February 2019

'Name-calling in reverse.' Worth pondering I think. https://www.thoughtco.com/glittering-generality-virtue-word-1690816

We’re taught that ‘life’ is this finite thing, between birth and death. And that death is the absence of life. Some people believe there is life after death. (Interestingly, it’s less common to ask - is there life before birth?) My two cents. Life and death are like all binaries, not things but perspectives. That’s where we get it wrong. In reality we’re not either alive or dead, we’re just more or less connected to other things. Death is equivalent to sleep, when we unplug our connections to other things. Dreams allow us almost infinite freedom to experience things, because we’re not restrained by connections. Dreams aren’t movies playing in our heads, they’re our lives freed up from having to compromise with other entities. From this point of view, lucid dreaming *is* what ‘life after death’ means. When we ‘die’, we don’t disappear, we live permanently in dreams. Whether we’re conscious of that depends on how lucidly we live those dreams.

These are the sorts of prices I remember from primary school. I was in Year 1 in 1974.

Around the World in 80 Days won Best Picture at the Oscars in 1957. It would never win today. To me there’s a lot to be learned in thinking about why.

Two of the most destructive concepts I think of our times are nature and culture. They’re glittering generalities, absolutely meaningless. The idea of nature has prevented us from understanding the natural world, and the idea of culture stops us understanding the social world. And more than anything, they stop us seeing the natural and social worlds as the same world.

Happy Birthday! Have a wonderful day

This graph shows why Australia has looked like its ‘economy’ has been growing constantly for the past 25 years. We’ve been using our houses as ATMs, ramping up house prices using cheap credit and then using the ‘equity’ in our homes to fund more spending elsewhere in the country. House prices are trending down. Sensible people have warned about the danger for many years. There is no equity in our homes, it’s a credit bubble. Our country is a casino. There is nothing to show for all this supposed growth - we haven’t produced anything. Extreme danger ahead.

Are you a hedgehog or a fox? Taken from an old fable, hedgehog thinkers have one big idea, which they apply to all things. Hedgehogs are certain, they’re ‘moral’ thinkers who talk about right and wrong. Foxes know many things, and are uncertain and empirical, they test and they question and believe things in a provisional, always revised way. In research on decision-making, foxes easily beat hedgehogs when it comes to making decisions that work. I see our societies as increasingly like a hedgehog, not a fox, searching for absolutes and big binary oppositions. Every issue gets transformed into a goodies and baddies fight. Which suggests we’re making poor decisions.

I’m lucky to have seen Elton years ago, before boomer rock acts charged you a week’s wages for a ticket. I wonder if people feel better in the shittiest seats in the house with ‘sapphire’ tickets? Marketing folk are good at polishing turds. As always we’re the problem, we pay the stupid prices so they keep charging them. Amazing that he’s coming to Bathurst, that’s fantastic. Might just sit on the verandah of the Panorama and listen.

Is the problem with the world today that there are too many stupid people? No.

More we. If people protest, who are they protesting to?

Give up your day job man.

Pondering narcissism. Maybe we have it wrong, why is the love of self bad? Esther Perel: “You rarely hear a woman say: What turns me on the most is to see him really into it. What turns her on the most, is to be the turn on. The secret of female sexuality is how narcissistic it is. It’s the antidote to a woman’s social world, which is so much about tending to the needs of others. In order to actually be sexual—which means to be inside her own mounting pleasures, sensations, excitement and connection—she needs to be able to not think about others. To think about others will take her outside the woman role and into the care-taking and mother role.”

So much wisdom in here about consent and what it means, and what it limits.

It's not a coincidence I don't think that bipolar disorder flourishes in a world addicted to binary thinking. It's the same phenomenon. The medicalisation of depression over time has stripped away most of that wider context. Our societies are themselves bipolar, things are either manically amazing, or catastrophically bad.

Is it society, or nature, when it takes 2.46 terawatt hours of electricity to keep in touch on social media?

Why don’t engineers and tradies get more annoyed with the definition of ‘mechanical’? Only somebody who’s never built or fixed anything could imagine that mechanical devices operate without spontaneity. That ‘automatic’ functioning is bloody hard work, and always needs fixing.

