October 2025

Where’s the fetus going to gestate, folks?

For thousands of years, Kings dominated human life globally. Only churches provided any sort of counter-weight. For example the 19th century was a century of kings, here’s a cartoon of the world’s top kings in 1815, carving up the spoils after defeating Napoleon. Kings and emperors and pharaohs dominated for thousands of years prior to this too. Then in the 20th century, we claimed we developed an alternative. Democracy. Now ‘the people’ would be sovereign. (Never mind the Greeks invented it thousands of years previously, and it never took off.) We had ‘people’-led revolutions in Russia and China, that then became ‘totalitarian’ regimes. Democracy in the way we think it exists, as the people leading countries, has never existed. It’s always kings, even if we call them by different names. Xi and Putin are kings, Trump too. The hapless pollies who claim to be the champions of the people are trampled in the stampede of the same people to vote for kings, like Trump.

This week Trump, and one of his clown car monkey idiots, Defense Secretary Hesgeth (ex Fox News), gathered all of the top brass of the US Defense forces in a single room. What followed was hilarious and horrific. Trump told them they were too fat, and there were too many blacks and women. He and Hesgeth have arbitrarily fired some of them in recent weeks, unsurprisingly also black and female. Trump also suggested the US military should be training in American cities, by which he meant going to war with Democrat-led cities. Listen to these last moments of the meeting, where Hesgeth told them to go out and ‘draw fire’. The total silence of zero response. Hesgeth and Trump are far too stupid to understand the lethal danger to themselves of the furious and disgusted silence of generals. If you put the military offside, your time at the top of any coup is over. These are professional modern soldiers, absolutely disgusted at the idiot clowns now in charge. It remains to be seen if they’ll remove him, as a threat to the nation, as militaries will do in coups.

I don’t think our global Covid strategy was widely understood. Let me spell it out in a few words. “Infect all the kids, so they can build up immunity and it won’t spread into the working community.” No conspiracies there, that is the actual strategy we’re following. It was thought to be harmless in children, so senior politicans and public health leaders decided let’s infect the entire next generation, over and over. With a pathogen that creates no immunity, in fact destroys immunity to everything else too. How it’s going. Now kids are also dying of ‘elderly’ cancers, like bowel and pancreatic, because Covid is attacking the immune CD8 T cells, the cancer fighters. Kidult culture yawns and goes to another gig, or on an OS trip.

Had a quick drive in and out of Sydney yesterday, and observed driver behaviour as I always do. What I found. About 30% of drivers were consistently below or well below the speed limit. About 40% of drivers were consistently above or well above the speed limit. Trying to overtake the first slower group transformed most of them instantly into members of the other group. Other fun behaviours I observed, and see time and time again. The speeding crowd have zero patience for anybody else on the road now. If you’re in a line of vehicles overtaking a slower vehicle, often you won’t be overtaking fast enough for their liking, so they’ll try to undertake you, to jump the overtaking queue. Similarly vehicles joining a road from side roads now often simply drive into the path of oncoming cars, expecting the whole queue of cars to slam their brakes on to make room for them. They can’t wait 10-15 seconds for traffic to pass. And towing. Fuck me, the towing. Wankpanzers with trailers loaded up with tonnes of gear, driving as if they’re in a hatchback. Coming into Lithgow yesterday two of them were holding up a line of cars, which is fine. But then the overtaking lanes arrived and both suddenly hit 120. Several tonnes of metal being towed between them. Even semi-trailers doing this sort of thing now. Road behaviour reveals a deeper culture. I now call it Permanent Year 9. Kidult culture. That’s the level of adult responsibility out there, in all walks of life. And I feel that’s unfair to Year 9 kids.

I’m the only person I know who still regularly masks. My kids are some of the only people their age who regularly mask. Why do we do it? Because nothing actually changed, the pandemic never ended. You can see here advice from just this week from the New York City health department. Pretending pandemics are over when they’re not is peak stupid in the entire history of humanity. Easily the most lethal and stupid thing humans have ever done.

So we had our little social media performative hissy fit with Swastikas and Nazi memes, about Tesla. Where people joined teams and cheered on the memes, and the mob riots and burnings. Fast forward a few months, and all that childish bullshit has been swamped by the empirical reality of the technology itself. Kidult society folks. It continues because nobody closes the loop on these pathetic adolescent games and tracks actual outcomes. Well, here are the outcomes. Engineering - 1, adolescent adult life - 0.

Trump is only the tail-end of a trend going back decades. Democracy is failing everywhere. But what does that mean, the lurch to autocracy, or authoritarianism? Those are just bogey words from inside the filter of the nonsense ideas we have about democracy. About ‘the people’. The people ARE now running socieities, through social media. What is that producing? New kings. Trump is a (very bad) king. Anybody who studies history even for 10 minutes can see this is a return to the form of society humans have had for thousands of years.

If democracy was a horse, we’d have shot it decades ago. Maybe it’s never existed, in the way we think about it. Which is why it’s failing, spectacularly, everywhere.

House prices in Australia are now 2-3 times higher, relative to income, than they were in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In the 'impossibly unaffordable' range. It's not avocado on toast doing this, too many who are now living comfortable retirements made that money owning those 1960s-80s houses, which is why nothing has been done about it.

If you have the terrible mental illness, EV range anxiety, check out the new Tesla Model 3 Long Range.

Again, if you can avoid social media, the reality of what's happening out in the world will astound you. A revolution, don't miss it listening to drongos here.

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the accepted wisdom of the day, to mollify his community by supporting the status quo. The price he paid for doing that was brutal, we can’t imagine today what a total banishment this was. To this day that community rejects him, nearly 400 years later. When I hit my 50s, I realised your life at that point can either follow the standard pattern of tip-toeing around the feelings and sensitivities of the community, all based upon the always shifting equilibrium of status in that community. Not tackling things that might upset family or friends, because lives are run by status. Like Spinoza, I decided that the only true joy and freedom is the truth of the world we live in. And that truth will always - always - be unpopular, it will put you at odds with the other people in your life. What is considered true is never about knowledge, it’s about status, the dominance of particular groups at a point in time. Following that path has cost me friends, but I actually don’t care. You get one life, and I refuse to live it as if I never left high school, constantly negotiating some position in the status hierarchy of the groups we live in. These thoughts came to me with the imminent arrival of the idiotic ‘Daylight Saving’ time again, plunging us back into dark winter mornings, in the middle of Spring. A phenomenally stupid practice, that survives because ‘people like it’ i.e. because it has status. It’s ridiculous, it harms peoples’ health, but fuck we now ‘live with viruses’, because the same unthinking status games say that’s fun. Not for me. In my life if a friendship or even love now gets in the way of obvious truths of the world, it’s bye from me. One of those truths actually is that we are all solitary, we just mostly don’t realise it.

