August 2019

One of the things philosophy taught me that can change how you look at everything. We're taught to think that things either exist, or not. But things happen. They're events, not things. And they continue to happen, like the Great Pyramid, seen in our time here but when built, it was gleaming white, clad with limestone. The pyramid has been happening that whole time, the event 'the great pyramid' is still going on.

It's much easier to do yoga I think when you recognise that it's not about this or that position or technique. Essentially yoga is when body, breath and attention are integrated in a single activity. Once you know that, everything can become yoga.

This is Herbert Benson, revolutionary American cardiologist who recognises that bodies can’t be understood or healed separately to minds. His patients are trained to activate the relaxation response, their parasympathetic nervous system. All healing ultimately comes from that response. I will bet you won’t find much relaxation in health care in general, it’s amazing to me that the anxious and sterile environments we use for healing aren’t seen as utterly ridiculous.

So, after more than $50 billion of our money, Australia is now 62nd in the world for broadband speed. They could fix the NBN by upgrading it to its original design, but that would mean these failed suburban solicitors occupying the LNP front bench would have to admit to being incompetent. Plus they've just given another $158 billion dollars away in tax cuts, so the cupboard is bare. It's a testament to how hopeless Labor are that they can't win an election against this bunch of incompetent idiots.

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social relations too. We tear our hair out over politics for example being so short-term in its thinking - here's why I think, the 'long-term' in society *is* infrastructure. For example there are about 2000 dams in the UK, and their average age? 110 years. They were mostly built when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Climate change may smash many of them. I don't think these are engineering problems. Every technology is also an agreement between thousands or even millions of people, across centuries, it's what holds society together. We need a politics where infrastructure is the central topic, not just humans, because infrastructure is human society looked at through a lens going centuries backwards and forwards. Our traditions and institutions are our infrastructure, they're the same thing and we're not seeing it. If we realised non-humans (technologies, infrastructure) are the most social part of our societies, our societies would change. Instead we focus only on humans, like sport, splitting every issue into two sides and barracking for our side. And we say morality is broken, how dreadful is the world, all you need is love etc. Drivel. We're focused only on the present day and the humans living in it, and how much tax they can avoid paying. Infrastructure is the only way to bring everybody together, with a long-term focus. Notice the Chinese, a society saturated with long-term tradition, are obsessed with infrastructure. It's not a coincidence.

The sorites paradox. If you remove one grain of sand from the pile at a time, at what point does it stop being a pile? (The beauty of this one is, you can also use the pile of sand and some breath mints to make an English cricket integrity kit.)

This is one birth of 'the economy' I think. The idea individuals are sovereign and that anything that gets in their way must be resisted is the Wild West. You can see it in modern ideas of the market, and in mass shootings in the US. The economy is just the modern version of this saloon, you don't understand American violence I don't think without connecting all of these dots at once.

That stretching of the pants is to hide that he'd shat them I think. Loud chorus of boos for Smith again when he got 100, Virat Kohli instructed Indian fans to cut out the booing. You won't see the English do the same, because unlike Kohli, spoiling is the only talent they have. The Bodyliners.

Gabriel Tarde, my greatest hero apart from the inventor of Crocs, saw desire as the root of all things. Even in what seems the driest topic, economics, he saw that desire was the engine of everything: "Economic progress supposes...a growing number of different desires, for, without a difference in desires, no exchange is possible, and, with the appearance of each new, different desire, the life of exchange is kindled."

More of the genius of Tarde. What would Tarde say we should do to get 'economic growth'? Tax cuts? Micro- and macro-economic reform? Fiscal or competition reform? All fairytale piffle, he'd have said. There is no economy, there are just people's desires interacting in different ways. For Tarde there's only one way to boost economic growth - people having conversations, processing their desires. The 'market' or 'the economy' are just big conversations. (He'd have seen social media as the greatest economic innovation in world history.) "There is no economic relationship between men that is not first accompanied by an exchange of words, whether verbal, written, printed, telegraphed, or telephoned...how do these needs for production and consumption...arise? Most often, thanks again to conversations, which has spread the idea of a new product to buy or to produce from one interlocutor to another...If, just for one week, conversation ceased in Paris, it would show very quickly through the singular decrease in the number of sales in stores...There is no...factor more powerful...in production than the chatter of individuals in their idle hours."

