February 2020

Astronomical electricity usage in NSW today, maybe unprecedented for a weekend. The same if not worse predicted for tomorrow. Who put their air conditioner on 24 to ease the load? I haven’t seen that AEMO suggestion widely publicised. Spread the word 🙂

A few times I’ve posted here that I think the apparent divisions of our time have nothing to do with Left versus Right. Or even politics. It’s about Church versus State. It never went away. Populism is our politics now. It destroys institutions. Secular institutions. One side is winning this one, and almost completely without being noticed.

Finally got around to seeing this. This is the 4th film version of this story, going back nearly 100 years. I’m actually a bit surprised that the basic premise of the story isn’t more laughed at - that a woman’s success must come at the expense of her man. All 4 versions end with the loser husband topping himself, and the woman then making a big point of using her husband’s surname for the first time, as if to say “now I know my place”.

Have you ever watched a show or film, and noticed that you’re not observing something the camera captures, you’re occupying a point of view? There’s no person ‘in’ the film with that point of view. But it’s also not just you looking *at* the scene, like you’re looking at CCTV. The show or film is the perception of a mind, which you inhabit. You cry, jump, get scared etc.

The generation who put a man on the moon went on to become passionate about tax cuts and overseas holidays, while many of their children now doubt the moon landing even happened, and dream of the perfect cup of coffee. Why? I think it’s demographics again, most things are. The boomers are such a huge generation that the generations that followed them can’t afford to dream big; they have so many old to look after. It doesn’t help that the old live such expensive lives now.

It doesn’t make sense to me that money is criticised for putting ‘a price on everything and a value on nothing’. Prices are values. They’re the result of people weighing up - evaluating - how much of this is equivalent to how much of that. Before money how much a person valued just about everything in life had no measure at all. If you can’t measure it, it has no visibility to anybody but you. You end up dropping your pants for food. Money has enormously increased the richness of our values.

Happy Birthday to you! Hope you got some rain for your birthday

Explain to me, if you're what some call a denier, why you know better than these 11,000 scientists. And why you'd resist even taking precautions against this threat. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-06/climate-change-emergency-11000-scientists-sign-petition/11672776

That expression, to ‘unwind’ at the end of the day. Not well known I don’t think is that your body is arranged as helical spirals of muscle. Try this. Stand in a doorway and raise your arms so that you’re gently holding the top frame of the door, as in the pic (if you’re too short, you may need to stand on something - maybe a touch higher than in the pic, so your hand can press on the frame and wall above it). You want to be well extended, without deliberately ‘stretching’. And then just stand there like that for 5-10 minutes (or longer if you want), NOT trying to stretch anything. Don’t try to do a thing with your body (ignore the arrow in the pic), just let it do what it wants to do, and see what you feel. It may want to move a bit forward or back, let it, but don’t try to stretch it deliberately.

Seat designers are like shoe designers. “Oh the foot/body is curved, so our shoes/seats need to be curved to ‘fit’ them”. A seat should be simple and straight/flat, and relatively firm. These are seats that support and also create slouching slobs. I try to be polite to shoe salesmen who tell me feet need ‘support’.

Social media's main weakness? And even outside it, the appetite for digesting ideas not described in only a handful of words is pretty low. "There are certain subjects upon which it is impossible to be concise, simple, and clear without being dogmatic." (Gabriel Tarde)

I was thinking about why the anticipation for an event is so often much better than the event itself. The red carpet arrivals, the tension before a band appears on stage, the night before Christmas etc. It could be because we always imagine more than the reality. But it’s more I think - it’s where we inhabit an aspect of reality called the potential or virtual. The eternal part of reality, where we hover over multiple possibilities. Anything could happen etc. We tend to think stuff either exists, or it doesn’t. But the third option is - it exists potentially. It’s existential poise.

I can’t really warm to podcasts. They’re huge right now, but I find it takes 45 overly-crafted minutes to deliver 1-2 ideas I could figure out in about 45 seconds if they were summarised in text.

Happy Birthday Peter. I hope you see a great film!

