December 2025

Silicon chips are far and away the most complex things humans have ever created. Take the M3 chip, from Apple. It has 37 billion transistors etched into a piece of silicon smaller than your thumbnail. The complexity of chips is so enormous that it's actually impossible to represent the structure visually. You can't draw a plan of a chip. All of the tens of billions of transistors on chips operate in the quantum realm too, which is mind-bendingly complex. I can't describe just how impossibly complex these chips are, it almost defies belief that they even exist. There are stupendously smart people in the world, who build these things. Anonymous heroes.

Inflation remains too high because we have an ageing, cashed-up population who are spending without restraint. The stupidity of the favoured economic ideas of our time, monetary policy (free market idiocy), says the solution will be to punish the young and poor, through interest rate rises, to try to restrain their supposed spending. They don’t have any money to spend on anything.

European and Japanese car makers who spend a lot of time sponsoring anti-EV propaganda here in the West made most of their money selling their vehicles to China. China no longer wants their vehicles, it has EVs. These companies are now on the skids.

Many EVs use two electric motors as well, so have double the power of a V8 combustion shitbox, the gold standard of ‘grunt’ cars. The electric motor is also about the size of a large glovebox, and gives you all of that power and torque from 0 rpm. Once you feel the power of an EV, every combustion engine will feel like what it is - a loud, puny, expensive waste of space.

After decades of blaming fat people for being lazy gluttons, spurred on by the pseudoscientific bollocks of ‘calories’ by the nutrition and fitness industries, the WHO has declared obesity an actual medical condition, and endorsed widespread use of new GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. At the same time it and governments are targeting affordability of these drugs. Patents expire very soon. The flow-on health effects go well beyond weight loss, into areas like cardiovascular health, effective treatment of long-term chronic infection conditions, and potentially even neurological health. A genuine revolution in health. Now if only we’d tackle infection again, and dump the idiot ‘living with infection’ nonsense.

Having my annual Covid shot today. In plenty of time for Christmas infection parties. When was the last time you got a booster?

Peter, Facebook is misbehaving on the other thread. Here's a summary I put together of sub-$50K EVs in Australia (new), plus I added a secondhand Tesla Model 3 (CPO - certified pre-owned i.e. comes with Tesla warranty).

Here come the batteries. Boom.

I wasn't unhappy to learn that Andrew Tate lost a lot of money in the current Bitcoin slide. Alan Kohler's assessment of crypto more generally is spot on. The Trump family uses it for what it is, a giant Ponzi scheme-casino to enrich themselves at the expense of the gullible. Even the more positive ideas behind crypto reek of organised crime, for anybody with 5 minutes of experience in finance and governance.

Left and Right politics is just adults playing football while pretending to run nations. Institutions run nations. The true story of our time is the gutting of those institutions, led by status-driven revolt against post-war institutions (the ones that created a ‘public’ to guide the re-building). And the countercultural anti-establishment push of the boomer generation. This started to really take root from the 1970s, both currents aligning. What we call neoliberalism (small government, free market politics) and the countercultural peace and love movement are the SAME movement. Both attack institutions. Even those institutions that retained staff had much of their work contracted out to the private sector. This destroyed the coherence, accountability and institutional memory of the institutions, and thus of our societies. What replaced these institutions? Imitiative social behaviour. Trends and viral fads. That’s all that structures our collective daily argy bargy now. Structuring hierarchies have been replaced with ‘trending’ waves of mass attention. Our nations are now just giant high schools, riven by popularity-based trends that shift every 10 minutes and have no connection to the material problems of our nation’s life. Not an analogy. Boomer culture replaced adult life, structured by hierarchical institutions maintaining a public sphere, with schoolyard life of group-based imitative status rivalry. It was all the boomers knew, they (like us now) spent their entire formative years IN high school. When they left, they remade adult life to match it. That’s what ‘kidult’ culture means. Social media copied this same structure, dramatically magnifying the shift.

The US has had 6 economic depressions in its history. All 6 were immediately preceded by politicians 'balancing the budget' i.e. paying off debt. Governments in debt mean citizens in surplus i.e. a healthy economy. Paying off government debt sucks money out of everyday life, which causes economies to crash.

From the Council courtyard, firsthand example of one of Tony Rinaudo’s underground forests. A tree was chopped down in the courtyard a couple of years ago. It continues to live underground, now it’s re-shooting. His work suggests a lot of attempts at tree planting are both doomed and possibly unnecessary. You just need to allow the roots of the old trees to sprout again.

The idea that modern governments need to collect tax from you so that they have money to spend is ridiculous, and centuries out of date. The money you have is not, despite what politicians say, ‘your’ money. All money in modern societies is government money. They create it, and put it in circulation, for us to use. They can also create money for themselves to use, they don’t need to collect yours to have money to spend. They also don’t have to pay back the money they create to use. Government spending doesn’t create debts, in the way household or business spending does. Who would they pay the money back to - themselves? This idea government spending is debt is political, designed by vested interests who don’t like government and want to undermine it. The function of tax in a modern economy isn’t to give governments money to spend, to ‘balance the budget’ (spare me). It’s to control the quantity and flow of money in circulation. To rebalance it away from hoarders, and free it up for widespread use. Lots of people with money = a healthy economy. A few hoarders with most having no money = economic collapse. Governments need to do the thing modern conservatives hate (because they’re really shills for the hoarders). They need to tax and spend. All the time, and much more than they do now. Most problems State and local governments face for example could be fixed in a day, if the federal government simply created billions of dollars and sent it to them. If that caused inflation, they would then tax the hoarders to reduce the overflow in money supply.

I paid for my own shingles vaccine doses (Shingrix) a couple of years ago, because I’m not yet old enough to qualify for the subsidised shots. I get every vaccine I qualify for, because I strongly believe infection is the cause of most acute and chronic human disease. Including the biggies, like heart disease, neurological disease, and cancer. Vaccines for one disease often offer cross-protection for others. The flu shot drops your risk of heart attacks by 25%. And the shingles vaccine is proving to be just as powerful against dementia. Civilisation is the control of infection. People who tell you we should happily live with infections are far more dangerous to you and your family than other fake threats used to scare you, like immigrantion.

Happy Christmas from foreign oil companies Australia! They thank you for your loyal $60 billion a year patronage. Let's keep our $60 billion. Imagine what we could do with it.

You can see here how the world today is really just the decline of various European empires. Only Asia is a counter-force, now on the ascendancy again as the failing European empires degenerate into populist status games, trying (and failing badly) to restore the Kings and empires that brought them into existence.

Study our own culture. You could once go to major sporting events for the love of the sport itself, and celebrate a ‘good game’, no matter who won. And then kidult culture took over, and now the rivalry in sport is existential. Peoples’ identities are bound up in their favourite team or sportsperson winning. That’s teen culture, taking over adult culture again. This year’s F1 championship has been a perfect example. Yes Piastri has been treated appallingly, mostly again because of the same team sports culture within the team and formula itself. But the fans are something else, the racing has become just a platform for their identity games. Even at the races, entire crowds decked out in the merch of their favourite team. Death threats, even, when fans are displeased. I want to live in a grown-up world again. It won’t happen in my lifetime.

Norway leads the world with EV adoption, nearly all of its vehicles are now EVs. it took only about 20 years to swap them all over. The government there led the change. All real change is led, the idea there's something called a 'market' that functions by 'supply and demand' is one of the most damaging myths of our time. A con. I will guarantee that everything that is said to be the result of a market at work is really just some small number of people who have monopolised an industry.

The big questions never get asked, let alone answered. There is no necessary reason that work and home had to become two separate places in the first place. For most of human history humans worked at home, on their homes. There was no separate place called 'work'. Now home is mostly just a real estate investment, which we travel to work to try to afford, and hope to cash in on rising housing markets. We're a culture without any understanding now of what 'home' even means. Also why we travel obsessively, lacking any sort of groundedness.

Sigh. The wankpanzer effect has hit batteries too. Humans run on status, the home battery program dominated by people putting truly ridiculously huge batteries on their homes, in a pissing contest. I want to leave high school.