A friend whose 94-year old mother is ailing made a fascinating observation to me today. Often people at that age are said to be losing their marbles, but he believes they're actually going through a profoundly sophisticated transition time. The behaviours we see as doddery and vague and a sort of breaking-down are actually sophisticated adjustment processes. Just as children's development looks simple on the outside, but is actually extremely sophisticated. We need to re-frame the old as doing really complex things that we can't quite understand, not dysfunctional things. My view is that this is related to how we don't understand time too. I've posted how I don't see death as the end of life, but as the end of actual rather than virtual life. What the Buddhists call shifting between different states of consciousness. Interestingly the old often 'lose their memory'. You can't actually lose your memory because memory is the past and the past doesn't 'pass', it's always just here, virtually. So I think the old are often already living and exploring a completely different relationship to time than we understand, which we can only see as them losing their memory. We 'read' both the young and the old through our own mid-life frames, which don't fit.

This guy's software can create hundreds of thousands of books automatically, which he sells on Amazon. It made me think about the TV stories you see about how machines are going to be smarter than us, and we should worry. Maybe our idea of 'smart' is the problem here, much of what we describe as human intelligence is really just algorithms. https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/

Admirable as Greta's cause is, I still think climate change isn’t a scientific thing. It’s not even about climate. The climate is changing because we lost all meaningful connection to space. We turned it into a map, an ‘environment’.

How is maths related to sex? Well...sex is desire. Desire is the basis of how we value things. To value things we need to be able to discriminate between them. Discrimination is strongest when you can quantify it. Quantification = maths.

Maths has a 'purity' that many people interpret religiously - some even call maths the language of God. As if the more mathematical something is, the truer it is, the closer to God. I think it's all nonsense, maths is the study of patterns - nothing more.

Isn't the idea that we wish we'd told people things before they died strange? Strange because the root of that wish is the idea that somehow they're still feeling what we did or didn't say to them in life. The most secular, atheist person or any type of religious believer can both have this wish.

Social media analytics, do we stop and think about how extraordinary it is to be able to now quantify so many desires and beliefs? The subjective/objective divide dissolving. I think this is maths finally achieving its core function - to accelerate the propagation of desire and belief. We use maths to understand patterns, and we want to understand patterns because they allow us to allocate values differently to different things, according to our beliefs and desires. It's sex all the way down, the modern mathematical/technical age is also the most passionate and desiring of all ages; aren't we all noticing that? The world seems a crazy clash of passions right now?

The Harmandir Sahib, also known as The Golden Temple. Amritsar, India. It's plated in actual gold, and is the main pilgrimage site for Sikhs. Free food is served to thousands of people here every day, and all faiths and those without faith are also welcome. I've never been there, but it struck me because it seems an example of how space itself can become meaningful, even sacred. And do we know any more how that works? Do we still have meaningful spaces?

The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, to a sacred place. 2 million people. The Ed Sheehan world tour: 8.5 million people. Rather than see ourselves as 'modern' and secular, wouldn't it be better to understand how our behaviour is almost exactly the same as traditions going back thousands of years? With this one crucial difference - our sacred now has no place. Sheehan played sports stadiums, music and sport are our religion. When the concert ends, we retreat to our headphones. Our modern religion has no place. Thus, climate change, the world - place - fights back.

Even the tiniest country towns built churches as a first priority. My theme at the moment - can we still understand how space and place can be so meaningful to people? At the same time we laugh at people who are obsessed with sovereignty, but they're showing a (often clumsy) passion for the space they live in that those who laugh maybe don't understand any more? And our obsession with travelling though other peoples' places, it's all the same phenomenon.

Test.

