Today is Australia Day, 26^th January 2019 considered as a celebration of the arrival of a fleet of British ships in Sydney Harbour in 1770.

Unfortunately it is not a day all souls in Australia wish to celebrate by consuming a mountain of tinnies down at the beach. There is also a rally of Aboriginal people in Canberra today, who wish to point out that they were here first and have at least, equal rights to the country.

It’s a difficult one, because both sides have a point. History (in my personal definition) consists of one dam thing after another. This includes previously undisturbed or (from the other view) undiscovered tribes, races or lottery winners – who would have preferred being left alone.

Clearly ships without engines cannot travel backwards any more than history can be rewound, so for purely pragmatic reasons, those hiding have to factor in the certainty of being found – eventually.

The important point in my view, is that the rights of those being ‘discovered’ are respected – in modern times these would be classified and defined as ‘human rights’. So ignoring the benefit of hindsight in too large a dose, the rights of indigenous peoples in say, Australia were largely ignored, even if this was out of a sense of ‘doing the right thing’; such putting European style clothes on them.

In New Zealand, I believe the Maori s were given a better ‘deal’ under the Treaty of Waitonga than their counterparts in Australia. Having said that, the Maori s gave the previous inhabitants of New Zealand a very bad deal indeed – few survived – so history can teach us all.

My point of conjecture is that humans find it alarmingly hard to be ‘universal’ in their love and trust of one another. Even when Homo Sapiens Sapiens left Africa and / or the Euphrates basin and headed north, the Neanderthals already in Europe were not too happy to see them. (Recent DNA evidence though, suggests that some Neanderthals were very happy to see them.)

In modern man there remains, what I call, the ‘football shirt’ mentality. This would be more accurately termed ‘tribalism’ by an anthropologist but the behavioural mechanisms are the very similar. Let me explain the football analogy.

If you quizzed the eager fans queuing for an important league football match to ascertain their level of understanding of the rules of the game, I expect they would all score in the region of 90% and above. In other words – they are fully conversant with the rules. However, fast forward to a moment in the game where there is a dispute of what just happened, say – ‘was a player offside just before scoring?’ The supporters who benefit from the goal will all swear that the player was not offside. The rival supporters will all swear the opposite.

Although they know how the game works in their heads, their hearts will filter what they have just seen in favour of their beliefs and prejudices. In other words, a bias is in command. At worst this is manifest as violence and hatred, at best, a conviction that the referree has left his white stick in the dressing room. What has happened is that the stadium has become emotionally divided.

Most so called ‘racism’ has this origin and manifestation although the word has complex meanings in modern usage (so much so that the Norwegians refuse to use it in legal definitions and prefer alternatives). However ‘racism’ is a bias or prejudice against a perceived group so that, that group suffer a loss. In the case of the football match, they may lose the game. In the case of an undiscovered tribe in a rain forest or continent, the effect may be considerably more serious than loss of a game.

Some tribalism persists irrevocably in modern western societies and is encapsulated in ‘religion’.

I remember Rabbi Lionel Blue speaking on the radio and telling a story of a Jewish boy arriving at his new primary school in Northern Ireland. He is quizzed by a Catholic boy and Protestant boy about his religion. On hearing that he was a ‘Jew’ they both looked confused. After a pause the question was asked, ‘Are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?’

With the perfect logic that is characteristic of the naïve and very young, we have an example of the irrationality of bias and prejudices of religious and cultural dogma. It may surface in a form of an unusual form of dress or a way of thought. In every instance it is worthy of deep mistrust.

At the end of the day (and at the end of the world) we will all be judged for our actions. Such things as the unconscious biases (that we all contain through parental and cultural conditioning) will reveal how prejudiced we have been to our fellow beings.

If you haven’t followed my train of thought, then watch the news when the Aliens arrive! As the jets and missiles are loosed at their space craft, consider for a moment what very highly advanced spiritual people, aliens probably are.

Humpty Trumpty

Imagined a wall

Humpty Trumpty

Had a great fall

You might be forgiven for not believing in election promises because this would not be the first election promise to be broken. After all, the Mexicans were meant to pay for it and they must have changed their minds…right?

Anyway, there are plenty of ways to climb down from a border wall promise. One might be that the country cannot afford it. A country that owed 9 trillion a decade ago and now owns 22 trillion dollars…perhaps it’s in the national interest not to go further into debt?

