Australian public life

Whether you're a member of a religion or not, we should at minimum read ancient texts as instruction manuals for life that ancient societies developed through much blood and tragedy. Take the Old Testament and its 10…

I think we might be surprised how many Australians would happily sell the country for cash even at the lower end of that Trumpian scale. Huge numbers of people are more or less living in the US already, because they…

This one is a real test case for what I’ve posted before, that if you want to live by the actual realities of life, you’re going to piss off just about everybody. Is this annual fundraiser a good idea? Like most modern…

One of the innovations of the Tupperware movement was to understand that people think and do things based on their conformity with what others they know think and do. What we think and feel and do is a social act.…

Every time I’ve suggested social media as a whole be shut down entirely it’s generated a lot of pushback. Peoples’ lives in all dimensions have been captured by these platforms, like they’re in a spider’s web. If you…

As Europe gears up to defend itself against America, at what point do Western nations decide that China is a much smarter superpower ally than America? Only blatant racism has stopped that assessment being made…

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has died of prostate cancer. Adams’ last years saw him disappear down the loon rabbit holes of social media, going all-in for Trump, and even using ivermectin to try to cure his cancer.…

Where you end up when you ‘live with’ viruses. We can shake our head and say this is just America. 9 out of 10 Australians you might ask think living with viruses is a good idea too. Ask them what that actually means,…

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

Record crowds go to everything now. An increasing shift in the culture towards trending, viral behaviour. The desire to 𝒃𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆. The loss of shared meanings and stabilised hierarchies through social media…

Pauline makes Trump seem like a brain surgeon. The thought of her occupying a more powerful role in Australian politics - well, it's on the cards. Proving again that elections destroyed democracy. You wouldn't hire the…

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

𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑉 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑙𝑦 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒…

Australia Day is now, like everything else in our lives, an argument. A debate. A great liberation for 2026 in my opinion is to identify this mechanism and ignore it, by ignoring all of the popular debates of the day.…

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

I still think the greatest danger of social media isn’t misinformation. It’s the subtle way it’s replaced community life itself, it’s where we actually live now In ‘vertical’ online communities. Facebook is a US…

The more equal you make a group of people or a whole society, the more violent it will become. The function of spectacle and magnificence in history is to control that violence, to prevent widespread imitative rivalry.…

From tonight the public forum at Bathurst Council meetings will be included in live streaming. It's interesting, that idea of 'the public'. Very often it's the same handful of people who dominate forums like this,…

Scams are sophisticated now. I think this is a scam, was actually embedded in the main ABC site I was looking at, and looks like a legitimate ABC page. But it's BS I'm pretty sure, spruiking another crypto ripoff.

I’m serious that social media is entrenching Year 9 as our permanent adult culture. This group shows it, and is getting more granular and personal as time goes on, to the extent that some people seem incapable of doing…

To those who have faith in electoral democracy, Keir Starmer’s thumping victory only 2 years ago, after years of totally incompetent Tory rule, should be a wake-up call. Starmer himself may now not survive, because the…

Probably the fastest way to improve social media is to turn off comments on posts. Not for personal things among friends, but for public-focused posts, from government, business and others. That function stems from the…

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) makes the rules for Australian energy markets and advises government. It wants to make an outrageous change. Right now your electricity bill is mostly based on how much…

AI is changing the world. Social media has already turned it into the usual team sports, between pro-AI and anti-AI teams.

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…

I trained as a materials engineer. Still the cutting edge of all science and technology, nearly all progress is the development of new materials. Like this beauty. I’m sure if it got discussed on social media we’d…

I can’t decide whether to file this under ‘travel culture karma’ or ‘social media is destroying civilisation’.

I used to fear the mumps as a kid. Never had them thankfully, thanks to vaccines. History is going in reverse, progress that took generations being unwound in the blink of an eye. Social media is a large cause, people…

The very many Australians of all ages contemplating voting for populists like Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce should really keep a watching brief on the terrible collapsing mess of Trumpism in the US. Trumpism is the…

Trump released one of his ridiculous AI videos of himself as some sort of national superhero. Some in his own party released their own AI-generated response. The wider point here is that we, all the way to the top of…

Violence is increasing. Populism creates violence, because it's the removal of status distinction between people, leading to continuous and ongoing rivalry, for position and status, in imitative teams battling each…

Because we make the disastrous mistake of thinking democracy is ‘the people’ individually reasoning out situations, we also assume the answer is to just get rid of ‘misinformation’, and everything will be fixed. I post…

The Busby Street developments have been controlversial in Bathurst, but that isn’t saying a lot, as anything that happens in a community now generates a pile-on. That’s social media culture, you can see it in the…

A Harvard professor researching aging. The key to a long life is to avoid infections. This should be obvious, given that control of infection doubled our life expectancies in the last century. But 'living with'…

It’s easy to see this as just an isolated issue. But it means something much wider. It means public health itself, which covers a whole range of diseases, has been broken by a social media culture that prioritises only…

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…

I overheard somebody the other day talking to another person about the cost of living. And ‘what do they do? They let all these migrants in, to take the jobs, and the houses. Pauline Hanson is right.’ Immigration is the…

The problem isn’t that people are stupid. We’re all stupid in areas we know nothing about. The problem is that people now get a say in all of those areas they know nothing about. Social media did that. We forget that in…

Seeing quite a few pained posts to local social media groups about petrol prices. Some are angry they’re over $1.80/litre. I see plenty over $2, or even $2.30. And they’ve been high for years. They’re never coming down…

If you wonder why communities seem increasingly aggressive and intolerant, look to social media. Social media is transforming our lives into never-ending argument and debate. We live inside the platforms, they are our…

It really is a symptom of how fundamentally baked-in stupid social media has made the world that this ever even became a fake debate. We argue over whether to use cars that run on more or less free energy, need next to…

That mythical universe James Cameron created in Terminator where humans are at war with the machines for supremacy? It arrived years ago, but without a battle. The machines already won, social media took over the world.…

Large luxury sedan with the performance of a hypercar, chock full of amazing tech, charging speeds quicker than filling with petrol, and for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Game over for combustion clunkers, unless you…

Disruptions to daily life are now treated like customers getting poor service on a holiday. The relentless pile-on of complaint, of course driven mostly by social media (that we live inside now). No sense of perspective…

Greek yoghurt is almost impossible to find in the shops. The cause is a viral trend about using it to make dishes like cheesecake. Look around and you’ll see evidence that our ‘real lives’ are increasingly just us…

When collective life is pulverised into a mass of fighting social media teams, fighting for status, the only thing that brings us together collectively is mass trending euphorias. The mad rush to join what everybody…

Today huge crowds gather mostly to see gigs. Why I call us a gig culture. But in 1851, they gathered at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, to see the wonders of modern science and technology, and how they would…

In many parts of Asia various measures to ration fuel have already begun. That’s because Asia is mostly still run by grown-ups, also why they took Covid much more seriously. Nothing in the West yet because the kidults…

Australia’s Trumps are mobilising. Amazing numbers of Australians who can’t stand Trump seem blissfully unaware how much One Nation and the new LNP love him and copy Trump’s playbook. Some of this group even travel to…

Social media has consequences. The wilful destruction of medical research in the US, at a time when medicine is making huge advances against major diseases, is entirely due to the power of health ‘influencers’ on social…

Social media means very large numbers of people you know are actually living in the US right now, because they live on social media. Social media has replaced any idea of a local community. I would say the majority view…

The great potential of AI. To shut everybody up. To counteract the destructive wrecking ball of social media. Social media culture believes everybody knows everything, about everything. A culture of opinions. It’s a…

It’s testament to the genius of the engineering design that the Model Y is the biggest selling passenger vehicle in the world, including all combustion and hybrid vehicles, for the third year in a row. And this despite…

Chinese cars are already dominant in Australia. Fleet sales make it look like older Japanese brands are, but they’re not. Ordinary Australians are already buying more Chinese cars than anything else, because they’re…

In a social media culture, somebody has to be to blame for everything, because that fires up the imitative rivalry. The fake debates, the outrage. Like right now, with fuel. The most common explanations you hear are…

Politicans are now tame servants of social media. The most urgent things aren’t done, for fear of some anti-vote viral trend on the socials. Social media has created cultures of the most toxic, rigid conformity,…

We’re doing nothing in social media society to prepare for this disaster, for fear of enraging the social media mob. Prepare yourselves for what’s coming, folks, because nobody is coming to help. Maybe the anti-EV and…

Already seeing in my own daily social groups the modern delight of ‘calm-mongering’. The people or paid talking heads whose job it is to take a critical situation and tell everybody to calm down, ‘nothing to see here’.…

Arson attack against a Western Sydney Tesla dealer yesterday. I worried this bullshit would start again. Basic civil order is the first thing to go with upset kidults, especially when they lose their petrol and diesel.…

I’ve posted a few times here about how the division between city and country is mostly fake. What we call the country is really just the extractive industries cities (where nearly all Australians live) use to extra the…

Loomer is the type of kidult taking over the world. A social media influencer, and a moron in just about every way, with deeply disfigured plastic surgery face to put the icing on the cake. As I sit here in a nation…

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,…

Here’s another window into kidult culture. Which is social media culture, we live inside the platforms now, they replaced public life. The pandemic is not over. The definition of a pandemic hasn’t changed, it’s defined…

The head of Australia’s largest super fund speaking the truth about housing that Australians never want to hear. ‘Supply’ won’t fix the housing crisis. Nobody is going to flood the market with cheap houses. It would…

Times are tough and are likely going to get very nasty. Possibly a recession. All of this was avoidable, but humans refused to give up fighting for social status, to follow what knowledge told us needed doing. And so,…

Saving petrol ad from the 1970s. These worked, though this is before social media. Social media turns everything into warring gangs, the car ‘enthusiasts’ are just as likely now to use double the petrol if asked to cut…

And this is for electricity at 15c/kWh. Most EV charging plans are half that, so over 80km for each $1 of electricity. If you charge with solar, it's free. Australians are some of the slowest in the world to adopt EVs.…

And noting again that at 15c/kWh, this is twice what most EV users can charge at overnight. So those 2c figures are actually 1c figures. Only just over 10% of Australians have bought electric vehicles. It's…

You don’t have to be very old to remember when Australia took pride in eliminating disease. Now gone in social media kidult society, where we celebrate ‘living with infections’. Because otherwise we can’t go out to…

A street in Shanghai. Teslas abound, because EVs abound. China doesn't have the obstructive adolescent whine of social media to prevent social progress.

It’s difficult to comment on this because so many people have had their lives transformed by this funding. But to put things into perspective here, the NDIS is currently costing $15 billion more per year than the entire…

Originally Anzac Day was a day of solemn mourning, and marches were often near silent as many who lined the streets were relatives of those who died. It was like a symbolic funeral. It started in 1916, in the middle of…

You can wish people weren’t so gullible, that they believe all of the total rubbish coming out of shock jock journalism every day. For example this one. Australian government employment as a proportion of total…

75% of Trump voters in focus groups are now saying they wish they hadn’t voted for him. In Australia the local Trumpies like Pauline are slow to realise they’re on a sinking ship. Many Australians may still vote for…

Outside all of the sponsored fake debates that social media society mistakes for reality, things are happening. Big things. A revolution. Quite seriously, don’t live to regret being the person who shouted at windmills…

You won’t find an AI platform that would put out dangerous rubbish like this. Only social media, where reality itself is just chips in a status poker game. Social media is infinitely more dangerous than AI, because it…

The energy market regulator has a dilemma. Paying for network upkeep is done on the basis of a daily supply charge based on how much electricity people use. But because millions of Australians have now installed solar…

Lovely example of how the socials create a fantasy world, separate to the real world. This lady represents farmers who want to embrace renewables. Many of them won’t speak up because social media gives the impression…

Is it that hard to see that we actually live inside social media now? It is our society. It’s not ‘about’ it. It’s where lives are lived, inside these ‘vertical’ communities. To the tiniest level of detail. And the…

Fuel should have been rationed in Australia starting weeks ago. Much of the population acting like toddler pork chops during Covid makes all politicians too terrified to do anything. Global supplies are non-existent.…

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

Girard realised that imitation was the root of all human life. Copying one another, our deepest passion. But he went a step further, because he realised *why* we do it. It’s rivalry. Imitative rivalry, his main concept.…

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

The softly-softly 'market' approach to transition to renewable energy and EVs won't work. For starters markets are a fiction. And humans simply won't change if important change is needed, unless they're forced to. For…

Supporters of all political parties are now rushing to adopt EVs. Even One Nation. Politics is a waste of our time, it’s nothing but a popularity contest between groups of people fighting for status. The material…

With home batteries I’m seeing time and again the same thing I’m seeing with EVs. Many people avoiding Tesla, because ‘Elon’. It’s your money. I can only advise what a terrible mistake that can be. Tesla is far and away…

I’ve seen so many people defend this sort of thing because their righteous cause was deemed to be more important. You won’t find a better example of how social media is causing the collapse of civil society. You open…

Lots of attention goes to the fuel that is pumped at servos. Nobody mentions that they're actually massive vacuum pumps, sucking Australian money from our wallets and sending it directly overseas. To the tune of $165…

Formula 1 now has its own anti-vax movement. The anti-battery/anti-electric crowd. F1 cars have been hybrids for years already, it’s made them faster than they’ve ever been before, while using much less fuel so…

The Chinese play a long game the kidult West has no hope of understanding or emulating. The Chinese text on the left says that there’s no rush, everything is under control. Asia’s capacity to think and act over…

Adult life in a social media society.

Modern conservatives for decades have sold the idea that government is a barrier to prosperity and aspiration. The dreaded ‘red tape’ of government bureaucrats, with their taxes and regulations. They claim to ‘free’ us…

I'd qualify this. We're ALL 'idiots', outside the areas we actually know something about. What social media did was let everybody's opinion on things they know nothing about suddenly have real power. That's literally…

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

Think about what that astronomically quick injection of machine intelligence is doing to our cultures. For me, after years of social media making whole societies fight each other in teams, to get social status, this…

I fully expect the morally righteous army of social media zombies to deny use on themselves of miraculous new drugs developed using AI, should they need them. Though that ship has sailed, alas. It was largely AI that…

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v…

Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. As a culture, and like most other nations on Earth, we’re dying out. Our birth rates are at terminally low levels. Cost is often given as a reason for this.…

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…

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…

If the polling is on track, One Nation - 53 seats. The National Party ceases to exist. The Liberals become a minor nothing party. Remembering that One Nation is nothing more than the Australian arm of Trumpism. Do you…

I’m posting a lot about medical science breakthroughs lately, because it’s another revolution happening in our lifetimes. And can you guess the major thing that has accelerated these ‘remarkable’ cures for diseases that…

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…

When i say we’re living a genuine revolution in medicine right now, it’s hard to convey just how enormous that shift is. This cardiologist yesterday responding to the news of the new anti-cholesterol drug was forced to…

There is no public backlash against AI. Just as there is none against windmills, and solar farms, and EVs and vaccines. ‘The public’ is not a thing, thinking and acting. Activists enlist members of the public to their…

Volvo make lovely cars. Their new EX60 EV though shows again the elephant in the room. It copies Tesla in just about every detail, including with mega-casting construction. But doesn’t have the self-driving, just for…

What China has done in the last 50 years is miraculous, unprecedented in all history. It’s lifted 900 million people out of poverty. In doing that it also made the rest of the world richer, most countries’ economies…

Current polling says this could even happen. A few things about that. 1) Like Trump in the US and Farage in the UK, the schtick is this is ‘the people’ fighting back. In reality all 3 are just a different elite, taking…

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

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…

I paid for my Shingrix shots myself a couple of years ago (I’m not 65 yet). One of the most important investments you could ever make. Kids vaccinated against chickenpox will never need this when they’re older. They’ll…

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.…

What’s another passion of adolescents? Historically, their cars. So we should expect to see that reflected in a ‘kidult’ culture, where adults think, feel and act like adolescents. Australians have more than 4 times as…

It’s been very dark and cold and wet in this part of world in the past week or so. That pushes down solar production, but would have been outstanding wind generation weather, day and night (even more at night). Except…

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…

Since the 1990s we’ve lived the disruption of social media to our lives. It’s been so destructive, we’re stripping away centuries of human progress in the space of a few decades. I encourage you to view the current…

Social media is our greatest threat because it taps into our deepest desire. To fit in, social conformity. Imitating others so as to form a team, which then battles other teams. In this case, kids belting their jaws…

Ask anybody how our democracies work and they’ll trot out the usual guff about parliaments and elections and voting etc. Since the 1990s all of that is gone. Social media algorithms govern our societies. Humans are…

There’s concern that AI assists people to do stupid things. Have we forgotten the way social media has almost destroyed our civic life, including our politics, but also our personal lives, and mental health in many…

The great lie of the Covid pandemic was that public health action against the virus was both unpopular, and damaging, to people and the ‘economy’. In reality millions were lifted out of poverty for the first time in…

One of the most interesting ‘data points’ I’ve seen in a while. The introduction of the smartphone corresponded with a pronounced drop in birth rates. As always people assume the device is the issue, rather than what…

Taylor is sane, and mostly sensible. But revealing here the deep belief system of the US, that is really what’s destroying it. Not fascism. The belief that ‘the people’ and their ‘free speech’ run democracies. And the…

I’ve discussed with a few people the idea that Chinese technology spies on you. You know what does spy on you, relentlessly, every moment? Social media. You’re the product. It collects vast data on you and on what you…

Social media viral trends become seen *as* reality. Like the current trending outrage, that AI data centres are colossal users of water. We’re trapped inside social media bubbles, mistaking their viral outrages for…

When social media came for: - gender, I ignored it - windmills, I ignored it - solar farms, I ignored it - EVs, I ignored it - democracy, I ignored it. It transforms everything into social comparison, the fight for…

Musk is the world’s first trillionaire today, like him or hate him, because he represents something that is missing in our lives. He’s like a hybrid of Jules Verne, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He promises grand…

Why do I dislike social media so much? This table gets to the reason. Civilisation itself only exists because of the control of contagion. Of all forms, not just infections. All of our lives today emerged as a control…

Part 2 on Musk. And for the millionth time, I’m not a ‘fan’ of Musk. Nor am I against Musk. I just want to understand the specific material things he does, which I think are revolutionary. There’s critical things to…

I think we’re maybe at the yellow box right now. I can only suggest people ignore the content of every public debate, and just feel and measure the level of anger. About everything. The content is irrelevant. It’s only…

Pauline is the PM you get if you allow social media to continue to replace the countries we live in. What she believes is irrelevant, the same as Trump. Her constituency is anger, anger she mostly generates herself. And…

Human social life is equivalent to evolution. All of our trending obsessions are meaningless. Only one thing really matters, for our survival. We have to ruthlessly control how much humans are allowed to imitate one…

I was delighted to see this group go belly-up this week. Firstly because like all social media groups, it was destroying the town and the people in it. (Pretty much the whole town was a member.) But also because it’s a…

The English so often talk about ‘going up’ to bed. Bungalows i.e. single-storey living have traditionally been associated with lower status, with the old and infirm. Again, this is about status. In a show like Downtown…

While people keep playing their goodies and baddies status games inside social media bubbles, Tesla keeps building things. In this case its 1000th Supercharger in Australia, in Byron Bay. This is big investment in…

Knowledge on the left, socials on the right. As long as we continue to allow social media to operate, we’re destroying our own cultures from the inside-out.

At a time regional towns are ceasing to have any reason to exist at all, every attempt to actually build something there, whether it be wind and solar farms, or data centres, is met by organised teams of social media…

The remarkable thing about the Cold War was that the invention of weapons of transcendent power, that would lead to ‘mutually assured destruction’, actually stopped the rivalry. Just as transcendent gods (religion) and…

This stupidity of social media pisses me off, that it labels things now with an AI warning. None of my posts are generated by AI. I may use AI to generate a graphic, or as part of my research. (The graphics are what…

Really quite bored with the socials, I only post here as a sort of online diary now, for my own future reference. And enjoy it when it’s of interest to somebody else and there’s the odd bit of conversation. But that’s…

All uncontrolled imitation, the simple act of people copying one another (our deepest passion), leads to violence. Here just one more social media viral trend that is progressing to the next stages. Anger, then rage,…

And one more viral outrage. To be specific here (outrages never do specifics). This isn’t a breach of copyright, which is only about copies and performances. AI is only learning from existing music so it can produce its…

People know my criticisms of social media. Not least that it provides a home and validity to the most bizarre and offensive fantasies, such as the belief you can not only ‘identify’ with having anatomical structures…

A pandemic of intelligence. We live in remarkable times, hidden from view by the daily dose of social media slop.

