The 1980s was a more innocent or naive time. Or at least it seemed so to me, given I was a teenager for much of them. Once, circa 1984, I was on an English class excursion to the city to see a movie, and we actually took a chartered bus rather than public transport, and I remember it driving past the Flagstaff Gardens.

I was quite impressed to see a dero strewn on each park bench in the Gardens as our bus drove past. My dad had told me that the Flagstaff Gardens were a bit of a no-go area due to their proximity to a Salvation Army depot in Franklin Street, which was regularly frequented by the deros. It was a bit of an eye opening experience for me then.

Nowadays, if I am on the south side of Victoria Street in North Richmond, between the station and Lennox Street, I barely bat an eyelid when I notice ice users swatting away at invisible demons.

There happens to be a safe injecting room somewhere around there, to the chagrin of local shop keepers and residents.

Now there are plans for the state government to open another safe injecting room within the Hoddle Grid, ie the centre of the city. More particularly, there is a specific site in mind on Flinders Street between Elizabeth Street and Swanston Street.

This proposal has Bad Idea marked all over it, but the brainiacs running the state have not twigged to this yet.

You see, that particular city block has two important Melbourne landmarks located there. One is Young & Jacksons, the most iconic pub in Australia. The other is Degraves Lane, a 100 metre long alley festooned with restaurants, bars and cafes along almost its whole length.

Y&J can probably survive a safe injecting room located several steps away. It has plenty of in-house security, lots of police regularly walking by, and being on the busiest pedestrian intersection in Melbourne will mean that the punters continue to flood in and spend their money in one or other of its bars.

Degraves Street is a totally different proposition. Like a lot of Melbourne’s laneways (of which it is one of the two best ones), it relies on a la fresco dining – tables located on the lane outside each restaurant.

Whist it is not totally unknown to happen, vagrant drug users rarely enter actual bars and restaurants to beg money or otherwise harass the clientele. But they do have a marked tendency to infest outdoor dining and drinking areas on footpaths and in lanes.

Take a case in point from a few years ago. Myself and some colleagues were out one Friday night having farewell drinks for a colleague moving overseas. We were outside a wine bar in Little Bourke Street at the Spring Street end of town. One vagrant, whose face was well known to various of us as he regularly worked that block, came up and bothered me for loose change. In the hope that he would go away and leave everyone else alone, I gave him all the coins in my pocket. Sadly, he then tried to work the entire table for more cash, which struck me as quite impolite, to say nothing of the lack of consideration for the bar owners, who were trying to make an honest living running that business.

Imagine what will happen if a safe injecting room is placed in the proposed location in Flinders Street. Virtually overnight, the a la fresco dining scene in Degraves Lane will be destroyed.

If such a place needs to be imposed in the CBD rather than in a ghost town like Docklands, some more thought might be given to where such a room might be placed, so as to minimise the damage to the laneway culture of Melbourne. It definitely needs to be far away from Degraves Street, or Hardware Lane, or the elbow of a la fresco dining along Bourke and Spring Streets.

I would suggest some moribund pocket, like Flinders Street at the Spencer Street end, where there are abundant bouncers from the King Street nightclubs and strip joints to prevent any flotsam from disrupting those businesses, and where, aside from the after dark life of King Street, the city closes outside of weekday business hours.

Otherwise, the best aspects of laneway and restaurant culture in central Melbourne will be destroyed quickly.

I hope you have heard of Silent Invasion, Professor Clive Hamilton’s 2018 expose on how Communist China was quietly and systematically subverting Australian democracy and society.

I bought three copies myself – one for myself, one to circulate around the office amongst my colleagues and friends, and one to give to a friend who is a book reviewer (and China expert) so he could get a review published.

As a responsible, civic minded citizen, I felt it was my duty to try and give this book and its critical message a boost.

Especially as it almost did not get published.

You see, Professor Hamilton usually gets his books published by Allen & Unwin (who, since 1990, are an independent Australian publishing house separate from the British parent company now owned by Harper Collins).

However, they declined to accept this book, as they felt nervous about the commercial risks they might incur from offending Communist China.

Obviously Allen & Unwin felt that these commercial risks outweighed any obligation they felt as book publishers in this country towards freedom of expression and making a positive contribution towards safeguarding our democracy.

