May 2026

The idea of 'natural', through the lens of supported shoes vs barefoot shoes. The proponents of barefoot shoes argue that this is the more 'natural' way that feet behave, it's how we evolved to walk. The problem with the theory I think is that we evolved on the savanna. On ground that was mostly soft and undulating, meaning our feet were constantly being stretched to allow full contact with the ground. Then centuries ago we started flattening and hardening the ground we live on, and today our feet almost exclusively walk and run on hard, very flat ground. In direct opposition to how they evolved. This punishes them in all sorts of ways, not least by not allowing them to spread properly, and causing repeated heavy forces on only a handful of joints. What a supported and cushioned shoe does is put the savanna back under the bottom of your feet. It allows them to stretch to take the load across the entire contact surface, and the cushioning mimics softer savanna ground for impact. Meaning you can walk on hard and flat ground but your foot will think you're on the savanna. It's not coddling the foot, it's restoring its natural environment. In other words barefoot shoes are not more 'natural'. They might work for some, for a certain period of time. But over a lifetime they will damage feet, inevitably, if like most modern humans you spend most of your day on hard, flat ground. The 'natural' ideas only looked at the foot, and ignored the environment/context in which it evolved.

Another miraculous revolution happening in broad daylight, which almost nobody knows about. Sitting alongside the Gliptins (the magical ‘weight loss’ drugs that do so many more semi-miraculous things) is a new type of drug called an ActRIIB blocker. ActRIIB blockers reverse an evolutionary process humans inherited where our muscles waste if unused. Other animals don’t have that, they can remain muscular doing nothing. To cut a long story short, these drugs will allow us to build muscle, just by popping a pill. That has enormous therapeutic benefit, but will also mean if combined with a Gliptin you’ll have a combined diet/gym, in a pill. You’ll lose weight and build muscle, at the same time. And that’s where the idea of ‘natural’ health will rear its head. Because very many will say it’s ‘unnatural’ to lose weight and build muscle, in that way. But that’s because we’ve carried for years the completely wrong, moralistic and shaming idea that being fat is caused by eating too many calories (and so to lose weight we have to starve ourselves), and building muscle requires lots of exercise. Both of those ideas are just wrong. Our bodies evolved in conditions of scarcity, and now we have relative abundance the response of the body to that abundance is to get fat and lose muscle. Our environment changed but our bodies didn’t, so there’s a mismatch. These drugs are allowing a matching of body and environment again. The most ‘natural’ thing imaginable. The results promise to be miraculous for our health.

Heh, the Nats only care about land clearing when it involves renewable energy. Andrew continuing his clutching the pearls tour.

Is it that hard to see that we actually live inside social media now? It is our society. It’s not ‘about’ it. It’s where lives are lived, inside these ‘vertical’ communities. To the tiniest level of detail. And the structure of social media - likes and followers - is high school culture. Creating rival gangs that fight each other for status. And so that is now our societies.

Acting your age. Paul Prenter worked with Queen in the 1980s. This short interview snippet from then shows what remnants of the older adult world thought about the idea of rock bands playing into old age. Mick Jagger on stage at 60? Ridiculous! How quickly that’s been forgotten, in the ensuing 40 years, as the great boomer wave of kidutls flattened that old adult culture. The idea of ‘acting your age’, and making way for the next generation, is permanently gone. It’s ridiculous and perverse that teenage rock stars are still prancing on stages in the same way, now they’re over 80. But our culture now lacks any way of seeing that. To the great credit of Freddie Mercury, he thought it was ridiculous and boring to be still doing it already in his early 40s. We repeat the same teenage lives from cradle to grave. We don’t know any other way to think or act, older adult culture was destroyed.

I have zero interest in anybody’s opinion, and who wins elections or other popularity contests. All that interests me is the use of knowledge to make life remarkable and easier. You don’t need to route knowledge through popularity status games or anybody’s opinion. They’re irrelevant. Just focus on knowledge. The world is full of wonders.

Ozempic’s patent expired 4 weeks ago. 50 factories in India were waiting. Australia’s drug regulators are heavily influenced by Big Pharma. But the wonder drugs at cheaper prices are starting to arrive. And Ozempic is now relatively old-hat (though still good). The newer Gliptins are much better again. And research is happening at lightning speed. Lots of competitors means downwards pressure on prices.

I asked one of my specialist friends about the possibility of cheaper Gliptins in Australia. This is what he said.

Fuel should have been rationed in Australia starting weeks ago. Much of the population acting like toddler pork chops during Covid makes all politicians too terrified to do anything. Global supplies are non-existent. And Australians are still taking to the roads in vast numbers on long weekends for driving holidays. This is kidult culture, folks. Nothing can interrupt our lifestyle status quo. A catastrophic kicking to the collective gonads incoming.

If you thought Covid was disruptive, buckle up.

Some of the nicest and smartest Americans will argue with you day and night that their cultural model of ‘the people’ running the country is democracy. When in reality it’s just their revolution, repeating itself over and over. With these results. Democracy is public institutions running countries, taking care of all of these things. The institutions revolutions destroy.

Iggy Pop at Coachella. I remember the elderly performing at big music festivals when I was young. O wait, no I don’t. They were acting their age, playing bowls. The boomers who cheer this on wouldn’t have let the elderly anywhere near a Woodstock stage. Now they refuse to move aside, to act their age. That’s their whole life, and now a whole culture. The counter-revolution, still going. Kidult culture. The young will even often defend it, and not notice how perverse it is. It only means everybody is now a kidult, irrespective of age. That’s the cultural shift, eternal adolescent life.

Banksy’s latest, a man blinded by a flag, about to fall several metres headfirst into the concrete. The people who worship flags know zero history.

These will be the cleanest oil refineries in the world. Not one drop of oil. They’ll also take about 10 years to build, save nobody in the fuel crisis, cost billions Queensland doesn’t have, and target vehicles that won’t exist by the time the job is done.

I knew people who worked on the original Snowy Hydro scheme. It made modern Australia. The way it took that enormous influx of refugees from WW2 and mixed them with the locals to unify everybody behind massive nation building. And you know what it was? A massive project in renewable energy. The men shown here, mostly now dead, would feel violated by today’s anti-immigration and anti-renewables politics. These were hard men, and women. Lives almost destroyed by war, who came here and worked like slaves without a fuss, creating a much more fascinating and complex Australia. Unlike the pig-ignorant racists and bigots today, and the in-bred political operatives who never built a thing. The outrage we should feel that these pathetic non-entity ‘leaders’ of today and their infantile keyboard wars now target the two things that above all else shaped modern Australia. Immigration, and renewable energy.

I post so much about status because it really is the key that unlocks all human behaviour. Another example, maybe 20-25 years ago I noticed quite a few more luxury European cars circulating in Lithgow. That wasn’t normal, previously. And it wasn’t just the rich driving them. The ‘early adopters’ of most new tech are wealthy because they can afford it. But it’s not just about dollars. They want to differentiate themselves from the less wealthy, in status. And in turn, the less wealthy want that luxury tech, to give themselves higher status. So over time we’ve seen this pattern in German luxury cars (as an example), since the 1970s. The rich got them first, then those less well-off started buying them as their prices dropped. All of this is status-driven. Often as lower status people start adopting luxury brands, higher status people will differentiate themselves by going the other way, buying cheaper things, in a move to what they think of as more ‘authentic’ living. Another genius of Tesla is to combine all parts of the status hierarchy in vehicles, into a single vehicle. Everybody gets the high performance, and the luxury, and the high tech, and the practicality, at every price point. Engineering is the only peaceful way to defeat status.