Supposedly abstract art, like Francis Bacon’s portrait here, annoys many because it doesn’t ’look like’ things. That gives it away, for non-artists ‘recognition’ is essential. Just as the greatest excitement at a gig is when the band plays one of the hits which the crowd ‘recognises’. Humans are social animals. What they recognise isn’t how things are, it’s a (social) agreement between people as to how they are. Perspective and realism are just styles of art, not art being truer to reality. Even the basic depth of a painting - perspective usually - is not reality, it’s a technique to try to include the view *other* people would have of a thing, standing somewhere else. It’s all about others, about sociality. What we like but also how and what we perceive, is determined by our relationship to others. Not reality. You may think your love of a band or artist is your personal taste or opinion, but it will nearly always be determined by a social group you’re part of, in competition with other social groups. A painter like Bacon tries to release us from the capture (it’s a literal capture) of social life, to see and experience things for how they actually are. Free of recognition (social pattern matching), forcing a confrontation with actual forces and affects. Abstract art is often ‘flat’, without the fake depth of perspective, trying to capture sensation itself, free of social imitation and rivalry. This is the first in a series of posts from me on the idea of a ‘world without others’. Not a world living as a hermit, but a life lived without constant reference to other people, a life not captured by sociality. A critical thing, in an adolescent age where sociality has replaced reality itself. Only what trends is (apparently) now real. ‘Why are you still wearing a mask? Nobody else is wearing one.’ Etc.

I do know people hate our culture being described as kidult. It’s not an insult, it’s only a description of how the culture operates. (It is also a disaster, but that’s different to it being an insult.) Twee sentimentalism is part of kidult/adolescent culture. Everything is a drama, turned up to 11. The culture of the feels, we don’t analyse or process feelings and solve the problems they represent, we just wallow in the feelings themselves, using them as platforms to perform our social identities. I chuckled seeing that the now universal wearing of black armbands by sportspeople, for example, because somebody’s granny’s cat died, has now led to bespoke armbands being produced for some teams, like the English cricketers. Added to the kit bag with the bats, gloves and pads.

Could you live in a world without others? By which I mean, not live without other people in your life, but live without the need to conform to the social frameworks they think, act and feel inside? It is tempting to think we’re doing that by simply adopting a social team that is in some ways opposed to or different to the dominant ones of the day. Like alternative lifestyles, or anti-vaxers, or transgenderism. The options are now prolific, because we’ve had so many years of social status games, where each group defines some new way to have identity and therefore status. But it’s all still a capture of you, by the social status games. All the same imitative rivalry. You imitate others in your own group, and fight other groups. It’s also tempting to think you can escape this by going ‘off-grid’ in some way, or ‘getting back to nature’. Alas, just more social groups, with a status axe to grind. Living in a world without others, as free as possible from social conformity as the guiding principle of a life, is not being a hermit. It’s a life focused on the material reality of existence itself. A life that refuses both popularity and unpopularity as measures of worth. Science tried to be that but if anything is even more infected by social status games. A life of a type of solitude that feels directly the violence of social conformity, which in every sphere of life (without exception) will come at you if you refuse to play social status games. Whenever you see social teams battling each other you’re as far from a world without others as it’s possible to be. Social media is that, endless imitative rivalry. Every tiny facet of existence transformed into a fight of some kind, between proliferating social groups. Somebody performing their social identity, in battle with others. Even and especially the harmless ‘here’s me on holiday’ posts, are that. Reframe every social media post, you can’t miss it once you see it. It’s high school, on steroids.

Happy Birthday Brett! Lovely to have it on a Sunday.

From next week social media platforms are expected to take effective measures to ensure people under the age of 16 can’t have accounts. A great idea, it should be extended to all age groups to rescue our societies from US IT robber-barons, and the transformation of adult societies into high schools. But progress is progress, Australia one of the few countries willing to tell IT CEO kidults to fuck off. I’ve heard criticism of this initiative, saying ‘kids will find a way around it’. Most adults completely ignore speed limits when driving, I don’t see that as a reason not to have speed limits. I also like the way the government has placed the onus on these idiot platforms to comply, or face hefty penalties, rather than on users. Like the insidious tobacco industry, the social media companies will be worried about this, and strategising to undermine it. It will also flush out just how kidult much of the population is, for whom social media IS life. Lots of kicking and screaming at every step of shutting these toxic sewers down for good. And lots of people who think it’s just a nice way to share their social lives, not even realising that’s the bait in the bait-and-switch business models of these platforms. Google ‘enshittification’.

For those who think AI just parrots what people put into it. This guy went to his local ER with terrible stomach pain. The ER diagnosed indigestion and gave him acid blockers. He went home still in terrible pain, and asked AI what might be wrong, The AI immediately said either a perforated ulcer, or atypical appendicitis, and encouraged him to go back to hospital and demand a CT scan. He did. The scan showed a critically inflamed appendix, at the brink of rupturing. 6 hours of surgery later, he’s now OK. AI likely saved his life.

HBD! 🥳🌟🎂

Algebra might help here?

Crypto is the 21st century way to be a teen forever. (He paid the woman btw.) Throw in hatred of children and you have the counterculture still in full swing, nearly 70 years on.

Always loved the show. But looking back at it, something really stands out. There’s not one child in this entire show. The ’good life’ had no place for children. Neither couple had children or even mentioned them. Both couples totally obsessed with their respective lifestyles. This is the cultural equivalent of looking at astronomical nebulae, to see the birth of a new galaxy. This was the birthing of a new culture. Mid-1970s, when the post-war generation were taking over adult life, replacing life with lifestyles. We’re living in the ruins.

The ugliest tiny minority of old Australia, totally out of touch with Australia as it actually exists today.

F1 was disgraceful this year, the formula is designed to do everything except race. The Brit darling won, but as Dave Hughes describes here the obstacles his own team threw in his team mate Piastri’s way defy belief. Include what the stewards did to Piastri in Brazil, which made even other drivers say whoa this is BS, and Piastri would have won the title comfortably.

James is only a college freshman. He suffered cardiac arrest while training. Finally some are starting to see the ‘uncomfortable truth’.

Happy Birthday Inez!!

Car brands are a fascinating study if you want to see how human societies are really just status games. Only five global companies own most of the brands of vehicle that people buy. It’s like laundry detergent, where the shelves in the supermarket give the impression of huge brand diversity. All of them owned by only one or two companies.  As with laundry detergent, cars have almost identical underlying technology. Manufacturers create brands because they know humans crave status, and want a way to differentiate themselves from other people. They do it even within a single brand, with a range of models that are all almost functionally equivalent. And even people who choose a particular brand as a way of differentiating themselves end up being one of thousands or even millions who make exactly the same choice. We never leave high school culture. Just as an interesting aside, I doubt many even know that Hyundai and Kia, two of Australia’s big brands, are the same parent company.

Gough Whitlam's government bought Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in the 1970s, for $1.4 million. There was lots of fake outrage at the time from the other side of politics, who used it as a stick to beat the government with. The painting is now valued at $500 million. Pollock is another classic example of the clash with the idea of art as needing to 'look like' something. Great art creates perceptions and feelings that are non-human (percepts and affects). It gives you a way to perceive and feel the world in ways that normally you wouldn't, as a human. 'Recognising' ('looks like') is the direct enemy of that, recognition is an immediate non-thinking matching. Great art forces you to stop and think, to experience something new. Pollock looks like just random scribble, 'anybody could do that'. Anybody can play the chords in most Beatles songs. Great art requires you to do a bit of work, not just fall back on unthinking recognition, which is pure redundant duplication (A = A). Pollock isn't supposed to look like anything in that way, it's an experiment with how the materiality of paint and gravity behave to produce percepts and affects.