Our senses aren’t a window onto the world, they’re statistical outcomes of our immersion in the world. What’s interesting about that for me is that what we usually call ‘statistics’ are actually perceptions. Perceptions of collective phenomena. They’re no different to us seeing a flower, except we’re literally seeing social phenomena. Not - I’m sensing some stats ‘about’ society - I’m sensing society. As statistics gets richer and richer with its visualisations, I think this point will become more obvious.

I really liked this post. Can't remember if anybody else did, I think it was one hijacked by mystical whacktivism.

Know those people who say "we've always had droughts and fires, this isn't climate change"? If they can read a graph, these two are worth their time.

Why do we think our inner voice is ‘in’ us? We think of ‘me’ as something in our heads. But it’s an illusion, just as a picture being in a mirror is an illusion. You don’t ‘hear’ that inner voice, it’s not like listening to a sound. Your ears are not in your head listening.

Conservatives are relishing the power populism is giving them to completely ignore all checks and balances. It’s a path many fools have trodden in history. What they forget is that populism always ends the same way. Mussolini and his girlfriend here, the ‘people’ the populists pretend to speak for eventually realise the populist is full of shit. And then the rebound is brutal and fast.

The candidates for US President are mostly old, 70 or above. But it wasn’t always like this, check the graph. This is an exception. And the answer, again? Demographics I think. The massive boomer generation is voting for itself, as it ages.

I’m glad Kirk and his wife had the work done, they looked 30 again 😳

The news reports about ‘drought relief’ because of drenching rain on the coast 🤔 Major regional centres will run out of water this year. Some have already. There is no answer to this problem. An absolute disaster pending unless the rain heads inland soon. We could have thousands of homegrown refugees, maybe whole (major) towns evacuated.

Coastal Australia is talking about the end of drought, as it gets drenched in rain. Which kind of shows that for the majority of Australians, that tiny coastal strip is Australia. Anything West of the ranges needs at least 15 rain events like this to even restore the deficit of rain. Prepare for many of those internal towns to run out of water within months.

U2, in 1993. Nearly 30 years before Brexit.

Even highly educated people I’ve spoken with believe that the answer to our water crisis is to build more dams. My analogy to this delusional thinking is believing that we’ll have more money if we have more money boxes or bank accounts.

On top of this, planes are much more like fish than they are like birds.

I’m not sure I explain why DST bothers me so much, how it connects to other ideas. My objections to travel, or to the idea that we’re not responsible for what our ancestors do, or to cars and maps, or a ‘climate’ divorced from the landscape. As if ‘time’ and ‘space’ are ours to play with like a board game. We don’t see our own culture for what it is, it’s all connected. We don’t understand why fiddling with the clocks is incredibly destructive and dangerous, and that’s the problem.

Happy birthday :)

Max Planck said science progresses one funeral at a time. A brilliant (and true) demographic insight. If the world seems mad today, remember the demographics. The old dominate, and with them the reactive, anxious and conservative thinking of the old, constantly at war with newfangled things. That unnaturally huge generation will eventually pass.

Dragons in mythology are ancient animals, who speak for ancient non-human knowledge. What is that knowledge? To hoard, to find treasure and sit on it. Not to create, or destroy. They speak for the natural abundance of the world. They sit on the treasures and stop humans using them. Many layers of meaning here.

I’ve seen several Bathurst residents suggest the solution to their water problems is to run a pipeline to Lithgow. This will be the sort of non-thinking that the imminent water crisis will be full of. What’s the possible outcome of a town of 50,000+ piping water from a town of 15,000? There’s only one outcome - big town drains small town dry, both towns out of water. Never mind that it would take a long time and a shed load of money to build any pipeline.

This is the first time in human history where the old are the richest generation. The circle of life is broken. As you can see from this extract on an ABC forum, very often the old aren’t even seeing it.

