September 2025

Yep.

If you want to see how humans work, watch any sporting event. People don’t just go to watch the sport. They go to support their favourites. That support creates teams in the stands as well. Being a member of a team like that gives you social status, it makes you a somebody rather than a nobody. Your team then competes against other teams, for that status, and there’s competition within each team for position in their hierarchy. All human life is status games. It’s all team sports, even where you least expect it. Science is the same, as well as art, any trade (tradies all have favourite branded tools, for example), music (favourite acts), clothes, coffee and baristas, cars, etc. etc.

Not money. Not power. Not ’capitalism’ or any -ism. It’s all status. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Everywhere. You are literally nobody, without status, for social animals status is also identity. Even what you ‘subjectively’ like, in music or art or clothes or food, is driven by status games, in social hierarchies. ‘Branding’ in marketing recognises this too.

Hamill describing the explosion of the counterculture, with an impact going well beyond music. The moment teen culture began to replace adult culture, at scale. The counterculture is our culture, just as the Soviet revolution created modern Russian culture, and Mao created modern Chinese culture.

Get every vaccine you qualify for, even if you have to pay for it. If you have friends or family who tell you to use 'natural' medicine instead, tell them you'll bring flowers when you visit their vitamin--soaked demented bodies in a care home.

Is our taste in music ‘purely subjective’? Researchers tested this in the early 2000s. They set up a music market of unknown songs and got about 15,000 students to rate them in one of two ways. The first got to rate them purely individually, while the second got to see what others’ preferences were before making their choice. What did they find? Two fundamental things. Firstly, that the group who got to see what others were ‘liking’ overwhelmingly converged upon a handful of artists. Those artists became the Beatlemania of the market. In technical terms, it created an information cascade, where people mass-imitated one another. Beatlemania was an information cascade. Secondly, they found that which songs became popular was separated entirely from any objective measure of quality, in the ‘social’ group. The artists people liked were the artists other people liked. That was the only criterion. Allow people to socialise, and they will always do two things. Mass-imitate one another, and form enormously unequal status hierarchies, with a tiny number of people at the top. That’s our social media world today. Notice how many touring artists now generate a mania (i.e. information cascade)? Taylor Swift, Dire Straits and ABBA years ago, Pink etc. etc. We flock to them in our millions. Our taste in things is mostly our desire to be part of a social group, even though it will feel the most subjective individual thing. Watch mass concerts (or mass anything), how many are actually listening. Most are there to be part of the crowd, of the imitative information cascade.

I asked AI to write and perform a song for a Welsh male choir, celebrating the beginning of Spring. It took about a minute. We're living a revolution, folks.

And one more. I asked it to write and perform a barbershop quartet number about foot tinea. Genius, again took about a minute. (P.S. I don't have foot tinea, but it seems under-represented in the charts.)

The real enemies of society now aren’t the ’Left’ or ‘Right’ of politics. Those are interchangeable pieces of the same game, like soccer teams. At the end of the day they’re both playing soccer, just running to different ends, switched periodically in the ‘half-time’ of elections. The real enemy of societies is hostility towards towards all forms of expertise. Expertise is deliberately labelled ‘elitist’, to allow populists to bypass peoples’ trust in expert knowledge. Imagine a Block-type show where actual building experts got to criticise and tear down rubbish DIY renos. That’s like the reverse of our current culture. Restoring faith in expertise is our only hope.

It’s one of the wet dreams of all modern popular music culture. The walk to the stage to be screamed at adoringly by tens or even hundreds of thousands of fans. In reality few will notice anything particularly musical about being there. They’re there because it’s a place where everybody wants to be, because everybody else wants to be there. It’s a circular loop. The musicians are just fodder for the crowd, as all leaders of large crowds are. Here we are now. Entertain us. Kurt knew. Smells like teen spirit to me too. Any artist who feels flattered by this adulation is a simpleton.

If you’re somebody (and this is probably most of us) who experiences stiffness in your body, and even pain from that stiffness, here’s something I think very few will tell you. Your body is not a muscular system, it’s a *neuro*muscular system. Muscles themselves are rarely ‘tight’. They’re made tight by your nervous system and thus ultimately by your brain/you, instructing them to hold on tighter. In other words, your ‘body’ coordinates exactly to what YOU are doing and feeling and thinking. If you’re very ‘tight’ in your thinking and anxious in your feeling, that’s how your body will be too. If you’re sitting at a desk rigidly and emotionally fixated on what you’re typing, not paying attention to anything else, your body will become tight, to match that rigid, anxious attention. If you’re fixated on having ‘good posture’, that will ironically also tighten you up, because you’re narrowly and emotionally focused on that task. You’ll get a coordination of ‘trying to get good posture’. All trying is effort, and effort creates tightness. Physios and other physical therapists might give you stretches, to try to loosen up all of this tightness. Most of that is a waste of time, the muscles and fascia aren’t tight. You just want all of you to be calm and mindful of what you’re doing, in each moment, open to what’s around you, which will lead to you breathing smoothly and deeply. That will make your *neuro*muscular body relaxed and effortless. Be aware of tightness, don’t try to stretch it out, often just that awareness will fix it, it opens you back out gently to the world around you. Your body will automatically move a little, to restore a more open, poised you, able to move in any direction as needed.

