Management

A Political Rant

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A while ago I was thinking about the state of play her in Queensland and in western democracies generally and came to what I thought was a very profound conclusion. Actually, and I digress, “very profound” isn’t correct grammar is it, whether I thought it or not. Like “very brilliant” or “very devastating”. The word “profound” is non-gradable so doesn’t need an adverb of degree. This lesson is the first of today’s contributions to the preservation of Western Civilisation. The second one follows so I’ll start again.

A while ago I was thinking about the state of play her in Queensland and in western democracies generally and came to what I thought was a profound conclusion. There are many problems in the world ranging from the specific, like the war in Ukraine and the covid virus which Joe Biden has just declared has lost its pandemic status much to the chagrin of his medical bureaucracy and many authoritarian politicians, to the more nebulous like stupidity and “racism”. The inverted commas round “racism” are there because generally, it isn’t. It’s mostly just a cover-all insult these days.

But the biggest problem facing mankind (I know, I know, and I don’t care) in my humble opinion is people who don’t pay attention. The inexorable creeping sludge of the many tides of leftism (remember the long march through the institutions?) is allowed to proceed because most don’t notice it until it slaps them in the face – looking at you Venezuela. Remember, you voted for Chavez and now the only way to get rid of him is if he died. Oh that’s right, he did and look what replaced him. Your most recent election was the last one before the next blood-bath. It was probably pretty crappy before Chavez but you weren’t paying enough attention when he offered something that was too good to be true, were you? Now a large proportion of you are on your way to the US. On foot.

Let me clarify. There are well-meaning people who vote Green because they think the Greens are for a cleaner environment. I guess in amongst the wealth-redistributing Marxists there may still be one or two who are, but it’s doubtful. So Greens voters (who aren’t Marxists) are just useful idiots. The vast majority of blacks still vote Democrat in the US. This is despite the fact that the inner city areas of most Democrat jurisdictions (like Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia….the list goes on) where a lot of black people live are, as described by POTUS 45, crime-ridden “shitholes”. And they’re getting worse not better but the residents continue to vote for Democrats for some reason lost in the mists of time. If you don’t realise you are being taken for granted, you are a useful idiot (and you’re not paying attention!).

I just re-read the rest of this diatribe and decided it’s too big a topic for a couple of pages on a blog. More like a book or series of books. So if you don’t want to read on, remember, if someone is seeking and wanting to hold absolute power, as far as they are concerned, the ends justify the means. That’s all you need to know.

Let’s go back the riots in the US in 2020. There are city’s (including those mentioned above) across that country that haven’t had conservative local government for decades. You know the ones. They’re defined by defunding the police, cashless bail, not prosecuting shoplifting if the swag is less than $1000 (has anyone seen a looter waiting at a cash-register?), emptying the jails, providing sanctuary from the feds for criminal illegals, skyrocketing homelessness, crime and drug problems etc etc. Now consider the poor bastards whose businesses and livelihoods were and are still being destroyed by the absolutely predictable mayhem caused by these policies. Many of them would have voted for the scum-bags who allowed these things to happen and are doing nothing to stop them happening now. If these victims of the BLM and Antifa riots and the ongoing lawlessness vote these same people back into power at the next election then (1) they are not paying attention and (2) all sympathy evaporates.

The key words in this rant so far are “inexorable creeping”. I mentioned the long march through the institutions which is eating education, the arts, legal systems and bureaucracies from the inside and is even worming its way into sport like bamboo up your fingernails. There are examples across the world illustrating the various stages in the authoritarian progression (or inexorable creep, if you like) from benign (ha!) smiling (smirking, more like) old socialists like the newly minted Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese all the way through to deranged tyrants like Kim Jong Un. Bear with me here.

If you leave these people alone (because you’re not paying attention) eventually the metastasizing is complete. So we have the currently relatively benign governments like the aforementioned Australian Government (although they are already making very disturbing noises). When we take a further step to the left we find leftist governments in Australia like that in Victoria which has implemented elements of the police state and Queensland where stupidity still trumps evil but give them time (and we will because too many people aren’t paying attention). Further along this highway to hell are New Zealand and Canada. If you don’t know what Ardern and Trudeau are getting up to (not with each other, that I’m aware of), then yes, you are not …. you know the rest.

The next stop is various state governments in the US like California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Minnesota and Oregon where BLM and Antifa do as they please with apparent impunity as outlined above. The US Government is proving to be particularly evil as it harasses its political opponents and cows its population with its covid mandates and declarations around domestic terrorism, white supremacy and MAGA voters as well as its joint venture with the media and big-tech. And whilst the US and Iran are ostensibly poles apart, I bet the people who run the Biden administration (not Biden himself, obviously) look lovingly towards Tehran and their complete control over all institutions including deciding who gets to run in their “elections”.

Talking of theocracies like Iran (and Saudi Arabia) some would consider them rightists rather than leftists because they are supposedly religious conservatives or whatever. These are arguments for political scholars. It’s a debatable point but remember the left is about one thing alone – getting power and holding it by whatever means available because the ends justify the means. So the Ayatollahs, the Saudi Royal Family, the US Democrat Party and its subsidiary the Biden administration and socialist political parties everywhere have that in common.

