November 2025

Teenagers didn’t exist until the 20th century. You were just a little adult, as a child. The idea of teen rebellion therefore also didn’t exist, until the middle of the 20th century. The idea of uprooting custom and tradition and re-inventing the world. In the 1960s that solidified into an actual revolution, the countercultural revolution. We’re still living that revolution. It’s why the entire world now seems in permanent chaos. Every new generation believes it has to destroy and re-make all of life anew.

As a kid I was once making breakfast for one of my grandmothers, who requested a piece of Vegemite toast. When the toast popped up, I was rushing to get the butter on it, so that it got that nice melted butter taste. My grandmother said ‘what are you doing? I prefer my Vegemite toast cold-buttered.’ I thought she was mad. With age sometimes comes wisdom, cold-buttered Vegemite toast is absolutely delicious.

400,000 km and still going strong, including the battery. You can drive an EV for years and years without any maintenance. Nathan had some things done on suspension, air conditioning compressor and the motor housing after the car had done nearly 350,000 km. Still has the original brake pads, which are still fine. He has no plans to replace the car with a new one, it’s still driving as new.

Speechless. Steeplejacks, not sure they still exist. Not even a harness, have a watch of this. I’m not scared of heights but even watching this made me go a bit pale. The wind is blowing a gale and at one point he even lights a cigga while he walks harness-free on planks that aren’t even fastened. And just the climb up and down the ladder would be exhausting and terrifying. The world of work has changed so much (this is only 1982).

Europe and China are rapidly arriving where Japan has already been for many years. No younger workers left, to service huge elderly populations. Look at Japan, it’s pretty much at 1 working person for every 1 retired person already. That’s a disaster. It’s why it’s spent decades developing robots, to try to fill the gap left by ageing populations. It hasn’t worked. Europe and China are converging upon only one worker for every 2 retired people, in the next few decades. That’s also a disaster. America and Australia with high immigration are able to resist this trend a bit better, but it won’t be enough longer-term. If you stop having babies, your society is over. Kidult culture did this, when everybody of every age just ‘lives their best life’, when lives become lifestyles, who would have children? They get in the way.

The same demographic trend but now looked at via the birth rates. You can see from the 1970s, fertility rates went into free fall. The 1970s was the decisive shift away from adult-centred life, the countercultural revolution of the 1960s which substituted adolescent high school life for adult life really started to hits its straps from the 1970s onwards. This is a terminal trend for all of these societies. It won't destroy them overnight, but again if you’re not replacing yourself with more babies, by definition your society is over. Try finding anybody even today to staff aged care, our largest growth industry.

By mid-century, about half of all public and private social spending in rich nations will be directed toward sustaining, treating, or caring for people past working age. I do wonder if people see the kidult society more clearly in this way. The complete collapse of the circle of life, of life stages with specific roles, replaced by everybody living a lifestyle from cradle to grave. Ironically an adolescent culture produces an entire society of geriatrics. And then the culture disappears, with nobody to replace them.

Wholesale electricty prices have tumbled in the past year, due to the renewables rollout. The cost of electricty from coal and gas has exploded in the other direction. You won’t see these reductions fully in your actual retail cost yet though, because wholesale electricty is only 35% of that cost. The other 65% is a series of parasitic add-ons generated by our idiot privatisation of electricty late in the 20th century.

Imagine living through the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago fighting to 'keep the horse'. You'd look like a moron today. Renewables will double again in the next 5 years. Exponential growth. You're living in the middle of the greatest revolution in history. Don't be the moron backing the horse.

Time after time in history people miss the tipping point to total revolution. Right up to that tipping point it seems like things are business as usual. Then that business as usual is smashed to pieces.

AI is immune to political propaganda. People need to realise that what was done for Covid was not only historically unprecedented. It was criminal. Never before in history had public health advocated to address a novel pathogen by infecting the entire population, repeatedly, forever. It’s such a staggeringly stupid thing to do that I despair at how stupid we now collectively are, that we don’t see it.

Happy Birthday, Julia! 💐🎂🥳

Chris Bowen has organised for all Australians to get 3 free hours of electricity in the middle of the day, as some retailers were already offering. This will give people an opportunity to load-shift their heaviest electricity use away from peak hours in the evening. You'll need to have a smart meter (if you don't already ask your retailer to install one.) 3 free hours, every day. Welcome to the renewable revolution.

And then let's build new steam trains. This person is paid a lot of money by you to run the country. Every single person in the energy industry is laughing at him.

I think one of the most abused words in modern culture is ‘experience’. It’s our religion, we see life as something to be ‘experienced’. Like we’re passive tourists on life’s journey, and it will keep throwing up new sights and sounds for us, which in turn will change us in some way, make us better and happier people. The thing is, everything is an experience. It’s an empty concept. There’s nothing about ‘being there’ with travel, for example, that will give you the greater reality of the pyramids. The experience of being there has no magical power to give you deeper access to them. The only path to true happiness and joy in life is understanding. What you understand will in turn profoundly shape what you experience. The more you understand the less experiences you’ll need. You’ll ’see the world in every grain of sand’. You don’t get to bypass the understanding step and just have experiences, which will do the understanding for you. People can travel for years and remain the same person, despite the hype about it broadening the mind. It absolutely doesn’t. The proof is in where people arrive, in a life sense. Those who rely upon experience to do their thinking for them have a never-ending desire for more experiences. They never arrive at some point of greater wisdom and happiness, they’re always booking the next trip or adventure. Always bored, always needing that next distraction from the deeper encounter with themselves. They can’t just BE, they always have to be DOING. We’re human doings now, not human beings. Look at the stats on modern mental health. People are not happy, they’re not all the things the culture of experience promises them. They’re snowflakes, increasingly fragile and depressed. This is kidult culture, adolescents have a furious urge to ‘experience’ the world, because their lives are constrained in schools. It’s just that we now never grow up, we don’t know how.

The reason Western countries no longer have children is simple. They don’t like them. They will howl bloody murder at being told that. The truth hurts. This (official NHS) advice for example to deliberately now infect all of the UK’s children with chickenpox to protect adults from shingles is EXACTLY the reason we’re also infecting all children with Covid. It’s a deliberate policy decision. That’s a violation of 150 years of public health practice. The practice that doubled our life expectancies. We don’t care, because kidult culture is more worried about having to share the XBox with the kids in ‘lockdowns’, and dressing up for Halloween as a grown adult.

Literally the only argument fossil fools have left is "it doesn't make broom broom noises". Which tells you the level of thought going on. Like toddlers in a sandpit. Their cars are slow, cost a fortune to run, are loud and might get to 300,000km with thousands in maintenance, though they'll be rattlers by then.

