Politics & government

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…

It was Abraham Lincoln who said democracy is government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. That’s pretty much the majority view of what democracy is and how it works even today. It’s complete rubbish. And I…

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

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…

Another beautiful example of elite rivalries. This whole debate is fake, as the sitting councillor is trying to convey here, the same lack of revenue for local government is seen in every town across the country. Rates…

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

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,…

America’s Department of Homeland Security. There are an estimated 50 million immigrants living in America, presumably the other 50 million they want deported are just ‘people of colour’. Many say government should be…

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

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…

Everything is a Hollywood movie in the American psyche, and this is also another key characteristic of kidult culture. Most views on AI for example are little more than feels from James Cameron’s Terminator movies. This…

The protests in Iran predictably being described as a popular uprising, ‘the people’ trying to take back control of the country etc. We love these fantasies. This all happened before in Iran, in 1978. They had a…

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…

The fantasy idea of ‘the people’ that animates American democracy refuses to die. If you believe that nonsense, it will look like the real problem is ‘division’ between people. It’s not division between people, it’s…

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…

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

All the poll numbers look terrible for Trump, particularly in the groups that he brought across to the Republican side, like Latino voters. Total collapse in support. This is how populist surges always end, the crazy…

Older workers, defined as 55 year or older, have significant power under law to request more flexible work arrangements in Australia. I think other countries have similar law. For two main reasons I think, one to help…

The skill of firing a good shot is like any other skill, pleasurable for the achievement. In that sense I can understand guns. In every other sense I find them boring, and just another example of how humans can turn…

One of the benefits of AI is that it cuts through BS quickly. I was discussing my recent Covid infection with it, now a month ago. When i said I was back at work, the AI said ‘oh, already? After such a serious illness?’…

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

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

This is humanity heading for extinction. It’s barely mentioned. This is *global*. There are all sorts of reasons given for why people no longer have babies, most correct, like the cost, greater freedom for women to…

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

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…

Is it not obvious that this same pattern repeats over and over in America? Shit happens, people take to the streets, nothing is fixed. This is the broken culture on full display. Basic, calm, public administration…

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…

The local Trumps are building and building. Pauline recently spent a few weeks (on taxpayer coin, while parliament was sitting here) in the US speaking and networking at major Trump events. I’ve shared here how this…

Be prepared in Australia for the targeting of rural and regional people by One Nation, including their newest recruit Barnaby Joyce. They see real opportunity to steal lots of Nationals votes. They’re also targeting…

I did something I had actually decided I wasn’t going to. I upgraded our existing Powerwall for 2 new Powerwalls. Originally the dollars didn’t really make sense, to do it, but the deal the installer offered that…

This is the ideas about status and identity I post about a lot. For example people who oppose or support renewables, or EVs or petrol and diesel cars, or this or that band, brand of bags or shoes, political parties…

Ben Stiller posted this online. Again it shows why the US is stuck in its own death spiral. The framing of the people being separate to government, and holding it accountable. Government *is* the bloody people. Also…

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…

America’s foundation was a revolution. Societies who are founded by revolutions tend to never shed the operating system of that revolution i.e. deeply held views about authority and tryranny, about carrying arms and…

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…

Good piece from Tim Dunlop here, but still stuck within the thinking of electoral democracy. The surge in support for One Nation, like Trump, is really people rejecting electoral democracy out of hand as a dismal…

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…

They’re saying the quiet bits out loud in the US now. Trump has now removed this post from the socials, after originally defending it. Elections did this, not fascism. By surrendering authority over a country to the…

“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…

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

Yep, populism (including elections) is the way we’re restoring monarchies, while saying we’re doing the opposite. Will share some research on this that shows directly how.

The spoilers are making hay with electricty prices still being high. They’re high because our ‘peaking’ plants, in peak times, are still run by gas, which is hideously expensive. But batteries and pumped hydro are…

The Economist is one of a handful of organisations that maps the health of democracies of the world every few years. All of the organisations that do this work agree that democracy is in seemingly terminal decline,…

Pauline wants to be Australia's Trump, with backing from the big money of Gina Rinehart. Both attend Trump events as invited guests in the US. On current polling numbers she's going to make a serious dent in the…

The UK de-fanged monarchy, but left it the critical role of status sink, making rivalry for the top position impossible. This allows politics there to become mostly procedural, and creates de-personalised continuity…

The great myth of ‘the community’, ‘the people’. Every elite aspirant to power evokes the community or the people. There is no such thing as a community or the people, just networks of groups following a tiny handful of…

If elected, One Nation plans to dismantle the government response to climate change, which it doesn't believe is man-made, wind back access to abortion care, and abolish the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). The…

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

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 uncomfortable truth is that successful entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, spitting in the soup of the status quo, a fart in the collective elevator. They’re…

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…

Margaret Thatcher is like a god to today’s conservatives, one of the founders of modern conservatism. You can see here from her speech almost 40 years ago how science dominated the discussion then on climate change,…

Those seduced by the anti-immigration stuff, from Pauline and the LNP, need to remember one thing. Without migrants, Australia (like most countries) is a giant aged care home. Our populations are OLD, and there are no…

Doing a screenshot as a cross-posting from Linkedin. I hate Linkedin, it’s even worse than FB, kidults humble-bragging at each other. But you have to go to where people are. This post is about how societies run exactly…

A brilliant story about local government in the age of social media. You can see here how even though the local Council was the only sensible player in the whole saga, it still copped all of the abuse, cost, death…

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…

We're living inside a revolution that will be written about for generations. Just imagine the current Opposition and One Nation coming to power right now, shutting all this down in favour of their old policy of…

Again I can’t comment on behalf of Bathurst Regional Council. But I can express a personal and general view about local government, and use Bathurst as an example. Pretty much every council in Australia is ‘broke’.…

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

This is the reality. Local government is nearly in ‘financial ruin’, pretty much everywhere. Even those Councils who can balance their books will have millions in arrears on infrastructure backlogs, like roads and basic…

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

Rage-baiting was word of the year in 2025. Invented to describe techniques to drive online engagement, it also describes how populist politics work. And because we shifted our lives onto social media, the two are now…

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

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…

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

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

Everything we label a political problem is really a social/cultural problem. Specifically that adult problems can’t be solved by adults with the understanding and attitudes of permanent teenagers. That’s not just some…

I’ve come to see voting as mostly a waste of time, and also the most destructive force in democracy, because it replaces competence with popularity. It’s still important to know what you’re voting for.

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

The tipping point must be coming when other Western nations change their superpower allegiance, to China. They’re already all absolutely dependent on China economically anyway. The whole thing is a farce, to maintain an…

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

It's beautiful to see the social status mechanism brought into the light like this. 'Load-bearing for people's sense of self'. That's glorious. "Here is what the shock jocks and the Murdoch machine and the fossil fuel…

To be clear, a vote for Pauline is a vote for Trump. And Trump isn’t a Senator. Facts have never been a Pauline thing.

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…

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

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

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…

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…

Tony wasting Australian oxygen as always, imploring us to get behind Trump and Israel. Abbott is like Morrison. Both have a public-facing persona which looks like it’s about politics. But the true agenda of both is a…

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…

DH Lawrence foretold a time when compulsory and prolonged schooling would make the majority of the population despise all learning. I’ve posted a lot about how that shift led to the emergence of ‘kidult’ culture i.e.…

At a time of international chaos caused by Trump, what does Angus suggest? That he be Trump. ‘Make Australia Great Again’, and ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’. The Liberal Party is dead.

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…

The stench of Trump’s incompetence and stupidity is thick in the nostrils of Americans now. Even many who voted for him. Meanwhile in Australia the prominent Trump cover band, One Nation, is surging in popularity,…

There's no such thing as 'the community'. Community consultation will mean getting the views of a whole range of people, many if not most of which will disagree with each other, and nearly all of which will just be some…

You may be surprised at how many Australians think this guy is terrific. Some of them are even local councillors elected to local councils. Many more Australians who can’t stand him will happily vote for Pauline Hanson,…

Australia’s conservatives are fighting each other to see who can be the most like Trump. You’d think the last election here was a warning about that. Or that what’s happening to Trump in the US would be a warning.…

Read the 10-point plan the Iranians sent Trump. There’s no chance that will be any deal. Both sides of politics in the US now openly talking about having Trump removed.

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…

Spinoza made visible an impossible tension at the heart of all of our lives. What is ‘right’, in terms of morals but also facts and knowledge, is always in opposition to what is socially acceptable or popular. If you…

Democracy has been a failure since its introduction, and it's been getting worse on all measures since. It's also deeply unpopular. That's what populism is, the popular response to democracy. 'The people' never run…

While the Queensland government spent $500 million drilling for enough oil to supply one service station, NSW is finally really ramping up EV fast-charging infrastructure, electric heavy vehicles and kerbside chargers.…

The revolution that founded America was just over 250 years ago. What I think they and most of the rest of the world don’t notice is, that the US just keeps repeating that original revolutionary moment. Revolutionary…

Actually what happened was, and it’s not the first time, Trump was responding to a leading question from Sky News Australia, the Murdoch sewer. They were trying to get a quote they could use as ammunition against the…

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

The Trump family are masters of ‘pump and dump’ politics. They make announcements, knowing they’ll cause big shifts in the stock market (the pump) and then secretly in the background they and their crony mates buy and…

In the US, home of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’, they’re not drilling. The entire Anglo world is beginning to experience what happens when you try to deal with realities using nothing but political slogans and spin.

Our native Trumpies/Paulines, even at local government level, are maybe not reading the room. At our last election, being associated in any way with Trump was electoral poison. In the US the collapse is well underway.

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

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

If we are going to stick with the idiocy of voting, let’s trial a new system where only the ladies get to vote, for three terms of government. Then the blokes, for three terms. And compare the outcomes. And who knew…

Remember, if you vote for Pauline, you're voting for this.

I have zero interest in anybody’s opinion, and who wins elections or other popularity contests. All that interests me is the use of knowledge to make life remarkable and easier. You don’t need to route knowledge through…

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

Some of the nicest and smartest Americans will argue with you day and night that their cultural model of ‘the people’ running the country is democracy. When in reality it’s just their revolution, repeating itself over…

I knew people who worked on the original Snowy Hydro scheme. It made modern Australia. The way it took that enormous influx of refugees from WW2 and mixed them with the locals to unify everybody behind massive nation…

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

When populism strips away all existing social hierarchies, including hierarchies of expertise, it leaves people without any way of belonging to a society. You have to then ‘perform’ your identity yourself, to have any…

Right from the start of this term as President, I’ve said this. Through all of the hysteria of apparent fascist takeovers of America. People have no idea what fascism is, and why this isn’t it. Nor do they understand…

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…

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

Following every election is a search for what it means. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a popularity contest. Popularity has no link to reality at all. When you fly on a plane, you don’t do a quick election to pick the…

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

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…

Strip all the bullshit away from 'politics', which isn't even a thing anyway. It's different social groups in the community fighting for status. Modern conservatives are the old landed gentry and industrialists trying…

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…

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

The idea a government has to 'balance the books', like a business or household, is flat-out crazy. Governments don't have to earn income, like a business or household. They 'print' the money. When they print it, they…

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

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

Who cares what people think? This is our delusional idea of democracy being ‘the people’ running countries. Most wouldn’t have a bloody clue on this question, or most questions of public policy. And nor should they,…

The same young people Labor is trying to help with tax changes now fighting back, because ‘aspiration’. Societies run on status. Not money, not information. Try to help ‘the poor’ and they’ll punish you for implying…

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

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…

A longish but very interesting read about why the airline industry can never make money. This actually links to my dislike of travel more generally, a culture that would be simply impossible without jets and jet fuel.…

Researchers have developed a gene-editing injection targeting the specific mechanism creating high cholesterol in people. The results were staggering, up to a 62% sustained drop in LDL cholesterol. If knowledge work…

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…

Hmm, sorry if this posts twice, it seems to have disappeared. This is what one of the senior staff at Exxon said, this week. Exxon is one of the biggest global oil companies. The cupboard is bare, we’ve run the reserves…

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

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…

Another medical breakthrough (they’re coming thick and fast). This time a drug, daraxonrasib, that doubles the survival time of people with pancreatic cancer, one of medicine’s greatest foes. Nearly always lethal, and…

Pauline’s big attraction is the same as all populists. They promise to ‘take down the elites’. Populists are always actually just an alternative elite, wanting to take over the top of social status hierarchies from…

Cancer patients who were on GLP-1 (the new ‘weight loss’) drugs had a 60% better survival rate. For some, even higher than that. Weight loss is just the tip of the iceberg of these drugs, as I post about frequently.…

Democracy as governing *for* the people is how it's meant to work. Democracy as government *by* the people is suicide.

I don’t back any political team, I think turning governance into popularity contests between teams turned our lives into football games. I think elections destroyed democracy, popularity can only ever lead to…

While I think this is an excellent analysis of the state of play of the various players in our electoral team sports, I’d caution against this idea that the Pauline/Trumps of the world are only the result of ‘blue…

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…

When you work with the public in government, as opposed to posting fantasies about them on social media, the first rule is - people will always lie. They will always cheat. They will always look out for themselves ahead…

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

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

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

A bit longer this, but I’m very tired of the Musk stuff and it needs a longer explanation. There’s a shorter Part 2 of this as a separate post, that explains some things about what Musk is doing that I think are…

Does it occur to us how insane it is that you 'win' an election? Like the country is a game? Elections destroy democracies.

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…

The seductive and dangerous power of music is that it is the only pure imitation. It doesn’t look like or sound like other things. It is imitation for its own sake, which is why it’s like social heroin. And why it…

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

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

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

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…

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

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

America’s 250th birthday would have been a great time for them to realise that they, like all societies founded by revolution, never recovered and are still living that same revolution. What Americans call democracy is…

America was broken long before Trump. It won't be able to elect its way out of its problems. Elections are the mechanism its plutocrats have gamed to assume total power. America is a plutocracy because it's a…

Farage is the UK’s Pauline. Both are franchises of Trump. Farage unravelling now as the truth that he (and Pauline) are simply opposing ‘elites’ to the elites they pretend to be taking down has become obvious, with his…

Status drives all human activity. The same people expressed entirely different political views, depending on the group of people they were talking with at the time. At the top, in a politically liberal group, they…

Elections as corruption laundering. This is what populists do, and why elections are what are actually breaking democracy. Farage is standing down in the hope he'll be re-elected, and that will wash the slate clean (he…

Nearly all of the anti-AI trend that's taking off online is sponsored by politicians and activists. The Democrats think it'll be a winner for them in key States in the US. As always most of what we call public issues…

I saw Count Binface interviewed about the upcoming by-election in the UK, and he was asked if he’d be door-knocking. No, it’s too hot. Glorious.

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

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…

Today’s government announcement. These requirements are the 3 trending outrages about AI, on social media. Now, as with everything else, mistaken for reality itself.

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…

"I use data centers as a prism for much larger but invisible environmental problems, hidden by our tendencies toward populism and localism that data centers offend. This post focuses on the ridiculous ways we use land…

This is the sort of gap that exists between the bullshit fake reality many live through social media, and what actually happens out in the real world. Not only are renewables now the leading source of electricity…

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…

Just to give a sense of the sort of analysis AI can turn out in a matter of seconds, I asked it to describe what it saw as the legacy of Live Aid. A superb analysis, and describes the kidult culture I often write about.…

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

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

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.…

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…

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

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.…

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

It’s so important the LNP or One Nation don’t win the next federal election here, so we can continue this transition. Both have promised to wreck it with completely idiot ideas about prohibitively expensive coal and…

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

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…

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

The importance of 'right-sizing' a home battery. This is the data for our place yesterday, a typical winter day. You can see from the green line that the battery charges once per day, and that's enough to get us through…

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

“…the vast majority of New England is in favour of the REZ. It’s jobs, whole new industries. It drought-proofs so many farmers.” New England is Barnaby Joyce’s electorate. When renewables started rolling out there years…

American culture has always been hostile towards the very idea of government. Watch all those old Western movies where the Sheriff is the tiny line between gangland and civic life. Not much has changed. Puritans founded…

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…

As populist politicians fall over themselves attacking migration, for votes, the reality is Western nations are aged care homes, staffed by these same migrants. At the same time the fastest growth identity in our…

If people are asked what is wrong with the world, 99% of the time the answer will involve a rivalry between some kind of goodies and baddies. Left v Right. Capitalists v socialists. Patriarchy v everybody else.…

As a culture it doesn’t even register how perverse it is that we need to use ‘gear’ to access our own landscapes. Landscapes people walked barefoot through for tens of thousands of years, that they *lived*inside. That…

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

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…

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,…

Beginning another year of work today. As colleagues collapse with increasing chronic disease around me, and ask why I still take Covid precautions like vaccination and masking. Because rich cultures are cultures of…

I believe all countries are more or less equivalent, all run using basic social rules. Not politics, not economics. Peter Turchin’s work shows the same thing, he’s identified what some of those rules are. Have a read.

Given freedom to do whatever they like, what do humans do? They copy what other humans do. This simple fact, that imitation is the heart of all human life, is in direct opposition to every idea about democracy that we…

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

This is the disgrace of Australia’s approach to Covid. Anybody below 17 can’t even get a vaccine. Why is that? For one reason. Your elected politicians decided the best way out of the pandemic was to let children get…

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

On the same theme, a recent study looked at the ‘immunity debt’ nonsense. The idea we all need regular infections to be healthy. Just think even for one second about how stupid that is, the idea that what makes us…

My name is now 'Dee' for the same reason teachers aren't allowed to post under their real names. Public (and other) employees are often forbidden from making public comment on public issues. Often by the same…

Insurance (big part of my job) is going to collapse in our societies, because our 'small government' politics doesn't solve any of our collective problems, dumping all the responsibility back onto individuals. Who can't…

It’s nearly election silly season again, and I don’t play those team sports. I often criticise the modern LNP (as do many who have left the coalition) because they’re not a political party, they’re now entirely a…

Humans never agree on anything. They always battle for status, and status is identity. They do it in groups, or teams as I call it, at every level of society, from school through to government and social media. All that…

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

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

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

The Nerd Reich is well underway. Simpletons still think this is a battle of Left vs Right, like those who think the Bathurst 1000 is still a battle of Fords and Holdens. Decades of slogans on ‘red tape’ and…

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

This plays well because for 70 years we’ve been encouraged by wealthy and powerful people to see public servants (it’s in the fucking name people) as our enemy. The people SERVING the public. Why do wealthy and powerful…

A privatised government is an oxymoron. (Morons might have to Google what an oxymoron is.) Again, to make public servants - people who SERVE the public - the enemy is the obvious end of our public life. By definition.…

Privatised public services not only cost a lot more (they’re much less efficient), they don’t even provide the service. This was the reason humans invented government in the first place, to create economies of scale.…

In Australia heat pumps (air conditioning we use in homes and many businesses) are not really a debate. Because they don’t really threaten status hierarchies here. In the UK it’s a furious fight, with the sorts of…

Look at what Trump is actually doing, right now. You won’t believe what you’re reading, but it’s actually happening, right now. It’s been planned for a long time. Ordinary people have been played by slogans about red…

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

I’ve mentioned this a few times here. Not a single policy. Not one. Just a series of slogans. Niki is an ex-LNP staffer, she’s not biased. She sees the danger this ship of fools are to Australia.

Those who think that government ‘should be run like a business’ are now getting their way in the US. And guess which business is running the government? Private equity. The business that hijacks firms, and plunders them…

Abuse and defamation can win you a seat in government. Then you have a Spring clean to polish the respectability.

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…

This is populism. The belief that democracy is elections. The elected should have all the power, and get rid of everything else. That’s a recipe for total social collapse, and fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were…

This is what’s really happening in the US, and in Australia too. Competitive status games, mostly carried out on social media, are taking over democratic institutions, and weaponising them for their competitive team…

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

When covid began, catching it gave you about 80% immunity from the disease, after one year. That immunity is now only 5% after 1 year. I know hardly anyone getting vaccinated now, against Covid. idiot politicians told…

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…

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

On the way into work yesterday, one of the local politicians was doing election shots in the park. My attention was drawn more to the glorious, colourful corruption and incompetence of Council, on display in the flower…

So you know who you’re voting for. Gina is Peter Dutton’s greatest champion.

The latest EV scare campaign, this time driven by lawyers desperate for work. The same happening in Australia. For years the government has sponsored test labs to debunk range claims on petrol and diesel vehicles too,…

I've watched many business people try to get involved with politics. It's always a disaster, because government is way, way more complex than business, and more ruthless. The ones who 'want to run the town/country more…

This is one of the Bibles of the Trumpian revolution. A how-to guide for super rich people to avoid regulation and taxes. This is also why crypto is so huge now, because those super rich see it as a way to get around…

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…

You'll never see a clearer 'vote to protect the status quo' graph (noting that the blue is in the lead, overall).

As somebody whose job is helping to run democracies, I’d say maybe 60-80% of people have no idea what it even is. They think it’s elections. See that ‘unelected’? That’s populism, the belief that democracy = a…

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

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

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

This is what's really going on in Trumpland. The tech moguls lining up to fellate Trump are there for a reason, for years now they've had the idea of replacing government with what they call 'The Network State'.…

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

On Council meeting duty tonight. Or as I prefer to call it, the cage fight between Facebook and democracy.

What Musk is trying to do with Trump in the US, Australia already did, with Robodebt. He wants to take over government departments and replace them with software. For that, Tesla property and Tesla owners have become…

To give a bit more of the flavour of insanity that passes for public life now, you'll see these Foxtel dishes all over Australia. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you think Murdoch is a cancer on democracy (and he…

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

Electricity is still very cheap in America. This is cost per kWh. In Australia most people pay at least twice these rates, sometimes triple. Why the difference? It’s mostly the last place people expect to look.…

It’s politicians who approve building on flood plains and who do nothing against climate change. They need a distraction, and insurers are always it in natural disasters now. Queue the next mob pile-on. Heck it may even…

This is why no matter how many times you catch Covid, you won’t become immune to it. Covid creates no lasting immunity. Ro is a measure of how infectious a disease is, a Ro of 18 means one person can infect 18 others.…

The genius of the renewables transition is that everybody wins. (Except foreign fossil fuel and nuclear companies.) For example, with OVO's supercheap overnight rates, and free energy between 11am and 2pm every day,…

Incredibly powerful way to see so much about Australian life. - we’re one of the most urbanised nations on Earth, though we pretend we all live in the outback (which we can’t define) - that level of urbanisation is what…

When governance is your job, it’s a bit like how everybody thinks they know about education, because they went to school. Everybody is a supposed expert in government, because they vote. Most don’t have a clue. For…

A brilliant idea. And even if you’re not a renter, it’s a brilliant option to buy a home battery and tap into the super cheap and even free rates some retailers are already offering, even if you don’t want to install…

Internal Liberal Party polling suggests 52% of women now prefer Peter Dutton as a possible PM. Now I can understand men thinking that, God gave us a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time. And…

America doesn’t have much of a functioning public sphere. So everything there sounds like an Avengers movie. If you want the government out of your life, maybe move there? It’s going well.

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

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

I can't comment much on Bathurst issues, but see this mistake all the time. 'Management' of local government i.e. full-time Council staff, don't make the big decisions about what happens in a town. Those decisions are…

The thing most populations now are completely addicted to, social media, is destroying their societies as they use it. This Lithgow experience is shared by councils everywhere. If you think ‘attack’ is too strong a…

It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes…

Trump wants to be free of the rule of law entirely. Democracy isn’t elections, it’s parliament + judiciary + executive power. Elections aren’t even in the top level. But populists like Trump tell people elections are…

I used to wear Crocs, and became notorious for it because they were considered socially 'out'. Now they're all the rage. If you look, you'll find everything in life, child or adult, follows this same basic mechanism.…

Imagine lapping up every scare campaign that politicans and big firms throw out there, as if it was something you always believed in. 2 years ago these people wouldn't have known what a wind turbine is. They still don't…

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

The delicious irony of this is that Musk became unpopular only when he started championing the anti-government views of people like Jeremy Clarkson. Both men are knobs.

Daylight Saving Time (really Dark Morning Time, no daylight is saved) is a pointless thing to fight against, it’s way too popular. And what’s popular now wins. People even think that’s democracy. Until what’s popular is…

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

Last night a local councillor described net zero as climate 'extremism'. Giving people the vote is the dumbest thing humanity ever did.

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

I think all elections are pointless hot air. Strip away all the parties and just look at the material needs of societies, and see who’s actually doing anything about those. I think The Greens have some really…

International students are in the top 3 of export income for Australia. Both major parties targeting them as scapegoats for a housing crisis that has nothing to do with them. Voting causes this, desperate attempts to…

Every engineer in the country told them this years ago. Nuclear is the thirstiest of all electricity generation methods. Bananaby hitched the Nationals' train to nukes, in his anti-windfarm crusade, to try to win back…

Trump isn’t trying to create a fascist State in the US. He’s doing what he’s always done. He even wrote a book about it long before he entered politics. He’s being a conman. Trying to ‘make deals’. The video is from…

Widespread home ownership only happened in Australia after WW2, with massive building of public housing. The green circle. Menzies did it, the founder of the Liberal Party. It’s been in decline ever since, with the…

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

The new LNP government in Queensland went the full Trump and ripped up the State's renewable energy plan. Took a day for one of the major coal plants they wanted to use instead to then explode. Their response? To sack…

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.…

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

Simon is suing for defamation over this article. All a lie of course, the fossil fuel lobby, and their sponsored chums in Rupert’s newspaper and SKY News stables, just make shit up every day. You can tell they’re now…

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

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…

When you're in the middle of a wave of outrage and euphoria, like we've had for women (metoo), Tesla, and here for climate change, it feels like you're changing the world. You're not. Sometimes protest movements cash in…

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…

I’m a fan of preferential voting. But looking at the 10 candidates for Calare, it’s a challenge when at last count 6 of the 10 I’d want to list 10th.

I see Peter Dutton is trying to get the welcome to country fired up as a last-ditch election issue. Some local councillors are passionate about it too. I agree, let’s get rid of all of these signs, they cost a fortune.

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…

Right now globally a very old population that was once dominant is dying out. As the young increasingly hold the upper hand politically, that old generation is firing up the old colonialist narratives about Queen and…

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

The two great 'authoritarian' powers of our time are Russia and China. Both regimes are the product of democratic revolutions, people uprisings. In both cases local people imported Western ideas about democracy, to run…

Tesla is launching cheaper versions of its major cars like the Model Y and Model 3, reportedly from the middle of this year. They'll take some of the more luxury elements out of the vehicles, that aren't needed for…

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

People over 50 are (on average) rooting for an LNP win, people under 50 ALP. All the Left and Right baloney in politics is hot air. All social decisions are about who controls the status quo. ALP looks on track to win…

I took this yesterday, to capture everybody’s two favourite things. Tesla and local government 😉 (Plus that beautiful blue sky in the building facade.) Spot the wankpanzer revving up through the gears to try to get…

There's a deluge of new renewable capacity coming online, provided no idiot politician gets in the way. 40% of Australia's electricity last year came from renewables. That number is going to climb very fast now, if…

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

Reform UK, the UK’s One Nation, just dominated local government elections there (like our State elections - the UK doesn’t have States). It did that by doing what Trump did in the US, targeting the lower socio-economic…

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…

Australian elections. Got my sausage with onions today.

The LNP’s own pollster labelling them now as only the party of the boomers. And that not being enough to be a government in Australia now, that generation will never again be a majority.

It’s easy to be blinded by politics as a team sport, like watching the footy. Tonight younger Australia exercised its muscles, over older Australia. That’s what the result really means.

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…

Real-time energy read out from our solar arrays. Has a Kubrick vibe to it. The red arrow is the shade from the chimney, we got micro-inverters (one per panel) so that this doesn’t matter. If you have a series inverter,…

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

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

The ALP landslide was really the young now finally having more votes than the old. Political parties who interpret it as a win or loss for them personally will continue to fail. The LNP is now toast. The ALP won only a…

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

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

The building industry serving the housing ‘market’ is falling off a cliff. It can be saved if it shifts to building affordable homes for government, to use as affordable housing for ordinary people. But it won’t like…

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

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

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

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…

The Nationals destroyed the Liberals at the last election with their Gina-funded anti-renewables nuclear lunacy. It’s hard to see how the Coalition survives this. The average Coalition voter is a white man aged 70. The…

Before his first term Albanese said Labor needed 3 terms in government to make meaningful progress against the catastrophic damage inflicted upon Australia by the Howard-Abbott-Morrison-Joyce faction of the LNP. It…

When I say adult life has been completely replaced with adolescent life, politics is a good example. We look at politics the same way we watch a State of Origin game. Red v Blue, even the colours are the same (we use…

I spoke with Hayley (the reporter) about this last year. My mum went to hospital for heart and lung issues and caught Covid there. No precautions were taken. Politicians direct health departments to minimise Covid…

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

Business people all over the world think government is inefficient and needs good business brains to fix it. Musk is easily the world's most successful businessman, given a chance to fix all that 'red tape'. It's been a…

Independents and small parties got pretty much the same primary vote as the ‘landslide’ ALP at the election.

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…

The Trump-Musk blow-up is largely about the budget deficit in the US. The fact that we still talk about governments having to make money (through tax) or borrow it to pay for things is ridiculous. Governments create…

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

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

A government in debt means a population in surplus, and vice versa - a government runs a budget surplus by putting individuals into debt. We act and think as if there are two buckets of money here, private and public.…

These lists of notable deaths every year another window into the culture that’s invisible to us. Almost entirely celebrities - rock, film and sports stars, mostly. Others from the entertainment industry. Some…

An Australian senator. I can think of some councillors at local government level who have similar wet dreams.

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…

In countries like the US with very weak or often non-existent public administration of key parts of life, when things don’t work people pile onto the streets to protest. This is said to be democracy in action. Really…

You can see here that the rhetorical nonsense in the US about democracy isn’t how the US actually behaves. And that’s not to criticise how the US acts, it’s to criticise the rhetorical nonsense. Nobody who governs…

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…

Ah Queensland. "If we don't do it somebody else will" is an excuse to never shut down anything. Child slavery and prostitution, drug trafficking. Etc. "The Premier also said his government would fast-track approvals for…

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,…

Apparently this is a famous singer. I don’t think most know that the idea that we could infect our way out of a pandemic didn’t come from doctors or scientists, it came from politicians, using the work of an American…

I get very tired of ‘debates’, and rarely engage with them. They define our age too because they’re the team sports I often talk about, driven by social media. The algorithms there prioritise people arguing, it drives…

This seems a sensible article. Except more than anything it shows the collapse of public health. The idea of public health is to prevent disease *arriving* at your home in the first place. To control diseases in public…

Genuinely curious how many still believe that governments need to ‘balance the books’? Comparing governments to households and business was a political trick to stop them paying for public things, by screaming…

One of the things the collapse of our education has created is the misunderstanding of thinking itself. Thinking is a job. Just like plumbing. It has a set of specific skills, that take a long time to learn. It’s what a…

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…

Like Tom Cruise's brand damage when he jumped up and down on Oprah's couch. Kidults forget, he's now stratospherically popular again. Societies that replace public policy with trends have no attention span.

An Australian family pays 2% of its annual income to fund Medicare. Right now the same average family is also forking out 4-6% of its annual income, in private health insurance. Do we not see how insane this is? They…

If democracy means ‘the people’ running things, why is every part of human life still structured by status, like the class system we say we left behind?

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.

The US began this rot, the idea that the population somehow magically runs the country. There is no such thing as ‘the people’. Every person is attached to a variety of status hierarchies, groups of any kind don’t think…

Almost done, just the skirting tiles, splashback on the vanity and mirror to go, plus reconnecting the split system for heating. The brushed copper tapware now all added. The colour scheme is the faintest pinks and…

Bureaucracy is the only democracy. Everything else is just a pissing contest, for status.

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…

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

I’ve had a day with multiple reminders of the kidult bullshit those at the front-line of actual provision of basic public services have to deal with. I know it annoys some to speak of kidult culture - well folks, come…

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…

This child behaviour, fighting over toys, really is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Neither really wants the toy, it’s a sideshow. Each wants it because the other wants it. It’s desired purely because…

Loved this government response about average speed safety cameras to one of the many boy racers who see public roads as personal race tracks. No doubt he 'drives to the conditions' (i.e. speeds indiscriminately,…

"...referred to the IPC because it received 83 objections – the trigger for IPC referral in NSW is 50 objections – but 77 of these objections came from people living more than 50 kms away, or even interstate. There were…

The belief that assembling a big crowd is democracy in action is never tested against actual outcomes. Which are usually non-existent. 4 times as many people went to see Taylor Swift play in Sydney as marched across the…

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…

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…

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

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.…

Just one of the fringe loon groups targeting local government in particular, wasting vast amounts of Council time with their endless requests, a deliberate strategy. These are gullible, simple-minded people targeted by…

The Nats are doing the rounds of Central West towns to whip people into an idiot frenzy about windmills again. You know what the future of most of these towns is right now? Nothing. Do the Nats have a single idea what…

Another example of social change. Remember the huge to-do about reducing urban speed limits to 50? Now barely rates a mention. If you drive through these areas now at 50, you can directly feel that 60 was much too fast,…

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

Transgender and its politics is really just one more subset of what we call identity politics. And identity politics in turn is the kidult society I talk about, where instead of focusing collectively on collective…

How do you prick the populist balloon dominating politics? You target the trick populists use. Don’t get involved in the details or content of what they say, it’s irrelevant. Their shtick is - make people ANGRY.…

Fossil fuel companies have their fingers in every pie. Jim Chalmers is gung-ho to tax EV drivers now, parroting slogans from the same industry. The reason I talk so much about renewable energy and EVs goes well beyond…

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…

You can see here that mass home ownership only ever became a thing after WW2, when government built masses of public housing. It’s been flatlined and then declining ever since that public housing program was stripped…

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

The real enemies of society now aren’t the ’Left’ or ‘Right’ of politics. Those are interchangeable pieces of the same game, like soccer teams. At the end of the day they’re both playing soccer, just running to…

If we keep mistaking democracy for elections, then the most popular idiots in our societies will keep winning them and leading millions of other idiots to their own destruction, like lemmings over a cliff. There’s not…

A similar belief made the Roman Empire the phenomenal success it was. Now the Americans, like the Brits, are in rapid reverse, the world of Trump and Farage. And here in Oz decades of ‘Stop the Boats’ politics did the…

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…

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

An elderly family friend went to hospital to have surgery for lung cancer. Caught Covid there, and the hospital’s response? Sent them home to deal with it themselves. LUNG CANCER. When mum caught Covid in hospital, the…

There seems quite a bit to like about Sussan Ley, including that she flies planes, and added a second S to her name just to piss off her parents. I doubt she actually believes all the small government, anti-welfare…

Here’s the problem in the US in one graph. It refuses to do basic public regulation and policing (all sides of politics), because the entire culture of the US was founded upon deep distrust of public anything. Of the…

How fast things are moving. NSW is running almost entirely on renewables during the day now, close to 80%. This is the last 7 days. The gap is mostly filled by coal, the red line. Overnight though NSW needs more wind…

“Aren’t you scared you’re going to get REALLY sick when you stop wearing a mask?” I hear that all the time. People genuinely believe that getting infected with diseases is keeping them healthier. Just think about that,…

We’re all encouraged to think democracy = elections. Riddle me this. The more people queue up to vote in the US, the less democratic the US becomes.

Australia’s youth voted overwhelmingly at the last election for George and people like him to go away.

Javier Milei is another Trumpian, who promised to take a chainsaw in Argentina to what all Trumpians see as the enemy. Government. It’s been an absolute disaster. Now relying upon loans from the IMF and US to the tune…

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…

There are 2 Denyers available to view tonight. I'd choose Deal or No Deal, this other one is a rerun of a boring program from before the last local government election.

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’…

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…

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,…

I don’t think our global Covid strategy was widely understood. Let me spell it out in a few words. “Infect all the kids, so they can build up immunity and it won’t spread into the working community.” No conspiracies…

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…

If democracy was a horse, we’d have shot it decades ago. Maybe it’s never existed, in the way we think about it. Which is why it’s failing, spectacularly, everywhere.