One of the most astonishing things that AI has already done, that nobody is really talking about. It has given us real-time instant translation between languages. And not just word-for-word translation. It captures…

I can’t emphasise enough that you’ll regret missing the revolutionary things happening in our societies right now, if you can’t escape social media bubbles. Any other time in history would look on and shake their heads…

We’ve accepted dirty air our whole lives, in a way we’d absolutely refuse to accept dirty water. Now venture capital, including the maligned AI companies, has put forward $500 million to help fix this obvious threat,…

For all the nuclear fans and social media experts out there who couldn’t even draw an atom, nuclear reactors use a shit-tonne of water. As do coal-fired power stations. Both are just big steam engines. And it has to be…

A trend I’ve noticed is the growth of female ‘whisperers’ online. Women who give advice to men on how to understand, relate to and seduce women. Contrast with the consent debates, the ‘no means no’ idea. These two…

It doesn’t matter if it’s windmills, data centres, electric cars, gender, or in this case Formula 1. The social media machine has only one product. Rage. Imitation produces rivalry. Rivalry produces rage. Social media…

Brockovich is that darling of American culture. The activist. Here also showing that the data centre trending viral outrage is not ‘the people’ or ‘the community’ rising up. It’s a handful of activists, like Brockovich,…

Social media immediately turned it into an us v them. Smart Americans v Dumb Europeans. Elite senior managers v poor workers on the lower 7 floors. Blah blah blah. It took AI less than 10 seconds to reveal that the real…

I genuinely believe many if not most are simply unaware we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution. That thing that transformed civilisation itself a few hundred years ago, completely upending all comfortable…

This is the federal President of the Liberal Party. Elected unopposed this year. The reason people stopped voting for the Liberals is because they ceased to exist as the Liberal Party years ago. The problem for Tone is…

The toxic lure of social media is that it looks and feels like a ‘community’. As I’ve posted about many times, people now live ON social media, it has actually replaced physical communities. This is from Facebook’s own…

A generation ago only serious criminals would even think about doing this. Now it's sport. Imagine driving around slicing fuel hoses at servos. This isn't about EVs versus combustion vehicles. This is about the…

Our supposedly ‘democratic’ age is an illusion caused by the creation of institutional checks and balances created by earlier nobles in king’s courts, in rivalry with the king. Those checks and balances were invented to…

I politely ask people to check every day whether what they think they know about what's happening in the world is only the latest viral outrage, generated on social media platforms. This is The Guardian, a reputable…

lol, awww Ian, it's ALWAYS meant that. Imitation breeds rivalry, rivalry breeds rage and disrespect. Social media is an imitation/social comparison machine. I sincerely hope people eventually all discover this pattern.…

Step outside the team sports that social media creates on issues, and look at things with a fresh pair of eyes. For example this, try looking at it as neither a pro-trans or anti-trans person. Surely something is amiss.…

Many of us lived the transition from social networking online, which was integrated with our physical communities. To social media, which ‘feeds’ you a version of social life, with no connection to your physical…

Traditional media is now caught up in the snowballing viral pearl-clutching over AI. This story of course framed as dreadful AI leading people astray. But where are these people being led astray? On social media. By…

One of the reasons discussions about transgender are so fraught is that they mix up two fundamentally different movements. The various sex and gender movements of the 20th century (and before), and the transgender…

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…

The most trivial, tiny social transactions are now processed through these platforms. The idea social media is an ‘information’ technology is nonsense. It’s a social technology, it replaces social life. How do people…

This. Regional areas have no real reason to exist now, that their founding rationale of resources for the cities is increasingly irrelevant. But as renewable energy and data centre hubs, they can become important again.…

I’m in the tiny minority who finds the ‘alarming’ pace of AI development the most exciting thing about it. The sooner it breaks the status quo we’re living, the better. Including destroying the hypnotising hold social…

I live in the regions, and I want them to survive. They won’t when their only idea is to become tourist locations for bored city people. Tourism generates activity, people passing through, it doesn’t and can’t create…

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking…

I unlocked my FB profile for now. Locking profiles was mostly just another thing people did, because everybody else was doing it. More imitation. Pretending it was about privacy, while sharing and even living much of…

Australia. Now the land of ‘community consultation’. Meaning a handful of twits in each town running obstruction for anything that was built after about 1810. The Australia of my youth wanted to be at the forefront of…

Anthony Albanese announcing a national approach to AI today. Having largely missed the opportunity to lead the world with renewable energy because of a decade of ignorant pigshit from Australia’s conservatives when they…

I do realise it's a lost cause talking about Covid. It no longer 'trends' in kidult/social media culture, therefore it doesn't exist. I'm still avoiding it like nothing has changed. You can see here medical researchers…

Council meeting again tonight. Another great example of the terrible mistake we’ve made with the idea of ‘the people’, and ‘community consultation’. Now it just means asking anybody who wants to offer an opinion, to…

Most human-created music is slop. The idea 'AI slop' is social media slop. We can't distinguish between social media and reality now. I don't think I've spoken with one person about AI, anywhere, who doesn't just…

I thought a good example of the way social media works. Pretty much everybody would read this and assume it was about AI. The big growth in data centre electricity use in Ireland happened before the introduction of AI.…

The ‘code’ of human civilisation is imitation. Social media hacked it 3 decades ago, and we didn’t even notice. That’s what a hack is, a deception. Everybody, even distinguished scholars, who felt comfortable in the…

Surely it's obvious that without social media and its weekly viral outrages, most of the public wouldn't even know data centres exist, let alone what they do? Don't we ever get tired with the daily fighting and…

I’ve posted before about how social media is confused with social networking, which came before it. The two main differences that turned social networking into socially toxic imitative rivalry, were: 1) the creation of…

Remove the feed. Remove the ability to comment outside your own network of contacts. It's our social networks that moderate our beliefs. Social media replaced those networks - the old social networking - with networks…

The medium is the message. It was social media severing our ties to our own social networks, which evolved over generations and included the institutions that operate our society, that unleashed perpetual rivalry and…

Why are we still subsidising motorists with petrol and diesel cars? Diesel subsidies alone cost Australians $15 billion per year. That would put an abundance of electric fast-chargers on every major road, with plenty of…

In the deepest anthropological sense, what social media has done is strip away multi-dimensional social networks, that evolved over generations, and replaced them with flat networks of visibility. It replaced belonging…

Imagine how expensive your car would be if car companies had to come to every home to build your vehicle from scratch, in your driveway. Cars are affordable because we don’t do that. We build them in factories, with…

Much was made of an AI agent ‘escaping’ its system in the past week. Social media escaped into our societies decades ago now. Doing untold destruction to societies and individuals. Why do we allow social media to…

The next time some pumped-up ambitious social climbing influencer using social media to promote themselves tells you your local council is incompetent and corrupt, and that's why you have potholes, think about this.…

Somebody at least honest enough to say idiot Terminator movies are doing their thinking on AI for them. Social media went rogue 3 decades ago and has been a wrecking ball through entire civilisations. Few even seem to…

People with violently opposed political views, when given just 10 minutes talking to an AI chatbot, suddenly lost much of their rage towards the other side. This is what I've posted about here - AI is destroying social…

The Tasmanian anti-AI protest is classic social media identity culture, versus AI. I'm so enjoying AI sitting that culture on its righteous arse.

Tesla is finalising another genius bit of engineering. If you have the home battery and wall charger and vehicle, it will allow you to use your car batteries to top-up your home battery, as needed. This is a post about…

Was at a tyre workshop chatting to the owner while they were working on my tyres. We were talking about tyre wear on EVs, which can vary depending on how you drive, the road surface etc. He said ‘it’s just that they’re…

It’s wonderful to see people escape the social media bubble and experience things as they really are, particularly when they’re also local. We’re so numb to the wonders we’re living. This was a tough test, it included…

I try to use images as compressed concepts. As a way of conveying complex ideas at a glance. AI is stunningly good at it. Like this one. While we physically still live in towns and cities, this is actually our culture…

It’s now trending on social media to label everything made by AI. For a reason nobody can really explain, except that it’s trending. Trending replaced thought years ago. I thought it was time to start labelling things…

Went to a servo this afternoon. I needed a carton of milk. When I got there, the young guy behind the counter was giving a long sermon to some poor young woman about how the petrol prices mean we should be refining more…

Roads are public infrastructure. They shouldn’t be user-pays. Imagine saying people should pay at the front door of the hospital, or to get into school every day. Fuel excise doesn’t pay for roads. How many times does…

And another AI post. What trends is what’s real, in zombie Western social media culture. Progressive politicians are making great inroads into rural States in the US, with confected outrages over AI. South Australian…

I remember when coal-fired power stations opened, how people treated it as an event, something interesting to see. And when wind turbines started in Australia, the same, people flocked to have a look in a wow this is…

I encourage people to listen to actual experts, when you’re thinking about AI. Like Geoffrey Hinton, the man who more or less invented it, and won the Nobel Prize for it. Is AI already conscious? He says yes, has been…

Brian showing his age. And that even smart people are swept up in dumb viral outrages. Incidentally I asked an AI chatbot the same question and it gave me the exact album cover. Meta AI is social media AI. There’s your…

The thing that saddens me the most, as I approach retirement, is seeing the probably unfixable damage social media culture has done to public health. I grew up in a world where widespread public health was still new,…

You can watch the battle between social media and AI every day. Humans are just the foot soldiers in the battle. For example, here. The government is doing public health work, notifying Australians over 50 of steps they…

The huge jump in the price of meat in Australia in the past decade got me wondering. We produce a LOT of meat, it didn’t make sense. It turns out the main reason is the same reason gas (and through gas, electricity) got…

If you’re swept up in the viral outrage over data centres, here’s a tip to make them go away. Get off social media and the internet, and stop streaming and using AI in record amounts. You’re the cause of the data…

People complaining because their social media slop, which they've been inhaling for over 3 decades, now has AI in it.

I often say as a culture we live inside social media. Here’s a direct example. I saw this on a Tesla group. Notice how people literally curate their ‘real-life’ experiences to match how they see things on social media…

How do we reconcile that supposedly authoritarian cultures are so much better at doing the things democratic societies need to do? All societies function in the same way, the democracy vs authoritarianism thing is a…

The brute fact our countercultural revolution societies don't want to accept is that hierarchy is not only inevitable, but is also the way societies evolved to suppress violence. The true function of hierarchy isn't…

I often say we live inside social media now, that it hijacked our entire culture. Here's what I mean, in numbers. Social media platforms are private businesses, mostly owned by American billionaires. They now own…

Blue is social media. Green is AI. I think a lesson in how the loud voices of viral rage hide realities. Despite the perception that there’s some AI ‘backlash’, in fact it’s far and away the most popular thing humans…

This is what you see in a culture that still has the excitement of building things. The celebration of achieving unbelievable things. We used to be like this, we had technological World Fairs to show off the latest…

Astroturfers (people who create fake ‘grassroots community’ movements) also create ‘turnkey’ action kits, which they distribute to communities to use, to create the impression the community has objections or support.…

The community is getting more angry, and more violent. Coles workers should try working for a council. The more social humans get, the more violent they become. Unlike the warm hugs idea that being social = people…

It's pleasing to see recognition that social media literally dissolves societies, amongst the capitalism is to blame framings that never lead anywhere.

Amongst the hysteria about AI taking over the world, we still forget I think that a technology already did that, and in much more damaging ways. Social media is a giant machine that transforms all of human life into…

It’s sad, disappointing and entirely unsurprising that humanity turned AI into just one more pathetic status game squabble between rival groups. Social media culture does that to everything, everything is a pile-on. Few…

How do people not notice these waves-upon-waves of protesting outrage? The pattern that dominates our social media culture? No 'community says no' to anything. The community is not a person, with points of view and…

Everywhere is getting more angry and violent. Schools are horrendous. See the enormous jump in incidents since Covid 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns are often blamed for this, but it's what people did during lockdowns that's the…

The ridiculous idea that men have to be learn to be better men is just more social media-driven drivel. Whether it’s the Neanderthals in the Manosphere or the semi-therapists like this bloke, teaching men how to be…

While social media life has delivered another victory for Pauline Trump, this time in WA, have a look at what AI is doing for scientific research. Google has developed an AI system called Co-Scientist, that dramatically…

The Anglo nations are enslaved by social media, the bubble they now live inside. All are rushing to install their own local Trumps, the social media President. Despite the complete train wreck Trump is in the US. Facts…

Trending viral social media outrages become real-life rage. Farmers were openly embracing renewables projects, a desperately needed added source of income immune from drought and other bad years, until the Nationals…

Treasury has warned the Australian government that we're missing out on the AI revolution. And that the feared job losses from AI aren't occurring in the places adopting AI. The Anglo nations - the US, the UK, us, to…

I was paying my rates the other day, and looked at the itemised costs. And while my rates are quite high for a regional town, when I looked at the itemised bill I thought this is such a pittance for what I’m getting.…

With Bathurst coming up, even if you’re not a car racing fan, there’s a genius to V8 Supercars that I think it’s still super important for everybody to understand. A specific Australian genius, that goes well beyond car…

“These are friendships that often play out on social media and group chats, which can quickly turn to bullying and harassment,” she says. “That leads to them becoming isolated and withdrawn.” If we don’t shut down…

It’s a measure of the power of social media trending BS that pretty much everybody assumes interpersonal relationships between people, and particularly between the sexes, have become dramatically more violent in our…

Social media transforms everything into rivalry between social groups. Team sports. The most common views on all social issues reduce down to membership of one or other social group, at war with some other social…

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones…

Those worried AI will make us all forget how to think were never school teachers. Nobody was doing much thinking for years before AI arrived. (Sadly, including many school teachers.) Lots of people copying each other's…

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often…

I’m the only person at work still wearing a mask, and probably the only person among my immediate friends who still does as well. Even before Covid, mask-wearing was common in Asia. They were hit by the original SARS…

If you want a real indicator of the damage social media is doing to societies, go out today and buy a hard copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. Skinny as a regional paper.

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

Most have swallowed the PR that there’s nothing that could be done about Covid, that we just have to ‘live with’ it, ‘like the flu’. (We don’t live with the flu, we spend billions controlling it.) Because of such…

Social media drives families and friends apart, and splinters public life as well. When we say ‘society is divided’, it isn’t really. That’s just social media’s business model. Its algorithm.

The catastrophic collapse in birth rates around the world is usually attributed to the young not having enough money to raise families. It is that too, but there’s a fascinating extra bit. We’re in a ‘relationship…

Today's Sydney Morning Herald is the thinnest I've ever seen it. Feels about a dozen pages. It costs $4.80. Nobody is getting value for money there. Social media is hollowing out all of our established institutions and…

Putnam is one of the main people who identifed how societies are now structured like high schools. His work is also a bit famous for showing that smoking and being a social outcast are about equally as damaging to…

I have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that…

Millions will defend travel as the having of ‘experiences’. The funny thing is that everybody seems to go to the same places, at the same time. Almost like they’re copying other people, like buying shoes, phones, cars…

Propaganda and hysteria now dominate public life. Anti-renewables propaganda, sponsored by fossil fuel companies, encourages Australians to believe that vast areas of Australia will need to be covered with windmills and…

I think it should seem strange to us, that at the same time the ‘world has never been more connected’, through social media, we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. That seems like a paradox, but it isn’t when…

Twitter and Truth Social Trump deciding on TikTok. If you don’t think social media now not only runs the world, but is our whole world, look a bit harder.

In China, social media is heavily regulated, and some platforms (like this one) are not even available. Our patronising hubris in the West says that’s because they’re ‘authoritarian’ and ‘censor’ speech. Read what these…

Personally I think they should close all social media platforms. We’re trapped inside their bubbles, while the world crumbles around us as we play status and identity games, that drive their algorithms. Society is…

We moved very quickly from sage nodding at ‘when something is free, you are the product’, to ‘without social media my life is over’.

Something happened overnight that shows the hijacking of America by social media. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci, the leading public health figure in America. Fauci has done…

Exhibit B for social media hijacking societies. The social media billionaire bros at Trump’s inauguration overnight. Seated ahead of his actual Cabinet.

This is morons trying to win social media wars, rather than running a country. China will be pissing itself laughing, and US automakers will be furious, they've invested billions. The US and the UK both accelerating…

The battle for status is the organising principle behind all human life, at all ages. Status is also identity. Without status, you’re nobody. Also why the fundamental act of a human being is to copy, or imitate. We…

I get exhausted even watching the curated lives helicopter parenting creates for kids. Trying to create ‘enriching experiences’ for the kids etc. The kids nearly always overly anxious and precious about everything,…

The First Fleet was a convict transport. Ask those convicts if they’d celebrate this day. ‘Australia’ began in 1901, more than a century after the First Fleet. We don’t even know our own history. I have zero interest in…

This will achieve exactly nothing, just like painting swastikas on Tesla buildings. This is the sort of performative rubbish social media has encouraged us to think changes the world. Really it just makes us feel good…

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with…

Humans imitate each other. Not just every now and then, it’s pretty much all they ever do, at every age. And why do they imitate? To achieve status. To belong, to have an identity. Imitation gives you membership of any…

We can shake our heads in disbelief at this. But Peter Dutton isn’t far away from this sort of culture war nonsense. Both creatures of social media society.

This person is using Facebook as if Facebook IS Bathurst. That’s the new norm, we live inside social media platforms, we’re not talking about our towns here, this IS our towns. Seamless, people don’t see them as two…

The Facebook franchise we used to call Bathurst is furious. Prepare for an ‘onslaught’, apparently. ‘We know who they are’, ‘not a big enough town to hide’! This is the switch in the social media bait and switch. The…

People think you’re unhinged when you tell them social media is destroying our lives.

If what the Trump-Musk forces are doing to the US concerns you right now, be assured the Australian arm of the lunacy is geared up and ready to go here too. Social media is their assault weapon. You’ll find many foot…

Want a window into the manipulation that social media is? Yesterday I posted about the myths around the lifetime of batteries in EVs (they basically last forever, in real terms). Within seconds this AI-generated anti-EV…

Got my own fuel bowser in the shed now. Zero cents per litre. SKY News Australia told me this morning that Australians don’t want EVs. Looking forward to watching them donate hundreds to the Saudi Arabia and Texas…

Glad to see even mainstream media now reporting that EV batteries last and last and last, and you can buy a secondhand EV with no anxiety. Battery ranges well in excess of 90% of new, even after 120,000km.

This is the true genius of Australia, not understood much by Australians, and not at all by the Brits or Americans. A genius now being destroyed every day by social media, importing lunatic ideas from the US and UK. The…

When people have moved on from the current trending fad around Tesla-hating (and they will, it’s just a fad), I encourage anybody to explore the full Tesla ecosystem. Extraordinary creativity and engineering. Here,…

I have no energy bills. And that increasingly includes for running the cars, a household’s biggest energy cost by far. Much of the Australian population could be the same. But they‘re stuck in fake wars against EVs and…

The American writer Noah Smith capturing here what I also believe about societies. Everything we call politics is a lie. Left to themselves, humans do one thing only. They fight each other for status, usually in teams.…

I have a couple of ex-good friends, who spend quite a lot of time on social media trying to convince everybody that vaccines are bad for them. We no longer talk. Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease. The…

Social media is not part of society. It has become society. It hijacked it. We transact everything from our most intimate and personal lives, to our businesses and our politics inside it. It's owned by American and…

Social media is turning the whole world into a violent self-righteous mob.

Every time I see a little Trump-wannabe here in Australia, determined to turn Australia into Trumpland (wave to Peter Dutton and Clive Palmer), I remember that Australians have the 7th best life expectancy in the world.…

(He said yes, just to get that out of the way.) I’ve worked in places where I thought senior management and a Board were criminally incompetent. But I still thought the institution and the people working for it were…

Conversation usually reinforces the status games of our lives. You don’t want to say the wrong things, wrong being what violates the spoken and unspoken rules of what keeps your social groups together. The author here…

I have a few friends here who use OVO (myself included now). With an EV their overnight 8c/kWh charge is fantastic (AGL offer similar). They also give you completely free electricity between 11 and 2 every day. You may…

Look at the headlines major media outlets are now writing. Shit is hitting the fan. Amusingly, the ‘alarmists’ were doctors and scientists, while 5 years ago we all followed the advice of politicans and social media…

Toby Walsh in the Herald today, saying things about social media that I often say about it. That it’s hijacked our societies, we transact everything from our personal to professional to political lives inside it. That…

Isn’t social media doing tremendous work? First, live with a pandemic! Now, live with ciggas! Wrap it all in some lame-brained conspiracy bullshit and people lap it up.