Bob Ross died 30 years ago, but he's become an international star posthumously. His painting videos are used by millions as relaxation aids, because of his gentle delivery and the sound of the paint going onto canvas using his variety of techniques. His paintings would fall under the realist-kitsch genre for art lovers (possibly because they're instructional), but if you watch you'll see the genius of something they missed. Ross doesn't try to create an image in a drawing sort of way. He uses the physical properties of the oil paint in interaction with brushes and painting knives to make textures, that create amazing likenesses with landscapes and buildings. The landscape emerges from the physical textures of his instruments, paint and canvas. Watch and you'll see (go to youtube and search for Bob Ross), how entire mountain ranges or clouds or forests appear as if by magic from some quick brush strokes, or scratches of his painting knives. It's enormously liberating for any new artist, there's no need to try to reproduce the complexity of a landscape, it's already contained virtually within the tools and materials. In this way he's like Cezanne or Pollock, the whole universe is present virtually in every thing, including a blob of paint and a brush. He releases or actualises it, no need to draw anything or try to create something from scratch. In a way his approach is more sophisticated than either of those giants of art.

There’s a suggestion of an export tax of 25% on gas. That would be a BRILLIANT idea. I’m not sure people understand just how much multinational gas companies are screwing Australia. We are giving them our gas for free, it’s outrageous in its stupidity. They respond with ‘let us drill more wells’. Yeh, fuck off. Pay up.

I think many school teachers today would say that their biggest challenge isn’t the kids. It’s the parents. Because the parents never left school, they’re kidults, and they then pass on those mindsets and behaviours to their kids, and actively intervene in school life to try to give them advantages. I’ve seen grown adult parents cry when their child isn’t selected as a school leader. My old high school still has parents boosting their kids’ post-school lives, 40 years later. The school status games never end. As a test I asked my old high school if I was the first person to attend the school to ever get a PhD. The response? “Oh achievement comes in many forms” i.e. who cares? The achievement of many others openly celebrated at the school. But not if you’re not part of the network of chummy parent-teacher status games. In primary school the dux award was given to somebody with only mid-level grades, because their mother was good friends with the teacher. Status games begin at birth, and never end.

I know many Australians who had an ageist chuckle about ‘Sleepy’ Joe Biden being old. This is the scene just about every day now in the US.

It’s very popular to create hysteria about China. You can see from these graphs that it’s the genius and scale of Chinese manufacturing and engineering (what drove the prices of goods down, the blue lines), that in turn allowed us in the West to pay workers more. Most of us now work in service industries.

It *was* a ‘Herculean effort’. With Covid, the kidults missed their gigs and restaurants and OS trips after about 3 months, and we had to abandon all public health because parents were sick of having to share the XBox and Playstation with the kids.

In our kidult (adolescent) culture, socialising is seen as the key to a happy life. Teens love nothing more than to ‘hang out’. Without it we are seen to be at terrible risk to our mental and physical health, through ‘loneliness’. Unfortunately that’s completely backwards. Socialising is what amplifies all status comparisons with other people. And our ‘neighbourhoods’ now are social media platforms, where social comparison is turned up to 11. Socialising is making us more miserable and violent every day. Throughout history the actual definition of maturing, of ’growing up’, is needing to socialise less. Socialising is a life stage, teaching kids how to move beyond only family ties, to learn to live with others. The counterculture means we‘re now stuck permanently at that transition point, never moving beyond it. The culture is an episode of Friends (teens worship friendship). Of besties. Of fragile personalities incapable of thinking, feeling or acting without a friend group. Everything is a viral trend. Public life is just a continuous churn of fads and fashions.

You can see the usual pattern of all fundamental change happening, with AI. People rushing to find reasons to protect the status quo, rationalising what they're already doing and finding fault with new things. But AI is so fundamentally useful and remarkable that most are ignoring the doomers. Nothing has ever unrolled this fast.

Whole nations with damaged immune systems. Norovirus also up 35% in the UK right now. Hospital chiefs say hospitals ‘engulfed’ by winter viruses. Here in Australia flu season (a 'winter virus’) was still going in summer. This is continued inaction over Covid. Your life expectancy without a functioning immune system is toast. I know nothing will be done, public health and public policy was replaced with ‘just do what everybody else is doing’. High school/kidult life. The most disgusting thing is people will be most at risk in their own homes, at Christmas. Once you stop public health, pathogens circulate freely inside your home. It’s like turning off the sewer network and letting raw sewage flow into thw backyard and bathroom.

For the first time ever in history, the world now has more people aged 65 and over than below the age of 5. 70% of the world’s population now lives in countries with below-replacement fertility.

80% of all global social communication now passes through three platforms: Meta (FB/IG/WhatsApp) TikTok YouTube That's a hijacking. A capture of our lives, by two American corporations, and China.

A day for fun stats. A contrast experiment, with our 'lifestyle' lives. There are now 10 times more chickens by mass on Earth than every other bird species. One million species are at risk of extinction, and vertebrate populations have declined by 69% since 1970. The total mass of human-made materials (concrete, plastic, metal) now exceeds the biomass of all living things.

The Seshat Global History Databank collects an enormous amount of information about civilisations in all of history, to help scholars understand present-day societies better, and identify when they're at risk of collapse. Maybe of interest to Mike and Kyle, and possibly others, is what the data says about hierarchy.

All of history and all human life is a rivalry between social elites. What looks like ‘the people’ running the show is really those same people being co-opted by different elite groups, to partake in their battles against other elite groups. This isn’t just politics, it’s art, fashion, language, architecture…the lot. As social animals status is our oxygen. All civilisations fit inside this phase diagram, and can shift from phase to phase. If elites are unified and the population is mostly happy, you get Attractor I. Stable order. If rival elites are in battle but the population is mostly happy, you get Attractor II - elites fight but little changes. If the population is unhappy, but elites are unified, you get Attractor IV, with ‘authoritarian’ suppression of popular unrest. If the popualtion is unhappy and elites are fragmented and in battle, you get Attractor III, violent bifurcation i.e. revolution. That breaks everything, there is no going back to the other attractors from there. Right now the US is probably resting in Attractor IV, bordering on III. It’s not an ‘authoritarian’ takeover of ‘democracy’. ‘The people’ never run anything, they’re just used by various elites (they emulate those elites, for status) in their campaigns against other elite groups. Remembering this goes well beyond politics, the phases describe everything about human life. You could use the four phases to describe shifting in fashions and tastes too, for example. Mike and Kyle and others, for your consideration ;)

In China fishermen use cormorants to help catch fish. The cormorants dive into the water to catch the fish, and are prevented from swallowing the larger fish by restrictions around their necks. This is just one example of living *in* a landscape, rather than on it, as we do. Other living things become active members of your society. To us landscape is just real estate. A ‘view’ at best. Then we get bored with our views and travel the world consuming other people’s landscapes as views or theme parks, on our ‘bucket lists’. Photographing it for our socials feeds, to feed our real passion, status games with other people. “I’ve been everywhere, man.”

Great to see this scheme almost tripled in funding. And also more evidence of what most deny, how status runs societies. The moment this incentive was first announced, people rushed to put the largest batteries they could on their homes, like the rush to get bigger and bigger wankpanzers in their driveways. Way beyond the storage they will ever actually need or be able to fill with their solar, and off with the fairies in terms of cost-benefit calculations. Thankfully the government has now put a stop to those status games with battery sizes. Let’s see what people choose next to turn into a status game.

In many ways China is uniquely similar to Australia. Both are ancient cultures who found way to live IN the landscape, for thousands of years. Not on it. To make the landscape part of their society. Those farmlands are thousands of years old, and are re-worked every year to keep the richness and diversity. Compare with post-European settlement landscape in Australia, which is almost universally a catastrophe, topsoil either blown out to sea or washed down rivers and creeks turned into erosion gullies. Nothing much alive in those farming landscapes today, either above or below ground. And no people live in it, so we’re not even living on the landscape, it’s mostly empty of people, just mechanised agriculture. Your relationship to your landscape determines the longevity of your culture. No society can survive without a productive relationship to landscape. We’re living creatures. We have no idea how to do it. Aboriginal people could show us, but we’re too ignorant and racist to even ask. We think they’re primitives.

