June 2025

Have posted about this a few times. How the ‘country’ really isn’t a thing, it’s mostly settler towns for farming and mining and other extractive industries, for the city. Once the extraction dries up, the town dies, with the usual last gasp an attempt to turn it into a tourist destination. That rarely saves it.

This guy is doing something very special this year, if you’ve missed it. A force of nature.

Finally what the scientific research has been saying for years on Covid, and which I share here often, is making its way into the mainstream reporting. Compare this with the delusional ‘living with Covid’: “COVID-19 infection can lead to serious illness that can impact every system in the body, leading to a variety of health concerns including cognitive decline, immune system damage, liver impairment, kidney disease and reduced lung function. It can also increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.“ Also for those still sceptical about the vaccines (get vaccinated! Today!): “The COVID-19 vaccine gives 85 per cent protection against severe disease, which is significantly higher than the influenza vaccine, which offers 44 per cent protection against hospitalisation." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-02/covid-19-booster-vaccinations-alongside-influenza-vaccinations-/105356650?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

Today's trivia. The fuelling network for petrol and diesel cost at least 3 times what rolling out supercharging Australia-wide will cost. The alleged 'range' of petrols and diesels is really the hundreds of billions spent on refuelling networks. Range is a property of refuelling infrastructure, not of a vehicle. And once rolled out, no need to run thousands of fuel tankers every day and night to top up the servos. The entire country is already on the grid, has been for decades. Most of the time you will never use fast-charging, after 6 months of EV ownership I've still only used a DC fast-charger twice.

Our seats-based governance means it really matters if you can target locations rather than ideas. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

More Monet.

Van Gogh loved to lavish huge dollops of paint onto the canvas, in glorious colours. I think he loved to foreground the materiality and process of art, the miracle of transubstantiation of paint into image. He didn’t want to hide the materiality in favour of some fake likeness, he wanted to show that likeness comes from a shared materiality of what he painted, with the paint itself.

Gutted bathroom, with cat. Still life.

It’s now cheaper to build fences out of solar panels than it is to build them out of wood. And the fence will power your home. We’re living inside a revolution, people. Stop status scrolling and get on board.

The enrichment activities in aged care now are something else. Let’s get as many name-drops in one sentence as we can, boys. Gig culture, the culture of ‘cool’. Of ‘making it’ i.e. achieving high social status.

Happy Birthday! Wishing you a wonderful day! 🥂🎉💐

The Anglo world is now the 3rd world. https://thedriven.io/2025/06/02/byd-to-roll-out-15000-super-fast-1-mw-electric-vehicle-chargers/?fbclid=IwY2xjawKrL_hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETEzR05RWldjZVphUk13VWszAR7nTvcz_zCrXurjJZQXNFPfHupsMlTezapDK3VgwWiOTCzqE6UB_FASoPK-Cw_aem_UPq7LEiCsYRwU0MgYLZCEQ

AUKUS was another Scott Morrison train wreck. AUKUS is the US wanting a mobile launch platform for their missiles, against China, in the Pacific. They can piss off. Why shouldn't China be our main ally, in 2025? Pretty much the entire Australian economy is selling stuff to China. We do next to no business at all with the US, the 'alliance' is really an historical Judaeo-Christian fan club, and not much more. The hysteria about China is old Yellow Peril racism.

Now that even Musk sees what a bullshit artist Trump is, maybe the focus can go back onto Trump and off Tesla. Where the focus always should have been, except social media rots our brains.

Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, and died penniless at 37. Now high status people make hundreds of millions off his work. Great art is rarely if ever recognised in its own time, it creates the future. Almost by definition a ‘successful’ artist today is not a great artist, if the status quo rewards them it means it’s not threatened by them.

Happy Birthday Louis!!!

Happy Birthday, a milestone!!

Combustion engines are a technology people still defend, just crazy. And you may say yes but they're better than this now. Actually they're even worse, because the pollution particles are now much smaller and invisible to the eye. Those tiny particles do a lot more damage to your health. Lung cancer now kills more women than breast cancer, and more men than prostate cancer. Much of the pollution in the lungs comes from our combustion engines.

Look at that huge surge in sales for Tesla in Australia, in May. Meanwhile all the Nazi-Tesla memes on social media have disappeared exactly as predicted, with no meaningful change to anything. Trump is still there. Kidult culture, living in a fantasy land of trending nonsense.

The Statue of Liberty under construction in France.

Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows.

The marble-columned ruins of ancient Rome are instantly recognisable. They copied them entirely from the ancient Greeks, whom they idolised for their culture and learning, after invading them. It was Romans trying to be Greeks. It’s a very common human behaviour, to idolise and imitate ‘golden ages’, even within individual lives. Exactly the same thing happened here, when we invaded the continent in 1788. Much of modern Australian life has its origins in the Aboriginal culture we found here. We just can’t see it, because we’re ignorant and prejudiced. For example the famous Australian accent, and dry sense of humour? Classic Aboriginal Australian culture. Germaine Greer did a brilliant and ignored essay about this, about the idea of reconciliation. And argued we go about it backwards. We assume we have a superior culture, and reconciliation is ‘recognition’ of a more primitive culture . Greer argued that much of what we take as our own invention in Australian culture, we actually flogged from the Aborigines. That matches exactly how cultures have always behaved, throughout history. Far and away the most extraordinary culture in human history is one we’ve been mining for its genius for nearly 300 years, without realising.

How many more years of the ‘living with Covid’ charade do you reckon we can keep up? Rather than do basic disease control, which we do for EVERY other disease, and have done for decades. Covid is the social media exception, disease control sidelined by lunatic anti-vax and ‘freedumb’ nonsense on these platforms, kidults whining about missing their OS permanent gap-year travel, eating out and gigs.

We live on the landscape, not in it. Our farming and mining are mostly equivalent, one extracts nutrients form the soil, the other minerals from the ground. (Mining actually does much, much less damage than farming.) We don't know how to live as part of a landscape. We either plunder it for resources, or turn it into a sacred object ('nature') and then worship it, using it as a theme park for tourism and off-roading. A Madonna-whore complex, for landscape. The people who know how to live in the landscape, to make the landscape a full actor in societies, we think are primitives. Without the landscape we're all dead, and fast.

Independents and small parties got pretty much the same primary vote as the ‘landslide’ ALP at the election.

If you want to escape kidult culture, Vincent can be one of your guides.

Most chronic disease, like cancers, heart and brain disease, are being revealed as ultimately caused by infection. The fact we can survive an infection in the short-term has led us to think of infection as a nothing burger. When in fact it’s the cause of almost all ill health and early death. The successes of vaccination and antibiotics made us lethally complacent about infection.

See, now you can buy a Tesla and be batting for the anti-Trump team.

I do feel for the millions of kidults out there who take their cues on what to think and how to behave from what’s trending on social media. This is a confusing time for them.

Know what would have been a LOT cheaper and easier? Opening a window in the classroom before the kids got sick. And sending kids home if there’s an outbreak. You know, disease control, the thing adults used to do.

