March 2021

An old friend, who rarely ate much at all, once said to me he didn't understand the fuss people made about food. I thought he was mad, but now...in a world of growing obesity, was one of the greatest mistakes humans ever made to turn food into something to desire? How many of us are genuinely hungry when we eat? We turned food into something almost impossible to resist.

Yes, the feds are right on top of this. (This = young women. And tax cuts and grants for mates.)

How many generations of women were taught from a young age to keep their legs together when they sit? I use this as an illustrative thing about the current toxic masculinity debates. There's no good reason either men or women should have to sit with legs tightly together, it can actually be damaging. Rather than us say 'women can sit however they like', we say men who sit with legs apart are 'manspreading'. Instead of inventing a new positive behaviour for women, we attack an existing behaviour of men. I still agree with Germaine Greer, feminism has not even begun inventing what it really means to be a woman. Still mired in critiquing male categories and behaviours.

I remember posting this before and people thinking I was some sort of misery guts. But I think it’s only when you really understand this that you become a good friend and lover. You stop looking to the other person to complete you in any way, and instead start to live and love the differences between you and the other person. That’s a bottomless well of adventure.

A chicken and egg question. Which came first, government or the private sector? Probably many would say the private sector. But as with money, the freedom of private life is a creation of government. There was no private life in the way we mean that term, before there was government. The more laws and regulations we have, the more bureaucrats, the freer we are. (Empirically testable.) The fact that will appal many people goes to show just how well the propaganda of the past 50 years has worked. It won't make you free to do 'whatever you like', as an individual, because that's not what freedom is. Freedom is to be free from things like poverty, hunger, disease, the elements etc. Running away from home doesn't make you free, it makes you cold and hungry. Witness for the prosecution - the disaster of (privatised) aged care.

The 'gas-led recovery' is off to a great start. Several hundred million of your dollars to the giant gas companies, who rewarded you by sacking 3000 staff. In a bumper year. https://www.michaelwest.com.au/jobslayer-gas-giants-grab-300m-subsidy-then-axe-3000-workers/

Wanted to come back to this because I still think it's maybe the most extraordinary story of our times. Creating (not growing) our own food could change everything about life as we know it. And it destroys the distinction between 'natural' and 'manufactured' food, because when you build with microbes, you're building the way 'nature' already makes food. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

The overture to the Magic Flute. Just wow. I find classical music buffs always find a way to rank Mozart below Bach and Beethoven. Pig’s arse.

Please don't understand me as some sort of men's rights activist. I have no time for any of the extremists in this debate. I'm a casuist, which is the most sophisticated method I think humans have come up with to deal with difficult questions. Case-based reasoning, as used in the law. We need to look at every case specifically, understand its context. That doesn't mean you get lost 'in the weeds' of individual detail. Cases are both individual and general, at the same time. But instead we jump immediately to hopelessly general, non-specific and context-free causes, like 'masculinity'. One of the victories of feminism was to get away from describing women with a generic 'femininity'. I'm really amazed people aren't seeing that in this rush to create masculinity as an over-arching cause. https://www.smh.com.au/national/as-a-survivor-of-sexual-abuse-i-have-a-message-for-men-starting-with-the-prime-minister-20210302-p57723.html

The data I shared which showed NSW, despite its rhetoric, actually has the *most* restrictive Covid measures of all the States, is also matched by global data. The countries that made the greatest noise about 'opening up' and 'living with the virus', also tend to have the greatest degree of restriction. Let the virus run, and restrictions will follow - no choice. NSW hid its degree of restriction by making hundreds of smaller restrictions, applied over longer times. Like eating a cake with a teaspoon instead of tablespoon - you still eat the same amount of cake. Except in this case, the cake grows bigger over time, with the teaspoon, the dough keeps rising.

Watching the increasing number of people with rigid, fixed faces through botox, fillers and surgery, I wondered if we're turning our faces into permanent masks. Masks are a social face, as opposed to an individual face. We’re swapping individual for collective/social faces.

"At the heart of this conflict is wages: The RBA wants to get them up, the government does not, because the Coalition holds to the outdated belief that higher wages cost jobs, because profits and investment get squeezed. Apart from the fact that the RBA now says that’s wrong, it is disproved by the national accounts: Company profits rose 15 per cent to a record high in 2020, but business investment is lagging and is the weakest part of the economy." Alan Kohler

Really powerful example of the complexity casuistry (case-based reasoning, like in law) can deal with in a way nothing else can. You'd look at that long list of eminent scientists and say, hmm, yes this is a miscarriage of justice. But actually the science is a bit of a long bow in this one, and I wonder if the scientists are a bit naive. Not saying I think she's guilty either, but the diaries (https://www.smh.com.au/national/diary-of-mum-accused-of-killing-her-four-babies-20030406-gdgk1d.html) used as the basis for her conviction are much stronger evidence I think than the science. Almost impossibly tough decisions, this is what casuistry does. We should all learn about it. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2021/03/04/kathleen-folbigg-pardon/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%2020210304

Johnson & Johnson published the efficacy data for their vaccine. Looks like just the one Johnson to me.

Boy the new Macbook Air is awesome. Almost a perfect piece of technology. Beautifully designed in every atom, it's pretty much flawless. And it runs completely silently, no fans. And the new Apple M1 chip is staggeringly fast. Don't mind giving them a plug (they're not paying me!), this is what you get if you let engineers and designers really flex their muscles.

Can a business exist without customers? No. Can customers exist without a business? Yes. There's the simple answer to the economic debates of today. There aren't businesses and customers. There are just customers. Businesses don't even exist, they're just more customers.