Democracy is back tonight for another gig. Though social media runs towns now.

We’ve had so many years of brilliant PR from farmers about being poor and downtrodden that it’s always forgotten that farming was the original wealth and privilege in Australia. The settler land-grabbers, who literally stole vast quantities of the continent for themselves, much unlawfully, and created empires of landed wealth. Just look today at how many farmers were found out rorting superannuation tax concessions by putting their entire farms into self-managed super funds, to avoid paying any tax at all. That’s the same landed gentry mindset still at work. And now the party supposedly representing them run hysteria campaigns about windmills and climate change, because they know fossil fuels fund the status hierarchy they’ve been sitting on top of since 1788. Their time is over.

Mr Lincoln says Happy 21st wedding anniversary to my beautiful wife. My smart wife. Always go with smart, everything else is a momentary distraction at best.

“One of the great divisions of existence is that between people who absorb the learning that lies in books, and those who take nothing on trust, and have to find out the hard way through life’s lessons for themselves.” (Nicolas Rothwell.) Mamet’s idea for this movie reminds me of this quote, where the bookish guy is the most able to survive the extreme situation, because he learned and thinks. We love to hate the scholarly, but they create civilisation. Most of the Western civilisation we enjoy for example we owe to generations of scholarly monks.

This is the wet dream of many adolescents of the past 70 years. Adulation from a stadium full of screaming fans. Anybody who studies crowds knows the screaming isn’t about the act. It’s about the crowd themselves, the act is just a means to an end. The smartest performers of popular music deeply distrust this experience, because they know they’re puppets to crowd psychology. The crowd will chew them up and spit them out every day of the week, should trends shift. Ask Nickelback. You’re just the soundtrack to the crowd’s needs to be a crowd.

1910. A lot of brutal, back-breaking work built the modern world. Most of those who did that work are anonymous and forgotten. We’d be completely incapable of repeating their efforts today, even a day of it would have 90% of the workforce off to the EAP for counselling. Life is definitely better for us today, because of that work. What work are we all doing today, to bequeath to people 100 years from now? Look around, what are we building that will make life 100 years from now profoundly better than life today? Are we just living off the fat of that past labour?

Isn’t it funny that all of the improvement in cars in the last 50 years, towards them being quieter both inside and out, less polluting, and more efficient converge upon the ultimate solution to all of those things. Using electric motors instead of combustion motors. Most cars on the road today, including petrol and diesel cars, are very quiet and very efficient. Transitioning to an EV is just to finish the job, but paying almost nothing for the fuel or maintenance, and giving you significantly more grunt and performance. Overwhelmingly the resistance to EVs from motorists comes from a tiny number of car enthusiasts who like to modify their cars to be noisy and inefficient, because that's their hobby, noisy inefficient cars. 

There's the Greased Lightning scene in Grease where teen gangs sing songs while modifying their hot rods. Post-war counterculture. I know we won't develop any level of self-awareness as a culture. A generation will need to die for it to be seen. History is always the same.

If you ever feel anxious or stressed (all of us), here's (I think) genius health advice. Just let yourself breathe through your nose for a while. Gently, without noise. Don't try to suck air in or blow it out. Close your mouth. At first that will feel a bit weird, like you're starving for air, but that's the body correcting your imbalance, stress and anxiety are nearly always about hyperventilating i.e. taking in too much oxygen, breathing out too much carbon dioxide. Your body preparing to flee or fight. I've circled probably the most amazing thing that does, it restores natural breathing rhythm. We habitually hold our breaths or hyperventilate. Breathing should be a non-conscious act, 'take a deep breath' is a load of shite. Don't fiddle with it. Being active will tend to remove stress and anxiety because the body then needs the extra oxygen and the breathing pattern normalises by itself. But while not active, just close your mouth and make your body breathe through your nose. It has lots of other health benefits too, some listed here.

I have literally less than zero desire to attend any stadium gig. The only reason you would go is the reason they exist. To give people the experience of being in a crowd, responding to a current viral trending artist. The true passion here is the viral trend, this is a celebration of social virality, our deepest passion. The sound is crap, the performances are always crap when the scale of the event utterly dwarfs performers, and you have to watch a screen to see anything. These are social phenomena, not musical performances. The countercultural substitute for public life, where teens of all ages gather to try to replace the void where the public once existed. The only place they feel any sort of ‘we’. The proof of this is that every trending artist now fills stadiums like the Accor, multiple times over. The culture began with Beatlemania nearly 70 years ago, now every trending tour is Beatlemania. Social mania, it’s in the name, now entrenched. This is the kidult culture I often write about, the culmination of the 60s countercultural revolution, which replaced public life with teen life. Every teen between the ages of 13 and 95 will howl you down for saying it. We don’t like our own culture examined.

I had even Australian friends who would chuckle about ‘Sleepy Joe Biden’. Trump at a press conference this week.

The great swindle here is to make unthinking Australians believe their power price rises are due to renewables. Even a Year 7 science student could find the data in about 5 minutes. The surge in power prices is due to the use of gas to generate electricity, and the continued failure of coal-fired plants, which require continuous and expensive maintenance. The ONLY cheap electricty in the grid is renewables. The suggested solution, to build more coal-fired plants and nuclear power stations, would be astronomically more expensive for Australians, and take 2 decades to do. Nobody in industry wants to build either, because they know they’re a white elephant, costing tens of billions to build with no chance of any economic return. So these halfwits want to become the new Soviet Union, building them with government money. (That’s your money, as they like to say.) Most of the renewables grid is being built with private money, it’s not costing you a cent.

These are of course known as miracle weight loss drugs. The GLP-1 drugs. But they’re showing signs of doing far more, in areas that medicine has been historically powerless. Chronic disease, like ME/CFS, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), POTS, IBS, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, osteoporosis etc. And Long Covid. People on these drugs have suddenly found themselves going into remission with some of these other conditions. One current hypothesis is that the drugs target inflammation. Inflammation can prevent your immune system clearing infections (most disease is caused by infection), because the immune cells are too busy fighting the inflammation to fight the pathogens. These drugs may be suppressing the inflammation so well that the immune system can finally start to win the fight against the pathogens. This also may help confirm that obesity never was about diet and exercise, as generations of people have been told. It was about inflammation, caused by particular combinations of gut microbes. You may literally have been able to ‘catch’ obesity all this time, by inheriting or acquiring certain gut microbes. Microbes the overweight then haven’t been able to clear from their systems, because of inflammation.

Anyone else had enough?

