April 2025

There was a time when pretty much everybody smoked. Humans copy one another, it’s the most basic human act. Anybody who in those times said smoking is bad for you would have been mocked and ignored. But smoking is lethally bad for you. And now most don’t do it. There’s a message there that what is right and good for you will *never* be ‘what everybody else is doing’. Many people die before they realise that.

Hybrids are selling like hotcakes, because people want to save money on fuel, and some even want to go full-electric but are worried about range. On both of those counts, unless you’re doing a lot of driving in more remote areas, you’re far better to buy a full-EV. The petrol part of the hybrid will frustrate you very quickly. And you might cut your fuel bill in half, but at current prices that’s still a hefty fuel bill. I see that on the online forums of people who bought a BYD Shark. Brilliant car and a hybrid, but can also do about 100km as a full-EV. Nearly every person on there sees how powerful and cheap it is when the car is running only as an EV, and looks desperately for every way to avoid needing the petrol engine.

I wonder if it’s real, planes fly far faster than ducks and I reckon it’d get blown off. But I love ducks.

For those still wallowing in memes about fascism and Nazis, here are the 4 main aims of Project 2025, the blueprint Trump is following. 1) Restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”. 2) Dismantling the federal bureaucracy 3) Defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”. 4) Securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.” If it succeeds (it won't), America will be like Little House on the Prairie, with nuclear weapons. Not a fascist State; the complete opposite of that.

Copycat stupidity. People vandalise great works of art like this now too, throwing tins of soup and paint at them. Mob behaviour is highly infectious. Their real passion is generating likes and follows on social media. Trump couldn't care less what happens to Musk or Tesla, but let's not let thinking get in the way of a good mob outrage.

HBD! 🎁🎈🎉

Hilarious, the man who wants to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear reactors Australia doesn’t even need thinks spending on health and education is a ‘waste’ of money. The cuts to the public service he wants would be half of the entire Canberra public service. It’s delusional, the man is delusional, but then he’s a Trump man, it goes with the territory. By the way this isn’t party political from me, because I think the entire electoral system is a joke. Voting is a joke. I had to sit through a few hours of lunatic anti-wind farm protestors at the Council meeting last night. I’m sick of all of it, social media driven life means any delusional halfwit can now run a town, State or country.

Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease. Including the annual flu shot. Nearly all serious disease has an infectious origin, and any vaccination alerts the immune system, and offers cross-protection against other diseases too. Even ones you don't think are related to infection, like cancer, heart disease and dementia. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/02/study-finds-strongest-evidence-yet-that-shingles-vaccine-helps-cut-dementia-risk

Last night a local councillor described net zero as climate 'extremism'. Giving people the vote is the dumbest thing humanity ever did.

Kidult culture. A culture that finds children a burden is a dead culture.

If you want to see how social media allows the widespread manipulation of public opinion, this is a bot farm. Automatically searching for particular topics, like climate change, renewable energy and EVs, and then posting fake software-generated anti-messages, from fake people, about those things.

Australia with AUKUS and the UK with Brexit thought they could re-energise the Anglo world, by partnership between the Anglo powers. With Trump now trashing all of that, the UK will have to look at going back into Europe. Australia needs to strengthen its ties with Asia, particularly China. Paul Keating said that 30 years ago. 30 years of Queen and Country conservative knobs here have delayed the inevitable and done terrible damage.

It won't be long now until the clown car drives off the road all by itself. No need for you to become a violent gang member and head out to loot and burn anything. No threat of fascism or Nazis, that's all cartoon politics from social media. You can get equally idiotic entertainment locally, watching your social media electees to local councils do their magic maths, to avoid dealing with people paying more for take away food and holidays than they do maintaining their town.

Headline of the day.

What's happening in the US has not the slightest resemblance to fascism, though social media is desperate for it to be that because Nazis are such juicy memes. It's the royal court of King Donald. The return of feudalism. Not an analogy. History's default social form.

And again, a return to feudalism (what Trump is doing, not fascism) means a return to patronage.

The moon viewed from the International Space Station, through the diffuse blue of the atmosphere. That blue is created by living things, they created our breathable atmosphere. Mostly blue-green algae at first. The only life in the known universe is there because of that tiny blue layer of gases, which again living things make every day. Gravity stops it all escaping into space. We pump billions of tonnes of shit into that blue layer every day. It’s like shitting in your beer.

A big plug for AI, if you have any technical problems, say with computers or wifi, or interaction of devices in your house etc. I had a really complex problem getting the car to talk to the home wifi, which was beyond all the human tech support I asked. I asked Grok and it diagnosed the root problem in less than second. Absolutely spot on, fixed it immediately, and in beautifully clear descriptive language, broken down into diagnosis and solution.

I found my own way to defeat the stupidity of Daylight Saving. I adjust my going to bed and getting up times so that they’re the same all year, in relation to the sun, not clocks. You’re a biological animal whose entire functioning coordinates via an internal clock, that synchronises to the sun, not clocks. If I don’t do this, my sleep is disrupted for months.