Veteran music producer Tony Visconti, who lived through Beatlemania, describing the EXACT shift the counterculture of that time was. And it had nothing whatever to do with music. Like he says here, until The Beatles, kids wanted to be their parents. Then along came The Beatles, and they now wanted to be The Beatles. That’s a fundamental change to *culture* itself. All of it. The young generating a counter-culture, to adult culture. Thus the name. This was the beginning of the great boomer hijacking of adult life, and replacement of it by teen culture. That shift had been building for most of the century, with compulsory schooling creating a separate child/adolescent culture. In 2025 we’re still living inside that adolescent counterculture. We just mostly don’t recognise it. People in their 80s with the same sets of beliefs, passions and worldviews as people who are 17. Completely unprecedented in world history.

A deal like this is going to introduce you to a world of pain. $3,999 for 50 kWh of storage is snake oil. Go with a reputable firm like solarquotes to get access to reputable battery installers.

You can watch the entrenched interests of the status quo, in this case American car manufacturers, implode in real time as their industry gets destroyed in front of them. The Europeans are reportedly going to weaken their shift to EVs too, under pressure from European car manufacturers. Again, an own-goal, which will accelerate their collapse. This is how social change always works, the existing vested interests squeal like stuck pigs, and are then swept away.

Nothing of much use will be said in the coming weeks about this event. Every team will use it to try to promote their team even more. We weaponise catastrophe for our social status games. Until the catastrophes destroy all of the status hierarchies, and the people in them.

One of the profound changes those who lived through the 1970s into the present day will have noticed, is the collapse of community service organisations. Lions, Rotary, Apex. It was organisations like this, and community sporting clubs, that taught Australians skills in how to live together as communities, around practical work targeted at community need. Fast forward to 2025 and they’ve been replaced with GoFundMe culture. Let shit happen, then fundraise for the victims. Normalising systemic failure. It’s far too easy to blame this on shifting attitudes of generations. The community service movement grew out of the almost total social collapse of WW1, WW2, the Great Depression and the Spanish Flu pandemic. Communities had to be re-built, almost from scratch. Only catastrophe brings people together. Without it they each fight for their own status. The absence of catastrophic threat to societies is what killed community service movements. Social media society is generating the next catastrophic disruption now, with uncontrolled social status games.

Happy Birthday Phil! Can’t believe it’s another year already.

People think you’re crazy if you suggest allowing people to become more social makes societies more violent. But sociality is violence, intrinsically, because social comparision is our deepest passion, and leads to imitative rivalry. If you then transform your entire societies into social media platforms, the violence will escalate exponentially. Welcome to 2025. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2517530122

Nothing reveals our culture more than disaster. The event has to be turned into a movie/TV show, it has to be narrativised. The culture of the feels, people need to be emotional to be engaged. Emotion precedes action. There’s competition for attention. Preferably with a part for the teller in the “I was there” genre, setting out some connection to the event, no matter how tenuous. Not a community response but a series of roles for individuals, in the event, even as an extra. Everything is emotion dialled up to 11. Heroic or tragic. Symbolism abounds, we ‘stand with’ people in sympathy, rather than act calmly prior to disasters to prevent them. Drama Queens to the max. Even watching it on TV threatens our mental health, because the whole thing is like a reality show.

Less than 24 hours, and the culture of the feels has kicked in with the crowdfunding. No question that he saved lives, but the precedent here is deeply problematic. For so many years we were told ‘not to take the law into our own hands’. No vigilantism. Now the message is if you do, you’ll be a hero, and as a bonus you’ll be showered with cash. The police must despair. A culture that can do nothing but feel. Emote. After the horse has bolted. Crowdfunding is charity without community. If you move people (make them feel - everything is feelings), you’ll be rewarded. It’s a DIY lottery, where those who make us feel a certain way win the prize. No thought or analysis of or action against actual problems, just wallowing in feelings and emotions. Sentimentalism. Compare it with a service culture community (Apex, Rotary, Lions that I posted about yesterday). Where social problems are worked with before they appear in a continuous and preventative way. “I belong, therefore I will help”, rather than “I am moved, therefore I might help”. The latter creates no lasting community or change. The former operates 365 days a year, as a community working upon itself.

Excitingly, the powerful new immune therapies against cancers are suggesting actual cures rather than just treatments for autoimmune diseases as well. Cancer is immune evasion, whereas autoimmune disease is over-activity of the immune system, under attack. The therapies can target both in opposite ways.

The GLP-1 drugs are improving at speed now. This is a revolution for health that goes well beyind weight loss. Obesity is just the symptom of broader dysfunction, that these drugs target. The impact on a whole range of conditions looks like being immense.

The President for ‘it’s all about me’ people. There are millions of those.

I want to talk about the ‘hollowing-out’ of towns, to give more context to my deep dislike of modern travel culture. This is Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Cotswolds, one of the most photographed towns in the UK. It has about 3,000 residents. Every year it’s swamped by between 300,000 and 500,000 tourists. Just look at the photo, it should disgust us. This has hollowed-out the town, meaning the town went from being an inhabited place, where work and schooling and shopping were focused on the needs of a local community, to now being an English countryside theme park. Residents actually say they feel like they’re living in a museum, most avoid the town altogether now, it’s been overrun. Basic things like postal services, pubs, shopping and schooling collapse, replaced by gift shops and pubs as visitor venues. I see many regional towns in Australia looking to tourism to save them from the decline of their original industries, like farming and mining. It will turn them into theme parks, where the most simple indicator of hollowing-out is that the town is mostly occupied by people whose commitment to place extends only as long as their stay i.e. nobody left there has any interest in the future of the location, only in its appeal as an image-venue during their stay. Many of these growing number of hollowed-out towns worldwide are also marked by the increasing ownership of housing and building there by people who don’t live there. Houses are converted to holiday homes, and AirBNBs, and ‘investment properties’. For now larger towns in the Central West are holding the line against hollowing-out, but I doubt they can without fundamental change to our cultural understanding of place. They’ll all become theme parks, and most will fail at that too. Tourists are easily bored, and move on to the next trending location. There for a fun time, not a long time. Geographical prostitution. If you think of yourself as a more ‘authentic’ traveller, answer me this: what’s your ongoing commitment to the places you’ve visited? Do you retain any connection to them at all, any interest in their ongoing survival? Or did you just get in, get the pics for the socials, the ’experiences’ for your personal growth and ‘bucket list’, and get out again?

You know that combustion clunker you have, that’s costing you $2/litre to run? (ouch) It gets much worse from here.

Less publicised in the Bondi shootings was the couple who tried to disarm one of the gunmen, and were shot dead. Doesn't fit the heroic narrative.

This isn't people reading information. They're living on the platforms. The platforms have replaced society. It's a SOCIAL process, not a communication or information process.

Covid infection can lead to significant increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Taking low-dose aspirin appears to significantly reduce that risk, by over 50%. The two drugs that seem most powerful in reducing long-term harm from Covid have been around for years and are super cheap. Aspirin and metformin. Most believe the acute phase of Covid, when you catch it, is the measure of how serious it is. They have a 'mild' experience and think that's it, not serious. It's the long-term effects you don't see that are far more dangerous.