Bacteria can swim like animals, photosynthesize like plants, and cause decay like fungi. One or another of these microbial geniuses can detect light, produce alcohol, waft hydrogen and fix nitrogen gas, ferment sugar to vinegar, convert sulfate ions or sulfur globules in salt water to hydrogen sulfide gas...The smallest of them have a diameter only a thousand times greater than a hydrogen atom...Bacteria have already mastered nanotechnology, already miniaturized, they have control of specific molecules about which human engineers dream. Far more complex than than any computer or robot...bacteria propel themselves by flagella, corkscrew-shaped spinning protein filaments attached to living motors in the membranes of their cells. Complete with rings, tiny bearings, and rotors, they are called 'proton motors' and spin at around 15,000 rpm...The entire planet is bacterial. Human technologies and philosophies are permutations of the bacteria. Eating, infecting, and irreversibly merging with one another, bacteria spun off powerful new prodigies: the protocists, fungi, plants, and animals - all of which keep alive the metabolism and movement of the bacteria from which they derived. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?

Wages are stagnant in Australia because people stopped joining unions. The end, there is no other reason. Even the Governor of the Reserve Bank has said workers should fight for higher wages - can you believe he's been forced to say that? Money comes from power, power comes from fighting for your rights. The 'economy' is us, the reason it's tanking is because most people don't have any money. People are customers, customers without money means businesses going broke. The great irony is the only thing that will fix the economy is more power for workers - unions. What's ScoMo doing? Trying to smash them.

You gave me the answer To love eternally I love you, and You, you seem to like me. - Paul McCartney, accidentally writing the greatest love song of all time.

I love this picture. I was taught that animals and plants are the most complex of living things, culminating in the supposedly magnificent sentient consciousness of a handful of animals. It's only in recent years that I've learned that this is a load of prejudiced hogwash. There are no levels in life, all life is microbes. Evolution isn't a hierarchy from simple to more complex (bigger) organisms - it's all microbes, re-arranging themselves in different ways. An animal or a plant is a highly simple collection of much more complex microbes. These microbes are immortal, plants and animals are temporary experiments the microbes undertake.

There are probably many ways to create a serial killer. One might be putting your kid on a bus full of teenagers while wearing your pyjamas.

My bus is trapped in the snow and ice. Not much else to do but take in the view.

This increasingly feels like life in an Anglo country. The Simpsons rarely miss the mark.

I love animals, but am ambivalent about pets. The amount of attention we lavish on domestic animals sits uncomfortably with me, like we're using them for unexamined emotional reasons. For example, the US spends more on its pets each year than the combined GDP of the 39 poorest countries in the world.

"The idea of "completion" stems from the hope crystallised in fairy tales. We meet the princess or the prince, we will live happily ever after. Any mature adult knows that this is absurd, but knowing it isn't the same as acknowledging it. For understanding that we cannot be completed, also acknowledges that, however much we love someone, we must finally live life existentially alone. This is a hard fact to swallow. This hope of escaping solitude is, I suspect, why people put such high expectations on their partner...We can only love, in truth, from a confident place of aloneness. It is the human condition."

This is an idea I think that is an almost bottomless well of insight if you apply it. Everything in life is individual and discrete, and all continuity, even something like the 'flow of time', is an illusion built from individual, discrete bits. The elements that make up our world are all discrete. Relationships are between discrete individuals. An interesting example is TV or film. Just about all modern films or TV are constructed from 'cuts', sequences of individual discrete scenes. The effect we feel is of a continuous story or narrative. But actually it's a whole bunch of discrete scenes.

Words. To cheat is to unfairly gain an advantage. What is the 'advantage' in infidelity, why do we call that cheating? Is sex a race of some kind to some endpoint, that you can cheat your way to?

Michel Serres once called our times the "reign of the Beatles - the shit-eaters". (He loved the Beatles.) What he meant by that was obviously a play on words referring to beetles, who like to eat turds. And the equivalence he was drawing was that from the 1960s onwards, music took on a political role that he thought was like eating the scraps from your master's table. At the same time as society was dismantling the institutions that protected the weak and vulnerable, peoples' political and social interests shifted to their favourite artists. Protest music, the idea that singing about something is a substitute for doing politics. Even further, to this day vast numbers of people know nothing about the way their own society operates, but could tell you every obsessive detail of their favourite acts. It was a massive diversion of attention away from the grown-up concerns of adult society. Perpetual adolescence.

