History & memory

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…

The kids in this pic look like they all want the same toy. But it's not about the toy, they fight over the toy because the other kids want it. That's what makes them fight. The kid who wins the fight will likely drop…

All the stuff about status and imitation and rivalry I post about is in this diagram. It shows that our lives exist in cycles, in time, and we get stuck in our thinking at one part of the cycle. For example right now…

In the past half-century the number of decamillionaires (people of net worth $10 million or greater) in the US has increased TENFOLD. This isn’t a story about inequality, bear with me. It’s this group from which nearly…

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

For well over a year, many have said America’s democracy is being taken over by a totalitarian regime, the Trump regime. But America has always been a plutocracy, a country run by its economic elites. It’s never been a…

There was a TV series on Bodyline, but it amazes me there’s never been a film about Bradman. His sporting achievement is one of the most extraordinary things statistically in all human history, it almost defies belief.…

The oldest you will ever be is the day you’re born. Everything you inherit, in your biology and culture, is ancient. And then everything you add to both of those in your life is brand-new and young. The more you…

Even while I was still infectious with Covid, it was beginning to impact my body in a range of ways. It triggered an excruciatingly painful elbow bursitis, infection creates massive inflammation in the body. Infection…

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are…

This, though it maybe doesn’t look it, is a cherry tree. An ornamental. It had to be butchered late last year to make room to install new guttering, which you can see above it. All of its major limbs were sawn off. I…

American protest counterculture now thickly layered with social media-driven identity politics as well. The French? Not so much. Revolutionary cultures always remain that. Everything is always an uprising of outrage,…

Countries collapse when elite rivalries within the country get out of control, often leading to civil war if the population is unhappy as well. Trump’s own gang of elite buddies don’t even want Venezuela, now he’s…

Many evoke the civil rights reforms of the 1960s as supposed evidence that activism and people-led change are both possible and define democracy. You can see with Trump’s rapid reversal of those reforms, which in…

The 'balance' people think needs to be made between disease control and their social life? We learned how to control disease to GIVE us social lives. It doubled our life expectancy. You don't control a disease by…

The daily team sports of ‘politics’ and fake debates and social trends blind us to the material realities of our lives. Despite all the B-grade Hollywood hype about us apparently under assault from totalitarian…

We're living inside a 2000-year period of history that has been mostly dominated by China. Our collective memory is about 10 minutes. The only thing that interrupted the total dominance of China was what they call their…

As another window into the culture, and again our own cultures are as invisible to us as water is to fish, our ideas about bodily agency and sanctity are resolutely adolescent. For example, I’m sure most would say rape…

This is the Financial Times, in the UK. One of the most conservative papers. I’ve been saying for many years that China is a far better superpower to be leading the world. It’s been doing it for nearly 2000 years. It’s…

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

Covid was just the start. ‘Living with’ infections. They’ve moved on to all the others now, diseases that have killed millions and which were controlled through long battles over generations will now be allowed to roam…

From Barack and Michelle Obama’s statement on Trumpian America. You can see here why the problem with America is…America. It’s not being taken over by anybody, every American is encouraged to sink the boot into…

I’m 57. I didn’t even think about getting a ticket to see an elderly Cold Chisel, or dance in the mosh pit, because…I’m 57. Being 17 again holds no appeal. My parents at 57 had zero interest in their teenage passions.…

The first casualty of war is truth. Take the Russia-Ukraine war. Pitched to us as a battle between the authoritarian communists in Russia, and the democratic Ukrainians. In reality Ukraine has been run by powerful…

I talk a lot about imitation and imitative rivalry. Imitation (copying) is the centre of human life. Rivalry (Rene Girard studied this) comes because to imitate another person is one of the most hostile or aggressive…

It’s not fascism. It’s history.

There are usually foundation-level social teams in the status games that define human society, at least in modern times (with the decline of Kings and Queens, at least temporarily). Today that’s the politics of Left and…

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.…

For nearly all of history, societies have been ruled by kings. It’s the default form of governance for humans. It amazes me that people opposed to the Trumps of the world don’t offer people an alternative king. The…

I can’t engage in what’s called ‘politics’ because it’s really just social team sports overlaid upon the material realities of human life. It’s literally like a football Premier League added to what keeps societies…

For a long time here I’ve tried to persuade people that what Trump represents isn’t fascism. Fascism is about the State, and Trump has no real interest in the State. It’s a shift back to royal forms of governance. Back…

Dennis Altman is an avowed Australian Republican. But he was compelled to write this book, because when he looked at the topic, he realised monarchies not only never went away, they keep being restored, and countries…

“There is a growing consensus that the democratic model developed over the past century is in trouble, but there is less clarity about why people are so disenchanted with their democracies.” Because democracy as we…

The Epstein files are damaging for Trump because they expose him to be a key player amongst the elites that he, and populists like him, pretend they’re fighting against. Pauline Hanson is the same here in Oz, pretending…

The reason monarchy is pretty much all of human history is that it's a technology to control status rivalry. Modern minds don't understand this. Take the rituals around royalty, which modern republicans see as outdated…

The Left/Right binary is being swept away by populism across the globe. Populism has no interest in sides or team sports. It wants a King. You may not believe that, but just look to history. For all but the past 70…

For any social progress or change, you'll find a rivalry between elite groups, using ordinary people as leverage. For example universal voting, which we're taught and assume was introduced because of pressure from…

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…

Most of what we call democracy is actually the Welfare State maintaining 'social security'. Without that life would be brutal and violent. The UK was one of the inventors of the Welfare State, and did it in the middle…

The British Medical Journal. Covid is not really a respiratory disease, breathing is just how it gets into your body. Covid is a vascular disease, it attacks blood vessels. You have blood vessels everywhere. When you…

People of a certain age (like my age) might remember a great sci fi TV show from late last century, called Blakes 7. One of the characters in Blakes 7, a favourite of mine, was a supercomputer called Orac. Only the size…

It's not a shift to the 'Right'. It's a shift to populism, which is the replacement of both Left and Right with a King or equivalent. Julius Caesar did it in Rome. It's a pattern as old as history.

We're not living in a time where fascism is trying to take over democracies. We're returning to humanity's most stable and long-lasting social form - feudalism. Headed by a King. Land is now only for the elite to own,…

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…

For most of the last 3-4000 years, China was the only world superpower. Then in the past 300 years Western countries discovered fossil fuels. That gave them a temporary dominance. That dominance is now rapidly coming to…

In the mid-20th century, more than twice as many people were born every year as died, in Japan. That’s now flipped entirely the other way, now twice as many people die there every year as are born. This is a trend…

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…

Again, this is about brilliant engineering, not brands, it’s just that Tesla is one of the few companies prioritising engineering. Tesla has now included its AI, Grok, in its cars. And you don’t have to go buy a new…

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…

When I use the word ‘kidult’, it’s not meant to be just some cheap insult. It’s an analytical term invented by people who study societies, to describe a type of culture, where adult life is replaced by an extended…

Another view of the Model Y 6-seater, about to be released in Oz. Seriously considering getting this, to replace our remnant combustion engine in the household, in the Kluger hybrid. The petrol price volatility with the…

Housing affordability is trapped inside a filter of understanding that will prevent us ever fixing it. The supply and demand filter, which is total nonsense. All sides of politics and most people will tell you the…

Meanwhile in Straya we're still driving around in Tonka Truck utes that are shit *as* utes, with no driver dynamics or comfort for passengers, lethal for other road users in collisions, zero aerodynamic design (they…

Driving past the servos on the way home, with all the prices north of two dollars per litre for the Texan/Saudi Arabian soup. Then I came home and plugged the car into free Australian sunshine.

When I talk a lot about Tesla, I often get the ‘Tesla fanboy’ label. Because people who say that have had their lives hijacked by social media, and so now everything in their life is a rivalry between opposing teams.…

Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia and Ras Laffan in Qatar are the global home of oil and gas production, respectively. Nowhere else churns out production like these, they’re the original and biggest sources of oil and gas.…

This is cheering. A nuclear war would also likely shut down social media, so the ANZAC nations may also stop arguing about everything, start vaccinating again, driving electric cars and using free energy from the sun…

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.…

I wonder if people can feel the imminent crash of what I call lifestyle culture. Where life and all of its existential complexities was replaced in the last century with the idea of life’s purpose being the maximisation…

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…

It seems that rather than admit petrol and diesel is an energy source that will never be cheap or reliable again, the latest invented outrage we’ll use to try to not change what we do is to say it’s a massive conspiracy…

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…

What concerns me about this is that we already live in a culture where adult life was replaced by adolescent gangs, fighting for their respective ‘brands’ in everything (cars, coffee, clothes, energy, etc.). If petrol…

The US is famous for having a national 55 mph (about 88 km/h) speed limit on its roads. That limit now varies across the country, controlled by States. The history of the 55 mph limit has echoes for us today. Richard…

In the past half a century the fear of overpopulation in the world was pretty common. But during that entire time, global birth rates have been in free fall. To the extent that many parts of the world now face a genuine…

The continuing surge in popularity of Chinese cars in Australia, easily the dominant vehicles in sales in Australia, and have been for a while. Their brilliant EVs are now rushing out of salesrooms. Tesla’s Model Y is…

Many see modern activism as ‘democracy’ in action. The idea that ‘the people‘ rise up to bring about change. It’s all bollocks. Protest-activism is just the remnant of earlier revolutions. It’s exactly the same social…

We’re a culture where history is something that lasts about 10 minutes. And therefore we don’t see this sort of thing for what it actually is. Cultures that were founded by revolutions, endlessly reproducing that…

The fuel tankers that deliver the fuel to all parts of Australia travel a distance each year equivalent to travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use over 200 million litres…

AI has written more words in the past couple of years than all of humanity has produced in written history.

Some more details about Teslas, we chose them for their brilliant engineering. Their engineering design not only targets everything that makes them incredible family cars, they’re also brilliant driver’s cars with…

When you think that we knew this 20-30 years ago, and did nothing. That last Coalition government in particular should be in jail for national vandalism, with the exception of Turnbull, who tried and was rolled by…

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…

For many years another anti-EV message was that they have no resale value. How the worm has turned. Some people are selling their used EVs now for more than they paid for them, new. Meanwhile second hand petrol and…

There have been debates for years between people who believe in ‘socialism’ (i.e. government-led life), and those who believe in ‘capitalism’ (a life led by individuals in markets). And me? I don’t think either -ism…

I often post about how culture is invisible to the people living it. Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. And that Western culture has no idea of ‘place’. No meaningful connection to the ground under its…

When you read the history of the first Industrial Revolution, the people who opposed it look like idiots now. Our current revolution is much bigger, to electric-powered societies. You get to choose right now whether you…

The supply of fuel we’re still getting all left the Middle East before the war began. It’s about to run out, globally. In populist politics it will all of course be ‘Albo’s’ fault. When really it’s the fault of…

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,…

Unsurprisingly the majority of comments on this post gushed about how amazing the Oldsmobile is, and how the Tesla has no soul, and how everybody would choose to ride in the old car. That’s kidult culture, rampant…

The hilarious thing about our Yellow Peril racism is that we’ve already been ‘dependent’ on China, for decades. The US does almost nothing for us, in practical terms. China funds almost our entire society, through the…

Sulfur has a beautiful yellow colour. World supply of sulfur has been badly impacted by the Iran war. One thing the war has done is reinforce that the basis of people living together isn’t the relationships between…

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…

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

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

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of…

To be brutal, I don’t listen to Americans about democracy. They’ve never understood it or lived it. They’re a revolutionary society that mistakes revolution for democracy. “American democracy is in such a sickly state…

For those who don’t follow American politics, Trump’s Supreme Court, in an act of ludicrous overreach, overturned a voting rights decision from about 60 years ago, that stopped States using openly racist methods to…

People think I’m delusional by still going on about Covid. Because they’re still trusting that the world they grew up in, where public institutions advised the expert course of action, is the world we live in now. They…

The changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing were long, long overdue. But it won’t fix housing. Supply is not the problem. Housing and land were transformed back into status objects, as they’ve been for most of…

How to see kidult culture. Culture is like water to fish, mostly invisible to those living it. In the 19th century, Jules Verne created magical stories. About travelling to the moon, and amazing submarines exploring the…

The empirical data-based historian Peter Turchin says one of the most dangerous things a society can do is educate most of its young to a high level. (A difficult truth for any educator to hear.) All revolutions in…

Modern 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…

About a century ago Walter Lippmann made the obvious point that in a mature democracy, elections shouldn’t introduce much change. The ‘running’ of a country is done by skilled administrators, not the elected. Imagine a…

You can see here how the belief that lack of supply is the cause of the housing crisis is really a fiction sold by the same investors who caused the crisis. They want to make even more money, with even more houses to…

It became very widespread to say ‘living with the virus’. Which was a phrase invented by a politician, not a scientist. It was bullshit. And this is where it leads. Every person who gets sick now, listen to them, will…

Unaffordable housing is land returning to a feudal model, to go alongside the shift in ‘politics’ back to monarchies/kings. About 90+% of Agatha’s Christie mysteries revolved around crimes related to inheritance. That…

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…

The irony here of a party representing the original land-grabbers in modern Australia, the huge 19th century stealing of most of the continent (and its communities) by the early pastoralists building their empires,…

Alan Kohler making the obvious point I made here well before the last election. If you bring house prices down, you also bankrupt millions of existing Australian homeowners who took out huge mortgages, with the belief…

A graph that's a window into status, the core of all human life. Real wages only began to rise after the apocalyptic first half of the 20th century, when millions of ordinary workers were killed, meaning those left had…

Two things to see here I think, one obvious, the other not. The obvious - China targets poverty specifically, and has made spectacular progress, unprecedented in history. The US like the rest of the West uses the poor…

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…

Put the team sports of this debate aside, which makes you choose one of the two equally idiotic, completely empty opposing team positions. Women fought to be treated as more than just their sex. But they did not, EVER,…

The most common trick populists use is to relentlessly imply that a town or nation is ‘heading in the wrong direction’, is being led by ‘incompetent and corrupt’ people, and that your town or country is being taken away…

I often post about how only catastrophe brings meaningful social change. Cars are a good example. Until World War 1, horses were the dominant way people got around in their daily lives. 8 million horses died in that…

I saw that over half a million young Russian men have been killed in Putin’s adventures in Ukraine, and well over 100,000 Ukrainian young men as well. It’s only when you have kids that the reality of them dying for some…

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…

The great American historian Professor Charles Beard was once asked what 4 lessons he drew from his study of history. This is them. Perfect for our doomscrolling times. That doom is reality already self-correcting. More…

One of the enduring symbols of fascism is thousands of troops goose-stepping in perfect unison. The origins of fascism are societies which reach a ‘mimetic crisis’. Meaning that everybody begins copying everybody else,…

When you define democracy as everybody doing whatever the hell they want, mostly that just ends up being collecting guns. Certainly not joining the metric system, or having 21st century amounts of electric power.

By far the biggest billing at this launch of the Obama Centre is musos. It’s a big gig. Like all countercultural political movements, it’s just another leftover Woodstock movement. Not only is modern popular music just…

Top Gear changed the motoring enthusiast community into a mocking, nasty movement attacking a whole variety of social groups. As well as stifling innovation by going to war on everything that isn’t gas-guzzling, usually…

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…

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…

“Fat cells have memory. Except they don’t remember when you were skinny.” Medical researcher, when asked why the world got exponentially fatter even with an exponential growth in diets and exercise.

Peter Dutton took the Trump playbook to the last election and got absolutely smashed by Albanese. Pauline is having another go, selling Australia as a Trump franchise. She’s now going backwards again, probably because…

"The last five prime ministers have actually been the five most unpopular prime ministers in polling history and, according to some polls, each of them has broken the previous one's record for unpopularity.” An article…

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…

I still remember that Australia. Pauline and her army of the permanently enraged don’t. I only exist because of that Australia. The Romans welcomed immigrants with open arms. It made their empire one of the longest…

I talk to people every day on the socials who tell me the AI apocalypse is upon us, and capitalism this and oligarchs that and Big Brother etc. And yet funnily, most of the world is falling over itself to use it. Far…

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…

This is the side of Musk that is rarely mentioned. He's a genuine believer in improving the human lot. A zealot for that improvement. Unlike earlier barons of industry, in the early 20th century or the much earlier…

For nearly all of history, most people couldn't read. Now most can, but choose not to. It's another one of those point-in-time things that a particular social group takes as essential, only because it was their thing.…

We hear a lot about mental health these days, and resilience. At a time when life is actually easier than at any other time in history. So what’s going on? Nietzsche knew. Humans will endure any hardship, so long as…

It’s became very popular to see ‘oligarchs’ as the root of evil in modern life. I shared a few weeks ago the fate of the oligarchs that led the first Industrial Revolution. They got very rich and powerful at the time,…

Farmers and the Clean Energy Council have quantified what’s at stake in the idiot war some in politics have invented over renewables in regional and rural areas. This is the projected income to both local towns and…

The humanities gave us much more profound ways to understand time well before modern science. Take Proust's remarkable description of how the past never actually passes, it's always still here. That a simple taste or…

Christopher Nolan has made a film of Homer's The Odyssey. In an important way the world has come full circle back to the concerns of ancient times, without recognising it. Homer's Iliad is about rivalry and status and…

I talk a lot about how human existence is people imitating one another, driven by a battle for social status. We imitate to become part of some social group, to recognise other group members. Creating rivalry within…

Chesterton’s Fence is a principle stating that you should never remove or change a rule, tradition, or system until you first understand exactly why it was put there in the first place. Chesterton, like Edmund Burke…

Germaine is still alive! But I’ve worked for years to understand the particular genius of her work, separate from all of the fake outrages about her. Most people who I discuss Greer with haven’t read a single word she’s…

The standard story goes, we once were naive and believed in transcendent things, but now we don’t and believe only in facts. I don’t think that’s right. History instead is the passage from the transcendent, to the…

Kings and other high status individuals exist because status hierarchies control the spread of imitation, and therefore violence. Imitation produces rivalry, rivalry produces violence. That’s the fundamental law of…

It’s stupidly funny, all the rhetoric about the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese. The Chinese are one of the few empires in history with almost zero interest in war or fighting in other countries. They nailed it here. The US is…

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…

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.…

There are 2 bubbles being mixed up in this type of argument. Yes there is a possible financial bubble in the AI race. But the technology bubble is independent of that. Railways caused a financial bubble when they were…

Cities are remarkable in a way I only recently came to understand. Throughout all of history humans have struggled to find ways to live together, without violence and death. That’s because humans relating only to other…

It's fairly standard to say that peer review is the test of objectivity in science. For most of the history of science, it didn't even exist. None of the giants of modern science had a single publication peer-reviewed.…

Jevons Paradox again. It reminds me of the comment that less than a century ago hardly anybody had flown in a plane. Now we fly at near the speed of sound all over the world, and complain that the food on the plane…

Father Brown was one of those shows I always saw in the options on streaming platforms, and never dipped my toe in. I thought it must be one of those innocuous Brit shows that offered pretty views of the UK countryside…

Most regional towns now hold regular economic forums, large chatfests to try to figure out how to keep the towns viable. The thinking being that the towns need to ‘attract’ business and people. I’m not confident that…

Rather than try to make their regions independently successful, China is rejecting the separation into city and country. It’s connecting regions more aggressively to their mega-cities, with fantastic transport and other…

In historical terms, many urban environments are remarkably peaceful and functional. Not utopian, not without issues, but compared to human history as a whole modern cities are very livable environments. We often…

The emergence of a near-transcendent force of destruction in the Manhattan Project created the fear of global annihilation. Instead that transcendence ushered in an era of almost unprecedented peace, via the threat of…

I'm never sure it really registers with many just how hopeless combustion engines are. In the history of engineering, they're a genuine embarrassment. On top of this the electric vehicle gives you far more performance.

I'm never sure it really registers with many just how hopeless combustion engines are. In the history of engineering, they're a genuine embarrassment. On top of this the electric vehicle gives you far more performance,…

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,…

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…

I’ve shared my concept of a ‘social field’, like a magnetic field but for society more generally. Not an analogy, the way mundane material transactions of everyday life create a collective, continuous web of stability…

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…

40 years ago Bruno Latour suggested that we think much more with our eyes and hands, than we do with our brains. Because thought itself has never happened ‘in’ the brain. It’s always been a distributed activity, across…

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…

Some perspective again on how remarkable what's happening in China is, and what a backwater of whining adolescent irrelevance the West now mostly is. In the past 20 years China has spent $7 trillion (AUS) building new…

Gen X is realising that the boomer model, where retirement is a permanent travelling gap year, flush with cash and free of most responsibilities, is not going to be afforded to anybody else. The countercultural…

Here’s a simple way to show that time doesn’t pass. It doesn’t flow like a river, from past to present to future. A melody. If time actually passed, melody wouldn’t be possible. Every new note would just stand on its…

Look at what AI can do. For years I’ve thought Formula 1 racing isn’t really racing, that its results are more about entrenched technological advantage in key teams. So with AI I looked at whether the results of the…

This is a lovely diagram explaining how AI turns masses of texts into actual reasoning. Into thought. Thinking. Consciousness. The greatest miracle in human history. You're alive right now, as it happens.

