May 2019

An expert on picking on people speaks of the pain of being picked on by people. https://www.9news.com.au/national/a-current-affair-pauline-hanson-interview-exclusive-steve-dickson-resign-latest-news-australia/578acccb-9264-49ab-bda1-9f5c1f4f3eb3

I recommend doing this for 10-15 minutes a day. In standing, the great spiral sheets of muscle that wrap around us can become asymmetrically tightened to the left or right, and laying on the ground removes the need for those spiral sheets to support you, upright. So the sheets get to de-rotate, having profoundly healthy impacts on all of your body. Just lay there like this, and/or with your head to one side or the other, and feel what you feel. You might be surprised. Give it at least a few weeks and see what changes you notice. Alternate with laying flat on your back, it does a similar thing.

Something important I learned about the body. If you lean forward and feel pressure under the front of your feet, what is it causing that feeling of pressure?

25 years of uninterrupted economic growth! Go the economy! Or...1995 that takes us back to. Notice anything? She's gonna blow.

I reckon super was a colossal mistake. It financialised and privatised retirement. The vast sums of money now hoarded by private financial firms could have been money government uses to fund services for all. Super has also directly encouraged a changing view of retirement as a ‘lifestyle’, endless holidays and spending. Retirement used to be a time to retire, to stop and rest. It matters because the thing paying for those lifestyle retirements is vast tax concessions, which working people are paying for.

At school you learn about compound interest. It's the basis of nearly all investment. It's an exponential function, which you can see in this graph. Which means it's a time bomb right at the core of our societies, because if your society lives on that exponential curve, it will blow up repeatedly. The financial industry has taken over our societies, and compound interest is their raw material.

Israel Folau's words here show exactly how I think religion was hijacked by idealists. Idealists are people who think there's another world, an eternal world of spirit and objective truths above and/or beyond our sinner's world here on Earth. Once you set up that opposition, it's game over, the world we actually live in can be nothing more than a 'materialist' filth that needs to be condemned. You can see how the idealist belief system reinforces itself too. Right now Israel is feelingly righteously put upon. But to him that's the 'persecution' of the 'world', and only strengthens his conviction. "The God of this world, Satan, has deceived many. But the one that lives inside us is all powerful. He can deliver us from anything...I encourage us all to store our treasures up in heaven, where it all counts...We're going to be hated by the world, persecuted by the world."

Happy Birthday Kath, hope you have a wonderful day :) Catch up soon?

‘Feeling low’, ‘feeling down’ - the reference to how close to the ground we are is very revealing. It’s impossible to separate our psychology from our relationship with gravity. We talk of somebody being ‘well balanced’, not always recognising the connection again with gravity and balance. All psychology is postural, because it’s about our relationship with the world around us. Not ‘posture’ as in some static position in space, but as in our state of balance. Somebody who feels low has withdrawn from poised interaction with the details of their life activities, which in turn destroys their balance and forces slumps and slouches.

Now social issues are getting too big for pollies to solve, and they’re struggling, rather than the public getting off their lazy, entitled and complacent arses and doing a bit of learning, debating and compromising, they just switch off and describe political chaos as ‘bloody politicians’. In countries without compulsory voting, they don’t even bother to show up. It’s not politicians’ job to solve your problems. If you’re not researching and debating the major issues of the day with others, you’re the problem. Not the pollies, they’re not your mummy. O please stop fighting mummy. Pathetic.

Happy birthday :)

All over the world, working people have had their political power reduced. The people who took that power away have at the same time steered the resulting anger away from themselves using champions of ‘the working man’. Shock jocks, tabloid press, all owned by extremely rich and powerful men responsible for the loss of the power of working people, and pretending to represent the working poor, whom they actually despise. It’s a genius strategy, all deliberate and thought out. Now we have a world where the average worker hates unions, the only political power they have, but loves Alan Jones and Ray Hadley.

Another example of how those who take power from working people operate. Paul Murray sometimes tours the country with his show and creates a town hall vibe, pretending he’s tapping into the lives of ordinary people, where they live. It’s a sham, if you listen to Murray when his show is back in the studio, it’s all about the big end of town. Rupert is his boss. I admire their genius in both screwing working people, and then capturing their anger to direct back against themselves, criticising unions, welfare, single parents, a living wage etc. This genial-looking friend of the people is a highly paid bastard, selling jingoism that doesn’t put one cent back in workers’ pockets.