Somebody asked me the other day if I 'had a life'. What prompted their question was that I rarely post anything about my personal life to social media. To me it was staggering, how deep oversharing is in people, that they don't see the wackiness of constantly posting about themselves on a global platform, that mines their personal lives to make money. The fact my personal life wasn't on social media meant I didn't have a personal life 🤔 It's still a head scratch for me, that the default seems to be to assume people want to know about your life. I can guarantee, they mostly really don't. They may say they do - they're lying. It's more a battle of curated images, not actual concern. I don't think most of what I post is of much interest to people either, but I'd rather have a go at discussing ideas than sharing endless stories about my own life, yuck. The people who want to know about that, already know.

The word rhetoric has a pejorative meaning today, like persuasion is a sneaky thing. Better to just 'stick to the facts'. I think it's the key to reforming education. The ancient Greeks had it right in the middle of schooling, because for them all facts are shaped by values, and all values by facts, they didn't separate them. We do. So we educate people with (what we see as) valueless facts, and factless values. Pick any debated issue today and it's easy to spot the valueless facts ('just stick to the facts') and the factless values (right to life, ethics, moral principles).

How do you determine what's right and wrong? What's good and what's bad, or less good? In any situation, including what music you like, whether to send your kids to this or that school, etc. This question really interests me, because while we live in an increasingly secular society, people still make value judgments all the time. But we rarely elaborate how we do that.

We collectively turn a blind eye to the well-off getting handouts, but are scathing about the poor getting them. I wonder if it's because social life is intrinsically comparative and competitive, no matter how much we pretend it isn't. The desire to 'aspire' to be as good or better than other people is stronger and deeper than the desire to help others.

Awesome.

Consultation with one of the country's top medical specialists. Doc: the test results were great, all good Me: fantastic! Doc: so, we'll start you on a full-time dose of [drug X] Me: um, isn't that only for people who get bad results on the test? Doc: *silence, then rustling of papers in my file* o yes, that's right. Gotta be an active patient. I wonder how many people end up on the wrong end of very bad decisions, because they just assume doc knows best.

Happy Birthday to you!

Those socialists down in Victoria, I dunno. The role of a State government is to help the gambling, alcohol, toll road and property development industries, not to do things like this. Loving that vehicles are being put second at last.

At $51 billion the NBN is Australia’s biggest ever infrastructure project, and it makes some people wince. But just to keep our societies running, an estimated $40 billion a year will be needed on infrastructure. Per YEAR. Because infrastructure needs long-term thinking, I think it’s the best measure of the circle of life. Tradition and multi-generational thinking. These numbers indicate how much the last generation focused on themselves, and how broken our relationship with time is. Societies of the eternal present.

Like trying to arrest Brian Blessed.

The most tedious thing about modern sport for me, at every level, is the constant attack on officials. Technology feeds it, endless replays and slow motions and microphones and projected ball trajectories, and 20 minutes later we say "bloody ref got it wrong". Ridiculous. Never mind that players get things wrong far more often than refs. It's 2 deeper issues for me. First it extends our attack on authority of all forms, into sport. (Trump, Brexit - these things are all connected.) Second the idea that technology gives the 'true' answer, which all law courts rejected ages ago, but we simplistically apply to sport. We want absolute truths, not complexity and nuance.

The ‘virtual’ world has nothing to do with IT. It sounds a bit abstract, but i think it actually changes everything we know, about life, death, space, time - the lot. We all still use Newton in everyday ideas, I think we need to update, we have all of our ideas at once: physics, theology, morality etc. It may seem an academic issue, but these all flow through to the everyday lives we lead. Things don’t exist or not, they ‘ripple’ in and out of existence, have finite lives and then return to the eternal virtual world. The words I’m typing this with are both virtual and actual, temporal and eternal. Your body is too.

