As I have indicated before, I consider that all the paranoia about the Coronavirus stems from the hard wiring we have from the 1600 plus years of eschatological conditioning from the time when Christianity become compulsory in the Roman Empire.

However, I cannot help but notice the effect on my share portfolio. Is someone who remains in the market now and tries to ride it out brave or foolish? I am neither – another part of my hard wiring, as is written in my description, is that I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. There is nothing in there which makes me a particularly reckless stock trader or financial hotshot.

So, when what I strongly suspected to be a dead cat bounce occurred on Tuesday, I pushed the SELL button on my entire portfolio. [Well, that is not entirely true. About 10 years ago, I bought 2 slabs of Broo beer when they did a share giveaway, and as a result, I still hold 100 shares of Broo, which were worth about 1.2 cents each on Tuesday.]

I could say that I am taking one for the team, for the greater good of Humanity. You see, when I buy usually turns out to be a good time to sell, and vice versa. So, if it turns out that I am wrong, then Coronavirus goes away, and the world economy and markets recover quickly.

If I am right, at least I will not have lost the accumulated savings of the past decade in an awful sharemarket bloodbath.

Things are starting to get a little surreal though. I passed through two supermarkets this evening, and ALL the toilet paper, paper towels, tissues and anything else could be used as a toilet paper substitute was sold out. [As I have indicated in an earlier post, I have kept a six month supply of toilet paper since the days of the Gillard Government.] Now even Bibles seem to be selling out, from what I also observed.

We are conditioned to think eschatologically, even though most of us struggle to understand what that means. Instinctively, like a herd, we are all cautiously heading for the fire exits, so to speak, grabbing sacks of rice, jumbo packs of toilet paper, and a plethora (I hardly ever use that silly word anymore) of other things which might come in handy if we are forced into isolation in our homes for a few weeks.

And that is why I feel very comfortable with having liquidated my share portfolio. I get the feeling that the fear out there is going to get much worse, and that this is going to cause major economic disruption. Exactly one month ago, when I started taking screenshots of the Coronavirus tallies, there were 28,262 infected, 565 dead, and 14 in Australia. As of right now the tally is 98370 cases, 3383 dead, and 63 in Australia, with some schools, shops and offices now closing where the occupants have come into contact with known cases. 2700 people in Queensland have been asked to self-isolate.

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The above photo was taken a couple of hours ago at my local bookshop at Highpoint Shopping Centre. This section is the Spirituality section where you buy the Bibles. As you can see, the shelves here are almost empty.

It appears that the threat of Coronavirus has now caused people to move on from panic buying toilet paper to panic buying Bibles too.

Time to emulate Hunter S. Thompson, grab a bottle of wine and my copy of the KJV, and start reading the Book of Revelation.

As you might guess from some of what I occasionally post on this blog, I am a bit of a Shakespeare fan. And I am both fascinated by and appalled by the theories that the plays were not written by Shakespeare.

Ben Elton, in writing a recently broadcast episode of Upstart Crow (a sitcom about Shakespeare), has dealt with the authorship theories very effectively. He has an episode where Shakespeare’s nemesis Robert Greene plots, along with Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford, to murder Kit Marlowe, as the first step in creating doubt about the authorship. His cunning plan is that future generations are to believe that Marlowe has faked his death, and in fact is hiding out and writing the plays for Shakespeare. He also assigns roles to Bacon and Oxford, so that they too are to become candidates for authorship.

It is a just too funny episode, in a series which gets better with each passing season.

In passing, I will mention that some of the early advocates for the alternative authorship theories include Delia Bacon, who lived out her life in an insane asylum, and a chap unfortunately named Looney.

Just got back from my local Coles, and yes, the Coronavirus panic buying is real. Most tinned food, hand sanitiser, pasta, and toilet paper (except for the brands reputed to be as soft as sandpaper) have sold out. I have not seen anything like it.

I don’t need to panic buy stuff. Ever since the Venezuelan toilet paper crisis a decade ago, during the prime ministership of Julia Gillard, I have kept a stockpile of sufficient toilet paper to last me six months or more. [My reasoning at the time was that if a communist government in Venezuela could cause the country to run out of toilet paper, I could not push my luck too hard on the authenticity of Julia Gillard’s abandonment of Marxist principles.]

All the same, whilst I was mostly there to buy some mineral water, I decided to stock up a bit on tins and pasta, just in case. The idea of holing up for a few weeks at home, binge watching Netflix and eating pasta and tins of beetroot (assuming that Uber Eats and Deliveroo are not operating in that period) does not hold any major dread for me.