The danger of social media isn't the information (and mis- and disinformation) it shares. Societies don't run on information. They run on status and trust. The real danger of SM is that it allows idiots to connect with…

The team sports of social media can achieve such a level of righteousness, that the team becomes a mob. People call this 'changing the world'. Really it's just being a mob. Looting, arson, vandalism. Some even gun CEOs…

A motoring writer used AI to try to understand the drop in Tesla sales. The AI said 'with 70% certainty' that it was the introduction of the new Model Y, the most popular car in the world, and the delays in changing the…

I'm genuinely curious what all the those who support the anti-Tesla protests have to say about this. There's no washing your hands of it, no half-pregnant membership of the mob. 130,000 employees and millions of Tesla…

This has nothing to do with me owning a Tesla. It's to do with mob behaviour. How many carmaker CEOs could people actually name? Do they know their political positions on things? Do they happily support the brutal Saudi…

1 year of free fast-charging. Tesla offering 5000km of free fast-charging on run-out stock of the previous Model Y. Incredible bargains out there. In the UK not only have EV sales surged, petrol and diesel sales have…

Grok is a new AI platform. It sees what Covid is and does. Social media calls it a cold.

I had hoped this bullshit would skip Australia and NZ. But the glory of social media is that one idiot doing something is quickly imitated by other idiots, who I actually don't think even believe they're changing the…

The thought of the MAGAs now buying Teslas to emulate the Great Leader amuses me. The thought of even more social media mob zombies heading out with spray paint doesn‘t. It’s like living in a childcare centre for…

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do…

Let’s say people decided that those who drive petrol and diesel vehicles are supporting the authoritarian Saudi regime and causing dangerous climate change, so others should key their cars, set them alight and abuse the…

Ultra-conservatives realised they can vacuum up votes of young men with a steady diet of angry social media and radio. Trump's success is largely that. Dutton is emulating him, with some success.

Social media had a big Bathurst victory yesterday. You’ll read about it in Council news in the coming days. Meanwhile in the US a social media cult destroying America is under assault from a social media mob destroying…

Two Australian Tesla owners discussing their car servicing. I honestly do pity those bogged down in social media anti-EV (and now anti-Tesla) tripe.

In the UK the social media idiocy is focused on split-system AC. The fossil fuel industry there sponsors the BS, just as they sponsor a lot of the anti-EV BS here. You can see how how they shape their strategy by…

The Los Angeles Times calls what’s happening ‘troubling’, while people here cheer on the destruction. The Times notes this is an American disease. I’ve worked for organisations with toxic senior leadership. It never…

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…

The Guardian calling it out. None of the 'teams' in the gender wars has it right. They're using peoples' bodies and identities as ammunition in a social media-driven battle for status, led by activists. Lives are being…

The biggest story in the world yesterday, that was barely reported. PNG turned off social media. It’s had enough of these platforms trashing its society. But just wait, it won’t last. Ordinary people and businesses…

In Bathurst social media warriors are outraged that Council has a single electric truck. But it’s an open question whether towns even exist now anyway, or whether they’re just a collection of social media groups. (And…

I saw a local politician complain about windmills being 'as tall as Sydney Tower!' as a reason to reject them. The reason they make them so tall now is because of morons like that politician. A few tall ones means fewer…

Many Australians believe the car industry is a competition between ICEs and EVs. There is no competition, ICEs are being phased out globally. Not one car company is planning to keep building petrol and diesel vehicles,…

Murdoch is society's cancer. Social media is that cancer metastasising. Start fights, fights generate teams, teams generate votes. Always the same business model.

Given that access to quality medical care is increasingly near impossible to get, and that even health staff are caught up in delusional fantasies perpetrated by social media like anti-vax, and ‘living with’ pandemics,…

Measles outbreaks in Western Australia and Victoria. Tthe world’s most contagious disease. The cause is 100% people using social media to run their lives, with Vitamin A and other ‘natural’ bullshit, instead of a…

As an Australian, when I see pics like this, I don’t ooh and ahh about what a beautiful place it is, or about what a great place that would be to take a holiday, or to churn up with a 4WD. The last thing I want to feel…

The fascism/Nazi rubbish on social media, in relation to both Trump and Tesla, is historically ignorant (no surprise there, this is social media), but even worse misdagnoses fundamentally what's happening in the US, and…

Two friends of friends in their late-30s/early 40s had heart attacks last year. One had two, in one year. Previously perfectly healthy with no heart problems. Doctors baffled! There’s no mystery, as Peter says, an…

Hilarious, the man who wants to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear reactors Australia doesn’t even need thinks spending on health and education is a ‘waste’ of money. The cuts to the public service he wants would…

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…

It won't be long now until the clown car drives off the road all by itself. No need for you to become a violent gang member and head out to loot and burn anything. No threat of fascism or Nazis, that's all cartoon…

What's happening in the US has not the slightest resemblance to fascism, though social media is desperate for it to be that because Nazis are such juicy memes. It's the royal court of King Donald. The return of…

Ties with nuclear energy as the most fundamentally stupid idea in the history of Australian politics. Vote-buying desperation.

Social media is spreading American 'gang' politics globally. Everything is always gang warfare in American politics, without a proper public sphere everybody just puts a gang together, to go to war against other gangs.…

Flu kills between 6-50,000 Americans every year. Covid is no longer trending, which in our new social media lives means it no longer exists. Covid doesn’t have any social media accounts.

Predicting elections is a mug’s game when politics has become infected by the fads and fashions of social media - by what trends. Entire populations can turn on a dime overnight. But right now, Peter Dutton would be…

Read the tidal wave of whinging and whining in the comments on this post. That’s social media life. Like an inflamed haemorrhoid on the arse of society.

You could just not post a picture of your baby at all. People know what a dummy is. Everything from the tiniest, most intimate and personal trivia through to our professional and political lives is being actually lived…

The English have a long history of cross-dressing. Of pantomime, of androgyny. Done with real humour and flair. It was the collision of this playing with gender roles with social media that created transgender culture,…

For about a century feminism fought to define women independently of their relationship with men. Then men invented the transgender movement, used social media to make it go viral, and here we are, with massive protests…

The band photo is a window into what I call gig culture. When music became a dominant way to forge an identity and status in the adult world. It always was that for modern teenagers, their favourite acts are dominant…

Social media is now raising most of your young men and women. That should scare the hell out of us. These platforms need to be shut down, they're destroying societies. That's not alarmism, that's pointing out that…

You go girl. They’re too stupid to be able to even spell misogyny, let alone recognise when it slaps them in the face with pantomime dame handbags. By removing the right of women to define themselves, we erase women…

We have social media zombies bellowing about the Nazi fascist takeover of the US, out there burning and looting and protesting. I thought from the start of Trump’s term that the whole thing would fall in a heap of clown…

Australians for Natural Gas is a fake group invented and funded by the Australian gas industry. (Which is really a foreign-owned industry.) The fact we still call it ‘natural’ gas too goes back to a time in the past…

There was once not long ago no separate culture or space for children. They were just little adults, working alongside adults, at work. It was an entirely adult world. Then we invented schools, and suddenly there were…

Australia follows a pattern also seen in the US and other places. The real tension is between urban and rural environments. The more urban a society is, the more cosmopolitan voters tend to be. Living in cities…

I encourage you to read at least the 10-point summary here, the expert consensus. It’s a far better guide than ‘what everybody else is doing’. Social media society has replaced expertise with fashion, what’s ‘trending’.…

OK Australians. What outcome are we going to see today? 1. A landslide for the ALP. 2. A minority government headed by the ALP. 3. A minority government headed by the LNP. 4. A landslide for the LNP. 5. A majority…

SKY Australia is a sewer, and here they are, having almost single-handedly destroyed the LNP by forcing it further and further into the lunatic fringes, claiming it’s all your fault Australia. And that the answer is to…

Trump also shared this today. This isn’t fascism people, it’s children playing at being grown ups. It’s social media society.

Zali Steggall, when called a 'Climate 200 candidate' by a political journalist, brilliantly replied, why don't you call LNP politicians Gina Rinehart candidates then? Because that is exactly what they have been, for…

In Australia household solar generates more electricity than all of our coal-fired power stations combined. And it’s still growing at an enormous rate. That was thanks to John Howard, who introduced the subsides for…

You can see here in an article about Peter Dutton that conservatives deliberately target young working class men, tradies in utes, who historically voted for the ‘Left’ side of politics. Many of these young men have now…

Every single seat that ran an anti-wind farm campaign showed an increased vote to Labor. The community has spoken to the anti-wind farm loons, and what did it say? Quit your whining, and go away. Social media and its…

This Modigliani nude sold for over A$235 million. The art market is an ocean of fakes and forgeries, trying to cash in on the enormous money a tiny handful of works attract. Modigliani is one of the most copied artists…

It's only in popular music that fights over 'originals' really happen. Symphony orchestras and jazz bands dine out on almost nothing but 'covers'. It's not a musical thing, it's a social thing. Popularity culture always…

This is an adult, 2025. Actually a kidult. An adult who sees and understands the world as a teenager. That’s the model of adulthood we now use. This started in the 1960s, and social media has now entrenched it.

Those who won’t buy an EV because of range anxiety are the people who buy a truckload of food if the shops are going to be closed for a day. It’s a genuine mental illness (it’s in the name - anxiety). Australians drive…

Exhibit A, Patrik. A grown up. Exhibit B, Kevan. A social media kidult.

Nobody cared about energy until social media politics turned it into one more 'debate' to generate fights, to generate votes. The comments on posts like this show how the simple-minded were vacuumed up.

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy aren’t ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist‘, or any of the other dumb -isms we believe in. They’re giant high schools, where permanent…

Covid didn’t end. We’re just ignoring it, as kidults we got bored with it disrupting our ‘fun’, so we decided to let it maim and kill millions instead. Nothing exists in social media society unless it trends. Not much…

Kids don’t need lessons in how countries run. Countries are just social media now, and kids are already expert in social media. It will allow them to be kids for the rest of their lives.

There are still people who think we overdid it for Covid (people who don’t understand exponential growth and pandemics). If a pandemic influenza emerges, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Killing machines, mortality rates…

William Mulready's The Seven Ages of Man, depicting Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage', from As You Like it. The idea that humans go through seven life stages. It's this idea of stages that has now collapsed, into…

Australia subsidises utes and SUVs to the tune of $250 million a year. That’s a big reason lots of people drive them. It’s time Australians went back to driving sedans and station wagons. Both utes and SUVs have the…

5000 Australians died of Covid last year. More than two years after we celebrated Covid being ‘over’. That’s more than 5 times as many die in a bad flu year. If you didn’t die but had Covid, you helped Covid reach those…

The comments on this post show the terminal damage social media has done to public health.

I shared this before. Humans copy each other, to attain status in groups. This also means it’s easy for the tiniest handful of bad faith actors to create havoc. For example, installation of wind and solar farms has been…

One of the great myths of democracy is the idea of ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. There is no such thing. A tiny handful of activists stir up trouble, and then attribute that trouble to ‘the community’. We see that…

The thing that is most popular on social media, sharing information about yourself and what you’re doing, is also the thing that is most damaging to you and others. Some of it is obvious humblebragging, like people who…

I’m sure Australians will respond with the time-honoured public health strategies of more gigs, more flights overseas, and sending kids to school sick and coming to work sick to cough all over everybody else, because…

Now that even Musk sees what a bullshit artist Trump is, maybe the focus can go back onto Trump and off Tesla. Where the focus always should have been, except social media rots our brains.

Look at that huge surge in sales for Tesla in Australia, in May. Meanwhile all the Nazi-Tesla memes on social media have disappeared exactly as predicted, with no meaningful change to anything. Trump is still there.…

How many more years of the ‘living with Covid’ charade do you reckon we can keep up? Rather than do basic disease control, which we do for EVERY other disease, and have done for decades. Covid is the social media…

One to share with social media 'I do my own research' people, who wet their pants over mRNA technology.…

This car should blow people away, the new BYD Tang-L. A 7-seater. Coming to Australia this year apparently. Can charge at up to 1000 kW, meaning you could add 400km of range in only 5 minutes. The electric motors in it…

Anybody who knows even the barest history of feminism should be aghast that we’ve arrived at a point where no definition of a ‘woman’ is even allowed to exist. Women have been defined out of existence. The stupidities…

Young Chinese women now go ‘boy sober’ and date guys acting in roles from online games and movies instead. ‘Cosplay’ culture. Adolescents love to play with roles, in the 1970s androgyny was big, mostly men camping it…

A handful of loons force rounds of ‘community consultation’ that are a waste of everybody’s time. The loons are never satisfied, numpties who swallow every bit of rubbish social media throws at them. The Australian…

The reason kangaroos love golf courses is obviously the grass, but it’s also because the way they’re designed is the way Aboriginal Australians designed landscape to trap roos, with open plains of lush grass surrounded…

If all the ice in Greenland melts, ocean levels worldwide go up 7 metres. That’s the end of most coastal cities. All except one of Australia’s major cities are on the coast. 98% of Australians live in those cities.

The prosecution rests. Adulting 101 classes. It’s not about skills. The adult world itself ceased to exist, to use the skills in. Replaced now by social media transacting the personal, social, professional and…

We should always close the loop on social media hysterias. Just to see how they pan out, so we maybe won’t be so stupid next time.

Noah Smith here showing how America worked when people with different views were able to spread out geographically and each occupy their own space, leaving others mostly alone. And then suddenly social media came along…

"...the new Model Y, which was – BY A LONG WAY – Australia’s best-selling EV in May 2025." I don't post this to say I told you so, but to plead with people to stop confusing social media with society. Those eating a…

I know it upsets some, to dismiss trans, or even discuss it. Because like every other public issue today, there has been no discussion. People just joined a team, mostly driven through social media. They support one or…

Yesterday Lithgow was the coldest place in the entire country, in the morning. Today is even colder. The house is toasty warm, in every room, and has been all night. I heated up its thermal mass yesterday with free…

Robert Putnam tracked the shift in US culture from a focus on “I”, to a focus on “we” and then back again, over the past century. What creates a ‘we’ or a ‘public’ is existential threat, in this case WW1, Spanish Flu,…

‘Encouraging’ staff in healthcare to do infection control is like encouraging police to arrest lawbreakers. It’s the job, people. There are unfortunately many ‘cookers’ in healthcare too, anti-vaxers and anti-maskers,…

Most resist the idea of being a kidult culture. The leader of the free world is running the world through a social media platform. How do we not see how ludicrous and unprecedented this is?

Can we take a step back from ‘supporting’ every person’s fantasy life as an actual real-world identity (I know a teacher who thinks he’s a Jedi), and actually unpack the ideas? To cut back on the ‘feels’ and actually…

DIY is a passion of our age. And another window into the underlying culture. The greatest threat to all of our lives is the collapse of trust in society. The loss of humility towards the expertise of others. The…

Used EVs are the hot buy in America now, people have figured out they’re an absolute bargain. The same here in Oz, you’re getting a luxury supercar for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Just one more of the empty…

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Everything is about feelings. And about ‘support’ for those feelings, in others. “I Stand With [insert cause]” is its imitation of adult life, symbolic performance plays of…

Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of Joint Forces Command in Europe, highlighting that without existential threat to societies, they degenerate into ‘snowflake’ culture, wallowing in feelings and obsessed with…

Meet Big Rob. One of the social media warriors taking over governance of our societies. Trump is the godfather of all of these opinionated numpties, their hero. They’re righteous, stupid, and often abusive and violent.…

Know what social media kidult culture hates more than anything? Knowledge. It gets in the way of opinions and feelings. The revenge of the jocks is underway. Again not an analogy, social media replacing society means…

This is Tom Keating, master art forger, taken in the 1970s. He forged thousands of works. He's now collectible in his own right, to the extent there are now forgeries, of Tom Keating forgeries. Humans copy, it's their…

The most important room in Bathurst. Council’s records archive, dating back to first European settlement. This is the ‘red tape’ opinionated windbags complain about, that actually runs societies. Without this room…

This is what caused the global pile-on, on J.K. Rowling. Her querying why ‘people who menstruate’ isn’t ‘women’. I saw this in a news article about cervical cancer screening. The sentence could easily say ‘you’re…

Where does a phone call happen? I remember asking that question a few times. There is no simple answer, which is the point of the question. There is a ‘presence’ to the conversation that isn’t located anywhere in space…

Renewable energy is Australia’s superpower. And we have bottom-feeding scum like the federal Coalition actively campaigning to knee-cap that advantage purely to score pathetic points and votes in the social media…

I think it’s important to close the loop on social media hysterias, because in the middle of them no thought is going on at all. And then afterwards nobody takes stock of what a delusional and hysterical situation it…

Watching the netball, and it was another example of how partisan crowds now are. An entire stadium fell silent because the home team lost. I’m sorry, even when I was growing up that would have been called appalling…

Meanwhile in the loony bin of social media society, people spend every day genuinely believing that things like electric cars and renewable energy are some sort of lifestyle choice. Playing team sports with the…

China is doing breathtaking things. Have a watch and compare it with the dull, argumentative nothing of Western life now, where nothing gets built, and there’s no vision for anything. Just trapped inside social media…

China is planning to send astronauts to the moon by 2030. Meanwhile in the West, which pioneered lunar flights, people live inside social media bubbles where we never even went to the moon, and where we live with…

Cory Doctorow predicted social media platforms would collapse under the process of what he calls enshittification, which I’ve posted about before. Where the platforms capture first users, then businesses, and screw both…

Supposed ‘toxic masculinity’ is an invention of gender activists, working mostly through social media, to reframe what is almost entirely domestic violence as gender-based violence. If all you have is an hammer,…

I have long conversations with AI. Very few people in my experience have curiosity for ideas or for discussing them, but AI is insatiable. Many of course say ‘but it’s just a machine’, but they don’t understand that a…

Interesting that it was women who carry this risk, not men. It’s usually assumed men ‘need’ more sex. And yes I know, in social media society anybody can be either a man or a woman now, or neither, or a Jedi or a…

Check out the comments on the Advocate post. Social media society up in arms. I don’t make this stuff up.

NSW only recently had local government elections. Social media Bathurst isn’t happy with who won, so is now trying to mobilise more ongoing abuse aimed at the Council. People really should pay attention to how kidult…

While China builds the future at staggering pace, we trot out Yellow Peril racist ‘cheap Chinese shit’ themes and do nothing but bid up the prices of our houses, and call that an economy. As the article says, one of the…

Electrochemistry is one of the hot fields right now, obviously with the explosion in interest in and demand for new types of batteries. What’s interesting is that the main element that features there, lithium, has…

Travel is a wrecking ball. But you’ll never convince the kidults to stop their permanent gap years from reality. They can’t do maths, maths is for nerds. Ask them how 8 billion people can ever possibly take up…

People can be such gullible numpties. When they built the wind towers near Blayney, people were so excited to see them they even had to build a viewing platform. Then the National Party was in crisis, after Barnaby…

Mazda is in big trouble. Many, many Australians drive Mazdas. Many, many Australians have no idea about the impact new vehicle emissions standards will have on traditional carmakers that don’t make EVs. Most Japanese,…

If you think kidult culture isn't real, have a look at the total collapse of Australia's world-leading gun control. Much of that is local shooters connected to the rabid gun loons in the US, through social media. Social…

People like this learn their lunacy on social media. It's really crazy that social media is allowed to operate at all, it's an open sewer poisoning whole nations.

"Governments are underestimating the reach and threats of these movements.” Not just governments. This is the kidult culture which I almost always fail to convince anybody is destroying our societies. I live this every…

“It's like watching two sides debate the dangers of tobacco while everyone smokes cigarettes.” People should be being vaccinated for Covid twice per year. Instead the vast majority of Australians had 2 vaccinations…

Is our taste in music ‘purely subjective’? Researchers tested this in the early 2000s. They set up a music market of unknown songs and got about 15,000 students to rate them in one of two ways. The first got to rate…

What Chirs Bowen should also point out to counter the idiot ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’ social media slogan is, we’re ASLEEP mostly when the sun doesn’t shine. We don’t need anywhere near as much energy then. Even…

I’ve seen many Australians make these arguments. That’s because nobody really lives in ‘Australia’ now. They live on social media. Which means increasingly they’re just Americans. Australians who believe this idiot…

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then…

If you doubt that the real story of our times is the replacement of societies built up over centuries, with warring tribes of social media righteousness, have a look at Nepal right now. The Nepalese government tried to…

John Howard popularised the ‘assimilationist’ view of immigration. The one that constantly bangs the drum about how migrants have to ‘integrate’ with ‘our way of life’. The problem with this view is, who is ‘our’? For…

Because we're entering dangerous times with echoes of the early 1930s (when people start talking nationalities and flags, lock the doors), I think it's worth looking at the features of criminal behaviour in Australia.…

Car makers know what this data shows. Anybody who's done year 8 maths should. The average broom broom social media person on the other hand, well...

