May 2021

This is Bathurst. People know I love patterns, and what they show. Bathurst is not unusual for modern cities, no strong pattern at all, it's sprawl. What does that mean? It means what it shows - no cohesive social activity. Just thousands of individuals strewn across the landscape, connected only by cars and roads. There's no real centre here, except in name. The farm land around the town is simple geometrical shapes forced onto the landscape. Everything (town and country) is individual territories fenced off mostly into squares and rectangles of different sizes. A mosaic of disconnected individuals.

A random part of the UK countryside, a pattern seen around the world. Look at the total saturation of paddocks, of farming. Nothing allowed to exist in the landscape except us. About 75% of the UK landscape is dedicated to farming. While we increasingly pack into cities devoid of any life except ourselves, the landscape around those cities is also a wasteland. These paddocks aren't the 'countryside', that's one of our myths. They're part of the cities.

Hey look, the pandemic is over! The UK and US full of this tripe now. Having sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives to economic interests, they then hoovered up most of the world's vaccine supply, and are now saying the pandemic is as good as over. (It isn't even close.) 'Economy on course', that's what it's only ever been about. You see the same push from Economy true believers here right now, urging a great rush to vaccinate, to get everything open again. The Economy, humankind's most lethal fiction.

Greenland from above is mostly that pure white you see on the left. Ice. On the coast it's increasingly that beautiful pattern of tributaries on the right. Which is catastrophically bad news. It's Greenland, melting. Most of the ice in the northern hemisphere is in Greenland.

Much of China is still an entirely different model of humans in the landscape. One that Europe used at one time, too, the village model. People and other living things living in close proximity, in an integrated way. Notice how houses are clumped along roads or waterways/canals, but never in suburbs which divorce people from the landscape or from where they work. One indicator I use to assess the health of a social system is the amount of colour it exhibits, from above. Chinese landscapes are superbly coloured. Most of the nasty stuff we see from China comes from their huge urban areas, which are car cultures like ours.

One more aerial shot for the day. Florence. Old cities could still be high density, and even have roads of sorts, without all the problems cars cause today. Access to the near vicinity (paths) rather than access to distant locations (roads). Each 'block' folded back upon itself, around internal courtyards, a mini-community within the wider community. And then there were larger public squares. Like a fractal: community at multiple scales. And a church in the middle.

Agriculture is culture. It's in the word. Look at farms in our country, and what they say about us.

From today (actually I think from 17 May in NSW) people aged 50+ can get an AZ jab. Lots of expertise in the news this morning telling everybody this is a 'safe' vaccine, and that the 'benefits outweigh the risks'. Now I'm the exact opposite of an anti-vaxxer, I think vaccines are superb things. But I find how this is being dealt with fundamentally dishonest. The risk maths is rubbish (making individual risk the same as population risk), the whole problem is being framed in ways that favour economics rather than public health. As I've posted here a few times, we have no idea which individuals will be impacted by this vaccine. But we know some will - 41 now dead in the UK. 41! Educated people will say "yes, but that's out of X million jabs!" If Panadol killed 41 people a year, out of tens of millions of doses, would it still be on the shelves? Of course not. The bar for risk is being set deliberately very low here, out of an abundance of haste (contrasting with the 'abundance of caution' being used in the pandemic to date). There are other vaccines, there are other public health measures that can continue to be used to keep virus out of circulation. The only justification for continuing with this known risk in Australia is haste to get the borders open again, and to scale back the other public health measures, which are seen as expensive and onerous. To get back to 'normal'. I'll be interested if those over 50s will play along here, or whether they will (rightly) expect the government to work a lot harder for their benefit.

If there's a place on Earth most infected by the car virus, it has to be Los Angeles. Staggeringly that's suburbia you can see down there, criss-crossed by major highways. This space would be entirely dysfunctional without vehicles. It's a shrine to the car. Proof that worship of the right to individual movement will paradoxically leave you with nowhere to move at all. (My comment on this same post below shows a close-up view of the centre of this shot, to show the packing of space more clearly.)

Pandemics reboot societies. Look at this, the 'Economy' going gangbusters, despite lockdowns and vast amounts of government spending. Exactly as predicted, do all the things the Economy loons say not to do, and the Economy booms. Give people money, and pow.