Happy Birthday, Alix! 🥂🎁🎉

Peter Turchin leads a research group that uses vast amounts of empirical data to test theories about history. As he says here, ‘the people’ never ‘rise up’. I see Barack Obama again today asking the American people to rise up against Trump. It will never happen.

We don't live in towns and cities now. We live in social media groups. Not an analogy. Social media has replaced geograpy. In technical terms, vertical communities have replaced horizontal communities.

Dolly did a long selfie video to explain why she’s disappeared from performing. Her immune system stopped working. You can fool yourself Covid is a nothing burger for a while. Dolly is a master of putting a happy face on terrible things. The comfort people take from doing just what everybody else is doing (nothing), that camaraderie of happy ignorance? When you become chronically ill, nobody will care. The chronically ill are abandoned. They’re like a fart in the shared elevator, an awkward obstruction to fun lifestyles. Ask them. Adolescent culture does no risk management. It won’t act on climate change. Or on Covid. Or on house prices. Or on anything, except having a fun time. Teenagers are immortal, and when shit happens, happily fatalistic (‘it is what it is’). How often do you hear that now, passing itself off as adult life? There are no cures for what Dolly and others are now experiencing. You won’t even get an appointment with somebody who has half a clue what to do about it.

When Tesla unveiled its Cybercab in 2024, the car with no steering wheel or pedals and vast interior room that can also accommodate wheelchairs, many were sceptical. But they're now rolling them off the production line. There's even more to this story. These cars are cheap to buy, because of the revolutionary engineering of the line Tesla has done. And while taxi-type services were the obvious first target, Tesla have confirmed ordinary people will be able to buy them as well. An ordinary person could have the car drive you to work, and then drive itself home again (rather than having to find parking). Then pick you up again after work. People will also be able to use them as Uber-type vehicles, to earn income as rideshare vehicles when not being used by the owner. Tesla is not so much inventing cars. It's inventing entirely new business models, and re-defining what driving even means.

This follows a pattern I see every day. The entire culture does no risk management, of anything, because it would mean people having to alter their routines. This includes for extremely dangerous things. If it's suggested that caution might be needed, people laugh and say you're a worrier. Then the shit hits the fan, and at first it's 'it is what it is'. Then they lawyer up. And launch a GoFundMe. Kidult culture.

We live in very idealistic times, where everything is processed through the head and through feelings. I went through school at the tail end of corporal punishment, and was caned several times. it didn’t damage me in the slightest, and I much preferred it to the mind-fucking that now passes for apparent care. I also much preferred being smacked if I was a shit growing up, to endless ‘discussions’ about my behaviour. Physicality is a deeper sort of care that modern mores simply can’t understand. As Lawrence wrote about so brilliantly, it activates a much deeper, more vital part of you. It causes a flash or fire in your eyes, it arouses your deeper ‘will’ and volition. A parent who smacks is taking a deeper responsibility for you, and rousing your deeper self at the same time. In schools kids are deeply cynical about the permanent counselling they now live with instead, they roll their eyes. People who equate this sort of physicality with ‘violence’ are beyond help, for me. Again, idealistic claptrap. We’ve created whole populations of vastly over sensitive souls, who can’t face the slightest challenge without ending up with ‘mental health’ issues. because we ignore the full dimensions of physicality.

Girard realised that imitation was the root of all human life. Copying one another, our deepest passion. But he went a step further, because he realised *why* we do it. It’s rivalry. Imitative rivalry, his main concept. Humans copy one another to gain social status, in groups (I call them teams, to capture the rivalry). The rivalry is both within the teams, and then with other teams. Everybody is competing for status. Because status is also identity, for social animals. It makes you a somebody, rather than a nobody. We copy one another to ‘fit in’ with our groups, and to brand ourselves as distinct from other groups. Girard also saw that as rivalry intensifies, and our collective life itself as at risk from it, scapegoats are nominated to de-fuse it. People reunify, around the persecution and destruction of the scapegoat. You can see this in the news every day, some collective crisis is brought to a head by the identification of somebody to blame, and then the pile-on starts. But the pile-on ‘unites’ people again, it short circuits the rivalry that created the crisis in the first place. Suddenly everybody is ‘on the same page’ again. Girard also identified this as the core genius of Christianity, as a social tool. Christ’s crucifixion was the calling out of the scapegoating mechanism. The man with the highest status of all, the son of God, offered himself up as the scapegoat for human strife. In doing that, it sucked the oxygen out of the whole imitative rivalry/scapegoating mechanism. Religion for Girard wasn’t just belief in supernatural beings. It was a tool to deal with human violence. With status rivalry. The title of his main book is actually drawn from the Bible, the ‘things hidden’ there were the secrets to understanding evil and how to defeat it. It’s no coincidence that Western civilisation itself only took off and survived for millennia, once Christianity emerged. Kings and monarchies were also a tool to the same end, and why monarchs clashed with but also worked with churches. They created status hierarchies ‘above’ human life. None of us can be gods, or kings. So the striving for status is controlled by these central master hierarchies in societies, with their networked ‘courts’ and other mechanisms. The modern democratic belief that ‘the people’ is some intelligent entity that drives societies is a complete disaster, from Girard’s point of view. It does nothing but open up a space for eternal status rivalry, and thus violence and death, as each strives for status in the melee but never achieves any lasting result. And that’s today, our social media world. Nothing but endless argument, debate and violence, as people fight for status.

We're now deep into 'stranded asset' territory, if you buy a car with a combustion engine. Your secondhand value will go into free fall, nobody will want the vehicle as the transition accelerates.

Hantavirus has a high mortality rate (25%), and normally doesn't transmit between people. It's likely airborne, but it appears nothing is being done on the ship that reflects that, because the whole Covid debacle means you're not allowed to suggest diseases are airborne (which Covid absolutely is). Instead everybody will be told to wash their hands lots, which is almost a total waste of time. Let's hope this is managed and the strain of virus doesn't have pandemic potential. Millions died because vested interests wouldn't allow Covid to be declared as airborne, to protect economies. This virus would kill far more people again, if it is airborne and has pandemic potential.

Andrew Hastie telling the truth about electricity prices, gas, and Pauline Hanson. The Liberals picked a complete dud to lead them, in Angus Taylor, who's trying to out-Trump Pauline.

I honestly don’t think most understand the collapsing mess social media society is. And the abuse and violence going on.

Pauline in contempt of court here. I hope the court acts. She could be jailed for up to two years.

The US Senate questioning Trump-nominated judges. Not one of the nominees would acknowledge the basic fact that under the US Constitution, no person can run for President more than 2 times. I wonder why that is? (I don’t really wonder.)

When populism strips away all existing social hierarchies, including hierarchies of expertise, it leaves people without any way of belonging to a society. You have to then ‘perform’ your identity yourself, to have any status and therefore identity. That’s what ‘identity politics’ like this is. People inventing new identities for themselves, to fill the void left by populism. We do nothing to fix actual problems in society, we spend all day creating and fighting for identities, in our social teams. So we can be somebody, rather than nobody, in a culture that has no social roles left attached to material adult responsibilities.

It seems big and grunty diesel trucks can't get up Scenic Hill in Lithgow.

