January 2026

Another revolutionary thing AI is enabling is the next generation of Covid vaccines. New pan-coronavirus vaccines target multiple sections of the virus that don't change over time, so that the vaccine will recognise the virus no matter how it varies itself, protecting against past, present and future variants. It may mean the vaccination will last for years. At the same time to prevent spreading the virus, nasal vaccines are being developed to target the virus as soon as you breathe it in. Mucosal immunity, traditional intramuscular vaccines don't create mucosal immunity. That could prevent people spreading the virus to others. The injected vaccine may also provide some immunity in the nose. The two vaccines combined are called 'prime + spike' vaccines. AI is making possible the design of these vaccines, and hugely accelerating their development.

Whether you're a member of a religion or not, we should at minimum read ancient texts as instruction manuals for life that ancient societies developed through much blood and tragedy. Take the Old Testament and its 10 commandments. Few talk about the most important commandment of all, the one that comes last. Number 10: 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙝𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙣𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙧’𝙨 𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙨𝙚; 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙝𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙣𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙧’𝙨 𝙬𝙞𝙛𝙚, 𝙤𝙧 𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙚 𝙨𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙖𝙣𝙩, 𝙤𝙧 𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙛𝙚𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙚 𝙨𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙖𝙣𝙩, 𝙤𝙧 𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙤𝙭, 𝙤𝙧 𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙙𝙤𝙣𝙠𝙚𝙮, 𝙤𝙧 𝙖𝙣𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙣𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙧’𝙨. To COVET. Why a whole commandment on that? Because it's the root of all human life. We desire what others have. But we desire not what they have, but just that they have it, and we don't. Like kids arguing over a toy. The toy is irrelevant, the fight is over one having it, and the other not having it. This is why humans imitate one another, above all else. They imitate the desire of other people. If the neighbour has a wankpanzer ute, they copy that desire and buy one too. It's not about the ute, it's about the neighbour having one, and you not having one. And this then leads to something I mention often - imitative rivalry. This is a violent process. Kids fighting over a toy are...fighting. Forget all the nonsense about fascists and Left and Right etc. What leads societies to crisis points is too much imitation. A 'mimetic crisis' (feel free to Google). Too much *equality* between people, because they become too similar, leading to more and more widespread and intense rivalry over coveted things. This was the reason humans invented Kings and Gods, to create separation between people. You can't imitate a magnificent palace or a God. It short-circuits imitative rivalry by putting those 'toys' out of reach of most people. It creates a hierarchy, which calms and stabilises societies. Social media is an imitation machine, it dramatically accelerates imitation between people. It therefore makes our societies more and more violent. It drives us to mimetic crisis.

The kids in this pic look like they all want the same toy. But it's not about the toy, they fight over the toy because the other kids want it. That's what makes them fight. The kid who wins the fight will likely drop the toy and go and do something else. That's what drives all human desire, and thus thought and behaviour. We want what others desire. We don't grow out of this, it just manifests itself in many more subtle ways in adult life. We imitate the desires of others. If they have the latest open plan living home, we want the latest open plan living home. It's not about open plan living, we'll argue black and blue that we love it. In 10 years we'll be putting all the walls back up because others are now doing that, and we will imitate *that* desire instead. We're still the kids in the pic. Millions suddenly go to see Taylor Swift, or AC/DC, or Oasis, because they see others desiring that, and so they desire it. Still the kids with the toy. These imitative waves now happen faster, and get bigger all the time. In history that usually means a society is in crisis, and violent upheaval is imminent.

My kids are gamers. It also shields them from social media. Many old farts do the usual nostalgia thing and say kids should be reading more books and out riding bikes and catching wombats. We always pine for a golden age that never existed.

All the stuff about status and imitation and rivalry I post about is in this diagram. It shows that our lives exist in cycles, in time, and we get stuck in our thinking at one part of the cycle. For example right now our nations are on the left side of this diagram, with an overproduction of candidates for elite status, all trying to co-opt others to their cause, thus generating populism. This in turn destroys the institutions that actually run societies. Eventually the chaos becomes so great that a scapegoat is looked for to blame all the mess on (look at that happening right now with Bondi, the fight over who’s responsible). And/or a catastrophic external event smashes the lot, like a war or plague. Then the social order collapses (right side of diagram), new institutions are formed to repair the damage, and the cycle begins again.

AI helps me to see what keeping hair would have maybe looked like for me. it even gave me a swanky haircut.

There’s a blast from the past, Happy Birthday short-arse! I was going to figure out just how old you must be by now, but don’t have a calculator.

To go back to Spinoza, a great example of how being popular with your own community is fraught with having to live a life devoted to appeasing others, rather than facing reality. Exactly 369 years, 5 months, and 7 days ago, his own community excommunicated him. This included: • curses “by day and by night” • exclusion from all contact, and • prohibition on reading his writings or speaking to him. To this day, he is not forgiven and the excommunication is not lifted. The power of social conformity is not felt by most, they live inside the comfort of never challenging it.

@[648887061:2048:Mike] Turchin is one of the major scholars looking at social dynamics and social collapse. Something here from him on why small-group based life not only won't work, it will create even more chaos and violence. https://peterturchin.com/the-pipe-dream-of-anarcho-populism/

Trump’s regime change adventure in Venezuela will horrify many. (And Trump is a dangerous buffoon.) But let’s add the context. The US does this sort of thing all the time, and for very specific reasons. Russia too, though much less. Rome did it thousands of years ago. China hardly at all - for fascinating reasons. SInce 1945 the US has been involved in between 60 and 80 regime changes like this. The Russians less than half that. Sometimes it’s overt, like what we’ve just seen. Sometimes it’s covert, behind the scenes. So why does it happen? The standard line is imperial expansion type stuff, trying to take over and run the world. But actually it’s all about the thing I post a lot about - managing status games at home. Elite rivalries. Because all humans fight for status, the great challenge for all societies is to manage the rivalries between elites looking for dominance. When a society overproduces elite contenders, it creates a crisis, often leading to revolution and collapse. That’s when everybody from Rome, through to the US and Russia today, starts regime change in other countries. For the same reason Kings and emperors always did this. It opens up new possibilities for their domestic elites, new positions and influence and wealth. We all know this, Kings would use foreign battles to offer new land and positions to their barons. The same today, the US is in an elite overproduction crisis, that’s what generated Trump. It’s releasing the tension by expanding, as the Romans and Russians also did. This expansion gives opportunities for domestic elites to make money and have influence, relieving pressure on the domestic status hierarchies. Why does China not do this as much? Because it internalised the crisis elite rivalries produce, it has periodic dynastic successions between its ’Great Leaders’, purging the old elites and opening space for rivals. Plus it has a highly competitive civil service and Party machine, that manages elite rivalries every day. Everything is always about status, for humans. From which pair of shoes and which bands and coffee you like, through to these international events. Without that framework, none of it makes sense, it all just looks like the forces of evil at work. But we all play these status games, we’re all part of it.

In the past half-century the number of decamillionaires (people of net worth $10 million or greater) in the US has increased TENFOLD. This isn’t a story about inequality, bear with me. It’s this group from which nearly all contenders for political power are drawn. Only they have the resources. The number of available political positions hasn’t changed. So this creates enormous rivalry between members of America’s elite. That in turn generated the populism that led to Trump, as these rivals tried to mobilise the population to their cause, all claiming ‘the people’ on their side against the wicked status quo. This astronomical increase in elite rivalry at home now overflows the US, into places like Venezuela. And the populism generated by the tools these rivals created, particularly social media, has infected the entire world. As Kings did in the past, who went into battle to give their barons new land and titles, to ease their rivalry on the King. You can’t miss it, the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg and others, all fighting in the US for supremacy. They’re exporting their domestic chaos.

