July 2019

By any measure, a magnificent photo. From the 1930s, Ray Olson, one of my heroes, a press photographer at the time who captured vast amounts of public life. Cameras are so good now that I find a lot of stuff published online as great photography pretty boring actually, it's high res but lacking composition and thought. (David Brazil a notable exception.) There's something visceral about black and white too, photography is really an art of light, and so black and white photography I find closer to the essence of photography. Chiaroscuro.

Scott Morrison's proposed $158 billion tax cuts will cost every taxpayer on average over $1200 per year. In return the average houshold will get a tax cut of about $1000 per year. An average household with 2 taxpayers will pay $2400 for a $1000 return.

There are 125 taxes in Australia. 99 are federal, 25 State and only 1 is local. We all live locally.

Have faith people. Tax cuts will turn the heating back on.

There's a tipping point with measuring things where the measure becomes the thing. Medicine has fallen into this trap I think, you'll be treated for 'blood pressure', for example, as if that were some independent thing. Organisations fall onto the same trap with KPIs, and of course we run our societies as economies now, with economic indicators. In each case, we mistake the measure for the thing itself. Statistics - see the word 'State' buried in there - were earlier measures invented to manage societies. They then also took on a life of their own.

The graph below is fascinating research, the richer you are, the poorer you think you are relative to others. It's called affluenza. There's something in the bible about that, Matthew 13:12. Describes Australia the Casino well, I don't think it's a reading at ScoMo's church: "Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them." (Oh and if you earn $200,00 or more a year, or even $150,000, you're rich. Get your head out of your arse.)

Descartes. Him what invented Cartesian coordinates, which we all learn at school. Maybe the most obvious example of us mistaking the measure of something for the thing itself. Ever since Descartes, I think we've made the mistake of thinking we live 'in' Cartesian space. '3D' space. Einstein came along and added a 4th 'dimension' - time. And maps use the same space. But we don't live 'in' Cartesian space at all. We don't live inside maps or kilometres or light years. Just as our 'weight' measured on a scale isn't what we feel as weight. Another classic mismeasure.

The Madonna-whore complex is a condition attributed to men who can't find a woman both nurturing and desirable at the same time. It's real. I think this is the same complex all of society now has, it turns all issues into Madonna-whore issues. Standing ovations or mob lynchings. Left or Right. Toxic men or sainted women. For Israel or against him. You could go all day listing the ways we plug everything into this same machine, our social lives flip between outrage and overblown sentiment. You'll notice this in public discussions, frame something as one of these Madonna-whore binaries, people pile on. Frame it as just a discussion - tumbleweeds.

Happy birthday Lydia 🙂 disgustingly young.

Poor Philip Lowe is whistling into the wind here. ScoMo and the LNP actually believe big tax cuts are like fairies at the bottom of the garden, the whole 'economy' will magically grow and fix everything. We're so stuffed. Know what would get the economy going? Government investing in things. You know, what the Reverend ScoMo calls 'spending'. But no, gotta have a surplus, country be damned. https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/rba-governor-philip-lowe-issues-warning-after-rates-drop-to-historic-low/news-story/6bd01680035cdb0acee30a7ec5be5f2b

The bit in the middle of a sundial that casts the shadow is called a gnomon. The etymology of the word is fascinating, it means 'one that knows or examines'. An object that knows. The ancient world wasn't like us, it didn't assume thinking took place in our heads, it believed that the world itself knows. The gnomon casts a shadow, which tells the time all by itself, but also reveals a vast range of information about latitudes and longitudes, just for starters. It doesn't need a human mind to do it. Darkness and light, more than metaphors for me.

Way cooler than the Da Vinci Code. Shadows told the time with the sundial, here they create space. Geometry. The day I realised that the drawings in the maths textbook were these same shadows on a page - boom. We just don't notice that drawings and writing are actual shadows of the things of the world. Knowledge explicates (brings to light) what is implicated (black boxed - objectified). Literally, not metaphorically, to 'know' is to bring to light. To 'illuminate', another metaphor that is literal.

I reckon every behaviour you can see on the road is matched by a different way people live and act in society. Have a look at this, our roads tell us every day how to solve society's problems. (It won't be individualism or the State, because they're both myths. But self-driving 🚗 know the answer.)