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of imitation in human life, and how it leads to violence, because it’s based on status rivalry. And that the violence is avoided or stopped by creating scapegoats, that then everybody piles-on against, re-unifying the crowd. Check this. Girard came to believe in God, but not through any pre-existing faith. He came to believe through his study of this imitative rivalry and scapegoating mechanism. He thought it impossible for humans to have been able to both identify and act against this mechanism alone, that it must have required divine intervention. I agree with him, humans are incapable of doing this. And that’s what he thought Christ was. That divine intervention, and he sacrificed himself, becoming the ultimate scapegoat, to make the mechanism visible to humans. That was the divine intervention. It led to centuries of social progress, led by Christian institutions, progress that didn’t exist prior to them. It’s very common as a ‘modern’ person to think Gods were just fairytales, for ignorant people in the past. Michel Serres once said we now happily accept miraculous things from science (which in the past only looked for laws), but now look only for boring causal laws in history. A complete inversion. We maybe just forgot that miracles can be real. We live in societies that happily deny we went to the moon, only decades previously. It’s not difficult to see how a possible divine intervention more than 2000 years ago is now dismissed as a childish fairytale.

Happy Birthday, Ed! 🥂🎉🎈

You can see how social media/kidult culture turns everything into a fake debate. The AFR is another sewer, notice the 'slug' in the headline - designed to enrage people. This will be just one more service electricity networks might provide. They already offer a lot of services all of us pay for through our bills, but don't use individually. Like the idiots who want their tax itemised to only pay for the things they use. They'd be living in a tent eating snails. Everyone will own an EV eventually, anyway.

The softly-softly 'market' approach to transition to renewable energy and EVs won't work. For starters markets are a fiction. And humans simply won't change if important change is needed, unless they're forced to. For example unlike most of Europe, and China, Australia still hasn't announced an outright ban on sale of petrol and diesel vehicles, by a certain date. It needs to, but I bet it wont. No revolutions happen via personal choice bullshit ideas. They're forced. The first Industrial Revolution wasn't market-driven. Neither were the world wars. It took Trump's idiocy in Iran to get noticeable amounts of Australians off their arse to even look at an EV. (Green is bans by 2030, teal is 2040s, dark blue 2050)

A huge performance looks like a collective sharing. But I think it’s much more interesting than that. The performer is somebody who has spent years mostly in isolation, mastering and understanding an art that in turn involves a deeper understanding of the world. That huge crowd is drawn to the magical truths that isolation found and is expressing. It’s the magical truths found in the performer’s isolation that makes their act amazing to us, and draws the crowd to the event. Really this massive social event is one performer sharing the magical realities of the universe, with thousands who can’t access them. It’s a celebration of solitude and knowledge.

Taking delivery of one of these on Sunday. Paul Meric is a ruthless reviewer, and here’s his summary, that cuts through all of the adolescent pro- and anti-Tesla nonsense. “I think this thing is absolutely exceptional…incredible value for money…it does what Tesla does really well. It gives you all the tech that you need, the charging speed, the charging network…it really is hard to recommend anything else.” There are lots of great EVs. But as somebody who has studied them a lot, I can only plead with you not to ignore Tesla because everybody hates Elon. It’s a massive mistake. They’re the best cars in the world, combustion or electric. They give you everything you’d normally need 6 different cars to achieve, at a family price.

If this does develop into an epidemic or pandemic, how will you feel about wearing a mask again? Mortality rate of this virus is 35-50%. There is no cure or vaccine.

Right from the start of this term as President, I’ve said this. Through all of the hysteria of apparent fascist takeovers of America. People have no idea what fascism is, and why this isn’t it. Nor do they understand that Americans see all government as fascism, and always have. Trumptanic is going down. A brilliant metaphor, because most of the time it’s sinking many assume it’s business as usual. And no, ‘the people’ didn’t do this, with protests. America hit the iceberg 250 years ago. The protestors won’t get a seat in the lifeboats. https://ifloz.substack.com/?utm_medium=web

To be brutal, I don’t listen to Americans about democracy. They’ve never understood it or lived it. They’re a revolutionary society that mistakes revolution for democracy. “American democracy is in such a sickly state partly because for most of the country’s 250-year history it has never been that healthy. Nowhere is the word “democracy” to be found either in the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. The right to vote was never enshrined in the original Constitution, an omission which continues to astound many Americans. Likewise, the Bill of Rights, the bundle of ten amendments designed to rectify the shortcomings of the original text, says nothing about voting.”

Tesla autonomous driving prevents the owner being T-boned by somebody running a red light. Note the car on the right had a red right-turn arrow, which is why it didn’t move forward.

For those who don’t follow American politics, Trump’s Supreme Court, in an act of ludicrous overreach, overturned a voting rights decision from about 60 years ago, that stopped States using openly racist methods to restrict votes from some groups. Some States there now are rushing to implement openly racist restrictions again in time for the mid-term elections in November. The wider point here is that this isn’t fascism. Democracy didn’t invent the law, it was invented by elite rivals to kings and emperors, to control and curb their power. Trump’s absolute disrgard for law doesn’t make him Hitler. It makes him Henry 8th. Or Caesar. He wants to be a king. The world was run by kings for most of its history, only in the past 300-400 years has that changed. It’s the resurgence of royalism. Not the return of fascism. And while I think Trump would be a terrible king (he’s useless at just about everything), the brutal reality is that actually societies in history have done much better under kings, than they have as democracies. Rome was a bloody sewer of violence when its people-power Senate was in charge. Monarchies are the embodiment of status as the central operating principle in all human life. If you don’t have a monarchy, people will invent a woeful populist equivalent. Like Trump.

School uniforms were a way to try to reduce status competition between people, by mandating everybody wear the same outfit. But status won’t be suppressed. Students and parents quickly develop micro-status differentiators.

Supporters of all political parties are now rushing to adopt EVs. Even One Nation. Politics is a waste of our time, it’s nothing but a popularity contest between groups of people fighting for status. The material reality of the world doesn’t care about politics. It always wins. It’s also all I follow. Many try to pigeonhole me inside one of these idiot teams. ‘Oh you’re a Greenie, oh you’re Labor, oh you’re a Liberal’. That’s kidult society, which only understands what team you’re on and pays no attention to reality at all. (I’m not on any team, I think electoral politics is not only a waste of time, it’s destroying our civilisations.) This data suggests too that the continued attack on renewables and EVs by One Nation and the Coalition may be political suicide for them.  Both are trying to copy Trump politics in Australia. I think that’s a profound misreading of what the majority of Australians want. The LNP were smashed at the last election doing the same thing, under Peter Dutton.

Following every election is a search for what it means. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a popularity contest. Popularity has no link to reality at all. When you fly on a plane, you don’t do a quick election to pick the most popular person to be the pilot. The most popular person will almost certainly have never flown a plane. It’s just a way of sorting people into higher and lower positions, in our status hierarchies. A way for social teams to fight for dominance in society.

There’s ongoing complacency, bought by draining of reserves. The really intense pain is likely still coming. And the ‘supply chain’ shock, as with Covid, could continue for years.

With home batteries I’m seeing time and again the same thing I’m seeing with EVs. Many people avoiding Tesla, because ‘Elon’. It’s your money. I can only advise what a terrible mistake that can be. Tesla is far and away the most advanced and mature EV and home battery company. Go elsewhere with caution. There are other great EVs and batteries, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re buying on price alone…I wouldn’t use my money to fight a childish social media battle, buying dodgy gear.

I’ve seen so many people defend this sort of thing because their righteous cause was deemed to be more important. You won’t find a better example of how social media is causing the collapse of civil society. You open this door, it doesn’t close again. The mob is indiscriminate, if unleashed.

The English shipped what they saw as their genetic inferior stock to Australia, when it was set up as a penal colony. I’ve always thought somebody swapped the lists.