One to share with social media 'I do my own research' people, who wet their pants over mRNA technology. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jun/05/breakthrough-in-search-for-hiv-cure-leaves-researchers-overwhelmed

Humans’ own culture is as invisible to them as water is to fish. The massing of tens of thousands of people into a space to all watch and listen to a handful of musicians doesn’t exist for 99% of human history. Its origin is politics, not art, the huge rallies of followers for various political leaders in history. Music is now politics too, that’s what gig culture means, the millions gathering around rock stars isn’t just people coming to listen to music. The music could be pre-recorded and most wouldn’t even notice. People are drawn to these events because rock stars are heroes to them. A guide in their lives. Here The Boss is even explicit about it, campaigning against Trump. The irony here is this industry drove much of the damage to public life it now protests about. Woodstock counter-culture IS the culture of anti-establishment destruction that Trump is now the endgame of.

I talk a lot about kidult culture, because it's our (mostly undiagnosed) culture. You can see it everywhere, if you look. Just one more example, the proliferation of ridiculous names for children. It's like child-branding, all about the identity and social status of the parent, not the child. “The Baby Boomers were the first parents who wanted to be cool, and who wanted their children to be cool as well." There it is, in black and white.

Such a common experience, you never want to go back. I asked Molly how driving the full-EV compared with our older car. (Molly has zero interest in mechanical anything.) She said she doesn’t like the old car now, when it goes up hills it has to ‘rev all the time’. Even those not really that much into driving feel the huge difference, how gutless and loud and clumsy petrols and diesels are.

The Trump-Musk blow-up is largely about the budget deficit in the US. The fact that we still talk about governments having to make money (through tax) or borrow it to pay for things is ridiculous. Governments create money, they don’t have to earn it or borrow it. They’re not households. A deficit doesn’t mean the country is ‘in debt’. Governments with sovereign currencies can print as much money as they like. And no, that won’t lead to hyperinflation, they’ve been doing it for years already.

Using your ceiling fan in reverse (winter) mode, or a circulating fan like a Vornado, can cut the amount of energy a heater needs to use by 50%. Huge.

The misleading Mercator map projection we’re used to, that inflates the size of countries near the poles. Africa is nearly twice as large as Russia, for example.

Happy Birthday mate! Haven’t seen you much online recently?

I noticed yet another symptom of kidult culture this week. A preface, those with no exposure to the front line of classroom teaching decided it was a good idea to give parents a much bigger role in schools. Now ask any primary teacher in particular, how every day is a nightmare juggling the demands of parents even more than children. This has swamped already completely overwhelmed teachers with the responbility for parenting the children of kidults. Children without a whole range of basic social skills, skills they used to get from adults, before their parents were swept up in the replacement of adult culture with kidult culture. They’re more likely to be playing the X Box and going to gigs than raising the children. I saw this at the Lithgow Halloween festival too, where by far the greatest passion for the event comes from adults, not kids. Kids are often dragged along as baggage, for the parents’ night out in Halloween drag. And now I’ve seen it firsthand at work. Some more background, with schools now bending over backwards to please parents, a whole range of personal and social issues that used to be left at the school gate now have to be dealt with during the school day. This can mean students being constantly referred to teachers and more senior staff to resolve a whole series of interpersonal clashes, endlessly counselling and disciplining kids. No basic manners, no sense of how to cooperate with others, and increasingly total disrespect for female teachers in particular. And this is what I saw in the workplace this week. The youngest staff are engaged in constant sniping at each other, often behind closed doors, but I found out this week they also dump it all on their supervisors too, endless stories about how X or Y is being mean to them, etc. They never left school, they’re going to see the Deputy to dob on somebody else. It’s what the tyranny of parent involvement in schools taught them to do. One of them made the mistake of trying to involve me in one of these personal battles, and I said ‘mate, I’m here to work, this isn’t a social club, leave that shit at home’. Friends know I used that approach as a manager too, you’re not paid to come to work to be friends with people (though that’s nice), you’re paid to work. Have manners, be civil to people, but it’s not the job of either workplaces or schools to deal with your petty interpersonal shit.

One of my rules of thumb. Anybody who wants to lead people, shouldn’t.

Just wanted to share this to show that i don’t make up the idea of ‘kidulting’ and gig culture. This is the cultural shift that dominates our societies, and has done since the 1960s.

I started shaving about 40 years ago. I began with an electric, an old one of dad’s. Then living in Sydney with the humidity made that frustrating, it tended to cause skin rash. I switched to a blade and have been using that method for maybe 30-35 years. We’re having the bathroom renovated so that’s now tricky for a few weeks. So I went out and bought the cheapest electric I could find that was still half-decent, a Philips 3000 series. Less than $100. It’s a ‘wet and dry’, electrics of course now can be used for wet shaving too, or even in the shower. I reckon I may never go back to a blade. These new electrics are phenomenal. What do others use?

This car should blow people away, the new BYD Tang-L. A 7-seater. Coming to Australia this year apparently. Can charge at up to 1000 kW, meaning you could add 400km of range in only 5 minutes. The electric motors in it produce over 1000 horsepower, with a 0-100 km/h time of 3.9 seconds for the AWD version. They’ll also offer it as a plug-in hybrid for the range anxiety sufferers. All-electric range of the plug-in hybrid will be about 140km, and about 1000km when driven as a hybrid. The pure-electric will have a range of about 500km. Also excitingly, big Chinese firms like BYD are looking to install super fast chargers in Australia too. Australians are incredibly lucky to be on good terms with China and getting this tech for a steal. This car will only be about $60,000. In China, to give you an indication of how advanced they are now as a society, this car even ships with a built-in drone that you can launch to take video, as you drive.

The same people who cheer on McCartney and Springsteen doing stadium gigs in 2025 would have laughed at the ridiculous idea of Louis Armstrong or Count Basie being invited to play at Woodstock. They wouldn’t have been ‘cool’, old peoples’ music. And those giants would only have been in their 60s then. McCartney is 83, Springsteen is 75. I know I’m pretty much alone in finding it perverse and ridiculous that people in their 70s and 80s are still rock stars. (Freddie Mercury thought it would be ridiculous at 50, George Harrison was sick of it by 30.) It’s profoundly unhealthy that cultures have no stages of life now, just a permanent youth. You’ll discover this the hard way if you live to this age (which is extremely unlikely, sorry, with Covid rampant), without the hundreds of millions in the bank they have. Society will just let you die, as we’re doing right now in aged care, with Covid. You’re not allowed to be old.

This is what a country is like without ‘red tape’.

More views of the new BYD Tang-L. Not sure if it’ll be called that when released here. The motors are also the most powerful electric motors in the world for vehicles, they’ll spin at up to 30,000 rpm. It will also ship with BYD’s autonomous driving system, something you pay $10K more for, in a Tesla. It’s a premium vehicle with supercar performance (over 1000 hp, for the AWD version), for only $50K-$60K.

Anybody who knows even the barest history of feminism should be aghast that we’ve arrived at a point where no definition of a ‘woman’ is even allowed to exist. Women have been defined out of existence. The stupidities social media culture makes seem normal. Like ‘living with’ pandemics. Or rock stars in their 80s.

