January 2019

Modern cars are too well made, and too comfortable. I say this because I think the reason cars are destroying our communities is because they’re not just modes of transport. Cars are the way people never have to leave home, to leave home. In that comfortable shell we venture into social space in the most anti-social ways. I’ve used buses and trains for years, and the experience - the social side of it - is completely different to driving. You have to actually encounter other people, and negotiate and compromise. What cars enable is selfishness. We’re cocooned in our homes and then cocooned in our comfortable cars as we move about society. People might be more inclined to improve social spaces if they actually had to experience them, rather than drive through them in their comfortable cars. People ‘escape to the country’ in their cars, but that just spreads the same disease further.

So many of the things we see as problems caused by other things are really just us. It’s very difficult to take people seriously when they’re concerned about privacy, for example, when they do nothing but post about their private lives online. This is what we seem to do, blame mythical things like government, or social media, for behaviours that are all us. Government is us. Social media is us.

I couldn’t recommend this show highly enough. Gripping Brit crime thriller, but way more than that. The Brits are peerless with this stuff, so much more sophisticated than the black and white moralising coming out of many other cultures. What it does that makes it great art I think is explore the human desires that end up as crimes, and as a result there isn’t any black and white here. No goodies and baddies, but an extraordinary edge-of-your-seat tension of the complex ways ordinary life tries to deal with ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ desires and behaviours, and their contact with the law. The show also asks questions like, does what we’ve desired and done in the past determine how we should be judged in the present? Can a person love multiple people without betraying any of them? Etc. It scares me that we judge one another, including in law, using the assumption that we are rational creatures at root, rather than desiring creatures. This show explores the incredible damage that does. Reason itself is a type of desire.

A sequence of aerial shots of the Sydney Opera House, at different altitudes. I put this together as an exploration of the idea of ‘local’ and ‘global’, a fundamental idea we use in many areas. I think aerial shots help to show the fallacy of the idea of local and global. If you look at the one most zoomed in, you might say that’s the ‘local’ opera house. And the most zoomed out one is the most ‘global’ view. But I think what’s so clear, when looking at these pictures, is that the whole lot is *already connected*, at every scale. You’re not seeing more when you zoom out, you’re seeing the *connections* that are already there to the rest of the city, that you can’t see in the zoomed-in ‘local’ shot. Every altitude or scale shows you different levels of connection, that’s all, not a shift from local to global and back again. The ‘local’ is already ‘global’, already connected to everything else.

The Beatles were superb musicians. But Beatlemania and the enormous phenomenon The Beatles became were a sickness I think. Even The Beatles recognised that, it’s why they split up. Music should not be what changes the world. You can see how Beatlemania began at the same time today’s vast inequalities were beginning. I think music became a false substitute for politics. The scraps from the table of the powerful. One of the things I loved about Freddie Mercury was his response to journalists who asked him about the ‘meaning’ of his songs, and changing the world. He called his songs tampons - use once, and throw away. He was half-joking, but was also amazed at the way people substituted music for politics.

Brexit and Trump’s America First I think are actually very valuable. It’s a real-world test of an assumption - the assumption that countries exist in isolation first, and then join together with other countries to form the ‘international’ community. In reality they’re going to find, I’m sure, that they have it completely backwards. Countries only existed *after* empires had already established vast connections between different places. Without those connections, the country ceases to exist. This old Empire ad says the same thing.

A story with two of my favourite characters. Tourism and cars.

It’s interesting in cricket that every player has to bat. But only the bowlers normally get to bowl. I wonder why that is, and how different the game would be if only dedicated batsmen got to bat. Or if every player had to bowl.

Most people would rather join a gym than a union now. Whether you’re Left or Right, rich or poor, the destruction of unions is what’s mostly destroying our societies. Working people being looked after and earning good money are happy people, who don’t vote for Trump or Brexit. And they’re business’ best customers. But we can’t stop watching politicians and seeing them as the problem. We watch too many movies maybe, politics seems like just another movie, with goodies and baddies. Most of the fights we see in politics wouldn’t happen if the interests of ordinary working people were looked after properly. That’s the job of unions.

