March 2017

Many, many people are despairing with politics. But that's what they want, to make people switch off politics. When people do that, it paves the way for the rich and powerful to do whatever they like. Politics isn't broken, it's been hijacked by extremists. Moralists and the greedy, not politicians. The 3 here in the picture for example, or the 2 behind Trump anyway. They have a moral agenda, not a political one. It's not the Left or the Right, it's Church versus State. The 'Church" wants to have power back again, and it's prepared to destroy the State to get it. But it's not a Church we'd recognise, it's a feral fundamentalist, pious individualism. And the rich and powerful are using that as a vehicle to destroy the State too, so they can become richer, and more powerful.

Saw this meme online. It made me think about the deep, almost mythical stories that really determine how people think about politics. Politics is ultimately about how people feel. This meme, for example, it's such a common belief amongst conservative voters. It's ridiculous nonsense really, in all sorts of ways. All money ultimately comes from government - there is no such thing as private money, and the idea businesses generate it and government spends it is also simply wrong. All the most successful economies in the world are State-driven, even the US, where the overwhelming majority of money that funds their innovation and business comes from the government. And in reality governments give hundreds of billions and even trillions of public dollars to already wealthy people and firms, who don't need it. But people believe this in their bones because it's more about the feeling of bludgers and freeloaders. About people being lazy and leaning on others who aren't. The feeling is spot on, it's just not attached to an actual reality.

Was a bit shocked at how many people confess to having done this.

This looks a bit dry, but is really huge. After decades of education see-sawing between more and more testing, and more and more hippie love for the whole child, finally the focus is on what actually, PRACTICALLY works. The research. Good on the NSW Dept of Education for doing this.

Printing a house is becoming a reality.

Bill Mollison was a wise man, he knew that it wasn't actually difficult to grow vast amounts of food just about anywhere. But his whole career he was followed around by hippies who thought this was a 'back to nature' message, and that we should all shun the modern world and 'go local' again. I did a Permaculture course with one of the leading designers in the world back in the 1990s, and you could see he was a uncomfortable with the participants doing spirit dances to reconnect with the Earth of an evening (it was New Age bullshit, new ideas and movements tend to attract the damaged). Mollison put the emphasis on 'culture' in the word agriculture. He knew that how we grow our food and sustain ourselves is the core of all culture. And that we had to think beyond massive agriculture, which is easily the most destructive human force in the history of the planet. But at the same time the danger is we interpret this as all retreating to our 'local' humpies to grow veg, as if progress is ignoring most of the last 500 years of human life.

Still gold.

Ads have billions of dollars of research behind them. I think they become fascinating when you realise that, they can tell you more about society than just about anything else.

When one slab of butter isn't enough.

Before facelifts and Botox.

More glimpses into a different time.

Trump's actual legislative agenda so far, summarised by an American friend. Not much in there for the ordinary downtrodden citizen, he's like Tony Abbott, talks the talk and then walks the jackboot big business and Church walk. 1. HR 861 Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency 2. HR 610 Vouchers for Public Education 3. HR 899 Terminate the Department of Education 4. HJR 69 Repeal Rule Protecting Wildlife 5. HR 370 Repeal Affordable Care Act 6. HR 354 Defund Planned Parenthood 7. HR 785 National Right to Work (this one ends unions) 8. HR 83 Mobilizing Against Sanctuary Cities Bill 9. HR 147 Criminalizing Abortion (“Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act”) 10. HR 808 Sanctions against Iran

If you haven't experienced binaural audio recordings, you need to. Binaural recordings are recordings that reproduce more or less exactly the sounds you would hear if you were actually in a situation, including the positions of the sounds in space. They're made by either wearing microphones directly in the ears to do the recordings, or using a dummy head with microphones at the ear positions etc. It's not 'surround sound' like they use at the movies or in your home cinema, it's even *more* realistic than that, it's a perfect reproduction of what you would actually hear, if you were there. Nothing makes you feel 'there' more than sound. It's much stronger than sight, for example, as a way to feel as if you're really there. Try this one for starters, of a pretend haircut at a barber shop. You MUST use headphones or earphones, you won't get the effect without them. You can find all sorts of binaural recordings on YouTube, recordings that will take you almost anywhere in the world, and you will seriously feel like you're there - walking through forests or at the seaside, or in famous cities etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

Painting a big wowser sign on my back by going on about this topic, I know. But it's not about wowserism, it's about self-awareness.