Young Chinese women now go ‘boy sober’ and date guys acting in roles from online games and movies instead. ‘Cosplay’ culture. Adolescents love to play with roles, in the 1970s androgyny was big, mostly men camping it up. None of those men thought they were women, they were playing with roles. Pantomime in UK culture has done the same forever. I think most people who identify as trans are cosplaying gender, in the same way. But because the world is now increasingly social media, we live our lives on it, they mistake that role-playing for reality. They think role-playing as a woman makes you a woman. Social media bubbles become actual worlds. The line between fantasy and reality is not only blurred, it’s collapsed.

Imagine being puzzled as to why. The *exact* years of the pandemic.

This is Nicolas Fouquet. He was treasurer to Louis XIV, in the 17th century. And a beautiful example of how status works. He threw an enormous party for the King, to honour him. The party was incredibly popular and successful. What did the King say and do? He got one of the Three Musketeers to arrest Fouquet and throw him in jail the very next day. He kept him in solitary confinement there for the rest of his life. Never be more popular than the person above you.

The Colosseum is one of the most famous structures in the world. What’s less known is how it was paid for. The Romans used the proceeds of their defeat and sacking of Jerusalem to fund the build.

A handful of loons force rounds of ‘community consultation’ that are a waste of everybody’s time. The loons are never satisfied, numpties who swallow every bit of rubbish social media throws at them. The Australian election voted decisively in favour of telling all of these professional whingers to fuck off.

The reason kangaroos love golf courses is obviously the grass, but it’s also because the way they’re designed is the way Aboriginal Australians designed landscape to trap roos, with open plains of lush grass surrounded by bushes and trees, where they’d hide to hunt them. Aboriginal Australia is still everywhere, if you know where to look.

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is the first full-length nude in Western art. But even more interesting showing the birth of the Renaissance, following 1000 years of The Dark Ages. The Renaissance in turn was mostly triggered by the invention of printing, including works from classical Greece, which was Botticelli’s inspiration and a dominant theme of the Renaissance. People often look back, to look forward. The Romans loved the Greeks too, all those columns and other styles of ancient Roman living were Greek. It was the collapse of the Roman Empire in turn which caused The Dark Ages, and the Holy Roman Empie which oversaw the Renaissance. So many intersecting things here.

The fashion writer Derek Guy makes a wonderful distinction between tailored clothes and designer clothes. For example he says the UK princes often wear designer suits, which fit badly and don’t look stylish. Their father the King wears tailored suits and looks stylish. Or look at Noel Coward in his tailored suit here, how fabulous it looks, compared to Harry. Designer clothes are more about status than functionality. Tailoring is entirely about functionality, which in turn creates great style. We’re awash in designer clothes and accessories today, because we’re a kidult culture. A culture where people are desperate to forge an identity for themselves, a status. That’s teenage life, but now all of adult life. Harry is now even a brand, rather than a Royal. That’s kidult culture.

What applies to fashion also applies to cars. The distinction between status and functionality. The idea that you can either have a practical car or a stylish car is rubbish. The Ferrari here is clearly the higher status vehicle. But to me the Tesla is the ‘tailored’ car, the car built by designers to meet a whole range of very specific needs of drivers. Like a tailor does with clothes. That intense focus on design creates the much more ‘stylish’ vehicle, in my view. If you decouple style from status. Ferraris (and many Italian cars) are mostly a pain in the arse to own, because they’re all about status and often pretty dysfunctional. Tesla’s design brief is to give people a car that provides comfort, power, handling, safety, efficiency, little to no maintenance, a vast number of practical functions, and it’s this focus that creates a car where the style emerges from the functionality. It ends up looking like a ‘sports car’, but from the other direction, where that comes from aerodynamic efficiency rather than status. At a tiny fraction of the cost of the Ferrari, always an indicator that status games are in play. A Tesla is a Noel Coward tailored suit, a Ferrari is a Designer Gucci. A car bought more to be seen in, as opposed to a car designed to be functional in every possible way.

Springsteen reportedly makes about $3 million every time he steps on stage. He makes more in a week of touring than giants of music like Louis Armstrong or Nat King Cole made in a lifetime. Most of the greatest artists in history died penniless. This is gig culture, a culture where popular music is a path to wealth and status and power. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, the point is that this is a culture where being a rock star gives you them. It’s an adolescent culture. Adults are supposed to grow out of rock stars.

98% of the vehicles on this ship are petrols and diesels.

Yep.

10% of all Australian children are on the NDIS. 15% of 6-year-old boys are on the NDIS.

BYD and Tesla both doing this, releasing cheaper variants of existing models. You’re not losing much, a lot of it is more premium features gone that aren’t really necessary anyway. $23,500 for a large sedan! Game on.

Cultures that travel obsessively love to call themselves ‘nomads’. They’re nothing like nomads, nomads move to survive. Meanwhile travel cultures invest trillions in their own homes, and in ‘strong borders’ to stop others wandering nomadically through their own countries. Travel cultures are imperial cultures, and their travel is the old ‘Grand Tour’ aristocratic families sent their boys on, when they came of age. To ‘see’ the world, like everybody else’s home is a theme park for our enjoyment.

If all the ice in Greenland melts, ocean levels worldwide go up 7 metres. That’s the end of most coastal cities. All except one of Australia’s major cities are on the coast. 98% of Australians live in those cities.

The prosecution rests. Adulting 101 classes. It’s not about skills. The adult world itself ceased to exist, to use the skills in. Replaced now by social media transacting the personal, social, professional and political. A technology that runs entirely on popularity - likes and followers - high school culture. Kyle, Nigel.

More kidulting. You may recognise Keith, from the Great Pottery Throwdown. A master potter. He and his wife Marj bought an old chapel in Wales, to renovate. What’s fascinating about the show is watching the modern adult have no clue about doing adult anything. The building they took on (behind them) requires enormous work, they have no idea how much. It’s their attempts that show it. They bore with even the most basic tasks inside 10 minutes, and go off to buy food and coffee. That’s Kidult culture 101, continuous eating out. When they do get professionals in to help, they target nonsense like sandblasting the steel columns in the building because they love the ‘gothic’ feel, while basics like fixing leaks and preparing the vast areas of painting needed are ignored. The crowning highlight so far is them buying a shipping container to live in while renovating. But it then has to be decorated too, in gothic ways, they even add a stylish bathtub to the container. The container has no running water of any kind, nor is it planned to. Meanwhile this colossal building sits there with nothing being done on it. Both were goths growing up, it’s how they met. They’re middle-aged, still living those teen years. Everything is done in designer chic clothes. Their choice of an old mortuary slab as their kitchen island bench (more goth styling) bemuses the guys who help them carry it in the building. There isn’t even a kitchen, they’re ‘styling’ the building before even basic repairs have begun. They’re literally playing The Sims, a concocted fantasy divorced from basic realities. And lots of ‘getting to the know the neighbours’ community stuff, more idealised drivel. Both burst into tears regularly in outpourings of sentimentality at their stylised adventure into coastal living in a chapel. The same gentrification we see here in Australia too, with old country towns turned into havens for baristas and lifestyle kidults. Kidult culture is styling and posturing and emoting over the ruins of adult society. I want to slap the pair of them in every episode and tell them to put on some old clothes and do some fucking hard work.