Then we have countries like the old Soviet republics including Ukraine. Yes, Zelenskyy has replaced Paddington Bear (now that he’s left the building with Queen Elizabeth) as everyone’s favourite cuddly toy but he ran a regime (before the war) with all of the trappings of a leftist dictatorship – restricted press freedoms, corruption, jailing of political opponents and banning of opposition political parties. And there are others like Uzbekistan and Belarus.

And Africa’s another book entirely. The word “Zimbabwe” should cover it for now.

Moving on we have the big five – Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, China and North Korea. Whether or not the people in these countries are paying attention is irrelevant because without massive upheaval, they are already lost. The rest of us, however need to observe these places and take notes.

I used to believe the left and the right were heading towards the same destination, it was just the road being taken which was up for debate. How naive. I don’t believe that anymore.

So there are examples everywhere of what can happen if you vote for socialists but more significantly, leave them in power too long. Inevitably it will all go to shit and uncontrollable debt will be the least of your problems.

And if you don’t believe that the “civilized” left believes the ends justify the means, check out this Sam Harris interview.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1560061984699064320

Road Trip! In Iran

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I’ve been to Iran seven times between 1989 and 1998. The first time was just after the Iran/Iraq war had finished so the Esfahan Steel Plant which I visited was still surrounded by anti-aircraft guns. My hosts also helpfully pointed out, from the panoramic viewing window in their board-room, the hill over which the Iraqi planes came when they bombed the place throughout the war. They had managed to keep the plant operating, to their credit, which is why I was there – to try to sell them some coal. But that trip’s not the reason for this post. There are plenty of incidents and experiences gathered over seven trips to write about but I’m going to tell you another story.

Getting to Tehran was problematic because there were so few flights so I’d waitlist on flights from Rome, Frankfurt, Vienna, London or Dubai and whichever one came up first I would take. These flights invariably got in early in the morning which allowed a few hours sleep in a cash only, once five-star hotel which had been Iranianized into a two-star. Then it was back out to the domestic airport to catch a flight down to Esfahan. Then would follow a lazy eight or so hours of shouting, fist banging “negotiation” then a flight back to Tehran to collapse into bed in the same hotel I had been in that morning.

After doing this a few times I decided to ask my hosts if we could negotiate our next deal in Tehran rather than Esfahan. They declined but to compensate, said I would be picked up at the airport and driven down to Esfahan thereby being able to sleep in the car. How kind.

Firstly, let’s consider the “picking-up” bit. On a previous trip they had “forgotten” to pick me up at Esfahan airport. The airport is on the north-east side of town and the steel plant is 45 kilometres south-west of town, in fact, that’s its address – 45Km on The Esfahan-Shahrekord Road. In the domestic airports back then there were no English signs and no English announcements. Also, there were no mobile phones and no public phones, just a phone call shop where I could have booked a call if only I could speak Farsi or one of the attendants could speak English. This prompted me, in desperation, to step away from the counter and shout into the terminal crowd “does anyone here speak English”. But that’s another story for another day.

As luck would have it, on the day in question, a driver was on hand to pick me up as I emerged from customs. Whether or not anyone is there at all is just part of the lottery and anyone could act as a taxi driver and most people who owned cars did. So you could be picked up by the local axe murderer if your luck was out. Being 4.00am after a flight from Europe where you had one or two gin and tonics because they’d be the last ones for a while and then wended your tortuous way through the airport formalities, you were fair game. But this bloke had a clipboard so was obviously legit. And he had another passenger – a German engineer who was also going to the plant.

So we set off in an ancient Chevrolet with four bald tyres on the four or five hour drive through the desert down to Esfahan. Now give the shah his due. He may have been a typical monarchical despot but he was our despot and he knew how to build roads. The freeway system round Tehran was pretty impressive although starting to resemble Ozzy Osbourne – visibly deteriorating. And the road to Esfahan was a wide-open highway. But that didn’t stop us getting a flat tyre.

So there we were – an Iranian who couldn’t speak English or German, a German who couldn’t speak English or Farsi and an Australian who couldn’t speak Farsi or German – alternately looking at each other and then the flat tyre. There was no spare – obviously – but there was a jack. Eventually our driver decided he would take the wheel off himself because the German and the Aussie obviously weren’t interested.

Way off in the distance we could see what looked like buildings so after removing the tyre and leaning it against the vehicle the driver jogged off into the heat haze, towards said buildings. The German and I looked at each other, shrugged our respective shoulders, found a bit of shade each and recommenced reading our books,

Eventually the driver materialized and without acknowledging us, stood the wheel up and commenced to roll it down the road in the direction from whence he had just come, occasionally batting it with his hand to ensure that it kept up with his steady jogging pace. Fritz and I went back to our books.

After another hour or so, the driver presented triumphally with a freshly fixed bald, fraying tyre and I swore to myself that I would be flying back to Tehran.

We eventually made it to Esfahan after passing through the city of Qom which is where all the religious heavies live. There were check-point-charlies on all roads in and out and security was somewhat ubiquitous. That is one place you don’t want to go for your holidays – smiles were as rare as golf courses and frivolity is a capital offence. And if applying for a job there, a sense of humour is definitely surplus to requirements on your CV.

The first hour of discussions with my hosts was taken up by trying to arrange how I was going to get back to Tehran. They eventually got me on a flight back that evening. Elimination of that source of stress allowed me to relax into the rough and tumble of hours of intense negotiation over a couple of dollars per tonne of coal for a 12 month contract. That was then, when the price was around $50/tonne. Today it’s $185/tonne and varies by up to $8/tonne daily.