What to do, in the face of horrible events like Bondi this week? To me the answer is always the same. Think. Learn. Don’t try to find a team to ‘stand with’, our usual populist kidult response to everything now. This isn’t a football league. I would encourage everybody to learn more about Judaism, as a first response. Judaism is a tradition almost unique in history, that puts thinking at the centre of human life. Jews love to think, it’s glorious. The greatest respect we can offer Jewish people is to think in return, to emulate them. Judaism historically refuses totalising argument and totalising politics. I’ve used the Western Wall as a picture here to highlight how profound that shift is. (Very happy for my Jewish friends to add depth or corrections to my post!) The Western Wall is the last remnant of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which the Romans smashed to pieces in the Roman-Jewish war in 70 AD (CE). How Judaism responded to this is historically unprecedented. Rather than try to re-build a Jewish HQ, as it were, a new temple, a new centralised home for Judaism, it decided to decentralise the tradition. To make Judaism itself a civilisational operating system largely without sovereignty. An operating system that opposes totalising in all of its forms. In religion, in politics, in society, a tradition that places the continuous interpretation of Jewish law (the Talmud) at the centre of all life, led by Rabbis, who are like judges in our common law tradition. The Talmud contains generations of Rabbinical interpretation, of the Torah, the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible (what we call the ‘Old Testament’), the foundation text for Judaism itself. The important thing I think for today’s strife is to understand an essential tension in the heart of Judaism. Between this de-centralised, knowledge-led operating system, and the desire of some Jews to restore some sort of homeland, some form of State, for Judaism itself. Israel. In its stronger form often called Zionism. The current Israeli government is very strongly Zionist, very much about creating a strong Jewish State of Israel, in the way the rest of us live in nation States already. That creates a real tension inside Judaism itself, between the de-centralised, Rabbi-led knowledge society, and this muscular push for Statehood, which is often totalising in its belief and actions, particularly under the current Israeli government. This is hotly debated within Judaism itself. The current PM of Israel is himself under a cloud of corruption, within Israel, and you need to understand how much violation of law is central to older Judaism, and the tension modern populist Zionism (more Trump-like) introduces into Judaism itself. Much of the violence we’re seeing against Jews in the wider world right now is a response to this internal debate within Judaism. A response to the muscular Zionists, rather than Judaism as a whole. And yes, alongside antisemitism, though the Zionists are very keen to evoke that as cover for their actions. I think caution is needed there. It’s not even clear either ‘side’ of this debate within Judaism is right or wrong. Some argue the de-centralised Rabbi-led model hasn’t worked, and Jews need a strong Israeli to survive. That may be true. Or the older Rabbinic tradition may be the more sophisticated and ultimately durable tradition, not basing Jewish survival on the existence and strength of a nation State of Israel, but allowing a more nuanced and flexible Talmud-based operating system to operate anywhere. We have similar debates about the powers of common law (judges) versus populism (electoral power) in other nations.

Singapore's Polyclinics are probably the future of healthcare. The great logjam in the Australian system is actually the GP. GP practices are fairly small, don't cover a large range of health services and often act more as a referral chokepoint through to specialist and allied healthcare, and hospitals. Very little actual treatment or care can happen in a GP practice. Hospital care is prohibitively expensive everywhere in the world, good health systems minimise the need for it. A single Polyclinic focuses strongly on preventative care, is team- rather than doctor/GP-based and often occupies several floors of a building. It integrates services that would usually require four or five separate appointments in Australia. On a single visit, a patient can: See a Family Physician for a consultation. Go down the hall for an X-ray or Ultrasound. Have blood drawn at the onsite lab. Visit the onsite Pharmacy to collect medications. See a Dentist, Podiatrist, or Dietician. Polyclinics also use AI and other high-end technologies to dramatically speed the turnaround time for diagnosis and treatment, and allow a lot of in-home care. Very few Singaporeans need to enter hospital, as a result.

Work Christmas party today. Hundreds packed into an inside space. I’ll be the only one there in a mask, which many will find weird. Because we now live in a culture where what you think and how you act is shaped entirely by your imitation of what everybody else is doing. Only that appears ‘right’ or ‘normal’. High school culture. Christmas is a week away. If you want to spend it in bed with Covid, it’s an unusual present, but each to their own. Imagine working a whole year to spend your holidays in bed, sick. I see so many Christmas parties online, because sharing them on the socials is a major link to the whole social process. We treasure nothing more than social events. We think sociality makes us happier and healthier than anything else. I’ve shared many times here how wrong that is. Sociality is an addiction, creating the greatest stress and violence in societies. It’s driven by social comparison, by a desire to ‘fit in’ and have a status and identity in a social group. Many families fight at Christmas, but will maintain the image of it being healthy ‘get-togethers’. Family violence on Christmas Day is 45% above the usual average. At New Years that jumps to 80%. The irony is Christmas celebrates a man who above all else asked humans to abandon social status games. Who went against even his closest group of friends, to act in a way that horrified and alarmed them. He horrified and alarmed them because he was rejecting the sociality that was their whole existence.

The notable thing for me in this story is that the car was serviced 100 times to meet the milestone. The Teslas I’ve shared here before with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on the clock received either one service in that entire time, or no servicing at all.

People who still read anything I post here will know that for a few years I’ve re-focused much of my attention on status. I did that because status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. If you don’t understand it, your life becomes a puppet to it. And here’s a thing. Many if not most would not even realise that Christmas has this as its core message. Why was Christ crucified? Because he wanted to stop human status games. He assumed mortal form to short-circuit the scapegoating mechanism that humans use to end rounds of status games. Look at the Bondi shooting. The fight is on to find a scapegoat. Albo, or antisemitism. Or whatever. More status games, more groups fighting each other to own the event, to define it. To make their team win and give it ultimate status. Christ’s sacrifice was designed to stop all of that. By placing ultimate status in a transcendent God, made mortal. And then sacrificing him. No point even playing status games if the top of the status hierarchy is a God. But a MORTAL God. That’s the genius. Centuries of Christian civilisation, in partnership with the Roman Empire, implemented this. It created the societies we enjoy today. By bypassing human status games, and creating a set of principles and practices to live by, that took our own pathetic human status out of the equation. That torpedoed status-driven violence. Of course there are no utopias, it didn’t always succeed, and now status games through social media are completely out of control, so we’re heading for civilisational collapse. But it showed us the way to beat them. By targeting status itself.

One of the bullshittings of the Covid pandemic was the explanation for why people started getting sick with everything, after the pandemic was apparently over. They’re still getting horribly sick with things they’ve never heard of, at all ages. The explanation offered was ‘immunity debt’ i.e. ‘lockdowns’ stopped us all catching things, so our immune systems got flabby. To this day people say to me ‘aren’t you worried how sick you’ll get when you take that mask off eventually?’ Not even aware they’re just parroting spin from politicians, not science. You can’t stop getting sick from infections by repeatedly getting sick from infections. It would be funny if people weren’t killing themselves believing it. People are getting sick because Covid is damaging and weakening their immune systems. Many may never recover, and may even die. Read the science. https://www.bmj.com/content/390/bmj.r1733

We’re not connecting with others not because of some epidemic of ‘loneliness’, but because as a culture we’re not engaged in any collective projects. We’re not building a common world, we’re all ‘living our best (individual) lives’ instead. We’re don’t need to be hanging out with our friends like teenagers well into adulthood, we need to be all working towards building better societies, together. Historically only catastrophes like wars and plagues and natural disasters make that happen. We’ve lived through historically unique times, in the past 70 years, of peace and prosperity. That peace and prosperity came from the collective work we did after WW2, to re-build the destruction of societies. A collective building project. Without that disruption and destruction humans will just play status games, like teenagers in the schoolyard, all day and night.

At the end of another year on Facebook, more than ever I wonder what the point of it even is. I’ve long since just started using it as an online diary of thoughts. Interaction is slim to none, on most things, unless you’re into mutual self-obsession, posting about your personal life and liking and praising others who do the same, to give each other permission to keep going. Living lives on the platforms, performing and curating your life as content for your feed, so that lives become difficult to distinguish from magazine spreads. Stories about the epidemic of loneliness and lack of connection should ring alarm bells, at a time when personal, professional and political lives are all now taking place inside social media platforms, which have hijacked society itself. It doesn’t seem to occur to us that the enormous *increase* of sociality, via these platforms, is what’s leading to the disconnection. Sociality is not connection, it’s teens hanging out. Connection comes from working together on things, and discussing those things. Social media is the complete replacement of adult life with an extension of high school life. Not an analogy. The culture of likes and followers. Of the ‘feels’. Rampant sentimentalism, where we ‘stand for’ everything, and do nothing. We don’t have a clue what to do, even if we wanted to. Hashtag culture where public life is just constantly shifting meaningless trends.