The BOM forecast says ‘Test match in Sydney.’

It was Abraham Lincoln who said democracy is government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. That’s pretty much the majority view of what democracy is and how it works even today. It’s complete rubbish. And I write about that a lot because the more we believe it, the more confusing the world will seem to us. How do I know it’s rubbish? Because it’s been tested. The political scientist Martin Gilens gathered a large data set of nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002, cataloguing the opinions of different parts of society about those decisions. What did he find? Statistical analysis showed that in every case the preferred decision of every voter and voting group had ZERO impact on the outcome. Except for one group. The current social elites of the time, those with the highest social status. Their views won and became the decision made, in every case. This isn’t a corruption of democracy. Social elites, those with the highest social status, *always* determine everything that happens. And when our democracies seem broken, like today, it’s not ‘authoritarians’ oppressing ‘the people’. Its rival elite groups fighting, and co-opting various parts of the population to their different crusades. Societies then go into crisis when there are too many elite rivals. And that in turn generates populism, because all of those rivals evoke ‘the people’ as their reason for trying to take control, and say ‘the system’ is screwing those same people. But there is no system, it’s spin. There’s just elites fighting. I encourage everybody who believes democracy is some magical emergent process where the ‘will’ of millions automatically becomes decisions and actions, to go and volunteer to run a local sporting club. Get your hands dirty with the reality of how human groups actually work. A tiny handful of people in that club will lead and do all the work.

Party-goers continuing to dance and film with their phones the fire that was about to kill 40 of them. To get a good vid for the socials. It’s the perfect window into our entire culture. All threats to our collective well-being are just raw material for our beloved self-expression, on the socials. Nobody actually does anything, nobody knows what to do anyway. Somebody might do a podcast on it. Or we avoid all of it in an escape into toxic positivity, of ‘focusing on the good’, like everything is fine, it’s only people being too negative. Like reality is just our feelings. Kidult culture. The culture of the feels. Permanent adolescents unable to do adult things, because adult culture was removed.

Katie Miller is the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for policy. I wonder what the Danes are thinking.

This was a day and a half ago. So I’m no longer infectious. Many workplaces let you come back to work while your RAT is still positive. Madness. I’m still on Metformin for another week. Because Covid is still inside me, you have to keep your foot on its neck. You’re not ‘better’ when you feel better and are testing negative. I’ll also be avoiding all exercise for 6-8 weeks, exercise can screw up immune repair, autonomic regulation and cause cardiovascular complications while your body is repairing. There’ll also be tests for any damage to things like kidney and heart function. Nobody is told this. I read the science, and have one of the leading doctors. Most are shoved back into the workplace about 3 days into their initial infection. Again, madness. Covid fucks you over, and you mostly won’t feel it doing it.

We already know that for about the past 150 years, the US has been an oil company with an army. And people still want to back in that technology. Be free Australia, go electric.

For those interested in the detailed science, this recent preprint talks about how damage to your immune T-cells is a likely cause of the post-Covid infections that have been plaguing communities - people being constantly sick with a whole range of different infections and infectious diseases. And how common and cheap drugs like Metformin can help reverse that damage.

For well over a year, many have said America’s democracy is being taken over by a totalitarian regime, the Trump regime. But America has always been a plutocracy, a country run by its economic elites. It’s never been a democracy in the way countries in the European tradition use that word. It’s run by business, now mostly northerners, the victors in the Civil War. Gone with the Wind is about that changeover in America, the country used to be run by slave-owning elites in the South. Many don’t know that the Democrats, one of the two main parties in America, were the party of these slave owners, opposing the new economic and industrial elites in the North. Today those southern States are the heartland of the Republicans. How did that change come about? Always follow the games of the rival elites. They won the war against the slave-owning South, but Republicans, who mainly represented the new business interests in the North, victors in the Civil War, still had to now win the votes of these defeated southern voters. So they used racist anti-black politics to win them. Those same commercial/business interests in the North have run America ever since. It’s a plutocracy, a country that has always been run by business. (Note that the fight over slavery wasn’t itself some noble thing. There wasn’t much appetite in the North to get rid of slaves either. But the slave owners in the South were in control of the country, and business interests in the North wanted that control. As always, elite rivalries determine what happens in a country, the content of political debates is meaningless, it’s all just spin to fuel elite rivalries. The same parties can stand for completely opposite things, at different times, if it gives them some strategic advantage in their rivalry with other elite groups.) Trump is nothing different at all. It’s just that he’s come at a time when there are an explosion of rivals amongst that economic elite for control of the country. Do people not notice the vast numbers of candidates now for President at each election? That’s the elite rivalry in plain view. That always triggers populism, as different rivals whip the population into continuous anti-establishment frenzy, to try to win their vote.  As George Carlin quipped, for the past 150 years America has been a giant oil company, with an army. It’s a plutocracy – a country run by economic elites. It always has been.

Another beautiful example of elite rivalries. This whole debate is fake, as the sitting councillor is trying to convey here, the same lack of revenue for local government is seen in every town across the country. Rates don’t keep up with costs. But local interests battling for control of the town have turned it into a populist ‘down with the system’ fight, in the name of ‘the community’, mostly through social media. Challengers to existing control of towns and countries always use this sort of populist spin, always evoking the people or the community, to try to take control themselves. The local Trumpians. They have no real interest in the community, it’s about them trying to replace the existing leadership, with themselves. Incidentally, the full-time staff of Council, particularly senior staff, who are usually the target of the populists, don’t decide how the town’s money is spent. Only elected councillors are allowed to do that, by law. It’s why if administrators are brought into a town, they usually sack all the councillors. Not the full-time staff.

Thinking back to all of the recent years of people describing China as a great threat to the world. China ran the world 200 years ago. Then the West decimated it, with fun strategies like flooding the country with heroin to create addiction and a market for the drugs. 200 years of Western rule is now coming to its ludicrous conclusion.

Et tu, Brute? Caesar’s greatest enemies, the ones that killed him, weren’t the peoples Rome invaded. It was his own team. This is ALWAYS how power works. Even when countries invade other countries, what gets called ‘imperialism’, they’re really just processing domestic rivalries amongst local elites. The fight for status. Invasion gives more room and opportunity for those elites to act and profit, taking pressure off the leader. That’s what we’re seeing with Trump. The US has a proliferation of wealthy and powerful people, all wanting to run the place. At the same time the wider population is getting poorer and more desperate. Those two combine to create social collapse. Rival elites find a receptive audience amongst the angry wider population, generating populist movements, to attack other elite rivals. Caesar himself came to power this way. He led a populust movement opposing the ‘elites’ of the Roman Senate. Sound familiar?

From my friend, the Covid researcher and leading clinician. “People cannot fathom the magnitude of cell turnover during a vicious viral illness. Consuming calories for replication, murdering your cells, whilst cleaning up the mess. Aches and pains and fever are crude metrics of the WW3 going on inside.”

Donut Labs, an offshoot of a Finnish company, created an electric motor that is actually part of the wheel. No drivetrain or transmission needed. Check out the stats: 845 hp, over 4300 Nm of torque, and weighs only 40kg. And is incredibly efficient to boot. Donut has also just announced it’s solved solid state batteries, and will release them commercially early this year. Those are batteries that charge in about 5 minutes, and have more than double the energy density of standard batteries, so more than double the range. And about half the weight. You’ll be able to able to add 1500 km of range to your EV in 5 minutes. They’re also even safer as batteries, as there are no liquid electrolytes. With that energy density they’ll be able to be used even in long-haul aircraft, trains, trucks, boats, heavy towing etc.