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…

A not spoken about revolution of AI? It’s the only thing in our history to be ‘well read’. That has read most human knowledge, from all sources, including images and sounds. No human has been able to do that since the…

I don't think the magnitude of global ice is widely known, and what melting it all will do to sea levels. For those sceptical sea levels can vary much, historically we know how high the seas were the last time all of…

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…

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…

17 million Americans now have Long Covid. That's seen as a vast under-estimate of actual sufferers, driven (as here) by people and their doctors having zero clue that Covid is the cause of their often horrendous health…

Medicare is under enormous pressure in Australia. Some of that is an ageing population. But a big chunk of it is price gouging by doctors and dentists. Fees being charged by many medical professionals are extortion,…

The annual flag worship is almost upon us, so just a few of my thoughts on Australia Day. I have zero time for any of the debates over the day, they're all fake arguments set up to create division, to harvest votes. I…

One of the most amusing FB trends of the past year or two is the same people who share voluminous details from their personal and social lives here, then locking their profiles to protect their privacy. Because…

My posts about ‘gig culture’ get bogged down in the offence people take at their favourite acts being criticised. It’s a wider argument about cultural and social change. The 20th century was a century of revolutions.…

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…

Much of what I post comes from the mostly unknown world of governance. What it is that makes it possible for people to live together. It’s not even art, let alone science. It’s a bloodsport with some core insights…

Just one sporting ground in the UK. This is climate change, they're no longer even denying it. This particular ground has flooded 8 times in the past year alone. Many big clubs are not confident they will survive.…

Oceans absorb 90% of the heat produced by us burning fossil fuels. They’ve hidden just how bad the warming is. Here’s the temperature of the top 2km of water in the oceans, since the 1950s. To give an indication of just…

The price war is escalating, and Australian consumers should be excited. We’re the luckiest car buyers in the Western world. BYD has just reduced prices on its models by thousands, vehicles that were already at almost…

Last year at work somebody said ‘aren’t you worried that when you eventually take off that mask your immune system will be weak?’ This is scientific nonsense pretty much universally believed now, that we all need to be…

“The Fab Four's music endures because it mirrors an era we still long for, says Adam Gopnik.” Yep, nostalgia. There’s a new Beatlemania right now, major films from Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and now Sam Mendes.…

For most of history, children were not thought of as a separate group. They entered the adult world from a very young age. When universal schooling arrived, we flipped the world in the complete opposite direction. As…

In my childhood, the old were not the wealthiest part of society. They were the people buying Iced Vo-Vos for a weekly treat at the supermarket. We refuse to notice or acknowledge the fundamental re-writing of society’s…

A stat for fans of ‘baseload’ power. In the past decade, households have used nearly 5% less total electricty. The cost of this electricity grew by more than 70%. This is coal and gas-fired ‘baseload’ electricity.

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…

“Last Friday, Trump launched a meme coin that reached a market capitalisation of $4.8bn inside of four hours. A former Obama administration ethics adviser assured the Washington Post that “this may represent the single…

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 year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Have we learned anything as a result of it? I don’t think so. Why did the Germans do this? Modern team sports claims it was ‘anti-semitism’. But the…

Years ago now I posted quite a bit about the emerging terrible damage that sugar does to bodies. At the time that was considered a very marginal view. But I was reading the science, and now it’s really becoming…

Expect to see that red grow. The DNA of Europe is war, because nationalism is top-level team sports, and those always lead to war. Europe invented nationalism, and exported it everywhere, a disease we can’t shake.…

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.

Humanity’s greatest ever achievement was doubling its life expectancy in the 20th century, through public health measures. Trump is going to war on that achievement. The impact will be catastrophic. People defend him…

Trump and others hate what they call the ‘Deep State’. Sounds scary! All it means is the professional civil servants that actually run countries, who annoy popularly-elected dickheads who can barely tie their own…

Trump’s lunatic plan is also the history of Australia in only one sentence. Kick the natives out and kill them, and turn their land into a real estate casino.

I was talking to my brother about overtourism. Mike is a senior manager in the travel industry. He made the fascinating point that what’s allowed travel to explode to levels of destruction is Airbnb. All of these people…

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…

A 'wit' shared this with me the other day. Loving the Tesla, loving sailing past poor combustion clunkers madly down-shifting and revving, trying to keep up. Loving no fuel costs, no servicing, loving the 17-speaker…

An international pandemic expert put this together, for those who talk about the pandemic in the past tense. We’re still ‘during’ Covid, it was never over. The greatest mass delusion possibly in human history.

After firing the people who oversee the US nuclear arsenal, then realising uh oh we need these people, the Trump team now struggling to rehire them because they also deleted their email access. The war on ‘red tape’ is…

The massive shift to private schooling in Australia in the past 20 years was a deliberate policy decision of the Howard government. And what made that shift successful was that it targeted status. That’s what…

Bill Gates has made more money in the quarter of a century since he retired, than he did in the quarter century beforehand when he was creating and running Microsoft. He’s done that by ‘investing’. Investing is the…

You despair of the public having any memory at all. It was cutting of the public service by the Morrison government that led to the rorting by big consulting firms, brought in to do the work of the sacked public…

The genius of Covid is to give people a ‘mild’ illness, so they think it’s ’just a cold’. That mildness is the virus bypassing your immune system, to gain easy entry to your organs and blood vessels. The immune response…

What modern car nuts (mostly just guys of middle-age who used cars as a way of defining their social group as teenagers) don’t understand is that an EV is really a GT car. A grand tourer, gran turismo. Cars engineered…

Hear the dreams here? That’s gig culture, music as a pathway to status and wealth in adult life. A very rare, modern thing in history, from about the 1960s, and now in terminal decline for all but a handful. I would…

A bidding war between the two major parties on household batteries is the best news.…

There have been many criticisms of 'boomer' culture. Nearly always misunderstood as being about them as supposedly horrible human beings. But it's a *cultural* criticism, about a mindset and attitude. About the…

The idiot memes about broken windmills never mention that in the past 2 years, there hasn’t been a single day when one or more of our coal-powered generators hasn’t had a breakdown. The nuclear ‘plan’ for Australia…

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…

The English countryside is one of the great attractions in the world today. The interesting thing about it is that most people know that it’s almost entirely man-made. But when they look at the Australian landscape,…

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…

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…

Wonderful footage from the 1960s of construction by the then Department of Main Roads (the DMR) of part of the Sydney-Newcastle expressway. Lots of familiar bits of road even today. I love that post-war public optimism,…

So, who’s getting a battery? Tesla batteries are still the best, which will challenge the Nazi-shy, but that ridiculous hysteria will be a memory soon. This should have been done years ago. There’s an ocean of free…

Electric vehicles preceded combustion vehicles. Combustion vehicles were considered a joke: loud, inefficient, spewing pollution, gutless. That’s because they were a joke, and still are. Rubbish technology. Only cheap…

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.…

Brits have named this pair the two sexiest men in England. When they transported the genetic diversity they did have to Australia in the 18th century, what was left became a nation of in-bred hobbits, with tastes to…

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…

Amazing aerial recreation of Rome more than 2000 years ago, at the time of Jesus. Nice one for Easter. Look at how stunning ancient Rome was. The Roman Empire also gave birth to many of the world’s most famous cities,…

The UK's energy system is privatised. It also has nuclear power. The whole thing is such a train wreck that a growth industry there now is energy theft, with ordinary people and organised crime finding ways to steal…

Historically tradies dominantly voted Labor, but were skilfully brought over to the conservative side of politics by targeting young men mostly, with fake wars on women, EVs and utes, Greenies and whatever else could be…

Whenever you see an activist or protest movement, remember these words from Edmund Burke. Pretty much every hashtag movement of the current age, but also their equivalents from the past 50+ years, would fall into…

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…

Many feel uncomfortable at discussions of ‘gig culture’, because it’s our culture and impacts peoples’ sense of status and identity. But this isn’t an argument that musicians shouldn’t be wealthy, it’s just pointing out…

Peter Dutton’s only success in the past 3 years was an old-fashioned bash-the-Abos campaign to bring down the referendum. He’s hoping it might get him over the line in the election now. Never discount Australia’s…

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…

Time doesn’t pass in the way that we think it does. The past is always just here, but it’s in potential form rather than actual form. We think things either exist, or they don’t. Something or nothing. But there’s no…

Part of the pelvic bone of a Roman gladiator from the 1st century. The hole circled in blue is damage caused by a lion’s bite.

I really admire what Simon Holmes à Court has done with the Climate 200 group. Unlike lobby groups, who line the pockets of existing parties with donations, C200 just offers funds to any independent who wants to promote…

The ALP is sometimes called ‘the natural party of power in Australia’. That’s historically true, and has nothing to do with which party you may prefer. It’s the only party that can and has ever won elections in our…

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…

Ross Gittins on the building industry. “The recent report by the Productivity Commission has revealed that the musclebound blokes in shorts and work boots – and their bosses – have yet to be introduced to the lovely…

Remember the term ‘superpower’. Understand it. It’s not about comics, it’s the technical revolution solar, wind and batteries (SWB) are introducing. SWB doesn’t just replace our existing fossil fuel energy, it floods…

City and country aren’t two ways of life. They’re one way of life. Originally what we call ‘rural’ coexisted in the cities with more urban dwelling. But then they ran out of room and needed more resources, so farming…

I posted a few times here how the Liberals and Nationals have almost nothing in common. Here we are. Historically they represent rich industrialists and pastoralists, desperate to oppose working people having power.…

Today’s historical trivia. Henry VIII executed 3% of the entire English population during his reign.

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…

In New South Wales, in the past week there was an increase of 29.2 per cent in COVID-19 notifications, an increase of 25.9 per cent in influenza notifications, and an increase of 9.7 per cent in RSV notifications.

AUKUS was another Scott Morrison train wreck. AUKUS is the US wanting a mobile launch platform for their missiles, against China, in the Pacific. They can piss off. Why shouldn't China be our main ally, in 2025? Pretty…

The marble-columned ruins of ancient Rome are instantly recognisable. They copied them entirely from the ancient Greeks, whom they idolised for their culture and learning, after invading them. It was Romans trying to be…

Humans’ own culture is as invisible to them as water is to fish. The massing of tens of thousands of people into a space to all watch and listen to a handful of musicians doesn’t exist for 99% of human history. Its…

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…

This is Nicolas Fouquet. He was treasurer to Louis XIV, in the 17th century. And a beautiful example of how status works. He threw an enormous party for the King, to honour him. The party was incredibly popular and…

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is the first full-length nude in Western art. But even more interesting showing the birth of the Renaissance, following 1000 years of The Dark Ages. The Renaissance in turn was mostly…

Springsteen reportedly makes about $3 million every time he steps on stage. He makes more in a week of touring than giants of music like Louis Armstrong or Nat King Cole made in a lifetime. Most of the greatest artists…

BYD is an engineering powerhouse, they can generate new cars seemingly out of thin air. The Denza B5 is a plug-in hybrid rival to the Toyota Prado. Early drives suggest it’ll eat the Prado for breakfast, a brutally good…

This was superbly entertaining. It sounds dry, a debate on whether ancient Greece or Rome were 'better', but between them Greece and Rome built the world we all live in, and are still key to understanding it. Despite…

No human group, of any size, ‘rises up’ to defeat anything. The great American myth, now foisted upon the rest of the world through its idiot invention, social media. We’re going through yet another round of impotent…

Bathurst’s councillors still wrestling with the issue of revenue. I encourage everybody to go to the iPart website and have a look at the special rate variations approved for just about every Council in the State over…

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,…

I have no memory of this trip at all. But looking at it now, I see it as some sort of ad for the importance of wearing sunglasses.

When the wankpanzerati discover the power of electric motors, but don’t quite get that’s what’s going on. That sweet reference to a ‘gearbox’. Gears are so 19th century.

Last week 34 people died of Covid in aged care, in Australia. Tens of thousands now have, in the past 5 years. Nobody cares. If it had been a bus carrying the national soccer and cricket teams, or rock bands on tour,…

Honestly, it sounds uncaring, but I’m over the critical problems facing us as a community being reduced to the ‘anxiety’ people feel about them. More ‘feels’. This is a total absence of resilience, snowflake culture.…

In activist culture, what we used to call ‘the public’ is long since destroyed, replaced by a continuous shift in what’s ‘trending’ on social media, where we now live. A more accurate name for activists is gangs, it’s…

Watching UK home shows, so often you see red, blue and pink carpets, which look (to my eye) hideous. I often wondered why these colours seem so popular, and then the penny dropped. These are the colours you find in…

Elon with his enormous war chest of money is now establishing his own political party, to take on Trump. Terribly confusing times for adults whose understanding of life comes from what’s trending on social media.

All humans are highly suggestible, particularly kids. If you tell them always their mental health is under threat, they will become people whose mental health is under threat. If instead you fill their lives with…

Many say to me that people flock to gigs as a mass social event because of the music. But I think this video shows well that big gigs appeal to many people because they like being in a crowd of people. It’s a social…

If you need to use any sort of dental device for prolonged periods of time, like a splint, retainer, plate, dentures etc., keeping it clean is critical to stop your mouth becoming a breeding ground for germs. Oral…

Europe went from getting about 25% of its energy from coal, to only 6%, in only 10 years. All the anti-renewables and anti-EV ‘debates’ are fake, stirred up and funded by vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, to…

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…

Tobacco plantation owners were some of the high status, wealthy people of their day. Every era has its high status positions, that generate wealth and power. The counterculture we’ve all lived since the 1960s is the…

"The “alt-music” image of a counterculture is a 20th century affectation; an evanescent form produced by radio and television, by Hollywood and the music industry. Those cultural forms are the empty vessel that 20th…

Some scholars say World War 2 ended with The Beatles. The early 1960s, when the huge surge of babies born after WW2 were coming of age, as teenagers. The Boomers. A mass of humanity looking for a way to remake the…

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…

The range EVs already have now, with current batteries, is equal to or greater than the range of the cars most of us grew up with. The things we forget. What’s even more interesting is that the range of combustion…

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was.…

There was not and will never be a ‘Concert for Covid’. Think about that. Up to 36 million people are thought to have died, so far, from Covid. That’s up to twice as many as died in World War 1. Why won’t there be a…

EVs reduce exhaust emissions to zero in cities and towns. And they also reduce the amount of brake dust by up to 83%. EVs use regenerative braking rather than brakes a lot of the time, meaning the electric motor spins…

Many people tell me that ‘capitalism’ is the cause of our many problems in the world. Others think it’s communism, or authoritarianism. Did you know none of the -isms are even real? All societies are functionally…

Gaza bewilders, how can Israel continue what it’s doing? It can because despite all the guff about Anglo countries (dominating the grey in the pic) being democracies, no country is actually a democracy, in the way we…

A retired couple who own a $2 million home and with other assets of nearly half a million dollars would still qualify for an annual aged pension of over $41,000 per year. And look at the growth rates along the bottom…

The EV not only measures how much energy is used on a trip, if you’ve driven the road before it has a memory of your last trip there. Every little peak and slope on this graph corresponds with a different part of the…

Why does it matter so much to understand that our lives are run by status games? That our particular culture uses a status economy developed in high schools and then rolled out to all of adult life? Well, it matters…

My 'kidult culture' posts aren't just random opinions of mine. It's a cultural shift, the countercultural revolution of the last century, carrying forward to today. Studied by many. It's not 'Peter Pan syndrome', adults…

Was revolutionary for its time. One of the pioneers of drive-in motel accommodation in the regions, counter meals (pub grub), and women drinking in the bar. I remember dad saying the brewery had asked how many kegs they…

Comments by a Bathurst councillor last night calling out misinformation and disinformation movements, referring to a program on ABC’s Compass. This is the issue of our time, the Trumpian populist tricks that shock jocks…

Thanks to David for this. I’ve highlighted the critical sentence. This isn’t just a cheap shot, this is exactly the cultural shift we’re living. Because societies are social, and use social models, the fact ours is…

Trump appointed a fossil fuel executive to run his energy policy. This is the BS at the heart of the US as a culture, this belief in freedom and free speech is really sponsored horseshit from its corporate barons, who…

Human life expectancy doubled in the last century. Most of that was due to the use of vaccines. Now kidult culture has turned vaccination into just one more team sport for morons on social media. The comments on this…

And again, petrol excise doesn’t fund roads. Petrol and diesel cars have been polluting for free for over a century, that’s the mother of all ‘free rides’. Ditch diesel fuel tax rebate and make billions more than this…

If you work at the front line of public service, the thing you will overwhelmingly notice is that what humans do above all else is complain. That complaint in turn is driven by the status games I often talk about.…

It’d be pretty common to say that the function of a road is to get you from A to B. Mary Beard, the historian of ancient Rome, points out that that was never the function of roads. You’ll have heard the expression all…

Democracy is not about electing people. Everywhere mass elections have been introduced, democracy is in free fall. It turns the ordinary running of basic things into an endless popularity contest, where the things that…

Paul McCartney recently mocked this song’s meaning as childish and naive. But it’s also a vital piece of evidence for the time that the kidult culture I talk about was taking over the world. Decades of compulsory…

How well do you really understand the town you live in? Victoria right now is looking for a ‘sovcit’ (sovereign citizen) who murdered two police officers. Lithgow has already had a sovcit siege. The ‘March for…

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…

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…

The still surviving belief that fat causes heart disease is behind the enormous surge in sales of air fryers. But after decades of drug and surgical progress, heart disease and stroke are still the biggest killers. It’s…

The world is going nowhere in the fight against climate change. This is like an enormous asteroid heading for Earth, as in the movie Armageddon, while we all choose to ignore it and go on holidays. Millions who failed…

The comments here show why in history meaningful change only comes when vast proportions of the human population are completely wiped out by war or natural disaster, or plague, or generations die of old age. Planck’s…

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.…

For the very many out there, whose families, friends and selves are constantly sick now. Covid has created dysfunctional immune systems, leaving people wide open to disease and unable to resolve that disease. SARS-CoV-2…

Robert is chief climate scientist at Berkeley. I posted earlier and in the past about how the oceans have absorbed a lot of the heat generated by our burning of fossil fuels. They’re now full. And it’s worse than that…

People wilfully ignorant of history refuse to see how the surge in importance of rock stars was the pointy end of the countercultural movement. Here are John and Yoko spelling it out, ‘power to the people’. That’s still…

If you’re sceptical status runs all human life, the road should be a great teacher. For example, why is it so overwhelmingly popular to overtake other vehicles, even those doing the speed limit? And why do people being…

As somebody who has worked as a governance professional for a quarter of a century now, it’s this sort of basic fact about democracies which I think is lost on just about everybody. ‘Authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’…

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.…

B-grade Hollywood scripts replace most thought and knowledge of history today I think. Like the claims America is being taken over by authoritarian Nazis. Pretty much everybody who says that never knew or studied any…

Covid attacks CD8 T cells in the immune system. These are the cells that usually fight cancer. We declared the war won against Covid when it was only just beginning. And we're infecting all the kids, over and over.…

215,700 millionaires live in London. 516 of them have more than $100 million. There are also 45 billionaires. The rest of the UK? Average incomes are lower than the 5 poorest states in the US, and the OECD average as…

For thousands of years, Kings dominated human life globally. Only churches provided any sort of counter-weight. For example the 19th century was a century of kings, here’s a cartoon of the world’s top kings in 1815,…

This week Trump, and one of his clown car monkey idiots, Defense Secretary Hesgeth (ex Fox News), gathered all of the top brass of the US Defense forces in a single room. What followed was hilarious and horrific. Trump…

I’m the only person I know who still regularly masks. My kids are some of the only people their age who regularly mask. Why do we do it? Because nothing actually changed, the pandemic never ended. You can see here…

Trump is only the tail-end of a trend going back decades. Democracy is failing everywhere. But what does that mean, the lurch to autocracy, or authoritarianism? Those are just bogey words from inside the filter of the…

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the…

If you want to understand why the status quo is fighting so desperately to save fossil fuels, and funding wave after wave of propaganda drivel to try to get ordinary folk to help them, just follow the money. Seriously,…

What different parts of the world charge for university education. The Anglo world (the US, UK, Australia, Canada - in pink), really just big nursing homes now in the demographics, unsurprisingly more focused on…

Australia has vast areas of desert and arid land, and much of its farmland is completely rooted too, and needs anything to help restore it. Solar panels help restore that land, bringing it to life again. Again, we…

This huge event in town for the past 2 days has been organised and run brilliantly by 3 Council staff. Just 3. Why only 3? Because local Trumpians have determined Councils waste money, so it’s a now a fire sale of staff…

“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the U.S. “Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”…

I like Kate. But Kate grew up in a boarding school. All of her own children will spend most of their childhood in boarding schools. How’s that for disconnection. The same parents and families going to war with devices…

The lychgate is one of my favourite architectural features, at the entry to old churchyards. Functionally lychgates evolved as a place to shelter a coffin from the weather, while waiting for the arrival of the priest.…

People who’ve never studied much science, which is most people, need to understand what’s at stake with climate change. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK have done the sums. Actuaries are not ‘Greenies’…

What I like about Tesla vehicles is that they reclaim motoring from kidult car enthusiasts, often adults whose identity as teens focused heavily around their cars. The need for EVs to focus on efficiency, to preserve…

“We need to stop trusting the experts.” RFK Jr spelling out here the toxic stupidity of American culture, the belief that ‘the people’ not only run societies, but also know things better than any expert in their field.…

I didn't know traditional Japanese homes are largely made of wood because that's much less likely to kill the inhabitants, if it collapses in an earthquake. But hardly anybody lives in those now, a century ago 85% of…

Throughout history the old had the role of guiding a society, with their life experience. The kidult culture doubters take note. In our culture the old do what many teenagers do when they finish school. They go on a…

The ‘Fundamental Law of Road Traffic’ is one of the most studied and accepted outcomes of transport economics. In simple words the law says “building roads creates traffic”. We get stuck in this loop, pouring more and…

I’m using AI to do something that I think is wonderful. You may have seen me post here in the past about how our understanding of Australia is based on a set of really crazy prejudices that we brought here with European…

I’ve worked in governance for a quarter of a century. In my experience, every single person who advocates for democracy being run by ‘the people’ has never worked 5 minutes in actual governance in their life. Nor have…

‘Building up immunity’ with lots of healthy, ‘natural’ infections. Like the good old days. I think I’d like to repeat every day that most people who have ever lived have died of an infection of some kind. With anti-vax…

Australia has by far the longest continuous culture in all history, about 65,000 years. I hadn’t realised the Māori only began to occupy New Zealand between 700 and 750 years ago. What I also hadn’t realised is which…

The control of infections and infectious disease is THE most important event in all human civilisation. And it happened only in the most recent history, in many of our lifetimes. The people you see and know who now…

House prices in Australia. You can see the exact time the catastrophe started. Not coincidentally the reign of the ‘lying rodent’ (his party’s own words), John Howard. Also the time we began bashing migrants, another of…

For nearly all of history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. More than 90% of societies always were peasants. So what changed that? The only thing that changes anything. Catastrophe. The Black Death…

Teenagers didn’t exist until the 20th century. You were just a little adult, as a child. The idea of teen rebellion therefore also didn’t exist, until the middle of the 20th century. The idea of uprooting custom and…

By mid-century, about half of all public and private social spending in rich nations will be directed toward sustaining, treating, or caring for people past working age. I do wonder if people see the kidult society more…

Wholesale electricty prices have tumbled in the past year, due to the renewables rollout. The cost of electricty from coal and gas has exploded in the other direction. You won’t see these reductions fully in your actual…

Imagine living through the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago fighting to 'keep the horse'. You'd look like a moron today. Renewables will double again in the next 5 years. Exponential growth. You're living…

Time after time in history people miss the tipping point to total revolution. Right up to that tipping point it seems like things are business as usual. Then that business as usual is smashed to pieces.