Two models of society. The most common one used by us is millions of separate individuals, who mysteriously add up to form a 'whole greater than its parts'. Then, to return to Venn diagrams, there's this one. Each person has a shared biology and shared ideas, and adds their own particular slant or viewpoint to those shared things. Each person (A,B,C,D,E) is a 'whole', each has a view of how ALL of society works. Society is the overlapping of all of those wholes - ABCDE.

Happy birthday Queensland chickie!

The pandemic is a long way from over. No country can vaccinate their way out of it, despite what politicians are telling you. The virus will continue to mutate to try to outsmart the vaccines, if it's allowed to keep spreading in the rest of the world. Look at how fast the variants have taken hold even in the US, with its extensive vaccination. The same fools who think the Economy is the issue will soon learn that hoarding most of the world's vaccines won't save them.

Science, the journal, saying what I've been saying: "Even a long wait for an alternative may be worth it if infections are low. In Norway, the risk of dying from TTS for women age 45 to 49 is equivalent to the risk of dying from COVID-19". The ridiculous haste to get jabs into people in Australia is driven by economic and not public health concerns. Slow it down, keep the virus controlled in the meantime, give everybody safer and higher efficacy vaccines. As NZ is doing, it's not rocket science.

Beautiful piece of teaching here from Brian Cox, have a look if you have 4 minutes, about why 'time' as we mean it doesn't exist. Interestingly many (like Brian) then go on to say that looking into the sky is 'looking back in time'. That's not true, it's more amazing than that. If the light from a star took a million years to get here, it doesn't mean you're looking a million years back in time. It means that star exists right now for us, here, in a way that is different to there. If somebody you know dies, for somebody at that star they haven't even been born yet, and for something closer they're still alive. Time is relative to standpoint. https://youtu.be/-O8lBIcHre0

Nerd Immunity. To be oblivious to all expert advice.

Everybody lies, we're all politicians. Not because we're dishonest, but because what we think people mean and feel is always our own translation. Love the most brutal example, nobody loves us, they love their own idea of us. None of this is avoidable, each person is ultimately unknowable by another person. The secret is to live that unknowability, the sparks it creates. Everything else is co-dependency.

Gladys - "our response will be proportionate". Please just for once people unpack the weaponised spin. What she means by this is 'we will avoid lockdown at all costs'. As if lockdown was the evil here, not the virus. Global data shows conclusively that lockdowns are the best health response, the best economic response, and also the LEAST restrictive of peoples' freedoms.

Who knows, it might even inspire us to turn our own country into something as beautiful as the places we fly overseas to visit.

I'm sure graphs don't excite many, but this one's a beaut. Blue line, countries who chose to 'live with the virus', impact on health, the Economy and peoples' freedom. Red line, countries (like Oz) that chose to eliminate the virus. The numbers are in, red the clear winner. So when Gladys says she's keeping things open, unlike those other States, you can see why the other Premiers are much smarter than she is.

Here's some numbers to contextualise what I say about the AZ vaccine. Currently it causes about 2 clots for every 100,000 people vaccinated. That sounds tiny, right? About 16 million Australians are scheduled to get that vaccine. That would mean over 300 clots. Mortality is about 20-25%. So over 60 Australians will die, from the vaccine, based on current data, if they were all to get vaccinated.

FB is is so friggin' boring.

There are all sorts of theories about why bad things happen in the world. Capitalism, power, inequality, toxic masculinity, Left, Right, etc. etc. None of those things are real, I don't think. This photo to me summarises societies right now. We don't talk. Ideas are what societies are actually made from, conversation is the process of doing the actual building. Every major or even minor problem you can think of in society will ultimately come back to toxic ideas, that nobody is discussing and so the ideas win. Where are the public conversations? Our idea of the 'public' is to share photos of ourselves doing things.