I think all elections are pointless hot air. Strip away all the parties and just look at the material needs of societies, and see who’s actually doing anything about those. I think The Greens have some really interesting policies, like dental under Medicare, and wiping all student debt. They also want a lot more public housing, the only solution to the housing crisis. Those would all be major boosts to real problems people are living. Most won’t vote for them, because electoral politics is really just football. They have a team, often the team their parents and grandparents backed too, which they’ll back no matter what. Or they’ll say ‘but how can we afford this?’, while voting for their dimwit team spending a trillion dollars on nuclear submarines and reactors. Always about the team, never about the material reality of peoples’ lives.

6am is when I get up for work. My body is understandably wtf?! about Daylight Saving. Within a month or so we’ll be back in the dark in the morning, because it’ll be winter. The body is hopelessly confused, and that physically damages it, in very bad ways. It uses your internal clock to run everything.

‘Living with’ Covid is like living with a leak in your roof. For a while you can pretend nothing is wrong. Then it destroys your house.

Gig culture.

Wonderful footage from the 1960s of construction by the then Department of Main Roads (the DMR) of part of the Sydney-Newcastle expressway. Lots of familiar bits of road even today. I love that post-war public optimism, of building things for society, of ‘public works’, accompanied here by the typical 1960s cheerful string soundtrack. Now public works has become a site for people to form protest groups and complain about things. We’ve lost that sense of ‘we’, everybody battles for status for their particular grievance instead. The anti-wind farm loons are targeting Bathurst now (where no wind farms are planned), probably because everybody else is sick to death of their whinging. Only major catastrophes silence the whinging and create that sense of we called the ‘public’. We had about 6 good decades. It took two world wars, a Great Depression and Spanish Flu pandemic to shut up everybody’s petty grievances.

International students are in the top 3 of export income for Australia. Both major parties targeting them as scapegoats for a housing crisis that has nothing to do with them. Voting causes this, desperate attempts to make fake things popular, for votes. Let’s get rid of voting and have democracy back. If you think those are the same thing, you’re part of the problem.

lol, is Channel 7 peak stupid in Australia? It’s a tough field. They go to a scary-looking industrial nickel refinery in Indonesia and say this proves EVs are environmentally unfriendly. Nickel refineries have been operating for nearly 300 years. Your stainless steel sink, laundry tub and washing machine tub all have nickel in them. Petrol and diesel cars all contain nickel, and nickel is used extensively in fossil fuel production.

So, who’s getting a battery? Tesla batteries are still the best, which will challenge the Nazi-shy, but that ridiculous hysteria will be a memory soon. This should have been done years ago. There’s an ocean of free energy being wasted every day. And unlike 500 billion dollars for nuclear power, this is just 2.3 billion.

Working people my age or over, adjusting your super investment options to minimise Trump’s wrecking ball?

Peter Dutton has no policies, and 3 slogans masquerading as policies. He ditched even those today. Not hard to see why.

I hardly ever see some friends on FB. Until they go on holiday. Then suddenly there’s a burst of posting. Which to me is a window into what travel culture is really about. It’s not about experiencing the world or ‘seeing the sights’. The greatest fallacy of all travel is that ‘being there’ brings you closer to the reality of the place. If you go there, you’re changing the reality of what it is you went there to see. When we travel we travel inside our own social networks, the places we want to see are defined by what others do (or don’t) want to see, we share our humblebrags as evidence to others of where we are, etc. Jerry Seinfeld’s observation that the real reason we went to the moon is so that astronauts could say to people at home, ‘so, did you see me up there?’ It’s also a gift to burglars, who scan posts like that to see who’s not home.

You only had to watch 30 seconds of this absolute rubbish Channel 7 screened the other night to know it was a stitch-up. The interesting question now is - who sponsored the story? Has the fossil fuel industry's fingerprints all over it.

A fun game is finding things people do as adults that aren't what they've been doing since they were 7 years old. Good luck.

2022, and 2024.

Again, this isn't a fascist State, even one in progress. It's just a circus. Mock and humiliate Trump and his team, don't grant them the prestige of being a fascist anything. They couldn't organise a school fete.

This ‘pristine landscape’ has been a regularly chainsawed pine plantation for decades. It’s IN THE PHOTO.

Michel Serres once pointed out that the text we read is really just the play of light and shadow. We say text ‘represents’ things, but Serres pointed out that it is the literal shadow, of those things. I think about that when watching the sun and garden create these patterns on the windows. What messages are they sending that we can’t read?

Ladies and gentlemen, your fascist takeover team, a few years ago. Sleep easy.

Every engineer in the country told them this years ago. Nuclear is the thirstiest of all electricity generation methods. Bananaby hitched the Nationals' train to nukes, in his anti-windfarm crusade, to try to win back rural votes. Those rural voters would come after him with pitchforks if his nukes vacuumed up all of their water, which they will. How much water do wind and solar use? None. Zero.