Iran is a different world and today, so’s the coal market.

Mid-Air Mayhem

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If you fly often enough you’re going to encounter the occasional “moment”. I remember a work colleague telling me of a discussion he had with the company pilot many years ago. The pilot told him that flying a plane is 99% sleep inducing boredom and 1% blind panic. Those of us sitting behind the pilot, preferably behind an internal wall and even more preferably, on another level (somewhat counter-intuitively, the bigger the plane, the less likely it is to go down) hopefully don’t experience all of those moments of blind panic but occasionally we do although to be fair to pilots, what causes us passengers to white knuckle our fingerprints into the metal part of the arm rest are probably just ho hum moments to those who’ve seen it all.

So there have been times I’ve contemplated rapid religious conversion and another time I would have taken up smoking again if the no smoking sign had gone off. Let me tell you about this episode – my first brush with a melodramatic death. But first a precursor to set the scene.

The night before, I was attending an Australia-India Business Council dinner at the Australian High Commission in New Delhi. The residence is a very nice building with beautifully manicured gardens, as you would expect. The dinner was taking place under a large marquee in the garden and everything was going swimmingly until a rip roaring storm stampeded through town. These storms charge in from the nearby Rajasthan Desert so orifice clogging dust and high winds precede torrential rain. As the storm picked up steam (and everything else in its path), the guests decamped from the marquee to the residence and watched the carnage as trees were stripped of leaves and what wasn’t nailed down disappeared into the distance, including the marquee. It finished up in Pakistan. Not the country but over the wall and into the back yard of the Pakistan High Commission which was and still is, next door. Afterwards the garden looked like the Pakistanis had bombed it in retaliation for launching surface to surface missiles at them cunningly disguised as a large tent.

The next night my agent and I flew down to Madras as it was known then and is still known now, by the locals. I think only cricket commentators and politicians call it Chennai. As luck would have it (or not as the case may be), we encountered one of these storms in a most inconvenient place – a few thousand feet above the ground.

To make matters worse the plane was rather old – a 737 1 Series which was so old it didn’t have overhead lockers; it had a luggage rack. Having flown many times before and having learnt what is a normal sound or movement (and by process of elimination, what isn’t), I felt and heard the plane take off at maximum throttle in a steep climb then after a short time, ease back on the throttle and lessen the elevation as we gradually began climbing to cruising altitude. Talk about being lulled into a false sense of security because a few seconds later, the engines roared back to life and the nose went up so high I thought we were on our way to the moon.

Then it began. And it seems a little wimpy looking back but I was pretty certain this dilapidated old plane was going to disintegrate and I didn’t have a parachute. I had never to that point and probably have only one other time since, experienced such mid-air violence as the plane was thrown around the sky. And the no smoking sign was on so I couldn’t take up smoking again and my agent couldn’t get the top off his bottle of scotch lest the contents finish up all over the surrounding passengers. And as I looked out of the window I could have sworn I saw a marquee fly past in the sandy gloom. I can only assume the pilot had decided that the best plan of attack was to spear right through the middle of this storm. Going round it or under it was for cowards.

Now my then agent and still good friend is a pretty cool customer who was quite used to the privations of travel round the Indian sub-continent as well as the vagaries of the weather. When I saw the look on his face I knew we were dead. But that was not to be because after what seemed like an hour and was probably ten minutes at most we hit clear air. The rattling rivets that were still in their holes relaxed back into place, ashen faced strangers silently started at each other, the relief on their faces palpable and couples pledged to never take each other for granted ever again, ever.

That first Oranjeboom went down like altar wine when we hit the bar at the Taj Coromandel a couple of hours later. The blood pressure was back to normal after about a week.

A Contract Job

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It’s difficult to conceptualise this now but when Bob Hawke, Australia’s then prime minister and previously the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, sacked a bunch of airline pilots for striking, all hell broke loose. The pilots were members of a union and the number 1 card-carrying union member in the country told them to take a hike.

This was such a long time ago that one of the planes that was brought in to replace our grounded pilotless planes to help move people around, was from Yugoslavia. Astute observers of history will be aware that Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore. The Yugoslavian divorce started in 1991 and some would argue it’s still underway which doesn’t auger well for Bill and Melinda Gates who have much more treasure to divvy up than the Balkans ever had.

Our pilots’ strike was in 1989 and I remember the time vividly which is just as well because I am about to tell you a story to which the pilot’s strike was of peripheral importance and the geopolitical strife brewing in Belgrade was of no significance whatsoever.

However what I am about to relate to you has some significance to what’s happening today trade-wise but you’ll have to bear with me here because it may appear that I am drawing a very long bow. Long story short, China is busy blocking exports of various Australian products to its markets and other countries are stepping in to take up the slack. One of them is India which is taking more and more of our coal which is currently persona-non-grata in China. The Chinese also don’t want our wine (that’s a heroic sacrifice on the part of the Chinese authorities), our lobsters (ditto) and a whole range of other things, the latest of which appears to be liquified natural gas. But back to coal.

The groundwork for India’s growing imports of Australian coal was laid by a few intrepid Australian companies and a small band of marketing brothers back in the 1980’s. I was one of them. And the first foundation stone was laid in 1989. I fear the introduction to this story will be longer than the story itself but here we go.