GLP-1 drugs are the ‘weight loss’ drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. But they go far beyond weight loss in potential impact. By targeting inflammation, they may address a huge range of chronic illness. Also showing promise against Parkinsons. Infection is the likely cause of most chronic disease. Infection causes inflammation, which causes disease. GLP-1 drugs may reduce inflammation to such an extent that your immune system can then go after the root infections. While the disease is often just largely the inflammation itself, which the drugs clear. If you want to live a long life, avoid infections. All infections, there are no healthy infections.

‘Richo’ declared the Covid pandemic a nothing burger in the same year it began, 2020. Millions died, and are still dying. He’s just died after several weeks of horrible suffering with influenza and pneumonia. From an influenza wave in November. Influenza, the ‘winter’ virus. In November. Humans are mostly stupid. Reality then kills them. It’s called natural selection.

The trials are coming in. This for those with Type 2 diabetes, assessing whether giving them GLP-1 ‘weight loss’ drugs impacted their progression to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons and any dementia. The blue line is those on the GLP-1 drugs. Significant slowing of progression. Dementias are some of our largest killers. It’s tantalising that GLP-1 technology may be targeting at last the root mechanism of most of our chronic diseases. As they refine the drugs and treatment regimes for these chronic diseases using GLP-1 (something they weren’t originally designed for), we may even be looking at cures for many of these conditions.

Ask people to change their favourite football team, or brand of phone or car. All public life is now a team sport. So deeply entrenched now that peoples' actual identities are synonymous with which teams they're on. They won't even be friends with people on other teams. Adult life is now Year 9 on infinite repeat.

Why was there an Anzac Day ceremony at the beginning of the Australia-England rugby league game? Also isn’t the English national anthem a tedious dirge? Not one mention of the country itself or its people, 100% from beginning to end just homage to the King.

One of the very, very tiny number of rock stars who grew up, gave up on the entire industry and chose to live an adult life instead. This bewilders kidults, some suggest Deacon has a mental illness. Deacon is extremely intellectually gifted, unlike the industry.

I’d like to share a series of ways that aren’t well known own in which AI is changing the world, far beyond what people might imagine. I may often sound frustrated, which is mostly due to a world being full of extraordinary wonders, wallowing in a bog of toxic adolescent status games, in societies hijacked by social media.

Something far more dangerous than Trump is attacking the US. Humans are obsessed with themselves. Something that killed more than twice as many already as the American Civil War, America’s previous greatest mass casualty event. It will keep attacking it for centuries to come, unless controlled.

Part 2 of things AI can do that most wouldn't know. A very common belief is that AI can only be as smart as the people who program it. That's just rubbish, all technologies introduce a whole range of things that humans can't do.

All of the stuff about Nazis and authoritarian/fascist takeovers in the US are the sort of hysteria that is endemic to US culture. Nick Bryant was US correspondent for the BBC there for 13 years and I think nails much of what is broken in US culture, and which has always been broken. It's always been at war with itself, that's the culture. Just a small sample: The Revolution of 1776 consecrated the idea that resistance to authority could be sacred. From the Boston Tea Party to the Declaration of Independence, Bryant notes, America’s creation story sanctified defiance as a civic virtue. This “origin story” left an enduring cultural residue: rebellion became not the exception but a moral inheritance. Bryant shows that even violent movements define themselves as restorations of the true American ideal, not rejections of it. The American obsession with guns, Bryant argues, is less about hunting or self-defence than about a symbolic right to rebellion — a perpetual reminder of the people’s supposed sovereignty through force. Bryant traces a recurring American belief that crises cleanse the nation — that civil conflict, rather than consensus, is how renewal happens. From Lincoln’s rhetoric of “a new birth of freedom” through the Vietnam and Iraq eras, Americans have repeatedly framed internal struggle as redemptive.

The National Party's push to turn windmills into a regional political issue could end up costing councils a fortune in wasted legal fees, if they get involved. Tamworth Council for example has just had a judge more or less throw their case out of court for being laughable, and the local action group who the Nats stirred up pulled out of the action, no doubt realising they were going to be up for big legal costs. The current strategy of these loon groups is to point out that the big turbines will need to be transported by road. As the judge said, so what. There's no requirement to get special approval to use roads to transport large things, it happens all the time. And over 1000 whining submissions to waste everybody's time, often sponsored by fossil fuel money in the US. Tamworth had a special rate increase of nearly 40% approved recently, and many ratepayers are now furious that the Council could be facing legal bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Central West Nationals politicians are trying to get local councils involved in action like this as well. Ratepayers beware.

I hate crowds. And wonder why anybody would like the experience of them, in fact I suspect most hate them. Nobody turns up to anything except a gig or battle and says ‘o goody, a crowd.’ Crowds have replaced public life. To me that’s a terrible, dangerous thing. On the surface they seem like mass celebration, communion. But that communion is imitation, not connection. You don’t go home from a crowd event knowing anything at all about the thousands of others there with you.

Dr John isn’t a medical doctor, though a large part of his success is allowing people to believe that. He influences millions. Had a young woman turn up to work to tell me that Council should be spreading Dr John’s news about Vitamin D to the entire Bathurst community. Most of his videos are political activism disguised as medical advice. Like all of these influencers, scratch the surface and there’s always a deeper political team they’re really batting for. John is a Trumpie.

Happy Birthday, Di! 🥳🥂

Most of what looks like 'community concern' in public debate today is really 'astroturfing'. Corporations, political parties, elected members of councils, and think tanks target a handful of loons in local communities who they can fire up with fury at anything at all really, right now it's wind farms. That furious group of loons is then called 'the community' because they make a lot of noise, even though they're tiny in number. The objective is to block action on things. The gall of the people who organise this knows no bounds. Like I posted yesterday, right now the Nats are firing up local councils against wind farms, to try to get them to do their dirty work for them, including taking things to court and paying all the legal fees. And those 'long distance objectors' are just these same organisations, mobilising to 'flood the zone with shit' (a Steve Bannon phrase), to bog everything down in inaction. You'll often hear politicians at all levels today talk about how they're in touch with 'the community'. Usually it just means a social media group they set up themselves, full of only people who agree with them. Everybody else is blocked.

The more social and visible we become to each other, the more chaotic and violent societies become. The more egalitarian we try to be, the more we fight. Look around and tell me this isn't what you see.

This is to shovelling what AI is to human intelligence.

Every old band has seen the massive cash-vacuum nostalgia tours now are, and are dusting off the instruments to get out there fast. The Gallagher brothers are making $100 million EACH from their tour. Nostalgia is hot right now, and is another window into status culture. Now that social media has taken over whole societies, it's created an avalanche of imitative rivalry. A population-level sameness (everybody copying everybody else), and an exponential increase in 'identity' movements to try to differentiate one another within this ocean of sameness (rivalry). Everything is now a fight, an argument, that's what the identity movements create. People fighting for status and identity, in the ocean of sameness. This creates fatigue, people become exhausted by the endless comparison and fighting. Nostalgia fills the void, people can flock to bands from 'the good old days'. Authenticity becomes the new passion. It restores hierarchy, which calms the rivalries. The bands aren't necessarily any better, but because they come from another time, they're turned into 'golden era' acts, that calm dissent. It's like Hansonites pining for the old Queen and Country, but in music.