Here's a story the pandemic has allowed to be told in big, bold letters. Much of our comfortable lifestyles is created by slavery. Migrant workers. They staff our basic industries, for slave wages and conditions. Right now employers are desperate for workers, economic theory of supply and demand says they'll now offer more wages, to attract staff. The government's budget is predicated on that idea. It won't happen, employers are lobbying viciously to get the slaves back, and keep employer profits high. https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2021/05/07/labour-shortage-pay-rise-pascoe/

This is how Gladys works. Declares she's against lockdowns, then asks the public to do it for her. That way she can say she doesn't do lockdowns, while she actually does lockdowns. And seriously, what does 'strongly recommended' mean in a public health alert? Are we all strongly recommended to follow the speed limit now too?

I prefer older-style towns, where there were more trees than cars. Now each household has 3-4 or even more cars, often parked all over the nature strip too. And the general quality of gardens is dropping I think, lots of them barely even mowed, often because some bloody car is parked on it.

Was in a webinar with John Skerritt this week, head of the TGA, the body that approves vaccines in Oz. A nice guy. This quote from him though shows the danger of medicalising a pandemic. "By being vaccinated, we're not only protecting ourselves but we're protecting your loved ones, especially the older and more frail loved ones in the community." This is true, but notice how the public narrative has shifted to suggest that vaccination is our way out of this pandemic? It isn't. It's a crucial part of the equation, but we desperately need to resist the political forces trying to replace a focus on virus elimination with a focus on getting jabbed. It won't work, the virus is already mutating to defeat the vaccines. We need to keep the amount of virus circulating down, globally, and that means restrictions, whether we like it or not.

Country towns now seeing the sort of road congestion you see in cities. And we keep making the same mistakes, thinking that more 'traffic' means we need more and bigger roads. Traffic is not a thing, its not like a flow of water that just needs more and bigger pipes. Roads create the congestion, every new road *increases* the 'traffic'. The fact small towns now have the same congestion as big cities proves it's not the number of people that creates the problem, it's designing towns that need far too much moving around. Public transport won't fix this either, it's part of the same moving around idea.

Happy birthday!

Another angle on our travel obsession. It's an enormous drain on our country's wealth. People take money that could be spent here and spend it overseas instead. Another thing the pandemic has brought to light, suddenly those dollars are being spent at home. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-unexpected-stimulus-how-the-closed-border-helped-save-the-economy-20210505-p57p7m.html

The LNP has sacked 1100 ABC staff since 2014. Commercial TV and radio is cheap reality programs, opinionated shock jocks, home renovation and other lifestyle programs, game shows, sport etc. Doesn't public life seem increasingly dumb to people?

On Mothers Day, I've been thinking about a magical mystery that women do. Men build houses, but women create homes. Home is a word like love, almost impossible to define. But, with love, the most important thing in the world. It's my love of and thoughts about home that drives my criticism of travel culture. 'There's no place like home', really true. But we've forgotten what home actually means, it's one of the most profound and difficult ideas in the world. What is it women (it's nearly always women, whether with children or not) do when they create a 'home' from a house? If we could understand that, we'd understand so much. I'm not sure many women could articulate it either. They ground us, they make where we live sacred, rather than a lot number. Another way men have ruled the world is the increasing forgetting of this most fundamental act. Our 'economies' are lethal to homes, they're about constantly undermining them. 'Move to where the jobs are!'. Yeh, nah.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde

That question people ask, if you had a time machine, where would you go? Now I would choose Australia, before the First Fleet arrived. Something miraculous, unique in all the world, had happened here, and had been happening tens of thousands of years before the pyramids were built. The aboriginal people had not only discovered the secret to eternal civilisation, in the process they'd created a paradise, a Garden of Eden. The firsthand accounts make you despair, what we've lost and can never recover. We don't just need to reconcile with aboriginal people, we may have lost access to the literal Holy Grail of all human knowledge.

Joining a few more dots between my posts, notice how politicians win votes with new transport spending, particularly roads. Moving around is the basis of our entire culture. Where are we going, with all that movement? Mostly nowhere, we end up where we started from, at the end of most trips.

Our homes and land were once so important to us that we built fortresses to protect them. Then economic thinkers replaced land-based identity with job-based identity. Today people are told 'move to where the jobs are'. But it's fake, we still need that deep groundedness, a connection to land. Politics shows it, 'sovereignty' is what now wins elections. Economy politicians are smart, on the one hand their policies actually strip away peoples' sovereign right to a home, to a connection to a piece of land, and replace it with a job. But they then run for office on a platform of 'sovereignty', the very thing the Economy takes away with jobs. It's a perpetual motion machine of winning strategy.