Since that time, whenever I see that a book is published by Allen & Unwin, I do think twice as to whether I am going to buy it. [It is just as well that Tolkien is published by Harper Collins these days, having kept control of the publishing rights from when they bought Allen & Unwin UK 30 years ago, as my well thumbed copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings date back to the 1980s and need replacing.]

However Allen & Unwin seem to have finally grown a new backbone, as I discovered on Thursday 20th May, when I attended a book launch for ABC Journalist Bill Birtles’ new book about his experiences in China.

For those who do not know, ABC China correspondent Bill Birtles was, in mid 2020, warned by our embassy in Communist China that it would be best for his safety if he immediately left the PRC. This warning happened just before he was hauled in for questioning by Communist Chinese security police.

Birtles has now written a book about China, where he lived on and off for many years, and his experiences there.

Allen & Unwin, to my deep surprise, have published this book. After they turned down Silent Invasion, I had the feeling that the spinelessness of their publishing policy was something which could not be cured.

Obviously I have been proven wrong, and I do hope that Birtles’ book sells many copies, and shows Allen & Unwin that doing the right thing, rather than the cowardly thing, brings its own rewards.

By the way, being at the book launch was a bit of an accidental blessing, as otherwise it is very likely that I would have visited Highpoint Shopping Centre that night when it was a Covid exposure site, in which event I would had to undergo the nuisance of isolating and getting tested for Covid.

Through some idle net surfing this morning, I discovered an interesting recent website called Real Freedom News.

Here is a link to it:

https://realfreedomnews.com

I find it interesting for two reasons.

One is that it includes a segment called China Watch which appears to share my concerns about Communist China. It is always a worthy pursuit to promote websites which are seeking to preserve the integrity of our democracy from both subversion and China’s more overt bullying attempts at hegemony.

The other is that it offers a fascinating fly on the wall insider look at the current infighting within the grassroots of the Victorian Liberal Party, naming names as to who is on which side and who is allegedly getting away with stacking branches etc.

Either reason alone is worth checking it out.

In the 1990s, I was a big Tom Clancy fan. I saw The Hunt For Red October and Patriot Games before I read any of the novels, but I quickly got onto the Jack Ryan novels.

They did quickly get a little bit over the top, although thankfully the Super Bowl was never nuked by Palestinian militants the way that it happened in The Sum Of All Fears.

But some of the other ideas in Clancy’s writings got a little too close to reality. Debt of Honor (I reluctantly spell it without a ‘u’ because it is an American book) ends with Jack Ryan as accidental president after the Capitol is destroyed by a kamikaze flying a 747 just after he is voted in as replacement vice president. That was published in 1994, seven years before 9/11 made such events more than works of fiction.

One idea which has gripped the minds of conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxers is that vaccines are actually part of a population control strategy by the mega-rich, and that plagues like Covid are intentionally unleashed so that the great majority of people can be stampeded into getting a vaccine which will actually kill or sterilise them.

That idea first makes its appearance in Tom Clancy’s novel Rainbow Six, which is the first John Clark novel rather than Jack Ryan. [It is also the first of Clancy’s novels where he stops advocating for an unadulterated rule of law and due process, and starts sanctioning some form of vigilantism, a theme not only absent from but explicitly opposed in his earlier novels.]

For a conspiracy involving the deliberate infection of (so far) 170 million people and the creation of some 5-6 (or more) competing intentionally lethal vaccines to be plausible or even viable, you would have to have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of researchers, medical scientists, business leaders and politicians all over the world both working in concord and all keeping their mouths shut.

Not really possible. But nor is the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked. However, there are plenty of crazy people out there who believe in either or both of these streams of theories.

The conspiracy theorists are feeding a growing popular paranoia about covid vaccination in particular, amongst otherwise sane and rational people, which has contributed to the slow vaccination rate in Australia.

We Australians love gambling. Horses, lotteries, poker machines, casinos. However remote the odds, we love throwing our money away on the slight chance that we might win some life changing or even just immediately gratifying sum.

But we do look at risk all wrong when we are looking at vaccinations and the current covid plague.

From the Astra Zeneca post vaccination fact sheet I read just after I was given my first Covid shot three days ago, I learned that the odds of blood clots from that vaccine are about one in a quarter million, and that the odds of dying from such a blood clot are one in four, ie the odds of dying from a blood clot if you get an Astra Zeneca shot are about one in a million.

Therefore, if everyone in Australia were to get the Astra Zeneca vaccine, 104 people would get blood clots as side effects and 26 people would die.

