June 2019

Maybe the desire for leadership is only laziness. The desire to hand our problems over to somebody else. And maybe, nobody is in charge and never has been, and couldn't be even if it was what they or we wanted. And maybe, we have no idea what 'we' is.

Personalising feelings - making them 'our' feelings - is I think the source of so much unhappiness and sickness. Like stress, which we often interpret to be a feeling that we 'have'. In fact stress is just your body being challenged by a situation, and that feeling is your body giving you extra energy to deal with it. Reframe it in that way and instead of focusing on the body - to try to get rid of the feelings - you use the energy to change the *situation*. The desire to 'relax' is actually misguided. As the graph shows, you want stress in your life. But you need to understand what it means.

The epidemic of plastic surgery and facial alteration is starting to make more sense to me. Throughout history the face of a ruler has been airbrushed into masks and images, as a unifying blank canvas. Specific blemishes and marks removed, and a smooth, universal face replacing it. Today celebrities are increasingly our rulers, the US has a TV star as a president and other celebrities are central to peoples' lives too. And now with social media, even ordinary people are seen by thousands or millions of others. So the blank, featureless universal mask-face is spreading, through all levels of society.

Humans like to see themselves as separate to 'nature'. But have a look at how our societies exactly match what we call the natural world. Patterns. For centuries we had leaders like the Sun King, at the centre of everything, directing what happened. The exact model of the solar system, sun in the middle. One emitter, millions of receivers. Now in a networked society, everybody is an emitter *and* receiver. Society now looks more like the universe more generally.

The Israel Folau freedom of speech hoo-ha is an example of how the LNP is deluding itself that they're back in government because people supported their policies and worldview. They took no policies to the election, they're back in power because a huge number of Australians voted against politics itself, and Clive Palmer vacuumed up those voters at a cost of $55 million and delivered them to the LNP. Those voters will punish them, they'll punish all parties, the election has only delayed it, and all sides of politics are (I think) missing completely what actually went on. Look at the US and UK. We're next.

3 million people per week worldwide move from the countryside to the city. Countrysides the world over are emptying of people, if not already empty, and drones and other equipment are taking over farming. I see this as another symptom of how we don't occupy space. It's not surprising we turned the countryside into some abstract thing called 'the environment' - many know about it only through books and TV. We don't live in and work the landscape any more, at best we 'sightsee' it or turn it into some loopy New Age object of worship. Climate change to me is actually the symptom of this emptying of the landscape. Most greenhouse gases produced by humans are generated by mega-cities and industrial farming. Meaningful, practical connection to landscape was all that kept us alive for millennia, but fossil fuels allowed us to pretend we were separate from the landscape. Now the world is fighting back.

Michel Serres, maybe the greatest thinker of all time, has died. Was only thinking yesterday while reading one of his books that this couldn't be far off. It's difficult to describe the magnitude of his genius, he was so far advanced of most thought of any time that it's almost impossible to describe his way of seeing things. But in a nutshell, his books describe the world without the boundaries we tend to place in it, between arts, science, religion, physical work, between people and the world. Reading them you actually see the seamless connection between all things that others only talk about in vague ways. They're often very difficult books for that reason, because we're so used to dividing things up into neat categories. When you read them maths is mixed with literature, art, religion, everyday life, his early life on farms and in the navy, etc. without any analogy, he describes the connections directly, as they exist and as he saw and lived them. No separation between thought and action, between the life of the mind and everyday life. To our modern mind they can seem baffling, because we love to divide and categorise. RIP Michel.

Happy Birthday Goodie!

Company boards are supposed to be made up of mostly independent directors. It's a bullshit model - see the GFC, or Australia's banks. Imagine a country or even a family run by people you don't get to choose, who don't have to know anything about the people or work you do.