AI is immune to political propaganda. People need to realise that what was done for Covid was not only historically unprecedented. It was criminal. Never before in history had public health advocated to address a novel…

This is the wet dream of many adolescents of the past 70 years. Adulation from a stadium full of screaming fans. Anybody who studies crowds knows the screaming isn’t about the act. It’s about the crowd themselves, the…

1910. A lot of brutal, back-breaking work built the modern world. Most of those who did that work are anonymous and forgotten. We’d be completely incapable of repeating their efforts today, even a day of it would have…

There's the Greased Lightning scene in Grease where teen gangs sing songs while modifying their hot rods. Post-war counterculture. I know we won't develop any level of self-awareness as a culture. A generation will need…

These are of course known as miracle weight loss drugs. The GLP-1 drugs. But they’re showing signs of doing far more, in areas that medicine has been historically powerless. Chronic disease, like ME/CFS, mast cell…

All of the stuff about Nazis and authoritarian/fascist takeovers in the US are the sort of hysteria that is endemic to US culture. Nick Bryant was US correspondent for the BBC there for 13 years and I think nails much…

You can go back to the original 1960s events and watch the emergent Boomer generation firing up their countercultural revolution, the avalanche of teens taking over the world. Facing up to things like wars and…

Renovation and lifestyle shows turn homes into magazine spreads. The focus is on what other people see and think about the house. It leaves me cold. To live a building has to be lived in, over an extended time,…

If you’re not convinced how much climate influences sea levels, for most of the past 25,000 years sea levels were between 40-140 metres lower than they are now. METRES. If we want to keep melting what’s left of the ice…

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…

Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are masterpieces, but are also terribly understood in what they show. Humphrey is almost universally understood through a modern American lens, as ‘red tape’ bureaucratic obstruction.…

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…

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within,…

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…

The US has had 6 economic depressions in its history. All 6 were immediately preceded by politicians 'balancing the budget' i.e. paying off debt. Governments in debt mean citizens in surplus i.e. a healthy economy.…

The big questions never get asked, let alone answered. There is no necessary reason that work and home had to become two separate places in the first place. For most of human history humans worked at home, on their…

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

Always loved the show. But looking back at it, something really stands out. There’s not one child in this entire show. The ’good life’ had no place for children. Neither couple had children or even mentioned them. Both…

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…

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

The Seshat Global History Databank collects an enormous amount of information about civilisations in all of history, to help scholars understand present-day societies better, and identify when they're at risk of…

All of history and all human life is a rivalry between social elites. What looks like ‘the people’ running the show is really those same people being co-opted by different elite groups, to partake in their battles…

In many ways China is uniquely similar to Australia. Both are ancient cultures who found way to live IN the landscape, for thousands of years. Not on it. To make the landscape part of their society. Those farmlands are…

Veteran music producer Tony Visconti, who lived through Beatlemania, describing the EXACT shift the counterculture of that time was. And it had nothing whatever to do with music. Like he says here, until The Beatles,…

What to do, in the face of horrible events like Bondi this week? To me the answer is always the same. Think. Learn. Don’t try to find a team to ‘stand with’, our usual populist kidult response to everything now. This…

We’re not connecting with others not because of some epidemic of ‘loneliness’, but because as a culture we’re not engaged in any collective projects. We’re not building a common world, we’re all ‘living our best…

Societies always have a foundational status hierarchy, social teams that are the most fundamental people belong to, that structure the rest. For most of our history those teams were religious. In our lifetimes that…

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…

A different way to see life. We privilege working life, because economies are all about work. Childhood we see as preparation for work, and old age we see as ‘retirement’, again from work. Without getting all New Age…

This person has a Masters in Public Health. I’m sharing it to show again that what we did with Covid, letting all kids catch it over and over without allowing them to even be vaccinated, was a deliberate strategy. To…

2026 is here. It's interesting that we view time like a river, flowing along. Like 2026 was always going to 'arrive', and we're just swimming in that river, dipping in and out depending on how long we live. Time doesn't…

On New Year's Eve, AEMO said new demand (not supply) had to be found for electricity in Victoria, or else some solar farms would need to be shut down. There was too much electricity. Remember being told by coal-carrying…

The drama around blue-green algae and recreational dam use. What’s less known is that it’s the greatest killer in the history of planet Earth. It’s not really an algae, it’s a bacteria, cyanobacteria. And it’s the…

The multi-millionaire cricketers are winning games, but players seem to have the ascendancy over selectors now. Pathetic Test play by most other nations has hidden the problem. Warner’s performances have been in free…

Price war still going. That's the drive away price.

An El Niño means cooler ocean temperatures off Australia. But right now, that ocean is 2.5-3 degrees hotter than normal. That’s ENORMOUS. The difference between heat (energy), and temperature. 2.5-3 degrees doesn’t…

To say this makes Australia look like yokels is unkind to yokels. That solar farms can now be rejected because they spoil the view. Having lived near two butt-ugly coal power stations for the past 30 years, I can…

There are so many debates about housing, and like in so many other things, some of the ways these problems have been solved in the past have been forgotten. From the 17th century in Europe and 19th century here in…

A personal post, a bit long, but a rare one about me, the person. I know many people who avoid the news, feeling that the world is too depressing and they don’t see a way out of the numerous problems societies are…

We need to join the dots here. All of these illnesses that we thought were things of the past are now back, and the reason is very simple. The ‘living with the virus’ we introduced for Covid was actually a destruction…

The Greenland ice cap is losing 30 million TONNES of ice every HOUR. To those who still pretend this is all normal, a tip. It wasn’t losing 30 million tonnes of ice an hour in our lifetimes, or anybody else’s, for at…

Trump is clearly an imbecile. Electing him again would be a disaster on just about every measure. But it’s looking increasingly likely. How does this happen, in a democracy? Because democracy always was a fantasy.…

A climate denier trick is to claim that every change to climate we experience is just normal variation. Luckily we have data to show this isn’t true. Take sea temperatures, a hugely important measure, because the oceans…

The ‘live with the virus’ slogan has driven a huge escalation in anti-vax beliefs and behaviour. We’re told that vaccinations will protect us from Covid, but nobody is getting them. And they’re also stopping their…

Australia Day? I love Australia, it’s truly unique in the world. Not the imported Barnum and Bailey flag-waving patriotism of the US, which today will be full of. A convict colony that survived being sent to the remote…

Renewables have cut the wholesale price of electricity in half in the past year. Consumers should see that in their bills from mid-year, when the regulators update the pricing for retailers.

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.…

Appeared in my feed from 10 years ago. Bittersweet memories of CSU again, from the time when leadership had disappeared and people sat in meetings like these all day, trying to figure out what the organisation should be…

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…

What Hemingway said of bankruptcy, that it happens gradually then suddenly, is also true of natural disaster. This ‘tipping point’ would be a catastrophe, an extinction-level event. And it will happen fast, maybe inside…

"Our group believes we are facing the most critical issue in the history of the Oberon community..." They mean windmills. Not the collapse of the life systems on the only known habitable planet in the universe.…

Measles is about the most infectious disease in the world. It also wipes your immune memory, meaning your immune system forgets how to fight EVERY disease it's ever fought. You're like a new-born baby, for 2-3 years.…

If you don't know about measles, it's super-hyper-infectious. Each person with it can infect up to 18 others. And it can wipe your immune memory clean, if you do get it, so that for 2-3 years you'll have as good as no…

I love that of all the things Welsh men could have chosen to do in life, right near the top of their list was to sing. This is music, there’s not much that can rival an all-male choir for goosebumps. Lithgow has a lot…

A sound principle I've discovered in the past 4-5 years is to take every word Nick Coatsworth says, and believe the exact opposite.

Raiding super to pay for houses is probably the stupidest political idea out there right now. And that's a tough field. The raids on super during the pandemic were a disaster too. I don't think it's well understood why…

Fascinating graph that should make us question the Australia we think we know (and it applies to many Western countries). The grey is Australia’s population broken into age groups, in 2022. Blue is what 2034 will look…

Nice graphic showing risk of Covid infection based on how much ventilation (measured by CO2 levels) you have and what type of mask you use (or no mask). Have put a red square where I've been for the past 4-5 years,…

I've often posted about how 'the economy' isn't even a thing. It's a political invention designed to replace public life with the dominant cultural form humanity has used for nearly all of its history - feudalism. How…

This is where our fun lifestyles are actually made. In factories in Asia. Asia graduates more engineers than the West graduates people in all disciplines combined. Asia has been restored to the centre of the world it…

In Asia they use strong government to drive investment and innovation. More than a decade ago they identified electric cars as the way of the future, and began developing EV batteries. They now pretty much own that…

This is the very good reason Council has kept the park closed for the past few months. Happening with lots of trees.

Running a superannuation system in parallel with a pension system is exactly the same as running a private health insurance system in parallel with a universal healthcare system (Medicare). A staggering waste of money,…

This graph should make us all very scared. The idea of 'living with' Covid did this, and it's driven ALL vaccinations down, for all diseases. Public health is dead, the thing that doubled our life expectancy in the past…

There were 8400 excess deaths in Australia 2023. Meaning 8400 more people died than was expected from the historical average. Over 6000 were caused by Covid. The other 2400 were likely caused by disruption caused by…

Transgender is the first theory in human history where the test of its reality is entirely social media. It went very quickly from being a fringe (whacky) academic theory in marginal gender studies departments in…

Home battery installations jumped 21% in the past year. And still climbing.…

Crabapples growing wild, street trees in Bathurst. Ran into an elderly European couple last year picking these, to the bemusement of passers by, who had no idea what they were. They were going to make jam, said it was a…

LGBTQIA+. LGB - sexual preferences (lesbian, gay, bisexual). T - Trans. Supposed disconnect between sex and gender. Q - Queer. Generic term for any diversity of sex and gender. I - Intersex. People born with ambiguous…

Politicians currently wrestling with the dangers of social media. I think we should all be. An honest, open question, as one example. Are people genuinely happy with the idea that we can all decide our own sex, simply…

For all of its wonderful contributions to humanity, this one toxic belief that dominates American life is a cancer on the world. Going right back in their history to the Puritans being booted out of Europe. Humans…

Musk is a CEO. CEOs answer to boards. CEOs who go to war with nation States are on a fast-track to redundancy. He owns 20% of Tesla stock, which makes him the majority shareholder. But it means 80% of the company is…

UK railways are one of the best real-life examples of the myths around public vs private. They began in the 19th century as private railways. That was a complete disaster, and so the government nationalised them in…

Another of the hysterical fear campaigns against EVs is that they ‘have no resale value’. As the article explains, when a new technology is being rolled out the resale will be lower at first, until prices of new…

Domestic violence data in Australia for the past 35 years. From the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, official government data body.

See the deeper motivations of trans movements here? To erase women and their history. This wally 'identified' as a woman, said 'hey, this isn't so bad'. So is now an expert on women.

Sad to hear Barry Otto is battling Alzheimers. Though always difficult to know how much the sufferers suffer, Otto apparently is enjoying a new childhood, with hot chip sandwiches and strawberry milkshakes, and delight…

April 2024 was the wettest month ever recorded in human history, across the planet. Mostly caused by rapidly heating oceans. Heating water produces evaporation, and then rain. The heat in the oceans is like a…

War graves are extra poignant when the guys who were alongside the dead sometimes only days before come to visit them. WW2 shot.

Sting once said a band is a way to avoid growing up. It’s why he left The Police, because he didn’t want to be a teenager forever. When you read the history of most bands, you’ll find the same thing, how for members it…

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…

This photo was taken 122 years ago, in 1902, by German scientist Adolf Miethe. We expect pictures of times long past to look old. It’s quite jarring for the people to look as alive and fresh as the people we see every…

Salt has been a staple in foods forever. But its close partnership with pepper on every table only began in the 17th century, at the advice of the chef to King Louis XIV of France, Francois Pierre La Varenne. You have…

The brutal reality of adult life is that it’s just high school life, hidden behind fancy words. Take any major issue facing societies, and history shows that no change occurred without disaster or catastrophe. Nothing…

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…

I know many people allowing themselves to get repeated Covid infections, thinking they’re getting more immune with each infection. They’ve been lied to, and it will shorten their lives. If you don’t control infections…

What’s caused the ‘cost of living crisis’? What’s not well understood is that our lifestyles have ALWAYS been expensive. Western lifestyles are the most expensive lifestyles in human history, they’re ruinously expensive…

The two greatest cultural forces of the past 70 years.

This was Saudi Arabia’s first major oil well, in 1938. We know the rest. The Saudis make up to a billion dollars per DAY from oil. They’ve been selling it for 70 years. Just imagine how much money that is. Right now the…

In the energy debates, lots of mention of 'baseload power'. The public is encouraged to believe this is the minimum amount of 24/7 power that is needed to keep society running. That's not baseload power. Baseload is…

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…

History shows time and again that the only thing that makes humans act meaningfully outside the existing status quo, is total catastrophe. Read Alan Kohler today if you want to understand just how much that's us right…

In 1997, over a quarter of a century ago, the world agreed to act to save us all from out of control climate change. Since that time, our use of fossil fuels has INCREASED by 55%.

Studying history gives whole new perspectives to the present. Right now the US is like ancient Rome. Rome had a republic, what we’d call a democracy today. It was a complete disaster, nothing but violence and blood and…

Between May and November 2021, the world named 13 variants of Covid. You may remember some of those names, like ‘Delta’. Then, because this highlighted that the virus was evolving i.e. it was out of control, when we got…

Long Covid is badly named. It suggests most people get ‘Short Covid’, and some unlucky ones then get some irritating persistent ‘long’ symptoms. In reality Covid goes to war against your body, even in mild cases. Our…

This is Oliver Cromwell’s actual head. Cromwell led the parliamentary forces in the English Civil War of the 17th century, that removed the monarchy and House of Lords, and decapitated Charles I. He then took control of…

One more slice and dice from the Powerwall. ‘Solar offset’ is how much your solar has offset your home energy usage. In our case, it’s provided almost twice what the house needed (with Spring and Summer still to come,…

What we now call mental illness (a terrible term) used to be called nervous illness. I much prefer that term because most garden variety mental illness is really a type of nervous exhaustion. Even people feeling…

The best EVs currently available are in the medium car part of the market. Tesla Model 3 and Y, and the BYD Seal. You can see how EVs are smashing all opposition there. BYD mid-sized SUVs will start to add even further…

I guess I can safely say that I’m clearly not sharing this denial. I get more or less zero traction with just about every person I work with and know, in trying to warn that the pandemic never ended, and never got less…

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’…

If oil companies were confident in the future of petrol and diesel, they'd be flooding the world with cheap fuel right now, to encourage people to buy more petrol and diesel vehicles, to obstruct the take-up of EVs. But…

You can see here that in 1916 it was only Rockefeller's cheap oil that knee-capped an obvious technology. It's taken us a century to come to our senses. It costs trillions to drill and refine and transport oil, to get…

We already know how to fix this. If we’d had a government for the past 20 years with even minimal competence, we’d barely need a drop of oil to run the country already.

Michael Faraday. One of the great geniuses. Invented the electric motor in 1821. American oil men stole a century from humanity, blocking this wonder while filling the world with noise and pollution.

It's been extremely windy, and you can see that here in South Australia's energy generation for the past 7 days, the wind in green. Yellow is solar. Purple is imports from the national grid, orange is gas. There was…

Here's NSW by contrast, for the past 7 days. Obviously daylight hours correspond with the yellow (solar). Black is coal, green is wind, purple is imports from the wider grid, blue is hydro. There's as much or more wind…

Human civilisation exists within a very narrow range of temperatures of the past 10,000 years. The trajectory we’re on for climate change will shift that range to levels not seen in nearly 3 million years. Those…

The crazy thing is, beating Covid is actually quite simple. Covid isn't everywhere, all the time. It spreads from small hubs, where it breeds. Mostly schools. You can see it in the data. Infections take off every time…

New Disco Clubs, where women in their 40s and 50s get to pretend they’re 18 again for a few hours. Of course that’s the culture now, 18 forever. But there’s also an interesting Covid angle here. Why do some people go to…

The last week of August was a watershed moment for Australia. Coal provided less than 50% of Australia's electricty for the first time. The total collapse of coal will accelerate rapidly from here, and it will have…

Nuclear power has been in decline everywhere for a quarter of a century. It’s enormously expensive and complicated, and renewables are incredibly cheap and incredibly fast to put together. Even China, who was still…

This is a team sports battle going back decades, Mac vs PC. PCs (and Windows) are rubbish, like the ICEs of computing, only dominant because of historical trickery from people like Microsoft. No integrated hardware and…

This is quite a big movement, and shows just how far Australia has fallen in the past 30 years. It used to be one of the cheapest places to live in the world. It’s now one of the most expensive. That’s a disgrace, with…

Do you reckon we started building houses with gold walls and diamond windows? Or did we maybe just start using houses like casino chips, bidding up the value on the same stock, to get quick capital gains? Only once in…

The impact of climate change. The Swiss and Italians have had to redraw their borders, which were previously defined by a lot of ice and glaciers. Many of which have now melted. Switzerland has lost 12% of its ice in…

Walking in a large shopping mall in a school holiday is a brilliant people-watching experience. What I increasingly notice is how the mobile phone has allowed us to essentially live inside our social networks now, more…

12 men walked on the moon. Only 4 are still alive. I was born just as the Apollo program was doing this. I’d sit for hours staring at the NASA photos of all the missions, amazed by the audacity of the engineering and…

This is the second US hurricane in a fortnight. The reason is the same reason Australia has been so wet in the past 2 years. The oceans are boiling. Water in the Gulf there is 1-3 degrees hotter than normal. That…

Elon Musk’s nonsensical big product launch yesterday and this story are interesting contrasts. You can see here the phenomenal ability of Chinese industry to bring rapid changes to market. Historically car makers…

An estimated 3 billion people had Covid in the past year, who don’t know it. This isn’t Covid being ‘mild’. It’s Covid being immune-evasive. Sneaking its way in.

The Germans at least tried with EVs. But they’re way too expensive. Most German cars have been for years. Asia figured out how to do German quality for about half the money, decades ago. Welcome to the Asian century.…

Volkswagen is in serious, serious trouble. (Note VW also owns: Å KODA, SEAT, CUPRA, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche and Ducati.) The 3rd biggest car maker in the world. This is a story you'll see repeated with other…

I know people love to feel old. It’s nearly a quarter of a century since the Sydney Olympics.

Santos is one of the big gas companies hijacking Australia right now. Guess how much tax they've paid on $38 billion of gas revenue in the past 10 years?

Trump is such a moron that the US will now hurtle towards complete global irrelevance. This can be excellent news for Australia, as Americans languish in the 19th century and we hitch a ride on Asia's coat-tails into…

Why do monarchies and churches exist? The answer has been forgotten, but is still there. They were human inventions to prevent violence. Left to themselves humans will *always* fight each other for status, in groups.…

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…

People have been encouraged to believe nothing can be done to prevent Covid, so we all just need to 'live with' (i.e. catch it) now. That's just political bullshit. For every pandemic in history, you know who ended the…

Again, look to China for where we’ll be going next. Car dealerships from legacy Western brands in China, like BMW, Mercedes etc are closing in their thousands. 2000 per year in 2021, 2022 and 2023. 4000 in 2024. That’s…

Our historical memories are so limited. Take today, where China is again leading the world in many ways, in innovation and manufacturing. We’ve been here before, we all know about eating off ‘china’. ‘Fine China’. It’s…

Murders his own mother for a life insurance payout he organised himself, to feed a social media-driven status lifestyle. Has a history also of crypto, another get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme, used out of desperation to try…

A more common driver behaviour I’m seeing now is widespread total impatience. If there’s a line of traffic behind a slower vehicle, and then an overtaking lane arrives, it’s now common for people further back in the…

The difficult thing about discussing ideas with friends and family is that every idea is actually a social group. Groups which help give people their sense of identity. In the past this often meant the rule of thumb,…

The solution to most of society’s problems is to tell engineers what the problems are, and then to get out of their way. If you don’t believe that, I encourage you to read history much more carefully. How’s an 8 million…

One of the explanations given for why so many people seem so much more sick now, and more often, is that lockdowns caused ‘immunity debt’ i.e. people weren’t getting infected with diseases as much, so their immunity had…

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…

In recent history South-East Asian countries bought nearly all of their cars from Japanese car makers. Chinese EVs are now taking them to the cleaners. South-East Asia is hugely focused on reducing air pollution.…

Change doesn't happen gradually. Nothing happens for a while, and then everything happens all of a sudden. See if the history below rhymes with changes to transport (EVs) you see today. "In the early 20th century...the…

VW is in the top 3 car companies in the world. Its current debt is $240 billion, one of the largest private debts in history. Their existence is in the balance. All because they didn’t shift to EVs much sooner. They…

I worked with somebody who told me it didn’t matter how far off in the distance a car was, they had to speed up to catch them, because they couldn’t bear anybody being in front of them on the road. That’s probably about…

The new Prado a good example of why petrols and diesels tend to ‘keep their value’ better, for now anyway, in secondhand sales. It’s $10,000-$13000 more expensive than the previous model. (It’s also not a great car.)…

In 1215 King John signed the Magna Carta, a truce document with his nobles about the sharing of power and wealth. It went on to become a foundation for most modern democracy. Project 2025 is Trump’s operating manual for…

Elsa Dreisig is a wonderful French-Danish soprano. Opera singers are extraordinary, physically what they do is harder than most elite sports, plus they have to play a role as an actor, as well as have advanced music…

This is the cultural shift that’s almost impossible to talk about without people of that age taking great offence. (People identify themselves individually with demographic groups, but these are cultural rather than…

Have others noticed how smoking has made its ugly way back into films and TV again? At the turn of the century it had been virtually eliminated from TV and film. Now whole films and shows are like ads for smoking. You…

Why do I persist with attention to Covid? This graph helps explain why. What’s not widely known is that we had a global pandemic through most of the 20th century. Heart disease. Some really bad science made us think…

In a culture that now defines a woman as anybody who cares to identify as one, we shouldn’t be surprised that all the gains women have made in the past 100 years are being rapidly wound back.