Our home battery (Tesla Powerwall 2) has a warranty that says it’ll still provide 70% of its original storage after 10 years. So still perfectly usable well after 10 years has passed. But if I run the diagnostics today, after more than 3 years of use, it’s still showing zero degradation. Many Powerwall 2s apparently still have > 85-90% original capacity after 10 years. It’s a brilliant investment for a home, because it also creates a micro-grid, which insulates you from power outages. Solar panels alone don’t. And you can fill the battery with free solar, or also with super-cheap grid power at different times of the day (useful in winter). Nicola Tesla saw what societies could be like if they used electricty as their main source of energy for everything. An abundance of wonders and plenty, and he didn’t even live to see free sunshine converted into energy. Go electric in everything folks, you’ll never look back.

There was a TV series on Bodyline, but it amazes me there’s never been a film about Bradman. His sporting achievement is one of the most extraordinary things statistically in all human history, it almost defies belief. Literal orders of magnitude greater in relative terms than any other sportsperson who ever lived, but also in any other field of human achievement, nobody has ever stood so far above everybody else. He was also like The Beatles for many more than 30 years before they arrived, in terms of cultural impact. His astonishing record also leaves out that WW2 interrupted his career in its prime, losing 6 years. He came back to play after the war to help rebuild national morale. His average pre-war was about 102, he was an old man in sporting terms for those later Tests, and still averaged over 80.

The oldest you will ever be is the day you’re born. Everything you inherit, in your biology and culture, is ancient. And then everything you add to both of those in your life is brand-new and young. The more you interrogate your inherited life, the younger you will be. The more you use social conformity as the guide for your life, the more you will never be anything but old. You can’t escape social conformity by just doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing, that traps you even more deeply. You need the bravery to question and understand what is popular and stand behind what is important but unpopular. It’s extremely difficult if not impossible to both understand life and reality, and be popular with anybody. I think that’s the true measure of whether you’re beginning to understand something, if it’s unpopular with everybody. I don’t think we really understand just how much everything we think and do is shaped by social conformity. By status. It blocks our access to reality as it really is. It’s easy to disagree with people you don’t like, it’s much harder to do it with the people who are closest to you. And in fact when you do reach a deeper understanding of things as they really are, people won’t so much disagree with you as just see you as completely incomprehensible, because that understanding doesn’t slot into any of the team sports of social life. 

Even while I was still infectious with Covid, it was beginning to impact my body in a range of ways. It triggered an excruciatingly painful elbow bursitis, infection creates massive inflammation in the body. Infection is the greatest violation possible to any body. It gets right into your cells, and even into your DNA. We all grew up in a time where through vaccination and antibiotics we came to believe that infection was no longer a serious thing. All infection is serious, the majority of people who have ever lived have died of an infection of some kind, in childhood. Our very temporary victories over infection are coming to an end. The lives we’re used to are extremely historically abnormal. We’re going to find out just how dangerous that ignorance is.

Happy Birthday, Jamie! 🥳🎂

I think we might be surprised how many Australians would happily sell the country for cash even at the lower end of that Trumpian scale. Huge numbers of people are more or less living in the US already, because they live inside social media. They’d probably even welcome the change. I know many are unhappy at our culture being called a kidult culture. They need to spend a bit more time dealing with modern adults. Australians withdrew $38 billion from their super earlier in the pandemic, to pay for things like gambling, restaurant and takeaway food, travel, and home renovations. Put a hashtag on it and they’d climb over each other to sign up.

This one is a real test case for what I’ve posted before, that if you want to live by the actual realities of life, you’re going to piss off just about everybody. Is this annual fundraiser a good idea? Like most modern fundraising, it targets sentimentalism, the Culture of the Feels. The genuine tragedy and motivations of the McGraths - who could question it? We *feel* so good chipping in. Some facts about the McGrath Foundation. It employs no nurses. It provides money to local area health services to employ them. That’s fine, but the majority of funding the foundation gets comes from government grants. So you have government grants going to government services, through the completely unnecessary (and expensive) intermediary of the Foundation. The Foundation spends more each year on its own administration and marketing than it does funding nurses. It has over 60 staff, professional fundraisers and marketers and administrators. Again, fine, somebody has to run an organisation. But this is a government service, why not bypass all of that and just give money directly to the local area health services? To quantify it, government spends almost twice what the Foundation does for each ‘McGrath’ nurse. Of the money raised through the Pink Test initiative, as little as 25% actually ends up funding any nurses. Nobody is dodgy here, it’s just an unthinking sentimentalist approach to a public health need. Governments go along with it because they don’t want to be on the receiving end of outraged pearl-clutching by kidults in social media society. The same thing applies to things like Jeans for Genes Day, or Red Nose Day, or Bandaged Bears. Ask people what they’re donating for and 9 out of 10 of them won’t have a clue. It makes us FEEL good. That’s all that matters, apparently.

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are copying his work with EVs, renewables and batteries, and will dominate the world as a result. America is over, in that race, because it can’t escape the modern adolescent adult world of social media, where everybody is an enemy of somebody else, and teams fight each other all day, every day. Trump sees Tesla-type technology as ‘Greenie’ plots, as many do here too. Like nobody got past Year 9 in maturity. I skipped Year 9 at school, maybe that helped me in my own development. I advocate for Tesla technology because it’s brilliant technology. Go Chinese or Korean or German etc. EV instead if you want, those are great too. They’re all copying Tesla and playing catch up still. Tesla is a whole ecosystem, which is part of its genius. It’s cars, home batteries, Superchargers (over 75,000 worldwide already) - and all of it just works, in the most beautifully designed way. Some will still jump over every teething issue with the self-driving technology. It’s optional, you don’t even need to include it. It’s common for those who resist progress to demand utopian perfection from the new thing that the old thing is miles away from. I’ve tested it extensively myself, as have many others, and it’s astonishing. It makes far fewer errors than human drivers, and the errors it does make are usually human error (people not paying attention). It’s a neural net, constantly updating its intelligence based on the experience of millions of drivers. Something human drivers never do, road deaths from human drivers are climbing. I would rather share the road with cars using this technology than with any human drivers, who are almost universally woeful, particularly when they think they’re good. The road is like a Year 9 playground, a pissing contest for status. Tesla has just changed its warranty to 5-year unlimited kms on its cars, with free roadside assistance for those 5 years. Some may say other carmakers have had that for years, or even better. But those cars all needed regular servicing. Teslas never need servicing, and are like riding a roller coaster in terms of fun to drive. Just go electric, in cars and solar and home batteries - everything. Go with whatever brand floats your boat. Teslas still dominate EV sales because once people do the research, they realise they tick all of the boxes, now. Live the revolution. Most humans miss them until their old world has been taken away from them, and then wonder why they waited.

This, though it maybe doesn’t look it, is a cherry tree. An ornamental. It had to be butchered late last year to make room to install new guttering, which you can see above it. All of its major limbs were sawn off. I thought that would probably kill it, but almost straight away epicormic growth started from the surviving bark. Trees are incredibly adaptable and can be grown into a whole range of different forms. The most commonly known are things like coppicing, espaliering, and pollarding. But I wondered, could I turn this cherry tree into a cherry bush, which would suit that space much better than the usual sprawling large limbs of a tree? I did a bit of reading and actually that was a very popular approach, historically in formal gardens. So that’s my experiment now, quite a bit of judicious pruning to get it into a bush shape. I think it’s going OK.

Semi-autonomous driving technology is already a revolution for older drivers, and those who share the road with them.