Well said Andrew Street. "Will housing become more affordable in Australia? Absolutely! And it could happen one of two ways. This complex web of legislation can be gently and strategically unpicked via careful bipartisan cooperation across our different spheres of government in concert with the private sector in an effort to create a sane, universally beneficial housing system at all levels. Alternatively, we can choose to leave things be until the housing bubble bursts and plunges Australia into a crippling recession. And since this is politics in 2017, we can assume that Plan A is already off the table."

There's a deep belief that sport combats obesity, based on another deep belief that exercise makes you lose weight. Neither is true.

Saw this last night, and after having whooping cough last year (and still getting over it) it struck a nerve. We're maybe making the same mistake with vaccines as we did with antibiotics. We set up these extreme positions, of all vaccines are bad versus vaccines will save us. And the truth is not at either of those extremes. The pertussis vaccine for example is failing, it's really puzzling to researchers. It will likely still save a baby's life, but it increasingly won't stop people getting the disease. The 'debate' has degenerated into the righteous extremes of pro-vax and anti-vax. Antibiotics used to be the common sense thing to use, now they're becoming useless. Vaccines may go the same way if we don't stop moralising and start thinking instead.

Can it be? Even Rowling?

Remember this clown, who saved us from that terrible socialist carbon tax and kept our power prices down?

"Housing prices have risen by more than 250 per cent in real terms since the mid-1990s, with the median house price in Sydney now well above $1 million. Household debt is more than 200 per cent of disposable income, and greater than 120 per cent of GDP...The risks being run actually dwarf those of the GFC." John Hewson

Whenever the world gets too unequal, the push from the people who have been excluded is perceived as a threat to those who aren't. The silliness and emotion in Western politics right now is just the reaction to this pushback from the poor and excluded of the world, including in our own countries. Our business is happily done by them, for a fraction of the money, new technologies help them to undercut our rich monopolies, they go looking for better lives in other countries (sometimes on boats), and so on. Whenever this happens in history we come out the other side smarter, richer and happier, as wealth is better shared. So we're in the middle of potentially something quite positive, not negative, if you don't listen too much to the reactionaries who try to make it sound like the end of the world. It is the end of *their* rich world, and that's a good thing.

Another one for the anti-government crowd. If you think the government is the enemy and the cause of the shit in your life, go and live somewhere without one. Like Syria. http://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/

This is on my bucket list. My big hydraulic bucket list.

Hmmm, cycloids? Fun.

Happy Birthday mate. We're getting close to 50

I do sometimes live in hope that smart is winning over stupid on this one. Seriously one of the most stupid things humankind has ever done. Despite the forces of stupid trotting out smug "is it fading the curtains?" every single year, showing they don't understand the issue at all, some of us fight on ;) And couldn't put it better: "Personally, I don't care whether we stick with DST or standard time. What I want, most of all, is to stop resetting my damn clock — the time change is, quite literally, a killer."

People are constantly bombarded with requests for money and/or assistance for various causes, often through schools but also through workplaces and even via harassment in the street or on the phone or internet. It's now a professional industry too, with lots of contention about the cut the professionals take. And so many cutesy ways to dress it up, people starving themselves, bucketing themselves with iced water, wearing red noses, taking on ridiculous physical endurance challenges, buying bandaged bears etc. What's the real problem here? Is all of this fundraising about inequality too, where basic services aren't provided any more because so much governance is about cutting taxes and costs to the better off? So the rest of us are called upon more and more to fund these basic requirements. Philanthropy for example has always been central to social provision in the US, with its minimalist public sector, so maybe us gutting our own public services is causing this shift here too. (And also, how many people actually investigate whether the cause they're supporting is a genuine and sensible one? Dressing it up with cute stunts is designed to stop people looking too hard at what they're shelling out for. And are a lot of these cute stunts increasingly more about the people doing them, and their love of stunts, than about the causes themselves?)