One of the great cons of our time is politicans and others telling people that only existing energy is ’reliable’ and ‘affordable’. They tap into deep-seated reluctance humans have to change, it’s always easier to sell the current status quo as better, because change is scary to people, it threatens their comfortable status in society. In reality, energy for example is only expensive now when tied to fossil fuels. Coal, gas, oil. Spain has shown it, by decoupling its electricty grid from gas and coal. It’s one of the only countries where power prices are now going down.

RIP Patricia Routledge. Most known for a series that focused on the defining feature of all our lives. Status. Keeping up appearances. In a cartoonish way, Hyacinth was seen as the only status-seeker, when in reality we all are. Also modern production quality hides the passing of time. Nearly the entire cast of that show is now dead.

Thanks to Tim for pointing out this milestone. There’s a revolution happening, don’t be disappointed when you have to tell your grandkids you were one of the whinging doubters sniping from the sidelines. Also for those who mistake thinking with regurgitating idiot slogans like ‘but not when the sun doesn’t shine’, I’ve added the red arrow. That’s where billions of investment is coming online, fast. Private investment too, not ‘subsidised’ government investment, for the same non-thinking sloganeers.

California has 1.5 times the population of Australia. Already 20% of its evening power between 6pm and 10pm is coming from batteries. This is our future, coming fast.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-04/cost-of-living-pressures-on-ratepayers-as-qld-councils-up-rates/105833630?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

If you want to understand why the status quo is fighting so desperately to save fossil fuels, and funding wave after wave of propaganda drivel to try to get ordinary folk to help them, just follow the money. Seriously, contemplate the staggering numbers here. Put solar panels on your roof, buy an EV and electrify all of your appliances. You’ll change the world, get this parasite industry’s hands out of your wallet. Unlike any other revolution in history, this one can free you simply by your own individual actions. You’ll save vast amounts of money.

EVs are following the classic S-curve of innovation. Slow early, then an exponential take-off, followed by a flattening out when mass adoption has happened. The reason all change is like this is, again, status. ‘Early adopters’ tend to be rich and higher status. Once enough of them adopt an innovation, the rest of society will follow through mass imitation (that’s the exponential surge, imitation is lightning fast). Not because they think the change is clever or smart, but because FOMO kicks in. They don’t want to be left out of what everybody else is doing. And everybody else wants to emulate the higher status folk, that’s why imitation is the absolute foundation of all human life.

So often those who are convinced daylight saving is a brilliant idea also can’t figure out even after years whether to put their clocks forward or back. I think that says it all.

11 time zones. Brought to you by ‘but I like it’. The culture of likes, and followers. Kidult culture, social media culture.

We think brands like Toyota, Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan etc. are the dominant car sellers in Australia. As an indication of just how out of whack our feelings are with reality, CarSauce went through the car sales data and got rid of all the fleet buys, which skew the results hugely. Toyota Hiluxes and Ford Rangers usually top the ‘best selling cars in Australia’ lists. But most of that is fleet sales. Who sells BY FAR the most vehicles in Australian, in 2025? China. It’s not even close. 53% of new car sales are for Chinese cars. The next best is Korea, with only 15%. In CarSauce’s data, by far the best-selling car in Australia is the Chery Tiggo 4. Chinese cars are now high quality, and unbeatable on price.

It’s been a lot of years since I first shared this science. I remember the outright hostility I got from some about it. People didn’t want sugar to be bad, like Daylight Saving they ‘like it’, so it must be fine. Humans don’t really think a lot, societies don’t run on knowledge. Adolescent culture. The culture of nothing but feelings, and the only good feelings are nice feelings. Things we ‘like’. Likes and followers replace adult life. Social media society, where we never leave high school.

The numbers in astronomy are almost beyond belief. We live in the Milky Way galaxy. A large galaxy, with billions of stars and (get this) an estimated 1-3 TRILLION planets. In this one galaxy. There are an estimated two TRILLION galaxies in the known universe.

What different parts of the world charge for university education. The Anglo world (the US, UK, Australia, Canada - in pink), really just big nursing homes now in the demographics, unsurprisingly more focused on tax-free retirement bonanzas now than on educating the young. Cultures in decline, where bashing migrants while draped in flags carrying memories of 70-80 years ago wins votes, even though there’s nobody else young left to run the nursing homes or do any of the work.

Look at the hugely inflated sense we’ve all grown up with of the size of northern hemisphere countries, due to the Mercator map projection, a mapping technique to try to make navigation by sea easier.

As another week begins in local government, another week of constant abuse from members of the community, I thought this was timely. You can see here that all councils, everywhere, are financially collapsing. Not because of corruption and incompetence, the favourite kidult idea (everything is goodies and baddies for adults who are still teenagers), but because as the article says, only 3 cents out of every tax dollar goes to local government, even though it oversees vast amounts of the nation’s infrastructure. Nearly 700,000 km of roads, just for starters. 80 cents goes to the feds, 17 to the States. The overwhelming majority of services are provided by States and local councils. The feds are hogging all of the money, to buy votes. "Their (councils’) cost of delivery is so much higher than the money they're getting in," says the guy who studies this for a living. That’s the problem, folks. Any populist blowhards in your local community, usually via social media these days, constantly banging the drum about how useless Council staff are, are just that. Blowhards, feathering their own populist nests.

Happy Birthday, Den! 🎈🌟

The end of our Anglo empire isn't just about money and power. Ultimately it's that we're not reproducing. We're dying out. At the same time idiots make immigration a political issue. Without migrants our nations are toast. Other idiots sell this as addressing population growth, lol. We are *retirement homes*. The old can't do the work, folks.

A 'revolution', yep. Not a musical revolution. A social revolution. Teenagers taking over the world. Those teenagers are now either dead or in their 70s and 80s. Still reaping the fruits of their revolution.

Trump's decision to reject renewables is leading America into a full energy crisis. They're critically short of electricity, and coal and nuclear, his (and all the loons worldwide who ride the Trump train) favourite alternative, are both hopelessly unable to help. This stuff matters, Trumpian foot soldiers even in regional towns like Bathurst are doing everything they can to obstruct the renewables roll out. Renewables is Australia's superpower.

This is the UK. In each case A, B and C were the possible trajectories for these diseases. C is the trajectory that actually happened, beginning in 2022. Most chronic disease is caused by infection, including cancers. Covid gets into every nook and cranny of your body, it’s a vascular and immune disease, a prolific killer. There are two more, I’ll post as separate posts.

Part 2, the UK. What happens when you let entire populations, including children, catch pandemic viruses, over and over. C is the trajectory that happened, beginning in 2022.

Final part. Remember C is the trajectory that actually happened, from 2022. So you have two choices. Do what everybody else is doing - nothing. That’s what most will do, because that’s how humans decide how they’ll think, feel and behave for most things. They copy others, so they don’t stand out from the crowd, to protect their social status. Or try to keep this c**t of a virus out of your body.