I tried watching this year's State of the Union, couldn't get through it. I love America and Americans, so these comments are observations, not criticisms. It always strikes me how pious the US is at root, I sometimes wonder that it may be only immigration that saved it from becoming one giant Amish community. Such a melting pot of people from all over the world, shoehorned into a sort of pious patriotism? (My American friends can correct or unfriend me here!) It makes the people lovely and kind and polite and generous, but there's such an earnestness about it all - so, so serious. And if every fart gets a standing ovation, just give up on applause right now people. It's meaningless.

The last famous Australian entertainer who retired and came back, coincidentally called "The Voice", has been mocked ever since.

I had a teacher in primary school who put a picture like this above the blackboard. We saw it all day, every day. Like most people we came to think of posture as a position of some sort - sitting up versus slouching. It never helped, sitting up hurt as much as slouching, we were up and down like yo-yos. Now I understand that nothing is more important to your health - all of it, right down to the cells, and including for diseases of our hearts, lungs eyes, even cancer - than your ‘posture’. All of it is integrated. But I also understand that ‘bad posture’ is one thing only - trying to fix your position in space. Positions are the bad. All bad posture disappears when you get rid of all positions and instead gently let yourself be poised in every moment, which just means paying attention to what’s happening in each moment. Poise, balanced between forces, making you calm and alert and ready to automatically respond to whatever happens. You will be present to the moment, and because each moment is different, your whole body will be poised in a state of calm readiness, dynamically and effortlessly changing its balance for you every second. It’s not even about your body, your presence to what you’re doing and the changes each moment *is* poise, your ‘body’ will respond accordingly.

“My sympathy for wealthy retirees has been sorely tested by their self-serving greed.” We might be getting close to the last elections where the old get to screw the young.

Did you know that if an asteroid hadn’t knocked the Earth off its axis to its current tilt, there would be no seasons? Earth would be mostly uninhabitable. Another example I think of how difference and deviation and variation are the origin of all things. And read this if you don’t like the cold of winter, without winter you would be, alas, dead.

Happy Birthday Nige! What a respectable age.

Watching this story unfold made me think again about our gambling culture. It's not just limited to what we see as traditional gambling? Get-rich-quick is like a society motto. How many people churned multiple homes in the past 20 years, to make quick capital gains? And look at the demand for lotteries, and tax-free superannuation, and and... https://www.theland.com.au/story/5887707/weir-out-for-four-years-over-jiggers/

In the 1970s, rock shows as we know them today were invented. It was an exciting time. But since then, has anybody really invented anything new with them? Better lights and sound technology, big screens, sure, but those are just tweaks. It's all become a bit formulaic, nobody has come up with new innovation in ways to present a rock show? St Vincent's last tour, maybe?

Never come between a boomer and a bucket of money. Here's the angry face of old fart entitlement. Oldies currently getting 'refunded' for tax they never paid, to the tune of nearly 8 billion dollars a year (almost double what the federal government spends on public schools). More than half of these 'refunds' are going to people with $2.5 million in super, or more. They may still decide the election. And we worry about people on the dole.

There’s talk that the ‘organisational culture’ at the banks needs to change. Consultants make millions trotting out ‘culture’ as an explanation of struggling companies, because it’s bullshit. You don’t get paid to have personal relationships, they’re none of the company’s business. I hate the Orwellian ways companies now feel obliged to try to manage peoples’ personal relationships and views at work, all because the work itself isn’t going well. So let’s blame the people. The culture at banks isn’t the problem, finance and credit as a way to keep society moving are the problem. Our banks are us, they’ve been funding our own credit-binge lifestyles.

A criminally neglected song. Love that guitar sound.

Happy birthday Rach :)

Popular music, with the exception of Brian May and maybe some vocal groups, has lost its counterpoint? Counterpoint for me is the highest form of music, and maybe of all art. Bach wrote the book. Instead of having melody plus harmonies, you have melody plus counter-melodies, which become the harmonies. So you have this delicious play of melodies off against each other, creating constantly shifting harmonies. Once you start noticing counterpoint, it becomes addictive. (I think it’s the highest form of art because it solves the old Tower of Babel - multiple voices in harmony, without losing their individual differences. Everything from music to conversation can aim at counterpoint.) Have a listen to this Nat King Cole classic. The big band leaders of that day wrote amazing counterpoint, the band was constantly playing counter-melodies to the main melody, which often gets missed. It’s like 2 or 3 stories all happening at once. Also, listen to that first big blast after Cole puts the little keyboard down, those big bands were the heavy metal of their day, a physical wall of air moving across a room. Amplified music can’t do it the same way, it was a physical wave of sound.