Experts fighting back. Not the house-trained poodles the government surrounds itself with, real expertise. I'd beg everybody to read this, except that would be demeaning. But then I do wear Crocs, so I'll beg anyway.

Isn't 'broad musical taste' an oxymoron? To 'have taste' is to to be able to pick crap from quality. There will always be a minority of art (or anything actually) that is truly great. I remember one of the great painters saying they were really only interested in Cezanne. I've never had a huge music collection, or book collection. Most of it doesn't interest me. I used to feel bad about that. (No, this picture isn't me.) I think people collect (or stream) music like they used to collect coins, or stamps.

Life returning to 'normal' a.k.a. people depressed in meaningless jobs, in debt to the eyeballs. Living for the next trip, to suck the life out of some place with actual culture, to compensate for what we don't have at home. If you were a person in a poorer country, with rampant Covid, and little hope of seeing a vaccine inside 2 years minimum, wouldn't the shallowness of life in the developed world disgust you? The same developed world who gave this virus to poorer countries? It disgusts me, and I live here.

Resharing from only yesterday. I'd be really interested to hear peoples' views, it's a powerful article about the mistake we're making right now.

This is important. Contact tracing failed. It also failed to find the source of some of the outbreaks in NSW over Christmas. This means LUCK saved NSW, not great contact tracing. It keeps rolling the dice, and getting away with it because too many people pay no attention to anything except slogans.

Here's a ripper on agency, Ben. Who did the killing here? The truck? The teen boys? The truck driver? The parents? The bin? Etc.

Up there with Daylight Saving for idiocy, for me. Way more people die of the smoke this causes than would ever be at risk from the fires. And now it turns out it's a waste of time anyway. Usually just red meat for the volunteers, who get bored sitting around in the sheds. Disturbing number of arsonists in the ranks too. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-11/research-shows-hazard-reduction-no-impact-on-black-summer-fires/100130164?utm_medium=social&utm_content=sf245762531&utm_campaign=abc_sydney&utm_source=m.facebook.com&sf245762531=1&fbclid=IwAR3i1pdEBrSu98XmPdph3ttSO5MnzSICn5zPHUIFMEsvdLDD5k51p1FHS5c

If you believe in the Economy, the federal budget is a big deal. If you don't, it's an Excel spreadsheet with text-to-speech turned on.

This is Jerusalem. Intense conflict again there this week. A holy place for Jews, Christians and Muslims. We call the problems there 'religious' problems. That framing of it never progresses anything, so is obviously wrong. This is about the sacredness of place. One of my main themes. We can't understand the conflict here because we don't understand the sacredness of place. To us it's all just real estate, or places to 'see' on our trips. We live in maps.

I liked this post about time, so am re-sharing.

A nasty budget last night. Token amounts to aged care and women, neither of which will fix the problems there. Tax offsets for low and middle income earners to get through one more election, after which their taxes go UP, while taxes on the wealthy will be massively slashed. And private school funding up by $3.6 billion, while unis cop more cuts, like the ABC. (LNP enemies, in their eyes.) These bastards never diverge from their same policies - cut taxes, cut regulations, smash your enemies. Only unions can stop them, but nobody joins them any more. People do protests instead, which never change anything.

Some talk today that pensioners may be forced to use the cashless welfare card - the indue card. Surely political suicide. Unpack the ideas, it's always in the ideas. The poor need to have how their money is spent controlled. Massive tax cuts to the wealthy, grants and tax concessions to private schools and gas companies - those are free to be spent as they like. We're becoming America so fast that it's scary. And people vote for it.

Clots. The important thing isn’t that very few people will get them. It’s that some will, and it will do this to them. When did our ethics become ‘so long as it’s not lots and lots of people, it’s fine’?

Good heavens, all those protests led to...not much. Knock me over with a feather.

Common sense prevails. High efficacy, safe vaccines for Australians of all ages. Well done.

Photography encourages a snapshot view of reality. As if reality is just one thing, that you can capture. Paintings are better at showing that reality constantly shifts and reveals more things, as you engage with it. A painting captures time, the time of that engagement.