Close up of springs in an anglepoise lamp. More generally called balanced-arm lamps. I’ve posted about these before, and how the human body operates via a similar principle, though using a different mechanism. These lamp arms will move to any position, and just stay there, without being clamped. Like they’re floating or suspended in space, balanced in every position by the distribution of weights and springs. They were invented by a vehicle suspension designer, George Carwardine. In a similar way, your body is suspended in space, in every position, by the distribution of the tissues and bones. No need to hold it in position, to strain muscles or relax them. You’re just suspended, effortlessly, no need to use effort with any bit trying to lift any other bit. Of course this isn’t how most people actually experience their bodies. They feel strains and tensions and stiffness and effort all the time. Because we’re brought up to believe our bodies are bits and pieces that we have to control, one piece at a time, particularly to hold us up against gravity. We feel weight and think that’s gravity, and then strain ourselves to fight that weight with other parts of our bodies. The weight feeling is not gravity, it’s your suspension system out of balance. When you’re using your body properly, you should feel weightless, all day. Because you are, while your body does of course have weight, nothing feels its OWN weight. There is never any need for effort.

It’s belief in ‘the people’ as an actual thing that destroys all democracies, all republics. All populist utopias. Every attempt to lead a society somewhere is seen as a tyranny, against which an insurrection is then organised. The winners of any insurrection become the new supposed tyranny, and thus the cycle perpetrates itself without end. This is also how the counterculture sees society. As any attempt to tell people what to do being a tyranny, an oppression, to be resisted. Which creates a new tyranny of the victorious revolutionaries, and so on, forever and ever. Amen. Trump is just the latest going around of this circle in the US, but all democracies are now entering the same cycle. It’s also the mechanism of friendship groups at school. That’s no coincidence, this is basic human behaviour.

Happy Birthday, Shev! 🥂💐🎊

Happy Birthday, Dirk! 💐👯🥳

I think 'explain what this data shows' would be a task for maybe Year 8. I'm yet to find more than about half a dozen adults who understand the importance of what it shows. They don't want to understand, it's too confronting.

Many more people find dogs to be lovely creatures than cats, in my experience. While I like dogs, there are all sorts of things about them that really don't gel with me either. I think if you compare them with their wild varieties (both dogs and cats) - let's face it, in most cases who likes wild dogs? Wild cats are magnificent creatures.

Combustion engines are so appalling that we only tolerate them by hiding them away out of sight and hearing. Genius, Nissan, genius.

We’ve been encouraged by countercultural ideas nearly 70 years ago to believe that the more equal and social we are, the more peaceful and prosperous we will all be. But societies run on status. The more equal and social we are, the more intensely we fight. Humans despise equality, despite what they say. They always want to differentiate themselves from the sameness. They want status, because status is identity for social animals. Look at the comments on any public social media post, the vicious pile-ons that are all about people resisting any attempt to ‘unify’ them behind things.

You can go back to the original 1960s events and watch the emergent Boomer generation firing up their countercultural revolution, the avalanche of teens taking over the world. Facing up to things like wars and suggesting…singing songs about it, and asking people to stop. Like other people got up every day all through history and said ‘let’s have a war’.

It seems certain the LNP will ditch a commitment to Net Zero, and try to spin their way out of it by pretending they're prioritising cheaper electricity through coal, gas and nuclear. Only complete idiots don't already understand that those are the 3 most expensive ways to generate electricity. They're relying upon people hating their current high costs, but not knowing that those are all due to expensive gas and coal already in the system. They'd also need to build brand new coal and nuclear plants, which would take 10-20 years and cost tens of billions of dollars. All your money, public money, no private company will touch it because it's a bin fire for their money.

I'm sure thousands of Australians avoided Tesla home batteries as part of the current rollout, because 'Elon'. Many if not most have flocked to Sigenergy instead, now 'Australia's favourite battery'. A good example of how it pays to be an adult and understand things, and not a kidult relying upon what's trending on social media. Tesla makes fantastic, reliable technology.

A used Tesla is hands down the best value car you can buy. You're getting astonishing value for money.

So the LNP did it, they decided to become the Dad's Army of climate (in)action. One part of their spin will be that Australia is only a small contributor to global climate change. Australians are carbon/energy PIGS. Second only to the US in the West. The same crowd will tell you China is the real polluter. It doesn't even make the top 5.

Trump is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is our ideas about democracy, the attempt to erase distinctions and hierarchies between people. That forces them to fight, all day every day, to try to restore those hierarchies. A wannabe King relieves them of this effort and is felt as a tremendous weight off.

Translation: Covid fucked up the immune system, dramatically accelerating the development of HPV-related cancer, even without Covid being found in cervical tissue (it was attacking the immune system, stopping the body fighting the cancer). Or put another way, yes you can catch cancer. Just keep the Covid infections coming. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165037822002923

It's glorious that companies like Globird are announcing plans like this only one day after the LNP announced their idiot 'let's use lots of expensive coal and gas and nuclear' policy. 4 free hours of electricity in the middle of the day. Their off-peak rate (any other time outside 4-8pm and the 4 free hours) is also very reasonable, only 27c/kWh. Renewables are doing this. Not coal or gas or nuclear. This plus the huge rollout of batteries will take massive pressure off peak generation in the evenings, which will drive prices down for everybody.

It’s reported Gina is going to help fund a mass propaganda push leading up to the next election, on the evils of Net Zero and also mass migration. To try to turn the public on Net Zero the way they did on the Voice referendum. This is a ‘debate’ that isn’t a debate. Those like me who haven’t paid for electricty (or even petrol) in years already know the way to cheap energy. It’s not Matt’s way, which will make energy astronomically expensive. The proof is right there in everyday lives already. Your electricity and fuel bills are now your choice. You can choose not to have them. Just as the country can.

Last year this same virus, EBV, was found to be the cause of multiple sclerosis. Now it’s thought to cause lupus too. We give it a cutesy name, the ‘kissing’ virus i.e. glandular fever, to normalise everybody catching it. Just as we call Covid idiot names like ‘the spicy cough’, to normalise mass infection. Viruses don’t go viral, usually a bit of sunshine and lack of water kills them. Humans are viral, their imitative ‘viral’ behaviour is what spreads diseases.