Every ’stunning’ home on this show looks pretty much like every other stunning home on the show. And like most homes on most shows on TV, about houses. Polished concrete, big windows, open plan living, stone and wood…

In saying Happy New year, I’d like to focus on the Happy part. So often in history the times of their lives when people found the most purpose, meaning and often even happiness was when they were confronted with a…

One of the less known impacts of Covid infection is aging. It causes cells to age much more quickly. Laura Miers had a mild case of Covid, before developing Long Covid. She’s now had to change her identity picture in…

77 dead in the past week in NSW. You’re not likely to see that reported anywhere.

This is funny, in a tragic sort of way. A device that allows energy companies to shut down a person’s solar system completely, if the State has too much solar power going into the grid. Remember 10-20 years of…

Memories of watching Laurel and Hardy.

I look at the holiday photos and social events people post to FB, where nobody is taking any precautions against Covid infection. And two things jump out at me. 1) So many seem to think only of risk to themselves, and…

Reading more sites discussing EVs. One of the most common questions always seems to be ‘how much does it cost to replace the battery?’ It’s an easy one. Zero. Batteries are warranted for well past the usual lifetime of…

One of the coolest electric motors people own right now, is the ‘digital’ motor in a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Dyson needed powerful and small (see pic of James Dyson comparing the size of a traditional household electric…

Three catastrophes paradoxically gave us the peaceful and prosperous lives we’re used to. If you study history you’ll see that the era post-WW2 is unprecedented in human history, for its prosperity and peace. But why…

Forget the politics, do the sums. Go electric, even in stages. I notice the same people who opposed all progress on energy for the past 20 years are now trying a new argument, that going electric is too expensive, a…

'House prices always go up long-term'. Just to add to a discussion elsewhere. They don't. The only time they do is when they become a Ponzi scheme, driven by enormous personal debt. Then the whole lot explodes. Like…

My honours year in engineering was research on these superconductors. Great that they’re now at least at liquid nitrogen temperature. You don’t need to replace the whole grid with them, just key sections. Engineers…

Paul Keating introduced mainstream super to Australia, because he saw it as a way to transform who holds wealth in our society, towards working people. So far it’s working. Super is the greatest financial nest egg we…

This current obsession that kids are almost invulnerable to disease is less than a century old. Before that most kids died before even reaching adolescence. Be a person who speaks out about us now reversing this, to…

I don’t like over-ripe fruit. I like fruit to be firm, even crunchy (like a good crunchy pear). Eating a super-ripe piece that dribbles down your chin - gross. The same for bananas, once they start to get really ripe…

This is the problem I've posted about a lot. We have oodles of 'supply'. We just can't get it anywhere, because we didn't build new transmission lines in the past 10-20 years.…

Lovely exponential curve. Not even the pandemic slowed the momentum much. You can be on the wrong side of this history, it'll just mean costing you a lot of money and pride. And think about the benefits: - no more…

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?’…

This is the first time in my memory that schools have closed in anticipation of a possible fire emergency. Must be a doozy of a weather event coming today.

Got my second and final shingles shot today. The most painful thing about the whole experience was the cost, about $600 for two shots. But it’s a great investment. People have probably seen the research I’ve posted…

Regional areas are expected to need another 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are also expected to leave teaching in the next TWO years. Try finding a tradie to do anything without waiting months. This day…

Good to see government funding new EV charging points in towns, including Lithgow. But we should electrify the whole town, everything. It would make it the cheapest place to live in NSW. We’re already a town with a long…

Working for local government is a bit of a hiding to nothing thing. Everybody almost universally hates it, and treats you with contempt. The pay is some of the worst in the job market. And there’s no funding, to do…

Missed this when it first came out. It's a corker. Set in a small town, some of the people buried in the local cemetery suddenly crawl out of their graves and come back to life, good as new. From various times in…

I was 1 when humans landed on the moon. The thing that interests me much more about it now is how society has changed, since then. Look at the pictures of that day in 1969, people gathered around the handful of TV sets…

Shale Oil was mined near Lithgow for about 10 years, from 1940-1950. Shale oil is known as ‘tight’ oil in the oil industry, tough to extract and usually uneconomic. The extraction process uses a now famous method -…

Look at the jump in transport costs for households, in the past 6 years. Nearly all of it the doubling of the price of fuel (see little bubble to the right). Over $20,000 per year, just to get around. That’s serious…

Really important article about the massive implosion of oil and gas underway. In the past 3 years, global supply has been saved by a huge push to frack in the US, their oil shale. 70% of new world supply came from those…

I think Australia needs many more mines, and far fewer farms. This one though is using some of the water that Lithgow historically looked to in drought times, from the coal mines. Being piped all the way to Blayney. I…

I’m not sure if my posts are still being seen in the same way, this absolutely ludicrous platform put a restriction on my account because last year I posted a picture of Neville Chamberlain shaking Hitler’s hand, in a…

The rai line over the mountains was electrified in the 1950s. Nearly 80 years ago, we understood that electric motors are not only much more efficient, but need much less maintenance and are also more powerful. We’ve…

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…

Yup. The worst failure of governance in all Australian history.

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,…

John Farnham’s term with LRB wasn’t very successful. But it was I think the greatest singing in the history of rock music. Farnham was at his peak, and the harmonies were like nothing anybody else has ever done live.…

We’re re-living a debate that’s more than a century old. This time petrol won’t win.

A serious question. What service do banks now provide? I struggle to think of a single one. You give them your money, which is then theirs to invest as they like, to make significant profits. They pay no real interest,…

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…

The man who made a career out of pretending to be a woman, ended his life under fire from a lot of other men who think they are actually women. History will vindicate him.

Covid has been over for well over a year now. Somebody better tell it. Hospitalisations up 35% in the past 3 weeks. If you're wondering why NSW Health can't get staff, here's one of the elephants in the room.

Liddell was Australia's largest coal power station when it was built 52 years ago. It closed today. Last year it broke down (needed restarting) 23 times. That's an average of about once a fortnight. How's the slogan go?…

I posted before how the epidemic of heart disease in the 20th century is likely to have been caused by earlier infections, not diet. The Spanish Flu one likely culprit. Research now showing Parkinson’s Disease may be…

The Owen Magnetic Tourer. Probably the world's first hybrid vehicle. 1915. The technology lost without trace after that for more than a century, replaced by absolute rubbish petrol and diesel cars. Now hybrids are back.…

These 3 trucks are slugging it out in the big pickup category in the US. The RAM 1500 and Chevy Silverado are already on sale in Australia, and Toyota is contemplating selling the Tundra here as well to sit above the…

This is what the people who argue there isn’t an intergenerational problem pay no attention to at all. The massive costs now to maintain an ageing population. At the same time as that older population pays almost no…

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…

heh, just look at this. The time we wasted in Australia in the past 30 years listening to morons.

Eurovision is really bad. My memories have always been people tune in because its bad?

Two things weren’t common before the 20th century, and that tells us that we’ve probably been looking at them the wrong way. Those two things are heart disease, and obesity. Both rare before last century. We even link…

As always, the smirking emojis on these posts are petrolheads, with their superior knowledge of cars. The biggest car companies in the world with their century or more of experience know nothing, next to the smirking…

Posted about this a few weeks ago. The massive melt in Antarctica is creating enormous icebergs, that when melted then slow deep ocean currents. Those currents transport food and heat throughout the world’s oceans. To…

If you'd asked this question to any generation of retired people in history, before today, they'd have laughed and asked what medication you'd forgotten to take. Socially and culturally, the retired being the richest…

“We must act now, the baby boomers are coming," she said. "Within a decade, our nation will have, for the first time in history, more people aged over 65 than under 18.” Australia will be one giant aged care facility,…

https://youtu.be/p2rCtaBBdwE Watch this. The worm is turning. The greatest crime in modern Australian history, which we're still in the middle of, gradually unravelling.

Oops. Canadian boreal forests burst into flame in the past week, with temperatures 10-15 degrees above average there. Tipping points being reached. Tipping points mean points of no return.

I have a passion for glass. It’s magic, invisible as air, but solid. And as a materials scientist knowing about it was my initial training. There’s a secret about glass, next paragraph. The thing about glass is, it’s…

TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The most important company in the world. Semiconductors are chips, the chips used in all our devices now. Not just computers, our cars, TVs, vacuum cleaners,…

The real sub-text of Ashes cricket? You don't have to like cricket. It's a very deep fear by the English that the people they dumped in the penal colony are actually better than they are. History has proven that to be a…

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…

The double glazed windows of course are fantastic for dramatically cutting heat and cold transfer. But something we’re enjoying as much if not more is how much sound they cut out. 70-80% of outside noise. For example in…

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…

Almost got a century of deaths this week. And this is just NSW. But let's focus on Taylor Swift concerts, some 'positivity'.

Thomas Midgley was responsible for two of the most damaging inventions in human history. CFCs (that created a hole in the ozone layer), and lead in petrol. The latter was particularly disgusting, because GM, who he was…

The Chuquicamata copper mine in Chile has been digging this enormous hole in the ground (more than 1100 metres deep) for the past 103 years. They’ve stopped digging down now and are shifting to underground mining. The…

We’re just back from Broken Hill (see, I do travel, occasionally). The Australian ‘outback’ (a stupid term) holds a secret, a mystery. Why I most wanted to go there. Lots of caravans and 4WDs out there. And goats,…

SBS has a great series right now looking at the fundamental shift in research on Aboriginal Australia. The recognition of a vastly more complex culture than we realised. Here’s a clip (whole series is on SBS catchup),…

Wilcannia is a famous outback town. Like all outback towns, the history is one of expansion of some empire. Nearly always mining (Broken Hill, Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs) or agriculture (Bourke, Wilcannia to some…

Watching the cricket, how some balls from great bowlers are near unplayable, and how sometimes luck like a ball keeping low is impossible to control for, I always wondered, how did somebody like Bradman manage to escape…

Leading the world. Have been for years. About the only smart thing Australia has done in the past 30 years. (I’m actually all ears if you can think of anything else.) That and control Covid, but we stopped doing that.

I don’t think it’s widely understood just how much energy human-induced climate change has added to the oceans (which are now releasing it back into the atmosphere, they’re full). In the past 150 years the heat added to…

Battery manufacturing is increasing worldwide at over 250% per year. Costs are also plummeting. Together that makes a battery plant profitable inside 2 years, unheard of in energy. The coming battle will be between, do…

What I say about travel even the travel industry says itself. It knows there’s a crisis. It has no idea what to do about it. Travel is Tinder, for locations. Momentary flings, wham bam, thank you…next. If you think your…

Already hearing the climate deniers roll out their You Tube wisdom, about the European heatwave. That ‘Europe has had heat waves before’. This isn’t a heat wave, it’s a heatING, a permanent shift upwards in temperature.…

These three figures show weekly energy use in our house, in 3 different weeks. Blue means electricity imported from the grid, yellow electricity exported to the grid, by us. You can see the past 2 weeks have been…

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.…

Read British journalism when England is doing well in sport, and you get a window into the psychology in play there now. ‘Little Britain’ as some call it. Desperately clinging to old ideas of empire and world…

The previous record was the dotted line. The past 20 days are likely the hottest on Earth in 100,000 years.

Sharing the details of your personal life and that of your friends and family, on a global platform. Adults, think about what you’d feel now if intimate details of your life had been shared on global platforms for the…

This catch was a bit of a chuckle, in the England define all their failures as triumphs vein. Great catch by Root, but actually a straightforward keeper’s catch. And look at Bairstow, standing there flat-footed like…

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…

Another way to see the shift in culture. U2. A fantastic band. Still active, so much so that they’ve been the highest-earning musicians in the world 5 times this century. Bono is worth $700 million. Let’s add some…

I’ve been called a ‘germaphobe’ a few times in recent weeks. Because I still wear a mask. I couldn’t care less, the people who said it are like most people in this pandemic, dumb as a box of hammers. Covid isn’t ‘germs’…

This is a rental house. In legal terms, a lease. Disgusting what the tenants have done, most would agree I'm sure. They'll lose their bond and could be charged. But here's a twist on leases, at a time the 'supply' of…

I post a lot about Australia and the land, because I think there are some truths about this country that aren't well understood. Take the classic distinction between the city and the country. If you work your way…

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?…

The Voice debate is a good time to talk about being Australian I think, and what it means. Where the most modern civilisation in the world at the time collided with easily the most ancient. That collision did amazing…

We have the history of Australia backwards. Take the conversation about the ‘Voice’ right now. Like all conversations about Aboriginal Australia, the starting point is the idea that post-1788 Australia, the European…

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…

There are many more homes approved than are ever built. In the industry it’s called ‘land banking’, where developers get a lot of building approvals, and then don’t move to construction until they feel they’ll make the…

One of my favourite anti-EV tricks on the endless sewer of stupidity of social media, is to show an electric vehicle being towed, as proof they’re not practical. Here’s a petrol vehicle being towed. Petrol and diesel…

A story of three photos. Of European genius and American swindling. Have posted before that the electric motor was invented over 100 years ago. By Michael Faraday, holding the glasses. The first workable cars were…

If ‘No’ wins in the upcoming referendum, Australia will be an international laughing stock. It’s looking like it may win too. Our history makes that unsurprising in many ways. I posted a while back about how what we…

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…

I wouldn’t wait for ‘urgent investment in generation’. Do it yourself, with solar panels, and a battery. AEMO even recognising that this may be a key way we can get out of the mess of total inaction for the past 20…

‘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…

The worst possible, most brainless thing to be happening here. The roads will become a killing field. One of these flew past me yesterday on my way home, doing about 20-30 over the speed limit. 3 tonnes of metal, the…

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a dominant force in building post-war Australia, socially. It brought over 65,000 Europeans and their cultures here, which changed Australian life fundamentally. And the engineering was…

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…

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…

One of the most interesting theories is that the Spanish Flu pandemic caused the 20th century epidemic of heart disease. The flu virus took up residence in peoples' bodies after they thought that pandemic was over, and…

I have friends who are actuaries. Actuaries are an excellent BS detector, because they calculate risks and those calculations are tied to peoples’ money. So no matter how much spin and propaganda is out there, reality…

This is only a minute long, you won’t regret it. I often say the economy doesn’t even exist. Here’s a property developer laying it all out there, what the economy really is, without even realising. It’s feudalism, the…

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the…

The oil and gas industry has made nearly $5 billion profit per DAY, every day for the past 50 YEARS. Never be in doubt who funds climate denialism. Anybody who lines up to cheer on petrol and diesel is doing the dirty…

Too much of the work that made societies peaceful and prosperous became invisible. Societies in the past did it almost too well, people assumed it all happened by magic. Until it didn't. That made people angry. Like…

The grid is changing fundamentally, have a look. It’s no longer a one-way grid, where the electricity flows from power stations to homes and businesses. It’s two-way, most of the energy is actually now generated at…

Everything points to us rewinding about 150 years, in the past 3 years.

People patient and smart enough to continue avoiding Covid will be rewarded with new tools that are coming quickly. Nasal vaccines, that will give (long-lasting) immunity not just to severe disease, but to catching…

Seinfeld ended 25 years ago. Quarter of a century. Yikes.

Here's a story of the pandemic that is never told. How we jumped straight from government action, to 'personal responsibility'. Leaving business completely off the hook. We've had WHS laws for a century that they should…

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…

Historical photo of Bathurst's famous street lamps being installed, a century ago. An interesting bit of trivia is that this caused community outrage at the time.

You can see the power of the fossil fuel industry. The world has been on fire the past year, and we still doubled our subsidies to that industry. Meanwhile it also spends billions on misinformation and disinformation…

I think history will show McCartney to be the true giant in The Beatles. Even while Lennon was alive the other 3 members admitted McCartney was the band’s leader, they’d have got nothing done without him. Fascinating to…

This is why fossil fuels historically seemed cheap. The industry has never had to pay for its pollution. (In economics terms, those are ‘externalities’ it can simply ignore, and pass the cost on to the rest of us.) No…

I rarely go to gigs. Call me old-fashioned, I grew out of them, much preferring a night in in front of the telly. But for the sake of the historical record I love that the greatest live band of all time, by many country…

We’re very close to a time when there will be no living Beatles. I think that will be jarring for us as a culture because they marked the real escalation point I post about a lot, where adult life was replaced with…

‘Just like the flu’, the slogan about Covid. Australia has had 2 bad flu years in the past decade. Right now Australia is killing more people every *quarter* with Covid than die in a bad flu year. 40 years of bad flu…

I focus on cars and renewables because they’re the centre of a new industrial revolution. And therefore of a whole new society. Our petrols, diesels and coal-fired power are 19th century technologies, over a century…

This is why we should be furious with the idiots who spent the past 10 years saying the problem with our energy was supply. 'Baseload' power. Bullshit. This graph shows how much solar and wind energy is TURNED OFF…

'Living with the virus'. Just not as long. We're trashing a century of public health achievement. But at least we can go to gigs and fly to Bali. Welcome to Teenage World.

Let me know if you see anybody suggest ‘living with’ tuberculosis. You won’t. Covid is much more dangerous than TB. You won’t find another disease anywhere that we’re asked to ‘live with’. Humans have never, not once in…

I share the solar stuff for those interested in how it pans out in practice. Here’s our highest-level use per quarter, in the past year. Yellow is electricty imports, green exports (we earn $ for those). Not shown is…

Andrew Irvine (L) and George Mallory. Possibly the first to reach the top of Mt Everest in the 1920s. Nobody knows, Mallory's body was found by American climbers a few years ago, nearly a century later, mummified by the…

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…

Elias won the Nobel Prize partly for his work in understanding crowds, something his generation experienced in frightening detail in 20th century Europe, where tens of millions died as populations with previous ties to…

We passed the projections for 2 degrees of warming this week. That’s the entire atmosphere heating by 2 degrees, phenomenal amounts of heat. 1.5 was the target to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, so we’re now…

Chinese car makers are growing fast. Chery is one I'd never even heard of, but it's the biggest exporter of cars in China. This EV (they have petrols and hybrids too) gets excellent reviews, on price and equipment and…

We’ve had years of hot air about how coal-fired electricty is cheaper for consumers. The reason our electricty prices are currently so high is the price of coal, which became prohibitively expensive. Just one more…

Wholesale electricity prices fell 76% in the past year. And are still falling.

The reason we've experienced such a dramatic rise in electricity prices over the past 2 years is that we generate most of it (in NSW) using coal. And look at the price of coal. Meantime the price of renewables has been…

Oh dear, oh dear. I dunno, these petrol cars. You'd think after more than a century they'd have figured out how to stop them catching fire.

I realised the reason I’ve become so bored with rock gigs is that they’ve lost their theatre. Plenty of acts use big light shows and effects, but they’re not coordinated into a show in the same way. A great rock show is…

Again it's not a particular interest in energy that makes me post about it. It's because energy is the centre of societies, everything they do. The black line is the US. Australia (not shown) is close to that black…

It’s an international embarrassment that the LNP went to COP28 and advocated for Australia to do nothing, and just wait a decade or more for nuclear power to be built. Reactors that don’t even exist, that nobody wants…

I was laying in bed this morning looking up at the ceiling fan, and realised it’s been running non-stop, for days, to provide gentle airflow. Completely silently, without fuss, using hardly any power at all. And it made…

The word ‘economy’ comes from ancient Greek, where it meant ‘management of a household’. The economy is just households. Instead we’ve said it’s business, a terrible mistake. Business was invented to serve households,…

Had another person say this week ‘why are you still wearing a mask?’ They asked in the way I know very well, what they mean is ‘nobody else is wearing a mask, why are you?’ Their measure of what to do is what other…

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…

Christmas is of course a Christian festival. But do we even understand what that means any more? In reality we in the West are all Christians, in that the Church pretty much built our societies, over millennia. The…

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…

Basic science lacking in the Covid news. Like ‘living with the virus’, Covid becoming ‘endemic’. Covid is an epidemic disease, it will never become endemic. Like smallpox. For centuries smallpox followed the same…

How epidemic diseases trick us. It’s all in the downwards part of the waves. The red arrows. This current Omicron outbreak for example will likely end in about 2-4 weeks. Will it end because Covid is beaten, the…

Sometimes I think it’s complete ignorance of infectious disease history that explains what’s going on right now. Take polio, as an example. Many I ask aren’t even aware that for the majority of people who caught polio,…

From NSW Health yesterday. Three things: 1) those beds are required for everybody who is sick enough to require hospitalisation, and 2) ICU capacity in NSW is 1000 beds, but again that’s for all conditions. 300-500…

There is no Economy, just people. Have been saying it for 2 years. The disgraceful, disgusting mess we’re in right now, caused by this idiot belief in an Economy. National Cabinet meets today to make decisions that will…

National Cabinet today decided the best approach is to return to the 19th century. - no isolation period at all now for key workers - ‘key workers’ is now just about everybody - Chief Medical Officer of Australia says…

TMZ reporting MeatLoaf died of Covid. And this was his support for the Clapton/Van Morrison Covid minimiser song. He was also reported in the past year saying masks are oppression. Your beliefs can kill you.

Over 40 people at my workplace have Covid. Meantime I have some friends who have been allowed to work from home for the past 2 years, or who are retired, telling me the whole thing is not as bad as is made out. I’m sure…

Drove past the Lithgow drive-through Covid testing at the Showground yesterday. Not one person there. Use it, don’t spend your own money on RAT tests that aren’t as good. We don’t want government to have an excuse to…

The great public health story of the 20th century was the huge reduction in child mortality. The great 21st century public health story is ‘let’s send kids back to school not even fully vaccinated, in the middle of a…

I never have much enthusiasm for Australia Day. Jingoistic claptrap most of the time. Culture wars about flags and invasions etc. We turn everything into sport. Yes the country was invaded, stolen. Yes many love the…

A re-share. If you think the world seems crazy and there’s no way out, you may be right. It’s nothing to do with who people vote for. It’s because for the past 50 years we’ve been smashing all of our institutions.…

We think the Spanish Flu ended in 1919. But it didn't. People just got sick of fighting it and reporting it in 1919. The 1920 variant was even more lethal, because of that collective giving up. This same thing then…

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…

Omicron is the most infectious disease in history. The ‘measures’ the NSW government has introduced for schools are pathetic to prevent it, and are being applied in barely half-arsed ways anyway. As in the US and UK, a…

"And perhaps that's what our leaders and academic economists lost sight of. It wasn't the lockdowns at the root of the economic catastrophe that has befallen us in the past two years. It was a highly contagious virus."