One of the great cons of our time is politicans and others telling people that only existing energy is ’reliable’ and ‘affordable’. They tap into deep-seated reluctance humans have to change, it’s always easier to sell…

Thanks to Tim for pointing out this milestone. There’s a revolution happening, don’t be disappointed when you have to tell your grandkids you were one of the whinging doubters sniping from the sidelines. Also for those…

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

The end of our Anglo empire isn't just about money and power. Ultimately it's that we're not reproducing. We're dying out. At the same time idiots make immigration a political issue. Without migrants our nations are…

What’s happening with Covid right now in the UK is so important to help people understand the mess we’re in. That 10 months of relatively low Covid low levels wasn’t interrupted by a new Covid variant. There is no new…

The government needs to grow a pair and ban new petrol and diesel vehicles here inside 5 years. We have no local car industry to protect. Leaving it to the 'market' just means leaving it to whatever idiotic thing is…

The US democratic fallacy winds up again. Create a big crowd and delude yourself this means 'democracy' at work. Everything 'public' looks like a gig. Societies are never, ever run by the people. 'People power' is a…

Estimates that about 7 million people marched in the No Kings protests yesterday in the US . Well over 70 million people voted for Trump at the last election. 10 times as many as turned out yesterday. It’s theatre.…

Two experiences yesterday that give a flavour of working in local government. One was trying to think of a way to rescue ducklings trapped in a fountain. The other a long phone call tirade from a resident about Council…

It’s apparently hateful to make the obvious point that transgender is a social fad, just one more ‘trending’ thing passing for reality now in public life. Like yo-yos, or wankpanzer utes. In its entirety it‘s an…

Wonderful piece making some of the points I sometimes make here, about democracy. Democracy is: 1. institutions 2. institutions 3. institutions Not 'the people'. Not 'people power', not liberty or rights. All of those…

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…

It took all of one day for rare earths to become the new battleground between rival social teams. Western democracies bring this on themselves with the idea communities or ‘the people’ run nations. All that does is turn…

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…

Not much thought goes into anything in public life now. For example the idea that Councils should raise their own money. Just think even for one second, the perversity of the idea of government (at whatever level)…

What’s happening in America and our interpretation of it, as ‘authoritarian’ takeovers, sometimes by ‘Nazis’, shows just how much adult life is teenagers living inside fantasies, mostly derived from Hollywood films.…

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…

The reason Western countries no longer have children is simple. They don’t like them. They will howl bloody murder at being told that. The truth hurts. This (official NHS) advice for example to deliberately now infect…

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

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

‘Richo’ declared the Covid pandemic a nothing burger in the same year it began, 2020. Millions died, and are still dying. He’s just died after several weeks of horrible suffering with influenza and pneumonia. From an…

The National Party's push to turn windmills into a regional political issue could end up costing councils a fortune in wasted legal fees, if they get involved. Tamworth Council for example has just had a judge more or…

Dr John isn’t a medical doctor, though a large part of his success is allowing people to believe that. He influences millions. Had a young woman turn up to work to tell me that Council should be spreading Dr John’s news…

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

Trump is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is our ideas about democracy, the attempt to erase distinctions and hierarchies between people. That forces them to fight, all day every day, to try to restore those…

It's glorious that companies like Globird are announcing plans like this only one day after the LNP announced their idiot 'let's use lots of expensive coal and gas and nuclear' policy. 4 free hours of electricity in the…

It’s reported Gina is going to help fund a mass propaganda push leading up to the next election, on the evils of Net Zero and also mass migration. To try to turn the public on Net Zero the way they did on the Voice…

Very well said. Doesn’t matter if Minns isn’t your pathetic political ‘team’ (I don’t have any political team). This is basic engineering. Like he says, the anti-renewables crowd are ‘bullshitting’ people.

This is what the LNP is hoping to do now with Net Zero, leading up to the next election. The total backflip of the Australian population on The Voice, in only a year. They’re hoping to engineer a similar viral…

BritTV is streaming The Good Life. Each episode is prefaced by a warning that the show is from another era, and the language and concepts may offend some viewers. lol, what a window into how every tiny bit of life has…

Two things to see here. One, the energy/climate debate is a fake debate. The entire industry already decided the answer years ago. It doesn’t matter whether your political team disagrees, it’s irrelevant. Second, the…

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…

And video 2 out of the UK. You can play make-believe and ignore serious threats to your life, so you can go to gigs and restaurants and pubs, and on OS holidays. And then reality will bitch slap you. Work won’t care, if…

Everything we mythologise as ‘democracy’ actually had its origins in battles between the highest status members of a society. Take the idea of a ‘fair trial’, or procedural fairness more generally. That had nothing to…

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

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

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.…

All sides of politics talk nonsense about debts and deficits in government spending. Governments create money, they don't need to tax or borrow to have it. And as you can see in the actual data, governments go into…

More belief that ‘the people‘ run democracies, through their votes. Leading to the idea that people are all voting strategically for minor parties and independents, to hold power to account. It’s a ridiculous idea, do…

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…

Inflation remains too high because we have an ageing, cashed-up population who are spending without restraint. The stupidity of the favoured economic ideas of our time, monetary policy (free market idiocy), says the…

After decades of blaming fat people for being lazy gluttons, spurred on by the pseudoscientific bollocks of ‘calories’ by the nutrition and fitness industries, the WHO has declared obesity an actual medical condition,…

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 idea that modern governments need to collect tax from you so that they have money to spend is ridiculous, and centuries out of date. The money you have is not, despite what politicians say, ‘your’ money. All money…

Norway leads the world with EV adoption, nearly all of its vehicles are now EVs. it took only about 20 years to swap them all over. The government there led the change. All real change is led, the idea there's something…

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

Gough Whitlam's government bought Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in the 1970s, for $1.4 million. There was lots of fake outrage at the time from the other side of politics, who used it as a stick to beat the government…

Whole nations with damaged immune systems. Norovirus also up 35% in the UK right now. Hospital chiefs say hospitals ‘engulfed’ by winter viruses. Here in Australia flu season (a 'winter virus’) was still going in…

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…

Great to see this scheme almost tripled in funding. And also more evidence of what most deny, how status runs societies. The moment this incentive was first announced, people rushed to put the largest batteries they…

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…

One of the bullshittings of the Covid pandemic was the explanation for why people started getting sick with everything, after the pandemic was apparently over. They’re still getting horribly sick with things they’ve…

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

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

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…

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

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…

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

See, if you make democracy = the sum of what everybody wants or likes, your country will be run by the people who need these warning labels. Except they probably can't read them anyway.

Who knew that crowdfunding was a mass movement of mobilised stupidity? I don’t go anywhere near mass crowdfunding things, no jeans for genes, or red noses, or bandaged bears. All adolescent cutesie things that nobody…

Neighbourhood Watch runs in several countries. The idea being the community more engaged in assisting in the prevention and reporting of crime. So here’s my idea. We need something similar for roads. For example,…

Reading the comments on this one, worth pointing out that the State government designs, builds and maintains all highways, including the parts of highways that run through towns. And all traffic lights on highways.…

We should have been highly sceptical from the start that the financial industry was asked to determine how much super people need in retirement. It's very lucrative business for them. The 'comfortable' rating for…

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

Woolworths scaled down its Australia Day products because nobody was buying them. Why does Dutton do this? Because his strategy to win government is the same Tony Abbott’s was - starting lots of fights. As politics, it…

A few years ago I posted a few times how I thought T20 would destroy cricket as a game. People said I was being melodramatic. It’s the same populist shift we’re seeing in politics too.

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…

Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, was born two days after my dad. I post him here to ask the question, what great human project are we engaged with today, that rivals the moon landings? I want to highlight how our…

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

An election year for local government, and these groups are continuing to set agendas for towns. Illiterate, ignorant. The surge of bats has been gone for almost two months. The other dimwit is looking for somewhere to…

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.…

How progressive tax works is one more thing I think has been lost in public understanding in our time. We have a progressive tax system, where there are increasing rates of tax as you earn more, because that way each…

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…

When politicians refuse to act on emergencies like climate change and Covid, the risk doesn’t go away. It gets privatised, individuals have to deal with it themselves. Insurance is the way they try to do it, insurance…

Politics is mostly done with words. Take the loaded word ‘spending’. Invented in the 1970s to portray all government as wasteful. A much more accurate word is investment. Governments invest in communities, creating…

The federal government collects more from HECS than it does from the fossil fuel industry. In Norway they tax the fossil fuel industry and give free education to students. We subsidise fossil fuels, and charge people…

State governments are now taking control of renewable projects, to bypass the local obstruction, often mobilised by Nationals MPs. Solar panels can improve farmland, have a look at how much shelter has been traditional…

Politicians told us the pandemic would be over when the vaccines arrived. That was at the red arrow. The vaccines are great (anti-vaxers are insane). But alone they’re not even close to being enough to end this pandemic.

There were 131 local objections to the Glanmire solar farm. Only 6 letters of support. It was approved by the State Government. If that seems strange, objections included: - risk of fire (?!) - noise (?!) - impact on…

Hinkley C nuclear power station, in the UK. When building began people were told it would be done by 2017, at a cost of about $20 billion. Now the project is expected to be HALF finished by 2031. And the cost has blown…

The federal government is putting forward 3 options for a fuel efficiency standard for Australian cars. Something every country in the world except us and Russia have had already for years. Check out Option A, one put…

Without question the greatest social disaster in Australia is housing. This book is about to be released and will be interesting reading for anybody who wants to understand how we got into this mess. The answer is the…

There are two truly staggering things in play here. One is the level of corruption and criminal behaviour, by a US President. The other is the number of people, including here in Australia (and often young people), who…

I find many are unaware of political strategy. The Nats had lost a lot of farmers, because the party became addicted to fossil fuel and mining dollars. Now they’ve found a way to marry those two together, by whipping up…

This is Widcombe Junior School, in the UK. They raised funds to put air purifiers in every classroom in the school. It cost them 20 pounds per student. Compare this to the national average cost of hiring casuals when…

Some politicians will tell you superannuation is 'your money', so you should be able to withdraw it whenever you like. That's a lie designed to destroy the super system. Look at those tax rates, a huge portion of your…

For years now it's been illegal for politicians to deal with lobbyists from the tobacco industry. We've seen the outcome, a dramatic decrease in smoking and smoking-related illness. Now there's a possibility, led by…

Reality is rapidly catching up with this toxic fraud. A bullshit con artist, who destroyed what’s left of American democracy. Thankfully the law still holds against these modern populist dictators.

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

Another astonishing breakthrough by materials scientists. (Disclaimer: my original training was as a materials scientist ;)) Battery development is on steroids right now, put the engineers to work and watch them go.…

Hilarious. German farmers want the exact opposite thing to what Australian farmers say they want. In both cases because it means opposing government plans for renewables. It shows that it's all really just about…

Fantastic piece from serious public health professionals. Ignore all the rubbish you hear from hand-picked celebrity experts on TV, chosen if they match the government intention to do nothing. Of course as always I…

To give an indication of just how corrupt fossil fuel politics is, it's worth remembering that university students pay more of Australia's bills through their HECS payments than all of the coal, oil and gas companies…

The government has launched a consumer guide for people interested in solar. My personal preference is still the Solar Quotes company, which as well as providing you the best quotes from reputable installers, also has a…

Australia like several rich countries has had 20-30 years of the politics of immigration. Have a look at these graphs. Without huge numbers of immigrants this country is terminal.

Look where they used to build public housing. Some of it is still active. It's a tremendous asset for government, not a cost. n some areas tenants could even buy it at cheap rates, outside the idiot 'market'.…

I did the Bathurst Council meeting last night, and can’t comment more than that. But in neighbouring Orange you can see the sorts of things that now dominate politics at all levels, while societies collapse around us.…

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…

From the late-1970s, a political movement created what we today call 'the economy'. To replace what we previously called society. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the big drivers of the shift. Thatcher said 'there…

Guess how much Sydney motorists will pay in tolls between now and 2060? $195 BILLION dollars 🤔 Governments should just build public infrastructure, like they used to.

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

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…

One Lib government left in Australia. Maybe not for long. Trashed Tasmania, just as they trashed the rest of the country. I would actually love a conservative government that *conserved* things. It’s in the name. Modern…

Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world. How did it do it? Public housing, built by the government. Every newlywed is offered a cheap apartment, on a 99-year lease. 80% of the country now…

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…

As a part 2 to my other post about vaccination, have a look how far down the list the Covid vaccines are. Not because they’re bad vaccines, but because Covid is a bastard to control. If you’re not getting boosted at…

Here’s how to end Covid. Ventilate schools. Schools are the breeding ground for community spread, because the entire community is mixed there, in its kids, who then take it home. You can see it in the prevalence data…

This is a social catastrophe that still has a long way to run. Cities and towns (including Bathurst) can’t even house essential workers. The standard idea that it’s all a problem of ‘supply’ isn’t right. It’s a lack of…

I don’t waste a lot of time arguing basic science and engineeering with people, because I know that really most are actually arguing from a political position. Team sports. It’s their lens for everything. If their team…

So many problems we face are just artefacts of social media. Like the current ‘youth crime waves’, seen across many countries. Imitative rivalry, driven by social media. Our refusal to act against Covid, or to vote Yes?…

Even with reality staring people right in the face, they can still find new ways to be stupid. Rising petrol prices apparently a conspiracy by the government, to make us all buy EVs. (Fuel tax hasn’t changed, btw.)

The reason housing prices don’t come down, no matter how much we build, is because housing is not a ‘market’. In a market, new suppliers can always add new products for sale, which is where competition then happens with…

Humans like to form teams, and then to compete with other teams. The underlying principle of all of society, if you look, we learn it at school but our adult lives are this too, whether it's the cars we drive, the…

One of my favourites is 'government should be run like a business'. Ask the Brits what they think about that right now.…

The source of all real wealth is building things. Engineering. Not the economy or its market (both fictions). Not supply and demand. Building things, at scale, to drive costs down. That’s how Henry Ford made cars…

US houses are less than half the cost of Australian houses, relative to incomes. How do they do it? It's not the market at work. American housing is nationalised, government provides the capital to banks through…

An example of the huge distance between our politics and reality. 'Out of an abundance of caution' he's isolating. The Deputy Prime Minister. Here in NSW, if you DON'T isolate, you're breaking the law, the NSW Public…

7 countries now generate ALL of their electricity from renewables. When you look at the list, they’re mostly not rich countries. And they managed to do it even ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’. Another…

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

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…

Farmers in Australia can earn up to $40,000 per wind turbine, per YEAR, if they have them on their property. And $1500 per hectare for solar farms. At a time when farming is a dead business, it's a lifeline. Making it…

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

One of the early pandemic arguments was that ‘lockdowns’ would cause an increase in domestic violence. Because women would be locked up with their abusing parters. It turns out the reverse was true. Domestic violence…

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

There’s the (meat in the) sandwich generation. Gen Zs and Millenials often call Gen X ‘boomers’. Gen X is the true forgotten generation. Oh and if you’re old, as I’m becoming, these numbers show that you better be nice…

It'd be worth a bet that Lithgow/Wang will be on Peter Dutton's list of nuke options, given neither town tends to vote for the LNP anyway, so they're less likely to lose important votes. Which is all any of this is…

Ah travel. Fucking up the world one location at a time. Actually that's not fair. It can fuck up many thousands of locations, all at the same time.…

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…

Really nasty people have deliberately confused the public by mixing together two fundamentally different things. What’s called the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, where it is genuinely good for babies and children to get into the…

In politics a libertarian is somebody who thinks regulation and government oppress peoples’ freedom. It’s a dominant force in politics now. For example Trump is a libertarian. Opposition to Covid action is libertarian,…

This is Johnny McEntee. One of Trump’s closest acolytes, and likely to be responsible for a purge of thousands of government officials if Trump wins again. Several millennials and Gen Zs at work have told me they like…

This is Johnny McEntee, one of Trump’s closest fanboy staffers. Responsible for hiring and firing Trump’s staff during his presidency, and predicted to head up ‘Project 2025’ if Trump wins again. Project 2025 includes…

I’ve been talking about Covid for the entire pandemic. Here’s a good example of why. I posted that mum was in hospital, for serious heart and lung issues. About 10 days later she was due to be released, but had a bad…

Ultimately the federal government needs to stop using taxation revenue to buy useless things, like nuclear submarines, and give it back to towns. Or even a fraction of it back to towns. In the meantime people spend more…

When even the Financial Review is calling BS. This is Dutton’s new attempt at ‘Stop the Boats’. But the majority of voters now aren’t oldies terrified of migrant invasion. They’re younger. Without migration there are no…

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

Why anybody going to an election promising to slash immigration is lying to you. We desperately need every worker we can find.…

To give a flavour of the dumb times we live in. In the UK they’ve had a blood infection scandal, where in the 1980s and 90s unscreened blood was used, resulting in tens of thousands of people catching diseases like…

It seems the local member was excited about the prospect of nuclear power, until somebody told him Mt Piper and Wang are on the list of possible locations. How many Lithgow folk know that? Good morning Springfield!…

From November in NSW this year, you can get up to $2400 from the NSW Government to add a battery to your solar installation, as part of their Peak Demand Reduction Scheme. They should have been targeting households a…

Talk to a Millennial or Gen Z. The anger is white hot. And the old remain largely absolutely clueless and dismissive about how the young are being screwed. Both major parties are still heavily wedded to a world now…

Have a look from 9:30, when the NZ Education Minister is asked about teachers getting continuously sick now from Covid, and their very high risk of Long Covid. The government’s solution? More sick leave for teachers,…

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

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…

It’s all NSW Government money, Paul, the people of NSW. Not National Party money. Though that is how they run their novelty cheque grant program when in government.

It’s NSW money, Paul. It didn’t belong to the ‘former NSW government’. It wasn’t a gift from them or the NSW Nationals. Unless we want to start calling the Sydney Opera House the NSW Labor Opera House?

Human beings are creatures of desire. Not just for other human beings, but for all things and anything. They pretend to be rational or objective or any of those other words, but in reality it’s all desire. Objectivity…

British elections are some of the most entertaining in the world.

Thanks to @[1112555254:2048:Dan] for the tip. A BYD Seal, an absolutely superb car which insiders liken to a Mercedes in quality, costs $50K in Australia. That's almost giving it away. In the EU and soon US, the price?…

It’s difficult to see this as anything except an act of political suicide. There was a time in Oz when opposing climate change action won you votes. That had already passed at the last election, where the Liberals lost…

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…

Notice that this farm is owned by a company in the Philippines. People offshore aren't stupid, they know renewables is the gold mine asset to own right now. Meanwhile in Straya, we're going to ANOTHER election trashing…

Mt Piper nuclear power station announced today. NSW Premier ruled out any nuclear in NSW (Victoria the same). Game over. Vote for somebody who isn't a fool.

We haven’t been to trivia nights in over 4 years. This nonsense yesterday made me think about it. The reason we stopped going to trivia was simple, it’s not Covid-safe. Objectively, scientifically, you should not catch…

I know people don’t like discussing things like this, because they say it’s ‘politics’, and they don’t like conflict. But putting politics to one side, I’m genuinely curious how people can genuinely believe nuclear…

Humans act socially, always. Ask them individually what they think of nuclear power? They hate it. But make it the rallying cry for their team, their political party? How great is nuclear power! Peter Dutton knows this,…

Who cares what voters think? Why is that even relevant? Do we let passengers fly planes?

Anthony Albanese has a real opportunity right now, to steal the debate. To do what Saul Griffith, the Australian engineer who also advised Joe Biden, suggested he do 2 years ago. To heavily subsidise Australian…

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…

What distinguishes most of the top 5 airlines in the world? They’re government-owned. What distinguishes our once great Qantas? Its horrific free fall down the rankings (outside the top 20 now), when it was privatised…

At the end of 2021 we reached a fork in the road. At that fork people could choose between what politicians said about Covid, and what scientists said. Overwhelmingly people went with the politicians (!). Karma has…

I’m ending my working life in local government. And am more happy with that choice every day. Meaningful work, unlike jobs where you just sit around in meetings all day discussing bits of paper that never lead to…

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…

In 1215 the Magna Carta declared that the King is not above the law. In 2024, Trump’s Supreme Court has just reversed that. The US is no longer a democracy, and only the fact most people spend their days on TikTok and…

One of the arguments for privatisation is that it saves the taxpayer money by shifting responsibility to private organisations. But the taxpayer ends up paying even more, in user charges. Driving is now much more…

A UK conservative politician described the loss as ‘devastating’. This is the party that presided over the death of over 230,000 Brits, from Covid, and have never once said sorry or been held to account in any way. But…

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…

Sydney’s toll roads are an epic story of how privatisation is always the gouging of taxpayers. Transurban built and runs the roads. It spent $36 billion building them. How much will it make from them, in tolls? At least…

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

Come on snow. Last time it snowed, the government is now so obsessed with ‘living with’ disasters, they left the road open. It was like ice skating with cars out there.

Government ministers visit for actual things. Nobody came to visit us for the nuclear fantasy. Without this, Lithgow is toast.

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

An American friend works in the biotech industry. His son just got a ‘mild’ Covid infection. He now has parosmia. Parosmia is a condition where your brain distorts what you smell, in this case his son smells an…

Those who look at what’s happening in the US politically with horror, need to carefully assess the teams at this year’s local government elections in NSW. Local government is where a lot of the Trump base target local…

Political strategy 101. Remember at school if somebody yelled 'fight!', how people would come running from all directions? The social group Trump represents doesn't have to fight for anything, they're rich and already…

West Connex was promoted, as all new freeways are, as the answer to traffic congestion, in this case along Parramatta Road. It’s been fantastic for people like us, who rarely go to Sydney, a super easy (but bloody…

When I was a kid, nobody talked about energy. When Wang opened in 1957, nobody did either. We just left it to engineers to sort out, the best possible power grid for Australia. And got on with our lives. That’s what’s…

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

Another ex-pollie going to a plum job in the resources sector. The conflict of interest sticks out, to use a phrase of my grandfather's, like a pair of donkey's balls. Perrottet was one of the main drivers of 'living…

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

The man who led a coup to try to overthrow a democratically-elected government, is now favourite to win elected control of that same government. Because one of his own supporters shot him in the ear, missing his head. I…

Because government actively suppress this information now. Epidemic diseases come in waves, we’re currently on the downslope (again). This is the time people stay ‘see? It’s over’. Which then generates the next up-wave.…

Trump is the only US President to lose the popular vote twice. He also lost the Presidency at the height of his popularity. It’ll be interesting to see how this election pans out, given that the US people had a gutful…

The guy who likes to sexually assault women, run coup attempts after elections and bankrupt businesses, may be losing. This is a FOX News survey.

As somebody who works in governance, the greatest danger by far to human life is what is sometimes called populism. Governing only by what is popular. It sounds harmless, even democratic. Try raising your kids or…

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…

Sheep love windmills, if they could vote it wouldn’t be for Barnaby.

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

The NSW Government is the worst in the country for cosy deals with big donors, like property developers. In this case, commercial property owners, who are losing money because so many employees now work from home. As…

Housing is unaffordable because governments stopped building public housing, through ideologies of ‘the market’ doing it instead. The market will never build affordable housing, how many people have you met who don’t…

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

You can check who your candidates are for the upcoming local government elections here, in NSW:…

Politics is really personal in the US, hey Alex and Trey?

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

I do wonder if most young Americans even know what the Soviet Union was. Most politics is male, pale and stale old men trying to scare their own generation. (Look at Dutton going back to bashing migrants again, like a…

They have no intention of ever building a nuclear power station, anywhere. It's just a way to pretend to care about climate change, while still burning coal. And turning farmers into zombies screaming at windmills so…

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

The origins of local government are fascinating. it wasn’t invented as some way to give local people a voice, or any of that other democracy claptrap. It was mostly invented to control disease. It’s a public health…

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

I’m a big supporter of the NDIS. But unless something changes, it will collapse in less than a decade. https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/ndis-cost-could-blow-out-to-125b-a-year-20240118-p5eye5

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.

Carbon capture and storage and 'carbon offsets' are both bullshit in plain sight. Like nuclear power. None work as solutions to climate change, but corporations and politicians promote them because they allow the fossil…

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

Elections are a disaster for democracy. Many confuse democracy *with* elections, but they're not the same thing. Democracy is over 2000 years old, elections are only 100. An election is a popularity contest, used as a…

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…

Brought to you by the incompetence and corruption of local government.

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

NSW really can be the arse-end of the world. The only jurisdiction on the planet with average speed safety cameras that doesn’t use them for cars. FINALLY after a big surge in road deaths, NSW politicians have…

Still lots of counting to go. But in both Bathurst and Lithgow, the local government election has so far produced the same pattern we’re seeing at State and federal levels. The equivalent of a ‘hung parliament’, with no…

My favourite post-election saying is ‘the people have spoken’. Many winners say that. Even some losers. Forgetting the people also spoke for the other candidates who got elected, and even the ones who lost. And the same…

China is literally saving the world right now. Which is why Yellow Peril politics is being ramped up, our existing status quo knows the threat. China is not only single-handedly building more renewables and EVs than…

We’re back at the evil supermarket ‘duopoly’ again. Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. Aldi and IGA for example have been other options for years. Aldi is cheaper than either of the Big 2. But people mostly…

From one of the major teaching hospitals in Sydney. Of course nurses have been saying this for a long time already, and voting with their feet, leaving the profession in droves. Now the BMW X5s are leaving the car park…

Households are installing LOTS of batteries. Enjoy the revolution. Each household that does takes load off the grid at peak times. They're national benefactors. They also help drive prices down for people who can't get…

Policing, teaching, nursing, doctoring, aged care, local government. Etc. All the essential services are in a state of collapse. Not only is it impossible to now do these jobs, the people who stick with them are under…

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…

Final local election results due early this week. At this stage it looks like Facebook has won the Bathurst election. Buckle up.

Local government elections are over. There will be ony two ways forward from here, no matter who was elected. Higher rates, or lower services. There is no magic bucket of money hidden by ‘corruption’ or ‘incompetence’.…

Europe's car industry is under assault from much cheaper (and better) Chinese EVs. You can see here the often reported drop in 'demand' for EVs is actually Western governments removing subsidies for those vehicles,…

This shows the percentage who get RE-infected every year, with Covid. Makes a laughing stock of the idea of 'hybrid immunity' governments are selling i.e. that everybody catching it is making us all more immune to it.

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

In 2022-23, Australia exported a record $107 billion of oil and gas. Tax paid by exporters was only $1.9 billion. That’s about a cent in every dollar. Australia is hostage to these companies. Politicians in receipt of…

Emeritus Professor Bruce Chapman invented HECS. He was on radio yesterday saying that HECS debts are now way too high, well beyond how the system was designed. And that repayments kick in much too low, at a salary of…

It’s funny that some who are horrified at the election of Trump would still vote for Peter Dutton. Dutton is Trump-lite. I thought Trump was going to fall asleep during his victory speech. He’s only in this for personal…

There's a bizarre idea that 'bureaucrats' come to work every day, sit down and think hmmm, what new rules can we invent today? All rules happen for the same reason. 1. Because people are demanding. 2. Because people…

When you get on a plane, you don't vote for who should pilot it. Scale that up to a whole society, and you can see why elections are such a bad idea. Democracy isn't, and never was, 'the people' running the country.…

Here's what I think very few seem to get about politics. When politicians win elections, they congratulate theselves for the victory. Commentators do too. They attribute the victory, to the politician. But the majority…

One of the things that makes me chuckle is just how aggressively Ford and GM (Holden) are developing electric vehicles, in the US. Many of the ICE knuckle-draggers in Australia are the Ford/Holden brigade, completely…

Yup. Get rid of it, put the money into public hospitals and Medicare. Junk insurance, funded largely by the taxpayer in opposition to the government system. A trick by the LNP to try to destroy Medicare from the…

Here’s something to vote for.

I challenge the now common idea that this sort of thing is ‘community concerns’. Having seen this from the inside in local government too. So often it’s a handful of local activists, stirring up shit, usually through…

Australia should use the coal from the mines owned by companies in Korea and Switzerland to power coal-fired power stations it doesn’t have and nobody wants to build, which would be at least 3 times more expensive…

Nicole Mansion was the previous Deputy Chief Minister of the NT. In that job she fought for fracking rights for Tamboran, a Texan gas company. Now she's out of politics, guess where she got a job. Wake up Australia,…

Hopefully we get through this fine. I know we personally will, our air conditioners will be running all day to cool the house walls for us when we get home, and won’t use one electron from the grid doing it. We’ll be…

The US is the same as here. The people who love voting to get rid of immigrants never have a clue that without immigrants there's nobody to do the work.

One to keep in the back pocket in case you need it, while we keep infecting the kids so we can go to gigs and Bali. How proud are we to be one of the only developed countries on Earth that doesn't even vaccinate kids,…

That peak mid-afternoon has the government and AEMO a bit worried. Ordinary people and organisations asked to cut electricity use. "About 6 gigawatts of coal-fired power station capacity remains unavailable, including…

'What's this button do?' government has begun.

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…

The NSW grid nearly went down this week, and as the article says, the conditions were relatively moderate. We’re not even in summer yet. The reason? Nearly half of our coal plants were offline, being repaired. They’re…

This is the sort of rank populism that plays well in our times. ‘Get rid of red tape!’ The problem with that idea is that the people who say it have no idea how things get practically done. ‘Bureaucracy’ is just the…

With the insane nonsense of living with a pandemic we’ve encouraged the total collapse in control of infectious disease more generally. The single and only reason our life expectancies are now over 80 rather than 40 is…

Peter Dutton often uses Canada as an example of nuclear power driving down power prices. It made the Canadians laugh with disbelief. He's a dangerous bullshit artist. The fact he's competitive in the next election is a…

It’s that time of year again, where women wallop Alan Rickman’s mid-life crisis character, and weep with Emma Thompson’s who says him being a twit makes her whole life a ‘lie’. The bizarre sexual politics of our time,…

The impression given by Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is that it’s nuclear vs renewables. Actually it’s nothing like that at all. He doesn’t even deny renewables will generate by far the most electricity into the future,…

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,…

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Have been saying this for years. Makes you about as popular as haemorrhoids. Travel is the most stupid and destructive part of our…

Looking at the list of approved new renewable energy projects on the latest government tenders. Number 1, a local. Attracted lots of whining and whinging, until the State Government thankfully took it out of local…

Trump has given Elon Musk the task of improving ‘government efficiency’. Trump has called the department he’ll lead the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE). Worth paying attention at this point. DOGE is also a…

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

Even Peter Dutton’s own party know what he’s proposing with nuclear is BS. They know it’s vastly more expensive, they just won’t say it publicly. But they’re leaking it to the press. "There's a flood of misinformation…

The combined cost of proposed nuclear subs and nuclear power stations, both LNP policies, is close to $1 trillion. All taxpayers’ money. The LNP calls itself the party of small government.

Peter Dutton’s only policy is ‘Peter Dutton for PM’. Seriously, he has no other policies. Turns out he’s the biggest critic of his own nuclear wet dream as well, have a quick listen. Only 5 seconds.

"All politicians have to play a delicate game with housing: appear to be trying to make it more affordable because it’s a “crisis”, but not achieve it, since most voters own a house and don’t want its value to fall."…

Back to the marginal cost curve for renewables, to one of the miracles of our lives. SWB = solar, wind, batteries. You can see that the lowest cost SWB grid generates between 3 to 5 times *more* energy than our entire…

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

New Zealand’s new government came to power with a tired old cliche about freeing everybody from dreadful government. They cut the guts out of public spending. Now their economy is a train wreck. There is no such thing…

The maths of stupidity. The Granville train disaster killed 83 people. It’s still commemorated. Tens of thousands of people have died (and are still dying) of Covid in Australia. Our attitude to that? It’s ‘just a…

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

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…

Anyone working in local government will chuckle reading this one. All the ridiculous idealistic rubbish about ‘community’, in complete contrast with how people actually behave together. Societies are status games, not…

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…

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

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…

This is astonishing. Millions of kg of Australian tomatoes come from this plant in South Australia, which grows them using sunshine and seawater. There are so many remarkable things happening, which are obscured by…

If you work in any of these jobs (you can add cafes, supermarkets, child care centres and funeral homes to the list, they’re under (o) in the regulations), then if you catch Covid, under NSW law you are automatically…

This is the side of solar that is less spoken about. Every person you see with solar panels on their roof is a mini power station. They’re providing some of the electricity you use, and they used their own money to…

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

When I started in the workforce, I was a bit in awe of people in their 50s. They were the ones who knew how stuff worked, who had an authority about them because of their long experience. They were often the calm ones…

They won’t build the tunnels, it’s just election spin. And the poor machines, I don’t think they’re boring.

What the science of alcohol tells us is that no amount of alcohol is good for you, and in fact even tiny amounts are bad. But of course the alcohol industry is one of the country’s big political donors. What interests…

Name something these 3 have in common: 1. The Davos World Economic Forum, in Switzerland 2. NSW parliament in Sydney 3. Parliament at Westminster in the UK. Anybody? Each has spent millions making the buildings safe…

Ours are down about 200%. The energy company is paying *us*. These changes brought in by government will help prices not go up much further from their current very high levels, but they won’t bring them down. Only the…

The German Health Minister one of the few honest politicians left in the world. Saying what I’ve been sharing here for a while, that Covid infection is possibly leading to incurable long-term damage to the immune…

Monbiot has had Covid 3 times. Every time, he caught it from a school, via one of his children. Schools are back next week, and guess what government has done to make them safer for Covid? The same thing it did last…

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

Having forced the public to buy their own tests, in a pandemic (!), governments now have a huge stockpile of RATs about to expire. I run out of words for the contempt I feel for the elected halfwits that run our…

Let's unpack this one (declaration - I worked at a nuclear power facility, as an engineer). - we would need over 15,000 new nuclear reactors to power the world - these reactors cost over $20 billion to build, EACH -…

The average Australian now pays around $5000 per year, per car, on fuel. If they buy an EV, their fuel costs will be about 10-20% of that. That’s a saving of about $20,000 over a 5-year span, a rough time a person keeps…

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…

What I said all through this wave turned out to be 100% true. Including that National Cabinet and the CMO were flat-out lying to us. To me it’s important to close the loop on the things I say here, because maybe people…

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…

The dog v cat person thing. I like both animals. But from working in local government, I can say there are 100 complaints about dogs for every complaint about a cat. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a complaint…

If you already own an old-style hot water heater (a 'resistive' one that heats the water like a jug does), the government will pay for it to be upgraded to a fancy heat pump version, worth thousands of dollars. Example…

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

Approaching the time when the fake prosperity of the last 30 years will be exposed for exactly what it was. A bubble created by astronomical amounts of personal debt. It’s what kept people voting for the politicians who…

All following the exact timeline I often post about here. We have more than a decade of criminal inaction to catch up on. If that work had been done we’d all be looking at huge drops in energy prices by now. Home solar…

Where the idiot UK government goes, we follow. They’re desperately short of workers there, first due to the stupidity of Brexit, and then Covid. The idiots assumed older workers had just retired, and had slogans ready…

In the UK, there’s now a national shortage of fresh vegetables. The minister in charge has told those complaining to ‘work harder’. Because we’re all paid in vegetables. No, we just elect them.

The longer term chronic impacts of Covid are well underway. We can’t positive think our way out of them, or define them away. The definition of a pandemic is based on number of infections, not severe disease or…

There’s a genuine risk of stagflation this year. Like the worst of all possible worlds. High prices, high unemployment, nobody buys anything. It happened in the 1970s, when Big Oil formed a cartel to drive oil prices…

The 'NSW Government’s Stronger Country Communities program' is a vote-buying slush fund, as most grant schemes are. Government first strips essential funding, then hands it back in much smaller novelty cheques precisely…

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…

Most countries have the same problems right now. Big jumps in cost of living, the need to reduce emissions. The problem is the solution. Dramatically reducing household energy use goes a long way towards fixing both…

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…

I strongly advise you ignore everything economists and politicians say about inflation and general economic problems right now, and watch this instead. It will also be much more entertaining. Modern economics is a…

The annual federal budget is like a religious ritual, in ‘the economy’. (Which doesn’t exist.) All that guff about balancing the books, and surpluses, and government debt. All nonsense, comparing a country to a…

No democracy sausages.