This is how Covid wins. By us no longer doing any meaningful testing, people can be out there completely symptom-free, infecting thousands of other people. I’ve highlighted in yellow the key part - a ‘mild’ illness doesn’t mean the infection is mild. It means the virus has inactivated your immune response, to make it easier to infect you. The sickness you feel with infectious disease isn’t the virus, it’s your immune response. The fact Covid is ‘mild’ for many is a red-light danger signal, those with mild or no symptoms are often the sickest people of all, the virus has a wide-open front door to their bodies. Somebody who gets very sick with Covid is likely healthier, their body is mounting a strong immune response. It’s fighting the virus. Often they’re vaccinated.

Jon Oates one of the few rock stars who knows it's a job for the young.

It was electric windows closing too fast. Fixed by a software update overnight for owners while they slept. Clickbait headlines.

Armani was a great man etc etc. here we are with him, let’s make this about us. Kidult culture.

This is an Australian senator. Paid for by you and me, the taxpayers.

A solar panel that weighs only as much as a primary school-aged child will produce as much energy as 8 tonnes of coal, or 40 barrels of oil.

If we keep mistaking democracy for elections, then the most popular idiots in our societies will keep winning them and leading millions of other idiots to their own destruction, like lemmings over a cliff. There’s not one single way in which popularity connects with the empirical reality of the world. It’s high school culture, not designed to do anything except help people (they hope) get laid.

What Chirs Bowen should also point out to counter the idiot ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’ social media slogan is, we’re ASLEEP mostly when the sun doesn’t shine. We don’t need anywhere near as much energy then. Even businesses who historically have used cheaper off-peak electricty overnight won’t need to any more, because they can generate their own energy almost for free, during the day. Off-peak rates only ever existed because you can’t switch off coal plants overnight, so they needed to find some way to offload the power when nobody actually wanted to use it.

Heh, you couldn’t make up just how unbelievably stupid our way of life is. 40% of all global shipping is transporting fossil fuels to other countries. Countries that can now produce all of their own energy, pretty much for free. Australia spends nearly $60 billion per YEAR importing this rubbish. And those ships use the shittiest, most polluting fossil fuels.

I’ve seen many Australians make these arguments. That’s because nobody really lives in ‘Australia’ now. They live on social media. Which means increasingly they’re just Americans. Australians who believe this idiot rubbish could move to the US under Trump and save us having to listen to the daily stupidity.

The power of urban myths. For years the story has done the rounds that at his death, Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen, hoping to one day be brought back to life. It never happened. Disney was cremated 2 days after he died.

Happy Birthday Rach!! Lovely day for it.

I admire J.K. Rowling because she’s one of the few higher status people who actively take on desperately unpopular causes, because she (rightly) sees what’s happening as wrong and unjust. Like Germaine Greer before her, she won’t be forgiven for doing it. The only reliable test of truth is unpopularity. I love her description of people (which is most people) who just follow the ‘vibe’ on an issue i.e. what everybody else thinks, out of cowardice. She calls them ‘weathervanes’, sensing the mood and then following it. Or to quote her directly: “Changing sides years late, and only after you've realised the non-elite opposition is winning, isn't a mark of integrity but of arse-covering. Those whose overriding focus is remaining in good odour with the in crowd can never be trusted.”

It’s fascinating to me to see how little societies change over time socially and culturally, despite looking entirely different because of the technologies of a given time. For example the obsessive focus of life in medieval times was the ownership of land, and your position in social status hierarchies, including the lineage of your family. Today home/land ownership is the centrepiece of life in places like Australia, worth trillions of dollars. At the same time interest in genealogy, tracing the family line, has exploded, with it now being the second largest hobby in places like the US, after gardening. And the second most popular type of website, after pornography.

Harry Houdini was the first person to fly a powered aircraft in Australia.

Remember the fairy tale that us all getting Covid over and over would make us immune to it? Over a million people every DAY are currently getting Covid in the US. Meanwhile their idiot Trump-appointed head of health had no idea how many people had died of Covid in the US when asked. (It’s 1.2 million, and climbing. About twice the number who died in the American Civil War.)

How well do you know young people, and the things they believe in? I remember Lawrence predicting Nazism years ahead of its actual emergence, through observing the ideas and behaviours of the young.

The average age on stage in these shows will be over 80. This is still mainstream culture, not some nostalgia act in an RSL club. That's what kidult culture means, nobody ages, nobody is allowed to age. Just permanent adolescence. This sort of show would never have happened even in my youth, people would have laughed at the idea of it. There was still a separation between child and adolescent and adult, and elderly adult. Not now.

If you can convince your GP to give you a supply of metformin to use when you or your family catch Covid, it may save you years of chronic illness. Good luck with it, most GPs I know spend more time selecting their next European luxury car or investment property than they do keeping up to date with current research. You can take research in like this to try to convince them. It’s what I did.

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then those who say that never give a reason why not going to work or school for a while would make people like this. There’s a very obvious reason though. The distinction between vertical (online) and horizontal (the town you live in) communities I’ve posted about. During lockdowns people joined and/or extended their allegiance to online vertical communities. That became even more their real community, to them. Vertical communities have none of the usual community values or practices that keep horizontal communities running. They mostly just love to fight, against other vertical communities. Everything is a war to them, a battle for status and identity. And that’s now overflowed back into the horizontal communities, which are struggling to even exist. I know right from the heart of one town that the governance and stability of a horizontal community is collapsing. The town ‘Bathurst’ is becoming not much more than a whole collection of battling social media groups. Listening to their respective podcasts, drinking expensive coffee, and abusing every older horizontal institution trying to keep the town running.