My first training outside school was as a materials scientist. Nobody I knew had heard of it; I’d still recommend it to anybody not sure what to study, it’s the most amazing field. Much of what we call ‘modern technology’ is about 80-90% materials science. Most innovation is in what things are made from, not in inventing new things. It’s also why I’ve never had much time for the criticism of ‘materialism’. Matter is our most extraordinary thing.

Have you noticed that the knuckle-draggers who oppose climate change action now call it ‘alarmism’? The same people who have spent 20 years brewing fake catastrophes in immigration and terrorism. Once you know your enemy and the pathetic God-bothering old men most of them are, they just become amusing.

Happy birthday Ian! Hoping to reward you with a perfect round or two tomorrow ;)

Happy birthday :)

Do you have those people in your life who are challenging because they talk at you constantly? Rather than it being a conversation, just an endless stream of verbal diarrhoea.

“Have you ever noticed that your awareness of pain is not in pain even when you are? Have you ever noticed that your awareness of fear is not afraid even when you are terrified? Or that your awareness of depression is not depressed; that your awareness of bad habits is not a slave to those habits; or perhaps even that your awareness of who you are is not who you think you are?” John Kabat Zinn

A huge number of the world’s most successful businesses were started and/or run by engineers. What this shows I think is that the image of engineering as just making stuff is fundamentally wrong. That stuff is as social as it is technical. Divorce those two and society literally falls apart. Infrastructure is society, not just its enabler.

Nobody really knows what this strain of Coronavirus will do, it’s wait and see. But if you end up being one of the unlucky ones who gets really sick with it down the track, here’s what I’d do. Ask for high-dose intravenous vitamin C. I’d do the same for any life-threatening infection resistant to treatment. Nothing to do with New Age hippie crap.

Happy birthday bassman!

Opening up coal seam gas fields won't drive energy prices lower. What it will do is satisfy ongoing lobbying from Santos and other big gas players, who already sell our gas overseas for cheaper than we can buy it here. They're parasitic bastards.

I think this is very likely true, that inflammation is the real cause of many of our diseases. We’re colonies of microbes, not a bag of organs. The good news is, it’s not that difficult to deal with inflammation. https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Inflammation_A_unifying_theory_of_disease

For me the two greatest prisons for our minds. Clocks and maps. Clocks make us think time is a series of ‘instants’. Maps make us think space is a collection of ‘points’. We even mix them together, talking about ‘points in time’. I think about it this way - how would time ever ‘pass’ if the present was really a self-contained point? It would have to be moving and standing still at the same time. Similarly any point in space is connected to every other point in space, making a nonsense of the idea of a point. ‘Here’ is already part of ‘there’. These two illusions generate all the others I think, like our divide between mortality and immortality, individual and group, me here ‘in my head’ and the rest of the world etc etc.

Little by little, humans are understanding that they’re experiments carried out by microscopic eternal beings - microbes. More than half of you is not even recognisably ‘you’.

People are getting angrier and ruder, I’m sure of it. Anybody who works with the public is treated with contempt. Moralists would ask people to be nice and have good manners. But manners are a sign of deference, and we don’t defer to anybody now. We’re each monarchs. That’s our default state. It’s only when societies have hierarchies that we defer to a chain of people ‘above’ us. Better to understand than to moralise, I think.

Queen were once described as ‘harder than Led Zeppelin, and wilder than the Rolling Stones’. Not a side of them everybody sees. And man, Lambert has a set of pipes on him.

There’s never enough money for new infrastructure, lots of our towns are crumbling, and at the same time millions of people are sweating every day in gyms and other forms of training, with the only outcome their own body. What if a new form of exercise was lending a few hours a week to building new infrastructure society needs, or repairing old infrastructure?

None of us will probably ever know the truth of Wallis and Edward’s relationship. But would that we all could look as into each other as this after decades of marriage.

Humans are said to ‘cheat’ in relationships when they ignore their commitment to a person. I’d suggest that our travel culture should be seen as cheating on our landscapes. Space for us is just different coloured areas on a map, new places to ‘see’. There’s no real connection to those spaces. We live in our maps.