I love this paradox. If you want a peaceful happy life, you have to debate things. Trying to achieve peace and happiness by avoiding conflict just kicks the conflict can down the road, and when we catch up to it it’s even bigger. I think this is also why politicians seem so hopeless today, they argue non-stop. It’s because the rest of us *aren’t* debating and discussing, and have been kicking our disagreements down the road to Canberra, for others to sort out.

What is it about Bill Shorten that people don't like? I have a feeling Shorten could be a great PM, very pragmatic, focused on results, in the long Labor tradition of investing in and building things. (Which the LNP then flog off and give away as tax cuts.) I'm not a Labor man, or a Leftie, by the way. I'm naturally conservative, in the true meaning of the world - I think institutions are the key to society working well. Unfortunately modern conservatives are vandals, they smash institutions with their 'small government' obsession, so I can't vote for them. The 'Left' at least has some respect for institutions.

The 'economy' was invented in the 1930s. There are people alive today who remember when it didn't exist.

I'm not sure what 'better economic managers' means. It seems to be something about accumulating vast amounts of debt, and throwing your economic ranking off a cliff.

The huge increase in early voting for elections, yeh nah. Election Day is a collective tradition or ritual, but pre-poll voting is making it an individualised thing. Vote when it’s most convenient it to you, customer service ideas coming to elections. Reminds me of the shift in school photos now, where they don’t do actual group photos, but just photos of each kid individually. It also ruins the drama of Election Day, as increasingly outcomes of elections aren’t known for weeks, as pre-poll and postal votes get counted. Individual flexibility at the cost of collective tradition.

Chicken and egg question. Which came first, local or global? I reckon the most common answer would be - local. But just as countries were invented *after* the world was ‘globalised’, your ‘local’ area was invented after there was already a region, a State and a country. So this saying, think global act local, is meaningless.

Voting for a minor party because you're sick of the major parties is like shopping at IGA. Same food, double the price.

Barnaby Joyce said the other day that bureaucrats actually run the country. We agree on something. He thinks that's a bad thing, I think it protects us from the country being run by idiots like Barnaby. Bureaucrats are my heroes, a country is way too complex to be run by anybody else. Politicians are there to steer the bureaucrats a little, according to shifting public need, that's all. Most elections don't change very much, and nor should they.

No spoilers, but I reckon this last season of GOT is more soap opera than Shakespeare.

Memories...

One of life’s weirdest things. Anybody can learn to ride a bike, and achieve amazing feats of balance on it. No effort needed, the body does it all by itself. But you struggle to find more than a handful of people who ever master sitting in a chair, or standing in one spot for more than a short time.

Soooo... I got the answer wrong. I am now keeping my word and posting this picture selected by Yasmin so I'm challenging my friends who are logical and smart thinkers, to have a crack at guessing the answer to the riddle below. When you think you know, Private message me the answer. If you are not going to follow the instructions after you lose, don’t bother playing. Your turn! Read the riddle. If your answer is incorrect, I can choose any of your photos and you have to post it along with the riddle. If you answer correctly, I'll write your name in the comments (with a trophy emoji). Riddle: It's 7:00 AM. You are asleep and there is a sudden knock on the door. Behind the door are your parents who came to have breakfast. In your fridge are bread, milk (pasteurized), juice, and a jar of jam. To answer, what will you open first? * Answer directly through Private message only please. Answers in the comment section will be deleted. ** Note: It’s not what you think. So far no one has got it. Read carefully!

Standing desks will be a fad that passes, mostly because the framework of ideas behind them - that sitting can kill you - is bonkers I think. 50 years ago the supposed dangers of standing were the reason so many workplaces ended up with chairs. I think this debate will flip endlessly between sitting and standing until it goes back to the drawing board, and realises the real problem is treating both sitting and standing as static, held poses. Rather than acts of dynamic balance. Treat both as like learning to ride a bike, where you need to learn to balance at each moment, and all the problems go away.

Muso: social media is destroying music! (P.S. I have a gig this Friday, come along.)