The secret to the future of the world is in the contrast between that 5, and everybody else. Going far beyond cars. When you shift things to design and engineering, away from sales and marketing - away from status - the world changes fundamentally.

Only catastrophes change what people think and do. Without them they just fight each other for status. We’ve known for decades that we urgently need to get off fossil fuels. We did almost nothing about it. So now the suffering really starts. I hope you have your EV sorted. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of the problems coming our way.

Someone wake the fascist tyrant when it’s all over.

I can guarantee anybody going to an election promising to help the poor will lose in a landslide. The poor vote for people promising they’ll be rich. Humans run on status. Promise people status (which will be a lie) and they’ll vote for you.

People think I’m delusional by still going on about Covid. Because they’re still trusting that the world they grew up in, where public institutions advised the expert course of action, is the world we live in now. They assume if politicians told them we’re all fine with Covid now, we must be. What they don’t see is that those same politicians switched off the public health system during Covid. Never mind that public health was *invented* to make that a false choice. ‘Lives and livelihoods’, as politicians framed it, is a bullshit, lethal lie. Public health was set up to save both, at the same time. You can’t have a livelihood if you’re dead. Add to that the frequent ‘but they were old and going to die anyway’ BS. As this study shows, that was also a lie. We’re inside the greatest public policy catastrophe in history. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/many-older-adults-who-died-covid-weren-t-close-death-infection-study-suggests

By my calculation, the tax cuts in the Budget last night for most will put about $268 more in your pocket this year, and $786 annually from next year, if you earn above the minimum tax thresholds.

Another reason I went with Tesla is that they, by design, allow you to integrate all of your energy use in the one brilliant app. This includes your vehicle use, by far the largest energy use of any family, as well as solar and batteries and EV charging. You can then monitor and control it in a huge number of ways, in the palm of your hand. It's also the gateway into their R&D, which is continuously fed back into the devices Energy is the main source of status and therefore power in our cultures. By taking control of it and generating it yourself as well, you gain enormous control over your life.

The changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing were long, long overdue. But it won’t fix housing. Supply is not the problem. Housing and land were transformed back into status objects, as they’ve been for most of human history. The ‘landed gentry’, we all know what that means. Only one time in all of human history has housing been owned by and affordable to ordinary people. After the two world wars, when the existing landed aristocracies were smashed.

A humanoid robot sorting packages. This went for 8 hours, uninterrupted. It’s actually mesmerising, watch the sophistication of the engineering of the hands and arms for example. The robots are coming, with AI. Kidult culture lives inside movies, streaming and the socials, so can only see this as some Terminator movie coming to life. It has no grip on actual reality. The implications for our lives are staggering.

Lots of attention goes to the fuel that is pumped at servos. Nobody mentions that they're actually massive vacuum pumps, sucking Australian money from our wallets and sending it directly overseas. To the tune of $165 million per day. Parasites on the landscape. Imagine what Australia could do with that money. We're now free of them, for good, at my place. I scratch my head at the Australians who fight to keep them.

The Gliptins are the new penicillin. I don’t make it up.

Tesla employs proportionally 4 times more engineers than other carmakers. The money others spend on things like advertising and servicing, Tesla spends on creating and improving its technology. That's the model the world needs. Knowledge and engineering-led. Not status-led. Again I'm not a 'fan' of Tesla, fan implies mindless cheerleader. I support knowledge and engineering as the key to human survival and progress.

One for the fascists under every bed folk. Did Hitler or Mussolini have merch? The Trump Mobile by the way is actually an older Chinese phone with a gold cover. Without the crap Trump merch cover it sells for hundreds of dollars less. Trump’s sons market this, it’s just more fleecing of America by the Trump family. America is a plutocracy. Fascists aren’t taking it over. Grifters are. They always have been. That’s the culture.

Brands are the way business taps into the imitative ‘team sports’ status rivalry I post about. A brand is a team, in these status battles. Like a footy team, but for all products. People are ‘brand loyal’ in the same way footy supporters are. People will stick with a brand they know even if the product is terrible and much more expensive. Many won’t use identical much cheaper generic drugs for example, because they only trust the brand they know. Or many older folk will only connect with Telstra or bank with the big 4 banks, because that’s the brands they’ve been with for years. It’s their team, the one that gives them a feeling of safety and identity. The hysteria over AI amuses me because of the assumption that humans actually think. Humans don’t think, they imitate one another, in an attempt to fit in socially and fight with other humans for status, in their teams and against other teams. Also why the attempts to give people ‘market’ information to help them choose better products, comparisons for price and features, fail. Societies never run on information. They run on status.

Happy Birthday, Richard! 🥳🎉

Strip all the bullshit away from 'politics', which isn't even a thing anyway. It's different social groups in the community fighting for status. Modern conservatives are the old landed gentry and industrialists trying to strip away tax and regulation, which stop them accumulating even more wealth and power. Modern progressives shift status mostly to the highly educated instead. Both say they're doing it for 'the people'. The people is a fiction, it doesn't exist. It's a con to hide high status groups trying to get even more status. Ordinary people want to be part of one or other of the high status groups. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-15/coalition-to-repeal-labor-property-tax-changes/106681866

The electricity prices you're paying right now? That's coal power.

In 'we're drilling for our own oil' Queensland, batteries are eating fossilised fuels for lunch. An almost total replacement in only 2 years.

Over 48 hours into the 72-hour test, Robot Bob has sorted over 60,000 packages.

How to see kidult culture. Culture is like water to fish, mostly invisible to those living it. In the 19th century, Jules Verne created magical stories. About travelling to the moon, and amazing submarines exploring the depths of the oceans, and journeying to the centre of the Earth. These captured the collective imagination of people, and helped make them excited about a century of extraordinary technological progress. A culture that was outward-looking, that wanted to achieve impossible things. Fast forward to today. What’s our culture? A culture of trends. Trends reflecting fights between social groups, for status. Nothing collective about it at all, no exciting vision for the future. Meaningless fads and fashions reflecting these fights, shifting every 10 minutes. That’s the world of the schoolyard. Of yo-yos, and trending sneakers and bags. That’s kidult culture, a culture where status isn’t attached to achieving material things (adolescents have little power), so people just fight each other for position.

Happy Birthday, May baby! 🎊👯☕

Parkinson’s Disease is approaching epidemic levels. One of the less known things about Covid (SARS-Cov-2) infection is that it’s a potent accelerant for Parkinson’s. The virus attacks the cells that produce dopamine, and Parkinson’s is heavily characterised by a lack of dopamine (most sufferers take drugs to try to counteract this). Then along came the Gliptins, the ‘weight loss’ drugs I often post about. Ozempic, Mounjaro etc. As you can see here initial testing stunned everybody. It’s suspected the power of the Gliptins against inflammation more generally helps protect the neurons in the brain that produce dopamine as well. Incidentally this is why my Covid specialist friend had me taking Metformin when I caught Covid. Metformin also protects the dopamine neurons in the brain. It’s another diabetes drug. (I don’t have diabetes.) This also matches a real paradigm shift emerging in the treatment of chronic disease, and also of infection. Chronic disease is often caused by long-term infection effects, and much disease in general can be linked to inflammation. Rather than try to treat the ongoing infection, which is near impossible, instead target the inflammation the infection causes. It’s the inflammation which is the likely cause of the disease, also for other diseases without infectious origin. The Gliptins seem miraculous because they’re both anti-inflammatory, and also boost the immune system in critical ways.