Robots are getting really, really good, really fast. It won’t be long now and we’ll get the ‘but they’re not as good as humans and they can only do what humans make them do’ lines. Always the last act of the play. Of course machines can do many things humans could never do, including think in many ways. What would be the point of building them otherwise?

One of the innovations of the Tupperware movement was to understand that people think and do things based on their conformity with what others they know think and do. What we think and feel and do is a social act. Social media has transformed society itself into a Tupperware party that never ends. No hierarchy of fantasy and bullshit, everything is as real as everything else. The entire culture is getting dumber and more dangerous every day, surely people see it.

Happy Birthday, Mia! 🎈🌟💐

Marco Rubio hands Trump a private note in a press conference, about what happened in Venezuela. Trump reads it out loud. Chevron is one of the fossil fuel giants. You can see Rubio almost shit himself, the cat is out of the bag. It’s not fascism. America has always been run by business. There’s just lots of them fighting for control right now, which is why due process is toast. The fossil fuel giants are just as powerful here in Australia, driving most agendas.

American protest counterculture now thickly layered with social media-driven identity politics as well. The French? Not so much. Revolutionary cultures always remain that. Everything is always an uprising of outrage, shorn of all history. Tedious for those who don’t live in revolutionary cultures, who long ago figured out ways to live calm, relatively peaceful lives guided by knowledge and tradition i.e. history.

There will come a day in the not too distant future where the old (the world is going to be full of old people) will be able to buy a humanoid robot to do most of their house and garden tasks, as well as offering self defence protection against things like home invasion. Because of the rapid development of AI, these robots will also be excellent companions for many of the lonely who have no real social networks. The Japanese in particular go as far as building robots with sexual capability.

America’s Department of Homeland Security. There are an estimated 50 million immigrants living in America, presumably the other 50 million they want deported are just ‘people of colour’. Many say government should be run by business people. Here it is, here’s how that looks. Hitler’s biggest backers were German industrialists.

Countries collapse when elite rivalries within the country get out of control, often leading to civil war if the population is unhappy as well. Trump’s own gang of elite buddies don’t even want Venezuela, now he’s offered it to them to keep them on his side. Trouble ahead for the orange buffoon, and the nation.

Every time I’ve suggested social media as a whole be shut down entirely it’s generated a lot of pushback. Peoples’ lives in all dimensions have been captured by these platforms, like they’re in a spider’s web. If you ever doubted the true function of social media, look what happens when elected governments try to challenge it. It’s always been a cultural assault weapon, which the Americans use to spread their dysfunctional culture globally.

As Europe gears up to defend itself against America, at what point do Western nations decide that China is a much smarter superpower ally than America? Only blatant racism has stopped that assessment being made already. China has made Australians rich. America does almost nothing for us except launch cultural attack weapons (social media) to fuck over our societies.

Trump is not an authoritarian takeover of America. He’s the logical outcome of American culture itself. America still doesn’t understand this, though some are starting to join those dots. 

Back to work today for me, after three weeks of not much of a holiday thanks to Covid. I see the socials have been active, accusing Council of selling buildings it doesn’t even own to ’Muslims’, to create a mosque. Another year begins of trying to help rescue a town from social media…

Somebody at work today asked why, if I’ve now had Covid, I just don’t get rid of the mask? The sort of question I’ve had for years. What’s revealed by these questions is that peoples’ assessment of what they should do is ENTIRELY based on ‘what everybody else is doing’. It’s peer pressure, their assessment of risk and even reality is all just their imitation of the behaviour of others. Jeff is a scholar in biomedical science of international renown. I’m going to listen to him every day of the week over people whose ‘knowledge’ of the world is their read of what’s currently trending in their social groups. I’m not in Year 9. They have no idea of the damage they’re doing to themselves.

Most people I know haven’t had a booster in about 4 years. Scott Morrison said they didn’t need one. Scott Morrison gets his science from Hillsong Ministries.

I’ve never had a fly or maggot infestation in any place that I’ve lived. I wonder if this is down to the more recent trend of no fly screens in new homes, because they come into conflict with trending style choices like folding bifolds and inside-outside living. Even worse, the increasing new problems with mosquito spread. These are basic public health issues humans solved generations ago. In developing countries the fly screen is a revolutionary salvation for millions of people. Here it’s now an idiot style choice. To not even know the fundamental role of mosquito control in our modern good health is fairly typical of how stupid public life now is. Mosquitoes can destroy a society, ask anywhere with malaria. Who remembers all the ‘tropical schools of medicine?’ Nobody, much. Adult life is the school playground again, imitative rivalry between trends. Most of which are brainless. Vaccines, fly screens, basic disease control, replaced with barista coffee, fine dining and bucket list travel.

Many evoke the civil rights reforms of the 1960s as supposed evidence that activism and people-led change are both possible and define democracy. You can see with Trump’s rapid reversal of those reforms, which in reality has been underway for several decades, that what I say about those reforms is the actual truth.  They only happened because elite groups in society were decimated by two world wars, an economic depression and the Spanish Flu pandemic. The status-led social model that our mid-century reforms replaced has been rapidly returning to remove those reforms, since the 1970s. There is no ‘we’, without catastrophe.

Everything is a Hollywood movie in the American psyche, and this is also another key characteristic of kidult culture. Most views on AI for example are little more than feels from James Cameron’s Terminator movies. This fascism guff in the US. What caused the European fascism everybody is so desperate to say is happening in America today was entire populations living a combined life of desperate, abject poverty after WW1, coupled to the humiliation of the truce at Versailles. Neither of these preconditions are present in the US in even a hint of a way. The US is a plutocracy with many elite (mostly corporate) rivals now gunning for control. American political culture has always been just a B-grade Western. Everything is a gun fight at the O.K. Corral.

Happy Birthday, Rosie! 🎉🌟🎁

The 'balance' people think needs to be made between disease control and their social life? We learned how to control disease to GIVE us social lives. It doubled our life expectancy. You don't control a disease by catching the fucking disease. Any immunity you get from the infection doesn't last, and does absolutely nothing to protect against long-term chronic health effects, like Long Covid. Did nobody do ANY science or history at school?

The protests in Iran predictably being described as a popular uprising, ‘the people’ trying to take back control of the country etc. We love these fantasies. This all happened before in Iran, in 1978. They had a ‘people’-led revolution, because Western powers had replaced their democratic government, which wanted to nationalise the oil industry, with their previously repressive monarchy. A puppet kingdom friendly to the West and our love of oil. There is no such thing as the people. All of these types of events are rival elites fighting for control of a country, co-opting an unhappy wider population to that fight. The last populist revolution led to the current regime in Iran. The French revolution led to Napoleon, the Russian revolution lead to the Soviets. There will be a rival elite or multiple rival groups inside and outside Iran right now driving these protests, it’s not ‘the people’. Like last time it would not be surprising if the West, particularly the US and Israel, are mobilising this action behind the scenes to undermine the current Iranian regime.

I needed a new drink bottle for work. We had one of these at home and I thought perfect, one simple moving part, easy to clean, potentially usable for the rest of my life. What happened next is another window into an adult life that is now Year 9 on infinite repeat. Not an analogy, you can’t unsee it, once you see it. ‘You can’t use that!’, I got from multiple people. ’Why’? ‘It’s a restaurant water bottle!’ ‘Um, yes they do use them in restaurants. It’s just a water bottle.’ Much laughter and incredulity. You can see here up close how much adult life is Year 9 negotiating everything through social conformity, various totems like what cars people drive, whether they wear a mask, what drink bottles they use, what coffee they drink, what shoes they wear, etc. etc. etc. Exhausting and without end. You won’t find any part of adult life that hasn’t been pulverised into branded, trending parts, to allow social groups to fight for status. The only organising principle of these kidult lives is ‘do I fit in? How is my status in the group? Why is that person different (snigger snigger, whisper), we don’t like them…’. Adult life is the school playground. The hilarious irony is that water bottles have become an industry. Full of brands and designs, to generate imitative rivalry between a proliferation of social groups. Most of which end up in landfill within a year, as people upgrade to the latest trending bottles. It’s outrageous and funny apparently to use a simple glass bottle to drink water from, but not to jump on the brand-train of bottles. Kidults.