Ryan expressing a common view here, that because he was still using grid power in winter, there was a problem, and so he better get another battery. That the aim should be ‘self-sufficiency’. Being ‘off-grid’. Actually that shouldn’t be the aim. The grid is a wonderful public resource. It will almost certainly cost you FAR more to buy a second battery (or a large battery) to try to avoid using grid power in winter, than it would cost you just to pay for some grid energy over winter. Use the grid when you need it. It’ll cost you much less than trying to be an island. True off-gridding costs tens of thousands of dollars. That’s completely wasted money, unless you live in an ultra-remote area with flaky grid connection.

The bizarre thing is that ‘sports’ cars are built to drive on public roads. The people who buy them will drive in anti-social ways, why spend the money otherwise? We need to reframe what ‘good driving’ means, away from car racing as a frame. Good driving is efficient, safe, smooth driving. Good for passengers as well as drivers, and safer for other drivers. That’s a very skilful art, needing constant assessment of other road users. Fast driving is just like quickies for sex. Not better driving, less skilful and more mono-dimensional driving. Those who want to do car racing driving can hire private race tracks and go and do it there. That tiny group has defined what good driving is for far too long. Also the group who worship fetishes like ‘driving a stick’. Gears are old technology, get rid of them for most driving. Only needed because combustion engines are so gutless.

The tour should probably have been advertised as Cliff alive on stage. Rather than live on stage.

I decided to catch up on Doctor Who by watching the last series. With the exception of maybe 1-2 episodes, it was appalling. But popular with some of the social media crowd, for whom it was mostly written. The show has become a vehicle for identity politics. And no, it’s not just ‘woke’, I refuse to play any of those games. It’s a faithful rendition of the culture we’re currently living. The fight for identity, which is the fight for social status. Innumerable references to the Doctor being gay, and of course he was now black too, after immediately previously being a woman for the first time. In the finale a team of wheelchair-bound helpers openly discussed ‘ableist’ topics. And everybody made interminably long, emotional speeches about everything. Excruciatingly earnest boredom. As a culture we’re obsessed with identity now. That happened because we no longer have a functioning status hierarchy to regulate status in societies, so it’s on for young and old to try to get to the top of that tree.

Societies always have a foundational status hierarchy, social teams that are the most fundamental people belong to, that structure the rest. For most of our history those teams were religious. In our lifetimes that seemed to have shifted to what we call ‘politics’ instead, whether a person is a Left or Right, or a ‘centrist’. But scratch the surface and some of those older teams never went away. It’s there in plain sight. Both of these recent PMs for example had as their true mission a continuation of church-led societies that they managed to mostly disguise in their daily work. They don’t bother trying to disguise it now they’re out of parliament.

Google is still doing amazing things. Like Google Beam, where they’ve found a way to use AI to make videoconferencing 3D (no glasses needed), so there’s a much greater feeling of connection with others in the virtual meeting. It will also be able to translate instantly between participants speaking multiple languages.

You’re supposed to wish people a Happy Christmas here I’m sure, because we’re supposed to treat social media *as* our lives in the community, the venue for our social lives. The place we meet, the new public square. I will always refuse to use it in that way. It’s a hijack of our societies, by mostly American tech companies, whose algorithms transform everything from the personal to the professional to the political into endless debates and fights, to generate likes and traffic. If you don’t believe me, tell me how you mostly ‘keep in touch’ with what’s happening in the lives of your friends, colleagues and even family today? And how you keep in touch with the news of the world, or how you shop or get advice? For those who see social media as democracy in action, I share this story. You’ll find it’s a (violent) wrecking ball through everything we have ever called democracy. I live in the firing line of this shit every day at work. Social media is destroying centuries of social progress, and most insidiously because it targets our deepest addictions, so we don’t even notice it’s doing it. Oh and by the way I’m having a lovely Christmas. But I won’t use the Zuck’s platform to help do it. I chuckle when people use my social media posts as evidence of the life I’m living. They’re trapped in the bubble.

One of the fastest ways to identify disphits on the road is to look through the comments on posts like this. Just one more example of the sewer social media turns our lives into, giving visibility and coordinating power to some of the most stupid and nasty people and behaviours in our societies.

Because nobody gives two fucks, just a reminder Christmas is one of the times of greatest risk to you and your loved ones, from Covid. Because we shut down public health, allowing lethal pathogens to circulate freely in the community, deep into our homes. If you’re in Australia, do as much as you can outside.

A brilliant side-effect of electrification, which will also revolutionise plane travel. Unlike fossil fuels, you can generate energy from renewable energy anywhere, without having to truck in fuel. It will make even remote locations viable as destinations for people, and will make shorter-hop electric flight both scalable for more remote areas, and also create a hub of activity at the generation site that can form a nucleus of growth in these areas. Right now flight is mostly dependent on flying into major hubs/airports, where the fuel infrastructure is.

My Christmas present arrived spot on 25 December. That’s the Christmas break ruined. Probably caught it at the work Christmas party, which was a barely ventilated room packed full of hundreds of people. Knew I shouldn’t have gone, even masked was probably not enough protection. Sharing this to encourage people to still be vigilant, Christmas is the most dangerous time of the year for Covid. Though nobody has much cared for years already now, across the world. I’ll use a few drugs that will hopefully dramatically reduce the risk of Long Covid and other longer-term damage.

Robots are going to change the world. For a long time the challenge was making them physically capable of doing complex tasks. But they’ve been able to get them to do even backflips already for years, the challenge isn’t the hardware. It’s the brain, the software. Every single task had to have its own program. But now with AI, they’re giving robots generalisable intelligence, to be able to figure out novel situations all by themselves. Have a look. And what one robot learns, it can feed back to other robots, so the learning becomes exponentially fast. Google is doing amazing things. Its Gemini robotics (from its Gemini AI, which you can use for free right now) is leading the way. If you’re worried robots and AI will take over the world, put away the Terminator movies. What the world needs right now is intelligence, from anywhere.

Because they don’t need to make room for a whole range of mechanical things, smaller EVs actually have more room inside than much larger petrol or diesel cars. I noticed this with the Tesla Model 3, which doesn’t look huge on the outside, but has loads of space on the inside. You don’t need to buy a large EV to get the same space as a large petrol or diesel. They’re also safer, because of the structural reinforcing they use in the chassis, around the battery.

It's so hard to talk about anything today without people defaulting to their team in whatever fake 'debate' has been set up around it. Like discussing Tesla things, it fires up the anti-Elons and the anti-EVs and anti-renewables teams. But astonishing things are happening in the world. Tesla's entire fleet is a neural learning network. Every driver of a Tesla automatically provides continuous data to a central server, linked to the road they're driving on, which is then fed back to every other Tesla on the road so that the car knows about that location. For example if full-self-driving is a bit slow on a country road, because the central server doesn't have a lot of drivers and data from that road, and you speed up the car while it's driving itself, with the throttle, that's fed back to the learning network. If enough drivers do that in the same location, every Tesla that self-drives there will carry that learning 'go a bit faster here'. I saw this in action driving from the coast to Lithgow a few days ago. On the coast and in Sydney the car followed the exact speed limit. But in regional areas it sometimes slows down a bit, if it doesn't have enough data for that stretch of road. Over time it will build up that data. The entire car fleet gets smarter with every driver, every time your car drives a stretch of road, it's repeating the experience of thousands or even millions of others. Normally you're just one driver, and your learning is restricted to you. I mean, how awesome? You have to experience self-driving to appreciate the genius of the engineering. It already drives up to 10 times better than any human. It's the accumulated wisdom of thousands/millions of drivers.