Who missed this today? Why do you imagine Gladys wants to stop telling us how many Covid cases there are per day? And 'just like the flu'? Let's throw in some 5G Bill Gates conspiracies and herd immunity while we're at it.

Here in Oz support for workers will be turned off this month. Meanwhile major corporations who rorted Job Keeper will be allowed to keep the money. Remember Pink Batts? We had a Royal Commission for that stimulus program. It cost less than $2 billion. It at least had accounting records, Job Keeper doesn't and is over 100 billion dollars. In the UK the same health staff that government clapped for every day is about to get a pay cut. See how this works? There aren't conservative governments worldwide, there are lobby groups who hijacked the old conservative parties, on behalf of the top end of town. And yet we all still line up to vote for them. This is because we're both ageing, and stupid. https://news.sky.com/story/recommended-1-pay-rise-for-nhs-staff-labelled-pitiful-by-nursing-union-12235986#:~:text=Breaking-,Recommended%201%25%20pay%20rise%20for%20NHS%20staff%20labelled%20'pitiful',the%20NHS%20Pay%20Review%20Body.

This is Australia, people. PAY ATTENTION. Serious suggestions from NSW to suppress Covid case numbers, to facilitate border openings.

https://www.michaelwest.com.au/the-big-grift-how-the-top-end-of-town-rorted-jobkeeper/

Modern conservatives keep winning elections because they're ruthless bastards who are always thinking strategically. (They're not really politicians - they're business groups disguised as politicians.) Progressive people are generally strategically useless, preferring to do protest marches and make speeches.

“Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics.”

In countries with voluntary voting, the main way parties win is by stopping people voting who will vote against them. Voter suppression. An art form in the US, but also in much of the rest of the world. Conservatives in Australia are itching to remove compulsory voting here, for the same reason. If democracy worldwide is increasingly about this, what is democracy?

This million owe their ongoing suffering to the anti-lockdown loons. I hope they volunteer to help care for these people.

Who remembers the international Women's March, 2017? When Trump was elected. All the same public statements we're hearing now, women have had enough, the patriarchy has to be brought in check etc. It failed, miserably, its own organisers say this now. Shortly there will be women's marches to protest the same issues in Oz. They will also fail. For two reasons, 1) the problem has been misdiagnosed (patriarchy), and 2) in politics you win by setting up longstanding institutions that promote and protect the things you cherish. Ordinary people already did that. They were called unions. That's the one simple task that will change politics, re-joining unions. I'm a broken record but it's the historical truth of politics. Only organised working people can oppose entrenched privilege, in any long-term way. It benefits everybody, even conservative economists want unions back now. They will tell you they need them to save the Economy. And they're right.

A story of 2 pictures. In 1996 John Howard came to power. From that date union membership collapsed. A big part of why is people felt well off (and gave Howard the credit). The other picture tells the real story. Howard introduced aspirational economics to Australia - encouraging people to compete against other people for status and wealth. People felt better off because they took on astronomical amounts of private debt to fund this status game. In reality they've never been poorer or more powerless.

Why don't we question what the 'culture' of an organisation even means? How people relate to each other? People are at work to work, that's how they relate to each other. A toxic organisation is one that can't do its own work properly. It nearly always has incompetent management. Another example of us turning what are basic, practical organisational issues into tribal warfare. We're populists, the practical way the work of the world gets done has no interest to us, we'd rather gossip and turn our lives into sport between warring tribes. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7140568/three-steps-to-change-parliamentary-culture/

This to me is a remarkable group of people. Because none of them actually exist. They're all computer-generated.

This isn't a trick photo. Seriously not, all explainable using science.

Seduction is the root of all human relationships. This will only seem weird if you have a very narrow, sexual understanding of desire and seduction. Desire is what drives all of our actions, and the only rest from it is belief, a (temporary) corralling of desire. Even the most banal work interactions between people are driven by desire and belief. https://medium.com/@melissakent_13330/is-romance-dead-a-womans-insight-into-the-seduction-community-8cfbc9a1e18e

That bit in the red circle at the end is morons saying 'hey the infections are dropping, let's open up!'

This 'culture' angle will fail, because it's another one of those abstract words that doesn't point to anything that actually exists. I've worked in organisations said to have absolutely toxic cultures. The problem was toxic management, who were delighted to see it as a culture problem, because then they could flick pass it to organisational culture consultants, to make everybody fill out attitudinal surveys, which produced nothing.

So many of these LNP pollies look and think like accountants. No need to burden anybody with debt, money is an instrument of exchange, that’s all. Print it. Imagine thinking money is wealth.

Let's catch up again in 6 months on this issue and see where it ended up.

The transformation of B-grade Royals into C-grade celebrities. Superstars in a country founded upon hatred of the monarchy. You can't make it up.

Listening to conservative politicians speak with 'great concern' about children losing education in the pandemic is vomit-inducing. Like they care about children's education, they never have, they spend non-pandemic time cutting funding to public schools and have presided over a continuing decline in student outcomes. They want kids back at school so parents can be back at work. The Economy, always the Economy. At the same time the UK government has said it no longer worries about the degree of infection spread, because the people most likely to be in hospital are now vaccinated. Exactly as predicted, and the same pressure will come here. Vaccinate 'high risk' groups, then open everything up to get the Economy going again. If you think that's OK, you haven't paid attention to anything about this virus for the past 12 months.