Australia has vast areas of desert and arid land, and much of its farmland is completely rooted too, and needs anything to help restore it. Solar panels help restore that land, bringing it to life again. Again, we should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century, with renewables. Our path to enormous prosperity. Instead the forces of old oil, gas and coal are determined to keep us chained to a couple of offshore countries, spending tens of billions on energy every year, when we have vast amounts of our own right here.

A Formula E car. All-electric. These cars only carry relatively small batteries, much smaller than modern EV road cars, less than 40 kWh. It's still enough to do nearly 100 km, at very high speeds. They flog an F1 car off the line, 0-100 in 1.8 seconds. They can manage with only small batteries because the regenerative braking in these is enormous, they literally make their own fuel as they go along. The Bathurst 1000 this week. As a series V8s is struggling, because Australians mostly don't drive V8s now, and very few drive Mustangs, and even fewer Camaros. The crowds still come, but the series now doesn't reflect the cars ordinary people drive. I think they should include hybrids, or even full electrics, into the future. F1 cars have been hybrid already for years, as have Le Mans cars. They've never been faster. Full-EV racing will eventually smash all petrol-engined racing records.

Can see here why Tesla and other EV brands prioritise minimising aerodynamic drag in their vehicles. From 90 km/h wind resistance (yellow line) takes off and dominates forces acting against the car.

This huge event in town for the past 2 days has been organised and run brilliantly by 3 Council staff. Just 3. Why only 3? Because local Trumpians have determined Councils waste money, so it’s a now a fire sale of staff and services. Those 3 staff are dead on their feet today. Still 4 days to go.

Paul sounds like what he is. A very old man pretending he’s still 17. I winced listening to it, doesn’t even have the strength left to sing in tune. And singing is a flattering word for it, more like a warbling.

One for your amateur climate expert friends who say 'the world has always warmed'.

“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the U.S. “Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.” Doubters are running out of time to not be the laughing stock of history. Free energy, ffs.

This 1940 video designed to teach the public about new dialling telephones (as opposed to having to always use an operator) highlights just how difficult it is to get humans to change anything. The task itself is childishly simple, the resistance is all social, humans don’t like to change, it threatens their status and therefore identity. The film talks to the viewer and people in it like they’re a kindergarten class. Separately to that, we become so accustomed and jaded to miraculous things. Imagine the first time a telephone came to a house, the idea that you could just pick it up and talk to anybody you know, anywhere, as if they were right there in your home. We forget how miraculous that must have seemed.

I like Kate. But Kate grew up in a boarding school. All of her own children will spend most of their childhood in boarding schools. How’s that for disconnection. The same parents and families going to war with devices are rapidly disconnecting from their traditional (horizontal) communities, in favour of massive *connection* with multiple vertical (online) communities. Towns and families are now just where people plug-in to ‘connect’ and recharge, in their vertical communities.

The lychgate is one of my favourite architectural features, at the entry to old churchyards. Functionally lychgates evolved as a place to shelter a coffin from the weather, while waiting for the arrival of the priest. But I’ll use it to talk about my deep dislike of travel culture, and what those who live it I think miss. As children of empire, we don’t inhabit the Earth. We live inside maps. Space and time are just coordinates, locations are only items for our ‘bucket list’ travel. We have such total disrespect for time that we fiddle with clocks twice a year, thinking we’re cleverly ‘saving’ it. We accumulate places in our travels like we used to collect stamps and coins. The imperial culture we evolved from travelled the globe, conquering, and then collecting what we found there (animals, resources, even people). The lychgate is a window into a culture we now can’t remember. Where space and time were sacred, where we *inhabited* both. It’s a portal between profane and sacred ground, but also between mortality and immortality (the carrying of the mortal and profane body through the lychgate to be sacralised and immortalised, via the service and then burial in the churchyard). A lychgate reminds us that space matters. You will directly feel a transition, walking through one, between two profoundly different spaces. The transition itself has a place, the gate gives it a reality. Old villages are now being consumed by the local rich, and emigrants and celebrities, who want to live inside Miss Marple stories. They have not one idea how those villages came to be. And so they’ll destroy them, as travellers do all locations. These villages were the profound, continuous inhabitation of both space and time. The locals worked the surroundings every day, with hard labour, to transform them into the beauty we see. Because to them place was sacred, they were reproducing what they saw as the sacred, in their landscapes. God’s creation. They were inhabiting space, working it continuously, to enrich and beautify it. And then on weekends, they would all gather at the local church, to meditate together on the traditions and meanings passed down through their culture. To re-inhabit time, to bring the past to life again, to work it and renew its lessons, in this continuous event that was their beautiful village. A sacred place, inhabited both in space and in time.

Wow, Bathurst 1000 price now. I'm sure the $25 hamburger crowd think that's reasonable.

It's exciting to be there at the start, to feel the ground shake. But also worth remembering combustion race cars rev the crap out of their engines at the start because otherwise their combustion engines have zero power. My family-priced Tesla would smash the entire field off the line from a standing start, no revving needed, and would be competitive even with them revving like this. Also a friend chuckled when I suggested mixing EVs in with the V8s, 'they'd get flat batteries!'. Because EVs use only a fraction of the energy of a combustion car to get the same power, you'd get the same number of laps out of a charge and then could either swap the battery out, use a hyper-fast charger or have a second car to swap into. Will never happen because the combustion cars would be lapped so many times the drivers would object.

People who’ve never studied much science, which is most people, need to understand what’s at stake with climate change. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK have done the sums. Actuaries are not ‘Greenies’ or ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. They’re experts at calculating risks, for anything. 2 degrees or more by 2050 is our trajectory. The actuaries show this will mean a greater than 25% loss in global GDP. And the death of more than a quarter of humanity, more than 2 billion people. We’re actually well on track to reaching even beyond the highest ‘Extreme’ risk rating, which is half world GDP gone and more than half the world’s population dead. At 4 degrees of warming, which is well on track, nothing survives. No economies, no people. In world wars everything humans do stops, to redirect to the war effort. This is an enormously larger risk than any we faced in the world wars. And we’re doing as good as nothing. We treat things like renewable energy and EVs as debating fodder for our kidult status battles, for dominance of our social groups.