Happy Birthday, Alun! 🥳🎈🎉

A government in debt means a population in surplus, and vice versa - a government runs a budget surplus by putting individuals into debt. We act and think as if there are two buckets of money here, private and public. All money is public, government creates it.

We should always close the loop on social media hysterias. Just to see how they pan out, so we maybe won’t be so stupid next time.

When I think about climate change, I think about Venus. Venus was once covered in oceans and rivers of fresh water, about the temperature of a lovely Spring day here on Earth. It then experienced runaway climate change, with its atmosphere trapping more and more heat. Now it’s a hellscape. The temperature on the surface is nearly 500°C all day and night. There’s not a drop of water anywhere. The atmospheric pressure increased to about 90 times what it is on Earth. It would crush a car in less than a second. Nothing can live on Venus. 

These lists of notable deaths every year another window into the culture that’s invisible to us. Almost entirely celebrities - rock, film and sports stars, mostly. Others from the entertainment industry. Some politicians (also celebrities). I spotted a token physicist. The same people who would argue black and blue that we’re not all perpetual teenagers fascinated by our favourite bands, wrote homilies to Brian Wilson this week. Right on cue. Does anybody even know who the trailblazing engineers, teachers or materials scientists in the world today are? How about stars of nursing or aged care? Or how’s water desalination going? Crickets. Because that’s not of interest to an eternal teenage culture. It was of interest to the Victorians in England. The people who were rolling out sewer and reticulated water systems, building bridges and train lines and hospitals, were superstars. You can have an adult culture, focused on adult things.

How it feels when you park your EV in the Coles car park in Lithgow.

It’s worth letting this graphic sink in, to let basic science and engineering inform car choice, rather than the pissing contest of branding. How much the fabled range of petrol and diesel cars is bought at the cost of an astronomical waste of energy. (Which you pay for, out of your wallet.) To get 1000 km out of a petrol or diesel car, you put about 5000 km worth of energy in it. 80% of it goes straight out the exhaust, unused. To get 1000 km of range out of an EV, you put 1000 km worth of energy into it. And 15.4 kWh per 100 km isn’t even a great EV. I get closer to 10 driving to Bathurst. Petrol and diesel engines are rubbish technology. They were rubbish when they were invented, and basic physics means they’re still rubbish today. Hopelessly inefficient, gutless (why they need gears), belching toxic exhaust gases, noisy. The noise they make, which many mistake for ‘grunt’, is the noise of that 80% of unused energy going out the exhaust. It’s the sound of puny.

Happy Birthday, Maicee! 🥳🎈🎉

BYD is an engineering powerhouse, they can generate new cars seemingly out of thin air. The Denza B5 is a plug-in hybrid rival to the Toyota Prado. Early drives suggest it’ll eat the Prado for breakfast, a brutally good off-roader but also luxury refinement for sealed road driving that the Prado doesn’t come close to. It also has 100 km of pure electric range, meaning all of your weekly driving can be free of fuel costs. The Prado’s hybrid system is rubbish, barely any fuel saved, and no capacity for full-EV driving at all. The BYD’s twin electric motor hybrid will also get you from 0-100 in 4.8 seconds. BYD also has a B8 to take on the Toyota Landcruiser. Expect to see the B5 and possibly even the B8 this year already, in Australia. BYD’s history suggests the pricing will be extraordinary too, for the tech you get.

Millions of children. MILLIONS. An entire generation sacrificed to the adolescent gods of recreational travel, gigs and dining out.

The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y are the least stolen vehicles in America. That’s delberate design at work again, they’re extremely difficult cars to steal. Every movement of a potential thief is captured automatically by 8 or more cameras. There are no keys, the car operates via your phone or a key card. You can set a PIN to use to begin driving too, so if somebody steals your phone or card they need to know a PIN to drive. The PIN pad shifts its position on the screen every time it appears so a thief can’t use fingerprint marks to figure out the PIN. An internal camera can capture the identity and activity of the thief. If the car is stolen its location can be tracked at every moment and various controls like speed limit can be accessed by the owner remotely. The owner can open the boot or front bonnet, blast the horn and do a range of things to make the thief give up.

Noah Smith here showing how America worked when people with different views were able to spread out geographically and each occupy their own space, leaving others mostly alone. And then suddenly social media came along and threw everybody into the same room. It’s been a shitfight ever since. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/social-media-destroyed-one-of-americas?triedRedirect=true

Happy Birthday, Bruce! 🥳🎈🎉

Happy Birthday, ‎ליאורה‎! 🥳🎈🎉

The current meaningless trending hashtag in the US. The US President is the most monarchical figure in the world. Hollywood makes movie after movie venerating the position in ways other countries would find farcical for their leaders. All societies are really monarchies. We just name the players different things.

An Australian senator. I can think of some councillors at local government level who have similar wet dreams.

Another view of the BYD Tang-L, which should arrive in Australia this year, sold probably as the Sea Lion 8. This is the one where the full-electric version has over 1000 horsepower, does 0-100 in 3.9 seconds, and can add 400km of charge in 5 minutes. The plug-in hybrid version will offer over 1000km of range. Has 7 seats, 24 speakers, AI-generated route management in the hybrid to maximise fuel efficiency, and full self-driving thrown in for free.

This was superbly entertaining. It sounds dry, a debate on whether ancient Greece or Rome were 'better', but between them Greece and Rome built the world we all live in, and are still key to understanding it. Despite being a twat in so many ways, Boris is a superb speaker, and knows his classics. Mary does wonderful docos on ancient Rome (all freely available on YouTube), and is a Professor of Classics. You can read modern political debates in everything they reveal here. I think the right team won this one. Give it a try, I promise you'll enjoy it.

Muscle pain is the most common ongoing symptom of Covid infection. Covid is a vascular disease and for a while they thought it was forming micro-clots in organs and muscles. But there’s some evidence now that it’s actually exploding red blood cells, and it’s the wreckage of those exploded cells that’s blocking the blood vessels. That’s very difficult if not impossible to fix.

I also post about this every winter. We shouldn’t be burning wood recreationally for heat and the vibe of a log fire. Wood smoke is toxic, it’s bizarre that in the only known place in the universe with a breathable atmosphere, not polluting it isn’t the number one priority of anybody who lives there.

In countries like the US with very weak or often non-existent public administration of key parts of life, when things don’t work people pile onto the streets to protest. This is said to be democracy in action. Really it’s just a crowd of people. That isn’t democracy. Democracy is the public institutions that administer public life. It’s in the DNA of American public life to not ever understand this, to have two opposing forces, leaders and big crowds, with no institutions mediating between them.

Toxic masculinity is a creation of social media. We don’t need to indoctrinate all of our boys about something they’re not. We just need to shut down social media, or at least target the toxic influencers online. There is nothing intrinsically toxic about being male or about male culture, just as there is no such thing as ‘trans’, outside social media.