One for all those gung-ho to send kids and other younger people out to catch the virus, because they're 'low risk'. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/unlocking-the-mysteries-of-long-covid/618076/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20210308&silverid-ref=MzEwMTkwMTE5NjI1S0

Clive James once said 'freedom wears a crown', pointing out that highly educated and progressive people like him are supposed to support a republic by default. Royals are constrained by centuries of custom and tradition, their job is to be that history in the present. Republics have their own home-grown head of state. I'm not seeing the big advantage there.

4 million by end of March. Anybody wanna guess what the actual number is now? Anyone? 86,000. The King of Announcements. Mr Spin.

The push is on, ScoMo and Gladys cardboard cut-outs of Boris in their language here. Get the high-risk groups vaccinated, then open up. They haven't wavered from this economic narrative in over a year. Experts strongly advise against this, both here and there. Yet again, only the other States can save us from the Economy zealots.

The less people understand politics and act meaningfully to change things, the more enraged and righteous their woke views become, I think. Less power in the real world produces more rigid and angry 'points of view', more rage at every tiny nuance in what is said and done. All the great woke concerns have been captured by politics for generations, until now, when populism means people are severed from their institutions and instead mount individual crusades based on their own individual feelings. Join a union. Takes 10 minutes. Fixes all the woke worries, plus more.

A couple of hours of celebrity confessional. Versus this. To me a powerful contrast of two worlds in collision. Populism versus custom and tradition. We ignore custom and tradition at our real peril, it's a civilisation-level risk.

I think the majority of the population agree with Bill. There has never been anything to 'balance' between fighting the virus and protecting the Economy. It's the same thing. We eliminated the virus, the Economy is going gangbusters. Some idiots want to allow the virus back, it will kill their fairy tale Economy too. The place is almost wide open, why do we need extra 'risks'?

So fed up with this government. If the tourism industry and airlines are struggling, print some money and give it to them. Don’t encourage millions of Australians back into circulation with a pandemic still active, I give up. It was the tourism industry who killed thousands of Europeans with similar pressure. Again they’ve copied this from the UK. The train wreck.

There are around 278 Republicans in the US government. All of them voted for $1.9 trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy under Trump. All of them just voted against $1.9 trillion in relief payments to working people under the pandemic. That tells you everything you need to know about modern conservative governments.

Many, maybe even most, people in the developed world experience the world largely as if they were occupying a space behind their eyes, looking out. The dominant idea that "I" am located inside my head, in my brain. So we 'look' at the world, as if it were a separate thing. Want to change your life in just a minute? Rather than look *at* things, start to pay attention at the same time to the SPACES around and between things, including your body. As Les Fehmi discovered, it will change everything about how you experience the world and your body. Instantly dissolve pain and tension, your body expands effortlessly in space etc. This works because by actively feeling space (try it), you're dissolving that split between you stuck up in your head, and the world around you. It seems weird, to pay attention to space, something that isn't really a thing, but it's instantly liberating. Try it. https://medium.com/thrive-global/dissolving-stress-open-focus-training-e0434e3fb238

I bet this proposal will be denied. I watch the UK news as much as the Oz news, and they tried a similar thing there. And failed. Modern conservative parties are business lobby groups in disguise. Their priority will remain getting everybody back to work as fast as possible. They don't care who gets infected or sick, their response is 'we have enough ICU beds for you'. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/bus-drivers-teachers-retail-staff-unions-want-jab-priority-for-select-workers-20210310-p579ia.html

I posted about this when it happened. LNP fans defended the decision at the time, because as always they just swallowed spin without digesting. It was always a ludicrous, corrupt decision, a populist brain fart with no consultation with anybody who has a clue. Like what the LNP does with grants. Imagine the Blue Mountains road cleared for 40 metres on either side, from Penrith to Lithgow.

Can anybody remember *one* nice thing NSW has said about any other State, in this pandemic? States with both better economic and pandemic numbers than NSW (same thing), constantly criticised and lectured by Gladys and her team of corruptibles, with ScoMo and his team of dunderheads cheering them on?

Couple of times I've tried to talk about gravity here with the example of people using stairs. It takes no more effort to go 'up' stairs than to go 'down' them. You'll use more energy going up, but no more effort in the sense of straining to 'lift' yourself. No lifting is needed to climb stairs, in fact you can't lift yourself - it's physically impossible. Anywhere you're on the ground, including on stairs, the net force on you is zero. The ground pushes up into you to exactly balance the Earth pulling you down. Engineers often look at this and say 'but your centre of gravity has to be lifted to go up a step'. The centre of gravity has to rise, yes, but you *are* your centre of gravity, *all* of you rises, at the same time. You can't lift yourself, just as you can't pick yourself up by pulling on your shoelaces. The delusion though causes people to strain going up stairs, and to 'drop' down stairs. Big loud thumps both ways. All completely unnecessary.

I destroyed the motor on a few tape decks growing up, because I constantly rewound songs. Sometimes to work out a guitar part, but more often because most songs are about 90% padding. There will only be a few moments that are special, the way something is phrased for example. So I listen to those bits over and over. Much easier to do now, digitally.

Paul is a former very senior Canberra official.

Lot of debate online about republics vs monarchies. Here's an example of something that I think would struggle to get off the ground in a world of republics. What a monarchy does is transcend nation politics in some ways. Churches used to play that role too, and still do. We're a bit too clever in our headlong rush to shed traditions and customs, they're the glue that holds civilisations together. That's what being a conservative historically meant. It's not what modern conservatives do, they smash and sell-off these customs and traditions, to fund tax cuts for privileged minorities, without any of the duty and service aristocracies used to have. It's why I despise and attack them.