The joke here is that school is irrelevant. The reality is that most jobs are a stupid waste of time where you have to turn your brain off to stay sane.

This is a painting. The likenesses art produces fascinate us. But do we understand why? Paint has lollipops in it. It has anything and everything in it. How is that possible?. When we say art 'looks like' something - how is it possible to look like something, using blobs of paint? It looks like a lollipop, because it IS a lollipop. A virtual, eternal lollipop. It will last as long as the painting lasts. Art isn't 'pictures of things', it's the immortal parts (the souls) of those things, folded into new materials. In this case, paint. Art is the human way of working with eternity.

This is a drawing, using just a blue pen like you'd use at school or work. Nothing else. Oscar Okonu. The soul of this man is now living in ink as well as flesh, art extracted it and gave birth to it in a new material.

One more painting tonight. It really is a painting. You can feel the presence of this girl? Some call that the soul. It's the eternal part of her, of all of us. Only art can show it, give it life in a new material.

Mouse plagues are caused by the destruction of diverse ecosystems in favour of monoculture agricultural crops. This destroys most species, leaving the field wide open for single species to dominate, who no longer have competition. This is exactly how Covid happened, our destruction of ecosystems, of landscapes, destroying the diversity of species that prevents a single species (like the SARS virus that causes Covid) from dominating the others. The Economy, including farming, caused the pandemic. You can see the connections re-emerging now with the pending disaster from baiting these mice. The baiting won't end the plague, but it makes farmers feel like they're doing something. It will kill a huge number of species that feed on the mice too, like many species of reptiles and birds. Our loss of connection to landscape is the root problem behind all of our other problems.

Look out, virus about! More nonsense from the UK, this is the absurdities 'living with the virus' creates. Like people can see the virus, and dodge it on the footpath. The idiot Economy people again, wanting 'business as usual' rather than fighting the plague.

happy birthday!

Happy birthday Sam :)

Just sayin’.

The same people who urged us to 'live with the virus' all last year, are seeing another opportunity to spread stupidity. I'll leave it to Professor Raina Macintyre to clear up: "But COVID-19 isn’t a chronic disease that will remain at the same level. It’s an epidemic disease, which means if you’ve got a certain level of disease, it’s just going to keep growing and getting bigger.”

Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi is the most expensive painting ever sold, at $578 million. If it was found to be a fake, its value would drop to about a dollar, immediately, even if the copy was impossible to distinguish from the original. Why would the original be worth 578 million times more than the copy, which nobody could tell apart? A secret key to unlock our whole culture lies in the answer to that question, I think.

Happy Birthday!!

The latest craziness from the US. People 'identifying as' vaccinated, to bypass vaccination and mask rules. I guess once you start down the rabbit hole of identifying yourself as something you're not, this is where it logically leads to.

Grey bits are confirmed deaths from Covid. Red is estimated, taking into account under-reporting. Around 10 million dead. And climbing worse than ever. Worth remembering when opening up borders to recreational travel seems an important thing right now.

Prue has a paid job on Australian TV. Which means at least some people think she's great. Be afraid.

You can't 'learn to live with the virus'. It needs to learn to live with us. Using strong restrictions, and vaccines.

Say good morning to the Vietnamese mossy frog.

Wisdom of the crowd. It's an actual, studied thing. In the right circumstances, a crowd is smarter than anybody in it. It's not what we usually call 'democracy'. In this case, the overwhelming crowd favourite is also sound public health. The 'open up' people are a tiny minority. The crowd drove both the State responses, and now the federal response. They took control, when our pollies and business leaders refused to. They're already being called names by the business leaders in response, 'Fortress Australia', like they're a bit simple and a real adult would open up and embrace more risk. The crowd is giving them the big middle finger.

Loving maths being compulsory in years 11 and 12. Not as thrilled that education is still seen as preparation for life. It is that, but it's supposed to change life too. Not just churn out well-trained employees.

This is obviously the sort of thing that made the government suck more money out of universities, and give it to rent-seeking parasites as tax cuts. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-17/queensland-coronavirus-antiviral-treatment-covid-19/100144370

Roughly 15% of the population is over 6 feet tall. Does this mean your chance of being 6 feet tall is 15%? No, you're the height you are. And there endeth the musings about the crazy dishonesty of AZ vaccine risk maths being sold to the public.