The whole idea behind bushwalking and camping is revealing. That our ‘bush’ is some thing, that we can go and see. ‘Nature’. Nothing captures better (though we never think about it this way) our total disconnection from the land we live in, or are visiting. Turning the landscape into a theme park, a tourist attraction. Like it’s some ‘natural’ separately existing thing.

Very well said. Doesn’t matter if Minns isn’t your pathetic political ‘team’ (I don’t have any political team). This is basic engineering. Like he says, the anti-renewables crowd are ‘bullshitting’ people.

Renovation and lifestyle shows turn homes into magazine spreads. The focus is on what other people see and think about the house. It leaves me cold. To live a building has to be lived in, over an extended time, everything in it has to be handled and used over many years, so that the building becomes a physical, evolving history of the life within it. A home, not a house.

This is what the LNP is hoping to do now with Net Zero, leading up to the next election. The total backflip of the Australian population on The Voice, in only a year. They’re hoping to engineer a similar viral turnaround, on climate. Will they succeed? I think some basics of economics and engineering make it unlikely. But they only care about winning an election, they may trash climate action to win votes from Labor, but just let renewables win anyway, saying it was ‘the market’. They don’t have any other source of energy to draw upon.

Being a rock star means you can be a rebellious teen your whole life. That’s why the job was invented.

One of the big criticisms of owning an EV is that it’s much faster to refuel a petrol or diesel car. There is actual data on this, average time to refuel at a bowser has been studied not least by service station owners, it’s a major part of their business model. The answer? About 12 minutes. That’s just to refuel, it doesn’t include queuing if the bowsers are busy, buying food or drink, or going to the toilet. On top of that the studies show it takes on average about 8 minutes for the driver to divert from their route and rejoin it, before and after re-fuelling. That makes the total on average 20 minutes. Modern EVs easily recharge in that time, or even much less. But most EVs also charge at home overnight. That means ZERO minutes out of a person’s trip.

BritTV is streaming The Good Life. Each episode is prefaced by a warning that the show is from another era, and the language and concepts may offend some viewers. lol, what a window into how every tiny bit of life has now been pulverised by identity (status) politics. Macbeth would put people in hospital.

Two things to see here. One, the energy/climate debate is a fake debate. The entire industry already decided the answer years ago. It doesn’t matter whether your political team disagrees, it’s irrelevant. Second, the real reason energy prices got higher is that we privatised energy, decades ago. This turned us all into energy consumers, like we’re buying sneakers, or coffee. It also now means when the grid needs modernising, we all have to pay for it. It should always have been a public service, funded centrally, not by ordinary people. Governments can even ‘print’ money to pay for it, they don’t have to tax or borrow.

It doesn’t matter if your car has a range of 1000km unless you’re going to drive 1000km without stopping. Which nobody does.

Yes, take your super and bid up prices in these beautiful spots, to drive out the locals and turn the villages into aged care resorts. Just stay home. Make it a beautiful place to be. Leave other people alone.

Somebody measured CO2 concentration at a gig. The reading for healthy fresh air is 450-500. Ever noticed rock stars have done diddly squat against Covid, even though causes are their usual bread and butter? No benefit concerts, not even any comments. When the pandemic started rock stars retreated to their multi-million dollar estates to wait out the storm. Public health is bad for their business model. Then they were one of the first to break the ‘lockdowns’. To this day many rock stars take significant and secret Covid precautions at their gigs, while caring not one tiny bit for their fans out there in filthy air. Kidults.

To those who like ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow’ as an argument against renewable energy, it’s worth remembering that off-peak power was invented decades ago because people *weren’t* using power overnight. They were asleep. And generators needed them to, to keep coal plants running (you can’t switch them off overnight). Off-peak has now shifted to the middle of the day. Off-peak ‘baseload’ generation at night will disappear. No big dinosaur generators you have to keep running 24 hours a day. The surest sign you’re talking to an idiot is if they say we need ‘baseload’ power.

Social media evolved to: 1. endless fights on everything that happens in life, between teams 2. endless ads targeted at you 3. a flood of personal trivia from peoples’ lives that nobody wanted to hear about, before social media. 3 was the bait, peoples’ deep desire to compare themselves against others. That fed 1 and 2, the business model.

I wonder if Kinross Wolaroi had any say on the placement of their ad in The Guardian.

I posted about the explosion of nostalgia the other day. People flocking to bands from decades ago, to religions from centuries ago, to 'trad wife' marriage models from the 1950s and earlier, etc. The world of infinitely flexible identity because of no stable hierarchies of status stresses people badly. Even basics like biological sex are grist to the identity-status culture mill. Now the Norse Gods are back.

This young woman posted online that she’d achieved her PhD in biology. The bros in the manosphere weren’t happy. Probably wankpanzer drivers.

Humans decided to burn energy that took millions of years to form, in only 300 years. Oops.

Tonight Bathurst’s councillors decide the fate of the general manager. There is a strong belief amongst the social media crowd that removing the general manager will find a magical extra $10-$15 million a year. It’s almost amusing the things people believe these days. 

It really is. Unfortunately the Americans will likely fuck it up for everybody doing what their culture always does, try to use it to make a tiny handful of people richer than most of the planet combined. I spend far more time discussing ideas with AI than with people now. People are hopeless at ideas, they’re obsessed with imitative status games, with their social position, their precious identities. Humans are so blind to that behaviour, catastrophe is all that changes their minds. And even then it just shifts their status games to a new set of ideas, if they survive the catastrophe.

The ‘weight-loss’ drugs continue to generate astonishing results well outside weight. Now they appear to counteract ageing, even at low doses that have minimal impact on weight loss. When given to mice ageing stopped across the entire body. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)00474-7

If you’re not convinced how much climate influences sea levels, for most of the past 25,000 years sea levels were between 40-140 metres lower than they are now. METRES. If we want to keep melting what’s left of the ice from that last glacial period, that graph is only going to go in one direction.

Most public debates are completely fake, they're not about the issue in any way. They're about the status of the competing teams. Here's a good example, in the US the two main parties (Democrat and Republican) have completely swapped their regional and racial strongholds, as well as their entire ideologies, in the course of their history. All that matters is victory to the team. Public issues are just fuel for the team sports, against other teams, and parties happily shift to fundamentally different beliefs and principles, if it wins them the status game (elections).

Two short videos out of the UK to share. The first, a breakfast TV host telling viewers and colleagues that he’s just had Covid. Took 2 days off. Now back at the desk, spreading it to co-hosts and crew, chuckling, while they chuckle along with him. This is every workplace I know right now.