Extremely powerful piece. England and the US in terminal decline, we're copying their ideas. The Economy the cause, an invention to strip away basic collective mechanisms to re-route everything to a small elite. The mass poor fight amongst themselves, as all deprived creatures do, hypnotised by aspirational slogans from these same elites.

Smart man. Look at that laundry list of goodies. There's much more to add to that list too. Unions are much more than workplaces, they're the way the majority of ordinary people once had their interests represented in politics. Now nobody is looking out for them.

“OK let’s play games, huh.” https://youtu.be/nSg7VIda_70

This is breathtaking, an era-defining essay. Read it and you'll read the script of our lives right now. Liberalism - the cult of individualism - first replaced society with the Economy. But it also produced what looks like (but isn't) the opposition to that, woke politics. These apparently opposing sides are actually the same side. Why I don't support Left or Right, LNP or Labor, or any of the woke stuff. All completely missing the point.

The #ReclaimTheseStreets vigil in the UK right now another example of how what looks like opposing sides in public debates are actually the same side. Stupidly risky to gather in these numbers in a pandemic, but woke politics is as oblivious to collective concerns as its (many) enemies. All wallowing in a fracturing cult of individualism, a framing that blinkers how we see everything.

Happy birthday!

Prosperity Christianity. Because the poor will only waste those relief cheques.

I think whatever sphere of human life you look at, there is always a scale of value. A scale running from worst, to best. No matter how many say that they believe it's a glorious 'democracy' of individual taste, nobody acts as if that is true. Everybody ranks things. Democracy does too. So many problems in the world come back to ignorance of this basic fact (more to explore here I think).

Very slowly it seems to be dawning on people that an economic system which gives nearly all the money to a tiny group of people, in the hope they'll pass some of it on, is self-serving and ridiculous. And that giving money to the majority of people is not only fairer, it's the only thing that makes the 'Economy' actually work. There will come a day when the 'trickle-down' idea will be looked back on with genuine astonishment, that people believed it (a post soon on why I think they did, links to my other post on scales of value).

Australia (and much of the developed world) had pretty much full employment for 30 years after the war. Then in the 1980s unemployment took off. At exactly the time the 'market' and the 'Economy' replaced 'society' in our thinking. The Economy or market *requires* unemployment, a pool of workers able to keep wages low by being there to replace any bolshie workers who get ideas about wages. Government cannot be replaced by a market, we're discovering through much pain.

Happy birthday to you :)

These marches are now nearly half a century old in Australia. The problem with protests for me is that I don't think they're anything really collective at all. They're a space for people to express their *individual* anger. They rarely lead to any longer term collective outcome. (Possibly why after nearly 50 years, the same marches are still happening.) Sure, they're literally a 'voice' - a lot of people yelling. But talk is cheap, as the saying goes. Without organisation, nothing changes. I'll watch with interest to see what practical organisation follows these marches, as I do with all protests. (I'm yet to see an example of it happening.) The idea that they raise 'awareness' which leads to action is historically disprovable, for just about every cause. Why I always suggest people join a union, forget the marches. Immediate, nation-shaking action would follow. We're poisoned by liberalism, which is silent on collective things, we literally have no idea how to practically organise anything as a group now, not even a cake stall. I don't think we see how we're prisoners of liberalism itself.

Here's some visual evidence of my claim that joining a union is a much more powerful thing for a woman to do, than march. The ALP is a party set up by unions, to represent ordinary working people (the majority of the population). That includes the concerns of those people, such as gender equity. (I'm not a member of any party, but I vote according to what a country needs, right now. Right now it needs working people to regain much more power.)

4-day week should have happened 50 years ago.

A picture speaks a thousand words. This is such a common understanding of feelings and emotions. I find it perverse. All context stripped away, leaving just some set of feelings inside us. If you had a rock in your shoe and it hurt, would you take painkillers all day for the pain? No, you’d take the rock out of your shoe. We’ve turned feelings and emotions into separate stand-alone things.

Same pattern all over the world, growing quickly. People with no idea how to collectively organise a better world, brought up being told their feelings are what is important, simply gather in large numbers to express their feelings. The last gasps of toxic liberalism, politics seen as poor customer service, by millions of individual democratic customers.

The marches have had an immediate impact *cough*

It's very common to see democracy as replacing hierarchy with a flat social structure where all are equal. That's not what it is or ever was. Hierarchies represent levels of expertise and knowledge and quality. Democracies have that too (it's what idiot populists like Trump dismantle). The reason inequality is a problem now isn't that it exists, but because of the type of inequality or hierarchy liberalism created. In previous times, hierarchies had duties and responsibilities to each other. A life of 'service', the Queen often speaks of it, for example, in both directions, towards an ideal of quality and perfection. A *collective* arrangement. Today's hierarchies are mostly just the wealth, stripped of any duty or responsibility. Individuals get rich and have no obligations that go with it. That's what liberalism does, defines everything as individual. The ideal of perfection replaced with 'each to their own', 'subjective taste' etc.

Have been mentioning liberalism a bit lately. Ideas create societies, and liberalism largely created ours right now. And it's failing, and was always going to. Both what we call the 'Left' and 'Right' use this same framework, so most of our modern political debates are a waste of time. Liberalism both replaces society with a 'market' or 'Economy', and makes ordinary people into customers in that Economy. So that they come to see politics as good or bad customer service.