Here's why I think religion versus science is a dumb debate. Take a scientific law, like Newton's in the picture. Nobody actually knows *why* F=ma. It's a pattern that just happens. Scientific laws don't explain why things happen, they only describe patterns - *what* happens, not why. All scientific laws are the same. So when it comes down to it, both science and religion are saying the same thing. Stuff happens, patterns appear, and something is creating them. If they stopped their meaningless debates about whether God exists, and instead debated the something that creates these patterns, they might realise they're talking about the same thing.

Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of Their Money) Bill 2019. I kid you not, the Bill is actually called that. The culture warrior virus has now infected legislation. Oh, and nobody owns their money. If you think you do, I suggest posting a video of you defacing it on FB or YouTube, and we'll watch your arrest with amusement: "Penalty: in the case of a person, not being a body corporate – $5,000 or imprisonment for two years, or both; or in the case of a person, being a body corporate – $10,000."

S'better, unusual for legislation to have typos.

Saying the universe is vast and meaningless is like saying your wife is great for cleaning and cooking. You gotta look a little harder, Brian.

A global map of the internet. I've been driving my family mad excitedly watching the NBN being installed in our street. You see, for me, what holds the world together isn't politics, or love. It's technology. That fibre being put in the ground outside my house is connecting us to the world. How could it get any more exciting than that? It's not just that I'll now be able to 'see' the rest of the world better. Technology bonds people together. When trains and roads first come to a town, the people who live there literally become connected to the rest of the world. The goods and services create ongoing contractual links with the rest of the world. With the internet, those connections go even further. The internet is what weaves humanity together, it creates bonds much more than it distributes information.

Happy birthday sir!

Happy birthday :)

Yep, it's always the boobs. As recently as WW2 women were blamed for sexually transmitted infections. Syphilis is back, one of the most horrendous of all diseases. Often called the 'no nose' disease, because sufferers lose their nose. Look at this 19th century prosthetic nose, used by a woman. And the damage syphilis does even to the bones, in this case the skull. This interests me because microbes understand time. Antibiotics made us think syphilis was in the 'past'. It isn't, it's back, as are many diseases we thought antibiotics had destroyed. Time doesn't pass, microbes are actually immortal. And we - humans - are societies of microbes, so share that immortality.

I'd go even further than this article. 'Business' doesn't exist, it's a fantasy that was created at the same time as the fantasy of 'the economy'. What exists is people, with or without money, and their needs and desires. If you make that the focus, most of society's problems disappear. No need to 'stimulate' anything, just constant attention on whether people are getting their fair share. The ideas of business and the economy were ideas invented by the privileged, to justify getting a greater share.

Happy birthday Captain :)

When cars didn't own cities.

"Obscure, ill-defined."

If resolution is your thing with images, here are some numbers. The old 35mm standard film for cameras would need a digital camera resolution of about 175 MP to capture the same amount of detail. Go to 4x5 inch pro film sizes and your digital camera would need to have a MP count of over 1000. Glass plate negatives have even higher resolutions, so would send the MP count into the thousands. With film you also get complete R, G and B (colour) resolution at every point.

Time is the universe's way of stopping everything from happening at once. If you're way too busy, everything *is* happening at once. So in an interesting way, I think it's not that you 'run out' of time when you're busy, as if time was like a tank of petrol. When you're too busy, time literally ceases to exist. In our world, busyness is a sure sign that tradition - the past - is being destroyed, so that time no longer 'flows'. Tradition or habit is what creates time, to stop you having to redo the same thing over and over (busyness). Without it to fall back on, time disappears.

"Time is out of joint." Shakespeare, Hamlet. Shakespeare knew a thing or two. Our modern crazy busy world is a world where time is broken. Out of joint. The collapse of institutions and traditions has left us either nostalgic for the past or planning for the future. The living present has gone.