At first glance this looks like a boring list of numbers. But this shows the age distribution of voters across all Australian electorates and States. It’s a window into who we really are as a country. If you look, what stands out is how in almost every electorate, the 60+ age group absolutely dominates voters. That’s the boomers. There are also summaries for each state in the coloured rows. We live in an old society. Is it surprising that so much of our politics is about what interests the elderly? Fear and anxiety of just about everything, xenophobia, law and order, enormous distributions of money to the old, punitive laws aimed at the young, and general conservatism and pining for the old days? Most of the mysteries of our crazy politics are explained by these demographics I think, not by looking at politicians. Politics and government are us. The old are desperately trying to resist the young and the new, and their own mortality. That’s the real battle front of our times, the Peter Pan generation versus the rest of us.

Find one big public issue that isn’t explained by the old replacing the circle of life with eternal unchanging youth. Faces that don’t age, countries that have to be shaped in the patriotic image of the past, tradition and institutions replaced by ‘lifestyle’ considerations, borders to keep change and diversity away, exponential increase in travel while our own landscape disintegrates, xenophobic fantasies about countries ‘going it alone’. Etc. In the news today, more pork barrelling to the old. Easy dots to join.

I’m with her. I’d call it an ‘ordinary’ life. Habit, routine, all the things I love the most. To go back to the circle of life, I see the apparent craziness of the world today as pretty simple, the replacing of calm traditions of generations of wisdom with frantic ‘lifestyle’ and career goals. The eternal present, where you can never be fit enough, young enough, travel enough, own enough, do enough ‘new’ things. Bloody exhausting. If you step off that train and into the calm depth of routine and habit, you find peace and wisdom. Nothing is more fulfilling for me than the simple routines of everyday life. And I like getting older, we won’t get the circle of life back until we give up our ridiculous fear of age.

I find Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray one of the strongest metaphors of the times we live in. It's a bit of a theme for me right now, because I think most of our big problems as a society are being misdiagnosed. Our society is the picture, gradually taking on all of the chaos and destruction which the desperate quest for eternal youth and fabulous lifestyles are creating. The desire to escape ageing and death are Dorian, society is the picture, absorbing Dorian's insatiable thirst for eternal, sensual youth.

An annual posting. I think it's an important insight.

It's nice when your theme of the week plays out repeatedly in the press in front of us. Doubt the elderly run our society? Look closely.

I’m curious if the main theme of Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie), which Rami Malek talks about here, is well understood? That Freddie Mercury was a persona, not a person. An incredibly shy outsider, connecting with other outsiders, using this persona as the tool. One of the ironies of the critical response to the film is that the film does exactly the same thing. It’s an outsider, taking on the film establishment. It’s interesting to me how common the assumption is that anything that connects with millions can’t be as good or serious as something that connects with only a handful. What does ‘good’ mean?

Every year engineers release a report card on the health of US infrastructure. (They do the same in Australia.) D+, not pretty. It’d be the same in many countries, we tend to build things and then just assume they never need maintaining. Isn’t this one of the clearest ways of showing the myth that we live in a ‘materialistic’ society? Materialism would require us to love and respect material things. We don’t, not only do we not look after material things, we also throw vast quantities of them away every day, as any trip to a tip will show. We’re idealistic societies, our real passion is disembodied ideals.

Happy Birthday Bellie!

A few years ago I had whooping cough, hell on Earth. There wasn't much on offer in terms of treatment, so I did my own research and found that some doctors a century ago used high doses of vitamin C to dramatically speed recovery. So that's what I did. I was better within days. Now it seems this has possibly much wider applicability. I tell all my friends suffering from infections to take vitamin C, they've had great success too. It's not really a 'vitamin' in the way that term is defined. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/could-deadly-infections-be-cured-vitamin-c-180963843/

Bill Shorten and Kerryn Phelps should have had the brains to figure out this medical evacuation issue would play right into the hands of the incompetent bunch of dipshits on the government benches. 20-odd years into the border protection, stopping the boats slogans. And still the progressive side of politics hasn't figured out a powerful, strategic rebuttal. Just more noble speeches and appeals to 'humanity' blah blah. It plays well to fellow progressives, but they didn't need convincing.