Trump isn’t trying to create a fascist State in the US. He’s doing what he’s always done. He even wrote a book about it long before he entered politics. He’s being a conman. Trying to ‘make deals’. The video is from yesterday.

Electric vehicles preceded combustion vehicles. Combustion vehicles were considered a joke: loud, inefficient, spewing pollution, gutless. That’s because they were a joke, and still are. Rubbish technology. Only cheap American oil made them widespread. History is now correcting that idiot decision. There’s not a single way a combustion vehicle can match an EV, EVs destroy them on every metric you want to use. Power and torque, silence, pollution, mechanical simplicity etc. Some say range, but range is a characteristic of the fuelling network, not of the vehicle. The charging network is developing quickly, and for nearly all of your trips you don’t need it anyway. You charge at home. I’ve used a fast DC-charger twice, just to try it out. Didn’t need it either time.

I challenge those spruiking the superiority of petrol and diesel vehicles to start their car in the garage, close the garage door and sit with it for a few hours. I'll do the same with my EV. We'll compare notes. (P.S. don't actually do this if you have a petrol or diesel, you will die.) The EV doesn't have an exhaust because it doesn't pump shit into the air we all breathe, nor 70% of the energy of the fuel, as heat.

Not 1984. Just a circus.

Driving an EV, another noticeable thing is the complete absence of either of these gauges. No fuel, and no need to regulate temperature. Battery percentage replaces the fuel gauge (and it can go UP as you drive, good luck with that in a petrol or diesel). And the motors run cool, always, there’s no combustion, so no heat. A combustion engine is a series of continuous explosions, generating heat, heat that will destroy the car if not regulated, and most of which goes straight out the exhaust as wasted energy.

Time to burn those Beatles albums?

Marvel at the engineering. A Tesla electric motor is only around 20 cm long and round. It weighs just over 30kg, you could carry it. Compare that to the combustion engine in the front of a car, weighing around 200kg. The Tesla electric motor also has at least twice the power of the engine in the combustion car, and uses 70% less energy. It will run for hundreds of thousands of kilometres without any servicing of any kind. At the end of its life nearly 100% of its parts can be remade into a new electric motor.

Probably the only thing combustion car enthusiasts have left to distinguish the technology is the noise those engines make. But have a look around at the overwhelming majority of cars being made today, how much quieter, near silent, modern cars are. That's deliberate engineering, noise is wasted energy, and also a curse for people living near roadways. By far the greatest resistance to the shift to electric vehicles is a tiny number of driving enthusiasts with very loud voices. Off-roading and sports cars, mostly. The overwhelming majority of drivers haven't even noticed that cars make almost no noise now at all, because to them that's a good thing, a noisy car is great if you're the only car, and a nightmare if everybody's car is noisy. Car enthusiasts are people whose vehicle is a major part of their identity, that's why they're so vocally opposed to the shift to electric. It threatens who they are, their sense of self. Their criticisms all revolve around them, as an individual, not any collective measure of what good cars and driving might be. All of that is dressed up in a growing list of nonsense claims about EVs, which are more ridiculous and transparent every day. There's not a single way a combustion-engined vehicle can hold a candle to an EV. It's not about the engineering, it's about their personal identity. In some cases, like the Japanese and Germans, it's about a national identity too, their car companies are fundamental parts of their culture. Combustion vehicles are rubbish, in engineering terms, and will be extinct soon.

I talk a lot about cars not because I love cars, but because they’re key to understanding our wider culture. Notice the debates around EVs are all about the technical pros and cons people see. But that’s not what this is all about. Societies don’t run on information. The people who resist EVs are nearly all older people. Older people tend to resist change, that’s been the case forever. They’ll also tell you their music is the best music, it’s the same cultural mechanism. Technically EVs are far superior technology, but that’s not the issue. The issue is older people not wanting to change, to surrender their existing social status. And because we live in an ageing society, that’s meant a hard slog to get acceptance for EVs. That will get easier as the old die out, unfortunately that’s how change usually works. Planck said it about science, that it progresses ‘one funeral at a time’.

It’s ute and 4WD drivers who are least likely to shift to electric. That’s partly because there aren’t many electric utes and 4WDs yet, but the number of people who actually use utes and 4WDs for carrying things and off-roading is a tiny proportion of the people who buy them. It’s a social status thing, people buy them because everybody else is buying them. They want to fit in, to be ‘cool’. To have status.

What makes you fat is also what causes pretty much all major chronic disease. Microbes, and infections. We’re happily infecting ourselves now with everything. Avoiding infection is the secret to a long life. And to not get fat, or lose weight? It’s about microbes in your gut, no amount of exercise or dieting will fix it because obesity is not an ‘energy’ disease. We’re not engines.

Healthy older societies prioritised both the young, as the coming generation, and the old, as the repository of wisdom, in ‘elders’. If you want to see how we’ve transformed that into one permanent adolescence, we no longer have enough children to even replace ourselves, and those we do have we infect repeatedly with Class 3 biohazards, so our own lifestyles aren’t disrupted. Our old are either on permanent adolescent gap years from reality in lifestyle retirements, travelling the globe on vast tax-free annuities, or clogging up ERs waiting for aged care beds that don’t exist. You don’t want to be young or old today. Only the healthy ‘lifestyle’ adult is prioritised, living a permanent present decoupled from custom and tradition. Travelling and eating out, mostly, ‘living their best lives’. The eternal teenager, living that permanent gap year from reality.