One of the big campaign things the PM says is that 'people want government out of their lives'. I think he's talking to the wrong country. An example. Masks. People will wear one if the government says you have to. If…

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…

‘We’re tired of the pandemic, let’s just say it’s over’ is the standard script worldwide now. Another reminder that it’s already killed more people than World War 1, and deaths are still climbing. And that returning to…

The 'I don't hold a hose' PM even threw his own wife under a bus on Sunday. Their holiday to Hawaii was her fault, apparently. His only contribution to public life is to deny responsibility for everything that goes…

Esmeralda the tortoise at Taronga Zoo is 105 years old. She came to the zoo in 1947. She has a male companion, called Lance, who is 66 years old. Esmeralda has never had hatchlings. When asked if this means she's missed…

Victoria had 10,000 Covid cases in schools in the past week. NSW refuses to publish the data.

Omicron is the most transmissible virus known in our history. A sub-variant of Omicron, BA.2, is now exploding worldwide. It’s thought to be 30-40% more transmissible again, than BA.1 (our current sub-variant). And…

I don't know how many people read these things. I strongly urge you to. "This is an epic public health disaster in the making."…

The guidelines for chickenpox are significantly more stringent than those for Covid. About 6 people die of chickenpox every year in Australia. Over 2000 people have died of Covid in the past 7 weeks. Come on 'live with…

I plan to retire at 60. Not to stop working, I’ll probably work more after retirement than before. But work that I choose myself. I’m not happy with the world my kids are growing up with, it seems increasingly…

Superb from Stan Grant today. These are the deep currents underneath our lives and our politics. All politics comes down to identity. In the West we fractured into a million competing individual identities. Russia and…

Paul Keating, in 1997. Back when we had leaders, and not just marketing men spewing empty slogans at us. Read this and then turn on the news. "The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech…

Now that masks are gone too, I think it’s worth looking at the data when assessing risk. Here’s Lithgow. The green line is the average of cases. It’s not going down, in fact it’s going up. And this is based on the…

Some say technology will fix climate change. The same people who think military hardware wins wars. We developed nations have war machinery unrivalled at any time in history. But…name the last war we actually won.…

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed leaders like Johnson and Morrison seeing a war as a platform to rescue their own careers. More than 9000 people are still dying of Covid every day around the…

Over 106,000 children have been infected with Covid in the past 30 days in NSW. The government says it's going well.

A superb piece from the British journalist Ed Yong. Why are we tolerating so many Covid deaths? His article brilliantly explains why. Mostly because the history of disease shows time and again that once the privileged…

To give another sense of just how much the ‘live with the virus’ people renormalise the absurd. In the US, every day for the past 6 months, on average about the same number of people have died of Covid, as died in…

Polls are probably less reliable today because people are also more fickle. Voting has become like putting a bet on at the horses, I think because people have less understanding of politics, they also have little…

To those who say ‘we can’t lock down forever’, a couple of things. 1) Nobody has ever suggested locking down forever, that’s a straw man of your own making. 2) You can be infected forever. Over and over. And not just…

Had a discussion yesterday about the Rockley Pub, now featuring a restaurant run by Matt Moran. My issue with some of these developments is that it’s partly a process of gentrification. Taking facilities in a poorer…

Delicious watching the windbags of the past 2 years trying to explain how kids actually did better during lockdown.

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…

There’s been extensive use of actors from a variety of ethnic/racial backgrounds in Bridgerton. That’s likely a response to the attention in recent years to the lack of diversity in TV and film. I wonder if this has led…

I fear for Lithgow’s future. The end of coal and of coal-fired power won’t come gradually, it will be sudden and brutal. It won’t be because of ‘greenies’. It’s basic economics, already happening everywhere in the…

Politicians are pitching for the tradie vote again this election. Young men are now one of the key demographics. The past 20 years have seen a long list of cash and tax bribes sent the way of the tradie vote. Tradies on…

The UK, always our future. Send the kids to school with Covid. In the past you wouldn't get this advice even for a cold.

Wonderful insight into China here. I particularly like the second Tweet, about how the Chinese are always focused on the longer term, on improving life across generations. In the West our retired people are the richest…

From the bottom of my toolbox. There is progress in history. Nobody misses re-wiring fuses.

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,…

Bit longer post, but (to me) a mysterious, magical topic. This is Tollund Man, buried in a bog in Denmark for 2500 years. Many cultures mummified or embalmed dead bodies. Today very few cultures still do, we’re…

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…

This project is a disgrace. $500 million! Brendan Nelson’s wet dream. Turning a genuine war memorial into a hangar for big boy’s war toys. The existing War Memorial had plenty of space, and the large exhibition hall…

When I drive through the Australian countryside, I notice how almost completely unoccupied it is. Apart from the odd farmhouse, the countryside is as good as empty of people. That’s not an accident. Like the Americans…

At some point the idea the LNP are ‘better economic managers’ has to encounter reality, surely? As economists constantly point out as well, the 2 highest taxing and spending governments in Australian history are the…

"The textbooks say, In 1900 most people died of infectious diseases, and today most people don't die of infectious disease; they die of cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's and all these things. Well, in ten years I…

“With more than 47,000 people testing positive in the past 24 hours, adjunct Professor Slevin says he ‘can’t think of anything comparable to the dissonance between what is happening on the ground and the political…

As Richard says, the simple reason wages haven’t gone up in Australia is that employers have refused to pay them. They always have some excuse for not paying them, it’s called self-regulation, meaning ‘we’ll do whatever…

When you replace your society with an Economy, there is no collective care. There is no collective, just a global market. And you’re just a 21st century disposable peasant worker in that market.

Hilarious genius, their best yet. If you've been basically asleep for the past 3 years, here's your election primer.

When interest rates are close to 0%, house prices go through the roof (ha) because people can afford to take on a lot more debt. It creates a bidding war on properties. So when interest rates go up again, the debts…

56 Covid deaths in Oz today. 96 over the past 2 days. But we can all have fun again. Except those 96 people and their families.

Most modern conservative parties are coalitions. This is because they don’t actually believe in anything much, except protecting the interests of those who are doing well. That’s how the parties originate, as a…

Every single home renovation or building show I’ve watched in the past 20 years has removed fly screens from homes. I think that’s a terrible mistake that will have to be fixed at some point, with climate change already…

Who remembers the Banking Royal Commission? The government doesn’t. The banks certainly don’t. They spent the pandemic gouging the public to new levels of greed. I’m sorry if you’re carrying large debt right now. Very,…

The US has had 100,000 new Covid cases per day, for the past 3 days. They clocked a million dead this week. In the past we might have gasped at this. But yesterday Australia, with less than 10% of the population of the…

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…

The problem with democracy as we do it is, that it pays no attention to basic competence. If you go for a job interview or have a performance appraisal at work, how good you actually are at the job is critical. If you…

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.…

Covid damages the immune system. A friend's experience in the past few months. - his entire family caught Covid - his entire family caught influenza - his entire family caught whooping cough. All in the space of only…

I think it’s a mistake for anybody to claim the election victory as a victory for their interests or group. It was a victory for the Australian community, it was that community reasserting itself as the main focus of…

Drive past any farm and you’ll see stock fighting over any tiny bit of shade they can find. I remember people arguing against solar panels because they said they would destroy good grazing land. Just another of a long…

The announcement of free flu shots was driven mostly by sheer, terrified panic at what we’re doing to our healthcare sector. Running it way past the rev limiter, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

A really superb piece showing more clearly than ever before how the story of the past 30 years has been a story of the reversal of a century of workers’ gains. All very deliberate, forced by conservative governments who…

It’s been nearly a century since working hours were last changed across the board, which is ridiculous given how automated the making of many of the things we need now is. It’s time for the 4-day working week. In 1948…

I’d genuinely welcome anybody explaining how 2022 isn’t the greatest disaster in our history. ‘Living with’ Covid is not making it go away, it’s what caused this. Those average deaths and infections don’t budge, every…

Long past time energy production is re-nationalised, like all essential services. Imagine ever thinking putting it out to the private sector was a good idea.

BA.4 and BA.5 hitting NSW, there on the right. Covid's latest trick is called 'imprinting'. Meaning if you get infected with an earlier variant of Covid, it imprints on your immune system. Which sounds great, except it…

Again a shame that those here from the past 2 years advocating getting kids back to school no matter the Covid risk have now gone quiet. People forgot that we didn’t allow kids at school for much less serious diseases.…

This film opened closer to World War 2 than to today.

Most of the core work local governments do had its origins in public health. Providing clean water, removing sewage, collecting and disposing of garbage, approving buildings, administering local parks and sporting…

Lots of talk of ‘wage-price spirals’. The fear that paying ordinary working people more will drive inflation. No concern at all about capital-price spirals in housing, for the past 30 years, driving prices higher and…

There has never been a time in our history when this would have been seen as anything except batshit insane. Except now. Honest question - where do people see this ending, what do they see as the point of it?

For those comfortable with the political line that vaccination was all we needed to do for Covid, here’s the reality. The vaccines were based on a strain of the virus that is 2 years’ old (and now extinct, the original…

Tennis is such a prissy sport. It's historically been played by the rich, as they're the only people who had enough land or money to build a court. It therefore has this genteel horror of anything a bit bogan. Give me…

This tracks the increase in cases across the 70 top LGAs. Have a look at number 1, Lithgow people, I’ve added a blue arrow. To explain the graphic, the percentages show you the percentage change in cases in the past 14…

Multiple people have said to me that there wouldn't be backing for stronger Covid measures, because the experience of too many has been 'mild'. A few things I'd say about that: 1) most obviously, as I've posted about…

Do you really want to be a person in history who thought ‘living with’ a pandemic was a good idea? It will go down as possibly the greatest act of collective stupidity of all time. And it’s all very deliberately…

This is the basic science people are not being told. A vaccine is not a drug, you don’t take it and then you’re ‘fixed’. A vaccine tweaks the ecological balance of an ecosystem of microbes, temporarily in one direction.…

My dad and his friends emigrated to Australia at the start of the 1950s. They were part of that big wave of post-war immigration, that gave Australia the hugest rush of European culture and energy, after the war. They…

In the 19th century the entire city of Chicago was raised over 4 feet, to allow installation of a sewage and stormwater system. The city had suffered repeated epidemics of typhoid and cholera. In 2022 people say we…

I'm curious how many are aware of the difference between public health and medicine? They're different fields, staffed by different people, but so often I see people assume medical doctors and hospitals are responsible…

People may have seen me posting here for a few years now about how the political battles between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are actually something else. The continuation of the driving force of our history, the battle between…

The 2 ways we’re told to stop people getting sick right now is for the government to spend billions more, or for us to take ‘personal responsibility’ for Covid. Anybody notice the enormous elephant in the room here, the…

No pandemic in the history of the world wads stopped by people becoming infected. Not one. Also, ‘endemic’ is just a technical word meaning ‘a disease out of control’.

A solar panel is installed in Australia every 44 seconds. We easily lead the world in household solar, more than 20% greater than other heavyweights like Japan and Germany. Just look at the graph, the growth (yellow is…

506 people have died of Covid in the past week, in Australia. This is what 500 people looks like.

Some people still cling to the idea that Australian Aborigines were primitives. But you won't find any other 'primitive' people whose cultures or civilisations lasted more than a few thousand years. You won't find any…

Covid change in the past 2 weeks, by local government area. Have highlighted Bathurst for reference. Percentage is percentage change in the past 2 weeks. The “1 in” figure on the right is what proportion of the LGA…

In the past 2 days, more than 3 times as many people were infected with Covid in Australia as were infected in all of 2020. About 120 of these people will die.

Saw this one on Twitter and it captures beautifully so much of what I post about here. How our culture is now a war on 'home'. We have no idea what home even means now, to us it's just an address, or some feelings of…

Memory loss after Covid in technical terms is called 'brain damage'. Living with the virus.

I've been very critical of people for not being more angry about the Covid situation. But really it's a complete absence of leadership. People no more understand how to beat a pandemic than they know how to fly an A380.…

The marginal cost of most things we use in society now is actually pretty much zero. Industrial manufacturing is so efficient that we long since haven’t needed most people to work at all. The only reason they do work is…

“Such a lack of transparency is indicative of a lack of respect for the institutions of government and for the general public who have a right to know how power is allocated.” I criticised this government for years, not…

Flame Trees is an interesting example of what a ‘songwriter’ is. Widely accredited to Don Walker, it turns out Walker only wrote the lyrics, Steve Prestwich wrote the music (and he didn’t like Walker’s lyrics). I see…

Novated leases are a massive government subsidy to petrol and diesel vehicles. Good to see them under the spotlight, so we can finally start to get affordable full-electric vehicles in Australia. We have 3 decades of…

The greatest epidemic of all time is likely the heart disease epidemic of the 20th century. Took off early in the century, peaked about the 1960s, and in decline ever since. The usual explanation for this is we ate bad…

Australia’s birth rate is only 1.66 babies per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population without immigration. And in decline for the past 60 years. Now we can’t even get visa workers to come here. It…

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…

Excellent run-down. New petrol and diesel vehicles will quickly become stranded assets. Fuel prices are about to climb quickly again, OPEC is planning to cut supply to boost prices and profits to themselves. And the…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago. A thing of almost sublime beauty, with…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction and discovering electro-magnetism, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago, and half…

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…

Australian taxpayers gave Qantas over $2.5 billion during Covid lockdowns. Qantas used the money to sack thousands of staff. Meantime the CEO bought an enormous mansion on Sydney Harbour, and still pockets annual…

“…my eye fell on a news story about an unresolved murder; a torso of an African boy had been found in the Thames and, after several years of forensic research, they had been able to track down the region of Africa from…

This is probably the world’s best car, the Mercedes EQS. All electric, but what’s interesting about reviews for this car is industry journalists now saying they won’t qualify a car as ‘luxury’ unless it’s electric. The…

Thanks to Ed for this. The oceans are masking just how bad global warming is. They’ve absorbed over 90% of the extra heat we’ve produced by burning astronomical amounts of carbon-based fuels. The amount of heat they’ve…

Have mentioned buying a Kluger hybrid and discovering by accident it's also a self-driving car. I do a daily round-trip commute of over 120 km. So in the past week I tested the self-driving technology. With me of course…

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.…

The WA power system is under pressure because the foreign-owned coal mine that provides coal to its power station is about to go belly up. It’s another fossil fuel stranded asset, that nobody wants because the industry…

Water’s been gushing out of the ground in the hills around Lithgow for months, even when it’s not raining. At the same time, if you go up Hassans Walls Road and look up slope, a huge number of trees are well past…

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,…

Climate change has so many ways of destroying society, and I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The damage to local road and rail over the past few years isn’t sustainable, enormously expensive to fix.

Weather permitting, my solar panels should be installed by the end of the year. Just in time. If you’re a fan of coal, oil and gas power, I hope you have deep pockets. And a memory, of being told those were the path to…

Adding a billion atomic bombs worth of heat to the ocean in the past 30 years funnily enough has created a lot of rain.

Every time I walk through the car park of doctor surgeries past the expensive European cars, I'm reminded that they're public servants and are not held to account like any other public servant. The scale of the rorting…

Transgender activism is a pretty nasty cult. See the comments on the death of Robbie Coltrane. Other transgender people are calling discrimination because their breast alteration surgery is given lower priority than…

I have so many memories of sessions like this, where everybody sits around trying to figure out what the organisation they’re working for is supposed to be doing. Nobody ever figures it out. The sessions only happen at…

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…

There’s such ancient sophistication in the law, which we’re never taught about. Like what’s currently happening in the Bruce Lehrmann trial, and the explanations for why the jury was dismissed. Imagine if you were on…

About half-a-dozen people I know this week have experienced severe medical episodes, life-threatening. All were healthy beforehand and had no prior conditions. All have had Covid. In all cases doctors have no idea what…

For background on why your wallet is bleeding at the petrol pump, OPEC is the cartel of oil producing countries that have held the world to ransom for the past century. If we electrify everything, the tens of billions…

If you read anything this week, make it this fantastic piece by Cory. WW2 upended social hierarchies. Those hierarchies reasserted themselves from the late-1970s until today. That’s what modern ‘economic’ politics…

The engineering behind restoring the gas supply (a story that is amazing) reminds me again how much most of what we call modern life is nearly entirely down to engineers. It’s not democracy that created the modern…

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…

When we watch period dramas, I’m guessing most of us identify ourselves with the main characters, because that’s how the shows are written. But in historical terms, we’re actually the servants in these shows. It’s 2022…

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.…

Fossil fuel companies have made $2.8 billion in profits every single DAY for the past 50 years. Buying politicians is what they do with their small change.

Elon Musk is a wally, but one thing I admire about him is that he actually builds things. Good, innovative things, like the Powerwall 2. And satellite broadband, cars and trucks, rockets, solar roof tiles etc. All…

Memories, me texting Kell.

Is this something Jesus said? My memory is rusty. 2023 needs to be a turning point to take back control from sociopaths.

Poorer countries surging ahead, while we in lazy and entitled rich countries cling to our ridiculously 19th century technologies like kids who won’t give up a teddy bear.

If you’ve had Covid and are having memory problems, you’re far from alone. Another recent story I heard was a guy who’d had Covid, driving to work at 8pm thinking it was 8am. And a woman getting lost driving her kids to…

An electric taxi in the early 1900s, New York. There’s an assumption that electric vehicles today are the new technology, replacing petrol and diesel. But electric cars were built 50 years before either petrol or diesel…

Greg is another leading Australian public health expert. You won’t get ScoMo or Gladys to this day to admit they were wrong about eliminating Covid. They told us all it was impossible. They said that because they didn’t…

A re-post, because it’s so wonderful. “Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that…

If you give up higher super (funded by your employer), the employer will give you higher wages. Pigs might fucking fly. Even if this disgusting fantasy were true, it would mean you’re paying for your own wage rises. The…

Some historical perspective on what true emergencies do to business. In WW2, conservatively over 650,000 small businesses were destroyed in the US, because of the war. There was no alternative, the fight was the…

Defeating a lethal disease is now against our way of life, apparently. Has there been a bigger fuckwit in Australian history than Tony?

In which Tony moans about 'orderly queues' as being anti-Australian. The same man who said the greatest risk to Australia was immigrants not forming orderly queues. I call Australia Day Australica Day, because I think…

Have had horrible foot problems for the past month. On the mend, but it’s been a perfect example again of how our ideas about medicine divvy the body up into (billable) bits, and farm you off to a specialist on each…

We’re all taught that big things are complex, small things are simple. It’s absolutely wrong. The world gets more complex the smaller you go. Tarde saw it all more than a century ago, it changes everything we think we…

Isn’t this graph a beauty? For hundreds of years, the UK had no real ‘economic’ output at all. Then look at it explode. Same pattern in all developed countries. 1.6 trillion times as much ‘economic’ output today as for…

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…

Another area of life where consent was a false God. For the same reasons, what people 'agree' to is never quite clear, even to them. We seem to think we live in a highly idealised fantasy world where people operate with…

Australia needs to vaccinate more than 200,000 people per day to meet its target of the population jabbed by October. So far it‘s barely managing 2000 a day. The federal government is in charge right now. That sort of…

It’s exhausting living in an age of extremes. Where every issue is immediately framed as a war between two extreme, generalising positions. Masculinity is a key battleground right now. I was so grateful to read this…

A chicken and egg question. Which came first, government or the private sector? Probably many would say the private sector. But as with money, the freedom of private life is a creation of government. There was no…

Who remembers the international Women's March, 2017? When Trump was elected. All the same public statements we're hearing now, women have had enough, the patriarchy has to be brought in check etc. It failed, miserably,…

Listening to conservative politicians speak with 'great concern' about children losing education in the pandemic is vomit-inducing. Like they care about children's education, they never have, they spend non-pandemic…

Clive James once said 'freedom wears a crown', pointing out that highly educated and progressive people like him are supposed to support a republic by default. Royals are constrained by centuries of custom and…

Lot of debate online about republics vs monarchies. Here's an example of something that I think would struggle to get off the ground in a world of republics. What a monarchy does is transcend nation politics in some…

These marches are now nearly half a century old in Australia. The problem with protests for me is that I don't think they're anything really collective at all. They're a space for people to express their *individual*…

This may end up the most spectacular rorting in Australian history. To think the pink batts stimulus scheme had a Royal Commission. Really laughable.

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…

More small business. Towns often struggle now to fill main street shops. Most of peoples' needs are met by much larger businesses, online too. In the past the small businesses in a main street were the hub of shopping…

The battle of ideas. The ALP returning to the idea that government needs to INVEST in the community, heavily. Full employment, rather than a permanent pool of unemployed used to drive wages and conditions down. The LNP…

Bruno Latour's ideas about agency to me are the most important thinking of the past half century. Here they are applied to gun control. Why a gun is a different object when held by a person than when it isn't. And why a…

I spent some time with Prince Philip, over a few days in the 1970s. It was fascinating to get that time with a Royal outside their formal, public duties. His death makes me think again about service and duty, and how…

"Up until about 1880, he said, cities functioned more like networked villages. A person likely worked, relaxed, and shopped all within about 20 minutes of their home. Cities of that era of course had plenty of their own…

Curious that something many attribute to a universal gender trait - toxic masculinity - at the same time as they argue gender is infinitely fluid - has such specific geographical outcomes? Similarly in NSW, DV up over…

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…

Anzac. A day with a theme of remembering and death. Those two are actually intimately related, I think. To 'live', as we think of that word, is to remember. Remembering is what makes us think time 'flows'. What makes us…

If you say (as I do) that we're actually immortal, the obvious question is - why don't I remember life before the one I'm living now? Well, of the 365 days you were 5 years old, I bet you'd struggle to remember 5…

Memory. This is Henri Bergson, long dead. Nobel Prize winner. Bergson realised that memories aren't in our heads. He showed that when we have a memory, we're not going into our heads, we're re-entering the past itself,…

Dementia shows that memory is an entirely practical faculty. We need to remember to be able to do things. Memory is what makes us think that time passes, that we are mortal, because it makes our lives seem to have a…

I want to challenge the idea that Australia is falling behind the rest of the world by being slow to vaccinate. Let's remember, there is effectively no Covid in Australia. We're not behind the rest of the world, we've…

Corruption, plain and simple. The National Archive is having to do fundraising to be able to keep some of our basic historical records, and aged care staff got no pay rise in the latest budget, but these clowns can find…

You can see how deeply libertarian populism has infected us. Crabb is no conservative. But even she's been so infected by populism that she describes the powerful use of public institutions to do what they were designed…

Those topics people say you shouldn't discuss (politics, religion etc.) are exactly the things we should talk about. Why are we surprised when the world turns into a toilet, when we don't discuss anything important? In…

I'm sure I bored people last year talking continuously about how the 'Economy' was the cause of the pandemic and the greatest obstacle to ending it. Now Boris Johnson' closest adviser confirms that it was exactly what…

Measles is a master of infection. It spreads literally like wildfire. But another thing it does is even more interesting. If you catch it, it can wipe your immune system's memory of every other disease you were already…

There's no question the great political experiment of the past 50 or more years, is libertarianism. The idea that governments get in the way, and we need to do everything to 'free' individuals from them. All the…

Another extraordinary stuff-up. Should be worth some extra popularity points for ScoMo, on past history. Come on Australia, you’re much smarter than this.