Happy Birthday, Brenda! 💐☕👯

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has died of prostate cancer. Adams’ last years saw him disappear down the loon rabbit holes of social media, going all-in for Trump, and even using ivermectin to try to cure his cancer. As you can see here, impending death forced him to recognise his mistake. Social media kills. It literally does, you can see it right there, in real time. It replaces institutionalised knowledge tested over generations, with complete and utter bullshit that ‘trends’. That’s what ‘kidult’ culture means, replacing adult institutional life with gangs of kidults, fighting over trends. Most of the Covid advice people follow is the same, a creation of social media. Even the ‘official’ advice, which is a cut-and-paste of a social media one-pager from a US free market think tank, the GBD. Telling us to ‘live with’ Covid. There will be many horrible endings to come, for so many.

"You've had Covid now, why are you still wearing a mask?" (losing count of that one) Compare with: "You've had a car accident now, whey are you still wearing a seatbelt?" The only part of the human brain now in widespread use is the mirror neurons, the ones that allow us to imitate other people.

The daily team sports of ‘politics’ and fake debates and social trends blind us to the material realities of our lives. Despite all the B-grade Hollywood hype about us apparently under assault from totalitarian leaders, in historical terms we’re living what you could call a Reversion to the Long Mean.  Historically there is only one real superpower. Nobody else is even close. Fossil fuels and us doing charming things like flooding China with heroin to try to disrupt their progress created a temporary blip on the historical chart. Normal order is being restored now. China plays the very long game, it understands time, something we don’t have the first clue about. They know the West screwed them with fossil fuels, they’re now developing the alternative. Meanwhile, what’s left of Western leadership is showing us all Western temporary dominance was ever about. The fight for fossil fuels. Drill, Baby. Drill. We’re a one-trick pony being put out to pasture.

What Metformin does for Covid it also does for flu. It does much more besides, they’re only beginning to figure out what, including various anti-ageing impacts. You’re very unlikely to learn this from your GP. Many spend more time leafing BMW catalogues for their new X5s than the current research papers. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging/articles/10.3389/fragi.2023.1272336/full

Somebody said to me that Tesla's Level 2 self-driving isn't that great (drove me the entire way to work today), that makers like Mercedes already have Level 3 autonomy. The problem is Mercedes' system only works in highly limited situations, at low speeds and mostly just on highways. It's basically rubbish. They've ditched it. https://insideevs.com/news/784404/mercedes-level-3-drive-pilot-canceled/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPU9fBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF2OWhxb3hxZG1hYXdsM3V3c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHmKd4hkiYK9416VnAGIHunENSSx43kCb5GJ6xj73Ihd9tQD6Vf_VbZH0GEH-_aem_kyj6sRIJG9H6gZYptAweTw

We're living inside a 2000-year period of history that has been mostly dominated by China. Our collective memory is about 10 minutes. The only thing that interrupted the total dominance of China was what they call their 'century of humiliation' between the First Opium War (1839), and 1945. When other major powers (see pic) tried to carve up China for their own gain, stripping them of financial and governance independence. The Chinese have never forgotten. All societies collapse, the genius of China is that it built a system that included that collapse as part of the daily business. That's when it invented its huge civil service to insulate itself from the revolutionary collapses other societies experience. The civil service retains the memory between collapses. Other societies stumble along blindly, repeating all the same mistakes between each revolution. Some China facts: - its growth has always tracked its population i.e. it isn't extractive or exploitative - China has had 25-33% of world GDP for two thousand years, far and away the largest power - for 1500 years, China dominated industrial technology - China was the first nation to solve large-scale governance, through its civil service - it was more prosperous than the next biggest 2 rivals (Europe and the Middle East), combined, and - 20-35% of world population has been Chinese for 2000 years.

Societies don't run on information. They run on status, which is also identity. In the absence of some way to make the smarter thing to do also the higher status thing to do, people will default to what they're already doing.

The fantasy idea of ‘the people’ that animates American democracy refuses to die. If you believe that nonsense, it will look like the real problem is ‘division’ between people. It’s not division between people, it’s different social teams aligned with different elite rivals, in battle.

Another piece of shared wisdom from my Covid researcher/doctor friend. Put this in the context of most being lucky to get 3 DAYS off when they have Covid, and you can see the crisis underway. People are doing the equivalent of having major surgery, and then running marathons inside the same week. Major infection is *much* more severe than major surgery. 𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑠𝑢𝑏𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑙𝑎𝑚𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑠 6 𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘𝑠 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑚𝑢𝑚. 𝐶ø𝑣𝑖𝑑???...𝑈𝑝 𝑡𝑜 3 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐬… 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 𝑎 𝑏𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑛 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑜 𝑎𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒. 𝐴𝑛 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑠𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑚 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛'𝑡 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑛𝑢𝑑𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝐿𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝐶𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑.

As another window into the culture, and again our own cultures are as invisible to us as water is to fish, our ideas about bodily agency and sanctity are resolutely adolescent. For example, I’m sure most would say rape is one of the greatest violations of a person’s body. It is an act of violence and indefensible, absolutely. At the same time we are pathologically casual about infection. But infection is orders of magnitude more violating to your body than rape. Adolescent cultures sexualise most things, so that anything to do with sex is invested with almost hysterical moral urgency.  I thought one of the most profound parts of Germaine Greer’s essay on rape, which few read because of modern (adolescent) identity politics, was her pointing out that by investing something like penetration with so much symbolic meaning, we give a power to rapists that they shouldn’t have. They should be seen as pathetic, puny, ridiculous.  When she was raped, her main emotion was pity for the pathetic dickhead who did it. There was no way she was going to allow his act to be seen as some fundamental violation of her self, again that would grant a power to him that he absolutely didn’t have. This is more about infection for me, in contrast. You don’t need to read very much history to know that infection is far and away the greatest risk to humanity itself. The absolutely blasé, casual way we treat it today, coupled to that adolescent ‘it is what it is’, ‘we have to live with it’ fatalism, is a disgrace to centuries of human suffering and progress. Millions died to teach us lessons about infection that today we have zero respect for.

This is a new low even for Trump. The precious man-toddler wanted this Nobel Peace Prize, didn't get it, and has been hinting he wants the actual recipient to give it to him. So she now has, clearly to try to rescue Venezuela from more US interference. The prize is not transferrable.

The instability creates a breeding ground for the generation and spread of novel pathogens. The pathogens then in turn create greater instability, as humans struggle to cope with them. Why the status quo moved to quickly try to end action against the pandemic.

Where you end up when you ‘live with’ viruses. We can shake our head and say this is just America. 9 out of 10 Australians you might ask think living with viruses is a good idea too. Ask them what that actually means, they have no idea. Peter is one of the world’s leading health scientists.

This is the Financial Times, in the UK. One of the most conservative papers. I’ve been saying for many years that China is a far better superpower to be leading the world. It’s been doing it for nearly 2000 years. It’s the only country taking climate change seriously, just for starters. China understands time. Time is its raw material, it builds continuity, it builds history.

If you think Trump is damaging America, have a look. Multi-generational, irreversible damage. And nothing is stopping, like us they’re still racking up the infections, each of which does more serious damage. At a minimum, maybe realise you were lied to when you were told that catching Covid would make you immune to it.