What I like about Tesla vehicles is that they reclaim motoring from kidult car enthusiasts, often adults whose identity as teens focused heavily around their cars. The need for EVs to focus on efficiency, to preserve battery life, takes us back to a time when engineers drove car evolution, not car fanboys. Tesla is releasing long range versions of its Model 3 and Model Y that do well over 700km on a single charge. That’s the range ‘problem’ solved, folks. No more reason to reject an EV because of range. And that’s just with current batteries, range will get even greater over time. With these you can drive Sydney-Melbourne with only one stop to charge. But it’s HOW Tesla did it that goes to my original point. They let engineers design the cars, not car fanboys. Amazingly much of it is in the wheels, smaller wheels use MUCH less energy, and are actually far more comfortable because you get thicker tyres. But also these Tesla vehicles are light, lighter than their petrol and diesel equivalents. Genius engineering at work here. For much of the past century we knew this, wheels were much smaller. Then the car fanboys took control, giving us much larger wheels purely for the look of them (i.e. a wank), and smaller sidewalls to allow them to drive around corners faster. Which made the cars less comfortable, more bumpy and much more thirsty. We drive on public roads, not racetracks. I buy cars designed by engineers, not car fanboys, sad adult men and women whose very identity as human beings is in their specd-up toys. Shown by their love of the noise their cars make too. Teenagers like making lots of noises. For engineers, it’s a symptom of appalling design.

Finn, electrical engineer and one of the reasons solar in Australia is world-leading, sounding a bit like me today. Frustrated that a revolution is being stalled by kidults. Using Tesla as an example, people opting out because “I hate Elon”. Like children in a playground. The engineering will win the day, it’s so overwhelmingly amazing, as Finn describes here.

In England, 10 months of relatively low Covid levels led many to believe Covid was finally ‘just like the flu’. Covid is not and will never be anything like the flu. We won‘t get ‘hybrid immunity’ to it, so that it settles down and mostly goes away. It’s an epidemic disease, infecting in wave after wave all year, and will remain that forever, unless we control it. Smallpox was the same, it kep infecting humans in epidemic waves for over 300 years, until an effective vaccine was found.

Facebook is like human society in a coma. Zero thought, brain-dead. ‘Not the place’ to discuss things, many will tell you, as if that’s some terrible faux pas like farting at dinner, or a contagious disease. You can follow your friends here for years and not know a single thing about what they think, about anything. Only what they do every day, or at most what they feel. And if you get that insight into what they feel, there won’t be any into why they feel it. Just the feels. Alongside what I post to Facebook, I also post to Twitter. I get maybe 3 or 4 people here who regularly engage with anything in terms of thought. On Twitter I have thousands of active followers. Yes Twitter can be a sewer. But at least humans think there, they talk about things. Not just about themselves. Many applaud social media as a chance to ‘connect’ with the world. And what do they do with it? Talk about themselves.

Opponents of the pumped hydro in Lithgow cite damage to platypus populations as one of their main arguments. One of the loon things anti-renewables people do is suddenly develop a fake interest in ecology. It’s the coal-fired power station that has doomed the platypus. All here in black and white.

What’s happening with Covid right now in the UK is so important to help people understand the mess we’re in. That 10 months of relatively low Covid low levels wasn’t interrupted by a new Covid variant. There is no new variant there. It’s the collapse in immunity in ordinary people that has caused the new surge. Mostly because the UK deliberately restricted access to Covid vaccines. Catching Covid will not give you immunity to it. It will make it *more* likely you’ll catch it again, and again and again. Each time doing more damage to your body and immune system. (It will also make you more sick with other infectious diseases, because of damage to your immune system.) You don’t build up lasting immunity to Covid with each infection. It’s not measles. And I’ve shaded in green the critical thing to understand here. Unlike flu ‘waves’, also shown here, which go back to more or less zero infections in the community between waves (look at the graph), Covid is now permanently infecting everybody. It’s now like the tide, going in and out, not waves. It’s always there, everywhere - the green. It was there even in those 10 months in the UK. It’s nothing like the flu, which has seasonal surges and then more or less disappears. Covid will NEVER be like that, if we don’t control it. Governments tell people we’re following a ‘hybrid immunity’ strategy for Covid. That’s bullshit. Hybrid immunity means some infection + some vaccination, to build up immunity in the population. They’re WITHDRAWING vaccines from the wider community, as in the UK. And most aren’t bothering getting them anyway. It’s just infection now, not hybrid anything. It’s a LIE. Even IF we were actually doing hybrid immunity as a strategy, it wouldn’t work. Covid vaccines *don’t prevent infection*, they’re not designed to. The only way to fix this Covid disaster is to control the spread of the infection, to NOT ALLOW PEOPLE TO BECOME INFECTED. That’s called public health. Like public education, public transport, and public energy, that’s now dead because of decades of bullshit about us apparently living in an ‘economy’, in ‘markets’. Our Covid strategy is just the privatisation of public health, that is literally all that’s happening. You are being asked to fix the pandemic yourself, individually. Like asking people to look after their own sewage or build their own roads. It can’t be done. It’s not a strategy, it’s no strategy. It was sponsored by a free market think tank in the US, the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), called the Great Barrington Declaration. Read it, it’s only a page, don't believe the opening that it was written by public health scientists. You’ll recognise everything going on today: https://gbdeclaration.org/#read

I’ve posted a few times about how country towns are doomed when the extractive industries that founded them (mostly mining and farming) leave. This article details the calamitous stats. There is no such thing as the ‘country’, it’s just the resources arm of cities. Most try to become tourist destinations as a last gasp attempt to survive, which only turns them into frozen-in-time theme parks for bored city dwellers looking for a weekend away. And/or they gentrify, becoming cheaper versions of the rich leafy suburbs in cities, hoping to attract hipsters. But hipsters don’t create anything, except coffee, $25 hamburgers and haircuts. As remnant imperial cultures, we don’t inhabit space. We don’t inhabit the landscape, we live on it, not in it. It’s a ‘resource’, nothing more. When the resource is exhausted, our towns disappear too.

Car racing needs something like the penalty try in rugby. Murray here for example had his race ruined, and while Golding copped a penalty, there was no justice for Murray. Officials should be able to restore a position or even the lead when other drivers cause incidents and are penalised. That’s an awesome piece of driving by Murray to avoid the wall.

I loved the F35 fly-by at the Bathurst 1000 on the weekend.

Well at least it makes a broom broom noise.

Quite a bit of public chat about the energy and environmental costs of AI. Let’s compare it with just one trip to Europe in a year.

The government needs to grow a pair and ban new petrol and diesel vehicles here inside 5 years. We have no local car industry to protect. Leaving it to the 'market' just means leaving it to whatever idiotic thing is 'trending' at the time, like giant American wankpanzers.

This happened in Lithgow on Friday. Cut water to much of the town for the weekend. I know people resent the idea of kidult culture, but it was another classic example of it. What was the overwhelming response, from the public? Carping, whining, whinging, trying to find somebody to blame, sinking the boot into Council etc. There were some attempts by members of the public to help those impacted, though often these are performative games too, it becomes an imitated thing, like bushfire relief concerts (that end in chaos because they’re purely about public displays of ‘my emotional response’.) Remember the phrase, ‘the Spirit of the Blitz?’ The only thing that long-term stops humans acting as eternal rival teenage gangs is a level of threat so enormous that they have to pull together, or die. It’s desperation. And if you study the Blitz, you’ll discover that even that was a struggle, to enforce compliance with emergency measures.