I know people love discussing politics. On behalf of the 6000 people in NSW who died in 2022 because of the criminal incompetence of the outgoing Premier, good riddance. Anybody else would be in jail for the rest of…

Have been to Harvey Norman twice in two weeks to buy things. It was deserted, you could have heard a pin drop. I asked the salespeople how business was going, and they said terribly slow. The ‘economy’ is imploding. One…

It's a shame Australia is increasingly moving towards the US in its culture, politics and tastes. Like the RAM. Americans (sorry my American friends) make almost universally rubbish cars. (We don't make any at all now,…

Paul Toole benefited from being in government for his time as member to date, showering his electorates with millions in novelty cheques, in true Nationals pork-barrelling style. It’s given him an aura of getting things…

I saw an interview with David Bowie, where he said The Velvet Underground were a much more important band than The Beatles. I dunno, every Velvet Underground track I’ve ever heard sounds like rubbish. Lou Reed seems a…

Multiple families I know struggling with multiple infections. Conjuncitivitis and tonsillitis common. Hand, foot and mouth disease too. And others. Many when I talk to them repeat the slogans politicians created to deal…

While the Liberals and Nats are a coalition in much of the country, in Queensland they're a single, merged party, the Liberal National Party. It's now the only State where the federal LNP wins many seats, driven by a…

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

The Americans are shifting to two-thirds of all car sales to be EVs in just 9 years, by 2032. From a starting point of only 5-6%. Notice the EPA there doesn’t need politicians to agree to it, it just sets vehicle…

The myths about public and private. All innovation and economic growth has its origins in the State. The State even invented the ‘private sector’. Biden understands this, and now industry is starting to boom again…

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

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

I’d like to do a few posts on climate change. The whole topic is infected with political slogans, but the real knowledge is fascinating. Probably the greatest slogan is that ‘the climate always changes’. People arguing…

One day, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine walked through a neighbourhood in London. People greeted and exchanged words with the Prime Minister. A street sweeper greeted Mrs Churchill in particular, and the two…

I continue to share Covid things because nothing has changed, including the fantasy that it’s over. This research was for healthy people under 40, not people in aged care homes. Covid is a vascular disease, not a lung…

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…

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

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

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

As always I share Covid things not to be a scaremonger or because I'm obsessed, but because you will rarely see any of it, anywhere else. Politicians have deliberately suppressed the information. I also only share from…

This is more of the subtle politics that infects all of our lives now. Trying to paint solar power as a rich person’s way to escape skyrocketing power prices. There are internet-free loans that will pay for your entire…

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

Priceless. Eventually dumb meets reality. Banging the anti-immigration drum has won many governments elections. But now their societies are full of old people with no young people to do the work. Checkmate.

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

A bit of trivia to add to this quote. Most say Covid is mild in children. In the US nearly 2000 children have died. More than 14,000 have been hospitalised. 245,000 children have lost one or both parents, to Covid.…

Preface: I like dogs. But I think the reason they're so enormously popular is one not often spoken about. I was thinking about it while watching Get Back, the Beatles film. The band were fighting, on the point of…

While politicians, industry spin doctors and economists drone on and on about housing ‘supply’ being the problem, a property developer finally tells us the truth. Everybody was just too greedy, and that greed is now…

Remember Tupperware parties? The brilliant idea that to break down resistance to people buying things, the smartest way is to get your own friends to flog them to you. This is the secret to understanding all society and…

From the Orange paper. A pharmacist saying lockdowns made us more vulnerable to diseases, because we weren't getting sick as much. (Technically called the 'immunity debt' hypothesis.) The thing is, it's scientific…

Death certificates are often signed by junior doctors. They're under extreme political pressure to continue to deny the reality of Covid, and suppress statistics about it.

Today's Covid update that governments don't want you to see. 81 dead in NSW this week. 64 last week. A whole large hospital full of sick Covid patients. If it was me, I'd put a mask on. But you may like your brain cells…

I know a few Trump supporters, and I’d ask them why other political candidates don’t have followers like the ones below.

T.Ryan Gregory is one of the strongest international scientific voices speaking out at the public health disaster we’re still inside. Read this long list of lies that he debunks, that are in common use in Australia too.…

UK Glamour has better health advice than the NSW Government.

The only part of the renewables shift the Flat Earthers tend to support is Snowy 2.0. Using the Snowy scheme as a big pumped hydro battery. The problem is, it’s a disaster. A typical example of private sector firms…

It's time Australia and the world dumped the 'pub test' and replaced it with the smart test. Society will never progress if the only thing that can be done is what people pissed off their tits can understand. Here's a…

One of the reasons I went with a battery for us is this. I'm not confident the deadlines are going to be met, and if they're not, the whole electricity system in Australia is in serious trouble. 2-3 decades of total…

Have a look at the public health messaging they have in NZ. Our governments here in Australia won’t allow these facts to be publicised.

And then this one, an international laughing stock. Even countries *with* big existing car industries are wayyyy ahead of us. 20 years of philistines in government here has taken a country that should be the richest in…

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…

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

Again, people should be in jail over this. Politicians. Over 600 dead and it struggles to even make the news. What an idiot society.

Remember all that political blah blah about how we couldn't go renewable, because China wasn't? China was. And how. We're pathetic. It's doing more than the rest of the world combined. Much more.…

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…

New York had 10 inches of rain today. It’s still raining. In local government there’s already no money to fix this sort of damage. It’s only going to get much, much worse.

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…

Fucking politicians. Measles advice out of the UK, for the current outbreak there. Nearly all absolutely useless to prevent the spread of measles, it’s just about the most contagious disease we have. They don’t want to…

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…

One thing I never did as a manager over almost 20 years, is delegate my work to other people. In nearly every larger organisation now, this is the pattern you’ll see. One of the first things a new senior manager does is…

Staggering numbers of people actually think democracy IS popularity, which shows how much we've already lost. Trump thinks his popularity can overrule all law and due process. Hitler and Mussolini thought that too. One…

This is the infectious disease research team at the Kirby Institute, UNSW. Notice they’re all wearing masks, if they’re in the same room. Who should you trust, these people, who study viruses for a living? Or…

You really should watch this. The outrageous story (that some of us have lived firsthand) of the privatisation of the pubic service, through outsourcing to the big 4 consulting firms. More than 15,000 public servants…

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…

Hopeless, useless, like the LNP as well. Completely in the pocket of developers. The whole country is run by them, politicians line up to chant ‘supply’ like trained monkeys.

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…

Lots of good sense here about housing, an area of Australian life with traditionally no sense at all. Anybody who tells you 'supply' is the issue is part of the problem. Note the important point that Councils approve…

I have a long commute each day on regional roads. Each day I think about the total cowardice of the NSW Government, the only State government in Australia that doesn't use average speed safety cameras for cars, only for…

There is only one answer to the housing and rental crisis. And it’s also simple. Governments need to become property developers again. They need to build and sell and rent lots of houses, at much lower rates than the…

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…

I share all of this data because governments don't want people to talk about it. It's not a conspiracy, we've been lied to, blatantly and repeatedly. 'We have to learn to live with this virus' was an election slogan…

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…

The new Health Minister defends this by saying 'we've got to learn to live with Covid and return to normal.' You hear that a lot, it's a slogan, completely free of any actual information. In reality what's 'normal' for…

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…

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

Not every person who votes No will be like this. But every person like this will vote No.

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

Like I said, we'll be an international laughing stock if the vote is No to something as innocuous as an advisory committee. The people who don't care also mostly don't care the planet is being incinerated, and that…

Somebody asked me the other day how many varieties of Covid we now have. The last public mention of variants by politicians was really Omicron, last year. As you can see, Covid has been having a field day since.…

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 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…

I think we should get rid of all elections and political parties. They served a (brief) purpose in organising democracies, but now they're destroying them, and fast. The problems societies now face are not problems that…

These wallies won about 3 elections dog whistling racist claptrap with ‘Stop the Boats’. Don’t take my word for it, Malcolm Fraser and others resigned from the party in disgust. They see ‘bashing the blacks’ as a way to…

Anybody who thinks nuclear power is the answer for Australia is scientifically and economically illiterate. I worked in nuclear engineering. This is Dutton creating an argument with outrageous fantasy ideas, to fire up…

The comparison of the No vote in the referendum with Brexit is incredibly accurate. Both populist movements based on a native xenophobia, both will be international embarrassments. Don't ask me, Nigel Farage is pointing…

Populism is the political system we now live under. It’s not Labor, Liberal, National or Green. It’s not Left or Right. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a politics that says what is most popular, is right. It replaces…

What’s less known about populism (believing that only what is popular is right and real) is that fascism is just a form of populism. Fascism is what you get if you let populism run. Hitler and Mussolini for example…

Living in a society where the dominant currency is popularity, in politics and in all things (a society of ‘likes’, of social media), doesn’t mean at all that it’s based on people getting the things they want.…

Elections began as a way to select leaders. They now define reality itself, now what the ‘majority’ thinks becomes reality. That’s populism.

To give an indication of how much of an international laughing stock we’ll be if (when) we vote No at the referendum, compare with other major countries with indigenous populations. In the US, there are treaties with…

The insurance industry invented fire brigades. It was in their obvious interest to try to protect the property they insure. It's the place I always go to to strip away the bullshit political spin around a topic. With…

When Rupert Murdoch dies, it will trigger something fascinating. His 4 oldest children (circled in red) each have an equal vote on what happens with the business. Lachlan is the chosen one while Rupert is alive, but the…

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

The Big 4 consulting firms that incompetent senior managers in every industry and in government throw billions at every year are like the Wild West. No regulation, everybody is a partner because that way they escape any…

I worked at a nuclear facility. Here’s what the proponents of nuclear power never say. Nobody wants the waste. What does somewhere like the US do with its nuclear waste? Nothing. It’s all sitting at the nuclear plants…

To help cut through the sloganocracy that replaced our democracy, there are now already almost as many public charging stations for EVs as there are service stations for petrol and diesel cars. But even more…

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

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

If you think Covid is over, ask your insurance company if they agree. Insurers ignore political spin.

Always check who you're in bed with. If you're voting No, here they are. It should tell you something. Much of this crap is posted by government agencies in China and Russia (and fringe loons in the US), trying to…

How did we think linking together all of the world's most stupid people into a political force, through social media, was going to end well? The danger is that it has power, Trump's mob for example organised through…

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

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…

‘Baseload’ is another slogan politicians use. It encourages the public to think we have some sort of minimum amount of ’base’ power we need coal-fired power stations to supply, and without them all the lights will go…

This weekend a nation of obsessive travellers will probably demonstrate the myth of 'travel broadens the mind'. By voting No.

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…

For a country so obsessed with travel, Australia seems to not have the first clue how ridiculous we will look to the rest of the world, if the vote is No. And how much that will damage us.

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

Don’t wear a Yes or No shirt or other item to vote tomorrow. It’s not allowed.

Interview with voters about why they voted No. “We already have some of them in the parliament.” (‘them’ 🤔) “We need to be one nation, not special rules for their culture.’ (‘their’ 🤔)

My politics? Get rid of all elections, all referendums. All political team sports (parties). There are very simple, clear things that need doing to fix our worst problems, none of which need a popularity-based mechanism…

We haven't paid a cent for electricity in over a year. We're making money from it. The previous government vomited endless propaganda about 'cheap, reliable power'. It was never cheap or reliable, because coal power…

I drive this road every day, and it's made me think about whether we've got lazy with road building. Lots of hilly bits like here, where instead of cutting the road into the topography of the land, to prevent large…

The true motivations of the No camp are now clear, because they know they won and now don't care about saying what they were really thinking. Tony Abbott already back out saying we need to get rid of the Aboriginal Flag…

When Australia led the world in defeating HIV in the 1980s it was largely due to a brilliant health minister, Neal Blewett. If you’re wondering why we’re doing nothing at all about Covid, here’s our current health…

Yep! Got the bills to prove it. I think the government is finally realising targeting households is the fastest and cheapest way to go. The LNP still agitating for nuclear, which they don’t actually want (it’d be…

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

Friend at work was onto Day 2 yesterday of very nasty immune issues, eyes puffed up like they’d done 12 rounds of boxing. Some of the hives on the face now suppressed with double-dosings of antihistamines. Is assuming…

From a year ago. We're now entering our 8th wave. None of the 'experts' governments trot out are expert at anything except churning out spin for governments doing nothing. All working from home safe from the virus.

When the petrol and diesel fetishists run out of EV posts to dive-bomb, they move onto solar. This was a post about the NSW Government’s new solar scheme for low income earners, promising to slash power bills. Losers…

Exactly what's happening, and has been for years. A lot of it began in the 1950s in the US, when political conservatives and churches formed an alliance to take control of government. To give you an indication of how…

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…

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

Dr Cameron Murray is doing brilliant work on understanding the disaster that is Australian housing. Unsurprisingly it’s pretty simple. Home ownership became a widespread Australian thing when governments built lots of…

CSU was the worst I’ve ever seen for meetings. Every day full of them, from beginning to end. It wasn’t always like that, changes at the top end brought total incompetence at that level, and the organisation spent all…

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is back in the news, with a multibillion new gas project approved for Santos. They swear it will be ‘carbon neutral’, that they can capture the carbon through CCS technologies. CCS is…

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

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

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

This is a HUGE shift. Essentially the government is (rightly) saying that privatisation of electricity has failed. This is the sort of brave public policy we haven't seen in Australia for years. Hats off to them, well…

This really is brilliant public policy. They'll use reverse auctions to drive prices down from bidders (what we should do for housing too). And they've put a ceiling and a floor on profits, so that the investors get a…

Probably quite a lot of people aren’t aware of the difference between public health and medicine. Public health isn’t doctors or nurses, or rather it’s very specific types of doctors, who work on the health of the…

This is why popularity (elections) is destroying democracies. We know exactly what to do to fix the housing crisis - to get governments to build a LOT more public housing - but we won't do it. Because doing that would…

Many use France as an example of how nuclear power might save us. It has 56 reactors. It’s government owned and run, because no business will touch it with a stick, it’s in astronomical debt. And estimates just of costs…

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…

Michael Pascoe nailing it again. Australian business is lazy and entitled, and mostly because we own hardly anything so can’t apply pressure to firms to do better. Both we and the UK have had idiot political leaders who…

Got my Covid booster. The government hasn't ordered enough but I guess they're factoring in that many haven't bothered in a while. Here's a sweetener.

Germany’s health minister really tries. Germany is facing its greatest wave of the pandemic so far, making a nonsense of the idea that Covid is over. And he points out at that people shouldn’t be catching Covid over and…

One of the most bizarre anti-renewables stories is that renewables only work because of big government subsidies. These graphs are from the International Energy Agency (IEA), and show the astronomical subsidies fossil…

Queensland's Chief Health Officer (CHO) was a political appointment, to replace their previous CHO, who often told embarrassing truths about Covid. (They made her Governor to shut her up.) Have a look how it's going.…

As a local government worker I always appreciate the advice from this FB group on how to run the town. It’s a powerhouse of insight.

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

A great friend loves Peugeots. He kept an entire farm shed full of old Peugeots, so that he’d have a supply of spare parts, as many were no longer supported. This will become the only way to keep your ICE running.…

People who are close to these accidents know the lifelong trauma they cause. I’m on that road every day, it has average speed safety cameras installed, and has done for years. And the NSW Government is too gutless to…

For those who don’t follow US politics. Project 2025 has been set up by ultra-conservative Republicans for Donald Trump, and is a plan (if he wins) to sack tens of thousands of key civil servants and replace them with…

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

Health staff being forced back to work to stop the hospital system collapsing should make us all extremely angry. Especially when accompanied with day after day of bullshit vomiting out of the mouths of politicians…

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…

Hospitalisations and ICU growing exponentially. Now nearly 200 more people into hospital each day. Oz politicians following the UK spin path, already saying ‘it’s not ICU, it’s how many on ventilators’. And then ‘some…

So you struggle to get a PCR test. And now if you want a RAT, you’ll be up for $10-$12 a pop. Which means for most working families, you won’t bother. At least NSW said it would provide these for free, let’s see how…

Hot tip. Don’t vote for the party who opened up the country to mass infection, but didn’t order any tests. Just as they didn’t order vaccines. Just as they don’t do anything except rort grants to win elections.…

Nostradamus hat on again. This time medium-term (4-5 month) prediction. Scott Morrison will: - wait for the Omicron wave to subside (all waves do) - run a March budget full of election bribes, and - call the election.

That’s 2 from 2 in the prediction game. (He’s still being a cheapskate with this announcement, just staggering that he won’t demand ineligible businesses repay $40 billion of JobKeeper payments they stole, but still…

Mike Ryan, one of the WHO’s most senior public health experts, on what we’ve done wrong in this pandemic. Really worth a minute of your time. Particularly on the last sentence, notice how our leaders have the whole time…

The NSW Government has an excellent Critical Intelligence Unit, which releases some of the most useful Covid stats. It’s where you can see how the trickery is done in trying to suppress hospital numbers, for starters,…

In talking to people, the thing I find that is creating the greatest risk to us all is the old favourite - ‘live with the virus’. A political slogan, that millions repeat with no thought at all. Politicians have…

What do the experts say? Delay sending kids back to school a few weeks until they’re vaccinated. What do the politicians say? I’m sure you can guess.

NSW Government having a Crisis Cabinet meeting this morning, to discuss significant new restrictions. How many times do we have to go through this same charade, with every wave, before people realise if you open up…

James is a smart operator, a very nice guy who also works inside the NSW Government. Has been in the press recently about his own experience with Covid. Nails it here, we’re back in 2020, except this time we’re paying…

‘Know any nurses?’ Doesn’t that fill you with confidence? Hats off to our nurses, trying to hold it all together while idiot politicians deliberately infect the entire State.

Let’s be smarter than this constant bullshit, hey? About this being about ‘panic buying’. It’s not. It’s about thousands of workers being infected with Covid. The politicians would like nothing more than for us to start…

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…

The ‘Economy’ is the worst it’s been for the entire pandemic. Lockdowns would be less damaging. (There is no Economy, just more proof.) Here’s the thing. ‘Living with the virus’ isn’t the opposite of ‘eliminating the…

Data is politics. If you’re wondering why your supermarkets are a bit empty, try the bottom two squares on the left.

The politics of language. ‘Living with’ natural disasters. Take floods. We live with floods, in that we know they will sometimes happen. We DON’T live with them WHILE THEY ARE HAPPENING. We live with floods, but we…

Might need to contextualise these. John Snow was the father of epidemiology i.e. the study of disease patterns and causes, in public health. Most famously he discovered that cholera was being spread by dirty water in…

Christmas 2021. When the people of Australia, tired from fighting Covid for 2 years, were thanked by their governments by infecting them with it.

Every day, this is how reality is re-framed. Going to hospital IS serious illness, that’s what hospital is for. In the meantime, experts have advised governments what to do to bring the current crisis under control.…

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…

The ‘regulator’ of aged care homes is the federal government. Living with the virus.

Numbers cut through political spin. It’s difficult to see anything except complete social breakdown within a month. We’re already a long way down that road. The only alternative is the UK and US model, where we just…

I wanted to talk about 2 things we’re told not to talk about, but I think we must. Politics and religion. My views on them, so people have a reference point. Politics first. My personal political leanings are to…

If you want a flavour of just what low-life bastards the NSW Government are, this is one of many, many stories I’ve heard about parents trying to buy air purifiers for their kids’ schools, to protect them from Covid.…

Last day of a great 3 weeks off. Reminded me again that we focus on the wrong things. Sure we went to the moon, we can fly anywhere in the world in comfort, we have all human knowledge at our fingertips via Google, our…

Political slogans about living with the virus have people now actively going out to try to catch it. We may have reached peak stupid. But I’m not calling it, we may find even more stupid things to do yet. This won’t…

Look at the wording, straight out of the 'Stop the Boats' playbook, trying to weaponise the Novak saga into a border control issue, for the election, and a 'don't look at the Covid shitshow' distraction. Laughably,…

Think about the logic of this. A test paid for by government is not ‘free’ - it’s OUR money, buying a test for us. What we’ve ended up with instead is us paying twice - once in taxes, and then out of our own wallets at…

The government has been on strike for over 2 years.

Advice from Treasury (yep, pesky bureaucrats) to government about opening up.

Returning to this, over 100,000 people caught Covid in NSW between Christmas and New Year. It takes about 3 weeks for cases to start translating into deaths. That’s what that explosive growth in deaths line now is. That…

Remember when politicians pretended schools had to be open in a pandemic, because of childrens’ education and mental health? They don’t even pretend that’s the reason now. The PM, yesterday. In the meantime,…

So many Covid updates. Now the NSW Government wants to waive RSAs for bar staff in pubs. Because the interruption to the free flow of booze is obviously a State emergency. (P.S. guess who's a big donor to political…

I suggest replacing National Cabinet with kids, and getting the politicians to drive the forklifts. Pandemic over.

Like all service professions, teaching is treated like dirt. Nobody, not ONCE, has asked teachers about Covid in schools. Just as they don’t ask nurses about Covid in hospitals. Instead we have opinionated…

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…

In populist democracy, numbers = power. In Western democracies, numbers = boomers. Boomers are about to face widespread infection in their own demographic, for the first time in this pandemic. Let’s see how that plays…

Politics 101. When reality contradicts your spin, hide the reality. Where are all the 'live with the virus' people, by the way? So vocal in 2020 and 2021. Grow a pair, face up to the bullshit you asked for.

A week ago the NSW Government quietly signed an exemption to Public Health Orders to exempt employers from reporting Covid acquired in the workplace to SafeWork Australia. Now they only need to if an employee is…

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.…

The 3rd vaccine shot. Get it, ASAP. This is the data from the UK, well ahead of us with Omicron. I've highlighted in yellow the effectiveness of 2 doses of vaccine, against hospitalisation and death, for Omicron. Those…

The politicians told us all to focus on deaths. So do it, people. Focus.

This is what so angers me with the mindless ‘live with the virus’ slogan. Look at the carnage in aged care. AGAIN. The government did nothing last time, and staggeringly has done nothing again this time. Why would…

The most democratic, free way out of the pandemic is rules. Mandates. Public health orders. All the stuff the nongs who marched on Canberra yesterday hate, for example, and our politicians campaign against. Rules apply…

I refuse to pay for Covid tests. Not content with letting the virus rip, government then forces people to pay for their own tests. Even in AGED CARE HOMES. You can't make this stuff up.

Remember people using delays to elective surgery as an argument against lockdowns? Those same people strangely quiet when letting Covid rip does the same thing. Letting it rip IS ‘lockdown’. A privatised one, where you…

Two tired concepts in public conversation are: 1) narcissism, and 2) toxic gender. Both take wider social and political issues and try to make them about individual psychology. Which suits those who are in society's…

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…

As we hopefully watch the rotting carcass of the federal LNP disappear from the front benches in Canberra, another earlier reminder of their disgusting legacy. Remember year after year, the relentless bullshit about how…

Using maths to do politics. 0.1% is 1 in 1000 people. Starts to look a bit less rosy when you rephrase it that way? That’s over 25,000 Covid deaths every year (flu kills 1000 in a bad flu year.) To put this in…

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…

We’re at the 50th anniversary of what some call neoliberal and libertarian ideas. Basically ideas that say government is the problem, get it out of peoples’ lives and life and prosperity will flourish. Reality tells us…

A senior member of the federal government described free Covid testing as 'largesse' this morning.

P.S. on tests. I'm not sure the people of NSW have realised yet that when the government ends free school Covid testing, NOBODY NOT ON A COMMONWEALTH CONCESSION CARD IN NSW WILL QUALIFY FOR A FREE COVID TEST. In the…

Indulge me here, a crystal ball looking deeper into 2022. Right now of course governments and probably most people are convinced the pandemic is as good as over, we're 'living with the virus' and life will return to…

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…

The biggest cause of death in Australia is now Covid. And you won't know that if you listen to politicians or the news.

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

Go the nurses! Somebody calling this government out for the disgusting lies around Covid.

This humiliating defeat for prize buffoon Frydenberg reveals something much more interesting going on. It’s restoring democracy to business, shifting power from managers and Directors, back towards owners. And those…

“I regret going out when Omicron was running rampant”. I wish that was a more common view. On schools and Covid, the NSW Government published infection numbers at the end of week 1 of term. Since then - nothing. This is…

Let's see if Clive Palmer can steal an election for the LNP with a big bag of cash, like he did last time. People who hate all politicians are attracted to this sort of populist rubbish, so they vote UAP. Palmer's…

'We have to live with it'. I get told that a lot. Do we live with HIV? Or cancer? Heart disease? Even flu? Do people even know how much money and effort goes into trying to eliminate all of those things? Do they notice…

This is the magnitude of the damage Scott Morrison is prepared to do, to protect his own job. China-bashing is the fastest way to flush what’s left of Australian prosperity down the toilet. This election matters more…

A reminder that political parties 'launch' their election campaigns at the actual end of their campaigns, so that taxpayers foot the bill for their campaigning, including travel to all parts of the country.

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

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…

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

This is how dangerous the NSW and federal governments are. There was no train strike in NSW today, it was an old-school employer lockout. The NSW Government shut down the trains. Why? There’s only one reason that…

At over 200 deaths per day, about 70,000 per year, and tens of thousands of infections per day. People are now completely ‘free’ again. Free to live with the virus. This is the insanity of where that idiot idea leads.…

It’s still a perfect analogy. We find ways to keep the measures in place that save lives, while letting life move on. The same applies to Covid, the measures that bring cases and deaths down need to stay in place or be…

We (mistakenly) think democracy = what’s popular, wins. ‘Majority rules’. It doesn’t mean that, it never has. That’s populism. Populism always ends the same way. Leaders promise people to only do what’s popular. But…

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the…

Wonderful article that explains how the 'Economy' came to be a thing people believed in. And what a disastrous, abject failure it's been. https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/

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…

Everything seems to be becoming a ‘mental health’ issue. Much of what we call that is really people being treated like battery hens by the politics of the Economy. The neoliberals already medicalised a pandemic so they…

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…

Where might all of those 0-19 year olds be catching Covid? It can't be at school, the politicians say it's not spreading there. Must be a helluva lot of kids wagging. Better get the masks off all of them, nothing to see…

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…

Two diagrams that illustrate the geopolitics in play. The entire rationale for NATO (blue) is driven by the US, to suppress Russia. That’s fine, countries make strategic decisions. But you can see how much Russia could…

Don’t be afraid, Queensland flood victims. The government has your back. It will help communities set up GoFundMe campaigns to assist you. ‘Getting government out of peoples’ lives’. Isn’t it going well.

I do like the pieces that go beyond the 'Putin is a tyrant and must be stopped' non-thinking. And spare us more symbolic protests in response, using another geopolitical emergency as just a platform for our own…

Clive's push to keep the ALP out of government is back on, for the second election in a row. How do we feel Australia, about billionaires buying elections? He doesn't think he can win, he'll settle for the ALP not…

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

How the Murdoch press works. Same commentator, different times. The first, when Bill Shorten was ALP leader talking about using government intervention to control electricity prices. The second, now, where private…

To this day I struggle with the idea that even Lithgow falls over itself to vote for the National Party. It's testament to the skill of the State LNP in rorting targeted grants that the impression is given that the Nats…

Lismore received no flood mitigation funding from the federal government prior to these floods. A quick scan of the electorate explains it. It’s the only Labor-voting town in a Nationals seat. That little patch of red…

I should apologise to my friends in advance that I won’t be taking part in ‘normal’ social life until Covid is at some sort of manageable level in the community. I’m not being part of the political attempt to wish Covid…

NSW was averaging 10,000 cases a day, before the masks came off. Already ludicrously high. Now on the rise again. 10,000+ people being infected a day means a community is very sick, and there are in reality many more,…

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…

I won't only talk about Covid, but it's kinda the issue threatening us all. 20-30,000 cases per day projected for NSW within weeks. The NSW Government response? Nothing. They say it's our fault, the community, we've…

It looks a good idea at face value. But it isn’t. Even the insurance industry told them not to do it. As always with this government, it’s looking to offload the problem onto us, as individuals, with our insurance. What…

The NSW Government hasn’t listened to NSW Health for months. So at this stage, remembering it’s your life and your health, and those of your friends and loved ones, do you: - trust NSW Health, or - trust a NSW Cabinet…

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…

You can see why some say Australia could be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st and 22nd centuries. Phenomenal amounts of flat, sunny land, basically a whole continent. Just need to get rid of the current dickheads in charge,…

"“The so-called shadow lockdown was very powerful, we believe, in constraining the omicron wave in January on top of the holiday period...if that had been in March, it could have been a lot worse.” Professor Jodie…

50% or more of parents are not vaccinating their kids against Covid. The same parents who are happy for them to be infected at school. The same parents who ARE vaccinated, themselves. So they’re not anti-vaxers. What’s…

John Howard used to say fuel prices are political dynamite. At current prices many will go to the wall, not just directly through the cost of buying fuel, but through the costs passed all the way down the supply chain.…

The people who argued here last year and the year before that Covid wouldn't be a problem in schools are now deafening in their silence. Cowards, immoral bastards. What's the government's plan here? You can guess, the…

Queanbeyan High School, which had adopted some remote learning again because of mass infections amongst staff and students, has apparently now been given a directive from the NSW Government to resume normal operations.…

I wish the election would hurry up and get here. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/education-minister-blames-dud-teachers-for-declining-education-results-20220317-p5a5k6.html

An expert on money says what I always say here about it. It’s worth - nothing. The idea a government for example needs to be able to ‘pay for’ its promises, by having enough money, is nonsense. Government makes the…

Covid update. A quick rule-of-thumb, take whatever the government says, and believe the opposite.…

I suspect Steven Marshall is just the first politician about to discover that the Australian public don’t see the role of a leader as deliberately infecting them all with a lethal virus.

An important thing to look out for when you’re doing RATs. As our immunity grows through vaccination and infection, we’re starting to get Covid symptoms much earlier than we did before. Previously people often had Covid…

Data from the US says not even 3 doses is going to be enough. The government, as always, saying nothing, with the Australian winter bearing down on us. 83% effective up to 2 months, down to only 31% effective after 5…

What a tangled web we weave...that's Kimberley Kitching, on the left. Apparently was a friend of Andrew Bolt for 10 years, and allegedly had an affair with him. Bolt has been in the frontline of beating up the story…

Only took the two weeks since the floods for the NSW Government to remove requirements that floods be considered when approving new land for housing development. The State is run by developers, publicans and gambling…

Roy Morgan research on Australia's least trusted politicians also points to an upcoming rout. In my experience the group still clinging desperately to the bloated corpse is young men.

You know things are going badly when Liberal politicians don't even include Liberal Party logos on their election advertising. This is now common. The brand is toxic.

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…

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

Try buying a car right now, supply can be months away. Sometimes several years. Just one of many things in the ‘Economy’ grinding to a halt. The fact things are functioning at all globally is largely down to China’s…

Really good article about regional roads. While federal governments give away hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, to people who don’t need them, basic infrastructure in every town in Australia is falling apart.…

From next year taxes are raised on low and middle income earners, and slashed for high income earners. So throw the low and middle folk a cash bone just before the election and hope they’ll vote you in, and then get…

Politicians asked us to look at hospitalisations and deaths. Both have been trending up all week. I looked, did you? How many are all aboard the bullshit train?

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…

It's really not rocket science. Peoples' wages have been rock-bottom for years because they no longer have any bargaining power. All that supply and demand rubbish is...rubbish. The government's plan to get your wages…

This is the bit pre-elections I reckon we need to learn from. The ‘caretaker period’. When there are no politicains ‘running the country’, and the country continues just fine. That’s because politicians don’t run the…

Voting. People assume I’m sure that I hate the LNP. That’s not the case, my objection to the current LNP is that it isn’t a political party at all, it was captured by vested interests. That’s why many of its most…

The story across the developed world. Retirees are wealthier than people raising families. They’re the wealthiest group in society. (People really don’t think about how perverse that is.) People don’t have kids because…

It's believed Ryan had Covid in February. And of course there was Shane Warne. This is the mess we're now in, we may never know how many of these are directly linked to Covid infection. But Covid is well known to cause…

There are so many aspects to assessing Covid risk. (The government considers almost none of them.) I'm 54 this year, so this shapes my own assessment. Vaccine-boosted people ages 50 to 64 are more than 10 times more…

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,…

Please don't be surprised that the politicians who told us to live with Covid, also hold these views. Society is returning to feudal times. Peasants were allowed to get the Black Death, and die. There were always more…

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…

Have to wonder if the feds are regretting trash-talking Victoria throughout the pandemic. And Queensland. And WA. Anywhere there was a Labor government.

That last row breaks up all voters for the coming election by age group. If you want a sense of an ageing population have a look at that enormous voting bloc aged 70 and over. Twice the size of the next biggest voting…

The Chinese are experimenting with so many interesting things, it’s such a shame we can’t learn from them because of the resurgence of yellow peril politics. This is Chengdu, a city committed to using green space for a…

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

For those sceptical of the ageing population and what it means for elections, the average age of a voter in Australia is 50. And look at how the older you get, the more you tend to vote conservative. Australia has been…

Here are current trends in hospitalisations. Because you won't see them much reported. Remembering this is the metric the government asked us to focus on.

"More than half of Aussies who took out a new home loan with one of the major banks lied about their circumstances on the advice of their banker to make sure their loan was approved, shocking new research has revealed."…

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…

I strongly encourage anybody who has contracted Covid in some way via a school, including your kids being infected, to register your interest with this class action. Won't cost you a cent, the litigation firm does all…

“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…

Everyone eats their greens in Beaver households. (Don’t they have remarkable ‘hands’.)

No need to say ‘eat your greens’ to a beaver. (Love their ‘hands’.)

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

I was listening to Peter Doherty on the way home today. The Australian Nobel Prize winner in immunology. He was a bit lost for words at what Australia is doing with Covid, more than 5000 dead since Christmas, nearly 6…

The 'fog of war'. That's literally where we now are, where trusted institutions have to compete with every opinionated halfwit online 'doing their own research'. As Steve Bannon always advises, one of Trump's minions,…

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

The government spinning this as ‘you need us to manage these difficult economic times’. (Which they created.) Like asking rapists to be gynaecologists.

If you're carrying a lot of debt, here's your how to vote card.

Several major banks have already passed on the full interest rate rise to mortgage holders. But haven’t passed it on to those with savings accounts. Banks are bastards. The Royal Commission was supposed to stop that. It…

I mention it. The times we live in, that this isn't even an issue in the election campaign, and for most people I talk to. The world is completely stark raving mad.

Maybe it’s an optical illusion, but ‘taking personal responsibility’ for Covid, the government’s Covid strategy, sure looks the same as ‘doing nothing at all about Covid’.

Yesterday the PM called basic checks and balances on political power 'public autocracy'. He's been running the (Trump) line that once somebody is elected, they have a 'mandate' to do anything they like. This is what…

People vote for this.

Both the US and UK are prey to destructive libertarian (‘freedom’) politics. I reckon the way they’re structured helps explain why. If you look at the electoral regions in both the UK and US, there are so many of them.…

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…

Worldwide children are experiencing a surge in hepatitis cases, some needing liver transplants, and some dying. It’s extraordinary watching the frantic attempt by Covid minimisers to deny Covid is responsible. The…

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

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,…

If politicians had to pass even the basic due diligence you need at a job interview, many would be unemployed. Who remembers Pauline snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef, to prove it isn’t damaged by climate change?…

Like Pauline, Clive claims to be independent. But he's really a Liberal, Pauline even began as one. Clive's function is to vacuum up all the angry people who want to vote 'against the system', and deliver them to the…

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

Prince Charles opening the UK parliament, describing Boris Johnson's cost of living 'levelling up' plan, from a gold throne. 'Levelling up' means they're not going to make obscenely rich people poorer, they're going to…

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

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

Childcare is an election issue. If you want to know why it got so astronomically expensive, it's always the same reason. It was privatised, as with aged care. Because the private sector is always more 'efficient' (at…

I know I'm mostly talking to myself, but when we launched 'living with the virus', did we think that meant it becoming the leading cause of death in Australia? Not one politician mentions it, they want us to pretend…

Most jobs aren’t about producing things. Most jobs are pointless, society produces so much already that there’s very little need for many of us to work. A job is the way those with most of society’s wealth ration it out…

Democracy is not, and never has been, ‘majority rules’. That lie is what’s used to justify killing over 200 people per week right now.

Chinese ship the S.S. Election seen off the West coast.

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…

Where empty-nesters are encouraged to sell up their big, expensive homes, and then buy the small, less expensive homes that first homebuyers are trying to buy. Banking the several hundreds of thousands in change in a…

Let’s hope all the One Nation voters in Hawke use these.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal is the body that reviews government decisions. Under the current government, 40% of its members are now politically appointed. The government is now reviewing its own decisions. Just…

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

There’s no greater threat to Australia as we know it than the relentless attack by libertarians, mostly from the US, on how we live. They do it mostly through social medial, it’s a global brainwashing and propaganda…

Have a read so you can laugh every time somebody says the answer to get housing prices down, is to build more houses. Another prime example of political lobbying becoming a slogan, becoming 'common sense', becoming…

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

Michelle is one of the most experienced political journalists still working in Australia. She sees the insanity of where we currently are, because she lived through times that weren’t so completely bonkers.