One of the beautiful, profound things I learned from Michel Serres was about legends. Because the true humanities are absent from most peoples' education today, a legend can only seem like a made-up story. But Serres reminded us that a legend is also the name given to something at the bottom of a map that allows you to read it. For Serres, legends in history do the same thing, they allow you to read society and life in profound ways. Take angels. In religious legends, angels are God's messengers. They're everywhere, huge in number. Serres saw the legend of angels as the key to understanding the modern world - the world of communications. Everything is a message, and in fact even what we call the natural world is full of messages too, if you know how to read them. The wind is a message, it literally tells you about diverse conditions globally, from your own backyard. But we mostly can't hear or understand those messages. The world is alive, and we're deaf to it.

Happy birthday to you :) Did you get to work?

The sort of complex questions that taking desire seriously lead to. I find we're very good at rationalising our desires, even pretending they don't exist if they seem inconvenient. We're desiring creatures I think before we are anything else. Even thought is a desire, as is 'moralism'.

All the data on the Internet weighs the same as an invisibly tiny grain of sand. That's the *entire* Internet. So - what is the 'online world'?

The picture below is the Maldives, tourist paradise and what the tourists have left behind. In tribute to Michel Serres, I coincidentally saw this paragraph from him the day he died: "Disguised under the label of tourism, the Third World War is covering the most beautiful sites in the world with shit, vendors and hideous noises...never visit Machu Picchu, or the pyramids of Egypt, or Ayers Rock in the centre of Australia; don't climb Mont Blanc, don't go to Mount Everest or the Côte d'Azur...Try and find anywhere the simple discrete beauty of a meadow or an unpretentious tree."

Economics is actually pretty interesting. Either government invests in the country, or you and I do. Modern conservative governments give money away to the rich in tax cuts rather than invest in the country, so that just leaves me and you to do the heavy lifting. Which is why they keep lowering interest rates, to try to make us take on even more debt, so we can spend and keep the country moving. Our current lowest interest rates in history are a sign of a government asleep at the wheel. They're about to hit a tree.

From cradle to grave, I think humans' most fundamental act is to copy, or imitate. In politics, school, shopping, fashion - everywhere. Have mentioned before that to try to go against the current trend is to be even more deeply buried in imitation - counter-imitation is an even stronger form of copying than direct imitation. Supermarkets know it too, adults think they leave the eternal battle to be 'cool' behind at school, but many of the brands you see as a choice for you the consumer are actually owned by only one or two big manufacturers. To let adults keep playing the game of differentiating themselves from other people through imitation and counter-imitation.

I'm not a republican, for this reason. The monarchy is one of the few institutions left in society that still understands institutions. Listen to the Queen's words to Donald Trump: “After the shared sacrifices of the Second World War, Britain and the United States worked with other allies to build an assembly of international institutions, to ensure that the horrors of conflict would never be repeated,” she said. “While the world has changed, we are forever mindful of the original purpose of these structures: nations working together to safeguard a hard won peace.”

Into week 2 of the continued reign of the Lunatic Nutters Party (LNP). Last week religious freedom of speech was the go, this week the Australian Federal Police is raiding journalists' homes and offices. Free speech is telling a gay person they're going to burn in hell, but not talking about government plans to spy on its own citizens. Gotcha. Then appalling economic figures again (peering at election image, what does that say in the background?). The Lunatic Nutters are all over it, the tax cuts will fix it apparently, where we all rush out with our extra $20 and kick start the economy. Who voted for these idiots?

Economics 102. Have a look at the graphs in this article. When government debt goes down, usually because some nincompoop is trying to 'balance the budget', private debt goes up. That's because the money to keep the country going has to come from somewhere, if the government cuts spending, individuals have to spend to make up the gap. Government *is* us, idiots who try to get rid of government just shift the burden to individuals. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/government-debt-isnt-the-problemprivate-debt-is/379865/

Sometimes people say Usain Bolt had the time to look around like this in a race because he was so good. But what if that's backwards? What if he was so good because he was the runner in the race not narrowed to where he wanted to go, as are the other runners you can see here? Narrowing like that tightens your body, look at the strain in their faces, whereas Bolt is open and free. For Bolt 'there' is already part of 'here', for the others there is somewhere they're straining to get to, from here, which they treat as two separate places.