“In Nothing We Trust”, the motto of our times. Without institutions, superstition, chaos and conspiracies replace trust. Have a look at the graphic for the US alone. The definition of an institution is “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour”. It’s not just organisations, it’s any stability, PATTERNS (one of my obsessions) of behaviour that derive from generations of accumulated experience - families, languages, customs, legal systems, disciplines, knowledge etc. All of those are under relentless attack by a culture obsessed with the present day only, and lives and lifestyle within that present day. A total lack of respect for custom, habit, expertise. And for generational thinking, which is what institutions protect - accumulated wisdom from the past, thought for the future. They’re the way the past and future are active in our present, and we keep smashing them.

Was Bohemian Rhapsody the ‘best’ movie? Fascinating for me, because this is what Queen always do, force people to think about what’s good and what isn’t. That’s been their entire career, in music and now in film too. I don’t think this is just about personal taste, there’s something more interesting going on. I think Queen are like *the* Queen, in that they aim to be something for everyone, from serious musos to those who just want a pop thing to dance or sing along to. That was partly why they chose the name Queen, and the ‘pomp’ that critics hate is them appealing to something deep inside all people. People love magnificence, splendour, spectacle, those things transcend differences. Queen are of the ages, and most critics and musicians are focused on the here and now. It’s rare for artists now to aspire to be universal, to speak to everybody. Music is mostly territorial, defining smaller sub-groups of people. It takes real intelligence, genius, to be successfully universal. Whereas so often a band or artists might sing about some ‘serious’ issue of the day, or some personal problem they’re having, and be seen as profound. They’re mostly not.

“The public is the great arbiter...we did a film for people to enjoy, to laugh, to cry, and to celebrate.” Not posting because I’m a Queen fan, but because everything in that sentence is I think worth chewing over.

Many people look at politicians as evidence the world is broken. Me, it’s more people like the couple of anti-social dickheads who walked my street last night randomly pushing over peoples’ garbage bins, forcing people outside at 2am to pick up garbage off the street. Or people who leave campsites looking like this. I don’t see any difference between these sorts of people and all of those vandalising our social institutions - Trump, Brexiteers, much of the banking and finance industry, tourism, the car lobby etc. Anti-social dickheads freeloading off civil society.

You know what’s funnier, Bernard? Watching you suffer. I remember Michel Foucault, the great philosopher, once being asked what fine wines and food he most liked. His answer? ‘A hamburger and a Coke.’ Exactly.

Let’s build a wall to protect our borders. Hmm, rings a bell. https://gbtimes.com/failure-great-wall

Exactly! We always talk about love (but can’t define it except as something else), and are terrified of desire, which is hardly talked about at all. What scares me in the MeToo debate is its generally absolutely hopeless or even absent understanding of desire. As Perel says, we denounce of a day what we imagine and do at night. We’re terrified of desire, and so we don’t try to understand it.

Trump. Brexit. Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie). What do they have in common? All massively popular, despite ‘thinking’ people feeling they shouldn’t be. It’s the ‘thinking’ people who need to dig deep here, in my opinion. They’re not understanding very important things.

It’s strange that if you want to learn how to play tennis, or to type, or an instrument, or to knit, your body will just figure it out for you, given enough time. But to sit or stand, so many of us are a train wreck. Have you ever tried to let your body learn how to sit or stand properly, all by itself? Like you were learning to do any of those other things?

‘Let them eat cake’ is for me the perfect motto for Trump and Brexit, and for everybody who hates governments and bureaucrats. As if getting rid of governments and bureaucracies will free everybody up - it’s the same as wishing starving people could all eat cake. Somebody has to bake the cakes.