The modern idea of 'events'. Bringing large crowds of people together. It's always felt a bit forced to me, like the only thing that will bring people together now is some type of personal entertainment. Even in my lifetime people used to join community groups (Lions, Rotary etc.), which had wider social aims and undertook community projects. Churches the same. Now those are all in decline, replaced by events.

Corruption, plain and simple. The National Archive is having to do fundraising to be able to keep some of our basic historical records, and aged care staff got no pay rise in the latest budget, but these clowns can find $600 million for a white elephant like this that nobody needs and which will drive electricity prices higher. Its real purpose? To stop the LNP fracturing along faction lines. This government which polls says would be re-elected right now has to spend $600 million of your money to stop the man-babies from falling out over an argument.

Nearly a third of Australians say they won't get vaccinated. That's a disaster. Looking at the stats, offering older age groups a different vaccine would help a lot.

Maggie Thatcher was one of those most responsible for the common claim that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Trains were her main experiment to prove it. 40 years of disaster later, and the UK is re-nationalising much of its rail. https://news.sky.com/story/franchises-scrapped-and-changes-to-season-tickets-among-major-changes-to-british-rail-network-12311161

Until 1984, foreign ships containing suspected carriers of infectious disease had to disembark passengers at Sydney's quarantine station, seen here on North Head. Quarantine facilities were sold off or closed down at that time. Now we use hotels for quarantine, the same hotels who normally take the bulk of travellers. As Camus said, there will never be freedom while there are plagues. They will never be over, a fully 'open' world is a dream only of business people who want easy traffic for their goods and money.

The government I suspect recognising that unless they do offer the highest efficacy and safest vaccines to all, the rollout will fail. And the crowd may again be wise here. https://theconversation.com/covid-is-surging-in-the-worlds-most-vaccinated-country-why-160869?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton

Women aren’t allowed to age in Hollywood.

Did you know that if you have a cold, you can't catch SARS-Cov2 (Covid)? The rhinovirus kicks Covid's butt. A good example of how microbes live in communities, just like we do.

I'm a fan of data, but data without good hypotheses is useless. I posted a hypothesis here about how fridges may be responsible for some of our chronic health problems, by removing the microbes we used to eat. Another theory I have links to fewer people having baths now, showers are much more popular. The origin of much disease though may be inflammation. And baths (hot or cold) are excellent to suppress and even reverse inflammation. I recently had a badly swollen foot, which I cured in a day by soaking it in hot water.

Look at this, the US will likely need to start its mass vaccinations all over again, as early as September. The UK will be the same. Microbes evolve to fight back. Why you need to control the spread of the virus, as well as vaccinate against it. That includes keeping movement and gathering restrictions, and borders closed. And not pretending you can end a pandemic at home, while leaving the rest of the world in chaos.

The call to 'open up' during the pandemic is just the grown up version of 'are we there yet?'

The curious, topsy-turvy world of pandemics. In health, public health professionals deal with population-level strategy. GPs/physicians deal with the health of individuals. This is from the GPs, but is a statement of public health strategy. Ethically it's actually a problem, because a physician in this situation should advise their patient to use the safer medication option. Ethics is the key to solving our current vaccine stalemate, but not many are talking about it. https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/it-s-a-dangerous-strategy-for-people-to-hold-off-g

The original suffragettes. Look what they did - formed a union. Their motto? "Deeds, Not Words".

An interesting set of calculations. The public aren't stupid.

My kids are gentle. In the libertarian, individualistic times we're living in, gentleness is sometimes seen as weakness. 'Strong' people are seen as those who assert themselves at the expense of others, aggressive and 'tough'. But gentle is like gravity. By far the weakest force in the universe, but also the force that shapes everything. Gentleness isn't the absence of strength, it's strength applied with finesse and precision, bending to meet the situation as it finds it.