Still seems an irony that people on the one hand are very concerned about privacy, and in the same breath use a global platform as a family photo album. And there's the slide night thing, there was a time inflicting your personal photos on others was considered cringeworthy and boring. And the psychology - why is it that, given a global platform to interact with others, the thing we most want to use it for is to talk about ourselves? We'd dread a dinner date who did that. All just bemused questions...

I don’t hate boomers. I talk about them because, as the article says, demographics explains just about everything. Left, Right, capitalism, patriarchy - all those big explanations explain pretty much nothing. But demographics will tell you, as David Foot famously said, about two-thirds of everything you need to know. Right now the old run the world because of the demographics. Simple as that.

Yes yes I know, broken record. But election looming, this stuff is important. Pictures do sometimes say more than a thousand words.

Here’s another way to look at a society without tradition and meaningful institutions. Williams describes the end point of doing that, the young, and the old and frail get thrown on the scrap heap, with only the healthy adult age group getting meaningful attention. That’s what the breaking down of the ‘circle of life’ means, it gets replaced with the ‘lifestyle’ needs of healthy adults. For example, schools and aged care are underfunded and treated as dumping grounds for kids and the old and frail. We’ve lost a lot of the ideas of duty and responsibility and tradition, how our young and adults and old interact, which our institutions maintained.

There’s lots to like about Dick. But he’s banging the population drum again. And it’s not really about population - which you can’t control - it’s about immigration, which you can. He doesn’t seem to understand that Australia is an ageing population, and without immigration there won’t be the young people to do the work to support the old. In 1927 9% of the population was older than 65. By 2057 that proportion will be 22%.

Spinning tops should be impossible. They move, and don’t move. They’re stable, and unstable. All at the same time. For me, they’re telling us something super important. Whenever we come up against a binary argument, between two ‘sides’, the way through isn’t the ‘middle’ or ‘moderation’. The middle for a top would be what - moving a bit, and not moving a bit? Standing up a bit, and falling over a bit? Doesn’t work. Both sides of an argument work together to create a dynamic stability. The ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’ in politics for example always exist together, and when they’re allowed to fight each other society becomes stable. You need both ‘sides’ to get that stability. Politics partly looks crazy at the moment I think because one of the sides - the progressives - is bloody hopeless. They believe argument and persuasion are unnecessary, that the right thing is obvious. The 'sensible middle'.

Is Australia watching ScoMo frothing at the mouth about border protection and thinking, "the boats will be back!"? Or are they thinking "these idiots are absolutely bloody desperate to try to stay in government"? You could see them change earlier this week, from having nothing to sell, to suddenly thinking they could bang the boats drum yet again.

🙄

I saw a prominent person say the other day that “aborigines lived in balance with nature for thousands of years.” They didn’t, nobody ever has, nature is not balanced, nature is not even a thing. To me it’s interesting that it’s exactly the same belief that drives free market thinking, that there’s this thing called a market, which will naturally balance itself if you leave it alone. How’s that for strange bedfellows. Balance is something you have to produce, it takes work and thought. Lots of ‘holistic’ thinking forgets this too I think, it has the same fantasy of balance, doesn’t matter where it’s used. All of it just replaces God, who was the old ‘balance’ regulating things, with a new magical balancing thing. Ultimately it’s a cop-out way of not taking responsibility for making things work.

Testing the big ScoMo slogan machine. Has anybody actually seen their electricity and gas prices go down?

Damning.

Yes. This. “We talk as though “traditional masculinity” were the enemy, as though we want men to evolve into something more like women. But that’s wrong. What we need is not faux-women but nobler, more confident men. The man-heroes of the future, if we’re to have one, won’t be the brutes and sociopaths. They won’t be the cruel and the thoughtless, the boat-stoppers and coal-brandishers. They’ll be those who hold power but refuse to exploit it, renowned as much for their kindness as their exploits. Literally, gentlemen.”

The Problem is the Solution

Here’s, to me, another magic way life is slapping us around the face to try to get us to listen to it. This phrase - the problem is the solution - has been used by a few people, to mean different things. Often seen in corporate gobbledygook, to mean ‘every problem is an opportunity to improve’, as if reality was one big self-help workshop.