Most people identify themselves in the political 'centre' too, as 'moderates', even though their views are clearly either Left or Right, or a combination of Left and Right (which isn't a centre, it’s a mixture of Left and Right). A drinker who says 'everything in moderation' is almost guaranteed to have a problem with alcohol. Ditto for food.

My gravity obsession. I would bet people think they feel that ‘weight from gravity’ in everything they do. But I’d bet very few of them feel that ground reaction force. We tend to see the ground as something we fall onto, a passive lump of rock. In fact it’s pushing up into you every second of every day, in everything you do. It supports you, so that you’re free from having to ‘hold yourself up’. What you’re feeling as your weight is not that downwards arrow, you can’t feel that. It acts on the ground, not on you. It’s you being out of balance, so that the ground reaction force is creating unbalanced forces inside you. Once you get back over your support properly, all feelings of weight will disappear.

You can love (verb), but you can’t friend. Worth pausing over, I think. BFF is shorthand for co-dependency.

Happy Birthday Cass!

It's not just wealth that's trickle-down. So are education, entertainment & news. Social media is smashing them all.

I’ve never had a lawn, in that manicured weed ‘n’ feed sort of way. Walking to work I notice the amazing ecosystems in wild self-sown grassed areas, like this one. Easy to walk past and not notice it, but there’s a staggering array of plants going on. And the bare areas developing, generated by rain run-off creating little islands of leaf matter, silt and other mulch. It makes me think of how many ways life will sort things out if we can stop trying to control it.

Not sure they’ve thought this one through from the branding perspective.

When you see a cartoon that combines the WTC conspiracies and the myth of moderation in one, what’s a man to do?

Idiots get leadership positions because, like how much money you earn, merit has nothing to do with it. It's always power. And idiots do power better than anybody. They start young, at school, where they're the ones who play favourites with other people, and have 'besties', learning the skills of building alliances and turning people against one another. Small-minded, weak people. Want to change the world? Get rid of besties, in schools, weed out the bullshit there so it doesn't grow into adulthood. In the olden days primary school teachers would actually do that, advise parents against their child having 'best friends'. They were wise, those old teachers.

Maybe my favourite cartoon showing what happens when you think the world is actually made up of opposites. You just cycle between the two options, eternally. I say opposites are debating positions, points of view, not actual realities. People who try to fix this by using the 'middle way' are stuck in the same paradox, confusing debating positions with reality. There is no middle here - what would it be?

One of those topics we desperately avoid discussing, so stuff like this happens. If you don’t know what’s happened in Georgia, have a look. I find ‘right to life’ a perfect example of how crude and hopelessly simplistic our moral thinking has become. These people have no actual respect for life, they turn it into a ridiculously abstract notion that then allows them to control women. That’s the real aim.

So much of what gets called morality is about denial, about policing ideals. How about a morality of abundance, that makes what is good what is abundant? The glorious abundance of material things. It would mean giving up the idea that heaven is somewhere else than right here.

There are plenty of people out there who think ‘real’ driving is driving a manual. Gears in cars are actually only there because internal combustion engines are crap technology and have narrow power bands. Electric cars don’t need gear changes at all, so it’s likely changing gears will disappear from driving altogether. It interests me though because it’s a good example of how we can turn something that’s crap into something apparently more authentic, often our way of trying to say we’re still cool, even though we’re getting old.

“Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal, since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the cardinal virtues. The venal man suppresses his murderous and anti-social instincts - honor, self-pride, patriotism, political ambition, religious fanaticism, racialism - in favor of his need to co-operate with others, his love of fruitful exchanges, his sense of human solidarity.” Michel Tournier. Friday, or the Other Island.

Political parties aren’t really what elections are about. They represent certain interests, elections are fascinating if you shift the focus to the interests and away from the parties. If we stop treating it as a sporting match between two sides. This picture is pretty much all you need to know. Labor on the Left, LNP on the Right.

People find this a depressing insight. But I think until we recognise this fact, we’re living a life that’s a projected fantasy. Love and friendship look entirely different when you start from this point.

Utopia hit a vein by focusing on infrastructure. But it’s interesting to think about why infrastructure has become such a political issue. Maybe because most of the wealth of the country has been channelled to the old, away from social infrastructure mostly used by the young. Schools, trains, water, electricity - all those and more are living off investment from 50 or more years ago, while tax dollars are increasingly shifting to tax "relief" for the wealthy and retired. And because in an ageing society, most economic growth is immigration, fresh young people to do the work of supporting old people. They need infrastructure to do their jobs.