Three companies and six coal marketers had been negotiating with the Indian Government steel authority throughout 1988 and 1989. The prize was the first long term coal contract that the Indian Government had ever signed. As it turned out they awarded five and our company got two of them. The business between India and Australia has since grown exponentially, hence the above reference to stepping in.

Now I don’t know whether it was naivety or mischievousness but our counterparts used to think they could call us over to India as if our office was across the street. Flights were few and far between back then so getting in and out at short notice was problematic at the best of times. And a visa was required.

So, it’s 8.00pm on Sunday evening, October 3rd 1989 and my wife and I are relaxing with a glass of wine (her) and a beer (me) when the phone rings. It’s my boss and he advises me he’s been talking to our agent who has been talking to our potential long term customer in India and they told our agent who told my boss who’s telling me that they want to sign the long term contracts on Tuesday October 5th. Did I mention that there was a pilot’s strike. And I didn’t have a visa. Or a signing authority for contracts the size of which I was being asked to sign. What happens next is called focussing the mind….or operating in a state of panic.

I had an Indian mate in Melbourne who was mates with the Indian consulate visa guy in Sydney (as luck would have it) so I rang him immediately and asked him for a favour – contact the consulate in Sydney, tell them what’s happening and ask them if I can drop by some time tomorrow (morning hopefully) and get my passport visa stamped. This process normally takes a week or two. I then rang our agent in New Delhi and asked him to book me a hotel room for a couple of nights. There was nothing else I could do that night so I either had eight more beers or went straight to bed – that bit I can’t remember.

First thing next morning I rang our travel agent and asked her to book me flights to New Delhi…..today. Oh and did I mention I need enough time in Sydney to go to the Indian Consulate in North Sydney to pick up a visa then get back to the airport (in south Sydney) with enough time to get an international flight. When she had stopped laughing and picked up the telephone off the floor she asked if I was aware that the pilot’s strike had somewhat restricted the availability of seats on planes. But being the professional that she was, she proceeded to get me a seat facing the side of a plane rather than the front. It was on an army C130 Hercules from Brisbane to Sydney. Sydney to Bangkok/Singapore/Hong Kong and Bangkok/Singapore/Hong/Kong to New Delhi were works in progress.

On arriving at the airport I rang my boss (no mobile phones back then kids) and asked him to organise a signing authority and to fax it (no email either) to our agent’s office in New Delhi and then rang my mate in Melbourne regarding my visa. He said it was being arranged. I got on the C130 and headed off to Sydney, not knowing if this adventure was going to stop there.

At Sydney airport I was advised that our travel agent had me on a flight to Bangkok (but Bangkok/New Delhi was still up in the air – yuk yuk) so I rushed off to the Indian Consulate, got my visa, rushed back to the airport in time to get on the plane and slump down in my (business class) seat with a glass of champagne and relax because there was nothing else I could do until Bangkok.

Eight hours later the nice lady at the transit desk in Bangkok airport advised that I had a booking on the next Thai International flight to New Delhi, in a couple of hours…..first class – love that travel agent. It had all come together in less than 24 hours.

What happened next was classic India. After moving heaven and earth and arriving in New Delhi in the early hours of Tuesday morning my agent and I fronted at the steel company office at 9.00am and were told……they weren’t ready for us and could we come back tomorrow. Now India can be a frustrating place at the best of times but in this case the prize was beyond valuable so we bit our respective lips and retired to the hotel to wait. Wednesday morning – same. Thursday morning – same. Friday morning they were ready to sign. But there was another twist and it didn’t involve travel because I had a bit of spare time to organise flights out and had taken the precaution of booking out on Friday evening, to be safe.

The other company marketing managers and their agents and me and mine were all pacing in the waiting room in which we had all spent far too much of our lives up to that point. After the contracts had been typed (yes typed) then checked and amended where necessary we would be asked in one by one to sign. After metaphorically drawing the short straw, my two contracts were numbers four and five in the queue. By mid-afternoon we were just starting on four. By about 6.00pm we were ready to start five when the steel company’s senior manager asked me if we could come back on Monday to do the last one.

Through gritted teeth I advised that in the circumstances I would prefer to not spend one minute more in that office than I had to. I may have said something a little more polite but the message was the same nonetheless. So at my insistence the typists and my counterparts soldiered on and we finished about 10.00pm on Friday night. Then the power failed so the lifts were out and we had to walk down 13 flights of stairs but I didn’t care as I had two contracts worth upwards of A$100million in my bag.

I don’t remember anything about the flights home but my log (which I kept for all of my business trips) tells me I came back first class on KLM to Singapore and on Qantas to Brisbane. I can’t remember if I was authorised to fly at the pointy end back than but that time, I didn’t care.

Do You Remember When…

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Back on 9/11 (this year) I intended writing one of those “do you remember where you were when….” essays but I forgot so I’m writing it now. I finished the (paying) work I do each week yesterday and the (non-paying) garden work half an hour ago and it’s raining so I thought I’d impose a bit of cancel-culture on procrastination to fill in a few minutes until beer time. Incidentally, that’s the only time you’ll see the words “cancel-culture” here other than as a target of disdain and ridicule.

There are very few events in human history that warrant remembering what you were doing when they occur because most of those memorable moments are the reasons you remember as in, I remember what I was doing the day I got married – I was getting married.

No we’re talking about disconnected events fusing together into an unforgettable nuclear marriage of inconvenience. For me, only three immediately spring to mind.