Wisdom from physics. Light doesn't shine on things, it's part of things, stars produce it by squashing matter so much that it explodes. What we call a 'material' thing is actually a container of light - light is stuff too. If you cast a shadow, you're absorbing the light. It will burn you. The wisdom here I think is in seeing light and darkness not as illumination, but as the two fundamental states of all things. Death is not the end of life, it's the capturing and entombing of light. Life releases light. Again why stained glass windows in dark churches are I think more profound than we understand. And why for thousands of years we've described evil and good and life and death in terms of darkness and light.

Darkness and light. Geometry. The Romans and Egyptians entombed things, some of their greatest legacies are their tombs. But it's not just about death, to entomb is to make implicit, rather than explicit. Knowledge can be explicit or implicit. Then along came the Greeks and Jerusalem, civilisations of light. Thales the Greek at the pyramids, measuring the shadows to create geometry. Look at what the Greeks did to solids - completely empty spaces, filled with light. This is still our civilisation today, we still live in the light, forgetting the dark or implicit. Our main infrastructure is communications, pure light, weighing less than the tiniest grain of sand. And the implied of settled habitual institutions has been smashed to make everything explicit in the full glare of light.

Here's more evidence that our society is run by (scared) old people. Do you know our two most trusted social institutions? Schools maybe? The legal system? Marriage? No. 1) Australian Federal Police. 2) State police forces.

Happy birthday you. I was going to call you fat, but at your age the shock might harm you.

What happens when maths and physics get too far apart. We're usually taught that 60 and 120 degrees here are the size of the angles. But you can't measure an angle, you can only measure the deviation it introduces in other things. An angle is an entity, an actual real thing, a deviation, and we mistake the measurement for the thing. It'd be like saying a car is 60 km/h.

Administration. The law refuses to define this word. If you think about why, it's actually very interesting. It's a disgusting, elitist concept.

Everyday social life is like weather, it can change from hour to hour, and politics follows short cycles too. So most of what we experience in daily life is these short-term patterns and cycles, changes in fashion, the daily news cycle, etc. But I think society also has a geology, it has deep tectonic plates that change much more slowly, and which, like an earthquake, explode if life at the surface isn't releasing forces. Those tectonic plates are institutions, set up to cross over multiple generations. Like marriage, the law, government itself, language etc. We're so focused on the present that we always forget that most of society was built by people long dead, whose experience and hard work and wisdom continues in institutions. The appearance of crisis in most societies at the moment is our institutions not being updated to match our current lives. Society is cracking, and we're looking at the surface to try to fix it, rather than at tectonic institutional plates. Put another way, society is about time as well as space, it continues across generations. The people is those who have died, as well as those still alive.

Happy birthday Adam

Happy birthday Rob

I guess what makes great artists great is how their works diagnose things. They see into the future. In 1820 Goya saw our world today, where reality has become sport, a fight between opposing sides. Whether we're watching or playing sport, or backing our side in politics, or aligning ourselves with different social groups against other social groups. Notice Goya's real genius here though. The fighters are sinking into the quicksand beneath them. The world is going to swallow both of them. Welcome to climate change, 2019.

Why doesn't a television strike people as a miracle? We're so blasé about these things. Yes it's clever technology, but that doesn't explain anything. The miracle is that images and sounds can be taken from one place, embedded in completely different materials to the images and sounds, and reproduced in another place. It means the images and sounds don't belong to their source, they're implicit or virtual in other parts of reality too. All of reality is virtually present or implied in all other parts.

Difference and repetition. The engine room of all relationships, and life. We want and need both. Too much repetition, comfort, stability, tradition, love - boredom. Too much difference, novelty, passion, desire - exhaustion and anxiety. You can't just mix a bit of each either. These are the key questions in every single thing we do, in life and work?

