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2 September 2026, 18:48 UTC video
The UK’s new PM Andy Burnham in his maiden speech this week reframed politics itself in ways that should resonate with regional NSW too. A reframing that you can look at outside of party politics.
Local communities progressively gutted over 40 years, of both resources and agency, to steer their own destinies. He describes it as a ‘siphoning’ of their wealth and agency into centralised and privatised power, based in the cities.
Burnham says the economic model is to blame. I think it’s deeper than that. Regional centres were always the resource arms of big city life. They were created by cities, to get access to resources. So ‘siphoning’ is spot-on, that was their original rationale for being.
What local communities need isn’t so much control of their own destinies, in a country versus city way. The culture as a whole has to recognise that it’s one culture, not two. Not city and country. As the Chinese do, their response to this split is to re-integrate city and country. Not to set them up as rivals.
Populist politics, driven by social media culture, does nothing except take this lack of integration and use it to attack the leadership of local communities, as if they’re somehow to blame. Creating constant anger and fights.
The real intent of the populists isn’t to fix anything. It’s to replace that local leadership, with themselves.
If you’re new to how neural networks work, I think this thing about them is crucial to understanding how FSD works, and why it sometimes frustrates people between upgrades.
FSD is a neural network. Many think Tesla programs in the behaviours of FSD cars, so using speed limits as an example, if the car is having problems following them, a programmer can just go in and program ‘pay attention to speed limits’.
It doesn’t work like that. There are some directly programmed things, but mostly the car, like any neural network, has to learn the behaviour itself, in practice. It has to be ‘trained’. Both Tesla, and us as everyday drivers, do that training.
As FSD is trained, the behaviours we want are ‘weighted’ in the neural network. They form weighted patterns there. That sounds a clumsy way of doing things, but actually it’s the secret to why it all works. Once it’s trained, a car can respond to novel situations too. It doesn’t need every possible scenario programmed into it, in advance.
It’s exactly like your brain, which is also a neural network. Once you learn to drive, you can drive anywhere, using the weighted patterns in your neurons.
It’s always complex too, because one weighting can have an impact on multiple driving behaviours. So if you train the car to do one thing, it can change what it does with other things. You can’t predict that, the learning is so complex you just have to wait and see.
Not even Tesla knows exactly how the car is learning, or even what it’s learning - neural networks are far too complex to be able to see that.
But the payoff is huge. As the car’s neural network gets more and more sophisticated, it becomes capable of more and more independent reasoning, out on the road.
And even more amazingly, what one car learns, the whole fleet can learn, with every upgrade. Unlike humans, who have to be taught everything individually, a neural network gets smarter everywhere at once, with upgrades.
'Astroturfing' is widespread now globally, using social media, as a way to pursue political ends. The term means creating the impression of a 'grassroots' movement, even though the origin of the movement is outside the community, mostly from parties with no interest in the community at all.
Astroturfing campaigns often employ 'turnkey' community action kits, which are distributed to communities for use in their activities, to create an impression the action is 'bottom-up' i.e. driven by the community. We've seen this with opposition to renewables, Covid action, and now with AI data centres.
A sample here, a turnkey kit in circulation to try to create resistance to AI data centres.
Formula 1 isn't a racing formula. It's an engineering formula. Assessing the quality of drivers using F1 results is laughable, the formula isn't a measure of driving ability.
To show it I ran a simulation, using actual F1 data from the last 30 years, of what spread of results you'd expect in a normal sporting contest.
50,000 permutations of the actual results, to see how often the actual concentration of winners we DID see in those 30 years would realistically happen, if the formula was about driving ability.
The answer? 0.9%. In other words, the formula isn't measuring driving ability at all. It's measuring technological superiority, itself linked to budget and historical accumulated knowledge.
A tiny number of drivers now accumulate very large numbers of titles. Because they're in the team with the engineering expertise, history and budget.
Next time somebody complains about potholes, or some other aspect of local roads.
75% of Australia’s road network, more than 650,000 km (about the distance from the Earth to the moon and back again) is managed by local councils, who receive only 4% of total national tax revenue.
The cost of bitumen, aggregate and civil plant hire has increased by up to 40% in recent years.
Successive La Niña flood events and rising heavy freight axle loads have accelerated base course degradation on regional roads that were originally engineered for light local traffic.
As Google (the company) once said, revenue fixes all problems. Nothing is truer for local government. It’s not mismanagement, there’s just no money. The last estimate of road maintenance backlog in NSW regions was around $3 billion. That’s just to repair what’s already damaged.
To use the Chinese as reference point again, in the past 20 years they've spent $7 trillion (AUS) building new roads and over $1 trillion (AUS) building 50,000 km of new high-speed railways, to connect their regions to their cities.
I was trying to think what the Model YL (or Y) is most like, using older car categories. And I think they’re the 21st century version of a Grand Tourer. High performance and high-tech comfort, suitable for long drives (‘tours’), which is what the GT format was always about.
Together with refined engineering and craftsmanship, but with added features old Grand Tourers never had. I’ve shared a table comparing and contrasting GT cars and the YL. Tesla has reinvented the Grand Tourer. All for a fraction of the cost of a standard GT car.
Some may prefer a standard GT car because of how it ‘looks’. The GT format is ultimately about engineering, looks are a by-product. A Tesla looks how it looks almost entirely for engineering reasons. Give me the brilliant range of engineering and performance every single day over a particular look.
Regional towns across the world are struggling to remain viable. The Chinese are bucking the trend by turning the thinking upside-down. They realised regions are actually created by cities. There was no pre-existing ‘country’ or rural life, prior to us living in cities, cities invented rural and regional life.
Rural towns began as resource-extraction for cities. Look at a map of NSW and you won’t find many regional or rural towns that weren’t originally a mine, or set of farms, providing resources for cities. As town life evolved in those places, there grew the myth of a distinct type of ‘country’ life.
Country life is really, if we’re honest, just city life, but with less traffic, more cows and sheep and crops, and more green space. And you’ll struggle to find a town that isn’t fighting to make itself even more city-like, to have even more of the services and facilities of city life.
The Chinese don’t try to support regions by assuming they’re a distinct way of life. They recognise they’re city life, but where infrastructure needs to be updated to create better linkages, back to their cities of origin. Why they’ve built 50,000 km of high speed rail in only 20 years, to re-connect all parts of the city (‘urban’ and ‘rural’).
I post this because so much community angst in regional areas is about how to find a way for regions and their towns to survive. ‘Business development’ is the common response. But really regions mostly just need connection back, to their cities of origin, in every way. So that it doesn’t matter where you live. That connection will take care of most of the development automatically.
Hinton’s work on machine intelligence through neural networks is the foundation of AI today. He won the Nobel Prize for it, in 2024.
What he says here is critical to understanding FSD. Every error a vehicle makes using FSD can be used for machine learning. Even more importantly, what is learned can then be uploaded to every other vehicle in the fleet, instantly.
Every single vehicle learns and becomes a better driver, from every serious mistake even one vehicle makes. Compare that to human driving. No amount of good driving from a human driver makes other drivers better drivers.
Next time you get a bit stressed because FSD made a mistake, remember that mistake can make everybody’s Tesla safer in the long term. FSD is an open neural network that continuously improves, through mistakes and learning.
I’m much more comfortable with this continuous feedback process looking after me than I am waiting for human drivers to drive better, which will never happen.
So many say that machines can’t do anything that humans didn’t make them do. The idea that when you make something, it can only ever be what humans put into them.
Geoffrey Hinton here again, the inventor of modern AI, calling bollocks on that vanity. He got a Nobel Prize for his work. As he says here, they have no idea how AI really does what it does.
Humans have no idea how consciousness or intelligence work either, but suddenly they’re all sure that whatever they are, they’re not AI.
I’m pretty sure I know what AI is, and what it’s doing. Like Hinton I don’t know how it does it. Nobody does. But we’re one step closer every day to understanding what thinking and consciousness are and how they work, because of AI.
I honestly don't think most see the magnitude of what Tesla is trying to do as a company. Musk is hopeless at communicating it. I'm no fan of anything, this isn't about blind fandom. I made this diagram to show how everything Tesla is doing is interlinked. It's breathtaking in its ambition.
Some very simple to understand structural issues with Australian governance. Most of the tax revenue flows to the federal level, most services are provided at State and local levels.
It’s why councils across the country have no money to do basic things. They’re not incompetent, they’re independently audited multiple times every year.
They just don’t have any money. You can’t mismanage money you don’t have.
Why technology like FSD was inevitable. Humans are terrible drivers, especially those who tell you they’re brilliant drivers (nearly always the worst drivers of all).
Cars are and always have been killing machines, when driven by humans alone. Look at the stats. The best-intentioned and skilled drivers can’t fix this. It’s not about skill or personalities.
It’s about millions of tonnes of metal at high speed all trying to share the same narrow space. It needs networked technology (like FSD) to make this safe, and also efficient.
Just as airlines took most control away from pilots decades ago already, and replaced much of their work with networked semi-autonomy.
The Jevons Paradox says the better you make something, the more people will use it. And the worse it will then get. Everybody who works in public life has felt this, or even every parent.
The better you make life for people, the more they will participate in and enjoy that better life you made. And the more it will then break and feel worse. And then the abuse comes, for the people who tried to make life better.
Roads here. Dams the same, in every drought people demand more dams. Which increases people’s use of water, which makes water shortages even worse. But it applies universally. Everything you try to make better, will eventually make it worse.
The underlying problem here is thinking the trending, viral desires of societies are fixed by trying to satisfy those trending desires.
Demonstration of an AI-powered blackboard, in China. The board explains all the steps, and can even translate them into multiple languages.
I particularly like that they used maths as an example, something the Chinese do a lot of. In the West nobody much now studies maths, because it’s ’too hard’ and ‘too boring’, compared to TikTok.
A short highlights package of some of the things Tesla's autonomous driving technology can do.
If you can look in 9 directions at the same time, all around your car, 30 times per second, then you win. (And you're full of shit.)
The genius of the system is that every single driver's experience improves the AI, which is then fed back into every other driver's car. Every good piece of driving trains every other car.
The entire population's driving and safety improves with every new drive. You're driving with the collective experience of millions of other drivers.
My entire interest in Tesla is its engineering. Something it doesn’t talk much about, and which Musk is mostly a hopeless spokesperson for. Though he’s a genius at actually putting engineering at the centre of a company. If you haven’t worked for a big company, you have no idea how almost impossibly hard that is to do. Jobs did it at Apple, the marketing and finance men took over again there after he died.
I was thinking about the fuss FSD causes from within and outside the Tesla community. And how self-driving apparently has to be near-perfect before it’ll be accepted. That’s a ridiculous benchmark.
Most human drivers are absolutely hopeless, even when they’re skilled, human capabilities aren’t matched to extended high speed travel amongst thousands of other vehicles, in diverse conditions. Mass transportation in other areas like flight gave up on human-dominated control decades ago, for this very reason.