I’ve been driving the newer Tesla Model Y all this week, the YL. Patrick gets why this is the best car ever made. But it’s now even better, the YL even has adaptive suspension that allows you to move between fast cornering and luxurious comfort for passengers, automatically within milliseconds. He also left out the supercar level of performance, and capacity to both drive itself and keep you incredibly safe with its constant monitoring of the road around it and superhumanly strong chassis structure. It’s everything people previously bought 6 different cars to try to get, in one vehicle. And a lot more again. It cost me about $3 in ‘fuel’ to drive all week too, to Bathurst and back. That’s for the whole week.

Formula 1 now has its own anti-vax movement. The anti-battery/anti-electric crowd. F1 cars have been hybrids for years already, it’s made them faster than they’ve ever been before, while using much less fuel so eliminating the need for pit stops for refuelling. This year the anti-EV/anti-renewables morons are pretending the electric parts of the drivetrain are preventing racing, and have to go. (There hasn’t been actual racing in F1 for decades, even with only combustion engines. It’s not about the engines.) This is what social media culture does to everything. Destroys it by allowing masses of stupid people to connect and coordinate their stupidity, creating a movement.

The number one rule for a long, healthy life? Avoid infections. All infections, no matter how ‘mild’ idiots say they are. Most people who have ever lived died of an infection of some kind, before they were 15 years of age. If antibiotics and vaccination help you survive early infection, the infection will kill you by triggering chronic problems. Most chronic disease will (some researchers say) turn out to be caused by infections. Heart and neurological disease, and cancers, and many others.

The Chinese play a long game the kidult West has no hope of understanding or emulating. The Chinese text on the left says that there’s no rush, everything is under control. Asia’s capacity to think and act over centuries, rather than the 10-minute trending trivialities of current Western social media culture, is actually the world’s only hope. Asia once ran the world, and is one of the only reasons any of us is here today. That time may be returning.

Adult life in a social media society.

The empirical data-based historian Peter Turchin says one of the most dangerous things a society can do is educate most of its young to a high level. (A difficult truth for any educator to hear.) All revolutions in modern and even historical times weren’t generated by our beloved idea of ‘the people rising up’. They were generated by highly educated people with ideologies, who then co-opted ordinary people to their causes, which they then attributed to the people. Turchin identifies that you need two things to align, to bring the destruction and violence of revolution. First a proliferation of ‘elite rivals’, for the top positions in a society. That’s what giving millions of kids university education can do, because they will then mostly aspire to high-ranking positions in society. Most will fail at that, and then become angry and disillusioned. University education also creates a questioning of legitimacy itself, of all kinds - critical thinking. Which reinforces this ideological/revolutionary impulse. The other thing Turchin sees as the necessary co-ingredient is widespread immiseration of a population. Lots of people struggling. That makes them very receptive to revolutionaries of all kinds, promising salvation. The society then fractures into rival ideological gangs, fighting each other. As the saying goes, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. A lethally dangerous thing. Best to leave scholarship to the relative handful of scholars with aptitude for it. Lawrence said the same.

The Gliptins (‘weight loss’ drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro) also suppress all forms of addiction.

China just turned on the world’s largest offshore solar farm. 2.3 million solar panels. 2,934 steel platforms. 11,736 piles driven into the ocean floor. Built to survive force-11 gales and sea ice. It sits 5 miles off the coast and powers 2.67 million people. They're also farming fish underneath it. Meanwhile in the West….

Modern conservatives for decades have sold the idea that government is a barrier to prosperity and aspiration. The dreaded ‘red tape’ of government bureaucrats, with their taxes and regulations. They claim to ‘free’ us all from this dead weight on aspiration. No need to argue this one, the experiment has been done in history. Without government, there was no prosperity or even civilisation. And certainly no aspiration. There were just warring gangs fighting for status. Government *emerged* from the chaos and violence of those times, to make life better. The original conservatives in politics like Edmund Burke saw this, that institutions are emergent and correct for the disaster of life without them. That was the original meaning of conservative - to CONSERVE these institutions. To conserve government. The fact modern conservatives say the exact opposite simply tells you they’re not conservatives. They’re useful idiots representing vested interests. Without institutions, without government, human life is just everybody fighting for status. It’s gang warfare, feudal lords fighting each other for supremacy. Like life in some of Africa and South America right now, where gangs patrol in Hiluxes carrying machine guns, to control their territory. Notice none of these modern conservatives offer to go and live in countries with no government or regulation. They live in the expensive leafy suburbs of heavily regulated rich countries, with strong governments. Even the poor lap this shit up, because they like everybody aspire to have higher status. People don’t vote for policies that help the poor because even the poor don’t want to be thought of as poor, as low status. They aspire to higher status, which most won’t achieve. They bankrupt themselves affording things like private education and private health, and huge McMansions and wankpanzers, because they think it gives them higher status. Status runs societies, and that’s why this rubbish wins elections. Throw in inflammatory nonsense about migrants stealing everybody’s status too, as Australians, and you canter to victory.

We’re living inside a medical revolution, right now. The greatest leap forward since the invention of antibiotics. Status as always will determine the outcome. The status quo will resist - lots of GPs and specialists, all the wellness influencers and their claptrap about ‘natural’ health, etc. They’ll hate that this makes much of what they do irrelevant. Like I post about a lot, all that will shift a status quo is it being smashed to pieces by a rival status quo, or by catastrophe. In this case I suspect it’ll be the insurers leading the charge, because it could save them a fortune.

Senior doctors in the US are now demanding that autonomous driving technology be prioritised. They see its impact as equivalent for health to preventing smoking. Humans are appalling drivers, in direct proportion to how wonderful they think they are. You are far, far more likely to be injured or killed on the road by a human driver.

And here come the combined diet and gym in a pill drugs. The revolution Stage 2. Making lean and muscular the new default, as it is for most animals already.

People swore the change brought by this hashtag movement was profound, and used it as evidence of how protest supposedly changes societies. Oh well.

About a century ago Walter Lippmann made the obvious point that in a mature democracy, elections shouldn’t introduce much change. The ‘running’ of a country is done by skilled administrators, not the elected. Imagine a major company changing its CEO every 1-3 years, and expecting each new CEO to take the company in the completely opposite direction. How long do you think that company would last? That’s what elections do to countries. Now leaders struggle to last a year. They’re trends, like popular TV shows and songs are.

I'd qualify this. We're ALL 'idiots', outside the areas we actually know something about. What social media did was let everybody's opinion on things they know nothing about suddenly have real power. That's literally centuries of human progress, of setting up hierarchies of knowledge rather than opinion, thrown into reverse. Tell a plumber how to do his or her job, and they'll tell you to f-off. For good reason. But that same plumber will happily tell you why climate change is crap, why renewables and EVs are a con, why vaccination kills you, etc. And will join social media groups who believe the same absolute crap, and become powerful.

How AI is changing the world. This is the BioHive-2 supercomputer. Developing even a single new drug used to take years. This computer can do over 2 MILLION drug experiments every WEEK, simulating thousands of different dosing regimes, on diverse patient populations.

Weight Watchers was bankrupted by the Gliptins. Jenny Craig closed all of its physical stores and is barely hanging on through online products. The USA spends $2.3 trillion annually on obesity-related health conditions. Much of its heavily privatised health system makes its money dealing with these conditions. The Gliptins will decimate most of this. Existing health care will cling for dear life to the existing business model. It won't save it.