What % of your FB posts invite people to actually talk about something? And what % are you talking about you in some way?

Today a person will often look for the feeling of connection from a relationship that they used to get from wider social institutions - the family, church, the community, etc. So relationships are doing a lot of heavy lifting. It seems part of the push to individualise everything, at the same time we vote for governments who shift the burden of maintaining public life away from social institutions and onto individuals. They're very explicit about that, the deep belief they have is that institutions inhibit individual freedom. And yet individuals are anxious, financially stressed, unhappy at work and finding life lacking in meaning. It's hard work trying to be everything yourself.

"Union thug." Should actually be "thug, who's also in a union." A bit like "conservative dipshit", which should be written "dipshit, who's also a conservative."

Class war? One of these guys is in the news today, condemned because of stupid (semi-private) comments about mens' rights. The other earns a salary of over $2.5 million a year, with support from the most powerful in the country. Comments like this, to his own staff (actual quote): "What the fuck do you think you're doing? Just who the fuck are you? I don't even know who the fuck you are. Who are you? You're a fuckwit … You're nothing but a fucking fuckwit.''

Something not often noticed is that you can't define space without using time, and can't define time without using space. Something is 'far away' because it takes a long time (long - distance word) to get there. And try to define time without referring to space, can't be done. Once time and space stop being containers we sit 'in', everything in life changes.

Is the 'object of our affection' a subject or an object? Another bizarre binary this one, the more individual and subjective something is, the more objective and definable it is.

Here's an idea for 'stimulating the economy'. How about diverting the vast rivers of taxpayer dollars flowing to Canberra, to State and local government, where the services people use actually are? At the moment Canberra sits on its mountain of taxpayer gold, and even hands tens of billions of dollars of it away in tax cuts to foreign companies, while our roads, schools, water, electricity etc. are falling apart.

The privileged sing from the same song sheet the world over. Boris is telling the UK these tax cuts will energise the economy. Just as Trump did in the US, and ScoMo here. It's complete self-serving bullshit, all it does is bankrupt countries and cost-shift public services to you and me. They're all arguing the interest of their own class - as George W Bush called them, the 'haves, and have mores'. They invented 'the economy' as a smart way to get away with it.

"Let me just restate for emphasis: the need for balanced federal budgets is a myth. Like many myths, it does have some factual historical origins. Back when currencies were backed by gold it was possible for governments to go broke. Because modern currencies are not backed by anything material, sovereign governments cannot run out of money and can never be insolvent in their own currency."

Hard to describe some ideas in 10 words, but this one is a cracker, I think. Jacinda Ardern got a lot of press recently by saying economic growth would not be her government's sole measure of achievement. Some described this as a sort of 'Leftie' fantasy. But actually, economics itself originally agreed with her, it was called 'political economy' and dealt with the political dimension of economics, not just numbers. Then economists stripped all of the politics out, and turned it into pure mathematical models, that made them feel more scientific without all the messy political stuff. It was a power grab by them, to become a more prominent discipline, and it worked. Powerful interests realised this new maths-only economics was terrific for them too, because these new models meant you could ignore all the real-world aspects of economics and tweak the models with profound political effects, while looking like you were just following economic 'laws'. They entered into alliance with academic economists, for mutual benefit. And thus, the 'economy' was born - a pure mathematical model. Designed to funnel money up to the top tier of society.

Sounds like the pitch for Fatal Attraction? I've been reading Esther Perel's remarkable book, Mating in Captivity. Sort of a Proust primer on love for the 21st century. A taste: "The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility."

The flip side to tax 'relief'. We're absolute dopes not to see this. The more they cut taxes, the more they shift the cost of basic public services back onto us. Anybody noticed the price of education, health, electricity, gas, water, petrol or tolls going down? Let's talk about public service cost relief instead.

When the Bohemian Rhapsody film was in cinemas, there were many who criticised the approach taken in the film. Here's Brian May responding to those claims. The thing about Queen is, underneath the pomp and spectacle is the smartest band in the world. This is the sort of thinking they brought to all of their work, but which you don't see at the surface.