"...the new Model Y, which was – BY A LONG WAY – Australia’s best-selling EV in May 2025." I don't post this to say I told you so, but to plead with people to stop confusing social media with society. Those eating a steady diet of social media claimed Tesla was toast, its cars chariots for Nazis. That was only the hysteria that lives inside social media bubbles. https://thedriven.io/2025/06/17/tesla-to-target-big-families-with-upcoming-6-and-7-seater-model-y-variants/?fbclid=IwY2xjawK9uZRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE2dVBiRU5ra0ZMdUZhcmN6AR6stj2qX6ALR-FsX3govfaqz0e0dXQBihmED8SNo2RPabRVnN5sSJ0J4bYWcw_aem_YYxkOwBLCvpBhuqMsVLRKw

This is what Trump is. Not some modern Adolf Hitler trying to impose authoritarian rule on the US. He's just an old-fashioned grifter, a conman, lining his pockets and those of his family. It's what he's always been, his entire life, it was never hidden.

No human group, of any size, ‘rises up’ to defeat anything. The great American myth, now foisted upon the rest of the world through its idiot invention, social media. We’re going through yet another round of impotent protest-rage, people taking to the streets to emote. None of it will change anything. Being ignorant of history and human nature is all that sustains it. What do these big crowd events copy as a model? Rock concerts. Gig culture. Not an analogy. It’s Woodstock culture, still going. The Woodstock crowd are now the richest generation in world history. ‘Down with the establishment’, they said. They now are the establishment. They created Trump, who’s putting the finishing touches on the destruction of US institutions, which Woodstock culture started.

I know it upsets some, to dismiss trans, or even discuss it. Because like every other public issue today, there has been no discussion. People just joined a team, mostly driven through social media. They support one or other position because their team does. Few on the team give any of the issues any thought at all. They line up behind a ‘cause’ because they see everybody else they admire doing the same. If you criticise trans ideas, you’re lumped in with the ‘anti-trans’ team, which is full of gibbering idiots and morons. I wouldn’t piss on EITHER team, if they were on fire. Social media turns all public issues into thought-free team sports. People spray painting cars with Swastikas. I criticise trans because the ideas are ludicrous and dangerous. As do people like JK Rowling. Do you have an answer to her great question here?

You can see here that the rhetorical nonsense in the US about democracy isn’t how the US actually behaves. And that’s not to criticise how the US acts, it’s to criticise the rhetorical nonsense. Nobody who governs anything, from a soccer club to a full country, does it by getting all of the members or citizens to actually run anything. They just pick somebody to do it for them. All countries operate in exactly the same way, all the systems we pretend they use like capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, authoritarianism, are adult fairytales. They’re all feudal monarchies, with a king or equivalent sitting at the top of the status hierarchy, and with status hierarchies cascading through the rest of society. Each has their own barons or aristocracy, what people now call oligarchs. The King always has a court. 

I’m curious what this parcel is.

Bathurst’s councillors still wrestling with the issue of revenue. I encourage everybody to go to the iPart website and have a look at the special rate variations approved for just about every Council in the State over the past 15 years, many even larger than what was proposed for Bathurst, and many have done it multiple times.  Bathurst is one of the best run towns in the country, and it’s managed to do that without significant rate rises over those 15 years. You always hope facts will change an argument, but I know from experience that they won’t. Much easier to give the Council a kicking, and to drum up votes doing that. That’s the Trump method. Tell people all the time that their institutions are corrupt and incompetent. People will sign up to that bullshit every day of the week, because we live in a kidult culture of complaint. The best solution would be for the federal government to provide a lot more money to States and local government, who provide nearly all of the services the Australian community uses. But federal governments would rather indulge in ridiculous fantasies like buying nuclear submarines. Think about those submarines every time you drive into a pothole that there’s no money to fix .

Hugely lower energy costs and phenomenal power and performance. Now is an incredibly fun time to own an EV, because the roads are still chockers with petrol and diesel clunkers that you can embarrass.

Fossil fuel rebates for vehicles cost taxpayers more than $10 billion per year. They're the third largest growth item in the federal budget, after aged care and the NDIS. For comparison, anti-EV folk often say EVs are 'subsidised'. Tax concessions for EVs are only 5% of the size of tax concessions for fossil fuels. This also excludes that fossil fuel vehicles have been polluting the air for free, for over 100 years. No other business is allowed to pollute, especially for free. If they had to pay the costs of that, the average petrol or diesel vehicle would be 2 or 3 times the cost they are now.

Yesterday Lithgow was the coldest place in the entire country, in the morning. Today is even colder. The house is toasty warm, in every room, and has been all night. I heated up its thermal mass yesterday with free solar power driving heat pumps (reverse-cycle AC), and that heat then kept the rooms warm overnight. Electricty is also cheap as chips overnight, so I can even run the split systems too. That also charged up the car for today’s commute to Bathurst and back, where it will carve up the road with its sublime, silent, enormous grunt. Free electricty. Free heating. Free driving. No wood to find/buy and chop, no ash to clean up, no asphyxiation of the family and neighbours with toxic wood smoke. Just press a button, and relax. At the time of year when mental midgets say ‘the sun doesn’t shine’. Join the revolution, don’t miss it inside social media bubbles.

Raina Macintyre is a global expert on infectious disease and public health. She’s also at my old stomping ground, UNSW, which is really kicking some goals. In this book she compares Covid-19 to syphilis, which has been called ‘the great imitator’, causing a whole range of terrible health problems that seem like something else. That’s what Covid does. That acute infection you get, which the mental midgets call ‘just a cold’, is just it making its way into your body. The on-ramp. Only then does it really get to work, fucking you over for the rest of your life in any organs or tissue, exploding blood cells, blocking blood vessels, causing cancer-forming inflammation etc. You’ve let it in, and it will never leave. Like a psychopath lodger.

Sigenergy has become the number one home battery in Australia. Fantastic technology. Personally I don’t think quite as good as the Tesla battery, particularly with Tesla’s software control and analytics, but either are fabulous.

Ah Queensland. "If we don't do it somebody else will" is an excuse to never shut down anything. Child slavery and prostitution, drug trafficking. Etc. "The Premier also said his government would fast-track approvals for new coal mines – a trade for maintaining increased coal royalties introduced by the previous Labor government – saying he wanted to “continue to extract coal from this part of the world.” “It’s the cleanest, the workers who go there get paid the most, it is the most environmentally sustainable,” he said. “To shut down our coal industry would be doing nothing other than driving competitors into the arms of people who won’t do the same thing.”"

When an accident blocks the highway, what do you do? You watch Netflix or Youtube.

Robert Putnam tracked the shift in US culture from a focus on “I”, to a focus on “we” and then back again, over the past century. What creates a ‘we’ or a ‘public’ is existential threat, in this case WW1, Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2, all in quick succession in the first half of the 20th century. Humans only come together in a we or public way when their societies are under desperate threat. Otherwise they just play status games, jostling for position in social status hierarchies. Right now we’re living in a time of uncontrolled, rampant status games, through social media culture. ‘Identity’ politics, because for social animals, status = identity. The birth of universal schooling in the first half of the 20th century also meant that the adults at the peak there in the 1960s of the ‘we’ became kidults. They learned how to act socially at school, and took that into adult life. That dramatically accelerated that downhill crash back into “I” culture. Social media *is* just high school culture, and we do everything now through social media. Everybody battling everybody else for status, for likes, emulating ‘influencers’. As kids do at school. That’s the culture.

I have no memory of this trip at all. But looking at it now, I see it as some sort of ad for the importance of wearing sunglasses.