The phone of a nurse working at one Melbourne hospital. If you’re out socialising like there’s no tomorrow, taking no Covid precautions, you and our governments are the reason nurses and others are drowning in sick…

Latest polling suggests the election could go right down to the wire. Unbelievable, as it was last time, that such lethal incompetence as the current government is currently even in the ballpark to win. It will be a…

The Prime Minister is relentlessly flogging his ‘getting government out of peoples’ lives’ libertarian shtick. This is the cancer eating away at the US and UK, destroying them. What libertarians can’t understand is that…

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…

People who’ve had Covid may have damaged immune systems, their T cells compromised. (What HIV does to you, that causes AIDS.) So instead of getting immunity, as the politicians say, their immune system becomes…

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

Another Liberal telling people how it is. Tells you this isn't about party loyalties, it's about basic competence and corruption.…

There’s one simple logic to all elections I think. It’s not about personalities, or even about policies. We live in a representative democracy. We delegate problems to our representatives to solve. We don’t want to deal…

I’m guessing no matter what else happens in the election today, Calare will get another term of Nationals doing nothing for Lithgow. Look at the latest NBN upgrades, as with the original rollout, Lithgow isn’t even on…

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…

At this stage, there’s no more LNP government. Just not clear what it will be instead, most likely a huge Labor-friendly cross bench, that will push the Labour decisions in directions that should be superb for the…

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.…

A weekend of political Ratsak. Clearing out the vermin.

One sneaky word that needs to be banished from Australia is the idea of a political ‘base’. US attack politics, noxious rubbish. As if a politician has a special group of people they relate to and look after specially,…

The ALP has hit 76. Majority government.

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…

Two bits of Australian political trivia. 1) The ALP is called the 'natural party of government' in Australia, because it's the only party who's ever won government alone. It's only ever been defeated by coalitions of…

It costs about $400 million to run a federal election. This one might crack $500 million.

Listening to an ex-head of the Commonwealth Department of Health on the way home, absolutely scathing about the outgoing government’s ’Covid denialism’. Almost nothing is being done, and infections and deaths are at…

A public service announcement. Because the NSW Government certainly won't tell you.

I think most of what we call Left v Right politics is really: - young vs old (we live in ageing populations) - urban v regional. As just one example. Guns in America. Mostly a battle of rural America v urban America.

Months ago I predicted a wipeout for the LNP in the federal election. They’ve now had the worst election result since they were formed. I don’t often loop back on my predictions in a told you so way, but here we are. I…

The bigger you make your roads, the more traffic you’ll get. Traffic breeds traffic. No government understands this. Most motorists don’t get it either.

Jon again, talking about our moral collapse, with Covid. About the widespread collapse of common decency. For all of us, not just politicians.

Here’s a story which I promise gets more interesting as it goes along. The ratio of tax paid to GDP in a country. (Stay with me!) GDP is a measure of how much wealth a country produces, usually in a year. Australia’s…

As power prices skyrocket, and everything else shoots up in price too, I hope people remember all of this is due to 10 years of total neglect by the now-gone federal government. Absolutely asleep at the wheel, for…

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…

Australia organises itself around the idea of community. It doesn’t really think much about it (which is a threat I think, we could lose it), it just does it. Other countries use territory and class and rank etc. to…

What’s going on in schools and hospitals is a national emergency. It’s hard to know how this all ends, we’re not the country we once were. This is the result of decades of gutting public services and institutions in…

Edward and the others in the Royal Box not really digging the new political Duran Duran lyrics.

Everybody is being urged to get the whole family vaccinated against flu (a very good idea). Meanwhile, childhood vaccinations against Covid stalled months ago with fewer than 50% of kids vaccinated. When the NSW…

8 months into 'living with Covid', hundreds still dying every week. 21 just today, in NSW. How many more months of this do people need to call BS? Do they know that NSW Health has asked for compulsory indoor masks and…

What a joke. They're not even serious, it's politics, not a serious proposal, the reactors they're talking about aren't even available or tested. To think the clowns in the LNP drove Australia's world-leading solar…

And yet…still nothing changes. No comment and certainly no action from government. Deliberate suppression of any mention of Covid at all, every day. Meantime the public takes little to no responsibility at all either,…

My kids are resilient, I’m proud of that. None of the drama queen anxiety at every tiny hurdle in life’s journey, that is popular now. But even they’re getting tired of having limited social options with the ongoing…

‘Base load’ power does NOT mean ‘a base amount of energy needed to keep society running’. That’s politicians using slogans to change the facts. Base load power is the amount of power we all need to USE, to prevent…

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…

'Private industry is more efficient than government' is one of those empty, meaningless slogans designed for numpties who want to avoid thinking about anything. We're living that lie right now, with electricity.…

Another example of how Australia just slept through a disastrous 10 years, under the previous government. We're seriously on track to becoming a third world country.…

What the pretty pictures mean is: 1) people infected with Omicron get reinfected with Omicron, it doesn't make them immune 2) even with vaccination, infection 'dampens' the immune system i.e. stops it responding to the…

My favourite take on the current energy crisis is "this is why we need more coal-fired power stations". Like the ones currently falling apart and costing a fortune to run, which no business will touch with a stick. A…

I discovered in the pandemic that quite a few of my friends have political beliefs straight out of the libertarian ‘freedom’ politics of the US and UK. I also discovered quite a few have been investing in…

Orwell often said politics is mostly about language. One of my favourites is one the boy racers of the world use, to argue against speed limits, ‘drive to the conditions’. What it really means is ‘we should be allowed…

Over 1300 people have died of Covid in Australia since the election. In 4 weeks.

I know, more Covid. But people are not being told these things. I've been saying for 2 years we must eliminate this virus circulating in our community. Do not believe people who say it can't be done, they're…

It seems to me the common story people in Australia would tell about the pandemic is ‘we locked down for 2 years, then we opened up to live with the virus’. The ABS is here to help. If you look at all of the lockdowns…

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…

Ah Peter Collignon, one of the previous government's go-to experts on Covid. You can see why.

I’ll use Lithgow as an example. The idea that Covid will become ‘endemic’. The term was first used to describe out of control disease in poor countries, that we couldn’t be bothered helping. Just as we often say crime…

Australia and electricity. Remove heads from anuses with a loud satisfying pop, and have a look. This is AEMO data, the regulator. - 100% of our electricity needs, Australia-wide, will be met by renewables at times…

Don’t you love NSW Government spin, ‘temporarily non-operational’. Meaning ‘the State is so infested with Covid we can’t operate.’ You have virtually zero protection from these new strains if you’ve been infected…

Another ripper from AEMO. Have a look how fast coal disappears from the energy mix, only a handful of years away. And also important is the massive *increase* in energy we’ll then have available, over the next 50 years.…

If you think the world is divided between ‘planned’ economies, like China, and the ‘market economies’ like us where supply and demand and individual consumers in the ‘marketplace’ drive things, have a read of this…

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…

When politicians ‘opened up’ to Covid, vaccinations stopped. Stone dead. And less than half of us went to get a free flu shot since then. And now stories like this. People are not seeing the bigger picture here I don’t…

We may be about to have two pandemics operating at the same time. Covid and monkeypox. I know people desperately want to believe Covid is over, but that’s political spin. If you think several hundred people dying every…

All these kids are clinically vulnerable to Covid, having diabetes. Not one mask in sight. With the Health Minister, no less.

NSW Health has never stopped asking people to wear masks inside. Politicians have said we don’t have to. About 99% of people are listening to the politicians, and about 1% to NSW Health. If you’re not wearing a mask,…

Kerry Chant today: “We need to act now to slow the spread of the virus in the community.” The government reply: “No.”

NSW Health has been saying this for months. No government backing, so the Chief Health Officer is reduced to begging us all to do it. Ridiculous, and not working, I barely see a single person in a mask every day. And…

"The Queensland government is warning of an escalation in the number of health and hospital staff unable to work due to COVID in the midst of the state's growing COVID-19 wave." Look at their response. Same as ours.…

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…

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.…

I promised to talk about chickens. This isn’t a chicken doing the splits, it’s a chicken with Marek’s DIsease. A type of herpes virus. It’s deadly to pretty much any chicken who catches it. I’m telling this story…

Booked in for my 4th vaccine shot this afternoon. If you're over 30, just do it. The government and business will do not one other thing to protect you, it's up to you now.

The Victorian Chief Health Officer told the Victorian government to mandate masks in places like childcare and shops. The Victorian government said no. Why? They're 'empowering' people to do it themselves. They actually…

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…

FINALLY journalists are seeing it, but way too late. Infecting an entire population and hoping you have enough hospital beds is not a public health strategy, it’s a public disease strategy. I still don’t think people…

When you 'get government out of peoples' lives', business moves in instead. You don't get to elect which businesses.

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…

Politics has always been a battle between working people (nearly everybody), and a tiny financial elite. When working people get screwed very badly, it's very dangerous for the elites, who remember things like the…

8-9 months of prolonged slaughter, and climbing even faster now again. None of this is making Covid go away. When do people and politicians say 'hey, we have this wrong, we've stuffed up'?

"The planet’s had enough of our shit, so it’s decided to kill us. Some will burn, some will drown, and most will starve. Enough people have woken up to that now that denying it for the sake of a few backhanders from the…

Politicians will have fun persuading people to ignore this pandemic, with pus-filled lesions on their faces and genitals. Takes some doing, to have 2 pandemics running in parallel.

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…

“There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot intercept the signs of a loved person without proceeding from worlds that have not waited for us to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which…

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

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

That 'minimum demand' note on the graph is another way to counter the myths of 'baseload power'. Australia is swimming in home-grown electricity, growing exponentially, and at that minimum point the grid itself will…

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…

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

A second booster reduces your chance of dying of Covid by 75% or more, if you’re 50+. I know some who haven’t even had the 3rd shot, let alone the 4th. Because the previous government told them 2 shots was ‘fully…

Maybe fewer novelty cheques coming Lithgow's way in future. Not before time.…

I see a lot of people trash the Greens. But I'd be interested what arguments people could muster against their current idea of making multinational gas companies, currently taking all of our gas for almost nothing and…

The side of politics which refuses to wear a mask in parliament now berating others who don't wear a tie.

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.…

This is such a brilliant article about how the UK is literally falling apart. All because of simple political beliefs of the ruling party that are just empirically wrong. The same beliefs the ex-government here had and…

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…

Yep. All because of an insane set of political beliefs that ‘privatise’ society. Insurance is as ‘capitalist’ as the day is long. It collapses in a privatised society. Disasters are empirical proof that these beliefs…

Anti-vax roid rage. This anti-vaxer apparently stopped a car carrying a doctor who administered Covid vaccines, and this is what he did. The bodybuilding community is a hotbed of ‘natural health’ numpties (this guy is…

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…

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

Paul Keating recently described the UK as ‘an old theme park sliding into the Atlantic’. That’s genius wit. As is this video, watch and ponder that the NSW and previous federal governments here copied everything the UK…

I like sharing the personal stories about Covid that are suppressed by politicians.

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…

Hey @[621123725:2048:Adam], LNP were blocking it then, and they're still blocking it now.…

When governments genuinely want individuals to manage things, like their choice of bank or energy retailer, they give them online tools with lots of information to help them compare the best deals. With Covid they…

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

Here's a way to think about Queens and Kings, in the time of Covid and climate change. The Queen reigned for 70 years, and we know almost nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her personal opinions or beliefs.…

Because the NSW Government is more likely to open a casino than give you Covid information, here are the two key documents if you have Covid or somebody close to you does. Some of this information may save your life. If…

Huge news. This gas field is enormous, 10 years ago it was a licence to make billions. Now our 2nd biggest energy company is pulling out without even starting it. Just as other companies sold coal-powered power stations…

Australia’s oldest man, who exercised every day and lived without smoking, drinking or gambling, has died at the age of 110, after contracting Covid-19. I'm sure the government would either say he should have been…

This is the Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia, USA. The only nuclear power plant the US currently has under construction. For those drunk on the hopium of nuclear power slogans from politicians, here's fun facts…

Lithgow is being left high and dry by having political representation at all 3 - local, State and federal - levels by a party that denies this emergency is even happening. That party’s own core constituency, farmers, is…

Politicians say ‘people are tired of Covid’. It’s not clear why, hardly anybody I know is doing anything about it at all. People are maybe tired of it still being here, but that’s because governments and businesses are…

Very few people I know still wear masks or pay any attention to Covid, amazingly putting their health, that of their families and friends in the hands of politicians, who they wouldn’t trust normally to buy them a bag…

Because governments now suppress this information to once per week, here's this week, in NSW. 69 people died last week, if you missed that one. 82 this week. Worse than last week. On the same day the NSW Premier will…

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me.…

Brendan is one of the leading pandemic authorities in the world. We need to listen a lot more to people like him. He’s 100% right that ‘Australians think it’s over’. And they think it’s over mostly because the previous…

We need to get rid of elections. There’s a huge list of basic jobs any community needs to get done, none of which are controversial. Right now though they don’t get done unless somebody can make it popular to do them.…

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…

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,…

Because government dumped responsibility for Covid on you and me, as 'personal responsibility', this will help you assess risk for hospitalisation and death. Note it doesn't assess any of the dangers of long-term…

When you fly somewhere, do you and all the other passengers vote for what the pilot should be doing at each stage of the flight? No? So why do we elect leaders of complex societies, who have a much more complicated job…

Notice politicians saying our only Covid threat is new variants? You'll never exhaust the way these bastards are lying to make us pretend it's all over. Have a look at the variant mapping. They just stopped naming the…

These are neutralisation assays, tests done to show how our antibodies (the main part of our immune systems that fight infection) respond to different viruses. These are people who have had 3 doses of vaccine, and a…

All grandstanding for the NSW election. I doubt this project will ever happen.

“The basic problem with government budgets is that they are still framed around the idea that surpluses are good, and deficits are bad, which is ridiculous. Governments are not companies making profits and losses,…

From the government who tears up planning controls so people can build on floodplains, we now get politicians deciding to remove concrete and steel from major projects, saying engineers are overdoing it. It reminds me…

This is why I think the NDIS will not only ultimately fail, it may in fact consume our entire democracy and sink it. A big caveat upfront, I’m a huge fan of the NDIS and what it represents. But I think we’ve introduced…

Here in the West we create cartoon-like caricatures of China. For example we say their Covid policy is a fantasy. But that fantasy is all that’s keeping any of our lives going. China is the world’s factory, one of the…

Today's trivia question. Not a hard one, unless you're a politician, employer or an economist i.e. an idiot.

Even Channel 9 starting to register the disaster. Don't wait for these stories to act, your life actually depends on it. Politicians will do nothing to protect you. https://twitter.com/i/status/1587353399141584900

Australia is swimming in solar-generated energy from our own rooftops. More than twice what any other country produces, per person. The big jump in electricity prices is caused by the previous government not building…

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…

“Infecting an entire generation is irresponsible. We don’t yet know what this infection does to children’s immune systems when it occurs repeatedly.” Karl Lauterbach, Minister for Health, Germany.

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…

Covid cases up 45% in NSW this week. Testing of course way down after the government stopped requiring it, so that’s cases up 45% even with reduced testing. The test positivity rate is a measure of how many positives…

What struck me again in the middle of the Bathurst floods yesterday is how destructive ‘the economy’ is. A sensible society would have looked at that river yesterday and said ‘I think people should take a day off, this…

Being in the middle of the flood activity, I can tell you who’s fixing it. Engineers. I can tell you who isn’t - politicians. We have this bizarre idea that politicians ‘run’ towns, States and countries. They don’t,…

Again, this is what happens when politicians actually try to run countries. (This is UK data.) People end up dead. Lots of people. Or injured for life. It also destroys the beloved economy, that big adult fairy tale. We…

'Living with the virus' is an idiot idea concocted mostly by male politicians and business leaders, whose wives and staff do all the actual work in society. They don't have a clue about any of it.

NSW Health has never stopped telling us to wear masks and avoid crowds. That’s never stopped being the medical advice. Bizarrely, people are basing their own health and that of their family and friends on the advice of…

We’re told that getting Covid repeatedly will give us ‘hybrid immunity’. It’s just another political lie. Have a look at what repeated infections does.

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.

Multiple great things in here that the title of the article won’t lead you to. The most bizarre belief that decades of a certain politics now makes common is that regulation is restriction, or even oppression. That’s…

There's an election in Victoria this weekend. It will have zero impact on Covid, where all sides agree to just keep infecting and killing thousands, and calling it 'going back to normal'. You can't vote your way out of…

Have decided on a Tesla Powerwall. It will likely never fully pay for itself at current prices (though I nabbed one before the recent price hike), but with electricity prices projected to rise by as much as 80% next…

I want to use aged care as an example of how political slogans actually kill people. Was having a conversation with a healthcare worker (HCW) who works in aged care. We all know Covid has gone on a killing spree in aged…

We got rid of our private health insurance a few years ago now, except for extras. The whole system is corrupt and just shovels wheelbarrows of money from the taxpayer into private hospitals and specialists' pockets.…

The Novavax Covid vaccine was slow to arrive in Australia, but it seems to outperform all of the other vaccines by a long margin. I posted this week how the efficacy of the AZ and Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, which most of…

Marvellous what an election in March can do.

Amazing numbers of Australians haven’t vaccinated their kids against Covid. Politicians told them the disease is ‘mild’ in children. I’m glad my kids are in the right-hand far column, and not the left.

It'll be interesting whether modern confessional 'look at poor me' victim politics swings support behind them. I doubt it, I think they'll be despised in the UK at least for the rest of their lives.…

Why Australia should already be by far the richest country in the world per person, but isn't. See that tiny proportion of world oil production that Norway has? It turned that into a sovereign wealth fund worth about $2…

There are only 2 real meaningful ways to lower your power bills. One is to renationalise energy, as a basic of human life. All politicians are too stupid and gutless to do that. The other is generate your own power. Our…

The NSW Government reported this week that the Covid wave has peaked, because hospital numbers have levelled off. Hospital admissions for Covid are up 11% this week. It's one more lie to add to the collection. I'm…

Last solar post, just as a comparison. Cloud gone, so system close to full generation. Over 9kW going back to the grid, so could run another 3 houses just off the surplus. (That 1.7 kW still the washing machine and…

A few people asked me to say a bit more about home batteries. I’ll talk about the Tesla Powerwall 2, because it’s what we have, but there are multiple brands out there now. But the Powerwall is probably still the best…

A new twist on batteries today. One big government announcement, and one change coming. Both will have a profound impact on the decision whether or not to own a battery. Today the government announced the building of 8…

This is such an exciting, revolutionary achievement, and spoiled in Australia by years of spin by politicians in the pockets of energy companies. I don’t think people have really registered yet what it will mean to be…

A friend who’s a public health professional, who lost his own daughter to Covid, compiled this chart to show how every time we remove protections, people get sick and die. Our politicians call those protections…

Notice politicians don’t deliver the ‘please don’t kill members of your family over Christmas’ message. Because they’re gutless arseholes. It will also mean most people won’t hear or will ignore the message.

Because politicians are doing everything they can to suppress information and data about Covid, I post updates on local cases occasionally, so people can see what’s really happening. Lithgow Hospital again restricting…

If you know governance and politics, this has been evident since the beginning of the pandemic. NSW’s strategy is not based on public health advice, it’s based on trying to keep the economy open. That approach has…

This is the sort of expertise that governments have refused to use in the pandemic, preferring to medicalise it. Meaning preferring to allow people to become infected, and then shoving them in hospital. The health…

“Wayne Errington and I discovered that early on members of federal cabinet were arguing for a Donald Trump style laissez-faire approach to the virus.” Governance is my job. People think I have a personal gripe with…

Follow up to my post a few days ago, wondering if the lack of stories about victims of Covid is political strategy to prevent peoples’ anger at the public health fuck-up in many counties. That’s exactly what’s going on,…

The Brits going where not even the Americans will go. They may still destroy the vaccines for everybody by doing this. What happens when you vote for people who think we live in an Economy and not a society.

Zoë is an international expert on Covid in schools. Remember ‘schools are safe’? Only where there’s no community transmission of the virus. If there is, they act as superspreading sites. In the UK the government is…

I’d recommend everybody read this short piece from Raina Macintyre about how public health action was fatally sabotaged in this pandemic. Worldwide. A vast range of expertise was needed, politicians and their backers…

I think we need wide education in political language, the Greeks called it ‘rhetoric’, it was a cornerstone of their education. For example yesterday the acting Premier was asked about risks to regional NSW from Sydney…

At least the US parliament was open. Do Australians remember that our own PM closed parliament completely for much of 2020, and a hand-picked committee of gas industry cronies decided Australia’s post-Covid future? The…

One of our elected LNP representatives. Apparently 40% of Australians would vote for Trump. Maybe some positivity would fix it.

“...to be perfectly frank at the moment I really want the community focused on achieving no community transmission," Dr Chant said. Meanwhile the Treasurer opines about masks, an area in which he has zero expertise.…

I’ve said a lot here that ScoMo is Trump-lite. People think I just have it out for him. He’s the only serious world leader who hasn’t condemned the coup attempt in Washington. His cabinet and backbench are in the news…

Parler is an extremist social media group, where Trump went when Twitter banned him. Matt Canavan is a federal LNP Senator. How much evidence will it take for Australians to recognise that they haven’t elected a…

People understand that our climate change policy is purely about keeping the Coalition from breaking. If they take that same perspective to NSW for Covid now, they’ll see the same thing. NSW’s Covid strategy is designed…

Short piece from the Lancet today which every person in NSW could learn something from. Confirming again that when you get a rise in Covid infections, you must smash them immediately. Not ‘live with’ them. And that…

The seduction of numbers. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have higher efficacy numbers of more than 90%. But those numbers are based on laboratory-based trials, not on real-world conditions of vaccination. This is where…

One of the first rules of political strategy is, if you want to do something unpopular, do something else that looks unrelated, but will achieve the same thing. The federal LNP despise superannuation, just as they do…

George has just had a bad case of Covid himself, which his daughter brought home from primary school. George looks for a pandemic plan, but Economy governments never had one. Ask somebody to show you Australia’s…

Once again the men in the NSW Cabinet on the take from big industries like tourism, gambling, booze and real estate, are desperate to smash the public health restrictions open. Restrictions should be under the control…

ScoMo and his government did this with RoboDebt. Nobody in trouble over it, nobody even really said sorry. And their popularity has gone up, showing Australians’ understanding of politics is 3-word slogans.

See and smell the fear. Trying to overthrow your own government with violence will get you sent to prison, who knew. Well, smart people knew.

Did you know the trials on the vaccines didn’t meaningfully test for either reduction in serious disease, or immunity? They may do both of those things, but it’s likely an enormous amount of guesswork and prayer is…

Hands up if you still think 'the economy' is a thing, separate to the people?…

Some very smart people jumped on the anti-lockdown wagon last year. I thought they might have done a bit of checking and found out there is no such thing as a 'lockdown' in public health, it's a political term invented…

I want him to do so well. Farewell to the pig he replaces. But to me, our populist times focus on leaders to our own peril. Obama was a much more capable man than Biden, and his 8 years led to Trump. In a democracy who…

Politics isn’t Left vs Right. It’s Church vs State, a brutal battle going on for centuries and continuing today. Also not judging which ‘side’ should win, the Church built our civilisation, in many ways it knows what…

Try as they might, the NSW Government cannot get higher testing numbers in W and SW Sydney. (Note this is actually a daily testing figure of only about 11,000, 6,000 are carried forward from yesterday.) There are all…

This is exactly what the Democrats should do. Progressive politics is far too nice.

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…

Christian Drosten is Germany’s leading pandemic adviser. Governments who started the pandemic saying ‘only a vaccine can end it’ (a lie), will now also vandalise the vaccine rollouts. Already happening in the UK. You…

The government vaccination ad campaign seems badly conceived. Featuring prominent talking heads who are just the sorts of people anti-vaxxers don't like. At the same time members of the same government fill the airwaves…

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…

The super casual approach many Australians are taking to Covid is disturbing. People happily organising and attending social gatherings with little protection, just because the government says it’s ok. The UK government…

Australia’s 2 greatest enemies in this pandemic are the federal LNP and NSW government. Both have spent the whole pandemic trying to force Australia to use the UK approach to the virus. Both have taken credit for…

It’s fascinating that on the one hand, travelling (crossing borders) is a global passion. But on the other hand easily the most powerful politics of our time is stopping people crossing borders, internally and…

How do those who support the NSW Government and Gladys possibly justify that only 1% of the $177 million of bushfire relief money went to Labor electorates? And that the Blue Mountains electorate (Labor), that had the…

The ad has 'crossed a line', the government says. Heh, this from the people who used a pandemic to smash working conditions and wages, give tens of billions in tax cuts to the wealthy, and free access to the Treasury to…

Still think this will be the big shitfight. Politicians have been keen to tell people vaccines will end the pandemic. That’s very unlikely, all the same social distancing and masks etc. will need to continue. Rich…

Australia's greatest Covid risk is hotel quarantine. To say it again, who is responsible for quarantine in Australia? The federal government. Why are States doing it, through hotels? Because ScoMo is too lazy to do it.…

Liberal Party logo on this announcement? Insiders say an early election is planned, capitalising on the pandemic. Just as they used the pandemic to run toxic policies through. They disgust me. (Incidentally there’s been…

Economics looks dry and boring, because it's designed to, to make you not pay attention. Look at this train wreck coming, hidden in a graph. At the moment that big dip down to about -15 is the government spending to…

The reason the PM is reluctant to act against the likes of Craig Kelly is that he hoovers up all the Trumpians here in Australia, to vote for the LNP. That vote is significant, otherwise the PM would just cut him loose.…

The average working person's wages and conditions have been decimated for decades (mostly because they stopped joining unions). Private debt creates an illusion that people are well-off. Now you may be forced to sell…

A lot of my working life has been about running meetings. If you didn’t see this today, it’s a hoot. Also why I don’t bash pollies, ordinary people are mostly pretty incapable of working together on anything. And they…

See how desperate the LNP are to destroy super? First they let you raid it in the pandemic, rather than them give you money. Then they suggested first homebuyers use it to buy a house. Now they’re gradually replacing…

Gotta wonder how farmers feel about their party spending most of its time trying to further the interests of multi-national mining companies. It’s probably why they’re now voting for the Shooters and Fishers.

Straya! And the people who brought you all this are *gaining* in popularity with voters. Which means, basically, that as voters you and I are stoopid. (And, to be fair, it means we have an old society that doesn't…

I wonder if Australians will join the dots to figure out why we don’t make the top tier as a democracy? NZ does.

Here's the distribution of federal government grants since 2013. Does there come a point when diehard LNP people look at what's left of their party, and wonder when corruption became the main policy?

NSW about to rollout 'Dine and Discover', free vouchers for food and entertainment. To prime the economy. This is Rishi Sunak, Treasurer to the UK, who rolled out 'Eat out to Help Out' in the UK, similar scheme, last…

Brendan Murphy, main adviser to government at the start of the pandemic, in March 2020. The Brits started the pandemic saying they’d just let everybody get infected with a lethal virus, to make them immune. They were an…

Grants finally being exposed as the biggest mechanism of outright corruption in politics. Please people, corruption matters. If it doesn't matter to you, go and live under Trump in the US. Or Bolsonaro in Brazil.…

Did you notice last year governments pegged public sector wage rises to private sector pay rises? Sold it as fairness, but the numbers tell the story. Private sector wages have been going backwards for years, was just…

Notice the pile-on on Victoria in this pandemic, orchestrated by the PM and his ministers? He’s a marketing man, a genius at misdirection. He does it to distract people from noticing that quarantine is his…

The PM. Notice what he’s saying here? Same as Boris. Vaccinate the high risk groups, then let the virus rip. It would be a disaster. This is not like other viruses in the community, it’s a vascular disease that can kill…

Very soon you'll be given vouchers to use in restaurants, cafes etc. The government will tell you it's about stimulus for a damaged dining and entertainment industry. It's nothing of the sort - they could give…

By the way people, you may notice if you try to share news from papers and other sources on FB now, it won’t appear in Australia. Due to the government’s battle on Rupert’s behalf to shut down Google and Facebook in…

It will irritate my rusted-on LNP voting friends no doubt, but the list of ways that party is destroying this country is growing to be very long. And no, I don't give a flying fig about the ALP either. I care about…

“The Andrews Government has made its position on keeping a bit of the virus around, ostensibly because it’s good for the economy, pretty clear. The medical experts here, without being too reductive, think that’s a…

Lots of criticism of FB for blocking a whole range of non-news sites as well. Because we’re too lazy to investigate anything, we miss that Rupert had specifically advised that the government’s social media legislation…

An age of extremes not just in politics. Extreme exercise and wellness techniques too. Hyper-vigilant minds trying to get ever more control over poor bodies. As if shaping your body according to the dictates of your…

The danger of ideas. Texas just had a massive winter storm, which cut off most essential services, including power. Many died. Some had to sit in their car, the only heater available. Many of them were then hospitalised…

"Mr Dutton, the Home Affairs Minister, admitted on Thursday “a mistake was made” in Scott Morrison’s office when the PM’s staff failed to pass on details of former staffer Brittany Higgins’ allegations." The staff, pigs…

Australians have amassed over $200 billion in savings during the pandemic. Global warming gases have plummeted. Crime has collapsed. Cities have their cleanest air in decades. Hundreds of thousands were lifted out of…

Beautiful graph, showing that the pandemic allowed hundreds of thousands of Australians to move out of poverty for the first time. About to be reversed, because the government and the many who support them think if you…

I struggle with the positivity/negativity people. Who look on at problems, and see them only as people being ‘negative’. No, they’re problems, not perceptions. I struggle even more with their retreat to the ‘positivity’…

If you were confused about the FB-government battles, this will help. If you weren't confused, this will also help, because you likely just swallowed more government spin (caution, toxic in large doses.)

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…

Such a democratic version. Used just about every key.

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…

Please don't understand me as some sort of men's rights activist. I have no time for any of the extremists in this debate. I'm a casuist, which is the most sophisticated method I think humans have come up with to deal…

"At the heart of this conflict is wages: The RBA wants to get them up, the government does not, because the Coalition holds to the outdated belief that higher wages cost jobs, because profits and investment get…

Here in Oz support for workers will be turned off this month. Meanwhile major corporations who rorted Job Keeper will be allowed to keep the money. Remember Pink Batts? We had a Royal Commission for that stimulus…

Modern conservatives keep winning elections because they're ruthless bastards who are always thinking strategically. (They're not really politicians - they're business groups disguised as politicians.) Progressive…

“Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics.”

In countries with voluntary voting, the main way parties win is by stopping people voting who will vote against them. Voter suppression. An art form in the US, but also in much of the rest of the world. Conservatives in…

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,…

Why don't we question what the 'culture' of an organisation even means? How people relate to each other? People are at work to work, that's how they relate to each other. A toxic organisation is one that can't do its…

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…

The less people understand politics and act meaningfully to change things, the more enraged and righteous their woke views become, I think. Less power in the real world produces more rigid and angry 'points of view',…

So fed up with this government. If the tourism industry and airlines are struggling, print some money and give it to them. Don’t encourage millions of Australians back into circulation with a pandemic still active, I…

There are around 278 Republicans in the US government. All of them voted for $1.9 trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy under Trump. All of them just voted against $1.9 trillion in relief payments to working…

I bet this proposal will be denied. I watch the UK news as much as the Oz news, and they tried a similar thing there. And failed. Modern conservative parties are business lobby groups in disguise. Their priority will…

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…

Smart man. Look at that laundry list of goodies. There's much more to add to that list too. Unions are much more than workplaces, they're the way the majority of ordinary people once had their interests represented in…

This is breathtaking, an era-defining essay. Read it and you'll read the script of our lives right now. Liberalism - the cult of individualism - first replaced society with the Economy. But it also produced what looks…

The #ReclaimTheseStreets vigil in the UK right now another example of how what looks like opposing sides in public debates are actually the same side. Stupidly risky to gather in these numbers in a pandemic, but woke…

I think whatever sphere of human life you look at, there is always a scale of value. A scale running from worst, to best. No matter how many say that they believe it's a glorious 'democracy' of individual taste, nobody…

Australia (and much of the developed world) had pretty much full employment for 30 years after the war. Then in the 1980s unemployment took off. At exactly the time the 'market' and the 'Economy' replaced 'society' in…

Here's some visual evidence of my claim that joining a union is a much more powerful thing for a woman to do, than march. The ALP is a party set up by unions, to represent ordinary working people (the majority of the…

Same pattern all over the world, growing quickly. People with no idea how to collectively organise a better world, brought up being told their feelings are what is important, simply gather in large numbers to express…

It's very common to see democracy as replacing hierarchy with a flat social structure where all are equal. That's not what it is or ever was. Hierarchies represent levels of expertise and knowledge and quality.…

Have been mentioning liberalism a bit lately. Ideas create societies, and liberalism largely created ours right now. And it's failing, and was always going to. Both what we call the 'Left' and 'Right' use this same…

Some interesting stats from the 2019 federal election in Australia, over a few posts. Firstly on gender. There is a trend over time to more women abandoning the LNP. It's not significant enough to change election…

Here are 2 graphs that should scare the pants off us. Over 41% of people were not satisfied with democracy at the 2019 election. Trust in government is plummeting. Look at that trend, that's the fast-track to Trumpland.…

In the Gods Must Be Crazy, we chuckle because a remote tribe attributes magical properties to a Coke bottle. But we do *exactly* the same thing with money. Money can be printed in any amount and given to people, and it…

This should be tremendous for the Economy. All of the houses developers built below the 100-year flood line in Western Sydney, after special deals from the NSW Government, and which are a big chunk of Australia's…

Notice the blissful (relative) quiet from the US, with Trump gone? He's a shining example of how modern populists function by throwing petrol on fake arguments every single day. Every single day, a new battle is started…

The international community understands better than we do what genius the Australian and NZ response to Covid is. That genius was our institutions, not our governments. Expertise. Under assault in the rest of the world,…

The LNP position on quotas is consistent with their belief in free markets. They believe talent will naturally rise to the top. Their record suggests this means there are no talented female LNP pollies, because they're…

Remember Gladys' rorting of local government grants? Then her rorting of bushfire relief grants? Total of about $500 million. Now there's Dine and Discover, another rort scheme, dressed up as Covid relief this time.…

Meanwhile in America, Republicans are already rigging the next election, by rushing through 253 voter suppression Bills in 43 States. This is how conservatives win modern elections, not by getting votes (not enough…

I've had a book of Ainslie Roberts' Dreamtime paintings for years, and they've always fascinated me. It seems for aboriginal people, the key is to have eternal ('everywhen') agencies at the root of your society. Imagine…

'Location, location'. What sort of society turns basic shelter into an opportunity to make money? Not only do we have no understanding of how to live in our landscapes, we parcel them up into blocks and sell them at…

After royally stuffing up the entire pandemic, the UK government has been trumpeting how it ‘leads the world’ with its wonderful vaccination effort. Actually all it’s doing is hogging all the vaccine for itself, ditto…

On the exact same day the government stopped paying between $375 and $600 a week to keep a working person employed under JobSeeker, it agrees to pay over $4,400 per week to keep one of its own MPs employed, despite him…

The genius of libertarians is to turn every issue into expression of individual feelings. All that think globally act locally rubbish, protests on whatever issue, all of it is designed to deflect and distract from the…

To keep the rusted-on LNP fans happy, here's a piece critical of Labor's decisions on privatisation. I thought Keating was a great politician, but economically he was also a neoliberal like all the modern twits. The…

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…

It costs up to 5 times as much to maintain ‘infrastructure’ over time than it costs to build it in the first place. Buildings, roads, sewers, pipes, parks etc. That funding is rarely forthcoming. Many local councils for…

An early John Howard. One of Howard's sneaky ideas was to drive wages down and smash unions, via vast numbers of migrant workers on slave wages. (The pandemic showed this very clearly, when suddenly these slaves were no…

ScoMo wanted to run the vaccine program as a lead-in to an early election, riding triumphantly to victory. Of course he completely stuffed it up. His only interest in the entire pandemic is how he can use it for his own…

Despite outrage in the recent protests, voting intentions for women have barely shifted. Despite demonstrated complete incompetence throughout the pandemic, ScoMo continues to lead in the polls, strongly. The only thing…

Next time you see people arguing, kissing, giving a speech, or whatever, try reframing it like this, I find it changes everything about how we see life. It's not them speaking and acting, it's ideas. Ideas about…

All through the pandemic people have whinged about National Cabinet arguing and fighting, saying 'can't they all work together'. We find disagreement and argument distasteful. But notice what it produced - one of the…

Have been driving a lot more during the pandemic. Nobody follows speed limits, almost without exception. We have average speed cameras in place for trucks, turn them on for cars. Our hyper-individualism doesn't even see…

To be blunt about the vaccines, and risk. - right now governments and experts alike are saying the risks are tiny. This is true, for nearly all of us (in fact the risks are zero for most). - but it's absolutely not true…

Surely all those protestors can't be wrong? "...a new survey by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age with research company Resolve Strategic, show that issues such as sexual harassment, assault and gender equity are…

ATAGI is the official scientific body that provides the vaccine advice to government. They've come out to make exactly the points I've been making in recent days, about the illegitimate use of risk in describing any…

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…

It's quite striking that domestic violence is much more likely in poor households. Poor women have to use police to solve these problems, the wealthy hire lawyers. Another dimension to why this is poorly understood as a…

Straya worships tradies. Tradies are in my family. But there's a reason you can mostly DIY your own plumbing, carpentry, painting etc., but that you can't DIY your own MRI, or commercial airliner, mobile phone or hip…

A scholar, courtesy of Rembrandt. Scholars are the tradies of ideas. Ideas are the literal building block of our lives and societies. Everything you do, think and feel is based on some idea. Unis now compete for…

See, 'in a million' kinda works, until what you're doing involves millions of people. Then you should really say "19 of you are going to die". (In fact it's now 32 dead, in the UK.) With vaccines available that don't…

A year ago debates abounded about 'living with the virus' (technically virus 'mitigation'), and eliminating it. Fans of the Economy argued then, and still do now, to live with the virus. They said the virus couldn't be…

Nails it, in every detail. NSW is the triumph of spin over substance that dominates federal government too.…

From today (actually I think from 17 May in NSW) people aged 50+ can get an AZ jab. Lots of expertise in the news this morning telling everybody this is a 'safe' vaccine, and that the 'benefits outweigh the risks'. Now…

Pandemics reboot societies. Look at this, the 'Economy' going gangbusters, despite lockdowns and vast amounts of government spending. Exactly as predicted, do all the things the Economy loons say not to do, and the…

The pandemic is a long way from over. No country can vaccinate their way out of it, despite what politicians are telling you. The virus will continue to mutate to try to outsmart the vaccines, if it's allowed to keep…

Everybody lies, we're all politicians. Not because we're dishonest, but because what we think people mean and feel is always our own translation. Love the most brutal example, nobody loves us, they love their own idea…

Here's a story the pandemic has allowed to be told in big, bold letters. Much of our comfortable lifestyles is created by slavery. Migrant workers. They staff our basic industries, for slave wages and conditions. Right…

Was in a webinar with John Skerritt this week, head of the TGA, the body that approves vaccines in Oz. A nice guy. This quote from him though shows the danger of medicalising a pandemic. "By being vaccinated, we're not…

Another angle on our travel obsession. It's an enormous drain on our country's wealth. People take money that could be spent here and spend it overseas instead. Another thing the pandemic has brought to light, suddenly…

Joining a few more dots between my posts, notice how politicians win votes with new transport spending, particularly roads. Moving around is the basis of our entire culture. Where are we going, with all that movement?…

Our homes and land were once so important to us that we built fortresses to protect them. Then economic thinkers replaced land-based identity with job-based identity. Today people are told 'move to where the jobs are'.…

Experts fighting back. Not the house-trained poodles the government surrounds itself with, real expertise. I'd beg everybody to read this, except that would be demeaning. But then I do wear Crocs, so I'll beg anyway.