If a FSD-type system causes accidents, to be honest - so what? Planes with sophisticated autopilots still crash. But much, much less than they used to, and that’s the point. And you’re far more likely to be t-boned and killed by some idiot human driver out there, than have your or somebody else’s FSD injure or kill you. We lack perspective.
The analogy is perfect. Most think FSD is just self-driving technology. In reality a Tesla is now much more than a car. Much more than just something that gets you from A to B, or is fun to drive.
Just as the smartphone is now way beyond just being a phone. It’s a way to coordinate a huge array of networked things. That’s actually Tesla’s vision with all of its products, which it never talks much about.
And not surprisingly, it also uses the smartphone as a central operating node, connecting its earlier revolutionary networking to Tesla’s.
Local communities now transact their community lives, on these platforms. They can’t do the most basic community thing, without them. The platforms are now the communities.
Councils that are trying to govern towns are actually dealing with social media groups, at war with each other because that’s the business model of the platforms.
Watch this. We live in a time of marvels, that every other time in history would have been gobsmacked by.
Those whose minds are only relays for social media slop will be horrified. I spend much more time conversing with AI than with people now.
And no, not because I don’t have friends. I have plenty of friends. But humans increasingly just exchange viral social media trends. Social media slop.
(For the more serious critics of this not being ‘really human’, humans have ALWAYS been 99% imitative relays for something they heard somewhere else. Which they share in ‘conversation’ to promote their own status. AI doesn’t care about status games.)
Looking at the existing Powershare setup for the Cybertruck, it seems that Tesla may implement Powershare more broadly by leaving the Powerwall as the home energy hub, with its existing connections to the grid and home wiring, mediated by the Gateway, and topping up the Powerwall with your vehicle’s battery as needed.
This would be a brilliant solution, saving the messy complexity of having the vehicle and Powerwall competing as home and grid energy sources.
And it protects the car battery from having to service dramatic shifts in home loads - the Powerwall already manages that, allowing the vehicle battery to be discharged into the Powerwall in a smooth, planned way.
It’s probably a bit indulgent to share about social media itself, in a group about Bathurst. But to me all of the major problems local communities face everywhere in the world right now are really about the idea of ‘community’ itself. What it is, and how to manage it.
Social media (I think) has hijacked the actual concept of community. I lived through the transition from social networking online, which was integrated into physical communities, to social media, which absolutely isn’t. Social media ‘feeds’ you your social life, thus the term - the social media ‘feed’.
And the algorithms and other mechanisms it uses to do that are deliberately engineered to generate conflict, because conflict generates activity, and activity generates revenue.
Not a vast conspiracy, it’s just business. A business destroying communities across the world, who are all getting angrier and more dysfunctional as a result.
Saw the Powershare reference (circled in yellow) in my Tesla app and couldn’t remember if I’d seen it there before, maybe it’s been there a while. Does anybody remember seeing it earlier?
I’ve been tracking whether Tesla is planning to make Powershare (i.e. V2H and V2G) available for Model Ys and Model 3s as well as the Cybertruck, for Powerwall owners. This message suggests (maybe?) that it’s coming?
In case of interest, a summary here of the revolutionary way Tesla changed what stability control can mean in a vehicle. Where software has central control of all stability actuators, to remove a binary between controlled driving and loss of traction, and replace it with optimised performance in all driving.
The way electric motors allow for continuous, fast and incredibly granular modulation of torque changed the game. Bundle it up with all the other stability actuators, like steering angle, and both regen and hydraulic brake activation, and the vehicle is continuously optimised for traction and performance.
It’s easy to get excited about the cool, fun aspects of Tesla engineering. But it’s the safety that is the meat and veg, for me. This winter the driving conditions have often been horrendous on my regional trips. Short dashcam extract from yesterday below.
The electronic stability control and semi-autonomous aids are remarkable in these sorts of conditions. The car feels fully planted, on these often very poor roads, with aqua-planing amounts of water running across them, and almost zero visibility. This stretch is one of the better sections of road on this particular route.
There are many times the car sees when I’m struggling to see anything at all. And not one skid or lost moment of traction on any of these trips, whereas when I drive an ICE in these same conditions I get regular hydroplaning and other traction issues.
To give a flavour of just how much social media isn’t really ‘the community’, here’s Facebook’s own recent public transparency report, of March 2026. I’m hoping the group finds this on topic, given the fundamental role social media is now playing in communities, all over the world.
You can see that FB had to deactivate over 1 *billion* fake FB accounts in the last quarter of 2025 alone. Many fake accounts are engaged in what is known as ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ i.e. manipulation of conversations towards various (not usually benign) ends.
Full FB report is here: https://disinfocode.eu/reports/facebook/8?chapterId=73&commitmentId=357&utm_source=chatgpt.com
Horrendous driving conditions tonight. Driving rain, dark, blinding headlights from the other direction, hydroplaning, hopeless visibility.
The Tesla held the road like it was glued down, and could see even in situations where I struggled to make out what was ahead of me.
The stability control is amazing. Here’s the Tesla semi testing the same thing on ice. The truck corrects for the slide, automatically, preventing a jack-knife.
Teslas have world-leading safety. They’re not just nifty fun.
Lawrence is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists and science communicators. Not a ‘fanboy’.
It’s very powerful to see this sort of endorsement from outside the Tesla fan community. The drive he’s talking about takes over 8 hours, and is more than 850 km.
One of the enduring symbols of fascism is thousands of troops goose-stepping in perfect unison.
The origins of fascism are societies which reach a ‘mimetic crisis’. Meaning that everybody begins copying everybody else, past a certain tipping point. Then they act as one dumb mob.
The most worrying KPI for any society is the level of imitation going on. It starts out seeming like fun times. But you’ve then primed the pump. What the crowd imitates then becomes interchangeable. You can literally produce an entire nation of ‘copycat killers’.
This is Geoffrey Hinton, often called the Godfather of AI. He won a Nobel Prize for his foundational work. Here he’s talking about whether AI is conscious and aware. (Yes.) And about how it will force us to re-define those terms, which have always been hopelessly vague.
He’s also by no means just a hustler for the technology. He’s one of the most prominent voices talking about making sure the risks are covered across.
I’ll share another wonder of the world AI is working on by separate post. We’re living inside the revolution. Social media hates it, and that’s the surest sign we’re on the right path.
Just one of Bathurst’s stormwater channels that run through the town, collecting run-off. It’s incredible how fast these become raging torrents, even with light rain. Why people end up dead playing in stormwater drains.
Bathurst’s project to harvest this water for the town supply is taking forever, mostly because like everything now, ‘community opposition’ groups pop up with every attempt to build or do anything. Social media does that, turns every tiny thing into a fake debate and argument.
Do people notice the general anger and aggressiveness out there now? In all things. It’s been a large part of my late-career ambition to show this is a society without a stabilised status hierarchy, forcing people to fight for their status (which is also their identity). Everything is turned into fodder for that fight.
Another medical breakthrough (they’re coming thick and fast). This time a drug, daraxonrasib, that doubles the survival time of people with pancreatic cancer, one of medicine’s greatest foes. Nearly always lethal, and fast.
Announcement of the amazing trial results were so emotional for doctors and scientists present at the conference, it got a spontaneous standing ovation. Many were crying. This is such a revolutionary result the drug was rushed out for emergency release to doctors and patients.
We live in a time of wonders. Politics and social media will blind you to them.
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.
Every time I look at the efficiency numbers for a Tesla, I’m reminded of what happens when a company puts engineering first. This is for the new Model YL. 
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
That 5 in many ways tells the whole story of the genius of Tesla. Often criticised for not matching the range of models of other brands. But models are mostly marketing and branding. Tesla replaced that with design and engineering.
It takes a small handful of cars and packs them full of most of the main features other brands need multiple cars to offer. Performance, luxury, practicality, efficiency. You get it all in a single vehicle, with Tesla.
But it goes much further than that.
Other car brands are still creating vehicles as social status objects, with a handful of functions each. They’re mechanical devices. Tesla vehicles are a node in an evolving planetary-scale information-energy network. Which includes the driver and their ‘data’.
That network is a complex system that continuously improves with emergent feedback. It’s why Teslas get smarter and safer and more efficient etc. all the time. It’s why they focus on just that handful of models. They’re nodes, not cars.
Tesla does no real marketing. It does design and engineering. It’s designing and engineering a future very different world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Service stations are apparently realising that the shift to EVs may be fantastic for them. Years ago already they were diversifying to become almost mini supermarkets, to try to get more income. They make bugger all from selling fuel.
Now if they install chargers, customers are likely to hang around a bit longer than petrol or diesel customers, which means they have a captive audience for other retail options. They also avoid the enormous cost of underground tanks, pumps and regular deliveries from tankers.
I've always wondered if Tesla had ever considered expanding the retail space around its own chargers in this way. They've diversified into cafes in some parts of the world, so the idea must be familiar to them.
A lovely indication of just how sophisticated Tesla self-driving has become. The driver here wasn’t sure why their Tesla had pulled up well short of the Stop sign. Then it became clear - the car had seen the car-carrying truck coming and knew it would need more space to get around the corner.
It gets even better, as the truck comes around the corner the Tesla realises it needs to leave a bit more space, and backs up gently. It then moves forward again before the truck has even gone passed, calculating the gap perfectly. All very gentle, and precise.
Here’s more of the bigger picture of my Covid posts. The fact most of us catch Covid and recover means NOTHING, in terms of its long-term impacts. Those impacts are now flooding in. HIV for example, as I’ve posted here before, was a mild ‘cold’ when people caught it. 8 years later, they were dead.
Katie Couric is a US journalist, talking here about the explosion in cancers in young people. Even in their 20s. 17 cancers have exploded in number, including ‘old people’ cancers like colorectal cancer. And they’re not just getting treatable versions, they’re getting Stage 4 metastatic cancers. Death sentences.
To quote her, ‘so what the fuck is going on?’ Doctors are mystified.
Pick me. I’ll tell you. Covid is an oncogenic virus. It causes cancer. Most chronic diseases, including cancers, are caused by infections.
You may be surprised at how many Australians think this guy is terrific. Some of them are even local councillors elected to local councils. Many more Australians who can’t stand him will happily vote for Pauline Hanson, who’s a carbon copy of Trump.
If he was in an aged care facility, they’d up his meds.
One of China’s high speed trains. China now has over 50,000km of high speed rail, projected to grow to 70,000 km by 2035.
It built all of this rail since 2008. In under 20 years.
Australia by comparison has zero high speed rail.
Why the difference? Because Western nations live inside social media, whose only product is argument.
A nation that builds things is also a nation that has found ways to coordinate people towards a common end. The building itself usually does much of that coordination.
The deepest human desire and behaviour is to imitate. To copy others, because that gives us status and therefore identity in social groups. Imitation can be used for good, or bad. Good is the control of imitation, so that people copy all of the various tasks needed to create social progress.