If you want affordable houses, you can either make everybody’s homes collapse in value. Or you can build a LOT of public housing, for people who don’t have much money. Supply and demand is a fairy tale for grown-ups. The end.

Widespread home ownership only happened in Australia after WW2, with massive building of public housing. The green circle. Menzies did it, the founder of the Liberal Party. It’s been in decline ever since, with the decline in public housing. Supply and demand won’t fix housing. That’s what we used either side of that green circle.

Ties with nuclear energy as the most fundamentally stupid idea in the history of Australian politics. Vote-buying desperation.

Think you know about Australia? Have you read the Gammage book yet?

Ah Jacinta, sprung. You can find terrific photos of local councillors in some towns doing the same. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/13/image-emerges-of-jacinta-price-wearing-maga-cap-one-day-after-she-says-coalition-will-make-australia-great-again

The new Model Y is getting 5-star reviews across the board. As Toby Hagon says, ignore the Elon the Nazi rubbish, this is the best-selling car in the world for a reason. Once you drive a great EV like this, you'll wonder why you waited so long. Few ever choose to go back to a combustion shitbox. When I drive a petrol or diesel now the revving and gear changing they need to give you hardly any power, and the lag (and noise) to deliver that power, make you chuckle with just how bad combustion engines are. There are no hills in an EV, everything is equally effortless, they just glide up hills like they're not there. No noise, no revving. https://evcentral.com.au/2025-tesla-model-y-long-range-review-why-elon-musks-antics-shouldnt-distract-you-from-how-good-the-juniper-update-is/

Game on! Bless the Chinese. Now European giants like VW are responding to the Chinese challenge with fabulous, affordable EVs, like the ID.4 Pro. Great mid-sized SUV, with superb German road handling, and at the same price point as competing EVs. An AWD GTX sports version also due this year.

Tongue-in-cheek, but absolutely spot on in showing how a vehicle is really a membership of a particular social group. Everything is that, when you look.

I told you so is a childish emotion. But why not 🙂

There's a vehicle driving from Lithgow to Bathurst every day, normally at about 90 km/h. Often has a queue of traffic behind it. I went to overtake them today, and suddenly they were doing 125. This sort of driving behavior is the reason I can't wait for humans to have much less control over vehicles. If you can't stick to a speed limit, and somebody overtaking you is some existential threat to your sense of identify, you shouldn't be driving. Similarly the great shortage of truck drivers has now led to cowboys getting behind the wheel of some trucks. Fully laden trucks of 30-50 tonnes, driving through traffic like they're in a sports VW Golf. Or wankpanzers towing big dual-axle car trailers, weaving in and out of traffic at 20-30 over the speed limit. You can get a really accurate assessment of the health of a society by looking at its driving. Australia is becoming the US.

Hmm.

Classic example (in an otherwise good review) of a misunderstanding I think we're seeing with the Shark. (And yes, it's an older article, posting to highlight thinking in it, not to share a new review.) "Once the battery has been depleted and you’re running in hybrid mode our heavily laden machines were using closer to 10L/100km. We’d expect about the same from a diesel ute. But, if you can top up at a caravan park or EV charger then the first 70-80km can be done purely on electricity." You don't run in hybrid mode when the battery is depleted, you run in hybrid while it's still full, if you want to maximise power and range. Similarly you don't get the best efficiency by first draining the battery in full EV, and then flogging the petrol engine. It should be run as a hybrid the whole way, if you're doing a long trip and want fuel efficiency. https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/new-cars/byd-shark-ute-tested-in-the-bush/news-story/7b2d76691d685103404ca7ed95b084e0

Once you electrify and network your car, all sorts of things become possible. I’d always imagined parents for example having greater control over their kids’ unsupervised driving (still the leading cause of death for young people). Tesla it turns out had already done it.

HBD! 🎂🎉👯

The new LNP government in Queensland went the full Trump and ripped up the State's renewable energy plan. Took a day for one of the major coal plants they wanted to use instead to then explode. Their response? To sack the senior staff responsible for the coal plant.

Social media is spreading American 'gang' politics globally. Everything is always gang warfare in American politics, without a proper public sphere everybody just puts a gang together, to go to war against other gangs. Like old Western movies, the exact same cultural model.

‘Ute Man’ is dying. We’ve reached Peak Ute (love that term). It was Scott Morrison’s big tax concessions for utes that led to them exploding in sales. Now with efficiency standards coming for Australian cars (last in the world, with Russia), utes will be thousands of dollars more to buy. Also for those who doubt that the ute is mostly a tax-subsidised status symbol, you can see the stats in this story. Utes aren’t being used as work vehicles by most.