Of course, 26 deaths are tragic, and we could add those to the total that we can blame Communist China for due to their research on turning coronaviruses into bioweapons in their Wuhan laboratories.

But let’s look at the alternative.

The alternative is what we might suffer if the 26 million members of the Australian community did not get vaccinated and everyone caught the covid plague. At a 2% fatality rate, that would something like 520,000 dead.

As a crude calculation for the anti-vaxxers out there, that means that not getting vaccinated puts you at a risk of dying from covid 20,000 times greater than that of getting vaccinated and then dying of a blood clot.

But we don’t think that way about risks. We are willing to buy a Tattslotto ticket where each game has a chance of less than one in eight million of winning the top prize. [Ozlotto and Powerball have even smaller probabilities of winning.]

But flipping that on its heads and increasing your chances of living by a factor of 20,000 times over dying due to one simple decision. People don’t really get that.

Sadly, the people who are thinking this way right now are not just conspiracy theory nutters or new age hippy types or Taliban thugs holed up in caves along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They are just normal, confused and worried people – troubled by all the background noise about vaccine risks and side effects to the point where they are not focusing on what the side effects will be of contracting and surviving Covid (apparently a lot of people who survive Covid are not doing so well now).

And no, vaccines are not going to shoot a microchip into your arm or make you develop autism. They are going to give you some protection from a very nasty disease which has already killed three and a half million people and caused lasting health damage to tends of millions more.

I was not at Highpoint last Thursday night, but I pretty much could have been. The risk of catching Covid would have been low but having to isolate would have been very disruptive.

That spurred me on to get my first dose of Astra Zeneca yesterday. I was a walk in at the vaccination centre at the Royal Melbourne Exhibition Building.

The 50 minute wait was not too bad, given I had my smart phone to amuse me. And the needle did not sting too much.

And despite all the hype about side effects, all that has happened is that my arm is sore, which is normal for many vaccines.

I did joke about the microchip in the vaccine causing me to have an urge to walk like a robot and that I was hearing instructions from Bill Gates. But really, it’s important to get vaccinated and I should not joke about it.

Of course, I was so happy and relieved to get the dose so easily that I forgot to ask for a lollipop.

www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-26/asio-reconsiders-huifeng-liu-s-national-security-risk-status/100168336

Having libertarian convictions means that usually I am a bit skeptical about ASIO and the security apparatus.

However, when you look at the way our democracy is bring subverted from within by rich donors to political parties who happen to have close links to communist China, I am totally on board with ASIO’s efforts to protect Australia.

So far, I’ve picked half of my olive tree and it’s a bumper harvest, unlike last year when I only ended up with a handful of fruit.

I picked about 2kg a few weeks ago and another 5kg this past few days.

It’s a great feeling to indulge my Italian peasant origins in this way.

Like most men, I suppose, I have a puerile streak. It partly manifests itself through a love of James Bond movies.

I do think that Bond Super Villains are amongst the most interesting characters in cinema, and direct descendants of the classic Shakespearean villains from the golden age of Elizabethan Theatre.

Twenty five or so years ago, in Tomorrow Never Dies, Terence Stamp played a super villain who controlled both a software empire and a media empire. It does not take much insight to realise that Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch were being used for the inspiration for that Bond Super Villain.

With Elon Musk’s recent activities on twitter, both building up and then knocking down cryptocurrency, I think a lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts are currently seeing him as a Bond level super villain right now. And I suppose that the Eon company might slyly look at scripting a villain in a future Bond film based on him.

I somehow doubt that Elon Musk would mind terribly much.

But as more and more people around me talk about getting onto the cryptocurrency band wagon, I have been revisiting the generally available commentary on asset bubbles.

The Wikipedia page on economic bubbles cites the economist Charles P. Kindleberger as dividing the stages of a bubble into 5 phases:

1. Substitution: increase in the value of an asset

2. Takeoff: speculative purchases (buy now to sell in the future at a higher price and obtain a profit)

3. Exuberance: a state of unsustainable euphoria.

4. Critical stage: begin to shorten the buyers, some begin to sell.

5. Pop (crash): prices plummet

Of course, we are still mostly in the third stage, Exuberance, where some people are saying that Bitcoin is going to replace gold as the preferred store of value.

Yes, go ahead and keep on believing that.

But I really think we are, like when a roller coaster reaches the height of the track, about to reach stage four, when people start selling.