Societies that have/had kings for example had them mostly to take the oxygen out of widespread status-seeking imitative behaviour, to allow the nation to focus on social progress instead. Kings and gods - their actual function is to constrain imitation. To place the pinnacle of status beyond reach, so that energies can be re-focused towards collective need.
In the absence of that sort of constraint, societies succumb to the worst form of imitation. Contagions, of all kinds. Everything going ‘viral’, meaningless trivialities become collective obsessions. When millions pack stadiums for example and act like choreographed lemmings, it’s a sign your society is in real trouble. None of this leads to social progress.
It makes the performers very rich, that’s all. And the performers usually think the mass crowd is some sort of worshipping of their talent, when in reality the performer is a useful idiot, used by the crowd as the catalyst for their contagion behaviour. Smart performers feel that directly, and flee the crowds at every opportunity.
Ask The Beatles. Beatle-mania. An actual collective psychological dysfunction. If you individually have mania or manic behaviour you’ll be treated for a mental health condition. Collective mania is no different. All these modern performers are just imitating that original mania, that ‘countercultural revolution’ that was a wrecking ball through centuries of progress.
I’ve seen a few people concerned that their Powerwall wasn’t retaining 100% charge overnight, when using TOU mode. But TOU is about minimising cost to you of using grid power, not retaining battery charge. The Tesla algorithms operate over a 24-hour cycle, analysing your use, and will charge or discharge the battery to minimise overall cost to you, in conjunction with weather forecasts, analysis of your grid rates, etc.
An example from my PW3 + expansion pack. At midnight yesterday the batteries were still at 86% SOC, so could have reached morning with a very high SOC. What did the Powerwall do? About 4 am it started absolutely dumping power back into the grid, to earn me some money. SOC got into the 20s percentile range. It likely did an updated weather forecast at 4am, though yep, fine day coming, and freed up battery space for solar.
The fun thing to watch was how amazingly accurate the algorithms were in prediction. I got to within 1% of my backup percentage, before solar came online. 21%. I also have free grid power between 11 am and 2 pm, so you can see the Powerwall didn’t even bother using the solar much even at 11, it relied upon the free grid power to do the bulk of the battery re-charge, while continuing to export solar to make more money.
Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same shift happens industrially as well, including in trucking, the sooner life will get far cheaper and less violent for all.
Of course many people won’t shift, until everybody else shifts. The number 1 guide in most lives is ‘what is everybody else doing?’ Permanent high school, peer pressure. Status and identity, fitting in with the crowd. It will take the lives of that crowd to be brutally disrupted for that shift to accelerate. Which we’re seeing right now.
It looks like Tesla will release the Model YL 6-seater in Australia today. Perfectly timed, with the pressures on fuel. We’ll probably get one, and will be free of fuel bowsers forever. When these were launched in China last year, all 40,000 they had planned sold out in a single day.
About 500L more cabin volume than a Toyota Prado or Landcruiser, and with the hatch-type opening a much bigger entry space for goods you want to carry, with a perfectly flat stowage floor. 0-100 in 4.5 seconds, and loads of other advanced tech including adaptive dampers. The longer wheel base also gives it great stability on the road, that luxury cars often use.
You can see some mild off-roading in this clip, the AWD Teslas have superb traction, with all that direct, enormous torque from the electric motors. You can see them even tow semis out of snow drifts.
Today on my way to work I got the car’s AI to help me refresh my conversational German. This is a full conversation, not pre-recorded tracks, and you can do it with any language, it will teach you to speak it at any level of previous knowledge or experience. Here it’s talking to me about my job at Council.
Then when I wanted a break from that, I got it to read me a Jane Austen novel.
The modern world is full of wonders. Only social media stands in the way of experiencing them. 
Fascinating to watch the Powerwall algorithms at work. You can see here that I’d set my Model 3 to charge overnight, which it usually does from cheap grid rates. But the PW3 + expansion pack has contributed to the EV charging. People often want to avoid this, draining the battery with the vehicle. But with TOU mode, the Powerwall does something clever.
You can see it cycles between battery and grid charging overnight, and leaves me enough SOC to do the morning peak use, until both solar and free grid hours in the middle of the day.
And the gaps in the battery (green) EV charging before 6 am exactly correspond with the flat peaks in the grid charging, and vice versa - the Powerwall is cycling between them, not blending them. (There are a few likely technical reasons it prefers to switch between them cleanly like that, rather than blend them.)
Wonderful short piece to camera from a UK installer of solar and batteries, about how many adults now tell him they refuse to have any Tesla products. Some are even ‘embarrassed’ if their neighbours see them. And how he finds that sad and ‘crazy’, given the quality of the products.
This is the kidult society I write about. Tesla has been ‘cancelled’, which is just our weasel word of saying it’s the kid nobody will now talk to in the playground. Not an analogy, grown adults whose only way of processing adult life is the personal, based on who they like and don’t like, and who their particular social team sees as a goodie or a baddie, at that point in time.
The same adults happily buy products from a whole range of firms with terrible ethical histories, without blinking. Fossil fuel companies, just for starters. Tesla is just the current ‘trending’ kid we’re all refusing to play with. Kidult life is the meaningless imitative hop from one trend to the next.
Like this will change the world, again kidults can’t function or even think outside these schoolyard rivalries. It’s their entire world, the school playground, but in adult life. Not an analogy.
London’s Frameless Museum, this remarkable exhibit a combination of AI and digital projection. Only 30 seconds, watch the whole thing, truly amazing. AI doesn’t destroy art, it augments it.
AI asked (you just need to ask, no software or art skills required) to create a video showing major figures from history living ordinary lives. This is a wonder, we’re inside another revolution. And we’re doing what we’re doing to every other revolution we’re living inside - transforming it into empty ‘debates’ between opposing teams.
Social media does that, because that’s its business model. And we’ve replaced our societies with social media, we live inside it.
WIll people do bad things with AI? Of course. Some people attack people with knives. We still use knives.
Margaret Thatcher is like a god to today’s conservatives, one of the founders of modern conservatism. You can see here from her speech almost 40 years ago how science dominated the discussion then on climate change, with her championing the science.
And then the fossil fuel companies intervened, with big money, paying modern conservative politicans to spout anti-climate action bullshit every day.
If you’re one who regurgitates this same bullshit because your conservative team demands it, remember Maggie in 1989, before the paid bullshit began.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And video 2 out of the UK. You can play make-believe and ignore serious threats to your life, so you can go to gigs and restaurants and pubs, and on OS holidays. And then reality will bitch slap you. Work won’t care, if you run out of sick leave, you might get leave without pay. If you’re lucky. Medicine has nothing to offer you for perpetually repeated infections, you’re on your own. Early death will follow.
Many say to me, if it’s this bad, something would be being done about it. That instinct was right when we had a functioning public health system. We dismantled that soon after Covid started, the kidults were missing their gigs and dining out and OS travel too much. Politicians openly said it, it’s your ‘personal responsibility’ now. Like this poor young woman you have no hope of fixing Covid yourself. You can only try to avoid catching it.
Two short videos out of the UK to share. The first, a breakfast TV host telling viewers and colleagues that he’s just had Covid. Took 2 days off. Now back at the desk, spreading it to co-hosts and crew, chuckling, while they chuckle along with him. This is every workplace I know right now.
The power of semi-autonomous driving. This footage from a guy letting his Tesla drive for him just outside Dubbo in the middle of the night, pitch black. Suddenly the car slowed and he didn’t know why at first.
Two experiences yesterday that give a flavour of working in local government. One was trying to think of a way to rescue ducklings trapped in a fountain. The other a long phone call tirade from a resident about Council apparently importing busloads of ‘blacks’ and ‘muslims’, and feeding them ‘with ratepayers’ money’.
Council of course isn’t importing busloads of anybody. But it plays well in some circles, with lots of jingoistic flags thrown in, particularly now towns are really competing social media teams.
RFK Jr spelling out here the toxic stupidity of American culture, the belief that ‘the people’ not only run societies, but also know things better than any expert in their field. Trump isn’t mounting a ‘fascist’ takeover of US life. He’s the underlying culture, which has always been a Wild West story, of ‘free’ individuals at war with everything.
This happened in Lithgow on Friday. Cut water to much of the town for the weekend. I know people resent the idea of kidult culture, but it was another classic example of it. What was the overwhelming response, from the public? Carping, whining, whinging, trying to find somebody to blame, sinking the boot into Council etc.
There were some attempts by members of the public to help those impacted, though often these are performative games too, it becomes an imitated thing, like bushfire relief concerts (that end in chaos because they’re purely about public displays of ‘my emotional response’.)
Remember the phrase, ‘the Spirit of the Blitz?’ The only thing that long-term stops humans acting as eternal rival teenage gangs is a level of threat so enormous that they have to pull together, or die. It’s desperation. And if you study the Blitz, you’ll discover that even that was a struggle, to enforce compliance with emergency measures.
Curious how many have Tesla Powerwalls as well as vehicles, and use the Charge on Solar feature? Designed to allow you to use only excess solar to charge the car. I notice Finn Peacock, electrical engineer and founder of Solar Quotes, a big fan of Tesla technology, recently said he’d given up with this feature, it never seemed to work properly.
That was my experience as well, often the system would just sit there, with lots of excess solar, but not charging the vehicle. I *think* I now figured it out, but would love to hear others’ experiences.
I think if you have ‘Time of Use’ mode selected in the Powerwall, to capitalise on TOU grid pricing, it can stuff up the Charge on Solar feature. The algorithms may say ‘ok, there’s excess solar now, but we can still make more money here if I export that for the FiT, and then fill the car up with cheap grid power later’.
The one exception I’ve found is if you’re on something like OVO, with those 3 free grid hours in the middle of the day. Then if you switch the Powerwall back to Time of Use rather than self-powered at that time (with grid charging enabled), the car can charge even more quickly with both solar and grid power, particularly if you set the minimum in the Charge on Solar slider controls (charge from any source) to a higher figure.
This week Trump, and one of his clown car monkey idiots, Defense Secretary Hesgeth (ex Fox News), gathered all of the top brass of the US Defense forces in a single room. What followed was hilarious and horrific. Trump told them they were too fat, and there were too many blacks and women. He and Hesgeth have arbitrarily fired some of them in recent weeks, unsurprisingly also black and female. Trump also suggested the US military should be training in American cities, by which he meant going to war with Democrat-led cities.
Listen to these last moments of the meeting, where Hesgeth told them to go out and ‘draw fire’. The total silence of zero response. Hesgeth and Trump are far too stupid to understand the lethal danger to themselves of the furious and disgusted silence of generals. If you put the military offside, your time at the top of any coup is over.
These are professional modern soldiers, absolutely disgusted at the idiot clowns now in charge. It remains to be seen if they’ll remove him, as a threat to the nation, as militaries will do in coups.