US government in shut down because Trump can’t get $5 billion for his ridiculous wall. The wall he said Mexicans would pay for (the man pathologically lies) and which construction experts say will cost at least $20 billion anyway. At a time too when US infrastructure is desperate for funding. Come on Trump fans. Justify this craziness. I saw a grinning idiot Republican saying “see, we don’t need government anyway, shut it down and everything keeps going”. Fuckwit, a lot of government employees are working for nothing to keep essential services running. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Was at the cricket yesterday. Made me think about crowds again. Have a look at the faces in any crowd, they don’t match the usual assumption about crowds, that the ‘mob’ is stupid and acts with one big, dumb mind. Every individual in a crowd acts as an individual, for their own reasons, you can see it in their faces. We tend to think crowds and individuals are 2 separate things. I don’t think they are. There is no society, as a separate thing to the individuals in it. Just as there is no separate government, no separate organisations to the people who work in them, etc. Also a famous face in this particular crowd, if you look.

Let’s pretend Orange, the town, declared it was going to separate from the rest of Australia. Like the UK is trying to do with Europe. How long would the Orange people know and love survive? Ask that question about any town or even city, and it seems obvious how ridiculous the idea of separation is. So it’s very interesting that when we ask this at a country level, many don’t think the same thing. Some people genuinely seem to not see that the country they want to isolate from the rest of the world wouldn’t even exist, without the connection to that world. They have it totally backwards.

I’m on a Brexit theme because this week the UK parliament makes the decision. Look at the mindsets in play here. Also surveys in the UK show that the public’s range of views exactly match the range of disagreement in parliament. But smug members of the public are again blaming politicians for the mess. Government is us.

Happy birthday Brenda :)

An adult standing on the ground is balancing. For me that one fact can change your entire world. We know that in young humans, to stand or sit is to balance. Check the picture. But then we become an adult, and tend to forget that in everything we do, we’re balancing. We try to ‘hold’ ourselves instead, in fixed postures. Those fixed postures become our prisons, our ‘bad backs’ and ‘dicky knees and hips’. I’d be interested if people can feel that directly. Stop holding onto yourself to try to fix yourself in positions, and feel that balancing in every moment?

This is a vortex tube. A miraculous thing hidden in industrial sheds. Compressed air enters the chamber (the bit with EXAIR written on it), and forms a vortex; like a mini-tornado. That vortex separates the air into two separate streams, one hot, and one cold (red and blue in the picture). The cold stream can get to cryogenic temperatures, minus 50 degrees C or lower, and the hot stream can go well over 100 degrees Celsius. The vortex was the centre of ancient knowledge, the link between the sciences and humanities. This device challenges everything we think we know - modern ideas can’t explain how it works. Our education and our interests are now so narrow, that this miracle goes unnoticed.

What if maps are why we can’t make sense of the world? We’re so used to understanding the world using maps like this, which suggest the world is contained inside neat coloured lines. But I’ve noticed that most fighting and debate in the world is about maps - about territory. The obsession with borders, and breaches of those borders (migration). The assertion of sovereignty - Brexit, Trump. Maps are one of the main ways we visualise or see the world, we sometimes forget the world doesn’t actually look like a map. Climate change at the same time smashes the whole thing. It crosses all of those borders. It’s all connected I think, climate change and Brexit and Trump are the wake up call that we need another way to think about territory?

Evidence lurks in interesting places. We wonder how society ends up split between millions of ordinary folk and ‘elites’. In the last 30 years almost no movie that people actually went to see has won best picture at the Oscars. Prior to that it was very common for popular movies to also win best picture. This is the point I was trying to make about Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s upset the film in-crowd - the industry luvvies - because it’s not their preferred film. They need to take a long hard look at themselves I think, and decide why they started defining themselves in opposition to the general public. And stop blaming Trump for doing it. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/03/movies/oscars-best-picture-box-office.html

Do Brexit and Trump show that nobody was listening to the Pythons? I really am interested in how people view government and regulation. In my experience a large number of people now have the shock-jock view, that regulation and government are 'red tape' and hinder peoples' freedom. The shock-jocks (and the people who pay them) seem to be winning.