That same Wikipedia article I have quoted from also talks about a concept known as moral hazard:

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. A person’s belief that they are responsible for the consequences of their own actions is an essential aspect of rational behavior. An investor must balance the possibility of making a return on their investment with the risk of making a loss – the risk-return relationship. A moral hazard can occur when this relationship is interfered with, often via government policy.

A recent example is the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on 3 October 2008 to provide a Government bailout for many financial and non-financial institutions who speculated in high-risk financial instruments during the housing boom condemned by a 2005 story in The Economist titled “The worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history”.^[26] A historical example was intervention by the Dutch Parliament during the great Tulip Mania of 1637.

Other causes of perceived insulation from risk may derive from a given entity’s predominance in a market relative to other players, and not from state intervention or market regulation. A firm – or several large firms acting in concert (see cartel, oligopoly and collusion) – with very large holdings and capital reserves could instigate a market bubble by investing heavily in a given asset, creating a relative scarcity which drives up that asset’s price. Because of the signaling power of the large firm or group of colluding firms, the firm’s smaller competitors will follow suit, similarly investing in the asset due to its price gains.

However, in relation to the party instigating the bubble, these smaller competitors are insufficiently leveraged to withstand a similarly rapid decline in the asset’s price. When the large firm, cartel or de facto collusive body perceives a maximal peak has been reached in the traded asset’s price, it can then proceed to rapidly sell or “dump” its holdings of this asset on the market, precipitating a price decline that forces its competitors into insolvency, bankruptcy or foreclosure.

The large firm or cartel – which has intentionally leveraged itself to withstand the price decline it engineered – can then acquire the capital of its failing or devalued competitors at a low price as well as capture a greater market share (e.g., via a merger or acquisition which expands the dominant firm’s distribution chain). If the bubble-instigating party is itself a lending institution, it can combine its knowledge of its borrowers’ leveraging positions with publicly available information on their stock holdings, and strategically shield or expose them to default.

When you look at the last three of the above paragraphs, you can perhaps see some parallels with what Elon Musk has been doing. He tweeted that he was going to allow people to use Bitcoin to pay for Tesla cars. This caused the Bitcoin price to go up considerably, at little actual risk to himself and his business. He has now suddenly discovered (I am being ironic here) that Bitcoin is bad for the environment and therefore has decided to not allow Bitcoin as a currency for purchasing Teslas. That has caused Bitcoin to go down considerably in price.

I think, if someone was to look at the relation between his and Tesla’s investment in, and potential divestment, in Bitcoin, and his tweets on the same subject, you could map the Bitcoin price fluctuations in direct proportion to those tweets.

And remember that whilst Elon Musk runs a rocket company these days, he is not a rocket scientist – he is a financial services guru, one of the creators of PayPal. He did not get to be so rich and successful without being extremely smart about money, and understanding better than all but a few thousand people on the planet how the financial system works. And he understands people and the way they behave in crowds very very well.

He can play social media in a very hip way, and everyone will follow his tweets and react to them (do I dare call them ‘sheeple’?). But he is the only one who can actually act, as he is the only one who knows what he is going to tweet.

So go ahead and pump your hard earned savings into Bitcoin, or Dogecoin, or Poseidon Nickel NL shares (no, you can’t do that as that bubble was 52 years ago), or tulips. At least with tulips you will have something pretty to admire.

Margaret Thatcher is quoted, probably Apocryphally, as saying in 1990 when discussing with Kenneth Clarke the England team’s defeat against Germany in the semi-final of the Association Football (aka soccer) World Cup:

‘They might have beaten us at our national sport, but we managed to beat them at their national sport twice in the 20th century.’

She might not have actually said this, but English fans love to chant, when they are playing against Germany: ‘Two World Wars and one World Cup!’

Which does put the place of sport somewhat into the proper context, much as we prefer it overwhelmingly over the prospect of War.

Of course, I would be naive if I were not to mention the warlike win at all costs attitude which fascist, communist, and nationalistic regimes have placed on success in sport over the years, right back to Berlin in 1936 and right throughout the Cold War, continuing now with the obsession Communist China has with Olympic success.

Australia has, as part of its foundation mythology, a reliance on both the courage and nobility of our citizen soldiers in wartime (we are never the aggressor), and the excellence of our sports people in international competition.

At the moment, some aspects of the behaviour of our soldiers in in our most recent conflict are falling into serious question. But at the same time, the commitment of Australia to triumph in sport remains paramount.