Last night’s meeting was a bearpit. Bathurst is heading for a very nasty collision, on rates. I wish I could comment more on that. My personal view is add up how much you spend on recreation (including travel), dining out, coffees and takeaway food every year. If it’s more than you pay in rates, you could say societies are on a permanent gap year from reality.

This can be true, and why I encourage people who are thinking about going electric to skip hybrids and go straight to full-EV, unless they're doing lots of long distance driving in remote areas. For example our trip to Broken Hill, consumption was 7.5L/100km, in the hybrid Kluger. Normally it's 5.5, in around town driving. 7.5 is still respectable, but not great. I get 5.7 between Bathurst and Lithgow, lots of hills so therefore lots of regenerative braking. The Tesla on the other hand actually gains charge, if we drive to Sydney down the Blue Mountains. Imagine a petrol or diesel where the tank filled up, as you drove. That's what EVs do.

What I love about the law is that it's still relatively immune to the whims, fads and fashions of everyday life. The team sports that is now every issue. You can't speak on transgender without immediately being attributed to this or that team. I'm not on any of the teams. The entire transgender edifice of ideas is a disgraceful flight from reality, generated in marginal (loon) gender studies departments in universities, and then given a sudden reality by going viral on social media. It is entirely a creation of social media. If it trends now, it's real. Horseshit. (Transgender is not gender dysphoria or any of the older trans-categories, which are all valid.)

Zoom out and look at the ridiculous world we’re now living in. A council is offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to install an EV charger, at no cost to the town, and the council votes it down because a majority of the councillors are anti-EVs. Who cares what they think? They can just not use the chargers. It’d be like a ‘debate’ 30 years ago about having LPG cars. There was no such debate, because there was no social media.

Flu kills between 6-50,000 Americans every year. Covid is no longer trending, which in our new social media lives means it no longer exists. Covid doesn’t have any social media accounts.

Happy Birthday Auntie Bev!

Predicting elections is a mug’s game when politics has become infected by the fads and fashions of social media - by what trends. Entire populations can turn on a dime overnight. But right now, Peter Dutton would be nervous.

Brits have named this pair the two sexiest men in England. When they transported the genetic diversity they did have to Australia in the 18th century, what was left became a nation of in-bred hobbits, with tastes to match.

There was a time when elders guided the running of societies. Now they fire drummers. Gig culture.

When you have no meaningful relationship with the land you live in, you develop a Madonna-whore complex. You either sanctify everywhere you don’t live as ‘nature’ (a completely empty term) - that’s the Madonna - or you treat it as a resource to be mined and farmed, and conquered by your 4WD in a theme park ‘bush’ - the whore.

Simon is suing for defamation over this article. All a lie of course, the fossil fuel lobby, and their sponsored chums in Rupert’s newspaper and SKY News stables, just make shit up every day. You can tell they’re now desperate, given current polling suggests their man (Peter Dutton) is losing this election.

Read the tidal wave of whinging and whining in the comments on this post. That’s social media life. Like an inflamed haemorrhoid on the arse of society.

At Easter, I wish (with little hope) this was understood. If anything we act with gleeful opposition to everything Burke says here.

You could just not post a picture of your baby at all. People know what a dummy is. Everything from the tiniest, most intimate and personal trivia through to our professional and political lives is being actually lived on social media now. A handful of American and Chinese billionaires now literally own societies. Social media is not like the old local paper, where you’d read about what’s happening locally. People are living their actual lives, through these platforms. It’s not information, it’s a social space. A person creates and maintains an identity here, shaped in turn by others on the platforms. The platforms are defined by algorithms, designed mostly to maximise anger and fights between people, which generates likes and activity on the platforms. That generates revenues for platform shareholders. Our societies are now these algorithms. Not government, not any custom or tradition.

I’m not sure everybody saw Bob Pepper’s really thorough analysis of the Shark pre-release, which included the issue of steep ascents (the Beer O’Clock Hill and Car Expert viral videos). From just before 4 minutes, you can see it all explained in clear detail. https://youtu.be/f5EOCDfNbZg

The English have a long history of cross-dressing. Of pantomime, of androgyny. Done with real humour and flair. It was the collision of this playing with gender roles with social media that created transgender culture, where people suddenly mistook the fantasy for the reality. Where roles were confused with identities. That’s what social media does. It made a reality TV star into the leader of the free world.

For about a century feminism fought to define women independently of their relationship with men. Then men invented the transgender movement, used social media to make it go viral, and here we are, with massive protests advertising the denial of that century of feminism. People feel they should support trans movements, because it went viral and what trends is now what’s real. It’s like ‘living with’ Covid, no basis in science or even common sense, but a thing we do because everybody else is doing it. Welcome to social media reality. Now your entire life, even your identity. You can refuse to be on either ‘team’ in this identity politics. Just stick with reality.

I don’t make many changes to my FB settings or friend lists, but will be altering who sees what I post to better reflect what interests different people. If you start seeing fewer posts from me, that will be why. I haven’t blocked or unfriended anyone, only shifted who sees what.