Remember the 'R number' from earlier in the pandemic"? An R less than 1 means a pandemic is under control. This is Sydney's R number for the past 5 days. I think many whose idea of thinking through the pandemic has been…

Fascinating that we smashed flu last year - you can see its death spiral at the start of the big national lockdown in Feb-March 2020 - but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021. It's just non-existent. Despite NSW…

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…

I study political strategy. It used to be part of every child's education, in Ancient Greece. I think we're suffering from the loss of that. Right now, for example, you'll see daily pile-ons at people not following…

Marble floor from a first century Roman domus.

You’re born old, and get younger every day you’re alive. How does that work? You are the accumulated inheritance of all of your ancestors, going back billions of years. Babies start with this ancient inheritance, you’re…

The ‘Economy’ and economics are the most deeply brainwashed ideas. Here’s another example. The word ‘economics’ comes from the ancient Greek, meaning ‘management of a household’. Who does that? Overwhelmingly, women.…

When I see anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown people on Twitter, I sometimes look at their profile and history of Tweeting, to get a sense of the person. This isn’t an unusual flavour of what you find.

Memories of 2020, when some people here on FB were insisting that schools were magically Covid-free zones. My experience is people just go quiet when their stupid assertions turn out to be stupid. Or they block you.…

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…

The Taliban are back. No matter how much we try to separate religion and politics, we always fail. The modernist view of the world we all grew up with says this is a bad thing. It’s very historically naive. I struggle…

When I post about the church, this is the historical sort of background I'm talking about. It's not about whether a person is 'religious' or not, it's much broader. We don't understand religion, we've turned it into a…

Magicians work by diverting your attention. Like 'there's no exponential Covid growth in NSW'. Numbers have doubled in the past week, from 415 to 830. Exponential growth, with a doubling rate now of only 7-8 days. It's…

Reality biting, fingers crossed. Kids to be vaccinated and more caution around the magical 70-80% drivel, at National Cabinet today. The PM will have to be dragged kicking and screaming, like every point in the pandemic…

My grandmother died this month. My last remaining grandparent. Nanna. Because of Covid she got no funeral, though at some point we’ll get together and commemorate her. That’s her on the left, holding either me or Mike…

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…

Something that’s become clear in this pandemic is how invisible basic public health work, which goes on every day of every year, is to much of the community. Take the idea again, that it doesn’t matter how many people…

Why aren’t we as a society insisting upon vaccinating kids against Covid before sending them back to school? Here’s a historical comparison. Whooping cough, pertussis. Before vaccines, about 50-120 deaths per year. I’ve…

Have watched a lot of scandi noir in lockdowns, love it. Bloodlands is Irish noir, with James Nesbitt, one of my favourite actors. I love a show with a twist, that upends everything you thought was happening. This one…

Things we haven’t learned in the past 2 years. 1. We really hate borders and restrictions when they’re applied to us, but we fall over ourselves to vote for politicians who apply them to other people. 2. Most of the…

Every period in history sees itself as breaking free from history. As the new 'modern' thing that leaves history behind. Like every generation thinks it invented sex. Here's a fun example of that being untrue. With the…

It is lethal. If you don't know what libertarianism is, worth doing some reading. Many vote for the LNP today because they think they're voting for Liberals and Nationals. They're not, they've long since transformed…

Politicians have now forced children back into schools, mid-pandemic, with little or no protection, because of apparent concern for their education. The same politicians who presided over this educational performance…

Not just allowing children to become infected with Covid. Now legislatively mandating it. Choose your side people, history will be a harsh judge. If you think infecting children with a novel multi-system virus is a good…

Covid cases are beginning to climb again in NSW. You can see here where it's mostly happening - in kids, in schools. On the 'herd immunity' front, people need to know that infection with Covid confers relatively little…

I could understand if people who have a passion for slogans voted for this federal government. They do a lot of slogans. I’m yet to find a single other thing they do. (Smart observers are suggesting the money may be…

I like Simon Holmes a Court, we've chatted a few times. His family came from a time when the wealthy in this country actually thought about the public good, and not just tax cuts. Australia could be the Saudi Arabia of…

Covid has killed about 20 million people. More than World War 1. In war, if you get a new, decisive weapon, what do you do with it? You use it, to try to win. We got our new, decisive weapon against Covid - vaccines.…

Before the 20th century, overwhelmingly the greatest fatalities in war came from infectious disease, not the fighting. The US Civil War, for example, where about 700,000 people died. Two-thirds of those died of…

"More than 270 NSW schools and 300 childcare centres have closed due to COVID-19 cases in the past month...". The same people who say kids wearing masks will damage them psychologically and socially, are now saying the…

‘I have faith in NSW Health’ many said to me over the past year. In the delusion NSW Health was actually being listened to. The facts are coming out now.

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…

Vote for libertarian conservatives (US, UK, Australia), this is the nonsense you get. The UK government, facing a 'tsunami' of Omicron infections (their word), is reverting to script. 'Get vaccinated'. It's less than 2…

Living in populist times (where people think what’s popular is what’s true) means having almost no attention span or memory. Take the ‘Omicron is mild’ story. Who remembers what happened when Delta arrived in Australia,…

Listen to Kerryn Phelps for a few minutes. We've gone barking mad in NSW in these past 6 months.

Again I apologise for those who find Covid discussion distasteful. Plenty of things for you to scroll past and look at instead. But think of it this way, if the government has given up keeping you healthy (which it…

From inside NSW Health. Worth a few minutes. Insight into what’s happening inside pathologies and hospital For the past few days there has been a huge amount of misinformation regarding COVID testing and as a healthcare…

Straya loves heroes who mop up disasters. We did it with the Anzacs, and with every war since. Now we’re doing it with firefighters. Who are the heroes that prevent disasters? Straya sees those people as pains in the…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. I don’t think we see our culture as a culture, we see it as just as how things are. Take the idea of ‘having a good time’. While nearly every part of the planet…

I would say what makes a person smart is if the ideas they have capture and change reality in some powerful way. It’s the ideas that make them smart, it’s not them (ideas don’t belong to any of us, they can be shared by…

It’s war now. Let’s get a billionaire race to the top. I pledge $2 to the Relief from Bushfire Relief Fund. (Too Gervais?)

Try replacing 'Left' and 'Right' with 'fashion' and 'custom'. In history politics is always carried out between two parties, one representing new ideas (fashion), and one representing existing customs.

Really curious why if you offered that glass of dirty water to most people, there’s no way they’d take even a sip. But you can tell people air is filthy, even hazardous, and they’ll go jogging. In history clean air has…

We’re still living the destruction of the world wars. Agriculture was even called an army in that war, and huge parts of the landscape were ripped up and changed to plowed fields, for the war effort. What we call…

There’s even a red hat. “No longer will you have to give in to toxic bullying feminist dogma and go against your ancient, biological nature as a woman, the men have arrived to help #MWGA”

When I was a kid Australia spoke about how clever it was, most people could list our famous inventions, like the Hills Hoist. Can you think of many great Australian discoveries or inventions of the past 25-30 years? Our…

I think people want something magnificent and glamorous. That magnificence is a scale of value. Royalty and the Church have been the historical answer at the country level. When replaced with secular republics, notice…

Conservatives are relishing the power populism is giving them to completely ignore all checks and balances. It’s a path many fools have trodden in history. What they forget is that populism always ends the same way.…

Max Planck said science progresses one funeral at a time. A brilliant (and true) demographic insight. If the world seems mad today, remember the demographics. The old dominate, and with them the reactive, anxious and…

Dragons in mythology are ancient animals, who speak for ancient non-human knowledge. What is that knowledge? To hoard, to find treasure and sit on it. Not to create, or destroy. They speak for the natural abundance of…

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.

Continuing on a car theme. The transition from horses to cars in cities took only 10 years. The horse manure crisis was a level of pollution absolutely dwarfed by modern car pollution.…

Travel makes all places equal, they’re just points on a map you can move between in comfort. But those points are also where people live. So I think you have this constant tension introduced at the heart of society,…

Sometimes different issues converge. For me, right now it’s coronavirus and domestic violence (DV). In the past infectious disease like TB was often treated in open-air sanitoria, see pic below. Researchers are now…

I wonder if the Chinese view of the world might make us notice what populists we really are. Nothing will make you more popular in our society than outrage against the establishment, against tradition and bureaucracy…

I think we should be cautious about these graphs and numbers circulating online. I have serious genius mathematician friends on FB, they’ll correct any of my thinking! Also sorry it’s hard to do this stuff in…

Patrick Collins was a soldier in World War 1. When his camp became infected with the Spanish Flu, he took his tent and went to the top of a hill by himself, with nothing but his rum ration. He sweated and shivered and…

People here know I talk a lot about our unhealthy obsession with travel. Try this reality filter, particularly if you think it's the Chinese who did all this: - every single case of Covid-19 in Australia right now is…

Another reality filter. We're all eternal beings, and our dreams are the experience of that eternity. Eternity is living a life where everything is possible, as in a dream. Being 'awake' is when a tiny subset of those…

We had world wars that lasted 4-5 years, and what happened on the other side of those? The greatest ‘economic growth’ in world history, usually shuffling winners and losers at the same time. The people who have been the…

If you're at home looking for something to do, play this game designed by one of the world's top labs, to help design a drug against Covid-19. It may lead to a drug within a month.This is serious science, crowdsourcing…

It astounds me that we've only been isolating for a few weeks and already some people are saying it's too hard. Ffs, our ancestors lived through nearly 10 YEARS of food rationing in the last world war, and 4-5 years of…

Camus' wonderful novel is the bible on pandemics. Nearly a century old now but reading it is like reading the paper here in 2020, and novelists go way beyond the medical angle to the deep human psychology. How…

Been a lot of talk of exponential curves lately. What doesn't get mentioned a lot is that this is also the reason our financial systems always crash. The interest we earn on our investments, even in basic bank accounts,…

How are people feeling during this time? When you read the history of previous pandemics, this is the rough succession of emotions people go through (not a joke). See if they sound familiar, social restrictions kick in…

An experiment, psychological immunisation. Our pandemic is horrible, but read about what the people who lived during the Black Death endured. The greatest catastrophe in human history. It lasted 3 years, killed about…

Only 8 new cases found today, across the ENTIRE country. The theory goes that infections stop when a virus runs out of people to infect. But I reckon it's not that clean and mathematical. For example, in human wars…

I think history can teach us more than medicine can, about pandemics, because the lessons learned are forgotten. This is a headline dated November 1, 1918, in the US. The 'open up' push. Triggering the most deadly phase…

The main evidence we have of ancient cultures is overwhelmingly about their ways of dealing with death. Death was the centre of their cultures, it gave everything meaning. For us death has become a disaster to be…

I sometimes almost apologise for posting every day about Covid-19. I do it because - it's the greatest issue of the past 100 years, changing every day, why wouldn't we talk about it? Kids and schools, obviously a focus…

As the article says, pay attention Australia. This may be the most important decision we make in our entire history, and I'm not sure many even know what it is. Many could live or die on the outcome, and the rest of the…

Was laying in bed this morning thinking about how epidemics just start and stop, and nobody knows why. And I thought, these microbes are working together, they're communicating somehow. When I got up, I did a bit of…

Here's context for my pandemic views. Look at these numbers, State-by-State. Everywhere except NSW and Vic may have already eliminated Covid-19. NSW and Vic may be damned close. You can see why the other States aren't…

Gladys wants the pubs and clubs open from next week (good luck getting them 'CovidSAFE' before then). Might leave it to Samuel Pepys, from a past pandemic. Thanks to Alex.

There is no longer a conservative side of politics. (You'd be lucky to find anybody who remembers what political conservatism is.) Conservative politicians have been replaced with lobbyists for various industries. In…

We tend to think freedom is the opposite of slavery. If you actually look at what happened though, in history, that bondage of one person to another didn't lift to give us freedom. We enormously expanded and diversified…

That 'period of euphoria' is palpable here in Oz right now. Why Israel thinks it lost control? Schools. Yesterday ScoMo said: "Eradication? Elimination? These are not the goals that we have". We love pandemics so much…

Civilisations last 336 years on average. Australian Aborigines were left out of this graphic - their civilisation lasted 100,000 years. (They would have gone right off the edge of the graph, by about a metre and a…

Well now. 122 cases linked to one school. (And people wore masks in this school.) Now 6 more schools with infections. I'm happy for history to show me as not on the side of people who say 'this respiratory infection…

Modern medicine is called a miracle. But actually its record against most acute and chronic disease is pretty hopeless. Here are the great heroes of modern medicine - sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. Penicillin…

Chlamydia pneumoniae. Likely the bugs that cause the heart disease we usually blame on fats, smoking and lack of exercise. Also looking like being a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease and arthritis. This bacterium may…

I wonder if it’s common to think that modern medicine means we’re healthier today than ever? Looking at heart disease, including stroke, can be an eye-opener. This is data for the US. At the turn of the 20th century,…

For thousands of years, until the early 1900s, about half of all people born died before they turned 15, from infectious diseases. We think we've changed history, with vaccines and antibiotics. Both of those are…

The almost silent danger in the huge rise in oral sex in recent decades, is that it’s likely responsible for many or even most cancers of the head and neck. Lots of viruses involved in oral sex, and those viruses can…

If you were born in 1900. - when you were 14, the First World War began. - when you were 18, the First World War ended, leaving 20 million dead. - the same year, the Spanish Flu began. - when you were 20, the Spanish…

I think we need a way to meet aboriginal culture somehow in the middle, halfway between our ideas and theirs. Generally we either dismiss them as primitive, or turn their ideas into New Age mumbo jumbo. I think they…

What if democracy is just confusion, the lack of widely shared beliefs? A temporary holding pattern, while those beliefs develop. Humans are very uncomfortable with confusion. When you look at history the great…

Prediction is a mug's game. But here's mine, for the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. We won't beat it with a vaccine or treatment. It'll just stop. Like every pandemic in history, the microbes suddenly pack up and go…

Was listening to talkback radio yesterday, and the question was - what’s something you learned at school that you actually used in later life? And it made me think about how education has failed, that this is such a…

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…

Unemployment, the loss of ‘jobs’. We need to think harder, like Dave Graeber: “Well, you could also just replace them with no jobs. Great economic thinkers like John Maynard Keynes were predicting that technology would…

Very few people died of heart disease before the 20th century. And then quite suddenly, nearly everybody did. See the graph. Medicine has no idea why, it usually says fat and salt are to blame, even though we ate even…

Normally a virus doesn't spread well if it's lethal, because the person dies before they can infect many others. 'Stealth' infections like Covid-19 are super smart, they allow the person to be healthy for weeks, happily…

Just one of the modern conservatives worldwide who franchised conservative politics to the financial sector. None of them would know what a political conservative is, historically. These are the people who can twist…

Thanks to Jason for sharing some research that provides some further clues as to why fridges might have been our enemy in the eternal war against infectious diseases. The researchers studied the mortality rate from…

Fantastic piece from Peter Hartcher today. This is the stuff I've been annoying people with for months. If you read the history of pandemics all of this was inevitable. But we don't want to hear it. He does leave out…

More on time. Time doesn't go past-present-future. The present changes the past. For example, if you buy a winning lottery ticket, it wasn't the winning ticket when you bought it (in the 'past'). But it is the winning…

The figures over the past 100+ years. World Wars 1 & 2 were major international emergencies, like our pandemic, and governments spent HUGE amounts of money. And what followed that huge spending/debt? The 'Roaring…

It’s a bit surprising that we so often hear that the only way this pandemic will end is with a vaccine. There’s not a single example in history of a pandemic ending with a vaccine. Not one. Vaccines are fantastic, don’t…

Some philosophers see pandemics as the way societies reboot. The way they turn off and then on again, when they stop working. In a pandemic everybody returns to the same level, all social distinctions and all economic…

This is what an expert who has actually fought and beaten pandemics says. The history of infectious diseases is the history of governments and vested interests continually undermining basic public health work. Like the…

When you look at the history of disease, most of it, including plagues, comes back to the most basic things. Clean water, clean air, healthy food, no crowding, no abject poverty, adequate shelter. All of these diseases…

Have been driving to work because of the pandemic. One thing I’ve noticed again is just how many people completely ignore road rules. Had a person go past me yesterday who was doing about 140 km/h. Couple of P-platers…

There's some sort of delicious irony in the LNP complaining about closed borders, when its main election strategy for the past 25 years has been 'strong borders'.

Yep. Hole in one. New restrictions from NSW, two lots, in the past day. More urgently needed on pubs, clubs, restaurants and regional travel. All big party donors, which is why they haven't done it yet.

"A danger greater than war faces the State of NSW...". From 1918-19. People came out of 4 years of horrific war into 3 years of horrific pandemic. The pandemic killed far more than the war. They weren't strategic…

History doesn't repeat. But it often sure does rhyme.

We're not seeing the politics. National Cabinet (the LNP end of it) desperately want contact tracing to be all we need, because that way they can keep their beloved 'Economy' open. The level of community transmission is…

“...we don’t understand that things look fine until right before they’re very not fine...Pandemic data are like the light of distant stars, recording past events instead of present ones...Policy makers end up acting…

Fewer people seem to be dying of Covid. (Always a critical sign a pandemic may be waning.) There's a theory that wearing masks is giving people immunisation against Covid, by restricting the dose of virus they inhale.…

What do people think of the idea of becoming a Republic? I think history is often a good guide (as it was for the pandemic). Look at the Romans, the most famous Republic. They began as a monarchy, and then became a…

Billy Graham is pivotal in understanding our world right now. One of the leading figures from the 1950s onwards mixing religion and politics. Read this, you’ll see how just about everything we describe as Left vs Right…

It's not an analogy for me that pandemics are the rebooting of societies. It's their job, throughout history. To force us to throw out everything we think we know and question everything we do. They can do that because…

The big orange man-baby has just done a drive-past of his supporters outside his hospital. Think about this - his car has about a half-dozen secret service agents in it. Windows must be up for his safety. So a known…

Nearly 70 years ago. But is this moment now gone, like we often think with time? That it ‘flows’ and what was in the past is now lost forever? Nope. That moment in 1954 is still happening right now as you look at the…

Solar will be the world's greatest source of energy by 2025. 5 years. The cost of solar has dropped 90% in the past 10 years.