The first was when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd 1963. I was a small boy getting on a ship in Southampton in the UK with my family to travel to Australia. A note was left on each table when we fronted for our first meal onboard advising us of what had happened. As master of ceremonies at one of my brothers’ wedding, also on November 22nd I was able to remind him that an event of earth-shattering infamy happened on that day, some 30 odd years before. Also, Kennedy got shot.

The second was the actual day of 9/11. I was in Seoul, Korea and had been out with a work colleague, our agent and some customers for dinner and drinks and on returning to our hotel our Korean agent received a phone call from his wife, advising him that a plane had flown into a building in New York – no other details. After a suitably shocked exchange of comments we retired to the bar. On returning to my room and turning on the TV, the full horror of the events that day were revealed.

Seoul is a garrison town for the US army and the hotel I was staying in is next door to the imposing Seoul World Trade Centre. It’s not uncommon to see military activity in Seoul both in the air and on the ground at the best of times. At the worst of times it was chaos. Organized chaos I’m sure but you can imagine the traffic when all but one entrance to the very large army base are shut. And there were more than the usual number of choppers in the air, many buzzing around the building next door, not to mention the troops on the ground. Seoul is after all, only about 50km from North Korea.

Incidentally, I’ve been to Korea over 60 times (I used to keep count) and have never been to the DMZ. The Child Bride has been to Korea once and when she went to the DMZ she brought me back a hat.

After doing what we had to do that day we made our way to the airport to catch our flight to Osaka to connect with our Ansett International flight to Brisbane. Ansett was doing it really tough right then and rumours were swirling that they were about to go under. As we flew into Kansai airport, I saw the big bird with the “A” on the tail – relief. After boarding (and getting upgraded to first class – some good things did happen on that trip) I was privy to a conversation between two flight attendants which filled me with, not so much dread considering what had happened the day before, but considerable disquiet. They weren’t sure whether the plane would actually leave Osaka. Fortunately, it did – relief.

Our flight was scheduled to fly from Kansai Airport to Brisbane and then on to Sydney. Bearing in mind that the airline was on its last legs (wings? wheels?), the announcements as we approached Brisbane went like this:

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Please ensure your belongings are stowed….etc

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers please deplane and re-board when the announcement is made. We’ll be in Brisbane for approximately one hour.

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers deplane and wait for an announcement regarding your onward journey.

A few minutes later…..

This flight will now terminate in Brisbane. The ground staff will advise arrangements for your onward connection to Sydney.

A few minutes later…..

Please be advised that all of the passengers heading to Sydney will have to make your own onward arrangements. We don’t know how we’re getting there either.

The airline had expired while we were travelling between Japan and Australia.

And the third time was only recently so only time will tell whether it sticks with me but I’m betting it will. It was one of those occasions that will only happen once in your life – my father died.

My mother and one of my brothers and I had been to see Dad in the morning and it was not a pretty sight. He was in stage 7 of Alzheimer’s which means an inability to swallow, amongst other things. Mum struggled to even look at the handsome athletic man of her youth now a shriveled shell of a man struggling to breathe. We left after a few minutes and returned to her home about 10 minutes drive away from the nursing home Dad had resided in for the past few years.

We had been there for about twenty minutes when Mum’s phone rang. Now those of you who have frequented nursing homes will know that a lot of the staff are Asian, in this case many were from the Philippines. My Mum still speaks with a distinct Manchester accent but, ironically struggles with other accents. She hates ringing the phone company or the electricity company because she will generally find herself talking to someone in Manila or Bangalore. Anyway she could not understand what the lady who rang was saying. If I hadn’t been there to take the call maybe she still wouldn’t be aware that Dad died just after we left.

I cheated a bit with the third example. It wasn’t a disconnected (from my life) event that imposed  itself on me to the extent that it never leaves but, what can I say other than I won’t forget that day.

I just thought of another. The day Gough Whitlam was sacked as Australia’s Prime Minister on November 11th 1975, I was at university. There was a great rending of garments, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the communist student union types. My lot, we did what we normally did – went to the pub.

Trials and Tribulations

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Apologies to the reader once again for the paucity of posts recently. As I may have mentioned previously, every now and then I have to play the journalist. Journalist in the sense that this (once) noble profession is lumped with fire-fighting and prostitution because they all involve long periods of slothfulness interspersed with furious bouts of intense activity. I have just finished a bout of intense activity culminating in, well, read on…..

I’ve just spent a somewhat stressful time in the witness box, playing my small part in what has been a long and complex trial that doesn’t appear to have an end in sight. Suffice to say it concerns a coal mine that never happened and one of the owners is somewhat miffed that it didn’t. My role was as an expert witness as I am perceived by some to have a degree of expertise in a particular aspect of the subject at hand. I’ve been working in the industry for decades so expertise is an inevitable consequence of longevity.

Anyway, the day and a bit I spent in Court 21 of the Supreme Court of Queensland was the most stressful of my life I think. Maybe flying into Bandar Abbas in southern Iran for the first time just after the Iran/Iraq war and seeing “Death to America” plastered across the front of the terminal was marginally more stressful. Or perhaps the three times I’ve been convinced the aircraft I was in was going to crash causing the heart to pound like John Bonham was using it as his bass drum. But this was up there and lasted far longer.