Clostridium Botulinum, the most toxic substance on Earth. Just 50 grams of this stuff spread across the surface of the Earth would kill every human alive. But...we inject it into our faces, as Botox. And it's a 'natural' entity. Worth bearing in mind I think in recent hysteria over Roundup, for example.

When people say "I got this", I'm pretty sure they don't got this.

I still think the real political divide in society isn't Left versus Right. It's old versus young. Wealth is being funnelled to retirees, a time of life that used to be about slowing down. And society has no money to do basic multi-generational infrastructure. Always follow the money.

I remember Saul Bellow, the great novelist, making a similar point to this undertaker. That 'celebration' has always felt a bit fake to me, like we don't want to face the reality of death. And actually, I think if we did, we'd be much less scared of it than we tend to be. "...the funeral has become instead a ‘celebration of life’. It has a guest list open to everyone except the actual corpse, which is often dismissed, disappeared without rubric or witness, buried or burned, out of sight, out of mind, by paid functionaries such as me — the undertaker."

The great demographer David Foot predicts which societies will succeed and which won't by looking at their demographics, the distribution of people across different age groups. For example he sees Germany, Russia and Japan as ageing so quickly, they will struggle to remain world powers (the image on this post is for Japan). Most Western countries are the same, ageing rapidly. Some countries like India on the other hand have far too many young people, which could lead to mass unemployment and social chaos. To quote Foot: “The countries of the future are Brazil, Turkey and Mexico because they have educated females, lower birth rates, but are younger demographically so they can increase living standards by employing everyone,” he said. “Indonesia is on the cusp of taking off with the right political decisions and Mexico will, but needs to improve its institutions.”

Thank you Business Dicitionary. So...how do the buyers and sellers connect with each other and carry out these transactions? Anyone?

NBN came and finished connecting my street last weekend. What struck me was that every worker was young and obviously from India, and they really knew their stuff, fantastic to watch them. And it made me think how stupid we are as a society, to be obsessed with immigration. Our society is very old, and our biggest crisis may be not enough young workers to support the oldies. Every great wave of immigration to Australia has enormously expanded the diversity and colour of Australian life, and made us far richer. And yet our biggest political issue is still paranoia about immigration. I'll re-post this image, which to me sums up just about every social trend in Australia right now. Old, scared and reactionary. ScoMo's Australia.

I suspect the contagion model is wrong for disease too. You don't 'catch' a cold, it 'persuades' some bodies to give it room, and not others.

It's liberating I think to stop seeing the news as a description of the world. The reason the news reads like the Apocalypse is the same reason the music industry pumps out pap artists now - both industries are collapsing. When you collapse, you titillate - try to seduce customers with cheap thrills. (I'm also not a fan of the idea of replacing 'bad news' with 'good news', because then you're still trapped in the illusion of the news being a description of the world.) Society is inventing new public spaces, much bigger than the media. FB, for example.

Germaine Greer, as an example of a truth-teller. You can always tell a truth-teller because: 1) what they say doesn’t support any ‘side’ in a debate 2) what they say will reframe a problem in ways that are totally surprising 3) they’ll be very rare and almost completely ignored, or even hated by both sides of debates, and 4) they’ll force you to rethink everything you believe you know about something, rather than give your emotions the righteous kick they’re after. Why would we think the truth on really complex questions would be something we already know and feel? Because I think, when it comes to thinking, we're lazy. If we want to run a marathon, we train. But for complex questions, we assume our existing opinion is fine, no research or hard work needed.

40 today! And still doesn't look much older than this. Happy birthday wifey, you're a bit special ❤️

Have you ever noticed that mobile phones make us immobile? We have to stop what we're doing to use them (why they're dangerous in cars). Not a criticism, I think they're misunderstood. Why do we desire and use them so much? Because they bring the world to us - our friends, music, information, photos etc. The mobility of the device allows us to become immobile, as the world comes to us.