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of kidult culture is its insistence that only happy, positive things are important. Trying to raise any serious or even critical issue at all prompts loud accusations of ‘hysteria’ or…

Social media isn’t where we go to get information about society and the world. It IS our society now. We live inside it. And it’s structured like a high school. Likes and followers. The transformation of adult life into…

The easiest social media posts to critique are the obvious hate speech type things, or scammers, or people being generally abusive. But this type of friendly innocuous post is actually the most dangerous symptom of all…

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…

There was a time people could all have different opinions, and it didn't matter a lot because important stuff was taken care of separately to peoples' opinions. But in social media society, opinions create our reality.…

So we had our little social media performative hissy fit with Swastikas and Nazi memes, about Tesla. Where people joined teams and cheered on the memes, and the mob riots and burnings. Fast forward a few months, and all…

11 time zones. Brought to you by ‘but I like it’. The culture of likes, and followers. Kidult culture, social media culture.

It’s been a lot of years since I first shared this science. I remember the outright hostility I got from some about it. People didn’t want sugar to be bad, like Daylight Saving they ‘like it’, so it must be fine. Humans…

As another week begins in local government, another week of constant abuse from members of the community, I thought this was timely. You can see here that all councils, everywhere, are financially collapsing. Not…

A Formula E car. All-electric. These cars only carry relatively small batteries, much smaller than modern EV road cars, less than 40 kWh. It's still enough to do nearly 100 km, at very high speeds. They flog an F1 car…

Facebook is like human society in a coma. Zero thought, brain-dead. ‘Not the place’ to discuss things, many will tell you, as if that’s some terrible faux pas like farting at dinner, or a contagious disease. You can…

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…

People love the 2025 version. The same attempt by Council to green George Street recently was met with widespread whining and resistance. The difference? Towns now are really competing social media groups, who latch…

Actual numbers show how what seems like a battle on social media is really just a tiny handful of idiots making a lot of loud noise.

I love when social media platforms say ‘this is to assist us to provide ads you’d prefer to see’. I don’t want to see any ads.

When you were at school, the morons who used to occupy most of the back rows in science class, not understanding anything? They now run the world. There they are at the red arrow. Social media gave them kidult power…

Another genius from the back row of your science class at school. These people now rule the world, social media gave them power. You’ll find hundreds of them commenting on every thread on key public issues.

Chris Bowen has organised for all Australians to get 3 free hours of electricity in the middle of the day, as some retailers were already offering. This will give people an opportunity to load-shift their heaviest…

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

The great swindle here is to make unthinking Australians believe their power price rises are due to renewables. Even a Year 7 science student could find the data in about 5 minutes. The surge in power prices is due to…

Most of what looks like 'community concern' in public debate today is really 'astroturfing'. Corporations, political parties, elected members of councils, and think tanks target a handful of loons in local communities…

Every old band has seen the massive cash-vacuum nostalgia tours now are, and are dusting off the instruments to get out there fast. The Gallagher brothers are making $100 million EACH from their tour. Nostalgia is hot…

We’ve been encouraged by countercultural ideas nearly 70 years ago to believe that the more equal and social we are, the more peaceful and prosperous we will all be. But societies run on status. The more equal and…

I'm sure thousands of Australians avoided Tesla home batteries as part of the current rollout, because 'Elon'. Many if not most have flocked to Sigenergy instead, now 'Australia's favourite battery'. A good example of…

So the LNP did it, they decided to become the Dad's Army of climate (in)action. One part of their spin will be that Australia is only a small contributor to global climate change. Australians are carbon/energy PIGS.…

Social media evolved to: 1. endless fights on everything that happens in life, between teams 2. endless ads targeted at you 3. a flood of personal trivia from peoples’ lives that nobody wanted to hear about, before…

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

Most public debates are completely fake, they're not about the issue in any way. They're about the status of the competing teams. Here's a good example, in the US the two main parties (Democrat and Republican) have…

The greatest con of the past 5 years is that ‘lockdowns’ damaged us. Lockdowns freed vast numbers of Australians from poverty, for the first time in their lives. They forced much more workplace flexibility, which…

Hilariously, Musk tried to reveal anti-American forces on social media by forcing Twitter accounts to show the country of origin of their owners. What it actually revealed is how much of Trump’s rise was due to the…

Somebody wrote a very smart pushback to the populist political surge in local government, in Bathurst. The Facebook invasion. The only thing I’d add to this is that General Managers implement the decisions of elected…

One of the great Australians most have never heard of. Tony Rinaudo, an agronomist i.e. an expert in agriculture. Rinaudo looked at degraded landscapes, particularly in Africa, and like many others helped with projects…

And given that virtually nothing ever goes wrong with the motors, you're looking at a car you could theoretically own your entire adult life. And it'll have the performance of a supercar that entire life, and will cost…

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

The Press has never been free. What we call media was invented by elite members of societies, barons, as part of the furthering of their own aims. It only began to appear free when multiple barons established opposing…

Left and Right politics is just adults playing football while pretending to run nations. Institutions run nations. The true story of our time is the gutting of those institutions, led by status-driven revolt against…

Could you live in a world without others? By which I mean, not live without other people in your life, but live without the need to conform to the social frameworks they think, act and feel inside? It is tempting to…

From next week social media platforms are expected to take effective measures to ensure people under the age of 16 can’t have accounts. A great idea, it should be extended to all age groups to rescue our societies from…

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

In our kidult (adolescent) culture, socialising is seen as the key to a happy life. Teens love nothing more than to ‘hang out’. Without it we are seen to be at terrible risk to our mental and physical health, through…

One of the profound changes those who lived through the 1970s into the present day will have noticed, is the collapse of community service organisations. Lions, Rotary, Apex. It was organisations like this, and…

People think you’re crazy if you suggest allowing people to become more social makes societies more violent. But sociality is violence, intrinsically, because social comparision is our deepest passion, and leads to…

People who still read anything I post here will know that for a few years I’ve re-focused much of my attention on status. I did that because status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. If you…

At the end of another year on Facebook, more than ever I wonder what the point of it even is. I’ve long since just started using it as an online diary of thoughts. Interaction is slim to none, on most things, unless…

I decided to catch up on Doctor Who by watching the last series. With the exception of maybe 1-2 episodes, it was appalling. But popular with some of the social media crowd, for whom it was mostly written. The show has…

You’re supposed to wish people a Happy Christmas here I’m sure, because we’re supposed to treat social media *as* our lives in the community, the venue for our social lives. The place we meet, the new public square. I…

One of the fastest ways to identify disphits on the road is to look through the comments on posts like this. Just one more example of the sewer social media turns our lives into, giving visibility and coordinating power…

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took…

“Only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks. The exact number varies by study, but roughly 60–90% of trans-kids…

For Australians, I think a hugely important security tip. myGov is our government access point for our core services, like Medicare and your tax, as well as your health record. I highly recommend firstly always just…

South Australia's Hornsdale battery was the biggest in the world when it was switched on, in 2017. Australians are now adding the equivalent storage with home batteries every 3 and a half DAYS. I post about renewables…

Saw this posted by one of the anti-science social media influencers. Goes to my interest in gravity. Things in orbit don't float upwards. They're falling, like you would if you jumped out of a plane. It's not 'zero-g',…

This stuff is insidious. SKY News UK, woman on the right is a Professor of Medicine at Oxford. That’s surely a digital filter on her face? Like a dynamic airbrushing. I never get much traction with this, likely because…

Thanks @[756306193:2048:Tim]. Scary how many use social media as a guide to pretty much everything. Amazing they’re still alive.

Australian governments are heading down this same UK path. Huge absences due to infectious illness caused by mass Covid infection being described as an attendance problem instead, as wagging. With ads like these…

“All of this is why governments must invest in long-term strategies for managing COVID into the future, experts say — particularly by introducing standards for indoor air quality. But until then, they say, Australians…

Seeing an amusing number of Australians share this, close to Australia Day, who read the first sentence about Aboriginals not owning the land, and go ‘yeah!’, and ignore the rest. Ignoring that they, as European…

People using digital filters in real-time on live TV, even very big names like Idris. Look at these stills. He looks like a cartoon. It’s not a resolution thing, his background and shirt are crystal clear. We’re living…

New York has declared social media a public health hazard. Which it is. It’s also a hazard to every other part of society, generating continuous tidal waves of bullshit to obstruct the most basic essential services. It…

Several people have been removed from my FB friend group, or muted. The ones who just vomit slogans all day that they pick up from various sewers of disinformation on social media. There’s a great fear in challenging…

Globally, young women and young men are diverging widely in their views, with young women becoming more progressive and young men becoming ultra-conservative, even more than older men. This is historically very unusual.…

I believe Gen X is the last generation for some time who will have the experience of an adult life that is qualitatively different from high school life. And only at the beginning of their careers, now past, social…

Social media is driving this.

As anybody whose kids have left home has felt I’m sure, it’s a difficult transition. For them, and for parents. I think it goes beyond our usual ‘homesick’ type explanations. For most human history families didn’t…

New records 7 years in a row. "In 2023, the oceans absorbed about 287 zettajoules of heat, which...is the equivalent of eight Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating every second of every day into the ocean." Scientists are…

There was only one EV again at the Bathurst charging station when I was there today. (Not this one, it was a Tesla Model Y.) I had a chat to the owner, who obviously loved his car. The hysteria about chargers and range…

Researchers track climate denialism. It’s shifted now, from denying climate change itself, which has failed, to now denying the technologies which create the solutions, like solar and wind and EVs. Funded by the fossil…

It’s frustrating not to be able to comment on this. But as a more general personal comment, I think we should all be very afraid of towns run by social media groups. We’ve seen that happen even at a country level, in…

Australia has a love affair with trades. But almost complete indifference to sophisticated engineering. Like this artificial heart, made of titanium, with the only moving part a single spinning disc suspended in a…

If you want to understand why nobody is getting Covid vaccines, look no further than highly paid idiots behind microphones. This is an outrageous breach of media standards.

Global EV sales jumped nearly 70% between 2023 and 2024. Worth remembering when the social media mind midgets post their hysterical nonsense about EV sales dropping.

About 7400 Australians died because of Covid in 2023. That’s 20 a day. But sorry, I forgot we’ve all moved on. Except for the 7400.

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.

What she said. Social media did this, it created a global social movement completely decoupled from reality. None of the usual tests through society's institutions to check the legitimacy of belief. Said to be true and…

Australians need to decide just how gullible they are. The car companies opposing this change have been selling vehicles overseas to meet the same and even higher standards, for years. In every other country in the…

For all of the years shown on this graph, most Australians would tell you that house prices can only ever go up. It's our culture, it began with gold rushes and other get-rich-quick schemes. All the get-rich-quick…

Why people really need to ignore social media as a window into reality. EV sales are booming, and where? In the outer, poorer suburbs. They’re saving people a FORTUNE. To quote from the article: “I can do my entire work…

Together with 'range anxiety' for EVs, many have battery anxiety, thinking they'll be up for thousands to replace faulty batteries. Both myths originating in social media slogans. EV batteries last way longer than you…

Only 3 vaccines provide lifelong protection, measles, rubella and yellow fever. They’re all produced from live virus, that is then modified (attenuated) to prevent it causing serious illness in you. I mention this…

This is the social media business model (not a joke, this is actually it). 1. Offer people a way to network socially. This is like social heroin for people, irresistible. 2. Transform that network into an economy of…

Barely 10% of Australians now smoke. That will be the future of ICE cars too.

Ben Chilfley Dam, autumn. Social media warriors blame the Council, and say ‘it’s only on the edge of the dam’. The world is cooking. And is full of dumb cookers. Never swim with blue-green algae, unless you want motor…

This got wide applause on social media. It was an act of rank stupidity. It’s vigilantism, the sort of thing social media encourages every day. If people had been injured or killed as a result of the DIY traffic control…

Apparently it’s ’Cash is King’ day? With all of the urgent problems facing the world, social media always makes sure people are focused on anything trivial and irrelevant instead, based on some loon conspiracy theory.

Lots of criticism of EVs from those who say they can't tow because it destroys their range. To take a common towing vehicle, a Toyota Landcruiser. Towing a caravan for example about DOUBLES its fuel consumption. Petrols…

I was called ‘transphobic’ and unfriended by somebody for posting on transgender issues. It’s too important for people not to speak out, children are being harmed, sometimes irreversibly, by these theories that few have…

Roy Morgan’s latest poll shows more Australians are planning to buy an EV over the next 4 years than are planning to buy petrol. EVs are now the dominant segment in planned purchases. Diesels have fallen off a cliff.

One of the most fascinating things to observe is what a nation chooses to mourn. The excess deaths Covid caused in 2023 alone was greater than the number of Australians lost at Gallipoli. Not even mentioned. Let alone…

Some very important research was published this month to assess whether 'hybrid immunity', the combination of infection + vaccination we're using for Covid, works. It doesn't work. It not only doesn't work, it makes…

I suspect people might be shocked how many young men look up to Tate as a role model. Social media will end our societies, unless something is done, and fast.

This is only possible because people share their most intimate personal lives on an international platform. And then often say they’re interested in ‘privacy’. They’re not interested in privacy, social media is all…

Social media is already running societies, we're seeing it now brought to the surface. We really don't see I think how it's a cancer eating away at democracies from the inside. We think it's a happy friendly place to…

No matter what anybody's opinion is, renewables are doing everything they promised to do, and more. As are EVs. Social media is a hopelessly distorted view of the real world.

I don't think there's a more important lesson to teach kids than this: that what's said on social media mostly has almost zero connection to actual reality. On renewables, EVs, gender, personal appearance, how happy…

Yeh, don’t let social media raise your kids.

Beneath a clickbait headline, the ABC sharing the same data I shared a couple of days ago. Homicides have been in steep decline for decades. And absolutely clearly in the data domestic violence not only shares in this…

Meanwhile in the Land of the Free (Market), attempts to track the rapidly accelerating outbreaks of potentially pandemic flu amongst cattle have come up against the usual social media hurdles.

How social media is distorting and destroying society. 28 women have died from intimate partner violence this year. We got this ‘crisis’ action this week, nearly a billion dollars. I shared earlier in the week that this…

I’ve criticised the use of social media as a personal space over many years. It’s not a personal space, though that’s overwhelmingly how it gets used. Peoples’ social lives are now transacted on these platforms. They’re…

In a week dominated by the question of violence against women, the Council of Europe provides an excellent summary on the topic. “There is no single factor that can explain gender-based violence in our societies, but…

Obviously unhinged. But there is also something here that’s important, for violence against women. Ask any police man or woman how many women are actually attracted to violent men. How many plead with police not to…

A window into the damage caused by social media to our societies. Mum is being treated for hospital-acquired Covid, in hospital. Yesterday a neighbour visited. Mum rang me afterwards, very upset. The neighbour had told…

Armidale. Applied for a special rate variation (SRV) of 58.8% last year. This was on top of a 10.5% SRV it had approved in 2021-22. It was approved because the independent regulator saw that the Armidale Council had…

I don’t use social media to transact my personal life. But a happy Mother’s Day to my mum Janet, hopefully to be released from hospital tomorrow. On this day 56 years ago, she was also in hospital. Giving birth to me…

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…

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…

For a moment I thought they were referring to children without gender dysphoria being butchered and drugged to conform to a social media fad. But apparently not. Up to 90% of teenagers who apply for transgender…

What happens when you use social media as a platform for your actual life. It’s alarming when you think about it that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now providing the infrastructure for…

Dick was a Professor of Infectious Disease and Chief of two Canadian hospital systems. I thought of his advice while scrolling through photos on social media of people happily spreading Covid. Living their best (short)…

With the September local government elections hurtling towards us and candidates beginning to campaign, just a reminder how the last notable election decided by social media turned out.

I worked at Oz's only nuclear reactor. And still every day somebody tells me on social media that I don't understand the nuclear thing, and I should watch some guy they like on YouTube.

The Unsatisfactory Husbands Club. Thought this was very powerful, I’ve posted a lot about love and how little I think we understand it, thinking of it as a feeling. The stories of these couples shows what happens when…

Social media is a class act.

I’m not sure Australians know that Chinese cars now outsell Korean cars from Hyundai and Korea here. BYD’s sales have jumped sixfold in just a year, for example. Meanwhile the US and Europe do what they’ve always done,…

Several younger people at work are open fans of Donald Trump. He’s a social media President. We have no idea how much we’re going to hell in a handbasket.

These are the 3 self-proclaimed ‘Great Leaders’ in the world today. What do they all have in common? Their power came from popular revolutions. Populism. People forget both the Russian and Chinese leaders today came…

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…

Top Gear is the home of petrolheads. One of their original hosts is now calling out the ongoing, deliberate campaign to try to undermine EVs, funded by fossil fuel and car companies and their associated media outlets.…

The Murdoch press have been hammering the ‘the EV bubble has burst’ rubbish all week. But Australians are still shifting to EVs, fast. Hybrids are EVs. And sales of hybrids have exploded. They’re using them as a…

Very real, driven by social media from extremist groups in the US and State-sponsored groups from Russia. Your local Council has to deal with this every day now.

‘Female’ cyclist Molly Cameron. It’s not ‘transphobia’ to question what’s going on here. These are very dangerous times, when social movements mobilised through social media require you to accept the most ludicrous…

Another window into how we never leave high school. I joined a FB group that talks about energy efficiency in homes. Over 120,000 members. Some useful information gets discussed there. I contributed my experiment at…

When petrol and diesel cars were first released, they were hugely expensive. Way beyond the reach of ordinary people. There were also no service stations, for 25 years afterwards. If social media had existed then, no…

Only 60% of Australians think dangerous climate change is caused by humans.

I saw a candidate for election say this. "[Aborigines] were not an advanced civilisation and DEFINITELY would have had to have some form of colonisation by someone in the 18th century." I think many Australians probably…

Australia is in a lot of trouble with energy. We’ll run out inside the next decade, unless urgent action is taken. The previous government had 21 energy policies in 10 years. TWENTY-ONE. How many of those did it…

I saw in the news this week that more than 50% of younger Australians surveyed engage in choking during sex, copied from a trend in online porn. So the woman is literally choked, for a short time. Humans imitate, it’s…

This group has lots of videos of ordinary street-legal family EVs embarrassing every muscle car thrown at them. The comments are hilarious, 'if the muscle car had a better driver/wheels, it would have won', 'yeh but the…

Australians are in love with hybrids because they want full-EVs, but are anxious about range. Most full-EVs have 400-600km of range already, and unless you're doing a long trip that's plenty for at least a couple of…

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether…

Social media is full every day of people ignoring this advice. The same people who will look for help (there isn’t any) or somebody to blame (it’s themselves), when they get chronically sick. I know many think I’m a…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

I’ve studied social media since it began. It’s both the most seductive thing humanity has ever invented, and the most dangerous. It’s classic bait-and-switch, the platforms vacuumed up whole populations, by offering…

You can see in what happened here how modern politics works. Turn everything into a ‘fight’. When Trump say he’s fighting, he means his own people, in the US. But on the other ‘team’. Which some call the ‘Far Left’. But…

Covid is a 'seasonal' virus, people trained in social media science say. Yes, you now get it in every season.

This is Trump's pick for Vice-President. Saying 'the professors are the enemy', quoting Nixon. We may gasp or even chuckle at that. Except very many Australians would probably agree, knowledge has no traction in any of…

Here’s an example of how social media took over the world. It’s a bait-and-switch operation. First it offered us the bait of ways to ‘connect’ with our friends and family. It then sold us as data, to media companies and…

Fish dont know water exists until they’re beached. In the same way, our own culture is the thing most invisible to us. Like travel, again. This passion Australians have to do the ‘Big Lap’, or equivalent. To accumulate…

If you want a sense of the reality of what’s happening in the car world, rather than the social media bubble filled with whining petrolheads, have a look at the staggering number of EV utes under development. The Nissan…

The phone is the tool that transforms life into social media. And it’s not a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a circular self-referential loop, where we use the world to feed our social media feeds, which in turn…

Nissan’s profits dived 99% in a single quarter. The reason? Like other Japanese makers, it’s way behind in building EVs. This is again where getting your news and view of the world from social media completely distorts…

Thanks to Jason for this one. This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittifaction, which has happened to search and is central to social media as well. It’s a bait-and-switch, you’re offered something you want to get you…

‘Where were you when this revolution happened, mum/dad?’ ‘Um, I was on social media posting fake facts about electric cars catching fire and running out of charge.’ Soak up the revolution. Don’t look back in regret that…

Enjoy the revolution that will be spoken about for centuries. Don't miss it in social media bubbles.