Nearly 70% of the world is or is becoming desert. A simple, truly remarkable idea that could save humanity. (P.S. you get to eat a LOT more steak.)

I’m not on either side of the debate about the Gillette ad. I think ‘toxic masculinity’ is an empty idea, and I think men claiming the right to behave like dickheads are just dickheads. Simple as that. A highly specific set of behaviours in domestic environments gets labelled a gender war, rather than a problem with domestic arrangements. But hey, it fires up outrage on all sides. It’s just another type of competitive sport.

Fleetwood Mac touring Oz this year. This will be the 15th lineup of the band, under the same name. It confirms the underlying stupidity of much of the music industry for me that this goes completely unremarked, whereas Queen having a couple of different singers (and even calling themselves "Queen + other singer", not "Queen") is a big issue. Fleetwood Mac also haven't released a new album in two decades. http://ultimateclassicrock.com/fleetwood-mac-lineup-changes/

Some people know the passion I've had for this idea for a long time. Opening the country to the West, instead of always North and South along the coast, could transform Australia. Come on Australia, build things again, invest in the country, much more exciting than bloody tax cuts. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-17/elon-musk-blue-mountains-tunnel/10721798

Paglia is like Greer, an older feminist with serious scholarship behind her. It’s hard to comment on modern gender politics without sounding like you’re trying to defend one of the two ‘sides’. Both sides are bananas. Having sides is bananas. “A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment.”

An observation. It’s very difficult to get people to engage with ideas, unless they see it as a battle between two sides. Left versus Right, Trump versus just about anything, Migrants versus home-grown, Men versus Women, etc. People will go hard in battle for their chosen ‘side’, but quickly lose patience with ideas themselves. I think it’s partly because we’re a rich society. People choose comfort over debate. Rich and privileged folk tend to assume that the happy peaceful lives they live are somehow the natural state of things. And so they don’t discuss, they don’t debate, that all seems so unpleasant and yucky. We like holidays, and booze, and our favourite bands, and having a good time. We mostly have no idea how our own society even works. By not debating and discussing with others, all the underlying differences of opinion between people end up escalated to the ‘top’ of society - government and politicians. Who then have to fight doubly hard, to try to resolve these differences. And we, the smug peaceful and comfortable public who don’t deal with our own shit amongst ourselves, then sit back and take endless pot shots at pollies, telling them to sort things out. We become exactly the crowd at the stadium, watching the sport, cheering on our ‘side’. Spoiled, hypocritical spectators to our own lives.

Discuss? Camille Paglia (prominent feminist) on whether most of what makes our world 'modern' is infrastructure, built and maintained, often in horrendous conditions, mostly by men. I often think about the invisible, filthy, back-breaking work that sits underneath our comfortable lives. "Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall. Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due..."

The 10-year challenge has hilariously showed vast numbers of celebrities look younger now than they did 10 years ago. Thank you fillers, botox and scalpels. Puttin' it out there, a plastic face is an abomination and a sickness. Loved this one.

Wondered. Googled. Somebody already had the idea. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160425-how-a-giant-space-umbrella-could-stop-global-warming

Droughts and flooding rains. Mackellar’s line was a bit of misty-eyed fondness. But ironically, droughts cause flooding rains, and flooding rains cause droughts. Both are symptoms of how the Australian landscape has been gradually destroyed, firstly by aboriginal people using fire to manage their food harvest, and then by European settlers with broadscale agriculture. Both of those destroy vegetation, land without vegetation turns to desert. Drought. When rain falls on desert, it runs off - it floods. Those grasslands between our coast and our full deserts are all progressively turning to desert too. It’s why we’re baking in the heat in summer, the whole country is becoming a bare oven in the sun. Maybe the only true vision for Australia is to find a way to re-vegetate the land. And get animals back on it too, a full living ecosystem again. Which will also trap carbon in the land (and reduce climate change), as well as water in the land, which will restore our rivers and billabongs. If we don’t do it, we will die. Desert kills civilisations. Simple as that, you can’t eat or drink sand.