No, Mr T has decided on a wall and he is having one. He will have made a thorough investigation into the problem and how a wall is the perfect solution, right?

What’s the problem?

Well, we have these eight year old criminals coming over into the USA from Mexico and other south American countries and threatening the lives of honest living Americans. So, to save the Americans we must stop the criminal children and their criminal parents seeking political asylum. This problem is so real and bad, really really bad, that any amount of money must be spent and liberty can go to hell, because a state of National Emergency is likely to be called all because of these bad bad people over there. Not me! Not me doing this! I am forced to do it!

It’s a rather chaotic summary of the problem but it’s close.

The solution proposed has passed the SWOT test as follows;

Strengths

Walls are known to keep the people out that you don’t like. For instance prison walls, they keep people out – well in actually but that’s not our intention – let me check – oh OK perhaps that is the agenda they said not to mention. So walls keep people out who are planning to murder Americans because they are hungry and tired and in fear of their lives and need a job. Well a wall is more effective and reliable than the Border Force we have already have. They are hopeless aren’t they? Anyway a wall will make them not work so hard which must be an advantage, right? Perhaps I can sack them! Oh please let me sack them.

Weaknesses

We don’t like to admit this but perhaps a wall only needs to be breached in a small section and you might as well not have thousands of miles of wall at all. A small breach lets through a lot of people in a short amount of time, like a leak in a dam drains the lake real quick. So anyone with a steel penetrating weapon, like a shoulder carried anti tank weapon, can make a hole in any steel wall. Not that you will get hold of a military weapon in America that easily.

Then there are the two ends which go into the sea. Not sure how to stop people using boats to go around the ends of the wall? Sharks?

And however high it is, people will try to go over it. Yes, people can’t fly but they can if they use aircraft, or hang gliders, or drones or balloons or anything that is lighter than air actually. And since the wall is intended to last a long time, technology is going to make flight easier, year on year.

Or they can dig. The wall will go under the surface of the earth a distance and then stop. So you dig and go under the wall. Advantage of this is you can’t be seen. Dig at night. Cover the tunnel entrance. Confuse sensors with motorbikes. Steve Mc Queen. He took a motorbike over a wall didn’t he? Huh, Hollywood pranks, just fake.

And the wall will force more people to use the pinch points, that is legal border crossings. These will need all the facilities to deal with processing asylum seekers, staff, investigators, medics, offices, holding areas, accommodation, food, money, money and more money…not cheap.

Opportunities

When there is a wall, American citizens can sleep in their beds at night because although there are millions of illegal immigrants already in America, America will be much safer because those in can’t get out and those out can’t get in. Get it?

Threats

The only threat to this very very good solution is the Democrats who just don’t get it. They don’t believe it will be practical or good value for money and will stop it being built. But once they see how good even a short section of wall is at keeping people on the other side, they will be convinced it’s good value for money.

Or perhaps in the future people will stop wanting to come into the USA. Perhaps the movement of people will change direction and people will want to leave America for a stable regime in Mexico and beyond. They won’t like the wall and won’t vote Democrat again.

Then there are robots being developed now that will be able to over come the wall far more easily than humans, and help humans travel either way over under through or around the wall. Robots. Don’t you hate them.

After all this really hard thinking the Whitehouse team were asked embarrassing questions by journalists. Isn’t a wall a very old fashioned idea that has never worked historically? The Berlin wall for instance or Hadrian’s wall in Scotland?

Someone suggested to Mr T that border walls were a medieval idea. Mr T was very very clever indeed in his response. He said that wheels were invented in medieval times and they are still being used. Therefore things that worked long ago, will still work today. That’s his logic. I wonder if he has ever seen a picture of a chariot from 5000BCE? When ever the first wheel rolled down the hill, the point is that walls were never a good idea and wheels always were a good idea. The fact that both appeared in the past does not make anything from the past a good idea. That’s a syllogism. Could someone hand Mr T a dictionary?

Many Caesars were murdered because of their politics in Roman times, but that does not mean assassination of a president is a good idea today.

Even if a president acts conspiratorial and wields executive powers over the democratic checks and balances, he is still a very very reasonable guy with only the lives of little American babies at the foremost of this thoughts and the criminal gangs trying to kill them.

Yes, sir. We all believe you.