And video 2 out of the UK. You can play make-believe and ignore serious threats to your life, so you can go to gigs and restaurants and pubs, and on OS holidays. And then reality will bitch slap you. Work won’t care, if you run out of sick leave, you might get leave without pay. If you’re lucky. Medicine has nothing to offer you for perpetually repeated infections, you’re on your own. Early death will follow. Many say to me, if it’s this bad, something would be being done about it. That instinct was right when we had a functioning public health system. We dismantled that soon after Covid started, the kidults were missing their gigs and dining out and OS travel too much. Politicians openly said it, it’s your ‘personal responsibility’ now. Like this poor young woman you have no hope of fixing Covid yourself. You can only try to avoid catching it.

The greatest con of the past 5 years is that ‘lockdowns’ damaged us. Lockdowns freed vast numbers of Australians from poverty, for the first time in their lives. They forced much more workplace flexibility, which employers had resisted for decades. They cleaned the air in cities that had previously been choking in smog. They made the ‘economy’ boom, because when the poor get money they spend it, unlike the rich, who hoard it. You can see even today how the status quo still attacks lockdowns. Those who did very well out of the old status quo will resist these changes to their last breath. That’s how humans work, people will fight for their own status. Only catastrophes like pandemics change things, breaking the status games. As this research shows, it’s much cheaper to end poverty, than to maintain it. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-28/cheaper-to-end-poverty-increase-jobseeker-than-maintain-hardship/105866692

Nathan’s Tesla has done 404,000 km. The only maintenance he’s needed is some work on the air conditioner, and on the suspension at 345,000 km. He’s paid not one cent for fuel, or on regular servicing. Fuel savings alone have been over $50,000, which would pretty much pay for the car. The car looks and drives as new, and smokes any combustion clunker on the road in performance. If you’re not driving electric, you’re just making excuses for following a dumb crowd, like at high school. Leave high school, be free (and much richer).

‘Bazball’ has definitely lifted England’s winning rate, almost doubling it. It also leads to spectacular losses, but I’m sure they’ll take the winning rate as the true test. (It was also introduced by a New Zealander, which follows a long tradition of England needing to import expertise and talent, to win at anything). However, England still isn’t winning at the same rate as the Australian teams in the early 2000s, who didn’t use Bazball. They just played aggressive cricket, as Australia always does, including aggressive defence when needed. Bazball is mostly a psychology thing, a way to stop players going into their shells under pressure. But Australia was already doing that. The current Oz batsmen aren’t though, they’re playing like England used to play.

The big plus of demolishing public health practice that’s 150 years old in favour of dining out, gigs and overseas travel. Diseases that used to be seasonal are now yours to enjoy all year round.

Well there you go. Even if your parents call you Travis, you can set the world on fire. Maybe that’s why you can.

Everything we mythologise as ‘democracy’ actually had its origins in battles between the highest status members of a society. Take the idea of a ‘fair trial’, or procedural fairness more generally. That had nothing to do with ‘the people’ at all, it was the outcome of brutal and bloody battles between Kings and their nobles, the nobles wanting limits placed on the King’s power. If the King tried to harm them, they insisted on a ‘fair trial’. Democracy is not for or done by ‘the people’. There’s no such thing as the people, it’s a fiction. All societies are full of status hierarchies of various forms, they’re not some amorphous mass called ‘the people’. Democracy is the managed rivalry of its highest status members. Trump for example isn’t doing an ‘authoritarian’ takeover of democracy. America just has unmanaged rivalries between its highest status people. He’s not being reined in by others of high status, mostly (for now) because they’re doing very well out of him. That will shift though, it always does.

“We have damaged an entire generation. The future costs of this are astronomical.” Senior Covid doctor friend of mine, in conversation

The climate crisis is reaching tipping points. This is Tehran, capital of Iran. 14 million people live there, about half the population of Australia. Preparations are underway for imminent possible evacuation of the entire city. They’ve run out of water.

America’s Department of Homeland Security. You’d laugh if it was Iran, or another theocracy.

Hilariously, Musk tried to reveal anti-American forces on social media by forcing Twitter accounts to show the country of origin of their owners. What it actually revealed is how much of Trump’s rise was due to the influence of foreign actors, often enemy governments creating fake influencers. The Russians and Chinese do this all the time, why wouldn’t they? We’re idiot enough in the West to leave ourselves wide open to entire populations being brainwashed by anti-climate, anti-renewables, anti-vax propaganda by placing no controls at all over these idiot platforms. Because of our idiot belief that democracy is ‘the people’ acting. China regulates social media and is called ‘authoritarian’. It’s the surest sign of a clueless idiot in my book, the use of the word authoritarian today.

Somebody wrote a very smart pushback to the populist political surge in local government, in Bathurst. The Facebook invasion. The only thing I’d add to this is that General Managers implement the decisions of elected councillors. They have very little discretion to do anything, except implement what the elected councillors want. Bathurst is like every other local government area in the country. Growing demands on its services, zero new income. Why everybody is getting big rate rises. The incompetence and corruption that plays well with the social media crowd is just about always amongst those elected to run towns, not those who are paid full-time to administer their decisions.

‘Living with’ Covid made us treat infections almost as a laugh. Any fool who says ‘spicy cough’ to me risks a spicy fat lip. The control of infection doubled our life expectancy, we’re too pig ignorant now to even know that. And that’s so unfair to pigs.

Still one of the prime kidult things, an entire street full of cars with parents picking up children from school, all with the windows wound up on a beautiful day, with their engines running for the air-conditioning (some for 20 minutes), playing on their phones.

In our children’s lifetime, 80% of the world’s population will live in Africa and Asia. Pauline Hanson’s nightmare 🙂 Europe and North America, the tiny bits at the bottom, hold 60% of the world’s wealth. The Asians and Africans won’t tolerate that for much longer. We’ll call them ‘authoritarian’ for trying to reverse the proportion. Our 60+% share of the world’s wealth came mostly from screwing Africa and Asia.

Some neuroscientists believe we’re very close to a cure for Multiple Sclerosis, now it’s known it’s strongly tied to EBV (Epstein Barr Virus, what we call glandular fever). Infections cause most human disease. Every year new links are found between chronic disease killers and earlier infection. For the anti-vax cookers, tough luck, back to your pointless vitamin D pills.

Happy Birthday, Rosco! 👯🌟🥳

The level of stupidity out there in the anti-EV crowd. Looks like a KIA Seltos, which is a petrol car. The smoke coming from under the bonnet gives it away anyway, the battery is in the floor of an EV, not under the bonnet. It's a petrol fire.

It wasn't my idea to replace society with social media.

Public health is toast in a culture of ‘living your best life’ i.e. adolescent life. Replaced by ‘cool’ i.e. with what’s trending. Surely people see this, how every facet of public life now is just a series of constantly shifting trends? That’s kidult culture, adolescent culture. We’ve thrown 150 years of social progress into rapid reverse.