One of the saddest sights is people queued up in a Telstra shop, thinking the staff can help them with a single thing.

I think the best business people know that the raw material of business isn't money, or competition, or products, or anything economic at all. It's peoples' desires. And yet the image we have of business is so boring - grey suits, competition policy, fiscal blah blah. Pictures like this one. Good business is much more psychology and sex than economics.

Complexities of gender. It's a common belief that women are better listeners, and better readers of emotions. I've found this to be true a lot of the time too. Where I think gender politics starts to confuse this stuff is in assuming those skills are gender-based (some would even talk about DNA). I suspect women have these skills more refined than most men because they've been a less powerful group for generations, and it's well known the less powerful quickly learn to see and hear things from their sidelines much better than the powerful, who tend to run roughshod over things. It's how less powerful groups survive, by being more alert to things. I think this applies to societies too. Rich societies simply don't see or hear or listen to a lot of the complexities of the world. They're used to getting their way.

Neither of these people feel upside-down. What's cool about that is it shows that we're floating in space, just like an astronaut, the only difference being the planet is coming up underneath us. It will change your life to experience yourself as an astronaut every day, floating in space with the ground coming up underneath you. Rather than experiencing yourself as falling 'down' onto that ground.

The Melanesians built runways in the early 20th century, hoping they would bring Western aeroplanes full of more of the Western goods they'd come to love. Cargo cults. Bathurst raised its dam wall thinking it would drought-proof the town; lots of towns and conservative politicians think that, that dams will somehow create water. We laugh at the Melanesians.

In 1984 Max Headroom, the manufactured face personality, was satire. Now he's real, Simon Cowell's recent work just one example. The more work we have done on our faces, the more cartoonish and individually featureless they get. I think that's the point, cartoon faces appeal to lots of people because they lack individual specifics. People 'get work done' to do the same - to create a 'social face', not an individual face, a face shaped for social effect.

Happy birthday to you :)

One of the most famous hypnotic inductions is arm levitation, where a person's arm begins to lift without their apparent will. I think hypnosis is absolutely real, and absolutely not a 'trance' or any of the usual explanations given for it. Here's how to make your arm levitate... To do it, make it lift while you're doing something else. Simultaneously - it *must* be absolutely simultaneous. So if you're watching TV, keep your attention fully on the TV, but raise your arm at the same time, as if you were reaching for something, without for a second taking your focus off your TV program. You should find it seems to raise all by itself, because you're not 'doing' it, you're watching TV (or whatever).

Aren’t we seeing that the same angst our societies feel about great hordes of migrants is exactly how we behave towards other countries, with our travel? This is Prague, being overrun and destroyed.

More on hypnosis. People doing the chicken dance. If people get up on a stage and are asked to act like chickens by a hypnotist, they're said to be in a 'trance'. These people aren't in a trance, and they're acting like chickens. Hypnosis is real, but it isn't a trance or other special state. It's just sophisticated persuasion. I think we're all 'hypnotised' in different ways every single day; for some it's seeing the 'Left' or 'Right' at work, for others it's plastic bags, or science, or memes.

Happy Birthday old man

This one's been doing the rounds for a while. It made me think about China, how we tend to see it from the outside as an authoritarian country. It is that, sort of, but I think it's the wrong word. In China tradition is incredibly powerful in defining what happens. My thing about time - the Chinese are like the opposite of us. They look authoritarian because tradition constrains what they do, but it's not just constraint. It's the wisdom of multiple generations acting in the present. We can't understand that, our societies struggle to see more than 3 years backwards or forwards.

Returning to a question. In a free market system, who builds and maintains the market? (Progressive politicians could fight back with a question like that.)

One day I hope to convince people that maps are our culture. We see the world as a map. Travel is our way of exploring the map that wars put in place. That violence is our history.

I'm surprised we think of big things as complex things built from lot of little simple things added together. Our own bodies say it's a lie. Cells differentiate, the complexity is all right there before they start. Differentiation is how things are made, not addition. Chris Alexander applies this in architecture, for example, replacing the idea of buildings as made up of simple modular bits.