Elderly people in the UK were twice as likely to vote to leave Europe. Younger people were 7 times more likely to vote to stay. Doesn’t the whole world make a lot more sense when you see it through the lens of an enormous, elderly, botoxed generation desperately trying to defy time?

D.H. Lawrence used to say that love has two sides, and ignoring either of them leads to perversion. An embracing, inclusive side, and a side that pushes away, that respects the unknowable in the other. ‘Tough’ love. Perel understands. Tough love is the source of desire. I still think we’re scared of desire, as a society.

My two cents. (Have a look at this article - many don’t seem aware of the destruction the boomers have overseen. And yes, they’re mostly lovely people, it’s not relevant.) The boomers didn’t just break with tradition. They broke tradition itself. From their youth onwards, it’s been a relentless assault on inherited tradition and institutions. Very visible in the early Woodstock, anti-establishment years. But it was as they aged that the catastrophe really got going. They replaced the idea of the circle of life, fed by tradition, with the idea of the eternal present. Their own eternal youth. Now many of them look on in horror as Trump and Brexit walk into the space left by the destruction of traditions. ‘Lifestyle’ replaced the circle of life.

When you question the epidemic of cosmetic surgery, the violence of the backlash maybe reveals just how many people are being nipped, tucked, having fillers etc. It seems very sensitive for them. I’m honestly flabbergasted people aren’t concerned by this. There’s a walking army of zombie-faced mannequins out there.

“It was a salient lesson for the state’s first ever Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence and Sexual Assault, that understanding a domestic violence offender was at the heart of prevention. "It's about what tips a bloke over the edge,” she said.” Exactly, that’s the key. Not myths like ‘toxic masculinity’.

What is it that allows people to cooperate as well as act in their own self-interest? Or put in my favourite way - what does ‘we’ mean? 5 minutes of your time on the tragedy of the commons is fun, it’s the most important question in the world.

Is it a bit peculiar that we call ourselves a materialistic society, but consumerism is actually about throwing material things away? If we valued material things - if we actually were a materialistic society - we wouldn't throw them away.

Watching Brexit debates. Every single person, from member of the public through to Prime Minster, says ‘we should...’. But the whole country can’t agree on any of it. There is no ‘we’. Isn’t Brexit trying really hard to tell us something? I say society and government is just us. It’s always individuals, agreeing or disagreeing. Individuals who don't just think about their own little space, but individuals with a view of what the whole thing should look like, what ‘we’ as a society should do. If all the we’s align, you get the appearance of a society and government existing separately to the individuals in it. But it’s an illusion, as Brexit is brilliantly showing. People are being forced to recognise that they need to find a way to agree with each other, there are no short cuts. No ‘power’ can force an agreement, power is an illusion. Which is why the public is being so critical of politicians in this, they don’t like having to find agreement themselves, they want politicians to do it for them. Politicians are just people like them, they don’t have magic wands with ‘power’ in them.

The 10-year challenge. With thanks to Alex Watts.

Fear of death is really the mistaken idea that you’ll be around to notice what you’re missing.

Almost time for the great annual patriotic orgasm. I’m a proud Australian. But I’ve always found patriotism to be like thinking your kids are the most amazing kids ever born. A dad growing up under the Nazis teaches you about patriotism. Lest We Forget.

We now mostly suck at sport in Oz. So...what do we have left to give the world that makes us interesting to them?

25% of pilots admit to having 5 hours of sleep or less, before a flight.

To me this is one of the most exciting things happening in the world right now. The rediscovery of the importance of big animals - megafauna. Big animals have been under assault for centuries, often by hunting but also because of misguided ideas about the ecological damage they supposedly do. But big animals are nature’s earthmoving equipment, without them our landscapes fall apart. All of Australia’s megafauna disappeared tens of thousands years ago. But now we have feral megafauna - camels, donkeys, horses, buffalo etc. - inhabiting our landscapes. And they may be fixing our landscape, while we see them as a pest. There were over 600,000 feral camels in central Australia not many years ago, we culled about 300,000 of them, thinking we were helping the landscape. That may have been a mistake. Also fascinating is that as countries or continents push their own megafauna to extinction, they often then pop up somewhere else. We’re playing swaps with our megafauna.