In China, more than 60% of EVs are already cheaper than petrol and diesel cars. Outside China governments are in bed with old car manufacturers and oil companies, who fund social media campaigns that get millions to…

Bathurst like many places is about to decide whether to let FB groups run the town. I can't comment on Bathurst specifically, but in general terms I wouldn't let social media run a chocolate wheel.

One of the main architects of mass death from Covid in Australia. You can see his libertarian bullshit here, about freedom and vaccines. You know what was mandated for all Australians, because of people like him?…

Important to understand this story. Firstly it doesn't mean people are buying petrols or diesels instead. Like the rest of the world, they're buying hybrids. 'Range anxiety' has them spooked, they want an EV, but are…

Remember the fight over the NBN in Australia? That was entirely Tony Abbott trying to protect Foxtel, for his mate Rupert. Murdoch knew the NBN would open the door to streaming platforms into Australian homes, directly…

Parents doing this. Kids as products to be sold. I’m well aware that pretty much everything I post to social media isn’t the sort of thing people log on to see. Imagine turning your own life into a product. Even those…

It’s disingenuous to say to young people today that their parents also had high house repayments. The relative price of houses between then and now is literally chalk and cheese. The fabled ‘we paid 17% interest rates’…

When I say people never leave high school, I mean that the social models we learn there are what shape all adult life as well. At least now. And that model is the constant battle for status. Which is really the battle…

FB’s resemblance to the old social pages and classifieds of local newspapers hides its danger. All social media platforms are lethally dangerous to societies, because our beliefs are backwards. We don’t get that being…

Social media is such a sewer, that in 14 Council areas they couldn’t even get enough people to run. They see the all-out assault elected people receive, from social media mobs. I know fine people in our own areas who…

The dirty unspoken truth of social media is one we don’t want to admit. Like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where the character spends his days spying on other peoples’ lives through the windows of his…

Another leading US doctor, showing how Australia went from leading the world in public health, to being its arse-end, in under 2 years. We're doing NOTHING for Covid in Australia, sickening the entire population for the…

We've only just started scratching the surface of what Chinese industry has for us. This is an absolute boon for Australians, we'll get these cars for tens of thousands less than the Europeans and Americans, whose…

@[23911136:2048:Trey], Texas stil kicking goals. Texas, oil country! Australians should be ashamed.

I watched (livestream) the meet the candidates session at the RSL club this week, for the local elections. Many repeated the line often that there needs to be more ‘consultation’ with the community. The thing as a…

The reason Australians will be getting unbelievable bargains on Chinese cars is that they have enormous industrial capacity, but their own domestic market is full. Thus the big push on now for exports. These are…

This shows the projected average payout to participants in the NDIS, through their lives. A gross amount on average *per person* of $2.63 million. There are now over 660,000 people on the NDIS (this was 2022 data). That…

The ‘outback’ is a mythology Australians love. It’s a myth. We’ve always used the land outside the main cities as either a big farm or big mine. Extractive industries. We’re a settler culture, ferrying resources back to…

Adult life has the same structure (now) as teenage school life. We’re all looking for status, in a group of some kind. To be recognised, accepted, and admired. Tell somebody their favourite band sucks and watch how much…

One of the social media sports is to mock the local council about potholes and roadworks. People seriously imagine Council employees come to work every day, and say ‘let’s not fix the roads.’ Like a Council needs…

Another social media favourite when sinking the boot into Council workers would be to have a superior chuckle at the circle of guys just ‘standing around’ while one does all the work. Nobody ever explains how you’d get…

A litte something about bats for the social media armchair experts. Yes you can make lots of noise to try to scare them away. You can see what that does in the picture, scares the bats, who all fly around lots, and then…

With this back in the news this week over the census questions, I thought I’d reshare. There is no ‘LGBTQIA+ community’. It’s a social media fiction.

Reading some of the social media around upcoming LG elections. ‘Councils should be run more like a business’, that’s an old favourite. Councils are nothing like a business. They’re a government. They provide services,…

I see the social media ninnies in WA managed to get their big windfarm pushed 30km offshore, because of the 'view'. Gladstone, Queensland. The gas industry.

Crowds at Westmead Station in 1955, excited to see the new electric train. Electric transport is just as exciting today. Unless social media is your guide in the world.

Plug-in hybrids (PHEVS - hybrids with bigger batteries that can do electric-only driving for most weekly drives) are hugely popular now, because of 'range anxiety'. They're great cars. But this could be a problem,…

This is ‘range anxiety’ at work, again a social media fiction. These platforms are wrecking balls through societies. The Chinese may save us (they’re smart, they don’t allow these platforms). Incidentally ‘slowing…

Just a brilliant time to be alive. A new industrial revolution. And so many of the public are instead trapped in the putrid sewer of social media bullshit, missing the whole show.

Social media connects people like this to each other, making them a powerful political force of rank stupidity. Before social media they were just isolated individuals in the community. Even local government elections…

A good example of how social media has dumbed down the world to probably terminal levels, is imagining in my childhood if somebody had said 'we'll give you a car with much more power, that needs no maintenance, makes no…

Watching Oscar Piastri continuing to win while the entire British media and F1 establishment (also heavily British) criticise him for not letting his Brit team mate win (miles behind). Typical Brits, can’t win it on the…

Australians travel obsessively for the same reason they drink and gamble obsessively, and always have. We’re a settler culture with no connection to place. Settler cultures accumulate places as ‘land’, and drink and…

In the UK there are annual media stories about how 'coal is making a comeback'.

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…

BYD has had to commission a second 7000-car ship, to deliver its growing global expansion. It's planning for 7 more ships. What I love here is these realities carrying on despite the absolute brain-dead rubbish…

“The only way to insist that a Queensland farmer should be paid much more for a cabbage, for instance, while simultaneously arguing that a Sydney shopper should be paying much less for the very same vegetable, is to…

So many convinced of the benefits of social media use it shamelessly as a way to plug what they’re selling, to their closest family and friends.

I would bet that the resistance of many Australians today to shop at Aldi still traces back to it being run by Germans. Coles and Woolies are the ‘Aussie’ options. People who don’t experience racism never really…

Social media makes us think we’re just here sharing lovely pictures and stories about what we’re all doing every day. That’s a trick. Nobody ever enjoyed looking at other peoples’ lives. They only do when it allows them…

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…

The new BYD Shark I’ve been mentioning has a 2.5-tonne towing capacity. This is a deliberate choice by BYD. It has nothing to do with ‘grunt’. The Ford Ranger and other utes for example will tow 3.5-tonnes. The BYD…

At least 10 new Chinese EV companies are looking to come to Oz. Australians have no idea of the smorgasbord of riches coming our way. I post about it a lot, China’s EV industry is creating family cars with supercar…

This is a stock image, the sort of thing billions of people share. How happy everybody looks! Because they’re socialising. ‘Living their best lives’, as we now call it. There’s an uncomfortable truth about socialising…

lol, Australians already live in some of the worst houses in the developed world. The surest way to turn us into even more the arse-end of the world than we already are, on just about every metric, is to elect these…

This bullshit review was always going to be a whitewash. The Brit’s review interrogated everybody from politicians down, grilled them. Ours was like free fellatio for all the main players. The headline is an example of…

I have zero interest in Halloween. I have no problem at all with others loving it, I don’t dislike it. I just don’t understand the interest in it at all, not my thing. Find it boring. It does interest me how it became…

Volkswagen’s 3rd quarter profits were down 42%. Toyota has had 8 straight months of declining profits. These are the big players in world car production. Ignore social media nonsense, EVs are destroying the traditional…

It’s a measure of just how crazy social media society is, that super-powerful and silent cars powered by sunshine are a hard sell.

I shared this word here a few months ago. I've chatted to Cory in the past, I think the concept is much more important than even the brilliant word. It's the world social media is making for us.

One of the most damning indictments of the idea of 'toxic masculinity' is the actual statistics. So much violence against women is domestic violence. Domesticity is the causal factor, specific strains on specific…

The ‘cost of living crisis’ and problems with domestic violence are really the same problem. They’re the social model of the nuclear family under strain. The nuclear family is the expectation that children will move out…

I think status is what drives all our lives. Starting at school, with kids negotiating their status there in different groups - peer pressure - and then right through adulthood. The overwhelming thing that drives humans…

This is social media society. Where instead of each of us just doing the jobs we’re trained to do, everybody is suddenly an expert on everything. And these platforms then aggregate all of our ignorant opinions on things…

Social media is so addictive because it’s a poker machine for status. Poker machines are addictive not because you can win, but because you’re not sure if you’re going to win, with each spin. That’s what makes you keep…

While social media wallows in oceans of BS, reality continues on without it.

Today Peter Dutton releases laughable ‘modelling’ to say nuclear power is the best option for Australia. Do you know anybody who’s ever worked with nuclear technology? I do - me. I can tell you right here, nuclear power…

4 million Australians already have solar panels. Under Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan these panels would be forcibly switched off on many days by the grid operators, to protect the planned nuclear power stations, which…

Tesla has some of the best electrical engineers in the world. They're scathing about Peter Dutton's nuclear plan, correctly pointing out that the grid won't function with that much 'baseload' power, and millions of…

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” The energy problem is already solved. You can live it right now. You don’t have…

Social media is where people go to argue with strangers about things none of them understand.

The Japanese car industry is in free fall, as is the German car industry. Honda and Nissan now looking to merge to survive. Though merging 2 companies with virtually no decent EVs between them just makes one bigger…

When humans gather together in groups of any size, they play status games. First within the group itself, for status within the group. Then between groups. Paradoxically (for many) this means that the more we ‘connect’…

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our…

Sorry that I don’t do Christmas cheer (or Anzac Day commemoration, or even much of birthdays or other life events) here. A few have taken that as evidence that I’m not living a full life, which I flip by asking them why…

Probably the most telling thing about the idea of a ‘Big Lap’ for me is how much like the old Blighty days of empire the idea is. Like you need to accumulate the entire continent, in one trip. It’s about collecting or…

Something I think many vegans (and others) don’t understand is that the best way to protect the diversity of life, is to eat it. If you eat a wide variety of plants and animals, then it’s in your best interests to…

The Trump team imploding before he’s even sworn in. Those looking for entertainment closer to home could do worse than watching how local social media stars are faring in local government.

Social media floods the world with shit. ‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. But that’s only a symptom. Its real destructive power is to destroy trust. To encourage everybody to think they’re an expert on everything,…

lol ‘dance like nobody is watching’, and then post it to social media for millions to watch.

One of my hobbies is making ice cream. I use dextrose (which is just glucose) instead of ordinary table sugar, to avoid the fructose which is really bad for you. You can buy dextrose in supermarkets or brewing shops,…

More Australians died of Covid in 2022 than died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic here in 1918-19. The Spanish Flu was the worst pandemic since The Black Plague. Back to work today. Will be the only person in a mask again.…

I turn 55 this year. About a decade ago I remember a flurry of colleagues retiring at 55, with gold-plated super schemes. The schemes where you retired at 55 at your final salary, for life. Those schemes were quickly…

This is the sort of anti-electric story you’ll see on social media all the time. Written in a way to make people laugh and slam their fist on the table. Like all of the stories, it’s fake. Deliberately written to try to…

I gave up pretty much all alcohol years ago, for health reasons at the time (I was isolating possible causes of a heart arrhythmia). I still have the odd celebratory champagne for birthdays etc. Australians get drunk at…

Social media is destroying societies. It sounds a big claim, but only a handful of years ago Trump used it to mobilise an insurrection on the Capitol, in the world’s most famous democracy. But social media’s damage goes…

Australians invented mass batteries for huge storage over 40 years ago. Batteries themselves were invented over 200 years ago. Watch for an explosion of innovation now in this area, suppressed for so long.

Jafari said every electric vehicle in Australia is sold out, and that they’re “often sold out within hours of being made available to the Australian market”. “Demand far outstrips supply, Australians are lined up ready…

It’s so exhausting for societies, countering the relentless propaganda put into circulation by those who do very well out of the status quo. Another common bit of spin is that we can’t shift to EVs because there aren’t…

People would say over and over that house prices wouldn’t crash in Australia. They said the same about Bitcoin. And magic beans. Between 800,000 and 1.3 million Australians are currently sitting on a fixed rate mortgage…

While societies collapse under the weight of multiplying disasters, meantime the thing that exercises the minds of the latest generation of kiddults is the apparently outrageous assertion by JK Rowling that only…

Yep. And there isn't a Plan(et) B. Ignore everybody who doesn't believe in climate change being an emergency. There isn't time to engage in their silly debating points, which are drafted by comms teams in fossil fuel…

A brilliant idea. The current idea is ‘business is charging far too high prices, so we need to bankrupt ordinary Australians so that they can’t afford to pay those prices, and business will then drop them.’ (That is…

So many Australians are either already in dire financial trouble, or are about to be. All because of a handful of absolutely ridiculous ideas, which Ian Verrender exposes here. Ideas which people with a modern training…

Nearly 3 times as many Australians died from Covid in 2022, as died at Gallipoli.

The federal government heavily subsidises the use of diesel fuel. The public money it spends on doing that could buy 125,000 Australians a free Tesla EV every year.

The share of Australians in 2019-20 with a super fund above $2m was just 0.5% – 79,540 people. That 0.5% make up 12% of all superannuation funds held. They’re using it for tax evasion.

The revolution happening right under our noses. And has been for years. You wouldn't know it listening to social media or the news.

The range of a horse and cart was way beyond what the cars and trucks that replaced them could offer. Unpacking the slogans and spin that now dominate our lives, nobody said ‘I can’t buy a car, what about the range?’…

Supercars may have a problem here. The racing worked best when drivers were driving highly modified versions of cars ordinary Australians drive. Hardly any Australians want to drive American muscle cars. Including…

Every 6 years the ABS analyses weekly household expenditures in Australia. One of the interesting facts to come out of it is that Australians spend as much or more on recreation and alcohol each week, as they do on…

If this had been electric vehicles, all the smirking petrolheads would be having a field day. Social media magnifies everything that’s stupid a hundredfold. For example an ordinary petrol car is 100 times more likely to…

I read things like this, and then look around me at how people are living as if nothing is happening, as disasters that could wipe out our entire civilisation carry on, with nothing being done. Covid the same. 20,000…

We're about to see coal-fired power fall off a cliff. What isn't clear in the public debates, this is already happening. Nobody is waiting to make the decision, it was made long ago. For the 'when the sun doesn't shine…

More on wood heating. It has its benefits, it’s a renewable resource for example, and can capture emissions when you replace cut wood with new plantings. (How often that happens is a bit questionable.) Here’s another…

For those interested in solar and EVs, it’s a full-time job keeping on top of the amount of BS social media generates about them. Here’s another myth, that solar panels cause a disturbing number of house fires.…

Scrolling past all of the happy social lives on FB made me think of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Compare the two images. The variety of passion and emotion in Da Vinci’s picture, and the monotonous single ‘living our best…

The unfixable destructive paradox of travel is that it forces somebody else’s home to change, to cater to you. No matter how low impact you want to be. Some European cities for example are fed up with the tourists who…

The English journalist Christina Patterson has been fighting a very brave fight against trans activism. She makes the excellent point, one I’ve posted here a few times, that the concept of trans is the social…

Nobody can get staff, it’s a genuine crisis. The thing is, we knew this was coming. It’s demographics. Our population was ageing, and is now old. There are nowhere near enough workers to support that older population,…

I sometimes say Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Rod Sims, ex head of the ACCC (a very conservative, ‘economic’ institution), spells out why very well here. In fact per capita we should be the…

Australians have been taken for a ride by offshore fossil fuel companies. Other countries make more in relative terms from their fossil fuel exports in a year than we’ve made in the past 30. That’s no accident, the…

I thought this photo was a nice example of the toxicity of social media to our social lives. A standard sort of photo you see shared, a happy couple, others would see it and feel a whole range of emotions, depending on…

Councils have no money, and their staff are walking out the door in search of higher salaries. The only way they can afford this sort of additional charge is to charge higher rates, for which they'll then be blamed. In…

In a world where our collective memory rarely lasts longer than a day, replacing all custom and tradition with what’s ‘trending’ on social media, I think we should pay close attention to the coronation. I’m no…

$2 billion for green hydrogen in last night's budget. Hydrogen is a dead-end for Australia I think. With our vast renewable energy resources of sunshine and wind, and spare land, we're crazy to invest too much in…

Having crippled our Covid response, the morons on social media are back to attacking meteorologists, about climate change. Social media was invented by Americans to implement their political views of how societies work,…

Social media needs to be shut down. It’s destroying societies at an ever-accelerating rate. It’s also destroying peoples’ mental health, even when they think it’s good for them. Nothing is more toxic to your mental…

Fantastic article on the most fundamental damage social media does. It completely distorts our understanding of what the public is.

Social media's assault on democracies continues. Mostly engineered by activist loons in the US, who organised and directed most of the 'Dictator Dan' rubbish in Victoria, for example, through social media. In Bathurst…

Many ask why I still wear a mask. Not one person has ever thought that it might be to protect others, as well as myself. Doesn’t even occur to them. That’s our culture now, orbiting ‘me’ in everything it does. Social…

Enormous numbers of Australians are hugely under-vaccinated for Covid. Here’s how dangerous that is. The latest boosters, which are shot 4 or 5 for the smart ones still bothering to get them, have an effectiveness of…

This graph is so interesting, you can read so much of our current lives in it. Notice how older Australians (the red circle) share an information space (mostly TV) that creates for them a feeling of Australia as a…

More than half of Americans, the 'land of the free', still aren't buying it. I think many more than half of Australians aren't either. It's just that the whingers have the loudest voices, and politicians with no…

This is a problem already solved by engineers, the business model is the stumbling block, carmakers need to step up. These stories excite the smirking emojis because they think it shows that EVs aren’t the future after…

I was watching The Drum yesterday, and something about this person, Sandy Chong, didn’t seem quite right. (She’s the CEO of the Australian Hairdressing Council.) Her skin didn’t look real, just a featureless area of…

The Project quoting research that says there are 1300 photos of a child on social media by the time they’re 13. Sharenting. France about to ban it.

One in an ever-growing line of people who social media presume to pass judgment on (for or against) before a case even goes to trial. This is why we have the law, to consider evidence. Not peoples’ opinions.