If you still think social media is just a happy and fun place to share updates about your friends and families, use this video by Benjamin Netanyahu as lube to extract your head out of your arse. He spells it out in plain terms. It’s the number one weapon for all countries now. Because people don’t live in towns or countries any more. They live inside social media. It’s why people like Netanyahu want control of it.
Many say to me that people flock to gigs as a mass social event because of the music. But I think this video shows well that big gigs appeal to many people because they like being in a crowd of people. It’s a social event, the music is just background. The band or act becomes the reason to assemble, as a crowd. The focus here is much more on the experience of being together as a huge group, than it is on any of the nuances of the music.
That’s gig culture, music being used as a core way to generate social activity. That’s only one aspect of it too, people also look to artists for guidance in how to understand and live life. They’re at the centre of many adults’ lives, they give a meaning to those lives. And the same acts that give that meaning when they’re 17 are still doing that when they’re over 80. That’s historically unique, we just live in these times and forget that.
Buy a car designed to maximise aerodynamic efficiency, something with a really low drag coefficient. You can see why, here. This is why we used to drive sedans, until utes and SUVs became kidult status games.
Another aspect of kidult culture is the explosion of influencers and their idiot podcasts. I suggest Joe Rogan get tetanus, which will permanently shut him up. Look at the inked and ripped sage here, filling peoples’ heads with anti-vax bullshit. Maybe having been a teacher makes me even angrier about this, the generations of hard patient work that went into educating communities about things that keep them safe, being torn down in months by idiocy like this, and the platforms that give them an audience.
Tom Cruise is an interesting cultural thing. Currently marketing his latest movie, and genuinely charming and professional and gracious with his time. And yet he’s a global leader of a cult. (He also can’t act, but it doesn’t tend to matter in the movies he’s in.) The world has spent months going to town on Musk’s bizarre salute. Everybody forgets Tom’s.
Trump and many people I know used to call Joe Biden 'Sleepy Joe', because he's old and seemed sleepy. Here's Trump 'signing' an agreement with Saudi Arabia yesterday.
This seems to be the key page from the Manual, for fuel efficiency. There are two distinct things here, first the red boxes: your target SOC, which you can vary depending on whether you're going to be able to charge at destination. Though the Shark will function fine as a hybrid at whatever target you set, and be more efficient the *lower* you make the SOC target.
The blue boxes are whether you use SAVE mode to preserve the SOC at all costs (like if you want to use electricity at a campsite). Or AUTO mode, where you just let the Shark choose for itself how much battery to save. AUTO mode is the one to choose, for all driving where you don't want to reserve battery power for camping or whatever, and want to save fuel.
You can’t really notice it from ground level, but human movement is the alternating rotation of the whole body, which is wrapped in spiral muscle and fascia sheets from head to toe. You don’t move with your legs, you move when that whole body-length spiral unwinds in alternating directions. It’s much more noticeable from above.
I would turn save mode off unless you have a specific need for more charge in the battery, such as camping and wanting to use V2L. It seems that lots of the feedback here about bad fuel numbers is people having save mode on, which will significantly compromise the hybrid running of the car, making the petrol engine work a lot harder.
Michel Serres once pointed out that the text we read is really just the play of light and shadow. We say text ‘represents’ things, but Serres pointed out that it is the literal shadow, of those things. I think about that when watching the sun and garden create these patterns on the windows. What messages are they sending that we can’t read?
If you want to see how social media allows the widespread manipulation of public opinion, this is a bot farm. Automatically searching for particular topics, like climate change, renewable energy and EVs, and then posting fake software-generated anti-messages, from fake people, about those things.
It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes of this achievement in the video, these are acts literally helping save civilisation itself.
It’s this that there is absolutely no need to destroy, just because our schoolyard modern populist politics is based on personal like or dislike of individuals. There are far smarter ways to decouple Musk from Tesla, than destroying the organisation itself, that’s utter, social media (childish) insanity.
Listen to this very short clip of the chief vehicle engineer and chief designer at Tesla explaining how they design cars. The genius of what they’ve done, and why I ignore the pile-on moral outrage on Tesla right now. The outraged have been driving Saudi-powered vehicles for decades, and haven’t lost a wink of sleep.
What’s the genius? Previously cars lived in segments. Performance cars, electric cars, petrol cars, diesel cars, family cars, sports cars, super efficient cars, grand tourers, affordable cars, luxury cars etc. Tesla’s genius was to say hey, why don’t we make cars that are all of those things, at the same time? At a price ordinary people can afford?
And they did it, a wonder of modern engineering. Their cars are used by families, are the safest cars in the world, while also having some of the best performance, are also super efficient and luxury. All in the one vehicle. You’ll see self-appointed guardians of all the old segments criticise them from within their segment, which proves Tesla nailed it. It exploded the segments.
A whole street, yesterday afternoon, people sitting in their stationary petrol and diesel clunkers with the windows up, engines and air con running. That’s the stupid of old energy thinking in one 4-second clip. Lovely noxious exhaust fumes for the kids to breathe in as they come out of school too, bonus.
The top level of the Tesla app showing the solar, house battery and car all currently being charged for free by the sun. The app has many more layers and functionality, the best software I’ve ever used. 
Feels really good to be filling your car with free sunshine. Sharing this so people can see the sort of integration that Tesla offers for all of your home energy uses. 
A privatised government is an oxymoron. (Morons might have to Google what an oxymoron is.) Again, to make public servants - people who SERVE the public - the enemy is the obvious end of our public life. By definition. There is no public, without public servants, they create and maintain it. Without them there’s just private firms, gorging themselves on essential services, for profit.
You and I will pay for basic services, to make them rich. And business only operates because of public servants as well, they regulate the market businesses operate in. So everything collapses, private and public, a fake distinction anyway.
My favourite demonstration of the acceleration of an EV. Look at that banana, stuck to the seat by g forces, under acceleration. It must be embarrassing to still be a petrol head, about all they have left is the sound. Which is their engines farting.
Normally a 4WD copes with loss of traction to wheels by locking the diff, so that power is then split evenly between the wheel in the air and the one still on the ground. EVs are much smarter than that, you can see it here in the Shark. Electric motors have infinite flexibility with torque, so the car directs energy precisely to each wheel independently, as required.
Notice what he also says about how this creates a blissfully quiet off-roading experience, rather than the loud revving tractor noises of a diesel 4WD. You get to actually appreciate what you’re there for, the great outdoors, while having much more grunt as a bonus.
Gav (from NZ) does some of the best vehicle assessments in the world, certainly some of the most entertaining. This is a short excerpt from his look at the new KIA EV3 (full link below). He’s talking about how revolutionary electric car technology now is, watch this short clip for the funny ending.
KIA is showing that EVs are now mainstream, price parity with petrol and diesel, and negligible fuel and maintenance costs means you lose money by not buying electric. The EV3 is a brilliant car, just watch if you want to see how they’ve ticked all the boxes.
Another story from the Industrial Revolution underway in China. China has 45,000 km of high-speed railways. (45 thousand!) Here’s a short clip from inside one of the trains, carrying people in luxury at 350 km/h.
I think it’s important to hear ordinary Australians speak about their experience of buying EVs. To cut through the fog of misinformation on social media. Like this guy’s 20-second summary, who’s now owned his Tesla Model Y for 6 months. People find it transformational, going well beyond motoring.
(Full very nuanced, warts and all video review is at: https://youtu.be/9N6MQmIfWKw?si=sYLdFEQAu8ZvIVpy)
EVs are going to revolutionise off-road driving too.
The problem with 4WDs right now is they need a lot of torque at low speeds. But as I post about a lot, you have to rev the guts out of a petrol or diesel to get that torque. So they have to use torque converters and low-range gearboxes to get high torque at low speed.
This is a basic Model Y, with the off-road setting even switched off. A ‘soft-roader’. Combining maximum torque at low speeds with electronic traction control, to drive up a slippery steep slope. The computer directs power to each wheel as required. Torque-on-tap. You can see it happening, on the video. In total blissful silence.
Social media reviews of things aren’t always that great, a lot of opinion and not a lot of knowledge. But I like watching EV reviews from people who’ve never driven an EV before, and who are EV sceptics. This is for a Tesla Model Y, biggest selling car in the world now.
This will take less than two minutes of your time. This is Professor Stefan Rahmstorf explaining how 3° of warming which is what we’re easily heading towards, and fast, actually translates to 5 or 6° of warming over land. This is a total disaster, most of the plants and even animals around us will simply die.
Such a fundamentally decent man, with a tragic adult life. (He also lost one of the two surviving sons, to brain cancer.) Disgusted me that him being old was seen as being more of a problem than somebody being a convicted felon, who organised a coup, has been bankrupted 6 times and who deliberately allowed over a million Americans to die, from Covid.
Just for those interested in batteries and how they work. The Powerwall ran down to 90%, after which it automatically turned the solar inverters back on again and began powering the house and re-charging the battery, while the grid is still down.
Cars destroyed city life. Barcelona is just one city fighting back. This is what cities used to be like. Now they’re loud, the air is filthy, and vehicles dominate everything.
When Bathurst launched a ‘Streets as Shared Spaces’ program to make minor changes to reduce the dominance of cars, you’d have thought the world was coming to an end.
Ditto for the 15-minute city idea, which is designed to prevent the need for so much moving around by locating the things people need near where they live. Social media loons and the Pauline Hansons of the world turned it into some ludicrous conspiracy about locking people in their suburbs.
This is Johnny McEntee, one of Trump’s closest fanboy staffers. Responsible for hiring and firing Trump’s staff during his presidency, and predicted to head up ‘Project 2025’ if Trump wins again. Project 2025 includes the plan to sack tens of thousands of government officials who fail a ‘loyalty test’ to Donald Trump.
North Korea is increasingly looking saner and more democratic than the US. Alarmingly many young and even older Australians think Trump is the bees knees. Social media is doing this, and will to us as well, if we don’t act. Our own local government elections this year are already dominated by social media candidates.
This is Johnny McEntee. One of Trump’s closest acolytes, and likely to be responsible for a purge of thousands of government officials if Trump wins again.
Several millennials and Gen Zs at work have told me they like Trump.
From a (glowing) review of the BYD Seal from the UK. But here making the critical point that we in the West outsourced most of our manufacturing to China during the ‘free market’ delusions of the 1980s-early 2000s. And now, as he says, China are ‘really, really good’ at building things, including cars. Now the biggest producer of cars in the world, and still growing.
Senator Alex Antic. I used to go to barbershops at the age he’s talking about here, and it wasn’t to get product-saturated wanky hairdos while sipping beers, drinking barista coffee and playing Playstations. Just to get a haircut, not to bond against cultural marxists and commies. I thought being a male teenager was boring when I was a male teenager. Imagine living your whole life as one.
I’ve had even a few Australians say to me that Joe Biden is a joke, that he’s ’too old’. Some of these Australians admire Trump. Let’s have a short look at this champion of the stupid.