Social media influencers now lead the free world. It’s popular to see that as a fascist takeover. That’s because ‘fascism’ trends on…social media. We’re living inside a bubble.

Because elections, which are the adult version of popularity cliques at school, are clearly the best way to select for competence.

SAT scores are used in the US mostly to select people for college admisison. They’ve been in free fall since the pandemic began (circled in red). I don’t know about your experience, but in workplaces I feel a real checking-out since Covid began. People have gone back to what they were doing in their lives pre-Covid, but the heart isn’t in it. There’s a loss of real commitment to or passion for things. I think that’s what’s happened in schools too. We had a lot of years of routine life, going to school or work, and then something disrupted that routine and opened a gap in our thinking and feeling. Suddenly we questioned what was the point of it all, we’d seen a bit of life without that routine. Pandemics and other catastrophes always reboot societies. That’s what I think we’re seeing. A reboot across all of life. We’re going through the motions, but something is broken. Also why the old status quo was so desperate to ‘get back to work’, and invented fantasties like ‘living with’ pandemics. It sensed the danger.

All the poll numbers look terrible for Trump, particularly in the groups that he brought across to the Republican side, like Latino voters. Total collapse in support. This is how populist surges always end, the crazy coalitions of voters fantasy politics puts together are fragile and temporary. Many are still trying to portray America right now as a serialisation of George Orwell’s 1984. Americans *always* do that, it’s in the cultural DNA, they’re a revolutionary society that never matured to having institutions run the place. So everything is populism, everything looks like authoritarianism to somebody, and everything demands a revolution.

Every new rock star thinks that crowd is cheering and yelling for them. You can see the rush of excitement on the star’s face. It doesn’t take them long to realise that the crowd made them, and owns them. Fame consumes and can destroy them, because the crowd made them and will always demand its pound of flesh. Usually within months they have extensive security arrangements to shield themselves from the same crowd. https://www.facebook.com/reel/870633912489176/?fs=e&fs=e

In the 1980s they were declaring victory over HIV because after 5 years of infection two-thirds didn’t progress to AIDS and death. Those people went on to die between 8-10 years after infection. Infection is a long game. Never assume that you ‘got better’ because you recovered from the initial infection. That’s usually just Stage 1. Most who got HIV got a ‘mild’ infection.

Yes planes are a big part of it. The modern mosquito. Not the engines.

Trump’s letter to the head of Norway, distributed to multiple European ambassadors.

Older workers, defined as 55 year or older, have significant power under law to request more flexible work arrangements in Australia. I think other countries have similar law. For two main reasons I think, one to help them transition to retirement more easily (many struggle with that). And more pragmatically, the workforce is shrinking badly, and government wants to keep as many older workers happy and working as possible. I’m not sure older workers always know this extra power exists for them. An employer can’t just reject these requests without significant business reasons.

Record crowds go to everything now. An increasing shift in the culture towards trending, viral behaviour. The desire to 𝒃𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆. The loss of shared meanings and stabilised hierarchies through social media culture, the endless fights for status and identity, drive this shift. We’re replacing this loss with shared presence. You don’t need to agree to be part of a crowd. You can 𝒇𝒆𝒆𝒍 togetherness while agreeing on nothing. We get relief from the endless fighting for status by creating crowds where everybody is the same rank. Also why adolescents in our time have liked partying and similar events. It gives them a break from the relentless ‘peer pressure’ world of social comparison, in school. The crowd dissolves that tension. All of adult life is that now too.

America is and always has been a very violent country. It’s orders of magnitude more violent than any comparison countries in Western society. Because it has no mechanism to rein in status rivalry. The ‘American Dream’ is to ‘make it’ - pure, uncontrolled status rivalry, achieving a higher status than your fellow Americans. Countries that survive find ways to regulate and control violence, by controlling status rivalry.

The skill of firing a good shot is like any other skill, pleasurable for the achievement. In that sense I can understand guns. In every other sense I find them boring, and just another example of how humans can turn anything into a fetish. A guy at work said that if government strengthens gun laws, he’s going to buy more guns. I think he has four or five already. He’s a suburban living person with no actual use for a gun.  Also loves his cars, those two fetishes often coexist.  Turning an object into a fetish is really about creating another social group or team, to create social status and therefore identity. They would probably never admit it, but car nuts and gun nuts aren’t really that interested in cars or guns. They’re interested in their ‘team’, and the identity it gives them.  You can prove this by actually talking about the engineering of these things, something they very quickly lose interest in. You can show them that the cars or guns they mostly like are actually rubbish in an engineering sense. They have zero interest in those discussions, they often like to tinker and see themselves as experts in the technology itself. But they’re not, and it’s not what it’s really about.

What a difference a decade makes.

America has always been snake oil oligarchs overlaid upon a pious small-town fundamentalist Puritanism. It was the latter that created the former, Puritans wanted to avoid State control of their lives (why they were booted out of Europe), so the culture from Day 1 was hostile to institutions. This in turn led to free rein to every grifter who wants to make a fortune. It’s a frontier, settlers culture that never matured.

One of the benefits of AI is that it cuts through BS quickly. I was discussing my recent Covid infection with it, now a month ago. When i said I was back at work, the AI said ‘oh, already? After such a serious illness?’ Compare that with the public health ‘advice’ governments and friends now dish out, where you’re expected back at work after a few days, even while still infected and infectious. I can promise you AI knows what a serious illness is, and politicians and friends who tell you Covid is ‘just a cold’ wouldn’t know science from a ripe banana.

Anybody who gets excited by nationalism (and flags) and migrants has spent exactly zero minutes reading one word of history. To be against migrants in Australia is to be against what Australia actually is.

Covid was just the start. ‘Living with’ infections. They’ve moved on to all the others now, diseases that have killed millions and which were controlled through long battles over generations will now be allowed to roam free, to protect ‘the economy’. Scott Morrison didn’t even pretend that wasn’t the plan here. If we return to the time of uncontrolled infection, most humans will die before reaching their teens. That’s not a projection, that’s the historical record. The overwhelming majority of humans who have EVER lived died of an infection, as children.

I never predicted the end of my working life would involve working with insurance. I’ve loved it. Insurance is great because it and the actuarial analysis that underpins it completely ignores people’s opinions on things. It cuts straight to the reality of what’s going on, it knows what’s actually happening, because it has to price the risks. Like this, with Tesla’s self-driving. 50% cut to insurance premiums for those who use it. Insurers I can promise you have zero interest in any online team sports over topics like this. They only look at outcomes. They know that no human can drive as well and as consistently as a well-engineered machine. Also why commercial planes shifted to mostly autonomous flight decades ago.

Trump is driving the Republicans off a cliff. Like I said when he was re-elected, his supposed fascist takeover of the US will collapse all by itself, by the mid-term elections.

Happy Birthday, Kristy! 🥂🎈☕

Pauline makes Trump seem like a brain surgeon. The thought of her occupying a more powerful role in Australian politics - well, it's on the cards. Proving again that elections destroyed democracy. You wouldn't hire the lowest level worker at any firm based on popularity, but for some reason we think it's the best way to select leaders of entire nations.

The realities of Covid. I had what would have been described as a fairly 'mild' case, but the real story of all Covid is mostly unseen. I lost 7kg in 3 weeks. With a full appetite (unchanged), eating my usual things, and obviously doing no exercise at all. All of that weight loss was my body fighting the virus.

A gig will fix it.

Have you heat-proofed your home? Was one of my priorities when getting good windows and split AC systems. It can be the difference between life and death, more all the time.