The Vienna based (but American) fantasy novelist, Jonathan Carroll, once wrote a wickedly black short story ‘The Jane Fonda Room’, in which damned person gets to choose their own unique version of Hell, and the protagonist of the story chooses The Jane Fonda Room, where he will watch all her films over and over again for Eternity. Here’s the ending:

She looked at him and her face was happy and animated again. “You’re just in time for the beginning of The Chase. Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando. Not a bad cast, eh? Then comes Barbarella, Klute, Coming Home, Nine to Five. What about that? Pretty good for your first time around!”

“And after that?” Paul’s eyes narrowed because it had finally began to dawn on him what was about to happen.

Ms Baker frowned for the first time. “After that? You see all of the other movies she made. However many that is. Isn’t that wonderful? What more could you ask – “

“Again and again?” His fingers were now very cold.

“You -“

“Without stop? All of Jane Fonda’s movies again and again and again without stop?’

Ms Baker signed and looked a little bored. “Yes, Paul, again and again. Again and again and again and again and again and again…” While she spoke she pointed to the door and it opened.

The first thing Paul saw in the middle of that darkness was the familiar face which he, at one time, would have died for.

Quite wickedly funny. Please don’t let me spoiling that five page short story turn you away from Jonathan Carroll’s novels. The Land of Laughs and Outside the Dog Museum are both classics, and I really think it is way too long since I read either of those.

Perhaps this is the sort of idea the people running Guantanamo Bay had when they had all those suspected terrorists there, and regaled them with the music of Britney Spears over and over again. Jonathan Carroll’s Hell is not too different from Sartre’s definition of Hell, when you think about it.

Which is a nice way of segueing into Falco, mid 1980s Vienna based euro-pop singer. Every few days, since the start of this year, I have tried to do some exercise, as I am about 12-13 kilos overweight and my eating and drinking habits do not really lend themselves to easy weight loss. I mostly do sit ups, although I every now and then try some push ups and have now started ‘planking’.

To make the exercise ordeal a little less painful, I open up the Apple Music and put some tunes on. Tonight, to inspire me to try and set a new record number of sit ups in a row (sit ups are easy, you can do as many as you like til you die of boredom), I perversely chose to listen to a collection of Falco’s greatest hits.

This consists essentially of one song, Rock Me Amadeus, played over and over again. By my count, there are ten different versions of this song available which I have heard this evening. There are a few other sounds to break up the monotony – but of them I am only vaguely familiar with Der Kommissar, which has only four different versions available (what on Earth is a ‘Pastel Remix’????). The rest of his body of work is a hitherto undiscovered country to me, and probably shall remain so, as I think I will choose something else for my next workout.

I am not sure that Rock Me Amadeus is the sort of song which one wants to hear over and over and over again. I think I was about 16 when it came out, some 35 years ago, which makes it further back in time from us now, than Rock Around The Clock was from us in 1985. And even then, it was one of those songs you might want to hear occasionally, but not all the time.

Ouch ouch ouch!

Last Friday afternoon, I really should have pressed the sell button on my share portfolio.

After one week (so far) of blood letting in the share market, I am down over $30G!

It looks like Coronavirus is the black swan event which we all expected but which none of us were prepared to anticipate.

Now, we can watch and learn an object lesson in what really motivates the share market, as we watch the falls continuing.

There are two motive forces driving the share market. One is Greed, which pushes it up, and the other is Fear. Or, if you are to look more closely at Greed, and define it in the way which millennials would describe it, as the Fear Of Missing Out, there is only Fear.

And now Coronavirus driven Fear, based on the great reliance on China as a key component of the global economy, is causing the markets to fall.

Having resisted the temptation to push the sell button a week ago, I am now left with little choice but to ride out this market fall to the bottom, whenever and wherever that happens to be. This will be an ‘interesting’ experience for me. I knew nothing about shares when the 1987 crash happened, had only a negligible share portfolio in the late 1990s when the Asian financial crisis happened and then tech wreck around Easter 2000, and only about a third of what I currently have invested when GFC hit 12 years ago.

With Coronavirus in the mix, this does remind me very much of Edgar Alan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – you can ignore the reality around you for as long as you can, and continue to party hard, right up until the Grim Reaper’s representative shows up on the dance floor….

In the past week, the Fairfax press has revealed that Australian swimming champion Mack Horton was apparently going to have a swimming pool named after him at his old school, Caulfield Grammar, but that this plan was quietly shelved due to his public criticism of convicted drug cheat Sun Yang, in order to protect the school’s commercial interests.

One of the stories is here:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/school-refloats-horton-pool-plan-after-backlash-at-china-cowardice-20200224-p543wf.html

Many people have already criticised the school for this cowardice, such that even though the school claims that there were no such abandoned plans, it is now actively considering repairing its damage by actually doing what was rumoured and honouring Mack Horton in this way.