One of the great Australians most have never heard of. Tony Rinaudo, an agronomist i.e. an expert in agriculture. Rinaudo looked at degraded landscapes, particularly in Africa, and like many others helped with projects to plant millions of trees. Nearly all of those projects fail, the trees die. Then one day he noticed in these landscapes what looked like small shrubs. But when he looked more closely, they weren’t shrubs. They were trees growing out of the ground, from established roots where old trees used to be before land clearing. (Western colonial powers had earlier been the cause of much of this land clearing). Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) was the result. Rinaudo taught people how to tend to this emergent new growth by pruning all but a dominant new stem. This led to the trees regrowing entirely by themselves, out of the ground. Whole landscapes are restored with minimal effort, in barren deserts, from these pre-existing forests underground. In Niger alone local farmers have regenerated over 6 million hectares of barren land, without planting a single tree. It’s doubled their crop yields and income. It’s a genuine revolution.

Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are masterpieces, but are also terribly understood in what they show. Humphrey is almost universally understood through a modern American lens, as ‘red tape’ bureaucratic obstruction. This fundamentally misunderstands the character, and what the show is about. The English, of all modern democracies, are unique in operating still strongly via custom and tradition. The UK has no written constitution. Humphrey’s inertia IS that custom and tradition, operating on the crazy whims of politicians and the public in the present. Resisting fads and fashions, in favour of long-term stability. Stability is Humphrey’s god, and the key to the historical relative peace and pragmatism of UK life. Other nations like the US and France, and China and Russia, come from revolutionary backgrounds. After their revolutions, social chaos reigned, so they quickly installed universalist creeds, like declarations of independence and liberties. Enshrined in written constitutions, which become like their Old Testament and its universalist commandments. The universalism was the urgent attempt to contain social disorder, with universal principles. The revolutionary nations operate under continuous debate and contestation, around the universalist principles. Unlike the calm, multi-generational customs and traditions that guide UK life. Revolutionary nations are unstable, seeking the stability that only custom and tradition can provide, and which only evolves over centuries or even millennia. I would say most would be horrified by the ‘anti-democratic’ quote by Humphrey in the meme. But his view there is much more profoundly democratic than the feverish gibberish we get from post-revolution nations, with their endless and repeated revolutions in the name of ‘the people’.

Everybody goes to AC/DC because everybody else was going to AC/DC. Everybody went to Metallica because everybody else went to Metallica. Everybody went to Oasis because everybody else went to Oasis. See the pattern here? Music is just the soundtrack to the real show.

The global Covid strategy was based on nothing more than a wish for the pandemic to be over. So we just defined it as over. Like defining yourself as rich, even though you have no money.

All sides of politics talk nonsense about debts and deficits in government spending. Governments create money, they don't need to tax or borrow to have it. And as you can see in the actual data, governments go into budget deficits when private debt is high and nobody is spending anything, to keep things moving. It's an exact mirror image. The idea that governments accumulate huge debts was a political trick to force governments to sell off public assets, by vested interests who wanted to make money out of public services.

One for those who think machines can only output what a human has input. That AI just plagiarises what humans do. AI taught itself Bengali, without any human training it. Google has no idea how it did it.

One for your anti-vax friends.

More belief that ‘the people‘ run democracies, through their votes. Leading to the idea that people are all voting strategically for minor parties and independents, to hold power to account. It’s a ridiculous idea, do 20 million voters confer and say ‘ok, you vote for party A, and I’ll vote for B, and you vote for C…”? We’re getting more minority governments for the same reason we have so many brands of washing powder. There are so many more options for people now when they vote, so many more ways they can differentiate their identities from other people, to promote their own status and identity. The parties all do more or less the same thing if they’re elected. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/senate-two-party-system-civic-duty-preferential-voting/105970018?utm_source=abc_news_web&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_web

We knew what Covid does to children 5 years ago already. We did nothing, in Australia they’re not even allowed to be vaccinated against it. I can’t get a single person to be interested or care about it, they’re all too busy going to gigs and restaurants, or boarding planes for OS holidays. While denying this makes them kidults i.e. adults who live like teenagers on a permanent gap year, from reality. It’s the explicit strategy with Covid to DELIBERATELY infect all children repeatedly, to try to create immune protection for adults. Not only is that sociopathic, it also doesn’t even work. Infection with Covid doesn’t give you immunity, even worse, it damages your immunity and makes you more susceptible to infection with everything.

Saw a lot of this sort of thing after the storms in Bathurst, with truckloads of abuse for Council staff. The 'nature strip' or verge (road reserve) is indeed Council land, and sometimes it plants trees there. If those fall over, Council is responsible for cleaning up the mess and taking it away. If the homeowner has planted trees in the nature strip and a storm damages them, it's their responsibility to have it cleared away - it's not a Council tree. Technically they shouldn't even be gardening in that strip, it's not their land, though Councils tend to allow it within reason, because it can improve the look and function of a street.

This is very common, deliberate behaviour. Men with tiny weenies whose entire identities is tied up in their Tonka trucks, like toddlers in a sandpit. The shift to EVs makes them feel what they are - nobodies. The modern ute is also useless in just about every way. A shit tray, shit handling on the road, shit aerodynamics, shit ride for the rear seat passengers. And a 2+ tonne raised missile with bullbar ready to pulverise you and your family if one of them hits you on the highway. People buy them because other people buy them, to fit in. We never leave high school.

And given that virtually nothing ever goes wrong with the motors, you're looking at a car you could theoretically own your entire adult life. And it'll have the performance of a supercar that entire life, and will cost you next to nothing or nothing to fuel and service. Data shows lots of people are making the switch, it's astonishing it took this long. If you're worried about range, you're misunderstanding some basics. The average daily distance travelled by Australians is 13 km. https://www.drive.com.au/caradvice/how-long-do-tesla-batteries-last/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOWBPRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeVSg5CERQkOY-TF7WUa4Zs6W3Ri-0IKuIg7OeLjlxDrjuXyaXKk_zSFKuguw_aem_nfmoe4MekjNtdO23lmWZ6g