I think this comes from the gold rush, and the wealth that filled Victoria, creating one of the first serious sporting cultures in the world, at a time where humanity was first rising above absolute poverty. Melbourne’s famous horse races are amongst the oldest in the world. Test cricket was born here. And the most ancient of the AFL clubs are older than English Premier League teams.

We have been interested in sport, and have been able to afford to invest in it, and in pursuing global success in sport, for far longer than just about anyone else.

Harken back to 1983 – where a shonky Perth businessman closed down a chain of department stores not too long before a yacht he was bank rolling, as part of his endeavours to rise above his Cockney low rent origins into what passes for genteel respectability amongst the sand gropers, happened to win a series of races against an American yacht.

We all remember Australia 2 defeating the Stars and Stripes to break the longest winning streak in sporting history. It was a very big national celebration – spontaneously declared as an unofficial public holiday by the newly elected prime minister. But who remembers the Waltons department stores which Alan Bond closed down at that time?

But the existentialist crisis in Australian international sports came a few years earlier, in 1976. This was the Olympics where Australia failed to win any gold medals. There was national dismay.

And whilst democracies do not see the same ideological need to win gold medals as totalitarian regimes do, our politicians do like to be seen as doing something to promote sporting victory, so that they can bask in the afterglow of the success of our athletes. And the success of national sporting teams promotes nationalistic fervour (NB – I consider myself to be a patriotic Australian, but not a nationalist, as I believe we should place limits on the nation-state).

Hence the federal government sprung into action, establishing the Australian Institute of Sport, and pumping increasing amounts of money over the ensuing years into ensuring that never again would we suffer the national disgrace of failing to win gold medals at the Olympics.

Winning gold medals is a serious monetary investment, something which I personally see as about as productive a pursuit as bitcoin mining. But our sporting bureaucrats have success targets and business plans, seeking to leave nothing to chance. The number of medals which our athletes are expected to win as a return for the taxpayer investment is subject to careful predictions. The amount of money poured into each sport and its competitors is in a precise formula involving a combination of probable success and of inclusiveness (a politically correct way of describing the long shot punts on obscure sports like speed skating where we might enjoy a fluke victory – after all, we are a nation of punters).

As some fictional Olympic official says in the Simpsons episode where the Olympics are almost held in Springfield (until Bart insults the entire IOC):

‘The Olympics are about handing out medals of beautiful gold, so-so silver, and shameful bronze.’

That does sum up pretty accurately the Australian public’s appetite for success at the Olympics.

Which brings us to Basketball, a sport which is fun to play socially, but extremely tedious to watch as a spectator. Liz Cambage, one of the stalwarts of the Australian Women’s Basketball Team, has come out and criticised the Olympic organisers for not being inclusive in the sorts of athletes who appear in the official photos promoting the Olympic team.

She has now threatened to boycott the Olympics.

Let’s look at the performance of the Australian Women’s Basketball Team at past Olympics. The Opals, as they are call, won silver in 2000, 2004, and 2008. They won bronze in 1996, and in 2012.

Shameful bronze.

I will not bother looking at the record of the Australian Men’s Basketball Team, because, let’s face it, basketball is boring and men’s basketball is even more boring than women’s basketball.

But, what I am getting at is that Australia is interested in winners, not losers. We love the swim team most of all, as they rarely let us down and give us GOLD GOLD GOLD. We are fond of our rowers and equestrians and shooters and some track & field athletes and cyclists, because they often give us the endorphins we need as a nation from winning gold medals for us. And we reward them accordingly for this by funding them and giving them their faces on postage stamps and the Order of Australia Medal in the next Australia Day Honours list.

But what do our Basketballers do for us? Forever disappointing us.

Lately, not even shameful bronze.

And who really cares about Basketball anyway? It is mostly a big thing in the USA. And what are some of the other things that they love in the USA which we are not so keen on here:

. Dr Pepper

. supersized junk food

. unrestricted gun ownership

. fundamentalist Christianity (the de facto state religion)

. the death penalty

. imprisonment rates approaching a one in ten chance in a lifetime of ending up in gaol.

Americans are welcome to keep all those things, and they are welcome to keep their basketball as well.

As far as I am concerned, not only is Liz Cambage welcome to boycott the Olympics and continue to play her lucrative career out in the WNBA in the USA, but the Opals as a whole are welcome to stay away from the Olympics too.