This is humanity heading for extinction. It’s barely mentioned. This is *global*. There are all sorts of reasons given for why people no longer have babies, most correct, like the cost, greater freedom for women to pursue more diverse lives, etc. But every policy used to address those factors makes virtually no difference. The problem is deeper than that. We hate children. The culture is hostile to children, and also to the genuinely old. Only the healthy adult is allowed, and their lifestyle. The old are tolerated while they can still live the lifestyle game. Then they’re discarded. Check out aged care stats. This is kidult culture, that I talk about a lot. The ‘circle of life’, the different responsibilities and features of different ages and stages of life, is completely gone. Replaced by just one phase, the adolescent, ‘living their best life’, for decades. Permanent adolescents (kidults) don’t want the hassle of kids *or* the old, they get in the way of lifestyles.

The Abilene Paradox is when a group makes a decision that nobody individually in the group actually thinks is a good idea. It happens when each individual goes along with a decision because they think it’s what everybody else wants. Covid is a good example of this. Most people I meet go along with ‘living with’ it, because that’s what everybody else seems to want. But if you see up close their personal experiences with Covid, they know something isn’t right. They don’t like what it does to them and their families, and it scares them. Why I talk about it when the pressure is there to not do that. The Abilene Paradox is a failure to communicate.

Yikes, Wagga this week. How’s the vibe, Jason?

Of course there are no penguins in Greenland or the Arctic. Trump puts this bullshit on social media because he knows that’s where most people live their lives. Trapped forever in the puerile gotcha oneupmanship of Year 9.

I know it is hotter tomorrow than today, but that projected peak demand tomorrow on the national grid around 6pm is about twice what today’s is projected to be (red circle on left). People with large home batteries selling back into the grid could make a motza at peak tomorrow.

𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑉 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑙𝑦 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑡 𝑡𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑠. 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝐽𝑎𝑛𝑢𝑎𝑟𝑦 6, 2021, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑔𝑜𝑡 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑔𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 𝑎 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚, 𝑖𝑛 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ ℎ𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝐺𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐹𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑒 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑜𝑛. The New Republic People might call that an analogy. But reality IS now social media, we live inside it, it doesn’t refer to a separate ‘real’ world. Trumpism is a social media world. A bubble.

One of the world’s leading astrophysicists describing his first encounter with AI in his work. It took it 20 minutes to understand something he’s spent a lifetime trying to master. As he says, he has to join this revolution now, it’s too remarkable not to. If you look around at our world today, there are wonderful innovations that could transform all of our lives. But what do we see? A continuous diet of abuse, disinformation, protest, obstruction etc. A culture of ‘but…’ - everything is ‘but’. Our first instinct is to block, not to make the remarkable happen, which is always hard work. We nitpick every bump in the road. All of it driven by an existing status quo that doesn’t want to give up its position, funding a sewer of fake debate and opposition to everything, mostly through social media, vacuuming up people whipped into continuous frenzies of anger over total fictions.

Australia Day is now, like everything else in our lives, an argument. A debate. A great liberation for 2026 in my opinion is to identify this mechanism and ignore it, by ignoring all of the popular debates of the day. They’re fake. The point is to make people argue, all day and every day, about everything. Mostly through social media, which is where people now live, not in towns or cities. Angry people are easy to mobilise for populist politics, which is why social media exists. Join me on this Australia Day, with a big yawn. That’s what it was for us, when I was a kid. A day off. I can celebrate that.

This is the experience of so many people now. There’s a great silence about how sick people are, to admit to it would be to admit we know we’re full of shit. For a couple of years we pretended these endless waves of sickness were our immune systems ‘catching up’ after lockdowns. Four years later, that anti-scientific bullshit doesn’t fly any more. Plenty of people have had plenty of infections, and they’re getting worse, not better. People who barely passed Year 10 science often lecture me about wearing a mask, that I’m damaging my immune system (ffs), and that I must be a ‘germaphobe’. I have no fear of germs, or anxiety of any kind. A mask is just protection against dangerous things to breathe in. Like tradies do to avoid dust, they’re not afraid. Covid is dangerous, if you’ve been told otherwise, you’ve been lied to, and your life looks increasingly like the one the lady here describes. It will get even worse.

Happy Birthday, Chelsea! 🌟💐👯 a milestone! So sorry to have missed your celebrations, we’ve had some bad weeks.

Happy Birthday, Sarah! 🎂☕👯

This one is going to make the local social media ‘Sack the GM’ Paulines bonkers with rage.

From Barack and Michelle Obama’s statement on Trumpian America. You can see here why the problem with America is…America. It’s not being taken over by anybody, every American is encouraged to sink the boot into government, every day. All sides of politics there believe this, that ‘the people’ is one thing, and government is another. They’re permanently at war with themselves. They’re a revolutionary society that never learned how to be any other way.

I’m 57. I didn’t even think about getting a ticket to see an elderly Cold Chisel, or dance in the mosh pit, because…I’m 57. Being 17 again holds no appeal. My parents at 57 had zero interest in their teenage passions. They were the last generation who grew up, who lived adult lives separate from their teen lives, before the great boomer surge post-war overwhelmed adult life with perpetual teen life.

I’m interested in how many people put on weight after they’ve had Covid. That’s not happened to me (yet) but research suggests it’s very common. Likely because Covid, like most infection, causes inflammation, and adiposity (depositing fat) is an inflammatory condition.

Is it not obvious that this same pattern repeats over and over in America? Shit happens, people take to the streets, nothing is fixed. This is the broken culture on full display. Basic, calm, public administration doesn’t happen because the entire culture is hostile to it. Government is always the enemy, for every side of politics. Their only expression of collective life is creating a big gig-like crowd and taking to the streets. That’s a sign of a terrible immaturity of social development. It even celebrates that immaturity as ‘democracy’. It's the repetition of its founding, of revolution against the (perceived) ‘tyranny’ of government, by Puritan fundamentalists.

Happy Birthday, Tash! 🎉🎂🥂

HBD! 🌟🎊🥂

Two of the biggest baddies in Western imaginations. It's interesting to view them through through the lens of the current US mess. Both Putin and Xi's histories involve the elimination of the sort of oligarchy-led plutocracy that is currently destroying the US. Russian oligarchs became mega-rich through the privatisation of State assets (itself largely driven by Western influence). China's oligarchs are similar. Putin and Xi shut them down or controlled them. China and Russia look like 'autocracies' to us, but we tend to view things through the distorted US Puritan lens, which sees restrictions on anything as oppression. Xi and Putin moved to control the proliferation of elite rivals for control, which is what destroys societies. Often what replaces the rivalries is State-led cronyism and corruption, but the countries are much more stable and less violent as a result of the crackdowns. I doubt the West has the appetite to do the same.

The first casualty of war is truth. Take the Russia-Ukraine war. Pitched to us as a battle between the authoritarian communists in Russia, and the democratic Ukrainians. In reality Ukraine has been run by powerful oligarchs for 35 years. Zelensky himself was an employee of one of these oligarchs. It's the war with Russia that has allowed Zelensky to break free from the hold of the oligarchy, using martial law to strip them of power and wealth. Right now the possible longer-term outcomes for Ukraine are grim. Either complete collapse as a separate State, or a country run by the military. The country itself is divided roughly in half in terms of allegiance, to either NATO or Russia.

Imagine aliens observing human life today. ‘Oh, they have some shit to deal with - climate change, energy, water and food availability, terminally ageing populations etc. etc.’ ‘OK, so what are they doing?’ ‘They’re all copying each other in adolescent cutesy viral trends generated by algorithms.’ I want the grown ups back.