Happy Birtdhay :)

@[783412914:2048:Kyle Manning], @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato], we often discuss science and religion debates, and the nature of science itself. Would be very interested in your (and anybody else's) views on this two-part NY Times piece Stanley Fish wrote. Neither part is very long. Fish is a brilliant mind, and wonderful essayist. I can't emphasize enough how much so much of what he says here desperately needed to be said. Part 1: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/citing-chapter-and-verse-which-scripture-is-the-right-one/ Part 2: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/evidence-in-science-and-religion-part-two/

“The research shows that the thing that’s the problem is the changing twice a year."

An annual re-post. Who knows if it's even a real quote. The logic is spot on though.

Dr Google isn't a threat to doctors, it's a threat to a model of care that makes the patient powerless and irrelevant.

Michael, these kids of yours are eating me out of house and home.

There was a time people weren't much interested in weather. But it's huge now. The reason for that would be interesting to understand.

This is dangerous territory. We don't live in North Korea. And ever notice how the people who whinge loudest about 'free speech' are always the first to shut it down? Free speech so long as it agrees with them, is what they mean. Disappointed that the other press people present didn't boycott the event.

Can we crowdfund a shirt for Wayne?

I reckon Dr Seuss was never jealous or dumped.

Signs are fun. They hardly ever work. These two are different perspectives on the same issue.

More Stanley Fish. We listen way too much to scientists on these questions, and not to people from the humanities, who are usually orders of magnitude more sophisticated. "Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith." https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/god-talk-part-2/comment-page-1/?_r=0

I looked up "bitch slap" in the dictionary, and this is what it gave me.

The petrochemical industry are basically self-interested arseholes. And the people smart enough in Canberra to negotiate with them, in the public service, were sacked by idiots who said we had too much bureaucracy. They've now taken us for a ride, could we get much dumber? "It's a neat trick, really. Take a country with enough gas to supply itself "indefinitely", send the vast majority of it overseas, refuse to sell locally at a fair price, create a domestic shortage, then demand access to some of our most environmentally sensitive resources as though it's an emergency measure."

Neurofen might be a triumph of marketing, there seem to be many who use it as their first-choice painkiller. Go for the paracetamol.

Anybody else's philodendron warm? From the vault.

No I haven't taken vows. Love the pics though.

There's something Caravaggio about Bob.

Some more of the filthy underbelly of gas in Australia. And remember that the mining industry even invests millions to get rid of Prime Ministers it doesn't like, and most of the industry is not even Australian. I live in a mining town, which uses an old model where the mines and the town mutually benefit. There's bugger all of that left now in the rest of the country. And the response of our current government to all of this? It wants to give these multinational economic rapists a big tax cut.

The Wizard of Oz is not as simple as it looks. The author (Baum) was a political journalist, and the story is full of political allegories and jokes. Here are just some. There was a rise of populism as well at the time Baum wrote the story, which makes it particularly relevant today. Dorothy – the all-American girl who represents virtuous, hard-working citizens who were attracted to radical politics because they realized things had gone terribly wrong and that something needed to change. The Cowardly Lion – this was William Jennings Bryan, the Populist and Democratic candidate for president in 1896 and 1900, who was nicknamed “The Lion” for his fiery rhetoric and called a coward by many for his refusal to support America’s decision to go to war with Spain in 1898. The Scarecrow – the American farmer, who was often portrayed as illiterate and brain-dead by elite policymakers who feared their radical activism and support for Populist-style reforms. The Tin Man – the American industrial worker, who had been exploited and treated like just another piece of machinery by rich and powerful employers. The Munchkins – the poor tired mass of citizens in the United States, enslaved by powerful interests and clueless about what to do to change things. The Yellow Brick Road – the gold standard. Monetary policy was a huge political issue at the time, with big businessmen generally supporting tight money and the gold standard while reformers favored an enlargement of the money supply through the coinage of silver or the issuance of paper money. Dorothy’s Silver Slippers – a representation of silver. Just as many in the book believed the silver slippers that Dorothy had acquired after accidentally killing the Wicked Witch of the East had magical powers, many farmers, laborers, and small businessmen believed that expanding the money supply by putting more silver in circulation would stop the boom-or-bust business cycles that plagued the economy during that time. More money would increase demand for goods and services, freeing up more funds for smaller investors and making things easier on debtors hurt by tight monetary policies that kept the value of the dollar artificially high. In the movie the magic slippers were changed to ruby, so the importance of this metaphor was obscured. The Wicked Witch of the East – a stand-in for Wall Street financiers, eastern elite big businessmen, and Washington politicians. The Wicked Witch of the West – western industrialists, bankers, and the railroads. The Good Witch of the North – Midwestern farmers and others in the heartland who were strong in their opposition to the powerful elites who ran the economy and the political system. Glinda the Good Witch of the South – a personification of southerners who realized they were being exploited and repressed by eastern political elites. Yellow Winkies – Chinese laborers, abused and controlled by powerful western interests just as the Wicked Witch of the West abused and controlled the Winkies. Oz – the abbreviation for ounce, which was significant because bimetallists wanted silver coined along with gold at a ratio of sixteen ounces of silver for each ounces of gold. The Wizard – any president of the United States, whose power was ultimately illusory. The Wizard, like everybody else, was just trying to survive and was really subservient to the power of the Wicked Witches of the East and West. Parallels between the Wizard and William Jennings Bryan have also been noted, possibly because Bryan had been a candidate for the office of president twice.