A nasty budget last night. Token amounts to aged care and women, neither of which will fix the problems there. Tax offsets for low and middle income earners to get through one more election, after which their taxes go…

Some talk today that pensioners may be forced to use the cashless welfare card - the indue card. Surely political suicide. Unpack the ideas, it's always in the ideas. The poor need to have how their money is spent…

Wisdom of the crowd. It's an actual, studied thing. In the right circumstances, a crowd is smarter than anybody in it. It's not what we usually call 'democracy'. In this case, the overwhelming crowd favourite is also…

This is obviously the sort of thing that made the government suck more money out of universities, and give it to rent-seeking parasites as tax cuts.…

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…

The government I suspect recognising that unless they do offer the highest efficacy and safest vaccines to all, the rollout will fail. And the crowd may again be wise here.…

Last year I argued with people here about Covid and school safety. I feel vindicated that the year since has proved Covid spreads in schools as easily if not more easily than everywhere else, that children are infected…

The Overton Window of public discussion. Debates are 'framed' (I use that word a lot - this is why). Ideas that get listened to have to be within a 'window' around that acceptable-sensible part of the continuum. From…

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…

One simple (and non-political) way to understand why Melbourne has needed to lock-down more than Sydney in the pandemic, is to look at how much movement occurs in each city. A city with more movement, means more people…

People-years is a measure I think we should use more. The International Space Station took the equivalent of 3 million people-years to build, or 26 billion work hours. Technologies don't just hold our morals, they're…

Deepti is a UK pandemic expert. A few of her superb Tweets, this is exactly the danger I believe we're not seeing. If you vaccinate AND let the virus continue to circulate, it's like pouring petrol on a fire. But…

This from the TGA today, our main regulator for medicines. Stay with me, I know it might seem dry... "With the ongoing risk of COVID outbreaks in Australia and the potential for severe long-term effects or fatal…

Have done a lot of risk management in my work. Here's another example of what to me is quite outrageous dishonesty in the vaccine debate. Just about every expert, doctor and politician is telling people every day that…

For more than a year we've had to listen to how smart NSW's approach to the pandemic has been, avoiding 'lockdown', to minimise disruption to the Economy. The actual costs show that to be nothing more than political…

Got my first Astra dose yesterday. Listening to whining UK tourists on TV right now, saying 'what was the point of getting vaccinated if we can't travel?' The fault of idiot politicians promising people that vaccination…

Hygiene theatre. Most of the Covid practices that have got the highest emphasis in the pandemic, like washing hands and staying 1.5 m apart, are next to useless at stopping the spread of Covid. This hugely expensive…

Workers in the US earn $10 less per hour today than the same job 40 years ago. Our current government aspires for Oz to follow this model. Look at the wage numbers in Australia if you think that's an exaggeration,…

This is a scandal of epic proportions. And yet this government continues to enjoy election-winning polling. Courts not only judged the Robodebt scheme unlawful, they were scathing in saying politicians who invented it…

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…

Here's an example of how this pandemic is actually a battle against libertarianism, not a virus. Headline from the UK today. 'Freedom', as if sheltering from a lethal virus is some sort of authoritarian oppression.…

I've held off commenting on the updated AZ vaccine advice. Obviously it makes me angry, that I missed a Pfizer dose by not waiting 2 more weeks, I thought they wouldn't budge. I told you so seems childish, but far out…

Imagining the NSW spin doctors having long, late nights, trying to find a way to rationalise locking down Sydney after spending a year vomiting nonsense about NSW not needing to do that sort of thing. Why you should…

The government public messaging seems to have missed this, so for information. If you've been in Greater Sydney (includes the Blue Mountains), or the Central Coast, Shellharbour or Wollongong since 10 June, you MUST…

Have a look at Sydney today - deserted. This is Sydney not 'locked down'. Same as being locked down, but takes even longer. You can either learn the specifics of this stuff, or just keep repeating the same promotional…

So far contact tracing and vaccines have been tried as silver-bullet fixes for the pandemic. Neither will end it, it's like hoping a bunch of flowers will paper over a dysfunctional relationship. A pandemic is a complex…

The NSW Government Covid strategy has arrived at its inevitable destination. A pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint. You sometimes win at gambling, in the short-term. You never do in the longer term. No amount of puff…

Politicians who believe we live in economies, not societies, adore transport projects. Do we stop and ask why? Transport is displacement, and displacement is dispossession. Taking goods and people from where they live,…

Choose your sides people. I watch the UK news every day, today’s bulletin is a story about how 250,000 school children have had to isolate at home because ‘only 9000’ of them were actually infected with Covid. Only! In…

Gladys has tried this one too. Conservative governments the world over are deeply in-bred. When the pandemic is going badly, they suggest we stop releasing the data. Trump did this, he also did it with election results.…

As a kid, my dentist had a sign in his office that said 'teeth don't fall out - gums drop them'. It's stuck with me, the wisdom in that. The pandemic similar. Viruses don't spread, people spread them. When we talk about…

We blame politicians for most of the problems we see, that are actually caused by us. For example, this pair of dimwits is the top-rating radio show in Australia. Meaning millions find them good to listen to. The…

The oldest trick in the modern conservative's playbook is to knee-cap taxation (on the wealthy), and then claim the resulting budget deficit is due to too much spending. The spending doesn't change much at all, it's…

A cynic would say that was always the intention anyway. A non-cynic would say, how incompetent does the NSW government have to be, for people to stop voting for them? Maybe Covid slaughtering a few members of people's…

"Portraying individual men and boys’ inability to be vulnerable, to express their authentic selves, and to form meaningful interpersonal relationships as toxic is a form of gentility or class politics, in which…

I liked this. There's also a serious point to it. Modern conservatives like to say that the government gets in peoples' way, restricts their freedom. But the government IS the people. Who else would it be? When the…

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…

This is dangerously out of control. Your life is literally at stake here, and that of your family and friends. I've spent 18 months criticising the NSW Government for a set of beliefs that were always inevitably going…

Who remembers this? I think we need to strongly oppose the idiot idea that our 'mental health' isn't up to a fight in this pandemic. Politicians use a behaviour model that says we're all fragile egos, individuals curled…

ScoMo made 55 phone calls to help get the OECD job for Mathias Cormann. He couldn't make one phone call to the head of Pfizer to get us vaccines. Don't blame me, I didn't vote for the fatuous God-bothering windbag.

For more than 18 months the NSW Government has lied, just as Boris lied in the UK, about ‘following the health advice’. As the article says, “There has been…no admission that its business-influenced approach to the…

This one flew under the radar this week. A proposed traffic light system for NSW schools and Covid. Follow the logic of this one and it's clear again the government plans to allow children to be infected. The amber…

Political strategy 101. Thanks to Matt Lucas for his brilliant impersonation. Boris appears a bumbling fool. He's sharp as a tack. The NSW Government is copying him. Pretend to be doing public health work, but twist the…

There's nothing quite as disgusting as Boris' latest spin. 'Levelling up'. The idea being, rather than address rampant, outrageous inequality, with the top 1% of society wallowing in all of a country's wealth, he will…

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see who is writing the NSW Government pandemic strategy.

NSW's gold standard contact tracing overwhelmed. Not their fault, contact tracing is only a viable process with a low number of cases. What gives you a low number of cases is 'locking down' peoples' movement and…

Yes it's satire. But there's a serious point here. Like many or even most senior managers in organisations, when times are good, your dog could run the company. It's when times are bad that leaders' true ability is…

‘Ring-fencing’ suburbs and even whole regional towns is about as effective as trying to avoid a fart in an elevator, by standing on the opposite side. The NSW Government again asleep at the wheel. Watch the toilet…

When the Economy crowd take over government (regulatory capture), this is what happens. Never, ever trust somebody who believes the Economy exists. They will kill you, and your family, without blinking an eye.

Do people remember Trump trashing Fauci in the US during the early days of the pandemic? Morrison continually does the same with ATAGI. Do we notice? Do we care about what this means?…

Here's a way I think to understand what our future will look like, after we're vaccinated. If a child or an adult turns up to school or work with whooping cough, do we say "come in, we're all vaccinated here!". Nope.…

Would you rather ‘die in battle’ with Covid, as Joe says? Because he shares the same political beliefs as the government. You can’t fight a pandemic virus with political beliefs. The virus has no political beliefs, it…

Out of control, has been for weeks. The government refusing to do anything more, growing and spreading every day. Yesterday trying to steal vaccines from other States, who rightly told Gladys to piss off and do her job.…

Imagine your plumber saying ‘I’m so proud to be gay, and to have fixed your toilet’. The dreary self-obsession of identity politics.

Victoria is lifting their lockdown today, after only 2 weeks, job done. We have the NSW Government. 5 weeks in and getting worse every day. If you think this is because 'people aren't following the rules', remember your…

If you have a glass political jaw and any criticism of NSW is seen as a partisan political thing, remember other LNP States are doing what Victoria does.

Speechless. Just despicable. Rather than introduce properly strong restrictions, the NSW Government strategy will be to encourage thousands of under-40s to get a vaccine they shouldn’t be having. The bitter, disgusting…

The LNP are masters of spin. Take ‘taxing and spending’. They’re already dusting off the ‘Labor love to tax and spend’ lines for the next election. Any primary school kid could understand from the graph what a load of…

Compare with the graph for NSW I posted yesterday. Truly criminal incompetence in NSW, already killing people. Those people would be alive right now if the government had done its job. Many more deaths and lifelong…

During the Black Plague, whole towns were quarantined (what libertarian loons call ‘locked down’), not to protect the people in those towns, as quarantine is designed to do today, but to protect the people outside them.…

The tabloid theatre (like toilet paper selling out) which political libertarianism generates. Everything is about the individual. At a time of collective emergency, the pile-on starts, on ‘naughty’ transgressors. No…

The basic flaw with democracy is, that people actually like being told what to do. They expect those smarter and stronger than them to lead them. If you don’t offer them that, they will find it where they can.…

Great piece from a public health professional about what our lives with Covid may look like into the future. The 'burden of disease' point is critical. Politicians and business people are desperate for people to believe…

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.…

John Thaw, as Inspector Morse, stating the often unspoken truth of our great housing market democracies. Roads and cars enslave us, and houses even more so. We’ve ‘economised’ all the basics of life, turned them into…

SKY News has a licence to broadcast in Australia. The government recently gave them tens of millions of dollars as well.

Get vaccinated, people. Not because it will end the pandemic (it won’t), but because you need to protect yourself. The politicians in NSW and Canberra won’t. The targets way too low (actually only about 56% of the…

There’s a common and simplistic view that ‘democracy’ means each person’s opinion is as equal as any other. It doesn’t mean that at all. Democracy is hierarchical, as hierarchical as any other system. That hierarchy is…

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.…

Read these daily updates. This is an unfolding catastrophe. Nearly every corner of the State now getting hits. What does the NSW Government do differently in response? Nothing. Get vaccinated, they're not going to save…

I’m now double-jabbed. Regional health providers have now been told to offer (encourage) people to have their second AZ shot after 8 weeks, and I’ve heard of some offering only 4. (Mine was 9 weeks.) Goes to show that…

Heh, let’s keep that Economy open by having the shops open. But not let customers inside. Seriously, did you vote for the NSW Government? Why?

This is really important. The PM established National Cabinet to bypass parliament. It has no jurisdiction and no authority. He tried to say it was a committee of the Cabinet so that its papers would be secret. A court…

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…

This doesn't appear to be only targeted at current hotspots, I can't see any geographical references where NSW Health and the federal Department of Health have been posting it. If you want proof of the ineptitude of the…

Watch Health Hazzard mansplain superbly here, to prevent the Chief Health Officer of NSW answering any questions. They know her answering honestly here would end their government. Look at Dr Chant's body language.…

I’m sure many thought I was on some politically-inspired year-long crusade against the NSW Government. I wasn’t. We’re seeing right now what angered me then, and infuriates me now. I see barely a whimper from fellow NSW…

Lost his entire family inside one week. Is it registering for people the catastrophe we’re in the middle of? Why don’t people talk about it? Are we using bullshit ‘positivity’ to try to avoid facing up to grown up…

The pandemic has never been a medical or even biological event. It’s a political event. It was caused by and is being prolonged by pathological individualism - libertarianism. The NSW Government are libertarians.…

A connected friend told me Chant resigned several weeks ago because the government wasn’t listening to her, and the resignation was rejected. It would bring down the NSW Government.

You don’t have to pay any attention to my advice. But it’s this. Assume the State is already in total lockdown. The government refuses to do it, but Covid is everywhere and spreading fast. Do the lockdown yourselves.…

Will NSW cases ‘skyrocket’ because the number of people ‘not following rules’ will skyrocket? Or because the government isn’t stopping the spread? (Hint: if you get it wrong, people you love may be dead by Christmas.…

The skyrocket is off. These people aren’t getting infected because they’re not following (pissweak) rules. They’re getting infected at workplaces the government refuses to close, and then taking it home to their…

Before we all get swept away in the latest tide of spin, NSW is not in total lockdown. The NSW Government has just extended the Sydney measures to the entire State. But…the Sydney measures aren’t working. They restrict…

Same trend here as overseas. Oldies get vaccinated, the virus moves to the kids. The test now is what our governments do next. Do they let kids become infected? That's the plan in NSW. I kid you not.

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…

Slogans like ‘live with the virus’ got NSW into the mess it’s in. And unsurprisingly, more slogans are now keeping it there. Like ‘just stay home’, and ‘follow the rules’. Avoid everything a politician says in this…

Every day the Premier stands there and lectures people for breaking rules. Remember she leads an extreme libertarian government who don't believe in rules. This disaster is NOT about people breaking rules. It's about…

Again, avoid anything politicians say in a pandemic. Listen to people on the front-line, like this doctor. The so many people taking comfort from the daily weaponised spin from the NSW Government aren’t aware yet of the…

Listen to to the NSW Chief Health officer. Ignore the Premier completely. It’s ordinary people doing ordinary things - going to work - who are the problem. Why are they going to work? Because the government refuses to…

This is Mkayla Robinson from Mississippi. Her first day of year 8, and her brother's first day of Kindergarten. She died 8 days later of Covid. Never, ever believe politicians who say it's safe for kids to go to school…

if you're one of the people constantly posting here about rule-breakers in NSW, please read this. And then stop doing it. People are catching it at work, taking it home and infecting their families. Most of that work…

Extraordinary that the same people who looked on with horror at Trump, seem completely oblivious to the same thing happening here. Trump succeeded because conservative strategists progressively destroyed public…

Parents are about to face some very difficult decisions in NSW. There is no way schools in NSW will be able to re-open safely until about March 2022, on current virus case numbers. It's early August 2021. The government…

As an indication of the idiocy in NSW, I see so many ‘stay home’ messages on social media. People can’t stay home, they have to go to work. Why do they have to go to work? Because the NSW Government won’t close…

4000 children now have Covid in NSW. 1500 of them are under 9. Expect those numbers to explode, when the NSW Government re-opens schools without vaccinating children first.

What happens when you turn ‘democracy’ from being just all of us choosing leaders every few years, who then go on to do the work of running the place with officials until the next election, into meaning everybody is…

"Gladys has so spectacularly muffed the pandemic, and ICAC is bearing down on her still, so it is little wonder there is talk of a spill...Yet the Premier of NSW has been enormously popular. Berejiklian has the uncanny…

These are the tragedies that will play out in thousands of homes around Australia, because the NSW Government refused to control spread of the virus.

She lied. She's good at that. We'll likely hit 1000 cases in a day tomorrow. She's still doing nothing more to get case numbers down. Thinks vaccines will do it. They won't, far too slow. She's ignoring the national…

Steve Duckett once ran the national health department. He knows his shit. "Governments cannot keep making unrealistic promises about easing restrictions at 70% and 80% adult vaccination, a plan that relied on optimistic…

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…

Here’s a new Gladys neat trick. She’s said many times what matters isn’t how many people get infected, it’s how many end up in hospital. Look how many she’s hiding from that statistic by having people treated at home,…

With schools re-opening, the NSW Government has mentioned a measure they’ll use to determine when a school is open or shut. It’s quite technical, which will no doubt stop many people paying attention to it. If the LGA…

"For all the NSW government’s attempts in the 11am media conference to sell a positive vaccination story and downplay the soaring COVID cases, the numbers and the reports from the front line have crushed the spin."

I share what the top experts say. Ignore every word out of the NSW Government's mouth.

The ‘National Plan’ to exit the pandemic. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s a re-election plan for the PM. Look at what it does. It makes meaningless claims about the vaccination rollout being as good as over when 80% of…

Ian is a top virologist. Notice vaccines are only one slice of the cheese. Politicians who tell you we can vaccinate our way out of a pandemic are lying. Simple as that.

Hey protest fans, finally we got to the endpoint. The Brittany Higgins case shut down, and now every legislative change stemming from the furore voted down by the government. Just saying. Join a union.

NSW now moving to the 'heroes' phase. Standard libertarian government strategy. Do nothing to prevent the disaster - whether it's bushfires, or a pandemic - so that the last line of defence, emergency services workers,…

This is a HUGE announcement. Australia's top experts have had enough of the relentless ongoing bullshit from the NSW Government and PM, and have formed their own independent advisory group to cut through the crap.…

Writers are often our most entertainingly insightful gifts. John Birmingham wins the internet today firstly for ‘Morrjiklian homunculus’, and then for nailing the exact politics in play right now, around children and…

The federal government funds private schools so that there’s equity for all children.

Spend one minute watching this Florida school board meeting, and I think it’ll become clear why democracy isn’t, and never was, government by the people. For the people, yes. But not by the people.

This vaccination rollout will be a brilliant test of the Australia we live in, compared to the one we maybe think we live in. Right now about 5 million Australians are saying they won't get a vaccine. Compare to our…

This story today, announced at the daily Gladys at 11am. Analysis commissioned by the NSW Government, to determine safety of sending kids back to school. They did a similar analysis last year after national lockdown.…

The NSW Government 'follows the health advice' in the same way a yacht tacks into a strong headwind.

The government released a ‘roadmap’ out of the pandemic yesterday. The metaphor tells you everything. Nobody uses roadmaps any more, we all use GPS. Real-time data adjusted to constantly changing conditions. Somebody…

The NSW Premier just announced she will no longer be giving daily press conferences. NSW Health staff will do them instead. She announced this immediately after saying the next few weeks will be the worst for Covid…

Did people read this one? If you follow every tiny detail of the pandemic, as I have to for work, it’s things already known. But for many you can read here how NSW has just barefaced lied for months. It isn’t following…

Political strategy is one of my areas of expertise. The constant talk about Delta being too hard to control is political strategy. NZ is controlling it as easily as it did in 2020. What’s happening in NSW and Victoria…

Can’t help think that the NSW Government taking a global event, and pretending it can fence it off in the poorer parts of Sydney, is going to do lasting damage to the entire city.

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…

People have probably heard a lot about the Doherty modelling in the news, the guide governments are using for the 70% and 80% re-openings. Wanted to share some of it because I’m not sure how many people have actually…

Is everybody happy infecting several hundred thousand children and killing up to 60 of them in the next 6 months, under the government's re-opening plan? These are the government's numbers, before you people who think…

100,000 children infected in just one week in England. The government there not even bothering to isolate infected people in schools, it all got too hard. If you don't think NSW could end up like this, you're not paying…

Here’s one for the people who can’t process an issue without a detour through their favourite political team. Lots to see here about NSW ‘success’ with vaccination.

The NSW Premier and our PM both tell us that the reason 2021 is different is because ‘Delta is like nothing we have seen before’. More lies, more spin. We’ve beaten far more infectious diseases than Delta. The only…

I post a lot less to FB these days, because it’s so bloody dull. Like reading personal ads and classifieds. An Israeli scientist said something the other day that interested me. He said the world is broken because when…

An aspect of the months between now and Christmas many aren’t aware of, is that the National Covid plan, modelled by Doherty and driven by the PM, involves the mass infection of children. This is quite deliberate, as it…

We have a PM rushing to an election by destroying 2 years of hard Covid work. And a NSW Premier who gets wide applause for leading a government with such entrenched corruption that ICAC wouldn’t have know where to…

Here’s the former NSW Auditor-General speaking about Gladys’ resignation. (Don’t forget either that this NSW Government also rorted the bushfire relief funding.) I plead with people to not embrace populism, where…

Please sign, so that 'open a window' isn't the only public health measure used to protect young children. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/la/Pages/ePetition-details.aspx?q=rpEwNg2UB9+LpW1NhPZzdA==

As one prominent journalist said, the NSW Government is run for business, by business. Shredders going flat-out in the Reverend Dom’s office, with all the NSW Health advice. The Deputy Premier, our own novelty cheque…

I know I post Covid things into the void. More than 800 children have been hospitalised in NSW for Covid since this outbreak began. And this is before restrictions are lifted. 5% of child Covid cases are ending up in…

This is why NSW and Victoria lost control of Covid in 2021, but not in 2020. Wasn’t anything to do with the Delta variant. The federal government gutted income support to workers and businesses, forcing people to go to…

Talking about vaccines for younger kids. Professor Cheng, co-chair of ATAGI, the group that will rule on safety: “When we are thinking about 80-year-olds, where the danger of COVID is really obvious, [about] a third of…

Feedback suggests some people like a different perspective on the pandemic, beyond the endless repetition of meaningless political slogans like 'live with the virus'. So I'll keep at it. Today - hospitalisations. "It's…

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…

The new Premier said these words yesterday. Orwell used to say that politics is all about language. Look at that word - 'alongside'. What does it mean? The problem is, Covid doesn't live alongside us. It lives INSIDE…

Those who back the NSW Government the way they might back an NRL team often defend what they do by also praising NSW Health. It’s been many months since the NSW Government listened much to NSW Health. Now they’ve…

The NSW Government spent a fortune upgrading its air conditioning system so that its air is changed every 7.5 minutes. Its 'effort' on schools returning? 'Open a window'. And also 'masks are ludicrous' (our new Deputy…

The same NCIRS who advised governments that kids are damaged more by missing school than they are by Covid, have endorsed the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme for years. Nearly all of the diseases in that scheme…

The health system, like most systems, is run at about 60-70% full capacity, to allow for the peaks and troughs that happen each year. Right now, globally, politicians are trying to run health systems at 100+% capacity,…

“The latest figures, published yesterday, show the UK's daily coronavirus cases have reached their highest level since July, with 45,066 new infections recorded…scientific advisers and ministers are now beginning to…

Another powerful political strategy - normalisation. Shifting what ‘normal’ means. Why people don’t even bat an eyelid at the idea of mass infections, of hundreds or even thousands of people dying every week. Why…

Ted Cruz is a libertarian pissant from the US who is one of the promoters of the "I stand with the people of Australia" rubbish. A message he wrote below, and wonderful response from the NT Chief Minister. The Chief…

Isn't this great, even where parents try to carry the cost of clean air in schools, because the NSW government won't do anything, they're not allowed. No masks, 'open a window'. Just disgusting, corrupt, and probably…

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…

Assumption School in Bathurst already closed because of Covid. Only years 1 and 2 there. It took only 4 days. If the idiot NSW Government follows its idiot overlords in the UK, the next stage will be to just keep…

Brilliant political cartooning out of the UK.

So often the smart and right thing to do won’t be the popular thing to do. Have a look at this excerpt from a BBC interview in 1967, of a female government minister introducing drink driving laws. Don’t go along with…

The Deputy Premier referred to use of masks in schools as 'ludicrous'. This is the official CDC advice, in the US, just so you get a sense of the calibre of the NSW Government: "Due to the circulating and highly…

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…

Those who doubt school re-openings are nothing about education - this is a federal minister, speaking on Sunday. Disgusts me that there isn’t public outcry about the deliberate infection of children with Covid. Not a…

Everything about this plan is laughable. Even the title, 'The Australian Way'. Just another book of meaningless political slogans to get him through the election. The man is vacuous, completely devoid of any vision or…

More of Trump’s America for Australia. Like voluntary voting, requiring an ID to vote sounds sensible, but is actually a strategy to reduce votes from people who don’t vote for conservative parties. This country really…

58% of Americans opposed going to the moon, when Kennedy announced it. ‘Moonshot’ became a term to mean pushing for a massive collective achievement. Kennedy succeeded. Compare and contrast this with the pandemic, where…

NSW has a zero road deaths road safety strategy. Quoting from it: “The NSW road toll isn't simply a number. It is people. Sadly, it's closer to home than you think. It's people like you. Grandparents, mothers, fathers,…

The NSW Government still refuses to even mandate masks for children. Only 6-7 weeks of school left, what possible reason could there be for not talking that basic precaution?

The fracturing of shared beliefs that has crippled action on both climate change and the pandemic. This *is* at the same time the ‘plurality of belief’ that we say is the strength of our democratic countries. How do you…

This is a wonderful, digitally-interactive article, describing all of the action that has been long underway by industry to change Australia. Really, really worth your time, don’t believe any of the political nonsense…

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…

You can look at this two ways. Regulators being cautious, as they're supposed to be. Or key members of these expert groups being culture warring, political operatives who have spent weeks attacking any sort of…

I sometimes think New Zealand is the only place left on Earth that hasn't gone batshit crazy. What they're arguing for in this article was common wisdom less than 30 years ago. I don't think we see just how much our…

"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…

Unprepared to do the basic grown-up work of stopping a virus spreading, Austria will instead lock up the unvaccinated. The hilarious irony of this pandemic is that it’s the same whinging libertarians going on about…

The UK government has now deliberately infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of UK children aged 5-14. Meantime they and politically conservative medical professionals…

Today’s news from Covid land. The ‘booster’ shots are really the 3rd dose in a 3-dose schedule. They work like gangbusters, whether you had AZ or Pfizer, they’ll supercharge you to the same level. If you’re wondering…

There will be no endemic Covid, despite what politicians and (alarmingly) some experts might tell you. It's an epidemic disease. Trying to live with it is like inviting Covid to be your flatmate, and then discovering…

The world is full of such nice people. Spoke to a person yesterday whose work ute got trapped in floodwaters. Came back the next morning to try to retrieve it, and found somebody had been overnight, flogged all of the…

I think you should get your 3rd Covid vaccine dose the first day you’re eligible. Numbers are off the charts, sustained fantastic protection. 2 doses will not be enough, don’t wait for politicians to realise that.

We’re ‘waiting for more data’ here in Oz. Must be coming by post, in the Christmas mail. The Sloganator probably forgot to order paediatric doses. I’m not joking, all he does is plan his own re-election, and he either…

Vaccine doses are being thrown away. We could all be getting boosters right now, but the government won't allow it because of (guess): the election. For them the vaccines work fine for 6 months to do the only thing they…

This one yesterday sobering context for the joyous 'return to normal' I see in restaurants, pubs and just about everywhere else. All 13 were fully vaccinated. 11 caught Covid. Despite what politicians say, Covid is…

Singapore at 93% and Portugal at 90%, of the TOTAL population vaccinated, now having to lock down again. (Australia currently at only 77% vaxxed.) Please people, when a politician says we must 'live with Covid', they…

Pictures tell stories. What the pandemic showed so clearly was who the really essential workers are in our socieities. Nurses, teachers, supermarket staff, sewer and water workers etc. Leading politicians are…

This new variant of Covid, in the red, is now called ‘Omicron’. Europe has closed international travel to Africa to stop it, as has the US. Australia? Nothing yet. Why? Because the government doesn’t want to upset its…

Now the Australian government has caught up with the rest of the world with travel restrictions for the new Covid variant, let’s see if it will also relax its 6-month rule on 3rd vaccine doses. Politically it doesn’t…

The housing industry, and politicians getting big budget revenue from housing prices, have spent the past nearly 3 decades selling us a lie that has ruined the lives of entire generations. The lie - that high housing…

The Omicron Covid variant is infecting people who have had 3 doses of vaccine. The vaccines won't prevent infection. You may think, following politicians, that this doesn't matter, because the vaccines will keep you out…

Workers compensation cases for Covid, NSW. Reality is biting. Politicians win popularity with slogans like ’we have to live with this virus’. But you can’t live with Covid, and business has realised that because the…

Time to end the fantasy of democracy and elected representatives, in emergencies. Get them out of the way. We don’t ‘vote’ on how to put out bushfires or fix floods.

So sick of the bullshit. Parliament in Canberra shuts down because of one Covid case. Primary schools in Sydney get Omicron cases, and they only send a few classes home.

The people who really understand democracy don't support it. And the people who support it don't understand it.

The US: 305,114 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 482,581 Covid deaths since. The UK: 62,130 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 83,744 Covid deaths since. Both libertarian governments which our NSW and federal…

Zooming out can give a very different view. This is an age of extreme and growing wealth inequality. At the same time it’s an age of populism, where increasing numbers of people reject democratic due process in favour…

Omicron doubling every 2-3 days in the UK. 1 million infections expected by Christmas. The government there in meltdown, leadership knows desperate action needed, its own backbench in revolt against it. Politicians…

Stephen Reicher is an expert on human behaviour. Watch this short (40-second) clip, where he explains how the use of the terms ’restrictions’ and ’lockdowns’, instead of words like ’support’ and ‘protection’, make…

In today’s Covid news, why a fast-spreading but ‘mild’ version of Covid is far more lethal than a slower-spreading, more severe variant. (Note that nobody actually knows if Omicron is mild - that’s just political spin…

We never leave high school. Here’s a lens to look at the world today through. There are 2 hierarchies in school and life. A social one, of status, with Prom Kings and Queens, the most popular people, at the pinnacle.…

Not a Grinch by the way. Just look at the UK, one of the most immune populations in the world. Check that x-axis, we’re talking days here, not weeks. Don’t be distracted by the ‘Omicron is mild’ stuff, that’s just…

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…

In today’s Covid news, the supposedly ‘mild’ Omicron variant. Hospitalisation rates in Denmark about the same as for other variants. Overwhelmingly the Danish being infected in the early days are 20-29, which will…

"...clusters linked to nightclubs and pubs threaten to push daily cases into the thousands by the end of the year...A NSW Health spokesperson said they were unable to confirm how many people were now considered close…

Wheeee, isn't this fun NSW? The Health Minister said no changes needed, he wants 'normal' life back in NSW. We're all in a bus on the Jenolan Caves road, driven by psychopaths high on meth.

This diagram is standard WHS, applied to Covid. Australia is doing 6, just. 1-5, nothing. Really highlights how populist idiot politicians have hijacked a standard public health response.

NSW Health Minister predicts 25,000 cases per day by January. Nobody seems to care.

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…

So bloody frustrating. So inevitable, and so avoidable. Easy to blame the government (who should wear most of the blame), but the public has been hopelessly indifferent to the emergency right under their noses.…

If you're not sure who to vote for at the federal election, I recommend trying to get your 3rd vaccine dose before Christmas. That should decide it for you, once you see the monumental cock-up that is. We never learn,…

Have we noticed the shift, from leaders ‘following the medical advice’, to the medical advice now having to write letters to leaders, pleading to be listened to? Does it make us all nervous? It really should, I find a…

Here's a projection of NSW cases, from one of the prominent modellers, based on current numbers. And the quote below is from Professor Adrian Esterman, a leading Australian public health person who has worked for the…

If you got AZ as your vaccine, get your booster as soon as you can. (The government doesn't give a shit, it urged all of us to get AZ, often only 3-4 weeks between doses.) These graphs show risk of severe disease and…

Not that anyone actually bet, but a win. Important for people to know that the Chief Medical Officer stressed yesterday is that people should wear a mask indoors too. The government simply refuses to mandate it.…

A Christmas miracle. Shout out to the nurses the government is about to force to work when possibly infected by Covid. Living with the virus.

The Health Minister needs a dictionary. Everybody compulsorily catching Covid isn’t ‘health’. I didn’t vote for him. I suspect millions of lemmings still would.

By the way, had a lovely Christmas, except for part of the family suffering from Covid. So let’s talk about Covid! That thing infecting your friends and loved ones, in the pet and Christmas pictures. (It’s even…

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US, the most prestigious infectious disease institution in the world. It understands you can’t ‘live with’ Covid. The next steps in our denial of this will be governments: -…

Governments now not even bothering to do testing. You can do it yourself. Also a brilliant way for the government to hide the true number of Covid cases, because if they’re not doing the testing, they don’t know the…

Remember ‘hospitalisations are what matter’? Predictably, now they’re trending up, suddenly that spin has gone a bit quiet. Also predictably, social media is still pretending we’re all living in 2018. As Covid inches…

[Re-posting, because NSW Health had the wrong hospitalisation figure, they’ve updated it now.] The NSW Health Minster (I use those terms loosely) said we’d get over 20,000 cases per day by the end of January. It’s the…

Stupid beyond words. They’re doing this because NOBODY ORDERED THE TESTS. Brought to you by the same federal government who didn’t order any vaccines. Do your best to survive, it’s literally all on you now.