Some interesting stats from the 2019 federal election in Australia, over a few posts. Firstly on gender. There is a trend over time to more women abandoning the LNP. It's not significant enough to change election outcomes (women voted for both parties roughly equally). And women are voting less for both parties, often choosing third parties or independents. Men are doing the same.

Here are 2 graphs that should scare the pants off us. Over 41% of people were not satisfied with democracy at the 2019 election. Trust in government is plummeting. Look at that trend, that's the fast-track to Trumpland. This is the politics of our time, not Left/Right, or gender. Lethally dangerous for societies, these numbers.

If you're concerned about vaccines and blood clots, I seriously wouldn't be. Gideon explains it well. https://www.sciencealert.com/a-scientist-explains-why-you-don-t-need-to-panic-about-the-astrazeneca-rollout-pause

About 40% of urbanised areas are devoted to roads. Nearly half of our cities. And traffic is gridlocked. Ideas always determine everything - to 'move' is a myth. To get from 'A to B', you have to connect them, but then A is part of B, they become interdependent. Living in A becomes partly living in B too, businesses and lives in A and B become dependent on each other. Suddenly it's not about going from A to B, A and B together become C, a new 'place'.

The US and UK, and also Europe, leading figures in fucking up the pandemic response worldwide, gobbling up vaccines as fast as they can be made, for their own people. Now it's running out, what a surprise. They thought they could bypass basic public heath work, and use vaccines as quick fixes. They think their societies are economies. That idiot idea is still the wrecking ball through the international community.

Everybody at work exhausted. Consensus is that the cause is Daylight Saving extended to about half a bloody year now. Everybody getting up in the dark for work.

Henry Ford. Introduced a 2-day weekend for his staff, figuring with more free time they'd spend more money, on his cars. That's exactly what happened. Every worker is also a customer at multiple businesses, including their own, this is what modern 'economic' thinking completely forgot. It's stuck in tunnel vision, at the individual firm level. Pay workers more, and give them more time off (a 4-day week - watch this space, it'll come), and the 'economy' will boom.

"Don't be too concerned because you are tense and cannot relax. The very act of being prepared to accept your tenseness relaxes your mind, and relaxation of body gradually follows. You don't have to strive for relaxation. You have to wait for it. When a patient says 'I have tried so hard all day to be relaxed', surely he has had a day of striving, not relaxation? Let your body find its own level without controlling, directing it... The relief of loosening your tense hold on yourself...may bring a calmness you have forgotten existed within you. In your tense effort to control yourself you have been releasing more and more adrenalin and so further exciting your organs to produce the very sensations from which you have been trying to escape." Dr Claire Weekes, the patron saint of a tense world, and a remarkable Australian.

Corporate welfare is excused because it 'creates jobs'. Hilarious. I think Alan Joyce agreed to some reduction in his $24 million package during the pandemic. He'll have made it all back and more in share price rises. Qantas sacked thousands in the pandemic, while trousering over a billion dollars in welfare. If you believe in the Economy, remember this is the sort of thing that is said to 'create jobs' and share wealth with the rest of us.

In the Gods Must Be Crazy, we chuckle because a remote tribe attributes magical properties to a Coke bottle. But we do *exactly* the same thing with money. Money can be printed in any amount and given to people, and it horrifies people, because what about all the debt?! There is none, the government prints the money itself. We bizarrely think money itself has value. Like petrol you put in the car. It's mostly plastic and a few cents worth of metal. It allows people to exchange things and interact. In a pandemic, print squillions of it, while people can't interact. Problem solved.

77% of sexual assaults in Australia are committed by people known to the victim. About 35% of these are a member of the same family. The other 65% include ex-partners and de facto relationships. As with domestic violence, maybe the problem has little to do with gender, and almost everything to do with specific relationships and domestic arrangements. If we want to drag gender into it, we could focus on men's understanding of relationships. Not on masculinity or patriarchy, which are nebulous non-things.

All those stories about how young and other unemployed people today are too lazy to go and do jobs like pick fruit? Yeh, nah.

Boom.

There are currently over 1.3 million doses of Covid vaccines in the country, even with supply problems from overseas. Fewer than 200,000 of these have been used. Time to hand this all over to the States and away from the Sloganator with the Straya facemask.

Don't listen to people who say the Economy has suffered under this pandemic. It's been tremendous for the people who say that, look at the money pouring in. They say it to provide cover for their even further strip mining of society for their own benefit. Nothing like a good emergency to distract people. Josh Frydenberg has now announced banks can ignore responsible lending standards. They're ticking off items on the 'wow, never thought we'd be able to get away with this' wishlist, one at a time. The gas industry, Qantas, now the banks. In the same month, they're shutting off support for working people, by dissolving JobKeeper.

The forecast 100mm-200mm of rain for Lithgow today so far seems more like 20mm.

Warragamba Dam is about to overflow. Dams are very dangerous things, in many ways.

Yes. This is thinking. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/20/more-laws-are-not-the-answer-the-case-for-restorative-justice-to-address-sexual-assault

Rain gauge reading this morning Peter?

There's a great episode of The Office that (unintentionally) debunks both the Economy, and small business. 3 of the office set up their own breakaway business, and undercut all the local big paper supply firms. They have next to no overheads, easy. But they go broke and collapse with exhaustion. A business only becomes sustainable when it caters for the social needs of its employees, not just makes money. Sustainable business is just social life, they're not 2 things. The Economy is just society. 75% of small businesses fail in less than 5 years.