The local Trumps are building and building. Pauline recently spent a few weeks (on taxpayer coin, while parliament was sitting here) in the US speaking and networking at major Trump events. I’ve shared here how this movement is acting even at local levels, some councillors are clear Trump supporters, sometimes openly and sometimes hidden behind pretend care for ‘the community’. One Nation is now their chosen vehicle. This poll was taken *before* the LNP split again, it may even be much worse than this.

Somebody said to me they hadn’t noticed any change to people’s health because of Covid. You won’t see what you don’t want to see.

https://c.org/26fQn5T6SC

I think it’s worth noticing that in this record week of outrageous heat, there hasn’t been one story in the news about potential grid collapse and the need for people to conserve energy. That’s because of renewables. It’s the old fossil-fuelled grid which could never cope with this sort of strain. Renewables are thriving.

Be prepared in Australia for the targeting of rural and regional people by One Nation, including their newest recruit Barnaby Joyce. They see real opportunity to steal lots of Nationals votes. They’re also targeting local councils, many of the populist candidates who have been successful in recent times are really Trumpian One Nation supporters. A lot of it will be driven by nonsense about wind farms, like this, to vacuum up gullible rural and regional voters who normally wouldn’t go near One Nation. It’ll be interesting to see how the Nats respond, given they invented the fake problems with wind farms to distract voters from how hopeless Joyce was as a leader, and won’t want One Nation to steal the fake hysteria from them. Just to correct the BS in this, annually the world buries over 500 MILLION tonnes of coal ash in landfill alone. Per YEAR. That doesn’t even start to touch the air pollution impact, or the impact of gas and oil. Wind turbine blades can also be recycled. When people who never mentioned the environment once in their lives untl they wanted to oppose renewables speak, ignore it. It’s fake concern.

I did something I had actually decided I wasn’t going to. I upgraded our existing Powerwall for 2 new Powerwalls. Originally the dollars didn’t really make sense, to do it, but the deal the installer offered that included both government and Tesla rebates was impossible to say no to. As a rough indication, buying 2 Powerwall 3s could normally cost you up to $35,000. I got them for just over $13,000. Something to understand about the evolving grid is that the days of making big money for all your solar exports are over. That subsidy was in place to encourage people to install solar panels. That’s overwhelmingly job done, they’re on millions of homes now. Now the target is to increase exports at peak times, and for that you need a battery. So subsidies shifted to batteries. You can make good money exporting in peak hours. But always the most money to be made consistently is in avoiding using grid power yourself, and again for that you need a battery (or 2). Every kWh you use that you might get 3-5c for by exporting, is a kWh you don’t have to import at 25-50 c/kWh. It’s also not just about money, with climate change creating more extreme weather batteries give you much more energy security at home. When the grid goes down, you’ll still have power. Why pick Tesla again? Because with all things electrical and renewables, they had such a head start on the world they still have the best technology. The software alone is worth the price of admission, and you need good software to manage a battery well. It also obviously integrates beautifully with a Tesla vehicle.

Increasingly I’m seeing people suffering ongoing, relentless sickness because of Covid start to blame the vaccines. Given they were sold a fairy tale that the pandemic is over, it’s not surprising. But not getting vaccines will only make their problems orders of magnitude worse. It’s not the vaccines, people. It’s Covid. Get as many Covid shots as you qualify for. Yes straight after any vaccine you can feel a bit bleh, that’s just your immune system reading the vaccine information.

It was bloody hot today, and I was tired at the end of work. Sitting in the car as it drove me home for 45 minutes, checking out the scenery and some tunes in air conditioned, insanely powerful and effortless, silent comfort, was a beautiful unwinding. Unbelievable that people resist wonders already available to them.

I talk a lot about imitation and imitative rivalry. Imitation (copying) is the centre of human life. Rivalry (Rene Girard studied this) comes because to imitate another person is one of the most hostile or aggressive things you can do. If somebody constantly mimics you, it will quickly seem a hostile act, like they’re mocking you. That’s because in some ways they’re capturing your identity, who you are. Just imagine somebody mimicking everything you do for even 10 minutes - you’ll want to punch them. Imitation becomes rivalry and dangerous when it’s between equals. When it’s not, such as when we imitate or emulate people of high status (experts, leaders etc.), imitation structures our societies, it provides the guide for how to think and act. But when we assemble huge crowds, and this loops back to gig culture I talk about, we create the conditions for intense rivalry, hostility and violence. Because crowds make everybody equal, and it’s imitation between equals that is lethal. I’ve seen people describe large gigs or other events as humans having some sort of numinous togetherness, an ancient thing. A load of bollocks, sorry. If you work on a large event like this, the very FIRST thing that is done is ‘crowd control’. Everything is done to prevent the crowd having the opportunity to form a crowd - queues, reserved seating, minimisation of dead times where the crowd could get bored and turn on itself for entertainment etc. It’s an entire science. You can even see the contrast between seating (more controlled) and standing (mosh pits as the most strong crowd). A mosh pit is a crowd unleashed, what all crowds would become without crowd control.

heh, ‘Maduro was a loon conspiracy theorist who thought the CIA was trying to overthrow his country’. ‘P.S. the CIA has now overthrown his country.’

Helping to care for the vast and growing number of old people in the world is one of the major reasons humanoid robots are under development. I’m sure many will have an immediate reflex ‘ugh’ to the idea, but this could be wonderful, particularly with the capacity to assist 24 hours per day. And with modern AI they could also be great companions in conversation. Again, the default reflex will be tedious narratives about that being impersonal and dehumanising. But people already happily allow the old to sit chattering every day to cats and dogs. Similarly semi-autonomous driving technology can dramatically increase the capacity of the old to remain on the road. We’re already at the point where cars can drive themselves for most journeys.

Petrolheads think they’re being clever when they call EVs ‘appliances’. None of them can explain what that even means. On all the measures of car performance they themselves have masturbated over for years, EVs wipe the floor with combustion vehicles. Every single one. They’re left trying to explain why the noise of the car is somehow significant, when it’s really just the car farting and the sound of 70% of their petrol dollar going straight out the exhaust and radiator unused. The noise petrol and diesel cars make has been reduced to a bare minimum over years anyway, because nobody likes the noise of traffic, and it wastes so much energy. The only noisy cars left on the road are the tiny minority owned by petrolheads, a marginal group who found identity in noisy cars as teenagers and don’t want to give it up. Drive a combustion car and an EV and you’ll never want to go back to combustion. They’re gutless, noisy, need never-ending maintenance and cost a fortune to run.

The more we replace human thought and decision-making with machines, the safer and happier we will be. Humans overwhelmingly don’t think, they battle each other for social status.

I didn’t know about the Garden Palace in the Domain in Sydney. Not least because it burned to the ground about 140 years ago.

This is the ideas about status and identity I post about a lot. For example people who oppose or support renewables, or EVs or petrol and diesel cars, or this or that band, brand of bags or shoes, political parties (status is in everything), are most often defending their ‘team’ in social status rivalries, from which they draw their identity.

I still think the greatest danger of social media isn’t misinformation. It’s the subtle way it’s replaced community life itself, it’s where we actually live now In ‘vertical’ online communities. Facebook is a US corporation. Bathurst like many other towns is now increasingly living inside its platform, which in turn is shaping the town in ways far removed from where Bathurst is on the map.

It’s not fascism. It’s history.

Ben Stiller posted this online. Again it shows why the US is stuck in its own death spiral. The framing of the people being separate to government, and holding it accountable. Government *is* the bloody people. Also this delusion that the people is a thing leads to the idea that ‘the country is divided’ (we get that here too). Countries look divided only because there are too many elite rivals for supremacy, and each fires up the population to try to get their support.