A similar belief made the Roman Empire the phenomenal success it was. Now the Americans, like the Brits, are in rapid reverse, the world of Trump and Farage. And here in Oz decades of ‘Stop the Boats’ politics did the same. Even white supremacy movements are back, some calling for a renewed White Australia policy.

Happy Birthday!

A wonderful example of how autonomous driving is much smarter than humans. The reviewer here happy with the way the car overtakes on the freeway, but says he would have done the move earlier and merged back earlier. But if you watch what's actually happening, the car is monitoring the speed of the car in front, which is slower than the speed limit and therefore the car is waiting to see if it will speed up, before merging behind it. Then when it does merge, the car in front slows down and the autonomous driving is slower to get back up to the speed limit than the truck which overtakes him. But again the computer is driving in a way that is best for traffic flow as a whole, not for instantaneous perceptions of going too fast or too slow, relative to the traffic around the car. It doesn't accelerate and brake sharply in response to every other vehicle. The reviewer obviously considers himself a good driver. Like all humans, he's mostly clueless.

The still surviving belief that fat causes heart disease is behind the enormous surge in sales of air fryers. But after decades of drug and surgical progress, heart disease and stroke are still the biggest killers. It’s infections, people. They’re the most likely cause of both. The epidemic of heart disease in the 20th century was likely caused by the Spanish Flu. Covid will be the next trigger for whole generations of organ-related mortality, cancers, neurological disease etc. Because we often survive infections the simple-minded believe now they’re even good for us. I still have people ask me if I’m worried if infections will hit me for six when i stop masking, as if I’m depriving my immune system of necessary exercise. All of that is politicised bullshit, not science. The most powerful way to have a long life is to avoid as many infections as you can. Get vaccinated too.

If you doubt that the real story of our times is the replacement of societies built up over centuries, with warring tribes of social media righteousness, have a look at Nepal right now. The Nepalese government tried to implement restrictions on social media. Social media junkies burned the parliament to the ground, and took selfies for their feeds in front of the flaming wreck.

Nampijinpa Price got the boot yesterday, from her own side. One of Australia’s leading Trumpians. For Bathurst residents it’s worth noting she’s also a pin-up poster girl for the social media-led coalition dominating Bathurst Council. It’s a Trumpian movement, disguised as a community movement. A vertical community, not a horizontal community.

Driving at the speed limit is best of all. Speed limits are important for safety, but even more important because they space-out the traffic, creating smooth traffic flow. But few follow them. Humans are hopeless drivers.

Happy bday cuz!

Happy Birthday sir!

My first call at work yesterday was a guy who said “what can I do about the prick who lives across the road from me?” The default state of human life is not happy, peaceful coexistence. It’s fighting, for status. America is not getting more ‘polarised’, it’s swapping collective life for social life. Social life is pure violence. Imitative violence. Without some massive disruptive treat to life itself, this is what humans will always do. Fight each other, for status. In imitative teams. Then if you get wars or plagues or natural disasters, suddenly a ‘we’ occurs, where people ‘come together’. The peaceful, healthy and prosperous lives we grew up with were still a legacy of the post-WW2 time. Now that ‘we’ is long gone.

Imagine them making a Star Trek movie where they got to choose between the sound of a combustion engine for a space ship, or this sound. Even the sound of an EV is sexier.

John Howard popularised the ‘assimilationist’ view of immigration. The one that constantly bangs the drum about how migrants have to ‘integrate’ with ‘our way of life’. The problem with this view is, who is ‘our’? For example my father was part of the massive European migration to Australia post-WW2. That wave of migrants changed this country fundamentally. Our ‘way of life’ became something much different. The Australia Howard and his descendants defend had disappeared already before the 1970s. Similarly today, I personally don’t subscribe to many of our new ways of life, particularly those where social media replaces older social structures. I’m more like the dreaded migrant. Howard’s call, and Hanson’s and the modern LNP’s calls today matching it, and now Trump and Farage et al too, is really just a call for the world to be like the one a (very small and getting smaller) sub-group of Australia likes. It’s just one of many ways of being Australian. It’s how all social change works. Lots of people bemoan the loss of ‘great’ music or cars, for example, as new forms emerge. It’s not about the music, or cars, or anything really, it’s about their place in the social status hierarchies of society. Their team. They don’t like no long being the ‘in’ thing. The average Australian from the last census is a 37-year old woman, often (and increasingly) of Indian descent. Not the flag wavers.

I think if I had to nominate one food that has done more damage to peoples’ health than any other, I’d pick soft drink. Soda, as the Americans call it. That stuff is disease in a can, and as the research now shows, the low sugar versions are as bad if not even worse.