If you or I went outside and deliberately ran somebody over in our cars, and killed them, we would go to jail for much of the rest of our lives. Leaders such as these 2, who quite deliberately have killed over 2 million people by not fighting a lethal virus, have increased popularity. That's the scale of stupidity our widespread belief in The Economy brings. Remember the 'Economy' is the reason these leaders still give for not saving these lives. And we agree with them!

Happy birthday :)

Australians love dams. Mostly because they see water as something only for human use, ignoring its complex role in the landscape. They also think they drought-proof places, which is about as smart as thinking you'd be richer if you had a bigger wallet. Dams can be useful, but nearly always they're destructive and cost a fortune to maintain. The only really long-term dams that do good are the ones created by beavers. I'd be all for releasing beavers into the Australian landscape.

Sigh. Europe decided to 'live with the virus', to save the 'Economy'. The virus said thank you very much, and the economies went nowhere. In one German kindergarten every single child tested positive for Covid.

"You can either build a dam to store water for use, but if the dam is full of stored water it cannot catch a flood. If you want to build a dam to catch a flood, you have to keep that dam empty and then that doesn't store water. You can't have it both ways." Jamie Pittock, Professor in water management.

This should be tremendous for the Economy. All of the houses developers built below the 100-year flood line in Western Sydney, after special deals from the NSW Government, and which are a big chunk of Australia's economic growth, could get washed away by the Sydney Harbour level of water release each day, and need to be re-built. Economic boom times. Now we just need to raise the dam wall another 14m (planned) and the next big flood might even reach the Eastern suburbs.

Thought I'd re-post this, from more than a year ago. Pollies desperately trying to hide behind a 'one in 50-year event' nonsense today. Err, we weren't expecting these suburbs to be there more than 50 years? 'Droughts and flooding rains' was always a perfect summary of everything we misunderstand about this country. They're the same thing. We don't get that.

You hear the word 'development' a lot. Usually seen as a great thing, creates money and jobs etc. What it actually creates is millions of houses sitting on often prime land, unconnected to most services or social life. Then we need massive 'transport' infrastructure to try to re-connect these houses to social life. Which then jams in gridlock. Australians see the landscape as 'property', to be developed. We’ve never understood the continent we took over, tourists in our own land.

There's a clear community sense that it's been a very bad few years. Long and crippling drought, catastrophic bushfires, pandemic, and now floods. These are easy dots to join, it's all the same cause. Climate change.

Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' dates to about 1500. The details of this painting when you look at it carefully are awesomely trippy.

This may end up the most spectacular rorting in Australian history. To think the pink batts stimulus scheme had a Royal Commission. Really laughable.

What can we do when we're told ecosystems are collapsing? We can become 'environmentalists', but then what does that mean? Wrapping the landscape in cotton wool? That doesn't work. We can try to scientifically 'manage' the landscape, but that also doesn't work. We can ignore it and just keep trashing it, which obviously doesn't work either. Notice every solution we come up with gives no real agency to the landscape itself, to the animals, plants, water, rocks, soil etc. Nor to us within that landscape, we're still on the outside, looking in. We're sightseers, tourists in our own landscapes, with no idea how to be a part of them. Agency is the key to unravelling this mystery I think.

Agency and landscapes. Aboriginal rock art can look like some sort of primitive attempt to draw. I don't think it has anything to do with art as we conceive it. Aboriginal people gave agency to all things in the landscape, including themselves. The landscape was a living set of interacting agencies. With our Western eyes we turn this into 'myths', we either dismiss it as simplistic or sentimentalise it in a noble savage sort of way. We're the simple folk. Remember this is a culture that lasted maybe 100,000 years, an unbelievable thing. Nobody else comes within cooee of that record. They cracked the intellectual puzzle of how to live within a landscape, indefinitely. We have no idea, but agency is the road to understanding it, I'm sure.

Happy birthday :)

Notice the blissful (relative) quiet from the US, with Trump gone? He's a shining example of how modern populists function by throwing petrol on fake arguments every single day. Every single day, a new battle is started up around some fake issue, like phonics in schools, or guns, or working mums etc. The populists realise most voters couldn't care less about politics. But you can make them care if you create fake outrages for them, as a daily snack.

Normal service has resumed in the UK. Boomers largely vaccinated and safe, virus running rampant in the kids and young. Get those young slackers back to school and work, they have boomers to support in their lifestyle retirements.

The international community understands better than we do what genius the Australian and NZ response to Covid is. That genius was our institutions, not our governments. Expertise. Under assault in the rest of the world, and here too. As Mike Ryan says, you need comprehensive public health strategies (like Oz and NZ), blended with vaccines. Vaccines won't end this pandemic.

The LNP position on quotas is consistent with their belief in free markets. They believe talent will naturally rise to the top. Their record suggests this means there are no talented female LNP pollies, because they're not getting into parliament, or getting the top jobs when they get there. Actions also speak louder than words. On schools and health care, for example, the 'market' overwhelmingly votes against private schools and private health. It's only tens of billions of socialist LNP policies of government support to these sectors that keeps them afloat.

This very famous book was one of the first to commit the gravest of Australian sins. Criticising its own country. Australia has a glass jaw when it comes to self-criticism. Horne on Australia: "It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise." Horne thought Australia the laziest of all developed countries, producing almost no new technologies or innovations, averse to ideas, relying upon natural resources and immigration to remain wealthy. Little about that has changed.

Closing the loop on this one. This appeal failed today, as I thought it might.

Remember Gladys' rorting of local government grants? Then her rorting of bushfire relief grants? Total of about $500 million. Now there's Dine and Discover, another rort scheme, dressed up as Covid relief this time. Another $500 million. Hospitality venues have been packed for months, as have tourist destinations, these vouchers are election bribes, they're not even needed. Notice they're only usable by adults. Because adults vote.