Do you know who funds firefighting in NSW? It’s insurance companies (about 74%), with local government (about 12%) the next biggest contributor. Together they fund nearly 93% of all firefighting.

It’s apparently OK to ‘play politics’ in emergencies when it’s foreigners in boats, but not when the country is a smoking ruin. Strayans like to say ‘now is the time to act, to help, not to talk’. To know HOW to act, we…

The UK, which has a deeply conservative government, has gone from 75% of its energy coming from coal in 1990, to 2.1% today. That’s TWO-point-one. Those of you who get all excited over nuclear and ‘baseload’ - its use…

You’ll often hear people argue against renewable energy as being unfairly ‘subsidised’ by government, whereas existing energy generation isn’t. This is because the costs of carbon pollution aren’t included in the sums -…

Tarde, Plato, Lippmann, Lawrence and others independently saw aristocracy as the mature state of society. They saw democracy as a transition state, when new aristocracies replace old ones. They both thought hierarchy in…

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.

Hugh discovered that if you say these obvious truths while the boomers still decide elections, you don't win the elections.…

Everyone should have the right to be an arsehole (my US constitutional law is rusty). There’s that pesky constitutional thing about not colluding with foreign countries for political gain, maybe that’s a ‘fake right’.

“Pater familias” was the Roman term for the father as ‘head of the family’. The father as authority figure in the family is still the foundation of our societies, the ‘State’ was modelled on the pater familias. Ultra…

Look at this bullshit, now they're walloping the charities, day after day. Why? Because it takes the heat off their darling ScoMo. These charities are doing the work LNP governments at State and federal level should…

I asked my son for a definition of ‘woke’, and he said “the opposite of you”. Burn. On Straya Day, why would somebody wanting to use a term like ‘Ms’ instead of Mrs be woke or politically correct, but somebody who…

Democracy is often seen as the increasing freedom of individuals. But actually, that freedom is the increasing freedom to have others serve you. Under kings and emperors and tyrants, only they have the right to demand…

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…

A few times I’ve posted here that I think the apparent divisions of our time have nothing to do with Left versus Right. Or even politics. It’s about Church versus State. It never went away. Populism is our politics now.…

The candidates for US President are mostly old, 70 or above. But it wasn’t always like this, check the graph. This is an exception. And the answer, again? Demographics I think. The massive boomer generation is voting…

It still angers me that people who go to university pay an extra tax, HECS. The rationale for it was always that they earn more because of their degrees. Some do, some don’t. I know more rich tradies than rich…

This from a discussion on domestic violence. Our domestic situations are isolated, and isolation breeds violence. Cars helped us do it. We need to think much wider than the gender politics that wants to turn this into…

I’m uncomfortable with a lot of modern ‘identification’ politics. This article is one reason - you don’t get to SELF-identify any social identity. It’s a social thing, by definition. But also secondly because I think we…

Today conservative parties in the Western world aren't really parties, they're lobby groups for big corporations, with simple messages - lower taxes, lower regulations. Corporations funded the overthrow of these…

If domestic violence is really caused by 'toxic masculinity', how do we explain the variations across all of these areas (check the map), sometimes of nearly 50% in a given year? Is masculinity getting more or less…

This pair have both been exposed to people with Covid-19. Both refused to be tested or to isolate themselves, as would be the legal requirement of any other person. People vote for these dipshits. No wonder most…

And the reason the NRL is a financial trainwreck, not mentioned here? Enormous player salaries. Never come between an NRL player and a bucket of money. Like Aussie cricketers. Gobsmacking they want government assistance…

Suddenly conservative politicians lining up behind ‘the science’. When it’s something that might kill *them*, they take notice.

The extraordinary power of a tiny microbe. The Tory government in the UK is now paying 80% of ALL wages in affected companies, up to a limit amount. That's Universal Basic Income, here at last, introduced by a…

Bill, Hilary, Jeremy, thanks for joining us. How are you feeling after losing those last elections?

These are the words by which ScoMo will ultimately be judged at the end of the pandemic. If he's getting this judgement wrong, his government is toast. “We are not going to do things to a business or someone’s job and…

If you want to see just how much the conservative side of politics has been hijacked by big money, worldwide, go no further than the Republican senator in the US who suggests grandma and grandpa take COVID 19 for the…

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…

The anti-social forces in our societies are extremely clever at political strategy. No matter what major issue comes along, their think tanks quickly find ways to turn them to their advantage. For example, for over 100…

Juries. Some countries, such as much of Europe, don't use them. They have a sort of democratic feel to them, but do they actually work? The George Pell case for example, where some very basic and clear rules of evidence…

They did it 100 years ago. They didn't even have many communications technologies to stay in contact with one another or be entertained. They were resilient. And they went hard, and early, and in multiple layers, and…

The government is about to release an app that people will be asked to use to allow their location to be tracked, to vastly speed up contact tracing for Covid-19. Brilliant idea, phones are maybe our most powerful…

My biggest frustration with conservative governments in this crisis has been the continuing insistence on 'balancing' the 'economy' and peoples' health. As if those were two separate things. Like this obsession…

Virgin is just one example of something some have observed in this lockdown. How few businesses of any size had any reserves to buffer them through difficult times. Our business models are too often rape the business…

Sat through Pru Goward spouting dangerous drivel on The Project about herd immunity last night. Another conservative politician who thinks it's a way to get 'the economy' going again faster, spare me. Listen to an…

Sigh, another half-pregnant scheme. This will be like the laundry list of lockdown rules, imagine the poor schools trying to administer this farce, and teachers now being forced to teach the students in classrooms and…

This is the first time that a modern, democratic country has made killing its own citizens an election strategy. (If you don't follow US politics, this is Trump's last desperate attempt to get his poll numbers up again,…

"Pandemics don’t change us, at least in the short term. They reveal us. We come to them as we’ve been formed over decades, and we respond accordingly." I notice ScoMo's early hints of his plans post-pandemic are…

Australia's pandemic response is being guided by a Nobel Prize winner. America's is being guided by a reality TV star suggesting we inject people with disinfectant and irradiate them with UV light. Just over 70 dead in…

"Australians and our governments have been so careful to balance the needs to get our economy back to a COVID-safe level so it can support people's incomes and we can return to higher rates of growth into the future."…

I don't have shares in the new contact tracing app. But I wonder if people have realised that the same 'data' they worry about sharing with government, through the app (which only happens if there's an infection near…

See how the same strategies cross the globe? Do we know anybody here who makes frequent reference to 'the science'? "The claim that government would be “led by the science” was reassuring many weeks ago, at the start of…

Seeing the same arguments here, that we need to 'balance' the apparently horrendous impact of lockdowns on the economy against public health. As if those economic impacts are just as bad for our health as a pandemic. As…

We should thank Australian universities for this, they assembled over 100 experts from diverse fields to assess where Australia should go from here with Covid-19. You'll see they suggest either elimination (my…

Schools are safe. But parliament is closed for 5 months, for safety. Join the dots. If you want to introduce a vaccine, you test it for a year or more. But apparently a few weeks' of data is enough to say that schools…

Funny this, from Gladys today. They said schools are 'safe'. Funny too that they have to close entire schools if they get an infection and bring in professional cleaners for 'deep cleans', even though schools are…

Curious whether when parents hear 'schools are safe'; they hear 'my child won't get infected at school'. Or whether they hear 'my child might get infected at school, but they probably won't get really sick', which is…

The UK Health Minister live on UK TV right now, asked about when UK schools will reopen. Quote: "although children don't suffer from the consequences of coronavirus nearly as much as adults - there have been a small…

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…

We had a postal vote to decide on gay marriage. This is a MUCH bigger issue. Why aren't Australians being asked to decide our way out of the pandemic, between the options of 'controlled adaptation' and 'elimination'? It…

Now we have our 3-stage strategy to all go and get infected to save the economy, anybody notice parliament is still closed, and isn't in the 3 stages? Presumably it's unsafe. Schools are safe though and in Stage 1,…

An indication of how 'the science' is just a political phrase designed to stop people actually looking at it, is that our PM can call powerful and effective public health measures 'hiding under the doona', and not one…

How's your toilet paper stash? "Prof Talley warned the Australian Government’s strategy of suppressing the virus rather than trying to eradicate it has left us in a vulnerable position."…

Free child care (not free - you pay for it through your taxes, conservatives are devious with language) isn't 'sustainable'. $150 billion in permanent tax cuts is though. Wouldn't it have been refreshing to hear him say…

And the Telegraph is a deeply conservative newspaper. "The real Swedish coronavirus story is a story of poor preparation (along with most other countries), threat underestimation (unique for Sweden), strategic…

Next time a politician goes on about ‘balancing economic recovery’ against keeping you free of COVID-19, remember what the science says. Both the medical and economic experts called bullshit on this from day one. It’s…

Many said this was the strategic role of the phrase ‘the science’ from the beginning of the pandemic. And here it is, exactly as predicted. Scientists as human shields for politicians. This will be exactly the line used…

It's a shambles. Government by press release. I don't think many people see the bull-at-a-gate approach this 'save the economy' obsession is creating. All the caution used to close things has been thrown out the window…

You can see this right now. The same people who won't trust the experts on climate change, because it means interrupting 'the economy', are the same people who trust the experts on Covid-19, when they can make them say…

The Brits are much smarter at sniffing out bullshit than us. Politicians here still have another 4 months of time off parliament, on full pay and conditions, for their own safety. Ordinary working people and their kids…

When tax cuts to the well-off are on the table, government money is 'your' money, that they apparently want to give back to you. When the money is being used to save your job, it's not your money, it's the government's…

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…

I've noticed in this pandemic the necessary tension between medical people, and public health people. They're not the same. Medical people (doctors, nurses) will tend to be focused on the health of an individual. Public…

UK opening up. With 50,000 new infections a week. 'Open up' is politics, not science. Wherever you live.

Actually an elbow. The suggestion of something is normally more desirable than the thing itself. And there I think you have the secret of why tens of millions will vote for the promise of riches, that they'll never see.

To go back again to my belief - the economy is just people with money. If they don't have much, the economy is in recession, if they have a lot, it isn't. Government creates money, therefore government creates wealth.…

Money's real power is also I think its greatest danger. Invented as a tool, by governments, to make exchange of things easy for people. Hoarded by a few which leaves little for others to exchange with. Tax was invented…

How to fix all the world economies? Simple. 1. Stop believing in economies. 2. Remember money was invented by government as a tool for people to exchange things with. 3. Redistribute the government's money to all people…

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…

Parliament hasn't been allowed to sit in this crisis. Nev Power heads up the government's recovery group, which has no formal authority and no transparency. Their biggest announcement so far? A 'gas-led' recovery, in a…

There's another way to look at Chump's behaviour. The dangers of voluntary voting. Research shows that voluntary voting creates more extreme politics. Why does Chump do these things? Because the secret to winning…

Think of this - this is an age of absolute abundance. And yet the vast majority of the world's population struggles to get by. There's a very simple explanation for that, and it's not 'they don't work hard enough'. And…

New Zealand looks set to declare total Covid elimination, on 15 June. For the people who think you have to ‘balance’ the economy and public health, note the NZers only needed 7 weeks of lockdown to achieve this.…

There’s no such thing as the private sector. Just as there’s no such thing as capitalism, socialism, communism or the economy. There’s just people, always just people. The private sector didn’t exist before we had…

The traffic heading West tonight was like nothing I’ve seen. I know people probably get sick of hearing it, but unless that virus is gone, this weekend alone is going to potentially spread it State-wide. Anyone who says…

Casinos in Australia put over 20,000 staff on the JobKeeper scheme. They still managed to pay full dividends to shareholders. They're good donors to the political parties. Just something to keep in mind when people talk…

Fantastic performance. All true, all urgent messages. There’s a but for me though - too often the progressive side of politics thinks a noble speech will bring about change. It loves noble speeches. To change you need…

“As the Prime Minister said, our strategy across the nation has been one of suppression. It is fantastic that we have effectively achieved elimination at this time in many parts of the country, but that's not our goal.”…

“Men will never establish any equality with which they will be contented...when inequality of condition is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the…

Humans invented parliaments and courts, where two sides debate the merits of issues, to stop arguments infecting all of society. I think the reason our public debates have now become so polarised into two sides is…

Testify! US companies (many already bankrupt pre-Covid) borrowed over $750 billion extra in the last 3 months, due to government underwriting. This is what fixing the economy means, giving our money to cowboys to pay…

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…

This is the battleground for Australia’s future. The government thinks business will lead Australia forward. Business has never, anywhere, led a country in any direction. Business uses the innovations generated by…

Sunday is God’s day. In my experience people who don’t believe in God just swap something else to be in charge - science, politicians, the market, truth, corporations, etc. I don’t think I’ve met another person who…

I see the Victorian government are sensibly recommending that Victorians don't travel interstate if they're going to be mixing with other people. This will be a test for 'open the borders' people. Why do we close…

The federal government has almost no role in management of a pandemic at all. The States do pretty much everything and have most of the authority, under constitutional law. The reason ScoMo wanted a National Cabinet was…

This is Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for pioneering the measurement of economic growth. He more or less invented the idea of GDP. What did he say about the economy? “The welfare of a nation can scarcely…

We'll 'suppress' the virus (close it down), while 'opening up' the economy. So we're closing and opening, at the same time. How does that work? It doesn't. Ask the US and UK.…

Genuinely funny. NSW people, tell Victorians to bugger off. Government-sanctioned. The game of Twister 'opening up the economy' forces people to play, priceless.

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…

The UK is still getting about 1000 new cases of Covid a day. And it's opening right up. See the shift in responsibility for the ensuing carnage? The people are now to blame. The US, UK and Oz share political strategy,…

If people spent half the time trying to understand the pandemic that they do getting outraged about toilet paper, maybe they’d notice that the ‘ridiculous’ thing is governments outsourcing their pandemic strategy to the…

Right now we could ask both NSW and Vic to lockdown again until they've eliminated Covid-19, like the rest of Oz may have achieved. We don't because the Economy Nazis say it would be the end of life as we know it.…

"Mr Morrison told 2GB's Ray Hadley he believed the JobSeeker payment was providing a disincentive for people to find work." Notice how too much government money for the poor is seen as a disincentive for them to work.…

Here’s another little trick the economy cult play on us. Government debt. Two simple graphs here. You can see government spending doesn't vary much from year to year, and in fact it’s trending down. What caused growing…

Apparently 500,000 people have cleaned out their super entirely with the allowed withdrawals for the pandemic. I can't decide if it's them or the government who are more stupid. Maybe we should entrust them both with…

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…

Democracy is winning. What if that's why the world seems batshit crazy right now? I don't have my ceremonial jackboots on, there is a serious line of thought that says democracy is what you get when people lose a shared…

Israel. Another government who thought they'd 'open up' without eliminating the virus first, to save 'the economy'. They had all the social distancing. Kaboom. Unemployment now 20%, and rising, the health and economic…

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…

Most of Australia has already achieved elimination, despite the Economy Cult (established business and their sponsored puppets in parliament) saying it couldn’t be done. They even hold economic guns to the CMO’s heads…

I wouldn’t wait for the government to catch up. The virus is on the move. Don’t go out unless it’s necessary. Avoid public places, avoid pubs, clubs and restaurants more than anything. Don’t be too proud to wear a mask…

The obvious evidence that conservative politics worldwide was simply bought out by the big end of town, is that these parties have the same 3 policies no matter what crisis or situation is in front of them. Cut taxes,…

In recent days we've had the Prime Minister and Premier of NSW asked if they would support further quarantining, if outbreaks get out of hand. Both said the same thing - 'we can't keep turning the lights on and off'. We…

Let it sink in. At a time when a million Australians have lost their jobs, the government’s rescue package centres on big tax cuts to people with high incomes, with jobs.

About time we listened to the people on the front line, and not to industry lobbyists and conservative politicians safely sheltered from the virus, worried more about losing their investments. Just saw this guy…

ScoMo just cancelled the next sitting of parliament. The Chief Medical Officer (CMO) said it's unsafe with virus circulating. The same CMO who says a pub can have 300 people in it, more than twice as many as are in that…

Who would you rather guide us out of this crisis? A failed advertising hack (ScoMo), and a career politician who went straight from university into politics (Gladys), both desperate to protect their party donors in…

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…

How ‘The Economy’ was born. Margaret Thatcher was shrewd, she made generations of people believe that government budgets are like household budgets. Now most assume as common sense that governments need to tax and…

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us.…

ScoMo said today JobKeeper and JobSeeker have to be scaled back, they're bleeding cash. SImple - print some more ScoMo, as much as you like. It will never need to be repaid, government doesn't need to repay itself.…

Do people think? Like the ‘mutual obligation’ idea for people who get the dole. They should work to ‘earn’ their dole. But if the government wants to give away massive tax cuts to people who already have buckets of…

And the Financial Times, saying the same thing. I say don't be bullied by politicians who have weaponised basic economics for political purposes. ScoMo for example could afford to keep JobKeeper going for ages, and pay…

I think masks are important. But we should be wary I think, they’re the lowest rung of the public health ladder, a last resort. People needing masks is a public health response that’s hopeless or that has lost control.…

The only challenge to my mental health in this pandemic is the steady stream of economic bullshit. The economy caused the pandemic, and it's also now stopping us getting out of it. Economic ideas were weaponised by…

Last time there was no virus circulating in the community, they got lucky. This time there is. Crises reveal how we see community. It appears we see it as a platform for personal grievance. Heaven forbid we all have a…

Business people often assume they know how to do politics. There are no examples of this being true. They try to run a country’s budget like a company budget, which is a stupid thing to do. On top of that I think only…

More economic BS. 'Balanced budgets'. The budget is just the income and expenditure for the government for a given year, not a measure of how well the 'economy' is doing. To add to the BS, the economic Nazis will tell…

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…

In the 1980s, Australia and NZ led the world in elimination of HIV. (No nonsense then of 'you can't eliminate'.) They let the pandemic experts lead, politicans got out of the way. NZ has done it again for Covid-19.…

As a household or business, a balanced budget is a good thing. As a country, it’s a disaster. Countries don’t need to balance budgets, they print their own money. They’re not households, running them like a household is…

All of the people who argued for months that elimination of the virus was impossible. Now it's government policy, and the government 'experts' who said it was impossible are now saying it's our aim. There has to be a…

When I was younger I’d never have thought this. Every democracy yearns for hierarchy. It has to be so, I see now. All values are not equal; pluralism is an armistice, not an endpoint. HK right now, we see China as…

Thanks to Stephanie Kelton. A government deficit isn’t debt, it’s a transfer of money to the community. A government surplus is the government pulling money out of the community. A government can have as big a deficit…

Exactly the same script worldwide. Politicians outsourcing management of the pandemic to the public through long lists of complicated rules, and then lecturing the public when they don't follow them. Some sweet naive…

208 people have died of Covid in Australia so far. 139 of these have been in aged care. There are a further 500+ residents of aged care in Victoria currently infected. For those who like to point fingers, responsibility…

We chuckle in The Gods Must be Crazy when the tribe starts to worship a Coke bottle. But I think it’s what we do with money. A tool that has no intrinsic value at all, but we still think of it like gold. ‘How is the…

This is the lengths the forces of the 'Economy' go to. The US election this year will likely be decided by postal votes, with the pandemic rampant there. The Trump administration has been systematically under-funding…

So far nearly 600,000 poor Australians have completely cleaned out their super accounts under Covid, about $32 billion. This super money if left until retirement would have been worth maybe $200 billion. (JobKeeper by…

Isn’t it the most bizarre idea, that taxpayers own money? That the government has to tax people to have money to spend? Doesn’t everybody just know that government prints and owns all the money? I used to believe in…

And another expert. How did we let politicians run a pandemic strategy?

I think Australia has 'Americanised' significantly in the last 40 years. Take our approach to the pandemic. 40 years ago a pandemic triggered a public health response, where large teams of experts were mobilised to…

It’s in the data. This is Victoria’s rolling average community spread for the whole pandemic. The red arrow - 2 May - was the day that average started to climb above 1. The same day NSW went below 1. Also the time…

This is why 'we're following the medical advice' has been political spin all along. When your Chief Medical Officers are employed by your politicians, they're not going to contradict the boss. Kerry Chant saying as much…

A plan that turns a pandemic into a set of rules to follow and a daily blame-game is no plan. It's the absence of basic public health planning. If you're a parent or teacher and you're reduced to writing a list of rules…

This is why you don't let politicians run a pandemic strategy. In fact that flatters them - they have no strategy. Expect this distraction politics to ramp up the more the absence of strategy is translated into…

Anybody who knows anything about Australian governance (that’s unfortunately a tiny number of people) knows this is true. The federal government has virtually zero role in a pandemic. The National Cabinet is a stunt,…

Here's the constantly updated list of 'hotspots' in NSW. It's overwhelmingly pubs, clubs and restaurants. Why are these still open in NSW? All big political donors. I'd advise everybody to avoid these 'like the plague'.…

Did you do maths at school? NSW Cabinet didn’t. There are close to 10 transmission chains of Covid in NSW right now that can’t be traced. Even one of those is enough to start an explosion of cases. Exponential growth,…

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'.

Is anybody else sick of politicians lecturing people every day about rising infection numbers? They don't have a plan to beat the virus, and so when the virus inevitably bites back, why do ordinary people not just tell…

Democracy doesn't understand the deepest human desires for shared belief and hierarchy. It can only see that as 'authoritarianism'. It's why democracies are now infected with multiple loon fundamentalisms.

What drama tarts we are. Now it's come out hotel guards didn't sleep with guests in the Melbourne hotels. And they also likely weren't who originally spread the virus from the hotels. Add to that the legal fact that…

The paradigm is shifting. Just print money. And take it away from politicians with ridiculous ideologies. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-16/economic-rebuilding-after-coronavirus-modern-monetary-theory/12563664

A guy who fights pandemics, speaking right at the start of this one. Very few governments listened. "You have to go after the virus". You have to fight. So many smart and stupid people spending the last few months…

Surveys in the US and UK say up to 50% of people there will refuse a Covid vaccine. The government here talking about making it 'mandatory'. To me this is just another example of the total absence of an actual virus…

More than 25% of Americans believe Bill Gates is using vaccines for mind control. When will we start taking seriously the destruction of our institutions (education, government, journalism etc.), creating this lunatic…

National Cabinet is a PR stunt. Parliament was dissolved so there's been no opposition allowed to the government's decisions for months. Our knowledge of our own governance is so appalling that the corruption of that…

A clear example of how the pandemic was politicised. Breaches of hotel quarantine (which it turns out may not have actually occurred) in Victoria were hammered day after day as 'Victorian mismanagement'. Now guards at…

Wow. Have to wonder if this is a pissing contest for territory between medicine and public health professionals. Doctors prescribe drugs that have risky side-effects in some people already, because benefits are thought…

Nice example of how ‘lockdown’ is a political construct in this pandemic. In public health it’s just one specific strategy applied in various degrees. But listen to the Covid deniers like this one and it’s their code…

Brilliant example here of how to do public health in a pandemic. The traffic light system, like the fire danger system. Takes it completely out of the hands of politicians, and culture warrior alarmists, and it helps…

Another flaw in democracy I think is - it has no effective way to judge good and evil, or even good and bad. I've posted here about how I think democracy is a holding pattern societies use when they don't have unified,…

Back to this brilliant research published in the BMJ. I've marked with an X now where schools, public transport, many workplaces, pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops would sit. All extremely high risk in NSW right now.…

Is populism telling us that people are actually tired of the checks and balances of democracy? Maybe we're defending the wrong thing. The idea of democracy is to let every person have their own opinions and use checks…

There's something delicious about watching a man who weaponised Australia's borders to win elections being helpless before closed borders. Are people realising yet that the feds have no authority in a pandemic? ScoMo…

If you're a fan of the modern LNP, fascinating piece by Gareth Hutchens today about how proud Menzies was of running large deficits over many years. Years where Australia boomed. Menzies knew deficits simply shifted the…

One of the debating tricks people who oppose strong public health action against the virus use is to say 'more people are being harmed by the restrictions than by the virus'. That's like saying 'we can't build new…

This is what we need for pandemics. Where the boundaries between each level and the actions that flow from them are determined by public health metrics, not by politicians trying to ram borders open or pander to…

Listen to the experts. Fuck off, politicians and lobbyists. Unbelievable, this isn't the Australia I grew up in.

Superannuation is the privatisation of the aged pension. Billions of it is creamed off in pointless fees and to create profits for financial services companies. The argument for it was that the government can't afford…

Bad people keep winning elections because good people are so often politically stupid. They think protest and noble speeches win elections and change the world. (They don't.) They want to feel good, to exude…

Very revealing in this pic that they couldn't think of an example for the 'centre'. It doesn't exist. You're either for or against something in politics. That's why we have two-sided parliaments (and courts), to…

The Economy Crowd. Not only spending their pandemic happily sheltered from the virus while undermining public health action for the rest of us, like demanding borders open to help mates in the tourism and airline…

Wanted to go back to this graph. Right now politicians are telling you that we need to get the economy open, we're facing an economic emergency. Bullshit, look at the 2 world wars here. The huge government spending in…

I'm gobsmacked that even educated people have swallowed the political 'herd immunity' strategy from the Economy Crowd. It was invented by a small dirty tricks unit in Boris Johnson's office.

This data today in the national accounts shows that ordinary people are taking home the same sized slice of the national pie as they did in 1959. Business profits though have been climbing for 50 years. Join a union,…

Maybe a million Australians have lost their jobs under Covid. Do you think Josh's $158 billion in tax cuts will cheer them up, now that they have no income and are paying no tax? Shows pretty clearly who's getting most…

When a pollie talks about debt and deficit, does it scare you? It shouldn't, it's a steaming pile of horseshit. We have Scrooges in charge, who need to open the country's fucking wallet and start investing in society…

Yep, the same mistake, time and again. You can't appeal to the centre, because it doesn't exist.…

Pictures really do tell stories. Australia's 30 years of economic 'boom' were a fantasy. Workers went backwards fast, and survived with enormous amounts of private debt. Debt they needed because governments sucked money…

My fear as well. Progressive voters make the same mistake over and over, Trump knows the secret to politics is in energising two-way battles over ideas, good and evil. Firing people up, seducing them, not focus group…

Check this out. Spanish Flu in NSW, 1919 - January 25, pandemic arrives in NSW (same day as COVID 101 years later) - NSW quickly put public health restrictions in place - only about 15 died in NSW during this first wave…

Conservative politicians were very critical of BLM protests in a pandemic. One of the few times I've agreed with them. It's very revealing that, as yet, not one word of criticism from the same politicians on the…

A disgrace. "...where we can reopen our economy and reasonably restore the liberties of all Australians." When will more thinking Australians speak out and say they're quite happy to have 'liberty' from the fucking…

You can train a Chief Medical Officer to do tricks. Like this one, appearing as an attack dog for the government as head of the Federal Department of Health. Obscenely inappropriate, Department Heads NEVER do press…

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…

When you listen to the real experts, it doesn't resemble much of what comes out of politician's mouths.

6 of our 8 States and territories are sitting there as good as free of Covid, while the remaining 2 are held hostage to a culture war, led by the PM, about scoring cheap political points and undermining the public…

“...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…

Thought I'd re-post this, after NSW politics today and koalas. It's not about koalas.

To illustrate the nonsense of debt and deficit scaremongering. Yesterday the NZ government borrowed money at an interest rate of -0.103%. Fund managers *paid* the NZ government to take their money. This is the time for…

My number one pandemic tip. When a politician or somebody on YouTube speaks, turn it off. Then read something like this instead. https://www.policyforum.net/australias-pandemic-policy-made-a-second-wave-inevitable/

Brilliant story about how power is shifting away from governance and senior management of corporations towards shareholders, usually superannuation funds (i.e. you and me). The excesses of the corporate world have been…

Democracy. Where everybody is free to not do the most basic things. Like public health work.

I’ve been so proud to be an Australian in this pandemic. Our magnificent public institutions stuffed full of expertise have been allowed to flex their muscles. We’re the envy of much of the world. At the same time…

Economists agree with the public health people. Restrictions save our economy and health at the same time, they're the same thing. Next time somebody says we need to relax restrictions to save our economy, just remember…

Delicious! The health experts back Queensland. Is there anybody left who thinks the federal government has the first interest in the pandemic? Or just the economy?

Couple of things here. First, the 'disaster' here is (of course) apparently 'financial'. Bugger people's health. Second, we hear the same bluster from idiot politicians all over the world, including here. The virus…

I saw people singing 'Imagine' outside the White House at the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And I thought, Trump is going to win again. I give up with how utterly useless progressively-minded people are at politics.…

A major business consulting firm explaining that lockdowns didn't damage the economy. The virus did. Economists almost universally say the same. When you see a politician demanding restrictions be relaxed to save the…

This is modern conservative politics. The technical term is 'regulatory capture'. The people they're regulating now own them. The gas industry, for example.

Angus Taylor today, talking about energy policy and climate change. "We shouldn't damage our economy to reduce emissions". Sound familiar? Replace 'emissions' with Covid-19 and you have their pandemic strategy too. He…

After spending more than twice what they promised, and running years behind their 'faster' rollout, the government is finally being forced to fix its white elephant. Staggering incompetence on every measure, don't play…

No need for conspiracy theories. Governments are victims of regulatory capture. Lobby groups bought them out, they stopped trying to influence politics and instead bought the parties. Then they funded mass persuasion…

Paul Keating savaged the Reserve Bank yesterday. And rightly. The country has more than a million people without a job, and businesses sitting idle. The government should be pumping billions into the country right now,…

This budget in October will be generation-defining. The government can either spend up hugely, investing in society for decades to come. Thankfully it at least seems to understand now that the 'debt for future…

I started the day hopeful this government would do the right thing for Australia. And ended it as flabbergasted as all the financial experts at how appalling this government is. Rather than dump their ideology about…

We say China is 'authoritarian'. That's because we say we're 'free', and they're not. But unpack that a bit - is a decision by government *not* to act authoritarian, as much as a decision to act? Here are the…

Trump just nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the US. Mother of 7, reads the Constitution as an 'originalist' (i.e. as if Moses had brought it down from the mountain), loves guns, hates abortion, hates…

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…

Thanks @[738682522:2048:Nicole] for this ripper. The herd immunity crowd include even quite educated people. It’s a dangerous fantasy, a political bastardisation of science. https://apple.news/A_kBEJSlMSZO0uRb1TKoErg

Widespread ignorance of how our own country works means the government plans to introduce a flat tax structure, and hardly anybody has blinked an eye. The populism virus continuing to eat our societies from the inside…

The government’s actions during the pandemic? - university funding gutted, thousands of jobs lost - arts sector gutted - $50 billion of peoples’ superannuation gutted - environmental protection laws gutted - a Covid…

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…

ScoMo is building a chicken coop (illegally) at his Sydney PM home. But it’s the invincibility that’s important here. Populism makes a politician politically invincible. Every check and balance - institutions (the law,…

"Until the end of the pandemic, it's highly unlikely that NSW will ever get to 28 days of no community transmission, because that is not how a pandemic works." It's highly unlikely this will occur because the State…

Some say the budget had nothing for women. The biggest part of every Budget is the HouseKeeper program. Worth an estimated nearly 34% of the entire Economy. All unpaid of course. Includes childcare, for which there was…

Everything about Trump and his popularity is explained by people wanting a King instead of a President. That's populism. Kings were often barking mad, it was seen as their prerogative. We habitually think 'democracy' is…

If the God-bothering conservatives we seem to vote for have such a problem with women in work (why they won’t fund extra childcare), then pay people higher wages. Then they can afford to keep a parent at home, if they…

This day, at the beginning of May, was a turning point for Australia. A large group of Australian experts from a huge range of fields advised the government to hold that first wave lockdown for a few more weeks, to…

Look at that wave of oldies coming over the next 20 years, the yellow line. Nearly everything about our life and politics right now is explained by these lines. A politics of the cranky, conservative, backward-looking,…

Proof that the Economy is just people. We imported lots of young, healthy, smart people, it’s why the Oz economy hasn’t tanked in over 20 years. That’s about to stop. The government think building roads and gas plants…

I think Gladys is likeable. A competent politician, those who would replace her from her side are mostly hopeless. I’d be surprised if she survives the latest scandal, she knew about the corruption, there’s no escape…

If you saw a parent or teacher pleading with kids to ‘follow the rules’, you’d (rightly) assume they have no idea what they’re doing. Think about that the next time a politician says we all need to follow the Covid…

Thiis is word-for-word what Donald Trump has been saying in America. And we’re not disgusted and worried that this is our federal government?

Sweden, darling of the virus deniers, is being forced to introduce lockdowns due to an explosion of cases. Incidentally if you know somebody who believes the fastest way out of this pandemic is just to let everybody get…

If you reckon this fella is doing a good job with Covid...he cancelled National Cabinet last week. His reason? He couldn’t get a plane back from Queensland. The real reason? He was at a Liberal Party fundraising dinner,…

The anti-lockdown people plead with us all to ‘wake up’. Let me flip that. Wake up people, and ask one simple question. If stopping a lethal virus gets in the way of our economy, shouldn’t it be our economy that…

This is a statement from NSW Health yesterday: “The only way to find new cases and prevent further transmission is to increase testing." That’s just obviously wrong. There are all sorts of ways to prevent transmission…

“Politically confected libertarian nonsense.” Inspiring when you see truly smart and experienced people at work.

If you're an LNP person, I'm curious how you justify this behaviour. Corruption of the highest order. Destroyed the lot, hard copies & digital. 250% more money than the Sports Rorts affair federally, that cost a…

It took generations to build cathedrals, started by fathers and finished by sons or even grandsons. We struggle to do anything that lasts longer than the 3 years between elections. So what’s to learn here? I think that…

“The Prime Minister said the continued lockdown suggested the state government was not confident its health system was capable of suppressing transmission of the virus.” Our health systems don’t suppress the virus,…

ScoMo just finished his address to parliament with 'God Bless Australia'. Our very own Trump.

What the virus is doing now is showing that the health sciences, including epidemiology, aren’t capable of getting us through this pandemic. Notice that their advice can get our numbers very low, sometimes to zero, but…

Humans always have hierarchies, because humans value things, and those values create hierarchies - some things are better than other things. I think there’s a misunderstanding of democracy as being ‘rule by the people’,…

Less than 2% of Australia's vast health spending goes to public health preventative measures. Barely a cent has been spent on that during Covid either. It's what I mean when I say the government has no plan to actually…

People are amazed I think Australia is in real danger with Covid. Our numbers are so low! Much of Europe’s numbers were low, going into their summer. Much of it is now about to be locked down. Low numbers come from…

Can you imagine any other democratic country where the incumbent tries to make mail-in votes illegal, after they've been cast? It's breathtaking corruption. A bit like closing parliament entirely during a national…

Because in my experience people have very little knowledge of how politics actually works, ScoMo the professional marketing man continually pulls the wool over our eyes. Take the masterful spin of ‘Covid normal by…

I suspect quite a lot of people in Oz actually like Trump and what he stands for, and are just a bit shy to say it. They hate bureaucracy, they hate politicians, they think mainstream media is trying to fool them etc.…

Reserve Bank dropped interest rates to 0.1% today. To me it’s a great example of how ideas are everything, they’ve been forced to do this because of the government’s fanatical belief that government spending is bad, and…

People scratch their heads about why polls now don't reflect election results. It's populism again, populists see pollsters as part of the same elite 'Establishment' they hate. So they lie to them. And vote for reality…

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…

I’ve always been a fan of the possibility of social media. But the reality is destroying our societies. I always talk about populism, and it’s social media that makes populism powerful. Every lunatic can mobilise…

Everything is ideas. Right now with Trump we’re seeing the endgame of our ridiculous ideas about democracy. That it’s just about the ‘people’. It isn’t, the people have only a tiny role to play in democracy. Most of the…

Gladys yesterday said 'if our businesses are Covidsafe, we can open the economy even more'. She was talking about QR codes. 3 important things here: 1) QR codes do nothing to make any business safe. They let NSW Health…

I love elections. But maybe not this much.

If you’re an LNP voter, maybe check that you really know who’s taking over your parties. This has been building for 25 years.

And this is the commissioner of the American Federal Election Commission.

Governance is my profession. This is a fascinating graphic doing the rounds. It’s slightly misleading, there aren’t far fewer Republicans (red), they’re just spread out a lot more. And their Congress (peoples’ house) is…

Universities are also a type of federal system. Schools and Faculties are like the States, and a central administration is like the federal government. Nearly every senior manager of a university doesn’t understand this…

From the last US election :)

For years politicians and farmers have argued that farmers employ backpackers because locals are too lazy to take the jobs. The truth is more brutal. They don’t employ locals because they can get away with shitty pay…

Exactly the way we should be looking at this. The (few) countries whose political systems prioritised public health have escaped most of the pandemic.

