September 2017

Would recommend this show if you want to go a bit deeper than the daily sound bites, into how government and parliament works. Fascinating stuff.

Often I think about everything being a woman would mean having to juggle. Biologically, socially, psychologically, the lot. Sometimes there are jokes about women being crazy. Seriously, I wouldn't want to have to do what they have to do. Respect.

Mosley is important because he really investigates the science.

Happy Birthday Kiah :)

Please, somebody? 'Hazardous haze' from 'hazard-reduction burns'. ffs? Could we get any dumber? (We could. Daylight 'saving' is only weeks away.)

I do wear crocs, so can't pretend I'm up with all the latest trends. I'd never heard of 'resting bitchface'. It's everywhere, if you're 20 years behind everybody else, like me, Google it.

Inspirational example of how real thinking solves the world's problems, and cooperation. Most of what's really important in the world is happening out of sight, not in the daily diet of disaster and terrorism, which is just there to sell papers and get people elected. The world is doing ok.

Here's some of the potential of 'self-driving' cars. You could program one of these to help teach young people to drive. On top of that they would also help prevent young people from killing themselves on the road, whether through lack of skill and experience, or stupidity. Would you sleep better knowing the car had your back, if your children were behind the wheel? I'm sure they'll include a mode for that, just as they have parental controls on other devices.

Still love it.

This is what every cake except one, in one store, says in Woolworths. And even in that store the 'Special Persons Day' cake was one only, amidst a great pile of Happy Fathers Day and Dad cakes like the one in the picture. All triggered by a suggestion by one loopy academic on the dumbest show on TV, Today Tonight. A suggestion nobody is going to take seriously. Take a breath. Think. Do 5 mins of research. Nobody is banning Fathers Day. Or Christmas. Or Christmas Lights. Or the Tooth Fairy. Or Easter. I noticed watching the netball today that both the South Africans and the New Zealanders sing bilingual national anthems. I think there'd be some sort of collective pants-shitting if it was suggested here.

Has satire failed when a character takes the piss out of an entire country for 50 years, and they mostly didn't realise?

Yeh.

In these hysterical debates, the apparently persecuted people opposing same-sex marriage want to spend $122 million of your money to stop it. And they're a tiny minority in the elected parliament. Always follow the money if you want to see where the power is.

The 'weaponising' of free speech. The people who claim their free speech is being shut down, by the 'politically correct'. Criticism is not censorship, suddenly having your views criticised is apparently you being censored. The people who make these ridiculous claims are some of the most powerful and influential groups in the world, with enormous resources to have their messages heard by everybody, to claim they're being shut down is beyond ridiculous. It's just another strategy these ruthless, powerful thugs have come up with to cling desperately to the power, privilege and prejudice they've had for centuries. They actually call it the weaponising of free speech, it's not my term. We're fools if we fall for it.

The sun. The Pacific. Tarde. A dream week.

This is motherhood at its most powerful, rescuing an otherwise horrifying kids singing to cam vid. (Thanks Molly) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hILk2BcE9BI

Life begins and ends doing pretty much the same things :)

Happy Birthday Brett! Have a wonderful day.

Happy Birthday Evert! Having a surf?

A while back I'd post a Proust quote every day, just because he was a bit special. Might do the same for Whitehead. On the outside the most gentle and unassuming of people, on the inside a complete revolutionary.

Sitting is the new smoking, they said. What a load of bollocks, some of us said. The bollocks crowd wins, double the risk of heart disease in people who stand all day at work. In fact, until these studies look at HOW people stand and sit, you may as well use them as toilet paper.

The daily Whitehead.

Often surprised at how many people haven't seen When Harry Met Sally.

One commentator said we're rapidly becoming the US, with millions of working poor with little job security, poverty-level wages and no ability to keep up with everyday expenses. And public services becoming privatised and unaffordable and increasingly gutted. And yet there has never been more money and wealth in this country and others, in the past 20-30 years. How does that work? The top 1% of the population have taken it. Unions and taxes were smashed, essential services privatised and a culture of status encouraged, in schooling and education.

As I go to bed tonight I look forward to seeing a white blanket of snow out the window in the morning. Or else, Amanda O'Regan 😉

Two Whiteheads for the price of one today.

There's a bit of sleet out here Amanda O'Regan, you're still in the game.