Babies when held in water can walk, they don’t need to learn it. It’s a reflex. Aboriginal Australians, without training or shoes or tracks, could run faster than Usain Bolt. Most of our training and exercise is ignoring this one basic fact - it’s not you who walks or runs. They’re reflex actions, interacting with gravity and the ground. To walk and run well, you have to stop trying to walk and run well, and let your built-in elastic reflexes use gravity to spring you forward effortlessly.

For events, what does ‘live’ mean? For example, I can see and hear more of any sporting or musical event from the comfort of my lounge room. Yes it’s not the same, but then if I were there ‘live’ I wouldn’t ever experience the huge range of views and nuanced sound available in the broadcast either. At home I see and hear more. And the bigger events get, the more half the people there are watching a screen anyway. And even ‘live’ with music, there are layers of amplification that change the sounds of what the band is ‘actually’ playing, and the band doesn’t even hear what the crowd hears etc. There is no ‘authentic’ event that is the fundamental baseline.

The debates between vegans, vegetarians and meat eaters miss something - it's not plants or animals we eat, it's proteins and fats and vitamins etc. The future is now, precision fermentation and microbiology are going to create foods from the microbe-level up. Burger King's Impossible Burger already has this in it. It will be the end of most farming as we know it.

Maybe this is judgmental. If you dump dirty dishes in the sink, you’re a disgusting slob. The end 🙂 (Not my sink pictured.)

Apologies in advance to anybody who requests I share something every day to FB, and nominate a new person each day to do the same. Chain letters were the curse of the postal system, and it’s not tricky maths to understand why they’re a curse online too.

Ever noticed that when you pay attention to something well, there is no you? It disappears, you become ‘one’ with what you’re paying attention to (though it’s not you paying attention, it’s not something you do). You have to stop paying attention to be ‘you’ again. It’s so easy to be stuck in the illusion that your ‘me’ is the foundation of your experience. It’s a secondary, created thing, born of lack of attention to the world.

Each to their own. K.D. Lang getting a lot of praise for her performance at the relief concert. I found it overwrought, prostrate on the ground at times wailing like somebody giving birth, with little art in the singing and dressed like a druid. Like Helen Lovejoy with haemorrhoids. Maybe apt given the occasion, the entire bushfire crisis has been a wallowing in emotion since the day the fires started. We love that emotional wallowing stuff, it’s easier than thinking.

People are angry now that the money they donated to Celeste Barber's fundraiser for the RFS, firefighters, doesn't automatically go to people who were affected by the bushfires, who aren't firefighters 🤔 Some are probably still waiting for their free set of steak knives. Straya, the clever country. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/radical-solution-needed-to-unlock-celeste-barber-s-51-million-bushfire-donations

The hay runners show that ‘the bush’ is more about national identity than about farming. Look at the flags. Agriculture is in terminal decline worldwide, mostly because it’s an absolute bloody disaster. Agriculture is the greatest threat to both civilisation and also all life on Earth. Just for starters: 1) it uses up to 90% of every country’s water 2) it uses more than 50% of the land 3) it uses more than half of the antibiotics, creating resistance 4) it destroys habitat and species at a much greater rate than climate change 5) it exports about 80% of its products, and is often foreign-owned, so is really foreigners mining our soil and water 6) it destroys soils that took thousands of years to create, and 7) it’s hugely subsidised to do all of this by the taxpayer.

Happy birthday :)

Are you a 'tourist of your own life'? Do you find yourself using your experiences as material for your social identity? Is 'you' increasingly defined by what you share rather than by what you are or think?

Trivia!

It’s surprising how blindsided we are sometimes by social change. For example, I wonder if it’s sunk in yet that this may be the last generation to ever get their driving licence and own a car?

One thing that interests me more all the time is how basic realities eventually overpower anybody’s opinion. For example cars again. I love them, but I criticise them a lot, because they’re a nonsense in the modern world. Take this stat - the average car is parked about 96% of the time. In techno speak, that’s some laughable utilisation numbers right there. Their time is over.