Yeh, nah. Another binary, as if a problem in your life has to be 'solved'. What if problems are just life not always giving you everything you want? That doesn't need solving, that's reality. Lennon was just one of a generation who encouraged us to think that the hard things in life - like ageing, disagreement, war - are problems to be solved. They refused to accept one basic humble fact, that we don't control life, and difficulties are what actually force us to grow. We're living in the ruins of those ideas right now.

The paradox of Attenborough’s work is that it’s encouraged a sort of voyeurism of the natural world. The ethical struggle they had with these penguins seems a bit ridiculous? And the ideas about ‘nature’ that they use in their work is the cause. The paradox is that by treating the natural world (whatever that means) in such a reverential way, we’ve just about destroyed it, I think it discourages us from developing meaningful relationships with it, we’re too scared we’ll break it. Or we say it’s nothing, man has dominion over it, it’s just a resource. Another modern binary, we either worship nature, or flog it.

More ways we maybe don’t understand gravity and weight well. The SAXA salt container was empty, and I asked a few family members to lift the spoon and the salt container a few times each, and say which one felt ‘heavier’. Everybody including me thought the spoon was heavier. When we put them on the scales, the salt container was more than twice the weight of the spoon. We then tried it with an empty cardboard box, about half the size of a shoe box. It felt about the same weight as the spoon. It was nearly 10 times the weight of the spoon, on the scales. Try it, it’s quite surprising for people. What we feel as ‘weight’ when lifting isn’t the weight of the object we’re lifting.

Do you get anxious about whether you have enough super? Super is I think one of the great shams of the finance industry, who naturally want you to invest as much money with them as you can. The idea of ‘lifestyle’ retirements (thank you boomers) is the fuel for this fire, being old is now seen as one permanent life of luxury, with overseas holidays, new cars etc. This really matters, it costs employers billions of dollars to fund this, but even more it costs you as a taxpayer astronomical amounts of tax concessions, money that can’t go to schools, hospitals, roads etc. The good news is, if you ignore the snake oil salespeople from the finance industry, you’re likely fine. If you’re a low-income person you’ll probably be richer in retirement than when you were working.

Teach your children to be brave. We could start by not always telling them how scary the HSC is. Or how scary being online is, or that scary perverts are trying to kidnap them, etc. Some of this stuff was scarier in my day, and no adult ever told us it was, so we all just got on with it. In my experience adults are as bad as kids with resilience, we all tell ourselves society and life are scary, and every challenge sends us off to a counsellor. Or we vote for politicians that tap into our fear. “Somehow a misunderstanding has grown up about stress and anxiety where our culture now sees both as pathological,” said Damour. “The upshot of that is that we have adults and young people who are stressed about being stressed and anxious about being anxious.”

What if our mistake with climate change is to think it’s about climate? We’ve used fossil fuels for several centuries to ‘free’ ourselves from the usual constraints of life - our connections to our landscapes, to our territories. We travel at whim to anywhere in the world and export and import goods similarly. We became the people of no-place, of every-place, at once. Fossil fuels contain millions of years of captured solar energy, which we’ve burned in only a handful of centuries. We’ve been burning time. Before them there was a natural limiter in things, we had to manage with the contraints of the energy and resources in our bits of territory. Fossil fuels massively deterritorialised humanity, stripped it of its territories. From this point of view, maybe the populism we see and are horrified by in politics today *is* the political response to climate change. We keep wondering why the public aren’t interested enough in climate, but actually they’re passionately interested about the root cause of climate change - the loss of their own territory. Their connection to place.

Here's the swindle right at the heart of superannuation. The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) sets the 'benchmarks' for different levels of retirement. For example, whether you want a 'basic', 'modest' or 'comfortable' retirement. These benchmarks are used by all super funds and policy makers as a guide. Why is it a swindle? For a few reasons, firstly because it's the finance industry being allowed to determine how much money we all need - what could go wrong there? It's a fundamental conflict of interest. Secondly because, as you can see in the graph, a 'comfortable' retirement is currently set at a level that is more affluent than most households, even if they're still working and earning income. It's ridiculously high (which in turn forces all of us to give the finance industry more money to invest). Retirement has never, ever, in human history been a time where you have more wealth than people raising families. (Until the boomers shifted retirement to a 'lifestyle' paradigm.) Thirdly and most scandalously, the only way any of this affordable is through colossal tax concessions. The taxpayer funds most of these enormous nest eggs we're accumulating, those tax concessions alone currently cost more than the entire aged pension. And it's not just the concessional 15% tax here, it's the completely tax-free super current retirees enjoy (once the boomers die, I will bet my house that concession will go, it was a vote bribe by Peter Costello, to boomers).