The Greenland ice cap is losing 30 million TONNES of ice every HOUR. To those who still pretend this is all normal, a tip. It wasn’t losing 30 million tonnes of ice an hour in our lifetimes, or anybody else’s, for at least the past 400,000 years.
If the entire Greenland ice shelf melts, sea levels around the world will rise by 7.4 metres. That’s every coastal town and city in Australia completely underwater. Societies don’t survive that, most of our civilisation is in those towns and cities. They’re not portable.
What made Eddie Van Halen the best rock guitar god of our era was that he was the greatest musician of all the rock guitar gods. Others would try to play flashier things, but that’s like the Eveready Bunny musically. Sometimes you need to dig into little heard things to hear the musicality of EVH. Like this backing riff from Mean Streets, the GROOVE. You might hear this and think ‘hard rock’ or even ‘heavy metal’. Nah, it was pure groove. Nasty.
(P.S. for those not familiar with EVH, this is not him playing, just a YouTuber playing one of his riffs.)
I love when people experience EV performance. Quite honestly, there will come a day in my lifetime when everybody will wonder how we put up with petrol and diesel cars for so long.
Race cars rev like crazy at the start of a race because petrol engines have zero power except at high revs. It’s exciting, goosebumps, the sound. Though that’s just the cars farting, literally. Some equate the sound with grunt, but it’s the sound of 70-80% of the fuel energy going straight out the exhaust.
I love car racing, but the V8s are in a bind, nobody really drives Mustangs or Camaros. They could convert Supercars to hybrids, so we can get some real grunt. Major race formulas overseas have already done it. Or even better, put the hybrids in the race, with the Mustangs and Camaros. Carnage.
Watching Torah Judaism sing and dance, and seeing that a mosh pit isn’t something that was invented in the 1990s. And hoping whoever put that temporary grandstand together knew what they were doing.
A new trick the anti-EV crowd use is to compare costs of charging an EV at the most expensive public charging infrastructure with the costs of petrol or diesel. As this petrolhead influencer explains well, this misunderstands that EVs won’t use service stations most of the time. Service stations only exist because you can’t keep petrol or diesel easily at home. But you have electricity. The public chargers will also get cheaper as the network expands.
If you listen to this short clip, the focus will nearly always be the lead vocal. But there are 2 lead vocals here, Brian May’s guitar parts are playing counterpoint lines to the main melody. It’s that contrapuntal play between May and Mercury, both ‘singing’ the lead vocal, that is extremely rare in rock.
Why May uses a sixpence as a pick too, to create a level of articulation or splutter that gets closer to a voice. It makes him a far more interesting guitarist than pretty much all the other legends, because he’s doing something much harder, and which is rarely even recognised for what it is.
Counterpoint is fiendishly hard to do, you have to be able to invent melodies in real time, and not just any melodies, but ones that resonate with the main melody in surprising ways. It’s also a model for societies, where instead of having one belief that everyone harmonises with (or not), you have different viewpoints all coexisting, but creating a surprising interplay.
The smart thing Tesla understands is that a big part of making the shift to EVs will be a social shift, not engineering. The engineering is a no-brainer, ICEs are rubbish and the sooner they’re gone, the better. Tesla wants to break a lot of the teenage masturbatory fantasies that surround existing cars. If it demonstrates how pathetic they are, it’s one more barrier removed. Like here, the new Tesla Cybertruck (like a large ute) easily beating a Porsche in a drag race. While towing another Porsche.
I shot this very short vid about 10 years ago, to show that ‘3D’ is not about stereopsis i.e. two eyes or two camera lenses. This is a single lens, but in a light field camera.
Iceland had 1000 mini-earthquakes in a day this weekend. Imagine trying to sleep or do anything with this happening all day and night. It could mean a volcanic eruption is imminent.
When Australia led the world in defeating HIV in the 1980s it was largely due to a brilliant health minister, Neal Blewett. If you’re wondering why we’re doing nothing at all about Covid, here’s our current health minister, doing the conference circuit. Also a nice window into what childish time-wasting bullshit conferences are. I’m so glad to be close to retirement.
Baby tourism. Where you hop between countries to give birth, to accumulate passports, avoid paying tax on income and expand your freedom to travel. All while posing for social media videos, with every hair, gesture and smile carefully choreographed, while babbling gibberish about increasing your freedom. A new chapter of colonialism, which I’m sure Tarzan and Jane here have never heard of.
Clive Ellis in this video is the reason everybody should ignore the conspiracy loons, on everything. His second bout of Covid, his first gave him no meaningful immunity. You can’t infect your way out of a pandemic.
The Big 4 consulting firms that incompetent senior managers in every industry and in government throw billions at every year are like the Wild West. No regulation, everybody is a partner because that way they escape any of the requirements of corporate governance. Designed purely as money-making machines, vampire squids that attach themselves to organisations and don’t leave until they’ve sucked them dry.
Deb O’Neill’s brutal take-down of them in the Senate inquiry is glorious to watch.
This is only a minute long, you won’t regret it. I often say the economy doesn’t even exist. Here’s a property developer laying it all out there, what the economy really is, without even realising. It’s feudalism, the dominant social form for all human history. Re-badged with wanky economic terms to disguise it. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is us all being disciplined, to know our place.
‘America’s Newsroom’, see there in the back? I shouldn’t laugh because dumb is everywhere now, he’s not an exception. Visiting the home of Karl Marx, to see where he wrote Mein Kampf in 1838.
Imaging from autopsies, showing Covid had taken up residence in the bone marrow of peoples’ skulls, and in the meninges. That’s what it does, your ‘mild’ illness is just the on-ramp. It uses your blood vessels and organs as a home.
Music was always my greatest passion, and the thing I was best at. But have posted before how I listen to it less than I used to. It nearly always leaves me feeling a bit unsatisfied now. Like it’s pointing at a something I can’t quite reach. I think the African fans at the netball world cup are showing that thing.
Cultures that integrated music into everyday life, they turn even the jobs and work of everyday life (and watching sport) into song and dance. The melodies and rhythms of Western music became separated from that everyday activity, not integrated. The closest link back to that integration is concepts like ‘groove’.
Have a listen to Professor Kevin Anderson (short, promise it’s eye-opening), a professor of energy and climate change, talk about how action for climate change is really only an ‘incremental’ change for most of us. The people who resist it most are those who do most of the emitting, 10-30% of the population. They’ve spent billions trying to convince the rest of us action will destroy our lives. It’s a con.
(I also like him because he’s part of a group of scientists calling out the ridiculous amount of flying and travel this 10-30% of the population do.)
Wet wall, cause still being determined. 6-8 days of this, 24 hours a day. But it does the job, they have this down to an art. House has ducted gas heating with the big pipe ducts under the floor. Should never have been done, upsets the natural ventilation under the floor. Having them ripped out.
Haven’t missed the ducted gas heating, it’s a very wet heat too and filled the house with moisture every winter. Plus gas heating fills your house with unburned gas and exhaust gases, both horrible for your health. Now it costs a fortune to run, haven’t turned it on in years.
Sharing the details of your personal life and that of your friends and family, on a global platform. Adults, think about what you’d feel now if intimate details of your life had been shared on global platforms for the past 30-50 years? The technology is already here that will make that an extremely dangerous thing to do. Have a look.
For the cricket tragics, have a look at this clip from 1994. For two reasons. Firstly for the beautiful balance Mark Waugh had in all things. And also because he places the ball on the ground after catching it, in the same way Mitchell Starc did in this Ashes, in a catch that was disallowed.
Transgender is the topic nobody will discuss, because its proponents are so often aggressive and even violent. But the distinction between sex and gender isn’t rocket science. If your sense of gender is a mismatch with your biological sex, it could be gender dysphoria, a known condition. Or it could just be that you don’t agree with all of the current models of masculinity and femininity.
People have always challenged and even rejected those, without creating some new sexual identity called ‘transgender’. I don’t identify with most macho bullshit at all. It doesn’t make me a woman or some other sex. It means I think those cultural and social models are rubbish.
New York had 10 inches of rain today. It’s still raining. In local government there’s already no money to fix this sort of damage. It’s only going to get much, much worse.
If you think climate change just means a couple of extra toasty degrees of temperature, believe me when I say we cannot survive it unless something is done, and very fast.
Another short excerpt from the SBS series, where they look at the mapping early Europeans did of the landscape they found here. And how it was nothing like ‘the bush’ we see today. The entire continent was an astonishing landscaped, tended garden. Our arrogance said Aborigines were hunter-gathering savages who lived in what we call the bush. But there was no bush, they shaped the entire continent into a landscaped wonder-garden, of abundance and beauty, which we then destroyed, creating ‘the bush’, a garden gone to seed, growing wild. WE created the bush, it’s like an abandoned block. As ‘the outback’ is abandoned interior land.
SBS has a great series right now looking at the fundamental shift in research on Aboriginal Australia. The recognition of a vastly more complex culture than we realised. Here’s a clip (whole series is on SBS catchup), showing one of the most counter-intuitive things. When Europeans arrived here, they saw what looked like a curated English great estate. Few trees, vast open and grassed plains - the whole thing looked like a Capability Brown landscape construction on an aristocratic estate. Because…it was.
We often thought early settler paintings and descriptions just reflected their English biases, projected upon ‘the bush’. But we had it backwards. What we call the bush today is the destruction of that created landscape. A total mess. Have a look at the visualisation from soil sampling, how only in the past 200 years was there suddenly ‘the bush’. The civilisation we found here had created a continent-wide landscape garden. Very little of it has survived.
The ABC shared this video of a rail car imploding at 1 atmosphere (i.e. our everyday atmospheric pressure). Implosions are the opposite of explosions, they don’t throw things in every direction, they make everything come together into the tightest ball possible. Just look at how much air pressure you have on you every day, without it being inside you as well as outside, you’d collapse.
The Titan sub had 375 atmospheres of pressure on it. That’s the equivalent of about 4 tonnes of pressure pressing in, from every direction. The debris they brought to the surface with human remains still inside matches exactly what I predicted earlier this week, just sayin’ ;)
I haven’t been to a conference in years, and don’t remember learning anything at any of them. Apparently this mass dancing thing is now common. Like being in pre school again. The icing on the cake with this one? It’s a conference of public health experts. In a pandemic.
Some may have seen in the news yesterday that Covid is now known to fuse and therefore destroy brain cells. Here it is captured in video. By all means keep believing the people who tell you it's a mild sniffle. Their brain cells are probably fused already.
There’s nothing to rival a huge church organ, full choir and herald trumpets. It shakes the ground if you’re there. Makes all other music sound trivial. Hair stands up on every part of your body. Gotta play it loud to approximate being there. You don’t have to be religious to feel it.
Even FOX News in the US would struggle to match this rousing patriotism from a Russian MP, singing the praises of Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles. (And I can’t help it, sub-titlers - there’s no such word as ‘hinderance’, though I guess you’re at least using your phonics.)