The people and animals in this photograph are all long dead? Yes and no. For example, some of them is in this photograph, some of who they are has been 'captured' here and lives on with every new viewer. You could say it's just a representation of them, but what does that even mean? Some part of them was detachable from their 'physical' body and able to be 'captured'. One of the reasons aboriginal peoples often don't like images of the dead. Another example, when they realised a few scribbles on a piece of paper from the 19th century could be re-activated to play the first ever recorded sound (https://youtu.be/7Vqvq-f-UtU), even though it was just scribbles on paper. We're not either alive or dead, we're more or less active or virtual. Everybody who has ever lived is still virtually with us, and then at times even made actual, as in this photograph, to some degree.

Happy birthday sir :)

A good question. Not sure I know any flat-Earthers.

Text on a page looks like shadows. Not a metaphor I don't think, text is the highly processed shadows of things themselves, that text talks about. Darkness and light. The word 'tree' doesn't look like the shadow of a tree. But it did in the beginning. Knowledge is in the world, not in our heads.

Our world is mostly driven by algorithms. Techniques and machines for producing automatic knowledge, from basic arithmetic with pen and paper, through to computers. We wet our pants over artificial intelligence, but intelligence has always been artificial, algorthims go back thousands of years. We have always used tools and machines to do most of our thinking. Even language is a type of algorithm. And yet we still have this bizarre idea that thinking happens in our heads, in our brains. The world is full of knowledge already. Knowledge isn't 'about' the world, it's part of it.

More rubbish from the financial services industry. Working families can't afford to heat their homes, but apparently it's a crisis that retirees will have to curb their enthusiasm for annual overseas junkets. What they need to curb is their appetite for outrageous lifestyles in retirement.

We think we're smarter now than at any time in history. But check this. The domesticated plants and animals essential to our survival all appeared thousands of years ago. Today nobody knows how that domestication was done, not a clue. You can tie up a wild animal and feed it, but it'll still be wild, as will its offspring. We don't know any more how to create things that last through generations.

One of the ironies of modern life is that the Soviets pioneered what every business now thinks is important. Strategic planning, 5-year plans. The ruins of Soviet Russia are like the ruins of most modern business, just more visible. Most businesses don't last 5 years. I keep coming back to our understanding of time and space, because that is I think actually all culture. We can't create things that last across generations because we think eternity is just some projected version of right now. We think we're 'in' time and space, like they're containers, that *is* our culture.

Did you know coins have serrated edges to make them difficult to file or shave on the edges, to steal the metal? And that coins are usually alloys so getting the precious metals like silver or gold out of them is much harder.

I have an occasional heart arrhythmia. Medicine has no idea with arrhythmias, there are some treatments that work ok, but nobody really understands what's going on. When I'm in hospital, like last week, I think about it. It seems to me it's a perfect example of how modern medicine slices the body up into billable bits, allocated to different specialists, who get rich focusing on that bit of you in isolation. My hunch is arrhythmias are, as the name suggests, a problem with rhythms in the body. Not just rhythms of the heart, but rhythms of everything you're doing, including breathing, movement etc. Rhythms of the body in activity, in everyday life. The conditions medicine struggles most with are the ones that should be forcing it to change its way of thinking about things. Oh, and hospitals. I'm sorry, but they're about as healing as hitting yourself in the head with a claw hammer. Another way medicine and patients should stop and think.

Q&A was a science luvvies thing last night. The way we deal with scientists troubles me. When we're not ignoring them, we fawn over them, like last night. O please give us the answers science, isn't it nice to have firm facts and answers to things, rather than debate and confusion! Science is our religion, objective truth is our God, scientists are our priests. Just another way to be fundamentalist, the hunger for certainty is our problem here I think.