lol, +1! They do the same thing here, seduce you with the low-20s or high-teens temperature or chance of rain in the forecast, at the end of a 40+ week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkDvqQKGgDA

‘Drought’ is still a highly loaded word in Australia for me. There’s a tendency to see rain as something that happens, or not, which we have no influence on. But rain is part of a wider water cycle, and we can influence that a lot. For example clearing land and preventing soil from storing water can drastically impact on rainfall. The Amazon rainforest, at the other extreme, makes nearly all of its rain itself. They say a river can survive humans taking about 20% of its water for irrigation and other uses. The Murray Darling regularly loses 50% of its water to irrigation in a standard year, and as high as 75% in a ‘dry’ year. Get the bullshit meter out next time you hear somebody say that river is dying because of ‘drought’.

Happy Birthday! A biggie.

You can't judge a book by its cover? Maybe. But everything I didn't like about John Howard is somehow in that look. Sneaky, mean-spirited, small-minded, vindictive, appealing to the worst side of us. Encouraged Australia to look in instead of out.

Excellent. Now let's get them to rule on Sky News, The Australian, the Daily Telegraph and 2GB, all rabid subsidiaries of the LNP. The 'Right' are so unbelievably precious, they invented advocacy groups and think tanks.

Emotions and feelings I think are our guides to what is true. The emotions you often see when people are trying to understand something are: 1) righteousness, and 2) numinosity - the sense of something ‘profound’. Both of those, I would say, are terrible guides. They’re emotions that express and reinforce our current beliefs, not discovery. Archimedes already taught us the emotion that corresponds with true understanding. The emotion of joy and surprise. Eureka! Translated from the Ancient Greek, it means “I found it!” The truth will always be something simple and highly SPECIFIC, will surprise you and will fill you with joy. In every case. Even the truths of politics.

I love this everyday example of reframing. Trip hazards on footpaths are a local council nightmare, they create legal messes. What they've done here is found all the non-level bits and sprayed them with high-vis yellow. This actually works. It reframes the problem from 'uneven footpath' to 'not paying attention as you walk.'

“Bohemian Rhapsody is more a crowd—pleaser then cinematic excellence.” Film critic. I still don’t think people see enough how the split in our wider world is all there in a statement like that. The ‘crowd’ is not able to define ‘excellence’, apparently. There’s Trump’s opening, right there. This isn’t about that movie, it’s about ancient questions on democracy and what is ‘good’.

I've noticed this, how in recent decades art - writing and music in particular - has been obsessed with being 'real' and 'authentic'. Writers and musicians are so often drawn to the pathological in life, because they think it's somehow more real. (Often because their own lives are actually pretty mundane, so writing about the way-out-there helps them feel less mundane.) This extract from 'Dark Mirror' analyses so well why they do that, I think. Well worth the 30 seconds it takes to read it.

Part 2 of previous post. This book is a ripper. Authenticity is a key idea in our time, for me, with a very dark core. "Musicians strive to “keep it real”; listeners condemn “fakes”; ... but does great music really need to be authentic? Did Elvis sing from the heart, or was he just acting? Were the Sex Pistols more real than disco? Why do so many musicians base their approach on being authentic, and why do music buffs fall for it every time? By investigating this obsession in the last century through the stories of John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Jimmie Rodgers, Donna Summer, Leadbelly, Neil Young, Moby, and others, Faking It rethinks what makes popular music work. Along the way, the authors discuss the segregation of music in the South, investigate the predominance of self-absorption in modern pop, reassess the rebellious ridiculousness of rockabilly and disco, and delineate how the quest for authenticity has not only made some music great and some music terrible but also shaped in a fundamental way the development of popular music in our time."

There’s something ethereally beautiful about Neptune.