Amazing aerial recreation of Rome more than 2000 years ago, at the time of Jesus. Nice one for Easter. Look at how stunning ancient Rome was. The Roman Empire also gave birth to many of the world’s most famous cities, including London, Paris, Barcelona, Vienna, Bath, and many more. It then later became the Holy Roman Empire, and basically invented modern civilisation over about 1000 years.

Turns out going to a pub to buy a $24 hamburger and $15 beer isn’t sustainable.

You can’t really notice it from ground level, but human movement is the alternating rotation of the whole body, which is wrapped in spiral muscle and fascia sheets from head to toe. You don’t move with your legs, you move when that whole body-length spiral unwinds in alternating directions. It’s much more noticeable from above.

Ruh roh Scoob, another mystery! Darren very likely has POTS, an extremely common side-effect of Covid. Gigs are a great place to go to catch Covid, for performers and crowd. We would rather infect all of the few children we still have than stop things like gigs long enough to control a disease. We’re a kidult culture, adult life is eternal teenage life.

The band photo is a window into what I call gig culture. When music became a dominant way to forge an identity and status in the adult world. It always was that for modern teenagers, their favourite acts are dominant ways they define who they are. Then adult life became teenage life, and bands became a high status priesthood. People flock to mega-gigs now well into their 60s and 70s. The acts are sometimes in their 80s. People understand the world through songs, TV shows and movies often eschew dialogue altogether now in difficult scenes and just play a popular song. The entire culture ground to a halt at age 17, now entrenched by social media which replaces adult responsibility with what’s ’trending’.

Marjorie on the death of the Pope.

The UK's energy system is privatised. It also has nuclear power. The whole thing is such a train wreck that a growth industry there now is energy theft, with ordinary people and organised crime finding ways to steal electricity and gas. The private sector has not once in history provided a reliable and affordable public service.

How are those paychecks, Alex and Trey?

Australia, this is literally like burning cash for energy. Almost every cent of that money goes offshore, where OPEC members use it to buy gold-plated Rolls Royces. The same Made in Australia jingoism the likes of Dick Smith have made a career out of is never applied to fossil fuels. It should be, it’s insane that we send tens of billions offshore every year for energy that is available for free, here.

FB, like all social media, is not a private space. Nor is it a public space. It isn’t your family, or your community. It’s a business. It makes money pretending to be those other things.

Happy happy birthday! 🥳☕🥂

HBD! 🥳🌟🎈

When you're in the middle of a wave of outrage and euphoria, like we've had for women (metoo), Tesla, and here for climate change, it feels like you're changing the world. You're not. Sometimes protest movements cash in on an already broken situation, and then act as a catalyst for a change. But without that pre-existing catastrophic disruption, protest politics is impotent. Performative feels. It's popular, because people love being in a crowd. Also why gigs remain so popular. Gigs also don't change the world. Gig culture is crowd culture. 1960s counterculture often claims to have led to major social progress. But again it relied entirely upon the catastrophic disruption to the status quo from WW1, WW2, the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression.

Social media is now raising most of your young men and women. That should scare the hell out of us. These platforms need to be shut down, they're destroying societies. That's not alarmism, that's pointing out that social media destroys the things that allowed societies to evolve and survive, over thousands of years.

I love the dappled light and colour of an autumn garden. The genius of it is the complex filling of almost every available niche in space, without sacrificing the capacity of light, air and water to pass through at the same time. If it was a board game or puzzle, like some sort of biological house of cards, you’d never be able to do it.

Anzac Day’s Lest We Forget is explained in the earlier lines. It’s not lest we forget the sacrifice of soldiers. They were sacrificed (verb).

This is the delusion. That ‘the people’ run democracies. Or anything. The people is not a thing, groups of people of whatever size don’t think, act or feel. They are always led, they always form hierarchies. Not because they’re sheep, but because a group of people has no group mind or will or any physical, practical way of suddenly becoming one thing. Americans love this delusion, it’s a defining characteristic of their entire culture. It’s also the basis of social media, and why it’s destroying the world. It doesn’t occur to Americans that these beliefs actually created Trump. They instead run B-grade Hollywood movie narratives about ‘oligarchs’ and ‘fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ overthrowing the people. Study social media, a technology beloved of ‘the people’ believers, and you’ll see it’s actually structured in intense and proliferating hierarchies. The exact opposite to what those who use it say it does.

Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of this idiot platform, was invited to address the UN. He said FB would provide free access to the internet to refugees around the world. His staff at FB then madly tried to see if this was something they had planned (it wasn’t). Then they realised it would cost them a fortune, so they changed the idea to FB selling internet to refugees. Then a senior staff member realised refugees have no money. The whole idea was cancelled.

Historically tradies dominantly voted Labor, but were skilfully brought over to the conservative side of politics by targeting young men mostly, with fake wars on women, EVs and utes, Greenies and whatever else could be turned into some sense of imagined outrage against them. Tradies are paid to train, and it’s not much but do you know what university students are paid to study? Nothing. They just have debts. They also need cars and tools. Tradies now also earn considerably more on average than uni graduates. HECS was designed because uni graduates were said to earn more. The conservatives who run these narratives don’t care about tradies, women, Greenies, or anything really, except their own elite social group, in the leafy suburbs of our capital cities.