This is sinus rhythm. Your 'normal', beautiful, steady heartbeat. Breathing is a rhythm too, as are your circadian cycles. Medicine has some tricks to help control rhythms, but it has little or no understanding of the rhythms themselves. Here's where years of living close to this got me. Funnily enough, I think the key is to try to understand rhythms. The key to smooth, regular rhythm - of breathing, of your heart, of sleep etc. - is *arrhythmia* of your activity in the world. If your everyday activity is too consciously repetitive, it paradoxically creates arrhythmias in your life and body. Disturbed patterns of breathing and heartbeat, just for starters. You can see that in anxious people, how they set up obsessively regulated routines in an attempt to bring regularity to their life, but it actually does the reverse, it creates clunky rhythms in their bodies and lives that cause all sorts of problems. Everyday life is full of mixed rhythms, and living those as they are paradoxically creates a sublime regularity of rhythm in your body. Also this is I suspect why people with something like anxiety and depression can find the repetitive rhythms of music irritating at times, songs get 'stuck' in their heads because their tendency to obsessively create rhythms to try to achieve calm latches onto anything.

Beware the blonde, hmm. From the 1930s.

Commiserations to those low income earners who stupidly went to university to train for a career. Your tax cut has been eaten up by the lowering of the threshold for repayment of your HELP debt. We need to look after our stupendously privileged retirees, their excess franking credit refunds and tax-free super instead. No shame.

Everybody lies. Behind every noble principle people espouse, you'll find some basic desires. Like a bucket of cash.

They say the Germans and Russians get on well. A mutual interest over gas supplies. But what's Aldi stocking here? Did Putin finally annoy the Germans just a little bit too much?

Hospital ward, 1930s. Kids are amazingly resilient.

The paranoia around privacy to me is the individual person version of the sovereignty argument. The same people overshare daily on social media, about everything. And the 'private' details people worry about aren't private at all, they're defined socially, just as countures are defined internationally. Do we really want a society where the default state is isolated atom-people, paranoid about everybody else? https://www.pcworld.com/article/2968365/why-you-should-stop-worrying-about-online-privacy.html

Thanks to Adrian for the wonderful picture of Sean Connery from 1974. The reason this interests me is the development of the 'ripped' body. In Connery's day, a body like Hemsworth's was seen as slightly ridiculous, something only body builders would be interested in, and they were generally seen as a bit unhinged - posers. Now a ripped body is seen as fit and healthy. Which it actually isn't. It's a body shaped by an idea, a type of mental illness, body dysmorphia. We see it clearly in conditions like anorexia, but if a person gets ripped, it's seen as them getting fit. The fitness industry is as much about the mind as the body.

San Francisco has some of the best fog in the world. Fog is interesting, like darkness it makes it very hard to see around you. But it's a very different experience at the same time, more disconcerting. It's an invisibility of light, where the amount of light doesn't help you. It feels more sinister, particularly at sea.

The SCG in 1903. It was a different sort of ground when there were only a few stands. Probably less comfortable, but somehow more exciting. These old silver coated glass plate photographs have a magical quality, extraordinary definition and capture of light. Nothing today is as good.

More of my love affair with analog photography. Look at the breathtaking quality of light in this shot. So many nuances that digital algorithms couldn't possibly capture here, I think. I'm a huge fan of the freedom and manipulability digital gives you, with sound too, but analog somehow captures more of the thing itself, it has more 'volume', more of the event itself is embedded in the image.

Another really beautiful analog shot. One of the things I love about the glass plate analogs is how the zoom is pretty much infinite, you don't get any pixellation at any scale

Happy birthday old man :)

England celebrates almost winning a World Cup! Go NZ, let's keep England's perfect record of zero World Cups intact. (Australia has 5 Cups, by the way, for any Brit people warming up their boos, so even with a win you'll still be down 5-1. Losers.)

Hands up if you plan to use your tax cut to: - upgrade the NBN - pay childcare workers a living wage - reduce hospital waiting times - take unflued gas heaters out of schools - build more public transport - fix the Murray-Darling - bring power prices down. Anyone? O wait, only government could do those things. It'd need about $150-odd billion for stuff like that. Where would it find that sort of money?

William Joseph Macpherson is another hero of mine, he took many breathtaking images of Australia at the turn of the last century. Like this one of The Rocks, where you see both the life of the people (kids in this case) and also the old ships as background, the harbour from a different time. More beautiful silver plate analog photography, FB dramatically cuts the resolution to upload these more easily, the originals are even more stunning.

It's a long time since Railway Square in Sydney looked like this. The blissful time before cars ate the world.