Nothing is true or false without a context, I think that's important. Something can be true or false in very many different ways, all at the same time.

@[580567321:2048:Kate] told me about the association researchers are seeing between algal blooms and motor neurone disease. A lot of our lakes and rivers are increasingly heavy with algae, I know the big recreation lakes here in Lithgow are. It’ll get worse with less rain and more heat. One of the reasons I don’t mind heavily chlorinated town water, I just filter the chloramine out before we drink it, best of both worlds. Swimming in it makes me profoundly nervous.

Another outrage bites the dust. Can I buy the cheaper eggs now @[725606566:2048:Kell]?

Do you think anybody sees a protest like this and thinks "well bugger me, I better make coal history"?

I might email my local school and ask if they can give me a private performance of the end of year school concert, say in August, when it works better for me.

There are worse things than walking to the bus on an autumn afternoon. Got the moon in there too, just noticed.

I love this idea. The nation is divided because the nation isn’t divided. To divide is to share, when we don’t share or divide, we become divided. To divide we need to argue. The more we don’t argue, the more divided we become.

JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” A message for people unhappy with political parties, like they’re shopping for a mobile phone and the one they want is out of stock. Politics isn’t a business and you’re not one of its customers.

Hopefully the paywall doesn’t prevent access. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/prepoll-voting-is-undermining-our-democracy/news-story/f1721826d60e50256a314648805636f1

Air pollution is finally getting attention as a lethal thing. It's not just a big city problem either, every morning as I travel into a country town, I see this layer of filthy air. We're very complacent about it, it kills millions of people each year.

This is what years of Botox and plastic surgery do to your brain. https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/kerri-anne-kennerley-unleashes-on-bill-shorten-and-declares-it-will-be-the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it-if-the-labor-leader-wins/ar-AABnIvk?li=AAgfYrC

Have you seen the number of scare pieces online about how 5G is going to kill us all? I looked into this, and it’s fascinatingly our very own ‘fake news’. Driven mostly from the Kremlin’s online political units. Russia has poor 5G capability, so this is a deliberate propaganda campaign to try to undermine our communications networks. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html

We’re very Old Testament in our morality I think. One example is the success rich vested interests have had in persuading millions of people that rules and laws are things that restrict your freedom. (They want to persuade us of that, because many of those rules prevent them ripping the rest of us off.) As if they’re all thou shall and thou shalt not things, imposed on us by others. When in fact even when we’re having the most fun in life, playing games, rules are what enable that fun. They’re enablers, not limiters.

Lithgow air quality monitoring stations are now in place. Worth having a look, you can see either end of town has very poor to hazardous air quality (dangerous to health). This was this morning, since this time, the Littleton reading has come back to Good, and the main town reading Very Good. Oakey Park still hazardous. A lot of this would be wood and coal fire smoke I think.

I really hoped the etymology of ‘menopause’ was ‘a break from men’. Alas, it‘s ‘a break from months’. Beautiful, but less funny.

These are the 2 most significant PMs of my lifetime so far. I’m not really interested in comparing them as people, but one thing each of them said I think defines the debates Australia is still having. Hawke: At every level of human relationships — personal, economic, cultural or sporting — a unity of understanding and purpose is rightly regarded as a desirable element in achieving success. The principle is no less true at the highest level of the nation’s affairs. Howard: I dream of an Australia where every person sees somebody drive past in a Rolls Royce, and thinks “I want that to be me”.

Fantastic short animation, even captures the shifts of day and night. Reckon politicians are to blame for global warming? Who do you reckon is in all of those planes? Also a nice way to map wealth in the world. Patterns, as always.

I don't find many people who agree with me on this, but I'm sure it's true. How much a person is paid is due to one factor only - how much power they have. There are no other determining factors - not merit, not the type of work being done. Nothing. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/14/meritocracy-myth-rich-college-admissions

Yep, lots of myths about the healthiness of exercise, I think mistaking physical activity with the quality of the physical activity. We need to learn to balance, to be poised. There are easily enough forces in even basic activities to 'work out', if you're properly balanced.