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took care of most aspects of life, so it didn’t matter a lot if people had bizarre opinions, it didn’t impact our lives. Now with social media it really does. Peoples’ often batshit crazy beliefs now have power. They can form or join groups of people with similar batshit crazy ideas, and achieve real political power to change everybody’s lives. ‘Living with’ Covid one example, from a public health point of view it’s just complete BS, a total rejection of 150 years of progress. We have *always* been able to control pathogens, in my lifetime, until this last pandemic, when instead we dismantled a public health system that doubled our life expectancies in the last century. In social media society what trends, what’s popular, *is* reality. No harsh truths or decisions will ever be made that might be unpopular. Nobody even remembers earlier fights against infectious disease, the sacrifices that had to be made. And worse, by opening up these core parts of our social operating system to everybody to ‘debate’, you end up spending much of your life fighting and arguing with everybody, including the people closest to you, to do basics like stay healthy. That’s social media’s business model. To turn everything into a fight or a debate, because that generates clicks/traffic, which generates revenue. It seeming like a nice place to ‘connect’ is just bait, to get people on the platforms. Once there the platforms fuck over society, from top to bottom. They destroy centuries of institutionalised progress in social life. At the same time it’s pretty much impossible now to stay friends with people, if they have batshit crazy beliefs. Those beliefs have become their identities. Challenge the beliefs, they feel you’re challenging the most fundamental thing about who they are. The beliefs give them social status, a place to stand in society now that the institutions are broken. So you’re left having to decide whether to live a life guided by reality, or by the need to constantly appease people. I suspect I’ve burned a lot of bridges in the past few years, in my own friend groups, because I won’t appease. The consequences are now too serious, your health just for starters can be destroyed. I won’t stand back and watch the society I enjoyed living in be taken over by social media warriors and their idiot ideas, destroying my kids’ future and threatening their and my health. My workplace is under continuous assault from these same networked morons. There’s no escape now. Thankfully I’m close to retirement and can soon escape the need to negotiate this bullshit every day. But I’ll still fight for my kids and to rescue what’s left of our inherited traditions. I fight with knowledge, not debates or activism. Spinoza is a hero of mine, and as he said, only knowledge ever sets you free. He was excommunicated from his entire community for doing it, there he is in the image. That’s the choice you have to make, at certain forks in the road in history.

I share this not as medical advice, though it was medical advice to me, from senior Covid specialists and researchers. If you go to your GP with Covid, you’ll probably get told to take some Panadol, drink plenty of fluids and rest. Like it’s the flu. It’s not the flu, not even similar. Covid is far more dangerous. These are 3 of the drugs I’m using right now, to minimise Covid’s impact on my body. Metformin dramatically accelerates your body’s capacity to clear the virus. The low-dose aspirin has been shown to significantly decrease the likelihood you’ll develop Type 2 diabetes as a result of having Covid, as well as possibly protecting you from some of the terrible vascular effects Covid infection can cause. And the Nexium is for reflux, a common side-effect of Covid which irritates the vagus nerve, leading to widespread problems. Add to this regular mouthwash gargling with a mouthwash containing CPC (Colgate Plax is good), and nasal rinses with carrageenan nasal sprays. The idea behind most of these is to get the viral load down as early as possible, to restrict the capacity of the virus to set up home in your body and cause long-term damage. It’s the long-term damage people aren’t understanding about Covid. The list of that damage is now huge. There are no treatments for much of that list, you’ll be on your own.

A perfect example of how ‘influencers’ are destroying centuries of progress. People listen to idiocy like this and believe it. In the 1970s-80s before widespread use of the measles vaccine, measles was the single largest killer of children in the world. 2-3 million children died annually, of measles.

Another kidult. Masking to protect his baby from a novel pandemic virus got in the way of a good pic for the socials.

More ventriloquism from Cliff’s latest tour. Marvel how he sings the word ‘keeping’ in the second line here, without moving his mouth. https://www.facebook.com/reel/2298182703927928?fs=e&fs=e

Snow skiing is disappearing, as the climate warms. Hundreds of ski resorts already closed for good. Resorts in Australia have relied upon man-made snow already for years to stay open. High altitude snow is a magical environment, which became a playground mostly for the rich.

Here’s a fascinating fact for local car lovers.

“Only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks. The exact number varies by study, but roughly 60–90% of trans-kids turn out no longer to be trans by adulthood.” Adds weight to those who say transgender is actually often a movement to ‘trans the gay away’ i.e. disguised homophobia. Also adds to my argument that we’ve taken highly fluid and healthy adolescent play over gender roles and essentialised it in tragic ways, through social media activism. Turned it into just one more identity team sport, which hardens ordinary social activity into rigid identities that become a battle for status. Adolescents are highly suggestible and fluid in their desires, forging adult identities. Activists have targeted that. Just one more example of social media fucking over societies.

Let me plug again why you should have air purifiers at home. My favourite - the IKEA Starkvind. Unbeatable on cost, less than $200 for the freestanding model or $250 for the version that also acts as a brilliant coffee table. And the filters are only $20, and last a long time. You’ll pay up to $1000 for other brands, and up to $100 for their filters. The more expensive brands may have slightly higher filtration ratings (higher HEPA scores), but actually that doesn’t matter if you just run the things constantly, even with lower HEPA numbers the Starkvind will do the same filtration because it filters the same air multiple times. So - why should you own these, even multiples of them? Dirty air is the silent killer in our societies. Especially particulates from combustion vehicle exhausts. Plus many experience hayfever and other respiratory illness every year. Lung cancer is also increasing even amongst the young and non-smokers, because of the impact of dirty air. And how many families right now struggle with constant infectious illness? Very, very many. This keeps the air clean in your home, and helps protect you even when other family members are sick. It also helps the sick to heal, put one in their room if they’re crook and it stops them constantly re-breathing the same infected air. It accelerates how fast they get better. We have 4 Starkvinds and they’re so easy to move we can put them just where we need them, at any time. Superb Scandinavian design.

Being in bed sick means I may post a bit more often, apologies 🙂 What this means is the longer you’re positive with Covid, the greater the chance you’ll develop Long Covid. Because nobody much tests any more, they probably have no idea how long they’re positive. This is why I take the Metformin. It acts as a dramatic accelerator in clearing the virus from the body.

It’s a pretty safe bet that if somebody you’re talking to hates Anthony Fauci, they’re a dangerous loon. Avoid them in your life. I highlighted here too the crucial change to our culture, how institutionalised expertise is now under assault from social media, which makes everybody believe they’re an expert in everything.

A different way to see life. We privilege working life, because economies are all about work. Childhood we see as preparation for work, and old age we see as ‘retirement’, again from work. Without getting all New Age about it, we leave out all sense of what that work is FOR. Another way to view life is that it’s really about both ends of it. Childhood and old age. It’s at those ages that you get to enjoy the full scope of life, without being tied to the requirements of work. Those ages are what all that work is FOR. To make it possible to LIVE. Today those stages of life are under assault. We don’t have many children, and those we do have are bankrupt before they even start work, and we infect them repeatedly with Covid. The aged are tolerated while they feed the economy, with their travel and other spending. We’ve left thousands of them to die from Covid in aged care in the past 5 years, nobody gives a shit. Our previous PM said that we needed to protect ‘lives and livelihoods’ when he stopped doing anything about Covid. We’re so stupid now that not one prominent person said ‘um, wtf is that bullshit?’ Like we have to ‘balance’ our lives, against our economy. As if those were 2 separate things.

Ricky and the Culture of the Influencer, of the performative Feels. Oh, and i’m doing a gig, lol.

What I’m trying to avoid, right now. It’s the long-term damage from Covid infection that is being missed. People ending up infected with a huge range of other things, their immune system is compromised by the Covid infection. Few realise why this proliferation of other infections is happening. As a minimum you need to REST, and do no real exercise, for 6-8 WEEKS after being infected with Covid. Physical exertion can cause your immune system’s recovery to go haywire. And you need to get that viral load down as soon as you know you’re infected, though good luck getting any GP to help you there.

More than 100 years ago humans already realised what was much better about electric cars. I’ve highlighted some of the main reasons then, which are the same now. So what happened, why didn’t this recognition in 1912 lead to us all driving electric cars? Rockefeller happened. Cheap American oil flooded the world. Standard Oil was in full swing by 1912, Rockefeller’s company. Everybody knew combustion cars were crap then, but the oil was so cheap they went with combustion clunkers instead. As is the case again today, so often some rich American, allowed to become wealthy beyond all sense by a dysfunctional society, perverts the sanity of human decision making.

Ordinary people are beginning to realise they were sold a pup on ‘living with’ viruses. Keith is hilarious, pretty much everybody can relate to this right now, I suspect.