Most of us don't go to church, and those who do often don't know the origins of the rituals and traditions there. And so we don't even see I think that money continues the Eucharist into modern times. Transubstantiation - bread and wine into body, money into anything. Nobody really loves money, what they love is the miraculous way it universally transforms all things of value into other things of value, through exchange. That's what transubstantiation means, and yet I doubt we see the miracle it really is.

Faces in crowds are a fascination for me. Mostly because when we talk about crowds we assume they're a dumb mob. But every picture you can find of a crowd will make a lie of that. If there are 1000 people there, you have 1000 different worlds sharing the one space.

Night Watchmen played the role of police long before there were police. And the name is important - it was the night and darkness that was thought to be the dangerous thing. If you have any interest in Victorian England, for example, what strikes me is how dark the general feeling of those times was, literally, and the centuries before it. Not just in lack of illumination, but in clothing, themes in literature and songs, obsession with the 'dark' arts, the devil etc. I still think light and dark are the key to understanding so many things.

Arnott's biscuit factory, April 1938. Ray Olson, photographer, he took some wonderful pictures of all sorts of things, but very hard to find out more about him.

Anxiety is at plague levels. What if it has nothing to do with psychology, but with the loss of faith? Faith in reality being something bigger than us, that has its own patterns and reasons. Some call that God, and that's fine, you can call it anything. Feelings and emotions aren't yours, they're your encounter with this bigger reality. Our loss of faith makes us interpret those feelings and emotions through our own heads. Our own vanity is scaring us. As well as those who try to make society a collection of separate individuals.

Re-asking a question. Which comes first - a river, or a river bed? And notice how a photo of a river looks like a painting of a river, if you include time in the image? I think painters paint time as well as light.

Australians tend to talk about rivers as if they were talking about drains. Something that drains water from one spot to the sea, hopefully with lots pumped out along the way. Or something to turn into a dam. You can see this mindset in our landscapes, with their huge erosion gulleys - big drains. We don't see that water, soil, rocks, plants are a seamless mixture, that need to all be managed together.

Happy birthday!

32, disgusting. Enjoy :)

Maps mislead us I think because they make us think of territory and space the wrong way. Nobody lives in the space of a map. What creates space and territory is rhythms. Animals sing or 'mark' territory with other rhythms. Humans do as well, notice how more and more people now live semi-permanently in their music? Rhythmic refrains, it defines their territory, even if they're out and about. (Notice also that this particular map is a song map, which is closer to the truth.)

Capitalism, socialism, communism etc. Do any of these things even exist? Watching a debate on TV. They're spoken of like they're a computer program you plug into society, a type of operating system. I think all of these -isms are fantasies, they all need their invisible hand to actually try to explain how 'we' - society - work. They all dodge the question.

It'll have tourists now. It's hilarious really that a big selling point for travel destinations is whether you'll be bothered by other tourists. The simplest way to fix that is not to travel. But we won't do that, we're imperial map-people, sightseeing the world to death, not understanding the passion for that as an emptiness at the heart of our lives.

I've noticed the increasingly desperate way politicians talk about 'mandates'. In the UK they've spent more than 3 years arguing what a referendum vote actually meant, what mandate it gave the government. I think it's a great example of one of my favourite ideas - the problem is the solution. This mandate stuff is telling us that representative politics is breaking, there are no mandates to do anything now, the people want more say in an ongoing way. Mandates are old power structures desperately trying to hold on.

Bono. Worth $700 million. (His music isn't pro bono.) We condemn American preachers who get rich selling God. But quite seriously, and myself a fan of the music, how is that different to what Bono does?

If a trip isn't shared on social media, did it happen?

Isn't it a bit strange that the people worried that artificially intelligent machines may take over humanity, are often the same people who will tell you technology is 'only a tool'?

I'm sure people get sick of me posting about overtourism. But here's the flipside of it, the even darker side. Once compulsive tourism wrecks a place, we leave it to rot. http://www.traveller.com.au/iceland-tourist-numbers-collapse-after-years-of-overtourism-h1fkhn

The red pill, if you believe the reason the 'economy' is breaking is that most people living in it don't have any money. The blue pill if you believe it's broken because the people with 10 times more money than they need, need more through tax cuts. It will even go with your blue tie.