When we say ‘sit down in a chair’, what do we mean by ‘down’? We’re already on the ground. Similarly when we ‘get up’ out of a chair, why ‘up’? We’re on the ground the entire time. This isn’t about words, it’s about gravity and how we understand our bodies and balance.

Wtf.

In sporting news from overnight: Old, rich and angry - 1 Young and poor - 0

10 thoughts about the election. 1. It’s not sport, nobody actually won or lost. Any party who reads election results as being about them, win or lose, will always get smashed by the people eventually. 2. The old still have the power and wealth in society, attacking those is the reason the result went as it did, despite the LNP being utterly dysfunctional. Demographics and distribution of wealth predicted this election outcome, seeing elections as sport didn’t. 3. Those who voted in protest for minor parties had their preferences vacuumed up by the LNP. 4. As in the US and UK, the vote against politics itself is being channelled into power by ultra conservatives pretending to represent those people. We’re still on the way to our own Trump. 5. This is the first time in a long time a conservative government is coming to power as the ‘economy’ is trending downwards. This may finally re-position the Labor Party to a healthier part of the economic cycle, in government. 6. The LNP took no policies to the election, using this anger in the electorate as its campaign. The last time somebody did that - Paul Keating in 1993, winning the unwinnable election using a scare campaign against an opposition with a big policy program - the Labor Party was in opposition for over a decade. 7. Political parties don’t win or lose elections, different groupings in society gain more or less power and influence. The election should always have been read through that lens. 8. Over 4 million people voting before polling day was a sure sign that this election was like the US and UK - an election about politics itself. We’re splintering into 25 million separate individual islands of entitlement and anger. Ripe for our own Trump. 9. Many Australian regions and towns are now running out of water. No amount of ‘the economy’ will make it rain. 10. Polls lie because all people lie, all the time. Always follow the money and power, not what people say. See 2.

Nearly every election, State and federal, in the last 10 years, has been a ‘shock’ result, defying opinion polls. No party is winning. People are voting to smash things. Our own Brexit underway.

Seeing lots of rubbish like this. We keep treating politics as a football game between parties, that we watch on TV. I reckon we don’t stop to think - no, the LNP didn’t ‘win’ the election, like a tennis match. The LNP is only a representative of the millions of Australians who believe certain things. These Australians are our families, friends and work colleagues. If we think this election result is bad, it means we disagree with millions of other Australians. We need to start TALKING to them about why they believe what they do. Not leave it to politicians, who are just us too. They’re only there to implement the outcomes of our conversations. Conversations we’re not having.

Here’s to me the greatest lesson of the election. Government is *always* just us, the people. In the past there was no way to mobilise all of us at once in real-time, so it led to a perception that a small group of people ‘lead’, and the rest of us are led. But politicians are just us, they’re the people too. Social media predicted the outcome of this election, because it knew. Because it’s us. It shapes politics in real time, every day, there’s not the big gap any more between leaders and led. Polls are a 19th-century idea of politics, where there are leaders, and then the people, who are surveyed about what they think. Social media are not just better polls, they’re taking over politics itself.

I can't remember who posted this (thanks to them). But I thought it was brilliantly expressed. 'No politics please' is the voice of privilege. Privilege is usually invisible to the privileged.

Who is ‘we’? Notice how often ‘the people’ are spoken about, as if that actually existed. Look at the faces in any crowd, different, each doing their own thing for their own reason. The world over people are trying to figure out what ‘the people’ want. The people don’t want anything, they don’t exist. Lots of people exist.

Did you know the pressure of the air on your body is the equivalent of a one tonne car sitting on you? Just as vacuums don’t suck, air pushes into them, when you breathe the air pushes into you, there’s a lot of pressure there looking for somewhere to go when you open your mouth and nose. You won’t ever breathe well trying to ‘suck’ air in.

If 'don't vote for the other guy' is your election platform, and the other guy loses, do you have a mandate to do anything at all?

To those of you who didn’t watch a single episode of GOT. We salute you, you’re just so awesome. Thanks for letting us know.

Another undercurrent from the election. Faith in politics is in freefall. As in the US, religious faith is filling the gap, drawing voters to parties. The separation of Church and State - some people never signed up for that. They're sneaky buggers.