I’ve negotiated with some of the most intractable, stupid and downright nasty people in the commercial world in my time. Some would qualify as smiling assassins and others would not have been out of place in the Kray gang. Animosity (both real and bogus) notwithstanding, we did both require and (most of the time) eventually achieve a mutually satisfactory outcome followed by handshakes all round and hundreds of beers later that night, except in Iran when I had to wait until I got to our embassy or caught the next international flight out.

But sparring with a sneering barrister who wants to not only destroy your opinions but also destroy your reputation and that of the sources you cite tends to focus the mind to the total exclusion of everything else. It’s not a pleasant experience because no matter how confident you are in what you are proposing nothing escapes a skilled and belligerent advocate’s forensic search for minor inconsistencies and use of semantic nonsense. At least in a negotiation you can come back hard (in the nicest possible way, you understand) at your protagonist whereas in cross-examination overt displays of frustration and anger are very much a losing hand.

Afterwards, over a glass of red, when my mind was acclimatizing with the real world again, I was reminded of the famous interview of Jordan Peterson by Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4. If you haven’t seen it I thoroughly recommend you have a squizz (it’s on YouTube). She spends a lot of the interview prefacing her questions with  “So what you’re saying is….” and he invariably responds with “No that’s not what I’m saying” or words to that effect. Every statement (I naively thought I was going to be asked questions) that was put to me in court finished with “you’d have to agree with that wouldn’t you” of “that’s correct isn’t it” and many times my answer was simply “no”. If I was mortally threatening his line of interrogation when given a chance to expand and expound on my “no” he would occasionally seek intimidating reinforcements and disdainfully state  “are you telling his honour that blah blah blah?”.

Most of the time I struggled to tell anyone anything because of the wad of cotton wool in my mouth. It’s funny because I do actually know what I’m talking about but there are so many points of attack, real and imagined, that can be gleaned from two lengthy reports which are in response to two other reports, all of which cite numerous learned sources. and especially when I’m disagreeing with the opposition’s experts. In these circumstances the metabolism does funny things, one of which is make you talk like a frog.

Yesterday morning one of my golf mates rang from the course and enquired as to my whereabouts as it was a few minutes past our normal tee-off time. Apart from not realizing we were supposed to be playing, I had to say “Sorry, I have to be in court”, a phrase I had always hoped I would never have to utter. At least in this case I was being paid to be in court rather than facing the reverse situation for which I would have to pay my debt to society. Despite the privations I was able to repeat back to him a phrase he once said to me regarding a less than salubrious task but one which was nonetheless a nice little earner – it’s another cruise.

 

Another Cruise Perhaps

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Apologies for not posting for a while dear reader, but I have been rather busy. If you’ll excuse the colloquialism, I’ve had my arse hanging out. First I had to squire some overseas colleagues on mine and port visits and then I had to write a report for a court case I am expert witnessing on.

I sometimes wonder which was the harder. The first one involved extensive planning then being on the road for the best part of two weeks with flights, long drives and lots of coal dust which had to be washed away by the occasional beer. Only occasionally I have to stress because we were all alcohol tested at every site and had to draw lots to see who got drug tested at every site. The mining industry is far too serious these days. The second job involved writing a hundred words when ten would suffice in plain-speak. But we’re talking legalese. And leaving out a comma could mean the difference between a slap on the wrist and death.

The trip was quite interesting for me – 11 coal mines, four ports and seven separate meetings plus lunches and dinners spread over ten days. I say interesting because even though I’ve been in the industry for centuries I never got to visit any of these mines (apart from one) because I always worked for a competing company so the respective owners wouldn’t let me in the gate. Now I work for a steel company which buys a……I was going to say truckload of coal but while a truckload of some things, like paper clips, is a lot, for coal it’s a veritable eye-drop.  Anyway, the cost of what they (I’m on contract so strictly speaking, am not an employee) buy from mines in my state every year is measured in the billions so it was nice to be treated respectfully by former competitors. Oh and the “apart from one” mentioned above was one I worked for when it was owned by one of my former employers and the less said about them, the better. One of these days that little episode will probably find its way here but I’m still looking for an amusing angle and right now that’s like looking for sincerity at the Oscars.

My visitors were from Singapore, India and Holland. All of them whip smart and experts in their respective fields but half of them had never been to Australia before so it was like herding cats. A half kilometre walk from one meeting to another in the city would see the group strung out over a hundred metres or so because photos had to be taken and walking was more accurately described as carefree meandering. And time management…pfffft.

Notwithstanding it was a very successful trip. We didn’t lose anyone despite going into a number of very large and very deep holes – that’s the most important of all success measuring criteria – and no one got hurt. The paranoia about safety in these places is bordering on the fanatical. In fact it probably is when you consider the need for a safety induction, a long sleeved shirt, a hi-vis vest, gloves, steel capped boots and a hard hat when you don’t even get out of the vehicle. Interestingly some open cut mines don’t require you to wear a hard hat because what’s going to hit you on the head – a bird? But others do. And some don’t require the boots or the gloves. My mates in production will be horrified at my devil-may-care attitude to safety but when I worked underground (as a mine geologist, not a miner) many moons ago, no one really gave a shit. And apart from the occasional mine visit nowadays most of my post-underground time is and was spent in offices and aeroplanes. I am rather a stickler for safety when it comes to flying though.