Does Tesla Mobile Service still exist in Australia? From feedback I’ve seen on various online forums, it appears to have been quietly removed as an option? All the service options in the app direct people to one of the existing Tesla Service Centres? I’d be delighted for that to be wrong. When I was buying a Tesla one of the big selling points was that they’re engineered to need minimal maintenance, and you had this backup in case, particularly as I live in a regional area, a long way from any of the Service Centres. BYD by contrast is already partnering with existing car dealers in regional areas to establish BYD service centres locally, for regional people. Right now if the mobile service options is gone for Tesla, and you live more than 80 km from a Tesla Service Centre, your options seem basically zero if you have a major failure? Just a very expensive tow to one of those Centres? Unless you can find a local mechanic or car service business tooled up for Teslas, both still pretty thin on the ground, particularly in regional areas. https://www.tesla.com/en_au/support/mobile-service

Microplastics are a big issue now. The two greatest sources of them are washing your clothes, and car tyres. You can buy filters for your washing machine output now that stop the microfibres entering the sewer system and therefore waterways. Not much you can do about car tyre wear. But some of this is behavioural/cultural too. Like how many clothes we own, and how often we wash. I was speaking to a Gen Z person this week, who lives with their partner. Just the two of them, in their mid-20s. They wash 5 times every week. 5 times! How does a young couple generate 5 loads of washing a week?

An elderly family friend went to hospital to have surgery for lung cancer. Caught Covid there, and the hospital’s response? Sent them home to deal with it themselves. LUNG CANCER. When mum caught Covid in hospital, the hospital’s response was ‘we have about the same level of Covid here as is in the wider community’. Like this meant they were doing a good job. Zero infection control. Florence Nightigale revolutionised modern hospital treatment with her obsession on fresh air for patients. Now it’s like she never existed. Bottom-feeding politicans are the cause here, and their ‘living with Covid’ bullshit. Egged on by a community of kidults who found public health too obstructive of their fun lifestyles.

Batteries are selling at astronomical levels now. Which means the shonks are out there. Like this deal, I wouldn’t touch it with a stick. 42 kWh is way beyond what most households would ever use, and they couple it to an absolutely puny 5kW inverter. It’d be like trying to fill and empty a massive water tank with a drinking straw. Use a service like solarquotes to get this stuff done.

Remember Monty Python’s ‘I Like Chinese’ song? Its time has come. For years we thought about a robot vacuum, but the cleaning wasn’t always great, and the AI not good enough. The Chinese have cracked it. Dyson has tried twice with robot vacuums, and failed miserably, with vastly overpriced units that aren’t great. But the new ones from China like this Mova Z50 Ultra (what we got) are breathtaking. Only they have the expertise to build stuff like this, and offer it at such unbelievable prices. It vacuums and mops and navigates through even complex rooms, flawlessly. There’s something special about coming home to a freshly vacuumed and mopped home.

I recently discovered SailGP racing. The F50 catamarans are outrageous! They can do more than 100 km/h, with their carbon fibre hydrofoils which lift the whole boat out of the water. And the sails aren’t fabric, they’re solid, like an aeroplane wing, and their height can be altered. But what interested me just as much is the way they organise the GP competition, like F1, for boats. All the technical development, repairs and maintenance are done centrally, by the competition itself. Meaning out on the water every team has exactly the same boat, and the outcome of each race is purely the result of skill and strategy. F1 could learn from that, it’s a joke, big money wins races with engineering.

Something you won’t ever see an autonomous driving car do.

The world is going nowhere in the fight against climate change. This is like an enormous asteroid heading for Earth, as in the movie Armageddon, while we all choose to ignore it and go on holidays. Millions who failed science at school comfort themselves with the coming catastrophe, with fairy tale science on social media. I often post about how the fight for status is all of human life. This is a perfect example. The status quo (the current state of play in the status games) will never, ever voluntarily change things. It always has to be forced to be changed, by catastrophic external threat, like natural disasters, war or plagues. We saw with Covid how not even plagues shake the kidult status quo. So climate change will be a big ‘let’s go to Bali’ yawn. Our only way to avoid total catastrophic destruction of civilisation itself, is the enormous disruption of China, the only nation on Earth taking climate change seriously. But I doubt even that will do it. We’ve gifted future generations the end of possibly all human life on Earth as we’ve come to know it. Some will argue with that, the same people who failed science at school and now apprently are experts in it because they use social media. To those people I always say now, stay in your own lane, you don’t have a fucking clue, you wouldn’t let others come and tell you how to do your job, hey?

Was listening to a violin concerto this morning on the way to work, and thought, why did we bother with electric guitars? The violin is so much better in terms of tone, sustain, harmonics, and ease of fingerboard use. Yeh it doesn't play chords, but just in terms of playing a melody or a lead line, it was an astonishing invention. The quality and variety of tone and the huge continuum of expressive emotion it can produce. And using a bow gives you that infinite sustain, at any volume, or the capacity to modulate that volume in real-time in hugely expressive ways. I may even buy one.

The comments here show why in history meaningful change only comes when vast proportions of the human population are completely wiped out by war or natural disaster, or plague, or generations die of old age. Planck’s adage. It happens one funeral at a time. I wish it were otherwise, but humans will never stop fighting each other for status. Status is their identity. So reality does the change for them.

In the US the supporters of the assassinated Charlie Kirk are now targeting those who they see criticise him by telling their employers as well. Is anybody else fundamentally bored with the USA? Except now with social media, this is all of us.

I’m sure the rest of us are fitter and stronger than Usain, with all of our own ‘natural’ Covid infections giving our immune systems a healthy workout.

‘All You Need is Love’ became an anthem for the countercultural revolution. Which is still our culture today. The Beatles split up after only 8 years because they couldn’t bear being in the same room together.