Re-posting from another thread. This is a major speech Winston Churchill made in 1946, after the disaster of World War 2 and Europe lying in ruins. This was the beginning of the building of modern Europe, what the Brexiteers are trying to dismantle again now, in similar ways to Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. Compare everything you hear from Brexiteers and Trump, to what Churchill says here. Judge the danger we’re in from these modern fools. https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/united-states-of-europe/

Inflation in Venezuela predicted to hit 10 million percent by the end of 2019.

102 ways (and counting) turning your government off destroys your society (thanks @[100002452996169:2048:Nigel]).

Let them eat cake, 2019 style. Why can’t unpaid workers just go and get a loan? You couldn’t make this stuff up.

So many animal rights activists are so incredibly angry. When you’re young you sometimes feel that sort of righteous anger, it’s healthy, but then you’re supposed to grow out of it. This anger does damage I think. For example many people are now converging on one super-important idea. That the landscapes we live in need animals, plants and people, to survive. Herded animals, hunted animals. The extreme vegan view that we’d all be better off eating nothing but plants would decimate the world’s landscapes. Even plants eat meat, they need phosphorus. The only workable source of that ‘naturally’ is - blood and bone.

“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. ” ― Lewis Thomas

How stupid selling of public assets to foreign profit-taking firms gets rebranded, by the idiots who sold it off, as "Lefties/Greenies against coal". Let's be less dumb. Notice how the more privatised electricity gets, or health, or communications, or roads and transport, the more expensive it all gets. Join the dots, companies have to make money. You pay. https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-renationalising-australias-electricity-grid-73951

Esther Perel: 'Fix the sex and your relationship will transform'. What if many or even most relationship problems aren’t about love, but about desire? Desire scares us, it gets put second, like it’s not grown up or something. A huge mistake I think. And what if the common stereotype that men love sex and women don’t as much, is really just because women’s desires aren’t explored?

Wonder how many farts she’s worn over the years ;)

Happy Birthday Chels! It doesn’t say how old you are, I’m guessing 30.

The Pledge is a UK debating show on SKY. Here in Oz the ABC is doing something a bit similar, though not as good, with The Drum. This is one area where ultra-conservatives have been so clever. What engages people is hearing the different viewpoints actually debated, that’s what we really need. Q&A is dreary, too many people, leading to no real debates, just an assortment of speeches. You need a small panel of good debaters, representing all of the views. It’s compelling TV, people actually see and learn how arguments can be had and differences of opinion can co-exist and even change through debate. I don’t think our society is broken, it’s just a rich society that hasn’t had to argue about much for a long time. So the arguments now are freaking people out. But done well argument is the soul of social life, shows like this are a necessary education. Sport is the most popular thing on TV. Debates are sport for the mind.

“We should credit [the sky] for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.” ― Lewis Thomas

Happy birthday Tash!

What are your undisclosed desires? https://youtu.be/R8OOWcsFj0U

Thunderbolt and lightning Very very exciting Me

In our maths books, when we do trigonometry, are angles. What we don’t get taught is how angles were once the centre of all knowledge. An angle is a deviation. Trig lets us measure the size of the deviation, but it doesn’t tell us a thing about the deviation itself. Archimedes and others said deviation is the root of everything that exists. Archimedes saw that everything naturally deviates, that new forms and orders are always emerging, all by themselves. Order doesn’t have to be added to the world, by a God or anybody else, deviation (the new) is the default state of the world, in every moment. It even creates moments - time. The vortex is the angle in movement, a deviation that is moving forwards, deviating as it goes. Archimedes saw the vortex as the real ‘atomic’ source of everything. If you look around us, you’ll find vortices or spirals everywhere. Your body is spirally organised, you move spirally. The Earth is moving spirally through space. Great vortices on our weather maps every night. A social meme is a vortex, each person adds their own slight deviation to it, as it moves forward. Our lives ‘spiral out of control.’ Etc.