Crank this. Wow. I don't reckon modern amplifiers could create the same physical movement of air those old big bands did in a room, goosebumps. And the arrangement, all those contrapuntal lines playing off the melody, swoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0i5gYx_l1c

I figured out the LNP’s power price reduction plan. Let the planet warm, kill off autumn and winter. No heating needed.

Humankind has done some terrible things. But then it invented jelly crimps, and I forgive it everything.

Zali. Seems lovely, but I think the perfect example of how you shoot yourself in the foot if you see politics as about leaders. She’ll have next to no power in the parliament, and by removing Abbott the LNP loses a destabilising force, which can only help them.

Know that creepy feeling a painting is looking at you? What’s amazing (I think) is that it IS looking at you. To be ‘looked at’ is a detachable sensation and perception, if it weren’t, you couldn’t ‘capture’ it in paint (very revealing term people use, it’s literal - to capture a likeness). The paint literally does capture that sensation. The sensation and the paint together create an independent being.

Facebook told us the outcome of the election in another way. Comparing ourselves to others is the fuel of society. Labor’s justice-based campaign couldn’t match the ‘aspiration’ campaign from the LNP. People don’t want to bring privilege (society’s ‘cool’) down a peg, they want to be cooler themselves. FB could have told us this, because again what fuels it is comparison - here I am doing X, look at me.

Here's a snapshot of everything I hate about travel. There's even a queue now to reach the summit of Everest. We turn the world into somewhere for us to have our precious 'experiences'. We see the world (literally - 'sightseeing'), rather than occupy and enrich space. We travel though it, like we're living in an illustrated map. Everest is strewn with nearly 50 fresh tonnes of garbage a year left behind by travellers, about 200 dead bodies, and so much human sewage it's made the local's water unusable.

Notice how some are now saying Labor’s redistribution of wealth agenda cost them the election? Conservatives have had nothing BUT a wealth redistribution agenda for decades, in the opposite direction. Their political nous is not to have called it that. Lessons there for the Left.

Thoughts? Seems pretty common.

We largely banish darkness from our lives today. In a city or even large town you can’t even see the night sky, we’re immersed in light from waking until going to bed. But have a look at this picture. The surface of the Earth at night is like a reflection of the sky above. We tried to banish the night sky, and it re-made itself on the ground. Not just a metaphor I don’t think, you can’t banish darkness, you’ll get pockets of intense energy surrounded by darkness. Just like the night sky.

Happy Sunday! God’s day. A stained glass window seen from outside a church has almost no colour at all. Go inside though, where the darkness and light can interact, and you get this. What if light doesn’t shine ‘on’ things, but instead is ‘in’ things? And what if the ‘material world’, which seems finite, and the light and information about that world, which seem eternal, are one and the same world? And what if God is the interplay of that finite and eternal, as in this stained glass window? What if Churches have been telling us for centuries that God is already there, in that play of light and shadow? And not somewhere up in the sky?

I think any of the elements can be a bully, the light of summer is harsh and bullies colour, temperature and moisture, the enormous sea robs coastal areas of autumn colour and temperature variation. The cold and dry of winter sucks colour and light from the landscape. In autumn away from the sea the elements are more balanced, it’s the most democratic season - gentle light, some moisture, rich colours emerging from the interplay of light and shadow.

"Ten years later, it's a prescriptive still handed out by anyone who doesn't like where someone's opinion is headed. "First world problem" or "don't go there" - the implication being that you are being snide, or greedy if you look at a thing too deeply, and that, if you do, nobody will safely make it back. Because to think too much is dangerous, particularly for women."

To go back to a favourite idea, why are most workplaces structured around trying to get everybody to agree to the same thing? In politics you get to choose between two options on each issue, with a champion for each, a government and opposition. Same in law, with prosecution and defence. Most people hate work. I reckon what they hate most is not getting a say, and being forced to go along with things they don't agree with. So have 2 CEOs or bosses, who get to argue for and against every big decision. Workers can choose one or the other, and have a champion for whichever they choose.

2016 election, Malcolm Turnbull's LNP won 76 seats, and 42% of the primary vote. 2019 election, Scott Morrison's LNP currently has 76 seats, and 42% of the primary vote. Scott Morrison beat the polls, not Labor. Labor and the Greens together - the 'Left' - got more than 43% of the primary vote.