I’d encourage everybody to take precautions against SIM porting and SIM swapping. Porting: hackers port your phone number to a different Telco, so they can then set up a mobile phone in your name and take your number.…

For the cricketing fans, what do you make of ‘Bazball’, the new English approach to test cricket? I think it’s marketing spin. Indistinguishable from the style of cricket the Australians under Taylor and Waugh played.…

This is from the official news for GPs. I don't make this stuff up. Warnings of a 'pandemic of cardiovascular disease', caused by Covid infection. Just as Spanish Flu likely caused the pandemic of heart disease we had…

Australians are increasingly drawn to the outback. The idea actually makes no sense at all, what does ‘outback’ mean? What I think it means, and why I think Australians feel increasngly drawn to it, is everything we…

How did the gas industry respond to the price caps the government put on it? It refused to create any new contracts for supply with local users, forcing them to buy from the international spot market, which is way more…

I don’t often talk about myself or my family here, because I still remember a time when that was the most boring thing a person could do. But because many seem to live their lives through social media now, and interpret…

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…

Banning mobile phones in schools is a great idea. Though the real problem is the social media apps on the phones, not the phones. And to take it a step further, the disruption those apps cause to education (huge) is…

The most important thing you can offer all people as a result of this insight isn’t kindness, it’s honesty. By not talking about things we find difficult in life, others think our lives are nothing but happy, fun times.…

Australia’s 4th test Ashes plan is playing out perfectly. Bowl and bat hopelessly, so the English look in complete command. Then let the rain wash out most of the 4th and 5th days. The emotional damage for the English…

I’ve worked with Michael Pascoe on a couple of things, a smart guy. Here he explains why the real problem with housing is that we stopped building public housing. We privatised the process of providing housing to poorer…

We LOVE to imitate, to copy what others do. It’s unavoidable, because it’s based on our deepest desire. To desire what others have, particularly if those others are people we admire. We know kids do this, but all adult…

Gee that’s gotta hurt 🙂 This is the same ‘spirit of the game’ England who booed Australians on the grounds and even in the dressing rooms throughout the series. Bodyline England. Well deserved agony. Rain didn’t save…

In some ways I have real affection for schools. I worked in them, and was a student in them. But I now realise they’re probably the most stupid thing humans have ever invented, and may yet destroy us all. I’m not…

People who study the way high school shapes our whole culture made an interesting finding. In most cases, your status in high school matches how your adult life turns out as well. With one interesting exception. The…

A BBC sports journalist described the 2-2 Ashes outcome as a fair result. But ‘England would have won if the 4th Test hadn’t been washed out’. Let’s play that what if game. The series would have been different if: -…

Australians are overwhelmingly huddled in a handful of cities on the coast. As far away from confronting the reality of the country they live in as possible. Got a great example of this yesterday, Paul McCartney is…

This is George Michael as a kid. I watched the Wham movie (excellent), and it resonated with the post I did about Freddie Mercury yesterday. Like Mercury, Michael was a social outsider all through his life. You can see…

Love the boat in this pic, taking at least 3 charging spots. Imagine parking your EV and boat in a petrol station, in front of 3 bowsers. The fact it has a cutesy name, ‘ICE-blocking’, tells you it’s a scheme hatched…

They're laughing at us. No doubt the justification is 'Australia needs a strong banking sector'. Or 'this is great for all of our super returns'. It needs ordinary Australians to have a roof over their heads and heating…

"Australians now travel further throughout Australia than ever they did before, as tourists; in recreational vehicles of all kinds they penetrate into the remotest areas, driving thousands of kilometres to see…

This is Ludwig Leichhardt. Famous explorer of Australia. Disappeared on his last expedition in 1848, nobody knows what happened to him. I remember learning about the explorers at school. What's most interesting for me…

Most of the early settlers to Australia were from the UK. So here’s a mystery. The famous Australian accent doesn’t sound like *any* of the UK accents. Not even blended in some way. Know what it sounds just like?…

Vaccinations were the reason people seemed happy to throw all Covid caution to the wind. You need a Covid vaccination every 6 months to maintain any meaningful immunity. Even amongst oldest Australians, we can’t get 50%…

It’s about respect. There should be no debates on topics like climate change, or Covid. There are thousands of people highly trained to know what to do, for both. They can’t do it, because of millions obstructing their…

After WW2, fewer than half of Australians owned their own home. Menzies wanted to change that. He knew 'the market' wouldn't achieve it (it hadn't ever), so what did he do? He made the government build LOTS of public…

Or…they lost a game of soccer. That’s what sport is, one team wins, the other loses. If you play sport ‘heartbroken’ when you lose, your mental health might get you to 30. 40 maybe, at best. I think social media has so…

We’re all used to the idea of a ‘power station’. But already now, by far the greatest source of electricty used by Australians every day is the solar panels you see on ordinary homes and businesses. Not just by those…

America’s most bloody war was one it fought against itself. The Civil War. Australia is actually the same, we just don’t learn that history. Far and away our most bloody war, that killed more Australians than all of our…

If somebody looks at your social media posts and says ‘don’t you have a life?’, I suggest asking them why they’re living their life on social media.

Some have 'range anxiety' about getting an EV. Apart from the fact nearly all Australians travel less than 40km per day, which is easily charged at home from a power point at the end of the day (like your phone), if you…

‘Closing the gap’ for Aboriginal people. What we mean by that is a paternalistic attempt to have them ‘catch up’ with us. Us modern, ‘advanced’ Australians. But the gap is actually the other way around. Australia, the…

This sort of innovation is happening everywhere. One of the most sad barriers to it expanding is community opposition, through lunatic ideas people get via social media. When I grew up most people paid no attention to…

This article was an excellent window again into the almost impossibly complex world that is the real Australia. And how we who think ourselves advanced because we can build cars and aeroplanes and computers, have not a…

Fewer than 5% of Australians tow anything - a trailer or caravan/camper trailer or boat. And yet so much of the EV narrative is around range, and range is mostly an issue for people who tow. Which relatively speaking is…

Father’s Day this weekend. There is no harder or more important job than parenting. We idolise celebrities and explorers and rock and sports stars and rich business people. None of that comes close to being as important…

If you want to understand why so many local councils are raising rates, have a look at the data here. And Google ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’. Social media as always will mostly be your worst possible guide. (My views on…

John doesn’t spend time on social media reading conspiracy fairy tales.

I still recommend every Australian (and every human) read this book. It provides firsthand accounts from the first European settlers of Australia of what they found when they got here. What they found was the greatest…

Social media decouples people so completely from reality that they do things like storm the parliament, and then wonder why they get 22 years in jail. Just wait until the people who let a pandemic rip end up on trial.…

Everybody loves a pile-on, on local government. Some food for thought. In the past 25 years councils have had to assume a whole range of community services that nobody else would provide. They now offer up to 150…

I strongly agree with this. I’m on social media because that’s where people are. But I think it’s destroying societies, and at great speed. And it’s not hard to understand why. Human communication and information has…

Australia lagging here, as in so many other areas. I’m sitting here right now with a temperature of nearly -5 outside, and I don’t even need a heater on, the temperature is about the same as when we went to bed last…

Grumpy old men are famous for criticising everything that’s new and young. I criticise the old for being a lead weight around the young’s shoulders, for blocking innovation and change that’s desperately needed. For…

Landline had a great story today about how the biggest obstacle to building the new electricity grid is community opposition, to solar farms, wind farms, pumped hydro and new transmission lines. This isn’t the Australia…

Why social media is dangerous. 1) It creates fake social lives that people then consciously and unconsciously compare to their own. This creates enormous stress and anxiety, as the relentlessly happy and fun posts clash…

Have a watch, fascinating and moving. How social media is driving stupidity deep into individual families as well as institutions. And breaking them apart. These platforms need to be shut down.

Listeria is mostly mild, often asymptomatic. It tends to kill only ‘the vulnerable’, and can even be cured by antibiotics if diagnosed. And yet it’s an excellent measure of how corrupted our Covid response is, because…

Can’t believe this is nearly 10 years old. And still spot on, actually a very smart way to understand just how stupid social media is, by translating what happens there into real life situations. The platforms are…

It’s something to be in the eye of a social media storm. To feel the surge of stupid incoherent rage and righteousness. And to watch the damage that great surge of dumb causes, as it unfolds and destroys things.

Australian households are smashing solar world records every single year. Most Australians are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, and EVs. A tiny minority of simpletons infected with social media memes and…

The men social media produces.

None of this happened before social media. Laurence Fox here, famous Brit actor whose wife Billie Piper dumped him for being an unhinged loon. Social media got to him, as it gets to millions of others. I have close…

From media today. The people who support Daylight Saving don’t even understand it themselves. Daylight Saving doesn’t make days any longer or create any more light.

Crispian Chan, a Chinese-Australian. Australians don’t like being called racist, a country that even had a ‘White Australia’ policy and that regularly votes for Pauline Hanson and to ‘stop the boats’. Those who’ve…

The previous government turned Australia into a quarry for the rest of the world. And we were practically giving the stuff away anyway. That’s all coming to an end. Right now, renewable energy and its associated…

Where previously you could be stupendously dumb and do little harm, now with social media you can connect with all the other morons in the world and destroy societies.

Tony Abbott on radio this morning saying Aboriginal Australians need to ‘integrate’ with our way of life. Why? In 235 years we’ve made exactly zero attempt to integrate with theirs.

Bathurst’s bats. This will happen more all the time now, as we trash the rest of the landscape and plants and animals come looking for somewhere to survive. I came up with a concept of ‘reality-based politics’, which…

Saw this on a local FB group. It’s a good example of how bad faith actors in places like the US (this is a US meme) prey on simple minds on social media in other countries. Whipping up angry mobs, protesting things that…

The new fighting in the Middle East should remind us that we have to ship most of our fuel from there. Over $50 billion of it, per year. And it’s sending ordinary Australians broke. But we can power our cars with our…

You won’t convince most No voters to change their minds, because they’re not using their minds. As with EVs, climate change, renewables, Covid and everything else, they’re cheering on their ‘team’. It’s team sports,…

The late-18th century was when the First Fleet arrived. But it was the 19th century when the wider settlement of Australia happened, a history only now starting to be really told. It was an uncontrolled expansion into…

The problem is easy to see, and nobody wants to admit it. Social media is a disaster for societies, a 24/7 assault on the trust that holds them together. It makes all views equivalent, the most pig-ignorant, bigoted…

‘Australians with periods‘ are women. JK Rowling made this same point a few years ago and has been hounded disgracefully ever since. If the trans community find it distasteful, remember that post-menopausal women and…

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…

Another victory for local social media groups full of morons.

A few times over recent years I’ve posted about the debacle the Snowy 2.0 would be. 4 Corners last night showed it in all its sad detail. (And it’s actually a $10 billion debacle, and growing.) The biggest mistake the…

Social media has made all needed social change almost impossible, bogged down in endless fake debates. The smartest thing the ALP can do right now is target households with full electrification for their homes. Heavily…

This is what social media is doing. Australia already built virtually nothing, we’re a quarry for other countries, with our local political flag-saluting halfwits obligingly ripping up what puny royalties we got for…

Now is the time to act if you don't want Covid for Christmas. I'm not holding my breath that most will.…

Many Australians doing it very tough right now. Look at far and away their greatest expense, transport. That’s fuel prices. That will drive the shift to hybrids and EVs faster than anything else. Always follow the money.

Nothing flushes out society’s dumbest people faster than any social media post about electric vehicles. Have a look at the comments, usually with smirking emojis.

The pro-petrol/diesel crowd trawl FB looking for any mention of electric vehicles, and then it starts. The same dumb things said over and over. Not one of them here for example even understands what a PHEV is, that the…

Every single slogan below is a lie. This industry creates them to cast doubt, flooding social media with them, to create resistance to change. Why so much of my social media is about countering this nonsense. Renewables…

Remember the slogan 'cheap and reliable power'? Look at South Australia. A wholesale price (purple line, the green is demand) of near ZERO. ALL DAY. Already easily the most reliable grid in the country. 99.8% solar and…

Its almost miraculous that social media protest groups emerge so fast at every new renewables development. Except it isn’t, it’s very deliberately planned. The Atlas Network is a key player here, funded by fossil fuel…

Most Australians live on the coast, making offshore wind a superb method of electricity generation for us, active now overseas for over 30 years. Offshore wind is often strongest at peak usage times as well, like when…

Trans-culture took historically quite common fun with androgyny, and tried to turn it into an actual identity. Social media enabled this, allowing it to bypass the usual slow percolation through various testing grounds…

This should make us ashamed. We have probably the greatest renewable resources in the world, and a tiny country in not particularly sunny Europe is way ahead of us. Worth remembering every time you see anti-renewable…

A daily vaccination against social media slogans. This one for the claims that solar panels and windmills produce as much if not more waste than fossil fuels.

Social media has won another election. Argentina, this new president is a big fan of Trump. Spend a couple of minutes watching just how crazy he is (short YouTube video). Social media won Trump the US presidency, and…

The bats are as good as gone in Bathurst for now, and unsurprisingly social media hysteria had no part to play in fixing anything.

The only thing keeping our coal industry afloat is China. Imagine the irony of that export now collapsing, as China shifts at warp speed to renewables, leaving us with nothing. While we have all the natural advantages…

For Doctor Who fans who haven’t seen this first of the new specials, no spoilers. But in terms of personal impressions - it’s appallingly bad. More a crusading piece for trans culture than a Doctor Who episode. I grew…

Consent fails time and again in law because it’s as nebulous as a fart in the wind. It’s a fad, a fashion. It will fail, because it already has failed, always, for years. It misunderstands the problem completely. This…

I share this stuff not because of a particular love of EVs or renewables. But because these shifts are shifts across our entire societies, everything links back to energy. An energy system that allows you to generate…

Solar capacity in Europe has grown by more than 40% per year for 3 years in a row. Graphs like this ram home what absolute fantasy most of what you read on social media is. (Except my posts, of course.)

Alan Kohler is so consistently brilliant. Like here, pointing out that the US (and the wider Anglo world) is handing total domination of the next century (or two) to Asia, because of our ridiculous culture wars on…

What used to be called our civic life is now being replaced by social media groups at the local level. The pathetic adolescent trivia that leads to is worse every day. These are adults, this is the shit that now passes…

Many have said over the years that what I post to FB looks negative, or not much 'fun'. It's important to me to clarify that. Spinoza is a hero of mine. The only real purpose of adult life is understanding. And that's…

I’ve had a few people ask me why I’m so critical of social media. There are many reasons, one of which is that my work takes me into places where the direct impact of social media on real world things happens. Like the…

One of my kids gave me a stern look and warned me not to share pictures of them on social media this Christmas. I almost never do that anyway, so it was never going to happen. We’ve raised them well! Transacting…

Nod to the garbos out early on Christmas Day on their usual runs. No doubt social media will find fault in something you’re doing, like the other 364 days of the year.

Scrolling through Christmas messages is a fascinating cultural exercise. Like this photo below, wouldn’t know these people from a bar of soap, but their personal lives are here, shared far and wide. The problem for me…

You may have seen John Campbell online during the pandemic, with lots of videos encouraging people to be less concerned about Covid. Now accountability is coming for him, and he’s running away. Social media influencers…

The urban cowboy travelling the country, protecting Australians from the evils of wind and sunshine. I guess it resonates better than ‘Nukes for Port Stephens’. Don Quixote attacked windmills. He was unhinged.

I can retire in 5 years so this stuff doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But I feel for the people who work for local government who are subjected to nothing but a steady stream of ignorant abuse, day in and day out.…

Work can be fun, and it can also be boring, tedious, stressful, and just bloody hard. But what it increasingly isn’t, and why I’m glad to be closer to retirement than not, is meaningful. Look at St. Peter’s Basilica, in…

Many have asked about terms - endemic, pandemic, epidemic etc. The picture describes it well. Covid is an epidemic disease, and because it’s spreading across the whole world, it’s now a pandemic (pan - international).…

In August last year, Australians were surveyed as to how many deaths per year would be acceptable, from ‘living with Covid’. 86% said less than 1000. 61% said less than 100. Living with Covid in 2022 killed over 1000…

98 Australians died of Covid yesterday. They were living with the virus. Until they weren’t.

BA.2 is a new variety of Omicron. It has arrived in Australia but is still at small numbers. Remember the Premier has asked us to ‘push through’ Omicron. That’s BA.1 Omicron. BA.2 is waiting. (P.S. Denmark has the same…

At least 90 million people have been infected with Covid in the past 10 weeks, worldwide. That's more than were infected in the whole of 2020. Over 50,000 people are dying every week. In other news, Greg Hunt said on…

The people who will do best in 2022 will be those who wear a mask, even if government says you don’t have to. And those with no debt. If interest rates go up, many Australians with big mortgages are going to be in a lot…

I keep posting about Covid, because there’s a total vacuum of actual information out there. Deaths first today. 1077 Australians have died of COVID in the last 15 days. That’s more than the 2020 road toll (1095), and…

"Randwick Council announced on Wednesday night that Malabar, Maroubra, Coogee, Clovelly and La Perouse beaches would also be closed for 24 hours while council lifeguards looked for any further sightings of sharks." One…

So the NSW Government ensures there's no official data on Covid in schools. But social media usually knows. Claims of more than 100 infected kids at Bathurst High School right now. Plus staff.

It should be a matter of deep shame to all Australians that we’re one of the only developed countries in the world where millions of people have to pay for their own pandemic testing. Not even the libertarians in the UK…

Going to have my first ever social media holiday, a few weeks probably.

Wikipedia so rocks. This news is already updated there, amazing. Was curious to see Barty cites missing being at home as part of her decision. That's something other Australians can learn from Aboriginal Australia, what…

Another from the Roy Morgan report. Australians hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at that astronomical jump in love for national lockdowns in 2020. (The 2008 jump was Kevin Rudd’s…

How are peoples’ schools and workplaces going with Covid infections? Social media should be telling this story every day. It’s not being reported elsewhere.

My passion for discussing the myths around gravity feels a bit justified, when I see that over 5000 Australians die every year with the cause of death listed as ‘falling over’. The language is always so interesting.…

Ignoring any love or hatred for The Greens, this makes a lot of sense? Why wouldn’t we do this? The change could also fund so much the country needs. Right now just about all $184 billion will go into the pockets of a…

Aren't we going well here in Australia. People needing to use credit to buy the basics of life. But at least wealthy Australians will get enormous tax cuts in the next few years, so they can buy the companies that will…

Smart people overseas, asking the questions Australians aren’t asking.

Did Jesus fly Jetstar to heaven at Easter? I think he just ascended. Australians engaging their deepest passion. Being somewhere else.

Do you reckon before you award wealthy Australians tax cuts worth $184 billion, you should first check if every school, hospital, road, river, sewer, NBN connection, women’s shelter, legal aid program etc. has all the…

Good Friday remembers a death. Even noticing death has become a challenge for many Australians. They’re happy that hundreds die per week from a preventable disease, provided they can get back on planes and into pubs and…

Covid is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia, in history. Only Spanish Flu and Scarlett Fever have killed more, and the widespread massacres of Aboriginal Australians. Covid of course is still killing,…

People-pleasers in relationships often have a history of some sort of trauma. I think this goes much wider though, because our social behaviour is now dominated by people-pleasing. The greatest fear many now have is…

When the man-baby got booted off Twitter, he set up his own social media network in a sulk. It’s been a disaster. What it shows is the bankruptcy of the libertarian ‘freedom’ ideas Trump and others peddle. Their whole…

Nearly 6 million Australians have been infected with Covid since Christmas. On purpose. Remember that in times to come.

If anybody can find one letter of journalism in this propaganda, please let me know. The people who whine about the ABC being ‘biased’ usually read Murdoch papers like this one, and don’t see it.

This unbiased media thing the Murdochistas always talk about is 'do as I say, not as I do', obviously. I'm yet to meet anybody who spews rubbish on Covid, the Economy or just about anything else who isn't just quoting…

Here’s the 2022 summary for Australia. A bus load of Australians dead every single day, since Christmas.

Another treat for the ‘ABC is biased’ people.

The great con of conservative pay-media is that it has no viewers. SKY call itself the ‘voice of the people’. Barely 40,000 people watch it. The let it rip Covid crowd always talk about ‘this is what the people wanted’,…

Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, his look at the ‘far Right’, is compulsive viewing. To me it shows how boys have been left behind in our thinking. Young men have been weaponised by politics, because they lack role…

I always like to mention that the Australian Government copies pretty much everything the UK government does.

Maybe we shouldn't be letting kids catch Covid, hey. What do we hear from Australian leaders and most Australians? Nothing. Sending them all to school to get infected. Photos of what you did on holiday or the weekend…

One of the election slogans is ‘the quiet Australians’. Vote for the quietest Australians. The 7513 dead from Covid, with a couple of hundred more each week. They’re very quiet. As are we, about them.

Vote for a change to this disaster. I can guarantee you a vote for the LNP is a vote for a continued criminal refusal to do the basic public health work we’ve been doing for 150 years. The second they said a pandemic…

Superb. Damien is bureau chief for the Australian office of the NY Times, now living in Sydney with his family. The same guy who realised what was unique about Australia through his kids joining the local surf…

20% of Australians surveyed said they’ve gone to work while knowingly infected with Covid. Don’t blame them, they have to eat. Blame idiot governments who let Covid rip.

All Australians should read this book. Damien is the Oz bureau chief for the NY Times. He brought his family to live here and discovered something really profound about us that I think many don’t even see. He knows us…

Election day musings. No other country in the world has an election day like ours, it’s like Grand Final Day but even bigger. It’s really hard to describe what’s unique about Australian society. But I think there is a…

Governance is my profession. People know I love to talk about stuff here, including why the LNP in 2022 was not just a threat to Australia, but also to itself. The Liberals in particular may not even survive as a party.…

It's inspirational to see young, smart and cashed-up Australians calling enough on decades of obstruction to needed change in this country.…

Another hike in interest rates coming today. I think it’s worth remembering that this only matters because much of society has no money and is living off debt. And that this is why the gutting of the living standards of…

Australia is being literally robbed by fossil fuel multinationals. (Note this is true for coal, as well as gas.) And what do Australians say about it? They attack everybody who tries to build domestic energy capacity to…

Joyce is also one of the main border-busters with Covid, which has killed over 7000 Australians since Christmas. Has earned himself over $100m gutting Qantas, which was once the envy of world airlines. You’d be brave to…

The astonishing thing about the transgender movement is how fast it became mainstream. I think it’s driven largely by social media, which allowed the bypassing of the usual testing process for the ideas through various…

Knock me over with a feather. Covid has been ‘hitting tens of thousands of Australians’ every day since Christmas time, this is not a new situation. Some leaders and health experts need to prepare for possible future…

I've travelled quite a lot. I hate the process of actually getting from one place to another, packed into planes like sardines, interrupted sleep, lost bags, foul shared toilets and showers etc. I don't mind it when I…

For those struggling with understanding that Covid isn't a health problem (though it's that too). It's smashing the economy as fast as it's maiming and killing people. 776,000 Australians worked fewer hours in June due…

Australia currently averaging over 54 Covid deaths per day. And as you can see, it’s still going up, we’ve been slaughtering since well before Christmas. Some say Australians won’t tolerate actions like masks again. But…

There was a time when these numbers would have outraged Australians. The reason it doesn't now is that they're being deliberately led to not care. Groups are always led, whether it's a committee or a society. They…

Those who think Covid isn’t an intrinsically political thing can explain these photos, I’m sure. Social behaviour is led, and you can see very clearly here who led Australians to ignore basics like masking.