Many people are not sure what to think about indigenous issues. Even if they mean well, they don't know where to start. Germaine Greer's essay on this from years ago now is brilliant. As with all things Germaine, most people dismissed it without even reading it. But she makes the very powerful point that we don't even properly understand what being a European Australian is, that from the day the Brits set up a settlement here, we've been drinking ourselves into oblivion, without really understanding why. So she approaches this topic from that direction - that if we understood what drives so many of us to drink so much, we might actually start to understand indigenous issues much better as well - that there's a common void at the heart of both of our lives.

A 7-seater is considered a 'people mover' today. That was barely half-full with some older cars, and people were seated in comfort.

Another double dose of Whitehead.

The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference.

This graph has a story to tell. It's not the "welfare is sending us broke" story. It's the "top 1% of earners are screwing the rest of us and destroying the economy" story.

It amazes me that we let ourselves get in a lather over something like Centrelink benefits, while corporate money pigs like Joyce do stuff like this. Linking take-home pay to share price is just one of the CEO's many tricks.

In the old days doctors would prescribe 'taking some air' at the seaside. We look back on that and think they were a bit simple. Maybe it's us who have become too simple to understand how wise they were. There are all manner of 'talking therapies' around to help people with their problems. Maybe life gives us a much faster, smarter way to deal with most of our problems. Fletcher is a fascinating guy, with the research to back him up.

Happy birthday mate!

A second language is a powerful thing.

Is your work a stupid place? Why?

Air pollution matters in so many ways. 4 out of the 5 mass extinction events in Earth history were air pollution events. "...more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire smoke."

Happy birthday :)

I think you can understand nearly all of our society with this one story.

Happy Birthday!

Hope nobody is eating dinner.

Well said, and true.

Happy Birthday cuz! Many happy returns, they used to say (I always wondered if that meant people got a lot of crap presents).

Remember who was first, when these are hip.

So, once we get the SSM postal survey out of the way, how about assisted dying next?

Phew, flew under the radar on most of these. Unless I'm delusional.

I’d wager most of us were taught that humans are the most complex organisms, and bacteria some of the simplest. Another thing we were taught upside down.

Like all the best sayings, many layers of wisdom in it. Discuss?

Tarde, one of my heroes.

Unsurprisingly, all the personal things are the dangerous ones. What do people understand the 'social' to mean, in 'social media'?

Happy Birthday!

Imagine a wearable device that allowed your partner to track how little or much they’ve been having sex with you. Reckon it might increase the quantity and quality of sex? Me either.

This winter we shifted our thinking on heating and energy, and it turned out to be a smart move. After previously spending nearly 2 grand for gas heating for a winter with the huge jump in gas prices, this year we shifted to reverse cycle air con. And at the same time ditched the major energy retailers and found one that offered close to wholesale prices. The outcome was amazing. Heating for the whole winter cost us about $100. And the new reverse cycle units are so good, they’re not only about 600% efficient (nothing else gets even close to 100%), but also come with an air purifying function that kept the air in the house clean of the wood and coal smoke and other nasties that are about in winter in particular. And now they’re keeping the pollen out of the house in hay fever season.

"...a society is a group of people who display many resemblances produced either by imitation or by counter-imitation. For men often counter-imitate one another, particularly when they have neither the modesty to imitate directly nor the power to invent. In counter-imitating one another, that is to say, in doing or saying the exact opposite of what they observe being done or said, they are becoming more and more assimilated, just as much assimilated as if they did or said precisely what was being done or said around them. Next to conforming to custom in the matter of funerals, marriages, visits, and manners, there is nothing more imitative than fighting against one's natural inclination to follow the current of these things, or than pretending to go against it.” Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation

I’m not a grammar Nazi, but ‘falled’ *cough*

I never quite understood the idea of a best friend, even as a kid. https://pamelahawley.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/why-you-shouldnt-have-a-best-friend/

Tarde was almost unique because he didn’t believe that there was any difference between big things and small things. And as part of that he didn’t think standardisation of things - McDonalds in every town, the spread of the same fashions, languages, music etc. - was a bad thing at all. He saw those as the way *differences* between things spread, not a way that some apparently lovely complex local thing was being wiped out. He would have loved pop music. “The speech of men, each with a different accent, intonation, and timbre of voice and gesture: this veritable chaos of discordant heterogeneities is the social element. But at length, general habits of language emerge from this confused Babel, and are formulated as grammatical laws. In their turn the latter serve, by bringing into relation a greater number of speakers, only to throw into relief the particular individual turn taken by their ideas: another kind of discord. And they succeed all the more in the diversification of minds to the extent that they are themselves more fixed and uniform.”