Edouard Louis understands nasty people. And that they talk a lot about 'free speech' because they want to say things that civilisation already decided are just hate disguised as words. Every generation seems to forget. “To me, democracy is not about saying everything. Some things, like racism, antisemitism, shouldn’t be issues, they shouldn’t be talked about. Some subjects should be considered obsolete, and yes, let’s shut down the debate because they are obsolete...That would be progress, that would be democracy, not letting people say what they want, not giving their racist, homophobic views the same value, the same credibility as other propositions. Not giving those stupid, unacceptable propositions weight and currency by responding to them. This has been the great tragedy of recent years in literature, the press, intellectual life, this ideology that in a debate all views have the same weight, that we can debate...with the extreme right. That’s wrong....We should say to the...far right: just shut up. Keep your stupid, nasty views to yourselves."

What does many happy returns mean? People giving bad presents? I hope you get good presents :)

For every teacher who wanted a comeback to this question.

One more for the teachers, the thin line between civilisation and chaos.

Do more sport, they say, it's good for you. “It’s true. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. Yes, it is. Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind — what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school, first thing they teach us is, ‘Oh, Columbus discovered America,’ but when he got there, there were some fair-skinned people with the long hair smoking on the peace pipes. So, what does that tell you? Columbus didn’t discover America. So, listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this s*** is flat to me. I’m just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me. I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity, have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It’s not. The world is flat.”

Happy birthday Julia! May your day be meeting-free :)

They could do an update on Friends, called Frenemies. There's a lot of this shit about, so boring and pathetic. http://m.wikihow.com/Deal-With-Frenemies

People say FB is a waste of time. I learn something every day.

Lots being said (ha) about free speech at the moment. Stanley Fish rarely disappoints. He wrote a book called "There is no such thing as free speech...and it's a good thing too." Here's a short interview with Fish about the ideas. Rather than emotional posturing, which is what most of our free speech debate is. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-February-1998/fish.html

Happy birthday! Hope the kids are kind

Fair enough.

Apparently this is a thing.

Happy birthday!

You see the strange people you wake up in bed with, when you talk silly. I wonder if Ricky likes that he agrees with the nut jobs of the far Right on this one.

Which car has right of way here Amy Thompson (or anybody else)? Been a few years since I did the test, apparently lots of older drivers get this one wrong.

John Lennon has always been beloved by many inside and outside music, because Lennon pursued causes. Like this one, the bed-in for peace. It's decades ago now and in hindsight it might be fair to say this was a total wank. Here they are in the Presidential Suite of the Amsterdam Hilton, in the early stages of a world the boomers made for the rest of us, pretending the only thing standing between us all and peace and love is personal choice. Rather than it being something that has to be achieved, through bloody hard work, compromise, and a whole range of institutions, including politics. This was the beginning of the great boomer wrecking ball through our societies, smashing human institutions that kept us all safe, in the name of personal choice.