It would be apt to do so. Mack Horton is an Olympic gold medalist, something which, in our wealthy and sporting mad nation, makes him a great hero in itself (I say that with a bit of irony – when I commented on a reigning Brownlow medalist being a hero at age 12, a teacher archly observed what about heart surgeons and others who save lives). But that he has been outspoken in his disdain and lack of tolerance for known and blatant cheating in his sport does elevate Mack Horton above other Australian swimmers, as he appears to represent an ideal of fair play which is increasingly disregarded and sidelined in modern sport in place of the expedience of winning.

The alleged behaviour of Caulfield Grammar is a case in point. The accusation is that they were so afraid of offending the government of Communist China, which allows many fee paying students to come to Australia and attend that school, that they were unwilling to honour one of their visibly successful old boys, who not only has succeeded as a swimmer, but who embodies fair play. Commercial interests are far more important, supposedly, than fair play,

What message is Caulfield Grammar sending to the families of Australians who send their sons there? That standing up for what is right is actually wrong, and that cheating should be tolerated? That is the sort of message which seems to be embedded into our export education system right now, and it obviously is starting to have an impact in the rest of the education system in its entirety.

Civil society and Australian democracy is under threat from various sources. One of those sources is the growing alienation from society and disillusionment in the political processes which many feel – the apathy, anger and anomie which are probably a result of our increasingly online lives and news cycles. But one of the other threats to civil society and democracy is the increasing economic dependence on Communist China, and the growing tolerance of the intentional interference which its representatives are exercising onshore in our society – or the fear of speaking out against it.

That Mack Horton has become, before this swimming pool issue came up, a poster boy for fair play is one thing. The alleged behaviour of Caulfield Grammar has propelled him to a greater status – he is now a symbol for what is going wrong in our civil society and democracy, the fear and greed which is propelling blindness to the motives of a tyrannical communist government which is trying to extend its tentacles into indirect control of our nation.

The best thing which Caulfield Grammar could now do for our nation and to honour Mack Horton, given the obvious contempt that I now feel for its leadership, is to name its swimming pool after Sun Yang. That would graphically and vocally illustrate to the public that there is a threat of us becoming, through our apathy, fear, and greed, a client state to Communist China,.

I consider myself as a personally conservative person, albeit someone who reluctantly describes himself as a libertarian (very reluctantly – I loathe the word). As such, I would have some guarded sympathy for the Liberal Party, albeit as someone who very much regards himself as an outsider looking in.

As a responsible and engaged citizen, I need to keep informed about such matters, given that I do not believe that we can ever take our democracy for granted.

At the moment, I am in a situation where I find myself wondering what Elvis would do, or, as he sang in one song:

Stop!

Look and Listen baby

That’s my philosophy

It’s called rubber necking baby

That’s all right with me!

You see, there appears to be a lot of dissension within the organisational base of the Victorian Liberal Party at the moment, based around a website and related email newsletter called Abalinx. Here, read the website for yourself: http://www.abalinx.com

The author of this website, retired army warrant officer and excessively enthusiastic Liberal Party volunteer Peter Adamis, currently, after publishing his epistles for some time, has incurred the wrath of the state executive of the Liberal Party, and appears to be facing some sort of hearing in March, which might result in expulsion or something such.

I do not know this chap, although I know, at least by reputation (and at best very vaguely), various of the people whom he names in his website and his related email newsletters.

I must say, on reading the various articles he publishes on his page, that I do not necessarily agree with him. He seems as enthusiastic about the Liberal Party as Joffa is about Collingwood Football Club, which is probably a little too one eyed for most people, including most Liberal sympathisers. However, unlike Joffa, he is not enthusiastic or uncritical about the organisational leaders of his beloved organisation, and that appears to be what has got him into trouble.

His writing sometimes is a little too obscure and rambling, and sometimes a little repetitive and critical in an ad hominem way, and sometimes too uncritical of those people with whom his sympathies lie (some of those people, to be honest, are perhaps best described as a-holes). And the writing is not that great.

However, putting his thoughts out there, in the way that he does (raising his dissent against matter which are shut down by the leaders of the supposedly grassroots based party he supports), is important for our democracy, especially at a time when Communist China has been buying many people within both of our major political parties with donations or consultant fees (look at Sam Dastiyari for example, or Santo Santoro, as frightening examples of the insidious attack on our democracy).

Transparency is important, especially at a time when the major political parties are becoming political machines increasingly unaccountable to either their members or their voting bases, and increasingly receptive to cheques from rich people who happen to be members of the Chinese Communist Party.