It surprises me that we so often now have the same passions and behaviours throughout life, and don’t recognise that grown up things are nearly always just rebadged childhood things.

Whenever you see an activist or protest movement, remember these words from Edmund Burke. Pretty much every hashtag movement of the current age, but also their equivalents from the past 50+ years, would fall into Burke's froth and bubble category. This excerpt from a book of his called ‘The Evils of Revolution’.

I miss John Clarke.

Nissan, like Toyota, has been playing with us. In public they’ve talked down the transition to EVs, because they don’t have any good ones. But behind the scenes they’ve been going flat out developing them to try to catch up. And here they come, this hybrid ute for example would be another game-changer, if they release it here. With new vehicle emissions standards all ute-makers will need to, utes will become prohibitively expensive otherwise.

You go girl. They’re too stupid to be able to even spell misogyny, let alone recognise when it slaps them in the face with pantomime dame handbags. By removing the right of women to define themselves, we erase women entirely, millennia of history wiped clean. The destruction of a century of feminism. Rowling sees it, the rest are too infected by the team sports battles of their social media lives to recognise the ultimate triumph of misogyny.

We have social media zombies bellowing about the Nazi fascist takeover of the US, out there burning and looting and protesting. I thought from the start of Trump’s term that the whole thing would fall in a heap of clown car incompetence, all by itself. It’s laughably a million light years from fascism. And here we are.

Happy Birthday! ☕💐🎉

Rory talking about how humans change, in this case using cars as an example, it’s about shifting a status quo. When first challenged a status quo will launch a whole range of increasingly bonkers ‘defensive opinions’, to justify what it already has. Love his example of the transition from manual (rubbish) to automatic transmissions. Then once people shift, they rarely go back, because the status quo has shifted. People want to do what everybody else is doing, that’s what a status quo is - it’s about status, and fitting in. People will dress it up as technical argument, but it’s nothing to do with any of that. It’s them trying to protect their current status.

If you travel to see the world, or for ‘experiences’ (whatever that means), increasingly all you’ll experience is other travellers doing the same thing. Travel only works if everybody else doesn’t try to do it at the same time. Being there doesn’t bring you any closer to the real place. If you want to experience George Clooney, read a bio of him and watch some of his movies and interviews. Stalking him outside his home, you’ll experience exactly diddly squat of the real George Clooney. The same applies to places, being there is the thinnest superficial veneer of their reality.

Gig culture. Bands who think they can change the world. The fact nobody laughs at them shows the extent to which most people agree with the culture.

You can choose to ignore what everybody else is doing. It might even save your life.

Explain how this isn’t spot-on, I’m genuinely curious.

Many feel uncomfortable at discussions of ‘gig culture’, because it’s our culture and impacts peoples’ sense of status and identity. But this isn’t an argument that musicians shouldn’t be wealthy, it’s just pointing out that most musicians were never high status/high power members of society, until the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. What people are prepared to pay you is a direct measure of your status. This is the top 50, and that’s artificially capped at the lower end, at $250 million! There are oodles more musicians below that figure, who are still wealthy beyond the dreams of musicians, historically. Frank SInatra for example was worth a paltry $14 million, in the 1980s. Only nostalgia gig culture inflated that figure in the years up to his death. Adolescent cultures worship rock stars. It’s not even a debate. You can see it in how they reward them, with acclaim and money and influence. This is historically unprecedented, it’s a defining feature of our cultures today. Where this begins to matter is when our reference points for adult life are the same as a gig-going teenager. These $$ figures show that’s exactly what’s happening.

The Don engrossed by the funeral. How are the ‘Sleepy Joe’ folks today?

This ongoing drivel about EV drivers not paying their fair share of road upkeep. Petrol and diesel tax doesn’t go to roads, and the same party promising to slug EV drivers to pay for roads are cutting fuel excise to buy votes, which by their logic means cutting funding for roads too.

The most common reason I see for whether to mask or not is ‘what is everybody else doing?’ I’m doing what Covid researchers are doing.

Gig culture when focused specifically on business is called a gig economy. The transformation of the adult world of work into fleeting ‘gigs’, usually mediated through online platforms. Like a nation of backpackers. They use the term gig economy because of its similarity with musical gigs, short-term work with no real purpose or organisational structure. This has been the wider cultural shift since the 1960s, towards life as a permanent gap year from adult reality, from responsibility and longer-term aims and planning. Those things are now called red tape or bureaucracy, by those resenting not being allowed to do whatever they like.

I’m a fan of preferential voting. But looking at the 10 candidates for Calare, it’s a challenge when at last count 6 of the 10 I’d want to list 10th.