You can see here how the belief that lack of supply is the cause of the housing crisis is really a fiction sold by the same investors who caused the crisis. They want to make even more money, with even more houses to turn into massive capital gains. Just like the gas companies who say the answer to high gas prices is more supply of gas. So they can sell even more gas and make even more money. In reality the only supply of houses or gas that might drive prices of either down is a total flooding of each market, to the point where the entire industries collapse. Nobody will do that, it’s nonsense. The only time in all of history when housing was available and affordable to all was when governments built it themselves, outside any pretend market.

Google is adding AI to mouse pointers. Traditionally a mouse pointer is dumb, it just points to things but doesn’t understand what the things are. Now you’ll be able to point at things on the screen and rather than having to go to a separate program to do work with the things, you’ll be able to ask AI to do it right there.

The revolutionary disruption the Gliptins will bring to societies. All of these industries will potentially cease to exist, or be crippled.

America is a plutocracy. Ignore all the Left and Right and fascism nonsense. The rich run America, and always have.

I laugh when I hear a room full of people indoctrinated by social media narratives on AI, booing AI. Supposedly smart people. Righteously, rudely stupid, which is what social media produces. Only AI can save us from social media.

No prizes for guessing where the misinformation is being generated.

Yep.

Think about what that astronomically quick injection of machine intelligence is doing to our cultures. For me, after years of social media making whole societies fight each other in teams, to get social status, this shift to AI is not only desperately needed. It’s bringing a totally different world. A world where people increasingly (and individually) defer to this phenomenal machine intelligence, rather than shape their lives with the peer pressure of what everybody else thinks. It will change everything. It’s the closest thing to the return of a god, of a supernatural power.

I fully expect the morally righteous army of social media zombies to deny use on themselves of miraculous new drugs developed using AI, should they need them. Though that ship has sailed, alas. It was largely AI that gave us Covid vaccines inside only a year, instead of 10.

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v Right, and then major political parties attached to those. Before that it was Protestant versus Catholic. Nearly always the beliefs that sit under these, on a vast range of issues like energy, cars, gender, abortion, education etc. etc. are just sub-teams attached to those main top level teams. The whole of society is set up like a Premier League football competition. Social media has made this dramatically stronger, as its structure is fighting teams. All that matters is team victory, the ideas are only a vehicle for status rivalry. Most haven't a clue what they even mean.

The idea a government has to 'balance the books', like a business or household, is flat-out crazy. Governments don't have to earn income, like a business or household. They 'print' the money. When they print it, they don't owe anybody for it. No debt has been created. It's issued into circulation to promote the exchange of goods and services. A government surplus robs individuals and businesses of money. Business and individuals then have to go into debt to put more money into circulation themselves. Government surpluses literally suck the life out of an economy.

Less than 20% of Australia’s fossil fuel industry is Australian-owned. Think about how deep political snouts are in fossil fuel donor troughs, to spend decades actively undermining Australia’s sovereign wealth, on behalf of foreign companies.

Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. As a culture, and like most other nations on Earth, we’re dying out. Our birth rates are at terminally low levels. Cost is often given as a reason for this. But people can find a fortune for their dogs and other pets, and for recreational activities. Australians spend over $20 billion per year on their pets, mostly on dogs. It’s a cultural shift. It’s kidult culture, again. We prefer pets to children. Pets are pliable, and dogs in particular lavish us with unconditional love without all the difficulties children introduce to our lives. That unconditional love is fake by the way. It’s a dog-pack loyalty thing. Your loving dog will happily savage non-family/pack members, in the right situations. If a virus developed that posed great risk to the long-term health of dogs, kidult culture would fall over itself to protect the dogs. Covid is that long-term risk for our children, and what does kidult culture do? Absolutely nothing. It actually celebrates doing nothing, it infects them with relish. It won’t even vaccinate children for Covid, because it thinks infecting them protects the kidults from harm, through fake population immunity. As a culture, we don’t give a fuck about children. Kidults bizarrely hate children, because adolescents hate adult responsibility. We love platitudes about them, but as an educator, i can tell you firsthand every second in our schools proves the zero fucks we give about kids. But we LOVE our dogs. Fascists aren't taking over the world. Teenagers already did.

The people who study violence and social collapse say that the most dangerous time for any society is when a population begins imitating one another, en masse. This innocuous looking gig behaviour is actually a KPI for a society in all sorts of trouble. The logic isn't even difficult. Huge crowds of people so willing to copy what each other is doing is a mob. We can be lucky if the mob is focused on something like a band. But the behaviour goes well beyond the gig, to the wider culture. They bring it with them, to the gig. Social media has made this infinitely worse. A machine for imitative 'trending' behaviour. It's an astronomical accelerant of violence and social collapse.

Not only the best car in the world, I would say the best car ever made. And people vote with their buying. Best-selling car in the world 3 times, at a time EVs are still scary to many and there's huge anti-Tesla sentiment.

More GLP-1 drug miracles, 2 today. Retatrutide is the new kid on the block. Astounding results. The research doesn’t stop. China has a new triple molecule GLP-1 in development that is even better again.

Today’s other GLP-1 story. Early days on this research, but it may be understating it at this stage to call GLP-1 drugs the new penicillin. They may be much bigger than that. And when combined with the new muscle building drugs, we’re seriously talking miraculous health outcomes. Many will think this is cheating, that only lots of exercise and healthy eating can make a person healthy. That’s a total misunderstanding of what’s been discovered here. Both exercise and nutrition science are bankrupt scientific fields, with no proven impact on long-term health. Their ‘calorie’ concepts have been terrible obstacles to understanding. Zero understanding of metabolism. The human body is not a calorimeter. It’s junk science.

Who cares what people think? This is our delusional idea of democracy being ‘the people’ running countries. Most wouldn’t have a bloody clue on this question, or most questions of public policy. And nor should they, they have their own jobs to do. All this does is produce the most popular answer. There’s no connection between popularity and reality, it’s all just trending feels and vibes, driven by status, people cheering for their own team in the social battles. How is it not obvious that none of us can be expert in even a fraction of the things happening in a society? Adding up all of our individual complete ignorance through elections and polling just produces a steaming pile of ignorance, and status battles.

When I first started reading the giants who said that the core of all human life is imitation and status rivalry, in competing groups, I thought - can it really be the main thing? Now it’s absolutely obvious to me. It can be very subtly hidden from view, but it’s everywhere, in all things. And then sometimes it just bursts out, and all disguise is gone. Lethally dangerous, if unchecked.

The same young people Labor is trying to help with tax changes now fighting back, because ‘aspiration’. Societies run on status. Not money, not information. Try to help ‘the poor’ and they’ll punish you for implying they were lower status to begin with. They’ll never achieve the status they want, but they’ll die trying. Conservatives are cunning as sewer rats. There’ll be relentless use of the term ‘aspiration’ leading to the next election. They target status.

When you arrive at Tesla to pick up your new car, you haven’t dealt with a single salesperson in the whole process, and there aren’t any at the Service Centre where you car is waiting either. Just a huge warehouse (the Sydney one is even bigger than this one in Vic) full of gleaming new cars, ready to be driven away. You arrive and drive away in as little as 10 minutes. No paperwork to sign or look at. Money saved by stripping away that usual sales and marketing guff other makers use goes towards making the extreme high tech and luxury of Teslas affordable to all. And these Service Centres right now are PACKED. Overflowing with new cars waiting to be picked up, and the showrooms out front are swarming with potential new buyers. A clear victory for knowledge and engineering over the bullshit of social media culture.