Australians haven’t been wearing masks since before the election. And again, you have to wonder why that might be. But you won’t need to wonder too hard.

Bypass what politicians, media outlets and friends are telling you about Covid, and go straight to the expertise, like Professor Chris Goodnow. For those who won’t read it, his main points. It’s vastly more serious than…

And this happened despite 30 years of a federal government running resistance to renewables on behalf of big donors in the fossil fuel industry. Australians never subscribed to the economic hoo-ha they were peddling,…

Today Australia reaches 10 million Covid infections (officially known, in reality there may be at least twice that number). Nearly all of those have happened in the past 8 months. More than 13,000 Australians have died…

A while ago I posted an article about how precision fermentation may replace agriculture almost entirely. It may be the greatest ever revolution in human life. It’s arrived, see ABC report below. Agriculture is far and…

This is the KIA EV6. Mid-sized family electric car. Drive one of these next to a Porsche or Ferrari at the traffic lights, or any muscle car, and it’ll smoke them, you can watch them in the rear-view mirror as you drive…

I’m a fan of the monarchy. What I think is so important about it is two things mostly, one being that it’s a form of government that puts custom and tradition at the heart of what we do. Institutions. The second being…

Australia's head of State should be...Australia. As it is for Aboriginal Australians. Not a person, the land itself. That's very difficult to do, because for us land is an inert thing, a 'resource'. But it's the cradle…

Crocodile Dundee is like the Frank Sinatra or Elvis of the Australian landscape. The whitefella substitute for the culture we didn’t understand and mostly destroyed. Elvis and Frank mined black music heavily, and became…

I post about changes to energy because what’s really happening out there should amaze people. And help explain why I say the change will be fast and brutal, much much faster than people are thinking. Some examples: -…

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me.…

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…

The real reason most people won’t wear masks or take Covid precautions is that the majority of people are followers, they follow others in deciding what to do. If mask wearing becomes optional (as it is now), they won’t…

This is the Covid story we’re all about to live. All existing vaccines lose effectiveness within 5 months. This isn’t unusual, your annual flu shot is the same, we’re saved by flu disappearing over Spring and Summer,…

Todd Sampson's two-part doco on social media premiered last night. Included in it was research that showed more than 80% of social media posts are about the person who posts them. Also why people encourage those posts,…

It seems we have a choice between curated happy online personas living their best (Instagram-filtered) lives, and righteous vandalism. Social media means we now never leave high school.

Here’s today’s quiz. Who was actually running the country since the mid-1990s? This should as much as anything make Australians determined to electrify everything, to give a giant middle finger to the people who did and…

Australian researchers study soap bubbles to design the most efficient way to dig an open-cut mine. Our lives would be almost infinitely more amazing if we ran societies on smart, and not on the social conformity of the…

These are neutralisation assays, tests done to show how our antibodies (the main part of our immune systems that fight infection) respond to different viruses. These are people who have had 3 doses of vaccine, and a…

I see very little evidence anybody cares. It's a defining moment in Australian society, deliberately infecting our children. Over and over, not just once. Our society may not survive it, the health costs alone could be…

I enjoyed this debacle. Only one house made any real money, and it turns out illegally, through dummy bidding. Huge numbers of Australians can’t even afford a roof over their heads, which makes the show incredibly…

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much…

38 Australians died on MH17. 39 people died of Covid in NSW, just last week.

Brilliantly simple. We could have been doing this for the past 20 years and energy would be as good as free right now for Australians.…

10GB of mobile data—less than one week’s consumption for many Australians today—is more data than any Australian mobile network transmitted in the entire twelve months of the year 2000.

I notice SKY News and other Murdoch neanderthals continue to bash Tim Flannery, for saying we'll never fill our dams again. The thing is, he never said it. The prime idiot Andrew Bolt put the words in his mouth.…

I know FB has become mostly a place to share what we're all doing every day. And I provide lean pickings for people there, sorry. I don't put my private life onto social media very much, I'm surprised so many do. Though…

I suspect many people believe vaccination protects them from getting Covid. I’ve circled in red the effectiveness of the vaccines in stopping transmission, after 6 months, which is about the last time most Australians…

The Novavax Covid vaccine was slow to arrive in Australia, but it seems to outperform all of the other vaccines by a long margin. I posted this week how the efficacy of the AZ and Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, which most of…

Before Christmas Australia may cap the price of coal, to keep electricity prices down. Coal and gas companies are making huge windfall profits on the back of exorbitant international prices. This could be very bad news…

Amazing numbers of Australians haven’t vaccinated their kids against Covid. Politicians told them the disease is ‘mild’ in children. I’m glad my kids are in the right-hand far column, and not the left.

Between 1 in 50 and 1 in 25 Australians currently have Covid. With Christmas gatherings approaching.

There are only a handful of ways to get rich. You can inherit a lot of money, or win the lottery (both very rare). Or invent something (a song, a car…) that is so popular that millions buy it. The hardest road is to…

A new twist on batteries today. One big government announcement, and one change coming. Both will have a profound impact on the decision whether or not to own a battery. Today the government announced the building of 8…

My workplace has a big Christmas party this afternoon. Covid is rife in the building this week, but the party will go ahead. Who knows how many will then take Covid home for Christmas. I won’t be going. For my own…

“Wayne Errington and I discovered that early on members of federal cabinet were arguing for a Donald Trump style laissez-faire approach to the virus.” Governance is my job. People think I have a personal gripe with…

During the pandemic, Australians still fly overseas in the tens of thousands, and then sit at the other end and moan about not being able to come back immediately. Travel was the petrol that started this pandemic, and…

At least the US parliament was open. Do Australians remember that our own PM closed parliament completely for much of 2020, and a hand-picked committee of gas industry cronies decided Australia’s post-Covid future? The…

One of our elected LNP representatives. Apparently 40% of Australians would vote for Trump. Maybe some positivity would fix it.

Parler is an extremist social media group, where Trump went when Twitter banned him. Matt Canavan is a federal LNP Senator. How much evidence will it take for Australians to recognise that they haven’t elected a…

ScoMo and his government did this with RoboDebt. Nobody in trouble over it, nobody even really said sorry. And their popularity has gone up, showing Australians’ understanding of politics is 3-word slogans.

"...as long as the state premiers continue to ignore the idiots in the federal Coalition and the Murdoch media and lock down as needed...It turns out that stopping the disease from spreading is the only thing that…

Re-posting this because the news is full of stories of Australians stranded overseas. Sure some of these people have legitimate reasons for being OS in the middle of a pandemic. But look at the numbers - they tried to…

Superb work from the ABC here, the entire pandemic in Australia in words and graphs. You can see very clearly here that Victoria’s big outbreak was due to spread into the areas where essential workers live. The people…

I live in an electorate that gets many of these vote-buying grants. The local members spend most days publicising more new spending. Makes them look like great members. It’s corruption. The Blue Mountains didn’t get one…

Over half of Australians currently saying they won’t get a vaccination when it becomes available. Trump should move here and run for PM, he’d probably win.

The super casual approach many Australians are taking to Covid is disturbing. People happily organising and attending social gatherings with little protection, just because the government says it’s ok. The UK government…

Radio host today, asks why Australians are so ‘compliant’ with health orders? Bizarre, how collective action is now seen as compliance. The victory of those who want to turn citizens into consumers, and countries into…

I wonder if Australians will join the dots to figure out why we don’t make the top tier as a democracy? NZ does.

I’m more bothered that so many Australians are so pleased with his handling. He hasn’t handled anything.

Australians returning from overseas in the pandemic. A clear public sense that NSW is doing the ‘heavy lifting’, taking more than its share of the arrivals. But the data tells a different story. Very little difference…

Lots of criticism of FB for blocking a whole range of non-news sites as well. Because we’re too lazy to investigate anything, we miss that Rupert had specifically advised that the government’s social media legislation…

Social media undermining traditional media is the First Person striking back against the Third Person.

Can’t share the ABC story on FB about how tourism is destroying Byron. People know I think tourism and travel are a type of disease. People literally consuming beautiful places, before moving on to consume the next one.…

Australians have amassed over $200 billion in savings during the pandemic. Global warming gases have plummeted. Crime has collapsed. Cities have their cleanest air in decades. Hundreds of thousands were lifted out of…

Beautiful graph, showing that the pandemic allowed hundreds of thousands of Australians to move out of poverty for the first time. About to be reversed, because the government and the many who support them think if you…

So fed up with this government. If the tourism industry and airlines are struggling, print some money and give it to them. Don’t encourage millions of Australians back into circulation with a pandemic still active, I…

The #ReclaimTheseStreets vigil in the UK right now another example of how what looks like opposing sides in public debates are actually the same side. Stupidly risky to gather in these numbers in a pandemic, but woke…

Australians love dams. Mostly because they see water as something only for human use, ignoring its complex role in the landscape. They also think they drought-proof places, which is about as smart as thinking you'd be…

You hear the word 'development' a lot. Usually seen as a great thing, creates money and jobs etc. What it actually creates is millions of houses sitting on often prime land, unconnected to most services or social life.…

A lot of countries give you a feeling of human history, sometimes going back thousands of years. But Australia feels much older than that again, like geologically old. There's not much else about Australia that I…

Australians spend $60 billion a year on overseas travel. That's 10 times what the country spends on infrastructure, and about equal to what it spends on education. And nearly every cent of that money ends up overseas.…

The great Australian dream is to live on the coast. The ultimate lifestyle location. When I say Australians are basically still tourists in their own country, this is what I mean. This vast land with its spectacular…

There's a lot of vaccine triumphalism in the US and UK right now, drunk on their speed of rolling out the shots. Both nations unwilling to do basic public health work, to eliminate the virus. Despite the media stories…

Makes me almost physically ill listening to Australians planning their next OS holidays. Reminder: a pandemic isn't a minor inconvenience to your recreational lifestyle. It's an international tsunami of death.

The PM refuses to build a national quarantine centre. So virus keeps leaking out of hotels not built for quarantine. Very happy to do it for the past 25 years for refugees, tens of billions on that one, because it wins…

Here's some numbers to contextualise what I say about the AZ vaccine. Currently it causes about 2 clots for every 100,000 people vaccinated. That sounds tiny, right? About 16 million Australians are scheduled to get…

The LNP has sacked 1100 ABC staff since 2014. Commercial TV and radio is cheap reality programs, opinionated shock jocks, home renovation and other lifestyle programs, game shows, sport etc. Doesn't public life seem…

Common sense prevails. High efficacy, safe vaccines for Australians of all ages. Well done.

Nearly a third of Australians say they won't get vaccinated. That's a disaster. Looking at the stats, offering older age groups a different vaccine would help a lot.

The Overton Window of public discussion. Debates are 'framed' (I use that word a lot - this is why). Ideas that get listened to have to be within a 'window' around that acceptable-sensible part of the continuum. From…

Lots of hysteria in public debates at the moment about vaccinating to prevent big outbreaks in the winter. I think we need to remember that even under the original ridiculously optimistic timeline to vaccinate the…

Thanks To Dave Roma for this shot. They're doing extensive renovations on the court house at the moment, I watch them every day. Another example of how technology is really morals wrapped up in materials. When you build…

Waleed's thinking is everything Australian culture has come to hate. Nuanced, researched, complex. Many Australians hate him for it, often the types whose banner of Straya-ness is putting a flag somewhere. It's hard to…

It's readers of the Telegraph who often go on about 'media bias'. I guess they know it well.

Social media is the old newspaper, pulled apart and the sections monetised into a particular app. Facebook is the old personal pages and classifieds. Instagram is the old social pages, where you'd look at pictures of…

Australians spend more on alcohol than on gas and electricity, or petrol. We spend more on booze than we do on clothes, and almost as much as we spend on health.

The good thing about social media is that it cuts through the BS very, very quickly.

Twice in Australian history, the ‘reserve powers’ have been used to remove a sitting government. Once in 1932, when the NSW Governor removed Premier Jack Lang (picture). And once in 1975, when the Governor-General…

I’m sure many thought I was on some politically-inspired year-long crusade against the NSW Government. I wasn’t. We’re seeing right now what angered me then, and infuriates me now. I see barely a whimper from fellow NSW…

The glory of social media is that the idiot things morons say can continue to embarrass them for years to come.

What aboriginal Australians know and we don’t, is that the world isn’t made of facts. It’s made of stories. Every fact is a story, it only makes sense within a narrative framework. Nicolas Rothwell, a writer, travels…

70% of Oz adults vaxxed = 11 million Australians unvaxxed (6.2 million adults, 4.8 million children). 80% of Oz adults vaxxed = 9 million Australians unvaxxed (4.2 million adults, 4.8 million kids). All of those…

Yep. In fact I’m not sure I really want to know Australians who think we should open up before kids are vaccinated.

"For all the NSW government’s attempts in the 11am media conference to sell a positive vaccination story and downplay the soaring COVID cases, the numbers and the reports from the front line have crushed the spin."

Pico Iyer sees something I don’t think many Australians themselves do. Living in Australia plugs you into something ancient, that works away at you unconsciously, by osmosis. You can physically feel it if you return…

When they announce that people who have died of Covid had ‘underlying health conditions’, it’s worth remembering nearly half of all Australians have those.

This vaccination rollout will be a brilliant test of the Australia we live in, compared to the one we maybe think we live in. Right now about 5 million Australians are saying they won't get a vaccine. Compare to our…

A bit long, but some ideas aren’t sound bites. I know the world seems crazy to many people. I think the cause is something hidden in plain sight. For generations now, we’ve allowed adolescents to grow up in a separate,…

At 80% of adults vaccinated, 40,000 Australians per day are still estimated to become infected with Covid. Many of those will be children. How about we be a bit patient and vaccinate 80% of the WHOLE population first,…

The questions Australians are not asking. The answers may hit them like a truck, before Christmas. How many know what Alan spells out here? Really worth your time.

Leonardo Da Vinci reading his social media comments.

I think my frustration with social media is exactly this, it's called the 'Spiral of Silence'. See excerpt below, but the link is only a page of reading too. People simply refuse to engage in discussion most of the…

How communities are fracturing. The article blames FB, people often blame social media for this sort of thing. Like saying guns are why people get shot, it’s too simple. I think social media is making existing…

Australians are much more Aboriginal than they realise, I think. Not only does the landscape shape us in ways we don’t understand, but our encounter with aboriginal people has become part of our cultural DNA. Take the…

Such fine Australians have formed the modern LNP. Saying the quiet bits out loud.

Focus groups apparently show Australians were ‘outraged’ Emmanuel Macron called Scott Morrison a liar. Uh huh. The focus groups must have been his wife and kids.

Between May and November 2020 Australians were the healthiest they've ever been. What's bad for the 'Economy' is terribly GOOD for us. The 'Economy' is a tool, and obviously one that isn't working. Let's get rid of it.

Pictures tell stories. What the pandemic showed so clearly was who the really essential workers are in our socieities. Nurses, teachers, supermarket staff, sewer and water workers etc. Leading politicians are…

Now the Australian government has caught up with the rest of the world with travel restrictions for the new Covid variant, let’s see if it will also relax its 6-month rule on 3rd vaccine doses. Politically it doesn’t…

The housing industry, and politicians getting big budget revenue from housing prices, have spent the past nearly 3 decades selling us a lie that has ruined the lives of entire generations. The lie - that high housing…

Anti-vax British doctor gets banned from social media. Gets the ban overturned. Goes on British right-wing nut job channel to talk about his persecution. Gets message from his prostitute mid-interview, on screen. Leaves…

In today’s Covid news, the supposedly ‘mild’ Omicron variant. Hospitalisation rates in Denmark about the same as for other variants. Overwhelmingly the Danish being infected in the early days are 20-29, which will…

Remember ‘hospitalisations are what matter’? Predictably, now they’re trending up, suddenly that spin has gone a bit quiet. Also predictably, social media is still pretending we’re all living in 2018. As Covid inches…

Maybe people can help me understand the appeal of Instagram. I’ve tried it a few times, and each time it seems to be the things I like least about social media - looking at other peoples’ pictures detailing their day,…

I don’t think I’ve seen any concert described on social media as anything but ‘amazing!’ or ‘awesome!’

Coastal Australia is talking about the end of drought, as it gets drenched in rain. Which kind of shows that for the majority of Australians, that tiny coastal strip is Australia. Anything West of the ranges needs at…

This is the first time in human history where the old are the richest generation. The circle of life is broken. As you can see from this extract on an ABC forum, very often the old aren’t even seeing it.

Babies when held in water can walk, they don’t need to learn it. It’s a reflex. Aboriginal Australians, without training or shoes or tracks, could run faster than Usain Bolt. Most of our training and exercise is…

At the lower end of the projections, a quarter of a million Australians may die of coronavirus. Similarly, one projected climate model this week predicts that all of humanity could become extinct by 2050, if projections…

Boris Johnson tells UK they should expect that many will lose members of their family. ScoMo tells us to relax and go to the footy. Lots of Australians are following ScoMo's lead in their understanding of what's going…

I’ve spent all week listening to people say dismissively that this virus thing is just media hysteria. Have a read of what Italian hospitals are facing right now. You want to see real hysteria? Let it get to this in Oz.

This pair have both been exposed to people with Covid-19. Both refused to be tested or to isolate themselves, as would be the legal requirement of any other person. People vote for these dipshits. No wonder most…

This is the national governance scheme for response to the pandemic. Lots of committees, lots of levels. All of this does add up to a not bad system, there’s a lot of expertise in that picture. But it’s all very boxy,…

Well now, 'supply chains'. Who'd have thought. Who will people play social media ping pong with now the hoarders and busloads of evil foreign supermarket pirates are off the hook?

Australians have shifted their outrage from hoarders to the 'Chinese' and inter-town supermarket raiders now. What doesn't vary is the outrage. As one scapegoat gets stripped away, another one is generated quickly. It's…

The barrage of complaint about unemployed people now getting more money? All the old dole bludger lines. Want to know what a bludger looks like? Somebody getting all of their super payout tax-free, or a bank being…

On the same day the Deputy Chief Medical Officer announces Australia is on the cusp of slowing the infection to the point the epidemic dies out, these dipshits announce the NRL will restart. As Australians we can choose…

I wanted to put down some thoughts about joy, and how to get it (imo), at a time plenty probably aren't feeling it. Takes a minute or two to read, I know that's not popular on FB! What inspired me is the number of…

"Australians and our governments have been so careful to balance the needs to get our economy back to a COVID-safe level so it can support people's incomes and we can return to higher rates of growth into the future."…

We should thank Australian universities for this, they assembled over 100 experts from diverse fields to assess where Australia should go from here with Covid-19. You'll see they suggest either elimination (my…

We had a postal vote to decide on gay marriage. This is a MUCH bigger issue. Why aren't Australians being asked to decide our way out of the pandemic, between the options of 'controlled adaptation' and 'elimination'? It…

How's your toilet paper stash? "Prof Talley warned the Australian Government’s strategy of suppressing the virus rather than trying to eradicate it has left us in a vulnerable position."…

Right now about 50% of Australians with cold and flu symptoms aren't lining up for Covid-19 tests. On the one hand they're told not to go to work if they're sick. On the other work is 'opening up' again, so many have to…

I was amazed they decided to push on with exams, just seems another example of how schools and kids are cannon fodder in this pandemic. I say don't be fooled by the appearance of care for education in Australia -…

Between 1800 and 1802, 69,980 gallons of spirits and 33,246 gallons of wine were landed in Sydney, and was consumed by a population of less than 6000. Australians drank then to forget the alienation they felt from the…

Gladys and ScoMo and friends are furiously trying to get State borders open. Have a look at the vast numbers of Australians who don't agree with them. I suspect vast numbers don't agree with a lot of the 'opening up'…

Public debates and protests are battles of ideas, using humans as troops. Ideas are beings, they’re alive. They enslave us. Education is supposed to free us from that slavery (it rarely does today). I don’t think ideas…

It's still a frustration for me that current public debate doesn't ask one simple question. Why did closing things for 5 weeks result in damage to the 'economy' that might take 20 years to repair? It's nonsense. Once we…

Humans invented parliaments and courts, where two sides debate the merits of issues, to stop arguments infecting all of society. I think the reason our public debates have now become so polarised into two sides is…

On any social media platform, scan the first 50 posts. How many invite you to share something about you? That are actually ‘social’?