Modern conservatives mostly believe government restricts individual freedom, and in most ways (that don't disadvantage themselves) they would rather government be dismantled. These are usually beliefs of those who are born into privilege, and think they got there by their own hard work. Or those who were lucky and attribute their success entirely to their own genius and hard work. Conservatives in history would have been flabbergasted by these beliefs, they're not conservative at all. I think if we reduced most social arguments back to core beliefs, the debates would make more progress. We need to debate the core beliefs.

No details with this shot, so these men are a mystery. A lot of the wonderful old shots don't have details unfortunately. Around late-1800s, early-1900s again, an industrial factory. I love it because they're so alive here. And that before casual clothes, suits (and even bowler hats) were used even in industrial jobs .

We get all wound up about plastics. But air? It's killing us, millions of us. Plastics aren't.

Hospitals are maybe the most damaging invention ever for our health, and it's not the fault of the amazing people who work there. We've let ourselves think of health as the functioning of different bits of us, overseen by vastly overpaid specialists in those bits, in hyper-sterile environments that encourage individual micro-organisms to become impossible to control. The patient has little to no agency in the whole sorry affair. And that's our fault, we delegate responsibility for our own health to other people. We don't see 'health' as about rich environments in our everyday lives, it's not just about our body. Most diseases we go to hospital for can ultimately be traced back to the breaking down of everyday life in some way. It takes real bravery to sometimes walk away from the 'health system' and look after yourself. It can save your life.

Happy birthday :)

On health, notice the sniggering you'll hear from some about 'Dr Google'. Turns out doctors regularly use Google as well. This is medicine's Trump moment. Patients have been ignored as ignorant for a long time, and instead of mocking them for trying to get involved in their own health, use it. It's telling us what's wrong with medicine. On top of that, I still think people who criticise the use of Google - school teachers do it too - don't understand how it works. Google aggregates the wisdom of millions of people. I would trust a Google result over an 'expert' view most days of the week.

Anthony Hordern & Sons Palace Emporium, Brickfield Hill, Sydney, 1935. The largest shopping centre in the world at the time, 52 acres of shops.

Couple of beautiful old shots for Adam and Cameron. SCG, January 27, 1883. And Her Majesty's Theatre fire, March 1902, Cam those would be steam-driven water pumps in the foreground?

Tesla once said "if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration." I think he's right and I'd add to that - resonance.Resonance is the way objects interact, and humans too. The rhythms of life. Have a look at what sound can do to water. If you look you'll find vibrations and resonances everywhere in the world.

Imagine being this excited winning on boundary countbacks, after deflecting a return throw for the needed runs to force a draw. Embarrassing. These are the people who boo a bit of sandpaper.

Happy birthday to you :)

WW2 shot. Caption this ;)

Your body isn't a series of measurements, nor is it a machine. Why are there not more thinking physicians, like Dr Herbert Benson, who ask the basic question - do our beliefs and emotions determine much of our health? And why does standard health care park that off to one side as 'placebo', and 'bedside manner'? Bodies heal themselves, we can only help them. Our emotions and beliefs are the core of our bodies.

Florence Nightingale once said if you want to control infection in a hospital, open the windows. Let fresh air in. Recent research suggests she knew what she was talking about, you get fewer infections in outdoor field hospitals than you do in modern gleaming sterile operating theatres. The idea of a 'sterile' environment is stupid, micro-organisms live in societies, not individually. Ironically what has produced superbugs *is* sterile environments, where individual microbes have been allowed to evolve independently from competition with other microbes. I'm on a health and hospitals theme at the moment, because I've been forced to spend some time there again, and it's the most non-healing experience I could imagine. You can't preserve life in environments devoid of life. Sterile in every meaning of that word, absent of emotion, feeling, agency, fresh air, colour, movement, privacy, humanity. People who work in these places are heroes, we need to change the model so badly.

Did you know that bacteria are immortal? But also, interestingly, one type of cells in our bodies is immortal too - cancer cells. This to me is where everything we think we know could be thrown wide open, if we questioned some of our assumptions: - that multicellular organisms like us are more complex than single-celled organisms (I think that's backwards) - that big things are more complex than little things (also backwards) - that cancer may in fact be not so much anti-life as eternal life, trying to exist in a mortal body - that our bodies are (simple) societies of (complex) micro-organisms, and like all societies the compromises are what make us mortal; all agreements or compromises are finite, and - time doesn't pass from past to future. Eternity is where bacteria live, and our bodies are momentary adventures of these bacteria, with our deaths not the end of time, but just a re-arrangement of bacteria.