Pathetic, as pathetic as our attempt to use the 'market' to create affordable homes. The market doesn't exist, it's code for 'letting everybody do whatever they like'. And what does that produce? People copying each other in imitative rivalry, for social status. Wankpanzer utes, homes used as casino chips. The sale of all new and even secondhand petrol and diesel vehicles should be banned within 5 years. We have no car industry to protect. We won't do that because peoples' kidult identities are too tied up in what vehicle they drive. People hate being told our culture is kidult - well, here it is. In the face of a far superior technology, and in response to a catastrophic threat to the extinction of human civilisation itself, what do humans do? Buy vehicles they think make them 'cool'.

Kidult culture despises children. It’s why it doesn’t have any, because they get in the way of lifestyles. Of ‘living your best life’. Lifestyles make them unaffordable. It seems paradoxical only if you think kidult = kid. But kidult = adolescent. Teen. The culture of the “I”. Only societies with a collective focus, a “we” culture, have children. Adult societies. (The red line is a mapping of the research of Putnam, the US historian, who looked at the shift between "I" and "We" cultures over time. The overlap with the fertility rate is exact.)

I’ve been experimenting a lot with AI. It’s astonishing what it can do. Unfortunately the deeper story is that the toxic dysfunction of American culture has driven most of its development, and could destroy everything in the resulting financial bubble pop. Read the magnitude of the potential disaster unfolding.

A measure of just how stupid public life now is, is that we now see the great tragedy of Covid as the ‘lockdowns’ that stopped us going to gigs, restaurants and pubs, on OS trips and children going to school. Over 20 million people died, and they’re still dying. 20 MILLION. And it was all done deliberately, deliberate obstruction of public health methods we’d used for generations to protect people. We’re still obstructing those methods today. We infected an entire generation of children, as icing on the cake.

We can call this corruption, but this is what the ‘American Dream’ always was. Grifting. Making it, where it was escaping from public squalor into private gated opulence.

Had an interesting conversation with my podiatrist recently, about barefoot shoes. At the time he was recommending Birkenstocks for me, for summer holidays, as he wears himself. I went barefoot one summer and ended up in excruciating pain for about 2 months. His interesting take on the whole barefoot shoe thing? Yes humans evolved to walk barefoot. But like all ‘natural’ health ideas, such as barefoot shoes, it misses most of the nuance. Humans evolved walking on highly variable surfaces, with lots of diverse movement of arches, joints and tissue. But now we walk on almost exclusively artificially flat ground. Your feet aren’t getting the sort of workout on those surfaces they have over millions of years. Arch support shoes give the feet more of that sort of stretch than just walking barefoot on the flat surfaces, which will tend to flatten the arches, both longitudinally and transversally. Arch support footbeds put that variable ground surface that is now missing into the shoe instead. They don’t so much correct bad feet, they help protect feet from the homogeneity of our external environment.

Lung cancer is now the deadliest cancer for women in the US, with many younger women coming down with it even if they haven’t smoked. There are more lung cancer cases than breast and ovarian cancer combined.

“We need to stop trusting the experts.” RFK Jr spelling out here the toxic stupidity of American culture, the belief that ‘the people’ not only run societies, but also know things better than any expert in their field. Trump isn’t mounting a ‘fascist’ takeover of US life. He’s the underlying culture, which has always been a Wild West story, of ‘free’ individuals at war with everything.

Tony Seba is probably the pre-eminent thinker on disruption and innovation. He has a rule he calls the “10x” rule. If an innovation is 10 times cheaper and better functionally, change is inevitable, it’s just a question of time. Shown here for the shift from keelboats to steamboats in the US, to transport goods. Renewable energy and EVs are already either at that 10x point, or close to it. At that point peoples’ precious opinions will be like farts. Amazing that something has to be 10 times better and cheaper for humans to shift from their lazy, stupid, conformity-driven status quo. Spare me the gnashing of teeth over AI ‘because only humans think’. Fuck off.

We’re down the rabbit hole, people. The destruction of public health by ‘living with’ Covid is now spreading to all other infectious disease, because the same social behaviours have been destroyed. A reminder that infectious disease and infections have killed *by far* most people who have ever lived. Now you’re told they’re even good for you, they ‘build up’ your immune system! That’s a lie, sorry. A lie that will shorten your life.

In the UK, the extreme levels of sacrifice the community had to make for WW2 lasted *15 years*. Rationing didn’t stop until 1954. That’s adult life, identifying a critical threat and acting accordingly, including making enormous sacrifice. Those who refuse to see kidult society can compare and contrast that with what we do for Covid, and climate change. In both of those cases, the piffling inconvenience of having to skip work or school for a few months, or wear a mask or open a window, or drive a different car or put up some windmills, is seen as some horrendous threat to ‘freedoms’ and a wrecking ball through our ‘mental health’. We never leave high school, too pathetically scared to break out of the conformity of ‘what everybody else is doing’ to respond to even the most obvious threats. That’s kidult culture, high school culture. That is literally what the countercultural revolution created.

The US democratic fallacy winds up again. Create a big crowd and delude yourself this means 'democracy' at work. Everything 'public' looks like a gig. Societies are never, ever run by the people. 'People power' is a myth. The US is failing as a society because it lives inside these myths and refuses to understand them. It's a myth not because people are stupid, but because it isn't even a thing. Populations are full of almost endlessly diverse groupings with very little to nothing in common. 'The people' is like saying all the people you went to high school with are some sort of unified group mind. It's the belief that the people run America that produced Trump. Putty in his hands, that just means gaming popularity (elections). Basic marketing, not 'the will of the people'.

I didn't know traditional Japanese homes are largely made of wood because that's much less likely to kill the inhabitants, if it collapses in an earthquake. But hardly anybody lives in those now, a century ago 85% of Japanese lived in the countryside. Now the vast majority live in a small apartment, in the incredibly dense cities. 127 million people, in an area less than half the size of New South Wales.

TB is the canary in the coal mine for immune damage.

Killjoys.

Estimates that about 7 million people marched in the No Kings protests yesterday in the US . Well over 70 million people voted for Trump at the last election. 10 times as many as turned out yesterday. It’s theatre. Americans love this sort of ‘grassroots’ stuff. (It’s not grassroots anything, nor is voting for Trump.) It never goes anywhere. Peace and prosperity come when you institutionalise the basics of public life. Employing people (‘public servants’, it’s in the name) to work on the necessary elements of public life, 365 days of every year, so that everybody else can get on with doing other things. American culture, both Left and Right, is hostile to institutions. The country was set up in opposition to them, by Puritans. Why it tries to solve problems by ‘taking it to the streets’, it can’t even imagine any other way to be public.