Our relationship with animals seems to be another one of those binaries - it has to be either ‘wild’ animals, or domesticated. And as this sign says, we also treat the wild animals as either pristine things which shouldn’t be interacted with, or eaten, locked up in national parks, or we ignore them completely and bulldoze their habitat for suburbs. Meanwhile our domestic animals are ridiculously pampered. (Some ecologists say animals actually domesticate us, rather than the other way around.) I like a model where animals are welcome in my yard, and then it’s like a process of negotiation. I might feed them, or not, depending on what happens. I might leave water for them, or plant a tree or shrub that helps them. But it’s an evolving relationship, it can end well or badly. Diplomacy with the ‘wild’. Diplomacy is what I see the world as needing, with people and with the landscape and its animals.

Supposedly rational people can believe the strangest things. This one always amazes me - that we think our brains are containers inside which our thoughts and memories and perceptions live. Seriously - if you have a physical brain in front of you, how on Earth would it ever contain those things? How do you get a memory or an image into a lump of meat? It’s such a bizarre belief that it still floors me every day that it’s so common.

In times of excess frugality is called being cheap, or stingy. It's a lesson many may have to learn again, the really hard way. 89% of Australians feel out of control financially, that's scary.

Queen playing at the Oscars. Might actually watch it for the first time in years. Has a rock act ever played the Oscars, before now?

One of the problems I see with most ‘causes’ is that they end up sounding like whining. They sound complaining and defensive. Most causes have every good reason to complain about something, but as a rhetorical device complaining or whining is usually ineffective because you’re adopting the same ‘framing’ of the issue as the person you’re complaining about. And so they win, they already set up your role in the discussion, as a whiny complainer. I said a similar thing to a female work colleague, who was incensed at an email from a very senior manager that was full of untruths and accusations. She’d drafted a point-by-point response to the accusations. I suggested not doing that, it would just come across as defensive and whiny. Instead reframe the issue, so that in the most polite and powerful way her response would be actually denying the entire framing of what had happened. Adopt a confident and calm assurance, rather than play the role they set up for you and their framing of what happened. Progressive politics has been doing this across every issue for decades, thinking rebutting accusations from the lunatic Right in lovely factual ways is powerful. It isn’t, it’s playing the game by their rules. These are basic rules of rhetoric, an Ancient Greek invention. Everything in life is persuasion.

Happy Birthday Bassman!

I think these experiences show a couple of important things. Firstly that freedom is always freedom TO do something, not freedom *from* something. Whether it’s gravity or taxes, what some describe as limits or constraints are actually what makes us free. It’s because these astronauts have no relationship with other objects like we do that they don’t have the free functioning we have on Earth. Those relationships set them free. Secondly, these astronauts don’t feel much in their bodies. They say they feel like they’re floating in water. But they have the same amount of ‘gravity’ we do. This is the wow fact I’ve mentioned before - we can’t feel our bodies. What we feel when we think we’re feeling our bodies is the forces generated between our bodies, and other objects. That one wow fact can change your whole life, can you reframe your whole experience so that everything you feel in your ‘body’ - the weight and tensions and sore backs etc. - shifts to become the relationship you have with the Earth and the world around you? Can you take what you think is feelings of your body and start feeling them as forces instead? It shifts your entire experience out into space. You’re as ‘in space’ as these astronauts.

Happy birthday!

Good on them. Let’s get the grown ups back, we can send the culture warriors our ‘thoughts and prayers’ for their loss.

I hit a safety barrier head on at over 100 km/h about 16 years ago. The only injury was a bruised thumb, from the air bag. Without the barrier I wouldn’t be here. The car lobby is extremely powerful, and extremely anti-social. Cars are like drugs, designed to serve us, and now we serve them. Our towns and cities were all re-designed to serve cars, and the social breakdown in them is largely caused by that change alone. They kill well over 3000 people *per day* worldwide in accidents (that’s 1.25 million people a year), and nearly 5 million others die from air pollution per year, a lot of which comes from vehicles. I love cars, but I think their time is up in their current form.

‘The private sector is always more efficient.’ A slogan I’ve heard since I was a kid. One of the most powerful fantasies of our time. Exhibit A, electricity. Look at how the roles of people in the electricity industry have shifted since privatisation. Enormous surges in managers and marketing people, and no more people actually making electricity. Privatisation shifts a public service to a ridiculous, desperate attempt to get ‘customers’. Customers the industry already had before privatisation, and who didn’t need marketing to. Universities are heading this way too.