Time began in 311 BC. Invented by this fella, Alexander the Great. Before him there was no 'river of time', where time 'flowed' along some linear path, there were just events, tied to geographical locations. The dynasty of so and so, of this part of Egypt etc. Alexander's conquests were so great though that they needed a way to try to coordinate new vast territories. I like to say our culture lives 'in' time (and space). This is what I mean, we think time flows along from past to present to future. So even today we'd probably say "ok, but now we know better, we can now place Alexander 'in' time, with a date". It's a fiction though, time is not a river. A river is not a river, it doesn't flow either! Time doesn't 'pass'.

A very wise friend, talking about NAPLAN, but you could apply this to any measurement, in any field. "I am astounded that people think that measurement will make a difference in education when there is such a poor understanding of quality learning and teaching practice. It's like counting the money you have in the bank over and over again thinking that somehow the act of counting it is going to increase the balance."

I'm sure their primary school teacher has none about getting rid of them.

How do you reckon Joe Walsh would go up against this 2019 teenager @[783412914:2048:Kyle]?

When you look at an old face, it's common to say that 'time' has caused all of those wrinkles. But if you wanted to know when a picture of a person you know was taken, you would look at the features of the face to try to figure out how 'old' the person is. Notice the trick? We use the wrinkles to measure time, but we say time causes the wrinkles. It's circular. We don't live 'in' time, time isn't a thing that makes us get old. Just as we don't live 'in' space. Big secrets of the world here, I reckon.

Skilled politicians are like reverse cycle air con I think. Let's say Right = cold and Left = hot. Rather than trying to turn hot into cold or cold into hot, by heating or cooling, a heat pump just shifts the heat from one place to another as needed. That's what skilled politicians do, they don't change Lefties into Righties or vice versa, they let people keep their Left or Right preference, but find ways to get them to vote the other way at the same time. Some try to say the answer is 'the middle'. Try finding the point where hot turns into cold or cold into hot and you'll see why that approach is doomed. Always.

I bang this drum, because I find it fascinating. The flaw of averages, of middles, of moderation. It can kill.

Sometimes you go to a wedding or a party, and it rocks. Other times it's a bit meh, it doesn't have a spark. I've worked with a few event managers, whose job it is to try to put on events that have that spark. It occurred to me that this work is trying to fill the void left by our disappearing traditions. Sometimes events become traditions, so it can be a sort of seeding mechanism. But I'd be skeptical of how long these events will actually last, compared to old traditions. It's a window onto our world I think, that we have to employ people to try to paper over our lack of traditions. Like those weddings where the whole wedding party does a twee choreographed dance, desperately trying to reanimate an old institution. The instinct is sound, they know deep down the institution is dead. But you can't fix a multi-generational tradition with choreography. Time is out of joint.

I love this photo. Mercury had the most magnetic eyes, somehow unique people always seem to show you a universe when you look into their eyes. The other thing that stands out here though is that Mercury's stage persona was so enormous and electrifying that you could easily forget what a small, slight man he was. I once stood face to face with him and the eyes were the first thing I noticed, but followed quickly by amazement at how little he was. Brian May is 6'1", which is tall but not enormous, and you can see in this pic how much smaller than even the shorter members of the band Mercury was. He had enormous presence, which gave the illusion of a much bigger man.

High definition film of Queen Victoria in 1900. From the Museum of Modern Art.

The religious freedom debate and legislation has had the excellent result of flushing out what the real battle lines have been in politics these last 30 years. It's the re-emergence of very old battles between Church and State, and this issue has made the players show their actual hands. (As an aside, the fact the Minister tasked with doing it is called 'Christian' is amusing.) It makes sense of all of the craziness, for example conservative parties all over the world have been doing completely un-conservative things in terms of economics and policy. That's not their interest, their real interest has been undermining the State in favour of the Church. Also why the 'free market' took off as an idea I think, it wasn't really about economics, it was a Trojan Horse to undermine the State further.