Watching again, with the same-sex marriage debate, just how hopeless progressive people are at politics. "For example, when Feinberg and Willer asked liberals to write an op-ed aiming to convince conservatives of the value of same-sex marriage, most wrote something to the tune of, “Why would we punish these people for being born a certain way? They deserve the same equal rights as other Americans.” The problem is, research on thousands of people around the world, summed up in something called Moral Foundations Theory, has shown that liberals are more likely than conservatives to endorse fairness-based arguments like these. Meanwhile, just 8 percent of the liberals in Willer and Feinberg’s study were able to craft an argument that would appeal to conservatives’ value of loyalty toward your own kind. (So something like, “Our fellow citizens of the United States of America deserve to stand alongside us ... We should lift our fellow citizens up, not bring them down.”) What’s worse, some of them picked an argument that directly contradicted what many conservatives value, with arguments like, “your religion should play no part in the laws of the United States.”

Who says scientific journals are boring? http://www.nature.com/news/sexual-competition-among-ducks-wreaks-havoc-on-penis-size-1.22648?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox

“PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them.” Nasty, powerful and rich people win again. Political correctness is a bullshit term, it means absolutely nothing. It’s a wink and nudge rallying cry for nasty, powerful people, another deliberate, thought-out strategy to screw the weakest people in our communities. They know exactly what they’re doing. Do you?

Happy Birthday Dan! Hope you're on the mend.

This is where people like Cleese get completely suckered by ruthless political strategists. Of course people should be allowed to be offended and to cause some offence, in comedy and elsewhewre. What Cleese doesn't understand is that the people who talk a lot about the evils of political correctness and people always being offended actually couldn't care less about either of those things. (In fact it's often how they make their vast money, by being offended 24/7 about everything, in their radio and TV shows.) It's a political strategy, to help rich, powerful groups appeal to the working poor, by suggesting to them that the 'elites' are telling them what to do. Cleese should take a look online at some of the scum who delight in re-posting his video. That will tell him what's really in play here.

Little experiment. If you’re standing up, and lean forward a bit, you’ll feel a pressing at the front of your feet. What is that pressing feeling, what causes it?

Life insurance companies and super funds make a motza off us, all because of this. We're not living longer.

I don't express many views here about same-sex marriage. But one thing the debate has highlighted for me is the resources and determination of very conservative people in Australia and around the world, and their political skill and ruthlessness. Euthanasia is another topic where their views have determined public policy for a long time, in clear opposition to the views of most Australians. It tells you that their skill in politics has given them power well beyond their actual numbers in society. Less well known is that it's these same people who reinvented conservative politics in the late 1970s, and are behind a lot of the modern tactics of attack politics - dog whistling, framing, the free speech and offence and political correctness campaigns etc. Hats off to them for their initiative and intelligence in this - those who oppose them have been fairly clueless in response.

Immortality - what if we actually all are immortal, already, and we just don’t realise, because we don’t understand time, life and death?

Happy birthday you!!!!!

My recipe for the relationship to last a lifetime? Don’t look for somebody who is like you, who shares the same interests and passions. Not saying that can’t work, but it can be a bit like looking in a mirror every day. It’s what nearly all relationship advice will tell you to do though. Look for somebody different. Not just any old different, you want the sort of differences that will make that person seem like a nice surprise to you, nearly every day. That feeling people often only get by changing relationships, that fresh and new feeling, of a new person with their unexpected ways. You can have that every day, if you don’t go looking for your mirror image.

Sigh, nobody does shows like this.

Some of you would be disappointed if I didn’t... It’s that time again, where the days are exactly the same length, but we pretend we’re ‘saving’ daylight because we make sods like me get up in the dark, so others can have an extra hour of sun after work. And mess up everybody’s circadian rhythms in the process. But hey, let’s not let health get in the way of a stupid idea.

@[100011365024408:2048:Amy Thompson]

Labs are workplaces. But they can also be beautiful, I haven’t often seen them described in aesthetic ways.

So, it *is* pronounced Mack-Le-more! In your face snotty smug teenagers.

Happy birthday to this special guy.