If you listen to car enthusiasts (people who think a good car is one that makes broom broom noises), the current shift to electric cars is destroying the soul of cars. But you can see how full of shit they are if you look at trends going back many years. They always were a highly antisocial outlier, teenagers who refused to grow up. 

China is far and away the most popular supplier of cars to Australia. Fleet sales make the usual top 10s profoundly misleading. And it’s still growing so fast. In 2026 *11* new brands launch in Australia. China is not only going to dominate Australian motoring, they’ll be dominating world motoring. They saw the electric revolution coming years ago. Arpit nails it.

Humans are such great drivers. There will come a day people will be astonished we ever allowed individuals to have such leeway over tonnes of metal travelling at high speed while sharing roads with millions of others.

Throughout history the old had the role of guiding a society, with their life experience. The kidult culture doubters take note. In our culture the old do what many teenagers do when they finish school. They go on a (permanent) gap year. In a culture defined by high school life, retirement is now when you leave school. They travel the world, over and over, using the wealth we now concentrate in the hands of the same old, rather than in the working lives of those raising families and doing the work of the nation. It should be obvious what a perverse cultural practice this is. But it isn’t, because our own (kidult) culture is as invisible to us as water is to fish. ‘New people and new places are what keep me alive’, yuck. Turning other cultures into theme parks to pursue some zombie state of eternal youth.

‘Freedom Day’ was the ridiculous declaration of victory over Covid. Reality wasn’t fooled.

Two experiences yesterday that give a flavour of working in local government. One was trying to think of a way to rescue ducklings trapped in a fountain. The other a long phone call tirade from a resident about Council apparently importing busloads of ‘blacks’ and ‘muslims’, and feeding them ‘with ratepayers’ money’. Council of course isn’t importing busloads of anybody. But it plays well in some circles, with lots of jingoistic flags thrown in, particularly now towns are really competing social media teams.

Putting to one side all of the pollution and energy arguments for petrol and diesel vehicles vs EVs, I can promise if you go electric, the majority will never go back simply because driving a combustion engine is a SHIT experience, when you've driven electric. Like having lead in the saddlebags, you think 'go you noisy gutless piece of crap!'

People love the 2025 version. The same attempt by Council to green George Street recently was met with widespread whining and resistance. The difference? Towns now are really competing social media groups, who latch onto everything they can find to whinge about, to differentiate themselves from other groups. Status games.

Can you guess what’s happening to the hearts of young people aged between 18-45, leading to such a rise in heart attacks? Dating from ‘freedom’ from protections against catching Covid?

The power of semi-autonomous driving. This footage from a guy letting his Tesla drive for him just outside Dubbo in the middle of the night, pitch black. Suddenly the car slowed and he didn’t know why at first. You’ll see why. 

It’s apparently hateful to make the obvious point that transgender is a social fad, just one more ‘trending’ thing passing for reality now in public life. Like yo-yos, or wankpanzer utes. In its entirety it‘s an identity-based movement, but where the identity has no link back to reality, only to mobilised numbers in online social groups. With no cohesive set of ideas underlying it. About identifying which ‘team’ people are on, in the social melee, ‘oh you’re a transphobe’, etc. No thought, just joining a team and ‘support’ for others on the team, and contempt for those identified as being on other teams. Others do the same thing with ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. All team sports, status games that don’t correspond with anything real except maintenance of the teams. You can not be on any team in this fad/trend. I’m not for OR against trans. I think it doesn’t exist. Like ‘the people’ in democracy. The data is in. The trend is in free fall. The social group that led it remains, but it’s not convincing any new members amongst the young now. They’ve moved on to other trends, other reality-free identities. Other positions in the eternal status games that define who we individually are, as social animals.

The Omicron variant ended any hope of Covid infection creating immunity. That was years ago already.

One of my favourite things to do now is use AI on my walks to learn more about the plants I see. You can even talk to AI directly, or just take photos and ask for details about what you’re seeing. The landscape opens up in front of you with fascinating detail. Like the epicormic growth on the elms in Machattie Park in Bathurst, which makes the entire tree look shaggy and green, leaves growing from every surface. Almost certainly the tree’s response to earlier damage or pruning. European elms are very rare now in the world, due to Dutch elm disease decimating them in Europe and North America. Australia is one of the few countries with surviving trees, the collection in Machattie Park is a world treasure.

The ‘Fundamental Law of Road Traffic’ is one of the most studied and accepted outcomes of transport economics. In simple words the law says “building roads creates traffic”. We get stuck in this loop, pouring more and more money into roads to try to ease congestion, not realising that’s what’s creating the traffic in the first place. Another way to look at this is the (wrong) idea that the point of a road is to get from point A to point B. The expression ‘all roads lead to Rome’ captures it. The purpose of roads isn’t to make it easier for people to travel to different places. It’s to collapse all places, into a single central place. A large city. Roads empty countrysides, wherever they’re built, they’re like a vacuum cleaner cities use to suck people out of the countryside. Ancient Rome built nearly half a million kilometres of roads not to allow Romans to have easy ‘transport’ between parts of the empire. But to consolidate power in the capital Rome itself, using the countryside as ‘resources’ for that city, with goods and people transported on the roads back to the capital. Roads today still have that function. Wherever we build them we empty the wider landscape of people, look at Australia and you’ll see that obvious truth. Nearly the entire nation huddled into major urban centres, on the coasts. Many of the towns in regional areas only exist because of the roads, they’re hubs of earlier resource extraction, for the cities.

This appears not to have worked. The No Kings (and Black Lives Matter, and MeToo etc.) symbolic feels haven’t either. What sort of person ‘protests’ ineffectually against adult life? A teenager. This is still the counterculture driving everything we do, nearly 70 years on.

I get to work early to get 10 minutes or so of this every morning, it’s good for the soul.

My car drove me to work today. The entire way, country highway, overtaking slower vehicles, roundabouts, traffic lights (negotiates amber beautifully), city traffic etc. Absolutely flawlessly, I didn't need to do a thing. It even parks for me if I want, at the other end. There was a dead kangaroo in the middle of the road between Bathurst and Lithgow. The car even swerved (safely) to avoid it. Join the revolution, you'll never want to go back.

Happy Birthday, Wayne! ☕🥳

94% of car accidents are caused by human error. Humans are not good drivers, and if asked what good driving is, will usually describe some variation of car racing, like fast cornering, braking etc. Good driving is mostly a social activity, it's about how you drive in relation to others on the road, not some fast driving skills you have. Machines will take over a lot of driving. No human can come anywhere near them for the basics of paying attention and adjusting the driving according to other vehicles on the road. Many, many lives will be saved.

Wonderful piece making some of the points I sometimes make here, about democracy. Democracy is: 1. institutions 2. institutions 3. institutions Not 'the people'. Not 'people power', not liberty or rights. All of those hopeless Americanisms destroying that nation at great speed. Australia is world champion at institutions.