Germany is a global economic superpower, producing some of the world’s most advanced and sexiest things. Many of the largest and most successful firms are still heavily tied to the regions and even families that set…

Germans are often seen as efficient, orderly, logical etc. Actually I think that’s a misdiagnosis, you understand so much about Germany when you understand they’re a nation of craftsmen. That’s where their apparent…

The science popularisers like Brian Cox, or Karl. Know what I’d like to see? A social science populariser, who can ask questions like ‘with all this gee whizbang new science and technology, why do people in the 21st…

I think the virus hasn’t been our real enemy in the past year. It’s a population trained for the past 5 decades to see themselves as individual, ‘free’ consumers. Many responded to the pandemic, and still do, just by…

My photo for every modern election. The Simpsons know. It’s not Left vs Right, that stuff is long over. People are at war with their own institutions. Populism. They’ll vote for anybody who promises to stick it to the…

Ideas are everything. For the past few decades (starting with John Howard), governments have embraced 'monetary policy' as the way to keep our 'economies' moving. All it really means is they've tried to make money…

In NAIDOC week, read Gammage’s book to completely change how you think about this whole topic. Aboriginal Australia was nothing like what you might have been taught or imagined. It was a manufactured Garden of Eden, a…

Here's an IQ test Australia. This is Covid numbers (unknown source infections) for the past 2 weeks in Australia. If you were the boss, would you: 1) tell all those zero States that NSW is the 'gold standard' and they…

Education isn’t about subjects, it’s about learning to pay attention. And keeping at it past the point where others get bored (Einstein’s advice). Without training your attention, everything in the world will just be a…

It’s quite remarkable Connery’s reputation survived these views. Giving a woman a good slap when she needs it, for example. If you look a bit beneath that though you get a glimpse of a time when male and female were…

Han Van Meegeren was the most famous forger of the 20th century. His fakes made between $100 million and $200 million. This is him painting a fake during his trial, to prove he’d created them. The much more interesting…

It seems like common sense, hey? Those publicly-funded leeches pulled back into line with the private sector. That’s what they’re counting on, that we don’t have a clue. Under cover of the pandemic, yet again, a toxic…

The virus deniers remind me of the climate deniers (they’re often the same people). Have a look at the graph, alongside these numbers: - between 1751 and 1987 burning fossil fuels put 737 billion tonnes of CO2 into the…

In the past 250+ years, fire domesticated us. We became its slave. The staggering volumes of combustion gases we’ve spewed into the atmosphere should have alarmed us because of the astronomical amount of fire that…

The real reason the feds are so interested in super is in that first line, industry super is set to control half of Australia’s economic output within 5 years. Industry super is the 21st century version of unions in a…

Another thing I didn’t just make up 🙂 One of modern science’s greatest weaknesses is its very poor knowledge of its own history. Economics the same. I found the vitamin C link when researching my own whooping cough, in…

It is actually what has just occurred. People accuse me of being anti-LNP. I’m quite fine with Liberals and Nationals. I despise populists, who took over both of those parties in the past 25 years, and are trying to…

"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…

Many took cheap shots at Victoria rather than focusing on the fact that quarantine in Australia is the FEDERAL government's responsibility, by law. This is now the 3rd 'leak' from Sydney airport quarantine in the past…

The two biggies in virus mitigation - ‘living with the virus’ - biting the dust. Will we suffer long enough to understand that it’s our way of life that is the cause of this pandemic, not the virus? Insecure work and…

In 2020, airlines have been parking their planes in the desert, because of the pandemic. You might think this has destroyed the tourism industry, and it is doing that. But as an indication of just how obscene the amount…

William Topley. In the 1930s one of the first researchers on the idea of herd immunity. The idea that if enough of us are immune to a disease, it will prevent it spreading at epidemic levels. This is why it pays to do…

A key (and unreported) finding of the review into Victorian quarantine? ScoMo had prepared no pandemic plan, with no quarantine arrangements. All commonwealth responsibilities. Premiers were stunned, and were left with…

Professor Marylouise McLaws on radio this afternoon, an international expert on disease outbreaks, asked to summarise the Premier’s decisions about Christmas in NSW. “Dangerous”. Disease outbreak specialists use the…

Johnson’s incompetence is on track to kill over 100,000 people by early 2021. Anybody in this pandemic who argued for softer public health action to save ‘the economy’ is worse than a war criminal. It’s genocide, no…

I didn’t hate 2020. I hated so many lives lost and being at risk, but I enjoyed lifestyles being openly challenged by actual life. Life isn’t endless holidays, shopping, partying, travelling and good times. Life isn’t a…

I couldn’t recommend this show highly enough. Gripping Brit crime thriller, but way more than that. The Brits are peerless with this stuff, so much more sophisticated than the black and white moralising coming out of…

“In Nothing We Trust”, the motto of our times. Without institutions, superstition, chaos and conspiracies replace trust. Have a look at the graphic for the US alone. The definition of an institution is “stable, valued,…

This is a vortex tube. A miraculous thing hidden in industrial sheds. Compressed air enters the chamber (the bit with EXAIR written on it), and forms a vortex; like a mini-tornado. That vortex separates the air into two…

Re-posting from another thread. This is a major speech Winston Churchill made in 1946, after the disaster of World War 2 and Europe lying in ruins. This was the beginning of the building of modern Europe, what the…

I find it’s often clever people who struggle most understanding politics. A country has tried exactly what Brian suggests here - it’s called China. Not sure that’s what he really wants. The custodians of our past and…

This graph shows why Australia has looked like its ‘economy’ has been growing constantly for the past 25 years. We’ve been using our houses as ATMs, ramping up house prices using cheap credit and then using the ‘equity’…

Watching this story unfold made me think again about our gambling culture. It's not just limited to what we see as traditional gambling? Get-rich-quick is like a society motto. How many people churned multiple homes in…

A few years ago I had whooping cough, hell on Earth. There wasn't much on offer in terms of treatment, so I did my own research and found that some doctors a century ago used high doses of vitamin C to dramatically…

Yeh, nah. Another binary, as if a problem in your life has to be 'solved'. What if problems are just life not always giving you everything you want? That doesn't need solving, that's reality. Lennon was just one of a…

Here's the swindle right at the heart of superannuation. The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) sets the 'benchmarks' for different levels of retirement. For example, whether you want a 'basic',…

Emotions and feelings I think are our guides to what is true. The emotions you often see when people are trying to understand something are: 1) righteousness, and 2) numinosity - the sense of something ‘profound’. Both…

“Bohemian Rhapsody is more a crowd—pleaser then cinematic excellence.” Film critic. I still don’t think people see enough how the split in our wider world is all there in a statement like that. The ‘crowd’ is not able…

Part 2 of previous post. This book is a ripper. Authenticity is a key idea in our time, for me, with a very dark core. "Musicians strive to “keep it real”; listeners condemn “fakes”; ... but does great music really need…

Supposedly rational people can believe the strangest things. This one always amazes me - that we think our brains are containers inside which our thoughts and memories and perceptions live. Seriously - if you have a…

One of the problems I see with most ‘causes’ is that they end up sounding like whining. They sound complaining and defensive. Most causes have every good reason to complain about something, but as a rhetorical device…

This. How many famous trials have been in the press in the past year (Rush, McLachlan, Pell, for example) where this principle has been openly ignored? If people don’t like the rule of law, or pay lip service to it as…

If you’ve never watched Rumpole, it’s not too late to start. Rumpole is like the Yes Minister of Law, a hugely entertaining chance for people to learn how ancient institutions actually work in practice, the institutions…

One of the recurring patterns in history that I think doesn’t get noticed much is how the powerful end up civilised by those they rule over. Big Bad Bill was a bad boy, civilised by marriage. Many men are civilised in…

So @[783412914:2048:Kyle], talk to me about MJ, and Pell. It appears MJ’s abuse could have been on a semi-industrial scale, compared to Pell. And it hasn’t been to court (though apparently some has been settled out of…

There’s an old (sexist) saying that if you have people by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. There’s real wisdom there I think, notice how people rarely agree on major issues, and yet society today is the…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

Green parties have never been very successful in politics. They tend to be fringe parties. My sense of why that is, is that their main historical interest - the ‘environment’ - is impossible to define. How could you…

Space and time. Ramesses II died over 3000 years ago. This is him. Some suspect him to have been the Egyptian Pharaoh who dealt with Moses. Recent studies suggest he may have died of tuberculosis. If you found a machine…

Sometimes a book can help change a life. Latour’s Science in Action was one of those, for me. Always hated the title, it sounds so boring, but it’s one of the most revolutionary books of our time, it can change how you…

The face of ‘sovereign borders’. Sovereignty is the issue of our time, it’s the most dangerous and difficult idea in world history. It also explains climate change, you get 2-for-1. But then, most of us don’t study…

How would you answer if somebody asked, who runs Australia? Or who runs the world, or the place where you work, or your household? My guess is many would name a person or people to answer each of those. My answer is -…

Happy birthday! Only a year until the half century!

I have no problem with the old, that’ll soon be me too. But we need to see society for what it is, and at the moment society is outrageously skewed to the old at the expense of the young. There isn’t one political issue…

Pensioner, living alone, quoted in the news today. “How a person can live on $67 a day, this is supposed to be the land of plenty. Plenty for who? Not for us," he said. "Our generation, we worked hard and all the…

The Coalition has added more government debt in the past 5 and a half years, than was added by all governments in the 118 years previously, since Federation. Adds some colour to the 'better economic managers' slogan.

More myths of the middle. The middle class, it probably doesn’t exist. The spatial metaphors around middle or centre are misleading I think. Yes you can find a middle point between two other points, in space. But there…

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…

Always some new outrage, every day. Anzac biscuits now, apparently you can even be locked up for varying the ingredients. Interesting that it seems likely that most Anzacs didn’t even eat them. And nobody really knows…

This interests me more all the time. Look at this GOT scene through the lens of ideas of consent. Incidentally I think the scene is great, it’s the ideas of consent that are the problem here. TV reflects public…

Eternity is not one unending life. It’s a life that uses the PAST - tradition - in the PRESENT, to create the FUTURE.

Geometry means ‘measurement of the Earth, or land’. Geo-metry. We learn it (badly) as ‘maths’. The original meaning gets lost. Ancient inventors of geometry would measure a piece of land to have a way to say ‘this piece…

Memories...

I’ve never had a lawn, in that manicured weed ‘n’ feed sort of way. Walking to work I notice the amazing ecosystems in wild self-sown grassed areas, like this one. Easy to walk past and not notice it, but there’s a…

Do you think anybody sees a protest like this and thinks "well bugger me, I better make coal history"?

These are the 2 most significant PMs of my lifetime so far. I’m not really interested in comparing them as people, but one thing each of them said I think defines the debates Australia is still having. Hawke: At every…

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…

I'm convinced our war on darkness (electric light, daylight saving etc.) is changing who we are, in bad ways. There was a time when sunset brought on darkness even in the home, with candles or lanterns the only light. A…

The epidemic of plastic surgery and facial alteration is starting to make more sense to me. Throughout history the face of a ruler has been airbrushed into masks and images, as a unifying blank canvas. Specific…

One of the beautiful, profound things I learned from Michel Serres was about legends. Because the true humanities are absent from most peoples' education today, a legend can only seem like a made-up story. But Serres…

The picture below is the Maldives, tourist paradise and what the tourists have left behind. In tribute to Michel Serres, I coincidentally saw this paragraph from him the day he died: "Disguised under the label of…

Economics is actually pretty interesting. Either government invests in the country, or you and I do. Modern conservative governments give money away to the rich in tax cuts rather than invest in the country, so that…

"Let me just restate for emphasis: the need for balanced federal budgets is a myth. Like many myths, it does have some factual historical origins. Back when currencies were backed by gold it was possible for governments…

Sounds like the pitch for Fatal Attraction? I've been reading Esther Perel's remarkable book, Mating in Captivity. Sort of a Proust primer on love for the 21st century. A taste: "The grand illusion of committed love is…

The people and animals in this photograph are all long dead? Yes and no. For example, some of them is in this photograph, some of who they are has been 'captured' here and lives on with every new viewer. You could say…

We think we're smarter now than at any time in history. But check this. The domesticated plants and animals essential to our survival all appeared thousands of years ago. Today nobody knows how that domestication was…

An example I think of how splitting knowledge up into 'subjects' destroys education. Trigonometry again, we all learn at school how to do it. Sometimes a teacher might even tell us the 'history', how the Greeks invented…

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social…

The bit in the middle of a sundial that casts the shadow is called a gnomon. The etymology of the word is fascinating, it means 'one that knows or examines'. An object that knows. The ancient world wasn't like us, it…

Yep, it's always the boobs. As recently as WW2 women were blamed for sexually transmitted infections. Syphilis is back, one of the most horrendous of all diseases. Often called the 'no nose' disease, because sufferers…

Time is the universe's way of stopping everything from happening at once. If you're way too busy, everything *is* happening at once. So in an interesting way, I think it's not that you 'run out' of time when you're…

"Time is out of joint." Shakespeare, Hamlet. Shakespeare knew a thing or two. Our modern crazy busy world is a world where time is broken. Out of joint. The collapse of institutions and traditions has left us either…

William Joseph Macpherson is another hero of mine, he took many breathtaking images of Australia at the turn of the last century. Like this one of The Rocks, where you see both the life of the people (kids in this case)…

Modern conservatives mostly believe government restricts individual freedom, and in most ways (that don't disadvantage themselves) they would rather government be dismantled. These are usually beliefs of those who are…

Did you know that bacteria are immortal? But also, interestingly, one type of cells in our bodies is immortal too - cancer cells. This to me is where everything we think we know could be thrown wide open, if we…

Henri Bergson's famous memory cone. Bergson showed that time doesn't 'pass', like a river. (Actually rivers don't flow or pass either.) What we call the 'present' is the tip of the cone, the most contracted state 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…

A friend whose 94-year old mother is ailing made a fascinating observation to me today. Often people at that age are said to be losing their marbles, but he believes they're actually going through a profoundly…

The word rhetoric has a pejorative meaning today, like persuasion is a sneaky thing. Better to just 'stick to the facts'. I think it's the key to reforming education. The ancient Greeks had it right in the middle of…

The Melanesians built runways in the early 20th century, hoping they would bring Western aeroplanes full of more of the Western goods they'd come to love. Cargo cults. Bathurst raised its dam wall thinking it would…

One day I hope to convince people that maps are our culture. We see the world as a map. Travel is our way of exploring the map that wars put in place. That violence is our history.

Time began in 311 BC. Invented by this fella, Alexander the Great. Before him there was no 'river of time', where time 'flowed' along some linear path, there were just events, tied to geographical locations. The dynasty…

Since the Second World War, the increasing prosperity of average people has been a mirage. We've looked and felt richer, but it's mostly the result of increasing levels of personal debt. While the well-off have taken…

I snapped this in Lidsdale on the weekend. It really resonates with me, because it's an old creek bed. Some of the ancient Greeks divided the world into Earth, Air, Fire and Water. I say we're a civilisation seduced by…

Some numbers on climate change. Between 1751 and 1987 (236 years), humans released about 737 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Between 1987 and 2014 (27 years), humans released about 742 billion tonnes of CO2…

For some interesting reason, in the 19th century people were asked to look very stern in photos. This one is rare, you get to see both the posed and unposed shots.

I love files. They created the modern world. Not those big words like capitalism or socialism, those are fairy tales for grown ups. If you want to know what built our societies, I say this is it - files. It's where all…

More modern curiosities. Why is that that people can get really passionate about working out their bodies. But you don't hear people say, "gee, I don't know much about history, or science, or maths, or how the legal…

Trump has arrived in Australia. ScoMo actually plagiarised Trump directly this week. Populism I think is politics for utopians, meaning people who don't think politics should exist at all, that we shouldn't have…

In 2018, for the first time in history, there were more people aged 64+ in the world than there are people aged 5 or younger. (Those who think poor nations are filling the world with too many babies should let that sink…

In the 18th century Edmund Burke watched the French Revolution murdering thousands of people. What he took from those events is an idea of freedom opposite to how we've been taught to think of it - he's one of the…

I think this is the most astonishing thing I've ever read. It's the story of how the US has grappled with the Mississippi River over the past couple of hundred years. It makes Jurassic Park seem like an episode of the…

The obsession we have with locating our minds and even our identities in our brains is unravelling. People like Descartes invented that idea, we came to live it as common sense. To me it's one of the weirdest, silliest…

Saw a farmer accidentally give the explanation for the drought yesterday. He said people had 'de-coupled' water from the land. He believed water rights mean that somebody far away can buy water that flows right past…

In Extinction Rebellion camps, they have health activities that are straight out of the 1960s. A whole range of New Age therapies. ‘The system’ is the enemy. By disrupting everyday life they feel they’re disrupting the…

I walked past a woman in the supermarket yesterday who was sub-consciously humming the tune the supermarket had playing. An ear worm, the song ‘stuck in her head’. What fascinates me is that ideas work in exactly the…

I loved Clive James, read a lot of his work, loved his wit and TV. He was an extremely clever man, but I don’t think he was the giant he’s being described as today. Not to disrespect his memory, but to make it real.…

The Name of the Rose. A murder mystery set in the Middle Ages, but with multiple interwoven themes. Eco shows us a world when people lived and died by ideas - the centre of the story is a Library built as a labyrinth,…

D.H. Lawrence believed forced mass education past a certain level was evil. The world of ideas he thought was a particular talent some people had, and many didn’t. Forcing everybody to take on higher levels of education…

Lest we Forget. Over 100 million people died in the 20th century fighting for freedoms. Everyday people were bombed daily, but got through it with stoicism. So...are we betraying those 100 million and more who died…

We are eternal, immortal beings. You could say ‘so why can’t I remember before I was born’? Memory is key I think, firstly can you remember being in the womb? Being 2 years old? 4, 5? Notice that the ‘younger’ you are,…

Lord Haw Haw was a Brit who broadcast propaganda messages for the Nazis. One of the most despised people in British history. I think the loud climate denial voices in our public discussions are worse, climate change may…

It’s easier to find the answer to any question, and fast, today than at any time in history. At the same time ‘facts’ have never been so ignored. Maybe this proves the maxim that we never desire what is easy for us to…

Bialowieza forest in Poland is the last remnant ancient landscape in Europe. It’s an astonishing landscape. Herman Goering planned to turn it into a hunting playground for Nazi supermen. It survived so many centuries…

Every age has its aristocracy. I didn’t realise for a long time what the function of an aristocracy is, they just look like daft rich twits. But it turns out the true function is to make a country open to ideas from…

When I was a kid, my grandmother said to me in front of a Blue Mountains scene a bit like this one, “it’s a mess, so untidy”. I chuckled at the time and thought she was being a typical European settler, not…

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…

I remember and miss the days when the checkout had somebody to tally up the price, and then a separate person to pack your shopping for you into those nice big brown paper bags. That was service. Used to love the sound…

Kelso High School was a unique school. The buildings were beautiful, light everywhere, central courtyards with gardens, everything carpeted, long ramps everywhere as well as stairs, it had its own cinema and…

They could re-make Friends for the 21st Century, I'm sure it would do as well again. It's probably not a coincidence that at about the time Friends was originally popular, young people started to move away from more…

We would look at this pic and see that the most complex and evolved life is living in the village, in the valley. Michel Serres reverses that entirely. “Animals, trees and stones...Reckon now the progressive ages of the…

Annabel Crabb has the gift of explaining what stinks in an argument with only a few, witty words. On this topic, when you strip away the hypocrisy of the critics, what’s left in plain view is the clear dislike of women.…

“By making accusation – long after the event – equal guilt, and making inevitable mistakes by doing so, a groundswell of belated anger such as the present one must inevitably produce a result opposite to the one…

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…

Scott Morrison on the TV, spruiking again that if you give $65 billion in tax cuts to foreign multinational companies in Australia, many of which pay no tax anyway, rivers of gold will flow through to workers in jobs…

Michel Foucault challenged the idea that sex was a repressed thing that we needed to talk about. Instead he pointed out that we talk about sex now way more than we ever have in history. Why? Foucault realised that our…

It’s time to de-privatise banking and return it to being a public service. Since the earliest days of all cultures money-lending has been seen as a social and moral evil. We think we’re too clever for that ancient…

The Mad Monk has escaped again, this time calling for cuts to immigration. One of the things not many know is that the only thing that keeps economies like Australia's running, is immigrants. Immigration actually fuels…

I think this is one of the greatest fantasies at the heart of modern life. The idea of starting society again from scratch, going off-grid, being more ‘authentic’. Think I’ve mentioned that before, I see the passion for…

The maverick Australian farmer Peter Andrews had what I think is a genius insight about the Australian landscape. That water in the Australian landscape has usually been stored in the soil, not above ground in dams or…

Nope. Time isn’t a resource. You can’t use it up like a jar of peanut butter. Nobody has ‘enough time’, we’re all ‘too busy’ etc. We fiddle with clocks to ‘save’ time. I think we confuse the number and types of activity…

Music has always been my first love, but at the same time it has a dark side I think that isn’t noticed as much, and which put me off doing it for a living. Music is territorial. In birds it’s very obvious, that their…

Often thieves understand human psychology better than anybody. Derren Brown, if you’ve never seen him, has produced some of the best television of the past 20 years, blending suggestion, hypnosis, magic and…

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…

@[783412914:2048:Kyle], @[100001374621876:2048:Kato], more hint at the range of Derren’s work. This was a series called Trick or Treat, where he took ordinary members of the public and gave them transformative…

Do you have any respiratory problems? Asthma, hayfever, a cold, the flu? Another shout out for vitamin C. For years it’s sort of been known as useful for conditions like this, but it gets caught up in the debates around…

The danger of constantly focusing on the brain. We’re brain-obsessed, whether we think thoughts are swimming around in there, or memories, or in this case disease.

Researchers studying the remains of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses 2, who died more than 3000 years ago, concluded that he died of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was only isolated by Koch in 1882. Notice how our technologies…

This is what has always struck me as the single most important thing people need from education. Not any individual subject or type of knowledge. The capacity for sustained attention on something.…

Moloch, a Canaanite god. Worshipped in Carthage, by some accounts, in the form of a giant bronze statue, which was heated to red hot, and children were then thrown into the statue as sacrifices. Barbarism, you might…

I haven’t been as unoutraged* since Adam Lambert started singing with Queen. (*made up word. This is around the 10th new lineup for Fleetwood Mac in its history.)

Anybody else love The Good Life? One of those wonderful 1970s TV shows, about leaving the rat race, with the Goods (in the picture) deciding to be self-sufficient. As I got older though, I wondered how healthy the…

Sometimes news stories from the past make super interesting reading. 2014, Tony Abbott was PM. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-15/budget-2014-funding-cut-to-asic-business-regulation/5453816

At school we had to sing the hymn, based on Kipling’s Recessional, from which ‘Lest We Forget’ comes. Do people still sing it in schools? It doesn’t have the meaning we give it today, as shown in the picture. It’s maybe…

Every night we all ‘rest’, after our days, as we sleep. The traditional Rest In Peace has usually meant our souls and/or bodies resting in peace, for eternity, with Christ or God. But what if there’s a much more literal…

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.…

"Historically, the crime of rape is not an offence against women, but an offence committed against men by other men." I think this would be a great piece to use as a springboard for a discussion of consent…

Somebody once taught me that we are born old, and we get younger every day we live. And I understand it now, every baby is the folded times of all of its ancestors, carrying their histories within it. I’m typing with my…

Like a dog returning to its vomit, I’m back at cars. There’s still more to do. We need our networked villages back. Try walking where you live, be it town or city, and just listen, and you’ll notice we’ve become used to…

The history of all life on Earth is likely the history of microbes. The animals and plants and fungi etc. we see as living things are likely just created by microbes and act as temporary homes for them. It’s why we and…

Sorry if you’ve just eaten. This is the Black Plague (it really is black), alive and well in the 21st century. This man had removed a mouse from his cat’s mouth, to stop the cat from choking. The reason I posted this is…

More love, because it’s a lovely topic. Proust is valuable because he allows us to strip away what Greer called the ‘wretched cant’ of love. The self-motivated projections we put onto other people, that are really about…

Because everybody loves Proust. Another of his insights, both the past and the future exist in the present, not before and after it. They exist in the ‘qualities’ we experience in the present moment - the sounds, the…

Who hates committees? Pretty much everybody. But committees in some ways are the heroes of modern life, it’s a fascinating history. Particularly after the Great Wars enormous effort was made to develop meeting…

Our public life is becoming a fantasy, like a film set. Celebrities at the front of the church with royalty at the royal wedding, now two TV stars in the White House. (Remembering Ronnie Raygun was also an actor.) I…

Artificial intelligence is famous, but much more interesting I think is the research in the past couple of decades on collective intelligence. Can groups or even crowds, think? There’s a lot of prejudice against crowds,…

It’s easy to look at the world today and assume it’s falling apart. But that maybe because we only look at how humans act with each other, and don’t look at how the things they build and maintain act to glue society…

Another interesting tidbit for those who sometimes struggle with sleep. By the time a person is 50, it's quite common for them to fall asleep about 9pm and be awake by 3 or 4 am. This trend starts in many in their 40s,…

A post just for the two of you, from Rowan Williams again. The "vastly complicated and enticing and frustrating borderland, where physics and philosophy and psychology blend" is the space I work in, in religious ideas.…

The opposition between what’s beyond us in some way - transcendent - and what is inherent to us - immanent, is one of the big tensions in history. But, surprise, I think all opposites are fake. Take a company as an…

Our politics looks like society is at war, but actually we live in some of the most peaceful times in human history. It’s impossible to understand that paradox I think if you only look at humans. An example - trains.…

Offshoot of another discussion. Data and visuals suggesting strongly that today is easily the most peaceful time in human history. Also shows that States or governments - the things many have a passion for destroying…

Christopher Alexander, the architect, was one of the first to put me onto patterns as a topic. Alexander noticed that beautiful buildings in history shared some common patterns, basic things like ‘light from two or more…

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…

What if the entire world, no matter what scale you look at, was nothing but mixtures? Our thinking and feelings can make us want there to be pure things, that are not mixed. But in reality, everything is a mixture.…

Imagine our great grandparents seeing the range of foods and other items in a supermarket. Something we take for granted, a true wonder. I don’t trust the modern search for the more authentic life, the passion for the…

Anti-materialism is a philosophy only the rich have. About a billion people in the world live in slums, and for them material comfort, or the lack of it, dominates their lives. I think material comfort, and the basic…

I think that attempted man bun can’t be allowed to disappear into history @[783412914:2048:Kyle].