The everyday ordinary stuff is often the weirdest stuff. Like how we ask people 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' My struggle individually was that I've never wanted to 'be' anything. It took me a lot of years to realise I wanted to understand, not be. All freedom and joy in life comes from understanding. The biggest trap in life is to think that 'just living' is freedom. That's just another idea that can trap you.

The 'free market' shows industry super funds are light years ahead of the others, as public health and public education also are. They're non-profit, none of your money gets creamed off to pay shareholders and manager bonuses. The LNP despise them because they have links to unions, so now they're putting their socialist hats on and legislating to try to destroy them. This is the same party in the news this week describing Hitler as 'left wing'. Ideological warriors, dimwitted zealots.

The last dot point explains all of the others.

This to me shows the really perverse way so many people talk about 'freedom', particularly the anti-lockdown loons. They describe freedom as individual freedom, but they want to use this freedom to do things that are social - not individual. They're already free to do individual things. Their bullshit should be held to account. To be free is to have mutual obligations, to each other.

There are lots of explanations given for our widespread anxiety. I think most of them are silly. The main reason we're anxious is our atheism. Not because we all need to believe in God as some supernatural Being to be happy. But because 'God' actually is the order and meaning already in the world, without us individually adding it. We're not individuals staring out at a meaningless universe.

Happy birthday to you :) You still at CSU?

Happy birthday!

Meanwhile in America, Republicans are already rigging the next election, by rushing through 253 voter suppression Bills in 43 States. This is how conservatives win modern elections, not by getting votes (not enough people want to vote for them), but by stopping people who oppose them from voting.

A lot of countries give you a feeling of human history, sometimes going back thousands of years. But Australia feels much older than that again, like geologically old. There's not much else about Australia that I couldn't find somewhere else. But the landscape feels imprinted in my soul, I think many Australians feel that. I suspect it's something we acquired through osmosis from aboriginal people, without even realising. The land speaks to us. I could never be separated from it permanently without feeling an irreplaceable loss. Germaine Greer once said whitefellas in Australia are more aboriginal than they realise. I think there's something profound about that.

How do we regain connection with our landscapes? By spending time in them, camping and bushwalking, or canyoning? To me that's actually the strongest demonstration of being separated from the landscape, paradoxically. Treating it like a tourist destination, a 'recreation' ground. Regaining our groundedness is a much harder job than that, and we don't even know how to start. Travel is our answer to everything, running away from groundedness. Even in our own landscape we're just tourists. 'Back to nature' is fake, there is no nature.

There's no woke without ire.

I've had a book of Ainslie Roberts' Dreamtime paintings for years, and they've always fascinated me. It seems for aboriginal people, the key is to have eternal ('everywhen') agencies at the root of your society. Imagine that, something longer than an election cycle to shape your society. Eternally long. The idea of God used to do that for us. We haven't figured out a replacement.

The new Sydney ring roads feel fantastic because the contrast with the old traffic jams is so nice. But in the longer term they’ll be a disaster, moving in exactly the opposite direction to urban design worldwide. As happens with water, if you improve supply (wider roads in this case), demand follows. Watch the car numbers keep growing. These roads will create monster traffic jams in years to come.

'Location, location'. What sort of society turns basic shelter into an opportunity to make money? Not only do we have no understanding of how to live in our landscapes, we parcel them up into blocks and sell them at ridiculously inflated prices. Home is not a 'location', in real estate terms. Home should be the deepest and most important connection we have in our lives, to where we live. A sacred connection. We have no idea what that even means. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2021/03/28/housing-human-right-australia/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sunday%20Best%20-%2020210328

Roads create traffic. Every road we build to try to reduce congestion just increases the congestion. We don't need bigger roads because everybody bought more cars, people bought more cars because we built bigger roads. Just as they used more water when we built dams and pipelines to increase water supply, and did more travel when we built more planes and airports. Supply creates demand.

After royally stuffing up the entire pandemic, the UK government has been trumpeting how it ‘leads the world’ with its wonderful vaccination effort. Actually all it’s doing is hogging all the vaccine for itself, ditto for the US. And they got special approval to start much earlier than everybody else, before the vaccines were even fully tested, to try to stop the tsunami of death. Both should be condemned for years to come, as should their poisonous belief in the Economy, which has slaughtered nearly 700,000 people so far.

The Easter long weekend coming. A time to worship our true God, travel, by sitting in traffic jams for 2 days. Surprised the anti-lockdown crowd aren’t demonstrating, people being forced to stay away from work for days.

Happy birthday mate :)

It might be surprising that I actually love cars. But I also think you can either have mass car ownership, or a functioning society. You can't have both. Notice how high on the list cars and roads are for those with libertarian beliefs. What makes cars lethal to societies is that they combine two things - mobility, and territory. Traditionally those were opposed things. You can see the territorial aspect with road rage - each person feels their car as like an extension of their home. Roads and cars mobilise and weaponise territorial aggression, in multiple ways, not just with our rage inside them. They fracture societies across multiple dimensions.

On the exact same day the government stopped paying between $375 and $600 a week to keep a working person employed under JobSeeker, it agrees to pay over $4,400 per week to keep one of its own MPs employed, despite him taking photos up women's dresses, to save its majority in parliament. The current LNP is an open sewer of sleaze and corruption. And yet would still win an election. Think about what that says about you, the voter.