Because we're entering dangerous times with echoes of the early 1930s (when people start talking nationalities and flags, lock the doors), I think it's worth looking at the features of criminal behaviour in Australia. See the dot points below. Imitation is the basis of most if not all human thought and behaviour. So any mechanism that allows the imitation of criminal acts will magnify criminality dramatically. Hello, social media. Criminals increasingly even film and share crime in their feeds, to outdo one another. The partner of imitation is scapegoating. When things go wrong through viral crime, a scapegoat is found to try to reduce the violence. In 1930s times, that was race. Not much has changed, though now you can add Left and Right and every other variety of identity-based social life, which proliferate in social media society. A Premier League with an exponential growth in teams. It's a powder keg waiting to blow. We never learn a thing from history, as the saying goes.

Somebody at work yesterday was riffing on the same theme, that the problem with housing was due to too many migrants. Again, welcome to the early 1930s. Lots of flags, and petrol bombs. Even the building industry said hold on, who’s going to build the houses, without migrants? Many countries, including Australia, are giant aged care facilities, with no young people. Only migration keeps us from collapsing.

China is saving the world. Meanwhile here in the West we just produce new identities every day. We join teams and battle other teams for status, which in turn gives us identity. Everyone has a list of ‘causes’ in the West, while producing nothing. We brand our inaction, with designer clothes and coffees and cars and trips, all focused on our precious status-identities. Still wallowing in the disastrous bog of 60s counterculture. Proud of our ‘diversity’ of ways of doing nothing, turning every pressing problem into a new variety of identity. Podcasting our endless fascination with ourselves, doing nothing. But we look good doing it, branded.

HBD! ☕🎈🥂

My work has random drug and alcohol testing. A safety thing, all fine. But isn’t it crazy bizarre that we don’t do any infectious disease testing in workplaces, which cause vastly more injury to staff and disruption to work.

Car makers know what this data shows. Anybody who's done year 8 maths should. The average broom broom social media person on the other hand, well...

There seems quite a bit to like about Sussan Ley, including that she flies planes, and added a second S to her name just to piss off her parents. I doubt she actually believes all the small government, anti-welfare rubbish like this. It's just red meat she's throwing to the Neanderthals that make up most of her coalition now, to stop them knifing her.

For the very many out there, whose families, friends and selves are constantly sick now. Covid has created dysfunctional immune systems, leaving people wide open to disease and unable to resolve that disease. SARS-CoV-2 is linked to “an unusually high level of ‘indiscriminate’ killing of T cells,”and is “reminiscent of” measles, which can cause immune amnesia by depleting memory B cells (a different type of immune cell), leaving people vulnerable to pathogens they were previously immune to.” The paper also demolishes the ‘immunity debt’ idea that became so popular, that this was happening because lockdowns had stopped people catching lots of diseases, like your immune system needs a good workout. Complete anti-scientific bullshit. https://www.bmj.com/content/390/bmj.r1733

Lots of talk recently about boosting productivity in Australia. Here’s a major productivity-killer nobody talks about. Sickness in the workplace. Already before Covid colds and flu cost businesses $7 billion/year. Immensely more now, with Covid. All quite easily fixed, not rocket science. The challenge is reversing the tidal wave of dumb ‘it’s healthy to get infected’, ‘let’s live with infections’ zombies.

The industry knows it. Electric cars: - are much more powerful - are non-polluting - are silent - run for years without servicing - are dramatically cheaper to run, and - can be fuelled with free energy, made locally. All the diehards have left is the noise. Funnily, they only like the noise of an engine when it's their engine. They don't want to live next to a busy road.

Happy Birthday, Megan! 🎂🥂🎈

I'm going to get this, so it can drive me to and from work each day, door-to-door, a round trip of 130 km. It'll be safer for me, and less stress and effort.

America’s decay isn’t caused by ‘authoritarians’ taking over the country. It’s caused by its cultural obsession, its hatred of public regulation and policing. That’s the theme of every Western movie, right there in plain sight. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, studied how the ‘commons’ (i.e. public spaces and resources) *must* be strongly and visibly regulated and policed, to function. You’ll see the same arguments even more strongly about road use. The libertarian car enthusiasts believe we’re over-policed, that it’s all ‘revenue raising’. But as the US discovered with its public transport, it’s UNDER-policing that makes it too unsafe for most people to want to use. Cars on the road are the same, they must be strongly regulated and policed, for roads to function as public roads. Read this article, it’s fascinating. And look at the stats on what happens when you under-police, how the prison population explodes. The data for the US is staggering.

Here’s the problem in the US in one graph. It refuses to do basic public regulation and policing (all sides of politics), because the entire culture of the US was founded upon deep distrust of public anything. Of the ‘establishment’. It sees it as ‘authoritarian’, largely because the US was founded by religious Puritans determined to not allow the State to ever restrict them again. As a result it ends up having to throw vast numbers of people in jail, when the WIld West culture doesn’t function. It is dramtically UNDER-policed, as a nation, too obsessed with the ‘freedom’ of individuals to do whatever they like. It mistakes regulation for authoritarian rule, that’s its deep cultural DNA. (Link to source: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647/THE-INJUSTICE-OF-UNDER-POLICING-IN-AMERICA1)

The big drop in costs for batteries have made them the hot new thing in grid planning. Will delight many protesting against wind farms and pumped hydro. The real test of what they actually stand for will be whether they now redirect their protests against batteries too, which is happening. They're numpties for fossil fuel money, trying to disrupt all renewables, dressed up as 'local' or 'community' concerns about specific projects.