Last year I argued with people here about Covid and school safety. I feel vindicated that the year since has proved Covid spreads in schools as easily if not more easily than everywhere else, that children are infected as easily if not more easily than everybody else, and also suffer severe consequences of having Covid. We saw none of that here not because 'schools are safe', but because we had no Covid. A year on, a new variation on the outrageous lack of care for children, from the UK. Because children aren't being vaccinated yet, the virus is now spreading like wildfire amongst UK children and schools, which are being opened right up. What does the UK government do? Simply remove that data from the report. This entire pandemic, and all these deaths, is caused by the people who think we live in an Economy, not a society. Who think restrictions on social activity, including borders, are the enemy, because those things stop businesses making money. Anybody who continually calls for us to 'open up' (anything - shops, borders, whatever) is one of these lethal idiots.

Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday!

The Overton Window of public discussion. Debates are 'framed' (I use that word a lot - this is why). Ideas that get listened to have to be within a 'window' around that acceptable-sensible part of the continuum. From there they can become popular, and then policy. Extremists discovered in the 1950s that they could take unthinkable new ideas, and push them into the Overton window, as shown in the diagram. They set up think tanks, media networks and shock jocks, to discuss the unthinkable and radical ideas. These seep into the mainstream (through outrage at first), where they get discussed as outrageous. But this discussion is what gradually opens the window to them, normalises them. This is also key to Trump's strategy for electoral success. And why the SKY news, Daily Teles and 2GBs of the world run outrage journalism 24 hours a day, to relentlessly widen this window. People who believe in the 'political centre' are the people who open the window for the extremists, as the whole idea of the Overton window is to shift extreme views into the mainstream, by constantly moving the centre.

Zoffany's The Tribuna of the Uffizi. Hilarious story behind this one. He'd bankrupted himself investing in Cook's voyage to Australia, on which he was supposed to be a passenger. He pulled out. Being friends with the English Royals, he got the Queen to give him some money to travel to Italy to capture its great art, for her (she'd never been). Thus this painting, which took him years. Full of scandalous allusions to the society of the day, and also complete nobodies willing to pay him to be in it. The King and Queen hated it, and he lost his Royal patronage. A technical masterpiece.

You can see how deeply libertarian populism has infected us. Crabb is no conservative. But even she's been so infected by populism that she describes the powerful use of public institutions to do what they were designed to do, as people being in love with 'being told what to do'. Staggering. In the past sensible societies delegated important tasks to their institutions, that's what institutions were for. Not because they loved being told what to do, but because they recognised they couldn't do everything themselves, and also didn't have the expertise to do it.

The rolling contempt for children and teachers. In no country that I'm aware of have teachers been considered 'front-line workers', for vaccinations. It's inexcusable. https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-i-m-in-my-thirties-but-wishing-i-was-40-20210521-p57u0t.html

Haven't looked at the weather forecast for Lithgow for Wednesday. But this tells me it's going to be cloudy. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/super-blood-moon-visible-in-australia-on-wednesday-night/13356336

Lots of hysteria in public debates at the moment about vaccinating to prevent big outbreaks in the winter. I think we need to remember that even under the original ridiculously optimistic timeline to vaccinate the country, it was all meant to finish in October. More than a month after winter ends.

I log onto FB each morning looking for signs that people are talking about anything except themselves. It's usually a disappointing moment.

Boris leads a party that killed over 120,000 in the UK. Why did they do it? Journalists have now unearthed this quote from him, at the start of the pandemic: "If I was 80 I wouldn't care, I'd be more worried about the economy." His popularity has increased. You can't find a clearer example of how the Economy caused the pandemic.

Those topics people say you shouldn't discuss (politics, religion etc.) are exactly the things we should talk about. Why are we surprised when the world turns into a toilet, when we don't discuss anything important? In the US right now, many conservative States are passing anti-abortion legislation that deliberately goes against what's legal. They're doing this because they want the matter referred to the Supreme Court, which they stacked with moral/religious conservatives under Trump. I think this is the Church gradually winning a war against the State that has been going on for centuries,. I'm not even saying it's a good or bad thing, just something we should notice and talk about. On abortion, I find it disgusting that people treat women as incubators, and don't see a baby as part of the woman too. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mississippis-pink-house-ground-zero-us-abortion-rights-fight-2021-05-23/

I'm not seeing hysteria in NZ about how fast they're vaccinating. They made a deliberate decision to give everybody in the country the safest possible vaccine. It probably slowed their rollout, but lives of the public is their first priority. As it should be, and was here until the border-opening obsessives got a whiff of OS travel again. On top of this, this is how fast rich countries with Covid control SHOULD be vaccinating. Vaccines are needed much more urgently elsewhere in the world.