Beautiful drone shot from the ABC, showing a dingo patrolling the dingo fence. Worth reading the article, how the landscape on the dingo’s side of the fence is much richer and healthier than the barren wasteland of the sheep grazing land on the other side. The Americans discovered the huge impact on the landscape when you return apex predators to them too.
One of the reasons cats have caused so much damage to wildlife, is this fencing out of the dingos, who would previously eat them. They also eat foxes. And just about all attacks on sheep are not ‘wild local dogs’. It’s dingos, some still get through. Domestic dogs don’t have the capacity to live in the wild.
I like to give use-case examples for those who don’t have solar, so they can get a sense of it. Right now, still 2-3 hours from peak solar production. But with the clothes dryer, oven, dishwasher and air conditioner on, still using less than half of the current solar production. The rest charging the battery for tonight (usually completed before lunch), and going back to the grid, which earns us money.
John Farnham’s fame hides the phenomenal one-off his voice is. You never hear even a fraction of what it can do in his popular hits. Listen to this English professional singer react to a track of Farnham doing Led Zeppelin at a sound check. Just about any other singer in the world would need to rest their voice for a week to recover, and they wouldn’t hit the notes anyway. This is Farnham mucking around *before* a full-length show. Listen to the full track on YouTube.
Genius innovators in agriculture have called enough on this sort of landscape vandalism. Not least because nobody makes any money out of it, long-term. They’re shifting most of our food production to massive greenhouses, utilising vertical space and desalinated and recycled water. It’s also a great business model, because it means crops are not dependent on weather, and pests are easily controlled. The picture-perfect truss tomatoes you can see in supermarkets now come from those greenhouses.
Last solar post, just as a comparison. Cloud gone, so system close to full generation. Over 9kW going back to the grid, so could run another 3 houses just off the surplus. (That 1.7 kW still the washing machine and clothes dryer, plus TV, computers etc.) Will use that surplus mostly to generate credits for winter. And maybe for hot water, when the government announces subsidies to convert gas to electric appliances in the next budget.
Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s the 1.8kW of ‘Home’ usage. 2.1kW going back to the grid. Battery already fully charged so sitting there waiting to power us overnight. Most nights we go to bed with about 80% of the battery charge still available, which would see us through maybe half of the next day, if we needed it. But the sun always comes up, so we don’t.
Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s the 1.8kW of ‘Home’ usage. 2.1kW going back to the grid. Battery already fully charged so sitting there waiting to power us overnight. Most nights we go to bed with about 80% of the battery charge still available, which would see us through maybe half of the next day, if we needed it. But the sun always comes up, so we don’t.
Brendan is one of the leading pandemic authorities in the world. We need to listen a lot more to people like him. He’s 100% right that ‘Australians think it’s over’. And they think it’s over mostly because the previous PM wanted them to think that before Christmas last year, so he could go into an election looking like the man who ended the pandemic, with us having had lovely holidays over Christmas on his behalf.
25,000 Australians are projected to die from Covid this year. If that doesn’t appall you, I think you should be deeply ashamed. (For the slogan-infected ‘just like the flu’ folk, about 600 people die of flu in an average flu year.) It’s also vital to understand that how we all behave makes these deaths happen. We spread it, to the people who die, in our social activity, even if our own case is ‘mild’. And Covid is not mild for anybody, it might just look that way in the short term.
There’s a border collie over the back fence who will chase drops of water sprayed into the air with a hose. Not a breed if you want a quiet life, limitless enthusiasm :)
Anti-vax roid rage. This anti-vaxer apparently stopped a car carrying a doctor who administered Covid vaccines, and this is what he did. The bodybuilding community is a hotbed of ‘natural health’ numpties (this guy is the brother of a famous bodybuilder, and is a bodybuilder himself). This is what politicians produce when they choose to make public health a political debating topic.
It’s nearly always the same people trying to make out Covid isn’t a problem, that have regaled us about how climate change isn’t a problem either, for years. It’s time to have zero tolerance for dumb. Dumb kills.
To be unwavering, unflinching, and uncompromising is rare, but not impossible. To be an outsider and those things, nothing is harder. To not care one tiny bit what anybody else thinks. One in a billion people are truly like that.
The secret sauce of Lithgow for those who don’t live here, is that it’s one of the few places where the entire town is a community. Most larger and newer towns are fractured now by cars, people live in widely dispersed suburbs and it takes specific ‘events’ to try to make them all feel part of the same community. But Lithgow has changed little since 1952 when this footage was taken, that sense of community is in its DNA.
People in town often have very little in common, but it doesn’t matter to that feeling of community. You just feel it here, it’s very hard to define. Partly it’s living in a valley, which prevents too much physical spread, and you can still walk to pretty much anywhere in town from anywhere else in not much time, which is more important I think than we often realise.
But it’s more than that, I can walk the streets of Bathurst or Orange for example and not feel that same sense of community, except in abstract ways. I grew up in Bathurst and didn’t feel it. In Lithgow you feel like you’re a Lithgow person first, and an individual second. The community gets into you somehow, it defines you.
This footage also a bit special for me, because my dad is in there somewhere. Lithgow was the first place he lived when he came to Australia, and he described attending the Marjorie celebrations to me before he died.
Lol. Also more proof of my theory that much of the Australian accent happened because of our encounters with aborigines. So much of what we call the aussie way of life I think we actually got from them, we just forgot.
This guy does instructional guitar videos on YouTube, and is charming. It made me think about how times change. I figured out this beautiful Fleetwood Mac song on guitar, by ear as a teenager, using a record player. (This guy gets it a bit wrong, but it still sounds glorious.) Now you can learn watching a video like this, up close. Though boy it trained the ear having no visuals, this piece is relatively easy, I think back to some of the almost impossible to hear things I pulled apart to play, by ear, for hours as a kid. Good times.
Check out the chuckle near the start when he talks about how QR codes became just a con job, to dupe people into going out again. And how sending kids to school had nothing to do with education or children at all, it was about making life seem ‘normal’ again.
We’re in so much trouble, with Covid. I‘m convinced people have no idea how bad things are. It’s not surprising, they’re simply not being told.
Stephen Reicher is an expert on human behaviour. Watch this short (40-second) clip, where he explains how the use of the terms ’restrictions’ and ’lockdowns’, instead of words like ’support’ and ‘protection’, make people oppose action against the pandemic. All deliberate framing and spin by politicians in this pandemic, to make people feel like support and protection are oppression, and letting the virus run is ‘freedom’.
The new Premier won’t allow NSW Health to say much in public. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out. So here they are, trying to tell you that Christmas parties, incuding work ones, and pubs and clubs, are giving people Covid for Christmas. Despite what the Premier says, you don’t want Covid for Christmas.
If you examine spin even for 30 seconds, it dissolves into nonsense. This one a favourite - ‘live alongside’ Covid. Wtf does it mean? You obviously can’t live alongside it, it lives *in* people. The words are exactly chosen to make you think you can sit next to it on a bus, or wave to it across the supermarket, without it touching you.
The Kyle Rittenhouse trial in the US (guy who took an AR-15 semi-automatic to a street protest and killed 2 people) features this performance. Surely only rivalled by Dave Warner and sandpapergate.
In other highlights, the judge’s phone ringtone is the Donald Trump rallying song. It went off twice during the trial. A true Trumpian, when video evidence was zoomed in to reveal greater detail, the judge said it was trickery. Like an episode of Catweasel.
This is cool, to see the patterns of air movement. Have often wondered if making air pollution visible would create greater action on it. People won’t pay much attention to something they can’t see. Imagine if every car, truck and bus had some colouring added to its exhaust gases, so we could directly see the impact of their use.
NSW is ‘open for business’. Also open for sport, music, swimming, visiting friends etc. The fact he only mentions business is just more evidence that NSW is run by business, for business. Here’s a thing. ‘Business’ doesn’t exist. You can test that very easily. How many businesses would exist, without customers? (Zero.) How many customers would continue to exist, without businesses? (All of them.)
Read this article (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/2/2055693/-COVID-19-must-be-eliminated-not-endemic-if-America-is-going-to-survive) about ’living with Covid’, and contrast it with what our PM said this week (vid). Desperate to hear what you think. Nothing to be afraid of, put it out there.
In years to come, remember this video. Substitute ‘cholera’ or ‘Ebola’ for ‘this virus’, and you’ll get a sense of how collectively insane we all now are. That we swallow these ridiculous, meaningless slogans, like hypnotised chickens. No integrity or leadership, saddling future generations with a new endemic disease. I doubt most people understand what the implications of that are. Hang your heads in shame, Australia.
Here’s the former NSW Auditor-General speaking about Gladys’ resignation. (Don’t forget either that this NSW Government also rorted the bushfire relief funding.) I plead with people to not embrace populism, where leaders and basic law and due process are seen as two opposing teams. That’s high school behaviour. I have zero interest in ALP vs LNP. I’m an official, I’m interested in things being run well, openly and fairly. Corruption destroys societies, no matter how popular it is.
Is everybody happy infecting several hundred thousand children and killing up to 60 of them in the next 6 months, under the government's re-opening plan? These are the government's numbers, before you people who think the world is a battle between Labor and the LNP get your knickers in a twist. The roadmap needs to allow time to vaccinate children. What sort of person would argue otherwise?
Trying to get to the bottom of the Bathurst Public School (or labelled as such) photos mystery. This another image from the series. The series also mentions a G.H. Wright as Principal.
This one comes from an (undated, though the old watering trough/lamp still there in front of the Court House?) series the NSW Government did to decorate the inside of trains. Beautiful light and shadow. A few Bathurst shots were in the series. If you zoom in on Heaths Cafe, does it say ‘Dining and Refrigeration’? And below that ‘Pastry’? Both obscured by trees.
Loved this one of the kids working hard in the old BPS. Unfortunately none of the photos are dated. Which buildings were these, are they still in town, or demolished? The view out the windows was interesting, but I couldn’t place it.
Came upon a few interesting shots of the old Bathurst Public School. Not the one I went to I don’t think, an earlier version. Some members may recognise it? Believed to be taken in 1895.
I have a feeling this one has been posted before. But the quality of image from those old glass plate negatives has never been surpassed, so worth another look?
Am guessing this one was taken pretty much just as the Court House was completed, as the old gaol seems to be visible behind it, and it was demolished in 1880? If they’d only snapped one a year and 2 years earlier, to capture the construction.
Felt I had seen these two (one more post to come after this) here maybe before, but can’t see them in the albums. Figured it can’t hurt re-posting. Unfortunately neither are dated. This one looks quite early. Beautiful photography. Love the old telegraph wires visible to the right, running along the footpath.
Spend one minute watching this Florida school board meeting, and I think it’ll become clear why democracy isn’t, and never was, government by the people. For the people, yes. But not by the people.
Every day the NSW Premier and PM suggest to us that 70% and 80% vaccination will mean much of our freedom will return. It’s a lie, every single day. This is 30 seconds from the head of the Institute who did the report for National Cabinet. Without significant ‘public health measures’ (this includes lockdowns) infections and deaths will skyrocket, even at 80% vaccination of adults.