Happy Birthday, Jason! ☕🥂🎈

How fast things are moving. NSW is running almost entirely on renewables during the day now, close to 80%. This is the last 7 days. The gap is mostly filled by coal, the red line. Overnight though NSW needs more wind (green line) and batteries (blue). Wind blows 24 hours per day. The batteries are coming fast now, but the National Party have done their best to destroy wind power in the State (the green). Batteries will take it over anyway. Home solar is carrying a lot of the load, because people got fed up waiting for fossil fuel-sponsored politicians to do anything. Get solar and a battery and kick the fossil fuel industry out of the country entirely.

There are mini-Trumps emerging everywhere, at every scale. From local through to State through to national and international. Super dangerous times, where popularity is the only measure of everything.

Happy birthday Kate :)

“Aren’t you scared you’re going to get REALLY sick when you stop wearing a mask?” I hear that all the time. People genuinely believe that getting infected with diseases is keeping them healthier. Just think about that, the idea that being sick lots, makes you less sick. Repeat that, so the craziness of it sinks in. Getting sick lots, so that you don’t get sick lots. Politicians deliberately mixed up two completely separate things. The ‘hygiene’ hypothesis, which says it’s good for kids to play in the dirt, because it builds their immune systems. That’s mostly true. But that has NEVER meant getting lots of diseases strengthens your immune system. The germs kids get from dirt aren’t infectious diseases. After lockdowns there was (and still is) a surge of a whole range of infectious diseases. The political ‘ooops’ explanation was lockdowns stopped us all getting infected, so now our immune systems were flabby. (Seriously, people still believe this.) Like we all get flu, RSV, pertussis, measles etc. every 2-3 months, and those 2-3 months of isolation meant we missed our healthy top-up. Fuck we’re dumb. Now kids who weren’t even born during lockdowns are still getting sicker than ever. The only way to reliably not get sick from infections, is to not get infected in the first place. Amazing that even needs to be said. Covid’s danger is that it weakens your immune system with each infection, making you not only more likely to catch Covid again, but also every other disease going around. Why so many are now so sick, all the time.

We’re all encouraged to think democracy = elections. Riddle me this. The more people queue up to vote in the US, the less democratic the US becomes.

Alan Kohler consistently shows how even the world’s modest climate targets are completely out of reach. Some are delighted by that, they feel like that’s a ‘win’ in the idiot online debates. Here’s the most basic way to understand the science. We’ve burned energy that took several million years to produce, in only 300 years. We’re adding 6-8 atomic bombs’ worth of heat to the atmosphere every SECOND. A total catastrophe, already well underway. Humanity is unlikely to survive it.

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of kidult culture is its insistence that only happy, positive things are important. Trying to raise any serious or even critical issue at all prompts loud accusations of ‘hysteria’ or ‘alarmism’, and a counter-movement of a flood of ‘positive’ social media posts to show that life is fine after all, no need to think or do anything. Sometimes called toxic positivity, but even more than that, it’s what I call the ‘culture of the feels’. Where we assess our lives purely according to how they make us feel. Feelings aren’t things, they’re symptoms of actual things. You don’t feel happy, you feel happy *about* something. Feeling bad is a symptom that something bad is happening, and you need to fix that bad thing. Not try to force ‘positive’ emotions over the top of it. Emotions and feelings are neither positive or negative. They’re like street signs for your life. Instead we run from our problems, in endless distractions - travel, entertainment, booze, buying things, gigs, drugs etc. All things that boost the happy feels, temporarily. The joy of adulthood, now being lost, is being happy because there are problems to solve. Things to get stuck into, to work hard and think hard about. Rather than this adoelscent substitute for adult life, where we chase only ‘positive’ escapist experiences. Where we don’t have ‘mental health problems’ every time we’re presented with a challenge. We should relish challenges.

Happy Birthday!

Australia’s youth voted overwhelmingly at the last election for George and people like him to go away.

People know I’ve campaigned against DST for years. But this is a world where knowledge has no currency. Only what’s popular survives, no matter how stupid it is. We live with lethal viruses, we do nothing as the planet burns to a crisp, we fight against free energy and much better silent and powerful cars, etc.

HBD! 💐🥳☕

So we’re adding 6-8 atomic bombs’ worth of heat into the atmosphere every second (yes, SECOND), and have been for decades. Where’s all that heat going? Until now, mostly into the oceans, have a look. But they now can’t hold the heat, and are starting to release it back into the atmosphere. They’ll keep doing that for decades, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Meanwhile, we keep pumping even more atomic bombs worth of heat into that same atmosphere, every second. We’re being cooked alive. But do tell me about your latest snorefest of a holiday, particularly if it involved burning tonnes of aviation fuel. Or your latest petrol or diesel-guzzling broom broom car. I’m riveted.