My Alexander friends use a physiological fact not well known in wider society. Your head and neck 'lead' your body - what happens in your body is determined by what's happening in your head and neck. Head leads, body follows. A way to play with this is notice if you have any tension in your neck, and then see how the quality of your activity changes if you can ease or remove that tension. The effect is very profound, startling even, a wonderful ease and lightness. Where I and others part company with Alexander is in this fiddling with the actual tension in the neck. Your neck is the connection between your head and your body, you can't actually free your neck. You can free your head from your body though, by allowing your attention to be freely in the world around you. That will remove tension in the neck, because your attention isn't 'holding' your head to your body.

Happy birthday Lorelle :)

The big city crush. All of my friends here at once, party on.

It's what makes English sporting teams so easy to despise. This is the country that admitted to having used breath mints to put extra shine on the ball in an earlier Ashes series, illegaly. And the country that invented Bodyline. One little bit of sandpaper? Please. When England can't win, which is most of the time, it looks to spoil.

If you've ever worked in 'middle management', you'll know it's often the pits. Impossible demands from above, impossible demands (often arising out of the top-down demands) to deal with from below. The meat in the sandwich. In my view the only genuine management going on in an organisation is the work middle managers do. Splitting organisations into these 3 tiers is a fantasy. You get senior people waffling about strategy unconnected to anything meaningfully operational, because their MBAs told them to firmly separate strategy and operations. That idea has destroyed more businesses than anything else I can think of.

I'm with Tom Gleeson on this one, the Logies have always been a complete joke, all about fatuously inflated egos looking to further careers etc. An interesting twist on this one though is that he may become the Trump of the Logies - the person who wins by going against the 'establishment'. I'm not sure we always see how the dots connect in our own culture. https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/awards/logies/logies-2019-another-gold-logie-nominee-criticises-tom-gleeson-for-his-smear-campaign/news-story/2853b028ead58548ffb0ced040de124e?fbclid=IwAR2bicqR3Q9qN4f-GPXXChiWGkPA-ZJES97aIq6mIpIBEeTL72F98XQu0AE

I think David Gillespie's forensic lawyer's mind was fantastic for exploding a lot of myths of dietary science, and also schooling. But on screens I'm not a fan. It's such an easy and lazy argument to say screen time is damaging kids. I would bet that nearly all of the hysteria will be looked back on with amusement. http://theconversation.com/david-gillespies-teen-brain-a-valid-argument-let-down-by-selective-science-and-over-the-top-claims-115142

I love plastic. The alarmism over it is I think like all alarmism, probably misguided. As the article says, there's not a lot of evidence it does harm, and bacteria are also eating it. Polymers are one of our greatest inventions. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/plastic-oceans-pollution-microplastics-evidence-harm-recycling-dumping-waste-a8275416.html

Screens, anti-social? I don't think so, in fact they're the exact opposite. They're hyper-social. Teens and others are glued to their screens because screens give them permanent access to their social group. The world has never been more social. But even more interestingly, when you magnify anything you see its essence more clearly. Social media shows us that being social has always been about 'me'. Socialness is imitation and comparison, and always has been.

Flatter taxes are what the LNP are trying to introduce by stealth in Australia. Rich people love flat taxes. It's a real test of just how dumb we are as voters, if we fall for it. They're a terribly regressive thing to introduce, shifting most of the tax burden onto lower and middle-income earners.

Why ultra conservatives win so much. They never ever compromise on their core beliefs. For example, notice as soon as the election was done, the LNP went straight back to those core beliefs. Slash taxes, beat up unions, remove layers of government. They never deviate from these, they only disguise them in different ways, with words like 'aspiration'. Progressives on the other hand have been seduced by the myth of the 'centre', thinking they need to shift their core beliefs to the Right to find the mythical centre. Ultra conservatives invented the idea of the centre, it's a brilliant trick to shift the electorate towards them. So Labor has for years, even in the Hawke/Keating days, been adopting elements of LNP policy, thinking they were moving to the centre. Blair did the same in the UK, it all ended very badly for him.