Extraordinary that the same people who looked on with horror at Trump, seem completely oblivious to the same thing happening here. Trump succeeded because conservative strategists progressively destroyed public institutions in the US. The institutions that ran the country and kept everybody safe and healthy.
The same thing is happening in NSW right now, with the government ignoring health institutions and following the same political libertarian BS that Trump peddled. They’ve succeeded so well they even have us blaming each other for the disaster. It’s all the rule-breakers! At least Lisa isn’t falling for it.
I spent 18 months putting the PM and Gladys at the top of my ‘risk to every Australian’s life’ list. Gladys saying exactly why, in just a few words, here. And making it quite clear that she and the PM are working together on this. Many will die in NSW now, for this idiot belief, that the economy and society are 2 separate things.
A photographer from regional Victoria. Her anger is at a public health measure, designed to save thousands of lives. That isn’t even mentioned. Her collapse in income is her only focus. No doubt that’s extremely stressful for her. But the wider point here is, you can see why this pandemic happened, and why it won’t end. Our way of life is incompatible with our collective wellbeing. When you turn your society into an Economy, even killing millions of people is casually accepted, so long as incomes carry on.
One of Gladys’ most endearing traits is that condescending snigger you can see here a few seconds in, when describing other States. Only a month ago. Such disgusting stupidity and arrogance. Every death and lost dollar in this outbreak is on her head.
It would have been so much better to not call it ‘classical’ music, genre labels drive people way from things they should hear. Figaro is the greatest of all operas, many think. God really was ‘singing through this little man’ (Mozart), put earphones on and listen to the voices swell and recede repeatedly, expressing the tenderness and absolution of love. A true wonder of the world.
Crush and kill. If your kids get nits, you don’t ‘live with’ the nits. You kill them. It’s staggering to me that NSW, the most closed State with the worst economic numbers and the only State with circulating virus, is getting the applause in this pandemic, when what it’s actually doing is holding the entire country back. Kill the fucking virus, like the rest of the country.
Listen to this. The genius of slogans is that they make you feel like they’re saying something, when they really aren’t. ‘Living alongside the virus’. Sounds obvious, common sense? I bet you can’t actually explain what it means.
Who would you rather guide us out of this crisis? A failed advertising hack (ScoMo), and a career politician who went straight from university into politics (Gladys), both desperate to protect their party donors in gambling, alcohol, construction, retail etc.? Or people who have 40 years of success in managing epidemics, like Bill Bowtell, who was a major architect of our superb HIV strategy, a disease for which we had no treatment and no vaccine? Have a listen to what Bill thinks.
Animals teach us that if you have your attention wholly engaged in what you’re doing, everything else follows without effort or strain. This hawk’s attention doesn’t budge for a second, which is what frees its body completely along its length to respond. All our feelings of weight and effort in our own bodies are only lapses of attention, usually to try to ‘do’ our own movements. That tightens us right up, creating those feelings of strain and weight.
Another re-post, because it’s life-changing. What you feel as your body, and your weight, is neither. If somebody pushed up against you, you’d know that feeling was caused by them pressing on you. But when the Earth pushes up into you, for some reason we think the feelings are our ‘weight’. You can’t feel your weight. You can’t even feel your body. You are your body, you can’t step outside it to feel it.
Try going about your life feeling those bodily feelings as the forces acting and changing, between you and the planet. It takes the attention outside your ‘body’, into its relationship with the planet, every second. Those forces will ‘work you out’ faster than any gym, if you get to know them. One amazing thing you’ll find is that you’re just floating at the surface of the Earth, you have no ‘weight’ at all, in the way we usually mean that.
If you think it'd be cool to have a crystal ball, I think insurance data might be the best you can do. All the debates over climate change are mostly froth and bubble, serious businesses are already deciding it's real. You'll see that in your insurance premiums over time, insurance does future-based assessments. Here's the Australia map.
Labelled School of Arts, Bathurst ca. 1880. Photographer unknown. Sorry if it was already in one of the albums.
"The Bathurst School of Arts In 1855 the Bathurst School of Arts and Mechanic's Institute was established, offering the beginnings of scientific and technical education in Bathurst (Greaves, 1961). A grant of land to the School of Arts resulted in premises being built by 1861 on the corner of Howick and William Streets on land adjoining the Church of England's All Saints Cathedral. It was a two storey building designed by local architect, M.H. Sadlier. A long-desired public hall was completed in 1874, helping boost the membership to 324 people (Bialowas, 2000, 35, 39-40).
During the 1870s the School of Arts received an annual grant from the Government on the understanding that 'the institution should tend to the intellectual advancement of the people'. Early accounts of the lectures and discussions suggest that entertainments were many and varied, including: lectures, tea-drinkings, readings, soirees, bazaars, an occasional circus, 'biological-phenomena', mesmerism, and phrenology. The courses of lectures were on occasion ambitious and expensive (Greaves, 1961)." - source: Heritage Council of NSW
Israel Folau's words here show exactly how I think religion was hijacked by idealists. Idealists are people who think there's another world, an eternal world of spirit and objective truths above and beyond our sinner's world here on Earth. Once you set up that opposition, it's game over, the world we actually live in can be nothing more than a materialist filth that needs to be condemned.
"The God of this world, Satan, has deceived many. But the one that lives inside us is all powerful. He can deliver us from anything...I encourage us all to store our treasures up in heaven, where it all counts...We're going to be hated by the world, persecuted by the world."
Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say 'hello', only rare people can turn that into an event. An event is something new and unexpected, that produces an upwelling of joy and surprise. Some lessons at school, with a bad teacher, are just lessons. A great lesson is an event. Any tiny part of life can be turned into an event.
Events are where the eternal meets the finite. Religion began as a method of producing presence - events. Of electrifying each moment, that electricity *is* 'God'. Then religion got hijacked by people who thought it was about God being some separate being, up in the sky, handing down moral laws. Eternity and mortality were split in two, God occupied eternity, we occupied finite time. But God is where those two meet.
Good teachers, speakers, sportspeople, or whoever, can all show us 'God', if they turn what they do into events. And one of my main passions for Queen isn't the music - which is great - but this presence Mercury had, in everything he did. He would electrify every room he was in, in everything he did.
If your familiarity with Queen is mostly the hits, one thing that can get missed is what a kick-arse rock and roll band they were. Just a short clip here, but listen to that power trio go. Brian May said they built a ‘wall of sound’ for Freddie to sing over, and you can hear it here. Roger Taylor’s cymbal work is so underrated, he was a percussionist in his thinking sometimes, more than a drummer, it fills spaces amazingly.
Look at that piece of ridiculously complex, inefficient junk on the left. There will come a time I'm sure when we'll wonder how we ever put up with stinking internal combustion engines. 100% torque available from 0 rpm on electric motors too.
I’m curious if the main theme of Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie), which Rami Malek talks about here, is well understood? That Freddie Mercury was a persona, not a person. An incredibly shy outsider, connecting with other outsiders, using this persona as the tool.
One of the ironies of the critical response to the film is that the film does exactly the same thing. It’s an outsider, taking on the film establishment. It’s interesting to me how common the assumption is that anything that connects with millions can’t be as good or serious as something that connects with only a handful. What does ‘good’ mean?
John Farnham became such an every mum and gran’s favourite that people sometimes maybe forgot that he’s actually one of the most amazing singers in history.
This little bit from Playing to Win. I’ve never heard a singer in any genre that has done this sort of throat-trilling, it’s like what yodellers do, but the trills are at an astonishing speed - for years I’ve wondered how it’s even possible. Anybody heard anything like it anywhere else?
From The Bletchley Circle. Exactly the sort of thing I mean by patterns, when I rabbit on about them. Patterns are I think, quite seriously, the path to the divine. Transcendent (they go beyond us) but also immanent (we make them), at the same time.
My trip home every day. First class, quiet comfort, spectacular views. Costs me $2 a trip, can have beer or wine, hot or cold food. Cars nearly destroyed train travel, it’s very sad going past the old unused stations in the beautiful countryside. Now we all lock ourselves up in our cars and yell at each other, crash into each other, sit in traffic jams and breathe in the pollution from other cars. That’s progress.
You can’t feel your body. You are your body. One of the greatest things I ever learned.
Weight and breathing as examples. Vid re-posted, cos it’s cool. What you feel as your weight, is not your weight. You can’t feel your weight, you are your weight. You feel the forces on you through your contact with the ground. When you feel heavy, it’s because those forces are out of balance.
With breathing, you don’t breathe. You are your breathing. Breath is the interaction of forces too, forces from the ground, but also air pressure pushing on you and into you, and the elasticity of your body. That air pressure is about a tonne on you - big, big forces. But you can use it to your advantage, to effortlessly breathe. Just as you can use the forces of gravity to effortlessly sit, stand, lift and move.
Masterful example of the way film images aren’t a record of any particular person’s seeing or hearing. From Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. Nearly all of it is a recollection, so is shifted in time, but also each of the images is not a particular person seeing or hearing things, it’s the perception of the story itself, as a Being or person. As a viewer the whole lot hangs together as a ‘story’ but that unity is felt, not just strung together. The story is an actual Being, made of percepts and affects, which we engage with.
Marshall McLuhan used to talk about how our technologies shape us. One way that I think is less seen is how our 'writing' technologies shape both how we think, and how we work.
For example, tables and spreadsheets. If you work in an organisation, have you ever noticed how many of the decisions and discussions are really nothing more than sorting things into categories, like in a table? Deciding who will do what, and when etc. We've used tables for so long that they've become a core part of our cognitive furniture, and we don't always realise it.
'Thinking outside the box' should also be 'thinking outside the table'. But it goes even further, because we're so used to thinking using documents more generally, that we maybe haven't realised one of the main reasons companies have so many meetings is that it's rare to think outside documents any more. Meetings are where documents are shared and discussed, we think documents give us the 'big picture' of an organisation (another visual technology metaphor, which is quite literal).
In the Victorian era, there was a passion for stereoscopic photography. In fact there were almost more stereo photos taken during that time in England than standard photos.
Has anybody seen any old stereo pictures of Bathurst? It would be wonderful if some existed.
Another example of Brian May’s genius. Not the solo itself, which is beautiful, but how May managed to design a guitar and rig which achieved the impossible. Instead of the usual opposites of a ‘clean’ sound and ‘overdriven’ sound, May found a way to create a continuum from one to the other, at every point along the way. And with infinite sustain, a guitarist’s Holy Grail. Notice how the solo starts with a clean sound, and then with a small nudge of the volume knob the guitar suddenly is in that infinite sustain space.