I’m using AI to do something that I think is wonderful. You may have seen me post here in the past about how our understanding of Australia is based on a set of really crazy prejudices that we brought here with European settlement. That before we arrived, this was a ‘wild’ landscape, and the Aboriginal people had been living here for tens of thousands of years as simple hunter-gatherers. Firsthand accounts collected by Bill Gammage make it clear this was an outrageous lie. He collected descriptions by first European settlers. They overwhelmingly described something entirely different, a cultivated landscape, made by human hands, that looked (in their words) like a country English estate. A thing of exquisite, supernatural beauty, crafted over tens of thousands of years but they assumed just the ‘natural’ landscape. I’m using AI to recreate the scenes these first settlers actually described. Rather than the racist, stupid mythology that dominates our view of this since. Open grassy plains, with beautiful open forests. Like an estate, maintained mostly to generate food through hunting and harvesting. The ‘bush’ we see today is this same engineered landscape allowed to collapse into ruin. This is the greatest story in all of human history, how Aborigines turned an entire continent into an extraordinarily rich garden of Edenesque delights. The most complex achievement in all human history, going to to the moon is a doddle next to this. We’re too far gone, too ignorant now to understand why. Nothing is as complex as living IN a landscape, for tens of thousands of years (!! I mean, this should take our breath away), rather than ON it, as we do now, destroying it. Nothing is harder to understand or engineer. Tens of thousands of years before the pyramids or Stonehenge were even thought of. Here’s the Bathurst plains, as described by the first Europeans who encountered them.

The Botany Bay region, as described by Cook, Banks and Parkinson upon European arrival in Australia. The Bathurst Plains recreation I posted earlier was from firsthand accounts by Evans, Macquarie and Oxley, upon European arrival in that area.

Here come the apples.

Zhao hosts the Trump's own crypto scheme. Estimates are that the Trump family has made $5 billion from crypto since Trump came to office. Trumpism isn't an authoritarian takeover of the US, it's an old-fashioned American grift. Snake oil. He's a conman, far too lazy to want to be a tyrant. He just wants to con people, and get very rich doing it.

A re-creation of the view between the Blue Mountains, Southern Tablelands and Monaro, as observed by Dawes (1788-89), Mitchell (1830s), Hume and Hovell (1824). A 'burning mosaic', alternating patches of fresh green regrowth, golden cured grass, and blackened ash from recent fire. A standard technique Aboriginals used to engineer the landscape, the landscape wasn't wild. The entire continent was a curated estate, engineered for tens of thousands of years. Now mostly in ruins through more than two centuries of total neglect. Much of this soil is now at the bottom of the Tasman sea, washed there by rain falling on the eroded wastelands settler agriculture turned this land into.

When Major Thomas Mitchell stumbled upon the Western District of Victoria in 1836, he described it as “the finest country in the world,” “rich, open, well-grassed, park-like.” See that? Park-like. There was a belief that these early explorers were just imposing their known European landscape ideals onto Australia. But as Gammage found, they were describing what they literally saw. Aboriginal Australia created an English estate the size of an entire continent. Now largely destroyed or allowed to fall into ruin, by those who either bulldoze, graze or plough it for resources, or those who sanctify it as 'nature'. Mitchell's own descriptions: Vast, rolling plains stretching to the horizon. Gently undulating land clothed in soft, knee-high golden grass. Scattered river red gums and clumps of trees standing apart “as if laid out for gentlemen’s seats.” A small, winding creek or stream reflecting the sky. Late-afternoon light turning everything amber; long shadows under a high summer sky. No fences, livestock, or human structures. Rather then fence to contain animals for farming, Aboriginals dramatically enriched the landscape to attract prey. Every animal free to move wherever it liked. Everybody won, including the prey and the landscape, animals free to roam and multiply on the rich food Aboriginals created for them. Compare with our farming, where you fence everything and then extract everything from that land, like soil mining. That lush grass was a permanent observation by first settlers, cultivated by Aborigines by fire mosaic burning.

I’ve always loved being on a bike. But I haven’t ridden now in years, can’t stand the seats. I don’t see a way around it either, yes some of these new designs help, but you can’t really get away from the fact that you’re grinding your gonads and pelvic area.

When you get rid of the rubbish engine under your bonnet, you gain a lot of space to put things. Very useful for smelly take-away food, or ice and drinks, or muddy shoes if you’ve been camping etc.

I’ve worked in governance for a quarter of a century. In my experience, every single person who advocates for democracy being run by ‘the people’ has never worked 5 minutes in actual governance in their life. Nor have they met the people they’re advocating for. Unleashing the people is what’s destroying democracy.

It took all of one day for rare earths to become the new battleground between rival social teams. Western democracies bring this on themselves with the idea communities or ‘the people’ run nations. All that does is turn every tiny thing a country needs to do into a pissing contest, for social status. All true change is led, because it disrupts the status quo. If you leave it to ‘the market’, or ‘the people’ (the same thing, the pro-people power folk are arguing for the same thing as the free market folk), nothing changes. Everything is just never-ending fights, for status. That’s why the fabled ‘oligarchs’ invented the fiction of free markets, as a mechanism to protect the existing status quo, to prevent change with endless fights. Democracy as ‘the people’ in charge is EXACTLY the same idea. It’s free market governance, meaning no governance.

From one of my long chats with AI. For anybody who ever experiences tightness in their body. Which is everybody.

Good on Twiggy. Nice to see an Australian flag on something not completely moronic for once.

Actual numbers show how what seems like a battle on social media is really just a tiny handful of idiots making a lot of loud noise.

Happy Birthday, Guy! 🌟🎉💐

‘Building up immunity’ with lots of healthy, ‘natural’ infections. Like the good old days. I think I’d like to repeat every day that most people who have ever lived have died of an infection of some kind. With anti-vax now rampant, antibiotic resistance and the demolition of public health control of the spread of disease, we’re on a fast-track back to those days. Human life expectancy doubled in the last century. Nearly all of that was the control of infection. Anybody who tells you we ‘live with’ infections is a moron and ultimately a killer.

Democracies are failing because we don’t understand how humans work. They never, ever, act as a big group of separate individuals. They are social animals, always, in everything they do.

Australia has by far the longest continuous culture in all history, about 65,000 years. I hadn’t realised the Māori only began to occupy New Zealand between 700 and 750 years ago. What I also hadn’t realised is which humans lived in New Zealand before then. None. As far as is known, the place sat empty of humans for nearly the entire history of humankind.

Self-driving saw the pedestrian before the driver did.

Happy Birthday, Alex! 🎈🌟☕

The control of infections and infectious disease is THE most important event in all human civilisation. And it happened only in the most recent history, in many of our lifetimes. The people you see and know who now argue that infection is healthy, that it ‘builds up’ your immune system, and that vaccination is bad, are worse than morons. They’re betraying civilisation itself.