Going back to the distinction between tailored and designer clothes. This is current F1 drivers. All of them, to a man, are badly dressed. All of them to a man are *expensively* dressed, in ‘designer’ clothes. None of the clothes fit them well, the footwear is usually an appalling fit for the suit, and there are various other basic tailoring train wrecks going on. Designer clothes are mostly about status. About branding. Tailored clothes are about functional and beautiful clothing. That distinction has been lost in every sphere now of human life. We have ‘designer’ homes rather than homes tailored to our actual needs. ‘Masterchef’ cookery has replaced good cooks with histrionic displays of wankery. We drive wankpanzers with the aerodynamics of a brick because everybody else does too, and we don’t want to lose our social status by not doing the same. Etc etc etc. This is kidult culture. Adolescents are obsessed with social status, because it’s also their identity and place in the world. It’s now adult life too, and always was, except now adults are ‘branding’ themselves in the same way as adolescents, whereas previously adult life’s status came from position in and contribution towards a master status hierarchy focused on the progress of civilisation. If you don’t believe that, tell me what what grand vision for society adults are now working towards? You won’t find one, instead we’re all encouraged to just ‘live out best lives’, a life of fun and enjoyment and self-improvement. Me me me. A permanent adolescent gap year from reality.

Happy Birthday! 🎂🥂🎊

Apparently this is a famous singer. I don’t think most know that the idea that we could infect our way out of a pandemic didn’t come from doctors or scientists, it came from politicians, using the work of an American free market think tank called the Great Barrington Declaration. The health of entire populations is now in free fall. Getting Covid doesn’t build your immunity to it. It damages your immune system, meaning you get even more Covid, and every other infection that passes your way. It’s why everybody is now so sick with everything, so often. Flu numbers are off the scale. RSV too. TB is back. Shingles. Etc. We’re the meal at a microbial feast.

Happy Birthday!!

All local Councils are externally audited every single year, by the NSW Audit Office. They also undergo separate and regular external performance audits, and have external auditors and audit committees scrutinise their books throughout every year. Continuous cries of corruption and incompetence is Trump’s methodology, to make people think ‘the swamp’ is screwing them. Kidults love that stuff, they lap it up, conspiracies abound.

When the wankpanzerati discover the power of electric motors, but don’t quite get that’s what’s going on. That sweet reference to a ‘gearbox’. Gears are so 19th century.

‘Encouraging’ staff in healthcare to do infection control is like encouraging police to arrest lawbreakers. It’s the job, people. There are unfortunately many ‘cookers’ in healthcare too, anti-vaxers and anti-maskers, and all sorts of other varieties of kidult social media lunacy.

How the US ever attracted the label of leader of the free world is a mystery.

‘Urging’ will never overpower the most powerful force in the universe. Peer pressure, the need to do what everybody else is doing, and not stand out. Especially when your adult culture is really just an extension of high school, transacted on social media. But posting it here in the vain hope people might look after themselves. Covid didn’t go away, hey? Even though we kidults got bored with it, it no longer ‘trends’. We didn’t all become magically immune to it. It’s still killing and maiming and disabling with abandon.

Again, do people have a meaningful response to this beyond an emotional need to ‘support’ others in the team sports of trans vs anti-trans? A battle invented by social media. One of the true challenges of adult life is to support people by sometimes telling them they’ve lost track with reality. To intervene. Puberty blockers are exactly that, chemical castration. This is what’s at stake.

Hey fellow Gen X’ers. People our current age during the Sydney Olympics are now in their 80s.

When kids learn to ride a bike, it just happens. They fumble around with training wheels for a while and then suddenly their body just knows how to balance and ride the bike. The curious thing about this is that we forget this automatic learning as we get older. Every activity an adult is engaged with, like sitting at a desk for hours, the body will learn to coordinate with complete effortless ease, if we leave it alone to do that. But instead so many of us try to do things like our posture, and we get stiff and sore because we’re not letting our bodies do that coordination.  This is actually also true for what we call mental and emotional things. By far the most effective treatment for anxiety and depression for example is to stop trying to control your feelings and allow them to self regulate. To carry on with our everyday activities without trying to improve anything, without trying to make ourselves feel a certain way.  Focusing on how we feel will lead to us fiddling with that, and then you’re trapped in this endless cycle of trying to get just the feelings that you want, as opposed to the feelings that make sense for a given situation. An anxious or depressed person has feelings that don’t make sense in a given situation, but if they leave them alone the situation will correct that. Your body will think okay these feelings are wrong here, I’ll stop firing them off. 

This is what people are not understanding about Covid. Every dot on that graph is you catching Covid once. Every time you do that, it may seem like a 'mild' disease, like a cold. But your chances of getting a permanent chronic condition or even catastrophic health event (like a stroke) increase hugely. It's cumulative. To paraphrase Paul Keating's line to John Hewson, that he was going to 'do him slowly', that's what Covid's genius is. It's doing us slowly, the ones who don't die immediately. HIV is the same, people with it could act for 6 or 7 years like nothing had happened. Then within 1-2 years after that, their health collapsed catastrophically, and then they were dead. There is no cure for ‘Long Covid’, a huge and growing number of serious medical conditions, many of which end peoples’ working lives, if not their actual life. It will certainly reduce their lifespan, even dramatically.

Imagine if we powered our vehicles with Australian-made energy. Those that do won't be impacted.

Another good example of the fake distinction between city and country. Pretty much every ‘country town’ is or was just a mining or farming operation, an extractive industry driven by city life. Once there’s no more need for the thing being extracted, the town dies.

Last week 34 people died of Covid in aged care, in Australia. Tens of thousands now have, in the past 5 years. Nobody cares. If it had been a bus carrying the national soccer and cricket teams, or rock bands on tour, we’d all have black armbands on and be posting homilies on our favourite extended high school, social media. Kidult culture. No adult responsibility.

Early Council meeting today, probably another fight. One of the most frustrating things about kidult culture is its general attitude of ‘chill’, of ‘have fun’. Until doing that for years and taking no responsibility for anything leads to things falling apart. Then it’s a pile-on, all the public institutions the kidults blissfully ignore while living their fun lives, spending like old French kings on travel and dining out and gigs, are suddenly evil, because they interrupt their fun lives, trying to fix a society on its knees.

Most resist the idea of being a kidult culture. The leader of the free world is running the world through a social media platform. How do we not see how ludicrous and unprecedented this is?

Can we take a step back from ‘supporting’ every person’s fantasy life as an actual real-world identity (I know a teacher who thinks he’s a Jedi), and actually unpack the ideas? To cut back on the ‘feels’ and actually think? The best support you can be for any person is to be honest with them. Some delusions kill, it’s not OK to just believe whatever you want because it makes you feel good. Greer labelled trans women as ‘pantomime dames’. As usual her brilliant mind was identifying the root of what was actually going on. It’s role-playing. And the roles are so often regressive sexual stereotypes, as Rowling notes here. Just look at what passes for ‘woman’ in trans culture. In social media culture, your role becomes your actual identity. What was previously playful experimentation in adolescence now becomes hardened essentialism, people genuinely come to believe they are the roles they’re playing. Because in social media culture, if it trends, it’s real. The line between reality and fantasy is collapsing. Do we not notice the explosion of ‘cosplay’ culture?