As I’ve already mentioned, either side of the mine visits I have been writing an expert witness report for a mining related litigation and the less said about that the better – literally. Legalese is a foreign language and a very wordy foreign language. If there isn’t at least one statement of the bleeding obvious in each paragraph then you’re not trying. But it pays the bills. As a mate said recently, every time he did a job like this it was another cruise for him and his wife. Not a bad way of looking at it as I wend my way wearily into the semi-retirement sunset. As if….

Peter Ridd

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Hearty congratulations to Professor Peter Ridd for his bravery, conviction and ultimate triumph over the forces of scientific (and by extension societal ) darkness. If you believe in the idiotic concept of scientific “consensus” can I remind you, you have a fundamental orifice where you can store it in perpetuity.

Forget you peak oil tipping points and your climate tipping points because this is a very real tipping point that will sew the seed of the reversal of the peak stupidity currently blanketing the world on so many levels.

Hashtag This

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Now that the Mueller Report is out, I believe it should be safe to publish this. I wrote it a couple of months ago and filed it away for future reference. The future is now and I feel ever so slightly vindicated because I think I have already  heard one or two mea culpas . Read on to find out what this is all about.

Alright blog, what do you think of this? The Spectator magazine is running an essay competition and the topic is “The Next Great Hashtag”. I’d love to enter. I’ve been threatening to submit something or other to one of these competitions or to a magazine for ages but it’s unlikely to happen here sadly because I’m not familiar with the mythical (to me) power of the hashtag or indeed why it isn’t still just that little sign you put in front of a number to indicate that it is a number, as in #3 or “number three”. There’s a degree of redundancy there you’d have to admit so someone somewhere has decided that # is being grossly under-utilised so is in need of a higher purpose. So dear blog, to continue concealing my hipness ignorance (“hignorance’ or “hipnorance” – could have invented a new word there) from the rest of the world because only three people regularly read you, I’ll subject you to a discourse on the topic at hand.

I’m a child mostly of the previous century so the significance or indeed the aforementioned power of a hashtag eludes me. My football mad relatives write comments on Facebook followed by #ManU  #Football  #SirAlex or such like. Why? What’s the point? Does this magically transport the comment to …..somewhere or someone? That Twitter thing uses them a lot but I don’t wallow in that sewer so am none the wiser there. I remember a picture of a pouting, frowny faced Michelle Obama holding up a sign with “#Bring Back Our Girls” written on it. The parodies were hilarious which just goes to show that unless you can genuinely fake sincerity then forget success (attrib. George Burns or someone called Jean Giraudoux or someone else). Come to think of it, Michelle Obama’s fake sincerity doesn’t seem to have held her back. Neither has Bill Shorten’s for that matter – once more with feeling Bill, the director might shout. But why is that noughts and crosses thing needed at the start of the comment?

So not understanding the authority of a hashtag makes me eminently qualified to expound prophetically on the next “big thing”. If it’s okay for humanities professors to lecture me on climate change and get away with it, then cop this.

No, I can’t do it. My curiosity has got the better of me and I’m going to have to do a bit of research.

Later that day……………..

Apparently, according to that fount of all knowledge Wikipedia, a hashtag links messages with a common theme, much like a common theme used to. During my in-depth research I went onto Facebook and clicked on a hashtag to see what would happen and bugger me, all of these Facebook entries appeared and all were related to the same, wait for it, theme. So there’s the clue. The Next Great Hashtag has to be linked to today’s most ubiquitous, prevailing (“trending”?) theme. And what might that be, said he, asking the most obvious question in the world?

Before I answer that question, let me say that I follow American politics reasonably closely. Closely enough to not have to read the numerous articles written by the work experience kids who populate some of our online “news” websites. You know the ones – they regularly point out where Donald Trump continues to go wrong or expound on the five reasons he will be impeached or resign or somehow or other be kicked out of office in the next three or six or nine months. This has been going on for more than two years. Predictions of his downfall or at least that he would achieve nothing and be the worst president since the last one have come and gone like so many climate tipping points.

Consequently I’m predicting that The Next Great Hashtag will be #Iwaswrong as in I was wrong to underestimate, demonise, mock (pick any number of abusive adjectives) Donald Trump and not give any credit where credit is due, which is all Donald Trump (and the rest of us for that matter) can ask for. I accept that this will be a stretch for those suffering the most chronic, incurable strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome, because let’s face it, there’s a lot of face to lose here. Mea culpa’s of the “It’s a fair cop, Your Honour; guilty as charged. I was wrong” type, will need to be levered out of CNN for example, with a crowbar.

In a parallel universe a casual observer might feel sympathy for someone who has put the bank account, the house, the car, the wife, the kids, the credibility and the beer can collection on a sure bet like Hillary Clinton who then rather unsportingly loses. If not for the billions squirrelled away in the Clinton Foundation, you’d almost believe that the fix was in. And the flashing red lights were there for everyone to see. Fortunately the “someones” in question in our universe are celebrities lite, 90% of the media, the self proclaimed elites of the bureaucracy and academia plus random undergraduates with nothing to lose and as would have happened with a different election result, nothing to gain. So they get no sympathy.

These clowns (for want of a better word) painted themselves into such a tight corner with their samurai-like commitment to Hillary, the only way out for some of them if she lost was the Hollywood version of hara-kiri – moving to Canada. When this level of devotion takes you to your own version of Jonestown, there is no backing down. The only way out, up to now, has been to totally discredit everything Donald Trump said, says, did and does, past present and future, so that upon his downfall they can say “See, I was right all along. It just took a bit longer than I thought to play out.”