Continuing on a car theme. The transition from horses to cars in cities took only 10 years. The horse manure crisis was a level of pollution absolutely dwarfed by modern car pollution. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/

Know anybody who can sing like this? Me either. He might be able to give K.D. Lang some lessons.

Travel makes all places equal, they’re just points on a map you can move between in comfort. But those points are also where people live. So I think you have this constant tension introduced at the heart of society, between ‘this is my home’, and ‘get out of my way’. That’s our whole history, really.

Highly recommended discussion, on one of the trending topics of the week. As audio or transcript. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/podcasts/family-violence-ending-the-hidden-crime

There are lots of different theories about what is 'true'. I think there's only one reliable test of truth - a feeling or emotion that i'm not sure has a name. If it makes you angry - you're not seeing it. If you get feelings of it being profound - you're not seeing it. If it makes you happy - you're not seeing it. Truth will always be a sort of surprised joy, like that feeling you get when you solve a difficult puzzle. It will always be that feeling that tells you you're seeing the truth. The feeling of a 'revelation', whatever the best name for that is. Also a barometer for life situations, which so often make us angry or sad or happy, but very rarely do we attain or even look for a 'revelation' or truth of those situations. But they're there.

What if the real problem with domestic and family violence is love? Just as cars and guns kill, but only a small number of us, what if the real problem in deadly relationships is our ideas about love, which become deadly in the hands of some? Freddie Mercury knew it, it’s likely what ultimately killed him. Ideas matter, more than anything else. They capture us.

If you feel stressed and anxious about the world today, I’d remember that what we call ‘the world’ is just the tiniest veneer of images, overlaid on a time of peace and abundance and wonders.

Happy birthday!

I plug air ionisation as a cheap and effective air purification method. With Coronavirus still menacing, there’s no reason these cheap devices couldn’t be installed in every public space quickly. I carry one of my own.

Holden to me shows one of the most important things about love. We never fall OUT of love, we always fall IN love with something else. Desires can only be changed by other desires.

Revisiting this one for discussions of domestic violence. I reckon this is the key.

More thinking about domestic violence. Would we make more progress understanding it if we gave more attention to the domestic bit, and not just to the violence bit?

It still angers me that people who go to university pay an extra tax, HECS. The rationale for it was always that they earn more because of their degrees. Some do, some don’t. I know more rich tradies than rich university graduates. Uni graduates who don’t end up well off still pay the tax. We already have a way to address income inequality, it’s called income tax. Already one of the dumbest countries on Earth, why would we tax education? Because we’re dumb, I guess I answered my own question. That and because the mega-generation who are now retiring, who mostly got their education for free, now prefer governments to fund massive handouts to retirees.

I wanted to go back to this photo of the King and Wallis Simpson because it has something unusual about it that I love. It looks like they’re smiling at the camera, at us. But I think those smiles are for each other, the sparkle in their eyes is about how they feel about each other. I love that paradoxical looking-at-us but actually being focused on each other.

This from a discussion on domestic violence. Our domestic situations are isolated, and isolation breeds violence. Cars helped us do it. We need to think much wider than the gender politics that wants to turn this into sport. “If you think about it, there was a time when you could send a child on an errand right across a village to the other side and everybody would bring the child on its way because they would all think that the child was part of them, was part of their polity. Even in the most familial societies you can't do that anymore. We've now got to the point when we won't trust our children even to walk in public at all. We have to lift them and carry them in armoured vehicles from one venue to another.” (Germaine Greer)

Sometimes different issues converge. For me, right now it’s coronavirus and domestic violence (DV). In the past infectious disease like TB was often treated in open-air sanitoria, see pic below. Researchers are now discovering that basic fresh air and sunshine are powerful weapons against infectious disease, because microbes are living things in ecosystems, and our sterile hospitals give the nasty bugs free rein. Often sunshine and fresh air was the only treatment needed. How is this related to DV? Humans when isolated into domestic spaces, aided by cars, become more virulent in their violence. Exactly the same as microbes. We are microbes.