Basketball is essentially irrelevant in Australia, and I think the organisers of both Netball Australia and the AFLW are probably today rubbing their hands with glee at Liz Cambage’s gestures of defiance against Olympic and Basketball officials alike.

I am on leave this week from work, a combination of routine medical appointments for my elderly mother in between days of annual leave to rest and undertake life admin.

For example, late last week I arranged for repairs to my iPhone (I cracked the screen recently). On Monday, I mowed the lawn and dug up the veggie patch and planted lots of kale, lettuce, broadbean and beetroot seeds.

And decluttering my home, carport, and garage is more than a few years overdue (I last summoned the hard rubbish removalists three years ago when an old couch needed to disappear and I do constantly accumulate stuff).

Hence I have booked in a hard rubbish collection for tomorrow, to get rid of all sorts of unwanted sticks of furniture which have accumulated at my home over the years (several people have either stored or gifted or abandoned furniture with me, most of which is of limited utility to me).

When walking down the street this morning, I ran into a neighbour who has recently restarted collecting scrap metal. He was more than happy to take the spare fridge from the garage and a lot of no longer useful bits of metal cluttering my car port.

That is a win-win situation. Tomorrow’s hard rubbish collection charges by the square metre, and I think that I will save a bit through that stroke of luck.

Which then caused me to think about getting rid of a pile of comic books and magazines which I happen to have hoarded in recent years, particularly Phantom comics.

I do not consider myself a collector of comic books, but I do still enjoy them, as I have since the age of seven. I usually read them and give them away, which is what I did today. The newly reopened book exchange at the Highpoint bus stop is all the richer for a nice big pile of Phantom comics which none of my friends seemed interested in taking off my hands.

The Phantom definitely is my favourite comic book, and by far my favourite super hero (FYI, otherwise I do not read any superhero comic books). Created by Lee Falk (who also created Mandrake the Magician) in the late 1930s, the Phantom is that rare superhero who both does not belong to either the Marvel or DC universe, and who does not have any superpowers (unless moral certainty and supreme determination are superpowers).

The back story to the Phantom is enthralling, at least to someone with my conservative and unapologetically pro-Western Civilisation inclinations.

As many of the comic book stories start, ‘for those who came in late’, the sole survivor of a ship attacked by pirates 400 years ago is washed ashore on a remote coast. He is nursed back to health by friendly pygmies, and then swears an oath on the skull of his father’s murderer to devote his life to fighting piracy and crime, and his sons and their sons will follow him. Over the centuries, he becomes myth, The Ghost Who Walks, Man Who Cannot Die, Guardian of the Eastern Dark, nemesis to evil doers everywhere, believed to be immortal.

Frew Publications has been printing Phantom stories in Australia since the late 1940s. Originally a partnership of four men to print various different comics, The Phantom survives as their sole current publication, and involves reprinting Scandavian stories (mostly set back in the time of previous Phantoms), recent Daily and Sunday newspaper strips, new stories which are still being produced from time to time, and an abundance of old strips from the archives.

What makes the Phantom so special is his moral certainty, and his willingness to constantly risk his life in the pursuit of justice and the protection of the weak. He rarely doubts his mission, and he is constantly able to put aside his fears and face danger. Evil doers everywhere have reason to fear him, even though he does not kill (except in the early WW2 era story The Phantom Goes to War, where he leads his pygmies and the other local natives in defence of their home land against the Japanese army), and he always triumphs, against all the odds.

There is great humanity and humour in the Phantom, even though we rarely see any particular outside interests he might have outside of fighting piracy and crime, apart from his family life. One rare exception to this is a story set in Vegas, where the Phantom is chasing some crooks through a casino. One panel sees him running into a room with a sign ‘Elvis Impersonation Contest’ and the next shows him exiting and discarding the ‘first prize’ trophy. We do not get to see him impersonate Elvis, but we are left with the impression that he must be very good at it.

The most famous superhero without any superpowers is Batman. In one of those recent DC franchise films, Aquaman asks Batman what exactly is his superpower, to which Batman retorts ‘I’m rich.’ Banal and materialistic, but halfway convincing in the DC Universe.

The universe in which the Phantom is set is almost identical to our own. There are no super powers, super heroes, nor super villains. The only monsters are other people, who choose to do evil, either on a minor or on a mega scale. The Phantom’s power is that he chooses to do good, and that he does not hesitate to face human monsters of any size. I suppose we wish that there really were more people like that, and that is why so many of us still buy Phantom comics.