What are we looking at here Russell?

An example I think of how splitting knowledge up into 'subjects' destroys education. Trigonometry again, we all learn at school how to do it. Sometimes a teacher might even tell us the 'history', how the Greeks invented it to measure things etc. The real story though of trig is the encounter of two civilisations - Egypt and Greece. It's the encounter of two graphisms, alphabetic writing (Greece) and pictograms (picture writing - Egypt). Alphabetic writing notates sounds, pictograms represent things. A simple trig triangle like this takes the pictogram - the triangle - from Egypt. The alphabetic letters are Greek. Why did this marriage happen? It's the birth of abstraction itself, the idea that ideas can 'represent' the world. The Greeks wanted a way for their words to connect with actual things, and Egyptian pictograms seemed the way; put the 'things' on the same flat page, as diagrams, and have the words or letters then interact with them. But the world is right there still, in the abstraction. The sounds are there in the alphabetic characters, the things in the diagrams. Generations of people have now been taught that knowledge is 'about' the world, that it describes an 'objective truth' of how the world is, separate to the flat page. Idealist rubbish, it's a trick.

Happy birthday. 114, that's a good innings.

Saw this debated on UK TV. One commentator said it was a #metoo issue, violence against women. Another example of how (I think) movements like #metoo, or men's rights, or whatever, are fuelled by incoherent anger, without a good dose of accompanying thought. In this case I think the guy lost his temper, and was way too rough. He's apologised for that. It's nonsense to make it a gender issue, I'm sure he'd have behaved in exactly the same way if the protester had been a man, probably even more violently. Also, protesters like this are in themselves acting violently, physically forcing their way into private gatherings and disrupting what's going on. It's a bit precious for them to pretend they're Gandhi when they're met with resistance.

None of the research on sleep can answer one basic question - why we do it . At the end of this article the researcher suggests something he thinks is crazy, but I reckon finally on the right track: "...sleep is so beneficial that the question is really why animals ever bother to wake up. Maybe it is actually the harmful state of wakefulness that is an evolutionary mystery, not sleep....What about this hypothesis: sleep was the first state of life and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged?" Sleep and death are equivalent, we die every night. But death is not the opposite of life, just as unconsciousness isn't the opposite of consciousness. We're conscious when we're asleep, it's just a different state of consciousness. Similarly when we die we live a permanent dream state, again it's just a different state of consciousness. We can't understand sleep because we keep opposing consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, the temporal and the eternal. Binaries blind us, in everything.

Happy birthday Jord

When I grow up dad, I want to be a boilermaker.

Before the paint had even dried on the last global financial crisis, the finance industry had already begun re-leveraging using the same instruments that caused the GFC. CDOs, and also CLOs now, worth over a trillion in the US alone. Only a few things will stop these bastards repeatedly destroying societies - long jail terms, tough regulation and punitive fines. Or re-nationalisation of the entire finance industry. Name one banker or finance industry person who attracted a single penalty out of the Royal Commission. Instead we get our undies in a twist over unions. How fucking dumb can we be people.

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social relations. Look at this 1955 ad, the top cartoon frames as well. A 'washing machine' would not even exist without those social relations, particularly relating to women. It is those relations, shifted to another medium. The much bigger story here too is that 99% of what makes society stable is technologies. They don't just do jobs for us, they create our most stable social bonds. The relative peace of the past century is nearly all due to this, people rarely agree on anything. But if you take the different beliefs and passions and weave them into a machine, agreement can be reached. Once that's done, the social relations embodied in the machines operate without us even realising it. So we stop fighting one another.

Happy birthday Jas, have a good one!