One of the most embarrassing open secrets of science is that it has no idea what 85% of the universe is made of. The elements we learn at school make up an estimated 15% of the visible universe - the other 85%? Nobody has a clue. They call it 'dark matter'. These are the sorts of wtf questions that should make us shift everything we think, IMO.

This man wins by trashing tradition. And yet to this day his opponents focus on the man, and ignore the reason he succeeds. Why is it that so many people vote to trash tradition? If we understand that, we understand Trump.

Happy birthday Snowy :)

Derren Brown sees reality as mostly about stories, I agree. He has quite spectacular ways of showing it.

I asked a friend how many disposable plastic products here west of the Blue Mountains might end up in a whale's stomach. (I would bet - close to zero.) Public discussion follows the same, tired path. Let's set up some lazy, sloppy binary and then pick which 'side' we'll be on. Like going to the footy. Everything is turned into sport. Plastics is a hugely complex issue with a million nuances.

There's something about modern Christians and taxes. Like a Church versus State ongoing grudge match. There's about a sixth of a degree of separation between these nutters and ScoMo.

Lithgow totally rocks, water freezes at 3 degrees here.

Society's deep tectonic plates. It occurred to me yesterday that most of the modern conservative agenda, of small government and lower taxes, is actually driven by the same people who opposed the separation of church and State. It's that same agenda, centuries-old, resurfacing in a modern form. Dressed up in economic terms, but actually the same religious folk continuing to try to destroy secular society by undermining the State. And it's their right to try, there's lots wrong with secularism too. But we have to be able to see it as what's actually going on.

Our fear of death distorts our understanding of time I think. Look at this standard definition of eternity. We use this model of time as a river which 'flows' along forever. But rivers don't flow along anything at all, the river bed and the water co-create each other. Time is just a name we give to something that changes, and we get it backwards and say that time is what causes the changes. If you flip it and focus on the changes themselves, the divide between finite and eternal is actually the divide between what changes and what doesn't change. Eternity is what doesn't change. And lots of things don't change, right here and now - you don't have to wait 'forever' for eternity.

Happy birthday cuz :)

Seasonal hours. The Babylonians and others, instead of doing something stupid like moving their clocks back and forward by an hour twice a year, instead allowed the length of their hours to vary with the season, defined by the sun and sundials. There were always 12 hours in the day, but the length of the hours themselves changed. Not that this was necessarily their concern, but this prevents the sharp (and very unhealthy) shock to the system from shifting clocks twice a year. The picture is a tablet they used to do these calculations.

I think emoticons actually reinforce a misunderstanding, that feelings and emotions are 'ours'. 'You hurt 'my' feelings'. The quickest way to completely transform your life I think is to experience feelings as relations between you and the world around you, including other people. You don't have to 'do' that either, all that's needed is experiencing feelings and emotions in the full context they're occurring, rather than artificially stewing on them as if they reside 'inside' you. Experiencing them in that context will transform your life, without you having to think about or do a thing. The context will provide the meaning of the emotions and feelings, automatically. That includes your 'physical' relationship with the planet, what we call gravity. I don't think there's a single human problem that isn't caused by people separating their emotions and feelings from the context in which they're occurring.

Is the only thing more dull than a career, looking at other peoples' careers? Makes me shudder, a life turned into a plan, with goals.

Australians are turning away from meat for the same reason they're turning away from plastic. Because Australia doesn't think. It calls thinking 'over-thinking', meaning any thought at all.

This is the belief destroying our societies, that government and individuals are separate things. Just as countries didn't exist before there were international agreements, individuals didn't exist before we had government. Try to live a rich life as an individual in a country without a strong government, and you'll be lucky to survive a year. This belief is destroying our societies because it's supposed to - as Margaret Thatcher famously said, one of the architects of this lunatic idea, "there is no such thing as society". They wanted to break it. The more we implement this belief, the more we destroy society, and the more authoritarian government becomes, to try to deal with the broken mess.

What if the main problem with health care isn't health care, but us? Just as the main problem with government is us. Stop going to the bloody doctor for 'check ups'. Health care is there to help heal the sick, not to make the population healthy. That's our job. Health care actually has very little useful advice on health, because it sees health as the opposite of sick.