This person has a Masters in Public Health. I’m sharing it to show again that what we did with Covid, letting all kids catch it over and over without allowing them to even be vaccinated, was a deliberate strategy. To try to protect adults (kidults). Kids were a sacrifice. Now the same thinking is shifting to other infectious diseases. Infect the kids, to protect the kidults. A culture that deliberately infects its own children, so that their parents can go to work, gigs, restaurants and on OS trips. In the early-to-mid 20th century we vaccinated kids for everything we could, even though often few were dying of the diseases. Looking after kids was the right thing to do, go figure! Then the kidults took over. (P.S. doing this to kids doesn’t even work.)

It’s a huge genre of vids on the socials now, everybody sick at Christmas. Everybody is sick all year. In Australia the flu season stretched into mid-summer, ffs. Will anything be done? Of course not, kidult culture doesn’t *do* anything. It just expresses feelings in cute videos, about not doing things.

I think, to quote Dad’s Army, that we’re now well into the realms of fantasy.

Don't get me wrong, I love Cliff. But he's 85, touring like a teen rock star. Have a look just after 10 seconds here, he's not even miming, he's forgetting to even sing the mimed 'walking about' line.

Adrian, in case of interest. For others, infection will nearly always be the root cause of most chronic disease. Why it’s important to take infections of all kind seriously. The fact you get better from an infection isn’t the key thing - infectious pathogens can remain inside you your entire life life, causing chronic problems. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.70769

Happy Birthday, Shannon! 🎈👯

Happy happy birthday! 🎈👯🥂

My boy thoughtfully drove all the way to Bathurst yesterday to get us Vietnamese pork rolls for lunch. I enjoyed watching the car top itself up with free sunshine when he got home. Total fuel cost for the 130km trip? $0. You can lead a horse to water…

The new BMW IX3 electric is part of BMW's 'Neue Klasse' vehicles i.e. they're getting very serious about electric. Seems to be a superb vehicle in every way, great range, handling, efficiency. The stumbling block for me is another reason I love Teslas. It's $120,000 minimum to buy. You can buy a Tesla for half that. Plus it will come with no servicing requirements and an excellent supercharging network. I'm not a fan of American cars, but Teslas are the exception. They put engineering first, and that includes finding a way to do it affordably.

Her son’s health has been destroyed. Blames the vaccines. Claims to be a doctor. I’ve highlighted the elephant standing in the middle of her living room. Also a nice little learner for those who think catching Covid lots makes you immune to it. It just makes you catch Covid lots more, and everything else besides.

For Australians, I think a hugely important security tip. myGov is our government access point for our core services, like Medicare and your tax, as well as your health record. I highly recommend firstly always just using the app they provide to access myGov. But whether you do that or access it via a web browser, go into myGov and turn OFF the option to access it using a password. That leaves hackers with nothing to try to hack, to get access to your personal data. As an alternative set up a passkey or Digital ID while there. I also highly recommend people use passkeys for all of their online accounts, where possible, it allows you to bypass the stupid world of passwords and is much easier and faster and more secure to boot. It'll allow you to use your device's security, like facial recognition, to access sites, rather than having to remember passwords. Again it leaves hackers with nothing to discover, no passwords to steal. A Digital ID for myGov is slightly more complicated, but you can use that too. The site will help you set that up. But a passkey is fine, and easier. And turn off that password access option when you do, as the image shows. I also highly recommend doing this for your main personal email, make it passkey access (rather than using a password), and/or add 2-factor authentication to your email to make it harder to hack.

As a follow up to my other myGov post, here are the simple instructions for how to set up a passkey for all of the sites, apps or main websites you use online that normally require you to use a password. It will also gloriously mean you no longer have to remember a whole collection of passwords, to access the apps and sites you use. I've seen a lot of people have had their FB profiles hacked too. This can help you avoid that ever happening again with FB too, you can set up a passkey for Facebook in the account/security and privacy settings in your Facebook account. Click on your picture and you'll find it amongst the account settings.

This is Demis Hassabis. I don't think we realise that we're living in a time where the greatest revolution of all time is unfolding right in front of us. That revolution is AI, and Demis is at the centre of it. He heads up Google's DeepMind, and pioneered much modern AI work. You'll find lots of people throwing cheap shots at AI, as the status quo always does in the face of change. But here's an indication of the revolution it's bringing. Demis was determined to solve an old 'impossible' problem in biology, the protein folding problem. How to predict the shape of a protein from its constituent amino acids. Nobody had ever cracked it, nobody had come close. Proteins are the root of life and also of research in biology, including in drugs and disease. Demis, with his team at Google, created AlphaFold. An AI system to predict protein folding. They did it, cracked the impossible. The system can predict every known protein, over 200 million of them. And can predict brand new ones too, and their links to other things like DNA and RNA. They released all of them, for free, to the scientific community. The gigantic leap this will lead to in science is staggering. Demis won a Nobel Prize for this work, in 2024. AI isn't a performing monkey, or a plagiarist. No human can do this.

South Australia's Hornsdale battery was the biggest in the world when it was switched on, in 2017. Australians are now adding the equivalent storage with home batteries every 3 and a half DAYS. I post about renewables and EVs not because of any specific interest in them, though I have that too. But because it's the greatest time to be alive, in terms of knowledge and engineering. Almost FREE energy. How dumb did we become, to ever criticise that? Social media created a space where everybody believes they're an expert in everything. So morons are ruling the world now.

See, if you make democracy = the sum of what everybody wants or likes, your country will be run by the people who need these warning labels. Except they probably can't read them anyway.

2026 is here. It's interesting that we view time like a river, flowing along. Like 2026 was always going to 'arrive', and we're just swimming in that river, dipping in and out depending on how long we live. Time doesn't flow at all. It doesn't 'pass'. Time is only a label we use for things that endure. If you create something that lasts, it also creates a before, during and after. Using The Beatles as an example, the work they did endured, McCartney even today is living inside a type of bubble created by that work. Time didn't do that, the creative work did. Most bands don't endure. The gigs they're playing today are the same gigs they were playing when they started. They didn't 'make it'. There's no before, during and after for them, no progress. Nothing endures, they have to re-make the same whole band experience every day. Just a perpetual 'now'. We don't live in time. We only more or less endure in what we do. When we endure, we become the conditions of life for those who come after us, which creates a feeling of 'time' passing because they have to negotiate our legacy, to exist. Notice how McCartney again isn't free to just make any music he likes now, he himself is more or less trapped inside what The Beatles created, that endured. We don't become immortal by surviving forever in time. We become immortal by becoming the conditions others have to live, who come after us. What we call 'objects' are really just past subjects, who have become the conditions for our own subjectivity today. Or more simply, we don't live in time. We create time when we create things that endure.

A shift in how they treat acute Covid is a shift we're seeing in other parts of medicine too. Rather than just trying to attack and remove the infecting pathogen, which is diabolically hard once it's inside you, to instead tweak your own body's response to infection, to better allow your immune system to fight the pathogen. Inflammation is the major response to infection, it's your immune system going into overdrive to try to kill the pathogen. But it also can get in the way, causing swelling and fluid build-up etc. The scary cytokine storms that killed early Covid patients were their own immune systems going into overdrive, flooding their bodies with inflammation products. Lungs are usually black in a chest X-ray, look at this seriously sick Covid patient's x-ray, the lungs are white. That white is the inflammation products from the immune system, trying to kill Covid. People literally choked to death on those products. Now some physicians instead target the inflammation itself, the immune response, modulating it so that the immune system is free to then attack the virus. Most people who get Covid receive no treatment for it. I think that's a mistake, yes they'll usually survive the acute illness and feel better. But the virus will often remain in them, causing sometimes very serious ongoing chronic issues for their health, maybe not until years later. Many drugs used in this approach are over-the-counter cheap drugs, re-purposed. The antivirals like Paxlovid that get a lot of press are often not much use by comparison. Gotta get that viral load down as soon as possible, to stop the virus setting up shop.

Happy Birthday, Susan! 🥂🥳☕