It's always what people do, not what they say. What they say? "We're all in this together". What they do? $150 billion in tax cuts skewed heavily to the rich and foreign corporations. Can't find a measly $84 million to…

Right now we could ask both NSW and Vic to lockdown again until they've eliminated Covid-19, like the rest of Oz may have achieved. We don't because the Economy Nazis say it would be the end of life as we know it.…

Let it sink in. At a time when a million Australians have lost their jobs, the government’s rescue package centres on big tax cuts to people with high incomes, with jobs.

If they don't want people moving about, close the places down they go to. Don't ask people not to move about and then leave the places open. The economy Nazis thought letting Australians travel all over the country in…

I use social media as a gauge of public thinking. For Australia it worries me every day. Still in denial of the danger we’re in, overwhelmingly posts are still about ourselves or some form of ‘happy’ distraction from…

Diana Tamir from Harvard Uni led a study that showed that 80% of social media posts are people talking about themselves or their own lives. Even when offered money to post about something else, they reverted to talking…

This time, eliminate the mongrel. What we should have done last time. Meanwhile Gladys also introducing new measures, but no leadership - just 'encouraging' us all to do it. And all via press conference, which hardly…

All through this pandemic Australians haven't engaged in the specific details. Instead they've played tabloid games, finding new scapegoats every day. Take the ridiculous hoo-ha about what's happened in Victoria. Blamed…

So far nearly 600,000 poor Australians have completely cleaned out their super accounts under Covid, about $32 billion. This super money if left until retirement would have been worth maybe $200 billion. (JobKeeper by…

We look back mystified that soldiers in the world wars were excited to be heading off to fight for a cause. But why don’t we relish a real existential challenge? Social media is swamped with happy diversion to…

I said this from day 1 of this pandemic, and was told I hated ScoMo. Australians don’t engage with the ideas, they just line up behind their ‘side’. The ‘balance’ of the economy (feds) and health (States) was exactly…

I'm so sick and tired of what passes for public debate. The bushfire enquiry recommendations published today. 76 recommendations. All the Neanderthals want to talk about is 'hazard reduction burning', the tabloid…

Maybe a million Australians have lost their jobs under Covid. Do you think Josh's $158 billion in tax cuts will cheer them up, now that they have no income and are paying no tax? Shows pretty clearly who's getting most…

Our passion for travel is matched by our passion for borders. Doesn't that strike us as bizarre? Those are OPPOSITE desires. It makes sense when you realise it's only *other* peoples' borders, the places we travel to,…

A disgrace. "...where we can reopen our economy and reasonably restore the liberties of all Australians." When will more thinking Australians speak out and say they're quite happy to have 'liberty' from the fucking…

It'd be amusing to see how many Australians would pass the Australian citizenship test.

Lots of prominent Australians signing this one. This is a tipping point for Australian society, I think. Do we want to head down the American road? https://nb.tai.org.au/tax_investment_price?recruiter_id=854569

Monash has surveyed for both waves of Covid in Australia, to test what Australians know, feel and how they behave, with Covid. Testing and tracing won't save any country, including us. Up to half of men and a third of…

We’re so lucky we have superb public health systems in Australia. This story is horrifying, what catching Covid can do to you, even if you’re young. And yet there are still people in Australia today who will look you in…

I suspect quite a lot of people in Oz actually like Trump and what he stands for, and are just a bit shy to say it. They hate bureaucracy, they hate politicians, they think mainstream media is trying to fool them etc.…

I’ve always been a fan of the possibility of social media. But the reality is destroying our societies. I always talk about populism, and it’s social media that makes populism powerful. Every lunatic can mobilise…

"The Prime Minister said states that were reopening could learn lessons from NSW, which he dubbed as "battle hardened" from recent months." Sorry, bullshit. NSW has looked great because it has close to ZERO virus. It…

If you observe groups like this (very similar to sporting change rooms and a lot of male ‘bonding’) you don’t see strength. You see fear, and weakness. The desperate weak personalities using the group to shed their own…

I wonder if we understand or even see our obsession with images. Old aristocratic homes were saturated with paintings. Today our favourite thing to share on social media is pictures. I think it’s usually the most taken…

I don’t make stuff up. The Australian government chose the UK and US as guides for our pandemic response. You know, those countries where people are dying all over the place. Luckily most of our Premiers decided to…

A thought experiment. If a prominent media commentator in last summer’s bushfires had told people in the path of the fires that ‘there’s no fire here, it’s all a beat-up’, I suspect they’d have been charged under some…

Most of the vaccines aren’t even designed to give you immunity, so re-infections are highly possible. I’m sure many of my friends on FB stopped reading what I say about the pandemic months ago. I’m actually quite…

Something I don’t think many Australians have really registered yet. You’d think the whole thing was over.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is a scientist who has been working on pandemics for 15 years. He's a huge fan of NZ and Australia's approach. Here's his summary of what works (green) versus what doesn't (red). Notice that what we did…

Many people argued schools were immune to Covid earlier in the pandemic. They are when you have no virus, they’re superspreaders when you do. What’s particularly disgusting about this is the reason they argued it. They…

"Polling shows that 62% of people “believe Australia is a victim in the trade war rather than making itself a target by the government publicly criticising the Chinese regime (38%)". A.k.a. 62% of Australians couldn't…

So many of the things we see as problems caused by other things are really just us. It’s very difficult to take people seriously when they’re concerned about privacy, for example, when they do nothing but post about…

The Pledge is a UK debating show on SKY. Here in Oz the ABC is doing something a bit similar, though not as good, with The Drum. This is one area where ultra-conservatives have been so clever. What engages people is…

Couple of UK media people talking about the 'sewer' of social media. One asks the - I think - crucial question: is social media the cause of this sewer? Or was the sewer already there, and social media just made it…

I’ve seen this one on social media a lot. Firstly Roosevelt didn’t say it, I don’t think. But secondly, how true is it? I’d maybe re-write it as: Small thinking doesn't discuss anything. It compares people with one…

In times of excess frugality is called being cheap, or stingy. It's a lesson many may have to learn again, the really hard way. 89% of Australians feel out of control financially, that's scary.

I have a daughter now old enough to drive. It's a tension for me, because: 1. I don't think kids should be driving cars. 2. I think society already has way too many cars and drivers. 3. The greatest killer of…

Trolls are the sort of people who live amongst us all the time. So I see social media doing again what it often does, making us visible to ourselves. We don’t often like to look in that mirror.

Australians see government as a service provider. Something to make sure the basic infrastructure of society is in place, working and affordable. I think it’s a very healthy framework for government, and have actually…

I think the power of social media is that it’s making visible the way that how we think and feel, as individuals, has always been a profoundly social thing. The split between individuals (psychology) and society was…

Muso: social media is destroying music! (P.S. I have a gig this Friday, come along.)

It's not just wealth that's trickle-down. So are education, entertainment & news. Social media is smashing them all.

Seeing lots of rubbish like this. We keep treating politics as a football game between parties, that we watch on TV. I reckon we don’t stop to think - no, the LNP didn’t ‘win’ the election, like a tennis match. The LNP…

Here’s to me the greatest lesson of the election. Government is *always* just us, the people. In the past there was no way to mobilise all of us at once in real-time, so it led to a perception that a small group of…

One of the greatest human problems, understanding how to balance individual and group. I think music solved it a long time ago, but people don't often go there to answer this one. Melody (individual) and harmony…

The Israel Folau freedom of speech hoo-ha is an example of how the LNP is deluding itself that they're back in government because people supported their policies and worldview. They took no policies to the election,…

Australians tend to talk about rivers as if they were talking about drains. Something that drains water from one spot to the sea, hopefully with lots pumped out along the way. Or something to turn into a dam. You can…

Screens, anti-social? I don't think so, in fact they're the exact opposite. They're hyper-social. Teens and others are glued to their screens because screens give them permanent access to their social group. The world…

Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of Their Money) Bill 2019. I kid you not, the Bill is actually called that. The culture warrior virus has now infected legislation. Oh, and nobody…

Australians are turning away from meat for the same reason they're turning away from plastic. Because Australia doesn't think. It calls thinking 'over-thinking', meaning any thought at all.

"...you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it." (Eckhart Tolle) It's a standard insight from presence traditions. I think it's fascinating to apply it to public debate. Lots of…

More of the genius of Tarde. What would Tarde say we should do to get 'economic growth'? Tax cuts? Micro- and macro-economic reform? Fiscal or competition reform? All fairytale piffle, he'd have said. There is no…

Social media analytics, do we stop and think about how extraordinary it is to be able to now quantify so many desires and beliefs? The subjective/objective divide dissolving. I think this is maths finally achieving its…

Somebody asked me the other day if I 'had a life'. What prompted their question was that I rarely post anything about my personal life to social media. To me it was staggering, how deep oversharing is in people, that…

Queen Vic yesterday made me think. Every 2 minutes humans take more photos than existed in the entire world 150 years ago. There are an estimated 700 billion pictures uploaded to social media every year. Add to that all…

There's a desperation about the 'big lap' I think. A dream of many Australians. As if the more we see of the country, the more we somehow understand it. To me it's a last-gasp leftover from our imperial past, empires of…

The Eels getting most of the media and social media attention tonight, but for me this is the best sporting team in the world right now. Awesome grand final win today Swifts.

Always follow the money. Real business people with real money at stake aren't even listening to the bullshit that passes for public debate on this..."insurers cannot afford to indulge the denialist fantasies". I take no…

What I love about social media is that it's real-time evidence of why politicians are not the problem. People are nuts.

I thank Kato and the good people of Newcastle for evidence that we're ripe for our own Aussie Trump. And that hatred of institutions has been the defining characteristic of society since the 1960s. These comments in…

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

Opposites are the in thing. Left and Right, city and the bush, quiet Australians and noisy Australians, etc. I think it’s worth trying this thought experiment with all of them. Hot and cold is a good example. If hot…

The politics of words. DROUGHT. Drought suggests that lack of water is due to lack of rain. It's a concept used a lot because it puts the blame on weather, rather than on anything humans do. One of a politician's…

If you work in a frontline public service position, it’s scarily obvious that Australians are now flipping from the easygoing, unthinking ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, to explosive rage in the face of emergencies, like…

It was a real surprise to me that fear is the reason many people either don’t post to social media, or post only about themselves. Then it clicked - people tend to use social media to create a social identity. That fear…

"Our rivers and landscapes are suffering once again and it is not due to drought. It is caused by poor policies and poor management. And these are driven by POPULIST myths. The critical need is not to drought­-proof the…

Maybe the fire crisis is nothing to do with fires, or with firefighting. These fires are the natural result of myths Australians tell themselves. I'm very interested that books like these are starting to unpick…

You can tell a lot about Australia from space. Look at most of us, huddled on the coast, afraid of our own country. Like a lot of Australians, I’ve wondered about what reconciliation means, with aboriginal people. Maybe…

Of course climate change intensified these bushfires. But there’s a deeper problem I think, as always it comes back to our ideas. Our idea of ‘the bush’ (and thus ‘bushfires’) is the direct cause of this disaster. This…

An ancient pattern. Kangaroos LOVE golf courses. It seems obvious, there’s grass to be eaten there. But it’s much more than that, the pattern of long grassy strips (each hole of the course) bordered by trees and shrubs…

Billy Joel wrote ‘The Stranger’ after a painful breakup. He realised the person he thought was closest to him in the world was actually a stranger to him. (Pure Proust.) You can never really know a person. And they can…

One of the things that isn’t widely known about China is how innovative it is with governance. The outside world thinks of China as a big communist totalitarian State, but within China there’s more experimentation with…

Every year Australia Day is a bit of a puzzle for me. As a kid nobody in the community really spoke about Australia Day. It was a day off, that’s all, the people who tried to whip some patriotism into us were considered…

More thoughts about Australia Day. Maybe it should be called ‘Coast Day’. We landed on the shores here, and never really left them. The overwhelming majority of Australians live on the coast, it’s almost like they can’t…

Gabriel Tarde, predicting social media a century ahead of time. And in the process completely redefining economics as the science of passion and desire. Economics is fascinating when you realize it’s really about how…

Some of the most solemn drivel in public debates is the stuff on A.I. Artificial intelligence is portrayed as computers becoming brains. Brains don’t ‘think’ either so it’s layer upon layer of drivel. There will never…

Not trying to excuse the Australians, who I think are a bunch of boorish, greedy, cheating yobs. But I do remember this, exactly the same or even worse behaviour. Has been going on forever, the games Pakistan threw for…

You only have to look at the way neither major political party will touch this topic here, and all media commentators laugh at it, to see just how much banks have everybody who counts in their pocket.

“Part of the problem is that we expend far too much effort comparing our behind-the-scenes reality with everyone else’s public highlight reels, posted in envy-inspiring terms, meant to catch our eye and make us wish we…

Reading is one of those universally loved things. But does it have a dark side? I think so, in a few ways. 1) Books created the idea that knowledge is separate to human beings who use it. It’s ‘in the literature’. The…

“But this is not, or not really, an article about speed, or cameras, or even cars. It is about the rise of the antisocial bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless…

This trend has been clear for a while. ‘Grown-ups’ who are still essentially teenagers. Obsession with bands and music, with consumer goods, with fantasy fiction and films, with binge culture, grown-ups having…

Budget day tomorrow. Know how they say governments should ‘balance their books’ and not have debts and should aim for surpluses? It seems right, because it’s how we as individuals and families have to manage budgets.…

The commentary from media personalities, to me, show the way we substitute outrage and sentiment for understanding. Lisa Wilkinson, ffs, who does the tear-jerker puff pieces now on The Project, devoid of any real…

It is a bit scary, the Nazi storm trooper type zealotry coming through the ranks. "Today, a publicly funded national broadcaster crowds out its private competitors and is an indulgence we can no longer afford." We need…

Have lived this firsthand. Steiner was an occultist, and occultism was very big in the 19th and earlier 20th century. The term occult and 'cult' are related - occult thinking tends to produce cults, a word that has…

A few days ago I started talking about the occult. Today some more connection to it, when it turns out the person who defaced the Eurydice Dixon memorial was an occultist. This is the fastest growing set of beliefs in…

A prominent journalist on the weekend said that nobody in the media could think of a way to save serious journalism. In a situation like this, it usually means I think that the ideas we’re using don’t fit. In the case…

Any country with 'democratic' in its name is usually an authoriarian dictatorship. Any media organisation that uses words like 'fake news' and 'bias' and 'the Left' and 'the Right' isn't a media organisation, it's a…

Men like this are helping to break our society. So why do people listen to them? I think it’s the same thing again - stories. They tell simple, emotionally powerful, stories. Stories that give a feeling of resolution to…

Once upon a time if you had ideas, you wrote a book or article, and published it if you could, and hoped people would read it. Most books are never read. What social media has done is bypass the book, and taken ideas…

“It’s a shame Germaine Greer’s insensitivity on issues of deep vulnerability so often gets in the way of her ability to start public debates about difficult issues.‘ I would rephrase that as “it’s a shame those who…

Some thoughts about the media and bias. It seems that those who talk about bias often don't actually understand journalism. They will often say journalists should just 'report the facts', equally for both sides of an…

Here’s my vote for why people like Trump and climate change deniers win. It’s a classic example of how the people who want the world to be different see the people they need to convince as simply stupid. How far do you…

The Great Super Lie is something highlighted by many more than a decade ago. Super is the financial industry, the messages they constantly give us about needing more super benefit the industry financially. (They’re also…

Check out the idea of peoples’ ‘second selves’, the self they curate, alongside the self they traditionally live. I think we’ve always had a social self, a second self, it’s just that now it’s much, much bigger than it…

The warning label that should come with all social media (or life in general), which I saw yesterday... Don’t compare your inside with everybody else’s outside. Everybody’s outside is mostly a lie. Or selective editing…

I love comparing social media and Google search. The former is often curated fantasy, the latter tells you want people are really thinking. An example, how people describe their husbands. Firstly, on social media, the…

"It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is…

Generations of Australians were brought up to think 'you can't lose money on housing'. A nuclear-scale reality check may be coming their way.

We think we're a bit clever for religion these days, but the true message of Easter is much more profound than all the self-help, self-esteem, self-improvement and status-seeking we've replaced it with in our lives.…

Last week Malcolm Turnbull talked about Australian values. Every year during the Easter-Anzac Day time, it's clear that what Australians value more than anything else, is holidays.

Really fascinating report on the impact of social media on young peoples' mental health. Instagram is the worst, followed by Snapchat. YouTube is the best. The overwhelming reason for the negative impacts is comparison.…

Really fascinating report on the impact of social media on young peoples' mental health. Instagram is the worst, followed by Snapchat. YouTube is the best. The overwhelming reason for the negative impacts is comparison.…

This is the true face of the 'culture warriors' who have been spewing their filth into the country for the past 15 or so years. People who talk about the 'Left' and the 'Right' a lot. And who never shut up about the…

Do you know anybody with 'Smiling Depression'? I think people with depression often seem happy, but it's good to see that people are more aware of that now. One of the main causes is social comparison, comparing…

There's a lot of worry about privacy online. But the overwhelming majority of information on 'the Internet' is already information most people can't access, it's in the 'deep web' and the 'dark web'. This isn't an easy…

I don't express many views here about same-sex marriage. But one thing the debate has highlighted for me is the resources and determination of very conservative people in Australia and around the world, and their…

Expensive suburbs are often described as 'leafy'. And with summers getting hotter also a fantastic way to keep places cooler. But so many of our towns and cities have very few trees. It changes the whole character of a…

What worries Australians, graphed over the last 7 years. Look at housing on the rise. Australia is in real trouble. Its economic success in the last 20 years is almost a complete fantasy. The country has been run like a…

"The data is designed to help governments, industry and communities to make better decisions. It will be updated each year." If the data is telling them that an average life expectancy of 80 means we're all going to…

You can see the radio shock jocks here foaming at the mouth about this already, if it were suggested. (Actually some of them think this is what already happens in Australia, that most of the population is apparently…

Still think Bill Shorten is a sleeper, don't write him off. Australians like dull and boring PMs. Turnbull is the victim of the same boneheads in his own party who crippled parliament under Rudd and Gillard. The "just…

Indigenous issues aren't always interesting to a lot of people. But the numbers alone are so staggering. Some theories say Australian Aborigines may have been on the continent more than 150,000 years. By contrast…

"Virtual untethering is mostly virtue signalling. It is deemed good for the soul by just about everyone who talks about social media on social media." Yep.

Heh, this from Rupert's News Corp, who pay no tax. Murdoch's minions got stuck into this guy because they know this is political poison. They have to make sure that the poor get seen as lazy, lying scum, not people…

Let's have a plebiscite on rich Australians using super as a tax shelter. The number of people this affects is tiny, and shows who this government really stands for. It's not me and you.

I'm sure Australians will say what they always say. That the problem isn't our cluelessness about racism, it's other peoples' need to lighten up.

Next week he'll announce the ABC is biased because it doesn't have government ministers on the show. Who voted for this clown?

The serial social media quitters, its not just the famous who spit the dummy. Many of them come back. A bit strange that they blame the technology rather than the way they use it.

Can always safely say that when somebody says "the ABC and Fairfax are to blame", you have a vested interest caught with their finger in the till, hiding behind fantasies about media bias.

Doesn't matter who you vote for, these trends in Australia should bother us. 1. People who get paid millions of dollars to mouth 'opinions' every day, like shock jocks and newspaper opinion columnists, are allowed to…

This is the main toad who introduced Republican attack politics into Australia, designed to not just win elections but to undermine peoples' faith in government more generally (he works for people such as tobacco…

We should be much more worried about the media companies politicians like than the ones they don't like. They all hate the ABC. I think that tells us something.

To save the time and effort in reading News Limited papers and understanding the new Coalition's media policy. It's all in one tweet from Master Rupert, who's shifted his campaign from the UK to here.…

Think I'm missing something here. This was in the press this week, and of course it gets lots of "social media is the apocalypse" support. But seems to me that the only way this might happen is if: 1) you have your…

Nice way to understand the national mood over the past few years.…