The battery rebate program has been hijacked by wankpanzerism. A lot of the rebate money is going to people supersizing home batteries to ridiculous sizes they’ll never need. Like people buying RAM Utes, it’s ’my battery is bigger than yours’ status stuff. I think the program should have offered an even greater rebate, say 40-50% of cost, to a standard 13.5 kWh home battery. To get more batteries to more people, rather than wankpanzer batteries to the status junkies. (P.S. I wouldn’t touch a 42 kWh battery that only cost $5K.)

Robert is chief climate scientist at Berkeley. I posted earlier and in the past about how the oceans have absorbed a lot of the heat generated by our burning of fossil fuels. They’re now full. And it’s worse than that because they’re now releasing that heat back into the atmosphere, to add to the heat we’re still adding every day.

So many think renewables is still a choice for people to make. The energy sector made that choice years ago, and not because it's full of Greenies. Renewables are so much cheaper and faster to roll out. That's it. The end. Solar power will be the largest source of electricity in the world, by 2033. By an enormous margin. It's a measure of just how stupid humanity can be that some people still argue against clean, almost free, available everywhere energy. Just to try to win some pathetic fake 'debate' somewhere, funded and set up by the fossil fuel industry to vacuum up the gullible.

If you had to guess, without Googling or asking AI, what has killed the overwhelming majority of humans who have ever lived, what would you say? (Smarty pants public health people like Dorothy can ssshh.)

Javier Milei is another Trumpian, who promised to take a chainsaw in Argentina to what all Trumpians see as the enemy. Government. It’s been an absolute disaster. Now relying upon loans from the IMF and US to the tune of $45 billion just to try to keep the country from completely collapsing. All populists, from local council through to country level, will tell you government is the problem. That it’s ’corrupt’ and ‘incompetent’, all the greatest populist hits. That’s their shtick. None of them could even boil an egg. They destroy societies.

People wilfully ignorant of history refuse to see how the surge in importance of rock stars was the pointy end of the countercultural movement. Here are John and Yoko spelling it out, ‘power to the people’. That’s still our culture, I’d bet 9.5 out of 10 people still think that’s what democracy is. ‘The people’ is a collective noun. That’s literally all it is. It’s a nothing, that can do nothing.

David is one of Australia’s leading specialists in the treatment of Covid. What he sees in his rooms and at the hospitals every day horrifies and scares him. Much of it going undiagnosed because GPs don’t even understand what they’re looking at. As he says, a massive global health crisis, huge numbers of people will never recover and have appalling quality of life and much shorter lifespans. And we’re still infecting everybody with gleeful abandon, including all of our children. An entire generation deliberately infected with a pandemic virus. As a culture we have worse than zero morality now, a culture of kidults interested only in ‘living its best life’.

More than half the children who have ever been born died before they were teenagers. From infections.

Fear not if you think climate change is a big con, your Great Intelligent Leader has your back. The rest of us are just 'stupid people'.

Robot vacuum faces off against cat. Like a Western movie.

There are 2 Denyers available to view tonight. I'd choose Deal or No Deal, this other one is a rerun of a boring program from before the last local government election.

Social media isn’t where we go to get information about society and the world. It IS our society now. We live inside it. And it’s structured like a high school. Likes and followers. The transformation of adult life into extended high school life was complete years ago already.

Running costs for our EV are now 80 cents per week.

Gig culture (adults being adolescents forever) is still fighting public health. And losing.

I put to you that the world was a much more wonderful and enchanted place when we had to imagine faraway lands. Rather than invade them as tourists. Us going there is destroying these enchanted places, transforming them fundamentally. I’m old enough to remember that magical feeling of places being sacred and mysterious, where we respected distance and knew more about these lands from afar, than we do now by visiting them.

If you’re sceptical status runs all human life, the road should be a great teacher. For example, why is it so overwhelmingly popular to overtake other vehicles, even those doing the speed limit? And why do people being overtaken often almost feel violated by it? Because our position on the road is about status. Overtaking is like queue jumping. Some drivers can’t bear the thought of any vehicle being in front of them at all, and will speed up to overtake any vehicle in sight. But even more moderate drivers will feel a sting if they’re doing the speed limit and others fly past them. You’ll also notice often how a slow vehicle that fights against being overtaken suddenly falls well back once you’re past them, proving again it wasn’t about speed. It was about status. People who just can’t bear being behind anybody are beyond help and should have their licence removed. Bring on semi-automated driving. (Speed limits are mostly useful to space out traffic and stop congestion. Most driving doesn’t know this, and wouldn’t pay attention to it even if it did understand.)

AI can now pass the very hardest chartered financial analyst exams in a matter of minutes, including essay writing. Meanwhile an Australian company uses AI to take on online spammers and grifters, by creating thousands of fake online people, to flood the spammers systems with fake targets. AI is like autonomous cars. Humans are hopeless drivers, and also mostly don’t think, they imitate one another in social status games. In both cases machines are far superior at things we like to believe only humans can do. They take the best parts of humanity, which humanity doesn’t use because it’s too busy playing status games, and actually implement them in life.

I’m old enough to remember a Bathurst where civic life was people rolling up their sleeves to help build a community. Where even when the work day ended, you joined a community organisation, like Rotary or Lions or Apex, to keep building actual community things, even in your spare time. Now largely replaced with online groups fighting vacuous online wars with each other, often imported from Trumpian groups overseas, claiming to speak for the community while building not one single thing. Using the physical town as fodder. In-between buying barista coffee or vastly overpriced restaurant food, in branded clothes, towns gentrified into lifestyle resorts with no functional foundation. Posting and podcasting their daily fascination with themselves, as kidults.

