire which drove them in their undergrad years and into their 20s and 30s is probably extinguished, or down to the embers. It is unlikely that they will reunite and do more gigs or new music.

I cannot, as I head further into my 50s, feel a little sad about that, given that I first heard their music when I was 18, and I wonder how all those years have swept by so quickly.

People who know me well are aware that I am only ever half joking when I say that I wish the British Empire still existed and that I would much prefer for the Commonwealth Games to revert to its original name, The Empire Games.

Whilst I have very little interest in sport (except that the Footscray Football Club is sitting on top of the AFL Ladder this week and my brother and I soon may have to confront the First World Problem of trying to secure Grand Final tickets), it is fair to say that the main purpose of the otherwise pointless Commonwealth Games (after all, it is not there for us to celebrate our membership of the British Empire anymore) is to give our athletes world class practice for the Olympics.

The purpose of the Olympic Games, of course, is to win Gold Medals. Our national identity demands that we triumph at the Olympics.

So we pour lots of money into the Australian Institute of Sport in the hope that we can set aside our parochialism (very visible at this time of pandemic) and celebrate victory over other nations who do not have the riches to pour money into their national skateboarding and BMX teams.

At the Commonwealth Games, we always prevail on account of that excessive funding, even over the Old Dart of England, let alone over small West Indian islands with sporting budgets smaller than those of the Phys Ed departments of our local high schools.

But the main game is the Olympics, where nothing but Gold will count, not so-so Silver, nor shameful Bronze. We get whipped into a frenzy by our media, our political leaders, and the whole sophisticated sports administration industry to expect Gold.

I was reading today that we expect to be competitive for 17 Gold Medals at these Olympics.

This is why the Australian Institute of Sport currently receives $420 million dollars in federal taxpayer funding. There is no other real purpose than the existential one of winning Gold at the Olympics, and continuing to exorcise the Devils which plagued us in 1976, the year of abject failure when we did not win any Gold.

So let us do some back of the envelope calculations.

1. The Gold Medals are actually silver, but plated with 6 grams of gold.
2. In recent Olympics we have won only 8 Gold Medals each time.
3. Over a four year period, the Australian Institute of Sport receives a total of about $1.6 billion dollars in funding.

Ergo, each Olympic Gold Medal costs the Australian Taxpayer $200 million dollars.

That rounds out to just over $30 million per gram of gold in those medals. If you convert from metrics to imperial (please do), that comes out to approximately $1 billion per troy ounce.

That is something for us to cheer about as we watch our team compete at these Olympics.

After all, we have each invested quite a lot as a nation of taxpayers in getting those medals.

Only Gold ones of course. We don’t really care about silver or bronze.

I only wish that the real price of gold was close to the price for Olympic Gold. I do own shares in Evolution Mining after all.