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…

Have a look here at how Victoria has SMASHED Covid. There's not a case of any type in nearly a fortnight. Same for every other State and Territory in the country, except NSW (it's *very* close). The entire country could…

The power of federalism again. Brilliant politicians at the State level can act without approval from their idiot federal colleagues.

Watching 4Corners about the blokey, sexist culture amongst federal LNP ministers last night, made me think again that we’re maybe looking at the relations between the sexes in the wrong way. The deeper problem to me…

Many are saying Trump still got 70 million votes, those people need to be looked after. It's no different to any other election, it's even quite common for half of an entire country to not get the person they voted for.…

That beautiful moment when a female federal cabinet minister is asked if Canberra's blokey culture is still bad. And the bloke-PM just talks right over the top of her. She then says my PM is terrific. Good girl, know…

People have been told that a vaccine will end the pandemic. That's because basic public health practice has been hijacked by stupid politicians, who want a quick medicine they can give you so they can minimise…

Takes a true leader to pass blame to officials for their own corruption. ScoMo is a master, never responsible for anything. "I don't hold a hose, mate". His words in the bushfires. Yesterday he didn't hold a dick…

Sweden’s pandemic, from its own public health authority. Smash the virus, or it will smash you. Don't try to 'live with it'. Kill it. See that they were still lifting restrictions as recently as 22 October? Never, ever,…

"The Prime Minister said states that were reopening could learn lessons from NSW, which he dubbed as "battle hardened" from recent months." Sorry, bullshit. NSW has looked great because it has close to ZERO virus. It…

My American friends, what the hell happened in 1964’s election?

The new 'LNP' strain of the virus. It's the same virus, behaving in exactly the same way it always has. This is just political spin. SA is experiencing exactly what Victoria experienced. It's also borrowed Boris'…

Follow up from yesterday. Another clear example of how politicians distort public health measures. They made up this 'new strain' rubbish to justify going into lockdown, because they knew it was embarrassing to have to…

Let’s play being an editor. Pick the redundant words in this sentence. My vote goes to ‘and unexpected’.

If you think our politicians are doing an amazing job with this pandemic, it means you're not paying attention. And it's mostly the LNP who are emulating their heroes in the UK and US here. I have no time for anybody's…

Meanwhile in the UK, Boris negotiates a deal with Covid to stop infecting people over Christmas. "Happy Christmas, look what I got you - a lethal infection!" will reverberate around the land. Funeral directors looking…

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…

Sharing this to highlight that eliminating diseases, even very tricky ones like HIV, is standard public health practice. Remember politicians saying from Day 1 of this pandemic Covid couldn't be eliminated? That was a…

George Orwell coined the term Doublethink in 1984, to mean people persuaded through propaganda language to believe two mutually contradictory things at once. Classic examples are 'Covid Safe' and 'Covid Normal'. Orwell…

I don’t make stuff up. The Australian government chose the UK and US as guides for our pandemic response. You know, those countries where people are dying all over the place. Luckily most of our Premiers decided to…

Alison is a senior economist. I highlighted bargaining power, because it links back to unions. All of the political problems we see today, across every issue, stem from the decline of unions. The majority of people have…

Democracy isn’t the people running the country. The country wouldn’t run if the people ran it.

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…

Look at what China has done with poverty in only 20 years. Of course it still has holes in it, but the intent and much of the outcome is something we pay only lip service to in the West. Is it more ‘authoritarian’ to…

Watching the Brits and others getting excited about this as some sort of ‘end of the pandemic’ shows yet again how completely out of touch with basic public health practice the public discussion is. Politicians are to…

The danger of identity politics, which is neither a Left or Right thing, just as populism isn’t, is that it takes a fragile social commons, and splinters it into a million subjective grievances. It happened with the…

ScoMo spent over $5000 of your money to go to the Murdoch Christmas party last year with his minister mates, in a government 737. Looks like they got a good return on investment.

Nearly everybody I see is more or less acting as if normal life has returned. Politicians are to blame, they’ve encouraged it. For some reason we let them get away with bringing the virus under control being an excuse…

This government can't believe how easily it gets away with spin. As Michael says, we just need to 'think about it'. Good luck with that, we're off getting fake tans, wasted, and booking holidays.

How’s that democracy going Straya? Where the government writes all the news. Anybody notice? Put the beer down for a sec and have a look, lots to see. Oh and the government also currently approving legislation to…

The populist takeover of Australia continues at pace. The word 'sovereignty' is a red flag - for example it's how the populist Tories sold Brexit, and Trump sold himself to the US. Notice the flag too, a giveaway. Local…

Hey, remember those tax cuts? Look how those pan out by 2030. Tax *increases* for everybody except high income earners, who get a cut. People are mistakenly seeing the LNP as a Liberal National Party. They're not,…

So apparently next cab off the rank of ‘shit we can get away with under cover of the pandemic’ that the LNP are onto, is compulsory voting. The envy of the world, but of course they want us to be the USA, so it has to…

Professor Crabb has been saying this for some time. As have I, because I follow his work and that of many other researchers. Covid is binary - you either have zero, or you have lots. There is no 'low' amount of virus,…

Ask anybody who works directly with the public, and I reckon you’ll find they all experience the same thing. Huge amounts of personal abuse, endless complaints. This is pretty interesting, because what actually happened…

In the UK as here there was much theatre early in the pandemic from pollies saying they were ‘following the science’. Conservatives never were, it was spin. They don’t on climate change, why would they on a pandemic?…

Do people even notice that every day of this pandemic, offices have been exempt from most Covid Safe requirements? It’s all been about the economy, not the virus or your health. Will we ever realise the beliefs we have…

Same spin, different country. Fast-spreading, horseshit. Incompetence in conservative government. At the same time this same government is threatening to take schools to court if they close to control the virus. We’re…

Yaneer Bar-Yam is a scientist who has been working on pandemics for 15 years. He's a huge fan of NZ and Australia's approach. Here's his summary of what works (green) versus what doesn't (red). Notice that what we did…

How's this for the 'free market', government interrogation of banks for their market-based decisions? And we think China is 'authoritarian'. All red meat for the lunatic backbench, these decisions are only about…

A public service announcement, because I doubt they'll spend much telling people this. NSW Health advises that if you're in crowded shops this Christmas, please wear a mask. Notice, no rule saying you should, which…

"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…

NSW Health Minister currently lecturing us all on an ‘avalanche of complacency’. Notice the political strategy here, copied from Boris and the Don? Government outsources its responsibility for the pandemic to the…

Professors, so often smart. I highly recommend them over opinionated windbags on radio and TV. And politicians in a pandemic.

If you needed a plumber, would you hire a politician? No? So for a pandemic, let’s listen to pandemic experts. Just for once.

In case you don’t see these. See how they’re now warning the whole State? Because they (Gladys, not NSW Health) relaxed most of the Covid restrictions. Don’t blame the people. The government have no idea how far this…

We began the pandemic blaming each other for supermarkets’ hopelessly fragile supply chains. (We’re still doing that.) And now we blame each other when governments don’t do their jobs with public health restrictions.…

Some simple maths here. Northern beaches locked down for 5 days. Many who may be infected won’t show any symptoms in that short time. It’s a political timeline, not a public health one. To try to save Christmas. It…

This should really anger us. The key voices opposing public health action in this pandemic, including this pair of senior US politicians and Rupert Murdoch, pushing to the front of the queue to be vaccinated. These…

Go shopping, don’t go shopping. Celebrate New Years, don’t celebrate New Years. Mix with your family, don’t mix with your family. Facing a toxic situation by just giving everybody what they want, even though all of…

And again, what happens when you make the health system the front line of attack in a pandemic, rather than (as it should be) the last line of defence. A pandemic is not a medical event, it’s a political creation.

This is the UK. Unsurprisingly a government who sacrificed over 70,000 Brits, and climbing, to save a fictitious economy, also can’t organise their magic beans pandemic solution either.

Many, many experienced experts have been saying this for months. Around the world conservative governments have been trying to use contact tracing as an excuse to not do public health work, to keep everything open. It’s…

NSW and the federal government don’t listen, they just lecture.

This is the core belief system of governments being smashed by Covid. Ideas kill. It’s why Gladys is watching the virus spread through NSW and is doing almost nothing about it. You know whose ‘choices’ she’s protecting?…

So many of the things we see as problems caused by other things are really just us. It’s very difficult to take people seriously when they’re concerned about privacy, for example, when they do nothing but post about…

The Beatles were superb musicians. But Beatlemania and the enormous phenomenon The Beatles became were a sickness I think. Even The Beatles recognised that, it’s why they split up. Music should not be what changes the…

Most people would rather join a gym than a union now. Whether you’re Left or Right, rich or poor, the destruction of unions is what’s mostly destroying our societies. Working people being looked after and earning good…

Many people look at politicians as evidence the world is broken. Me, it’s more people like the couple of anti-social dickheads who walked my street last night randomly pushing over peoples’ garbage bins, forcing people…

‘Let them eat cake’ is for me the perfect motto for Trump and Brexit, and for everybody who hates governments and bureaucrats. As if getting rid of governments and bureaucracies will free everybody up - it’s the same as…

US government in shut down because Trump can’t get $5 billion for his ridiculous wall. The wall he said Mexicans would pay for (the man pathologically lies) and which construction experts say will cost at least $20…

Was at the cricket yesterday. Made me think about crowds again. Have a look at the faces in any crowd, they don’t match the usual assumption about crowds, that the ‘mob’ is stupid and acts with one big, dumb mind. Every…

I’m on a Brexit theme because this week the UK parliament makes the decision. Look at the mindsets in play here. Also surveys in the UK show that the public’s range of views exactly match the range of disagreement in…

Do Brexit and Trump show that nobody was listening to the Pythons? I really am interested in how people view government and regulation. In my experience a large number of people now have the shock-jock view, that…

Paglia is like Greer, an older feminist with serious scholarship behind her. It’s hard to comment on modern gender politics without sounding like you’re trying to defend one of the two ‘sides’. Both sides are bananas.…

An observation. It’s very difficult to get people to engage with ideas, unless they see it as a battle between two sides. Left versus Right, Trump versus just about anything, Migrants versus home-grown, Men versus…

Elderly people in the UK were twice as likely to vote to leave Europe. Younger people were 7 times more likely to vote to stay. Doesn’t the whole world make a lot more sense when you see it through the lens of an…

“It was a salient lesson for the state’s first ever Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence and Sexual Assault, that understanding a domestic violence offender was at the heart of prevention. "It's…

Watching Brexit debates. Every single person, from member of the public through to Prime Minster, says ‘we should...’. But the whole country can’t agree on any of it. There is no ‘we’. Isn’t Brexit trying really hard to…

102 ways (and counting) turning your government off destroys your society (thanks @[100002452996169:2048:Nigel]).

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…

"That's not a forehead, dad. It's a fivehead." Megamind has infiltrated the European Parliament.

Big elections this year. 1. Should voting be compulsory? 2. Should we move to online elections? My view. 1. Absolutely yes. 2. Absolutely no.…

“My sympathy for wealthy retirees has been sorely tested by their self-serving greed.” We might be getting close to the last elections where the old get to screw the young.

Never come between a boomer and a bucket of money. Here's the angry face of old fart entitlement. Oldies currently getting 'refunded' for tax they never paid, to the tune of nearly 8 billion dollars a year (almost…

At first glance this looks like a boring list of numbers. But this shows the age distribution of voters across all Australian electorates and States. It’s a window into who we really are as a country. If you look, what…

Bill Shorten and Kerryn Phelps should have had the brains to figure out this medical evacuation issue would play right into the hands of the incompetent bunch of dipshits on the government benches. 20-odd years into the…

Yes yes I know, broken record. But election looming, this stuff is important. Pictures do sometimes say more than a thousand words.

Spinning tops should be impossible. They move, and don’t move. They’re stable, and unstable. All at the same time. For me, they’re telling us something super important. Whenever we come up against a binary argument,…

Is Australia watching ScoMo frothing at the mouth about border protection and thinking, "the boats will be back!"? Or are they thinking "these idiots are absolutely bloody desperate to try to stay in government"? You…

Teach your children to be brave. We could start by not always telling them how scary the HSC is. Or how scary being online is, or that scary perverts are trying to kidnap them, etc. Some of this stuff was scarier in my…

What if our mistake with climate change is to think it’s about climate? We’ve used fossil fuels for several centuries to ‘free’ ourselves from the usual constraints of life - our connections to our landscapes, to our…

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…

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…

In an election year, it's interesting to again look at the 'coalition'. Have mentioned on here before that I think there's hardly a single point of agreement between the Liberal and National parties. One is a free…

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 most beautiful examples I think of the difference between the freedom from something, and the freedom to do something. Lots of people might argue that making voting compulsory takes away freedom, but it…

The genius of England for me is the common law. One of the things shock jocks get very wet in the underpants about is what they call ‘activist judges’, judges making law. But that IS common law. Law made from…

Always follow the money. ‘Self-funded retirees’ is an oxymoron, a huge chunk of their wealth is tax concessions, which we all pay for. The political battle of our times is between the old and young, not Left and Right.…

Scott Morrison, talking about tax cuts again this morning. "We want to give people back more of their own money." This is classic ultra-conservative framing at work, the 'tax relief' nonsense, gotta call it out. There…

Another big framing that ultra-conservatives use. Government 'debt'. Treating public finances like a household - debt is bad, surplus is good. The justification for 'austerity' policies, that are really nothing more…

Such an important article. Both sides of politics have become infected with purity and righteousness. And that flows into the community, the sides of debates are so righteous. My interest in all things is diplomacy,…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re caught. That’s how I see living in a rich and privileged country too, we often don’t see that privilege, we assume that’s just how the world is. For example, the idea of…

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…

Saw a vid on the problem with politics in America. This is a telling graph. You can see that the level of public support for a given issue has no impact whatsoever on the vote in Congress. That’s why Trump is popular.

Waleed nails the Pell issue, this is a SUPERB piece. Highly recommended reading. Societies whose only moral emotion is outrage, and who mistake vengeance for justice, don’t survive. We have no clue how government works,…

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…

Imagine you have a child who is sensitive to loud noises. Then, you go and buy everybody in the house their own drum kit, and ask them to play all day. Then imagine unhinged, violent people who feel like we’re being…

Derren Brown’s best work shows how desire and suggestion are the most fundamental part of who we are. The fascinating techniques he uses here are used by politicians and advertisers too, for example. Suggestion isn’t…

Another ultra-conservative political trick, on debt. 'Debt' is obviously a combination of revenue, and spending. What ultra-conservatives do is slash revenue, by cutting taxes, and then when the budget goes into deficit…

In my experience, there is again only one true indicator of understanding - a feeling of surprise and joy. If you feel anything else, you’re not understanding something. Take politics, which many despair about, and feel…

Another example of the ideas of penetration. ‘Higher wages kill jobs’. Hearing that a lot with the election coming up. If you see every individual as isolated from everybody else, then that might be true. But…

I think pollies are very misunderstood. Take this one - that they ‘lie’. It’s been clearly shown that we all lie, all of the time, about just about everything. They are us. But on top of that, the job of a politician is…

Here’s another reframing. A ‘world in crisis’ is just our usual channels, of TV and film and now social media, feeding back to us the complexity of the world we’d ignored before. ‘No politics please!’ is the voice of…

How many relationship problems are due to the fact that people mature at different rates? We tend to blame individual personality for a lot of these problems, just as we say the problem with politics is individual…

Elections and leaders to me are like picking the colour of your car. Society is the car, a very complex piece of engineering, needing large numbers of smart people, hard work and tradition to keep running. It doesn’t…

More reframing. The people of the UK can’t agree, on Brexit. Is it a crisis, or could disagreement be the basis of a society, not just agreement? Compromise as the basis for society, rather than the false gods of…

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…

Watching the big election bribery cash splash. I mean budget. The usual stuff both sides trot out, idolising small business. There’s nothing wrong with small business. But it isn’t the engine room of our economy, or any…

I’m proud to say I’m an expert on committees, it’s a big part of my job, I get paid to do it. Some observations about committees from years of working with them: 1) everybody hates them, but take them away and people…

"But I wonder also if it is us — entertained to death, with a closet full of our team’s favorite colors hoping to beat the hell out of the other guys." I agree with this. Politics needs sides, but we need to be doing…

Politics as sport, an example. Brexit again. Divided into pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit forces, which is how politics should work. However outside politics, this is also how the public is tending to line up, backing their…

Watched some election talk today. It comforts me thinking that society is way too complex for anybody to really be able to lead or run. No person would know how to keep society running for even 5 minutes. Elections and…

All political movements are grounded in promoting particular interests. I think this helps focus what we see in politics, always look to the actual interests involved. The ALP: - is the oldest political party in…

For years elections were won and lost in Queensland, because that’s where the population was going. This election though will probably be won and lost in Victoria and NSW, where the bulk of the immigration to Australia…

This story is now going to cost the Daily Telegraph millions of dollars. I hope it emboldens others to take more Murdoch-driven filth to court, Murdoch thinks he’s a law unto himself, he’s a key player in wrecking all…

Google had a hiring policy based on a strong view that the second you let an idiot into an organisation, it’s like a virus. That idiot hires other idiots, creates informal networks of idiots, and soon you’re overrun by…

I have many friends and acquaintances who identify with the ‘centre’ in politics. I’m genuinely interested to hear of policies that would count as ‘centre’ policies. Specifics always tell the real story. Interested…

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.

All modern democracies share this same fantasy. “The American political system has evolved several mechanisms to protect its own dysfunction. One of them is fantasy. Like a spouse who manages to remain monogamous by…

Some pollsters say the election will be very close, and Scott Morrison may still win. If he does, it’ll be, again, the old winning over the young, as it was in the 2016 election. The circle of life has been broken for a…

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…

This happened in Lithgow recently. The investigation as to why turned up the interesting fact that nobody even knew how the Lithgow reticulated water supply works. They still don’t, some of it is still a mystery. The…

The disaster of averages! The average voter doesn’t exist, it’s a statistical calculation. And it turns out, when you survey actual voters, they’re *more* extreme in their specific views than most politicians. This is…

Teenagers’ bedrooms are maybe the perfect way to change how we think about climate change. Their habits create their HABITat, a much better word than ‘environment’. Environmental politics never really gets traction I…

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…

Outrage that Clive Palmer seems to be ‘buying’ his way back into parliament. Actually the LNP and Labor have always bought their way into parliament too, politics always costs money. Is it time to make all elections…

Hazardous air quality in Sydney, headline. Caused by ‘hazard reduction burning’. Seeing the stupidity here, anybody? This one is right up there with daylight savings. If somebody builds a home in the middle of the bush,…

Selfish and selfless. Another toxic false opposite, I think. As if we either look after ourselves, or look after others. If you frame it like that, you have no choice but to either be a dick to other people, or to be a…

I reckon super was a colossal mistake. It financialised and privatised retirement. The vast sums of money now hoarded by private financial firms could have been money government uses to fund services for all. Super has…

Now social issues are getting too big for pollies to solve, and they’re struggling, rather than the public getting off their lazy, entitled and complacent arses and doing a bit of learning, debating and compromising,…

All over the world, working people have had their political power reduced. The people who took that power away have at the same time steered the resulting anger away from themselves using champions of ‘the working man’.…

I love this paradox. If you want a peaceful happy life, you have to debate things. Trying to achieve peace and happiness by avoiding conflict just kicks the conflict can down the road, and when we catch up to it it’s…

What is it about Bill Shorten that people don't like? I have a feeling Shorten could be a great PM, very pragmatic, focused on results, in the long Labor tradition of investing in and building things. (Which the LNP…

The huge increase in early voting for elections, yeh nah. Election Day is a collective tradition or ritual, but pre-poll voting is making it an individualised thing. Vote when it’s most convenient it to you, customer…

Voting for a minor party because you're sick of the major parties is like shopping at IGA. Same food, double the price.

Barnaby Joyce said the other day that bureaucrats actually run the country. We agree on something. He thinks that's a bad thing, I think it protects us from the country being run by idiots like Barnaby. Bureaucrats are…

Most people identify themselves in the political 'centre' too, as 'moderates', even though their views are clearly either Left or Right, or a combination of Left and Right (which isn't a centre, it’s a mixture of Left…

“Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal, since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the…

Political parties aren’t really what elections are about. They represent certain interests, elections are fascinating if you shift the focus to the interests and away from the parties. If we stop treating it as a…

Utopia hit a vein by focusing on infrastructure. But it’s interesting to think about why infrastructure has become such a political issue. Maybe because most of the wealth of the country has been channelled to the old,…

JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” A message for people unhappy with political parties, like they’re shopping for a mobile phone and the one they want is out of stock.…

Hopefully the paywall doesn’t prevent access. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/prepoll-voting-is-undermining-our-democracy/news-story/f1721826d60e50256a314648805636f1

Have you seen the number of scare pieces online about how 5G is going to kill us all? I looked into this, and it’s fascinatingly our very own ‘fake news’. Driven mostly from the Kremlin’s online political units. Russia…

Fantastic short animation, even captures the shifts of day and night. Reckon politicians are to blame for global warming? Who do you reckon is in all of those planes? Also a nice way to map wealth in the world.…

10 thoughts about the election. 1. It’s not sport, nobody actually won or lost. Any party who reads election results as being about them, win or lose, will always get smashed by the people eventually. 2. The old still…

Nearly every election, State and federal, in the last 10 years, has been a ‘shock’ result, defying opinion polls. No party is winning. People are voting to smash things. Our own Brexit underway.

Seeing lots of rubbish like this. We keep treating politics as a football game between parties, that we watch on TV. I reckon we don’t stop to think - no, the LNP didn’t ‘win’ the election, like a tennis match. The LNP…

Here’s to me the greatest lesson of the election. Government is *always* just us, the people. In the past there was no way to mobilise all of us at once in real-time, so it led to a perception that a small group of…

I can't remember who posted this (thanks to them). But I thought it was brilliantly expressed. 'No politics please' is the voice of privilege. Privilege is usually invisible to the privileged.

If 'don't vote for the other guy' is your election platform, and the other guy loses, do you have a mandate to do anything at all?

Another undercurrent from the election. Faith in politics is in freefall. As in the US, religious faith is filling the gap, drawing voters to parties. The separation of Church and State - some people never signed up for…

Zali. Seems lovely, but I think the perfect example of how you shoot yourself in the foot if you see politics as about leaders. She’ll have next to no power in the parliament, and by removing Abbott the LNP loses a…

Facebook told us the outcome of the election in another way. Comparing ourselves to others is the fuel of society. Labor’s justice-based campaign couldn’t match the ‘aspiration’ campaign from the LNP. People don’t want…

Notice how some are now saying Labor’s redistribution of wealth agenda cost them the election? Conservatives have had nothing BUT a wealth redistribution agenda for decades, in the opposite direction. Their political…

I think any of the elements can be a bully, the light of summer is harsh and bullies colour, temperature and moisture, the enormous sea robs coastal areas of autumn colour and temperature variation. The cold and dry of…

To go back to a favourite idea, why are most workplaces structured around trying to get everybody to agree to the same thing? In politics you get to choose between two options on each issue, with a champion for each, a…

2016 election, Malcolm Turnbull's LNP won 76 seats, and 42% of the primary vote. 2019 election, Scott Morrison's LNP currently has 76 seats, and 42% of the primary vote. Scott Morrison beat the polls, not Labor. Labor…

Around the world people are voting for sovereignty. I think we need to understand that? Urgently?

In the UK, everybody talks about what 'the people' want. In Australia everybody interprets the election here as what 'the people' wanted. 3 years ago they (the ones who bothered to vote in the UK) decided they wanted to…

I think these signs are a model for where democracy needs to head. Away from the unsolvable problems of representative government, where everybody argues about what 'the people' want', when nobody actually knows or can…

One of the greatest human problems, understanding how to balance individual and group. I think music solved it a long time ago, but people don't often go there to answer this one. Melody (individual) and harmony…

The Israel Folau freedom of speech hoo-ha is an example of how the LNP is deluding itself that they're back in government because people supported their policies and worldview. They took no policies to the election,…

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…

From cradle to grave, I think humans' most fundamental act is to copy, or imitate. In politics, school, shopping, fashion - everywhere. Have mentioned before that to try to go against the current trend is to be even…

Into week 2 of the continued reign of the Lunatic Nutters Party (LNP). Last week religious freedom of speech was the go, this week the Australian Federal Police is raiding journalists' homes and offices. Free speech is…

Economics 102. Have a look at the graphs in this article. When government debt goes down, usually because some nincompoop is trying to 'balance the budget', private debt goes up. That's because the money to keep the…

Everyday social life is like weather, it can change from hour to hour, and politics follows short cycles too. So most of what we experience in daily life is these short-term patterns and cycles, changes in fashion, the…

I guess what makes great artists great is how their works diagnose things. They see into the future. In 1820 Goya saw our world today, where reality has become sport, a fight between opposing sides. Whether we're…

Today a person will often look for the feeling of connection from a relationship that they used to get from wider social institutions - the family, church, the community, etc. So relationships are doing a lot of heavy…

Here's an idea for 'stimulating the economy'. How about diverting the vast rivers of taxpayer dollars flowing to Canberra, to State and local government, where the services people use actually are? At the moment…

"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…

Hard to describe some ideas in 10 words, but this one is a cracker, I think. Jacinda Ardern got a lot of press recently by saying economic growth would not be her government's sole measure of achievement. Some described…

I've noticed the increasingly desperate way politicians talk about 'mandates'. In the UK they've spent more than 3 years arguing what a referendum vote actually meant, what mandate it gave the government. I think it's a…

Flatter taxes are what the LNP are trying to introduce by stealth in Australia. Rich people love flat taxes. It's a real test of just how dumb we are as voters, if we fall for it. They're a terribly regressive thing to…

Why ultra conservatives win so much. They never ever compromise on their core beliefs. For example, notice as soon as the election was done, the LNP went straight back to those core beliefs. Slash taxes, beat up unions,…

Poor Philip Lowe is whistling into the wind here. ScoMo and the LNP actually believe big tax cuts are like fairies at the bottom of the garden, the whole 'economy' will magically grow and fix everything. We're so…

A global map of the internet. I've been driving my family mad excitedly watching the NBN being installed in our street. You see, for me, what holds the world together isn't politics, or love. It's technology. That fibre…

Hands up if you plan to use your tax cut to: - upgrade the NBN - pay childcare workers a living wage - reduce hospital waiting times - take unflued gas heaters out of schools - build more public transport - fix the…

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…

This man wins by trashing tradition. And yet to this day his opponents focus on the man, and ignore the reason he succeeds. Why is it that so many people vote to trash tradition? If we understand that, we understand…

Society's deep tectonic plates. It occurred to me yesterday that most of the modern conservative agenda, of small government and lower taxes, is actually driven by the same people who opposed the separation of church…

This is the belief destroying our societies, that government and individuals are separate things. Just as countries didn't exist before there were international agreements, individuals didn't exist before we had…

What if the main problem with health care isn't health care, but us? Just as the main problem with government is us. Stop going to the bloody doctor for 'check ups'. Health care is there to help heal the sick, not to…

Aristocrats are mocked for living privileged lives separated from basic reality. But - this is us. Our societies are the rich, privileged people on the planet. It's why social life is freaking us out right now, because…

Clive Palmer tried to do a 'Trump' in the Australian election. He didn't succeed for himself, though definitely strongly shaped the outcome by strip mining disaffected voters and delivering them to the LNP as…

If you ran a company, and said "we're going to spend $158 billion to boost business over the next 3 years", do you think at the end of those 3 years you'd be sacked if the new business didn't happen? (I'd say you'd…

This is the next step for the 'sovereignty' movement. Sovereignty moves inside the individual. Seriously nasty in many ways, these people do things like shoot policeman asking for their driver's licence. Notice they…

So, after more than $50 billion of our money, Australia is now 62nd in the world for broadband speed. They could fix the NBN by upgrading it to its original design, but that would mean these failed suburban solicitors…

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social…

Michel Serres once called our times the "reign of the Beatles - the shit-eaters". (He loved the Beatles.) What he meant by that was obviously a play on words referring to beetles, who like to eat turds. And the…

Those socialists down in Victoria, I dunno. The role of a State government is to help the gambling, alcohol, toll road and property development industries, not to do things like this. Loving that vehicles are being put…

I still think the real political divide in society isn't Left versus Right. It's old versus young. Wealth is being funnelled to retirees, a time of life that used to be about slowing down. And society has no money to do…

The great demographer David Foot predicts which societies will succeed and which won't by looking at their demographics, the distribution of people across different age groups. For example he sees Germany, Russia and…

NBN came and finished connecting my street last weekend. What struck me was that every worker was young and obviously from India, and they really knew their stuff, fantastic to watch them. And it made me think how…

I think the best business people know that the raw material of business isn't money, or competition, or products, or anything economic at all. It's peoples' desires. And yet the image we have of business is so boring -…

Complexities of gender. It's a common belief that women are better listeners, and better readers of emotions. I've found this to be true a lot of the time too. Where I think gender politics starts to confuse this stuff…

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…

Returning to a question. In a free market system, who builds and maintains the market? (Progressive politicians could fight back with a question like that.)

Skilled politicians are like reverse cycle air con I think. Let's say Right = cold and Left = hot. Rather than trying to turn hot into cold or cold into hot, by heating or cooling, a heat pump just shifts the heat from…

The religious freedom debate and legislation has had the excellent result of flushing out what the real battle lines have been in politics these last 30 years. It's the re-emergence of very old battles between Church…

Conservatives are using populism to turn people against their own parliaments. Every ‘bloody politicians’ means they’re winning.

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…

People watch something like Married at First Sight or The Bachelor for the drama and interpersonal politics. And yet right now, with Brexit, we have something that is real and so important, and infinitely more dramatic…

Isn't this magnificent? The House of Lords has its problems, but one of them isn't its full name: "The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in…

Was the problem with communism the idea, or the implementation? The idea is straight out of the Bible - a society based on sharing. (It's bizarre that modern conservatives evoke the Bible so much actually, nothing they…

If you want to know why total dickheads keep winning elections around the world, these 2 fellas (Srnicek and Williams) know. They studied how the Left of politics, in its big anti-establishment push, moved to 'folk…

How can people look out for themselves while at the same time looking out for others? Normally we oppose those. I think Dixieland jazz knows. Every musician is a soloist here, at the same time. All of those simultaneous…

Divided means 2 things - a disagreement, and to share. They seem opposite meanings but I think are actually the same. Shared goods and shared understandings. I think debates like abortion are tough to resolve because…

Isn't the problem obvious here? A whole bunch of individuals (with views I agree with btw), whose only collective action is to stand together and complain. They have an industrial-scale political weapon they can use,…

After trashing: - parliament through populism - the press by constant talk of 'fake news' - universities by constant attack on academics - civil service by constant attack on bureaucrats - unions by constant attacks,…

“Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that…

One of the best predictors of how a person will vote is their attitude towards raising children. For many politics is just an extension of family, at a social level. These 4 questions are used to do it. Should children:…

The Local Government Act has this quite intriguing clause in it. Glad to see it made it as far as legislation, one of the greatest justice issues of our time. (d) Councils should have regard to achieving…

You know which politicians never argue? Dictators. That should be all we need to know before we make some idiot statement about politicians arguing too much. They argue so we don't have to, and the more we're too lazy…

This is Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the UK Tories. On TV just now, saying "parliament isn't sovereign, the people are sovereign." I believe that any politician who sets parliament up in opposition to the people…

More Venn. This is how I see people. Say you're discussing a topic, in politics for example. No person is just an issue, that issue is part of their entire way of seeing everything. It'll link to what washing powder…

In some countries mortgage rates are negative, meaning you pay back less than you borrowed. Depositors then pay to have their money in the bank. There may not be a better illustration of how countries are really just…

Hatred of: - referees - politicians - local and State governments - bureaucrats - call centres, etc. I think our populist age could be summed up as - hatred of the 'middle man'. We want our stuff direct. Uber and social…

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…

Isn't this big anti-officals thing going well? How about Rexit, get rid of refs altogether? Look in a mirror folks, politicians can't govern us because we don't like officials, of any kind.

When people evoke 'common sense' in my experience, it always means the same thing. I don't agree with you, my ideas are sensible (common sense) and yours aren't. The literal meaning of common sense sense is 'common…

Thousands of lives ruined, millions spent on a Royal Commisson. No banker went to jail or was even charged. The current outcome of this? Shared advice from the banks and government, to us all as borrowers: "personal…

Our civilisation is part Greek, part Roman. The Greeks gave us democratic ideas, the Romans built things. Like their roads, in the picture. The Romans survived over 1000 years, the Greeks, just over 300. Maybe there's a…

The Left of politics talks about facts without values. The Right talks about values without facts.

I've worked in governance for two decades. Whether it's a sporting club, or a major organisation, or a parliament, you only have to spend a day in these places to know the real reason governing people is hard. People…

What I love about social media is that it's real-time evidence of why politicians are not the problem. People are nuts.

The 'false consensus effect' is a widespread cognitive bias where people overestimate how many other people agree with their beliefs. It's one of the main reasons people hate pollies, they think there's broad consensus…

Those damn politicians, hey? If it wasn't for them Brexit would be all decided? 🤔

This may be a genuine crisis. Even bigger towns, like Bathurst and Orange and Tamworth, may soon have no water. And Sydney's dams are not pretty either. Like Brexit in politics, I wonder if we need this sort of crisis…

I've said before and still strongly believe that people who have no time for politics are like spoiled children who have no time for chores. Privileged, spoiled brats, who think the world just works without them having…

Every time you feel angry at a politician, remember a majority of your fellow people voted for them. It's like screaming into a mirror. Scratch the surface of the people around you, and you might be surprised at what…

There are still about 1.5 million people in Australia who are members of unions. No political party has a membership greater than 50,000 🤔

To me it’s ridiculous that modern countries like Australia can only offer people 4 weeks of leave in a year. Other counties are even worse. My sense is this won’t change in Australia for one main reason - our worship of…

"The proliferation of protests is no guarantee that things will change. “Staging [demonstrations] is no longer the difficult part,” says Youssef Cherif, a political analyst and one of the authors of new Carnegie…

I'm not sure my interest in institutions always makes sense to others. Here's a simple example of what I mean. The people in the US who will vote for Trump no matter what he does are drawn heavily from the people who…

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

Have a look at this, if you believe in moderate or centre-based politics. This is for the US, but the same patterns occur everywhere. They captured all varieties of non-aligned voters: those who vote for independents,…

One of the weirdest ideas for me is that politicians are ‘in charge’. It’s why people protest to them, for example, to ask them to change decisions. But at the same time, we see how absolutely obsessed politicians are…

"If this parliament looked like deadlocked purgatory, the Commons has rarely better reflected the national state of mind. The country is split, conflicted, afraid to defy the referendum, to revoke it or carry it out.…

The average (median) age of workers in Australia is about 40. If you’re uncomfortable with immigration, look at that number. Somebody has to do the work. Boris Johnson has just announced huge importing of health care…

I reckon teachers understand power better than anybody. You can’t just give people orders, it doesn’t work. Power is granted to you, by the people you lead. It’s a contract, a provisional agreement. Nobody ‘has’ power,…

The politics of words. DROUGHT. Drought suggests that lack of water is due to lack of rain. It's a concept used a lot because it puts the blame on weather, rather than on anything humans do. One of a politician's…

Socialism or capitalism? The UK invented both, and its next election is going right back to basics.

Conservatives like to paint the ‘we’ as bureaucratic nanny state interference. The Left likes to paint the ‘we’ as the greater good. Both of them are arguing inside the same framework of ideas, separating ‘I’ and ‘we’.…

In Germany the transition away from coal is going much more smoothly, because unions and business there work in partnership, putting the interests of coal workers right in the mix. Here the government just tries to…

Another example of why ideas matter. The ‘environment’ as an idea is the problem, not the answer. This mythical environment is trying to kill us right now, it doesn’t need protecting - it doesn’t exist. Well-meaning…

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…

Right now both ScoMo and Boris are pushing new union-busting regulation. Both say unions get in the way of the ‘economy’. You know what gets in its way, really? People have no money. They have no money because they’re…

Conservatives never shut up about terrorism and immigrants because people are too lazy, stupid and scared to learn anything about those topics. That wins conservatives elections. For example, the ‘terror’ attack in…

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…

Good political cartoons are priceless. This one by Ben Jennings on the London Bridge terror attack this week says everything really about how modern conservatives use terrorism. Inside Tory HQ there would have been…

Meanwhile in the UK, old people are voting for a ‘Great’ Britain that disappeared years ago, as their last parting gift to the next generation. Wrapped and put under the tree with a climate emergency, and debts that…

ScoMo and BoJo are both implementing populist programs right now, following Trump. Populism isn’t Left or Right, it isn’t even politics. It’s society eating itself. The damage these people do, fuelled by the public’s…

I wonder sometimes if the loudest voices on climate denial remember this fact. Having spent a few decades now actively and wilfully spreading misinformation, a time will come when they may be put on trial (literally)…

People sometimes say if you pay for private school or private health, you should still get government support, for fairness. I love David Gillespie’s response to this idea.