Happy Birthday Miff :)

Happy Birthday :)

3 laps into the new F1 season, and it already looks even more boring than last year, which takes some doing. All the technical changes make it even more impossible for anybody to overtake, and only two cars can really win, in a field of 20. They try to hype the start of each year as 'this is the year that changes things', and then do all the things that make it even worse. The Americans now own F1, hopefully their common sense will put a rocket up some arses.

"Your daughters are watching you. They look to you as an example of how to be a woman, so when you stand around in packs in order to whisper, and gossip, and cut other women down, don’t think they don’t notice. Remember, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree." http://www.sheknows.com/community/parenting/moms-mean-girls

Have always loved hydraulics.

I wouldn't mind the AMA 'dabbling' in a little medical science too, occasionally. Plenty of what Evans says is backed by genuine cutting edge medical science, just not by doctors because they're not always connected to cutting-edge research. Look at the number of doctors who will still tell you fat is bad for you, for example, there's plenty of medical science which flatly disagrees. And fluoride - if somebody suggested today that something should be added to the water supply, no matter how noble the cause seemed, I guarantee it wouldn't be approved. You simply don't fuck with the water supply, except to kill nasties in it. It was social engineering on a grand scale. Given the most probable cause of all those cavities was people eating refined carbohydrates, changing the water everybody drinks as a band aid was just outrageous. All of this fuss over Evans misses what's really going on here, I think. Medicine has charged along for over a century treating patients like they're cars on an assembly line. As Monty Python said, it basically said to patients "shut up, you're not qualified". And in the process it turned doctors and nurses into the robots on that assembly line. Now patients are fighting back, and many of them will find fruit loop ways to try to do that, no doubt. But it was a problem medicine largely made for itself. Politicians did the same with members of the public, and we got Brexit and Trump.

These are actually fun. Memories. Who gives way in these scenarios?

Germaine Greer is a vastly under-appreciated Australian. So, maybe a series of quotes. Today...libraries. "A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity." "Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark ... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed."

Know of Tuck Andress, Pauly and @[585851453:2048:Adrian]? https://youtu.be/8k0_JxqiTB8

Greer, day two. “Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women—and has become an option for men—while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.” ― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

Germaine Day 3.

Edmund Burke was a brilliant political thinker, living at a time when politics was probably even more dire than today. Some of his wisdom (note women weren't thought to be active players in society in his day, although he does say some very wise things about women as well): "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength." "Our patience will achieve more than our force." "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." "No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning than fear." "Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.”

Happy Birthday Kim :)

Often we see fads as things for kids. Yo-yos, types of clothes, pop music one hit wonders like Gangnam Style, etc etc. But adults like fads too, and it's growing. Types of phone, types of fitness activity, types of diet, types of home design, etc etc. The technical name for this is 'The Bandwagon Effect'. It's important to understand why this is such a huge thing for all ages, at this point in history in particular. It's not just people being 'lemmings', although conformity is the main driver. But the desire to conform is complicated, and also often people don't differentiate why they 'like' something from their desire to conform. Other recent adult fads: - open plan homes - reality shows like MKR - cycling - standing ovations - active wear - camping gear - cosmetic surgeries and procedures.

So much of the venom for Pete Evans is laid bare here. It shows how deeply people believe that medicine is all scientifically based and that conditions like autism are well understood. Neither of those things is true. The venom is about people like Evans challenging our deepest need to have fundamentals in our lives, that will tell us unequivocally what to do, without thought. Evans may not have the answers either, but the venom isn't really about the particular issue of autism or nutrition. It's about people hating the uncertainty of needing to think hard. Nothing replaces the need to think.

Happy Birthday tall one! Been a while.

Young teenager busking. On recorder. Immediate pity for him. Then he started up "We Built this City on Rock 'n' Roll". Spent the money on a pie.

The modern pre-fab concrete method of constructing big commercial buildings. What's with these bits?

Are you a rentier? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth-banks-google-facebook-society-economy-parasites?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Heh, even Rupert Murdoch is part of the "Left" now. He owns Sky News, which sacked Latham for being a turd. Lesson there for us all. Anybody who uses the term "the Left" is usually brain damaged in some way.

It's very, very difficult to convince people of the silliness of moderation as an idea.

"Offence is the collateral damage of free speech." Yes Ricky.