Catacombs in Paris and Rome, tombs in Egypt. It’s important I think that historically people looked for the source of life and the afterlife in the ground beneath us, not up in the sky in some Heaven. Tombs and…

I think there’s truth in this, women have historically not done ‘leisure’? And not out of choice. Even shopping is rarely leisure. Maybe wine o’clock is a sort of pushback on this, although not sure it’s a positive one.…

I find that IT experts will generally tell you IT systems aren’t safe, particularly ones they didn’t build themselves, because it keeps them in a job and the centre of attention. A lot of the modern data hysteria seems…

The Hitler Youth are an example of the power of children. The Nazis targeted children specifically, and nearly every child in Germany at the time became part of the Hitler Youth. The process was so successful that the…

If thinking and language is mostly metaphors, here’s one that I think might matter. Knots versus boxes. We tend to think in box ways, we separate things and our ideas about things into boxes, with an inside and an…

Supply and demand. Hay has gone past $300 a bale, with the current lack of feed for farm animals. People will reflexively say "that's just supply and demand". But what does that mean? Doesn't it just mean people are…

A thought piece for the latest hysteria, Roundup. Moving on from the plastic bag hysteria and drought hysteria. Lessons from past hysterias, detention for not reading.

Kidult, the child-adult. Hadn’t heard the word before, but adults with the mindset of adolescents, and adolescents aping what they see as adult behaviour seems very real. People well into middle age, often with no…

It changes how you look at politics I think, if you look past the politicians to the points of view in the community that they represent. Like today in Canberra, could easily be dismissed as politicians just looking out…

Gough Whitlam was dismissed by the Governor General in 1975 for not being able to pass appropriation Bills through the Senate. Government was running but the big money Bills couldn't be passed, which the GG (bless his…

The (F)law of Averages! We misread climbing average life expectancy as meaning ‘everybody is living longer’ (we aren’t). You can see the same flaw in superannuation, how we’re told we need a lot of super because we’re…

There are towns in danger of running out of water. Even Sydney has lost alarming amounts from its vast reservoir this past year. (In Australia we tend to think dams somehow magically create water from nothing, in…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

I sometimes wonder if the modern fights between atheists and believers are down to the fact that we talk about God, rather than Gods. Historically we arrived at God - singular - via Gods - plural. Like the old Olympian…

I’ve spent a lot of the weekend browsing the Holtermann Collection. Bernhardt Holtermann was a German immigrant in the mid-19th century, and became famous because of the Holtermann Nugget, the largest gold nugget ever…

Climate change is usually seen as a scientific thing. Too much carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. But there’s a different way to see it that some are starting to articulate. It’s a problem of morality. One of my…

In world terms, the UK was very late to introduce national parks, only in the second half of the 20th century. The reason why is very interesting. There was no untouched land left in the UK, its landscape is entirely…

As a kid I used to see ‘pasteurised’ written on milk cartons and wonder what it meant. Louis Pasteur’s story is amazing, he came at a time when society debated whether life was something that was added to a broth in a…

The history of chairs is actually very interesting. Originally chairs were more ceremonial things, reserved for royalty or people in high church office. If you look at some of the old paintings of kings at court for…

My trip home every day. First class, quiet comfort, spectacular views. Costs me $2 a trip, can have beer or wine, hot or cold food. Cars nearly destroyed train travel, it’s very sad going past the old unused stations in…

Maybe labouring consent here, but it's topical (and fun - apple of my armpit!). My view is consent is what we have left, once we remove all the more sophisticated rituals of courtship we used to have. It's another…

My vote for the most important thinker alive. Check him out in this interview, it was through studying Latour (he was also one of the markers on my PhD a couple of decades ago now) that I learned more about the world…

The Da Vinci Code was one of the biggest selling books of all time. The root of the stories is Gnosticism, which is one big reason I think the book sold so well. We say we live in a secular world, but even the most…

The Thirty Years' War took place in the 17th century. More than 8 million people died, and it's considered one of the most destructive conflicts in history. Triggered mostly by competing ideas of one true religion, it's…

Border protection gets people excited. One of the things I reckon is not said much is that a national border isn't a physical thing. It's a legal thing. All national borders are the result of an agreement, between…

The idea of ‘Left’ versus ‘Right’ came out of the French Revolution, where those who voted to retain great power for the King sat on the right of the chamber, and those to limit that power sat on the left. At the same…

It's slaying them at the Box Office, number one film in every country it's opened. And it's worth reading this self-serving, delusional piece to see inside the mind of critics, who can't accept that the masses might be…

I couldn't recommend Edmund Burke highly enough. Also John Howard's hero, though I think Burke would have found Howard clueless. This description of Burke describes exactly the world we ended up living in, which he…

Incidentally, I do like a huge range of music, not just Queen. But I think they’re the greatest rock and pop act in history, and are hugely misunderstood. Even greater than The Beatles - is there an act or band that…

The memories that are the most special for me in life have often been of events that are everyday, ordinary things. For example, coming home from school every day and snacking on SAOs and Vegemite. I can still feel that…

Have now seen the movie. Thought it was great, verged on telemovie in a couple of spots, but it was Queen doing what it knows how to do better than anybody - appealing to the widest possible audience, and entertaining…

The top TV programs of the past 15 years. Nearly all sport, or if not sport then reality TV competitions. I have a theory that sport or competitions are so popular, because we really do love a contest, a duel, a stoush.…

John Farnham became such an every mum and gran’s favourite that people sometimes maybe forgot that he’s actually one of the most amazing singers in history. This little bit from Playing to Win. I’ve never heard a singer…

I just spent a few days in Melbourne. It made me angry, because it reminded me again of the unforgivable vandalism that was done in ripping up Sydney’s tram network. Walking in central Melbourne is pleasant, the trams…

The idea of ‘mental illness’ came from having to deal with conditions that were beyond the limited understanding of medicine. For example the horrendous injuries many men suffered in World War 1, which couldn’t be…

To the driver of the Council street sweeping truck who’s been driving and beep-reversing up and down the street for the past 20 minutes, before 7am, Merry Christmas to you too.

This whole article is a wonderful read. It’s about the trends in trust, worldwide. I think you can explain an awful lot of the problems we see by looking at how our trust in each other, and in institutions, is changing.…

This is one of Ancient Rome’s sewers. Still surviving, great engineering. I don’t think it’s well recognised that technology is what actually binds us together. For example, bridges in the US currently need more than…

Whooping cough part 2. Because it might get you next, whether you're vaccinated or not, and it isn't nice. But there are things you can do that can make you suffer a lot less. The treatment of whooping cough hasn't…

Remember those vacuum cleaner salesmen who would come door to door, and leave people a couple of grand poorer with a great machine but scratching their heads wondering why they agreed to buy one? This video seems a bit…

Work sets you free. There are so many things for us to ponder about this Nazi sign, in 2016, let's learn from something that millions died to get rid of, and remember that it all started very small, in lack of respect…

My own history is a father who grew up under the extreme nationalism of the Nazis. So I've never found any national days much chop to be honest, patriotism can be a very dangerous thing. Being proud of your country is…

Edmund Burke saw institutions as the heart of public life, and that rampant individualism was the source of public breakdown. Modern conservatives have been destroying institutions as fast as they can manage, which puts…

The French Prosecutor responsible for coordinating executions during The Great Terror in the French Revolution apparently said on his own way to the guillotine, "so will your bread be any cheaper tomorrow, you fools?"…

Every year I give a plug to Margaret Court, an astonishing sportsperson who is not properly appreciated. Serena Williams has just won her 23rd grand slam singles title, which is amazing, but still one behind Court's 24.…

Thanks @[606028898:2048:Jason] for this one. If you think unions are corrupt and of no use to you, then you've been got at by the people who have been trying to destroy them for the past 40 years. That's exactly what…

A little bit of Proust every day, I reckon. Proust used the taste of Madeleine cakes to explain more about memory and how it works. We've all experienced that, how a taste or a smell can immediately throw us back in…

Today's Proust. More on love, a big topic. Each person is an absolutely singular, unknowable being. In love, and especially in its early stages, this is forgotten, and most of the qualities we say we love in somebody…

It's how nonsense spreads. Somebody writes a post about some long-forgotten information, and how the past was even worse today, so why do we worry? That era IS studied carefully, and even further back and in much more…

"It's like the kids have an entitlement". Thus speaks the most entitled, rapacious generation in human history.

It's been an unpopular thing to do, pointing out for the past 20 years that Australia is a house made of straw. Most people who have tried have been howled down. The clock is ticking.

Good on SBS for its Face Up to Racism set of programmes, and good on Ray Martin for being onboard. Australia doesn't like talking about racism, we're like the Brits, funnily enough. The Anglo world has been the dominant…

Today's Proust. Time and memory again. The past never leaves us. Smells and tastes are the door back.

Marshall McLuhan was a thinker well beyond his time, many didn't understand him when he was writing in the mid-20th century. A conservative professor of literature, he took on the job of trying to understand the modern…

Looking at old photos, it's tempting to think of history as something that happens in discrete slices of time. This one, for example, taken in the 19th century, can make you think about the 19th century as a slice of…

Bill Mollison was a wise man, he knew that it wasn't actually difficult to grow vast amounts of food just about anywhere. But his whole career he was followed around by hippies who thought this was a 'back to nature'…

Whenever the world gets too unequal, the push from the people who have been excluded is perceived as a threat to those who aren't. The silliness and emotion in Western politics right now is just the reaction to this…

The Wizard of Oz is not as simple as it looks. The author (Baum) was a political journalist, and the story is full of political allegories and jokes. Here are just some. There was a rise of populism as well at the time…

I wouldn't mind the AMA 'dabbling' in a little medical science too, occasionally. Plenty of what Evans says is backed by genuine cutting edge medical science, just not by doctors because they're not always connected to…

These are actually fun. Memories. Who gives way in these scenarios?

Often we see fads as things for kids. Yo-yos, types of clothes, pop music one hit wonders like Gangnam Style, etc etc. But adults like fads too, and it's growing. Types of phone, types of fitness activity, types of…

Buildings look like inanimate objects, but notice what happens almost the day they're abandoned. They get trashed. Buildings and people form a sort of ecosystem, they need each other. A building is a living thing, an…

Everything is a war now, apparently.

Another great topic. The brain. It doesn't store memories, images or thoughts. It doesn't store our 'minds'. It's a lump of electrified meat.

Another one of the interesting myths that live with us. Average life expectancy. You can ask just about anyone, and they'll tell you that we live much longer today than our ancestors, mostly due to advances in…

The Argument to Moderation, also known as the Golden Mean Fallacy. 'Everything in Moderation'. In this extreme time in history, people feel that the truth 'must lie somewhere in the middle'. In politics, food, exercise,…

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.…

Happy birthday Mel! We're creeping close to that half century...

"3D" TV and film have struggled to take off every time they've been launched and re-launched over the past century. People usually hate the hassle of the glasses, but even more they just don't think ordinary TV and…

"This Anzac Day let's maybe tone down the talk of noble sacrifice and Australianess and remember that eight thousand young men, all of whom were sons and brothers and nephews and friends and husbands and grandsons, were…

This is what you've been saying @[728961585:2048:Angela Gray]? Reading it described this way, it sounds like the same concerns most small businesses have. Small business is rarely very profitable, there aren't economies…

We're not living longer, another article that doesn't understand how averages work. What it does show is that the people who do live to old age - and there aren't many more of them than there were in the past - are…

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…

History is such a good teacher.

This is how the Earth got its tilt. Early in its history something about the size of Mars crashed into us, breaking off a huge amount of rock and rubble. That rubble and gravity together then formed the moon, and the…

Another aspect of the word we've been living in for the last couple of decades - the world of sentimentality, of extreme emotions, and of debt-fueled social comparison - is brands. Brands are the way people…

Germaine Greer was one of the only prominent boomers who saw through the emptiness of the 60s 'peace and love' movement. This looks a miserable quote, but it's not at all, and matches what Proust for example saw about…

Inequality in history has always been 'fixed' by plagues and wars. (Inequality played a big role in creating those plagues and wars at the same time.) Are we smart enough to avoid more wars and plagues (including…

Kids with autism should be mainstreamed. They probably should get a lot more support than they currently do IN that mainstream now though. Mainstreaming in the past has often been a cost-cutting measure too, removing…

"A bass player at a large symphony orchestra recently told me that fellow musicians refer to a common programming ploy – a contemporary work played between two popular classical compositions – as a ‘shit sandwich’."…

"...up until about 2010, Facebook was mainly a website for young people. Young people doing stupid things. And it was glorious. But now, I can’t stand it. Now, all it is is one big family photo album full of weddings…

That's how to open a rock show. The robot , 1977. Memories.

One of the most difficult things to get for your kids in Australia is good training in foreign languages. I would swap 90% of what kids are taught at school for good training in other languages. Up to 4 or 5 languages…

Andrew Charlton usually says smart things, in this case he notes that societies are so fractured that there's almost no hope of any party sweeping them all together again, in 'the centre'. Instead different parties give…

We tend to not trust 'big business'. But maybe that's a mistake. 97% of businesses in Australia are small businesses. 60% of these fail within their first 3 years. At the same time wages and working conditions have been…

Unions are like feminism. Too many people think they're old news, because they're living the fruits of past fights. Freedom and justice are always work, they're not the natural state of things. If you hate unions,…

Professor John Buchanan, from the University of Sydney business school, says policies of both conservative and Labor governments over the past 30 years have resulted in depressed wages. "None of this stuff is an…

Discovered something a bit miraculous today. Or re-discovered it, doing a bit of research shows it was first noted in the late 1740s, and has been mostly forgotten for over a century now. Will write it up, it's an…

Huge week for the LNP. I don't think it's noticed much that the Libs and Nats have almost nothing in common. One is a party of the city, the other the bush. One believes in free markets and free trade, the other loves…

When they teach maths at school, they rarely give you the history behind the maths. It's the history which often brings the whole subject alive. Take calculus. Calculus firstly is some of the sexiest *looking* maths you…

It was angles that led the ancient Greeks to invent the idea of atoms. You know those questions you sometimes ask as a kid, about the infinitely big and infinitely small, like if the universe ends at this point, what's…

One commentator said we're rapidly becoming the US, with millions of working poor with little job security, poverty-level wages and no ability to keep up with everyday expenses. And public services becoming privatised…

Air pollution matters in so many ways. 4 out of the 5 mass extinction events in Earth history were air pollution events. "...more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel…

One of the easiest reflexes of our time is to have a problem with ‘materialism’. But the love of comfort and well-being and new relationships is the healthiest instinct we have. We really don’t understand our own world.…

Politics! But hopefully not what you're thinking... There are 2 games in town I think, and mixing them up is what's destroying our societies. There are traditional political parties, like Labor and the LNP here in Oz.…

Daylight Saving is only one part of our general war against the dark. Also, it’s a genuine tragedy if you can’t see the night sky. “As we discussed a litany of light-related problems, I asked Stevens: ‘Is it a…

“The same is true of love as of death, when we imagine we will still be alive enough to see the faces of those who have lost us. In the same way we imagine that we will still be enough in love to enjoy the regrets of…

Henri Bergson was a trippin’ dude, even though he looked like a minister at the local parish church. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, although was actually a philosopher (he wrote very well). His speaking tours…

There are thousands of old wax cylinders from the beginning of sound recording, in the 19th century. Very famous people were often recorded, which isn’t always well known. Here’s Florence Nightingale speaking in the…

The world repeats the same patterns, and I think we often get stuck in just one part of the pattern and miss the wider movement of what’s going on. Take the music and film industry. For years they’ve been talking about…

Was watching the fawning over Brian Cox again last week, on one of his visits to Oz. He’s a lovely, smart bloke. But science is in a mess, and the wide-eyed gee whiz people give to Brian is a symptom of that mess. And…

Memories.

I think this metaphorically describes the Queensland election, and most politics in the Western world. The conservative side of politics - the LNP here - is a very shaky coalition of people who are in many ways…

As is the case with medicine, banks are not private business. They’re HUGELY subsidised by the taxpayer. Tens of billions of dollars. Worth remembering when you hear all the apologists argue to leave them alone. Every…

This sign is most peoples’ wet dream writ large. But it’s bollocks. Here’s to the bureaucrats, society’s heroes. Why? It’s pretty simple. Every generation lives a certain time. It can’t reinvent history in every…

So beautifully said. Terrible pain and chaos coming all of our way unless we get our heads out of our bums. "It’s clear what needs to happen. There needs to be wholesale change in economic thinking. Forces in world…

When you study trigonometry at school, you're actually studying deep history. Modern curricula separate maths and history though so you're never told that (hardly anybody even remembers the connection). Angles are the…

Like Hans Rosling, Pinker (who has his faults) is one of the few brave enough to point out that this might be the best ever time to be alive. And that there may be such thing as progress in history.

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…

Trickle-down is another way to see the main political differences that divide people. The idea that if hard-working and/or rich people are taxed less, they will then create more jobs and wealth for everybody (the wealth…

THE CHECK UP We go to doctors and dentists for check ups. But this is a type of check up that's even more important, and not as common. To check up or check in on yourself. All it requires is a bit of time, where you…

Even more, religions have been the institution that more than any other have stopped us from exterminating one another. And I'm not a card-carrying member of any of them, it's just an historical fact. We live in dumb…

A bit of a guilty secret of mine, that I don't much like travel. I also don't like that ever more places in the world are spoiled by people 'finding themselves' through travel. Nomads historically are peoples who move…

Big fan of the staycation. Sometimes holidays seem to be going the same way as after-school activities for kids. Family holidays in the past were so often to dodgy, cheap places not far away where you just got to lay in…

Watching bank CEOs being interviewed here in Oz brings to mind Wells Fargo. One of the biggest banks in America. In an attempt to improve their numbers they ordered employees to open millions of fake accounts for actual…

It's one of the great triumphs of certain politicians, and their sponsors, that so many of us are convinced these are terrible times to live in. This is the best time to be alive in human history.

This is often voted the greatest rock performance in history. Only 20 mins long but they took the stage and literally blew the other biggest names in the world off the stage. Mostly Freddie, nobody before or since could…

Gabriel Tarde saw all of this more than a century ago, and took it even further. Individuals and groups (or governments) are not separate things. Groups are the way individuals emerge and survive. Instead we've had…

Mark Twain said history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Modern companies and organisations have so much in common with much older organisational forms. I did a fantastic course on organisational forms and…

What Shorten and Turnbull and others like them around the world should do is get together in secret and agree to support each other through key decisions. Because the biggest danger in the world today doesn't come from…

Watching The Martian again the other day, along with the film Gravity there's been a real shift in the way people see science fiction. In the past science fiction was all that corny Star Trek reaching for the stars…

So much history in one photo.

Thanks again to Adam Hyland for this one. Sydney once had an extensive network of trams, and it's now desperately trying to restore a small fraction of that sort of transport with light rail, at enormous cost. Let's…

A little bit risky to see history through the lens of human development, but is the Western world stuck in a rut of adolescence? Adolescence is a time of ruthless comparison, of defining yourself according to others and…

For those interested in the universal basic income idea (everybody getting a living wage whether they have a job or not). Not a bad summary of the underlying ideas at the link below, here's a taste: "In the mythology of…

This will infuriate politicians. And it should. This is maybe one way that a constitutional monarchy is still a better system, nobody else of prominence is saying these things so well right now. And I'm still connected…

Wow. Bet there are some memories there for people.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/05/cern-restarts-large-hadron-collider-with-mission-to-make-scientific-history We can't comprehend the idol smashing in northern Iraq because we can't see the similarity to…

I'm not sure people realise just what fanatical zealots are in charge here now. They won't stop until they've dismantled most of the public sector that Australia took a century to build. But all the way along they'll be…

As we get older we tend to feel that time is flying by, more than when we were young, Pierre Janet provided a great explanation for this in the 19th century (hasn't time flown ;) )…

The thing with the "assimilate" idea is that it's a repeated theme, throughout history. The same people saying that about Muslims now were saying it about "Asians" 10-20 years ago, and Italians or "dagos" before that. I…

Very powerful visual summary of all 2053 (yes, 2053!) nuclear tests that were done between World War 2 until today. Nobody knows how they've affected the health of people globally. They start slowly but watch them…

Dang if history don't repeat. Except the first time the con actually worked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude

History is an interesting thing... One for your research @[100000218740944:2048:Sarah Nietz]? https://vimeo.com/145666660

The effects of WW2 are still being felt, emotionally and psychologically, as well as in all sorts of other ways. For example agriculture changed profoundly after this war, as the war industries looked to new sources of…

3D hasn't really taken off, again - must be the 3rd or 4th time in the last century that they've tried. Is it the glasses that put people off?

What's the normal practice with hyphenated names once they get past the first generation using them?

Some history.

This is the clown who presided over the biggest spending (and taxing) spree in Australian history. Don't believe the Terrorgraph trying to soften people up for the Coalition having no answers to how to fix a budget, it…

Nice way to understand the national mood over the past few years.…

can't remember a single mention of a shandy today. Some people are either soft or their memory is going.

wonders how status updates disappear by themselves (nothing to do with my memory, it's FB's memory, I swear).