Both winners and losers of elections talk about the 'will of the people'. There is no will of the people. There are millions of people each with their own view, that's all. You have to get closer to those individuals to…

I wrote this yesterday Ben, about underlying currents as I see them, in politics. It's why i think all the categories we use to understand current conservative domination are no use to us, and they keep winning.

It’s not often I agree with the Daily Telegraph, but 100% on this one. Politicians won’t do it because they (probably rightly) think huge numbers of the ‘law and order’ public pay no attention to speed limits at all. So…

The second a Tory has the election over, all the ‘governing for all of us’ disappears and we’re back to the standard script. Sell off public assets, sack public servants, tax cuts for the rich. ScoMo followed exactly…

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…

Surprises me sometimes that people don’t see the word ‘protest’ in ‘Protestant’. The Protestant churches are a protest movement that’s been going on for centuries. Have a look at what protest produces - directionless…

One way to see the current bushfires is eucalypts intensifying their control over our landscape. The huge amount of scrubby undergrowth we’ve allowed to proliferate in our national parks, through our appalling attempt…

It's not just schools that need to stop fundraising. This lady gets it, fundraising is an epidemic, often being used to fill gaps in services caused by government cuts. My parents always said it wasn't the parents who…

The train strike interests me, to see how people respond. The government in this case has been trying to create an impression in the public mind that recent chaos on the trains is due to lazy drivers calling in sick. As…

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…

If it seems that the world has gone mad, Urban Dictionary can help. All of the talk of ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ in politics is a sideshow. The real clash we’re all living through is probably much deeper, and nothing…

Do you work somewhere where your performance is measured? If so you may love this book. Nurses, teachers, police, anybody who suffers in the world of performance measures and KPIs. I have nothing against measurement,…

I'm betting there will be vocal criticisms of these ads. But it's a message that is actually true and the key to society staying healthy and happy. For too long we've been led by (mostly men) in suits who use the…

Last year the financial services sector took $31 billion in fees, from super. That’s almost as much as the age pension costs, and it’s growing. What could go wrong? If the government hadn’t been so keen to privatise…

Iconoclasts were famously known as the people who would go into churches to smash ‘idols’. All the beautiful iconography in churches was their enemy, which they saw as a distraction from true religion. But iconoclasm…

Both of these industrial sites are uneconomic and the owners desperately want(ed) to close them. The government is desperate to save one, and was happy to watch the other go belly up. Understanding why will tell you…

Institutions, especially unions, are the answer to the world's problems. Brilliant read, institutions are the answer, not voting or swapping leaders. Institutions, always institutions. "Although income stagnation is…

You only have to look at the way neither major political party will touch this topic here, and all media commentators laugh at it, to see just how much banks have everybody who counts in their pocket.

Notice how we tend to see freedom as freedom *from* something? As if we are more free if we have fewer connections, rather than more. It’s the paradox of freedom, we are usually more free the *more* we form…

“No human collective can exist without an object. There is no object without a collective, no collective without an object. The political animal is a fiction. The group floats wildly; it settles for a short time only by…

“But this is not, or not really, an article about speed, or cameras, or even cars. It is about the rise of the antisocial bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless…

“Besties” is the source of terrible suffering amongst kids of school age. Old-school teachers would actively discourage kids having ‘best friends’. It’s a difficult topic, but the bestie phenomenon is buried deep in all…

It’s maybe a sign that things are starting to swing around that they’re talking about raising the dole, after decades of bashing the unemployed as bludgers. If a bludger is somebody receiving government money while…

I love parliament, and I despair of people wishing politicians would be ‘nicer’ to each other. Paul Keating once said politicians fight so that people on the streets don’t have to - that’s real wisdom. (The picture…

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.…

Waleed nails it. BUT this was recorded before the budget, and the scale of the tax cuts is more than double what he’s talking about here. $140 billion. It will bankrupt Australia, and in the process ScoMo has now…

"Governments don't have any money, they only have your money." (Barnaby Joyce, Sky News Live, this morning.) The sad thing is people actually think this is true. The opposite is in fact true.

What do people think about “the politics of envy” as an idea?

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…

A friend showed me this clip, and asked what I thought, apparently it went viral at the time and has really divided opinion. Peterson is a warrior against political correctness. What do people think?

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…

I love politics. Lithgow is the only place in the entire region, and the neighbouring Riverina, that doesn't have NBN yet. And it's just been delayed another year. I looked at the Australian Electoral Commission records…

So...the proposed tax cuts seem popular. Because government is unpopular, and the silly myth that tax takes ‘our’ money off us. Around the world there’s been a rush to gut government, often through tax cuts which starve…

Tony Abbott once said that Malcom Turnbull ‘invented the internet’ in Australia. Want to know who really invented the internet in Australia? Universities. Universities built Australia’s first internet. And they still…

Were you taught to hate bureaucrats? And politicians? Did you stop to wonder why that narrative was rammed home again and again in news and other places? I did. Always follow the money, as the saying goes. Without…

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…

Has anybody actually seen ‘the economy’? I think it’s the most powerful political myth of our times. By believing there’s this thing called an economy that has to be driven like a truck, you can bypass the due process…

I wonder if political debates, like the one currently surrounding David Leyonhjelm, would get further if people actually made the effort to understand the beliefs and ideas that drive the different views. Leyonhjelm for…

A few days ago I started talking about the occult. Today some more connection to it, when it turns out the person who defaced the Eurydice Dixon memorial was an occultist. This is the fastest growing set of beliefs in…

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.…

The world is swimming in debt. The Chinese as much as anybody. If it all goes boom, they're much smarter than us, they used their debt to build things. The rest of us used it mostly to turn our housing markets into…

When Trump came to power, my view was people were focusing on the man, and not on what the man means. If anything I think that’s now worse. People honestly seem to think that getting rid of Trump is the important thing?…

Maybe our increasing anxiety around privacy tells us a lot about how we see our own society. A lot of it seems focused on ideas about somebody - corporations, governments mostly - spying on us and using what they find…

Hannah Arendt saw loneliness as the root of all extreme thinking. Not the loneliness of not having friends - lonely people often have many friends - but the loneliness of not fitting in. The breakdown of social…

Nabellah Jaffer again, in conversation with extremists. This is a common pattern as well, the fear and caricature of the ‘collective group’, or ‘crowd’, or ‘mob’. This binary thinking is very widespread, even in…

The modern world seems peculiar. On the one hand life has never been more complex and connnected and rich. But on the other we seem to often be in a state of panic about it all, for example: - belief in conspiracies is…

What decides ideas in the end is whether they work. In the world right now it’s interesting to see how the major Western countries, especially the Anglo ones, have been flirting for decades with anti-State ideas. The…

Love this image of power. It’s difficult to persuade people that there is no such thing as power, as some thing that a person can hold and wield. When a person ‘has’ power, it’s because others are granting it, others…

Another lens to view our world through (see link). This example comes from business, but applies to anything society does I think. Most of what’s seen as disruption in business is really that companies are dumber than…

This was a superb story, if you’re interested in drought and drought relief, it should be compulsory viewing. Lots of very smart farmers out there, doing incredibly smart things, and using very different ideas about 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…

I’ve worked at a few large organisations, and something that never works is the idea of having everybody in the company unified. Mission statements and visions and values and plans are supposed to bring people together,…

A sort of Part 2 from earlier, about whether organisations should have an 'opposition', in the way politics does. Here's the famous separation of powers in our societies. One thing that's not mentioned that I've seen,…

The bridge collapse in Europe overnight. Stories. The story of the collapse is ‘wasn’t properly maintained’. Which means the story of maintenance wasn’t one that resonated with enough people. Vast amounts of the…

Something about size. If you use a microscope, telescope, or even climb to the top of a building, you’ll feel like you’re seeing more in some ways. But actually that’s not true, you’re definitely seeing things you…

As a kid it never made sense what adults saw in politics. But I see it now. Many hate politics, but it’s an amazingly rich teacher about life. Take the current fight between Turnbull and Abbott. We’re all so used to…

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…

Canberra right now is Shakespearean. Shakespeare based quite a lot of his work on politics. It still frustrates me that people think politicians should all be nice to each other, should stop arguing and fighting. Our…

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…

It’s a funny video. But I’m going to maybe be a lone voice and say this week *has* been politicians doing their job. We just don’t understand their job.

One of those little keyholes into our amazing world. To divide is both to share, and to drive apart. ‘We are divided’ means we are fighting with each other. But to have peace we need to divide our common goods amongst…

Any country with 'democratic' in its name is usually an authoriarian dictatorship. Any media organisation that uses words like 'fake news' and 'bias' and 'the Left' and 'the Right' isn't a media organisation, it's a…

I once suggested that we get ‘Nanny States’ when we act like children. In a similar vein, libertarianism is a set of desires and beliefs that see institutions, like government or the law, as restricting individual…

This was such a good article that I'm going to re-post it as a separate thing. Covers a lot of territory I sometimes talk about in relation to politics, where I think peoples' understanding of political strategy is now…

So...now the book/essay is out. And as most reviewers say, deeply nuanced and researched, as all her work is. And I will guarantee - those who are outraged by her won't read it, as they haven't read anything else she's…

It’s a difficult time to be an administrator. Both politicians, and senior managers in organisations, are running roughshod over due process, due processes set up often over generations. Sports stars do the same with…

“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…

Some thoughts about the media and bias. It seems that those who talk about bias often don't actually understand journalism. They will often say journalists should just 'report the facts', equally for both sides of an…

Here’s my vote for why people like Trump and climate change deniers win. It’s a classic example of how the people who want the world to be different see the people they need to convince as simply stupid. How far do you…

It says a lot that the same people who froth at the mouth about what a terrible restriction on individual freedom compulsory voting is, will at the same time quite happily support draconian laws on flags, welfare…

Walter Lippmann was skeptical about democracy. He thought the idea of a ‘public’ was a myth, that there is no such thing as some collective entity called the public. So he called it ‘The Phantom Public’. John Dewey then…

Some classic examples of political framing - feel free to suggest more. This is how smart politicians shape how people feel, and therefore vote. Use the frame enough and it shapes how people think. Tax cut = "tax…

Are we really democratic in our hearts? I talk to people about this a lot. I think nearly everybody prefers living in a democracy, but I’m much less sure it’s well understood what that actually means. My experience is…

Got lichen on your roof? Lichens are amazing things, that may provide a model for understanding everything in our world. Lichens are not a single organism. They’re a symbiosis of multiple organisms. Evidence is…

A theme for me. The big shift that climate change has brought, that I don’t think is well noticed, is that the ideas of nature, and the environment, are doomed. The idea humans live ‘in’ nature, or ‘in’ environments, is…

Check out these stats for the US. Small government and small business are both championed by the same powerful people. That's not a coincidence. We tend to fetishise the small and demonise the large, and I think it…

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…

I like Harrison, I love Americans. But this is a whole lot of hot air, I think. We don’t need more science, or nature, we need Americans to ditch the Wild West, Puritan fantasy which stops them trusting any institution…

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…

Just watching a conservative pollie trotting out the standard "a strong economy gives us the money to do the things society needs" guff. This is how 'the economy' works - it's a political device. It's a trick. Throw any…

I remember studying news as a genre. It’s designed to look like ‘what happened today’. But of course it isn’t that at all, it’s a tiny selection of events pitched a certain way, to create certain feelings in viewers.…

Here are some huge companies. If somebody asked you ‘where’ these companies are, what would you say? If you were asked ‘please take me to Coles, the company’, where would you take the person? The corporate headquarters?…

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.…

Desperate government + election looming = time for immigration and border security beat ups. I’d like to add again to the debate - it’s not ‘our’ border. All countries’ borders are international legal agreements. Just…

I think there’s a broader message to come out of the banking Royal commission. Management and governance, of every organisation, is broken. The ideas we use to manage and govern organisations are absolutely bloody…

Bill Shorten's energy announcement today is a slam dunk. He's a skilled operator, mocked continuously but unionists know about politics. We can't get rid of the current LNP idiots fast enough - their entire energy…

On the theme of political myths, with elections looming....my favourite. If you come out every day and say "debt and deficit and spending" about the other side, and claim you make all the money and they spend it, the…

I've been a bit quiet lately, and I think this Sherry Turkle TED talk mirrors my thoughts about FB at the moment. Like many new social media, it's being used to create connection, at the expense of conversation. Where…

Do you agree with this? I don't, I think it's the disease that has infected Anglo countries in particular, in the last 50 years. The current LNP believes in this crap - listen to how often they talk of tax 'relief' and…

When we see chaos in politics, I think we’re looking in a mirror. There is no ‘sensible centre’ just waiting for somebody to lead them. Politicians are us, government is us. The more we withdraw from and don’t debate…

Welcome, Waleed. “I’ve been thinking about institutions a lot lately. About how if there is anything that characterises our current political moment of disillusionment, anger and a rampant, destructive cynicism, it is…

A government shuts down parliament because it thinks it might lose a vote. Both here and now in the UK. Hardly anybody cares or even notices. The Honeybadger not choosing one of the Bachelorettes creates outrage. A…

Translation is usually thought of as something you do between different languages. But actually all meaning is translated, even within the same language. What we think we’re communicating to others is always translated…

I still recommend people replace assumptions about society with Google Trends. Which shows what people really are thinking. For example, the political attempt to link terrorism to Islam has clearly been a tremendous…

People lie. Governments lie. But they can’t hide the traces of what they do. A fun example here, GDP is a measure that doesn’t tell you a lot about how well a country is really doing, and it can also be gamed. North…

Ever noticed that people can only live 'off the grid', in 'self-sufficient' ways, in societies that have a grid in the first place? They're not self-sufficient at all, they're absolutely reliant upon a strong, stable…

Greg Hunt, Health Minister: "We support private health". Greg, government 'supporting' private health makes it public health, not private health. Admit it, you're a socialist. Nothing else works.

Long-term political success depends I think on being elected at the right time ‘economically’. When things are doing well and people have money in their pockets, they tend to assume the government in power is…

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are…

We are the problem. We are our governments.

People are still obsessed with Trump, and not with what made him possible. He's a distraction. And as this piece says, the other side of the political fence - the progressives - are masters at "gorging themselves on…

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…

"It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is…

The symmetry of this graph speaks for itself. Politics without unions means governing for the top 1% of society alone. Join a union. Your opinion is hot air without them.

Hooray! And only one thing missed - that we already have the institutions to do the heavy lifting. They're called unions. They know how to do it, they've done it before. "But it is up to the left to do something with…

And when they get there, they'll learn the one thing nobody is talking about. That most of politics doesn't happen in government. It has to be organised outside of government. So they'll get there and like every other…

"As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of…

This one lets German industry off the hook a little, it was more actively financing and supporting Hitler than is suggested here. But otherwise a good summary. All bad things in politics come from people being excluded…

Another way to look at Trump's success (thanks Scott Tully) is to look at how ordinary people have lost power in politics. Those are the people who voted for Trump, although the rest of us have lost power too and voting…

"This was one of the first acts of Hitler and the Nazis, who had just come to power in Germany a few months earlier, in January 1933. The German labor movement was one of the largest and strongest in the world, with…

Mark Davis, talking about Hannah Arendt and why she was sceptical of the value of political protest. Arendt of course being another person who lived under the Nazis, and who wrote about the 'banality of evil', replacing…

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…

Klee's Twittering Machine. Music is more than anything else a territorial thing. Like dogs pissing to mark territory, music began in the marking out of a space with sound. Refrains. Birds use song for this. Humans do…

Heard that joke about how the private sector is so efficient? Health insurance has gone up 28 percent in the last 4 years, and at the same time the pay packets of its bosses have more than doubled in some cases. This…

You can dig deeper into the dramas of the world right now. This is what it's really all about, from Trump to Turnbull here in Oz. Not so much about religion trying to take over the role of the State again, although…

I'll be on the outer with this, but I think politician's entitlements is a bit of a non-issue. The reason politicians have things like generous super and entitlements is that politics is effectively a part-time job, a…

Don't believe for one second the bullshit in the news, or from moron politicians carrying big lumps of coal into parliament, about South Australia's power problems. NSW prices are some of the highest in the world, and…

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…

Monbiot gets this one absolutely right. This is how very rich, ruthless people got millions of people to believe that government, politicians and politics are the problem.

Best quote on the Sunday penalty rates, from Crikey: "Today the Fair Work Commission, reflecting three years of Coalition government appointments to the industrial relations body, decided that Sunday penalty rates are…

Many, many people are despairing with politics. But that's what they want, to make people switch off politics. When people do that, it paves the way for the rich and powerful to do whatever they like. Politics isn't…

Saw this meme online. It made me think about the deep, almost mythical stories that really determine how people think about politics. Politics is ultimately about how people feel. This meme, for example, it's such a…

Well said Andrew Street. "Will housing become more affordable in Australia? Absolutely! And it could happen one of two ways. This complex web of legislation can be gently and strategically unpicked via careful…

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…

Another one for the anti-government crowd. If you think the government is the enemy and the cause of the shit in your life, go and live somewhere without one. Like Syria. http://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/

Some more of the filthy underbelly of gas in Australia. And remember that the mining industry even invests millions to get rid of Prime Ministers it doesn't like, and most of the industry is not even Australian. I live…

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…

Edouard Louis understands nasty people. And that they talk a lot about 'free speech' because they want to say things that civilisation already decided are just hate disguised as words. Every generation seems to forget.…

John Lennon has always been beloved by many inside and outside music, because Lennon pursued causes. Like this one, the bed-in for peace. It's decades ago now and in hindsight it might be fair to say this was a total…

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…

Edmund Burke was a brilliant political thinker, living at a time when politics was probably even more dire than today. Some of his wisdom (note women weren't thought to be active players in society in his day, although…

"In a few decades city dwellers will look back on the twilight of the internal combustion engine and ask why governments were so much slower than consumers to read its last rites."

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,…

This is where knowing what to think about Trump is tricky. Neville Chamberlian was widely criticised in hindsight for trying to appease Adolf Hitler, on Hitler's rise to power. To try to negotiate with him. In hindsight…

Some see this as evidence of political correctness, or as some sort of attempt to appease halal food requirements. Others, with properly functioning brains, see this as Cadbury selling eggs that are good for Easter egg…

Gas companies are exactly like property developers. Disgusting vermin. Both use the same language, we need more 'supply'. Which just means they both want even more public land, having used up what they'd already been…

If you have kids who want to go to uni, are you happy for them to pay for the big tax cuts to businesses who often aren't paying any tax anyway, and are mostly overseas? This isn't political, it's stupidity. This is the…

It's strange something as abstract as climate change become such a big political issue. Have often wondered why. It's most likely because there are two main responses to the challenges in the world at the moment, and…

Tony Abbott was a wrecking ball for Australia. Firstly every business that uses energy in the country curses him for wrecking a carbon price, and wants it back (it will come back), and then he smashed the NBN and put us…

This fella stood up on Q@A last night and questioned how it's fair that rich people would have almost half their income 'confiscated' if the top tax rate went back to around 50%. Firstly he doesn't understand marginal…

Some fun facts about welfare. - far and away the largest welfare cost is the aged pension - unemployment benefits are one of the smallest welfare costs and will remain stable for at least the next 4 years - welfare…

Trump is hopeless, no doubt. But getting rid of him will be a shallow victory. The others in his party who would replace him are actually much worse. And the people who voted for him will be furious if he's impeached,…

This could all change if we keep electing people determined to outsource government services to the private sector. Don't think it can happen? Just look at schools people, look at schools.

So UK people - time to move to compulsory voting? Amazing really that countries can have compulsory seat belts, but not compulsory civic responsibility. Anybody who tells you it's about freedom of choice - smash their…

I doubt many will pay much attention to this, but if you have your government openly attacking your judges, you're on your way to living in the sort of country refugees run away from.…

Another way to understand the separation of powers is that it puts a wall between idiots, and the rest of us. Imagine having Hinch come to your aid, it'd be like Rolf Harris giving you a reference to be a Girl Guide…

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…

Politics won't improve until we really want to understand how somebody can remove health care from the poor, to fund tax cuts for the rich, and the poor line up to vote for them.

"All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act — is founded on compromise and barter." Edmund Burke

This is really bizarre, it must have implications for other things we do as well. "In short, heroin addicts who can usually tolerate extraordinarily high doses are at risk of overdose if they administer the drug in an…

Report on the state of Australian schools. Some highlights: - equity in schools is declining (family and personal background are becoming far too important in determining how well you do) - students/families who can…

You hear people talk about 'the economy' all the time. Which is kind of weird, because the economy doesn't exist. It's a myth. They do it I think because it allows people to bypass the messy work of doing actual…

"The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in…

"But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she…

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…

Bill Shorten has been playing the long game. Now he's made inequality the central plank of his platform, which is both brave and the only thing any politician should be doing right now, it doesn't matter if you don't…

This is exactly right. The obsession with finance has also been behind the destruction of banking, and politicians talking constantly about the 'economy', which is really mostly a fiction made up of financial indicators.

To continue my highly popular defence of politicians ;) Remember these people run the country, you may think they don't do it well, but we all know a lot of other jobs we've come into contact with where people aren't…

In the last few years of people arguing about politics, and talking about 'the Left' and 'the Right', not enough people have said what this Republican Senator is saying. That this isn't about two sides of politics, it's…

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…

The same-sex marriage debate is brilliantly showing us I think what's really going on in politics, we just have to look. Why are people so prepared to go to the wall on this issue? I think it's because the people so…

A perfect description of how everything wrong with politics right now is a problem with US, me and you, not politicians. Turnbull is holding together a fragile coalition in the face of enormous pressure, against a huge…

People are often disgusted with politicians arguing. This disgust actually irritates me, politics is the way societies invented to resolve their differences. I think it was Paul Keating who once noted that societies…

A P.S. on yesterday's post. Very few people seem to like politics, and maybe a majority of people think politicians should be 'nicer' to each other. Anybody who has been involved in a group of any kind, like at work or…

Do people think Church and State should be separate? A lot of what's going on in politics is driven by people who think the answer to that is a firm no. That fight never went away.

It's about time we went after the disgusting greed at the top-end of town. Maybe the LNP would call this 'the politics of envy', I call it organised crime.

Waleed Aly was spot on about this. The idiot moralists in the LNP have scored a possibly massive own-goal, with impacts well beyond marriage equality. Suddenly there are 100,000 extra potential Greens/Labor voters on…

Would recommend this show if you want to go a bit deeper than the daily sound bites, into how government and parliament works. Fascinating stuff.

In these hysterical debates, the apparently persecuted people opposing same-sex marriage want to spend $122 million of your money to stop it. And they're a tiny minority in the elected parliament. Always follow the…

The 'weaponising' of free speech. The people who claim their free speech is being shut down, by the 'politically correct'. Criticism is not censorship, suddenly having your views criticised is apparently you being…

Watching again, with the same-sex marriage debate, just how hopeless progressive people are at politics. "For example, when Feinberg and Willer asked liberals to write an op-ed aiming to convince conservatives of the…

“PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them.” Nasty, powerful and rich people win…

This is where people like Cleese get completely suckered by ruthless political strategists. Of course people should be allowed to be offended and to cause some offence, in comedy and elsewhewre. What Cleese doesn't…

I don't express many views here about same-sex marriage. But one thing the debate has highlighted for me is the resources and determination of very conservative people in Australia and around the world, and their…

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.…

Yep, this is the real issue. And why is the US so much more violent? My favourite theory: because it hates regulation. Because it has no real tradition of collective focus, so that each person then becomes their own…

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.…

Professor Talisse is a clever man. If you want to have fun, don’t try to have fun, if you want friendship, don’t try to make friends. If you want democracy, don’t try to have democracy. Democracy comes when people have…

Hmm, what was the last time we had a public policy that was "technology-agnostic", as a quick political fix? NBN? What could go wrong?

Brought to you by the same team who promised getting rid of the carbon tax would slash your power bills. They’ve doubled. It’s amazing how these idiots can take any issue and turn it into a political whipping boy.…

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…

The gas 'crisis' is easily solved, and from that electricity prices should come down a lot too (gas is used heavily in electricity generation). Instead we have the idiots going into bat for the big gas companies, who…

It sounds political, but really - how is giving away $65 billion of our money to businesses, many of whom are owned by overseas interests, of any use to Australia? It's been proved all over the world and in Australia,…

I've substituted LNP for "Republican Party" in the quote, because they're reading from the same playbook. "What is the fundamental purpose of the LNP? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax…

Quiz question. A government orders federal police to raid the offices of supporters of its opponents. Which country is this? A. Sierra Leone B. Russia C. Colombia D. Australia

If ever there was a wolf in sheep's clothing, it's Julie Bishop. Her views are much more extreme than she lets on in the public sphere. This is how Trump started. The ultra-conservatives within the conservative side of…

The Flat-Earthers are a growing movement, apparently. It does seem like it’s less about the Earth and more about a growing distrust in any sort of authority at all, in politics or now knowledge too. Is the Earth flat…

Haven’t commented much on same-sex marriage. But watching ultra-conservatives at work is revealing, having known that for decades they’ve been manipulating our political systems with impunity. Now they’ve been flushed…

Took the No campaign all of a day to turn really nasty in defeat. Abortion today. Bun or bump? Is a woman just a container for a baby? Or is that baby also part of her? For Cory and his friends a woman is like an…

The local Nationals member seems to spend a lot of time publicising local Nationals politicians, I guess we should expect that. I guess we should also expect some of them to say things like “local Council should be…

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…

Ah, tax cuts. Freeing us from the terrible burden of government stealing ‘our money’. Do you believe that sort of thing? I’d be interested to hear. Trump’s just-passed tax cuts will probably almost destroy the American…

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…

Every politician who offers you a tax cut should be told the same thing. I would rather have: - decent and affordable schools - decent and affordable health care - affordable and effective transport options - power that…

"The data is designed to help governments, industry and communities to make better decisions. It will be updated each year." If the data is telling them that an average life expectancy of 80 means we're all going to…

Here's a genuine question to puzzle-through. I think it's an important topic, and there are some interesting myths around. Many supporters of private education say it saves the public money, because the public subsidy…

Continuing on stories. People hate politics, but actually it all makes a lot more sense if it’s looked at as stories. The two main sides of politics, around the world, each have their own story. Roughly, these: Story 1…

My wish for 2018 is that the millions of us working in organisations for much of our lives start to be relieved of the stupidity that increasingly makes every day in them frustrating and stressful. No cheap shots here,…

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2014/09/08/fans-arent-going-pay-music-anymore-thats-ok/ Steve Lukather (net worth about $40 million) was a good recent example of a muso without a clue, complaining about how real quality…

Substitute "Liberal" or "Tory" for "Republican" and you have a beautiful description of how conservative politics was hijacked by very rich extremists, across 3 continents. "What is the fundamental purpose of the…

Not really political. Just important.

Ah the Swedes. Why can't they just replace democracy with the market, like everybody else? http://esnoticia.co/noticia-8790-swedens-prostitution-solution-why-hasnt-anyone-tried-this-before

Might look like a bit of a dry topic, but fascinatingly horrifying. The Bush-Blair-Howard war. How they're not charged as criminals for it is amazing. And shows how much you should never trust somebody who thinks…

Still think Bill Shorten is a sleeper, don't write him off. Australians like dull and boring PMs. Turnbull is the victim of the same boneheads in his own party who crippled parliament under Rudd and Gillard. The "just…

Aww man. Let's hope sanity spreads worldwide. http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article62292437.html

This is a test of how much people really understand politics. Turnbull doesn't believe in any of those things, but he has two main opponents. One is the Labor Party. The other is a powerful group of zealots and…

Heh, "The whole philosophy is highly influential where we live, and perhaps as a result, our local parks are full of exhausted-looking women shackled to two-stone toddlers, and nobody has slept in months." It's nice to…

Lol, it's bizarre that so many people hated Paul Keating, who is a fundamentally intelligent, warm and bloody funny guy. And that so many loved John Howard, who was always a mean-spirited weasel who played the race card…

Fantastic piece on the politics of science, the myth of the scientific method, and the myths in particular of nutrition science.

The bit about bringing your fattest hog so Cameron can roger it was hilarious. There really are terrorists among us. They're the people not paying tax or enough tax, and at the same time telling the rest of us to…

Brian May and Queen are a different type of hero for our times. Relentlessly smart and curious and inventive, and decent. And able to shamelessly access the power of magnificence and spectacle at a time when these were…

So voting is easy. Vote for the party that thinks most of us are lazy bludgers living off the government, and a tiny group of rich people are carrying the rest of us. Or vote for the party that thinks the opposite.

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…

Heh, this from Rupert's News Corp, who pay no tax. Murdoch's minions got stuck into this guy because they know this is political poison. They have to make sure that the poor get seen as lazy, lying scum, not people…

The best way to make this stupidity go away is to ignore it. He only said it to dog-whistle to certain voters. And it worked, they've had 2 days of attention on this now, distracting everybody from the fact they don't…

Walter Lippmann saw how it's done nearly 100 years ago. Not to be cynical about pollies either, this is just politics 101.

Some help in holiday planning for those tired of the tyranny of government. We can band together to send the Tories, Republicans and Abbott-LNP folk to all of those countries coloured orange or red, which have either no…

The people who decide elections ask themselves only one question. Do things seem generally OK? If the answer to that is "yes", they vote to keep the current lot, no matter what brand they are. All politics is about this…

Watching the Brexit results. There are some simple things that go wrong in countries, and every generation forgets them. It took us to 2 world wars, and we still forget. 1. If things are unequally shared, people get…

Cosmopolitanism and art, priceless. And noble speeches no doubt, because they make us feel good about being useless. Politics is what we need, done proper.

It's slowly dawning on more people that the millions who want to vote for Trump or Brexit, and who are just fed up with politics altogether, are often the same people who *used* to be in trade unions. Lots of triumphant…

Brexit may be the best thing that ever happened to democracy.

The Australian people got this absolutely right. Lots of chest thumping and bluster at the moment, but like Brexit, this election result is exactly what people want and need.

So much of the mood is gloom. But are we blaming the wrong things? We attack religion, we attack politics, we attack unions, we attack business. We attack institutions, basically. But institutions are the answer, not…

This is the time of the year energy suppliers tend to raise prices, so they can add another layer of 24-carat gold wire to the networks. I hadn't seen this site before, the government provides a price comparison tool to…

Is this sort of horseshit still going to wash, after the last election and what happened with Brexit? How stupid is this? The reason these people don't pay tax is they don't earn enough money to pay tax. Most wealth is…

A few slippery facts in this debate. The Labor Party was founded by unions - it's their party - so to deny them the right to fund Labor is basically just outlawing the Labor Party. Which the Liberals know. Also a lot of…

Let's have a plebiscite on rich Australians using super as a tax shelter. The number of people this affects is tiny, and shows who this government really stands for. It's not me and you.

“Public school students receive significantly more total government funding per student than what goes to private school students." Um, yes, that's why they're called government schools. Next he'll be telling us that…

For so long it seemed logical that big things are complicated, and small things are simple. In living things, organisations, politics - wherever. Bacteria have now taught us we had this completely backwards, the smaller…

$152 trillion is a lot of money - that's the world debt. But...two-thirds of this is private debt. That's the big story about debt and always has been, politicians who make out debt is a government problem (the ones who…

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.

I'm guessing the steel and auto workers who've lost their jobs and want to vote Trump will find this compelling. *facepalm*

The idea of framing and reframing is something I would put right at the top of a list of things everybody needs to understand, for their health and happiness. A good example is stress, where so often people focus on the…

I'm a fan of politicians. There aren't many harder jobs than having to somehow connect with everybody, even the people who hate you and disagree with you. Most of us never have to do that, so we think we're somehow more…

Brexit, now Trump. If we really understand what's going on here part of us should be happy, people who have been screwed by both sides of politics have had enough. Now we just need to understand that this means ditching…

The delusional are out in full force. Never trust any idiot who goes on about 'the Left' or 'the Right'. Those are code words for nutjobs. There are many on 'the Right' (meaningless term) that are crowing that Trump's…

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…

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…

We're not living in a 'post-truth' era, that's just the next stupid way to misunderstand Trump. It's the 'Trump supporters are stupid' rubbish dressed up in different clothes. As if they're too dumb to understand facts.…

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…

What was it Kamahl always said? "Why are people so unkind?" What goes around comes around, probably. Bop.…

I don't have much time for Tony Abbott, but I also don't think what's most important is whether he's there or not. Abbott represents an extremist sect in the Liberal Party, the very opposite of conservative - a sect…

Both Kennett and Fraser grew on me hugely after they left politics.

Next week he'll announce the ABC is biased because it doesn't have government ministers on the show. Who voted for this clown?

Government revenue is already bankrupt after the last lot of tax cuts. So the only way this will be doable is by complete slashing and burning of public services. which they're admitting (funded by 'savings'). We don't…

Maybe the tide is turning on miserable slash and burn politics.

Two issues being mixed up here? Nobody really owns the land underneath where they live, they just are given that ownership by government (i.e. from the public - it's a common resource). And there have always been…

"Corporate greed and systematic political failure have brought healthcare to its knees. There are too many misinformed doctors and misinformed patients." Amazing that the third greatest cause of death is prescription…

Why anybody would want to copy the US tax or health systems is impossible to figure out.…

Call me boring but I think point to point speed cameras might be the only thing that will make people pay attention to speed limits. Right now a huge number of people on the roads ignore them completely. That's why…

If it's true the budget will target high income earners with higher taxes, then well done Tony and Joe! That's the only reason the budget got into trouble in the first place, because the idiots Costello and Howard cut…

Tired of the politics of this, but this myth sorely needed debunking. Our biggest spending and taxing government by a country mile was the Howard government.

Heh, the old 'negative' Tony Abbott, "this is a bad government". The new 'positive' Tony Abbott, "what we need is good government". Old negative Tony, "Gillard is childless, what does she know about families?" New…

Super is a rort. What a nation of precious, pampered darlings we've become if $250K a year isn't wealthy, ffs.…

The myth is still out there. But the truth is as well: "The conservatives did not spend conservatively at all, it turns out. Howard and Costello engaged in net new spending of $133 billion, and net tax cuts of another…

Doesn't matter who you vote for, these trends in Australia should bother us. 1. People who get paid millions of dollars to mouth 'opinions' every day, like shock jocks and newspaper opinion columnists, are allowed to…

It must be panic stations at News Limited. Here they were assuming Rupert - sorry I mean Tony - had the election in the bag.

This is the main toad who introduced Republican attack politics into Australia, designed to not just win elections but to undermine peoples' faith in government more generally (he works for people such as tobacco…

Righto, 8 things about me. 1. It fascinates me that you're cool when you sit in the front of a car, and the back of a bus. 2. I'm an identical twin, but we live on opposite sides of the world (Mike moved because he…

We should be much more worried about the media companies politicians like than the ones they don't like. They all hate the ABC. I think that tells us something.

To save the time and effort in reading News Limited papers and understanding the new Coalition's media policy. It's all in one tweet from Master Rupert, who's shifted his campaign from the UK to here.…

Politics is just about getting things done, even at work. And rational argument is rarely what works, peoples' emotions are what work. Wish we didn't hate politicians for understanding this, and us not understanding it.…

Both sides of politics here have a fair amount of this 'disease', although the Liberals after Howard have gone all guns blazing in this direction. Which is why people like Malcolm Frazer resigned from the party in…

So if a blonde moment is doing something stupid, what do you call doing something smart? (I vote for "a bald moment".)

Don't hate a politician for making a compromise you'd refuse to make yourself. That's their job.

Hmmm, private debt in Oz is now 2700% the size of government debt. (Not a typo, that's two-thousand, seven-hundred percent.) Most of it was taken on in the late 1990s up to about 2005. When that bubble blows, take…