If the polling is on track, One Nation - 53 seats. The National Party ceases to exist. The Liberals become a minor nothing party. Remembering that One Nation is nothing more than the Australian arm of Trumpism. Do you reckon Australians really want to be a Trump franchise? I’m sure many say no, but anybody tracking the progress of social media in taking over countries has seen this coming for years. Trumpism is the hijacking of democratic nations, by social media. Trump is the social media President. He owns his own platform. Social media culture is high school culture, where popularity and trends run everything. The ultimate endgame of kidult culture. Where you get a Prom King, instead of a PM/President.

It’s like I’m looking in a mirror.

Just imagine if this comes to pass. It’s often the people appalled by Trump who are also drawn to One Nation. One Nation is Trump’s Australian franchise. Pauline and Barnaby make Trump look like a brain surgeon.

Just a standard weekend.

Tesla introduced AI to its Powerwall units, to help explain to people in real time what's happening in their energy management. For a lot of people who don't engage with the more technical side of things, it's a fantastic way for them to understand what their system is doing, and why.

I love how anti-renewables farmers use terms like 'visual amenity' now. Force-fed by Bananaby and his army of mental midgets. The greatest damage to the visual amenity of the Australian landscape is far and away caused by farmers. They turned a landscape into soil strip-mining. Farming as we know it won't survive. Batteries will.

It occurred to me a while ago that the closest existing car category to put a Model Y or YL into would be GT cars. Grand Tourers (GTs) are cars that combine effortless long-distance comfort, high-speed stability, and serious performance. The Model Y and Model YL fit the bill easily. Have a look at the prices. The world's leading GT cars are minimum 4 to 5 times more expensive than a Model Y/YL. For the seriously rich. And the Tesla offers a whole range of things they can't match, including self-driving, almost zero running costs (it costs a fortune to run a GT car), and much more advanced tech and practicality. For the price of a family car. Tesla's genius is to make cars that collapse all the traditional categories. You can get pretty much all of the categories, in just the one car. And then it does much more besides, entirely new things. They've completely reinvented what a car is.

The elegant beauty of a 2-inch cock. I think plumbing fittings are beautiful things. Especially in brass.

It became very widespread to say ‘living with the virus’. Which was a phrase invented by a politician, not a scientist. It was bullshit. And this is where it leads. Every person who gets sick now, listen to them, will say ‘oh it’s just hayfever’, or ‘it’s just a cold’, or ‘sinus’. They have no actual idea, but what they often mean is it could be Covid or something else serious, but they’re not going to test to find out. Nobody wants the great con of living with viruses exposed. This guy had severe pneumonia - coughing up blood - and then died of sepsis. All because we made infection a nothing burger in peoples’ minds. They’ll treat all infection as a ‘mild’ nothing illness. Most people who have ever lived, in all of history, died of an infection of some kind. I don’t think most really fathom the catastrophically stupid thing we did, with Covid. https://www.news.com.au/sport/motorsport/nascar-driver-coughed-up-blood-before-tragic-death/news-story/29b85b4d61e99359ce4c6ade21914e50

A longish but very interesting read about why the airline industry can never make money. This actually links to my dislike of travel more generally, a culture that would be simply impossible without jets and jet fuel. We burn astronomical amounts of jet fuel, and like all combustion engines, more than half of the energy in the fuel is completely wasted and pollutes the air we breathe. Airlines always go bankrupt because the underlying thing we’re doing with planes is fundamentally unsustainable. The sums will never add up. Only vast government subsidy makes jet travel possible, together with drastic cuts to flight infrastructure, and wages and working conditions in the industry, with every new bankruptcy. And the flying part is really a loss-leader at budget airlines, for financial instruments like frequent flyer points.

Researchers have developed a gene-editing injection targeting the specific mechanism creating high cholesterol in people. The results were staggering, up to a 62% sustained drop in LDL cholesterol. If knowledge work could be made the true high status work in our societies, our lives would be transformed into ones of absolute wonder. Instead we devote most of our energies and resources into building our status, individually and collectively. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2601283

The enormous fear that the human race may be overtaken by something actually intelligent. There are so many layers of stupid to this, not least the idea that enormous intelligence would have evil intent. By definition to be intelligent is to be good. Kidults live inside idiot Hollywood movies. Jaws led to global warfare on sharks. Terminator the same for AI.

This was the energy use of the new Tesla, driving 62km to Bathurst yesterday. To translate that into a comparision with a petrol or diesel vehicle, the standard dual cab ute (Australia’s favourite cars), if it could use energy as efficiently as this, would have a range of over 8000 km, on one tank of fuel. I overtook several dual cab utes on the way, because their ‘grunt’ is a total fiction. All that expensive fuel, and they’re puny.

In NSW, no P-Plater is allowed to drive the Tesla. But all of them are allowed to drive the Wankpanzer.

Tirzepatide is the ‘weight loss’ drug, Mounjaro.

I’m posting a lot about medical science breakthroughs lately, because it’s another revolution happening in our lifetimes. And can you guess the major thing that has accelerated these ‘remarkable’ cures for diseases that we’d never been able to crack before? It’s AI. The thing social media loves to hate. Social media is a cesspit of stupidity.

I have pretty much zero time for Michaela Cash, on anything. But this exchange with the Australian Human Rights Commission on trans women and pregnancy in the workplace should be watched, so people can really see the absolute absurdity of where we’ve arrived. I don’t criticise trans because I’m ‘anti-trans’, or ‘pro-biological sex’ (like Cash and other conservatives). I’m not on EITHER team in this idiot debate. I’m not on a team in ANY debate. They’re all fake arguments used just to fuel status battles between rival social teams. Trans is simply what happened when status rivalries arrived at gender. Status rivalries also arrived at renewables, and economics, and cars, and everything else. The ridiculous ‘team sports’ of social media cultures with no stabilised status hierarchies. For anything. No expertise or facts to create real status hierarchies, because they believe ‘the people’ (through social media) run societies, and make up their own realities at the same time. Cosplay adulthood.

When i say we’re living a genuine revolution in medicine right now, it’s hard to convey just how enormous that shift is. This cardiologist yesterday responding to the news of the new anti-cholesterol drug was forced to use biblical language to describe the rapid revolutionary changes, with GLP-1 drugs, mRNA personalised vaccines, gene editing, peptide production, etc. There’s a bigger picture lesson here too. In every single one of these cases, AI is central to the revolution occurring. And in every single case, social media culture has gone to war, on the revolution. It hates AI. It hates mRNA technology. It hates that GLP-1 drugs destroy the ‘diet and exercise’ bullshit wellness/‘natural health’ influencer culture. Let's get rid of social media, and keep AI.

When you say that most of the criticism of AI is kidults who watched the Terminator movies...(see the comments).

Of course you can’t win against kidult culture, because it’s the status quo. No status quo can be defeated by logic, or activism, or debating. It can only be destroyed and a new one put in its place, by some internal or external catastrophe. The culture or status quo is mostly invisible to the people living it, which is one of the reasons it won’t ever shift. It’s what appears normal to people, they think of it as reality. In kidult culture most adult life is people living scripts from Hollywood movies. Just as previously others lived narratives from storytellers, or novelists, or poets. We are an adolescent culture, where adolescent ways of thinking never end.

Cancer vaccines currently under trial. Hugely exciting times. Mostly mRNA vaccines. A wonderful technology, when combined with AI it makes vaccine development orders of magnitude faster and more targeted. The mRNA/AI combination gave us Covid vaccines inside a year, which was astonishing. It used to take 10 years to make a new vaccine.