Expelling Peter Adamis from the Liberal Party would be a sad mistake. It would be better to expel the politicians and apparatchicks who accept fees and donations from members of the Chinese Communist Party, especially as the Liberal Party of Australia was established to be a Liberal, anti-Communist party, defending individual liberty.

The decision by General Motors to retire the Holden brand and withdraw from the Australian car market entirely has disappointed and upset many people. There has long been a perception that Holden was an Australian company, and that Holdens are Australian cars.

I expect that many people, never having reason to reflect on the matter, did not know that GMH was simply the fully owned local operation of the American company General Motors, the largest car company in the world. It was never a publicly listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange, nor privately owned by Australian interests.

It simply was an American company which, like many other car manufacturers the world over, took advantage of government policies intended to foster local manufacturing industries, through subsidies and tariffs.

There is an iconic photograph of Prime Minister Chifley in 1948, standing next to the first locally produced Holden. A milestone moment in local industry and Australian history. And it did so much to make people believe that Holden was as Australian as Vegemite (btw, is Vegemite still foreign owned, or has someone in Australia bought it back from Kraft yet?), whilst Ford, despite being a worthy car, was American.

It’s probably the greatest marketing snowjob in history.

I recall, in the 1990s, that there even was a Holden shop at Highpoint Shopping Centre, where the local bogans could buy their own Holden Racing Team jackets and hats and other merchandise. (Note, I use the term ‘bogan’ affectionately – we all are a little bogan in our own ways, even if most of us drink craft beer these days.)

And who can forget Kingswood Country, the greatest of Australia’s sitcoms, where Holden loving true blue Aussie Ted Bullpit would constantly spar with his Italian son in law in a manner far too non-PC 40 years on, and where he would never let anyone else drive his Kingswood (and not too much later, the Commodore).

If you want to get another snapshot of how loved Holden was in the 1970s, try and buy online a copy of ‘My Love Had A Black Speed Stripe’, a very dark comedy about a Holden factory worker who loved his new car far more than his wife. (My high school actually still had a class set of them in the early 1980s so that it could be studied in English, although not in my year.)

Holden, even on its way out the door, is going to leave like the Cheshire Cat in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, disappearing such that the smile will remain long after everything else has faded. My brother plans to buy himself a 2020 Commodore in around 6 years time (he never buys new cars), and that way, he will be still driving Holdens well into the 2030s. Another Holden devotee, a very distraught colleague of mine, has suggested that I stop putting money into superannuation and start buying up Holdens instead. If I had a large enough shed to store them in, perhaps I might.

1986 was definitely not a great year in my life. Aside from my default from being 17 and facing that semi-adult rite of passage that involves finishing high school (at my local school, where the likelihood of successfully completing high school in six years, from when you started six years earlier, was about 12.5% at best). my father, who was a smoker and a former coal miner (from his late teenage years), got sick at the start of the year and departed this life in mid July.

I would have to say that staying stable and sane and trying to successfully finish high school at first attempt gave me a few challenges, ones that I realised not too many years later had ripple effects on the person that I was that had taken several years to fully manifest themselves.

Staying sane, and trying to get through the stress of exams and the aftermath takes some doing. To this day, Suzanne Vega remains my favourite singer, even though I am not too thrilled with much that she has recorded in the past 20 years. At the time, I played a copy of her self-titled debut album over and over again as I studied for my Math exams and all the rest (is not everything Math if you are doing science?).

But that is not all, from that time, that I feel fondly about, in terms of remembering the barely sane not quite 18 year old I was, who was starting on his first steps into the jungle and inviting stupidity that is adulthood. For example, Paul Simon put out Graceland, an album which was a tad controversial at the time, but which had a great song (and filmclip with Chevy Chase) which resonates with me at the time that I was drawing a deep breath after the ordeal of those final exams.

And there is Huey Lewis and the News, at the height of their success.

Ok… Fore! is not exactly a classic album from any era, and it sure is nowhere near Graceland if we are just looking at music from that year. But it was a popular album, a hit if you will, of honest middleweight rock from the mid eighties.

I doubt that ‘Happy to be stuck with you’ is going to be a bridal dance at many weddings, but perhaps ‘Power of Love’ might be.

But Huey Lewis is a bookmark in time – he and his band represent a point in my life when I was starting to recover from the first major calamity in my life at the same time as I was summoning all that youthful hubris needed to embark on the scary entrance into adulthood. I survived that time. Looking back, I am rather surprised that I have actually thrived as much as I have since then. I have faced and slain several dragons since then, so to speak.

And now, over 33 years later, I discover that they are back, with a new album “Weather”, and a single ‘I’m there for you” with the same mellow tones and middle weight rock that I loved back then, when I was on the northern edge of seventeen.

Thank you Huey, thank you!