The Bullingdon Club, Oxford University, 1987. You can see David Cameron (ex British PM) second from top left, and Boris Johnson, likely British PM from Wednesday, seated at the front. This club reportedly performed acts such as burning cash in front of beggars. I post this to show the sort of privilege the world over currently heading up the main conservative parties. The same parties who claim to speak for the common man and woman. You'd be an idiot to believe them. These are the people for example who think the UK can just leave Europe with no damage to everyday life. These people can't even boil an egg, they wouldn't know a thing about everyday life. Trump is the same in the US, and the Australian LNP is full of private school boys in the same vein.

Aristocrats are mocked for living privileged lives separated from basic reality. But - this is us. Our societies are the rich, privileged people on the planet. It's why social life is freaking us out right now, because suddenly our comfortable, trouble-free lives are being invaded by difficult political problems. Those problems - immigration, climate change, etc. - are telling us we're out of touch.

Wouldn't progress be women sitting with legs ajar, rather than men sitting with legs together? Where there's a lack of room like on a bus here, sure, don't hog the space next to you. But to turn the act of spreading legs into a gendered criticism - do we have it backwards? Forcing women to sit with legs together is actually the original sexist power play here.

Clive Palmer tried to do a 'Trump' in the Australian election. He didn't succeed for himself, though definitely strongly shaped the outcome by strip mining disaffected voters and delivering them to the LNP as preferences. (The LNP is still deluding itself it won because of its policies, the day of reckoning is still coming.) I wonder if the reason Australia avoided a Trump or a Boris Johnson, for now anyway, is compulsory voting.

Boom.

Another glimpse into our changing world I think. More than 500 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube every *minute*. It would take you an entire lifetime and more to watch all the video uploaded to YouTube in just one day. But it's even more staggering on the viewing side. Nearly 175,000 hours of video are being watched every minute in YouTube, compared to the 500 hours being uploaded. That's hundreds of millions of hours being watched each day.

Unlike Trump, I find Johnson actually pretty likeable. You can see why many people are drawn to him. Leaders always need that. They need more too, which he likely doesn't have. And it's not clear he even agrees with Brexit. On Brexit, the zealots say a 'majority of Brits voted for it'. Actually only 72.21% of eligible Brits voted, and of those 51.89% voted for Brexit. So 51.89% of 72.21% of Brits voted for Brexit = 37% of the UK. Of that 37%, the majority were aged 50 or older, and male. Demographics as always, we focus on the leaders and miss the actual social causes.

"...you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it." (Eckhart Tolle) It's a standard insight from presence traditions. I think it's fascinating to apply it to public debate. Lots of resistance going on obviously, does it mean that we're all just not paying attention to what's actually happening?

I've posted several times about vitamin C, most recently how it's being used to cure sepsis. I think Linus Pauling was really onto something, you don't win 2 Nobel Prizes for being stupid. You need to take this outside the loopy New Age vitamin crowd though, vitamin C is very badly thought of as just a vitamin. You can see here, what it can do is extraordinary. Also recent research that it prevents arrhythmias in 85 percent of patients who have open heart surgery. Your GP will likely toe the standard line that it's ok but not anything special, and you'll piss out more than a small dose anyway. This is one time I'd strongly encourage you not to listen to them. I take 500mg-1000mg a day, spread across 3-4 doses of 250mg. 500mg is probably enough if you're not sick, you can take multiple grams if you are. And if you're really sick, like in this article, go for it intravenously, if any doctor or hospital will listen to you. If they don't listen, find somebody who will.

Biomechanics likes to explain how the body moves by breaking it up into a collection of levers, like the arm below. The problem I see with this whole approach is that something can't lever itself. It's bootstrapping, like trying to lift yourself up with your shoelaces. If you say the arm is a lever, for example, who's working the lever? You? But your arm is you.

What happens when you marry a smart-arse.

In a society of ripped bodies and flabby minds (society struggles to solve its current issues), how do you workout our thinking? I think the law knows, and the fact the law is so disliked suggests it's the place to look. The genius of legal thinking is that it rejects the way we usually oppose specific things, and general things. In law, every 'case' is both highly specific, and general, at the same time. Flabby thinking opposes those two things to each other - platitudes (general) or outrage (specific). Case-based thinking forces you to look at the specifics of every case, but at the same time how it connects with other similar cases, to tease apart similarities and differences.