When South Australia's power went out because a storm trashed transmission lines, dickheads like Canavan blamed it on renewables. Now a coal plant explodes plunging Queensland into blackout, what's to blame? Apparently, renewables.

I joked about it earlier in the week. Tempted fate. 10 minutes before the blood moon was due, Lithgow clouded over completely. Wouldn't even know there was a moon in the sky.

I'm sure I bored people last year talking continuously about how the 'Economy' was the cause of the pandemic and the greatest obstacle to ending it. Now Boris Johnson' closest adviser confirms that it was exactly what was going on. The Economy doesn't exist, it's a spreadsheet. It's killed millions of people. Sorry, scroll past for more dog pics.

A deeper take on travel and movement. An astronaut in space cannot move. They can flap their arms and legs around, like in this video, but in terms of going from 'A to B', they can't move a millimetre. It's only by contacting and interacting with something else, that you can 'move'. This is why I say our ideas about travel are so destructive, because we see it as just moving from place A to place B. To get from A to B, you have to change A, and B, and everywhere in-between. You have to build roads, and airports, and train tracks. To travel is to transform, not to 'see sights'. We see the sights, and ignore the way we had to transform the world to make them visible.

Racism, paternalism, pandemics. With an Ebola outbreak (for example), rich countries rush to lock those countries down to prevent the Ebola getting to us. Notice how with Covid, the exact opposite was done? Rich countries, where the virus started, refused to quarantine themselves from others, to prevent spreading the virus. Flights continued in most developed countries throughout the whole pandemic, spreading it wildly everywhere. Now these same rich countries say the answer is to vaccinate the world, not to shut down their jetset lifestyles to control the spread. The pandemic would have been over last year if they'd done this basic public health act. Then on top of that, these same rich countries took all of the world's vaccines, for themselves. Is it surprising how much the poorer countries in the world probably hate us?

Fly less, drive less. Travel less. Who’d have thought.

Part of Darwin's beetle collection. Science was part of empire, it 'collected' the world, to categorise it. Placing the world in classifications, and on maps. The voyages of exploration were also mapping voyages, each added to the imperial map of the world. Those classifications and maps are the world we now live inside. Our travel, for example, is us exploring the map. Accumulating sights, like a beetle collection.

Rich countries are like cars who refuse to slow down for roadwork. Movement is their pathological obsession. For the whole of the pandemic they've tried to run 'normal life' alongside a pandemic. Now they're doing it with vaccines, hoping to avoid movement and gathering restrictions. To 'live with the virus', as they say, like having a death adder as a pet for the kids. It won't work, as we're seeing below. Kids will be next, unable to be vaccinated, the virus spreading rampantly into schools. Nobody will care.

Remarkable that these scientists are working on a problem that experts here say isn’t even worth worrying about. Some deeply unethical things going on, people will be held to account one day.

Happy Birthday!

Speed bumps one of my favourite examples of how morality and technology are not 2 separate things. Speed bumps only exist for moral reasons, to slow drivers down who won't do it of their own (moral) accord. There is literally no other reason a speed bump exists, it's all morals.

Happy Birthday :)

Thanks To Dave Roma for this shot. They're doing extensive renovations on the court house at the moment, I watch them every day. Another example of how technology is really morals wrapped up in materials. When you build something like this, you're committing multiple generations to its upkeep. What we call 'infrastructure' isn't just stuff and services, it's society identifying things of *value* (morality) that it will invest in, for generations, and build into stone, metal, concrete etc. to make it last. Like law, or transport, or fresh water. In our populist age, much infrastructure is crumbling, because we won't commit to anything except enrichment of our personal lifestyle, in a single generation. Engineers are actually the best guides to successful civilisation. The Romans were engineers, their empire lasted over 1000 years. Aboriginal Australians engineered the Australian landscape for maybe 100,000 years. Building things - technology - is the key to civilisation. Run a mile from anybody who criticises 'materialism', the idealists.