Sadly for them, it’s not playing out. Consequently we have the tragically pathetic sight (and sound) of an actor at the top of his game (debatable, I know), Robert De Niro contributing a philosophical “F…Trump” to the discourse thereby proving that even the most inspirational actors are orally vacuous unless someone else puts words into their mouths. In fact the two years of Trump’s presidency have played out like the speeded up versions of left-slanting news shows on CNN and MSNBC on election night which are preserved for posterity on YouTube  – initially euphoria but morphing into equal parts feral aggression and despair. If the leader of the free world didn’t have such a profound and ongoing impact on global machinations, those shows would have represented the pinnacle of Trump’s presidency before it even started.

Now we know most of the Trump opposition is of the left; not exclusively but predominantly. And we know that leftists like collectives because, let’s face it, most of them don’t have the courage of their convictions when confronted by arguments which rely on facts, logic, common sense and human nature. They need a protective outer cloak of like minded automatons. Watching Ben Shapiro or Brendan O’Neill or Jordan Petersen or the late Christopher Hitchens skewer emotive half-baked arguments with these axioms, even though a couple of those people mentioned would not necessarily consider themselves to be of the right (socially and/or economically), is a latter day version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, such is the mirth-making.

Returning to the hashtag, the aforementioned emotive collective (“emective” perhaps – I’m on a roll with these new words) has nowhere to go especially if the Mueller probe into God knows what turns up nothing of significance and the now Democrat dominated House of Representatives turns out to be, as expected, all piss and wind.  I’m predicting that the dam will break when one prominent leftist admits they erred in condemning everything Trumpian and tweets #Iwaswrong. Collectivists being what they are will initially try to isolate this clearly deranged outlier until someone else realises that maybe he/she is right. Then other collectivists, because they are, will want to join the party to show how woke they are and hey presto, the trend is on its way.

Incidentally I was torn between #Iwaswrong  and #Wewerewrong but such is the power of #, I have found, it doesn’t matter because in social media world # is the great gatherer or more appropriately collector, if we want to stick to our leftist shtick. It turns out the armour provided by “we” won’t be required.

Now I’d love to do a piece on the “Green New Deal” but it would look something  like this byooooootvglsek5bvdktgb,bsc              after I fall face first into the keyboard laughing like a drain.

Rule 1 – No Dick Heads

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We’ve all started new positions during our working life. Admittedly some people do it only once and these are generally public servants or Japanese although the job-for-life the previous generation of Japanese workers expected is not quite as ubiquitous these days.

Before you start a new position you generally have to negotiate your way through an application to get an interview, then fill in some questionnaires to make sure you’re not a psychopath or a sociopath. And here’s the rub.

Did you ever wonder, once you’ve got to know your workmates, how some of them jumped those hurdles. Some of them wouldn’t be able to jump rope if it was lying limp on the ground. How did these thoroughly unlikeable individuals slip through the fuck-wit filter? Were they interviewed by like minded people? Are they put there as a management challenge for everyone else? Do they know someone or have photos. Or are they simply the beneficiaries of the only job generating programme left-leaning governments throughout the world know – employing more and more bureaucrats. Because let’s face it, many of these people work in government. One of the few privileges private enterprise enjoys compared with government is the ability to fire someone. That person has to have committed an atrocity three times or three different atrocities before human resources will stop wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth long enough to risk a trip to the unfair dismissal tribunal. But such are the “rights” of employees over management these days.

Back to our work-place wankers. You know the type. They work to rule absolutely when it advantages them. Breaks are taken at exactly the time they are meant to be taken. This doesn’t necessarily mean one returns to work at the allotted time. One has to finish one’s cigarette, doesn’t one. They are the ones who loudly assert their rights at work. If there’s a union presence they will utilise it as often as my mother calls her local member of parliament. They will leave their workplace exactly at knock-off time even if it means leaving a nail half banged into a piece of wood. And they will gossip, maliciously.

There is an Australian Football club that famously implemented a “no-dickheads” rule which is a bit like the fuck-wit filter mentioned above. This meant that if you were up yourself to the extent that you disrupted the team’s cohesion, it didn’t matter how good you were, you weren’t welcome and you weren’t selected. And it worked because the club enjoyed considerable success.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will work everywhere. Imagine applying it to an NBA franchise. Overnight you’d be down to about three players. And NFL teams would lose whole defensive lines – you know the ones who carry on like they’ve cured cancer after making one tackle. Unfortunately when you see an eight year old soccer player put on a Hugh Jackman routine when they score a goal, to the raucous cheers of Mum and Dad, you know the future supply of dickheads is secure.

When the no-dickheads rule is rolled out to all work places in the country we will have platoons of embittered ex-administration officers roaming central business districts all over the country, stopping outside their previous places of work, sucking on fags and abusing passers-by. In the US they will occasionally (rarely thankfully) return to their old workplaces with guns. Stringent application of the no-dickheads rule at the appropriate time could have nipped a tragedy in the bud. Or more likely simply shifted it to another location.

Unfortunately it seems we are stuck with these people and now that political correctness has sunk it’s cold dead claws into every facet of life, especially the fun bits, they can claim victim hood status as well. Best to just ignore them.