Henri Bergson's famous memory cone. Bergson showed that time doesn't 'pass', like a river. (Actually rivers don't flow or pass either.) What we call the 'present' is the tip of the cone, the most contracted state of time where only one thing happens at once. Those slices of the cone (the A-B) show what happens when we move away from that highly contracted present point, to allow more of the past (which never leaves) to arise, like in daydreams, remembering or sleep. Memories. Time is an elastic state, contracted more or less, not something that flows. Our default state is sleep and even death, living in pure memory, with time uncontracted and fully relaxed so that all events coexist.

This animation is fun, about how to know if you're believing the right things (the rope puzzle is a classic). It ends asking if we all need to be more open-minded. For me that's the strange idea that truth is just there, if you can remove your biases.

Brian Cox's The Planets is jaw-dropping TV. Raining solid and liquid diamonds on Saturn - you couldn't make this stuff up. There is one point where he says that if there is life on one of the moons of Saturn, it will just be very simple microbes, and not more evolved life like us. That's a common prejudice in science and outside science. What's mind blowing is that the work of people like Lynn Margulis is reversing that prejudice, showing that humans and plants and animals may in fact be the simplest of all life forms, and that complexity increases the smaller you go, towards microbes. Have posted about that before, how humans for example are likely just societies of microbes. We are little microbe projects, with a finite lifespan, but the microbes that make us are eternal, they build all the animals and plants we see in the way we build bridges and houses. Then when we 'die' they build something else. But we are them too, eternal beings. I don't think we understand time or eternity.

If you ran a company, and said "we're going to spend $158 billion to boost business over the next 3 years", do you think at the end of those 3 years you'd be sacked if the new business didn't happen? (I'd say you'd probably go to jail.) So...if at the next election the $158 billion in public money given away in tax cuts hasn't supercharged the economy, shouldn't that be seen almost as criminal, given the demands on the public purse with an ageing population? ScoMo always tells us it's our money, if you're a shareholder in a company and somebody loses your money, there are serious legal consequences.

When even the head of the AMA is calling it a dud, how does it survive? The LNP shut down the car industry for costing taxpayers a helluva lot less than private health insurance.

When Charles Darwin visited Bathurst in 1836, he made this fascinating comment about the Macquarie River: "The Macquarie figures in the map as a respectable river, and it is the largest of those draining this part of the watershed; yet to my surprise I found it a mere chain of ponds, separated from each other by spaces almost dry." He'd made similar comments about a river he'd found at Wallerawang. To me this is fascinating because this is how many rivers were in Australia, before European settlement - chains of ponds where the water spread into the surrounding soil and was stored there. Billabongs were also part of these systems. It was European landscape management that converted these chains of ponds, through 'incision', into huge gulleys and flowing streams - basically big drains that empty the water from the landscape (Darwin even uses the word 'draining'). You can still find some of these chains of ponds, but you'll find a lot more rivers, streams and gulleys where water drains out of the land. Europeans have several of their own upstream 'discontinuous watercourses', like swamps and bogs, so it's surprising they didn't see the connection. The answer to our water and even climate change problem is at least partly to re-vegetate the landscape and slow the water down so it can be stored in the soil again.

Profound wisdom here I think. You can't escape the mind using the mind, I imagine how many lives are stuck in that rut.

This is the next step for the 'sovereignty' movement. Sovereignty moves inside the individual. Seriously nasty in many ways, these people do things like shoot policeman asking for their driver's licence. Notice they only try to be sovereign individuals in countries that are peaceful and where you can live as an individual, because of strong government. They freeload off society, in a fantasy that society restricts their freedom.

Just some of the at least 50 known minerals that are actually created by living things. The boundary between living and non-living is one we'll have to think harder about if we're to understand climate change I think. Couresty of Margulis, What is Life?

Trivia!

The idea that restricting the number of your children will save the world is one of the most stupid and offensive ideas I know. Richer countries already don't have enough babies to replace themselves, because they have ways of funding retirement without needing children to look after them. If people have enough to live, population looks after itself.

Herzlichen glückwünsch zum Geburtstag!