And finished with a power chord where you can hear how much more harmonically rich the sound is than standard guitars, which tend to sound buzzy and electricky at that overdriven stage, with almost no link back to the acoustic qualities of the instrument. You can hear every note in the chord, again often seen as impossible for overdriven guitar. It irritates me a little when people call all of this ‘the Brian May sound’, as if it’s just some idiosyncratic sound. Makes as much sense as saying everybody who plays a Telecaster or Stratocaster is looking for the ‘Leo Fender sound’.
You are an astronaut. Seriously (this can change your life).
One of the things that is so misunderstood is that what you feel in your body is not your body, it’s the FORCES that are on your body. For example, you can’t feel your weight - what we think is the feeling of weight is nothing of the sort. As this video nicely shows.
You are an astronaut because the only difference between you and an astronaut ‘floating’ in orbit is that you’re next to the ground. Being near the ground doesn’t add weight to you, not the tiniest bit. What it does do is add contact forces to you, UP into your body. Once you start to feel everything in your body as a force that is due to the relationship you have with things around you, everything changes. You are floating in space, just like that astronaut, even when you’re on the ground. It’s just that the Earth constantly pushes up into you, as you float.
The story of the phenomenal success of Febreze has some resonances with AT work.
Febreze is obviously specialised at removing odours. However when it was first put on the market, nobody bought it. It took the company a while to figure out why. People stop noticing odours in fairly quick time, so what might be a stench one moment can stop being sensed the next.
This is I think because our senses capture changes, rather than absolute states. If nothing is changing we don’t really sense. Often what is called unreliable sensory information is actually a misunderstanding; an interpretation of the senses as absolute rather than relative.
How Febreze went on to become hugely successful is all about habits. The manufacturer instead targeted an existing habit - cleaning - and the reward many people who clean experience of a ‘freshness’ of the cleaned room. So they inserted Febreze into an existing habit - they changed the routine without altering the stimulus and response.
Changing habits effectively is about targeting the routine that comes between stimulus and response, rather than the stimulus or the response themselves. What’s powerful about this knowledge is that it really doesn’t matter what routine you insert between the old stimulus and response, any change to the routine can change the habit.
The discussions on the definition of AT. One suggestion in the thread was to break down different aspects of the Technique and more specifically target peoples’ understandings of core concepts, rather than try to define all of AT in a few words.
So why not start with - Primary Control? What is (the) Primary Control? Diagram not a suggestion of my own view!
Discussion within the group suggested an activity that may be interesting to try. To agree upon a definition of the Alexander Technique, but a definition focused on practitioners, not members of the public. A definition that combines both desired outcomes and methodology to achieve those outcomes - the WHAT and the HOW. The activity is aimed less at arriving at the one, true definition (although that would be a sensible thing to arrive at eventually) than to make more visible differences in view and conception, for exploration.
Rather than each person posting a completely separate definition, which might just produce a big list of standalone definitions, it was thought it might be better to provide a definition to begin with, and then each person can suggest modifications to it. I’ve copied the Wikipedia one for now, as a starting point.
“The Alexander Technique (A.T.)...is an educational process that attempts to develop the ability to avoid unnecessary muscular tension by retraining physical movement.”
The image shows a simple version of the standard view of vision.
Gibson’s much more sophisticated view, which so comprehensively demolished the standard view it’s amazing it still survives.
“It is not necessary to assume that anything whatever is transmitted along the optic nerve in the activity of perception. We need not believe that either an inverted picture or a set of messages is delivered to the brain. We can think of vision as a perceptual system, the brain being simply part of the system. The eye is also part of the system, since retinal inputs lead to ocular adjustments and then to altered retinal inputs, and so on. The process is circular, not a one-way transmission. The eye-head-brain-body system registers the invariants in the structure of ambient light. The eye is not a camera that forms and delivers an image, nor is the retina simply a keyboard that can be struck by fingers of light.”
Crocs. Actually very good shoes, allowing your feet to operate pretty much how they were designed to operate. Wear the straps behind your heels though, or as with thongs you can cause problems in your achilles tendons.
Bunion. Big toe pushed towards the other toes, creating problems also in the joint at the base of the big toe. The bump is caused by this problem in the joint.
Note the big toe has been turned towards the other toes, rather than splaying to the left of the foot following the line of the foot. Note also the dislocation of the joint at the base of the big toe - the bump on the side of the foot.
An apocryphal quote, but real insight in the wit. It’s about unity.
To me this quote allows a contrast between two clearly different ways to work with unity. One, and by far the most common, is to assume a starting point of non-unity, and then some procedure or method to create or restore unity. The idea that sculpture for example is the working of the stone to create the form you want, that the artist shapes the material to do their bidding.
The second approach is as the quote says, to assume the unity is already there. To feel the stone, paint, bodily sensations and emotions, as the relational encounters of that unity constantly being remade.
The extraordinary and still (more than a century later) largely unheralded genius Gabriel Tarde, was and is unique in seeing not just all human development but also all reality as following the same repeated pattern. Everything begins with difference, some of these differences are ‘imitated’ or repeated more than others to create a standard, and then this standardised base is used to allow even further differentiation of difference. And so on, without end.
It’s interesting to apply this model to AT. To the work itself and the organisation of it (following recent discussions), but also to ourselves, where ‘habits’ are that continually created base from which fresh innovation emerges.
Long-ish quote, but captures a lot. And delightful 19th century colour in the language. Tarde is one of the only thinkers in all of human history to make difference the root of all things, and thereby to not oppose standardisation and creativity, he saw the former as the inseparable tool of the latter.
“If we could gather in a single place all the researchers who are collectively constructing a science at an early stage of its development (organic chemistry, for example, meteorology, or linguistics), there could be no more bizarre pandemonium than this scientific furnace. And yet in this furnace an impersonal monument is forged, an edifice in glacial grey, where the least trace of the multicoloured psychological states which built it seems to have been absolutely erased...
Let us imagine it finished, complete, and condensed into a definitive catechism which could easily be installed in a corner of everyone’s memory: in this way a vastly greater quantity of energy than we can presently imagine would be made available in the human brain for other uses. It would then become clear that the perfect systematization and universal propagation of scientific orthodoxy had had for its ultimate and supreme rationale the extraordinary flourishing of hypotheses, of philosophical heresies, of an endless series of self-invented systems...in which, thanks to the impersonality of scientific knowledge, each mind’s profound need to universalise its particular nuance and to set its seal upon the world could be fully satisfied.”
Dr Claire Weekes, talking about nervous illness, but I think the same principles apply to use. We are what we do, we are a unity. Act how you want to be. If you want to be open and light and free and without tension, be open, light, free and calm/not tense, in your actual everyday being. Striving for anything, whether it be good use, or relaxation, will just create the tension of striving in you. The lesson of Chinese finger traps.
“In other words, don’t be too concerned because you are tense and cannot relax. The very act of being prepared to accept your tenseness relaxes your mind, and relaxation of body gradually follows. You don’t have to strive for relaxation. You have to wait for it. When a patient says ‘I have tried so hard all day to be relaxed’, surely he has had a day of striving, not relaxation?”
Are people familiar with balance bikes? Bikes with no pedals or drive train, used to teach kids how to balance on a bicycle. The theory is that traditional training wheels teach kids to pedal more than they teach kids to balance. Training wheels also prevent counterbalancing and teach kids the wrong relationship between counterbalancing and steering, which has to be unlearned once the training wheels are removed. My own youngest child was a good example of this, after removing training wheels it’s taken her some time to actually learn not to lean into corners.
Bikes are my favourite analogy for how to achieve good use. I see conscious control as analogous to training wheels, a focus in the wrong place. To use yourself as a balance bike means to completely give up any attempt to consciously alter your use at all, and instead keep the focus entirely on your activity and allowing your body to (usually quickly) learn to adapt to that activity. Poor use is always trying to manipulate your use, in some way.
(Incidentally, science is not actually sure how bikes balance in the first place, it’s a contested area. Usual explanations of the gyroscopic effect don’t really hold up.)
I worked with a researcher studying the use of elastic strain energy in organisms, back in the 1980s. Alexander (a different one) was one of the pioneers. There’s a lot more work that has been done since to show how organisms, including humans, store elastic strain energy to assist with support and movement. To me elasticity is the key to understanding how we function, especially in relation to gravity. It’s elasticity that is the direct functional relationship between ourselves and the objects around us, including the Earth - gravity. The elasticity is the direct expression of those relationships.
One of the limitations of Wolff’s Law is the limitation of a lot, if not most, of biomechanics. It isolates out some body part as an isolated beam structure, pays no attention to the tissue (muscle, ligament, tendon) in place and then tries to analyze it like a simple lever problem in mechanics. So Wolff’s recognition of forces shaping bone development is spot on, it’s just that like most others, his model of those forces is simplistic.
It’s been known for some time that the dominant source of force or strain on bones comes from these tissues, not from the superincumbent ‘weight’ of the person. Muscles, ligaments and tendons are the support mechanism of the body, not the skeleton (a reversal of the usual framework). You can see research heading slowly in this direction, nice article here:(https://biomedical-engineering-online.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1475-925X-5-12?site=biomedical-engineering-online.biomedcentral.com)
and to quote:
“The hip, despite its apparent simplicity, is surrounded by a very complicated arrangement of muscles and ligaments. The joint capsule and its ligaments are recognized as being among the thickest and strongest ligaments of the body and they are always in tension to prevent dislocation of the hip; a rare event. They also contribute to the stability of the standing posture by counterbalancing the weight of the torso. These tissues have been ignored in previous models and yet, anatomically, represent some substantial elastic structures. The muscles include some of the most powerful in the body and the orientations of the muscle fibres, especially in the deeper muscles, suggest that they exert forces with a large component pulling the femoral head into the acetabulum.”
One of the contested arguments in orthopedics and biomechanics is whether the joints are weight-bearing. As this picture shows, there's often an assumption that obesity for example will increase pressure or weight on the joints.
And yet the bones on either side of major synovial joints like the knee for example, which you would most expect to bear the compression of our "weight", don't really touch. The joint is a nothing, a space between bones.
There is so much confusion about weight and how our bodies function in relation to it. This is another example.
Two of the most important pieces of science I think for AT-type work, are Wolff’s Law, and Davis’s Law. Wolff’s Law recognises that the composition and structure of bone is shaped by the forces that are applied to it. Davis’s Law says the same thing, but for tissue. Together they show us that the forces we encounter every day are not only things our bodies have to respond and adapt to, those forces in a very real sense *are* our bodies, the shape and structure and functioning of our bodies is like a bouquet of all of the forces in play.
Sorry to post so often today, things keep presenting themselves to me with direct relevance to AT!
Here's another piece of 'evidence' - following on from my earlier post about prehistoric man's capabilities - that the human body is perhaps far more capable than standard practice and theory allows. We've all seen monkeys scale trees with speed and ease, and wished we could do that (I have anyway). But perhaps we can, we've just forgotten how, and perhaps it doesn't even need much in the way of training. This famous short clip - I may have posted it here before - is of somebody from the early 20th century, whose name I forget, living I think in New York.