Brian May talks now about being in the autumn years of his life. To me he’s an example of how genius is mostly misunderstood, because that’s what genius actually is - something too difficult for most to understand. (The term ‘genius’ applied to popular things is meaningless - by definition genius will never be popular. It will be incomprehensible to most people.) I could write a book on May’s specific genius, but to be brief - he solved the problem of rock guitar tone. The industry is mostly stupid, so doesn’t understand this, they just call it the ‘Brian May sound’, like it’s a personal idiosyncracy of his, or a new flavour of ice cream. But he solved what seemed the impossible problem, of how to make an overdriven guitar still be harmonically rich, so you could ‘hear all the notes’ even with complex chords, and get an overall harmonic resonance that is beautiful and not jarring, and musical. When you distort a guitar tone, by definition you’re creating a distorted sound. Really those are just extra harmonics being added to the sound, but in an uncontrolled way. You need to find a way to make them *resonate*, harmonically and therefore musically. Nobody had ever solved this, until May came along. It was thought to be impossible. His entire rig of guitar and gear is designed to create a resonant tone, at all stages of the continuum from clean to distorted. See the graph. There are no gaps, all other rigs have gaps in that continuum, and the distortion tends to arrive abruptly and go into mush, that only sounds great with simple power chords. But even more than that (true genius here), to create that resonance in the sweet zone of the human ear, in the voice frequencies of 1-5 kHz. Why May’s guitar sounds like a ‘voice’. The combination of actual acoustic feedback in his semi-hollow bodied guitar, Tri-Sonic pickups on the guitar (resonance ~1.8–2.2 kHz), treble booster resonance (~2–4 kHz), EL84 vacuum tube even harmonics in the Vox amp (2nd harmonic emphasis), and Alnico Blue cone speaker resonance in the Vox amps (~2 kHz & ~4 kHz) creates a self-reinforcing harmonic bloom — the guitar seems to “come alive.” You can’t achieve that plugging just any old guitar into a treble booster and Vox AC30 either, it will lack key dimensions of the harmonic resonance. Why his hand-built guitar is so crucial to the full sound. The ultimate visibility of that genius is in how May controls where the guitar sits on that continuum of clean to overdriven, in a particular song. He just turns the volume knob on his guitar. That single knob controls the entire resonant connected architecture, of guitar plus treble booster plus amp. Compare and contrast with the sort of rig many other players use, in the other picture. Players obsessed with gear, and not tone. Eddie Van Halen was a similar great, obsessed with tone and totally indifferent to gear. But May achieved what Eddie looked for his whole life, almost before Eddie was born. I stopped playing overdriven electric guitar because I got sick of the mush sound, losing the distinction between notes in everything except the simplest power chords. And the lack of harmonic resonance, the tone was just ugly, except for harsh metal music. Brian solved that. He won’t be recognised for it because most of the industry is too stupid to ever understand it. And he’s too polite to force the issue, too gentle.

I said when Trump was re-elected that the whole farce would likely implode by the mid-terms, and that the hysteria about fascist takeovers of the US is nonsense, that ‘totalitarian’ paranoia has always been the defining feature of all American culture. It’s childish to say I told you so, but here we are.

In just under 5 months, Australians have added 175,000 home batteries to the grid. The demand is immense. The negative drivel you see on social media about things like renewables and EVs is a sponsored tiny minority of professional influencers, trying to sway the more gullible in the community.

We’ve arrived at the green part of the curve. It gets very fast from here, the hangers-on to the old status quo will be run over in the rush. How change always works. Many still opting for hybrids. My advice? Don’t do that. A hybrid will make you wince every time the petrol engine kicks in and the car feels like it’s suddenly got flat tyres, with the pathetic lack of grunt from the combustion engine. Range anxiety is a deliberately invented fiction to make you fear driving an EV.

The Press has never been free. What we call media was invented by elite members of societies, barons, as part of the furthering of their own aims. It only began to appear free when multiple barons established opposing media empires, to this day media is just wildly divergent views all competing, to further the ends of owners, not some objective, neutral commentary. Democracy itself has never been about the people, it’s a temporary state where there’s a provisional balance between elite groups, none of which can assert total dominance. That in turn only happens following some catastrophic disruption to the status hierarchies, like war or natural disaster. The democracies we grew up in only existed because of two world wars and a pandemic and Great Depression, which smashed status hierarchies. Over time one person or group will reassert itself, as Trump is now doing in the US. Monarchies and churches were the winners of these games for most of history. What we call democracy is just a transition state, between two hierarchies.

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within, that they create such weak and fragile ties. Being separated from your land and constantly not grounded in your surroundings should be a profoundly difficult thing - but the culture loves it, relishes it. It huddles the coast, spending far more time OS than having any real connection to its own continent. And when it does travel domestically, it’s glaringly obvious we’re tourists in our own land, no matter how much we have Crocodile Dundee fantasies about getting back to nature. Camping doesn’t bring you any closer to the reality of the place. Every trip to me feels like a violation, to me and also to those whose lands we turn into tourist attractions. Those lands are people’s homes. They create tourist districts to shelter from visitors, wanting the income but secretly (or increasingly not secretly) hating being overrun. The occasional trip, sure, but let’s not pretend travel is an occasional treat for modern people. It’s a lifelong obsession. Many defend it with analogies about nomadism. Nomads didn’t travel. They moved around to find food. We refuse to see that this passion is a remnant of our colonial/imperial history, the accumulation of places that is the passion of all empires. Today disguised under terms like ‘bucket list’. The entire culture needs to come ‘down to Earth’, as Bruno Latour said, meaning learning how to inhabit space again, rather than just pass through it. We also can’t do basic maths. About 4% of the world does regular international travel. That 4% alone is destroying and overwhelming popular destinations, while burning and emitting tonnes of jet or ship fuel per person, per trip. It’s not an activity that is globally sustainable, for anything except the tiniest elite. We are that elite, the children of empire. And above all else, it doesn’t bring you any closer to the reality of the places you visit. You will literally get closer to that reality reading a book about the place, by somebody who lives there. Being there is just a point on a map, not participation in the landscape and its culture. Even ‘authentic’ tourism is bollocks, the pretense that by staying a while you’re doing anything except invading other people’s space. You are always just a visitor, you being there changes what you went to see.

Even NSW, which was a laggard, now on most days provides most of its electricity from renewables. Those red arrows show the tiny remnant of coal used during the day, quickly collapsing. Overnight you can see what impact Barnaby Joyce’s army of mental midgets have done to hamper wind power (green), which is actually stronger at night. That and batteries (dark blue) will fill those gaps, batteries coming online super fast now. People forget too that business and consumers only consume electricity overnight in any quantity because they were made to over decades, with off-peak power. Mostly we’re asleep. The off-peak time has now shifted to middle of the day, and that night time use should fall away significantly as behaviours change. We don’t need 24-hour continuous full power, only coal plants made us think that because you can’t turn them off.

Happy Birthday, Eva! 🥂🎁

A more subtle manifestation of kidult culture is how songs are used to express emotion in TV shows, streaming and films now. Rather than characters articulating a set of feelings and exploring them, which used to be the meat of any story, notice how often now at critical points of a story's emotional evolution songs are just played, it becomes like a music video clip. Adolescents invest enormous emotional meaning in favourite songs. Rock stars are one of their key reference points upon the world.