The easiest social media posts to critique are the obvious hate speech type things, or scammers, or people being generally abusive. But this type of friendly innocuous post is actually the most dangerous symptom of all of what social media has done to us. We’re living our lives on it. It has become our community. These posts betray that loud and clear, people see them *as* Bathurst (in this case), as the community. The new public square. In reality FB (for example) is an American corporation, monetising all of these communities, driving engagement (and thus $$) through algorithms that encourage people to constantly compare themselves with others, and to fight and argue with one another. That’s also why you don’t see much of my everyday life on FB. To me that’s the worse violation of social media, to make this the venue for that life. It turns peoples’ lives into endless imitative rivalries, posturing for social status, fracturing families and communities.

Happy Birthday, Dan! 🥂☕🎂 The big 5-0!!!

If you still think social media is just a happy and fun place to share updates about your friends and families, use this video by Benjamin Netanyahu as lube to extract your head out of your arse. He spells it out in plain terms. It’s the number one weapon for all countries now. Because people don’t live in towns or countries any more. They live inside social media. It’s why people like Netanyahu want control of it.

Not only will installing solar save you thousands of dollars in electricty costs and pay for itself (easily the smartest investment for your spare money), but it also significantly increases the value of your home at resale. See graphs below. In addition having energy efficiency measures in your house (double-glazed windows, good insulation etc.) adds another similar premium to house sale price. But it gets even better. Because if you electrify your life, converting all home appliances to electric and also your car, mower etc, those same solar panels can be leveraged to create even more dramatic cost savings for you. Like I posted last week, the EV is costing us 80 cents per week to run. Worth pondering next time you’re at a petrol or diesel bowser, as the big dollars click over. Fossil fuel energy is the centre of our culture. All of the proceeds from it go to a handful of overseas countries, who use it to coat their Rolls Royces in pure gold. Renewable energy is Australian energy. Buy Australian. It’s not just free energy, you can even make money from it.

As somebody who has worked as a governance professional for a quarter of a century now, it’s this sort of basic fact about democracies which I think is lost on just about everybody. ‘Authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’ countries are actually equivalent. Democracies just have populist substitutes for that ‘one man’.

Happy Birthday! Enjoy your day! 🎈🎊🎁

Happy Birthday, Kate! 🎂💐🌟

There was a time people could all have different opinions, and it didn't matter a lot because important stuff was taken care of separately to peoples' opinions. But in social media society, opinions create our reality. And look at the bullshit so many Australians believe. Gullible numpties vacuumed up by fossil fuel-funded propaganda, mostly on social media. This is my kids' future, so my tolerance for this bullshit is zero. We're well past the time for tolerance of any sort of bullshit, it's destructive of the future of civilisation itself now. If you believe this sort of crap, grow a fucking brain.

B-grade Hollywood scripts replace most thought and knowledge of history today I think. Like the claims America is being taken over by authoritarian Nazis. Pretty much everybody who says that never knew or studied any Nazis. To me America is just entering another Gilded Age. It had one at the end of the 19th century, after its Civil War. That war like all great catastrophes broke the existing status quo, leaving the field wide open for new individuals to come storming through and dominate American status hierarchies. And storm through they did. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt. Sometimes called ‘the robber barons’. One man saw that this was just an old historical pattern repeating itself. Thorstein Veblen. He saw this was really about battles for status, to restore a feudal model of society, humanity’s stable form throughout all of history. Democracy never was about the people. All the checks and balances we call democracy today were a truce between the King and his robber barons, via the Magna Carta, a document where they carved up the spoils of society. Trump is restoring the King and court model to the US, with his own robber barons, the owners of social media.

Covid attacks CD8 T cells in the immune system. These are the cells that usually fight cancer. We declared the war won against Covid when it was only just beginning. And we're infecting all the kids, over and over. Kidult culture doesn't give 2 shits, it'll fly to Bali, or grab an expensive coffee and go to a gig.

The meeting between all of those with 'opinions' on climate change, and the reality of it, has been brought forward.

Got your solar yet? Tip: get us much as you can afford and will fit on your roof. That way you have a 'superpower' system i.e. maximises winter production, while giving you a vast excess in the other seasons to do what you like with, include sell for profit and power your car.

Flushing of the duck pond underway again. That algae is bad (and stinks).

215,700 millionaires live in London. 516 of them have more than $100 million. There are also 45 billionaires. The rest of the UK? Average incomes are lower than the 5 poorest states in the US, and the OECD average as well. Life expectancy in some parts of Blackpool are lower than in Rwanda. It’s a King and his peasants. That’s what the great conservative revolution started by Maggie Thatcher was all about. Restoring feudal society. Before that outrages you, it’s the dominant form of society, and has been for thousands of years. Trump is doing the same to the US, Putin to Russia, and Xi to China. Farage is looking to accelerate the same shift even further in the UK, under cover of populist claptrap about migrants. I’ll post more about why any knowledge of history would have predicted this.

Lots of the global army of Trumpians will be palpitating with excitement, seeing that sign. The thing kidult life has forgotten is that humans don’t determine reality. You can have pathetic little debating wins on social media. Reality will still win. If you delay, it will sit you on your arse. Hard enough that you won’t get up again.