DIY is a passion of our age. And another window into the underlying culture. The greatest threat to all of our lives is the collapse of trust in society. The loss of humility towards the expertise of others. The ‘debating’ of things we know nothing about. In every single sphere of human life now, people who actually know what they’re doing are drowning in a swamp of DIY social media know-alls, getting in the way, often with a good serve of abuse and even violence. We hate expertise because it’s hierarchical. We hate to admit somebody else is better at something than we are. We all think we can do renovations or cooking or public health as well as the experts. We can’t. One of the great joys in life for me is to sit back and watch an expert do something, for me, with great skill and minimal effort. We need to worship expertise again, not DIY.

A Model 3 for the price of a Toyota Corolla is unbeatable value, the Model 3 is one of the best cars in the world. I've driven lots of different cars, but the Model 3 is like another level of motoring. Mine drove me home yesterday, while I watched. Silently, powerfully.

If you feel 24 inside when you’re 85, you’re a kidult. It’s the definition.

Mercury was bored of gigging before he was even 40. Rock and roll culture is teen culture, he knew it and said it. We miss that insight in him in the rock stars now left, most of whom have only a fraction of the talent or intelligence. I love the new Spinal Tap movie sub-title: “The End Continues”. Those guys get it. Most rock fans who laugh at Spinal Tap don’t understand that they’re the joke.

NBN is doubling its speeds in September.

I remember asking a few years ago what people think ‘love’ means. Nearly universally they agreed with this, that it’s a feeling. Usually they described it as an enhanced form of friendship or affection. Probably not a surprise in a culture where the ‘feels’ is so dominant. Love is not a feeling. Feelings have no independent existence, but one of the defining things about our culture is that we think they do. What we *feel* as love is love acting, sure, but the feeling is not love. I say love is the encounter with somebody who is different to you, where those specific differences cause a type of existential ‘spark’. The spark excites you, makes you feel alive. It’s entirely different to friendship, which is a very shallow, superficial relationship by comparison. Friendship binds like being fans of a football team binds. It’s about sameness, imitation. Love is about difference, and the sparks it produces. Also why so many relationships fail, they start with the spark, but they’re unable to maintain it because the desire for ‘fidelity’ (in the broadest meaning of that term, the desire for sameness, not just about sex) overpowers the desire for difference, for the spark.

I get very tired of ‘debates’, and rarely engage with them. They define our age too because they’re the team sports I often talk about, driven by social media. The algorithms there prioritise people arguing, it drives engagement and likes. There’s an assumption that is also wrong, which we use for democracy too, that lots of debating leads to progress and change. It never does, it’s just hot air. Change is driven by rare events and rare minds, causing millions to imitate and emulate something. That then gives the appearance of millions having debated that outcome. It is never that, 99% of it was people imitating something. Have a look at every public issue that emerges, and you’ll see how it’s structured like Premier League footy. People forming teams, that then battle each other. Imitative rivalry, what Rene Girard (rightly) called the root of all culture. Left v Right. Renewables v fossil fuels. Etc. Discuss things and the first thing most will do is try to place you (in their mind at least) as speaking for one of the teams. There’s little to no engagement with actual ideas, often those passionately engaged in the team sports haven’t even read them (as is nearly always the case with the ‘trans’ debates, for example, why I often return to them as an example).

Also why secondhand Teslas in particular are an absolute steal. Better than any new ICE car you could buy, at a fraction of the cost. ICEs not only stop working over time and need continuous maintenance, they become less efficient even if they still work. Electric motors have almost no moving parts, they’re as efficient at a million miles as they are at 1 mile. Even the ‘old’ Tesla here had almost zero maintenance in its entire life.

It really is an episode of Utopia. Who would we be defending ourselves from, China? Our largest trading partner and the only thing keeping our country afloat? The US are grifters, this is a forced looting of national treasuries to buy hardware from US defence industries. Most US wars are the same.

And there it is. The US push to dramatically increase defence spending is a push from its weapons manufacturers to drum up more customers. That's the US way, privatise basic public services and then shamelessly profiteer.

This seems a sensible article. Except more than anything it shows the collapse of public health. The idea of public health is to prevent disease *arriving* at your home in the first place. To control diseases in public spaces and activities, so that they can’t spread into homes. Then fatuous politicians changed all that to ‘personal responsibility’ public health. A totally nonsensical idea, no individual can do public health. Step back and you can see here just one more victory for what we call privatisation. We now pay more and more for basics like education, transport, and health care. It’s politics, the small-government loons, not science. Dismantling all the public infrastructure set up post-WW2 to create a healthy and prosperous public-based society. Culturally this is the kidult culture I talk about, the shift to a focus on individual ‘living our best lives’. Former public life is now just a stage for us all to perform our beloved individual identities on. The reasons you’re now forced to ‘live with Covid’ is this same shift. Politicians wanted to destroy public health, because it interrupted their beloved (and total fiction) ‘economy’. ‘Lives and livelihoods’, they said, and idiots lapped that up as some sort of common sense. Public health was invented to reject that distinction outright. How stupid we now are to think we have to ‘balance’ (a total weasel word used by politicians) our health against our livelihood. They’re the same thing. You can’t work if you’re sick.

Used EVs are the hot buy in America now, people have figured out they’re an absolute bargain. The same here in Oz, you’re getting a luxury supercar for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Just one more of the empty propaganda lines social media zombies regurgitate is ‘resale on EVs is terrible’. That’s a standard part of the rollout of any new technology, and then (as now) suddenly the secondhand goods are in high demand and their price goes up. Many friends ask me worried questions when thinking about buying an EV. All of the questions are the propaganda car and fossil fuel companies sponsor on social media. ‘They don’t have any range’, ‘how often do you have to replace the battery?’, ‘do they catch fire or explode?’ etc. Now is your chance to ignore all of that bullshit and get in early on the revolution. Very few will ever go back to a petrol or diesel, they will feel directly what rubbish they are.

I often call petrol and diesel vehicles rubbish technology. To clarify, I mean that in a very precise, engineering sense, it’s not just a casual insult. Here’s one of the specific ways they are. The energy produced by exploding petrol and diesel in cylinders has to change direction three times before it even gets to the wheels. It’s a ludicrously stupid and inefficent process, mechanically, with hundreds of moving parts, all with their own friction and needing lubrication and maintenance etc. An electric motor just sits on the axle, and spins. That’s it. No change of direction needed. Also why they launch like a rocket ship. Almost zero moving parts, and the ones that do move don’t even touch. No lubrication or maintenance either. No need to turn the car ‘on’ or idle it. The motor just spins when you add power, and doesn’t when you don’t. Also freeing up the engine bay for storage.

China also hasn’t forgotten that the Anglo world flooded its country with heroin, to force addiction on its people and open up opportunities for trade. We’re the Empire, people, the Darth Vader side.

Tesla is now moving to a model where you don’t even need to go to a dealership to pick up your new car. The car will drive itself to your home. My car drives me to and from work most of the way now. Of course I supervise it, but no human can drive as well as a machine for most driving. Also why commercial airliners mostly fly themselves. Humans of course believe they’re brilliant at these things, but they just aren’t.