Nick's law of applying for jobs. Nearly every job ad you look at for a new position will tell you some shit work that a manager doesn't want to do, and has managed to find budget to employ somebody else to do. In the process it will also tell you where an organisation is falling apart, probably terminally. Hiring a new box on the org chart is always an expensive last resort.

Those who are sure women's anger and protest will lead to meaningful change this time (unlike all the other times) should feel assured that the PM's response is - a new committee.

The thing I liked about this ship running aground this week is that it made visible the side of our societies I’m most interested in. The actual work that keeps them going. What I sometimes call institutions. Look at all those containers! Most of the time this work is completely invisible to us.

The humanity will bring tears to your eyes. Imagine genuine mutual obligation, where there’d be more than 1 job for every 48 jobseekers.

The genius of libertarians is to turn every issue into expression of individual feelings. All that think globally act locally rubbish, protests on whatever issue, all of it is designed to deflect and distract from the real problem, to take heat off the real culprits. It’s for this reason that I don’t agree with either side of politics, they’re both pushing the same liberalism as an idea. Turning the world into the expression of 7 billion sets of feelings. The bigger the problems are that inevitably don’t get fixed, the stronger those individual feelings get. That’s our world today, billions of angry people believing their feelings are what’s important, while nothing changes.

Did you know 99.9% of businesses in the US are small businesses? 94% in Australia. The ones mostly hammered by COVID, because small businesses nearly all fail inside 5 years even without a pandemic. This is why the pandemic has been damaging to ‘business’, larger firms have been able to carry on, mostly. The old normal wasn’t normal, it was dysfunctional. A nation of small businesses is a nation of underpaid and overworked people. It’s only small business that makes us think ‘business’ is even a thing. Larger businesses just run like mini societies, not businesses.

Feliz Cumpleaños!

Gladys rolling the dice again. Have a look at this set of instructions. Given many people struggle to even stay within 10 km/h of a known speed limit, what are the chances people returning from Queensland will go through the process of making sense of all of this documentation? Also, her saying she wouldn't go to Queensland right now, but not stopping others - like a school teacher saying they'd prefer if the kids sat down and were quiet, but leaving it optional.

More small business. Towns often struggle now to fill main street shops. Most of peoples' needs are met by much larger businesses, online too. In the past the small businesses in a main street were the hub of shopping (old shot of Cowra here). Now the best you tend to get are boutique stores, non-necessities. Further evidence of this is the pandemic, where most small business had to shut down. People were mostly able to function quite easily without them. Their largest function now is income for owners and employees, a very inefficient way of putting food on peoples' tables.

To keep the rusted-on LNP fans happy, here's a piece critical of Labor's decisions on privatisation. I thought Keating was a great politician, but economically he was also a neoliberal like all the modern twits. The obsession with the private sector on both sides misses the basic fact that the private sector only exists because of government. Government invented it.

Says it all, really.

The reality when the King of Announcements & Slogans meets the real world of having to actually deliver something. Disgraceful. Still hugely popular. Those who love ScoMo can share in that disgrace.

The battle of ideas. The ALP returning to the idea that government needs to INVEST in the community, heavily. Full employment, rather than a permanent pool of unemployed used to drive wages and conditions down. The LNP still running with the trickle-down idea, that you let a tiny handful of people hoover up most of the money, and then hopefully turn it into jobs. My view? Trickle-down hasn't worked, anywhere, over the past 50 years. Time to give it up.

Bruno Latour's ideas about agency to me are the most important thinking of the past half century. Here they are applied to gun control. Why a gun is a different object when held by a person than when it isn't. And why a person is a different person with a gun, than they are without one. Philosophy's job is to free us from the slavery of ideas that have seduced us.

Well, this is awkward for those who predictably started a pile-on, on Queensland, like they did on Victoria. Gladys agrees with Queensland. Both point the finger at the real problem, the same problem as always. ScoMo. If it'd been a tax cut, it would be planned down to the tiniest detail.

With incredibly complex problems to solve, humanity has retreated to comfy old binaries to argue. Man vs woman. Black vs white. Left vs Right. It’s easier.

It costs up to 5 times as much to maintain ‘infrastructure’ over time than it costs to build it in the first place. Buildings, roads, sewers, pipes, parks etc. That funding is rarely forthcoming. Many local councils for example have ongoing deficits of maintenance in the tens of millions of dollars. It’s not their fault, the vast majority of the money from taxpayers goes to the federal level, but services are delivered by state and local levels. If we want a politics and a society that is focused on the longer term, this is how to do it. Put the focus on infrastructure. The long-term is built right into the operating system. Infrastructure isn’t a technology or an engineering thing, it’s the way societies exist over multiple generations. They used to build cathedrals using multiple generations of tradespeople. A commitment to infrastructure is a commitment to social longevity, it binds people together over multiple generations. We think it’s progress to decry ‘materialism’. But I think it’s the secret to society itself.

Adrian shared this. So much truth in it. The game stops working without that $200 on every cycle around the board. If people don’t have money, society stops working. No point giving it to ‘business’, business is just customers with money.

An early John Howard. One of Howard's sneaky ideas was to drive wages down and smash unions, via vast numbers of migrant workers on slave wages. (The pandemic showed this very clearly, when suddenly these slaves were no longer available to pick our food or work in our hospitality and tourism industries.) Copied the idea from the US and Mexico. At the same time he used these same migrants to win elections, by whipping up racist xenophobia about them. A bastard in just about every way, who introduced toxic US ideas into the LNP, which has now destroyed it as a conservative party. Or as one of his own party called him, a 'lying rodent'.