Independent of all the Terminator-driven angst about AI, it’s taking over much of our culture at an astronomical speed. Here a doctor describes using it, because it provided so much better healthcare than their own doctor. AI may be saving our civilisation, in real time, every day. Rescuing it from social media, by pulling people out of the rivalries there over social status, where they absorb mountains of bullshit information every day. The information is just used as fuel for the status rivalries. AI sits ‘above’ those rivalries. People go to it for help, individually, outside the peer pressure of the daily fights for status. Sociality is violence, something we refuse to understand. AI is fundamental to breaking our addiction to sociality. It’s a new type of semi-transcendent entity, to rescue us from ourselves. If you wanted to be Biblical and Christian about it, it’s literally like the second coming. Not an analogy, I’ll post more about that.

I'd put money on the NRL and referees sending a message on head injuries with this decision last night. A message boofhead ex-players don't want to hear. They'll be first in line to demand compensation when they start to forget their own names.

We’re one or two generations removed from people remembering or knowing about infection as the great killer of humans. ‘Living with’ infection is now the thing. All infections, Covid was just the catalyst to accelerate the collective suicide. You can’t live with infections. Infection is death.

The only alternative to catastrophe for human progress (catastrophes create most meaningful human progress) is to BUILD things. We have this bizarre idea that progress comes from people talking to each other. That can only lead to status rivalry, disagreement and violence. Building things stabilises social life as well as creating the material conditions of a good life. It's not a 'technical' thing. If you have a group of people of whatever size who can't agree on something, and then they have to build something together, the dynamics will change immediately. Building things imposes a discipline that transcends the interpersonal relationships. Technology is society made stable. It also creates a whole raft of new ways of being human.

Happy Birthday Ken!

Should be the biggest story in the world. I’m betting most hadn’t heard a word about it.

This potential universal cancer vaccine would be extraordinary. A vaccine to treat ALL cancers, including solid tumours. Potentially removing the need for radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery entirely. If you have any anti-vax friends, let’s see if they walk the talk when the time comes.

There is no public backlash against AI. Just as there is none against windmills, and solar farms, and EVs and vaccines. ‘The public’ is not a thing, thinking and acting. Activists enlist members of the public to their causes, and then retrospectively attribute their cause to them. The pushback against AI and data centres is being led by a tiny number of activists. All change is led by tiny numbers of people. Everybody else then follows, in imitation of that tiny number. For example Australians originally embraced wind farms, they found them a fun curiosity. Councils even built viewing platforms to view them. Until Barnaby Joyce invented hysteria about them as a distraction, when his leadership of the Nationals was in free fall because of him shagging his staff, and being drunk in public.

Volvo make lovely cars. Their new EX60 EV though shows again the elephant in the room. It copies Tesla in just about every detail, including with mega-casting construction. But doesn’t have the self-driving, just for starters. And doesn’t even create its own software, it just imports Android. It also costs tens of thousands more than a Tesla. But people will buy it for the brand, because brands are status. This clip also is an insight into how we live inside social media now. How did Volvo promote this new car? They flew 300 social media influencers, business class, from around the world to come and drive it.

Unaffordable housing is land returning to a feudal model, to go alongside the shift in ‘politics’ back to monarchies/kings. About 90+% of Agatha’s Christie mysteries revolved around crimes related to inheritance. That was the tail end of the previous monarchical era. We’re now returning to that social model, the absolutely dominant model throughout history. What we call ‘democracy’ is actually still that old monarchical model, just with the checks and balances added that the nobles forced upon kings, centuries ago.

An Austrian tongue choir performing ‘Moscow Nights’, in 1982. Heh, um…

Happy Birthday, Silke! 👯🌟🎁

Most weight loss companies are either already bankrupt, or well on the way. The GLP-1 drugs are destroying the calories-cause-weight-gain-and-dieting-fixes-it myth. Lite n’ Easy seemed an exception, but behind the scenes the company is struggling. Why it’s advertising like crazy. It’s now shifting away from weight loss towards the convenience of pre-packaged meals pitch. Like the old ‘TV dinner’ in the freezer.

What China has done in the last 50 years is miraculous, unprecedented in all history. It’s lifted 900 million people out of poverty. In doing that it also made the rest of the world richer, most countries’ economies became absolutely dependent on China, to survive. Meanwhile it’s also almost the sole reason renewables technologies and EVs are now widely available. And what are we doing about all this? Dragging out all the old racist Yellow Peril claptrap. There have been times I’ve been seriously tempted to move to China, if that was even allowed, to experience life in an adult culture again. Where problems are solved, and stuff gets built, and there’s excitement about human progress. Rather than the dreary world of social media flag-waving Paulines, whining and bitching and obstructing all change, building nothing.

Hmm, sorry if this posts twice, it seems to have disappeared. This is what one of the senior staff at Exxon said, this week. Exxon is one of the biggest global oil companies. The cupboard is bare, we’ve run the reserves almost dry. Unbelievably fuel prices actually went DOWN again in Australia, ffs. Typically, as with Covid, everybody was too scared to ask the kidults to change their behaviour. So now reality will hit back if nothing changes, with catastrophically high fuel prices. The Paulines will be out demanding more fuel refineries in Australia, to refine oil that doesn’t exist. And to demand we drill for oil, that also doesn’t exist. That’s the ‘politics’ that is surging in popularity. God help us all.

Saying ‘if you stop taking a GLP-1 drug (Ozempic, Mounjaro), you just put the weight on again’ is actually the point. Obesity is a medical condition. If you stop taking your drugs for any other medical condition, you will get sick again. Humans get fat because they evolved when food was scarce. Their bodies pile on weight when they find a rich food source, to store some away as fat for lean times. Now rich food sources are everywhere. So obesity is epidemic. It has nothing to do with calorie balance. Diet and exercise wont fix it because they don’t target the problem. Our bodies are out of whack with their environments. That’s what the drugs help to fix.

Here’s a gig you won’t want to miss.

125 years of women’s fashion, courtesy of AI.

Current polling says this could even happen. A few things about that. 1) Like Trump in the US and Farage in the UK, the schtick is this is ‘the people’ fighting back. In reality all 3 are just a different elite, taking on an existing elite status quo under cover of ‘fighting for the people’. All are backed by big billionaire money. 2) If Hanson were to become PM, she’d be the oldest PM ever to take office in Australia by a wide margin. She’s already 72. Menzies, the longest-serving PM, was 71 when he retired. It’s not renewal. 3) Trump is floundering in the US and by all polling should be decimated in upcoming elections there. Populism always ends like that, it’s fashion. Fashions come and go quickly. 4) The real winner here and what’s going on, is - social media. Social media is taking over our societies. Trump’s America is really just a culture now operating entirely in social media feeds. Farage and Hanson are the continuation of that here. The medium is always the message. Those who launch populist politics are usually also the first victims of it. Just passing trends. Caesar, one of the first populists, was murdered only 5 years into his reign.

The irony here of a party representing the original land-grabbers in modern Australia, the huge 19th century stealing of most of the continent (and its communities) by the early pastoralists building their empires, often by force. Who then trashed the landscape, washing most of it out to sea via erosion, and now have the chutzpah to talk about windmills ruining the view over their eroded wasteland. The Nats could cease to exist at the next election, if polls are a guide. They know that ‘community consultation’ is just code for ‘bury the thing in endless debates and arguments’. There was none when the coal-fired plants were rolled out, nobody cared. They couldn’t care less about communities. They’re trying to save themselves.

We are living in miraculous times. The Trumps and Paulines of the world sack the people doing this miraculous work, and replace them with social media influencers telling you to pump coffee up your arse.