Also gig culture. The reason the gig economy is so popular, zero commitment to any wider purpose. Everything is about ‘the feels’, about how we individually feel. Total absence of any sort of collective purpose, of everyone putting their shoulders to the wheel to create something magnificent for us all. Everyone with ‘mental health’ issues, zero resilience. And this isn’t confined to the young, if anything the old are now the worst offenders, living permanent ‘lifestyle’ lives. That’s what gig culture means, the collapse of adult life and its replacement with permanent adolescence, with melodrama and emoting and performative outrage.

3D has completely disappeared again from cinemas and TVs. It never takes off because it’s based on a misunderstanding, that a surface (screen, page) being flat means an image people look at on that surface is flat. That’s not true. People when watching standard TV or films are not seeing ‘2D’ images. They’re seeing images that look real to them, with depth. You can see that depth in chromadepth images, which show how colour for example can create depth without any binocular lenses, even with one eye. Look at this image for a little while, and notice the depth.

I see Peter Dutton is trying to get the welcome to country fired up as a last-ditch election issue. Some local councillors are passionate about it too. I agree, let’s get rid of all of these signs, they cost a fortune.

Marshall McLuhan once said “we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.” In the same way our own culture is mostly invisible to us, we assume it’s just the way things are. As people who read my posts know, I think we don’t see that societies now are giant high schools, and not by analogy. That is now our culture. It happened by accident, when we separated children from adults, in schools. Those children then remade adult life, with school culture.

Another example of what Bill Hero can do. It costs less than $50 a year and automatically finds average savings for people of $350/year on their energy plans. This is my data, I was already on the best available plan, but it compared it to everything else on the market just to be sure. Huge savings being with the right energy retailer, look at those figures in red.

Peter Dutton’s only success in the past 3 years was an old-fashioned bash-the-Abos campaign to bring down the referendum. He’s hoping it might get him over the line in the election now. Never discount Australia’s passion for bashing the ‘Abos’.

Australians for Natural Gas is a fake group invented and funded by the Australian gas industry. (Which is really a foreign-owned industry.) The fact we still call it ‘natural’ gas too goes back to a time in the past when the same industry was trying to overcome resistance to gas, by making it sound healthy and ‘natural’. Burning gas in your home is like using your lounge room as a garage, with the car running.

So many people locked their FB profiles, supposedly to protect their privacy but really just because everybody else was locking their FB profiles. Like the exact opposite of privacy, trying to fit in with others. They still overshare everything, every fart and sniffle.

Happy happy birthday! ☕💐

Right now globally a very old population that was once dominant is dying out. As the young increasingly hold the upper hand politically, that old generation is firing up the old colonialist narratives about Queen and country one last time. It's even managed to convince a significant number of young men to believe some of it. As that generation dies, these narratives will go with them. That's how societies change.

There was once not long ago no separate culture or space for children. They were just little adults, working alongside adults, at work. It was an entirely adult world. Then we invented schools, and suddenly there were two worlds, child and adult. Then we made schooling universal, at which point the adult world began to disappear, and the entire lifespan was now a child/school culture because kids left school and then remade the adult world in its image. That's us today, why I post about it a lot. We turned our entire culture upside down. We now live in a world of permanent adolescent childhood. How we see, feel and act in the world is driven by the culture we learn at school. Social media platforms use the same cultural framework. It's everything. We're about to vote in an election. Elections are pure adolescent schoolyard, granting top dog status to the most popular kids. Mass elections didn't exist before schools, this isn't an analogy.

Again, if you compare and contrast these two fundamentally different experiences of childhood. Imagine how each would remake adult life, as they age.

Time doesn’t pass in the way that we think it does. The past is always just here, but it’s in potential form rather than actual form. We think things either exist, or they don’t. Something or nothing. But there’s no such thing as nothing, you can’t even imagine nothing. Watch this video by an electronics expert who’s trying to fix a very old recording machine that uses wire. The details of the electronics aren’t that interesting to most people, but what hopefully should jump out at you is how the voices of people now long dead are still ’in’ that wife and in the electronics. Potentially. There’s nothing about the electronics or the wire that resembles a human being in any way at all, but that voice when it suddenly appears is as real as if the person was still there in the room. How he manages to extract the voice from multiple pieces of the old machine too, it’s spooky.

The two great 'authoritarian' powers of our time are Russia and China. Both regimes are the product of democratic revolutions, people uprisings. In both cases local people imported Western ideas about democracy, to run their revolutions. It won't be Trump that converts the US to a dictatorship. It will be the idea of 'the people' running countries.

Part of the pelvic bone of a Roman gladiator from the 1st century. The hole circled in blue is damage caused by a lion’s bite.

Seeing a lot of ads for these kits. If you keep your dust filters clean, you’re much less likely to ever develop mould in the rest of the unit because proper airflow will keep it dry. Most of those who need a kit like this don’t clean their dust filters regularly.

Made me chuckle. At the same time it’s more kidult culture, where bliss is apparently being permanently in a child-free state of romantic MAFS adolescent ecstasy. No doubt they’re getting ready to go to a gig too, while the ‘dumb’ couple with children are looking for a babysitter, so they can go as well.