Tennis was my main sport as a kid. I’ve been interested in Federer regularly being called the greatest player of all time. The statistics don’t bear that out, Margaret Court is like the Bradman of tennis, nobody else is even close statistically. And Nadal and Djokovic both have significantly better records against Federer than he does against them. Hmm, how to say this. I think tennis is actually a prissy sport. Rich people generally play tennis (they can afford a court). Federer is adored because he’s nice, respectable, well mannered. Tennis crowds are sipping wine and eating canapés crowds, it’s a class thing. They want to see respectable players. They hated McEnroe. To me Federer as a player is actually like McEnroe, which is why I like him. An artist with the ball, unpredictable and unexpected. Djokovic and Nadal and even Serena Williams are like muscular ball machines, relentlessly belting the ball back over the net. Most modern players are trained like that. They bore me.

There is no ‘big picture’. The big picture is just a picture. This is one of the key ideas for my entire life. Whether it’s in your life or work, ‘zooming out’ will just show you another picture, with different details. You don’t see more. Apparently profound sayings, like ‘everything in moderation’, or ‘all you need is love’, sell greeting cards but are otherwise completely empty of content. There’s an emotion that goes with big picture thinking, an emotion of numinosity. Especially in what feels like troubled times, people retreat to these feelings of ‘oneness’ and ‘awe’, or ‘love for all things’, or ‘connectedness’. I never trust those feelings, they’re false Gods. Everything is always specifics, never retreat to the numinous. It’s a test I live by, if something is confusing or stressful, I’m missing what’s specifically going on. When you find that specific thing, everything becomes clear.

BBL commentary the other night. "Gilligan's Island was a good show. But it always annoyed me that they didn't get off the island, surely there was a way?" "Yeh, but then you woudn't have much of a show, would you?"

Couple of UK media people talking about the 'sewer' of social media. One asks the - I think - crucial question: is social media the cause of this sewer? Or was the sewer already there, and social media just made it visible? I think the latter - social media is us. We find new ways to delegate our failings onto other things, in this case 'screens'. As if a screen is a problem.

I find it’s often clever people who struggle most understanding politics. A country has tried exactly what Brian suggests here - it’s called China. Not sure that’s what he really wants. The custodians of our past and future are our institutions. The things Trump and Brexit are dismantling. Imagine a politician telling you your pay had to be cut ‘for the interests of people 500 years from now.’ They’d be a laughing stock. Yet another way I think we lump all of our grievances into one overflowing basket labelled ‘politicians’. They’re the scapegoats for most of our failings.

Happy Birthday! Settled with a good book?

Happy Birthday mate

Can we as a society discuss this fantasy? The fantasy that countries can exist separately. It's poison, it will literally destroy us. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-brexit-fantasy-goes-down-in-tears

A new model of worker power. Self-organised action, using the Net.

Nobody ever has an answer to this one, a question about space with huge implications. Where does a phone call take place? You could say ‘at either end of the call’. But that’s not peoples’ experience in a call, they laugh, cry and just generally chat as if the other person was ‘there’. So what’s the space we’re occupying when we’re talking on a phone?

"That's not a forehead, dad. It's a fivehead." Megamind has infiltrated the European Parliament.

Big elections this year. 1. Should voting be compulsory? 2. Should we move to online elections? My view. 1. Absolutely yes. 2. Absolutely no. https://theconversation.com/compulsory-voting-much-like-democracy-beats-the-alternatives-34765

I’ve seen this one on social media a lot. Firstly Roosevelt didn’t say it, I don’t think. But secondly, how true is it? I’d maybe re-write it as: Small thinking doesn't discuss anything. It compares people with one another. Average thinking gets lost in the numinous. Great thinking discusses how ideas can change peoples’ lives.