Watching the Oscars makes me think about 'making it'. About 'recognition'. It's a whole room who have devoted themselves to making it. To being recognised. The funny thing about recognition is, that's all it is. Being recognised. "That's Brad Pitt", or "that's Meryl Streep." You could say they're recognised *for* their acting, but recognition isn't acting - it's recognition. It's an almost completely empty thing. Sometimes B-celebrities are mocked for being famous, for being famous. But that's ALL fame. All recognition. It's being able to be identified, by lots of people. And nothing else.

The health benefits of good breathing are really amazing. The problem with being told to ‘breathe deeply’ though is that you kind of have to stop what you’re doing to do the deep breathing. There’s a reason you weren’t breathing deeply in the first place, that’s the thing you need to address. What I realised is that breathing is part of everything else you’re doing. You hold your breath or hyperventilate when your whole body is doing something badly. YOU are held, not just your breath. If you let yourself be aware of what all of your body is doing, when you do anything, you’ll start to notice these patterns of tightenings. The magic is, that awareness is all you need. You don’t need to try to un-tighten yourself, if you do that you’ll zero in on the areas that feel tight, as if they’re separate to the rest of you. They’re not, they’re part of a wider pattern of balance. Just like noticing you’ve been leaning on one leg makes you automatically shift your balance, all of those tightenings will right themselves, if you keep that awareness of your whole body in all of your activities. And your breath will return to its natural slow depth.

Do you think everybody paying the same rate of tax (a ‘flat tax’ system) would be fairer? My view is pretty well represented by the cartoon.

Journalist talking about the Bohemian Rhapsody film. "I haven't seen it, I've heard it's a very enjoyable but terrible film." Again I don't raise this because I'm a Queen fan. I raise it because of that distinction between enjoyable/popular, and good. The way people so easily oppose what is good, and what is popular. I'm fascinated that it isn't questioned more. Trump is only a leader today because people believe in that distinction.

Catherine McGregor gave an extraordinary lesson on Q&A this week. I don’t often watch it, but with Jordan Peterson on she showed how it’s possible to enter even a heated discussion without trying to ‘win’. Have a watch on iView if you missed it. No silly attempt to find the ‘middle ground’ (there isn’t one), no fighting for the purity of your own view. Just talking to other people from within their own frames, and steering conversation towards the limits of those frames.

I have a theory that Facebook is turning into a giant newspaper, produced by the public. Not only that many people get their news from FB - which is true - but that just about everything you see in the FB newsfeed is reproducing what we used to get in newspapers. Letters to the editor-type rants, social pages (lots and lots of photos of peoples’ social lives), personal ads, confessional outpourings, actual news stories, classifieds. Etc. Maybe the newspaper isn't dead, as some journalists fear, it's just become democratised. Many more contributors and editors now.

Spiders aren’t responsible for the fear of spiders. A society saturated with outrage will produce outrageous injustices.

I want to be Deirdre.

In Who Wants to be a Millionaire, asking the audience gets you the right answer 91% of the time. Google search works by asking questions to an audience of billions, it’s why it works so well. Why are we so reluctant to accept that we are smarter as a group than we are as individuals?

Happy Birthday Ian! a big one.

In an election year, it's interesting to again look at the 'coalition'. Have mentioned on here before that I think there's hardly a single point of agreement between the Liberal and National parties. One is a free market party, the other an agrarian socialist party. The only thing that unites them is hatred of Labor, and unions. Hatred of a large chunk of the rest of society doesn't seem like a healthy basis to form a government. But there we have it. I'm sure some people think I'm a Leftie, but actually I'm a conservative person at heart. We just don't have any decent conservatives left, we have union-hating, cold-eyed zealots.

I don't have any affection for George Pell at all, he seems an arrogant prat. But I would defend anybody's right to a fair trial, above any other principle. They even had trials for the Nazis after the war, as they should have. I still wonder if the judge in this case may find themselves under appeal. The 'critics' here are legal experts. And I hate the lynch mob mentality of some of the public with this, and with any offence really. A guy in the US was released last week after being jailed for 38 years, for something he didn't do. https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/cardinal-sin-critics-raise-questions-about-george-pell-s-conviction-20190227-p510iv.html