Around the world people are voting for sovereignty. I think we need to understand that? Urgently?

In the UK, everybody talks about what 'the people' want. In Australia everybody interprets the election here as what 'the people' wanted. 3 years ago they (the ones who bothered to vote in the UK) decided they wanted to leave Europe, by a small margin. Now it's reversed. The moral of the story, only the people know what the people want. Everybody else is talking out their butt.

Nice way to show I think that regulation and compromise is what makes us free. We don't need 'relief' from tax and regulation.

I'm convinced our war on darkness (electric light, daylight saving etc.) is changing who we are, in bad ways. There was a time when sunset brought on darkness even in the home, with candles or lanterns the only light. A person would trundle off to bed in a little cocoon of golden light, navigating through a wider spooky darkness. These experiences have profound impacts on our biology and psychology, life is much more nuanced when you mix darkness with it. Maybe one of the reasons people are so polarised in their views is that they've lost the 'shades' in their thinking. I don't think that's just a metaphor, we're maybe hyper-stimulated by all that light.

There's no such thing as a mandate.

I think these signs are a model for where democracy needs to head. Away from the unsolvable problems of representative government, where everybody argues about what 'the people' want', when nobody actually knows or can ever know. What I think we need instead is more and more direct feedback loops in social processes, where people can see in real-time the impact of collective behaviour, so they can modulate their individual behaviour, also in real-time. That's what 'we' is I think, each of us modulating our views of the whole, each day.

All those years of worm tablets may have been doing us more harm than good.

One of the greatest human problems, understanding how to balance individual and group. I think music solved it a long time ago, but people don't often go there to answer this one. Melody (individual) and harmony (group). The most common model - homophony - melody and supporting harmonies, is like how most see politics and even business. Leadership (melody) and others supporting the leadership (harmony). But music found a much better model than that too. Polyphony. No longer a separate melody and harmony, but melodies harmonising with each other, in counterpoint. Everything is a melody, harmonising with other melodies. No separate individual and separate group, just individuals harmonising with other individuals, in different ways. It's actually how social media is changing the world, and we use our old homophonic models to try to understand how. We need polyphonic models to understand how it's doing it.

I think this is absolutely wrong. You already know what death is like, every night you experience a version of it - you rest in peace. Not metaphorically, life and death aren't opposites, they're measures of the degree of action we can take in the world. In sleep hardly any, in death even less. Death isn't the end of life, it's the end of your active life, that's all. You are still virtually there, eternal, and that virtual or eternal part of you is here right now too, if you're reading this. Opposites aren't real things. You're not alive or dead, you're more or less active in the world, that's all. Time and eternity aren't opposites either.

If a film makes you cry, isn't it evidence that art creates living things with the power to affect us, just like other people affect us?

Happy birthday!

The word 'virtual' is used a lot, and I think mostly to suggest something 'online'? To me it's one of the critical concepts to understand the world we live in. For example, here's a hammer. All hammers are virtual, but I bet wouldn't get classified as that in most places.

The 'tax relief' nonsense uses this weird psychology, that people will work harder and generate more business and jobs, if you relieve them of tax. It's never - not once, anywhere - been shown to be true. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/study-trump-tax-cuts-failed-growth-investment.html?fbclid=IwAR0jMyeOPYOciC5ID3WgrTKk1rDLtPh_sZBuDPKkFB-HPa3viTLhYZNddTs

Mysteries of the virtual world. (I'll get back to hammers.) I think 'online' is often talked about as if it was a place. "I'll go online". But online isn't a place - where would it be? Can anybody point to where the 'online world' actually is?

Happy Birthday :)

I think chronic busyness is a disease. In life and at work, peoples' lives are exhaustingly busy. My hunch is busyness became chronic because we use being busy as a way to avoid anxiety. NIKE tapped into that with the "Just Do It" slogan, as if the anxiety can be fixed by just doing more stuff. It can't, it makes it worse. For me busyness is caused by loss of control over our own lives. That's the cause, what makes us anxious, busyness is the symptom. The only way to get that control back is to not 'just do it' - it's to stop and question, what is the 'it'? At work or in your personal life, fight back against people who say to you that thinking is a waste of time, that you should just do it. Ask them what it is, and why people do it.