I saw an article the other day describing mobile phones as the most addictive device ever invented. I don’t think phones are addictive, in any way. Give somebody a phone with a flat battery and they won’t do anything with it. It’s what people DO on their phones that is addictive. And that’s be social. Being social is addictive.

If you study the Spanish Flu of 1918, what’s interesting is that it may not have been any more deadly than a normal flu. What may have killed so many is my theme of the week - herding sick people in large numbers into confined spaces. Notice our obsession with locking up in the face of crisis - with refugees for example, crime, cruise ship passengers and other quarantine. The greatest chance coronavirus will kill millions is likely Muslim detention camps in China, which could supercharge the virulence of the virus.

I sometimes say America doesn’t have a gun problem, it has a violence problem. These DV stats make a similar point. That the problem we’re seeing there is less a gender problem than a violence problem. Notice that women definitely cop the brunt of physical and sexual violence, possibly because men are more likely to express their anger physically. In the area of emotional abuse it’s almost level pegging, suggesting the anger is shared anger, but expressed in different ways. We need to understand what makes domestic spaces fertile ground for violence.

I often talk about Australia as an ageing country. Look at this - almost twice as many 65+ (in % terms) here as in China. That's the boomers. Also I think having outdoor hospital wards for a pandemic needs to be discussed right now. The quickest way to kill a person with a severe infection is to put them in a bed and close all the doors and windows.

The bushfires showed me two big things. That the conservative project to turn society into a collection of disconnected individuals has largely succeeded. We don’t see ‘society’ any more, our response to the bushfires mostly ignored all the public institutions in place for generations. They’re seen as being in the way. Secondly as a result our response to real social challenges is mostly symbolic posturing, like the appeals, and now with domestic violence. Hopelessly ineffective, but makes all those millions of isolated individuals feel good. With a looming pandemic and simultaneous end of some major centres’ water supply, no amount of symbolic crowdfunding will fix anything. I doubt we’re ready for the potential shitstorm bearing down on us.

I wonder if we see this contradiction of our culture, as one that worships the free movement of travel, for ourselves. And the locking up and restriction of movement of others who try to emulate us. Know what that contradiction produces? Pandemics.

There are eternal beings, they’re called ideas. Ideas are the only real gods, they’re immortal and our lives are bit parts in the endless battle of ideas. If you don’t believe everything is really just an idea, try thinking of a single thing in your life that wasn’t originally an idea. Libraries are where we connect with eternal life. They’re ‘heaven’, it’s not up in the sky.

These 3 populists all came to power by either creating pretend problems, like terrorists killing us all, or by encouraging us to approach real problems as fictions, as ‘fake news’. Now all 3 of them have real problems that won’t be wished away, like pandemics, climate emergencies and economic carnage. And how bloody hopeless do they look? We voted for fantasies about the past, but the future is coming right at us. Old societies in their last desperate gasps.

That beautiful combination of outrage and stupidity.

We’ve spent 50 years flirting with one catastrophic idea: that society doesn’t exist, it’s just a collection of separate individuals. It explains our massive and ongoing accumulation of debt, the increase in family violence, our inability to take action on climate change, our skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression, our woeful education results, and so on. It appears only a virus will pop this bullshit bubble.

I still wonder whether it’s a mistake to call LGBTQIA a ‘community’. I have no issue at all with people having any sort of sexuality, I’d even go into bat for the shoe fetishists. This is more about making sexuality the basis of community. Absolutely it can be a social movement, but to define sexuality itself as a full community - I think that’s dangerous. Hannah Gadsby talks about that in Nanette, how it can lead to the sort of homogenisation and stereotyping that the movement is actually fighting against.

I’m uncomfortable with a lot of modern ‘identification’ politics. This article is one reason - you don’t get to SELF-identify any social identity. It’s a social thing, by definition. But also secondly because I think we get trapped in binary thinking, and I see identification as the wrong counter to that. You don’t fix binaries by allowing people to ‘identify’ along the continuum of the binary. You get rid of the binary, or at least keep it within its specific context.