Genuinely curious how many still believe that governments need to ‘balance the books’? Comparing governments to households and business was a political trick to stop them paying for public things, by screaming hysterically every day about governments ‘going broke’. Except when they pay for tax cuts and other goodies for the people screaming hysterically. A government can ‘print’ as much money as it likes. It doesn’t have to pay it back to anybody, who would it need to pay it back to? A government deficit is a surplus for citizens, and a government surplus is you paying for everything yourself instead. Governments don’t need to tax or borrow, to pay for things. Government is us, all of us, not a separate business with a balance sheet.

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Everything is about feelings. And about ‘support’ for those feelings, in others. “I Stand With [insert cause]” is its imitation of adult life, symbolic performance plays of one’s feelings. A person can be attached to the most toxic idiot nonsense, as I think most trans culture is, but what’s important is that we ‘support’ them in that journey down the rabbit hole. I notice Ukraine has benefited diddly squat from all the ‘standing with them’ emotive ‘look at me’ people did on the socials. I thought about this ocean of twee sentimentality we’re all swimming in when reading this article today, about masses of marine life choking to death on toxic algae caused by us boiling the oceans with our wankpanzer and recreational travel jet fuel emissions, in our permanent adolescent gap years from reality. The only human action described in the piece? ‘Eco-grief’ counselling sessions for those apparently traumatised by seeing the dead sea life. Gotta look after the feels. I was a high school teacher, they’re experts in adolescents. I saw teenagers collapse in great imitative weeping heaps of ‘support’ for people experiencing challenges in life, often people they didn’t even like. What was important was them using that difficult time somebody was having as a stage to launch symbolic performance plays of their own feelings. In earlier times it would have been ruthlessly shut down by actual adults focused on strengthening these adolescents into adults. It’s no coincidence that the teacher is one of the most ignored, abused and disrespected of all professions now. You can feel that gap in adult life, now dominated by adolescent culture unleashed. Some find me abrasive, but that’s the teacher in me, refusing to play any of these idiot games. The best teachers have a brutality about them, they take the job of socialising people into adulthood seriously in a way others don’t have the balls to do. Now they’re under assault from kidult parents, they’re raising children, not just teaching them. I’m calling it as I see it, society is a giant unending high school now. Literally, not by analogy. We live inside social media bubbles, which are modelled on high schools. Likes and followers. Performative ‘feels’.

A mum I know was despairing this week that her kids are sick again, for the third time this year. ‘They just seem to catch everything now, and it doesn’t go away.’ That’s Covid at work. It suppresses (technically exhausts) your immune system. Leaving you wide open to all other infections. I share these images of Freddie Mercury as a prominent example of mistaking acute and chronic infection. The acute impacts of catching something, like HIV or Covid, can be literally ‘just a cold’. You think you get better, and life goes on. For most of the 1980s when Queen were at the peak of their fame, Freddie was living with HIV in this way. Nobody, including him, knew he was on a terminal train ride. But he was dying with HIV, every day, that whole time. You can see the earliest public evidence in that Kaposi sarcoma I’ve highlighted on his face, in red, the snap of him playing tennis. The virus was eating him away, from the inside. Covid does this too. Does it do it as badly as HIV? Nobody knows, yet. It certainly kills in an acute way in a way HIV never does, so it’s actually the more aggressive virus. And its chronic after-effects, like the mum at work is seeing in her kids, are beginning way earlier than happened with HIV. You got 8-10 good years ‘living with’ HIV. These Covid after-effects are kicking in after 1 or 2. I wouldn’t roll the dice. But most people are. It’s Russian Roulette, at a global level.

Happy Birthday, John! 🥳🎈🎉

Happy Birthday, Jacky! 🥳🎈🎉

Elegance is a difficult concept to define. But it’s far removed from modern designer/brand culture. You rarely hear about somebody being elegantly dressed now. Tailored clothes are elegant, because they combine style with functionality. The solution to a scientific or maths problem can be elegant, meaning not just that it works but also that it solves something in an unexpected and efficient way, while being pleasing.

One of the things the collapse of our education has created is the misunderstanding of thinking itself. Thinking is a job. Just like plumbing. It has a set of specific skills, that take a long time to learn. It’s what a scholar is, a trained thinker. Ideas without scholarship are lethally dangerous to a society. Nothing kills more people than ideas separated from scholarship. The idea that ‘democracy’ is everybody having their own opinions, which then all add up to a collective decision on things, is destroying democracy. It’s nonsense mostly generated in US culture, which has a fanatical need to believe ‘the people’ run societies. There is no such thing as ‘the people’. Opinion is the death of thought. As the saying goes, opinions are like arseholes, everybody has one. They’re team banners people march under, used to identify and unify a team in battle against other social teams. The anti-EV crowd pretend to be talking about ideas, for example, but it’s all team sports battle from a social group feeling threatened by change. There was a time when thought was a hierarchy in society, when we respected scholars for being the people to follow when we had to deal with ideas. Just as we do for plumbing, flying planes, sports etc. Everything has a hierarchy of expertise and value. Except thought, now. Thought has been replaced with everybody’s opinion. It’s destroying our civilisation, it’s making us lethally stupid.

A couple of years ago, I shared this photo to see if people knew who it was. These days people can cheat at these things with Google searches, but curious if people remember.

HBD! ☕🥂🌟

Anybody?

Honestly, it sounds uncaring, but I’m over the critical problems facing us as a community being reduced to the ‘anxiety’ people feel about them. More ‘feels’. This is a total absence of resilience, snowflake culture. The war generations would have found us beyond ridiculous. But this is kidult culture, that we’re refusing to see. Adults who can’t face adult challenges, because they have no conception any more of what an adult is. Earlier in the pandemic I was asked if I wanted support for my mental health, at work. I laughed, ‘for what?’, I said. To me it was just a series of actions that we all had to take responsibility for, and should still be doing right now. But it was too much for the great kidult snowflake society, wallowing in its beloved feelings.

This would worry some people, AI generally does. It shouldn’t, AI is us, it’s a technology to magnify our own intelligence. You know what should worry people? The fact that another technology has taken over health care and every other area of human life. Social media. People will live a lot longer going to AI for health advice than they will doing what they currently do, go to social media.

This sort of greeting card garbage is rampant in a society of the feels. You know the way to true resilience and happiness in life? Facing its challenges head on, instead of wallowing in how we feel about everything. In the society of the feels, bad things are waved away as ‘negativity’. Like reality is only how we feel about things, and thinking positive things fixes reality. Kidults.

Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of Joint Forces Command in Europe, highlighting that without existential threat to societies, they degenerate into ‘snowflake’ culture, wallowing in feelings and obsessed with furthering their own status (identity). Identity culture is the culture of the feels. What I call kidult culture, where feelings replace reality. We’re not feeling how ‘enormously fragile’ this makes us, because we’re hiding from reality in social media bubbles of toxic positivity. Fantasy worlds where we can all have big bowls of strawberry ice cream, to quote Marge Simpson. To be an adult is to find dealing with the actual reality fun, and the fantasy abhorrent.