My GP was agreeable to me having a stock of these on hand, should I catch Covid. Metformin seems to significantly reduce viral load (i.e. how much Covid reproduces inside you) if taken as soon as possible after infection. It therefore also significantly reduces risk of Long Covid. I can't stress enough that the unseen damage of any infection comes well after you think you're better. The infectious agent can easily take up residence inside you, you need to do everything possible to minimise that risk. Also it shouldn't even need to be said that the real secret to a long life is to avoid infection, of any kind.

What was the last unpopular thing you did in your life? Not just the last thing you did that was opposed by some people, in your team of other people opposing them. Unpopular with *everybody*.

House prices in Australia. You can see the exact time the catastrophe started. Not coincidentally the reign of the ‘lying rodent’ (his party’s own words), John Howard. Also the time we began bashing migrants, another of his rodent innovations. Fiddling with interest rates just brutalises ordinary people, bankrupting them. As Ian Verrender writes today, regulators could limit home loans to a certain multiple of income. That would kill this casino overnight. Ultimately though all that makes housing affordable is government building and selling it at controlled prices. History will show you that was the ONLY time in all of history homes were affordable for ordinary people.

The damage to the immune system caused by Covid that I often post about is sometimes lymphocytopenia. Damage to your immune T cells and B cells. Patients with lymphocytopenia experience recurrent infections or develop infections with unusual organisms. Others have normal blood counts but the B and T cells are so stressed they’re behaving in crazy ways. Same outcome, badly damaged immunity. If you and/or the people you know seem to be getting recurrent infections and find it harder to resolve them, that’s what’s going on. Every new Covid infection makes it worse. The travelling, gigging, dining out kidult mob has decided Covid is harmless for you. You’ll have to save your own life. Which will mean doing unpopular things, like wearing a mask, getting vaccinated and insisting on ventilated rooms where you work. Because most people in a kidult culture would rather die than be unpopular, the prognosis is bad.

Some angered by the suggestion Covid is extremely bad for them say ‘but my doctor says it’s fine’. Doctors are human and subject to the same social dynamics as the rest of us. It will take millions of deaths for the scientific status quo to shift, and a lot longer again for that shift to find its way to general practice. The MSD Manual I shared in my other post this morning is a major clinical resource for practising doctors. You can see many likely haven’t even read it, and most certainly aren’t following it. Millions died of smoking before that disaster was recognised for what it was. The science on smoking was in for at least a decade before anything was actually done about it. But smoking was highly popular, and a central totem of social life of the time. Part of ‘living your best life’ then. Many who lived that best life died horrible, early deaths. I go straight to the current research on Covid, I’m not waiting for it to have to make its way through the bog of social status games to help me.

Not much thought goes into anything in public life now. For example the idea that Councils should raise their own money. Just think even for one second, the perversity of the idea of government (at whatever level) having to fundraise to provide government.

For nearly all of history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. More than 90% of societies always were peasants. So what changed that? The only thing that changes anything. Catastrophe. The Black Death in Europe killed nearly half of the population. That gave the surviving peasants much more negotiating power with the gentry/landholders. Suddenly they were mobile, paid workers. The status quo at the time was so alarmed, that Edward III issued a Statute of Laborers in 1351, to try to outlaw this gain in power for peasants. It failed. The Black Death is the only reason you or I still aren’t peasants. We saw the germ of the same shift with Covid. Work from home is now much more widespread, though many employers are still trying to rein it back in. The status quo pretended the vaccines ended the pandemic and threw the rest of us back into our old working arrangements, telling us infection is great for our immune systems. The stupid celebrate that as ‘freedom’, and the monumentally stupid as a ‘natural’ boost to their immunity and health.

Tom Hanks, October 2025. Not buying the Covid is over bullshit.

I love when social media platforms say ‘this is to assist us to provide ads you’d prefer to see’. I don’t want to see any ads.

When you were at school, the morons who used to occupy most of the back rows in science class, not understanding anything? They now run the world. There they are at the red arrow. Social media gave them kidult power that adult life used to deny them.

Anti-renewables people dishonestly blame higher electricity prices on renewables. The real cause is the use of gas to generate electricity, with the failure of coal-fired plants. Gas is hugely expensive. As batteries now come online, downwards pressure is finally coming on power prices. It's deeply dishonest to cherry-pick every bump in the road during a fundamental change to how things work. It's what whining kidults do. This happened during a time of record demand for electricity too. The renewables grid coped with ease, still driving prices down. I'll never forgive every moron in this country who stood in the way of this revolution, the most stupid behaviour I've ever seen. Or tied with pretending to 'live with' a pandemic.

Long Covid cost Germany over $50 billion last year alone. It’s cost them over $220 billion since Covid began. We’re not living with Covid, like every other pandemic virus it’s destroying our societies, now from the inside out. You can’t live with a pandemic.

There’s a whole chapter in Gammage’s book on Aboriginal farming without fencing. Fences are bizarre when you think about it, only needed because we insist on eating things that don’t already live here. If we ate native things then there’s no need for fences, just the need to do what Aborigines did, make the land attractive to those animals. Which means everything wins. The land becomes incredibly rich and diverse to attract animals, we get to eat, there’s no need for constant farming bills to buy and maintain livestock etc. The livestock walks or hops onto the land for you, in endless supply. It’s genius, Aboriginal life was the greatest genius the world has ever seen. Instead we fence a handful of species into paddocks that degrade and erode, forcing farmers to spend a fortune buying the stock, feed in bad seasons, vet bills, dams and other water sources, landscape restoration like anti-erosion measures, and of course the cost of building and maintaining the fences themselves. When they talk about ‘closing the gap’ for Aboriginal people, they mean letting them catch up with us. It’s hilarious, the gap is the other way around. We’re absolutely clueless. We live on the land, not in it.

What’s happening in America and our interpretation of it, as ‘authoritarian’ takeovers, sometimes by ‘Nazis’, shows just how much adult life is teenagers living inside fantasies, mostly derived from Hollywood films. Aristotle knew what’s wrong with America. Its middle class is weak. Without it, you get tyrannies, of either the rich (monarchies, oligarchs) or poor (populist heroes, like Trump). The middle class runs democracies. They staff its institutions. Democracy is those institutions, not ‘the people’.

Happy Birthday, Graham! 🎂🎈💐

Another genius from the back row of your science class at school. These people now rule the world, social media gave them power. You’ll find hundreds of them commenting on every thread on key public issues.

The status games that we see with wankpanzer utes, caravans and camping gear has now entered the solar and battery world too. I saw somebody say their house has 30 kW of solar panels (!!), and a 40 kWh battery, and ‘they use it all’. What are they doing, smelting aluminium in the backyard?